Are Dems already on a runaway train toward a wreck at their 2020 convention? | Will Bunch

In the future, the late great Andy Warhol once predicted, we will all be Democratic presidential candidates for 15 minutes. OK, so that’s not exactly what the pop artist and occasional prophet (apocryphally) predicted. But I was starting to think this after watching every prominent -- or at least prominent in their own heads -- Democrat who ever dreamed on a kindergarten playground that someday she or he might someday run for president decide that, by golly, 2020 is the year to actually do it.

With Donald Trump’s unpredictably dangerous presidency turning every week into an ominous political Shark Week, the Democrats’ 2020 campaign slogan has become: We’re gonna need a bigger boat.

On Friday, Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee became the 13th in-some-form-announced Democrat to throw his or her pink pussy hat into the ring to emerge as Trump’s challenger in the fall of 2020. As the governor of a medium-sized state with a reputation for innovative policy ideas: Inslee fits exactly into the model -- think Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton or even Michael Dukakis -- of the kind of candidate the Democrats routinely nominated in the era before the race for the White House became a TV reality show.

What’s more, Inslee is boldly staking a claim on an issue that many rank-and-file Democrats want to see front-and-center in 2020: Climate change. “We’re the first generation to feel the sting of climate change, and we’re the last that can do something about it,” Inslee said in calling for a moonshot approach to fighting global warming that echoes the Green New Deal being discussed on Capitol Hill.

Inslee’s ideas and his all-or-nothing laser focus on climate ring true for the existential moment we’re facing at the end of the 2010s, but his announcement made a sound like a falling pine tree deep in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest. With so many candidates vying for the chance to oust Trump 20 months from now, Inslee is just one more candidate in a race with a baker’s dozen of candidates seeking new political niches that barely existed before the Age of The Donald.

The climate candidate will have to struggle for oxygen against the robot candidate (businessman Andrew Yang, the most obscure candidate with the most interesting idea), the anti-militarism candidate (Rep. Tulsi Gabbard), and the anti-corruption candidate (Sen. Elizabeth Warren), not to mention historic-landmark candidates like former cabinet secretary Julian Castro (who’d be the first Latino president) and South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg (a two-fer, seeking to become the first millennial president and the first to be openly gay.)

But that’s nothing. In the past, the start of the presidential cycle was usually marked by big-name possible candidates loudly deciding NOT to run. There is no such filter in 2020. Any bigwig or semi-bigwig in the Democratic Party who has ever given half a thought to running for president ... is running for president. Stay tuned in the next few weeks for the candidate who would be the oldest president (ex-veep Joe Biden, but only if Bernie Sanders doesn’t beat him to it), the richest (Mike Bloomberg, who, unlike Current Occupant, is an actual billionaire) and potentially America’s first emo president (Beto O’Rourke.)

This, by the way, is in addition to the all but certain addition of other Democrats who probably couldn’t win another term in the job they now hold (most spectacularly, New York’s increasingly unpopular Mayor Bill de Blasio, but also Colorado’s fossil-fuel soaked Gov. John Hickenlooper) in the field that will probably max out at more than 20 candidates, which has already forced the Democratic National Committee and NBC News to spread June’s first debate over two nights.

Why is this happening? A lot of reasons, but two jump out. One is the rise of the small (think $27) political donor, an idea pioneered by Barack Obama in 2008 and perfected by Sanders in 2016 -- which has ended the so-called invisible primary in which a handful of billionaire donors and bloviating pundits could kill a candidacy before it started. The other is something that Democrats are loathe to admit -- the reality-show nature of 21st-century American politics that they themselves decry. In such a culture -- why, yes, the same one that gave us Trump -- there’s only one show that matters, The Race for the White House. About 98 percent of Americans will never be able to find Olympia on a map, but running for president gives someone like Inslee an uninterrupted 1-hour CNN town hall -- worth millions -- to espouse his view on climate change and build his brand.

But is that so terrible? No and yes. I do tend to believe -- and most of you will probably agree -- that voters should be winnowing down the field and not rich donors. And it can’t be bad for democracy to be hearing new ideas on coping with robots or greenhouse gases, or learning that a politician from Indiana can look and sound a lot different from Mike Pence.

But ... an emphasis on the power and glory of the modern American presidency -- and a lack of focus on the importance of thousands of lesser political offices -- is partly how Democrats got into their current mess during the Obama years. So the idea that someone like the charismatic but less experienced O’Rourke -- having listened to party insiders (including the Obama crowd) telling him it’s 2020 or bust if he ever wants to be POTUS -- has nixed a potentially winnable Texas Senate race to focus on the White House is very troubling. If their party doesn’t gain a handful of Senate seats next year, a Democratic president will be hopelessly deadlocked on matters like the Supreme Court, and Justice Ginsberg will have to keep lifting weights until she’s 106.

And that’s assuming that such a divided Democratic Party can even beat Donald Trump in November 2020. Stay with me for one moment while I risk exposing myself to peer ridicule, because I’m about to bring up the Great White Whale of post-World War II American politics: “The brokered convention.” The idea that a party could go into its convention (probably Milwaukee for the Dems in 2020, although they’ve yet to make it official) without a clear nominee gets bandied about every four years, and the more cycles it doesn’t happen, the sillier the notion of this political black swan has become.

I’m not 100 percent certain it won’t happen for the Dems in 2020, Here’s why.

For the last few decades, the battle for the Democratic fight usually comes down to a war of two factions. From the 1980s through the early 2000s, this usually played out as the working-class “lunchbucket” (and, later, “waitress mom”) candidate (like a Bill Clinton or Al Gore) besting the candidate of the Volvo-driving upscale suburban Democrats (Paul Tsongas, Bill Bradley) until Obama scrambled the recipe by adding nonwhites to the arugula crowd. In 2016, it became center (Hillary Clinton) v. left (Sanders) -- but, still, any two-person race is guaranteed to produce a first-ballot nominee.

For 2020, I see three factions among Democrats that look pretty strong and fairly equal:

-- The “Whoever Beats Trump” center-left Democrats. This is a large demographic -- it includes the bulk of Democrats who aren’t engaged in day-to-day politics (which in 2019 means people who aren’t screaming at each other on Twitter) and who tend to be more pragmatic. For now, anyway, this group probably includes the true base of the party that’s essential for getting nominated: Older black women. This bloc is the reason you see Biden -- the most experienced candidate in the likely field, the most centrist and the most pro-bipartisanship -- leading in almost every poll so far. If Biden fades -- like he did when he actually ran for president in 1988 and 2008 -- Sens. Amy Klobuchar and (maybe) Sherrod Brown will vie for these votes.

-- The young and ascendant left. There’s only two major candidates in this lane -- Sanders and Warren -- whose backers say American society needs radical change, including higher taxes on the wealthy and an end to their outsize influence on our politics, with new revenues to pay for free or reduced college, universal health care and other government programs to save the middle class. As the 2016 primaries showed, this group will fight for its cause and its candidate through the convention and beyond.

-- The #MeToo Resistance Democrats. Here’s the wild card of 2020 -- a bloc that didn’t really exist before the 2016 election of a gross misogynist in Trump and catalyzing events like the Women’s March and the birth of the #MeToo movement in the following year. The energy of radicalized women -- especially, if not exclusively, in predominantly white suburbs -- is what swept the Democrats into control of the House in 2018, and the tsunami won’t break before the presidential race. This is the lane in which Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and to some degree Kamala Harris drive, with Klobuchar veering in from the right lane and Warren weaving left.

The early dominance of Biden and Sanders -- two white men who happen to also be the oldest candidates and won’t light a fire under the #MeToo Resistance anytime soon (i.e., never) -- may fuel female voters to rally behind their candidate (I’d bet on Harris, but it’s early). A couple of things could then happen. Biden could fade -- that’s what he’s always done in the past -- and the pragmatic center merges with the Resistance behind a Harris or a Klobuchar to beat back Bernie. Or, you could see a giant train wreck on the Milwaukee Line. Never bet against the Democrats to throw open the wrong switch.

This is the scenario that Trump prays for every night when he finally clicks off the Fox News Channel, because it’s the only way that the short-fingered fraudster that Michael Cohen tried to warn us about last week can escape with a second term. In my lifetime, I’ve seen four Democratic conventions that -- while not brokered -- were marked by unresolved conflict and division: 1968 (the extreme case), 1972, 1980 and (to a lesser extent) 2016. Those confabs preceded Richard Nixon, Nixon again, Ronald Reagan, and Trump.

I know the history, but I’m not going to advise Democrats on how to avoid this because honestly I have no idea. All I know is that a second Trump term would weaken our democratic institutions, saddle our young people with an extremist Supreme Court for 30 to 40 years, and raise the risk of global war. Democrats, you have 16 months to work it out. Time’s yours.