In one important respect, 2020 is shaping up to be a very traditional presidential election.
Sure, any campaign involving President Trump will never be quite normal. But as it comes to how the nomination processes will go, the election is likely to return to historical patterns that were disrupted in 2016.
That is, during the modern era, it has typically been the Republican Party that has gone in with a clear favorite among party elites (who often rallied around a candidate who had run before and was seen as “next in line”), and that candidate has typically won. Democratic primaries have tended to be much more wide open and unpredictable.
Back in December 2006, the late Robert Novak described this tendency within the Republican Party as he predicted that John McCain would be the nominee in 2008. “It is beginning to look like ‘McCain Inc.’ — that is, party regulars, corporate officials, and Washington lawyers and lobbyists moving toward John McCain, the man they feared and loathed eight years ago,” Novak wrote. “The GOP, abhorring competition and detesting surprises, likes to establish its presidential nominee well in advance.” He went on to describe how this had played out with Ronald Reagan in 1980 (who had been the 1976 runner-up) and George W. Bush in 2000. A similar scenario played out with Mitt Romney in 2012 (who I had described as an “unorthodox frontrunner” late in 2010).
In 2011, Nate Silver did a helpful post looking at polling in the year before primaries going back back to 1976 for Republicans and 1972 for Democrats. What he found was, “the Republican who was leading in national polls of primary voters in the first six months of the year before the primaries won the nomination on 6 out of 7 occasions; the only exception was John McCain, who was placing a reasonably close second to Rudy Giuliani at this point in 2007 but overtook him to become the standard-bearer.” In contrast, he found, “Democrats have had a considerably more varied set of results. Of the 9 primary cycles in our study, the Democrat who was placing first in the early polls won just twice (1984 and 2000). Although the second-place candidate won on three other occasions (1980, 2004, 2008), there were years (1972, 1976, 1992) in which the eventual nominee emerged from deep in the early field.” Jimmy Carter started off at 1 percent ahead of 1976, and Bill Clinton was at 1.7 percent ahead of 1992.
[Also read: Obama: Republicans are going along with ‘crazy’]
The 2016 elections totally blew away this tendency. On the Republican side, it was a massive field with no clear frontrunner and a year before the start of the primaries, Trump was so off everybody’s radar he wasn’t even being polled. When he first appeared in some polls starting in late March, he was about at 4 percent. When Trump announced his candidacy, he shot up in polls despite being opposed by both the GOP establishment and the movement conservative establishment, who were divided among several candidates, and the rest is history. On the Democratic side, of course, Hillary Clinton started off as a prohibitive favorite and her deep institutional support helped her stave off a surprisingly strong populist challenge from Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.
In 2020, the nomination processes are likely to return to normal. Assuming Trump runs and that nothing emerges from the Russia inquiry that changes the dueling partisan narratives on the issue, he will enjoy overwhelming support of Republicans — both at the grassroots level and among institutionalists. There could always be some challenger embraced by the remnants of Never Trump, but that person would likely enjoy negligible support outside of a handful of pundits.
Democrats, meanwhile, are facing another totally wide open race in 2020. A Harvard CAPS-Harris poll taken over the summer found that the top performing candidates were Joe Biden (32 percent), Clinton (18 percent), and Sanders (16 percent). It’s seriously questionable whether any of them will run for president, and even if they did, they each have too many vulnerabilities to be considered strong favorites. After the top three, the only one who registers in double digits is Sen. Elizabeth Warren at 10 percent. Among the senators, Cory Booker was at 6 percent, Kamala Harris was at 2 percent, and Kirsten Gillibrand was at 1 percent (tied with Gov. Andrew Cuomo). Billionaire former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was at 3 percent. There are probably over a dozen other candidates that one could imagine running (though there is likely to be some narrowing of the field in the coming months as the so-called invisible primary takes place, and some candidates quietly realize this isn’t their year).
So, come 2020, we can expect a traditional election in which the Republican primary is boring because everybody knows who is ultimately going to win, and the Democratic nomination battle will be exciting because it will be anybody’s ballgame.
