Train wreck a-comin'

The Democratic Party had a good midterm last month, by any reckoning.

Interestingly, Republican turnout (51 million House votes) was much higher than in the "wave" midterms of 2010 and 2014 (44 million and 40 million, respectively). The problem was that Democratic turnout was higher still (over 60 million House votes, not too far shy of Hillary Clinton's 66 million total in 2016).

Donald Trump mobilizes the Republican vote, but he mobilizes the Democratic vote even more.

Thus, the 2020 fantasy scenario for "Never Trump" conservatives is that Trump decides he's already made American great again and it's time to return to private life and refill his coffers. Declaring victory and cashing in on his post-presidency sooner rather than later might be tempting for a fellow obviously frustrated by the job.

Within this scenario, Republicans would then get a mulligan for the 2016 nomination process and put together a ticket -- say, Nikki Haley at the top with Ben Sasse, Marco Rubio or John Kasich as running mate -- that would be hard for Democrats to beat and might even help the GOP retain control of the Senate and retake the House.

On the other side, the hunch is that things are going to get awfully messy awful fast. Indeed, the Democratic race might turn out to be one of the most chaotic in the history of the American party system, perhaps even ending in the first brokered convention since 1968.

By some tallies, there are at least 40 Democrats contemplating a run. Many of those won't, of course, but there's still a good chance that the field could end up as large as two dozen or so, dwarfing even the unwieldy 2016 GOP herd.

Incumbents who are 10 points "underwater" in approval, as Trump basically has been since his inauguration, tend to heighten ambition on the other side.

How to fit all of those Democratic aspirants onto a debate stage and allow each more than 30-second sound bites will be a daunting task -- if the Republicans had to resort to separate "A" and "B" debate cards the last time out, the Democrats will likely have to add a "C."

And this is where the Democrats immersion in identity politics will make things still trickier. As John Podhoretz puts it, "What if the Democratic B-list panel has twice as many women on it as the A-list panel? You know that the accusations of sexism and patriarchal dominion will fly fast and furious and will come to control the national conversation for a time. The same will be true of African American candidates, or Hispanic candidates, or LGBT ones."

In short, the Democratic obsession with identity politics will form the backdrop against which the nomination fight will be fought, likely making that fight (like everything else these days) more brutal because it's all about racism, sexism, and oppression.

But it will get even worse when considering two other considerations: that the Democratic primaries (in contrast to the GOP) generally allocate delegates on a proportional rather than winner-take-all basis (thereby making it more difficult for anyone to break out of the pack with early plurality victories that winnow the huge field), and that changes in the primary calendar have created a new "Super Tuesday" on March 3 that includes California, Texas and seven other states.

Because of those calendar changes and the likely size and makeup of the Democratic field, it's entirely possible that five or six different Democrats could win primaries in the first month of the race -- perhaps Bernie Sanders in Iowa, Vermont and again in New Hampshire, Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts, Joe Biden in South Carolina, Julian Castro in Nevada, and favorite sons Terry McAuliffe in Virginia, Beto O'Rourke in Texas, and Kamala Harris in California.

If something resembling that happens, the odds increase that no one contender would be anywhere close to the number of delegates sufficient to win on the first ballot going into the mid-July convention.

This could also be where the "superdelegates" enter the picture -- in 2016, Hillary Clinton maintained a strong position over the insurgent Sanders throughout because she could count on having the support of the vast majority of the party's 712 superdelegates (a quality-control mechanism that Republicans unfortunately lacked; hence Trump's hostile takeover).

In yet another new wrinkle, in response to claims on the radical left wing of the party that Sanders never got a fair shake, the Democratic superdelegates will now be prevented from voting on the first ballot at the convention.

That won't matter if a candidate has a majority sown up going in, but it could prove decisive if it goes to a second ballot, as it well might.

Thus a scenario that could tear the Democratic Party apart in a manner reminiscent of, if not worse than, Chicago in 1968: the superdelegates representing the party establishment, based on an assessment of party prospects in November, choose an old white male like Biden over a minority or female candidate who might have received more votes on the first ballot.

Mix in the likely reaction of the Ocasio-Cortez radical wing of the party and the phrase "hell to pay" comes quickly to mind.

Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

Editorial on 12/17/2018

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