Biden and Sanders are now fighting for the soul of their party
The Democratic presidential primary has shifted from a battle over individual candidates to a fight for the soul of the party.
With the departures of U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, former Mayor Pete Buttigieg and billionaires Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg, the field has narrowed and the focus has sharpened. This is now a race between former Vice President Joe Biden and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, with Sen. Elizabeth Warren eyeing the exit.
Democrats have a clear choice between a moderate who wants to reach across the political aisle to build a bipartisan campaign to defeat Donald Trump and unite the country, and a self-described democratic socialist who wants to blow up the political status quo.
For us, it’s hard to imagine the latter strategy being successful. Yet, to win the White House, Democrats need to find a way to bridge the internal gap while expanding support beyond their party.
As we said last month, the United States needs a president who can heal the nation’s deep political divide — who can work with, and appeal to, members of both parties and independents.
We said that as we urged support for Klobuchar, who seemed to provide the party’s best chance of victory in November. But Klobuchar, fresh off her stronger-than-expected showing in New Hampshire, never managed to gain political traction again.
Meanwhile, Biden, whose campaign seemed on life support, has catapulted to the front of the delegate pack with a Super Tuesday surge few thought possible.
Moderates have coalesced. They have found their candidate.
Biden isn’t California Democrats’ first choice, but the election in November isn’t about this state. It’s about Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Florida — states that backed Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 but Trump won in 2016, each by margins of less than 1.2 percentage points.
If Democrats hope to recapture the presidency, they must remember those swing voters in those swing states. At the same time, they, and Biden in particular, ignore and dismiss Sanders and his coalition at their peril. Hillary Clinton learned that lesson the hard way in 2016.
There’s a bloc of Sanders voters who have no party loyalty and jumped to Trump in the 2016 general election. And there are younger voters who turn out for Sanders rallies but didn’t show up at the polls with the same intensity on Tuesday.
To be successful, Democrats need both those groups as well as the centrists who are the core of Biden’s support. Bridging the gap won’t be easy.
The gulf between Sanders supporters and other Democrats was revealed in last week’s UC Berkeley poll of likely California voters.
By nearly a 2-1 margin, Sanders supporters are looking for a candidate who most agrees with them on the issues rather than the person who has the best chance of beating Trump. For other Democrats, it was just the opposite and by roughly the same margin. And for 80% of Biden supporters, beating Trump was the priority.
Similarly, 86% of Sanders supporters want a candidate who advocates major policy changes even if they are harder to enact rather than incremental changes that are more likely to be enacted. Conversely, at least two-thirds of voters who were supporting the moderate candidates prefer an incremental approach.
Biden’s challenge in the primary and, if he wins the nomination, in the general election will be finding a way to reconcile those two sets of disparate approaches. It won’t be easy.