In reviewing what House Democrats said they wanted to do in 2019, one item really stood out to me, and I wrote about it at New York:

In recent years the struggle over voting rights has been played out across the complicated landscape of state governments, and in the federal and state courts. The new Democratic majority in the U.S. House is signaling that it wants to change that, and return to the now-lost era when the federal government acted to guarantee voting rights everywhere.

The House Democrats’ first bill, the “For the People Act,” has three major sections. One (as my colleague Sarah Jones has explained) involves campaign-finance reform. Another focuses on ethics and lobbying reform. The third, as voting-rights expert Ari Berman notes, covers a broad range of efforts to protect the franchise against recent, mostly Republican abuses:

“This includes nationwide automatic voter registration, Election Day registration, two weeks of early voting in every state, an end to aggressive voter purging, funding for states to adopt paper ballots, the restoration of voting rights for ex-felons, and declaring Election Day a federal holiday. While states control their voting laws, Congress has the power to set voting procedures for federal elections.

“The bill would also target partisan gerrymandering by requiring independent commissions instead of state legislatures to draw congressional maps.”

These are all familiar ideas, already in place in many states (other than, obviously, the idea of a federal holiday to vote). But taken altogether as a package, they are unprecedented:

“The bill represents the most far-reaching democracy reform plan introduced in Congress since the Watergate era. Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig calls it ‘the most important civil rights bill in half a century.’ It also builds on recent state-level efforts to expand voting rights: In the 2018 midterms, eight states passed ballot measures to make it easier to vote and harder to gerrymander.”

In a separate measure that will be introduced later, House Democrats plan to offer a bill that would reconstruct the federal “preclearance” system for potential voting-rights violations that was struck down as obsolete in the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder Supreme Court decision, as Talking Points Memo explains:

There’s actually faint Republican support in Congress for fixing the VRA — veteran GOP congressman James Sensenbrenner co-sponsored a bill in the last Congress with Democrat John Conyers to do just that — but it has been of zero interest to party leaders or the Trump Justice Department.

And in fact, none of the voting-rights initiatives House Democrats are promoting have any sort of immediately viable future so long as the GOP controls the Senate and Trump is in the White House. But the priority Democrats are placing on this set of issues is potentially significant, for two reasons.

First of all, making voting rights a national political issue instead of a state-level preoccupation or an obscure subject of litigation could pave the way to major reforms if and when Democrats have a governing majority in Washington. The last big federal voting-rights push occurred after the 2000 Florida fiasco, and resulted in the Help America Vote Act of 2002, a pallid set of largely hortatory encouragements, supplemented by inadequate grants, aimed at getting states to clean up their act in administering elections. It notably failed. Maybe next time Congress will get both tougher and more generous in creating carrots and sticks for more voter-friendly registration and election systems.

But as the HAVA example sadly illustrates, voting rights simply have not been a day-in-and-day-out preoccupation, even for Democrats, but rather an occasional topic of discussion during and occasionally just after electoral outrages. The current House Democratic focus on voting rights, and particularly its comprehensive nature, is a very good sign that this crucial issue is finally getting the attention it deserves, at least on one side of the partisan barricades. And perhaps, though this is less likely, Republicans can even be shamed into rethinking their increasingly reflexive opposition to voting rights, which used to be limited largely to its neo-segregationist southern conservative wing.

Today’s celebration over Nancy Pelosi’s return to the Speakership spurred some interesting ruminations about where House Democrats were ten years ago, which I wrote about at New York:

Nancy Pelosi was formally elected House speaker today, regaining the gavel she wielded from 2009 until 2011, then lost in the 2010 elections. As Ron Brownstein notes, it is a significantly different House Democratic Caucus she will lead than the one that was sworn in ten years ago with Pelosi as its speaker:

“Though slightly smaller, the Democratic caucus that’s assuming power is far more ideologically and geographically cohesive than the party’s previous majority 10 years ago. While the 2009 class included a large number of Democrats from blue-collar, culturally conservative, rural seats that were politically trending away from the party, the new majority revolves around white-collar and racially diverse urban and suburban districts that are trending toward them….

“In 2009, 49 House Democrats represented seats that had voted for John McCain in 2008. Even after November’s gains, only 31 Democrats now hold seats that voted for Donald Trump. Moreover, Republican DNA was more deeply engrained in those earlier split-ticket seats: Of the 49 Democratic-held seats that voted for McCain, 47 also voted for George W. Bush in 2004. This time, only 14 Democrats represent districts that voted for both Trump in 2016 and Mitt Romney in 2012, according to calculations by Tom Bonier, the chief executive officer of the Democratic voter-targeting firm TargetSmart.”

The new House Democratic majority is significantly more rooted in suburban and urban America. The number of members from relatively rural districts, says Brownstein, dropped from 89 in 2010 to just 35 today. That doesn’t mean ironclad party unity, but does mean Democratic divisions will largely be limited to less emotional fiscal and economic issues rather than the culture-war hot buttons that often divided them in the past.

There’s really nothing about the new majority, however, that should keep Democrats from full-throated resistance to Trump and his radical agenda on immigration, the environment, and the rule of law. And above all, they do not have their predecessors’ burden of advancing a Democratic president’s controversial agenda.

The Democrats elected with Speaker Pelosi in 2008 did a lot of heavy lifting in enacting the Affordable Care Act and passing a cap-and-trade bill addressing climate change (which the Senate never took up). This (alongside economic distress and white conservative resentment of the first African-American president) made them ripe targets for Republicans in 2010.

If Democrats retake the White House in 2020, perhaps their House Caucus will have a similarly critical and politically perilous set of assignments (particularly if Democrats take back the Senate as well). For now they will probably be united just enough for the limited if dramatic role they will play in the next two years. They won’t be able to make laws, but they can break virtually all of Trump’s legislative designs, while utilizing the House’s investigatory powers to expose the corruption and possibly the criminality underlying his 2016 campaign and the strange administration it produced.

Thinking about the perpetual challenges to Democratic Party unity, I discovered and nourished a new concern: 2018 provided some fresh fodder for those who want to enforce ideological rigor. I wrote it up at New York.

This is the time when political analysts take a long look back and a longer look forward at what the midterm results mean for the two political parties, led often by ideological factions determined to prove their way is the highway to success in the next contest.

This is an especially urgent task for moderates of the center-left and center-right, who often take credit for wins in hostile territory and warn that they alone can win the big presidential prize just down the road — or at least that used to be the case. Nowadays, moderate Republicans are an endangered species, and at the presidential level, being at least “moderately conservative” or having some distinctively savage brand of right-wing politics like Donald Trump has become mandatory. The ideological “struggle for the soul of the party” is more common among Democrats, who haven’t had a loud-and-proud lefty president since FDR.

With no clear presidential front-runner for 2020 and a huge array of potential candidates lining up, Democrats will have plentiful opportunities to argue over which ideological persuasion gives them the best opportunity to topple President Trump and salt the earth that brought his monstrous presidency to life. But the empirical case for any particular type of Democrat having an advantage in 2020 did not get much of a boost from what happened in 2018, according to top-shelf political scientist Alan Abramowitz:

“The outcomes of House contests in 2018 were overwhelmingly determined by two factors — the partisan composition of House districts and the unpopularity of President Trump in many of those districts, including some that had supported him in 2016 …

“[The results] had very little to do with the characteristics of the local House candidates. In making their choices, voters apparently were far more concerned about which party would control the House than about who would represent their district. As a result, the advantage of incumbency reached its lowest level in decades — less than three points in terms of margin, according to an analysis by Gary Jacobson.

A corollary to the irrelevance of incumbent characteristics was that ideology didn’t much matter either:

“[F]or both Republican and Democratic incumbents, election outcomes were overwhelmingly explained by the presidential vote in the district. Moreover, the incumbent’s voting record had little or no influence on the results. For Republican incumbents, conservatism had a very small and statistically insignificant negative impact on incumbent vote share. For Democratic incumbents, liberalism had a very small and statistically insignificant positive impact on incumbent vote share.”

These findings have limited implications for Republicans, who, barring something unforeseen, are stuck with Trump in 2020. And however you choose to define Trump’s ideology, he has shown little to no interest in appealing to Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (other than those who already share his white nationalist tendencies).

For Democrats, though, the idea that running “to the center” generates no measurable electoral gains will be a central talking point for those who want to run hard to the port side of the ship. Indeed, for many self-conscious progressives these days, there are only two plausible reasons for a Democrat being anything other than a progressive: pure political expediency, or corrupt submission to corporate power. Only the former justifies the presumed sin of centrism.

This is a pretty important issue in intra-Democratic debates. While progressives may excuse, say, a Democrat’s refusal to fully embrace an immediate leap to single-payer health care in conservative areas of the country, they tend to assume such a centrist posture must be accompanied by public or private acknowledgement that of course Medicare for All is the ultimate goal. It is far less acceptable to claim that some other form of expanded health coverage — say, Obamacare with a strong public option — is actually a superior policy. That sort of talk must reflect a sellout to private insurance interests, or so it seems to those who assume that Democrats should press for as much democratic socialism (to choose the most prevalent label) as political markets will bear.

There are going to be other leftward pressures on Democrats going into 2020. As Jamelle Bouie argues, white Democratic presidential candidates seeking to display solidarity with an increasingly nonwhite primary electorate may seek to do so with more controversially progressive positions. But in the general election, if it just doesn’t matter what flavor of Democratic policy thinking you use to spice up your messaging, since everyone is polarized for or against Trump as a matter of first principle, then left activists are going to want to know why any Democratic candidate doesn’t steer steadily to the left.  Moderates need a better answer than “I have a poll!” Because this time around, they probably don’t.

Reading a piece by the renowned Steven Teles about the possibility of an unorthodox 2020 Democratic nominee got me thinking, and I wrote about it at New York:  

Part of the explanation usually offered for the extremely unlikely elevation of Donald J. Trump to the presidency is that he outflanked a huge field of bland Establishment conservatives and forced an astonished Republican Party to take a wild ride with him all the way through November. And it’s true things might have turned out differently if Establishment conservative voters had been consolidated by a single candidate (say, Marco Rubio) early in the primaries, or had a hard-core ideologue like Ted Cruz gotten into a one-on-one with Trump before the deal was all but done. We’ll never know, of course; it’s possible an angry God determined to subject America to a Trump presidency from the get-go as punishment for our sins.

But in any event, the likelihood of an equally large 2020 Democratic field is quite naturally encouraging fantasies about an equally unorthodox outcome in that contest. No, unless Oprah Winfrey changes her mind and runs, there isn’t a Democratic analogue to Trump — i.e., an extremely well-known pop-culture icon who loosely embodies one party’s values and viewpoint while offering some variations that are attractive to certain constituencies (in Trump’s case, nativists, racists, globaphobes, and conspiracy buffs). But as Steven Teles argues, there could be enough clustering of candidates around the orthodox progressivism that Democratic activists prefer to create an opening for someone closer to the center:

“More than a dozen candidates may run for the Democratic nomination in 2020: governors from the Plains states, senators from the coasts, billionaire entrepreneurs. But the most serious so far—Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, and Bernie Sanders—run the risk of falling into the same trap as the main Republicans did in 2015. All of them—even the previously ideologically flexible Cory Booker—are competing for the same section of the primary electorate, one that wants to trade in centrist triangulation for social democratic economics. Given the repeated failures of deregulation, fiscal conservatism, and crony capitalism, this is an understandable instinct. Any one of these candidates could win the nomination if he or she were the only one in the mix. But there are (at least) four or five of them, all clustered around the same positions; come next summer, they will be fighting for the same voters, and as a result, they could all lose. It’s the same bad math that afflicted Cruz, Kasich, and Rubio four years ago, only now it’s on the other side.”

For this to happen, of course, there has to be a conjunction of supply and demand for a different kind of politics. Teles thinks it could be what he calls (following a terminology created by Michael Lind) “radical centrist” politics:

“[P]eople who are economically more left-wing—angry about the powerful moneyed interests who, they believe, have rigged the economy in their favor—but more traditional on questions of social order and skeptical of the nation’s governing elites. New America’s Lee Drutman recently found that these kinds of voters make up 29 percent of the entire American electorate.”

The “radical centrists” include most of those “populist”-oriented Obama–Trump voters Democrats lost in 2016. Teles describes a hypothetical candidate who could appeal to them via redistributive policies that don’t require big government or its clientele-tending bureaucracies, while also taking crime and immigration concerns seriously without becoming Trump-y. And he argues that there are enough voters craving this mix of policies to win a Democratic presidential nomination if the field is as large and ideologically conventional as seems likely at this point.

But where is the candidate who could become, in effect, the Democrats’ own Trump? For Teles, it could be anyone who sees the opportunity and hasn’t already cast her or his lot with the progressive ascendancy in the party:

“Such a candidate may not exist. But the potential Democratic contenders, like Joe Biden or Amy Klobuchar, who have not yet fully attached themselves to the left’s agenda, could incorporate at least parts of this appeal. And there may be an opening for a purer version of this ideologically unorthodox Democrat, especially someone like outgoing Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper or former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, who has not yet developed a clear political brand.”

Would a standard-brand Clinton–Obama “centrist” of the non-radical variety like Biden generate the kind of grassroots excitement Teles thinks is out there to be captured? It’s hard to say. A Suffolk-USA Today poll released just this week showed Democratic voters expressing roughly equal “excitement” about Biden and a hypothetical “someone entirely new.” Yes, the Democratic presidential nominating process with its strictly proportional delegate-award rules provides a clear path to respectability for any candidate who can win a consistent minority of primary or caucus voters. But then again, the heartland states most likely to support a “radical centrist” candidacy aren’t well-positioned early in the 2020 calendar. And the calendar — particularly now that California has moved up from June to early March — might well enable a progressive candidate to execute the voter consolidation coup that eluded Trump’s opponents.

All in all, a big Democratic field could just as likely produce a front-runner who has high name ID and/or unusually broad support (descriptions that could match not only Biden but Beto O’Rourke or even Bernie Sanders) as some sort of ideological outlier. But this scenario is a reminder that ideological conformity within a political party has its limits. To the extent the major Democratic candidates sound like magpies reciting a formula of single-payer–minimum-wage-job guarantee–stop-ICE, some voters may look for a different tune. And if there is a surprise nominee — left, center, or “radical center” — the horror of a second Trump term will likely keep Democrats in the harness despite their issues with the candidate.

As the federal government partially shut down following a strange series of changes in direction from the president, it’s appropriate to compare and contrast how Donald Trump and Barack Obama responded to his party’s midterm defeat. I wrote about that this week at New York:

The standard reaction to the way the president has behaved since his party’s midterm setback has been to note accurately that he is Donald Trump acting just like Donald Trump. There’s been no “pivot’ (other than his standard minute-to-minute erratic communications), no effort to project a “New Trump,” and of course, no acceptance of responsibility. To the extent the president has even reflected on the results, it has been to deny it’s a defeat at all (which is ridiculous if predictable), or to blame Republican losers for ensuring their own defeat via insufficient sycophancy toward his own self.

Before moving on to the reality that Trump will probably remain Trump right on through to the 2020 election, it’s worth looking back at how the last president reacted to his own midterm defeat in 2010. For one thing, Obama accepted responsibility for his party’s performance, as the Washington Postreported at the time:

“President Obama, appearing somber and reflective after what he described as a ‘shellacking’ at the polls Tuesday night, conceded Wednesday that his connection with Americans has grown ‘rockier’ over the last two years and expressed sadness over the defeats of congressional Democrats who supported him…

“In response to a question about how he felt when some of his Democratic friends and supporters in Congress lost their reelection bids, Obama said: ‘It feels bad. You know, the toughest thing over the last couple of days is seeing really terrific public servants not have the opportunity to serve anymore, at least in the short term.’ Not only is he sad to see them go, he said, ‘but there’s also a lot of questioning on my part in terms of, could I have done something differently or done something more so that those folks would still be here?’ It’s hard. And I take responsibility for it in a lot of ways.’ “

And Obama also made immediate and reasonably durable overtures to the opposition in a way that Trump hasn’t done except in the most superficial (“let’s compromise: do it my way!”) manner:

“He said he told Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Rep. John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), the new presumptive speaker of the House, that he is ‘very eager to sit down with members of both parties and figure out how we can move forward together.’ He added, ‘I’m not suggesting this will be easy. I won’t pretend that we’ll be able to bridge every difference or solve every disagreement.’”

These Obama gestures led to the long and murky search for a “Grand Bargain” over budget and tax policy, which didn’t produce any breakthrough (Republicans couldn’t bring themselves to support any sort of tax increase, and Democrats wouldn’t buy into “entitlement reform”) but did arguably help Democrats clarify their side of the argument and position Obama for reelection in 2012. It wasn’t as dramatic as what Ronald Reagan did after his party lost ground in 1982; he accepted two tax increases before rolling to a landslide reelection win in 1984. But both of these presidents understood that going along with electoral signals that they had initially overreached made a sort of reset possible which set the foundation for reelection.

If there is any discernible lesson President Trump drew from his midterm defeat (beyond denying it) it seems to be that he and his party did not go far enough in energizing its base by driving so deep a ravine between the two parties that any talk of bipartisanship would be a laughable ruse. So instead of discussing a “Grand Bargain,” Trump has created a situation in which even a no-brainer tiny bargain to keep the federal government operating through the holidays looks very unlikely. To the extent that his strategy (or lack thereof) going forward relies on confrontation rather than actual negotiation, with (presumably) 2020 preelection polls and then the election results determining the “winner” rather than any policy accomplishments, Congress could shut down for much of the next two years and it would not make much difference, now that his party has lost the House.