With candidates for the 2020 Democratic nomination popping up like mushrooms after a rain, it is worth noting that in the last two presidential year primaries, between 58% and 62% of the California votes were cast early by mail. The Iowa caucuses are on February 3, 2020, and the California primary is on March 3 [Super Tuesday], but early voting in California starts the day of the Iowa caucuses. In other words, it is not the case that someone can spend all of his or her time and money on Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina, and therefore hope to do well in California, because by then most of the votes in California will have been cast.
Of course, the first voting and caucusing will be preceded by innumerable debates, during which some hopefuls will flourish and others will wilt.
Bernie is apparently trying to recruit some women and African-Americans for his campaign team to overcome his weakness there.
It remains to be seen whether Trump will make it all the way to 2020.
I am not optimistic about the Democratic Party's chances in 2020. In my dreams, Bernie would have been the presumptive Dem nominee ever since the loss of 2016. I fear that he is too late to the race, now, though, having not officially announced, and with the field already so full.
ReplyDeleteHere's the always interesting Corey Robin on the various candidates:
ReplyDeleteBeto, Harris, Klobuchar, Biden, Gillibrand, Booker: The basis of their candidacies is ultimately them, their person. That's what they all have in common.
Sanders and Warren are the only two candidates whose basis is a set of ideas, well worked out over the years, about the economy and the state.
Among the many reasons that I have no time for the first set of candidates is that I'm so tired of these quintessentially American campaigns that are so wrapped up in the personality of the candidate, tied up in a bow of banalities—Biden as the white working class Joe! Harris as a woman of color who's a prosecutor for the people! Beto as the white man on a horse! Klobuchar as the abusive boss (maybe she's hoping to give Trump a run for his money)! Booker as the man of love—as opposed to mounting a comprehensive political argument about our world.
One of the things I've always found so strange about liberals and Democrats is how much they make fun of Ronald Reagan as an intellectual and political simpleton—when the slightest review of his speeches and writings (many of which he wrote himself) would show just how intense was this man's worldview, how slowly and carefully he worked it out over the years and decades of his move to the right—while running to embrace candidates almost entirely for their charisma (or putative charisma; I've never understood how people could persuade themselves to fall in love with a John Kerry or a Biden or a Gillibrand) and life story.
I've said this before and I'll say this again: the last successful Democratic candidate who had an actual story to tell about American politics and the economy, about where we were and where we were going, was Bill Clinton. I hated that story, but it was an analysis. Even Obama, whose speeches I've been reading so closely, didn't really have much of an analysis of American politics and the economy, despite his populist nods throughout the 2008 campaign.
Sanders does have a story and an analysis. Warren even more so (though I'm much more in synch with Sanders's). AOC has a story and an analysis. That's the kind of politics I want. Not these campaigns that show how impoverished our political discourse is in this country.
(Again, there are a lot of other reasons why I support Sanders over the first set of candidates, but this is one of them.)
Might be interesting to know what if anything Robin has to say about Buttigieg. I sort of assume he'd put him in the first group.
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