There’s an old joke (that I love): Two silkworms had a race. They eneded up in a tie. Last night’s nail-biting Democratic caucuses vote ended up in a virtual tie. The keyword here is “virtual” because in the end (partially due to being on the winning end of some coin tosses) former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton beat Vermont Senator Bernie Sander, by part of one of those bitten fingernails.
But a real tie means exact tie. And this wasn’t it. So is it accurate for the Clintonistas to call it a win? It was not an exact tie. . The Week’s Peter Weber says the closeness of the vote was significant — but underscores a problem for Sanders:
As with horseshoes and hand grenades, close does count in tough primary fights like the one brewing between Clinton and Sanders. Momentum and beating expectations also matter, especially for the political scorekeepers in the news media, and Sanders can claim victories on both those metrics. But the fight for a party’s presidential nomination really comes down to math — a fact Barack Obama’s campaign drew on to defeat Clinton in 2008 — and a near-win in Iowa doesn’t add up for Sanders.
The problem for Sanders is that his base of support is among white liberals, and “there is only one state where whites who self-identify as liberals make up a higher share of the Democratic primary electorate than Iowa and New Hampshire,” said David Wasserman at the Cook Political Report. “You guessed it: Vermont.” Clinton also has a massive lead in pledged superdelegates, who make up 15 percent of the Democratic delegates and aren’t tied to state results.
Wasserman and the Cook team put together a chart with estimates of the number of delegates Clinton and Sanders would have to win in each state to be “on track” to win the Democratic nomination. The “key takeaway,” he notes, is that “for Sanders to be ‘on track’ to break even in pledged delegates nationally, he wouldn’t just need to win Iowa and New Hampshire by a hair. He would need to win 70 percent of Iowa’s delegates and 63 percent of New Hampshire’s delegates.” In other words, Wasserman adds, “if Sanders prevails narrowly in Iowa or New Hampshire, his support among liberal whites and in college towns… would be entirely consistent with a scenario in which he also gets clobbered by Clinton nationally.”
Of course, other things can happen to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, but most of the assumptions on that front is that she keeps doing the campaign exactly as she has now, has the exact same staff, and doesn’t analyze where she needs to boost her campaign. She’s now facing another Battle of Her Political Life.
Sanders will win about 50 percent of Iowa delegates, or 21 delegates, according to a near-complete tally. Wassermann’s chart suggests Sanders had to win 31 delegates to be on track to tie Clinton nationally. “When placed in the proper mathematical context,” Wasserman concludes, “this year’s Democratic primary remains a much steeper mountain for Sanders than many chroniclers of the campaign trail seem to realize or acknowledge.”
If you want to know why Clinton told supporters on Monday night that she’s “breathing a sign of relief” over the Iowa results, that’s probably why..
…..More to the point, the Sanders campaign isn’t a repeat of Obama 2008. Obama’s decisive victory in Iowa expanded his base of liberal white voters by convincing black Democrats that he could actually win. Sanders hasn’t shown yet that he can expand his pool of young, liberal, white supporters. As Charles Pierce argues persuasively in Esquire, Sanders 2016 is less like Obama 2008 than the 1984 and 1988 campaigns of Jesse Jackson — a candidate Sanders endorsed at the time — and the 2004 run by Howard Dean, a Vermonter like Sanders.
If so, that’s significant:Jackson, Dean, and now Sanders all tapped into “a subversive, counter-establishment energy” in the Democratic Party that has “refused to be quelled,” despite attempts to tamp it down by the party establishment, Pierce writes. “This old flow of counter-establishment energy… has been magnified by the frauds and crimes of the financial elites,” he adds, but “it has been a continuous strain of activist politics, from Jesse Jackson to Bernie Sanders.”
Neither Dean nor Jackson ever won the Democratic nomination — and, perhaps ominously for Clinton, the Democrats lost in 1984, 1988, and 2004. But they did push the eventual Democratic candidates to the left, making their marks on the party and its platform. Sanders appears to have already accomplished a similar feat with Clinton.
And if you look at those years the Dems lost, Republicans used those years to further put their imprint on the judiciary. Judges appointed by them often make decisions that liberal Democrats decry and wonder how the judiciary got so conservative. There are many reasons, but Democrats staying home to teach their party a lesson has been one of them. This could well happen again.Sanders has the resources and popular enthusiasm behind him to give Clinton a run for her money. And given the unpredictable nature of this race, the anti-establishment fervor in the country, and the ever-lurking Clinton email situation, Sanders might even pull together enough delegates to win the Democratic nomination.
But he needed a solid win in Iowa to shift the fundamental dynamics of the race. He certainly did not get that. And that makes Iowa a win for Hillary Clinton.
The bottom line? Both Sanders and Clinton have their work cut out for them in the battle for the nomination — and both better be ready to be bettered by Republicans with “high concept” advertising if they get the nomination. GOPers have already raised money off saving the country from Hillary Clinton and according to one news story are already using Sanders being a self-declared socialist to raise money. On Twitter some Republicans are even referring to him as a “communist.” Presumably both camps will have plans ready to use if the expected onslaught is unleashed.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.