Generational currency
We’re now four days from a development that probably will send Democrats to record-level intensity in hand-wringing.
My idea that Democrats need to lump Iowa and New Hampshire into a new four-state opening day may start to get currency after Monday evening. The idea would be to weave South Carolina’s black votes and Nevada’s union and Hispanic votes into the mix for more nationally reflective first-night returns.
Something else may get more currency after Monday, not that the candidate to whom I refer needs more currency. That would be the lateengaging Mike Bloomberg campaign.
The former New York mayor may be in a position Tuesday morning to say Democrats find themselves in a bit of a pickle and that he might be able to help.
Here is the cause for alarm: Bernie Sanders—not a Democrat, but a socialist independent, and someone whom Hillary Clinton says no one in the U.S. Senate likes—looks well-positioned to win the Iowa caucuses.
People like him and keep telling pollsters so and sending him money.
Sanders would then declare victory in a fiery message aimed at New Hampshire, which will vote eight days later and where he might be pushed by Iowa’s momentum into the lead.
But, then, New Hampshire tends to want to counter, not compound, Iowa, which might be the only thing establishment Democrats have going for them before Joe Biden gets to South Carolina and black votes on Feb. 29.
Iowa and New Hampshire are almost entirely white. The nation at large isn’t and is ever less so.
The Iowa event is more than a thousand Monday-night caucuses requiring people to venture into the chill and dark to their assigned precinct gathering. They then must stand in groups signifying their support, whether for Sanders, Biden, Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, another candidate or “uncommitted.”
If their group fails to amount to 15 percent of the gathering, they are free to re-associate. The Andrew Yang voters and the Tom Steyer voters—will they realign with Sanders or Biden or Warren or Klobuchar or Buttigieg? Will there be enough of them to matter? Will it be Warren and Buttigieg supporters realigning?
From all of that, the news media will glean a statewide outcome to be reported both in raw numbers of votes and the number of delegates to the next level of caucuses the numbers proportionately produce.
The winner of the raw vote could be different from the delegate-counter winner.
Sanders has been installed as the favorite because he has been moving up in Iowa polls. He’s also favored because the caucus system rewards youth and vigor, which his campaign offers if he doesn’t. His campaign features throngs of highly engaged and well-organized supporters willing to do the hard people-herding required by the process. Bernie’s people will be at the caucus sites early and in full force. Biden’s will roll out of their sedans and SUVs sometime before the event starts, depending on traffic and road conditions.
The latest Iowa polling showed interesting trends. Sanders had shot into a clear lead at 30 percent. Biden was stuck at 21 percent. Amy Klobuchar was making a move up to 13 percent. Elizabeth Warren had faded to 11 percent and Pete Buttigieg to 10.
Those findings almost make you wonder whether Klobuchar, who will live or die by Monday’s result, could overtake Biden more readily than Biden could overtake Sanders.
Catching Sanders would seem out of the question considering that the above-referenced poll, by Emerson, showed that, among Iowa Democrats 50 and younger, Sanders had 40 percent and Warren 11, with no other candidate in double figures.
Young people have a lesser tendency to recoil from the socialist label. They have more reason to embrace Sanders’ post-Clinton, post-conciliation message of uncompromising allegiance to Medicare for all, free college, forgiven student loans and urgent attention to climate change.
Icould explain at this point that the dynamic changes entirely for the general election. I could explain that Sanders’ positions would alienate him from decisive swing voters, thus assuring Donald Trump’s re-election.
Younger voters would likely respond that it’s time Democrats tried something other than a Clinton or a John Kerry or an Al Gore or a Biden, to try for a change a nominee who stands unapologetically for something rather than finesses everything.
Each generation seems out of touch with the other. But Democrats’ chances of doing their one essential job, denying Trump a second term, requires them to get seamlessly in touch with each other.
A millennial might say: “If you baby boomers want to beat Trump, then you should understand that you’re the ones who gave us Trump in the first place and we’re the ones who’ll get him out.”
A boomer might say: “Not with a socialist.”
A millennial might say, “OK, boomer.”
The truth is that I’ve heard that very conversation. The truth is that I’ve had that very conversation.
Listen for it late Monday night and early Tuesday morning.
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