The Guardian view on the US Democrats’ debates: Harris and Warren are setting the pace

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/28/the-guardian-view-on-the-us-democrats-debates-harris-and-warren-are-setting-the-pace

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Everybody knows Donald Trump will be the Republican candidate for US president in 2020. Nobody has a clue who his Democratic opponent will be. The contest to find the answer to this question will be a marathon not a sprint, and the marathon has only just begun. The first real votes will not be cast until February; the nominee will not be formally adopted for more than a year. It is also an unusually crowded field this time. As many as 20 hopefuls qualified (on the basis of their poll ratings and their fundraising) for the first candidates’ debates in Miami this week. This meant they were randomly divided in two groups of 10, putting their cases on successive nights. Since there is no clear favourite, this underscored that this week was not the conclusive battle but more the start of a winnowing process.

That reminder is timely because the two debates this week also had different dynamics. In the first, it was always clear that today’s hopefuls have significantly less faith than earlier Democratic leaders in the US economy’s automatic ability to expand and solve the material problems of ordinary voters, as well as a greater appetite for ambitious government programmes to achieve these ends. This made things straightforward for Elizabeth Warren, who puts these issues – including higher taxes on the super-rich – at the top of her agenda. Ms Warren arrived as the only one in her debate with poll support in double figures. She surely departed with that position enhanced. None of her rivals – who included the more centrist Cory Booker and the much touted Beto O’Rourke – wrested the initiative from her. The fact they missed this first best chance does not mean their campaigns are finished; but it means they are weakened.

The second debate not only contained more Democratic heavyweights but also the early frontrunner, Joe Biden. Mr Biden had a bad evening, with both his age and his record under attack. Eric Swalwell led the calls for a new generation to take over, while Kamala Harris, whose campaign had stalled in recent times, made a particularly effective series of assaults on Mr Biden’s record of political compromise on race. Partly as a result, the predicted focus on the differences between Bernie Sanders’ radical agenda and Mr Biden’s more cautious approach never quite materialised. Mr Sanders did not have a bad evening, but he made a less energised case than Ms Warren had done the previous evening.

Individually and together, this week’s debates show the Democratic party moving to the left, partly in response to the frustrating caution of the Clinton and Obama years, but also in response to widening inequality and the aggressive conservatism of Mr Trump. The big question the party will have to try to resolve over the coming months – the next debates are in July and September – is whether to fight Mr Trump’s rightwing radicalism with a more leftwing programme than in the past or to try to defeat him by tacking more to the centre to attract disgruntled independents and Republicans. There is no doubt that much of the party wants to follow the former course. The times undoubtedly warrant radical action. But the political risks cannot simply be ignored. The Democrats have an immense responsibility to America and the world to find the most effective way to beat Mr Trump. That may work in Ms Harris’s favour. The winnowing will begin to sort out the stayers from the sprinters in September. But there are miles still to go.

In any case, the famous axiom that all politics is local still applies in America. This week, in a ruling with immense implications for US elections, the supreme court voted 5-4 that it could not intervene in the partisan gerrymandering of electoral districts by state legislatures. The upshot, for the time being, is that the states can do what they like. Since Republicans control more states than Democrats and since even the most ambitious Democratic president would have little immediate prospect of overturning the ruling, the state-level elections of 2020 and 2022 have suddenly become far more significant. As Ms Harris said in response to the decision, the essence of democracy is that voters choose their politicians. It should not, she added, be the other way around.