Progressive group MoveOn.org has conducted an early straw poll for the 2020 Democratic presidential field, and the group’s members narrowly support defeated Texas Democrat Beto O’Rourke as their favorite.
The Texas congressman, who failed to unseat Ted Cruz in the Texas Senate race last month, topped the poll with 15.6 percent of the vote, followed closely by former vice president Joe Biden, who received 14.9 percent support. Coming in third was Vermont’s socialist senator and 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, who raked in 13.1 percent of the vote.
The poll featured 30 options of potential 2020 candidates, and two female senators — Kamala Harris (D., Calif.) and Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) — trailed behind Sanders as the fourth and fifth choices of voters. A plurality of respondents (29 percent) said they don’t yet know who they’d support as the nominee or would support someone not listed as an option.
Some observers have questioned whether it’s wise for Democrats to consolidate around a candidate such as O’Rourke, who lost his most recent election and has little government experience. The obvious rejoinder is two-fold: Barack Obama had hardly more experience than O’Rourke when he was elected president, and our current commander in chief had none at all. The era of demanding previous electoral success or governing chops from our presidential candidates seems already to have come to a close.
Among the three leading contenders in the poll, Biden is the least progressive and most moderate, but even he has drifted further and further to the left over the last decade. Democrats should be asking themselves whether Donald Trump truly presents an opportunity to succeed with an intensely progressive nominee, or whether settling on a moderate candidate would present a safer path to victory by enabling the party to pick up some of the Rust Belt states that Trump nabbed in 2016.