P O L I T I C S
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Edited by
Amanda HurleyBloomberg Businessweek March 9, 2020Joe Biden’s Very
Good Night
● The candidate’s comeback
defied expectations. But he still
has a long way to goBill Clinton dubbed himself “The Comeback
Kid” after experts wrote him off early in the 1992
Democratic primaries. After the Super Tuesday
primaries on March 3, Joe Biden can lay claim
to the nickname. Left for dead after dreadful
finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire, the former
vice president came storming back to edge
Bernie Sanders in the delegate lead and narrow
the race for the Democratic nomination to a two-
man affair. Appearing onstage in Los Angeles,
Biden, always prone to overstatement, for once
undersold the scale of his victory. “We are very
much alive,” he declared.
The emergence of Biden and Sanders presents
Democratic voters with a stark choice about how
best to take on Donald Trump in the fall: Pick
Biden and follow the moderate path that delivered
Democrats huge suburban gains in 2018 and con-
trol of the House of Representatives—or tack left to
embrace Sanders’s message of generational change.
For some Democrats, that quandary summons
up memories of another recent presidential pri-
mary, one they’d like to forget. With the field
narrowing to an establishment favorite and a liberal
insurgent, some strategists fear the primary contest
could soon mirror the contentious clash four years
ago between Sanders and Hillary Clinton.
“What worries me is that we’re looking at a 2016
redux,” says Rebecca Katz, a progressive strategist,
“where the nominee limped into Election Day and
then lost to Donald Trump.”
Entering Super Tuesday, the preoccupying
concern among most Democratic lawmakers and
party officials was that moderate support hadn’t yetcoalesced around any single candidate. That prob-
lem has disappeared, aided by the exit of former
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg from the race
on March 4. (Bloomberg is founder and majority
owner of Bloomberg LP, which owns Bloomberg
Businessweek.) Biden’s surge creates a different
challenge for a party that must unite if it hopes to
prevail in November.
In deciding between Sanders and Biden,
Democrats are effectively choosing between the
past and the future of the party. On Tuesday night,
Biden’s ties to Barack Obama and his promise to
restore American politics to the era of relative
civility that existed before Trump won the day. As
Democratic strategist Addisu Demissie said, Biden,
who tirelessly invokes his affiliation with “Barack,”
managed to reconstitute most of the former presi-
dent’s key groups of support—not only seniors and
African Americans, but also the white-collar sub-
urban voters who powered the party’s gains two
years ago. That represents, Demissie noted, “a
pretty formidable coalition.”
Yet Biden is still missing one vital compo-
nent of Obama’s support that proved decisive in
pastpresidential elections: young people. He’s
consistently failed to attract younger and even
middle-aged voters, leading some Democrats
to question whether he can ultimately generate
enough excitement to defeat Trump. “Moderation
is not what gets people out to vote,” Katz says. “We
lost with Clinton, Kerry, and Gore. You win when
you do something different.”
Younger voters have instead flocked to Sanders,
who’s built a committed following beyond what he
drew in 2016 that now includes working-class voters
and Latinos. Collectively, they represent the future
of the Democratic Party. Sanders showed the pos-
sibility of this coalition by decisively winning the
Feb. 22 caucus in Nevada, a state whose demo-
graphics more closely resemble those of the