Why has the 2020 primary been so 'disappointing' for Democrats?
The 'America's Newsroom' A-Team Panel debates the state of the 2020 Democrat primary race heading into South Carolina.
An old, and maybe overused, political cliche describes the confusion facing the primary: “Democrats fall in love, while Republicans fall in line.”
Well, sometimes love is messy. And the Democratic nominating process is designed to get messy – and no one should complain when it works as it should. Voters need to know now, before a majority cast their ballots, that their vote and their voice will be represented by their candidate’s delegate this summer in Milwaukee at the Democratic National Convention.
The Democrats have designed the nominating process in a way that is the opposite of the Republican process that allowed Donald Trump to steamroll a large field of establishment competitors. The "winner-take-all" approach of the Republicans befits a conservative approach to society: plurality rules and the winners get everything.
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That works when you are a relatively homogenous political party, dominated by one race, one religion and one ideological approach.
That is not how anyone would describe the Democratic Party, home to a melting pot of races, religions and political ideologies. That is why Democrats have a process reflective of the big tent it takes to win.
Unlike the winner-take-all approach of Republicans, Democrats allocate delegates proportionally after reaching a 15 percent threshold.
Polls show that a majority of Americans cannot name the three branches of government. It is safe to say that practically no one knows how the Iowa caucuses worked (or were supposed to work).
So it may be expecting too much to ask Democratic primary voters to start thinking about their vote in terms of delegates. But as the chances of a contested convention rise as “no majority winner” becomes the front-runner in the primary, the candidates must start building that line of thinking into how they campaign for votes.
After all, voters are throwing their support to delegates pledged to candidates – not to the candidates themselves.
Early in the race, much ink was spilled by pundits decrying voters acting like pundits by focusing on who would be the most electable candidate. Voters were told just to vote for who they thought would be the best president.
After the first primary contests, there has been a natural framing that the race is between the moderate and progressive wings of the Democratic Party. For three years we have heard how 2016 was that type of two-person race between former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. This year’s landscape is much different, though. We see multiple moderate candidates and potentially two progressive standard-bearers, yet many are trying to make 2020 an apple-to-apple comparison to 2016.
Some reporters who have had far more complex conversations with voters and analyzed the “second choice” polls push back on that narrative, finding that voters are less ideologically driven than some make it seem.
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When viewed through the lens of a potentially brokered convention, this nuanced approach is exactly right. And the campaigns are already there – major supporters of both Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., are already trying to see how they could potentially merge their delegates.
For four years, Sanders has driven a narrative of revolution by rising up the young and frustrated left of the left party in our country. Sanders, backed by insurgent candidates in the midterm primaries and amplified by an online army, successfully distorted the perception of what Democratic primary voters wanted. He has created the circumstance where some of his challengers adopted his unpopular policy positions only to attempt to walk them back. And in the end, Sanders is dominating a smaller progressive pool while the moderate faction remains divided among multiple candidates.
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But polls show "electability" as the primary issue.
We owe it to voters to tell them who it is they are "electing" after all: delegates. And to be clear that the process, however messy it looks, is working as designed for a diverse party.
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