Amidst all the retrospectives of the last decade, I had to note at New York the upcoming decennial anniversary of a bad moment for Democrats:

I’ve only seen one take on the 2010s, from USA Today’s Jill Lawrence, that gives proper weight to the shocking event that showed in the world of politics, the “teens” would not reflect a continuation of the strong Democratic trends of 2006 (which made Nancy Pelosi Speaker of the House) and 2008 (when Obama won the presidency in a near-landslide).

That would be Republican Scott Brown’s January 2010 conquest of the Massachusetts Senate seat held since 1962 by the “liberal lion” of that chamber, Ted Kennedy. At the time there were some Democratic hopes that the special election was an aberration based on irregular turnout and a feckless campaign by Democrat Martha Coakley. But as Lawrence pointed out, it was the ultimate omen:

“To call Brown’s win a trauma for Democrats would be an understatement. And yet, although it was a DefCon 1 warning about the midterm to come, they went into those 2010 November elections unprepared for the debacle. Wipeouts in the state legislatures that would draw up new and in some cases egregiously gerrymandered election maps based on the 2010 Census. Wipeouts in races for the governors who would have been able to temper or veto those maps. Wipeouts in the House, installing a GOP majority hellbent on thwarting Obama.

“The trend continued through 2014, from state legislatures, governors and the House to a 2014 Republican Senate takeover that offered a glide path for conservative judges and justices when the next jolt arrived two years later in the form of Trump.”

Yes, Obama was reelected in between those two strong Republican years, though by a significantly reduced margin (dropping from 7.2 percent to 3.9 percent in the popular vote). And of course, Brown lost his Senate seat to Elizabeth Warren in 2012. At the time, many observers (myself included) deduced that the demographic disparity between midterm and presidential electorates explained a lot of the apparent oscillation of results, which augured well for Democratic prospects in 2016. And then you-know-what happened.

Now, three weeks before the tenth anniversary of the Brown shocker, there is no easily discernible pattern in American party politics going forward. Democrats did better in 2018 than Republicans did in 2014, by any standard other than net Senate seat gained (Republicans picked up nine net seats in 2014 and actually gained two more in 2018 thanks to a heavily skewed landscape). But that wasn’t unusual for a president’s first midterm, particularly a president as unpopular as Donald Trump. The 2020 election is widely expected to be a barn-burner, and while Democrats should continue to benefit gradually but steadily from demographic changes in their favor, Republicans have proven quite good at maximizing their power via a combination of voter suppression, gerrymandering, the unrepresentative nature of the Senate and the Electoral College, and ruthless demagoguery. If Trump hangs onto the White House next year and his party hangs onto the Senate, the GOP could establish a hold on the federal judiciary lasting for decades, while continuing to punch above their popular weight in other arenas thanks to the structural advantages they maintain.

Brown’s victory and the ensuing struggle to enact Obamacare (and other, less successful, elements of the president’s agenda) without a Democratic Senate supermajority also offered a tutorial on the obstruction a disciplined Republican majority could mount, and the price Democrats would have to pay in policy compromises to govern even with a strong position in Congress (which they were soon to lose).

Without question, Democrats will be ebullient if they manage to defenestrate Trump, particularly if that win is accompanied by the first Democratic trifecta (control of the White House and both Houses of Congress) since 2008. But as 2010 quickly showed, political fortune can change almost instantly, and the work of building a governing majority never ends.

With all the justifiable focus on the presidential contest, it’s easy to forget how important the battles for control of Congress in 2020 will be. I wrote about the Senate landscape this week for New York:

The general feeling going into this election cycle has been that flipping the Senate will be difficult for Democrats, even if they depose Trump. They have a three-seat majority, and in Alabama’s incongruous Democrat Doug Jones, a pretty easy mark. Only two Republican incumbents (Cory Gardner of Colorado and Susan Collins of Maine) up for reelection represent states carried by Hillary Clinton in 2016, and aside from Jones, Michigan Democrat Gary Peters is in a Trump ’16 state.

But as the Cook Political Report’s veteran Senate guru Jennifer Duffy notes, Democrats are off to a very good start, particularly on the fundraising front, in their effort to place as many GOP Senate seats into play as possible:

“If there is anything that sticks out in Senate races this cycle, it’s the early spending on television advertising in the most competitive races. As of December 19, just over $32.5 million has been spent in eight key races. Democrats have outspent Republicans, $21.9 million to $10.6 million, according to data provided by Advertising Analytics. The Senate race in Maine has seen the highest level of spending at $8.2 million. To put this in some perspective, Collins spent $5.6 million on her 2014 reelection bid, and independent expenditures amounted to less than $2 million. Advertising Analytics estimates that $55 million will be spent on television advertising in Maine this cycle, an astonishing amount for a state with three relatively inexpensive media markets. Democrats have outspent Republicans almost two to one and nearly all that money has been on ads criticizing Collins.

“Democrats have also outspent Republicans in Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, and Kentucky. Republicans have spent considerably more than Democrats in Alabama and North Carolina, but most of the money is being spent in GOP primaries.”

Duffy notes that a Senate impeachment trial could create some general-election problems for GOP incumbents Collins, Gardner, and Martha McSally — who dare not offend the Trumpian base with a vote to remove him from office. But there are signs Democrats also have a shot against North Carolina’s Thom Tillis and Iowa’s Joni Ernst — and perhaps the occupants (David Perdue and the top Republican in the 2020 special “jungle primary”) of the two Georgia Senate seats at risk. Even Kansas is a possible pickup so long as Kris Kobach is in the race.

“It appears that there will be at least five GOP-held seats in play, with a chance that Democrats could add one or two more. This puts Democrats in a position to win the majority, even if they lose Alabama and/or Michigan. This is not to suggest that Democrats will win the majority, only that their prospects are considerably better today than they were five months ago.”

If Mike Pence is reelected as vice president, of course, Democrats would need to post a net gain of four Senate seats to be in a position to block — Joe Manchin willing — Trump executive- and judicial-branch nominees, not to mention whatever nasty legislative treats he has in mind. Given the strong likelihood that we’ll see remarkable levels of straight-ticket voting in 2020, prospects for a Democratic Congress confronting a raging, reelected Trump are limited. More likely, Senate Democrats will be focused on giving a president of their own, if they get one, a fighting chance for success.

On the occasion of Donald Trump’s impeachment by the U.S. House of Representatives, I offered a quick history lesson at New York to counter all the angst about the partisanship of the process:

[Y]ou may have already heard handwringing comments about the exceptional partisanship that House members exhibited in the vote to impeach Donald Trump. It wouldn’t have happened in the days when members of Congress socialized with each other and worked on legislation in a spirit of comity, etc., etc.

Perhaps there is some merit in that much-rehearsed paean to lost bipartisanship, so full of manufactured nostalgia that it ought to be made into a Hallmark Channel movie. But actually, the two previous examples of House votes on presidential impeachment were arguably just as partisan, differing only in degree.

The principal vote to impeach Andrew Johnson (in those days the House voted on a general resolution of impeachment before drafting individual articles), on February 24, 1868, was carried by a 126-47 margin, with 17 members not voting. Of those who did vote, all but two Republicans voted “aye” and all the Democrats voted “nay,” according to the official House history. The later votes on the 11 individual articles eventually sent over to the Senate are hard to find online, but the House history indicates that the margins were “similar.”

When the House voted on the impeachment of Bill Clinton on December 19, 1998 (Thursday is the 21st anniversary of that event), the two articles on which the president was later tried by the Senate passed, per the New York Times, on near-party-line votes. The first, impeaching him for perjury before a federal grand jury, passed by a 228-206 margin in the Republican-controlled chamber, with five Republicans and five Democrats defecting. The second, alleging obstruction of justice, passed by a narrower 221-212 vote. This time 12 Republicans and five Democrats broke ranks.

Yes, there was theoretically more bipartisanship in votes on two articles of impeachment the House rejected, mostly because some Republicans considered them redundant or too easily mockable. An article alleging perjury in the Paula Jones civil case lost 229-205, with 28 Republicans defecting and no Democrats breaking ranks. And a final article alleging “abuse of power” because Clinton apparently offended the dignity of Judiciary Committee Republicans by answering their written interrogatories evasively, didn’t resonate much outside that committee; it was defeated by a wide margin with 81 Republicans (and one Democrat) breaking ranks.

There were, of course, many differences between the three impeachments. Andrew Johnson was pretty much a lame duck, rejected by both major parties as a reelection prospect (though he did get some votes at the later Democratic Convention; he was later elected to the Senate as a Democrat, rejoining his pre-Civil War party), by the time he was impeached. Clinton was a popular second-term president. Johnson was very nearly convicted and removed from office by the Senate; there was never any real chance that would happen to Clinton.

But the most conspicuous thing distinguishing Trump’s impeachment from those of his predecessors has been the full-throated defense of his conduct by his own party. By the time he was impeached, Johnson was virtually a man without a party; southern Democrats, while voting against impeachment and removal, couldn’t be that thrilled about the man who demonized them during the Civil War as traitors who deserved death in battle or by hanging. And he was acquitted mostly because of the concerns some Republicans had that the Tenure of Office Act (banning removal of Cabinet members without congressional concurrence), the backbone of the impeachment articles after Johnson defied it, was unconstitutional (as it was eventually held to be by the Supreme Court). As for Clinton, many, many Democrats condemned his behavior during the Lewinsky scandal, and there was robust support in their ranks in Congress for a measuring censuring him.

So you could say that this third presidential impeachment was more partisan than the first two in that the two parties were not simply arguing over what should be done about a president’s misconduct, but whether it existed at all. And I suspect that his party will be found guilty for that misdemeanor at the bar of history, if not sooner in the 2020 elections.

When U.S. Rep. Jeff Van Drew decided to switch parties after Democrats in his district did not take kindly to his refusal to back an impeachment inquiry, I noticed something about his record that will give his new friends heartburn, and wrote about it for New York:

New Jersey congressman Jeff Van Drew’s impending Democrat-to-Republican Party switch has gotten a lot of attention as another sign of partisan polarization over impeachment (his was one of just two Democratic votes against the formal launch of impeachment proceedings in October, and he had signaled his opposition to the articles of impeachment that will hit the House floor this week). This was punctuated over the weekend by a mass resignation of most of his staff.

The move was probably made inevitable when Democrats back home began to abandon Van Drew much as his staff did later. But Chris Cillizza thinks it’s a great trophy for Trump:

“The image of Van Drew, then, being driven from his party because of impeachment plays directly into Trump’s hands. The President has long argued that Democrats are blinded by their hatred for him and that this latest congressional reaction to his behavior with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is nothing more than a partisan hoax.”

I don’t know about that; I’d say having actual Democrats instead of former Democrats opposing impeachment is more valuable to his cause and to the “Democrats in disarray” narrative political media love so much. But there’s an aspect of Van Drew’s apostasy that could cause Trump and the GOP some heartburn, too. After the 2018 elections (when Rodney Frelinghuysen and Charlie Dent retired), the anti-abortion movement could boast it had finally hunted to extinction the once-vibrant herd of pro-choice House Republicans. Whatever else he is now, Van Drew is pro-choice, having received a 100 percent rating from Planned Parenthood in the New Jersey legislature, and then saying this during his 2018 congressional campaign:

I’m strongly and unequivocally pro-choice: I support Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to choose. Any efforts to weaken or undermine that right will face my fierce opposition.

It is most definitely going to annoy Trump’s extremely important conservative Evangelical and traditionalist Catholic allies that a friend of the baby-killers has snuck back into the tent. And they may not be happy that POTUS has publicly offered Van Drew fundraising help in his 2020 reelection bid.  want to know whether the president has promised Van Drew support in his 2020 reelection bid.

Before the party switch, Van Drew had three Republicans already in the field running against him, one of whom is a self-funding business executive who called the incumbent a “weasel.” I’d be shocked if his primary opponents don’t make a big deal out of his position on abortion, which in turn could cause problems for Trump if he defends the apostate, when he really needs anti-abortion activists whipping the faithful into a frenzy before November.

If, like me, you’ve been watching as much of the House Judiciary Committee deliberations on impeachment as you can stand, you have endlessly and interminably and redundantly heard Republicans argue that Democrats are engaged in a “coup” to overturn Trump’s election. This is how I responded at New York: