In the aftermath of Iowa and New Hampshire, barreling toward Nevada and South Carolina, the Democratic Party finds itself if not on suicide watch, certainly in the Intensive Care Unit.
The basic cause of the party's malady is that the Presidential candidate with the clearest path to the nomination--Senator Bernie Sanders--is not the one the majority of the rank and file or the Democratic Establishment want.
Not unreasonably they fear that Sanders--an unabashed social democrat--would be a dragging anchor for Democratic candidates at every level.
Simply put, the Democrats have too many candidates none of whom are likely to go away anytime soon. Historically Iowa and New Hampshire have served as a winnowing process which reduced voter choices to a manageable number, but this year no less than eight (including Bloomberg) remain in the hunt and their names will still be crowding the ballot on not so distant Super Tuesday, March 3rd.
Compounding the problem is that seven of the eight are dubiously asserting, "I am a moderate not a socialist and I can bring the party together".
Ironically the real "poison chalice" for Democrats is their own rules for nomination, which are traceable to their disastrous 1968 Chicago convention and the subsequent adoption of the "McGovern Rules" which ordained that all candidates would have a fair chance to gather delegates. This provision requires that state delegates be awarded proportionately as opposed to "winner take all".
This well intentioned mandate will likely have dire consequences, as it raises the specter of a "brokered" Convention--an experience Democrats have not had since 1952 when a relatively unknown "dark horse" candidate, Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson, emerged victorious only to lose to Gen. Dwight Eisenhower in a landslide in November.
Today in 2020, the tireless Bernie Sanders has a devoted nationwide core support of anywhere from twenty to thirty percent of the Democratic electorate. Even in states he does not win he will almost always cross the critical 15% threshold required to win delegates.
Thus it is highly likely that Bernie will arrive at the Milwaukee Convention as the leader of the pack, albeit with only a plurality of delegates pledged to him on the first ballot.
So, who will be left after Super Tuesday? Early casualties will be Gabbard and Warren because they have little money and no credible path forward. Steyer could stay but he'd be wasting his money since Bloomberg has already won the billionaire sweepstakes.
Klobuchar has upward potential but only if she can sell herself as the real experienced moderate the party supposedly yearns for, and performs well through Super Tuesday.
"Mayor Pete" Buttigieg is currently the darling of the media--always on the lookout for a fresh face, a new generation, the next Obama etc--but to date in all polls he has shown a stunning inability to gain traction among African Americans--the most indispensable demographic in the entire Democratic coalition.
Virtually every pundit in the country has written Joe Biden’s political obituary, but they may have been a bit premature. Biden's Southern "firewall" may have lost a lot of bricks but it hasn't collapsed all together; many African-Americans may have abandoned Joe, but many will stick with Obama's loyal Veep at least thru March 3rd.
There are two candidates who definitely won't run out of money before Milwaukee. Sander's prodigious fundraising machine and Bloomberg's personal wealth guarantee that. A highly combustible convention endgame of Bernie vs. the Billionaire is not entirely implausible.
On thing is certain: Bernie's people will fight to the end and for many of them there is no "second choice". If they come to believe as many already suspect --with some justification--that the party establishment has conspired to cheat them out of the nomination as they feel was done in 2016, they will not go quietly.
Rather, in a nightmare scenario for the Dems, a large proportion of these impassioned and predominantly young voters will do as they did in 2016: simply stay home or as about ten percent did--vote for Trump.
Those who pursue the highly dangerous profession of commercial fishing know that when all meteorological indicators simultaneously move in the wrong direction there is created a massive and ominous weather condition called "The Perfect Storm," which can and often does have fatal consequences. It is just such a storm that now threatens to engulf the Democratic Party.
William Moloney, Ph.D., is a Fellow in Conservative Thought at Colorado Christian University 's Centennial Institute who studied at Oxford and the University of London. He is a former Colorado Commissioner of Education.
