I was not yet a voter in 1972, but I remember that bummer year, and the parallels to 2020 are bugging me out. At that time there was a cold civil war happening within the Democratic Party. Few people talked about it openly at the time, but an awful hangover from 1968 drove the process. To recap: in the spring of 1968, LBJ withdrew following his weak victory over Gene McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary. Three weeks later MLK was assassinated. Bobby Kennedy entered the race, fracturing the anti-war movement, and was assassinated in June on the night of the California primary. Meanwhile, vice president Hubert Humphrey entered the race as a centrist, and secured the nomination with the brutal assistance of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and the rest of the Democratic establishment. The general election race between Humphrey, Nixon and George Wallace was an unholy mess, but among the factors contributing to Humphrey’s razor thin loss was the fact that a significant chunk of McCarthy and Kennedy supporters, disgusted with Humphrey and alienated by the process, did not vote in the general election.
In 1972 the anti-war left largely coalesced around George
McGovern’s candidacy. (What would have happened if more voters had taken Shirley
Chisolm’s run seriously?) Ed Muskie was
the establishment candidate this time, and just like in 1968 he suffered a
humiliating win in New Hampshire, thanks in part to Muskie’s emotional reaction
to smears that had been perpetrated (as we later learned) by Nixon’s operative
Donald Segretti (a K-Mart knockoff of Roger Stone.) Muskie withdrew, Humphrey stepped in. George Wallace, who was competing for the Democratic
nomination in this cycle, won 8 primaries, including Maryland and
Michigan. Humphrey actually ended up
with a slightly higher popular vote total than McGovern, 25.77% to McGovern’s
25.34%, with Wallace at 23.48% and Chisolm at 2.7%. But McGovern had won most of the primaries,
and secured the nomination on the first ballot.
Afterwards the party establishment half-heartedly fell in line behind
McGovern, but it was no use. The Nixon
campaign sold worried voters on the notion that McGovern was practically a
socialist. Nixon was re-elected in a
landslide.
OK, you see where I’m going.
I love Bernie (though TBH I would still prefer Warren), and I believe that
he has a chance to prove the pundits wrong and win in November. But there are two competing strategies to get
there. One strategy is to stay true to
the vision, and attract new and alienated voters to the cause on the strength
of Sanders’ consistently progressive message.
The other strategy would have Bernie gradually pivot in his messaging in
order to attract moderates, independents and disaffected Republicans to his
side in the general election. You really
can’t do both (Warren has tried to do that, and it hasn’t worked so far). And there’s good evidence that the first,
more straightforwardly progressive strategy is likely to fail—the pundits are unfortunately
correct on this point.
Getting back to the 1972 analogy, the subtext here is that a
lot of Sanders’ coalition believes, with some justification, that the
Democratic Party establishment is fundamentally corrupt. And much of the party establishment plainly
despises Sanders. The moderates want a
candidate with broad appeal, and Biden, Bloomberg, Buttigieg and Klobuchar are all
competing in that lane as of today. This
means that Sanders could win the nomination, just as McGovern did, with as
little as 25% of the total primary vote.
If Bernie doesn’t clear that bar, and nobody else does, we’ll
have a contested convention. That could
be as ugly as 1968, or as futile as 1972.
In the best case, the delegates could winnow the candidates in
successive ballots, or by an instant runoff process (if the rules would permit
that). We’d end up with a compromise
candidate who might not be the person with the plurality or the most delegates
going into the convention, but who was arguably more broadly acceptable than a
factional candidate could be. If that
person isn’t Sanders, they’ll need consummate skill to placate progressives and
attract independents at the same time.
The biggest problem for any Democratic presidential
candidate lies in a fundamental asymmetry between the way the GOP and Democrats
win state and national elections. Ezra
Klein has given the best analysis of this state of affairs: because the GOP is
as ethnically and ideologically homogenous as the Democratic Party is diverse,
and because the Electoral College and the provision of two Senators per state both
significantly favor the GOP, Democrats usually cannot win elections the way
Republicans do, by appealing primarily to their base. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both succeeded
by running hard down the middle.
Republicans candidates always play to the fear that
Democrats in power will take away the little that you have, and give it to the undeserving. This plainly racist appeal actually works on
working class voters of all races. Clinton
and Obama were nimble enough to overcome it.
So far, Bernie doesn’t seem to be moving in that direction. Yesterday, responding to AOC’s suggestion
that a compromise on Medicare For All would still be a win for Democrats as
long as it established a public option, Sanders responded that the four-year
phase-in outlined in his plan “is, in a sense, already a compromise.” Are skeptical voters really going to buy
that? I doubt it.
Given that Trump is plainly dishonest, incompetent, corrosive
to our political institutions, a horrible human being, and a total hypocrite
when it comes to addressing the real needs of the people who voted for him, you
would think that defeating him would be a straightforward process. But given the extent of polarization both within
the Democratic Party and in the general electorate, it won’t be.
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