2020 Democrat Nomination Bandwagon Effect

The 2020 Democratic Presidential primaries have been a whirl-wind of events and unprecedent turning of support like we have rarely seen before. The Senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, barely lost in a close race to eventual nominee Hillary Clinton, who then lost to Republican Nominee Donald Trump in the general election. This was a crushing defeat for the Vermont Senator who had rallied a tremendous amount of grass roots support and had seemingly been cheated out of a nomination from rules favoring Senator Clinton from the Democratic National Committee. Bernie Sanders seemed determined to not make the same mistakes again in 2020 and was leading the charge for the nomination early out of the gate, by winning  Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada. In all of those races, the former Vice President Joe Biden was receiving support in the single digits. That is until the South Carolina Primary was held on February 29^th. Biden received a tremendous 48.7% of the vote with the 2^nd place Sanders receiving just 19.8%. Following this win we saw a rallying electorate with major candidates dropping out and Biden receiving a huge boost. Pete Buttigieg dropped out and endorsed Biden, as well as Amy Klobuchar and Andrew Yang. The next string of victors for Biden would come during Super Tuesday when he would win a staggering 10 states, to Bernie Sanders 4. This would lead to Michael Bloomberg and Elizabeth Warren dropping out. Bloomberg would then endorse Joe Biden. Finally, on March 10^th Biden would then win 5 out of 6 states, surely securing his path to the nomination.

What we witnessed first hand was an example of partisan mobilization in the Democratic party. Walter Veit stated: "economics, psychology, and political science describes the 'bandwagon effect' - or alternatively 'contagion effect' - as a general cultural phenomenon or bias in which the rate at which the spread of ideas, behaviour, and trends more generally, rises with the rate of others adopting the trend.” Many scientists and psychologists have weighed in on why Joe Biden is now winning the nomination. A further trend that is occurring, especially with candidates endorsing Biden is the bandwagon effect. Veit continues to elaborate on this by saying “For Democrats, especially the moderates among them, there was a consolidation problem in deciding who to endorse. In a field with progressives such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, moderate Democrats were scrambling for votes amongst each other. The victory of Joe Biden in the South Carolina Democratic primary sent a signal for all the others to unify behind him. Had this decisive victory gone to any other of the moderate candidates we might be looking at a very different field now. It thus need not be a sign of the quality of Biden's candidacy, but rather an instance of the Bandwagon Effect. An easy analogy suggests itself from the success and failure of restaurants that might be based entirely based on chance, rather than their quality.”

The bandwagon effect and political mobilization of voters was seen in 2016 with Republicans and Trump. At a certain point in the campaign several big name Republican candidates dropped out and endorsed Trump and campaigned for him, name Chris Christie and Ben Carson. This type of bandwagoning is an interesting concept to study and analyze on when candidates decide its time and how they decide who to support. This year, it appeared to be after South Carolina and the candidate was Joe Biden.