Well then! I had no idea how powerful a Riot Trail endorsement was! With great power comes great responsibility 🤔.
But seriously, although many people I know seem to be freaking out about yesterday, I for one am relieved. It looks like it's gonna be Bernie vs. Biden from here on out, which mean one of them (probably Joe, but who knows) will likely be able to win outright on first ballot. Although I was kind of fascinated by how a contested convention (during a pandemic!) would play out, it's undoubtedly better not to go through that. And I agree with my friend JH who said, "I feel much, much better that the narrative turns out to be something like 'black voters gave Joe the momentum to win' instead of the much nastier alternatives about superdelegates or the party establishment or billionaires or Super PACs."
Ezra Klein has an excellent article about Bernie's flawed strategy of attacking people he needs to join his coalition. In short:
If you treat voters and officials in the party you want to lead as the enemy, a lot of people in that party aren’t going to trust you to lead them.
Now if Bernie somehow does manage to right the ship, build a coalition and win the nomination against a single rival, he will have surely proved his mettle and deserve to be the nominee. I don't see that happening, but if it does, fine.
But I'm glad we seem to have avoided the two worst outcomes: Bernie winning by default because everyone else splits their votes between them, or (less bad but still pretty bad) the superdelegates choosing someone else at a contested convention.
It's also worth noting that the huge surge in turnout of young people that Bernie has been banking his candidacy on did not materialize yesterday. Good to figure this out now rather than later. Promising to get non-voters (like young people) to turn up has been the fool's gold of many a campaign over the years. It never happens.
And as a commenter on this blog pointed out, the old crusty moderate voters who might defect if they're worried the Dem is going to screw up the economy will vote either way, possibly for Trump, not just stay home... so that is in effect a double vote loss, rather than the single votes lost from disaffected Bernie supporters sitting the election out.
There are a lot of concerns out there about Biden as a candidate, and I share those. He is far from ideal. He's not running a campaign of ideas. He naively suggests Republicans will work with him. He has trouble forming complete sentences.
But, overall, I'm breathing a huge sigh of relief today.
One person who isn't breathing a sigh of relief: Donald Trump.
I guess if ever there's a moment to say what I think about politics on my political blog it is now. Super Tuesday is... Tomorrow! And that means my State of California and many others will be voting, after which the basic contours of the race will be set and difficult to alter. It appears we're headed for either a clear-cut Bernie win, or no one getting a majority and therefore a contested convention, which could play out any number of ways. I have read so many arguments and counter-arguments for the different candidates it's difficult to conclude anything with any strong sense of certainty, but I will share my basic impression of the situation.
Suffice to say I am not sold on the idea that Bernie is the best candidate to beat Trump. This study calls into question the Sanders' camp's electability claims:
Democrats should not be very reassured by early polls that find Sanders faring as well against Trump as the more moderate candidates: These numbers may only look decent for Sanders because they assume he will inspire a youth turnout miracle. Our survey data reveals voters of all parties moving to Trump if Sanders is nominated, a liability papered over by young voters who claim they would be inspired to vote by Sanders alone.
The gamble Democrats supporting Sanders based on his early polls against Trump must be ready to make is that, despite the evidenceto the contrary, the lowest-participating segment of the electorate will turn out at remarkably high rates because Sanders is nominated.
There have been many articles making the case that Sanders is either the most electable, or in any case a very electable candidate... I cannot say with certainty they are wrong, but my gut feeling is that all these arguments are written by people who badly want them to be true, and whose biases are affecting their judgment. More concretely, the above article notes that all the models that have Bernie winning rely on the assumption that there will be a historic surge of voting among people who typically do not vote. This seems a dicey proposition at best to me.
Jonathan Chait makes many salient points about the dangers of nominating Sanders here, but one in particular I want to call attention to is this:
In 2008, Republicans began shifting their attacks to Barack Obama after he took a delegate lead over Hillary Clinton. By the end stages of the primary, Clinton was outperforming Obama in polls against John McCain. And indeed, Clinton’s popularity continued to rise for years after Obama became the face of his party, and Clinton was spared the brunt of Republican hostility. But this hardly proved Hillary Clinton would have made a stronger 2008 nominee than Obama. It simply displays the fleeting benefit of drafting off the front-runner’s position as the principal target of intraparty attacks. Notably, Trump has been directing his criticism at almost every candidate except Sanders, whom he, in fact, frequently defends as the innocent victim of a rigged process.
To me it feels obvious that this is what's going on right now... and of course as soon as Sanders seals the deal that dynamic is going to change FAST. There's no question that Sanders is the candidate Trump wants to face, and for all his flaws Trump does seem to have a gut instinct for what needs to happen for him to pull out another win.
Trump is a notably unpopular president, especially considering how well the economy has been doing, and is very beatable. What Trump needs to do to win is to change the election from a "referendum" on him into a "choice" between him and a seemingly equally risky opponent. He needs to be able to say, "hey, you might not like me, but my opponent will wreck the economy!" Sanders is probably the only candidate still in the race that would be seriously vulnerable to that charge.
I believe he would be a weak candidate in a general election, for the most obvious of reasons. Just try to step back and disengage from this particular moment and just think in general terms: Does the United States seem like the kind of a place that would elect a Socialist as President? Has that been your understanding of where this country is at? Because to me it's the type of country that elected George W. Bush after starting a disastrous war over John Kerry, and then Donald Trump after (insert list of obscenities here) over Hillary Clinton. But perhaps you have a much, much more charitable view of the American electorate!
That said, Sanders has certainly run an impressive campaign and built a potent turnout operation during this primary. Honestly, for most of the campaign I assumed he had no chance of being the nominee, because most voters named "electability" as their top criteria. Amazingly that hasn't changed, but Sanders has managed to convince people that he, the "Democratic Socialist," is in fact, the most "electable." While I don't agree, I'm impressed he's been able to convince so many people of it. If he manages to secure a majority of the delegates (either before or during the convention) then he will certainly have earned his spot at the top of the ticket!
Of the candidates still in the race, for my money the one that would make the best President is Elizabeth Warren. In contrast to Sanders, who even if he managed to win I suspect would be an ineffective leader, I think Warren knows how to get stuff done. But, honestly, I don't see her as being any more electable than Sanders, although for different reasons. I think she is likely to evoke the same hostility as HRC did, just because of who she is. Obviously her gender is a key part of that, but it's more than just that. Most people aren't very ideological, but vote for people they can relate to... The qualities I like about EW - her razor sharp intellect, her unwillingness to suffer bullshit - are precisely the things that many Americans find alienating. Like HRC I think she will strike people as a know-it-all woman telling them how to live their lives. I feel like arguments for her electability are, like those for Sanders, made by people who very much want them to be true, and so should be treated skeptically. That said, if we're going to chance it on a riskier candidate personally I'd rather it be Warren, as I think there would be more of a pay-off in the event she won.
I literally did not decide who to vote for until today, as I filled in my ballot. But ultimately I chose the candidate I think has best chance of beating Trump, among those that have a chance of winning the nomination. Swing state polling suggests that person is Joe Biden. While I'll concede I'm not super inspired by Biden, I do think he's basically a good guy, and with him at the top of the ticket the election will be a referendum on Trump, which bodes well for our chances. Furthermore it's possible we could do quite well down ballot with Biden at the top. I'm certain that the balance of Congress will have far more to do with how much gets accomplished than who is President (provided it's not Trump). I think that Buttigieg, Klobuchar and Beto all all getting behind Biden speaks to their understanding that we cannot afford to blow this election. It would be catastrophic.
Of course the concern about nominating anyone other than Sanders is that there are surely some Sanders supporters who would sit out an election if their guy isn't at the top of the ticket. This is a legitimate concern. Ultimately, though, I think Sanders is the riskier proposition. First of all, anyone who would sit out an opportunity to get rid of Trump is ultimately not a reliable voter under any circumstance. In other words, if you can't be counted on to vote for Biden over Trump you can't be counted on to vote for anyone over Trump. And second of all I think any defections from Sanders supporters will be more than outweighed by the defections we will avoid from the rest of the political spectrum who are primarily concerned about not screwing up the economy.
So, after much back and forth, that's where I finally landed. But I want to add that one thing I've come to appreciate over the course of this challenging election season - having seen so many impassioned, well-reasoned, persuasive arguments on behalf of any number of candidates - is that none of us have a monopoly on the truth, nothing is certain, and that all you can really hope is that people will take it seriously, consider alternate points of view and make their best choice according to whatever criteria they find appropriate. It may sound trite, but I really do respect anyone whose made their best effort to do that, even if they came to a different conclusion than me.
The only thing that gets under my skin is when people impugn the character of other candidates. All of the candidates are flawed, to be sure. But I do think they're all trying to do what's best for the country. They have different ideas about what that means, and various personal deficiencies, and sorting through all that is why we have primary elections. But let's at least give them some credit for throwing their hat in the ring to try do right by our country, to their best understanding of what that means.
I also want to add that, despite my serious reservations about Bernie as the nominee, I certainly do not share the paranoid fears of people like David Brooks who think Sanders is going to destroy democracy. (This takedown of Brooks' column is worth the read.) Sanders, like all of us, has his personal failings, but I do believe he is a fundamentally decent person and would do his best to help the less fortunate, which is certainly admirable. If he is the nominee I will support him without reservation.
Onward to Super Tuesday and beyond!
ICYMI I highly recommend these articles and companion videos by Vox making the case for the top candidates. They all make very interesting points.
Also, completely unrelated (for now), I learned a lot from this article about Coronavirus. I have a feeling we'll be talking a lot more about this.
