It hasn’t made headlines because it’s a complicated story, but gradual changes in how the Democratic presidential nominating process is going to work were in my opinion worth an analysis at New York:

From the beginning of the modern era of popular control of the presidential nominating process (basically inaugurated in 1972) to very recently, the unrepresentative nature of the first two stops on the road to the presidency, the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses and the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary, was a chronic complaint. This was especially true for an increasingly diverse Democratic Party that nonetheless gave two small and very white states (as of the 2000 census, Iowa was 94 percent white and New Hampshire was 96 percent white) protected status as dominant factors in the nominating process.

After the 2004 cycle, Democrats (followed eventually by Republicans) got serious about this problem, and introduced calendar reforms that added two more diverse states — Latino-heavy Nevada and African-American–heavy South Carolina — to the early mix. Super-honkified Iowa and New Hampshire still got to go first, but nonwhite voters got to have a say before the whole deal was done. Indeed, Barack Obama’s successful nomination strategy combined an Iowa win with a dominant performance in southern states with large African-American voting populations, beginning with South Carolina. Hillary Clinton followed the same pattern in overcoming a terrible New Hampshire performance in 2016 by wins over Bernie Sanders in Nevada and South Carolina that put her ahead for good.

The 2020 nominating contest will represent a big leap forward in the development of a more diverse early calendar for Democrats, as Ron Brownstein explains:

“As in every recent Democrat primary race, the 2020 contest will begin in two virtually all-white states, with the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary in early February. But after that the next month of the primary calendar is dominated by states across the Sun Belt where non-white voters comprise a large share, and often an absolute majority, of the electorate.

“This decisive turn toward diversity, reinforced by California’s decision to move up its primary to Super Tuesday, represents a potentially critical new wrinkle in the nomination process. The pivot begins with Nevada and South Carolina, where contests will be held in the second half of February. The tilt toward diversity then explodes in early March when big Sun Belt states from Florida, North Carolina and Virginia in the southeast to Arizona and Texas along with California across the southwest will all crowd together on the calendar.”

This shift may actually be intensified by the fact that while Iowa and New Hampshire have never embraced early voting, their new competitors emphatically have, as my colleague Gabriel Debenedetti has pointed out:

“[S]trategists aligned with potential contenders’ teams are already starting to plan for 2020 by operating under the assumption that early voting in California — the state with the most delegates up for grabs — will start the very morning of Iowa’s evening caucuses, the traditional kickoff. (Vermont’s primary voting will have already begun by that point, if the current expected schedule holds.)

“Usually, all the attention then shifts to New Hampshire directly after Iowa. This time, though, Ohio and Illinois could both begin their own early voting before the Granite State’s day in the spotlight, and Georgia and North Carolina could start the day of New Hampshire’s primary. Then the windows could open in Tennessee, Texas, Arizona, and Louisiana before Nevada’s caucuses, let alone South Carolina’s primary.”

All these wrinkles are likely to reinforce nonwhite voting power, notes Brownstein:

“Through March 17, the Democratic candidates will face significant Latino populations in Texas and California on Super Tuesday and then Florida and Arizona on March 17 …

“Starting on Super Tuesday [March 3], large black populations will vote through mid-March in Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida and Illinois. In all of these states, minorities comprised at least about two-fifths of the 2018 vote, and they reached majority status in several of them, including Alabama, Mississippi, Florida and Texas. Given the overall trends in the party, Democratic strategists consider it likely that the nonwhite share of the vote in virtually all of these states will be higher in 2020 than it was in 2016.”

If that’s not enough diversity, New York may move its primary to March as well.

These dynamics will likely help candidates who really do well among nonwhite voters while hurting those who don’t. It could, as in 2008, put a minority candidate in the driver’s seat, though the fact that there are at this point a Latino (Julian Castro) and two African-American (Cory Booker and Kamala Harris) candidates could keep the nonwhite vote split up for a good while.

[T]he former longtime duopoly of Iowa and New Hampshire will still matter in 2020. But they’d do well to elevate candidates who are prepared to excel in the next very difference phase of the nominating process.

I’ve written about this issue before, but with the presidential field now forming, it’s time to get serious about it, as I argued at New York:

With Bernie Sanders’s announcement of a 2020 presidential candidacy, we know for sure that there will be at least one aspirant for the job who would turn 80 during his first term in office. He’s the second septuagenarian to enter the race, counting the 72-year-old incumbent, though Elizabeth Warren will turn 70 this summer. And the field could soon include another candidate who would have an 80-candle birthday cake in the White House, Joe Biden (a little over a year younger than Sanders).

Will our budding gerontocracy be an issue during the nominating or general election stages of the 2020 campaign?

[F]ans of Biden and Sanders tend to brush off questions about their heroes’ ages by denouncing ageism, touting their vigor as compared to the junk-food-loving and sedentary Trump, or pointing at each other (if Biden can run, so can Bernie, and vice versa). But it was an issue in the presidential campaigns of the two nonincumbent septuagenarian major-party nominees before Trump (Bob Dole in 1996 and John McCain in 2008 — both younger than Biden and Sanders will be in 2020), whose other unusual features overshadowed his age. So it cannot just be waved away as somehow irrelevant.

Presumably the younger Democratic rivals of Biden and Sanders will bring up the age issue indirectly by drawing attention to their own relative youth and/or their appeal to younger voters (though it will be tough for any of them to do better among younger voters than Sanders did in 2016). But the most destructive way it could arise, especially in the general election campaign in which no vulnerability will go unexploited, would be via a negative health event or some incident suggesting a “senior moment” or some more serious cognitive issue.

Do Democrats really want to take that chance given the existential threat of a second Trump term? And conversely, could they find significant value in a situation where it’s Trump and Trump alone who is vulnerable to age-related voter concerns? Is that a potential advantage that should be casually tossed away?

These are certainly factors that ought to be taken into consideration along with current horse-race polling and other candidate assessments that don’t take terrifying if marginally likely possibilities into account. Democrats have the luxury in 2020 of a vast field of qualified candidates with platforms ranging across the ideological spectrum; it’s doubtful there’s any one candidate who is indispensable. Perhaps testing the upward limit of an intangible maximum age for running for president is worth the risk in order to beat Trump soundly or reward Biden or Sanders for past service. But dismissing the risk involved is plain foolish.

On reading a description of plans for the first Democratic presidential candidate debates of the 2020 cycle, I put down some thoughts at New York:

[A]nyone who has thought for a few moments about the giant Democratic presidential field that is currently assembling has probably wondered how it will affect candidate debates. Faced with a similar problem in 2016, Republicans devised a poll-based formula for participation in the first several debates. But since there were 17 (or a bit later, 16) candidates in the field, the networks sponsoring the debates divided them into two groups, with the top tier (ranging from 8 to 11 candidates) getting a spot in the main prime-time debate, and the remainder appearing in a prior (but little-watched) “undercard” or “kiddie table” debate.

As you can imagine, there was a lot of complaining about this arrangement from those left off the big stage. But it probably helped Republicans gradually winnow their enormous field into, well, Donald Trump and an assortment of candidates who were supposed to beat him.

Now Democrats are preparing for their first round of 2020 Democratic debates for June, to be sponsored by NBC News, MSNBC, and Telemundo. And with a field that could potentially include well over 20 candidates, the Democratic National Committee has had to face some of the same decisions Republicans encountered last time around. Perhaps because of residual bitterness from former and current Bernie Sanders supporters over the DNC’s role in minimizing the number of debates in 2016 — presumably in the interests of Establishment favorite Hillary Clinton — the party is taking a lighter hand this time around. So while there is a formula for getting on the stage, there’s no “kiddie table,” and if the field is really large, random rules for sorting out participation could lead to some rather interesting combinations:

One of the first developments of the 2020 congressional election cycle was a retirement from a veteran House member from Georgia. It was more significant than the end of a particular man’s career, as I discussed at New York:

One sign of Georgia’s changing political environment occurred on Tuesday night, when 2018 Democratic gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams was tapped to provide the national party’s response to Donald Trump’s State of the Union Address. Another occurred today when five-term Republican congressman Rob Woodall from the north Atlanta suburban 7th district announced he would retire in 2020, after very nearly losing last year.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Woodall’s Gwinnett County base was synonymous with the growth of the Republican Party. I distinctly recall a moment when environmentalists complained about the destruction of trees in the county, and the top local developer responded: “Gwinnett is not for trees.” It was for massive subdivision and strip mall development, and rapid middle-class (and upper-class) population growth.

Woodall was certainly a fixture in Gwinnett GOP politics, serving on the staff of hard-core conservative congressman John Linder for 16 years before succeeding the boss and winning at least 60 percent of the vote in his first four races. He clearly underestimated his 2018 Democratic opponent Carolyn Bordeaux. But he had a bigger problem, as the Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman observes:

“The 7th CD is the epitome of a high-education melting pot. In 2010, when Republicans first drew the seat, it was 50 percent white and in 2012, Mitt Romney carried it by 22 points, 60 percent to 38 percent. But in 2016, President Trump carried the district by just six points, 51 percent to 45 percent. Now, Census estimates peg it at just 47 percent white, 19 percent Hispanic, 19 percent African-American and 13 percent Asian.”

Among other things, this slice of Gwinnett County is home to Koreatown (or K-Town), an enclave of economically rising Korean-Americans who are very active politically. Woodall and other local Republicans just couldn’t keep up; he won by 419 votes, and only after a recount.

With Woodall retiring and Bordeaux preparing to run again, Wasserman says of GA-07 that it “may be [Democrats’] best pickup opportunity in the country.” And the whole state of Georgia may represent a serious pickup opportunity in the Senate–and for the presidency, too.

Amidst all the fatuous talk of bipartisanship in anticipation of the State of the Union Address, I had an idea that I explained at New York:

Anyone who expects bipartisanship somehow to break out between now and the 2020 election has clearly been asleep for the past four years.

That is not to say, however, that we should give up on promoting ideas that might have appeal in both parties, particularly if they don’t depend on the approbation of the president. One such idea could be of urgent relevance before you know it: getting Republican as well as Democratic leaders to denounce right now any prospective challenge to the legitimacy of the 2020 election based on vague and unsubstantiated claims and theories of “voter fraud.”

As Phillip Bump noted today, not only Trump but other Republicans are getting into the comfortable habit of making up or massively embellishing illegal-voting claims:

“It took just over a day for an announcement from the office of the Texas secretary of state hinting that thousands of noncitizens might have voted to make it into President Trump’s Twitter feed.

“’58,000 non-citizens voted in Texas, with 95,000 non-citizens registered to vote,’ Trump wrote, apparently lifting the data from an episode of Fox & Friends. ‘These numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. All over the country, especially in California, voter fraud is rampant. Must be stopped. Strong voter ID!’

“A bit later, he retweeted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who hyped the same numbers with an all-caps intro: ‘VOTER FRAUD ALERT.'”

As Bump goes on to explain, the “reports” from Texas, like those from other jurisdictions in recent years, melt away into near-nothingness once they are are scrutinized. And that’s again the backdrop of years of mostly Republican-inspired investigations of alleged in-person voter fraud that never, ever, ever turn up more than a handful of violations. As recently as the month before last, first House Speaker Paul Ryan and then his successor as House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy bought into a conspiracy theory blaming GOP losses in California on voting “irregularities” such as the sinister-sounding procedure called “ballot harvesting,” which really just means letting third-parties deliver signed-and-sealed-under-oath mail ballots.

As you may recall, Trump repeatedly claimed, with zero evidence, that he was robbed of a 2016 popular vote plurality by “millions” of illegal votes cast by non-citizens. This was the basis for his so-called Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, led by voter-fraud fabulist and anti-immigration zealot Kris Kobach, which was dissolved after a few months mostly consumed with fights with Republican and Democratic election officials who refused to turn over sensitive personal data to this bunch of yahoos. That largely put an end to the 2016 “controversy,” but no one at the time much thought through what would have happened had Trump lost the electoral college, making the illegal voting claims far from academic.

It’s likely that responsible Republican office-holders, many of whom didn’t take Donald Trump seriously until they had to, wouldn’t have let him create a disputed election and a constitutional crisis absent clear and compelling evidence that he wasn’t just pulling these allegations out of his prejudices and the files of his sketchy white-nationalist backers. We’ll never really know. But now, after two years of falling into line with Trump and adopting his passions and fevers as their own, is it clear at all that Republican opinion-leaders, from Fox & Friends to the Capitol, would tell Trump to leave office quietly if he lost decisively in 2020 and still claimed he was robbed by swarthy rape-loving “criminal illegals” pouring across the southern border? With the Supreme Court, the U.S. Tax Code and a long-desired rollback of regulatory restrictions on corporate misbehavior in the balance? I don’t know.

This is a possibility that needs to be taken right off the table right now. That means Democrats should waste less time trying to convince Republicans to help them get Trump on a one-way ticket to Palookaville before the 2020 election and more time getting them to agree he should get on the train to retirement immediately afterward if he loses. Yes, maybe he’ll go quietly on his own, but anyone who doubts he’s capable of calling the military in to defend his continued occupation of the White House needs to read his tweets for a few days and reconsider.