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Originally Posted by davidm
The only candidates who jazz me at this point are Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, and the latter has not even announced, though I recently read that his announcement is imminent. Of course, if he does enter the race, he will split the progressive vote with Warren
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I don't think those two are the only ones who appeal to progressives, but either way... in a 10+ candidate field, if having two candidates splits your faction too much, you didn't have a large enough faction to win in the first place.
How will Warren and Sanders split the vote too much, but all the "Clintonesque" candidates like Gillibrand, Booker, Harris, Castro, Brown, Biden and Bloomberg splitting the "centrist" vote will come out on top?
Also... the Democratic nomination doesn't work by plurality voting in the first place. It's not winner-take-all. Delegates are assigned approximately* proportionately. If Warren and Sanders go to the convention, they will both have delegates and will be able to combine them on the second ballot, so if they have a majority combined and are able to agree, one of them will probably be able to get the nomination.
*A notable deviation from this is that candidates that get less than 15% in a delegate-assigning district** won't qualify for any delegates. I don't know what happens if no candidate breaks 15%, and too much splitting the vote could result in only one candidate breaking 15% and thus getting all of them, maybe? But if Warren and Sanders are the only ones splitting the progressive vote, and I assume you think that's at least close to 50%, they shouldn't have to worry about that.
**In most states, there are two statewide delegate categories, and then each congressional district has delegates. Each grouping is proportional to how Democratic the constituency is, so that overwhelmingly Democratic DC, for example, gets significantly more delegates than GOP stronghold Wyoming.
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Then there is Joe Biden. I hate to say it, but as of right now, anyway, ol’ Joe, warts and all (mostly warts), may be the Dems’ best bet.
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I'm hoping that's just about name recognition and the others will improve when people learn more about them. I really don't want Biden, and one thing that cartoon is definitely right about is that he has creepy boundary-violating behavior that you can just imagine causing a huge headache if he's the nominee.
Unfortunately, I think that Biden and Sanders's numbers are probably more inflated than the other candidates' are deflated. They haven't had to sustain a really negative campaign against them, and there's no way they're getting out of the huge field of candidates without their negatives coming up (and of course, the GOP and the "liberal" media will dig more into them if they get the nomination).
But Trump's approval numbers are quite bad, and he has
not handled the transition to Speaker Pelosi well. I am cautiously optimistic.