We’re three weeks into the 2020 race and is it too early to get a sense of the Democratic fields’ strengths and weaknesses? Of course it is. In November 2014 no one had any idea Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee, possibly including Donald Trump. Anything can happen!
But usually, “anything” doesn’t happen. Hillary Clinton was the front-runner in November of 2014 and she became the Democratic nominee in 2016. Mitt Romney was the front-runner in November 2010 and he became the nominee two years later. Early favorites who went on to win the nomination include George W. Bush, Bob Dole, Al Gore, and H.W. Bush. And even Obama—who was a longshot and definitively not the favorite—was making moves by this time in 2006 and officially declared as a candidate by February of 2007.
Which is to say that while the favorite doesn’t always win, early positioning isn’t meaningless.
So let’s rank the Democratic field as (we think) we know it today.
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(1) Bernie Sanders. Bernie is second in the polls. (We’ll stipulate that at this point, polling is indicative of name ID more than anything else. That’s why Beto is running third.) On the one hand, that’s not great. Why is the 2016 runner-up sitting behind Joe Biden, who hasn’t gotten a vote on his own two legs since he finished fifth in the Iowa caucuses in January of 2008?
And why has Sanders’ level of support dropped? He got 43 percent of the Democratic vote in 2016, but he’s only polling at 19 percent now. Maybe that tells us that Sanders’ movement was less about Bernie and more about a fluid anti-Clinton vote that had nowhere else to go.
Also: Sanders is still weak with African-Americans. Black voters carried Clinton to the nomination in 2016; Sanders couldn’t break through with them. And in the Politico poll, he’s at 19 percent support overall, but 15 percent among black voters.
That said, he should still be our presumptive frontrunner. He raised $230 million in the 2016 cycle; $130 million of that from small donors. That means he has a built-in network of people to go to for money, support, and campaign organization. Do you need fundraising and infrastructure to win? Nope. Would you rather have it than not? Yup.
More importantly, Bernie is where the Democratic party wants to be. The message Democrats should take out of the 2018 midterms is that Tester and Manchin won while Gillum and Abrams lost. But take a look at Democratic attitudes as they are currently constituted at the elite level. Do you think this looks like a movement that wants to be more like Manchin and Tester?
Me neither.
Sanders is authentic. He has a populist message. He’s in sync with his party’s base. And he has a network ready to be activated at the push of a button. If he wants to run, he’s going to be a tough out, even though he’s be the lone guy in the field older than Trump.
(2) Kirsten Gillibrand. She was initially elected as a populist Democrat but over the last 10 years Gillibrand has been steadily repositioning herself to the left, because that’s where her party is. Here’s 538’s Clare Malone surveying the change:
In 2017, things are different. Gillibrand supports a path to citizenship, and has called Trump’s border wall a “hurtful, terrible policy that will never work.” In 2016, she wept in an interview while discussing her former stance on guns. She has voted against Trump’s positions more often than any other senator and is the sole member to vote against every one of the president’s Cabinet nominees. Gillibrand is a co-sponsor of Bernie Sanders’s single-payer health care bill, widely seen as a new Democratic presidential litmus test. In the House, where she served from 2007 to 2009, she was among the least liberal members of the Democratic caucus, ranking 209th out of 241. But in the Senate, she has skewed left. In the last Congress, she was the seventh most liberal member of the 46-person Democratic caucus.
Gillibrand is hard-headed enough to believe that her party’s politics can be transactional and smart enough to see where the party would need her to be if she wants to be president.
As 538 pointed out, she voted against Trump more than any other senator. But as an added bonus she had her Sister Souljah moment when she said that Bill Clinton should have resigned during impeachment. If there are Democratic voters who secretly want to shive Clinton World—and after the 2016 debacle, there might be quite a few of these folks—Gillibrand will given them a frisson no one else in the field can deliver.
And she has now admitted that she’s considering a run.
(3) Kamala Harris. Why is everyone so high on Kamala Harris? She’s liberal. She’s a woman. She’s African-American. Those three factors alone would give any candidate a built-in opening in a Democratic primary, where you simply can’t win unless you’re liberal, and have the support of women, and the support of African-Americans.
On paper, Harris is the perfect candidate. She’s smart and ambitious. She feels like another Obama. Certainly Democrats want her to be the next Obama. But it’s not clear that she has the ability to pop off the screen they way Obama did. Our politics are trending in the direction of Celebrity Big Brother and Harris might be too traditional a figure.
But you can be certain she is going to get a long look from Democratic voters if she runs.
(4) Sherrod Brown. He’s the opposite of Harris in that, on paper, he seems like none of the things that Democrats are looking for. Why have him ranked this high? Because all he does is win.
Brown has been winning elections—in Ohio—since 1982, when he was 30. He won his reelection bid two weeks ago even as Republicans dominated Ohio. Think about this: Republican Mike DeWine won the governorship by +4 points; Republicans went 12-4 in Ohio’s congressional districts. And Brown won his race by almost +7 points.
Ohio is a state the Trump needs to be able to take for granted in 2020. Brown not only puts Ohio in play, but also Michigan, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.
Is he a goofy-looking, 66-year-old, straight white guy from the Midwest? Sure. Are Democrats desperate to get out of that business? You betcha. But have a look at where he sits on the liberal versus leadership axis on this chart. His only real liability, to be honest, would be with Democratic primary voters. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln . . .
(5) Elizabeth Warren. The tragic lesson of nearly all failed military campaigns is “too late.” The same applies to politics. Warren should have taken on Hillary Clinton in 2016, but either she didn’t want to or she misjudged Clinton’s strength.
Since then she was outbid in her progressivism by the socialist from Vermont. There was the Native-American debacle. Chris Cillizza and Harry Enten have her as their overall No. 1, but I’m not buying it. Warren is now polling at 5 percent, that’s 1 point ahead of Harris and 3 points behind—behind—Betomania.
That’s not what it looks like when voters are pining for you to run.
(6) Cory Booker. The Democratic party is desperate for another Obama to rescue them: a young, charismatic figure with the ability to inspire cult-like devotion. Kamala Harris might be it. Deval Patrick might be it. Heck, Beto O’Rourke might be it. (Spoiler: He’s not it. ) But Cory Booker is definitely not it. He’s the political equivalent of “fetch.” Stop trying to make fetch happen.
The tragedy of Booker is that he twisted himself to become what he thought the party wanted of him (a progressive Spartacus) when his initial political persona (a quasi-conservative, hyper-competent technocrat with a real personality at his core) would be much more saleable today because he’s had have an entire lane all to himself.
(7 – 15) Everyone else. Lots of people are going to take a good, hard look at running. Joe Biden, Andrew Cuomo, Terry McAuliffe, Michael Bloomberg, Amy Klobuchar, Eric Garcetti. And don’t sleep on Michael Avenatti. Or Oprah. The field is so wide open than anyone could run. Everyone might run.
If that happens, be mindful of what David Byler wrote last year: the Democratic primary process is a machine designed to produce chaos. Especially with a multi-polar field.
My one big initial thought is that the central question of the Democratic primaries will be how the party sees itself. It used to be that Republicans nominated the next guy in line (Reagan, H.W. Bush, Dole, Romney, McCain) while the Democrats took fliers on new guys (Carter, Clinton, Obama).
With 2016, that flipped. Republicans picked the biggest outsider in the history of outsiders and Democrats dutifully accepted the candidate whose turn it was, despite their reservations.
It’s impossible to know what the Democrats’ self-image will be by the time we get to Iowa. They could be a radicalized party ready to try anything—or a sober, disciplined lot determined to try to not make stupid mistakes.
What they won’t be is boring.
