The Daily - The Sudden-Death Phase of the Democratic Primary

Episode Date: September 4, 2019

The Democratic presidential race has entered a phase that is specifically designed to reward front-runners and push out lesser-known candidates. We look at how that will influence the campaign. Guest: Alexander Burns, who covers national politics for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background coverage: Which candidates are leading the Democratic primary? Here’s a look at the state of the race.Listen to an episode of “The Daily” about the intended and unintended consequences of the Democratic National Committee’s new debate qualifying rules.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, the Democratic presidential race enters a punishing new phase specifically designed to reward frontrunners and push out lesser-known candidates. Alex Burns on how that will influence the kind of campaign that Democratic voters get. It's Wednesday, September 4th.

Alex Burns, how do you think about this particular phase of the presidential campaign? You know, the fall is traditionally the beginning of the sprint, right? When the campaign really starts to accelerate towards Iowa, towards New Hampshire, and the candidates start spending all that money they've raised, stepping up their travel schedules, and in some cases, dropping out of the race. That we are very, very close to what will become, I think, a kind of sudden death phase of this campaign. close to what will become, I think, a kind of sudden death phase of this campaign. That are the people who, exactly,

where the people who clearly have not made it or have not put together campaigns that can go the distance start to bow to that reality. We've already seen that to a limited degree over the last few weeks. Who is already bowing to reality? We've had five candidates drop out since the beginning of the summer. Today ends our presidential campaign. The first one was Eric Swalwell, Congressman from California. If there was a viable chance, I would not be standing here today.

Congressman Seth Moulton of Massachusetts. It's a hard decision to quit the race, but I'm very proud of the campaign. You had two current and former governors, Jay Inslee of Washington State. But it's become clear that I'm not going to be carrying the ball. I'm not going to be the president, so I'm withdrawing tonight from the race. John Hickenlooper of Colorado dropped out of the race. Now today, I'm ending my campaign for president.

But I will never stop believing that America can only move forward when we work together. And then most recently... Hey, everyone. I wanted you to hear it from me first, but after more than eight incredible months, I'm ending my presidential campaign. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. So what you have now is five significant candidates have dropped out. That leaves 20 more candidates in the race, and half of them have been excluded from the next debate because there are so many candidates running. The party imposed these restrictions on who can qualify to participate in the televised debates.

And for not all but many of the candidates who have dropped out so far, it has been a recognition that they were not going to qualify for the third round of debates in the middle of September. So you had somebody like Kirsten Gillibrand qualify for the third round of debates in the middle of September. So you had somebody like Kirsten Gillibrand qualify for the first two. The DNC raises the threshold for participation in the third one, and she just doesn't make the cut. So you have essentially 60 percent of the candidates either dropping out or being sidelined from the televised debates that are driving so much of this campaign. Officially and by their own party, not by some natural selection. No, and not by the media, right? This is not television networks saying we're not going to allow these 10 people on stage.

This is the Democratic Party saying we're not going to allow these 10 people on stage. And does not participating in a debate effectively end a campaign for the nomination? Or is that not necessarily the case? Well, we're going to find out. Thank you for doing this, Senator. You're welcome. Kirsten Gillibrand, when I spoke to her about dropping out of the race, said basically, yes, she thinks that without the platform of the debates, there was no way forward for her

in the race. I think being able to have a voice on a debate stage when other candidates have that is really important. And without it, I just didn't see our path. Alex, is a different kind of candidate dropping out this time than in the past? In other words, if this is always a period when candidates fall out of the race, is there anything notable about who is dropping out because of these new rules? I think there are two things. The first is that we see a huge disadvantage in this field for candidates who are not from Washington, D.C. as federal officials. Governors are really, really struggling to have

any kind of place in this race, that of the candidates who have dropped out so far, two of the five have been governors and pretty popular and successful governors. So someone like Jay Inslee from Washington state, like John Hickenlooper from Colorado, these are people who fit the profile of the candidates who Americans nominated for president for most of the second half of the 20th century. People like Governor Reagan, Governor Bush, Governor Clinton, Governor Dukakis, they really struggled to gain any significant traction in this race. There are cultural reasons for that in that we are living in a moment when liberals are very, very focused in that we are living in a moment when liberals are very, very focused on what's going on in President Trump's Washington, not in Jay Inslee's

Washington state. There just doesn't seem to be in the Democratic Party much of an appetite for what the governors are selling, that this message that is characteristic of governors who run for president, that I was a capable steward of a significant state, that I've actually passed laws. I'm proud that we've passed a law that prevents local law enforcement from being turned into mini ICE agents. I'm proud to be a person who's not only talked about DREAMers, but being one of the first to make sure that they get a college education. That I'm not just proposing things, I've actually done things. We've done the big progressive things that people said couldn't be done. I've done what pretty much everyone else up here is still talking about doing. The other reason, there's just a structural problem here for governors, which is that federal officials can cultivate tens of thousands of online donors in their federal campaign accounts and then roll all of that straight over into a presidential race. It doesn't work the same way for governors. So somebody like Jay

Inslee or John Hickenlooper or Steve Bullock from Montana, maybe a totally credible fundraiser on a state level, all the money he may stockpile in his campaign account in Montana or in Colorado is totally worthless in a federal election. He cannot roll it over. So somebody like Elizabeth Warren can come into the presidential race essentially with a head start of $10 million. Governors do not have that advantage. So explain how it would have worked for a governor before with a Reagan or a Clinton or Bush and why it doesn't work now. Well, for some of those governors, somebody like Bill Clinton or Michael Dukakis, they got into the presidential race and they had a lot of time to build their name recognition, introduce themselves to people and eventually create some moment in Iowa or New Hampshire or another early state. And we don't know yet what the final tally will be.

I think we know enough to say with some certainty that New Hampshire tonight has made Bill Clinton the comeback kid. You didn't have a situation where the DNC was saying in September of 1987, you know, sorry, Governor Dukakis, but you're too obscure to continue being a serious candidate in this race. But even independent from the rules for these debates, that doesn't seem terribly persuasive to Democratic voters this year. They seem much more drawn to candidates who have big ideas of some kind or who are campaigning on big, bright neon themes in this election rather than this idea of I'm a pragmatist who can get things done. And that appetite isn't just affecting governors, that you have people in this race who are very conventionally qualified federal officials, somebody like a Kirsten Gillibrand, who was just never able to create a kind of moment of electricity or whose message did not resonate in a distinctive enough way for

Democratic voters to say, I'm going to pick you out of this crowd of so many other options and give you my vote. And so because of these DNC rules, it not only places a premium on candidates who can come into the race with some level of national recognition or federal fundraising prowess, but also on candidates who have a demonstrated ability to really punch through the clutter of this election. And Alex, you mentioned Clinton and Dukakis as presidential candidates who may not have made it under the first change in this election season. Are there equivalent people under this second change, the kind of non-buzzy figures?

In some ways, this change is more of a formal ratification of cultural changes that have already happened in politics, that it has been hard for a while to get very far in a presidential election if you are essentially a diligent, conventional, dull candidate. And the people who have succeeded at getting nominated, despite their dullness, have generally not gone on to win the presidency. So somebody like John Kerry. John Edwards and I support tort reform. It's in my health care proposal. Go to JohnKerry.com.

You can pull it off the Internet and you'll find a tort reform plan. Now, may not have been polling high enough to clear all the thresholds that the DNC will set up over the next few months, but he didn't go on to win the presidency. Somebody like a Mitt Romney, who was a diligent, hardworking, dull candidate. I was with one company that makes valves in process industries.

And they said, look, we were having some valves coming in that were broken, and we had to repair them under warranty. And we looked them up, and they had our serial number on them. And then we noticed that there was more than one with that same serial number. There were counterfeit... He would have cleared these debate requirements with no difficulty, didn't go on to win the presidency. So this is in some ways the DNC acknowledging, formalizing, and then getting beat up for a set of preferences about how people engage with politics that have been going on for a really long time. So somebody like Seth Moulton in a different time may have had a couple more months to go door to door in a place like Iowa, a place like New

Hampshire, talk about his military experience, talk about national security, and maybe slowly create some kind of space for himself in the race. But what's happening now is because of the premium on buzziness and because of the higher threshold for participation in the debates, he doesn't get to spend a couple more months trying to do this. And neither do nine or 10 other people who are still technically candidates in this race, but who are never likely to appear on a stage with Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren again. Well, tell me how you made up your mind and when you made up your mind. I decided just in the past few days. And when we spoke a couple weeks ago, Seth Moulton acknowledged that reality. I think it's evident that this is now a three-way race between Biden, Warren, and Sanders.

That he said that he sees this as essentially a three-candidate race. And really it's a debate about how far left the party should go. What makes you think this is sort of effectively a three-person race at this point? Well, I mean, I'm no political pundit, but if you just look at the polling, I mean, that's where things are. That's winnowing the field even more dramatically than the DNC debate rules have, just essentially saying everybody else in this race is free to keep competing, but look at the writing on the wall. We'll be right back. Alex, Moulton told you that he dropped out because he now sees it as a three-person race at this point. Why is that?

Why are Biden, Warren, and Sanders now being talked about in those terms, given that we still have five months before anyone votes in a primary? It's because of some of the trends in this race that, at this point, have actually been pretty stable. Joe Biden is the only candidate who has ever led in the polls. Elizabeth Warren is the only candidate who has ever consistently gained in the polls. Elizabeth Warren is the only candidate who has ever consistently gained in the polls. And Bernie Sanders clearly has a fairly high floor of support in this race that he can't drop too far because there is this faction on the left of the party that doesn't seem like it's ever going to desert him. Those are the three trends in this race that have been stable and consistent throughout the election. Those three candidates are all people who, if you look today at their polling numbers, at their financial numbers, at their organization in the early states, you can say that all three of them have a clear path to the nomination. Doesn't mean a strong path to the nomination, but I could explain to you if Bernie Sanders were

going to get nominated, how he would do it, or if Elizabeth Warren was going to get nominated, how it would happen. Joe Biden is the easiest one to explain because he's currently the frontrunner. You look at this second set of candidates, people like Kamala Harris, Beto O'Rourke, Julian Castro, Cory Booker. For that larger group of candidates, it's about seven or eight people, they need something to change over the next few months. seven or eight people, they need something to change over the next few months. And that's part of why the debates are so important at this stage in the race, that when you look at the polling trends in this race. These are out in the last 30 seconds. Here it is. Quinnipiac poll, national, Democrats, post-debate, Kamala Harris surging to second place, 20 percent within two points of the former vice president. The only candidate who has moved big in the last three or four months was Kamala Harris.

Senator Kamala Harris beginning a three-day campaign tour of Iowa today. As yet more new polling shows her rapidly overtaking much of the Democratic presidential field. And she moved up very significantly after that first debate. Kamala Harris, meanwhile, has dropped significantly. And then she moved very significantly after that first debate. Kamala Harris, meanwhile, has dropped significantly. And then she moved very significantly down. She stood at 17 percent support in the June poll, but now has the backing of 5 percent of potential Democratic voters. Because the bounce from that debate kind of faded.

She did not fully capitalize on it and sustain it. She did not fully capitalize on it and sustain it. But if you are one of those candidates who's polling right now at 2% or 3%, you look at somebody like Kamala Harris and you say, I could do that. I could have a big moment on a debate and suddenly go from 3% to 13% and from then on, who knows? Somebody like Elizabeth Warren pretty much did exactly this at an earlier point in this race, that when she got into this thing, she was pulling in the mid to low single digits. But we knew she was a popular person among Democrats. The Democrats liked her and they liked her a lot. And they had a clear view of her as somebody who was a fighter against corporations, a fighter for regular people. And so her challenge was to say, let's take that pool of people out there, that big pool of people out there who like me and persuade them to vote

for me. And how does she do that? Well, she has had this relentless campaign of ideas. The threat from corruption is real. And this campaign that has mirrored those ideas in her stylistic approach to the race, right, that she is running as a populist, she's running as a reformer. So the question becomes, what are we going to do about it? And my answer, we attack the corruption head on. And she has the ideas to back that up. And she has the sort of campaign methodology to back it up. She's not holding fundraisers. She does these enormous rallies and then follows them up with these endless, endless photo lines, right, that people see all over social media a couple times a week. Like I said earlier, if anyone wants to stay for a selfie, I'll stay as long as you want.

That's what somebody like a Kamala Harris or a Beto O'Rourke or a Cory Booker needs to achieve at some point if they're going to take off. And what has Warren's rise meant for Bernie Sanders, someone with whom she shares so much ideologically, but who predates her on the presidential stage by four years and who is still sitting in this top triumvirate? Well, her rise has come at the cost of a number of other candidates, but no one more than Bernie Sanders. more than Bernie Sanders. That if you look at the polling numbers in this race among people who identify themselves as very liberal voters, if you look at the polling among younger voters, especially, you see a significant swing

away from Sanders and towards Warren. That's not to say that he doesn't have real support with those constituencies. Still, he does. He just had a monopoly on those constituencies when he was running against Hillary Clinton. He does not have that anymore. He clearly can go the distance. He has the infrastructure. He has the base of support.

What he doesn't have in this campaign is a demonstrated ability to gain support. That the trend since late last winter has been Bernie Sanders steadily losing support. He's kind of plateaued now. He's not really lost support over the last month. But he has lost it. He has. If you look at where he was in January, February, March, it looked like he and Joe Biden, between the two of them, were on track to take 60 to 70 percent of the primary vote. Between the two of them now, they're collecting more like 45 to 50 percent of the primary vote. Most of that movement has come from Sanders supporters moving towards Elizabeth Warren. She is clearly taking some of his support from the populist ideological

left. She is clearly pulling away support that he had four years ago among young people. She's also drawing on wells of support that he never had. Collegeated women, people who are higher-income voters with college degrees who see her as smart and articulate and having big ideas, and also a Harvard professor who happens to be a populist, right? So she's somebody who can reach, frankly, a lot of Hillary Clinton primary voters who were never going to be inbounds for Bernie Sanders in 2019. to be inbounds for Bernie Sanders in 2019. I'm also struck, Alex, that when the field was young and full and vibrant, we talked about the dynamic within the Democratic Party of blow it up, kind of rip everything up from

the roots, restructure the system versus the kind of restore it to a pre-Trump America. And now that the field is starting to narrow, we have candidates at the very top who very much embody and crystallize those differences. You really couldn't find a better set of people to argue those two positions than Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren. This is what we're finally going to see when they appear on a debate stage for the first time together in a little more than a week. And so the party now seems poised to have the purest possible version of that argument. And it will get purer as this race advances, as we get fewer and fewer candidates, as we find ourselves probably sooner than any of us would like to think on the eve of Iowa and New Hampshire, it seems like a pretty safe bet that Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders will still be very significant candidates at that point. And the rest of the field still has to prove they can be a part of that conversation. realities have brought us to this point where we have two or three frontrunner figures in this race

and the dynamic between them that blow it up or restore that will define the race for the next few weeks and months. What will that mean is likely to be left out of this conversation? What issues are likely to fall by the wayside as a result? I think it's less likely that you're going to have important issues left out of the conversation and more that they are going to be increasingly filtered through a smaller number of candidates and a smaller number of distinct perspectives.

We're not going to stop hearing Democrats talk about gender equity because Kirsten Gillibrand is going to not be in the race. We're just going to hear it talked about the way Elizabeth Warren talks about it. We're not going to have climate change left out of the conversation. We're just going to hear the solutions that Bernie Sanders is proposing rather than the ones that Jay Inslee is proposing. And by the way, there may be a significant amount of overlap there. So you're weeding out personalities that are not breaking through and you're filtering the remaining issue disagreements in the party through the lenses that we've been talking about all year. These perspectives of drastic change in government and in American institutions versus a return to normalcy.

Alex, thank you very much. Thank you. Alex, thank you very much. Thank you. On Tuesday night, Senator Elizabeth Warren announced a $3 trillion plan to combat climate change that explicitly adopts the ideas of her former rival, Governor Jay Inslee. Several other Democratic candidates, including Senators Cory Booker, Senator Amy Klobuchar, and former Housing Secretary Julian Castro, announced their own climate change plans in the days since Inslee dropped out of the race.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Order! Order. The ayes to the right, 328. The noes to the left, 301. Not a good start, Boris. Not a good start, Boris.

On Tuesday, British lawmakers rebelled against their new prime minister, Boris Johnson, by trying to prevent him from leaving the European Union without a negotiated agreement. Point of order, the prime minister. Mr. Speaker, I think that... The vote was a highly public rebuke of Johnson, who was jeered and mocked by his former colleagues in Parliament and undermined by members of his own Conservative Party, one of whom dramatically defected to a rival party, stripping the Prime Minister of his parliamentary majority.

Parliament is on the brink of wrecking any deal that we might be able to strike in Brussels because tomorrow's bill would hand control of the negotiations to the EU. And that would mean more dither, more delay, and more confusion. In response, Johnson warned that if Parliament blocks his plan for Brexit in a vote scheduled for today, that he would call for an immediate election that could either destroy his government or give him enough and to compel another pointless delay to Brexit, potentially for years, then that would be the only way to resolve this. And a weakened Hurricane Dorian turned away from the Bahamas, where it has lingered for nearly three days, and toward the east coast of the U.S. The hurricane, the second strongest storm ever recorded in the Atlantic,

has been downgraded from a Category 4 storm to a Category 2, but has still triggered large-scale evacuations from Florida to South Carolina, as forecasters try to predict its exact course. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Bavaro. See you tomorrow.