Pete Buttigieg campaign truck in front of Iowa Democratic presidential debate
When it comes to the Democratic presidential nomination, our mainstream media are quick to make snap judgments and predictions without much reflection. Currently, the media are overemphasizing the results of the outlier Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primaries, to declare Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders, respectively, the front-runners, while simultaneously declaring Joe Biden‘s moderate candidacy dead in favor of either Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar or Mike Bloomberg. The media likely are wrong in these conclusions. At minimum, their declarations are premature and lacking in evidence. For perspective, let’s take a look at the 1992 and 2004 Democratic presidential nominations, since that’s the last two times the Democrats were running against an incumbent Republican president:
1992: Similar to today, in 1992 the Democratic primaries were wide open, with numerous candidates competing to unseat George H.W. Bush. Amazingly, four different candidates won the first four primaries and caucuses, including Iowa and New Hampshire: Tom Harkin in Iowa, Paul Tsongas in New Hampshire, Jerry Brown in Maine, and Bob Kerrey in South Dakota. None of those candidates went on to win the nomination. It wasn’t until “Super Tuesday,” March 10, after 14 primaries and caucuses had taken place, that Bill Clinton emerged as the front-runner, by winning many of the southern primaries (including the majority of black voters who are so crucial in such states) that day.
2004: While the 2004 Democratic primaries saw a front-runner emerge early, who went on to win almost all the states and crush his competition, that front-runner was Senator John Kerry. That is important for two reasons. First, almost no one expects that Buttigieg or Sanders is going to go on to win all of the rest of the contests, and indeed, they split the first two already. Second, Kerry was a long-serving Democratic Senator, considered moderate in his positions, and an establishment insider. By far the candidate who is most in the mold of Kerry today is Joe Biden. Thus, if 2004 is any lesson, it’s that, as more primaries take place, including ones that are not demographic outliers such as the nearly all white Iowa and New Hampshire, the more the map favors Biden.
Moreover, while Buttigieg is the current front-runner by virtue of having the most delegates thus far, there are also plenty of possible further developments that could shake up the Democratic nomination battle. For example, just yesterday, audio was released of a 2015 speech by Bloomberg in which he spoke favorably of racial profiling, including “stop and frisk.” That is not likely to sit well with the Democratic Party base, a large part of which is people of color who will play a very large role in the South Carolina and Super Tuesday primaries that are set to take place on February 29 and March 3, respectively. Likewise, given the age of some of the candidates, especially Sanders who is 78 and who already had a heart attack on the campaign trail, a health issue could quickly eliminate a top candidate from the race.
Many folks in the media have their biases (chief among which is ratings and profits that come from creating a roller-coaster Democratic horse race), and these biases now seem fully on display in the media predictions of the moment. At minimum, the primaries are just getting started, and it’s way too soon for the media to be making solid predictions, as well as it being way too soon for voters to believe them.
Photo by Phil Roeder, used under Creative Commons license. https://is.gd/N2hz1Z
