Missouri voters find ‘comfort’ with Biden, reject Sanders’ call for revolution
Missourians aren’t ready for a revolution.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders narrowly lost the state in 2016, but on Tuesday former Vice President Joe Biden trounced him so badly that many news outlets called the result immediately upon polls closing. Biden’s victory demonstrates how much the political climate has shifted in the span of the last four weeks — and for that matter the last four years.
Former Kansas City Mayor Sly James called Sanders’ platform — which includes Medicare for All, free college tuition and the Green New Deal — aspirational. Biden’s pragmatic approach, he said, appeals to the state’s moderate voters after four years under President Donald Trump, whose presidency has been marked by bitterly partisan fights over impeachment, immigration and other issues.
“I don’t think people had the appetite to move to the other extreme in one fell swoop,” said James, one of many prominent Missouri Democrats to announce support for Biden in recent days. He originally backed former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
Biden’s Tuesday night victories in Missouri, Michigan and Mississippi help solidify his path to the Democratic nomination and cast doubt on whether Sanders, the party’s clear frontrunner just two weeks ago, can close the gap.
Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Missouri, an early Biden supporter, said Biden’s opponents had tried to persuade voters they wanted a race car, but they’ve “decided that a Ford or Chevy is OK with them. It gets them where they want to go.”
Cleaver said that Biden’s candidacy has become more viable with every shock or outrage from Trump. In recent weeks, Trump has called coronavirus a hoax and launched Twitter attacks on the foreperson of the federal jury that convicted his former campaign adviser Roger Stone of witness tampering and other crimes.
“It’s hard to sleep in the back of a car when somebody is speeding. You get nervous. And right now people are nervous,” Cleaver said. “They want something that is comforting right now and its name is Joe Biden.”
Biden’s victory was so assured that the Associated Press and other news outlets did not wait until results were tabulated before calling the state for Biden.
His dominance Tuesday night suggests that Sanders’ path to the nomination has severely narrowed.
“I’m sure his advisers are telling him if he loses the three M’s (Michigan, Missouri and Mississippi) his candidacy is not necessarily over, but it’s certainly in intensive care,” Cleaver said.
Biden won every county in Missouri, garnering 60.1% of the vote compared to Sanders’ 34.6% after performing well in both cities, suburbs and rural communities.
He won Kansas City’s urban core with 57.6% compared to Sanders’ 38.3%. Biden’s margin was even wider in the rest of Jackson County, where he drew 61.4% compared to Sanders’ 34.2% with 95% of precincts reporting.
There were similar margins in St. Louis County, where Biden’s 65.2% support was more than double Sanders’ 29%. In the city of St. Louis, Biden won 53.4% to 41.4%.
In Missouri, younger voters strongly favored Sanders, but did not turn out in large numbers. Exit poll data released Tuesday evening indicates that more than two-thirds of voters were over the age of 45, a group that strongly leaned toward Biden.
The exit polls showed Biden winning strong majorities of both black and white voters. He also won majorities of voters with and without college degrees.
“He won in the cities and in rural areas,” said Biden spokeswoman Meira Bernstein. “This is the coalition that can not only win the Democratic nomination, but can propel Democrats to victory this fall.”
The Missouri Democratic Party will distribute the state’s 68 delegates based on both the statewide total and each candidate’s performance in the state’s eight congressional districts.
As of 10:25 p.m. Tuesday, Biden looked poised to capture 43 of the state’s delegates, according to the party’s unofficial count. Sanders would capture the remaining 25.
Biden’s victory will be welcome news for many down-ballot Democrats in Missouri worried about the impact of a Sanders nomination, said Adrianne Marsh, a consultant who has worked for former Sen. Claire McCaskill and other Missouri Democrats.
“It’s clear voters are looking for a candidate who can defeat Donald Trump and that’s Joe Biden. I bet there are more than a few candidates down ballot breathing a sigh of relief that we’re another step closer to making Biden the nominee,” Marsh said in an email.
“He would simply be far more helpful to those candidates in Missouri for any number of reasons.”
Cleaver said Biden has pledged to keep an operation in Missouri through the general election, which would be a boost to turnout efforts for other candidates in the state.
Missouri Auditor Nicole Galloway, the only statewide Democratic official and a candidate for governor, announced her vote for Biden Tuesday morning after remaining neutral through the primary campaign. Galloway’s support for Biden came after an array of polls showed the former vice president winning the state by double digits.
‘A return to more normal politics’
Biden framed his campaign as a restoration and continuation of Barack Obama’s presidency, a message that resonates at a time when Trump’s administration is grappling with the spread of coronavirus and a possible recession, said Peverill Squire, a political scientist at the University of Missouri.
“It’s sort of pitched as a return to more normal politics and a time of considerable crisis both domestically and internationally. There’s a degree of comfort that we can have someone… who knows how the system is supposed to work,” Squire said. “I don’t know if given the current circumstances that revolution is what anybody wants at the moment.”
Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, speaks in broad, fiery strokes about the need for revolutionary changes like elimination of the the private insurance industry in favor of Medicare for All.
Biden promises more incremental policy changes, which he argues are more politically achievable. He would preserve Obama’s signature policy, the Affordable Care Act, and expand it with a public option, leaving private insurers intact.
St. Louis Alderwoman Megan Green, an early Sanders supporter, said many voters are “looking for comfort or normalcy or a time before Trump was in office. For a lot of people, Biden represents going back to a time when we didn’t have the atrocities that Trump pushes on us on a daily basis.”
However, Green questioned the logic of this approach and called on Biden to embrace portions of Sanders’ platform if he becomes the party’s nominee.
“What preceded Trump gave us Trump. If we don’t address the issues that happened in the years preceding Trump, we won’t win come November,” she said.
St. Louis Alderwoman Annie Rice, another Sanders supporter, said she was disappointed but not entirely surprised.
“It’s not 2016 anymore. We’re dealing with a different presidency and a different situation nationally,” Rice said. “I’m disappointed at the missed opportunity to pull the party left and I’m hoping the results are close enough that the party recognizes that we’ve got to do some bold things.”
Sanders’ ambitious platform has helped energize progressive activists and younger voters, but it’s also helped galvanize opposition to Sanders from the moderate wing of the party.
In the lead-up to Tuesday, the Jackson County Democratic Central Committee office received phone calls from voters who said they like Sanders’ policies but worry “it’s too much, too fast,” said Geoff Gerling, the committee’s executive director.
“A reliable Missouri Democratic voter—somebody who voted for (former Gov.) Jay Nixon twice— they’re just going to be more moderate and temperate,” Gerling added.
Gerling said before he dropped out the candidate he received the most positive phone calls about was former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who blanketed Missouri’s airwaves with television ads. He predicted most of those voters would have crossed over to Biden, but a small percentage appeared to still vote for Bloomberg whose name remained on the ballot.
Sanders appears to have a lower ceiling of support than in 2016, said Abe Rakov, who managed Missouri Democrat Jason Kander’s 2016 campaign for U.S. Senate.
In 2016, many Democratic voters embraced Sanders as an alternative to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, but now “people are definitely more focused on getting rid of Trump than in 2016. I don’t think anyone saw him as a threat to be president and now he’s president,” said Rakov, who worked on former Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke’s presidential campaign.
There’s also a “segment of the population that doesn’t seem to be comfortable voting for a woman,” which may explain why some voters who opposed Clinton in 2016 are more comfortable supporting Biden, Rakov said.
Biden acknowledged that sexism had played a role in the race in an interview with The Star on Saturday, but said he couldn’t judge whether it sank the campaigns of other Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and other female candidates.
‘Uncle Joe’
Biden’s surge in Missouri comes after large weekend rallies in Kansas City and St. Louis and a flurry of campaign events by his wife, Jill Biden, and others around the state ahead of Tuesday.
Sanders held a rally in St. Louis Monday, but he canceled an event in Kansas City as his campaign focused on Michigan for much of this past weekend.
Kansas City Councilman Brandon Ellington, one of Sanders’ Missouri campaign co-chairs, called the decision to call off the Kansas City event a mistake.
“I’ve reached out to the campaign team to let them know my sentiments,”said Ellington, who said he had received calls from prospective voters in Kansas City who were interested in hearing Sanders’ message and disappointed by the decision.
“I think it’s a mistake for him not to be in Kansas City… You need to turn out both urban centers.”
Kansas City Councilwoman Melissa Robinson, a Biden supporter, said the attention the campaign paid to the state this past week helped seal Biden’s victory.
“Missouri is a place where we’re very down to earth,” she said. “He’s ‘Uncle Joe,’ so I think by him coming and showing up and showing that personal side is helpful.”
Cleaver said that prior to last week he had heard less than 10 people interested in working for Biden in Missouri, but after Biden’s Super Tuesday surge last week he’s received an outpouring of calls from people looking to help Biden’s campaign in the state in sign of Biden’s momentum.
He compared Biden to a chocolate cake that everyone now wants to eat.
“It’s like, ‘Let’s take a bite.’”
The Star’s Jason Hancock reported from Columbia. The Belleville News-Democrat’s Kelsey Landis contributed from St. Louis.
This story was originally published March 10, 2020 at 7:59 PM.
