The battle lines for the 2016 Democrat presidential nomination are already being drawn up.  Hillary, of course, will run.  Joe Biden probably will, too.  Why not?  Vice presidents of two-term presidents often have great advantages, as the nominations of Nixon, Humphrey, George H. Bush, and Gore demonstrate.

If more Democrats enter the race -- and there is no reason to doubt that some might -- then the Democrat nomination could becoming a tight race, with no one clearly separating from the pack.  Why not, then, vet and support a conservative Democrat to vie for his party's nomination? 

The usual excuses -- Democrats are all leftist, the party elites despise conservatives, it would be impossible to raise money -- are simply defeatism.  Once, both major political parties were "conservative."  Democrats and Republicans both held the same reverence for liberty and traditional American values.  How to realize them was the point of difference.

The Blue Dog Coalition has sixteen members in the House of Representatives, and while most of these come from the South, there are congressmen in the coalition from California, Illinois, Maine, and Utah.  There are also a woman and a black man in this coalition.  There are also some governors who are much more conservative than the Democrat elites. 

If one of these ran for the Democrat nomination, and did so specifically to bring his party back toward the center, he might well win some primaries, and especially open primaries in the South, Great Plains, and Rocky Mountain regions. 

Conservatives, according to virtually every polling organization, dramatically outnumber liberals.  The latest Gallup Poll shows that there are only two states -- Massachusetts and Rhode Island -- in which, by tiny margins, more respondents called themselves "liberal" than "conservative."  This is consistent with past Gallup Polls, which sometimes have shown conservatives outnumbering liberals in every single state.

Importantly, many states with "open primaries," in which voters can choose which party primary to vote in, are lopsidedly conservative, as these margins of conservative over liberal voters in the states show: Alabama (+36%), North Dakota (+34%), Mississippi (+33%), South Carolina (+27%), Arkansas (+27%), Georgia (+26%), Tennessee (+26%), Texas (+24%), Missouri (+21%), North Carolina (+21%), and Arizona (+20%) -- and in virtually all the "open primary" states except Massachusetts, there are more conservative voters than liberal.  That means that in eleven states, a conservative Democrat candidate for president could win the primary, if conservative voters of all parties supported him.  

If others states in which conservatives had a lopsided advantage -- very conservative states like Wyoming (+35%), Utah (+32%), Oklahoma (+30%), Idaho (+30%), Montana (+27%), Nebraska (+26%), West Virginia (+25%), Louisiana (+24%), Indiana (+24%), South Dakota (+22%), Kansas (+22%), Kentucky (+20%), Alaska (+21%), Iowa (+20%), and Arizona (+20%) -- registered as Democrats or attended caucuses as Democrats, then the conservative Democrat candidate could actually win twenty-six of the fifty states, which would have profound psychological impact upon the Democrat Convention.  Moreover, these would be states not just of the Deep South, but rather across most of America.

During the months leading up to the nomination, leftist Democrats would be spending an inordinate amount of time attacking fellow Democrats who support the conservative candidate.  Money, time, energy and emotion which otherwise would be aimed at Republicans would be wasted in civil war.

The conservative delegates could also wage war in that part of the convention usually deemed most meaningless: the platform.  Conservatives could demand a vote on a platform provision which limits partial-birth abortion or which supports development of all our fossil fuel and nuclear energy resources as quickly as possible.  These delegates could demand votes on resolutions deploring the political use of the IRS by Obama or the blanket surveillance of Americans in the name of national security.

These delegates could demand that several convention speakers reflect their philosophy, and if the leftists at the convention attempted to throttle everything that these conservatives tried, then the delegates could very vocally express their unhappiness throughout the convention, which the whole nation would be watching.

There is even a chance, albeit not a probability, that a charismatic conservative who swept through most of the states could catch fire with other Democrat voters, those who consider themselves "moderate" or "conservative."  If a conservative actually won the nomination in 2016, the impact on American politics would be monumental.

Any plan to organize a serious conservative Democrat nomination race needs to start soon.  There is no downside, but the potential for making radical and positive reforms in America is vast.