In previous posts on the state of the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination battle, I questioned the fundamentals of Beto O’Rourke and argued that his rise says more about the weakness of the rest of the field at this point in the race. But there’s also another factor that could propel him to run: recent history that suggests candidates should strike while the iron’s hot.
There was a time in which the typical advice for presidential hopefuls was that they need to wait their turn to run and build up accomplishments and experience in the meantime. But in the past several election cycles, the opposite has been true. Voters have downgraded the importance of experience and have rewarded candidates who aimed high, while punishing candidates who waited too long.
[Read: 45 Democrats jostling to challenge Trump in 2020]
One obvious example is former President Barack Obama. In the fall of 2006, Obama had been in the Senate for just under two years when chatter was building about a possible presidential run after he released a book that was hyped by Oprah. Many pundits argued that he should wait his turn, seeing him as too inexperienced to mount a serious challenge, and they argued if he flamed out it could put at risk what was otherwise a promising political future. Things obviously turned out differently.
On the flip side, there’s Chris Christie. In 2011, Christie had earned a lot of fans among conservatives for YouTube videos of him yelling at opponents, such as pro-union teachers. As disappointment with former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and the rest of the Republican field mounted, there were some calls for him to run. But he had only been governor of New Jersey for about a year and a half at this point. He made what at the time seemed like the sensible decision of punting so he could gain more governing experience, focus on his re-election, and run for president at a future date.
However, in the years that followed, his political fortunes reversed dramatically. In 2012, he gave what many saw as a self-serving speech to the Republican National Convention that did nothing to help Romney. Just before the election, he embraced Obama during Hurricane Sandy and lashed out at House Republicans for being too slow to approve federal aid. Then, of course, came the disastrous George Washington Bridge lane closure scandal. Whether he would have had a shot in 2012 remains a hypothetical question, but what’s clear is that he was in a much stronger position the first time around, and he stumbled into the 2016 presidential race as damaged goods.
Though it’s still early, it’s possible that Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., may find herself in a similar boat. In 2016, liberals were begging her to challenge former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She deferred because Clinton seemed unbeatable, and she sat on the sidelines as Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., appealed to a similar coalition and mounted an unexpectedly serious challenge. Warren is more likely to run now, but she enters 2020 in a much weaker position than four years ago, her support dwindling to the low-single digits as many other candidates appeal to the liberal base, and the DNA test gambit over her Native American background blew up in her face. Even the Boston Globe, her home-state newspaper that urged her to run in 2016, said she shouldn’t bother in 2020, arguing that she “missed her moment.”
The experience of President Trump is a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, Trump had been exploring a presidential run for decades before ultimately going ahead with it. So it can’t really be said that he struck early. On the other hand, however, the fact that he was able to capture the White House without any prior political experience or deep policy knowledge, and do so against somebody who had served as senator and secretary of state, reinforces the lesson that voters don’t really care much about experience.
My guess is that this reality is going to figure heavily in the decision-making processes of those considering whether to take a shot in 2020, which is one of the many reasons we’re likely to see an incredibly crowded Democratic field.
