By Noah Rothman
Tuesday, March 03, 2020
The dam has broken, and it was Joe Biden’s resounding
victory in the South Carolina primary that broke it.
With that nearly 30-point victory, Democrats had what
Republicans in 2016 did not: proof of concept that a presidential candidate who
was acceptable to the party’s institutional stewards also had the support of
the party’s base voters.
The final tally in South Carolina was not yet known when
the floodgates broke open. Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe declared
his support for Biden. He was followed by former vice-presidential candidate
and Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine. Reps. Bobby Scott, Jennifer Wexton, Collin
Peterson, Veronica Escobar, and Gil Cisneros soon joined them, along with
Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth. Provided with sufficient political cover to
justify his thumb on the scale, former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid
belatedly gave Biden his imprimatur.
Following Biden’s victory, the news that Barack Obama had
made a congratulatory call to the former vice president circulated widely. And
though the former president declined to endorse his one-time running mate
outright, former UN ambassador and national security adviser Susan Rice
enthusiastically backed Biden shortly thereafter, signaling support within the
Obama administration that the Biden campaign has long advertised but could not
prove.
The former vice president’s victory in South Carolina
also mended the schisms the long primary race had aggravated. Biden’s victory
in the Palmetto State was not yet 24-hours old when former South Bend, Indiana,
mayor Pete Buttigieg suspended his campaign and signaled his intention to
support the most viable non-Bernie Sanders candidate in the race. That promise
was fulfilled on Monday night when Buttigieg joined Biden on a Texas stage to
endorse the former vice president. Additionally, Biden appeared alongside Amy
Klobuchar, who also suspended her campaign and endorsed the establishmentarian
frontrunner. Even former presidential candidate and congressman Beto O’Rourke,
who had presented himself as an advocate for radical progressive reforms, made
an appearance in support of the last viable anti-Bernie candidate standing.
This intimidating show of force by the Democratic Party’s
anti-insurgent wing is proof of how radically the dynamic of this race shifted
from only one week ago. Following Sanders’s victories in New Hampshire and
Nevada and amid a surge of support in Super Tuesday state-level polling for
Mike Bloomberg, it appeared as though the Democratic primary would take a form
familiar to Republicans who remember 2016. If the race had come down to these
two candidates, both of whom maintain only transactional and conflicted
relationships with the party they were seeking to lead, Democrats would have
acutely felt the GOP’s pain.
Among anti-insurgent Republicans, Ted Cruz’s three-point victory
over Donald Trump in the Iowa caucuses was thought to be the beginning of the
end of the GOP base’s dalliance with the reality-show host-turned-presidential
candidate. It was not. Trump went on to dominate the New Hampshire primary, win
every delegate up for grabs in South Carolina, and best his strongest opponent
in Nevada by 20 points. At no point did Republican establishmentarians have the
cover to plant their flags on defensible ground in support of a candidate who
also had the support of the party’s voters. While history remembers only the
anti-Trump movement, in part because of the hold that modest reaction maintains
over the imaginations of the president’s supporters, the institutional GOP was
at the time far more apprehensive over the prospect of a Cruz victory.
For months, the Republican primary contest was typified
by self-reinforcing theories of the race that only served to advance Trump’s
interests and cement his appeal among voters. Though he was sharply critical of
Trump, the Jeb Bush-aligned Right to Rise PAC all but ignored the real-estate
developer until the final months of 2015. Cruz and his allies heaped
conspicuous praise upon Trump under the assumption that the Texas senator would
win most of the president’s voters after he quit the race. Sen. Marco Rubio,
too, held his fire and even praised the audacity of Trump’s most controversial
anti-terror and immigration proposals. By the time the Florida senator began
training his attacks on Trump in late February, nothing could arrest the latter’s
momentum.
As Tim Albert revealed in his deeply reported 2019 book,
“American Carnage,” Rubio and Cruz were nearly cajoled by Sen. Mike Lee into
making a last-ditch effort to join forces and unify behind the Texas senator
against Trump, but Rubio declined the overture. Anyway, it was already too
late. Super Tuesday had come and gone, and Trump emerged victorious in seven of
the 11 states that voted. The anti-Trump candidates’ respective theories of the
race were not only paralyzing; they were dead wrong.
For months, both the GOP’s 2016 race and the Democrats’
2020 primary campaign were characterized by the conflicting interests among the
non-Bernie candidates and weak institutions that couldn’t break the logjam. All
the while, despite his relatively anemic standing in the polls, the fractured
multi-candidate field allowed Sanders to win more votes and amass more
delegates than his opponents. If establishment Democrats have managed to
coalesce around a single candidate and present a united front against the
progressive insurgency, they will have achieved what Republicans could not in
2016.
The two party’s respective conundrums are, however, not
identical. Even by early March of 2016, Donald Trump was by no means the GOP’s
preferred candidate. In hypothetical head-to-head polls that pitted Trump
against a single opponent, either Rubio or Cruz, the numbers indicated that
Trump would lose those contests. By contrast, as of mid-February, Sanders
emerges victorious in a hypothetical matchup against any one of his remaining 2020
opponents. Republicans never got the chance to test this proposition, whereas
Democrats might. And the outcome of that contest is far from certain.
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