Is the Field Too Big for Kamala Harris?

Nate Silver: “In theory, the easiest way to win a presidential nomination is to bring the various wings and factions of your party together toward some type of consensus. Not every voter has to love you… But they should all at least like you. Usually, this is accomplished by adopting policy positions that represent a rough average of the voters in your party — and which are also fairly closely aligned with the views of party elites who can influence the nomination process.”

“Kamala Harris is one example of a candidate who has rather explicitly been pursuing this strategy. She’s not the most moderate candidate in the field, nor is she the furthest to the left. Rather, she has tried to calibrate herself somewhere in between….”

“But it’s worth remembering that the previous times parties have had very large fields, they produced eccentric nominees — George McGovern in 1972, Jimmy Carter in 1976, and Donald Trump in 2016 — who weren’t really pursuing any middle-ground or coalition-building or triangulation strategy. (The opposite, really, in the case of Trump and McGovern.) That isn’t a large sample, and Harris is still among the Democrats most likely to win the nomination. But she’s increasingly at risk of becoming the Marco Rubio in a field of candidates who have more distinctive pitches to voters.”