2020 election

Kirsten Gillibrand has always been a woman of the moment. But has her moment passed? She obviously doesn’t think so, and the New York senator was riding high in one poll on Tuesday night — she was trending on Twitter across the country. Gillibrand appeared on the top-rated late-night talk show, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, on which the host asked the Democrat the question no one has been asking. ‘I’m just curious — do you have anything you would like to announce?’ She grabbed Colbert’s hands, holding them hokily on his desk for a few moments before answering. ‘I’m filing [pause] an exploratory committee [pause] for president of the United States [pause] TONIGHT!’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Kamala Harris’s memoir, published this week, has reignited speculation that the senator has her eyes on a Presidential run. Harris – a self-made public servant with a solid record on progressive causes – should be a strong candidate for the Democratic ticket. Somehow, however, she isn’t. The former California Attorney General’s biggest problem is that the left has changed: rather than organizing around unions or the party itself, a large chunk of the Democratic base now mobilizes around identity issues. Some of these pet causes make a lot of sense; others less so. Either way, Harris breaches two of the big ones. First of all, she’s a career prosecutor – or as the new left like to put it, ‘a cop’.

The first micro-scandal of the Bernie Sanders 2020 presidential campaign has already erupted, and he hasn’t even formally declared he’s running yet. Appearing on CNN last week, Sanders was asked about a report in the New York Times that chronicled the ways in which the 2016 version of his campaign allegedly failed to respond to sexist discomforts experienced by female staffers. Pressed if he had been aware of these apparent issues, Sanders reacted curtly: ‘I was a little bit busy.’ One of the allegations detailed in the NYT article was a staff member complaining that she had been saddled with suboptimal lodging arrangements ahead of the Illinois primary.

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.

For all the good news 2018’s midterms have given Democrats — a House majority, a Senate seat from Arizona, seven more governorships, and an all-blue congressional delegation from Orange County — they have also shown that President Trump has a clear path to re-election in 2020. Midterms historically maximize the relative turnout for the opposition party. More voters overall will go to the polls in 2020 than did so this year, just as more people voted in 2016 than did so this November. But the ratio of Democrats to Republicans will be narrower, if the past anything to go by.

Democrats had a good night last Tuesday, flipping dozens of seats to recapture the House of Representatives for the first time in eight years. On the surface, the party looks confident and newly ascendant. It seems to have shaken off the 2016 jitters, which gave liberals around the country a mild form of PTSD. Yet, underneath the veneer, Democrats are still their usual listless selves. They may seem unified and ready to do battle against President Donald Trump, but the party remains divided about which course to take, how to bring the white working class back into their corner, and which candidate would be their best hope in 2020 to make Trump the first one-term president since 1992. The Democrats are desperately searching for their own white whale.

Is there a possibility Hillary Clinton will launch her third presidential campaign in 2020? If you ask former chief political strategist Steve Bannon, there is no doubt in his mind the former First Lady, US Senator, Secretary of State, and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee is itching to run. ‘She’s looking for a rematch’ against Donald Trump, Bannon told Curt Mills in a Spectator USA exclusive. Whether or not Clinton enters the race, Democrats across America will have plenty of choices when candidates officially declare their bids next year.

‘It will be Stalingrad every day,’ if the Republicans lose the House in November, Steve Bannon, the president’s former chief strategist, told me earlier this month at his house in Washington. But, he adds, ‘I think he’s on fire right now. I think the Kavanaugh thing, ironically, will play against the Democrats.’ ‘They’re going to start to turn on each other,’ Bannon says of the Democrats if the Republicans continue to close in the polls. ‘The Clinton Junta has never been held accountable. How do you lose the presidency? She’s never been held accountable for that.’ That, says Bannon, creates the perfect storm for her to run. ‘It’s not that she’s going to run,’ Bannon told me.

Geronimo! Elizabeth Warren, whom President Trump has repeatedly mocked as ‘Pocahontas,’ has now issued the results of a DNA test indicating that she does indeed have Native American ancestry going back some 6-10 generations. A video released by Warren shows her receiving the news from one Carlos Bustamante, a professor of genetics at Stanford University. According to Bustamante, ‘The facts suggest that you absolutely have a Native American ancestor in your pedigree.’ Trump has been fixated with Warren’s heritage.This was supposed to be his new ‘birther’ issue. In Iowa last week, he observed that he would like to ‘finally get down to the fact as to whether or not she has Indian blood.’ Why this was the case he did not indicate.

Every four years, Michael Bloomberg hears something nobody else hears: a groundswell of support for a Michael Bloomberg presidential candidacy. Now, it’s happening again. Bloomberg, the media mogul with an estimated worth of $48 billion, announced on Wednesday that he has changed his political registration to Democrat. That makes a full circle for the former New York City mayor, who began as a Democrat, became a Republican, became an Independent, and has now returned home. ‘Today, I have re-registered as a Democrat — I had been a member for most of my life — because we need Democrats to provide the checks and balance our nation so badly needs,’ Bloomberg wrote in an Instagram post announcing his move. Democrats are welcoming Bloomberg — and his checkbook.

So Michael Bloomberg is now officially a Democrat. He started out as a Democrat, became a Republican, then an independent, and now he’s back to being a Democrat. These days, for a Manhattanite worth $52 billion, it’s the logical place to be. For their part, the Democrats, the erstwhile party of the workers, are happy enough to have him. After all, in 2016, Bloomberg loudly endorsed Hillary Clinton, and this year he has given the Democrats $100 million. And that’s on top of the many millions he has spent to advance liberal causes, notably gun control, climate change — and the dreaded super-sized soda. Still, that’s not the same thing as the Democrats’ being willing to pick him to lead anything — except perhaps their finance committee.