Super Tuesday was supposed to mark the coronation of Bernie Sanders as the presumptive Democratic nominee. Instead, with Joe Biden winning most of Tuesday’s contests (and likely most of its delegates as well), the public focus is now on the unexpected revival of the former vice president’s once beleaguered campaign.
Only a few weeks ago in Iowa and New Hampshire, Biden finished fourth and fifth, respectively. But the actual Super Tuesday story may not be about Biden (or his comeback) at all. History’s real takeaway may very well be that strong political parties serve as a moderating, and even conservative, influence within a healthy republican system of self-governance.
Indeed, just as Bernie Sanders’ disheveled brand of “democratic socialism” seemed poised to capture the Democratic Party’s nomination, it was the swift and dramatic intervention of party loyalists — moderates — that seemed to upend the race.
For weeks, the vote tallies in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada had all fallen like dominos in Sanders’ direction. And, with each victory seemingly more decisive than the last, and with momentum clearly mounting, the party surely realized something needed to change if a candidate more reflective of the party’s broad coalition was to carry the Democratic banner.
On the surface, Joe Biden’s victory in South Carolina was the hinge point.
But reshaping the race required more than a single win. Biden’s Super Tuesday surge is more likely attributable to party forces intervening on the former vice president’s behalf. While, yes, the victory in South Carolina provided the necessary cover for unofficial institutional actors to start moving, resuscitating a campaign on life support demanded more direct action.
If all of this seems shockingly anti-democratic, well, that may just mean the party system is working. Although some of the Founders were wary of the partisan feelings political parties often engender, it was none other than James Madison, one of the chief architects of the U.S. Constitution, who eventually came to see parties as helping to mitigate many of the risks inherent in America’s system of self-governance. He believed parties could aid in moderating factionalism, special interest groups, and political extremes (see, for instance, “democratic socialism”).
As political scientist Joseph Postell points out in a recent essay for the conservative Heritage Foundation, strong political parties tend to place “party principles above candidates’ personalities. They have institutional resources to hold their coalitions together in the face of incentives to act individually, maintaining coalitions based on principle and presenting their principles to the American people. These great parties make American politics more accountable by letting the people decide between competing visions of good government rather than individual candidates and their personalities.”
The nation witnessed this prioritization of party over personalities when — within 48 hours of Biden’s victory in South Carolina — two of his moderate rivals, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, dropped out of the race and endorsed Biden. And then, as if part of a well-choreographed two-step, the former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid tossed his weight behind Biden via an op-ed endorsement in USA Today.
On Wednesday morning, Mike Bloomberg also dropped out of the race and endorsed Biden.
After a not-so-secret phone call between Biden and Barack Obama, rumors began spilling out into the press that the two-term democratic president was deploying, behind the scenes, his immense influence to tip things in his former VP’s direction.
In other words, things were working as Madison envisioned.
Though hard-to-quantify, and often untraceable, this kind of soft party maneuvering could prove strong enough to temper or even outflank Bernie Sander’s impressive populist pull.
Of course, what the nation is seeing play out among the Democrats of 2020 stands in contrast to the Republicans of 2016. Four years ago, the Republican party largely crumbled under the weight of a populist candidate whose direct appeals to party voters pulled reluctant leaders along. The real story last night was that the Democratic Party of 2020 proved its mettle as a moderating institution; a political party in a truly Madisonian sense.
Another possible lesson from 2016, however, is that moderate party standard bearers don’t always deliver political victories, and party leaders, it turns out, can be out of touch with their base and the electorate at-large. So, in other words, whether these latest maneuvers to block Bernie from the nomination will actually aid the Democratic Party in winning back the White House very much remains to be seen.