2020 democratic primaries

Beto O’Rourke is about to launch a presidential campaign off the back of a failed Senate bid. He’s not the first to do so – Abraham Lincoln famously followed exactly that path to the White House. But nobody else is Lincoln, and Beto is hardly anyone at all: as a contender for the 2020 Democratic nomination, he’s the ‘not’ candidate. He’s not the most electable. He’s not the most left-wing. He’s not a woman or a minority. He’s not the most wonkish candidate. He’s not the most loyal to the party – that’s supposedly part of his appeal, the notion that he’ll pick up Republican votes. But obviously enough, he’s not going to be the most Republican candidate on the ballot in November 2020.

Has Joe Biden finally made up his mind? The former vice president has told a House lawmaker that he is running for the 2020 Democratic nomination and asked for an endorsement, according to The Hill. The site reports that Biden called the lawmaker and said ‘I’m giving it a shot’, before asking if he could run some campaign strategy ideas by them and proposing an in-person meeting at a later date. The Democratic lawmaker did not commit to supporting Biden, and spoke to the publication on condition of anonymity ‘due to the sensitive nature of the conversation.’ If it was that sensitive, surely they could have kept it to themselves?

Here is the tragedy of the Democratic party in 2019: its partisans are left to hope that personal hatred of Donald Trump will do for them in 2020 what the Iraq War and the Great Recession did in 2006 and 2008. The first time Nancy Pelosi became speaker of House of Representatives, her party was the party of second thoughts about Iraq. The fact that Democrats won control of the Senate with the 2006 election was even more clearly tied to that misbegotten war: the victory of James Webb over George Allen gave Democrats their 51st seat. Webb was a former Republican – a Reagan cabinet official – who switched parties and challenged Allen out of disgust with the George W. Bush administration’s foreign policy.

Here’s a riddle for you, and if you solve it, the Democrats will nominate you for president: how does one candidate carry both Cambridge, Mass. and Luzerne County, Penn.? Sure, the former’s a cake-walk. Hillary Clinton could stand in the middle of Harvard Square and shoot somebody, and she wouldn’t lose any voters from the People’s Republic of Taxachusetts. But the latter, which Obama won in 2012, went to Trump in a whopping 25-point swing. This was the big story in 2016: the defection of blue-collar voters to the Republican party. Now, as the 2020 election draws nigh, Democratic office-holders in ‘Purple America’ are feeling the heat. Speaking to Politico at the National Governors Association’s winter meeting, Gov.

In the past six months, Democrats have accused Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of gang rape, gone apoplectic over an awkwardly smiling 17-year-old boy, flirted with infanticide, embraced late-term abortion, and fallen all over themselves to endorse an absurd so-called ‘Green New Deal’ that calls for eliminating air travel, remodeling of every building in the United States, and, at long last, confronting the scourge of ‘farting cows.’ Where, in this great, big, moralizing, self-righteous, progressive mess that has become the Democratic party are the non-radical voters? Where are the moderates? The ‘blue dogs?’ Are there even any left? The answer seems to be no and obvious the conclusion is that the Democrats have gone off the rails.

As Donald Trump closed in the Republican nomination in 2016, pundits grasped for explanations. The Republican field was too crowded – but then, why should a crowded field help Trump rather than some other candidate? Trump hogged the limelight, then: he was a celebrity with an unfair advantage right from the start, and the media lavished undue attention on him. Of course, all of that attention was negative, but it’s true that Trump’s name and persona dominated the race almost from the minute he got into it. Trump’s celebrity gave him an opportunity, but he made the most of it, speaking many truths about American life and politics that professional politicians dared not utter.

When Tulsi Gabbard announced that she would seek the Democratic nomination in Hawaii’s 2nd district in 2011 she was quickly endorsed by a laundry list of liberal institutions including the Sierra Club and Emily’s List. She was asked to speak at the 2012 Democratic Convention and by 2015 she was Vice Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. National Democrats were eager to boost this rising star, but now that she is running for president they are just as eager to snuff her out. So why are Democrats giving her the cold shoulder? For starters, during the last election, Gabbard was not down with Team Clinton or the corruption that follows them.

Let’s make it clear right off the bat that Tulsi Gabbard will not be the Democratic nominee in 2020. The party’s base is so consumed with hatred for the president that only one criterion matters: which candidate can cast embody the spirit of The Anti-Trump. Do you hate the Orange Menace for his divisiveness, his crudity, his total lack of chill? Then lose yourself in Obama nostalgia with Cory Booker, Beto O’Rourke, and Joe Biden. Or are you looking for an all-out brawl, fascists v. reds, Spanish Civil War-style? Well, Elizabeth Warren is sharpening her tomahawk, and Bernie Sanders has his game face on. Gabbard is not the antithesis of Trump, in either temperament nor ideology. Quite the opposite: more than any of her colleagues, she resembles Trump circa 2016.

Block after block, thousands queued to enter Oakland’s Frank H. Ogawa Plaza to hear Sen. Kamala Harris announce her campaign for president. As police and security fielded anxious questions – ‘Will we get in? Will we see her?’ – the guard by me repeated: ‘I’m not sure, but don’t lose hope’. Hope was in the air. It was an atmosphere of a home crowd waiting to see a hometown team: here, the junior senator from California, a ‘daughter of Oakland,’ raised by immigrants in the East Bay, who served as District Attorney and California’s Attorney-General before becoming the second black female senator and first Indian American senator. As I spoke to people on the rope line, they told me why they came.

Bernie Sanders will imminently announce a campaign for president in 2020, according to a Yahoo News report last night. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, as all indicators have pointed in this direction for months, if not years. But Sanders skeptics and antagonists have expended major energy sowing doubts about his viability – mostly around his age, race, gender, and party registration. Still, none of these cheap talking points have ever detracted from the fundamental reality that Sanders has a large, existing base of supporters, many of whom desperately want him to run and will work on his behalf. Were Sanders to bow out under pressure, it would reasonably be interpreted as a woeful capitulation.

If Kamala Harris, who announced her candidacy on Martin Luther King Day, wins the presidency, she would not only be the first black woman to ascend to the Oval Office but also the first Democrat from California to accomplish that feat. The last two politicians to emerge from the Golden State and prove that they had the right stuff were both Republicans, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. Reagan personified the optimism of California Dreamin’; Nixon, a kind of grapes of wrath resentment that he reverse engineered to condemn liberal elites. Like Nixon, a red hunter par excellence, Harris has tried to play the Russia card to rise to prominence. Today it is Democrats who decry Moscow gold, while Republicans play kissy face with the Kremlin.

Six years ago, Julián Castro was a rising star in the national Democratic party. But by the end of 2018, his star had fallen. Last week Castro formally began his climb back toward national prominence, via his 2020 presidential campaign. In 2012, Castro: 1. Gave the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte 2. Was in his second-term as San Antonio’s mayor having won re-election in 2011 with 81 percent of the vote, more than 74 percentage points ahead of his closest rival 3. Secured the passage by voters of a sales tax increase to fund high quality Pre-K for a group of lower-income children 4. Received an offer to become President Obama’s Secretary of Transportation (which he declined).

By most conventional pundit metrics, Bernie Sanders should be the presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee. To state the obvious, he was last cycle’s runner-up, having won 46 percent of elected delegates, 23 states, and smashed small-dollar fundraising records. His policy platform has taken hold across the party, with most every nationally ambitious figure now calling for universal Medicare, free public college tuition, and a host of other measures that were closely associated with his 2016 run. He has consistently polled as the most popular politician in America, he just won re-election in his home-state by a massive margin, and his social media engagement is off-the-charts. So what’s the problem? Simply put, large sections of the party still view him as a threat.