As the 2020 election season looms, we are reminded of two things.
First, we will vote for president in 12 months. Second, the Democrats will have to put together a ticket at their convention in Milwaukee.
How do they go home happy after their convention? They won’t. This is a party with a “coalition too big” to get anything done, as Damon Linker wrote:
It sounds like a joke — a political version of the old Yogi Berra one-liner about a local restaurant: “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.” Yet however paradoxical, the statement about the Democrats may nonetheless be true.The party could well be too capacious to coalesce around any single candidate with sufficient intensity to take down President Trump.The Democratic electorate is extremely broad in ideological terms.During the last presidential cycle, a lifelong socialist independent who joined the Democrats only to compete for the party’s nomination managed to come in a strong second place to a center-left candidate fully supported by the Democratic establishment.Four years later, a billionaire who’s most accurately described as a liberal Republican is attracting modest but significant support among a very different kind of Democrat before he’s even officially joined the race.The distance separating Bernie Sanders from Michael Bloomberg is impossibly vast. Yet those are the ideological boundaries of the Democratic Party in 2019.
Again, how do you put a ticket together with all of these factions?
Let’s assume that former VP Joe Biden makes it to Milwaukee. Who will the convention force on the ticket as vice president? What happens when nominee Biden moves to the center to attract voters between the coasts?
Let’s assume that Senator Elizabeth Warren or Senator Bernie Sanders get the nomination. Where do they go to put someone on the ticket?
Let’s assume that Harold Bloomberg makes it. How many will walk out during his acceptance speech?
This is a train wreck coming. This is a party that is together on one thing — they hate Trump. It gets a lot more complicated when they have to make proposals or explain how they are going to pay for them.
A coalition too big? Yes — too big to survive.
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