In case you need an explainer for the president’s weird claim that American Jews are “disloyal” this week, I tried to oblige at New York:

This week the president strangely accused American Jews of being “disloyal”–to Israel, or to himself; it’s not clear which (and he may think they are the same thing). Why does the man keep excoriating Jews for voting for Democrats? Does he really not understand the bloody history of right-wing “nationalist” and “populist” movements when it comes to Jews?

Maybe he doesn’t; for an Ivy Leaguer, the president is impressively ignorant about an awful lot of things. But it’s more likely that all his talk about the Jews is really aimed at a very different audience: his white conservative Evangelical Christian electoral base, which has its own distinctive and unsettling form of philosemitism. As the Washington Post’s Philip Bump wrote in his explanation of Trump’s discussion of Jewry and Israel:

“One of Trump’s most fervent pockets of support is white evangelical Protestants, a group which consistently sides with Trump on political and policy questions. His approach to Israeli politics often lines up with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but it also reflects priorities that have been central to evangelical politics for years.

“In other words, Trump’s approach to the politics of Israel is likely driven in part by the same motivation that drives so much of what he does: Delivering for his base …

“It’s somewhat akin to his campaign-trail outreach to black Americans, a superficial outreach that seemed, at least in part, to be aimed at demonstrating to his base that he wasn’t racist. His reflexive insistence that Democrats are anti-Semitic seems to be much more about demonstrating to his base the fervency of his adherence to Israel than to be offering real, considered criticisms of his opponents.”

So why do Trump’s ruminations about Jews and Israel resonate so much with conservative Evangelicals? Strictly speaking, of course, they are largely of the opinion that Jews are going to burn in hell for all eternity if they don’t accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior. But they also tend to view Jews through the prism of their own self-conception as the Chosen People of God — sort of the new, complete model for which Jews were a rough cut. Theologically, this is called “supersessionism,” the belief that a New Covenant God made with believers through Christ has replaced his Old Covenant with the Hebrews. It’s not an exclusive Evangelical belief; Catholic James Carroll wrote an entire book about it as the ultimate source of Christian anti-Semitism throughout the ages. But it shows no sign of fading among Evangelicals, who generally view the Hebrew scriptures as their own inheritance, and themselves as new, perfected Jews.

In this scheme (mostly laid out in the New Testament Book of Revelation, an elaborate allegory probably written in the traumatic aftermath of the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in A.D. 70), Jerusalem plays a key role. This is why American Evangelicals were significantly more excited than American Jews at Trump’s decision to move the U.S. embassy there, as theologian Diana Butler Bass explained at the time, drawing on her own Evangelical upbringing:

“Jerusalem was our prophetic bellwether. God’s plan hung on its fate. Whenever Israel gained more political territory, whenever Israel extended its boundaries, it was God’s will, the end-times unfolding on the evening news. Jerusalem, as the spiritual heart of Israel, mattered. Jerusalem was God’s holy city, of the ancient past, in its conflicted present, and for the biblical future.

“For many conservative evangelicals, Jerusalem is not about politics. It is not about peace plans or Palestinians or two-state solutions. It is about prophecy. About the Bible. And, most certainly, it is about the end-times.”

And so, in tightening Israel’s grip on Jerusalem, and more generally supporting an aggressive and expansionist Jewish State, Trump may be appealing to Jewish solidarity with Israel, but more important to him politically is the demonstration to Evangelicals that in this, as in many other things (notably the fight to reverse LGBTQ and reproductive rights), he is an agent of the divine will, despite (or sometimes because of) his heathenish personal behavior.

From this perspective, Trump’s strange rhetoric begins to make sense: When he accuses American Jews of “disloyalty,” he really means they are not playing the role Christians have assigned them in the great redemptive saga of the human race. Voting for Democrats, from this point of view, isn’t a matter of abrogating Jewish self-interests as reflected in Israel’s interests (as exclusively vested in Trump and his close ally Bibi Netanyahu), but is an unholy betrayal of God Himself, who wants confrontation, not peace, in the Holy Land.

In other words, Trump’s not as interested in Jewish opinion as he often sounds. He’s just using Jews and Israel to express his solidarity with Israel’s, and God’s, truly loyal followers over there in that nice Evangelical church. He needs every one of them in 2020.

Now and then I get so tired of a particularly threadbare historical analogy that I push back, as I did this week at New York:

We hear all the time that Democrats are heading “off the deep end” on a left-wing ideological bender that will mean disaster in the general election. The warning is very often associated with the specter of 1972 Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern, who lost 49 states four years after Hubert Humphrey lost by an eyelash and four years before Jimmy Carter won the presidency. The obsession with the idea that 1972 may repeat itself is a bipartisan phenomenon. Some McGovern Redux takes are from conservatives who are simply promoting the perennial claim that Democrats have become an anti-American cabal of baby-killing hippie socialists with a fresh urgency given the current extremism of the GOP. And some of these takes are (and have been for many years) from self-styled moderate Democrats grinding axes against self-consciously progressive aspirants to the presidential nomination.

Sometimes the latter includes a separate grievance against McGovernism beyond ideological extremism: divisiveness. A good example of this argument was recently provided by former Clinton and Obama staffer, “moderate” congressman, and former mayor of Chicago Rahm Emanuel as quoted by Todd Purdum:

“Rahm Emanuel, the former Clinton adviser and Obama chief of staff, told me he likens the current environment to the period following 1968, when Lyndon B. Johnson was succeeded by Richard Nixon, in a right-wing victory that exploited and exacerbated deep internal divisions in the Democratic Party, just as Trump’s ascendance has. Emanuel acknowledged that Johnson’s war in Vietnam makes the analogy imperfect — ‘unless you think the surge in Afghanistan counts as that, and I don’t’ — but added, ‘We have seen this movie before.’

“’Here’s the thing,’ Emanuel told me. ‘Today’s progressives are more angry at Clinton and Obama than they are at Bush 43. Whether it’s Clinton’s “small ideas” and welfare reform, or Obama’s Affordable Care Act without a public option — those are the things where they feel like there were missed moments for big, bold ideas. Really? And that’s what drives the energy. Yes, they’re angry at Trump. Yes, they’re angry at Bush. But a lot of the energy is directed at the fact that they don’t love those two presidents — which I’d remind everybody are the only two Democrats to get reelected since Franklin Roosevelt.'”

Embedded in this complaint is the idea that McGovern represented a revolt against the long line of successful Democratic presidents from FDR through LBJ, dividing the Democratic electorate and handing victory to Nixon. Today’s progressives, the thinking goes, are McGovernesque because they, too, are more interested in a hostile takeover of the party than in winning the general election.

Here are a few relevant points:

1. McGovern Didn’t Bust Up the New Deal Coalition; It Was Already Broken, and Never Reformed

The real disaster for Democrats wasn’t in 1972 under the lefty McGovern; it was in 1968 under the consummate New Dealer Hubert Humphrey, when the Democratic share of the popular vote dropped from 61.1 percent (under LBJ in 1964) to 42.7 percent. What happened? The civil-rights revolution happened, and the southern (and southern-adjacent) wing of the party made its exit, only returning (briefly) for native son Jimmy Carter, as I noted in 2012 when McGovern died:

“McGovern took the blame for the first and most dramatic election in which the collapse of the New Deal Coalition became fully manifest. Humphrey’s near-win in 1968 distracted attention from the fact that he won the lowest percentage of the popular vote of any major-party candidate since Alf Landon. In 1976 Jimmy Carter disguised the structural trends by winning the South and southern-inflected voters in border states and the midwest–voters who, by and large (aside from the Deep South regional loyalists who stayed with Carter in 1980), weren’t going to vote Democratic in a presidential election again. When Fritz Mondale got blown out in 1984, it represented the fourth time in five cycles that the Democratic candidate won less than 43% of the popular vote nationally. Yet this era of defeat is very often associated with McGovern alone.”

Mondale, by the way, was no lefty, but rather the favorite candidate of the Democratic Establishment, as opposed to his primary rival, Gary Hart, who had been McGovern’s 1972 campaign manager. More importantly, it is often forgotten that Nixon’s big 1972 landslide was mostly accomplished by appropriating George Wallace’s southern-based 1968 third-party vote, which Carter largely flipped back to the Democrats in 1976 after being endorsed for the general election by Wallace and virtually every other southern racist (along, remarkably, with every civil-rights activist). As Carter’s regional religious appeal faded, Democrats fell back on the minority of the electorate that had regularly supported them after 1964.

2. McGovern Wasn’t All That Far to the Left

For the most part, George McGovern was a standard-brand Democrat of his era who understood that his narrow path to the 1972 Democratic nomination required becoming the favorite of antiwar activists (who knew him well as the placeholder for Bobby Kennedy delegates at the 1968 Democratic convention after RFK’s death). But by 1972, McGovern’s Democratic rivals (with the exception of Scoop Jackson) had mostly turned against the Vietnam War as well.

McGovern was no pacifist (he had, after all, been a World War II bomber pilot), and his tentative support for an amnesty for draft evaders just anticipated Jimmy Carter’s (and to some extent even Gerald Ford’s) actual policy by a few years. The closest he came to a “socialist” domestic policy proposal was a famous $1,000-a-person Universal Basic Income proposal, which he abandoned during the course of the general-election campaign. Aside from anticipating Andrew Yang by nearly a half-century, it was pretty close to the Family Assistance Plan that Richard Nixon himself had earlier endorsed.

3. McGovern Didn’t Divide the Party: His Opponents Did

The ex post facto mythology of the McGovern campaign represented it as a takeover by a wild-eyed bunch of radicals determined to purge the Democratic Party of the “Establishment” elements (including the labor movement) that had sustained it for so long. As noted above, the white southern wing of the party had already seceded (at the presidential level, anyway). Also as noted above, McGovern and his supporters weren’t repudiating LBJ’s War in Vietnam; by then it was definitely Nixon’s War.

What did happen was a widespread abandonment of the Democratic presidential nominee, led by a labor movement (or at least by the leadership of the AFL-CIO) that was still loyal to Johnson and Humphrey and didn’t feel its interests would be particularly compromised if Nixon won reelection. Political historian Rick Perlstein reminds us that McGovern wasn’t the aggressor in intraparty strife:

“Humphrey himself, backed by [AFL-CIO president George] Meany, ran a stupendously vicious primary campaign against McGovern in the late innings. Edmund Muskie, Scoop Jackson, and Humphrey even cast aspersions against McGovern on ‘Meet the Press’ segments during the convention. Others were more casual — like the Catholic Missouri senator, one of the few up and comers associated with the regulars’ old order, who gave a blind quote to Evans and Novak at the height of the primary season, when McGovern looked to be clinching the nomination: ‘The people don’t know McGovern is for amnesty, abortion, and legalization of pot. Once Middle America — Catholic Middle America, in particular — finds this out, he’s dead.'”

Part of the reason Democrats indulged themselves in dumping McGovern is that this was (in sharp contrast to today) an era of heavy, heavy ticket-splitting. Democrats actually made a net gain of two Senate seats in 1972. They won Senate races in Alabama (where McGovern won 26 percent of the presidential vote); Arkansas (McGovern: 31 percent); Georgia (McGovern: 25 percent); Louisiana (McGovern: 28 percent) and Mississippi (McGovern: 20 percent). In 2016, not a single state elected a senator who was not from the party of the candidate who carried it in the presidential election. If they can just stop calling each other unelectable (and again, that’s mostly centrists calling progressives that), 2020 Democrats should be — and better be — united.

4. McGovern Ran a Bad General-Election Campaign

The criticisms of McGovern that are most justified had little to do with his ideology: He ran an amateurish general-election campaign, punctuated and exemplified by his sloppy vice-presidential election process that led to the selection and then the dismissal of running mate Tom Eagleton (the Missouri senator, by the way, who dissed McGovern in Perlstein’s account). Another really bad sign was McGovern’s delivery of his nomination acceptance speech (perhaps his best speech of the entire campaign) at 2:48 a.m. Eastern Time. The contrast with Nixon’s highly regimented 1972 Republican convention was astonishing, which leads to perhaps the most important distinction of them all between 1972 and 2020.

5. The 1972 Richard Nixon Was No Donald Trump — Yet, Anyway

Perceptions of McGovern’s 1972 opponent have been heavily influenced by Nixon’s subsequent disgrace and resignation from office. But in 1972 itself, Nixon was brilliant, in a devious, unprincipled sort of way. He had already defied conservative orthodoxy by imposing wage and price controls (1971) and visiting the previously forbidden kingdom of the People’s Republic of China (a maneuver so audacious that Nixon-to-China became a general term for politicians going sharply against type).

Nixon’s campaign relentlessly appealed to Democratic constituencies, especially labor (the AFL-CIO was neutral in a presidential general election for the first time ever), southern white voters (a Democrats-for-Nixon organization was headed by LBJ crony John Connally), and Catholics. He falsely promised imminent peace in Vietnam and used fiscal stimulus to pump up the economy (helping to create later inflation that would bedevil his successors). He gave every appearance of being a very successful president, disguising the moral rot within his White House. His job-approval ratings in 1972 breached 60 percent in May and were at 62 percent on Election Day. Trump has never been within hailing distance of this sort of popularity, and has never shown any interest, much less ability, in appealing beyond his electoral base.

The more you look at him, the more George McGovern is an unfairly maligned figure of Democratic failure, whose actual failures are not relevant to any 2020 nominee of his party. Yes, many baby-boomer Democrats will always be haunted by Election Night 1972, when their ancient enemy Tricky Dick won New York, California, Michigan, and McGovern’s own South Dakota — just as millennial Democrats will never forget HRC’s shocking 2016 defeat. Neither defeat offers any clear guidance for 2020, truth be told. But 1972 is about as illustrative of what to do or not do as 1928 or maybe the Battle of Agincourt. The best evidence we have is that thanks to extreme partisan polarization exacerbated by the terrifying example of the 45th president, any competent Democrat, whether she or he is a centrist or a progressive — a moderate or a democratic socialist — can beat Trump and can probably lose to him as well if everything goes wrong. If there’s anything about McGovernism to be avoided, it’s simply this: The 2020 Democratic nominee needs a lot more practical campaigning skill and also a bit of the luck that relentlessly eluded the very decent and well-meaning 1972 candidate.

 

After 2016 Democrats constantly remind themselves that presidential contests are about the Electoral College, not the popular vote. That’s not necessarily good news for Trump, as I noted at New York earlier this week:

There has been a lot of discussion in political circles about Donald Trump’s job-approval ratings, what they portend, and Trump’s Electoral College strategy for 2020, which doesn’t necessarily require a popular-vote plurality. But in the end, of course, the conjunction of the Electoral College with Trump’s state-by-state popularity is where the deal will go down.

The online polling firm Civiqs has published a new set of state-by-state job-approval ratings for Trump as of August 11, and it shows how the president’s overall standing (a 43 percent approval rating nationally, which happens to match the current RealClearPolitics polling average) might translate into electorate votes. It’s not a pretty picture for the president, to put it mildly.

Civiqs shows the president’s net approval ratios being underwater (i.e., negative) in 10 states he carried in 2016: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin. If that were to represent how the 2020 elections turn out, Trump would have a booming 119 electoral votes. And it’s not as though he’s on a knife’s edge between victory and defeat in all these Trump 2016 states where he’s doing poorly: He’s underwater by 12 points in Pennsylvania, 11 in Michigan, and nine in Arizona, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. And there’s virtually no indication that states that narrowly went for Clinton in 2016 are trending in Trump’s direction: His approval ratios are minus 18 in Colorado, minus 15 in Minnesota, minus 12 in Nevada, and minus 27 in New Hampshire. These are, by the way, polls of registered voters, not just “adults,” so they should be a relatively sound reflection of the views of the electorate.

If you credit these polls at all, Trump’s reelection will require (1) a big late improvement in his approval ratings, which is possible but unlikely based on long-standing patterns during his polarizing presidency; (2) a campaign that succeeds in making the election turn on theoretical fears about his opponent rather than actual fears about a second Trump term, which won’t be easy either; (3) a big Republican turnout advantage, which is less likely among the larger presidential electorate than it was in 2018; or (4) some diabolical ability to thread the needle despite every contrary indicator, which superstitious Democrats fear for obvious reasons.

If the fourth scenario — a win against all the evidence — is Trump’s best hope for reelection, he’s the one who needs to experience some fear and trembling heading toward 2020. If anything, there’s evidence that he is likely to undershoot rather than overshoot his approval ratings as the sitting president of a country whose direction lacks any kind of public confidence.

A lot of political observers obsessively watch the president’s approval rating. One offered a different and alarming take, which I addressed at New York:

If there has been one bit of conventional wisdom about 2020 that has most comforted left-of-center analysts like me, it’s that Donald Trump’s job approval ratings seem exceptionally stagnant and too low to support the evident optimism of his conservative media boosters….

But now comes the formidable number cruncher Nate Cohn with a challenge to this assumption from a couple of different directions. It will be received by many Times readers as something of a terroristic threat, but it’s important to face it directly.

First up, he calls attention to something most of us have ignored since Trump took office: the president’s personal favorability ratings. Yes, we all know that Trump won despite astonishingly low favorability numbers (an Election Eve ratio of 36/61 according to Gallup). But Cohn notes these numbers now look better for POTUS:

“Millions of Americans who did not like the president in 2016 now say they do. Over all, his personal favorability rating has increased by about 10 percentage points among registered voters since Election Day 2016, to 44 percent from 34 percent, according to Upshot estimates.”

That is still well under a majority, though not far below the 45.9 percent of the popular vote he won in 2016. But more important, Cohn suggests, a lot of these voters who have a newly favorable view of Trump may not have voted for him last time around:

“Republicans with an unfavorable opinion of Mr. Trump were more than twice as likely to stay home on Election Day as those with a favorable view, according to New York Times/Siena surveys of North Carolina, Florida and Pennsylvania in 2016.

“It seems likely that a substantial number of these voters now have a favorable view of the president: Over all, 28 percent of Republican-leaning voters with an unfavorable view of Mr. Trump in 2016 had a favorable view of him by 2018, according to data from the Voter Study Group.”

Cohn acknowledges that the odds are pretty good Democrats will nominate a more popular opponent for Trump than Hillary Clinton was in 2016, though nobody knows how she or he will compare to the president in personal favorability. I think it’s pretty important to remember that Trump won among the 18 percent of the electorate who disliked both candidates by a robust 47/30 margin, which could reflect either relative unfavorability or the natural tendency of unhappy voters to support change (which would be my guess). The latter explanation would be bad news for Trump as the incumbent.

In any event, Cohn concedes that presidential job approval ratings are more relevant to a president’s reelection prospects, and makes two separate arguments about them. The first is that Trump’s job approval ratings have been rising since the end of the government shutdown this year. While this is true, they were clearly depressed by the government shutdown, just as they were when Republicans were trying to kill Obamacare. Without question, when Trump is supervising one of his party’s least-popular policies or tactics, he will suffer. But if his approval ratings have rebounded to their natural state, that’s not a sign they will continue to rise to that of presidents who are cruising toward reelection. According to Gallup last month, Trump’s approval rating was at 42 percent, just two points above the average approval rating for his presidency. The average approval rating for modern elected presidents in their tenth quarter is 54 percent. It’s not at all clear Trump is showing much progress in “normalizing” his popularity.

Cohn’s second argument is one that only data dogs like himself are much in a position to contest:

“In some periods over the last few months, his job approval rating increased to among the highest levels of his term, according to live-interview telephone polls, long considered the gold standard of public opinion research …. Curiously, online polls have not shown this same increase; in fact, they’ve shown no increase at all.”

Trump’s relative strength in online polls prior to the 2016 election was the basis for the “shy Trump voter” hypothesis holding that voters embarrassed to tell potentially disapproving interviewers they were MAGA people gave Trump some of the hidden strength he showed at the polls. So as Cohn suggests, the new inverse live/online gap undermines that theory. What else it might mean is beyond my ken.

In any event, even if you buy Cohn’s argument that Trump is near the ceiling of his narrow band of job approval numbers, there’s no evidence he’s about to bust right through it. Some observers seem to think that a steadily improving economy will save him, but aside from the possibility of bad economic events occurring, it’s important to remember that solid majorities of Americans continue to express unhappiness with the general direction of the country. There’s really no reason to assume that incumbency is going to help Trump more than it hurts him. As Kyle Kondik noted recently, there’s increasing evidence from trial heats testing Trump against Democrats that his performance will undershoot, not exceed, his approval ratings.

From a longer perspective, my guess is that the narrow band of favorability and job approval numbers for Trump is just another testament to the partisan polarization that made it possible for him to win in 2016, despite his unpopularity. He cannot fall too far, even when he’s behaving in his signature beastly manner, because Republicans will sustain him. But he’s the wrong figure to expand his party’s base, having already pretty much maxed out with those residual white working-class conservative independents and Democrats he so famously won over in 2016. Sure, we all understand there are circumstances under which he can transcend his many handicaps by demonizing his opponent, revving up the MAGA people, and taking advantage of an Electoral College system which does not weigh popular votes equally. But having thought through Cohn’s argument, I’m less terrified than when I read his tweets and fear he has stumbled into some pro-Trump breakthrough.

One of the big questions about Trump’s 2016 win was the impact of minor-party candidates. I took a long look at the past and the present situation, and wrote it up at New York:

Like those who voted for an earlier Green candidate, Ralph Nader, in 2000, 2016 Jill Stein voters, and Clinton-hating progressives who tossed a vote to Libertarian Gary Johnson, will always get far more blame for the election outcome than they objectively deserve. The obvious reason is that just about any change in voting patterns can be given outsize importance in crazy-close elections (this one was famously decided by 77,000 votes in three states). As with most lurid theories of betrayal, there’s a kernel of truth to this one, as the Guardian noted on The Day After:

“In Michigan, where the election was so close that the Associated Press still hasn’t called the result [AP did call it later, of course], Trump is ahead by about 12,000 votes. That’s significantly less than the 242,867 votes that went to third-party candidates in Michigan. It’s a similar story elsewhere: third-party candidates won more total votes than the Trump’s margin of victory in Wisconsin, Arizona, North Carolina and Florida. Without those states, Trump would not have won the presidency.”

Fury at protest voters has spilled over into the 2020 Democratic race, exacerbated by data showing that 4.5 percent of Bernie Sanders primary voters pulled the lever for Stein and another 3.2 percent went for Johnson in November 2016 (perhaps more to the point, 12 percent of them voted for Trump, but that’s a different story). Some Democrats still fear defections by “Bernie or Bust” voters in this cycle. So as the general election draws nigh, you can expect renewed attention to what’s going on in the minor parties and how they might (or might not) take advantage of major-party divisions.

Having said all that, in 2016 Stein and Johnson both got a lot of votes. Johnson (and running mate William Weld), who was on the ballot in all 50 states, won nearly 4.5 million votes; only once (four years earlier, with Johnson as the nominee) had the Libertarians topped 1 million votes. Stein and Ajamu Baraka, on the ballot in 45 states, didn’t match Nader’s enormous 2000 vote, but with around one percent of the total, they beat the previous three Green presidential tickets combined. So even if Democrats are wrong about Stein and/or Johnson giving us President Trump, their parties bear watching in 2020, where a different configuration of forces may make them significant.

Interestingly enough, both Libertarians and Greens seem to be having a bit of a purist moment as they prepare for 2020. Libertarians have probably benefited electorally from their recent habit of running prominent ex-Republican elected officials for president (former New Mexico governor Johnson the last two times, former congressman Bob Barr in 2008, and former and future congressman Ron Paul in 1988). But a lot of Libertarian activists aren’t happy about the ideological compromises that has involved. Here’s Reason’s Matt Welch discussing an early presidential-candidate forum he moderated last month:

“’We aren’t Republican light; we’re not Democrat light,’ said [Kim] Ruff, an Arizona-based manufacturer who would go on to win that evening’s informal post-debate straw poll, eight to five ([Arvin] Vohra) to four ([Adam] Kokesh) to one apiece for [Max] Abramson and [Dan] Behrman. ‘We’re advocates of full, unencumbered liberty. And that means taking positions that make the public squeamish. I would never do black tar heroin, but I’m not going to stop you from doing it, because what you do with your life is your business.’”

What the candidates were alluding to is the buzz about Representative Justin Amash of Michigan, who recently left the Republican Party (right before a political lynch mob might have ejected him for endorsing a Trump impeachment). For the moment, he is running for reelection, but that could change, as National Interest reported last month:

“In the few days since leaving the GOP, he’s talked about ‘room for a third party’ and refused to rule out running for president. But sources close to Amash and the Libertarian Party deny that a presidential run is in the works — although the door is still open. For the time being, the Libertarian-leaning representative is looking to build a fiscally conservative, pro-restraint coalition across party lines.”

The 2020 Libertarian Party convention is scheduled for May of next year (with state gatherings to select delegates held earlier), so Amash doesn’t have a lot of time to decide on a path. Gary Johnson has ruled out another run. But the announced candidates seem to be stressing their radicalism to distinguish themselves from potential ex-GOP interlopers like Amash. Candidate Dan Behrman’s motto is “Taxation Is Theft.” Adam Kokesh’s platform features this plank:

“When elected, I will swear in, walk to the White House, and sign one executive order. This executive order will lay out the process for dissolving the federal government in a peaceful, orderly manner. With it, I will be resigning as President to become ‘Custodian of the Federal Government.’”

I don’t believe Amash would endorse that idea.

The Greens aren’t worried about Democrats or ex-Democrats appropriating their ballot line but are concerned about appropriation of their ideas, as Emily Atkin explained earlier this year:

“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the wunderkind congresswoman from New York, has been getting most of the credit for the Green New Deal, an ambitious plan to fight global warming that has become increasingly popular among Democrats. But Howie Hawkins wants to set the record straight. ‘A lot of people think AOC thought it up,’ he told me by phone Wednesday. ‘But I’m the original Green New Dealer.’”

Hawkins started talking about a Green New Deal as a New York gubernatorial candidate for the Greens in 2010. He’s now running for president, and he stresses that his and his party’s version is more serious than the Democrats’, mostly because it involves a socialist transformation of the U.S. economy:

“The two plans have the same goal of 100 percent renewable energy by the year 2030, and they both call for universal health care and a federal job guarantee. But the Green Party’s plan calls for single-payer Medicare for All, tuition-free college, and ‘democratically run, publicly owned utilities.’ To pay for it, the Greens call for major progressive tax and financial reform, including a 90 percent tax on bonuses for bailed-out bankers, and a reduction in military spending by 50 percent.”

Hawkins is running for president, and Jill Stein is not; another interesting Green presidential aspirant, Dario Hunter, describes himself as a “black, gay, Jewish son of a Persian immigrant.” He’s a rabbi and a local school-board member and also supports a “REAL Green New Deal,” among other intensely progressive priorities.

The 2020 context for these minor parties set by the major parties is, of course, very important to their relative appeal. Republicans are far more united behind Donald Trump than they were in 2016. You’d have to figure a self-consciously progressive Democratic nominee (Sanders or Warren, most notably) would take some of the oxygen away from the Greens. What is less clear is whether a nominee like Biden would drive voters to a Hawkins or a Hunter, or whether the vast ideological and psychological gulf between Trump and the entire Democratic field will induce unprecedented solidarity, even if the primaries turn out to be more fractious than they were in 2016.

The one thing we know for sure is that no one is going to take any particular outcome for granted after what happened in the Trump-Clinton race. The number of protest votes could drop significantly, even as turnout goes up. Dedicated supporters of the Libertarian and Green platforms will stay with their party, though even among true believers, those who are horrified by one of the major-party candidates more than the other may be tempted to “make their votes count” in 2020.