Prospect Illustration
Democrats emerged from New Hampshire last night with a passel of candidates who have rocky paths going forward, and that list isn’t confined to Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren.
Pete Buttigieg, who ran a close second in the first two states, will have trouble in the next two, heavily Latino Nevada and more heavily African American South Carolina. Amy Klobuchar, who had a remarkable debate performance last Friday night and gave a remarkable election night semi-victory speech last night, is nonetheless a candidate from the Great White North, has a record as prosecutor that won’t endear her to a share of the black and brown communities, and has precious little time to raise money to exploit her suddenly ascendant performances. Even Bernie Sanders, the two-time winner who is poised to do well in Nevada and could perform well in South Carolina, too, has hit a speed bump in Nevada’s one big city, Las Vegas, where the state’s largest union—the Vegas hotel workers, at once a great union and a very parochial one—has opted to go to war against him.
Somebody’s got to win this thing, and it had better not be Michael Bloomberg.
Amy Klobuchar ran a surprising and very respectable third last night, surpassing not just former Vice President Joe Biden, as I predicted at the close of Friday’s debate, but also Elizabeth Warren, whose vote she actually doubled. She also shone in what was effectively her introduction to the larger electorate last night in a speech that made her sound more grounded, empathetic and effective in going after President Trump than any of her fellow candidates. More than any other Democrat, she takes on Trump as a human being—the measure by which he’s weakest. She introduced herself as a woman with working class roots, of apparently normal talents but exceptional grit.
She dealt with policy less than any of her Democratic rivals, alluding in one brief paragraph to dealing with climate change, making college and healthcare more affordable, and treating immigrants as human beings. It was the human contrast with Trump that she stressed. When she became president, she vowed, she would take responsibility for errors, wouldn’t pick fights with everyone not singing her hosannas, wouldn’t tear the country apart. And on these rocks—responsibility and empathy—she pledged to build her campaign and provide the contrast to Donald Trump that would lead the Democrats to victory.
I am not an Amy Klobuchar fan as such; I fear that as president she won’t push for the transformative reforms our economy and society clearly need. That said, her pitch, her tone, her manner is more affecting than any that her rivals have exhibited, and ones that may be the most difficult for Trump to counter.
She also presents the Democratic establishment with a post-Biden option not named Buttigieg. My guess is that in coming days and weeks, more of that establishment will join Klobuchar’s column than Mayor Pete’s. Her electoral track record is far better than his, her resume reassuringly longer, and her manner all grown up. That said, she doesn’t have time or resources to wage the kind of campaign she now needs to wage; doesn’t even have time to raise those resources. Moreover, as she and Buttigieg and Bloomberg combine to divide the non-Sanders vote, it will be Advantage, Bernie—as it was last night even in Bloomberg’s absence.
Sanders is taking a more upbeat tack these days, and not just because he’s on a roll.
Stacked up against Klobuchar’s displays of empathy and Sanders’s cornering the authenticity market, Buttigieg has a synthetic quality that doesn’t serve him well, and isn’t likely to help him in the next debate, when Bernie will attack him as the billionaire’s boy and Amy will cast a cold eye on his brief resume and industrial-strength chutzpah. In Tuesday’s voting, Klobuchar was the big winner among seniors while Bernie, as always, romped among the young. Buttigieg likes to present himself as a middle-class guy from the Midwest; his public—into which Klobuchar may well make further inroads—is increasingly middle-aged, too.
Sanders is taking a more upbeat tack these days, and not just because he’s on a roll. His election night talk bore scant resemblance to his stump speeches, which, as every Democrat knows, feature a flaying, of Biblically prophetic intensity, of the economic, social, and political injustices built into our system. On Tuesday night, Sanders squeezed the flaying into one relatively brief segment (more allusive than statistical) of his talk, while promising to build a more just society. Perhaps most revealingly, he made no reference to Medicare for All, speaking only of universal health care.
As the exit polling made clear, Bernie ran best in working-class communities, while the wine-cave candidate Buttigieg was the clear winner among wine-track voters. That’s Sanders’s strongest argument for his ability to beat Trump—that he can turn out more young and minority working-class voters than the other Democrats in the field, and has a better shot than they at peeling away some of Trump’s white working-class supporters. His problem is how to expand his margins of victory going forward. Even if he continues to win pluralities in multi-candidate primaries, he has to get his vote totals well over 30 percent—at some point, over 40 percent—if he’s to amass a big enough delegate lead going into this summer’s convention.
His more immediate problem is how to overcome the clear opposition that Culinary Local 226—the 60,000-member union of Las Vegas hotel workers—is now waging against him in the upcoming Nevada caucuses. A local with brilliant leadership and a dedicated membership, the union has waged impressive strikes and organizing campaigns to become probably the most powerful private-sector union in the nation. It has used that power to win perhaps the most comprehensive and high-quality health care plan out there, with virtually no out-of-pocket costs to its members. For which reason, many, probably most, of its members view a Medicare for All system that eliminates all other plans as a distinct comedown from the coverage they’ve won through decades of struggle.
Problem is, there are at most a few hundred thousand working-class Americans for whom Medicare for All would be a comedown, and more than a hundred million working-class Americans for whom it would be something between a figurative and literal lifesaver. Local 226 is part of a union—UNITE HERE—that has seldom hesitated to promote the welfare of its members over the general good. (I’m flashing back to 2002, when the union’s other mega-local—the one representing New York’s hotel workers—endorsed Republican Governor George Pataki for re-election over a far more pro-labor Democrat, because Pataki had given the local the right to organize one in-state casino.) There are good arguments for and against the course that Local 226 has now embarked on, but it certainly presents an obstacle to the most pro-union Democratic front-runner in the party’s recent history. That may be one reason why Sanders didn’t mention Medicare for All last night.
After Tuesday, it’s almost impossible to see how Biden and Warren can go forward, particularly since their funding will slow to a trickle. For Warren, the election was nothing short of devastating, as she finished fourth even among college-educated women, the constituency that had been her firmest base. Clearly, she hemorrhaged votes to Sanders on the left, to Buttigieg among the college educated, to Klobuchar among women. In her election night talk, she positioned herself, as she did all last week, as the one candidate who could bridge the gap between Sanders supporters and the party establishment. Her assessment was probably correct but proved to be of little help to her when New Hampshire voters picked their candidate.
With Sanders, Warren has played a crucial role in prodding the Democratic Party to acknowledge the cruelty and dysfunctionality of actually existing American capitalism and to embrace some reforms to that system that go well beyond anything Democrats have advocated at least since the 1930s, and in some cases, ever. Whatever the outcome of her increasingly tenuous campaign, that’s no small accomplishment.
A closing thought on the absurdity of beginning the primary season in New Hampshire (not to mention Iowa): In 1968, California Assembly Speaker and political sage Jesse Unruh dismissed the Granite State’s primary by saying, “There are more Democrats between LaBrea and LaCienega [two Los Angeles boulevards that run parallel to each other about two miles apart] than there are in all of New Hampshire.” Fifty-two years later, that’s still true.
