With just under 500 days until Election Day in the United States, the first of several Democratic primary debates kicks off in Miami Florida in what is already the largest presidential field in history.
But so great in the number of candidates running for the Democratic nomination to face likely Republican candidate and incumbent President Donald Trump next year November, that the opening debates will happening over two night with 10 candidates apiece.
Of the 25 Democrats running for the White House, only 20 have qualified for the first round of NBC-hosted debates split over prime time slots on Wednesday and Thursday.
It will be the first time candidates – some more well known that others – will have a national platform to stand out from among the crowd.
Political analysts Luke Vargas will be closely watching the race for the White House.
“Everybody thinks that this large democratic field is going to stay large forever and that democrats are inherently in a very dangerous scenario where they’re all going to be fighting with each other and that’s going to create a huge opening for the President to paint the opposition as divided. It looks like that now, 24 (now 25) candidates is a lot, two debates, spreading them across two nights, ten people on the stage both nights, it is a little overwhelming but fields narrow down,” says Vargas.
Among the earlier front-runners is former President Barack Obama’s VP Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders who lost the nomination after a tight race against Hillary Clinton in 2016, progressive Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, former California Attorney General and United States Senator Kamala Harris and Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who has rocketed up the polls with 20 others vying to trade places with them.
Vargas adds, “And then we start to go down into a second tier and those are the people we really should watch in this debate – does Cory Booker the former Mayor of Newark New Jersey just outside of New York can he break through, can Beto O’Rouke from Texas fight to stay in the conversation or not.”
Vargas believes that with 17 months until election-day, staying in the conversation will be key. Elections mean big bucks in the United States – and lots of it – with the 2016 Presidential election costing $2.5 billion alone. Add in all the Congressional races and that figure jumps to $6.5 billion dollars.
“What’s going to be different this time around, or at least many democrats who are still trying to understand how they possibly lost in 2016 will want in their nominee, someone who is comfortable going on the air, battling against Trump whenever Trump sets the terms of the debate. This is a guy who’ll tweet late into the evening and change the conversation, wake up first thing in the morning and throw all of us journalists on a wild goose chase to crack down the next big story,” Vargas explains.
While the incumbency of President Trump – as history shows us – is likely to play to his advantage.
“For a while it looked like Donald Trump didn’t have the support of a lot of the members of his own party – he’s controversial – and for a while people distanced themselves from him. Now I think his incumbency advantage is starting to become apparent again, no matter where he goes, Florida, the Senators there like Marco Rubio who used to stay away from Trump are now happily getting on stage with him at his rallies, I’d say Trump is finding the incumbency advantage once again, he can go to almost any state in the country and I couldn’t tell you very many of them where the lead Republicans in that state aren’t going to stand by him on the stage, that really helps in a general election,” says Vargas.
The political pundits are calling this the most diverse democratic field in presidential history – and includes three black candidates, six women, and a Latino – among them centrists and progressives who are fighting not only for the direction this party will take on issues like Climate Change, Healthcare, Student debt and jobs of the future – but also want to set themselves apart as the candidate most likely to defeat Donald Trump in 2020.
