I don’t know, how the hell do you lose this election, right?
There are a lot of Democrats who fancy taking a shot...
...at the incumbent president
By September the Democratic Party rules will have whittled the field down...
...to a more manageable number
September is also the time when polls start to become more accurate...
...if you look at past races
The front-runner at the moment is Joe Biden...
...the best-known candidate in the field
He was vice-president for eight years...
...he was a senator for Delaware for a long time...
...he’s run for president before
Name recognition is incredibly important in American politics...
...and actually starting with a famous name like Biden’s...
...is a great advantage
He’s seen as a centrist from the party’s moderate wing
Thus far his campaign has been pretty light on policy
A large part of his appeal really is the idea that...
...put up against Donald Trump he might be the safest choice
That comes with some risks
Biden is by no means a perfect candidate
He has a long political history that people will be able to rake over
He’s also a candidate prone to gaffes...
...we’ve seen in the past
He’s even older than President Donald Trump is
There are some Democrats who feel that...
...it might not be smart to put an older man up against Donald Trump...
...it might be better for the party to go for some sort of...
...generational contrast
Pick a much younger candidate...
...who can make the president look old and out of touch
Also among the top tier of candidates is...
...Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren
Senator from Massachusetts
In a previous life she was a professor at Harvard University
She has plans for everything
They may be good plans, they may be bad plans but...
...you cannot fault her for a lack of detail...
...she really stands out in the field on that point
She, like Bernie Sanders, is in a sort of leftish part of the party
She’s made the theme of her campaign “rethinking capitalism”...
...she’s in favour of universal health care...
...she wants to put workers on boards...
...higher minimum wage and so forth
I’m not sure there’s room for both her and Senator Sanders ultimately
I think they’re competing against each other...
...they will draw votes from each other
You’ve got Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont
Familiar figure to many people from his run...
...in the 2016 Democratic primary where...
...he was beaten by Hillary Clinton
He’s a self-avowed socialist—something that...
...until quite recently was pretty rare in the Democratic Party
He’s been in favour of a lot of progressive policies like...
...universal health care long before they became fashionable...
...and that’s given him a certain amount of credibility
But Sanders is still seen as being a big risk...
...as being too left wing for a lot of Americans...
...or at least for a lot of the states that a...
...Democratic presidential candidate would have to win...
...to have a realistic chance of getting to the White House
But I’m sure he’ll be in the race right to the end
Pete Buttigieg is the mayor of South Bend, Indiana
He’s doing well in the polls at the moment...
...he’s popular particularly among...
...well educated, sort of urban Democrats
If you told me before 2016 that...
...the mayor of a small Midwestern town...
...would be not only running for president...
...but would be in with a shot of getting...
...one of the major parties’ nominations...
I would have thought you were nuts...
...and tried to sell you some real estate
But, you know, Donald Trump changed all the rules...
...Buttigieg is doing rather well
He has lots of policies for all sorts of things
One of the most striking ones to my mind...
...is that he’d like to put an extra few justices...
...on the Supreme Court, to try and counterbalance...
...the conservative justices...
...who’ve been placed there in the past couple of years
Kamala Harris is a Democratic senator from California
Before she was a senator she was a prosecutor
She’s an interesting candidate for a number of reasons
If Joe Biden slips up in some way during this primary...
...then who will benefit from that?
It looks at the moment that Kamala Harris...
...might be the best-placed person to benefit
She’s in a similar sort of lane in the party to Joe Biden...
...but she has a couple of other things going for her
She would be the first African-American woman...
...to get the nomination so...
...her candidacy would have a certain kind of historical dimension
Early in her candidacy...
...she attached herself to a lot of...
...policies from the progressive wing of the party...
...where it seemed like that was where the energy really was...
...before Joe Biden stepped in, so she said she was...
...in favour of Medicare for all, for instance...
...debt-free college, raising the minimum wage and so on
One challenge for her is relative to Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders...
...she’s really not particularly well known around America
Then there’s a whole group of candidates behind that leading group...
...just to mention just a highlight, a smattering of the best ones
Beto O’Rourke, former congressman from El Paso...
...a border town in south-west Texas
He’s best known for having run Ted Cruz...
...close in 2018 when he ran for the Senate
And he was such a charismatic campaigner...
...that he attracted a lot of political attention nationally...
...a lot of donations...
...and his presidential primary run is kind of...
...a springboard from that
There’s Amy Klobuchar, the senator from Minnesota
She’s from the moderate part of the party...
...and the strongest point in her favour really is that...
...she does well in the Midwest, where she’s from
She out-polled Hillary Clinton substantially...
...in her home state of Minnesota when she was up for re-election
So if you were looking for a woman at the top of the ticket...
...and somebody who might be able to win back those...
...key states in the Midwest that Democrats lost to Republicans...
...in 2016 then she might be a good place to look
There’s Cory Booker, Democratic senator from New Jersey...
...he’s long been seen as a rising star in the party
He’s got an interesting record actually as mayor of Newark in New Jersey...
...particularly as an education reformer
He tends not to talk about that very much now...
...because some of the things he did annoyed...
...teachers’ unions who are an important constituency...
...in the Democratic primary...
...but, you know, he is somebody to take seriously as well
These primaries will partly be a referendum on what sort of party...
...the Democratic Party is these days, ideologically
There are a lot of people who think that the party has moved to the left
If they’re right about that then you’d expect Bernie Sanders...
...perhaps Elizabeth Warren to do well
There are a lot of other people who argue no it really hasn’t
The thing that Democrats want most of all is to...
...pick somebody who’s going to beat Donald Trump
They’re not particularly ideological as a party
Less ideological than Republicans...
...and so, if that’s the case...
...you’d look at somebody like Joe Biden...
...Kamala Harris...
...perhaps Amy Klobuchar