Behold! The era of the 2020 Power Ranking is upon us. From now until our eyes bleed out of our skulls at some point before the Iowa caucuses, political writers will rank the putative field of Democratic presidential candidates, like fantasy-football players, according to their relative strengths and weaknesses as they pursue their party’s presidential nomination. These power rankings are an amusing kind of clickbait for political junkies and a fun pastime for journalists who cover politics like a game. At a time when hundreds of migrant children remain separated from their parents and the president is appointing a supplicant attorney general without any congressional oversight, it’s a little weird these listicles still get published. But hey, content.
It’s worth noting that these lists are often divorced from how voters actually evaluate candidates. Witness the rankings delivered by The Hotline in January 2015, which placed Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Rand Paul as the top three contenders for the Republican nomination. You’ll be shocked to learn who went unmentioned in the 16 slots of power: Donald J. Trump.
In past cycles, these rankings would debut during the so-called “invisible primary,” which is where we sit now, when potential candidates are hiring staff, courting donors, and road-testing their campaign messages. Candidates were scored according to these mechanics—things that would seem fairly anodyne to anyone not immersed in politics. But these days, politics is no longer downstream from culture. It is culture. Democrats might have recaptured the House by talking about health care and economic fairness, but the national conversation continues to feel existential. Trump has tapped into our cultural anxieties so deeply that many people, experts included, are now ascribing enormous meaning to identity, race, and gender as we think about who can best defeat him.
Enter CNN’s latest power ranking. Kamala Harris has been deemed “the new Democratic front-runner.” Why? As a “nonwhite woman, Harris looks like the Democratic Party base these days.” The list is full of hot takes that dangerously revolve around identity and not much else. Golden boy Beto O’Rourke, arguably the most exciting figure in the Democratic Party, is ranked a lowly 10th, because he’s “a man running in a party becoming dominated by women.” Julián Castro is ranked seventh, in part because of “the rising influence of Hispanic voters within the Democratic coalition.” Joe Biden “is a white male.” Sorry, Joe! Elizabeth Warren is “a woman in a party that was nominating women at a record pace in 2018.” And Mike Bloomberg’s biggest vulnerability seems to be that he’s “a white guy from N.Y.C.”—not the more glaring political handicap that he’s Mike Bloomberg and it’s the year 2018.
Make no mistake: thanks to Trump, the issue of race matters more in political campaigns than at any time since the 60s. This is especially true among younger voters who are coming of age when cultural combat feels like the dominant vocabulary of our time. Race also matters in a Democratic primary. A Democrat cannot win the nomination without establishing a durable connection with African-American voters, as Bernie Sanders learned painfully in 2016. Race is an inescapable riptide as we look ahead to the presidential race. But as the term “identity” creeps more and more into our elite political conversation, the complexities of race and gender risk being sanded down into glib pundit-speak, power ranking-style, with little correlation to real-world behavior. People might have a tendency to vote according to their identity in general elections, but the idea that blacks vote for blacks and whites for whites and women for women cannot possibly be mapped onto a Democratic primary that will be historic in its size, diversity, and unpredictability. Moreover, it’s an idea that ignores how voters actually behaved at the polls just more than one week ago.
In October 2007, Barack Obama was facing a big problem. His campaign in South Carolina, an important early-primary state, was courting African Americans in a state where black voters make up around 60 percent of the Democratic primary vote. At that point, Obama was still trailing Hillary Clinton in the state, in part because African Americans at the time were wary of a black man actually winning over white voters in a general election. As part of Obama’s black-outreach strategy, his team organized a series of gospel concerts, starring a Grammy-winning artist named Donnie McClurkin, who quickly became a flashpoint in the campaign. Obama’s rivals circulated remarks McClurkin had made about gays and lesbians, claiming homosexuality was a choice that could be cured by prayer. L.G.B.T. groups erupted, demanding Obama drop McClurkin from the concert series. The campaign eventually found a compromise, inviting leaders from the gay community to also appear at the shows, but not before causing heads to explode in Obama headquarters. Being the only African-American candidate in a Democratic primary was not a cinch.
One of Obama’s South Carolina advisers called me at the time to vent. “The Democratic Party isn’t a party, it’s just a constellation of interest groups fighting with each other,” he told me. I remember it vividly, because it summed up the minefield that Democrats have to walk to win a nomination. There might be “lanes” in a primary—a populist lane, an African-American lane, a centrist lane, an Avenatti cul de sac—but a candidate cannot win a nomination without eventually growing their appeal to voters beyond their obvious base. With little policy daylight between candidates, primary campaigns are won and lost based on personality, messages, and the ability to endure unfortunate news cycles and pesky mistakes. Much of this activity is confined to a handful of early-voting states, mainly Iowa and New Hampshire. Campaigns are frequently reacting, bouncing off one another, forcing candidates to adapt and pivot and survive. The identity of a candidate is constantly being reshaped by forces outside of their control. Like a new shirt in the wash, politicians come out of campaigns looking a lot different than when they went in.
Obama, a black candidate, ultimately won Iowa, a state that is 91.3 percent white. And yes, he won South Carolina, where the majority of the Democratic primary electorate is black. But he lost New Hampshire (mostly white) and Nevada (not as white) in between. Still, his personal talents carried his campaign through its darker days. He eventually captured the nomination, above all else, because he delivered a message of change that suited the time, at a moment when Democratic primary voters were weary of war and yearning for new voices. Black voters were a key element of his path to victory, yes, but so were young people, college-educated whites, and upper-income voters. It’s fun to imagine where Obama would stand on a power-ranking list today, most likely described as “a black candidate in a party increasingly dominated by black voters.” He’d probably be a front-runner—but not exactly for the reasons that ultimately made him president.
“Is a candidate like Barack Obama going to turn out more black voters in a city like Detroit or Philadelphia than, say, Hillary Clinton? Probably,” said Lynn Vavreck, the co-author of Identity Crisis, which examines the role of racial and ethnic identities in the 2016 election. “But is that a big identity thing? Well, no, it just is what it is.” Identity and partisanship are closely aligned in general elections. White men without a college degree are likely to vote Republican, for instance. But primaries are more complicated, Vavreck told me. The role of identity in a Democratic primary is not really about the race or gender of a candidate. It’s about how a candidate’s message and persona are reflected in the eyes of voters at any given moment.
Look at Clinton in 2008 versus Clinton in 2016. In the 2008 primary, in a head-to-head race against an African American, Clinton infamously branded herself as the candidate of “hardworking Americans, white Americans.” Her identity in the primary, and the way voters identified with her, was a condition of whom she was running against. It didn’t pan out. But eight years on, Clinton was running against Sanders, who was gathering strength with white voters instead of African Americans. Clinton, seeing black voters as a key element of her path to victory, ultimately took positions on race that were even more aggressive than Obama’s in 2008, talking openly about racial injustice as a factor in economic inequality. She won the nomination, in part, by winning over the black voters who flocked to Obama eight years earlier. At the same time, Clinton was running to become the first female president. But her signature identifier, her gender, didn’t really matter at all in the primaries, according to surveys. “Women who said that gender was a very important part of their identity were not more likely to support Clinton than were women who said gender was not important,” Vavreck wrote in her book.
Identity matters. But context matters more. “No one knows what the context of this election is going to be,” Vavreck told me. “We don’t know whether the economy will continue to grow or be stagnant. We don’t know about Bob Mueller. There is a lot of uncertainty about what the backdrop for the play is going to be. And that does matter. It sets the stage for everything the candidates will do and say and who they will activate in terms of attitudes. People sort themselves conditional on the choices that the candidates are giving them.” If voters made choices purely on a candidate’s skin color or gender or age, then Sanders would have built his grassroots success on an army of curmudgeonly Larry David look-alikes who constantly had dandruff on their lapels. But that’s not what happened. Sanders’s base of support looked precisely the opposite of the white, 74-year-old Vermonter: he was powered by an army of young people who adored his progressive agenda in spite of his age, not because of it.
It was Sanders, of course, who touched off what might have been the first racial flare-up of the 2020 cycle. After Andrew Gillum and Stacey Abrams, two African-American gubernatorial candidates in the South, fell short of victory on Election Day, Sanders told the Daily Beast that whites in Florida and Georgia might have felt queasy about their votes. “You know there are a lot of white folks out there who are not necessarily racist who felt uncomfortable for the first time in their lives about whether or not they wanted to vote for an African American,” Sanders said, apparently forgetting that Obama won Florida twice. Sanders later clarified, saying Republicans in both states ran race-baiting campaigns.
But his comment was hard to ignore against the backdrop of what might be the most diverse Democratic presidential field in history. There are several African Americans mulling presidential bids. Can they win over whites, particularly non-college-educated whites, at a time when Trump appears to be solidifying his support among those voters? Was Sanders making that implicit argument ahead of the Democratic primary? Conversely, can a white, male candidate like Sanders, Biden, or O’Rourke win over black voters and women? Even as I put these words to paper, the questions feel not only icky, but also kind of dumb. A better question might be: are there really that many Democratic primary voters who think like this?
“It’s an incredible source of frustration for me when people think that way, talk that way, write that way,” said Kamala Harris, the “nonwhite woman [who] looks like the Democratic base these days.” “It is simplistic,” she told me. “People seem to have a need to fit others into these discrete, neat compartments of their brains. It undervalues the intelligence of the American people. It’s really a mistake to assume, based on a person’s race or gender, that they only care about certain issues to the exclusion of other issues. With that kind of thinking, you can’t be relevant to the people you serve. It will handicap our ability as a party to be relevant.”
Harris said “it’s pretty insulting to white people” to suggest they’d be reluctant to vote for candidates who don’t share their skin color. Trump certainly shored up support among rural and downscale whites last Tuesday, helping Republicans in competitive Senate races. But the election results are littered with examples of white voters showing up for nonwhite candidates. In Illinois’s 14th District, which is 86 percent white, Lauren Underwood became the youngest African-American women elected to Congress. Lucy McBath, another African-American woman, won Newt Gingrich’s old seat in Georgia. There are myriad examples of African-American women winning even further down the ballot in majority-white districts: Sydney Batch flipped a state House seat in majority-white Wake County, North Carolina, while Elaissia Sears won a position as justice of the peace in Mesa, Arizona. And what about Harris’s home state? She cheerfully mentioned to me that the African-American population of California is just 6.5 percent. Harris has been elected statewide three times.
Sherrod Brown, “a white male” who told me he’s considering a presidential bid after his dominant re-election to the Senate in Republican-leaning Ohio, has already been typecast as a Democrat who can talk to the elusive working-class “Trump voter.” But like Harris, he chafes at the idea that his appeal is limited to voters who look like him. Ohio’s white workers have captured the nation’s political attention in the Trump era, but the state also boasts a higher African-American population than the national average and an array of urban centers like Cleveland and Cincinnati. Brown said he frequently talks about voting rights and criminal justice. He noted that he’d just met with Al Sharpton. But Brown’s point of pride, as he tells it, is a consistent political message about being on the side of workers, a message he claims can override the identity-based conflicts that have consumed our political conversation.
“I don’t talk about white workers or black workers or Latino workers or Asian-American workers,” Brown told me. “I just talk about workers. To me, it’s about the dignity of work, about whose side are you on? Whether you punch a clock or work for tips to work for salary or you’re raising kids, that pretty much covers everybody. Populism isn’t racist. Populism isn’t anti-Semitic. It doesn’t tear people down. That is the contrast I will make . . . A hospital worker in South Carolina faces the same challenges as a worker in Mansfield, Ohio, or a bus driver in North Dakota, or a farmer in Iowa.”
If that farmer in Iowa is a racist, chances are he won’t vote in the Democratic caucuses. But if the farmer is not a racist, he might. And he might view his identity not as a white man, but as a farmer in Iowa, possibly with a family and some obnoxious health-care bills. And the Democrat who eventually wins him over just might win him over because that Democrat has a compelling message that resonates with the farmer on some gut level.
There’s a wild amount of uncertainty about the looming Democratic race. But there’s one thing that is absolutely true: there’s not a chance in hell the Iowa farmer looks his preferred Democratic candidate in the eye and says, “I’m going to vote for you because you’re a nonwhite woman in a party increasingly dominated by nonwhite women.”
No one thinks that way, unless they identify as a power-ranking writer.
Peter Hamby is the host of Snapchat’s Good Luck America.
