As the 2020 Democratic presidential primary plays out, new data is emerging from entrance and exit polls validating what some political consultants already know but others view with irrational skepticism. While the conventional wisdom is that Democratic candidates win by running to the Left and Republicans by running to the Right in presidential primaries, in actuality, it’s smart to stake out and hold more moderate positions.
The data regarding voter preferences on healthcare policy from this cycle proves it.
Remember at the outset of the 2020 contest, when so many candidates were running on socializing healthcare via “Medicare for all”? All those hands raised in the first debates? It turns out that allying themselves with Bernie Sanders on the healthcare issue wasn’t a smart gamble for any of them.
According to Iowa entrance polls, healthcare was the top issue for Democratic caucusgoers. But guess what? While about 60% of caucusgoers supported swapping the private insurance system for “Medicare for all,” 40% opposed it. Yup, 40% — that’s a pretty big number.
New Hampshire exit polls showed something similar. Again, healthcare was the top issue, and per CNN exit polls, “just under two-thirds of voters supported a single-payer system.” That means that close to 40% of people, as in Iowa, opposed it on some level.
But even so, according to those same exit polls, Pete Buttigieg, a candidate campaigning against Sanders’s version of “Medicare for all,” got 25% of the pro-“Medicare for all” pool of voters in New Hampshire. Would it have benefited him in Iowa or New Hampshire to copycat Sanders on healthcare? That’s doubtful — and it’s even more doubtful that it would help him with the contest now moving to Nevada.
There, so much of the outcome will be determined by the preferences of the culinary workers union, which hates the idea of banning private insurance. (As “Medicare for all” would undoubtedly entail.)
The union alone is capable of swinging the results of the Nevada caucuses in the direction of one candidate and against another with basically a snap of the fingers. Here, Sanders’s platform seems extremely unlikely to cut it. No wonder Buttigieg was just on CNN talking about how “Medicare for all” would play poorly in Nevada.
None of this should be news to the consultant class, but still, it will be for too many political professionals.
In the 2008 GOP primary, moderate John McCain triumphed over more conservative rivals. On the Democratic side, Barack Obama, who also ran on a more moderate healthcare plan than Hillary Clinton, ultimately prevailed. In 2016, President Trump triumphed.
While Trump is now seen by many as the patron saint of the right wing, the truth is, he ran far to the left of the rest of the field on healthcare, and indeed on many topics, barring perhaps immigration and trade, which follow a free market versus restrictionist and not a clear-cut Left versus Right axis, anyway.
In party primaries, there is a constant temptation to play to the “base,” those voters most on the Left or the Right. In part, this narrative seems to be driven by consultants who often are not members of the base or, in fact, even remotely in touch with it. Instead, candidate positioning would be better determined by something a different Democratic candidate, Andrew Yang, championed: math.
The truth is, if not everyone, or even a supermajority of Democratic primary voters, is in favor of “Medicare for all,” then candidates running against that plan can make inroads by sticking to their guns and their guts. Moving to the fringes is foolish unless you’re already on the fringe. There are lots of votes from people closer to the middle that will only go to candidates closer to the middle.
Liz Mair (@LizMair) is the founder, owner, and president of Mair Strategies LLC, a boutique strategic consulting firm that works on financial services and tech policy issues. She is a dual U.S.-U.K. national and a longtime critic of Britain’s National Health Service.
