Your guess 4 who will be on the 2020 Dem Ticket (Not.. who do you want it to be)

[RaphaelDLG]

Booker will be on da ticket for sure like Vosem said.  Identity politics trumps all in the Democratic party. 

Not so sure after the 2016 loss.  Their response as a party seems to be going in the other direction.

The response of the party leadership or the response of ordinary Democratic voters?  It's not clear to me that regular voters think strategically like that, as opposed to just voting to nominate whoever they like best.  Of course, the VP pick isn't made by the voters, so....

Maybe not ALL voters, but I think the most rabid Democratic voters - and therefore the most likely to vote in the primaries, the most likely to organize, the most likely to be passionate about one candidate, etc. - are absolutely intent on making the next nominee very progressive on class issues and will be less concerned with how they answer questions like, "BLM or ALM?"  I'm thinking of the people who were practically drowning out the speakers at the DNC because they were chanting against the TPP so loudly.

OK, but weren't those largely Sanders voters (who aren't a majority of the party, as seen by the fact that he got 43% of the vote nationally, as opposed to 55% for Clinton)?  They were always prioritizing class issues over identity politics.  Are the people who were previously voting on the basis of "identity politics" actually going to change their priorities?  I'm skeptical.

Maybe not, but I'm doubly skeptical that they will find someone so appealing and uniquely attractive (to them, of course) to organize around as Hillary.  She was joked about as being the "anointed one" for a reason.  People like Hagrid and Ice Speer are testaments to some of the loyalty she enjoyed.  And, at least IMO, while Bernie enjoyed similar loyalty, that seemed to be more about his "movement" and less about him.  In other words, I think more progressive Democratic voters will be just as rabid (and with more of a chip on their shoulders) as they were in 2016, but other Democrats won't be so nicely sorted into an opposing camp.

Well, my default assumption is that the 2020 Dem. primaries won't just be a 2-person race, a la 2016.  So no, there won't be any one big faction that block votes for one candidate who they find "uniquely attractive", because there'll be a number of different choices to pick from.

So, as usually happens, the early primary winners will only be plurality victories, but then the field starts to winnow, and whoever got the most plurality victories early on will likely end up the winner.

But I actually agree with you that the "Sanders" faction is more likely to come out on top of this than the "Clinton" faction, simply because my hunch is that the latter will have more candidates splitting the vote.  E.g., maybe Booker will dominate among black voters, while someone else does well among Hispanics, and someone else gets more of the white Clinton '16 voters.

So yeah, in that sense, perhaps the Sanders crowd is ascendant.  But it wouldn't actually be because they converted people into choosing their candidate on the basis of class issues rather than "identity politics".  It would just be because they got lucky that their opponents ran too many candidates who split the vote.

The invisible primary is largely held by pundits to have been debunked by the events of 2016, but if it is real, then perhaps money will coalesce early around someone (like Booker) and make them a juggernaut a la Jeb who crowds out some amount of challengers, sucks up cash and media oxygen, and largely faces off 1 vs 1 against another progressive small-$ challenger.

This will probably be somewhat difficult for Dem donors if Warren is active, given how ridiculously popular/high name ID she is among the Democratic base - institutional forces may capitulate ahead of time and float to her (like they are to Sanders and his allies like Ellison right now).