Today in Bloomberg Opinion: Trump's Critics Call Him Unelectable. Will Voters Listen?

The disappointing results of the 2022 midterms have awakened concerns among some Republicans about their party's occasional tendency to nominate weak candidates in key races. Some of these party leaders now fear that another Trump nomination in 2024 will drag down their party once again—but as I observe in Bloomberg Opinion today, Republican voters aren't nearly as accustomed as Democrats to accept that a tradeoff exists between electability and other party goals.

Were Democratic Voters Right About Biden's Electability?

The idea that there is often a difference between the candidate you love the most and the candidate who has the best chance to win is a long-standing fixture of nomination politics, especially in the Democratic Party. But the assumption that "electability" is a quality shared by some potential nominees more than others, and even that it is a valid criterion of candidate selection, was disputed more than usual in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries. Though it requires diving back into what now seems like a long-ago pre-COVID political world, it's worth revisiting this debate from the perspective of the summer campaign and the current state of the general election race.

Electability was a fraught subject in the 2020 Democratic nomination contest partially because of the perception of a significant ideological divide within the party, made more salient by the viable candidacy of self-described socialist Bernie Sanders. Sanders's lack of defensiveness about his philosophical commitments made him an admirable figure in the eyes of his supporters, but also provoked considerable opposition to his prospective nomination among other Democrats—including most of the party's elected officials and a large proportion of its activists and organizational leadership.

Layered on top of this familiar debate over whether a tradeoff exists between electability and ideological purity was another set of concerns about candidates' social identities. Many Democrats had deduced from the racist backlash after Barack Obama's 2008 election and the unexpected defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016 that non-white and (especially) female presidential candidates are likely to lose votes due to the persistence of popular prejudices. Even though they supported the general goal of increasing the demographic diversity of the nation's officeholding class, a number of Democratic primary voters proceeded to draw the natural conclusion that nominating a white male presidential candidate for the first time since 2004 would be the safest path to ejecting the hated Trump from office.

But the prevalence of this view dismayed some feminist commentators, who continued to ascribe Trump's political rise to the prevalence of misogyny in the American public but who objected when this argument was then cited as justification for supporting a male nominee to oppose him. In the young progressive circles that are disproportionately well-represented in the online world, it was common either to reject the electability logic altogether or to claim that it actually favored candidates on the left. The science reporter at a well-known "explainer" website even argued that because differences in the relative potential strength of prospective nominees cannot be determined precisely in advance, the entire concept was dubious even in the abstract: "it's subjective, not objective . . . electability ain't no science." (Normally, the scientific mode of inquiry tends to make a stronger distinction between the difficulty of measuring a phenomenon and the existence or absence of the phenomenon itself.)

Despite these assertions, a coalition of the Democratic Party's most pragmatic constituencies—including African-Americans, southerners, upscale suburbanites, and senior citizens—ultimately rallied behind Joe Biden's self-presentation as the safest choice to send into battle against Trump. Now that we're about midway between the point in March at which Biden became the presumptive Democratic nominee and the date of the November election, it's time to re-evaluate the electability debate in light of how the campaign has proceeded so far.

From one perspective, the electability argument for Biden has been completely vindicated. Biden has opened up a bigger lead over Trump in the national popular vote than any candidate has enjoyed at this stage since Bill Clinton coasted to re-election in 1996, and he is so well-positioned in the electoral college that the battleground map has expanded into the traditional red territory of Arizona, Georgia, and even Texas. The Trump campaign has proven unable as of yet to land a damaging punch on Biden, and has even struggled to find a promising line of attack.

Biden hasn't been as invisible a candidate as some critics claim, but his campaign activities during the pandemic have not generated much sustained attention. Because journalists do not find the very familiar Biden to be a particularly fruitful source of interesting stories, the national media has been focusing instead almost entirely on Trump, and Trump's spiraling political problems, since the Democratic nomination wrapped up after Super Tuesday. The relative novelty of nearly every other major potential nominee—Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg—would have attracted more coverage from the media and pulled the spotlight away from Trump much more frequently.

On the other hand, Biden's current success surely reflects the sinking fortunes of Trump's presidency more than any particular attribute or skill of his own. Even more than most, this election promises to serve as a referendum on the performance of the incumbent; perhaps any plausible Democratic nominee would have opened up a steady lead after the events of the past few months. As Trump's approval ratings continue to slide, supporters of Democratic candidates who were deemed less electable in the primaries might justifiably feel in retrospect that 2020 may well turn out to be a missed opportunity. Perhaps the party could have taken the additional risk associated with a non-white-male or more left-wing nominee while still retaining a good chance of victory.

Because we lack access to the parallel universes in which other nominees were chosen, it's impossible to completely settle the electability debate. However, enough evidence now exists to shed light on two claims made by some advocates of non-Biden candidates in the 2020 Democratic primaries. One is that there are so few remaining swing voters in our current age of rampant polarization that mobilization of the party base is more productive than trying to achieve a broader appeal, and the other is that a Biden nomination would not excite enough voters on the left to stimulate this necessary mobilization.

Both of these claims have already been contradicted by the polls. Biden wouldn't have pulled into the strong lead he now holds if he weren't drawing significant support from previous Republican voters. (According to recent surveys by the New York Times, 14 percent of battleground state residents who supported Trump in 2016 are not supporting him in 2020.) After years of media stories about Trump’s skill in stoking the passionate devotion of his own party, the last few months have forced a widespread journalistic rediscovery of the importance of swing voters and the danger of Trump's declining popularity among this still-pivotal bloc. And while Biden himself doesn't inspire as much personal enthusiasm among Democrats as Trump does among many Republicans, overall levels of interest in the election are equal across party lines: Democratic voters are as motivated to vote against the president as Republicans are to vote for him.

There are still four months to go in the campaign, which is still plenty of time for the prevailing dynamic to change. Republicans have become concerned that Biden's status as a elderly white man who isn't a socialist means that the familiar playbook of accusing Democrats of supporting left-wing extremism or revolutionary social change won't work as well against him as it would have against other potential nominees. But Biden's to-be-announced running mate will be a woman, probably a woman of color, and quite possibly a woman of color with a more liberal record than his. It's likely that she will wind up serving as the target of these attacks, with Biden himself portrayed by the Trump campaign as too hapless and mentally impaired to prevent her from imposing her "radical" agenda on the nation if elected. Just because Biden won the Democratic nomination by promising to transcend divisions of race, gender, and ideology doesn't mean that the fall campaign won't once again be dominated by these highly-charged subjects.

Sanders Was a Big Step Forward for Leftism—But Where Does It Go From Here?

Bernie Sanders officially suspended his 2020 presidential campaign on Wednesday, choosing not to contest the Democratic primaries all the way to the end of the calendar as he had done in 2016. It may seem in retrospect as if Sanders's second campaign was less successful than his first, since his support fell below its 2016 level in every state that voted after Super Tuesday and he dropped out of the race much sooner this time around. Yet Sanders achieved something important in 2020 that he never did four years ago: a temporary status as the favorite for the nomination during the two-and-a-half weeks between the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries, before Joe Biden's sudden resurgence blocked his path. It's likely that Sanders's two presidential bids, taken together, represent an important milestone in American politics. But it's impossible to know right now how important they will turn out to be.

After each of his candidacies, some analysts confidently declared that Sanders—despite his present-day defeats—nevertheless represents the future of the Democratic Party. This blog has consistently been skeptical of that argument, and it remains so today. Even if Sanders had managed to win the 2020 race, it would have been a testament to the complexities and contingencies of multi-candidate nomination politics more than the expression of a fundamental shift in the preferences of Democratic voters. And if Sanders had gone on to lose the general election to Donald Trump, there would have been substantial backlash within the party against his brand of politics.

Sanders found more success running for president than many people anticipated—and more success than any left-wing candidate achieved since Jesse Jackson, if not George McGovern. But as these historical parallels suggest, temporary breakthroughs do not inevitably lead to long-term transformations. Sanders has given leftism (a word I use in a non-pejorative sense to distinguish Sanders-style politics from the conventional Obama-Biden liberalism now prevailing within the Democratic mainstream) its best opportunity in at least a generation to establish itself as a persistently influential force in American politics, even if it remains unlikely to succeed in remaking the entire Democratic Party in its own image. But opportunities can be squandered, and they often have been before.

Sanders's most obvious contribution to the leftist cause is demonstrating that millions of Americans can be mobilized to support—and support passionately, with generous financial contributions—a political candidate who identifies himself as a socialist and who advocates a comprehensively left-wing set of issue positions that would, especially in the economic realm, represent a break from the thrust of American policy-making over at least the past 40 years. He diverted the attention of activists on the left who have often remained aloof from electoral politics to the potential benefits of seeking power through that means. And he (very sensibly) used the vehicle of a major party to do so, illustrating the self-defeating pointlessness of leftism's previous third-party dalliances by winning nearly four times as many total votes in one-and-a-half nomination contests as the Green Party has won over the past six general elections.

Sanders also introduced new or long-absent policy positions into the realm of public debate. Whether or not student debt forgiveness, a federal jobs guarantee, or six months of paid family leave are ever implemented in the United States, the necessary first step toward enactment is for a candidate to build a campaign around them. A political journalistic class that does not naturally welcome discussions of economic inequality and fairness has been compelled by Sanders's campaigns to acknowledge these subjects to a much greater degree than it did in preceding decades.

But Sanders also exposed some of the continued political weakness of American leftism even in a moment of relative triumph, so it's worth considering what else would need to happen for his candidacies to become the start of a larger revolution (as it were). Simply pointing at the age distribution of Sanders's support and claiming that the left wing can just wait to inherit the Democratic Party from its more moderate elders isn't very convincing. At any given historical moment, lefties can be prone to assuming that the enthusiasm of youthful activists for their cause is a sign that popular victory is just around the generational corner, but it's worth considering how many baby boomers who were marching in the streets in the 1960s and 1970s aged to become supporters of Joe Biden—or, for that matter, of Donald Trump.

While Sanders did much to promote the idea that left-wing politics could be productively advanced within the institutional framework of the Democratic Party, he did not entirely resolve—and, in some ways, even exacerbated—the tension between corners of the activist left and the party as it now exists. Sanders's refusal to officially become a Democrat himself, combined with his rhetorical attacks on the "Democratic establishment," meant that he couldn't speak of the party as a "we" rather than a "they," which contrasted with other leaders (such as Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) whose policy views overlap with Sanders but who present themselves as heirs to the left's lineage within the Democratic Party rather than outside it.

For those on the left who disdain the Democratic name, this separation was a major reason why Sanders was preferable to alternatives like Warren. In both 2016 and 2020, Sanders ran better among political independents than among self-identified Democrats. Some of his most prominent and devoted public supporters, and even campaign staff members, have histories of open antagonism to Democratic leaders and organizations. But increasing the appeal of leftist politics within the Democratic electoral base in the future will require courting citizens who are loyal to the party and proud of its history—such as the black voters whose lack of support for Sanders proved decisive in both of the last two elections. The modern conservative movement gained control of the Republican Party not by dismissing the GOP's heritage but by claiming it for itself. Yet analogous actors on the left have been much more likely to criticize the Democratic leadership from outside the tent, limiting their persuasive power over those inside.

Another question still unanswered at this stage is whether momentum on the left will survive the end of Sanders's own national candidacy. Sanders is famous for his lack of interest in promoting or even talking about himself, but insurgent or upstart presidential campaigns often wind up presenting their candidates as political saviors who have arrived on the scene to personally cure the nation's ills, and—as with Obama and Trump before him—Sanders has indeed become such a figure, treated by some admirers as the only honest man in politics. Both Sanders campaigns styled themselves as a "movement," but can this movement extend beyond Sanders, his current activist supporters, and a handful of backbench allies in the House of Representatives?

One might be tempted to compare Sanders to Barry Goldwater, whose own unsuccessful presidential candidacy laid the groundwork for later transformational change, but the modern conservative movement was already much larger than one candidate or campaign by the time of Goldwater's 1964 nomination, and only two years after his general election defeat it elected its ultimate embodiment, Ronald Reagan, to be governor of the nation's largest state. Sanders has been a very effective spokesperson for his cause, but he does not seem to be a natural institution-builder, and an enduring political movement or party faction needs renewable capacity beyond the intermittent mobilization of quadrennial presidential campaigns. Here, as elsewhere, the conservative movement's ability to draw steady financial and structural support from business interests and wealthy patrons has given it an advantage that is difficult to replicate on the left.

The Sanders campaign was also ultimately hampered by another common impediment of left-wing politics: strategic and tactical deficiencies. Lefties can easily fall into the habit of waging campaigns in the political world as they wish it to be, not in the world as it is. They may also avoid practices that they consider unseemly, even if they might be effective. Post-mortem accounts of the Sanders operation describe flawed or absent polling, considerable strategic rigidity, and a candidate disinclined to reach out to other political figures who would have been in position to help him win. (The Warren campaign also seems to have been organized around the idea that relying on pollsters and professional consultants to make major decisions was somehow beneath its dignity and therefore to be resisted.) Romanticizing the noble defeat is a long-standing tradition on the American left, but it has undeniable practical drawbacks if the goal is to gain and hold political power.

Sanders has already left a mark on aspects of the Democratic policy platform, and he will almost certainly be credited in coming years with drawing a generation of activists into the political arena. Rather than exerting a transformative effect on the party as a whole, a more invigorated left wing is—if it can sustain its energy over the long term—more likely to act as one among many constituencies tugging on Democratic leaders to prioritize its particular concerns. Though such a development would fall well short of some supporters' revolutionary ambitions, it would be still a fairly impressive legacy for a second-place campaign to leave behind.

Nelson W. Polsby's Analysis of Presidential Nominations Still Applies After 37 Years

Today at the Washington Post's Monkey Cage blog, I reflect on the continued relevance of Nelson W. Polsby's 1983 book Consequences of Party Reform for the events of the last several weeks. The media-driven ups and downs of the Democratic presidential candidates in the 2020 election illustrate the enduring insights of Polsby's research, as does his newly-resonant concern that excluding party leaders from playing a central role in selecting nominees increases the risk of electing a president who is unable to meet the expectations and challenges of the office.

March 10 Primary Review: From "Contested Convention!" to "Over Already?!?"

It wasn't all that long ago that the prospect of a contested Democratic convention was every savvy Washingtonian's favorite topic of conversation. Traditional political journalists, who are habitually bored and irritated by the smoothly stage-managed and substantively anticlimactic nature of modern conventions, seem to envy the days when their forerunners like H. L. Mencken witnessed the excitement of a political party actually resolving its nomination contest in a blur of stem-winding speeches, repeated roll-call votes, and dark-horse bandwagons. But their predictable musings, usually accompanied by ill-disguised hope, at the beginning of every nomination season that the imminent primary race could easily produce such a thrilling grand finale received reinforcement this year from the ranks of the cutting-edge quantitative analysts. According to the FiveThirtyEight forecasting model, the probability of no single Democratic candidate receiving a majority of delegates spiked after this year's Iowa caucus, briefly rising well over the 50 percent mark prior to Super Tuesday.

Of course, that all seems rather quaint now. Joe Biden's remarkable resurgence, beginning with his modest second-place finish in the Nevada caucus and picking up rocket fuel the following week in South Carolina, extended through another week's worth of elections this Tuesday night. Barely a month after his damaging losses in Iowa and New Hampshire seemed to bring his campaign to the edge of a cliff, Biden is poised to assume the mantle of presumptive Democratic nominee.

What's more, the procedural mechanism that previously made a contested Democratic convention seem so very possible—the party's requirement that delegates must be allocated in proportion to the popular vote in individual states and congressional districts—is the same thing that will now help Biden's campaign make the case that the race is effectively over. At the beginning of the primary sequence, with so many active candidates dividing voter support, it's only natural to suppose that no single contender may be able to attract an outright national majority of delegates. Republican candidates can quickly amass a strong advantage even without a popular majority by placing first in multiple states that award delegates in a winner-take-all fashion, but national party rules close off that path for Democrats.

At the current stage of the nomination sequence, however, proportional allocation becomes a Democratic front-runner's best friend. Biden's lead in the delegate count, though it may not appear numerically lopsided at first glance, has in fact become sufficiently large that only a series of crushing defeats in state after state would seriously endanger it. A Republican candidate in Sanders's position could conceivably ride victories in multiple winner-take-all states to make up ground quickly in the back half of the primary calendar, but the Democratic Party's proportionality requirement dramatically blunts the impact of upsets late in the process. Both Hillary Clinton in 2008 and Bernie Sanders in 2016 notched some notable wins in populous states during the final phases of the primary season, but they had both already fallen far enough behind their opponents that anything short of repeated landslides wasn't going to throw the final outcome into doubt.

And so, like in many other years, the 2020 presidential nomination system has quickly transformed apparent chaos and uncertainty into order and predictability. There are still more states to vote, more questions to resolve, and more strategic choices ahead for both Biden and Sanders. But unless a truly extraordinary disruption occurs in the race, the process has now foreclosed any other outcome than the one that now stands before us.

Super Tuesday Review: Biden Back in Front

The vote-counting from Tuesday's elections will continue not only through the night but also, in California anyway, for a couple of weeks to come. Yet the overall picture is relatively clear. Joe Biden appears to be the winner in ten states (Alabama, Arkansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia). Bernie Sanders has placed first in four states (California, Colorado, Utah, and Vermont). Mike Bloomberg won the caucus in American Samoa, and Elizabeth Warren finished no better than third in every state or territory—including her home state of Massachusetts.

Here are some of the most important implications of the Super Tuesday results:

1. All of a sudden, Biden is once again at the front of the Democratic race, in what might be the most dramatic apparent comeback in the modern history of nominations (no candidate has previously survived finishing fourth in both Iowa and New Hampshire to vault back into the lead). The Biden surge of the past week was spread across the entire nation, and only the prevalence of early and mail voting in California, Texas, and Colorado kept him from amassing a near-decisive lead in delegates.

2. We won't know the final results in California for a while, and it's possible that Sanders did well enough there to keep the total Super Tuesday delegate margin between him and Biden from becoming too lopsided. But the most damaging result for Sanders on Tuesday wasn't the delegate count—it was his unexpected losses in Massachusetts and Minnesota. Beginning with next week's primaries in Michigan and Missouri, many of the key states in the post-Super Tuesday phase of the nomination calendar are urban states in the Northeast and Midwest, including New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois. Had Sanders been able to confine Biden's victories on Tuesday to the string of states from Virginia to Texas, he could have argued that Biden's strength was mostly regional and unlikely to endure once the contest moved northward. But Sanders's losses in two medium-sized, mostly white urban states where Biden didn't even campaign or spend money are much more troubling omens for his candidacy.

3. These results show why a truly contested convention—despite dominating media speculation in the early stages of every election season—is unlikely to occur except under very unusual circumstances. Nearly always, nomination contests naturally narrow down fairly quickly to one or two viable candidates; it's very hard for three candidacies to sustain themselves through the entire gauntlet of primaries. With only two contenders (at most) left standing by the end of the schedule, one or the other can count on a first-ballot majority at the convention, even if the arithmetic technically requires a bloc of delegates previously pledged to withdrawn candidates to pitch in enough votes to put the leading delegate-winner over the top. (Before a recent round of rules changes barred their participation on the first ballot, superdelegates could also perform this service, as they did for Barack Obama in 2008.) Democratic voters in the first 18 states have reduced what was once a large field of candidates to two plausible remaining options—Biden and Sanders—and the role of Democrats in the remaining 32 states is to determine which of these two will be the nominee.

4. Biden's now the favorite once again, but Sanders is by no means out of the running. More twists and turns are still quite possible, if not likely. But this is usually the kind of defeat that compels a candidate to make adjustments: tweak the campaign message, revise the strategy, target a new constituency. A key question hanging over the rest of this race is whether Sanders, who prides himself on his consistency, will rethink his approach or simply plow ahead on his current path.

5. A lot of people seem to have drawn the conclusion from the last few days that campaign ads and field organizing have become fairly meaningless in modern elections, since Biden engineered his historic surge while being massively outspent and out-organized by Sanders and Bloomberg. The reality is probably more complicated. It's certainly true that national media and social media are more important factors in the nomination horse race, and local organizations less important factors, than they once were. But Biden also has a unique advantage: everybody already knows who he is, and Democrats already have positive views of him, so television ads and campaign mailers are much less necessary to boost his name recognition or get his message out than would be true for other candidates.

In fact, it's very possible that Biden's lack of money and organizational capacity severely damaged and almost ended his candidacy in Iowa and New Hampshire—especially in Iowa, where the caucus system rewards candidates who have the infrastructure to identify supporters, drag them to the caucus meetings, and keep them there until the voting is complete. Similarly, while Bloomberg's money wasn't sufficient to deliver him the nomination, one glance at the Super Tuesday results is enough to confirm that he was able to buy himself a significant, though ultimately insufficient, amount of popular support simply by spending at unprecedented rates.

Rather than decisively declaring one factor "the real story" and other factors "worthless," we analysts should acknowledge the extraordinary complexity of multi-candidate nomination contests. It can be tempting to declare Biden's comeback inevitable now that it's happened, but nominations are much less predictable and more contingent than that. All of us are students rather than masters of this subject, and the unusual events of the past few days have shown how much there always is to learn.

South Carolina Primary Review: Biden's Back in the Game, But He's Not Winning Yet

The one silver lining in Joe Biden's weaker-than-expected performances in Iowa and New Hampshire was that they gave him the chance for a "comeback" in South Carolina, where he retained a potential reservoir of support among the black and moderate white voters who dominate the state's Democratic electorate. Biden's advantage was temporarily shaken—several polls after New Hampshire showed his lead in South Carolina narrowing to single digits—but a combination of his second place finish in Nevada last Saturday, sharper-than-usual debate performance on Tuesday, and key endorsement from veteran congressman Jim Clyburn, the House Majority Whip, on Wednesday helped propel him to a victory of nearly 30 points.

It's likely that Biden will benefit from a few days of very positive media coverage heading into Super Tuesday, and that a number of elected Democrats will rally around him as the most viable remaining alternative to Bernie Sanders. But Biden still has a ways to go before he reclaims his position as front-runner in the race. Sanders will probably win a decisive victory in California on Tuesday, where much of the vote has already been cast by mail and is thus insensitive to a Biden surge, that may alone provide him with a significant lead in the national delegate count. It's also unclear what proportion of any last-minute decline in support for Warren, Buttigieg, or Bloomberg will migrate to Biden, and how much will be transferred to Sanders instead.

It does seem as if the Democratic contest is quickly heading toward a showdown between Sanders and Biden, though polls suggest that Bloomberg is poised to accumulate a chunk of delegates on Super Tuesday that could conceivably matter to the final outcome. (A two-candidate race would provide some clarity to the question of whether there will be a contested convention, since one or the other will have a majority of delegates.) But can Biden, who suffers from a much smaller war chest and weaker campaign organization than one would expect a two-term vice president to have, actually keep up with Sanders once the election calendar accelerates from Tuesday onward? The answer to that question may well hold the key to the nomination.

Democratic Debate Review: A Telling Final Question

The news media didn't take very long Wednesday night to settle on a consensus interpretation of the evening's Democratic presidential debate. Before the first commercial break had been reached, the conventional wisdom had already swept across Twitter: the evening was a victory for Elizabeth Warren and a defeat for Michael Bloomberg. There were reasons to expect such a storyline even before Warren used her first statement of the debate to launch a direct attack on Bloomberg: the press has been stung all week by accusations that it hasn't been granting Warren the attention she deserves, and Bloomberg, who has has been looming over the race for months but hasn't yet competed for votes or participated in any debates, was facing the difficult task of living up in person to a set of rising poll numbers fueled by an unprecedented advertising blitz.

Whether Bloomberg experiences a serious popularity reversal as a result of the night's events is difficult to predict. He's likely to suffer negative news coverage over the next few days, but he doesn't have to worry about his funding sources drying up, and it's not clear that the specific subject that was the main source of contention at the debate—the use of non-disclosure agreements by former employees of his media company—will resonate strongly with the segment of the Democratic mass electorate otherwise open to supporting his candidacy. Warren can count on a temporary boost in positive publicity and fundraising, but with two early states that should have been relatively favorable ground already behind her and a much less friendly geographic path laying immediately ahead, she probably needs more than one strong debate to remain in serious contention.

All this is pretty good news for current front-runner Bernie Sanders, who mostly escaped attacks from the rest of the field on Wednesday and who has the least of all the candidates to fear from a continued media focus on Bloomberg. (The biggest threat to Sanders would be a resurgent Joe Biden, but while many media observers thought Biden's performance was stronger than usual on Wednesday, it won't be the major story coming out of the debate.) In fact, the final question of the night revealed the strength of Sanders's position: he was the only candidate to agree that if no single candidate wins a majority of pledged delegates, the candidate with the most delegates should receive the nomination.

This is, of course, partially the Sanders campaign's recognition that he is unlikely to be a compromise choice or the preferred nominee of Democratic superdelegates in the event of a contested convention. But it's also a signal to the party made from a position of strength. The Sanders camp is betting that there's a good chance that they will have at least a delegate plurality, and they want to warn Democratic leaders at this early stage that they will denounce any attempt to deny him the nomination under such circumstances as an illegitimate usurpation of the process.

The fact that the rest of the Democratic field responded to the question by defending the right of the party to select a different nominee reflects the extent to which contestation rather than an outright delegate majority is, in their minds, a live possibility even with 48 states and 7 territories still to vote in this race. Of course, we can expect any of them to make the same argument that Sanders is currently making if they wind up with a delegate plurality instead. But more than a third of the total national delegate count will be selected within the next two weeks, and it's quite possible that we're not very far away from a situation where a contested convention is the only numerically plausible alternative to a first-ballot Sanders nomination. With such a front-loaded nomination calendar, it gets late early out there.

New Hampshire Primary Review: Bernie's Biggest Win Wasn't His First-Place Finish

Bernie Sanders's performance in Tuesday night's New Hampshire primary isn't likely to impress the news media much. Sanders won New Hampshire for the second straight election, but he received less than half of his 2016 vote share (26 percent, as of this writing, compared to 60 percent last time) and edged Pete Buttigieg by less than 2 percentage points, in contrast to his 22-point margin over Hillary Clinton four years ago. Both Sanders and Buttigieg will receive the same number of pledged delegates from the state. Unsurprisingly, a New York Times reporter proclaimed the 2nd- and 3rd-place finishes of Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar to be the top two stories of the night, rather than Sanders's nominal victory.

But those two results are themselves very good news for Sanders's ultimate chances of winning the nomination. Had it been Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren who received 24 and 20 percent of the vote in New Hampshire to Sanders's 26 percent, Sanders would be facing two rejuvenated opponents who would have the name recognition and resources to compete with him once the race opens out into a quasi-national contest on Super Tuesday, and Biden in particular would be back in position to enter Super Tuesday with a campaign-stabilizing victory three days earlier in the South Carolina primary.

Instead, Biden and Warren have been seriously damaged by their descent into the high single digits in New Hampshire, and the media death watch over both campaigns that will probably ensue won't make it easy for them to rebound. Buttigieg and Klobuchar can expect a short-term publicity boost after their overperformances on Tuesday, but they will need to quickly build Super Tuesday-caliber campaign operations around themselves over the next three weeks in order to avoid being drowned out by Sanders's financial and organizational advantages in expensive, delegate-rich states like California and Texas. And the fact that each of them is competing against the other as well as against Sanders (Buttigieg, in particular, was a repeated target of critical remarks from Klobuchar in last Friday's debate) makes their tasks even more challenging.

Much has been made of Sanders's relative weakness among black voters, which was a pivotal impediment to his campaign against Hillary Clinton in 2016. But while Joe Biden was previously considered a heavy favorite against Sanders in South Carolina and other Deep South states due to his supposedly strong personal support among this constituency, there's no reason to believe that Sanders couldn't attract a significant share of the black vote if Biden were seriously weakened or driven from the race and Sanders’s main opponents were instead Buttigieg and Klobuchar—neither of whom has yet invested much, or demonstrated much success, in courting black leaders or citizens.

A national Quinnipiac poll released on Monday showed Mike Bloomberg's level of black support approaching Biden's, 27 percent to 22 percent, suggesting that Biden's continuing decline might benefit Bloomberg most of all among black Democrats. (Bloomberg has recently spent millions of dollars on an advertising campaign featuring video footage of Barack Obama praising him by name.) But in an utterly inexplicable strategy, Bloomberg has opted not to contest South Carolina, even though it votes only three days before Super Tuesday and will undoubtedly influence those results. While the current state of the race in South Carolina isn't clear, it's quite possible that Sanders could be very competitive there if Biden continues to fade, and a Sanders victory followed by a successful multi-state Super Tuesday performance would make it difficult for any other candidate to catch him in the pledged delegate count absent an extraordinary turn of events.

So it's probably wise to discount media talk that Sanders has had trouble growing his coalition. No other single candidate has done any better at winning votes so far, and there are good reasons to believe that his major advantages have not yet been activated. Of course, there's a long way to go in the delegate race, and strange things can and do happen in nomination politics. But the two candidates who once loomed as Sanders's strongest rivals are starting to look like they won't be the ones to stop him—if anyone does.

The Media Expectations Game Usually Hurts Nomination Front-Runners, But Not in 2020

The history of presidential nomination politics suggests that it's a mixed blessing for a candidate to be considered a front-runner by the national media heading into the primary and caucus season. Of course, it's better to be doing well in polls and fundraising, the usual metrics of pre-primary success, than to be doing badly in either. At the same time, front-runner status usually comes with expectations for a dominant performance in the early states. These expectations can produce waves of damaging news coverage for a candidate who fails to meet them, driving voters away and scaring off financial donors—while rivals who appear to "beat the spread" in Iowa or New Hampshire receive a major publicity boost. From Ed Muskie in 1972 to Howard Dean in 2004 to Hillary Clinton in 2008, pre-primary favorites have repeatedly suffered major damage from early-state results deemed by the shapers of conventional wisdom to be insufficiently impressive.

But something's different in 2020. Joe Biden is the Democratic front-runner by media consensus, and for understandable reasons—he's a former two-term vice president who's consistently led the national polls. Yet journalists and commentators don't seem to be treating Biden as especially likely to win either Iowa or New Hampshire. This is an unprecedented situation in the modern (post-1968) nomination era; there have been previous races without a single clear pre-Iowa favorite, but none in which a widely-acknowledged front-runner isn't assumed to enjoy an advantage in at least one, and usually both, of the first two states. Only South Carolina, the fourth and final pre-Super Tuesday contest, is by general agreement a place where Biden needs a victory (and probably by a double-digit margin) to avoid a serious media backlash.

There are a few reasons for this unusual state of affairs. One element of pre-election expectations-setting is poll numbers, and Biden hasn't had a consistent lead in either Iowa or New Hampshire since the early fall, which has helped lower the perceived benchmark for him in both states (though a few recent polls, especially in Iowa, still show him narrowly ahead). Another reason is demographics. Influential media voices have become increasingly sensitive to the fact that the racial composition of the Democratic Party in Iowa and New Hampshire differs significantly from that of its national membership, and are well aware that Biden runs better among non-white voters than he does among white liberals. Finally, the 2016 election offers what seems like an instructive parallel: Hillary Clinton failed to meet expectations in both of the first two states, barely defeating Bernie Sanders in Iowa and then losing New Hampshire to him by 22 percentage points, but she quickly managed to rally in Nevada, South Carolina, and the southern Super Tuesday states. If Biden loses the first two states to Sanders, it will seem to many analysts more like a rerun of the last Democratic nomination race (with Biden in the ultimately successful Clinton position) than a clear indicator of an imploding candidacy.

As my political science colleague Seth Masket notes, some Sanders supporters are frustrated that the media isn't currently giving their candidate a better chance of victory. Of course, the logic of nomination dynamics suggests that being underestimated at this stage is actually a strategic advantage, so perhaps it would be savvier for them to stifle their complaints for now.

Still, they have a point. Sanders is in a kind of inverse, but complementary, position compared to Biden: expectations for his performance in Iowa and New Hampshire are higher than his perceived chances of actually being the Democratic nominee. He therefore needs to win New Hampshire, and probably Iowa too, to convince the media that he has a shot at winning a majority of national delegates. But if he can claim those early victories—and this week's polling in both states suggests that it's quite achievable—the electoral terrain quickly shifts to South Carolina and the Super Tuesday states, where it will be much easier for Sanders to "overperform" (and thus impress the media) than for Biden to exceed what will be rising expectations on his own side. Sanders is also extremely well-funded for the quasi-national campaign that Super Tuesday requires. And if he can break through in California and Texas, there will be a fair number of delegates in his pocket after the first week of March, plus the potential for a self-subsidized Michael Bloomberg candidacy to cut into Biden's advantage with party moderates.

While Biden and Sanders have both been able to keep media expectations in check despite favorable polls and fundraising success, the rest of the field faces a tougher challenge. It's quite possible for one or more of them to outperform their current polling numbers in either of the first two states. But for midwesterners Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, anything short of a first-place finish in Iowa will raise the question of where they can win if they can't win there, and the same logic will be applied to New Englander Elizabeth Warren in the New Hampshire primary the following week. It can seem strange that a nomination contest that began with more then 20 active candidates might narrow to a functional two- or three-horse race after a handful of state contests, but the number of serious contenders in this election who didn't even make it as far as Iowa demonstrates how effectively and unsentimentally the sequential nomination process culls the field before most voters get the chance to register their preferences.

October Democratic Debate Recap: What Purpose Do Debates Serve?

Tuesday night's Democratic debate fell into a familiar pattern: a discussion of the relative merits of single-payer health care vs. a public option early in the evening, a few awkward exchanges thereafter but no single revealing moment, and a silly closing question that inadvertently revealed the extent to which television anchors tend to regard their viewers as simple-minded and allergic to substance. Anyone who hasn't already been paying attention to the race could glean some information from the dynamics on display: Warren and Sanders are running as transformational idealists; Biden, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar are running as art-of-the-possible realists; and Harris, Booker, and Castro are trying to split the difference. Warren was the target of criticism from multiple rivals (though, interestingly, not from Sanders), reflecting her status as a candidate on the rise in the polls.

But most of the audience tuning in for a three-hour debate held more than three months before the start of the primary season presumably knew most of this information already, or would have gathered it soon enough from other sources. Despite all the hype that debates receive—and despite the power that the qualification rules now hold over candidate behavior, especially fundraising strategies—the value that they actually add to the nomination process remains very difficult to determine. (I suspect that their net effect in general is somewhat negative, increasing the chance that the election is affected by non-substantive "zingers" and "blunders" while attracting an excessively large field of also-ran candidates seeking national publicity.)

Maybe the solution is to have fewer debates. But, at the minimum, expectations for their newsworthiness should be lowered to an appropriate level—especially in this election. With so many candidates in the race, it is hard for any single contender to receive enough camera time to make a strong impression or create a dramatic moment. And a multi-candidate election also scrambles the strategic picture considerably: attack one opponent, and another rival might wind up benefiting more than you do.

After every debate, complaints pile up at the feet of the moderators or the sponsoring media outlet: it was boring, the questions were bad, important topics were ignored, this or that candidate got too much or too little attention. Some of these points are always valid. But when debate after debate fails to enlighten, perhaps the flaw is in the institution itself, or in the anticipation that precedes it. Presidential candidates always differ in important ways that an informed electorate should consider before making its choices. But there's no reason to assume that debates, at least as they are currently organized, do much to educate voters about these differences.

Democratic Debate Analysis: Who Has the Right to Question Biden's Competence?

It's likely that even those analysts who love to declare winners, losers, and game-changing moments (a practice largely eschewed here at Honest Graft) won't find all that much fodder in Thursday night's Democratic debate. The biggest pre-debate media hype focused on the opportunity for a dramatic personal showdown between Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren, who were appearing on the same debate stage for the first time this year. But no major conflict arose between the two, and for sound strategic reasons. Biden is still ahead in the race, while Warren seems to be steadily gaining support, and so neither candidate has much incentive to rock the boat—at least not right now. Aiming a sharp personal attack at the other might only backfire among the large share of Democratic voters who have positive views of both candidates.

Even those contenders who are far behind in the polls, and thus have more reason to adopt a risky, attention-grabbing debate style, mostly played nice—at least with each other. (Some mockery lobbed in Donald Trump's direction, especially by Kamala Harris, was seemingly designed not only to play to the crowd but also to potentially bait the president into responding on Twitter.) The biggest exception was Julián Castro, who directly challenged Biden on at least two occasions. Castro provoked the most comment during an exchange on the subject of health care, when he claimed that Biden had contradicted himself about an aspect of his reform proposal. "Are you forgetting what you said two minutes ago?" Castro asked Biden.

Anyone paying even modest attention to the news coverage of the 2020 Democratic nomination race is likely to have encountered the implication from multiple corners of the national press corps that the front-running former vice president is not operating at peak performance these days. Biden has long been treated by many reporters, fairly or not, as an undisciplined speaker with an unremarkable intellect, but something of a collective judgment has formed that even by his own standards he's lost a step or two, mentally speaking, as he approaches his late 70s. When combined with Biden's digital illiteracy and propensity to tell stories about the mostly-forgotten senators he served with 45 years ago, this has led to an unmistakable theme running through reporters' coverage of Biden that their subject is a man whose time has come and gone—a pattern that Biden's own orbit recently complained about to Ryan Lizza of Politico.

One might think that the potential competence of would-be presidents would be a critical topic for primary voters to consider—or, at the least, fair game to contest in a debate. But from the perspective of a rival candidate, it's a very tricky issue to raise. And Castro missed the mark: his accusations that Biden had misstated, or "forgotten," his own health care plan were simply not true.

Candidates who make false attacks on their opponents are being unfair and deserve criticism. But multiple media assessments faulted Castro not only for making a false attack—something that has been known to happen from time to time in debates—but also for engaging in underhanded if not offensive insinuations about Biden's cognitive acuity: a "low blow," "playing the age card." Yet later in the debate, Biden gave a somewhat meandering answer in response to a question about Afghanistan and made a non sequitur remark about "having the record player on at night" as (apparently) a suggested means for parents to improve the verbal skills of underprivileged children. Both of these comments provoked immediate media mockery in the familiar "Uncle Joe is losing it!" genre that has become a staple of campaign coverage this year.

One need not agree with Castro's specific line of attack—which was clearly erroneous on the facts—to wonder whether the national media are in danger of adopting a kind of double standard under which reporters and commentators can openly ridicule Biden's outdated references and freely speculate about potential senility while simultaneously pronouncing any political competitor who suggests the same to be guilty of ageism or other out-of-bounds transgressions. This is a complicated and delicate subject, and no clear rule book applies. But if journalists are as concerned about Biden's fitness to serve as they appear to be, they should allow the issue of competence to be openly litigated during the nomination campaign. It's an important attribute for a president to have, and voters should be allowed—and even encouraged—to take it very seriously.

Is the Nationalization of Politics Hurting Favorite Sons and Daughters?

Over the weekend, a new poll of the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination race was released. It showed Joe Biden in first place, Elizabeth Warren in second, and Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, and Kamala Harris following—with no candidate other than these five at more than 2 percent. The poll's findings are quite consistent with the results of other recent surveys, but they are noteworthy in one respect: the poll was conducted in Massachusetts, where Warren has twice been elected to statewide office (most recently last November). Why isn't the Bay State resident far in the lead among her own constituents despite running a highly competitive national campaign?

The question of why Warren isn't more dominant in her own political backyard has occasionally attracted interest from followers of nomination politics. This article by Vox's Ella Nilsen (in which I'm briefly quoted) focuses mostly on her unremarkable level of popularity among the Massachusetts general electorate, but some of its explanations could apply to the Democratic primary as well: Warren has a polarizing persona; she hasn't focused much on cultivating an identity as a fighter for Massachusetts rather than for national causes; she suffers from voter sexism in a state that lacks a history of electing women regularly to high office.

But maybe it's misleading to focus solely on Warren, as if coolness to a home-state candidate is a phenomenon unique to her. How are other serious Democratic presidential contenders faring with the voters who presumably know them best? Reliable public polling at this stage is limited, and its availability varies significantly from state to state, but we have enough evidence to draw some preliminary conclusions.

Let's start in California, where Harris has been elected three times statewide since 2010 (as state attorney general twice and U.S. senator once). The latest public survey by CBS News/YouGov, from July, found Harris running neck-and-neck with Biden (24 percent for him, 23 percent for her), with Warren and Sanders close behind at 19 percent and 16 percent, respectively. A Quinnipiac University poll conducted around the same time found Harris with a slender lead over Biden, 23 percent to 21 percent, with Sanders at 18 percent and Warren at 16 percent.

It's clear from these results that Harris does somewhat better in her home state than elsewhere in the country (she's never received more than 20 percent in any national poll since the start of the race). But she was not able to establish an unambiguous lead in California even during the few weeks after her attention-getting performance in the first Democratic debate, a moment that appears to have been a temporary peak for her candidacy (Harris briefly hit 15 percent in the national RealClearPolitics average in mid-July; today, she's down to 7 percent). So even if she was barely winning California in July, she almost certainly isn't winning it now.

What about Beto O'Rourke, the hero of Texas Democrats for waging a near-miss Senate campaign last year? A July poll by CBS/YouGov found him running in second place in his home state, though barely so: Biden 27 percent, O'Rourke 17 percent, Warren 16 percent, Sanders 12 percent, Harris 12 percent. A more recent survey by Texas Lyceum seemed to confirm this arrangement of the candidates, albeit with a small sample size of Democratic voters (N=358): Biden 24 percent, O'Rourke 18 percent, Warren 15 percent, Sanders 13 percent. (The other Texan in the race, Julián Castro, has failed to reach 5 percent in any public poll of the state.)

It's hard to know how seriously to treat the online polls conducted by Change Research without a longer track record of forecasting success, but in two states where no other nomination polling exists, Change Research results follow the same pattern. A June survey found Amy Klobuchar in fourth place in Minnesota, though only 5 points behind the leader. An August poll of New Jersey found Cory Booker struggling badly there, placing sixth with only 5 percent of the vote.

Taken together, these results suggest that the "favorite son/daughter" phenomenon, in which voters begin a presidential nomination campaign by voicing support for a serious contender from their home state, is not playing a major role in structuring the 2020 nomination race. It's possible that this pattern reflects the nationalization of American politics: voters are paying more attention to national media, national issues, and nationally prominent political figures than they once did, which reduces the relative power of their home-state loyalties.

All else equal, such a development would work to the advantage of Biden and Sanders, who come from very small states but have big national profiles. It's not very good news for Harris and O'Rourke, who could find it more difficult to leverage what would otherwise be an important strategic asset (assuming either can survive the gauntlet of Iowa and New Hampshire): home-field advantage in the two largest states of the country, each sending hundreds of delegates to the national convention. If Elizabeth Warren's decision to devote more energy in office to raising her national visibility than to tending her Massachusetts constituency has hurt her a bit in one state while helping her in 49 others, right now that looks like a sound strategic choice.

Democratic Debate Analysis (Second Night): Can Anyone Beat Biden But Biden?

Some takeaways from Part 2 of this week's Democratic presidential debates (my analysis of Part 1, as well as more general thoughts on debates, can be found here):

1. Joe Biden was the biggest target of attacks on Wednesday—unsurprisingly so, given his current status as the leading candidate in the race. And nearly all of the attacks were ideological jabs from the left: Castro and de Blasio on immigration, Gillibrand and Harris on women's rights, Gabbard on Iraq. What's not yet clear is how vulnerable Biden is to such criticisms; his frequent deployment of his service under Barack Obama as a defense shield in these situations prompted a frustrated response from Booker but may well turn out to be a perfectly effective strategy given Obama's continued popularity with the Democratic electorate. One important question that the debate raises is whether there is an argument that another Democratic candidate can make that's strong enough to bring Biden down, or whether Biden is ultimately much more vulnerable to self-inflicted wounds such as gaffes, or quiet concerns about his age, than open attacks from rivals.

2. One strategic implication of the "lanes" model of party nominations is that it can be advantageous for candidates to attack competitors who are the most ideologically, demographically, or stylistically similar to themselves, on the theory that they are competing over the same blocs of voters. But we haven't seen much evidence yet that Democrats are thinking this way. No Sanders vs. Warren, Buttigieg vs. O'Rourke, Harris vs. Booker, or Biden vs. Bennet showdowns erupted in either debate this week. This was partially due to CNN's transparent maneuvering on both nights to stoke cross-ideological conflict, but no candidates seemed particularly interested in challenging this network-imposed dynamic.

3. Underlying much of the discussion on both nights of the debate is a divide within the Democratic Party over the proper interpretation of the 2016 Clinton-Sanders race and the subsequent rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and company. Do these recent elections demonstrate that a majority of the Democratic Party continues to prefer Obama-style incrementalist politics? Or, instead, do they reflect a growing pressure at the party roots for transformative social change?

Democratic Debate Analysis (First Night): CNN Decides What the Race Is About

Honest Graft was on vacation during the first pair of Democratic presidential debates last month, so this week's events are the first of the 2020 campaign that will receive recaps here on the blog. Perhaps it's worthwhile, then, to review my general perspective on debates before proceeding to discuss Tuesday night's proceedings.

• I tend to be skeptical of analysts' confident declarations of debate "winners" and "losers," because the standards by which such pronouncements are made are usually unclear and are often colored by previous preferences. However, a strong collective judgment among media figures about who did well or who committed a major gaffe can affect candidates' fortunes in important ways, regardless of the fairness of such evaluations.

• Debates can tell us important things beyond who won or lost. They help illustrate candidate strategy, internal party trends and developments, and media preoccupations. But most debates don't turn out to be dramatic "game-changers" in the race as a whole.

• As tools for voters to learn about candidates and make decisions about whom to support, debates are not entirely useless—but neither are they reliably helpful. Rather than adopting the common media theme that debates are sacred exercises in civic enlightenment, citizens should treat them more like the television productions that they are at heart. Television can be entertaining, but it's not reliably informative.

Now, on to a few takeaways from the first night's debate:

1. There was a chance that the random assignment of Sanders and Warren to the same debate stage this month would lead to a showdown between them, but that didn't happen. Instead, the most common dynamic was one in which both candidates were lumped in together as targets of criticism from more moderate rivals.

2. This dynamic didn't just naturally happen on its own; it was largely the consequence of CNN's choice of questions. The moderators, who displayed a curiously hostile tone throughout the evening, were clearly most interested in defining the race as a battle between ideological purity and electoral formidability—a frame to which they frequently returned. (CNN's post-debate coverage summarized the event by repeatedly displaying the chyron "Breaking News: Liberal and Moderate Democrats Clash in Detroit.") The moderators' behavior had the inevitable effect of minimizing the differences between Sanders and Warren, while making the two of them stand out dramatically from the rest of the field.

3. John Delaney, Steve Bullock, Tim Ryan, and John Hickenlooper all repeatedly accepted the moderators' invitations to make attacks against Warren and Sanders, but the short response times imposed by CNN (as low as 15 seconds in some cases) meant that these candidates didn't have as much of a chance to explain what made them, personally, the best alternative to the two leading lefties in the race. There's a long historical tradition of Democratic candidates distancing themselves from the left edge of their party—and convincing the Democratic electorate that they are smartly positioning themselves for the general election by doing so. But previous Democrats who have successfully employed this approach en route to the nomination have had some other quality that could excite the party's voters: impressive biography, youthful charisma, policy wonkery. Without an immediately obvious personal selling point, these candidates need to make a positive case for themselves as well, but the format was not well-suited to this objective.

4. Amy Klobuchar, interestingly, didn't really take the opportunity to join in the push against the left, despite her self-positioning as an electable midwesterner. (She preferred the popular moderate tactic of attacking the other party instead.) Klobuchar seems to be doing just well enough in polls and donations to qualify for the next debate in September, so she's not in imminent danger of being culled from the race, but as the resident of a neighboring state she'll need to make a big splash in Iowa or she'll be written off before the New Hampshire primary.

5. After (mostly) uniting around the ACA, the presidential wing of the Democratic Party is splintering again on the issue of health care, with substantive policy differences among candidates sometimes illustrated, and sometimes confusingly obscured, by the invocation of phrases like "Medicare for All." Whether or not Democratic primary voters consciously base their choice of candidate on the issue, the 2020 nomination contest will determine whether the party enters the general election on a platform of advocating the wholesale restructuring of the American health insurance system. A vote for Sanders or Warren as nominee is partially a bet that such a position is now viable in a national race.

What's Missing from the "Ideology vs. Electability" Debate

We're still in the early stages of the 2020 presidential campaign, but a common media frame has emerged already: will Democrats prioritize pragmatic electability when selecting a challenger to President Trump, or will the party instead prize ideological purity? Again and again, news coverage of the Democratic nomination contest has boiled a well-populated, multi-faceted candidate race down to this either-or choice, with Joe Biden usually personifying the "electability" option while Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren represent the "purity" alternative.

News outlets have repeatedly publicized surveys of Democratic primary voters designed to measure how they come down on this supposedly inevitable dilemma. "Which type of candidate would you prefer to see the Democrats nominate for president in 2020: a candidate who agrees with you on almost all of the issues you care about but does not have the best chance of beating Donald Trump, or a candidate who has the best chance of beating Donald Trump but who does not agree with you on almost all of the issues you care about?" "Who would you choose if you had a magic wand and can make any of the candidates president—they don't have to beat anyone or win the election?"

One problem with this increasingly ubiquitous concept of the race is that Democrats might not register an obvious collective preference after all. As a general rule, most political analyses in the "now we have come to a fork in the road" style don't turn out well in retrospect; politicians and voters alike are demonstrably adept at avoiding clear choices and generally muddling through. Past nominees like Barack Obama have often found success by finessing differences within the party rather than planting their flags firmly on one end of an internal debate. Kamala Harris, for one, is clearly pursuing a strategy of presenting herself as simultaneously more liberal than Biden and more electable than Warren or Sanders, and perhaps that will turn out to be the most effective approach in the end.

But the more serious danger is the underlying assumption that these are the only major considerations for primary voters as they deliberate over their preferred candidate. While both policy positions and electoral strength are highly appropriate grounds on which to evaluate candidates, they are not the only important attributes when choosing a nominee or potential president. Surveys and media accounts that presume otherwise thus present an oversimplified and distorted picture of presidential politics. And because voters in primaries are heavily influenced by media coverage, endless news stories that frame the race as fundamentally a tradeoff between just two criteria—idealism vs. practicality, head vs. heart, sincerity vs. calculation—could persuade many citizens to view their alternatives in precisely those terms, and to pay less attention to other deservedly relevant candidate qualities.

Like. say, competence.

Surely it's highly sensible to evaluate candidates in terms of who would, and would not, prove to be successful presidents if they wound up in the job. One of the benefits of the old system of presidential nominations is the influence it granted to politicians within the party who knew the various candidates personally and had previously worked with them in government. But the candidates' own records, as well as the kind of campaigns they run, can provide valuable evidence in this area, and voters should not be discouraged from placing effectiveness at the center of their considerations.

In this particular race, there are several candidates who lack the traditional credential of previous service in Congress or a state governorship, plus others who have served only for a brief time in federal office. Two of the candidates with the most experience are also approaching their 80s. At least one candidate seems to have chronic difficulties getting along with subordinates. Candidates also disagree over the optimal approach to accomplishing policy change: stakeholder compromise or mass mobilization? All of these factors and more seem highly relevant to the question of potential future success in the presidency, independent of the policy positions or personal popularity of the various contenders.

Discussions of competence can lack the drama of ideological battles or the savvy calculations of electoral strategy. But how—and how well—a president governs ultimately matters a lot. The more that voters, activists, and journalists acknowledge this truth during the nomination process, the healthier our political system will be.

Once Again, the Debates Are Going to Cause the DNC Plenty of Grief

The Democratic National Committee faced a lot of criticism for the way it organized presidential nomination debates in 2016. Originally, the party only planned six debates (there ended up being nine), and the first event wasn't held until mid-October 2015—in contrast to the Republicans, who held a total of twelve debates beginning in early August. One of the Democratic debates was held on the Saturday before Christmas, and another occurred over the Martin Luther King holiday weekend in January 2016. The Bernie Sanders campaign suspected that the DNC had intentionally scheduled the debates in order to minimize their likely viewership—and, not coincidentally, to deprive Sanders of a large audience for his challenge to the better-known front-runner Hillary Clinton. Complaints about the debates thus became part of the larger case that Sanders supporters built against the DNC for "rigging" the nomination process in Clinton's favor.

Desperate to preserve its popular legitimacy and prove its dedication to equality and inclusion, the DNC changed its ways in advance of the 2020 election. There would be twelve debates in all, and the first event would be held much earlier—in the last week of June 2019. And, importantly, the standards for inclusion in the June and July debates would be very forgiving, in order to forestall accusations that the party was being exclusionary or manipulative: candidates would need only to reach 1 percent in three polls of Democratic voters or to attract 65,000 financial donors. If there were too many candidates to fit in a single debate, the party wouldn't consign secondary candidates to a separate, lower-status "undercard" or "kiddie table" debate, as the Republicans did in 2016. Instead, each candidate would be assigned to one of two consecutive nights via a random draw, stratified in order to ensure that the top contenders in the polls didn't all happen to wind up on the same stage.

But as so often happens in life, maneuvering to address one set of problems can create a new, different set of problems—with no guarantee that the original set will indeed be solved. The scheduling of very early debates with modest eligibility requirements turned out to be something of an attractive nuisance, helping to draw into the race a record-breaking flotilla of candidates enticed by the prospect of national television exposure. With ten candidates participating in each of two 2-hour debates, it's likely that each individual candidate won't get much of a chance to make his or her case to the voters even as a lot of camera time will collectively be consumed by contenders with little or no chance of winning the nomination.

Acknowledging these inconvenient consequences of its own policies, the DNC has indicated that the inclusion criteria will become more stringent beginning with the third debate in September, requiring candidates to reach 2 percent in at least four polls and to receive financial support from at least 130,000 donors. But if a higher threshold succeeds in solving the problem of a debate stage too crowded with also-rans, it will simultaneously exacerbate the older problem of a party perceived to be favoring some candidates over others. Montana governor Steve Bullock is already complaining that his exclusion from next week's debates means that the party isn't hearing "different voices," and it's very possible that the DNC-is-silencing-me caucus could expand by the fall to include multiple sitting senators whose campaigns have yet to catch on with the public.

Maybe nobody will care much that candidates with little popular support aren't invited to future debates. But internal party warfare tends to attract substantial media attention, and frequent complaints from journalists that there are too many Democrats running for president hardly guarantee that they will come to the party's defense when it acts to further limit the number of debate participants. Voters could easily form a vague impression that something about the process was unfair without necessarily supporting, or even recognizing, any of the excluded candidates.

Media figures also love to hype debates in advance, even though they often turn out to be bored in practice by the rehearsed rhetoric and awkward one-liners that usually dominate the proceedings. Anything that dampens anticipatory excitement, then, tends to provoke a fair amount of journalistic grousing. The DNC attempted to ensure that the top candidates were evenly divided between the two debate events next week—but because it defined "top" as polling at only 2 percent or higher, it wound up assigning four of the five leading candidates to a single debate group. Even worse for media critics, the one candidate left out (Elizabeth Warren) is the trendiest at the moment, depriving pundits of the juicy prospect of potential Warren vs. Biden or Warren vs. Sanders in-person showdowns. Journalists responded to the announcement of the debate lineups last Friday with considerable disappointment on social media, despite the DNC's hopes of using the process to demonstrate its scrupulous devotion to fairness and equality.

The centrality of debates in presidential nomination politics is a fairly recent development; the 2012 Republican race is arguably the first nomination contest in which debates played a major role in influencing the dynamics. With their interests increasingly at stake in these events, parties have understandably responded by asserting more control over their production. But the Democratic Party in particular is also extremely sensitive to accusations that any new rules imposed on the process infringe on the sacred right of "the people" to choose a nominee without the stain of elite interference. The DNC is attempting to thread its way through the narrow straits separating excessive chaos from excessive order, but it seems unlikely to do so without attracting simultaneous criticism that it is being both too strict and too indulgent. When it comes to presidential nominations, it's impossible to satisfy everybody—and easy to satisfy nobody.

Presidential Caucuses Are Fading, But Iowa and Nevada Still Matter

Both national parties, but especially the Democrats, are prone to tinkering with the mechanics of the presidential nomination process in the period between elections, in a constant scramble to respond to various problems and complaints that reliably emerge during every competitive nomination contest. The Democratic National Committee's most urgent priority after the 2016 election was to remedy the perceived legitimacy crisis within the party that arose from the presence of unpledged superdelegates, which had caused a fair amount of public controversy during the Clinton-Sanders race that year. After considering a range of proposed reform measures, the DNC ultimately decided to keep superdelegates but deprive them of the power to cast decisive votes on the first presidential nomination ballot at the national convention.

But the party also approved another change to nomination procedures that has received much less attention so far. For the first time, the DNC passed an official resolution encouraging the use of presidential primaries rather than caucuses to select pledged delegates, and required states continuing to hold caucuses to allow a means by which voters could cast absentee ballots or otherwise participate remotely. With relatively little attention, this reform seems to have immediately produced a notable effect on the 2020 nomination process.

The case against caucuses contains several distinct arguments. Critics are fond of pointing out that the participation level in caucuses is much lower than that of primaries. Even the well-publicized Iowa caucus produced a turnout rate of just 16 percent in 2016, compared to a 52 percent rate in the New Hampshire primary the following week. In other, less-hyped states, the caucus turnout rate fell into single digits—8.1 percent in Minnesota, 5.5 percent in Kansas, 4.6 percent in Hawaii. Caucuses are also especially difficult for specific subpopulations to attend: service-industry workers; parents of young children; people with disabilities or limited transportation options. (Concerns about such inherent biases in the caucus system is what ostensibly motivated the DNC to mandate the availability of absentee ballots in future state caucuses.)

Notwithstanding the comparatively depressed participation rates, unexpected surges in turnout have sometimes strained the organizational capacity of the state parties that manage the caucuses, producing full parking lots, long lines, and procedural confusion once inside. Some Mainers waited for over four hours to participate in their state's 2016 caucus, while some Minnesotans had to vote using Post-It notes in 2008 because their caucus sites ran out of ballots.

A final strike against caucuses, at least from the perspective of traditional party leaders, is their tendency to benefit insurgent candidacies with high supporter enthusiasm over the party regulars favored by more casual primary voters. In 2016, for example, Hillary Clinton defeated Bernie Sanders in the first two caucuses of the year by narrow margins (0.2 percent in Iowa and 5.3 percent in Nevada), but Sanders proceeded to sweep the remaining 12 state caucuses on the calendar, losing only the 4 caucuses held in U.S. territories that lack representation in the electoral college.

Presidential primaries are already the norm in the most populated parts of the country. In 2016, Democrats employed caucuses in 3 mid-size states (Colorado, Minnesota, and Washington); 11 small states (Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming); and 4 territories (American Samoa, Guam, Northern Marianas, and the Virgin Islands). A total of 561 delegates were selected in caucuses, representing 14 percent of all Democratic pledged delegates.

But as the 2020 nomination process comes into focus, it's clear that there will be notable movement away from the use of caucuses. According to political scientist Josh Putnam's invaluable FHQ website, which closely tracks such changes, all three of the most populous states that held caucuses in 2016 plus three more small states (Idaho, Nebraska, and Utah) have opted for government-run primary elections in 2020, with a seventh state (Maine) still considering whether to join them. The number of Democratic pledged delegates selected outside of state-operated primaries seems certain to decrease to less than half of its 2016 level, perhaps dropping to just 5 or 6 percent of all pledged delegates nationwide.

On top of that, a few of the remaining states that are not shifting to standard primary elections are still abandoning traditional caucuses in favor of a "firehouse" primary administered by the state party. According to Putnam, the state parties in Kansas, North Dakota, Alaska, and Hawaii are all planning such a change. These elections may wind up behaving like a cross between a primary and a caucus, with fewer balloting sites and shorter voting hours than a regular primary would have. But there seems to be a clear response at the state level to the DNC's post-2016 policy shift, with the pure caucus model of delegate selection suddenly falling out of favor in multiple places at once.

Does this mean that state caucuses are poised to be virtually irrelevant to future presidential nominations? From a purely mathematical perspective, it certainly becomes even less likely that the shrinking share of delegates chosen in caucuses turns out to represent the margin between national victory and defeat for a prospective nominee. On balance, that's mildly good news for "establishment"-style candidates (like, say, Joe Biden) and mildly bad news for "outsider" types (like, say, Bernie Sanders).

But the first and third states on the nomination calendar will persist in selecting delegates via traditional caucuses, and these states' temporal primacy gives them substantial influence over the outcome that is far out of proportion to the modest size of their convention delegations. As Putnam notes, both Iowa and Nevada have good reason not to abandon their caucuses for primaries, or even to lean too far in the direction of a caucus-primary hybrid: if they do, their jealous sibling New Hampshire would undoubtedly respond by claiming the right to push even further to the front of the line in order to defend its self-proclaimed perpetual right to hold the first primary in the nation. Unless the national parties act to disallow caucuses altogether, then, the distinctive demands that they place on candidates and voters will remain a key component of the highly complex and thoroughly unique manner in which American presidential nominees are chosen.

The Democrats Are Still the Party of Obama, Part 2 (Joe Biden Edition)

After the 2018 midterm elections, much of the national media suffered from a collective misunderstanding of the Democratic Party. Multiple news stories described a party that was moving sharply to the left under the newfound leadership of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her fellow Democratic Socialists. But Ocasio-Cortez wasn't very representative of the large freshman class of Democrats elected in November. Like her, many of these members were young, fairly new to elective politics, and non-white, non-male, or both. But most also avoided ideological rhetoric, built campaigns around middle-class practicalities, and preferred a cooperative style to confrontation. Figuratively (and in some cases literally), they were political protégés of Barack Obama.

So I wrote a post-election analysis in which I explained how the Democrats were still the party of Obama, notwithstanding all the hype swirling at the time about an imminent leftist revolution. Even so, most of the phone calls I received from journalists asking for expert comment on American party politics over the subsequent three months were for stories they were writing about Ocasio-Cortez. But the recent entry of Joe Biden into the presidential race as the early favorite of Democratic voters has finally started to inspire a broader reappraisal of the actual state of the party, since Biden's initial lead in the race seems so incongruous with media perceptions of the political "moment."

One important reason for this apparent disconnection is that reporters and commentators swim in a social and social-media current where there is little obvious enthusiasm for Biden compared to other Democratic candidates. No notable pro-Biden activist faction exists on Twitter, for example, unlike the highly visible fan clubs belonging to Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren. At the mass and elite level alike, Biden draws much of his support from an older, more moderate, less digitally hyperliterate population—some of his most prominent endorsements so far have come from party figures like Andrew Cuomo and Dianne Feinstein who are themselves favorite targets of the hip online left. And because Biden waited until late April to begin actively campaigning, journalists looking for Biden aficionados in the real world have had no easy place to find them.

But there's another factor working to Biden's advantage that has been underappreciated by many political analysts. Barack Obama left office after eight years as an extraordinarily popular president among members of his own party. Gallup measured Obama's favorability rating among Democrats at 95 percent in 2017; a CNN poll from early 2018 estimated it at 97 percent. More Democrats identify as "Obama Democrats" than as liberals, progressives, or any other label. Michelle Obama's memoir has sold over 10 million copies in the five months since its release, making it perhaps the biggest-selling autobiography in history. Democrats are even more likely to name Obama as the best president of their lifetime than Republicans are to say the same about Ronald Reagan.

Obama has not maintained a high public profile since leaving office, and the non-stop whirlwind of the Trump years can make his presidency seem to professional politics-watchers like ancient history. But Democrats out in the country at large continue to regard him with great affection—more so than Bill Clinton, who was viewed as a successful president but who (understandably) inspired rather less straightforward personal devotion. It's hardly surprising that these uniformly positive feelings would extend to Obama's vice president as well.

Biden's service under Obama doesn't guarantee him the nomination. He suffers from some personal vulnerabilities as a campaigner; his current lead in the polls is partially a temporary reflection of superior name recognition; the first-in-the-nation states of Iowa and New Hampshire are not ideally suited to him; and several other Democratic contenders have Obama-esque qualities of their own that may allow them to build greater support as the electorate starts to tune in more closely. But media analyses of the 2020 presidential race that reduce the candidates to mere ideological or demographic profiles risk ignoring a very real advantage that ex-Vice President Biden can uniquely claim (and that the Senator Biden who washed out early in the 1988 and 2008 elections lacked): eight years as the second-in-command to the nation's most beloved Democrat. In a huge field of candidates struggling to attract attention from voters, that's not a bad place from which to start.