Freezing the Bern

The obviously orchestrated coalescence around candidate Joe Biden last week was amazing. First was the speed with which it happened – five major candidates dropped out of the Democrat primary race within days of each other. Second, was the completeness of the newfound Biden advocacy. Except for Elizabeth Warren (who hasn’t endorsed anyone yet), all the other candidates immediately endorsed Biden. Even Beto O’Rourke came out of the woodwork on Biden’s behalf.

Our gut tells us something is afoot. Biden is hardly the ideal candidate to rally around. His vulnerabilities are legion. Trump would take maximum advantage of every one of them in the coming Presidential debates and in his thunderous campaign rallies. And quite contrary to Trump, Biden’s biggest weakness is his energy level. He tires easily. It is then when he is most prone to his signature gaffes and inaccurate statements. Despite the big endorsements this past week, and the comical about-face of the news media (who completely wrote him off only two weeks ago), he still lacks momentum, charisma, and excitement. He does not draw substantial crowds at his rallies, and some of those who do show up are there only to hear the next gaffe firsthand. The difference in authentic enthusiasm between Biden’s supporters and those of Trump and Sanders is stark.

We wrote an article back in January predicting a “dark horse” candidate would emerge from a contested Democrat Convention this July. We still stand by that prediction. En route to that eventuality there now appear to be several interesting scenarios that could play out. If everything that has happened this past week still isn’t enough to stop Sanders from getting the nomination, Biden could make an early announcement of a surprise running mate. In 2008, John McCain faced a very similar enthusiasm gap among his supporters when compared to Obama’s supporters. Enter Sarah Palin. McCain brought Palin in from seemingly out of nowhere. Regardless of what you may think of Sarah Palin now, in the late summer of 2008 she injected a huge shot of energy and excitement into McCain’s boring campaign. While it wasn’t enough to save him, McCain would’ve gone down to a much more devastating defeat without Palin’s presence.

In any event, it seems the next move in the chess game may now come from Sanders. He too could announce a surprise running mate early on. The possibilities are delightfully intriguing in his case. He could double down on his socialist agenda and choose someone as radical as himself. Or, he could potentially expand his voter base and try to cut into Biden’s support with a more moderate choice. In either case, Sanders is much more likely than Biden to make demographics and age the first priority in whoever he chooses.

Just like they did in 2016, the Democrat party leadership (elites, establishment, elders, former senior officials, candidates, etc.) are once again trying to bias the primary process against Sanders. Fox News contributor Juan Williams not only acknowledged and praised this activity as necessary and justified but stated that it is exactly what the Republican leadership should have done in 2016 against Trump. This is a prime example of how differently the leadership of each party adapts to a clear, but unwanted, message from the voters.

At this point in the 2016 Republican primary, the remaining candidates could also have coalesced around one single competitor to Trump. That action might well have denied Trump the nomination outright, or at the very least forced a brokered Republican convention. Although some Republicans wanted this to happen (e.g. John Kasich), it did not. That the party leadership took no action to try and force this outcome could be viewed as a mistake if you are a Trump critic (like Juan Williams). Another way to look at it though is that riding the horse with the most momentum, no matter how ugly, is a proven winning strategy. There is no substitute for genuine enthusiasm from the grass roots of the electorate. Despite all his foibles, Trump far outpaced his Republican rivals in this regard. As opposed to Juan Williams, we believe the Republican party elites ultimately recognized the reliability and energy in Trump’s supporters as providing the best chance for winning the Presidency.

In 2016, Bernie Sanders had the same kind of authentic grass roots following. However, the Democrat National Committee acted both overtly and covertly to deny Sanders any chance of being nominated.¹ The Democrat party leadership’s distaste for Sanders was so great, they completely discarded the value of all the palpable energy in Sanders’ campaign in favor of an uninspired Hillary Clinton campaign. In the end, fully 25% of Sanders supporters either didn’t vote at all in the general election or voted for someone other than Clinton (including 12% of them who actually voted for Trump instead!). Grass roots momentum can work against you as well as for you.

Is the Democrat leadership now doing the exact same thing they did four years ago? It would appear so. You can’t easily fake genuine grass roots momentum, and Joe Biden doesn’t have it. Once again, Sanders does. We’re not implying in any way that we favor the socialist philosophy that accompanies Sanders.  Far from it. But believing in our form of government, particularly the part about “of the people, by the people, for the people”², means that the people decide, come what may. We emphatically made this same point for Trump when he was elected, and it must apply equally to every candidate, regardless of party.

If last week’s power play by the anti-Sanders Democrats does result in Biden winning a plurality (but not a majority) of the primary delegates, we don’t believe Biden will emerge as the nominee from a brokered convention. In fact, we strongly believe that the DNC has already conceded the election to Trump and their goal now is to maintain control of the House and possibly pick up a Senate seat. Their calculus must be showing that If Sanders was the nominee, that new goal is in more peril than with any other candidate. Thus, Biden is merely being used as a tool to deny Sanders an outright majority of delegates. 2016-rinse-repeat. The one difference is that in 2016 Hillary Clinton was very much witting of the Sanders takedown. Today in 2020, Biden has no clue what’s really happening.

If we are right, and the DNC has already conceded this election to Trump, then why not let Sanders be the nominee? We know they fear that they will lose more than just the Presidency, namely House and Senate seats. But that may not be the outcome given the sheer number of Sanders’ supporters, especially when combined with disaffected Warren supporters. Also, given what happened in 2016, it’s more likely the Sanders’ supporters would stay home if Sanders wasn’t the nominee.

In addition, Biden’s supporters seem to be the sort that would still come out in November to vote further down the ballot even if they didn’t like Sanders on top of the ticket. That would bode well for the Democrats in the House and Senate. Lastly, if Sanders were the nominee, he would likely get trounced by Trump in the general election. That would shine the light of day on the true antipathy towards the socialist movement in this country. Such an embarrassing result could actually help unite the Democrat Party. Sanders will have gone down in utter defeat as opposed to just being pushed aside again. A crushing rout of Sanders would also dramatically weaken the outsized influence of ultra-progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her fellow squad members who identify with the same socialist ideology as Sanders. If these house members don’t get voted out this November, they will be operating from the position of a humiliating loss. A far cry from their 2018 launching pad of brash confidence that their far-left ideology was widely accepted. In effect, Sanders could be the solution to the Democrats’ biggest problem – by neutering his side of a divided party.

¹The overt part of this was best exemplified by the “superdelegates”. Superdelegates are party elites who are un-bound by any state vote totals and can support whichever candidate they choose. In 2016 they lopsidedly supported Hillary Clinton by a count of 591 – 49. The superdelegate count is added to the “pledged” delegate count to get the final primary result. Unlike superdelegates, pledged delegates are bound to the voter’s choice in each state). The “pledged” delegate count was close enough in 2016 that if the added superdelegate count was reversed, Sanders would’ve been the nominee.

²These words were spoken by Abraham Lincoln in the last sentence of his Gettysburg Address in 1863.The full sentence is: “…that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth…”