Bernie Sanders speaks during a campaign rally in Dearborn, Michigan on the weekend. Photo / AP
Four years ago, Sen. Bernie Sanders scored an upset win over Hillary Clinton in the Michigan Democratic primary, reviving his insurgent candidacy one week after his political prospects dimmed because of Super Tuesday losses.
Now Sanders, of Vermont, finds himself once again urgently in need of a bounce-back victory in Michigan's presidential primary after another disappointing Super Tuesday, this time against former Vice President Joe Biden.
Sanders has shaken up his schedule to hold three days of events and rallies in Michigan. He has intensified his attacks on Biden over trade, a major issue in the state; in remarks in Dearborn, Michigan, on Saturday, he recalled joining picket lines to protest "disastrous" trade deals. And his campaign arranged an event in Flint, Michigan, on Saturday night for the explicit purpose of Sanders making his case to black voters, who have largely favoured Biden so far. The Flint event mostly drew white voters, though, and Sanders mostly reiterated his stump speech.
As Biden now attempts to leverage his Super Tuesday success and build momentum, Sanders may face even longer odds in Michigan than he did in 2016. The state that Sanders last week called "very, very important" suddenly looks forbidding for him.
Biden, despite having a thin operation in Michigan, appears likely to do well with black Democrats and college-educated white voters, two groups that handed him decisive margins in Virginia, North Carolina and several other states on Super Tuesday. And the exit polling and voting trends in some of those states indicate that Sanders has declined in strength with working-class white voters, who, uneasy with Clinton in 2016, delivered him landslide wins across much of central and northern Michigan that year.
Michigan, with its 125 delegates, is the most populous state to vote Tuesday, and it is the first of the big Midwestern battlegrounds to cast ballots — a general-election trophy that President Donald Trump painfully pulled from the Democratic column in 2016 with a narrow win. But Michigan also could amount to a bellwether for the rest of the Democratic primary race this spring.
With Biden appearing strong in the South and Sanders winning in the West, the industrial Midwest could effectively determine the nomination. And if Sanders can't win in Michigan, he may struggle when Ohio and Illinois vote on March 17 and Wisconsin on April 7, while also undercutting his claims about expanding the electorate in some of the most pivotal general-election swing states.
"Michigan is an important state to do well in because the issues facing residents here are issues we see across the country, so a strong message and showing here will be extremely helpful for the nomination," said Rep. Rashida Tlaib, one of Sanders' most prominent supporters in the state.
Recognising the stakes here, Sanders is assailing Biden for his support of what he called "disastrous trade agreements like NAFTA." And his campaign is airing a commercial in the manufacturing-heavy state that features a former autoworker highlighting the former vice president's lack of regret for supporting the pact while pointing out that Sanders has opposed free-trade deals.
As he addressed supporters in Dearborn, Sanders devoted about one-third of his stump speech to attacking Biden, lashing him not only on trade but also over entitlement programmes, support for the war in Iraq and a willingness to take donations from wealthy donors.
"Our campaign and our administration is about representing the working families in the country," Sanders said.
Abdul El-Sayed, a Sanders supporter who ran for governor in 2018, said he believed that Michigan Democrats would see clear distinctions between the two candidates.
"Free trade helped decimate those manufacturing jobs. Bernie has always been against it; Biden has been for it," he said.
But recent election trends in Michigan are not encouraging for Sanders. In 2018, Michigan Democrats rallied behind a number of moderates — most notably Gretchen Whitmer in the governor's race, and Haley Stevens and Elissa Slotkin in congressional races — and ended up winning Republican-held seats and loosening the GOP's grip on the state.
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El-Sayed, who ran against Whitmer for governor on progressive issues like "Medicare for All," enjoyed Sanders' support and a flood of news media attention in 2018 but did not capture a single county in that primary. Whitmer, a former Democratic leader of the state Senate whose most memorable vow was to "fix the damn roads," beat him by nearly 22 points.
While the race was somewhat competitive in Detroit and around Ann Arbor, home of the University of Michigan, Whitmer ran up enormous margins across much of rural Michigan.
"The Whitmer primary victory over El-Sayed paints a clear road map for Biden over Bernie," said Eric Goldman, who ran Whitmer's campaign. "Biden will excel where Whitmer won big, plus he'll run up the score with black voters."
Sanders' candidacy may in fact hinge on whether he's able to perform better with African Americans in the Midwest than he has in the South — and if he can replicate his strength with working-class white voters who abandoned Clinton in the primary and general election. Biden's supporters, in turn, believe that he is better positioned than Clinton was, including with union members who like the former vice president and don't want their health insurance to change under a Medicare for All system.
"The connection with the workers here is at a completely different level," said former Mayor Mike Duggan of Detroit, a Biden supporter, noting the former vice president's support for the auto industry during the Great Recession. "We have a candidate who I think will bring the traditional Democratic coalition back together."
Also lifting Biden in Michigan is some of what helped him going into the primary last Tuesday in Virginia, where many of the state's leading Democrats endorsed him in the run-up to the balloting. Whitmer, Slotkin and Stevens all threw their support behind Biden this past week.
In an acknowledgment that his campaign would be grievously wounded if he did not rebound in Michigan, Sanders cancelled an event scheduled for Mississippi, which also votes Tuesday, to spend more time here. And he has abruptly started to attack Biden on abortion rights, not an issue the democratic socialist typically uses against his intraparty rivals.
It is clear why Sanders is scrambling: The Super Tuesday results carried ominous signs for his candidacy. In next-door Minnesota, for example, Biden did not visit once but still defeated Sanders 44-32 among white voters without a college degree, according to exit polls.
Rep. Dan Kildee, a longtime Michigan Democrat who has not endorsed a candidate in the presidential race, said Sanders was in a far weaker position going into Tuesday than he was four years ago. Voters then wanted to slow Clinton's front-running campaign and did not feel the level of Trump-inspired alarm that they do now.
"Those factors conspired against Hillary much to the benefit of Bernie," Kildee said. "The feeling that she was inevitable, and his supporters were much more animated. And there was just, among some, a lack of enthusiasm for her campaign."
Now, Kildee said, Biden is experiencing a surge of enthusiasm because of "the absolute commitment to beat Donald Trump."
Brandon Dillon, a former chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party, said, "I know people personally who voted for Bernie because they wanted to send a message to Hillary."
Now, Dillon said, Sanders isn't "a novelty anymore."
"People just want to want to win because we know who our opponent is and what he can do if he gets another four years," he continued.
Some of the more Clinton-friendly precincts from 2016 may be even more hospitable to Biden now that Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, is out of the presidential race. Polls taken while Bloomberg was still running showed Biden leading, but with the former mayor of New York — who poured tens of millions of dollars into the state — also receiving some votes.
Yet now that Bloomberg has withdrawn and endorsed Biden, some of his supporters appear poised to migrate to the former vice president; a Detroit News survey taken before Super Tuesday found 49% of Bloomberg's supporters indicating that Biden was their second choice, while just 18% said Sanders was their second choice.
These Bloomberg-to-Biden voters could prove especially crucial in the Detroit area, which was where Clinton ran the strongest. In suburban Oakland County, for example, Clinton won by about 5 points in 2016. But after Biden's commanding margins in similar upscale communities on Super Tuesday, many Michigan Democrats expect him to win by far more there.
"Those women are voting for Joe Biden against Bernie Sanders, and they'll vote for him again against Donald Trump," state Senator Adam Hollier said of the suburban women who helped power the Democrats in the midterms and who surged to the polls last Tuesday.
Just as worrisome for Sanders, the same Detroit News poll had Biden winning 40% of black voters, while Sanders was taking just 16%.
Hollier, who initially supported former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, represents a legislative district in and around Detroit that includes a number of working-class black neighbourhoods as well as some of the most affluent enclaves in the state. He said, "Everybody in my circle is coalescing around Joe Biden."
At first, he said, black and white voters alike were "looking for President Obama — but instead we went with the one we've always felt comfortable with."
Written by: Jonathan Martin and Astead W. Herndon
© 2020 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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