Clock is ticking for 2020 contenders
WASHINGTON — The presidential campaign clock may be ticking, but Bernie Sanders insists it doesn’t rattle him.
“I am here in northern Vermont, and people just went through six months of an election, and they are not all that happy to get into another election,” the newly reelected Vermont senator said in his characteristically brusque manner when asked about deciding on a presidential bid.
“The media has pushed this country into never-ending campaigns. We can all take a deep breath,” he said.
That unworried attitude belies the intense pressure on Sanders and the rest of the potential Democratic contenders to move swiftly. Privately, some of Sanders’ advisors have warned him that holding his fire much longer than a few weeks into the new year could prove fatal to a 2020 bid.
At no time in recent history have Democrats forged into a presidential primary with a field of viable candidates so large and the outlook for their individual prospects so muddled. President Trump’s rewrite of the rules of political engagement has spilled into the contest among his rivals. Candidates who wait for a clear path could find themselves knocked aside before they take their first steps.
“No one seems to have a clean field here,” said Jim Jordan, who managed the presidential campaign of 2004 Democratic nominee John F. Kerry.
“There are multiple Californians, multiple New Yorkers, multiple Massachusettsans, multiple African Americans, lots and lots of women,” Jordan said. “The pie is going to get carved up quickly into small slices.”
Building a campaign is complicated business, he and others warn. The pool of top-shelf operatives, wellconnected fundraisers and activists in early-voting states will get spread thin quickly in a year when more than 20 notable candidates could realistically jump in.
Already, in addition to Sanders, Sens. Kamala Harris of California, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Cory Booker of New Jersey, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota have all taken steps toward a possible presidential bid.
Former Vice President Joe Biden has been calling seasoned operatives seeking assurances that they will be on board if he runs — and that they won’t take jobs with another candidate without checking with him first. Aides declined to discuss Harris’ timing, but her previous campaigns suggest that if she formally enters the race, she will do so on the earlier side.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who has been visiting early primary states and taken on advisors with presidential campaign experience, plans to make up his mind by the end of the year.
Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio told local media after his reelection that he’d be working through the possibility of a bid with his family over the holidays.
Gillibrand vowed only weeks ago, during her reelection campaign, that she would serve her full six-year Senate term. She waited just two days after the election to pivot away from that, sending a clear signal to party activists and donors not to shop elsewhere when she told late-night host Stephen Colbert that she was weighing a White House bid.
Govs. Steve Bullock of Montana and John Hickenlooper of Colorado have been touting the benefits of making a Western governor the party’s nominee. Former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu has joined Garcetti in talking up the benefits of nominating a mayor.
Another former mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, spent tens of millions to help elect Democrats in the midterm election. So did California billionaire Tom Steyer.
Julian Castro, the Obama administration’s secretary of Housing and Urban Development, has been eyeing an early announcement. Another Obama friend, former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, also has been considering the race.
The hesitance of any of the party’s factions to coalesce around a candidate heightens potential for an outside-the-box alternative such as Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke to become a runaway star, as Sanders did in 2016.
And the list goes on. Knowledgeable operatives project a flurry of announcements early into winter.
Most serious candidates will have entered the race by February — a shift from the last Democratic presidential primary, when the race didn’t get underway in earnest until Hillary Clinton released an announcement video in mid-April of 2015.
At Gonring, Spahn & Associates, a public affairs consulting firm that has long advised big Hollywood donors, the phone is already ringing.
“In the last 24 hours, I’ve gotten three calls” from potential 2020 candidates, firm President Andy Spahn said Tuesday. “That tells me there is going to be a regular drumbeat for the next six to eight weeks.”
The unique dynamic of this year’s midterm has pushed the calendar up for everyone, said Bill Carrick, a strategist who was campaign manager for Richard A. Gephardt in 1988 and is now advising Garcetti.
“We’ve had full fields with multiple candidates before, but we have never had anything like this,” Carrick said. “It’s like three times more than anything we have had before.”
Voters typically don’t grasp how challenging it can be to build a campaign infrastructure when so many candidates are vying for a relatively small pool of proven talent, he said.
At the same time, party activists yearn for new blood and ideas. That has many veteran campaign warriors and donors reconsidering whether to re-up with candidates whose careers they have long nurtured.
“People are going to make judgments based on considerations other than ‘I have known someone for a whole hell of a long time,’ ” Carrick said. “There is a lot of talk about needing new faces.”
For now, many of the party’s big donors are still assessing the field.
“I am just going to wait and see,” said Susie Tompkins Buell, the San Francisco philanthropist who gave more than $15 million to Bill and Hillary Clinton’s campaigns and helped raise untold millions more for them.
“This is such a serious matter now. You can’t just fall in love with somebody or sign on with them because you have a relationship,” she said. “We have to keep an open mind and see what opportunities we have.”
The new fundraising possibilities unleashed by online platforms like ActBlue and social-media-savvy operatives do give candidates alternative paths to building war chests.
But even in that arena, candidates playing coy could be at a disadvantage against those openly playing to win.
Not everyone buys into the idea that moving fast is essential this cycle.
Former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who mounted a Democratic primary bid in 2008, is skeptical that the earliest-voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire will hold the inf luence they have in the past, particularly now that California has moved its primary up to early March.
Relative newcomers would be better served focusing on California, South Carolina and possibly Nevada in a year when Democratic voters consumed with ousting Trump are focused on electability, he said. The voting populations in those states are more diverse, and the latter two in particular are not dominated by the party’s progressive wing, and are probably more reflective of the general electorate, he added.
And the deck is not already stacked against newcomers in such states as it is in New Hampshire and Iowa, where candidates like Sanders and Warren already have built formidable campaign machines, Richardson said.
“There is a totally new landscape and new thinking,” he said.
But like so many other political veterans, Richardson is cautious about dispensing advice at a time none of the old rules of presidential politics seem to apply and the new ones have yet to be written.
“Of course, what do I know?” he said, recalling his fourth-place finish in Iowa and New Hampshire before dropping out of the 2008 race. “I lost.”