Why You're Wrong About the Democratic Primary [View all]

[brooklynite]

Politico

Warren’s down! No, she’s back! O’Rourke is hot! No, he’s faltering! Biden is dead on arrival! No, he’s unstoppable! The 2020 Democratic presidential campaign already has the feel of a stock market, with TV pundits and Internet prediction experts monitoring the minute-by-minute movements on the big board.

There’s much to praise about all this attention. It provides gainful employment for hundreds, if not thousands, of campaign workers, journalists, pollsters and hotel, restaurant and car-rental employees. It offers leisure-time speculation for the millions of TV viewers searching for a successor to “Game of Thrones.” And in the pages and on the websites of our best journalistic enterprises, it even provides detailed, tough-minded looks at what the women and men in the race intend to do with the powers they seek.

Here’s what it does not do, though: tell us what will actually happen in 2020. If voters and the news media take that to heart, and focus our attention on the character and the intentions of the candidates instead of who’s winning eight months before anyone votes, the coverage—and the choosing—will be better for it.

And what the history of modern presidential nominating contests suggests about this moment is that the seemingly daily polling, and the “she’s-surging-he’s failing” stories, have all the staying power of sandcastles at high tide. The last half century of presidential primaries is a catalog of slow erosions of “insurmountable” leads, sudden shifts of the current, candidates left for dead who have revived and triumphed, front-runners hit with a blow from nowhere that recalibrated the certainties of a moment ago. If there’s a candidate you like in this race who you feel isn’t getting the attention she deserves, it’s far too early to fret. The history is varied enough to worry every one of the top-tier candidates, and provide comfort to most, or even all, of the rest. Even John Delaney. Here are a few lessons for the field.