If you’ve been following the Democratic presidential primary and were surprised by Bernie Sanders’s exit this week, it might be because pundits misled you about the strength of his campaign, Keith Boag writes.
“It was always going to be Joe Biden,” said U.S. campaign professional Joe Trippi, who has advised Democrats for decades.
Trippi stayed out of the primary campaign this season, but he’s seen enough of them to know that there’s always a gut-check moment when he says Democrats ask themselves this hard question before committing their vote: “Holy crap, are we really gonna do that?”
Former vice-president Biden is the presumptive 2020 nominee because he passed the gut check. His rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders, isn’t because he didn’t. At least, that’s part of the story.
If you’ve been following the Democratic presidential primary and yet were surprised when it tidily wrapped up with Sanders’s exit this week, that might be because the punditocracy generally misled you, once again, about the strength of the Sanders campaign.
Pundits overcorrected
The first time Sanders ran for president, in 2016, pundits wrote him off as too far left, before anyone had cast a single primary vote. But Sanders turned out to be a formidable challenger to front-runner Hillary Clinton.
The pundits got it wrong again this year when they overcorrected and very nearly handed Sanders the nomination while there was still snow on the ground in New Hampshire, apparently believing the party was moving inexorably in Sanders’s direction.
The “garbage in, garbage out” rule means any analysis built on those two mistaken assumptions is probably wrong, too. So there is some rethinking going on about why Sanders was underestimated in 2016 and overestimated in 2020; what really happened and what it means for the party in the general election in November.
As they did in 2016, some Sanders supporters claim that their man was railroaded out of the nomination by a party establishment disdainful of his grassroots movement.
After Sanders dropped out Wednesday, for instance, his national press secretary, Briahna Joy Gray, suggested Biden had been installed as the nominee by the Democratic Party leadership. She also retweeted a Fox News clip that asked whether Biden could “find his car in a three-tiered parking garage” or “navigate a salad bar,” let alone lead the country.
Bernie was too kind to go after Biden, but it’s coming.
Either Dem leadership cares more abt maintaining a corporate status quo than getting rid of Trump, or they’re planning to replace Joe – adopting a pretty fast and loose relationship w/ representative Democracy.
Lose lose. https://t.co/mzQYMjM2Nc
But if you cross-check the 2020 primary results with the 2016 results, it’s clear why Sanders isn’t the nominee: in every primary election — every single one — Sanders did worse this time than he did last time, sometimes a lot worse.