For much of the Democratic nomination battle, it’s been assumed that Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are dividing the far-left vote and making it more likely that Joe Biden will win. In reality, the most realistic path that progressives have for denying Biden the nomination likely involves both Warren and Sanders remaining in the race until the bitter end.
On the surface, the argument for why liberals would be better off with either Warren or Sanders in the race rather than both is straightforward. Add their support together in national and early state polls, and they easily surpass Biden. In the run-up to Iowa, the clash between Warren and Sanders would seemingly be an acknowledgment that for one of them to win, they have to take out the other to consolidate the anti-Biden vote.
Even if it were plausibly true that had, say, Sanders decided to stay out of the race and endorse Warren from the get-go, that there would be higher odds of a liberal candidate defeating Biden, that ship has long since sailed. Both candidates will be in the race at least until Iowa. So the question at this point is whether the Left is better off with one of them dropping out early, or with both of them trying to stay in for the long haul.
Biden remains in a position to finish at or near the top in Iowa and New Hampshire, and if he’s able to survive those contests, he has a much better chance of amassing delegates as the race moves to South Carolina and other states with a large percentage of black voters. Thus, if Warren and Sanders fail to bury him in Iowa and New Hampshire, the best shot at stopping Biden may be on the convention floor. The possibility of a contested convention is more likely in 2020 than in most years as a result of the way that Democrats allocate delegates, as well as the size of the field.
Under a rules change, superdelegates who are allowed to vote for any candidate they want are barred from casting a decisive vote on the first ballot. That is, if Biden does not win a majority of delegates outright, then he’ll have to win the nomination when Democrats gather in Milwaukee in July. If both Sanders and Warren can remain viable, it increases the odds that they will be able to deny Biden an outright majority.
Though there may be some degree of overlap between Warren and Sanders voters, their supporters are not interchangeable. Some Warren voters may prefer her policy proposals or simply want somebody younger or female. Sanders voters may view him as more authentically dedicated to the “revolution” or may have bought into the argument that it would be harder for a woman to beat President Trump. A recent Morning Consult poll found that nearly as many Sanders supporters chose Biden as their second choice (27%) as Warren (30%). Warren supporters were more likely to gravitate to Sanders as their second choice, but still, only 37% of her supporters chose him as the next best option. There is also a “Bernie or bust” crowd that would not vote if he were not on the ballot.
Were Sanders and Warren to both remain in the race through the primaries, they would be able to capture more voters collectively than they would otherwise be able to were only one of them to survive. Biden’s share of the vote will be further carved up if additional candidates, such as Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, do well enough in the early states to stay in or if Michael Bloomberg takes off in some of the later states where he’s unloading tens of millions of dollars.
Anti-Trump Republicans attempted a similar strategy in 2016, hoping that the combined votes for Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, along with John Kasich, would deny Trump a majority of delegates. However, Trump benefited from a delegate allocation process that more heavily favored the statewide winner, whereas Democrats allocate delegates proportionately, meaning that even candidates who don’t win a given state can swallow up delegates if they can get to 15% either statewide or in targeted congressional districts.
As an example, when Trump won winner-take-all Florida, he received 46% of the vote, but all 99 of the state’s delegates. In South Carolina, Trump garnered under one-third of the vote, but he claimed all 50 of the state’s delegates because with Cruz and Rubio nearly tied at 22%, Trump was able to win the state and every congressional district. Those two states alone gave him more than 10% of the total needed to capture the Republican nomination. Had the GOP followed Democratic delegate allocation rules, instead of receiving 149 delegates between those two states, Trump likely would have ended up with less than half that amount.
So though it may seem counterintuitive, no matter which one they support, liberals interested in stopping Biden should be rooting for both Warren and Sanders to remain viable for as long as possible.
