With one eye on New Hampshire and one toward the very different electorate waiting beyond, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders engaged in a feisty but respectful debate Thursday night.
In their first one-on-one, side-by-side encounter, they very clearly delineated the difference between Clinton’s pragmatic liberalism—“a progressive is someone who makes progress,” she said—and Sanders’s fatalistic idealism, in which corruption makes nothing possible before wholesale change to the underlying system.
In the short term, at least, that difference appears to redound to Sanders’s advantage. Polls show him with a large lead over Clinton in New Hampshire, upwards of 20 points. He has built that lead campaigning in the state for nearly a year, on the same message he pounded away at Thursday night: that everything comes down to a corrupted campaign finance system through which Wall Street protects a rigged economic system.
Sanders seldom strayed from that single theme throughout the two-hour debate. He made it his opening and closing argument. He said he would pay for his plans by making “Wall Street bail out the middle class.” He argued more than once that legislation on issues such as immigration reform and climate change could happen only after reforming campaign finance laws—including a Supreme Court reversal of the Citizens United decision. He railed that “money controls the political process,” and when Clinton asked if he was accusing her of selling her vote, he essentially said yes: “There is a reason why these people are putting huge amounts of money into the political system.”
Clinton, while vigorously claiming the “progressive” mantle, seemed to be thinking outside the immediate playing field, to three groups of Democratic voters she hopes will treat her well regardless of a loss in New Hampshire.
One of those groups is Southern black voters, who dominate the next phase of the primary calendar. South Carolina, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, and Virginia all vote by March 1.
Sanders barely thought to mention race at all over the course of two hours—and did so most notably by stealing Clinton’s line from a previous debate, that Flint’s water disaster would not have happened in a wealthy white community. Clinton, by contrast, mentioned the importance of racial issues in both her opening and closing statements. (She also noted that she will jet to Flint on Sunday, a strong sign that she is already putting New Hampshire in her rear-view mirror.)
Clinton also had Hispanic voters in mind; they will be critical in the very next contest, the Nevada caucuses, and in the huge March 1 Texas primary. Clinton—I believe for the first time in a televised debate—called out Sanders for voting against Ted Kennedy’s immigration-reform bill. Sanders did not respond.
But a third group of Democrats may have been most important for Clinton Thursday night: moderate white voters in more conservative states—the old-fashioned lunch-bucket Democrats in states where she beat Barack Obama in 2008. That’s primarily in the industrial northeast, from New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Indiana, and Michigan.
Those Democrats have long tended to be on Clinton’s side of the lines of demarcation she drew on Thursday night. They don’t like their taxes raised; Clinton accused Sanders of planning to raise taxes to pay for his plans. They care more about small business than financial megacorporations; Clinton several times raised the importance of small businesses. They are more conservative on some social issues; Clinton spoke in favor of the death penalty. And, they don’t obsess, as elite progressives do, about campaign finance reform.
Or at least, all of that used to be true. One would have said much the same about New Hampshire Democrats not long ago; now they appear poised to vote 60-40 for the socialist raging against the machine. Although her campaign is trying to attribute that to the Vermonter’s home-field advantage, we may be learning that economic realities of the past 10 years have radicalized the lunch-bucket Democrats more than Clinton realizes.
