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Farewell, Spartacus: Where the Dem Race Stands Now
After months of barely hanging on, Sen. Cory Booker (NJ) has finally suspended his campaign to become the Democratic presidential nominee.
“It was a difficult decision to make, but I got in this race to win, and I’ve always said I wouldn’t continue if there was no longer a path to victory,” Booker said in an email to supporters.
In a tweet, Booker added: “To my team, supporters, and everyone who gave me a shot—thank you. I am so proud of what we built, and I feel nothing but faith in what we can accomplish together.”
The president reacted with his usual magnanimity:
Really Big Breaking News (Kidding): Booker, who was in zero polling territory, just dropped out of the Democrat Presidential Primary Race. Now I can rest easy tonight. I was sooo concerned that I would someday have to go head to head with him!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 13, 2020
The next Democratic primary debate is Tuesday night in Des Moines and will feature just six candidates who have met the party’s official threshold:
- Joe Biden
- Pete Buttigieg
- Amy Klobuchar
- Bernie Sanders
- Tom Steyer
- Elizabeth Warren
Booker did not qualify for this debate, leading to his actions Monday. Six active candidates not making the cut were:
- Michael Bennet
- Mike Bloomberg
- John Delaney
- Tulsi Gabbard
- Deval Patrick
- Andrew Yang
And then, there is the long list of candidates who have already dropped out of the primary race:
- Steve Bullock
- Bill de Blasio
- Julián Castro
- Kirsten Gillibrand
- Mike Gravel
- Kamala Harris
- John Hickenlooper
- Jay Inslee
- Wayne Messam
- Seth Moulton
- Richard Ojeda
- Beto O’Rourke
- Tim Ryan
- Joe Sestak
- Eric Swalwell
- and Marianne Williamson, who suspended her campaign on Friday.
That’s right, there were 28 (!) candidates at the start and now only a dozen remain. The Iowa Caucuses are scheduled for Feb 3, making Tuesday’s debate the last before the voters begin to weigh in.
Published in Elections, Politics
I think he’s using the Kamala Harris-Julian Castro metric, in that getting out now before any votes are tallied preserves his viability as a possible VP nominee. Once you start racking up those 1-2 percent or less vote totals in your home state or region, it lowers your marketability to the eventual nominee of being able to attract any new voters to the ticket.
It really is interesting that there were 28 relatively big name candidates. (I’m betting that if one looked at the filings, one would find a hundred more nobodies.) We shall see what happens next.
Has anybody heard what T-Bone thinks about all this?
T-Bone is still in the race at least until Super Tuesday….
The Dem primary just got significantly less entertaining.
It’s width is starting to look like its depth.
I still couldn’t identify 17 of the 28 candidates by their faces.
To quote Bernie Sanders out of context, “And that’s a good thing!”
Here in Central Texas, we are being inundated with TV ads for Bloomberg. He was just here in the state, campaigning. But if he is not even making the cut for the Iowa debate, why is he campaigning like Waco, Texas is a do-or-die political battleground? Maybe he’s not as smart as his campaign ads say he is. What am I missing?
He’s meeting Corp Pop there.
Bloomberg ads are everywhere. Normal campaigns have to conserve resources by carefully selecting ad targets. Bloomberg is apparently opting for a carpet-bombing strategy to raise his floor of support and create buzz.
If Bloomberg actually gets any delegates to the convention, the per-delegate cost will be astronomical. I guess he figures if he establishes a presence and a vaguely positive image and name-awareness, that if and when the nutballs ahead of him implode, he will be the next one up. His biggest problem is that Steyer has an overlapping strategy.
I think the idea is that Texas has a lot of delegates, but is a fairly conservative state, even on the Democratic side, with the Latino population which votes that way, as opposed to the Bernie/Liz/Mayor Pete types in the Austin/Dallas/Houston inner city liberal hubs. Bloomberg’s problem is he’s probably better known to people outside NYC for his most progressive crusades of banning guns and sodas, not his strict anti-crime policies or support for charter schools, so it’s really going to take a ton of advertising to lure those people over (Beto did do well in the Latino areas in 2018. But Beto also didn’t run on the same hard-core progressive issues in ’18 against Cruz he ran on during his train wreck of a presidential run).