Jay Cost of National Review Online looks past the midterm elections and focuses on the next process of nominating a Democratic presidential candidate.
In three weeks and two days, the jockeying for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination will begin. That will probably be an out-and-out circus.
Over the weekend, CNN released an early snapshot of the state of the race on the Democratic side of the ledger. Among a whopping 15 candidates who were polled, former vice president Joe Biden leads with 33 percent, while Vermont senator Bernie Sanders is at 13 percent. No other candidate has more than 10 percent of the vote. …
… Unfortunately for the Democrats, their party is not well suited to managing such a crowded field.
They suffer from many of the same problems that have plagued the Republicans — namely, the party organization basically exists only to legally launder money through our ridiculous system of campaign-finance laws. It has virtually no capacity to manage these candidates. Instead, and as with the GOP, the race will be managed by the high-profile donors, the cable-news networks, and the grassroots activists — none of whom individually can be said to represent the interests of the party as a whole. And collectively, these groups present a highly distorted picture of both their own party as well as the general electorate.
