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OMG Democrats, Please Stop Joining the 2020 Race

Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick stands in the visitor center of the New Hampshire State House after he filed his paperwork to run for president in 2020

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The Democratic field has narrowed ever so slightly since the first debate a million months ago. A few candidates have dropped out as debate qualifications tighten, including Beto O’Rourke, Kirsten Gillibrand, Jay Inslee, and some guys you definitely don’t even remember were ever running.

Unfortunately, a number of other presidential wannabes have taken that herd-thinning to mean there’s some sort of void to fill. There is not! There are still SEVENTEEN Democrats in this race. So who is Deval Patrick and why the hell did he just announce he’s entering the race as number 18?

Patrick is a former Massachusetts governor. Before that, he was the assistant attorney general for the civil rights division of the justice department under Bill Clinton. After he was governor, he served as a Managing Director for the private investment firm Bain Capital.

So why is he running for president? If you ask him, it’s because everyone else sucks.

On the one side, he says, we have nostalgia (obviously meaning Biden) and the other side, we have Too Big Ideas (i.e. Warren and Sanders). So Patrick is running on a platform of being yet another Middle of the Road Candidate. How very exciting.

And he really is making his Don’t Make Waves policy plan clear. He’s against Medicare for All, but for a public option. He wants taxes on the wealthy to go up, but “not as a penalty,” whatever that means. In his announcement video, he says he wants a future “not built by somebody better than you, not built for you, but built with you.”

Basically:

Michael Bloomberg has also been teetering on the verge of entering the Democratic race this week, and as the ninth richest person in the country, it’s not surprising that he doesn’t love those “big idea” candidates. Patrick may not have that level of wealth but his work for Bain Capital–which was founded in part by Mitt Romney and is famous for draining and killing smaller businesses because yes, the name is as evil as the Batman reference it inevitably brings to mind!–has gotten a lot of attention today and made his interest in this race pretty transparent.

(via , image: Scott Eisen/Getty Images)

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Vivian Kane
Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.

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