Another big Tuesday set for Democrats
Biden, Sanders square off in Michigan, 5 other states
DEARBORN, Mich. — Former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont are spending their first weekend as the Democratic Party’s last major White House contenders by taking aim at each other.
Each wants to show he’s the best choice before six more states — Idaho, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota and Washington — vote on Tuesday.
Biden and Sanders are competing for the right to face President Donald Trump in November.
“We have a two-person race,” Sanders said Saturday in Dearborn, Mich., a Detroit suburb with one of the nation’s largest Arab American populations. “And all over this country, people are asking themselves which candidate can best defeat Trump. I have zero doubt in my mind that, together, we are the campaign that can beat Trump.”
“We are in the midst of a very, very difficult primary process,” Sanders told reporters before taking the stage at his rally. “Come Tuesday, maybe Michigan is the most important state.”
“I think we are the stronger campaign to defeat Donald Trump, but you have not heard me say that I think that Biden cannot defeat Trump,” Sanders said. “I will certainly do everything I can if he is the nominee.”
Asked about Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s endorsement of Biden on Thursday, Sanders sounded miffed. “Well, that wasn’t her thoughts when I came here to help her get elected, as a matter of fact,” he said.
Campaigning in St. Louis, Biden said he was the one to unite the party and the country, and he would do that by promoting an upbeat message.
“If you want a nominee who’ll bring the party togeth
er, who will run on a positive, progressive vision for the future, not turn this primary into a campaign of negative attacks — because that will only reelect Donald Trump if we go that route — if you want that, join us,” Biden said.
Speaking by phone to people at a fundraiser in Bethesda, Md., on Friday night, Biden said, “What we can’t let happen is let this primary become a negative bloodbath. I know I’m going to get a lot of suggestions on how to respond to what I suspect will be an increasingly negative campaign that the Bernie Brothers will run. But we can’t tear this party apart and reelect Trump.”
Winning, he added, “means uniting America, not sowing more division and anger.”
But Biden also knocked Sanders’ weeks of suggestions that he is the candidate who can prompt record voter turnout in November and defeat Trump, saying that actually “we’re the the campaign that’s going to do that.”
ATTACKS, COUNTERS
Sanders argues that no Democrat will win the presidency “with the same-old, same-old politics of yesteryear.”
The 78-year-old Sanders is a year older than Biden. But the avowed democratic socialist, who has served in Congress since 1991, says he’s bucked the establishment of both parties for decades with unpopular stands that now give him the credibility to lead a political revolution “from the bottom up.”
Sanders is pledging to increase Democratic turnout by drawing younger voters, minorities and working class people to the polls even though they tend to vote in lower concentrations than many other Americans.
Strong support among Hispanics lifted Sanders to victories in Nevada and California, but Biden trounced him in South Carolina and throughout much of the Deep South that voted in last week’s Super Tuesday. Biden especially ran up the score with African Americans.
Some activists are disappointed that a once diverse field of women and minorities has dwindled to two white men in their late 70s. But in Dearborn, Sanders, who is Jewish, said he was inspired by so many Arab Americans backing him. “I see people coming together from so many different backgrounds. It is beautiful,” he said.
Top advisers expect Sanders to finish strong in Washington. Still, he canceled a trip to Mississippi to focus on Michigan, Tuesday’s largest prize. He made a stop in Chicago’s Grant Park on Saturday afternoon, and declared that he has a different vision than Biden, “And the American people are going to hear about it.” Sanders will spend the rest of the weekend in Michigan, while Biden is in Missouri and Mississippi.
The pair are also circling each other on the airwaves.
In Michigan, where the Sanders campaign is running a TV ad featuring an autoworker who says his community has been “decimated” by free trade deals, Sanders attacked Biden for his support of the North American Free Trade Agreement in the 1990s.
“Joe Biden and I have a very serious disagreement with regards to NAFTA,” Sanders said at a roundtable he convened of workers, union leaders and economists in Detroit. “Just last year — I’m not talking about 20 years ago — Joe said that voting for NAFTA, quote, was not a mistake, end of quote, and a few years before that he called NAFTA a success,” Sanders said. “Joe, you’re wrong. NAFTA was not a success. Voting for it was a big, big mistake.”
Biden announced this summer that he was reversing his position on that, but Sanders said that wasn’t enough.
Biden saw a surge of donor support after South Carolina and Super Tuesday, and his campaign announced that it was spending $12 million on a six-state ad buy in places voting Tuesday and the following week. It was his largest single advertising effort of the 2020 campaign.
He is using two television and digital ads, one promoting his relationship with former President Barack Obama, the other a new effort to counter a Sanders attack on Biden’s record on Social Security.
It’s a criticism Sanders has used for months. He has released his own ad airing in states voting Tuesday and the following week dinging Biden on Social Security.
It features a past clip of the former vice president saying, “When I argued if we should freeze federal spending, I meant Social Security.” Biden’s counterattack has a narrator saying, “Biden will increase Social Security benefits and protect it for generations to come.”
TRUMP AWAITS
Meanwhile, the president retains robust approval ratings among Republicans as he asks voters for another four years.
Trump’s campaign remains confident it will not only retain those who backed him in 2016, but also expand the electorate by turning out people who did not vote four years ago, in addition to peeling off some African American and Latino men.
At a rally last month in South Carolina, nearly 29% of those who registered for tickets didn’t vote in the 2016 election, according to Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale.
Trump’s Twitter following has grown to more than 73 million, up from 25 million at the start of his presidency.
Brian Ott, a Texas Tech University professor of communications and co-author of The Twitter Presidency: Donald J. Trump and the Politics of White Rage, says Trump’s Twitter following has naturally expanded beyond his fervent supporters and political watchers because of his standing as the world’s most powerful leader.
But his hard-core fans don’t get the same thrill from retweeting and commenting on Trump’s every post, and Russian trolls who were active on social media ahead of the 2016 election have less incentive at the moment to interfere and have melted away, Ott said.
Trump’s campaign speeches have also become longer, according to Fact base, a data analytics company that analyzes spoken and written remarks by elected officials.
In 2017, his campaign speeches averaged 59 minutes. Thus far in 2020, he’s clocking in at an average of 80.7 minutes.
At Trump’s rally in the swing state of North Carolina last week, his speech ran 67 minutes. But with about 20 minutes to go, dozens of people who had showed up hours early to get prime spots to stand on the floor of Charlotte’s Bojangles Coliseum headed for the exits.
Several pockets in the seated area that had been filled with men and women chanting “Four More Years!” and waving campaign signs as Trump took the stage began thinning out a full 15 minutes before the president concluded his speech.
Similar scenes played out at recent rallies in Colorado Springs, Colo., and Las Vegas.