Democratic Bloodletting Ensues on Super Tuesday
All is not lost, though, for Sanders’ voters, especially if Biden moves to co-opt Sanders’ platform in a meaningful way
Like all articles on The New Haberdasher, this story is presented to you for free. If you like what I do, consider supporting my work with a small monetary contribution at my Patreon and thank you.
No doubt, 2020’s Super Tuesday was “Extra Super Tuesday” for Joe Biden’s campaign for office. You could say, it started with about 80 hours straight of wall to wall pro-Biden “earned media” including South Carolina Representative James Clyburn’s endorsement that apparently “gave permission” to Democrats to vote for Biden, and then that endorsement’s outsized effects in the South Carolina Primary Contest, through all the wringing of hands whether Biden can stop Sanders on Sunday talk shows and Monday cable news broadcasts, through the surprise dropping out and prime time endorsements of Mayor Pete, Senator Klobuchar, and Beto O’Rourke on Monday evening all the way into smug celebratory football spiking by Party elites like James Carville following the positive results in the South and Northeast.
The earned media was responded to by a huge number of moderate Dems who flooded to polls to vote for Biden because Party elites and the Press had convinced them that Biden was the “safest bet” against Donald Trump. Naturally, Democrats who supported Biden want to tell themselves that the decision was actually “theirs” as if they came up with the idea to vote for Joe Biden on their own. To be clear, I also believe the same about Sanders’ voters, who are no more immune to the effects of propaganda than Biden voters.
A scene in the movie “The Devil Wear’s Prada” comes to mind. Meryl Streep, who plays the eponymous “Devil” in this scene explains, in very straightforward terms, how many fashion choices are made. “Andy Sachs” played by Anne Hathaway, suggests that two belts, which look exactly alike, aren’t really all that different. And then Miranda Priestly boils down how the color of Andy’s sweater came into the world, found its way onto clothing, and into Andy’s wardrobe. Its a sharp introduction to not only fashion, for Andy, but the notion that options have often times been selected for you long before you even know that you have a “choice”. It really is a great scene.
But the exit polls belie this perception and lack of self-awareness — in fact, that “choice” that millions of Democrats made on Tuesday was, given the above convergence of circumstances, almost a foregone conclusion. Nearly two thirds of all of Biden’s votes in states outside of the South, and a majority in all Super Tuesday states came from “late deciders”, or those who decided in the last couple days. It must be attached to the tsunami of free, “earned media”, where press coverage was almost entirely pro-Biden, and more importantly, anti-Sanders, because that is the only thing that changed pre- and post-South Carolina as far as people “not in South Carolina” are concerned. Biden didn’t increase spending. The Press make a big deal about how he didn’t have any money and no staff in Super Tuesday States. News of the major endorsements of Biden’s rivals would not have filtered out to voters except for constant reminders from the Press.
So Biden’s success in one of the most reliably conservative States in the Union, amplified by a massive boost from cheerleaders in the corporate press and a huge influx of endorsements from Democratic Party elites following Clyburn breaking the dam, worked particularly well in Super Tuesday for Joe Biden.
These elections, which excepting California, are now in the books: Massive support for Biden from conservative Southern voters, a TKO in Northern States where Sanders and Warren split the non-Biden opposition (with an important assist from Sen Klobuchar in Minnesota), and strong, but not overwhelming support for Sanders out west, where Latinos vote have put Joe Biden in a comfortable lead in delegate count and have given him massive momentum going forward.
Incidentally, Twitter has become a warzone as a result. So what now?
It’s looking like Biden has the momentum to carry him through the rest of the States. Sanders will still wrack up some delegates, and may win some states too, especially out West and in the Industrial Midwest. But based on the fact that more states like those won by Biden — largely conservative states which will not be voting for Democrats in the fall anyway — will be voting in the near future than ones that look like the ones which support Sanders, the Democratic Paty moderates likely get their preferred candidate, and the progressives get to pound sand.
Let’s suppose the Biden campaign does nothing more than it is doing right now toward Sanders. Let’s assume the leftist portions of the Press keep their same attitude toward Sanders, and more importantly, those who support Sanders. What does this mean, if Biden ends up taking the nomination and the Democratic Party leaves Sanders’ supporters completely out in the cold the way they did in 2016?
Well,the overwhelming preference among the youth is for Sanders, despite blame for Sanders’ poor performance being cast upon these supporters’ typically low turnout rates by sources eager to deflect criticism of the influence of Democratic Elites in the Party and the Press coalescing around Biden. But it is important to remember that these are the same people with a lot of energy and a lot of spare time to do things that candidates need, like phone banking, and mailing, and canvassing. Biden may have reliable voters in the 60-something, yuppie suburbanite “Sanders is a bigger threat than Trump” set in the Southeast, but he doesn’t have a reliable GOTV machine if he loses the youth. But even without reliable GOTV in most Super Tuesday states, Biden still won in many places, so perhaps he does not even need the youth to win in the General Election.
Its far more likely, however, that if he doesn’t have GOTV, the youth aren’t going to go vote anyway, but neither are thousands of middle-aged folks in the Rust Belt, who would have made the difference for the Democrats in 2016, had they just showed up. It doesn’t matter how big a menace Trump is: If there is no reason for the Youth to buy in, besides “Not Trump,” and if more reliable voters don’t have people constantly harassing them about going out to vote, many of them will sit on the sidelines, and Biden, or more importantly, those speaking for him in the Press, on the Trail, and on social media, will be to blame for that.
Failure to bring Sanders’ supporters in from the trees WILL be a disaster for Biden, the Democrats and the supposed obsession over defeating Trump in 2020. In other words, if Biden ends up being the nominee, his campaign must deal very carefully with Sanders’ supporters, who already are absolutely convinced that the fix is in with regard to their candidate (and, by the way are immune to Trump’s efforts to stoke division among Democrats which has been there since 2016 for many, and will likely be deepened by this primary process.)
Biden’s campaign must first and foremost, shut James Carville up, to keep him from saying things like:
Look, you ran all the way through in 2016 primaries. You had a voice in a 2020 primaries. You carried your campaign, you raised a lot of money. But our most important constituencies in this party are just not for you. And we have to deal with that and get on to the business of November here. Are you going to be able to negotiate with him or anything like that? Of course not.
on MSNBC last night.
The most offensive thing in this statement to a Sanders’ supporter is the notion that “the most important constituencies in this Party” do not support Sanders. To a Democratic insider, who successfully propelled a conservative southern Democrat to office 28 years ago and is not more or less the Left Wing version of Rudy Guilliani minus the corruption, sure Biden won all the “most important constituencies”, meaning southern conservative and pro-Biden black voters.
But he’s essentially telling the youth to sit down and shut up and let grown folks handle things from here on out. He’s obviously ignoring progressive black voters who supported Sanders — who in many cases represented a fifth or more of the Black vote — and Latino voters out west who overwhelmingly prefer Sanders to Biden, or the fact that even with Black voters and Latinx voters combined, the Democratic Party is still majority White, majority progressive, and majority coastal. Where Carville gets his notions of who are “the most important constituencies” from is straight out of his own head, bent in service to protecting rightist Clintonite ideology in the Party.
Most importantly, what Biden’s campaign needs to do, should it come out on top ultimately this summer, is give the Sanders’ supporters something to buy into. There has to be some concessions to the Left in the Party. Biden won’t get all of Sanders’ supporters. There are more than a few who will not vote for him under any circumstances. But Bernie Sanders said to Rachel Maddow tonight that whoever wins will end up with 99 percent of the Democratic VOTE vs. Trump in November. He is correct in that. But: he said nothing about getting Democratic activists to volunteer for the Biden campaign before the election. To get the youth, and therefore the activist base, to actually support you, rather than just vote against your opponent, you can’t run a backwards looking campaign the way Biden is.
Biden has to find something to adopt that will convince most of Sanders’ voters that he is an acceptable alternative to staying home. Anything like this would have to be something that Sanders’ core of voters would want but which Biden’s core would not want, for it to be credible. If it doesn’t alienate at least some of the most right wing of Biden supporters, then it is like offering, as a concession something you were already going to do anyway, and then demanding concessions from Sanders’ supporters. These types of concessions are typical in union negotiations, where management offers the union something they were going to do anyway, and then asks what the Union wants to give up for it. You don’t score points with people who greatly dislike you when you do something you were already going to do anyway.
Some suggestions which MIGHT be acceptable to some of Sanders’ supporters would be things like, in no particular order, and in no way exhaustively:
- Student debt forgiveness. Since Sanders’ supporters are overwhelmingly college aged or recent graduated, this is the thing that is immediately in front of them. Sanders is the ONLY candidate who announced debt forgiveness as a plank in his platform.
- Meaningful immigration reform. Biden was associated with the President who oversaw the highest number of deportations, a point that Trump has been able to capitalize on repeatedly. Biden needs to get past this, and offer a genuine immigration reform program which is significantly different than just DACA, but includes a clear and swift path to citizenship for DACA recipients at least, and for immigrants more generally.
- A robust Public option. While Medicare for All might be a non-starter, in Illinois, parents of children on CHIP were able to buy into CHIP as well. In other words, we were able to buy into Medicaid, with a monthly premium of something like 65 dollars a month and a modest co-pay for drugs and office visits. This model could be deployed nationwide, to not only make a public option available for anyone, but also to make it far preferable to private insurance. Then if people want their crappy expensive insurance, they could keep that if they like. This would be an acceptable compromise for some between Medicare for All (which is nowhere near “revolutionary”, contrary to Biden, et al’s claims,) and continuing the for-profit racketeering operation known as private insurance. It also provides a system which is partially paid for already and is already in place.
- A federal jobs program to guarantee a living wage to people, especially people right out of college. This could take the form of National Service, which I have advocated in this blog, or something else, but the Government NEEDS to do something about unemployment among the poor and the young in this country, and it needs to happen as soon as possible, across the entire nation, not just rich areas.
- Firm commitment on trade which benefits the American worker first. This is a no-brainer. One of the worst policies for the American worker was NAFTA, which was concluded under HW Bush but went into effect under Clinton, who deepened the free trade precepts that wiped out whatever was left of security in the working class in exchange for greater profits for corporations and trade opportunities for American capitalist ventures. Biden has to focus, like a hawk on proposing policies which explicitly rebuild the dignity and earning power of the working class in this nation, white, black, Latino and Asian.
- Prison reform and rebuilding American cities. This could be as simple as ending federal contracts with for-profit prisons and getting rid of mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines, as well as commuting the sentences of non-violent offenders, and those with marijuana convictions at the National level. It also involves vigorously prosecuting cases of police brutality and extrajudicial killings in our cities. It also involves, unequivocal support for the end of prohibition on marijuana and ending the war on Drugs in the US. But is also involves putting money into American cities, allowing blacks to invest in businesses, buy houses and restore neighborhoods blighted by de-industrialization and capital flight, and getting rid of programs that promote gentrification of black neighborhoods, unless the residents there are the primary beneficiaries of those efforts. Improving failing public schools instead of throwing them to the side and embracing private, for profit education can be promoted by ending block grants to States and actually targeting money from the Federal Government at schools themselves.
- There MUST be meaningful commitment to fighting the effects of climate change and proactive steps toward reducing US pollution. There is all sorts of euphemistic names for it, but essentially, we are polluting the world. Our reliance on fossil fuel has to end. The production of greenhouse gasses, however they are made, also has to end. Whatever that means, it must be a strong commitment.
Any or all of these things could potentially get some Sanders’ supporters on board. The more Biden includes, the more support he will probably get. But refusal to do any of them will guarantee him tepid support, at best from most of Sanders’ more reasonable cadres, and outright hostility from everyone else.
Whatever happens, if Biden is the nominees, and he has any hope of uniting the various factions of the Democratic Party, he has to move to the Left. He just has to. And James Carville and people like him have to be boxed up and put on a shelf. People like him do not help anyone except the ratings whores at MSNBC, who apparently love his “candid take”. If Biden is interested in doing so, and makes as serious an effort at it as he apparently has in courting Southern conservative votes, he may become a candidate worth supporting, not just a default “not Trump.” And if he is a candidate worth supporting, maybe he might deserve to govern, regardless of what the polls say in the fall. If he fails to do so, and leaves all those votes out in the trees, then he deserves to lose, because he follows the advice of bad advisers.
Like all articles on The New Haberdasher, this story is presented to you for free. If you like what I do, consider supporting my work with a small monetary contribution at my Patreon and thank you.
