Bernie-Trump voters are back

Are they poised to play an undetected role in the election?

“See, how the extremes meet!” (Illustration of the Horseshoe Theory)

In 2016, Donald Trump’s transition team was led by Chris Christie, who had been the first Republican governor to endorse his campaign. At the time, the appointment was seen as an olive branch to the Republican establishment (which Christie was then a major cog of, even if he isn’t really now).

The partnership didn’t last long: soon after Trump was elected, Christie was unceremoniously dumped by Jared Kushner, a move that was more personal than ideological (Christie had prosecuted Kushner’s father), although it nevertheless ushered in a wave of appointees detached from Republican Party orthodoxy, more in Kushner’s mold than Christie’s.

By the time Trump took office, his administration was essentially a Frankensteined power-sharing agreement between several different factions: moderate business types (Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Steve Mnuchin); the Republican professional class (Reince Priebus, Kellyanne Conway); conservative evangelicals (Mike Pence); military hawks (James Mattis, John Kelly); and populist nationalists (Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller).

Flash forward eight years, and Trump announced the honorary co-chairs of his 2024 transition team on Tuesday: Tulsi Gabbard and Robert Kennedy Jr., both onetime Democratic presidential candidates. If his 2016 transition lead was meant as a signal to the GOP establishment, this new iteration should be seen as outreach to a very different — and rarely discussed — demographic: the Bernie-Trump voter.

Remember them, from 2016 — the outsider, “burn it all down” populists who voted for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary and then Trump in the general election? We don’t talk much about these voters now, but in 2016, they were all the rage (and often literally raging). Post-election studies suggested their votes may even have been decisive for Trump: data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study showed that 12% of Sanders’ primary voters cast ballots for Trump in 2016 — including critical segments in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin that were more than enough to swing the election.

Neither Kennedy nor Gabbard were part of this crossover demographic in 2016; their transformations have taken place over a longer gestation period. Further complicating matters, Kennedy has claimed that he did not endorse Sanders’ 2016 campaign, even though the podcast that he co-hosted at the time did, in a statement invoking Kennedy’s name that cited Hillary Clinton’s “close relationship with Corporate America” and support for “virtually every American military invasion, including Iraq.” (Thus, the age-old question: if a podcast endorses a political candidate, have its hosts not also?) Kennedy also interviewed Sanders on the podcast at around the same time, lavishing praise on the Vermonter.

Gabbard, on the other hand, very publicly and pointedly endorsed Sanders in ’16, resigning her post as DNC vice chair to do so. “There is a clear contrast between our two candidates with regard to my strong belief that we must end the interventionist, regime change policies that have cost us so much,” Gabbard said on “Meet the Press,” embracing Sanders.

There are a few core principles that define Bernie-Trump voters as a group, many of which can be heard from Kennedy and Gabbard: Skepticism of institutions. Skepticism of Big Business. Opposition to foreign military intervention. Distrust of the “establishment.” Use of words like “Uniparty.” It isn’t hard to understand why figures who were drawn to Sanders for those reasons might drift to Trump today.

In many ways, the appointment of Kennedy and Gabbard to Trump’s transition effort is the fulfillment of Steve Bannon’s long-held dream of a populist Republican Party that united anti-establishment voices on both sides of the aisle. Bannon, a disaffected Democrat himself,¹ cultivated both Kennedy and Gabbard during his time in Trump’s inner circle, bringing both in for Trump Tower meetings during the transition. “He loves Tulsi Gabbard. Loves her,” a source familiar with Bannon’s thinking told The Hill in 2016. “Wants to work with her on everything.” (She was reportedly considered for posts including UN ambassador and Secretary of State or Defense; all three posts went to more “globalist,” not populist, voices.)

Bannon has also praised Sanders in the past (“I like Bernie,” he told Bill Maher in 2020) — and explicitly targeted his voters. “Either don’t vote or vote for Trump,” Bannon urged Sanders supporters in the same interview. “The Bernie people helped make Trump president and they’re gonna help make Trump president again, because he’s been screwed by the Democratic Party.”

The populist mastermind is now unavailable for interview (he’s about halfway through a prison sentence), so I dialed up the next best source: Raheem Kassam, a top lieutenant who worked for Bannon first as an editor at Breitbart and more recently as co-host of his “War Room” podcast.

I asked him if I was right to sense Bannon’s fingerprints on all this, if the embrace of Kennedy and Gabbard was Trump’s belated effort to stitch together an anti-war, anti-corporate coalition. He agreed it was — but said my litany of policy points was missing one key factor: “The lifestyle thing.”

The Kennedy-Gabbard faction goes by many names, depending who you ask: Contrarians. Cranks. Doves. Independents. Kassam, for his part, calls these voters the “crunchy-ish” demographic. “These are people who think about what their clothes are made of,” he explained. “They don’t want to wear polyester. They don’t want to eat seed oils. They prefer all-natural, no sulfites in their wines.”

They are also, of course, the original anti-vaxxers, and Covid has helped engineer some of these shifts: members of this demographic tend to side with Trump on the pandemic-era culture wars, in addition to sharing his stated opposition to actual wars. “Our children are now the unhealthiest, sickest children in the world,” Kennedy, the nation’s leading vaccine skeptic, said in Phoenix last week as he offered Trump his endorsement. “Don’t you want healthy children? And don’t you want the chemicals out of our food? And don’t you want the regulatory agencies to be free from corporate corruption?”

Kassam told me that this focus on health was the missing piece to understand what drives the Bernie-Trump voter — and that Trump, for the first time, was paying attention to it. “Probably more than any other point in his life, Trump is on a learning trajectory right now,” said Kassam, who has ties to the campaign. “I think he probably looked at it originally from, like, ‘Okay, I’m for no war. Are you for no war?’ And they go, ‘yeah, we’re for no war.’ ‘Okay, so what else are you into?’ And they start talking about all this health stuff and everything else and he goes, ‘Oh my God, I had no idea.’”

Kassam said that Trump acknowledges that he is a less-than-ideal messenger for these arguments (“He’s still eating his quarter pounders and flying on planes every day”), which is why he has recruited surrogates like Kennedy and Gabbard to reach these voters. His campaign now has “six people who could credibly talk to anti-establishment podcasters with more viewers than nightly network news: Trump himself, his eldest sons, Vance, Kennedy, and Gabbard,” one strategist told Semafor.²

Indeed, Trump has been making the rounds on these podcasts lately — another clear play for this vast audience who doesn’t traditionally vote Republican and gets their news from off-beat sources. Most recently, he sat for an unusually personal interview with comedian Theo Von, including a long discussion on the health lobby, cocaine, and alcohol. Von’s previous political guest, in a episode he recorded one week before while sporting a tie-dye Grateful Dead shirt? You guessed it: Bernie Sanders.

The ur-podcaster of this demographic is Joe Rogan; as The Atlantic put it, Rogan and Von’s shows “plow the great crunchy intersection at the middle of American politics, where the Supplement Bros of the right find communion with the Wellness Vegetarians of the left. (Just don’t let them talk to each other about vaccines.)” Von and Rogan both have “a weakness” for Sanders and RFK Jr., as The Atlantic reported; Rogan hosted Sanders for an interview in 2019, and endorsed him the next year.

Looking ahead, Kassam told me that he expects Trump to sit for a Rogan interview in the last week of October — the ultimate “October Surprise” for Bernie-Trump voters.

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To be clear, none of this is anything new. The term “Horseshoe Theory” — referring to the idea that the far-left and the far-right are more near sides of a horseshoe than opposite ends of a spectrum — dates back to 1972, although the concept has roots even earlier.

“In the midst of [a debate between two Frenchmen in Beirut] I was struck by the cordiality with which the Monarchist and the Socialist united in their denunciations of England and English laws,” the American author Bayard Taylor wrote in 1856. “As they sat side by side, pouring out anathemas against [the British Empire], I could not help exclaiming: Voilà, comme les extrêmes se rencontrent!” Or, in English: “See, how the extremes meet!” (This observation, Taylor added, “turned the whole current of their wrath against me, and I was glad to make a hasty retreat.”)

In our modern politics, this phenomenon has been noted in relation to issues like the war in Ukraine or QAnon’s roots in New Age spirituality (aided, of course, by wellness gurus — the “lifestyle thing” is never far). Dennis Kucinich, the former Ohio Democratic congressman, is a recent politician who personified this convergence; not coincidentally, he served briefly as Kennedy’s campaign manager this cycle.

However, what is new is a political party giving it much notice — or elevating figures at the center of the horseshoe to positions of power. (Kucinich never would have been nominated to a Cabinet slot, although Republican Ron Paul — another politician who deserves mention here — said he would have considered him for one.)

According to Kennedy, as honorary transition co-chairs, he and Gabbard will “help pick the people who will be running the government” — although none of this necessarily means a second Trump administration would suddenly mimic Bannon’s populist vision for the first.

At the Phoenix rally, Trump noted that “millions and millions of Americans who want clean air, clean water and a healthy nation have concerns about toxins in our environment and pesticides in our food,” pledging to appoint a panel of experts who will work with Kennedy on these issues. But the last time Trump supposedly promised to bring Kennedy into his administration, it was seemingly squashed by other advisers.

As ever, Trump enjoys “pitting different factions of people against each other,” as Kassam put it. Trump’s current campaign managers, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, who are expected to play a hand in staffing a potential administration, are from the traditional Republican operative mold (the role Priebus and Conway played in Trump 1.0). The transition’s two official co-chairs are the business executives Howard Lutnick and Linda McMahon (think Kushner and Mnuchin from last time around)³; famously, the Heritage Foundation and a constellation of other conservative groups are also making transition plans.

Kassam described Kennedy and Gabbard as a “very needed counterbalance” to these more corporatist, mainline conservative figures. He also noted that the Trump transition team will be privately funded, having opted not to take the federal money available to it, which he said created further need for a populist “bulwark” against potential donor influences.

Equally unclear as the influence Kennedy and Gabbard will wield in the multi-factional Trump universe is the size of the electoral segment they might bring to him.

Estimates pegged the Bernie-Trump vote in 2016 at anywhere from six to 12 percent of Sanders backers — but it is unclear how many of these voters are still Democrats or Independents: it’s possible that many of them are, by now, simply reliable Trump voters.

The demographic can seem awfully reminiscent of the “need for chaos” voters identified in 2023 by the political scientist Michael Bang Petersen — those voters who expressed agreement with statements such as, “When I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking ‘just let them all burn.’” Petersen calculated that these voters, who are deeply suspicious of authority (Sanders, Kennedy, Gabbard, and Trump all come to mind), to make up 5% of the electorate, not a huge slice, but more than enough to impact an election. (That is also approximately the amount of support Kennedy had in the polls before suspending his campaign.)

These voters are also, in all likelihood, among the hardest to detect in surveys, due to their distrust of pollsters (and the media writ large) and general aversion to politics. (These are not people who you would consider “likely voters,” although Trump proved in 2016 that sometimes “unlikely voters” vote.) They are certainly a group that receives little media attention: Von, for example, has basically never received coverage in The New York Times, despite hosting a top-five podcast, boasting almost 3 million subscribers.

Is it possible that, because of their reliance on more mainstream outlets like The Times, Democrats are missing this chunk of voters, at the same time as Trump is focusing attention on them? If you’re looking for the young men who appear to be abandoning the Democratic Party in droves, disaffected liberals who listen to Rogan and sympathized with Kennedy are hardly a bad place to start. “Do the Democrats have anything to offer [these voters] in opposition to [Kennedy and Gabbard]?” Kassam asked. “Right now, it doesn’t look like it.”

But it also doesn’t look like they want to. Harris didn’t court Kennedy’s endorsement; her campaign seems plenty fine with this quasi-realignment. After all, it’s not as if they get nothing in the bargain. Democratic support among young women, who are more frequent voters anyways, has rarely been higher; Trump’s embrace of Gabbard and Kennedy is also no doubt a turn-off to certain segments of the Republican coalition. (“Free-market, limited-government and social conservatives have been kicked to the curb” by Trump’s campaign, Marc Short, Mike Pence’s closest adviser, told the Times yesterday. “Doubling down on big-government populists will not energize turnout among traditional conservatives.”)

Yesterday, as illustrated by Current Status — a webpage I use to help stay abreast of headlines — I couldn’t help but notice that the Kennedy/Gabbard news came around the same time as Harris announced the endorsements of more than 200 former Bush, McCain, and Romney staffers. This is very much a two-way street: just as Kennedy and Gabbard backing Trump helps drives some former Republicans towards Harris, every Harris endorsement from a neocon warmonger (as the “crunchy-ish” might call them) helps bring these less politically-minded, more contrarian voters into the MAGA fold.

At the Democratic convention last week, Harris offered few rhetorical olive branches to the “crunchy-ish” but threw plenty of bones to the neocon set, promising to make America’s military the “most lethal fighting force in the world” and to support Israel against Iran and Ukraine against Russia. Both parties have chosen the demographics they want custody of in this divorce; Democrats are all too happy to take Adam Kinzinger in exchange for Tulsi Gabbard, just as Republicans are pleased with the reverse. The only question is which surrogate represents a larger chunk of the electorate, and which chunk will be more motivated to show up come November.

Kassam, a British native who has worked in populist politics on both sides of the pond, likened the changes to a trade in soccer (sorry, football).

“I’m a Man United fan,” he said, “and Man United are currently looking at swapping out Jadon Sancho for Raheem Sterling. And it’s that kind of swap where it’s like, yes, on paper, Jaden Sancho might look like a better player, but per the team and per what the manager of the team wants to do, [he] doesn’t really work, and so you’re willing to make that trade.”

“For that to be happening right now,” he added, “just a couple of months before the election, is probably genuinely the most fascinating thing that could be happening.”

1. “The Bannons, like many conservative Irish-Catholic families, were captivated by a different Democrat, John F. Kennedy,” Joshua Green reports in his masterful book “Devil’s Bargain,” a biography of Bannon. “We were Kennedy freaks,” Chris Bannon, Steve’s younger brother, told Green. “My dad knocked on doors for Kennedy. Every Irish kid thinks he wants to be Jack Kennedy, right?”

2. Kassam has his eye on a seventh potential surrogate that he hopes Trump will target: Spiritualist former Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson would probably find “far more cohesion philosophically with the New Right than with the Old Left,” he told me.

3. Rounding out the transition team as honorary co-chairs are Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and JD Vance. The elder Trump sons are hard to pin down ideologically — but their presence is notable partly for the absence of their sister Ivanka, who played a key role in the 2016 transition, hiring a moderate, globalist cast of personnel. (I would also note the role of Barron Trump, a Von listener who urged his dad to go on the show.) The Trump sons helped steer their dad towards picking Vance, a more populist-minded Republican, who — to bring things full circle — has said “the people on the left…whose politics I’m open to — it’s the Bernie Bros.” Talk about horseshoe theory.