Avenatti (user search)

Quote from: Mr. Morden on August 11, 2018, 08:51:42 PM

Quote from: The Mikado on August 11, 2018, 06:23:09 PM

Michael Avenatti obviously shouldn't be president, but don't immediately write off his candidacy. The guy is going to be a total clown at the primary debates if he runs and will get a lot of attention disrupting them when everyone else is playing safe. Also, cable news loves giving Michael Avenatti multiple twenty minute interviews a day, and that's a lot of free media exposure.

One thing that I think many pundits aren't really appreciating is the fact that primary debate stage space is limited, and it's far from clear who is actually going to qualify for the debate stage, since the vast majority of prospective candidates are completely unknown to the average voter, and so will start out polling at 0 or 1%. This is actually pretty different from the GOP race of 2016, where there were a bunch of candidates running who already had decent national name ID even if they hadn't run for prez before, including Cruz, Rubio, Christie, etc. There just aren't too many 2020 Dems in that category.

So the problem that might come up for the Dems is that a few "clown car" type candidates could end up following Trump's example by getting a bunch of media attention for the "wrong reasons". That is, they say a bunch of outrageous things, and it generates media coverage, which in itself could give them higher poll #s, since those will be the candidates who voters are hearing about.

I'm not suggesting that someone like Avenatti is going to come anywhere close to winning the nomination. But could he end up driving enough media coverage to get something like 3% in the polls? Sure. And that could be enough to be one of the ~10 or so candidates on the main debate stage. Which means that he could take spot that would otherwise have gone to one of the more serious (but less "exciting") candidates, like Bullock or Hickenlooper or Klobuchar or Murphy or whoever.

Pretty much this. His constant "I'm on television multiple hours a day sometimes because CNN and MSNBC will just do multiple 20 minute interviews with me on a single day" exposure will give him huge name recognition advantages over the various small state governors Atlas loves. No way Steve Bullock outperforms Avenatti in polls, which means Bullock will be relegated to the Kiddie Table debate while Avenatti's at the big show with Harris and Sanders and Gillibrand and Dwane The Rock Johnson and Biden.

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