There are two things that anyone vaguely political knows about the US election: Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, two men widely dismissed as joke candidates (sound familiar?), are threatening to beat Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Republican and Democratic nominees. Pundits are excited because polls suggest Sanders, a self-declared socialist, could beat Clinton in Iowa and New Hampshire: the first two states to vote when the primaries begin in the new year.
Jeremy Corbyn’s unexpected victory in the Labour leadership election has been noted by mainstream Democrats in the US. Like Corbyn, the 74-year-old Sanders is a left-wing outsider who is threatening to upset the established candidate. The similarities between the two ageing socialists go further—Sanders also boasts significant trade union support and wants to raise taxes, break up the banks, help students financially and build a national health service in the US. Just as Corbyn so successfully mobilised activists to pack out venues across the country, so too is the Vermont senator filling stadiums with over 20,000 supporters. But, there is one glaring distinction between the two life-long rebels—while there was no standout candidate to counteract the Corbyn surge, Sanders faces a formidable opponent in Hillary Clinton.
Last night’s Democratic debate confirmed that it is unlikely that Sanders will replicate Corbyn’s success. An ability to fire up the party faithful is not enough to earn you the chance to campaign for the most powerful office in the world. For Sanders to become the nominee he must win in the big states, which offer far more votes, and to do that he must start to win over the moderates who will decide places like California, Illinois, New York, Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio; these seven states alone account for nearly 40 per cent of delegates. Iowa and New Hampshire account for 2 per cent.
The US system is nothing like the UK’s. Only a fraction of Labour voters voted in Corbyn’s leadership election: just over 420,000 cast a vote, when 9.3m voted Labour in May. That’s 4.5 per cent of the party's support. Compare that to Sanders’ challenge. In 2008, 35m people voted in the Democratic primary, against the 70m who went on to vote for Obama. In other words, half the party's support—not one-twentieth of it—took part.
Sanders must win over far more of his party’s general election supporters than Corbyn did, and he won’t—he isn’t even trying to. If he was, he wouldn’t have sparked what became the most memorable moment last night. After about an hour, he fielded a question from Anderson Cooper, CNN’s action-man moderator who began the debate by firing up the crowd (should Dimbleby start doing this?). “Let me say something which may not be great politics”, he began, before a pregnant pause, “The Secretary [Clinton] is right, the American people are tired of hearing about her damn emails!”
Hillary, shocked and relieved, thanked him and an impromptu handshake—along with wild cheers from the crowd—quickly followed. When another candidate tried to resuscitate the issue and Cooper asked Clinton whether she would like to reply, she just said “No” and smiled to more whooping and applause. Debate over.
If Sanders wants to win, he has to seize every skeleton in Clinton’s well-stuffed closet—such as her having used a private email account when Secretary of State—and pursue it relentlessly.
He is too good a man to do that. He is leading a moral crusade, not a political campaign. He spent the night almost shouting at the camera (57 per cent of income is earned by the top 1 per cent! The scientific community are telling us the world may be uninhabitable for our grandchildren! Every other civilised country in the world has a national healthcare system!) in a manner which will delight any left-winger, but these facts are not going to win over 18m people, as Obama (and Clinton, who actually won more votes than him) did in 2008.
While Sanders growled in his staccato style, sounding a bit like a mobster—he should be played by Junior Soprano if this race is dramatised—Clinton was fine. She is warmer than she was in 2008, when Obama’s easy smile often overcame her stern looks, and memorably flashed a guilty smile at one point, when Jim Webb interrupted her to continue his crusade against Cooper.
Webb, one of three other candidates on stage, spent the night saying two things: "I fought in Nam" and "I should be allowed more time to speak goddamit!" As one longtime Obama aide tweeted, taking on the moderator is the surest way to lose a debate. Webb’s a military man—and he wasn’t going to let you forget it—but he seemed bewildered by the idea he had to stop speaking after a minute, especially after he’d usually spent the first 30 seconds complaining that he only had a minute to speak.
As for the other two, Lincoln Chafee (who? Governor of Rhode Island apparently, and Rhode Island is a state) was laughable, and at one point tried to defend a vote of his by explaining his dad had just died and he’d only recently arrived in Congress. As one tweeter put it, “Lincoln Chaffee: Ready for President on Day 2.”
Martin O’Malley, the Maryland governor and former Baltimore mayor who was the basis for Tommy Carcetti in The Wire, rounded out the field, and had the best night after Hillary. But his candidacy is irrelevant, he is here to campaign for a cabinet post; he cannot beat Sanders at rousing the left and has no establishment support.
Debates are about the impression candidates create, not the policy stances they espouse. The specifics don’t matter yet, and the Democratic debates, of which there are three more in the next three months, might not ever really matter. What matters more is how would Clinton take on a polished Republican candidate such as the Hispanic senator Marco Rubio (who is surging in the polls), and could help bolster minority support for his party in the presidential election. Last night didn’t much enlighten us on that front.
Regardless, Clinton’s commanding performance last night probably ended the idea that Joe Biden, the Vice President, could step into the race and challenge her establishment support. This summer-long idea has always been ridiculous: Biden would have to rapidly create a nationwide network of field offices, staffers and volunteers. Obama's win in 2008 was due as much to his “ground game” as to his assured debate performances. Biden cannot build one overnight.
But Hillary is a flawed candidate. “She’s got nothing new to say”, someone watching it with me said. Rubio does, and America has often been captured by young forty-somethings (Kennedy, Clinton, Obama) who offer a new path and no tarnished history. Will Hillary be defeated by another younger and fresher man? While these debates are fun, they won’t help us answer that question for a few months yet.
