Meanwhile, Bloomberg has already spent hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising—more than all the other candidates combined—and is willing to spend $1 billion to defeat Trump, even if he does not secure the Democratic nomination. If the Democrats are united and encourage strong turnout, especially among minorities and younger voters, they could win.
After complaints from the Sanders campaign that party rules unfairly favored Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primary contest, Democratic convention delegates will now be awarded proportionally to all candidates who receive at least 15% of the vote in a given state. Ironically, this means that Sanders may reach the summer convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with a plurality but not the majority needed for nomination.
In that case, party officials, chosen without regard to primary results, will vote on a second ballot. Overall, more Democrats associate with the center-left than with the far-left. But if they come together to nominate a more moderate candidate, they risk alienating Sanders’s base, whose failure to turn out in November would tip the scales to Trump. Republicans, meanwhile, remain united behind Trump following his impeachment, which enraged his base and which most moderates viewed as unnecessary overreach.
As of now, Bloomberg is untested, Sanders’s odds are lower than they would be in the event of widespread economic distress, and Trump remains both his own best advocate and worst enemy. The outcome might come down to whether the 10-15% of persuadable voters in swing states—most of whom are satisfied with the condition of the country, the economy, and their personal finances—decide that they can tolerate another four years of Trump’s tweet storms. Or, they might not “vote their pocketbooks.” They could decide that enough is enough, and accept a leftward policy lurch in exchange for a leader who foregoes the Twitter attacks.
Michael J. Boskin is professor of economics at Stanford University and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He was chairman of George H. W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers from 1989 to 1993, and headed the so-called Boskin Commission, a congressional advisory body that highlighted errors in official US inflation estimates.