In circular terms, you should be paying attention to that which you are paying attention.
Here's the thing about presidential campaigns. They are interminably long. Like, they go on for years. It's bloody April of 2019. We're almost a year from votes being cast. I'm a political scientist. I study this for a living, and even I'm pulling the, "seriously, guys?! We just did halloween and your christmas shit is already out? Give it a rest!"
Here's what this means. Those candidates giving policy-oriented speeches? They gotta give the same damned speech, month after month, for possibly a year and a half! Most of the Democratic field at least vaguely supports some version of some kind of healthcare expansion. So, Democrat X gives a stump speech on his/her version. Then again. Then again. Then again.
(Unfortunately, youtube didn't have a snippet of Vampire Willow, who is infinitely cooler. Still, I needed to use a clip of Willow saying, "bored now.")
Right now, there is room in the public discussion for the differentiation between healthcare proposals, who supports what kind of tax plan, watching them trip themselves up on "reparations," and all sorts of other actual policy. However...
After a few months, those stump speeches and policy discussions aren't going to be anything close to news anymore. Group A supports replacing all private health insurance with government-run health insurance, like Medicare, for everyone, and Group B supports various expansions while maintaining private insurance. Blah, blah, blah. Picture Vampire Willow in your heads.
Hey, let's talk more about Biden sniffing hair and getting hands-y! Time for another Anita Hill interview. Oh, Elizabeth Warren is talking about...
Trump tweeted about her, and called her Pocahantas again! Let's interview some Native American tribal leaders about that DNA test, and have a bunch more talk about Trump calling her "Pocahantas!" Then, a panel discussion on affirmative action in colleges and universities.
OK, back on track now. Kamala Harris has something serious to say about criminal justice and...
Nope. Can't do it. We need to have more panel discussions on Democrats who are gun-owners, and re-examine every case she has ever prosecuted. Really, I promise we'll talk about policy again at some point...
Oh, and just wait for the discussion of African-American women's hair. You know it'll happen because a bunch of jagoffs will decide that they're bored with policy and Harris will have to restrain herself from pulling out that gun when some Fox News anchor asks to touch her hair.
(If Biden pulls something funny with Harris's hair... I won't even know what to say. Anyone want to start taking bets on that?)
Anyway, what happens in an extended campaign is that the candidates make their policy statements, and they do so early. Right now, in April of 2019, we basically know where the candidates stand on policy, or at least, you can look it up if you choose. Part of the confusion is that there are so many candidates competing for attention that you simply can't describe every candidate.
That does leave time. In principle, if we had a responsible press, they could sequentially examine every candidate's policy positions. However, that's not what happens. What happens is.... there's already substantial agreement on policy among most of the candidates, so policy is going to get really old, really fast. Older than Biden's approach to personal space.
And neither journalists nor the public-- even the primary-voting public-- has the attention span to focus on policy from now through April or so of 2020. Right now, there are policy discussions. If you had any delusions about those policy discussions having a serious impact on who wins... not likely. Why not? These discussions will peter out long before those votes are cast.
That doesn't mean the discussions don't matter in any way. Candidates are lobbing proposals like live hand grenades, trying to figure out which ones are duds, and which ones detonate. They want to see how other candidates react, how the press reacts, how donors react, how polls react... this is a dynamic process, and it is a process by which parties define what policies they pursue and the boundaries of what policies are acceptable within their ranks.
Once upon a time, the GOP was a party in which tax increases were verboten and economic trade, free of regulation, was a sacrosanct principle. Now, every GOP elected official in the country jerks off at night thinking about a tax-raising, trade-war-starting mercantilist who doesn't understand the first thing about capitalism. Why? Because as Matt Grossman and Dave Hopkins taught us, the Republican Party believes in ideological purity! (That was sarcasm, in case you couldn't tell...) The Republican Party redefined itself away from the Norquist tax pledge, away from trade and deregulation, away from capitalism, and towards mercantilism when the 2016 contest brought it around to Donald Trump. This is, now, the GOP. It is no longer even a capitalist party, but a mercantilist party. Why? Because parties define themselves through their presidential nomination process, especially when they win the general election.
Of course, the flip side of that is that losing presidential candidates don't matter as much. So, whatever idiocy Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and others like them continue to spout might not matter. Then again, one could make the case that the dramatic leftward march of the Democratic Party is at least associated with a useless idiot who didn't even win the Democratic nomination in 2016. These discussions matter, in that sense.
However, for the purposes of the 2020 contest itself, there is only so long that a policy discussion can sustain itself in the public eye, and the length of the campaign far surpasses that time. The consequence is that what you are watching now-- this contest of proposals-- is sort of a silly game, from the electoral perspective.
Then again, if this isn't how the candidates compete and determine who will win, what is? What does determine who wins? As I wrote yesterday, I haven't the foggiest.