The fight for the right to challenge US President Donald Trump later this year came into clearer focus last night, as Senator Bernie Sanders won the Democratic Party’s New Hampshire primary and former vice-president Joe Biden limped in a distant fifth.
While an ebullient Sanders celebrated, Biden slunk off early to South Carolina, which holds its primary at the end of this month. Biden is hoping his eight years serving under president Barack Obama will earn him victory in a state with a large percentage of black voters.
If he loses in South Carolina, his campaign is all but finished. This is Biden’s third campaign for the presidency and he is still yet to win a primary election.
Pete Buttigieg, the 38-year-old former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, came second to Sanders last night. Buttigieg won 24 per cent of the vote behind 26 per cent for the Vermont senator, and well ahead of Biden’s eight per cent.
After scoring a virtual tie with Sanders in last week’s Iowa caucus, Buttigieg has been the surprise of the two first legs of this long primary season. He has established himself as the centrist candidate versus the socialist Sanders.
In his various presidential runs, Sanders has always done best in these early races. New Hampshire neighbours his home state of Vermont. Young and lower-income voters in the state have been drawn to his crotchety tirades against the economic elites, and his plans to end tuition at public colleges and universities and introduce NHS-style free healthcare.
However, the dynamics and demographics of the campaign will now change rapidly, and Sanders will be at less of an advantage.
Nevada, which is nearly a third Hispanic, comes next on February 22, followed by South Carolina a week later and then on March 3, Super Tuesday when voters in 13 states, including big ones such as Texas and California, go to the polls. The rapid scaling up of the elections should favour candidates with strong establishment networks, union support and money.
Former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg has bypassed the early primaries to focus on Super Tuesday, flooding those states with advertising in the hope that he can burst through as a viable centrist alternative. Bloomberg will have been encouraged by the collapse of Biden, previously the great hope of the Democratic establishment. But will have been unnerved by the growing swagger of the Buttigieg campaign.
Bloomberg has deep pockets and a sterling record as an entrepreneur, philanthropist and three-term mayor. But he will turn 78 on Friday. Buttigieg is inexperienced but young, and is clogging up the centrist path Bloomberg was hoping would clear out for him once Biden had faltered.
The evolution of these primaries has rattled many Democrats who want, above all, a candidate who can beat Trump. What they now fear is a choice between Sanders, a socialist, who for all his popularity with parts of swathes of the Democratic base stands little chance of winning a national election; and Bloomberg, a former Republican who is not considered a real Democrat.
Rahm Emanuel, the ex-mayor of Chicago and Obama’s former chief of staff, said on Sunday that “one of the threats to the party right now is a rupture in the core”. To win nationwide, the party needed a candidate “who moves those swing moderate voters”. Voters who for now, at least, are enjoying the fruits of a long economic boom under Trump.
Handing the nomination to Bloomberg would, many Democrats fear, feel like outsourcing the most important job the party has to offer. Even if he represented the best hope of beating Trump, he would feel like a compromise choice.
Yesterday morning, however, he focused on Bloomberg, whom he has known for many years in New York. Linking to an audio clip in which Bloomberg discussed the aggressive policing tactics he had approved as mayor, Trump wrote: “Wow, Bloomberg is a total racist.” Later in the day, his tweet was removed.
However, he may be right to worry that Bloomberg could snap up the nomination. The New York Times columnist Tom Friedman articulated the thinking of many Democrats yesterday.
He wrote: “So who is the right Democratic candidate? I will tell you who it is not. It is not Bernie Sanders.” Sanders would be too easily caricatured as an extremist “Che Guevara” by the Trump campaign. Bloomberg, by contrast “has the right stuff — a moderate progressive with a heart of gold but the toughness of a rattlesnake — for what is going to be an incredibly big, brutal task: making Donald Trump a one-term president.”
@delvesbroughton
