The B-Team: are Beto, Biden and Bernie the best Democrats can offer?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/24/beto-o-rourke-joe-biden-bernie-sanders-democrats-2020

The B-Team: are Beto, Biden and Bernie the best Democrats can offer?

Josh Wood in Plymouth, New Hampshire

Sun 24 Mar 2019 10.00 GMT Last modified on Sun 24 Mar 2019 10.03 GMT

It was the kind of welcome of which some presidential candidates, campaigning for months, might have been jealous. Well before the former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke arrived wearing a green Plymouth State University baseball cap, students and local Democrats had filled the large atrium where he was due to speak.

The town hall event was on a Wednesday morning, a time when students have classes and other people have work, potentially a recipe for sparse audiences here in the lightly populated foothills of New Hampshire’s White Mountains.

But O’Rourke draws crowds and cameras wherever he goes, despite his campaign being young, despite a lack of detailed policies and despite his having skipped the flirtatious trips to New Hampshire that are considered customary before a candidacy is announced.

The field of Democratic candidates for the 2020 presidential nomination is the most diverse ever, filled with women, candidates from minority backgrounds and one openly gay man. The party’s base is diverse too, with four of 10 Democratic voters anticipated to be non-white. In 2008 and 2016, the party put forward a black nominee and a woman.

But three of the top-polling candidates for 2020 so far are white men: Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, O’Rourke and former vice-president Joe Biden, who has not even declared his candidacy. Does that present a problem?

In New Hampshire in recent days, Democratic voters who spoke to the Guardian laid out a simple answer. Yes, it would be nice to have a woman or a minority candidate but the focus must remain on removing Donald Trump from office. Whether the most electable candidate will be a woman or a member of a minority remains to be seen, but undecided voters are willing to consider a white man if he is determined to have the best shot at the White House.
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