Establishment Democrats’ Best Chance to Derail Sanders Faces More Obstacles

(Bloomberg) -- The Democratic Party’s best chance to stop Bernie Sanders from winning its presidential nomination comes on Super Tuesday, but his two top challengers -- a newly buoyant Joe Biden and a beleaguered Michael Bloomberg -- both face huge obstacles to doing so.

Sanders is heavily favored to come out of Super Tuesday with a slew of delegates and perhaps an insurmountable lead, despite deep worry in establishment Democratic circles that he would lose to President Donald Trump. So if the nominee is going to be anyone but Sanders, Democrats in the 14 states voting in the single-biggest day of balloting need to choose an alternative.

“Well, I think it’s no secret that the establishment is getting very nervous, whether it is the corporate wing of the Democratic Party or the political leadership. And the argument that we can’t beat Trump is absolutely wrong,” Sanders told reporters in Los Angeles.

With his commanding win in South Carolina Saturday, Biden pitched himself as that candidate, and many party leaders rallied to his side with well-timed endorsements. But he’s low on cash, his Super Tuesday operation is negligible and the sprawling map negates his strongest asset: a folksy one-on-one appeal.

That leaves Bloomberg, the former New York mayor who has risen to the top tier through the force of more than $538 million in advertising. He has defied new calls to drop out -- coming loudest from the Biden camp -- before he has earned a delegate or appeared on a ballot.

Bloomberg bet his whole candidacy on Super Tuesday, the first time he’ll face voters, but if anything, he seems to be stalling right at the moment he hoped to peak. A pair of shaky debate performances and fresh scrutiny of his record on minorities and women has tarnished his persona as the competent alternative to a president he calls dangerously incompetent.

(Bloomberg is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.)

Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar all won delegates in early contests but were boxed out in South Carolina. Buttigieg saw no path forward, and without much money left, dropped out of the race Sunday.

Unless Warren or Klobuchar can mount an improbable upset win on Tuesday, their continued presence in the race only helps Sanders, by diffusing the anti-Sanders delegates. They, too, are likely to face pressure to drop out if they fare poorly on Super Tuesday. Klobuchar, in particular, will be pressed to step aside, even though she probably will carry her home state of Minnesota.

Without Buttigieg, Tuesday now has five competitive candidates -- and the bigger the field, the better it is for Sanders, who commands an army of supporters fiercely loyal to him, his unorthodox campaign persona and left-of-center policy prescriptions.

Super Tuesday awards 1,344 delegates overall -- most of the 1,991 needed to clinch the nomination on the first ballot at the Democratic National Convention, with 415 coming out of California alone, where Sanders leads. He could put himself almost out of reach if he gets the lion’s share of the day’s spoils and others carve up the rest. There are other big delegate hauls out there, including an April 28 primary day that includes New York state, but Tuesday’s is the biggest.

“Fragmentation is a big problem,” said David Price, a North Carolina congressman who has endorsed Biden. “It’s about having so many candidates who are dividing the vote. It’s a problem going into Super Tuesday but I certainly hope that coming out of Super Tuesday we can see a path forward where not all those candidates remain in the race and we can begin to focus on fewer contenders.”

The sprawling field also has spurred worries among Democrats that no candidate can win the required delegates needed to secure the nomination on the first convention ballot, leading to a messy and divisive floor fight over the nomination.

Democratic rules leave open such a possibility by requiring a candidate to get at least 15% — either statewide or in a congressional or state legislative district — to win delegates. That means even someone who does poorly in the statewide totals can pocket a few delegates and make it hard for one person to amass enough to win outright before the July convention.

It looks like only Sanders — who’s polling at about 30% nationally — can consistently hit that mark. He’s leading in the polls in California, Texas, Virginia, Massachusetts, Colorado and Utah, according to the RealClearPolitics average of polls taken before South Carolina.

In those polls, Biden led only in North Carolina, the third-biggest Super Tuesday state, although several smaller states have no reliable public polling to set expectations.

Biden has reason to be optimistic. Winning begets winning, and Biden’s victory in South Carolina was the most dominant of any state yet.

His 29-point margin over Sanders Saturday gives Biden a shot of momentum, that fickle and elusive quality that energizes campaigns, fills bank accounts and drives news coverage.

Biden said Sunday he had raised $5 million in the 24 hours around the South Carolina primary. He appeared on several Sunday shows and noted that he has won more votes in the first four contests than Sanders, despite trailing him narrowly in delegates.

“I can win in places where I don’t think Bernie can win in a general election,” Biden said on ABC’s “This Week.”

Biden has been on the wrong end of momentum before. He had almost consistently led the national polls from the moment he got in the race last April.

After coming in fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire, he lost that national lead to Sanders, who won the Nevada caucus over Biden by about 26 percentage points. History has shown that once a candidate loses an early polling lead, it’s almost impossible to get back.

Besides North Carolina, Biden’s other strongholds are likely to be in other Super Tuesday states with large African-American populations, like Virginia, Tennessee and Alabama, where he hopes voters reward him for being a loyal vice president to Barack Obama for two terms.

Bloomberg entered the race late, on Nov. 24, and attempted to do something never before tried, skipping the first four contests to focus on Super Tuesday. He began to rise in national and state polls in the midst of his advertising barrage, as Democrats cast about for a candidate to stop Sanders and saw the billionaire Bloomberg as someone who could match Trump dollar for dollar or even outspend him, as he is self-funding his campaign.

Bloomberg has invested heavily in delegate-poor states largely overlooked by others, like Arkansas and Oklahoma.

Biden, in particular, has been attacking Bloomberg as someone who isn’t a “lifelong” Democrat -- he won the mayor’s race in New York as a Republican and only recently switched back to being a Democrat. Bloomberg told CBS’s “60 Minutes” in an interview taped last week he will continue his campaign even if he is not in the top three on Tuesday.

He reiterated that message even after South Carolina gave Biden the win. “We’ll see what happens, but I’m optimistic. All I can say is this: We have to stop talking and start doing,” Bloomberg said Sunday at the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King Unity breakfast in Selma, Alabama on Sunday.

The Delegate Map

So the race is still Sanders’s to lose. Polls show him leading by nearly 20 points in delegate-rich California, where his calls to tax the wealthy, raise the minimum wage and provide cradle-to-grave government programs have won over voters in areas with the most income inequality.

Read More: Sanders Dominates in California, Where Income Inequality Looms Large

California and Texas both have large Hispanic populations — a demographic Sanders won in Nevada nine days ago.

“We have a bunch of states that, you know, we’ve campaigned in very well that have large Latino populations, larger populations of young people, larger populations of progressive voters,” Ari Rabin-Havt, Sanders’s deputy campaign manager, told reporters on Sunday.

“We’re really happy with where we stand on Super Tuesday, we’re really happy with the state of the race,” he said. “We go in with a pledged delegate lead. We go in with fund-raising that allows us to sustain the campaign we need to run to win.”

But Sanders’s 30% polling means there’s room for another candidate to consolidate enough of the remaining 70% to challenge him for the nomination.

Warren briefly enjoyed front-runner status last fall, but has collected only a handful of delegates in the early contests. She’s largely looking past Super Tuesday to next week’s March 10 contest, when six states, including Michigan and Washington state, vote, though she faces the prospect of a humiliating loss to Sanders in her home state of Massachusetts on Tuesday.

Game of Chicken

But it’s not Super Tuesday that will ultimately decide the fate of the Democratic nomination.

It’s Reckoning Wednesday.

The candidates know that no one can beat Sanders as long as they all stay in the race, but none of them wants to drop out.

The Warren campaign said Super Tuesday would force some candidates to drop out — but she wouldn’t be one of them.

“As the dust settles after March 3, the reality of this race will be clear: no candidate will likely have a path to the majority of delegates needed to win an outright claim to the Democratic nomination,” campaign manager Roger Lau said in a memo to supporters Sunday.

If no candidate gets the 1,991 delegates needed to win on the first convention ballot, an also-ran could be transformed into a compromise nominee. Worst case, a candidate with a tranche of delegates could have the opportunity to play kingmaker at a brokered convention by throwing their delegates behind the nominee.

While there hasn’t been a brokered convention since 1952, the size of the Democratic field makes such a scenario plausible. It could allow anyone holding delegates to parlay them into a Cabinet post or even the vice presidency. All those candidates want to know what cards they’re holding before they decide to fold.

“If not now, when?” said Price, who announced his Biden endorsement last week ahead of his state’s Super Tuesday vote. “Folks, this is the time. Time’s up. You know, we’ve got to make a choice, we’ve got to realistically assess how this is going and make a choice.”

--With assistance from Tyler Pager, Mark Niquette and Billy House.

To contact the reporters on this story: Gregory Korte in Washington at gkorte@bloomberg.net;Jennifer Epstein in Selma, Alabama at jepstein32@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Wendy Benjaminson at wbenjaminson@bloomberg.net, Magan Crane

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