Bernie's back and Democrats are scared

Washington | The fear is palpable. Bernie Sanders is back in the game.

Youthful waves of ultra-progressive supporters have pushed the ornery, self-proclaimed socialist senator from Vermont to the top of Democrat poll rankings this week, overtaking Joe Biden just days out from the opening Iowa caucus that will set the tone for this year's bitter party nomination battle.

The Sanders surge has triggered alarm and doom across the party's establishment, which has been yearning for three long years to reverse what it regards as the aberrant horror of Donald Trump's 2016 win and restore to the White House a centrist, politically and economically moderate president in the mould of Barack Obama or Bill Clinton.

In the way stands a reborn Sanders and his loyal base, who four years ago came close to upending Hillary Clinton's bid for the nomination and to this day remain convinced he would have beaten Trump in a head-to-head contest.

Yet in 2020 many fear the Senator's fierce anti-corporate populism and eye-popping tax-and-spending plans will drag the party so far to the left he'll end up gifting Trump an unthinkable second term. The President, it's said, is praying for a Sanders nomination.

And why wouldn't he? Americans would be choosing between the populist they now know versus the one they don't.

“They’re about to make all the same mistakes we made,” an Australian political operative who was intimately involved in Labor’s failed 2019 election campaign told AFR Weekend during a visit to Washington DC this week.

Within days, the Iowa caucuses will deliver the first hard verdict on a tightly balanced field of Democrat front-runners. Pretty much anything is still possible. But all the focus right now is on whether Sanders comes out on top.

As per long-standing tradition in American politics, it's the voters of Iowa who get the first say.