18 Candidates and Counting: The Democratic Debacle

The number of presidential candidates in the 2020 Presidential Election decreased this week as one of President Trump’s primary challengers, Mark Sanford, decided to end his candidacy.  However, it looks like the number of candidates in the Democratic primary continues to grow; even though the number of candidates usually drops as the Iowa Caucuses approach.

Billionaire former Mayor of New York City Michael Bloomberg has filed to run in Alabama and Arkansas, which will hold their presidential primaries on “Super Tuesday,” March 3.  Bloomberg appears confident that he can bypass the early states that normally have an enormous impact on the outcome of the race.  Over the past several election cycles, no candidate has gone on to win the Democratic nomination without winning Iowa, New Hampshire, and/or South Carolina.  All of those primaries will take place in February this year; before Super Tuesday.

In the modern Democratic Party, only two types of candidates exist: socialists and economic pragmatists.  Centrists and moderates do not exist.  All of the candidates support abortion, gun control, and some form of government healthcare to varying degrees.  The candidates only differ on the issue of economics; specifically, how much or how little to tax the rich and whether or not the United States should embrace Medicare-for-all or simply improve upon Obamacare. Bloomberg’s decision to run appears motivated based on fear among the liberals on Wall Street that Elizabeth Warren, who has made a career out of demonizing the high-income earners in the United States, will receive the Democratic nomination over economic pragmatist Joe Biden.  These concerns likely stem from the fact that Biden has found himself in fourth place behind Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Pete Buttigieg in Iowa and trailing New England residents Warren and Sanders in most of the polls in New Hampshire.  While South Carolina, which has a high black population, may bail Biden out, many in the party appear concerned about his ability to go the distance.  It probably does not help Biden that the South Carolina primary will not take place until the end of the month, after voters in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada could have voted for somebody else.

If Democratic Party insiders really saw polling as the holy grail, they would have little to worry about if Biden receives the nomination.  A poll released this week showed Biden and all of the other Democratic candidates in Georgia.  It looks like the chickens have come home to roost for Republicans who have supported liberalizing America’s immigration policy.  The explosion of the foreign-born population in the two suburban Atlanta districts likely explains the state’s lurch to the left.  Georgia’s 6^th and 7^th Congressional Districts have sent Republicans to Congress for years and given Republican presidential candidates substantial margins.  However, President Trump barely won both of the districts in 2016.  In 2018, the Democrats picked up the 6^th District in the House of Representatives and Republicans just barely held on in the 7^th.  Both districts have foreign-born populations exceeding 20 percent; far above the national average.  To put things in perspective, the very first poll taken in Georgia ahead of the 2016 Presidential Election followed Hillary Clinton beating all three of the potential Republican challengers named; although two of them did not actually run. 

Even if the rules of political gravity kick in and enable President Trump to win Georgia, the head-to-head polling between the President and potential Democratic opponents shows Biden winning in most of the other battleground states. On the other hand, when matched up against the other two frontrunners, Sanders and Warren, President Trump performs much better. 

However, despite the fact that Biden beats President Trump in most of the head-to-head matchups in battleground states, do not appear confident in his ability to run a competitive race. He has developed a reputation as a gaffe machine, has done a poor job fundraising compared to the other candidates, and his “rallies” do not come close to matching President Trump’s in terms of volume and enthusiasm. Should Biden fail to win the Democratic nomination, the party establishment fears that one of the other, more liberal candidates will win the nomination instead; eliminating the advantage enjoyed by the party in the general election.  Party insiders seem to view Bloomberg as more competitive in a general election; which they so desperately want to win.

Besides New Yorker Judge Judy and maybe some other liberals who live in New York City and cannot stand the incompetence of Mayor Bill de Blasio, Bloomberg appears to have little support within the Democratic Party.  A Fox News poll taken before Bloomberg’s entry into the race found that only six percent of Democratic primary voters would “definitely vote for” the three-term New York City mayor who sees guns and big gulps as the biggest threats to American democracy.

If Bloomberg has entered the race with the goal of derailing Warren and Sanders’s candidacies, those efforts seems kind of doomed.  After all, Sanders and his protégé, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, gave the Bloomberg candidacy a tepid response during a joint interview on ABC.  Their supporters, as well as Warren’s, seem unlikely to ditch their candidate in favor of a billionaire who epitomizes the two things they hate most about America: success and “stop and frisk.” While they probably appreciate his help in turning the House of Representatives blue in 2018 and turning the Virginia legislature blue in 2019, most liberals seem lukewarm to the idea of a Bloomberg presidency.

In order for Biden’s candidacy to crater, he would have to lose support in the African-American community; which none of his competitors, including the African-American Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, have matched in the polling.  Perhaps that explains why former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick decided to enter the race at the last minute.  Patrick served as governor of the Bay State from 2006 to 2014; meaning that he has something else in common with Bloomberg besides entering the race at basically the last possible second: they both fit the definition of “yesterday’s news.”  As Bloomberg left office a year earlier than Patrick, both of them exited the political stage before the rise of President Trump.   Patrick apparently believes his close friendship with former President Obama will help him in a general election.  Considering his late entry into the race and his low name ID, it seems unlikely that he will even make it there to begin with.

Patrick became governor in the blue wave of 2006; crushing his opponent Kerry Healey, who served as unpopular outgoing Governor Mitt Romney’s lieutenant governor, by double digits. In 2010, he just barely won re-election with a mere plurality of the vote in one of the most liberal states in the union. Shortly after his close re-election, he decided not to run for re-election in 2014 and became Manager of Bain Capital, a venture capital firm that Romney once worked for.  In other words, Patrick has the exact same vulnerability that Bloomberg has: an association with big business at a time when the grassroots wants to punish the rich by dramatically increasing the corporate tax rate and has committed to instituting a “wealth tax.” As for the idea that an Obama endorsement of Patrick would move the needle, consider this: nearly every single candidate has suggested making substantial changes to the former President’s signature legislative achievement: the Affordable Care Act.  Keep in mind that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the new face of the Democratic Party, has made it clear she does not want to “go back” to the good old days of Obama.

Bernie Sanders may have actually had a point when he talked about the arrogance of Michael Bloomberg.  If candidates who have spent months campaigning have failed to make it into the top tier despite appearing in every single debate that has taken place thus far, what makes Bloomberg and Patrick think that they can leap frog over all of the second-tier candidates and make it into the top five?

Perhaps they do not realize it but based on their background and ideology, Bloomberg and Patrick’s late entries into the race will do more to cut into Biden’s percentage of the vote; if they have any impact at all.  If Bloomberg cuts into Biden’s support among moderate voters and Patrick puts a dent in his support in the African-American community, Warren could end up prevailing by keeping her coalition of super-woke progressives together.  With another debate just around the corner, the dynamic duo of late entrants will not have a chance to participate.  They have very little room to persuade since polling has found that 70 to 80 percent of Democrats feel satisfied with the existing field; indicating a lack of desire for “something different.”

If anything, Blooomberg or Patrick seem more likely to emerge as consensus candidates in the event of a contested convention.  Republicans had a much easier time avoiding a contested convention in 2016 because they had “winner-take-all” primaries in a number of states; in addition to “winner-take-most” states and proportional states, where multiple candidates could end up receiving delegates from a single state.  The large number of “winner-take-all” states enabled President Trump to reach the magic number of 1,237 delegates faster in a crowded primary.  Democrats do not have the luxury of “winner-take-all states,” all of their delegates get awarded on a proportional basis.  The high number of candidates makes it quite possible that none of the Democratic candidates will reach the magic number of delegates required to clinch the nomination. 

From the establishment’s perspective, a Bloomberg-Patrick ticket would make a lot of sense.  Bloomberg’s former membership in the Republican Party would make him palatable to the Never-Trumpers and moderate Republicans who find Trump abhorrent but would not bring themselves to vote for a socialist.  Having two people with experience on Wall Street would blunt concerns about the ascendance of socialism in the Democratic Party.  Patrick’s presence on the ticket could enable African-Americans to turn out at the same levels that they did for President Obama.

At the same time, both Bloomberg and Patrick share some vulnerabilities with the unsuccessful standard bearer in 2016.  Their old age makes them unattractive to the extremely energetic youth wing of the Democratic Party pushing for socialism, the Green New Deal, open borders, and the abolition of the First Amendment. While Patrick’s presence on the ticket might placate concerns about the Democrats nominating “two old, white males,” such a ticket would fail to please the feminists pining for a progressive woman President. If the party ultimately decides to nominate this “consesnsus” ticket despite the fact that neither one of them came close to winning the popular vote in the Democratic primary, it would probably spur a backlash among the supporters of the candidate who received the most votes; especially if it’s Sanders or Warren. 

With just two and a half months to go until the Iowa caucuses, the Democratic Party remains divided.  The addition of two has-beens, who have not served in elected office for five years, to the lengthy list of candidates will likely do little to unite the party. Hopefully, whoever ends up as the Democratic nominee will end up uniting Republicans, independents, and even Democrats who supported President Trump in 2016 to do so again in 2020.  The future of the country hangs in the balance.