Watching a political ad for Georgia GOP gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp, in which he labels himself as a “politically incorrect conservative,” made some things fall into place for me, which I wrote about at New York.

Not that long ago, “political incorrectness” (perhaps most conspicuously identified with abrasive lefty gabber Bill Maher, whose Comedy Central/ABC show Politically Incorrect was on the air from 1993 until 2002) was a politically anodyne (and bipartisan) term connoting a rebellious unwillingness to accept norms of civility in public discourse. A 2010 essay on the term in Psychology Today identified it with Maher, Larry David, and the subversive schoolyard humor of South Park.

But by 2016, “political correctness” had become the target of virtually every conservative politician in America. One pioneer was Dr. Ben Carson, who developed an elaborate conspiracy theory in which “political correctness” (an example he often used was restrictions on torturing terrorist suspects) was a weapon for suppressing free speech and disarming Americans in order to enslave them. But Donald Trump took attacks on the PC devil to a new level, in a one-two combo in which he would say something egregiously offensive and then pose as the brave rebel against political correctness. Trump branded this approach in the first GOP presidential debate in 2015:

“I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct. I’ve been challenged by so many people and I don’t, frankly, have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time, either.”

Again and again, Trump deployed this strategy, and by the time he won the GOP presidential nomination, most of the Republican Party had adopted the same evil habit of exulting in “brave” bigotry. By the time President Trump accused the 2017 Charlottesville counter-protesters as being as bad as the white supremacists they were protesting, anti-PC ideology had reached new heights, as I argued at the time:

“[I]n the blink of an eye, the backlash to acts of simple racial decency began. It was not confined to Donald Trump’s campaign, but in many corners of the right, hostility to ‘political correctness’ — defined as sensitivity to the fears and concerns of, well, anyone other than white men — became a hallmark of the “populist” conservatism Trump made fashionable and ultimately ascendent.”

By now being “politically incorrect” among conservative pols has become a totem of ideological orthodoxy as firm and clear as any lefty campus speech code. Georgia Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp has provided an especially clear example of its use in the ad he is running on the eve of his tight primary runoff with Lieutenant Governor Casey Cagle:

The title of this ad, tellingly, is “Offends.”

Its use by Kemp is particularly interesting because his earlier ads were an orgy of over-the-top right-wing madness, culminating in the proud “politically incorrect” claim.

Indeed, his opponent Casey Cagle, a hard-core conservative by national standards, was caught on tape complaining that the whole gubernatorial nomination process had become a competition to demonstrate “who had the biggest gun, who had the biggest truck, and who could be the craziest” — a clear reference to Kemp’s ads. But now Kemp just uses the “politically incorrect” tagline, and everyone knows what it means.

If Kemp wins his runoff on July 24 with this strategy, it is going to reinforce the already powerful Trumpian impulse to treat conservative “base” voters as motivated above all by the desire to go back to the wonderful days when a white man could without repercussions tell a racist joke, “tease” women about their physical appearance or sexual morals, and mock people who in some way (say, a disability) differ from one’s own self. At some point we may all come to understand that it’s not (except in some scattered college campuses) the politically correct who are imposing speech norms on the rest of us, but the politically incorrect who won’t be happy until offending the less powerful is again recognized as among the principal Rights of Man.

Now Kemp has been endorsed by Donald Trump. There is a comfortable consistency in that development.

A check-in on polling numbers led me to the following cautiously optimistic observations at New York:

[T]oday represented a bit of a landmark in the RealClearPolitics polling averages. The Democratic lead in the generic congressional ballot (asking respondents which party that want to control the U.S. House of Representatives) hit 8 percent for the first time in nearly four months.

Last time RCP showed Democrats up by eight or more points was in mid-March. Since then the lead slowly trended downward, hitting a low of 3.2 percent on the last day of May. But the rebound has been quick. At FiveThirtyEight, where a slightly different mix of polls are weighted for reliability and adjusted for partisan bias, the Democratic lead is up to a similar 8.5 percent. These are numbers considered consistent with pretty sizable net gains in House seats, and according to many analysts, probably enough to flip control, particularly since history usually shows the party not controlling the White House making gains late in the cycle during midterms.

Similarly, what looked earlier in the year like a steadily climbing Trump job-approval rating seems to have leveled off. According to RealClearPolitics averages, Trump’s job-approval percentage is at 42.8 percent. That’s precisely where he was three months ago, on April 12. At FiveThirtyEight, Trump’s average approval rating is at 42.3 percent, down more than a couple of points from his 44.8 percent posting four months ago on March 12. Instead of looking at an outlier 45 percent job-approval rating from Gallup in mid-June — a historic high — it seems more realistic to look at his current 46 percent rating from Rasmussen, the very pro-Republican survey where he hasn’t hit 50 percent since May.

So how does one explain the most recent trends? It’s hard to say, but for the most part it appears that both the generic congressional- and Trump-approval numbers are reverting to the mean after a brief period of pro-GOP and pro-Trump trends, perhaps because of a combination of less unambiguously robust economic news, abatement of high expectations from the North Korea summit, and all those distressing images from the southern border. Perhaps the numbers will turn around again, but at this point the commonly discussed (among Republicans, anyway) idea that 2018 would turn out to be a good GOP year after all seems implausible.

At the level of individual districts, projections unsurprisingly get cloudier. One trend worth watching was identified earlier this week by the Cook Political Report’s House race wizard David Wasserman:

“In the June NBC/WSJ poll, 65 percent of Democratic women and 61 percent of whites with college degrees expressed the highest possible levels of interest in the midterm elections. However, only 43 percent of Latinos and 30 percent of young voters (18 to 29) did.

“This explains why so far, the “blue wave” is gathering more strength in professional, upscale suburban districts where women are mobilized against Trump than in young, diverse districts where Democratic base turnout is less reliable.”

Since Democrats need gains in both kinds of districts, the national averages could be misleading. But on the other hand, the odds are still in the donkey’s favor:

“If the 24 Toss Ups were to split evenly between the parties, Democrats would gain 18 seats, five short of a majority. But that doesn’t take into account that there are 26 GOP-held seats in Lean Republican with strong potential to become Toss Ups, and an additional 28 GOP-held seats in Likely Republican with the potential to become more competitive. In other words, there’s still a lot of upside for Democrats.”

After some anxious weeks for Democrats in the spring and early summer, that’s not a bad characterization of the overall landscape in the House with under four months left to go.

After hearing and reading many Republican efforts to lower the stakes involved in the choice of a replacement for Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court, I offered this cautionary analysis at New York:

As Washington, D.C., girds its loins for the biggest Supreme Court confirmation fight since 1991 (when the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill saga riveted the country), conservatives are already working overtime to lull progressives to sleep by claiming fears a Kennedy replacement would help form a five-justice bloc ready to unravel abortion rights are exaggerated. The Wall Street Journal editorial board is offering the template for other “nothing to see here” takes:

“[T]he predictions of doom for abortion … rights began within minutes of Anthony Kennedy’s resignation last week. These predictions are almost certainly wrong.

“[T]his is what Democrats and their media allies always say. They said it in 1987 when Justice Kennedy was nominated. They said it in 1990 about David Souter, again about Clarence Thomas in 1991, John Roberts and Samuel Alito in 2005, and Neil Gorsuch in 2017. They even claimed the Chief Justice might overturn Roe because his wife is a Roman Catholic. Mrs. Roberts is still waiting to write her first opinion.”

Actually, “they” didn’t say that about Roberts or Alito or Gorsuch. Yes, the likelihood that these nominees would someday take advantage of the opportunity to overturn or greatly modify Roe v. Wade were factors in the debates over their confirmation, but nobody argued abortion rights were in imminent danger from placing any of them individually on the Court. During the period when Kennedy and Souter and Thomas joined the Court, there was every reason to fear that abortion rights were fragile, until Souter and Kennedy (along with Reagan nominee Sandra Day O’Connor) formed a new if narrow majority in the 1992 decision in Casey v. Planned Parenthood.

It is no exaggeration to say that the current era of conservative judicial politics really began with backlash against the “perfidy” of Republican-appointed justices like Souter and Kennedy and O’Connor in reinforcing abortion rights. That is why Donald Trump won so much conservative street cred by creating an official, exclusive list of SCOTUS prospects that would be vetted by the fiercely anti-Roe legal activists of the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation. Here’s how legal journalist Jeffrey Toobin described the views of chief Trump judge-vetter Leonard Leo, who is on leave from the Federalist Society:

“According to Leo, the vast majority of abortions are a consequence of voluntary, consensual sexual encounters, an opinion that influences his view of the procedure.’We can have a debate about abortion,” he told me. “It’s a very simple one for me. It’s an act of force. It’s a threat to human life. It’s just that simple …’

“As Edward Whelan, a prominent conservative legal activist and blogger, wrote recently, ‘No one has been more dedicated to the enterprise of building a Supreme Court that will overturn Roe v. Wade than the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo.'”

The odds of a secret supporter of abortion rights sneaking through a process that leads from Leo to Trump (who promised explicitly to produce a Court that would overturn Roe) are more than zero, but they are extremely low.

Like some other naysayers about the threat to Roe, the Journal editorial places a lot of stock in conservative respect for judicial precedents:

“The liberal line is always that Roe hangs by a judicial thread, and one more conservative Justice will doom it. Yet Roe still stands after nearly five decades. Our guess is that this will be true even if President Trump nominates another Justice Gorsuch. The reason is the power of stare decisis (or precedent), and how conservatives view the role of the Court in supporting the credibility of the law.”

Roe’s survival has in fact become steadily less, not more, certain, for the very simple reason that over the years one of America’s two national political parties has been completely taken over by politicians who want to see it reversed. The once-robust tribe of pro-choice Republicans is about to become extinct in the U.S. House, and is limited to two senators. The official position of the GOP as expressed in its national party platform goes far, far beyond reversing Roe and embraces enshrining fetal personhood in the U.S. Constitution. Now we have a Republican president whose relationship with conservative activists and particularly to white conservative Evangelicals depends heavily on an agreement to conduct a counter-revolution on the Court, a Republican Senate, and a judicial selection system created to root out constitutional heresy. Yet the Journal would have us believe it just won’t happen because it hasn’t happened yet.

Yes, it’s true the post-Kennedy Court with a second Trump justice might not overturn Roe and Casey immediately. They certainly don’t have to go the whole hog in order to significantly restrict abortion rights. The truth is that the Court experienced another key inflection point in 2016 in the Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt case in which Kennedy was one of five justices who headed off a massive wave of TRAP (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) laws being enacted by Republican-controlled state legislatures. A new justice replacing Kennedy could instantly form a majority ready to give a green light to state laws that could make the theoretical right to an abortion a dead letter in many red states with abortion clinics being run out of business. To look at it another way, runaway TRAP laws (justified by spurious health requirements) could create a practical situation much like the pre-Roe environment, when women needed the means to travel to more liberal states to secure an abortion.

Still, the possibility of a full reversal of Roe — at once or in stages — should not be underestimated. Yes, stare decisis (the judicial principle of respect for Supreme Court precedents) will complicate the process, but it’s hardly a straitjacket once a majority decides to overturn a precedent believed to be wrongly decided. As even the Journal notes, the Court just got through overturning a 40-year precedent in the Janus v. AFSCME labor case. Conservative justices, moreover, have in recent years arguably transformed constitutional law on a host of subjects ranging from campaign finance to voting rights to regulation of businesses. Even the Roberts Court’s most famous decision that disappointed conservatives, the NFIB v. Sebelius case on Obamacare, reversed decades of Commerce Clause precedents.

The reality is that conservatives have grown used to hiding the ball on Roe v. Wade and abortion policy — a habit that parallels the old (and still enduring) claim of Confederate apologists that the Lost Cause was about states’ rights rather than slavery. Democrats shouldn’t buy one any more than the other.

The recent craziness in the U.S. House, and the horrible images of kids in cages from the border, have not been good for the GOP. But as I explained at New York, there could be a lot more trouble where that came from.

With the dismal failure of two House Republican immigration bills in the last couple of weeks (bills that were doomed in the Senate in any event), there’s a sense that the Great Immigration Debate of 2018 in the GOP is over. After all, a lot of the recent agitation on the issue in the House was motivated by the desire of two different factions of Republican lawmakers — the moderates led by Representatives Jeff Denham of California and Carlos Curbelo of Florida, and the hard-liners centered in the House Freedom Caucus — to get their views on record before the November midterms. Everybody got to vote on the hard-core Goodlatte bill and the slightly less draconian compromise proposal — nicknamed Goodlatte II — so that’s all that had to happen, right?

Maybe, but maybe not. There are several future developments that could force the issue back into the limelight:

(1) A renewed bipartisan push to vote on Dreamers and more. The latest flurry of failed legislative activity in the House was successful in one limited respect: it did indeed head off a discharge petition (a rare procedure to bypass committees and the congressional leadership) that some of the GOP moderates were pushing — with the support of the entire Democratic caucus — that would have forced votes on a whole spectrum of immigration proposals, with the original DREAM Act being the most likely survivor of the process. Now that it has led to yet another dead end, it’s possible the discharge petition idea could come back.

If that looks like it could happen, you can expect Paul Ryan and the leadership to shout and scream about the perfidy of giving the godless Democrats power over the House floor schedule, at the risk of damaging vulnerable members like Denham and Curbelo, who are needed to keep the gavel out of Nancy Pelosi’s hands. Ultimately opponents of bipartisan immigration legislation would rely on VERY LOUD Trump promises to kill any such abomination should it arrive at his desk.

(2) A renewed uproar over the Trump administration’s treatment of migrant families. When the crisis over family separation at the border blew up in late June, it looked momentarily like Congress would be forced to act to stop the separations — until the president abruptly acted with an executive order that at least temporarily reversed his administration’s toxic policies. If the growing realization that kids are still being detained (just with their parents) revives the big public furor, and/or the courts strike down Trump’s executive order, the pressure for legislation could ramp right back up. But it’s not at all clear that any of the necessary parties to a quick legislative fix (House Republicans, Senate Democrats, or Trump) would go along with a narrow bill instead of insisting on tying it to some broader objective. As Politico reports, Trump might not go along at all:

“Although top White House officials support such a fix, one told POLITICO that he wasn’t sure the president would sign anything without getting concessions from Democrats. Indeed, a House GOP source said Trump was asking for wall money to be included in any standalone legislation keeping families together — a nonstarter for many lawmakers.”

If as some observers suspect, Trump and his top immigration adviser Stephen Miller exult in border chaos and think the prominence of the immigration issue is a good way to motivate the GOP base heading toward the midterms, then the odds of a border fix could go way down. But that would not eliminate the pressure on congressional Republicans to do something.

(3) The courts force a DACA crisis. The family-separation issue isn’t the only one where action in the federal judiciary could force immigration into the headlines and onto the congressional agenda. The long-simmering conservative legal challenge to Obama’s original DACA executive order — which created a protected category for immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally as children — could reach at least temporary fruition as well, as Rachel Bade explains:

“A conservative-leaning federal court in Texas is expected to rule on the constitutionality of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program as early as mid-July, pushing the issue to the fore again.

“The case, brought by Texas and several other Republican-dominated southern states, could contradict a previous court’s decision that halted Trump’s move to end DACA. The result could be that Dreamers again face the risk of deportation unless the Supreme Court — or Congress — weighs in.”

Trump could again use the peril to Dreamers as leverage to demand his own shifting but politically explosive set of immigration policy goals. And the status of Dreamers as the most politically attractive subcategory of undocumented immigrants will again put vulnerable Republicans on the spot.

(4) Trump threatens a government shutdown. Even if Republicans avoid a crisis forced by public opinion or the courts, their own president is perfectly capable of generating one all by himself, and has already threatened to do so. In March and again in April, the president publicly suggested killing must-pass appropriations legislation at the end of September (when the omnibus appropriations measure he grudgingly signed runs out) if he doesn’t get full funding for his border wall. And it apparently came up again in June during a private meeting on spending plans, as Burgess Everett reported:

“Trump fumed at senators and his own staff about the $1.6 billion the Senate is planning to send him this fall, according to two people familiar with the meeting. Trump wants the full $25 billion upfront and doesn’t understand why Congress is going to supply him funds in a piecemeal fashion — even though that’s how the spending process typically works….

“The president said at the meeting that if Congress doesn’t give him the resources he needs for border security, he will shut down the government in September, according to one of the people familiar with the meeting. He did not give a specific number, but has been fixated on getting the $25 billion in a lump sum.”

Even if the Trump threat comes and goes with his moods or negotiating strategy, it could place immigration policy back on the front burner in Washington whether or not other Republicans want it there. And it’s not just Trump, of course, who has tunnel vision about immigration: Breitbart News, many conservative activists, and a sizable chunk of the party’s electoral “base” won’t be happy until deportations soar.

So congressional Republicans can run from the immigration issue, but they sure can’t hide.

In the wake of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s bombshell retirement announcement, a lot of strategic re-calculations are underway. The most immediate involves the 2018 midterm elections, as I discussed at New York:

There is no question that the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy is one of the biggest political stories of 2018, and it will duel for attention with the fall midterms. It is a little less clear how the two big stories will intersect.

Democrats are calling on the White House and Mitch McConnell to delay the confirmation of a new justice until after the midterms, citing the rhetoric McConnell used in 2016 to deny Obama nominee Merrick Garland a timely vote:

My @SenateGOP colleagues should follow the rule they set in 2016 not to consider a SCOTUS nominee in an election year. Sen McConnell would tell anyone who listened that the Senate had the right to advise & consent, & that was every bit as important as POTUS’ right to nominate.

— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) June 27, 2018

If Republicans bent to this logic, the midterms would become, in part, a referendum on the Supreme Court, probably to an unprecedented extent given the gravity of this particular appointment. But so far they have shown zero interest in any sort of delay in getting a second Trump justice onto the bench, with McConnell planning confirmation hearings in August and a Senate debate and vote as soon as possible thereafter.

So if a new justice is in fact confirmed in September or October, will the saga actually affect voting in November?

Nate Silver addressed that question today, and found no clear answer. He stipulates that any development that equally stimulates the two parties’ bases could on balance help the GOP:

“If the midterm elections look more like the special elections we’ve had so far this cycle, in which Democratic turnout significantly outpaced Republican turnout, the GOP is very likely to lose the House and the Democratic wave could reach epic proportions. But without that enthusiasm gap, control of the House looks like more of a toss-up, at least based on the current generic ballot average.”

Since on balance Republican voters have shown more concern about SCOTUS than Democrats (as reflected in 2016 exit polls), a national obsession over the topic might goose GOP turnout disproportionately. But if the confirmation fight is all over by the time voters vote, will it still matter?

“[A]ssuming Trump has his choice confirmed by the Senate before the midterms, the Supreme Court will arguably be more of a backward-looking issue in 2018 than it was in 2016. I say “arguably” because Kennedy probably won’t be the last justice to retire under Trump; liberals Ginsburg and Breyer are retirement risks, as is conservative Clarence Thomas. Still, in 2016, voters were deciding on an open Supreme Court seat and not just the prospect of further vacancies.”

While it’s uncertain how much the SCOTUS fight will affect the midterms, the midterms could most definitely affect the SCOTUS fight. The last thing the large group of Democratic senators running in pro-Trump states need right now is a vote that could either infuriate the GOP’s right-to-life base or discourage anti-Trump Democratic voters. Three of them who are especially vulnerable — Joe Donnelly, Heidi Heitkamp, and Joe Manchin — voted for Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation.

At this point, the strategy for McConnell & Co. is pretty obvious: Proceed with the confirmation process as quickly as possible (The Hill noted today that confirmation of the last four justices took between 66 and 87 days), preserving the option, if the final vote looks dicey and/or something newly controversial about the nominee pops up, of pushing the whole thing into next year and then making the midterms a referendum on abortion and other constitutional issues for real. Even in the current environment, the Senate landscape gives Republicans a reasonable chance of adding to their slim margin in the upper chamber, as evidenced by this startling datum:

Fact: if all '18 election results were an 8% pro-Dem uniform swing vs. '16 prez results, Dems would gain 44 House seats & lose 4 Senate seats.

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) April 13, 2018

If the SCOTUS confirmation fight reaches its potential decibel level, it’s possible ears will still be ringing when early voting begins in October.