Super Tuesday wrap-up

March 4, 2020

     The story of the last 72 hours has been the Lazarus-like resurrection of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, courtesy of African American voters.  Once Jim Clyburn’s endorsement anointed him, Biden trounced the competition with 48.4% of the vote and 64% of the Black vote, (Source:  “Biden dominates, Sanders slips and other takeaways from the South Carolina primary,” by Rebecca Morin and William Cummings, USA Today, 2/29/20).  After his win, the dominoes fell quickly, with one billionaire and the two moderates dropping out within 24 hours.  Beto, Buttigieg and Klobuchar endorsed Biden on the eve of Super Tuesday and he went on to win in ten states, although Bernie Sanders is on track to win delegate-rich California.

There will be a rush of hot takes from these results, all of them premature, and many of them wrong. We should approach our analysis with humility and patience, two things in short supply in an election year where we are desperate to rid ourselves of the pathogen of Trumpism that is laying waste to our democracy from the inside out.

       That said, the most obvious wrong takes should be called out.  The first, mostly from armchair activists on Twitter, is that Biden’s dominance with African-American voters is a function of them being “low information” voters.  The “low information” canard is simply proof that some on the left can be just as racist as their counterparts on the right. More than any other voter in this country, Black southerners know precisely what unconstrained white racists are capable of, since the violence of Jim Crow is part of their lived experience.  They also know that given the choice between justice and higher taxes on the one hand and lower taxes and repression of the marginalized on the other, many voters will pick lower taxes every time. Elie Mystal details the pragmatism of Black southerners with brutal candor here.

The race is far from over. California’s votes haven’t been fully counted and only one third of all potential delegates have been awarded. Upcoming contests next week in Michigan, Missouri, and other states may shift the dynamic in Bernie’s favor, but his campaign should be alarmed by the paucity of youth turnout yesterday. Only one in eight voters on Super Tuesday was between the ages of 18 and 29, (Source: “Five Takeaways From Super Tuesday,” by Aaron Blake, The Washington Post, 3/4/20). The lack of turnout may have been a function of the deliberate closing of polling places in Black and Brown communities, which tend to skew younger, leading to long lines in Texas and California, (Source: “California and Texas voters faced hours-long lines in California and Texas,” by Oliver Laughland and Sam Levine, TheGuardian.com, 3/4/20). Perhaps, rather than rail against the Democratic Party establishment, Bernie might consider spending some rhetorical firepower and campaign cash on fighting voter suppression and making sure his supporters can vote. By way of example, despite massive voter purges engineered by the gleefully racist, Brian Kemp, Stacey Abrams is registering voters faster than Georgia can purge them, (Source: “Rise of young and diverse voters may influence 2020 elections,” by Mark Niesse, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 2/11/20).

   Given her dismal showing last night and Bloomberg’s decision to drop out and endorse Biden, the pressure is on Elizabeth Warren to drop out and endorse Bernie.  Those pressuring her to do so assume that all of her supporters would go to Bernie, but that isn’t necessarily the case. Some Warren supporters may be more moderate.  Others may legitimately believe that Biden will have better coattails, enabling us to keep the House and gain the control of the Senate we need to actually enact progressive change.  The truth is that nobody knows.

The fact that yet another accomplished woman has failed to get traction and the Democratic race has come down to two septuagenarian white men with problematic histories on race and gender is disappointing, but it should not be surprising. How could the broader society be unaffected by a four year assault on the very idea of racial or gender equality? The only silver lining is that neither Biden nor Bernie can win without us. Vote for the candidate who shows you they know that.