Three days from Wisconsin goes to vote, which could set the tone for the rest of the campaign. It offers more opportunity for Hillary and more peril to Bernie, as both candidates are trying to make their narrative on the race the dominant. While Hillary is arguing that the primary has ended and it’s time to consolidate around the nominee, Bernie is trying to convince everyone that there’s still a race to be had. Wisconsin may settle which narrative is correct, but certainly not who wins the nomination.
A quick bit of history regarding Wisconsin’s primary. It’s a state where no one faction of a party has a dominant edge, allowing both front-runners and challengers to have a chance at victory. Its relative lateness in the calendar however is typically used to ratify the front-runner, but the challengers are usually able to keep within single digits.
.Such a close result is similar Tuesday as the state is as much on Hillary’s turf as it is Bernie’s. For Hillary, there’s the fact that it’s a primary instead of a caucus, which Bernie tends to dominate (with two important exceptions in Iowa and Nevada) in 2008 had an electorate that was 57%-43% female and 28% was 65 or older favoring Hillary and 53% of the voters are moderate or conservative, the ideological groups Hillary does best with.
Bernie is not without advantages however, as it’s an open primary, has same day registration, only 10% or so of the electorate will be nonwhite and is a northern state. The exit polls available from the 2008 primary were not useful, as it only separated age by those older or younger than 65, so there’s no way to tell if the age of the electorate favor’s Bernie or Hillary. Bernie also has the benefit of Milwaukee electing three socialist mayors in past, so they’re more familiar with democratic socialism than other states may have been. Given that the city was home to around 200,000 votes in 2008, that’s no small advantage.
The evenness of the electorate presents an enormous opportunity to Hillary who wants to box Bernie out of the race. Right now, Hillary’s core mission in the primary is to convince everyone that it’s over and to a point it’s working. Calls for Bernie to leave the race have been consistent and more people consider the primary all but over. Yet it hasn’t stopped Bernie from winning states, nor has Hillary started to eat into his core constituencies.
As mentioned in one of my previous blog entries, linked to below, front-runners typically prove that the race is over by winning over the opponent’s constituencies. If Bernie can’t win white men, or liberals, or his winning margin with voters aged 18-29 is cut to say, 20 points, he’ll stop winning states and it would only be a matter of time before all but his most strident supporters move onto the general election. In such a situation, Bernie might remain in the primary, similar to Ron Paul in 2012, but he would likely never win another state, no matter how much he spent.
This shows how much Hillary could gain from winning Wisconsin, yet she doesn’t need to win Wisconsin. Her lead with pledged delegates ensures that losing states like Wisconsin, which favors neither candidate, won’t cost her the nomination, just prolong the process. Bernie however does need to quiet the talk of him dropping out of the race and can only do this by continuing to win states, especially ones that can’t be explained away as flukes due to being caucuses, or primarily white. Essentially he needs to show that each candidate’s voters are locked in.
As mentioned before, Wisconsin is usually the state where the front-runner is ratified, in fact the last time the winner failed to get the nomination was with Gary Hart in 1984, who won the state, but lost the nomination to Walter Mondale. Usually a challenger drops out shortly after the loss of Wisconsin,. This is because their loss is almost always due to losing core constituencies, either outright to their opponent, or not winning by enough to have a winning coalition.
At first, that’s what seemed to be happening with Hillary in the 2008 Democratic primary. Hillary lost by 17 points, due in part to losing her core constituencies of women 51/49 and Democratic voters 50/49. It seemed as if both front-runners were finally winning over the rest of their respective parties, as John McCain was defeating Mike Huckabee by 18 points, mostly by earning equal support from conservative voters as Huckabee had and beating him by one point among Protestant/other christian voters.
Then, came the March fourth Super whatever Tuesday. While John McCain had successfully won over more than half of Huckabee’s key constituencies and swept the states and won his party’s nomination, Obama lost all but Vermont and the Texas Caucuses (which were overshadowed by Hillary’s victory in the Texas primary). This sudden reversal of fortunes demonstrated that Hillary still had about half the party who would not abandon her campaign, even if it was becoming impossible for her to win.
This is what Bernie needs to do, make it undeniable that enough of the party will stand by him for the long haul. While this won’t completely silence the calls to drop out, just as winning the March 4th primaries didn’t stop all of the calls for Hillary in 2008, it did signal that the race wasn’t over and there was a reason to stay in.
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