2020 Race: Joe Biden vs Bernie Sanders: unite or fight?

It isn’t hard to imagine a Joe Biden administration in which Kamala Harris is vice president, Michael Bloomberg is treasury secretary, Pete Buttigieg is homeland security secretary, Tom Steyer is climate-change tsar and Andrew Yang is commerce secretary — or, well, maybe special envoy for math and numbers and stuff like that.

It is, on the other hand, almost impossible to imagine a Bernie Sanders administration in which that same group of former competitors would unite.

In a nutshell, that illustrates the most basic choice Democrats face now that Mr Biden’s candidacy was revived in South Carolina’s primary just before this week’s Super Tuesday primaries. MrSanders talks of waging a pitched battle against the status quo of both parties, culminating in a revolution. Mr Biden proposes a return to the kind of calm and normalcy that prevailed before the arrival of President Trump.

So, are Democrats in 2020 looking for somebody who promises to fight, or somebody who promises to unite?

Mr Biden framed the choice precisely this way in the speech he delivered after his decisive South Carolina victory Saturday night, perhaps the most definitive address of his candidacy to date: “Winning means uniting America, not sowing more division and anger. It means not only fighting but healing the country. We have to beat Donald Trump and the Republican party. But here’s the deal: We can’t become like them.”

In a sense, this is the choice that has been before Democrats throughout the presidential primary season. Mr Trump calculated in 2016 that the country was in such an angry and antiestablishment mood that a dystopian candidacy that both acknowledged and stoked that anger would prevail.

He was right, and in his own way Mr Sanders is making the same calculation from the other side of the partisan and ideological divide. He also is calculating that working-class anger at “the establishment” is the animating emotion running through the heart of the electorate, and he is adding in a dose of millennial disenchantment as well.

Like Mr Trump, Mr Sanders is barely a member of the party whose nomination he seeks, and has no hesitancy about taking on and alienating the leaders of that party. The Trump and Sanders candidacies have more in common than either man would like to admit.

Joe Biden at his primary night election event in Columbia, South Carolina. Picture: AFP.

Mr Biden offers a quite different proposition. Yes, he says, he will fight for the working man and working woman, but he can get them what they need via evolutionary change rather than revolutionary upheaval — and even by working with Republicans along the way. At its base, it is an argument for realism, and for the proposition that most Americans are tired of the raw divides of the Trump era.

Is that what Democrats really want to hear? We don’t know the answer to that question yet, and the evidence from the early results of this primary season is inconclusive.

Sen. Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar all tried, to one degree or another, to frame themselves as unifying candidates and found that kind of message didn’t do the trick. Mr Booker dropped out in January, MrButtigieg on Sunday and Ms. Klobuchar on Monday.

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg also is offering himself as a candidate who can unite America and Americans with a moderate message and style, yet also has found that his personal profile is divisive rather than unifying for many Democrats. The first live test of the Bloomberg proposition comes on Tuesday’s ballots.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren enjoyed an early surge with a fighting message much like Mr Sanders’s, but she seems to be finding that there’s room for only one liberal warrior in this race.

The choice before Democrats has often, perhaps most often, been portrayed as a choice between liberal policies and more-moderate policies, and that certainly is true. But this choice between a fighting message and a unifying one is equally stark, and may be even more important. Political pros and pundits obsess about ideology and position papers; often average voters decide based more on mood and attitude.

So now these competing visions face a nationwide reckoning on Super Tuesday this week, when 14 states from coast to coast vote. That still may not be the full or final test of the choice.

Many voters in California, Texas and Colorado cast ballots early, before the Biden bounce in South Carolina made his candidacy and message look newly viable. Mr Sanders already had put in a lot of work there.

So here’s a pro tip: Watch the live voting in North Carolina and Virginia, both of which are big and middle-of-the-road enough to provide a real test of the mood.

The Wall St Journal