I’ve been watching the president’s job approval ratings closely, and they’re again reverting to a mediocre mean, as I observed at New York:

Week before last, I wondered if at long last we were finally seeing a significant lift in the president’s job-approval ratings of the sort Republicans had been predicting from practically the moment the man took office:

“This morning as on every weekday morning I glanced at RealClearPolitics’ polling average for the president’s job-approval ratings, and I nearly dropped my coffee cup: It was at 45.1 percent. Just yesterday I had written that Trump had ‘yet to hit 45 percent in average approval ratings at either RealClearPolitics or FiveThirtyEightsince the earliest days of his presidency.’ Scanning RCP’s graph of past averages, I learned that today’s was Trump’s highest average approval rating since February 20, 2017.

“So is the president undergoing some sort of serious improvement in his famously stagnant levels of popularity, which could result in him reaching levels consistent with past presidents who were reelected? Are the economy and the triumphant GOP spin on the Mueller report combining to give him an unprecedented lift?”

I expressed some skepticism about that possibility, and indicated time would tell. Looks like it has. Trump’s approval-rating average at RCP hasn’t drifted ever upward, but is back down to 43 percent. At FiveThirtyEight, it’s at 41.8 percent. Most startling of all, it’s at 44 percent in the Rasmussen tracking poll, which is the lowest it’s been since February 1. The president has been known to tweet out unusually favorable numbers from this poll. He’s not going to mention this one.

We’ve been here many times before. Gallup calculates Trump’s average approval rating for throughout his presidency at 40 percent. Apart from a dip into the high 30s when he was unsuccessfully trying to kill Obamacare in 2017, the low 40s are where he’s been consistently in the RCP averages; at FiveThirtyEight (which weighs results for polling quality and partisan bias), he’s similarly very near where he’s usually been, with somewhat more frequent and recent dips into the high 30s.

So it’s more and more evident that the man’s popularity simply isn’t very elastic, regardless of economic conditions and/or the daily gyrations of his Twitter feed and the partisan conflict in Washington. And it reinforces the very high likelihood that his reelection is going to depend not on any Trump surge in approval but on dragging his Democratic opponents down into the depths of popular opprobrium right along with him, like an alligator executing a death roll to drown its prey.

In listening to some of the intra-Democratic discussion of Trump as an “aberration,” I felt the need to weigh in at New York with some not-so-distant memories:

One of the latent questions in American politics for both parties is whether Donald J. Trump is some sort of horror-movie version of a unicorn, who after this term, and perhaps another one, will retreat to Mar-a-Lago, leaving the Republican Party — and the United States — scarred but not fundamentally changed. For obvious reasons, Republicans don’t discuss this view of their own future very openly, lest their master resent the suggestion that he’s a man whose moment is rapidly slipping away. You hear the subject discussed more among Democrats, particularly those who are running for president to consign Trump to the ash bin of history. Joe Biden, for example, has made it clear he considers the 45th president an aberration, whose evil spell over Republicans will dissipate once he’s out of office.

But Trump’s undoubtedly strange and outlandish personality should not make us forget that the party he took by force in 2016 was already exhibiting an alarming extremism on multiple issues. Here’s Barack Obama being hopeful about Republicans in 2012:

“President Obama told supporters that he expected the gridlock to end after the election, when Republicans can stop worrying about voting him out of office.

“’My expectation is that if we can break this fever, that we can invest in clean energy and energy efficiency because that’s not a partisan issue,’ Obama said, speaking to supporters in Minneapolis.

“Obama pointed to deficit reduction, a transportation bill, and immigration reform as initiatives that could well pass in November.”

None of that happened, of course. And instead of getting over their “fever” of policy extremism and tactical obstructionism, what did Republicans do? They nominated Donald Trump as their next presidential candidate.

Mitt Romney, one of the GOP’s most respectable figures, advocated immigration policies arguably to the right of Trump’s in his pursuit of the 2012 presidential nomination. He also endorsed the Ryan budgets (reflecting the party’s hard-core commitment to “entitlement reform” and an end to decades of anti-poverty measures), and supported the cut, cap, balance pledge to permanently shrink the size of the federal government. And most famously, he embraced one of the foundational myths of conservative extremism in his remarks that the votes of “47 percent” of Americans had been corruptly bought by welfare-state benefits, thus implicitly making those votes illegitimate.

For the ninth consecutive time, the GOP platform on which Romney ran in 2012 called not just for the reversal of reproductive rights in Roe v. Wade but the constitutional enshrinement of fetal (even embryonic) rights in a Human Life Amendment that would ban states from allowing abortions from the moment of conception.

All that was mainstream Republican policy pre-Trump. In the ever-more-militant conservative wing of the party, the big fashion in the early years of this decade was to call oneself a “constitutional conservative.” As I tried to explain at the time, this meant something genuinely alarming:

“I do worry that the still-emerging ideology of ‘constitutional conservatism’ is something new and dangerous, at least in its growing respectability. It’s always been there in the background, among the Birchers and in the Christian Right, and as as emotional and intellectual force within Movement Conservatism. It basically holds that a governing model of strictly limited (domestic) government that is at the same time devoted to the preservation of ‘traditional culture’ is the only legitimate governing model for this country, now and forever, via the divinely inspired agency of the Founders. That means democratic elections, the will of the majority, the need to take collective action to meet big national challenges, the rights of women and minorities, the empirical data on what works and what doesn’t — all of those considerations and more are so much satanic or ‘foreign’ delusions that can and must be swept aside in the pursuit of a Righteous and Exceptional America.”

A first cousin to, or perhaps just a corollary of, constitutional conservatism is the belief, which has spread rapidly through the GOP ranks, that the Second Amendment is the most important element of the Bill of Rights and includes an implicit right to armed revolution against “tyranny,” as defined by, well, constitutional conservatives. It wasn’t Donald Trump who espoused that point of view during the 2016 Republican presidential nominating process, but his rivals Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, and Ben Carson.

Constitutional conservatism has more or less been absorbed into “America First” Trumpism, but the way of thinking hasn’t gone away — as evidenced by Trump’s tendency to disregard those aspects of the Constitution that don’t suit his needs, while deifying those that do. When it comes to extremist goals like banning abortion entirely, or defending an absolutist view of gun rights, or sealing the borders, or making freedom of religion contingent upon its consistency with “Judeo-Christian heritage,” Trump is a louder champion of extremism, but hardly novel. And even where Trump has departed from hard-core conservative orthodoxy, he seems to have coarsened it more than anything else, viz the open pro-corporate mercantilism of his trade policy, and the supposed “non-interventionism” that is accompanied by constant threats of military violence.

Yes, there are long-term demographic trends that could make Republican extremism no longer practicable, but you have to figure the GOP will have to lose a few more presidential elections before that lesson sinks in; extremism does, if nothing else, help mobilize the party “base” and attract highly motivated donors. For every Democrat baffled by Trump’s win in 2016, there’s a Republican who believes the formula will work forever. For the legions of younger Republicans who have probably never met a genuinely “moderate” GOP leader in their lives, the “fever” could be especially persistent.

Practical politics aside, progressives need to take seriously the possibility that their counterparts on the right feel just as passionately about fetal life, the alleged threat of immigrants to civilization, and the decline of religious affiliation and 1950s-style patriarchal “family values” as those on the left feel about climate change or equality. Those who doubt the staying power of conservative extremism beyond its relationship to Trump should take another look at Michael Anton’s 2016 essay arguing that the condition of liberal-dominated American society is so catastrophically dire that voting for Trump is a survival impulse like that of the terrorism victims who stormed the cockpit of United Flight 93 on 9/11. Trump’s 2016 victory was in no small part the product of that brand of extremism, not its cause.

Sometimes a political party’s left hand doesn’t seem to know what the right hand is doing, and that’s happening to Republicans on abortion policy, as I noted this week at New York:

For many years, the chief political strategy of the anti-abortion movement has been to gradually chip away at reproductive rights by focusing on rare but lurid-sounding late-term abortions. It made sense, given the unpopularity of such procedures (particularly when presented without the context of the tragic circumstances involved) and the overwhelming popularity of legalized early-term abortions, whose criminalization is the movement’s ultimate goal. Once the regime set up by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey is unraveled, anti-abortion proponents thought, it might be time to stop the charade and go public with a more radical agenda.

But as my colleague Irin Carmon recently explained, as pro-lifers have gained power in state legislatures via the Republican Party they now completely dominate, the temptation to go for the anti-choice gold has been too strong for many to resist, as evidenced by the sudden rush to enact “heartbeat” bills that ban abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy:

“Heartbeat bans are suddenly in place, if not in effect, in Ohio, Georgia, Mississippi, and Kentucky …

“For nearly a half century, the Supreme Court has said that states can’t ban abortion before a fetus is viable — no earlier than 24 weeks, not six, before many women even know they’re pregnant. That’s why the focus-grouped, gray-suited architects of the anti-abortion movement believe total bans hurt their cause. They’ve read the polls that say Americans broadly support abortion in the first trimester, that they don’t want to see Roe v. Wade overturned, and that they squirm when they hear about the later abortions allowed under it: after 20 weeks, or later for reasons of health or life.”

Yet states’ early-term abortion bans are becoming more radical every day, culminating in this week’s passage of legislation in Alabama that would ban all abortions from the moment of conception other than those necessary to save the life of a pregnant woman. There aren’t even exceptions for pregnancies caused by rape or incest.

As a matter of constitutional law, it’s unlikely that even today’s 5-4 majority of presumed abortion foes on the Supreme Court would choose so extreme a law as the lever to reverse or modify its reproductive-rights precedents. If they do want to go in that direction, laws regulating later-term abortions — such as the 20-week bans popular among Republican legislators in many states and in Washington, too — are a more likely vehicle.

But beyond that, such laws uncloak the ultimate goals of the GOP and the RTL movement at a time when Republicans are trying to brand Democrats as an extremist party that supports abortions so late in pregnancy that they can be labeled “infanticide.” As National Journal reports, this is a big deal for Donald Trump’s party heading toward 2020:

“President Trump has laced it into his rally repertoire, calling Democrats ‘the party of high taxes, high crime, open borders, late-term abortion, witch hunts, and delusions.’ And as campaigns continue to ramp up for 2019 and 2020, there is little expectation among Republicans that the abortion message will fizzle …

“The issue was sparked in January, when New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed the Reproductive Health Act, which expanded limited abortion rights beyond the 24th week of pregnancy, and days later when Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam made comments about a bill in his state loosening restrictions on late-term abortions …

“Critics call the infanticide claims manufactured outrage, pointing to the existing laws that criminalize action taken to end a newborn’s life. As it stands, late-term abortion — generally referring to those after 20 weeks of gestation — is a rare procedure typically done in the interest of protecting the mother’s health, according to a 2018 Congressional Research Service report.

But it’s kind of hard to pose as the party in the firm mainstream of public opinion on abortion, fighting those baby-killing Democrats, when one’s own Republicans are trying to ban the bulk of abortions that occur early in pregnancy. It’s not just a mixed message but arguably an honest statement of principles stepping all over a calculated lie.

Some observers suggest the infanticide talk may be “cover” for the early-abortion prohibition measures beginning to sweep through Republican legislatures. If so, it may not be loud enough to drown out the howls of triumph from extremist lawmakers in places like Alabama or the cries of dismay from those who previously thought basic reproductive rights were safe. It’s hard to look at all this state-level activity and not quickly discern who the real “extremists” are.

Having heard a lot of despair from Democrats over high-profile recruits turning down the opportunity to run for the Senate, I looked at some trends and suggested a more optimistic approach at New York:

[A]s my colleague Eric Levitz recently explained, a Republican-controlled Senate could dash hopes that a progressive 46th president could enact any kind of legislative agenda or reverse the conservative judicial revolution that Donald Trump is overseeing. Beyond that, a Democratic president who can’t get anything done would be a strong candidate for a disastrous 2022 midterm and early lame-duck status.

So picking up three net Senate seats is almost as urgent a task for Democrats in 2020 as getting Trump out of the White House. The conventional wisdom in some circles is that Democratic Senate hopes have been betrayed by potentially strong candidates (e.g., Texas’s Beto O’Rourke, Montana’s Steve Bullock, and Georgia’s Stacey Abrams) selfishly deciding to pursue other offices and other goals. Aside from how you feel about the proposition that these people owe the Democratic Party a year or so of tough, miserable campaign work and then six years in a job they may not even want, the candidate-driven look at 2020 Senate races may be missing something more fundamental. In the last presidential election year, split-ticket voting in Senate races basically vanished. That’s right: In 2016, all 34 races were won by the party that won the state in question in the presidential contest. That’s never happened before. As Harry Enten pointed out, there wasn’t much variation in the pattern of votes:

Unless 2016 was an outlier (and given a general trend toward straight-ticket voting, that’s unlikely), you can see why most observers are pessimistic about Democrat Doug Jones surviving a presidential year in Alabama (Trump won the state by 27 points), and also why Steve Bullock wasn’t interested in a Senate race in Montana (which Trump carried by 20 points) and Beto O’Rourke gave it a pass in Texas (a nine-point Trump win in 2016).

More generally, the depressing fact for Democrats is that 22 of the 34 Senate races in 2020 are happening in states won by Trump in 2016. Considering that Trump managed to lose the national popular vote, that’s mostly a reminder that the United States Senate, with its equal seats for California and Wyoming, is a fundamentally anti-democratic (and hence anti-Democratic) institution.

There is a flip side to this straight-ticket-voting reality: If Democrats win the presidential race decisively, some of those presidential red states could turn blue. In particular, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina are states with 2020 Senate races against Republican incumbents where Democrats think they have a decent chance of beating Trump this time. Add in two states Trump lost last time that have Republican senators up in 2020 (Colorado and Maine), and the odds of liberating the upper chamber from Mitch McConnell’s death grip look a lot better. That means a strong Democratic investment in purplish states with Senate races could pay off doubly.

Strange things can always happen in the interim, of course: Joe Manchin could practically hand over his Senate seat to Republicans if he resigned to run for governor of West Virginia. On the other hand, Alabama Republicans could make an equally generous gesture by again nominating Roy Moore to run against Jones. But instead of obsessing about recruitment of ideal candidates for potentially winnable Senate races, Democrats would be wise to focus on winning those states against Trump, with all the good things that could mean down-ballot.

As a long-time national convention junkie, I’m looking forward to next year’s Democratic assemblage with even greater than usual interest, and wrote about some candidate contingency planning at New York:

Even though campaigns stay mostly focused on the immediate, there have to be strategies in place for remote (in time and likelihood) contingencies. With 21 Democratic candidates already in the field and at least one more (Steve Bullock) on the way, they must all deal with the possibility of Democrats arriving in Milwaukee in July of next year with nobody having the requisite majority of pledged delegates buttoned down.

Under this “contested convention” scenario, a strange and ironic thing would happen once a by-the-book first ballot ended in deadlock. Party superdelegates, the ex officio delegates (mostly elected officials and DNC members) who lost their independent first-ballot voting power in a post-2016 concession to angry Bernie Sanders supporters, would regain it on any second or subsequent ballot. So after being written off as nonentities, these largely Establishment figures — 769 of them in all, compared to 3,768 pledged delegates — could, in the context of a contested convention, wind up deciding it all.

As Ruby Cramer of BuzzFeed reports, the Democratic campaigns are beginning to think about this scenario. Unsurprisingly, Bernie Sanders, who has (a) prior experience running for president, (b) money to burn, and (c) a robust record of trashing the very institution of superdelegates, seems to be thinking about it most deeply:

“’We’re taking superdelegates and superdelegates strategy seriously,’ a Sanders aide said, ‘hence having a team dedicated to delegates who can prepare for multiple convention scenarios. We will be reaching out to them over the course of the campaign. When the senator wins the nomination, he’s eager to work with them to support and unite of all the party in the general and beyond.'”

Of course he is.

Cramer touts Kamala Harris’s campaign as having a very effective superdelegate outreach program already, under the direction of Hillary Clinton’s top 2016 delegate tracker (who also worked for DNC chairman Tom Perez). But it’s kinda something any candidate with the resources for it would want to do even if a contested convention was impossible:

“An official from Harris’s campaign pointed out that superdelegate outreach is good politics regardless of whether they factor in the convention. ‘All of these people — whether they are DNC members or members of Congress — have footholds in their communities,’ the Harris official said. ‘Obviously we are reaching out to those individuals and doing our due diligence.'”

That will matter a whole lot more if Democrats look up after the blitz of March primaries and see no one really in charge of the race:

“[F]ully 60 percent of pledged delegates will be awarded during a two-week period running from March 3 (generally known as Super Tuesday) through March 17, when primaries are scheduled in fully half the states (a share that could go even higher if late-deciding states like New York move into this window). Depending on what happens in the four February contests that are “protected” from additional competition by national party rules (Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina, in that order), this huge bloc of early-to-mid-March states could either produce scattered results that make an early decision impossible, or could instead make one candidate the putative (not official, but certain) nominee.”

In the case of a Wild West scenario, superdelegates could again walk tall in the councils of the Donkey Party, and even the fieriest of insurgents will find kind words to say about those staid Establishment figures toiling in the party’s vineyards.