Democrats may settle for second best

BloombergOpinion Early Returns

Jonathan Bernstein

Nate Silver has an interesting item analyzing Kamala Harris's presidential campaign. There may be more at stake in the outcome than Silver lets on – not for Harris herself, but for the strategy she seems to be following. Harris's campaign is a classic coalition-style effort. She's not playing to an ideological niche in the party, or appealing primarily to a particular demographic group. Nor does she have a personally loyal faction the way that Donald Trump or, in a very different way, Jeb Bush did in 2016.  Silver argues that candidates who adopt this approach end up with a potential weakness: The fact that your policy positions closely resemble those of voters on average doesn't necessarily mean they reflect a lot of voters' first choice — and being voters' first choice is how you win primaries.  It's not really clear that this is true.  For one thing, even the relatively attentive voters who show up for primaries don't always organize their policy positions in a coherent way. They may like Bernie Sanders's position on health care, Joe Biden's on North Korea, Amy Klobuchar's on something else and Beto O'Rourke's on yet another topic. If Harris has the second-choice policy across the board for that group, then she may well be a voter's first choice overall even without having the top position on any given issue.  It's unlikely that many voters choose candidates by tallying things up this way, of course. But what they might do is eliminate contenders based on a policy question or some other characteristic. So perhaps a voter really likes Julian Castro's immigration policies but thinks he doesn't have the right experience for the presidency; another likes Elizabeth Warren's plans but thinks she's too liberal to be electable; and so on. The fact is that factional candidates from 1980 on, with the important exception of Trump, all fell short, and often very far short. Republicans Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum each won the Iowa caucuses as factional candidates but soon faltered; Howard Dean, the anti-war factional candidate in 2004, caught fire but burned out before Iowa.  Silver points out that the earlier factional candidates George McGovern and Jimmy Carter (along with Trump) all won in cycles with very large candidate fields. That may have been a factor, but there are better explanations. For one thing, McGovern (1972) and Carter (1976) won early in the reform era, when the system was new and neither party actors nor candidates really knew what they were doing. This gave smart factional candidates a real advantage: Building coalitions requires bargaining and compromise, which is harder to do when the rules of the game are unclear. Mobilizing a faction is less dependent on everyone understanding the rules.  All this matters, because how the president is chosen matters. If the nomination system simply rewards factional candidates who appeal to a plurality of their party but few others, and who never learn the importance of expanding their support by cutting deals and compromising, then it's likely to produce presidents who – like Carter and Trump – behave exactly that way in office. Mobilizing their strongest supporters was enough to win, so why do anything differently in the White House? By contrast, coalition-style candidates learn to constantly reach out to new groups and are chosen largely because of their skills in making deals. They're apt to be better presidents, and to be healthy contributors to a political system built on compromise and bargaining.  Political scientists have disagreed over the years about whether the modern nomination system rewards factional or coalition-style candidates. Nelson W. Polsby, writing after McGovern and Carter had won their nominations, argued that the system basically encouraged mobilizing factions and catching the attention of the news media. But over time, strong evidence has emerged for the ability of the parties to reward coalition-style campaigns. At least, until Trump came along. As it happens, I'd argue that many of the Democrats running this cycle – Biden, Cory Booker, Harris, Klobuchar, and probably Pete Buttigieg, Castro, O'Rourke, and Warren – are really coalition-style candidates. My guess is that one of them will win, and that he or she will be rewarded precisely for being someone who a lot of party actors feel they can live with – in other words, for being everyone's second choice. We'll see. As I said, if the Democrats turn out to be selecting a president, then a whole lot hangs on what kind of politician they choose. 1. Michael Tesler at the Monkey Cage on public opinion about Trump and white supremacy. 2. Paul Volcker, Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen on the benefits of an independent Federal Reserve. 3. Adam Serwer on the history of the slur that black people can't govern. 4. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Timothy L. O'Brien on Trump and the recent mass shootings. 5. And Ali H. Soufan on Islamists and white supremacists. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You'll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close.

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