Second, she would work the superdelegates. The Democratic Party provided a certain number of convention seats (712 of 4,763 in 2016) to elected officials and other party figures who were free to exercise their own judgment, at least in principle. In 2008, Obama wooed the superdelegates more skillfully than Clinton, even persuading some Clinton supporters (e.g., Representative John Lewis of Georgia) to switch sides. This time, Clinton got to the superdelegates early, and by the fall of 2015, an AP survey found that she had support from 359 of them.64
Third, she would relentlessly court the African American vote, which accounted for a large share of the Democratic primary electorate. Clinton started the 2008 campaign with a big advantage over Obama among African Americans.65 After Obama won Iowa, however, they suddenly moved in his direction. In the 2016 race, knowing that Obama had unique stature among African Americans, she took every opportunity to embrace his legacy. Because of the 1990s Clinton record on crime, she had a difficult relationship with the Black Lives Matter movement, and in summer 2015 she faced a backlash for saying that “all lives matter.” She quickly adjusted her rhetoric: “Yes, black lives matter,” she said in South Carolina. “We all have a responsibility to face these hard truths about race and justice honestly and directly.”66 Success in holding African American support would have a specific payoff in the delegate count, because it was the decisive element in several Southern primaries. “There’s so much focus on Iowa and New Hampshire, but Secretary Clinton and her team know that the South will deliver a huge number of delegates that will essentially seal the nomination for her,” said DuBose Porter, the Georgia Democratic Party chair and a Clinton supporter.67
Last, but not least, she would keep her war chest full. Her 2008 campaign ran low on funds, and she eventually had to lend it $13 million out of her own pocket. Not eager to tap her savings again, she held dozens of high-dollar fundraising events in the summer of 2015. She also had support from several outside spending groups:
• Ready for Hillary, a super PAC, raised millions in 2013 and 2014, keeping the Clinton fires burning between her departure from the State Department and her formal announcement of candidacy. Since FEC rules forbid super PACs to use the names of announced candidates, this organization rebranded itself as Ready PAC once she officially entered the race.
• Priorities USA Action started in 2012 to support President Obama’s reelection and later sided with Clinton. It ran sophisticated TV ads, which it financed with million-dollar checks from big names such as Steven Spielberg and George Soros.68
• Correct the Record, originally part of another super PAC called American Bridge, spun off so that it could do rapid response and opposition research. Super PACs are generally forbidden to coordinate with the campaigns they support, but Correct the Record found a loophole. The Federal Election Commission only regulates Internet activity when it appears on another entity’s website for a fee. The group put all its material on its own website, so it contended that it could coordinate with the Clinton campaign.69 And coordinate it did. In a July 2015 memo addressed to Clinton herself, her campaign laid out detailed plans for working with Correct the Record.70
Big money would simultaneously fuel her campaign and renew doubts about her character. In February 2015, the Washington Post reported on the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation. Created in 1997 to underwrite a variety of good works around the world, the foundation had raised nearly $2 billion. Much of the money came from corporations, particularly from the financial services sector, as well as foreign governments and businesses.71 The Wall Street Journal revealed that least sixty companies that lobbied the State Department during her time as secretary had given a total of at least $26 million.72
Another issue would have more impact on the fall campaign than the primaries. In March, news broke that Clinton had used a personal email account to carry out government business as secretary of state. This practice appeared to violate requirements for retention of official correspondence. One expert told the New York Times, “It is very difficult to conceive of a scenario—short of nuclear winter—where an agency would be justified in allowing its cabinet-level head officer to solely use a private email communications channel for the conduct of government business.”73 Even more troubling, her use of a “home-brew” server raised security concerns that she had exposed secrets to Internet espionage.
Clinton tried to put the matter to rest with a hastily arranged press conference, but the effort failed. James Carville, who had served Bill Clinton in the 1990s, told a reporter, “Look, the problem here isn’t about the emails; you guys are never going to be satisfied with whatever answers she gives. Y’all are just going to go out there and say, ‘She raised more questions than she answered.’ ”74 At the New York Times, Maureen Dowd reviewed controversies from the 1990s and concluded, “The Clintons don’t sparkle with honesty and openness. Between his lordly appetites and her queenly prerogatives, you always feel as if there’s something afoot.”75
In the meantime, Bernie Sanders was drawing big and enthusiastic crowds full of students and other young voters. “Sanders offers what young people— and most Americans—want in political leaders,” wrote columnist Brent Budowsky. “He offers authenticity and ideas; a politics of conviction and values that soars above the petty cash of political propaganda and political spin.”76 Sanders had a long history of supporting civil rights: during his own student days, he had attended Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech and been arrested at a civil rights demonstration in Chicago.77 He also had a big problem in this respect. With African Americans making up only 1 percent of its population, Vermont is the second-whitest state in the Union, just after Montana. Sanders’s ties to the African American community had atrophied during his many years in office, and few black activists rallied to his campaign. His supporters were youthful, zealous, and pale.
The impact of his demographic challenge would become evident later. For the time being, he was contemplating an unusual approach to fundraising. On March 9, 2015, he told the National Press Club, “[If] I was really enormously successful, and I had three million people contributing a hundred dollars each, three million people, that would be $300 million dollars [ sic ], an enormous sum of money, one-third of what the Koch brothers themselves are going to spend. So those are the issues that I’m trying to work on right now.”78 He was not kidding. The response to his famous 2010 Senate speech showed that he had an enormous potential cyber-constituency. His nascent campaign focused on the Internet. “From the beginning, we knew it was important to fund this campaign differently from most,” he wrote. “We weren’t going to receive a whole lot of support from wealthy donors and we didn’t want a super PAC. In the end, 94 percent of our money came in online, and we not only talked the talk about campaign finance reform, we walked the walk.”79
EARLY SKIRMISHES
Hillary Clinton formally announced her candidacy on April 12, 2015, and Sanders followed eighteen days later. For most of the year, the mainstream media assumed that the Democrats would not have much of a fight, and that the real action was on the GOP side. In 2015, the Tyndale Report found that Donald Trump dominated political coverage on the three broadcast networks’ evening news programs, with 327 minutes (or nearly a third of the airtime) devoted to the presidential campaign. Clinton was the second most newsworthy candidate (121 minutes), with another 88 minutes going to her email controversy and 29 minutes to the probes into the Benghazi attack. The Democrat who got the second-greatest amount of coverage was not even running: the networks gave 73 minutes to Biden’s decision to stay out of the race. Bernie Sanders got only 20 minutes.80
Still, there were signs of a serious Democratic contest. The release of FEC data in July showed that Clinton had raised about $45 million during the previous quarter, while Sanders had raised $15 million. Though his haul was smaller, he outperformed expectations and had a lower spending rate, so he could keep more of what he took in. Moreover, since his contributions mostly
came in small amounts, he did not have to worry about contributors bumping against the legal contribution ceilings, and he could hit them up repeatedly. The next quarter was an even bigger surprise. At $25 million, Sanders’s take was just $3 million behind Clinton’s.81
Pressure from the left weighed on Clinton. During the Obama years, many liberal activists had grown increasingly critical of Israel in connection with Palestine and other regional issues. When Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to a joint meeting of Congress in March 2015 to make a case against the Iran nuclear deal, dozens of Democratic lawmakers stayed away.82 In May of that year, Clinton policy aide Jake Sullivan wanted to include a strong statement of support for Israel in her standard stump speech. In an email exchange, pollster Joel Benenson disagreed: “Why would we call out Israel in public events now? The only voters elevating FP [foreign policy] at all are Republican primary voters. To me we deal with this in stride when [and] if we are asked about FP.” Campaign manager Robby Mook added, “I’m w Joel. We shouldn’t have Israel at public events. Especially dem activists.”83
Her husband’s administration had promoted NAFTA, and as secretary of state, she had praised international negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade deal including nations in Asia and the Americas. The agreement was unpopular among Democratic liberals, and in the fall of 2015, she changed her position and came out against TPP.84 She could not erase her history, however, and the issue would continue to dog her through November.
The party’s ideological winds also moved her on the issue of the Keystone XL Pipeline. President Obama was about to reject a proposal to build a 1,179-mile leg to bring oil from Alberta to Nebraska. The project was popular among blue-collar workers in the Rust Belt but toxic to environmentalists. Clinton sided with the environmentalists. “The [building] trades are also hearing that HRC will put out a statement stating that she encouraged Obama to take this position,” wrote Nikki Budzinski, Clinton’s labor outreach director in an email that later leaked. “Politically with the building trades, this would be a very dangerous posture.” Campaign chair John Podesta answered, “Your [ sic ] in trouble, girl. Seriously, doubt we’ll say we ‘encouraged’ but assume we’ll support if it goes that way.”85 Clinton came out against Key-stone in September. Environmentalists cheered. Labor leaders grumbled but gave her a pass. Evan Halper of the Los Angeles Times offered a prescient warning: “For Democrats eager to capture key swing states in the Rust Belt and Rockies, Keystone is dangerous. The loud, persistent and growing opposition in Democratic strongholds like California hasn’t taken hold in the parts of the country where the election will be hardest fought.”86
On October 13, the candidates met for their first televised debate, in Las Vegas. CNN’s Anderson Cooper raised the Clinton email issue, and, as expected, Clinton called it a distraction from policy concerns. Sanders made news by agreeing: “Let me say—let me say something that may not be great politics. But I think the secretary is right, and that is that the American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn e-mails.”87 In the short run, Sanders helped Clinton by declining to probe a weakness, and he helped himself by looking high-minded. In the longer run, he may have inadvertently helped Trump.88 Had he pushed the issue, Clinton would have had to build up her defenses, and it would have become old news to an easily bored electorate. Instead, he left the issue on the table, where Republicans could later grab it.
Sanders preferred to stick to the economy and political reform. Clinton provided him with plenty of material. On November 14, at the second Democratic debate in Des Moines, he went after her Wall Street contributors: “Well, why do they make millions of dollars of campaign contributions? They expect to get something. Everybody knows that.” Clinton responded, “I represented New York on 9/11 when we were attacked. Where were we attacked? We were attacked in downtown Manhattan where Wall Street is. I did spend a whole lot of time and effort helping them rebuild. That was good for New York. It was good for the economy and it was a way to rebuke the terrorists who had attacked our country.”89 Clinton’s remarks got a poor reception. One columnist wrote that “invok[ing] terrorist attacks and the subsequent rebuilding as any sort of defense for Wall Street having such potential influence is unbelievably tone deaf at best, and wildly offensive at worst.”90 At a Democratic barbecue the next day, Clinton campaign chair John Podesta tried to defend Clinton against charges that she was a corporate lackey, but a sharp-eyed reporter noticed that he was wearing a fleece jacket bearing the logo of Equilibrium Capital, a $1 billion investment firm.91
On January 1, 2016, the RealClearPolitics polling average put Clinton 23 points ahead of Sanders among Democrats nationwide. She had hundreds of endorsements from elected officials, whereas Sanders had only a few. The only members of Congress to support him at this point were Representatives Keith Ellison of Minnesota and Raul Grijalva of Arizona.92 Clinton also led among unions and advocacy groups. Sanders, however, noticed that while Clinton did better when the executive boards decided the endorsement, he did better when the members got to choose. “In general, we did well with the rank and file, not so well with the Inside the Beltway leadership.”93
IOWA AND NEW HAMPSHIRE
In 2008, Hillary Clinton never quite recovered from losing the Iowa caucuses. Eight years later, she poured time and resources into the state, in hopes of avoiding a repeat. She won, by the narrowest of margins. Iowa tallied its caucus by “state delegate equivalents” (SDEs) instead of the popular vote, and Clinton came out ahead by 700.47 SDEs to Sanders’s 696.92, a difference of about two-tenths of one percent. Clinton got a numerical win of sorts and avoided a humiliating defeat. Sanders got a moral victory and a psychological boost.
Youth was the old man’s secret weapon. Entrance polls showed that caucus-goers under the age of thirty (18 percent of the total) favored Sanders by an 84–14 percent margin. He also led among first-time participants (59–37 percent) and those who identified as “very liberal” (58–39 percent).94 Several features of the Iowa contest favored Sanders. Iowa is almost as white as Vermont: Clinton was strong among African Americans, but they accounted for only a tiny percentage of the caucus vote. Sanders tended to do better among poorer voters, and the Iowa caucus electorate was relatively downscale. The state’s Democrats have long leaned to the left: as noted earlier, a significant number openly embraced the “socialist” label. New York Times election analyst Nate Cohn had a word of caution for Sanders supporters: “National polls show him roughly tied with Mrs. Clinton among white voters, and it was the case here as well. It suggests that additional gains for Mr. Sanders in national polls will require him to do better than he did in Iowa, not that the close race in Iowa augurs a close one nationally.”95
Eight years before, Clinton had won an upset victory in the New Hampshire primary, which enabled her to stay in the race. This time, the Clinton forces recognized that Sanders had a home-court advantage in the first primary because he came from neighboring Vermont. The two states also shared demographic characteristics that favored Sanders, including a very small African American population. Still, the Clinton campaign decided to make a real effort. On February 4, she debated him in Durham, and the candidates had a lively disagreement over who was more liberal. Reflecting his state’s affection for hunting, Sanders did not have a consistent record in favor of gun control. Clinton pounced: “You know, we have differences and, honestly, I think we should be talk[ing] about what we want to do for the country. But if we’re going to get into labels, I don’t think it was particularly progressive to vote against the Brady Bill five times. I don’t think it was progressive to vote to give gun makers and sellers immunity.” Sanders answered that “you can’t be a moderate [and] a progressive.”96 The back-and-forth probably played well with the MSNBC audience, but it was less obvious that the more-liberal-than-thou debate positioned Clinton well for the general election.
As most expected, Sanders won the New Hampshire primary with 60 percent of t
he vote, to Clinton’s 38 percent. As in Iowa, Sanders had crushing margins among voters under 30 (83–16 percent) and “very liberal” voters (67–33 percent).97 One datum should have given pause to the Clinton campaign. About a third of voters said that the candidate characteristic that mattered most was “honest and trustworthy.” Sanders won these voters 92–6 percent.
THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK
Clinton reassured supporters that Iowa and New Hampshire were quirky states with atypical electorates. The next state, Nevada, was different. With significant numbers of Hispanic and African American voters, it was a chance for Sanders to show that his appeal extended beyond cold climates and light complexions. But he had made an early decision to focus on Iowa and New Hampshire, and by the time of the February 20 Nevada caucuses, the Clinton campaign had the organizational upper hand. Clinton won 53 percent of the county delegates—no landslide, but enough to restore her campaign’s confidence. Entrance polls showed her winning most of the African American vote while losing the Hispanic vote to Sanders. Nate Cohn analyzed the caucus results and found Clinton ahead in heavily Hispanic areas, suggesting that the survey data were misleading.98 It would not be the last such case in the 2016 campaign.
The morning after the caucuses, Sanders held a conference call with campaign aides, expressing regret that he had not build a stronger ground operation in the state. “If Clinton had lost Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, it would have been a devastating series of defeats that would have called into question her entire campaign,” said Sanders adviser Tad Devine. “We had to shift our strategy. But no matter what, the nomination became tougher to win.”99 Devine was understating the case. A week after the Nevada caucuses came the South Carolina primary, where African Americans made up most the Democratic primary electorate. Sanders had attempted outreach to the black vote, but it was too little, too late. Clinton won with 73.5 percent to just 26 percent for Sanders.
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