"[Bernie] Sanders is more liked than [Joe] Biden, voters think he's better on their top issues than Biden and more than twice as many respondents said they would never vote for Biden as Sanders, yet Biden leads the race, and when asked which candidate they think has the best chance to win the 2020 general election, the biggest portion of respondents--45%--chose Joe Biden. Only 16% chose Sanders."Though only one poll of a single state at a single point in time, this echoed many from 2016, when the Clinton campaign deployed the "electability" argument against Sanders, the notion that a progressive is too far to the left, simply can't win a general and that only a more conservative candidate like Hillary Clinton could pull it off. This is standard Clintonite triangulation--throwing one's own base under the bus in order to present "both sides" as "extreme" and position oneself as an artificially manufactured "sensible center." Clinton was a very problematic candidate right from the beginning, perpetually scandal-plagued, secrecy-obsessed and already disliked by more than liked her on the day she entered the race. She brought along decades of negative baggage, corruption as a way of doing business, an absolutely disgraceful performance in the 2008 primaries and represented a politics that voters thought they'd rejected years earlier. Sanders drew massive, screaming crowds everywhere he went; Clinton could barely fill high-school gymnasiums and often had more press than supporters attend her campaign events. In the polling, significant majorities of respondents would say they thought Clinton was more electable but those same polls would also refute this, showing Sanders performing better. In the "electability" narrative pushed by the Democratic Establishment and the corporate press, people had been sold a bill of goods. Ultimately, it helped bring about the Trump presidency.[1] When, last year, this turned up in that New Hampshire poll, during a campaign wherein Joe Biden and his press allies have much more forcefully pushed the "electability" argument, I didn't like the look of it. Now, something like it has turned up again and it's pointing to some serious problems presently confronting both Democrats and the American version of liberal democracy itself.
The endless polling to which Americans are subjected makes it very clear that most support the headline items in the progressive agenda advanced by Sanders, often by overwhelming margins,[2] but in a media environment that too often resembles some futuristic dystopian nightmare, these are the very items that are treated by the press as rendering Sanders unelectable. In the present cycle, the notion that Joe Biden is more "electable" than Sanders is treated as an article of faith in national news media. It's never interrogated, and it is, on a daily basis, relentlessly propagated on the major networks' news operations, by all the major newspapers and 24 hours a day on the cable news networks. This is done both directly and, more often, by implication, as Sanders is very aggressively presented as unelectable, someone who will lose and cost Democrats the congress. Perhaps recognizing the popularity of Sanders' issues, news media have, throughout the campaign, ubiquitously engaged in unethical push-polling--"polling" intended to drive public opinion in a particular direction rather than gauge it--by regularly commissioning polls in which respondents are asked if they prefer a candidate who agrees with them on the issues or one who can beat Donald Trump, as if the two are self-evidently irreconcilable polar opposites. Such questions are also a demand by the free press and a significant faction of the political elite for a substance-free politics that should make every dogmatist of the liberal democracy shudder.[3]
A new CNN poll released on Monday is another to add to that particular pile. It asked respondents, "Which is more important to you personally, that the Democratic party nominate a presidential candidate with a strong chance of beating Donald Trump, or that the Democratic party nominate a presidential candidate who shares your positions on major issues?" An overwhelming 65% chose the candidate who can beat Trump vs. only 29% who chose a candidate who shares your positions.
This leads in to another question in the same poll, "Regardless of who you support, which Democratic candidate for president do you think has the best chance to beat Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election?" An overwhelming 66% picked Joe Biden. vs. only 26% for Sanders. That's what 11 months of press propaganda on this subject has drilled into Democrats' heads.
But is it true? Here's the payoff, asked of a sample of registered voters:
Worse, it's a phantom propped up by the refusal of the press to cover Biden's long and terrible record and, perhaps most damaging, his obvious cognitive decline.
From abortion to desegregation to trade to criminal justice issues to putting the screws to creditors on behalf of the financial services industry, Biden has, at some point in his career, been on the wrong side of nearly every major issue near and dear to the progressive base of the Democratic party. He is, for those seeking--or desperate for--policy substance, essentially a blank, someone who publicly disdains policy, who, historically, blows with the wind and who, in the present campaign, offers for policy only a string of thin, half-baked and generally very bad ideas slapped together by his underlings that he may say he has something and that are clearly as much a mystery to him as to everyone else. He is a half-wit, profoundly corrupt, a congenital liar whose big idea for ingratiating himself with black voters in South Carolina was to fabricate a personal history wherein he attended an historically black college (he never did), was involved with the civil rights movement (he wasn't) and claim he was arrested in the '70s while trying to see the then-imprisoned Nelson Mandela in Apartheid South Africa (he wasn't). He has, for both his own self-advancement and for the big checks given to him over the decades by his well-heeled donors, spent his entire career pushing government actions that harm wide swathes of his fellow Americans, from gleefully helping generate the mass-incarceration epidemic to helping create the student debt crisis to pimping Bush's Iraq war. At the moment, he's suffering what appears to be significant cognitive impairment. At his worst, he can barely form coherent words, can barely marshal the words he can manage into coherent sentences and doesn't even seem to know where he is. He can talk for extended periods without it being at all clear what he's trying to say or even what he's even talking about. He's thin-skinned and ill-tempered; in at least half a dozen incidents in the last few months, he's blown his top in conversations with voters, becoming instantly dismissive of their concerns, telling them to vote for someone else, even physically invading their space and putting hands on them. Earlier this week, he got into a confrontation with a Detroit auto-worker; while visiting the man's place of employment, Biden said he was "full of shit," a "horse's ass" and threatened to "go outside with your ass." Democratic voters haven't even been informed of most of this.[4] Neither has most of the wider public. Biden's record has plenty to turn off wide swathes of the Democratic coalition, while, in a general, he'd be taking on an incumbent president who has the fanatical support of his own base. His policy-free campaign that merely opposes most of the major items in the progressive agenda leaves him without anything Democrats can positively support. At the same time, he nullifies most of the big weapons Democrats could use against Trump; Joe Biden certainly isn't someone who can trash Trump as a compulsive liar, a dimwit, an authoritarian or a hundred other things policy-related and otherwise. His cognitive impairment could potentially convince millions of people who would ordinarily never consider voting for Trump that Trump was the safer, even more responsible choice. And if he becomes the Democratic nominee, it's safe to assume Trump and the Republicans will make sure all of it gets an extended airing.
For those who follow these matters, these claims of Biden's self-evident electability seem extremely questionable, at best, and utterly ludicrous in general.
There isn't a lot of polling about what the public has actually learned about the Democratic candidates but there are bleak hints. For example...
Bernie Sanders has made big structural changes a key issue in his campaign. Joe Biden has made returning to the "normalcy" of the Obama administration a cornerstone of his own, a sort of Make America Great Again for Democrats. In an incident in June, in fact, Joe Biden explained to a group of oligarchs at one of his endless big-money fundraisers that, under his administration, "nothing would fundamentally change." In a political environment in which people are screaming for major change, this was one of the 10,000 potentially campaign-ending things Biden has said or done but while it caused a furor on social media, it was--as usual--barely covered by the regular press and certainly not treated as a scandal. That CNN poll asked those same Democrats and Democratic leaners about this:
It gets better.
Questions like this have been included in some of the exit-polls from the already-concluded state contests. South Carolina turned around the race for Biden. Pollsters asked South Carolina Democrats who participated in their primary, "Do you think the economic system in the United States works well enough as is, needs minor changes or needs a complete overhaul?" Even in uber-conservative South Carolina, the bulk of voters--53%--told pollsters they thought the economic system needs a complete overhaul but this is how they voted:
Among an informed electorate, Biden's "nothing would fundamentally change" would loom large over this question--only 8% of South Carolina voters agree with it--but Biden gets the bulk of the majority of voters who say it needs a complete overhaul--over twice as many of those votes as Sanders. That group alone represents nearly 26% of the total SC electorate; if it had gone to Sanders instead of Biden, Sanders would have won the state.
It is, of course, possible that voters who wanted fundamental change simply chose not to prioritize this when voting but given the strength of the view itself--"needs a complete overhaul"--that seems remarkably counterintuitive.
The exit-polling in this campaign season has been rather poor; most of it is just basic stuff, with very few questions about actual issues, but all of them have asked about healthcare and one often finds those same bleak hints there.
Bernie Sanders has made Medicare For All one of his trademark issues. His support for it spans decades. His advocacy of it during the 2016 Democratic primaries convinced congressional Democrats--always far more conservative than the Democratic base--that it was a winning issue.[5] Of the other Democratic presidential contenders, only Elizabeth Warren, who has now left the race, supports Medicare For All, though even she backed away from the proposal months ago. Joe Biden has offered the strongest opposition to the policy; echoing the anti-M4A rhetoric of Donald Trump, he's spent most of the present campaign trying to undermine the strong Democratic support for it.[6]
Despite the combined efforts of Biden, most of the other Democratic presidential candidates, the insurance industry and Trump, Democrats, when polled properly, overwhelming back M4A. The standard exit-poll question on the matter has been, "How do you feel about replacing all private health insurance with a single government plan for everyone?" That's not an example of a proper poll on the issue. It adopts the conservative framing of M4A as taking away, rather than extending, coverage, misrepresents the policy (M4A eliminates duplicative insurance coverage, not all private health insurance) and doesn't include any of its benefits--the fact that it's cheaper, that it will allow people to keep their physicians, etc. It isn't the worst way to ask the question--the worst is to use this same framing plus present M4A as merely an expense, something that will raise taxes--but it is an effort by the pollsters to drive down the indicated support for it.[7]
What's surprising is that, even with this very bad framing, M4A has had majority or plurality support among Democrats in every state that has so far voted and in which exit-polls have been conducted.
To return to South Carolina, 49% of Democratic voters in even this deep-red conservative state supported it vs. only 46% opposed. But here's how they voted:
Follow this: Those who support M4A but voted for Biden are more than 25% of the total state electorate.
If they'd gone to Sanders instead of Biden, Sanders would have won.
Even if that faction--M4A supporters who voted for Biden--had split down the middle, with Sanders and Warren each taking half (and Warren wouldn't have gotten that much, given her proportion of the vote), Sanders would have won.
Even if, under either of these scenarios, one deducts from Sanders the voters who oppose M4A but still voted for him--5.5% of total voters--Sanders still wins.
Perhaps voters just didn't prioritize this, right? Well, when asked by the exit-pollsters which issue was most important to them, the plurality--41%--said "health care. The 2nd-most cited issue, income inequality, was chosen as most important by only half as many (and is, itself, another Sanders specialty on which Biden offers nothing but on which Biden gets the lion's share of the vote of those citing it). Maybe those who said healthcare was their most important issue were the ones who opposed M4A. Given the uphill fight that awaits any effort to pass M4A and its popularity among Democrats, that doesn't seem very likely. Maybe this is just a manifestation of the same low-information voters who have always been a critical part of Biden's coalition.
Evidence for a heavy presence of the latter is also found in a poll question regarding when voters decided on the candidate for whom they intended to cast their votes. Results:
The campaign had, by this time, been ongoing for over a year. Only deciding which candidate to support a few days before the primary suggests an extreme detachment from public affairs. The South Carolina results were also driven by a massive turnout of older voters, 71% over the age of 45. These are the contingents most susceptible to things like the three-week legacy-media gang-rape of Sanders leading into South Carolina, when Sanders led the race and the efforts by the press to obliterate him were at their height.[8] After his South Carolina win, by contrast, Biden was treated to a 3-day Triumph by the press; he became the conquering hero, regaled in those 3 days with over $100 million in free positive press coverage, leading directly into--and to--his Super Tuesday wins and continuing right to the present. That dollar-figure would probably be in the hundreds of millions now, and that fawning coverage has meant late-deciders are both plentiful and disproportionately breaking for Biden.
But before we entirely leave South Carolina, it should be noted that voters there were also asked one of those obnoxious push-poll questions that voters have been asked throughout the campaign season. "Would you rather nominate a candidate who agrees with you on major issues or can beat Donald Trump?" Results:
What I've cited here are trends across the many states that have voted and for which there is exit-polling data.
In Maine, a state Biden won by 1.1%, wholly 47% of voters were late deciders, the vast bulk of them going to Biden; 69% supported M4A but 24% of that--16.6% of the total state vote--went to Biden. In Massachusetts, 11.5% of total voters supported M4A yet voted for Biden; Biden won the state by a hair under 7%. M4A had the support of 62% of Minnesota Democrats but 16.2% of total voters supported it but cast their ballots for Biden; he won there by a little over 8%. In Tennessee, 53% supported M4A; 17% of the state's voters supported M4A but voted for Biden; 17.04% were late-deciders who voted for Biden; Biden won by just under 17%. In Michigan, just under 21% supported M4A but voted for Biden; 18.5% thought the economic system needed a complete overhaul but voted for Biden; Biden won the state by 16%. In Texas, 53% said they'd only decided for whom to vote in the past month and the largest chunk of those went to Biden; 63% said they supported M4A but just under a quarter of those--15% of total voters--voted Biden; Biden won the state by 4.5% of the vote. Turnout by older voters and particularly the elderly up everywhere. And so on. This has been the case across the Democratic contests, wherein healthcare has been cited as the top issue. Nearly all of the push-poll questions have found majorities favoring defeating Trump over a candidate with whose policies they agree.[see Update below]
At present, phantoms are conducting the train. They can do so in primaries, wherein attendance is a fraction of a general, but should Biden become the nominee, they won't be able to continue into that general. Biden's wins are being artificially driven by fawning and entirely uncritical press coverage that posits a narrative of him as the only hope against Trump, buries his record, conceals his flaws and attacks his opponent at every turn but this is a mask behind which is building to the potential coronation of a candidate who is more flawed than even Hillary Clinton, is contemptuous of the core animating issues of the activist Democratic base,[9] who offers no one any real, affirmative reason to support him. He's the Not Trump. And that's all. Fun fact: Sanders has already defeated Biden among independents in 16 of the 20 contests to date. The public will learn these things. How they'll be received, after it's too late to do anything about it, remains to be seen but their generating any real optimism for Biden seems the least likely scenario.[10]
There are other related matters I'd like to cover here--it seems a fairly obvious shortcoming that I haven't addressed how the Biden campaign is essentially a war by the elderly against their own children and grandchildren--but I'll put them aside for now.[11]
Where does all of this point? At a time when people are angry, frustrated, desperate for change, Democrats are being lulled by their party elites and the press into a politics almost entirely divorced from substance, one not only entirely incapable of confronting the problems that face so much of the population but entirely uninterested in doing so, one that is unworthy of winning, one that will, if allowed to succeed, almost certainly reelect Trump and make things much, much worse and one that has already said it won't make things any better even in the unlikely event that it does win the presidency.[12] We're already living through an effort to run the most powerful government on the planet through ignorance and fantasy. That isn't an approach an alleged opposition party should emulate.
--j.
---
[1] A privately-commission poll conducted immediately prior to election day showed Sanders beating Trump by double digits.
[2] The link there is to an article compiled in January 2016. It is, admittedly, hopelessly out-of-date but Americans have only gotten more progressive in the meantime.
[3] It should be noted that neither that free press nor, most especially, that political elite believe in that substance-free politics. They offer it to the rank-and-file that they might continue to operate behind it in pursuit of their own agendas.
[4] The confrontation with the auto-worker got some play but Biden was as celebrated for it as criticized. Something like that would have ended nearly any other campaign.
[5] In 2015, Michigan Rep. John Conyers' Expanded & Improved Medicare For All Act managed to draw 49 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives. Its post-2016 successor, the Medicare For All Act--the House version of Sanders' current bill--now has 118 co-sponsors--a majority of the House Democratic caucus. Sanders' current Senate version has 14 co-sponsors out of the 45 Democrats in the body. The number of Senate supporters for his previous 2013 plan: 1. Sanders himself.
[6] From "Give Me A Break: The Sad, Sorry Spectacle of Joe Biden," from 11 August, 2019:
[O]ne of the top Democratic priorities at the moment is creating a Medicare For All single-payer healthcare system, a policy Biden vehemently opposes. A few weeks ago, Biden launched a crusade of lies intended to discredit and defeat M4A, employing many of the same "arguments" against it being advanced by Donald Trump. At an AARP forum in Iowa, Biden said that under M4A, "Medicare goes away as you know it. All the Medicare you have is gone." This is, of course, entirely false--M4A, as the name implies, just significantly expands the existing Medicare program--but it also mirrors what Trump wrote in an op-ed back in October devoted, in part, to attacking the policy. According to Trump, "so-called Medicare for All would really be Medicare for None. Under the Democrats' plan, today's Medicare would be forced to die." Biden has repeatedly employed Trump's Orwellian characterization of M4A as taking away health coverage, rather than expanding it. "[T]he Democrats would eliminate every American's private and employer-based health plan," wrote Trump. Biden:
"How many of you like your employer based healthcare? Do you think it was adequate? Now if I come along and say you’re finished, you can’t have it anymore, well that’s what Medicare for All does. You cannot have it. Period."Trump appeals to the absolute worst, most selfish "got-mine" entitlement psychology. "[Medicare For All] means that after a life of hard work and sacrifice," he wrote, "seniors would no longer be able to depend on the benefits they were promised." Biden incorporates all of this--without attribution, of course--into his own recent anti-Medicare For All ad.
[7] Something probably worth keeping in mind when reading this. Democratic support for M4A is a lot stronger than even the exit-polling suggests.
[8] I described this press environment in an article last week:
"While Sanders was winning contests, his lack of 'electability' and the idea that he would cost Democrats the congress were presented, hour after hour across national media outlets, as givens. Major media figures felt entirely comfortable repeatedly comparing the Jewish candidate to the rise of Nazism. Then, with no sense of self-awareness, they also compared him to plagues, disasters, etc. A major theme was to portray Sanders as an apologist for Marxist dictatorships, particularly the former Castro regime in Cuba. It was suggested that if Sanders the socialist won, there may be executions of dissidents in New York's Central Park. And so on. This endless campaign of defamation was the dominant news media narrative for three weeks..."[9] Biden recently submitted to a rare interview with Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC and was asked a hypothetical question; if he was elected and Bernie Sanders managed to pass Medicare For All through congress, would he sign it into law? Passing M4A would be, in the words of Walker Bragman, "one of the greatest legislative accomplishments in American history," but even during a growing coronavirus pandemic, wherein the U.S. is severely disadvantaged because of its lack of a M4A system--and even after even a conservative framing of M4A has drawn majority or plurality support among Democratic voters in every primary state that has so far happened--Biden suggested he would veto it. Much of the press barely mentioned this.
[10] Democratic elites aren't saying it but they seem to be depending on a recession, for which the U.S. is due, to finish off Trump, thinking that when the economy goes South, the public will support whoever they nominate. It's not an entirely unwarranted notion either--election-year economic downturns have a habit of washing away incumbent regimes--but this cynical gambit would seem a dangerous gamble for those most vulnerable to Trump's rule, particularly given the demoralization of the activist base that will follow if their will is--again--thwarted by the shady means presently being used to foist Biden on them. The Clintonite right that runs the official organs of the party correctly sees a Trump reelection as much less of a risk to themselves than the election of a progressive, which would mean the end of their own gravy-train.
[11] ...except for perhaps this footnote. Biden's support is mostly over 50 and heavily concentrated in the elderly, while, for the second presidential primary contest in a row, Sanders has the under-50s and is utterly dominant among the under-30s, groups to which Biden is utterly off-putting. Look at the age-split from Michigan:
To tie those Michigan numbers into the commentary in the rest of this article, here are the Michigan general-election numbers going into that primary:
In the Michigan exit-polling, 57% of Democratic voters said they prefer a candidate who can defeat Donald Trump, but in the general election, Sanders beats Trump in the state while Biden only manages a tie.
[12] And, indeed, a Biden success in November would have extremely negative long-term consequences. It would close the door on any hope for progressive solutions to anything for at least the next 8 years. If a Biden-led ticket didn't cost Democrats the congress this year, he would certainly do so by the 2022 midterms--parties in the White House always lose seats in the first midterm. He'd then insist on running for reelection in 2024 and Democrats would insist on renominating him. Whether he won or lost a reelection bid, there would be no progressive in the White House until at least 2028.
---
UPDATE (Fri., 20 March, 2020) - Even with the growing coronavirus pandemic, three states still held their primaries on 17 March--states where the responsible officials should probably be prosecuted. Joe Biden, whose support is concentrated in the elderly, who are particularly at risk from the virus, encouraged people to go to the polls! Biden tweeted: "If you are feeling healthy, not showing symptoms, and not at risk of being exposed to COVID-19: please vote on Tuesday." But, of course, one of the hallmarks of the coronavirus is that people can be asymptomatic for extended periods but still be contagious, and anyone taking part in large gatherings of people--like at voting precincts--are, by definition, at risk for contracting it.
President Biden, indeed.
The result, as could be expected, was chaos. More to the point for our purposes here, the exit-polls, with somewhat different questions, still showed the same disconnect as documented above.
ILLINOIS
--76% of voters said they favor "legalizing the recreational use of marijuana nationwide," but 55% of those voters went to Biden, who doesn't favor such an approach, vs. only 39% to Sanders, who does (Biden has rejected legalization, putting forth, instead, a weak decriminalization, and even on that, he's waffled with time). The 47% of voters who "strongly favor" legalization split 47%-47% between Sanders and Biden.
--The exit pollsters changed the wording of the Medicare For All question in this round of primaries, asking the still-imperfect but improved, "Do you favor or oppose changing the health care system so that all Americans get their health insurance from a single government plan instead of private health insurance?" A huge 70% of Illinois Dems favored M4A. Unfortunately, 52% of those voters went to anti-M4A Biden vs. only 42% for pro-M4A Sanders.
--Voters were asked, "Do you favor or oppose the government canceling student loan debt for most people?" 72% of voters favored doing so but 53% of them voted for Biden, who opposes this policy, vs. only 41% for Sanders, who not only supports it but is the one who proposed it.
--As what I suppose one could interpret, given such responses, as a bit of pollster humor, voters were asked about qualities they thought were important in a Democratic nominee. Asked if it was important if the nominee "has the best policy ideas," 96% said it was important but 57% of those went to Biden vs. only 36% to Sanders.
Yeah.
Asked how important it was that the candidate "can beat Donald Trump," 93% said that was important but 60% of those went to Biden vs. only 35% to Sanders.
FLORIDA
--Asked the marijuana question, 75% of respondents said they favored legalization but 60% of those votes went to Biden vs. only 26% for Sanders.
--On Medicare For All, 72% of voters supported the policy but 58% of those voted Biden vs. only 29% for Sanders.
--74% favored cancelling student loan debt and Biden got 60% of those voters, Sanders only 27%.
--And yes, 97% said it was important that the Dem nominee have the best policies, and 62% of those went to Biden vs. only 23% to Sanders.
--94% said it was important that the Dem nominee be able to beat Trump; Biden scooped up 63% of them to Sanders' 23%
ARIZONA
--78% of voters favored legalizing marijuana; 41% of them voted for Biden vs. 35% for Sanders.
--78% favored Medicare For All; Sanders and Biden split those voters 38% to 39%.
--76% favored cancelling student loan debt; of those, Biden got 39% and Sanders 38%.
--96% said it was important for the Dem nominee to have the best policy ideas; Biden got 42% of those voters to Sanders' 32%.
--96% said it was important that the Dem nominee can beat Trump; Biden got 44% of those voters vs. Sanders' 32%.
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