Jim Webb Announces Presidential Campaign

Former Virginia Senator Jim Webb announced his campaign for the White House yesterday, using a post on his campaign web site's blog to break the news. The Washington Post reports:

In uphill 2016 bid, Jim Webb brings conservative bent to Democratic field

Former Virginia senator Jim Webb announced Thursday that he will run for president, setting himself on an uphill trek for the Democratic nomination with little national name recognition and scant financial support.

Webb adds a decidedly more conservative option for Democratic voters in a field in which former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton has tacked to the left under criticism from liberal former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley and socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

Yet Webb is hard to pin down politically. A former Republican who served as secretary of the Navy for Ronald Reagan, Webb talks often of his military service in Vietnam. He is known for an idiosyncratic collection of positions that include opposition to the war in Iraq and advocacy for sentencing reform. An economic populist, he has accused Clinton of coming late to the conversation about excessive chief executive pay, and he has regularly championed the plight of rural and working-class Americans...

Webb can potentially appeal to more conservative Democrats and independents than his rivals, but the cost of that appeal is that he is likely to struggle with voters that make up the core of the Democratic base, according to the Post:

One of his central challenges will be to parlay those credentials into support among an increasingly liberal Democratic primary electorate.

Also uncertain is whether Webb can appeal to women, a crucial constituency that could be difficult to win over given his past opposition to letting women serve in combat...

Many of his positions place him squarely to the right of his Democratic rivals.

He has accused fellow Democrats of using low-income white men as a “whipping post” and argued against broad affirmative action and diversity programs. Just this month, he defended those who retain fondness for the Confederate flag. He opposes any increase in income taxes while supporting capital gains tax increases. He was critical of Obamacare, though he voted for it. He advocates for gun rights and against coal plant regulations...

Webb faces a steep climb to become a viable contender for the Democratic nomination, based on polls and scant visibility for his campaign, suggests Politico in its report on Webb's announcement:

Webb is a long-shot for the nomination in a field dominated by Hillary Clinton, and which also features a surging Bernie Sanders — not to mention Martin O’Malley and Lincoln Chafee. While Webb has traveled to early-voting states and begun to build a bare-bones political operation, he remains near the bottom of Democratic polls in Iowa, New Hampshire, and nationwide...

One sign of how dim many views Webb's chances: the New York Times, which has published a feature titled "What [Candidate] would need to do to win" for every previous candidate including many other "longshots," has not published a similar feature for Webb. The web site FiveThirtyEight.com explains that Webb's biggest problem may be that he is trying to win the nomination of a Democratic Party that no longer exists:

Webb, who served as secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration and later as a Democratic senator from Virginia, is one of the last of the moderate Democrats...

Webb’s record appears to be considerably to the right of either of the two most recent Democratic presidential nominees, John Kerry and Barack Obama, not to mention either of the two top Democrats running for the 2016 nomination, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. For example, he voted against comprehensive immigration reform and in favor of allowing firearms into checked baggage on Amtrak. Both of those positions are verboten in the modern Democratic Party. In fact, Webb looks like a throwback to the Bill Clinton and Al Gore era...

The party’s direction has changed considerably since then. White moderates and conservatives have been shrinking as a percentage of self-identified Democrats, according to the pre-eminent General Social Survey. After Gore’s run in 2000, they have made up less than a plurality of all Democrats. You simply cannot win a Democratic nomination by relying on only moderate and conservative white Democrats...

Because he is only the fifth candidate to join the Democratic field (and possibly the last), Webb will most likely have a place on the debate stage where he can deliver his message directly to caucus and primary voters. This  could give him the opportunity to become a serious contender, if he can rally working-class Democrats who may be leery of his more liberal rivals. But as FiveThirtyEight.com suggests, that may not be enough.