Waiting for Sanders to quit
Democrats are facing the springtime of their discontent, and maybe the summer too. The recent national polls showing an unexpectedly close general election race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have punctured the Democratic hope that the Republican’s high unfavorable ratings would render him uncompetitive.
Instead, the polls underscore that Clinton’s image is comparably battered after her surprisingly difficult primary race against Bernie Sanders. Whereas the polls show Trump rapidly gaining among Republican voters (if not GOP leaders), Clinton’s generalelection position looks to be deteriorating within the key Democratic constituencies that are still drawn to Sanders, particularly among liberals and young people. Democratic strategists almost universally believe Clinton can’t repair that damage until she concludes the nomination fight and starts to consolidate Sanders and his movement behind her. The deepest source of anxiety for Democrats is that they don’t know when that will be.
Counting both pledged and superdelegates, NBC News calculates that Clinton is now within 100 of the total she needs to secure the nomination. Yet Sanders has offered no hint of when he might concede and lock arms with her — after the final major primaries on June 7, before the Democratic convention in July or perhaps not at all.
Since Clinton’s lopsided victory in the April New York primary in effect ended Sanders’ chance of winning, his tone has oscillated. Initially, Sanders appeared to accept the inevitable, blunting his attacks on her. But his series of May wins sparked a shift back toward confrontation that peaked with the extraordinarily belligerent statement his campaign released after his supporters disrupted a Nevada state convention. That statement — which denounced the Democratic Party more than it condemned the violence — set off alarms among Democratic leaders that only grew louder when Sanders and his allies charged that the primaries had been “rigged” against him. Even if inadvertently, that argument dovetailed with Trump’s efforts to brand Clinton as “Crooked Hillary.”
Sanders has some legitimate complaints. The Democratic National Committee did minimize and obscure the primary debates. On the superdelegates, the ledger is more nuanced. The party leaders who, as superdelegates, can vote at the convention, are largely supporting the candidate they consider most able to win and govern, which is precisely how the system was designed to function. But it’s understandable that Sanders is frustrated that they have broken toward Clinton far more lopsidedly than the voters themselves.
Yet Sanders hasn’t been cheated out of the nomination. Clinton has beaten him. Overall, she’s won about 13.2 million votes — about 3 million more than his 10.2 million. That means she’s won about 55% of the total vote, compared with his 43%.
Her popular vote lead is rooted in her dominance of the big states. Nine of the 10 largest states have already voted; Clinton has won eight of those nine (losing only Michigan). Nine of the next 10 largest states have also voted, and Clinton has won six of those. By contrast, 12 of the 20 states Sanders has carried rank among the 20 smallest. The principal reason for the contrast is that in virtually all of the big states, the Democratic electorate is diverse, and Clinton has won about three-fourths of all African Americans and about three-fifths of Latinos, according to a cumulative analysis of all exit polls. (Whites have split about evenly between the two.)
Clinton has amassed larger victory margins too. Sanders has beaten her by at least 100,000 votes only in Wisconsin. Clinton has beaten him by at least that much in 14 states, with margins double that in states including Florida, Texas, Georgia, New York, Maryland and Pennsylvania. Sanders has galvanized young people, revolutionized small-donor fundraising and formulated a visionary (if expensive) agenda that may rally liberals for years. But he’s lost this race to Clinton in the voting booth, not the backroom.
When Sanders appeared in Santa Monica on Monday afternoon, he again looked to be accepting that reality. Against a perfect azure sky, with palm trees swaying behind him, Sanders criticized Trump much more than he did Clinton. In his closing words, he placed his campaign in the lineage of previous socialchange efforts such as the labor and civil-rights movements, implicitly acknowledging that his uprising too might not succeed on the first try. The speech had a soft, almost elegiac, tone. Yet when the sun set, Sanders was still making the case for his nomination.
The history in both parties is that primary wounds eventually get healed. But with Trump stirring in these early polls, that healing process can’t start too soon to soothe anxious Democrats.