The Ultimate Crowded Field

Little wonder that many Democrats are weighing a challenge. The Democratic caucus in the Senate is full to bursting with potential contenders. There has been chatter about senators Cory Booker of New Jersey, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Kamala Harris of California, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. Former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe has hinted he might run. There is buzz about Governor John Hickenlooper of Colorado and Montana governor Steve Bullock. Ditto Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti and former secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julián Castro. Former attorney general Eric Holder might run, as well. And then, of course, there is Oprah Winfrey, who says she will run if God gives her a sign.

This is a very long list. Several of these people will undoubtedly decide not to run, but there will surely be some surprise candidacies that nobody has thought of yet. In sum, we should expect a very large field.

That raises the question: Can Democrats select a quality candidate from among this multitude? A lot will depend on how the party rules perform.

We like to think of party nominees as the choice of the voters, but that is only half true. Individual preferences among the millions of primary voters have to be aggregated into a collective decision, using some set of rules that serve as a social-choice mechanism. Those rules can easily sway the outcome.

Consider, for instance, the 2016 Republican nomination. Donald Trump won 60 percent of available delegates but only about 45 percent of the primary vote. The difference was due to the fact that Republican rules award bonuses, sometimes substantial ones, to the candidate who finishes first in a contest, even if he does not win a majority.

Democrats do not have anything like that. Their system is proportional, which is to say that delegates are allocated, more or less, based on the portion of the vote a candidate receives in a given caucus or primary.

Donald Trump’s glidepath to the GOP nomination after the Indiana primary in May 2016 would not have happened if Republicans had the same rules as Democrats. Instead, there probably would have been a four-way battle between Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and John Kasich all the way to the GOP convention in Cleveland. No candidate would have won a majority of delegates, so there would have been some kind of brokered convention, with multiple ballots cast and delegates having to hammer out a deal.

There is an inherent trade-off the two parties make with their respective rules. Republicans prefer a quick and tidy end to their process, even if the chosen nominee is not the consensus of the party electorate. This has happened in the last three cycles, as both Mitt Romney and John McCain also wrapped up the nomination at a point when they had won fewer than half the votes.

Democrats, on the other hand, have rules that stretch out the presidential nomination contest unless and until somebody has won a clear majority of the party, even if that means the process gets a little messy. And it certainly has. Democrats have had knock-down, drag-out fights many times since the current rules were set in place. George McGovern in 1972, Jimmy Carter in 1980, Walter Mondale in 1984, Barack Obama in 2008, and Hillary Clinton in 2016 all had to battle through to the end. Carter had to fight Ted Kennedy at the convention itself, even if the eventual outcome was clear.

The composition of the Democratic party lends itself to such infighting, too. The party has long been an accumulation of factions with relatively few overlapping qualities, except a commitment to the expansion of government.

This is as true now as it ever was. The party as a whole is close to being minority-majority, meaning that Latinos, African Americans, and Asians outnumber whites. These ethnic and racial groups do not always agree among themselves, however. For instance, Latinos supported Clinton in 2008, while African Americans supported Obama. Among white voters, a declining share of the Democratic coalition is to be counted as working class, although they still play an outsized role in certain primaries, like West Virginia’s and Kentucky’s. Upscale white moderates have migrated to the Democratic party over the last 30 years, but they coexist with an aggressively leftist, activist base that often has disparate priorities among its own ranks—with environmentalism, gay rights, abortion, gun control, and other issues vying for supremacy.

Given this diversity, Democrats could use some sort of mechanism that nudges their factions to come to a consensus choice in a timely fashion. But their rules lack such a unifying force. Indeed, the Democratic Unity Commission—the group impaneled by the Democratic National Committee to evaluate the party rules after the 2016 nomination—has recently recommended doing away with most of the “superdelegates.” These are party officials who are able to vote as they please at the convention, unbound to any candidate. DNC chair Tom Perez has endorsed this idea, and it is likely to be enacted at the party’s next meeting this month.

What might this mean for 2020? As Niels Bohr once said, “It is very hard to predict, especially the future.” It is undoubtedly possible that some Democrat could emerge as the clear frontrunner, unite a sufficiently broad swath of the party, and secure the nomination in an expeditious manner. John Kerry managed this feat in 2004, catching fire at just the right moment to defeat Howard Dean in Iowa and New Hampshire. But given the multiplicity of factions within the party, the abundance of serious candidates who might run, and the lack of a mechanism to force a tidy conclusion to the process, the chances for a protracted battle are substantial.

It is not hard to envision three, maybe four candidates contesting the nomination all the way to the convention, each dominating some factions within the party while still falling short of a majority. Meanwhile, the elimination of the superdelegates would decrease the ability of the party leaders to preempt an ugly battle on the convention floor. And who is to say the eventual winner of such a knock-down, drag-out contest would reflect the values and interests of the whole party or serve as a winning alternative to Trump?

This is a general problem with the current nomination process, one that Republicans share as well: Primaries and caucuses essentially import the general election approach to settling political questions into the nomination—namely, campaigns, conflict, one candidate running against another. Is that really what parties should be doing? Partisans are all mostly on the same page, right? So why is spending more than a year fighting amongst themselves—compared to six months fighting against the political opposition—the smart move? Partisans, in theory, agree on enough points that a more consensus-driven approach could determine nominations in a more efficient manner. The only clear winners in the current system are the consultants and strategists who make a living working for campaigns.

For all the calumny they’ve been subjected to, the “smoke-filled rooms” of the old parties made a lot of sense in that regard. Like-minded leaders of the party came together, hashed out some deal over an extended weekend, and chose a candidate that the whole party, more or less, could live with. It wasn’t perfect, but these days it looks a lot more reasonable than the apocalyptic battle the Democrats might wage amongst themselves just for the privilege of challenging Trump.

Jay Cost is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.