Super Tuesday: Now it’s Bernie v Biden
Super Tuesday has sorted the possibles from the probables, but it’s too early for the former VP to think only about Trump.
“It’s a good night and it seems to be getting even better. They don’t call it Super Tuesday for nothing.
“Folks, things are looking awful, awful good. For those who’ve been knocked down, counted out, this is your campaign.
“We’re very much alive and, make no mistake about it, this campaign will send Donald Trump packing.”
Super Tuesday was a spectacular triumph for the 77-year-old former vice-president, marking one of the great comebacks in US politics.
Yet it is too early for Biden to think only about Trump.
Bernie Sanders, the 78-year-old democratic socialist, remains in the fight for the Democratic nomination but this race — in the space of 24 hours — has been turned upside down. Incredibly, Biden is now the favourite after being written off by many only two weeks ago.
Yet Sanders still won in the biggest state, California, a huge prize that will keep him highly competitive in the weeks ahead.
Bye-bye, Bloomberg
The Biden-Sanders tussle may become so close that no candidate gets the 50 per cent needed to automatically claim the party’s nomination at the Democratic National Convention in July.
What Super Tuesday also revealed was that billionaire Michael Bloomberg will not be the next president. Despite spending an extraordinary $US400m-plus ($600m-plus) in advertising on his campaign, the former New York mayor did not win a single state.
Bloomberg tried to put a positive spin on things, saying: “In just three months we’ve gone from 1 per cent in the polls to being a contender for the Democratic nomination for president.”
But while he claimed publicly that he would stay in the fight, it is almost certain that he will withdraw, possibly within days, to avoid being blamed for taking votes from his fellow moderate in Biden.
Super Tuesday also told us that Elizabeth Warren will not be president. She failed to win a single state or attract much support in any of them. She even lost her home state, Massachusetts, to Biden.
For Biden, the Super Tuesday results continue his fairytale-like resurgence.
Just a few weeks ago his campaign for the presidency seemed all but over. His lacklustre, bumbling performances on the campaign trail saw him easily beaten by his rivals in the first three contests in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada.
But two things changed his fortunes. The first was his thumping landslide victory in South Carolina, a win that turned heads in a Democratic Party that had been wondering which of the moderate candidates would pose the biggest challenge to the frontrunner Sanders.
The second factor was the decision by Biden’s former rivals and fellow moderates Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar to quit the race and throw their support behind him.
This not only anointed Biden as the moderate candidate to take on Sanders, it also put Bloomberg in the awkward position of accidentally being the spoiler for the moderates if he stayed in the race.
Biden’s pitch seeks to appeal to Democrats who want a reset to the policies and norms of the Obama era and a return to a more stable government that would seek to overcome divisions in congress and repudiate the abrasive style of Trump.
Unsuccessful tilts
Biden has campaigned heavily on the message that he is the best placed Democratic candidate to defeat the President. Professionally he touts his long record in congress including his eight years as vice-president to Barack Obama. Personally he touts his midwest, working-class upbringing and his ability to appeal in vital swing states such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.
But he also has had a long list of unsuccessful tilts at president. After announcing his first bid for president in 1987, Biden dropped out less than four months later, admitting he lifted passages of a speech by a British politician.
In the 2008 race he took his second shot at the Oval Office and finished fifth in the Iowa caucuses, receiving less than 1 per cent of the vote before quitting the race.
His life also has been hit by a series of personal tragedies.
As vice-president to Obama, Biden agonised for weeks over whether to run for president in 2015 in the months after the death of his son, former Delaware attorney-general Beau Biden. He decided to stand down as his family was grieving.
As a newly sworn-in senator, Biden also lost his wife and young daughter in a car crash that also badly injured Beau and his other son, Hunter.
By the time of this, his third presidential bid, Biden had established himself as the party’s most prominent moderate.
The decision by Buttigieg and Klobuchar to quit the race and back Biden has underpinned just how fearful they and other moderate Democrats are about Sanders winning the nomination.
They fear that Sanders’s big-spending, high-taxing agenda and his self-description as a socialist would make him an easy target for Trump in the November election.
Trump and Republican leaders have made it clear they would prefer Sanders to be the nominee.
The President attacked the recent push by moderates including Buttigieg and Klobuchar to close ranks around Biden, accusing the Democrats of rigging their system to try to deny Sanders the nomination.
Tom Emmer, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, has made clear what Republicans think of a potential Sanders candidacy.
“The Democrats’ embrace of socialism is going to cost them their majority — I mean, it’s as simple as that,” Emmer said. “Bernie is about as good a contrast as we could ever have hoped for.”
The argument put forward by moderate Democrats against a Sanders candidacy goes like this. His far-left agenda, in the context of American politics, will never be embraced by anyone except the Sanders base, which is the left wing of the Democratic Party and unrepresentative of mainstream Americans.
They say that to recapture the White House, Democrats need to keep winning back those moderate voters, especially from the suburbs of midwestern towns, who switched to Trump in 2016.
In the 2018 midterm elections, the Democrats won back enough of these voters to control the House of Representatives. That was a victory powered by moderate Democratic voters, not the liberal voters to whom Sanders appeals.
The argument goes that Sanders’s agenda is too extreme to win over these moderate swinging voters and that his policies will scare them into voting for Trump or not voting at all.
So what scares moderate voters about Sanders’s agenda?
What’s so scary?
The main bogey is his sweeping Medicare-for-all proposal that would create a universal healthcare system but that also would abolish the option of private health insurance.
Sanders says such a system is not radical because many Western nations have universal healthcare. But countries such as Australia and Britain have a universal system while also offering the choice of private health insurance for those who want it. Sanders also admits that middle-class taxes would rise to underwrite the Medicare-for-all system.
Yet polls consistently show that Americans want the option to keep their private health insurance, which often is provided by their employers.
A recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll found 58 per cent of Americans were opposed to eliminating private health insurance while 60 per cent opposed paying higher taxes for healthcare.
“The suburbs are not looking for a revolution,” says Matt Bennett, co-founder of the centre-left think tank Third Way.
“They want change, for sure. Many of them loathe Trump with a burning passion but they do not want somebody who is proposing to double the size of the federal government. They do not want somebody who is proposing to take away the healthcare of 180 million people.”
Moderates question how Sanders would pay for his program which also includes free college tuition, wiping out student debt, strong action to curb climate change and raising the minimum wage to $US15 an hour.
Experts estimate that Sanders’s major proposals could cost a stunning $US60 trillion, effectively doubling the size of the government.
When asked to put a price tag on his promises, Sanders does not give an answer and admits he does not know.
“Well, I can’t — you know — I can’t rattle off to you every nickel and every dime,” he said when asked about his costings in an interview last month.
Moderates also worry that Sanders himself is too divisive and inflexible to appeal to voters beyond his young, passionate base. Unlike Biden, he shows little empathy on the campaign trail, rarely interacts personally with voters and appears constantly angry at the world around him.
Sanders, who has been in congress since 1991 and a senator since 2007, is also unpopular within the Democratic Party, of which he has never been a member.
“He was in congress for years,” Hillary Clinton said in a withering attack in January. “He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. It’s all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.”
But Sanders is dismissive of the moderates’ concerns. He maintains that Biden and Bloomberg are mistaken to run “conventional campaigns” and that voters want “energy and excitement” and a big, transformative agenda of change, not a return to the status quo.
“We need to change the power structure in America,” Sanders says. “We need to end the political oligarchy. If you want to beat Trump, what you’re going to need is an unprecedented grassroots movement of black and white and Latino, Native American and Asian, people who are standing up and fighting for justice. That’s what our movement is about.”
Battle of outsiders
Sanders says the vast majority of polls show him defeating Trump in a match-up.
His supporters point out that he is the only one of the Democrat candidates who has created a genuine movement around his message that exudes energy and passion, with big arena rallies and an army of young millennial volunteers.
They say Sanders’s message is one that will appeal to Trump’s “forgotten people” — angry, disaffected working-class voters. They say that this, combined with Sanders’s strong appeal to a new generation of millennials, is enough to propel their man to victory over Trump.
Just like Trump, Sanders sells himself as an outsider willing to combat the corrupt and broken system of Washington and, again like Trump, he commands a large and ferociously loyal army of supporters.
The Wall Street Journal warned in a recent editorial that Republicans should not be lured into believing that Sanders would be easy for Trump to beat.
“Republicans shouldn’t be too sanguine that Mr Sanders would make an easy September mark,” the editorial said. “A majority of Americans aren’t socialist, at least not yet, but the country is closely divided politically. Democrats and the media will close ranks behind Mr Sanders as an alternative to the incumbent.”
Until last week Sanders appeared to be cruising towards the nomination after his early wins in New Hampshire and Nevada and a close second in Iowa.
But Biden’s remarkable comeback has recast this race. There is still a long way to go and Sanders’s campaign has the resources and grassroots strength to test Biden, whose campaign is relatively poor and threadbare by comparison.
But moderate Democratic voters have finally awakened to what they see as the potential danger of Sanders. This race is far from over.
Cameron Stewart is also US contributor for Sky News Australia.
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“Folks, we can do this,” a beaming Joe Biden told the screaming crowd in Los Angeles that had just watched most of the 14 states of the Super Tuesday primaries fall his way.