New Jersey Senator Cory Booker dropped out of the presidential race Monday. This comes hot off the heels of former HUD Secretary Julian Castro and self-help author Marianne Williamson also dropping out earlier this year. Castro and Booker follow in Kamala Harris’s footsteps; candidates of color who look great and charismatic on paper but are just not quite able to pull it together to challenge party heavyweights. In Tuesday’s debate in Des Moines, all 6 candidates on stage were white. Some people would’ve lost their minds if they had been told that a year ago. Now, it’s just one of the many unexpected twists of this primary.
Joe Biden seems to be the go-to candidate for voters of color, and I think he will suck in Booker’s and Castro’s supporters, giving him a boost that keeps him snugly in first place.
The Rise of Bernie Sanders
Bernie Sanders has risen in polls all across the nation. He is consistently in second place in national polling. This surge has shocked many people, including me. I fully expected Sanders to fade out as more vibrant options entered the arena, like Castro, Booker, O’Rourke, or Harris. They’ve all been knocked out, but Sanders has remained competitive.
So what has allowed him to stay a top contender for this long? The answer is his ability to create the feeling of revolution that surrounds his campaign. While Elizabeth Warren tried to tow the line between democratic socialism and neo-liberalism, Bernie Sanders has been a loud and proud democratic socialist. Warren, especially when talking healthcare, tried to make everyone happy, which actually made less people happy, because she was inconsistent about how her plans would be executed without radically changing the American system. This contrasts with Bernie Sanders, who champions a “revolution” in America. He embodies how American progressives feel. Until Sanders’s campaign, the establishment of both parties shunned and dismissed many of the progressive economic policies we see emerging today, like Medicare-for-all, a $15 minimum wage, and a wealth tax. Progressives, thinking that they were alone and that progressive policies like these would never be implemented, stayed quiet. Now, Bernie Sanders is giving progressives an outlet and a space in the party, and hope that progressive reforms aren’t as far-fetched as they once seemed. This has bolstered them, and they aren’t taking “no” for an answer anymore. This campaign structure is why Sanders is taking back a lot of the support he lost to Warren last year.
Many parallels can be drawn between Sanders’s campaign and Donald Trump’s, which also tapped into previously unnoticed anti-establishment feelings to take what we knew about politics and turn it on its head—just from the right instead of the left. Given these parallels, is a Bernie Sanders nomination inevitable? Maybe. But he has never led in the national polls, whereas Trump did so early into his campaign. This suggests that the Democratic party isn’t the right party to run a campaign structured like Sanders’s. I’ll put him beneath Joe Biden at second place on the Best Shot Tracker. Elizabeth Warren can take Bernie Sanders’s former #4 spot.
Other Best Shot Tracker Changes
In addition to moving Bernie Sanders up to 2nd place, Amy Klobuchar gets moved to 5th place. Amy Klobuchar has had some OK polls and, unlike many undercard Democrats, is running a pretty decent campaign. She’s continued to make the debates as well.
Andrew Yang gets moved down to 8th place. While he has enjoyed unprecedented netroots support and has a loyal fanbase, he has just not been able to break out in the way many other candidates have. Even Tom Steyer got to double-digits in South Carolina and Nevada. A miracle will be needed for Yang to avoid going the way of Booker, Castro, and Harris.
Not that anyone cares, but John Delaney moves down 1 spot to 11th place. If you’ve been on the campaign trail since 2017 but still have a polling average below 1%, you’re doing something wrong.
Mayor Pete Buttigieg holds steady at 3rd place.
15 Days Until Iowa
The date of the Iowa Caucus, February 3, is coming fast. It looks like it will be a four-way race between Biden, Sanders, Warren, and Buttigieg. It seems unlikely anyone else will receive delegates, but maybe Amy Klobuchar, Tom Steyer, or Micheal Bloomberg could get one or two if they push hard. Remember, in order to get delegates, a candidate needs to get at least 15% of the vote statewide, or 15% of the vote in one of the state’s four congressional districts (except for the state’s 4th district, where one would need to get 20%.)
Even though we’re so close, the Iowa Caucus remains unpredictable, and there are valid scenarios where any of the four candidates listed above win the day. Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are virtually tied in state polling, with Warren and Buttigieg only about 5 points behind. Elizabeth Warren is said to have the best ground operation in Iowa, and Pete Buttigieg has been proven to be skilled at retail politics. It will be a game of musical chairs: Whoever has the best headlines at the time of caucusing probably wins. I think the biggest X factor is if Bernie Sanders will keep surging, or if the surge will recede—and if so, who his support will go to. I’d tend to think his level of support will be brought back to earth a little. Over the last 12 months, we’ve seen it time and time again that a candidate looked like he or she was making serious gains, only to return to underwhelming poll numbers after increased media scrutiny and attacks by the other candidates, the by-products of being a frontrunner. The movement-style structure of Sanders’ campaign may limit this to an extent, but you can already see this begin to happen to Sanders, with the headline dropping that he told Warren a year ago that a woman can’t beat Trump. Over the next two weeks, we will see the media scrutinize Bernie Sanders’s unabashedly progressive policies and their perceived low levels of realism.
Who gains from this? Warren and Buttigieg. Conventional wisdom says that Warren and Sanders are competing for the progressive wing of the Democratic party, but Pete Buttigieg backslid more than Warren as Sanders surged, showing he may have been losing more of his support to Sanders than Warren did. I feel people just liked Sanders more as opposed to being offended by something Buttigieg did, so if people sour on Sanders, I would expect Buttigieg to get some of his support back. People will have different reasons for leaving Bernie Sanders in this scenario, and they won’t all go to the same candidates.
While I believe my Toss-Up rating for Iowa remains justified, if I had to pick someone, I’d probably go with Joe Biden to win the caucus. His support has been by far the most consistent.
Will Iowa Even Matter That Much?
The losing candidates shouldn’t sweat it. With 12 different candidates still in the race, it’s possible the winning candidate doesn’t even get 25% of the vote. As candidates drop out and coalitions change throughout the primary, the Iowa results may lose relevance. The Iowa Caucus electorate is overwhelmingly white and from rural areas, while the Democratic party at-large is an increasingly diverse, metropolitan party, and thus poll results from Iowa have been different from national polling. Conventional wisdom says Democrats will “fall in line” after a candidate wins an early state, but I think that the bases of the four main candidates are strong, and won’t be wooed by something as small as a caucus from a state with a lower population than Los Angeles.
These predictions aren’t final, but I’d rather be Bernie Sanders on February 11th when New Hampshire votes due to his good performance there in 2016, and on February 22nd for the Nevada Caucus, where Warren and Buttigieg have consistently been weaker. Joe Biden remains a heavy favorite in the South Carolina primary on Leap Day.
Super Tuesday, March 3rd, is the date that really matters the most this primary season, when more than a third of the delegates will be given out.
Thank you for reading my article. If you want more Toss-Up Central, visit my homepage: https://tossupcentral.com/. New articles will be posted at least every other Sunday at 6PM.
Knocked it out of the park again! Thanks Derek