(Bloomberg Opinion) --
The race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination has been going on for a bit over three years now. Finally, it’s time for the voters. On Monday, Democrats in Iowa will caucus. The following Tuesday, Feb. 11, New Hampshire will hold the election cycle’s first primary. Nevada caucuses follow on Saturday, Feb. 22. The South Carolina primary comes on leap day a week later, followed by a massive Super Tuesday on March 3. That’s five weeks from now. There’s a good chance that the nomination fight will be over after that, or at least that the winner will emerge. If not, a long battle is possible or even (gulp) a contested convention starting July 13 in Milwaukee.
Several things to keep in mind:
Iowa really is a toss-up. The FiveThirtyEight average has Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and former Vice President Joe Biden tied for first (Sanders has a 0.1% advantage). But the most important point made by the FiveThirtyEight analysts is over at their projection page: “Joe Biden is forecasted to win an average of 28% of the vote in Iowa. In 80% of simulations, he wins between 11% and 44% of the vote.” Plug in Sanders, and the same results come back. Former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts have similar, although slightly lower, ranges. In other words, it’s plausible that those four candidates could finish in any order at all. It also wouldn’t be surprising if one or two of them finish below Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, although she could also finish below several of the others if she winds up at the bottom of her likely range.
The FiveThirtyEight model is telling us something important. When there are lots of candidates, and lots of voters who like most or all of them, the history is clear: Large swings from the polls to the final results are possible in Iowa, even in the final week.
Sanders is a classic factional candidate. The Denver University political scientist Seth Masket has a must-read item on this with plenty of evidence from fundraising, staffing and more that he has both enthusiastic supporters and high negatives elsewhere in the Democratic Party. Masket is correct: Being a factional candidate is probably a significant disadvantage. It doesn’t mean Sanders can’t win. It does mean, however, that it’s reasonable to expect more resistance to his candidacy from party actors outside his faction if he does well in early contests than there would be to any other leading candidate who might succeed in February.
What is less clear is how that resistance would translate into votes. It’s also not clear how deep the opposition to Sanders might be. His status isn’t like that of Donald Trump, a factional Republican candidate whose personal faction was, at first, not really part of the Republican Party at all. It’s more similar to the position of Jesse Jackson, the Chicago preacher-activist who ran for the Democratic nomination in 1984 and 1988. When Jackson started doing well in his second campaign, some party actors outside his faction opposed him, but others were open to accommodating him, even if he wasn’t their ideal nominee.
Media interpretations matter. Dave Hopkins, a Boston College political scientist, has a good item explaining why. Beating expectations tends to generate more publicity. That tends to hurt front-runners, although Hopkins notes that it could be different this time. (See here for several examples of how a candidate can “win” an early state without getting the most votes). Yet beating expectations isn’t the only way to get treated as a winner. It’s probably true that candidates with more support from party actors, candidates who seem new to the media, and candidates with better relationships with reporters all tend to get rewarded, although all of these are only tendencies, not hard-and-fast rules.
One big question for this cycle: Will news about the impeachment of President Donald Trump reduce media effects because political coverage has to be shared with what’s happening on Capitol Hill, especially if the Senate trial continues beyond this week? It certainly seems possible that if the big news story of February is impeachment that it will be a lot harder for any candidate who isn’t already doing well to break through. One general point is that coordination among party actors may depend on relatively predictable media behavior; I’ve argued that changes in media norms disrupted Republican coordination in 2016 and helped Trump win with hardly any support from party actors. The same could be true if the national media pay less attention to Iowa and New Hampshire this time around.
1. Elanah Uretsky at the Monkey Cage on China and public health.
2. Sarah Handley-Cousins at Made By History on Trump and troop injuries.
3. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Conor Sen on an obstacle to building public infrastructure.
4. Matt Flegenheimer, Rebecca R. Ruiz and Nellie Bowles on badly behaved Bernie Sanders supporters.
5. And Jonathan Lai on November vote counting in Pennsylvania. It’s critical that those reporting on elections emphasize this story in advance and then remind everyone about it on election night Nov. 3. Democrats are going to gain ground on Republicans in many states, and nationally overall, as votes are counted in the days and weeks after Election Day. It’s simply a function of who votes and how the votes are counted. There’s nothing sinister about it, so it’s important to educate voters before the inevitable negative spin begins.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jonathan Landman at jlandman4@bloomberg.net
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He taught political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University and wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.
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