I can’t see any reason why having a non voluntary and non-ballot determination that forces 16 candidates to drop out of the race would go wrong for the Democrats. Any time the party is perceived as doing the whole “The Party Decides” thing, that’s usually met with garlands and cheers from the rank and file. ;)
Timex
4259
This didn’t used to be the case, where you had a million different people running for president. What changed?
I think the main driver is that most of them think this is the best chance to win the general election in their generation. Perhaps even a bigger opportunity than 2008.
Historically (as in decades ago) the party would have played a bigger role in winnowing the field, but the evolution to primaries and letting the voters decide is probably now fully complete. The party caught some serious flack for the idea that they put their thumb on the scales for Clinton in 2016, and they are unlikely to do anything like that now.
Thanks for the insight! I do not follow politics that closely.
This, from Atrios, is exactly right IMO:
Details vary, but basically this debate is between those who think that the only way to achieve better things is to aim for one more cookie crumb, and those who think it is better to aim for more. Those who support the former push it as smart strategy even though one more cookie crumb is really want they want.
Think what you want about Obama generally, but it is hard to defend his “if I come to Republicans with a reasonable compromise they will be so impressed by how reasonable it is that they will have to support it.” This worked precisely zero times and I am not sure why anyone would think this group of Republicans (not your father’s Republican party! Joe Biden keeps saying) is more receptive to this than the early groups.
And the voters who matter - swing and irregular ones - don’t reward “reasonableness” no matter how often they tell pollsters it’s something they value.
Not only are you not going to win support from Republicans in Congress for your offers of compromise, you aren’t going to win any net positive support for those offers from actual voters. Who is the constituency for let’s try to cooperate with Republicans among the electorate that is not already inclined to vote for the Democrat anyway?
Part of it results from the population’s decreasing reliance on network television.
The same mechanism that allows some obscure video to go viral gives hope to obscure candidates that they might catch attention. And, in fact, I think that there have been obscure candidates in the past that were simply ignored by network television to the point that most of us did not know they existed.
So much that has changed within my lifetime flows from the fact that those 3-4 networks no longer get to act as gatekeepers.
I think PACs, book deals and social media.
It used to be that someone like Ryan, Williamson or Yang would not have declared. It was too expensive to run and if you didn’t have some major Party support you would not get any traction in the press whatsoever.
But now it’s relatively cheap to run… or at least declare. It only starts to get expensive later on when you need to field people to get your name on the ballot in the various states.
The publicity you get from the action will help you sell books or other crap if that is your thing (Trump and Williamson), so for folks like that there is no real downside to them if they run. Only to us.
Along with that, if you are someone hawking a particular idea (like Inslee), you can get nationwide funding through PACs that you would not have had access to a decade or so back. Someone posted a tweet upthread that implied that several of the no-hope Dem candidates are just paid shills for the healthcare industry; running simply to derail the “Medicare for All” train. I thought that was a silly conspiracy theory until I watched the first debate later that day… I can easily believe that PACs funded by the insurance industry are behind a couple of those guys after seeing their performance.
Finally, you can fairly easily bypass the traditional “gate-keepers” in the media by using the Internet and especially social media to get your name out there.
Menzo
4265
Yeah I think this is the primary reason. 20 years ago it was the major networks that decided who got airtime. They had 14-ish minutes to fill with actual news, and if you weren’t included, nobody knew about you.
The rise of 24-hour news started the change, since they had so much more airtime to fill, but then the internet and social media broke everything. Now everyone gets the same opportunity, which in some ways is good, but I do sometimes miss the days when someone smart was acting as a gatekeeper.
Scott, I think that this is true as far as it goes.
“Reasonable” will not actually work, because the brains behind our opposition has an actual goal of making the federal government not work.
And “reasonable” as a public stance/image will not work very well, because it begs the question of “reasonable about what?” I want to be reasonable about gun control, but not climate or voter suppression or anti-trust or healthcare. My friend would pick out abortion as a topic to be reasonable about, while taking the hardest of lines on guns.
However, there is a whole other aspect to “reasonable.” There is the claim that certain kinds of healthcare proposals would disrupt the American economy, that like it or not a quarter of our economy depends on existing healthcare arrangements, and that the very things required to bring down the absurd level of healthcare in this country would endanger the livelihood of a huge number of people. Many of whom are potential or actual Democratic voters.
Note, I do not say that this is necessarily accurate, but consider this kind of claim. IF true, then “reasonable” involves not compromise with Republicans, but the political foresight to realize that while a more extreme idea might seem to be ideal, it will bring new and larger problems. For real people. And for the lifespan of the law. And for avoiding political consequences two or four years later.
FDR and LBJ did not do what the other party thought was reasonable, so much as they looked at reform in terms of how it was likely to play out politically, in the longer run.
This is the argument offered by pundits and the media, but the reality is that whoever wins the election, they will under no circumstances end up signing any bill that remotely resembles their ‘plan’. Not even close. The candidates are simply signaling where they are on the ideological spectrum, to differentiate themselves from the others, and all the arguing about whether their plans will work or not is wasted breath. It’s just different versions of I think everyone should be able to get good affordable health care, with each version attempting to outflank the others on the right or the left.
I agree 100% with every word you wrote.
But I also think that for many people, “reasonable” as a signal has at least as much to do with “my actual plan in office will be thought out in pragmatic terms” as “I’ll play nice with Republicans.” My sense is that the media does not frame it that way, because their core interest is always in “How big of a food fight are we going to get to see?”
As I posted earlier the number of candidates running this cycle while quite large isn’t that much bigger than the 16 person field of 1968 or the dozen plus that has been typical for the out of power party this century.
By admittedly early public polling data: Joe Biden.
Again, he’s the Democrat whose numbers go up when Trump’s go down, after Trump has said or done something horrifically racist. The numbers we’ve seen so far show that there are Trump voters who are disappointed in Trump…but so far the only Democrat they’re willing to vote for is Biden.
Don’t shoot the messenger, but…the that’s what is showing up in these early poll numbers.
I was but a wee tot of 9, but I can remember a Newsweek cover (we subscribed) from very early in 1976 with an absolute clown car of Democratic candidates on the cover. Carter. Udall. Scoop Jackson. Church. Shriver. Brown. Bayh.
Obviously not like things are right now, but still.
After Goldwater - an extremist by any measure - lost the '64 election, Republicans reacted by insisting on fielding moderates who could appeal to independents and swing voters.
- Nixon
- (Ford)
- Reagan
- (Bush 1)
- Bush 2
- trump
(I recall Bush 1 being pretty decent)
1968 remains one of the weirdest, outlierish elections our country has ever had.
-Domestic turmoil
-unpopular war
-A major political party completely overhauling a major wing of support
-A possible nominee and potential (likely?) President being assassinated in the middle of the primaries
-A third party candidate dramatically altering the vote in an entire region of the country
I disagree with your interpretation of the history.
You begin your story with Goldwater, but it goes further back than that.
The nation experienced unheard of prosperity and upward mobility post WWII, with the New Deal in place. And the New Deal was anathema to the group that ran the Republican Party, who held to the principle that the federal government had no responsibility for economic well-being of the masses. It was bad for the people to rely on government (and would detract from the power and wealth at the top).
The Republican Party was split between those who held that they hold to their principles and oppose the New Deal directly, and those that counseled moderation/step-by-step backtracking or at least limiting the scope of the reforms. Eisehnower and Ford epitomized the latter, Taft and Goldwater the former. But the actual winners within the party turned out to be the devious plotters epitomized by Nixon: Don’t run on your opposition to popular economic programs, run as champions of groups disadvantaged by social/cultural changes. Not that civil rights is wrong, but bussing your children is an outrage. Not that women aren’t deserving, but how will it be for children whose mothers work. And what is this stuff about not praying in school?
This wing of the GOP built a coalition of various groups of the disgruntled, and they rarely did anything for them, just expressed rhetorical support for them, which inevitably caused Dems to react angrily. Which reminded the disgruntled that the Democrats did not represent their views. In fact, GOP presidents appointed several of the key SCOTUS justices to assure that reform would continue unabated, largely so that they could run against it. The angrier and more frustrated the disgruntled, the better the electoral results.
End result: a vast distraction from the the goals of the core GOP to upend the principles and the specifics of the New Deal and Great Society.
So… if you want to draw a lesson from the GOP, it’s not the triumph of moderation. (Ford was 0-1, George H. Bush was 1-1) but rather the triumph of Macavellian politics.
Sorry I was being sarcastic but didn’t post the obligatory /s. I agree with everything you wrote here.
Sorry, I totally missed it.
Don’t be! My bad, I should have realized 2016 killed both irony and sarcasm.
