After a number of writers warned of Democratic incivility given the huge 2020 presidential field, I weighed in at New York with a summary of good advice for avoiding the problem:

We’re now well under a year away from the Iowa caucuses, and an unusually — perhaps uniquely — large Democratic field is forming to compete for the opportunity to face Donald J. Trump in 2020. It is highly appropriate that before the festivities intensify, multiple voice are being raised to remember the wolf at the door before engaging in any intramural fisticuffs.

At the American Prospect, veteran labor political operative Steve Rosenthal offers four “rules” for 2020 Democrats in order to avoid a “circular firing squad” that helps Trump win the general election.

Seeing a few straws in the wind, I wrote up for New York some concerns about the likely Trump/Republicans demagoguery about racial reparations.

Some 2020 Democratic presidential candidates in discussing anti-inequality measures have mentioned the moral rationale for a particular effort on behalf of African-Americans who were enslaved and then (under Jim Crow) semi-enslaved, and are suffering from systemic racism even now. Elizabeth Warren, for example, has made the obvious point that the legacy of slavery and its successor regimes has had a negative impact on the ability of black families to accumulate wealth over generations. Her proposed remedies, especially universal child care, are not actually “race conscious,” and aren’t similar to the cash compensation to descendants of slaves that is usually connoted by the term “reparations.” But there are signs that Republicans looking for a fresh way to appeal to white voters worried about alleged redistribution of resources from themselves to minorities may use the r-word to describe any and all race-conscious rationales for public initiatives. Fox News’ highly influential Tucker Carlson devoted an entire segment to the subject last week based on the premise that Democrats are stampeding in the direction of reparations.

Tucker Carlson agrees with his guest after he goes on a rant about how African Americans just need to get over slavery pic.twitter.com/8riQIlUr2I

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 22, 2019

Carlson and his guest are probably canaries in the coal mine in terms of the likely interest of Republicans in adding “No Reparations!” to their “No Socialism!” battle cry for 2020. At FiveThirtyEight, Perry Bacon Jr. explains that relatively strong public awareness of past and present racism does not translate into support for anything like reparations.

But when it comes to acting on these beliefs, notes Bacon, public opinion is significantly more mixed. And sizable majorities reject the idea of “reparations” as they are commonly understood:

“A July 2018 survey from the left-leaning Data for Progress found that 26 percent of Americans supported some kind of compensation or cash benefits for the descendants of slaves. A May 2016 Marist survey also found that 26 percent of Americans said the U.S. should pay reparations as ‘a way to make up for the harm caused by slavery and other forms of racial discrimination.'”

That Marist poll showed 68 percent of respondents, and 81 percent of white respondents, opposing reparations, defined as “money [paid] to African-Americans who are descendents of slaves.”

Now it should be noted immediately that an idea’s unpopularity is not an inherent reason for Democrats rejecting it (as Bacon puts it, “That’s kind of the point of bold ideas — they wouldn’t be bold if everyone already agreed with them.”) And Lord knows Republicans insist on promoting very unpopular ideas, from total opposition to gun regulation to supply-side economics to a ban on all abortions.

But being attacked for a position you do not actually hold is another thing altogether. So far, no 2020 Democratic candidate has embraced “reparations” as the public understands the term (cash payments to all descendants of slaves). But it appears some candidates, led by Warren and Kamala Harris (who called for “reparations” in the form of “investing in historically black colleges, improving maternal mortality rates for black women, and reducing racial disparities in the criminal justice system”) may finally begin to entertain the broader question of America’s moral and material debts to those it not only oppressed but robbed.

In his landmark 2014 essay, “The Case for Reparations,” Ta-Nehisi Coates sought to document those debts in some detail, but concluded that the most important step white America needed to take was simply to acknowledge its falsified history and come to grips with what that means today:

“Reparations — by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences — is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely …

“What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices — more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling ‘patriotism’ while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.”

This idea may not be as controversial as cash reparations, but even if stated honestly, it will become a target for fury among the MAGA folk who believe the abolition of slavery discharged all obligations to African-Americans, and that the falsified past Coates speaks of was one long reign of glory endangered by political correctness and the demands of the previously marginalized. One of the most pervasive ideas of contemporary conservatism (championed, for example, by one of its leading lights, former House Speaker Paul Ryan), in fact, is that liberating impoverished people is best accomplished by denying them any government assistance at all, so as to spur them on the road to self-sufficiency.

So Democrats and the media need to set the record straight on what “reparations” actually mean when discussed by Warren, Harris, and others. But they shouldn’t run away from the inevitable conflicts over what they domean and do propose. They owe a reckoning over racism’s legacy not just to the descendants of slaves and sharecroppers and victims of official and unofficial discrimination; they owe it to their country and its willingness to live up to its purported values.

If that offers Donald Trump another demagogic talking point for 2020, so be it. He’s not going to start telling the truth simply because Democrats tell less of the truth than they should.

It hasn’t made headlines because it’s a complicated story, but gradual changes in how the Democratic presidential nominating process is going to work were in my opinion worth an analysis at New York:

From the beginning of the modern era of popular control of the presidential nominating process (basically inaugurated in 1972) to very recently, the unrepresentative nature of the first two stops on the road to the presidency, the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses and the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary, was a chronic complaint. This was especially true for an increasingly diverse Democratic Party that nonetheless gave two small and very white states (as of the 2000 census, Iowa was 94 percent white and New Hampshire was 96 percent white) protected status as dominant factors in the nominating process.

After the 2004 cycle, Democrats (followed eventually by Republicans) got serious about this problem, and introduced calendar reforms that added two more diverse states — Latino-heavy Nevada and African-American–heavy South Carolina — to the early mix. Super-honkified Iowa and New Hampshire still got to go first, but nonwhite voters got to have a say before the whole deal was done. Indeed, Barack Obama’s successful nomination strategy combined an Iowa win with a dominant performance in southern states with large African-American voting populations, beginning with South Carolina. Hillary Clinton followed the same pattern in overcoming a terrible New Hampshire performance in 2016 by wins over Bernie Sanders in Nevada and South Carolina that put her ahead for good.

The 2020 nominating contest will represent a big leap forward in the development of a more diverse early calendar for Democrats, as Ron Brownstein explains:

“As in every recent Democrat primary race, the 2020 contest will begin in two virtually all-white states, with the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary in early February. But after that the next month of the primary calendar is dominated by states across the Sun Belt where non-white voters comprise a large share, and often an absolute majority, of the electorate.

“This decisive turn toward diversity, reinforced by California’s decision to move up its primary to Super Tuesday, represents a potentially critical new wrinkle in the nomination process. The pivot begins with Nevada and South Carolina, where contests will be held in the second half of February. The tilt toward diversity then explodes in early March when big Sun Belt states from Florida, North Carolina and Virginia in the southeast to Arizona and Texas along with California across the southwest will all crowd together on the calendar.”

This shift may actually be intensified by the fact that while Iowa and New Hampshire have never embraced early voting, their new competitors emphatically have, as my colleague Gabriel Debenedetti has pointed out:

“[S]trategists aligned with potential contenders’ teams are already starting to plan for 2020 by operating under the assumption that early voting in California — the state with the most delegates up for grabs — will start the very morning of Iowa’s evening caucuses, the traditional kickoff. (Vermont’s primary voting will have already begun by that point, if the current expected schedule holds.)

“Usually, all the attention then shifts to New Hampshire directly after Iowa. This time, though, Ohio and Illinois could both begin their own early voting before the Granite State’s day in the spotlight, and Georgia and North Carolina could start the day of New Hampshire’s primary. Then the windows could open in Tennessee, Texas, Arizona, and Louisiana before Nevada’s caucuses, let alone South Carolina’s primary.”

All these wrinkles are likely to reinforce nonwhite voting power, notes Brownstein:

“Through March 17, the Democratic candidates will face significant Latino populations in Texas and California on Super Tuesday and then Florida and Arizona on March 17 …

“Starting on Super Tuesday [March 3], large black populations will vote through mid-March in Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida and Illinois. In all of these states, minorities comprised at least about two-fifths of the 2018 vote, and they reached majority status in several of them, including Alabama, Mississippi, Florida and Texas. Given the overall trends in the party, Democratic strategists consider it likely that the nonwhite share of the vote in virtually all of these states will be higher in 2020 than it was in 2016.”

If that’s not enough diversity, New York may move its primary to March as well.

These dynamics will likely help candidates who really do well among nonwhite voters while hurting those who don’t. It could, as in 2008, put a minority candidate in the driver’s seat, though the fact that there are at this point a Latino (Julian Castro) and two African-American (Cory Booker and Kamala Harris) candidates could keep the nonwhite vote split up for a good while.

[T]he former longtime duopoly of Iowa and New Hampshire will still matter in 2020. But they’d do well to elevate candidates who are prepared to excel in the next very difference phase of the nominating process.

 

I’ve written about this issue before, but with the presidential field now forming, it’s time to get serious about it, as I argued at New York:

With Bernie Sanders’s announcement of a 2020 presidential candidacy, we know for sure that there will be at least one aspirant for the job who would turn 80 during his first term in office. He’s the second septuagenarian to enter the race, counting the 72-year-old incumbent, though Elizabeth Warren will turn 70 this summer. And the field could soon include another candidate who would have an 80-candle birthday cake in the White House, Joe Biden (a little over a year younger than Sanders).

Will our budding gerontocracy be an issue during the nominating or general election stages of the 2020 campaign?

[F]ans of Biden and Sanders tend to brush off questions about their heroes’ ages by denouncing ageism, touting their vigor as compared to the junk-food-loving and sedentary Trump, or pointing at each other (if Biden can run, so can Bernie, and vice versa). But it was an issue in the presidential campaigns of the two nonincumbent septuagenarian major-party nominees before Trump (Bob Dole in 1996 and John McCain in 2008 — both younger than Biden and Sanders will be in 2020), whose other unusual features overshadowed his age. So it cannot just be waved away as somehow irrelevant.

Presumably the younger Democratic rivals of Biden and Sanders will bring up the age issue indirectly by drawing attention to their own relative youth and/or their appeal to younger voters (though it will be tough for any of them to do better among younger voters than Sanders did in 2016). But the most destructive way it could arise, especially in the general election campaign in which no vulnerability will go unexploited, would be via a negative health event or some incident suggesting a “senior moment” or some more serious cognitive issue.

Do Democrats really want to take that chance given the existential threat of a second Trump term? And conversely, could they find significant value in a situation where it’s Trump and Trump alone who is vulnerable to age-related voter concerns? Is that a potential advantage that should be casually tossed away?

These are certainly factors that ought to be taken into consideration along with current horse-race polling and other candidate assessments that don’t take terrifying if marginally likely possibilities into account. Democrats have the luxury in 2020 of a vast field of qualified candidates with platforms ranging across the ideological spectrum; it’s doubtful there’s any one candidate who is indispensable. Perhaps testing the upward limit of an intangible maximum age for running for president is worth the risk in order to beat Trump soundly or reward Biden or Sanders for past service. But dismissing the risk involved is plain foolish.

On reading a description of plans for the first Democratic presidential candidate debates of the 2020 cycle, I put down some thoughts at New York:

[A]nyone who has thought for a few moments about the giant Democratic presidential field that is currently assembling has probably wondered how it will affect candidate debates. Faced with a similar problem in 2016, Republicans devised a poll-based formula for participation in the first several debates. But since there were 17 (or a bit later, 16) candidates in the field, the networks sponsoring the debates divided them into two groups, with the top tier (ranging from 8 to 11 candidates) getting a spot in the main prime-time debate, and the remainder appearing in a prior (but little-watched) “undercard” or “kiddie table” debate.

As you can imagine, there was a lot of complaining about this arrangement from those left off the big stage. But it probably helped Republicans gradually winnow their enormous field into, well, Donald Trump and an assortment of candidates who were supposed to beat him.

Now Democrats are preparing for their first round of 2020 Democratic debates for June, to be sponsored by NBC News, MSNBC, and Telemundo. And with a field that could potentially include well over 20 candidates, the Democratic National Committee has had to face some of the same decisions Republicans encountered last time around. Perhaps because of residual bitterness from former and current Bernie Sanders supporters over the DNC’s role in minimizing the number of debates in 2016 — presumably in the interests of Establishment favorite Hillary Clinton — the party is taking a lighter hand this time around. So while there is a formula for getting on the stage, there’s no “kiddie table,” and if the field is really large, random rules for sorting out participation could lead to some rather interesting combinations:

In looking at the list of actual and potential Democratic candidates for president in 2020, I’ve become a bit concerned, and shared some thoughts on the situation at New York:

It’s been obvious for a while that the Democratic presidential field for 2020 is going to be pretty large, and could produce an unexpected nominee, much like the comparably vast Republican field of 2016 that gave us our very strange 45th president. But as Nate Silver explains, this could be the largest presidential field in any one party since the advent of near-universal state primaries and caucuses made announced candidacies all but essential for anyone wanting to become a major-party nominee.

Silver counts nine announced candidates with at least potentially viable profiles (plus one, Richard Ojeda, who announced and then dropped out), and then another 12 that he figures are more likely than not to run in the end. So even without such remote possibilities as New Yorkers Michael Bloomberg, Bill de Blasio, and Andrew Cuomo, or retreads John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, or House backbenchers Tim Ryan and Seth Moulton, we are likely looking at the largest presidential field ever.

The largest Democratic fields up until now were in 1972 (15 candidates) and 1976 (16 candidates). Those two cycles, interestingly enough, produced the least likely Democratic nominees in recent memory, the ideologically marginal (by contemporary standards) George McGovern and then the very obscure one-term Georgia governor Jimmy Carter. McGovern, as you probably know, lost 49 states; Carter narrowly won what was supposed to be a Democratic slam dunk by putting together an unusual coalition rooted in the Deep South, a region where Democrats had not done well at all since 1960. So neither nominating contest went the way most party elites would have preferred, for sure.

So it’s reasonably safe to say that very large presidential fields have more often than not led to defeat and/or eccentric nominees. They’ve also often produced nominees who didn’t get anything close to a majority of the popular vote in the primaries, which was less problematic back when Democrats didn’t have the kind of strict proportionality in delegate awards that they do now. As Silver observes:

“The three past elections when the field was as large as its shaping up to be in 2020 all resulted in party elites failing to get their way. They also resulted in a nominee who failed to get 50 percent of the popular vote in the primaries, which could yield a contested convention since Democratic delegate allocation rules are highly proportional to the popular vote. In a field of 20 candidates, for instance, you’d project … that the eventual nominee would have either 32 percent or 40 percent of the popular vote, depending on whether you use a linear or logarithmic trendline.”

Yikes.

Now it’s also entirely possible that a giant field could get “winnowed” early on, as it was among Republicans in 2000 (when George W. Bush basically had a one-on-one fight with John McCain after New Hampshire) and among Democrats in 2008 (when Obama and Clinton largely stood alone after New Hampshire). If, say, Biden and Sanders both run and rout the field in Iowa and New Hampshire, a lot of candidates might quickly drop out. But as Silver notes, the size of the field itself represents a pretty big bet by a lot of people that nobody’s going to run away with this thing.