Historically, the main role played by the Iowa Caucuses and the New Hampshire Primary is to narrow the field. While, for different reasons, they are not necessarily representative of what it takes to win the nomination or the general election, they are both small enough that even candidates not well-known to the general public have a chance to make their case to the voters. (Of course, for all of its flaws, the party-sponsored debates are eliminating some of that aspect of Iowa and New Hampshire.) And candidates who fail to show any signs of life in these two states tend to lose their supporters (both financially and vote-wise) who begin to look for somebody who has a chance at making it to the convention.
This year seems like it might be a bit different than in the past. In part due to the chaos that was Iowa, nobody dropped out after Iowa. Last night, when it was clear that the results were not going to be there for them, Senator Michael Bennet and Andrew Yang announced that they had reached the end of the road. And Governor Deval Patrick is apparently taking time to consider if he still has a path forward. Bu that seems to be the extent of the winnowing that we will see for now.
With the possible exception of Representative Tulsi Gabbard, the remaining candidates each seem to think that they have a path forward that, at least, justifies staying in the race a little bit longer. Both Vice-President Joe Biden and Tom Steyer have invested heavily in South Carolina. Biden still leads the polls in South Carolina and Steyer is either second or third depending upon which poll you credit. If they can hold onto that support, South Carolina would breathe new life into their campaign. As the last remaining person of color in the race, Governor Deval Patrick apparently hopes that he can become the second choice of South Carolina voters in Biden’s support collapses.
Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Senator Amy Kobluchar, on the other hand, have good reason to believe that they are the logical contenders for the voters that were previously planning to vote for Biden. Both are ahead of Biden in the delegate count after New Hampshire and appeal to the vague center-left moderate wing of the party. If they could convince minority voters to support them, they could win the nomination.
Senator Elizabeth Warren’s path forward is mostly as the last person standing in the race. Simply put, many in the Democratic Party are going to be reluctant to unify behind Senator Bernie Sanders. If the progressive wing of the party is doing well enough in the primary, that the “establishment” has to make its peace with a progressive nominee, Senator Warren is viewed as more acceptable to other Democrats than Sanders is.
Finally, there is Mayor Michael Bloomberg. His path in this race has been to ignore the early states and spend money in the big Super Tuesday states to be ready in case Biden collapses. Current polling seems to show that he is succeeding in that strategy, steadily gaining nationally as Biden’s support seems to be drifting away.
What does this mean for the nomination? Right now, it looks like at least four or five candidates will have some degree of viability heading into Super Tuesday. In most of the recent cycles, there were, at most, two candidates that emerged from Super Tuesday with the lion’s share of the delegates. And one of the two candidates who survived Super Tuesday was able to quickly gain (and then hold onto) the lead in pledged delegates with the superdelegates eventually falling in line behind that candidate to allow that candidate to win on the first ballot.
This race, however, is beginning to look a little like 1988. For those too young to remember 1988, three candidates emerged as contenders from that early version of Super Tuesday (which was a little bit smaller than the current Super Tuesday) — Governor Michael Dukakis, then-Senator Al Gore, and Reverend Jesse Jackson. However, the rules differed back then, and Governor Dukakis was able to pull away with wins in the mid-Atlantic primaries. I am not sure that you could get the same results today. (A lot of the media coverage stating that moderates need to unify around one candidate — while tactically sound — really gets how the Democratic primary works with proportional representation.) Maybe by Super Tuesday or, at worst, New York and Pennsylvania, things will clear up. But the odds of a contested convention are increasing.
One last point, assuming that Patrick drops out — either now or after South Carolina — there will be no remaining persons of color in the race. Notwithstanding that, whoever remains in the field will still be different from the typical president. If you were to paint a picture of the people who have served as president, the typical president has been a white male, at least nominally Protestant, married with no divorces, at least nominally heterosexual, and with experience in a significant government position (U.S. Representative, U.S. Senator, Governor, Cabinet-member, or general). You can find a handful of exceptions to these characteristics (one non-white male, one non-Protestant, two divorcees, a handful of widowers, one never married, some suspected homosexuals in the closet and one disaster with no governmental experience), but the general tendency remains. Nobody left in the Democratic field checks all of these boxes. Assuming that one of the current leading candidates win the nomination, we will make history in November — either with the first woman president, the first openly gay president, the first Jewish president, or the second Catholic president.
