Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,
In 2018, a record turnout of women, minorities, and the young added 40 House seats to Democratic ranks and made Nancy Pelosi speaker.
This, we were told, was the new diversity coalition - women, people of color, Millennials—that would take down The Donald in 2020.
So how has the Democratic field sorted itself out half a year later?
According to the Real Clear Politics average of polls, two old white guys, Joe Biden, 76, and Bernie Sanders, 77, are setting the pace and have together corralled more than half of all Democrats.
There is a good chance the party of minorities, Millennials, and women will be led in 2020 by a white man who would be the oldest candidate ever nominated by a major party.
Biden and Bernie may be wheezing, but the old white boys are out in front of the pack.
Add Pete Buttigieg and Beto O’Rourke, running fifth and sixth, and 60 percent of Democrats favor white men for the nomination. Only 20 percent favor one of five women: Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Kirsten Gillibrand, or Tulsi Gabbard.
The African-American candidates, Harris and Cory Booker, are backed by only one in 10 Democrats. Julian Castro, the lone Hispanic, is at 1 percent, as is the Asian-American Andrew Yang.
While the first primaries are still half a year off, the odds today—after nominating Barack Obama twice and then Hillary Clinton—favor Democrats returning to their 20th-century traditional candidate, a seasoned white man.
Frontrunner Biden is benefitting from the fact that his closest rival, Bernie Sanders, is a socialist with a large and loyal following from his 2016 campaign. For Bernie sits on a huge pile of votes that Biden may not be able to win but that Bernie is denying to any other challenger.
Indeed, Bernie is becoming a problem for a whole host of Democrats.
If he defeats Biden for the nomination, he pulls Democrats a long way towards becoming a US replica of the British Labour Party of Jeremy Corbyn. Many moderate Democrats will not vote for a lifelong socialist who chose to spend his honeymoon during the Cold War in the Soviet Union.
Yet as long as Bernie holds onto the votes he has, he prevents any candidate of color, any woman, or any fresh new face from amassing enough strength in the polls to get within striking distance of Biden.
Bernie is thus today a de facto ally of Biden. He holds too few votes to take the nomination from Joe, but sufficient votes to stay in the race through the early primaries and deny any other Democrat a clean shot at Biden.
As of now, there are two lanes to the Democratic nomination—the centrist-moderate lane Biden occupies almost exclusively, and the left lane where Bernie leads but is being challenged by Elizabeth Warren.
Where does the Democratic race, with the...