March 1 was Super Tuesday, with a dozen Democratic contests. As explained earlier, Super Tuesday originated in the 1980s as a way to give a voice to conservative Southern Democrats. Over the years, the Super Tuesday roster had evolved, and so had the makeup of its Southern states. The conservative whites who had voted for Bill Clinton in 1992 had long ago left for the GOP, and African Americans were the dominant Democratic force in much of the South. In 2016, Clinton swept Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia, and even narrowly carried Massachusetts, which Sanders had hoped to win. She also won the caucuses in American Samoa. Sanders won his own state, Vermont, together with Colorado, Minnesota, and Oklahoma.
On that night, Clinton effectively clinched the Democratic nomination. Though several months of campaigning were still ahead, Super Tuesday made it prohibitively difficult for Sanders to overtake her. The reason was proportional allocation of delegates. Under Democratic rules, each candidate’s share of a state’s convention delegates is roughly proportional to his or her vote share. Even if one candidate wins a plurality of the vote in a state, another candidate can still take a substantial number of delegates. So once one candidate builds up a sizable lead in delegates, it is very hard for rivals to erase it.100 In 2008, this dynamic kept Obama ahead even after Clinton won some key contests later in the season. In 2016, Clinton was the beneficiary, and her delegate margin was larger than Obama’s had been.101 Campaign manager Robby Mook wrote in early April:
Hillary Clinton has a lead of nearly 230 pledged delegates—and with each passing week, it’s becoming increasingly unlikely that Senator Sanders will be able to catch up. In order to do so, Sanders has to win the four remaining delegate-rich primaries—New York, Pennsylvania, California, and New Jersey—with roughly 60 percent of the vote. To put that in perspective: Sanders has thus far won only two primaries with that margin: Vermont and New Hampshire. Needless to say, the size and demographic makeups of New York, Pennsylvania, California, and New Jersey are decidedly different than Vermont and New Hampshire. And these figures don’t even include superdelegates, where Clinton has an overwhelming lead.102
Spoiler alert: Clinton won New York, Pennsylvania, California, and New Jersey. She did have some unpleasant moments in the months after Super Tuesday, however. Despite polls showing a Clinton victory in the Michigan primary, Sanders won an upset victory. In hindsight, this result was another indicator that election surveys have become less reliable. (The same state would provide another reminder on the night of November 8.) Clinton had been counting on the black vote in the Detroit area, but she did not generate the same level of passion as Barack Obama, particularly among younger African Americans.
As the outcome of the nomination contest became clear, some Sanders supporters reacted with anger. One activist posted a database of personal information on superdelegates, with a graphic of a donkey in crosshairs. “These people are worried someone is going to come to their house,” said Bob Mulholland, a California Democratic political operative in California who backed Clinton. “They have been put on a ‘hit list.’ ”103 The Nevada state Democratic convention dissolved into disorder after Sanders forces lost a rules dispute. The “Bernie Bros” did not stop when the convention ended. “It’s been vile,” said state Democratic chair Roberta Lange. “It’s been threatening messages, threatening my family, threatening my life, threatening my grandchild.”104
This period also generated some problems that were not apparent at the time. Democratic operative Donna Brazile, working as a commentator for CNN, improperly gave the Clinton campaign advance information about debate questions. Just before a Michigan debate, she sent an email saying that a woman from Flint would ask about the city’s water contamination crisis. “One of the questions directed to HRC tomorrow is from a woman with a rash,” Brazile said in the subject line. She continued, “Her family has lead poison and she will ask what, if anything, will Hillary do as president to help the ppl of Flint.”105 At most, the Clinton campaign got some marginal value from Brazile’s messages. But once they leaked in the fall—probably as the result of Russian hacking—they supplied Donald Trump with yet another way to attack “Crooked Hillary.”
That revelation was still in the future. In the spring, it still looked as if Clinton was on the road to becoming the first woman president. In early June, she locked up enough delegates to win the nomination. After her victory in the June 7 California primary, President Obama endorsed her. On June 24, Sanders said that he would vote for her.
WHOSE PARTY?
Bernie Sanders lost the nomination but won the party. He had defied the odds and stunned the political community by raising more than $200 million, mostly online via small donations. On the day that Clinton clinched the nomination, he had a higher net favorability rating among Democrats: 52 percent to Clinton’s 39 percent.106 His zealous base of supporters was a powerful force that no Democrat could ignore. As he recounted in Our Revolution, the 2016 Democratic platform reflected his influence:
While we didn’t get everything we wanted, we did get much of what we were fighting for. It was now the Democratic Party’s policy to break up too-big-to-fail banks, pass a twenty-first-century Glass Steagall Act, make public colleges and universities tuition free for working families, enact a price on carbon and methane, raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, abolish the death penalty, expand Social Security, close loopholes that allow corporations to avoid paying taxes, create millions of jobs rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, eliminate super PACs, and pass a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United.107
In addition to making concessions to Sanders on the platform, Clinton tried to unify the party with her vice presidential selection. Tim Kaine was a nominal Southerner, representing Virginia in the U.S. Senate. He had been a civil rights lawyer and mayor of majority-black Richmond. He spoke Spanish, an outgrowth of his time as a Catholic missionary in Honduras. And he had an acceptably liberal voting record from the Americans for Democratic Action. In some ways, he was also like Clinton herself: he had a Midwestern upbringing and accent, a commitment to liberal religious values, and Ivy League law degree (Harvard). He was a good fit for the Democratic Party of 2016.
Throughout the convention, the roster of speakers repeated the themes of diversity and inclusion. Clinton herself discussed all the groups that would benefit from her policies and suffer under Trump’s. “This was a strategic mistake,” wrote scholar Mark Lilla of Clinton’s emphasis on identity politics. “If you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention all of them. If you don’t, those left out will notice and feel excluded.”108
The nomination process had left Clinton in a precarious position. To appeal to the Democratic liberals and counter the Sanders insurgency, she had moved to the left, where her stands on cultural and environmental issues might cause her trouble among working-class white voters in the fall. However, as Sanders’s strong showing indicated, she had not totally closed the sale among core Democratic voters, either. Sanders had scored points by linking her to Wall Street. Al From, who founded the now-defunct DLC, explained why such a connection had become so toxic: “The circumstances are changed when you go through a depression like we did in 2008 and 2009, when you can point a finger at somebody. In this case, people point the finger at Wall Street. It’s a different world. We needed Wall Street for investment to grow the economy so everybody could do better. Now they’re the villains.”109
Hillary Clinton had moved far beyond the Clintonism of the 1990s, but the past was still too much with her.
NOTES
1. Al From, The New Democrats and the Return to Power (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 97.
2. Ibid., 111.
3. James Ceaser and Andrew Busch, Upside Down and Inside Out: The 1992 Elections and American Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993), 55–56.
4. Ibid., 65, 78.
5. Gwen Ifill, “Clinton Won’t Back Down in Tiff with Jackson Over a Rap Singer,” New
York Times, June 20, 1992, http://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/20/us/1992-campaign-democrats-clinton-won-t-back-down-tiff-with-jackson-over-rap.html.
6. Transcript, “Leaders 2,” 1992, http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/1992.
7. H.R. 3734 (104th): Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/104/hr3734.
8. Barry Latzer, The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America (New York: Encounter Books, 2016), chapters 3–4.
9. University of Albany, Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics Online, http://www.albany.edu/sourcebook/pdf/t31062012.pdf.
10. Steven M. Gillon, The Pact: Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and the Rivalry That Defined a Generation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), xv.
11. In 1998, seven in ten Americans said that they did not believe that Clinton had high ethical standards. David S. Broder and Richard Morin, “Struggle Over New Standards,” Washington Post, December 27, 1998, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/values122798.htm.
12. “Hillary’s Cash Cows and Other Sweet Deals,” Newsweek, April 3, 1994, http://www.newsweek.com/hillarys-cash-cows-and-other-sweet-deals-186812.
13. William J. Clinton, “Statement on Signing the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998,” October 31, 1998, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid55205.
14. William J. Clinton, “Address to the Nation Announcing Military Strikes on Iraq,” December 16, 1998, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid55414.
15. Frank Newport, “Clinton’s Job Approval Legacy,” Gallup, January 4, 2001, http://www.gallup.com/poll/4657/clintons-job-approval-legacy.aspx.
16. William F. Connelly Jr. and John J. Pitney Jr., Congress’ Permanent Minority? Republicans in the US House (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), 156–58.
17. Matthew Cooper, “Beware of Republicans Bearing Voting Rights Suits,” Washington Monthly, February 1987, 11–15, at http://www.unz.org/Pub/WashingtonMonthly-1987feb-00011.
18. John J. Pitney Jr., “Clinton and the Republican Party,” in The Postmodern Presidency: Bill Clinton’s Legacy in US Politics, ed. Steven E. Schier (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), 178.
19. Harry Enten, “Hillary Clinton Was Liberal. Hillary Clinton Is Liberal,” Five-ThirtyEight, May 19, 2015, http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/hillary-clinton-was-liberal-hillary-clinton-is-liberal/.
20. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, “Floor Speech of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton on S.J. Res. 45, A Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq,” October 10, 2002, https://web.archive.org/web/20081218155448/ http://clinton.senate.gov/speeches/iraq_101002.html.
21. Andrew J. Taylor, Elephant’s Edge: The Republicans as a Ruling Party (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005).
22. Matt Bai, The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remark Democratic Politics (New York: Penguin, 2007), 74.
23. Ronald Brownstein, The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America (New York: Penguin, 2007), 335–36.
24. Ibid., 214.
25. Harold Meyerson, “A Real Realignment,” Washington Post, November 7, 2008, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/06/AR2008110602571.html.
26. Ben Smith, “The End of the DLC Era,” Politico, February 7, 2011, http://www.politico.com/story/2011/02/the-end-of-the-dlc-era-049041.
27. Lydia Saad, “Conservatives Hang on to Ideology Lead by a Thread,” Gallup, January 11, 2016, http://www.gallup.com/poll/188129/conservatives-hang-ideology-lead-thread.aspx.
28. Michael Dimock et al., “Political Polarization in the American Public,” Pew Research Center, June 12, 2014, http://www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/political-polarization-in-the-american-public/.
29. Carroll Doherty et al., “The Parties on the Eve of the 2016 Election: Two Coalitions, Moving Further Apart,” Pew Research Center, September 13, 2016, http://www.people-press.org/2016/09/13/2-party-affiliation-among-voters-1992-2016/.
30. Carroll Doherty and Rachel Weisel, “A Deep Dive into Party Affiliation,” Pew Research Center, April 7, 2015, http://www.people-press.org/2015/04/07/a-deep-dive-into-party-affiliation/.
31. Carroll Doherty, Jocelyn Kiley, and Bridget Jameson, “Wider Ideological Gap Between More and Less Educated Adults,” Pew Research Center, April 26, 2016, http://www.people-press.org/2016/04/26/a-wider-ideological-gap-between-more-and-less-educated-adults.
32. Joe Klein, “One for All and All for One,” Time, September 10, 2012, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2123309,00.html.
33. Jay Cost, “The Democratic Bench Is Shockingly Weak,” The Weekly Standard, January 29, 2015, http://www.weeklystandard.com/democratic-bench-shockingly-weak/article/830664.
34. Chris Cillizza, “Republicans Have Gained More Than 900 State Legislative Seats Since 2010,” Washington Post, January 14, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/01/14/republicans-have-gained-more-than-900-state-legislative-seats-since-2010.
35. Erica Orden, “Andrew Cuomo’s Former Top Aide Indicted on Public-Corruption Charges,” Wall Street Journal, November 22, 2016, http://www.wsj.com/articles/andrew-cuomos-former-top-aide-indicted-on-public-corruption-charges-1479849941.
36. At the start of 2015, her average poll rating was 51–28 percent unfavorable. “Nancy Pelosi Favorable Rating,” HuffPost Pollster, December 14, 2016, http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/nancy-pelosi-favorable-rating.
37. Jeffrey M. Jones, “Biden Maintains Positive Image,” Gallup, October 14, 2015, http://www.gallup.com/poll/186167/biden-maintains-positive-image.aspx.
38. Jennifer Hoar, “Biden’s Comments Ruffle Feathers,” CBS, July 7, 2006, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/bidens-comments-ruffle-feathers.
39. Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, Double Down: Game Change 2012 (New York: Penguin, 2013), 71.
40. Byron York, “Joe Biden’s Woman-Touching Habit,” Washington Examiner, February 17, 2015, http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/joe-bidens-woman-touching-habit/article/2560311.
41. Nick Gass, “Barney Frank: Joe Biden ‘Can’t Keep His Mouth Shut or His Hands to Himself,’ ” Politico, March 24, 2015, http://www.politico.com/story/2015/03/barney-frank-joe-biden-no-discipline-116360.
42. James W. Ceaser, Andrew E. Busch, and John J. Pitney Jr., Epic Journey: The 2008 Elections and American Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 121.
43. Jon Greenberg, “Hillary Clinton Says She and Bill Were ‘Dead Broke,’ ” Politi-Fact, June 10, 2014, http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/jun/10/hillary-clinton/hillary-clinton-says-she-and-bill-were-dead-broke/.
44. Aaron Blake, “Hillary Clinton: Last Time I Drove Was 1996,” Washington Post, January 27, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2014/01/27/hillary-clinton-last-time-i-drove-was-1996/?utm_term.17c558d85f50.
45. Allison Graves, “Did Hillary Clinton Call African-American Youth ‘Superpredators?’ ” PolitiFact, August 28, 2016, http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/aug/28/reince-priebus/did-hillary-clinton-call-african-american-youth-su. The inventor of the term was political scientist John J. DiIulio Jr., who would go on to advise the George W. Bush administration. See John J. DiIulio Jr., “The Coming of the Super-Predators,” The Weekly Standard, November 27, 1995, http://www.weeklystandard.com/the-coming-of-the-super-predators/article/8160.
46. Amy Chozick, “Bill Clinton Says He Regrets Showdown with Black Lives Matter Protesters,” New York Times, April 8, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/09/us/politics/bill-clinton-apology-black-lives-matter-philadelphia.html.
47. Jonathan Chait, “Hillary Clinton Is Reliving Al Gore’s Nightmare,” New York Magazine, October 7, 2015, http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/10/hillary-clinton-is-reliving-al-gores-nightmare.html.
48. Bernie Sanders, Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2016), 17.
49. Gabriel Debe
nedetti, “Poll: Majority of Democrats Say Socialism Has ‘Positive Impact,’ ” Politico, February 22, 2016, http://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/democrats-poll-socialism-219600.
50. John McCormick and Arit John, “Anti-Wall Street Sentiment Breaks by Party Line in Iowa Poll,” Bloomberg News, January 15, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-01-15/anti-wall-street-sentiment-breaks-by-party-line-in-iowa-poll.
51. “Clinton in Commanding Lead Over Trump Among Young Voters, Harvard Youth Poll Finds,” Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government, Institute of Politics, April 26, 2016, http://iop.harvard.edu/youth-poll/harvard-iop-spring-2016-poll.
52. Max Ehrenfreund, “A Majority of Millennials Now Reject Capitalism, Poll Shows,” Washington Post, April 26, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/04/26/a-majority-of-millennials-now-reject-capitalism-poll-shows/?utm_term.780f677af5fd.
53. Sanders, Our Revolution, 22.
54. Vermont does not have party registration. For an account of Trump’s switches, see Joshua Gillin, “Bush Says Trump Was a Democrat Longer Than a Republican ‘In the Last Decade,’ ” PolitiFact, August 24, 2015, http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2015/aug/24/jeb-bush/bush-says-trump-was-democrat-longer-republican-las.
55. Bernie Sanders, “Full Congressional Record Transcript of Sanders Filibuster,” December 10, 2010, http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/full-congressional-record-transcript-of-sanders-filibuster.
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