2020 Presidential race: Sanders playing by Trump’s rule book

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then the Democratic party is heaping praise on Donald Trump.

The contest to be the party’s nominee to take on the president in November is starting to resemble the race Mr Trump won four years ago to be the Republican candidate: a maverick whose views are outside the political mainstream leads a field of the party’s supposedly more electable candidates.

But they can’t unite around a single challenger and, as the primaries go on, the outsider’s position gets stronger until he becomes unstoppable.

The role of Mr Trump in the 2020 Democratic primaries is being played by Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator and self-described socialist.

On Tuesday, Mr Sanders won the primary in his neighbouring state of New Hampshire, as expected — but only just.

In a wide field, he finished with 26 per cent of the vote, holding off Pete Buttigieg, 38, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, by less than two percentage points.

In third place was Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesota senator whose campaign has finally caught fire. Elizabeth Warren, the progressive Massachusetts senator, and Joe Biden, Barack Obama’s vice-president, who just a few months ago were heavily favoured, both scored in single digits.

The socialist’s narrow victory followed a virtual tie with Mr Buttigieg in the chaotic opening contest a week ago in Iowa, where Mr Sanders ended with a similarly slim lead in votes cast over his youthful challenger.

These first two votes seem unlikely to narrow the field much. For now it is probable that all five of these candidates will press ahead through the next primaries in Nevada and South Carolina and then the big national contest on Super Tuesday, March 3, when they will be joined by the man who sat out the early races in the hope of springing a billion-dollar surprise, Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York.

Michael Bloomberg could be the billion-dollar surprise packet. Picture: Robert F. Bukaty/AP

The unusual breadth of the field, combined with the results from New Hampshire, underscores the challenge for Democrats hoping to pick a mainstream candidate to beat Mr Sanders. The candidates seen as centrist, including Mr Buttigieg, Ms Klobuchar and Mr Biden, received almost 60 per cent of the vote between them. The left, represented by senators Sanders and Warren, got just 35 per cent.

As the race unfolds, Mr Sanders may well consolidate the left wing vote around his own candidacy, and even though that may continue to be little more than a third of the total, his advantage will grow as long as the centrists remain divided. It’s worth remembering that, of the first 15 contests that helped him to win the Republican nomination in 2016, Mr Trump scored more than 40 per cent in only three.

Some Democrats take comfort in the fact that this year’s primary is being played by new rules that will allocate the delegates who decide the nominee proportionately, rather than on a winner-takes-all basis. It won’t be enough, therefore, for Mr Sanders to come out on top in a state with just a lead in votes; he’ll also need a majority.

As the primary race heads south and west, the key now may lie in the hands of ethnic minority voters. In Iowa and New Hampshire, fewer than 10 per cent of voters are from minorities, compared with almost a third of Democratic voters in the nation as a whole.

These voters tend to be more centrist and recent polling of them has shown strong support for

Democratic presidential candidate, former Vice President Joe Biden. Picture: Gerald Herbert/AP

Mr Biden, a lifelong campaigner for civil rights and Mr Obama’s loyal deputy. His campaign continues to cling to the hope that they will deliver him enough votes to put him back in contention after a disastrous showing in the first two contests.

But if the former vice-president’s campaign doesn’t revive, where are these voters likely to go? This may be more grim news for the challengers to Mr Sanders.

Mr Buttigieg fares poorly with African-Americans in part because of a controversial record of policing while he was mayor. He’s also a married gay man which doesn’t go down well with many culturally conservative black voters. Senator Klobuchar faces a similar problem from her time as a public prosecutor in Minnesota. But Mr Bloomberg may face the toughest challenge of all. As mayor of New York, he was responsible for a policy of “stop and frisk”, a policing tactic that targeted young blacks. Opinion polls had suggested his support among minority voters was recovering after he apologised for the policy. It also helped him to win endorsements from three prominent black members of Congress this week.

But a leaked recording of him defending the policy in language that appeared to suggest crime was mainly a black issue may yet harm him.

While Mr Sanders lost heavily among ethnic minority voters to Hillary Clinton in the contest for the Democratic nomination 2016, he is well enough liked, as are his policies to boost health and education for the poorest.

In the weeks ahead, the tough task for Mr Sanders’s opponents will be to convince voters he’s simply not electable. But that didn’t work out for Mr Trump’s challengers four years ago, did it?

The Times