Even as Hillary Clinton takes what looks to be a sizable lead in the presidential contest, the impact down-ballot remains unclear. I discussed the possibilities at New York earlier this week.

[T]he idea that Republicans can save their congressional majorities, even as Trump goes down to a dreadful defeat, really does depend on a degree of ticket-splitting that has become less and less common in the 21st century. As the Washington Post’s Philip Bump notes, in 1992, 11 of the 34 states holding Senate elections produced different partisan results for the upper chamber and the presidency. In 2012, despite two Democratic Senate pickups in red states where the GOP candidate basically imploded, only six states split their results.

Reasons for this trend are well-known. In a process often called “the great sorting-out,” liberal voters have increasingly associated themselves with the donkey party, while conservatives have clustered in the shadow of the elephant. This “ideological polarization” has itself reduced ticket-splitting, as there are fewer opportunities for voters to find like-minded candidates on the other side of the partisan divide. But it has also increased “partisan polarization,” whereby voters prone to support one party (as self-identified partisans, or as independent “leaners” who almost always vote like partisans) tend to view those in the other party as enemies, or even as threats to the republic.

Democrats focused on down-ballot races this year are hoping that this pattern holds in 2016 — assuming Clinton wins, of course. But Republicans think (and certainly hope) that Trump’s exotic nature — amplified by the sheer number of GOP opinion-leaders who are keeping their distance from him — will send a signal to swing voters that the genial, glad-handing Republican pol who represents them in Congress or the statehouse has nothing to do with the rude, raging beast at the top of the ticket. There’s even a belief, more speculative than empirical, that if Trump really falls apart, it could make it easier for voters to split tickets — partly because everybody’s doing it, and partly because some will want congressional Republicans to act as a counterweight and safeguard against Hillary Clinton running wild, with her radical ideas of gender equality and access to health care and child care and so on. The last time there was any clear evidence of widespread “strategic voting” of this type, however, was all the way back in 1972: Democrats picked up Senate seats despite the debacle that George McGovern suffered at the presidential level. And back then, of course, it was very easy for voters in the South and parts of the West to vote for conservative Democrats down-ballot, along with the conservative GOP presidential candidate. In Georgia, where I lived at the time, there was even a ballot line where you could vote straight-party Democratic, right after you cast your presidential vote against the communistic McGovern.

There’s really not much clear evidence of how this is going to work out either way. Even as Clinton moves ahead at the presidential level, no one is seeing signs so far of a “wave election” which might sweep not only the Senate, but possibly even the House, into the Democratic column. Some vulnerable Republican senators (e.g., Rob Portman of Ohio and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania) seem to be running ahead of Trump in their states, but often voters make up their minds late on such contests. The best-case scenario for Democrats is probably for 2016 to be the mirror image of 1980, when a presidential-level landslide gave Republicans wins in just about every close Senate race. After the Republican victory in 2014, such an outcome would also almost certainly produce big House gains as well, if not necessarily a majority. But whatever happens, it’s clear that a lot of the talk from Republicans about Trump and Clinton is really aimed at keeping the GOP rank and file in line — for the benefit of Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell.

Donald Trump’s latest outrage involved a statement–originally called a “joke” by his supporters but now being spun as an innocent call for high turnout by gun owners–that “second amendment people” might have the only solution to a President Hillary Clinton’s Supreme Court nominations. Trump is actually drawing on an old extremist meme that’s a familiar dog whistle to second amendment ultras, as I explained at New York.

[E]ven as they condemn the shocking utterance, a lot of observers seem to be missing the fact that Trump is adapting a dangerously common right-wing claim. It’s that the most important purpose of the Second Amendment is not to allow people to defend themselves from robbers and muggers and would-be murderers and rapists if the police cannot get the job done, but rather to create a heavily armed populace prepared to undertake revolutionary violence if the government tries to impose “tyranny.” Let’s be clear about this doctrine: It lets the gun-wielders decide for themselves whether high taxes or government surveillance or Obamacare is a sufficient threat to liberty to justify getting out the shooting irons and killing the police officers and armed-services members assigned the responsibility of enforcing the “tyrannical” laws in question. And conservative politicians have often made it clear they understand and are okay with that incredible risk, as when Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle referred cheerfully to “Second-Amendment remedies” for the liberal policies supported by her opponent, Harry Reid. Angle was hardly alone: During the Republican presidential primaries this cycle, Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz both endorsed the idea of gun rights being a safeguard against too much Big Government liberalism. During her successful Senate campaign in 2014, rising GOP star Joni Ernst of Iowa used to happily talk about the “beautiful little Smith & Wesson” she carried with every intention of using it to defend herself and her family from “government, should they decide that my rights are no longer important.”

The most common use of this “right to revolution” argument, however, is to threaten anyone who doesn’t bend the knee to the Second Amendment itself. So it makes even the blandest support for gun-safety legislation self-evident proof of “tyranny” justifying even more stockpiling of lethal weapons to be used against “government.”

In Hillary Clinton’s case, the “tyrannical” threat is apparently that she doesn’t approve of a 5–4 decision reached by the Supreme Court in 2008 (D.C. v. Heller) that first made the Second Amendment’s “right to bear arms” a personal instead of collective (i.e., in the sense of authorizing a “well-regulated militia”) constitutional right. I guess that means the four dissenting Justices were tyrants, too, and that Ronald Reagan presided over an era of government tyranny since Heller had not at that point been handed down.

Credit Donald Trump for doing us the service of taking a dubious dog-whistle argument for violence, always discussed abstractly (it’s the “government,” not cops and soldiers, much less presidents, who will become bullet-riddled when “patriots” revolt), and with his characteristic crudeness making it a joke about rubbing out his opponent. Maybe next time some conservative pol makes a similar argument for turning to the gun if politics fails, we’ll all recognize it for the thinly veiled sedition it is.

And we’ll scorn the “super-patriots” who only love the America of the distant past–or their imaginations.

There’s been a lot of argument since the Democratic convention as to whether in her acceptance speech Hillary Clinton “pivoted to the center” and potentially abandoned the progressive voters she appealed to earlier. I don’t think so, and I discussed this issue at New York:

Between the first and last days of the Democratic National Convention last week, there was a much-discussed change of tone. Monday was all about progressivism and unity between Clinton and Sanders supporters. Thursday was about the flag, and national security, and chants of USA! USA!

Now, it’s not surprising that folks with Bern marks on their psyches — who weren’t totally convinced by Monday’s unity display — got the willies from Thursday’s rhetoric. OMG, some doubtless thought. Here’s the Clintons triangulating again, and “pivoting to the center.” Progressives could be abandoned entirely by Labor Day!

Was there actually a contradiction between Clinton’s progressive gestures and outreach to Republicans in Philly? Is it possible to energize the base while persuading swing voters at the same time, without betraying somebody’s trust?

To answer that question, it’s important first to take a look at the nature of Clinton’s “outreach to Republicans.” Andrew Prokop put it well at Vox:

“If you look closer, it turns out that Clinton and the Democrats are indeed embracing the symbolism and tropes that the right has loved — but they really aren’t making policy concessions to win them over … Indeed, all of this imagery and rhetoric was deployed in service of an agenda that is remarkably liberal — at least when it comes to domestic and economic policy.”

Even on national-security policy, notes Prokop, Clinton didn’t really “pivot to the center”; she stayed pretty much where she has always been. But the heart of her persuasion technique was not about convincing swing voters she was something they did not think she was; it was about convincing them — and most definitely including Republicans — that Donald Trump was exactly what they feared he was.

In this respect, Clinton deployed a technique I used to call “Barbara Boxer centrism” (named after the famously combative liberal senator from California), wherein a politician “seizes the center” not by occupying it with any surprising or “moderate” policy proposals, but by pushing their opponents out of the center by constantly labeling them as extremist. It just so happens that Clinton’s opponent is an exceptionally good foil for this kind of attack. And so she does not really have to choose between “left” and “center,” or between base mobilization and swing-voter persuasion. He’s dangerously crazy is a message that serves both purposes equally.

You cannot get much better than that.

A prominent member of the House Freedom Caucus, Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-KS), lost in a primary on Tuesday. A lot of the immediate reaction made it sound like a nationally-driven counter-purge of a Tea Person by the Republican Establishment. I didn’t entirely agree, as I noted at New York:

[I]t is true that national groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Ricketts family super-pac fought a proxy war with Huelskamp’s allies in the Club for Growth and Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity in Kansas’s 1st congressional district.

But in a very real sense what Huelskamp’s defeat showed is that ideology does not always trump local factors, even in the ideological hothouse of the contemporary Republican Party. The endorsement that really lifted the challenger Roger Marshall to victory was probably one from the Kansas Farm Bureau.

Huelskamp’s district, which covers most of western Kansas, is dominated by farm and ranch interests; it famously has more cattle than people, and grows wheat, sorghum, sunflowers, and hay. So it mattered a great deal when Huelskamp, then a House freshman, was kicked off the Agriculture Committee for serial defiance of the GOP leadership. Even more eyebrows were raised when Huelskamp became one of just 12 House GOPers to vote against the last omnibus farm bill in 2013, partially because of its SNAP (food stamp) spending levels, but also because the whole bill included a lot of “corporate welfare.” The revolt against the farm bill by House tea-partyers struck at the very heart of the ancient urban-rural compact that supported agricultural programs deemed essential to places like the 1st congressional district of Kansas. In retrospect, it’s rather amazing Huelskamp survived as long as he did.

But there was another primarily local factor that contributed to Huelskamp’s demise: a backlash from Republican voters against the ideologues closely associated with Governor Sam Brownback, whose tax-cutting “experiment” in Kansas produced a fiscal disaster and a particular crisis in public education. In yesterday’s GOP primary, pro-Brownback state legislators lost ten of 16 contested seats; the Wichita Eagle called it a “brutal night for conservatives.” Reality matters, and if Tip O’Neill overstated things by saying “All politics is local,” it’s clear local issues do matter when they are in sharp conflict with ideology.

In many respects, the overriding story in Republican politics for a very long time has been the conquest of the party by conservatives who imposed a rigid ideology on themselves and others not just in the right-wing fever swamps of the Deep South or the Mountain West, but across the country. What’s happening in Kansas right now doesn’t indicate conservatives are losing their grip on the GOP; a stronger data point for that proposition would obviously be Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of the national ticket. But Kansas is showing there are limits to the power of ideology.

It’s about time.

As we await the next batch of polls to determine if and to what extent Hillary Clinton got a convention “bounce,” it’s a good time to gain some perspective on these often short-lived phenomena, as I discussed at New York.

[H]istory offers a cautionary lesson that some convention bounces are like young love in the early spring: They just don’t last. As Harry Enten shows at FiveThirtyEight, presidential candidates’ net favorability ratings often rise or plunge between the conventions and Election Day. And some famously large convention bounces were really misleading when the deal went down.

One such bounce was in fact so chimerical that it’s now puzzling it existed at all. The 1980 Democratic Convention that renominated Jimmy Carter is now remembered as a rolling disaster, which began with an effort to dump the sitting president, continued with a speech by losing primary candidate Ted Kennedy that upstaged the nominee, and then concluded with Carter chasing Kennedy around the stage pursuing in vain the traditional clasped-hands unity gesture.

But guess what? Carter’s net favorability rating rose 24 points between the beginning and end of the two conventions that year. He was unpopular earlier and unpopular on Election Day, but for a while there the sun really shined on the 39th president that year.

A more recent and less dramatic example of this dynamic was in 2008, when John McCain got a net 8-point convention advantage, drawing even with Barack Obama before both Sarah Palin and the U.S. economy imploded.

So yeah, the bounces are important, and we are all in a perfectly appropriate habit of beginning to pay attention to polling once the conventions have ended and we are truly into the general-election season. But you cannot take bounces to the bank, and particularly in a year when the conventions are relatively early, the numbers can turn on a candidate like an old love gone sour.