You say you want a revolution -- Feb. 27, 2020 column

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By MARSHA MERCER

Four years ago this week, I wrote that voters on Super Tuesday could put the brakes on Donald Trump – “but will they?”

At the time, mainstream Republicans and Democrats were both worried that insurgent presidential candidates Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders might actually win their parties’ presidential nominations but turn off general election voters that November.

Trump Fever seemed to be spreading, I wrote, and on Super Tuesday a few days later Trump triumphed over his GOP rivals, winning seven of the 12 states with Republican contests, including Virginia. Of the 11 Democratic contests, Hillary Clinton beat Sanders in Virginia and six other states.

And so, Trump, the candidate many were sure couldn’t win a general election last time is now the president many say can’t lose reelection if his opponent is the current frontrunner, an avowed Democratic socialist. 

Michael Bloomberg painted this bleak scenario at the Democratic debate Tuesday night:

“If you keep on going, we will elect Bernie, Bernie will lose to Donald Trump, and Donald Trump and the House and the Senate and some of the statehouses will all go red and then, between gerrymandering and appointing judges, for the next 20 or 30 years we are going to live with this catastrophe."

So far, just a trickle of votes in three states has been cast. (As of this writing, South Carolina hasn’t yet voted.) A torrent is coming.

On Super Tuesday, 15 jurisdictions, including California, Texas and Virginia, will select more than a third of the pledged delegates needed to secure the Democratic nomination. Forty percent of the U.S. population will have a primary event that day.

Sanders, who is not a Democrat, sent chills down many Democratic spines with his appreciation on “60 Minutes” last Sunday of Fidel Castro’s literacy program. Castro is anathema to Cuban-American voters in South Florida. Florida, for those who don’t remember the 2000 election, is a crucial state.

Sanders, 78, insists he has “opposed authoritarianism all over the world,” but he hasn’t budged in decades in his admiration for aspects of those ruthless regimes.

“When dictatorships, whether it is the Chinese or the Cubans, do something good, you acknowledge that,” he said at the debate. “But you don’t have to trade love letters with them.” Trump said in 2018 he and North Korea’s Kim Jung Un “fell in love” over their “beautiful love letters.”

Pete Buttigieg warned that Democrats can’t win critical House and Senate races “if people in those races have to explain why the nominee of the Democratic Party is telling people to look at the bright side of the Castro regime.”

Sanders claims he will beat Trump with an infusion of young, new voters, but turnout has not surged. He has won in the early states not by bringing in new voters but by expanding his appeal among existing Democratic voters, a New York Times analysis found.  

Sanders has proposed a Medicare for All plan, free child care and free public college tuition. He hasn’t said how much all that would cost and talks about raising taxes on the wealthiest 1%. Amy Klobuchar put a pricetag of nearly $60 trillion over 10 years on Sanders’s plans. Voters would not support such a huge expenditure, she said.

But Sanders maintained on CBS after the debate, “The truth is, nothing I am saying is radical.”

Sanders argues the United States already has corporate socialism, which benefits billionaires like Trump, while Sanders’s brand of democratic socialism would use the federal government to protect the interests of working families.

Buttigieg, 38, warned of “a scenario where it comes down to Donald Trump with his nostalgia for the social order of the ‘50s and Bernie Sanders with a nostalgia for the revolution politics of the ‘60s.”

No Democrat wants a repeat of the 1972 or 1984 debacles, which many Sanders supporters probably don’t remember.

In 1972, George McGovern lost 49 states to Richard Nixon, winning only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. In 1984, Ronald Reagan’s landslide left Democratic Walter Mondale with wins only in his home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia.  

The big question this Super Tuesday: Democratic voters can put the brakes on Sanders – but will they?

©2020 All rights reserved.

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Competence: Heat's on New Hampshire -- Feb. 6, 2020 column

By MARSHA MERCER

The Democratic caucuses in Iowa Monday night were supposed to give Iowans the first say on winners and losers for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. Instead, the Democrats coughed up a political mess.

The culprit was a brand-new app that reportedly was developed in just two months and hadn’t been tested on a statewide level. What could go wrong? Just about everything. Precincts were unable to send in results to party headquarters, and the back-up emergency phone system was overwhelmed.

Caucus results were delayed for days, then disputed. Chaos ensued. Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders were nearly tied, and both had claims to winning. Naturally, President Donald Trump gloated.

“Unmitigated disaster,” Trump tweeted Tuesday. “When will the Democrats start blaming RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA, instead of their own incompetence for the voting disaster that just happened in the Great State of Iowa?” Trump has steadfastly refused to accept the U.S. intelligence community’s findings that Russia interfered on his behalf in the 2016 election and that it is doing so again this year.

If Democrats can’t run a caucus, Republicans scoff, how can they run the country?

In raising competence, Trump again showed his knack of finding opponents’ soft spot. For Democrats, the Iowa debacle underlined their anxiety in 2020. Who in their large field of presidential contenders can beat Trump – and is up to the job in the White House?

As candidates turned to New Hampshire, whose primary is Tuesday, polls show New Hampshire voters, like Democrats in Iowa, are late in making up their minds. No clear frontrunner has emerged. Joe Biden, once thought the strongest candidate against Trump, came in fourth in Iowa and called the caucuses a “gut punch.”

Turnout in Iowa was also worrisome for Democrats. Predicted to be high, turnout was more on a par with 2016 than the record crowds in 2008. Nor does it help Democrats that Trump’s nationwide job approval has been rising. It stands at 49%, the highest since he took office, the latest Gallup poll reported.

Trump’s team claims -- based on conspiracy theories, not fact -- Democrats “rigged” the Iowa caucus vote. If you recall, Trump also claimed repeatedly during the 2016 campaign that the election would be rigged -- until he won.

In 2016, the Democratic establishment did put its thumb on the scale for Hillary Clinton. But the Democratic National Committee rewrote the rules for 2020, giving party officials known as superdelegates less power in the nominating process.

Democrats wisely have been moving away from caucuses. Only a handful of states will use the antiquated system to choose delegates to this summer’s presidential nominating conventions. Nevada Democrats, who caucus Feb. 22, quickly announced they scrapped the software that failed in Iowa.

Caucuses tend to be run by the political parties, while the New Hampshire primary, along with the primary in South Carolina Feb. 29, and primaries in Virginia and other Super Tuesday states March 3 are run by state and local governments.

“Caucuses are run by rank amateurs. Even though we have concerns about the capacity of election officials, at least this is what they do a lot of,” Charles Stewart, who runs MIT’s election data and science lab, told ProPublica. “Even in the smallest of jurisdictions you run a lot of elections – you have contingency plans. The parties, bless their hearts, they don’t do this very much and that’s the bottom line.”

Competence may not be sexy, but it’s reassuring when it comes to elections and government. It’s not too much to ask for timely, accurate election results.

That’s why New Hampshire, which has been holding the first primary since 1920, is even more important this year. Democrats need to put the chaos in Iowa behind them. New Hampshire will give a snapshot of where independents are leaning. In the Granite State’s semi-open primary, “undeclared” or independent voters -- about 42% of those registered in the state – can vote. Sanders won easily last time.  

After the 2020 election, Democrats will probably go back to the drawing board, again, to find a better process of picking their nominee. Iowa likely will lose its caucus in favor of primaries. Restoring faith in the election process is crucial.

 For now, it’s time to focus on the present. Hello, New Hampshire. Don’t mess it up.

(C)2020 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

As Iowa goes, so goes Iowa -- Jan. 30, 2020 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Don’t expect Iowa’s first-in-the nation caucuses Monday to write history. More likely, they’ll will write history’s footnotes.

If Iowa’s quadrennial caucuses actually picked presidents, we might be talking about Democratic Presidents Edmund Muskie, Richard Gephardt and Tom Harkin. Or Republican Presidents Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum and Ted Cruz.

All were winners in Iowa’s caucuses, but not one of them became his party’s presidential nominee, let alone president. In 2016’s caucuses, Cruz beat Donald Trump, and Hillary Clinton barely edged out Bernie Sanders.

Iowa’s gift to the nation is picking also-rans.

The Hawkeye State began holding the nation’s first presidential contests after the turbulent 1968 election, when nobody cared who went first. These days, many argue Iowa’s demographics make it a poor choice to kick off the presidential voting. It’s 91% white, 4 percent black and residents are older than the national average.

Both the state’s Democratic and Republican parties will hold presidential caucuses Monday night, but with President Trump having only nominal opposition, all eyes are on the Democrats.

Candidates have lavished personal attention on Iowa for over a year, but a week before the caucuses something like 40 percent of Iowa Democrats still hadn’t made up their minds. Sanders appears to be in the lead, but maybe not. He, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren were bunched together within 8 percentage points in FiveThirtyEight’s average of state polls on Tuesday.

A Sanders win would thrill many young and progressive voters -- and the Trump campaign. Trump would love to run against the Democratic socialist. Trump and Co. call all Democrats socialists, of course, but Sanders is really a Democratic socialist, and proudly so. Trump planned a big rally in Des Moines Thursday to tout his accomplishments.

Democratic moderates – read: pragmatists – prefer tried-and-true Biden as the candidate they believe actually can beat Trump.

What’s at stake in Iowa for Democrats is just 41 pledged delegates to this summer’s Democratic National Convention. That’s all. California, which votes on Super Tuesday, March 3, by itself will select 495 pledged delegates.

Under Iowa Democrats’ complex caucus rules, a presidential candidate needs 15 percent of the first vote in a precinct to remain “viable.” If a candidate doesn’t reach the threshold, the candidate’s supporters are free to join another candidate, move to undecided or try to persuade people to join their first-choice candidate.

Since 1972, the candidate who won the most votes in Iowa’s Democratic caucuses has won the party’s presidential nomination in seven of 10 contested races, but only two of them captured the White House, Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Barack Obama in 2008, according to a  history of the caucuses by the Des Moines Register. 

Since 1980, three winners of contested Republican caucuses won the GOP presidential nomination, but only George W. Bush in 2000 won the White House.

A record turnout is expected for the caucuses that start at 7 p.m. Central on Monday in 1,678 precincts around the state. Those who will turn 18 by Nov. 3, Election Day, can participate, as can unregistered voters who register on caucus night.

And, for the first time, Iowa Democratic voters who can’t get home for the caucuses can vote in nearly 100 satellite locations, 25 out of state. Many are in sunny places where winter-weary Iowans retire, in Arizona and Florida. But the Iowa caucus is also coming to Virginia at George Mason University and to Washington, D.C., at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel. Iowa Democrats overseas can caucus in Paris; Glasgow, Scotland; and Tbilisi, Georgia.

Also new this time, the state Democratic party will release the first, raw vote totals in precincts as well as the final tally. What could go wrong with transparency? Disputes over who the real winner is.

You’ll probably hear there are “three tickets out of Iowa” for presidential candidates. That stems from the historical tidbit that since 1976 only one Democrat or Republican contender has come in lower than third in Iowa and won the presidential nomination. John McCain finished fourth in 2008 and won the GOP nomination.  

That same year, Iowa Democrats gave Obama a clear victory, launching the little-known senator from Illinois into history, showing Iowa can be a key first step.

©2020 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.