Klobucharge! Is Amy The New Moderate Choice?

The surprises from the New Hampshire primary were not the top two finishers. Everyone knew Bernie Sanders would take the Granite State. The big news above the fold was how poorly Bernie fared relative to his performance in 2016 when he did not face a bevy of challengers. Likewise, Pete Buttigieg’s strong second-place finish was not unexpected after his win in Iowa.

The big news from New Hampshire came from further down the list with Amy Klobuchar’s surprisingly strong showing in third place. Last week, Klobuchar was polling in single-digits and this week her share of the vote pegged at just below 20 percent. What happened in the meantime?

There were two big reasons for the shift in polling. First, there was Klobuchar’s formidable performance in last week’s New Hampshire debate. Second, there was Joe Biden’s underwhelming finish in Iowa and his subsequent self-immolation moment in which he called a voter at a town hall meeting a “lying, dog-faced pony soldier.”

Aside from the question of what a pony soldier is and how it would apply at a town hall meeting, the lesson here is that candidates should probably refrain from insulting voters if they want to win votes. Even if Biden was joking, he has now built a history of attacking town hall attendees after calling an Iowa man “a damn liar” in December.

If we compare the recent polling trends on Real Clear Politics with the actual results, we see that Sanders, Biden, and Warren all underperformed relative to expectations while Buttigieg and Klobuchar did better than expected. I don’t think it is unreasonable to speculate that part of Klobuchar’s surge (dubbed the “Klobucharge” by the FiveThirtyEight podcast) came at the expense of Biden and Warren who both had lackluster performances in the recent debate. With Biden failing and Sanders’ success alarming the party, it is possible that Klobuchar is emerging as the moderate in the race.

When I discuss moderate Democrats, I always get comments that say that no Democrats are moderate so let me stipulate that the term is relative. A Democratic moderate is not the same as a Republican moderate, but there is a range in the Democratic platforms. Biden and Klobuchar are not identical to Bernie and Buttigieg by any stretch of the imagination.

The big question is what comes next. Well, next after Nevada where no one has any real idea of what is going to happen (but where Sanders is under attack by the Culinary union).

What about South Carolina?

Joe Biden has been betting big on South Carolina with its large black population, which has been the base of his support. But now new polling shows that Biden’s support among black voters is falling as blacks turn to… Mike Bloomberg? [Checks notes.] Yes, Mike Bloomberg has cut sharply into Biden’s minority support in a new Quinnipiac poll that shows the mayor at 22 percent in the demographic versus 27 percent for the vice president. If Biden’s support among blacks is slipping then he’s toast.

But will blacks stick with Mayor Mike? Bloomberg is already in hot water as an embarrassing clip has resurfaced in which he blames “male minorities, 16 to 25” for “95 percent of your murders.” The comments relate to the unpopular stop-and-frisk policy of the NYPD in which police were permitted to stop and search minority men.

Black voters represent the kingmaker of the Democratic primary in almost every presidential campaign. The question is who they will coalesce around if they desert Joe Biden. The three remaining likely contenders are all white northerners with little minority support.

Bernie Sanders has not caught the imagination of black voters even in his second campaign. Pete Buttigieg has little traction in states after Iowa and New Hampshire and may be too liberal for black voters. That could conceivably leave Amy Klobuchar as the heir apparent to the moderate lane.

However, it is premature to count Joe Biden out. Despite the media narrative that his campaign is freefall, he is still the frontrunner in national polling, if only just so, and still holds a double-digit lead in South Carolina polling. As I pointed out last week, there is a dearth of polling in most Super Tuesday states so no one is really sure what will happen.

The most recent polling average in South Carolina shows Biden with 31 percent, surprisingly followed by Tom Steyer at 19 and Sanders at 17. Warren, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar are all at less than 10 percent. Mike Bloomberg doesn’t even register.

However, South Carolina is still two weeks away and the field is in a state of upheaval. A poor showing in Nevada could deepen Biden’s descent in the polls and impact his performance in the Palmetto State.

With the situation changing rapidly and little hard data to look at, especially relating to the minority vote, all eyes are on South Carolina and Super Tuesday. This year, the race could be described like Forest Gump’s box of chocolates.

“You never know what you’re gonna get.”

Originally published on The Resurgent

Amy Klobuchar Targets Republicans

Amy Klobuchar is still in the race for the Democratic nomination, even though you may not have heard her name for a while. The Minnesota senator is hoping that she can change things by reaching out to a niche of voters that have been almost ignored by her rivals: Republicans.

Since entering the race, Sen. Klobuchar has failed to catch fire with voters but has nevertheless managed to maintain enough support to be included in debates. As Democratic primary voters flirt with flavor-of-the-month candidates in an effort to find an alternative to Joe Biden, Klobuchar remains one of the few Democrats who could conceivably rally moderates and independents to defeat Donald Trump. Although hampered by her status as a relative unknown, she was rated among the most effective and the most popular members of the Senate as well as having a relatively moderate voting record.

Now Klobuchar hopes to parley her skills at winning rural Minnesota voters into a surge in New Hampshire where the mindset may be similar to that of her constituents back home. Politico reports that the Klobuchar campaign is campaigning in towns that are all but ignored by other candidates. In particular, Klobuchar is gunning for voters who supported Obama and then voted Trump in 2016.

“Those are really a lot of communities that tend to be bellwethers or communities that have an impact on New Hampshire outcomes,” said Scott Merrick, Klobuchar’s state director. “Whether they're Democrats and they'll vote for more moderate candidates or they're truly undeclared voters who mix it up.”

However, University of New Hampshire pollster Andy Smith said “Obama-Trump” voters made up only about three percent of the electorate, a number too small to affect the outcome of the election. Therefore, the Klobuchar campaign is also targeting traditionally Republican towns and districts. In a state where Trump’s net approval stands at -16 points, there may be crossover Republican voters who would support socially liberal, fiscally moderate Democrat. The big question for Klobuchar is how to get those Republicans to back her rather than Joe Biden.

The answer may be two-fold. If Biden proves to be damaged by his tangential relation to the Ukraine scandal, such as by an embarrassing testimony in Trump’s Senate trial, his stock may fall, leaving a path for another moderate Democrat. The second part of the equation relates to Klobuchar’s strong debate performance (for those who actually watched), which resulted in a late-December fundraising haul. If Biden falters, Amy Klobuchar could become the non-radical alternative.

At present, Klobuchar has a lot of work to do before she earns her first delegate. The Real Clear Politics national average shows her at 3.5 percent. She currently polls even worse in New Hampshire with two percent. Fifteen percent of the vote is required to earn delegates in Democratic primaries. As Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren decline, Klobuchar may be well-positioned to rise if she keeps delivering strong performances in the remaining debates.

Amy Klobuchar remains a long shot but don’t count her out. She’s an experienced campaigner and could benefit from Trump voters who like the president’s economic policies but are disenchanted with his behavior. With no serious challengers opposing Trump in the Republican primary, the opportunity cost of crossing over to vote for a moderate Democrat is very low for previous Trump voters.

Originally published on The Resurgent

Debates Exposed Schisms In Democratic Party

The most important takeaway from the second round of Democratic debates, other than the fact that Joe Biden performs better after a practice round, is that there is a deep division within the Democratic Party. Contrary to claims by many of the pundit class, the Democrats are not all in lockstep solidarity with the democratic-socialist left. Over the past two nights, several Democratic candidates sounded almost (but not quite) conservative.

In particular, there seems to be an ongoing struggle between different factions of the party with respect to two issues: immigration and health insurance. Several sharp exchanges in the debates related to whether healthcare reform plans should eliminate private medical insurance in favor of Medicare-for-all and whether illegal immigration should be decriminalized.

Joe Biden led off the second night of debates with an attack on Kamala Harris’ plan to replace private health insurance, saying, “There is no talk about the fact that the plan in 10 years will cost $3 trillion. You will lose your employer-based insurance. And in fact, you know, this is the single most important issue facing the public. And to be very blunt and to be very straightforward, you can't beat President Trump with double-talk on this plan.”

Sounding almost like a conservative, Biden continued, “The plan, no matter how you cut it, costs $3 trillion when it is, in fact, employed, number one. Ten years from now, after two terms of the senator being president, after her time. Secondly, it will require middle-class taxes to go up, not down. Thirdly, it will eliminate employer-based insurance. And fourthly, what happens in the meantime?”

Biden is on firmer ground here than Harris. The former vice president was deeply involved with Obamacare, the 2010 health care reform bill that was intensely unpopular until Republicans came close to replacing it in 2017. At that point, Obamacare suddenly gained more fans and maintains a 10-point advantage in polling.

On the other hand, the approval of Medicare-for-all fluctuates wildly in polling and is heavily dependent on the details. AP polling from January found that voters like the idea of Medicare-for-all but not the higher taxes and longer wait times that it could bring. More recently, FiveThirtyEight pointed out that more voters are on board with the idea of allowing people to buy into Medicare voluntarily than in eliminating private insurance and forcing everyone into the program.

This is underscored by the recent endorsement of Joe Biden by the International Association of Fire Fighters, who said in a statement that union members “do not support the concept of abandoning those plans for a government-run single-payer plan,” adding, “The elimination of employer-based insurance in favor of a Medicare-for-all or government-run single-payer proposal is a bad idea that punishes working families who have secured quality healthcare.”

In his opening statement on the first debate night, John Delaney, a former Maryland congressman, argued that the focus on Medicare-for-all could cost Democrats the election. “We can go down the road that Senator Sanders and Senator Warren want to take us with bad policies like Medicare for All, free everything and impossible promises that’ll turn off independent voters and get Trump reelected,” Delaney said. “That’s what happened with McGovern. That’s what happened with Mondale.”

Later that night, Delaney took on Sanders directly, saying, “His math is wrong” and warned that many hospitals across the country would close if they had to rely on Medicare reimbursement rates.

“Why can’t we just give everyone healthcare as a right and allow them to have choice?” Delaney asked. “I’m starting to think this is not about healthcare. This is an anti-private sector strategy.”

Amy Klobuchar voiced similar concerns about the Medicare-for-all plans of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. “I just don’t buy… that it’s somehow not moral to not have that public option,” she said.

The other big policy disagreement between the Democrats was over immigration. When former Obama Housing Secretary Julian Castro advocated decriminalizing illegal immigration, it was Joe Biden once again who resisted the urge to pile on the popular liberal talking point.

“I have guts enough to say his plan doesn't make sense,” Biden responded to Castro. “Here's the deal. The fact of the matter is that, in fact, when people cross the border illegally, it is illegal to do it unless they're seeking asylum. People should have to get in line. That's the problem. And the only reason this particular part of the law is being abused is because of Donald Trump. We should defeat Donald Trump and end this practice.”

There was one other issue where one Democrat sounded more conservative than present-day Republicans. At one point, John Delaney mounted a spirited defense of free trade, something rarely heard these days in either party.

“So listen, this is what I don’t understand,” Delaney postulated. “President Trump wants to build physical walls and beats up on immigrants. Most of the folks running for president want to build economic walls to free trade and beat up on President Obama.”

“I’m the only one running for president who actually supports the Trans-Pacific Partnership,” Delaney continued. “President Obama was right about that. We should be getting back in that. Senator Warren just issued a trade plan that would prevent the United States from trading with its allies. We can’t go and we can’t isolate ourselves from the world. We have to engage with fair, rules-based trade.”

At the end of the two nights, it was obvious that there are two different overlapping factions within the Democratic Party. One is the Obama faction represented by candidates like Biden, Delaney, Klobuchar. The other is the far-left faction of Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, and Elizabeth Warren. After attempting to keep one foot on both sides of the party in recent months, Joe Biden seems to have firmly embraced his position in the moderate lane.

As I’ve argued in the past, Biden is the dominant moderate candidate in the Democratic primary while numerous strong candidates are vying for the limited number of progressive votes. Barring unforeseen circumstances such as a gaffe of Trumpian proportions or a sudden health problem, this makes Biden likely to become the eventual nominee.

It also makes Biden likely to eventually become president. As he stakes down middle-of-the-road policy positions, he makes himself palatable to the moderate and independent voters who will decide the election, voters who have been all but ignored by Donald Trump for the past three years. As Biden attacks Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders, he is also inoculating himself from charges of socialism by Republicans and positioning himself for the general election.

Originally published on The Resurgent

Conservative College Crusader On Moderate Democrats Versus Identity Politics

Charles Copeland is the former chairman of Delaware Republican Party and minority leader in the Delaware State Senate. He currently heads the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, an organization dedicated to bringing conservative thought to college campuses. The Resurgent caught up with Mr. Copeland this week to talk about Amy Klobuchar’s candidacy and whether a moderate Democrat could win against Donald Trump in 2020.

“From an intellectual perspective,” Copeland says, “I don’t think that the president really spent a lot of time during his life worried about conservative or even libertarian philosophy. I think he worried about what price the union cement contractor was giving him for whatever his next project was. He was somewhat of an unwritten page and I know a lot of people that were very, very worried, but I would submit that, from a policy perspective, what he’s implemented since being in office has been very conservative policy.”

Copeland doesn’t consider himself a Trump critic, saying, “I would not consider myself a Never Trumper nor would I consider myself an Always Trumper. On my board at ISI, I have both.”

“As a friend of mine once described it, it’s a bit like having a dull limo driver,” he adds. “He’s getting you where you want to go, but you just want to put the glass up.”

Despite the fact that Copeland seems pleased with much of the Trump Administration, he acknowledges that the president is in trouble with moderate voters. The Republican defeats in the House in the 2018 midterms were largely due to a loss of moderate voters in the suburbs.

“Where I live, it’s a suburb of Philadelphia, even though we’re in Delaware and that was one of the areas where Republicans got crushed in the 2018 elections,” he says. “Maybe it wasn’t a wave election in other places, but, in my area, it was a wave election and I consider this to be a fairly moderate area.”

“I think that a lot of moderates said, ‘We want somebody to put a brake on what is going on or, perhaps, on the president directly,” Copeland continues, adding, “I’m not expressing my own opinion, I’m just trying to call balls and strikes.”

“If you think back to the 2016 election,” he adds, “there were about 60,000 people in three states that called the election. If 11,000 people in a Pittsburgh suburb and 11,000 people in a Milwaukee suburb and 11,000 people in a Detroit suburb changed their votes, you change the outcome. Add to that the fact that the president’s approval rating has never in his entire administration broken 50 percent and normally sits around 40 percent. Meanwhile, there are some Never Trampers out there, 43 percent or so, who say they want to impeach the guy. He starts a little behind in a generic situation.”

“I think that if a moderate Democrat made it through their primary system, it would be a much more difficult race” for President Trump, he continues but adds that the Democrat primary system is stacked against moderates.

Copeland says that the large number of Democratic candidates will make it very difficult for any one of them to win a majority of delegates. If five or six prominent candidates such as Kamala Harris, Corey Booker, Beta O’Rourke, Kirsten Gillibrand and Amy Klobuchar each win about 15-20 percent of the delegates, it would conceivably be possible for a moderate like Klobuchar to emerge as a consensus candidate.

“From a structural perspective,” he adds, “they’ve got a real hard time getting a candidate who actually has crossover appeal, but, if they did, I think that would be a very, very challenging environment for the current administration.”

Copeland adds that he believes that President Trump will shift gears over the next two years to make himself more amenable to moderates, especially when compared with the radical left-wing Democratic candidates, and notes that the State of the Union may have been the beginning of such a shift in tone.

“I didn’t think the speech was huge as the speech goes,” he says, “but compared to how he’s framed by the media, he came across as a guy that likes people” such as immigrants, war heroes, childhood cancer victims, and Jews, contrary to allegations of anti-Semitism. “It’s kind of hard to frame the guy as a xenophobic hater if he stands in front of people and says, ‘Look at all the people I like.’’’

“I think he’s starting to change tacks,” Copeland says, but adds, “How long that stays, who knows?”

Indeed, a few days later, the kinder, gentler Trump fell by the wayside as the president proclaimed a national emergency in an attempt to bypass the congressional refusal to appropriate money for his signature border barrier.

When asked about the possibility that Joe Biden might enter the race, Copeland jokes, “Joe Biden lives about a mile from where I’m standing right now. Of course, the state is small.”

“I’ve known Joe for a long, long time and Joe loves the sharp elbows of politics,” he says. “If you could go and sit with God and make the perfect human for politics, it would look something like Joe Biden from a skill set. From a policy perspective, I disagree with him on almost everything, but he loves politics and is skilled at it.”

“The problem that he’s got on the Democrat side is he’s an old white guy,” he continues. “How do the Democrats that are dominated by identity politics today” nominate “an old white guy?”

“He’s hugely skilled, but I think that, at the end of the day, it’s going to be very tough to pull that off,” Copeland muses. “But, as I said, if you got to the convention and everybody had 15 percent, could he be somebody that they rallied around because he would be a holding cell for the future? Could be. That’s something that I think, that if I’m Amy Klobuchar, I would be thinking about.”

Copeland takes a swipe at Corey Booker and the identity politics of the Democratic Party, saying, “Corey Booker is now aiming to be the first vegan guy who shaves his head and it’s just an absurdity. I don’t understand the allure to somebody saying that I’m going to be the first vegan president. We’ve got serious issues to face in this country and whether you like McDonald’s hamburgers is not one of them.”

There are deep divisions between even moderate Democrats and conservative Republican voters. Two issues where the differences are most apparent are abortion and immigration. Of the two, Copeland believes that immigration would be the easier gap to bridge.

“The majority of Americans, and I think it’s a good-sized majority, maybe 60-65 percent, want some sort of immigration reform that takes people that are in the United States and gives them legal status or a pathway to legal citizenship,” he says. “They don’t want to uproot families and nobody wants to see the ICE agents coming into a house, pulling out mom and dad and leaving a crying kid standing there as their parents are taken away.”

“I think the majority of Americans want to see that, but they also want to see border security,” he says, adding that “the mainstream media has vilified border security in such a way that” many people don’t want to admit supporting a wall but see the value in adding security to “control the border and bring those people who we believe will be valuable citizens into the country and keep out the criminal element and MS-13.”

Copeland sees the possibility that a split government after the 2020 elections might act on immigration reform. Even if President Trump is re-elected, the two parties might find a middle ground on the issue. Copeland notes that several pieces of landmark legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was passed with strong Republican support and signed by President Johnson, “a racist cad,” and welfare reform under Bill Clinton, were passed with government control split between the two parties rather than when one party controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency.

“Abortion is a little different, “he says, “because the Supreme Court with Roe v. Wade jumped into the middle of it and put it on ice. Until that’s dealt with, I don’t believe that either side has any interest in doing anything except using it as a club.”

Even though Copeland is a fan of President Trump’s policy, he does acknowledge that the president’s behavior has made him somewhat unpopular among the college students that ISI works with. “I think that President Trump’s problems with aggressiveness in his tweets and in name-calling, some of those things are manifest. In kindergarten, we all learned how to be polite and hold doors for other people and speak in our inside voices and I do think that rubs a lot of people the wrong way,” he admits.

But that does not mean all is lost. He goes on, “I think that there is a large portion of the student body who like what the president has done because they have job opportunities when they graduate. They like what the president has done because they look around the world and it is a safer place.”

Copeland points out that 18 percent of college humanities professors are Marxists compared to only five percent who are conservative. “And Marxism is a political theory that has never worked. It’s 0-for-40…. Conservative policies that have worked almost every time and every place they’ve been tried, maybe they’re 37-and-three, and yet it is the minority opinion on campus.”

Many conservatives and moderates on campus are afraid to speak up because of the leftist practices of public shaming and doxing their opponents, posting personal contact information, including phone numbers and home addresses publicly. Conservatives and Trump supporters “are afraid to say anything because they don’t know if the student next to them is a rabid left-winger who is going to start shrieking at them like that woman did to Jeff Flake in the elevator. People don’t want that kind of stuff, they just want to go about their life and live their life the way they want and to go to their classes and believe in free markets and opportunity and limited government and property rights.”

ISI’s mission is help educate students in these conservative, small government principles. Copeland says that ISI is different from some organizations that preach the simplistic message that, “socialism is terrible and capitalism is great.”

“We talk about the fundamentals and let students make their own decision. We’ve had debates in which we’ve had open borders and closed borders people debate one another” with debaters from the libertarian Cato Institute and the conservative Heritage Foundation, Copeland says. “Even in debates like that, we’ll have protesters because they don’t want to have an opinion other than their own talked about. I think that’s largely because they’re afraid that their own opinion lacks any deep intellectual underpinnings. They’ve just got an emotion.”

“I think that there is a vocal minority on campus that is led by an increasingly strident faculty that is driving this social justice, identity politics debate,” Copeland says, “Many students look at it and go, ‘Well, I’m just going to keep my head down and drive forward and get out.’ And that’s what they do. And it’s a shame.”

Originally published on The Resurgent

Where Are The Democrat Moderates?

The 2020 presidential campaign has officially kicked off and there are already at least nine Democrats, about half of whom you may have heard of, who have tossed their hats in the ring to compete for a chance to unseat Donald Trump. So far, the Democratic primary is shaping up to be a veritable freak show with one candidate who falsely claimed to be an American Indian, another who was endorsed by Klansman David Duke for her anti-Israeli politics, and a third who has advocated eliminating the entire private health insurance industry. The burning question for many Americans is, “Where is all the moderate Democrats?”

Even though the public face of the Democratic Party leans sharply left, that isn’t necessarily true of Democratic voters. CNN exit polls show that in the 2018 midterm elections, Democrats not only won nine of ten liberal voters, they also won almost two-thirds of moderate voters, the largest share of the electorate. If that weren’t enough, in what might be described as the Trump effect, Democrats won 16 percent of the conservative vote. Other polling supports the idea that Democratic voters are not as liberal as their party leadership. FiveThirtyEight notes that almost half of the Democratic Party (47 percent) identify as moderate or conservative. In 2016, at least a quarter of Democratic primary voters said that they were moderate or conservative. Despite their success with other ideological groups – or more likely because of it – liberal Democrats now feel that the time is right to put forth a radical agenda of tax increases, government expansion and attacks on farting cows.

What this means is that the Democrats on the verge of repeating the same mistake that President Trump made. This also happens to be the mistake that Barack Obama made that led to Trump’s election.

The misconception made by both parties is that a rejection of the other party does not constitute an embrace of your party’s most radical ideas. The rejection of Hillary Clinton’s continuation of the Obama Administration was not a blank check for the Trump Administration to enact an unfettered right-wing populist agenda. By the same token, when voters fired the Republicans in 2008, they did not intend for Democrats to enact a far-left wish list. This is especially true considering that Barack Obama campaigned as a post-partisan moderate.

If Democrats want to build on their success in 2018, the smart bet would be to back a candidate who would have broad appeal. Instead, the candidates who have generated the most interest so far are all fire-breathing champions of far-left ideas. These ideas may be popular in the liberal enclaves along the West Coast and in the Northeast, but they are unlikely to gain much traction with voters who are representative of flyover country.

The good news for those who don’t want to see Democrats nominate a far-left candidate in 2020 is that it is unlikely that the current crop of nine hopefuls will be the only Democrats running. Joe Biden, the potential candidate who consistently leads preference polls of Democratic voters, has not declared his candidacy yet but seems likely to do so.

Biden has run for president twice before in 1988 and 2008 but stepped aside for Hillary Clinton in 2016, a decision that he almost certainly regrets. Hillary was eventually shown to be such a weak candidate that Biden could probably have won both the Democratic nomination and the presidency. Since 2016, he has engaged in a war of words with President Trump that kept him in the news. In addition to being one of the more moderate voices in the Democratic Party, Biden is a proven quantity with elder statesman status. After two presidential campaigns and two vice-presidential campaigns, there are unlikely to be any hidden skeletons in Biden’s closet. It is also worth noting that Biden performs best in head-to-head polling with President Trump.

If Biden decides against running, there are other possibilities for a moderate Democratic nominee as well. In fact, there are already moderates in the race, you just probably haven’t heard about them. One is Pete Buttigieg is the mayor of South Bend, Indiana and a former naval reserve officer who served in Afghanistan. Buttigieg attracted the attention of David Axelrod when he campaigned for the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee in 2017. A second moderate already in the race is John Delaney, who was a congressman from Maryland until he retired this year.

Another moderate generating buzz is Amy Klobuchar, a Democratic senator from Minnesota. Klobuchar has a reputation for reaching across the aisle and is one of the most conservative Democratic senators. Klobuchar apparently has other candidates concerned. A preemptive attack on her candidacy was launched this week with allegations that she was verbally abusive to her staffers.

The “other” Democratic hopefuls from 2016 may also return for another try. Lincoln Chafee, a former governor of Rhode Island, Jim Webb, a former Virginia senator and Secretary of the Navy, and another Marylander, former Governor Martin O’Malley, would also appeal to moderates. Chafee, Webb and O’Malley may be waiting to see what Biden decides for launching their own campaigns.

It will be tempting for liberal activists to look at Donald Trump and think that the time is ripe to push forward with a radical candidate and agenda. Given the president’s weakness in the polls, a radical candidate might be successful at defeating Mr. Trump, but the safe bet would be to nominate a candidate with broad appeal. It would be easier to expand the Democratic voter base with a positive pitch than to win an election with the message that our candidate isn’t great but Trump is worse.

Originally published on The Resurgent