For the life of me, I can’t get this down to letter-to-the-editor length. 🙂 But here’s the latest iteration of my argument:
For Democrats who believe it would be disastrous to nominate either a 78-year-old socialist or a 78-year-old billionaire to face President Trump in November, these are worrisome times.
A passionate progressive plurality has made Bernie Sanders the favorite to win the party’s nomination. Meanwhile, the moderate majority has deep reservations about the Vermont senator’s electability, but is hopelessly divided among four or five alternatives. And, even though only two states have voted, time may already be running out to unite around a single, unifying candidate.
With the March 3 mega-primary fast approaching, the centrist split benefits two people: Sanders, the left-wing polemicist who rails endlessly against billionaires, and Mike Bloomberg, the billionaire who endlessly bombards the airwaves and Internet with his glossy 30-second ads. Among the major Democratic contenders, these men are arguably the two worst options. Unfortunately, Bloomberg’s hundreds of millions of dollars (still less than 1 percent of his fortune) are sucking up all the political oxygen, crowding out worthier candidates.
Take Amy Klobuchar. The 59-year-old Minnesota senator rejuvenated her campaign by surging to a strong third-place finish in New Hampshire, earning more votes than Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren combined. Klobuchar is a center-left pragmatist with a demonstrable track record of outperforming other Democrats on the same ballot in general elections. She is especially strong among the heartland voters who Democrats desperately need to win the electoral college. Her forward-looking optimism and Midwestern sensibility help uniquely position her as the only candidate who can run on both “change” and “experience” — a winning combination. By any traditional criteria, she is the Democrats’ most logical option by far.
With Biden fading and Sanders rising, one might expect panicked mainstream Democrats to rally around Klobuchar as a broadly acceptable, consensus alternative to the divisive Vermont firebrand. But the alluring siren song of a profligate billionaire is distracting Democrats from the reality at hand. Bloomberg’s untested, unexamined grass-is-greener appeal is empty comfort food for a voter base and a party establishment terrified of making the wrong choice and handing Trump a second term. Yet, in a bitter irony, a second Trump term will become much more likely if Bloomberg emerges as the only non-Sanders option left standing after Super Tuesday.
The true winner of a Sanders-Bloomberg primary fight would be Donald Trump. Math and timing dictate that Sanders would almost certainly win a plurality of votes and delegates, so Bloomberg could only win at a contested convention — denying Sanders a victory that he and his supporters will believe is rightfully theirs. Such an outcome would seem to validate every criticism, fair and unfair, that has ever been lobbed at the Democratic Party by its liberal critics, from the claim that centrists are “closet Republicans” (Bloomberg was literally a Republican until 2018) to the belief that every progressive setback is the result of an establishment conspiracy (difficult to dispute in this instance). Bloomberg will never unite, still less inspire, the party base. Nominating him would be the ultimate test of whether Sanders supporters will hold their noses and turn out to vote for literally anyone if the alternative is four more years of Trump. Perhaps the answer, for most, would be yes. Or perhaps not. Democrats cannot afford to take such a dire risk.
Yet the opposite outcome is no less risky. If Sanders wins the nomination, as he probably would (Bloomberg is his perfect foil), this momentous election would become a massive political science experiment of grave world-historical consequence. Democrats would essentially be betting the future of liberal democracy on Sanders supporters’ belief that the rules of politics have completely changed. Under this theory, an avowed socialist is actually the most electable candidate — even though his ideology is toxic among many suburban swing voters who would happily vote for a moderate pragmatist like Klobuchar — because he would (supposedly) maximize base turnout, bring out new and infrequent voters, and win back rural Trump backers with class-infused populist polemics. Perhaps that would all prove true, but it goes against the most basic tenets of political strategy borne out by decades of experience. And wagering that “this time is different” is an awful risk to take this year, of all years, given Trump’s already flagrant disregard for constitutional norms, democratic principles, and the rule of law itself.
Uniting now behind Amy Klobuchar offers another path, one that would give Democrats a better option than the nightmare choice between a high-risk Sanders nomination and a party-destroying Bloomberg convention gambit. But it is a narrow path; time is of the essence. Before the front-loaded primary calendar short-circuits their decision, Democratic voters need to rally around a single alternative: not Bloomberg, but Klobuchar. Party leaders should urge them to do just that.