Stopping Sanders [Updated]

Update Feb 27 8:17 am CST: In his daily e-newsletter this morning, David Leonhardt of the New York Times sharpens the too-many-candidates-fracturing-the-Sanders-opposition-vote analysis by pointing specifically to Michael Bloomberg (and his unlimited advertising budget) as the third-candidate spoiler.  In Leonhardt's telling, the candidate whose chances Bloomberg is spoiling the most is Joe Biden.  He refers to this Texas polling data presented by John McCormack in National Review:

With Bloomberg in the race, Biden and Sanders are exactly tied in Texas:  

Biden 24 Sanders 24 Bloomberg 17 Warren 14 Buttigieg 10 Klobuchar 4 

If Bloomberg were not in the race, the poll shows Biden holding a six-point lead over Sanders:  

Biden 31 Sanders 25 Warren 17 Buttigieg 11 Klobuchar 7 

Leonhardt goes on to note:

This situation highlights one of the problems with a late-entering candidate, as Bloomberg is. He is on a different timetable from the rest of the field. Maybe he has a real chance to win the nomination, and voters who are attracted by his candidacy should vote for him. Or maybe he has little chance to win and has arrived just in time to be a spoiler who helps the candidate who’s most different from him.

I continue to believe that party leadership could exert more control than it has.  Just because Bloomberg wants to be a candidate doesn't mean that the Democratic Party leadership needs to accept him.  Bloomberg's elective-office history has been as a Republican and an independent.  Democratic Party leaders could argue credibly that billionaires with virtually no party history can't buy their way into the process.  Of course, similar stewardship and gatekeeping should have been exercised by GOP leadership in 2015 and 2016.  And Sanders himself wouldn't be exempt from this calculus if it were to be applied indiscriminately.

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The political cycles for major-party presidential nominations are two years long, or even longer, and very expensive - but once the actual primaries and caucuses get underway, the outcome can become clear relatively quickly.  Whether it is possible to rewrite the foreseeable ending to the story, is very much an open question.

Bernie Sanders has come in first or second in the three delegate-apportioning events held so far (Iowa caucuses, New Hampshire primary, Nevada primary).  According to Real Clear Politics, as of this morning, Sanders has 35 delegates, Buttigieg 24, Biden 10, Warren 8 and Klobuchar 7.  To be sure, the race is a very long way from settled: a winning candidate needs to accumulate 1,991 delegates to win the nomination on the first ballot.  South Carolina's primary is this Saturday; the Real Clear Politics poll average for that state shows Biden at 24.5%, but Bernie well within striking distance at 21.5%.  The only other two candidates in double figures are Tom Steyer(!) at 16.5% and Buttigieg at 10.1%.

In just a little more than a week, we may have a considerably clearer view to the outcome of the nomination race.  Only three days after  South Carolina comes the Super Tuesday primaries, on Tuesday, March 3rd.  On that day, Democrats in 15 states, plus Democrats Abroad, will vote.  By Super Tuesday evening, Democrats will have chosen 40% of the electable delegates.   

The two plum states on Super Tuesday are California and Texas, the two largest states in the union.  As of this morning, Sanders holds a decisive polling lead in California, with a cluster consisting of Biden, Bloomberg, Buttigieg and Warren trailing behind by 12-15 points.  And Sanders holds a narrow lead over Biden in Texas.  In the second tier of Super Tuesday states would be North Carolina, Virginia and Massachusetts.  Sanders currently leads Bloomberg and Biden narrowly in North Carolina; I haven't been able to find polling yet for Virginia and Massachusetts.

The Real Clear Politics average of national polls shows Sanders at 29.3%, leading Biden by over a dozen points, with Bloomberg and Warren trailing farther behind.

These data points, taken together, make it clear that Sanders already has a significant delegate and polling advantage over his opponents, and that by next week, that advantage almost certainly will be even starker.   Whether Sanders will have, for practical purposes, sewn up the nomination if he does as well as projected on Super Tuesday, is not yet clear to me.

Many analysts have drawn parallels with the 2016 GOP primary race, in which Donald Trump mounted a hostile takeover of the party which more conventional candidates were unable to stop.  In the Washington Examiner, Liz Mair, a political consultant and veteran of the 2016 Republican wars, takes the parallel seriously.  In an article entitled "Never Sanders needs to step up its game", she suggests that, if Democrats don't want Bernie Sanders fronting their party in November, the time to act is now - in fact, it may already be too late.

Mair has two sets of suggestions:

1. More-moderate candidates must immediately consolidate around a clear alternative to Sanders
2. Stop-Sanders Democrats must attack Sanders a good deal more ferociously than they have so far

Consolidation: this is where the GOP failed in 2016, and where Democrats who wish to stop Bernie may fail now.  Mair notes,

In New Hampshire, [FiveThiryEight's Nate] Silver notes, “50 percent of voters said Sanders’s positions were too liberal. Meanwhile, the combined vote shares for Buttigeig (sic), Klobuchar and Biden (52.6 percent) considerably exceeded that for Sanders and [Sen. Elizabeth] Warren (34.9 percent).”

New Hampshire voters are in agreement with all of the Real Clear Politics polls cited in this post: there are many more not-Sanders voters than Sanders voters in the Democratic Party.  But so long as candidates who are alternatives to Sanders continue to split the vote among one another, Sanders will continue to win primary after primary.

What might consolidation look like?  Mair suggests that it looks a lot like Amy Klobuchar:

What if Cruz and Rubio [in the 2016 GOP primary contests] had joined a ticket on terms that would make them virtual co-presidents? This is something that Buttigieg, Biden, and Bloomberg should all be thinking hard about right now, and they should be looking squarely at Amy Klobuchar, either as their potential boss or as their potential partner in such an arrangement. Unlike two of the moderate men, Klobuchar has Senate experience and knowhow that will be vital for getting an agenda through Congress. Unlike all of them, she is actually funny, which is a huge advantage in electoral politics (just look at Trump). Also unlike them, she is a woman who has won statewide in the Midwest. Given the electoral map and the Democrats’ zealous focus on identity politics, these are both positives.

Attack Sanders:  Another mistake made by not-Trump candidates in 2016 was that as Trump built up an early delegate lead, alternative candidates went after one another in debates and advertising campaigns, presumably in a belief that, after all the alternatives but one had been eliminated, the last man standing (there were no women among the GOP leading candidates) would become the clear Trump alternative.  Eventually, the pool of candidates was winnowed down to one not-Trumper, Ted Cruz. But the internecine-warfare process took far too long, and by the time Cruz was left to face Trump by himself, Trump had virtually clinched the nomination.

There was some evidence, in the most recent debate, that the Democratic candidates were following the same script; they all got in some shots against one another.  The other candidates didn't leave Sanders alone, but Mair believes that there is plenty of room for not-Sanders candidates to crank up the heat:

Bloomberg is doing this most, and most effectively, but even after hitting Sanders on socialism in the debate, it still is not enough. Politics is nasty. Where are the people crashing Sanders rallies with Soviet flags and blaring the Soviet national anthem over their phones? Or putting on Marx, Lenin, and Stalin masks? Or in Florida, showing up dressed up as Fidel Castro and Che Guevara waving Bernie Sanders signs? Where are the fake “Bernie Sanders travel guides” detailing his favorite places to hang out in Moscow, Managua, Havana, and Caracas?
Given that Sanders first won office by aligning with the National Rifle Association, which Democratic voters seem to loathe, it’s frankly embarrassing that Biden, in particular, hasn’t made this into a line of major attack. Biden could easily start hammering Bernie hard on this in town halls, at ice cream socials, and other voter meet-and-greets and simultaneously deploy some fake "NRA members for Bernie" carrying phony Kalashnikovs and talking about Sanders’s real record. It would work better than his throwaway line at the end of last week’s debate hitting Sanders on the subject.

Among her other suggestions is to go after Sanders for hypocrisy - Sanders regularly pounds on the wealthy even though he is wealthy himself; and he resisted paying his campaign staffers the $15/hour minimum wage he proposes for the country.

She also notes that there are some considerations that complicate the attack-Sanders approach: given his age and possibly precarious health, the other candidates may not wish to get him too worked up.

Mair also is critical of the press corps following Sanders:

Many people who cover Sanders are fans of his who won’t write a bad word about him; many others are simply pure horserace people. Only a few have an investigative journalist’s bone in their bodies (it’s those last few that you want to get the dirt in front of).

And she notes the perennial political danger of attacking the leader:

As with the anti-Trump contingent in 2016, presumably they’re all afraid that if they attack Sanders too hard, his supporters will never back them in a general (of course, as we saw in 2016, a decent number of Sanders voters won’t back the eventual Democratic nominee anyway).

This was a problem for never-Trump Republicans in 2016, and four years later, they still haven't solved it: they want Trump to go away, but they want to keep his voters.