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I can not see any of these having a chance in the future.

from https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/the-curse-of-the-2020-democratic-presidential-field/

The Curse of the 2020 Democratic Presidential Field

Left to right: Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg introduces
President Joe Biden at the White House complex in Washington, D.C.,
November 27, 2023. Senator Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) speaks during a
town hall in Waterloo, Iowa, January 26, 2020. Senator Cory Booker (D.,
N.J.) speaks in Chicago, Ill., August 21, 2024.(Evelyn Hockstein, Brenna Norman, Mike Segar/Reuters)
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By Jim Geraghty
November 25, 2024 9:30 AM
230 Comments
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On the menu today: Shortly after the election, Morning Jolt reader
Hawaiian Jim wrote in, “My wife and I were discussing the 2020
presidential candidates on the Democratic side and were thinking how
many of those people vanished altogether. And I wonder of the 109
candidates that were announced, how many of them have any reasonable
chance to have a political career going forward.” Today’s newsletter is
a bit of a “where are they now?” crossed with a cautionary tale for ambitious politicians: An unsuccessful bid for president does not always
leave you in a better spot years later.

The Forgotten Candidates of 2020

“You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” It’s a line from The Dark Knight that “plagues” director Christopher Nolan. Whether your inclination is to see the Democrats who
ran for president in the 2020 cycle as heroes or villains, it is safe to
say that many of those aspiring presidents lived long enough to become something completely different from what they intended back in those
pre-Covid days.

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Four years later — really five, since so much of the action in that
cycle took place in 2019 — a slew of the major players from that field
ended up in places and roles they didn’t expect, often experiencing disappointing fates that they didn’t foresee. The cavalcade of
frustration and woe that you are about to read might just make the next
crop of politicians who have more ambition than genuine standout talent
think twice about running in 2028.

Let’s start with the big winner of 2020, Joe Biden. If Biden isn’t
ending his presidency disgraced, he is leaving the Oval Office as a
shell of a man, a mumbling, stumbling octogenarian who couldn’t remain
his party’s nominee, who imploded on a debate stage, and for nearly a
month stubbornly resisted the obvious evidence that his time had passed.
He only withdrew from the race after he proved unable to remember the
name of his own secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, during an interview
with Black Entertainment Television, declaring, “Look at the heat I’m getting because I named a, the, secretary of defense, the black man.”

Why the Democrats Blew It
The Democrats Have a Woman Problem
Harris 2028!

As president, Biden’s economic policies enabled the worst inflation in
40 years, his border and immigration policies fueled the improbable
comeback of Donald Trump, and his foreign-policy decisions led to a
world on fire from Afghanistan to Ukraine to Israel to the Red Sea and
rising tensions from the Taiwan Strait to the DMZ between the Koreas to Venezuela.

In the pages of The New Yorker, Isaac Chotiner fumed, “Trump’s second
term is Biden’s true legacy. . . . Biden’s arrogance remains astonishing
to behold: well before 2024, he was quite simply too old to ask people,
in good faith, to keep him in office through 2028. He did so anyway,
ensuring that his age became the biggest political story of the first
half of the year.” Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley fumed in the
pages of the New York Times, “His presidency will not get high marks
because he was hired to extinguish Trump and Trumpism and they’re both
alive and well in America.”

Biden achieved his lifelong dream of becoming president — and then
ensured he would be widely remembered as a failure.

Still, Biden will be remembered as a president. The other seeming big
winner from the 2020 election, Kamala Harris, will be remembered as “the other woman who lost to Trump.”

Harris raised and spent a billion dollars, enjoyed gushing coverage
focused on “joy” and memes for the first month or so after becoming the nominee . . . and then lost every contested swing state, and was only
the second Democratic presidential candidate to lose the popular vote
since Michael Dukakis. It is hard to envision any clamor for her to run
again in 2028, and it is reasonable to wonder if the Democratic Party
will nominate another woman for president for many cycles. Harris will
be second-guessed, criticized, and ridiculed for years, and she must be experiencing one of the most intensely disappointing defeats in American political history. She’s made one public appearance since the election,
at a Veterans Day ceremony.

Harris will preside over certifying the November election she lost to
Trump, and then, according to Politico, decide whether to run for
governor of California in 2026 or to run for president again in 2028.

Pete Buttigieg, the soon-to-depart secretary of transportation, is a
curious case. Serving in Biden’s cabinet did keep Buttigieg in front of
the cameras, and he recently spoke to young Democratic elected officials
about how to handle the coming Trump presidency. He’s said that he’s not retiring from public life; “I know that I will make myself useful again later,” he said. “I just don’t know how.” In May 2023, Wired gushed that
Buttigieg “comes off like a Mensa black card holder” and “his cabinet
job requires only a modest portion of his cognitive powers.” American travelers are likely less impressed with Buttigieg’s tenure at the
Department of Transportation, marked by, in Axios’s words, “a historic string of air, rail and supply-chain meltdowns,” and he’s likely to be remembered for taking two months of paternity leave during the
supply-chain crisis. Buttigieg was never seriously considered to be
Harris’s running mate, an indication that the number of Democrats
yearning to see him on a national ticket hasn’t grown since 2020. And if America is within a lasting populist era, a young-looking Harvard-and-Oxford-educated former McKinsey consultant will face an
uphill climb.

Bernie Sanders is still around in the Senate and still the patron saint
of the Democratic Party’s economic Left; some may well argue he was a
prophet of today’s populism. Technically, Sanders was a winner in 2024,
as Vermont voters sent him for another six-year term in the Senate; at
the end of it, Sanders will be 89.

You could argue that senator Elizabeth Warren was one of the secret
winners of the 2020 cycle, as her former staffers spread out into a lot
of positions in the Biden administration. In a reflection of the state
of Massachusetts politics, Warren ran for reelection this year, and I’ll
bet you never noticed; she won with nearly 60 percent of the vote. At
age 75, Warren will still denounce Trump almost every opportunity and is already gearing up for the fight to renew the Trump tax cuts next year.
But she will spend at least the next two years in the Senate minority,
and it is likely that Warren’s apex of influence has passed.

Still around, still involved in legislating, but having faded to the
background — that’s been the fate of a lot of the Democratic senators
who ran for president in the 2020 cycle — Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota,
Cory Booker of New Jersey, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, and both
Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper of Colorado.

These senators still pop up on cable news and the Sunday shows. It’s not unthinkable that one or more of them will run for president again
someday, but no one is clamoring for it. (Notably, none of them were
seriously considered as Harris’s running mate this summer.) They’ve been reduced to faces in the crowd again, “Oh, it’s that guy, whatshisname” status. Virginia senator and former Hillary Clinton running mate Tim
Kaine seems quite comfortable in his return to relative obscurity,
making fun of how no one remembers him in a recent Saturday Night Live
sketch. You wonder if these five are quite as satisfied with returning
to their status as “just another Democratic senator.”

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Jay Inslee, age 73, will finish his third and final term as governor of Washington January 15. When Inslee ran for president, he made climate
change the central issue of his campaign. This week, Inslee attended the
United Nations climate conference COP29, in Baku, Azerbaijan — the one plagued by “a rancid smell from what seemed to be a sewage leak spread throughout a central area of the conference venue,” and that the
Panamanian delegate denounced as “chaotic, poorly managed, and a
complete failure in terms of delivering the ambition required.” Before
the election, Inslee warned that Trump would “sell the climate to the
highest bidder.” Trump will reenter the presidency a few days after
Inslee departs the governor’s mansion.

Marianne Williamson ran against Biden again in the 2024 Democratic
primary, and received 2.9 percent of the vote, about three-tenths of a percentage point behind Dean Phillips. Back in 2019, there was something
kind of quirky and likable about Williamson’s new-age warnings about
Trump harnessing a “dark psychic force.” This time around, Williamson amounted to an asterisk.

Massachusetts congressman Seth Moulton ran one of the least-noticed presidential bids of the 2020 cycle. He is currently facing his own
version of the Salem Witch Trials for daring to suggest that those born
male should not be participating in teen girls’ sports.

Eric Swalwell is also still in Congress, still representing Alameda,
Calif., and unlikely to worry about ever losing his seat in the D+22
district. The most interesting thing to happen to him in the interim was
the revelation that he was, as far as we know, the only member of
Congress to penetrate Chinese intelligence.

Julian Castro was one of the few candidates willing to publicly argue
that Biden’s memory was failing him as he aged. For this Cassandra-like prophecy, Castro was metaphorically cast into the Phantom Zone. He is
now an MSNBC political analyst and guest anchor, telling his followers
on Election Day, “I would not be surprised if Ted Cruz loses tonight.”
Cruz won reelection, with a margin of almost a million votes.

This autumn, Castro’s fellow Texan, Beto O’Rourke, was featured at a
Harris campaign event alongside the candidate’s husband, Doug Emhoff.
Many people forget that after O’Rourke’s 2020 presidential campaign
flamed out, he ran for governor of Texas and lost to Greg Abbott by a
margin of roughly 883,000 votes. (That’s just under the population of
South Dakota.) Now O’Rourke wears the fervor of his 2018 Senate campaign
like an old high-school letterman jacket, a reminder of his glory days.

“With each new race he loses it becomes more difficult to convince
voters and persuade them that he can still win the next race,” said
Sharon Navarro, a political scientist at the University of Texas at San Antonio, told the Texas Tribune. “That’s a very difficult barrier to overcome for a third-time loser.” At least O’Rourke can boast that he
came closer to defeating Cruz than Colin Allred did.

When you’re a billionaire like Michael Bloomberg, you never lose all influence; in October, Bloomberg donated about $50 million to Future
Forward USA Action, a dark-money vehicle that was supporting Harris’s presidential run. But I would note that one of the causes nearest and
dearest to Bloomberg’s heart is gun control. He has donated more than
$270 million to groups supporting gun control over the years. And while Democrats are as supportive of gun control as ever by some measures,
Harris boasted of owning a Glock and said, “If someone breaks into my
house, they’re getting shot.” It’s not that Democrats have given up on gun control, but Harris certainly didn’t want to campaign on it.

Andrew Yang was, briefly, a much-discussed figure in the Democratic
primary, in part because of his appearance on (ironic foreshadowing) the
Joe Rogan Experience. In 2021, he ran for mayor of New York City and
finished fourth. Also that year, he founded the Forward Party, but this
fall, he argued that Americans should not vote for third-party
candidates. Earlier this year, Yang threw his support behind Dean
Phillips’s long-shot bid in the Democratic primary, which did not catch
fire. He recently offered Politico his “thoughts on what the Democrats
should do, which they will ignore.”

Former Montana governor Steve Bullock did become the president of the
United States . . . in a war-game documentary. He’s now become the kind
of retired elected official who gets invited to college campuses to
speak about the importance of moderation.

Retired Ohio congressman Tim Ryan attracted some attention this year as
one of the few people who had debated J. D. Vance on stage, and offered
advice to that other Tim, Walz of Minnesota. (It apparently didn’t do
much good.) Ryan now heads WeThePeople, a political action committee “fostering unity, reform and reconciliation in American society.”

Former New York City mayor Bill de Blasio left office “incredibly unpopular,” and attempted a comeback in an open House seat, but in July
2022, “abruptly ended a campaign for Congress, saying that voters were clearly ‘looking for another option’ and that his time in electoral politics was over.”

Because of how rarely he’s been in the news, it’s understandable if you believed billionaire former hedge-fund manager Tom Steyer was put in the witness-protection program. In the 2020 cycle, he spent $191 million and
failed to win any delagates. (Bloomberg can boast that at least he won
American Samoa.) Steyer is still chair of Galvanize Climate Solutions,
“a climate-focused global investment firm” and involved in big-ticket real-estate deals.

John Delaney, a former representative from Maryland, founded Forbright
Inc. and is executive chairman of Forbright Bank, formerly Congressional
Bank. The bank was recently criticized by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation for “reliance on noncore funding.”

And in perhaps the most unexpected fate of anyone in the 2020 Democratic presidential-primary field . . . Tulsi Gabbard is likely to be the next director of national intelligence for President-elect Trump. If
confirmed, she will have a major hand in assembling and delivering the Presidential Daily Brief.

Hopefully, all these figures are happy with their lives; there is more
to life than politics and which elected office you’re in. But it’s a
fact of life that most political careers end in disappointment, and
every four years, every presidential campaign ends in withdrawal or
defeat except one.

After Wired magazine wrote its love letter to Buttigieg, I wrote, “We
keep reading profiles about Democratic Party figures who are supposedly
the Next Big Thing, and then they turn out to be Not Much of a Thing At
All.” For the past two decades or so, the mentality for a lot of
ambitious politicians was that running for president was all upside, and
almost no downside — and whether you were a billionaire, a relatively
unknown representative, or an obscure South Bend, Ind., mayor, there was
no shame in running and losing, even if you never cracked 2 percent.
Maybe that’s not quite the case anymore.

ADDENDUM: Our Andrew Stuttaford does a head count for the COP29
climate-change conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, and finds that the United Kingdom sent 470 delegates to the summit, compared with 405 from the
United States, 437 from Italy, and 115 from France. “The Mail on Sunday reported that the British delegation was estimated to have tallied 2.3
million air miles in total for return trips, with a total carbon
footprint of at least 338 tons of carbon dioxide.” In other words, in
that one trip, the typical U.K. attendee flying to COP29 generated about four-fifths as many carbon emissions as the average American generates
in a year.

Next Jolt
Senate Republicans Slam the Gaetz Shut — and Save Trump

comments include
zragland
10h
Shout out from South Bend, IN. The nation's loss is our gain. Now if
only we could get Buttigieg's protege out of our mayoral seat and into
national politics, we might get something worthwhile done around here.

fairj123
10h
I can't see Kamala ever being nominated as democratic nominee.


2
Cryptonumismatist
10h
“If Biden isn’t ending his presidency disgraced…”


If? Please.


1
DependsontheRoom
10h
For the past two decades or so, the mentality for a lot of ambitious politicians was that running for president was all upside, and almost no downside...Maybe that’s not quite the case anymore.

Entertaining article as usual, but I don't see a great deal of
"downside" here. A bunch of folks staying rich or being Senator or
writing books (Williamson) and so on. You do allow that "there is more
to life than politics." But the overriding theme of a "curse" falls
flat, seems to me.

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