Once upon a time, say, a year ago, Democrats seemed to be in good shape for this year’s election. They had a promising field of diverse and young prospects who were sure to appeal to nonwhites, women, and all those exhausted by President Trump.
But that was then, and this is now. The party is now on its third field of candidates — one that seems to change constantly and gets stranger every day.
Phase one was the young and the restless — the diversity crew of the nonwhite and female candidates coming out from under the shadow of Hillary Clinton eager to do their own thing. Every faction would have its proponents: People of color had Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, Latinos had Julian Castro and pseudo-Hispanic Beto O’Rourke, and women had Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand ready and eager to give women abortions whether they liked them or not.
Surely among them, there must be a winner? Sadly enough, there was not.
The most extreme were the ones the most badly beaten: Gillibrand, a genuine abortion fanatic, left with her poll ratings down around zero. O’Rourke was close to 2% when he exited, warning Hispanics that race wars were coming and that white men (he is one of those) were possibly out for their blood.
This left three major candidates standing: Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders — both of them are white, both are in their 70s, and both of them are very far left — and Joe Biden, President Barack Obama’s vice president who had dreamed of the White House since he went to the Senate in the 1972 election. Biden hasn’t abandoned his dreams just yet. He also wanted to give a voice to the center, which has largely been leaderless.
Biden’s entry changed the race from a free-for-all mess of the diversity era to a binary battle of Center vs. Left. Biden soared to the top of the polls, but his age of good feeling didn’t last long. He’s Sanders’s age, 78, but he looks and seems older. He had run for president twice before and each time had done miserably. Now, he’s the same guy — but ages older than the last time he ran. What if Biden couldn’t stand all the pressure? What if he wins a few contests and then fades badly? Old, white, and male, could he draw young men and women voters?
Democrats panicked when they saw socialism perhaps taking charge of their party. They looked out to Biden but then saw Biden himself as being the problem. So just as Biden came in to stop Warren and Sanders, Michael Bloomberg stepped in with all of his money to keep his party from going astray.
Bloomberg is also Biden’s age, but he looks and seems younger. And when he stands on top of his money, he looks younger still. But with his entry, the party is sent off in a whole new direction. If stage one, the diversity derby, was the young and the restless and stage two was mainly the Center-Left struggle, then stage three looks to be the age of the mogul, where large sums of money rule all.
Four years ago, Trump upended the entire Republican Party by picking and peeling off all his opponents. It was a stunning event, but it was still in itself a conventional race by most standards. The field remained stable — except that it became smaller all the time. The Democrats this year are entirely different in that the nature of the race itself has been constantly changing. It now has almost nobody left from its first iteration, and some of today’s more prominent players have only just entered the scene. Many races have many front-runners, but few have had whole fields that change so completely.
This is the strangest event we may ever experience, and the shocks may not be over yet.
