Will Joe Biden, the former vice-president, retain his early lead in polls to win the Democratic presidential nomination and take on President Donald Trump in 2020? Or will it be one of the others, younger, ethnically different, or one of the six women in the fray or an Indian American or a Hindu American?
Democrats kicked off their search for their 2020 nominee on Wednesday with the first leg of their inaugural presidential debate in Miami, Florida. Ten candidates, with Senator Elizabeth Warren in the middle, will take the stage for two hours of grilling by a panel of journalists on prime-time television.
The next lot of 10, headlined by Biden, will be on the same stage on Thursday.
President Trump, their target, will be watching and has started trash-talking it already. “It just seems very boring, but I’m going to watch it because I have to,” he told Fox Business.
He will be watching very closely, in fact, with an eye on Biden, who appears to have had the President worrying the most, given the frequency and intensity of his public attacks on him, his age, his intellect, his experience as President Barack Obama’s vice-president.
But it’s an open field, a most diverse collection of candidates in US history with six women, two African-Americans, one Indian-American, one Hindu American, one of Hispanic-descent, one Asian American and an openly gay married man. At this stage, any one of them has as good a chance of going through as a little known African American senator had in 2007, Barack Obama.
Each candidate will get 60 minutes to answer questions on the debate, 30 seconds for rebuttals, and one minute for their closing remarks. The format will remain the same for the next debate, which will be split again into two legs, on July 30 and 31. The next debates, however, are expected to be smaller with qualifying rules becoming progressively tighter.
These debates will continue through the caucuses and primaries that kick in in January-February, till the party has found its nominee, who will be crowned at a national convention of the party to be held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin from July 13 to 16.
