Sanders Was a Big Step Forward for Leftism—But Where Does It Go From Here?

Bernie Sanders officially suspended his 2020 presidential campaign on Wednesday, choosing not to contest the Democratic primaries all the way to the end of the calendar as he had done in 2016. It may seem in retrospect as if Sanders's second campaign was less successful than his first, since his support fell below its 2016 level in every state that voted after Super Tuesday and he dropped out of the race much sooner this time around. Yet Sanders achieved something important in 2020 that he never did four years ago: a temporary status as the favorite for the nomination during the two-and-a-half weeks between the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries, before Joe Biden's sudden resurgence blocked his path. It's likely that Sanders's two presidential bids, taken together, represent an important milestone in American politics. But it's impossible to know right now how important they will turn out to be.

After each of his candidacies, some analysts confidently declared that Sanders—despite his present-day defeats—nevertheless represents the future of the Democratic Party. This blog has consistently been skeptical of that argument, and it remains so today. Even if Sanders had managed to win the 2020 race, it would have been a testament to the complexities and contingencies of multi-candidate nomination politics more than the expression of a fundamental shift in the preferences of Democratic voters. And if Sanders had gone on to lose the general election to Donald Trump, there would have been substantial backlash within the party against his brand of politics.

Sanders found more success running for president than many people anticipated—and more success than any left-wing candidate achieved since Jesse Jackson, if not George McGovern. But as these historical parallels suggest, temporary breakthroughs do not inevitably lead to long-term transformations. Sanders has given leftism (a word I use in a non-pejorative sense to distinguish Sanders-style politics from the conventional Obama-Biden liberalism now prevailing within the Democratic mainstream) its best opportunity in at least a generation to establish itself as a persistently influential force in American politics, even if it remains unlikely to succeed in remaking the entire Democratic Party in its own image. But opportunities can be squandered, and they often have been before.

Sanders's most obvious contribution to the leftist cause is demonstrating that millions of Americans can be mobilized to support—and support passionately, with generous financial contributions—a political candidate who identifies himself as a socialist and who advocates a comprehensively left-wing set of issue positions that would, especially in the economic realm, represent a break from the thrust of American policy-making over at least the past 40 years. He diverted the attention of activists on the left who have often remained aloof from electoral politics to the potential benefits of seeking power through that means. And he (very sensibly) used the vehicle of a major party to do so, illustrating the self-defeating pointlessness of leftism's previous third-party dalliances by winning nearly four times as many total votes in one-and-a-half nomination contests as the Green Party has won over the past six general elections.

Sanders also introduced new or long-absent policy positions into the realm of public debate. Whether or not student debt forgiveness, a federal jobs guarantee, or six months of paid family leave are ever implemented in the United States, the necessary first step toward enactment is for a candidate to build a campaign around them. A political journalistic class that does not naturally welcome discussions of economic inequality and fairness has been compelled by Sanders's campaigns to acknowledge these subjects to a much greater degree than it did in preceding decades.

But Sanders also exposed some of the continued political weakness of American leftism even in a moment of relative triumph, so it's worth considering what else would need to happen for his candidacies to become the start of a larger revolution (as it were). Simply pointing at the age distribution of Sanders's support and claiming that the left wing can just wait to inherit the Democratic Party from its more moderate elders isn't very convincing. At any given historical moment, lefties can be prone to assuming that the enthusiasm of youthful activists for their cause is a sign that popular victory is just around the generational corner, but it's worth considering how many baby boomers who were marching in the streets in the 1960s and 1970s aged to become supporters of Joe Biden—or, for that matter, of Donald Trump.

While Sanders did much to promote the idea that left-wing politics could be productively advanced within the institutional framework of the Democratic Party, he did not entirely resolve—and, in some ways, even exacerbated—the tension between corners of the activist left and the party as it now exists. Sanders's refusal to officially become a Democrat himself, combined with his rhetorical attacks on the "Democratic establishment," meant that he couldn't speak of the party as a "we" rather than a "they," which contrasted with other leaders (such as Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) whose policy views overlap with Sanders but who present themselves as heirs to the left's lineage within the Democratic Party rather than outside it.

For those on the left who disdain the Democratic name, this separation was a major reason why Sanders was preferable to alternatives like Warren. In both 2016 and 2020, Sanders ran better among political independents than among self-identified Democrats. Some of his most prominent and devoted public supporters, and even campaign staff members, have histories of open antagonism to Democratic leaders and organizations. But increasing the appeal of leftist politics within the Democratic electoral base in the future will require courting citizens who are loyal to the party and proud of its history—such as the black voters whose lack of support for Sanders proved decisive in both of the last two elections. The modern conservative movement gained control of the Republican Party not by dismissing the GOP's heritage but by claiming it for itself. Yet analogous actors on the left have been much more likely to criticize the Democratic leadership from outside the tent, limiting their persuasive power over those inside.

Another question still unanswered at this stage is whether momentum on the left will survive the end of Sanders's own national candidacy. Sanders is famous for his lack of interest in promoting or even talking about himself, but insurgent or upstart presidential campaigns often wind up presenting their candidates as political saviors who have arrived on the scene to personally cure the nation's ills, and—as with Obama and Trump before him—Sanders has indeed become such a figure, treated by some admirers as the only honest man in politics. Both Sanders campaigns styled themselves as a "movement," but can this movement extend beyond Sanders, his current activist supporters, and a handful of backbench allies in the House of Representatives?

One might be tempted to compare Sanders to Barry Goldwater, whose own unsuccessful presidential candidacy laid the groundwork for later transformational change, but the modern conservative movement was already much larger than one candidate or campaign by the time of Goldwater's 1964 nomination, and only two years after his general election defeat it elected its ultimate embodiment, Ronald Reagan, to be governor of the nation's largest state. Sanders has been a very effective spokesperson for his cause, but he does not seem to be a natural institution-builder, and an enduring political movement or party faction needs renewable capacity beyond the intermittent mobilization of quadrennial presidential campaigns. Here, as elsewhere, the conservative movement's ability to draw steady financial and structural support from business interests and wealthy patrons has given it an advantage that is difficult to replicate on the left.

The Sanders campaign was also ultimately hampered by another common impediment of left-wing politics: strategic and tactical deficiencies. Lefties can easily fall into the habit of waging campaigns in the political world as they wish it to be, not in the world as it is. They may also avoid practices that they consider unseemly, even if they might be effective. Post-mortem accounts of the Sanders operation describe flawed or absent polling, considerable strategic rigidity, and a candidate disinclined to reach out to other political figures who would have been in position to help him win. (The Warren campaign also seems to have been organized around the idea that relying on pollsters and professional consultants to make major decisions was somehow beneath its dignity and therefore to be resisted.) Romanticizing the noble defeat is a long-standing tradition on the American left, but it has undeniable practical drawbacks if the goal is to gain and hold political power.

Sanders has already left a mark on aspects of the Democratic policy platform, and he will almost certainly be credited in coming years with drawing a generation of activists into the political arena. Rather than exerting a transformative effect on the party as a whole, a more invigorated left wing is—if it can sustain its energy over the long term—more likely to act as one among many constituencies tugging on Democratic leaders to prioritize its particular concerns. Though such a development would fall well short of some supporters' revolutionary ambitions, it would be still a fairly impressive legacy for a second-place campaign to leave behind.

Nelson W. Polsby's Analysis of Presidential Nominations Still Applies After 37 Years

Today at the Washington Post's Monkey Cage blog, I reflect on the continued relevance of Nelson W. Polsby's 1983 book Consequences of Party Reform for the events of the last several weeks. The media-driven ups and downs of the Democratic presidential candidates in the 2020 election illustrate the enduring insights of Polsby's research, as does his newly-resonant concern that excluding party leaders from playing a central role in selecting nominees increases the risk of electing a president who is unable to meet the expectations and challenges of the office.

March 10 Primary Review: From "Contested Convention!" to "Over Already?!?"

It wasn't all that long ago that the prospect of a contested Democratic convention was every savvy Washingtonian's favorite topic of conversation. Traditional political journalists, who are habitually bored and irritated by the smoothly stage-managed and substantively anticlimactic nature of modern conventions, seem to envy the days when their forerunners like H. L. Mencken witnessed the excitement of a political party actually resolving its nomination contest in a blur of stem-winding speeches, repeated roll-call votes, and dark-horse bandwagons. But their predictable musings, usually accompanied by ill-disguised hope, at the beginning of every nomination season that the imminent primary race could easily produce such a thrilling grand finale received reinforcement this year from the ranks of the cutting-edge quantitative analysts. According to the FiveThirtyEight forecasting model, the probability of no single Democratic candidate receiving a majority of delegates spiked after this year's Iowa caucus, briefly rising well over the 50 percent mark prior to Super Tuesday.

Of course, that all seems rather quaint now. Joe Biden's remarkable resurgence, beginning with his modest second-place finish in the Nevada caucus and picking up rocket fuel the following week in South Carolina, extended through another week's worth of elections this Tuesday night. Barely a month after his damaging losses in Iowa and New Hampshire seemed to bring his campaign to the edge of a cliff, Biden is poised to assume the mantle of presumptive Democratic nominee.

What's more, the procedural mechanism that previously made a contested Democratic convention seem so very possible—the party's requirement that delegates must be allocated in proportion to the popular vote in individual states and congressional districts—is the same thing that will now help Biden's campaign make the case that the race is effectively over. At the beginning of the primary sequence, with so many active candidates dividing voter support, it's only natural to suppose that no single contender may be able to attract an outright national majority of delegates. Republican candidates can quickly amass a strong advantage even without a popular majority by placing first in multiple states that award delegates in a winner-take-all fashion, but national party rules close off that path for Democrats.

At the current stage of the nomination sequence, however, proportional allocation becomes a Democratic front-runner's best friend. Biden's lead in the delegate count, though it may not appear numerically lopsided at first glance, has in fact become sufficiently large that only a series of crushing defeats in state after state would seriously endanger it. A Republican candidate in Sanders's position could conceivably ride victories in multiple winner-take-all states to make up ground quickly in the back half of the primary calendar, but the Democratic Party's proportionality requirement dramatically blunts the impact of upsets late in the process. Both Hillary Clinton in 2008 and Bernie Sanders in 2016 notched some notable wins in populous states during the final phases of the primary season, but they had both already fallen far enough behind their opponents that anything short of repeated landslides wasn't going to throw the final outcome into doubt.

And so, like in many other years, the 2020 presidential nomination system has quickly transformed apparent chaos and uncertainty into order and predictability. There are still more states to vote, more questions to resolve, and more strategic choices ahead for both Biden and Sanders. But unless a truly extraordinary disruption occurs in the race, the process has now foreclosed any other outcome than the one that now stands before us.

Super Tuesday Review: Biden Back in Front

The vote-counting from Tuesday's elections will continue not only through the night but also, in California anyway, for a couple of weeks to come. Yet the overall picture is relatively clear. Joe Biden appears to be the winner in ten states (Alabama, Arkansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia). Bernie Sanders has placed first in four states (California, Colorado, Utah, and Vermont). Mike Bloomberg won the caucus in American Samoa, and Elizabeth Warren finished no better than third in every state or territory—including her home state of Massachusetts.

Here are some of the most important implications of the Super Tuesday results:

1. All of a sudden, Biden is once again at the front of the Democratic race, in what might be the most dramatic apparent comeback in the modern history of nominations (no candidate has previously survived finishing fourth in both Iowa and New Hampshire to vault back into the lead). The Biden surge of the past week was spread across the entire nation, and only the prevalence of early and mail voting in California, Texas, and Colorado kept him from amassing a near-decisive lead in delegates.

2. We won't know the final results in California for a while, and it's possible that Sanders did well enough there to keep the total Super Tuesday delegate margin between him and Biden from becoming too lopsided. But the most damaging result for Sanders on Tuesday wasn't the delegate count—it was his unexpected losses in Massachusetts and Minnesota. Beginning with next week's primaries in Michigan and Missouri, many of the key states in the post-Super Tuesday phase of the nomination calendar are urban states in the Northeast and Midwest, including New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois. Had Sanders been able to confine Biden's victories on Tuesday to the string of states from Virginia to Texas, he could have argued that Biden's strength was mostly regional and unlikely to endure once the contest moved northward. But Sanders's losses in two medium-sized, mostly white urban states where Biden didn't even campaign or spend money are much more troubling omens for his candidacy.

3. These results show why a truly contested convention—despite dominating media speculation in the early stages of every election season—is unlikely to occur except under very unusual circumstances. Nearly always, nomination contests naturally narrow down fairly quickly to one or two viable candidates; it's very hard for three candidacies to sustain themselves through the entire gauntlet of primaries. With only two contenders (at most) left standing by the end of the schedule, one or the other can count on a first-ballot majority at the convention, even if the arithmetic technically requires a bloc of delegates previously pledged to withdrawn candidates to pitch in enough votes to put the leading delegate-winner over the top. (Before a recent round of rules changes barred their participation on the first ballot, superdelegates could also perform this service, as they did for Barack Obama in 2008.) Democratic voters in the first 18 states have reduced what was once a large field of candidates to two plausible remaining options—Biden and Sanders—and the role of Democrats in the remaining 32 states is to determine which of these two will be the nominee.

4. Biden's now the favorite once again, but Sanders is by no means out of the running. More twists and turns are still quite possible, if not likely. But this is usually the kind of defeat that compels a candidate to make adjustments: tweak the campaign message, revise the strategy, target a new constituency. A key question hanging over the rest of this race is whether Sanders, who prides himself on his consistency, will rethink his approach or simply plow ahead on his current path.

5. A lot of people seem to have drawn the conclusion from the last few days that campaign ads and field organizing have become fairly meaningless in modern elections, since Biden engineered his historic surge while being massively outspent and out-organized by Sanders and Bloomberg. The reality is probably more complicated. It's certainly true that national media and social media are more important factors in the nomination horse race, and local organizations less important factors, than they once were. But Biden also has a unique advantage: everybody already knows who he is, and Democrats already have positive views of him, so television ads and campaign mailers are much less necessary to boost his name recognition or get his message out than would be true for other candidates.

In fact, it's very possible that Biden's lack of money and organizational capacity severely damaged and almost ended his candidacy in Iowa and New Hampshire—especially in Iowa, where the caucus system rewards candidates who have the infrastructure to identify supporters, drag them to the caucus meetings, and keep them there until the voting is complete. Similarly, while Bloomberg's money wasn't sufficient to deliver him the nomination, one glance at the Super Tuesday results is enough to confirm that he was able to buy himself a significant, though ultimately insufficient, amount of popular support simply by spending at unprecedented rates.

Rather than decisively declaring one factor "the real story" and other factors "worthless," we analysts should acknowledge the extraordinary complexity of multi-candidate nomination contests. It can be tempting to declare Biden's comeback inevitable now that it's happened, but nominations are much less predictable and more contingent than that. All of us are students rather than masters of this subject, and the unusual events of the past few days have shown how much there always is to learn.

South Carolina Primary Review: Biden's Back in the Game, But He's Not Winning Yet

The one silver lining in Joe Biden's weaker-than-expected performances in Iowa and New Hampshire was that they gave him the chance for a "comeback" in South Carolina, where he retained a potential reservoir of support among the black and moderate white voters who dominate the state's Democratic electorate. Biden's advantage was temporarily shaken—several polls after New Hampshire showed his lead in South Carolina narrowing to single digits—but a combination of his second place finish in Nevada last Saturday, sharper-than-usual debate performance on Tuesday, and key endorsement from veteran congressman Jim Clyburn, the House Majority Whip, on Wednesday helped propel him to a victory of nearly 30 points.

It's likely that Biden will benefit from a few days of very positive media coverage heading into Super Tuesday, and that a number of elected Democrats will rally around him as the most viable remaining alternative to Bernie Sanders. But Biden still has a ways to go before he reclaims his position as front-runner in the race. Sanders will probably win a decisive victory in California on Tuesday, where much of the vote has already been cast by mail and is thus insensitive to a Biden surge, that may alone provide him with a significant lead in the national delegate count. It's also unclear what proportion of any last-minute decline in support for Warren, Buttigieg, or Bloomberg will migrate to Biden, and how much will be transferred to Sanders instead.

It does seem as if the Democratic contest is quickly heading toward a showdown between Sanders and Biden, though polls suggest that Bloomberg is poised to accumulate a chunk of delegates on Super Tuesday that could conceivably matter to the final outcome. (A two-candidate race would provide some clarity to the question of whether there will be a contested convention, since one or the other will have a majority of delegates.) But can Biden, who suffers from a much smaller war chest and weaker campaign organization than one would expect a two-term vice president to have, actually keep up with Sanders once the election calendar accelerates from Tuesday onward? The answer to that question may well hold the key to the nomination.

Democratic Debate Review: A Telling Final Question

The news media didn't take very long Wednesday night to settle on a consensus interpretation of the evening's Democratic presidential debate. Before the first commercial break had been reached, the conventional wisdom had already swept across Twitter: the evening was a victory for Elizabeth Warren and a defeat for Michael Bloomberg. There were reasons to expect such a storyline even before Warren used her first statement of the debate to launch a direct attack on Bloomberg: the press has been stung all week by accusations that it hasn't been granting Warren the attention she deserves, and Bloomberg, who has has been looming over the race for months but hasn't yet competed for votes or participated in any debates, was facing the difficult task of living up in person to a set of rising poll numbers fueled by an unprecedented advertising blitz.

Whether Bloomberg experiences a serious popularity reversal as a result of the night's events is difficult to predict. He's likely to suffer negative news coverage over the next few days, but he doesn't have to worry about his funding sources drying up, and it's not clear that the specific subject that was the main source of contention at the debate—the use of non-disclosure agreements by former employees of his media company—will resonate strongly with the segment of the Democratic mass electorate otherwise open to supporting his candidacy. Warren can count on a temporary boost in positive publicity and fundraising, but with two early states that should have been relatively favorable ground already behind her and a much less friendly geographic path laying immediately ahead, she probably needs more than one strong debate to remain in serious contention.

All this is pretty good news for current front-runner Bernie Sanders, who mostly escaped attacks from the rest of the field on Wednesday and who has the least of all the candidates to fear from a continued media focus on Bloomberg. (The biggest threat to Sanders would be a resurgent Joe Biden, but while many media observers thought Biden's performance was stronger than usual on Wednesday, it won't be the major story coming out of the debate.) In fact, the final question of the night revealed the strength of Sanders's position: he was the only candidate to agree that if no single candidate wins a majority of pledged delegates, the candidate with the most delegates should receive the nomination.

This is, of course, partially the Sanders campaign's recognition that he is unlikely to be a compromise choice or the preferred nominee of Democratic superdelegates in the event of a contested convention. But it's also a signal to the party made from a position of strength. The Sanders camp is betting that there's a good chance that they will have at least a delegate plurality, and they want to warn Democratic leaders at this early stage that they will denounce any attempt to deny him the nomination under such circumstances as an illegitimate usurpation of the process.

The fact that the rest of the Democratic field responded to the question by defending the right of the party to select a different nominee reflects the extent to which contestation rather than an outright delegate majority is, in their minds, a live possibility even with 48 states and 7 territories still to vote in this race. Of course, we can expect any of them to make the same argument that Sanders is currently making if they wind up with a delegate plurality instead. But more than a third of the total national delegate count will be selected within the next two weeks, and it's quite possible that we're not very far away from a situation where a contested convention is the only numerically plausible alternative to a first-ballot Sanders nomination. With such a front-loaded nomination calendar, it gets late early out there.

New Hampshire Primary Review: Bernie's Biggest Win Wasn't His First-Place Finish

Bernie Sanders's performance in Tuesday night's New Hampshire primary isn't likely to impress the news media much. Sanders won New Hampshire for the second straight election, but he received less than half of his 2016 vote share (26 percent, as of this writing, compared to 60 percent last time) and edged Pete Buttigieg by less than 2 percentage points, in contrast to his 22-point margin over Hillary Clinton four years ago. Both Sanders and Buttigieg will receive the same number of pledged delegates from the state. Unsurprisingly, a New York Times reporter proclaimed the 2nd- and 3rd-place finishes of Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar to be the top two stories of the night, rather than Sanders's nominal victory.

But those two results are themselves very good news for Sanders's ultimate chances of winning the nomination. Had it been Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren who received 24 and 20 percent of the vote in New Hampshire to Sanders's 26 percent, Sanders would be facing two rejuvenated opponents who would have the name recognition and resources to compete with him once the race opens out into a quasi-national contest on Super Tuesday, and Biden in particular would be back in position to enter Super Tuesday with a campaign-stabilizing victory three days earlier in the South Carolina primary.

Instead, Biden and Warren have been seriously damaged by their descent into the high single digits in New Hampshire, and the media death watch over both campaigns that will probably ensue won't make it easy for them to rebound. Buttigieg and Klobuchar can expect a short-term publicity boost after their overperformances on Tuesday, but they will need to quickly build Super Tuesday-caliber campaign operations around themselves over the next three weeks in order to avoid being drowned out by Sanders's financial and organizational advantages in expensive, delegate-rich states like California and Texas. And the fact that each of them is competing against the other as well as against Sanders (Buttigieg, in particular, was a repeated target of critical remarks from Klobuchar in last Friday's debate) makes their tasks even more challenging.

Much has been made of Sanders's relative weakness among black voters, which was a pivotal impediment to his campaign against Hillary Clinton in 2016. But while Joe Biden was previously considered a heavy favorite against Sanders in South Carolina and other Deep South states due to his supposedly strong personal support among this constituency, there's no reason to believe that Sanders couldn't attract a significant share of the black vote if Biden were seriously weakened or driven from the race and Sanders’s main opponents were instead Buttigieg and Klobuchar—neither of whom has yet invested much, or demonstrated much success, in courting black leaders or citizens.

A national Quinnipiac poll released on Monday showed Mike Bloomberg's level of black support approaching Biden's, 27 percent to 22 percent, suggesting that Biden's continuing decline might benefit Bloomberg most of all among black Democrats. (Bloomberg has recently spent millions of dollars on an advertising campaign featuring video footage of Barack Obama praising him by name.) But in an utterly inexplicable strategy, Bloomberg has opted not to contest South Carolina, even though it votes only three days before Super Tuesday and will undoubtedly influence those results. While the current state of the race in South Carolina isn't clear, it's quite possible that Sanders could be very competitive there if Biden continues to fade, and a Sanders victory followed by a successful multi-state Super Tuesday performance would make it difficult for any other candidate to catch him in the pledged delegate count absent an extraordinary turn of events.

So it's probably wise to discount media talk that Sanders has had trouble growing his coalition. No other single candidate has done any better at winning votes so far, and there are good reasons to believe that his major advantages have not yet been activated. Of course, there's a long way to go in the delegate race, and strange things can and do happen in nomination politics. But the two candidates who once loomed as Sanders's strongest rivals are starting to look like they won't be the ones to stop him—if anyone does.

Democratic Debate Review: If Klobuchar "Won," Sanders Actually Won

Friday night's Democratic debate in New Hampshire mostly rehashed the participants' past arguments and rhetorical styles, and it didn't generate a dramatic candidate confrontation or meltdown despite repeated attempts by the moderators to incite conflict or trap a candidate in a "gotcha" moment. Amy Klobuchar seems to have been anointed the winner by prevailing news media sentiment, but this evaluation was based more on the perception of a series of fluid, well-crafted remarks rather than a killer moment destined to be frequently replayed on cable news or spread widely on social media.

Most likely, that means the evening's proceedings won't have much of an influence on the polls. A debate's impact on the horse race tends to be maximized when it generates a single attention-grabbing segment, and only one of the seven previous debates this election appeared to produce a clear subsequent shift in candidate support: the first debate last June, when Kamala Harris attracted widespread publicity for challenging Joe Biden over his school busing positions in the 1970s. It's hard to think of many past examples of a candidate who gained a significant post-debate bounce based on a general media judgment that he or she just "did the best" over the course of the evening.

But if Klobuchar indeed gets a popularity boost in the final days before Tuesday's New Hampshire primary, it's most likely to work to the ultimate strategic advantage of one of her opponents—in particular, Bernie Sanders. As a conventionally partisan center-left woman, Klobuchar's profile overlaps less with Sanders than with any other major candidate in the race. A last-second Klobuchar surge could deal major blows to Pete Buttigieg (by potentially denying him a valuable victory in New Hampshire) and/or Joe Biden (by relegating him to a fourth- or even fifth-place finish in the state), who at this stage must be considered Sanders's two main rivals for the Democratic nomination.

Sanders didn't seem to get much credit from the media for his performance in Iowa; the press had expected him to win, weighed Buttigieg's apparent narrow edge in the state delegate count much more heavily than Sanders's larger margin in the raw vote totals, and was enticed by the novelty of the Mayor Pete phenomenon. But the damage that Iowa inflicted on Biden's campaign arguably left Sanders in the best position of any candidate in the race at the moment. At the very least, Sanders is currently likely to finish either first or second in each of the first three early states, he has what appears to be the best-funded and best-organized national campaign (not counting the untested Bloomberg operation, which is hamstrung by its risky "wait until March" strategy), and he would benefit the most from a prolonged multi-candidate race in which two or more non-insurgent opponents jockeyed with each other for support.

Of course, the outcome is still unclear. Today's polls suggest that Sanders is in danger of losing New Hampshire to Buttigieg, which the press would interpret as a serious setback considering his 22-point victory there in 2016, and Biden could yet rebound if he can manage to survive until the race moves to the friendlier terrain of South Carolina. But without much reason to believe that Klobuchar has more than a minimal chance of launching herself into actual contention for the nomination at this stage, any temporary good fortune for her is probably even better news for Bernie.

The Media Expectations Game Usually Hurts Nomination Front-Runners, But Not in 2020

The history of presidential nomination politics suggests that it's a mixed blessing for a candidate to be considered a front-runner by the national media heading into the primary and caucus season. Of course, it's better to be doing well in polls and fundraising, the usual metrics of pre-primary success, than to be doing badly in either. At the same time, front-runner status usually comes with expectations for a dominant performance in the early states. These expectations can produce waves of damaging news coverage for a candidate who fails to meet them, driving voters away and scaring off financial donors—while rivals who appear to "beat the spread" in Iowa or New Hampshire receive a major publicity boost. From Ed Muskie in 1972 to Howard Dean in 2004 to Hillary Clinton in 2008, pre-primary favorites have repeatedly suffered major damage from early-state results deemed by the shapers of conventional wisdom to be insufficiently impressive.

But something's different in 2020. Joe Biden is the Democratic front-runner by media consensus, and for understandable reasons—he's a former two-term vice president who's consistently led the national polls. Yet journalists and commentators don't seem to be treating Biden as especially likely to win either Iowa or New Hampshire. This is an unprecedented situation in the modern (post-1968) nomination era; there have been previous races without a single clear pre-Iowa favorite, but none in which a widely-acknowledged front-runner isn't assumed to enjoy an advantage in at least one, and usually both, of the first two states. Only South Carolina, the fourth and final pre-Super Tuesday contest, is by general agreement a place where Biden needs a victory (and probably by a double-digit margin) to avoid a serious media backlash.

There are a few reasons for this unusual state of affairs. One element of pre-election expectations-setting is poll numbers, and Biden hasn't had a consistent lead in either Iowa or New Hampshire since the early fall, which has helped lower the perceived benchmark for him in both states (though a few recent polls, especially in Iowa, still show him narrowly ahead). Another reason is demographics. Influential media voices have become increasingly sensitive to the fact that the racial composition of the Democratic Party in Iowa and New Hampshire differs significantly from that of its national membership, and are well aware that Biden runs better among non-white voters than he does among white liberals. Finally, the 2016 election offers what seems like an instructive parallel: Hillary Clinton failed to meet expectations in both of the first two states, barely defeating Bernie Sanders in Iowa and then losing New Hampshire to him by 22 percentage points, but she quickly managed to rally in Nevada, South Carolina, and the southern Super Tuesday states. If Biden loses the first two states to Sanders, it will seem to many analysts more like a rerun of the last Democratic nomination race (with Biden in the ultimately successful Clinton position) than a clear indicator of an imploding candidacy.

As my political science colleague Seth Masket notes, some Sanders supporters are frustrated that the media isn't currently giving their candidate a better chance of victory. Of course, the logic of nomination dynamics suggests that being underestimated at this stage is actually a strategic advantage, so perhaps it would be savvier for them to stifle their complaints for now.

Still, they have a point. Sanders is in a kind of inverse, but complementary, position compared to Biden: expectations for his performance in Iowa and New Hampshire are higher than his perceived chances of actually being the Democratic nominee. He therefore needs to win New Hampshire, and probably Iowa too, to convince the media that he has a shot at winning a majority of national delegates. But if he can claim those early victories—and this week's polling in both states suggests that it's quite achievable—the electoral terrain quickly shifts to South Carolina and the Super Tuesday states, where it will be much easier for Sanders to "overperform" (and thus impress the media) than for Biden to exceed what will be rising expectations on his own side. Sanders is also extremely well-funded for the quasi-national campaign that Super Tuesday requires. And if he can break through in California and Texas, there will be a fair number of delegates in his pocket after the first week of March, plus the potential for a self-subsidized Michael Bloomberg candidacy to cut into Biden's advantage with party moderates.

While Biden and Sanders have both been able to keep media expectations in check despite favorable polls and fundraising success, the rest of the field faces a tougher challenge. It's quite possible for one or more of them to outperform their current polling numbers in either of the first two states. But for midwesterners Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, anything short of a first-place finish in Iowa will raise the question of where they can win if they can't win there, and the same logic will be applied to New Englander Elizabeth Warren in the New Hampshire primary the following week. It can seem strange that a nomination contest that began with more then 20 active candidates might narrow to a functional two- or three-horse race after a handful of state contests, but the number of serious contenders in this election who didn't even make it as far as Iowa demonstrates how effectively and unsentimentally the sequential nomination process culls the field before most voters get the chance to register their preferences.

This Week in Impeachment: Will Impeachment Affect the Democratic Presidential Race?

When the impeachment of Donald Trump became a likely event in September, it became fashionable to speculate how Trump's re-election fortunes might be affected: would the process hurt Trump by generating damaging disclosures and negative publicity, or would he benefit from a popular backlash and highly-mobilized Republican base? I suggested at the time that impeachment wasn't likely to matter much in the 2020 general election, and the evidence so far is consistent with that expectation. Trump's job approval rating has barely moved since the beginning of the impeachment push—or, really, since the end of the government shutdown last winter.

A more unsettled question is whether impeachment has had, or will have, any effect on the Democratic primary race. Since all serious Democratic contenders agree that Trump's impeachment is merited, any effect would need to be more indirect—but there are three plausible ways it could occur. First, the connection of Joe Biden and his son Hunter to the Ukraine affair could be expected to influence Democratic voters' perceptions of Biden: either positively (as Democrats might rally around Biden in partisan solidarity or view him as Trump's personally most-feared opponent) or negatively (if they became troubled by Hunter Biden's role in the story and began to worry that it would dent his father's electability). Second, the attention that the news media and American public would inevitably divert to impeachment could deprive Democratic candidates of valuable popular visibility during the key months preceding the first nomination events in Iowa and New Hampshire. Third, the fact that so many of the Democratic candidates in 2020 are members of the Senate means that they will be forced to choose between attending the trial early next year (assuming that articles of impeachment are indeed approved by the House, as seems certain) and joining their rivals on the campaign trail.

On the first question, it's not yet clear whether Biden's popularity has changed much since the Ukraine story broke. The Economist's polling analysis indicates that Biden's share of support in national polls has remained steady since the end of the summer, although his lead has fluctuated due to the rise and subsequent decline of Elizabeth Warren. But in Iowa, Biden does seem to be losing some strength: first Warren and more recently Pete Buttigieg have pulled ahead of him in the RealClearPolitics polling average since the end of September. Of course, it's possible—even probable—that this decline has little to do with impeachment. But, at the least, there is no sign of a pro-Biden rally phenomenon among Democratic voters.

The second question is harder to answer, since it requires considering a counterfactual timeline where impeachment does not occur. In that scenario, it's likely that the Democratic contest would be a more prominent national story, which might in turn have made it a bit easier for candidates who aren't already well-known to have gained some upward momentum. The surprising withdrawal of Kamala Harris earlier this week underlines the unusual lack of volatility in the race so far—and, in particular, the inability of anyone in the large field of contenders other than Biden, Warren, Buttigieg, and Bernie Sanders to consistently attract significant support from Democratic voters.

Normally, a contested presidential nomination is the top political story in the fall before an election year. But we are not in normal times. It's a safe bet that Trump would have continued to dominate news coverage of politics, as he has ever since he began his campaign in the summer of 2015, whether or not he was facing an impeachment inquiry. Any candidate needing a late surge—Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Julian Castro—will find it hard to attract the necessary media hype as Congress moves toward a well-publicized impeachment vote and probable trial over the remaining weeks before Iowa and New Hampshire. But there's also no particular reason to believe that such a surge would have happened absent impeachment, given Trump's continued public ubiquity and how little success these candidates have found so far.

The final question pertains to events that have yet to occur. Mitch McConnell and the Republican Senate leadership will assuredly not schedule a potential impeachment trial in order to maximize the convenience of the multiple Democratic senators who remain active presidential candidates. But it's hard to see how much mischief McConnell could cause—will these senators indeed feel compelled to attend every impeachment session in person?—and there isn't much political logic to Republicans' intentionally trying to disadvantage Warren and Sanders, whom conventional wisdom suggests the GOP would rather face in 2020 than Biden or Buttigieg. Sitting senators will also have the unique opportunity to make stem-winding floor speeches on behalf of conviction that will undoubtedly receive extensive publicity and attract considerable attention from Democratic voters.

All in all, it's not especially likely that impeachment will be a decisive factor in the Democratic presidential race. Nomination politics can be full of complications and unpredictability, so conclusions must be made cautiously and provisionally. But observers looking for the political consequences of impeachment should probably start their search elsewhere.

November Democratic Debate Recap: Lovefest or Snoozefest?

The Democratic debate Wednesday night was mostly devoid of sharp exchanges between candidates, with the partial exception of a few moments involving also-ran Tulsi Gabbard. To some observers, it was a pleasant and substantive affair; to others—especially reporters searching for a headline—it was a boring anticlimax to a long day dominated by the impeachment hearings in Washington.

The amicable climate was partially due to the MSNBC moderators, who mostly declined to ask questions intended to provoke conflict between specific candidates. Some corners of lefty Twitter credited this dynamic to the fact that all four moderators were women. But female moderators in previous debates have not been reluctant to set candidates against each other; a more likely explanation lies in MSNBC's own house style (personified by Rachel Maddow, the network's biggest star), which sells itself as floating cerebrally above anything that smacks of a mere made-for-TV stunt. Most candidates may also see attacks in a large field as strategically risky unless they can be directed at an easy target like Gabbard.

Biden, Warren, Sanders, and Buttigieg are all doing well enough in the polls—whether in Iowa, nationally, or both—that debate performances aren't critical for their candidacies at this stage in the race (pundits never seem to think Biden does well in these events, but it doesn't seem to be hurting him with voters), and Gabbard, Yang, and Steyer aren't serious contenders for the nomination. That leaves Harris, Booker, and Klobuchar in the position of needing some kind of breakthrough as the days tick down, and all three seemed to have prepared for Wednesday's debate with an eye toward making a memorable impression with viewers. Notably, each of them made an explicit strategic case for themselves as nominees.

The problem is that they are all, to an extent, in competition with each other to attract media and activist attention during a crucial pre-Iowa stretch in which impeachment, not the Democratic primary race, will be the chief national political story. Journalists will probably agree that they all performed well, but none of them is likely to gain the kind of post-debate bounce that Harris got over the summer but couldn't sustain thereafter. For all three, their best path to the nomination remains a better-than-expected showing in Iowa that carries into the succeeding states. But while it's still early, it's not as early as it used to be, and their hopes increasingly depend on a major stumble by one or more of the front-runners.

Is the Nationalization of Politics Hurting Favorite Sons and Daughters?

Over the weekend, a new poll of the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination race was released. It showed Joe Biden in first place, Elizabeth Warren in second, and Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, and Kamala Harris following—with no candidate other than these five at more than 2 percent. The poll's findings are quite consistent with the results of other recent surveys, but they are noteworthy in one respect: the poll was conducted in Massachusetts, where Warren has twice been elected to statewide office (most recently last November). Why isn't the Bay State resident far in the lead among her own constituents despite running a highly competitive national campaign?

The question of why Warren isn't more dominant in her own political backyard has occasionally attracted interest from followers of nomination politics. This article by Vox's Ella Nilsen (in which I'm briefly quoted) focuses mostly on her unremarkable level of popularity among the Massachusetts general electorate, but some of its explanations could apply to the Democratic primary as well: Warren has a polarizing persona; she hasn't focused much on cultivating an identity as a fighter for Massachusetts rather than for national causes; she suffers from voter sexism in a state that lacks a history of electing women regularly to high office.

But maybe it's misleading to focus solely on Warren, as if coolness to a home-state candidate is a phenomenon unique to her. How are other serious Democratic presidential contenders faring with the voters who presumably know them best? Reliable public polling at this stage is limited, and its availability varies significantly from state to state, but we have enough evidence to draw some preliminary conclusions.

Let's start in California, where Harris has been elected three times statewide since 2010 (as state attorney general twice and U.S. senator once). The latest public survey by CBS News/YouGov, from July, found Harris running neck-and-neck with Biden (24 percent for him, 23 percent for her), with Warren and Sanders close behind at 19 percent and 16 percent, respectively. A Quinnipiac University poll conducted around the same time found Harris with a slender lead over Biden, 23 percent to 21 percent, with Sanders at 18 percent and Warren at 16 percent.

It's clear from these results that Harris does somewhat better in her home state than elsewhere in the country (she's never received more than 20 percent in any national poll since the start of the race). But she was not able to establish an unambiguous lead in California even during the few weeks after her attention-getting performance in the first Democratic debate, a moment that appears to have been a temporary peak for her candidacy (Harris briefly hit 15 percent in the national RealClearPolitics average in mid-July; today, she's down to 7 percent). So even if she was barely winning California in July, she almost certainly isn't winning it now.

What about Beto O'Rourke, the hero of Texas Democrats for waging a near-miss Senate campaign last year? A July poll by CBS/YouGov found him running in second place in his home state, though barely so: Biden 27 percent, O'Rourke 17 percent, Warren 16 percent, Sanders 12 percent, Harris 12 percent. A more recent survey by Texas Lyceum seemed to confirm this arrangement of the candidates, albeit with a small sample size of Democratic voters (N=358): Biden 24 percent, O'Rourke 18 percent, Warren 15 percent, Sanders 13 percent. (The other Texan in the race, Julián Castro, has failed to reach 5 percent in any public poll of the state.)

It's hard to know how seriously to treat the online polls conducted by Change Research without a longer track record of forecasting success, but in two states where no other nomination polling exists, Change Research results follow the same pattern. A June survey found Amy Klobuchar in fourth place in Minnesota, though only 5 points behind the leader. An August poll of New Jersey found Cory Booker struggling badly there, placing sixth with only 5 percent of the vote.

Taken together, these results suggest that the "favorite son/daughter" phenomenon, in which voters begin a presidential nomination campaign by voicing support for a serious contender from their home state, is not playing a major role in structuring the 2020 nomination race. It's possible that this pattern reflects the nationalization of American politics: voters are paying more attention to national media, national issues, and nationally prominent political figures than they once did, which reduces the relative power of their home-state loyalties.

All else equal, such a development would work to the advantage of Biden and Sanders, who come from very small states but have big national profiles. It's not very good news for Harris and O'Rourke, who could find it more difficult to leverage what would otherwise be an important strategic asset (assuming either can survive the gauntlet of Iowa and New Hampshire): home-field advantage in the two largest states of the country, each sending hundreds of delegates to the national convention. If Elizabeth Warren's decision to devote more energy in office to raising her national visibility than to tending her Massachusetts constituency has hurt her a bit in one state while helping her in 49 others, right now that looks like a sound strategic choice.

Democratic Debate Analysis (First Night): CNN Decides What the Race Is About

Honest Graft was on vacation during the first pair of Democratic presidential debates last month, so this week's events are the first of the 2020 campaign that will receive recaps here on the blog. Perhaps it's worthwhile, then, to review my general perspective on debates before proceeding to discuss Tuesday night's proceedings.

• I tend to be skeptical of analysts' confident declarations of debate "winners" and "losers," because the standards by which such pronouncements are made are usually unclear and are often colored by previous preferences. However, a strong collective judgment among media figures about who did well or who committed a major gaffe can affect candidates' fortunes in important ways, regardless of the fairness of such evaluations.

• Debates can tell us important things beyond who won or lost. They help illustrate candidate strategy, internal party trends and developments, and media preoccupations. But most debates don't turn out to be dramatic "game-changers" in the race as a whole.

• As tools for voters to learn about candidates and make decisions about whom to support, debates are not entirely useless—but neither are they reliably helpful. Rather than adopting the common media theme that debates are sacred exercises in civic enlightenment, citizens should treat them more like the television productions that they are at heart. Television can be entertaining, but it's not reliably informative.

Now, on to a few takeaways from the first night's debate:

1. There was a chance that the random assignment of Sanders and Warren to the same debate stage this month would lead to a showdown between them, but that didn't happen. Instead, the most common dynamic was one in which both candidates were lumped in together as targets of criticism from more moderate rivals.

2. This dynamic didn't just naturally happen on its own; it was largely the consequence of CNN's choice of questions. The moderators, who displayed a curiously hostile tone throughout the evening, were clearly most interested in defining the race as a battle between ideological purity and electoral formidability—a frame to which they frequently returned. (CNN's post-debate coverage summarized the event by repeatedly displaying the chyron "Breaking News: Liberal and Moderate Democrats Clash in Detroit.") The moderators' behavior had the inevitable effect of minimizing the differences between Sanders and Warren, while making the two of them stand out dramatically from the rest of the field.

3. John Delaney, Steve Bullock, Tim Ryan, and John Hickenlooper all repeatedly accepted the moderators' invitations to make attacks against Warren and Sanders, but the short response times imposed by CNN (as low as 15 seconds in some cases) meant that these candidates didn't have as much of a chance to explain what made them, personally, the best alternative to the two leading lefties in the race. There's a long historical tradition of Democratic candidates distancing themselves from the left edge of their party—and convincing the Democratic electorate that they are smartly positioning themselves for the general election by doing so. But previous Democrats who have successfully employed this approach en route to the nomination have had some other quality that could excite the party's voters: impressive biography, youthful charisma, policy wonkery. Without an immediately obvious personal selling point, these candidates need to make a positive case for themselves as well, but the format was not well-suited to this objective.

4. Amy Klobuchar, interestingly, didn't really take the opportunity to join in the push against the left, despite her self-positioning as an electable midwesterner. (She preferred the popular moderate tactic of attacking the other party instead.) Klobuchar seems to be doing just well enough in polls and donations to qualify for the next debate in September, so she's not in imminent danger of being culled from the race, but as the resident of a neighboring state she'll need to make a big splash in Iowa or she'll be written off before the New Hampshire primary.

5. After (mostly) uniting around the ACA, the presidential wing of the Democratic Party is splintering again on the issue of health care, with substantive policy differences among candidates sometimes illustrated, and sometimes confusingly obscured, by the invocation of phrases like "Medicare for All." Whether or not Democratic primary voters consciously base their choice of candidate on the issue, the 2020 nomination contest will determine whether the party enters the general election on a platform of advocating the wholesale restructuring of the American health insurance system. A vote for Sanders or Warren as nominee is partially a bet that such a position is now viable in a national race.

What's Missing from the "Ideology vs. Electability" Debate

We're still in the early stages of the 2020 presidential campaign, but a common media frame has emerged already: will Democrats prioritize pragmatic electability when selecting a challenger to President Trump, or will the party instead prize ideological purity? Again and again, news coverage of the Democratic nomination contest has boiled a well-populated, multi-faceted candidate race down to this either-or choice, with Joe Biden usually personifying the "electability" option while Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren represent the "purity" alternative.

News outlets have repeatedly publicized surveys of Democratic primary voters designed to measure how they come down on this supposedly inevitable dilemma. "Which type of candidate would you prefer to see the Democrats nominate for president in 2020: a candidate who agrees with you on almost all of the issues you care about but does not have the best chance of beating Donald Trump, or a candidate who has the best chance of beating Donald Trump but who does not agree with you on almost all of the issues you care about?" "Who would you choose if you had a magic wand and can make any of the candidates president—they don't have to beat anyone or win the election?"

One problem with this increasingly ubiquitous concept of the race is that Democrats might not register an obvious collective preference after all. As a general rule, most political analyses in the "now we have come to a fork in the road" style don't turn out well in retrospect; politicians and voters alike are demonstrably adept at avoiding clear choices and generally muddling through. Past nominees like Barack Obama have often found success by finessing differences within the party rather than planting their flags firmly on one end of an internal debate. Kamala Harris, for one, is clearly pursuing a strategy of presenting herself as simultaneously more liberal than Biden and more electable than Warren or Sanders, and perhaps that will turn out to be the most effective approach in the end.

But the more serious danger is the underlying assumption that these are the only major considerations for primary voters as they deliberate over their preferred candidate. While both policy positions and electoral strength are highly appropriate grounds on which to evaluate candidates, they are not the only important attributes when choosing a nominee or potential president. Surveys and media accounts that presume otherwise thus present an oversimplified and distorted picture of presidential politics. And because voters in primaries are heavily influenced by media coverage, endless news stories that frame the race as fundamentally a tradeoff between just two criteria—idealism vs. practicality, head vs. heart, sincerity vs. calculation—could persuade many citizens to view their alternatives in precisely those terms, and to pay less attention to other deservedly relevant candidate qualities.

Like. say, competence.

Surely it's highly sensible to evaluate candidates in terms of who would, and would not, prove to be successful presidents if they wound up in the job. One of the benefits of the old system of presidential nominations is the influence it granted to politicians within the party who knew the various candidates personally and had previously worked with them in government. But the candidates' own records, as well as the kind of campaigns they run, can provide valuable evidence in this area, and voters should not be discouraged from placing effectiveness at the center of their considerations.

In this particular race, there are several candidates who lack the traditional credential of previous service in Congress or a state governorship, plus others who have served only for a brief time in federal office. Two of the candidates with the most experience are also approaching their 80s. At least one candidate seems to have chronic difficulties getting along with subordinates. Candidates also disagree over the optimal approach to accomplishing policy change: stakeholder compromise or mass mobilization? All of these factors and more seem highly relevant to the question of potential future success in the presidency, independent of the policy positions or personal popularity of the various contenders.

Discussions of competence can lack the drama of ideological battles or the savvy calculations of electoral strategy. But how—and how well—a president governs ultimately matters a lot. The more that voters, activists, and journalists acknowledge this truth during the nomination process, the healthier our political system will be.

Honest Graft on the Primary Concerns Podcast

This week, I was interviewed by Brian Beutler of the New Republic about the Bernie Sanders–Hillary Clinton race and the future of the Democratic Party, following up from my recent Vox interview on the subject. We were joined by fellow political scientist Theda Skocpol of Harvard. The interview is now posted as part of the New Republic's weekly Primary Concerns podcast, which you can listen to here or on iTunes.

The Democratic Endgame Begins (Or, How Trump Undercuts Sanders's Leverage)

Tuesday night's Democratic primary in the District of Columbia brought the 2016 presidential delegate selection season to an official end, four and a half months after it began with the Iowa caucuses. While Hillary Clinton has accumulated enough delegates to win the Democratic nomination, her opponent Bernie Sanders remains—for now—an active presidential candidate. At some date in the near future, Sanders will no longer be a candidate and will instead be a supporter of the Clinton campaign. The precise sequence by which Sanders moves from A to B is presumably the main topic of discussion at a private meeting between Clinton and Sanders that occurred in Washington Tuesday evening.

It is clear that Sanders intends to use his current status as an active rival candidate to extract concessions from Clinton and, by extension, the Democratic National Committee. Clinton supporters frustrated at Sanders's behavior might object that their own candidate, in a similar position eight years ago, dropped out of the race at the end of the primaries and immediately endorsed the victorious Barack Obama without apparent conditions. Yet Clinton did receive something quite valuable in exchange for her unequivocal support of Obama in June 2008: credentials as a loyal Democrat and team player that not only gave her the opportunity to hold a high-level position in the Obama administration, but also allowed her to position herself as Obama's (tacitly-sanctioned) successor in the presidential office once he reached the constitutionally-prescribed two-term limit.

Sanders has a different set of interests. His age prevents him from being a realistic candidate in 2024 or even 2020, and his independence makes him a poor fit for a position in somebody else's presidential administration. Instead, he has three other objectives in mind: (1) winning demonstrable influence over the Democratic platform in order to be able to boast to his supporters that they succeeded in pulling the party to the ideological left; (2) forcing reforms to the presidential nomination process, both as another achievement to claim for his campaign and as a procedural benefit to future insurgent candidacies; and (3) visiting revenge upon DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, whom Sanders blames for exhibiting a perceived favoritism toward the Clinton campaign during the nomination process.

This is an ambitious wish list for a losing presidential candidate to expect from the winner, and it seems unlikely that Sanders will be in a position to insist upon all of his demands. Indeed, his leverage over Clinton is quickly beginning to weaken—in part because of the identity of the presumptive Republican nominee.

The looming nomination of Donald Trump undercuts Sanders's bargaining position in three ways. First, Trump's routine dominance of the daily political news directs attention away from the Democratic race, making it more difficult for Sanders to win the publicity he needs to press his case. Second, Trump is something of a custom-built Democrat repellant, which will encourage even Clinton-wary Democratic voters to rally quickly around her as the only person standing between their archnemesis and the White House even if Sanders himself remains a holdout. Third, Clinton and her advisors likely view Trump as eminently beatable whether or not they receive Sanders's blessing, which makes them more likely to call Sanders's bluff than if they were facing a race against Marco Rubio or John Kasich.

Given Sanders's rapidly eroding strategic position, here's my best guess for how the Clinton-Sanders contest gets resolved:

(1) Sanders will soon suspend his campaign and make a public gesture of support for Clinton—though he might save a wholehearted endorsement until the convention itself.

(2) With Clinton's support, Sanders will win approval of platform language echoing his anti-Wall Street campaign message.

(3) The Democratic convention will approve a resolution calling for an internal party commission to study potential "democratizing" reforms to the presidential nomination process prior to the 2020 elections. It is less likely that the resolution will commit to specific reform provisions sought by Sanders such as requiring open primaries or abolishing superdelegates.

(4) Wasserman Schultz will stay at the DNC through November.

Vox Interview on Clinton, Sanders, and the Future of the Democrats

I was interviewed this week by Jeff Stein of Vox.com about the legacy of the Sanders presidential campaign, and you can read an edited transcript of our conversation here.

The Reason Sanders Wouldn't Have Won Lives in the White House

Over the weekend, the Washington Post published a long retrospective article on the Sanders presidential campaign entitled "How Bernie Sanders Missed His Chance to Beat Hillary Clinton." While the story departs from the official Sanders campaign line in conceding that the Democratic nomination race is effectively over, it is otherwise an extremely sympathetic account told from the perspective of Sanders, his wife, and his top advisors.

These figures—and, by extension, the Post writers—characterize the election as a tantalizing near-miss for Sanders, who supposedly fell just short of victory due to a variety of relatively minor factors under his own control. The article suggests that if Sanders had started just a bit earlier in building a national campaign infrastructure, in forging an appeal to black and Latino Democrats, in criticizing Hillary Clinton, and in (I'm not kidding here) posing for more selfies with voters at his rallies, he might have pulled off an astounding upset victory over Clinton.

It's only natural for a candidate in Sanders's current position to engage in this sort of "if-we-had-only-done-X" thinking, but the understandable frustrations produced by electoral defeat do not necessarily lead to sound analysis. In particular, a stronger Sanders campaign would have provoked a more formidable strategic response from Clinton, who more or less coasted after Super Tuesday (and especially after her March 15 victories) on a secure delegate lead rather than directly engage in counterattacks on Sanders. Nate Silver noted that the Clinton campaign and pro-Clinton super PACs have about $77 million in cash that could have been spent against Sanders had he continued to pose a threat to her nomination.

What would an anti-Sanders rhetorical offensive have looked like, and how effective would it have been? Sanders has various political vulnerabilities, but surely the biggest in this particular race would have been his longstanding ambivalence about the Obama presidency. Sanders has smartly avoided direct criticism of Obama during his run—though, as Clinton noted from time to time, some of his attacks on her served as implicit rebukes to the sitting president as well—but he was on record suggesting that Obama should be opposed from the left prior to the 2012 election. Retrospective analyses like the Post's that lament the time it took for Sanders to become comfortable speaking in black churches and discussing racial issues—suggesting that he could have seriously competed with Clinton for black support had he only found his footing a bit earlier—need to contend with the likely effect that a hypothetical television ad based on film of Sanders criticizing Obama and encouraging a primary challenge would have had on his popularity among African-American voters.

If Clinton had really found herself in trouble, she would have been able to call on campaign help from Obama himself. Obama has chosen to formally remain on the sidelines so far, but it is hard to believe that he would have refused to come to Clinton's aid against Sanders had the need arisen. Indeed, he is preparing to do so once she reaches the required number of delegates to secure the nomination, and will work to begin unifying the Democratic Party behind her despite Sanders's pledge to soldier on to the convention in July.

Given Obama's popularity among Democrats, it is difficult to see how it would have benefited Sanders had the race become anything like a referendum on the incumbent's performance. Sanders ran an impressive campaign and far exceeded initial expectations, but he never had much chance of actually winning the Democratic nomination.

What the Trump vs. Sanders Polls Do, and Don't, Tell Us

A Quinnipiac poll released today shows what has become a familiar pattern: Hillary Clinton leads Donald Trump by 4 percentage points in the national popular vote (45 percent to 41 percent), while Bernie Sanders leads Trump by a 9-point margin (48 percent to 39 percent). These results are consistent with other recent poll results; the Pollster.com aggregator estimates Clinton's current lead over Trump at 2 points as of today, while Sanders leads Trump by 11 points.

The reason for this persistent gap is not difficult to divine: Sanders is viewed much more favorably than Clinton in the broader electorate. Pollster.com calculates his current favorability rating at +9 (49 percent favorable to 40 percent unfavorable); Clinton is currently at –16 (40 percent favorable to 56 percent unfavorable) and Trump at –21 (37 percent favorable to 58 percent unfavorable).

Purist insurgencies like the Sanders campaign usually lack direct evidence that they might be stronger general-election nominees than their primary opponents, which causes them to fall back on "hidden vote" theories claiming that they would inspire large numbers of previously inert citizens to flock to the polls to their behalf—thus compensating for their comparatively weaker standing among habitual voters. (This was Barry Goldwater's professed path to victory in 1964, an election that he lost by 23 points.) But Sanders and his supporters can currently point to national surveys suggesting that he would be a more electable candidate for the Democratic Party, which have become incorporated into his current pitch for why superdelegates should reverse the results of the pledged delegate count in order to award him the nomination.

Of course, popularity in June does not guarantee popularity in November. The flaw in Sanders's argument is that he has yet to demonstrate that he can survive a sustained blast of negative attacks. His advocacy of higher taxes on the middle class, support for government-run universal health care, past dalliances into leftist foreign policy, and self-identification as a "socialist" all represent potentially serious political vulnerabilities for Sanders, who represents a small, left-leaning state where he hasn't faced a serious electoral challenge in over 20 years and who therefore has little experience in defending his record against well-financed opposition in an unfriendly political constituency.

The fact that Sanders is currently polling well in a hypothetical matchup against Trump therefore don't necessarily predict how a general election between the two would turn out. Sanders would begin the race unburdened by the negative popular evaluations that now weigh down the Clinton campaign; on the other hand, November is a long way off, and there would be plenty of time for him to lose his current relative appeal—while Clinton, as more of a known quantity, may be less vulnerable to further Republican attacks and may in fact make a modest recovery in the polls once the Democratic nomination contest has concluded. Most Democratic leaders view Clinton, for all her flaws, as still representing a safer choice for the party's nomination (putting aside the question of whether it would be appropriate for the superdelegates to overturn the results of the pledged delegate count).

But these polls do tell us something useful about the election all the same. Some observers who view Trump as a potentially formidable general election candidate have suggested that he could receive a significant crossover vote from Democrats. "Because Trump isn’t a doctrinaire conservative—because he appeals on emotion and not policy—the theory is that he can win white working-class Democrats and other disaffected voters in the Democratic coalition," wrote Jamelle Bouie of Slate in a March critical appraisal.

If Trump had a unique appeal to non-Republicans, however, we'd expect to see evidence of it in trial heat polls against Sanders, who may be viewed as more or less a generic Democratic candidate by a general electorate who is not yet very familiar with him. Sanders's fairly wide lead at this stage indicates that there is no substantial population of Democrats who are sufficiently attracted to the Trump candidacy that they would support him over either candidate of their own party.

Perhaps things will change, and Trump will succeed in crafting a message that appeals to Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents—or perhaps the Democratic nominee will alienate a sufficiently large sector of the electorate that such an achievement won't be necessary. But while the polls can't tell us for sure whether Clinton or Sanders would be a stronger general-election candidate, they do continue to demonstrate that the Trump fan club has very few non-Republican members. Regardless of the final outcome in 2016, it is therefore unlikely that the Trump candidacy will fundamentally redefine the two parties' mass bases of support.

Process Obsessions Aren't Enough to Sustain Sanders Past June

Yesterday, I wrote a long post interpreting the melee at the Nevada state convention on Saturday as reflecting the broader tendency of liberals to get bogged down in process arguments when denied political success, which can often prove counterproductive to their long-term goals. The Bernie Sanders campaign has become increasingly preoccupied with procedural issues, citing them as excuses for their inability to defeat Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016.

The New York Times provides additional evidence with an article eye-catchingly headlined "Bernie Sanders, Eyeing Convention, Willing to Harm Hillary Clinton in the Homestretch." The piece seems intentionally written to provoke nervous Democrats into uncontrollable bouts of hand-wringing over the possibility of an angry and undaunted Sanders waging a kamikaze mission against Clinton all the way to, if not after, the national convention this summer. Stripping away the various inferences, suggestions, and on-background complaints from the Sanders campaign, however, leaves us with the following on-the-record quote from Sanders strategist Tad Devine, which is hardly a call to storm the barricades:

The only thing that matters is what happens between now and June 14 [the date of the final primary]. We have to put the blinders on and focus on the best case to make in the upcoming states. If we do that, we can be in a strong position to make the best closing argument before the convention. If not, everyone will know in mid-June, and we’ll have to take a hard look at where things stand.

It seems more likely that Sanders and his top aides don't really know today what they'll do once the primary season is over, and there may be some internal difference of opinion on the subject. That they remain privately as well as publicly preoccupied with process questions is clear: the Sanders camp is still nurturing long-held grievances about perceived unfair treatment by the Democratic National Committee, and one suggested set of demands at the convention would involve unspecified "fundamental changes to how presidential primaries and debates are held in the future."

But complaints about nomination procedures, however valid they might be, are simply not important or motivating enough at the mass level to sustain a presidential campaign—especially a campaign that will not be able to claim the most votes or the most pledged delegates once the primary calendar is complete. Superdelegates, party activists, and Democratic voters are unlikely to view the Sanders campaign's gripes as justifying a post-primary battle over the nomination in the face of a general-election race against Donald Trump. It's one thing to continue a debate within the party over substantive policy priorities that might affect millions of people, but it's hard to run a serious campaign for the office of president of the United States that is primarily dedicated to the cause of exacting revenge on Debbie Wasserman Schultz.