| Senator Elizabeth Warren has been having something of a rebound in the Democratic presidential campaign. It's a good reminder of the odd ways in which competition over public policy can affect the nomination process.
Warren has grabbed a fair amount of attention by rolling out idea after idea. She's running on the slogan that she "has a plan" for just about everything. From a political perspective, this is useful: It helps her generate press attention when she debuts new proposals, and it brings an easily identifiable theme to the campaign. It may also give her the one thing that every candidate is looking for: The ability to stand out from the crowd.
But are Warren's proposals any good? Do the policy details actually matter? That turns out to be a complicated question. Broadly, there are three ways to approach the issue. On one level, you could argue that the details are almost irrelevant. The truth is that most Democratic voters are going to like almost all the Democratic candidates once they get to know them. And most voters aren't policy specialists: They don't have time to delve into lengthy proposals on climate or education or health care or military reform or immigration or trade, much less sort out the details of all those topics at once. In fact, they usually don't care that much about policies in general, beyond one or two issues they may follow closely.
On another level, though, all those proposals can have a significant impact on the campaign. Policy specialists, including governing professionals and party-aligned interest groups, care very much about the details of Warren's plans. And satisfying those experts matters: If a candidate's proposals are junk, then she won't generate the kind of buzz she needs within the party. She'll only get the reputation she wants if her proposals hold water, even though very few voters will care much about them. If the party is working correctly, then, this acts as a sort of quality-control mechanism that can affect the overall race.
From a third perspective, finally, policy choices could matter more than the candidates themselves do. One way to view the choices that Warren and the other contenders make when they roll out their proposals is as part of the ongoing competition within the party to define its preferences and priorities. Sometimes, that will produce two or three very different policy proposals from the campaigns; sometimes, if the party has reached a consensus, the candidates may float identical or closely overlapping ideas.
The main point is that the content of policy proposals can be irrelevant to voters and the whole point of what's happening in the campaign – all at the same time.
1. Julia Azari on the terrible decision by President Barack Obama to have only digital archives at his presidential "library."
2. Elizabeth Popp Berman at the Monkey Cage on Arthur Laffer's Presidential Medal of Freedom.
3. Catherine Rampell on President Donald Trump's new Mexico tariffs.
4. Heather Hurlburt on Trump and the possibility of war by accident.
5. Alyssa Rosenberg on "woke" corporations.
6. And my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Francis Wilkinson argues that Democrats "should methodically highlight the truth of Trump's ethical and policy failures, day after day, in hearings, reports, news conferences and events in Washington and around the country. And then they must get up each succeeding day and do it all over again." Yup. House Democrats have been slow to illustrate examples of Trump's malfeasance, including the special counsel's report, in a systematic way. They need to do better.
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