If this kind of news cycle keeps up, soon you can start looking forward to the newest Netflix piece of shit series, Wednesday is the new Friday. This upcoming Wednesday is Robert Mueller’s long awaited, potentially make-or-break-impeachment in front of two House committees, and the following Wednesday, July 31st, is the second and final Democratic Presidential primary debate under the old qualification rules.
The face of the Democratic primaries for President will fundamentally change starting on August first. And actually, the scheduling of these two debates is problematic for several of the second tier candidates, although not due to any malevolent, discriminatory intention of the DNC. But there are two reasons why making a lasting impression next week is going to be of critical importance to all of the candidates, especially the second tier candidates.
Two things are going to happen after the debates next week. One, in the following week, congress is going to adjourn for their 6 week summer recess.This means two things. One, the impression that the candidates create in the debate is going to have to tide-them-over until sometime in September. And two, while all of those candidates are free to campaign to their little hearts content, nobody is going to be paying the slightest bit of attention! Because they’re all on vacation too, or at least spending all of their time trying to keep the kids from reenacting the Battle of Blenheim in the living room.
The second event again is bifurcated. First, in the week after Labor Day, congress will resume their session, and attention will again return to legislative issues. And two, with the kids once again safely shepherded off to school, where they become somebody else’s problem for 8 hours a day, people will finally start turning more serious attention to politics, and the Democratic primary brouhaha.
Which, like everything else I’m writing in this article, i both a blessing and a curse for the Democratic contenders. It’s a blessing because, of course the candidates want the public paying more attention to what they’re saying and proposing. But it’s a curse because once again, the timing of the debate in September is problematic. because sadly, any noise that any of the candidates make during the debate is likely to be muted by the impending Saturday night drunken brawl in congress over things like the budget, the debt ceiling limit increase, and a potential government shutdown if His Lowness feels that people aren’t paying enough attention to his Pampers clad ass.
Especially for the second tier candidates, making the stage in September is of paramount importance, nothing else matters. Because the mechanics of the debate is going to fundamentally change, they are going to be smaller. Right now, there are currently only six candidates who have already met the requirements to be on the stage in September. It is likely that there may be fewer than ten candidates in single debate, which will give every surviving candidate more speaking time to make their pitches. And if more than ten candidates qualify, the DNC will be forced to make a choice, either cull out the lowest qualifiers to narrow the stage to ten, which I hope they don’t do, or again hold identical events on simultaneous nights, which would again offer each candidate more speaking time.
This is especially important to three current denizens of the second tier who shouldn’t even be on the second tier. Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, and Kirsten Gillibrand are all serious, well qualified candidates, and their lack of ability to generate any kind of traction amazes me. Especially Booker, since he entered the race riding high on being critical to the passage of The First Step Act, comprehensive prison reform. And Booker tried to peddle that, but somehow, nobody was buying.
Those people deserve to be on the debate stage. The DNC has done its job, every candidate who ran got stage time with the exception of Seth Moulton. And the way I look at it, if a political curiosity like The Mystic Mistress Marianne Williamson can make the cut, and Seth Moulton can’t, then obviously Moulton wasn’t saying anything that people wanted to hear in the first place.
Starting in September, the race is going to take on a more serious, issue and policy driven edge. The real meat-and-potatoes entree is about to be served, and the chefs need the time to fully develop and explain their positions and policies. And the sooner the wanna-bes go back to finishing school, and let the serious candidates take over, the better it will be for everybody. Trump is no joke, and we can’t afford to treat him like one. But starting on August 1st, as my favorite Sesame Street meme likes to say;
Where I will disagree is on the idea that nobody is paying attention. This might be true of the boomer set, assuming they still head off to someplace tropical in the summer and reduce their media intake down to old episodes of Gidget and Route 66 (this is what I assume boomers do with their time on vacation)
But younger voters take in a lot of news on the go with their devices, and I think they’re highly engaged and paying attention in this cycle. Quinnipiac has been tracking this for several months. At the end of June, 74% of registered Dems saying they are paying “some” or “a lot” of attention to the campaigns. (Split 29/45). In mid-May this was 78% (34/44) and in April it was 84% (27/58).
So we do see some summer erosion in the metric, but not a lot. If three quarters of the Dem electorate is engaged, and talking about this with their friends, the electorate is pretty informed and paying a lot of attention relative to other past primaries. In past cycles, in the June polls in both 2007 and 2015, about 20% of Dem voters said they were paying a lot of attention, compared with 45% today.
So I think the information age has made it so that we don’t really get a vacation anymore…this stuff is, for better or for worse, in front of us all the time now.
What you just said, Rory, cuts to the heart of why I find so many of the current analysis on where the race goes from here…lacking. Too much of it is predicated on two implicit falsehoods: 1) that 20th Century yardsticks apply to a 21st Century world and 2) that Boomers have the overwhelming edge on voting that they’ve held for several decades. Few thing piss me off worse than to hear some Boomer growl about the kids not stepping up here when the former hasn’t got much to show for their own efforts. So yeah…whatever formulae used to apply to the American electorate, throw it out. It’s not that world anymore.
Do I sense a bit of rancor with Boomers here?
Only the ones pretending that the present is still exactly like the past and/or those get snappish at the kids coming to take the spaces the Boomers once dominated. That generation, in my opinion, peaked in the 2000s and far too many are having a hard time with the inevitable changing of the guard.
It’s time for them to learn how to share and remember how to listen. And some do to their great credit. But it is my firm contention that any who can’t are no better than their own parents who did them the same way.
2020 is an interesting generational election because for the first time, the various primary generations have almost equal voting power. Boomers are estimated to represent 28% of the electorate, Gen X is 25% and Millennials will be 27%.
We will also have lost about a third of Silent Gen votes since 2016…they’ll represent 9% of voters. Gen Z doubles their voters and will be 10%.
Actually Rory, I went data driven with that contention…A recent poll shown on MSNBC indicated that less than 25% of Democratic voters were paying close attention to either the campaign, or the debates so far…
But is the poll itself reliable, Murf?
Those are really disparate results between Quinnipiac and MSNBC. They’re both good pollsters. Interesting.
It’s not atypical to get really varied responses to a poll question like that…it’s a pretty subjective question. If I watch Rachel Maddow every night, is that “a lot of attention?” I might say yes where others would say no.
Your figure would be consistent with 2008 and 2016. So the various data points at least suggest voters aren’t disengaged. Thus far, honestly, this feels like a pretty good election. The debate system worked…no breakdown of decorum…voters don’t seem overly pissed at anything. Not bad considering the size of the field.
I kind of wish that the ones who qualified only by polls would drop out. They really don’t have any support.
Patience, P J. They’ll get lost quick enough.
You’re spot on about Seth Moulton!
You’re spot on about Seth Moulton!