The Democratic Parties Decide

The Democratic establishment is an ill-defined group, to say the least. It includes everyone from county party chairs in Minnesota to Wall Street-based bundlers to five-term senators to low-level operatives pecking at laptops in the Democratic National Committee building. It is not a group that can actually act in concert or plan conspiracies. It is too large and unwieldy, and the ties between its disparate elements are often weak state party chairs don’t usually hang out with partners at Goldman Sachs. Since the rise of the internet, it has lacked the power to control the flow of money to candidates or to impose messaging and ideological discipline. 

But on Monday, the day before the most important day of the 2020 primary race, it showed the ability to get three former presidential candidates to rally behind a former vice president who, in an earlier political era, likely would have locked up their endorsements months earlier. 

On Monday night in Dallas, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas) joined together to endorse former Vice President Joe Biden for the party’s nomination to challenge President Donald Trump .

“The heart of this country is bigger than the heart of the guy in the White House,” Klobuchar said as she endorsed Biden. “It is time for a president who will bring dignity and decency back.”

The trio’s move along with endorsements from a host of other party figures, including Sen. Tammy Duckworth (Ill.) and former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.) represents a coalescing of mainstream and moderate Democrats . And it serves as a rebuke of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a democratic socialist and longtime independent who leads the Democratic primary field in delegates and who, before a wide Biden victory in South Carolina, was expected to romp on Super Tuesday, when more than 1,500 Democratic National Convention delegates are up for grabs.

At the same time, however, Sanders was consolidating support in his own portion of the party at the expense of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). Democracy for America, a progressive group that had remained neutral, announced its support for Sanders after more than 80% of its membership said they support him. 

And Justice Democrats, another progressive group that has announced its opposition to Biden but had remained neutral, went out of its way to scold Warren for her attacks on Sanders’s effectiveness and legislative record, and suggesting her proposed path to the nomination through a contested convention “would be harmful for our movement, our party, and the policies she’s spent her life fighting for.”

“I hope she stops attacking Sen. Sanders and publicly commits to give her delegates to him if he has more votes to ensure a progressive wins the nomination,” said Alexandra Rojas, the group’s executive director. 

If, as Sanders-supporting Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently said, she and Biden would be in different political parties in most European countries, then each of the two parties that divide the Democratic Party are deciding on their nominees.

One wing, which is more suburban, higher income and older, is focused on building a stronger social safety net without overturning the core of the existing economic order. They are wary of rapid change and tired of political chaos, and hold out hope they can reach reasonable agreements with Republicans . Their primary concern is Trump’s divisiveness, misbehavior and threats to American institutions. Their candidate is Biden. On Tuesday, he’ll win delegates from heavily Black areas in the South and likely from wealthy suburbs in the Sun Belt.

“We’ve got to beat Donald Trump and the Republican Party, but we can’t become like them,” Biden told one of the largest crowds of his campaign in Dallas. “We’ve got to heal the divisions.”

The other wing, which is more urban, younger and lower-income, is focused on a revolution to overturn that existing economic order and is willing to wage political warfare to achieve its goals. It is frustrated and disenchanted with the slow pace of change in a country it feels disrespects and undervalues them. These voters’ primary concerns have little to do with Trump and are instead material: high rents and tuition, and a lack of access to affordable health care. Their candidate is Sanders. He’ll win delegates from liberal and heavily Latino areas in the West, especially in California, the biggest delegate prize of all.

“The political establishment is getting nervous, and they look at rallies like this and they say, ‘What’s going on here?’” Sanders told a crowd in Klobuchar’s home state of Minnesota. “Imagine a Democratic Party in which working people and young people finally have a real voice.”

Each wing has different weapons at its disposal. Biden can win endorsements from former presidential candidates, while Sanders is left to counter with endorsements from state legislators in Pennsylvania and Kentucky. Biden is the only candidate left holding traditional fundraisers and courting fundraiser bundlers, potentially solving his campaign’s on-and-off money woes. (Biden has raised $10 million in the past two days, more than he raised in all of January.)

Sanders has a deeply loyal core of supporters, compared to the Johnny-come-latelies who have jumped from candidate to candidate during the primary and are rushing to Biden following his South Carolina win. He can rely on them to fill his campaign coffers with small donations (he raised $50 million in February) and to make social media posts attacking Biden go viral. (A Twitter video on Biden’s support for the Iraq War racked up more than 1 million views in six hours on Monday.)

Still, Sanders is increasingly politically isolated as Biden accumulates momentum and positive earned media. Two of his closest allies in the Senate are now working against him. Klobuchar, who may be Sanders’s closest personal friend in the upper chamber (he requested her as his partner for a CNN-sponsored health care debate against two Republican senators in 2017), has now endorsed his major rival. And repeated sniping and now open attacks have cooled his relationship with Warren, his closest ideological partner. 

This dichotomy may leave little room for candidates not named Sanders and Biden. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a multibillionaire who spent more than $500 million on his campaign, may soon discover that all the television commercials in the world can’t beat the image of your former rivals endorsing you live on CNN and MSNBC the night before Super Tuesday.

Warren, who has done more than any other candidate in the race to try to merge the two wings of the party, has made it clear she plans to try to stay in the race. In a speech at East Los Angeles College on Monday night, Warren pleaded with the Democratic electorate not to buy into a false choice she believes doomed the party in 2016.

“From the start of this campaign, despite so many great candidates with so many different perspectives, voters who were worried about beating Donald Trump have been told there are only two lanes, only two choices. And now we find ourselves barrelling toward another primary along the same lanes as 2016: one for an insider, one for an outsider,” she told the crowd of 3,000. “Democratic voters should have more choice than that. America needs more choice than that.”