The 2020 Democratic Primary Retrospective Tier List

With four years of hindsight, how do the major candidates of the 2020 race stack up?

Ever since the 2020 Democratic presidential primary came to its anticlimactic conclusion four years ago, few have wished to think about it that much. Those on the winning side were, and are, happy to sum it up as an example of their candidate having run a perfect campaign from the very start whose genius went unappreciated by a biased elite press. Those on the losing side were, and are, unwilling to revisit a moment when their hopes were raised so high only to be crushed so swiftly and painfully. Many more were just glad for it to be over, and more still just thought that there wasn’t much to say in the immediate aftermath. This was a very reasonable conclusion to make in 2020, but now, it is 2024. It has been four years since Joe Biden won the nomination. We have enough information to finally revisit the questions that used to dominate the political world:

Who really had the best chance of beating Donald Trump? Who ran the best campaigns? And who would have been best positioned to be an actually good president?

Mike Bloomberg Hell Tier

Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg (CCP-NY)

Credit: Gage Skidmore

For this list, I decided to include all of the candidates that made at least modest headway in the primaries: Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and Michael Bloomberg. Pretty much all of them were difficult to place. Some were terrible presidential prospects, but stood good chances to win (or did win in real life). Others were more promising, but would either have been near-guarantees to lose or faced a shaky road to getting a trifecta. All of them had a multitude of complex factors to consider, with plausible to semi-plausible cases for a wide range of spots on the list.

Michael Bloomberg was an exception.

---

This is because he is a Republican.

---

That’s it.

---

There’s no multi-factored analysis to be conducted here. There’s no need to do some complex weighing of the likelihood that he could have won with the strength of his policies. Michael Bloomberg was just a right-wing candidate with a lot of money and no pretensions of being even a New Democrat. And for as hard as it may be to remember anything about his brief and bizarre campaign, it’s still surprising just how little effort he put into disguising this. Beyond some pushes on gun control and climate change, which, if his checkbook is any indication, he does seem to legitimately be passionate about, he ran like he was running against Obama in 2012. Few things in political history have ever been as uniquely baffling as his decision to put more than one billion dollars behind an effort where the best idea he could come up with was calling one of the party’s most popular figures a communist while somehow getting steamrolled in a debate by Elizabeth Warren. 

Everything about it was shit. The idea behind it—just replacing the current New York Republican billionaire with a new, shorter New York Republican billionaire—was an existentially depressing proposition, even within an already existentially depressing political context. The way he executed it was abhorrently embarrassing. He couldn’t even manage not to be a transphobe. By itself, there was absolutely nothing on offer for anyone with more than two brain cells and a net worth below 10 digits.

Still, despite all of this, Bloomberg still could have had one saving grace in the eyes of history—one that could have made him worthy of any consideration at all. Could he, with his moderate reputation and endless supply of cash, have defeated Trump to such a degree that it could have destroyed the Republican Party? The answer is simple: no. Not would Bloomberg not have won in a landslide, but he would have failed to clear other, far simpler bars, like “beat Donald Trump at all.” Regardless of how highly he thought of his ability to win, what we know now clearly shows that he wouldn’t have come close in the general election. For a party struggling with the combined issues of age, elitism and inauthenticity, the nomination of a four-time party-switcher billionaire even older than Joe Biden would have been nothing less than a self-inflicted death wound.

It’s almost enough to predispose you to look at every other candidate on this list in a more favorable light simply because they’re not him.

Almost.

F Tier

Mayo Pete Buttigieg (D-CIA)

Credit: Gage Skidmore