The early stages of the 2020 Democratic primary are rewriting the rules of how a candidate wins his or her party’s presidential nomination. Recent Democratic primary battles were all about the invisible primary, the yearlong period before the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary — when presidential candidates hired key staff members, seduced major donors and lined up crucial endorsements.

“Invisible primary” comes from an influential 2008 political science book, “The Party Decides,” which argued that all this behind-the-scenes activity to secure the support of party elites essentially predetermined who would ultimately claim the party’s nomination.

So Hillary Clinton, the winner of the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, actually sewed up the nomination in 2015, when she won the invisible primary. You’d think, at this point in the 2020 Democratic presidential race, 10 months before the Iowa caucus, that the invisible primary is fully engaged — and that far away from public view, candidates like Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Beto O’Rourke, Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren are wooing the donors and securing the endorsements that will prove determinative in the race.

But you’d be wrong. In the 2020 campaign, what’s left of the invisible primary exists in a very different form. As David Karol, a University of Maryland political scientist and a co-author of “The Party Decides,” recently told me, “The invisible primary isn’t so invisible anymore.”

In 2020, presidential fund-raising is extremely different. Once upon a time (in 2008), presidential candidates spent countless hours in New York City penthouse living rooms and Hollywood backyards schmoozing hedge fund titans and film studio executives who could be counted on not only to give maximum contributions of $2,300 themselves but also to act as “bundlers” by raising tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions from their wealthy friends and colleagues.

The advent of online fund-raising has upended that. In 2016, Mr. Sanders eventually caught up to Mrs. Clinton in the fund-raising race, thanks to his army of online donors. This cycle, online fund-raising is proving even more potent. Mr. Sanders raised $18 million in the campaign’s first quarter, nearly $6 million of which came in the 24 hours after he announced his candidacy. Beto O’Rourke raised more than $6 million in the 24 hours after he announced his candidacy and $9.4 million total.

What’s more, online donations from small-dollar donors are now, in some ways, worth more than the maximum contributions (which are $2,800 for the 2020 election cycle) from the fat cats. Candidates can earn a spot in the presidential debates by collecting contributions — no matter how small — from at least 65,000 donors.

Smaller online donations also carry a certain cachet — symbolizing a candidate’s real or imagined grass-roots appeal and populist credentials. Elizabeth Warren has made a big show of refusing to hold high-dollar private fund-raisers or one-on-one donor meetings. Announcing that Mr. Sanders’s average donation in this campaign is just $20, his campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, boasted that his war chest came from “no bundling, no sneaking off to posh fund-raisers with nice hors d’oeuvres — that is not this campaign, it may be others.”

The candidates who are still courting big-money donors — Ms. Harris, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar — are doing so on the down-low. High-dollar fund-raising is the one part of the primary that in the 2020 race has actually become more invisible.

High-profile endorsements don’t carry the same weight as they once did, either. The power of superdelegates — elected officials and party leaders who voted as they wished at the presidential convention — has been greatly reduced in the 2020 campaign. In response to Mr. Sanders’s complaints about Mrs. Clinton’s superdelegate advantage in 2016, the Democratic National Committee last year adopted rules that forbid superdelegates from casting the deciding vote on the first ballot at the convention. (If no candidate wins a majority in the first round, superdelegates are permitted to vote in subsequent rounds.) As a result of this rule change, a crucial aspect of the old invisible primary — courting elected officials for their endorsements — is less important in 2020.

And these endorsements could actually carry a stigma. “The way we thought endorsements mattered before was, to the extent everyone in the party was for someone, you got the sense that this person was the party’s choice,” said Hans Noel, a Georgetown political science professor and a co-author of “The Party Decides.” “But it’s possible no one’s going to want to claim that mantle now, because of the sense that there was something unfair about the way Clinton had all that support in 2016.”

Even the way candidates build their campaign staffs has changed. Before, candidates competed with one another to make splashy hires of campaign managers and media strategists in the hopes of impressing donors, endorsers and, often, political reporters. In the 2004 race, for instance, the invisible-primary competition between John Kerry and John Edwards for the services of the veteran media strategist Bob Shrum was called the “Shrum primary.” Mr. Kerry won the Shrum primary, which in turn helped him win the invisible primary, which ultimately won him the nomination.

But in 2020, said Tommy Vietor, a co-host of the “Pod Save America” podcast and a former Obama campaign staff worker, “the era of headhunting for the biggest, best consultant is over. The nature of your whole communications staff has changed. The communications team I was on in 2008 was almost exclusively designed to handle reporters. A communications team in 2020 is designed to go around the filter. Well over half if not three-quarters of the work it does is creating its own media, whether it’s live stream, memes, podcasts, whatever.”

Democratic rank-and-file voters are receiving some of the same treatment — or at least a simulacrum of that treatment — that presidential candidates once reserved for party elites. “Voters are incredibly hungry for authenticity and believability, and it’s critically important that they see who the candidate really is,” said Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist who worked on Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 campaign. “You don’t get that from a 5,000-person rally, but you might get that from a day on the road with a videographer on Instagram.” Ms. Gillibrand has gone so far as to hire two campaign workers who, as The Washington Post reported, “make personalized appeals” to her online supporters.

The transformed primary has led to a revaluing of resources. Out are bundlers and endorsers. In are ears and eyeballs. “There’s intense competition for attention,” said Peter Hamby, the host of Snapchat’s “Good Luck America.” “Attention is now the main currency in our politics.”

Four years ago, Donald Trump rendered the Republican Party’s invisible primary irrelevant. Now Democrats may be going through the same process. Once, there was a clear dividing line between party elites and rank-and-file voters — with the former’s votes and contributions seemingly counting more than the latter’s. But in the 2020 Democratic primary, the only thing that may distinguish the two groups is that one of them still gets nice hors d’oeuvres.

Jason Zengerle is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and correspondent for GQ.

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].

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

Source: Read Full Article