A year of US campaigning that didn’t change much at all

My favourite measuring stick in the US presidential race is the continually updated RealClearPolitics average, which sorts through the numbers from the last twelve surveys. Hopefully this balances out and minimises the effect of outliers, days when a pollster collects a sample of responses that is just too heavily weighted in one direction or another. They don’t use partisan pollsters, and almost all of the twelve surveys that go into the mix have been done in the past two weeks.

As of this writing, the RCP average of national levels of support in the Democratic presidential primary show Joe Biden at just under 28 per cent, Bernie Sanders at 19 per cent, Elizabeth Warren at 15 per cent, Pete Buttigieg at 8.3 per cent, and the late entrant Mike Bloomberg at 4.9 per cent. Everyone else is in a jumble at the bottom, with less than 3.5 per cent each.

If you looked back at the RCP average numbers from one year ago, you would find the race hasn’t changed that much in a year, particularly at the top. In late December 2018, Biden was at 27.3 per cent, Sanders was at 18 per cent, and then well behind them, Beto O’Rourke was at 8 per cent, Kamala Harris was at 4.8 per cent, and Warren was at 4.5 per cent.

The two top septuagenarians have had, by traditional measures, rough rides over the past twelve months. Biden turned in shaky debate performances and comments on the trail and endured a still-ongoing glare of spotlight on his son’s work for Burisma Holdings in Ukraine. Sanders looks every bit of his 78 years and was even briefly sidelined by a heart attack. And yet, there they are, a year later, with support that appears entirely unaffected by the year’s events. The drama of the primary in the past year has mostly been provided by second-tier candidates getting a whiff of the first tier… and then crashing and burning.

Some political minds will jump in at this moment and insist that because the parties don’t select their nominee through one big national primary, the national numbers aren’t as significant as they seem, and the more consequential measurement of support is who is leading in the earliest states in the primary process: Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina. That’s true enough as far as it goes, but political history is full of examples of campaigns that peaked in those early contests — Dick Gephardt in 1988, Mike Huckabee in 2008, John Edwards’s second-place finish in 2008, Rick Santorum in 2012.

Every cycle brings some underdog candidate operating on a shoestring and attempting to win either Iowa or New Hampshire through old-fashioned “retail politicking” — focusing entirely on one state and attending as many events as possible, day after day. These candidates later realise that this style of campaign can’t be replicated on a national scale. You might be able to shake enough hands in diners in Des Moines or Nashua for months, but you can’t charm voters face-to-face when the race goes national, and it starts on “Super Tuesday” — March 3, 2020 — when fifteen states hold their Democratic primaries, including the two most populous, California and Texas.

If we’re being kind, 2019 saw a lot of short-lived and inconsequential campaigns from a lot of “nice” Democrats who turned out to be wildly unprepared for the requirements of a serious campaign. They had nowhere near the kind of national name recognition, their fundraising networks were well short of what was needed to cover the costs of a serious multi-state campaign, resumes and accomplishments that were “eh, okay,” and their charisma was fine but couldn’t shine brightly on ten-candidate debate stages. Sorry, former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan and Montana Gov. Steve Bullock — you’re perfectly acceptable candidates, but ill-prepared for the cacophony of a primary that has had, so far, 28 men and women running, with 15 remaining.

Some of these “nice but not standout” candidates, like Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, are still around, hoping for a sudden leap into the realms of the top-tier candidate.

The Democratic presidential primary that had seemingly everyone running turned into the primary where almost no one could stand out. If you wanted the Democratic nomination this cycle, you needed to arrive with your national fanbase already established like Biden, Sanders, and eventually Warren. There was one glaring exception — South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg.

The mayor is the single-clearest refutation of the complaint that the process somehow created insurmountable obstacles for new faces. The window of opportunity for lesser-known figures to get taken seriously was only open a crack, but Buttigieg squeezed through and is, so far, making the most of his opportunity.

Much of the discussion around the 2020 primary is going to focus on the concept of older Democrats against younger Democrats or the “centrists” against the progressives or “self-professed socialists”. But looking at the past year, perhaps the most important factor was how many Democratic primary voters simply weren’t all that interested in new options.

They knew Biden, Sanders and Warren, and that was about all they needed. If the RCP average is accurate, about 45 per cent of Democrats knew which candidate they wanted a year ago, and they haven’t jumped off the bandwagon after bad debates or heart attacks. They’re like diners who didn’t want to hear about the specials or soup du jour; they know what they like.

As much as the primary debates have focused upon big questions about Medicare for All, raising taxes, free higher education, and dramatically scaling back immigration enforcement, a lot of Democratic voters have a much shorter and simpler wish list: “Just make Donald Trump a one-term president.”

But polling results which show that “a big chunk of primary voters feel pretty satisfied with the best-known candidates” are just about the least interesting ones imaginable to journalists, who are always looking for the Next Big Thing.