Jon Margolis is a political columnist for VTDigger.
It is not over, decreed the late philosopher L. Peter Berra (or words to that effect) until it is over.
It’s over, decree the esteemed authorities. Joseph Biden will be the Democratic nominee for president.
No it isn’t, insists Bernie Sanders, explaining how he will challenge Biden when they debate Sunday.
For two reasons, it is possible if most unlikely that Sanders is right and the esteemed authorities are wrong. The first reason centers around that debate, where Sanders will have one distinct advantage: he is not Joe Biden. The former vice president has not excelled in the 10 debates so far. On Sunday in Washington, with only Sanders sharing the stage, he will have two hours to make a bad impression on the electorate.
The second reason is that so far the esteemed authorities have been wrong about almost everything.
On primary night in New Hampshire last month, two veteran political observers chatting in the bar of the big hotel in downtown Manchester agreed that Biden’s fifth place finish meant his campaign was effectively over.
I was one of the two. The other, long known for his perspicacity, covers politics for a very prestigious publication. We were hardly alone. The common view in that bar that night – and this was before anybody’d had enough to drink to diminish his or her astuteness – was that only Michael Bloomberg could stop Sanders.
As recently as March 1, polling analysts projected that Sanders had a far better chance of winning a majority of delegates than did Biden. Now Biden is considered all but certain to win that majority. Could such an abrupt reversal not itself be reversed?
Probably not, for reasons having nothing to do with polls or the wisdom of esteemed authorities. Bernie Sanders’ campaign is failing because from the beginning it rested on an incorrect premise: that Democratic primary voters wanted a “political revolution” that would replace or overthrow “the Democratic establishment.”
As it turns out, a substantial majority of Democratic voters want change, not revolution. The big change most of them want is to replace Donald Trump with a Democrat. Most Democratic voters approve of the “Democratic establishment,” whatever it may be.
No one approves more than African Americans. Because politicians and commentators of the left habitually proclaim their commitment to racial equality, and because most non-whites vote Democratic, it is tempting to assume that non-white voters hold very leftish views.
They don’t. Black and Hispanic Democrats are less likely to describe themselves as liberals (and more likely to describe themselves as conservatives) than white Democrats, especially college-educated white Democrats, according to a 2019 survey by the Pew Research Center.
Almost a third of Hispanics vote Republican. African Americans do not. More than 90% of them loyally vote for Democrats, and in many black communities the Democratic Party as an institution is important to their lives.
“That’s why a lot of activists … are also educators and religious leaders,” wrote the irreverent and often angry black columnist Michael Harriot. “It’s why Dem. Party meetings take place in church basements.” To many people in these communities, attacking the Democratic Party is “talking about their church members, their piano teachers, the people that help them when they are the lowest.”
As much as anything, this could explain why Sanders did so poorly with African American voters, especially in the South. They didn’t doubt his own commitment to racial equality. They probably appreciated how much harder he tried to win their support than he did in 2016. But they didn’t like him attacking “the Democratic establishment,” perhaps because they consider themselves part of it.
They are. So are all the white voters without college degrees who also flocked to the polls these last two Tuesday, most of them to vote for Biden. Together, these two factions have been the bedrock of the Democratic Party for almost a century. Together, they decided in the last few weeks to vote for a Democrat.
Needless to say, when Sanders and his supporters assail the “establishment,” they don’t mean these voters. They mean the Wall Street/corporate ultra-rich who create super PACs and make big contributions to their favorite candidate, who is almost never Bernie Sanders.
There are such people, and while most of them are Republicans, a few are Democrats and – being contributors – they have some clout, and so could be considered part of a Democratic “establishment.”
But they and their money did not win these primaries. Sanders spent far more on television commercials and social media than was spent by Biden’s campaign or by independent committees on his behalf. This was just regular folks coming out on their own to vote.
But as Sanders noted, it was mostly older regular folks who came out to vote for Biden. In this contest between two old men, younger voters overwhelmingly preferred the older (by one year) Sanders. “In order to win in the future,” Sanders said, “you need to win the voters who represent the future of our country.”
True, but as Sanders acknowledged, his campaign is “losing the debate over electability,” and the only way he can win in the present is to hope that Biden performs so poorly Sunday evening that Democrats in the coming primaries conclude that he is less electable than Sanders.
That’s not a happy place for either candidate, especially for Sanders, who prides himself on not attacking his opponents. He did not seem happy Wednesday afternoon as he proclaimed that he was staying the race and looking forward to his one-on-one debate against Biden. Notably, he did not pledge to contest every remaining primary or to take his campaign to the Democratic National Convention.
Sometimes, even the esteemed authorities get it right.
