Is the Coronavirus Creating an Anti-Establishment Primary Season?

I. Introduction

In mid-March, while waiting at the airport for a plane to take me back to my hometown in the wake of the mass closings caused by the novel coronavirus, I sat captive audience to the 24/7 television cable news blinkering in the lobby. It was the night of the Michigan primary (among others) and watching the returns come in it became clear within minutes that any flinty sparks of hope that the Bernie Sanders campaign had to live on past Super Tuesday were now vanished. A bit of an ominous thought sat with me for a while. It seemed that those of us on the left and the progressive movement as a whole had stacked nearly all our eggs in the Sanders’ basket. Watching these disastrous returns come in, I thought back to my friends involved in the Massachusetts political scene either running as or working for the numerous candidates pushing for a more progressive agenda in the state. With the lodestar of the Sanders’ campaign now faded and the coronavirus seemingly killing off public life in total, at least for the moment, I had a sense that all of us were in a real Charge of the Light Brigade-type scenario. That without face-to-face campaigning—the lifeblood of grassroots campaigns that lack the money for big-ticket advertising—progressive candidates were doomed to be trounced handily by the more established forces at the local level. Preventing any kind of seedlings to grow from this quite awful year. The original belief formulated that night watching the Michigan primary results come in was that the coronavirus will spell doom for progressive and insurgent candidates. Now, with the primary season nearly completed I’ve come to believe the opposite. Is the coronavirus fueling an anti-establishment surge in primary elections this year?

II. The COVID Primary Season

This year saw a wave of serious progressive candidates file to run in both open seats and even more significantly in seats held by long-time incumbents. In Massachusetts alone, there’s Jarred Rose challenging conservative incumbent Senator Walter Timilty, Suffolk alum Jordan Meehan challenging Allston-Brighton power broker Kevin Honan who has never faced a competitive election since being first elected in 1987, and Chelsea city councilwoman Damali Vidot mobilizing the changing demographics of Charlestown and Chelsea to oust incumbent State Representative Daniel Joseph Ryan among many many others (Anna Callahan, Erika Uyterhoeven, Ceylan Rowe, Nichole Mossalam, the list truly could go on…).

Coronavirus overnight seemingly halted all that momentum. The campaign strategies candidates had come to rely on to guarantee success were now a no-go. Public rallies, meet and greets, fundraising parties, and most importantly canvassing all became impossible to hold in the interest of public health. The loss of canvassing, the act of going door to door and having in-person conversations with voters, was the most severe. Political science research has consistently shown that canvassing is the single most important campaign tactic to increase voter turnout. An experiment cited in a Vox article about the importance of canvassing found that

 “voters called on the phone or sent postcards were not noticeably more likely to vote than those sent nothing. But canvassing was different. Just one in-person conversation had a profound effect on a voter’s likelihood to go to the polls, boosting turnout by a whopping 20 percent” (Kalla and Broockman)

This was not the only study to show the seismic effect canvassing can have:

“Hundreds of academics and campaigns have tested the impacts of various campaign tactics with randomized field trials. High-quality canvassing operations emerge as consistent vote-winners. On the other hand, impersonal methods have consistently failed to produce cost-effective results, no matter how you slice the data or which populations researchers examine”.” (Kalla and Broockman)

So what does it mean for candidates, especially those that didn’t have the resources for expensive voter outreach programs in the first place, now that in-person canvassing is no longer an option?

Well, it’s basic evolution. Primary campaigns like most social ventures have had to move their operations to the digital realm. A June ABC News report speaks to the struggle many campaigns had dealing with the transition away from in-person campaigning. Keybo Taylor, a first-time candidate running for Gwinnett County Sheriff talked about the challenge that his team faced

“Taylor and his team had to find new ways to spread his message. ‘It changed the whole dynamics of what we were doing,’ he said. Through mailers, Zoom calls and social media, they were able to contact potential voters. For Taylor, setting up a campaign was already a tough new experience to navigate, and the added digital pressure made it more frustrating.” (Kendall and Abdul-Hakim)

Taylor suffered a close loss to another first-time candidate. While the switch to organizing events on Zoom and using phone-banking as the primary means of voter contact is currently the best possible option it feels impossible to replicate the number of positive experiences that in-person campaigning can bring. Speaking from personal experience, as an intern on two primary campaigns and a volunteer with three more this year, the switch to all-digital has been highly stressful and very unfulfilling. Phone-banking can be anxiety-inducing during a regular campaign season in the high-strung times of today it feels like defusing landmines. So how can there be a surge of insurgent primary victories from New York to New Mexico from Kentucky to Pennsylvania?

III. Proving Conventional Wisdom Wrong

As hard as campaigning should be in the age of COVID progressive primary candidates with little established support have had very real and very groundbreaking victories. In the New York Primary last month school principal Jamaal Bowman ousted Eliot Engel, a Democratic congressman who had held the seat since 1989. Engel was one of the highest-ranking Democratic members of Congress and is currently chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Engel had received endorsements from every key powerbroker in Democratic politics from groups such as Planned Parenthood to Andrew Cuomo to Hillary Clinton. But was resoundingly crushed, losing by about 15 points to Bowman. Engel’s loss is an exceptional case. He made a world historically bad gaffe being caught on a hot mic saying “If I didn’t have a primary, I wouldn’t care” while demanding to speak at a local press conference being held by another elected official. Most notable the district was one of the worst-hit by the coronavirus. The New York Times reported that Engel’s public speaking skills weren’t the only issue “he also seemed badly out of step with the challenges of campaigning amid the pandemic, a crisis that killed more than 4,500 people in the Bronx and Westchester [Engel’s district]” (McKinley)

But Jamaal Bowman’s success is not just an exception. During that same primary election, the Democratic Socialists of America successfully elected all four of their endorsed state legislature candidates. Including Jabari Brisport to the State Senate, an educator and organizer, who got his start in Green Party politics of all places. New York was not the only place to see lefties sweep. In Pennsylvania’s First State Senate District, Nikhil Saval, a socialist organizer and founder of left-wing periodical N+1 Magazine defeated powerful Philly machine incumbent Larry Farnese. In New Mexico, four conservative incumbent State Senators who partnered with Republicans to keep the latter party the majority in the New Mexico State Senate were swept out of office including Senate Pro Tempore Mary Papen.

In Kentucky, Charles Booker, a one-term State Representative, challenged Amy McGrath, the chosen candidate to face off against Mitch McConnell for Kentucky’s Senate seat.

“Just last month, it looked as if Amy McGrath would coast to the Democratic Senate nomination in Kentucky. A moderate former fighter pilot with strong backing from the party establishment, she had raised over $40 million, far more than all her competitors combined. From her TV ads, you would have thought she was already running against Senator Mitch McConnell in the general election.” (Russonello)

In the wake of the killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and the mass protests that followed—Charles Booker was able to capitalize on his policies of criminal justice reform and his personal experience as a Black man to attract new media attention and rally progressively minded voters to his cause. Trading first and second place with Mcgrath in the weeks after the primary he ultimately lost by a little less than 3% after the final count of absentee votes. An impressive outcome considering McGrath spent thirty-one million dollars to Booker’s four million.

The ability to rally voters in the wake of protests over police brutality proved critical for both Charles Booker and Jamaal Bowman. Both leveraged their personal experiences into sound political platforms that gave voters something to rally behind. In a year where racial justice is critical to White Americans just as much as it is to Black Americans.

“roughly four in five Kentucky Democrats are white, and Mr. Booker could not be performing strongly without meaningful support from white progressives.” (Russonello)

Jamaal Bowman managed to win, not only in the majority-minority Bronx but the wealthy and majority-White Westchester county as well. In the cases of Jamaal Bowman and Charles Booker having a campaign narrative that matched the national mood helped both candidates overcome structural challenges and low name recognition.

The other answer to why primary insurgents are succeeding this year may lie in the buildup of decades-long work by progressive activists to create alternative institutional organizations. While all the candidates mentioned in this article are certainly underdogs. It’d be rare only a few years ago to see a candidate challenging an incumbent have the endorsement of two leading presidential contenders. This year Jamaal Bowman and Charles Booker had the vocal support of both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Other candidates such as Nikhil Saval also received the “Bernie bump” at a critical time. These presidential candidate interventions show a shifting Democratic primary electorate that is more willing to embrace bold progressive policy and challenges to the status quo. Previous Democratic presidential contenders such as Hillary Clinton, Howard Dean, or John Edwards (pretend that someone would actually want this endorsement) would not break ranks so eagerly. It also speaks to the groundwork laid by organizations such as the Working Families Party that gave insurgent Democrats a reliable safety net in New York to fall back on when the campaign season had to move to digital. The WFP collaborated with newcomers Justice Democrats to purchase $500,000 worth of airtime in support of Bowman. If a state like Kentucky had an organization as institutionalized as the Working Families Party to back Charles Booker he may have trounced Amy Mcgrath by the similar margins that Boman beat Engel with.

IV. Whispers From Across the Aisle

So Coronavirus can’t quite be pinned on the driving force behind these insurgent campaign successes and there’s surprisingly little reputable or academic literature on elections in times of crisis. Even more shocking there is no research that this author found on elections being held during pandemics. So observations about campaigns and coronavirus are mostly straight from the hip and have little empirical data to back them up.

One noticeable fact that seems completely unremarked upon is that pandemics coincide with two of the biggest wave elections of the 20th century. 1920 which saw a huge anti-Democratic tidal wave knock hundreds of elected officials out of office (Democratic nominee James Cox lost literally every county in New York) and came only a few months after the cooldown of Spanish Flu in the United States. The second being the 1958 midterm elections which came a few months after the little researched “Asian Flu”, an outbreak of the flu virus that was highly infectious although not as fatal as coronavirus or Spanish Flu, that struck in 1957 and ended its reign in the early months of 1958. The 1958 midterms represented the peak of Democratic hegemony in the House of Representatives, it was the only time in the 20th century that Vermont would elect a Democratic candidate to the House (excluding Bernie Sanders). So perhaps there is a precedent for pandemics creating an anti-incumbent feeling in American elections.

One research wing of political science that focuses on politics in times of crisis are the newly born scholars of populism. Researchers such as Inglehart and Norris have found that

“the rise of populist parties constitutes a reaction against a wide range of rapid cultural and economic changes that seem to be eroding the basic values and customs of Western societies.” (Reid)

Our current political moment certainly meets the definition of “rapid cultural and economic changes” with unemployment numbers often breaking new records and every American has to adjust to social distancing policies and learn the benefits of mask-wearing. That is why you see an equal rise in anti-establishment candidates winning all of the sudden in Republican primaries as well.

Conservative Congressman Scott Tipton lost his primary to a fringe gun-rights activist named Lauren Boebert who runs a gun-themed restaurant that refuses to comply with social distancing guidelines. Libertarian-Conservative Congressman Denver Riggleman in Virginia lost his nomination to a former Liberty University athletics director because he supported gay marriage. These two primaries match equally with the number of successful primary challenges on the left. Marie Newman in Illinois 3rd and Jamaal Bowman in New York’s 16th. With the average number of successful primary challenges usually being only 2-3 the 2020 election cycle is certainly set to double or even triple that average as another month remains. Whatever the causes of this anti-incumbent sentiment it is clearly being driven somewhere.

V. Conclusion

We do not yet know what shape the general election will look like between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. As of writing this, former-Vice President Biden still has not selected a running mate. The data and polling experts whisper in hushed tones of a landslide coming for the Democratic nominee. Perhaps in a nod to the 1920 election and the recovery from Spanish Flu in that previous era, we will once again see voters clamor for a “return to normalcy” with Joe Biden. Yet the local primary field has much potential to shape the general election and the tone and platform of people who will share the podium with President Biden. Here we see a much more radical Democratic future where Socialism continues to lessen as a dirty word day by day. On the right, Trumpist style candidates emerge from the woodworks. Primary candidates that come of age during this campaign in the age of COVID will for the most part be willing to turn to much more radical solutions and the voters, seeing just how dire our situation really is are willing to let them try.

Bibliography

Kalla, Joshua and David Broockman. 2014. “Experiments Show This Is the Best Way to Win Campaigns. But Is Anyone Actually Doing It?” Vox. https://www.vox.com/2014/11/13/7214339/campaign-ground-game

Karson, Kendall and Gabriella Abdul-Hakim. “Campaigning during the Pandemic: Local Candidates Get Creative.” ABC News. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/campaigning-pandemic-local-candidates-creative/story?id=71262188

McKinley, Jesse. 2020. “Jamaal Bowman Proves Ocasio-Cortez Was No Fluke.” The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/17/nyregion/jamaal-bowman-eliot-engel.html

Reid, L. Jan. 2019. “Why Insurgent Campaigns Rarely Win the Democratic Presidential Primary in the United States.” Athens Journal of Social Sciences 6(2): 139–54.

Russonello, Giovanni. 2020. “How Progressive Candidates of Color Are Building Winning Coalitions.” The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/us/politics/charles-booker-kentucky-jamaal-bowman.html (August 3, 2020).