Most of the wagers 2020 candidates began placing months or even years ago are about to fail. A small handful will soon pay off.
One way to think about presidential campaigns is as a type of wager. A candidate’s strategy is essentially a calculation about what factors will exert the greatest influence on voters, and if that prediction is right he or she wins power.
Biden’s bet, said Chicago-based reporter Natasha Korecki, who has spent much of the past year reporting on Iowa, is that “the primary electorate is really looking for a moderate, that the moderates are the ones who are really going to show up, the sort of older-sector of the Democratic Party, they’re the ones that are going to come to the polls and that are going to caucus.”
There's no way to know whether the DNC’s bet pays off til a year from now, when we see what happens in the general election. The person with the biggest bet that the DNC has screwed up is Donald Trump, whose team is hoping Democrats pick a nominee who they can portray as too liberal or too out-of-touch with the values of swing state voters.
The biggest possibility of a major race-altering event is if Iowa voters decide to snub three of the oldest presidential candidates in history: Biden , Sen. Bernie Sanders and Warren . This may be the most consequential strategic divide of the Democratic race. Biden has spent most of his five decades in politics believing that the key for a successful progressive politician is to play defense — to avoid being caricatured as too liberal, to provide reassurance to voters concerned that the party has drifted ideologically and culturally away from its working-class roots.
Except ... Warren was murky for months in 2019 about whether her support of “Medicare for All” was actually an endorsement of Sanders’ plan to essentially blow up Obamacare and abolish private health insurance. Eventually, and eager to leave no daylight between her agenda and the demands of many liberal activists, she clarified that this was indeed the case — without matching Sanders’ concession that this expensive dream would require raising taxes for the middle class.
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