Buttigieg and Klobuchar Endorse Biden, Aiming to Slow Sanders

In a swift turn of events, Mr. Buttigieg and Ms. Klobuchar quit the presidential race and endorsed Mr. Biden on the eve of Super Tuesday to try to boost him against the liberal front-runner, Mr. Sanders.

NY TIMES

What Biden’s Big South Carolina Win Might Mean For Sanders.

NATE SILVER,FIVE THIRTY EIGHT

JIM WATSON / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Saturday was Joe Biden’s first-ever win in a presidential primary or caucus. It was an awfully big one: Biden won South Carolina by nearly 30 percentage points over Bernie Sanders. And it made for one heck of a comeback: Biden’s lead over Sanders had fallen to as little as 2 to 3 percentage points in our South Carolina polling average in the immediate aftermath of New Hampshire.

What explains the big swing back to Biden in South Carolina? And what does it mean for the rest of the race — and in particular for Sanders, who had entered this weekend as the frontrunner?

Here are five possible explanations — ranging from the most benign for Sanders to the most troubling for his campaign.

Hypothesis No. 1: This was a “dead cat bounce” for Biden because voters were sympathetic to him in one of his best states. It may have been a one-off occurrence.

Remember Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire in 2008? Left for dead by the national media after she lost Iowa to Barack Obama in 2008, she overcame a big polling deficit for an upset win in the Granite State. It didn’t do her much good, though; she won Nevada the next week but badly lost South Carolina two weeks later, eventually losing the nomination to Obama.

There are some similarities to Biden’s position in South Carolina. Like Clinton before New Hampshire, the media all but counted him out of the running after Iowa. Like Clinton in New Hampshire, Biden had a strong debate a few days before the primary along with some emotional moments on the campaign trail. Furthermore, some of the reporting from South Carolina suggests that certain South Carolina voters — especially older whites and African-Americans — felt deep loyalty toward Biden and wanted to keep him in the running.

Degree of concern for Sanders if this hypothesis is true: Low to moderate. If this were truly just a one-off sympathy bounce, then Sanders can live with it. Sure, Bernie missed an opportunity to put the race away with a win — or perhaps even a close second — in South Carolina. But voters rarely just hand the nomination to you without creating a little bit of friction. But if voters in other Super Tuesday states feel the same way that South Carolinians did, the sympathetic moment for Biden may not be over yet.

Hypothesis No. 2: The disparate results so far are simply reflective of the geographic and demographic strengths and weaknesses of the candidates. The notion of “momentum” is mostly a mirage.

If this is the case, you could wind up with a very regionally-driven primary, with Biden doing well in the South but perhaps not so well everywhere else. This is more or less what our model expects to happen, for what it’s worth; it now has Biden favored in every Southern Super Tuesday state except Texas, and he’s an underdog everywhere outside of the South.

The counter to this: Biden clearly did much better in South Carolina counties and precincts that weren’t as emblematic of his base than he had in those kinds of districts in other states. The counter to the counter: Geographic factors pick up a lot of information that demographics alone miss. So his strong performance in certain parts of South Carolina may bode well for how he’ll do in Alabama or North Carolina or Georgia. It may not say much about his performance in Michigan or California, however.

Degree of concern for Sanders if this hypothesis is true: Low to moderate. Sanders led Biden by about 12 points in national polls heading into South Carolina. Moreover, our model — which uses demographics in its forecast — has Sanders ahead. So although Biden has some strong groups and regions, Sanders’s coalition looks as though it’s slightly bigger and broader overall — although a post-South Carolina bounce for Biden or swoon for Sanders could eat into that advantage.

Hypothesis No. 3: The party is finally getting behind Biden. It may or may not work.

Almost half of South Carolina primary voters said that Rep. James Clyburn’s endorsement of Biden was a big factor in their decision. There are some questions about the cause and effect: It may be that Biden voters were pleased with the endorsement and said it was a major factor, even though they were planning to vote for Biden already. Still, Biden did get a big, late surge in the polls following the debate and the endorsement.

Clyburn is also one of the few party bigwigs to have endorsed a candidate. While lots of U.S. representatives, mayors, lieutenant governors and so on have endorsed, not many senators, governors or party leaders have. That leaves open the possibility there could be a surge of endorsements for Biden in the coming days. He’s already scored several major endorsements in Virginia, for instance, which is a Super Tuesday state.

Degree of concern for Sanders if this hypothesis is true: Moderate. The “Party Decides” view of the race treats endorsements and other cues from party leaders as being highly predictive and important. And a surge of endorsements for Biden seems reasonably likely. This could reverse a longstanding period of seeming indifference by party leaders toward Biden as they hoped for Michael Bloomberg or some other alternative to emerge.

But it’s not clear how effective an endorsement surge would be, as few legislators command the respect in their states that Clyburn does. Moreover, although we’re not going to cover it at length here, there’s plenty of room to question how empirically accurate the “Party Decides” is. Meanwhile, endorsements aren’t necessarily what Biden needs; an influx of cash would do him more good.

Hypothesis No. 4: Voters are behaving tactically. Biden was the only real alternative to Sanders in South Carolina, and he may be the only real alternative going forward.

Tactical voting is something you hear a lot about in multi-party systems like the United Kingdom’s, where voters are trying to find the most viable candidate from a number of similar alternatives (for example, from among the various parties that opposed Brexit). The same dynamics potentially hold in multi-candidate presidential primaries, and we’ve already seen evidence of it. In New Hampshire, voters flocked to Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar in the closing days of the campaign and away from Biden and Elizabeth Warren. In South Carolina, tactical voting may have worked in Biden’s favor, instead. Biden was fairly clearly the most viable alternative to Sanders, so voters for candidates like Tom Steyer and Buttigieg may have gravitated toward him in the closing days of the campaign.

Degree of concern for Sanders if this hypothesis is true: High. First, if voters are actively looking for alternatives to Sanders — but just can’t settle on which one is best — that can’t be good news for him, and gives some credence to the “lanes” theory of the race in which the moderate vote could eventually consolidate behind one alternative to Sanders. The South Carolina exit poll had Sanders’s favorability rating at just 51 percent, which is some of the stronger evidence for a ceiling on his support so far.

Moreover, Biden’s strong finish in South Carolina, along with improved debate performances, endorsements, and increasingly favorable media coverage, could make it clear to voters that Biden is the best alternative to Sanders after all, possibly with some exceptions where there are home-state alternatives (Klobuchar in Minnesota and Warren in Massachusetts). If Biden picks up support from tactical voters who had previously backed candidates such as Bloomberg and Buttigieg in polls, that could lead to a larger-than-usual South Carolina bounce.

Hypothesis No. 5: There has already been a national surge toward Biden that is not fully reflected in the polls.

It didn’t get much notice, but polling outside of South Carolina was also pretty favorable to Biden toward the end of last week, including polls that showed sharp improvements for him in states such as Florida and North Carolina. He’s also gotten better results in some national polls lately — climbing back into the low 20s — along with other, not-so-great ones.

The data isn’t comprehensive enough to know for sure. Between the dense cluster of events on the campaign trail (primaries, debates, etc.) and the different races that pollsters are surveying (South Carolina, Super Tuesday, national polls), everything is getting sliced pretty thin. But we do know that Biden made big improvements since the debate in South Carolina polling, the one state where we did have enough data to detect robust trendlines.

Degree of concern for Sanders if this hypothesis is true: High. Suppose that Biden gained 5 or 6 percentage points across the board nationally and in Super Tuesday states as a result of this week’s debate (or other recent factors such as voters’ reaction to coronavirus), but it’s gone largely undetected because there hasn’t been enough polling. If that’s the case, then Biden may already be in a considerably better position than current polling averages and models imply — and then he could get a further bounce from winning South Carolina on top of it. This is a scary possibility for Sanders, and although there isn’t enough data to prove it, there also isn’t much that would rule it out.

Sanders Says He’ll Attract a Wave of New Voters. It Hasn’t Happened.

Bernie Sanders has so far prevailed by expanding his appeal among traditional Democratic voters, not by driving record turnout.

Senator Bernie Sanders at a “Get Out the Early Vote” rally at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas this month.Credit...Bridget Bennett for The New York Times


By Sydney Ember and Nate Cohn
Feb. 24, 2020,


CHARLESTON, S.C. — It is the most politically provocative part of Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign pitch: that his progressive movement will bring millions of nonvoters into the November election, driving record turnout especially among disaffected working-class Americans and young people.

And yet despite a virtual tie in Iowa, a narrow victory in New Hampshire and a big triumph in Nevada, the first three nominating contests reveal a fundamental challenge for Mr. Sanders’s political revolution: He may be winning, but not because of his longstanding pledge to expand the Democratic base.

The results so far show that Mr. Sanders has prevailed by broadening his appeal among traditional Democratic voters, not by fundamentally transforming the electorate.

In Iowa, for instance, turnout for the caucuses was lower than expected, up 3 percent compared with 2016, and the increase was concentrated in more well-educated areas where Mr. Sanders struggled, according to a New York Times analysis; in the Iowa precincts where Mr. Sanders won, turnout increased by only 1 percentage point.

There was no sign of a Sanders voter surge in New Hampshire either, nor on Saturday in Nevada, where the nearly final results indicated that turnout would finish above 2016 but well short of 2008 levels, despite a decade of population growth and a new early voting option that attracted some 75,000 voters. The low numbers are all the more striking given the huge turnout in the 2018 midterm elections, which was the highest in a century.

There was also no clear evidence across the early states of much greater participation by young people, a typically low-turnout group that makes up a core part of Mr. Sanders’s base and that he has long said he can motivate to get out to the polls. And Mr. Sanders has struggled to overcome his longstanding weakness in affluent, well-educated suburbs, where Democrats excelled in the midterm elections and where many traditionally Republican voters are skeptical about President Trump’s performance, meaning they could be up for grabs in November.

Because the moderate wing opposing Mr. Sanders, a Vermont liberal, is so fragmented, the lower-than-hoped-for turnout has not slowed his ascent. Many Democrats believe that for a general election, their nominee will need to pull in new voters, including those who sat out 2016 and moderate Republicans repelled by Mr. Trump. Even some inside the Sanders campaign expressed concern about the race’s initial turnout.

On the campaign trail, Mr. Sanders, 78, has proclaimed that his “is the campaign of energy, is the campaign of excitement, is the campaign that can bring millions of people into the political process who normally do not vote.” In rallies in Texas over the weekend, as his resounding victory in Nevada was becoming clear, he conveyed an air of triumph, drawing enormous crowds as his campaign made plans to solidify his front-runner status by Super Tuesday on March 3.

“If the cameras turn on this crowd, and our friends in Wall Street and the drug companies see this kind of crowd, you’re going to really get them nervous,” Mr. Sanders declared to thousands at a rally in Austin on Sunday.

Mr. Sanders’s rivals have rejected the premise that he will expand the Democratic Party’s base, saying he is too rigid in his worldview. The Times’s analysis of the first three states show some challenging signs for his goal of producing a surge in turnout. In New Hampshire, for instance, turnout increased far less in townships he won than it did in townships won by Mr. Buttigieg and by Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota.

The share of the electorate made up of first-time Democratic voters also decreased in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada compared with 2016. And unlike four years ago, when Mr. Sanders mobilized far more first-time voters than Hillary Clinton did (averaging a 30-point lead over Mrs. Clinton across the three states), he had only a modest 10-point edge over his closest rival, Mr. Buttigieg, in that metric this time around.

Among young people, entrance poll data showed that the share of those voters remained essentially unchanged across the three early states. Participation was basically flat in precincts and townships in New Hampshire and Iowa where 18- to 24-year-olds made up more than 50 percent of the population.

For months, Mr. Sanders has consolidated support on the left and successfully parried challenges from moderates in the race. He has amassed the largest war chest of any Democratic candidate and has an army of loyal supporters. His aides and advisers are optimistic about his path to the nomination as the most crucial delegate-rich phase of the race approaches.

Jeff Weaver, a top strategist to Mr. Sanders, pointed to strong performances with working-class voters in places like Manchester, N.H., and Latino voters in Nashua, N.H., and categorically rebuffed questions about the Sanders turnout machine.

“His movement is working, which is evidenced by the fact that he is winning,” Mr. Weaver said.

A crowd cheering for Mr. Sanders at a rally at the University of Houston on Sunday. He aspires for large voter turnout in Texas and other Super Tuesday states.Credit...Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times


Although Mr. Sanders has not yet realized his goal of spurring greater voter turnout, there are signs his campaign strategy is flourishing in other respects. One of the biggest changes between his previous presidential bid and the one this year is that he now seems to fare as well among nonwhite voters as his nearest rivals.

In Nevada, Mr. Sanders won nonwhite voters by a 19-point margin, according to an entrance poll, far greater than his 10-point margin among white voters. The result is consistent with recent national surveys, such as ones this month by Monmouth University and NBC/Marist, which show Mr. Sanders winning a higher vote share among nonwhite than white voters.

His campaign aggressively courted Latinos in the state for months, sending out mailers, knocking on doors and making calls urging them to caucus. In the end, Mr. Sanders won Latino voters by an overwhelming 51 to 17 percent margin, according to the entrance polls, a feat that would leave him well positioned in Texas and California on Super Tuesday.

Yet Latino voters, surprisingly, appeared to represent an even smaller share of the Nevada caucus electorate than they did four years ago, according to entrance poll results, even as the same polls showed Mr. Sanders riding their overwhelming support to victory statewide.

Larry Cohen, a longtime adviser to Mr. Sanders who serves as chairman of Our Revolution, the organization that spun out of the senator’s 2016 presidential campaign, said it was incumbent upon grass-roots groups and the 2020 campaign “to demonstrate that we can significantly boost turnout,” especially in swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

During a rally at the University of Houston on Sunday after his commanding victory in Nevada, Mr. Sanders — as he had in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada — aspired to a “large voter turnout” on Super Tuesday, when voting takes place in Texas and 13 other states.

Saying he wanted to motivate “working people and young people, people who have given up on the political process, people of all shades who believe in economic justice, social justice, racial justice, environmental justice,” he forecast a victory in Texas both in the primary and against Mr. Trump in November.

Sydney Ember reported from Charleston, and Nate Cohn from New York.

This Is the Only Move That Will Stop Sanders Now

THE PARADOX

Attacks on Bernie work better in a general election than a primary. So what are Democrats convinced he’ll lose to Trump to do?

Michael Tomasky

Special Correspondent

DAILY BEAST

So it’s another win for Bernie Sanders, his easiest yet. 

It’s now completely legit to ask if he’s just going to waltz his way to this nomination. Yes, we’ve only had three contests. But we see the lay of the land. Sanders is in the left lane, way ahead of Elizabeth Warren. The other lane is crowded with people who either have shockingly underperformed or just don’t quite have the mojo—or both. 

The panic is going to grow. Sanders is now going to be Target A for a while for everybody—Elizabeth Warren included, I’d imagine. That comes with being the frontrunner, but it’s intensified here because so many Democrats are strongly against him. So now he’s really going to be attacked.

But attacked for what? This is the thing about Sanders that makes this so tricky. 

The matters on which he is most vulnerable are strictly general election matters. They’re not primary election matters.

That is, the matters on which he’s most vulnerable are: his past radical leftist affiliations; his policy proposals that will increase taxes and double federal domestic spending; certain other positions he’s taken that don’t have to do with taxes but are pretty left-wing nonetheless, like allowing prisoners to vote, decriminalizing border crossings. 

But these aren’t matters that render him vulnerable in a primary. Some of them are things that Democrats aren’t going to attack him about, or will attack him about only half-heartedly. I think his radical past falls into that category. Most Democrats won’t want to hit that too hard. There would be a backlash against the person who does.

Others are positions that won’t hurt him in the context of a primary. Democratic primary voters aren’t going to care about decriminalizing border crossings. General election voters will, I presume. 

Thus, the Sanders Attack Fodder Paradox: The kinds of attacks that so many of us fear will work against him in the general will not work in the primary—in fact, they will backfire and help him in the primary!

“The matters on which he is most vulnerable are strictly general election matters.”

So are there any criticisms of Sanders that would work with primary voters? Well, the obvious one, the one a lot of people are arguing, is that he can’t win a general. But with every head-to-head poll of him vs. Donald Trump showing him winning, it’s hard to argue that. You might argue that the attacks on Sanders haven’t started, but when you start ticking off the lines of attack, they will sound utterly dismissible to the ears of a Sanders partisan.

The line of attack that I’ve always thought might have worked would have centered around effectiveness. He’s been in Congress for 30 years. He’s passed seven bills. Two of those are post-office renamings, and a third is “Vermont Bicentennial Day.” Only one of the seven is substantive. 

I also always thought Vermont was a potential Achilles heel. Vermont isn’t quite a real place, in the sense of having numerous competing powerful political interests. It’s easy to be ideologically pure from Vermont. There are no corporations in Vermont. No big banks. Not a single billionaire. There’s no pressure on him to cast any non-left-wing votes at all. 

In other words, a picture could have been painted of a totally ineffective guy In other words, a picture could have been painted of a totally ineffective guy who operates in his own little non-real world bubble. It might have worked. But it’s a little late for that now. 

So what do the other Democrats do? Well, if they really believe Sanders can’t win in November, they have to sit down and talk turkey and decide that they’re going to get behind one person and the others are going to drop out. 

“If they really believe Sanders can’t win in November, they have to sit down and talk turkey and decide that they’re going to get behind one person and the others are going to drop out.”

That’s impossible, you say; and you’re probably right. But seriously: If these people are certain Sanders is going to lose, that means they’re certain Donald Trump is going to be re-elected. That means in turn they think the republic is at grave risk of going down the tubes if Sanders is the nominee. If that’s what they think, then they ought to put their egos on the shelf and get behind one person to block Sanders. If their view is really that nominee Sanders will re-elect Trump, that’s not just an option. It’s their duty. And that includes Mike Bloomberg. He should say, “I’ll drop out, and I’ll spend another $450 million to stop Sanders and nominate Biden” or whomever. 

But that isn’t what politicians usually do. 

In the meantime, Sanders has taken them to the cleaners. He’s winning this thing fair and square. And he is inspiring to millions of people. That counts for something. That’s what politics is supposed to be.

If the others can’t stop him, they’d better get behind him. I certainly will. With zero hesitation. Sanders is vastly superior to Trump in every imaginable way. The re-election of the incumbent is unthinkable.

Sanders wins in Nevada, grows lead as race enters key stretch

Candidates address supporters 2:08

(Video: Joyce Koh, Blair Guild/The Post; photo: Reuters)

Democratic Caucus

Live Results

What are CCDs?

County convention delegates are the current number of county delegates each candidate will get at the state convention, which determines the number of pledged national delegates each candidate receives.

Victory boosts senator’s insurgent campaign

Sen. Bernie Sanders set down a marker in the first state with a significant share of nonwhite voters. Incomplete results suggested a distant second-place finish for Joe Biden.

• By Matt Viser
• • 
    

Explore poll data to see who is supporting the candidates

• By Scott Clement, Emily Guskin, Chris Alcantara and Kevin Uhrmacher

As Sanders’s momentum builds, down-ballot Democrats move to distance themselves

With the senator from Vermont at the top of the ticket, Democrats fear their chances of winning the Senate would evaporate and their House majority would be at risk.

• Bernie Sanders’s triumph will provide a burst of momentum heading into the South Carolina and Super Tuesday primaries.

• The Vermont senator not only won among self-described liberal voters, but also made inroads with moderates for the first time, entrance polls showed.

Election 2020

Sanders briefed by U.S. officials that Russia is trying to help his campaign

It is not clear what form the Russian assistance to Sen. Bernie Sanders has taken. President Trump and lawmakers on Capitol Hill have also been informed about Russian interference in the Democratic presidential contest.

• By Shane Harris, Ellen Nakashima, Michael Scherer and Sean Sullivan

Bloomberg says he will release women from three nondisclosure agreements

After increasing pressure from his fellow presidential candidates, the former New York mayor said Friday he will permit his company to release women who accused him of sexual harassment from their non-disclosure agreements.

• By Colby Itkowitz and Michael Scherer
• • 
    

Trump embarks on expansive search for disloyalty as administration-wide purge escalates

Johnny McEntee, President Trump’s former personal aide who now serves as director of presidential personnel, has begun combing through various agencies with a mandate from the president to force out political appointees who are not seen as sufficiently loyal.

• By Toluse Olorunnipa, Ashley Parker and Josh Dawsey
• 
  

Paul Harkin, director of harm reduction at GLIDE, hands out naloxone and fentanyl detection packets in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. (Nick Otto for The Post)

Drug overdose deaths rise in the West while they drop in the East

National progress in reducing fatal overdoses has stalled as illicit fentanyl, a synthetic drug that is roughly 50 times as powerful as heroin, floods California and other states west of the Mississippi.

• By Joel Achenbach