"It's still early going, but the basic dynamic of the 2020 Democratic primaries seems to be set and is likely to crystallize in the weeks and months ahead. Faced with a restless party base and an insurgent Bernie Sanders candidacy that appears worryingly viable, party elites and donors will continue to look to anything — and anyone — they believe might push the reset button and restore a sense of normalcy.

Indeed, there’s good reason to believe that the upcoming primary contest will end up resembling the GOP’s chaotic and disorienting 2016 race, in which Republican elites scrambled to find the secret formula that could arrest Donald Trump’s momentum, cycling awkwardly through donor-friendly suits like Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and John Kasich before finally settling on the widely loathed (and spectacularly unsuccessful) Ted Cruz. (Most of those Republican elites then swiftly turned on a dime, becoming die-hard Trump loyalists.)

In similar fashion, Democratic power brokers and consultants have already auditioned several Anything But Bernie vehicles and are likely to test-drive a few more before the race is through. Even at this early stage, the primaries have become a kind of phony war in which an array of functionally indistinguishable establishment candidates compete to make the contest about something, anything, other than a decisive break with the political and economic status quo."