Joe Biden isn’t much better, but the doom of Bernie Sanders’ campaign looms
Backstage at a 1999 New Hampshire rally for his son, George H.W. Bush told me he knew two weeks before the 1992 election that he would lose to Bill Clinton. How in the world do you keep going? “Well,” he said, “you can’t just give up. You have to keep trying. And in politics, you never know what might happen.”
That still holds true today. We don’t know what might happen before this year’s mid-July Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee. However, we’re getting pretty ominous indications of what’s ahead for Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign for that party’s presidential nomination.
It’s in trouble, serious trouble.
Sanders is an old pro, very old. He’s spent virtually his entire career on a public payroll running for one office or another. And he knows trouble when he smells it.
Of course, like Bush, he can’t admit the outlook publicly. That’s self-defeating. And being the front-runner, as former Vice President Joe Biden is now, has been a perilous place of late.
So instead, Sanders talks about how close he and Biden are in delegate counts at this point, which is true. At least before the remainder of this month’s cascade of 1,100 delegate selections. Entering this week, Biden had 664 delegates, a third of what he needs to be the Democrat who faces Donald Trump on Nov. 3. Sanders is only 91 behind.
But this time, Sanders is running behind his 2016 successes. All along, Sanders has been promising he can “expand turnout in a way that few other Democratic candidates can.”
Well, 2020 Democratic primary turnouts are indeed larger than four years ago almost everywhere. Virginia’s vote totals, for example, increased more than 60% over 2016. In Texas, turnout soared from 1.4 million four years ago to more than 2.1 million this time.
But Sanders lost both states. His Texas share fell from 33% to 30%. In Virginia, it plummeted from 35% in 2016 to only 23% this time. Sanders’ core, the youth vote especially, is also down. North Carolina’s Democratic turnout was up 17%, the youth vote down 9%. Is it possible young voters are not as progressive as Sanders and media hope?
“Have we been as successful as I would hope in bringing young people in?” Sanders said last week. “The answer is no. We’re making progress … It’s not easy.” True. Young voters have been the most stubbornly indifferent and impervious to urgings for generations. Ask their parents.
But all indications are the increased turnout is not due to the shouted anger of Sanders, who’s rerunning almost his exact same 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton.
And larger turnout is sure not because of Joe Biden, who’s no Demosthenes. In fact, the fuzzed syntax and confused thinking put Biden’s speaking skills right up there with Rocky Balboa. At one point over the weekend, he stumbled twice in one sentence, then said, “We can only reelect Donald Trump.”
Primary turnout has increased because Democrats are virtually united in wanting to oust the boorish Trump in the worst way. And nominating socialist Sanders would be the worst way, like handing Trump reelection on a platter. Nominating the phlegmatic, often-befuddled Biden is less worse, but not by much.
Biden’s likable enough and has credibility with African American and LGBTQ voters, which is vital for a Democrat. And although the most recent Democratic president has said absolutely nothing so far, Barack Obama did put up with Joe for eight years, called him the best vice president ever and gave him the Medal of Freedom. Obama remains the gold standard of party popularity.
In the 72 hours immediately after Biden’s overwhelming South Carolina primary victory, Democrats across the country who hadn’t already voted appear to have made a collective transcontinental decision that Biden, not Sanders, was their best available bet to dump Trump. Likely as a political placeholder until a new face emerges in 2024 or beyond.
Most U.S. presidential elections are in some way about change. Voters want it, as they did after four years of Jimmy Carter’s malaise. Or they don’t want change, as in 1984 when they gave Ronald Reagan 49 of 50 states over Walter Mondale.
Exit polls this time reveal Democrats want change all right, but not Sanders’ revolution. They want to change Trump out for one of their own. And Biden seems to be in the right place right now, even if he thinks he’s in Ohio instead of Iowa.
Here’s Joe Biden’s 2020 challenge, though: It was easier for a wealthy, blunt-talking, New York non-politician vowing to drain the D.C. Swamp to be seen as a change agent.
It’s a considerably harder case for Biden to make when he’s been ensconced in Washington for five decades as a senator, vice president and former vice president reaping sudden wealth from books and speeches with no notable achievements on his resume beyond survival, plagiarizing and opposing Osama bin Laden’s assassination.
The 77-year-old Biden is counting on widespread voter desire for a return to pre-Trump “normalcy.” That is a guaranteed best seller for Democrats.
However, for anyone who remembers the stagnant economy of the Obama-Biden years, the legislative incursions on religious freedom, the fidelity to abortion rights over right-to-life, the rise of ISIS, the misbegotten Libyan war, bloody Benghazi and the Afghanistan troop surge, that’s going to take a whole lot more of Mike Bloomberg’s money to sell.
This story was originally published March 10, 2020 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Joe Biden isn’t much better, but the doom of Bernie Sanders’ campaign looms."