The Democratic Candidates

Seeing how well my playoff predictions went, maybe my predictions shouldn’t be listened to by anyone. So I’m not going to try to predict who will win the Democratic nomination for 2020. Instead, I want to give something that’s not very common on this blog: non-jokey, sincere opinions about the people I think have a chance of winning the nomination. Now that Joe Biden has declared, I think the field is at last finalized, so it seems as good a time as any to do so.

Warren: Warren seems genuinely smart and pretty relatable. She is the candidate I like most as a person. But she is such an incredibly bad personal politician that I really hope she doesn’t get nominated because she would lose badly and look like a total incompetent while doing so. Luckily this also makes her unlikely to get nominated. Everything about her campaign just screams desperation which is a bad thing to scream. Instead of being president, she should be the person the next democratic president hires to decide and implement their agenda.

Buttigieg: I think the Buttigieg candidacy is predicated on the idea that what we need is a person like Obama, a mild-mannered younger intellectual who’s gonna be inoffensive and competent most of all. There are people who campaign on that promise who then deliver mild-mannered competence (Obama) and those who don’t deliver it (Macron). So basically, the absolute upper limit of a Buttigieg presidency is Obama, and the lower limit is below Macron. I like Obama. But then we’ve had Obama. And my conclusion from Obama is that Obama gives you Trump, and Macron gives you the gilets jaunes and [whoever is gonna be elected after Macron who I assume is going to be very very very bad]. Is it really worth it? I kind of think it’s not.

Beto: A straightforwardly worse version of Buttigieg. There’s no axis I can think of on which he’s better, other than having a cooler punk past, but that’s not worth that much because a punk that’s running an establishmentarian presidential candidacy is really really not a punk.

Kamala: As a candidate, Kamala would hasten the realignment of US parties even further away from a left-right alignment to a globalist-nationalist one. As someone who is much more sympathetic in the US to a left party than to either a globalist or a nationalist one, I don’t want this to happen. I think she could win, and would be a better president than Trump, in the same way that Hilary could have won and would have been a better president than Trump. If she wins the nomination, which I think she has a decent chance to, I will work to try to get her elected. But I think nominating her is risky, and also moves the world into a bad direction that I hope the world doesn’t go into.

Bernie: Bernie is a good guy. My original opinion was that he doesn’t seem super smart, in the sense that he doesn’t have any plan for achieving the things he says he plans to achieve, and it’s not clear to me that it’s because he doesn’t want to achieve them. In a sense, he’s less “professional” than the other candidates which is a disadvantage in terms of getting things done. But then Matt Yglesias persuasively argues that he is actually quite good at achieving things, but just has a rhetorical style that makes him seem like someone who isn’t super politically savvy and not into achieving things because those attributes are popular. Whether Bernie is a secret pragmatist or an ineffectual revolutionary, there is very little to no downside to electing him as a result. If you think the US could stand to move in the direction that Sanders wants to move it in, you should welcome him even if you don’t agree with the specific policies he proclaims. He’s not going to get his specific policies, but he is probably going to succeed in moving the US in his direction. One reasonable worry about electing Sanders last time around was that, hey, is the rest of the world going to be less sure about what America is going to do now, and is that going to lead to instability? But is the world opinion of the US really going to get topsy-turvied by moving from Trump to Bernie? I don’t think so. And I think Bernie would beat Trump. As a result, if I had a vote in the primaries, he is who I would vote for. The other reasonable worry is that he is very old. This is true.

Gillibrand: Her name should be pronounced with a hard g, like gif. Other than that, she seems like Hillary Clinton without being as smart and also without the Clinton-specific baggage. That would have been enough to win in ’16, but I don’t know if it’s enough this time around. She would be a caretaker president who would not make things any better and is unlikely to deal with the problems facing the world in any way, but is also unlikely to make things actively worse through incompetence or adventurism.

Booker: it’s hard to cheer for someone whose whole thing is that he’s that much of an obvious fraud and also a non-charismatic loser. But I think he would probably make the best president of the choices available. He seems aware of the need for big changes, but is not so ideological as to be totally inflexible. My concern with voting for him in the primaries is whether he is going to beat Trump. Trump can smell loser-ness and attack it like a shark, and that sounds bad for Booker who is a huge loser.

Uncle Joe: I think Biden is a fundamentally decent person. He has a history of some bad ideas, like campaigning on splitting Iraq in three last time he ran. This is a worrying situation not just because it was a bad idea but because it was a weird idea, too. The combination of bad+weird means that he is overly confident in his bad judgment, and that is scary to me. I think the reason he’s the most popular Dem so far is that his job as VP was mostly acting as a figurehead. Thus people conceptualize him as being a figurehead for his own presidency, but I don’t think he actually would be. So you have to think about what he would try to get done as a president. And I think it would be bad. On domestic issues, the primary will push him to a set of commitments far to the right of any other Dem. As someone who thinks US domestic economic policy needs to move left, I think that is not a good result.