Over this past week, former Democrat-turned Republican-turned Independent-turned Democrat New York City Mayor, Media Mogul, and actual Multi-Billionaire Michael Bloomberg filed paperwork to run in the Alabama Democratic Presidential Primary.

At this point, Mayor Bloomberg has not officially announced that he is running for President.  It was just necessary to file to be on the Alabama ballot to keep his options open.  With a deadline of Friday, Mayor Bloomberg has not yet filed for the New Hampshire primary.  (He is not alone.  Of the candidates who have qualified for the November debate, Cory Booker and Tom Steyer have not yet filed for the New Hampshire primary.   Likewise, Julian Castro — who has met the donor threshold for the November debate but seems unlikely to meet the polling threshold — also has not yet filed for the New Hampshire primary.)  But let’s assume that he (or somebody else who missed the deadline for Alabama) might still get into the race.  Is it too late for somebody new to get in the race.

By requiring that every state allocate delegates proportionately, the Democratic rules theoretically make it possible that nobody will win a majority of delegates to the Democratic convention allowing those delegates to revert back to the days in which the convention actually had to choose between several candidates.  In those days, winning key primaries was a factor in that decision.  So it was not necessary to enter the race early and compete in all primaries.

However, despite the possibility that multiple candidates could stick around through the entire primary season resulting in a deadlocked convention,  the experience of both parties in the modern primary system has been that the expensive nature of the campaign forces candidates who are not winning a substantial number of delegates to suspend their campaign, narrowing down the field to one or two candidates with one candidate ultimately emerging as the clear winner.  (The closest that the process has come to an inconclusive result was 2008 when President Obama had a narrow lead, but not a majority, among “pledged” delegates and the unpledged delegates — who will not get to vote on the first ballot in 2020 — put President Obama over the top on the first ballot.)

Additionally, there has been some “momentum” generated by the early primaries.  Candidates who overperform in Iowa have seen a surge of support in New Hampshire and later states.  Candidates who underperform in Iowa tend to lose votes.  (This trend is not absolute.  And some candidates do bounce back in New Hampshire.)

So if it is no longer possible to win the nomination as a “white knight” candidate swooping in at the convention to save the day, how late is too late to get into the race.  Of course, with only eighteen “contested” races (counting all primaries starting in 1976 other than the Republican races in 1984 and 2004 and the Democratic races in 1996 and 2012), any conclusions are risky.  But the latest that any candidate has entered since 1976 and still won was Bill Clinton in the 1992 race.  President Clinton did not get form his “exploratory committee” for his 1992 run  until August 1991.  And even that late start may be a product of the first Iraq war which effectively froze things for several months (first with the actual war in January and February 1991 and then as potential candidates weighed whether the bump in the president’s approval ratings in the aftermath represented an insurmountable barrier to a Democrat winning in 1992).   Candidates who waited until September and October have tended to fall short.  Most successful candidates have started their campaigns between the December after the mid-term election and the following April.  And the ones who waited until April had run before and merely had to reactivate prior campaign organizations.

And that reflects the nature of the early states.  Especially in caucus states like Iowa and Nevada, an effective campaign organization requires more than a state headquarters with a team of volunteers canvassing key precincts in an effort to get out the vote on election day.  In a caucus, voters who supported a candidate who fails to get enough support on the first round of voting are allowed to switch to other candidates.  The best campaign organizations are those that have successfully identified individuals in each precinct who are ready and prepared to convince the supporters of unsuccessful candidates to switch to their candidate on the second round of voting.  (The rules this time around in Iowa and Nevada are slightly more favorable to the candidates that get 15% on the first round and make it harder for a candidate who falls short on the first round to get to 15%; so it is hard to determine if these precinct representative will matter as much in 2020 as they have in the past.)  And building that type of campaign organization that has good representatives in most people takes time.   And the first four states are small enough that voters expect to have a chance to meet the candidates.  A late starting candidate has to rely more on mass media.  And, while a candidate like Mayor Bloomberg has the resources to run a mass media campaign, that may not be enough to make him competitive in the early states.

Is it possible for a candidate to do poorly in the early states and still win?  Again, in theory, it is possible.  But on the Democratic side, only Bill Clinton in 1992 failed to get to 15% in Iowa and win the nomination.  (And in 1992, Iowa Senator Tom Harkin was running and got 76% of the vote in Iowa.)   And no candidate has won without finishing in the top two in New Hampshire in either party under the modern nomination system.   In 1976, a handful of Democratic candidates opted to skip the early races.  While these candidates had decent results, the outcome of the 1976 primaries made clear that the primaries would be determining the winner and that — to win — you could not enter the race after half of the delegates were chosen.  Since then, the only example of a candidate “intentionally” skipping the first four states was Rudy Giuliani in 2008 who — after deciding to skip Iowa and New Hampshire and pursue Florida instead — only finished a distant third in Florida.

Now Mayor Bloomberg is an experienced politician and has been thinking about running for a long time.   It is unlikely that he has stuck his toe into these waters without doing some preliminary polling.  He may have money to burn, but that does not mean that he is going to simply throw it away.  Given that Mayor Bloomberg seems likely to be taking a fiscally conservative and socially liberal stance on issues, it seems like he is likely to be competing for voters who are currently supporting Vice-President Biden.  And the current polling average places Vice-President Biden in fourth in Iowa and a three-way tie for first in New Hampshire.  Mayor Bloomberg seems to be one of several candidates that seem to be thinking that, if Vice-President Biden barely beats 15% in Iowa and New Hampshire (or falls below that threshold in either state), then Vice-Presidents support will crater.  And, as that represents close to 30% of the vote nationally, a candidate who can unify that support behind himself/herself will be competitive going forward.

The problem with this theory, however, is the Democratic debate rules.  It is already too late for Mayor Bloomberg to make the November debates.  The deadline for qualifying for the debate is Wednesday, and most polls that will be released today or tomorrow would have been in the field before Mayor Bloomberg announced that he would be filing the paperwork for the Alabama primary.   For Mayor Bloomberg to get even one qualifying poll, a polling organization would have had to scrap the poll that was already in the field and put out a new one that included Mayor Bloomberg.  Now, the possibility of making the December debate is a little bit better, but it will still require hitting 4% in at least four polls.  And having heard the candidates debating for five months now, I have trouble seeing how there is room for a new voice at the table.

Which is ultimately the bottom line here.  While, in theory, a candidate could get the nomination without actually running, I have trouble seeing the delegates going for a candidate who has not been in the race.  And, while a candidate can wait until the last second to file (as Mayor Bloomberg has done), the rules for the debates favor a candidate who got into the race early.  Given his personal financial resources, Mayor Bloomberg may be the exception to the rule, but for almost anybody else November is too late to get into the race.