Super Tuesday results surprised pundits. Do more shocks await us?
Political prognostication is perilous. Less than a week ago, the conventional wisdom among American pundits and pollsters was that the democratic socialist Bernie Sanders was cruising toward the Democratic presidential nomination. Then came Super Tuesday. Joe Biden won critical states such as Texas, Virginia and North Carolina, and finished first in Massachusetts and Minnesota, where a week ago he was projected to finish fifth. Now much of the talking-head consensus is shifting toward proclaiming Biden the favorite. Do the people who pronounce on politics really know any more about what’s going on than the random loudmouth in the pub or coffee shop?
One thing the pundits got right was their consistent message that the Democratic party is deeply divided. The Super Tuesday results showed that majorities of African Americans, moderates and older Americans cast their votes for Biden, while younger voters, progressives and Hispanics favored Sanders.
Pollsters had also long predicted that Biden would do well among black voters and that, by extension, he would do well in the 29 February primary in South Carolina, where the Democratic electorate is majority black. The overwhelming margin of Biden’s victory among black voters in that primary was something of a surprise: he won almost two-thirds of their votes, coming in almost 44 percentage points ahead of his nearest competitor. The impressive scale of his victory reversed the perception of failure that had grown from his tongue-tied debate performances, poor results in Iowa and New Hampshire, and reported donor exodus. Given the importance of African Americans in the Democratic party base – the Democratic candidate who has won the most primary support from black voters has won the nomination every time over the past 30 years – Biden’s South Carolina triumph gave him tremendous momentum going into Super Tuesday.
Why do black voters support Biden? Obviously he benefits from the residual good will of having spent eight years as vice-president to Barack Obama, who remains enormously popular among black people. He also benefits from his reputation as a moderate. There’s a widely held stereotype that African Americans, since they vote Democratic by overwhelming majorities, must also be liberal. In fact, 70% of black voters identify as moderate or conservative, according to a January survey from the Pew Research Center. Even black voters who found Sanders’ democratic socialism appealing may have voted for
Biden in the belief that white voters would find him the more electable candidate. “Black voters know white voters better than white voters know themselves,” one black South Carolinian told a New York Times reporter. “So yeah, we’ll back Biden, because we know who white America will vote for in the general election in a way they may not tell a pollster or the media.”
In general, people who predict political outcomes for a living lean heavily on history. Why are most of them skeptical that there will be a contested Democratic national convention this year? Because there hasn’t been one since 1952. Why don’t they believe that the candidate with the most enthusiastic following wins? Because if that were the case, Barry Goldwater and George McGovern would have been elected president. Why are they skeptical that Sanders, if he were to become the Democratic nominee, would draw in huge numbers of energized young voters to make up for the moderates who would stay home? Because turnout among young voters typically lags 20 to 30 percentage points behind older voters.
Obviously the 2016 election results embarrassed the predictions of a legion of pundits and pollsters, leading many people to believe that any argument from history is useless in our present era of political volatility. But many patterns of American political life show considerable persistence. Biden seems to have received a boost in South Carolina, for example, from his endorsement by influential powerbroker congressman Jim Clyburn, the dean of the state delegation and the third-ranking Democrat in the House. By the same token, after Super Tuesday it seems a more serious vulnerability that Sanders
so far hasn’t been endorsed by a single Democratic state governor. The 2020 election may give new life to The Party Decides theory that party elites and insiders have considerable influence over the eventual choice of nominee, even though that theory completely failed to predict Donald Trump’s overthrow of the Republican establishment in 2016.
It’s also obvious, however, that historical analogies carry limited weight when it comes to some of the unique dynamics of the 2020 race. You could argue that Biden’s comeback is reminiscent of John McCain’s Lazaruslike 2008 revival, when he managed to win the South Carolina Republican primary and go on to take the nomination despite having run out of funds and having been written off as a non-contender for the previous six months. But I honestly can’t think of any real parallel to Biden’s comeback this year, given that prior to his South Carolina victory he had run for president three times across four decades without winning a single primary. I also can’t think of a recent parallel to Biden’s having won five states – Arkansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oklahoma and Tennessee – in which he didn’t even campaign. Biden also won despite being outspent in Super Tuesday states 7-1 by Sanders and more than 100-1 by Mike Bloomberg – who abandoned his campaign and endorsed Biden the next day.
The central argument for Sanders supporters has been that the Democrats lost to Trump in 2016 because they nominated a boring centrist instead of the kind of exciting antiestablishment candidate that voters prefer. But some Super Tuesday results suggest that belief is misguided. In Oklahoma, for example, Sanders beat
Hillary Clinton in 2016 in part because he carried self-identified “moderate or conservative voters” (including independents) by 11 points. But this year, lacking the uniquely disliked Clinton as a foil, he lost those same voters to Biden by 28 points.
I doubt many Super Tuesday voters were thinking of the research findings by a pair of Stanford University political scientists that extreme candidates tend to lose, because even though they fire up their base they motivate their opponents’ voters even more. But the surge in voting in a Super Tuesday state like Virginia – where a record 1.3 million voted, nearly double the turnout of four years earlier – seems to have driven largely by suburban voters concerned that nominating a democratic socialist would cost Democrats not just the White House but control of the House as well, which was won back by Democrats in 2018 largely through gains in moderate suburban districts.
No one can definitively say at this point who will be the Democratic presidential nominee this year. Returns from California may bring Sanders into close contention with Biden. Sanders may do well in upcoming primaries in other western states such as Washington and Idaho, or in midwestern states like Michigan where he beat Clinton in 2016. The coronavirus outbreak may wreak havoc on the economy and reshape the election dynamics.
There may yet be a contested Democratic party convention, in which the nominee most likely would be determined by superdelegates voting on the second ballot. If the nomination goes to Biden under that scenario, and Sanders claims to have been screwed yet again by the Democratic establishment, his followers may vote for an independent party or stay home. They might do that in any case if Biden were to run as a status quo ante candidate, whether or not he chose a running mate from the party’s progressive wing.
At any rate, Super Tuesday has dynamited a lot of the congealing certainties of partisans and pundits alike. To paraphrase the apocryphal Chinese curse, we are all living in interesting times.
No one can definitively say at this point who will be the Democratic presidential nominee this year