The Democratic Presidential field became, last week, a game of twenty questions, the latest being: Joe Biden? The former Vice-President finally joined the race on Thursday, with a three-and-a-half-minute video that was much less about him than about Donald Trump’s apologia for white supremacists in Charlottesville. Perhaps Biden figured that voters already know his story. That’s not a luxury shared by the nineteen other candidates, who range alphabetically from Senator Cory Booker, of New Jersey, to Andrew Yang, a tech entrepreneur—or, by first names, from Senator Amy Klobuchar, of Minnesota, to Mayor Wayne Messam, of Miramar, Florida—and, by age, from Mayor Pete Buttigieg, of South Bend, Indiana, who is thirty-seven, to Senator Bernie Sanders, of Vermont, who is forty years older.
The shorthand questions (John Hickenlooper? Eric Swalwell?) are already giving way to deeper inquiry. Did Biden miss his moment four years ago, or in 1991, when he failed to stand up for Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas hearings? (Last week, Biden called her to express his regret; she was not convinced.) Did Sanders go too far in seizing his moment from Hillary Clinton? Is Buttigieg the new Beto O’Rourke, or the new Booker? Are you following Chasten Buttigieg, the candidate’s husband, on Twitter yet? Why, some would ask, keep talking about the men?
There are, after all, six women running. Four are senators: Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, Kamala Harris, of California, and Kirsten Gillibrand, of New York. They are joined by Representative Tulsi Gabbard, of Hawaii, and Marianne Williamson, who has never held elected office but has written best-selling books offering spiritual advice, and is close to Oprah. Williamson is running against American “dysfunction.” (And why not?) There are also candidates who are African-American (Booker, Harris, and Messam); Latino (Julián Castro, a former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development); Asian-American (Yang, who argues that a universal basic income is crucial to redressing the displacement of the working class by automation); Pacific Islander (Gabbard); and South Asian-American (Harris, whose mother is from India). Three—Buttigieg, Gabbard, and Representative Seth Moulton, of Massachusetts—are veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And, at an event in Des Moines, when an audience member asked Buttigieg what to tell acquaintances who doubted whether America was ready to elect a gay man, he said, “Tell your friends I say ‘Hi.’ ”
Polls show that Democrats want someone who is “electable,” but there is little agreement about what that term means, and also a justified impatience with its use as a euphemism for demographic blandness. Last week, the group She the People sponsored a forum, in Texas, at which several candidates were asked why, given the richness of the choices, women of color should vote for them. For a lot of Democrats, particularly in the Party’s activist wing, this is a central question, for reasons of both justice and practicality; in many states, African-American and Latina women are the Party’s electoral bedrock.
In response, Sanders and Warren made impassioned remarks about the racial dimension of economic inequality. But Sanders, who is polling only slightly behind Biden in surveys of likely primary voters, at about twenty-three per cent, was booed, while Warren, who is at just above six per cent, was cheered—a reminder that, at this stage, neither polls nor viral YouTube moments are reliable. Harris talked about her “mentorship of young women of color.” O’Rourke, an El Paso native, said that he had been talking backstage to Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, of Houston, who was “a mentor to me.” The real test, though, might be how well he listens when the woman doing the talking is not backstage but onstage, competing with him in the debates, which is where the contest will begin in earnest.
As it happens, twenty is the cap that the Democratic National Committee has set for the number of participants in the official debates, the first of which will play out in Florida, a swing state, over two nights in June. (The second will be a month later, in Michigan.) There is a formula to qualify: candidates must either have the support of at least one per cent of respondents in three recognized polls or have received contributions from sixty-five thousand “unique donors,” with at least two hundred in each of twenty states. (Sixteen candidates are already there, including John Delaney, a former congressman from Maryland, and Tim Ryan, a current one from Ohio.) The candidates will be randomly assigned to appear on one of the two nights, meaning that fan favorites may not be onstage together.
How the candidates interact will be a measure not only of their capacity for respect but of their instinct for victory. Will they refrain from demagoguery? How tough, or how cheap, will the shots be? (The goal is to defeat Trumpism, too.) How will the candidates respond when—as will almost certainly be the case—someone’s campaign is hacked, or a “deep fake” video of an opponent emerges, or their allies set up deceptive Facebook pages? One risk, in a heavily contested primary, is that momentous questions, such as whether to impeach Trump, or to abolish ICE, will be reduced to a litmus test—a matter of hands raised on a stage. Another, as Barack Obama recently warned, is that “a circular firing squad” will form, leaving the Party fractured. But a search for the safe haven of an early consensus pick may not serve the Party well, either; arguably, it didn’t in 2016.
A sensible approach for undecided Democrats, then, is what might be called radical agnosticism. The truth is that no one yet knows who can beat nineteen other Democrats—and Trump. In this varied field, there is a heightened possibility for surprises or breakouts. (If Governor Jay Inslee, of Washington, answers every debate question with a call to focus on climate change, will people drift away or be exhilarated?) Preëmptive dismissals of one candidate or another as a spoiler, or an impostor, or too young or too old, or too staid or too outré, or just a big drag are not likely to be helpful.
Those who want to see the current President defeated might, in other words, stop worrying and learn to love this twenty-person mob. Some of them may be maddening; none of them is Donald Trump. On Thursday, he tweeted, “Welcome to the race Sleepy Joe,” with a prediction that the primaries would be “nasty,” and involve “people who truly have some very sick & demented ideas. But if you make it, I will see you at the Starting Gate!” One of them will. And it may not be the candidate Trump, or anyone else, expects.
