Depending on how you count, it looks like there’s going to be between 18 and 25 Democratic candidates for President in 2020. We’re gonna need a bigger boat.
Commenting on the large field, a Republican-leaning friend sent me a link to this article: Why are 2020 Democrats so weird?
Funny. But true enough.
When the first candidate announcements came out, it did strike me that some of them were a bit strange. I chalked that up to the odd ducks just needing the early press. Unfortunately, as the list of candidates grew, things didn’t dramatically improve. The field isn’t without considerable substance but it’s not an abundance of riches, either. Where is the academic intellectual giant or the brilliant military mind or the popular business executive or the impressively theatrical orator? So, okay. Maybe the field is a little weird.
Of course, given the Republican opponent, weirdness is a matter of scale. No Democrat will ever out-weird Donald Trump.
More importantly, though: Does it really matter? This won’t come a huge shock to anyone who reads my blog, but it’s worth repeating…
I simply don’t care if the Democratic candidate is weird or boringly ordinary. I don’t care if the candidate is young or old, male or female, tall or short, gay or straight, black or brown or white or green. While I have some strong policy preferences, absolutely nothing is a litmus test for my support and my vote. I don’t care if the candidate is as dull as a spoon or, to paraphrase Lina Lamont, “a shimmering, glowing star in the political firmament.”
My sole concern is that whoever wins the Democratic nomination must be able to successfully execute a campaign strategy to win 270 Electoral votes in the general election.
In my perfect world, each candidate would need to declare a state-by-state strategy for winning the Electoral College. Many would have a tough time defending their ability to win all of the states on their lists. A candidate without control of the math necessary to win the general election is just a waste of oxygen. And a lot of oxygen is going to be wasted.
Many candidates in the Democratic herd will be able to rack up huge polling numbers in states where anyone not named Trump could win in the general election. Some candidates will be favored to win the Democratic primary in states where no Democrat could possibly win in the general election. These states don’t matter. They. Don’t. Matter.
Even people that know better sometimes miss the point. FiveThirtyEight keeps track of what they call the “Endorsement Primary” which puts point values on the endorsements that candidates receive from “prominent members” of the Democratic party. While it might be a clever way of determining who has the best intra-party buzz, it includes no weighting for endorsements in swing-states. While Cory Booker currently “leads” this FiveThirtyEight construct, he has zero endorsements from anyone in a swing state. Conversely, while FiveThirtyEight puts Amy Klobuchar in third place, every one of her endorsements comes from a swing state. As the campaigns progress, and more endorsements are forthcoming, I might have to create my own version of this that includes only swing-state endorsements weighted by the associated Electoral vote count.
For Democrats to win, they’re going to have to recognize that swing-state performance in the general election is the only thing worth considering. At the moment, unfortunately, it doesn’t even seem to be part of the conversation. That must change. The outcome is too important. Our nation cannot survive another four years of Donald Trump. Ruth Bader Ginsburg would be 92 at the end of Trump’s second term. The oldest Supreme Court Justice to-date was the 90-year-old Oliver Wendell Holmes. Just sayin’.
I’ve already weighed in on the Democratic Electoral Strategies that I believe have the best shot at winning and I don’t yet have any reason to change those opinions. The point is that a Democratic win is still well within reach given the correct candidate.
So what candidate(s) can successfully execute one of the winning strategies? I don’t know yet. In the coming months, some candidates will run better campaigns than others; some candidates will break out of the pack via some random event; some candidates will do better than others in the debates; some candidates will seriously self-destruct; some candidates will allow the media to build them up and then destroy them. And, most unfortunately, some potentially good candidates will be successfully marginalized by other, weaker candidates.
In the end, though, it’s a numbers game that screams for meaningful data analytics. Such analytics require discrete polling data in each of the 18 swing-states. And, again, it’s a bit too early.
While nationwide polls are abundant, they are actually less than useful. Not only is overall popularity meaningless given the rules of the Electoral College, some of these polls are being used to push political narratives that simply don’t reflect reality. My biggest worry is still that progressive activists in very Democratic states will nominate someone who has been forced so far to the left that they will be unable to win in enough swing-states.
The swing-state polls that do exist may not be particularly useful, either. Without a specific Democratic candidate, current polls are forced to pit a generic Democrat against Trump. In such polls, the generic candidate benefits from being “Not Trump” without having to deal with any candidate-specific baggage. Thus, these polls will artificially favor the generic Democrat. There will also be an issue of accuracy even once the field shrinks enough to allow match-up polls. Sampling voters in a single state is considerably harder than conducting a national poll. Given those difficulties, there might not be enough publicly-available state polls to mathematically eliminate the outliers.
I’ll keep looking, though, and will share whatever I gather. In the meantime, I sincerely hope that someone in the DNC’s new DDEx with access to a lot more data is being paid to do this level of analysis.
But, then, I also sincerely hope that I win the lottery. Weird, huh?