The Washington Post - 11.03.2020

a8 eZ M2 K the washington post.wednesday, march 11 , 2020

to leverage that,” s he said. “Now is the time to ask for accountability. And now is the time to ask for commitments — real commitments — not just gestures.” S anders’s inability to grow his coalition at this moment was especially damaging given that a central premise of his candidacy i s that he will expand the electorate, attracting young people and oth- ers new to politics. T hat, in t heory, would compensate for his chal- lenge i n attracting more tradition- al Democrats. But while Biden has rounded up support from former candidates from the party’s centrist wing, Sanders has been unable thus far to win the backing of Warren, a fellow liberal and a prominent figure in the Demo- cratic Party. relations b etween the t wo were strained earlier this year by a dis- pute about a private conversation before the campaign began, when Warren c ontends Sanders told h er a woman could not win the presi- dency, something he sharply de- nies s aying. Instead, Sanders sought to rely on prominent liberals who are already in his corner to help him turn things around, for example campaigning Sunday with o casio-Cortez in Ann Arbor, mich. on the trail a nd in an interview, ocasio-Cortez struck a more inclusive chord than many other Sanders s upporters, talking about the need to build a broad liberal movement that goes beyond indi- vidual candidates. “We have to do that from a fundamentally i nclusive a nd posi- tive a nd welcoming gesture, a welcoming kind of position,” o casio-Cortez said. Declining to urge Warren to endorse Sanders, she said, “I don’t think it’s about telling anybody what to do. I t hink it’s about, how do we invite people, and how do we make our movement bigger, and how do we adapt it to be as inclusive a possi- ble while retaining our v alues.” The past week showcased how much the Sanders campaign is an unruly coalition rather than a tight operation, as allies voiced various conflicting theories about what he needed to do. Some said Sanders needs to show a more personal side, a re- curring suggestion that Sanders has repeatedly been reluctant or unable to embrace. “He has g ot to really speak from the heart to people,” s aid roseAnn Demoro, a close friend of Sanders who emailed the senator and his wife last week encouraging this more personal pitch. “We’re going up against sharks,” s he added, and Sanders s hould “tell America w ho he is.” The campaign has also experi- enced a push-and-pull over strate- gic decisions, debating in recent days whether to release internal polling showing a competitive race with Biden in michigan, for example, according to p eople with knowledge of the situation. In the end, the campaign did not release any polling d ata, opting not to risk setting expectations and then fall- ing short. By the end of Tuesday, Sanders had been dealt a significant loss i n michigan, leaving his path forward m ore uncertain than e ver. [email protected]

Jose a. Del real and David weigel contributed to this report.

Super Tuesday, some felt that in- cluded millions of Democratic voters, as well as Buttigieg, the onetime mayor of South Bend, Ind., and Klobuchar, a senator from minnesota. “one of the things that I was kind of not surprised by is the power of the establishment to force Amy Klobuchar, who had worked so hard, Pete Buttigieg, who, you know, really worked ex- tremely hard as well, out of the race,” Sanders said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” He said the Democratic establishment wanted to ensure “that people co- alesced a round Biden.” That prompted a stern reply from one of Buttigieg’s top campaign aides, Lis Smith, who wrote on Twitter t hat the f ormer mayor’s decision “was his and h is a lone.” But speaking on NBC the same day, Sanders said that had Butt- igieg and Klobuchar not dropped out, he would have won massa- chusetts, minnesota and maine — all states where Biden prevailed last week. It was his most direct acknowledgment of the campaign’s long-held belief that a fractured Democratic field would deliver him victory. Instead, the losses in those states had a chilling effect on some Sanders advisers, who were privately alarmed that Biden won in places where he did not even campaign. The sense of fatalism grew Tuesday night. ocasio-Cortez, speaking on Instagram Live after the results began coming in, enu- merated the left’s recent wins and appeared to suggest a landscape beyond Sanders. “Now is the time

those terrible trade agreements.” Then he took aim at one of Biden’s chief selling points — electability. “my point here is to ask you to think that in a general election, which candidate can generate the enthusiasm and the excitement?” Sanders said. But while Sanders made this relatively straightforward case, some supporters took to social media to lob attacks that struck some Democrats as uglier, going after Biden’s cognitive abilities. Among them was Shaun King, a prominent Black Lives matter ac- tivist who has introduced Sanders at s ome events. “It’s genuinely abusive at this point to hand this man a micro- phone and ask him to interact with people,” King wrote Sunday on Twitter, retweeting a message alleging that Biden’s “brain stops working for a few seconds” in a video clip. “It’s painful to watch.” In an interview, King defended his critique, arguing that primaries ought to put candidates through a “gantlet of examina- tions” and assess how they would fare i n debates against Trump. “I don’t a pprove of p eople mak- ing armchair medical diagnoses, but like, I do see Biden and he is a diminished version of his best self,” said King. “It’s kind of the elephant i n the room.” That l ine o f attack echoed shots at Biden taken by the Trump camp, a point not lost on some other Democrats. And it met resis- tance from other Sanders supporters who preferred that the contrasts remain in the realm of policy. Biden, who has often stumbled

Some in the Sanders campaign
have a dopted a similar credo. Two
top campaign officials spent
hours working the phones late
Saturday night to finalize a cov-
eted new endorsement from civil
rights icon Jesse Jackson. But on
Tuesday night, it was clear that
Sanders’s overarching approach
was in trouble. Punctuating the
week since Super Tuesday, Biden
scored resounding wins in michi-
gan and three other states, mov-
ing closer to a daunting lead in
delegates.
Sanders’s losses a week earlier
had created a moment of reckon-
ing for a campaign that was well-
suited for a fractured field but
ill-prepared for a swift consolida-
tion by his opponents. Sanders
campaign officials for months had
talked up the power of their limit-
ed but passionate following in a
crowded race where the opposi-
tion w as split.
When the party rallied around
Biden almost overnight, it was a
gut punch and the campaign
struggled to recover. Sanders al-
lies were especially stunned by
how fast Pete Buttigieg and Sen.
Amy Klobuchar, two prominent
centrists, dropped out and en-
dorsed Biden.
“You basically had the most un-
precedented event happening in
the history of presidential prima-
ries,” said Sanders pollster Ben
Tulchin. “Coming out of that un-
precedented event, we had to re-
tool and focus on the march 10
and march 17 s tates.”
The campaign threw all it had
into winning michigan, a dele-
gate-rich state where Sanders
landed his biggest upset four
years ago against Hillary Clinton.
If Sanders could show he was
stronger t han Biden in a state that
was key to President Trump’s vic-
tory, t he campaign would be back,
officials believed. If not, they rec-
ognized, Sanders would face the
kind of serious trouble he found
himself i n Tuesday night.
When the campaign scrapped
plans for Sanders to spend time in
mississippi in favor of michigan, it
signaled to many Democrats that
he was effectively giving up on
black voters in the South, who
have s trongly f avored Biden.
At the same time, campaign
officials drew up a plan for Sand-
ers to step up his attacks on the
former vice president, sending a
memo to supporters even before
Super Tuesday declaring a new
phase in the fight and releasing a
TV ad that attacked Biden by
name for t he first time.
As the former vice president
racked up new endorsements
each day, portraying himself as a
unifying force and the increasing-
ly inevitable nominee, Sanders,
who associates say is less comfort-
able directly attacking Biden or
anyone else than talking up his
own record, opened u p new fronts
against his chief rival, seeking to
undercut him on gay rights and
abortion rights.
At a rally monday in St. Louis,
Sanders ticked off a litany of is-
sues on which he said Biden had
been wrong. “Joe Biden voted for
the war in Iraq. I voted against t he
war in Iraq,” he said. “Joe Biden
voted for the Wall Street bailout. I
helped lead the effort against the
Wall Street bailout. Joe voted for
disastrous trade agreements.... I
helped lead the effort against

sanders from a

election 2020

BY AARON BLAKE

former vice president Joe
Biden continued Tuesday night
on his trajectory toward the
Democratic presidential
nomination with wins in
michigan, mississippi, missouri
and, late into the night, Idaho.
The wins meant Biden would
extend his delegate lead over
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) one
week after initially gaining it on
Super Tuesday, even as two states
voting Tuesday had yet to be
called: North Dakota and
Washington.
Here are some takeaways.

The delegate gap widens

We don’t yet know the full
results, but we can say with
confidence that Biden’s delegate
lead will grow substantially once
we get them all. That’s because of
both the wins — early-called
michigan, mississippi and
missouri made up 63 percent of
the delegates available Tuesday
— and the margins of victory.
michigan and missouri were
very close between Sanders and
Hillary Clinton in 2016, but the
margins Tuesday were so big that
Biden was called the winner in
both shortly after polls closed.
There was also an outside shot
that Sanders would fail to clear
the 15 percent threshold for

delegates in mississippi, which would be yet another big setback for him, despite the state’s relatively small number of delegates (36). When you throw all of that on top of the fact that the slow- counting California primary hasn’t produced the kind of delegate comeback Sanders was hoping for in the days after Super Tuesday, you start to see a yawning gap in the delegate race. All that remains to be seen now is how much the margin increased.

Michigan giveth, and
Michigan taketh away
The Wolverine State was
Sanders’s ticket to the party in
2016, with his shocking upset
there — after polls showed him
down by double digits — serving
notice after Super Tuesday that
Democratic voters weren’t quite
ready to anoint Clinton. on
Tuesday, it may have served the
opposite function.
one of the more interesting
findings in the early exit polls
was this: Among voters who
decided on their candidate
before this month, Sanders took
a majority of voters, compared
with Biden’s 4 in 10. But about
half of voters said they decided
this month — i.e., after Biden
began his comeback with a big

win in South Carolina — and they went for Biden more than 2 to 1. In other words, Sanders was arguably primed to win the michigan primary just 11 days ago, and then things changed significantly. It’s an especially big win for Biden because he did it statewide and with surging turnout. While 1.2 million people voted in the state in the 2016 Democratic primary, that number was estimated at 1.7 million Tuesday. Part of that could have been that there was no competitive republican primary. In a state that Democrats badly need to win in the general election after losing it narrowly in 2016, expect Biden to make that part of his pitch: I can get voters to the polls in michigan, because I just did it.

sanders hits his
demographic wall again
It was incumbent upon
Sanders at the start of this race to
build on his 2016 coalition — or
hope for the crowded race to last
longer. But now that the field is
down to two candidates, two very
familiar and potentially fatal
problems remain for Sanders.
The first is his performance
among black voters. His inability
to win them over in 2016 was
pretty much fatal in his race

against Clinton. And now that it’s just him and Biden, the story is virtually the same. In mississippi, he took 11 percent of the black vote in 2016 and was taking 13 percent on Tuesday, according to exit polls. In missouri, he took 32 percent in 2016 and was taking 28 percent on Tuesday. In michigan, he moved from 28 percent four years ago to 29 percent on Tuesday. The other is his reliance upon younger voters. Sanders’s campaign has argued that he can win in the general election because of his unusual appeal to this low-turnout group, but thus far that hasn’t panned out in the earliest contests. And it deserted him again on Tuesday. Voters between 18 and 44 were 40 percent of the vote in mississippi in 2016, but just 31 percent on Tuesday. In missouri, they were 41 percent in 2016 and 33 percent on Tuesday. In michigan, youth turnout was the reason he pulled a shocking upset in 2016, but 18-to-44-year- olds’ share of the vote dropped from 45 percent then to 38 percent on Tuesday. Given that, Sanders needed to expand his appeal to older people and to working-class white voters, but he’s regressed on both of those, too.

The calendar is turning in
Biden’s direction
As ominous for Sanders as
what happened on Tuesday night
was this: It might have been his
best shot at actually getting back
in the race this month.
In 2016, Sanders carried four
of the six states that were up
Tuesday — the three yet-to-be-
determined states and michigan.
He also came within 0.25 percent
in missouri. The opportunity was
there, but he lost ground.
Next week, by contrast, the
primaries will be Arizona,
florida, Illinois and ohio.
Sanders lost all of them in 2016,
including three of the four by
double digits. All of them are
demographically tough for him,
for varying reasons, and all of
them are relatively big delegate
prizes, with about 200 more
delegates at stake than there
were on Tuesday night.
Then the week after that
comes Georgia, a state with a
large black population and many
delegates.
In other words, it becomes
very difficult to see how Biden
doesn’t come out of this month
with a very large delegate prize.
Sanders needs to do something
to change the race in a big way,
but it’s not clear that he has the
opportunity over the next two
weeks.

Also consider this: The only states Sanders has won east of the mississippi river are his home state of Vermont and the neighboring state of New Hampshire, which was very close. There simply aren’t enough people in the western part of the country for Sanders, especially with California out of the way.

Biden’s electability case
grows
It wasn’t just the surge in
turnout in michigan. Biden’s
wins also spanned the
Democratic electorate in one
very significant way.
The following is true in all
three states that Biden won early
Tuesday night: He won
nonwhites who both went to
college and didn’t — no surprise
there — but he also won both
whites who went to college and
those who didn’t. The closest he
came to losing any of them was
in michigan, where non-college
whites were somewhat close.
You can’t directly translate
primary results to the general
election, but for a Democratic
Party that is twitchy about
putting forward an electable
candidate, you could do a lot
worse than showing that kind of
appeal to all corners of the party.
[email protected]

analysis

The bad omens are s tacking up for Sanders’s presidential candidacy

campaign announced the endorsement and the pledges Sun- day, Sanders called it “one of the honors of my l ife.” It was a significant win, given Jackson’s decades-long promi- nence as a civil rights leader. Ye t Sanders’s efforts to improve his standing among black voters h ave been awkward in r ecent days. As Khanna and Turner worked to finalize the Jackson endorsement, Sanders appeared in flint, mich., at a n event billed as a town h all on racial justice.

Ye t of the 1,200 attendees, only about three dozen were black. Then the senator decided at the last minute not to deliver his planned speech contrasting his record with Biden’s on racial justice issues — because, a spokes- man said, he wanted to let the African American panelists on- stage speak about their own expe- riences. Still, the effect was to suggest that Sanders continues to be un- comfortable delving personally into issues that affect black people’s l ives. Alongside these fumbling efforts to court black voters, Sand- ers was lumping many who o p- posed him into his derision toward the “establishment.” After

over his words, released a letter from his doctor last year describ- ing him as a “healthy, vigorous 77-year-old male.” He has also opened up about overcoming a stutter. “I’ve made it very clear that I don’t think trying to make these health arguments is fair,” s aid Ab- dul El-Sayed, a 2018 candidate for governor of michigan who cam- paigned with Sanders o n monday. “We’ve got to focus on the i ssues.” other Sanders supporters were also f ocusing on trying to win new

allies, with rep. ro Khanna (D- Calif.) at t he forefront o f the effort. In a ddition to going out o f his way to praise the party publicly, Khan- na worked with Nina Turner, his fellow Sanders c ampaign co-chair, to finalize the Jackson endorsement, according to people with knowledge of the situation, who spoke on the condition of ano- nymity to be candid about the internal discussions. The duo spent several hours speaking with Jackson and his inner circle Saturday night, following up on a call Jackson made call to Turner on march 3. They helped finalize commitments on the Sanders campaign’s part to address issues important to Jack- son, the people said. When the

“I’ve made it very clear that I don’t think trying

to make these [Biden] health arguments is fair.

We’ve got to focus on the issues.” abdul El-sayed, 2 018 Michigan gubernatorial candidate and sanders backer

All-out but unsuccessful quest in

Michigan embodies Sanders s lide

salwan georges/the washington Post sen. Bernie sanders leaves a polling station Tuesday in dearborn Heights, Mich., after speaking to supporters and journalists there. sanders, who narrowly won Michigan in the 2016 democratic presidential primary, lost decisively there Tuesday to Joe Biden.

The Washington Post - 11.03.2020

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