Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are trailing Joe Biden 2-1 in most polls….
The two are selling a Progressive /Lefty policy push from themselves if they get nominated to represent the Democrats against Donald Trump next year…
Joe Biden on the other hand is selling the Moderate/Center policy he and Barack Obama DID for 8 year ‘s up to two years ago…
‘Change’ is ALWAYS what Presidential candidates offer to voters….
Sanders and Warren want to change Healthcare , Taxation and a whole lot else….All this WOULD be a HEAVY lift that most voters instinctively know will NEVER happen…And will cause issues in part’s of America Democrats need to gain traction in…
Biden is more simple and direct…
He want’s to remove Donald Trump from the White House ….PERIOD...
So far?
Biden’s thing is working better with Democrats in the poll’s…
Voters who are highly informed, ideologically consistent and politically active make up a minority of the electorate.
The rest — a group that commands the votes to decide the Democratic nomination — might prefer an emotional appeal to an analytical argument. They might default to well-known, battle-tested politicians whom they’ve grown fond of over the years. They might say they vote “for the person,” or “with their gut.” They might vote for Republicans on occasion. They might be drawn to superficial considerations like appearance and voice depth. And many voters might harbor traditional and even discriminatory notions of leadership that disadvantage nonwhite and female candidates.
When asked by a pollster, these voters might say they support Medicare for all. But they might not have thought much about it, and may not care much about the nuances that debate moderators try to tease out of the candidates.
All of this winds up posing a challenge to candidates who intend to appeal to voters based on policies reflecting a consistent worldview. The challenge is most obvious for the liberal, reformist and idealistic candidates who often manage to assemble a factional base of support among ideologically consistent voters, but usually fall short of the nomination.
Jerry Brown, Gary Hart and Bill Bradley are examples. They have sometimes been referred to as “wine-track” candidates (in contrast with “beer track”), a characterization that’s fitting because of the demographics of the voters who tend to back them (it also reflects the idea of a sophisticated and acquired taste that might seem obvious to the aficionados but isn’t universally held).
But the fundamentally nonideological character of the so-called moderate vote also leaves moderate candidates without as large of a constituency as it seems. Many moderate Democratic primary voters might be better understood as holding few particularly strong ideological or policy views at all, at least in an intraparty setting. They’re not an ideological faction. So there is no great applause for a moderate who opposes Medicare for all. There is no flood of donations.
Many of the moderates who wind up winning the nomination are able to overcome that by being longtime political figures with deep reservoirs of support, like Al Gore, Hillary Clinton or Walter Mondale. They didn’t become nominees because they were moderates, per se. But they weren’t going to lose simply because they weren’t as liberal as the party’s activist base. Bill Clinton is a notable exception, succeeding without that deep well of support at the start, although he had the benefit of a three-way race, and the Southern Democrats were effectively a faction in the party at that time.
This time, concern about electability offers another path for a moderate candidate, as it did for John Kerry in 2004. The collective assumption of electability-minded voters about what kind of candidate is likeliest to defeat Mr. Trump may or may not add up to a decisive advantage for any one candidate. But what is relevant is that it is not likely to be a strictly ideological consideration, and even analytical voters may draw on things like superficial appearance or biography to make a determination about who is likeliest to defeat the president.
None of this is to say that policy debates are irrelevant. Nor is it to say that an ideologically consistent candidate can’t win the nomination. But if Mr. Biden wins, it probably won’t be because of his policy record….