Booker

Going into the primary slog, I was most intrigued by Gillibrand and Booker.  Gillibrand has already dropped out, and I don't know why Booker never caught fire.  There's an interesting roundtable about why that might not have happened.

It starts from a premise that makes a certain amount of sense, which is that if you were looking for another Obama, Booker certainly fit many aspects of that role, and not just race. He's an Ivy Leaguer who returned to work on local politics to help urban minorities. He's charismatic. He can be an electrifying speaker, even if it's not on a par with Obama.

The panel hit on an interesting observation from 2008 though. They noted that African American voters were, ironically, some of the last to warm to Obama.  He broke through among college educated whites first, and African Americans were reluctant to vote for him, because they thought racism was too strong. I remember so many conversations with both white and black voters opinionating that Obama would lose in the end, because even if people told pollsters they were voting for him, implicit bias and subliminal racism would change their mind in the voting booth.  No presidential candidate ever won more raw votes than Obama did in 2008.

We see a similar dynamic playing out among some Democratic constituencies in 2020.  Trump is uniquely awful, and therefore we should play it safe.  This is the heart of the appeal of Joe Biden, I think.  Sure, there's the connection with Obama, but I think the reason many African Americans support Biden is that he's seen as the safest bet to win 270 electoral votes. In short, African American voters are not so naive to assume that Americans will vote for a more qualified woman, because, well...

This is a remarkably impressive field, until you start parsing every utterance and applying litmus tests to how eager they support charter schools or how much they want to soak the rich.  The 2020 primary is a clinic in the narcissism of small differences.

If you ask Democrats, 90% want someone who can thrash Trump.  That's their #1 goal.  They might see that through an ideological lens (I think Warren's transformational message is the only thing that...yadayadayada.), but they are primarily interested in beating Trump. That might make them risk averse, and that might be why African American voters are rallying around Biden - even though in many ways he's as risky a candidate as the Democrats could nominate.  The perception, however, is that he isn't.  To a certain degree, Buttigieg is on both sides of this calculus.  He's a moderate but he's gay, so that constitutes a risk.

Booker still has time to rally and make a strong showing somewhere, and I think he'd be a tremendous candidate in the general election.  But it's clear that he has an obstacle to overcome, and it's not just Joe Biden and Kamala Harris sharing "his lane."