I usually mock the idea of a contested political convention in this day and age. But 2020 could be different for Democrats, as I explained at New York:

At this early point of the 2020 cycle, it’s natural to hear those old siren songs from a more interesting past when conventions actually decided something instead of serving as a four-day party infomercial as tightly scripted as any other TV drama. The fact that the last-multi-ballot convention occurred in 1952 (when Democrats nominated Adlai Stevenson on the third ballot), and the last seriously contested nomination in 1976 (when Gerald Ford survived a close challenge from Ronald Reagan on the first ballot), is often forgotten. And yes, it’s fun to engage in reveries over the “smoke-filled rooms” that picked Warren Harding out of nowhere in 1920, the 103 ballots Democrats needed to find their doomed nominee (John W. Davis) in 1924, or the stampeding of Republican delegates by galleries chanting “We Want Willkie!” in 1940.

But aside from the question of who, exactly, would “broker” a “brokered convention” these days, fantasies of any sort of contested nomination at a convention run up against a fundamental change in the process that made primaries and caucuses ubiquitous and delegate selection less arbitrary and “bossed,” as I noted a few years back:

“The main reason for this shift away from deliberative–or if you wish, ‘brokered’–conventions was the rise of a primary system that all but eliminated undecided delegates and favorite-son or stalking-horse candidacies. So it requires really, really special circumstances even to get within shouting distance of a convention where someone hasn’t locked up the nomination long before the balloons are inflated.”

The big shift was in 1972, when virtually all states moved to primaries or voter-driven caucuses. (That’s also the same year that Democratic nominee George McGovern gave his acceptance speech at about 3:00 AM Eastern Time, which led both parties to move quickly to squelch virtually all spontaneity at later conventions, wherever possible).

Despite some late hijinks involving dubious plans (similar to those Democrats entertained in 1980) to unbind Trump delegates, the convention itself was a Trump coronation (despite a spoilsport star turn by Ted Cruz). And this outcome probably led most observers to assume that despite their own vast 2020 candidate field, Democrats won’t have any trouble settling on a nominee well before their Milwaukee convention in July.

But there is a basic problem in assuming that the Republican delegate selection process in 2016 tells you anything about the Democratic process in 2020. Once he got rolling in 2016, Trump benefitted enormously from winner-take-all (usually by congressional district) delegate award rules. Democrats insist on strictly proportional delegate awards, which makes it much easier for candidates with limited but consistent support to hang around and hang around until late in the primary season hoping to catch fire (or to benefit from a front-runner’s calamities). That’s particularly true if they have a reliable source of money and/or an ideologically motivated national support base (like Bernie Sanders). So those who scoff at the possibility of a contested convention need to factor in several things: the size and strength of the field, the absence of a big-time front-runner, the likely split of delegates and a relatively front-loaded primary calendar that could make survivors of the early events quite durable.

It’s important to note that proportionality of delegate awards has its limits. There is a 15 percent minimum threshold for winning delegates at all, and in many congressional districts awarding delegates there really aren’t that many at stake to spread them around in strict proportion to the popular vote. But there are some counter-pressures that might encourage “losing” candidates to hold out, as well. As Nate Cohn notes, Democrats have “killed” superdelegates’ independence on first ballots. But if there are subsequent ballots, these ex officio delegates will spring back to life:

“In 2020, Democrats have sought to tamp down the superdelegate hysteria by barring these leaders and officials — currently 765 of them — from casting votes on the initial ballot at the convention. But here’s the ultimate irony: They can still cast votes on successive ballots, so they could be more influential than ever if the Democratic primary devolves into a floor fight.”

So sure, maybe history will hold true and only two candidates emerge from the earliest contests and one croaks the other by April. But for the first time in a long while a contested convention is an actual if still remote possibility. That in turn could influence candidate strategies in ways that are hard to anticipate. Despite its reputation for mild summer weather, it could get hot in Milwaukee in July of 2020.

Political writers have gotten used to outrageous and mendacious statements by the 45th president on a daily, if not hourly, basis. But one today took the cake, and I wrote it up for New York.

It’s no surprise that Republicans continue to try to make hay out of the Ilhan Omar controversy, even though, arguably, Democrats turned the tables on them by developing an anti-hate resolution which they unanimously supported, whereas 23 Republicans just couldn’t endorse such a sweeping condemnation of bigotry.

Characteristically, the leader of the GOP, one of the most skillful hate-mongers in major-party political history, is asserting that Democrats lost the battle over Omar while exposing their deep animus toward Jews and Israel, per CNN:

“’I thought yesterday’s vote by the house was disgraceful because it has become, the Democrats have become an anti-Israel party. I thought that vote was a disgrace. If you get an honest answer from politicians, they thought it was a disgrace. The Democrats have become an anti-Israel party and anti-Jewish party,’ Trump said.”

Let’s look at the record.

There are 27 Jews currently serving in the U.S. House. Twenty-five of them are Democrats; 2 are Republicans. There are nine Jews in the U.S. Senate. All of them are Democrats (if you consider Bernie Sanders a Democrat). Republicans: zippo.

Are all these Democratic Jews in Congress self-loathing?

A look at Jewish voting patterns is equally revealing. According to the best available data, Democrats have carried the Jewish vote in 24 consecutive presidential elections, dating back to 1924. In six of the last seven presidential elections, the Jewish vote was more than 70 percent Democratic (the one exception was in 2012, when Barack Obama won 69 percent of the Jewish vote). Hillary Clinton trounced Trump among Jews by a 71/24 margin. 2018 exit polls showed 79 percent of Jews voting Democratic in the midterms.

Did Democrats just become the “anti-Jewish party” since November of last year?

Trump’s “anti-Israel” smear is only slightly more credible. Yes, a significant minority of congressional Democrats are less slavish to Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies than nearly all Republicans (who are beholden, for the most part, to militantly pro-Likud conservative evangelicals rather than to Jews on the whole). But the vast majority of Democratic elected officials have supported a robust U.S. alliance with Israel dating back to Israel’s founding, in which Democratic president Harry Truman played a key role. The most recent congressional vote on military assistance to Israel, in 2018, showed the measure passing both Houses on voice votes; 36 Democratic senators, including their Jewish leader, Chuck Schumer, were original co-sponsors.

Were all these Democrats hiding an anti-Israel bias while voting for a measure that AIPAC praised as “ensur[ing] that Israel has the means to defend itself, by itself, against growing threats”? And speaking of AIPAC, if Democrats are anti-Semitic and anti-Israel, why did that organization greet the results of the 2018 midterms with this comment:

“’Americans elected a solidly pro-Israel Congress,’ declared the lead article in Near East Report, a monthly publication distributed by AIPAC to its followers across the United States. ‘While polarized on many issues, the 116th Congress remains committed to the U.S.-Israel relationship on a bipartisan basis,’ it stated.”

The president’s smear against Democrats may even be a projection of his own issues with Jews, who are naturally suspicious of the Christian nationalism he keeps flirting with, which is historically associated with anti-Semitism.

But he’s a long way from being able to say his party is the natural political home for American Jews, much less a bulwark against those antisemitic Democrats.

Thinking through the various ways in which the 2020 presidential election may unfold, I thought one unlikely but feasible possibility demanded attention now, and wrote it up at New York.

Trump remains one of the most unpopular presidents ever. His party is unpopular, too, as evidenced by Republicans’ poor performance in the 2018 midterms. Democratic voter enthusiasm seems high, fed by Trump’s daily antics. And the reasonably high odds that voters will eject him from the position he improbably won in 2016 while losing the popular vote are the very reason so many candidates want to run against him.

That’s the “glass half full” way of looking at the landscape. But there’s a “glass half empty” take that’s plausible as well.

After what should have been a calamitous stretch in which he shut down the government for an unpopular border wall, declared a nonexistent national emergency, and underwent a whole new round of high-profile airings of his alleged 2016 sins, Trump’s approval ratings have bounced back to the low-to-mid 40s levels that appear to be his long-term floor. Lest we forget, according to Gallup, his favorability number just before winning the presidency in 2016 was 36 percent (61 percent of respondents gave him an unfavorable rating).

And speaking of 2016, Republicans arguably retain an Electoral College advantage. The initial 2020 presidential battleground map from Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball showed Republicans with 248 electoral votes and Democrats with 244, with 46 in the “toss-up” category. Kyle Kondik explained Trump’s strong position:

“[T]he president’s base-first strategy could again deliver him the White House, thanks in large part to his strength in the nation’s one remaining true swing region, the Midwest. He’s an incumbent, and incumbents are historically harder to defeat (although it may be that incumbency means less up and down the ticket in an era defined by party polarization). Still, Crystal Ball Senior Columnist Alan Abramowitz’s well-regarded presidential ‘Time for Change’ model, which projects the two-party presidential vote, currently projects Trump with 51.4% of the vote based on the most recent measures of presidential approval and quarterly GDP growth (the model’s official projection is based off those figures in the summer of 2020). Arguably, the state of the economy is the most important factor: If perceptions of its strength remain decent, the president could win another term. If there is a recession, his odds likely drop precipitously. Meanwhile, it’s not a given that the Democratic nominee can consolidate the votes of Trump disapprovers, particularly if a third party candidate (Howard Schultz?) eats into the anti-Trump vote.”

Making the 2020 Democratic effort even more problematic is growing evidence that some targets thought to be ripe may be more resistant to Democrats, and more supportive of Trump, than previously thought. Ron Brownstein has some new Gallup data suggesting the incumbent’s resilience in Sunbelt states where many Democrats have espied strong trends in their favor:

“Across the potentially competitive Sun Belt states, Trump’s position among whites is consistently much stronger. In particular, his support among non-college-educated whites was much higher than it was in the Rust Belt: Gallup found that he drew positive job ratings from 73 percent of these voters in Georgia, 67 percent in North Carolina, 66 percent in Texas, and 61 percent in Florida. Likewise, among college-educated whites, Trump ran well above his Rust Belt numbers in all four states.”

And that’s against a generic Democratic opponent, as opposed to the flesh-and-blood candidate who might not, as Hillary Clinton demonstrated, be as strong as his or her party hoped, after a billion-dollars-or-so of attacks from the Trump campaign and its social media/Fox News allies.

As Brownstein notes, these numbers (and the intensely pro-Trump white Evangelical voters they reflect) mean that Democrats will probably need to mobilize nonwhite voters at extraordinary levels to win Sunbelt states Trump carried in 2016. It’s not clear the kind of candidate who can exploit Rust Belt opportunities can do that. And Trump has residual areas of strength in the greater Midwest as well….

Again, this is a glass-half-empty look at how 2020 is shaping up for Democrats. But it raises an important question about how Democrats — at both the elite and grassroots level — react to the real possibility of a second Trump win, particularly if it grows more plausible as 2020 approaches. Will they calmly resolve to unite behind whoever emerges from the abattoir of the nominating process, based on their popularity among Democratic primary voters? Or will they panic and become obsessed about “electability” as opposed to any other candidate quality?

They probably shouldn’t. As my my colleague Eric Levitz has argued, “electability” is a slippery concept that often involves bad-faith efforts to tear down other candidates based on selective deployment of limited evidence. But if it looks like Trump is in a relatively good position, it may be difficult for Democrats to think about anything other than electability, as I noted late last year:

“For most Democrats, the prospect of a second Trump term in the White House is an existential threat, whereas in 2016 his initial election was a bad but implausible nightmare. A second Trump term would not only drive progressives wild with frustration and fear: It could tangibly mean enough additional Supreme Court decisions to guarantee an end to abortion rights and other cherished constitutional protections, along with a federal judiciary skewed to the right for a generation and enough backsliding on critical challenges like inequality and climate change to darken every American’s future.”

Faced with that nightmare — and ineradicable memories of that shocking Election Night in 2016 — will progressive journalists and Democratic activists neurotically look at horse-race polls every other hour and adjust their views of presidential aspirants accordingly? It’s entirely possible. So in addition to developing an exciting agenda and raising money and figuring out where on a complex primary and caucus map to deploy candidate time and other resources, 2020 Democrats need to develop, update, and document a strong case that they are a good bet to beat Trump.

After a number of writers warned of Democratic incivility given the huge 2020 presidential field, I weighed in at New York with a summary of good advice for avoiding the problem:

We’re now well under a year away from the Iowa caucuses, and an unusually — perhaps uniquely — large Democratic field is forming to compete for the opportunity to face Donald J. Trump in 2020. It is highly appropriate that before the festivities intensify, multiple voice are being raised to remember the wolf at the door before engaging in any intramural fisticuffs.

At the American Prospect, veteran labor political operative Steve Rosenthal offers four “rules” for 2020 Democrats in order to avoid a “circular firing squad” that helps Trump win the general election.

Seeing a few straws in the wind, I wrote up for New York some concerns about the likely Trump/Republicans demagoguery about racial reparations.

Some 2020 Democratic presidential candidates in discussing anti-inequality measures have mentioned the moral rationale for a particular effort on behalf of African-Americans who were enslaved and then (under Jim Crow) semi-enslaved, and are suffering from systemic racism even now. Elizabeth Warren, for example, has made the obvious point that the legacy of slavery and its successor regimes has had a negative impact on the ability of black families to accumulate wealth over generations. Her proposed remedies, especially universal child care, are not actually “race conscious,” and aren’t similar to the cash compensation to descendants of slaves that is usually connoted by the term “reparations.” But there are signs that Republicans looking for a fresh way to appeal to white voters worried about alleged redistribution of resources from themselves to minorities may use the r-word to describe any and all race-conscious rationales for public initiatives. Fox News’ highly influential Tucker Carlson devoted an entire segment to the subject last week based on the premise that Democrats are stampeding in the direction of reparations.

Tucker Carlson agrees with his guest after he goes on a rant about how African Americans just need to get over slavery pic.twitter.com/8riQIlUr2I

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 22, 2019

Carlson and his guest are probably canaries in the coal mine in terms of the likely interest of Republicans in adding “No Reparations!” to their “No Socialism!” battle cry for 2020. At FiveThirtyEight, Perry Bacon Jr. explains that relatively strong public awareness of past and present racism does not translate into support for anything like reparations.

But when it comes to acting on these beliefs, notes Bacon, public opinion is significantly more mixed. And sizable majorities reject the idea of “reparations” as they are commonly understood:

“A July 2018 survey from the left-leaning Data for Progress found that 26 percent of Americans supported some kind of compensation or cash benefits for the descendants of slaves. A May 2016 Marist survey also found that 26 percent of Americans said the U.S. should pay reparations as ‘a way to make up for the harm caused by slavery and other forms of racial discrimination.'”

That Marist poll showed 68 percent of respondents, and 81 percent of white respondents, opposing reparations, defined as “money [paid] to African-Americans who are descendents of slaves.”

Now it should be noted immediately that an idea’s unpopularity is not an inherent reason for Democrats rejecting it (as Bacon puts it, “That’s kind of the point of bold ideas — they wouldn’t be bold if everyone already agreed with them.”) And Lord knows Republicans insist on promoting very unpopular ideas, from total opposition to gun regulation to supply-side economics to a ban on all abortions.

But being attacked for a position you do not actually hold is another thing altogether. So far, no 2020 Democratic candidate has embraced “reparations” as the public understands the term (cash payments to all descendants of slaves). But it appears some candidates, led by Warren and Kamala Harris (who called for “reparations” in the form of “investing in historically black colleges, improving maternal mortality rates for black women, and reducing racial disparities in the criminal justice system”) may finally begin to entertain the broader question of America’s moral and material debts to those it not only oppressed but robbed.

In his landmark 2014 essay, “The Case for Reparations,” Ta-Nehisi Coates sought to document those debts in some detail, but concluded that the most important step white America needed to take was simply to acknowledge its falsified history and come to grips with what that means today:

“Reparations — by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences — is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely …

“What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices — more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling ‘patriotism’ while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.”

This idea may not be as controversial as cash reparations, but even if stated honestly, it will become a target for fury among the MAGA folk who believe the abolition of slavery discharged all obligations to African-Americans, and that the falsified past Coates speaks of was one long reign of glory endangered by political correctness and the demands of the previously marginalized. One of the most pervasive ideas of contemporary conservatism (championed, for example, by one of its leading lights, former House Speaker Paul Ryan), in fact, is that liberating impoverished people is best accomplished by denying them any government assistance at all, so as to spur them on the road to self-sufficiency.

So Democrats and the media need to set the record straight on what “reparations” actually mean when discussed by Warren, Harris, and others. But they shouldn’t run away from the inevitable conflicts over what they domean and do propose. They owe a reckoning over racism’s legacy not just to the descendants of slaves and sharecroppers and victims of official and unofficial discrimination; they owe it to their country and its willingness to live up to its purported values.

If that offers Donald Trump another demagogic talking point for 2020, so be it. He’s not going to start telling the truth simply because Democrats tell less of the truth than they should.