Culture

Is It “Winnowing” Time for the 2020 Democratic Presidential-Primary Field?


As of Wednesday, the deadline set by the Democratic National Committee to qualify for the third primary debate, to be held in mid-September, only ten candidates had made the cut: Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker, Beto O’Rourke, Amy Klobuchar, Julián Castro, and Andrew Yang. To make it, the candidates had to have received campaign contributions from a hundred and thirty thousand people and to have gained at least two-per-cent support in four national polls or polls of states with early primaries or caucuses. It wasn’t the highest of hurdles, when you consider the job that these people are going for, but it kept more than half the field out. Even before the third debate lineup was set, some of the race’s peripheral candidates—Jay Inslee, Seth Moulton, John Hickenlooper—had dropped out. Inslee, the governor of Washington, might in some ways consider his campaign, which centered on a forceful call for action on climate change, to have been a success. Moulton, a Massachusetts congressman trying to carve out a political identity as a hard-nosed veteran of America’s post-9/11 wars, will have a harder time saying what his run accomplished. His exit, as the Washington Post’s Alexandra Petri pointed out, called to mind G. K. Chesterton’s line about journalism consisting of saying “Lord Jones Dead” to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.

Is this the moment when a historically large Democratic field finally begins to contract? Since last winter, at political events around the country, I have encountered people lamenting how many choices they have. How was anyone supposed to learn about all of these people? Who has the time? And these were the people turning out at rallies and town halls months before any actual voting would take place. On Wednesday, having failed to qualify for the third debate, Kirsten Gillibrand, a senator from New York, announced that she, too, was dropping out. “I think it’s important to know how you can best serve,” she said. That seems to be the takeaway that Hickenlooper, Colorado’s former governor, left the race with as well. He is now running for the Democratic Senate nomination in Colorado, where the incumbent Republican, Cory Gardner, is seen as vulnerable.

Ten candidates means that ABC will be able to keep the debate to a single night. And it means that the candidates with the highest poll numbers, biggest campaigns, and most money in the bank will be onstage together during prime-time television for the first time. That’s a useful thing, up to a point. Voters have yet to see Warren and Biden side by side, for instance. The very real differences between the leftward turns advocated by Warren and Sanders and the more traditional approach pushed by Biden have, at times, been obscured by the sheer number of candidates running and the glut of plans and policy proposals on offer—Medicare for All, Medicare for America, Medicare for All Who Want It, Medicare X. In practice, though, ten candidates onstage still means ten candidates onstage. The September debate is likely to feature the same ping-pong arguments and jostling for air time that the first two rounds did. It’ll just be one night of it instead of two.

The Iowa caucuses are six months away. With the exception of Warren’s rise in the polls over the summer, the race for the Democratic nomination has been a pretty steady affair thus far. Biden and Sanders each lay claim to a large but not overwhelming chunk of support, as they did when they entered the race. Harris is lurking, and Buttigieg has performed far better than any mayor from a city of a hundred and thirty thousand people would be expected to. Three of the five other candidates who will be on the stage in September—Booker, Klobuchar, and Castro—are Party insiders with an interest in the details of policy. Booker, a senator from New Jersey, talks about the importance of returning African-American voter turnout to Obama-era levels. Klobuchar, a senator from Minnesota, talks about winning back the Midwest. And, although Castro, a former Cabinet secretary, has resisted being labelled merely as the “Latino candidate,” he has a powerful story to tell about his family’s route to America at a time when the President is trying to make immigrants scapegoats for the nation’s ills. O’Rourke, meanwhile, is still trying to find a way to turn the national attention he received as a candidate for Senate in Texas, last year, into widespread support for his Presidential campaign. And Yang, a businessman turned universal-basic-income advocate, seems to be riding on a small but committed group of voters attracted to his outsider style.

It’s still possible that the debate stage will be forced to accept more than ten candidates—the qualifications for the fourth debate, in October, will be the same as those for the September event, meaning that the nine candidates left out this time have a few more weeks to make up some ground. Until now, the size of the field and the variety of candidates on offer has been advertised by the Democratic Party as a strength. “The more, the merrier,” Harris said, in April, when Biden entered the race. Candidates, and their supporters, won’t like feeling forced out of the race before the voting begins, or being treated as second-tier because of arbitrary debate cutoffs imposed by the Party. The idea of a winnowing—a classic media term for this stage in a contest—is sure to inspire resentment. Polls and fund-raising are rough tools, but they’re the best we have for measuring constituencies between elections. At some point, the Democratic race will need to move on from an advertisement of the Party’s big tent to a battle over who will lead it. We may have finally reached that point.





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