Thoughts on the 2020 Democratic Field Policy and Focus of your Candidate.

[TheRay]

JFK was also unlikely to win the election, given the anti-catholic sentiment in the US. Many Americans believed John F. Kennedy would rather obey the Pope than enforce the US Constitution.
JFK was not the first Catholic to become a presidential candidate. New York governor Al Smith was the first Catholic US presidential candidate and he lost the POTUS election in 1928. Many Protestants feared his candidacy, including German Lutherans and Southern Baptists, believing that the Pope in Rome would dictate his policies

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Smith

Excellent point. In fact, now that you really mention it, almost 50% of all Presidents were long shots at the start of the race. To varying degrees of course, with President Kennedy being an outlier as his religion (identity politics) was a lot more significant than say President Polk, who was just too obscure to be considered a real challenger. I brought up Obama and Trump because they were the most recent, but also because the media was and is a lot more widespread, making pundits talking about how unlikely they were that much more salient. With Trump's unlikeliness being proclaimed all the way down, essentially, to the point where he was actually declared the winner.

Really just a great contribution to this discussion, thank you.

[ed2962]

Warren

[Malvolio]

Let's remember something many people from outside of New York may not realize. de Blasio is from New York City. Gillibrand is from upstate NY. They might as well be from separate states.

[SquirrelMan]

De Blasio's popularity with black voters could be helpful in Southern primaries.

[SquirrelMan]

Liz has a plan for everything:

[Mister Mets]

Yeah, good luck, Mayor De Blasio. No mayor has ever been able to win the presidential nomination. Same with the mayor Pete.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_D...tial_primaries

Steve Bullock also joined the race a couple days earlier. I think a little-known or obscure governor of a sparsely populated state has a good chance of winning as a United States senator. After all Bill Clinton won the election. So did Jimmy Carter.

and let's not forget Senator Michael Bennett who declared his candidacy on May 2. I wonder if American people would decide to elect a candidate of Jewish descent born in another country. Barry Goldwater and John Kerry, both of whom have Jewish ancestry, lost. John McCain, who was born in Panama, lost.

Do you think those losses had anything to do with their backgrounds? How many people reading this thread (which is going to be limited to people who know a lot about politics) were even aware that Kerry has a Jewish background?

Regarding the backgrounds of losing candidates, a complicating factor is that they were not the favorites in the general election due to circumstances beyond their control.

Al Smith was hurt by anti-Catholic bias but he also ran against a popular member of the popular Republican administration at a time when only two Democrats got elected to the White House in a more than 60 year period (and Woodrow Wilson was helped by a strong third party campaign from a former Republican President.)

The nation was not ready for a new President so soon after Kennedy's assassination so Goldwater was doomed no matter what. And there had only been one time in over a century that a party had been kicked out of the White House after just one term. Kerry had that problem, and ran against a war-time President.

McCain ran for a third term for his party (and parties had only been able to stick in the White House for three terms once since Eisenhower's election) at a time when his party was historically unpopular.

Electability matters on the margins, but it's wrong to assume that all elections occur under similar environments, so that FDR would have beaten Hoover in 1928, that Kennedy could have defeated Eisenhower in 1956, or that Kerry would have lost to McCain in 2008.

NYC's Bill De Blasio Trades Criticism at Home for Curiosity in Iowa

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...iosity-in-iowa




Even his own city doesn't want him near the White House. Maybe we shouldn't expect too much from him. Well, another New yorker, Kirsten Gilibrand has better chance than the mayor Bill.

Bill is a terrible mayor. How can he make a good president?

Gilibrand's tanking in the polls right now, so it doesn't appear either has much of a shot.

[Gray Lensman]

So if it was someone else instead of Al Smith, the Democrats still would not have won the White House.

Since JFK, many Catholics including Robert Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, Jerry Brown, Edward Kennedy and Joe Biden ran for president but only one made it to being the nominee and he was John Kerry.

Out of all today's 23 presidential candidates for the 2020 elections, some are Catholics:
Joseph Biden (D), former vice president, from Delaware
Steve Bullock (D), governor of Montana
Julián Castro (D), former secretary of housing and urban development, from Texas
John Delaney (D), former U.S. representative from Maryland
Kirsten Gillibrand (D), U.S. senator from New York
Beto O’Rourke (D), former U.S. representative from Texas
Tim Ryan (D), U.S. representative from Ohio

https://www.americamagazine.org/poli...candidates-jfk

Bobby Kennedy is a special case due to being assassinated during the primary. We can only make educated guesses as to how that primary would have turned out in the end.

[Mister Mets]

Bobby Kennedy is a special case due to being assassinated during the primary. We can only make educated guesses as to how that primary would have turned out in the end.

And Edward Kennedy challenged an incumbent President in a primary while also being responsible for the death of a young woman. That election was a tough lift.