For the moment and for understandable reasons, all eyes are on the GOP. The Republican Party’s fractious primary and its boisterous frontrunner are both compelling and entertaining. The myopic scrutinizing of the Republican primary process in the press should not, however, come at the expense of a critical review of the Democratic primary. The coronation is off. The same restlessness that capsized an orderly contest within the GOP is coming to typify the Democratic Party’s activist base voters. This edgy agitation among liberal primary voters has made Hillary Clinton’s life much more difficult than she expected it would be at this stage of the race.
Ask the average ossified, establishmentarian political analyst about Clinton’s prospects for winning her party’s nomination, and they will likely tell you the same thing: The race was over before it began. Clinton certainly has broader and firmer support among her party’s voters than do her competitors. Much more importantly, Clinton’s prohibitive organizational structure in the early primary states has been four years in the making. That bulwark cannot be so easily overcome, and it won’t disband overnight.
This mantra affirmed by the conventional wisdom’s devout proselytizers haven’t evolved even as the prevailing conditions characterizing the state of the Democratic primary race have. An objective assessment of the race must concede that Clinton’s task became a lot harder over the summer.
Over the weekend, the Democratic Party’s presidential race drew a new candidate: Harvard University Professor Lawrence Lessig. His candidacy has one objective: To be elected to the presidency, to sign one series of reforms to campaign financing and reapportionment, and to then immediately step down. His campaign is already being dismissed as a joke and a “long-shot” in the press. On its face, Lessig is a perfect protest vehicle for an extremely narrow subset of Democratic Party voters for whom the issue of campaign financing is paramount. On its face, his quixotic candidacy would probably represent more of a threat to another far-left protest candidate, self-described socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, than to Clinton.
Lessig has, however, focused more on his contrasts with the senator from Vermont. “Sanders is great, but he is running a campaign to win, not to govern,” Lessig told a group of supporters on Reddit last month. Like Obama 8 years ago, he is talking about the problem, but not giving us a plan for how it will be fixed.” His yet-unknown running mate can easily augment Lessing’s support since he has averred that his presidency will end the minute his objectives are achieved. If a popular figure on the left intimated a willingness to join the Massachusetts-based professor on his ticket, it could easily enhance his appeal.
“If you stand up and say we can become Sweden, America is not going to rally around you,” Lessig declared last week. He’s right, but that message won’t endear him to the wild-eyed students and nostalgic children of the Summer of Love that have rallied around their socialist avatar. And that’s no longer a modest group of Democratic voters. Bernie Sanders now enjoys a substantial lead over the field of prospective Democratic candidates in New Hampshire. The Real Clear Politics average of polls shows Sanders leading Clinton by 7.6 percent at the top of the field. Clinton performs substantially better in Iowa where she maintains a 17.7-point lead in the RCP average, but the trajectory of the race is not favorable toward Clinton. As recently as early June, Clinton’s lead over her nearest competitor stood at an insurmountable 50 points. A Des Moines Register survey released last week revealed a close race in Iowa, too. Sanders support has climbed 25 points since January while Clinton’s has fallen by 20 percent – that poll found Sanders polling at 37 to Clinton’s 48 percent.
Clinton is no longer acting like a peerless competitor. She has begun to acknowledge the persistent nipping at her heels from the upstart Sanders. “You can wave your arms and give a speech, but at the end of the day are you connecting with and really hearing what people are either saying to you or wishing that you would say to them?” Clinton told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell on Friday. “The American people will know they can trust me when it comes to standing up to them and advocating for them and being their champion.” She didn’t address the matter of trust on a whim. A now infamous word association poll conducted by Quinnipiac University found that the descriptors the electorate most closely associates with Clinton are “liar,” “untrustworthy,” and “dishonest.”
Even if Clinton is in trouble in Iowa and New Hampshire, the thinking goes, the calendar gets a lot harder on the race’s protest candidates by late February. “South Carolina and Nevada are next. Neither is fertile ground for Mr. Sanders, the self-proclaimed democratic socialist,” former White House strategist Karl Rove observed. “On March 1 come primaries in Arkansas, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas, all states Mrs. Clinton carried in 2008.”
Competing in these primaries will be expensive. A reasonable flight of three or four weeks of television ads in those states will cost north of $30 million, even at the low rates candidates are guaranteed by the FCC, and more if the ads are bought by a super PAC. Mrs. Clinton is likely to have the cash; Mr. Sanders is not, even if his fundraising gets a boost from early victories.
Furthermore, as the New York Times reported, Clinton’s team is investing heavily in infrastructure in the South that will serve as a firewall against a surging parvenu who manages to perhaps pull off a come-from-behind win in Iowa or New Hampshire. “The Southern firewall also includes Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and North Carolina, which vote through mid-March,” the Times revealed. “If Mrs. Clinton wins big in the Michigan and Ohio primaries later that month, her advisers and supporters believe, the nomination will essentially be hers (though crossing the total delegate threshold takes time).”
Yes, we are reigniting the speculation over delegate counting that dominated the 2008 primary race – another inauspicious feature of the 2016 Democratic race that should not inspire confidence in Hillary Clinton’s supporters.
Obviously, the biggest question mark of the race remains Joe Biden. Will the Vice President of the United States get in the race or won’t he? If he does, those close to Biden have suggested that he will lead a frontal assault on Clinton’s Southern firewall beginning with South Carolina. Biden has roots in the state and local allies that have been openly clamoring for him to challenge Clinton. “Farther South, where relationships and warmth are prized, the feeling is markedly different,” The Atlantic’s Jeremy Borden noted. “While Biden and Clinton are politically close, especially on domestic issues, it is Biden’s candor and loose campaign style that contrasts starkly to Clinton’s more scripted and calculated approach, Biden supporters argue.” It is this focus on the South that has led Biden’s advisors to reportedly contemplate his getting in the race late, even after the first (of very few) debates. Obviously, this would leave Biden at an organizational disadvantage. But if Clinton is sputtering, the vice president’s advisors believe he can cast himself as a responsible and plausible alternative. If Clinton were to lose in both Iowa and New Hampshire, she would limp wounded and vulnerable into South Carolina. The Biden as Savior scenario is not a difficult one to envision.
By dismissing the volatility of the Democratic race in observance of a conventional wisdom that is rapidly shedding its compelling nature, political observers are doing their audiences a disservice. The primary race on the other side of the aisle is as if not more exciting than on the Republican side. If the winds are blowing in the right direction, the shifting dynamics within the Democratic Party’s coalition could undo the party’s erstwhile inevitable nominee yet again. If predictability again comes to characterize the race, Clinton at best emerges from the primaries battered, wounded, and forced to tack much farther to the left than she would have liked.
