mpi04/MediaPunch/IPx via AP Photo
At the Democratic debate in Miami, June 2019
I don’t see how Democrats could be very happy with the way the presidential nomination race has gone—except for the small proportion who enthusiastically supported Joe Biden from the beginning.
Contrary to what some are saying now, Biden was never even the choice of the Democratic establishment. He had relatively few major endorsements and not much big money behind him. While he registered high support in early horserace polls, those numbers were mainly the result of name recognition, Biden’s association with Barack Obama, and general good will. It wasn’t because many Democrats were thinking, “Joe Biden is just the leader we need now.” His limitations were well known, and they have been on display all throughout the primary season.
The Democratic Party conducted a casting call for candidates who could supplant Biden as the chief alternative to Bernie Sanders. We had some surprises in the winnowing process—I would not have guessed Pete Buttigieg would go as far as he did, or that Kamala Harris would pull out so early. But none of the would-be alternatives generated enough support from the party base, in particular from African Americans. Elizabeth Warren and others tried; they just couldn’t break through.
To the question, “Who has now made Joe Biden the favorite to win the Democratic nomination?” the answer is the black Democratic voters of South Carolina. It was the magnitude of Biden’s win there—helped but not caused by Representative James Clyburn’s support just before the vote—that convinced Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar to end their campaigns and endorse Biden. That led to the consolidation of the liberal to moderate vote in the party on Super Tuesday; Michael Bloomberg’s withdrawal and endorsement just completed the process.
Nobody ordered those moderate and liberal voters to make that choice. They were waiting for a signal to consolidate, and South Carolina provided it.
What drove that consolidation is no mystery. It wasn’t a sudden enthusiasm for Biden. It was a deep fear of Sanders becoming the presidential nominee and dividing and dragging down the entire party.
The Democratic Party desperately needed a candidate who could transcend the party’s divisions and bring its diverse constituencies together. Neither Biden nor Sanders can do that. The party needed a candidate with the energy, flexibility, and imagination to address the new crises we are facing, from the coronavirus to climate change to new technologies that are disrupting communications and the economy. But as different as Biden and Sanders are, they are both figures from our past, with ideas formed in another era.
We deserved better than this. America deserved better.
The primaries aren’t over, and there may yet be new twists. Warren seems an impossible long shot, though if she stays in, she may yet get enough delegates to be a factor at the Democratic convention. But barring any dramatic surprises, Biden will be the Democratic nominee; he even has a decent shot at a first-ballot victory.
No one would say that Biden’s reemergence as the favorite was inevitable. But, in one respect at least, it’s unsurprising. In the 2018 Democratic congressional and gubernatorial primaries, the liberal-to-moderate candidates almost always defeated the left-progressives. All the Democrats who flipped governorships were center-left. Nearly all the Democrats who flipped congressional seats were too. The 2020 presidential race is just repeating the same pattern.
Many progressives have insisted, on the contrary, that the Democratic Party has moved left. In a sense, that’s true: The candidates who are called “moderate” or “centrist”—Klobuchar is a good example—were generally regarded as liberals only a short time ago. They’ve taken some positions, like support for a $15 minimum wage and substantially higher taxes on the rich, that used to be considered radical. But that shift isn’t equivalent to a move leftward in the Sanders sense. In 2020, he’s getting substantially lower shares of the Democratic primary vote than he did in 2016, when he was the protest candidate against Hillary Clinton. It was simply an illusion that Democrats had moved that far left.
What’s actually happened is that Democrats have moved both to the left and to the right. Their younger voters have moved left at the same time the party has had an influx of centrist and center-right suburban professionals, many of them women alienated by Donald Trump and today’s Republican Party. This is one of the critical long-run tensions Democrats face: how to reconcile constituencies that are pulling them in opposite directions.
New leadership could have helped resolve those tensions, and new leadership must be coming. Even if Biden or Sanders wins the presidency, will the winner be around to run again in 2024 and complete a full eight years in his mid-to-late eighties? Let’s hope by that time Democrats have identified the new generation of leadership American needs.
