As the 2016 Democratic nomination process begins to to wind down, and the numbers look increasingly dismal for Bernie Sanders’ chances, it’s inevitable that everyone starts focusing on Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump. Math is math and that is the most likely scenario of where we’re going to end up.
But, the Democratic race isn’t over. Well … it is (math, and all), but Bernie’s not throwing in the towel. He says he’s staying in the race so that everyone who wants to vote for him has the chance to, and so that all of their votes actually count for something. His advisers want him to stay in because they think that if they can force a contested convention that they can peel off superdelegates from Clinton and win the nomination. Now, the first of those objectives is very admirable. The second is pretty underhanded and probably just one more fairy tale in the string of many from the Sanders campaign.
So, does it matter if he stays in? Does it affect Hillary Clinton’s chances one way or another?
The 1980 election has been held up as a mirror to this one for a few reasons. For one, this is the most fucked up and disfunctional elections we’ve had since then: 1980 was a mess; so is 2016. For another, the two major parties haven’t both had serious, simultaneous soul-searching … in the same primary season … like they have had this year. This could have been the year that the Democrats laughed as the GOP fell apart, but then Bernie happened. (Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it did prevent the party from coasting into the general.) Third, there are the comparisons between Trump and Ronald Reagan. One the one hand, we have a marginally competent entertainer with a paranoid, militaristic, America First, isolationist view of the world running for president on a platform of racism, protectionism, silly domestic economic ideas, and grandiose nationalistic fantasies. And then there’s Trump, who’s campaign has been eerily similar. (There are some making perfectly adequate arguments for why Trump is not actually Reagan incarnate, but I have my doubts.)
Also, we compare this election against past ones because we’re small-minded shaved monkeys who have a hard time thinking of anything that is truly original, or of comprehending history when it’s actually happening. But I digress …
We can, however, look to the 1980 Democratic race for clues on how the rest of this primary run could end up, and how certain decisions could affect what happens in November. Trump is the GOP nominee now; whether or not the party is actually fervently by his side in six months will be another matter altogether. Clinton will be the nominee. All the talk of peeling off superdelegates is, in the end, nonsense. Most of those people (and they are ACTUAL people) have worked with both her and Bernie in Congress or in the party operations and they already made up their minds. (Some of them are still mad that Bernie voted against a bill that they championed, or something like that.)
If Bernie overtook Hillary in the popular vote and in pledged delegates, these 500-plus superdelegates would have eaten shit and changed their votes. But that won’t happen, so they won’t flip. Right now, Clinton is up by about 3 million votes and nearly 300 pledged delegates. At this point, Sanders would need to sweep all of the states by an unthinkable margin to even get close to catching up. (For instance, before the April 19 New York primary, Nate Silver estimated that Sanders needed to sweep nearly all of the remaining states, including California by 15 points to even get close. After losing New York, Pennsylvania, and three more states, added to the fact that he didn’t win others with the insanely high margins he would need, it’s probably getting to the point where every person in California would have to come out and give him 100 percent of the vote. Needless to say, it ain’t gonna happen.)
Back to 1980, where the Democrats did face a similar situation. Jimmy Carter looked weak. The virulent Left was chomping at the bit to nominate Ted Kennedy, who they saw as their standard bearer. Kennedy as a shitty campaigner, but he had the name, which has always been the American version of a “Get out of Jail Free” card, so his followers continued to push for him, cultishly and religiously, and followed him well past the point where the campaign could win, to the Democratic Convention, where (like the Sanders campaign now), they thought they could appeal to the “true” Democratic Party and “real” Democrats to get the convention delegates to flip and support Good Ole Teddy Richypants. He was about 3 million votes and 700 delegates behind Carter (sound familiar?), but they still indignantly insisted that “they” were the real party and their “true and pure” Liberal campaign was what the party really needed against the Republicans.
So they fought. And when they lost … again … they still refused to give up and truly endorse and get behind Carter. For a time, at least, and in a very public way, they broke the party.
But, the real question is: Did Kennedy and his subservient acolytes cost Carter and the Democrats the 1980 election? Was it Ted Kennedy who gave us President Ronald Reagan?
Let’s start with the national polling between the final party nominees:
Jimmy Carter started the election cycle at the end of 1979 with a monstrous 62 percent approval rating. (Kennedy had just declared his candidacy to contest the incumbent and the gaggle of Republicans had been working their way into the race.) Iran had just been overthrown by radicals and Americans held hostage, so the country rallied around the president. That’s a sick approval number, and a sign of a very different time in our politics. Barack Obama would kill to have an approval rating like that. In fact, he tried! Even after killing Osama bin Laden, Obama didn’t even crack 50 percent. (Seriously, WTF? That’s just cold.)
While the country rallied about President Jimmy, most of the electorate started off being afraid of Ronald Reagan. Ray-Guns was still, to most Americans, the red-baiting, commie-hating, America First-ing plutocrat from the Fifties and Sixties in California who ran an insurgent campaign against Gerald Ford in 1976. Carter’s numbers dropped off by April 1980 as the Iranian crisis dragged on and the attempted rescue that month failed miserably. Also, inflation continued to be a problem and unemployment, which had been falling during his administration had started going back up again in 1979 and was over 7 percent again by the start of 1980.
So, in April 1980, the same one-third of the nation that liked Reagan still liked him and no more. On the other side, reality had set back in, with the wearing off of the rally-around-our-president moment and a Leftist insurgency from the Teddy-philes having taken their toll on Carter. The other major development was that John Anderson’s unexpected success in early Republican contests, but not successful enough to win, led him to leave and run as an independent candidate. Even though he was a Republican, as you can see from the Gallup tracking polls, his 21 percent of support pulled entirely from Carter and none from Reagan.
Even through the initial battle with Kennedy, and now the fight with Anderson, Carter was still leading Reagan. The moderate Republican (now Independent) Anderson drew about a third of the president’s support away, but the incumbent retained his roughly 10 percent lead over the leading Republican candidate.
The Democratic primaries then ended on June 3. Carter beat Kennedy by 3 million votes with a final delegate lead of about a thousand. (Which is very likely equivalent to where Clinton and Sanders will end up.) Still, at that point, after a protracted and tough campaign and Anderson’s polling at 20 percent, Carter was up on Reagan by 7 percent, according to Gallup (above), or polling roughly even according to the composite view of polling (below). If Teddy had resigned and endorsed Carter then, it would have been a much different general election. Carter’s numbers might have started going back up and the party might have been able to pressure Anderson to drop his bid. The Big Tent idea could have been the Democrats’ idea instead of being taken by the Reagan campaign.
But that didn’t happen.
Instead of admitting that he lost, Kennedy and his fans refused to give in and vowed to fight on, arrogantly declaring that they were the rightful, true, pure base of the Democratic party and that they were better suited to stand against the Republicans in November. (This shit still sounds pretty familiar.)
So the Kennedy-philes and their fearless leader fought up to and through the Democratic Convention in August, and dragged Carter’s numbers down the entire time. By the time the convention started, after months of continuing to fight off Kennedy, Carter’s numbers were down under the lowest that Reagan had seen at any time during the entire race. Anderson’s numbers stayed the same through the Republican Convention in July, after which Reagan peeled off nearly half of the independent’s supporters (mostly by choosing moderate George H.W. Bush as his running mate, giving GOP moderates someone to wash some of the disgusting, right-wing taste of Reagan out of their mouths).
After Carter finally prevailed against the scorched-earth policies of the liberal fringe, he did get a “convention bump” … but his numbers had hit such a low that the bump didn’t even get back up to where Reagan’s numbers were. Usually, each party gets a bump after their convention which puts them over the opposition. This bump fades, then the other party’s convention puts them over the top momentarily, then that fades too and the final leg of the election begins for real.
For instance, see the convention bumps for Obama and then McCain in 2008 (below). As hard as it may be to believe now, given how irrelevant both have become in national politics, John McCain and Sarah Palin actually led Obama for half a month after their 2008 convention in early September 2008 after Obama got his own convention bump in August, before then fading again in the run up to the election.
Carter didn’t even get that measly much. The combination of Anderson and Kennedy was too much. Most of the voters that gave up on the sitting president for those two losing candidates weren’t ready to go back. Some would stay with Anderson. Despite finally coming around and endorsing Carter, Kennedy probably still couldn’t get a healthy portion of his supporters to do the same. (They had been told, by Kennedy himself, for so long that Carter shouldn’t be the next president, and believed him. They trusted him and were devoted to him. How could they just switch back? Those voters might have shown up for Anderson, but most likely just stayed home.)
Carter steadily improved until the election, but it was too big of a hole to climb out of.
But, back to the real question: Did Ted Kennedy actually cost Jimmy Carter the election?
Well, let’s look at the numbers. Here are the final results:
Reagan beat Carter by about 8.5 million votes. Anderson ended up with a disappointing 5.7 million votes. In the Democratic primaries, Ted Kennedy had garnered 7.4 million votes.
Let’s look at Anderson’s influence first. Likely, any voters who were on the fence between him and Reagan showed up and voted for Ronald Reagan. As I noted above, we can see the swing after the Republican Convention: About half of Anderson’s support left him for Ronny then. Between that point (at about 14 percent in the polls) to the end (when he ended up with only about 6 percent), Anderson shed another 8 percent. Some of his former supporters probably voted for Carter, but I doubt it was the majority of that 8 percent. Once Americans have been convinced to lose faith in our leaders, it’s very hard for us to get that back. A small fraction of Anderson’s supporters probably stayed home or voted for someone like the Libertarian ticket’s Ed Clark. But even more probably voted for Reagan, not necessarily because they wanted to, but because they were either lifelong Republicans and couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a Democrat in the end, or because they had been convinced by the tag team of Kennedy and Anderson that Carter was unfit for a sequel but didn’t want to “throw away” their vote on Anderson.
Now Kennedy. The damage he did between the end of the primaries and the convention, when it became apparent to voters that Carter and the Democratic establishment couldn’t even control their own party (so how could they control the country?) probably did cost Carter the election, at least in conjunction with Anderson. Americans hate a lot of things, but two things we really loathe are weakness and losers. And Ted Kennedy and his supporters did everything in their power to make Jimmy Carter look like a weak loser. A rough summer economy, a prolonged hostage crisis, and some political blunders on the president’s part undoubtedly helped to reinforce this. But without someone from his own party standing there to monopolize on those mistakes, Carter probably could have weathered it.
As for votes, most of Teddy’s 7.4 million people probably did show up and did vote for Carter. Some probably didn’t. There are no hard data for this, but let’s assume about a quarter of them didn’t bother. That’s just shy of 2 million votes. If the Democrats had coalesced and forced Anderson to drop out before the election, maybe those 5.7 million voters would have voted for Carter. (I think we have already established that the remaining Anderson voters were most likely never going to vote for Reagan.) Carter still would have been a little shy of Reagan, but it would have been neck-and-neck at that point.
Any additional bump at that point would have put Carter over the top. A bump, such as … say … Ted Kennedy dropping out of the race in June and working with Carter to force Anderson voters to come over to the Democrats. Doing that probably would have re-elected the sitting president. Of course, we’ll never know, but that’s the best reading I get from the numbers.
So, what does all of that tell us about the current election?
There is no such thing as “History repeats itself.” That’s a tired old axiom used by lazy people who don’t want to go through the difficult (and possibly impossible) task of fully understanding the situation they’re faced with, so they compare it one-to-one against a situation from the past that their feeble reptilian brains have unboubtedly reduced to a weak parable of what it really was. The truth is that variables and circumstances change every single day, so there will never be a situation in the future that is exactly the same as it is now, and thus it is impossible for history to ever, ever repeat itself.
But … while history doesn’t repeat itself, it does rhyme. Themes, theories, and motivations appear and reappear, evolve and transmogrify into wholly new beasts that then rear their heads once again, albeit in a new and different form. They’re never the same, but they are similar.
Because of the campaign of John Anderson and the fact that Hillary Clinton isn’t the incumbent, there isn’t a straightforward comparison between then and now. Bernie Sanders isn’t Ted Kennedy, although he has had a very, very similar level of success, and his supporters also see themselves as the true, pure base of the party and deserve the right to represent the party … even if they’re not actually the majority.
This scenario would be different if Michael Bloomberg had actually decided to run as an independent. A moderate Republican with a more liberal social sense, Bloomberg very closely matches the John Anderson role. Sanders’ Kennedy impersonation would then have been that much more effective, since Bloomberg would have pulled off some of Clinton’s support, but not Bernie’s. Trump supporters would not have been influenced by any of them, leaving Clinton, Sanders, and Bloomberg to fight it out for the rest of the electorate. Republicans, sensing weakness in the opposition, could then have swallowed the mouthful of bright orange shit that is the Donald and capitalized on the mistake.
But as we’re being repeatedly being told ad nauseum, Trump’s negatives with voters is at historic highs for a presidential candidate and much higher than Reagan’s ever were. Because of this, he might not have the Gipper’s capacity to peel off Democratic and Independent support come November. (Then again, let’s face it, everyone’s negatives are at historic highs lately. The combination of overall national dissatisfaction combined with the magnification of political polarity given to us by the echo chamber of social media, hate is out in the world like never before. It’s not that everyone is more full of hate than they were in the past, but they certainly aren’t afraid to talk about it anymore.)
Reagan was also a known quantity. He had been a nationally known politician for two decades and a movie star for a couple of decades before that. He wasn’t necessarily liked. A lot of people saw him as a fascist wingnut, but at least he was a fascist wingnut with whom they were already familiar. While Trump has been a public figure, he has no political track record to use to see how he would govern, and his policy statements are all over the place. That’s not going to sway too many people who are still on the fence.
But Democrats should still be wary. Now that Trump is the only GOP candidate left, the party is going to spend the next few months trying to pull their various constituencies together. It will be difficult, but never discount the will of a party out of power in doing what they need to do to win an election. After eight years, Democrats have gotten spoiled and have forgotten what it was like to have a Republican president. Republicans, on the other hand, are pining to kick the Dems out of the Oval Office come November.
So, to avoid a repeat of 1980, the Democratic party needs to do a few things. First, it needs to make sure that someone like Bloomberg doesn’t jump in at the last minute. (Even though that’s highly unlikely at this point.) Second, is make sure that Sanders doesn’t leave to run as an independent. (Also unlikely at this point.) Third, the party can’t force Bernie to quit before the primaries are finished for fear of turning off all of his voters. As we saw from 1980, Kennedy staying in the race didn’t hurt Carter while the primaries were still happening. This year, Democrats will need Sanders and and as many of his people as possible to come on board the Hillary train. So if they want to vote, let them vote. But once the primaries are over at the beginning of June, they need to insist that Sanders drop his bid and embrace and support Clinton. If he drags this on after the voting is done and he has lost, it could hurt the party’s overall chances, just like it did in 1980.