Why Was There a Long Bernie Moment but not a Long Jackson Moment? Why was 2016 "Our Time" and Not 1988?

And What Are the Lessons?

[Note: at the end of this too-long essay is a list of sources that dig hard into this question from a deeper contemporary perspective. As I age I realize that to get it right we need to not act like we we have just invented the wheel but to scan back and appreciate the hard work and perceptiveness of previous cohorts. In this case it’s primarily two people that I found inspiring and challenging in my coming up years, Bill Fletcher and the late great Joanna Misnik.]

A question has been nagging me since Jesse Jackson passed earlier this week. Namely: why didn’t the Jesse Jackson 1988 campaign produce the same kinds of waves of the long Bernie moment?

The Jackson campaign did roughly about as well Bernie did performance wise–and even better in some ways politics wise by being a direct, organic connection to Black-led electoral politics moving in the 70s and 80s. Both campaigns were preceded by tough economic times for the US working class (and even tougher times for the BIPOC working class). Politically both had strong left-populist/social democratic platforms and had dedicated leftists working it at many levels.

So why didn’t it create a big vibrant layer of the Left and the knock-on effect of winning left candidacies? Was it just the conjuncture? Was it organizational failure? What happened?

In 1988, Jesse Jackson ran one of the most ambitious insurgent campaigns in modern American political history. Jesse carried almost 7 million votes and 11 states plus DC in a pre-internet era. His Rainbow Coalition stitched together Black voters, Latinos, union members, farmers, peace activists, feminists, and progressive whites around a platform that looks strikingly familiar today: full employment, labor rights, universal healthcare, massive public investment, and a foreign policy rooted in diplomacy rather than militarism.

Nearly three decades later, Bernie Sanders ran on a similarly social-democratic program and helped jump start the largest growth of socialist organization in the United States since the early twentieth century. Sanders won approximately 13.2 million votes in 2016 and 9.6 million votes in 2020, while raising over $600 million combined across both cycles, mostly from small donors.

Sanders’ campaigns helped turn Democratic Socialists of America from roughly 6,000 members in 2015 (when I joined thanks in fact to that campaign) to just over 100,000 members now, with active chapters in all 50 states. They also coincided with a dramatic increase in left electoral campaigns: by 2022, more than 200 openly democratic socialist candidates had won local, state, or federal office.

It’s genuinely puzzling at many levels.

Jackson and Sanders both won millions of votes, Jackson enjoyed significantly deeper Black voter support than Sanders ever achieved, and Jackson assembled a visibly multiracial base. Yet Jackson’s campaign didn’t produce a durable national organization, nor did it spark rapid growth in socialist groups. The Rainbow Coalition faded after 1989.

The explanation is not that Jackson’s politics were weaker, nor that Sanders is uniquely gifted. The explanation lies somewhere around a mix of structure, timing, subjective factors, political technology, racism and more. Whatever the cause Jackson ran ahead of the kind of organizational terrain we now enjoy. Sanders helped catalyze and then ran atop an ecosystem that had finally become capable of absorbing, multiplying, and retaining millions of politicized people.

“[Jesse Jackson’s] creation of the Rainbow Coalition, a revolutionary idea at the time, that developed a grassroots movement of working people — Black, white, Latino, Asian-American, Native-American, gay and straight — laid the foundation for the modern progressive movement which is continuing to fight for his vision of economic, racial, social and environmental justice.” - Bernie Sanders on the passing of Jackson.

Membership Organizations

Jackson’s vehicle, the Rainbow Coalition, was intentionally broad and flexible. It functioned mainly as a campaign-centered alliance rather than a dues-paying, internally (or semi) democratic, chapter-based organization with stable membership rolls. Contemporary reporting indicates that while the Rainbow could mobilize hundreds of thousands of volunteers during election cycles, it never maintained a verified national membership list or dues outside of donations.

This distinction matters because coalitions can be good at mobilizing disparate groups around a charismatic leader and shared platform, but far less reliable at reproducing themselves over time. Membership organizations create routines, obligations, leadership pipelines, and identity. Analysts of the Rainbow period repeatedly note that the coalition never resolved what it was meant to be between elections: a pressure group inside the Democratic Party, a proto-party, a national organization, or simply the apparatus for Jackson’s presidential bids.

Sanders’ campaigns benefited from the existence of organizations that already were membership organizations. DSA, labor locals, and later groups like Our Revolution, Justice Democrats, Sunrise and countless localized Berniecrat groups provided obvious landing pads for newly politicized supporters. Jackson’s supporters largely had nowhere equivalent to go.

Candidate-Centered Gravity

Jackson was the moral center, public face, chief fundraiser, and ultimate decision-maker of the Rainbow project. Movements that orbit a single towering figure struggle to develop autonomous institutions. Decisions tend to flow upward, disagreements become personal, and long-term strategy becomes difficult to separate from the career arc of the candidate.

After 1988, internal tensions within the Rainbow intensified. Key organizers later described a decisive turn toward centralization and personal control rather than collective governance. Membership meetings declined, local chapters weakened, and national coordination slowed. By the early 1990s, most Rainbow infrastructure existed primarily as part of Jackson’s later nonprofit and electoral efforts rather than as an independent political organization.

To its credit the campaign did spark innovative attempts throughout the 1990s by the left to assert independent electoral projects and new forms. According to Bill Fletcher and Danny Glover in an excellent (and highly prescient) 2005 piece about the “Neo-Rainbow”:

“ In the wake of what we would describe as Jackson’s coup against himself, alternative views and strategies toward progressive electoral and mass initiatives began to surface. For example, former Texas agricultural commissioner Jim Hightower proposed a “Democratic-Populist Alliance” to fill the void left by the collapse of the Jackson Rainbow; the late trade union leader Tony Mazzocchi founded the Labor Party; through the New Party, Dan Cantor and Joel Rogers advocated a fusion approach to politics–later undermined by a Supreme Court decision in 1997–whereby independent parties could achieve power by cross-endorsing major-party candidates; former National Rainbow Coalition executive director Ron Daniels campaigned as an independent for the presidency in 1992; and the Green Party emerged at the local level, mounting successful runs for municipal and county positions on a progressive platform.”

But of course all these projects (with the exception of the GP) had short lives and often dramatic crashouts.

Bernie Sanders, by contrast, functioned less as a singular charismatic spark (though he did that too) and more as a catalytic node. In 2016 alone, his campaign reported over one million active volunteers, thousands of whom were already running phonebanks, canvasses, and house parties semi-independently.

I myself worked on the Bernie Vol2Vol network, a calling and coaching program that moved hundreds of volunteers to call and support the tens of thousands of volunteers hosting parties, barnstorms and canvasses (a program repeated on an even larger scale in 2020 with the Bernie Victory Captains).

This distributed leadership model helps partially explain why Bernie’s movement survived losses while Jackson’s project largely did not.

The Neoliberal Moment

Jackson ran at the high tide of neoliberal confidence. In 1988, union density had already fallen from 27 percent in 1979 to roughly 17 percent, but many Americans still believed economic decline was temporary and reversible within existing structures. The Cold War remained intact, and communism was widely treated as a failed experiment. Only a year later there would be a tidal wave of popular revolutions rocking the Warsaw Pact.

Sanders ran in the wreckage of the 2008 financial crisis. By 2016, household wealth for the bottom half of Americans was lower than in 1989, real wages had stagnated for decades, and nearly 45 million Americans carried student debt. Among people under 30, favorable views of socialism began exceeding favorable views of capitalism in multiple national polls.

Jackson’s platform was radical in an era of politics that still believed the rising brand of neoliberal capitalism basically worked. Bernie’s platform sounded practical in an era that increasingly knew it did not. Movements emerge when ideas intersect with lived crisis.

White Supremacy

Jackson was persistently framed as a “Black candidate,” despite his universalist economic program. Exit polling in 1988 showed Jackson winning over 85 percent of Black primary voters, but only around 10–12 percent of white voters nationally. Even when white working-class voters agreed with Jackson’s policies, too many white voters simply wouldn’t vote for him or worse rolled out one of the thousands of racist Jackson jokes that lived in that moment.

Bernie Sanders, an older white man with a Brooklyn accent and rumpled style, was read by any number of white voters as familiar and trustworthy. In 2016, Sanders won roughly 55–60 percent of white voters under 30 and performed strongly among white voters without college degrees in numerous states. This symbolic positioning lowered the barrier to entry into left economic politics for millions.

It’s of course an old and still challenging story, how do we move white working class voters out of invisible and visible forms of racism to join fuller and richer democratic movements so they can win the solidarity dividend of better public goods and a multiracial democracy.

The Internet Changed the Physics of Organizing

Perhaps the single biggest discontinuity between 1988 and 2016 is the rise of networked digital infrastructure. Jackson ran in the broadcast era. Bernie ran in the network era. This is not cosmetic. It transforms how movements are built.

The existence of ActBlue enabled millions of people to become habitual small donors with a single click. In 2016, Sanders received over 2.3 million individual donations with an average contribution of about $27. By 2020, his campaign reported over 10 million individual contributions.

Jackson’s campaign reportedly compiled a donor list approaching 700,000 names by 1988. But without mass email, automated processing, and frictionless recurring donations, that list could not easily be converted into a permanent financial base. Bernie’s donor list became a living organism that fed both campaigns and post-campaign organizations.

Comms

Email, social media, and texting allow campaigns and organizations to speak daily to millions of supporters. By 2020, Sanders’ email list reportedly exceeded 15 million addresses, while his social media following across platforms topped 20 million users. Movements no longer rely primarily on newspapers, union newsletters, or occasional rallies. They can maintain continuous contact.

Jackson’s supporters often returned to an atomized media environment after Election Day. Bernie’s supporters continued receiving messages, calls to action, and invitations to meetings.

Not Me, Us Organizing

Peer-to-peer texting platforms allow volunteers to directly contact thousands of voters. In 2016 and 2020, Sanders’ campaign logged hundreds of millions of volunteer-sent texts. This produces a psychological shift: “I am not cheering for a campaign. I am the campaign” famously “Not Me, Us.” That shift is part of how how supporters become organizers themselves but it was also a conscious distributed organizing program to scale to organize, coach, and support (mentioned earlier).

Shared documents, Slack, Zoom, and online toolkits make organizing knowledge copyable. Instead of one organizer training ten people, one organizer writes a guide that trains a thousand. Bernie’s campaign functioned at some moments like open-source software (the internal slogan “give away the passwords”).

The Handoff Problem

Movements succeed when they solve the handoff: supporter to member to organizer to leader to (possibly even) candidate. Jackson’s era lacked some of the technical tools and the institutional hosts to make this pipeline routine. Bernie’s era had both.

In 1988, joining a socialist organization often required mailing a check and waiting weeks for a response. Friction suppresses growth. The internet removes some but not all friction.

Labor’s Position in the Two Eras

Jackson ran when unions were far stronger than they are now density and conditions wise but when the employers offensive hit its strongest moments after the PATCO strike. Strike activity in the late 1980s averaged fewer than 50 major strikes per year, compared to over 200 annually in the 1970s. Union density continued to free fall in the private sector. (Jackson to his great credit showed up all through the 1980s and 1990s on picketlines as a force multiplier).

Sanders ran amid a slow re-radicalization (albeit one with a much lower union density and overall strength). Occupy had built up a young layer of activists around a broad class movement outside the workplace. Between 2018 and 2023, the U.S. saw the largest strike wave in decades, with over 500,000 workers participating in major work stoppages in 2023 alone. Indeed many of the mass teachers strikes in red states like WV, AZ, and OK came out of volunteers involved in the Bernie 2016 campaign. These struggles produced layers of labor activists that consciously leaned much further than the Democratic establishment leftward.

Movements can be juiced by institutional allies with money, staff, and space. Jackson and Bernie 2016 had fewer. Bernie 2020 had more.

Jackson demonstrated that a multiracial working-class left could win millions of votes. Bernie demonstrated that such a campaign, in a networked era, could also generate millions of durable relationships, thousands of new leaders, and a self-reproducing organizational ecosystem.

Jackson planted seeds in frozen ground. Bernie arrived in a new not yet-thawed spring.

What This Teaches Us Now

The lesson is not nostalgia. It is it still alive as we look to 2028. Campaigns do not automatically create movements. They must be intentionally designed to build lists that become organizations, convert donors into members, convert volunteers into leaders, and create structures that outlive candidates.

Jackson’s failure to produce a durable vehicle was not inevitable. It reflected the limits of the era’s political technology and the absence of a prepared organizational ecosystem. Bernie’s success was not inevitable either. It happened because an ecosystem finally existed that could metabolize mass radicalization.

The next left breakthrough will not come from simply rerunning a cyborg Bernie–or less jokingly just a similar successor. It will come from designing campaigns that treat longhaul movement/organization/coalition building as a central objective, not an after thought.

And let’s be clear, I do help DSA continues to be a key part of that–socialists should lead–but it cannot be the only vehicle, the times demand larger, stronger, and less internally weighted down united fronts.

Jackson showed us the horizon. Bernie showed us the machinery and told us to believe in our power. Our task is to build the next generation of machinery and power for…say 2028?.

Further Reading

• The Iconic Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Potential, Bill Fletcher

• The Rainbow and the Democratic Party— New Politics or Old?: A Socialist Perspective, Joanna Misnik

• Visualizing a Neo-Rainbow, Bill Fletcher Jr and Danny Glover

• Rev. Jesse Jackson, 1941-2026, Dan LaBotz