A Boring Presidential Nominee? Bring It, Democrats
Going traditional wouldn’t be a bad strategy in the Trump era. Plus, Jonathan Bernstein’s morning links.
Highly unlikely.
Photographer: Yuri Gripas/AFP/Getty Images
It’s probably still too early to make sensible predictions about who will be the next Democratic presidential nominee. Still, with less than two years until the Iowa caucuses, some 15 months or so until the first debates, and less than a year before the bulk of the candidates officially announce their campaigns, it’s less early than you might think. Candidates have already made trips to early primary and caucus states, and they’ve started the process of shopping policy proposals and meeting with party actors.
Some two dozen candidates are currently showing tangible signs of (as Josh Putnam puts it) running for 2020, and what happens over the next year will determine how many of them will be running in 2020. Candidates who drop out after testing the waters are best thought of as having run and lost, although in practice it’s sometimes very difficult to distinguish between those who have a national profile but really never did run from those who mounted serious (but unannounced) campaigns, found little interest, and then declared they were choosing not to run after all.