It’s a familiar plotline: An interloper runs for a party’s presidential nomination, and with an anti-insider pitch, scores wins and near-wins in the first contests with pluralities of the votes.
His numerous opponents, fearful of antagonizing the interloper’s enthusiastic supporters, launch attacks on each other, which, predictably, hurt the attacker as well as the target.
Party establishment types, convinced the interloper is a sure loser in November, dither and tilt things mildly against him while trying to maintain the impression of fairness.
Candidates with no chance remain in the race, dividing the anti-interloper vote, hoping the interloper will collapse. But he doesn’t, and he even starts winning absolute majorities in late contests.
That’s how President Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016. So far, it’s consistent with how Bernie Sanders is doing in this year’s Democratic race.
Remember that Trump lost the Iowa caucuses to Ted Cruz and that 65% of New Hampshire Republicans voted for somebody else. Sanders’s performance so far is comparable: a lead in the first- and second-round popular votes in Iowa (though he lost in state convention delegate equivalents 564-562 to Pete Buttigieg) and a two-point win over Buttigieg in New Hampshire.
The animus of the party establishment is even clearer now than it was in 2016 — Iowa Democrats’ botch of the count and the repeated anti-Sanders bias of MSNBC and CNN. Reince Priebus and Fox News handled Trump more gingerly four years ago.
Sanders looks hard-pressed to grow his core constituency (people under 35) as Trump did his (noncollege graduates) at this point four years ago, though in time, his ceiling grew higher.
Sanders repels the highest-income Democrats, for obvious reasons. He got only 16% in affluent Bedford and Windham, two of the three New Hampshire towns he lost to Hillary Clinton in 2016. But the vote there, and likely in the affluent precincts of contests to come, was split between Amy Klobuchar and Buttigieg.
Each of them, in turn, has constituency problems. Buttigieg gets just about zero support from black voters, who cast more than 20% of Democratic ballots nationally and a majority of them in South Carolina. Many Democratic voters’ sense of moral superiority derives from Democrats’ near-unanimous support from blacks and the charge, based on thin to zero evidence, of Republicans’ and Trump’s racism. Buttigieg puts all that at risk.
As for Klobuchar, she has little history with black and Hispanic voters. Her surges in Iowa and New Hampshire were powered by white college graduates, who have been notoriously malleable in their preferences so far. And she doesn’t have nearly the money Buttigieg has raised, much less the billions — that’s not a misprint — that Michael Bloomberg can spend.
Those problems are nothing compared with those of single-digit finishers Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden, who lost two-thirds of their peak support in polls. But why should they drop out before Super Tuesday on March 3, when 39% of delegate votes will be determined?
One possibly salient difference between the 2016 Republican race and the 2020 Democratic contest so far is turnout. With Trump as a box-office draw, Republican primary and caucus turnout in 2016 was up 44% nationally from its previous peak, up 54% in Iowa and 15% in New Hampshire.
There was a similar upsurge of Democratic turnout in 2008, but not in 2016, and not so far this year. Democrats’ Iowa turnout was up only 3% from 2016 and down 26% from 2008. Democratic turnout in New Hampshire is not complete at publishing, but it’s still 1% below 2008, albeit up 12% from 2016.
The 2008 turnout numbers nationally and in the opening states showed the Democrats’ huge enthusiasm edge, which became evident once again in November. By the same token, low 2016 turnout showed Democratic enthusiasm flagging, foreshadowing November.
The 2020 Iowa and New Hampshire turnouts are far below widespread expectations. My theory to explain this apparent disillusion: Democrats are still in shock over the collapse of the Russia/collusion meme. They fully expected to watch Trump being frog-marched out of the White House. Having given up on that savory dream and internally accepted that Trump will be reelected, many of them lost their appetite for politics and disengaged. This might explain why MSNBC and CNN ratings are down. (Just to illustrate, Monday’s prime-time ratings compare quite poorly to those of the second Monday of last February, two months before the collusion story was debunked. CNN is down by 20% and MSNBC by 24% year-over-year, even as Fox News is up by a modest 4%.)
Of course, the Democrats might fail to replicate the 2016 Republican plotline. Sanders might stumble, Buttigieg or Klobuchar could soar. Michael Bloomberg, unorthodox both in party affiliation and on policy (see his abject apologies for his successful stop-and-frisk policy), could spend his way to the nomination of a party that bemoans the role of money in politics.
Maybe it takes one interloper to beat another.
