The number of people who said that they were considering running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 only left three or four dozen voters in America to cast the deciding ballots.
Ergo, anyone who voted in the Democratic primaries should have been declared a superdelegate to the Democratic National Convention. Too bad, the Democrats removed most power from superdelegates in 2018.
So, to give you three or four dozen voters something to do while awaiting the first Democratic debates, tentatively scheduled for June and July 2019, we at the Northwest Arkansas Gridiron offer up a tried and true way of selecting a nominee — the 2020 Presidential Bracket.
It’s like the NCAA Basketball Tournament Bracket, which starts with 64 teams and narrows down the competition to the Round of Thirty-Two, the Sweet Sixteen, the Elite Eight, the Final Four and a championship game called the Big Dance, at the end of the tourney.
We thought about starting with 64 candidates, too, but we realized that if you saw so many unrecognizable names aspiring to be president you might start thinking you have a better chance of running than these clodhoppers. To spare you the temptation, we’ve narrowed the field to 32 candidates. And we’ve designated time periods for advancing candidates:
- The Thrifty Thirty-Two — The early primaries and caucuses in February 2020 (Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina) force candidates to appeal to voters face to face. Who can save enough dough to keep going on and yet pick up some delegates? Only the thrifty. Or the billionaires.
- The Sexy Sixteen — Super Tuesday on March 3 used to be primarily a Southern thing, but now it includes enormous delegate prizes in California, Texas, Virginia and North Carolina. Who can get their message in the most TV markets at the same time?
- The Great Eight — The rest of March’s primaries and caucuses, which are scattered from Louisiana to Idaho and Florida to Hawaii, will get little coverage since the Northeast isn’t bothered with the flyover states, but candidates can still pick up hefty delegate numbers in places like Ohio, Michigan and the aforementioned Florida.
- The Fortunate Four — The April-to-June ennui presents the chance of a late surge as voters in states with late primaries or caucuses assess how stupidly their neighbors voted and vote the other way. Unexpected scandals can also envelop the heretofore proclaimed juggernauts.
- The Big Prance — Will a candidate walk in with the necessary number of delegates to claim the title? Will there be a brokered convention? The latter hasn’t happened since 1952, but hope springs sempiternal. The Democratic National Convention starts July 13, 2020, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
There will be no winner in this bracket competition, but if there were, the winner could expect to receive the prize of a shiny, obsolete pica pole, similar in many respects to a presidential nomination.
And don’t forget about the Republican Bracket. It only has two candidates so far, and one of them might not be in the race by the primaries, depending of course on the outcome of various Congressional investigations. The other candidate, William Weld, seems like a sane individual, which means he has no chance.