The primary system is rather strange to somebody from Europe. Its main feature is that it seems to go on forever. It starts to get interesting in the autumn of the year before a general election, and the winning candidate might not emerge until the following summer.
The Democratic campaign for this year’s election is the first one to have really caught my attention. Before, I have given the primaries a wide berth, either because the results seemed inevitable or because anything including Trump makes me sick in the stomach. But this time, the Democrats have put on a real show, with many viable candidates, lots of swings of fortune, and plenty of uncertainty as we go into peak season. As many as six candidates might still have a lane to win, each with their own constituencies, style and vulnerabilities.
In the autumn, there was a point when Elizabeth Warren seemed unstoppable. She is the intellectual powerhouse of the field, spouting thought-through detailed policies with great passion. She seemed poised to sweep through the middle, more electable than Sanders to her left and more professional then anybody on her right. Somehow, she lost traction. Pundits suggest that she has pivoted too much on health care, but I think there is more to it than that. She came in for plenty of ire from Trump, which suggested to me that he was scared of her. Anyway, she is fading, and her best chance now is to hang in there long enough (she has plenty of money) and to emerge as a last minute compromise between Sanders and a moderate.
Before Warren, the shoo-in seemed to be Joe Biden, and even now he leads national polls, bolstered by lots of support from the party machine, unions and African-American groups. But the gruelling campaign has showed him up as old, tired and out-gunned, and he is crumbling and broke. He might still win though if he dominates in South Carolina and his machine holds up to give him wins on Super Tuesday.
So the only one of the original big three still intact is Bernie Sanders, an impressive, consistent firebrand who is the only candidate to fire up the base, especially young voters. He has become the frontrunner, and may be unstoppable, especially if he handily wins California and other Super Tuesday states. His vulnerability is that the party machine will try to stop him once again, and the ceiling to his support might come to haunt him. His healthcare plan is bad for cosseted unionised groups with favourable insurance schemes, and those groups wield party power.
The other victor in the early states has been Pete Buttigieg, an inexperienced, openly gay candidate with authenticity, smarts and the benefits of youth and of relative poverty (all the others are multi-millionaires, and it shows). He has played a weak hand beautifully, and has a clear lane as a likely recipient of new support if Biden collapses completely. But he will surely be spread very thinly over the coming crucial month, and seems to have made little or no headway so far with non-whites.
Hanging in there is Amy Klobuchar, an attractive traditional candidate who has worked her way up as a competent legislator from Minnesota. She had been a bit lost in the fog of all the candidates, but strong debates and the schedule have given her something of a lane. She will probably be spread too thinly as well, and she starts from a lower base than Buttigieg.
Finally there is the wild card, Mike Bloomberg, the filthy rich former mayor of New York City, who has upturned traditional ideas by sitting out the early states. In normal times he would be barely credible as a Democrat, being rich, short, uncharismatic and even Jewish. But he bought the NYC mayoralty and then performed competently, at least as far as I can judge. He has recruited a strong campaign team and is money-bombing the airwaves. It is working, and now he has a clear lane, as potentially the last moderate standing against Sanders, at which point the party might hold its nose and rally around him.
Who will win? Like any great horserace, it is hard to say, and I am chastened by my early coronation of Warren. But at this point I fancy Bloomberg. Biden is collapsing fast, and neither Buttigieg nor Klobuchar have the deep resources to fully capitalise. Warren seems to have peaked. Sanders will get close, but I don’t think the bulk of the party is ready to let him win – as Hillary Clinton says, they all hate him.
While in any primary the candidates have to fight each other, they all know that the most important thing is to beat Trump, and, incredibly to most non-Americans, that will be a tall order. There are two ways to beat Trump. One is to encourage all the low-turnout sectors to be enthused enough to show up and vote. The other is to peel off the least fanatical Trump supporters. In both cases, this is only really relevant in the ten or so states that decide elections.
Another way to look at electability against Trump is to highlight four specific constituencies, again specifically in the marginal states. One is the young, a second are racial minorities, the third are unionised blue-collar workers, and the fourth are other marginal Trumpers (“I don’t like him, but the economy is doing well and I fear socialism”).
Sanders can bring out the young, but not the other groups, and indeed repels the third and fourth groups. Buttigieg is great for groups three and four and his mid-west background helps, but seems weaker with minorities.
What about Bloomberg? Well, sad to say, money really talks. Trump will use incumbency to influence the campaign, probably spurning debates altogether and trying to build beyond is base by spending big (and smart on social media) with negative messages. This tactic can drown all the democrats, except for Bloomberg, who can spend just as heavily and smartly, and actually matches Trump well on most of his brand messages. Furthermore, only Bloomberg can chuck money to support key senate races.
I am enjoying these primaries, but the electability questions really shows up their flaws. I also love cricket test matches, and watch baseball and NFL games end to end for the sport and not the highlight reels and personality shows. But this places me in a small minority nowadays, and most of that minority is far from any of the four key constituencies. Who watches long debates nowadays, especially a long series of them over months and months? The primaries are a beautiful process, but one that is irrelevant or even harmful to electability.
In the end, the primaries are another symptom of a fragile democracy. Even the debates are seriously flawed, in that they focus on topics where congress, not the president, has much of the power. The primaries use a method that few have the stomach or passion for and are off-putting for most. They cost a fortune, hamper law making, and are only really available to super-rich candidates, and ones that deliver sound bites rather than policy.
We can also observe that such an out-dated system can only persist within a two-party duopoly. With more credible parties, not even the cable networks would carry all those debates, and even fewer would tune in if they did. The campaigns would become shorter, sharper, less expensive, and reliant on policy manifestos. Lee Drutman’s recent book, Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop, posits that it is the duopoly that is the true root cause of political dysfunction. Much though I am loving them, the primaries are just one more example of how Drutman may be on to something.
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