Anyone heard anything lately about Martin O’Malley? Four years ago the former Democratic official was busy out in Iowa running for president. After two successful terms as mayor of Baltimore (homicides fell during his years) and as governor of Maryland, he seemed like a plausible candidate. Strumming his guitar and singing Irish songs, he seemed more likeable than either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders.

Yet as a candidate, like most of the Democratic candidates running thus year, he got just about zero support. In the Iowa caucuses, he won just 0.54% of “state convention delegate equivalents” (the Iowa Democrats’ metric); it appears that of the 171,000 Democrats who showed up on caucus night, only about 1,000 voted for him. There just wasn’t much demand for a white male nonsocialist that year.