You! Oh, Hi Radio Atlantic listeners, this is Isaac Dauver, staff writer here at the Atlantic.

You've heard me a couple of times as a guest on the show, but with Alex out on maternity leave,

I'm stepping in to the host chair this week.

So my main beat at the Atlantic is covering the 2020 Democratic primary race, which means that I spend

a lot of time talking to all the people running chasing them all over Iowa, New Hampshire,

thinking about them when I get back to Washington, and trying to make sense of it all.

It's a lot.

More of my life, I assume, than it is many of yours.

But the one thing that everyone knows

about the Democratic race right now is that many people are running. 18 already

and another half dozen or so it seems like about to get in.

An obsession of mine is that we don't know who counts as a front runner or a long shot at this point

or who's in what tier, the top tier, second tier. It's really early and already the polling is

very fluid and what we've seen from the fundraising numbers is that Pete Budajudge, the

South Bend Indiana Mayor, who's getting a lot of attention these days but

who most people still in their gut assume can't win. Well he raised more money

for more people than Elizabeth Warren, Cori Booker, or anyone else other than Bernie Sanders,

Kamla Harris, or Beto Arork. And Arook of course is a guy who lost a Senate race

last year. Before that, three-term congressman from Texas wasn't very well known.

And all of a sudden we think of him as a top-tier candidate, but seriously,

most of these people aren't going to win or come close to winning.

But I'm telling you for almost all, if not all of them, they really believe that there's a way

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