If Bernie Wins, Where Will He Take the Democratic Party?
There are many pitfalls on the road ahead.
On Monday night, the Iowa caucuses ended in chaos. More important, the partial results released on Tuesday suggest that the Democratic path to the White House remains rocky.
A number of analysts and political scientists with whom I spoke initially described Joe Biden as the candidate to beat, but the two clear beneficiaries of Monday’s caucuses were Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg.
The popular vote as of Tuesday night provided a degree of momentum to both candidates, with Sanders slightly ahead. Under Iowa’s arcane system of delegate allocation, however, Buttigieg pulled ahead of Sanders, 26.8 to 25.2 percent, giving Buttigieg’s bid for the White House new legitimacy.
So far, Buttigieg has encountered difficulty winning support among black voters, whose enthusiastic turnout will be crucial to a Democratic victory in November. In South Carolina, as Politico reported on Jan. 24:
The more than $2 million Buttigieg poured into TV and radio ads, some featuring black supporters touting the former South Bend mayor, hasn’t budged his stubbornly low poll numbers in the state among African Americans.
Buttigieg was at 2 percent among black voters in a recent Fox News poll. Elijah Anderson, a professor of sociology and African-American Studies at Yale, observed that “Buttigieg made a surprise showing, and then took advantage by making the early rounds of the news shows.” In 2016, Hillary Clinton was fatally handicapped by relatively low black turnout compared with 2008 and 2012, the years Barack Obama ran.
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Both Sanders and Buttigieg could be high-risk choices for the Democratic Party. While Buttigieg now seems to have a legitimate shot at the nomination, none of the experts I contacted were prepared to put him in the top tier.
Eitan Hersh, a Tufts political scientist, responded to my inquiry:
As the first states continue voting, the main thing I would look for is whether any of the moderate candidates (Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar) can consistently perform well. If Buttigieg suddenly does well in New Hampshire, i.e. better than Biden, then voters looking for an alternative to Sanders and Warren may coalesce around him. I think that’s unlikely. I still think Biden is the mostly likely mainstream candidate.
Charles Stewart, a political scientist at M.I.T., wrote:
I’m still betting on Biden. Ultimately, Sanders has a ceiling of around 30 percent. Buttigieg is too raw and untested. This leaves Warren and Biden. But it’s going to be a long slog to the nomination.
Suzanne Model, a professor emerita of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, told me that
Despite a potential surprise in Iowa, I believe that the Democratic nomination will go to Joe Biden. He leads slightly in national polls and strongly among African Americans, a key Democratic constituency. What’s more, the DNC is again likely to throw its weight against a truly progressive candidate. Finally, America still appears reluctant to elect a female president.
Others put Sanders in the top tier.
“Sanders is still the most likely beneficiary from a fractured race,” Matt Grossmann, a political scientist a Michigan State, wrote me late Tuesday:
He’s a factional candidate with a solid floor, but he’s made inroads with Latinos and can probably do well in most of the early states and California. His biggest competition was Biden, and Biden is likely to suffer the most after tonight.
The potential pitfalls for the Democratic Party of nominating Sanders go beyond the possibility of losing to Trump again, raising the likelihood that the Senate will remain in Republican hands and threatening the re-election prospects of the 40+ Democrats who defeated Republicans in moderate districts in 2018.
The next step is the New Hampshire primary on Feb. 11, where Sanders currently has a strong 8.6 percentage point lead, according to RealClearPolitics.
If Sanders wins New Hampshire, there will almost certainly be an establishment-led drive to block him from the nomination.
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Looking toward the general election in November, the RealClearPolitics average of the seven most recent national head-to-head surveys shows Sanders ahead of Trump by 3.7 points, 49.0 to 45.3.
Those polls were taken before any concerted Republican efforts to demonize Sanders, which are certain to start in earnest if he becomes the nominee. Sanders’s Democratic opponents have shown little inclination to publicly test his general election weaknesses, fearful that such an effort would backfire.
Sanders stands out among the leading Democratic presidential candidates in that none of the others have accumulated as many potentially debilitating liabilities as he has over 50 active years in politics.
Sanders, wrote Richard North Patterson, the novelist and former chair of Common Cause, in an article posted on The Bulwark on Jan. 29,
is, in short, the Democrats’ waking nightmare: Sanders remains more likely to split the party than win its nomination. And in the unlikely event that he does, Democrats would then be tethered to the candidate of Donald Trump’s most ardent dreams.
Not only does Sanders currently take positions that would be tough to defend in the general election — a Medicare for All planeliminating private health coverage, a ban on fracking highly unpopular in Pennsylvania, the decriminalization of illegal border crossings — but in the past he has also argued for
nationalization of the energy industry, public ownership of banks, telephone, electric, and drug companies and of the major means of production such as factories and capital, as well as other proposals such as a 100 percent income tax on the highest income earners in America.
Sanders’s positioning on the far left has been crucial to mobilizing pluralities of Democratic primary and caucus voters. But many studies show that in general elections, the nomination of more extreme candidates has alienated moderates and driven up voting for the opposition — in this case the Republican Party.
In their 2018 paper “Who Punishes Extremist Nominees? Candidate Ideology and Turning Out the Base in US Elections,” Andrew Hall and Daniel Thompson, political scientists at Stanford, write:
We have found consistent evidence that extremist nominees do poorly in general elections in large part because they skew turnout in the general election away from their own party and in favor of the opposing party.
While a party’s base voters, especially those who turn out in primaries and caucuses “may prefer a more extreme nominee, the opposing party’s base voters dislike this extreme nominee more than the party’s base likes him or her,” Hall and Thompson write. The opposing party’s voters “care the most about a party nominating an extremist instead of a moderate.”
The consequences of nominating an extremist can be devastating. In an earlier 2015 paper, Hall found that:
When an extremist — as measured by primary-election campaign receipt patterns — wins a “coin-flip” (close) election over a more moderate candidate, the party’s general-election vote share decreases on average by approximately 9—13 percentage points, and the probability that the party wins the seat decreases by 35—54 percentage points.
Anthony Fowler, a political scientist at the University of Chicago who provided me with numerous studies of the effect of ideology on election outcomes, wrote by email:
Given this evidence, if I had to make a prediction, I’d say that the Democratic Party’s chances of winning the presidential election are notably lower if they elect Sanders or Warren as opposed to, say, Biden, Klobuchar, or Buttigieg. That’s not to say that Warren or Sanders can’t win the general election, but the evidence suggests that their chances are lower.
While there are “idiosyncratic characteristics of candidates other than ideology that are relevant,” Fowler continued, “we know that ideology is extremely important and that this puts Sanders and Warren at a significant disadvantage in the general election.”
Sanders’s weaknesses have been cataloged by a variety of writers, including Jonathan Chait in a recent New York magazine article, “Running Bernie Sanders Against Trump Would Be an Act of Insanity” and by my Times colleague Timothy Egan in his column last week, “Bernie Sanders Can’t Win.”
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Sander’s vulnerabilities, Chait writes,
are enormous and untested. No party nomination, with the possible exception of Barry Goldwater in 1964, has put forth a presidential nominee with the level of downside risk exposure as a Sanders-led ticket would bring.
Chait bolstered his critique of those arguing for full-throated support of the most liberal policies by citing the success of moderates and the defeat of more radical candidates in flipping seats from Republican to Democrat in the 2018 congressional elections.
The recruitment of moderates by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Chait writes,
was a good strategy to win the House. Democrats flipped 40 seats. Tellingly, while progressives managed to nominate several candidates in red districts — Kara Eastman in Nebraska, Richard Ojeda in West Virginia, and many others — any one of whose victory they would have cited as proof that left-wing candidates can win Trump districts, not a single one of them prevailed in November. Our Revolution went 0—22, Justice Democrats went 0—16, and Brand New Congress went 0—6. The failed technocratic 26-year-old bourgeoisie shills who were doing it wrong somehow accounted for 100 percent of the party’s House gains.
Sanders’s ascendancy in the nomination fight places the Democratic Party in a double bind. Not only is he potentially a dangerously weak general election candidate but, if an Anybody-But-Bernie movement materializes and successfully defeats him at the convention, Sanders supporters — more than backers of any other major candidates — are likely to bolt on Election Day and vote for either a third-party candidate or even Trump (as many Sanders supporters did in 2016), or sit out the contest altogether. In 2016, more than 7 million votes were cast for third-party candidates, more than enough to have given the election to Hillary Clinton.
A January 22-23 Emerson College survey asked Democratic primary voters “will you vote for the Democratic nominee even if it is not your candidate?” 87 percent of Joe Biden supporters said yes, as did 90 percent of those backing Elizabeth Warren and 86 percent of those aligned with Pete Buttigieg. 53 percent of Sanders supporters said yes, 16 percent said no, and 31 percent said they were undecided.
If that were not enough, Sanders loyalists have been primed by their belief that in 2016 the Democratic National Committee backed Hillary Clinton and view the Democratic establishment with deep suspicion — as evidenced by the displays of anger and resentment toward party leaders at two Sanders events earlier this month in Iowa.
As Michael Tomasky pointed out in a Daily Beast article on Feb, 4, “Iowa Caucuses on the First Day of What’s Poised to be the Ugliest Democratic Primary Fight Ever,” if Sanders becomes the clear front-runner and the party establishment tries to block him, the story line will be
that party establishment corporatist hacks are moving heaven and earth to thwart the pure insurgent, the man of the people. The Sanders army will push it, and so will Trump and Fox News and the Republican Party, because they want Sanders as their opponent. Fox is going to run more “poor Bernie” stories than Jacobin.
There are election analysts, including a number of conservatives, who say that they believe that Sanders would be a credible nominee with a good chance of beating Trump.
In “Don’t Believe Anyone Who Says Bernie Sanders Can’t Win,” David French, who used to write for National Review and is now published in The Dispatch, argued on Jan. 30:
Every single factor that caused reluctant Republicans to hold their noses and vote for Trump will apply to reluctant Democrats. “Binary choice,” they’ll hear. “Judges,” they’ll declare. And, unlike 2016, when a host of people on both sides of the aisle thought there was no way that Hillary Clinton would lose to Donald Trump, not a single member of the Democratic coalition will be complacent. They’ll attack the election with fierce moral urgency.
Now imagine, French continued,
not just a theater full of young, hopeful faces. Imagine stadiums. Imagine that enthusiasm and sense of hope magnified by a mainstream media (especially online) that will march happily behind Bernie’s banner.
French concluded:
We coldhearted analysts and nerds always seem to underestimate the power of victory and hope. If Bernie wins the nomination, he would have triumphed over impossible odds and a small army of scoffers. Just like Trump. If Bernie wins, his core base voters will start to believe that their dreams can be a reality, and they’ll stand with him even if he shoots a man on Fifth Avenue.
Along similar lines, Drew Holden, a Republican consultant, wrote “Of course Bernie Sanders can win,” on Feb. 3 in The Washington Post:
All of these criticisms ignore Sanders’s considerable strengths. He commands a passionate, dedicated and active army of volunteers and small-dollar donors. Sanders’s message, whether you agree with it or not, is consistent and resonates deeply with millions of Americans.
On the liberal side, Matthew Yglesias took on the assignment of making the best case for Bernie Sanders in Vox: “Bernie Sanders can unify Democrats and beat Trump in 2020”:
The Vermont senator is unique in combining an authentic, values-driven political philosophy with a surprisingly pragmatic, veteran-legislator approach to getting things done. This pairing makes him the enthusiastic favorite of non-Republicans who don’t necessarily love the Democratic Party, without genuinely threatening what’s important to partisan Democrats.
Toward the end of his essay, however, Yglesias sounds more skeptical. “At the end of the day, Sanders’s record is not nearly as scary as many establishment Democrats fear. His ‘revolution’ rhetoric doesn’t make sense to me, but he’s been an effective mayor and legislator for a long time,” Yglesias writes, adding “Some of his big ideas are not so hot on the merits, but it’s not worth worrying about them because the political revolution is so unrealistic.”
Most political scientists I contacted this week saw greater disadvantages for the Democratic Party in a Sanders nomination than in the possible selection of other leading candidates.
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Andrew Engelhardt, a postdoctoral researcher at Brown, wrote, that
a Sanders nomination would be helpful for other party races to the degree he can encourage individuals who would otherwise not participate to actually turn out. It’s unclear if he helps Democrats win in more moderate districts.
Engelhardt then noted that a January Economist survey “found that independent and Republican identifiers see Sanders as quite extreme relative to most other prospective Democratic candidates.”
Winning Republican voters is a lost cause for any Democrat, Engelhardt noted, but nominating Sanders could turn away
any who may at least consider someone like Biden or Buttigieg. Further, it may go so far as to encourage these individuals to turn out and vote against Sanders and other Democrats.
Wendy Schiller, a political scientist who is also at Brown, noted in an email that
Sanders appears to generate the most fervent and intense enthusiasm among his supporters, but polls continue to show that Biden attracts more support among the key groups that are known to get out the door to vote in general elections, especially black voters and voters over the age of 35.
At the moment, Schiller continued,
the evidence today just isn’t there that Bernie Sanders at the top of the ticket can generate high enough turnout among black voters to put the Democrats in the White House 2020.
Hersh, the Tufts political scientist, raised a different set of concerns about a Sanders nomination, primarily that he would mobilize conservatives:
Democrats will turn out no matter who their nominee is because they are mostly motivated by their opposition to Trump. Republicans would look at a moderate like Biden or Klobuchar and think the stakes are lower than if the candidate is Sanders or Warren. So they might stay home more.
How would a Sanders nomination influence the outcome of races for Senate, House and local offices?
“Lots of caveats here,” Hersh wrote,
but if you want my best guess, it’s that the logic does apply: Democrats should be concerned about heightened counter-mobilization that limits their chances up and down the ballot if they nominate a more ideologically extreme candidate like Sanders.
Now it may be that the country is ready to elect as president a 78-year-old angry democratic socialist calling for revolution. But if I were a partisan whose top priority was to bring the Trump presidency to an end, I would not bank on it.
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