I suspect Biden is the best bet among the top 4 but there are obvious concerns about his age and mental sharpness. On election day he will be around as old as Reagan was when he left office. I suppose he is lucky in that Trump is also old and even less sharp.
And then there were 17 again, because Deval Patrick is running.
I’d say this candidacy is as pointless as that of Michael Bennet or Steve Bullock. He won’t win. But he might such some votes away from Elizabeth Warren in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, and generally cost her among the college educate demographic.
'Waaaay too late and doesn’t bring anything so remarkable to the table that it’s worth his entry, I’d say.
Might be a play for VP
I could see him, just like I could have seen Bullock, as a strong general election candidate, and a strong primary candidate in a cycle that was playing out differently that this one did. But in the current universe? His path is really very narrow and very improbable. But it is a short investment for him. He would have to win or be a very close second in New Hampshire and bootstrap that moving forward. Fail that and he knows he’s done.
How could that happen? I see it as Buttigieg winning Iowa yet voters in New Hampshire feeling he is too young and inexperienced (more even than America not ready for a gay president) for the general. With Buttigieg winning, and say Biden not being in the top three (demonstrating poor electability), less full on progressive Ds in New Hampshire might fairly suddenly want a moderate but more electable Warren alternative (as she has moved harder away from the more centrist D voters). Harris has proven that she is not that person in most voters minds by now. And New Hampshire is Patrick’s backyard. He could in that scenario win New Hampshire and then leverage that to wins and fundraising going forward in what would then look like a long slog.
Improbable but higher probability than several others in the race have as their paths. Worth a few months of all out effort to see if it has any chance.
I’m actually cautiously optimistic about a Patrick run. He has a lot of support from the Obama world, executive government experience and experience in the business world. As Perry Bacon of 538 says, there’s a potential Goldilocks moment for him-- “He’s Buttigieg but older and Biden but younger.” He’s also left, but not that left. He’s rich, but the dude came from poverty in the south side of Chicago. With the right message, he could be the bridge between the college educated liberals/progressives and the moderates; between the suburban whites and the blacks.
If he could start raising money quickly, which he could do by tapping some of his business friends, there’s a path to do well in his neighboring state of New Hampshire as well as South Carolina (especially if AA voters begin to see Biden as too weak a candidate). I’m not one of those Dems who thinks there’s some sort of purity in not accepting money from PACs or wealthy donors. Why kneecap ourselves at a time when we need to do whatever it takes to beat back the cheaters and cons?
All that being said, the dude’s got a lot of catching up to do. And he may just hover around 1.5% before dropping out unceremoniously in a few months.
Yes let’s nominate the Bain Capital guy. Maybe Mitt Romney can switch parties and run too. The more the merrier.
He is running to cut into Warren’s and Bernie’s leads in New Hampshire in an attempt to block their momentums. That’s it. This is not a stupid man- he knows he can’t win this late in the game. He can, however, possibly hobble two of the front runners that the millionare donor class is terrified of. Maybe if Patrick pulls enough votes in NH by virtue of name recognition alone, Biden can stumble his way into 1st or 2nd there with less than 20% of the vote. He is currently on track to land in 3rd or 4th there and in Iowa.
The Democratic establishmemt fossils have learned nothing from 2016.
How can somebody who is not a recognised name, who does not have deep pockets to fund his own campaign, who will not make the debate stage at least until the turn of the year by which time the next half of debates will coincide with voting, suddenly propel himself to the top? Seems to be a vanity run. The game is not played the same way as 1992 when Clinton jumped in fairly late. These election cycles are longer and candidates who have been doing the work on the ground still can’t break past 1% but this guy thinks he can?
Some people are just stuck in this idea that a winning Presidential candidate has to be a moderate Governor or Senator between the ages of about 45 and 60, and are panicked because none of the frontrunners fit this profile. Many of these people are also very concerned about nominating someone other than a straight white male.
Clearly, most Democratic voters don’t feel that way, since they have rejected or seem to be in the process of rejecting multiple candidates who do fit that mold in Inslee, Hickenlooper, Booker, Klobuchar, etc. And polls show that the vast majority of Democrats are excited about at least one of the candidates already in the race. But that view is pretty widespread among party elites and big money donors (who also see their personal economic interests threatened by the Sanders/Warren wing). So I think there’s at least some chance that he could attract enough funding to become a presence in the race. But basically, he doesn’t offer anything that say, Booker or Harris don’t, and I don’t see any reason why he would catch on when none of the other “traditional” candidates did.
Writing checks to Patrick offers the Democratic establishment one more way to remain temporarily in denial about the fact that the voters don’t want the same sort of candidate they do.
Other than the last sentence, that doesn’t make much sense. Patrick’s Wall Street-friendly “centrism” isn’t going to pull any voters away from Bernie or Warren. If he attracts any significant support, it will be at the expense of Biden, Harris and Buttigieg, thus actually making it more likely that a progressive wins the nomination.
The average voter is stupid and operate largely on name recognition. Patrick was governor of a neighboring state in the same media market as New Hampshire- that’s enough to make him competitive there.
As for who he would pull voters from- remember that the 2nd or 3rd choice among most Bernie supporters is Biden, and vice versa. Outside of political junkies, activists and media elites, the electorate does’t understand the ideological differences between candidates at all.
Patrick’s got to win the expectations game in N.H., which could be hard for him. I remember it was when I was working on Mike Dukakis’s campaign there in 1987-88.
I’m also not at all sure he’s going to be able to break through the scrum in Iowa.
This could get ugly:
My model has always been how people handle choices between small-to-large numbers of alternatives generally. As your choices go up from 1 to 2 to 3 and beyond, up to a point you consider all your alternatives, then most, then you hit a point where the number of choices overwhelms you and you just want to pick one and walk away.
This is why few people are even considering the Klobuchars and Bookers and Castros and Bennets and Bullocks of the field, and why they’re not going to pay much attention to Patrick or Bloomberg. They will have little if any effect on the race. My WAG is that people won’t even pick up on the implicit message that Biden sucks as a candidate, so his support is likely to be unaffected.
Actually, as recently as April 2019 - this spring - he was describing M4A as the compromise position: “Single-payer, which is very much a compromise position between nationalized medicine and fully private payer and provider…that’s the middle ground” and describing Obamacare as a “conservative tweak to our health care system…cooked up in the Heritage Foundation and piloted by a Republican governor.”
So support of single-payer was his position for years, right up to April of this year, and by September he wasn’t just going, “I’ve changed my mind,” but going on the attack against other candidates who supported it.
So he now thinks his long-held position, which he was arguing for just eight months ago, is now not merely less than the best choice, but rather it’s unreasonable. Other people shouldn’t hold this position that was his for so long and until so recently.
That’s quite a swing in a short time.
Completely aside from the perfectly reasonable suspicion that all that health-care lobby money caused him to change his mind, one must ask what other positions he might abandon, and turn around and attack, that he appears to be solidly behind at the moment.
I’m not a big fan of Biden, but I at least know what he’s about. I can’t say the same about Mayor Pete.
Can’t remember where I saw it, but there will be a new Des Moines Register poll of Iowa out on Saturday night.
I could get behind a Patrick-Buttigieg ticket. I seriously like the idea of Deval Patrick, I just don’t know if it’s too late for him at this point.
Could you explain exactly what it is about Deval that is so appealing? I worked for the Commonwealth of Mass. the entire time he was governor, and his strong points elude me.
What is being called MfA is not that. It is nationalized healthcare even if curiously ashamed to say so. He described actual Medicare accurately and moving towards it for all would be that compromise position.
I’m not sure he’s even going to try to.
Skip Iowa and there are no expectations of your performance there. His (unlikely) path depends on his New Hampshire performance in the face of a possible Biden bomb.
He’s depending on, well, voters like me. Voters who care most about electability.
Biden’s underwhelming debate performance had me moving to the candidate I had as back-up quarterback in my list - Warren - who I concluded was also electable with a different appeal. But her all in on MfA is to voters like me very bad in many ways, inclusive of making her much less electable. She has driven voters like me away. So I doubled back to hoping that Biden gets his shit together. If he totally crumps then we’d be looking at Klochbuchar but she is short on charisma. So we are still looking for a back-up quarterback. Buttigieg too young, too untested and no particular good theory supporting why he’d be electable. The ONLY demographic that really likes him is college educated whites, and electability is contingent on hitting more than one of other important groups, be it Obama level Black turnout, or appeal to NCEW voters enough to undercut GOP margins there, or driving young voter and/or Hispanic turnout to unprecedented levels …
Patrick being a fairly “moderate Governor or Senator between the ages of about 45 and 60” … or close enough (he’s 63) is certainly a plus. More so he has the charisma that Klobuchar lacks.