Posts published in “Campaigns and Elections”

Biden won big Tuesday night (March 10). Thus the pundits who wrongly insisted after Super Tuesday (March 3) that it was a two-man race between him and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders now acknowledge, belatedly, that Biden is the Democrats’ 2020 presidential nominee.

The Democratic primary results might also mean that Biden is the prohibitive favorite to win the White House. Consider:

First, Biden is not Hillary. He does appreciably better with working class whites, white ethnics, and black male voters than Hillary. These are voters whom Hillary under-performed with against Trump as compared to past Democratic presidential nominees.

Biden’s relative success with these voters spells real trouble for Donald Trump, especially in Michigan and Pennsylvania, which he barely won in 2016.

Biden doesn’t have to win a majority of the white working class or white ethnics. Instead, he simply has to do better with these voters than Hillary and keep Trump’s margins down.

Biden, likewise, doesn’t necessarily have to win a greater share of the black vote.

Instead, he simply has to get more black Democrats to the polls versus staying home from indifference or apathy. All indications are that, for Biden, this will be a mission easily accomplished.

Second, Democratic voters are seriously motivated to vote against Trump, whom they despise. In the March 3 Virginia Primary, for instance, a record 1.3 million voters cast ballots, and voter turnout was up by 69 percent over 2016, reports the Washington Post.

In the nine Super Tuesday states, the Post notes, voter turnout grew by an average of 33 percent, according to Edison Media Research.

These are astounding numbers; and they spell real political trouble for the President, who again, won a very narrow, fluke victory in 2016.

Trump won in part because some Democratic voters were indifferent to Hillary and thus didn’t bother to vote. In 2020, with Biden as their nominee, it appears that these formerly indifferent Democratic voters intend to turn out and make their voices heard.

Third, although Biden is in no way a “moderate” or centrist Democrat, he nonetheless is being portrayed that way because of the contrast between him and self-avowed “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders, and this helps Biden politically.

Most voters are not liberals, leftists or socialists; and centrist or independent voters are the ones up for grabs, politically.

Indeed, these are the voters Biden needs to win to unseat Trump; and, by being described incessantly in the media as a “moderate” or centrist, Biden already has a built-in advantage with these voters.

Trump will try to disabuse moderate or centrist voters of this misperception by pointing to Biden’s long and very liberal record as a senator, and his current left-wing views as a 2020 presidential candidate; but after months of conditioning by the media, that may prove to be a long, uphill slog. 

Fourth, Biden’s age is a real and worrisome problem for the Democrats. This is obvious to anyone with eyes to see, and to any honest political observer. Biden often misspeaks, flubs his words, and rambles incoherently in ways that suggest senility or dementia.

Biden also is prone to sudden bouts of intense energy and apparent anger followed by rambling incoherence.

This is not surprising given his advanced age. Should he win the election, after all, Biden would be 78 years old on inauguration day. He would be the oldest person ever elected president and the oldest serving president in our nation’s history.

The question is whether Biden can hold it together and avoid a major faux pas between now and Nov. 3, 2020, without giving voters real reason to think that he simply isn’t up to the job.

At the very least, there will be much greater weight and scrutiny given to Biden’s vice presidential pick, since may voters will correctly perceive that there is a strong likelihood that person will become president within the next four years.

Fifth, Trump needs a second-term agenda, especially if the economy slows or goes into a recession because of the twin shocks of the coronavirus and Saudi-Russian oil war.

Trump has had many praiseworthy achievements as president: corporate tax reform, record low unemployment, a strong and robust economy, two superb Supreme Court appointments, a phase one trade deal with China, and a concerted effort, against incredible partisan odds, to enforce the rule of law at the nation’s southern border.

Elections, though, are about the future, and voters will want to know what Trump plans to do in a second term. Unfortunately, Trump has said little about this and has offered up no new agenda. That will have to change if he intends to serve four more years.

The bottom line: Biden looks very strong coming out of this primary contest and has some real political advantages over Trump. His age and political record, though, are real liabilities; and Trump and the Republicans have yet to really go after him.

Moreover, a lot certainly can and will happen, politically, between now and election day. Who, after all, would have predicted the coronavirus? And these future happenings and events will affect the trajectory of the race and whom the nation chooses as its next president. Stay tuned.

Feature photo credit: The New Yorker.

We reported Tuesday morning, before Super Tuesday, that the Democratic presidential primary was “clearly a two-man race, even though Elizabeth Warren and Michael Bloomberg [were] still formally running.”

Well, today, after Super Tuesday, we can say with certainty that it is no longer a two-man race: because, for all practical intents and purposes, the race is over. Joe Biden will be the Democratic presidential nominee.

Why? Because Biden won big, prevailing in 10 of the 14 Super Tuesday states. And, in the four states that Biden lost, he nonetheless gained delegates by surpassing the requisite 15 percent threshold.

Consequently, in a result no one anticipated, Biden actually has more delegates now than Sanders: 566 to 501, according to Axios.

Future Primaries. Moreover, between now and March 17, there will be primaries in 10 states, where, for the most part, Biden has the clear advantage. These include delegate-rich Florida (248 delegates), Illinois (148 delegates), and Ohio (153 delegates), all of which vote March 17.

Biden has the advantage in these states because the demographics are clearly in his favor.

Indeed, the voters in Florida, Illinois, and Ohio tend to be older and more traditional Democrats, who strongly favor Biden. These states also have significant numbers of black voters, who, likewise, strongly favor Biden.

Thus NPR’s Juana Summers reports:

In Alabama and Virginia, Biden had the support of about 7 in 10 black voters. In Tennessee and North Carolina, Biden had the support of more than half of black voters.

Biden also outperformed Sanders with black voters in Texas, where they make up about one-fifth of the Democratic primary electorate. Exit polls show Biden had the support of roughly 60 percent of black voters in the state; Sanders had 17 percent.

Indy100’s Sirena Bergman, likewise, reports:

Exit polls show that more than half of voters aged under 45 voted for Sanders, compared to only 17 per cent of them backing Biden. By contrast, those over 45 were drastically more more than twice as likely to vote for Biden than Sanders.

Sanders’ last stand almost certainly will be in Michigan, which votes March 10. Sanders won the state in 2016 by just 1.5 percent over Hillary Clinton, but trails Biden in the latest poll by 6.5 percent. That poll was completed before Super Tuesday; yet, it still shows Biden surging.

As The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein explains:

If Biden wins next week in Michigan, one of Sanders’s most significant victories four years ago, the rationale for the senator’s candidacy could quickly become murky.

Sanders won’t win Michigan, but even if he does, so what? Where does he go from there? Nowhere; that’s where. As The Bulwark’s Jonathan Last observes:

Over the next two weeks, Biden will win overwhelming victories in Florida and Mississippi. He is likely to win in Ohio, Arizona, Illinois, and Missouri. A week after that, he will win a large victory in Georgia.

As things stand now, no one else has a path to a majority of the delegates, and Biden’s principal rival is a socialist who does not identify as a Democrat, is heading into difficult demographic terrain, and—most importantly—is fading, rather than surging.

Meanwhile, Biden remains the vice president to the most recent Democratic president, a two-termer who remains immensely popular both with the public at large and the Democratic base.

Last is right: Biden, to his credit, has been resilient. He won this race when too many clueless pundits wrote him off. On the other hand, we have to note—as we have noted before—that this was Sanders’ race to lose and lose it he did. How?

By making absolutely no attempt to appeal to anyone beyond his base of young, hardcore secular progressives. As the Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney observes, this was a real problem for Sanders in South Carolina and other Southern states with large numbers of black voters, who tend to be more temperamentally conservative and religious. 

If Sanders were a better politician, with more range and reach, he might have been able to pivot and find common ground with these more traditional people of faith. But the truth is that Sanders is a dour, dull and predictable socialist apparatchik who seldom smiles and rarely shows any wit, humor or humanity.

And so he lost.

Sanders Limited Appeal. That’s why we can say confidently that this primary race is over. Sanders cannot be someone or something that he is not. We’ve seen him now in two presidential campaigns, 2016 and 2020. Democratic primary voters have taken their measure of the man, and they’ve found him wanting.

“Sanders reached 33 percent or more of the vote in just five of the 14 states that voted, including his home state; beyond Vermont, he did not exceed 36 percent, his share in Colorado,” Brownstein notes.

Of course, there is a lot more to say and observe about Super Tuesday and what it means for the future of American politics. We’ll record those observations and explore those issues in future posts.

But certainly, the most significant development thus far is that Super Tuesday determined at last whom the Democrats will nominate as their standard-bearer against Trump, and that standard-bearer is 77-year-old Joe Biden.

Feature photo credit: CBS News via the BBC.