| At least a dozen Democratic presidential candidates have plausible paths to the nomination. Maybe more than that. And after the 2016 election, I'm not counting anyone out. That said: I think it's starting to sink in that Senator Bernie Sanders is right at the fringes of plausibility. At best.
That's what I'm seeing from the mainstream media, some liberal bloggers and sophisticated polling analysis. Recent Iowa polls show Sanders at about 15%, essentially in a three-person race for second place with Senator Elizabeth Warren and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg. That's for a candidate who won half the vote there in 2016.
And while Sanders is faring somewhat better nationally, that's mainly because almost all the other candidates remain unknown to voters. As Nate Silver points out, only about 8% of Democrats say they're definitely supporting Sanders. In other words, it's entirely plausible that Sanders could fail to reach the delegate threshold in Iowa, Nevada, and South Carolina (and possibly New Hampshire). Even if he stayed in, he probably wouldn't be much of a factor.
Sanders does have some assets, of course. That 8% matches former Vice President Joe Biden's dedicated voters, and no one else registers as more than a rounding error at this point. If it's true that any candidate can catch fire and surge in the polls, then Sanders definitely starts a step ahead of everyone but Biden. He also has plenty of money and the capacity for raising more. He remains well-liked by Democrats.
They just probably don't want to vote for him. What happened to the 43% of the vote he received in primaries and caucuses in 2016? Only a fraction of those votes came from dedicated Sanders fans – that is, people who really thought he should be president. Some of those voters wanted to push the party in a more liberal direction. Some thought they could send Hillary Clinton a message. Some just disliked Clinton. In short, it was clear at the time that a lot of Sanders votes were protest votes, and everything so far in 2020 confirms that he simply doesn't have that many dedicated supporters.
It's worth noting, too, that Sanders really hasn't expanded his support among party actors. He's in sixth place in endorsements so far. At least this time around he has Vermont's politicians in his corner, but he has the backing of only a single member of Congress from the rest of the U.S.
I think when it comes to the most liberal voters, Noah Berlatsky has it right: "There's nothing wrong with Sanders. It's just becoming increasingly clear that, for the 2020 primary electorate, there isn't anything overwhelmingly right with him either." Is it possible for Sanders to win? Sure. Is he among the 10 most likely nominees? I don't think so.
1. Henry Farrell at the Monkey Cage on building stable democracies.
2. Ed Kilgore on complaints about how the Democrats are handling the debates. One quibble: Some of the historical cases he mentions were candidates who might have reached debate thresholds had those existed at the time. We'll see what happens in September.
3. Amy Walter on public opinion about President Donald Trump.
4. Heather Hurlburt on national-security strategy.
5. Quinta Jurecic selects some details from the Mueller report.
6. Margaret Sullivan on the media, Watergate and Trump. The truth is that a lot of institutions performed well during Watergate, including the press, but the media has always overstated its importance in the scandal.
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