The theme set for today was analysis of why Hillary failed, or Obama succeeded. And while both of these are interesting questions, with many valuable lessons to learn from even trying to answer, I thought this year's Democratic campaign's big surprise was that momentum failed to give us a nominee early. And I believe that understanding why this failure occurred is clearly more important than understanding why Obama managed to nose past Clinton.
Clearly, the conventional wisdom going into this election cycle was that one candidate would have it sewn up after the first 4-5 states had voted. Had this expectation not been nearly universal, FL and MI would not have been willing to risk throwing their convention votes away in a Quixotic bid to edge in front of the early states. But so great was the belief that going later than 4-5 states into the process was certain to condemn a state's contest to irrelevance anyway, because the nomination would surely already be decided by then, that these states were willing to risk the probability of having their early votes bobbed against the supposed certainty that late votes would mean nothing.
Why wasn't this strong belief that momentum would kick in after the first few contests born out by events this cycle, as it had been so many cycles previously? Why did momentum fail this year? Was this year a fluke, and will momentum reassert itself in the future?
To answer that question of why momentum failed with any confidence, you would have to know why momentum succeeded in so many previous years. While any answer would be speculative, I can offer one reasonable conjecture. Momentum seemed to be driven by relatively weak voter loyalty to particular candidates arising from differences among them of ideology and personality. Weak, at least relative to the overriding desire to see any candidate from our side, whether that be second choice, third choice, or last choice on ideological or personality grounds, be elected rather than any candidate on the other side. Democratic voters were so focused on electability, that they were very ready to abandon their first choice for a candidate based even on the weak and indirect testimony of their electability in the general election, that they were unable to win a few primaries against fellow Democrats.
You could extend this idea to the notion that this eagerness to abandon our ideological first choice for even a dubious indicator of electability was yet another manifestastion of the Democratic defensive crouch. We were so afraid for so long of losing that we convinced ourselves that we didn't have the luxury of sticking with our ideological first choice, but simply had to abandon him or her at the first hint of failure for some supposedly more electable "centrist", or we were doomed to repeat 1972. The only problem with this extension of the idea, is that momentum seemed to be a strong factor on the Republican side as well, and they have been as hyper-confident these past many cycles as we have been lacking in confidence. Perhaps you could get out of this difficulty by saying that momentum worked on their side because it was driven by deference to authority. Once the party elders and string-pullers united behind a candidate, that candidate became the anointed one, whom the rank-and-file immediately fell in behind.
If this is essentially the correct understanding of why momentum worked in previous cycles, the explanation for why it failed this year is pretty reassuring for our side, at least for this year. This year we had two strong candidates to whose ideology or personality voters were sufficiently loyal that they refused to abandon their first choices at the first hint of failure. The extended version is even better. Our voters are so confident in our chances this year that they didn't think that we had to hustle up and unite around somebody, anybody, to stand any chance against the Republicans. They were confident enough of victory for our side that they chose to allow themselves the luxury of a lengthy process to find the best candidate.
If these two dynamics were the only ones at play, the failure of momentum this year would perhaps not be repeated. In 2016, which is hopefully the next time that we shall have a contested nomination, we may not be so lucky as to have such a strong field, and the voters would revert to quickly abandoning their weak ideological first choice at the first sign of problematic electability. Hopefully the self-confidence will not prove as transient and fickle, and it will still be going strong next time, but there are grand cycles in politics, and eventually we will get to a cycle in which our prospects will not inspire confidence, and the pressure to get a candidate, any candidate, quickly, will return.
But these dynamics, even if correct, are not the full story. To some extent, momentum worked because the voters knew that it had worked in the past to get us a candidate quickly, therefore they had better abandon their first choice at the first sign of failure, or the train would leave the station without them. But now that momentum has so obviously and radically failed this cycle, there will not be that expectation next cycle driving voters to either decide early to jump to their second choice, or risk wasting their vote on an irrelevant non-contender. Nothing succeeds like success, because it generates the expectation of success, but nothing fails like failure, because it generates the expectation of failure. Momentum failed this year, dramatically, and that alone will weaken it until its reputation for invincibility is restored.
And if the failure of momentum will work to lessen its hold on voters in the future, the effect of this failure on candidates and their contributors will be even more dramatic. Had Edwards, and perhaps more importantly, his backers, known that momentum would not kick in, and that Obama and Clinton would take it to the last primary without a majority delegate winner, he almost certainly would not have quit the race. Even if, after the first 3-4 contests, he was looking at a future with at most a few hundred Edwards delegates, this year that would have made him the kingmaker. And sometimes the kingmaker gets to make himself king. Knowing what they know now, none of the candidates would have withdrawn. The point is that next cycle, they will know from this year, going into the process, that momentum may not work, and that there is thus great potential value to staying in the race no matter what, if only to be the kingmaker.
Whatever other effects it might have, the most predictable effect of this year's failure of momentum is that it makes the likelihood of a contested convention next cycle much greater. It is important to acknowledge this because we are not ready for a contested convention. By the next time we have a contested nomination, we need to either take drastic steps to bring back momentum (say, by requiring winner-take-all), or we need to be ready to hold a contested convention.
This year we had a near miss on a contested convention. If we don't take the warning and act on it so that we are ready in 2016, we may not get lucky again.