No clear front-runner as Dems slug it out
MANCHESTER, N.H. — The Democratic presidential primary is entering an intensely tumultuous phase, after two early contests that have left former Vice President Joe Biden reeling and elevated Sen. Bernie Sanders but failed to make any candidate a dominant force in the battle for the party’s nomination.
The collapse of Biden’s support in the first two states, and the fragmentation of moderate voters among several other candidates, allowed Sanders, a Vermont progressive, to claim a thin victory in New Hampshire and an apparent split decision in Iowa with former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind.
In both states, a majority of voters supported candidates closer to the political center and named defeating President Donald Trump as their top priority, but there was no overwhelming favorite among those voters as to which moderate was the best alternative to Sanders. Unless such a favorite soon emerges, party leaders may increasingly look to Michael Bloomberg as a potential savior.
In an unmistakable sign of Bloomberg’s growing strength and Biden’s decline, three black members of Congress endorsed the former mayor of New York City on Wednesday, including Rep. Lucy McBath of Georgia, a high-profile lawmaker and guncontrol champion in her first term — and a senior adviser to Bloomberg told campaign staff that internal polling showed the former mayor now tied with Biden among African Americans in March primary states.
The turmoil in the party has the potential to extend the primary season, exacerbating internal divisions and putting off the headache of uniting for the general election for months.
With no winner-take-all contests, and no indication yet that Sanders can broaden his appeal or that a moderate can coalesce support, the candidates are poised to keep splitting delegates three or four ways.
“We are obviously going to have a longer battle here,” said Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster who directed an anti-Sanders ad campaign in Iowa.
The leading candidates are plainly worried about the party’s divisions, and signaled as much in their speeches in New Hampshire on primary night: Sanders, blamed by much of the party for his slashing approach to the 2016 primaries, stressed in his victory speech that the most important task was defeating Trump, while Buttigieg urged his supporters to
“vote blue, no matter who” in November.
In a particularly urgent plea, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who slumped to a fourth-place finish Tuesday, warned that no candidate should be “willing to burn down the rest of the party in order to be the last man standing.”
There is no sign that any of the half-dozen major candidates left in the race are headed for the exits: Buttigieg and Biden will have to contend in the Nevada caucuses against Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who finished a strong third in New Hampshire, while on the left Sanders still faces a dogged competitor in Warren. Unless one candidate comes out of Nevada and South Carolina with a powerful upper hand, it is quite likely that the same atomized delegate count could continue into Super Tuesday, when 15 states and territories, accounting for nearly 40 percent of all delegates in the Democratic race, cast ballots on March 3.
With early voting already taking place in California and other Super Tuesday states, and no dominant front-runner, the fragmentation may already be well underway.
In Arkansas, a Super Tuesday state where early voting starts next week, a poll taken after Iowa illustrated the Democrats’ dilemma: Bloomberg, Biden, Sanders and Buttigieg were each winning 16 percent to 20 percent of the vote.
All of those candidates are increasingly confronting Bloomberg’s presence as a rival in the March primaries. Bloomberg skipped all four February contests but has climbed into double digits in national polls on the strength of an enormous and sustained advertising campaign, funded from his personal fortune.
On a conference call with campaign staff members Wednesday afternoon, Howard Wolfson, Bloomberg’s senior adviser, said that internal tracking data showed that the former mayor had pulled “very narrowly” into first place across the March primary states, inching ahead of Sanders overall and tying Biden among African American voters.
Though Wolfson did not provide specific numbers, he said Biden had “rather precipitously fallen” in the larger array of states voting next month, according to Bloomberg polling.
But Bloomberg is facing new tests as a candidate: For the first time, he may qualify for a televised debate, next week in Las Vegas, and he has come under newly direct criticism from other Democrats for his record on policing and much else.
Recently circulated audio recording of Bloomberg in 2015 matter-of-factly stating that “the real crime is” almost always committed by young “male minorities” quickly ricocheted across the tight-knit community of black political leaders.
J. Todd Rutherford, the minority leader of the South Carolina House, said many African Americans had increasingly recognized that Biden did not have “what it takes” and had been ready to bolt to the former New York mayor.
“A lot of people would’ve said Bloomberg last week, but now I don’t know,” said Rutherford, alluding to the recording.
Yet even supporters of Biden acknowledge that if one of the moderates does not take a clear lead with that faction of the party after Nevada, the eyes of many establishment-aligned Democrats will turn to Manhattan.
“The longer the waters are muddy, the better off Bloomberg is,” said former Gov. Jim Hodges of South Carolina, who recently backed Biden.