Pete Buttigieg’s recent popularity surge in Iowa and New Hampshire has many speculating that President Trump could face a Democratic ticket in 2020 that he doesn’t want and fears the most — the South Bend, Ind., mayor and another candidate recently in the spotlight, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii.
Despite what the “experts” might say, it’s certainly possible. Like weather forecasters and economists, political pundits often are proved embarrassingly wrong. Voters from both parties have a tendency to recalibrate rather quickly, and quite unexpectedly, toward candidates they believe actually might have a chance of winning.
In 2004, for example, Democratic voters threw the preening pundits a curveball when, during the primary process, they suddenly tapped on the brakes, took a much longer and harder look at front-runner Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont, and turned in the slightly more “establishment” direction of Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts.
Four years later, Democratic primary voters most certainly went counterintuitive again when they bypassed the pundit-approved and -predicted Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York for the relatively unknown Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois.
The instincts of those primary voters almost won the Democratic Party the White House in 2004 and for sure got them a very popular two-term president in 2008.
In 2016, Republican primary voters made fools of an army of political pundits and pollsters who — even very late into the primary process — declared continually that Donald Trump had no chance of getting the Republican nomination.
