Hey, everyone. I'm David Chalien, the CNN political director, and this is the Daily D.C.

Thanks so much for listening. Today on the podcast, number 18, yes, that is the number of Democratic,

viable presidential candidates in this race. The Democrats have now exceeded the 17

who ran on the Republican side in 2016. And in case you don't remember, that was an unprecedented

number of folks to deal with in terms of the debate stage, which needed to be split into two different

debate stages, much like the Democrats are going to have to do this year and that the DNC said

in June and July at least, debates will take place over the course of two nights. So not a happy

hour debate earlier in the evening and then a primetime debate. And everyone will draw

straws, basically. It'll be a lottery as to who gets on which stage. So it's not necessarily

just a heavyweight top tier contenders on one debate stage and all the potential also rams

on the other debate stage. It's going to be a mix throughout a random lottery.

So it could prove quite beneficial to a lower-run candidate

and perhaps not give us as much one-on-one, two-on-two kind of comparison of the top-tier contenders.

But that being said, this is the most crowded field of viable contenders the Democratic Party

has ever seen.

And it is important when looking at the size of the field to remember something that

almost every Republican operative working for a campaign not named Trump throughout the 2015-16 cycle

kept saying part of their biggest frustration electorally was that the field was so big.

And so the vote was being sliced.

And so Donald Trump, when he got that dedicated core of supporters inside the Republican

primary electorate, he didn't really need to grow beyond that.

That plurality was enough to get him the nomination because the rest of the votes were

...