Michael Bloomberg has just delivered his latest delicious hint about running for president. Eric Holder is fresh from taking credit for the new Democratic legislative majorities in Virginia, making known that he might be interested, too. Former Gov. Deval Patrick is now reported to discern demand for another presidential candidate from Massachusetts.
So this might be a good time to look at some of the patterns in former Democratic presidential nomination contests that might help late entrants.
The first is that opinion sometimes flows very rapidly, sweeping everything in its path, like lava down a volcano, like mud after the collapse of a dam, like the tide ebbing in the Bay of Fundy.
One example goes back to 1984 when Walter Mondale won the Iowa caucuses with 49% in a field of only (only!) eight candidates. It was a fine performance, but all the attention went to Gary Hart, who, with his “new Democrat ideas,” ran second with 16%.
Hart swept New Hampshire 37% to 28%, winning states like Florida and Massachusetts. Only Mondale’s appeal to blue-collar whites — a splinter group among today’s Democrats — helped him recover in Michigan, Illinois, and New York and win the nomination.
Opinion flowed even more inexorably 20 years later. Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, with his unambiguous anti-Iraq War message, attracted huge crowds and led the polls in 2003. On the eve of the caucuses, Des Moines was swarming with “Deaniacs” in their orange stocking caps. But opinion was flowing away from Dean to the long-lagging John Kerry, who beat Dean 38% to 32%. After that, opinion just kept flowing. Kerry lost Vermont, the Carolinas, and Oklahoma but won the rest of the states.
Some years, Democratic opinion doesn’t move much. The same demographic divisions prevailed in the close 2008 and 2016 races. Hillary Clinton got enough support from “beer Democrats” to lead Barack Obama in votes and delegates in primaries, but his support from blacks and “wine Democrats” got him enough caucus wins and superdelegates for the 2008 nomination.
In 2016, the tables turned. Clinton lost “beer Democrats” to Bernie Sanders but won big enough majorities from blacks, Hispanics, and “wine Democrats” to take the nomination. This year, the hold of any candidate on these groups seems weak enough that a late entrant might dare hope that opinion may flow lava-like to them.
Moreover — and this is my second point — “wine Democrats” may be numerous enough now to be analyzed as two demographic segments. Elizabeth Warren’s and Bernie Sanders’s big-government promises have attracted many white college graduates. But polling suggests they are “jug wine” folks — I refer to teachers and social workers with grad school degrees entitling them to public employee union wage increases and millennial thirty-somethings still hoping to find themselves.
That may leave the “champagne Democrats” up for grabs. In 2016, Sanders got more votes than Clinton from whites, but she handily carried the highest income communities — Manhattan and Greenwich, Connecticut; New Trier Township in suburban Chicago; Lincoln and Lexington, Massachusetts; Grosse Pointe and Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Sanders’s bland approval of 70% tax rates probably hurt him there, and Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax may hurt her even more. This leaves an obvious possible opening for a newcomer.
The third opening for late entrants could be black voters. Current polling shows Joe Biden, Barack Obama’s vice president, leading among blacks. But Holder, as Obama’s self-described “wingman,” has a claim on that credential. He or Patrick might enthuse the many black voters whom Cory Booker and Kamala Harris have failed to stir.
More important perhaps is the fact that black voters, with their above-average religious ties, currently say they’re “less liberal” than most white Democrats on many cultural issues, including supposed racial issues. As Columbia undergraduate (and rap performer) Coleman Hughes and New York Times blogger (and veteran political reporter) Thomas Edsall both report, younger blacks are more concerned about jobs than climate change and believe that individual behavior more than societal racism is holding many blacks back. Reparations are not their thing, and they’re the demographic group least supportive of same-sex marriage and transgender rights.
Traditionally, blacks have voted almost unanimously for one candidate, a rational strategy for voters who see themselves as part of a group subject to systematic discrimination and disrespect. But there’s evidence — Bernie Sanders holding Hillary Clinton to 65% of black votes in Michigan in 2016 and recent polls showing young black men significantly less Democratic than their elders — suggesting that such unanimity may be outmoded, as blacks’ incomes surge upward and overt discrimination becomes less and less common.
So a late-starting presidential campaign may not be hopeless — maybe not even for Hillary Clinton.
