The Iowa caucuses are complicated enough without the “virtual caucus” option the DNC forced on the state’s Democrats. But now the DNC is disallowing the method Iowa and Nevada have proposed for implementing it, as I explained at New York:

In a potentially major development affecting two of the four protected “early states” in the 2020 Democratic presidential nominating process, the Democratic National Committee let it be known that it’s going to disallow the “virtual caucus” option for remote access to delegate selection events in Iowa and Nevada next February. The Des Moines Register broke the story:

“The decision was confirmed to the Des Moines Register late Thursday by two sources close to the conversations. It follows a meeting of the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee last week in San Francisco, where members voiced concerns about the security of the Iowa plan and the potential for hacking.”

First Iowa, and then Nevada, have developed plans to let otherwise eligible voters cast their votes in caucuses by phone rather than showing up in person. What will make the apparent red light maddening to party officials in the two states is that the DNC forced them to make this option available in response to complaints — many of them from 2016 Bernie Sanders supporters, though Hillary Clinton offered similar criticism back in 2008 — that the traditional caucuses (and more generally, the traditional nominating process) excessively restricted participation. Iowa (followed by Nevada) wound up choosing a teleconference model for remote caucusing as more feasible than an absentee-ballot system or caucusing-by-proxy. But then this happened, as Bloomberg reported last weekend:

“At a closed-door session of the Rules and By-Laws Committee on Thursday, the DNC told the panel that experts convened by the party were able to hack into a conference call among the committee, the Iowa Democratic Party and Nevada Democratic Party, raising concerns about teleconferencing for virtual caucuses, according to three people who were at the meeting.”

The trouble — for Iowa, at least — with something less techno-dependent like mail ballots is that it could make the caucuses begin to resemble a primary and run afoul of New Hampshire’s law requiring its secretary of state to do whatever is necessary, including moving its primary to the previous year, to maintain its first-in-the-nation status.

It probably didn’t help the reputation of the “virtual caucus” system that it was even more fiendishly complicated than the traditional Iowa event, as Vox explains:

“The plan the Iowa Democratic party came up with would have given virtual caucus-goers six different days/times to call and choose their candidates. The last available day would have been February 3 — caucus day itself. Users would have dialed a phone number, entered a unique pin and their date of birth to verify their identities, and ranked up to five 2020 candidate choices over the phone.

“What was trickier is how these people’s votes were to be counted and how much they would have accounted for. Here’s how it was supposed to work: All of Iowa’s four congressional districts would have been allocated up to an additional 10 percent of the overall state delegate equivalents (or, the delegate totals from each county). In other words, if one congressional district had 400 people going to their delegate convention, they would get an extra 40 delegates that could be awarded based on the results from the virtual caucus.”

This wrinkle exacerbated complaints about Iowa’s “delegate equivalent” system for reporting caucus results; the DNC had already required that raw caucus totals be made public (to this day, many Bernie Sanders supporters believe he, not Clinton, would have won Iowa in 2016 had raw votes been reported). Two pots of raw votes — one of live caucusgoers, one of virtual caucusgoers — made the whole thing even more unwieldy.

Nevada had a simpler system whereby people could call in votes during one two-day window, but it has to go back to the drawing board as well.

With the Iowa and Nevada caucuses less than six months away, the DNC may simply decide to give Iowa and Nevada a waiver from its rules for 2020 and then work on fixing the system for the future — or perhaps even make more fundamental reforms in the nominating system. If that happens, a lot of campaign planning based on the virtual caucuses will have been wasted. Iowa political analyst Pat Rynard speculates about the potential impact:

“Politically speaking, the biggest beneficiary of this debacle is Joe Biden. One of the best strategies to winning the Iowa Caucus is to inspire, organize and bring out a lot of new, first-time caucus-goers. Candidates like Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker and Julian Castro are all very well-suited to do just that. While Biden has strong support among the older and long-time caucus veterans who always show up, it is harder to see how he would turn out a whole new generation of caucus-goers like Barack Obama did in 2008 or Sanders did in 2016.

“The virtual caucus would have greatly aided candidates who were focused on new voters. Even though they were still emphasizing showing up in person, campaigns would happily direct their supporters who simply can’t make it out on caucus night into the phone option.

“However, even if this caucus runs like a more traditional year, Warren’s superior ground game still poses the greatest threat to Biden. But Biden’s chances are certainly better without the virtual option, and any margin of victory from anyone who might pass him may be smaller.”

It’s possible as well that having provoked the reforms that led to the virtual caucus system, Sanders supporters will view the DNC action as another Establishment effort to “rig” the results. But this really isn’t a very good time in political history to adopt potentially hackable technologies for voting events.

Pity the pollsters and campaign tacticians who have to do their work without knowing the shape and size of the caucus-going universe, at least until this mess is sorted out.

A major development in my home state of Georgia led me to explain its significance at New York:

Like Arizona, another potential sunbelt target, it has been slowly but steadily trending Democratic, making it an increasingly plausible presidential prize among the states carried by Donald Trump in 2016. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’s impressive 2018 midterm showing was another sign of Georgia’s increasingly purple hue; she also proved you don’t have to run away from the national party’s progressive issue stance to do well in this former Blue Dog bastion. Republican senator David Perdue is up in 2020, and he’s thought to be potentially vulnerable. There are also two highly competitive U.S. House races on tap in north metro Atlanta, where Democrats picked up one seat in 2018 and are aiming for another next year.

Now, veteran Republican senator Johnny Isakson (who has Parkinson’s disease) has announced he will resign his seat at the end of 2019, which means the state will hold a special election in conjunction with the 2020 general election to fill the last two years of his term. That race, along with Atlanta’s status as a regional media center, should guarantee major bipartisan political spending in the state in 2020.

The Republican candidate to succeed Isakson will likely be chosen by Governor Brian Kemp, who will appoint an interim senator when the incumbent steps down at the end of the year. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Greg Bluestein reports that a list of familiar statewide GOP pols is likely under consideration for the appointment:

“It’s not yet clear who Kemp will appoint to fill Isakson’s seat, though potential candidates include Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr, state Senate Pro Tem Butch Miller, Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, U.S. Rep. Doug Collins and U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue.”

This last name will surely raise eyebrows. The former governor is the cousin of that other Senator Perdue, and while two Perdues in the Senate would accurately reflect this extended family’s domination of the Georgia GOP, it would be a mite risky, too. This possibility could depend on how badly Sonny wants to get away from the angry farmers he is facing as Agriculture secretary, thanks to his boss’s trade policies. He’s also 72 years of age, a bit long in the tooth for a freshman senator.

The name of a much younger man with impeccable GOP credentials may also eventually come up: Nick Ayers, who, as a college student, was Sonny Perdue’s “body man” during his first gubernatorial bid. Ayers moved on to become a national Republican operative and wunderkind, and was most recently chief of staff to former political client Vice-President Mike Pence. His knack for being in the right place at the right time would certainly be enhanced by a Senate appointment, and he knows how to raise money.

Kemp has a while to ponder his choices, but Democrats looking at a second 2020 Senate race need to get it in gear. Stacey Abrams, the candidate most Democrats in Georgia and across the country would have preferred (for this Senate race, or as a challenger to David Perdue) instantly ruled it out, preempting a world of pressure.

One immediate question is whether any of the three initially viable Democrats who have been considering running against Perdue — former Columbus mayor Teresa Tomlinson (likely the front-runner), outspokenly progressive Clarkston mayor Ted Terry, or 2018 nominee for Lieutenant Governor Sarah Riggs Amico — will switch to the other Senate race. But as Bluestein notes, the prospect of an open seat (or at least one occupied by an appointee) could attract some even more familiar names from the not-so-distant Democratic past:

“Among the potential Democratic contenders for the seat are the Rev. Raphael Warnock, the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church; Jon Ossoff, a former candidate for Georgia’s 6th Congressional District; Jason Carter, the runner-up for governor in 2014; and Michelle Nunn, who was defeated by David Perdue in the 2014 Senate race.”

Ossoff, Carter, and Nunn are known as formidable fundraisers, but all lost after stirring up a lot of local and national Democratic excitement.

One important wrinkle about the race to fill Isakson’s seat is that, as a special election, it will not be part of the standard party primaries but a single “jungle primary” on general-election day, followed by what is likely to be a low-turnout runoff in January. So among Democrats in particular, there will be an effort to clear the field to give a single candidate a clear shot at a November win. It could all get crazy.

The impending end of Isakson’s career represents a landmark of its own. Arguably his retirement (along with that of Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander) removes one of the last vestiges of an old-school, moderate southern Republicanism that wasn’t based on racism and didn’t involve snarling partisanship. He’s gone along to get along in the Trump era, but he was increasingly a rather sad figure from an increasingly distant past. You can be sure that whoever the self-styled “politically incorrect conservative” Brian Kemp chooses to replace Isakson will not be his equal in basic decency.

Jamelle Bouie struck a chord with a column, so I decided to expand on it at New York with some examples of what he’s talking about:

Jamelle Bouie explains something important it in a very useful column for the New York Times:

“Spend enough time talking politics on the internet — or in any other public forum — and you’ll run into this standard reply to anyone who wants more democracy in American government: ‘We’re a republic, not a democracy.’

“You saw it over the weekend in an exchange between Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Dan Crenshaw of Texas. In a brief series of tweets, Ocasio-Cortez made the case against the Electoral College and argued for a national popular vote to choose the president. ‘Every vote should be = in America, no matter who you are or where you come from,’ she wrote. ‘The right thing to do is establish a Popular Vote. & GOP will do everything they can to fight it.’

“Crenshaw, who has sparred with Ocasio-Cortez before, jumped in with a response: ‘Abolishing the Electoral College means that politicians will only campaign in (and listen to) urban areas. That is not a representative democracy.’ And then he said it: ‘We live in a republic, which means 51% of the population doesn’t get to boss around the other 49%.'”

Bouie points out that this argument for the Electoral College is simply wrong on its own terms (like most arguments for the Electoral College). But he challenges the premise that the United States has a form of government that makes democratic principles irrelevant. In part, he does this by distinguishing between the direct democracy the Founders did fear and the representative democracy they gave us. But he also gives us a quick account of the unsavory history of the “republic, not a democracy” slogan:

“The term went from conservative complaint to right-wing slogan in the 1960s, when Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, used it in a September 1961 speech, ‘Republics and Democracies.’ In a democracy, Welch protested, ‘there is a centralization of governmental power in a simple majority. And that, visibly, is the system of government which the enemies of our republic are seeking to impose on us today.'”

For us baby-boomers, the Birchers’ use of the term republic to justify all sorts of artificial restraints on popular majorities rings familiar. But aside from its precise origins, the general intention in opposing a “republic” to a “democracy” is clear:

“The point of the slogan isn’t to describe who we are but to claim and co-opt the founding for right-wing politics — to naturalize political inequality and make it the proper order of things. What lies behind that quip, in other words, is an impulse against democratic representation. It is part and parcel of the drive to make American government a closed domain for a select, privileged few.”

Some specific examples beyond the defense of the Electoral College come to mind that reflect the conservative tendency to use “republican” limitations on democracy to justify and even expand privilege.

(1) States’ Rights Champions: The oldest and most thoroughly abused doctrine seeking to take “republican” restraints on democracy and justify privilege is the ancient rebel yell of “states’ rights.” Pre–Civil War defenders of slavery often claimed that the power of states to protect the peculiar institution was essential to the ability to maintain liberty and even democracy for white people (often citing the Athenian precedent). Similarly, the Southern revolt against Reconstruction and the imposition of Jim Crow were rationalized as self-protection against the tyranny of the (black and/or carpetbagger) majority that prevailed in many parts of the region or, alternatively, against the race-mixing national political consensus. That this doctrine produced local tyranny and entrenched racial privilege was obvious, if often ignored by its defenders.

(2) The Lochnerians: This conservative legal movement — which harks back to the era of constitutional jurisprudence defined by the 1905 Supreme Court decision in New York v. Lochner (eventually overturned after its application, as invalidating much of the early New Deal produced a near constitutional crisis) — holds that fixed private-property rights embedded in the Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment cannot be abrogated by federal or state legislatures. There is a neo-Lochnerian movement active in laws schools and corners of the federal and state judiciaries today, aimed at protecting wealthy individuals from democratic “violations” of their rights via regulation and taxation.

(3) Constitutional Conservatives: During the heyday of the Tea Party movement, conservative politicians (notably Sarah Palin and presidential candidates Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry) took to calling themselves “constitutional conservatives” to signify their adherence to a view of limited government that takes Lochnerism and expands it beyond property rights to prohibit all sorts of democratic interference with “natural rights,” ranging from state self-determination to the fetal “right to life.” It’s sort of a plenary juxtaposition of a republic dedicated to capitalism and cultural traditionalism as against any effort by majorities to change anything, forever. The privileges that posture protects stretch from the nearest property line to the most sweeping idea of cultural patriarchy.

(4) Religious-Self-Determination Supporters: Perhaps the most vibrant current example of conservative efforts to use “republican” limits on democracy to entrench special privileges involves expansive notions of “religious freedom” to give Christian conservatives far-reaching exemptions from anti-discrimination laws, hand in glove with public subsidies for religious education. The ultimate objective seems to be to create a sort of collective “Benedict Option” wherein militantly religious people can form parallel communities beyond the common law, where LGBTQ folk remain closeted and women and children remain under the firm hand of servant-leader menfolk.

In other words, “It’s a republic, not a democracy” reflects a persistent strain of conservative thinking that is focused less on vindicating individual rights than on protecting oligarchies of privilege, whether they be national, regional, or local. That many of the same people who cite this slogan are among the first to complain about liberal “activist judges” who interfere with “democracy” when conservatives are in the ascendancy just exposes the game for its hypocrisy.

The more Republicans argue for maintaining the Electoral College, the more they tend to undermine their own positions. I wrote about an example this week at New York:

The case for the perpetual continuation of that grand anti-democratic institution, the Electoral College, is ancient and generally (as my college Eric Levitz definitively demonstrated earlier this year) threadbare. But it’s useful to blow up defenses for it one by one as they arise, with the latest being a remonstration by Senator Joni Ernst aimed at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s arguments for abolishing the electoral dinosaur:

Actually @AOC, eliminating the Electoral College would silence our voices here in Iowa and in many other states across the country.

This is just more evidence of how out of touch the Democrats have become. https://t.co/yfm4oDCpkm

— Joni Ernst (@joniernst) August 21, 2019

To state the most obvious issue, there’s something fundamentally stupid about the claim that giving voters everywhere the exact same power to elect a president is going to “silence” anyone. Besides, is voting for president the only way citizens can “voice” their opinions? What the hell is Joni Ernst doing in the U.S. Senate? Are her efforts just a waste of time unless presidential candidates are lusting after Iowa’s six electoral votes every four years?

Now it’s true that the “losers” — relatively speaking — in a shift from Electoral College to a popular-vote system would be closely contested “battleground states” that naturally attract candidate attention more than safely Democratic or Republican states. Presumably, Ernst thinks of Iowa as a battleground state, which it has indeed often been in recent years. But these things change. In the 2016 presidential election, Iowa was ten points more Republican than the nation as a whole. It was redder than Texas. Is Joni Ernst going to urge Iowans to tilt more Democratic so that the state remains a battleground, thus keeping their voice from being silenced? I don’t think so.

Generally speaking, Iowa needs the Electoral College to make sure presidents are aware of it about as much as the current president needs more self-esteem. Joni Ernst or whoever runs her Twitter account should take down that tweet before it really embarrasses her.

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.