While perusing the less noticed January 5 primary states, I had some thoughts about that white working-class enclave in the prairies, Iowa, for New York:

California was the Big Kahuna of June 5 primary states. And New Jersey has four competitive House races going on this year.

But it’s another June 5 primary state, Iowa, that may wind up being the more important bellwether heading into autumn.

Democrats there are targeting two House seats and the governorship, along with other statewide offices and the legislature. But just as importantly, they are challenging the trend of the last two election cycles, in which Iowa tilted red at an alarming pace.

Entering 2012, Iowa was a classic battleground state, with one senator from each party (an arrangement Iowans seemed to like because it protected them against party swings in Washington), a governorship that had gone back and forth since 1998, a legislature with control divided between the two parties, and a three-Democrat, two-Republican House delegation. Thanks to redistricting, a Democratic and Republican House incumbent were forced to face off, and the Republican won. Barack Obama carried the state by just under 6 percent.

In 2014, the “Harkin seat” in the Senate (in which U.S. House Democrat Bruce Braley was the front-runner to succeed the retiring Harkin) went to Republican Joni Ernst by nearly nine points. GOP governor Terry Branstad was reelected by an astonishing 22-point margin. Braley’s First Congressional District, which he had held since 2006 fell to a very conservative Republican, Rod Blum. It was a terrible year for Democrats.

And then it got worse. Of the six states that flipped from Democrat to Republican in the presidential elections of 2012 and 2016, Iowa’s had by far the largest shift in popular votes: from D+6 to R+9 (Ohio was second with a net 11-point shift). From being a classic battleground state for years with most recently a distinct Democratic advantage (Obama carried it by 8.5 points in 2008), Iowa was suddenly more Republican than Texas. (This was particularly astonishing because Iowa was one of the few states Trump lost in the nominating contest.) The GOP also won undivided control of Iowa’s state government for the first time since 1998.

It was reasonably clear at the time that demographics were a big factor in Iowa’s lurch. As I said in 2016 in a piece headlined “Iowa Is So White It’s Turning Red,” Iowa was a microcosm of some important national trends:

“Iowa, once a classic blue-leaning battleground state (it went for Obama handily in 2008 and 2012), is moving toward the GOP and particularly Trump because of its high concentration of conservative white working-class voters and its small minority population. To put it another way, Democrats in both presidential and state elections have had to rely in Iowa (as in other Upper Midwestern states) on winning a relatively high percentage of the white vote. The ‘Obama Coalition’ in its full glory just doesn’t exist there. And as Democratic support among white voters — especially evangelicals, and especially non-college-educated people — has gradually eroded, it has gradually made Iowa more hospitable to Republicans, who won a very big midterm victory in the state in 2014.”

If Democrats are going to mitigate or reverse their losses among white voters (and especially non-college-educated white voters), states like Iowa are a great place to start. And Iowa Democrats have some good indicators. For one thing, their front-running candidates in three big, competitive races won their primaries easily: wealthy businessman Fred Hubbell in the governor’s race, state legislator Abby Finkenauer in the northeast Iowa First Congressional District, and small-business owner Cindy Axne in the southwest Iowa Third Congressional District. For another, the early signs sure don’t indicate another easy GOP year. A February 2018 Iowa Poll from the very reliable Selzer & Company showed incumbent Governor Kim Reynolds with a narrow 42/37 lead over Hubbell, who isn’t remotely as well known (but who has the resources to make up for that). In May, Roll Call named First District incumbent Representative Rod Blum the country’s most vulnerable House incumbent. Finkenaeuer has been out-raising him, and a late 2017 generic congressional poll of the district showed Democrats with a huge 18-point lead. Third District incumbent David Young isn’t in as much trouble as Blum, but Cook Political Report calls the race competitive (“Leans Republican”). Democrats also think they can make gains in the Iowa House, which is being targeted by the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee.

Such gains are a matter of sheer conjecture at this point, and the demographic factors that tilted Iowa red in the last two cycles have not gone away. But there’s no better laboratory for how to undermine the Trump coalition.

In connection with the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, I offered these thoughts at New York:

Fifty years ago today, I awoke to a radio that was playing the famous recording from Mutual Broadcasting System reporter Andrew West, who was an eyewitness to Robert Kennedy’s assassination at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles:

“Senator Kennedy has been … Senator Kennedy has been shot! Is that possible? It is possible, ladies and gentlemen! It is possible! He has … Not only Senator Kennedy! Oh my God! … I am right here, and Rafer Johnson has hold of the man who apparently fired the shot! He still has the gun! The gun is pointed at me right this moment! Get the gun! Get the gun! Get the gun! Stay away from the guy! Get his thumb! Get his thumb! Break it if you have to! Get the gun, Rafer [Johnson]! Hold him! We don’t want another Oswald!”

Moments before being fatally shot by Sirhan Sirhan, Kennedy had said to the celebrating crowd at the Ambassador: “It’s on to Chicago, and let’s win there!” That year as in most years, the California primary was the last on the schedule, and RFK was pointing toward the twilight struggle over delegates that would precede the national convention in late August.

It has been widely surmised in the years since, with the special intensity of a counterfactual myth that can neither proved nor disproved, that had Kennedy not been assassinated that night, he would have gone on to win the Democratic presidential nomination and then the presidency, sparing America and the world from years more of bloody conflict in Vietnam, and from the Nixon presidency with its polarization, corruption, and eventual disgrace.

In fact, our best guess from this distance (reinforced by serious examinations of the issue from RFK biographer Evan Thomas and historian of the 1968 election Michael A. Cohen) is that Kennedy’s odds of winning the nomination were slim by the time of his death. His antiwar rival Eugene McCarthy was in no mood to get out of his way, and the Johnson-Humphrey administration had an iron grip on delegates from many of the 33 states that did not hold primaries (and even some that did, but which did not bind delegates to primary results). Kennedy himself seemed to believe his only chance to win was by reconstructing his late brother’s alliances with old-school urban political bosses like Chicago’s Richard Daley, and it’s at best a wild conjecture that they would have defied LBJ and the unions that were so close to Humphrey to take a flyer on Bobby.

And even if Kennedy had won the nomination, he, like Humphrey, would have led into the general election a divided party that had done horribly into the 1966 midterms and had lost much of its white southern wing to George Wallace. It’s anybody’s guess as to whether RFK’s countercultural associations would have alienated fewer Democrats than Humphrey’s tardy establishment of an independent position on Vietnam. And there’s no telling what LBJ might have done to complicate life for the bitter rival he loathed and feared for so long.

Even RFK aide Jeff Greenfield, who wrote an alternative history account of a Robert F. Kennedy presidency, concedes that on this day 50 years ago the path to that actually happening was rocky and uncertain:

“’We were losing altitude,’ de facto campaign manager Fred Dutton reflected later, looking back at the political terrain Kennedy was facing. In fact, the day of the primary, Dutton was skeptical enough of our chances to suggest that RFK would take the vice-presidential slot if offered.”

There is a reason for the persistent myth of the world we lost to RFK’s assassin, that goes beyond loathing for LBJ or Humphrey or Nixon or the policies they embraced. And it involves more, I think, than just general Kennedy/Camelot nostalgia. For a whole generation of progressive political activists and journalists, there was a glimmer of something different in RFK than the more conventional politics of his brothers Jack and Ted — an ability to both put together a mind-bending coalition of minority and white-working-class voters that would blow up the racial politics the GOP was beginning to aggressively embrace by 1968 and to keep the fraying New Deal majority alive.

This coalition was glimpsed by some journalists watching Kennedy win African-American and Polish-American voters in Indiana, and others examining his California victory and its heavy reliance on a black-brown-and-white working-class support base that eschewed the McCarthy-loving suburbs. Without exit polls and other modern tools, it is difficult to discern how broad RFK’s 1968 voting coalition actually was. But the fact that Kennedy was later adopted as a patron saint for all sorts of left-of-center folk (both left-bent radicals and centrist “New Democrats”) who were tired of the old-time religion of interest-group liberalism suggests that he might have been onto something new. Indeed, in a critical 2000 book about the RFK myth, Ronald Steele suggested just that:

“He was the link between two competing visions: the welfare state world of the New Deal and the ‘middle way’ of latter-day New Democrats like Bill Clinton.”

Indeed, in the real world of politics without RFK, it has often been southern-bred centrists who have been been able to put together solid biracial coalitions that maintained minority enthusiasm and reached deep into the white working-class. No Kennedy coalitions were more mind-bending than that of Jimmy Carter in 1976, who had equally devoted support from African-Americans and former Wallace supporters — albeit only in his native South. Bill Clinton had some of the same appeal. But so too (mostly outside the South) did Barack Obama in 2008.

It may be significant or incidental that Carter lost a lot of his white working-class support in 1980 (after surviving an intraparty challenge from RFK’s brother) as did Obama in 2012. And then in 2016, Hillary Clinton lost in no small part because she did very poorly among white working-class voters while suffering from low turnout by minority voters as well. In terms of the enduring myth of RFK, HRC was the anti-Bobby, or at least the representative of a party that was struggling with both its New Deal and more recent constituencies.

And that’s partly why Bobby Kennedy remains so fascinating a character. In trying to build a multiracial coalition that includes a robust share of the still-very-large white working class, there remains the ancient formula of the social-Democratic Left: a class-based appeal that eschews all cultural or identity issues and simply pounds away at the need to defend and extend the universal benefit programs, progressive taxes, and anti-corporate regulations and trade policies that presumably all poorer folks support or ought to support. It seemed to work pretty well for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primaries, and in all honesty, it has never really been tried by the national Democratic Party since the days of the actual New Deal.

But for progressives who, for one reason or another, don’t think white working-class losses or lagging minority turnout are the product of too little “populist” agitation or too much talk about the racial or cultural issues that voters seem to care greatly about, there is a persistent craving for something less formulaic and more poetic. Is it possible to develop a message that transcends group tensions by a higher appeal to common values and aspirations that cannot be captured by tax or benefit distribution tables or the lashing of a common corporate foe? Fifty years after the fact, the abiding myth of Bobby Kennedy is a testament to that abiding hope.

After reading a lot about new movement in Congress towards immigration legislation, I thought it was time for a reality check, which I wrote for New York.

In the House, an all-conference GOP confab on June 7 could well determine whether a variation on the hard-line Goodlatte legislation, a Democratic bill backed by a handful of Republican “moderates,” or some yet-to-be-identified compromise bill that virtually all Republicans can support — or some combo platter of alternatives — will make it to the floor. That’s pretty remarkable given the lower chamber’s record as a graveyard for immigration legislation in this century.

Meanwhile the Senate, where four separa”te immigration bills went down to defeat in February, is informally talking about the subject, if only because the House might toss a bill in their direction — or the federal courts might reach some action-forcing resolution of the legal challenges surrounding the president’s revocation of the DACA program protecting Dreamers last fall. But it’s quite the heavy lift, as Politico reports:

“In recent weeks, Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) has been taking the lead on talking to [Sen. James] Lankford and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), two more junior GOP senators who are widely viewed as bellwethers of Republican support for immigration reform. While senators say that the staples of any immigration deal are protections for Dreamers and money for border security, negotiations have broadened to include the expiring protected status for hundreds of thousands of Central American immigrants.

In the past a narrower DACA-for-border-security deal was considered most likely to get something done on immigration policy. Now new issues — and new complications — have been introduced. That is probably not a good thing. And meanwhile, Mitch McConnell has cut to the chase:

“Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said he will not commit another week of the Senate’s time to immigration after the February exercise, but he added the Senate might take legislation if the president is supportive and it can pass the House.”

McConnell might as well have said “If I had some ham, I’d make a ham sandwich, if I had some bread.”

The problems the House is having on this subject are well known. So too is the likelihood that Trump will use a veto threat to head off any legislation that isn’t quite similar to his own proposal. Just last week he made it clear that he wouldn’t sign the kind of Democratic-backed bill that would likely come out of the House if the discharge petition House GOP moderates are threatening to consummate triggers a series of immigration votes:

“President Donald Trump said Wednesday he will veto any immigration legislation that emerges from Congress that does not include funding for a border wall and improved border security measures, a warning shot at moderate House Republicans pushing GOP leadership for a vote on immigration proposals.

“’Unless it includes a wall, and I mean a wall, a real wall, and unless it includes very strong border security, there’ll be no approvals from me. Because I have to either approve it or not,’ the president said in a Fox News interview that was taped Wednesday and aired Thursday morning. ‘There are bills going through. I’m watching one or two of them. We’ll see what happens, but I can tell you there is a mood right now for border security.'”

This was a pointed reminder that at the end of the long, twisting road which in theory leads to an immigration deal in Congress, Trump will be there with his chief immigration adviser Stephen Miller handing him a veto pen.

And that could sap the already limited interest in Congress in cutting an almost impossible deal.

The two most-likely scenarios in the House are passage of a Democratic bill with the support of the GOP “moderates” who want relief for Dreamers, or passage of some modified version of the Goodlatte bill with tweaks to attract some more votes. It is extremely unlikely either of those approaches would survive a Senate filibuster.

The Trump factor makes it all immensely more difficult. His own position has hardened during the course of his presidency, with his increasingly adamant demands for what he is calling a “real wall” at the border and his more recent but equally strident support for legal immigration restrictions — both reportedly at the behest of Miller. What makes the administration’s position especially problematic is that all these quasi-nativist provisions are combined with what many actual nativists despise as “amnesty” — a path to citizenship for Dreamers.

It’s no real surprise that Trump’s proposal, offered by Chuck Grassley, got only 39 of the required 60 votes. And it may have been designed that way.

In a fascinating new profile of Stephen Miller, McKay Coppins suggests that at the heart of Trump’s approach to the immigration issue is Miller’s lack of interest in actually accomplishing anything as opposed to outraging liberals and firing up Trump’s base:

“When Miller found out one afternoon in January that Senators Lindsey Graham and Dick Durbin were coming to the White House to pitch Trump on a bipartisan bill, he reportedly moved to stack the Oval Office with hawkish conservatives in hopes of swaying the president. By the time Graham and Durbin arrived, Trump was in an uncompromising mood: angry, dug in, and ranting about immigrants from ‘shithole countries.’ As Trump uttered those soon-to-leak words, which would poison the talks on Capitol Hill, Miller stood on the periphery. ‘He doesn’t have to command rooms to be effective,’ one senior Democratic Senate aide said, ‘because he does his thing behind the scenes.'”

This was the same dynamic, says Coppins, that led to Trump’s unnecessarily provocative travel ban, in which Miller played an equally prominent role:

“One of his first acts on the job was to work with then–chief strategist Steve Bannon in crafting an executive order that banned travel to the United States from seven majority-Muslim countries. The hastily written order contained no guidance on implementation, and soon after Trump signed it—on a Friday afternoon one week into his presidency—airports across the country were plunged into chaos. Hundreds of travelers were detained, civil-rights lawyers descended, and protesters swarmed. To many, the televised disarray was proof of failure. But according to Michael Wolff’s account of the Trump administration’s first year, Fire and Fury, the architects of the ban were tickled by the hysteria; Bannon (who was Wolff’s main source) boasted that they’d chosen to enact the disruptive measure on a weekend ‘so the snowflakes would show up at the airports and riot.’ They counted the anger on display as a political win.”

So don’t bet the farm on the success of any immigration legislation this year. To Team Trump, failure and the anger it generates may also be greeted as a political win.

When Nate Silver released FiveThirtyEight‘s revised pollster ratings for the first time in two years, I was all over it at New York:

The letter grades Silver and his people assign to particular polling outlets is mostly based on accuracy over time, with adjustments for methodological quality and transparency. The database for the ratings “includes all polls in the final 21 days of gubernatorial and congressional elections since 1998 and presidential primaries and general elections since 2000. It also includes polling of special elections for these offices.” That’s a lot of data.

There’s a short list of outlets that earned an A-plus rating. Some are well-known nationally: Monmouth, ABC/Washington Post, and Selzer and Co. A few others limit their work to particular states or regions, such as Colorado-based Ciruli Associates and the Northwest-focused Elway Research. There’s one other, sadly, that has closed its doors (California-based Field Research). The longer list of “A” pollsters includes some very familiar names: Survey USA, Marist, Siena, Fox News, PPIC, and Marquette Law School.

At the other end of the spectrum, one very prominent online-polling outfit, Survey Monkey, gets a D-minus rating. An enormous number of pollsters do no better than C-plus, including a lot of smaller, state-based enterprises, but also nationally renowned and prolific sources of data like Zogby Interactive, Trafalgar Group, Rasmussen Reports, and Opinion Savvy.

Having a high rating is no guarantee of infallibility, of course. One of Silver’s A-plus pollsters, Ann Selzer, who has a long-established reputation for accuracy, missed the order of finish in her final 2016 Iowa Caucus poll of Republicans (she had Trump rather than Cruz winning), which was shocking at the time. And being inaccurate doesn’t mean an outlet’s data is useless: Survey Monkey may have a bad rating from FiveThirtyEight, but its vast sample sizes can provide valuable information on non-horse-race matters, and trend lines in even dubious polls can have some predictive significance. Polls can be misleading if you aren’t careful, but the answer to poor data is more and better data, not throwing it all out and relying on intuition, anecdotes, or academic models.

And as Nate Silver makes clear in the article accompanying his new ratings, the recent rap on polls — much of it attributable to a misunderstanding of what happened in 2016, with Donald Trump piling on with ignorant or malicious takes on the polls ever since — is largely a crock:

“Over the past two years — meaning in the 2016 general election and then in the various gubernatorial elections and special elections that have taken place in 2017 and 2018 — the accuracy of polls has been pretty much average by historical standards….

“The media narrative that polling accuracy has taken a nosedive is mostly bullshit, in other words. Polls were never as good as the media assumed they were before 2016 — and they aren’t nearly as bad as the media seems to assume they are now. In reality, not that much has changed.”

Some basic limitations of polling remain as important as ever: primary (and special election) polling is very difficult to do, and state polling is almost always less accurate than national polling. It’s also worth remembering that getting the winner right is no indicator of quality: some national polls that picked Trump to win in 2016 were not especially close on the actual popular vote totals, while some that picked Clinton to win were spot on (because she did in fact win the popular vote by more than 2 percent).

In the end it’s smart to pay more attention to the aggregate polling averages (most notably those maintained by FiveThirtyEight and RealClearPolitics) than to any one or two or three individual polls, and to avoid the temptation to hype polls showing one’s own “team” doing well while filtering out adverse findings — particularly if “your” poll is conducted by a firm with a poor reputation and “their” poll is gold-standard. When all else fails, you can just wait for actual elections and go with that. But even then, polls help us understand the “why” as well as the “what.” And that matters, too.

Thinking about the Georgia Democratic gubernatorial primary that occurred earlier this week, I offered some ruminations at New York as a long-time Georgia Democrat about the evolution of the party in the region:

It has been remarked upon often that Georgia’s Democratic gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams is bidding to become the nation’s first African-American woman to serve as a governor. But it is equally significant that she is the first African-American of either gender to be nominated by a major party for governor of her state, and a rarity nationally. If she wins in November (still an odds-defying accomplishment) she will be just the third elected African-American governor, and just the second from a former Confederate state.

The absence of African-American officeholders in the south was no accident during the period between Reconstruction and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, when most black citizens in the region were disenfranchised or at best politically marginalized. Since then African-Americans have become a pivotal, often dominant factor in the southern Democratic Party as the two major parties have polarized both ideologically and racially. But to a remarkable extent southern black Democrats have been expected to loyally support white candidates who spent most of their time appealing to white swing voters, including those who at the presidential level routinely voted Republican. More often than not African-Americans were the silent partners in statewide southern politics, expected to confine their ambitions to majority-minority jurisdictions where their presence would not arouse a racial backlash.

The few exceptions to this rule helped confirm it in the minds of many southern white Democratic political professionals. In North Carolina, Harvey Gantt, a politically centrist African-American who had served as mayor of Charlotte, twice won Democratic nominations to take on the intensely reactionary U.S. Senator Jesse Helms. Gantt lost twice to racially saturated Helms campaigns in the 1990s. Another prominent black centrist, Dallas mayor Ron Kirk, ran for the U.S. Senate in Texas in 2002, losing to John Cornyn by a landslide.

The first African-American anywhere to win election as governor (he was later joined in that incredibly exclusive club by Massachusetts’s Deval Patrick) was Virginia’s Doug Wilder, who as sitting lieutenant governor ran behind his white ticket-mates in 1989 but still eked out a remarkable victory. Wilder was not (and still is not) easy to typecast ideologically; he ran for governor on an anti-crime and fiscal-responsibility platform. He was banned by the state’s system from running for a second consecutive term, and became a largely marginal and sometimes eccentric figure in statewide politics, though he did make a comeback as mayor of Richmond. Virginia now has an African-American lieutenant governor, Justin Fairfax, but it’s anybody’s guess whether he will ascend to the top job like Wilder did.

It has all but been forgotten that in Stacey Abrams’s own state of Georgia, two ideologically centrist African-American Democrats were elected to statewide office in three consecutive elections (1998, 2002, and 2006) before flaming out in unfortunately timed bids for higher office. Attorney General Thurbert Baker actually ran to the right of former governor Roy Barnes (who himself ran behind African-American Andrew Young in a 1990 gubernatorial race won by Zell Miller) in the 2010 Democratic gubernatorial primary, and lost. Labor Commissioner (an elected position in Georgia) Michael Thurmond actually won the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate that same year, which was a terrible year for any Democrat to take on popular U.S. Senator Johnny Isakson, who defeated another rare African-American statewide nominee (and another perceived centrist), U.S. Representative Denise Majette (best known for upsetting Cynthia McKinney in a U.S. House primary in 2002), by a similar margin in 2004.

You see the pattern. African-Americans in the South have struggled to construct two-way biracial coalitions within the Democratic Party, and when they could it often required conspicuously nonprogressive messages. As the parties have continued to polarize, that path has become less viable than ever. There just aren’t that many white swing voters to whom to “reach out,” as the saying goes. Some may still try the old formula: in Mississippi, former congressman and U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy, a darling of Clintonian New Democrats, is given some chance to win a special U.S. Senate election with the GOP split between appointed senator Cindy Hyde-Smith and conservative firebrand Chris McDaniel, though there will be a post-November low-turnout runoff that will likely pit Espy against just one Republican.

But the very different strategy pursued by Stacey Abrams looks like the future of biracial Democratic politics in the South: a strongly progressive (though not abrasively so) African-American who can expand turnout among a rising minority population while still appealing to increasingly liberal white Democratic and independent voters as well. Interestingly, in the gubernatorial primary Abrams faced the relative novelty of a white progressive opponent in Stacey Evans, who differed little from Abrams on issues but whose entire campaign was based on the old strategy of a one-way biracial coalition (black voters supporting white candidates) and outreach to white swing voters. In a Democratic electorate that is now over 60 percent African-American, it’s not surprising that Abrams won. But her better than three-to-one margin over Evans showed she had built her own biracial coalition without a white skin — or conspicuous centrism.

One of the moving parts in this development was explained by Sean McElwee in a New York Times op-ed this week: white Democrats are becoming not only more progressive, but more responsive to the kinds of racial-justice concerns their fellow Democrats from minority backgrounds care about. Within the Democratic Party, racial divisions are simply less compelling than they once were, even as minority politicians are taking a more active and visible role.