As someone who was in Des Moines during the 2020 Iowa Caucus debacle, I’ve been watching what may happen next with the presidential nominating system, and wrote it up at New York:

One year ago today, Iowa’s Democrats caucused in the first step of their party’s 2020 presidential-nomination process. As is now clear, state’s party officials were nervous heading into the night of the caucuses because of new reporting demands imposed on them by the national party, a new (the first ever) remote-caucuses process, and because they had doubts about the technologies being deployed to tabulate the results. And during the event, the overburdened, volunteer-run caucuses results reporting system broke down, leaving furious campaigns and pundits with nothing to talk about.

As I reported at the time from Des Moines, there was a palpable sense of mourning the following day amid widespread predictions that the meltdown would cost Iowa its privileged — but much-criticized — position in the nominating process.

Little did any of us political junkies know that the country was about to experience traumas that made the Iowa-caucuses reporting debacle the smallest of small potatoes. Even in terms of the Democratic presidential nominating contest, Iowa (along with its co-privileged first primary in New Hampshire) wound up being largely irrelevant, as the nomination was won by a candidate who finished fourth in Iowa (once the votes finally were tabulated) and fifth in New Hampshire.

In any event, the fateful presidential cycle of 2020 has now given way to its successor, and the parties are beginning to look ahead to 2024. Given everything that happened in the past year, everything’s on the table, including a return to the status quo that looked kaput after the last caucuses, as The Wall Street Journal reports:

“Democrats and Republicans are united in Iowa behind defending the state’s political golden goose: the first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses …

“Members of both national parties are already strategizing about how to structure the 2024 nominating contests, a formal Democratic National Committee review is under way, and potential Republican presidential candidates are likely to spend time in Iowa and other early states this year.

“Jeff Kaufmann, the Republican Party of Iowa chairman, said he plans to meet soon with his newly elected Democratic counterpart, Ross Wilburn, and pledged bipartisanship in trying to keep both party caucuses first. ‘We will stand shoulder to shoulder in this fight,’ he said.”

One option for maintaining Iowa’s position as a protected “early state” (there are four whose status have been recently protected by both parties: Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina) would be to switch from a caucus to a primary (as Nevada is already planning to do in a bid to enhance its own status). But that would require action by the Republican-controlled legislature and an expenditure of taxpayer dollars in a state where the parties have controlled and financed the presidential nominating contest dating back to 1972. Worse yet, New Hampshire’s law requiring its secretary of State to take every necessary measure to ensure that its primary remains first is a problem for Iowa and for Nevada – it’s largely why Iowa has stuck with having a “first-in-the-nation caucus” for so many years.

A wild card is new DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison, who, as nominations-process expert Josh Putnam explains, may not approach the primary calendar unprejudiced:

“[N]ewly elected DNC chair, Jaime Harrison does hail from South Carolina. That could mean an effort to strip out contests that were not representative to the broader party (like the three states that preceded South Carolina on the 2020 Democratic calendar). But it could also translate to a maintenance of the status quo if the delegations from each carve-out state’s party to the DNC sees benefit in coalescing.”

Presidents have a huge influence over their own party’s rules for the nominating process. In Joe Biden’s case, it’s hard to overestimate how much he owes to South Carolina Democrats, who saved his bacon after poor performances in the three earlier contests and put him on the road to the White House. And any national deal to subordinate the “early states” could depend on the kind of bipartisan agreement that won’t be easy, particularly given the many uncertainties impacting the field for the presidential race in both parties. Yes, Iowa haters may use the experience of 2020 and the state’s (and equally white New Hampshire’s) unrepresentative nature to push for a new calendar. But so long as the four early states hang together, it’s a lot more plausible now than it was a year ago that the political class will again be spending many wintry days and nights in Iowa and New Hampshire in 2023 and 2024.

Looking through some political history, I saw some bad news and some potentially good news about 2022, and wrote it up at New York:

If it seems Joe Biden is in a big hurry to get things done, there’s a very clear reason, aside from the poor shape in which his predecessor left the country. His party has a five-seat majority in the House and only controls the Senate by the tie-breaking vote of Vice-President Kamala Harris. The odds of Democrats maintaining a trifecta after November 8, 2022, are not good. In the last century, there have been 25 midterm elections. The president’s party lost House seats in 22 of them (the exceptions were in 1934, the very beginning of the New Deal; in 1998, when Republicans were trying to impeach Bill Clinton; and in 2002, the first election after 9/11). The Senate is a bit iffier, thanks to the variability of the landscape in any given election. But even there, the president’s party has lost seats in 20 of 25 elections.

The reason for these midterm blues for the president’s party are obvious enough. There’s a natural cooling-off period of affection for the party lifted to executive power, with all the afflictions and disappointments over the direction of the country becoming attached to the people controlling the White House.

Midterms when the president’s party holds a governing trifecta (controlling the White House and both Houses of Congress) have been especially difficult; in the last century, no party in that circumstance has gained House seats, and only two gained Senate seats (under JFK in 1962, and believe it or not, Trump in 2018). There’s a strong consensus among political scientists that midterms typically serve as a referendum on the incumbent president and his record. Since World War II, presidents with a Gallup job-approval rating under 50 percent going into the midterms (Truman in 1946, Truman in 1950, Johnson in 1966, Carter in 1978, Reagan in 1982, Clinton in 1994, Obama in 2010, Obama in 2014, and Trump in 2018) have lost an average of 37 House seats. Biden’s job-approval-rating average at FiveThirtyEight right now is 53.2 percent, which is pretty low for a newly elected president (albeit better than Trump’s at any point in his presidency).

Adding to the obstacles facing Democrats in hanging on to the House in 2022 is the decennial redistricting just ahead, in which Republicans have a clear advantage. As David Wasserman put it recently: “[Republicans] could gain all six seats they need for House control from reapportionment and redistricting alone.”

It’s possible, of course, that the COVID-19 pandemic is an event like the Great Depression or 9/11, one that scrambles all normal political expectations. If the Biden administration confidently leads the country to a public-health and economic recovery, a referendum on the first two years of the presidency could turn out well. But there’s another possibility, too, that Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter describes:

“Donald Trump isn’t going anywhere. Unlike previous presidents — especially those who lost re-election, he isn’t interested in retreating from public view. He — and those who support his brand of politics — are going to play a much more significant role than we’ve seen in modern times …

“Democrats [may] want to make Trump the centerpiece of their midterm strategy. Do they want to keep up the pressure on Republicans to answer for the events on January 6th or for its most controversial members like freshman firebrand Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene? Or, once the impeachment trial is finished, will they try to put Trump — and those attacks — in the rearview mirror?”

In other words, Trump’s unique character and his continued domination of the GOP could make 2022 at least in part a referendum on him rather than (or as well as) Biden, particularly if the 45th president tries to make the midterms a vindication of his thwarted 2020 campaign. Indeed, this could be the silver lining for Democrats of an impeachment trial expected to acquit Trump and leave him eligible to run for president again. If the Senate doesn’t kill a 2024 Trump comeback, some voters might feel compelled to do so in 2022. And that could provide Biden’s party with a crucial margin of victory.

Looking back at the most recent presidential beginnings, I made some comparisons at New York  to what Biden is trying to accomplish:

For those closely following the initial steps of the Biden administration, it’s obvious the new president’s team is placing a premium on creating the impression that it’s successfully following a carefully planned rollout. Each day has a topical theme, and Joe Biden’s time is ruthlessly rationed. One purpose, of course, is to create a vivid contrast with the previous occupant of the White House, and from this Washington Post report, it seems a success:

“Almost every day of his young tenure, President Biden has entered the State Dining Room, a portrait of Abraham Lincoln looking down and wood burning in the fireplace. He speaks on the planned topic of the day. He sits at an undersized desk and searches for a pen to sign his latest stack of executive orders. Within 30 minutes of entering the camera’s frame, he has left it.

“It is all plotted and planned. Little room is left for the unscripted or the unusual.

“Biden’s first full week in office has showcased an almost jarring departure from his predecessor’s chaotic style, providing the first window into a tenure whose mission is not only to remake the White House in Biden’s image but also to return the presidency itself to what he sees as its rightful path”.

But there’s more to this disciplined approach than adding a redundant reason to wish Donald Trump good riddance. Biden and his people are undoubtedly aware that they need a sense of momentum to encourage Democratic unity and just enough Republican cooperation to get his agenda passed. Getting things done is the key to avoiding a midterm setback that will make it truly impossible to get more things done. Recent presidents provide plenty of object lessons in the dangers of a slow or clumsy start.

Bill Clinton stumbled early

Clinton was the first Democrat to occupy the White House since Jimmy Carter, which meant limited experience for his eager and relatively young team and a disorganized transition that got the new administration off to a bad start, as Vox’s Richard Skinner later explained: “An atmosphere of chaos and disorganization permeated this transition. Clinton’s policy advisers were divided between centrists and liberals. The president-elect stumbled into a controversy over allowing open military service by gay individuals that soon set him against the Joint Chiefs of Staff and members of his own party.”

Clinton also had some conspicuous personnel problems, including trouble finding an attorney general who had not violated laws on reimbursement of domestic servants (the so-called Nannygate scandal that ended two AG nominations and complicated the top Pentagon nomination) and some disorganization in the White House itself. His first major legislative initiative was an economic-stimulus plan that Senate Republicans gutted. After successfully (albeit narrowly) getting a budget approved, the Clinton administration got bogged down in a complex and ultimately unsuccessful health-care-reform effort. And it failed to pursue the sort of political reforms that might have kept 1992’s Ross Perot voters from returning to the GOP voting habits many of them had abandoned.

In 1994, all these setbacks and lost opportunities contributed to a disastrous midterm election in which Democrats lost both houses of Congress for the first time since the early days of the Eisenhower administration. Democrats didn’t regain both houses until 2006.

Obama lost control

Some Biden advisers served in one capacity or another in the Clinton administration. Far more worked for Obama and Biden when they took office in 2009.

Unlike Clinton, Obama had the benefit of a solid popular-vote majority and coattails that gave his party a big margin of control in the House and 58 Democratic senators. By July, Democrats had a supermajority of 60 senators after Pennsylvania’s Arlen Specter switched parties and Minnesota’s Al Franken was seated upon the resolution of a disputed election.

But before gaining complete control of the Senate, the new administration lost early momentum when it had to pare back and reconfigure its own economic-stimulus package to secure Republican votes, a step widely thought to have reduced its effectiveness.

Meanwhile, the fruitless pursuit of Republican senators in the design of Obamacare slowed down its progress and complicated its provisions, nearly producing a catastrophe when Ted Kennedy’s illness and death, and then a shocking Republican victory in the special election to replace him, robbed Democrats of their supermajority.

If disorganization was the biggest avoidable problem besetting Clinton in his early days, for Obama it was probably the failure to keep his powerful campaign infrastructure in place to mobilize support for his agenda and keep pressure on a Republican Party that saw no real risk in obstructing him.

Like Clinton, Obama suffered a calamity in his first midterm election, with congressional and downballot losses that emboldened Republicans further and made a mockery of the talk after 2008 that Democrats were building a durable majority. Democrats lost the House and any measure of real control in the Senate.

George W. Bush’s accidental success

If Clinton and Obama showed how much promise could be squandered through poor planning and strategy or just bad luck, the administration between theirs got out of the early doldrums via a bolt from the blue.

Bush got off to a reasonably good start despite the shady nature of his elevation to the White House in 2000, easily enacting one of his campaign’s top priorities, a big tax-cut bill (made possible, ironically, by Clinton’s achievement of budget surpluses). But his party lost control of the Senate in May 2001 when Vermont’s Jim Jeffords changed sides to become a Democrat, and by the end of the summer, Bush’s job-approval ratings had slumped to a meh 51 percent. He was likely en route to the usual midterm setback and a further loss of power.

All that changed, of course, on September 11, 2001. W. was transformed overnight into the wildly popular commander-in-chief of a unified nation, and his party managed the very unusual feat of gaining ground in 2002 and consolidated its control of Congress. It took Bush a longer time to squander his wartime popularity than his father did after the Gulf War, but he did so thoroughly by 2008.

Presidents can overcome a bad start

Clinton and Obama both had comebacks after a slow start and a disastrous first midterm election, winning second terms and posting some impressive accomplishments (including, in Clinton’s case, becoming more popular than ever even as Republicans impeached him). And in his own way, Trump also showed there’s life after failure or, in his case, failures every day. Despite his party controlling Congress and bending the knee to his every whim, it took him nearly a year to post a significant legislative accomplishment: the 2017 tax-cut measure. Republicans lost a string of special elections the first two years of the Trump presidency and then, in 2018, lost the House and some key governorships that ultimately played a role in thwarting his attempted 2020 election coup.

Trump had his own good luck in inheriting a strong economic recovery and in harvesting an epochal trend in conservative-media infrastructure that gave him a way to convince his supporters to reject the exposure of his many lies and missteps as nothing more than enemy misinformation. But in the end he came within a distressingly small margin of winning a second term on the scorched ground of his divisive and violence-inducing rhetoric.

So Biden’s current effort to get off to a fast start isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition, and there will be positive and negative influences on his power that he can neither anticipate nor control. But I can think of no precedent in which early success hurt a new president. So he and his people might as well get a few steps down the road before the winds of fortune buffet them.

It’s been overshadowed by other issues, but now that Joe Biden is president with a Democratic Congress, the status of abortion rights remains in question, as I discussed at New York:

On the 48th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade that recognized a federal constitutional right to choose to have an abortion, there is a sense among reproductive-rights advocates that a major disaster was averted by Joe Biden’s win over Donald Trump. A second Trump term might well have given him an opportunity to further strengthen the Court’s conservative, presumably anti-abortion majority, which he helped build with three Justices — perhaps by replacing the 82-year-old pro-choice justice Stephen Breyer, and certainly by giving older conservative justices like Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito an opportunity to retire in favor of younger jurists with similar views. Trump would also have been sure to keep the executive branch of the federal government relentlessly on the side of those who sought to curb and ultimately destroy reproductive rights, while promoting and facilitating the state-level attacks on abortion rights and opportunities that were a constant of his first term.

It was certainly a change of pace from the past four years to see the new president and vice-president release a pro-choice statement on the Roe anniversary:

“The Biden-Harris Administration is committed to codifying Roe v. Wade and appointing judges that respect foundational precedents like Roe. We are also committed to ensuring that we work to eliminate maternal and infant health disparities, increase access to contraception, and support families economically so that all parents can raise their families with dignity. This commitment extends to our critical work on health outcomes around the world.”

The statement was a reminder that despite his past sympathy for certain elements of the anti-abortion agenda, Joe Biden is now firmly in the pro-choice camp along with nearly all Democrats in Congress. But it also reflected the limits of what they can accomplish under current governing arrangements. “Codifying Roe v. Wade” means enacting a federal statute preempting state abortion laws to ensure that if the Supreme Court does reverse Roe, the law of the land would not materially change so long as that statute stayed in place. But without elimination of the Senate filibuster, enacting such a statute is not remotely feasible. And that’s one of the reasons Mitch McConnell is demanding a “power-sharing” deal that rules out any attack on the filibuster. More immediately, breaths are being held on both sides of the abortion-policy barricades as legislators await clear signals of what the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court will mean for Roe, amid what is uniformly expected to be at least some erosion of the precedents set by it and its 1992 reformulation, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. We have every reason to assume that six justices on the Court (John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and now Barrett) are hostile to abortion rights. It’s unclear, however, how quickly and thoroughly they may proceed in undermining precedents they all recognize (even the straightforwardly anti-choice Clarence Thomas, who is least reticent about favoring their reversal). Chief Justice Roberts has, famously, been concerned about the Court’s moving too quickly on politically charged issues, including abortion; he single-handedly (though on very narrow grounds) ensured that a Louisiana law that would have had a decisively negative effect on access to abortion services was struck down last year.

But that was before Barrett joined the Court. Will the new weight of the anti-abortion majority lead to a quickening of judicial activism against abortion rights, regardless of what Roberts would prefer? We don’t know.

One big question is what strategy the anti-abortion movement will choose to pursue. It has for years alternated between efforts to restrict or ban late-term abortions (which, while rare, are also controversial) or chip away at abortion access and full-on assaults on basic abortion rights, like the “heartbeat bills” and the even more extreme bans enacted by a wave of Republican-controlled states in the past few years. It’s possible the changes on the Court will embolden those responsible for “teeing up” landmark decisions through state legislation. But it’s also possible enemies of abortion rights will fail to properly coordinate between the states and the federal courts (where, moreover, pro-choice precedents will remain binding until SCOTUS erodes or overturns them).

Pro-choice activists will await these developments nervously, accomplishing what they can through Biden-administration executive actions and litigation under existing precedents so long as they last. Soon after the Biden-Harris ticket’s victory became clear, some progressives began publicly asking Justice Breyer to retire so that a Democratic president could appoint a younger justice and a Democratic majority in the Senate could confirm her or him (a Republican reconquest of the Senate in 2022 is always possible). And grassroots support for filibuster reform (and with it the codification of Roe Biden and Harris have promised to pursue) will continue, particularly if Republican obstruction persuades Democratic “centrists” like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to reconsider their current opposition to that step.

Until the presidential-election results became certain, defenders of abortion rights had every reason to wonder if Roe as we have known it would survive to its 50th anniversary. It’s still in peril, but the most immediate threat has been repelled.

There’s been so much confused and confusing talk about Joe Biden’s pleas for unity in his Inaugural Address that I decided to offer some historical context at New York:

Just about everybody has something to say about the “unity” thematics that dominated Joe Biden’s Inaugural Address. Some hopeful, if naïve, observers credulously think Biden could be on the brink of introducing some sort of new Era of Good Feelings. Progressives fear Biden is betraying a premature willingness to compromise an agenda that united Democrats before it has even been announced. Republicans are using the unity talk as a cudgel in making demands that Biden do exactly what progressives fear on subjects ranging from COVID-19 stimulus to the Trump impeachment trial. One conservative writer professes to be offended by calls for unity, which smell to him of totalitarianism!

Perhaps Biden’s unity plea seems odd because of the bitterness of the election that lifted him to the White House, a victory he was able to claim for sure only after an attempted coup failed less than two weeks before the inauguration. But let’s remember that most presidents offer similar rhetoric, whether sincere or simply ritualistic. Even Donald Trump made the occasional unity plea early in his presidency, though he kept interrupting himself with attacks on all his enemies.

The previous Republican president, George W. Bush, distinguished himself when running for the office with a “base plus” strategy that didn’t involve much outreach beyond his own ranks. But he also called himself a “uniter, not a divider” and said this in his own first Inaugural Address:

“[S]ometimes our differences run so deep, it seems we share a continent but not a country.

“We do not accept this, and we will not allow it. Our unity, our union, is the serious work of leaders and citizens in every generation. And this is my solemn pledge: I will work to build a single nation of justice and opportunity.”

This wasn’t strictly rhetoric, either. His political wizard, Karl Rove, developed a domestic agenda aimed at expanding the Republican base with targeted appeals to seniors (a Medicare prescription-drug benefit), women with kids (No Child Left Behind), and Latinos (comprehensive immigration reform) before the Bush presidency became defined by its foreign-policy excesses and a poorly managed economy.

Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, of course, became a breakout national celebrity with a unity speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. And he carried these themes into his presidency, as I noted in 2009:

“From his emergence onto the national political scene in 2004 throughout the long 2008 campaign, Obama has consistently linked a quite progressive agenda and voting record to a rhetoric thoroughly marbled with calls for national unity, ‘common purpose,’ and a ‘different kind of politics,’ and scorn for the partisanship, gridlock, and polarization of recent decades. Call it ‘bipartisanship,’ ‘nonpartisanship,’ or ‘post-partisanship,’ this strain of Obama’s thinking is impossible to ignore and has pleased and inspired some listeners while annoying and alarming others.”

Neither Bush nor Obama was under any illusion about leaders of the two major parties sitting down to work out the nation’s destiny in comity. Both were hardheaded politicians who wanted to undermine the opposing party’s politicians by appealing over their heads to their own and to unaffiliated voters. The idea was to expand the president’s coalition at the opposition’s expense while placing pressure on that opposition to cooperate in order to maintain its own following. In Obama’s case, I labeled his strategy “grassroots bipartisanship.” It’s obviously something Biden is intimately familiar with.

But Biden also presumably knows that Obama’s “grassroots bipartisanship” didn’t work. Instead of a segment of the Republican rank and file moving some of its elected officials in Obama’s direction, something like the opposite occurred: GOP pols in Congress decided on a strategy of obstruction, and the Republican grassroots followed them into polarization. Obama’s Gallup job-approval rating among self-identified Republicans declined from 41 percent just after his inauguration to 25 percent in mid-May 2009 and continued slumping to 16 percent by year’s end (eventually hitting single digits in 2010).

So why would what didn’t work for Obama now work for Biden? The ever-insightful Ron Brownstein thinks the new president has a small but potentially important sliver of Republican support he can use to create a more significant “wedge” into the opposition. He writes in The Atlantic: 

“Recent polls have repeatedly found that about three-fourths or more of GOP voters accept Trump’s disproven charges that Biden stole the 2020 election, a number that has understandably alarmed domestic-terrorism experts. But in the same surveys, between one-fifth and one-fourth of Republican partisans have rejected that perspective. Instead, they’ve expressed unease about their party’s efforts to overturn the results — a campaign that culminated in the January 6 attack on the Capitol by a mob of Trump’s supporters.

“Those anxieties about the GOP’s actions, and about Trump’s future role in the party, may create an opening for Biden to dislodge even more Republican-leaning voters, many of whom have drifted away from the party since Trump’s emergence as its leader. If Biden could lastingly attract even a significant fraction of the Republican voters dismayed over the riot, it would constitute a seismic change in the political balance of power.”

By linking his unity appeal to a firm rejection of the Capitol riot and the lawless president who incited it, says Brownstein, Biden is seeking to establish “a new dividing line in American politics, between those who uphold the country’s democratic system and those who would subvert it.” Maybe the moment has arrived when just enough Republican pols are sufficiently motivated to break with Trumpism to make bipartisan legislation possible — or maybe if they don’t, they’ll lose enough voters to give Democrats an advantage now and in 2022 (when the normal midterm swing might otherwise be expected to undo the narrow Democratic margins in Congress).

If this gambit fails, of course, Biden and congressional Democrats can always return to partisan hardball tactics with Republicans bearing much of the blame for polarization. The question is how far Biden will take his unity campaign and how much time and opportunity he is willing to sacrifice to pursue it.

But there’s really no reason for progressives to fear, or for conservatives to hope, that Biden is so gripped by nostalgia for the back-slapping Senate bipartisanship of yore that he will sacrifice his and his party’s agenda via sellout compromises or simple inaction. What he’s doing so far is entirely traditional, even if it feels exotic thanks to the receding shadow of Donald Trump.