Julia Azari is one of my favorite political scientists. I’m a big fan of both her work and her very entertaining Facebook posts. Nonetheless, I am not nearly as confident as she is that the crowded Democratic primary field shouldn’t worry Democrats. In her recent FiveThirtyEight.com piece Azari writes, quite correctly, that “there’s no consensus on whether a long, divisive primary contest hurts a party in the general election.” She also argues “that a primary as competitive as the current one can be better for the party than artificial unity.” The argument among political scientists about what is called the “divisive primary hypothesis” is indeed a long standing and unsettled one, and “artificial” party unity hardly seems a worthwhile strategy or goal, though creating artificial party disunity among Democrats will certainly be part of the GOP 2020 playbook. Surely, the longer and more divisive the Democratic nomination fight is, the easier it will be for Republicans (and the Russians) to “hack” another election.
My concern is with Azari’s assurances to Democrats here because much of the data she is relying on to discount the potential danger of a prolonged and divisive Democratic presidential nomination contest in 2020 is from before the internet and so-called “big data” were weaponized as effectively as they were in 2016. Furthermore, the most divisive candidate in the 2016 Democratic primaries is back and will very likely remain in the 2020 contest past the point when he no longer has a route to victory, just as he did in 2016.
I agree that there is no expert consensus on the impact of divisive primaries on general elections. What I am arguing is that in the situation at hand the lack of scholarly consensus shouldn’t be treated by Democratic operatives, activists, or voters, as sufficient cause to ignore the potential negative impact of intense and prolonged intra-party division in 2020, especially since Bernie Sanders is running again. Scholars have the luxury of moving slowly and not outrunning the evidence. This is surely as it should be. In the present era of incredibly high stakes and hyper-partisan American electoral politics, however, I would suggest that Democrats have no such luxury and would be better served by a “better safe than sorry” attitude and approach to the party unity question in 2020.
My hypothesis, to the extent that I have one, is that the campaign communications environment since at least 2004 has changed far more and far more rapidly than it had over the previous 10 to 20 years and that these changes have increased the likelihood of a divisive primary being effectively manufactured and/or exploited by opponents with the financial wherewithal to employ a sophisticated high-tech disinformation campaign, a type of campaign that was not nearly as easy to run 10 to 15 years ago. For example, we now know that the GOP, the Trump campaign, and even the Russians actively bombarded 2016 Sanders supporters with micro-targeted anti-Clinton propaganda in an effort to depress Democratic turnout on Election Day. Had Sanders not attacked the Democratic Party so passionately and had he ended his campaign sooner and more enthusiastically supported the nominee, these effort may not have been so successful and the results on Election Day may have been different. The folks who weaponized Sanders’ anti-Democratic Party rhetoric and exaggerated his anti-Clinton rhetoric in cyber-space would have had less material to work with, and Democrats would have had more time to push back effectively if Sanders had not persisted in a campaign that was as much an attack on the Democratic Party establishment as it was on the Republicans.
In the 2020 contest I expect Sanders to have company in sniping the eventual Democratic nominee, possibly from a very odd Democratic aspirant from Hawaii who seems to have much more confidence in her campaign for the nomination than the evidence warrants.
The nature and reach of Sanders’ 2016 campaign for a “political revolution” was surely unusual and thanks to the internet, unusually successful at creating the appearance of viability in terms of fundraising and generating media attention. It seems to me that there is enough evidence suggesting that Sanders (and the high-tech manipulation of his supporters long after he dropped out) did hurt Clinton in the general election to warrant concern among Democrats that his latest campaign (among others) could be exploited once again in ways harmful to the 2020 nominee.