You’re wrong about the Democratic primaries
The wild history of presidential races offers this lesson: Nobody knows what will happen
Warren’s down! No, she’s back! O’Rourke is hot! No, he’s faltering! Biden is dead on arrival! No, he’s unstoppable! The 2020 Democratic presidential campaign already has the feel of a stock market, with TV pundits and internet prediction experts monitoring the minute-by-minute movements on the big board.
There’s much to praise about all this attention. It provides gainful employment for hundreds, if not thousands, of campaign workers, journalists, pollsters and hotel, restaurant and car-rental employees. It offers leisure-time speculation for the millions of TV viewers searching for a successor to “Game of Thrones.” And in the pages and on the websites of our best journalistic enterprises, it even provides detailed, toughminded looks at what the women and men in the race intend to do with the powers they seek.
Here’s what it does not do, though: tell us what will actually happen in 2020. If voters and the news media take that to heart, and focus our attention on the character and intentions of the candidates instead of who’s winning eight months before anyone votes, the coverage — and the choosing — will be better for it.
And what the history of modern presidential nominating contests suggests about this moment is that the seemingly daily polling, and the “she’s-surging-he’s failing” stories, have all the staying power of sandcastles at high tide.
The last half-century of presidential primaries is a catalog of slow erosions of “insurmountable” leads, sudden shifts of the current, candidates left for dead who have revived and triumphed, front-runners hit with a blow from nowhere that recalibrated the certainties of a moment ago. The history is varied enough to worry every one of the top-tier candidates, and provide comfort to the rest. Even John Delaney. Here are a few observations ...
How confident should Biden be?
Joe Biden entered the race in April, and since then, the former vice president has polled more strongly than nearly anyone anticipated, staking out what is, six weeks later, a 17-point lead in the RealClearPolitics polling average. How safe is a lead like that?
The canonical cautionary tale is that of Ed Muskie, the former senator from Maine. In 1971, he was the consensus choice for president among a wide range of Democrats, considered the most electable challenger to a president despised by progressives: Richard Nixon. But the intensity of the party’s anti -war elements, and a New Hampshire win that was characterized as a defeat by the news media, sank Muskie by spring.
But if Mr. Biden starts to fade, that doesn’t mean you can write him off. More than three decades after Muskie, in the summer of 2007, the Republican front-runner, Arizona Sen. John McCain, was out of money. His top campaign aides had fled. By that autumn, the new, undisputed poll leader was former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, whose path to the nomination would be a romp. Could an anti-abortion, pro-gay-rights, progun-control candidate actually win the presidential nomination of the Republican Party?
Well, no. As soon as voters actually began, er, voting, Mr. Giuliani sank like a stone. And as is so often the case in presidential campaign politics, Mr. Giuliani’s collapse helped to cement a conventional wisdom that was soon upended. The failure of a mouthy, socially moderate New York mayor was one reason so many discounted the consistent lead in the polls held by Donald Trump in 2016. Could a formerly anti-abortion, currently anti-free trade, anti-war candidate actually win the nomination of the Republican Party? Well, yes.
What about Bernie?
As for Bernie Sanders, his surprising strength in 2016 might be mitigated by the precedent of a similar candidate from 2004. By late 2003, the insurgent campaign of his fellow Vermonter, Howard Dean, had turned the internet into a cash machine of astonishing and unprecedented proportions, fueled by the anger of progressive Democrats at what they perceived as a timid and centrist party in Washington that wasn’t responding to the grassroots anxiety over the unilateralist Republican in the White House.
Just in the third quarter of 2003, Mr. Dean raised $15 million, almost all of it in small donations. His anti-Iraq War message had won him a significant lead in the polls. At year’s end, CNN reported that Mr. Dean was polling twice as high as his nearest rivals. Both of the Democratic contenders from 2000 — Al Gore and Bill Bradley — endorsed him.
John Kerry’s more mainstream campaign, meanwhile, had become a joke. In November, Jon Stewart mocked the Kerry campaign on “The Daily Show” and highlighted the departure of key staff members. Then the calendar flipped to the election year of 2004, and a combination of fears over Mr. Dean’s electability and a Democratic electorate unsure of the risk of an unknown candidate caused Mr. Dean’s support to tank in what his top campaign aide Joe Trippi called “a flight to safety.” The former Vermont governor finished third in Iowa and was plummeting in New Hampshire even before his caucusnight “scream.” A few weeks later, he was out of the race.
The rise of the rest
The rest of the field — from rising contenders like Pete Buttigieg to candidates such as Kamala Harris, Beto O’Rourke and Elizabeth Warren who were deemed to be struggling after promising debuts — can take heart that primary campaigns are so volatile that they sometimes shift, quite literally, overnight.
In March 1976, former California Gov. Ronald Reagan had lost five consecutive primaries, and was virtually out of money. His aides were beginning to reach out to the campaign of President Gerald Ford to discuss the details of Reagan’s withdrawal. But in North Carolina, Reagan was propelled to victory by the field army of Sen. Jesse Helms and the impact of a half-hour televised speech that denounced Ford’s foreign policy. Reagan then ran off a string of primary wins, leading to an intense, contested convention in Kansas City, where he fell just a few dozen delegates short of unseating an incumbent president in his party’s primaries.
Reagan faced a similar challenge four years later. After he lost the Iowa caucuses, prominent NBC analyst Tom Pettit said, “I would like to suggest that Ronald Reagan is politically dead.” Six weeks later, Reagan’s landslide win in New Hampshire put him on the road to the nomination and the White House.
History’s lesson is not that front-runners are always doomed to fail like Muskie or Mr. Dean or Mr. Giuliani, but that at some point they will have to survive a serious competitor.
Unless Trump changed everything
But even that time-tested observation — that every front-runner must surmount an existential challenge to his or her candidacy — has now failed the test of time. In 2016, Donald Trump, a candidate with no political experience and no measurable support from his party’s establishment, never trailed in the polls and was never seriously threatened during his campaign for the nomination. Based on the lessons of history, Mr. Trump’s inevitable fall was confidently predicted by journalists and insiders, even as he racked up primary victories and delegates. The day former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush withdrew from the race, his brother George W. was telling a New York audience that he did not believe Mr. Trump would win the nomination.
Every winning candidate’s journey to the nomination is serpentine, and their stories are so varied that, depending on what contest you look at, there are enough different paths to provide encouragement to just about any candidate. Will voters choose familiarity, as they did in 1984 and as Mr. Biden may hope they will do again? Or will they go for a Reagan-like insurgent who represents a rising ideological wing of the party, like Mr. Sanders? Can Ms. Harris or Mr. Booker draw large portions of black voters by doing well in an early contest, as Barack Obama did in 2008? Will a candidate now struggling and basically given up for dead (Kirsten Gillibrand?) come out on top, as Mr. Kerry did in 2004 and McCain did in 2008? Or what if the past offers no guidance whatsoever, as was the case in 2016?
The answer to each of these questions is: We don’t know, and we won’t know for quite a while. The adage that “if you want to hear God laugh, make a plan” has a corollary: If you want to hear God start wheezing and crying and struggling to breathe, make a prediction a year in advance. And when it comes to presidential primaries, you could sometimes have generated a divine belly laugh just by trying to project a day into the future.