{"id":19917,"date":"2019-01-28T17:15:53","date_gmt":"2019-01-28T22:15:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/?p=19917"},"modified":"2019-01-28T17:15:53","modified_gmt":"2019-01-28T22:15:53","slug":"theyve-been-running-all-along","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2019\/01\/28\/theyve-been-running-all-along\/","title":{"rendered":"They’ve been running all along"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

My Gracious Host posted a link to Who\u2019s Running for President in 2020?<\/a> It\u2019s a New York Times<\/cite> interactive page by Alexander Burns, Matt Flegenheimer, Jasmine C. Lee, Lisa Lerer and Jonathan Martin, and it lists three dozen or so of what it calls prospective contenders<\/i> for the Democratic Party\u2019s nomination. It seems like a good opportunity to talk about what we mean when we talk about running for President.\r\n

The NYT<\/cite> gang break down their list into Running<\/i>, All But Certain<\/i>, Likely to Run<\/i>, Might Run<\/i>, Unlikely to Run<\/i> and Not Running<\/i>. I object to the terminology, because the distinction between running<\/i> and not running<\/i> isn\u2019t always clear. In their terminology, f\u2019r\u2019ex, Cory Booker is All But Certain<\/i> to run for President, while in point of fact, Senator Booker is indeed running for President and has been for months. Their primary criterion for running<\/i> seems to be a formal declaration\u2014and there are lots of legal reasons, and even rhetorical reasons, why those formal declarations get made when they are made that have nothing to do with whether a person is running<\/i> or not. \r\n

Josh Putnam (of FHQ<\/a>, which is an excellent, excellent resource for presidential primary politics) uses terminology that distinguishes between running for<\/i> 2020 and running in<\/i> 2020. Lots of people started running for<\/i> 2020 in 2017, and some of them earlier. Most of them will drop out of the race without ever officially announcing their candidacy. That doesn\u2019t mean they didn\u2019t run, just that they lost. This terminology matters (to me) for a variety of reasons\u2014first and prospectively, if Cory Booker is running now<\/i>, then party actors of various kinds should treat him like he\u2019s running now<\/i>, including demanding policy commitments in return for support. If your particular organization or organizations\u2014labor unions, interest groups, policy advocacy networks, political action committees, regional coalitions, religious associations, whatever\u2014wait until he formally declares his candidacy in order to get started on that business, you will have fallen well behind those who treat his candidacy as the actual, if unofficial, thing it is. And then retroactively, it\u2019s terribly misleading to think that (f\u2019r\u2019ex) Joe Biden did not run for 2016. He ran and lost, as did half-a-dozen other impressive candidates who are running now.\r\n

Another reason why it\u2019s helpful, I think, to conceptualize the candidates as already<\/i> running for 2020, and some as already having lost, is that an awful lot of what Jonathan Bernstein (among others) calls winnowing<\/i> happens well before voters cast votes. And there\u2019s a tendency, I think, to look at the people who are still running in<\/i> the election year and be dissatisfied with the choices. There are plenty of choices! You have plenty of opportunity right now to have some influence on which of those choices will still be around when votes get cast. You will not have anywhere near as much opportunity in<\/i> 2020, when most of the people who were running for 2020 will have been winnowed out.\r\n

So what does it mean to run for<\/i> 2020? If the official announcement is just one criterion among many, what are the others? Well, essentially they are the things that candidates do\u2014if someone is doing the things that candidates do, then I\u2019m calling them a candidate. Those include (but aren\u2019t limited to) releasing campaign books, visiting or arranging visits to New Hampshire and Iowa (and South Carolina and Nevada), raising money (including pledges in advance from major donors or groups), taking speaking engagements at gatherings of party factions, hiring or getting commitments from staff, commissioning polls, seeking endorsements (or pledges of future endorsement), landing profiles in newspapers and other news sources, and of course getting on to the national and local broadcasts.\r\n

It\u2019s worth keeping in mind that not all prospective contenders<\/i> walk in to this process with the same resources. If John Kerry, for instance, announces his candidacy in April or May or June, he will start with a bit of a disadvantage, but he\u2019ll probably be able to recruit staff away from other candidates, and it\u2019s likely that many donors who have already picked a candidate would go back in to their pockets. He will already know many of the people in New Hampshire and Iowa who someone like (f\u2019r\u2019ex) Beto O'Rourke does not\u2014and pretty much any group that\u2019s inviting candidates will happily make room for him. So the fact that he\u2019s not running<\/i> (to the point that he doesn\u2019t appear on most of the lists) should be taken along with the fact that he has a new book and has been making the kinds of book tour stops that a candidate makes. The NYT<\/cite> calls him Unlikely to Run, which I think is accurate, but it\u2019s an edge case. It\u2019s perhaps more accurate to say that he done enough to keep open the possibility of running, and that\u2019s not really all that different from running, for John Kerry.\r\n

Another kind of edge case is Chris Murphy\u2014he raised a ton of money for House candidates in 2018, which was totally a thing that positioned him to run for 2020, but he didn\u2019t do much else on the list that anyone has been reporting on. I mean, it was the invisible part of the invisible primary, so I am totally willing to believe that after the election he attempted to hire pre-exploratory-committee PAC staff and found that everyone he wanted to hire was already committed to Warren or Harris or Booker. Or maybe he called up a bunch of donors and was told not to bother calling back. Will we eventually say that he ran and lost, or that he didn\u2019t run? At this point, I think he ran and lost, but maybe you would say otherwise.\r\n

The other people that the New York Times<\/cite> says are Not Running mostly ran and lost, in my opinion: Bob Casey, Richard Ojeda, Deval Patrick and Tom Steyer. I don\u2019t think Oprah Winfrey actually ran and lost, but then I wouldn\u2019t have even mentioned her name on the list, so there\u2019s that.\r\n

Speaking of lists, here\u2019s a list of people who have probably been running for the 2020 Democratic Nomination:\r\n