people. Our candidates should stay in and promote their lanes and merge at the Exit.

That's one reason why Joe Biden looks like a good candidate right now. I haven't decided yet, but I'm leaning for Biden. Whoever leads our party next year needs to be a lot of things to a lot of people. It's a hard thing to do and somebody will always end up disappointed because of it. Name recognition goes a long way, and it's a big reason why Chump won in 2016.

I don't want a reality tv star, and I don't want a super hero. But I do want somebody who's smart, honest, a good listener, thinks on his/her feet, empathetic, and an entertaining speaker who can hold people's interest and be convincing. If our candidate can do all those things well, people will respond. He/she will have a great chance of being elected.

It's too early to do that. I'm thinking more about how whoever becomes our nominee should think about the general election. Whoever that is needs to stick to a basic platform and avoid fiddling around trying to attract those independents. Stability and a clear message will work better on them, in any case.

Presidential elections are about general trends, not specific issues, really. The more a candidate specializes on issues, the more likely he or she will be to lose voters from among those three groups of independents. The more stable and straightforward a candidate is, the more likely he or she will be to pick up voters who think themselves to be logical and reasonable.

So, this thread isn't about primary candidates. It's about an overall approach to winning the presidential election. That's the only election we have that chooses a single individual to represent the entire country. It's a big, weird, confusing country, at that. Stability matters, I think.

not super bright but intellectually vain mostly men in their 30s-50s who voted for Reagan as a fuck you to their hippie parents but who weren't fundamentally racist or sexist enough to stick with the Republican party through the Tea Party "revolution".

The problem is that the Democratic party can't really move any further right to pick these people up without losing even more progressives on the left who are getting fed up with being condescended to and told to sit down and shut up by their own party for their entire voting lifetimes.

So I agree we need to stick to our lanes but not that all independents are sitting way out there at the extremes.

the group that are the most likely to drift to one side or another, based on things that are difficult to identify. Democrats can attract them without swinging to the right. What works best is being sensible and being able to explain what you have in mind clearly.

They're center independents, who don't have a clear side they're on. They'll go fairly easily to the more sensible side.