A few months ago, my cousin, Jesus Hachecristo, came to his Tia Imelda’s funeral.  Long after the service, and everyone had gone home, we sat in the dark in the cold backyard of the house I grew up in, passing, as usual, a bottle. “Primo,” he said at last, “your Pop is going to be very popular in the community.”

“What community?”

“The old folks home.  He’s gonna move, right?  Old ladies, there, they dig old men with money and most of their teeth.  So do young ones, truth be told.  Look at Bernie Sanders!”

“Dude, too soon!”

“Nah, I think he’s gonna run.”

“For what? Head of the old people’s home?”

“Not your Pop!  Sanders!”

“Same question.  Same answer.  Still too soon.  The election is…” I checked my phone; it was past midnight. “Two years from yesterday. This year’s election is still 2 days off.”

We drank in silence for 5 or 10 minutes, then: “Still…”

“Too soon, Cuz.  For any of it.”

Not anymore. Now that it looks like nothing will stop the current resident of 1600 but losing to the next President, it’s time to think about how that’s going to happen.

Uncle Barry’s Home Remedy for Busted Muellers

I think it is still too soon to pick a favorite.  I like a lot of what I see about a lot of the people running, about to be running, or thinking about running.  But the door for the latter is closing fast, and I wanted to talk a little bit about why.

Because one year from now, the race for the Democratic Primary may be all but over.

In an apparent move to forestall the eventual candidate being harmed by statistically-eliminated clingers-on, the California-June-Miracle-That-Never-Ever-Happens has been moved to the Almost-A-National-Primary-Super-Tuesday on March 3, along with Texas.  By the end of that night, over a third of the Democratic delegates will have been allocated.  By two weeks later, that number will be nearly 60%.

That percentage can go even higher, by the way, as there are still 17 primaries and caucuses comprising 20% of the delegate count yet to be scheduled, including heavy hitters New York, Georgia, Colorado and Washington.

This distribution, combined with the Democrats’ proportional allocation rubric, has a couple of practical effects.  First, with the front-loading of one-third of the delegates in the first four weeks, any well-funded candidate can stay in the race until March 3, despite any performance in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina.

Second, candidates that are less-well-funded can follow the traditional route of trying to gain buzz in New Hampshire and Iowa, trying to build momentum and cash heading into Super Tuesday.  Alternatively, they can choose to concentrate on one of the first four contests, and a winnable subsection of the Super Tuesday races, and hope for a strong showing in the bigger states.

After March 3, the natural horse-race tendency of voters and media to focus on the front-runners will begin to lead to a lack of oxygen (a.k.a. money) for the failures to launch.  Now, a large group of people could be sitting on small piles of delegates, which could make for interesting horse-trading come July in Milwaukee.  However, I believe that, after nine debates between this June and the end of next February, voters will have settled in on their favorites, fallbacks, and fugazzis.

Fuhgeddaboudit!

If, however, there is no actual winner on the first ballot at the Convention, THAT is when the recently-chastened superdelegates arise from their crypts and are allowed to vote.  Ironically, in this most crowded, most crowd-sourced, most crowd-centric, most in-crowd field in years, the old crowd may actually determine who wins. Just like in retirement homes.

We got this, Dad!