Jane King, a financial investor from Boston who describes herself as progressive, began the presidential primary as an avowed supporter of Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. But as Ms. Warren’s candidacy seemed to fade early this year, Ms. King looked elsewhere.
She considered Michael R. Bloomberg, Ms. Warren’s electoral nemesis. She thought about Pete Buttigieg, another moderate. Ultimately, in the Massachusetts primary that was a must-win for Ms. Warren, Ms. King voted for former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
She was simply trying to be strategic, Ms. King admits: She was willing to do whatever was necessary to stop Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont from becoming the Democratic nominee.
“I didn’t want Bernie to beat Elizabeth in her own backyard. But then, it became much more complicated than that,” said Ms. King, 70. “Are we going to have a nominee who could take on the Republican Party? We have to stop Bernie.”
Rarely has political momentum flipped as quickly as it did in the first half of March, as Mr. Sanders lost serious ground to Mr. Biden before the coronavirus slowed their race. There are well-known reasons for the shift: Moderate candidates like Mr. Buttigieg and Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota rallied around Mr. Biden. He enjoyed demographic advantages, particularly with black voters. And turnout among young voters and liberal nonvoters did not surge, failing to reshape the electorate as Mr. Sanders had hoped.
But beyond ideology, race and turnout, a chief reason for Mr. Biden’s success has little to do with his candidacy. He became a vehicle for Democrats like Ms. King who were supporting other candidates but found the prospect of Mr. Sanders and his calls for political revolution so distasteful that they put aside misgivings about Mr. Biden and backed him instead.
In phone interviews, dozens of Democrats, mostly aged 50 and over, who live in key March primary states like Massachusetts, Virginia, Michigan and Florida, said that Mr. Biden’s appeal went beyond his case for beating President Trump. It was his chances of overtaking Mr. Sanders, the only candidate in the vast Democratic field they found objectionable for reasons personal and political.
For some, like Amy Siegel of Natick, Mass., the anti-Sanders feeling relates back to the 2016 Democratic primary, when she supported Hillary Clinton and believed Mr. Sanders ran a divisive campaign that wounded her ahead of the general election. This time around, Ms. Siegel, 57, initially supported Mr. Buttigieg. But she voted for Mr. Biden in her state’s primary, held on Super Tuesday, days after Mr. Buttigieg dropped out and endorsed the former vice president. Ms. Siegel said she decided to flip her vote even before Mr. Buttigieg exited the race.
Others, like Beatrice Abetti of Bonita Springs, Fla., switched to Mr. Biden after Ms. Warren suspended her campaign, viewing Mr. Sanders as a general election risk. Ms. Abetti, 69, an author and former professor, said centrist Republicans she thought were critical to an Electoral College victory saw Mr. Sanders as a fringe leftist, even if she supported his policies.
“I can wait for four more years for ‘Medicare for all’ and the Green New Deal — and go with Biden — just to get Trump out of office,” Ms. Abetti said, “because that’s my number one thing.”
Her fears were specifically tied to the belief that Mr. Trump could win by highlighting a good economy against Mr. Sanders’s message of radical change. Now that the spread of the coronavirus has caused sweeping unemployment and a historic drop in stock prices, Ms. Abetti acknowledged that the political landscape had shifted.
Still, she said: “I thought Never Trump Republicans wouldn’t vote for Sanders, and more people who support Sanders would vote for Biden. So it’s with a heavy heart that I decided to back Biden.”
These voters’ willingness to unite against Mr. Sanders helped Democratic Party leaders stave off his insurgent campaign and has made Mr. Biden the all-but-certain Democratic nominee. The convergence behind Mr. Biden also highlights a critical difference between this year’s primary and what happened to the Republican Party in 2016. Four years ago, establishment Republicans were openly skeptical of Mr. Trump after his victories in early primary states, but a fractured field and split primary vote allowed him to amass an insurmountable delegate lead, reshaping the party in the process.
Mr. Sanders, for his part, has explained his slide by blaming the Democratic establishment, the collection of party leaders leery of grass-roots candidates promising structural change. Allies have zeroed in on the endorsements of Mr. Buttigieg and Ms. Klobuchar, whose consolidation behind Mr. Biden after the South Carolina primary left the Sanders campaign flat-footed.
“What the establishment wanted was to make sure that people coalesced around Biden and try to defeat me,” Mr. Sanders said, days after Super Tuesday, on ABC’s “This Week.” “So that’s not surprising.”
But some of Mr. Sanders’s vulnerabilities were self-inflicted, and voter interviews and exit polls from states that held their primaries in March suggest that problems existed on the ground level.
Ahead of Mr. Sanders’s presidential run in 2020, his campaign did not concern itself with smoothing tensions among voters who supported Mrs. Clinton in 2016. He did not seek the endorsements of many party leaders, who were always unlikely to back him, but could have been swayed from being openly antagonistic to ambivalent.
As a result, after a strong finish in Iowa and wins in New Hampshire and Nevada, Mr. Sanders did not benefit from an assumed truth of presidential campaigns: that early-state victories help bring in voters from other factions. Instead, people like Lori Boerner of McLean, Va., said Mr. Sanders’s performance sent them searching for a candidate who could stop his rise, and after the South Carolina primary, they landed on Mr. Biden.
Ms. Boerner, 57, said she switched her support from Mr. Buttigieg to Mr. Biden the night Mr. Biden won big in South Carolina. This was before Mr. Buttigieg had dropped out and endorsed his former rival.
“I guess after New Hampshire, it became clear — Bernie’s going to win,” Ms. Boerner said. “So are we going to stop him or are we not? And then South Carolina came that Saturday, and that provided an answer and a way out.”
Most Democrats across the country do not view Mr. Sanders negatively, polling suggests. In a recent national poll from The Economist and YouGov, Mr. Sanders and Mr. Biden had nearly identical favorability ratings among Democrats, even as Mr. Biden led in presidential preferences. Mr. Sanders continues to enjoy ardent support among people who describe themselves as progressives and among younger voters across the country.
But in exit polls and interviews from states that voted in the last month, it is also clear that members of key demographics that were once skeptical of both Mr. Biden and Mr. Sanders, such as college-educated white voters, broke for the former vice president.
Mr. Sanders, who caucuses with the Democratic Party but calls himself a democratic socialist and independent, also suffered with self-identified Democrats. The Super Tuesday exit polls showed Mr. Biden trouncing Mr. Sanders among self-identified Democrats by about 30 percentage points in both Virginia and North Carolina and nearly 50 in Alabama. In Michigan, Mr. Biden won self-identified Democrats by 22 points, according to exit polls, and Mr. Sanders’s 2016 advantage among independent voters was all but wiped out.
Progressive groups have been left to lament what could have been, and some have openly questioned the outreach strategy of the Democrats’ left flank. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York said recently that some on the left were too focused on “conflict.” Sean McElwee, a founder of the progressive think tank Data for Progress, said progressives must couple their desire to change the scope of the Democratic electorate with regular efforts at political persuasion.
“It cannot be a hostile takeover,” Mr. McElwee said. “We have to persuade people in the Democratic Party that our ideas are good ones and we’ll make the world a better place.”
The most stark example of Mr. Sanders’s problems with self-identified Democrats may be the Warren-to-Biden voters, people like Barbara Becker and Lisa Stone. These voters, many of whom are older Democrats and college-educated women, chose to support a candidate whose platform was a far cry from Ms. Warren’s promises of “big, structural change,” rather than a fellow progressive, Mr. Sanders — whom they admit they agree with on most policy matters.
The voters said that while they share many of Mr. Sanders’s beliefs, they reject his political style.
“Biden is and always has been a collaborative worker — one who knows how to gather and draw on colleagues’ expertise,” said Ms. Becker, 73, a college professor in Chapel Hill, N.C. “Sanders is a do-it-yourselfer.”
Ms. Stone, 63, an educator in Houston, said she “supported Warren because she was progressive but practical, and that’s not what Sanders is.”
Plus, Mr. Biden is, like her, a Democrat through and through. And Ms. Stone said that while she remained disappointed Ms. Warren did not perform better in Texas, the fact that the state went to Mr. Biden was some consolation.
“I wasn’t terribly upset,” she said. “It’s better than Sanders winning.”
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
