Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

Joe Biden is running. The former vice president will make his candidacy official with a video announcement next Wednesday, according to people familiar with the discussions who have been told about them by top aides.

Seriously, he’s actually made a decision. It’s taken two years of back-and-forth, it’ll be his third (or, depending on how you count, seventh) try for the White House, and many people thought he wouldn’t do it, but the biggest factor reshaping the 2020 Democratic-primary field is locking into place.

He wants this. He really wants this. He’s wanted this since he was first elected to the Senate, in 1972, and he’s decided that he isn’t too old, isn’t too out of sync with the current energy in the Democratic Party, and certainly wasn’t going to be chased out by the women who accused him of making them feel uncomfortable or demeaned because of how he’d touched them.

Biden’s campaign will, at its core, argue that the response to Donald Trump requires an experienced, calm hand to help America take a deep breath and figure out a way to get back on track. First, however, the man who would become the oldest president in American history needs to get through a primary—one that’s already tracking 18 other candidates, including six senators, two governors, a charismatic Texan wannabe senator, a geek-cool Indiana mayor with an impossible-to-pronounce name, and a guy no one had ever heard of who’s already scored a spot on the debate stage by becoming a mock obsession in weird corners of the internet by talking about universal basic income and robots.

The primary, Biden believes, will be easier than some might think: He sees a clear path down the middle of the party, especially with Bernie Sanders occupying a solid 20 percent of the progressive base, and most of the other candidates fighting for the rest. And the announcement comes at a moment when many in the party have become anxious about Sanders’s strength, with some beginning to wonder whether Biden might be the only sure counterweight to stop him from getting the nomination.

Remembering Biden’s old plagiarism problems. He also visited a union picket line and delivered Fritz Hollings’ eulogy.

Why has Harris got a better start than Booker? The answer is in the demography of the Democratic primary electorate and the importance of women in the party. The strength of black women was clearly illustrated in the results of the recent mayoral race in Chicago where the two finalists were both black women.

The CNN research indicates the Democratic primary electorate has changed significantly since 2008. Black and female voters made up a larger share of the Democratic primary electorate in 2016 than they did in 2008. Unfortunately for Booker that gives the advantage to Harris.

Several past candidates come to mind in trying to assess the Buttigieg phenomenon. One is Barack Obama. Another is former senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey. A third is former Arizona governor Bruce Babbitt. All had their moments. All were the subject of favorable and sometimes gushing media coverage. Only Obama went on to become both his party’s nominee and president of the United States.

The tiny problem with this analysis is that Buttigieg can’t be Obama because he doesn’t have a century of white guilt behind his candidacy…

Once considered a rising star in the Democratic Party — he was the first Latino to give a keynote address at the Democratic National Convention — he has been outshined in the ever-expanding field by brighter stars and nonstars alike. While he has many fans in his hometown, San Antonio, where he once served as mayor, he is not well known on the national stage. And with the sudden rise of the former El Paso congressman Beto O’Rourke, Mr. Castro is not even the most well-known candidate in his own state.

Lots of “this should be his moment because immigration” blather snipped.

Some Democrats believe that Mr. Castro’s moment has, if anything, already passed — that his best shot at national success occurred after he gave his electrifying speech at the 2012 convention. Some wonder whether he is too quiet, too inexperienced and too careful to compete in such a crowded, high-powered primary field.

While Mr. Castro tries to brush off the inevitable comparisons to Mr. O’Rourke, whose challenge to Senator Ted Cruz last year turned him into a national celebrity, the attention drawn by Mr. O’Rourke — who speaks fluent Spanish, and whose hometown is on the border with Mexico — has cast something of a shadow over Mr. Castro’s candidacy.

When he left Washington at the end of the Obama administration, Mr. Castro returned to Texas but resisted entreaties to run for statewide office. He finished writing a book, did some teaching and spent time with his family, but some Texas Democrats believe he missed an opportunity to advance his career and gain the kind of political profile that could have fortified his presidential run.

Because Mr. Castro never ran for statewide office, he has not built up a big email list of supporters, and he still has not met the 65,000-donor threshold to qualify for the first Democratic primary debates. In the first three months of the year, he raised only $1.1 million (though his campaign said it had raised over half a million more by mid-April).

Theta’s the real takeaway here, but 538 says he’s in the debates thanks to cracking 1% in three polls.

It may be hard to believe now, but for a New York minute it seemed that Bill de Blasio was going to be the champion of an insurgent left. Progressive activists and commentators hailed de Blasio’s landslide victory in New York’s 2013 mayoral election as a sign of an encouraging new direction for the Democratic Party. His unabashedly liberal campaign—which centered on income inequality, or what de Blasio poetically termed a “tale of two cities”—prefigured the unrest that would shake the party, culminating in Bernie Sanders’s unlikely challenge to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential primary.

Many unfulfilled, NYC-specific campaign promises snipped.

Yet as de Blasio weighs entering the 2020 race, the prospect of a President de Blasio has been met with widespread derision. The New Republic’s Alex Shephard termed his interest in the presidency an “embarrassing quest for national fame,” while the mayor’s own allies (anonymously) told Politico that his flirtation with a presidential run was “fucking insane.” De Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, has said the “timing is not exactly right” for him to launch a campaign. The New York Times, which seems to take gleeful pleasure in dinging de Blasio for everything from calling errant snow days to ostentatiously hanging around Iowa, recently noted that Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has generated far more presidential buzz than the mayor of the country’s biggest city. Even in his hometown, there seems to be only one person who thinks a de Blasio presidential campaign would be anything other than a joke: de Blasio himself.

How did he fall so far? De Blasio does, after all, have a robust record of actual accomplishments under his belt, which is more than what can be said for, say, Beto O’Rourke. He was once the favorite of grassroots groups and leftist elites alike. Perhaps the left soured on him because he is a singularly ham-handed politician, who possesses all the native charm of a Howard Schultz, the billionaire Starbucks founder who is trying to win the presidency one sanctimonious tweet at a time. Perhaps de Blasio has never been as progressive as his early cheerleaders made him out to be; he might simply be an opportunist who saw, early on, the way the wind was blowing and adjusted accordingly. Or maybe the Democrats, unnerved by the disaster of the last election and fearing another Trump victory in 2020, have started to prefer candidates who are all promise and no baggage.

Read on for more bashing of other candidates, but since the words “corrupt crapweasel” never appear, I don’t think the author has quite hit the nail on the head…

By the numbers, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s bid for president is foundering.

Support for her candidacy has hovered around 1 percent in national polling of Democrats.

Contributions to her campaign in its first three months totaled just under $3 million.

And viewers of her CNN town hall on April 9 numbered 491,000, rating worse than nine of the 10 forums before hers.

Hell, she’s struggling to stay in the middle tier. She also transferred $10 million from her 2018 senate campaign.

The Inslee strategy was to grow his numbers as Beto O’Rourke began to fade (which is already happening), move into the second tier with Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker, and eventually fight his way into the Final Four. But why isn’t he breaking into the second tier?

Three reasons. First, Inslee is a white, older, male with a wonderful wife and pedestrian liberal views. Yes, Bernie Sanders is an even older white married man, but he has been a socialist and an outsider for years. In short, he’s authentic, the real deal for people who want an outsider who will challenge the power structure in both political parties. In years past, Jay’s personal bio would have been reassuring. This year it’s boring.

Second, climate change is an important issue, but to help Jay Inslee it needs to be the issue. It guarantees media coverage, young volunteers and green money, but others are crowding his turf, preventing him from owning it outright. And there is an issue that is more important: being a genuine outsider. The three candidates with the most momentum, Bernie Sanders in Tier 1, Pete Buttigieg in Tier 2 and Andrew Yang in Tier 3 are completely outside the political vineyards, where Jay Inslee has been happily toiling for 30 years.

Rep. Seth Moulton announced Monday that he is running for president, vowing to engage young people and military veterans and becoming the third Massachusetts politician to throw a hat into the 2020 ring.

An Iraq veteran who led an unsuccessful effort to oust Nancy Pelosi from the House leadership last year, the 40-year-old Moulton has said he plans to run a campaign focused on national security and defense issues, which his campaign argues will make him a foil to President Donald Trump. Moulton was elected to Congress in 2014, after he upset former Democratic Rep. John Tierney in a primary fight. The Salem lawmaker is serving his third term.

“Engaging young people and military veterans” sounds less like a plan than a demographic excuse to run, as there won’t be enough of either voting in the primaries to secure the nomination. And “national security and defense issues” go over in the Democratic base about as well as tofu at a BBQ cookoff. He’s also securing office space and staffing up. Upgrade over Maybe.

I suspect that pronouncement is premature. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)