Bernie Sanders has been declared the winner of the New Hampshire primary but his margin of victory over second-place finisher Pete Buttigieg was small 25.70% to 24.45%. While the turnout in the earlier Iowa primary narrowly beat the 2016 numbers but was disappointingly smaller than the record 2008 levels, this year’s New Hampshire turnout will beat 2008 and set a new record.
However Sanders won 51% of the youth vote aged 18-29, showing that his ideas resonate with future generations of voters. He alsowon nearly half the voters under 30 in Iowa.
To me the big surprise is that Amy Klobuchar did so well, winning close to 20% of the vote and beating out Elizabeth Warren who finished fourth with less than 10% and Joe Biden who finished fifth with about 8%. I read earlier that Klobuchar polls showed she had won a large share of the women’s vote and that her increase came at the expense of Warren and Biden but cannot find that link now. Since you need 15% of the vote to be awarded any delegates, the latter two will leave New Hampshire empty-handed.
The results also resulted in Andrew Yang ending his quirky campaign after getting only about 3% of the vote. Michael Bennett has ended his campaign and Deval Patrick is also expected to do so after each getting less that 1% each although these two really had had no impact on the race and I suspect that many people might be surprised that they were still in it.
While I can understand why Klobuchar might be appealing to voters, Buttigieg’s continued popularity puzzles me. She is after all, the sitting senator of a large state while he was the mayor of a small town. But Buttigieg seems to be favored by significant segments of the oligarchy, Wall Street, the political establishment, and intelligence community and that seems to be working for him.
Also deeply puzzling is Warren’s poor performance. As far as I can see, she did not do anything really wrong since the time when she was surging to the top in the polls and her decline seems inexplicable. [UPDATE: Josh Marshall has some plausible explanations for Warren’s decline.]
So now we move on to the next elections, starting with the caucuses in Nevada on Saturday, February 22 (yes, another caucus!) and then to the South Carolina primary on February 29, and then the big event on March 3 known as Super Tuesday when 16 contests take place.
Nevada is going to be a test of how well each candidate appeals to Latino voters who make up a third of the population. It is going to be tough for Sanders there.
In 2016, if New Hampshire was the state where the Sanders campaign first came to life, Nevada was where it died. Sanders was hopeful for a victory in the caucuses there, but fell just short, 53 to 47 percent, amid acrimony and allegations of misconduct. It dampened his momentum heading into South Carolina, where he was trounced.
…At the same time, the leadership of the powerful casino workers’ Culinary Union (Unite Here Local 226), ramped up its attacks against Sanders on Tuesday with English and Spanish-language flyers, texts, and emails to its 60,000 members.
…The Culinary Union, which is mostly made up of women and Latinos, has been actively discouraging support for Sanders and Warren over Medicare for All, warning its members that a single-payer plan would “end” their health care — despite not yet having made an official endorsement in the race.
…The Vermont senator also faced a variety of hurdles going into the election. Cable networks, particularly MSNBC, favored by Democrats, had spent the days after Sanders’s popular vote victory in Iowa skewering the senator, with hosts going so far as to compare his zealous supporters to Nazis and to claim that a presidency led by Sanders could lead to mass executions.
Tim Dickinson and Ryan Bort wonder how the Democratic establishment that dislikes Sanders will deal with the fact that he is now the front-runner.
The revolution is being televised.
Bernie Sanders has scored a win in the first in the nation New Hampshire primary. It wasn’t a blowout, but the Vermont Senator bested a rugby scrum of more-moderate contenders, including Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and former vice president Joe Biden, who posted another dismal early-state showing. Sanders also soundly defeated Sen. Elizabeth Warren, his progressive and regional rival.
…With Sanders now having won the popular vote in both Iowa and New Hampshire, this much is clear: The frontrunner for the Democratic nomination is a Democratic Socialist. And unless there’s a quick winnowing of the crowded moderate lane, Sanders has significant running room heading into the February 22nd Nevada caucus and the Super Tuesday states, particularly the diverse and delegate-rich prize of California, where polls show him surging.
…Early-state victory isn’t destiny. Sanders also took the New Hampshire primary in 2016 before losing the nomination to Hillary Clinton. But in the four years since that defeat, his agenda for universal health care, free college tuition, and high taxes on the wealthiest Americans has shifted from the edges to the center of the Democratic debate. Nearly 60 percent of New Hampshire primary participants said they backed Medicare for All in exit polling, while nearly two-thirds supported free public college. All the same, Sanders remains distrusted by the party establishment, which remains eager to trip him up in favor of a more-center-than-left candidate.
…There are warning signs for Sanders. His theory of the election hinges on turning out masses of new voters. Instead he’s turning out only enough to eke out victory. Sanders also has work to do in consolidating the Democratic base. The Vermonter is showing resonance with Hispanic voters in the West, but has yet to prove that he can inspire large numbers of African-American voters, particularly in the South. If he cannot stage a decent showing in South Carolina’s end-of-February primary, and Joe Biden’s current polling support from black voters holds, Sanders’ electability could come into question. Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida are all likely swing states in the 2020 general election, and black turnout will be a key to victory.
The article goes on to analyze the prospects for the other candidates still in the race.
2% is not really small. It’s not a crushing victory but … so what?
It’s interesting how the dem establishment is dancing around the fact that Biden is collapsing like a balloon. Ooops, the anointed one looks like a flop, now what? They could actually treat the primary as a popularity contest but then they have to realize they have no control.
I think that all this shows is that the dems have done a great job of muddying the water so the electorate has no clear favorite. What else did they expect, with the absurd cluster-debates and billionaire vanity candidates? They ought to have sorted out a while ago, but that’s what happens when you ask the power-mad “who here wants to be president?” Wrong question. If the various dem candidates actually believed in doing the right thing, they’d be stepping aside and lining up behind Sanders or Warren. Instead they just have got to demonstrate what dangerous egotists they are. Great so you’re a milder version of Trump? How comforting. Bloomberg really bugs me -- he’s like a competent version of Trump. We need to keep all of his ilk out of power.
I have seen at least two pundits so far who’ve said that the patriotic thing for Biden to do now would be to drop out of the race. The unspoken but obvious subtext was “give Bloomberg, Buttigieg, or even Klobuchar enough of a boost to stop Sanders before it’s Too Late.” But I agree that he’s doomed — Black voters are likely to reevaluate now, but it’s mainly the age thing that is going to sink him.
I agree that I don’t understand Warren’s fading. She seems like the only one who might be capable of bridging the gap between the socialist and conservative wings of the party.
Yes, that’s good news.
Unfortunately I also read that your hero president Maduro has made sure that the Venezuelan politico-economical elite has enough US dollars to continue their way of life, while the common people keep on suffering. But hey, Maduro opposes Donald the Clown, so he’s automatically a good guy.
Josh Marshall has some plausible explanations for Warren’s decline.
Something seems really fucky about a union distributing agitprop against universal healthcare. Is this a situation where the union controls the healthcare plan and thus has leverage over its members that it doesn’t want to lose, or is the leadership simply getting kickbacks?
There is that. He’s also a dude and a veteran of Afghanistan, among other things. (A secret agent like James Bond? Heh, just kidding.)
Even among Dems (the centrists who would even consider him or the others in the clown car), things like that can make a difference … it’s as if he was also the mayor of an even larger small town in Indiana, but they can figure that he was probably more competent in that imaginary town.
He’s also a pretty convincing liar, so what’s “really” appealing to some people isn’t going to match so well with the things he actually stands for.
It’s a crowded field, and the trouble is apparently that she didn’t really do anything right for the past several months, not so much that there were many huge mistakes. Sanders had a big movement, to start with. If she’s trying to be sort of like a scary progressive too, but not too scary, that’s a small corner to be in. What’s she bringing to the table that Sanders isn’t? Little or nothing. There’s just no selling point in that, for people who might be uncertain about how “moderate” they need to be to get someone who can beat Trump but are also willing to take the plunge.
If you’re aiming for progressives like Sanders is, quite a few those people will realize that any compromises that may eventually be made could start from a stronger position. It doesn’t make strategic sense to do anything else. If you don’t start as far as you’re willing to go initially, that will work against you. You’re conceding all that ground for no obvious reason, before Congress even starts fighting over the issues and most likely watering the results down some more. Very few will thinking that they’ll get everything that the campaign hopes it can achieve in the long run, but people want to know that their candidate really means to fight as hard as possible for their goals and that they’re going to be completely unapologetic about it. That sums up a lot of the difference between Sanders and Warren.
On the other hand, if you’re the type who does want to stay in the shallow end with the purportedly “safe” moderates, and if you think that’s what Warren is, she’s got a plan for that too. But you also have tons of candidates to pick from and no very strong reason to stick with her. With this kind of thinking, the choice you happened to pick isn’t particularly special because of a coherent agenda or set of policies. The idea is just “beat Trump” and “make Dems less weak.” That doesn’t say anything at all about policy or governance, which is pretty much how these centrists like it, because they aren’t so unhappy with the way things are to begin with. They just kind of hate Trump, and they want to be the ones in the driver’s seat, that’s all. Whatever you gotta do with your policy stuff after they’re done proving that they’re winners, that’s fine, they don’t care so much.
But if you’ve seriously got that kind of mindset, Warren isn’t the right choice, and that’s pretty obvious, because she’s trying to be seen as a progressive and not so much a centrist. Pick somebody much more bland and insincere, if that’s what you’re looking for — there are still several to pick from. So Warren doesn’t win that contest either.
The point is, she’s in a very precarious place, because of how she tried to position herself to the right of Sanders, while there were all of those others to the right who are all “just as good” as far as many centrists are concerned. A nice debate here or there, some media buzz, one little scandal or slip-up from any of the candidates, and people like Buttigieg or Klobuchar can easily take that and ruin all the fun for someone like Warren. (They also have a pretty low chance of making it to the end, but they’re hanging on long enough to do some serious damage to others like Biden and Warren.)
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It makes my brain hurt, trying to imagine what people will say if this boils down to Sanders and Bloomberg. Will Sanders still be the outsider candidate then? Or would it be the Republican billionaire who’s basically trying to pull off a hostile takeover of the party?
I mean, it’s obvious which one belongs in the left, ideologically speaking. But I bet most people in the news would try to portray Bloomberg as the safe and comfortable choice for the Democrats. They’re the same type of centrists who buy into all of these other wishy-washy candidates with hardly any platform to speak of, as long as they’ve got money to keep campaigning.
It’s a crowded field, and the trouble is apparently that she didn’t really do anything right for the past several months, not so much that there were many huge mistakes.
I think her “I have a plan for that” schtick started to wear out. Especially when her signature plan for single-payer didn’t appear and then morphed into arglebargle. That’s kind of a giveaway that maybe she’s more serious about getting elected than doing anything else. Her plan was morphing into the ACA.
Bernie’s plan also appears to be bullshit but he’s unwavering about it.
As I’ve said before I don’t consider any of these plans to be anything but teasers for votes, unless the candidate is also willing to speak truthfully about whacking back military spending and extracting the US from expensive wars. Bernie’s “well I didn’t vote for it!” Is not an answer to “what are you going to do about it?”
I read an article recently comparing Sanders and Warren which stated that the main difference between them was that she was willing to make compromises in her pursuit of her agenda, and he was not. The article framed this comparison as being entirely to his benefit. I agree that this is a difference between them. However, if a definition of “moderate” is “someone who believes that compromise is often necessary to accomplish ones’ goals in a pluralistic democracy,” then I guess I’m a moderate.
Sanders is apparently fairly unpopular even among his Democratic colleagues in the Senate (wait, he hasn’t even actually been a Democrat for most of his career). This sounds to me like a recipe for the most ineffectual administration in modern history. If he can’t even sell his ideas to the elected members of his own party, how does he expect to accomplish anything? Is he going to just follow Trump’s and Obama’s lead, ignore Congress, and give us a flood of Executive Orders? That has its own problems.
Effective presidents need to follow Johnson’s model: you need to know how to scratch peoples’ backs sometimes, threaten sometimes, and use sharp elbows to get key figures lined up and eager to advance your agenda. (Failure to figure this out was one of Obama’s key weaknesses.) I can imagine President Warren doing this. I can imagine President Sanders sitting in the Oval Office getting crankier and crankier that nobody wants to play ball using his rules.
His oft-stated solution to this problem is to start a movement to elect a flood of AOCs willing to back up his agenda. This sounds about as workable a solution as asking Dumbledore to wave a magic wand to solve global warming — it’s a fantasy, and it doesn’t give me much confidence in Sanders’ ability to solve other problems.
I’m not sure what you think he hasn’t been truthful about, with regard to the military and the ludicrous amount of money we pump into it. His position here isn’t about pointing at his past record, although it is a good one. The idea certainly is to raise taxes on the wealthy and not spend boatloads on waging wars everywhere, if those are your concerns.
Do you have any reason to think he’s lying about that? Do you know how popular “raise taxes” and “end the wars” is with the general public, and if you do realize how much we hate taxes and love wars, why would someone lie about wanting to do one or both of them?
This is the thing that might be confusing you…. Many centrist Dems do lie all the time about exactly those things, but the deal with Bernie is the reverse situation, and it wouldn’t make any strategic sense to lie in that way, because those aren’t terribly popular sentiments (except among the progressive left) which are portrayed fairly in the media and given the stamp of approval by the establishment, unlike the sentiments that the “centrists” (the establishment itself) have been pushing for decades. They won’t say they’re raising taxes, and he will. They’ll try to obscure what they really want to do about our bullshit wars, and definitely won’t come out and say those days are over, because they’re scared of being seen as “weak.” Bernie will, because he really does have a spine, as anybody can see (and this kind of position demonstrates), which is exactly why he wouldn’t want to or need to lie about it.
What’s also true is that Medicare for All (since you brought it up) doesn’t actually amount to lots more spending, like Joe Biden pretends it does. Good ol’ Joe is one of the inveterate liars we just discussed, and what he’s saying is just noise, People will save a lot of money this way, not spend more this way. So your concerns about how to pay for it (so that you can take it seriously) are misplaced. I mean, you can print the word “tax” on the medical bill, or you can print anything else you like on it for all I care. But that will not change the fact that we are talking about less (and not more) money than what we would be paying if we stick with our current system.
I don’t think that’s a good definition. You have some things that you believe are correct, the right approach to take to a problem, etc. I assume that you actually have some such views, presumably at least one view about one things that has some kind of substance to it, and that you don’t just have this weird sort of meta-view about what one is supposed to do with everyone else’s views in a pluralistic democracy. Would you say that’s correct? I bet you would.
If there are people to the left and to the right of you, you are a moderate (in the middle) with respect to them. It has nothing to do with how negotiations work, because there aren’t a bunch of people who think differently about that. And nobody would be talking about them as a distinct type of political animal, if they applied it to practically everyone.
consciousness razor @7
Hmm…I tend to see Bloomberg’s candidacy as supporting the folks who are currently in charge of the party. It’s the likes of Sanders and AOC (of whom I’m a fan) who are trying to take it over (of which I approve).
Sure, that’s sort of accurate, if you were thinking of “the folks who are currently in charge of the party” as being the same thing as “the party.” Look, I’m sure you get this, but we have voters in this country. The party isn’t just some small inbred collection of insiders and donors, or the Senators and Representatives and Presidential candidates they try to prop up.
I remember Klobuchar making some inane point in the last debate about how many Senators are against Bernie’s plan…. I had to start counting up exactly how many total people that might be, which she was claiming to be on her side, as if it meant anything — it’s maybe upwards of 67 people in a country of over 327 million, and that’s why Bernie’s plan is unpopular? Hilarious. I say we are they are equals, that we hired them for those jobs they take for granted, and the whole point is that we can also fire them. The millions of ordinary people are the ones who count here, as soon as enough of them wake up and realize it.
@11 consciousness razor
One can be an extremist in positions but not necessarily an extremist in tactics. Personally, I’m an extremist when it comes to climate change (I agree that it should be treated as a full-on global emergency, the equivalent of war). I’m more moderate on other issues.
Another problem with Sanders is that, in all his time on the Senate, he’s originated very little important legislation. He’s big on ideas, but he’s never created much of a coalition to get anything done. Warren, from her time on the Consumer Commission, has been a get-stuff-done type of person. I don’t necessarily agree with her on all her issues, but I think she’s got the energy and intelligence to push at least a few things through. I’m less sure about that with Sanders.
(Obviously, I’ll still campaign and vote for him if he gets the nomination.)
consciousness razor, I take your point; but the “hostile takeover” isn’t new with Bloomberg…it’s been going on at least since Bill Clinton.
But in general, I sense that we’re in violent agreement. 😎
I am a Bernie supporter and have donated to his campaign.
I’m not optimistic about his prospects however.
Every one that is going to support Bernie pretty must has decided to. Once the moderates start dropping out you’ll see the moderate candidate get those supporters and Bernie will suddenly be in a distant 2nd place.
He needs to ask for Yang meager number of supporters to join his ‘revolution.’ And every candidate that drops out he needs their endorsement.
You didn’t have a first problem.
False. Even while ghouls like Newt Gringrich were still haunting the place, he was getting more amendments passed than anyone else.
You might have noticed how the entire conversation of this campaign consists mostly of anti-Sanders being tossed into the fray by the establishment, then flailing for a while and dropping out, in which their plan (if you can call it that) is roughly “let’s not do concrete things that will help the lower classes, who don’t matter to people like us.”
And maybe you do fall for that crap, but you might have at least noticed many others who haven’t. His is one of the few coalitions that has really been aimed at getting things done, while the most others can do is pee their pants on live TV because of how scared it makes them.
And the fact is, everybody’s agenda for this election (pro and con) has been set by Sanders. There is no other candidate, Warren included, who has done anything close to that. Whether it’s due to laziness or incompetence or privilege or greed or whatever, for some reason they just don’t get it and are not going to do anything about it.
Could they do something? Why would you think that question matters now, when you know that they won’t?
I think Bernie means what he says, to the extent that he says it. I think Obama believed the stuff he said about shutting down gitmo and the wars, too. They believe what they say and I believe Bernie believes what he says but he’s not going to do the stuff he says. At this point, any real change is preceeded by “first we must destroy the republican/whig party” because any changes while they are in power will be fought in endless rearguard actions.
Warren has already backpedaled away from Bernie’s plan because she knows it won’t happen. Does he?
I really hope Bernie gets the nom and beats Trump like a taiko drum.