​​And the Candidate Is: Part IX

Labor Day has come and gone as the pundits reminded us that by long tradition it marks the real start of the presidential campaign.

But wait, the presidential election is 14 months from now, this is 2019, not 2020. Don’t they mean Labor Day 2020? Yes, but in reality a Labor Day start to presidential campaigns, all campaigns really, is long since irrelevant fiction.

In Great Britain, the nation’s Prime Minister is blundering his country to a parliamentary election campaign that will take all of six weeks from start to election. Israel is about to hold its second national election this year.

But not us. Our presidential campaign is nearly a year old if you date it to the first Democratic candidate announcements at the end of 2018, and more than two years in the making as the present field began to shape and test candidacy in 2017.

And – and we have a year to go with 10 months more before Democrats actually nominate their candidate at the national convention in Milwaukee, where the first ballot roll will be called the third day of the convention. The day the Democrats choose a nominee will truly start the 2020 general election campaign.

With 57 primaries and caucuses starting Feb. 3 in Iowa, what’s happened, what might what happen puts a focus on complicated and complicating rules beyond even those discussed in the predecessor to this piece (“And the Candidate Is: Part VIII”).

Yes indeed, there are yet more rules to consider. Let’s look at those first.

More Rules

The DNC, wanting to make caucuses fairer and thinking definitely about the first ones in Iowa Feb. 3 that will kick off the voting and thus have an inordinate place in the media’s estimation of the race, required caucus states to broaden the opportunity to participate.

The DNC’s decision, aimed at getting caucus states to shift to primaries, persuaded nine caucus jurisdictions to do just that for 2020 leaving but six with caucuses still including Iowa and Nevada, both with February votes.

Nevada,  where the main industry is casino hotels in which tens and tens of thousands of people work night and over-night shifts, solved the problem in 2016 with all-day caucuses. This makes Nevada’s caucuses more like polling stations so that night shift workers can participate, especially those who belong to the powerful Culinary Union, representing the vast majority of hotel workers.

More traditional are the Iowa caucuses in which voters gather in the evening at specific locations where they separate into groups for their preferred candidates with the ability to migrate to other groups if their candidates receive little support at the outset. This has always had an inherent unfairness built into it because if you work the night shift, you just can’t get to a caucus.

Suffice it to say, caucuses are stupid, unfair and inefficient. But Iowa Democrats stubbornly persist, knowing New Hampshire, which still boasts the first primary, would get really troublesome if Nevada switched to a primary.

Hillary Clinton, her presidential candidacies damaged twice in 2008 and 2016 by Iowa caucus results in Iowa, cogently observed that caucuses held on a cold winter Iowa night between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. mean homebound people, night shift workers like nurses and restaurant workers (natural Democratic constituencies) were excluded.

In response to the DNC requirement to expand caucus participation in 2020, the Iowa Democratic State Committee revised its caucus procedure to provide a telephone call-in mechanism. But, at the end of August, the DNC barred it because telephone voting could be vulnerable to tampering. This left Iowa Democrats to figure out a substitute. As of now, the Iowa DSC has not announced a new plan.

Part VIII of this series about the presidential campaign identified delegate selection rules concerning the 15% rule of proportionality, PLEO and At-large delegates, lifting of elected delegate pledges after a first ballot, elimination of super delegate voting on the first ballot, numbers of delegates needed to win the nomination on a first and then on subsequent ballots. That complex of complicates rules should make predicting the ultimate outcome of the contest for the nomination a fool’s errand. It is a fool’s errand the oblivious political talking heads on cable news seem glad to run every day.

Here then are still more rules. Every delegate slate for every candidate must meet the affirmative action goals of each particular State Democratic Party for whose primaries and caucuses they are formulated. They have to conform by race, and by gender, at least as to men and women though given the party’s propensities someday that will no doubt drift expansively to the full span of modern gender confusion. This is relatively simple enough in states like Iowa and New Hampshire that are literally 95% and 94% white, but not so easy in say the most diverse state in the nation, New Jersey.

Then there is this twist in the proportionality rule. Recall the requirement that to win delegates in a district or at large statewide on a PLEO slate statewide, a candidate must score at least 15%  to get a proportional share of the delegates at stake in that particular segment of the vote or of the state’s PLEO/At-large delegates.

But what if no candidate reaches 15% in a district or for a statewide slate? Then the rules provide that the percentage won by the top vote-getter minus 10% becomes the percentage.  Why 10% less? I have no idea and cannot find an explanation but there it is.

So if, for example, the top vote-getter in a congressional district in the New Jersey primary gets 12%, the resulting thresholded to award delegates from that district to candidates would be just 2%. That may seem purely crazy and it may be — but it is the rule.

The national political media seem oblivious to the rules and how they are impacting and will continue to impact candidacies, campaigns, voting and, perhaps, ultimately the convention.

Debates:

The third Democratic presidential debate on Sept. 12 in Dallas carried by ABC networks and Univision includes just 10 candidates who qualified by having 130,000 or more individual donors and scored at least 2% in four recognized polls (recognized by the Democratic National Committee) between June 28 and August 28.

The same qualifiers will determine the field for the debate scheduled on October 15 and 16. When billionaire Tom Steyer qualified in September for the October event it meant that debate to take place in Ohio will span two nights with five candidates one night, six the next, providing greater chance to see the candidates at their best or worst.

Other candidates who did not meet the thresholds for September have until Oct. 1 to qualify for the Oct. debate.

The DNC is expected to raise qualification thresholds for later debates. The DNC no doubt hopes and very probably expects the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary will reduce the field to five or fewer candidates — something not necessarily likely because of the DNC’s very own delegate selection rules.

The 10 who qualified for the September debate were former Vice President Biden, Senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernard Sanders,  Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and Amy Klobuchar, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, businessman Andrew Yang, former Congressman Beto O’Rourke and former HUD Secretary Julian Castro.

It was to be the first such event in which Biden and Warren share the stage, albeit with eight others. The debates have become a reality TV show in which the media score the candidates as if they were in a dance competition.

Polls

There were more than two dozen polls published over the summer and a slew more since Labor Day. Almost all national polls, including at least five published Labor Day week and several published ahead of the second debate show this general trend: Biden in the lead at 30%-32%, Warren and Sanders either in second or third, each typically with between 15% and 22% although Warren seemed to be moving up close to the debate.

Harris, who reached a high point at 12% after the first debate fell back after the revealing second debate and consistently registers about 8%. Buttigieg has fallen from highs of 9% and 10% to a range of 4% to 6%. Booker perhaps at 4%. Everyone else is in a narrow range of 1% to 3%. But with about eight to ten more candidates measuring even in single digits in each poll they share a cumulative polling slice ranging from about 15% to upwards of 20%.

Let’s say then for argument’s sake that the polling looks like this on any given day: Biden, 30%, Warren 22%, Sanders 15%, Harris 7%, Buttigieg, 5%, Booker 4%, the field, 17%.

What do those numbers say? That Joe Biden is the frontrunner as the media keeps reporting? Well, literally yes, but actually, no.

What the numbers say is that after 50 years in high profile public and political life, including eight years as Vice President to the most popular Democratic president since FDR or JFK, now on his third run for the White House, 70% of Democrats don’t want Biden, who spent the summer committing verbal faux pas after faux pas in a pas de deux with his habitual lack of focus and discipline.

The numbers say Sanders and Warren together represent about a third of the Democratic nominating electorate, which is not the same as the general election electorate, not hardly.

The numbers say Warren’s gains have come substantially at the expense of Sanders but also that Sanders has a bedrock base that could be impenetrable unless he strongly endorses the ultimate winner with the fair assumption he will not be nominated. Were he to depart the convention disgruntled, angry and unwilling to forcefully back the nominee, he could cause a lot of damage to Democrats’ chances.

The numbers suggest the division between Biden’s supporters and the Warren/Sanders “progressive” faction is about equal, with the remaining third of Democrats splintered across the rest of the field and likely to leave the party divided a long while with no clear choice.

Divided even to the convention given the complex delegate election rules that encourage candidates to stay in rather than abandon the contest once voting starts as they develop first-ballot and favorite son/daughter delegate contingents that could get them to subsequent ballots.

So the bottom line, as is often said, is that the polls say Democrats are broadly divided between their center third represented by Biden, their left Sanders/Warren third, and a don’t- know and won’t-know-for-a-while third.

That gets the discussion to the other set of polls over the summer and into the fall in which poll after poll shows President Trump declining to a range of approval between 40% and 45%, dipping below 40% as September advanced.

A subset of polls continues to find him trailing almost across the board in head-to-head surveys against specific Democratic candidates often by substantial margins.

At the same time congressional preference polls consistently have Democrats outpolling Republicans by a steady 10%, the margin polls gave them on the eve of the 2018 Democratic congressional landslide.

All those primary, head-to-head matchup party preference polls suggest a decisive 2020 result. It is one that should persuade House Democrats the best comeuppance for Trump is not a bill of impeachment that would not be taken up in the Republican Senate, but a decisive election defeat of him that is within the grasp of the Democratic Party.

Those polls, the president’s continued erratic, incendiary conduct and malignant mismanagment of the U.S. government in every way make it clear that the last thing Democrats should want is to remove Trump from office by impeachment. The thing they should want most is for him to run because in a certain sense he is their best candidate – the one who can propel the actual Democratic nominee into the White House.

As Trump so often says, we’ll see.