The fight for the Democratic presidential nomination will begin to assume a more concrete shape on the nights of June 26 and 27, when twenty candidates take the stage in Miami for the first round of debates. They qualified to participate by meeting one of two criteria before June 12: securing a minimum number of donors (at least 65,000) or registering more than one percent support in three major polls. The qualifying criteria are the same for the second round of debates in Detroit on July 30 and 31. For the third round, to be held on September 12 and 13 (in a location not yet chosen), the criteria are essentially doubled, which could winnow the field considerably. The Democratic National Committee has sanctioned twelve debates, to be held until next April. [...]
There are reasons to think that this time the nomination battle could drag into June 2020, when the primaries end, or even, some have suggested, all the way to the convention in July, making for the first truly contested Democratic convention since 1952, when Adlai Stevenson arrived and declared himself to have no interest in the nomination but delivered a welcoming speech so good that it ultimately led to the delegates choosing him on the third ballot over Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver. The reasons have to do, first, with new rules the party wrote after the Clinton–Sanders battle in 2016, and, second, with a growing schism in the party between its two poles of influence in the age of social media: the younger, urban, and more left-leaning people who carry out a daily and often pestiferous political dialogue on Twitter, and the older and more traditionally liberal-to-moderate people who make up the actual backbone of the party across America. If there is a division within the party that will bring it to ruin in 2020, this is it. [...]
The most contentious issue they faced was the power of the high-ranking party insiders and elected officials known as superdelegates, a category that had been conjured into existence after the 1980 election to try to ensure the success of mainstream candidates (the move was a delayed response to the 1972 nomination of George McGovern, whose campaign was seen as too left-wing by many party regulars and who lost to Richard Nixon in a landslide). Superdelegates could vote at the convention, and in 2016 they gave Clinton a big advantage. Many of them endorsed her before the primaries even began, and they were counted in the running delegate totals published daily in The New York Times, The Washington Post, fivethirtyeight.com, and other venues, perhaps giving the impression that she had earned more delegates in the primaries and caucuses than she had. [...]
Democrats in the Pew survey skew younger than their Republican counterparts. About 43 percent are under forty, and just 12 percent are over seventy (the numbers for Republicans in those categories are 32 and 17 percent, respectively). A rather remarkable 56 percent are female. Just 54 percent are white, as opposed to more than 70 percent of Democrats on social media, with blacks and Latinos constituting 19 percent each (Republicans are 81 percent white). Of four designated income levels, the most represented by far is the lowest, under $30,000, at 36 percent. Likewise, of four designated education levels, the most represented by far is high school or less, at 37 percent—although interestingly, 15 percent of Democrats have graduate degrees, while only 8 percent of Republicans do. About a third of Democrats don’t express a religious affiliation, which means two-thirds of them do, which again is quite different, at least in my experience, from Twitter Democrats, who seem for the most part irreligious.
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