I don’t think your average Democratic primary voter has a particularly sophisticated understanding of presidential politics, but they seem to collectively be searching for a safe choice, or at least someone who won’t further inflame the racial, regional or ideological polarization of the country. Maybe they haven’t noticed that Trump’s rural advantage has probably grown since 2016, but they seem to understand that they can’t just rely on the cities and suburbs to overcome the GOP’s Electoral College advantage. The Democrats are gravitating toward candidates they perceive to be electable, and they base that perception more on who they fear alienating than on who they hope to excite.

They worry about nominating someone too far to the left, or a woman, or a person of color, or someone with age or health related concerns. If someone seems to check all those boxes, well, how about a gay small-town mayor with not a lot of experience?  Simply put, there are no candidates that the Democrats feel comfortable with, and that certainly includes Kamala Harris.

Where I agree with Al Giordano is that all the candidates have both real and imagined weaknesses. Where I disagree is that I don’t believe Harris has much of a chance to emerge as someone who is more broadly acceptable to all the various factions of the party than the others. Maybe he’s right to complain that it’s too early to be flooding the zone with Harris’s political obituaries, but I think he grossly overstates her potential appeal in the current political environment. Simply put, she combines too many risk factors, from relative lack of experience, to coastal identity, to race and gender, and I think the primary voters are unlikely to ever perceive her as a safe choice based solely on ideological grounds.

If that were the case, Cory Booker wouldn’t be fighting to qualify for the next debates. Unfortunately, one byproduct of Trump’s effective style of racist politics is that the Democrats are taking identity into account as a mostly negative factor in this cycle. This is probably the primary reason Joe Biden continues to poll so well nationally despite his wretched debate performances and clear signs of his decline.

Michael Bloomberg clearly doesn’t like what he’s seeing from Biden, but he has his own massive identity problems, including his status as a multi-billionaire. He’s most likely to hand the nomination to Warren or even Sanders by denying Biden the votes he needs to go on a winning streak after the Iowa and New Hampshire contests are concluded. But carving up more of the middle seems very unlikely to redound to Harris’s benefit. Voters aren’t really comparing the candidates’ platforms except when they seem perilously far to the left. So Harris can position herself in the middle and not really get a benefit out of it.

I don’t see a pulse to her campaign right now, and I have trouble seeing how she can break through. Her biggest hope is simply that everyone implodes around her at just the right times and in just the right combinations, but that’s like running an inside straight. It can happen, obviously, but few people ever got rich betting on it.