The old becomes the new. Less than a week out from the Iowa caucuses, Bernie Sanders, born two months before Pearl Harbor in September 1941, leads the RealClearPolitics average of recent polls by 4 points in Iowa, 8 points in New Hampshire, and 1 point in the biggest delegate prize, the Super Tuesday state California.
One hastens to add: The Sanders surge, like the Elizabeth Warren warming period from mid-September to mid-November and the Pete Buttigieg bump in December, may not last.
Old-timers may remember when Sanders’s fellow Vermonter Howard Dean, a fierce critic of the Iraq war, was leading the field going into Iowa and New Hampshire in 2004. Dean came out of those two contests far behind front-runners John Kerry and John Edwards.
That year, Democrats decided Kerry’s military record made him more electable against George W. Bush. This month, multiple polls suggest Democrats are moving away from electability and toward candidates expressing their own views. That’s especially true of young Democrats — they heavily support Sanders, who leads Joe Biden among people under age 35 by a 50-point margin in the latest Quinnipiac poll.
The Democratic Party has always been a coalition of out-groups — people who are somehow not considered typical Americans but who together can form a majority. This is true even in Iowa, where the generational divide is vivid: The Emerson poll, for example, shows Biden winning 32% of people over 50 and Sanders winning 44% of people under 50.
White college grads, here as elsewhere, have been shopping around. Upscale Democrats in October and early November seemed inclined toward Warren’s “I have a plan for that” campaign. Then, perhaps proud of Americans’ widening acceptance of gay equality, they put Buttigieg in the lead from mid-November to the end of the year. Perhaps they’ll switch again.
Iowa’s caucus rules tend to over-reward the two or three candidates leading in polls and ruthlessly punish those with less backing. In each of the 1,678 caucus sites in the state’s 99 counties — this list could also include 97 satellite sites in other states, the nations of Scotland and France, and (for reasons unclear to me) the city of Tbilisi, Georgia — caucusgoers, after listening to pitches for candidates, must declare their choice. But candidates who fail to reach 15% are declared “unviable,” and their supporters then have the option to join with other candidates’ supporters and form or augment viable groups.
The theory is that conscientious Iowans, after months of retail politics, will make well-informed judgments of character. Maybe so, but in 2004 and 2008, Iowa Democrats gave strong second-place finishes to political fraudster John Edwards. Bernie Sanders finished in an even closer second in 2016, and he may have actually had more votes than Hillary Clinton. Iowa Democrats have always counted the results by state convention delegate equivalents. This year, Iowa also promises to announce a head count of the human beings voting for each candidate.
If current polls are right and opinion doesn’t change, Sanders and Biden both seem likely to come out of Iowa with plenty of delegates. But Buttigieg, Warren, and neighboring Minnesota’s Amy Klobuchar are at risk of running well behind if they don’t make the 15% threshold and are therefore ruled unviable in hundreds of caucus precincts.
New Hampshire seems easier to predict unless Sanders is out of the running after Iowa. Its population is relatively upscale, and the creeping Vermontification of at least its Democrats, spreading east from the Connecticut River and west from woke Portsmouth, is almost complete. New Hampshire’s once stout resistance to tax increases has weakened among Democrats, and voters here generally in the 20th-century birthplace of the state lottery take a laissez faire view on cultural issues.
So it’s not surprising that in 2016, Sanders carried every city, town, township, grant, gore, purchase, and location except for three lightly populated units in the north and, presumably in response to his support of high tax rates, the state’s three highest-income suburbs — Bedford, Windham, and New Castle. His increasing leads in New Hampshire polls this month suggest he’s on the brink of a similar win in February.
Victories in Iowa and New Hampshire would make Sanders hard to stop. Biden’s current national and Nevada poll leads could vanish overnight. His candidacy would then depend on heavy support from blacks in the Deep South and industrial North.
Democratic professionals who fear that Sanders’s liabilities (age, socialism) are too great to overcome might find it as difficult to defeat him as their Republican equivalents found it difficult to stop Donald Trump four years ago — or as difficult as it was for Britain’s New Labour establishment to stop the left-wing Jeremy Corbyn from leading the party to a record defeat last month.
