A lot can be said about why Biden won both Massachusetts and Super Tuesday overall, but I think these are a few points worth considering.
1) White progressive candidates failed to engage black voters
Rene Graham at the Globe and Jonathan Cohn on twitter both have smart takes about this. Gonzalez failed to increase black turnout in his run against Baker, so did Teachout and Cynthia Nixon in their primary runs. This is a real deficit, and white moderates in Southern or Mid Atlantic states like Bill Clinton and Joe Biden have figured it out. So did Rahm Emmanuel and Richard Daley when I lived in Chicago. So it is incumbent upon the next Warren or Biden or even Buttigieg to authentically engage with this community. Not with five point plans or what a few black activists on twitter are endorsing, but with real tangible outreach to black churches, black veterans, faith leaders, and unions. Winning elections and governing is all about coalition building and this is one area where progressives fall woefully short.
2) Passing Ranked Choice Voting is Imperative
It is unlikely Biden wins MA without Warren and Sanders splitting the vote. Instead of an acrimonious campaign between both progressives it could have been a cooperative campaign like the one we saw in Maine that returned a Democrat to the House and the Governors office. Anyone in either camp accusing the other of being a spoiler would better spend their time pushing for this reform. We can live in a world without spoilers. For local Bernie and Warren activists dejected about their candidates, this is the next campaign to work on. It may even be cathartic.
3) Moderates unite. Conservatives unite. Progressives fight…amongst themselves
There was just a ton of unnecessary acrimony between Warren and Sanders supporters. There is a movement to convince Warren to back Bernie, it will likely not succeed because he and his supporters bullied her and her supporters and vice versa. Even without ranked choice voting, both candidates did better when they were lifting up one anothers ideas instead of tearing each other down. Biden’s win was largely due to moderates coalescing around him and progressives being divided.
4) Class matters
Warren supporters largely exist in a college white liberal bubble. People who are fluent in the political process, fluent in policy, like data, and like complex plans. Matthew Yglesias writes compellingly about this. Just not a ton of blue collar people of any race or people of color working on this campaign or on behalf of this candidate. You can look at the MA map and see places with a lot of Latinos and blue collar whites voting for Sanders (Chelsea, Revere, Everett, Lynn, Lawrence, Malden) and places with the college educated white hipsters voting for Warren (Somerville, Brookline, Cambridge, Arlington).
Meanwhile the middle class suburbs are all for Biden, just like they were for Baker. So there is a cultural/class disconnect that flows in both directions that has real implications for MA politics going forward. We can come together and elect Pressley to Congress, but she and Healey and others like them are dead in the water for the Corner Office or Senate.
5) Our state is not that progressive
I see Kennedy winning those Biden communities and making in roads to the Latino communities and handedly beating Markey. People will hate me for saying this, but Warren now has a target on her back. Honestly Moulton could probably beat Warren in a primary looking at this map, or a Charlie Baker Republican could beat her in a general. There are a lot more Biden Democrats like him in Massachusetts than Warren Democrats. This map proves it.
I agree with pretty much all of this.
Elizabeth Warren has four years to regain her tight focus on wealth inequality and build her support among minority working-class communities. My biggest concern when she was contemplating her candidacy was that a presidential campaign would take her out of her wheelhouse and weaken her overall. I think that’s exactly what’s happened.
I think the single thing that Elizabeth Warren, Ed Markey (or JKIII if it goes down that way) and our entire Congressional delegation could do to win support from Black voters is to bring immediate and real wealth to Black communities. How do the 351 Massachusetts cities and towns rank by decreasing share of Black households? How do those same 351 Massachusetts cities and towns rank by decreasing share of total government investment? How do they rank by decreasing share of total wealth held by households?
I think that elected officials and candidates who make real progress in aligning those rankings will win enthusiastic support from Black voters.
I’d like to add one more bullet to your list:
6) Black voters are more conservative than progressives assume
Even though black voters bear the brunt of the obscene wealth and income concentration that affects all of us, black voters are not ready for revolution. In particular, they are not ready to sign up for a revolution led by a well-to-do white male elected official from a well-to-do white state. They are similarly not ready to sign up for a revolution led by a well-to-do white female elected official from Harvard.
Black voters care about issues of concrete racial discrimination, and strongly support any candidate who credibly fights such discrimination. Black voters are more conservative about a host of other issues than we assume, specifically including (but not limited to):
– Scope and reach of government
– Other social issues (LGBTQ rights, women’s choice, women’s rights, etc)
– Taxes and financial policy
– Climate change and environmental issues
– Health care and health insurance
The seemingly endless arguments about health insurance and M4A that the mainstream media largely forced upon the firehose of debates are irrelevant to most Black voters.
In my view, a huge takeaway of both 2016 and 2020 so far is that Black voters want NO PART of the Bernie Sander’s revolution. They are similarly unenthusiastic about the more intellectual counterpart offered by Elizabeth Warren.
If we truly value those Black voters, then all of us will do well to remember that.
I agree with this wholeheartedly. I also think your point about black wealth explains why so many of them suddenly gravitated to Bloomberg in the polls (and in some states at the polls) despite his record on stop and frisk. They need help now. Not yesterday and certainly not in some distant future where every member of Congress does a privilege walk on their way to vote on reparations. They need small business loans, good schools in their communities, community health centers, and good paying jobs.
I think tapping into that is smart politics. Trump is already hoping to replicate George W Bush margins with that message and tapping into the religious vote. Outside of Buttigieg, Biden was the only candidate who was comfortable talking about his faith, Outside of Biden, there was no white candidate who looked comfortable in a black church. That stuff matters, even if folks in Burlington and Cambridge don’t think it does.
Black people have consistently supported Medicare for All, as they do most progressive programs, more than every other single group divided by “race.” This remains true no matter however the question is phrased. It takes only looking at a single poll to get this.
This might have been more convincing prior to Tuesday.
“Convincing” is a word to apply if someone is trying to persuade you. Like I said above, you need only look at the data.
A major error that you and Tom are apparently making here is the premise that the majority of black voters in these last few primaries voted primarily based on policy. Even if you don’t care to get yourself familiar with the data, I’m sure you know countless white people who have said that they agree with Bernie Sanders on policy but do not believe he is electable, or that he would lose to Trump.
Who am I to judge people of color who went with the safe choice? My life as a straight white dude in a unionized job with tenure hasn’t changed much under Trump. For my students with relatives stuck in Syria or relatives sent back to dangerous parts of Mexico and El Salvador, this is a life or death election for their families. For my wife, this was a reckoning that her own attempts at code switching and white washing are for naught. This country still looks down on her. For my students of color who could be stopped by police, for my students in the ROTC who could be sent to Iran-this is a life or death election.
For my female students who have seen their own sex assaults go unpunished to have a rapist in the White House who would take away their reproductive freedom-this is a life or death election. For the queer student who survived a severely homophobic beat down in freshman year-this is still a life or death election. For the 11% of my students who identify as Muslim-this is a life or death election. I voted for the revolution too, but I won’t begrudge people of color for picking the safe harbor of a known quantity.
I would argue that is the error Warren, Sanders, and Buttigieg made in their failed outreach to black voters. They had a laundry list of radical policies to promote racial justice and redistribute white wealth into black hands. I support those policies, but do most black voters? The proof is in the election results.
They also lost to the guy who sponsored the Crime Bill and even lost in some states to Mayor Stop and Frisk. I think it’s because those pragmatic candidates knew how to talk to a black constituency in a way the aspirational white candidates could not.
What aspect of the AfAm vote on Saturday and Tuesday supports your claim?
The AfAm community is turning out in droves to support Joe Biden. Their second choice in Texas was Mike Bloomberg — not Bernie Sanders.
I’m quite familiar with the data. It does not support your argument.
I think this is an example of ‘white progressives know best’ that is part of the reason they have not cut through to black voters in the same way the white moderates have done. Joe Biden had to win over black voters to get elected in his state. Delaware is almost a quarter black. Meanwhile VT is the whitest state in the union and our state, despite electing both a black Governor and black Senator, is only 8% black. So Biden, like the Clintons, had decades of relationships with the black community and those relationships count. Not to mention he is the most prominent white person in America to work for a black man, who happened to be the first black president. So these facts matter to black voters.
I think the likelier DSA endorsed President will be AOC in a few years. Her statement on the public option and her reaching out to Biden supporters in recent days on twitter is proof she has the coalition building skills that Warren and Sanders both lacked in their own way. Her district is one of the most diverse in New York City. She can bring voters of color and white professionals together. The very coalition that nominated Biden and elected Obama.
I would be very careful about extrapolating the results of one race to predict another, though if anything Markey has struck me as the working class candidate (Lawrence to Malden) while Kennedy is, well, a Kennedy.
Kennedy’s campaign seems to be intentionally targeting and activating Latino voters in a way I have not seen from Ed Markey. He’s addressing them in their language, meeting them in their communities, and linking his life experience serving in their home countries as a Peace Corps officer with his work in the Congress and potential in the Senate.
You may not find him persuasive as a Markey supporter, but for a lot of these voters its the first time they’ve met a candidate. While Markey has rushed to embrace the AOC left, the state just rejected Warren and Sanders in a profound way. If he can win those Sanders cities and Biden suburbs, than Markey is toast. I am not even sure if that’s the outcome I want anymore, but I suspect it is what will happen.
That’s fine Kennedy is playing to his strengths which is to be expected. He has the advantage of being able to speak Spanish, which I don’t know if Markey can. Both I think are quite progressive and I don’t see why any of us on the left couldn’t be very happy to support either of them as our nominee.
Oh for sure, I’m happy with either one. I am just suggesting that Kennedy looking at that map is poised to do quite well against Markey.
As a big proponent of RCV, I nevertheless want to correct the point made here. Given a reasonable adaptation of the Democratic Primary rules, it would not have made a difference in the results, except maybe a few more Pete/Amy voters going to Biden, and a bunch of Bloomberg voters going to Biden. I’m assuming only non-viable first choices would be redistributed.
It would have some effect on the dynamics of the campaign and the resentment among supporters, but not much, I suspect, as everyone would expect both Warren and Sanders to be viable so the first choice counts.
I do think it’s absolutely necessary when we have early voting as candidates drop out. Nevada did early voting right, but MA, TX, and CA just had about 450,000 people throw their votes away on candidates that weren’t running.
RCV solves for that. Also I favor a WTA RCV model so we do no need to worry about proportionality at a contested convention. Either way, I do think RCV would have changed how the candidates campaign to focus more on lifting one another up in the spirit of coalition building rather than tearing one another down to be the only champion for their ‘lane’ of the party.
What’s WTA RCV? I saw a suggestion on Daily Kos that votes in states that voted early also be redistributed if a candidate later withdrew.
WTA = Winner Take All
RCV = Ranked Choice Voting
It was the WTA part I was blanking on. I could see RCV until everyone is viable, but WTA goes in the wrong direction. I’d rather have representation be as close as possible to reflecting the actual vote spread.
I mean it’s very hard to project RCV onto a FPTP race. It would’ve been an entirely different primary campaign, but I do think that vote splitting and spoiler effects are non-existent in RCV and a good feature to adopt for future primaries.
What an inordinately large crock of poorly mixed and incompletely cooked hogwash. Matt Yglesias is extrapolating from the results to form a thesis, or as Sherlock Holmes would say, making a capital mistake.
Elizabeth Warren is the nearly complete intellectual and political heir to Barack Obama. In intellect, in temperament and in ideology she is very nearly an exact and identical clone of Barack Obama: She just has an X chromosome and that is the sole and only reason she’s losing. If Betsy Warren were Bert Warren, with no other change whatsoever, it would be well over by now.
Same old story. Same old song and dance.
Warren started tanking after she described how Bernie Sanders told her ‘a women cannot win the White House.’ He denied it and in the resulting he said/she said most people believed him and not her: because he is a he and she is a she. It’s that simple. But he did say it. And he did lie about it. And many do believe the lie exactly and precisely because they don’t want to believe the woman.
I’m sympathetic to this argument, and I still fear it’s mistaken.
Elizabeth Warren, as much as I like her, does not have the cadences and masterful control of a crowd that Barack Obama shows. Sometimes it’s helpful to watch video of a speech with sound off, so that it’s easier to focus on gestures and body language.
I still remember being just blown away by his very first press conference after winning the election in November of 2008. It’s a complete package, with all sorts of physical, verbal, and visual aspects (many or most of them unconscious and natural) that are very rare.
Barack Obama has impressive and masterful chops. In terms of his pure political skills, I think only Bill Clinton has surpassed him in my lifetime (I’m not talking about content).
Elizabeth Warren doesn’t play in that league.
Sadly, neither does Bernie Sanders. My take is that Bernie Sanders relies on the public speaker tropes of righteous anger and enthusiastic altar calls. Mr. Sanders is more preacher and prophet than politician. Elizabeth Warren makes no attempt to duplicate that, and doesn’t show the political technique to counterbalance the resulting vacuum.
I found a CSPAN video of the event. The Q&A begins at 6:05.
Here’s Barack Obama’s first press conference as President. Questions begin at 7:06.
Remember when Presidents gave press conferences? Remember when the President spoke in complete and coherent sentences?
I fear that we grew so accustomed to this level of excellence in communication that we forgot how rare it is.
I don’t think Elizabeth Warren, as stellar as she is, performs at this level as a politician. As a lawyer in cross-examination — absolutely.
This is different.
Seems to be confusing technique and style (Warren and Obama) with mood and emotion (Sanders). Anyway, some of his technique has helpfully been analyzed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16S2lQn5xgs
That’s an interesting clip to offer in the context of this discussion. Since it compares Mr. Sanders and Mr. Trump, it is at best only indirectly related to the question we’re discussing — was Elizabeth Warren defeated by sexism, or in the words of the original commentator, “If Betsy Warren were Bert Warren, with no other change whatsoever, it would be well over by now.”
It’s interesting to me for another reason. I invite anyone interested to watch Benito Mussolini speaking with the sound turned off. Consciously or not, Donald Trump emulates the gestures, body language, facial expressions, and visual style of Mr. Mussolini. Note how he grabs the podium at 0:08. Check out the raised eyebrows at 0:23 — look familiar? Here is another … this time with Mr. Mussolini speaking in German rather than Italian. Just look at a still frame at 0:09! Watch that delivery!
I think it’s fascinating that you’ve offered a clip comparing Mr. Sanders to Mr. Trump, when Mr. Trump is so clearly channeling authoritarian tyrants in his persona. I’m not accusing you or Mr. Sanders of being authoritarian, of course. Still, you’ve pivoted away from what we’re talking about and into the Sanders vs Trump talking point.
Another observation that simply has to be made is that there are NO black faces and no women anywhere in the clip you offer. NOWHERE. Surely you’re not making the claim that Mr. Obama does not inspire emotion!
I invite you to watch a Black preacher preaching. Is Mr. Sanders going to reach an audience born and raised on preaching like this? Check out Al Sharpton in 2004. Bernie Sanders might rely on “mood” and “emotion” for a white audience, but I suggest that his style misses the mark for many or most AfAm voters.
If you prefer a more political example, I invite your attention to The Rev. Jesse Jackson addressing the 1988 Democratic convention.
Barack Obama masterfully threaded the needle and attracted white audiences while not repelling AfAm voters. Elizabeth Warren isn’t able to do this, and Bernie Sanders isn’t able to do this.
Elizabeth Warren is a strong candidate because she is sincere and candid about who she is and faithful to her Oklahoma roots. That’s a compelling message for white college-educated voters in Cambridge and Somerville (like me) who love powerful women and love nerds. It’s a much less compelling message for AfAm voters whose roots are in the Harlem of 1950 rather than Oklahoma of 1950.
I agree that sexism plays a role. I think that role is being overshadowed by the importance of the growing wakefulness and passion of AfAm voters across America. That community helped propel Barack Obama into office in 2008 and kept him there in 2012. That voice was shouted out by Trumpist thugs in 2016 and largely ignored or taken for granted by the Democratic nominee in that same election. Bernie Sanders did not connect to the AfAm community in 2016, and I argue he is still missing the mark in 2020. Elizabeth Warren is not that community’s first choice. She just isn’t.
The Democratic Party of 2020 cannot ignore the AfAm voter in 2020. So far in the campaign, Joe Biden is the only major candidate that shows evidence that he gets that.
LOL, no. Warren didn’t start to tank after that fiasco. She reached her peak in early October. Her ceiling started to crack after Buttieig started targeting her and saying that she wasn’t being forthcoming about if she would raise taxes on the middle class in order to pay for M4A and implying that she would but was denying it (notably, an attack she used against Sanders, in turn, a few days ago). In early November, she came out with her M4A plan, which was widely decried across the political spectrum. Although many analysts tend to attribute her campaign’s implosion to her plan, support for her candidacy had already started the downward spiral a month earlier.
The controversy that Politico and, then a few days later, CNN instigated was in January, at which time, her polling average had already plummeted 10 points. An inverse that we can easily see is that it was during the first month of her decline that Buttigieg was climbing, as there was likely a bit of migration in support from Warren to him. https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/us/2020_democratic_presidential_nomination-6730.html
I worry it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. When we say someone lost because they are a woman, we make it harder for women to win.
That’s interesting; I would have guessed things turned in January as well.
It is also possible that she did not gain traction because she tried to be a bit of a bridge between moderates and lefties, and that the gap between these two groups might not be bridgeable..
That was her own answer when asked at her press gathering this afternoon.
She said, to paraphrase, that the experts told her that there were just two lanes to the nomination; the progressive lane, occupied by Bernie Sanders, and the moderate lane, occupied by Joe Biden. She told the cameras this afternoon that she launched her candidacy because she believed there was another way.
She said that she has learned that the experts were right and she was wrong. In the Democratic Party of 2020, there are just two lanes.
That man did run and his name was Bernie Sanders. He also did not win Massachusetts. Warren also won statewide here twice before despite being a woman, and won Somerville and Cambridge this time around. I think there is a class disconnect. She only won affluent white college towns, and that’s it. Jay Gonzalez was also a man and his support was limited to the same places Sanders and Warren carried. It’s an ideological and cultural issue, though I won’t deny gender plays a role. Particularly with the black and latino communities, unfortunately.
Warren’s experience, intelligence, compassion, and her performance remind me so much of Don Berwick.
Warren is not Sanders by philosophy, temperament, affect, or background.
Other than that, I agree with your analogy..
Which is why I, a white masters educated professional liked her and why most non-white non-professionals voted for someone else. It’s a cultural thing and a class thing.
Agreed. I’m a professional white male boomer. I like powerful women and I like nerds. I resonate with Elizabeth Warren in a way that no other candidate comes close to. I have learned over my lifetime that my white privilege is a huge factor in that. When I watch her press conference from the driveway of her Cambridge home yesterday, that’s my neighborhood. I see it in that lovely brick apartment building behind her.
NEIGHBORS like Elizabeth Warren — are why I live here, as opposed to Kansas, Nebraska, Mississippi, Alabama, or Florida.
As you say, it’s a cultural and class things.
The sense I’m getting is that the seeming repudiation of Warren wasn’t personal. Voters here like her just fine, but they like electability even more.
The “electability” argument is circular. Voters who won’t support a candidate like Elizabeth Warren because that candidate is not “electable” ensure that candidates like Elizabeth Warren will never be electable.
The takeaway from the outright (not “seeming”) repudiation of Elizabeth Warren is that even though we say we want candidates who speak the truth, who are sincere, who make decisions based on what’s best rather than what’s politically expedient, and so on, we shred such candidates at the ballot box.
Whatever we say we want, we VOTE for candidates who yell at us, who repeat poll-tested bromides and slogans, and — most of all — candidates that are familiar, that don’t rock the boat, that don’t push any edges ever, and that never ever challenge our beliefs and prejudices.
We had a great candidate in Elizabeth Warren, and we sent her packing. I hope we all watched her press appearance this afternoon. I was in tears by the end.
She was characteristically blunt:
I think every vote is personal. I think white college-educated voters like her a lot more than black voters and white working-class voters.
Again with the Ranked Choice Voting? I don’t like the outcome so let’s do Ranked Choice Voting even though it won’t fix what you don’t like?
Massachusetts delegates are awarded proportionately, so that when Warren, Sanders, and Biden split the vote three ways the delegates will be split three ways.
My Warren vote will go toward awarding a proportion of delegates statewide and in my congressional district. I don’t want a system where my Warren vote will wander off to my second choice, I want my Warren vote to go for Warren delegates.
Your Warren vote was wasted since she just dropped out. Perhaps under ranked choice voting, Massachusetts voters could select her as their first choice and hedge their bets with a Biden or Sanders second choice. Under that scenario, it is likelier a progressive gets the full vote for the entire state rather than Biden. Biden won a minority of our delegates, the anti-Biden vote was the majority. Yet at the convention Biden will probably be nominate on acclamation on the first ballot once Warren delegates drift to both of the remaining candidates. Pete or Amy or Mike could have stayed in and directed their supporters to rank Biden second. Rather than tear one another down to be the sole progressive, Warren and Sanders could have built one another up with a joint list. This would create more cooperative campaigning. Maine progressives already did this.
A winner take all ranked choice election also prevents a contested convention and makes sure every state sends the choice of its majority to the convention. Wraps it up faster too. You favor jungle primaries-ranked choice is exactly the same but done instantaneously. Lastly, this has nothing to do with outcomes. My sole criteria is I want a process where the nominee is selected by a clear majority of primary voters. Our current process does not allow for that.
This would end useless votes and preserve the convenience and higher turnout generated by early voting without those early votes being thrown away. It would eliminate the spoiler effect which you cited as the reason Martha Coakley lost, and is arguably something that hurt Warren and Sanders alike in this state and others that Biden was not expected to win. Had the moderates not coalesced, it’s likely Sanders would have benefited from a split field. No candidate should win the nomination with a minority plurality.
I think Pablo is comparing the current preferential system of selecting delegates to an RCV system that is also preferential, such as the one for the Cambridge City Council. It could be argued that the two systems (actual versus Cambridge) applied to our primary would produce a similar result.
I think JC is thinking of a classic RCV with a single winner. This is consistent with his idea of dispensing with the nominating convention. You want to build in some diversity for a unity-building convention; you don’t need it so much otherwise, in fact you want the majority to rule.
JC’s other points about how RCV changes the dynamics of the contents in beneficial ways are valid, I think.
RCV isn’t always beneficial. It can be quite the opposite.
Here’s an example. Let’s say you have a municipal election where you choose three candidates for school committee. The candidates are:
Harry Potter
Hermione Granger
Ron Weasley
Lord Voldemort
Under the current system, 420 people go to the polls. 300 wizards use their three votes for Potter, Granger, and Weasley. 120 death eaters bullet vote for Voldemort. Voldemort loses.
Under RCV, voters don’t walk into the polling place with three votes for three seats. Every voter has one vote and needs to rank their choices. The death eaters all vote for Voldemort with their first vote and vote for nobody else. Voldemort gets 120 votes. 300 ranked choice votes are divided between Potter, Granger, and Weasley, and one of the wizards loses to Voldemort.
Under the current system, if Weasley is out campaigning, he is happy to have folks vote for him, Potter, and Granger. Under RCV, Weasley wants the number 1 vote, and needs to compete against Potter and Granger as much as he competes against Voldemort.
If representation by death eaters is your goal, RCV is a wonderful thing, but it involves taking two votes away from every voter.
I don’t like it.