After Election Day 2016, Bernie Sanders was arguably the front-runner for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. He had finished a respectable second place in the last primary, he had a strong network of small donors, and he seemed to be channeling the left-ish energy in ways that others weren’t.
Most of that hasn’t changed, but I think that Sanders is in a significantly worse position now than he was two years ago. He’s still arguably the front-runner (in fact, my boss made a strong case for that earlier this week), but I think Sanders has some big issues. And those issues (many of which also apply to other Democratic candidates) make me think that “the Field” is a much better bet than any individual candidate at this point.
Bernie Has a Beto Problem
Sanders won 43 percent of the vote in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, but he’s now hovering below 20 percent in the most polls. There are a lot of possible explanations for that drop, but one is that he now has competition for his 2016 lane.
In 2016, Sanders performed really well with voters who described themselves as very liberal (duh), and his voters tended to distrust the system more than Clinton voters. This makes sense. Sanders is a Democratic Socialist who basically ran against the Democratic Establishment personified.
But in 2020, he’s likely going to be squeezed on both fronts by candidates with unique selling points. We don’t know who is going to run yet, but it’s possible to imagine Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, Kamala Harris, and others all essentially trying to be Sanders Plus, grabbing some part of his coalition with an opportunity to expand on it. If you want someone who agrees with Sanders on a lot of the substance but is more tied to the Democratic party, you can vote for Warren. If you want someone who has an outsider-y feel, can raise boatloads of money, and is a couple of decades younger than Sanders, you can vote O’Rourke.
I could go on, but you get the point: Multiple Democratic candidates who are in Sanders’s lane seem to be interested in running for president. If Sanders was in a one-on-one matchup with, well, anyone in the field, I think he’d be polling better than he is now. But he’s getting squeezed from a couple of different directions, and that lowers his odds. So far it doesn’t seem like Sanders has scared off his competitors in the way that other front-runners have, and he’ll probably have some real competition for his lane.
Bernie Has a Hillary Problem
Sanders also likely won’t be running one-on-one against a candidate who is basically a perfect foil for him.
In 2016, part of Sanders’s appeal was that he wasn’t Hillary Clinton. It’s hard to know exactly what percent of the Sanders vote was simply anti-Clinton (voters don’t always know why they do what they do) and how he would have done in a fight with a similar but less controversial opponent (e.g. Kirsten Gillibrand instead of Hillary Clinton).
We can use West Virginia (my home state!) as an example. Sanders won the 2016 West Virginia Democratic primary by a whopping 16-point margin, taking every single county. But that win wasn’t a hidden signal that West Virginia Is Actually Very Liberal or something. Forty-one percent of respondents in the exit poll said they wanted the next president to be “less liberal” than Obama (Sanders won that group handily) and 33 percent said they’d vote for Trump over Sanders in the general election (remember that this is an exit poll for a Democratic primary and, weirdly enough, Sanders beat Clinton among voters who would vote Trump over him). Those numbers aren’t consistent with a broad-based affirmation of Sanders-ism within the West Virginia Democratic Party (which, to be fair, contains a lot of Republican converts still registered as Democrats). They suggest that some Sanders voters were actually anti-Clinton voters.
West Virginia is a politically unique state (especially when we’re talking about primaries and within-party politics), and it’s far from the most important contest in a Democratic primary. These same numbers would be completely different in almost any other state.
But the point is that anti-Clinton voters exist, and they’re probably part of the reason his vote share has gone from 43 percent by the end of 2016 to the high teens now. If Sanders had faced a candidate not named Clinton in 2016, he probably wouldn’t have done as well—which suggests that he could have real problems in 2020.
Bernie Has a Rules Problem.
If Democrats used Republican rules, I’d rate Sanders higher. Under GOP presidential primary rules, a candidate can run up the delegate count by winning pluralities against a divided field and end up becoming the nominee despite not being the consensus candidate (*cough cough Trump*).
But Democratic primary rules have traditionally been more proportional. It’s typically harder for a Democrat to run up the delegate count early in the process and build an insurmountable lead. This more proportional delegate allocation system kept Clinton from officially clinching the Democratic nomination until the end of the process—if she had been running under GOP rules, she would have been able to put Sanders away much earlier.
That means that either Sanders would have to grow his coalition significantly (which may be harder when he’s not running against an opponent as suited to him as Clinton was) or get into a situation where nobody has a majority (which is uncharted territory for recent primaries, so we shouldn’t make strong predictions about what would happen) by the end of the primary. Those things are by no means impossible, but they’re not easy either. And they highlight how far Sanders still has to go.
Everyone Else Has a Lot of These Same Problems—Bet on The Field.
None of these problems are insurmountable. In fact, other Democratic candidates face either these exact same obstacles or their own personal variant of them.
My point here isn’t to pick on Sanders or even argue that he’s a wrong first pick in the draft. My point is that Sanders isn’t in a great position—he’s arguably in a much worse position than other next-in-line candidates like the 2012 version of Mitt Romney or the 2016 version of Hillary Clinton. And the Democratic primary is still highly unsettled at this point. So if you have the choice to bet on Sanders (or really any other Democratic candidate) or the field, you really should take the field.
