This Democrat Wants To Run For President in 2020. He’ll Get Smoked.
According to sources close to the New York Post: “Gov. Cuomo has hired two Florida fundraisers, a sign he’s building a national network to launch a presidential bid.”
The two consultants — one is former Hillary Clinton money man Jon Adrabi — will help plan events and build relationships with Democratic donors in the key swing state, sources said.
Here’s the thing-after the debacle that was Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, the Democratic Party will want to reunite the old Obama coalition, which means they’ll need extraordinary cross-spectrum appeal. The best way for the Democratic Party to achieve such appeal is by playing their favorite game: Victim Box.
Victim Box requires a candidate that satisfies all the superficial needs of various political identity groups. Andrew Cuomo, a white male, who in 2020 will be 62-years-old, falls somewhere near the bottom of the established progressive victim hierarchy, and will lose any game of Victim Box in which he engages.
To be sure, as governor of New York, Cuomo has pushed several beloved progressive policies.
Per The New York Times:
He persuaded many reluctant legislators to expand the right to marriage to same-sex couples, making New York the largest state in the country to break down this civil-rights barrier through legislative action. He muscled through the Legislature one of the strongest gun control bills in the country, expanding the ban on automatic weapons and big ammunition magazines and requiring background checks for private gun sales…[and he] raised the minimum wage.
He’s also had to deal with some alleged ethics issues, as well as broken promises, and propositions to cut funds to education-something progressives despise. Generally speaking, however, Governor Cuomo fits the bill as a good progressive politician. Unfortunately, he sits dead last in the 2020 edition of Victim Box.
The most critical component of Victim Box is empathy for marginalized and oppressed communities, and everyone knows that one cannot experience such empathy properly unless one himself is a member of those communities. That is one of the reasons President Obama performed so well at the ballot box. He didn’t simply offer a philosophical representation of oppressed minorities, he was himself an oppressed minority-running against two elderly white men, for that matter.
Cuomo has some stiff competition in Victim Box: 2020. No politicians have announced plans for a White House bid as of yet, but signs point to the following individuals tossing their hats in the ring within the next two or three years:
- Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA), an African American female.
- Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), an African American male.
- Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), a Samoan female, who is also Hindu.
- Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), a female.
- Julian Castro, a Hispanic male, former HUD secretary and former mayor of San Antonio.
- Thomas Perez, a Hispanic civil rights attorney, and current DNC chair.
Out of all the individuals mentioned above, Senator Harris has the best hand in Victim Box, which means-barring unforeseen blunders-she will have the best shot at bringing back the coalition of voters who so enthusiastically endorsed Barack Obama. Moreover, she would have the first-female-president advantage.
Sorry, Cuomo. You’re at the end of a very deep bench.
