With 10 days left before the Iowa Caucuses now seems like a great time to revisit where things in the Democratic field stand.
Following other posts I've written like this I'm going to continue to rate candidates in terms of their likeliness via broadly defined tiers. However I'm going to add something new, taking a (very, very) rough guess at the percentages of a given outcome and see where they line up with 538's cool new prediction model on who will win the nomination. So with an eye towards how idiotic this will probably look in three months, let's jump right in! (Also if you'd like to see how my thinking from about this has changed just click on the 2020 tag at the bottom of this post).
TIER 1:
Joe Biden: Simply put Biden has been and remains the front runner in the 2020 Democratic nomination cycle. Despite negative coverage by much of the press, and the never ending "gaffes" we hear so much about, he remains on top by most measures. In 538's national poll tracker he's about 6.5 points above Bernie, and over 10 points above Elizabeth Warren. Likewise he has a large lead in endorsements compared to his nearest competitor, 226 points to Warren's 81 by 538's methodology. More over Biden's support among state legislators, another metric of party support, is the best with him having the most endorsements overall, and probably more importantly having a sizable contingent of endorsements from all four early states, unlike his competitors. And finally he has significant support from unions (see this awesome tracker somebody made), with only Bernie Sanders also having formal support among this key aspect of the Democratic coalition. To be sure, this hardly guarantees success, there is no national primary after all, and endorsements might be less valuable now that they appear to have been in past cycles. But never the less Biden is the front runner.
-538's odds of Biden winning more than half of the delegates as of 1/24: 41%
-Longwalk's guesstimate: I'd go a bit higher, as I guess his older, multiracial coalition is more durable than most suspect and there's a reasonable chance he could see a flood of party support after Iowa. Let's say 50%.
TIER 2A:
Elizabeth Warren: Warren seems to have basically been treading water since I last wrote about the race back at the beginning of December. She's in 3rd place in national polling at around 15% while generally tying Pete for fourth in Iowa and New Hampshire. Likewise she's gathered some more endorsements over January and is in second place after Biden by 538's count, but her pace of new support isn't very impressive. She picked up 13 new endorsement points in January compared to Biden's 54, Bloomberg's 22, Pete's 10, Bernie's 7, Bennet's 3, and Steyer's 1. That's not very impressive. Never the less she is well positioned as a big tent unity candidate if Biden and/or Bernie falter in early states.
-538's odds of Warren winning more than half of the delegates as of 1/24: 13%
-Longwalk's guesstimate: That seems low to me, I'll go with 25%.
TIER 2B:
Bernie Sanders: I've been bearish on Bernie's chances for a long time, mainly because he's a factional candidate running in a party that values coalition building and big-tentism. But I can't deny he has real support in the form of close polling in Iowa with Joe Biden and a small recent lead in New Hampshire while being second nationally. Likewise he recently passed Klobuchar and moved into third place in endorsement support. So despite my longstanding doubts, it is quite possible Bernie can succeed. Having said that I still think Warren and Biden are far more likely.
-538's odds of Bernie winning more than half of the delegates as of 1/24: 23%
-Longwalk's guesstimate: Due to the above factors I still think this is high, but having gotten this far and retaining real support means Bernie has a chance. I'll go with 10%, and feel free to mock me when he wins (I can then point out you don't know how probability works).
TIER 3A:
Pete Buttigieg: Since early December Pete has gone down in national polls from about 10% to 7.5% basically tying him with a rising Bloomberg. In addition, his support in Iowa and New Hampshire has declined making him roughly tied for fourth with Warren in both. Likewise, he remains weak when comes to party support, with his tiny roster of state legislators being pretty noteworthy, at least to me. But despite these difficulties it's his total lack of support among non-white voters in general and black voters in particular, that remains his biggest challenge. Could he win Iowa and somehow dramatically upend this race? I guess anything is possible, but at this point in the race he strikes me as a longshot.
-538's odds of Pete winning more than half of the delegates as of 1/24:7%
-Longwalk's
guesstimate: Seems about right!
TIER 3B
Amy Klobuchar, Michael Bloomberg: I see both of these candidates as extreme long shots, but for very different reasons. Klobuchar has run a classic "Iowa or bust!" campaign hoping to use a victory there to launch a bandwagon that everyone will climb aboard, similar to what happened with John Kerry in the 2004 cycle, or Jimmy Carter way back in '76. Unfortunately while she has improved her standing in Iowa into the high single digits, she's still way behind everyone else. Moreover she seems to have little to no support in states after that. In that sense I really don't see it happening for her.
-538's odds of Klobuchar winning more than half of the delegates as of 1/24: Essentially Nil (538 gives everyone but the "Big Four" a .6% combined chance of winning).
-Longwalk's
guesstimate: Hey, Trump's president right? So let's say 3%.
Michael Bloomberg has been trending up in national polls after spending God knows how much money of TV ads and hiring an army of staffers. Likewise he's been able to parlay his extensive connections with mayors and other Democratic political actors into some real endorsements, earning him 33 points by 538's counting, right behind Pete's 36. At this point he's no longer someone who can be dismissed. But at the same time the fact that he's skipping the early states, something that has never worked for other candidates who've tried it, and has a record that's deeply out of touch with the contemporary Democratic Party makes him a major long shot in my view. But then again look who's president!
-538's odds of Bloomberg winning more than half of the delegates as
of 1/24: Essentially Nil.
-Longwalk's
guesstimate: Hey, Trump's president right? So let's say 3%.
TIER 3C:
Contested Convention: As far back as I can remember journalists and pundits have fantasized about this outcome and thus every four years people try desperately to try to find ways bring the dream to life, and this cycle is no exception. But a mid-20th Century style convention in Milwaukee where the ultimate nominee is unknown when the convention is gaveled in remains really unlikely. Why? Well Dave Hopkins summed this up nicely last spring when professional take writers first got excited about it. Simply put such an outcome is unlikely because the winnowing based process we've already seen happening will only accelerate once voting starts, the front loaded calendar might end the process soon rather than later, the Democratic Party isn't "highly fractious", and party elites will work incredibly hard to prevent what would undoubtedly be a disaster in the modern era where there simply are no "brokers" to "broker" the convention.
-538's odds of a contested convention as of 1/24: 16%.
-Longwalk's
guesstimate: Something really remote, let's say 2%.
TIER 4:
Everybody else. Sorry, you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here.
Showing posts with label 2020. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2020. Show all posts
Friday, January 24, 2020
Thursday, December 5, 2019
Handicapping The Democratic Field IV
With Kamala Harris dropping out unexpectedly this week, now's a great time to update where I think the Democratic field stands (as well as find a new candidate, as she was my top pick!)
As I see it the race remains kind of typical of past wide open Democratic cycles like 2004, 1992, and 1988. That is the Democrats started out with a large field of perhaps 40 people and it's slowly but surely been winnowed down to 15 as of right now. Oh there's been some bumps along the way, a vanity gazillionaire candidacy here, a "why-are-you-getting-in-now?" there, 10,001 media cycles about "gaffes". But from on a macro level it's more or less that things are proceeding pretty normally for the Democrats (unlike how they did for the Republicans in the 2016 cycle).
With that said I like the idea of differentiating between "officially winnowed" that is when a candidate says they are done (like Harris did this week) and "functionally winnowed" where a candidate can no longer win but are still "running". As an example, Montana governor Steve Bullock was "functionally winnowed" not long after he announced because he went nowhere in terms of polling, fundraising, or endorsements. Meanwhile Cory Booker was functionally winnowed at some point over the last few months by my reckoning as he failed to breakthrough to voters and thus appears to be on his way to not qualifying for the December debate, arguably his last chance to make his case to a large audience.
Accordingly I will follow my model of ranking the candidates by tiers and then go through the remaining candidates who I'd consider "functionally winnowed" and what's going on with them.
Tier 1A:
Joe Biden: Folks he remains the frontrunner. Despite never ending "gaffes", despite a progressive press that often mocks him as a buffoon, despite being almost as old as Bernie, despite all the predictions that he couldn't win (see here, here, here, and here) he remains the front runner. That is to say he remains a comfortably 10 or more points ahead of his closes rival Bernie Sanders in Real Clear Politics (RCP) poll tracker and continues to lead comfortably in endorsements, two metrics that historically get increasingly predictive as we get closer to Iowa. Moreover his multi-racial coalition of older, more working class supporters don't seem to care about the "gaffes" or the negative coverage he gets. This doesn't mean he's going to win, a lot could still happen, but he's in the lead. A good comparison in terms of Democratic nomination politics might be Walter Mondale in the 1984 cycle, but in a slightly weaker position. But then again Mondale won the nomination.
Tier 1B:
Elizabeth Warren: November was a bad month for Warren, she's fallen over 12 points in RCP's national tracker and her endorsements have slowed to a crawl (she got just two House Reps in 538's tracker was in November). But even so that puts her in third place nationally in the polls and second place in endorsements which are real strengths. And she has a vast army of progressive donors and activists backing her up. In other works she's taken some steps back recently but I still see her as someone who could possibly put together a big tend coalition and win in the end.
Tier 2A:
Pete Buttigieg: Pete's had a great run of polling as of late shooting up to 11 percent nationally in RCP's tracker. That's a real accomplishment, but the reason I'd leave him out of the top tier is that he remains incredibly weak in two key sectors. For one he seems to have little to no support among non-white voters in general and black voters in particular. The reality in today's Democratic Party is you simply can not be the nominee without significant support from black voters, the last one able to do it was Dukakis in 1988, and a lots changed since then. Secondly he's just really weak with Democratic Party actors. In 538's endorsement tracker he's at 25 points compared to Biden's 161. Both of these are major hurdles to overcome and I remain skeptical he can do it in the remaining two months before Iowa. But again lot can still change.
Tier 2B:
Bernie Sanders and Amy Klobuchar: I remain quite bearish on Bernie's chances. I suppose anything is possible but nothing I've seen since I last wrote about this in July has fundamentally changed my view of him as a factional candidate running in a party that values coalition building and big-tentism. He has caught up to Amy Klobuchar in endorsements, but he also had a heart attack, which I guess is rude to point out but always struck me as a big deal. Again anything is possible, but I personally just don't see it, especially since he remains at 16 or so percent nationally despite running nonstop for five years and having higher than 90 percent name recognition. Klobuchar is kind of the opposite in that she is way behind everyone else in national polling, but has shown and uptick in Iowa and is poised to possibly surge. Will this happen? Well the door is closing for her, and the December debate might be her last chance, but Iowa is a strange place and something could still happen.
Tier 3:
Michael Bloomberg: I really doubt Michael Bloomberg will be the nominee. He's spent part of his career as a Republican. He's given to Republicans as recently as 2016. His track record in New York City is admirable to many, but not so much among key Democratic constituencies. He's also not contesting the early states. Having said that he has more money than God and apparently wants to spend it all on television advertising. Can he win? Again Trump shows anything is possible, but I doubt it.
And that's kind of it, everyone else strikes me as being "functionally winnowed", I run through what's going on bullet point style:
As I see it the race remains kind of typical of past wide open Democratic cycles like 2004, 1992, and 1988. That is the Democrats started out with a large field of perhaps 40 people and it's slowly but surely been winnowed down to 15 as of right now. Oh there's been some bumps along the way, a vanity gazillionaire candidacy here, a "why-are-you-getting-in-now?" there, 10,001 media cycles about "gaffes". But from on a macro level it's more or less that things are proceeding pretty normally for the Democrats (unlike how they did for the Republicans in the 2016 cycle).
With that said I like the idea of differentiating between "officially winnowed" that is when a candidate says they are done (like Harris did this week) and "functionally winnowed" where a candidate can no longer win but are still "running". As an example, Montana governor Steve Bullock was "functionally winnowed" not long after he announced because he went nowhere in terms of polling, fundraising, or endorsements. Meanwhile Cory Booker was functionally winnowed at some point over the last few months by my reckoning as he failed to breakthrough to voters and thus appears to be on his way to not qualifying for the December debate, arguably his last chance to make his case to a large audience.
Accordingly I will follow my model of ranking the candidates by tiers and then go through the remaining candidates who I'd consider "functionally winnowed" and what's going on with them.
Tier 1A:
Joe Biden: Folks he remains the frontrunner. Despite never ending "gaffes", despite a progressive press that often mocks him as a buffoon, despite being almost as old as Bernie, despite all the predictions that he couldn't win (see here, here, here, and here) he remains the front runner. That is to say he remains a comfortably 10 or more points ahead of his closes rival Bernie Sanders in Real Clear Politics (RCP) poll tracker and continues to lead comfortably in endorsements, two metrics that historically get increasingly predictive as we get closer to Iowa. Moreover his multi-racial coalition of older, more working class supporters don't seem to care about the "gaffes" or the negative coverage he gets. This doesn't mean he's going to win, a lot could still happen, but he's in the lead. A good comparison in terms of Democratic nomination politics might be Walter Mondale in the 1984 cycle, but in a slightly weaker position. But then again Mondale won the nomination.
Tier 1B:
Elizabeth Warren: November was a bad month for Warren, she's fallen over 12 points in RCP's national tracker and her endorsements have slowed to a crawl (she got just two House Reps in 538's tracker was in November). But even so that puts her in third place nationally in the polls and second place in endorsements which are real strengths. And she has a vast army of progressive donors and activists backing her up. In other works she's taken some steps back recently but I still see her as someone who could possibly put together a big tend coalition and win in the end.
Tier 2A:
Pete Buttigieg: Pete's had a great run of polling as of late shooting up to 11 percent nationally in RCP's tracker. That's a real accomplishment, but the reason I'd leave him out of the top tier is that he remains incredibly weak in two key sectors. For one he seems to have little to no support among non-white voters in general and black voters in particular. The reality in today's Democratic Party is you simply can not be the nominee without significant support from black voters, the last one able to do it was Dukakis in 1988, and a lots changed since then. Secondly he's just really weak with Democratic Party actors. In 538's endorsement tracker he's at 25 points compared to Biden's 161. Both of these are major hurdles to overcome and I remain skeptical he can do it in the remaining two months before Iowa. But again lot can still change.
Tier 2B:
Bernie Sanders and Amy Klobuchar: I remain quite bearish on Bernie's chances. I suppose anything is possible but nothing I've seen since I last wrote about this in July has fundamentally changed my view of him as a factional candidate running in a party that values coalition building and big-tentism. He has caught up to Amy Klobuchar in endorsements, but he also had a heart attack, which I guess is rude to point out but always struck me as a big deal. Again anything is possible, but I personally just don't see it, especially since he remains at 16 or so percent nationally despite running nonstop for five years and having higher than 90 percent name recognition. Klobuchar is kind of the opposite in that she is way behind everyone else in national polling, but has shown and uptick in Iowa and is poised to possibly surge. Will this happen? Well the door is closing for her, and the December debate might be her last chance, but Iowa is a strange place and something could still happen.
Tier 3:
Michael Bloomberg: I really doubt Michael Bloomberg will be the nominee. He's spent part of his career as a Republican. He's given to Republicans as recently as 2016. His track record in New York City is admirable to many, but not so much among key Democratic constituencies. He's also not contesting the early states. Having said that he has more money than God and apparently wants to spend it all on television advertising. Can he win? Again Trump shows anything is possible, but I doubt it.
And that's kind of it, everyone else strikes me as being "functionally winnowed", I run through what's going on bullet point style:
- Michael Bennet: I guess he really hates being in the Senate and so wants to be doing this for a while longer, but I don't see him winning (if he ever was a plausible nominee).
- Cory Booker: A once promising candidate, it just didn't work out for him as he's never broken out. Apparently he's going to stick around and give speeches about "what it all means" but yeah he's done, especially since he has his day job to get back to.
- Julian Castro: Like Booker he's toast but also wants to stick around and highlight various issues and causes and such. Good for him, but it's over and that he only has a platform because he's still running and that can't last forever.
- John Delaney: To paraphrase David Karol: "He's a wealthy retiree, this is his hobby now." I have no idea when he'll formally drop out, but he's finished.
- Tulsi Gabbard: I have no idea what's going on here. Maybe auditioning for a sweet gig as a talking head on Fox News bashing Democrats all day? Maybe she'll have to settle for Russia Today? Who knows, who cares.
- Deval Patrick: Maybe there's a new type of winnowing here? Let's called it the unwinnowed, that is someone who runs in the "invisible primary", gets winnowed, then comes back from the dead like a zombie for more! Interesting sub-field of candidates to study I guess, but yeah he's not going to win.
- Tom Steyer: Basically John Delaney, but with much, much more money.
- Marrianne Williamson: Selling books.
- Andrew Yang: Yang is only famous and only has a platform because of running, so probably won't be leaving anytime soon, but he's also not going to win.
Tuesday, July 2, 2019
Handicaping the Democratic Field III
Well the first round the Democratic debates just happened last week and so I thought it would be a good time to check in on where things stand at this point in the 2020 election cycle.
Obviously there hasn't been a lot of dramatic upheaval over the weekend, but still I think there have been enough changes to justify an update. Especially since we probably won't see a whole lot of changes until the next round of debates at the end of July.
One non-candidate trend that I thought was important to acknowledge was just how popular these debates were with over 18 million people watching the second one on TV or online (the first debate had about 15 million viewers). It's hard to tell what sort of effects this popularity might have on either the nomination or the general election in 2020, but this overwhelming level of engagement by Democrats seems like a notable part of the 2020 election cycle.
The conventional wisdom appears to be that Biden had a pretty lousy night and a number of other candidate, especially Kamala Harris, did much better. Rather than parse those takes, I'd rather focus on developments since then with a focus on where party actors seem to be lining up. With that in mind I'll use the tier system I've used before to try and rank where I think things stand.
Tier 1:
Joe Biden: While I'll agree he had a pretty bad night and his poll numbers have gone down a bit, folks he's still the front runner. Looking at the RCP poll aggregator he remains about 12 points above Bernie, his nearest rival and 13.5 above Harris and Warren his next closet challengers. To be sure that's a pretty big hit from where he was just a few weeks ago, but he's still very much in the lead. But while poll respondents are fickle, party actors tend to stick with their picks, and Biden remains in the lead with party actors picking up two major endorsements since the debate with Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont and Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms backing him. This puts him at 102 points in 538's endorsement tracker compared to his closet rival Kamala Harris at 75, a small but very real lead. Moreover Biden's endorsement remain the most diverse of the whole field both in terms of types of supporters and also geography. He's in a weaker position than he was at the start of June but he remains the front runner, at least for now.
Tier 2A:
Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris: Harris and Warren remain in the best position to beat Biden. Harris' widely praised debate performance has helped her shoot up since then to basically tie Warren at around 13.5% in RCP's poll aggregator. Meanwhile a wave a positive news coverage has helped Warren go up in the polls as well since the beginning of June. If there is a major difference between the two at this point I'd say that Harris is much stronger in endorsements. Over June she picked up six more House Members, only one of which was from California showing a broader geographical base of support that she's sported in the past. With Warren one thing that strikes me as a real weak point is how despite the weeks of glowing coverage in the media and a well received debate performance she hasn't added a single new endorsement to 538's tracker since mid-May. Seriously, why can't Warren get other Democrats to support her?
Tier 2B:
Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker: These are the two candidates who strike mes as being most likely to be able to make the jump to Warren and Harris's level, but each has some pretty major weaknesses. Booker remains stuck in the doldrums in polling at around 3% despite a well received debate performance. However Booker does have an impressive list of supporters from New Jersey giving him an important base and I suppose he could spiral up sometime in future just like Harris recently did, so don't write him off. Mayor Pete has a different set of problems, his polling numbers have come down some and he hasn't been able to line up much party support but he's still doing better than Booker in the polls and raised an impressive $24 million this quarter which could easily keep him viable through Iowa. His big problem right now is something close to a total lack of support from non-white people. See this recent Quinnipiac University poll that has him at 0% among black voters. There's just no way he can win if he can't fix this, but the good news is he has time to try.
Tier 2C:
Bernie Sanders: This may seem weird since I'm moving the number two guy in the polls down but I really think Bernie is in trouble. Over at CNN Harry Enten does a good job of laying out some of the grim news in recent polling for Bernie (despite almost universal name recognition he's going down and especially weak in Iowa these days, a state he almost won four years ago). But I think the problems are even bigger for him than that. The fact of the matter is he's running a "factional candidacy" where he basically has this chunk of the party dead set behind him and he's trying to take over the whole party with it George McGovern style. The problem is Democrats seem to still want someone who can build a big tent coalition style campaign and that really leave him SOL. While I suppose he could still try to reboot his campaign, his debate performance, which was basically just him giving his 2016 stump speech over and over again in response to every question, just makes me really doubtful of this.
Tier 3A:
Julian Castro, Beto O'Rourke, Amy Klobuchar: This is basically the group of people I think have the best chance of being able to make the jump into the second tier. Each has their own problems and none is doing particular well in polls but they seem like plausible contenders if they get some lucky breaks so they have that going from them. Klobuchar and Castro have the very real problem of needing better polling to qualify for the September debate, but Castro was able to parlay a strong debate performance into fundraising and Klobuchar has a strong base of Minnesota endorsements. Beto is in a bit of a different boat as he already had a major surge in press coverage and polling only to see it fade away, but lighting can always strike twice.
Tier 3B:
Jay Inslee, Steve Bullock: In another cycle either of these could have been plausible contenders but they don't seem to be going anywhere. Then again both are successful governors and have at least some party support in terms of endorsements so I suppose they have a chance to try to get things going over the summer, but they remain pretty far behind Tier 3A.
Tier 3C:
Kristen Gillibrand, Michael Bennet: This is basically the tier for 3B people with even bigger problems. With Bennet it's a total lack of endorsements or polling support despite a well received debate performance among some journalists. I don't know what's gone wrong for Gillibrand but her incredible weaknesses in polling and endorsements after months of going full bore makes her seem pretty likely to drop out soon if things don't change.
Tier 4:
Delaney, Gabbard, Moulton, Ryan, Swalwell, de Blasio, Hickenlooper: This basically the tier of Representatives going nowhere, a mayor of New York City going nowhere, and a former popular governor who's campaign is falling apart while also going nowhere. They are really unlikely to win at this point, but I suppose anything is possible in the Age of Trump, (after all Castro was able to escape Tier 4 with a good debate performance by my reckoning!)
Tier 5:
Everyone else: This is everyone else, they are running for some reason.
(Special case: Stacey Abrams: If she did run I'd guess I'd put her in Tier 4 at this point. If she was considering running for president her decision to sit things out until the fall was a major blunder with the race having moved on and resources being captured by other campaigns all summer long. I also doubt she could qualify for any debates at this point, a lesson Steve Bullock learned after he decided to take a wait and see approach. Finally, I suspect her decision to frame her choice in terms of what's best for her rather than the country or voters wouldn't serve her well if she did run. Sure didn't work for Beto.)
I'll check back in after the second round of debates!
Obviously there hasn't been a lot of dramatic upheaval over the weekend, but still I think there have been enough changes to justify an update. Especially since we probably won't see a whole lot of changes until the next round of debates at the end of July.
One non-candidate trend that I thought was important to acknowledge was just how popular these debates were with over 18 million people watching the second one on TV or online (the first debate had about 15 million viewers). It's hard to tell what sort of effects this popularity might have on either the nomination or the general election in 2020, but this overwhelming level of engagement by Democrats seems like a notable part of the 2020 election cycle.
The conventional wisdom appears to be that Biden had a pretty lousy night and a number of other candidate, especially Kamala Harris, did much better. Rather than parse those takes, I'd rather focus on developments since then with a focus on where party actors seem to be lining up. With that in mind I'll use the tier system I've used before to try and rank where I think things stand.
Tier 1:
Joe Biden: While I'll agree he had a pretty bad night and his poll numbers have gone down a bit, folks he's still the front runner. Looking at the RCP poll aggregator he remains about 12 points above Bernie, his nearest rival and 13.5 above Harris and Warren his next closet challengers. To be sure that's a pretty big hit from where he was just a few weeks ago, but he's still very much in the lead. But while poll respondents are fickle, party actors tend to stick with their picks, and Biden remains in the lead with party actors picking up two major endorsements since the debate with Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont and Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms backing him. This puts him at 102 points in 538's endorsement tracker compared to his closet rival Kamala Harris at 75, a small but very real lead. Moreover Biden's endorsement remain the most diverse of the whole field both in terms of types of supporters and also geography. He's in a weaker position than he was at the start of June but he remains the front runner, at least for now.
Tier 2A:
Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris: Harris and Warren remain in the best position to beat Biden. Harris' widely praised debate performance has helped her shoot up since then to basically tie Warren at around 13.5% in RCP's poll aggregator. Meanwhile a wave a positive news coverage has helped Warren go up in the polls as well since the beginning of June. If there is a major difference between the two at this point I'd say that Harris is much stronger in endorsements. Over June she picked up six more House Members, only one of which was from California showing a broader geographical base of support that she's sported in the past. With Warren one thing that strikes me as a real weak point is how despite the weeks of glowing coverage in the media and a well received debate performance she hasn't added a single new endorsement to 538's tracker since mid-May. Seriously, why can't Warren get other Democrats to support her?
Tier 2B:
Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker: These are the two candidates who strike mes as being most likely to be able to make the jump to Warren and Harris's level, but each has some pretty major weaknesses. Booker remains stuck in the doldrums in polling at around 3% despite a well received debate performance. However Booker does have an impressive list of supporters from New Jersey giving him an important base and I suppose he could spiral up sometime in future just like Harris recently did, so don't write him off. Mayor Pete has a different set of problems, his polling numbers have come down some and he hasn't been able to line up much party support but he's still doing better than Booker in the polls and raised an impressive $24 million this quarter which could easily keep him viable through Iowa. His big problem right now is something close to a total lack of support from non-white people. See this recent Quinnipiac University poll that has him at 0% among black voters. There's just no way he can win if he can't fix this, but the good news is he has time to try.
Tier 2C:
Bernie Sanders: This may seem weird since I'm moving the number two guy in the polls down but I really think Bernie is in trouble. Over at CNN Harry Enten does a good job of laying out some of the grim news in recent polling for Bernie (despite almost universal name recognition he's going down and especially weak in Iowa these days, a state he almost won four years ago). But I think the problems are even bigger for him than that. The fact of the matter is he's running a "factional candidacy" where he basically has this chunk of the party dead set behind him and he's trying to take over the whole party with it George McGovern style. The problem is Democrats seem to still want someone who can build a big tent coalition style campaign and that really leave him SOL. While I suppose he could still try to reboot his campaign, his debate performance, which was basically just him giving his 2016 stump speech over and over again in response to every question, just makes me really doubtful of this.
Tier 3A:
Julian Castro, Beto O'Rourke, Amy Klobuchar: This is basically the group of people I think have the best chance of being able to make the jump into the second tier. Each has their own problems and none is doing particular well in polls but they seem like plausible contenders if they get some lucky breaks so they have that going from them. Klobuchar and Castro have the very real problem of needing better polling to qualify for the September debate, but Castro was able to parlay a strong debate performance into fundraising and Klobuchar has a strong base of Minnesota endorsements. Beto is in a bit of a different boat as he already had a major surge in press coverage and polling only to see it fade away, but lighting can always strike twice.
Tier 3B:
Jay Inslee, Steve Bullock: In another cycle either of these could have been plausible contenders but they don't seem to be going anywhere. Then again both are successful governors and have at least some party support in terms of endorsements so I suppose they have a chance to try to get things going over the summer, but they remain pretty far behind Tier 3A.
Tier 3C:
Kristen Gillibrand, Michael Bennet: This is basically the tier for 3B people with even bigger problems. With Bennet it's a total lack of endorsements or polling support despite a well received debate performance among some journalists. I don't know what's gone wrong for Gillibrand but her incredible weaknesses in polling and endorsements after months of going full bore makes her seem pretty likely to drop out soon if things don't change.
Tier 4:
Delaney, Gabbard, Moulton, Ryan, Swalwell, de Blasio, Hickenlooper: This basically the tier of Representatives going nowhere, a mayor of New York City going nowhere, and a former popular governor who's campaign is falling apart while also going nowhere. They are really unlikely to win at this point, but I suppose anything is possible in the Age of Trump, (after all Castro was able to escape Tier 4 with a good debate performance by my reckoning!)
Tier 5:
Everyone else: This is everyone else, they are running for some reason.
(Special case: Stacey Abrams: If she did run I'd guess I'd put her in Tier 4 at this point. If she was considering running for president her decision to sit things out until the fall was a major blunder with the race having moved on and resources being captured by other campaigns all summer long. I also doubt she could qualify for any debates at this point, a lesson Steve Bullock learned after he decided to take a wait and see approach. Finally, I suspect her decision to frame her choice in terms of what's best for her rather than the country or voters wouldn't serve her well if she did run. Sure didn't work for Beto.)
I'll check back in after the second round of debates!
Tuesday, June 4, 2019
Handicapping the Democratic Field II
I wanted to write an update to my predictions back in the fall about where the 2020 Democratic hopefuls stand and since we are about a month out before the first round of debates, now seems like a great time, so let's do it.
First off I think there were some major developments over the last nine months that have really changed things quite a bit. To begin with we've had a lot of "winnowing" over the last nine months. By winnowed here I mean candidates who basically started doing the things one does when running for president but for whatever reason(s) decided to quit in one way or another, even if they never got around to formally announcing.
Seth Masket has made a great online tracker of people who were "winnowed" and it's quit a few. By Seth's count there are already 16 of these (I'd count some of the people he has still on there as having been winnowed or never run as well) and while the Democrats are still stuck with a ridiculously large field (I think the official count is like 23 at this point) it could be a lot larger with a lot of big name governors, senators, and former cabinet officials in the mix. But they aren't because well, #winnowingworks, as we like to say on Twitter.
Moreover this process of winnowing is good evidence that the presidential nominations process is working as it is suppose to (in theory). That is a huge number of people start doing the things you need to do to be president and that number is winnowed down over the course of the campaign to more manageable number (say 10) by the time the Iowa caucuses roll around. This number is then wacked down further going into New Hampshire, and well, you get the drift.
A major problem for the Republicans in the 2016 cycle, and a key reason Trump was able to ultimately win, is this winnowing process didn't seem work, or kicked in too late. Candidates like John Kasich stayed in way after it was clear they could no longer mathematically win enough delegates to win and thus further split the anti-Trump vote. While the Republican party actors seemed to have failed to rally around one viable "not Trump" alternative. Indeed everyone from Marco Rubio to Mitt Romney seemed to play that role for a time.
So the good news for the Democrats is that the winnowing process seems to be working. But there's one big caveat here. Nobody has dropped out since mid-April meaning the pace of winnowing could have slowed down which could be a problem with a field this size. However, I think the smart money is on the debates winnowing quite a few candidates out between now and the fall, either by candidates failing to break out and calling it quits, or the new formal DNC rules shutting them out.
The second big change is that Joe Biden decided to take the plunge. Which is a great segue into where I think the field stands at this point. Going off a Nate Silver's piece from about a month ago I'll go with "tiers" rather than rank everyone.
Tier 1:
Joe Biden: Folks he's the front runner. He consistently leads by a modest plurality in the polls so far which at this point are starting to get predictive about who will win the nomination. Likewise he 's easily ahead in the endorsement hunt with 94 points in Nate Silver's tracker compared to 57 for Booker and Harris, his closest rivals in that metric. More to the point Biden's support is much more diverse, in terms of types of politicians, regions, and yes race than most of his adversaries. Moreover while we don't have much information on his fundraising so far, what we have is pretty great for him. To be sure, he has a bunch of weaknesses as well, and I'm not really interested in going through them, but at this point it's fair to say he's the frontrunner, although hardly a dominate one. If I had to bet Biden vs the field at this point I'd bet the field, but he's still in the top tier by himself.
Tier 2A:
Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren: These are the candidates that seem closest behind Biden in a broad range of factors. They have decent polling, a large following, have raised lots of money so far, and have racked up a number of major endorsements. Between them I see Harris as being in the better position both in terms of polling and endorsements, but I could easily see Warren blowing up in the debates or any number of other things between now and Iowa.
Tier 2B:
Peter Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders. I know this sounds crazy, but once you adjust for Mayor Pete's relatively low name recognition and Bernie's relatively high name recognition arguably their polling is more similar than you'd think. the reason I would put these two in a lower subgroup than Harris and Warren is they both have pretty major weaknesses as party coalition builders which makes them below the A tier. Both obviously have difficulty winning over non-white voters and party actors, and Bernie's "factional" style candidacy is a pretty major problem. Likewise Mayor Pete's lack of conventional qualifications, even "inexperienced" Barack Obama was in the Senate for four years, makes me more skeptical of his chances. It might be an asset in the GOP to be political newbie, but it doesn't seem to help with the Democrats.
Tier 3A:
Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker: We have now fallen into the "field" portion of the rankings were there's a bunch of people who could in theory win, but for whatever reason don't seem to be quite in the tier above them. Klobuchar and Booker both have impressive resumes, acceptable fundraising, and a slew of home state endorsements giving them an important base. But for whatever reason this hasn't translated into polling. To break out they are going to need something: a viral campaign moment, a big debate victory, or underdog performance in Iowa. If that happens they have they could start a upward spiral of positive coverage causing a spike in the polls producing more positive coverage etc. But right now it's just not there.
Tier 3B:
Beto O'Rouke: In a slightly different boat than Klobuchar or Booker in that he already had his movement in the sun and the press moved on to a new shinny object (Mayor Pete!). The good news for him though is it could always happen again so he'd not finished yet. But he's not doing very well these days either.
Tier 3C:
Hickenlooper, Inslee, Bennet, Bullock, Gillibrand: These are folks who in another cycle might have been a formidable candidate but they are either getting drown out in the noise, or are just not good at this, or something else is going wrong. Anything could happen so I could see any one spiraling up with a breakout moment, but they have less of a base to build on than the A or B tiers so it will be pretty hard. Gillibrand might be a special case in that powerful party actors may be working hard against her behind the scenes due to her role in Al Franken's downfall, but it's not clear.
Tier 4A:
Castro, Delaney, Gabbard, Moulton, Ryan, Swalwell: This is the "Reps other than Beto" category and all of these folks seem like long shots, because they are. Indeed the last person to make the jump from the House to the White House directly was Garfield. Anyway I guess anything is possible, but don't count on it.
Tier 4B:
Bill de Blasio. For various reasons being Mayor of New York City is a dead end job. Just ask Bloomberg, Rudy, Ed Koch, John Lindsey, or LaGuardia for that matter. So I really, really doubt Bill will win. But in the age of Trump anything is possible I guess.
Tier 5:
Everyone else: This is everyone else, they are running for some reason.
(Special case: Stacey Abrams: If she did run I'd guess I'd put her in 3C. She would be the only candidate from the south and could in theory rally a lot of black voters (especially women) to her banner which would be a sizable block. That's not nothing, but then again it is getting pretty late in the process which means gathering the resources you need to win is harder and harder by the day. Moreover I suspect her decision to frame her choice in terms of what's best for her rather than the country or voters wouldn't serve her well if she did run. Sure didn't work for Beto.)
We'll see were we stand at the after the first round of debates!
First off I think there were some major developments over the last nine months that have really changed things quite a bit. To begin with we've had a lot of "winnowing" over the last nine months. By winnowed here I mean candidates who basically started doing the things one does when running for president but for whatever reason(s) decided to quit in one way or another, even if they never got around to formally announcing.
Seth Masket has made a great online tracker of people who were "winnowed" and it's quit a few. By Seth's count there are already 16 of these (I'd count some of the people he has still on there as having been winnowed or never run as well) and while the Democrats are still stuck with a ridiculously large field (I think the official count is like 23 at this point) it could be a lot larger with a lot of big name governors, senators, and former cabinet officials in the mix. But they aren't because well, #winnowingworks, as we like to say on Twitter.
Moreover this process of winnowing is good evidence that the presidential nominations process is working as it is suppose to (in theory). That is a huge number of people start doing the things you need to do to be president and that number is winnowed down over the course of the campaign to more manageable number (say 10) by the time the Iowa caucuses roll around. This number is then wacked down further going into New Hampshire, and well, you get the drift.
A major problem for the Republicans in the 2016 cycle, and a key reason Trump was able to ultimately win, is this winnowing process didn't seem work, or kicked in too late. Candidates like John Kasich stayed in way after it was clear they could no longer mathematically win enough delegates to win and thus further split the anti-Trump vote. While the Republican party actors seemed to have failed to rally around one viable "not Trump" alternative. Indeed everyone from Marco Rubio to Mitt Romney seemed to play that role for a time.
So the good news for the Democrats is that the winnowing process seems to be working. But there's one big caveat here. Nobody has dropped out since mid-April meaning the pace of winnowing could have slowed down which could be a problem with a field this size. However, I think the smart money is on the debates winnowing quite a few candidates out between now and the fall, either by candidates failing to break out and calling it quits, or the new formal DNC rules shutting them out.
The second big change is that Joe Biden decided to take the plunge. Which is a great segue into where I think the field stands at this point. Going off a Nate Silver's piece from about a month ago I'll go with "tiers" rather than rank everyone.
Tier 1:
Joe Biden: Folks he's the front runner. He consistently leads by a modest plurality in the polls so far which at this point are starting to get predictive about who will win the nomination. Likewise he 's easily ahead in the endorsement hunt with 94 points in Nate Silver's tracker compared to 57 for Booker and Harris, his closest rivals in that metric. More to the point Biden's support is much more diverse, in terms of types of politicians, regions, and yes race than most of his adversaries. Moreover while we don't have much information on his fundraising so far, what we have is pretty great for him. To be sure, he has a bunch of weaknesses as well, and I'm not really interested in going through them, but at this point it's fair to say he's the frontrunner, although hardly a dominate one. If I had to bet Biden vs the field at this point I'd bet the field, but he's still in the top tier by himself.
Tier 2A:
Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren: These are the candidates that seem closest behind Biden in a broad range of factors. They have decent polling, a large following, have raised lots of money so far, and have racked up a number of major endorsements. Between them I see Harris as being in the better position both in terms of polling and endorsements, but I could easily see Warren blowing up in the debates or any number of other things between now and Iowa.
Tier 2B:
Peter Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders. I know this sounds crazy, but once you adjust for Mayor Pete's relatively low name recognition and Bernie's relatively high name recognition arguably their polling is more similar than you'd think. the reason I would put these two in a lower subgroup than Harris and Warren is they both have pretty major weaknesses as party coalition builders which makes them below the A tier. Both obviously have difficulty winning over non-white voters and party actors, and Bernie's "factional" style candidacy is a pretty major problem. Likewise Mayor Pete's lack of conventional qualifications, even "inexperienced" Barack Obama was in the Senate for four years, makes me more skeptical of his chances. It might be an asset in the GOP to be political newbie, but it doesn't seem to help with the Democrats.
Tier 3A:
Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker: We have now fallen into the "field" portion of the rankings were there's a bunch of people who could in theory win, but for whatever reason don't seem to be quite in the tier above them. Klobuchar and Booker both have impressive resumes, acceptable fundraising, and a slew of home state endorsements giving them an important base. But for whatever reason this hasn't translated into polling. To break out they are going to need something: a viral campaign moment, a big debate victory, or underdog performance in Iowa. If that happens they have they could start a upward spiral of positive coverage causing a spike in the polls producing more positive coverage etc. But right now it's just not there.
Tier 3B:
Beto O'Rouke: In a slightly different boat than Klobuchar or Booker in that he already had his movement in the sun and the press moved on to a new shinny object (Mayor Pete!). The good news for him though is it could always happen again so he'd not finished yet. But he's not doing very well these days either.
Tier 3C:
Hickenlooper, Inslee, Bennet, Bullock, Gillibrand: These are folks who in another cycle might have been a formidable candidate but they are either getting drown out in the noise, or are just not good at this, or something else is going wrong. Anything could happen so I could see any one spiraling up with a breakout moment, but they have less of a base to build on than the A or B tiers so it will be pretty hard. Gillibrand might be a special case in that powerful party actors may be working hard against her behind the scenes due to her role in Al Franken's downfall, but it's not clear.
Tier 4A:
Castro, Delaney, Gabbard, Moulton, Ryan, Swalwell: This is the "Reps other than Beto" category and all of these folks seem like long shots, because they are. Indeed the last person to make the jump from the House to the White House directly was Garfield. Anyway I guess anything is possible, but don't count on it.
Tier 4B:
Bill de Blasio. For various reasons being Mayor of New York City is a dead end job. Just ask Bloomberg, Rudy, Ed Koch, John Lindsey, or LaGuardia for that matter. So I really, really doubt Bill will win. But in the age of Trump anything is possible I guess.
Tier 5:
Everyone else: This is everyone else, they are running for some reason.
(Special case: Stacey Abrams: If she did run I'd guess I'd put her in 3C. She would be the only candidate from the south and could in theory rally a lot of black voters (especially women) to her banner which would be a sizable block. That's not nothing, but then again it is getting pretty late in the process which means gathering the resources you need to win is harder and harder by the day. Moreover I suspect her decision to frame her choice in terms of what's best for her rather than the country or voters wouldn't serve her well if she did run. Sure didn't work for Beto.)
We'll see were we stand at the after the first round of debates!
Thursday, March 21, 2019
Beto Defended
So if you're like most of the American electorate these days you're probably either worried or outraged or glad-you-got-em-done about your taxes, happy to see spring finally arrive, or thinking about sports these days. But if you're one of us politically obsessed weirdos you're probably talking about the latest phenomenon to rock the Democrats' already ridiculously crowded field for 2020.
No, not Joe Biden. Beto O'Rouke! You know that guy who posed like Reagan in blue jeans? Yeah that guy.
To his detractors he's something of an up-jumped, "centrist", vapid, loser of a man, drench in "white male privilege" and perhaps a representation of everything that's wrong with politics these days.
To his fans he's...not those things.
Anyway, he's who everyone is talking about these days (barring the Oprah run various media types dream of) but I think some people who are less that fans are missing his appeal, even if they get his weaknesses as a candidate and a potential president quite right.
This came apparent to me recently when listening to and episode of a fun podcast out there by two political scientists named Larry Becker and Tyler Hughes out of California State Univeristy, Northridge called The Filibluster. In their latest edition Becker and Hughes were talking about the "three white dudes" Biden, Bernie and Beto running for president and what it all means. I'll save the Bernie and Biden writing for another day, and while I agree with many of their points I did think they missed some important stuff about Beto's appeal. Especially when it comes to important party actors in the "invisible primary" party of the 2020 cycle we are in.
You should listen to the podcast to get their whole arguments, but I think it's fair to summarize Hughes' view of Beto's appeal as being "He's a young white bro, and that's how people see him, and that's what it's comes down to, he's this cool exurb bro...he's just charismatic and young and a male and a white dude."
I don't think these these points are necessarily wrong, Beto does seem to have a big appeal with a certain type of younger liberal white man ("identity politics" strikes again!) and those might be the sorts of people who do have some extra cash to contribute to his epic first 24 hour haul.
But while I get Hughes' frustration around Betomania, at the same time I think there's a reasonable argument for Beto as the Democratic nominee: simply put he may be one of the more electable candidate out there.
"Electability" in presidential politics is a very tricky subject. As Seth Masket pointed out recently much of the writing about electability is basically just praising white men for how they are very white and also men (and if I can date myself: questions about if you'd want to have a beer with them). Likewise I think most people, including me as an Obama-fanboy back in 2008, first pick their candidate, and then come up with reasons why they are the most "electable" to justify this pick to everyone else (often including themselves).
But to the degree we can measure how good a given candidate is at winning the presidency I'd argue that how they did in a statewide election relative to a "generic" person of their party is a good metric, regardless of if they won or loss. For example, Nate Silver's number crunching shows that Beto probably outperformed a generic Democrat significantly in 2016 even if he lost in a very conservative state. The same way there's good evidence in Warren under performs in her elections, even if she easily wins in a very liberal state.
Moreover I think O'Rourke has demonstrated an ability to solve a key problem for the Democrats. One of the reasons, among many others, Trump was able to win razor thin majorities in key Great Lakes States in 2016 was low turn out from otherwise very Democratic voting young people, and high levels of "defection" in the two party vote to third parties. We can argue about why this happened, I have my own theories, but it clearly was a problem. Just as it was for the Democrats in terms of the drop off in young people voting in 2010 and 2014. In Wisconsin in 2016 over 6% of voters cast ballots for third parties and write-ins, in 2012 it was just a little over 1%. Trump won by a little over 20,000 votes. (all numbers from Wikipedia).
In other words Beto, for all his flaws, has a prove ability to turn young people out to the polls. This is no small thing in an age of increasingly age related political polarization. So it should be no surprise Democratic political actors are excited about Beto, he might be able to fix a fairly major problem for them.
As a liberal and a party hack for the Democrats, Beto is hardly my first choice. Indeed I find his political style a bit much. Becker might wince at Beto's jumping up on countertops, but I kind of roll my eyes at his lack of experience and vagueness about policy. Being president is a hard job, and it takes a lot more than energy and charisma to do it well in my opinion.
But at the same time I get that most voters kind of hate politics, especially now, and often find it gross and awful, and want someone who "is different" and can "change Washington." Trump after all, used this to great effect last time around. Just as Obama did back in 2008.
So while I won't be supporting him anytime soon, I thing Becker and Hughes are wrong to dismiss Beto as simply an empty suit or product of cultural factors they dislike. From a Democratic Party actor standpoint there is a reasonable argument for him.
In what might be a close election, his vagueness and can-do optimism might just win the Electoral College.
(A terrible system they discuss in great detail in that same podcast).
No, not Joe Biden. Beto O'Rouke! You know that guy who posed like Reagan in blue jeans? Yeah that guy.
To his detractors he's something of an up-jumped, "centrist", vapid, loser of a man, drench in "white male privilege" and perhaps a representation of everything that's wrong with politics these days.
To his fans he's...not those things.
Anyway, he's who everyone is talking about these days (barring the Oprah run various media types dream of) but I think some people who are less that fans are missing his appeal, even if they get his weaknesses as a candidate and a potential president quite right.
This came apparent to me recently when listening to and episode of a fun podcast out there by two political scientists named Larry Becker and Tyler Hughes out of California State Univeristy, Northridge called The Filibluster. In their latest edition Becker and Hughes were talking about the "three white dudes" Biden, Bernie and Beto running for president and what it all means. I'll save the Bernie and Biden writing for another day, and while I agree with many of their points I did think they missed some important stuff about Beto's appeal. Especially when it comes to important party actors in the "invisible primary" party of the 2020 cycle we are in.
You should listen to the podcast to get their whole arguments, but I think it's fair to summarize Hughes' view of Beto's appeal as being "He's a young white bro, and that's how people see him, and that's what it's comes down to, he's this cool exurb bro...he's just charismatic and young and a male and a white dude."
I don't think these these points are necessarily wrong, Beto does seem to have a big appeal with a certain type of younger liberal white man ("identity politics" strikes again!) and those might be the sorts of people who do have some extra cash to contribute to his epic first 24 hour haul.
But while I get Hughes' frustration around Betomania, at the same time I think there's a reasonable argument for Beto as the Democratic nominee: simply put he may be one of the more electable candidate out there.
"Electability" in presidential politics is a very tricky subject. As Seth Masket pointed out recently much of the writing about electability is basically just praising white men for how they are very white and also men (and if I can date myself: questions about if you'd want to have a beer with them). Likewise I think most people, including me as an Obama-fanboy back in 2008, first pick their candidate, and then come up with reasons why they are the most "electable" to justify this pick to everyone else (often including themselves).
But to the degree we can measure how good a given candidate is at winning the presidency I'd argue that how they did in a statewide election relative to a "generic" person of their party is a good metric, regardless of if they won or loss. For example, Nate Silver's number crunching shows that Beto probably outperformed a generic Democrat significantly in 2016 even if he lost in a very conservative state. The same way there's good evidence in Warren under performs in her elections, even if she easily wins in a very liberal state.
Moreover I think O'Rourke has demonstrated an ability to solve a key problem for the Democrats. One of the reasons, among many others, Trump was able to win razor thin majorities in key Great Lakes States in 2016 was low turn out from otherwise very Democratic voting young people, and high levels of "defection" in the two party vote to third parties. We can argue about why this happened, I have my own theories, but it clearly was a problem. Just as it was for the Democrats in terms of the drop off in young people voting in 2010 and 2014. In Wisconsin in 2016 over 6% of voters cast ballots for third parties and write-ins, in 2012 it was just a little over 1%. Trump won by a little over 20,000 votes. (all numbers from Wikipedia).
In other words Beto, for all his flaws, has a prove ability to turn young people out to the polls. This is no small thing in an age of increasingly age related political polarization. So it should be no surprise Democratic political actors are excited about Beto, he might be able to fix a fairly major problem for them.
As a liberal and a party hack for the Democrats, Beto is hardly my first choice. Indeed I find his political style a bit much. Becker might wince at Beto's jumping up on countertops, but I kind of roll my eyes at his lack of experience and vagueness about policy. Being president is a hard job, and it takes a lot more than energy and charisma to do it well in my opinion.
But at the same time I get that most voters kind of hate politics, especially now, and often find it gross and awful, and want someone who "is different" and can "change Washington." Trump after all, used this to great effect last time around. Just as Obama did back in 2008.
So while I won't be supporting him anytime soon, I thing Becker and Hughes are wrong to dismiss Beto as simply an empty suit or product of cultural factors they dislike. From a Democratic Party actor standpoint there is a reasonable argument for him.
In what might be a close election, his vagueness and can-do optimism might just win the Electoral College.
(A terrible system they discuss in great detail in that same podcast).
Saturday, September 8, 2018
Handicapping the Democratic Field
Here's a fun topic to distract us the various constitutional crises going on in Washington DC: how's 2020 shaping up?
There are a lot of ways to approach this question, but I like the method Matt Ygleisas, Laura McGann, and Dylan Mathews took in Vox recently where they looked at this question by saying who'd they "buy" (they're underrated) and "sell" (they're overrated) on the PredictIt betting website.
As I see it the Voxers, who are smart people who work for a good website, are a bit off to begin with when they announce, "It’s obviously way too early for anyone to have a realistic sense of who is going to prevail in Democrats’ large field of 2020 presidential candidates..." Sure, in the Age of Trump who really knows what will happen, but we can already draw some conclusions.
I don't know what to tell you about the Republicans these days, but in the Democratic Party it appears that party actors are still important and the "invisible primary" has been underway for quite some time. Indeed the gigantic Democratic Field has already been winnowed twice by my count with Jason Kander deciding to run for mayor of Kansas City instead of president, and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo basically bowing out of 2020 who with his "only caveat" which I'd say is a pretty Shermanesque statement.
In other words the Voxers are right about it being hard to pick the winner, but there's already a lot of ground to cover. My position is to sell Bernie and Biden and buy Martin O'Malley and Montana Governor Steve Bullock (this sounds insane I know but it'll make sense).
To make things simpler let's just go through by candidate as the Voxers rate them and I'll say what they get right and wrong:
Don't get me wrong, there will be many groups and actors pushing for things like a more liberal candidate, or nominating a woman or a racial minority. The thing to remember though is that so many candidates are running you could see how coordinating around one single candidate could be a big problem for many political actors and groups. Honestly if you want to nominate a liberal woman woman you have four strong contenders so far by my count. And indeed that's a big part of how Trump was able to win the GOP endorsement! That is so many candidates were running, few dropped out, and few wanted to take him on under the theory that he would implode allowing them to gather up his supporters. So that's were you get Jeb! spending 20 million dollars to tear down Rubio in negative ads instead of Trump. And the GOP party leaders refusing to rally around Ted Cruz (probably the most viable alternative to Trump) after Iowa because they don't like him, or would rather dither. And Kasich refusing to drop out long after it's become possible to win enough delegates for him to win thus divided the anti-Trump vote for reasons.
Could something similar happen to the Dems in 2020? Probably not, but it could, and you could see O'Malley or Bullock being able to win a "bandwagon" campaign by wining Iowa and getting tons of people to jump on board, which as Seth Masket has pointed out is basically how the not very liberal Jimmy Carter was able to win four years after George McGovern.
Will this happen? Probably not. Is there a greater that 1% chance it could? Sure.
There are a lot of ways to approach this question, but I like the method Matt Ygleisas, Laura McGann, and Dylan Mathews took in Vox recently where they looked at this question by saying who'd they "buy" (they're underrated) and "sell" (they're overrated) on the PredictIt betting website.
As I see it the Voxers, who are smart people who work for a good website, are a bit off to begin with when they announce, "It’s obviously way too early for anyone to have a realistic sense of who is going to prevail in Democrats’ large field of 2020 presidential candidates..." Sure, in the Age of Trump who really knows what will happen, but we can already draw some conclusions.
I don't know what to tell you about the Republicans these days, but in the Democratic Party it appears that party actors are still important and the "invisible primary" has been underway for quite some time. Indeed the gigantic Democratic Field has already been winnowed twice by my count with Jason Kander deciding to run for mayor of Kansas City instead of president, and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo basically bowing out of 2020 who with his "only caveat" which I'd say is a pretty Shermanesque statement.
In other words the Voxers are right about it being hard to pick the winner, but there's already a lot of ground to cover. My position is to sell Bernie and Biden and buy Martin O'Malley and Montana Governor Steve Bullock (this sounds insane I know but it'll make sense).
To make things simpler let's just go through by candidate as the Voxers rate them and I'll say what they get right and wrong:
- New York Governor Andrew Cuomo: Matt says sell. Makes sense due to him basically bowing out already.
- Washington Governor Jay Inslee: Matt says buy, makes sense, and please see my crazy O'Malley/Bullock theory outlined below.
- Joe Biden: McGann says time to sell. I agree, sell sell sell! But her analysis is all wrong. Biden's problem, and it's been basically the same thing since he decided to run for president sometime around 9:45 pm eastern on November 6th, 1984 is that the party loves him, just not for the top spot. McGann focuses on various "scandals" and gaffes to explain Biden's defeat that strike me as fairly similar to "But emails!" claims about Hillary Clinton. Likewise Biden's often bashed by younger liberal journalists like, well Matt Ygleisas about his length and "problematic" record. Which makes sense! Again the Democratic Party and politics in general have changed a lot since his shocking upset win against J. Caleb Boggs back in 1972. But that doesn't mean he;s not without his charms (progressive Vox journalists might hate him, but I love him, and yeah I saw him speak in person in a small room, it was amazing, shut up, you weren't there!) and a certain type of voter loves the man, but that same piece points out that Biden is going to "make a decision" about running around Christmas. Which means the man who ran for 30 years could give up the ghost. Or he could charge ahead and that would be a world in which in the invisible primary where, "What's left of his New Hampshire network, for instance, is fragmented, aging and undecided heading into 2020." Anyway feel free to sell.
- Tim Kaine: McGann claims Kaine is "a good buy at 2 cents" my response is, really? Don't get me wrong he could have been a incredibly formidable candidate but he's done none of the things you do when running for president. This tells me he doesn't want it and like's being a senator, so 2 cents is probably a bit much at this point. You can't win if you don't play!
- Kamala Harris: Matthews says sell, and I agree that 22 cents is way to high, instead put her in the middle of the pack with Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand around 10 cents or so. But note that Matthews' analysis is still bad. Matthews argues that Harris, "...will face a challenge winning over Black Lives Matter activists, #AbolishICE proponents, and other voters critical of mass incarceration and police brutality." and goes on to criticize her for a bunch of other things. I think this gets the Democratic Party wrong on a number of levels. To begin with the Black Lives Matter Movement isn't really part of Democratic party politics (and they have stated that!) and itself is an composed of a whole bunch of groups with all sorts of differences that would find backing, or not backing, a candidate for president difficult for a number of reasons. Likewise #AbolishICE is a vague slogan that in my conversations seems to mean everything from "America shouldn't have immigration laws" to "Make the INS great again" so that's a loophole Harris can drive her Chevy Impala through at top speed Moreover there's a Yuge problem with party actors not being able to dismiss someone without an alternative. If you're a progressive journalist or voter who dislikes Harris you can just shout "dealbreaker!" about this or that. But if you're a party actor you kind of have to pick an alternative or be like much of the GOP in 2015-16 and remain paralyzed while disaster strikes. In other words you can say "Kamala Harris' stance on transgender rights in prison is simply unacceptable, I can't support her." And if you can't come up with who you'll back then I can barge in on your fun party, rip the mic out of your hand and shout "Which is why we are caucusing for Steve Bullock for President baby! WHOOOOO!" Is that what you want? Well no, but that's kind of the way this works.
- Bernie Sanders: I know people who read this will get annoyed, but yes sell. There's the obvious points that Sanders isn't a Democrat (problem!) and would be 81 years old in January of 2021 (also problem!). But let's just go through Matthews' points line by line:
- "He tied in Iowa last time, and there’s no regional candidate who would obviously be stronger than him there." See my Bullock post below, also the idea that "because I did good in Iowa before I'll do it again!" Isn't backed up by historical data. Once upon a time Dick Gephardt won Iowa in a shocker. Doesn't tell you what the future is.
- "He won New Hampshire in a blowout, and even against fellow New Englander Elizabeth Warren, he’s in a strong position to do the same again." This is just silly writing. New Hampshire voters are notoriously fickle and love to ask "What have you done for me lately?" of their candidates. This afterall was the state where Bill Clinton becomes "the come back kid." Where Hillary seems on the ropes and then "found her voice", where they apparently they love John McCain, and Donald Trump, and George Herbert Walker Bush, but not this son. That is to say New Hampshire voters winnow, but they all the over the map when it comes time to pick, and Dylan's theory about them being ruled by ideology or "local appeal" strikes me as nonsense.
- "It’s common for parties to choose runners-up as their nominees the next time around (as Sanders learned when he lost to Clinton)." Barack Obama, John Kerry, Al Gore, Michael Dukakis and Walter Mondale all stare at you and say "That's not how this works, that's not how any of this works."
- "He’s the genuine article in a field of imitators. If you’re a nurse in Iowa, would you rather go with someone who’s supported single-payer health care his whole life, like Sanders, or someone who signed on last year, like Booker, Gillibrand, Harris, or Warren?" This strikes me as being profoundly off base. Matthews sees a world filled with voters, caucus goers, and party actors deeply committed to ideological stances. I get that, it's a way for a "politics journalist" to think about the world, but it strikes me as missing a lot of how American party politics works. Maybe the nurse in Iowa has changed her mind, or thinks that since Bernie and Deval Patrick both support Medicare for All she'll go with Patrick because Bernie is old and Patrick is fun. Likewise maybe you've just had enough of Trump's misogyny and despite your ideological commitments you throw caution to then wind and back this woman Gillibrand because, well, what she said about Trump and women at the first debate, you can't top that.
- I'll add in that there are often claims about Bernie's powerful "organization" that he'll be able to activate for 2020. I really don't see it. Like Gary Hart, a lot of his support wasn't from people committed to his ideology or values, but rather people who disliked a party status quo. After all nobody is more Mr. Status Quo than Walter Mondale, or Ms. Status Quo that Hillary Rodham Clinton. Likewise Bernie Sanders' support in the 2016 cycle was largely about identity, that is age and race, more than anything else. Thus while there might be some core of supporters committed to Bernie personally or his ideology, it's likely much of his impressive "network" is falling apart as we speak. Especially since people who want a passionate liberal New Englander who wants to fight big business can always jump on board the USS Elizabeth Warren, who also happens to be a Democrat.
Don't get me wrong, there will be many groups and actors pushing for things like a more liberal candidate, or nominating a woman or a racial minority. The thing to remember though is that so many candidates are running you could see how coordinating around one single candidate could be a big problem for many political actors and groups. Honestly if you want to nominate a liberal woman woman you have four strong contenders so far by my count. And indeed that's a big part of how Trump was able to win the GOP endorsement! That is so many candidates were running, few dropped out, and few wanted to take him on under the theory that he would implode allowing them to gather up his supporters. So that's were you get Jeb! spending 20 million dollars to tear down Rubio in negative ads instead of Trump. And the GOP party leaders refusing to rally around Ted Cruz (probably the most viable alternative to Trump) after Iowa because they don't like him, or would rather dither. And Kasich refusing to drop out long after it's become possible to win enough delegates for him to win thus divided the anti-Trump vote for reasons.
Could something similar happen to the Dems in 2020? Probably not, but it could, and you could see O'Malley or Bullock being able to win a "bandwagon" campaign by wining Iowa and getting tons of people to jump on board, which as Seth Masket has pointed out is basically how the not very liberal Jimmy Carter was able to win four years after George McGovern.
Will this happen? Probably not. Is there a greater that 1% chance it could? Sure.
Saturday, August 18, 2018
The Real Problem With Caucuses
Let me start this post by saying that I've long been an apologist for the dying system of caucuses as a means of picking political candidates. Part of this is probably because I'm from Minnesota, a sort of land of caucuses, where we still have a caucus system that both the DFL (Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (even our state parties have weird names)) and the Republicans put on well before elections to decide on endorsing a given candidate which historically has meant a lot.
Part of the reason is also that caucuses reward participation, and as someone who both has strong opinions about politics and believes that we liberals need to do a lot more "doing" in politics and a lot less complaining about it on the internet, wasting a Tuesday night, or even a whole Saturday, in some school gym has a sort of stoic appeal. As my Methodist grandmother might have said, "Suffering in caucuses is good, it builds character."
The case against caucuses is well known and you can expect to see it trotted out the closer we get to Iowa in 2020. To summarize about a gazillion op-eds and blog posts: caucuses are deeply unfair as they are hard for many to access, few people participate in them relative to a given electorate, and they are rarely if ever representative of a given population they are suppose to represent. People making this case some time jazz things up by declaring them "racist" or "classist" or "elitist" or some other "ist" but the arguments are usually pretty similar.
The old me that use to defend this strange system would have replied something like, "That's a fair description but it's also kind of irrelevant." The reason? Political parties are private organizations, not creatures of the state and so how they chose to endorse and nominate candidates should be left up to them. The same way there shouldn't be some law declaring that every registered voter should be able to have a voice in what the Black Lives Matter movement chooses to do, even though that is essentially what "open primaries" allow for political parties.
Moreover there are benefits to the caucus system (in theory). They reward participation so people who are willing to work hard, say by building up good will in a precinct or bringing a bunch of friends to the caucus and having them help make you a delegate to the next level, get that much more say because they are that much more committed to advancing the goals and doing the work of the party. The same way a committed Black Lives Matters activist should have more say in what they chose to do than a random white guy named longwalk who doesn't participate in the movement at all.
In addition, caucusing (again in theory) is cool because it is a rare example in modern life where you, an ordinary citizen can have real power. In a primary you are just yet another random voter who's vote will almost certainly not change the outcome of an election even in a town of thousands. Let alone a state of 5.5 million people. But caucuses are different, in caucuses you have power.
You'll probably never believe me but I really did once have a state representative come to my door to ask for my support because I was a delegate. Likewise I once really did have a member of Congress once ask for my personal support for a candidate at a senate district convention. In a primary system you go to the candidate rally to shake their hand, they don't come to you. If you're a delegate in a caucus system it's different.
Meanwhile supporters of primaries often just ignore that system's very real shortcomings. The biggest example of this can be found in the 45th President of the United States who's take over of the party of Lincoln was caused in no small part by saturation media coverage because he was so "interesting" as a candidate. In most other democracies, and in most of American history, party leaders would never chose a know nothing reality show host to lead their party both for electoral reasons, but also because that person should never be put in charge of the party or the country. But here in the US in our post McGovern–Fraser "better" more "democratic" primary based presidential nomination system the voters, in their infinite fucking wisdom, decided to go with reality show host.
Likewise the fans of primaries arguments about "democracy" often don't hold up under scrutiny. As political scientists Julia Azari and Seth Masket put it in an excellent op-ed in the New York Times "democracy" inside political parties isn't a very helpful standard as parties by definition involve a balancing act between leaders of different sorts and rank and file members:
So if caucusing is so great, why am I writing this post? Well, that's the thing. After participating in Minnesota's caucus process for the last 10 years I've come to see that the arguments for caucuses just don't hold up. This isn't because primaries are better, I'd argue that Donald Trump shows that primaries are actually pretty terrible. Instead what I came to see was the main problem with caucus is that they are dominated by political hobbyism.
"Political hobbyism" is a term coined by the political scientist Eitan Hersh that he laid out not to long ago in a great New York Times op-ed. As he puts it:
Here's my story:
Nah, the reality was more like "hobbyism, hobbyism, hobbyism."
I wasn't there, and there are many media accounts you can read, but here's my general impression of a hobbyist fiasco. Once upon a time (ie in June) Attorney General Lori Swanson was well liked and seen as a rising star in state politics. She was on the short list for replacements for Al Franken after he resigned.
But at the convention the DFL delegates decided to endorse a 37 year old progressive activist (who full disclosure I've met and is a good guy in a lot of ways) for reasons that have never become clear. According to some I've talked to the "buzz on the floor" of the convention was something like, "Vote for Matt Pelikan (the insurgent) to send Lori a message. We'll endorse her on the second ballot." The problem of course is he won the endorsement on the second ballot! From a party standpoint this and what followed is something of an epic disaster, but from a hobbyist standpoint it's great: we rooted for the underdog and they won, hooray.
But from a party standpoint though this was a disaster. Swanson, for reasons that remain unclear, decided to run for governor after this rebuke and after her campaign was engulfed in scandals came in third in the August primary. Meanwhile Representative Keith Ellison (my member of congress and full disclosure I worked on his 2010 campaign) jumped in to run for AG himself, leaving the DFL endorsed candidate with 10.6% of the vote for AG in the recent primary election. Meanwhile the endorsed DFL candidate for governor Erin Murphy had trouble gaining traction with voters, who remember are pretty disconnected from liberal hobbyist types like me, resulting in Congressman Tim Walz, who lost the endorsement at the state convention, wining with 41.6% of the vote compared to Murphy and Swanson.
The hobbyism though seemed to reach a peak, at least for me. When Senator Tina Smith's name came up for endorsement. Tina is an amazing person (full disclosure I've worked for her) and when you think of a older white Boomer feminist Democrat in politics her face should pop up in your mind. She worked on a number of campaigns in the 90's, she managed Walter Mondale's crazy "Fritz Blitz" campaign in 2002 for the Senate seat that opened after then Senator Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash less that two weeks before the 2002 election, she then worked for Planned Parenthood. In government she became chief of staff to then Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak in 2006 and after that she was Governor Mark Dayton's chief of staff for four years and was then elected Lieutenant Governor in 2014.
From a party perspective she's about as good as they come. As a DFL delegate you know she's committed to your party and knows she must value what you value right? That's how I see it it, but not to some DFL state delegates, who gave her a big victory with 74.5% of the vote for endorsement, but one out of four decided to go with someone else. Many instead went with with Richard Painter, a former member of George W. Bush's administration and a contributor with the Federalist Society who was a talking head on CNN as well. The fact that such a person could still win a significant chunk of the vote of people supposedly deeply part of the party due to advancement through the difficult caucus process seems like a indictment of the whole process in and of itself. But from a hobbyist standpoint its a great way to spend the weekend. Fight for the little guy. Let's make things interesting. Etc etc.
I recite this story because Hersh spells out the consequences of political hobbyism in this piece so well.
I guess the question here is what is my alternative, and to be honest my answer is I don't really have one. Caucuses may no longer work but if you care about politics remaining engaged makes sense. Likewise primaries may be awful, but that's the world we are living in.
I don't really have an answer here, other than to say that to improve our politics we need more that fights over process reform. We need to engage with politics, as messy as that is, in ways we've shied away from for a while.
Part of the reason is also that caucuses reward participation, and as someone who both has strong opinions about politics and believes that we liberals need to do a lot more "doing" in politics and a lot less complaining about it on the internet, wasting a Tuesday night, or even a whole Saturday, in some school gym has a sort of stoic appeal. As my Methodist grandmother might have said, "Suffering in caucuses is good, it builds character."
The case against caucuses is well known and you can expect to see it trotted out the closer we get to Iowa in 2020. To summarize about a gazillion op-eds and blog posts: caucuses are deeply unfair as they are hard for many to access, few people participate in them relative to a given electorate, and they are rarely if ever representative of a given population they are suppose to represent. People making this case some time jazz things up by declaring them "racist" or "classist" or "elitist" or some other "ist" but the arguments are usually pretty similar.
The old me that use to defend this strange system would have replied something like, "That's a fair description but it's also kind of irrelevant." The reason? Political parties are private organizations, not creatures of the state and so how they chose to endorse and nominate candidates should be left up to them. The same way there shouldn't be some law declaring that every registered voter should be able to have a voice in what the Black Lives Matter movement chooses to do, even though that is essentially what "open primaries" allow for political parties.
Moreover there are benefits to the caucus system (in theory). They reward participation so people who are willing to work hard, say by building up good will in a precinct or bringing a bunch of friends to the caucus and having them help make you a delegate to the next level, get that much more say because they are that much more committed to advancing the goals and doing the work of the party. The same way a committed Black Lives Matters activist should have more say in what they chose to do than a random white guy named longwalk who doesn't participate in the movement at all.
In addition, caucusing (again in theory) is cool because it is a rare example in modern life where you, an ordinary citizen can have real power. In a primary you are just yet another random voter who's vote will almost certainly not change the outcome of an election even in a town of thousands. Let alone a state of 5.5 million people. But caucuses are different, in caucuses you have power.
You'll probably never believe me but I really did once have a state representative come to my door to ask for my support because I was a delegate. Likewise I once really did have a member of Congress once ask for my personal support for a candidate at a senate district convention. In a primary system you go to the candidate rally to shake their hand, they don't come to you. If you're a delegate in a caucus system it's different.
Meanwhile supporters of primaries often just ignore that system's very real shortcomings. The biggest example of this can be found in the 45th President of the United States who's take over of the party of Lincoln was caused in no small part by saturation media coverage because he was so "interesting" as a candidate. In most other democracies, and in most of American history, party leaders would never chose a know nothing reality show host to lead their party both for electoral reasons, but also because that person should never be put in charge of the party or the country. But here in the US in our post McGovern–Fraser "better" more "democratic" primary based presidential nomination system the voters, in their infinite fucking wisdom, decided to go with reality show host.
Likewise the fans of primaries arguments about "democracy" often don't hold up under scrutiny. As political scientists Julia Azari and Seth Masket put it in an excellent op-ed in the New York Times "democracy" inside political parties isn't a very helpful standard as parties by definition involve a balancing act between leaders of different sorts and rank and file members:
Part of the problem for parties is our insistence that they be run democratically. That turns out not to be a very realistic concept. Yes, we can hold elections within parties, but party leaders will always have vastly more information about candidates — their strengths and flaws, their ability to govern and work with Congress, their backing among various interest groups and coalitions — than voters and caucusgoers do. That information is useful, even vital, to the task of picking a good nominee. As the political scientist E. E. Schattschneider once said, democracy is to be found between the parties, not within them.More over the anti-caucus "democracy" and "participation" arguments don't really hold up on inspection. After all, most primary elections are pretty low turn out affairs and like caucuses turn out in primaries is often older, whiter, and wealthier of any given electoral constituency. To cite a recent example Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won her recent primary win a whopping 15,897 votes, in a district with perhaps 240,000 registered voters. Does that really represent "the will of the people"? Likewise many voters in states with "open" primaries often vote in another parties's primaries than the one they'll vote for in the general election to cause trouble, or just because they think it's more fun.
So if caucusing is so great, why am I writing this post? Well, that's the thing. After participating in Minnesota's caucus process for the last 10 years I've come to see that the arguments for caucuses just don't hold up. This isn't because primaries are better, I'd argue that Donald Trump shows that primaries are actually pretty terrible. Instead what I came to see was the main problem with caucus is that they are dominated by political hobbyism.
"Political hobbyism" is a term coined by the political scientist Eitan Hersh that he laid out not to long ago in a great New York Times op-ed. As he puts it:
For years, political scientists have studied how people vote, petition, donate, protest, align with parties and take in the news, and have asked what motivates these actions. The typical answers are civic duty and self-interest.I'd argue that this is everywhere very much includes the 2018 DFL caucus and endorsement process. Consider my experience this cycle, not from the mindset of a pro-caucus partisan talking about "grassroots democracy" or an anti-caucus person declaring it some diabolical system of "voter suppression" or elites "subverting the will of the people."
But civic duty and self-interest do not capture the ways that middle- and upper-class Americans are engaging in politics. Now it is the Facebooker who argues with friends of friends he does not know; the news consumer who spends hours watching cable; the repeat online petitioner who demands actions like impeaching the president; the news sharer willing to spread misinformation and rumor because it feels good; the data junkie who frantically toggles between horse races in suburban Georgia and horse races in Britain and France and horse races in sports (even literal horse races).
What is really motivating this behavior is hobbyism — the regular use of free time to engage in politics as a leisure activity. Political hobbyism is everywhere.
Here's my story:
- I tramped to a school gym on a cold winter night to go to my local precinct caucus on caucus night, it was pretty good turn out, but then again I live in a very Democratic neighborhood in a very Democratic city so that's to be expected. I voted in a straw poll that wouldn't allocate any delegates and thus only counted for bragging rights. This kind of makes sense from a hobbyist standpoint, straw polls, even if meaningless, are fun.
- Our caucus went relatively well (ie it took 2 hours) but no fist fights broke out and no pistols were drawn so that's a win (we used to have those in Minneapolis caucuses back in the 70's). Delegate allocation was done not by debating the issues or voting but by volunteering. So I got to be a delegate for my precinct to my senate district convention because I raised my hand and didn't demure when the convener asked for some to step aside as we had too many men in our delegation (we have rules about gender balance among delegations). This could be seen as a failure of the caucus idea, or just hobbyism. Some kids would hang out with us when I was on the Quiz Bowl team in high school to have fun, but wouldn't necessarily want to go to any meets on the weekend.
- And a meet on the weekend is kind of what a senate district convention is! Basically I went to a day long convention of all those people elected as delegates from the numerous precincts in my state senate district to be elected delegates to go to the state convention. When I say "day long" I mean it took 12 hours, but it could have been worse, one convention in Minneapolis got kicked out of the building after their 14 hours ran up and had to reconvene another weekend for eight more hours. From a party standpoint this is an idiotic fiasco that needs to be addressed. But these sorts of crazy conventions are pretty regular, believe me, and from a hobbyist lens they make sense. Like your insane 18 hour Dungeons and Dragons game or LAN party in high school, the fact that it's goes on forever kind of ads to the mystique. "I survived my 12 hour convention", you could put it on a t-shirt. In fact the DFL party put something like that after the record turn out in 2008 that devolved into chaos in many parts of the state. Ah, memories.
- I left my convention after 8 hours (before delegates had been elected to go to the state convention) because I had other things I had to do. In other words the day was effectively a waste. Also because of having a sort of "I don't like this process, I hate this process" moment that Hersh's piece would later help me understand. But there were great moments of hobbyism. For example, an old lady at the microphone screaming at us that it wasn't okay to leave early due to her commitment to racial justice. This is a strange way to approach party politics (maybe some people only budgeted six hours for the convention?) but it makes sense as hobbyism. To put it in Dungeons and Dragons terms "You can't go home now! Your dwarven cleric is crucial to our plans to confront Theronorax is his lair!" If that's too much insert a golf metaphor about someone bailing of your own choosing.
Nah, the reality was more like "hobbyism, hobbyism, hobbyism."
I wasn't there, and there are many media accounts you can read, but here's my general impression of a hobbyist fiasco. Once upon a time (ie in June) Attorney General Lori Swanson was well liked and seen as a rising star in state politics. She was on the short list for replacements for Al Franken after he resigned.
But at the convention the DFL delegates decided to endorse a 37 year old progressive activist (who full disclosure I've met and is a good guy in a lot of ways) for reasons that have never become clear. According to some I've talked to the "buzz on the floor" of the convention was something like, "Vote for Matt Pelikan (the insurgent) to send Lori a message. We'll endorse her on the second ballot." The problem of course is he won the endorsement on the second ballot! From a party standpoint this and what followed is something of an epic disaster, but from a hobbyist standpoint it's great: we rooted for the underdog and they won, hooray.
But from a party standpoint though this was a disaster. Swanson, for reasons that remain unclear, decided to run for governor after this rebuke and after her campaign was engulfed in scandals came in third in the August primary. Meanwhile Representative Keith Ellison (my member of congress and full disclosure I worked on his 2010 campaign) jumped in to run for AG himself, leaving the DFL endorsed candidate with 10.6% of the vote for AG in the recent primary election. Meanwhile the endorsed DFL candidate for governor Erin Murphy had trouble gaining traction with voters, who remember are pretty disconnected from liberal hobbyist types like me, resulting in Congressman Tim Walz, who lost the endorsement at the state convention, wining with 41.6% of the vote compared to Murphy and Swanson.
The hobbyism though seemed to reach a peak, at least for me. When Senator Tina Smith's name came up for endorsement. Tina is an amazing person (full disclosure I've worked for her) and when you think of a older white Boomer feminist Democrat in politics her face should pop up in your mind. She worked on a number of campaigns in the 90's, she managed Walter Mondale's crazy "Fritz Blitz" campaign in 2002 for the Senate seat that opened after then Senator Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash less that two weeks before the 2002 election, she then worked for Planned Parenthood. In government she became chief of staff to then Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak in 2006 and after that she was Governor Mark Dayton's chief of staff for four years and was then elected Lieutenant Governor in 2014.
From a party perspective she's about as good as they come. As a DFL delegate you know she's committed to your party and knows she must value what you value right? That's how I see it it, but not to some DFL state delegates, who gave her a big victory with 74.5% of the vote for endorsement, but one out of four decided to go with someone else. Many instead went with with Richard Painter, a former member of George W. Bush's administration and a contributor with the Federalist Society who was a talking head on CNN as well. The fact that such a person could still win a significant chunk of the vote of people supposedly deeply part of the party due to advancement through the difficult caucus process seems like a indictment of the whole process in and of itself. But from a hobbyist standpoint its a great way to spend the weekend. Fight for the little guy. Let's make things interesting. Etc etc.
I recite this story because Hersh spells out the consequences of political hobbyism in this piece so well.
....all the way down to the everyday armchair quarterback who professes that the path to political victory is through ideological purity. (In the face of a diverse and moderate country, the demand for ideological purity itself can be a symptom of hobbyism: If politics is a sport and the stakes are no higher, why not demand ideological purity if it feels good?)That seems like the epitaph of the 2018 DFL State Convention. Especially considering how the endorsed candidates largely would lose.
I guess the question here is what is my alternative, and to be honest my answer is I don't really have one. Caucuses may no longer work but if you care about politics remaining engaged makes sense. Likewise primaries may be awful, but that's the world we are living in.
I don't really have an answer here, other than to say that to improve our politics we need more that fights over process reform. We need to engage with politics, as messy as that is, in ways we've shied away from for a while.
Thursday, January 11, 2018
President Oprah Is A Terrible Idea
In case you've missed it while living on the Moon for the past week, or like me don't watch Hollywood awards shows, the hot new idea for how to fix American politics is the having Oprah Winfrey, yes the one and only, become president.
My general position on this as a liberal Democrat and someone who wants to see American politics "work" is this: please for the love of God no.
Don't get me wrong, if the Age Of Trump has taught us one thing it's that anyone who secures the nomination of a major political party has a chance of winning a general election, so yes Oprah could win.
Moreover while the Democratic Party seems to have a better grip on its presidential nomination than the Republicans who lost it to Trump due to a combination of media coverage, party dysfunction, "resentment", and bad luck, Oprah still could win the nomination as she shares with Trump many, but not all, of his key strengths as a candidate. She has sky high name recognition and approval, she could spend an almost unlimited amount of her own money. And as political scientist Matt Dickinson pointed out about Trump, the likely resulting media circus with overwhelming coverage of her while her opponents are ignored could be a major asset too.
So she could win the nomination and become the 46th president. But while some people are quite enthusiastic about the idea on the internet that doesn't change the fact that it's still terrible.
Jonathan Bernstein summed up why pretty bluntly on Monday morning:
In other words Oprah has many admirable qualities. For example, unlike Trump she is actually a self-made billionaire overseeing a vast business empire. But that's not really that helpful when it comes to running the government. In her business role Oprah deals with staff members she can hire and fire, celebrities eager to court her favor, or vendors and corporations who'd like to strike deals with her. But she can't work that way as president because that's neither the people she'll be dealing with nor how presidents do business.
Cabinet members can't just be hired, they have to be confirmed by the Senate. Likewise bureaucrats are protected by civil service laws and their ability to thwart presidents is the stuff of Washington legend. Federal judges have lifetime appointments and can have been on the bench for decades before a new administration arrives in Washington. And members of Congress are ultimately only beholden to their own constituents and caucuses; they can tell the president to go pound sand if they want to (and frequently have throughout history). I doubt Oprah's TV show or magazines were run that way.
Good presidents are usually able to compensate for this by having lengthy experience of working in, well, politics. That is being members legislative bodies. Or finding the levers of power and influence in bureaucracies. Or learning how to turn a political opponent into an ally or when an ally ultimately is more trouble than they're worth. Oprah has a lot of experience in life but as far as I can tell little in this vein.
Likewise there's not a whole lot of evidence that Oprah knows much, or is interested much, in the finer aspects of public policy. I don't mean this as a putdown, few people do know this stuff, but it's really important for a president to know it to be able to do things like bargain or oversee a White House able to craft politically and practically viable ways for tackling problems.
I mean honestly, what does Oprah (or anyone) really know about foreign trade, tax policy, climate change projections, the power grid, solar energy, driver-less cars, fracking, early childhood education, decommissioning nuclear plants, monetary policy, agriculture, changes in health care cost inflation, changes in workforce participation, mass transit, the 2020 Census, charter schools, the Social Security Trust Fund, student loan debt, waste water treatment, disaster management, an aging federal workforce, court reform, cloud computing, flood prevention, treaties with Native American Tribes, potential earthquakes, deforestation, or any other number of domestic non-military policy issues?
Now Oprah is by all accounts an intelligent and driven woman so she can (hopefully) learn this stuff especially with the help of good advisors, but one thing that should be clear to everyone over the last 12 months is the presidency is "no place for amateurs" as a smart people have long said, and on the job training has some very real downsides. And that's not mentioning her unfortunate tendencies to promote quacks, at least when it comes to health care "policy" as it were, which is something the president has to deal with as well.
Moreover there's not a whole lot of evidence she's that interested in foreign affairs or how to be a good commander in chief, which is fine for a celebrity. Most people and many politicians don't know about these things, but this is also huge parts of the job as well. It's one thing to interview the nicest man on the planet his Holiness the Dahlia Lama, it's another to deal with the Syrian Civil War.
All of which isn't to say I don't understand Oprah's appeal. It would be nice to have a president who isn't a horrible person like Donald Trump and does something to empathize charity, honesty, and empathy in public life. These are good things. But I'm fairly confident that candidate or president Oprah wouldn't be a very good vessel for transmitting these ideal across American society, because she wouldn't be "Oprah" anymore, she'd be another politician. In other words, Oprah right now is a popular celebrity, but once upon a time the Hillary Clinton who had left politics had approval ratings of 65% or so. Things changed once she ran for president, and the those same powerful forces could change Oprah's standing relatively quickly as well.
It's important to note that I could be wrong, I was dead wrong about Trump winning the Republican nomination after all, and Oprah might be able to rise above these challenges and be a good president. But it's a crazy gamble to take in my opinion. A politician who's spent a career seeking the White House has strong institutional incentives to do the things necessary to win the nomination and lead a functional administration (at least in theory) to craft a politics that "works" at least to some degree. With Oprah (or Ric Flair, or Ross Perot, or Waka Flocka Flame) there's no institutional reason to believe this at all, and if Democrats are going to just trust "their gut" or whatever they might as well just select nominees by lot.
The good news is the Democratic Party doesn't suffer from the same level of dysfunction as the GOP. Their party's groups and actors care a lot about creating viable policy and I suspect (hope?) are as skeptical of choosing a celebrity and political amateur as me. Likewise while the foolish progressive push to reduce the number of superdelegates is going forward there still will be some (and hopefully the DNC will just junk the idea of reducing them due to the threat of Oprah) to help coordinate party support and act as an important backstop if necessary. Likewise the Democrats have state-wide proportional representation rules in their delegate allocation which means Oprah would have to win a majority of votes to win a majority of delegates. Not the plurality of votes that gave Trump a majority of delegates due to GOP winner take all and winner take most rules. Add in the fact that it seems highly unlikely Oprah would want to subject herself to the awfulness that is running for president in order get the most demanding and stressful job in the world, and I'm pretty confident we'll be okay.
But sadly I'm a lot less confident than I would have been a week ago that the Democrats would emulate the Republicans and go with a inexperience celebrity candidate in 2020 rather than Harris, Booker, Warren, O'Malley, Kaine, Gillibrand, Patrick or any number of other qualified nominees who'd make fine presidents in my eyes. Especially due to the enthusiasm many progressive figures seem to have towards the whole idea.
And I think this says something damning about where the progressive movement is. The political media has strong economic and normative incentives to support crazy celebrity candidacies for the presidency. Trump may be hated by most journalists but he's been a boon for newspapers. But it's quite unsettling to see many people who purport to care about things like health care reform or climate change policy get interested in someone who'd be poorly equipped to persue change in these areas if they did get in the White House for reasons as yet unexplained.
Thomas Chatterton Williams put it recently in an aptly titled column, "Oprah, Don't Do It":
My general position on this as a liberal Democrat and someone who wants to see American politics "work" is this: please for the love of God no.
Don't get me wrong, if the Age Of Trump has taught us one thing it's that anyone who secures the nomination of a major political party has a chance of winning a general election, so yes Oprah could win.
Moreover while the Democratic Party seems to have a better grip on its presidential nomination than the Republicans who lost it to Trump due to a combination of media coverage, party dysfunction, "resentment", and bad luck, Oprah still could win the nomination as she shares with Trump many, but not all, of his key strengths as a candidate. She has sky high name recognition and approval, she could spend an almost unlimited amount of her own money. And as political scientist Matt Dickinson pointed out about Trump, the likely resulting media circus with overwhelming coverage of her while her opponents are ignored could be a major asset too.
So she could win the nomination and become the 46th president. But while some people are quite enthusiastic about the idea on the internet that doesn't change the fact that it's still terrible.
Jonathan Bernstein summed up why pretty bluntly on Monday morning:
The truth is the same as always: The presidency is a real job, and a damn hard one. The easily visible parts -- the speeches and the interviews, even the moral leadership -- are a relatively small part of the responsibilities of the office. There's simply no substitute for a good grasp of public policy and government affairs.I think that's exactly right.
There's also no substitute for political skills, which require training and experience, and are simply different from business skills, or cultural mastery, or the ability to perform.
In other words Oprah has many admirable qualities. For example, unlike Trump she is actually a self-made billionaire overseeing a vast business empire. But that's not really that helpful when it comes to running the government. In her business role Oprah deals with staff members she can hire and fire, celebrities eager to court her favor, or vendors and corporations who'd like to strike deals with her. But she can't work that way as president because that's neither the people she'll be dealing with nor how presidents do business.
Cabinet members can't just be hired, they have to be confirmed by the Senate. Likewise bureaucrats are protected by civil service laws and their ability to thwart presidents is the stuff of Washington legend. Federal judges have lifetime appointments and can have been on the bench for decades before a new administration arrives in Washington. And members of Congress are ultimately only beholden to their own constituents and caucuses; they can tell the president to go pound sand if they want to (and frequently have throughout history). I doubt Oprah's TV show or magazines were run that way.
Good presidents are usually able to compensate for this by having lengthy experience of working in, well, politics. That is being members legislative bodies. Or finding the levers of power and influence in bureaucracies. Or learning how to turn a political opponent into an ally or when an ally ultimately is more trouble than they're worth. Oprah has a lot of experience in life but as far as I can tell little in this vein.
Likewise there's not a whole lot of evidence that Oprah knows much, or is interested much, in the finer aspects of public policy. I don't mean this as a putdown, few people do know this stuff, but it's really important for a president to know it to be able to do things like bargain or oversee a White House able to craft politically and practically viable ways for tackling problems.
I mean honestly, what does Oprah (or anyone) really know about foreign trade, tax policy, climate change projections, the power grid, solar energy, driver-less cars, fracking, early childhood education, decommissioning nuclear plants, monetary policy, agriculture, changes in health care cost inflation, changes in workforce participation, mass transit, the 2020 Census, charter schools, the Social Security Trust Fund, student loan debt, waste water treatment, disaster management, an aging federal workforce, court reform, cloud computing, flood prevention, treaties with Native American Tribes, potential earthquakes, deforestation, or any other number of domestic non-military policy issues?
Now Oprah is by all accounts an intelligent and driven woman so she can (hopefully) learn this stuff especially with the help of good advisors, but one thing that should be clear to everyone over the last 12 months is the presidency is "no place for amateurs" as a smart people have long said, and on the job training has some very real downsides. And that's not mentioning her unfortunate tendencies to promote quacks, at least when it comes to health care "policy" as it were, which is something the president has to deal with as well.
Moreover there's not a whole lot of evidence she's that interested in foreign affairs or how to be a good commander in chief, which is fine for a celebrity. Most people and many politicians don't know about these things, but this is also huge parts of the job as well. It's one thing to interview the nicest man on the planet his Holiness the Dahlia Lama, it's another to deal with the Syrian Civil War.
All of which isn't to say I don't understand Oprah's appeal. It would be nice to have a president who isn't a horrible person like Donald Trump and does something to empathize charity, honesty, and empathy in public life. These are good things. But I'm fairly confident that candidate or president Oprah wouldn't be a very good vessel for transmitting these ideal across American society, because she wouldn't be "Oprah" anymore, she'd be another politician. In other words, Oprah right now is a popular celebrity, but once upon a time the Hillary Clinton who had left politics had approval ratings of 65% or so. Things changed once she ran for president, and the those same powerful forces could change Oprah's standing relatively quickly as well.
It's important to note that I could be wrong, I was dead wrong about Trump winning the Republican nomination after all, and Oprah might be able to rise above these challenges and be a good president. But it's a crazy gamble to take in my opinion. A politician who's spent a career seeking the White House has strong institutional incentives to do the things necessary to win the nomination and lead a functional administration (at least in theory) to craft a politics that "works" at least to some degree. With Oprah (or Ric Flair, or Ross Perot, or Waka Flocka Flame) there's no institutional reason to believe this at all, and if Democrats are going to just trust "their gut" or whatever they might as well just select nominees by lot.
The good news is the Democratic Party doesn't suffer from the same level of dysfunction as the GOP. Their party's groups and actors care a lot about creating viable policy and I suspect (hope?) are as skeptical of choosing a celebrity and political amateur as me. Likewise while the foolish progressive push to reduce the number of superdelegates is going forward there still will be some (and hopefully the DNC will just junk the idea of reducing them due to the threat of Oprah) to help coordinate party support and act as an important backstop if necessary. Likewise the Democrats have state-wide proportional representation rules in their delegate allocation which means Oprah would have to win a majority of votes to win a majority of delegates. Not the plurality of votes that gave Trump a majority of delegates due to GOP winner take all and winner take most rules. Add in the fact that it seems highly unlikely Oprah would want to subject herself to the awfulness that is running for president in order get the most demanding and stressful job in the world, and I'm pretty confident we'll be okay.
But sadly I'm a lot less confident than I would have been a week ago that the Democrats would emulate the Republicans and go with a inexperience celebrity candidate in 2020 rather than Harris, Booker, Warren, O'Malley, Kaine, Gillibrand, Patrick or any number of other qualified nominees who'd make fine presidents in my eyes. Especially due to the enthusiasm many progressive figures seem to have towards the whole idea.
And I think this says something damning about where the progressive movement is. The political media has strong economic and normative incentives to support crazy celebrity candidacies for the presidency. Trump may be hated by most journalists but he's been a boon for newspapers. But it's quite unsettling to see many people who purport to care about things like health care reform or climate change policy get interested in someone who'd be poorly equipped to persue change in these areas if they did get in the White House for reasons as yet unexplained.
Thomas Chatterton Williams put it recently in an aptly titled column, "Oprah, Don't Do It":
In a way, the conversation of the left (and the anti-Trump right) around Ms. Winfrey is more troubling than the emotional immaturity and anti-intellectualism pulsing out of the red states that elected Mr. Trump. Those voters have long defined themselves in opposition to the intellectual seriousness Democrats purport to personify...I get that people, especially progressives, are angry. I get that people distrust institutions. I get that people hate politics these days. But while Oprah is the answer to many things, she is not the answer to your political prayers.
The idea that the presidency should become just another prize for celebrities--even the ones with whose politics we imagine we agree--is dangerous in the extreme. If the first year of the Trump administration has made anything clear, it's that experience, knowledge, education, and political wisdom matter tremendously...The presidency is not a reality show, or for that matter, a talk show.
Friday, January 5, 2018
Ambition In Politics Is Good: Kirsten Gillibrand Edition
While most of the political media is currently going bananas over Michael Wolff's new tell all book about Trump's first year, a columnist named Ciro Scotti at The Daily Beast decided to mix things up and write about possible 2020 Democratic presidential nominee Kirsten Gillibrand instead.
This is a good idea, at least on paper. After all the Democratic Party seems to still control it's presidential nomination (well at least in theory) and so the crucial "invisible primary" stage of the process has been underway about 5 am November 9th, 2016. And a lot has already happened! Obscure but important changes have happened to the delegate selection process with some states switching to primaries and California moving the date of theirs up. Likewise a number of behind the scenes political battles have already been fought. With the "progressive/Sanders" (or whatever you want to call them) wing winning in their foolish quest to reduce the number of "superdelegates" while losing the larger war to the "establishment/regular/not-Bernie" (or whatever you want to call it) wing when it comes to more radical changes to the nominations process and control of the formal Democratic National Committee itself.
Likewise some candidates, like Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, or Martin O'Malley are obviously doing the sorts of thing you do when you are signaling to the "expanded party network" that you are running while not formally declaring.
So it makes sense to talk about Kirsten Gillibrand and 2020. She's in the spotlight more and more after the Franken Fiasco and she hasn't given a Shermanesque refusal, so as far as I can tell she's in the hunt for 2020, which of course doesn't mean she'll be running in 2020.
Unfortunately instead of saying something interesting about Gillibrand, we got, well this sort of dreck:
I apologize for the sarcasm, but the claim that "she's not qualified because she wants the job" is pretty frustrating after years of seeing it over and over again with Hillary Clinton's run for the White House in particular or the ongoing push to silence her since.
Moreover it gets how our political system works exactly backwards. Our political system is one that is based on the idea that politicians are going to be "opportunistic" in that they'll be driven by ambition, and so we might as well harness that ambition to serve both as a check on other politicians, as well as a way to drive politics forward. As Jonathan Bernstein put it back in the day:
Don't get me wrong. There are political systems where ambition can be a real problem (which is why K'mpec makes Picard Arbiter of Succession!) and there is a very real human cost to our ambition focused political system, but then again it's the system we're kind of stuck with. Gillibrand's "opportunistic" ambition will serve her well if she makes it to Iowa, and the ambitious pursuit of being a successful president would serve her well in the White House as well.
This is a good idea, at least on paper. After all the Democratic Party seems to still control it's presidential nomination (well at least in theory) and so the crucial "invisible primary" stage of the process has been underway about 5 am November 9th, 2016. And a lot has already happened! Obscure but important changes have happened to the delegate selection process with some states switching to primaries and California moving the date of theirs up. Likewise a number of behind the scenes political battles have already been fought. With the "progressive/Sanders" (or whatever you want to call them) wing winning in their foolish quest to reduce the number of "superdelegates" while losing the larger war to the "establishment/regular/not-Bernie" (or whatever you want to call it) wing when it comes to more radical changes to the nominations process and control of the formal Democratic National Committee itself.
Likewise some candidates, like Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, or Martin O'Malley are obviously doing the sorts of thing you do when you are signaling to the "expanded party network" that you are running while not formally declaring.
So it makes sense to talk about Kirsten Gillibrand and 2020. She's in the spotlight more and more after the Franken Fiasco and she hasn't given a Shermanesque refusal, so as far as I can tell she's in the hunt for 2020, which of course doesn't mean she'll be running in 2020.
Unfortunately instead of saying something interesting about Gillibrand, we got, well this sort of dreck:
The larger question about Gillibrand, though, is whether she is too transparently opportunistic to be a viable candidate after the rejection of another New York politician criticized for basing her positions on supposedly canny calculations rather than on from-the-gut convictions.This is of course the sort of sexist double standard that often gets applied to women in politics. The state senator with the funny name using his chance to address the Democratic Convention back in 2004 as a way to introduce himself to the nation and showcase himself to his party as a man to watch in case John Kerry couldn't pull it off wasn't being "transparently opportunistic." No, no, no. Likewise FDR wasn't being "transparently opportunistic" when he used his nomination speech for Al Smith at the 1924 Democratic Convention to re-enter political life and set himself up for replacing Smith as governor four years later. And Abraham Lincoln wasn't being "opportunistic" when he auditioned for the position of "guy other than Seward" to a bunch of anti-Seward party bosses by giving his famous speech at Cooper Union. Likewise his whirlwind speaking tour of New England afterwards was not part of "opportunistic" strategy of winning delegates for the upcoming convention in Chicago.
...
For Gillibrand, nearly every move seems to be a self-serving playing of the angles. While it’s not surprising to see a politician behave this way, Gillibrand seems to be an especially egregious practitioner of the finger-in-the-wind politics that so many voters can no longer abide.
I apologize for the sarcasm, but the claim that "she's not qualified because she wants the job" is pretty frustrating after years of seeing it over and over again with Hillary Clinton's run for the White House in particular or the ongoing push to silence her since.
Moreover it gets how our political system works exactly backwards. Our political system is one that is based on the idea that politicians are going to be "opportunistic" in that they'll be driven by ambition, and so we might as well harness that ambition to serve both as a check on other politicians, as well as a way to drive politics forward. As Jonathan Bernstein put it back in the day:
You remember what Madison says in Federalist 51: “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” The constitution, with its separated institutions sharing powers and federalism, depends on the self-interest of politicians to work. If our politicians were altruists, we’d really be in trouble; they’d be eaten alive, either by the remaining ambitious ones, or by the various and many self-interested folks outside of government. So we expect, and probably need, politicians who have a more-than-normally-healthy amount of drive, self-interest, and ambition.(See also here and here).
Don't get me wrong. There are political systems where ambition can be a real problem (which is why K'mpec makes Picard Arbiter of Succession!) and there is a very real human cost to our ambition focused political system, but then again it's the system we're kind of stuck with. Gillibrand's "opportunistic" ambition will serve her well if she makes it to Iowa, and the ambitious pursuit of being a successful president would serve her well in the White House as well.
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