As of today, approximately seven hundred thousand people have formally announced they seek the Democratic nomination for President. Even semi-serious candidates had to be sorted into two groups of ten to get them all into TV debates.
While the horde includes well known candidates like Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden and notable upstarts like Pete Buttiegieg (sp?) Julian Castro and Beto O’Rourke, it is largely composed of interchangeable white guys with names such as John Hickenlooper, Michael Bennet, John Delaney, David Naylor, and Seth Moulton, and be honest, you had to read that twice to figure out which of those names I made up.
It is plainly obvious that Tim Ryan and Joe Sestak have no chance at all, so why are they doing this? It is building their brands? Is there a hustle? Are they angling for Cabinet positions? Why would a person work so hard to get shit-kicked in Iowa?
How does fundraising work as a candidate for one of the two major parties? Specifically, does a failed candidate have to give the money back when the campaign ends? If not, then that could be a reason for being a candidate. Even if they have to give back the unspent portion, campaign funds can help build their brand as a political figure during this campaign.
Aside, I thought Hickenlooper was one of the significant dark horses in the Democratic Party? Former Mayor of Denver, then Governor of Colorado, and a reputation as a bit of a centrist.
These twoarticles try to answer that question. Some people end up with the vice-presidency or cabinet positions. Others get more recognition nationally, with some getting jobs on Fox News, MSNBC or elsewhere. Some turn into public speakers. (Although some end up losing a good reputation as a result of an unsuccessful run.)
I agree that people don’t get elected by virtue of being or having been members of the House of Representatives (hi, Ryan and Moulton and Delaney and Swalwell and Gabbard and now Sestak and hi also to anyone else I have forgotten).
And mayor is even more a longshot, though Buttigieg’s standing in the polls suggests it’s not a lost cause.
That being said, the poster candidate for the longshots is not really Obama, who was a) a senator when he ran and b) well known for his 2004 nomination speech, which was extraordinarily well received when he made it. It’s Bill Clinton, and especially Jimmy Carter, little-known governors of not-especially-large states who knocked aside better-known and better-funded candidates in the primaries to win the nomination and ultimately the Presidency. Yeah, going back to the twentieth century for the last example of an obscure politician winning the Democratic nomination doesn’t bode real well for the obscures currently running. But politicians are arrogant, and you could catch lightning in a bottle. And didn’t your mother tell you you could be anything you wanted to be? Why not give it a whirl?
(As an aside, I campaigned for Sestak when he lost to Pat Toomey in 2010–spent about four days canvassing in various parts of Philadelphia. A good guy in many ways, but no, I don’t have any clarity into why he entered this race.)
Typical there’s next to nothing left by the time they go through the expenses associated with actually shutting down the campaign. Only a couple big fundraisers, and sometimes only the eventual nominee, have the luxury of not living hand to mouth financially. That said they don’t prorate out the pennies and give the money back.
…and a factcheck article with what they can do with the funds.
Not mentioned in the link above they can roll money from one federal campaign fund to another. Pretty much all the sitting Senators running had a nice little nest egg in their Senate campaign fund to start with. Of course if they burn through all of it that can causes issues for their next Senate run.
Spending on brand/name awareness can help, or hurt if they really soil the bed :p, with later runs for office including President. It can also be a chance to spend a bunch of money talking about specific issues they are personally concerned about. Inslee wasn’t seen as having a great shot despite being a governor. He really wants to focus on addressing climate change. Moulton’s campaign really wants to focus on foreign policy; he’s on the House Armed Services Committee. Inslee qualified for at least this first debate giving him a chance. Moulton has work to do just to get to that big stage.
Isn’t Donald Trump the poster child of poster children? There were close to twenty Republican running for the nomination in 2016, some of whom were qualified by any reasonable measure.
The success of Buttigieg at this point does help explain why these other folks are in–if the mayor of South Freakin’ Bend can get near double digits in a poll, then why not a House member, or the mayor of Nowhere You’ve Ever Heard of, Florida? The attention paid to O’Rourke is another example–he’s a failed Senate candidate who never served above the House. Hey, that’s Joe Sestak, except that Sestak had a military career as well! In addition to taking the example of Carter as instructive, candidates look at the successes of people like O’Rourke and Buttigieg and say, rightly or wrongly, “What’ve they got that I haven’t got?”
Thanks. I remember that back in the day, retiring Congresscritters got to take their war chest home with them, but I thought that loophole had been closed? Per this abcnews story, the loophole allowing campaign funds to be used for personal purposes, started to be closed in 1979, which sounds about right, and finally shut in 1989.
2010 opensecrets.org article mentioning what retiring Representatives and Senators could and could not do with their remaining campaign funds. Interestingly, at that time, while campaign funds could not be used for personal purposes, other PACs had no such restrictions. And I didn’t see a lot of reasons why campaign funds couldn’t be rolled into a “Leadership PAC,” then later converted to personal use.
I’m sure, like every other part of campaign financing, the rules are arcane, byzantine, and serve as a full employment act for attorneys.
Right. I was limiting it to Democrats, partly, and mostly I was limiting it to politicians: Trump is a different story because he was widely known before he ever started running. There’s no direct analogue to Trump among the Democratic candidates, no one who was already famous for non-political reasons; we’d have to have a Bill Gates or an Oprah Winfrey or somebody in the field to make that analogy. I’m sure Sestak and Mouton are basing their hopes much more on what happened with Clinton and Carter than on what happened with Trump.
The turning point in Obama’s ascendancy was his huge victory in the US Senate Democratic primary in 2004 bolstered by his famous keynote address a few months later at the Democratic National Convention. Few had heard of him before that, but after those events he was considered a major star within the Democratic establishment for the four years until his nomination for the presidency. He never ran for president as a “nobody”.
You can also use campaign funds to pay for hotel rooms for you and your campaign staff, to hotels that you own, and which jack up the prices above normal levels so you can transfer larger amounts of money from your donors to yourself.
Once you get White House fever, the only cure is embalming fluid. A lot of these candidates know they have no prayer in 2020. But they need to build up name recognition they can enter the fray in 2024 (hopefully not, because that would mean a Democratic loss in 2020) or 2028 as a first tier candidate. And there’s no doubt that a lot of them are auditioning for VP.
