The Moderate Pileup, and the Sanders Path to the Nomination

The results of the Iowa and New Hampshire contests amount to a strategic victory for Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, fracturing his opposition and opening a path for him to win the nomination.

But the results do not leave Sanders in a dominant position. His support in national polls remains in the low-to-mid 20s, leaving many candidates within striking distance of overtaking him if the race should break their way. That includes former Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York, who despite not being in either contest can claim with some credibility that Iowa and New Hampshire were a strategic victory for his campaign as well.

And even if no single rival emerges as a strong challenger, a group of viable opponents could easily deny Sanders a majority of delegates to the Democratic National Convention, raising the specter of a contested convention in Milwaukee. Much will depend on the Democratic Party’s arcane math for awarding delegates.

For now, though, the Iowa and New Hampshire results leave the moderate wing of the Democratic Party in disarray, with few obvious opportunities for any of its candidates to consolidate support before Super Tuesday on March 3. Bloomberg’s recent rise even creates a possibility that the wing could splinter further before it unifies, if it ever does.

Rather than winnow the field, Iowa and New Hampshire elevated the candidates who had been in fifth and sixth place in national polls: former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota. It dealt a blow to the former national front-runner, former Vice President Joe Biden, who was the only candidate who seemed poised to reassemble the traditional winning coalition for a moderate establishment-backed candidate in Democratic primary politics: most of the black vote along with white moderates.

The moderates’ challenges

New Hampshire and Iowa gave all three candidates a reason to stay in the race. In part for the same reason, none have a particularly clear path forward. The primary calendar also does not seem to give these candidates an easy way of establishing themselves as the dominant leader of their faction. Certainly, neither Nevada nor South Carolina would seem to offer a natural opportunity for Buttigieg or Klobuchar, who have struggled among nonwhite voters in national polls and in surveys of these states.

It had been thought that Biden could perform well in more diverse states like Nevada and South Carolina to consolidate the moderate wing heading into Super Tuesday. But it is not at all clear whether he is strong enough to take advantage of more friendly terrain, as Hillary Clinton did in 2016. His standing in post-Iowa national polls has taken a far greater hit than Clinton’s four years ago, and could drop further after New Hampshire.

His collapse in New Hampshire and Iowa certainly offer additional reason to think he could fade down the stretch, whether it’s because he has been outspent on advertising, because some of his rivals have gained as they have become better known, or because his performances on the debate stage and stump have raised doubts among his supporters.

Even if one of the three moderate candidates emerges as plainly the strongest of the bunch, it remains unclear whether any has the resources or broad appeal necessary to reunite the disparate elements of the typical establishment-friendly coalition.

Buttigieg and Klobuchar, for instance, have virtually no support among black voters in national polls. Sanders has substantially more support among black voters and could easily claim the lead among them in the next round of national polling. His vast financial resources and status as a well-known returning runner-up give him some of the advantages that establishment-backed candidates have usually relied on to outlast activist-backed candidates.

At the same time, the apparent decline in Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s standing has allowed Sanders to consolidate the party’s progressive left. The calendar offers few opportunities for her to regain her footing, as with the other candidates with predominantly white, well-educated support. She will have to create her own magic — probably on the debate stage, the way Newt Gingrich did before the South Carolina primary in 2012 or the way Klobuchar did last week.

But despite the advantage of a potentially unified left, Sanders does not seem like a juggernaut poised to roll to the nomination, at least not yet. He has somewhat underperformed his final poll numbers in both Iowa and New Hampshire. It would be wrong to assume that all of the moderate voters would coalesce behind a single moderate candidate — but there’s no doubt that the more moderate candidates, combined, have fared better than the sum of Sanders and Warren.

Party math and the magic 15

Most important, the Democratic nomination rules, which award delegates fairly proportionally among candidates who exceed 15% of the vote, make it hard for Sanders to win a majority of delegates on Super Tuesday with a plurality of the vote.

Take Donald Trump in 2016 as an example. At this point in the race, he had a wider lead in national polls than Sanders does, won New Hampshire by a wider margin and would soon win Nevada and South Carolina by wider margins than seem likely for Sanders at this point. He then won a decisive victory on Super Tuesday. Yet under the Democratic delegate rules, he would have been left well short of a majority of delegates, potentially setting the stage for a contested convention.

There are some situations where Sanders might nonetheless rack up a big delegate majority: if he is the only candidate who breaches 15% of the vote in a state, or if only he and one other person do so. This is possible; the non-Sanders candidates who are over 15% are generally in decline, while some of those on the rise are well beneath 15%.

Even if three candidates get more than 15% nationwide, the real key is whether three candidates will top 15% in every state, as at least three candidates did in every state in the Republican contest on Super Tuesday in 2016. The difference between whether one or five candidates breach viability in a Sanders-friendly state like California might wind up being pretty narrow, and the whole nomination could turn on it.

What about Bloomberg?

Bloomberg could figure prominently in this scenario, and perhaps in the whole race for the nomination as well.

He has around 12% of the vote in national polls, according to FiveThirtyEight. At that tally, he would usually fail to hit 15%. In that case, his millions of dollars in ad spending might prevent another moderate from clearing 15% in many cases, improving Sanders’ chance of winning the nomination.

But this calculation could change quickly if Bloomberg keeps gaining. If he advances well past 15% — and some post-Iowa polls suggest he may be in the process of doing so — he could easily be positioned to get over viability in enough states to deny Sanders a majority of delegates.

There is a chance, of course, that Buttigieg or Klobuchar could surge ahead of Bloomberg, or into a roughly even four-way race in the moderate lane. (The latter is something like the dream scenario for Sanders, and might still unfold.) And if Bloomberg moves into contention, his serious vulnerabilities, including his support of the stop-and-frisk policy in New York City, could come to the fore.

But it seems just as likely that Buttigieg and Klobuchar would fail to overtake Bloomberg. For now, they will share media attention with each other and with Sanders after New Hampshire, and neither is poised to follow it up with a strong showing in Nevada and South Carolina.

Perhaps most important, these states could prompt the moderate candidates to attack one another, as Biden attacked Buttigieg’s lack of experience before the New Hampshire primary. Bloomberg, left unscathed, might just steadily advance in the background.

It is just as easy, then, to imagine that Bloomberg will quickly overtake a fading Biden to reach second place in national polls, perhaps even as soon as next week.

None of this is assured, of course, but some post-Iowa polls showed Bloomberg breaching 15% of the national vote. They also showed that he had fairly substantial support among black voters, which would position him to assemble the traditional winning establishment-backed coalition. A poll on Tuesday gave Bloomberg a lead in Arkansas, his first lead in any state, perhaps hinting at the outlines of where he might succeed on Super Tuesday.

There are probably limits to what unlimited ad spending can accomplish. But at this point, it doesn’t need to do that much more than it already has to put him in position to win a few states on Super Tuesday — perhaps even including Texas. That would be enough to block Sanders from winning a majority of pledged delegates on that date, and set up something like a one-on-one race in the contests after Super Tuesday.

None of this is inevitable, and it is even harder to predict what would happen next. It would be a whole new race, and Bloomberg has vulnerabilities that have not yet been put to the test. He also has unprecedented resources for a presidential race, and exactly what he can achieve with that amount of money has not been put to the test, either.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .