At the Washington Monthly today, I drew attention to a very important set of observations by Ken Goldstein of Bloomberg Politics:

[Goldstein] looks at the candidates’ record of “electability” from the point of view of the “two electorates” issue that’s become so important:

Six of the Republican contenders (Cruz, Graham, Huckabee, Jindal, Paul, and Perry) are from states that are reliably red–and have never faced electorates that would have the partisan distribution they would encounter in purple states. Two of them (Carson and Trump) have never ever faced any electorate whatsoever and one (Fiorina) ran and lost in a blue state.
Five (Bush, Gilmore, Kasich, Rubio, and Walker) have won statewide elections in purple states, and three GOP contestants have won statewide contests in blue states (Christie, Pataki, and Santorum).
But, even for those purple and blue state winners, presidential year electorates are fundamentally different than mid-term electorates. Presidential electorates are less white, younger, and more Democratic than mid-term electorates. And only one of the eight candidates who have previously won in blue or purple states has ever run statewide in a presidential election year. Jim Gilmore ran for Senate in Virginia in 2008 and lost by more than 30 percentage points. In fact, according to my calculations, of the 40 elections that the 17 announced or soon to announce GOP candidates have collectively run in at the state level (not all of them wins), only four of those contests were in presidential election years–Gilmore lost in Virginia in 2008, Lindsey Graham won re-election in South Carolina in 2008, Ted Cruz was elected in Texas in 2012, and Rick Santorum was re-elected in Pennsylvania in 2000. None of the other 13 candidates has ever faced statewide voters in a presidential election year.
This means that even candidates who’ve won in battleground states face significant hurdles. For example, Marco Rubio won election to the Senate in 2010 in an electorate which, according to the exit polls, was 71 percent white, and in which Republicans enjoyed a four percentage point (40 percent to 36 percent) advantage in party identification. In 2012, the Florida electorate was 67 percent white and Republicans suffered from a two-percentage-point deficit in partisan identifiers (33 percent to 35 percent). Looking at the voter file in Florida, of the approximately four million registered voters who vote in just about every election, Republicans have a five-percentage-point advantage. But among the three million-plus registered voters who vote only in presidential elections, Democrats have a six-percentage-point advantage.

Remember this analysis when you are tempted to look at a general election scenario and mentally put Florida in the GOP column for Rubio or Bush, or Ohio in the column for Kasich, or Wisconsin in the column for Walker (I don’t think anyone is going to assume New Jersey will go for Chris Christie or Pennsylvania for Rick Santorum or California for Carly Fiorina). None of them has faced a statewide presidential electorate.

That’s doesn’t guarantee they’ll lose these states in a general election, of course, but does mean it may be more difficult than is generally assumed.

Aside from some of last week’s less publicized but significant conservative victories on the Supreme Court in cases involving Clean Air regulations and the death penalty, its latest term ended with a couple of signs of trouble in orders for cases it will hear next year. I discussed them briefly at Washington Monthly:

One involves a racial gerrymandering complaint from Arizona Republicans which could create new problems for what is left of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Another, and the one that got a lot of horrified reaction from progressives today, is a case designed to enable SCOTUS to overturn a precedent benefiting public employee unions.
The case, brought by California teachers at odds with the California Teachers Association union, is aimed at generating a decision that would deem any required payment of fees by non-union members in a public employment setting a compelled “political” expenditure that violates the non-member’s First Amendment rights.
I’m not as sure as some commentators that this would be the end of the road for public-sector unions. It would, unless I’m missing something, put them in the same position as private-sector unions in a “right-to-work” state–forced to put up with “free riders” who cannot be required to help support the collective bargaining efforts from which they benefit in compensation and working conditions. That’s not a good position. But it’s more another unfair burden than a death sentence.
Both actions today are a pretty good indication that the talk of a “left-leaning” Roberts Court is premature, particularly when it comes to anything that directly handicaps the Republican Party or helps workers.

A much more ambivalent signal came from an order to suspend enforcement of a notorious Texas statute aimed at restricting the availability of abortion services via phony “health” regulations. The four Justices traditionally opposed to abortion rights all voted against the order. But it also could pave the way for the long-awaited Supreme Court review of “health”-based abortion restrictions on which one of the five Justices supporting the order, Anthony Kennedy, has already flipped to the dark side.

The recent intraparty tensions over trade and commercial policy haven’t been a picnic for any Democrats. But it’s possible to exaggerate the disunity and its implications, and that’s what The Hill columnist Brent Budowsky did today, or so I argued at Washington Monthly:

[Budowsky claims that] liberals “insulted” by the president’s disrespecting of Elizabeth Warren during the fast-track debate may well decide to stay home in 2016–just as they did when similarly insulted in 2010 and 2014–forfeiting Democratic control of the White House. Watch him add 2 and 2 and get 13:

The president’s defamation of Democrats over trade was untrue, shameful and destructive to the Democratic Party. Most Democrats inside and outside Washington are genuinely worried — with good reason, rooted in the history of trade agreements — about the potential loss of American jobs.
This pattern of Obama and his aides insulting liberals began well before the 2010 and 2014 midterm elections, with repeated background quotes in mainstream media from unnamed White House personnel referring to leaders and members of the Democratic base as “the left of the left” and “the professional left….”
Given this legacy of damage that Obama has inflicted against his party and his presidency, by depressing liberal Democratic voters and motivating conservative Republican voters in two midterm elections that were disastrous for Democrats, it was breathtaking that throughout the recent trade debate Obama demonstrated he still has not learned that the leader of a great party must not insult its core voters if it has any hopes of prevailing in future presidential and congressional elections.

Funny, isn’t it, that in the midst of all this carnage Obama managed to get himself reelected. Why weren’t liberal Democratic voters “depressed” in 2012? Why did they take out their anger at Obama on their own Democratic candidates in 2010 but then turn out for the source of their “discouragement” two years later? And did Democratic losses in more conservative parts of the country in the two midterms really revolve around hordes of angry liberals staying home?
There are two things we actually do know reasonably well: first, the demographic groups that don’t tend to show up in non-presidential elections ever, even if liberals are not being insulted by a Democratic president, are now a disproportionate element of the Democratic electoral coalition. And second, strongly committed ideologues, including liberals, do tend to show up and vote in a higher proportion than their less committed “moderate” or “somewhat ideological” counterparts, whether or not they’ve been “insulted” or “discouraged” or “deenergized” by this or that leader. 25% of the 2012 electorate self-identified as “liberal.” That number dropped to 23% in 2014–less than you’d expect given the dropoff in youth and minority voting. That was hardly the most important factor in the outcome. I strongly suspect self-identified “moderates” who are by and large less engaged politically were the people over-represented in the “dropoff” population. And like voters generally, they were vastly less interested, and mostly unaware of, all the ideological signals by Obama that so obsess pundits.
You can certainly make a case that had Obama paid more attention to the advice offered by liberals his policies might have been more effective, and that would have improved party prospects in 2010 and 2014, both in terms of turnout and the Democratic share of the persuadable vote. But the idea that turnout patterns are mostly the product of which party faction has its feelings hurt or assuaged is an ax-grinding proposition with no real empirical basis that I can discern. It doesn’t help that Budowsky assumes Obama is personally responsible for the downballot losses of the Democratic Party since 2010. And he also blames Obama for managing to fire up conservatives even as he is discouraging liberals. Had Obama been an Eagle Scout liberal throughout his presidency, would conservatives have been less “energized” in 2010 and 2014? Are we supposed to believe they are like dogs, sensing fear or irresolution in their opponents?
Look, I agree it was a bad idea for the president to talk smack about fast-track opponents and criticize Elizabeth Warren. But let’s don’t get carried away with the implications. Turnout is unlikely to be the central problem for Democrats in the presidential year of 2016, and to the extent that it is, the challenge will be maximizing minority turnout, which is by no means the same as “liberal” turnout, as the long history of liberal presidential primary challengers who cannot attract minority voters should make reasonably clear. There’s also no particular reason to assume that liberal anger at Obama is directly transferable to the 2016 presidential nominee. Even if HRC has annoyed some Democrats by refusing to break with the president whose youth and minority supporters she desperately needs in 2016–more than she needs self-identified liberals–she has not insulted anybody so far as I can tell. And everything about the unfolding presidential nominating process indicates that self-identified liberals are going to get a lot of love from HRC.
So no, I don’t think Barack Obama has destroyed the Democratic Party by insulting liberals, and if he’s done anything to disproportionately “energize” conservatives who have been working themselves up to an ideological bender for years, it’s by embodying the right-wing caricature of “liberals” as elitists working hand-in-glove with those people.

Since Democrats are still going to have to deal with additional tensions as the Trans-Pacific Partnership is taken up in Congress (assuming negotiations don’t somehow break down), it’s a good time to contain the damage instead of claiming the party is heading towards another 2014. I would add to what I said above that if self-identified Liberal Democrats are indeed so “insulted” by the president’s words that they’ll likely sit out a high-stakes 2016 election, you’d think it would show up in the president’s approval ratings with that category of voters, wouldn’t you? According to Gallup, it’s at 88%. If liberals are “insulted,” they’re rapidly getting over it.

This week’s two landmark Supreme Court decisions represented the culmination (for the time being, at least) of two long, hard legal and political struggles. This is most obvious with respect to Obergefell v. Hodges, which made marriage a federally protected constitutional right. It sounds corny, but it really does seem like yesterday that here at TDS we were publishing Jasmine Beach-Ferrara’s analysis of how marriage equality activists lost the fight over Proposition 8 in California. It’s been a remarkably quick sprint to victory since then.
But unique as Obergefell is, there’s something to be said for the historic nature of the Obamacare case, too, as I discussed at Washington Monthly today:

[A]t Vox today, Dylan Matthews reminds us that of the incredibly long hard path this country has followed to reach even the Affordable Care Act’s first timorous steps towards universal health coverage. Those conservatives who talk as though no one has ever seriously considered such a socialist abomination until now really are betraying their ignorance about history:

National health insurance has been the single defining goal of American progressivism for more than a century. There have been other struggles, of course: for equality for women, African-Americans, and LGBT people; for environmental protection; against militarism in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. But ever since its inclusion in Teddy Roosevelt’s 1912 Bull Moose platform, a federally guaranteed right to health coverage has been the one economic and social policy demand that loomed over all others. It was the big gap between our welfare state and those of our peers in Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan.
And for more than a century, efforts to achieve national health insurance failed. Roosevelt’s third-party run came up short. His Progressive allies, despite support from the American Medical Association, failed to pass a bill in the 1910s. FDR declined to include health insurance in the Social Security Act, fearing it would sink the whole program, and the Wagner Act, his second attempt, ended in failure too. Harry Truman included a single-payer plan open to all Americans in his Fair Deal set of proposals, but it went nowhere. LBJ got Medicare and Medicaid done after JFK utterly failed, but both programs targeted limited groups.
Richard Nixon proposed a universal health-care plan remarkably similar to Obamacare that was killed when then-Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) walked away from a deal to pass it, in what Kennedy would later call his greatest regret as a senator. Jimmy Carter endorsed single-payer on the campaign trail, but despite having a Democratic supermajority in Congress did nothing to pass it. And the failure of Bill Clinton’s health-care plan is the stuff of legend.

Yes, Obamacare haters may dismiss the experience of virtually every other wealthy country by intoning “American exceptionalism”, as though we have some long-cherished right to die young that’s as essential to the national character as unlimited possession of guns. But this has been a constant issue in our own country, too, and it’s a token of how far our political system has drifted to the right that redeeming the vision of Teddy Roosevelt and Harry Truman and Richard Nixon strikes so many people as a horrifying lurch into socialism.

America actually feels a lot more “centered” today.

You may recall that two years ago from tomorrow the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. There was a lot of talk about a bipartisan “fix”–that never came. So now Democrats are moving on their own, as I discussed today at Washington Monthly.

At the time Shelby County v. Holder came down, there was initially some talk about bipartisan action to “fix” the VRA, mostly led by the genuinely well-meaning Rep. James Sensenbrenner, but fed by comments from then-House GOP Majority Leader Eric Cantor suggesting the GOP congressional leadership wanted to make this a priority. Then, for two years: crickets.
So now congressional Democrats are tired of waiting for the GOP to show some interest, even as GOP-controlled state governments trip over each other in enacting voting restrictions.
As Ari Berman notes at The Nation, a new bill will be introduced tomorrow

The legislation will be formally introduced tomorrow by Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and leaders of the Black Caucus, Hispanic Caucus, and Asian Pacific American Caucus in the House. Civil-rights icon Representative John Lewis will be a co-sponsor. The bill is much stronger than the Voting Rights Amendment Act of 2014 (VRAA), Congress’s initial response to the Supreme Court’s decision, which garnered bipartisan support in the House but was not embraced by the congressional Republican leadership, which declined to schedule a hearing, let alone a vote, on the bill.
“The previous bill we did in a way to try and get bipartisan support–which we did,” Senator Leahy told me. “We had the Republican majority leader of the House [Eric Cantor] promise us that if we kept it like that it would come up for a vote. It never did. We made compromises to get [Republican] support and they didn’t keep their word. So this time I decided to listen to the voters who had their right to vote blocked, and they asked for strong legislation that fully restores the protections of the VRA.”

It’s not like waiting around forever for GOP interest in a “fix” didn’t have a psychological cost:

The legislation will be formally introduced tomorrow by Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and leaders of the Black Caucus, Hispanic Caucus, and Asian Pacific American Caucus in the House. Civil-rights icon Representative John Lewis will be a co-sponsor. The bill is much stronger than the Voting Rights Amendment Act of 2014 (VRAA), Congress’s initial response to the Supreme Court’s decision, which garnered bipartisan support in the House but was not embraced by the congressional Republican leadership, which declined to schedule a hearing, let alone a vote, on the bill.
Since the Shelby decision, onerous new laws have been passed or implemented in states like North Carolina and Texas, which have disenfranchised thousands of voters, disproportionately those of color. In the past five years, 395 new voting restrictions have been introduced in 49 states, with half the states in the country adopting measures making it harder to vote. “If anybody thinks there’s not racial discrimination in voting today, they’re not really paying attention,” Senator Leahy said.

This history probably won’t keep Republicans from complaining that Democrats aren’t being bipartisan on voting rights. Or maybe GOPers will be too busy congratulating themselves from finally abandoning Confederate insignia to pay attention.