The 2020 presidential race has got the Democratic Party twisted in knots. Its basic character and its supporters’ basic values, which have enabled it to rebound from multiple political disasters, may be producing another one this year.
Consider the Democrats’ concept of fairness in representation. The party’s delegate allocation rules, not just this cycle but going back years, favor proportionate representation.
This comes naturally to a party that has always been a coalition of out-groups — segments of America’s always diverse population that, when they stick together, can form a majority.
This can be carried to extremes. From its second national convention in 1836 up through 1932, the Democratic Party required its presidential nominees to win a two-thirds supermajority of delegates. That gave each of its various subgroups, ranging from segregationist Southerners to big-city Catholic immigrants, an effective veto over the choice of nominee.
The Republican Party, a party always centered on a core constituency of people thought of as typical Americans but who are not by themselves a majority, have a different conception of fairness: Winner takes all. They’ve always given near-unanimous support for a Republican president, even one as unconventional a Republican as President Trump.
Winner-take-all delegate allocation enabled the party interloper Trump to go from amassing less-than-50% primary victories to a nearly insuperable delegate lead four years ago — even before he won his first 50%-plus win in New York on April 19.
That will be harder for the Democratic Party interloper Bernie Sanders. National polling shows him leading with 28% of the vote, but with four other candidates, Joe Biden, Michael Bloomberg, Elizabeth Warren, and Pete Buttigieg, not far behind with 10% to 18%. Others, Tom Steyer and Amy Klobuchar, reach that level in polling in soon-to-vote Nevada or South Carolina. Proportionate representation could give each of these candidates a bunch of delegates.
But there’s a catch. Democratic rules tend to require candidates to get 15% in order to get any delegates at all. That makes sense when there are just two or three serious candidates. But when there are five or six, a poll leader like Sanders might be the only candidate to reach 15 percent and win delegates in every contest. Possible result: Sanders builds a huge delegate lead with pluralities far below 50%.
It’s no secret that Democratic Party leaders and their confreres at MSNBC and CNN consider Sanders a disastrous nominee and are searching for someone else. Unfortunately, at that point, they come up against the Democrats’ traditional professions of abhorring money in politics.
Republicans were never embarrassed by their party’s fundraising advantages in the early and mid-20th century. Democrats are embarrassed to the point of denial at their party’s fundraising prowess over the past 30 years. They continue to denounce the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which overturned limits to corporate political spending, even though studies have shown it’s had zero impact.
Democrats still love to see themselves as representing the little guy against the big corporations. But in this century, their presidential nominees have outraised and outspent their Republican opponents, and they’ve been running ahead of Republicans in the highest income groups.
Yet as Democratic pols and pundits search for someone to stop Sanders, on whom do they alight? Not Biden or Warren, whose support has been visibly waning. Probably not on Buttigieg, who’s struggling to win any perceptible support from blacks, or Klobuchar, whose support seems confined to white college grads.
Instead, they’re looking to Bloomberg with his $56 billion fortune. Over the past several weeks, he’s spent some $400 million — the same amount the Obama reelection campaign spent over two years.
Bloomberg wasn’t on the ballot in Iowa or New Hampshire, and he isn’t in Nevada or South Carolina either. But his heavy spending has made him competitive in big states like California and Florida, where no opponent can come close to matching his ad buys.
Even before he’s won a single delegate, his backers are calling on other candidates to drop out so that he can take on Sanders one-on-one. But this isn’t going to happen — at least not until after Super Tuesday (March 3), and maybe not even then.
In the meantime, Bloomberg may be roadblocking the paths upward for Buttigieg or Klobuchar (or back upward for Warren or Biden), while revelations of his politically incorrect and in some cases repellent past utterances may impede his own rise — which would leave things open for Sanders, who in YouGov’s one-on-one pairings is beating the other Democrats. Feel the Bern?
