Jonathan Bernstein, Columnist

Longshot Democrats’ Victory Formula: Cash + Luck

Five presidential candidates have shown broad enough support to win. Here’s how the others can hope to crash the party.

January 14, 2020 at 12:15 PM UTC

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics. A former professor of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio, he wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.

Before the winnowing.
Photographer: Allison Farrand/Bloomberg

Provide news feedback or report an error

Site feedback:

Take our Survey

This article is for subscribers only.

Get Jonathan Bernstein’s newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe.

The five candidates with a reasonable shot at the Democratic presidential nomination — former Vice President Joe Biden, ex-Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, and Senators Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts — will debate Tuesday night in Des Moines. Tom Steyer, the California hedge-fund billionaire, will join then, and he and several other candidates are still running even though the others didn’t qualify for the debate. I don’t think any of them have a plausible chance of being nominated, but then again I didn’t think Donald Trump had a chance at winning the Republican nomination in 2016. So it’s worth assessing the strengths and weaknesses of at least some of them.