FiveThirtyEight: Why Bernie Sanders Lost (APR. 8, 2020)

In 2016, Sanders built a passionate bloc of supporters who crowded his rallies and flooded his campaign with money, but lost to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a more centrist, establishment Democrat who had greater appeal among black, Southern and older voters. In 2020, Sanders built a passionate bloc of supporters who crowded his rallies and flooded his campaign with money but lost to Biden, a more centrist, establishment Democrat who had greater appeal among black, Southern and older voters. Sanders got almost no backing from elected Democrats in 2016, and didn’t court the party establishment that much in 2020 either. That was a major barrier to his candidacy — not only did Sanders again get little support from the party elite, but that same elite was instrumental in helping Biden consolidate the field and winnow the race to a two-man contest. [...]

Sanders and his aides also made new mistakes in 2020. There were some clear indications that some of Sanders’s success in 2016 — among white voters without college degrees, in particular — had more to do with anti-Clinton sentiment than strong support for Sanders. But the senator’s advisers seemed to think that Sanders had a unique appeal to white working-class voters that would simply continue in 2020. So the Sanders campaign decided to invest heavily in the March 10 primary in Michigan, a state packed with white voters without a college degree. Biden not only won Michigan easily, but he won overall among white voters without a college degree (and pretty comfortably). [...]

We made this case in more detail in an article earlier this week, arguing that Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and the Democratic left were always going to face an uphill climb in the 2020 primary. Democrats’ overriding priority in 2020 has been defeating Trump, and many in the party view left-leaning ideas as something that makes it harder to win over swing voters. The boomlets around former Rep. Beto O’Rourke and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, neither of whom had the traditional qualifications for a presidential nominee, had the feeling of the Democratic Party desperately searching for a white, male, centrist-y candidate to take on Trump. The party landing on Biden (white male, centrist-y) fits that general narrative. [...]

The way the primary process played out, with Sanders the clear front-runner after the Nevada caucuses and Biden needing a surprising comeback to win, suggests that Sanders could have won in 2020. But it would have been somewhat fluky if a candidate (Biden) who led in the polls for basically the entire race crashed without the party’s establishment able to mobilize behind any alternative. Had Biden not run in 2020 or faltered fairly early, could Buttigieg, O’Rourke, Sens. Cory Booker or Kamala Harris, or even Warren have defeated the Vermont senator in the same way Biden did, by getting into a one-on-one race with Sanders, running to his right and receiving the bulk of support from the party’s establishment? That seems entirely possible.

read the article

FiveThirtyEight: Bloomberg Lost, But He May Still Get What He Wanted

But I don’t think Bloomberg’s candidacy was a mistake or unwise. He’s worth more than $50 billion — so it’s not clear the $400 million he spent on television commercials or the other money he poured into his campaign matters much to him. He got to go on stage in the debates and attack Sanders and Warren. We don’t know if that boosted Biden, but it likely didn’t hurt him. With Biden now in a much stronger position than when Bloomberg entered the race, you could argue that Bloomberg provided what he and other more center-left figures wanted — to steer the race towards a more moderate nominee. The more extreme back-up plan — nominate Bloomberg — ended up not being needed. My guess is that Bloomberg would have preferred to be the candidate instead of Biden but knew that was a fairly unlikely outcome, since he is a one-time Republican who entered the race in late November. [...]

Now go back to his previous political role: pumping his billions into a variety of liberal causes. He hired people in numerous states for his presidential campaign, and his employees were reportedly told that they would have jobs through November. It’s not clear if Bloomberg will end up retaining these staffers for some kind of operation to boost Biden against Sanders and Warren in the primary, have his team start focusing now on the general election against Trump or simply wind down his apparatus. But I expect him to stay out of the primary and focus on Trump.

read the article

WorldAffairs: Don't Be Evil: Has Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles -- and All of Us?

"Don’t be evil." It’s an iconic phrase that was written into Google’s code of conduct during the early days of the company. It conveyed a utopian vision for technology that would make the world better, safer and more prosperous. But twenty years later, has big tech lived up to its founding principles or has it lost its soul? Rana Foroohar, Global Business Columnist at The Financial Times and Global Economic Analyst at CNN, documents the bigger implications for how tech companies now operate. In her conversation with World Affairs CEO, Philip Yun, Foroohar looks at the extent to which the FAANGs (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google) threaten democracies, livelihoods and our thinking.

listen to the podcast

TLDR News: Bernie Wins Nevada: What That Means for the 2020 Race

At the weekend Senator Bernie Sanders won his third Primary of the 2020 process in Nevada. In this video, we discuss the winners and losers in Nevada as well as the impact this will have on the rest of the contest.

Politico: Bernie breaks out of the pack

While few expect that Sanders can carry more than a third of the vote in Nevada, nearly everyone believes that will be enough to win in a field where the moderate vote remains splintered. It is becoming a source of celebration for Sanders' supporters and an urgent problem for those who want to prevent him from claiming the nomination. [...]

Pete Buttigieg, who topped the field with Sanders in Iowa and finished less than 2 percentage points behind him in New Hampshire, is not polling well in Nevada or in the next voting state, South Carolina. Amy Klobuchar surged in New Hampshire but is starting from behind in Nevada. Biden is the opposite — humiliated in Iowa and New Hampshire but with better prospects here. [...]

The dim prospects of anyone beating Sanders in Nevada were laid bare last week, when the state’s powerful Culinary Workers Union elected not to endorse in the presidential primary. Despite its criticism of Sanders’ signature policy proposal, Medicare for All, the union was not convinced that any other Democrat could defeat Sanders, even with the union’s endorsement, according to a source familiar with the union’s deliberations.

read the article

Nautilus Magazine: This Psychological Concept Could Be Shaping the Presidential Election

Pluralistic ignorance is a discrepancy between one’s privately held beliefs and public behavior. It occurs when people assume that the identical actions of themselves and others reflect different underlying states. The term has been in circulation for nearly 80 years, though more recent experiments have made it a focal point of social psychology. [...]

Over a decade later, psychologists Nicole Shelton and Jennifer Richeson examined whether pluralistic ignorance stymied friendship among black and white college students. They designed an experiment that asked students to imagine approaching a group of people from a different race in a dining hall. Results showed both groups of students wanted to have more contact with each other, but erroneously thought the other group didn’t want to have contact with them. In subsequent studies, Shelton and Richeson documented the real consequences of this miscalculation among Princeton students. They found that people who endorsed divergent explanations for their own actions and the identical actions of racial outgroup members had less contact with people of different races in their daily lives. Pluralistic ignorance deterred Princeton students of different races from interacting with each other.4 [...]

Nate Silver, editor of FiveThirtyEight, reflected on these data in a blog post. “Being a woman was the biggest barrier to electability, based on Avalanche’s analysis of the results, and women were more likely to cite gender as a factor than men,” Silver wrote. “So there are a lot of women who might not vote for a woman because they’re worried that other voters won’t vote for her. But if everyone just voted for who they actually wanted to be president, the woman would win!”9

read the article

Social Europe: What’s at stake in the Democratic primaries

For example, with regard to health care, all the candidates support moving beyond the reforms introduced under Barack Obama’s presidency towards universal coverage. Where they differ is on how to get there: Sanders and Warren favour a rapid transition to a ‘single-payer’, public (‘Medicare for all’) system, while the moderates favour gradual change, beginning with the expansion of a public option (Medicare) to those lacking private insurance.

Similarly, all the candidates advocate higher taxes on the wealthy, fighting inequality, more business regulation, increased spending on social programmes and infrastructure, making college more affordable, and devoting greater attention to environmental issues and climate change. As with health care, on these issues the candidates differ more on how they favour achieving these goals than on the goals themselves. [...]

On the other side of the electability debate are those who believe the path to victory lies not in trying to attract independent and wavering voters but in mobilising the party’s base. Supporters of this strategy point to research arguing that voters generally don’t know much about policy and the intense polarisation of the American electorate, which makes them care even less. In this view, Democrats and Republicans are so committed to their own ‘team’—technically, ‘negative partisanship’ has become so strong—that they will vote for any candidate their party puts up.

read the article

TLDR News: Sanders' New Hampshire Win Explained (& an Iowa Update)

Last night Burnie Sanders won in the New Hampshire Primary, marking his second win in the Democratic Primaries of 2020. In this video, we discuss the winners and losers in New Hampshire as well as the impact this will have on the rest of the contest.

Politico: Bernie crashes the gates, Buttigieg cuts the line

The winner in New Hampshire, Senator Bernie Sanders, is, like the man he wants to overthrow, U.S. President Donald Trump, a gate-crasher who knows the only way he will be accepted by establishment power in the party or elsewhere in American life is not by persuasion or reassurance but by beating them head-on with the votes of people who share his grievances.

The runner-up, former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, is a line-cutter just like the last Democratic president, Barack Obama — perfectly comfortable with establishment power, just not willing to wait his turn and indifferent to those who say he’s promising but needs more experience. [...]

The former New York mayor’s unorthodox strategy, skipping the early states and blasting his way into the race with hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising, gives him elements of both line-cutter and gate-crasher. At a minimum, his $50-billion-plus fortune, combined with zero restraint about spending it, allows him to not care much about whatever old rules he is bending or breaking.

This leaves Klobuchar — newly ascendant just as Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former vice president Joe Biden are losing altitude with two weak performances in a row — as the only conventional candidate to emerge from New Hampshire with enhanced momentum. Neither gate-crasher nor line-cutter, she is the student who didn’t necessarily dazzle with charisma but turned her homework in on time and asked the teacher if she could have some more for extra credit.

read the article

TLDR Explains: What Happened in Iowa? Who Won and Did Pete Cheat

On Monday Iowans voted in the Iowa Caucus for the candidate they wanted to become the Democratic Presidential Nominee. It was always going to be an interesting race, but it ended up being interesting in a different way than expected. Chaos ensued after the caucus with Pete quickly claiming victory despite major issues in the reporting system. This lead to widespread confusion and some even alleging that Pete cheated.

AJ+: Naomi Klein: Trump Is A Shock Machine & The Climate Crisis Can’t Wait

War with Iran, the climate crisis and supremacist ideologies: Naomi Klein explains how they’re all linked together – and how to fight them. Klein is the award-winning author of several books, including “The Shock Doctrine.” In it, she explains how natural and man-made disasters are used to impose unpopular economic policies. In this interview with AJ+’s Sana Saeed, she says President Trump is a constant ‘shock machine’ and talks about why she wants Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren to win the next U.S. election.

UnHerd: The mother of all protests

The Arab Spring challenged the stability of long-standing dictatorships that many scholars and pundits saw as unassailable — either because the dictators had apparently mastered the political techniques of authoritarianism, or because they simply enjoyed the luxury of living in a region that did not value democratic principles. When Francis Fukuyama asked in 1989 whether humanity had reached “the end of history” with the universal acceptance of liberal democracy, cultural relativists offered the so-called incompatibility between Islam and democratic values as a rebuttal to his argument. But even though dictatorship mostly endured in the region (although specific rulers like Muammar Gaddafi and Hosni Mubarak fell), the tens of millions of people who came out into the streets showed that authoritarianism was contrary to the will of the people. [...]

The Arab Spring’s demonstration of widespread support for democracy also highlighted the role of youth in the movement. The Middle East is experiencing a youth bulge, and these young people are technologically savvy and significantly more educated than their parents. But they are also frustrated by mass unemployment and the lack of the political freedoms they are able to observe in other parts of the world. Using both old-fashioned mobilisation techniques and social media, these young people drove the push for democracy and freedom in their countries. More recent protests in countries like Lebanon and Iraq show that this desire for change has not abated. [...]

Beyond their effects on mainstream politics, both the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement shaped the nature of protests that have proliferated across the world in the last decade. The Arab Spring successfully merged 21st century, youth-led social media activism with old-fashioned, ‘to the streets’ protests. Whereas ‘hashtag activism’ threatened to undermine more substantive forms of mass political action — why carry a sign and perhaps risk arrest when you could simply forward a tweet? — the Arab Spring used various media, social and otherwise, as tools to complement and magnify the crowds that gathered in the streets and public squares to demand change. [...]

As we enter 2020, the legacy of 2011 has morphed into seemingly countless movements around the world. But as in any uprising, counter-revolutions have also materialised. The backlash has taken the form of governments and powerful conservative forces responding to the outpouring of often young, often leftist or radical protestors. The outpouring of progressive anger has created a conservative backlash — not just with fringe Right-wing populist groups, but within mainstream politics as well. Although Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren ascended to the top of their respective opposition parties, they remain far from number 10 or the Oval Office.

read the article

The Intercept: The Bernie Blackout

Bernie Sanders faced a media blackout that helped sink his 2016 run for president. Today, the trend continues: Sanders gets less media coverage and a higher rate of negative coverage than his top rivals for the Democratic nomination in 2020.

The Daily Beast: How Warren Went From Wonky Blogger to Democratic Frontrunner

Those who have run for the party’s nomination in the past have largely hailed from one of two perches: insurgents or establishment types. Warren’s candidacy is a synthesis of the two. She has spent decades operating in elite institutions from Harvard to the Obama administration to the halls of Congress. But she is also the first true candidate of the Netroots era of the Democratic Party, in which wonkiness and unapologetic progressivism are both regarded as unimpeachable political virtues. [...]

The Democratic Party has had candidates closely associated with online activism before. Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign was fueled by a nascent Internet culture that was, in retrospect, the first true iteration of the so-called blogosphere. Barack Obama took concepts of community organizing and applied them to emerging social media channels to fuel his rise. And Bernie Sanders built a small dollar online donor network that has far surpassed anything previously constructed in electoral politics. [...]

Warren may not be the preferred candidate for all of these individuals or others whose roots are in the era of blogging. Indeed, many veterans of the early Netroots era have gone on to work for other presidential candidates or media outlets or political entities that simply won’t play in the 2020 primary. But her rise does represent the remarkable degree to which Democratic politics has shifted from a place where insurgents were seen as pesky naifs and political outsiders to one where they run the show.

read the article

Politico: New poll has Warren leading Biden ahead of next Democratic debate

Warren leads Biden by 30 percent to 27 percent among Democratic voters and independents who lean Democratic, according to a Quinnipiac University poll published Monday.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is expected to return to the campaign trail after recovering from a recent heart attack, came in at third with 11 percent. South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg received 8 percent, while Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) received 4 percent. No other candidate topped 2 percent in support.

Biden, according to the poll, remains the most electable candidate in voters' minds, with 48 percent saying he's the one to beat Trump in the 2020 general election, but Warren is gaining ground. The Massachusetts senator sits at 21 percent, an increase from 9 percent in August. [...]

Support for impeaching Trump has seen a slight uptick in the last week. In an October 8 Quinnipiac poll, 45 percent of voters said Trump should be impeached, while 49 percent said he shouldn’t.

read the article

Politico: The One Thing Elizabeth Warren Needs to Do to Win

There are significant challenges to this strategy, not the least of which is winning over a reasonable share of the African American vote, where Biden dominates. In fact, the South Carolina primary in 2020 could be Iowa 2008, but in reverse. Back then, Barack Obama convinced African-Americans that he was more than a symbolic candidate when he won the caucuses in an overwhelmingly white state. This time around, if Warren were to win a respectable slice of the black vote in South Carolina, she would prove to white liberals skeptical of her electability that she has support among a constituency without which no Democrat can win a nomination, or the presidency. [...]

And African American Democrats are, as Tom Edsall pointed out in a much-discussed column in the New York Times, on average, more centrist than white Democrats. The party’s “more moderate wing, which is pressing bread-and-butter concerns like jobs, taxes and a less totalizing vision of health care reform, is majority nonwhite, with almost half of its support coming from African-American and Hispanic voters,” he wrote. [...]

So far, there is little sign that Warren has any interest in following the example of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. She is a candidate whose surge is in good part predicated on her deeply detailed policy proposals and her campaign skills, but evidence of the potential for broader reach to middle-of-the-road voters is difficult to find.

read the article

FiveThirtyEight: Where I Think The Candidates Stand After The Second Debate

First things first: Joe Biden is pretty clearly out in front, so I don’t quite get why prediction markets only have him in a rough tie with Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren. Pre-debate, he led his nearest competitors (Bernie Sanders and Warren) by 16 to 17 points in the RCP polling average, a margin that’s nothing to be sneezed at given the historical accuracy of primary polls at this stage. And he’s shown some resilience, having already bounced back in the polling average to where he was before the first debate, and then having had a second debate which — while it wasn’t great, in my view — was better than the first one despite a lot of incoming fire from other Democrats. I’m still a seller of the proposition that Biden is an odds-on favorite to win the nomination — that is, I think his chances are under 50 percent. But I think he’s more likely than anyone else.

With that said, I’d keep an eye on Warren, whose strong first-night performance looks better by comparison after a series of uneven evenings for the Democrats last night. She has a clearer message than Harris, and she makes for a sharper contrast to Biden, whom she hasn’t had a chance to share a debate stage with yet. [...]

If I had to pick someone from among the Tier 4 candidates, it would probably be Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, who was among the stronger performers on Tuesday night, and who has a variety of interesting attributes (electability, executive experience, a mix of moderation and economic populism) that differentiate him from the field. But he’s far from qualifying for the next debates, so he’s going to have to find some way to command attention in what could be a slow period for the campaign.

read the article

Vox: The surprising thing about older voters: they’re moving more to the left

In the last presidential election, 71 percent of Americans over 65 voted, according to US Census Bureau data — more than any other age group. Older adults are also much more likely to participate in primary elections than their younger counterparts. [...]

Like any demographic group, voters 65 and older are no monolith. But there are certain characteristics that have come to define older Americans: that they’re generally more conservative, they really care about issues like Medicare, Social Security, and drug prices, and they vote. But advocates for seniors see an electorate actually more fluid than these tropes suggest. They’re also interested in what world they’ll leave for their grandchildren, from climate change to education access and income inequality. And broadly they’re shifting ideologically to the left. [...]

Republicans have relied on older Americans’ support since the 2000 presidential election. In 2016, 53 percent of adults 65 and older voted for President Donald Trump, who campaigned on protecting Medicare and Social Security and lowering drug prices. But those dynamics could be changing. [...]

In the months leading to the 2018 election, a Morning Consult poll showed that among the voters that prioritized issues most important to seniors — like Social Security and Medicare, 52 percent preferred a Democrat. Only a third said they would vote for the Republican candidate. And there’s more openness to more progressive ideas.

read the article

CNN: Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are building very different progressive coalitions

Progressive activists and strategists routinely applaud these demonstrations, in part because they fear an open rift between Sanders and Warren could divide a movement they fought for years to build. But the near-absence of any major policy gaps between the two, despite their different approaches to campaigning and divergent ideological backgrounds, has created a mix of risk -- over dividing the vote -- and opportunity -- to broaden the progressive coalition. [...]

Sanders's support, as seen in a recent Fox News survey in South Carolina, drew more from black voters (15%) than white voters (12%). Warren did about the same with white voters, at 11%, but was only the first choice for 2% of black voters, whom she has gone to great lengths to court with a series of plans tailored to address concerns specific to the African American community.

In another CNN poll, this one conducted by the University of New Hampshire in the Granite State, Sanders and Warren were deadlocked overall -- with 19%, behind only Biden. They shared the highest favorability numbers, both at 67%, and came in first (Warren at 22%) and second (Sanders at 20%) when voters were asked to name their second choice for the nomination. But Warren's numbers have been mostly ticking up, while Sanders' are largely staying level or trending slightly downward.

read the article

Today in Focus: Is a new generation taking over the Democratic party?

Kamala Harris was the big winner of the first round of Democratic party debates in the US. This week, her poll numbers surged and so did donations to her campaign. But as Lauren Gambino in Washington notes, it was bad news for the frontrunners as Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders faltered. Also today: Daniel Boffey on the new cast of characters taking over the EU’s top jobs.

The race for the Democratic party’s presidential nomination is intensifying after two rounds of televised debates in which the candidates squared up to each other on major issues and their past records. The big winner was the California senator Kamala Harris, who denounced the record of the frontrunner, Joe Biden, on race.

The Guardian’s Lauren Gambino joins Anushka Asthana to look across the diverse field of potential presidential nominees and the debates that highlighted the generational and ideological divides in the party.

Will the Democrats coalesce around a centrist such as Biden, a former vice-president? Or could they opt for the more radical figure of Bernie Sanders, four years after he lost out to Hillary Clinton? Or will the torch pass to a new generation?

listen to the podcast