| The first Democratic presidential debates are only three weeks away now. Candidates have until June 13 to meet the polling and donor criteria set by the Democratic National Committee to qualify. So far, 21 of them have met the minimum. With only 20 spots available over two nights, that means it'll go to tiebreakers.
Overall, I think it makes sense to err on the side of inclusion for these early debates, and when the standards get more restrictive in September, the DNC can correctly say that it gave most candidates a chance.
But it seems to me fairly obvious which candidates should be excluded – and it looks like they'll all end up on the debate stage. Andrew Yang and Marianne Williamson have never held office and therefore don't hold conventional qualifications for the presidency, even loosely defined; Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii holds several policy positions that are far from the party mainstream. The other 20 contenders all have at least something resembling normal qualifications, and while there's plenty of policy diversity they all fit fairly easily within the mainstream.
It's understandable that the DNC preferred objective qualifying standards, even arbitrary ones, to just choosing the most sensible list of candidates. But even so, I'd have urged them to figure out criteria that would've tended to screen for the best contenders. Why run the risk that Gabbard, Williamson or Yang might be the one to get a polling surge out of their debate performance?
Another risk is that the new rules could winnow out a solid candidate who happens to be off to a slow start. The most vulnerable is New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. To me, the party would've really erred if it had eliminated her from the debates and perhaps knocked her out entirely. So far she still has a shot. The two who haven't qualified at this point appear to be Seth Moulton, a House member from Massachusetts, and Wayne Messam, the mayor of Miramar, Florida. Of the candidates who have already met the criteria, at least one won't appear on stage. It looks like that will be Representative Eric Swalwell or former Representative John Delaney. It's hard to see what the party would lose by pushing either of them out.
That said, no one knows what will happen to the excluded candidates. Perhaps they'll drop out. Perhaps they'll keep running, but the media will treat them the same way it treats hundreds of minor candidates – and ignore them completely. Or perhaps they'll find a way to use their exclusion to generate more publicity than they would've gotten as one of 10 candidates on a debate stage.
Ideally for Democrats – for the entire party, both formal organizations and informal networks – the field will be winnowed sooner rather than later. It seems to me that the DNC is doing its part. But they're making it up as they go along. It's going to take a while to judge how well this new process is working.
1. Brendan Nyhan on President Donald Trump's habit of inventing and then "solving" problems.
2. Raihan Ismail at the Monkey Cage on politics within Saudi Arabia.
3. Maggie Koerth-Baker at FiveThirtyEight on money in politics. Good item, but to be clear: It's one thing to show how campaign contributions may influence policy outcomes; it's another to make the case that that's a bad thing. You'd need to do both to argue convincingly for laws that restrict money in politics – and there are lots of reasons to think the details matter.
4. Josh Marshall argues against impeachment.
5. Adam Jentleson makes the opposite case. I'm with Marshall here, but read them both.
6. Sean Trende takes a look at the 2020 Senate elections.
7. And Stuart Rothenberg does the same.
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