Why Bernie Sanders lost Michigan – and what it means for his campaign
With the Democratic primaries down to two real candidates, only one state really mattered on mini-Super Tuesday: Michigan. Bernie Sanders has staked his electability on his alleged unique ability to win swing states like Michigan, the so-called “rust belt” states that had fallen to Donald Trump in 2016. In fact, some of the most questionable decisions of his 2020 campaign – doing a Fox News Town Hall and touting a controversial endorsement by Joe Rogan – were based on the rationale that Sanders alone could win back white working-class voters who had abandoned the Democratic party for Trump.
Despite trailing in the polls by 25%, he had eked out a narrow but significant win over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primaries. Sanders supporters hoped this would play out again on Tuesday night, but it was not to be. His loss to Joe Biden might not shake the belief of Sanders and his supporters that he, and he alone, can defeat Trump in November, but it most likely does end his chance at winning the Democratic nomination.
This should not really have come as a surprise. Despite all the hype after the first three primaries, in wildly unrepresentative and largely irrelevant states, Sanders was winning by pluralities between one-quarter and one-third of the vote. In several cases his support was only half that of 2016, suggesting his surprise success last time was as much anti-Clinton protest as pro-Sanders support. Even when the field started to thin, Sanders only won a majority in his home state of Vermont, and only barely so.
While Super Tuesday was brutal for the large size of the Biden wins, the modest Sanders wins were equally telling. Despite massive campaigning efforts in terms of both money and personnel and very favorable poll numbers for weeks, Sanders won just 34% of the vote in California. Biden, who had barely campaigned in the Golden State, came second with 27%, just seven points behind.
After the disappointment of Super Tuesday, Sanders’ campaign had prioritized Michigan, pulling out of Mississippi, doubling his organizational staff in the Great Lake state, spending millions on increasingly negative ads against Biden, and holding rallies with his most popular surrogates, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cornel West, and Michael Moore. In sharp contrast, Biden visited Michigan just once, in a rally where Cory Booker and Kamala Harris endorsed him, but he did use part of his new cash to narrowly outspend Sanders.
This time Sanders was not saved by “an unexpected surge of younger voters”, or by his “firewall” of blue-collar voters. While Sanders did poll ahead of Biden among the young and among white Americans without a college education, they were not enough to offset Biden’s advantage among older, moderate and suburban white voters as well as older African American voters.
And this is pretty much the story of the Democratic primaries, at least since Super Tuesday. To put it sarcastically: young people tweet, old people vote. According to analyses of exit polls in 12 key states by the Harvard pollster John Della Volpe, the youth vote (under 30) only increased in a minority of the contests. In sharp contrast, turnout among those over 30 has been up in virtually every state, with some huge increases among the oldest cohort (over 65) – including in (potential) swing states such as New Hampshire, North Carolina and Virginia.
So, where does that leave Sanders and the Democratic primary race? Until Super Tuesday Sanders ran largely as an Independent, a “democratic socialist” attacking “the Republican establishment” and “the Democratic establishment” with equal fervor. While this satisfied his core base, which has seemed much larger than it actually was because of its disproportionate activity, organization and size on social media, it did little for the broader Democratic electorate.
After Super Tuesday Sanders tried to “reset” his campaign, mostly by prioritizing the midwestern states, by reaching out more to African American voters, and by attacking Biden’s track record. He also doubled down with attacks on “the corporate media” and “the Democratic establishment”. The Michigan results show that this strategy has not worked either.
The argument that Sanders should get the nomination even if he wins only a plurality of delegates is becoming increasingly irrelevant. The claim that only Sanders can mobilize two key groups in November, independents and young voters – which has always lacked empirical evidence – is further weakened by the lower turnout of young voters in the primaries. At this rate, not only will Sanders fail to win a plurality of delegates – Biden could win a majority outright.
As Sanders’ chances at the presidency start to fade, perhaps the most important part of his campaign is about to start: convincing his staunchest supporters, the so-called “Bernie or Bust” crowd, to come out to vote for Biden in November. Because however big Biden’s victory will be in the Democratic primaries, he cannot defeat Trump without the vast majority of Sanders’ supporters.
Cas Mudde is a Guardian US columnist and the Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF professor in the school of public and international affairs at the University of Georgia
has yet to catch on.
Under ranked-choice voting, voters rank their favorite candidates in order of preference, and if their first choice is no longer viable, their vote would count towards their next choice. The process would continue until all votes are supporting viable candidates.
If ranked-choice voting had been in place in Washington, voters who turned in their ballot early for Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, Mike Bloomberg or Elizabeth Warren could rest assured that their vote would still count towards their next preference rather than being wasted on a candidate who is no longer in the running. And candidates would probably face less pressure to drop out of the race early.
But reforming our primary elections is only one benefit.
Under the current plurality voting system, candidates benefit from attacking their opponents and highlighting their ideological differences in an effort to appeal to their base. However, in a ranked-choice election, candidates are also campaigning to be voters’ second and third choices.
We saw this happen in the 2018 San Francisco mayoral race: two candidates, Mark Leno and Jane Kim, actually campaigned together to fight for shared values as they reached out to voters in a ranked-choice election. In a political field that is often fraught with negativity, this kind of positive campaigning is a welcome change.
This same system, meanwhile, can help historically marginalized communities achieve representation in their own cities.
Here in Washington, for example, Yakima county is in the middle of a legal challenge under the Washington Voting Rights Act. The population of the county is approximately 49% Latino, but the county has only ever elected one Latino candidate to the county commission – partly because it has an at-large general election system that dilutes minority voting rights.
“We are trying to ensure that we have a more equitable election system here in Yakima county,” Dulce Gutiérrez, a plaintiff in the case, and one of the few Latinx city council members elected told us. “We believe that there are remedies that can improve the likelihood of representation.”
Historically, the remedy has been to move to majority-minority districts that concentrate minority voters in a particular geographic district in order to garner representation. However, such a system is vulnerable to gerrymandering and vote splitting and, perversely, only protects communities of color that live in highly segregated neighborhoods.
In Yakima, a switch to rankedchoice voting with multi-member districts would help achieve “proportional representation” and guarantee that roughly every one-third of the residents is able to pick one of the three commissioners. Latino candidates regularly get more than a third of the countywide vote, but historically are unable to win countywide races.
Washington state has been a leader in adopting commonsense reforms, like mandating marriage equality or legalizing marijuana, but it is well behind the curve in electoral reforms like ranked-choice voting.
We have plenty of real-life examples of ranked-choice voting working for communities. It’s already used in several countries, including Australia, Scotland and New Zealand. It’s also gathering momentum in the United States, where it is used in over 20 jurisdictions. After all, our democracy is at stake. • Mohit Nair is partnerships director of FairVote Washington.
• Colin Cole is legislative director and a co-founder of FairVote Washington. He is also policy director at MoreEquitableDemocracy.
Sanders. Heads Biden wins, tails Sanders loses.
Biden’s nomination sits on the cusp of inevitability. He has reassembled the coalition that flipped the House of Representatives. If it holds, come January 2021 the incumbent would be leaving office as a failed one-term president.
Lloyd Green is an attorney in New
York. He was opposition research counsel to George HW Bush’s 1988 campaign and served in the Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992
Andrew Gawthrope: must endorse Biden’ ‘Sanders
This is the beginning of the end for the campaign of Bernie Sanders. Facing losses among the sort of rural and white voters without college degrees who were behind his successes in the 2016 primary, his path to the nomination has narrowed to the point that it is imperceptible. Michigan, which he won in 2016 and lost this year, embodies this shift. The one group that Sanders still wins handily – young voters – do not vote in sufficient numbers to make up for his losses in the suburbs, in rural towns, and among white and black working-class voters.
Everyone’s attention should now turn to negotiating Sanders’ exit from the race in the way best calculated to defeat Donald Trump. Sanders has built a powerful and proud movement which will not just help Biden but also downballot progressive causes and candidates in November, if only it can be won over. Sanders will probably never run for president again and much of his legacy will be determined by the role he plays between now and November.
Biden needs to show that he takes this movement seriously, and Sanders should respond by endorsing Biden speedily and campaigning for him with energy. It’s the best way to send Trump into retirement, and to keep the hopes of the progressive movement alive
Andrew Gawthorpe is a historian of the United States at Leiden University
your job, which is feeling, being curious, trying to know yourself, trying to know others.”
This is Remy’s chief project. “It’s that cliche: if you can’t love yourself, you can’t love someone else. I’ve been in a relationship for 10 years now and I’ve found that is the case. The other person starts acting like a mirror for you and it’s so revealing.” What has she seen? “I don’t have an off switch when it comes to drinking – I just keep going. Because the way my brain is wired, it wants that, and my body’s not going to be the one to reveal it to me. Also, I have always had an inner monologue that’s always really negative about myself, and living intimate with someone means it starts coming out. It’s like a tic, I’m so hard on myself. And when someone who loves you is like, ‘Give yourself a break!’ … there’s nothing more powerful than someone feeling pain for you. It’s really healing.”
This relentless scrutiny of herself and others has left her with an almost supernatural-sounding ability to sniff out repressed feelings. “When I know that something doesn’t sit right, I feel it physically,” she says. “My stomach starts hurting and I know there’s something more there. Some things happened to me when I was a kid that broke that part of my brain, or implanted a bullshit detector. I have these really fine-tuned antenna, constantly picking things up because I’m trying to survive.”
There is a long pause. “This is always the part in so many interviews where it’s like: do I want to go there or not? I’ve been dancing around it in my work for ever.” Her songs are full of lines like “we can never know the hands we’re in, until we feel them grip”, from MAH, which stands for Mad As Hell. “Do I want to be that vulnerable and tell someone exactly what happened? I feel everyone knows what happened.” It was an abuse situation? “Mm-hmm, yeah.” A physical one? “Mm-hmm. So when that happens to you, and you decide to acknowledge it for yourself, it’s a paradigm shift. I can’t look at anything else.”
And it left you with a bullshit detector. “Empathy as well. There was a period, and it can still happen, when I was acting real squirrelly. There were probably people around me like, ‘What is up with her? She’s crazy.’ If they’d only known what was going on with me, maybe they’d have empathy. I know now what you can do to yourself when you’re deceiving yourself, or you’re trying to repress something, or the narrative you’re supposed to live by can’t land in your body and plant, because your body’s telling you it’s not accurate.” She says that now when she meets someone giving her attitude, “I can say: this probably has nothing to do with me, it’s something in their life and I should be kind to them.”
Today’s culture tends towards resisting trauma with “safe spaces”, but Remy is devoted to facing hers head-on, partly inspired by the writer and activist Sarah Schulman’s book Conflict Is Not Abuse. “We’re living in that cancel culture of, ‘No, I don’t want to talk about that’,” she says. “But if you’re feeling vulnerable, it usually means something important, something that you should go into. If something’s triggering you to feel bad, if you ignore it, you’re losing the colour in your life.” First getting on stage to perform was about “feeling the fear that I felt in abuse situations, that is like: this is dangerous. It’s like, you never feel as good as after you’ve been sick, because you understand then how terrible you felt. So I don’t have a fear of that vulnerability any more.”
She gives me an example of someone else who decided not to hide. The band played Coachella festival in the Californian desert and were invited to a marijuana-themed event. “We’re not crazy weed heads but it was like, whatever, it’s free, there’s going to be food, let’s go. We show up at this McMansion
and there’s all this free weed stuff. And out comes this woman, Susan, who looks like your typical white mom lady. She said she was once high up in the Mormon church, a racist, terrified of drugs. She had some sort of injury, was at her wits’ end, tried weed, and her life changed. All that scaffolding crumbled. And now she’s best friends with Sean Paul.” The lesson being: “If she doth protest too much, that means go there. You have these white male Republican dudes who are so homophobic, you’re like: huh, I think you need to kiss a man right away. It’s going to be really good for you.”
She’s still mad as hell, though. She doesn’t vote, reasoning: “I cannot name one politician who is not ill.” She rails against the military-industrial complex, the Catholic church, luxury goods, how matriarchy props up patriarchy, how history is taught in American schools, and smartphones (she deliberately threw hers in a pool last year). Against capital, ultimately. “You’re working so much at your job, and when you’re not working, you’re supposed to have the energy to dissect the system? No, that’s why you want to watch Netflix – you need a fucking break. That’s why they invented these time-suck leisure things, so you have no energy and no time to question the thing that you’re stuck in.” And yet, “the types of conversations are definitely shifting. In France, talking with people there about the movement to change the language to be more inclusive so everything’s not gendered. Whoa, we’re just having wine at some loud bar talking about this – I think that’s incredible.” There will always be music, too – “one of my gods, that thing that makes life psychedelic and special”.
More and more of us are having that scary, emancipating and neargiddy moment where we’re certain things are very bad indeed, and Remy is the soundtrack to that. “I’m not afraid of looking like a fool,” she says. “I’m not afraid of exposing myself, or being vulnerable, or being too earnest. Time’s up, time is so up.”
• Heavy Light is out now. A US tour begins on 4 April at Mocad, Detroit.
takeover of the House in 2018 turned out in record numbers for his opponent. Despite Sanders dominating support among young voters, youth turnout has been flat or down compared with 2016.
Since South Carolina, Biden has racked up dozens of endorsements from elected officials in key battleground states and Congressional leaders. And on Tuesday night, Democratic officials began to declare the primary over and urge the party to turn to the delicate task of unity in the wake of a contested primary battle.
“The math is now clear,” said Guy Cecil, the head of Priorities USA, the most powerful Democratic Super Pac, or political action committee, organizations that fundraise and drum up support outside a candidate’s official campaign machine.
“Joe Biden is going to be the Democratic nominee for president,” the South Carolina congressman James Clyburn, who endorsed Biden, told NPR that the Democratic National Committee should consider moving to “shut this primary down” and “cancel the rest of these debates”. The next Democratic debate, now down to just Sanders and Biden, is on Sunday in Phoenix, Arizona, ahead of voting in that state on 17 March.
But Sanders’ campaign signaled there would be no such ending.
Briahna Joy Gray, a national press secretary for the Sanders campaign, said she looked forward to the next debate, when “America finally gets to see Biden defend his ideas, or lack there of”. David Sirota, a longtime Sanders adviser, wrote that “tough primaries” produce the strongest nominees. “Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise,” he said. “Not over indeed,” added Nina Turner, a national co-chair of Sanders campaign.
Two days after the Phoenix debate, Arizona, Florida, Illinois and Ohio hold primaries. Sanders lost all of them in 2016 and polls show him trailing Biden by a wide margin in Florida, which has the most delegates up for grabs that night.