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Sanders is Waving Goodbye

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If there’s ever been a solid indicator that Sanders is done, it is that multiple gauges of debate performance place Biden ahead. Biden. I mean, Biden.

From fivethirtyeight.
NYT gets fancy with smoothing, committing a data visualization foul.

This is not because Biden has all of a sudden become more effective or that Sanders has all of a sudden become a worse candidate.

Yes, part of this is the COVD-19 crisis which greatly increases the value of Biden’s experience in the executive branch. While might have derided the veracity (or at least magnitude) of his claims regarding his purported role in the Obama-Biden administration, Biden’s campaign strategy has turned out to be a good one for two reasons. One, the constant message of “I’ve been in the executive” seems to have stuck – I know that seems simple, but, that’s what a good message is. By itself, the message could easily have been cast aside as an old man who wandered behind a stronger, cooler president. But, two, another reason the executive branch strategy has paid off is that Biden can point to actual ways in which he addressed a crisis that we are about to face in recovering an economy from runaway unified Republican government policy.

Biden, who has been pegged as exciting as Mondale through this entire election might be morphing into something closer to LBJ.

But, aside from the executive experience argument, there are other features about the campaign that are leaning toward a Biden nomination. The coverage of everything other than COVID-19 has stopped. If people were not paying attention to politics before, they certainly aren’t now. On the one hand that might favor Sanders’ fired up base; on other other hand, low-information voters tend to go with who they already know. Sanders’ base is already smaller than it was last year and not-Sanders consolidated very quickly. (One wonders what the primary would look like now if we still had five candidates in the time of coronavirus).

Perhaps most importantly, the tenor of the race has shifted. The candidates were once campaigning in an environment where the parameters of the race were relatively certain (terrible person in office, but strong economy) and everyone agreed that they were angry. Now, uncertainty (about many things, the economy, public health, our parents and grandparents) reigns and people are afraid.

No disrespect to Sanders – I truly mean that – but his message is better suited for an angry campaign. Biden message of healing (he uses that word a lot) is one that addresses both the actual issue of the day but the current emotional landscape of the campaign.

At least for now. No doubt people will be plenty angry again come this summer when the economic fallout of this catastrophically incompetant administration is truly visible. But, by then, the delegates will be awarded.

Of course, one or both of them could always get sick.

They are really old.

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