First blood, fresh blood, and bad blood: That’s this week’s story from the presidential race.
Begin with first blood. This day in California, Representative Eric Swalwell finished his race for the Democratic nomination, shocking news for the many Americans who had no idea that he had been operating in the first location. Swalwell will seek reelection to the U.S. House instead. He’s the candidate to depart the race.
Swalwell’s effort was quixotic from the beginning, but unlike Cervantes’s hero, he never really journeyed anywhere. Swalwell was not able to construct much name recognition, even though managing to qualify for the very first Democratic debate in June. His most notable moment came early in the second night of that argument, when he contested Joe Biden to hand off the torch to a younger generation. Biden whined Swalwell off; Kamala Harris delivered the punch that Swalwell had been expecting to land on the former vice president; and Swalwell much more or less disappeared, ending up with all the second-least amount of speaking time of the night, before only Andrew Yang. He was in danger of not making the second debate, in the end of July.
This is not necessarily an indictment of Swalwell; it is just that it’s hard to get focus in this field. 1 common explanation for why long-shot candidates run is to raise their profiles, and possibly Swalwell failed, but based on a Morning Consult poll, 50 percent of voters hadn’t even heard of himwith just his House colleague Seth Moulton fared worse.
It speaks well of Swalwell that he is able to read the writing on the wall if a lot of his rivals are still feigning illiteracy. While he could be the very first to leave the race, he is likely to be joined by others before too long. Take John Hickenlooper, the former governor of Colorado, who recently fired a lot of his staff and is trying a relaunch. After initially seeming to attribute his former aides, he told a reporter in Iowa that the real issue was probably the offender. “Certainly the vast bulk of the problem with the effort was not being as great of a messenger as I need to be, but you can not change or commerce in a new offender,” he said. That could be true of this Hickenlooper campaign, but voters can switch or exchange in–not that many of them were at his corner in the first location.
Then, the new blood: Even as Swalwell prepares to exit, another Californian, the financier Tom Steyer, may enter the race, my colleague Edward-Isaac Dovere reports. I’ve written in this space multiple times that the field is finally at ability and will just shrink, and new candidates keep appearing. (Hello, Joe Sestak! Nice to see you, Steve Bullock!) Steyer is an interesting case because he announced back in early January that he would not run. Yet despite watching a field of coiffed white dudes don’t go anywhere, he is apparently tempted to try his hand anyway.
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