Obama hasn’t endorsed any Bernie Sanders backers
President Obama arrives on Air Force One with Rep. Patrick Murphy, D-Fla., and Rep. Corinne Brown, D-Fla., at Cecil Airport in Jacksonville, Fla., Friday, Feb. 26, 2016. (Photo: Rick Wilson/AP)
President Obama has endorsed 12 candidates for political office in 2015 and 2016. He has openly backed incumbents and first-timers, candidates for mayor, for the Illinois Statehouse, for the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives, candidates running from Ohio to Florida. Some face contested Democratic primaries. Others never did, or won their primaries and are now looking toward the November election.
Obama’s chosen candidates are all Democrats, of course. But they share another trait: Not one has openly endorsed Bernie Sanders for president.
In fact, of the 12, five have endorsed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while the others have remained officially uncommitted.
It’s not clear whether this is part of a strategy or whether Obama sees candidates running further to the party’s left as less viable candidates in the general election. White House officials declined to go on the record to discuss the president’s criteria for granting an endorsement. And given the relatively small number of candidates endorsing Sanders, it may not be especially meaningful to understanding how — or whom — Obama endorses.
The president, who has never been more popular during his second term than he is right now, laid down one clear marker in a January 7 New York Times op-ed. “I will not campaign for, vote for or support any candidate, even in my own party, who does not support common-sense gun reform,” he said.
Obama seems to have held to that standard, albeit with some flexibility. Former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, a longtime gun rights advocate, flipped on the issue in late 2015. In March, Obama endorsed Strickland, a longtime Clinton ally, in his primary fight, and the White House played down the Ohioan’s remarkable conversion on guns.
“Obviously, an individual’s record matters, but when it came to that particular promise, it gave candidates the capacity to change their mind,” Obama’s press secretary, Josh Earnest, told reporters.
One week later, Earnest explained Obama’s endorsements of Strickland and Rep. Patrick Murphy’s Senate bid by saying the president “has put his endorsement alongside who he believes are the strongest candidates in those two key states.” (Murphy’s rival for the Democratic senate nomination in Florida, liberal firebrand Alan Grayson, has endorsed Sanders.)
Obama hasn’t made much of a secret that he’d prefer to see Clinton win the Democratic presidential nomination. Current and former aides say she, not Sanders, is best positioned to defend and build on his legacy. At the same time, they’ve said he does not plan to endorse either candidate during the Democratic presidential primary.
To understand how the endorsement process works at the White House, Yahoo News spoke to aides to five candidates who have secured the president’s public support. None would agree to be quoted by name, or even described as working for a specific campaign, saying they did not want to offend the White House by laying bare a system so shrouded in secrecy that Obama aides won’t say how many Democrats have asked for the president’s endorsement.
But that is the starting point for each presidential endorsement: A candidate has to ask for it.
The West Wing’s political office, led by David Simas, takes stock of the candidate’s positions on major policy issues — whether they support Obama’s push for a Pacific trade deal, for instance, or his calls for new restrictions on gun ownership — as well as their viability in the primaries and the general election. One candidate’s aide said their boss’s long relationship with Obama also had been a factor.
If the endorsement request gets the green light, the candidate’s team then works with Simas and his aides to draft the president’s statement, which is always announced by the endorsee’s campaign, not the White House. The result typically highlights the candidate’s position on key issues important to voters, or showcases parts of the candidate’s experience, and frequently includes a boilerplate promise that they’ll fight for middle-class interests if elected.
“There’s a back and forth over the exact language — they’re very good and they know basically our issues, but maybe we know better what we want to highlight,” a senior aide to one candidate told Yahoo News. The statement was “tailored to fit our needs,” an aide to another candidate explained.
After that, it’s up to the individual endorsee to announce that he or she has Obama’s support.
Murphy “has been a tireless champion for middle-class families and a defender of the economic progress that American workers and businesses have made,” Obama said in his endorsement. “In Congress, he’s fought to strengthen Medicare and Social Security, reform our criminal justice system and protect a woman’s right to choose. Floridians can count on Patrick Murphy to stand up for them every day as their next senator.”
“Katie is a true champion for working families, with a proven record of taking on big challenges and delivering for people,” Obama said in his endorsement of Katie McGinty, who is running for a U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania.
“She spent her entire career working to promote clean energy and combat climate change, and worked closely with my administration to implement the Affordable Care Act and expand Medicaid coverage to more than 500,000 Pennsylvanians,” he added. “I know Katie will take that same tenacity and drive with her to the Senate to ensure affordable, available heath care, to protect Social Security and Medicare and to uphold and enforce Wall Street reforms.”
Aides to two candidates said they hoped the president’s endorsement would help with fundraising. An adviser to another candidate said he hoped the endorsement would help them squeak out a win in a difficult primary. All five aides said an Obama endorsement virtually guaranteed one day of overwhelmingly positive news coverage — the president has a roughly 52 percent job approval rating overall, but consistently scores in the 80s among Democrats.
That doesn’t mean it’s always only a positive. Obama’s March 28 endorsement of Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, whom he installed in 2011 as head of the Democratic National Committee, led to speculation that the Sanders-supporting Florida professor challenging her, Tim Canova, posed more of a political threat to her than previously acknowledged.
Obama called Wasserman Schultz “a strong, progressive leader in Congress,” adding that “she always stands up and fights for what is right for her district while passionately supporting middle-class families” — an apparent effort to defuse the assault from her left.
The result? Canova posted strong fundraising figures in the first three months of 2016, a $557,000 haul that included $100,000 pulled in during the last four days of the quarter — money raised right after Obama’s endorsement of his opponent.
