Michigan looks tougher for Sanders this time
DETROIT — Four years ago, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont scored an upset win over Hillary Clinton in the Michigan Democratic primary, reviving his insurgent candidacy one week after his political prospects dimmed because of Super Tuesday losses.
Now Sanders finds himself once again urgently in need of a bounce-back victory in Michigan’s presidential primary after another disappointing Super Tuesday, this time against former Vice President Joe Biden.
Sanders has shaken up his schedule to hold three days of events and rallies in Michigan. He has intensified his attacks on Biden over trade, a major issue in the state. In remarks in Dearborn, Mich., on Saturday, he recalled joining picket lines to protest “disastrous” trade deals. And his campaign arranged an event in Flint, Mich., on Saturday night for the explicit purpose of Sanders making his case to black voters, who have largely favored Biden so far. The Flint event mostly drew white voters, though, and Sanders mostly reiterated his stump speech.
As Biden now attempts to leverage his Super Tuesday success and build momentum, Sanders may face even longer odds in Michigan than he did in 2016. The state that Sanders last week called “very, very important” suddenly looks forbidding for him.
Biden, despite having a thin operation in Michigan, appears likely to do well with black Democrats and college-educated white voters, two groups that handed him decisive margins in Virginia, North Carolina and several other states on Super Tuesday. And the exit polling and voting trends in some of those states indicate that Sanders has declined in strength with working-class white voters, who, uneasy with Clinton in 2016, delivered him landslide wins across much of central and northern Michigan that year.
Michigan, with its 125 delegates, is the most populous state to vote Tuesday, and it is the first of the big Midwestern battlegrounds to cast ballots — a general-election trophy that President Donald Trump painfully pulled from the Democratic column in 2016 with a narrow win. But Michigan also could amount to a bellwether for the rest of the Democratic primary race this spring.
With Biden appearing strong in the South and Sanders winning in the West, the industrial Midwest could effectively determine the nomination. And if Sanders can’t win in Michigan, he may struggle when Ohio and Illinois vote March 17 and Wisconsin on April 7, while also undercutting his claims about expanding the electorate in some of the most pivotal general-election swing states.
“Michigan is an important state to do well in because the issues facing residents here are issues we see across the country, so a strong message and showing here will be extremely helpful for the nomination,” said Rep. Rashida Tlaib, one of Sanders’ most prominent supporters in the state.
Recognizing the stakes here, Sanders is assailing Biden for his support of what he called “disastrous trade agreements like NAFTA.” And his campaign is airing a commercial in the manufacturing-heavy state that features a former autoworker highlighting the former vice president’s lack of regret for supporting the pact while pointing out that Sanders has opposed free-trade deals.
As he addressed supporters in Dearborn, Sanders devoted about one-third of his stump speech to attacking Biden, lashing him not only on trade but also over entitlement programs, support for the war in Iraq and a willingness to take donations from wealthy donors. “Our campaign and our administration is about representing the working families in the country,” Sanders said.
Abdul El-Sayed, a Sanders supporter who ran for governor in 2018, said he believes Michigan Democrats would see clear distinctions between the two candidates.
“Free trade helped decimate those manufacturing jobs. Bernie has always been against it; Biden has been for it,” he said.
But recent election trends in Michigan are not encouraging for Sanders. In 2018, Michigan Democrats rallied behind a number of moderates — most notably Gretchen Whitmer in the governor’s race, and Haley Stevens and Elissa Slotkin in congressional races — and ended up winning Republican-held seats and loosening the GOP’s grip on the state.
El-Sayed, who ran against Whitmer for governor on progressive issues like “Medicare for All,” enjoyed Sanders’ support and a flood of news media attention in 2018 but did not capture a single county in that primary. Whitmer, a former Democratic leader of the state Senate whose most memorable vow was to “fix the damn roads,” beat him by nearly 22 points.
Sanders’ candidacy may in fact hinge on whether he’s able to perform better with African Americans in the Midwest than he has in the South — and if he can replicate his strength with working-class white voters who abandoned Clinton in the primary and general election.