An old debate among Democrats has been revived, and I wrote about it at New York:

Political writers have understandably tried to make sense of the large 2020 Democratic field of presidential candidates by sorting them out ideologically (“left” or “center”) or by indicators of policy audacity (“bold” progressives versus “cautious” or “incremantalist” moderates). And part of the reason for the general belief that the party is “moving to the left” is the clustering of presidential candidates around policy positions (e.g., single-payer health care or a Green New Deal) that were considered “radical” not that long ago.

But as Ezra Klein observes after interviewing Pete Buttigieg, the most important differences may have less to do with what the candidates want to do and more with how they plan to do it — their theory of change:

“The central lesson of Obama’s presidency, Buttigieg argues, is that ‘any decisions that are based on an assumption of good faith by Republicans in the Senate will be defeated.’ The hope that you can pass laws through bipartisan compromise is dead. And that means governance is consistently, reliably failing to solve people’s problems, which is in turn radicalizing them against government itself.”

Which is, of course, precisely the way obstructionist Republicans led by Mitch McConnell planned it.

“Buttigieg’s response — one that you also hear from 2020 hopefuls Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Gov. Jay Inslee — is to restructure government so popular majorities translate more cleanly into governing majorities. He’s discussed eliminating the Electoral College, scrapping the filibuster, and remaking the Supreme Court so each party nominates the same number of justices and vacancies become less ‘apocalyptic.'”

There is not, however, any easy equivalence between the audacity of policy proposals and the willingness of candidates to consider the “process” changes that could make achieving these policies possible, as shown by Bernie Sanders, the “radical” who wants to preserve the filibuster and the current system for selecting Supreme Court justices. And indeed, you could imagine that a newly elected president who’s on fire to enact Medicare for All might not be initially inclined to spend political capital on boring process issues. As Klein says: “It’s easier to run for reelection bragging about a tax cut than about weakening the Electoral College.”

Klein points to a very useful 2007 essay by Mark Schmitt urging Democrats with very similar policy goals to focus on ways and means of achieving them:

“[Schmitt] argued that the contest between Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards was ‘not a primary about ideological differences, or electability, but rather one about a difference in candidates’ implicit assumptions about the current circumstance and how the levers of power can be used to get the country back on track.’ It was, he said, the ‘theory of change primary.'”

You can look back and say (as I just did) that Obama’s “theory of change” turned out to be significantly wrong. But in the circumstances of 2009, it’s unlikely that either Hillary Clinton’s claim of hard work being the answer, or John Edwards’s appeal to pure confrontation, would have done much better. So now, given the enduring reality of Republican obstruction, and their reliance on institutional barriers to democracy and change, having a clear-eyed understanding of the prerequisites to policy achievements is an absolute must for the 46th president. And this should not be a topic confined to elites; Schmitt’s proposed “theory of change primary” can and should be held in the early televised debates and on the campaign trail.

To put it another way, Donald Trump should be the last U.S. president to take office with no clue about how to implement his campaign promises.

I’ve been watching the polls closely to see if the president’s getting the sort of popularity “bump” he anticipated from the news that Mueller didn’t find clear-cut evidence of collusion or obstruction of justice, and wrote it up at New York:

[N]ine days after Barr’s letter to Congress revealing Mueller’s legal conclusions was transmitted and released, a growing number of public opinion surveys are showing virtually no change in Trump’s famously stable (or stagnant, depending on how you look at it) approval ratings. His average approval rating according to RealClearPolitics was 43.6 percent on March 24, the day the Barr letter was released, and was 43.2 percent on April 1. At FiveThirtyEight, Trump’s average approval rating was an identical 42.1 percent on March 24 and April 1.

Nate Silver notes that there’s quite a bit of data supporting a “no game-changer” read on the Barr letter:

“While I’d urge a little bit of caution on these numbers — sometimes there’s a lag before a news event is fully reflected in the polls — there’s actually been quite a bit of polling since Barr’s letter came out, including polls from high-quality organizations such as Marist College, NBC News and the Wall Street Journal, Quinnipiac University and the Pew Research Center which were conducted wholly or partially after the Barr letter was published. Some of these polls showed slight improvements in Trump’s approval rating, but others showed slight declines. Unless you’re willing to do a lot of cherry-picking, there just isn’t anything to make the case that much has changed.”

In terms of explaining this result, Silver offers an assortment of possible interpretations, but the one that makes the most intuitive sense is that the only people who really cared whether Trump colluded with the Russians were Democrats, who aren’t going to turn around and praise his presidency even if they are convinced he didn’t commit one of many horrific acts:

For the same reason, the full Mueller report isn’t likely to cut much ice in public opinion, either, whether it supports or undermines the positive claims Trump and his allies have been making with every breath. And it’s another indication that opinions of the 45th president are so sharply polarized that it will be difficult to change them, which means the identity of his 2020 opponent and the degree of enthusiasm he can inspire in the MAGA crowd may determine his fate. Since the Trump campaign and Republicans generally have already preemptively been pounding the 2020 Democratic field as a bright-red landscape of unremitting socialism, infanticide, and political correctness, while encouraging his supporters to approach the campaign season in a hate rage, the Mueller report and Barr’s summary probably won’t change his reelection strategy, either.

The huge field of Democrats running or considering a 2020 presidential race has a lot of diversity. I discussed one aspect of their differences this week at New York:

In assessing the very large Democratic field assembling to challenge Trump in 2020, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that a lot of politicians with résumés that would not normally bespeak presidential timber have taken a look at the 45th president’s rise to the White House and concluded there are no longer any minimum requirements. Yes, there have been presidents with no prior experience in elected office, but before Trump they were all war heroes (Taylor, Grant, and Eisenhower) or Cabinet members (Taft and Hoover). A few major-party nominees were closer to Trump in the empty résumé department (notably 1904 Democratic nominee Alton Parker, a state judge, and 1940 Republican nominee Wendell Willkie, a utility executive), but for the most part, especially in more recent times, the major parties have nominated former or current senators and governors.

A recent Morning Consult poll suggests that rank-and-file Democratic voters still value that kind of high-level experience, with 66 percent saying that “decades of political experience” was “very important” or “somewhat important” to them in choosing a 2020 nominee. That could help explain why two candidates (one potential and one actual) who together have 81 years of experience in elected office, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, top every poll. And there’s more where that came from: An astonishing seven former or current U.S. senators are in the race.

It’s possible that while Trump hasn’t totally dispelled an interest in experience among voters in either party, Democrats are less worried than they might normally be about sending up a relative novice to oppose him; it’s not like Trump is going to depict himself as the wise, credentialed, steady hand on the tiller. It’s notable that candidates at both ends of the experience spectrum — Biden and Sanders, and O’Rourke and Buttigieg — are thought to be potentially strong among the white working-class voters so important to Trump’s 2016 election and 2020 reelection prospects. Perhaps all that’s going on is that against the terrifying Trump Democrats are valuing perceived electability above all.

It’s also possible that candidates like O’Rourke and Buttigieg are best compared to recent flash-in-the-pan presidential candidates on the Republican side like Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain (in 2012) or Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina (in 2016), who got an audition but were eventually cast aside. But one thing’s for sure: Democrats won’t forget about Trump and what happened in 2016 for a moment in selecting their next nominee.

The intersection of religion and politics is one of my favorite subjects, and I have a good opportunity to write about it this week at New York:

it’s important now and then to challenge the conservative assertion — often shared in ignorance by secular media — that religiosity, and particularly Christian religiosity, dictates reactionary positions on culture and politics. So I found it interesting and provocative that 2020 presidential candidate Cory Booker goes out of his way to talk about his own religious faith:

“[Booker] bids fair to become the most overtly Christian Democratic presidential candidate since Jesse Jackson and perhaps even Jimmy Carter, at a time when his party is trending irreligious and the opposition claims a monopoly on all things biblical. What makes Booker different from many left-of-center figures who are “personally” religious is that he purports to be progressive because of his faith, not despite it or incidentally alongside it (e.g., the way John F. Kennedy referred to his own faith as an ‘accident of birth’). If this becomes central to his identity as a presidential wannabe, it will be provocative to both the Christian right and to secular Democrats. And that could be both a benefit and a handicap for Booker ’20.”

As E.J. Dionne observes, there is another 2020 Democratic presidential candidate who’s conspicuously talking about his faith, the fast-rising dark horse Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana.

“During an appearance on MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ last week, the 37-year-old from South Bend, Ind., made a modest plea: ‘I do think it’s important for candidates to at least have the option to talk about our faith,’ he said. He specifically targeted the idea that ‘the only way a religious person could enter politics is through the prism of the religious right.’

“An Episcopalian and a married gay man, Buttigieg pointed to the core Christian concept that ‘the first shall be last; the last shall be first.’

“He added: ‘What could be more different than what we’re being shown in Washington right now — often with some people who view themselves as religious on the right, cheering it on? . . . Here we have this totally warped idea of what Christianity should be like when it comes into the public sphere, and it’s mostly about exclusion. Which is the last thing that I imbibe when I take in scripture in church.'”

Dionne notes that Booker and Elizabeth Warren share Buttigieg’s willingness to talk about Christian faith. But what makes Mayor Pete especially interesting is that he challenges the idea that Christianity is inherently homophobic in a direct and personal manner. To him, LGBTQ folk aren’t third parties who are the subject of some argument between Christians and progressives: He’s Christian, progressive, and gay. So conservative Christians who like to imply that their more accepting co-religionists aren’t “real” or “orthodox” because they don’t exclude gay people need to be willing to tell Buttigieg he’s taking the Lord’s name in vain. And that may be — and certainly should be — uncomfortable for them.

The Episcopal Church of America accepts gay parishioners, priests, and bishops in churches that recite the Nicene Creed every Sunday and have as authentic a claim to “orthodoxy” as any other church and more than many. So, too, do such solid elements of the American and global religious landscape as the United Church of Christ (a.k.a. Congregationalists), the Presbyterian Church (USA) (the largest gathering in that faith tradition), the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ditto), the Unitarian-Universalist Association, and many congregations and whole regions of the United Methodists and my own Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) that embrace gay people as equals in every way. There are many smaller denominations and nondenominational gatherings that do the same. And that’s aside from the millions of individual Catholics, Evangelicals, and Pentecostals who reject, quietly or openly, the homophobia of their own denominations.

Any Democratic presidential nominee who can authentically talk about his or her faith would be well advised to do so if only to confound Christian-right leaders and followers who have cast their own lots with the heathenish warlord in the White House. But Pete Buttigieg offers a particularly interesting contrast with the 45th president. Would anyone be confident in accusing this married, churchgoing, Afghanistan veteran of being ethically inferior to Donald Trump? Not without risking hellfire.

There’s been a lot written about the Democratic House’s new voting rights push. But as I argued at New York, much of the discussion doesn’t quite capture its scope and historical significance.

The remarkable partisan polarization over HR1 — House Democrats’ ambitious but hardly novel package of “pro-democracy” reforms, centered on voting rights — shows that this issue, once a matter of bipartisan do-gooder sentiment, has now become a deadly serious point of contention in our politics. This has happened rather quickly as the two parties each came to recognize their future might depend on expanding or restricting ballot access.

All 234 House Democrats present voted for HR1 while all 193 Republicans present voted against it. That’s remarkable given the bipartisan support voting rights (and even other features of the bill like campaign finance reform) had until very recently. To be sure, politicians in both parties still think ballot access is critically important. But Republicans, having placed their bets on an electoral base that is overwhelmingly white and significantly upscale, are becoming deeply invested in suppression of voting opportunities for those who are unlikely to join their coalition.

A recent study showed that of 20 states identified as making it most difficult to vote, Trump carried 17. Hillary Clinton carried 12 of the 20 states where it is easiest to vote.

The homeland of Republican voter suppression is in the South, where keeping African-Americans from the ballot box is an ancient tradition practiced mostly by Democrats in the long period from the emancipation of slaves until the end of Jim Crow. Now across the region the Republicans who control every state legislature in the former Confederacy are pursuing an ensemble of measures to restrict the franchise, from cutbacks in early voting, to aggressive voter purges, to voter-ID requirements, to reductions in polling places. This trend rapidly proliferated after the 2013 Supreme Court decision (supported by all five Republican-appointed Justices, with all four Democratic-appointed Justices dissenting) that killed the chief enforcement mechanism of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Without the requirement that states with a history of racial discrimination submit election system changes to the U.S. Justice Department for “preclearance,” it’s been open season on ballot access, particularly as racial polarization in partisan preferences has intensified.

As veteran political journalist Ron Brownstein has observed, the current split in Congress over HR 1 is just the beginning of an era in which one party supports and the other opposes voting rights: it’s a struggle that may determine political dominance in many states and nationally for years to come:

“Particularly in states across the Sun Belt — from North Carolina, Florida and Georgia to Texas and Arizona — the electoral competition is shaped by a stark demographic divide. In all of those states, Democrats are increasingly reliant on growing populations of younger and nonwhite voters. But in each of those states and others demographically similar to them, a Republican coalition almost entirely dependent on white voters — especially older, blue-collar and non-urban whites — still has the advantage, particularly in state elections.

“In each state the Republican majorities have used that power to approve either restrictions on voting — such as tougher voter identification laws — partisan gerrymanders or both, making it more difficult for that emerging nonwhite electorate to overturn their dominance.”

As in the Reconstruction era after the Civil War, one party is committed to the use of federal power to vindicate voting rights, and the other is opposed. Today’s Republicans don’t openly tout white racial supremacy rationales the way many Democrats of the 19th century did, but they do similarly claim they are simply defending states’ rights to control elections, and warn of electoral fraud and corruption, and less vocally, of a partisan conspiracy whereby minority voters will use their political power to redistribute the wealth of virtuous tax-paying white folks. Southern opponents of the first Reconstruction resorted to terrorism along with less violent forms of intimidation aimed at black would-be voters and officeholders. But formal disenfranchisement was accomplished throughout the region by 1900, aided by Supreme Court rulings sharply limiting federal jurisdiction over elections. Now strategies for disenfranchisement are covert and partial. But like yesterday’s Democrats, today’s Republicans are acutely aware that their local and national power depends on holding back a tide of minority voting power than might submerge their party.

These partisan dynamics are what separate today’s climate from that of what many have called the Second Reconstruction, the civil-rights era that culminated with the successful implementation of school desegregation, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The battle lines then were mostly regional rather than partisan, though the prominence of Democratic president Lyndon B. Johnson in the key landmark legislation initiated a partisan realignment of the South that led formerly Democratic white conservatives overwhelmingly into the GOP. That party was slowly but surely transformed into a militantly conservative bastion of support for states rights and property rights, and opposition to the kind of public spending that might disproportionately help minorities.

The white conservative backlash to the First Reconstruction succeeded almost totally in the disenfranchisement of African-Americans and the imposition of a virtual apartheid regime at the end of the 19th century. The Second Reconstruction’s accomplishments have been undermined more subtly, via voter suppression measures in the states and recent illustrations of residual racism from redlining to efforts to drain public schools of resources to police misconduct aimed at minority citizens and undocumented immigrants.

And so, arguably, we are seeing the first stages of a Third Reconstruction, again focused on (but not limited to) the South, with the goal of finally realizing the promise of equality extended in the so-called Reconstruction Amendments (the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, which abolished slavery, mandated equal protection for all citizens, and banned discrimination in voting) enacted after the Civil War. Because the bipartisanship of the Second Reconstruction has been lost, the Third Reconstruction may be as bitterly divisive as the First, and could quickly grow to overshadow other political issues. And while this Third Reconstruction may extend to multiple issues touching on equality, it will almost certainly be rooted in the fight for voting rights, which will determine the balance of power in many states and nationally.

Reverend William Barber II, the North Carolina pastor who founded that state’s Moral Mondays movement in opposition to a conservative takeover that made voter suppression prominent and explicit, titled his 2016 memoir/manifesto The Third Reconstruction. In it he accentuated the importance of voting rights as a threshold issue:

“Because political power is a democracy’s chief safeguard against injustice, we must continue to engage the voting rights issue after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which removed protections against voter suppression in southern states that had been in place for half a century. This fight is, in many ways, bigger than Selma and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That expansion of voting rights fifty years ago was a concession to the civil rights movement. We didn’t get all we were asking for. Now, fifty years later, we’re fighting to hold on to the compromise. What we really need is a constitutional amendment to guarantee the same voting rights in every state. This must be the cornerstone of the Third Reconstruction.”

Constitutional amendments in our system are very difficult to secure. But HR1 and Sewell’s legislation restoring the VRA together represent an effort to nationalize voting rights as much as the Constitution allows, as both its supporters and opponents acknowledge. HR1 takes a chainsaw to the thicket of voter-suppression techniques Republican-controlled states have contrived, which in intent echo the formal disenfranchisement the first Reconstruction fought and the poll taxes and literacy tests targeted by the second. And the restored voting rights enforcement mechanism in the Justice Department that Sewell’s bill would provide is aimed at rebuilding the federal government’s oversight of state and local electoral procedures, giving the victims of voters suppression an ally as powerful as the Freedmen’s Bureau of the first Reconstruction.

As in the first two Reconstructions, action in Washington will depend on the success of local grassroots pressure in the states where the battle against voter suppression rages. And that means today’s voting rights push must become not merely an issue among issues, but a social movement with a sense of moral urgency.