Tomorrow night at 8 PM, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden will sit down in front of cameras, but no live audience, for the next Democratic Presidential debate. The moderators are CNN’s Dana Bash and Jake Tapper and Univision’s Ilia Calderon. Missing will be Tulsi Gabbard, as the DNC changed the rules after Gabbard won delegates in America Samoa to increase the number of delegates required to get on the debate stage. Also missing is Univision’s Jorge Ramos, who had originally been planned to be the moderator, but who is now in self isolation after being in contact with someone who has coronavirus.
The debate offers Sanders perhaps his last chance to alter the dynamics of the race between him and Biden. We believe that he knows that Biden is highly likely to win the nomination, but Sanders wants to make sure that he can push the Democratic agenda even further to the left. The primary conversation topic will be the coronavirus pandemic. We suspect Biden and Sanders will both go after Trump and try to portray the administration’s response as inadequate and bungled. Sanders will try to position his government universal health care system as the answer to the pandemic. Personally, we don’t think the universal coverage system in Italy which is known as the SSN (Servizio Sanitario Nazionale) has done a particularly good job at fighting the coronavirus, but that will not stop Sanders from using this crisis to push for universal national healthcare. Biden will primarily criticize Trump and blame him for inadequate testing. Oddly, Biden has gone out of his way to attack Trump on limiting flights from Europe even though most health professionals recognize that Europe is now the epicenter of the disease.
Perhaps most interesting will be how aggressively Sanders goes after Biden personally. We don’t think he will be that aggressive, preferring to call him a friend and mainly focusing on policy. Sanders does not want to be blamed if Biden also loses to Trump in November. On the Biden side, the strategy will undoubtedly be to run out the clock. Biden needs to avoid the blank stares and gaffes that have become a staple of too many of his appearances so far. We think he will talk a lot about unity, Obama, and beating Trump. The less Biden is seen or makes news during the primary, the better for Biden. His stock went up when he got the endorsements of all the other candidates – Klobuchar, Harris, Beto, Booker, Bloomberg and Buttigieg — not when Biden came out with a new initiative or signature campaign speech.
We think this could be the final Democratic debate. If Biden wins the Arizona, Florida, Illinois and Ohio primaries convincingly on this coming Tuesday, we expect Sanders will drop out. That said, there is a real chance that one or more of these primaries could be postponed due to the coronavirus outbreak. Indeed, we note that today Georgia announced that it was delaying its primary from March 24 until May 19, as did Puerto Rico. One problem that could occur if Bernie stays in the race is that more primaries get delayed and Biden does not clinch the nomination until closer to the Democratic Convention.
Finally, we note that DNC has managed to antagonize both the Sanders and Gabbard supporters. The consolidation of the establishment candidates behind Biden reinforces the narrative that the DNC has rigged the election against Sanders. Likewise, Gabbard’s followers have to be upset by the poor treatment that she has received by the DNC changing the debate rules to exclude her from the debate stage. Gabbard is much more friendly towards Sanders than Biden and would likely have gone after Biden, something the DNC certainly wanted to avoid. On Twitter, there is a growing #NeverBiden movement. To quote one Sanders’ supporter on Twitter, “I’m going way beyond just not voting for Biden, I’ll be trying to convince everyone I come into contact with to vote AGAINST him specifically. Biden will lose anyway without this help but I want to run up the score to humiliate the Dem party as much as possible.”
Looking forward to this debate. The stakes are high.
NewEnglandPolitics.com 