Fighting the Last War or How to Kill the (Sanders) Revolution

The primary is over. We are waiting to hear from Bernie on his intentions going forward (Thursday’s speech provided little clarity) but it’s hard to see what he can possibly do. He does have a list of demands. Some are understandable, such as asking to remove Debbie Wasserman Schultz as DNC chair (though that does seem oddly personal) and seeking to incorporate his policy goals into the Democratic platform. But the other two causes, getting rid of super delegates and opening up primaries, don’t seem to further his cause. They may appear to benefit the Sanders revolution, yet they actually don’t. We will dig into super delegates later. Today’s issue is open primaries.

On this front, we believe Sanders is fighting the last war. One of the most difficult things in politics is to think ahead. There is no doubt open primaries that allowed other than Democrats to vote would have benefited Sanders slightly in this election. Sanders’s two other proposed rule changes, the end of super delegates and same-day registration, also would have benefited him in this election. But as Hillary Clinton quickly discovered, support in one race does not automatically transfer to the next race. Open primaries won’t necessarily benefit progressives in future races.

To see that, we can look at what happened in an open primary this year where Sanders won with a coalition of the left, the disgruntled and the young. Sanders’ support began with people who wanted more liberal policies than those pursued by the President, what might be considered “the left.” In Michigan’s open primary, these liberals were 31% of the electorate, according to exit polls. They voted for Sanders by a nearly 3-1 margin. This was his base in state after state and it would have won him 30% of the vote regardless.

Another 13% of those voting in the Michigan Democratic party wanted more conservative policies than those of the President. Bernie Sanders is not to Barack Obama’s right on a single issue and yet Sanders was able to win 53% of this group. Sanders may like to believe these conservative voters joined his movement but perhaps they simply did not know much about Sanders beyond the fact that he was against the powers that be and he was not Clinton. They constituted “the disgruntled” in his coalition. Another exit poll question revealed how strongly this group went for Sanders; only 13% of Democratic primary voters in Michigan said they wanted a candidate outside the establishment (82% said they wanted a candidate with experience in politics), yet the former group chose Sanders by more than 4-1.

The other source of Sanders support was people under 30, “the young.” Exit polls didn’t zero in on the young but the importance of their vote can be inferred by another measure. While Sanders was winning those who wanted more liberal policies than Obama by 3-1, Clinton was winning those who wanted to continue Obama’s policies by just 2-1. It’s likely that many young voters said that they wanted to continue Obama’s policies and voted for Sanders, thus reducing Clinton’s margin among this group by enough to lose the primary. Had she won by same margin among “continue Obama policies” that Sanders won with the left, she would have won Michigan.

This coalition was enough for a slight victory (49.69 to 48.26) in Michigan, a state that had other demographic factors that benefited him beyond being an open primary. Rules were not the only thing which kept people from voting for Sanders because if they were he would have done far better in all the open primaries of which there are lots. Still this coalition took Sanders to 42% nationally; the young and the disgruntled moved him beyond his expected one-third based on the left vote. But it couldn’t get him to a majority; there are not enough of these kind of voters in the Democratic base to counter-act the Clinton coalition that included significant numbers of minorities, particularly African Americans, and older voters.

So could the open primaries that Sanders is demanding get a future candidate across the majority threshold? Probably not. A Sanders-equivalent couldn’t count on getting more left voters in open primaries. For the most part, they are already registered Democrats (or were able to become so for Sanders with relative ease in most places) and thus seem stuck at about one-third of the Democratic electorate. Open primaries might attract the young and the disgruntled that powered Sanders past his left base, but they still can’t make up for a weakness in minority support, which will continue to be the backbone of Democratic voters.

Even if more open primaries and their pull of young and disgruntled voters would have boosted Sanders this year, they wouldn’t necessarily help another progressive in the future. Voting coalitions can’t be expected to be stable. The Clinton coalition from 2008 fractured somewhat this year. Clinton did much better with African Americans and the rich than she did in 2008, but she did worse with almost all other groups. Because African Americans and the rich are a larger part of the Democratic coalition than the “left,”, Clinton won with room to spare. (She won lots of other groups, she just did not beat her numbers in 2008 with them.)

To build a 50% plus 1 coalition, the Sanders coalition would have to add more voters, almost certainly from non-whites. But adding non-whites to a coalition can mean losing white voters. In this cycle, white voters in states such as Oklahoma, Kentucky and West Virginia clearly punished Clinton for her association with Obama.

Open primaries pose their own dangers. Because there were competitive contests on both sides this time, cross-over voting for the sole purpose of messing with the other side was minimized. (There were some reports that Democrats voted for Republicans in Virginia’s open primary to oppose Trump.) But that might not always be the case. A candidate of the left some day might want to prevent moderate Republican voters (The Kasich Voter) from flooding a primary to vote against him or her. Party registration may have blocked some Sanders voters this cycle but the left might be glad for those restrictions under different circumstances.

There is also another way in which Sanders is fighting the last war. By undermining the idea of a party and insisting on being a separate unit, Sanders supporters may be limiting their own effectiveness. Sanders’ 2.7 million donors and his enthusiastic rally attendees, if they were willing to put in the work, could seize control of the Democratic Party. The procedures are somewhat complicated and the process might be long, but if the Sanders left was willing to fight the establishment forces for control of the party, they certainly would have a shot to win. Using one of the two major political parties as a vehicle for accomplishing policy goals can work. In the end, the civil rights movement captured the Democratic Party almost completely. There were a lot of struggles, but President Obama is the direct result of that capture. Is the Democratic party as responsive to the concerns of African Americans as it should be? Probably not, but by working within the party, they gained a lot. By insisting upon open primaries, Sanders is sending a clear signal that there’s no value in being a party member and discourages this sort of capture.

The next candidate of the left will be disserved if the current candidate of the left pushes hard for rule changes that would have benefited him but can’t be counted on to benefit similar candidates in the future. It also doesn’t help to discourages participation within what is America’s only currently viable left party.