I Am a Walking Michael Dukakis Helmet I'm back in Los Angeles after a week of covering the primary in New Hampshire. New Hampshire is gorgeous—it's basically Yankee Narnia. It's full of trees and mountains and rivers, and all of the houses look like very elegant lunch pails. I could happily live there, just wandering around creeks, inhaling fog and breeding golden retrievers. It's a state in marked contrast to my new home of Los Angeles, which is Spanish for "a large clump of strip malls," and appears to be constructed entirely from bathroom tiling grout. I am giving serious consideration to buying a plant to compensate.
It was an eventful trip. In addition to visiting three very different campaign rallies, I fell into candidate-love with Andrew Yang and enthusiastically endorsed his candidacy. . . just under nine hours before he pulled the plug on it. It turns out that I am a walking Michael Dukakis helmet, and my endorsements are a kiss of death. In fact (prove me wrong, Internet) I believe I have the honor of being the very last endorsement Andrew Yang received before throwing in the towel.
So, alas, my preferred Democratic candidate has folded up. Here's what we've got in store with the remainder:
Democrats are now engaged in two pre-scrums before the big slugout with Trump. They're battling to see who becomes the standard bearers for their respective subgroups—the Very Loud Progressive Caucus, and the Centrist Caucus, respectively—and then cruising towards a showdown between the two.
Elizabeth Warren's anemic finish in New Hampshire pretty well seals her doom in this primary. Bernie beat her for the Very Loud Progressive Caucus bracket. But the Centrist Caucus is still in play: Biden, Klobuchar, and Pete are all vying for head of the class, with Bloomberg standing off to the side throwing fistfulls of money at television sets.
Biden will drop out shortly. I predict he'll flame out in Nevada and then endorse a Not Bernie candidate before South Carolina, where he still has an emergency stockpile of political clout. Between Pete and Klobuchar my money is on Pete. Klobuchar is the "pragmatist running the PTA meeting" candidate, which has great appeal to fiscal realists like myself, but Pete is the "shot out of the blue wow can you believe it?!" candidate. And Democrats want to live in the inflection point of history. They enjoy the energy of the record skipping, the wheel breaking, the sensation of "this time it's really different!" In a showdown between Centrists, Pete will prevail.
The question right now is, will the Centrists get their act together and rally behind a single candidate, or will they Cruz-and-Kasich each other long enough for Bernie to snag the plurality and take the party nomination? Also what on Earth is Bloomberg up to? He's not even running in the first few contests—I tied with him in Iowa.
FiveThirtyEight projects a 36% chance of a brokered convention, in the event no single candidate has enough delegates to declare victory. Bloomberg will keep pumping money into the primary to stretch it out as long as possible and turn it into a war of attrition. To qualify as a candidate in a brokered convention you have to have two things going for you: you must be a declared candidate, and you must have at least one delegate. If Bloomberg can force a brokered convention, he need not rely on Bloomberg Mania catching on (it won't) but instead on making a pitch to a concentrated clot of activists instead.
Which is all a very sad, of course, because Andrew Yang would have been a WAY better candidate than any of these people, and what with that sweet last-minute endorsement, I suspect I probably could have nabbed a solid ambassadorship. Better luck next time.
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