Super Tuesday is coming up. This is the biggest contest on the primary schedule, so it makes sense to assess the state of the nominating contests used by the two major parties. I’ll do this with reference to other recent primary contests, to put the results into perspective.
Right now, I’m seeing a great deal of what amounts to journalistic malpractice: Many news outlets, notably including the New York Times, present the Republican contest as a done deal with the party rallying behind Trump - but suggest that Biden faces deep difficulties within his own party and that Democrats may yet turn away from Biden.
From a quantitative perspective, this is absurd. At this point, leading into Super Tuesday, it is clear that Biden faces no real challenger for the Democratic nomination; the Democratic Party cannot abandon Biden without abandoning the entire McGovern-Fraser system. The Republican primary, however, shows a serious contest, with significant dissent.
Comparing Biden to Trump
In the early contests, Biden has won 81.9% of the Democratic primary vote. Trump, at the same time, won a combined total of 62.9% of the Republican primary vote - less than Biden did in New Hampshire as a write-in candidate.1 Biden’s primary performance has unequivocally been better than Trump’s.
When it comes to the delegate math and candidate viability, the difference is even more stark. While Trump clearly leads with 77% of delegates won thus far, three of Trump’s individual opponents have won delegates. Biden, on the other hand, has earned over 99% of the Democratic delegates thus far, with two uncommitted delegates being assigned in Michigan.
Numerous states have canceled Democratic primaries and a number of states have not granted ballot access to Biden’s top challenger, Dean Phillips, who remains largely obscure and polls behind Biden in every measurable segment of the population.
In a contest where both Biden and Trump were considered prohibitive front-runners from the start, it is clear that Trump faces greater opposition from within his own party. This includes a credible opponent who has ballot access, has won delegates, and is more popular with potential swing voters. Trump faces twice as much dissent from his own party’s voters, and he’s underperformed pollsters’ predictions.
Is Nikki Haley this cycle’s Ronald Reagan?
Nikki Haley is currently behind in national polling and has yet to emerge victorious in a single statewide contest. Her eventual victory in the primary is plausible but unlikely. The same was true for Ronald Reagan in 1976 when he challenged incumbent Gerald Ford for the Republican presidential nomination.
Reagan lost primaries and caucuses in Iowa, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Vermont, Florida, and Illinois before scoring his first victory in North Carolina. Despite opening with an unimpressive 0-6 record, Reagan was able to grow his support further and presented a serious challenge to Ford. Reagan’s candidacy also showed that the Republican Party was in the process of fragmenting between factions, which hampered Ford significantly in the general election.
Nikki Haley’s 0-5 record is comparable in many ways to Reagan’s opening 0-6 contest record in 1976, and there remains room for her to improve. As with Reagan in 1976, she has a path to potential victory; also as with Reagan in 1976, she will be vindicated if her opponent is nominated by the party and then loses in the general election.
But what about the Gaza protest vote?
The short answer to this question is that the Gaza protest vote is negligible. Polling unambiguously shows that American voters are strongly in favor of Israel. The median voter wants a ceasefire in the same way that Biden wants a ceasefire and supports Israel within limits in the same way that Biden supports Israel within limits.2 The median voter is not very far from Senator Fetterman on this topic.
We have seen two major electoral tests of the Gaza protest vote so far. In New Hampshire’s Democratic primary, there was a campaign to write in “ceasefire” as a vote. This earned 1,512 votes, barely crossing the 1% mark. placing in sixth place behind not only Joe Biden, Dean Phillips, and Marianne Williamson … but also Republican contenders Nikki Haley and Donald Trump.
That’s right: More Democratic primary voters in New Hampshire supported Donald Trump than Gaza. “Ceasefire” even lost to Derek Nadeau, a presidential candidate who was so obscure that he still does not even have a Wikipedia page.
In Michigan, Rashida Tlaib led a campaign encouraging voters to vote for “Uncommitted” as a form of protest against Biden’s support for Israel. Because “Uncommitted” is a ballot line instead of a write-in, estimating the Gaza protest vote in Michigan requires accounting for the baseline level of “Uncommitted” vote.
There are two ways to generate a baseline. One is to look at prior similar elections. The most similar prior election was 2012, when Obama was running for re-election essentially unopposed. In that election, “Uncommitted” won 10.7% of the vote.
Another technique is to look for variation in the uncommitted vote. The Gaza protest campaign was supposed to demonstrate the electoral strength of a community that is narrowly geographically concentrated.3 The median Michigan county had an “Uncommitted” vote of 11.1% and the first quartile Michigan county had an “Uncommitted” vote of 10.2%.
Since both baselines agree strongly, this means that the Gaza protest vote in Michigan was probably around 2-3% of the Democratic electorate, or about twice the Gaza protest vote in New Hampshire (1.2%). This, in turn, strongly suggests that less than 1% of the overall Michigan electorate is willing to vote against Joe Biden on the basis of his support for Israel.
Given that most American voters support Israel, it is likely that more than 1% of Michigan’s electorate would react negatively to any concessions made by Biden that would help Hamas maintain power in Gaza.
Why is this not what the headlines say?
Media bias. Journalistic malpractice, really.
During the 2020 primary cycle, I analyzed media bias in an article that was published in Towards Data Science. (Also available here on Substack.) In general, coverage of Democratic candidates was biased both in terms of volume and in terms of tone. Media figures inside the “blue bubble” tended to be very similar to each other in terms of being highly educated, progressive on political issues, and embracing a postmodern constellation of beliefs, rhetoric, and tactics - and most of them wanted to tip the scales in favor of the candidates they liked.
In general, the uniformity of the blue bubble means that the media was biased strongly against Joe Biden during the primary season, both because he ran as a moderate (like Beto O’Rourke and Amy Klobuchar) and because he was a straight white male (like Bernie Sanders and Jay Inslee, who ran hard to the left and still were covered negatively). This negative coverage died down once Biden secured the nomination.
We are now presently in a very similar news cycle. Biden is facing negative coverage from the same unrepresentative “blue bubble” representing a very narrow segment of public opinion. In America, the educated activist left that is sympathetic to the Palestinian cause for reasons related to postmodern social discourse does not represent a very large segment of the population.
It is not possible to say if news reporters present a skewed view of the primary because they dislike Biden or because they genuinely think their own beliefs are common in the population at large. Most likely, it is often both.
Some caveats apply to this total regarding combining Nevada’s caucus and primary votes.
This is visible in almost all nuanced polling conducted on the subject. In general, “are you in favor of a ceasefire” polls well, but most voters want Hamas to return hostages and surrender.
Tlaib claimed to be speaking for the Arab-American community, and most of the organizational effort was visible in a few key communities (e.g., Dearborn). Support for “Uncommitted” was also high in a few college communities, similar to the “Ceasefire” write-in in New Hampshire.