The good news for Joe Biden isn’t just that he is now almost certain to become the Democratic nominee for president. It’s also the fact that, unlike Hillary Clinton, he will become the nominee cleanly. He will defeat Bernie Sanders fair and square.
Thus, Sanders and his supporters will have nothing resembling a legitimate grievance when Biden wins. The question, of course, is whether the lack of a legitimate grievance will cause Sanders’s supporters to vote for Biden in larger numbers than they voted for Clinton.
I think it will. Sure, the most hard core Bernie Bros will regard Biden with as much contempt as they viewed Clinton. In November, they will stay home or vote for the next Jill Stein. A few might even vote for President Trump.
But I think the number of such defectors will be appreciably smaller in 2020 than in 2016, in part because this time the process by which the party rejected Sanders was completely fair.
The other reason why I think there will be fewer defectors is that Sanders’s supporters take Trump much more seriously now than they did in 2016. Four years ago, many observers thought Trump would lose decisively. Thus, voting for Jill Stein (for example) seemed like a harmless gesture. This won’t be true in November.
In addition, Sanders’s supporters couldn’t be sure in 2016 what a Trump presidency would look like. Now, they know. It looks nothing like socialism.
Trump’s approach to trade bears some resemblance to Sanders’s. However, I doubt this will be enough to overcome the far left’s repugnance for Trump.
In sum, Trump will probably have to defeat the Democratic nominee straight up this time — in other words without the help of Sanders supporters who opt out of the election in one way or another.
If the economy holds up, I expect Trump to do so. There are plenty of voters who rejected Trump in 2016 but have been won over by the administration’s successes, or at least now consider Trump acceptable.
But if, due to the coronavirus, the economy is in big trouble as November approaches, and if the public blames the economic ills on Trump’s response to the virus, then Biden might well stumble his way to victory.
UPDATE: Being an extremist means always having a grievance, so I should have noted that the Sanders crowd thinks it’s unfair that non-socialist candidates like Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg endorsed Biden when they dropped out of the race. They claim that the “establishment” orchestrated this.
It’s ridiculous to suggest that a conspiracy was required to get Klobuchar and Buttigieg to endorse Biden over Sanders. Anyone who watched any of the Democratic debates should understand that the views of Klobuchar and Buttigieg were more closely aligned with Biden’s than with Sanders’s.
It is plausible to claim that establishment figures might have influenced the timing of Klobuchar’s and Buttigieg’s exit and endorsement. Frankly, though, I think Klobuchar dropped out when she did mostly out of fear of losing the primary in her home state. Given all of her boasts about winning in Minnesota, a loss in that state’s primary would have been beyond humiliating.
In any case, the 2020 grievance over endorsements pales in comparison to the 2016 grievance, which involved intervention and favoritism by the DNC on behalf of Hillary Clinton in what was a much closer contest.
Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.