Everyone Learned the Wrong Lessons from 2016

Bernie Sanders Fails to Save the Democratic Party from Itself

Super Tuesday went about as well as possible for Joe Biden. Buoyed by a dominant performance in South Carolina, and the subsequent endorsements from former “moderate lane” contenders Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, Biden won 10 of 14 states contested on the most delegate-rich day on the primary calendar. This included more overwhelming wins across the South, a mild upset in Texas, and stunning wins in Massachusetts, Maine, and Klobuchar’s home state of Minnesota.

Although the delegate count remains quite close, many have concluded that Super Tuesday’s results demonstrate that Biden has consolidated enough support and halted Bernie Sanders’ pre-South Carolina surge. Although many votes remain to be cast, Bide has reprised his role as the clear front-runner for the nomination.

In 2016, approaching Super Tuesday, the Republican party faced a similar circumstance. After Donald Trump won three of the first four contests, each of the non-Trump alternatives failed to emerge from the pack. All three stayed in, and Trump managed to win enough delegates on Super Tuesday to essentially clinch the nomination.

The conventional wisdom held that Trump would not be able to survive a head-to-head match, given his inability to crack 50% in any Super Tuesday state. But, even after Super Tuesday John Kasich, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz stayed in, with each believing they could outlast their competitors as the alternative to Trump. Shortly thereafter, Trump was declared the presumptive nominee.

This year, the Democratic establishment didn’t wait until Super Tuesday to rally behind a non-Sanders candidate. Klobuchar and Buttigieg cleared the path, and Biden, judging by the differences between the polling and the results, as well as the margins by which he won late deciding voters, managed to capture a clear majority of voters from his former rivals. Sanders, who had managed to win popular vote victories in Iowa and New Hampshire with less than a third of the overall vote, once again failed to reach 40% in any state outside of his home state in Vermont.

The Democrats, unlike Republicans, were able to successfully stop their factional, divisive, unelectable candidate from winning their nomination, and therefore avoid handing the White House to the incumbent party, and harm down ballot races and the party’s future in the process.

Except that, for all of his faults, Trump won the election. He changed the electoral map, increased the GOP’s seats in the Senate to 53, and maintained his party’s edge in the House. The party today appears as unified as ever.

Democrats should not seek to replicate the Trump phenomenon and comparisons between Sanders and the incumbent President are often lazy and disingenuous ones. But they both pose threats to their respective party’s establishment and were therefore labeled as the risky choice. Trump has demonstrated that, at least in his case, that theory does not hold true.

While moderate Democrats learned one lesson from 2016 — the only way an insurgent campaign is to consolidate quickly and forcefully — they failed to grasp that that same insurgency might represent their best shot at winning.

The Democratic party also appears doomed the mistakes that their own party made last time around. Biden has many of the same shortcomings as Hillary Clinton. Although Trump suffers from many of the same defects, he is the country’s most shameless politician and will therefore surely use the same litany of attacks on Biden that he deployed to great effect four years ago.

First, Biden allows Trump to be in his comfort zone: as a combatant against the establishment. Though as the incumbent, Trump should not be able to claim the outsider mantle, running against a man who served in the Senate and White House for over 40 years would allow him to depict his opponent as someone who is a creature of the “swamp” who has been corrupted by decades in DC. While centrists fear that a Trump/Sanders matchup would yield a referendum on “socialism,” a Biden/Trump showdown would devolve into a referendum on the pre-Trump political status quo.

Biden, supported the Iraq war; Trump will claim to have opposed it (and to have reduced the

United States’ military footprint in the Middle East). Biden has previously bragged about writing the 1994 crime bill; Trump will use this, as well as his signing of the First Step Act, to try to depress African-American turnout.

Trump, despite the huge number of credible sexual assault and sexual harassment allegations against him, will surely make remarks about Biden’s history of inappropriate actions toward women, just as he criticized Bill Clinton, and by extension his wife, for his past treatment of women.

Finally, just as Trump managed to capitalize on the email story as the encapsulation of everything that was wrong with Hillary and therefore the corrupt political establishment more broadly, he has already begun to focus on the Biden’s family’s ties to Ukraine. Regardless of the credibility of these attacks, Trump and his allies Congress and at Fox News will drain every ounce possible out of the Biden/Ukraine scandal.

To make matters even worse, Fox News has already begun to launch a series of attacks focusing on Biden’s worsening mental faculties and his frequent memory lapses.

To be sure, Sanders is no shoo-in against Trump. However, at least his kind of campaign is not a tried-and-failed experiment against Trump. It’s possible that the “socialist” label comes back to bite Sanders and costs him too many center voters to win the election. It is possible that he fails to win over the support of voters who he has alienated over the past four years. Older African-American voters may not show up in large enough numbers to deliver a victory. He may cost Democrats many of the suburban Congressional gains made in 2018. The 2020 election is sure to be close, and no candidate at this point can be declared a certain victor or loser.

Nonetheless, statistical evidence suggests that the media has greatly exaggerated Sanders’ lack of appeal among Democratic voters. While the Democratic elite certainly fears Trump, he polls as well if not better than his competition in most important electability measures. As Peter Beinart puts in his article in The Atlantic:

“A Monmouth University poll last week found not only that Sanders’s favorability rating among Democrats nationally — 71 percent — was higher than his five top rivals’, but also that his unfavorability rating — 19 percent — was tied for second lowest. Sanders’s net favorability rating was six points higher than Elizabeth Warren’s, 16 points higher than Joe Biden’s, 18 points higher than Pete Buttigieg’s, 23 points higher than Amy Klobuchar’s, and a whopping 40 points higher than that of Michael Bloomberg, whom more than a third of Democratic voters viewed unfavorably.” (…) he Quinnipiac poll suggests that Sanders enjoys widespread affection even outside his ideological lane. Among self-described moderate or conservative Democrats, Sanders boasts a net favorability rating of 43 points — far higher than Biden or Bloomberg fares among the “very liberal” Democrats who compose Sanders’s ideological base. Ninety-eight percent of Warren supporters, 97 percent of Buttigieg supporters and 92 percent of Biden supporters say they would back Sanders against Donald Trump. Only among Bloomberg supporters does that number dip to 83 percent. Overall, Sanders voters are significantly more likely to say that they won’t back one of his rivals in the general election than the other way around.”

Perhaps this polling means that while perhaps more voters prefer Biden as a first choice to Sanders, his voters are more willing to vote for Sanders should he clinch the nomination. Biden supporters tend to be committed Democratic Party supporters who are most concerned with defeating Donald Trump. They will vote for the Democratic nominee.

Sanders supporters, on the other hand, want a candidate who agrees with them on the issues. If they feel as if neither of the candidates do, enough may stay home to give Trump the election. Sanders’ campaign may also be able to bring in more new voters, namely disillusioned young voters and disaffected former Trump supporters who still are looking for an anti-establishment candidate. Exit polls in 13 Super Tuesday states also indicate widespread support for Sanders’ signature policy proposals.

Now, this is not an endorsement of Sanders supporters abstaining, but it is possible that the conventional wisdom on electability is backwards.

Biden may beat Trump in the general election; and Sanders may lose to him. But the truth is that Democrats are hoping to win a rematch of 2016 with Trump, instead of throwing a counterpunch.

Democrats’ inability to adjust is not, however, the only takeaway from yesterday’s results.

Between 2016 and yesterday, Sanders also failed to adjust. He wasted the chance to expand his coalition and strengthen his support. Instead, his share of the vote either stagnated or decreased across the map. Blame the media, Elizabeth Warren’s refusal to drop out, the establishment, or whoever and whatever else, but Bernie Sanders was given an opening after Nevada and he failed to broaden his base in any meaningful way.

Firstly and most importantly, Sanders has failed to attract black voters to his campaign. Primarily in the South, Sanders failed to grow the approximately 15% share of the vote he received in 2016, and he lost the black vote in every Super Tuesday state that reported exit poll data. Of course, Biden has the advantage of having served as the Vice President for the nation’s first black President, but Sanders himself also failed to make crucial adjustments to his candidacy in the past four years.

Sanders failed to build the important relationships and networks of trust in the black community. As many black political scientists have noted, successful candidates like Obama, Biden, and Bill Clinton built trust in communities of color for years before running for President, while Sanders’ outreach only began in 2016.

Black voters, and in particular older black voters also tend to be more conservative then their white Democratic counterparts. The party sorting that followed the Civil Rights era of the 1960s left mostly better educated and less religious white voters in the Democratic party, whereas the vast majority of black voters, even the more conservative ones, remained in the party that had officially become the party of minority rights.

Sanders failed to merge his rhetorical emphasis on class divides with race-conscious proposals, while also abandoning some of his economic populism and took on a more social activist identity, which, while an important addition to his platform, likely hurt him with more conservative black voters and rural white voters, a group which represented one of his strongest constituencies in 2016.

Part of this decrease in rural white support can likely be attributed to the fact that Biden is more appealing to these voters than Clinton was. But Sanders also prided his campaign on a surge of youth and new voter turnout that, even he has acknowledged, has yet to show up.

As some Sanders supporters have pointed out, and the aforementioned evidence, Sanders had an opening to combat the media’s portrayal of him and present himself as the “centrist” choice, given that his policy preferences tend to appeal to most Americans. While Sanders has attempted this pivot, he has simultaneously upheld his image as an anti-establishment crusader.

Sanders’ campaign was likely hoping that name recognition and Clinton’s losses in the midwest could slightly expand his coalition in 2020, and that other voting blocs would be split enough to carry him to the nomination. Instead, his campaign shifted slightly away from his 2016 message and failed to replicate his success from four years ago.

The timeline of this campaign is surely unfortunate for Sanders. He was on the brink of winning the nomination before the established coalesced against him and seemingly blocked his path. But the truth is that, in order to win the nomination, he was going to have to overcome a concerted effort by the media and his opponents to stop him. Even if it took place after Super Tuesday, Sanders was going to eventually have to take on Biden one-on-one. He now faces a margin smaller than that from this same time in 2016. He still has a small opening to make appeals to new voters to support him.

So far, it appears as if Sanders, like the Democratic establishment, learned the wrong lessons from 2016: He thought that the results from 2016 meant that the time was ripe for a leftist insurgency to win the nomination. He focused on consolidating this support instead of extending his base of voters.

Sanders was not the victim of a coup this week. Party insiders will often consolidate their support around one candidate in order to stop an undesirable alternative. That’s what happened before Tuesday, and Biden proved capable of winning over a large portion of Democratic support. The Democratic Party made a decision; and it paid off. It just may have been the wrong choice.