20 or so Democrats are headed to the debates. Is it more? Maybe, but I’m not counting. I’m sure we’re all plenty confused. How should we evaluate all these presidential candidates? In some sense, you can evaluate the presidential candidates however you want. I’m not your boss. But here are the key questions I ask when I’m evaluating presidential candidates.
Category: Elections (Page 17 of 19)
These are posts on elections from the blog Base and Superstructure. Topics include international elections, American elections, and local Iowa elections. There’s a particular focus on describing and explaining leftist electoral results.
Source: Lorie Shaull (https://www.flickr.com/photos/number7cloud/32568282327)
Julián Castro’s campaign isn’t getting a lot of attention. Admittedly, I’d have probably forgotten about him as well, if not for the fact that I know people caucusing for him in Iowa or thinking about doing so. He’s polling very badly.
But Castro’s worth a look. He seems to be running the leftmost campaign other than Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. And, on closer inspection, I think that assessment holds up well enough. I’ve written a couple of posts on Sanders and one on Warren. Castro merits one, too.
Here’s what’s going on with his campaign, as I see it.
Image Source: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images (https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/12/18221752/2020-democrats-biden-bernie-sanders-beto-poll)
Quite a few people seem surprised by Joe Biden’s lead in the polls. Some of this is because their friend circles aren’t representative of the Democratic Party electorate. But some of it’s deeper than that. Democrats say in generic polls that they’d prefer women to men, non-white candidates to white candidates, and younger candidates to older candidates. Given the fact that Democrats are more or less evenly divided between moderates and liberals, we could form some hypotheses about who ought to be leading right now.
The best hypothesis would be Kamala Harris. She’s a black women who’s probably neither too liberal nor too moderate for the Democratic electorate. She’s youngish and serves in a political office that’s a common launching pad for presidential campaigns. And we’d expect candidates like Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Amy Klobuchar to be doing OK. We might even think candidates like Julián Castro could take off.
To put it lightly, that’s not what we’re seeing. The two leading candidates, as of May 2019, are Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. Two white guys older than any president-elect in the history of the US. Biden is arguably too conservative for the Democratic electorate, and Sanders is well to the left of the electorate. Even moving beyond Biden and Sanders, we have Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren as four of the top five. Warren isn’t as far left as Sanders, but she’s still well to the left of most Democrats. And Buttigieg is a white guy.
What’s going on here?
Source: Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elizabeth_Warren_speaks,_May_19,_2014.jpg)
2004 was the first year I was old enough to vote in presidential elections, and I quickly found it’s a depressing experience. But it’s easy to do. I’ll start thinking about voting for someone once I’m convinced they’ll work hard to leave the world a better place than they found it. Democratic presidential candidates never met that standard, so I never seriously considered voting for one. Depressing, but easy. Bernie Sanders complicated that in 2016. He met the standard, but he lost to Hillary Clinton. But what if there were a candidate clearly to Hillary Clinton’s left, and still to the right of Bernie Sanders? Did someone say ‘Elizabeth Warren’?
What’s going on with the Warren campaign? That’s my topic here.
With Joe Biden in the race, the presidential candidate field is more or less complete. I promise I have something a bit more substantive on the way. For now, let’s get on with ranking the Democratic candidates! Who’s deserving of a vote?
I’ve written previously about how I vote. But it’s easy enough to summarize. I vote for candidates who have a chance to win and won’t leave the world worse off than they found it. In practice, the decision for President is usually pretty easy. Almost all presidential candidates would harm the world. Usually Democrats harm it less, and Republicans harm it more. But both cause harm. Therefore, in presidential elections, I usually face a decision between voting third party or not voting at all.
Local elections are less bleak, as lower ranking officials have less potential to cause harm.
But here we are, ready for yet more voting in 2020. Should the left support Bernie again? Support someone else? Should we support no one at all?
Let’s think about this. Right now, I’m just giving the presidential candidates a quick first look. I’ll have more to say later about the three or four best.
