Now that the 2020 silly season is gearing up, it looks as if the Democrats’ presidential primary field could be as crowded as the Republicans’ was in 2016. Steven Teles has a piece over at The New Republic that examines how a Democrat might win that party’s nomination using a strategy similar to the one pursued by Donald Trump in 2016—let the broad field of candidates divide the vote of the mainstream while he went after an sizable niche that was larger than anyone else’s share of the divided larger pie.

A recent survey by More in Common, a bipartisan think tank, identified a section of voters it called “progressive activists.” These people account for a disproportionate percentage of voters in Democratic primaries. But they are, More in Common found, just 8 percent of the American electorate as a whole. In other words, many more potential primary voters may be out there who would be open to a different kind of ideological mix than the one offered by the major Democratic candidates. And because no one is fighting for (and splitting) their share of the vote, they could end up deciding the Democratic primary.

In 1995, the writer Michael Lind argued that the center in American politics was divided between a “moderate middle” of people who are fiscally conservative but socially liberal (they’d probably vote for Michael Bloomberg) and what Lind called a “radical center” of people who are economically more left-wing—angry about the powerful moneyed interests who, they believe, have rigged the economy in their favor—but more traditional on questions of social order and skeptical of the nation’s governing elites. New America’s Lee Drutman recently found that these kinds of voters make up 29 percent of the entire American electorate. They are, essentially, the people politicians fight over in the battleground states in the general election every four years. But they are also important in the nominating contests. If a Democratic candidate could convince a sizable portion to participate in the primary, she might win the nomination.

Read the whole thing.

One thing that stands out to me in this theory is that the potential group of Democrats identified is economically radical but socially conservative, meaning that they’re likely put off by the social policies of ¡Ocasio! She Guevara and her ilk.

Things are about to get interesting. I’d better check the popcorn inventory.