Welcome to the Voting and Elections Collection.

According to recent polling, there are currently four leading candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination: former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg. On December 15, the RealClear Politics rolling average of nationwide polls showed Biden with 28.2 percent support of all respondents, followed by Sanders with 19.2 percent, Warren with 16.4 percent, and Buttigieg with 8.8 percent. No other candidate had more than 5 percent.

The Democrats’ top four features three septuagenarians (Biden, Sanders, and Warren) and a candidate in Buttigieg who is still under 40 years old. Biden is focused on his electability over President Donald Trump, an urgently desired quality by all Democratic voters. Sanders and Warren speak to the progressive activism aroused in the party since 2016. Buttigieg epitomizes a new generation of national leadership, untarnished by the political dysfunction of recent years.

Yet all four candidates have something to prove when it comes to vote-getting ability. Biden easily held his Senate seat in Delaware for decades, but quickly went belly up in his two previous tries for the Democratic presidential nomination. In 1987, he quit the race months before the primaries after admitting to plagiarizing the British Labor Party leader at the time in his standard stump speech. In 2008, he withdrew after a poor showing in the lead-off Iowa caucuses.

Like Biden, Sanders has dominated at the ballot box in Vermont. But his first presidential run for the Democratic nomination in 2016 had its limitations. He did run well in the caucus states, where the relatively low turnouts enabled his passionate support to prevail, and in smaller primary states across the northern tier of the country.

Yet in the larger states, those that in the general election have the biggest electoral vote prizes, Sanders had problems. He lost the most populous states from California to New York, Illinois to Florida, Ohio to North Carolina, as well as Pennsylvania and New Jersey—all states with sizable minority populations to which Hillary Rodham Clinton had greater appeal. Of the nation’s 10 most populous states, Sanders could carry only Michigan in the 2016 Democratic primaries, and that by a margin of less than 20,000 votes of more than 1.2 million cast.

As for Buttigieg, he has yet to win office beyond the confines of South Bend. According to the 2017 World Almanac, South Bend had an estimated population in 2015 of 101,516, making it the fourth-largest city in Indiana behind Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, and Evansville. Before beginning his mayoral career early this decade, Buttigieg sought the post of state treasurer in 2010, losing by 25 percentage points to Republican Richard Mourdock. (The controversial Mourdock would go on to lose an ill-starred Senate race two years later, handing Indiana Democrats a rare Senate victory.)

And then there is Elizabeth Warren. On the face of it, she has done quite well at the ballot box in her brief political career in Massachusetts. In her electoral debut in 2012, she ousted Republican Sen. Scott Brown with 54 percent of the vote. In 2018, Warren was reelected with 60 percent.

Yet in 2012, Warren drew more than 200,000 fewer votes than President Barack Obama, who rolled over the state’s former Republican governor, Mitt Romney. In 2018, she drew far fewer votes than three of the other four successful Democratic candidates for statewide office, with her total of 1,633,371 dwarfed by the totals for the Democratic winners for Massachusetts secretary of state (1,877,065), state attorney general (1,874,209), and state treasurer (1,761,282). Among the victorious Democratic statewide candidates last fall, the only one she outpolled was the entry for state auditor (1,606,518).

Yet maybe the most noteworthy vote comparison in 2018 was between Warren and Massachusetts’ popular moderate Republican governor, Charles Baker, who like Warren, was also running for reelection against nominal opposition. In the strongly Democratic Bay State, Republican Baker drew 1,781,341 votes, or nearly 150,000 more than Warren.

She did manage to outpoll Baker in Democratic Boston, its liberal suburbs (such as Brookline, Lexington, and Newton), and academic-oriented communities from Amherst and Northampton in the western half of the state to Cambridge outside Boston. Yet in much of the rest of Massachusetts—with its smaller, less Democratic communities and old mill towns—Baker often drew more votes than Warren. And the latter are the type of places that Warren would need to penetrate in Massachusetts and beyond to stand a good chance of defeating President Trump next November.

Still, the upcoming presidential primaries give the Democratic candidates an opportunity to embellish their vote-getting credentials—in short, a chance to make a first or second impression (or in the case of Biden, a third impression). In 2016, Trump showed himself to be a prodigious vote-getter during the Republican primaries. Democrats and the media seemed slow to realize it, since he did not win a majority of the vote in any state contest until mid-April, more than halfway through the primary season. Still, Trump swept 34 of the 38 GOP primaries in 2016, many by lopsided margins.

Now, it is the field of 2020 Democratic candidates—led by Biden, Sanders, Warren, and Buttigieg—who have a chance to show they can put together a winning coalition in the primaries that could ultimately lead to success in November.

Rhodes Cook

12/17/19

There are many in the political community who believe that any presidential primary polling at this point of the nominating process is virtually meaningless. With more than six months to go before the lead-off caucuses in Iowa, it is way too early to conduct significant polling, they say, because the results simply accent the standing of those candidates with high name recognition. Yet over the last dozen years, pre-primary polls taken during July of the pre-election year have been highly prescient.

Every 30 years or so of late, there has been a generational change in the White House. In 1960, the election of John F. Kennedy ushered into the presidency members of the “greatest generation”—raised during the Depression and combatants during World War II. In 1992, the election of Bill Clinton flipped the White House to the “baby boom” generation–steeped in the Great Society, urban race riots, and the war in Vietnam. Now, by the calendar, it appears that it is time for a new generation to take the helm.

It could be in the presidential election of 2020, almost certainly in 2024. And it would be “Generation X” into whose hands the presidency would be handed. (For the record, the birth years for baby boomers runs from 1946 to 1964; that of “Generation Xers” begins in 1965.)

Generally, the flip to a new generation of leadership is fueled by a strong feeling among voters that it is time for a change in the nation’s politics with a need for fresh faces and fresh thinking. For good measure, a “change of generation” election often features a sharp contrast in age between an elderly outgoing president and a relatively young new one.

In 1960, the outgoing president, Republican Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower, was 70 years old at the time of the election, having cultivated an avuncular, grandfatherly persona that made him seem at least that old throughout his eight-year presidency. Having successfully led the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, Ike was a respected elder statesman. But he was also publicly dogged by health issues that included several heart attacks during his presidency. His successor, Democrat Kennedy, had some hidden health problems of his own. But at 43, JFK was able to portray himself as the champion of an energetic new generation ready to assume national leadership.

In 1992, the dichotomy was much the same. Republican George H.W. Bush, age 68, was defeated by Democrat Bill Clinton, 46. Bush had served with distinction during World War II before beginning a long career in business and then politics. For the much younger Clinton, the military conflict of his generation involved the murky war in Vietnam that divided the country. Clinton had to weather charges during the campaign that he was a draft dodger. But he was able to sell himself as a smart, well-spoken “people” person and policy wonk, whose generation (the baby boomers) represented the future, not the past. The latter was underscored in his campaign song (appropriated from Fleetwood Mac): “Don’t Stop Thinking about Tomorrow.”

A similar type of generational change in the presidency could be shaping up for 2020. The incumbent, the 72-year-old Donald Trump, was the nation’s oldest president at the time of his inauguration, but hardly fits the part of an elder “statesman.” More like a boundless whirling dervish sowing chaos throughout the government, say his critics. As such, he appears to some to be more like a wayward adolescent than an aging codger.