It's rare for Arkansas to be cited in the national media as nationally representative of anything. It's downright ironic for the state to be cited in national media as representative of the national Democratic condition.
But there it was Thursday morning on National Public Radio, which was setting up an interview with Jennifer Palmieri, former director of communications for both the Obama White House and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.
The topic was the two Democratic "lanes" to the presidential nomination--the progressive, semi-socialist one occupied by Bernie Sanders and now less prominently by Elizabeth Warren, and the moderate to center-left one occupied by Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Joe Biden and, imminently, the mighty shadow that is Michael Bloomberg.
The point was that the moderates outnumbered the semi-socialists, as was reflected in New Hampshire where Buttigieg, Klobuchar and Biden cumulatively took 53 percent of the vote compared to Sanders and Warren--mostly Sanders--getting 35 percent when put together.
And the point was that moderates to center-leftists fearing Sanders as a marginalized and losing nominee--and his drain on Democrats seeking key U.S. Senate seats in swing states--were lamenting the stifling effect the moderate and center-left candidates were having on each other.
Sanders' 30 percent will make him the inevitable nominee, perhaps as early as the day after Super Tuesday, if the 53 percent keeps self-dividing into three or four groups of less than 30 percent.
That's how Donald Trump took into his own image what once was a Republican Party. In 2016, he kept getting 30 percent while Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Jeb Bush and several others were splitting the 70 percent into under-30 shares. The same could well be happening to the Democrats now with Sanders.
It's Biden's fault. Every bit.
His complete campaign essence was that he presented the most electable center-left nominee to consolidate the non-Sanders vote. And he hasn't cut it.
It's not that he didn't win either Iowa or New Hampshire. He always was relying on black votes elsewhere to make his full play. But it's that he ran a poor fourth in Iowa and a more-distant fifth in New Hampshire, closer to Tom Steyer than Buttigieg.
And that is your electable alternative?
Anyway, the NPR host invited Palmieri to consider a poll just the other day in Arkansas, a Super Tuesday state on March 3 in which four candidates were bunched between 15 and 20 percent.
That would be the poll by Talk Business and Politics and Hendrix College, conducted by text messaging last Thursday and Friday. It found Bloomberg at 19.6 percent; Biden at 18.5; Sanders at 16.4, and Pete Buttigieg at 15.5. The margin of error was 4.3 percent, which covered the difference among them.
Palmieri said the appropriately hedged and credibly analytical thing. It was that, if the non-Sanders vote stays fractured, the Vermont senator could achieve inevitability. And it was that the big question Super Tuesday would be whether the moderates and center-leftists coalesced--on, say, Bloomberg--to make it a two-way race going forward that the center-left option should win.
She said one other candidly important thing, which was that, should Sanders achieve seeming inevitability but not reach pre-convention the required number of delegates, the Democrats simply could not survive the civil war that would arise from denying him at that point. It would be better to live with him as the nominee and face likely defeat than infuriate all his supporters into imploding the modern Democratic Party.
Either way, we'd be talking about four more years of the bloviating despot now in the White House, remaking not only the Republican Party in his own image, but the American justice system.
My best guess is that Sanders, Biden, Buttigieg and Warren split the Nevada caucus delegates, furthering the crisis of Democratic fracturing. It's that Biden might win South Carolina, but only because of a declining African American base that Bloomberg will be positioned to further reduce on Super Tuesday, never mind his "stop-and-frisk" problem.
The best commentary I've heard on that came Tuesday night from Joy Reid, an African American analyst for MSNBC.
She said black women, especially, have tended over the generations to vote for the best-relating and most-electable white Democrat, though not from great affection, but to best contest the Republican they fear. The only candidate for president who ever really excited them, she said, was Barack Obama.
They've been leaning to Biden on the electability front, Reid said, but also with a little added affection considering that Biden was "a white man who was willing to be No. 2 to a black man for eight years."
But, she said, black women will abandon Biden in a heartbeat if he can't cut it. They'll turn "totally mercenary," she said, possibly if not probably to Bloomberg.
Beating Trump would be bigger than frisking.
Arkansas, on March 3, will have a small but timely say in all of that.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 02/16/2020