Warren Can’t Win, But She Can Stop Bernie From Winning Xander Follow Feb 1 · 17 min read

On January 24th, the Warren campaign released a memo in which they lay out what they ostensibly believe to be their candidate’s path to securing the Democratic nomination — and on the first ballot, no less.

The memo begins by emphasizing that they’re taking the long view and are preparing themselves for a protracted battle: “We expect this to be a long nomination fight and have built our campaign to sustain well past Super Tuesday and stay resilient no matter what breathless media narratives come when voting begins,” it reads. This is followed by a roadmap that breaks the primary calendar into four phases, and briefly outlines their particular strategy for tackling each one. There’s a tad more to this memo, of course, but let’s take it step by step.

Following the opening declaration of intending to compete throughout the entire primary is a not-very-subtle attempt to temper expectations with respect to how the first listed phase (more specifically, the early voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina) will play out.

According to the memo, that’s “just the beginning,” and makes sure to remind us that they collectively comprise only 3.9% of total pledged delegates. Doubtless, this is at least in part an attempt to allay concerns and reassure volunteers, staffers, and supporters who might be growing increasingly skeptical of Warren’s chances as Iowa fast approaches.

The memo then swiftly proceeds to addressing Super Tuesday (the second phase) and beyond, touting a “broad, grassroots effort and organization” that they intend to build on and establish in all 57 states and territories, which will supposedly make up for whatever deficit likely caused in the first phase, and, over the long haul, steadily propel Warren into first place — overtaking Biden and Sanders, and nabbing the 1,990 pledged delegates (out of an estimated 3,979) required to secure the nomination on the first ballot.

In theory, this may sound all well and good, but there’s a glaring flaw in this plan: it goes against virtually everything we know about how presidential primaries work. In reality — and to the extent that this strategy bears any fruit — it is astronomically more likely to produce one of two outcomes: At worst, it will outright hand Biden the nomination on the first ballot. At best, it will force a contested convention in which an additional estimated 766 superdelegates come into play and essentially get to determine the outcome — and since they are overwhelmingly on the side of the Democratic establishment, it should come as no surprise that their chief priority will be to ensure that no bold, progressive agenda survives through that process. To any serious progressive, it should be readily obvious that either outcome would spell nothing short of absolute disaster for the progressive cause.

Allow me to demonstrate exactly why such is in fact the case.

How It Actually Works

The flimsy foundation upon which the roadmap is built in the process of justifying its central thesis is downplaying the important role of early states can play in shaping the later dynamics of the primary race. The sole piece of evidence presented by the Warren campaign in defense of this is the percentage of pledged delegates (3.9%) they make out of the total. That number may be correct, but in the absence of any further contextual analysis, it ends up overlooking other critical factors that can dramatically alter the equation concerning how things play out beyond that point.

One such key factor is how the amount of momentum generated from performing strongly within them can reshuffle preferences for voters in subsequent states, which will in turn affect voting percentages and thus proportional delegate allocation. This is known as sequencing, but has also commonly referred to in a different sense as the “bandwagon effect.”

Perhaps the most noteworthy demonstration of this phenomenon taking place in recent memory would be the 2008 Democratic Primary, in which Barack Obama’s upset victory in the Iowa caucus elevated him to the national scene and — having trailed Hillary Clinton badly in national polling and superdelegates before then — provided him with the perception of legitimacy he needed to mount a serious challenge to Clinton for the remainder of the primary season.

So although he experienced a temporary loss of momentum in the New Hampshire primary and narrowly lost the popular vote in the Nevada caucus, he went on to crush Clinton in the South Carolina primary and emerged with slightly more delegates in total from the early states. This placed him on equal footing with Clinton heading into Super Tuesday, and in no small part thanks to that he went from an underdog candidate with virtually no shot to being able to battle it out with her throughout the entire remaining primary in a strictly two-candidate duel, one that culminated in him defeating her at the very end of the season. To put it simply, none of this would have been even remotely possible had he not performed well enough earlier on (or, for that matter, if had to deal with a third viable candidate bleeding delegates past the early states phase).

But that’s just one example, you might say. Fair enough, let’s take a broader look and see if my case continues to hold up. For our purposes, the methodology behind the analysis I shall be providing will be as follows: (1) Examining the data and literature available concerning the importance (or lack thereof) of early states, especially Iowa and New Hampshire, and determining whether there’s a consistent pattern — or at least a key set of operating factors — that play into determining the eventual Democratic nominee; and (2) Connecting that information to this particular primary via applying a contextual framework that accounts for any significant historical and circumstantial discrepancies. (Every primary has unique contextual elements to consider, so both parts are at least equally important.) Let us begin.

Since the start of the modern (aka post-reform) primary era in 1972, both Iowa and New Hampshire have held national importance as early states. For Iowa in particular, this is most especially true since 1976, when an underdog candidate, Jimmy Carter, found his winning strategy by campaigning heavily there, finishing first in a strong showing, and thereby finding the momentum he needed to win later contests and eventually claim the nomination.

In addition to firmly establishing Iowa as a premiere state alongside New Hampshire, the event marked the origin of a conventional wisdom nugget you might have heard from pundits: with the exception of Bill Clinton in 1992, no candidate since 1976 has won the Democratic nomination without winning either Iowa or New Hampshire.

But this in and of itself would warrant an objection regarding the conflation of correlation and causation (with Bill Clinton and Bob Dole from Republican primaries being noteworthy contradictions) — not to mention an accusation of arbitrary statistical framing and selectivity; not unlike, say, being the only woman to defeat a Republican incumbent in the last 30 years, as a purely random and hypothetical example — so let us take a more comprehensive and thorough look.

Back in 2001, political scientists Randall Atkins and Andrew Dowdle set out to separate doctrine from reality with respect to the true importance of both states in deciding the eventual nomination of a candidate. This is what they had to say:

“Assuming that the exhibition season [defined as the period of time between the previous presidential election right up to the Iowa caucuses] produces a hierarchical ordering of candidates in terms of their odds of winning the nomination and the Iowa and/or New Hampshire elections change that ordering, then the results confirm the momentum model [presented in their research] by raising the position of some candidates in the field relative to the exhibition season expectations. On the other hand, if the results of these two contests fail to change the rank ordering of candidates from the preseason forecasts, then the results suggest any momentum gained does not have the capacity to affect the results of the exhibition season.”

After delving into their prediction models, the authors present their overall conclusions:

Including the results of Iowa and New Hampshire can significantly increase the accuracy of primary forecast models that only take exhibition season into account.

While both states do notably increase forecast accuracy, including New Hampshire results in particular considerably increases forecast ranking accuracy, thus holding a greater influence compared to Iowa. (That being said, the results of Iowa can shape the results of New Hampshire, as we’ll see in a bit.)

Momentum does play a role relative to exhibition season perceptions. However, depending on the overall dynamics of the race (most especially exhibition season) and how primaries are structured, losing both states does not necessarily mean, in and of themselves, either losing the nomination as the front-runner or identifying a new eventual nominee. (Take into account that in context they were responding to punditry consensus that seemed to place less emphasis as they should have on exhibition season and thus in turn disproportionate emphasis strictly on how Iowa and New Hampshire play out.)

Further, in 2008, then Iowa-based political scientist Peverill Squire further explores the role of the Iowa caucuses. For our purposes, Squire brings up three noteworthy points:

Iowa alone never determined the nominee in a “king-maker” fashion, but did grant its winner a considerable boost, susceptible to other contextual variables. In addition, if a candidate who finished second or third performed noticeably better than expected, they might stand to gain as well.

For all the controversy surrounding whether it’s justified that a small, demographically unrepresentative state gets to play such a role (which, for the record, I sympathize with but is wholly irrelevant to our purposes; we play the game as it is, as Warren herself would agree), Iowa’s voters do in fact, on the whole, tend to consistently reflect national voting preferences in primary contests. With few (understandable) exceptions, rather than dictating the national tone, Iowans tend to represent it.

Based on the above, it is safe to conclude that the critical role Iowa does play is less that of “king-maker” but rather “peasant-maker”: it winnows the field, separates the candidates who are able to demonstrate viability from those who don’t, and helps determine whether any momentum candidates can pose a serious a challenge to the frontrunner in the contests ahead.

If we connect the threads between Iowa and New Hampshire, we can complete the picture being painted here and be able to clearly visualize the dynamic at play. The relationship between Iowa and New Hampshire is simply that Iowa influences New Hampshire based on how New Hampshire expected candidates to perform in Iowa. Put differently, it depends less on how you perform overall and more on how you perform relative to expectations.

So Iowa plays into New Hampshire, which statistically helps determine to a greater degree of accuracy the eventual primary rankings, and as we’ve seen above, under the right circumstances this could mean either making a front-runner virtually unstoppable (if they win/don’t lose badly enough) or assist to varying degrees in blowing the race wide open for a momentum candidate to potentially claim top national spot. Sounds quite a bit more significant than the Warren memo seems to be letting in on, don’t you think?

Finally, in presenting its strategy the Warren memo seems to overlook the harsh realities presented by frontloading and the 15% threshold applied in the Democratic primaries’ proportional delegate allocation system.

Frontloading is the process by which state partisans move their contests to the front of the primary calendar, an accumulation of which renders a “loading” effect can lead to substantially shortening the amount of time in which a likely or presumptive nominee can be reasonably determined. In his research on the topic, political scientist Mark Wattier highlights the substantial difference this creates.

Since 1972, state leaders, wishing to wield greater influence in their party’s nominating process, sought to move their contests to earlier dates the primary calendar. It was gradual at first, but greatly escalated in 1984, again in 1996, and yet another time in 2000 — at which point Super Tuesday was worth a whopping 1,183 delegates for Democrats, or one third of all delegates (which is still less than this primary season, despite only counting pledged delegates). The result is perhaps best demonstrated by the figure below:

The figure illustrates the effects of frontloading by juxtaposing the election year with the corresponding number of weeks-to-50-percent (i.e. time when a candidate could legitimately claim being the nominee). As can be seen, the nomination contests of 1968 took 12 weeks to credibly presume a nominee. By contrast, it only took five weeks in 2000, which happens to have remained the same for Democrats in 2004. (Beyond this figure, clearly the 2008 Democratic primary was a stark exception to this trend, which is useful for our purposes.)

This matters because the electoral effect of frontloading is that depending on the frontrunner and the dynamics of a particular primary, frontloading can make it much, much harder for a momentum candidate trailing behind the frontrunner to win. Look at our current primary calendar. All early state contests take place in February (Iowa is on the 3rd, New Hampshire is on the 11th, Nevada the 22nd, and South Carolina the 29th). When is Super Tuesday? March 3rd. How many delegates will be awarded on Super Tuesday? 1,357 (or 34.1% of the total, so by the end of March 65.4% of all pledged delegates will have been awarded). In other words, if the early states don’t hurt the frontrunner, there is little to no time for or a momentum candidate’s ranking to significantly change in the upward direction by the time most delegates are awarded, as we’ve seen in the 2016 Democratic primary. None of the delegate bonuses and penalties applied by the DNC for late/early dates manage to significantly negate this fact.

To put this plainly, presidential primaries will be thus increasingly made more in the process of the year before the primary season (i.e. exhibition season) and by the time we can throw in Iowa and New Hampshire’s results, one can be sure to a remarkable degree whether the frontrunner will proceed more or less uninterrupted to the nomination or whether a major disruption might take place. In terms of this particular election, it might be helpful to think of all this in terms of casino gambling; the house (or establishment) may not always win, but the odds are sure as hell rigged in their favor from the start. Keep this in mind as we proceed to analyze the dynamics of this particular primary.

Coupled with frontloading, what places the final nail in the coffin for the memo’s outlined strategy is that in addition to the gigantic crowding of delegates early into the primary calendar, the primary contests apply a harsh 15% threshold that a candidate has to meet in order to be awarded any delegates in a given county or district. Moreover, in order to be eligible for state delegates (which comprise roughly one-third of the state’s entire delegates), the candidate has to meet that voting threshold once again on the state level. As FiveThirtyEight illustrates, this has a sharp winnowing effect on the field:

When you factor in sequencing, what you’re left with is a stark realization that the less you win early on — especially as a trailing underdog yet to demonstrate sufficient momentum or viability — the less you can win later on. More importantly, if you’re a momentum candidate and you lose early on to the frontrunner (or fail to sufficiently damage them), then the chances of overtaking them later on become almost overwhelming, if not near zero.

So to summarize the above, the importance of early states cannot be overstated for this particular primary, especially for candidates in the positions of Warren and Sanders as far as winning on the first ballot goes. The reality is simply that the narratives generated from the first two states will determine to a significant degree whether any substantial changes occur by the time Nevada and South Carolina get to vote. Super Tuesday arrives right after that, and should Joe Biden manage to hold on until then, he will almost certainly be the nominee.

By contrast, if Warren fails to win either of those first two states — which is almost a certainty at this point given all the external data we have, and the fact that the Warren campaign went out of its way to promote the false narrative that they don’t matter much to the big picture, revealing that their internal numbers probably aren’t all that promising either — the entire plan put forth in the memo falls apart.

The Warren Roadmap: Narrative vs. Reality

You might have noticed that it only took basic primary physics to take it all apart. I haven’t even touched on fundraising, at which point it only gets worse. The memo states that they plan to not only keep all present infrastructure, but expand it and maintain it in key areas for the general election, to which I ask: with what money and to what end? Warren’s fundraising numbers haven’t been stellar to say the least. The only end to which this would serve given the most likely outcomes out of early states would be deceiving supporters — who might otherwise back another candidate who can actually win — into funding a sinking and non-competitive campaign (as far as the first ballot goes), falsely advertising that they will compete to win on the first ballot and somehow set up the infrastructure for defeating Trump and taking back Congress at the same time.

This begs the question: if the task is to stay in the race as long as possible, even with no realistic chance of winning on the first ballot, is the Warren campaign willing to take big money to achieve that goal if needed? The memo gives legroom for that by only stating that Warren has spent zero time with big money donors. But she doesn’t have to personally spend any time with them to collect money. Other personnel affiliated with the campaign can do that on her behalf and the statement would remain technically true. And if you’re wondering why I’m having such a hard time taking Warren at her word, her record speaks for itself: she has funneled money from her 2018 senate campaign into her presidential campaign, couldn’t swear off not taking big money in the general election until last October, and according to her record, Warren doesn’t exactly seem to have a lot of qualms when it comes to taking big money in general.

To put the icing on the cake, if current projections hold, Warren will, by virtue of basic campaigning dynamics, undermine Bernie’s early state momentum narrative (which is to say beyond fragmenting the progressive vote within those contests to begin with) to promote her own campaign’s narrative that results from early states don’t matter all that much. In this particular respect alone, she might as well campaign and fundraise directly for Biden.

Hence, staying in the race beyond that point (assuming the numbers aren’t bad enough to effectively compel her to drop out) will only serve to derail whichever candidate happens to share the greatest overlap of support with her — and by virtue of being a momentum candidate, at the same time happens to require as much demonstrable electability as possible. To what end? In the hopes of accumulating enough delegates in her column to have some leverage over what happens later.

In other words, Warren can’t win, but is, for all intents and purposes, willing to obstruct Bernie from winning for the risky gamble that she can be nominated at a contested convention from third place (that’s what her “unifying candidate” narrative is for). Failing at that, she could always side with whoever offers the most power and political expediency when the time comes (most likely Biden, given the current trajectory). Should Bernie by some miracle manage to overcome both and win on the first ballot, hypothetically speaking, she could always side with him if/when that happens. This way, she keeps her options open as tries to maximize as much power as she can for herself without committing too early. (Of course, a concomitant consequence of this strategy in the first place given the current state of our primary will be that it comes at the expense of costing Bernie the only realistic shot he has at winning the nomination — winning authoritatively on the first ballot.) Though if you really think about it, she would prefer siding with Biden and may very well endorse him during the primary season should that prove the most expedient choice, as that significantly grants her more power at a considerably shorter amount of time compared to Bernie.

Oh, and if you’re still under any illusion that Bernie pooling delegates with Warren at a contested convention is even remotely worth considering, perish the thought. That false narrative has been thoroughly debunked. And I would go as far as suggesting that the only purpose its promotion served from the very beginning was for Warren to shield herself from any criticisms from her left aimed at exposing her true motives. When you cannot defend yourself to progressives on record, policy, and campaigning strategy choices — basically tell the truth in terms of what you actually think and intend to do — this is the kind of stuff you’d resort to.

It should also be stated in this respect that Warren’s strategy to force a contested convention ignores by necessity just how much a political catastrophe it would result in. No matter who gets nominated (though you can be reasonably sure it won’t be Bernie as much as they can help it), it would invariably emerge from a process entailing a great deal of strife and acrimony (well above and beyond anything we’ve seen yet) that unfolds in a very public way. Worse yet, nominating someone in third place, and selected largely by Democratic insiders after endless brokering against progressive priorities, would only serve to further exacerbate any resentment and bitterness in the party — one that is already experiencing a civil war between its progressive and corporate factions, especially since the aftermath of the 2016 Democratic primary.

Besides the fact that attempting to amiably reconcile those two camps in the first place is a fool’s errand in and of itself, even if that was possible, no unity could realistically emerge from this process. Instead, you would end up with a broken and fractured party nominating a deeply damaged candidate who was chosen in spite of the popular vote.

Needless to say, this would be a recipe for disaster come the general election, and throws a veritable wrench into the seriousness Warren’s memo attempts to convey with respect to her prioritizing defeating Trump in the general. Counting on a reckless primary strategy such as this one (with the parachute option of siding with Biden if it doesn’t work) is a sure way to hand Trump re-election, devastate the progressive cause, and damage the party perhaps beyond all repair in the foreseeable future. Trust me, it would result in nothing but a big, structural wreck.

Wake Up, Because It’s Now or Never

As Nate Silver observes in his own way, the only way to prevent this from happening is to make this a two-person race as soon as possible. Frankly, the ideal time from a purely strategic standpoint would have been before Iowa, but since that’s not going to happen, then right after Iowa/New Hampshire and most certainly before Super Tuesday.

Otherwise, the door opens for either handing Biden the nomination outright or preventing anyone from winning on the first ballot so that maybe Warren gets to negotiate a “unity” nomination, despite being the candidate with the least delegates when it becomes clear that no one will win on the first ballot, both of which probably ending in re-electing Trump. Either way, the establishment wins, and progressives (and the working class as a whole, for that matter) loses their once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to overturn the neoliberal consensus that has destroyed millions of lives with unflinching support from the highest office of political power.

When considering how high the stakes truly are, not just for the millions of Americans who continue to suffer and die under the crushing weight of a diabolically oppressive system so that a privileged few get to concentrate ever increasing amounts of wealth and power, but for working class members around the world as well who are absolutely powerless in this process and yet their lives and deaths continue to be dictated by it, allowing this to happen would be an unspeakable tragedy.