| Okay, I was wrong. Earlier this year, I guessed repeatedly that the Democratic presidential field would get winnowed quite a bit at the formal announcement stage of the contest. I estimated that fewer than 15 major candidates would remain at this point. Instead, depending on how we count them, there's more like 24.
So what happened?
Back in the winter, everything seemed to be going more or less as I expected. By my count, about 14 candidates had dropped out through the first week of March, a number that exceeded those who had formally announced. Since then, however, only one Democrat who had been doing candidate-like things has dropped out. Everyone else, including some who barely seemed active, wound up staying in. Not only that, but two candidates who I wasn't including in my original count, Andrew Yang and Marianne Williamson, now seem likely to qualify for the debates and therefore have moved into major-candidate status.
There was always going to be a large field in this cycle, given that there was no obvious front-runner and most Democrats think President Donald Trump is beatable. Those are two standard reasons that candidates choose to run.
But I suspect that new debate criteria set by the Democratic National Committee was also factor. Not only was the stage opened to 20 candidates, but the qualifying standards were set extremely low: Candidates had to reach either a very low polling threshold or get 65,000 unique donors, metrics that are both objective and largely out of the hands of party actors. Usually, winnowing happens early on when candidates try and fail to win encouragement from party actors. This time, however, candidates can simply focus on reaching a qualifying goal rather than assessing the reaction they got from party officials or key politicians. Twitter: TicToc by Bloomberg on Twitter In fact, the new rules actually encouraged on-the-fence candidates to stick around for a while. After all, the DNC basically gave them a list-building challenge. Marginal candidates might well have decided that that alone was worth a formal run. Anyone who met or exceeded the donor threshold and then dropped out would've earned themselves a valuable resource in the meantime, not to mention increased national exposure, CNN Town Halls and a shot at a debate appearance. That's a lot of rewards for what may turn out to be very little effort by some of the candidates.
I'm not criticizing anyone for responding to those incentives. That's what politicians do. It just means that some marginal candidates may be making practical cost-benefit calculations rather than plausible assessments of their chances of winning. And I'm not saying the DNC made a mistake. After all, the whole party can benefit from list-building and even, to some extent, from a parade of reasonably solid Democrats making the case for themselves and against Trump.
But I'd argue that it's still premature to worry that winnowing won't work. If the next round of debates locks out several less promising contenders, then we may lose a batch of candidates fairly quickly. Even if everyone sticks around until Iowa, all those who don't meet the delegate thresholds will very likely drop out immediately or after similarly failing in New Hampshire.
Unless, of course, the DNC creates new incentives for candidates to keep staying in. I suspect they won't make that mistake.
1. At Mischiefs of Faction, an excellent conversation between Hans Noel and Seth Masket on electability. It's the best thing I've seen on the topic this cycle.
2. Dan Drezner with an overview of Trump's foreign policy so far. Brutal.
3. Jessica Chen Weiss at the Monkey Cage on how the trade war looks from inside China.
4. Kelly Dittmar is looking for Republican women in state legislatures.
5. Josh Putnam notes that we won't know the number of delegates needed to win the Democratic nomination for a long time.
6. Elaina Plott has a good one documenting how often people in the Trump administration ignore the president's directives. I'll emphasize, as I try to every time this comes up, that this happens to every president – but Trump's presidency appears to be off the scale in both how frequent and how public these episodes are.
7. Dan Larison on Trump's shock that he's surrounded by warmongers. "Trump is the president, but he is an exceptionally weak one who lets his appointees run amok at great risk to U.S. security and Trump's own political fortunes."
8. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague David Fickling on the coming demise of coal.
9. And also here at Bloomberg Opinion: Karl Smith on Alice Rivlin.
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