Two of the biggest Democratic Senate primaries are this week, and Bernie Sanders’s foot-soldiers haven’t put up a fight.
On Tuesday, Democratic voters will go to the polls in five states—Rhode Island, Connecticut, Pennsylania, Delaware, and Maryland—and cast a ballot for Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. But the day also features the first two blockbuster Senate primary match-ups of 2016.
In Maryland, Reps. Chris Van Hollen and Donna Edwards are vying for the nomination to replace retiring Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D); due to Maryland’s deeply Democratic hue at the federal level, the winner will be in a commanding position in November. In Pennsylvania, three Democrats are fighting for the right to challenge first-term Senator Pat Toomey (R): ex-Rep. Joe Sestak, a former Navy admiral who narrowly lost to Toomey in 2010, Katie McGinty, chief of staff to Gov. Tom Wolf, and John Fetterman, the small-town mayor of Braddock.
Both races will test whether Bernie Sanders has changed anything about the Democratic Party as a whole—and whether his movement exists beyond his campaign. In Maryland, Donna Edwards has become the darling of progressive organizations, winning the endorsements of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Daily Kos, and various labor groups. She would be only the second African-American woman to serve in the Senate, and her campaign has prioritized expanding Social Security, pushing more regulations on Wall Street, and redressing income inequality. Rep. Van Hollen, on the other hand, has played something much closer to Clinton’s playbook and is nobody’s idea of an outsider—before deciding to jump to the Senate, many party insiders saw him as the next Democratic House Speaker.
On the face of it, you would expect Sanders’s grassroots movement to energize Edwards’s campaign. But, to the irritation of some progressives backing Edwards, the Sanderistas have shown little appetite for moving down-ballot. And Van Hollen looks to be the favorite, with a sixteen-point lead in the most recent Monmouth poll, despite the large number of African-Americans voting Clinton/Edwards. Could Sanders have improved her fortunes with active support?
With a few small exceptions for House candidates, the Sanders campaign has jealously guarded its lists of supporters. And while Sanders has raised unprecedented sums for an insurgent, neither Edwards nor other staunch liberals have seen a similar rise. And unlike Hillary Clinton, who has fundraised jointly with state parties, the DNC, and the Democratic House and Senate campaign arms (the DCCC and DSCC) for the whole campaign, the Vermont Senator gave his first official support—a fundraising email for three House candidates—in April. And grumblings about Sanders’s lack of commitment to down-ballot races isn’t limited to money; on the eve of the Wisconsin primary, state party officials asked both Clinton and Sanders to urge their supporters to vote against conservative Rebecca Bradley in a key State Supreme Court race that was also on the ballot of the April 5 primary. Clinton incorporated the race into her Wisconsin stump speech; Sanders declined to do so.
In Pennsylvania, the revolution has also never gotten started. To be fair, Joe Sestak is nobody’s idea of an insider. He gained the ire of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party by successfully challenging party-switching Sen. Arlen Specter in the 2010 primary, before losing to Toomey in the November GOP wave. He has refused to mold his campaign to suit the DSCC, leaving them in the dark about even basic campaign strategies, prompting a scramble to find an alternative candidate that settled on McGinty. The DSCC has airdropped over $2 million in ads backing her, and she has received the (rare) primary endorsements of President Obama and Vice President Biden. It seems to be working, as Sestak’s long-held lead has evaporated, with Monmouth showing a tied race.
But Sestak is hardly a Sandersite. His platform focuses on trimming regulation on small businesses, infrastructure investments, and workforce retraining; it eschews lofty rhetoric about single-payer health care and income inequality, while barely mentioning Wall Street. The Bernie supporter in the race is John Fetterman, an idiosyncratic small-town mayor who cuts an unconventional figure. Despite his M.P.P. from Harvard, Fetterman cuts an unconventional figure; he is 6’ 8”, 300 lbs., tattooed, and eschewed long-sleeves for a debate—let alone a jacket or tie. But he is mired in the single digits, with little support from Sanders or his revolutionaries.
The “netroots” that backed Howard Dean in 2004 became a force to be reckoned with down-ballot, enabling the Democratic wave that retook Congress in 2006 with such unlikely figures as Montana rancher Jon Tester. Dean himself was the architect of the fifty-state strategy that prioritized down-ballot races in hostile territory in his tenure at the DNC. With his chances at the nomination marginal at best, Bernie Sanders’s revolution will not be a presidential one. If he can’t refocus it, it’ll probably die an undignified death.