Two up, two down. Two of the whitest states this side of the Swiss Alps are now firmly in the rear-view mirror. And here's what we know so far: Of the top five candidates who ran in Iowa and New Hampshire, the left-lane candidates - Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren - received a total of 178,434 votes; the center-lane candidates - Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar and Joe Biden - received a total of 234,805 votes. And please note when I say center lane, I'm being facetious. The fact is that two of those three "center-lane" candidates - Buttigieg and Biden - if they were to be elected, would be to the left of Barack Obama, and the third - Klobuchar - if elected would pretty much be a mirror image of his administration. If that's the definition of center lane, I'm the new power forward for the New York Knicks.
Consider this: The two most progressive candidates, with 43 percent of the vote, have the left lane all to themselves, while the so-called moderates, with 57 percent of the vote, are crowded into a single lane. And that single lane, mind you, is about to become considerably more crowded. Come Super Tuesday, Michael Bloomberg officially joins the race. Bloomberg is currently polling at 13.6 percent nationally according to the RCP average, and most of that has come at the expense of Biden, who is rapidly losing whatever steam he had just a few months ago. So bad was his performance in New Hampshire that he didn't even wait for the polls to close before heading to South Carolina, where he is pinning his presidential hopes on a firewall he thinks will save his candidacy. Ask Hillary Clinton about firewalls, Joe. More often than not they're made of paper-mâché.
That odor you detected was the Democratic Party soiling itself. The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced this race is shaping up to be a carbon copy of the one Republicans ran four years ago, when a reality TV star by the name of Donald Trump ran away with the nomination, despite not getting a majority of the vote in the states he won.
The parallels are striking. For instance, in Iowa, Trump came in second with 24 percent of the vote; one week later, he won New Hampshire with 35 percent of the vote. The next five candidates - John Kasich, Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Chris Christie - combined for 56 percent of the vote. I'm sure it didn't dawn on any of them at the time, but the supposed strength they thought they enjoyed, in the end turned out to be a weakness; a weakness Trump exploited all the way to the convention.
The same thing could happen to Democrats in 2020. Despite what his supporters keep insisting, Sanders does NOT enjoy majority support for his proposals within the party. In fact, in a Pew Research poll released just last month, only 15 percent of Democrats identified as very liberal, while just 32 percent said they were somewhat liberal. If you're counting that's comes out to less than 50 percent of the overall total of Democrats. That doesn't bode well for a candidate looking to start a revolution. In fact, it more closely resembles a candidate like Buttigieg or Klobuchar. The irony is that if either of them had decided to drop out of the race prior to New Hampshire, I have no doubt Sanders would've been stopped dead in his tracks. It's obvious, both are pulling from the same trough of voters.
It is quite conceivable that Sanders edges out Biden in Nevada, Biden holds on in South Carolina, and on Super Tuesday, Bloomberg doesn't manage to win any states, but he costs Biden several of them, thus greasing the skids for Sanders to jump out to a huge delegate lead. This was the nightmare scenario that the party was hoping to avoid: a logjam in the middle that allows a fringe candidate to escape with the nomination.
Some of you will say I'm getting ahead of myself; that we still have a long way to go. Four years ago, I'm sure Republicans felt the exact same way. I doubt any of them seriously believed that Trump could win the nomination. I, of course, thought otherwise. I saw the GOP field and I knew how to count. The same thing is happening here, trust me. Yes, I'm aware that the candidates running for the Democratic nomination this year are considerably stronger and more qualified than the candidates who were running for the Republican nomination in 2016. That's not the point. It's not about quality; it's about percentages, and right now, Bernie is in the driver's seat.
What needs to happen to prevent a catastrophe is for one or more of the "center-lane" candidates to take one for the team. With Warren on life support after her dismal showing in both Iowa and New Hampshire, she could potentially drop out of the race after Super Tuesday, especially if she doesn't even win her home state. As for Tom Steyer, he'll stay in the race as long as his money holds out. That leaves Biden, Bloomberg, Buttigieg and Klobuchar divvying up just under 60 percent of the vote. Now you know why I'm hyperventilating.
Now before I go any further, I want to make it clear that I am not suggesting in any way that Sanders is the moral equivalent of Trump. If given the choice between the two, I'd take Sanders in a heartbeat. But let's be honest for a moment: there are some similarities between both men. For starters, both enjoy an almost cult-like following. I personally witnessed this in 2016. Throughout the campaign, whenever I would criticize Sanders and/or his supporters, you'd have thought I had just burned an American flag at a Veterans' Day Parade, that's how virulent the response was. I've never experienced anything like it in my life. I can almost sympathize with Republicans who are fearful of crossing Trump today. Almost.
Another similarity is where Trump and Sanders draw most of their support. It's primarily from the same voting bloc. People who feel as though the system is rigged against them and that both political parties are corrupt. Trump certainly made this a central theme in his campaign, and Sanders has not been shy about his contempt for Democrats in general. To this day, the majority of his supporters are convinced the DNC stole the nomination from him. And while I can't prove it, I believe that some of them either stayed home on election day or voted for Trump out of spite. Given the margins in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, even a small drop off among Sanders supporters - say 5 percent - could've tipped the scale in Trump's favor.
Then there's trade: Both Trump and Sanders are vehemently anti-free trade. They both came out strongly against NAFTA and TPP, despite evidence that neither deal was responsible for the tremendous loss of factory jobs in the Rust Belt states. If anything, automation has been the primary culprit, as Andrew Yang attempted to point out in the debates. And any Democratic candidate who believes that America's problems will magically be solved by simply retreating into the past has already ceded the election to Trump.
Some pundits - most of them progressive - have dismissed the concerns that many Democrats have about Sanders. They insist that a true progressive at the head of the ticket will turn out the base in a way Hillary couldn't. They also point out that a nominee who can fight on Trump's turf will be a good thing come November. Perhaps they're right. Maybe Sanders will turn out the base and convert some of those Trump voters into Bernie voters. Or perhaps those Trump voters will stay with Trump and that surge Democrats were counting on will never materialize. It's worth pointing out that Clinton got almost as many votes in 2016 as Obama got in 2012. The idea that she didn't turn out her base is simply not supported by the evidence.
Four years ago, in a two-person race, Hillary Clinton handed Bernie Sanders his lunch on her way to winning the nomination. This time around, with a much more crowded field, Sanders could conceivably return the favor to the DNC. Trump has already seized control of the Republican Party. Sanders would like nothing more than to do likewise to the Democratic Party. If he isn't dealt with soon, he'll get his wish.
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