Hillary Clinton And The Not Too Bitter, Not Too Smooth, Just Right Primary

Every election cycle can be considered, first and foremost, a monument to hype. With every passing week, the political world is a blizzard of brash predictions, bold pronouncements and bad advice. This year, your Speculatroners shall attempt to decode and defang this world with a regular dispatch that we’re calling “This Week In Coulda Shoulda Maybe.” We hope this helps, but as always, we make no guarantees!

This week: We focus on one specific question — what if they have a Democratic primary, and only one presidential candidate shows up?

It shouldn’t be controversial to say that at this point in the 2016 race, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton enjoys virtually every possible advantage in the Democratic primary field. She’s the best-known candidate with the highest level of name recognition and visibility. She has a long-nurtured campaign apparatus and the ability to call campaign infrastructure into being on the fly. Against the rest of the Democratic field, she’s the overwhelming favorite in every poll that’s ever been conducted.

Of course, anytime we talk about a “Democratic field,” we should really say, “insofar as one exists.” Her competition — so far a dimly lit constellation of long shots (and perhaps the current vice president) — isn’t shaping up as a particularly robust challenge. Clinton plays a role in that simply by looming on the landscape. As has been discussed previously, Clinton has the power to “freeze the field” — meaning that her dominance is such that Democratic party elites and mega-donors are loath to invest in a competitor, creating a sort of vicious cycle in which no viable competitors can truly present themselves.

All of that suggests that even though the 2008 Democratic primary got fiercely competitive, it still stoked an energy that lasted throughout the election cycle, ensuring that Democratic voters stayed engaged over the long haul. Perhaps what a political party, ideally, wants out of a primary is a contest where the competitiveness fosters some amount of voter engagement without tipping into a grotesque spectacle that leaves those who had engaged with it feeling nauseous, discouraged and just plain done with politics for the year.

Handled the right way, a contested primary creates a number of “products” organically that would need to be manufactured by other means in a non-contested primary. Competition helps to present those Big Ideas to the electorate, a vision of the future for which to fight. It breeds passion and gets voters to start using those muscles of commitment, which eventually get them out of the house and to the polls on Election Day. Perhaps most importantly, it allows the candidates to make connections with those activist members of the electorate, who’ll use their muscles to make sure those committed voters know how to get to those polls on time.

At this point, it sure looks like Hillary Clinton can grab the nomination without too much trouble. Trouble is, some trouble might be a nice thing to have.

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The Huffington Post