I've heard a conspiracy theory, which starts to sound slightly believable, that he's intentionally making himself a punching bag for Kamala Harris.
It is possible, if that theory is true, that it was part of a broader strategy to lose the number one spot, and win the nomination via a late come from behind push late in the primary. I noticed that Warren and Sanders (and Harris) were attacked very little either night. This might allow him to avoid presenting himself as a crazy extremist that would have no chance of winning the general election.
Warren did well enough in the debate from a Dem perspective, but there's ~no way that Warren could win against Trump. She's too far left, a poor communicator, and the native American thing will weigh her down forever.
As noted above, she was not attacked either night, despite the ability to grab headlines by attacking her fake American Indian heritage -- what the majority of the Dems need is name recognization.
As a conservative, warren getting the nomination would be very good because it was allow Trump and those on the right to highlight problems with identity politics, and the downside of giving minorities arbitrary advantages to school admissions, and job selection that Democrats like to push.
Buttigieg performed well.
His handling of the police shooting in his city has been very poor. This has the potential to put him in a negative light for much longer than the debate, and depending on what happens, could sink his candidacy. I also don't think he is very well qualified -- his only experience is leading a city of about 100k for about 7 years.
Gabbard [...] maybe she'll get a significant number of Republicans/independents voting for her in the primary.
In many (most?) states, you need to be a registered democrat to vote in the primary. Primary voters tend to be made up of the base of a party. She is very anti-establishment, and I expect the media to treat her similar to how they treat Trump until she either wins the nomination or drops out. The daily beast published a
hit piece claiming she was being supported by Russians not long after she announced she is running for President, and the media has otherwise not been friendly to her.
Fortunejack now gives Trump a ~45% chance of winning the election.
You have to keep in mind that a lot of people are predicting a recession sometime before the election. If there's a recession, Trump's likelyhood of winning goes way down. [...]Note that I boosted each candidate's conditional probability from my
present-conditions guess to take into account a 25% probability of a recession.
since 1945, the US has had 10 recessions with the average expansion lasting 57 months, counting up until the expansion that ended in 2001. If you assume any given month has a 1-in-57 chance of being the end of an expansion, you could say there is between a 21 and 26% chance of a recession starting early enough to affect the election between now and the election. However, in general, recessions are started by an economic shock that causes demand for a group of goods to quickly fall, creating excess inventories of that good, causing an even steeper drop in demand for materials required to make said good, which in turn causes demand to fall for other goods throughout the economy (and repeating said effects). I really don't see anything that could potentially shock the economy between now and next summer/fall.
I also get the strong impression they are setting up Gabbard to be the populist polar opposite answer to Trump for the Democrat party.[...]This narrative would align with establishing her as the underdog, and that is a lot of the psychology of why people voted for Trump, because he was the populist underdog outsider.
I would find this very unlikely. Democrats appear to believe whoever they nominate will nearly automatically beat Trump. Look back to the 2015/2016 Republican debates, a common theme was x candidate would be "best" to oppose Clinton, while last weeks debates did not mention any candidates' ability to beat Trump once (that I recall). I do think her foreign policy stances would give her an advantage over Trump, but I don't think her beating Trump would be a given.