Thread by @asymmetricinfo

Dems are running farther left than usual in the primary in part because the base thinks Trump will be easy to defeat.

My colleague @henryolsenEPPC argues this CW is wrong: Trump's actually likely to win, particularly against a Dem perceived as far-left. washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/…

@henryolsenEPPC I do not know whether this is correct. But it does strike me that it's possibly correct, which presents a real problem for Democrats: the activist portion of the base isn't going to figure out the danger for a while.

@henryolsenEPPC If @henryolsenEPPC is correct, then as the field winnows, the left-friendly policy positions will eventually start raising the unfavorable numbers for Democratic candidates, as the field winnows and recognition of candidate names and positions rises.

@henryolsenEPPC But by then, in deference to the activist base, the Democrats will already have taken positions that they can't really walk back from, and the damage will have been done. Democrats chances will rest entirely on whether a war or recession shows up before June 2020

@henryolsenEPPC And since Trump has control over those factors, and does possess a certain low cunning when it comes to electoral positioning, the war probably won't arrive, leaving Democrats to bet on a recession.

@henryolsenEPPC However, after a certain point in an expansion, at least some research suggests that the odds of recession starting in any given month don't go up from month to month

i.e., if the odds of a recession starting in May are 0.5%, then the odds of a recession starting in June are also 0.5%, not 0.51% or whatever. (These numbers are purely hypothetical, for illustration purposes only).

So while it seems intuitively obvious that it is particularly likely that there will be a recession in the next 11 months, that isn't necessarily more likely than the recession we didn't have for the first two years of his term.

All of which is to say that while a recession in the relevant timeframe is certainly very possible, it's not inevitable. Which again makes it risky to bet on the idea that it really doesn't matter what positions the candidate takes.

Occurs to me it's also worth noting that to make Democrats near-certain to beat Trump, a recession doesn't just have to show up "in 2020", but "by the summer of 2020", because it takes the public a while to notice that the recession is happening and factor that into their votes.