After racking up a big win in Nevada, Sen. Bernie Sanders is in a commanding position in the 2020 Democratic presidential race. Though he may not yet be inevitable, we’ve reached the point where it will be hard for establishment Democrats to stop him without inflicting a great cost on their eventual nominee.
Sanders arguably won Iowa, and he now has added a big win in Nevada to his victory in New Hampshire. So, there’s a case to be made that he’s already won the first three contests, and he should do no worse than second in South Carolina.
He will then head into Super Tuesday on March 3 as the best performer in the early contests, and that will be coupled with money, organization, and likely standing as the national front-runner. On that day alone, there will be 16 contests with 1,357 delegates up for grabs — or more than a third of all available.
Here’s the thing about the way Democratic contests work. Because they allocate delegates proportionally, to candidates clearing 15% in states and congressional districts, it’s harder for a front-runner to amass a majority of delegates quickly in a crowded field than in the Republican system, in which there are a lot of states where the winner takes all or most delegates.
However, the flip side of that is it also means that if one candidate builds up a substantial lead, it becomes harder for any other candidate to catch up.
Without going into all the theoretical math, while there’s doubt about whether Sanders goes into the Democratic National Convention with the majority needed to become the nominee on the first ballot, it’s becoming increasingly hard to see how anybody goes into the convention with more delegates than he does. This was already becoming clear in Wednesday’s Democratic debate, when Sanders was the only candidate who said that the one who has the most delegates should be the nominee if no candidate wins a majority. All other candidates said the process should play out on the convention floor.
Here’s the problem that any other Democrat faces at this point. In 2016, a number of embittered Sanders voters refused to vote for Hillary Clinton in the general election, which came down to tight races in a few key states. That was during an election in which Clinton went into the convention with a clear majority of delegates. If a subset of Sanders fans thought he was robbed four years ago, how will they react if he gets to the convention in July with the most delegates and loses the nomination as a result of deal-making among other campaigns and party insiders?
The only way to avoid that outcome at this point would seem to be either have all other candidates drop out and unite around one of the more center-left Democrats, such as Joe Biden — which is very difficult to see happening in the next week and a half, especially with billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s entire strategy based around hundreds of millions in ad buys in Super Tuesday states. Or, alternatively, have Bloomberg unload a blizzard of negative ads targeting Sanders — a strategy outlined by former Jeb Bush communications director Tim Miller. But if a billionaire managed to nuke Sanders successfully with ad spending, it would anger Sanders’s supporters just as much if not more than him losing due to convention shenanigans.
Nominating a socialist as their standard-bearer no doubt carries significant political risk for Democrats up- and down-ballot in November. But even if there’s somebody else who is in theory a safer bet, in practice, we’ve reached the point at which Democrats may be taking an even greater risk by handing somebody else the nomination and alienating Sanders supporters.
