It’s time for my bi-weekly look at the Democratic presidential primary. As usual, we start with two objective data points: the FiveThirtyEight tally of primary polls and the Real Clear Politics polling aggregate.
There’s some serious movement going on.
1. Joe Biden ⬇️ (last week: 1)
Biden retains the top spot by dint of his double-digit polling lead over the rest of the field, but by every other metric, he’s had a disastrous run the last several weeks.
As the chart above shows, Biden’s oft-predicted polling fade is in progress. His support is shallow, lacking a real base or motivated core base. Name recognition and Obama nostalgia can only go so far, and his lack of policy heft or a demographic base leaves him exposed to … well, knowledge. The more people tune in to the race and realize that there are amazing alternatives, the weaker he gets.
If that was all, his slow fade might be … slower. But his 1980s-vintage campaign and inability to adjust to current political sensibilities is quite breathtaking. HIs self-inflicted stumbling on reproductive rights, his inappropriate touching of women (which he jokes about at rallies because it’s so fucking hilarious), and his weird inability to communicate with young girls aside from sexualizing them are creating serious problems with the single most important core Democratic constituency: women.
As Emma Roller notes in an excellent Slate piece, “Biden has been able to use this line because some part of him recognizes that the people he’s addressing are largely powerless to respond. They are young girls and women who have already been taught to be embarrassed by their bodies and their appearance, who are now forced to listen and laugh nervously as a very powerful man uses their budding sexuality as the butt of his joke.”
It is unconscionable that anyone would dismiss or defend this kind of behavior, both morally and politically. This is not a question of whether Biden is electable or not. All of our candidates are electable. It’s whether we nominate someone who inspires, elevates, and motivates supporters to fight hard for the Democratic ticket, top to bottom, or whether we (collectively) do the minimum necessary to get rid of Trump.
And it’s clear that on the “inspire, elevate, and motivate” scale, Biden is slipping hard.
What’s going to arrest that decline? His candidacy has no motivating principle beyond “get rid of Trump,” which does nothing to distinguish him from the crowd. But you know what does? He’s now the only top candidate left who opposes impeachment. So a campaign 100% based on Trump is also the only campaign to empower Trump to keep breaking the law by refusing to hold him accountable.
He’s slipping in the polls, he’s got no policy chops, and every time he’s out in public he says something cringeworthy. No wonder his campaign is doing everything possible to limit his public appearances. They may seek to protect him by hiding him, but that’s the mark not of a campaign generating enthusiasm and excitement, but of one trying to run out the clock to when the primaries begin. And it’s freakin’ June. There’s a world of time on that clock.
He’ll never let that go. If you want a Democrat who will pathetically abase himself before Mitch McConnell to earn GOP approval that will never arrive, he’s your guy.
2. Elizabeth Warren ⬆️ (Last week: 3)
Warren slips past Bernie Sanders for this week’s No. 2 spot based on poll movement. While she still trails narrowly in the aggregate (12.8% vs 15.8%), her upward trajectory—in addition to second-place finishes in polls in early-state-primary California and Nevada—suggests that polls are catching up to what we’ve seen in our own unscientific straw poll: that Warren is the hardest-charging candidate currently in the field. By force of her unrelenting flood of policy proposals (backing up her “I’ve got a plan for that” motto) and equally relentless campaigning, Warren has shed early comparisons to Hillary Clinton and established a clear personal brand that is all hers.
Eschewing high-dollar fundraisers (something no other candidate is doing, not even Bernie) will likely continue to hurt her fundraising numbers when Q2 results are announced at the end of this month. But so what? She’s getting more free promotion than anyone else at this point, worth millions in TV ads. And it’s not by accident. One major example? She takes selfies with everyone at her town halls. At her Oakland rally with 6,000 attendees, there was no way she’d keep up that tradition, right? Well, she did, staying late into the night, hitting her 25,000th selfie that evening. And you know what? Every one of those selfies gets posted on social media, shared with friends, circulated among networks. And each person in that selfie now desperately wants a selfie with a president, making them that much more committed and motivated to work toward her victory.
It has to be exhausting! I’d rather die. But is it more exhausting than begging wealthy people for money? Given the choice, I’d easily pick the 25,0000 selfies and take the hit on my fundraising. And the promotional benefits are 25,000 times better.
If you watch her social media feed, you’ll see a campaign working to erode fears about her electability. After the big Oakland rally, they had a guy ask supporters on camera, “Do you think she can win?” The supporters would invariably shout “Yes!” It’s kitschy, but a clear bandwagon-effect effort. But whatever people might think (or fear) about her electability, polling shows that she’s looking good on that front, as the latest Quinnipiac University poll showed:
Biden 53, Trump 40
Sanders 51, Trump 42
Harris 49, Trump 41
Warren 49, Trump 42
As her name recognition rises, the gap between her and Biden and Sanders will continue to narrow. Because the big number above isn’t what the particular Democrats get; it’s the 42% that Trump fails to exceed, no matter who he’s matched up against.
On substance, there are so many good plans, including last week’s plan to provide $7 billion in grants to minority-owned businesses. As a Latino immigrant who started this site with zero capital and no connections, I’m painfully aware of the difficulty “non-traditional” entrepreneurs face in starting new businesses. So I love, love, love it. And that’s about the 20th most exciting proposal out of her campaign.
Substance may matter less after we have our nominee. Democrat vs. Trump will be a base turnout battle. No “proposal” will move the battle lines at that point (except perhaps the one swingy demographic—suburban white women). But in this primary? It’s good to see that we liberals care about details. Hopefully this encourages other campaigns to roll out their own detailed proposals.
Meanwhile, Trump’s campaign used Tucker Carlson to send a message to Trump: Worry about Warren. “The reelection campaign first began taking note of Warren’s momentum several weeks ago, when polling showed her gaining substantially on Biden and Sanders. They were startled earlier this month when Tucker Carlson, a host on Trump-friendly Fox News, used the opening monologue of his show to heap praise on the liberal senator,” reported Politico. “’Warren’s populist economic agenda, Carlson said, “sounds like Donald Trump at his best.’”
Trump wishes.
See also: Can Elizabeth Warren actually win in 2020?
3. Bernie Sanders ⬇️ (last time: 2)
A quiet couple of weeks for Sanders, as he’s fully lost the “insurgent” label to Warren. His core base of support will keep him at that mid-teens point in the polling, but Warren is now (perhaps for the first time) a direct threat to that support. If she looks like the strongest anti-Biden, why split the vote of the Left? He’s certainly still doing nothing to expand that support. And while he’s (presumably) raising a ton of money, what’s that money going to do to bring new people into his coalition, particularly as his polling aggregate is slowly approaching this cycle’s low-water mark?
In fact, mulling it over, it seems that Biden may be the best thing to happen to Warren’s campaign—an external danger to the party’s left flank, generating an impetus to consolidate support in a way that wouldn’t be happening without Biden in the race. (Thinking about it, the dynamics would be dramatically different. Let’s put a marker on that thought and explore it in a future post.) But if Biden is a boon to Warren and the need for a unified Left behind her, he’s an existential threat to Sanders, threatening to erode his support far earlier than might be the case otherwise.
Now what’s supercool about Sanders’ campaign is his polling vs. Trump, like that 51-42 showing in the Quinnipiac poll above. Imagine that! The most socialistic candidate we could possibly nominate, a guy who literally calls himself a socialist, is still handily beating Trump. That bodes well for us, as Republicans will attack whoever we nominate (even if it was Biden) as a “socialist.” It’s their new go-to boogeyman word. So if it’s not working against Bernie, how can it work against anyone else?
4. Pete Buttigieg ⬆️ (last time 5)
0.5% separates Harris and Buttigieg from each other, with Buttigieg taking over the slight lead. But I nudged him back above Harris because of stronger poll showings in early-primary states Iowa and New Hampshire … and even South Carolina, a must-win state for Harris. I know he’d rather talk about values than policy (and he does that so well!), but still, would it kill him to show some substance in his campaign?
5. Kamala Harris ⬇️ (last time 4)
A third place in home-state California in the latest UC Berkeley poll is … kinda embarrassing. That won’t be the likely result in the end, but it is symbolic of her current diminished standing in the race. If Harris’ current strategy is to be as invisible as possible, she’s succeeding. It’s taken her from 12.3% in the polling aggregate post-announcement to 7.3% today, where she appears to have stabilized.
Perhaps she’s letting Warren, Biden, and Sanders take all the flack now as frontrunners, biding her time for a post-Labor Day blitz. If so … okay. It wouldn’t be a strategy without logic. She is staffing up heavily in the early states, so the campaign isn’t sitting quietly. And she is starting to engage on the policy front, with a proposal to grant citizenship to DREAMers via executive action and another to secure abortion rights. Given the challenges of retaking the Senate, the intransigence of the GOP, and the refusal of too many Democrats to consider eliminating the filibuster, our next Democratic president better figure out how to use executive orders to accomplish their policy goals.
Still, her early play is South Carolina, and so far she’s gotten little traction there. Obama didn’t become a force in the state until he won Iowa, proving to black voters that he wasn’t just a serious candidate (he was in the Senate, after all!), but one who could win white voters and become a serious presidential candidate. So far, it appears that Harris may be put through the same test, if she is to be trusted to be the one to defeat Trump.