Having heard a lot of despair from Democrats over high-profile recruits turning down the opportunity to run for the Senate, I looked at some trends and suggested a more optimistic approach at New York:

[A]s my colleague Eric Levitz recently explained, a Republican-controlled Senate could dash hopes that a progressive 46th president could enact any kind of legislative agenda or reverse the conservative judicial revolution that Donald Trump is overseeing. Beyond that, a Democratic president who can’t get anything done would be a strong candidate for a disastrous 2022 midterm and early lame-duck status.

So picking up three net Senate seats is almost as urgent a task for Democrats in 2020 as getting Trump out of the White House. The conventional wisdom in some circles is that Democratic Senate hopes have been betrayed by potentially strong candidates (e.g., Texas’s Beto O’Rourke, Montana’s Steve Bullock, and Georgia’s Stacey Abrams) selfishly deciding to pursue other offices and other goals. Aside from how you feel about the proposition that these people owe the Democratic Party a year or so of tough, miserable campaign work and then six years in a job they may not even want, the candidate-driven look at 2020 Senate races may be missing something more fundamental. In the last presidential election year, split-ticket voting in Senate races basically vanished. That’s right: In 2016, all 34 races were won by the party that won the state in question in the presidential contest. That’s never happened before. As Harry Enten pointed out, there wasn’t much variation in the pattern of votes:

Unless 2016 was an outlier (and given a general trend toward straight-ticket voting, that’s unlikely), you can see why most observers are pessimistic about Democrat Doug Jones surviving a presidential year in Alabama (Trump won the state by 27 points), and also why Steve Bullock wasn’t interested in a Senate race in Montana (which Trump carried by 20 points) and Beto O’Rourke gave it a pass in Texas (a nine-point Trump win in 2016).

More generally, the depressing fact for Democrats is that 22 of the 34 Senate races in 2020 are happening in states won by Trump in 2016. Considering that Trump managed to lose the national popular vote, that’s mostly a reminder that the United States Senate, with its equal seats for California and Wyoming, is a fundamentally anti-democratic (and hence anti-Democratic) institution.

There is a flip side to this straight-ticket-voting reality: If Democrats win the presidential race decisively, some of those presidential red states could turn blue. In particular, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina are states with 2020 Senate races against Republican incumbents where Democrats think they have a decent chance of beating Trump this time. Add in two states Trump lost last time that have Republican senators up in 2020 (Colorado and Maine), and the odds of liberating the upper chamber from Mitch McConnell’s death grip look a lot better. That means a strong Democratic investment in purplish states with Senate races could pay off doubly.

Strange things can always happen in the interim, of course: Joe Manchin could practically hand over his Senate seat to Republicans if he resigned to run for governor of West Virginia. On the other hand, Alabama Republicans could make an equally generous gesture by again nominating Roy Moore to run against Jones. But instead of obsessing about recruitment of ideal candidates for potentially winnable Senate races, Democrats would be wise to focus on winning those states against Trump, with all the good things that could mean down-ballot.

As a long-time national convention junkie, I’m looking forward to next year’s Democratic assemblage with even greater than usual interest, and wrote about some candidate contingency planning at New York:

Even though campaigns stay mostly focused on the immediate, there have to be strategies in place for remote (in time and likelihood) contingencies. With 21 Democratic candidates already in the field and at least one more (Steve Bullock) on the way, they must all deal with the possibility of Democrats arriving in Milwaukee in July of next year with nobody having the requisite majority of pledged delegates buttoned down.

Under this “contested convention” scenario, a strange and ironic thing would happen once a by-the-book first ballot ended in deadlock. Party superdelegates, the ex officio delegates (mostly elected officials and DNC members) who lost their independent first-ballot voting power in a post-2016 concession to angry Bernie Sanders supporters, would regain it on any second or subsequent ballot. So after being written off as nonentities, these largely Establishment figures — 769 of them in all, compared to 3,768 pledged delegates — could, in the context of a contested convention, wind up deciding it all.

As Ruby Cramer of BuzzFeed reports, the Democratic campaigns are beginning to think about this scenario. Unsurprisingly, Bernie Sanders, who has (a) prior experience running for president, (b) money to burn, and (c) a robust record of trashing the very institution of superdelegates, seems to be thinking about it most deeply:

“’We’re taking superdelegates and superdelegates strategy seriously,’ a Sanders aide said, ‘hence having a team dedicated to delegates who can prepare for multiple convention scenarios. We will be reaching out to them over the course of the campaign. When the senator wins the nomination, he’s eager to work with them to support and unite of all the party in the general and beyond.'”

Of course he is.

Cramer touts Kamala Harris’s campaign as having a very effective superdelegate outreach program already, under the direction of Hillary Clinton’s top 2016 delegate tracker (who also worked for DNC chairman Tom Perez). But it’s kinda something any candidate with the resources for it would want to do even if a contested convention was impossible:

“An official from Harris’s campaign pointed out that superdelegate outreach is good politics regardless of whether they factor in the convention. ‘All of these people — whether they are DNC members or members of Congress — have footholds in their communities,’ the Harris official said. ‘Obviously we are reaching out to those individuals and doing our due diligence.'”

That will matter a whole lot more if Democrats look up after the blitz of March primaries and see no one really in charge of the race:

“[F]ully 60 percent of pledged delegates will be awarded during a two-week period running from March 3 (generally known as Super Tuesday) through March 17, when primaries are scheduled in fully half the states (a share that could go even higher if late-deciding states like New York move into this window). Depending on what happens in the four February contests that are “protected” from additional competition by national party rules (Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina, in that order), this huge bloc of early-to-mid-March states could either produce scattered results that make an early decision impossible, or could instead make one candidate the putative (not official, but certain) nominee.”

In the case of a Wild West scenario, superdelegates could again walk tall in the councils of the Donkey Party, and even the fieriest of insurgents will find kind words to say about those staid Establishment figures toiling in the party’s vineyards.

One of the oldest arguments in politics reemerged this week, and I wrote about it at New York:

There is no area of argument in politics hoarier than the one that revolves around targeting “base” or “swing” voters — or to put it another way, the choice between mobilizing voters who already agree with you or persuading voters who don’t but might.

There’s obviously some ideological freight carried by the argument, since by definition base voters are going to be more comfortable with positions and messages most distinct from that of the opposition, while swing voters tend to listen to both sides. And so, among Democrats, base versus swing has long been a bone of contention between centrists and progressives.

This argument used to be one in which centrists usually had the upper hand because there were so very many swing voters, and also because winning a swing voter had the dual effect of gaining Democrats a vote while taking one away from Republicans. But with the rapid shrinkage of swing voting amid growing partisan polarization, and the heavy investment of Republicans in obstructing full voting opportunities for young people and minorities, the shoe is more often on the other foot now, with base mobilization becoming more essential and swing-voter persuasion being more difficult. It should still be possible for campaigns to do both. But on occasion representatives of the base view appeals to swing voters as something of a betrayal.

That’s how New York Times columnist Charles Blow appears to feel about appeals to white working-class voters:

“[T]here is part of the Biden enthusiasm, and to a lesser extent the energy around candidates like Bernie Sanders, that focuses too heavily on the fickle white, working-class swing voters and is not enough focused on the party’s faithful.

“Indeed, in political circles, Biden’s chief attribute in this election feels like his apparent appeal to these white voters.”

Then Blow, well, blows up:

Blow goes on to quote from a 2017 sociological study concluding that only 18.6 percent of 2016 voters were from the white working class. But that study develops its own, narrow definition of “working class” based on specific occupations, which may be defensible as a matter of sociology but does not describe the much larger universe (most commonly defined as non-college-educated) of voters actual politicians are actually targeting. As Ruy Teixeira reports from a 2018 study of this larger universe, it represented 44 percent of the 2016 electorate.

But even if I think his numbers are way off, I can understand Blow’s frustration with those exclusively preoccupied with swing voters who don’t share the party’s basic values. As a southern Democrat, I was always bothered that the members of the party’s most important electoral bloc, African-Americans, were expected perpetually to vote for white candidates, including those who self-identified as conservatives, with no expectation of white-voter reciprocity. As white southern voters increasingly moved into the GOP ranks, this particular swing-voter strategy became morally if not politically obtuse.

Is that what’s going on with the national Democratic Party now? And is that why Joe Biden is a viable candidate? Is Paul Waldman right in saying that “Hoe Biden seems to be assembling a coalition combining ‘People who’d just be more comfortable with an older white guy’ and ‘People who figure other people would just be more comfortable with an older white guy'”?

There’s enough truth in that to make me chuckle, but on the other hand, the only reason Joe Biden is the 2020 front-runner is that he’s also the single-most-popular candidate among minority voters. A March 28 Quinnipiac poll of Democrats with detailed cross-tabs showed Biden supported by 44 percent of African-Americans (and just 29 percent of white voters), with Bernie Sanders a distant second at 17 percent.

More generally, it’s a rare and foolish Democrat who argues for targeting all white working-class voters; there’s a large segment lost for the foreseeable future thanks to reactionary racial, cultural, and even economic views, and a smaller but still significant segment that’s open to the same Democratic messages as most base voters. We are mostly, after all, talking about white working-class voters who supported Barack Obama in 2008 or 2012 — a candidate deeply beloved among base Democrats (and perhaps the main reason so many base Democrats currently like Joe Biden).

What will fail to bring these voters back, of course, is a Democratic Party that ignores them, or that treats them as inherently reactionary, or that goes out of its way to tell them they don’t matter politically. Charles Blow comes pretty close to arguing for precisely those tokens of disrespect:

“At some point, the leadership and the front-runner are going to have to explain to women and minorities why their inordinate focus on white, working-class voters is justified, and that explanation will have to extend beyond, ‘It’s the only way.'”

“That explanation no longer has currency. ‘Anything to defeat Trump’ is also not a soothing elixir. At some point, the loyal constituencies will demand to know: ‘What’s in it for us, specifically?’ And I don’t blame them.”

No one that I’m aware of is in favor of an “inordinate” focus on white working-class voters, but in the end a vote is a vote, and an a priori rejection of broad demographic categories is a good way to make sure you don’t get enough of them.

Without question, the base will determine the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, and no matter how much talk about electability takes place, it’s extremely unlikely anyone can win without explaining to “loyal constituencies” what’s in it for them, specifically. But treating the defeat of Donald Trump as a second-order consideration that’s less important than rewarding the steadiest of base voters is an approach that runs a high risk of forfeiting these very voters’ interests.

With Democrats now discussing the “electability” of their 2020 prospects, I thought it was worthwhile to conduct a thorough examination of Trump’s “reelectability,” and I wrote it up at New York.

As you can imagine, there’s no ironclad formula for determining these things (despite the occasional glib and inaccurate assertions that incumbents always win or that “it’s the economy, stupid”), particularly with respect to an outlandish president like Trump. But there are factors that will definitely have a bearing on the odds that he’ll have a second inaugural and can again radically exaggerate attendance.

1. The sheer power of incumbency

A statistic we’ll hear often between now and November 2020 is that four of the five presidents running for reelection after 1980 won — or alternatively, that eight of the 11 running since the end of World War II won. Some gabbers may even stack the deck a bit more by excluding Gerald Ford from the calculation, since he was never elected president or vice-president before his narrow 1976 loss. And there are those who would distinguish Ford and Jimmy Carter from any meaningful precedents because they had to overcome powerful intraparty primary challenges unlike anything Donald Trump is likely to face in 2020.

And there’s still another argument for excluding Carter, as noted by Musa al-Gharbi in predicting a Trump win in 2020:

“Had Ford won in 1976, it would have marked three consecutive terms for the GOP. If George H.W. Bush had won in 1992, it would have meant four consecutive Republican terms.

“Since 1932, only once has a party held the White House for less than eight years: the administration of Democrat Jimmy Carter from 1976 to 1980.”

In any event there are real advantages any incumbent president undoubtedly possesses:

“’Incumbents have the following advantages,’ says Allan Lichtman, a presidential historian at American University. ‘Name recognition; national attention, fundraising and campaign bases; control over the instruments of government; successful campaign experience; a presumption of success; and voters’ inertia and risk-aversion.'”

Name recognition and the ability to command attention are assets that don’t matter quite so much at the end of a high-profile presidential general election, and it’s hard to envision Trump ever being the natural choice of the risk-averse. But “control over the instruments of government” does involve the ability to throw a surprise or two into the mix (e.g., Barack Obama’s DACA directive in June 2012, which was not only quite popular but preempted a Romney move in the same direction that might have mitigated his harsh anti-immigrant image).

So Trump probably should be credited with a modest thumb on the scales simply for being in the White House already.

2. Good times for the economy

While most political scientists reject the idea that economic conditions are the only thing that matters in presidential elections involving an incumbent, virtually all predictive models do take the economy into account. And if there’s been a recent revision of expectations in Trump’s favor in recent weeks in the chattering classes generally, it’s because earlier signs of a possible near-term economic slowdown now appear to be hiccups. Initial estimates that first-quarter 2019 GDP growth came in at 3.2 percent(significantly higher than most economists’ expectations) struck fear into the hearts of many Democrats.

But economic indicators in the year before a presidential election aren’t usually a very reliable guide to how voters will feel when they head to the polls. One well-reputed model, developed by Emory University’s Alan Abramowitz, uses second-quarter GDP growth in the election year as the primary economic variable. Even economists who weren’t surprised by the early-2019 numbers (usually attributed to the effects of the 2017 tax legislation) aren’t predicting they’ll continue all the way into 2020. So what may matter more than any particular numbers right now is a general climate in which steady growth, low inflation, and perhaps a touch of partisan politics convince the Federal Reserve Board to continue expansionary monetary policies, keeping the economy in the pink as the 2020 election grows nigh (it’s frequently assumed that short of a catastrophe, very late economic developments don’t matter anymore than very early ones — hence Abramowitz’s second-quarter focus).

As a separate matter, however, strong economic indicators in 2019 could complicate Democratic messaging in the early phases of the presidential election cycle. Democrats and their presidential candidates may, accordingly, focus less on macroeconomic conditions than on arguments about growing wealth being poorly distributed, which is what a majority of Americans appear to believe even as they perceive economic conditions as relatively rosy.

3. Presidential approval ratings

It’s generally agreed that presidential job-approval ratings are the single most reliable indicator of any POTUS’s reelection prospects, if only because it reflects so many other factors, such as economic conditions, international developments, and the net effect of partisan pressures. Trump’s approval ratings 18 months out are not that different from those of a number of predecessors. The most recent monthly Gallup rating (from early April) has Trump at 45 percent, identical to Ronald Reagan’s number at this juncture in 1983; one point above Barack Obama’s 44 percent in 2011; and one point below Gerald Ford’s 46 percent in 1975. Reagan eventually won 49 states in 1984, Obama won by just under four points in 2012, and Ford lost very narrowly in 1976.

What separates Trump from all of these presidents, and indeed from all presidents, is the remarkable stability of his job-approval numbers; he’s had the least variation of any post–World War II president. His current Gallup rating is at his absolute peak, which he briefly achieved two other times in his presidency but could never sustain. Reagan’s Gallup approval rating rosefrom 45 percent 18 months out to 53 percent six months later, then 55 percent eight months later. Obama’s rose from 44 percent 18 months out to 52 percent on Election Eve. While anything’s possible, there’s no particular reason to think Trump is capable of a similar ascent. And for that matter, Gallup’s latest relatively high job-approval number for Trump could be an outlier on the high side: His average approval rating at Real Clear Politics is 43.1 percent, and at FiveThirtyEight, 41.3 percent. The GOP’s hope that the “exoneration” of Trump they falsely attributed to the Mueller report would finally get POTUS over the hump into something like positive job-approval territory did not turn out to be realistic at all.

Whether it’s a product of Trump’s singular personality or partisan polarization, his inflexible approval ratings do not bode well for an election-year surge, barring some very large external event or a very poor decision by Democrats in nominating an opponent.

4. Comparative popularity with opponents

Midterm elections are for the most part referenda on the party controlling the White House. Presidential elections involving an incumbent are partially that as well, but there is a significant comparative element, too, that is not as important in midterms.

The possibility that Trump could be reelected despite bad job-approval ratings is best illustrated by the still-shocking fact that he won in 2016 despite a horrendous Election Eve Gallup favorability ratio of 36/61. His opponent’s ratio of 47/52 was bad enough to enable him to win with an inside straight in the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote by more than two points. Since his entire 2020 strategy is again to drive down his opponent’s popularity with savagely negative attacks while solidifying his own base, Trump’s own popularity could again be less crucial than might otherwise be the case.

Despite an ever-increasing Democratic preoccupation with the “electability” of their 2020 prospects, it’s very difficult at this juncture to predict whether 2016 could repeat itself. Early trial heats show Trump mostly trailing the best-known Democrats, Biden and Sanders, and mostly leading the lesser-known aspirants. But early presidential trial heat polls do not have a very good record of predictive value. After a Democratic nominee is chosen such polls really will begin to be worth following; despite all the postelection caterwauling about inaccurate polls, they weren’t at all far off in 2016, as Nate Silver observed in a postmortem:

“[The] myth is that Trump’s victory represented some sort of catastrophic failure for the polls. Trump outperformed his national polls by only 1 to 2 percentage points in losing the popular vote to Clinton, making them slightly closer to the mark than they were in 2012. Meanwhile, he beat his polls by only 2 to 3 percentage points in the average swing state.”

After what happened in 2016, however, it’s a good guess that more extensive polling will be conducted in states that are competitive but not assumed to be battlegrounds, like the Rust Belt states that fell to Trump with very little warning.

A big imponderable is the question of whether the various Democratic candidates truly vary in electability, or if instead partisanship will drive the election — i.e., in the end, any Democrat will be a “generic” Democrat. Surely the specific identity of the nominee, and for that matter campaign developments like debates, will matter at least at the margins, where close elections are often won and lost. And it may also matter whether the nominee is or isn’t especially vulnerable to GOP campaign attack lines aimed at painting the Democrat as an “extremist,” or to put it another way, as risky a proposition as a second term for Trump.

5. Other factors

Reporters will pay a lot of attention to fundraising numbers heading toward 2020. But while these may matter in primaries, barring massive advantages by one side or the other, money isn’t usually a decisive factor in presidential general elections, in part because name identification isn’t an issue and in part because there’s so much unpaid media available. How the money is spent could be important, but it’s a bit too early to make comparative conclusions about any of that.

Comparative turnout will matter a lot, and both parties are expected to focus more than ever on driving base voters to the polls, both via mechanical outreach efforts and inflammatory rhetoric. Generally speaking, presidential elections bring out pro-Democratic elements of the electorate more than midterms, though high 2018 turnout from those very elements could mean Democrats shouldn’t count on that much of a boost in 2020. Long-term demographic trends universally assumed to favor Democrats will have marginally affected the shape of the electorate since 2016, which is one of those things that could make a difference in another razor-close Electoral College contest.

There is one factor that is difficult to measure but undoubtedly real that could help get Democrats across the line in 2020: Trump will not ambush them again. It’s unclear how many should-have-been Clinton voters in 2016 didn’t bother to vote, went third-party, or even cast a protest vote for Trump on the assumption that HRC was certain to win. But anecdotally at least, they existed, and that very likely won’t happen again. Similarly, the 2020 Democratic candidate, whoever it is, will almost certainly avoid the underinvestment in what turned out to be crucial battlegrounds that the Clinton campaign mistakenly made.

Last but not least, there’s the little matter of some election-altering set of external events. There’s no way to know if some sudden international development involving military conflict, or some domestic terrorist incident, will happen between now and November 2020 and, in that event, whether Trump will handle it in a way that helps or hurts him politically. Right now, Democrats and neutral observers alike are engaged in an intense argumentabout whether moving toward impeachment of Trump would help crystallize public understanding of his corrupt and even criminal character, or would distract voters from more compelling anti-Trump arguments. How that argument is resolved could be one of the greatest wild cards for 2020.

So adding all this up, how do Trump’s reelection prospects look? I still think he’s an underdog — albeit a menacing, loudly growling underdog — for reelection given his perpetually poor approval ratings; the likelihood that Democrats’ larger base will be exceptionally motivated to turn him out of office lest the existential threat of a second Trump term materialize; and his inability to control some of his worst impulses, even when it’s politically imperative.

But a Trump defeat won’t happen automatically, and we already know that precedent-shattering bad behavior by the incumbent is so fundamental to his identity that it probably won’t matter at all, unless a critical mass of voters just get weary of the whole circus — in which case, he’s toast.

Listening to some of the “opening arguments” for various 2020 Democratic presidential candidates, it struck me that many campaigns use the same words but mean different things. One of the most important of these is “electability,” so I thought it would be useful to sort out the varying assumptions at play, and wrote it up at New York: