With former Vice President Joe Biden fresh off a weak fourth-place showing in the Iowa caucuses and a disastrous debate performance, moderate Democrats are shopping for a new candidate, and the polling shows they’re ascendant.
But Democrats’ best bet to stop Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders with a moderate option is not Pete Buttigieg, who just won the Iowa caucuses and very well may win New Hampshire, and it’s not Michael Bloomberg, whose Super Tuesday spending has catapulted him to the double-digits nationally. It’s Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, the only other real moderate who can win.
First, Biden: His national polling suffered its first major blow with Quinnipiac’s finding that the former vice president collapsed by nine points to 17% support, coming second to Sanders’s new high of 25%. A single poll doesn’t spell definitive doom, but Biden has crumbled in surveys in New Hampshire, Nevada, and now, California. With his greatest asset, perceived electability, in peril, that’s why moderates are looking elsewhere.
Some in the media call Buttigieg the leading moderate. Unlike the left-wing candidates of the race, Buttigieg doesn’t back “Medicare For all” (anymore), and whereas the left-wingers disdain those who personally don’t support gay marriage, the openly gay Buttigieg has quipped that while he may not love Chick-fil-A’s politics, he still enjoys their sandwiches. The former South Bend, Indiana, mayor is affable and clearly trying to accommodate a diversity of viewpoints among his supporters.
But although Buttigieg is not half an inch to the left of Jeremy Corbyn, he’s still far from a moderate on policy. He supports packing the Supreme Court and has embraced removing any and all restrictions on abortion up until the point of birth, even insinuating that pro-life liberals have no place in the Democratic Party.
Bloomberg may be even more of a farce of a moderate. An extreme sycophant for the Chinese dictatorship, the former New York mayor’s entire political career has reeked of petty authoritarianism, from grotesquely endorsing the use of racial profiling to banning Big Gulps. He’s openly running for office on curtailing the Second Amendment and instituting an unconstitutional wealth tax. While many of his fiscal and healthcare policies seem inoffensive enough on paper, his history of disparaging women could render him as toxic with women as Donald Trump was in 2016. Plus, newly released audio of his remarks in favor of racial profiling are attack ads in the making for his opponents.
Only one viable moderate other than Biden offers voters a meaningful alternative to leftism, and only one could feasibly challenge Trump. It’s Klobuchar.
By definition, Klobuchar is electable. She’s a likable woman running in an election that will largely be determined by suburban women, and more importantly, she has proven appeal in the Midwest. Whereas Hillary Clinton only won Minnesota by 1 point in 2016, Klobuchar routinely wins the state by more than 20 points. Although her national head-to-head polls against Trump haven’t been terribly strong, it’s not hard to imagine that after she gains greater name recognition and media coverage, she could win key Rust Belt states that earned Trump the Oval Office.
On the merits, Klobuchar is the last true moderate liberal standing after Biden. She supports liberal policies such as increasing the federal minimum wage and establishing mandatory paid family leave, but she also supports centrist ones such as charter schools and nuclear power. She supports both providing citizenship for immigrants brought here illegally as children, through no fault of their own, and increasing funding for physical border protection. She is heavily pro-choice within the scope of Roe v. Wade‘s viability parameters, but she has emphasized the importance of third-trimester limits on abortion, celebrated the reduction of the abortion rate, and most recently gone against the grain in declaring that not only do pro-lifers belong in the Democratic Party but also that they can work together on issues such as adoption access.
Today I asked @amyklobuchar if there is room in her coalition for pro-life people. She said yes of course. I asked if she’d try to find common ground on bringing down the number of abortions.
She said “Yes. Yes.” And told me about her work in the adoption caucus in the Senate. pic.twitter.com/CIvfMSulEE
— Chris Crawford (@CrawfordStuff) February 10, 2020
Politicians try to frame elections as binary choices, but as we saw in 2016, when presented with two unpalatable options, many voters simply choose to stay at home. Democrats may loathe Trump, but if their only other option wants to effectively nationalize up to 40% of the economy through “Medicare For all” and the Green New Deal, or legalize the unfettered abortion of fully viable and sentient third-trimester fetuses, the Obama-Trump voters the Democratic nominee will need the most may simply choose to sit out 2020. Klobuchar provides voters a viable alternative to Trump; one around whom primary voters could realistically coalesce to take down the socialist Sanders. But it’s now or never.
