| It appears that former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper will be the next candidate to drop out of the Democratic presidential nomination contest. Winnowing works: Some 35 to 40 people did at least some candidate-like things; some 25 major candidates made it to the official declaration stage; and now we'll be down to 23. It's quite likely that at least a couple more of the dozen who won't qualify for the September and October debates and have little other reason to expect to win will follow Hickenlooper out soon. Beyond that, it's not clear how many will hang on until the Iowa caucuses, but after that, it's unlikely that more than a handful will remain. One might have expected governors to do especially well in this cycle. Democrats seem to be looking for experience and appear open to the pragmatism that often goes along with executive experience. Mayors are doing well! And yet Deval Patrick, Andrew Cuomo, Terry McAuliffe and Martin O'Malley didn't even survive long enough to make it official; Hickenlooper never got anywhere; and both Steve Bullock and Jay Inslee appear more likely to join Hickenlooper as former candidates than to pick up any delegates at all. And yet … it's hard to find anything systematic about the governors that hurt them. Hickenlooper and Bullock placed their bets on the idea that Democrats would be looking for a moderate candidate, which was a real misread of the party and, perhaps, an overestimation of how well Bernie Sanders would do. There are, to be sure, plenty of Democrats who aren't thrilled about an avowed socialist winning the nomination, but large segments of the party appear perfectly willing to consider the very liberal Elizabeth Warren, and those who don't have plenty of mainstream liberals to chose from without having to turn to those running as moderates. Inslee, on the other hand, seemed to have a perfectly good gimmick to help him stand out from the crowd — a one-issue candidacy focused on climate — but he's been utterly inept at executing that strategy. None of those governors, meanwhile, have run specifically as pragmatic problem-solvers who would bring competence back to government, the natural platform for successful governors. Inslee in particular wound up using the rhetoric of a problem-solving governor from time to time, but that doesn't actually fit his campaign theme of the urgent need to take action on climate. Especially when his (otherwise perfectly fine) examples of effective governing had nothing to do with his supposed single-minded focus. Nor were any of the governors really aggressive early in the contest. Bullock, in particular, delayed his launch so long that he wound up missing out on the first round of the debates. Hickenlooper and Inslee waited until March for their formal declarations, which was on the late side, but it was really their participation in the "invisible" primary before those formal announcements that just didn't seem to be as serious as what Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Warren and others were doing. That doesn't seem to have anything to do with being governors; it's just three candidates who didn't quite have their acts together when they needed it. It is possible that the failure of the governors is really just an artifact of long-term Democratic failures — until very recently — to nominate women for that office, along with a failure to nominate black and Hispanic candidates. To the extent that the energy in the party lies with those groups, it was more likely the candidates they would look to would be senators, not governors. Other than that, however, it's really not clear why Democratic governors have been such duds during this cycle. 1. Hans Noel on the 2020 Democrats and the 2016 Republicans. Differs in several respects from my analysis (although we agree on lots of things, too), so be sure to read this one. 2. Charles Larratt-Smith on why Nicolas Maduro has survived in Venezuela. 3. Dan Hopkins on public opinion about the Affordable Care Act. 4. Nikole Hannah-Jones on slavery and democracy, as part of the 1619 Project at the New York Times. Must-read. 5. Here at Bloomberg Opinion, Michael R. Strain on the effects of Trump's trade wars. 6. And Neil Irwin with a gloomy look at the global economy. | 
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