Bernie Sanders needs a repeat win in Michigan. But Joe Biden is not Hillary Clinton.
Michigan was always going to be a must-win battleground for Democrats in the general election. But first, it might be a do-or-die contest for Bernie Sanders in the party’s presidential primary.
As the largest delegate prize of the six states voting on Tuesday, the Michigan primary is teeming with symbolism for the two finalists in the Democratic race. It will be the first contest featuring a general election swing state that requires Sanders and Joe Biden to appeal to white working-class voters outstate while energizing an urban African American core.
It will also ramp up the fight for the industrial Midwest, with Illinois, Ohio and Wisconsin set to follow in the weeks to come, offering a trove of 500 total delegates among them.
Facing a delegate deficit and an increasingly arduous path to the nomination, a victory in Michigan has become even an even more urgent imperative for the Vermont senator, who won the state narrowly in 2016.
But Brandon Dillon, a former chairman of the state Democratic Party, said Sanders’ losses in states like Minnesota, Maine and Massachusetts suggest “it’s going to be much tougher for him in Michigan” this time.
“I never saw the same coalescing around Hillary Clinton with folks that you’re seeing around Joe Biden. I think people are saying, ‘We’ve got to get a nominee sooner rather than later,” said Dillon. “Hillary was a lot more polarizing than Joe Biden for a lot of folks. Even with regular Democrats there was an uneasiness about Hillary Clinton, that there doesn’t seem to be with Biden.”
Sanders’ upset in Michigan over Clinton four years ago both revitalized and extended his campaign. This time, the democratic socialist likely needs an even more emphatic outcome than a mere 1.5 percentage points if he’s to demonstrate he can gradually overtake Biden, whose lead currently sits north of 70 delegates.
Sanders’ campaign all but pulled out of Mississippi this week, and now has four rallies scheduled in Michigan over the weekend.
“We are going in with the full expectation and the hope that we will win,” Sanders said Wednesday. “Michigan is obviously an enormously important state.”
Conversely, a Biden victory in the state would undercut Sanders’ attempt at a revival and elevate the former vice president as the candidate with the proven ability to win back voters who defected to President Donald Trump.
The power center of the party is gravitating toward Biden. In recent days he’s picked up endorsements from Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, former Sen. Carl Levin and Rep. Brenda Lawrence.
Biden also captured the support of Reps. Elissa Slotkin and Haley Stevens, two freshman Democrats representing swing districts whose survival is dependent on moderate Republican voters.
“They won those seats largely on the back of suburban, higher-educated, white women,” said a staffer to a congressional Democrat in the state. “I worry about Bernie Sanders’ appeal to them. My fear is Bernie is more scary to them.”
Sanders has signaled that Biden’s support for free trade agreements like NAFTA will be his main line of attack in Michigan, and is already airing a TV ad on the issue. Democrats say it remains a powerful weapon among those touched by manufacturing losses.
“Those are important messages. Economic populism was potent for Bernie in 2016 and it was powerful for Trump,” said Amy Chapman, a Democratic consultant who directed Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign in Michigan. “NAFTA was a real problem in the primary and in the general.”
Biden has not backed off his support of the trade deal that was recently renegotiated by the Trump administration. But the revamped NAFTA, known as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, earned bipartisan congressional support, including among most of the members of Michigan’s delegation. Sanders opposed it.
And even those Democratic voters who detest trade deals like the original NAFTA are still stuck between choosing a candidate they agree with most on the issues versus someone they see as a winner.
“The real question is does people’s desire to see somebody who can beat Donald Trump override the stark contrast on trade,” said Garrett Arwa, a former executive director of the Michigan Democratic Party.
Trade was a cudgel that Sanders used successfully against Clinton, and his allies believe there’s an even broader parallel between Clinton and Biden that can be damaging.
“The comparisons between Biden and Clinton are obvious. Both of them benefited tremendously from party elites consolidating around them. In a lot of ways Bernie is running against a united, unified establishment wing of the party,” said Abdul El-Sayed, who unsuccessfully sought the Democratic Party’s nomination for governor in 2018 with Sanders’ backing. “In a lot of ways this momentum swing that we’re seeing is manufactured and it was manufactured by party insiders to create an air of inevitability and swing votes.”
Sanders is also targeting Biden’s support for the Wall Street bailout and the authorization of the Iraq War. And a second Sanders ad replays Biden’s past comments advocating freezing Social Security and Medicare, another argument that Sanders hopes will resonate with workers who lost jobs and benefits during the last economic downturn.
But Biden is not Clinton, and some see his candidacy as significantly more palatable to white blue-collar voters, especially men, that Sanders dominated last time. While Sanders lost Michigan women to Clinton, he carried men by 11 points, according to 2016 exit polls, a margin Democratic operatives will be much harder to achieve against Biden.
“There were certainly ways that Secretary Clinton appealed to working-class voters, but I don’t feel like they fully got that feeling here in Michigan,” said Ryan Irvin, a Michigan-based Democratic strategist.
Biden also has a memorable chit in his favor: the bailout of the automobile industry at the start of the Obama administration, which helped save the then-struggling business during the Great Recession and continues to be popular in the area now.
“People who still have their job, who just saw pretty big raises in their last contract, they have not forgotten it was Joe Biden and Barack Obama who stood up for the auto industry and rescued the industry,” Irvin said.
What’s more, Sanders and Biden enter the final days on a more equal footing organizationally. In 2016, Clinton didn’t hire a state director until 30 days before the primary and was criticized for a light footprint.
This time, neither Biden nor Sanders have planted deep roots in the state early. Sanders only deployed paid staff over the last week and a half, relying largely on his substantial volunteer base to gin up enthusiasm. Several Michigan Democrats couldn’t even name Biden’s state director.
But as Super Tuesday showed, organization might not matter in a race that Democratic voters seem increasingly want to dispose of.
“Michigan is very susceptible to momentum,” Chapman said. “This time with Biden’s seeming momentum, I’m not sure there’s the element of surprise for Bernie.”
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