With Super Tuesday right around the corner, improbable as it might have seemed even a year ago, socialist Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders is running strong in the Democratic primary. After solid showings in both Iowa and New Hampshire, there’s a significant risk that he could ultimately triumph, either outright or at a contested convention at which he holds a plurality of delegates.
As FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver wrote last week, the model used by the data and polling analysis site is now “quite bullish on Sanders.” While it still shows as the most likely outcome that no candidate wins a majority of delegates before the convention, the model also indicates that Sanders is ultimately the “most likely Democrat to win a majority of pledged delegates.” A few factors have come into play here. About 40% of pledged delegates come from Super Tuesday states and those preceding them, where Sanders has (so far) done a pretty good job of running up his numbers. Sanders tends to clear 15% in each state vote, the minimum percent to be eligible to win delegates, so he can always bank at least a delegate here or there. And Sanders is not, in fact, as disliked as one might suspect. He currently holds roughly a 5-point advantage in a head-to-head matchup against President Trump, according to the RealClearPolitics average.
But a big factor weighing in Sanders’s favor is that a glut of centrists remains in the contest, fighting it out among themselves. Technically, Mayor Pete Buttigieg has the outright lead, based on pure delegate math. But others in the “moderate” lane see plenty of reason to continue. In addition to the Indianan there’s former Vice President Joe Biden, whose campaign rests on the assumption that his delegate count should improve sharply after South Carolina. There’s Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who is gaining traction and in New Hampshire proved appealing to late-deciding voters. And, of course, there’s the elephant — or rather former elephant — in the room, Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
As we saw with the Republican field in 2016, there’s a risk that these “moderate” candidates could split the non-Bernie vote and thereby, ironically, lock down a Bernie win. In New Hampshire, Silver notes, “50 percent of voters said Sanders’s positions were too liberal. Meanwhile, the combined vote shares for Buttigeig (sic), Klobuchar and Biden (52.6 percent) considerably exceeded that for Sanders and [Sen. Elizabeth] Warren (34.9 percent).”
In autumn 2015, I was getting laughed out of the room by fellow Republicans for arguing that Trump could wind up as president fairly easily. And we all know how that turned out. Bernie-skeptical Democrats who wish to avoid a 2016 redux on their side of the aisle should take note of the road they are going down. In several vital areas, they’re repeating the same mistakes of the Never Trump coalition.
The first and most obvious thing on everyone’s lips this week, but especially Bloomberg’s, is “consolidate.” Many are starting to wake up to the notion that Sanders has a clear and viable path to the nomination. But recognizing that fact and acting on it, whether by campaigns coordinating attacks on Sanders or centrist Democratic candidates actually dropping out to make way for a single contender, are different things entirely. It also doesn’t help when Bloomberg, the guy who has most adamantly made the consolidation argument, is not crushing it in the polls and turned in a fairly disastrous debate performance last Wednesday.
The truth is, a big part of how Trump became the GOP nominee was that anti-Trump forces refused to consolidate to block him out, and so he just kept on moving up. Some did try to prevent it. Notably, figures in the camp of Sen. Ted Cruz have told at least a few political writers around Washington, D.C., that at a crucial stage in the 2016 fight, they had arranged a meeting at which the Cruz campaign intended to try to cut a deal with Sen. Marco Rubio to shut Trump down, likely involving a Cruz-Rubio or a Rubio-Cruz ticket. Allegedly, Rubio and/or his emissaries failed to show. So the dynamics of the race continued unchanged.
Gov. John Kasich, who never had a real shot anyway, certainly stayed in the race for a ridiculously long period. This likely prevented Cruz from amassing delegates that could have been used to block Trump. A key focus for the anti-Trump super-PAC I ran in 2016 was limiting Kasich’s delegate accruals in Arizona and Utah to ensure a stronger delegate count for Cruz, something we did successfully in those two states.
But what if anti-Trump forces in the GOP had done what Democrats could do now and consolidated? What if Cruz and Rubio had joined a ticket on terms that would make them virtual co-presidents? This is something that Buttigieg, Biden, and Bloomberg should all be thinking hard about right now, and they should be looking squarely at Amy Klobuchar, either as their potential boss or as their potential partner in such an arrangement. Unlike two of the moderate men, Klobuchar has Senate experience and knowhow that will be vital for getting an agenda through Congress. Unlike all of them, she is actually funny, which is a huge advantage in electoral politics (just look at Trump). Also unlike them, she is a woman who has won statewide in the Midwest. Given the electoral map and the Democrats’ zealous focus on identity politics, these are both positives.
Of course, to take this big but very straightforward step toward shutting down Sanders, Democratic centrists must be able to be realistic about their own chances. They have to ask themselves if they’re content with gambling their party, and maybe even the country, on an egotistical desire to prove that, yes, people really do like them enough. Particularly when the math does not look obviously workable.
Can they change that math? It’s possible. Yet to do so would require making other changes that the collective anti-Trump Republicans mostly failed to do in 2016, and which anti-Sanders Democrats should have begun last summer.
A major problem that afflicted the other 2016 GOP candidates was Trump’s extensive recognizability with potential voters. Anyone who had walked through a supermarket checkout in the prior 30 years already knew the name Trump. Anyone who watched primetime NBC shows also knew the name Trump. They knew what he looked like, that he was wealthy, that he was a “boss.” According to one statistic we heard while running our 2016 effort, Trump entered the 2016 primary with 99.2% name ID. Only Jeb Bush came close to that number, and the last name “Bush” was not a strong selling point after his brother’s White House tenure.
This continued even as the Republican contest was kicking off in earnest. Emblematic was Spencer Guinard, then 18 years old, who attended a Charleston, South Carolina, Trump rally covered by Yahoo News’ Jon Ward. As Ward reported, “Guinard, originally from Boise, Idaho, had never heard of most of the Republican presidential candidates. When I mentioned Marco Rubio, the Florida senator, Guinard told me he’d ‘never heard that name.’” But like everyone else, he’d heard of Trump.
This is a problem for Klobuchar and Buttigieg, especially. But it’s also (probably) a problem for Biden. For instance, Axios’ Mike Allen reported last April that five out of a group of 12 Ohio swing voters who were shown pictures of 2020 presidential candidates “had no idea” who Biden was. This is after eight years of having served as vice president, previously having run for president twice, and having been an active figure in national politics since the 1970s.
Probably some of those five voters now recognize Biden. And yes, they’re swing voters, not diehard Democrats. Nonetheless, recognizability is key, especially in states with open or semi-open primaries and caucuses, or states where voters can change their registration late. Say what you will about Bloomberg’s advertising strategy — and there are lots of reasons to be skeptical one can “buy” a nomination, with most of the money dumped into TV ads that many viewers tune out — but it’s unlikely that by Super Tuesday, on March 3, anyone in America won’t know who Bloomberg is. Biden, by contrast, still probably lacks Trump-level recognition.
How do you change this? Stunts. Street theater. Getting attention. Basically, what Trump did, though you don’t have to be as offensive about it (protip: it’s probably not advisable to impersonate disabled people on a rally stage, for instance).
A lot of Rubio backers were unhappy when he launched the “tiny hands” attack on Trump and thought it “unbecoming,” but it got him on cable news without having to spend money, and fast. It put him on the radar of people who weren’t paying attention. For those GOP voters who were shopping for someone who didn’t look like a wuss, it helped beef up Rubio a bit.
Put another way, it’s time not just for the moderates to think about consolidating, but also to pick a fight with Sanders. Last week, we saw a Democratic debate in which the centrists did this a bit — but barely more than they attacked each other. As with the anti-Trump contingent in 2016, presumably they’re all afraid that if they attack Sanders too hard, his supporters will never back them in a general (of course, as we saw in 2016, a decent number of Sanders voters won’t back the eventual Democratic nominee anyway). Given how Sanders’s ire appeared to rise, coupled with his health problems, it’s possible some of them also didn’t want to get too heated with him on the debate stage (it’s notable that Klobuchar jabbed at Sanders’s health a few times).
Bloomberg is doing this most, and most effectively, but even after hitting Sanders on socialism in the debate, it still is not enough. Politics is nasty. Where are the people crashing Sanders rallies with Soviet flags and blaring the Soviet national anthem over their phones? Or putting on Marx, Lenin, and Stalin masks? Or in Florida, showing up dressed up as Fidel Castro and Che Guevara waving Bernie Sanders signs? Where are the fake “Bernie Sanders travel guides” detailing his favorite places to hang out in Moscow, Managua, Havana, and Caracas?
Given that Sanders first won office by aligning with the National Rifle Association, which Democratic voters seem to loathe, it’s frankly embarrassing that Biden, in particular, hasn’t made this into a line of major attack. Biden could easily start hammering Bernie hard on this in town halls, at ice cream socials, and other voter meet-and-greets and simultaneously deploy some fake “NRA members for Bernie” carrying phony Kalashnikovs and talking about Sanders’s real record. It would work better than his throwaway line at the end of last week’s debate hitting Sanders on the subject.
And while Bloomberg hit Sanders for his wealth and his swank millionaire properties, with a little help from Mayor Pete, this is also readily available ammunition, just lying around for the taking. It would be best deployed by the Indianan, who appears to be the only non-millionaire in the race. And the good news is, he’s also (usually) the most articulate candidate running and has an extremely able press team who could shove out the message of the socialist multimillionaire with three houses acting like an aggrieved factory worker making minimum wage.
Stuff such as this is petty and, in some cases, stupid. But it draws attention to an opponent’s liabilities and gets the campaign pushing it on TV, thus boosting name recognition while having to spend hardly a dime. And often, it provokes a response in the targeted candidate that sours voters on them by baiting them into losing their cool.
Of course, to do it, you have to have treated the target seriously enough to do your opposition research in the first place, to know their liabilities and be willing to exploit them. That’s something else that anti-Sanders candidates don’t seem to be doing, just as rival campaigns to Trump’s didn’t much bother with it in 2015 and early 2016. Like the crotchety old socialist, Trump was treated as a joke who could never win. Until he did.
Sanders has had a long and colorful public life. Obviously, it’s been colorful in ways that Trump’s is not, and vice versa. But just as Trump proved to be an opposition research treasure trove once someone — not the GOP candidates so much as the media, super-PACs, and anti-Trump groups such as mine — dove in, so will Sanders. It’s just not clear anyone has done this. And if they have, they’re talking about the wrong information to the wrong reporters. Many people who cover Sanders are fans of his who won’t write a bad word about him; many others are simply pure horserace people. Only a few have an investigative journalist’s bone in their bodies (it’s those last few that you want to get the dirt in front of).
Ultimately, the moderates’ campaigns should be looking for nuggets that underline Sanders’s elitism, hypocrisy on wages, benefits, climate, sexism, etc., and generally the extent to which he is out of touch with the common voter. One of the deadliest moments for Sanders’s campaign was probably when he was busted for not paying staff in line with his own $15 minimum wage plan and was proving less than enthusiastic about their union organizing efforts. Things such as that can kill.
But so too can the palling-around-with-communists business. There are still a lot of older Democratic voters who hated the Soviet Union, hated the Sandinistas, and generally hate socialism and communism. Even more, those who hate being tagged with the “socialist” moniker themselves just because they like the New Deal and their Medicare and Social Security. Plus, unlike Sanders’s younger followers, who may or may not turn out to vote, these people always vote. They also have time on their hands to volunteer, and in many cases they have more disposable income than would a recent college graduate making $40,000 a year and carrying $100,000 worth of student debt.
Trump knows this. It’s why when he played word association games with Sean Hannity recently, he replied “communist” when Hannity said Sanders’s name. It wasn’t nice. It was nasty. But Sanders isn’t a member of the GOP, and he’s actually not a member of the Democratic Party, either, even if he caucuses with them. Trying to win an election isn’t like playing touch football. This is the NFL, and if centrists want to stop Sanders (which, incidentally, probably gives them a better shot at stopping Trump), they need to start getting rough and executing, fast.
God knows, when it’s general election time, Trump will do all of these things, so either go big or go home. That’s how it works. And if you don’t believe me, just ask Cruz, Rubio, Kasich, or anyone else who was left in Trump’s dust while saying “this guy is a joke” or “I don’t want to cut a deal with X” a mere four years ago.
Liz Mair is the founder, owner and president of Mair Strategies LLC, and a former adviser to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Sen. Rand Paul, Gov. Rick Perry, and Carly Fiorina. In 2008, she served as the Republican National Committee’s first and only online communications director, and a spokeswoman.
