The huge field of Democrats running or considering a 2020 presidential race has a lot of diversity. I discussed one aspect of their differences this week at New York:

In assessing the very large Democratic field assembling to challenge Trump in 2020, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that a lot of politicians with résumés that would not normally bespeak presidential timber have taken a look at the 45th president’s rise to the White House and concluded there are no longer any minimum requirements. Yes, there have been presidents with no prior experience in elected office, but before Trump they were all war heroes (Taylor, Grant, and Eisenhower) or Cabinet members (Taft and Hoover). A few major-party nominees were closer to Trump in the empty résumé department (notably 1904 Democratic nominee Alton Parker, a state judge, and 1940 Republican nominee Wendell Willkie, a utility executive), but for the most part, especially in more recent times, the major parties have nominated former or current senators and governors.

A recent Morning Consult poll suggests that rank-and-file Democratic voters still value that kind of high-level experience, with 66 percent saying that “decades of political experience” was “very important” or “somewhat important” to them in choosing a 2020 nominee. That could help explain why two candidates (one potential and one actual) who together have 81 years of experience in elected office, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, top every poll. And there’s more where that came from: An astonishing seven former or current U.S. senators are in the race.

It’s possible that while Trump hasn’t totally dispelled an interest in experience among voters in either party, Democrats are less worried than they might normally be about sending up a relative novice to oppose him; it’s not like Trump is going to depict himself as the wise, credentialed, steady hand on the tiller. It’s notable that candidates at both ends of the experience spectrum — Biden and Sanders, and O’Rourke and Buttigieg — are thought to be potentially strong among the white working-class voters so important to Trump’s 2016 election and 2020 reelection prospects. Perhaps all that’s going on is that against the terrifying Trump Democrats are valuing perceived electability above all.

It’s also possible that candidates like O’Rourke and Buttigieg are best compared to recent flash-in-the-pan presidential candidates on the Republican side like Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain (in 2012) or Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina (in 2016), who got an audition but were eventually cast aside. But one thing’s for sure: Democrats won’t forget about Trump and what happened in 2016 for a moment in selecting their next nominee.

The intersection of religion and politics is one of my favorite subjects, and I have a good opportunity to write about it this week at New York:

it’s important now and then to challenge the conservative assertion — often shared in ignorance by secular media — that religiosity, and particularly Christian religiosity, dictates reactionary positions on culture and politics. So I found it interesting and provocative that 2020 presidential candidate Cory Booker goes out of his way to talk about his own religious faith:

“[Booker] bids fair to become the most overtly Christian Democratic presidential candidate since Jesse Jackson and perhaps even Jimmy Carter, at a time when his party is trending irreligious and the opposition claims a monopoly on all things biblical. What makes Booker different from many left-of-center figures who are “personally” religious is that he purports to be progressive because of his faith, not despite it or incidentally alongside it (e.g., the way John F. Kennedy referred to his own faith as an ‘accident of birth’). If this becomes central to his identity as a presidential wannabe, it will be provocative to both the Christian right and to secular Democrats. And that could be both a benefit and a handicap for Booker ’20.”

As E.J. Dionne observes, there is another 2020 Democratic presidential candidate who’s conspicuously talking about his faith, the fast-rising dark horse Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana.

“During an appearance on MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ last week, the 37-year-old from South Bend, Ind., made a modest plea: ‘I do think it’s important for candidates to at least have the option to talk about our faith,’ he said. He specifically targeted the idea that ‘the only way a religious person could enter politics is through the prism of the religious right.’

“An Episcopalian and a married gay man, Buttigieg pointed to the core Christian concept that ‘the first shall be last; the last shall be first.’

“He added: ‘What could be more different than what we’re being shown in Washington right now — often with some people who view themselves as religious on the right, cheering it on? . . . Here we have this totally warped idea of what Christianity should be like when it comes into the public sphere, and it’s mostly about exclusion. Which is the last thing that I imbibe when I take in scripture in church.'”

Dionne notes that Booker and Elizabeth Warren share Buttigieg’s willingness to talk about Christian faith. But what makes Mayor Pete especially interesting is that he challenges the idea that Christianity is inherently homophobic in a direct and personal manner. To him, LGBTQ folk aren’t third parties who are the subject of some argument between Christians and progressives: He’s Christian, progressive, and gay. So conservative Christians who like to imply that their more accepting co-religionists aren’t “real” or “orthodox” because they don’t exclude gay people need to be willing to tell Buttigieg he’s taking the Lord’s name in vain. And that may be — and certainly should be — uncomfortable for them.

The Episcopal Church of America accepts gay parishioners, priests, and bishops in churches that recite the Nicene Creed every Sunday and have as authentic a claim to “orthodoxy” as any other church and more than many. So, too, do such solid elements of the American and global religious landscape as the United Church of Christ (a.k.a. Congregationalists), the Presbyterian Church (USA) (the largest gathering in that faith tradition), the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ditto), the Unitarian-Universalist Association, and many congregations and whole regions of the United Methodists and my own Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) that embrace gay people as equals in every way. There are many smaller denominations and nondenominational gatherings that do the same. And that’s aside from the millions of individual Catholics, Evangelicals, and Pentecostals who reject, quietly or openly, the homophobia of their own denominations.

Any Democratic presidential nominee who can authentically talk about his or her faith would be well advised to do so if only to confound Christian-right leaders and followers who have cast their own lots with the heathenish warlord in the White House. But Pete Buttigieg offers a particularly interesting contrast with the 45th president. Would anyone be confident in accusing this married, churchgoing, Afghanistan veteran of being ethically inferior to Donald Trump? Not without risking hellfire.

There’s been a lot written about the Democratic House’s new voting rights push. But as I argued at New York, much of the discussion doesn’t quite capture its scope and historical significance.

The remarkable partisan polarization over HR1 — House Democrats’ ambitious but hardly novel package of “pro-democracy” reforms, centered on voting rights — shows that this issue, once a matter of bipartisan do-gooder sentiment, has now become a deadly serious point of contention in our politics. This has happened rather quickly as the two parties each came to recognize their future might depend on expanding or restricting ballot access.

All 234 House Democrats present voted for HR1 while all 193 Republicans present voted against it. That’s remarkable given the bipartisan support voting rights (and even other features of the bill like campaign finance reform) had until very recently. To be sure, politicians in both parties still think ballot access is critically important. But Republicans, having placed their bets on an electoral base that is overwhelmingly white and significantly upscale, are becoming deeply invested in suppression of voting opportunities for those who are unlikely to join their coalition.

A recent study showed that of 20 states identified as making it most difficult to vote, Trump carried 17. Hillary Clinton carried 12 of the 20 states where it is easiest to vote.

The homeland of Republican voter suppression is in the South, where keeping African-Americans from the ballot box is an ancient tradition practiced mostly by Democrats in the long period from the emancipation of slaves until the end of Jim Crow. Now across the region the Republicans who control every state legislature in the former Confederacy are pursuing an ensemble of measures to restrict the franchise, from cutbacks in early voting, to aggressive voter purges, to voter-ID requirements, to reductions in polling places. This trend rapidly proliferated after the 2013 Supreme Court decision (supported by all five Republican-appointed Justices, with all four Democratic-appointed Justices dissenting) that killed the chief enforcement mechanism of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Without the requirement that states with a history of racial discrimination submit election system changes to the U.S. Justice Department for “preclearance,” it’s been open season on ballot access, particularly as racial polarization in partisan preferences has intensified.

As veteran political journalist Ron Brownstein has observed, the current split in Congress over HR 1 is just the beginning of an era in which one party supports and the other opposes voting rights: it’s a struggle that may determine political dominance in many states and nationally for years to come:

“Particularly in states across the Sun Belt — from North Carolina, Florida and Georgia to Texas and Arizona — the electoral competition is shaped by a stark demographic divide. In all of those states, Democrats are increasingly reliant on growing populations of younger and nonwhite voters. But in each of those states and others demographically similar to them, a Republican coalition almost entirely dependent on white voters — especially older, blue-collar and non-urban whites — still has the advantage, particularly in state elections.

“In each state the Republican majorities have used that power to approve either restrictions on voting — such as tougher voter identification laws — partisan gerrymanders or both, making it more difficult for that emerging nonwhite electorate to overturn their dominance.”

As in the Reconstruction era after the Civil War, one party is committed to the use of federal power to vindicate voting rights, and the other is opposed. Today’s Republicans don’t openly tout white racial supremacy rationales the way many Democrats of the 19th century did, but they do similarly claim they are simply defending states’ rights to control elections, and warn of electoral fraud and corruption, and less vocally, of a partisan conspiracy whereby minority voters will use their political power to redistribute the wealth of virtuous tax-paying white folks. Southern opponents of the first Reconstruction resorted to terrorism along with less violent forms of intimidation aimed at black would-be voters and officeholders. But formal disenfranchisement was accomplished throughout the region by 1900, aided by Supreme Court rulings sharply limiting federal jurisdiction over elections. Now strategies for disenfranchisement are covert and partial. But like yesterday’s Democrats, today’s Republicans are acutely aware that their local and national power depends on holding back a tide of minority voting power than might submerge their party.

These partisan dynamics are what separate today’s climate from that of what many have called the Second Reconstruction, the civil-rights era that culminated with the successful implementation of school desegregation, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The battle lines then were mostly regional rather than partisan, though the prominence of Democratic president Lyndon B. Johnson in the key landmark legislation initiated a partisan realignment of the South that led formerly Democratic white conservatives overwhelmingly into the GOP. That party was slowly but surely transformed into a militantly conservative bastion of support for states rights and property rights, and opposition to the kind of public spending that might disproportionately help minorities.

The white conservative backlash to the First Reconstruction succeeded almost totally in the disenfranchisement of African-Americans and the imposition of a virtual apartheid regime at the end of the 19th century. The Second Reconstruction’s accomplishments have been undermined more subtly, via voter suppression measures in the states and recent illustrations of residual racism from redlining to efforts to drain public schools of resources to police misconduct aimed at minority citizens and undocumented immigrants.

And so, arguably, we are seeing the first stages of a Third Reconstruction, again focused on (but not limited to) the South, with the goal of finally realizing the promise of equality extended in the so-called Reconstruction Amendments (the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, which abolished slavery, mandated equal protection for all citizens, and banned discrimination in voting) enacted after the Civil War. Because the bipartisanship of the Second Reconstruction has been lost, the Third Reconstruction may be as bitterly divisive as the First, and could quickly grow to overshadow other political issues. And while this Third Reconstruction may extend to multiple issues touching on equality, it will almost certainly be rooted in the fight for voting rights, which will determine the balance of power in many states and nationally.

Reverend William Barber II, the North Carolina pastor who founded that state’s Moral Mondays movement in opposition to a conservative takeover that made voter suppression prominent and explicit, titled his 2016 memoir/manifesto The Third Reconstruction. In it he accentuated the importance of voting rights as a threshold issue:

“Because political power is a democracy’s chief safeguard against injustice, we must continue to engage the voting rights issue after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which removed protections against voter suppression in southern states that had been in place for half a century. This fight is, in many ways, bigger than Selma and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That expansion of voting rights fifty years ago was a concession to the civil rights movement. We didn’t get all we were asking for. Now, fifty years later, we’re fighting to hold on to the compromise. What we really need is a constitutional amendment to guarantee the same voting rights in every state. This must be the cornerstone of the Third Reconstruction.”

Constitutional amendments in our system are very difficult to secure. But HR1 and Sewell’s legislation restoring the VRA together represent an effort to nationalize voting rights as much as the Constitution allows, as both its supporters and opponents acknowledge. HR1 takes a chainsaw to the thicket of voter-suppression techniques Republican-controlled states have contrived, which in intent echo the formal disenfranchisement the first Reconstruction fought and the poll taxes and literacy tests targeted by the second. And the restored voting rights enforcement mechanism in the Justice Department that Sewell’s bill would provide is aimed at rebuilding the federal government’s oversight of state and local electoral procedures, giving the victims of voters suppression an ally as powerful as the Freedmen’s Bureau of the first Reconstruction.

As in the first two Reconstructions, action in Washington will depend on the success of local grassroots pressure in the states where the battle against voter suppression rages. And that means today’s voting rights push must become not merely an issue among issues, but a social movement with a sense of moral urgency.

It’s a point made by political scientists repeatedly over the years, but it’s worth reiterating with fresh evidence, as I did at New York.

Pew has a new report out looking at self-identified political independents. It doesn’t break any new ground, but it should be waved in the face of Howard Schultz and others who look at the high percentage of Americans who prefer to call themselves independents and see a huge constituency for some centrist “third force.” It’s largely a mirage.

According to Pew’s numbers, while 38 percent of Americans identify as indies, only 7 percent “decline to lean towards a party.” Party “leaners” are a lot like self-identified partisans. For example, 70 percent of GOP-leaning indies give Donald Trump a positive job rating; 75 percent of them favor an expanded border wall; and 78 percent would prefer a smaller government providing fewer services. And far from being “plague on both your houses” nonpartisans with disdain for elephants and donkeys, independent leaners like one party and really dislike the other:

“Currently, 87% of those who identify with the Republican Party view the Democratic Party unfavorably. Republican-leaning independents are almost as likely to view the Democratic Party negatively (81% unfavorable). Opinions among Democrats and Democratic leaners are nearly the mirror image: 88% of Democrats and 84% of Democratic leaners view the GOP unfavorably. In both parties, the shares of partisan identifiers and leaners with unfavorable impressions of the opposition party are at or near all-time highs.”

The idea that independents are mostly “moderates” is increasingly out of whack with reality, too. A majority of GOP-leaning indies self-identify as conservative now, and while “moderates” still outnumber “liberals” among Democratic leaners (by a 45-39 margin), the latter category is steadily growing, as is the case with self-identified Democrats.

One implication of the report that’s worth internalizing is that polls and other opinion indicators that don’t break out leaners from true indies create an impression of the whole category as being in the middle on issues and candidates alike. In truth, much of what you read about independents reflects the dynamics of partisan leaners canceling each other out. So that big, potentially irresistible force poised between the two parties is mostly a figment of the imagination. And the partisan polarization so many self-identified pundits love to deplore extends well into the ranks of the technically unaffiliated.

 

You had to be of a certain age to remember Birch Bayh when he died this week at 91. As it happens, he sponsored the first piece of congressional legislation I was ever involved in. But his bigger accomplishments were near-legendary, as I wrote about at New York.

If you voted between the ages of 18 and 21 or benefited in any way from the Title IX program banning gender discrimination in higher education, Birch Bayh had an impact on your life. And he played an indirect role in the breakthrough in reproductive rights represented by the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision.

Bayh was elected to the U.S. Senate at the age of 34, after serving as the youngest-ever Speaker of the Indiana House. His first high-profile national moment came in 1964, when he pulled his colleague Ted Kennedy to safety from a plane crash that killed the pilot and a Kennedy staffer.

He soon became a power on the Judiciary Committee and chairman of its Constitution Subcommittee. In that role he became one of the last great advocates for constitutional amendments, co-authoring the 25th amendment providing for appointment of a vice president upon a vacancy in that position, and the 26th amendment lowering the voting age to 18 in federal and state elections. Bayh was also the chief Senate sponsor of the Equal Rights Amendment, which cleared Congress in 1972 only to succumb to a powerful backlash closely associated with the rising conservative movement when the drive to ratify it stalled (there’s still an effort underwayto complete ratification of the ERA, though some argue the deadline for state approval is long past).

But Bayh considered Title IX, best known for its impact on opportunities for women in college athletics, his most important legacy, as NBC News observed:

“The law’s passage came at a time when women earned fewer than 10 percent of all medical and law degrees and fewer than 300,000 high school girls — one in 27 — played sports….

“Now, women make up more than half of those receiving bachelor’s and graduate degrees, and more than 3 million high school girls — one in two — play sports….

“Bayh said the law was aimed at giving women a better shot at higher-paying jobs. He continued speaking in support of Title IX’s enforcement for years after leaving Congress.”

From his position on the Judiciary Committee, Bayh had a definite if more subtle affect on the shape of constitutional law via the composition of the U.S. Supreme Court. He led the successful opposition to two Nixon SCOTUS nominees, Clement Haynesworth and Harrold Carswell, who were widely perceived as payoffs to southern reactionaries who had stood by Nixon in 1968. Nixon ultimately substituted Warren Burger and Harry Blackmun for the rejected pair; Blackman soon authored Roe v. Wade, with Burger concurring.

Bayh’s final years in national politics were deeply disappointing given the high esteem he had gained from liberals in particular and from political observers generally. After a flirtation with a 1972 presidential run cut short by his wife’s cancer diagnosis, Bayh ran for real in 1976, but was soon eclipsed as the liberal champion in the field by Mo Udall. It’s also clear his Hoosier-style persona and campaign methods didn’t travel well, as Adam Clymer notes:

“The Bayh campaign never caught on. It was troubled by poor fund-raising and a style described by Charles Mohr of The New York Times as ‘juvenile, corny.’ His campaign theme song, to the tune of ‘dHey, Look Me Over,’ began: ‘Hey, look him over, he’s your kind of guy./His first name is Birch and his last name is Bayh.’ He dropped out of the race in March.”

No wonder.

Bayh lost his Senate seat in 1980, suffering the ignominy of a defeat at the hands of a then-obscure young conservative named Dan Quayle. It was a bad year for Democrats generally: late in the campaign year Bayh had to take time to head up an inquiry into the so-called “Billygate” scandal, involving President Carter’s brother Billy, who had acted as an unregistered lobbyist for Libya’s Muammar Ghaddafi.

After leaving Congress, Bayh stayed out of electoral politics (other than supporting his son Evan’s career), but was still visible in defending Title IX and advocating the abolition of the Electoral College. The one public shadow on his long and dignified retirement came in 2016, when the champion of equal rights for women was accused of sexual assault (as Clymer notes):

“He…become the subject of a sexual-assault accusation in 2016 by a technology journalist, Xeni Jardin, who said in a series of tweets that he had groped her in the 1990s in the back seat of a car in the presence of unidentified male colleagues of hers. News websites, including Vox, reported the allegation at the time, but Mr. Bayh did not respond publicly.”

That Bayh did not reply is not surprising, given his advanced age at the time. 88-year-olds rarely do. Here is tennis legend Billie Jean King’s statementupon hearing of Bayh’s death:

“Sen. Birch Bayh was one of the most important Americans of the 20th century and you simply cannot look at the evolution of equality in our nation without acknowledging the contributions and the commitment Sen. Bayh made to securing equal rights and opportunities for every American….

“Birch Bayh was a man of integrity, a leader with unquestionable character and an American treasure.”

God only knows how ultimately to judge Birch Bayh, but for all the nostalgia about the passing of deal-cutting back-slapping senators, he was a lawmaker of principle who got things done.