2020 not so far away

Haley was critical of Trump during the election, and was a supporter of Florida senator and candidate Marco Rubio. When Rubio dropped out of the election, she then supported candidate Ted Cruz. When Trump became the Republican finalist, she said that she would vote for him, but was "not a fan".[104]

Since Haley became U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, multiple pundits have opined that she could become a possible Republican presidential candidate in the future[105][106] and could, in fact, win the White House.[107][108][109] Trump was said by his staff to be grooming her in October 2017 for a national political role, having many private meetings with her on Air Force One after she had befriended his daughter, Ivanka.[110]

Established party officials and political pundits might look forward to the day Haley throws her hat into the presidential ring, but most surely don’t think she should do it now. As Democratic leaders believed about Obama in 2008, Republican Party brass think Haley should wait her turn, because the party already has a popular figure at its helm who will be hard to beat in 2020—President Donald Trump. And while Haley has found ways to set herself apart from Trump—on Thursday she said in a speech “in America, our political opponents are not evil,” a break from Trump-style politics—she is, it appears, following their advice.

But back in 2008, Obama was smart enough to ignore party bosses. He understood that political landscapes change, sometimes by the day, the hour even—that he had a chance in 2008 that might not come again. The question is, is Haley smart enough to understand that? Is she smart enough to see that 2024, or 2032, if Trump wins reelection and Mike Pence is able to succeed him, is an eternity away in political time and that the opportunity she has now might not materialize in future?

And, is the Republican Party smart enough to see that Trump is more vulnerable than they think, and that Haley might be the GOP’s best chance to win in 2020?

Though you won’t hear this from pundits and political analysts who are still smarting from getting it wrong in 2016, Trump is highly unlikely to win a national presidential race in 2020. His chances aren’t zero, and whoever wins the Republican nomination two years from now has a chance to win. But his prospects for a second term are extremely dim. Four years ago, he ran against a candidate nearly as unpopular as he was. He had help from the Russian government. He was aided by an eleventh-hour intervention from then-FBI Director James Comey. Aggressive voter suppression efforts by Republicans also played a role in his victory. (Some version of each of those things might still be in place in 2020, but they are not nearly as rooted as they were in 2016.) And despite all of that support, he lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million and won the Electoral College because of a roughly 80,000-vote difference in three states. He’s unlikely to benefit again from a confluence of such events.

Things have gotten only tougher for Trump since he got into office. Democrats are energized in a way they weren’t in 2016. His poll numbers remain in the high 30s or low 40s, even with a historically low jobless rate. Trump is incredibly unpopular despite a strong economy. Econ 101 tells us that we are overdue for a recession. What if that materializes in the next two years? We should not forget that Robert Mueller is still quietly going about his work, the results of which reportedly might be revealed by the end of this year and alone could have a devastating effect on Trump’s 2020 plans.

Beating Trump—a sitting president—in a primary would much harder than defeating him in the general, of course. But a poll from analytics firm Applecart suggests he is more vulnerable even among Republicans than many think. The same poll also found that Haley is the most popular among GOP challengers and would have a real shot if she declared her intentions to run.

Republicans should be jumping at that chance. Let’s be frank. Haley is a highly-qualified woman and a member of a minority group who shattered the glass ceiling and destroyed racial barriers in a Deep South state to become governor of South Carolina. She is also far more conservative than Trump. That combination of attributes should be extremely appealing to a party that knows, despite its current hold on power, its base is shrinking by the year. The party knows that in order to avoid becoming a regional party a couple of decades from now, it must make a choice: Either keep trying to subvert the democratic process by implementing voter-ID and other laws designed to curtail the Democratic vote—which will be harder to do once Democrats begin retaking power in Washington and numerous state capitals during the midterm elections, not to mention as the American electorate continues to change—or make itself seem more inviting to minority voters. Those paying close attention know Trump is more Jesse Ventura than Ronald Reagan—a shock to the system, not a transformative figure—and that his brand of racist, white nationalistic, angry politics has a short shelf life.

I know the GOP knows this, even if it doesn’t want to admit it publicly. South Carolina officials told me the reason no top Republicans dared challenge Tim Scott in his run for U.S. senate in 2014—after Haley had appointed him to the seat in 2012—was because it would have “been unseemly” to have challenged a popular Republican vying to become the first black man elected to the Senate from the Deep South since Reconstruction. I got the same message from several of my white conservative readers, who in one breath said identity politics was awful but in the next emphasized how proud they were to vote for a conservative black man. Though they loudly protested and claimed otherwise, they were desperate to get out from under the cloud and charges of racism that has dogged Republicans in the South for decades, and voting for Scott was one way they believed they could do this.

That same dynamic is at play in the era of Trump—maybe even more so. Concern with party diversity was one of the reasons the all-male GOP caucus in the Senate Judiciary Committee hired a woman to question Christine Blasey Ford during Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s contentious confirmation hearing, and why some Republicans are now touting that Kavanaugh, who was credibly accused of sexual assault, has the first all-female clerk team in the court’s history, including a black woman. And the top conservative political pundits and analysts, who have spent years complaining about so-called identity politics on the left, had no problem with any of this. Not only that, Trump himself has been accused of sexual misconduct by nearly two dozen women and was recorded bragging about casually sexually assaulting women. His record of racism and open bigotry is so deep and long and disturbing, most black voters automatically become suspicious of any black person who cozies up to Trump, if not hold them in outright contempt, no matter their black bona fides. Ask Kanye West and the presidents of historically black Colleges and universities if you doubt this.

Publicly, Republicans repeatedly claim that none of this matters because Democrats are supposedly worse. They point to how Democrats defended Bill Clinton 20 years ago, not just of an illicit affair with a young intern in the White House, but also turned a blind eye to charges of sexual harassment and rape. But privately, Republicans know their record sends an awful message, one that might have worked to their advantage these past two years but that can’t last forever.

I’m a black guy who used to vote for Republicans as easily as I did for Democrats. When I saw the GOP become more extreme and increasingly OK with open bigotry and racism, I vowed not to consider another Republican candidate for the foreseeable future, if ever again. Haley would force me to at least reconsider. That’s how desperate I—and many others—are to move beyond Trump.

On his travels this fall, Patrick had sought out candidates campaigning in districts “where Democrats had not been competitive in a long time and were running at the grassroots level,” he told me. He saw this as an electoral opportunity for his party and as a reflection of the values he’s tried to espouse in his political career, which has so far consisted only of his two successful races for governor. “I think there is real power when you show up, when you respect people enough to ask for their votes,” he said. Several of the congressional candidates, such as Joe Cunningham, in South Carolina, Lauren Underwood, in Illinois, and Colin Allred, in Texas, came through with upset victories.

“On the downside,” Patrick went on, “there was no political price paid for overt racist appeals, in Florida, in Georgia, to a certain extent in Texas.” Ron DeSantis, who won the governorship in Florida, had said on Fox News that the state should not “monkey this up” by electing Andrew Gillum, a black progressive; in both Florida and Georgia, voters received racist robocalls. “We are a great nation because we are good,” Patrick said. “We are a nation that, by design, is supposed to have a conscience. We can either embrace that or not, and that’s the right frame for the policy questions we face. There are many ways in which the other party chooses outcomes that are cruel and unfair. But we have to make choices that reflect goodness—but that doesn’t mean soft. It means firm, rule-of-law-based choices for opportunity and fair play.”

Patrick has no illusions about the difficulty he will have distinguishing himself from the crowd. As governor from 2007 to 2015, he was little known outside New England, and he hasn’t spoken much in public since. Compared with Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren, he is practically a nobody. He is African-American, but so are Senators Cory Booker, of New Jersey, and Kamala Harris, of California. In 2020, Steve Bullock, of Montana, John Hickenlooper, of Colorado, and Terry McAuliffe, of Virginia—all possible candidates—will, like Patrick, be former governors. Patrick is a businessman, but so are Michael Bloomberg (Bloomberg L.P.), Howard Schultz (Starbucks), and Tom Steyer (venture capital in San Francisco). Even within his own state, he is one of five potential candidates, along with Warren, John Kerry, and Representatives Joe Kennedy III and Seth Moulton.

Still, Patrick would enter the race with one significant distinction: he is a kind of political heir to Barack Obama, and enjoys broad support from people close to the former President. Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s former senior adviser and still a close friend, told me, “Deval would make an outstanding President. He’d make a terrific candidate.” She added, “President Obama and Deval are very much alike in terms of their core values, what drove them into public service, their willingness to lend a hand, the responsibility to give back. I think they share a basic philosophy about what it means to be a good citizen.” Obama and Patrick also have in common roots in Chicago, Ivy League educations, and complicated relationships with largely absent fathers (which both men have chronicled in memoirs that feature youthful pilgrimages to Africa). They espouse a politics of unapologetic idealism, with a largely moderate, center-left orientation. On the stump, both are part teacher and part preacher. “Deval is a very genuine person, a very empathetic person,” David Axelrod, who has been a strategist for Patrick as well as for Obama, told me. “He is a guy who makes people feel comfortable. He’s very principled, you can see that—just like Obama.”

Fresh off reelection, Sen. Sherrod Brown said Monday that he is weighing a presidential bid, potentially joining what is expected to be a large field of Democrats seeking to topple President Trump in 2020.

Brown (Ohio), who won reelection to the Senate last week, said in an interview that the message that resonated in his Midwestern state during his campaign can help Democrats win back the White House.

“I hope people running for president hear this message about the dignity of work and start talking more this way,” Brown said. “The way we’ve done it serves as a blueprint in 2020. I don’t want the 2020 election to be the Democrats winning the popular vote by 4 million votes this time and lose the presidency because they can’t win my region.”

Brown, whose plans were first reported by Cleveland.com, ran his Senate campaign espousing liberal positions but still won reelection in a state that Trump carried by nearly eight percentage points in 2016. The senator’s staff Monday highlighted that he wears suits made 10 miles from his home in Cleveland, drives a Jeep Cherokee made in Toledo and rather than wearing a Senate pin on his lapel, wears a canary pin given to him by an Ohio steelworker.

Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., has started consulting with two top Iowa presidential campaign strategists who worked for Hillary Clinton and former President Barack Obama as he contemplates a run for the White House in 2020.

These early conversations with top-tier consultants in Iowa, where the major parties hold their first contests of the presidential election season, are the latest signs Booker could be preparing to launch a campaign.

Booker has held discussions with Matt Paul, who led Clinton's victorious Iowa Caucuses operation in 2016, according to three people with direct knowledge of the matter.

For some Warren allies and progressive groups, Ms. Warren’s standing by the DNA test amounts to profoundly poor judgment. Some said she was too reactive to Mr. Trump’s attacks — tests results would never silence a president who often disregards facts, they said — and created a distraction from her own trademark message of economic populism. The president revels in repeatedly slurring Ms. Warren as “Pocahontas,” and conservative commentators like Howie Carr of the Boston Herald have enjoyed holding the DNA issue over the senator’s head.

“The biggest risk in engaging a bully is that bullies don’t usually stop, regardless of what the truth is,” said Charles Chamberlain, executive director for the progressive political group Democracy for America. Mr. Chamberlain’s group had, in 2014, launched a “Run Warren Run” campaign to encourage her to seek the 2016 presidential nomination.

“When you can’t win an argument,” he added, “then sometimes it’s not worth having that argument.”

Ms. Warren’s allies also say she unintentionally made a bigger mistake in treading too far into the fraught area of racial science — a field that has, at times, been used to justify the subjugation of racial minorities and Native Americans.

Native American critics, including Kim TallBear, a prominent scholar from the University of Alberta, said in October that Ms. Warren’s actions relied on “settler-colonial” definitions of who is an indigenous American and amounted to a haughty refusal to hear out her longstanding critics.

Three people close to senior members of Ms. Warren’s team, who were granted anonymity to speak freely on the issue, said they were “shocked” and “rattled” by the senator’s decision to take the DNA test, which they described as an unequivocal misstep that could have lasting consequences, even on 2020 staffing. One former adviser, who also asked not to be named, called it a “strategic failure” that was “depressing and unforgettable.”

More than two dozen women and men who worked on Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign are seeking a meeting with the senator and his top political advisers to “discuss the issue of sexual violence and harassment on the 2016 campaign, for the purpose of planning to mitigate the issue in the upcoming presidential cycle,” according to a copy of letter obtained by POLITICO.

“In recent weeks there has been an ongoing conversation on social media, in texts, and in person, about the untenable and dangerous dynamic that developed during our campaign,” they wrote.

Several people who signed the letter said that their effort is not just about Sanders’ 2016 or 2020 presidential campaigns, but rather about what they called a pervasive culture of toxic masculinity in the campaign world. They stressed that they hoped their letter would not be reduced to reinforcing the “Bernie Bro” caricature, but rather would be one part of a larger reckoning among people running campaigns.

“This letter is just a start,” said one of the organizers who declined to be named. “We are addressing what happened on the Bernie campaign but as people that work in this space we see that all campaigns are extremely dangerous to women and marginalized people and we are attempting to fix that.”

People involved in the effort said they signed the letter before Sanders (I-Vt.) officially launched a 2020 presidential bid in the hopes that it would lead to real action if and when the senator begins assembling his team. Organizers wrote they wanted the meeting to produce a plan for “implementing concrete sexual harassment policies and procedures; and a commitment to hiring diverse leadership to pre-empt the possibility of replicating the predatory culture from the first presidential campaign.”

Before any Democrats can get to Trump, though, they’ll have to get through the “Why not me?” primary—the next 14 months of scramble and mania, set against a primary-calendar shake-up that for the first time has delegate-heavy California and Texas both voting at the beginning of March, which will make it so candidates have to campaign for those millions of much more diverse votes in order to have a chance of locking up the nomination. The only thing that’s clear so far: The early polls being circulated will likely have as much relevance to the outcome of the race as learning Mandarin does to visiting Algeria.

Within weeks from now, the 2020 Democratic-primary race will be at full force. Here are 10 factors that will define it—and make it unlike any that have come before.

Democrats are desperate for a candidate who can take on Trump. They can try to parse tactical advantages and demographics to decide who that is, but the easiest way is to imagine them in a debate together. And the easiest way to imagine them is to see how the Democratic candidates themselves debate.

Luckily for them, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) last week announced that there will be 12 official primary debates. Each will mix front-runners with back-runners, attempting to put anyone who meets a basic set of qualifying criteria on equal footing.

All political debates are performance art, but multicandidate primary debates are the most unpredictable kind. The format is built for unexpected breakouts and flops, especially in a field of candidates who will start out almost completely unknown.

They won’t have to wait long to begin their arguing: The DNC schedule has the first two debates set for June and July, fewer than 200 days away.