Posts published in February 2020

Bernie Sanders’ was expected to win the Nevada Caucuses, but did even better than expected, crushing Joe Biden by a more than two-to-one margin, thus making it exceedingly unlikely that he (Sanders) can be stopped as he steamrolls his way to the Democratic Party’s 2020 presidential nomination.

“The basic takeaway here is that it’s Bernie’s nomination to lose,” says FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver. “Bernie Sanders in all likelihood is the nominee unless it gets taken from him at the convention,” adds former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe.

The Bulwark’s Bill Kristol casts a dissenting note, arguing that there’s still plenty of time and ability to deny Sanders the nomination.

Sanders, he observes, has won just 43 of 101 delegates chosen so far and about 30 percent of the popular vote. Ninety-seven percent of the delegates, Kristol explains, have not yet been chosen.

That’s true, but Kristol’s theoretical possibilities ignore the practical realities, which make it all but impossible for Sanders to lose the nomination. For starters, as the primary race advances, Sanders is getting stronger, not weaker; and his opponents are getting correspondingly weaker, not stronger.

Biden’s Fall. Before losing in Iowa and New Hampshire, for instance, Biden had been expected to win Nevada. “A Real Clear Politics polling average has [him] in the lead in both Nevada and South Carolina,” reported CNBC Feb. 4.

But losing creates new political dynamics and electoral facts on the ground; and so it was with Biden, who lost badly to Sanders across most major demographic groups in Nevada—Latinos, young voters, the college educated, union members, and progressives.

Even 22 percent of self-styled “moderates” voted for Sanders versus 25 percent for Biden.

Sanders’ broad-based electoral appeal bodes well for him in Texas, Florida, and California—big delegate-rich states with large and diverse populations and burgeoning numbers of Hispanic voters. (Sanders won more than half of all Hispanic/Latino voters in Nevada.)

Biden did win the black vote in Nevada, 39-27 percent over Sanders; but that’s a weak performance, relatively speaking, when compared to how, say, Hillary Clinton did in Nevada four years ago. Clinton, reports the Washington Post’s David Weigel,

won 76 percent of the black vote in Nevada, to just 22 percent for Sanders. The senator from Vermont actually increased his share of black support this year despite the divided field, to 27 percent.

“Biden’s black voter advantage [also] keeps shrinking… [and] that constituency is not rallying around Biden like it used to, or like he needs it to,” Weigel notes.

This is an ominous development for Biden, who needs a very strong showing among black voters in South Carolina and other Southern states if he is to have any chance of stopping Sanders. Biden desperately needs black voters because, as Weigel observes,

he’s struggling with white voters… Biden won just 14 percent of Nevada’s white voters, running behind former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg and tying Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

Right now, Biden is still favored to win in South Carolina; but his margin for victory keeps shrinking as he badly loses these early caucuses and primaries and appears increasingly to be a weak and unattractive candidate in the eyes of prospective voters.

Moreover, even if Biden wins South Carolina and other Southern states, Sanders will still gain a respectable share of the delegates there.

That’s because the Democrats award their delegates proportionately, provided a candidate wins at least 15 percent of the vote, which Sanders is doing and no doubt will continue to do.

The bottom line: as the Bloomberg campaign’s Kevin Shelley told Axios’ Mike Allen: “according to his (Shelley’s) models, if the current field remains on Super Tuesday (March 3), Sanders would win about 30% of the vote—and 45% of the delegates.”

That’s a plurality, not a majority; and, according to party rules, only a candidate with a majority of the delegates can win the nomination.

But will the party establishment really deny Sanders the nomination if he arrives at the convention with 40-45 percent of the delegates? No way. Again, while this may be theoretically possible, it is practically impossible.

To deny Sanders the nomination after he has won far more delegates than any other candidate, and after he has won big and important states such as California, Texas, Florida, and New York, would be to invite an open revolt among the Sandernistas.

Such a move would split the Democratic Party, render it asunder, and destroy whatever prospects it had to defeat Donald Trump.

So if, as now appears inevitable, Sanders wins these big states and at least 40-45 percent of the delegates overall, then he will be, without question, the party’s nominee.

Also-Rans. What about Bloomberg, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and Warren? Might they stop Sanders? No, and for the reasons we’ve already explained here at ResCon1.

Warren rendered Bloomberg Democratic roadkill at the Las Vegas debate. The party’s base will never tolerate a Bloomberg nomination. In their eyes, he has three strikes against him. First, he’s a plutocrat; second, he’s a misogynist; and third, he’s a racist (in their eyes).

Buttigieg has demonstrated no ability to win black votes, and this is a real problem, since African Americans are a core Democratic Party constituency. A Democrat simply cannot win the party’s nomination without them.

Warren is a great debater, but she finished fourth in Nevada, with a dismal 9.6 percent of the vote. That’s less than the 12 percent she was expected to get according to the last poll conducted before the Nevada Caucuses. So much for any post-debate bounce.

Again, Warren’s great debating skills don’t correspond with political popularity. She’d have to overcome Buttigieg and Biden before she can have any hope of competing with Sanders. That ain’t gonna happen.

And the situation is even worse for Amy Klobuchar, who could not parlay a strong showing in New Hampshire into a respectable showing in Nevada. Indeed, her sixth-place finish gives her a ticket to nowhere.

That leaves Sanders, and maybe Biden, as the nominee. But Biden, as we’ve seen, is on a clear glide path to defeat. If he doesn’t win decisively in South Carolina, he’s finished.

In short, Biden is the walking dead, and Sanders is the Democratic ghost that won’t die, and this is unlikely to change.

Feature photo credit: New York Times.

Should the commentariat reconsider Elizabeth Warren’s prospects in light of her impressive debate performance Wednesday night, during which she effectively destroyed whatever slim chance Michael Bloomberg had to win the Democratic presidential nomination?

That’s the question many journalists and pundits are now asking. It’s a fair question, of course, but the answer is “no,” and here’s why:

Although she can be an extraordinarily effective and formidable debater (Mona Charen calls her “the Terminator”), Warren has not demonstrated a corresponding ability to win votes, caucuses and primaries.

She finished third in Iowa, with less than a fifth of the vote, and fourth in New Hampshire, with just 9.2 percent of the vote. Warren also is losing to Sanders in her home state of Massachusetts. (“Losing your home state,” quips the Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein, “is the political equivalent of the Mendoza Line.”)

And these results almost certainly are the high-water mark for Warren. Indeed, for her campaign, it appears to be all downhill from here—even accounting for any post-debate bounce. The Nevada Caucuses, for instance, are tomorrow (Feb. 22), and a new Emerson College/8 News Now poll shows Warren finishing fourth, with just 12 percent of the vote.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that Warren gains five points from the afterglow of her stellar debate performance. That’s still not nearly enough to overtake Bernie Sanders, who has a commanding lead in Nevada.

Moreover, report Shane Goldmacher and Astead W. Herndon in the New York Times, because of early voting, 75,000 Nevadans voted before the debate even took place.

The South Carolina primary (Feb. 29) is eight days away, and a new Winthrop University poll shows Warren in fifth place there, with an abysmal six percent of the vote.

Again, let’s assume, generously, that she gains five points from her debate performance: Warren’s still not anywhere close to overtaking Sanders or Biden in South Carolina. And she faces similar hurdles throughout the South.

In a word, Warren’s problem is Sanders. He stands in her way. They are both the most left-wing or “progressive” candidates running, and they both compete for the same voters. Warren’s problem is that woke progressives prefer Sanders and are far more loyal to him than they are to her.

The New Yorker’s Peter Slevin captured Warren’s predicament in a Feb. 20 report from Raleigh, North Carolina. “Morgan Jackson,” he notes,

a North Carolina political strategist, thinks that Warren is in trouble in the state, where Democrats are as divided as their counterparts across the country, and that Sanders, in particular, stands in her way.

“As long as they split the very progressive vote in North Carolina, there’s no path,” Jackson said, adding that neither candidate has been polling well among African-American voters, who comprise nearly half of the state’s electorate.

Even with her superior ground game, he believes, Warren cannot do well in the state unless she finds momentum somewhere, “and I don’t know where that is,” he said.

Second-Choice Candidate. Exactly. Warren is the left’s second-choice candidate. She did an excellent job discrediting Bloomberg. His net-favorability fell by 20 points post-debate, according to a new Morning Consult poll. Yet, she is still in fourth place, while Sanders has solidified his status as the front-runner.

In short, while Warren can continue to shape and disrupt this race, she cannot win the Democratic presidential nomination.

And this is not simply a matter of conjecture. We’ve already seen enough voting, polling, and real-world results to know that, while the party’s base respects Warren, it does not love her.

The left’s heart lies with Bernie. Centrist Dems, meanwhile, are more inclined to vote for Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, or Bloomberg.

Warren raised $5 million off of her debate performance and “reported the best hour of fundraising in [her] campaign’s history,” writes ABC News’ Cheyenne Haslett. So she may hang around in this race for a while longer.

However, her ultimate place in the primary contest already has been determined: second, third, fourth, or fifth place, but not first. Not this time. This time, it seems, Bernie’s the one.

Feature photo credit: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images via Forbes.

Elizabeth Warren destroyed Michael Bloomberg and ended any chance he had to win the nomination. The beneficiary of her hit job: Bernie Sanders.

Everyone acknowledges that last night’s Democratic Presidential debate was a disaster for Michael Bloomberg. He was weak, timid, meek, defensive, and appeared utterly incapable of taking the fight to Donald Trump in November. And if there’s one thing the Democratic base wants, it’s a fighter who can prosecute the case against Trump and win the general election.

Bloomberg did not in any way, shape or form appear to be that fighter. Quite the opposite: it was all too easy to imagine the Michael Bloomberg whom we saw last night getting destroyed by Trump and his minions.

The question is: how significant was last night’s disaster? Does it do irreparable harm to Bloomberg or can he recover? Andrew Egger argues in The Dispatch that Bloomberg can recover. His electoral strategy, he argues,

has never hinged on scoring an effervescent victory on the debate stage.

In fact, there’s a sense in which the whole thesis of the Bloomberg campaign is that, in a divided field that overwhelms voters with options, a big enough infusion of cash can short-circuit the system and render sorting mechanisms like debates irrelevant altogether…

It’s hard to see how one bad debate performance sets it [Bloomberg’s big money strategy] back much. After all, the voters Bloomberg is targeting are the ones least likely to have seen that performance at all.

I completely disagree, and here’s why.

As we’ve explained here at ResCon1, despite his boomlet in recent weeks and sudden rise in the polls, Bloomberg was always exceedingly unlikely to win the Democratic nomination.

There are too many candidates in the race; his opponents, especially Bernie Sanders, have too much underlying political appeal and organizational strength; and the Democratic primary electorate is too fractured for Bloomberg ever to have had any hope of getting a majority of the delegates before the party’s convention in July.

Bloomberg’s only hope all along has been to deny Sanders and Biden a majority of the delegates, build up a big head of political steam and momentum going into the convention, and fight it out there in a 21st-Century version of what the political pros call a “brokered” or contested convention.

But that strategy always depended on Bloomberg performing well and demonstrating not just political appeal to a Democratic base that is increasingly woke and progressive, but also that he could win and defeat Donald Trump. The problem with last night’s disastrous debate performance is that it demonstrated (conclusively, I think) that both of those things are manifest untrue and won’t change.

No Political Appeal. Bloomberg’s political appeal to the far-left Democratic base was always suspect—because of his phenomenal success as a businessman and because of his record as Mayor of New York City, where he supported “stop and frisk” police tactics and school choice, among other heresies.

But what last night proved is that Bloomberg has other big problems with the left, which he never effectively addressed. Acting as the party’s ideological enforcer and referee, Elizabeth Warren led the charge and absolutely eviscerated Bloomberg with laudable prosecutorial skill and precision:

I’d like to talk about who we’re running against, a billionaire who calls women “fat broads” and “horse-faced lesbians.” And, no, I’m not talking about Donald Trump. I’m talking about Mayor Bloomberg.

Democrats are not going to win if we have a nominee who has a history of hiding his tax returns, of harassing women, and of supporting racist polls like redlining and stop and frisk.

Look, I’ll support whoever the Democratic nominee is. But understand this: Democrats take a huge risk if we just substitute one arrogant billionaire for another.

This country has worked for the rich for a long time and left everyone else in the dirt. It is time to have a president who will be on the side of working families and be willing to get out there and fight for them. That is why I am in this race, and that is how I will beat Donald Trump.

Those were Warren’s opening remarks, but it got even worse for Bloomberg as the debate progressed.

When he was asked about allegations that his company was a hostile workplace for women, and that he had publicly admitted to making sexually suggestive remarks to former employees, Bloomberg meekly responded that had no tolerance for bad behavior toward women; and that lots of people who have worked for him in high positions are women.

Warren immediately responded with direct rhetorical jabs that had Bloomberg reeling with no response and no fight.

I hope you heard what his defense was. “I’ve been nice to some women.” That just doesn’t cut it.

The mayor has to stand on his record. And what we need to know is exactly what’s lurking out there. He has gotten some number of women, dozens, who knows, to sign nondisclosure agreements both for sexual harassment and for gender discrimination in the workplace.

So, Mr. Mayor, are you willing to release all of those women from those nondisclosure agreements, so we can hear their side of the story?

Bloomberg’s lame and politically disastrous response: “They signed the agreements and that’s what we’re going to live with.”

There are other instances in the debate of Bloomberg floundering and showing his political ineptitude and tin ear; but the bottom line is this:

The Democratic Party in 2020 is not gonna nominate a candidate whom major party leaders such as Elizabeth Warren compellingly charge with being a misogynist and a racist. It’s simply not gonna happen. The party is too woke for that.

If Bloomberg had been able to respond effectively to these charges and had demonstrated real political skill and capability, then he perhaps might have overcome this problem.

The Democrats, after all, want nothing more than to defeat Donald Trump. Thus they might well have been willing to forgive Bloomberg for his transgressions and heresies if he had demonstrated some ability to win. But the fact is Bloomberg did not respond effectively because he is incapable of doing so. He cannot win and he cannot defeat Trump.

The Democratic base knows this now and won’t ever rally to Bloomberg—not now in the primaries and not at a brokered or contested convention.

Sure, Bloomberg may be able to buy 15-30 percent of the primary vote through the political equivalent of carpet bombing—i.e., saturating the airwaves and cyberspace with political advertising—but he’ll never exceed 15-30 percent. That’s a ceiling he can’t possibly overcome.

Nor will Bloomberg ever overcome the disastrous first impression that he created with his abysmal debate performance. A leopard never changes its spots, and Bloomberg can’t become something he’s not. The Democratic base knows who Bloomberg is now and he is not someone whom they want. He’s finished, even as he limps forward into Super Tuesday and beyond.

Bernie’s The One . The big winner, without question: Bernie Sanders. None of the other candidates laid a glove on him. They were too focused on going after Bloomberg and attacking each other. 

Warren, in fact, went out of her way to largely defend Sanders when he was attacked by Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg for pushing a healthcare plan that would take away private-sector health insurance from millions of Americans. Buttigieg, she said,

really has a slogan that was thought up by his consultants to paper over a thin version of a plan that would leave millions of people unable to afford their health care. It’s not a plan. It’s a PowerPoint.

And Amy’s plan is even less. It’s like a Post-It note: “Insert Plan Here.”

Bernie has… a good start, but instead of expanding and bringing in more people to help, instead, his campaign relentlessly attacks everyone who asks a question or tries to fill in details about how to actually make this work. And then his own advisors say, “Yeah, [it] probably won’t happen anyway.”

In other words, Buttigieg and Klobuchar are not serious about health insurance reform, but Bernie is. However, Bernie needs to be less defensive and more accommodating of outside input.

The bottom line: the Las Vegas debate is notable and historic because it has irreversibly altered the trajectory of the Democratic presidential primary race.

Before the debate, Bloomberg was rising in the polls. He had created an opportunity for himself to challenge Sanders for the nomination. It was, as I’ve explained before, a slim chance, but it was a chance nonetheless.

Now, though, that chance is gone. Warren effectively closed if off by exposing Bloomberg as ideologically out of synch with the Democratic Party and politically inept and weak. Steel yourself, then, for socialist Bernie Sanders to be christened the Democratic Party’s 2020 presidential nominee.

Feature photo credit: CNN.