Inside a fairground in Salt Lake City (Utah), on March 2, the day before Super Tuesday, the Bernie Sanders revolution was sailing smoothly. The same message, the same enthusiasm. But outside everything was falling apart. About seven primaries were starting to drop to a one on one battle. Three retired candidates secretly flew to Dallas to stage their support for centrist Joe Biden. At the headquarters of the Sanders campaign in Washington, on the Twitter accounts of his followers, on the mobiles of his army of volunteers, an idea was repeated: Did you really believe that they were going to allow us to win?
The establishment Democrat had come to the rescue of the party. As in 2016, he regretted the insurgency, they would do everything in their power to stop Bernie Sanders again. But the truth is that the agent who sabotaged the revolution had to look for himself. Sanders always knew that only if he managed to generate a historic mobilization, if he massively incorporated young people in electoral politics, could he reach the Democratic nomination and, later, the White House. He repeated it in his speeches: “We must focus on building a grassroots movement unprecedented in the country’s political history.” His own campaign slogan suggested it: “Not me. U.S”. But it turned out that it was the moderate candidate Joe Biden, and not him, who is achieving that mobilization.
Sanders’ theory has collided with reality. The process to avoid a second Trump term has mobilized new voters, yes. Only it was not the young, but the older, the moderate suburban neighbors and African-Americans. It is not the big corporations, nor the media, nor the money of the super-millionaires, nor the party apparatus, to whom the accusing finger of hiking is customary to point, which have derailed the revolution. It was that young electorate who filled their rallies and dressed their shirts, but who refused to go to the polls en masse.
From South Carolina to Michigan, from Texas to Missouri, Democrats from the 21 states that have voted since February 29 have sent a message. They don’t want a revolution. They just want to kick Donald Trump out. And, unless things change a lot, they consider Joe Biden to be the most likely to do so.
The signs were there from the beginning, hidden under the euphoria of the rallies animated by rock stars, in the responses to the polls at the ballot box, in the fine print of the results since the first contest in Iowa. Already in that State , where the race began on February 3, turnout fell short of the expectations of those who believed that only vigorous grassroots activism can lead to a Democratic victory in November. Campaign leaders expected 300,000 voters, but there were only 176,000. It is 3% more than four years ago, but “very far from what the Democrats expected,” as the Trump campaign recalled. In New Hampshire turnout seemed better: 45,000 more voters than in 2016. But the problem is that the voting-age population had grown to the same extent.
And it happened that, after a very weak start to the campaign, it ended up being Joe Biden who achieved that massive mobilization that his rival promised. The first notice came on February 29 in South Carolina, which brought the former vice president’s first victory. Participation in that State, which was the first date with the African American electorate, broke the record that had set the presidential race of Barack Obama in 2008.
Super Tuesday came, and in state after state, with the exception of California, the evidence was that Sanders had failed to mobilize the young voters he hoped for. In no State did minors under 30 years represent more than 20% of the electorate. Participation in general rose compared to 2016, according to a study by the Harvard Institute of Politics, but only in four states did the vote of young people between 18 and 29 rise. “Have we had the success that I expected in mobilizing young people? The answer is no ”, the candidates themselves acknowledged before journalists, after their disappointing result.
The boss was repeated this Tuesday, when six other states voted. Polls at the ballot box show that, in the vast majority of states that have voted so far, youth participation is less than or equal to 2016. Sanders continues to have overwhelming support among youth, and large The candidate’s success is that four years later, as the ballot box polls show, the majority of Democratic voters support his progressive agenda. However, the Vermont senator has failed to decisively expand the movement he built in 2016 when he lost the nomination to Hillary Clinton.
Joe Biden, after uniting the moderate vote as a whole, has instead managed to mobilize the electorate significantly. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes, 30, a shining star of the Sanderista firmament, pointed out the key in a message to her followers this Wednesday. “This year there is something different: Defeating Trump, understandably, is the number one priority for virtually every voter we have seen. The notion of eligibility has been decisive in shaping these primaries, ”he explained. “We have won the ideological debate, but we are losing the eligibility debate”, Sanders himself recognized the same day.
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