There’s been more talk than usual among 2020 Democratic presidential candidates about their “theory of change”–how they will implement their proposals. But there’s still a hole in the discussion, which I discussed at New York after the first night of candidate debates:

Like a lot of political obsessives, I came up with my own question I wanted to hear posed to the Democratic candidates debating on Wednesday and Thursday nights:

“One highly relevant question the 20 Democratic presidential candidates who are debating this week might be offered is this: Do you have a plan B for the agenda you will pursue if Republicans retain control of the Senate?”

Well, on the first debate night, to my shock, two moderators went there. First, Rachel Maddow asked Cory Booker this question:

“Senator Mitch McConnell says that his most consequential achievement as Senate majority leader was preventing President Obama from filling a Supreme Court seat. Having served with Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, do you believe they would confirm your court nominees?”

Booker hemmed and hawed and then said he was confident Democrats would win the Senate in 2020 (not a strong bet, actually), an assertion that Julián Castro had made earlier. Asked the same question by Maddow, Bill de Blasio was slightly more responsive:

“[T]here is a political solution that we have to come to grips with. If the Democratic Party would stop acting like the party of the elites and be the party of working people again, and go into states, including red states, to convince people we’re on their side, we can put pressure on their senators to actually have to vote for the nominees that are put forward.”

This suggests some sort of political transformation that is very unlikely in the wake of what is sure to be a bitter, closely fought election. It’s precisely the sort of argument Barack Obama made in 2008 about how he’d overcome Republican obstruction, and he struggled against McConnell even with an initial supermajority in the Senate.

Then Chuck Todd asked Elizabeth Warren a more direct and general question:

“It’s very plausible that you’ll be elected president with a Republican Senate. Do you have a plan to deal with Mitch McConnell?”

Warren responded instantly: “I do.” But she really didn’t.

This often practical-minded senator, who by my account was the overall debate winner, gave it a good try, saying she’d call on her supporters to stay engaged and never stop fighting. The saturnine Mr. McConnell could not possibly care less….

Todd tried asking John Delaney about dealing with McConnell, and as usual he talked about bipartisanship, but didn’t have any insights for winning Republican votes in the Senate beyond calling for “ideas that work.” Todd went back to Booker, who managed to come up with the unicorn of an underwhelming bipartisan criminal-justice-reform bill in 2018 as though it offered some sort of template. Criminal-justice reform, of course, is a cause that developed a grassroots conservative constituency over a long period of time. If there’s some similar area where both parties are already poised to come together, I don’t know where it is.

Now the truth is, there are no easy answers to Maddow’s and Todd’s questions about McConnell. But there are plausible approaches: (1) You can aim at picking off one or two Republicans with the kind of public pressure that Warren (and Sanders and de Blasio) like to talk about, and hope for the best, following the example that saved the Affordable Care Act in 2017 when Republicans could not hold their own conference in line; (2) you can focus on executive actions — Amy Klobuchar should have busted into the discussion of a Republican Senate and drawn attention to her vast agenda of executive orders and agency policies she has already promised to implement during her first 100 days in office; or (3) you can promise to lead a holy crusade to retake the Senate in 2022 if Republicans obstruct the new president’s agenda and maybe build a durable Democratic governing majority.

But just promising to fight is not going to strike fear into Mitch McConnell’s dark, hardened heart. The candidates ought to think more deeply about this problem, because it could be more important than anything else the winner encounters.

During the last week of the Supreme Court’s 2018-19 term, the Court’s conservative majority committed an act of injustice that will definitely make life harder for Democrats and for voters, as I explained at New York:

For a while, the possibility that the U.S. Supreme Court would find partisan gerrymandering to be unconstitutional rested in the hands of Anthony Kennedy, a swing justice who seemed offended by the practice but could never quite find a method he liked to measure or remedy it. With his retirement last year, Court watchers figured the odds of the justices doing something about it had dropped significantly. Today they dropped to zero, as NPR’s Nina Totenberg succinctly explained:

“Prior to Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court, Justice Anthony Kennedy was the swing vote on this issue. He seemed open to limiting partisan redistricting if the Court was presented with a “manageable standard.” But with Kavanaugh on the Court, the search for that standard is over.”

Writing for the new 5-4 conservative majority on the Court in two combined cases (Ruccho v. Common Cause and Lamone v. Benisek), Chief Justice John Roberts argued that partisan gerrymandering, while offensive to traditional notions of democracy, was a “political issue” best left in the hands of political branches of the federal and state governments.

“Federal judges have no license to reallocate political power between the two major political parties, with no plausible grant of authority in the Constitution, and no legal standards to limit and direct their decisions.”

There wasn’t much doubt in the cases before the Court that Republican legislators in North Carolina and their Democratic counterparts in Maryland had drawn district lines purely and simply to maximize partisan outcomes. In North Carolina, in particular, GOP legislators openly spoke of their plans to screw over Democrats in congressional redistricting, in part to rebut (or perhaps simply disguise) racially invidious motives that would invite judicial intervention. And as Justice Elena Kagan emphasized in a scathing dissent joined by the Court’s other liberals (Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor), the majority admitted partisan gerrymandering was a travesty:

“[T]he majority concedes (really, how could it not?) that gerrymandering is ‘incompatible with democratic principles.’ Ante, at 30 (quoting Arizona State Legislature, 576 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 1)). And therefore what? That recognition would seem to demand a response. The majority offers two ideas that might qualify as such. One is that the political process can deal with the problem … The other is that political gerrymanders have always been with us.”

Indeed, Roberts suggested federal and state legislatures could police partisan gerrymandering more effectively than could federal courts, but Kagan put her finger on the emotional core of the conservatives’ argument: Political gerrymanders have always been with us. But the circumstances have entirely changed, she observed:

“Yes, partisan gerrymandering goes back to the Republic’s earliest days. (As does vociferous opposition to it.) But big data and modern technology — of just the kind that the mapmakers in North Carolina and Maryland used — make today’s gerrymandering altogether different from the crude linedrawing of the past. Old-time efforts, based on little more than guesses, sometimes led to so-called dummymanders — gerrymanders that went spectacularly wrong. Not likely in today’s world. Mapmakers now have access to more granular data about party preference and voting behavior than ever before. County-level voting data has given way to precinct-level or city-block-level data; and increasingly, mapmakers avail themselves of data sets providing wide ranging information about even individual voters.”

In view of the majority’s hard-line opposition to getting into the subject, the growing sophistication of partisan gerrymandering, and with it the ever-more-severe practical disenfranchisement it enables, isn’t going to matter any more in the future than it does right now. So what this decision does as a practical matter — beyond launching celebrations among the Republican lawmakers and lawbreakers who control a majority of the country’s state legislatures — is direct concern over gerrymandering into different channels.

The silver lining of the Supreme Court’s retreat from interest in partisan gerrymandering is that it has led the Court to defer to recent efforts to attack the practice on state constitutional grounds. That’s what happened last year when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down a GOP-drafted congressional map and substituted its own: As Republicans everywhere howled, the U.S. Supreme Court shrugged and refused to review the case. Today’s decision obviously leaves open the avenue of state redistricting reforms (whether undertaken by legislatures or ballot initiative) that drastically limit politically motivated discretion in redistricting procedures. But the timing is inauspicious for slowly building momentum for redistricting reform with the decennial Census and the next round of map-drawing just around the corner.

No matter what happens at the state level (or in Congress, which could theoretically limited partisan gerrymandering in federal elections), the decision is deeply dissatisfying to anyone who believes justice should be the overriding motive of the Supreme Court in cases touching on the most fundamental rights. And that was the real travesty of Robert’s decision, as Kagan rightly pointed out:

“For the first time ever, this Court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because it thinks the task beyond judicial capabilities.

“And not just any constitutional violation. The partisan gerrymanders in these cases deprived citizens of the most fundamental of their constitutional rights: the rights to participate equally in the political process, to join with others to advance political beliefs, and to choose their political representatives. In so doing, the partisan gerrymanders here debased and dishonored our democracy, turning upside-down the core American idea that all governmental power derives from the people.”

Anthony Kennedy should be ashamed of himself for taking a pass on the opportunity to deal with this problem before heading off to retirement.

“Base versus Swing” has been an ancient strategic choice in politics, and it’s coming up again, as I discussed this week at New York.

In these days of intense partisan polarization, driven in no small part by an intensely polarizing president, it’s become commonplace to argue that the politics of persuasion don’t matter anymore, and that elections are won by “energizing” or “mobilizing” one’s own party base. And it’s true that with the number of swing voters dwindling, turnout strategies have become indispensable in any competitive election.

But there are limits to base-mobilization, as veteran political reporter Ron Brownstein notes in an observation on Trump’s incessant efforts to keep his troops in a hate frenzy:

“Trump’s unrelenting emphasis on stoking that base—both in his rhetoric and through his policies…[is] providing the fuel for Democrats to mobilize their own core constituencies, particularly young people and nonwhite voters.”

In other words, every vote you get by motivating core constituencies to turn out to vote via highly emotional messages is at least partly offset by the stimulus you provide for your opponent’s core constituencies. Meanwhile, even if there aren’t a lot of swing voters who are very likely to vote, every one you “flip” by persuasion gives you two net votes — one for you, one less for your opponent. Less than one versus two: It’s always worth the trouble to devote some attention to persuasion.

Brownstein goes on to discuss a second problem with Trump’s base-mobilization emphasis: it erodes the incentives for people who don’t much care for him nonetheless to pull the lever for him because they like his policies or their effects:

“Trump [is trying] to pump up his base by acting in exactly the manner that pushes away so many voters who are content with the economy but disenchanted with his behavior….

“[P]olling throughout Trump’s presidency has consistently shown that economic improvement hasn’t lifted him as much as earlier presidents. Across many of the key groups in the electorate, from young people to white college graduates, Trump’s job-approval rating consistently runs at least 25 points below the share of voters who hold positive views about either the national economy or their personal financial situation.

“The result is that Trump attracts much less support than his predecessors did—in terms of approval rating and potential support for reelection—among voters who say they are satisfied with the economy.”

Because — to put it mildly — rational persuasion isn’t the 45th president’s style, he will likely supplement his base-tending with savage attacks on his Democratic opponent aimed at making her or him equally unpleasant to swing voters. If 2016 was any guide, he’ll supplement this strategy with overt and covert efforts to suppress Democratic turnout (apparently a major focus of Trump’s social media strategy) by repeating intra-party Democratic complaints about the ultimate nominee. His Republican allies at the state level, of course, will seek to suppress Democratic turnout in more literal ways by planting mines along the path to the ballot box for young and minority voters.

Still, a “persuasion” prong of his strategy would improve Trump’s odds of victory. And Democrats, too, should keep in mind that a pure turnout battle could be perilous.

While this site is devoted to helping Democrats plot strategy, it’s important to recognize that on occasion the quality of opposition can make the toughest contests easier. As I noted at New York, that could definitely be happening again in Alabama:

To the great joy of Alabama Democrats and aficionados of strange politics everywhere, former Alabama Supreme Court chief justice Roy Moore announced today that he will again run for the U.S. Senate in 2020. It’s hardly anything new for the 72-year-old theocrat and alleged mall creeper. This will be his sixth run for statewide office in Alabama, counting two successful races for the state bench (though the first time he was removedfrom office, and the second time suspended, as he regularly defied federal court orders related to his theocratic views), two unsuccessful gubernatorial bids, and then his 2017 Senate race in the special election to choose a replacement for then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

In this last campaign, he managed to upset Donald Trump’s handpicked candidate in a primary and runoff, and then lost a shocker to Democrat Doug Jones, whom he now seeks to take on again. He is as ornery as ever, as the New York Times reports:

“His decision was an unsurprising act of overt defiance toward many of his party’s national leaders, including President Trump, who recently publicly warned him away from another Senate bid.

“Republican officials fear that Mr. Moore, were he to win the party’s nomination in March, risks their prospects of defeating the Democratic incumbent, Senator Doug Jones, and recapturing a seat they long controlled with ease …

“Before he made his announcement, Mr. Moore detailed his grievances against Republican officials in Washington, and he predicted that the campaign arm of Senate Republicans would run ‘a smear campaign’ against him.”

That’s hardly a paranoid statement, since Moore is broadly viewed as the Republican candidate most likely to help Jones to a full-term in this very red state. But Judge Roy is trying to turn that into a token of Christian martyrdom, as al.com reports:

“’Everyone in Alabama knows that last election in 2017 was fraudulent,’ Moore said. He added disinformation tactics will not be tolerated and will be punished. When asked if he believed the fraud came solely from Democrats, Moore said he thought there was also Republican collusion.”

It’s likely that at least some of the allegations of sexual misconduct that bedeviled him in 2017, which ranged from sexual assault to predatory behavior toward teenagers at the local mall, will return. But Moore is heartened by the ability of a certain Supreme Court Justice to overcome similar allegations, according to a recent fundraising missive:

“’It was no strange coincidence that only 10 months later these same false and scurrilous tactics would again be used in the midst of a very important Supreme Court nomination process of Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. Judge Kavanaugh would survive to be appointed to that high court.’”

In truth, Moore was considered an extreme and eccentric character even by Alabama’s tolerant standards — albeit one with a strong electoral base in the fever swamps of the Christian right — before the sexual allegations arose. The general feeling is that he made it to the general election against Jones in 2017 mostly because his major Trump-backed opponent, appointed incumbent Senator Luther Strange, was unusually weak, mostly because of suspicions of a corrupt deal with the disgraced governor, Robert Bentley, to get the job.

This time around, the Republican field facing Moore is less tainted, if not overpowering. The presumed GOP Establishment candidate is Congressman Bradley Byrne, who like everyone else in his party in the state, is a slavish Trump loyalist. Hard-core conservatives, including 2017 also-ran Congressman Mo Brooks, are backing state legislator Arnold Mooney. Former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville will begin the race with name ID nearly as high as Moore’s in this gridiron-mad state. And the latest hot rumor was begun this week by Jones’s Republican Senate colleague Richard Shelby, as the Washington Post reported:

“Former attorney general Jeff Sessions has not ruled out running next year for his old Senate seat from Alabama, the state’s senior senator said Wednesday, as Republicans braced for the expected entrance into the race of Roy Moore, their failed 2017 candidate.

“’Sessions, I don’t think, has ruled it out,’ Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) told reporters. ‘I’ve talked to him about it. I think if he ran, he would be a formidable candidate. Formidable. I’ve not encouraged him to run, but he’s a friend, and if he ran, I think he’d probably clear the field.'”

Sessions has declined to comment on the speculation so far, which will only encourage it. He may be trying to figure out what his old boss the president, who said so many hateful things about him after holding him responsible for the Mueller investigation, might say about a Sessions political comeback.

Even Sessions probably won’t intimidate Roy Moore into withdrawing, though. He’s very much on a mission from God, and it’s an angry, vengeful God he worships. Moore’s out for blood, and he doesn’t much care if it’s red or blue.

For Democrats who really need to hang onto this seat to improve their odds of taking back the Senate in 2020, this is good news indeed.

This week at New York I addressed a controversy that comes up every four years like clockwork:

One of the great quadrennial rituals of our presidential-nominating system is the descent of candidates on Iowa (e.g., the 19 who appeared in Cedar Rapids at this year’s Iowa Democratic Hall of Fame Dinner) at about this point in the cycle. Close behind it in predictability is the rise of complaints about Iowa’s First-in-the-Nation caucuses and their privileged status. This year it’s Michelle Cottle who has offered an exceptionally high-profile objection to the whole thing. Here’s a sample, though if you’ve read this sort of argument before, you can practically recite it without a script:

“Demographically speaking, the Iowa electorate looks about as much like the face of America as does the Senate Republican conference. Which says a lot.

“Iowa’s caucuses are mind-numbingly convoluted and anti-democratic, favoring the most motivated, well-organized few over the less-obsessive majority of Iowans. More fundamentally, granting one state — any state — a perennial lock on the pole position of presidential voting fosters a sense of entitlement resulting in a quadrennial parade of pandering that borders on the absurd. Ethanol subsidies? Seriously?”

To her credit, Cottle understands that we’ve been hearing such complaints for eons, saying: “Hating on the Iowa caucuses has become a cliché.” Some of the particulars of her indictment are a bit off, though. Yes, caucuses don’t enlist as much participation as government-sponsored primaries, but party-sponsored primaries don’t do much better. Who’s going to force the taxpayers of Iowa to pay for official presidential-nominating contests? Since Iowans are by and large very happy with the status quo, that ain’t happening.

Her dismissal of Iowa Democratic Party efforts (via a “virtual caucus”) to comply with new rules allowing for participation in the caucuses without physically attending them seems a bit churlish as well: It’s an entirely new and untested system, so it might be wise to let it operate at least once before denouncing it as a sham.

The idea that Iowa (alongside New Hampshire, site of the first primary) maintains a death grip on the nominating process by unrepresentative, too-white electorates is a bit outdated as well. Between the 2004 and 2008 cycles, both national parties agreed to move two other states, Nevada (holding caucuses) and South Carolina (with a primary) into the charmed circle of contests sanctioned to kick off the nominating process to provide geographic and racial-ethnic balance (Nevada has a sizable Latino population; South Carolina an even more sizable African-American population). This reform was also a good example of how Iowa has adapted to all the criticism over its preeminence by giving up a bit of power in order to create allies willing to help it defend the power it retains. If they had to, I have no doubt Iowa Republicans and Democrats would support allowing other states to go “early” — though not first — in order to hang onto that First-in-the-Nation designation.

Ultimately, though, Iowa’s primacy depends on the perpetual willingness of presidential candidates to reinforce it. Since the caucuses became major events in 1976, only one successful presidential nominee — Bill Clinton in 1992 — has skipped Iowa, and that was a unique case because Iowa’s own Tom Harkin was running, making the caucuses irrelevant that year. But just participating in the caucuses isn’t enough: Iowans expect prospective candidates to come early and often, and if possible, to spend money and time promoting their own local candidates and their own party infrastructure. And naturally, once candidates have invested in Iowa, they have every interest in recouping that investment instead of supporting some effort to remove the caucuses from their traditional role.

And so the current system, with occasional tweaks and even reforms, lurches along. Those like Cottle who crave a more rational system sometimes fail to comprehend that the nominating process requires action not just by the national party but by state parties and bipartisan state legislatures. She personally favors the idea of rotating regional primaries, an idea that’s been kicking around forever. Actually making that happen across state and party lines would be a gargantuan undertaking. At a minimum, it would require a big push from a powerful figure like, say, a very popular incumbent president with no fear of alienating people in the early states.

There are already gradual developments underway that further erode the old Iowa–New Hampshire duopoly, most notably early voting: On the very same day of the Iowa caucuses next year, by-mail voting for the immense California presidential primary will begin. In the end, though, somebody has to have the first official nominating-contest results, with whatever consequences that might have for winners and losers. Iowans figure it might as well be themselves going first. They have the experience.