Kamala Harris folded her tent, and on that patch of ground, many flimsy theories bloomed.
Disappointed Democrats groused that you obviously had to be rich to compete in the 2020 race — because she was gone, while two billionaires remained — and pointed to the potentially all-white, un-diverse lineup at the party’s next debate as proof that the qualifying criteria put too much of a premium on fund-raising.
But Harris had made the cut for that debate. And she entered the presidential sweepstakes with a higher net worth ($6 million, according to Forbes) than Bernie Sanders ($2.5 million), Amy Klobuchar ($2 million) or Pete Buttigieg ($100,000), who are still in the hunt and are among the six contenders slated to be sparring onstage on Dec. 19. What’s more, Sanders and another of the six, Elizabeth Warren, have raised buckets of money without courting plutocrats.
Many Democrats blamed the media for Harris’s demise. They have a point, inasmuch as some news organizations never had the kind of romance with her that they did with Buttigieg and Beto O’Rourke, two white men. I noted as much in a column last May, pointing to O’Rourke’s placement on the cover of Vanity Fair and Buttigieg’s on the cover of Time.
But the media fell quickly out of love with O’Rourke and is picking Buttigieg apart for his lack of support among African-Americans and his past employment as a McKinsey consultant. And Harris was hardly ignored: Her initial campaign rally in Oakland, Calif., in January was covered live, in its entirety, on MSNBC and CNN. That same month, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC told her, in a face-to-face interview, “I think there is a good chance that you are going to win the nomination.” And after the Democratic debate in June, when Harris stirringly confronted Joe Biden about his past opposition to federally mandated busing to integrate schools, she received a bonanza of media attention and rapturous reviews.
I get that this Democratic primary isn’t playing out as anyone predicted or in remote accordance with the party’s image of itself and with its priorities. None of the top four candidates — Biden, Warren, Buttigieg and Sanders — is a person of color, three of them are 70 or older, and the billionaires, Tom Steyer and Mike Bloomberg, are dipping into their personal fortunes in their efforts to gain ground. For a party that celebrates diversity, pitches itself to underdogs and prides itself on being future-minded and youth-oriented, that’s a freaky, baffling turn of events.
But some of the conclusions being drawn and complaints being raised don’t fully hold water.
Take the fears about the nomination being purchased. Without question, running for office is too expensive. That dynamic can definitely favor candidates with lucrative connections. And candidates are forced — unless they’re Steyer or Bloomberg — to devote ludicrous and possibly corrupting sums of time to political panhandling.
But at least at present, neither Steyer nor Bloomberg is exactly barreling toward victory. And while Cory Booker drew a connection between Harris’s departure and a process warped by wealth, the link is tenuous. Booker, whose campaign presses on despite his failure to qualify for the December debate, said of Harris’s withdrawal, “Voters did not determine her destiny.”
Actually, they kind of did. They’re the ones who are or aren’t excited enough about a candidacy to donate money and keep it alive. They’re the ones responding to pollsters and, by flagging their preferences, determining which candidates take on the air of plausibility that often generates the next round of donations. I keep seeing, on Twitter and Facebook, laments about Harris’s fate from Democrats who chose to support candidates other than her. Well, she couldn’t succeed on generalized, ambient good will.
I also keep seeing and hearing statements along the lines that the party should be ashamed of the way things are turning out, that the party failed. While an official party entity, the Democratic National Committee, indeed set criteria for the debates — which had to have some criteria — there’s otherwise no committee of elders or secret cabal that decrees which candidates prosper and which don’t.
Besides which, as Eric Levitz observed in New York magazine, Harris “boasted the enthusiastic support of Hillary’s donor network and supporters, warm relations with Obamaworld, and the sympathies of a broad range of Democratic lawmakers in the nation’s largest state and beyond.” Levitz added that when Harris ended her campaign on Tuesday, she trailed only Biden in the website FiveThirtyEight’s tally of important endorsements; that Booker has more such endorsements than Sanders, who is far ahead of him; and that Klobuchar has more than Buttigieg, whom she distantly trails. So if the party is fellow Democratic politicians of note, it’s hardly driving the direction of this contest.
We in the media aren’t driving it, either, though there’s constant carping along those lines. We’ve always been fundamentally responsive, bestowing coverage based on established interest, and we’re more responsive than ever in this digitized age of sophisticated, real-time measures of precisely what our audience does and doesn’t turn to. We give you a tide of Warren in part because you thrilled to the earlier trickle. We serve you oodles of Buttigieg because we’ve noticed your appetite for it.
Another questionable assessment of this primary is that “electability” is crowding out candidates who don’t fit some safe profile. Yes, many Democratic voters tell pollsters that choosing the candidate most likely to beat Trump is their top concern. Yes, there’s evidence that such an impulse is leading some voters away from candidates of color.
But if “electability” emphatically ruled the day, wouldn’t at least one of the three current or former governors already gone from the race — John Hickenlooper of Colorado, Steve Bullock of Montana and Jay Inslee of Washington — have fared better? Governors are frequently touted as the best candidates, and they account for four of the past seven presidents.
If “electability” ruled the day, would Biden’s stiffest competition be coming from a 78-year-old democratic socialist who recently had a heart attack (and just placed first in a California poll), a 70-year-old former Ivy League law professor whom Trump delights in calling “Pocahontas” and the 37-year-old gay mayor of a small Indiana city?
There’s a lot to this primary that’s more complicated than meets the eye, a lot that explodes assumptions. According to the polling so far, voters aren’t drawn to candidates whose demographic profiles overlap with theirs. Biden’s support from black Democrats in a national Quinnipiac poll late last month was more than eight times what Harris’s or Booker’s was. He and Sanders do exponentially better among Latinos than Julián Castro does. Sanders, not Buttigieg, has the advantage among Democrats under the age of 35. And many gay Democrats have rejected Buttigieg as inadequately progressive and even insufficiently gay.
So if identity group, electability, media bias and personal wealth aren’t the secrets to success, what are? I think we’re learning yet again that there’s no tidy, trusty formula. But broad name recognition among engaged voters — which Biden, Sanders and, to a lesser extent, Warren all had at the outset — is an enormous asset. So are a sales pitch and brand, like Buttigieg’s, that are distinct from any other contender’s.
Finally, there’s political acumen. There’s raw talent. The last Democratic president, Barack Obama, had plenty of it. The next Democratic president will, too.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
I invite you to sign up for my free weekly email newsletter. You can follow me on Twitter (@FrankBruni).
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Home » Analysis & Comment » Opinion | Democrats’ Baffling 2020 Mess
Opinion | Democrats’ Baffling 2020 Mess
Kamala Harris folded her tent, and on that patch of ground, many flimsy theories bloomed.
Disappointed Democrats groused that you obviously had to be rich to compete in the 2020 race — because she was gone, while two billionaires remained — and pointed to the potentially all-white, un-diverse lineup at the party’s next debate as proof that the qualifying criteria put too much of a premium on fund-raising.
But Harris had made the cut for that debate. And she entered the presidential sweepstakes with a higher net worth ($6 million, according to Forbes) than Bernie Sanders ($2.5 million), Amy Klobuchar ($2 million) or Pete Buttigieg ($100,000), who are still in the hunt and are among the six contenders slated to be sparring onstage on Dec. 19. What’s more, Sanders and another of the six, Elizabeth Warren, have raised buckets of money without courting plutocrats.
Many Democrats blamed the media for Harris’s demise. They have a point, inasmuch as some news organizations never had the kind of romance with her that they did with Buttigieg and Beto O’Rourke, two white men. I noted as much in a column last May, pointing to O’Rourke’s placement on the cover of Vanity Fair and Buttigieg’s on the cover of Time.
But the media fell quickly out of love with O’Rourke and is picking Buttigieg apart for his lack of support among African-Americans and his past employment as a McKinsey consultant. And Harris was hardly ignored: Her initial campaign rally in Oakland, Calif., in January was covered live, in its entirety, on MSNBC and CNN. That same month, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC told her, in a face-to-face interview, “I think there is a good chance that you are going to win the nomination.” And after the Democratic debate in June, when Harris stirringly confronted Joe Biden about his past opposition to federally mandated busing to integrate schools, she received a bonanza of media attention and rapturous reviews.
I get that this Democratic primary isn’t playing out as anyone predicted or in remote accordance with the party’s image of itself and with its priorities. None of the top four candidates — Biden, Warren, Buttigieg and Sanders — is a person of color, three of them are 70 or older, and the billionaires, Tom Steyer and Mike Bloomberg, are dipping into their personal fortunes in their efforts to gain ground. For a party that celebrates diversity, pitches itself to underdogs and prides itself on being future-minded and youth-oriented, that’s a freaky, baffling turn of events.
But some of the conclusions being drawn and complaints being raised don’t fully hold water.
Take the fears about the nomination being purchased. Without question, running for office is too expensive. That dynamic can definitely favor candidates with lucrative connections. And candidates are forced — unless they’re Steyer or Bloomberg — to devote ludicrous and possibly corrupting sums of time to political panhandling.
But at least at present, neither Steyer nor Bloomberg is exactly barreling toward victory. And while Cory Booker drew a connection between Harris’s departure and a process warped by wealth, the link is tenuous. Booker, whose campaign presses on despite his failure to qualify for the December debate, said of Harris’s withdrawal, “Voters did not determine her destiny.”
Actually, they kind of did. They’re the ones who are or aren’t excited enough about a candidacy to donate money and keep it alive. They’re the ones responding to pollsters and, by flagging their preferences, determining which candidates take on the air of plausibility that often generates the next round of donations. I keep seeing, on Twitter and Facebook, laments about Harris’s fate from Democrats who chose to support candidates other than her. Well, she couldn’t succeed on generalized, ambient good will.
I also keep seeing and hearing statements along the lines that the party should be ashamed of the way things are turning out, that the party failed. While an official party entity, the Democratic National Committee, indeed set criteria for the debates — which had to have some criteria — there’s otherwise no committee of elders or secret cabal that decrees which candidates prosper and which don’t.
Besides which, as Eric Levitz observed in New York magazine, Harris “boasted the enthusiastic support of Hillary’s donor network and supporters, warm relations with Obamaworld, and the sympathies of a broad range of Democratic lawmakers in the nation’s largest state and beyond.” Levitz added that when Harris ended her campaign on Tuesday, she trailed only Biden in the website FiveThirtyEight’s tally of important endorsements; that Booker has more such endorsements than Sanders, who is far ahead of him; and that Klobuchar has more than Buttigieg, whom she distantly trails. So if the party is fellow Democratic politicians of note, it’s hardly driving the direction of this contest.
We in the media aren’t driving it, either, though there’s constant carping along those lines. We’ve always been fundamentally responsive, bestowing coverage based on established interest, and we’re more responsive than ever in this digitized age of sophisticated, real-time measures of precisely what our audience does and doesn’t turn to. We give you a tide of Warren in part because you thrilled to the earlier trickle. We serve you oodles of Buttigieg because we’ve noticed your appetite for it.
Another questionable assessment of this primary is that “electability” is crowding out candidates who don’t fit some safe profile. Yes, many Democratic voters tell pollsters that choosing the candidate most likely to beat Trump is their top concern. Yes, there’s evidence that such an impulse is leading some voters away from candidates of color.
But if “electability” emphatically ruled the day, wouldn’t at least one of the three current or former governors already gone from the race — John Hickenlooper of Colorado, Steve Bullock of Montana and Jay Inslee of Washington — have fared better? Governors are frequently touted as the best candidates, and they account for four of the past seven presidents.
If “electability” ruled the day, would Biden’s stiffest competition be coming from a 78-year-old democratic socialist who recently had a heart attack (and just placed first in a California poll), a 70-year-old former Ivy League law professor whom Trump delights in calling “Pocahontas” and the 37-year-old gay mayor of a small Indiana city?
There’s a lot to this primary that’s more complicated than meets the eye, a lot that explodes assumptions. According to the polling so far, voters aren’t drawn to candidates whose demographic profiles overlap with theirs. Biden’s support from black Democrats in a national Quinnipiac poll late last month was more than eight times what Harris’s or Booker’s was. He and Sanders do exponentially better among Latinos than Julián Castro does. Sanders, not Buttigieg, has the advantage among Democrats under the age of 35. And many gay Democrats have rejected Buttigieg as inadequately progressive and even insufficiently gay.
So if identity group, electability, media bias and personal wealth aren’t the secrets to success, what are? I think we’re learning yet again that there’s no tidy, trusty formula. But broad name recognition among engaged voters — which Biden, Sanders and, to a lesser extent, Warren all had at the outset — is an enormous asset. So are a sales pitch and brand, like Buttigieg’s, that are distinct from any other contender’s.
Finally, there’s political acumen. There’s raw talent. The last Democratic president, Barack Obama, had plenty of it. The next Democratic president will, too.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
I invite you to sign up for my free weekly email newsletter. You can follow me on Twitter (@FrankBruni).
Source: Read Full Article