On Wednesday, July 15, 2020, the Democratic National Convention will call the roll of the states and U.S. territories to choose a presidential nominee. That’s just 13 months from now. If you think it is a long way off, it’s not.
If you think House Democrats should impeach the president less than a year before their national convention and send an impeachment charge to the Senate, where Mitch McConnell no doubt would let it fester right up to Election Day, think again.
The Constitution says the Senate has the sole power to try impeachment. It doesn’t say the Senate has to and, even if it did, as federal Judge Merrick Garland can attest, McConnell is situationally creative when it comes to what the constitution doesn’t say.
Better than the very stupid politics of impeachment is to give us all the chance to repudiate the president at the ballot box and send him back 18 months from now to the tender mercies of the Southern District of New York, the Attorney General of New York and the Manhattan District Attorney.
Focus on that roll call date, July 15, 2020. As this is written it is 13 months away. That’s all, 13 months.
In two weeks the Democrats hold their first presidential candidates’ debate. At least one member of the U.S. Senate is a candidate on the qualification cusp, not there yet in terms of qualifying (65,000 donors including 200 each in at least 20 states or ranking at a 2 percent average in several recognized polls). Indeed, Kirsten Gillibrand may not be on the debate stage either night (two nights, 10 candidates each night from Miami on NBC channels including Telemundo June 26 and 27).
Also unlikely to make it this time is very late-to-announce Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana. Were this a remake of “The American President”, he might be a shoo-in. He is appropriately middle-aged, handsome, sensibly liberal in a clear-spoken, common-sense centrist way, from a crimson red mountain state that nonetheless elected him governor and Democrat Jon Tester to the Senate twice. But this year and these times are different and hardly anyone outside Montana knows him.
Maybe Gillibrand or Bullock or both of them will qualify for the September debate when the qualification rule changes to require 130,000 individual donors. This is a move by the Democratic National Committee – read that National Party Chairman Tom Perez– to reduce debate stage clutter by bringing some order to an unruly race full of people who should not be running for president.
It is a race in which the news media and the political commentariat has and remains fixed on Joe Biden, viewing him as the front-runner. As usual, they have it wrong and misread signals in the two months since the former vice president entered. Yes, he’s ahead in all the polls. But he is static or gradually declining in them while others move up.
Not to belabor this but yes, as soon as Biden entered he surged in the polls getting to above 40 percent in a few national preference surveys. But he has, true to form, made mistake after mistake, demonstrated he is too old, out of touch and way too full of himself, and settled back to polling earth at around 30 percent. Biden made one smart decision at the start, to run not for the nomination but against Trump from the get-go. But then, as he does, he got to talking and talking always gets Joe Biden in trouble.
So you may say 30ish percent in a 23-candidate field is strong. But it isn’t because it is clear by now that there are no more than six or seven candidates among the present 23 from whom the nominee will emerge. The remaining 16 consistently fail to poll better than a combined 20 percent together.
Instructive in this way is a poll of Iowa Democrats released two weeks before the first debate.
Conducted by and for the Des Moines Register and CNN (the Register has always been the go-to source for all things political in Iowa), the poll showed this: Biden 24%, Bernie Sanders 16%, Elizabeth Warren 15%,Pete Buttigieg 14%, Kamala Harris 7%, Robert (Beto) O’Rourke and Amy Klobuchar 2% each.
Those are the seven candidates from whom the nominee most likely will come as it looks right now. That means it is not so foolish as it looks and won’t be once the field is winnowed of all the dead wood candidacies. Among the seven, O’Rourke is looking the least likely while Klobuchar has a slim chance to get noticed in the first debate to position herself to take the center away from Biden over time, much as Warren has made big inroads in Sanders support.
Then what does this Iowa poll say, tell about the contest? Does it say Biden is the clear front-runner the media says he is? Hardly.
It says as of now 76% of Iowa Democrats want someone else. That suggests if they don’t want Joe Biden now they are not likely to want him later given that he is best known and that more is known about him than any other candidate.
It says right now 45% prefer one of the next three top candidates and that 52% prefer one of the next four.
Biden’s 24-hour flip of his 45-year position on the Hyde amendment (not going to explain that, you should not be reading this if you don’t know what that’s about) is not the mark of a constant man or of political grace.
It is the sign of an aloof, bad campaign with an out-of-touch candidate with a divided staff. The sign of another gaffe by a man who can afford none. Others lately from Biden? His assertion that China is no threat to us when really the entire century hangs in the balance of our antagonistic competition with China – in which China is gaining.
And of course, the former Judiciary Committee chairman has yet to apologize to us, much less to Anita Hill, for Clarence Thomas being on the Supreme Court the past 28 years – Thomas, whose confused conflated judicial mumbling equates birth control with eugenic selection.
In sum, there is no front-runner, not really. As polling continues, someone is always going to be ahead. The first time it is not Biden will be the last time he is called the front-runner. There is confusion, there is show biz, there is the over-heated, overly self-impressed cable news channel commentariat, but there is no clear picture yet in this race.
Then what if no candidate gains a lock on the nomination heading into the convention a year from now? Let’s consider where that developing possibility points, especially understanding that more than 700 Super Delegates cannot vote until the second ballot and so a smart Super-D would keep his or her ballot dry.
It points to a multi-ballot convention choosing from among three, four, even five candidates who could arrive in Milwaukee in mid-July 2020 with sufficient delegate strength to preclude a first-ballot decision.
They might well arrive with sufficient support to compete, wrangle, bargain, conspire and woo super-delegates and also go after elected delegates freed from pledges after the first ballot. The last time Democrats went beyond a first ballot was 1952. Seventy years later no one knows how to do it. They should be reading history books right now.
Meanwhile:
Meanwhile, if you are old enough to remember Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus you remember the clown car – the tiny car out of which streamed a couple of dozen clowns.
The contest for the Democratic Party nomination for president is in the clown car stage. Here is a review of the 23 candidates. Again, as always, the list provides the age each will be on Inauguration Day Jan. 20, 2021 or within 30 days afterward.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, 60
Joe Biden, 78 (same as me but I decided not to run – I’m too old even if Joe isn’t).
Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, 56
New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker,51
Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, 54
South Bend, Ind. Mayor Peter Buttigieg, 39
Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro of Texas, 46
Former Maryland Congressman John Delaney, 57
Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, 39
New York Sen. Christin Gillibrand, 54
Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, 69
California Sen. Kamala Harris, 56
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, 70
Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, 60
Miramar, Fla. Mayor Wayne Messam, 48
Mass. Rep. Seth Moulton, 42
Former Texas Congressman Robert O’Rourke, 48
Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan, 47
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, 79, (older even than me and Joe Biden)
California Rep. Eric Swalwell, 40
High tech investor Andrew Wang, 46
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, 71
Marianne Williamson, 67.
On some lists, there is a 24th candidate, former Sen. Mike Gravel of Alaska, who would be 91 on Inauguration Day. Barring a surge to the front you won’t read his name here again. He last served in the U.S. Senate in 1981. He did run for president in 2008 but no, I did not remember that either.
What Has changed lately?
What HAS changed in the polls is the standing of Sanders. He’s slipped. He remains second in all polls so far, barely so, but his preference has fallen by a third at least so that he recently sat at about 15 percent.
Warren is the beneficiary of Sanders’ decline. In any case, recent polls show a consistent top tier of Biden, Sanders, Warren, Harris, and Buttigieg, with O’Rourke flailing as Klobuchar sits stalled behind the leaders
The remaining 16 candidates each poll at 1 percent or 0 percent in survey after survey, including two U.S. senators, Cory Booker, and Kirsten Gillibrand.
The first debate is not likely to lead to anyone dropping out so soon though some may begin to find themselves being written out by the media after the first debate.
Even now it is abundantly clear at least half the candidates are on fools’ errands, including some who are senators or governors; and including all four current members and one former member of the House of Representatives — a body from which no one has been elected president since James Garfield in 1880.
If there is a takeaway from the way the contest is moving it would be that Democrats don’t necessarily need to win back alienated, working class, non-college, whites in three states whose electoral votes made Donald Trump president.
The 2018 election demonstrated Democrats need to focus on the health-education-economic fairness agenda they are putting into legislation in the House, albeit understanding this year it is DOA in the Senate.
Last year’s election revealed a counter-balance to losses among the industrial-era Democratic working-class constituency will be to increase participation by young voters, minority voters, suburban voters, college graduates and, above all, suburban women.
About Generations:
A recent extensive Pew Research survey put Millenials political preference at 60% liberal. It recorded Generation Z, those born since 1996 at 70% liberal, albeit just one-third of that generation will be of voting age next year.
These are enormous generations by their numbers in the census, each now surpassing the shrinking more conservative Boomer Generation and its diminished predecessor, the Silent Generation. In the longer term after 2020, and its’ not that long really, the older generations have far fewer years left on our climate changing earth than the two youngest generations.
Generation X those born after the Boomers but before the Millenials are now parents of Gen Z. They too tend to the liberal side. For the younger generations fiercely focused on climate change, a climate-science denial Republican Party is holding a going-out-of-business sale.
Democrats need to ignore the punditry’s harping about the voters lost to Trump, focus less on the mythology of the alienated white working class rural voter and concentrate on winning and getting to the polls women, minority and young voters in numbers equal to or better than 2018.
Witness women: Republicans have 13 women in the House but just one new woman member elected last year. Democrats elected 89 women to the House in 2018 including 35 new members. Starting with the women’s march Jan. 21, 2017, women drove the agenda, provided the candidates, the energy and the surge that saw Democrats retake the House, state legislatures and governorships.
It is not hard to imagine Republican primitivism on women’s reproductive choice and health presaging a women’s vote tsunami pushing Democrats next year and punishing the GOP.
It is pretty unlikely the Democratic presidential nominee will get any more votes from white men this time than last time. But there are fewer of them in the electorate all the time. As an offset the nominee can pull a lot more votes from the party’s other traditional constituencies like black voters and Latinos and from new ones like suburban women, millennials, the LGBT community, and Gen Z.
Generals fight the last war. Coaches replay the last season. Pundits and commentators, political analysts and consultants model the last campaign, the last election. Mostly, they get it wrong.
What will change the chatter? The debates and then the first five weeks of voting in 2020 caucuses and primaries starting Feb. 3 in Iowa, ending March 3 in the nine Super Tuesday states including Texas and the big one, California.
Super Tuesday is why candidates already have made forays away from the first four states (Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina) into Super Tuesday states. Mail-in voting will be underway in many of them, notably in the California and Texas primaries, starting early next February. Iowa and New Hampshire will still be the first two states to report results, but voting will be going on in much bigger, delegate-rich states when they do.
That Clown Car:
For now, who among 23 candidates, barring a star debate performance, should think seriously about climbing back into the clown car? I nominate these 13.
Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet
Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro of Texas
Former Maryland Congressman John Delaney
Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard
New York Sen. Christin Gillibrand
Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee
Miramar, Fla. Mayor Wayne Messam
Rep. Seth Moulton
Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan
California Rep. Eric Swalwell
High tech investor Andrew Wang
Marianne Williamson
Peeling the Onion 