Sometimes you see a political phenomenon so often that you can forget to look into what it means. I chose one to write about at New York this week:

By any objective standard, the president’s prospects for reelection are looking down. Joe Biden is continuing to lead him in trial heats nationally (by 8.1 percent in the latest RealClearPolitics averages) and in most battleground states. The president’s job approval numbers are lower than they’ve been since last December. People are still very afraid of COVID-19, and despite one good monthly jobs report, the economy is still in the ditch, with unemployment higher than at any time since the 1930s.

There’s tons of time between now and November, the economy could somehow turn around and that second “wave” of the coronavirus could fail to appear, and Joe Biden could do or say something self-destructive. But the possibility of a Trump revival is not the same thing as its probability, much less certainty. Yet as Politico notes, there’s little doubt in MAGA-land that Trump will win in November, and maybe win big:

“Interviews with more than 50 state, district and county Republican Party chairs depict a version of the electoral landscape that is no worse for Trump than six months ago — and possibly even slightly better. According to this view, the coronavirus is on its way out and the economy is coming back. Polls are unreliable, Joe Biden is too frail to last, and the media still doesn’t get it….

“’The more bad things happen in the country, it just solidifies support for Trump,’ said Phillip Stephens, GOP chairman in Robeson County, N.C., one of several rural counties in that swing state that shifted from supporting Barack Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016. ‘We’re calling him “Teflon Trump.” Nothing’s going to stick, because if anything, it’s getting more exciting than it was in 2016.’

“This year, Stephens said, We’re thinking landslide.’”

Politico found that if you ask Republicans why Trump’s going to win, they generally offer explanations ranging from the hyper-optimistic (everything will be back to normal any day now and a happy back-at-work electorate will reward Trump for saving them), to the aggressively ignorant (all polls showing Biden ahead are fake, because they were dead wrong last time —well which they actually weren’t), to pure disinformation (Democrats are throwing away the election by calling for the abolition of police departments and confiscation of private property, beginning with guns).

So why are Trump-supporting Republicans so relentlessly upbeat, and dismissive of objective evidence that points in the direction of defeat? Here are five theories:

1. They’re drinking his own Kool-Aid

Trump supporters are by definition big fans of a man who never admits mistakes or weaknesses, expresses narcissistic, self-congratulatory hubris every other hour, and hates “losers” as much as Jesus Christ loved them. Perhaps they are simply following the leader, who appears to systematically block out any source of information that doesn’t tell him what he wants to hear.

2. They believe “enthusiasm” is the ball game

As is well known, Trump’s reelection strategy, and his behavior in office, have been heavily oriented towards “base mobilization,” to the extent of sometimes excluding any serious effort to identify or persuade swing voters, much less Democrats. To the extent that mobilization is facilitated by enthusiasm, getting the MAGA faithful to believe they are marching in a perpetual victory parade is presumably valuable. It’s possibly relevant that polls show a majority of Republicans are motivated by a desire to support Trump, while a majority of Democrats are more focused on beating Trump than on electing Biden. Trump voters want to know they are part of a historic reelection campaign that will take America another step closer to the paradise of the 1950s, not into some socialist nonwhite dystopia.

3. They want to “own the libs”

One bond Trump has with his supporters is in deeply enjoying the discomfort of their common enemies. They are aware that the vast majority of left-of-center Americans don’t simply dislike the president, but dislike him intensely. Many view the prospect of this strange “accidental president” serving another four years with genuine horror. So it’s great sport for Trump supporters to confront them with this possibility, raised to the level of certainty. It’s mass schadenfreude, with a dollop of Trump’s own signature cruelty.

4. They truly despise the “elite” sources of adverse information

If you are convinced that polls are all “fake” and most of the media — including Fox News on occasion — just systematically lie, all to benefit Trump’s enemies, then it’s a short leap to assume that the “truth” they are hiding is MAGA-rific or even glorious. Similarly, once one is convinced that “real Americans” are in the president’s corner, then anything (like a bad poll or mockery of a self-destructive Trump video clip) emanating from sources that either “don’t get it” or are actively hostile to this country and its interests simply cannot be credited as “real.” Believing that Trump might lose, therefore, can become an anti-patriotic act, or a sign of being duped by contemptuous wrong-doers.

5. They are preparing to contest any defeat

The most troubling possibility is that Trump supporters understand the president is laying the groundwork for contesting a defeat, and want to help him do so. Here’s how I recently described Trump’s efforts to undermine, in advance, the legitimacy of the November election in case he happens to lose it:

“Trump is now regularly claiming that voting by mail is inherently illegitimate, except for grudging exceptions for people who can’t make it to the polls. So, presumably, states that allow for no-excuse voting by mail in November are holding ‘substantially fraudulent’ elections. That’s 34 states who do so by law (including battleground states Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin), 11 more that so far are waiving excuse requirements this pandemic year (including New Hampshire), and another that may be forced to do so by a lawsuit (Texas).

“So in a very real sense, unless Trump backs off his claims that voting by mail means a ‘rigged election,’ he’s letting us know that he and his supporters will be justified in challenging any adverse results in states that allow this terrible practice to take place.”

Keep in mind that Trump went to a lot of trouble to claim he was robbed of a popular-vote majority in 2016 (thanks to “millions of illegal votes” for Hillary Clinton for which he offered not a shred of evidence), even though it didn’t ultimately matter. One possible rationale was to convince his followers Democrats always cheat, meaning their victories should prospectively be discounted or challenged. If on Election Night 2020, Donald Trump claims victory on the basis of early returns, is there any doubt his fans and media allies will join him in crying out “fraud!” to the high heavens should late mail ballots drift in and reverse the results? I don’t think so. And either consciously or unconsciously, some of them may be anticipating that fraught scenario already. To a significant number of the faithful, Trump is not just a president, but an embodiment of America, and even God’s Annointed. He can’t fail. He can only be failed.

As Democrats took cheer at Joe Biden’s recent strong showing in horse-race polls, I offered a cautionary word at New York:

At a time when Joe Biden is enjoying comfortable leads in both national and battleground-state polls, it’s a good time for us all to remember the most fundamental lesson of what happened four years ago: Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election while winning the national popular vote by 2.1 percent, or more than 2.8 million votes. The current Republican skew in the composition of the Electoral College (or if you prefer, the “wastage” of “excess” Democratic votes in noncompetitive states like California) has not gone away, as David Wasserman noted last year:

“The ultimate nightmare scenario for Democrats might look something like this: Trump loses the popular vote by more than 5 million ballots, and the Democratic nominee converts Michigan and Pennsylvania back to blue. But Trump wins re-election by two Electoral votes by barely hanging onto Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Maine’s 2nd Congressional District.”

With that possibility in mind, it’s useful to look at the analysis of recent battleground-state polls (taken in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin) conducted by Geoffrey Skelley for FiveThirtyEight. According to the data Skelley assembles, Biden leads in six of them (all but Georgia and Texas). But here’s the thing: In just one of them does Biden’s lead match his national polling lead.

“There are two big takeaways here. One, Biden is in an enviable position in many of these battleground states. However, the second takeaway — which is the caveat we mentioned earlier — is that all of these battleground states save Michigan are more Republican-leaning than the national average. In other words, most of the states that will decide the presidential election are to the right of the country as a whole, and that speaks to Trump’s advantage in the Electoral College.”

And that means Democrats shouldn’t get at all complacent about Biden’s national polling lead:

The other reason Biden needs a big national popular vote win is that he really needs a Democratic Senate to accomplish anything legislatively as president, and to the modest but very real extent he may have coattails, it could be crucial in close Senate races. That obviously matters in battleground states with Senate races, like Arizona, Georgia (two races), Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Texas. But it could matter even more in red states where a narrower-than-2016 presidential loss could be the key to a Democratic Senate win, such as Iowa, Kansas, Montana, and perhaps even Kentucky and Alabama.

One advantage Biden has over Hillary Clinton in managing a polling lead is that Democrats are almost certainly going to refuse to be overconfident this time around. Uncle Joe may have to be up by 20 points before they relax for a moment.

At New York this week, I repeated a bit of strategic advice I offer now and then:

Those of us in the political analysis industry love nothing more than slicing and dicing the electorate into its constituent parts and divining via polls and election results which are moving where at what velocity. That is often the best way not only to predict future elections, but to understand their implications, and also to evaluate political parties as coalitions.

But it’s easy to get carried away with such distinctions, and act as though this or that “key” group literally holds the key to victory. In the end (with an exception I will get to in a minute), a vote’s a vote, and candidates who do poorly in a “key” constituency can make it up elsewhere. Indeed, it’s especially dangerous to pretend that winning some voter group matters most; sometimes losing a group by less than the expected margin is just as important. For example, the conventional wisdom is that Democrats made big gains in the 2018 midterm by winning college-educated white voters (who leaned Republican in 2016). But it was also important that Democrats cut their margin of loss among non-college-educated white voters from 37 percent in 2016 to 24 percent in 2018 (according to exit polls).

There are times, of course, when harping on one group makes sense because polls are underestimating their numbers (one reason white working-class voters have gotten so much attention since 2016, when polls clearly under-sampled them), or have ignored them altogether as a distinct group (some polls and analysis lump together disparate voters with imprecise categories – are voters under or over the age of 45 really a “group”? – or failure to make obvious subdivisions such as by gender, or by the various identities of “non-white voters.”).

“In the most recent polls, white college graduates back Mr. Biden by a 20-point margin, up four points since the spring. It’s also an eight-point improvement for the Democratic nominee since 2016, and a 26-point improvement since 2012.

“Mr. Biden has also made some progress toward redressing his weakness among younger voters. Voters ages 18 to 34 now back Mr. Biden by a 22-point margin, up six points from the spring and now somewhat ahead of Hillary Clinton’s lead in the final polls of 2016….

“Remarkably, Mr. Biden still leads by seven points among voters 65 and over in the most recent surveys, despite the kind of racial unrest that led many of these voters to support Republican candidates at various points in their lifetimes.”

In other words, there are multiple paths to a popular-vote plurality nationally and in any one state. But that does call to mind the biggest exception to the doctrine that a vote’s a vote. The Electoral College makes huge numbers of voters irrelevant in presidential elections, and reduces the influence of various groups who are or aren’t situated in battleground states. The single biggest reason for the recent focus on white working-class voters is that they are disproportionately represented in the Rust Belt states where Donald Trump pulled his 2016 upset. Conversely, even though Latinos are the fastest growing racial/ethnic group in the electorate, their clout in presidential contests is reduced by the large number living in states that have not been competitive recently (Arizona, California, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, and Texas). If, as some Democrats hope, Arizona and/or Texas do become competitive this year, you will hear a lot about Latino voters in the aftermath.

But even in battleground states that are easy to stereotype, there’s a lot going on under the surface. Was Trump’s 10,704 margin in Michigan in 2016 attributable to underestimated white working-class voters, or low turnout among African-Americans, or a late minor-party trend among younger voters? You can make a case for any of those propositions, or for any number of combinations of them. So beware over-simplification.

Because it was such a red-hot topic this last week, I did a little research and learned that Tom Cotton unsurprisingly had his history wrong, so I shared it at New York:

In a highly controversial (so much so that its publication produced anguished protests from Times staffers) New York Times op-ed on Wednesday, Arkansas senator Tom Cotton called on President Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and send U.S. military units into an undefined number of cities to suppress the “nihilist criminals” and “left-wing radicals infiltrating protest marches.” Cotton has been egging Trump on in this direction for a while now. He may have inspired the president’s threats to “send in the troops,” which Trump did in a June 1 conference call with governors (one participant called Trump’s manner “unhinged”) and then publicly in his Rose Garden remarks that evening, just prior to his infamous stroll to St. John’s Episcopal Church.

It’s a dangerous idea generally, as such revered military veterans as Trump’s own former secretary of defense James Mattis noted yesterday in decrying the politicization of the armed forces it would represent. Given the president’s reckless and divisive character, his taste for militarism, and his desperate need for base-inspiring action, telling him he has the power to take over city streets across the country and crush his enemies while showing up Democrats is like handing a pyromaniac a flame-thrower.

Cotton knows this, but his own reputation for the harshest sort of law-and-order politics is well earned. You wouldn’t expect a man who fought criminal-justice reform tooth and nail in the Senate and said America had an “underincarceration problem” to have much sympathy for protests aimed at addressing police misconduct toward minorities. In an effort to get a grip on what makes Cotton feel so threatening to progressives alert to whiffs of authoritarianism, I once described him as having the “mien and the worldview of a grim and unforgiving lawgiver right out of the Book of Deuteronomy or Calvin’s Geneva.” Likewise Molly Ball wrote that Cotton possessed a “harsh, unyielding, judgmental political philosophy, one that makes little allowance for compassion or human weakness.” Like Trump, he has no patience for “losers,” which disposes him to the use of maximum repressive force to defend privilege and property rights.

The only modern precedents involving a president invoking the Insurrection Act against the wishes of state authorities were Eisenhower’s dispatch of troops to insure the integration of Little Rock schools in 1957, Kennedy’s similar use of U.S. military assets to integrate the University of Mississippi in 1962 and stop racist violence in Alabama in 1963, and Johnson’s deployment of troops to protect the Selma-to-Montgomery marchers in 1965.

Cotton notes these cases but does not acknowledge that what justified all of them was a situation where state and local authorities were in open and explicit defiance of federal court orders aimed at vindicating constitutionally protected rights. These presidents did not “send in the troops” simply to maintain order, or because they deemed local law-and-order measures ineffectual, but because in a very real sense these places were in a state of rebellion led by governors like Orval Faubus, Ross Barnett, and George Wallace (all of whom not-so-secretly welcomed armed federal intervention so as to posture as defenders of Jim Crow).

Are any of the Democratic governors disdained by Trump and Cotton raising flags of rebellion on a pro-looter or pro-rioting platform? Are there any antifa state governments? I don’t think so. Federal military interventions without state and local consent would simply represent a political use of the U.S. Armed Forces to substitute an angry president’s notion of “law and order” for those of the officials elected to make such decisions. Trump does have the power to do so under the Insurrection Act. But the dire consequences of doing so is why sober supporters of constitutional order ranging from Mattis to conservative law professor John Yoo to Trump’s own secretary of defense, Mark Esper, oppose it. The president should listen to them rather than the avid, skull-cracking moralist from Arkansas before playing commander-in-chief in the streets of America.

In the last few tumultuous days, when I was under a stay-at-home order, I did some reporting by phone, as noted at New York:

As Democrats openly — and Republicans more covertly — consider holding virtual national conventions in August, the general assumption has been that it would be a diminished event that no one would voluntarily hold.

This week, Texas Democrats are holding their own virtual convention that they believe may show that less is more: that the virtual format can enable them to prepare their party more effectively for November than a live event, and create a template for the party conventions of the post-pandemic future.

The convention will be made available via two digital channels: one devoted to the sometimes boring but essential party business that is conducted at annual conventions, and the other to the speeches, messaging, and entertainment that make party conventions an effective “infomercial.” The latter channel will get a lot of attention as the locus for speeches throughout the week by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, vice-presidential prospects Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren, and former presidential candidates from Texas Julián Castro and Beto O’Rourke. Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is slated to speak next Saturday, June 6.

This public-facing channel will also provide a convenient outlet for fundraising appeals and party outreach efforts. But the other channel, a sort of digital home for the nearly 12,000 official convention delegates, will focus not only on “convention business,” but on general election preparations, in a less expensive and more transparent version of what live conventions normally do in hotel or civic center conference rooms.

One particularly important chore the virtual convention will actually make easier is pre-general election volunteer training. As the state party’s Voter Expansion director Luke Warford explained to me, Texas’s voter-unfriendly laws on registration efforts have a highly restrictive training requirement for volunteer “deputy registrars.” It’s actually easier to do the training virtually, and the infrastructure being built for the convention is conducive to that sort of labor-intensive but crucial chore. Already Democrats are close to meeting their goal of a thousand participants in their convention-based training to become state-recognized deputy registrars.

That’s a big deal in a year when harvesting demographic trends to change the shape of the electorate is the ball game for Texas Democrats, and could tilt the national landscape if and when it becomes seriously competitive (the state has more electoral votes than Michigan and Pennsylvania combined).

While the Texas Democrats’ virtual convention is a bit of an experiment that the DNC and other state parties are watching closely, it’s likely to become a success by normal standards. As Texas Democratic Party communications director Abhi Rahman told me, the event has already been paid for and will command six-figure viewership, if not more. There’s no real reason to go back to an in-person event in the future.

Texas Republicans, as it happens, are still planning an entirely in-person state convention for Houston on July 16 to 18, reflecting the national GOP’s commitment to set a “reopening” example by ignoring public-health injunctions against large gatherings. There is a lot of risk associated with this approach, which could produce either a sparsely attended, low-excitement convention or worse yet, a super-spreader event illustrating why big crowded conventions full of sweaty cheering partisans are just a terrible idea.

Risks aside, Republicans in the Lone Star State are also passing up on some of the efficiencies they could achieve by going virtual in order to show how little they are interested in accommodating themselves to the present, not to mention the future.

As Democrat Warford noted, they’re planning an event that “is right from a public safety perspective, but that also makes sense from a strategic point of view.”

I am a bit nonobjective on this subject, having argued for years now that the national political convention as we know it needs to go away. If it can be established this year that the essential business of such gatherings can be done virtually at less cost, with far less risk to public safety, and with all sorts of additional advantages in general election preparation, then there may be no rational argument for going back to a model that hasn’t made sense for years.