John Duricka/AP Photo
Former Vice President Walter Mondale arrives at a rally after the final 1984 presidential debate, October 21, 1984, in Kansas City, Missouri. Mondale, and that year’s Democratic contest, may be the best analogue to Joe Biden in the 2020 Democratic primary race’s competition for multiple distinct voter groups.
A month from now, voters in California will begin to get mail-in ballots for the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, and caucus-goers in Iowa will trudge to gymnasiums and town halls to express their own preferences. What began as the largest field in modern primary history has shrunk officially to 14 and unofficially to more like four, with a few more if we’re being charitable. It would be surprising to me if more than five candidates pick up delegates, given the 15 percent viability threshold required to do so.
Despite this relatively smaller canvas, the primary race feels jumbled, because the way we’ve commonly understood Democratic primaries doesn’t map neatly onto our new political reality. There are multiple races being waged at once, seeking to peel off segmented voters. The strategies to cobble together a winning coalition make the race somewhat unpredictable, unless or until those strategies prove unrealistic.
If this were a traditional Democratic primary, all of the smart money would be placed on Joe Biden to emerge as the nominee—and like it or not (I personally don’t!), that’s still the smart play. Biden’s campaign resembles two from the past, for different reasons. It’s like Trump’s in 2016, in that other candidates, the media, and assorted activists all have reassured themselves that he simply must implode, waiting for an epiphany that never comes. His durability may surprise some, but opposing campaigns have done little to provoke missteps or attack Biden’s record, and his built-in name recognition and attachment to a popular former president has strengthened him throughout.
The other campaign most historically similar to Biden’s is not Obama’s in 2008, who won with a completely different coalition. Biden’s campaign most resembles Walter Mondale’s in 1984. Political reporter and friend of the Prospect Ron Brownstein coined the phrases “beer track” and “wine track” to characterize lanes of Democratic primaries past. Biden is running a classic beer track race, combining working-class white voters and minorities to build his lead. He’s opposed in the beer track by Bernie Sanders, who has similar strengths among downscale voters (to be fair, mostly because they’re younger and came of age in a sclerotic economy). Sanders is a stronger version of Jesse Jackson, a beer track leftist who, in other ways than Sanders, made it harder for Mondale to fend off Gary Hart. In the wine track this year are Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg, fighting over more upwardly mobile Democrats.
Yes, you also have Andrew Yang, Cory Booker, and Amy Klobuchar, who theoretically could cut into these subgroups a bit, but there’s been no demonstrated evidence that they’re doing so appreciably. Then there’s a whole separate lane for “billionaires who think they can sway low-information voters with saturation-level advertising.” Tom Steyer has frontloaded his spending in the four early states, while Michael Bloomberg is mimicking a Jerry Brown 1976 late-entry campaign, only with $100 million more (and counting) to spend. The billionaires may not be totally delusional, as companies use ads for a reason; but politics is littered with big-spending self-funders who fail to excite the electorate.
You’ll notice that ideology plays no role in the beer track/wine track framework. You can occupy either space from the left or the center. Gary Hart, the “Atari Democrat” who rejected New Deal remedies for economic problems, was a wine track candidate no less than anti-war Howard Dean in 2004 and progressive economic reformer Warren. Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden differ widely on policy, as did Bill Clinton and Jesse Jackson; they all get lumped into the beer track.
The beer track/wine track metaphor has faded a bit because the past two contested Democratic primaries also broke this rule of thumb. In 2008, Barack Obama paired wine track voters with people of color, and a version of that pairing also pushed Hillary Clinton through in 2016. Clinton’s biggest margins over Sanders in 2016 came with African Americans, but she also did better with voters making over $100,000 per year than with those under $50,000. She lost ground compared to 2008 not just in college-town counties but also in rural white counties.
Nobody in the 2020 race has yet re-created the Obama coalition; Biden doesn’t attract well-off voters and nobody but him has a large slice of voters of color. But ideology plays a stronger role in Democratic politics than it did in 1984. By one estimate, very liberal and moderate voters are about evenly split in the party, with another third in the middle. Another, from the Brookings Institution, shows liberals doubling in number within the party from 1992 to 2018.
So you have four candidates, each competing separately and with one another simultaneously. Warren and Buttigieg both appeal to wine track voters, but Buttigieg is at the same time staking out Biden’s ideological territory in a moderate lane. Warren and Sanders compete for liberals, but Sanders has different, lower-income voters in a separate battle with Biden. If you cut it up by race, Buttigieg’s voters skew much whiter, and Biden’s much less white.
Then there are the lanes of age and gender; Buttigieg’s voters skew much older (like Biden’s, to some degree) and Sanders’s much younger (like Warren’s, to some degree). Warren appeals to more women but Biden leads there, while Buttigieg’s and (to a lesser extent) Sanders’s support is concentrated more among males.
In sum, there are many primaries going on, many one-on-one battles for certain groups of voters. And changes in the Democratic electorate, along with the presence of four main candidates, mean that candidates must pay attention to all of these flanks. In 2016, Clinton’s dominance among voters of color was enough to offset the changing ideologies of the electorate; but it doesn’t seem that anyone has matched that level of dominance. (Biden’s African American support is nowhere near Clinton’s.)
The multiple primaries being fought by different candidates on separate terrains could explain why the race seems up in the air, maybe more than it actually is. After all, if you look at FiveThirtyEight’s numbers from the end of 2018 and compare them to the latest polling, Biden and Sanders, the top two in the field, for the most part haven’t budged. That would spell a protracted but eventual Biden victory, who has led just about every poll all year. Given how things worked out in 1984 for Mondale, the best analogue to Biden, maybe Democratic voters should be thinking a bit more about electability.
