HOW WILL ROGERS DEMOCRATS WENT ROGUE

HOW WILL ROGERS DEMOCRATS WENT ROGUE

"I am not a member of an organized political party.  I am a Democrat."

So said William Penn Adair Rogers . . .

a/k/a Will.

And until roughly two weeks ago, it looked as if he was right.

Before the South Carolina primary on February 29, eight Democrats were vying for their party's presidential nomination this year, with seven of them deemed sufficiently serious to participate in more or less regularly scheduled debates.  The group included former Vice-President Joe Biden, US Senators Bernie Sanders (Vt.), Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, his fellow billionaire Tom Steyer, and US Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (Hawaii).  None had broken away, though Sanders seemed poised to do so, and overall it was a frustrating muddle.

The muddle was caused by a lack of clarity.  The frustration was on account of what was at stake.

In the first two contests, the leads or advances were spread among three of the candidates.  Buttigieg surprised in Iowa, beating Sanders with a combination of organizational strength and a seemingly preternatural ability to appear calm and brilliant all at the same time.  But for the Democratic Party's inability in that state to get the vote count correct on the night of the caucuses, a screw-up that deprived Mayor Pete of the almost guaranteed boost an Iowa winner gets as he or she moves on, Buttigieg might have won the New Hampshire primary a week later.  As it was, he came pretty close.  Sanders' 1.3% NH margin was viewed as either a draw or the unfair product of Pete's bad luck.  And it was complicated further by Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota's iron range Senator.  Channeling FDR and the "he knew me" working stiff who cried as Roosevelt's funeral train travelled north from Warm Springs to DC all those years ago, a "resilient" (her own word) Amy catapulted  out of single digits into a third place finish with almost 20% of the vote.

So there we were the day after New Hampshire.

A Brooklyn-born and raised democratic-socialist now housed in Vermont, a brilliant gay Mayor from a city a sixth the size of  Vermont (or one twenty-fifth the size of Brooklyn, pick your infinitesimal), and a moderate, successful legislator from the mid-west with some hitherto unkown (or unsung) eloquence. 

In the background was another brainwave, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who literally had plans for everything and could explain them, and the billionaires, Steyer and Bloomberg, who had bank accounts to fund any eternal campaigns.

That was the competitive field.

But not the whole field.

Back in the pack, having finished fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire, in the latter case with so few votes he didn't even qualify to win any delegates, was Delaware's Joseph Robinette Biden.

Old Joe.

Reliable. Informed.

Endearing.

A heart (broken more than once) on his sleeve.

Two-term former Vice-President.

Six-term former Senator.

And . . . from all indications . . .

Yesterday's news. 

New Hampshire voted on February 11 and there followed a two-week interregnum until the Nevada caucuses on February 29.  

In that period, as Biden sought life support and strived for coherance, Steyer unleashed his war chest on Nevada and South Carolina, and Bloomberg unleashed his both nationally and on the fourteen Super Tuesday states set to vote on March 3.  Their money created movement. 

But not in Nevada (where Steyer but not Bloomberg was on the ballot). 

Though Steyer started to rise in the polls in South Carolina and Bloomberg did the same in the Super Tuesday states, crowding out their moderate (but decidedly poorer) competitors Buttigieg and Klobuchar, Bernie decisively won the Nevada caucuses, pasting Biden by more than 25 points and leaving everybody else even farther behind.  Warren, Klobuchar and Steyer didn't even qualify for delegates there and Mayor Pete got only four.

The day after Nevada, Nate Silver gave Sanders an even chance at becoming the Democratic nominee.

At which point all hell broke loose. 

Everyone now knows what happened after Nevada.  Biden romped in South Carolina, and then again on Super Tuesday and in last night's Super Tuesday 2.  As of this writing, he has 864 delegates to Sanders's 710. He has received overwhelming support from minority voters, winning more than 60% of their votes in primaries throughout the South and substantial margins outside it as well.  For the first time last night, he bested Sanders with non-college educated white voters and with white voters as a whole.  He wins decisively among voters who think their most important objective is defeating Trump.  Though Sanders still wins the youth vote, it's not by as much (nor is it showing up in the large numbers Sanders predicted or needs to win).  And in any case, all of Sanders's margins compared to his campaign in 2016 are way down, suggesting that the size of his 2016 vote may have had more to do with his then-opponent than with his much ballyhooed progressivism.

None of this, however, was caused by Biden.

Over the course of the last two plus weeks, there hasn't really been any Biden campaign, at least not one in the traditional sense of the term where money is raised, field offices are opened and staffed, ads are purchased and run, and voters are identified and turned out.  

Biden couldn't do any of that.  

He more or less ran out of real money, that is, money he could use to persuade voters rather than ferry himself and his staff from venue to venue,  sometime in February.  He was outspent by Sanders in all the Super Tuesday states. Sanders spent $14 million on ads in those contests, Bloomberg spent orders of magnitude more, and Biden was reduced to some minor six-figure buys.  Sanders' spending was substantial and critical in California, where over 400 delegates were up for grabs and where early voting created a bit of a fire wall for Bernie, much of whose vote had been sought and cast there before the loss in South Carolina.  

Biden had one field office in California (compared to Sanders' 23 and Bloomberg's 24), two in Virginia, one in North Carolina (staffed until days before the election by only a single aide), one in Massachusetts (with a staff member and a handfull of union volunteers available intermittently), and none that I could identify in Arkansas, Alabama, Tennessee, Oklahoma,  Maine, Colorado or Utah.  He gave up in Vermont for obvious reasons.

What he had, more or less on a spontaneous basis, was . . .

Voters.

Who were afraid Trump would win the general election.

And endorsements.

On the same account.

Sanders' democratic-socialism scares people for one of two reasons.  

Either . . . 

(1) It scares Democrats who otherwise think the term innocuous but believe -- correctly --  that it alienates the vast majority of Americans and is thus either an electoral non-starter at worst or an unnecessary electoral ball and chain at best.

Or . . .

(2) It scares moderate Democrats, independents and swing voters who just don't want to get anywhere near state ownership of the means of production.  

In either case, and on first blush, it appeared that nothing but this fear could explain Biden's miraculous resurrection over the last two weeks. The endorsements were significant and in at least one case apparently critical.  Polls in South Carolina confirmed  that more than half the Biden voters in that state were influenced positively by Rep. Jim Clymer's endorsement, which came the Wednesday before the Saturday primary.  After Biden won in South Carolina, Buttigieg and Klobuchar withdrew from the race and immediately endorsed him.  Both had been explicit in their views that Sanders could not win the general election, and Klobuchar enlisted her Minnesota organization on Biden's behalf in that state's primary, which he then won. Following Super Tuesday, Bloomberg (another vocal critic of Sanders' electability) withdrew and that week both he and Steyer (who had departed after South Carolina) endorsed Biden too.

That said, I have been involved in political campaigns for over thirty years and endorsements, though important, are rarely determinative.  In this case, the data establishes that Clymer's may have been, but the others -- Klobuchar excluded, because she forwarded her Minnesota organization along with her endorsement -- were less important than the actual candidate departures from the race.  The endorsements were fine -- and Biden's un-funded, non-organization needed all the help it could get --  but the real benefit was in clearing the moderate lane so that one and only one  candidate in the moderate group could compete with Sanders (and Warren).

So, that was it, right?

Fear?

Not quite.

It was still the voters.

On their own.  

For two reasons.  

The first is that, as noted, the Biden campaign did not have the resources to identify and turn out much if any vote at all.  It certainly could not compete with the organizations and ground game  of Sanders or Bloomberg, and given both the scope of the job (fourteen states on Super Tuesday and six a week later) and the absence of resources, the campaign's actual impact was minimal to non-existent.  Nevertheless, in the face of this non-campaign, and this is the second reason, turnout on both Super Tuesday and yesterday was enormous.  It exceeded the turnout in the primaries in 2016 and approached those of 2008 when Obama was blowing up standard turnout models with his audacity of hope.  On MSNBC last  night, Nicole Wallace (erstwhile Republican, senior advisor to the McCain campaign, and Bush II's communications director) said it was as if a "Bat-signal" went out to all the Obama voters and "they showed up".

It did.

The Bat-signal was Donald Trump.

Nutty, narcissistic, immoral, uninformed, loud-mouthed, dishonest and, in the world of coronavirus . . .

Dangerous Donald Trump.

But the actual vote for Biden, the journey to the polls and the vote in the face of multiple alternatives and Old Joe's de facto non-campaign . . .

That was self-initiated.

No one told them to go for Joe.  No one pulled them for Joe.  No one bought them. No one conspired with them.

They did it on their own.   

There is a long way to go.  

But if Biden is sworn in on January 20, 2021, these two weeks will go down as the ones in which millions more than predicted showed up on their own initiative to vote in enormous numbers for a guy deemed dead a month ago but very much alive in the psychological super-ego of masses who have had it with the incumbent.

To organize, according to Webster, is to work on something together.  For the last few weeks, unbeknownst to the pundits and unexpected by the candidates, that's what Democratic voters have been doing.

We don't know yet, but they may have just saved the country.

What we do know is that . . .

Somewhere . . .

Will Rogers is laughing.