Thomas ferguson: Let’s put it in very simple English. Joe Biden was the consensus candidate of the Democratic Party establishment in 2020 because he was the only one who was broadly acceptable within the Party, looked viable against Trump, and could hold off Sanders. His candidacy was strongly reminiscent of Paul von Hindenburg’s second run for president in the last days of the Weimar Republic, when everyone from liberal elements of big business to the Social Democrats united around the doddering octogenarian as the only candidate capable of defeating Hitler.
I like to start the discussion of recent American politics with the 2014 midterm elections, which I analyzed in a piece with Walter Dean Burnham. The big story in 2014 was the stupendous decline in voting turnout compared to the presidential election in 2012. The turnout drop off was the second largest ever in percentage terms. Only the 1942 decline was greater, because millions of voters were shipping out across the globe to serve in World War II. But in many states turnout in 2014 collapsed to astonishingly low levels, akin to those of the Federalist era (when property suffrage laws limited voting). Regional differences in turnout between the North and the South also pretty much closed up for the first time since perhaps 1872, when much of the former Confederacy was still under occupation by Union armies. But this wasn’t because Southern turnout arced upward. Of course voter turnout in the South had been slowly rising since the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, but what finally brought the regions to parity in 2014 was plunging northern and western turnout. California probably witnessed the lowest rates of voting since it came into the Republic, while Nevada, Utah, and other states hit true lows. Burnham and I concluded that this signaled voters were sick of the establishments of both parties—that real upheaval impended.
What we got were challenges from outside the normal political spectrum. Trump challenged from the right, Sanders from the left. The dramatic entrance of candidates who did not stand for business as usual started a process in which turnouts rose sharply with these outsiders pulling in lots of people on both sides.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party leadership would not deal with Sanders. They famously cut the Sanders movement out of everything. In 2020, with Trump in the White House, Sanders ran again and lost, but he did quite well and the rest of the party consolidated around Biden. Sanders was undeniably a major force in the party and his movement could not be ignored. Elizabeth Warren represented a somewhat similar force.