Democrats Rallying Around Joe Biden Could Alienate Generations of the Party's Youth Support

The 2020 Democratic primary has completely changed in the past couple of days. Following Joe Biden’s big win in South Carolina, two of the candidates who had been running as alternatives to Biden have dropped out and endorsed the former vice president. Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar — with Texas’s 2018 midterms star, Beto O’Rourke, for good measure — joined Biden at rallies in the Lone Star State last night, ahead of Super Tuesday voting.

For many on the left, the past couple of days have been a painful reminder of what the Democratic establishment thinks of voters. The message, while it may be softly spoken, is as clear for the electorate as it was for these candidates: It’s time to get in line. My great fear is how a Biden nomination has the potential to alienate large swaths of younger voters from the Democratic Party for generations.

The whirlwind of endorsements is more than just coincidence; it is a blatant attempt to consolidate power around the party’s official answer to Bernie Sanders, the man being propelled by a movement that’s tired of politics as usual. If these Democrats wanted us to believe this was an organic moment, they could’ve studied pro wrestling and learned something about narrative nuance first.

But behind the scenes, there are some subtle details that voters are just now starting to trickle out. Like the quiet role former president Barack Obama may have played in fostering this recent consolidation around Biden. Sources close to the former president (a cryptic phrase) reportedly told NBC News that Obama had sent out a signal that it was time to rally behind his former VP. And an unnamed Democratic official told the New York Times that Obama and Biden spoke to Buttigieg on Sunday night to make the case for what his endorsement would mean.

These developments bring to mind Politico’s reporting from November, that Obama had privately said he would get in the race to stop Sanders if it seemed like the Vermont senator was in a position to win. (At the time, a spokesperson also said Obama would support whoever ends up being the Democratic nominee.) The possibility of a Sanders nomination seemed much less real then than it does now that Sanders is leading in delegates and poised to potentially have a big Super Tuesday.

While Obama likely isn’t the only Democratic leader involved in the push to coalesce around Biden, the former president — or more properly, the reality of how he won his elections — is central to what’s happening now. Biden has taken to calling himself an “Obama-Biden Democrat” and clearly understands that the voters who propelled Obama to success are key to his run against Trump.

“We need to build on a coalition and a legacy of the most successful president in any of our lifetimes, Barack Obama,” Biden said at a rally in Houston yesterday. Whatever your assessment of Obama’s record (and some people have legitimate criticisms), the idea that we need to expand the so-called “Obama coalition” to overpower Donald Trump at the ballot box is salient.

But how exactly would Biden, of all people, do that? The Center for American Progress (also, apparently, no fan of Sanders) defined the Obama coalition in 2012 as “a multiracial, multiethnic, cross-class coalition — made up of African Americans, Latinos, women, young people, professionals, and economically populist blue-collar whites.” Certainly, Biden checks some of these boxes. He has support from some Black voters. Polling indicates he’s done okay with the professional class. But, if I’m being honest, that description sounds more like the Sanders coalition, especially in one big way: It includes young people.