It's Going to Be Biden or Sanders

Vice President Joe Biden (D-DE) & Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT)

It didn't feel like it was going to end like this.  Early on in the primary, I honestly thought with the vitriol that faced someone like Hillary Clinton getting into the 2020 election that America was ready for some new blood in their primaries.  It seemed like others did too, because a new generation of Democratic leaders lined up to run for president.  Beto O'Rourke, Julian Castro, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker-these are the people who were proclaimed the future of the party, the people who would take on the new mantle of John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama, and come in & stop the greatest threat to democracy since Jefferson Davis.  And yet, one-by-one they all fell.  With just eight days left until the Iowa caucuses, it's become perfectly clear-the Democratic nominee for president is going to be a man in his late seventies, someone who has been in public life for longer than most voters (including me, a man who can now legally run for president myself) have been alive.  Polls, momentum, it's all clear-the nominee is going to be either Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders.

I know that we're not supposed to say this.  I've seen people mute someone for even mentioning that Elizabeth Warren doesn't have a chance on Twitter, but let's be honest here-she doesn't.  If she wasn't "your candidate" she'd be someone that'd be easy to dismiss.  Like Pete Buttigieg, she's someone who clearly could have been the presidential nominee at some point, but her poll numbers are in a free-for-all.  She'd need a miracle win in Iowa to resurrect her chances, and quite frankly she'd need Biden or Sanders to get out early, something neither is going to do.  Biden leads nationally and all of his best states are after the Iowa/New Hampshire nonsense ends, and Sanders seems incapable of admitting defeat, even if (like in 2016) he lost months earlier.  Elizabeth Warren's big mistakes were a Medicare-4-All rollout that went horribly wrong, and for not taking out Bernie Sanders at the beginning of the campaign, when she needed to do so.

Warren's reluctance to go against Sanders is why, gun-to-my-head, I'm predicting he'll be the nominee, though I wouldn't bet money on that at this point as I very much think Biden is in this race. It was a fatal error, and I think while sexism has cost her dearly, the assumption that Sanders wouldn't be the nominee after getting clobbered by Hillary four years ago (and yes, that was a clobbering by modern political standards) was idiocy.  Sanders' supporters seem immobile, even to a woman who on-paper seems a better option for them (younger, less baggage, more real-world plans for the beliefs they have), and the only way she was going to take him out was early and brutally.  But Warren, like Biden, Buttigieg, & Harris, didn't go after Sanders because they assumed that he'd stay a gadfly, and they wanted his supporters when he dropped out.  It's bizarrely the exact playbook that people like Ted Cruz & Marco Rubio tried to wage against Donald Trump, and we all saw how that turned out.

Biden's best shot in the coming days will be to win Iowa, probably on the backs of people like Amy Klobuchar & Pete Buttigieg failing to get to 15%.  There's a sense of irony that Mike Bloomberg reportedly got into the presidential race to stop Sanders/Warren and help a candidate like him (say, Joe Biden) come out on-top and it's possible he'll cost Biden in the long-run.  A win in Iowa (by virtually any margin) would be a huge blessing for the Biden camp, giving them momentum against the inevitable Sanders win, and when both Klobuchar & Buttigieg drop out, he has the chips there to potentially sweep up support from the anyone-but-Sanders camp that got Hillary a victory in 2020.  But, again, the media makes it almost impossible for someone to win the nomination without taking either Iowa or New Hampshire-if Sanders wins both, it's going to be a steep uphill climb to stop him.

I don't like Bernie Sanders.  That has been apparent on this blog for years, and while I try to keep my political leanings out of my elections prognostications (suffice it to say, it brings me no pleasure to state that I think Bernie Sanders will be the nominee in 2020 unless something happens in Iowa), I'm not going to end this without some sort of commentary on this subject, as I think you can have opinions without it impacting how you predict an election will turn out.  I think Sanders will lose to Trump.  People like to make arguments stating that someone like Sanders can "bring out voters," but history does not bare that out.  Pretty much every candidate in American political history who claimed they could "bring out new voters" has failed, frequently spectacularly, and Bernie Sanders has not shown the growing appeal of someone who will buck such a trend.  I live and grew up the Midwest.  A 79-year-old Socialist from Vermont is going to lose Minnesota, not to mention of course Wisconsin, Michigan, Florida, and Arizona.  Throw in the fact that he recently had a heart attack, and so his health will be under constant surveillance throughout the campaign (it is appalling, and a good indication that he lacks the bearing to be president, that Sanders didn't drop out after the heart attack, basically declaring himself "too important" to put the issues he stands for before himself-a staggering act of hubris, something I'd expect from Trump).  Trump is hated by a large swath of the country, but as Boris Johnson bore out last year, you don't have to be loved, you just have to be hated less than the other guy.  And Bernie Sanders seems an awful lot like Jeremy Corbyn to me.

Joe Biden wasn't my first choice.  I admire his career and his contributions to this country, but I wanted a new voice to lead the party and the nation.  I preferred Harris or Gillibrand or O'Rourke or Inslee.  I think Amy Klobuchar would be a better nominee, and I think Elizabeth Warren would be a better president.  But it's clear at this point it's either Biden or Sanders or throw your vote to someone who has no chance of being the nominee, and I don't believe in protest-voting when the stakes are this high.  I'm endorsing Joe Biden because polls and his policies show he can win, and not only win, but give the Democrats a real chance at winning the Senate and holding the House.  That's why countless incumbent congressional Democrats in tough races (Doug Jones, Abby Finkenauer, Conor Lamb, Elaine Luria, Tom Malinowski) have all gotten behind him-he's the best chance we have of keeping them in office, and as Mitch McConnell has proven, you need to control both chambers of Congress to get anything done.  I want to win and I don't believe in casting protest votes when it matters.  So Biden is my candidate by default.

It's going to be Sanders or Biden in 2020.  The nation had the opportunity to go a newer path, but they declined the opportunity to do so.  If you share my concerns about Bernie Sanders, I urge you to choose accordingly.