Biden, Sanders to clash amid crisis
For the first time in the long Democratic primary campaign, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and former Vice President Joe Biden will meet in a one-on-one debate, facing off Sunday night as Sanders fights for the future of his candidacy against a rival who has taken a commanding position in the race.
But that isn’t why this debate is different from most others in modern politics.
Both men will be auditioning for the presidency amid an unfolding national emergency over the coronavirus; the last candidates to debate in such urgent circumstances were Barack Obama and John McCain during the 2008 financial crisis. Sanders will be under added pressure to show why he is still running, at a time when people are worried about far more than presidential politics, while Biden — often uneven in these debate settings — must navigate far more speaking time as he tries to appear capable of uniting the country and leading it through a crisis.
Rarely has a debate been so shaped by palpable anxiety: The event has been relocated from a Phoenix theater to a Washington, D.C., television studio to limit any unnecessary travel. There will be no live audience and no spin room. One moderator who had potentially been exposed to the virus has bowed out to avoid spreading it.
Debates are often unpredictable, but it is especially hard to game out how this debate featuring a moderate standard-bearer and a liberal challenger will unfold and how people will process it.
Hundreds of thousands of viewers, if not millions, will have been personally affected by Sunday, as public gathering spaces are shuttered, schools are closed and on Thursday the stock market plunged by the largest percentage in decades, though it did snap back sharply higher on Friday).
“It is going to be a different kind of debate,” Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, an early ally and surrogate for Biden, said with more than a little understatement.
The extraordinary situation offers an unusual challenge and opportunity. It will provide a national platform and audience for Biden, 77, and Sanders, 78, to preview their own brands of presidential leadership, especially in contrast to that of President Donald Trump, who had spent weeks downplaying the threat that the coronavirus presented.
“You have to throw the entire playbook out the window and focus on what people care about because the agenda has shifted dramatically since they were last onstage together,” said Jared Leopold, a Democratic communications strategist who worked for Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington during his 2020 presidential bid. “It’s like you were preparing to pitch in the World Series and suddenly you found yourself at bat at a key moment. The dynamics have totally shifted.”
Stephanie Cutter, a Democratic strategist who worked on the Obama campaigns, said moments like this are when “voters want to see leaders, not politicians,” warning against anything that would look like “petty politics.”
“This is a time for leadership and demonstrating that you have the judgment and vision to fix the incompetence that we’re seeing out of the White House,” Cutter said. “That is job No. 1 in this debate.”
The state of the race itself has been fundamentally upended since the last debate, too.
Back then — less than three weeks ago — Sanders had won the most votes in three consecutive contests and was threatening to seize control of the nominating contest. Now, Biden has romped through two straight weeks of sizable victories, so much so that Sanders’ campaign is facing what experts see as a nearly insurmountable delegate climb.
Sanders now trails Biden by more than 150 delegates after losing four states last Tuesday and 10 the week before. His defeats were so thorough in Mississippi, Missouri and Michigan [a state Sanders won four years ago] that he trailed in every county. The states that vote Tuesday — Ohio, Florida, Illinois and Arizona — are challenging for Sanders, as well.
That difficult math might typically suggest an aggressive new posture for Sanders, who needs a real restructuring of the race to be successful. But his speech after last week’s disappointing elections — “we are losing the debate over electability” — was widely interpreted as an effort at de-escalation, as he pressed Biden to win over his liberal supporters on issues ranging from the environment to student debt, repeatedly asking “Joe, what are you going to do?”
The two candidates offered a preview of their contrasting approaches to the crisis in a pair of speeches on Thursday.
Standing in front of a row of American flags, in Wilmington, Delaware, Biden adopted the scene and serious tone of a statesman, calling for collective action as a country. “The coronavirus does not have a political affiliation,” he said.
Sanders, speaking from Burlington, Vermont, with the state and American flags positioned in front of “Bernie” signage, warned starkly of casualties that could top World War II, while pivoting to his central message of the urgent need for universal health care.
“Our country is at a severe disadvantage compared to every other major country on Earth because we do not guarantee health care to all people as a right,” he said.