In his New York Times column, Thomas B. Edsall reports that “It is not surprising that black and Hispanic Democrats moved to the left in response to Trump’s racist goading and baiting. Pew found that the percentage of black Democrats who agree that “the country needs to continue making changes to give blacks equal rights to whites” rose from 82 percent in 2014 to 90 percent in 2017. The percentage of Democratic Hispanics who agreed with that statement grew from 59 to 76 percent…More surprising was the increase in support among white Democrats, many of whom are professionals with college degrees, for the view that the “country needs to continue making changes to give blacks equal rights.” According to Pew, their support grew from 57 percent in 2014 to 80 percent in 2017…In a working paper, “Trumped by Race: Explanations for Race’s Influence on Whites’ Votes in 2016,” Andrew Engelhardt, a postdoctoral research associate in International and Public Affairs at Brown, makes the case that the percentage of racially liberal white Democrats grew from 19 percent in 2012 to 40 percent in 2016, as shown in the accompanying chart.”

“A number of scholars who study race and politics agree with Engelhardt’s conclusions, Edsall continues.  “Ashley Jardina, a political scientist at Duke and the author of the book “White Identity Politics,” wrote by email that Engelhardt’s “findings are consistent with some of my own analysis. I’ve found, as have others, that there was a notable shift in racial resentment in 2016, but only among Democrats, who became more racially liberal on the racial resentment scale.”…At the same time, one of the most striking facts to emerge from Engelhardt’s analysis is how far white Democrats have moved in a liberal direction on issues of race over the last three decades….In the period from 1988 to 1990, the level of racial resentment was almost the same among both white Democrats and white Republicans. In 1992, they began to diverge, as Republicans moved to the right and Democrats to the left on issues concerning race…For example, in 1988 the mean level of racial resentment, on a scale of 0 to 1, was .65 for white Republicans and .61 for white Democrats. By 2016, the mean for white Republicans rose to .70, but fell for white Democrats to .41. While the proportion of racially resentful white Republicans grew only slightly, the Trump campaign’s rhetoric raised the salience of race. Democrats, by contrast, grew increasingly liberal.”

At Sabato’s Crystal Ball, Theodore R. Johnson, a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice and expert on African-American voting patterns, explores the vital role that black voters will play in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary in an excerpt from his contribution to The Blue Wave: The 2018 Midterms and What They Mean for the 2020 Elections by Larry J. Sabato and Kyle Kondik. Among Johnson’s conclusions: “Black voters are a crucial voting bloc in the upcoming Democratic primary season, particularly in the South…White candidates with proven bona fides among black voters can compete for the black vote, even against other black candidates, as Joe Biden is showing (at least for now)…The differing backgrounds of Kamala Harris and Cory Booker provide each with unique avenues to appeal to black voters…Whites, not blacks, are driving the growth in liberal self-identification among Democrats.”

With the Supreme Court set to rule in the coming days on the legality of the Trump administration’s addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 census,” Ari Berman writes at Mother Jones, “all eyes are on Roberts, now the court’s ostensible swing justice after the retirement of Anthony Kennedy. Many are wondering which Roberts we’ll see—the pragmatic justice who saved the Affordable Care Act in 2012 and has occasionally, as in the Buck case, sought to redress egregious instances of racial discrimination? Or the hard-edged conservative who wrote the majority opinion gutting the Voting Rights Act in 2013 and has spent much of his career trying to roll back civil rights for racial and ethnic minorities? His ruling in the census case will determine Roberts’ legacy—and that of the court he presides over—for many years to come…At stake is whether Roberts will allow the Trump administration to rig American politics for the next decade by corrupting the census, and turn the Supreme Court—which he has often said should stay above partisan politics—into an unmistakable ally of the Republican Party and white power. If the court upholds the administration’s addition of the question, experts say, it would reduce census participation by immigrants afraid of being targeted by the government and diminish the political power and economic resources of parts of the country where many immigrants live.”

Henry Grabar has an insightful article, “The Nonwhite Working Class: Talking to the people in Youngstown, Ohio, that the national media usually ignores” at salon.com. While the media’s better-late-than-never discovery of the white working-class has been a positive development of contemporary political analysis, the media’s comparative neglect of the distinct political culture of the African American working-class has been a glaring omission that should be corrected. Grabar’s article, cross-posted here from Salon, is a good place to begin:

YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio—In 1984, Lewis Macklin stood up at a community meeting and argued that city officials should shut down his high school. It had been seven years since Black Monday—when Youngstown Sheet & Tube announced it was closing its largest factory, costing 5,000 people their jobs and setting off a chain of plant shutdowns that sent the city’s population into free fall. Youngstown could no longer fill its schools, so one would have to close.

But the city did not want to shut down Macklin’s school, Wilson High, which was mostly white. Officials wanted to close the nearby black school instead. Macklin, who is black, recently told me the city’s argument was, “ ‘Keep Wilson open—if you close it down, the white community will move. We’ll take our children and we’ll move.’ ” That argument won. The city shut down the black school, South High, in 1993, and its students were sent to the district’s remaining schools. White families continued to flee the south side anyway, and by 2016, students in the Youngstown School District were 15 percent white and 64 percent black.

Like many buildings in Youngstown, South High School stands abandoned—a stately, stone Beaux-Arts building whose afterlife as a charter school never stuck. The hedges are trimmed, but the flagpole is bare. For Macklin, now a reverend at a nearby Baptist church, the building is a reminder of how deindustrialization, and the response to it, hurt not just the city of Youngstown, but the city’s black community in particular.

If you’ve heard about Youngstown lately, it is probably because the city has been held up—over, and over, and over again—as the locus of white working-class drift from the Democratic Party to Donald Trump. “The epicenter of the Trump phenomenon,” the public policy theorist Justin Gest called the city. It was here, the story goes, that Trump stoked white anxiety, pitched cures to roiling crowds, and brought white union workers into the GOP’s column for the first time in decades, where they appear to be staying put. Democrats underperformed in the region during the blue wave in 2018, and Youngstown will be represented by a Republican in the Ohio state Senate for the first time in 60 years.

“There’s no boom in Youngstown, but blue-collar workers are sticking with Trump,” the New York Times announced last month, in the latest of a series of Trump Country dispatches on the nation’s white working class. These heartland safaris exhibit a common media oversight: the compulsion to paint white, small-town manufacturing workers as the face of the working class, which is in reality mostly urban, racially diverse, and more likely to make burgers than automobiles.

In Youngstown, these stories exhibit another oversight: Youngstown is not white. In contrast to the largely white Mahoning Valley, for which it often serves as an unthinking stand-in, the city itself is 43 percent black and majority-minority. The mayor is black. In more than a dozen interviews in Youngstown’s black community, I could not find anyone who knew a black Trump supporter, let alone was one. But not all of the people I talked to voted for Hillary Clinton, either.

The collapse of manufacturing in the Mahoning Valley may have provoked a white identity crisis that the national media can’t get enough of, but the upheaval was more severe for black Americans. As Sherry Linkon and John Russo, onetime co-directors of the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University, wrote in Steeltown U.S.A., their portrait of Youngstown after the fall: With less money saved, smaller pensions, and less valuable homes, black families, “suffered disproportionately when the mills closed.”

And they keep losing ground. In 1980, according to data provided by Jacob Whiton at the Brookings Institution, the median black family in the Youngstown area made 18 percent less than the median black family nationally; today that family underearns by 35 percent. In 2017, the median black household in the city of Youngstown, where most of the region’s black population lives, makes $20,646—little more than half the income of the median black family nationally.

It has been a slow half-century since the crisis began. The city’s longtime black residents remember what, in retrospect, look like the good times. On a recent morning, I sat in a bar called the Pit Stop with a group of older, black men who have been meeting for breakfast for more than a decade. “Jack’s Jury,” they call themselves, after Jack Carter, a former Ohio Department of Transportation worker and the group’s mischievous, raspy-voiced patriarch. There were two words I was told not to mention as we sipped coffee: work and Trump.

This used to be a white bar. “Ten years ago, I couldn’t walk in here,” said Carl Bryant, a former TV newsman. The group is on its fifth location, after three previous meeting spots closed and one was sold.

This is Youngstown’s golden generation of black Americans—men who grew up here when wages were decent enough, the neighborhoods were (briefly) integrated, and the schools were good. Sylvester Patton worked at the General Motors plant in Lordstown in the late ’60s, making Chevy Vegas, a car that no longer gets built, and served five terms in the state Legislature. “Youngstown was good to me,” he reminisced. But, like many Youngstown residents of his generation, he’s watched his children move away in search of opportunity.

Today, Youngstown is a city of 65,000 that has one hospital and barely one full-service supermarket. The unemployment rate for black workers here is triple what it is for whites. And the poverty rate in the city is 36 percent—twice as high as the county figure. For residents who remember the good years, there’s a feeling of whiplash. A good job now pays $15 an hour. It used to be $30.

Whatever went wrong for the white working class here went even worse for their black counterparts. Blacks were hurt by job sprawl that saw work opportunities move from the heart of town into distant suburbs, where housing racism kept black workers out. They were hurt by the racist legacy of the unions here, which left them with worse jobs than their white peers and made them more likely to be dismissed first when downsizing occurred. They were hurt by urban renewal and the wave of declining home values, public services, amenities, and school quality. They were stuck in the city as white flight hollowed out the neighborhoods. They were hurt by the whiteness of the county Democratic Party, which they say has shown little interest in the city’s problems.

The story of Tre Lewis, who lives in a modest, well-kept house with his family on the south side, is typical. Lewis was raised on the city’s east side, where his father was a union metalworker for four decades at Falcon Foundry in Lowellville. He works at a cleaner’s. His daughter works at Wendy’s. “If there was something to do in this town, this town would prosper, because there’s a lot of loyal people here, a lot of good people,” he said as we chatted in his front yard. “But there’s nothing to do. There’s no jobs here. The only jobs we had they just closed.”

He means Lordstown, the enormous GM plant 16 miles west of the city that General Motors closed in March. The saga of the Lordstown plant has obsessed Donald Trump, who had criticized GM for layoffs at the plant and boasted on Twitter of “GREAT NEWS FOR OHIO” when the company said it was in discussions to sell the 6-million-square-foot facility to a 99-person company called Workhorse. In July 2017, Trump held a campaign-style rally in downtown Youngstown that drew 7,000 people to the city’s convention center. “Don’t sell your homes,” he told the crowd, promising new jobs at the valley’s abandoned plants.

Talk like that was what swayed some white Democrats in Mahoning County, which includes Youngstown. In 2016, the number of registered Republicans here went from 14,663 before the GOP primary to 35,867 afterward. For the first time since 1972, the Democratic candidate failed to crack 50 percent. Trump deserves credit. But also important was the lack of turnout for Clinton. Trump improvedon Mitt Romney’s performance in the county by 11,000 votes. Clinton underperformed Obama by twice that margin.

Lewis was one of those people who did not vote for president, for the first time in his adult life. He has plenty to say about why he finds Donald Trump appalling: his comments about women, his deportation of a local Jordanian business owner, his petty feuds. But he found little to like in Hillary Clinton; he told me that he felt she was hiding something. Other black voters in Youngstown told me they didn’t like her stance on trade or abortion, or remembered her “superpredators” speech, or her husband’s crime and welfare bills.

“They need to give a sense of reality, not false hope,” said Mayor Jamael Tito Brown, when we spoke on the phone about how the Democrats could counter Trump’s appeal in the county. “The reality is we have tough economic issues. But in a place like Youngstown, Ohio, we don’t just want a campaign speech every 3½ years.” I asked the mayor which presidential candidates he liked, and he did not hesitate: “Tim Ryan” —the local congressmen, who is currently polling at 0.5 percent. “He understands what we’re going through.”

Trump keeps floating trial balloons, proposing that “he serve more than two terms as president.” If polls are any indication, there’s litttle support for the notion: “Donald Trump has instructed close advisers to play down internal White House polling that showed him losing heavily to Joe Biden in key industrial “rust belt” states ahead of the 2020 election,” Nick Allen writes at The Telegraph. “According to a leaked 17-state poll, conducted by the president’s pollster Tony Fabrizio, Mr Trump was down 16 points in Pennsylvania, and 10 points in Wisconsin, both of which he won narrowly in 2016.Mr Trump was also trailing Mr Biden by seven points in Florida, which he won in 2016, and was only two points ahead in the traditionally Republican state of Texas.”

Screenshot from NBC News, via Axios enewsletter:

At FiveThirtyEight, Perry Bacon, Jr. writes, “a national Quinnipiac University poll released this week, for example, showed Joe Biden with a 53-40 lead against President Trump. But it wasn’t just Biden — all the Democratic contenders Quinnipiac included in matchups with Trump were significantly ahead of the president: Bernie Sanders 51-42, Kamala Harris 49-41, Elizabeth Warren 49-42, Cory Booker 47-42 and Pete Buttigieg 47-42. Meanwhile, in an interview with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos, Trump dismissed any polls that showed him trailing the Democrats.¹ “No, my polls show that I’m winning everywhere,” Trump said….So, just how seriously should we take hypothetical general election polls more than a year out and before the Democratic nominee has been selected?..Not seriously.” However, Bacon notes, “Trump’s real political problem is self-identified independents and voters who don’t love him or hate him. In the 2018 midterms, independents broke heavily for the Democrats in U.S. House elections (+12), as did voters who “somewhat” disapproved of the president (+29), according to exit polls. In this Quinnipiac survey, all the Democratic candidates had double digit leads over Trump among independents, and those are the numbers that should worry the president and his political team.”

From Mark Murray’s post, “Support for beginning impeachment hearings grows among Democrats in new NBC News/WSJ poll: Americans overall remain divided over beginning impeachment hearings but Democratic support has surged since last month” at NBC News: “More Democratic voters believe Congress should begin impeachment hearings on President Donald Trump’s conduct while in office, but the country at large remains divided on the matter, according to a new national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll…Overall, 27 percent of Americans say there’s enough evidence to begin impeachment hearings now — up 10 points from last month…Another 24 percent think Congress should continue investigating to see if there’s enough evidence to hold impeachment hearings in the future, which is down eight points…And 48 percent believe that Congress should not hold impeachment hearings and that Trump should finish out his term as president — unchanged from a month ago…Among independents, 22 percent support impeachment hearings now; 34 percent want to continue investigating; and 44 percent oppose impeachment hearings.”

At Vanity Fair T. A. Frank has a litany Democrats will like: “If we look at polls from places like Pew and Gallup, the statistical portrait of the silent majority is complicated, but it’s hardly unfavorable to Democrats. Over sixty percent of Americans favor increased federal spending on education, infrastructure, and veteran’s benefits. Over 55 percent support spending more on environmental protection. Sixty-two percent believe that corporations don’t pay their fair share. Sixty percent say that government must ensure that all Americans have health coverage. About two thirds support upholding Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that made abortion a constitutional right. About 69 percent describe themselves as “sympathetic” or “very sympathetic” to illegal immigrants. Well over 60 percent support same-sex marriage. And a plurality feels our military interventions abroad have made us less safe. On the face of it, then, Americans and Democrats are made for one another.” He also has one for conservatives.” He also has a similar screed touting some conservative cultural views of the public, then notes “Here we see the problem for Democrats. While much of Twitter condemns these views as deplorable, they are held by robust majorities of Americans. They’re far from the hard-right social views of someone like Pat Robertson, but they’re also far from the social views of Atlantic interns.”

All of the “it’s way too early” to take polls seriously arguments aside, Elizabeth Warren’s rise in the polls is pretty impressive, considering the sheer size of the Democratic field. Christopher Cadelago puts it in context at Politico: “Elizabeth Warren is threatening Joe Biden’s front-runner standing in California, and Kamala Harris is showing signs of weakness in her delegate-rich home state, according to a new poll…A new UC Berkeley-Los Angeles Times poll found Biden leading with 22% of likely Democratic primary voters; followed by Warren and Sanders, who are at 18% and 17%, respectively.,,Harris (13%) and South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg (10%) are the only other 2020 presidential contenders to exceed 3% in the survey, which was directed by pollster Mark DiCamillo, who for years led the venerable Field Poll.”…As Sen. Elizabeth Warren rises in opinion polls, Sen. Bernie Sanders is honing his message of economic populism with more focus on a “21st Century Economic Bill of Rights.” In recent speeches and interviews,   Sanders unveiled his economic and social reform agenda and promoted his “21st Century Economic Bill of Rights.” Recalling FDR’s 1944 proposal, Sanders said he wanted to secure the right to a job at a living wage, real retirement security, universal health care and educational opportunity. “I think, frankly, I am the strongest candidate to defeat Trump…We can win in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, and some of the other battleground states.” Sanders has a slight lead over Warren in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination in most recent polling, and many progressive Democrats like them both. Although they are trying to win over each other’s voters, their campaigns have managed a civil tone. They won’t be on the same stage during the June 26-27 presidential debates. Warren is in the first group of ten debate on the 26th, while Sanders is on the next night.

In his article, “Brace for a Voter-Turnout Tsunami: Even with a surge in overall participation, white working-class voters could still remain decisive in the 2020 election,” Ronald Brownstein explains at The Atlantic: “Signs are growing that voter turnout in 2020 could reach the highest levels in decades—if not the highest in the past century—with a surge of new voters potentially producing the most diverse electorate in American history…But paradoxically, that surge may not dislodge the central role of the predominantly white and heavily working-class voters who tipped the three Rust Belt states that decided 2016: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Even amid a tide of new participation, those same voters could remain the tipping point of the 2020 election…With Donald Trump’s tumultuous presidency stirring such strong emotions among both supporters and opponents, strategists in both parties and academic experts are now bracing for what Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political scientist who specializes in voting behavior, recently called “a voter turnout storm of a century in 2020.”…In a recent paper, the Democratic voter-targeting firm Catalist projected that about 156 million people could vote in 2020, an enormous increase from the 139 million who cast ballots in 2016. Likewise, Public Opinion Strategies, a leading Republican polling firm, recently forecast that the 2020 contest could produce a massive turnout that is also unprecedentedly diverse.”

Brownstein elaborates, “I think we are heading for a record presidential turnout at least in the modern era, and by that I mean since the franchise went to 18-year-olds,” in 1972, says Glen Bolger, a partner at Public Opinion Strategies. “And I mean not only in total numbers [but also] in terms of the percentage of eligible voters [who turn out]. The emotion behind politics … is sky-high, and I don’t think it’s just on one side. I think it’s on both sides.”..’McDonald thinks the turnout surge in 2020 could shatter even older records, estimating that as many as two-thirds of eligible voters may vote next year. If that happens, it would represent the highest presidential-year turnout since 1908, when 65.7 percent of eligible Americans cast a ballot, according to McDonald’s figures. Since 18-year-olds were granted the vote, the highest showing was the 61.6 percent of eligible voters who showed up in 2008, leading to Barack Obama’s victory. And since World War II, the highest turnout level came in 1960, with John F. Kennedy’s win, when 63.8 percent of voters participated…But the clearest sign that high turnout may be approaching in 2020 is that it already arrived in 2018. In last year’s midterm, nearly 120 million people voted, about 35 million more than in the previous midterm, in 2014, with 51 percent of eligible voters participating—a huge increase over the previous three midterms. The 2018 level represented the largest share of eligible voters to turn out in a midterm year since 1914, according to McDonald’s figures. Catalist estimated that about 14 million new voters who had not participated in 2016 turned out two years later, and they preferred Democrats by a roughly 20-percentage-point margin.”

“The nature of the population eligible to vote is evolving in a way,” notes Brownstein, “that should indeed help Democrats. McDonald estimates that the number of eligible voters increases by about 5 million each year, or about 20 million from one presidential election to the next. That increase predominantly flows from two sources: young people who turn 18 and immigrants who become citizens. Since people of color are now approaching a majority of the under-18 population—and also constitute most immigrants—McDonald and other experts believe it’s likely that minorities represent a majority of the people who have become eligible to vote since 2016…In 2016, the Census calculated that almost two-thirds of eligible white voters cast a ballot. By contrast, African American turnout fell to 59 percent—a sharp decline from both of Barack Obama’s elections—and Latino turnout remained at typically modest levels, just below 48 percent. Young people stayed home, too: Only about 46 percent of eligible voters under 30 turned out, far below the participation among those 45 and older…while turnout surged across virtually all groups, it increased most sharply among the voters who historically have participated at the lowest levels. For instance, the Census Bureau reported that turnout among voters under 30 last year jumped to about 36 percent of eligible voters, compared with just 20 percent in 2014. That still left young people far behind the turnout rate among seniors, about two-thirds of whom voted, but their rate of increase from the previous election was much greater. Similarly, the Census Bureau found that the turnout rate in 2018 increased more for Latinos and Asian Americans than it did for white people.”

Brownstein reports that “Data from States of Change show that over the past quarter-century, white voters without a college education have typically declined as a share of actual voters little by little over each four-year presidential cycle: They fell from 61 percent of voters in 1992 to 44 percent in 2016. Minority voters, meanwhile, have increased over those seven election cycles from 15 percent in 1992 to 26 percent in 2016. And college-educated whites have drifted up, from 24 percent in 1992 to 30 percent in 2016…Ruy Teixeira, a veteran liberal analyst and a co-founder of States of Change, believes it’s likely that in 2020 the decline in blue-collar white people’s share of the total vote could again push toward the high end of recent experience, shrinking by as much as 3 percentage points, to just over 40 percent. “I think if we do have a high-turnout election that builds on the trends we saw in 2018, you might see the white non-college share decline significantly more than it did in 2016,” Teixeira says…Those changes pose obvious problems for Trump in winning the national popular vote. But they also present a challenge for Democrats, because these shifts are not evenly distributed among the states. The electorate is not diversifying nearly as fast in the three Rust Belt states that Trump dislodged from the Blue Wall—Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Those states, for years to come, will remain older and whiter than the nation overall, meaning that to win them, Democrats have to run better with older, whiter voters than they do in most places.”

Montana Governor Steve Bullock is the one Democratic presidential candidate who has figured out how to win a state-wide election in a red state. His exclusion from the first primary debates on June 26-7 does not speak well for the DNC’s selection criteria, nor for the Democratic debate process as a whole.

True, rules are rules, and with 23 Democrats announced for the presidency, some worthy candidate was bound to get screwed. But Politico’s Zach Montellaro highlights some of the flaws on the first primary debate process that excluded Bullock:

At issue is whether Bullock has crossed the polling threshold to qualify for the first debate. Candidates needed to earn at least 1 percent in three polls conducted by qualifying organizations and released by the end of Wednesday. But Bullock’s case hinges on the rules surrounding a single poll released in January by ABC News and The Washington Post…The ABC/Post poll showed Bullock receiving 1 percent support — but the question was open-ended, meaning respondents had to volunteer a name instead of being read a list of candidates.

Bullock’s campaign argues that he met the criteria, and Montellaro notes that “many poll trackers — including POLITICO and MSNBC, one of the media sponsors for the first debate — believed Bullock had crossed the polling threshold.” There will be more arguing about the specifics of the rules, and whether Bullock met them.

Not only is Bullock the only Democratic Governor of a red state running for president; He is also the only one who negotiated with his Republican-controlled state legislature to secure Medicaid expansion. Inasmuch as polls indicate that Americans are hungry for bipartisan leadership, as well as better health care, Bullock ought to be considered a standout.

Noting that “the Democratic National Committee is vulnerable to criticism for being heavy-handed after multiple complaints in 2016 that it tried to “rig” the debates and the primaries for Hillary Clinton,” Ed Kilgore writes that “a more generic complaint by another late-announcing laggard, Senator Michael Bennet, has challenged the very idea that the DNC should be in the candidate-winnowing process, as it definitely will be with those toughened second-round requirements (which at this point only eight candidates would definitely meet).”

However, notes Kilgore,

It’s unlikely the party is betraying any individual candidate preferences in setting debate rules that merely hold down the crowd to the size of the biggest family table in a restaurant. And by eschewing the GOP’s 2016 practice of demoting a big chunk of the field to a “kid’s table” preliminary event that few will watch, and giving all qualifiers an equal, random assignment, the DNC is doing its best to avoid putting a thumb on the scales for the candidates most likely to win.

Still, Kilgore writes that “there’s at least a theoretical argument that the party should not do anything to discourage anyone until the caucuses and primaries come around and let voters do the winnowing. Otherwise, late-blooming candidacies will be killed before their time.” Well-said.

We might also ask, is the public well-served by having 10 candidates on a stage, each one of which gets a few minutes to make her/his case in a few soundbites? The argument that it’s just good to see them all together begs the question: Other than the overall impressiveness of the Democratic field, Why?

Might it be better to have a rolling series of one-on-one, nationally-televised debates in communities large and small across the country? Let the networks pick a few choice high-ratings confrontations, such as Sanders vs. Warren or Biden/Harris, and then another dozen or two match-ups selected at random.

Big TV certainly has the resources to fund such a project, and it’s not like there isn’t enough time to make it happen, with more than a year to go until the Democratic convention. Dems could also benefit by hosting some debates in rural America, much of which now feels neglected by the party. As it is, the field includes only three Democratic governors, one of them a former Governor, a complaint frequently cited by voters who would like to see more candidates with executive experience.

Meanwhile, you can’t blame Bullock supporters for feeling a little ripped-off. True, he was “late” getting in, compared to others. Here’s Bullock’s explanation:

“I certainly knew getting in at the time I did would give me fewer opportunities to be on shows with you and others, but I had a job to do and if it ultimately ever came down to choosing between getting Medicaid reauthorized, getting 100,000 Montanans health care, versus getting in earlier just to bump up on another poll, I would make that same choice time and time again,” he said. Bullock, who announced his bid a month ago, waited until the Montana legislative session concluded to enter the race.

Bullock made the right choice. Hopefully, the networks will give him some extra exposure. Those so inclinded can visit Bullock’s ActBlue donations page.

In FiveThirtyEight’s insightful forum, “Is The Senate Really A Better Option For Some Presidential Candidates?,” political analyst Geoffrey Skelley explains why the senate seart of Maine’s Susan Collins is a prime p[ick-up opportunity for Democrats: “Collins remains relatively popular in Maine, although her approval rating isn’t as high as it used to be — in 2017, Morning Consult found her approval rating north of 60 percent, but in the first quarter of 2019, it was 52 percent…But, yeah, besides Colorado, Maine is the only other GOP-held Senate seat that’s up in a state that isn’t Republican-leaning — in fact, it’s 5 points more Democratic than the nation as a whole, and Trump lost it by 3 points in 2016. So it’s vital for Democrats that they compete there, especially since Democrats need a net gain of three seats to win the Senate (if they also win the presidency; otherwise they need to pick up four seats). And Alabama is going to be very difficult for Democrats to hold.” But Democrats still need a good candidate to make a go fo it.

From “Pelosi’s Agenda Is Popular — Much More So Than Impeaching Trump” by Perry Bacon, Jr. also at FiveThirtyEight:

At The Atlantic, Ben LaBolt, a former national press secretary for President Obama’s reelection campaign, warns that “neither the Democratic National Committee nor any of the major Democratic super PACs are live with any notable broadcast or digital-advertising budget in battleground states targeted toward general-election swing voters. The 23 Democratic presidential campaigns are naturally focused on proximate targets, such as winning early states and meeting the DNC’s fundraising thresholds. As a partner at Bully Pulpit Interactive, a communications and digital-marketing agency that has in the past served as an advertiser for Democratic presidential campaigns and super PACs, I follow this world closely. I’ve seen a number of campaigns begin to spend on digital advertising, but their ads are not focused on messages that will erode support for Trump. That’s not the role they are expected to play at this stage.”

“By tearing one another up over the impeachment question, Democrats only serve Trump’s interests by dividing and dispiriting the very people who most want him driven from office,” E. J. Dionne, Jr. writes in his syndicated column. “Personally, I continue to prefer a glorious election night in which Americans tell the world that we are not Trumpists and Trump is not us. The best way to get there is to focus public attention not on the impeachment debate itself but on the horror of Trump’s actions — and on the Republican Party’s flight from problem-solving…Thus, a modest proposal that is imperfect but may be the only practical way forward: Democrats should publicly time-limit their forbearance. Give the Trump administration a set amount of time — say, 60 days — to respond to subpoenas for witnesses and documents and end the blockade on testimony from current and former officials. Make clear that if the stonewalling continues, an impeachment inquiry will start…Given the Republicans’ complicity with Trump, it’s a near-certainty that only the voters can make this happen. All thinking about impeachment must keep this goal in mind.”

In his Vox post, “Public support for left-wing policymaking has reached a 60-year high,” Matthew Yglesias explains that “Public support for big government — more regulation, higher taxes, and more social services — has reached the highest level on record in one of the most prominent aggregate surveys of American public opinion…James Stimson, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina who’s one of the giants of American public opinion research, broke the news in a modest missive to a political science email listserv on June 6. He was sharing the news that the latest edition of Policy Mood, a composite look at American opinion across a range of polls on a range of issues, was available for public release…“The annual estimate for 2018 is the most liberal ever recorded in the 68 year history of Mood,” he wrote. “Just slightly higher than the previous high point of 1961.” However, concludes Yglesias, “while the public is more open to a surge of activist government activity than at any time in the past six decades, the odds of actually getting such a surge remain relatively low.”

Ronald Brownstein writes, also at The Atlantic, “Democrats debating whether to impeach Donald Trump may be misreading the evidence from the last time the House tried to remove a president…It’s become conventional wisdom—not only among Democrats but also among many political analysts—that House Republicans paid a severe electoral price for moving against Bill Clinton in 1998, at a time when polls showed most of the public opposed that action…But that straightforward conclusion oversimplifies impeachment’s effects, according to my analysis of the election results and interviews with key strategists who were working in national politics at the time. While Republicans did lose House seats in both 1998 and 2000, Democrats did not gain enough to capture control of the chamber either time. And in 2000, lingering unease about Clinton’s behavior provided a crucial backdrop for George W. Bush’s winning presidential campaign—particularly his defining promise “to restore honor and dignity” to the Oval Office.”

Brownstein continues, “Tad Devine, a senior strategist for Al Gore, the Democratic nominee in 2000, concurs. Bush’s ability to tap the public’s dismay over Clinton’s personal life “more than anything else got in our way in terms of winning the election,” he told me. Even if the Senate doesn’t convict Trump, Devine believes, impeachment in the House could offer Democrats a similar chance to highlight the aspects of Trump’s volatile behavior that most alienate swing voters…it’s easy to overstate the magnitude of the GOP’s backslide in 1998. In the Senate, Democrats gained no seats that year, leaving the Republican majority intact. Nor did the five-seat House loss cost the GOP its majority in that chamber. Republicans still won more of the total national popular vote in House races than Democrats. Swing voters didn’t stampede away from the GOP; in exit polls, Republicans still narrowly beat Democrats among independent voters.”

Brownstein concludes, “All of that suggests it’s not a guaranteed political winner for House Democrats to impeach Trump when there’s virtually no chance the Senate will vote to remove him. But the full ledger on Clinton’s impeachment invalidates the common assumption that impeachment without removal is a guaranteed political loser. Considering both the 1998 and 2000 elections, there’s considerable evidence that the struggle actually helped the GOP; at worst, its political impact was equivocal. Which means that, on impeachment, House Democrats may have more leeway than they believe to do what they think is legally and morally right.”

Matt Ford unveils a complicated plan for Supreme Court reform at The New Republic: “The best mechanism for reform would be a constitutional amendment. That process faces more hurdles, to say the least. But it would be less corrosive to the nation’s governance in the long term than letting Congress lob the Supreme Court’s membership back and forth like a frayed tennis ball. To build consensus around a constitutional amendment, the restructuring should also take place along neutral principles that favor neither side.” Ford proposed relinking Supreme Court seats to the circuit courts, throwing in term limits and then “When one of the justices leaves the court, their replacement would be chosen by lottery from among the federal judges in their seat’s respective circuit. To avoid the oddities that come from an even-numbered court, a thirteenth seat would be held by the chief justice, who would be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.” All of this would have to be done by constitutional amendment.” For Democrats, however, the quickest route to high court reform is forget about constitutional amendments. As former Supreme Court clerk and law professor Ian Samuel has argued, “You could amend the constitution to fundamentally change the way the court works — that’s very hard to do. You could try impeaching justices, but that would also be very hard to do and not obviously justifiable,” he said. “Then you have this idea of changing the size of the Supreme Court that has this wonderful virtue that it’s just doable with ordinary legislation the next time you happen to hold political power in the elected branches of government.” Yes, it would require a Democratic landslide. But that’s what we are fighting for anyway.

Steven Greenhouse, author of the forthcomming “Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor,” makes the case that “Unions should draw up a Contract for the American Worker and make it clear they will only support candidates who endorse it” at The Guardian: “Such a “Contract” could call for”: A $15 federal minimum wage by 2024; Paid parental leave for 12 weeks; Paid sick leave (at least five days per year); Paid vacation; Universal health coverage; Free community college; and Lifelong training credits. “For too long, largely because of the disproportionate power of business, workers in the wealthiest nation have gone without many basic protections. This proposed contract would aim to end what I call “America’s anti-worker exceptionalism”….Whichever candidates back this Contract for the American Worker can trumpet themselves as true friends of workers. Those who don’t will need to explain to voters why American workers deserve less than workers in other advanced industrial nations.”

Tomorrow, House Democrats will vote to hold AG William Barr and Don McGahn in contempt of Congress. Michael Tomasky writes at The Daily Beast that “The contempt vote is without precedent in the modern history of the country. Never before (that I’m aware of) have two very high-ranking officials been charged with contempt on the same matter and on the same day…Tuesday’s vote isn’t just symbolically nailing some hapless AG to the cross to make him bleed in public for a few hours. This is part of an investigation into genuine presidential obstruction of justice. And it involves both Trump’s attorney general and his former White House counsel, who is described in the Mueller Report as saying that the president directed him to obstruct justice…Assuming Barr doesn’t budge, the next step against him should clearly be impeachment…And McGahn? He can’t be impeached. But he can be disgraced. What the Democrats need to understand here is that the contempt vote is not the end of anything. It’s the beginning. Holding the two attorneys in contempt is step number one in bringing them before the bar of justice—in working what remains of their consciences, which in Barr’s case particularly seems to be pretty close to nothing, and in forcing them to capitulate to what both surely know is a justified pursuit of the truth, and threatening them with a pretty bad next 10 or 20 years if they don’t.”

From Dylan Scott’s “Trump is really unpopular in the most important 2020 battleground states: Trump is deep underwater in New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other key 2020 states” at Vox: “Here are the raw numbers for Trump in the states that are expected to be competitive in the 2020 election:

• New Hampshire: 39 percent approval, 58 percent disapproval
• Wisconsin: 42 percent approval, 55 percent disapproval
• Michigan: 42 percent approval, 54 percent disapproval
• Iowa: 42 percent approval, 54 percent disapproval
• Arizona: 45 percent approval, 51 percent disapproval
• Pennsylvania 45 percent approval, 52 percent disapproval
• Ohio: 46 percent approval, 50 percent disapproval
• North Carolina: 46 percent approval, 50 percent disapproval
• Florida: 48 percent approval, 48 percent disapproval
• Indiana: 49 percent approval, 46 percent disapproval”

Amid all of the buzz about Wisconsin becomming a critical swing state in the 2020 presidential election, there are encouraging signs that the state Democratic party is preparing an unprecedented voter mobilization effort. As Emily Hamer reports at The Wisconsin State Journal, “Former MoveOn.org leader Ben Wikler has been chosen as the new leader of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, the party announced Sunday. Wikler will lead Democrats into the 2020 campaign in which Wisconsin is widely viewed as potentially decisive in the race for the White House.” At MoveOn, “Wikler helped lead the successful organizing push in 2017 to halt the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.”

Also at Vox, Ella Nilsen writes, “Five candidates, including Biden, Inslee, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and former Reps. Beto O’Rourke and John Delaney have all released massive plans to combat climate change, ranging from $1.5 trillion to $3 trillion in federal investment over a decade. Candidates are factoring in the spur of private investments as well, hence the jump to $5 trillion in Biden’s plan…“It’s a recognition of where the electorate is,” Monmouth University polling director Patrick Murray told Vox. “This popped out from the very beginning. Climate change and the environment in general was the No. 2 issue after health care for Democratic voters.”…“I think it’s just becoming a zeitgeist for Democrats,” Murray added.”

Nilsen and Tara Golshan have another Vox post, “Democrats’ extremely uphill battle to retake the Senate majority in 2020, explained,” which notes a “very tough map” for Dems. As they observe, “Just three Republican seats seem truly competitive, as far as the Cook Political Report is concerned: Colorado, Arizona, and Maine. The rest is a sea of red, including the seat Democrats have to defend in ultraconservative Alabama…To retake a bare majority in the Senate, Democrats need to pick up four seats on net. Because this cohort of senators was last up for election in 2014 — a very strong year for Republicans — Democrats are on offense this year…To retake the majority, Democrats would likely have to:

1) Keep Sen. Doug Jones’s seat in deep-red Alabama. (Trump has a +27 approval rating there.)

2) Win Arizona and Colorado — and they could, since there are already strong candidates declared or interested in running.

3) Turn out an extremely enthusiastic Democratic base and put tough states — Maine, Georgia, Texas, Montana, and Iowa — within reach. Democrats, by the way, still need to recruit “top tier” candidates in all of these states.

4) Take advantage of divisive Republican primaries in Kansas and North Carolina, where Trump has anemic approval ratings. But again, they need solid candidates to compete.”

Ed Kilgore, Gabriel Debenedetti and Benjamin Hart discuss “How Much Does Age Matter for Presidential Candidates in 2019?” at New York Magazine. Some of their observations: Hart notes that “So far, talk of being too old to serve as president does not seem to have had a major effect on any of these people’s standing. Is age now just a number in the presidential sweepstakes?” Debenedetti adds that “voter age doesn’t actually line up with candidate age in any obvious way. Bernie gets younger voters, Biden gets older ones, etc. But to use Buttigieg as an example again, he actually often talks about how older voters have flocked to him in the past in recent elections, specifically because of his youth.” Kilgore argues, “I think there are three ways it could matter in 2020: (1) if a candidate is perceived as too old (that’s sort of what Gabe was just talking about), (2) if a candidate exhibits age-related debility or illness, and (3) a candidate’s age could take away a potential advantage against Trump.”

Elaine Godfrey explains why “Why Pro-impeachment Democrats Are Still Siding With Pelosi” at The Atlantic: “Some of the lawmakers who have recently called for impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump say that, despite their own personal feelings, they still support leadership’s slow-and-steady strategy of pursuing congressional investigations first. Although in lengthy Twitter threads and interviews on MSNBC these lawmakers have explained that impeachment proceedings are the best way to protect democracy, they don’t plan to publicly challenge the speaker, according to interviews with several House Democrats and congressional aides…“Right now, the vast majority of the caucus believes she’s doing the right things,” Representative John Yarmuth of Kentucky, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, told me in an interview…A lot of us feel that even though we’re convinced he should be impeached, we should let these investigations play out for a little while.”

“America Is Missing Its Chance to Fix Our Election System Before We Vote in 2020,” warns Steven Rosenfeld at Common Dreams: “The emergence of powerful forms of online political propaganda, the absence of progress in 2019 state legislatures on improving audits and recounts, and new revelations about the extent of Russian hacking in 2016—accessing more election administration details than previously reported—all point to the same bottom line: what evidence can be presented to a polarized electorate to legitimize the results?…To be fair, some policy experts who network with senior election officials—who have authority to order more thorough vote-verification steps without new legislation—say there is still time to act. But as 2020 gets closer, there are fewer opportunities to do so…There’s a lack of vote count evidence trails and transparent audits to serve as a counterweight to the newest forms of propaganda. And Congress is not poised to handle the power struggle if the presidential result is contested. The clock has not run out with taking proactive steps before 2020, but it is ticking, and opportunities to act are ebbing away while new worries are emerging.”

In his post, “Social media shapes our politics. But does it actually elect presidents?” Sam Fulwood III writes at ThinkProgress that “More In Common, an international research group examining global civic engagement, found that Americans’ use of social media is an imperfect tool to assess the relative support of one candidate over another because highly motivated activists play an outsized role in shaping online conversations…The group’s report — “Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape” — surveyed 8,000 Americans and conducted focus group and in-person interviews to discover that Americans are “defined by their core beliefs, rather than their political opinions, race, class or gender.”.Among the report’s more significant findings was that people at the extremes were a distinct minority of the U.S. population, but were among the most active on social media…Americans identified as Progressive Activists, for example, make up 8% of the population and 70% of them said they had shared political content on social media. Those identified as Devoted Conservatives are 6% of the population and 56% of them shared political content on social media…By contrast, the study noted that people categorized as Politically Disengaged, the largest single category at 26% of the population, “are practically invisible in local politics and community life,” and only 5% of them said they shared political content on social media.”

At CNN Politics, Harry Enten explains why “Why Nancy Pelosi’s impeachment strategy is politically smart,” and notes, “After Mueller’s statement, Pelosi again decided to strike a center chord. She didn’t call for impeachment proceedings to begin, but indicated such action may be necessary in the future depending on what House committees investigating potential obstruction of justice issues find…Polling shows that’s likely the right move for now. Voters seem most open to a path in which obstruction of justice is investigated, but not via an impeachment inquiry. A clear majority of voters (57%) agreed with the statement that Congress should “investigate whether Donald Trump committed obstruction of justice during the course of the Mueller investigation” in a CNN poll taken after the Mueller report was released. This includes 94% of Democrats, 52% of independents and even 18% of Republicans…In the CNN poll, 61% of voters were against impeaching and removing Trump from office…An ABC News/Washington Post poll similarly showed that only 37% of Americans want Congress to begin impeachment proceedings, while 56% were opposed…Put it all together: Voters are very much open to the idea that Trump did something wrong, but they don’t want to go the road of impeachment just yet.”

Writing about the CNN poll, Daniel Politi notes at slate.com “Among Americans as a whole, support for impeachment increased only slightly to 41 percent, up from 37 percent last month. On the opposite end, 54 percent are opposed to impeachment. And despite the slight uptick, it is hardly the highest it has ever been compared to the 47 percent who supported impeachment in September 2018…Democrats are increasingly in favor of impeaching President Donald Trump, with 76 percent saying they support the move to oust the president from office, according to a new CNN poll. That marks a seven-percentage-point increase from April when support for impeachment stood at 69 percent among Democrats, according to the poll conducted by SSRS.”

From “Democracy Fights Back: Republican attempts at voter suppression have inspired a movement to restore and expand access to the polls” by Adam Eichen at The New Republic: “Florida is just the tip of the iceberg. Activists are winning pro-democracy battles across the country. Just on election night 2018, voters approved over 20 pro-democracy ballot initiatives. Now, 15 states and Washington, D.C. have automatic voter registration. Nineteen states and D.C. have same day registration. Fourteen states and D.C. will have joined the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (with three more likely to join by the end of the year). Public financing of elections is spreading via municipalities. Five states last year attempted to limit gerrymandering(with varying degrees of success). And on a federal level, the House of representatives passed the For the People Act (H.R.1), an omnibus package that includes, among many other things, public financing of Congressional elections, nationwide automaticand same-day voter registration, and independent redistricting commissions.”

“Twitter is not exactly known as a platform for centrist, middle of the road, political discourse,” Hana Trudo writes in her article, “Dem Centrist Group Launches Twitter Campaign to Get People to Ignore Twitter” at The Daily Beast. “But Third Way, the prominent think tank for moderate Democrats, is hoping to change that. The group is targeting roughly 10,000 “influencers” on the platform by promoting paid content that aims to change the progressive conversation to centrist chatter ahead of 2020. And they’re doing so, in large part, by encouraging the individuals they’re targeting on Twitter to not pay too much attention to Twitter…with Democratic lawmakers continuing their leftward drift, the group is rethinking what type of incentive structures matter. The Twitter campaign is a recognition that social media conversations—and the powerful public opinion shapers who participate in them—can be as influential in shaping how lawmakers act as, say, polling data…Ultimately, Third Way’s goal is not simply to influence the influencers, but to shape the direction that the Democratic Party takes heading into the 2020 primaries.”

At the lefty Counterpunch, John Rynn, author of author of Manufacturing Green Prosperity: The Power to Rebuild the American Middle Class,” has some salient thoughts on the importance of a permanent infrastructure strategy for Democrats. An excerpt: “Increased infrastructure spending is proposed by the Democrats, Our Revolution, the Green Party, the the CPC, and BLM up to about $200 billion per year, to fix what is clearly crumbling…What we actually need right now is a massive increase in spending to rebuild the crumbling infrastructure and create new green infrastructure to prevent the worst of global warming and other environmental catastrophes. This spending could provide a decent job to anyone who wants one and at the same time rebuild the critical manufacturing sector (I have proposed an approximately $1.5 trillion per year plan for this purpose).” Rynn urges creation of a “permanent sector of the economy”  dedicated to “permanently spend all of their time maintaining, updating, and expanding national infrastructure…Infrastructure thus enables modern wealth creation and growth, supports manufacturing, creates millions or even tens of millions of jobs, and ideally can be used to prevent ecological collapse…There is plenty of infrastructure building in American and world history to be proud of in the past hundred years or so that can provide lessons for current agendas. Promoting economic democracy is a new function of government that could help evolve left-of-center parties from declining, boring remnants of the past into inspiring and attractive political movements of the future.”

Gabriela Resto-Montero’s “Democratic presidential candidates call for change at California’s Democratic Party Convention” at Vox  rounds up choice comments of the 14 Democratic presidential candidates, including: ““Here’s the thing, when a candidate tells you about all the things that aren’t possible, about how political calculations came first, about how you should settle for little bits and pieces instead of real change, they’re telling you something very important — they are telling you that they will not fight for you,” she [Elizabeth Warren] said…“Beating Donald Trump is a must, but that is a floor, not a ceiling,” [Sen. Cory] Booker said. “We are bigger than that, we have greater ambitions than that.” And, “In these times, Democrats can no more promise to take us back to the 2000s or 1990s than conservatives can take us back to the 1950s,” [Mayor Pete] Buttigieg said. “If we want to defeat this president and lead the country in a new direction, we must be ready to transform our economy and our democracy into something different, something better.”

Emily Yoffe explains why “Democrats Need to Learn From Their Al Franken Mistake: The country lost an opportunity to model how fair procedures can work in a #MeToo case” at The Atlantic: “The lessons of this debacle remain unlearned, and the consequences of Franken’s case continue to play out, in the presidential race and beyond. The Democratic reaction to the Franken allegations and the precedents it set will present a danger to the Democratic Party until it reconsiders the episode, and thinks about ways to stop such unfair and swift destruction from happening…The Senate is the rare workplace in which an established set of proceduresaddresses such violations. The inquiries are conducted by staff (or sometimes outside attorneys) with subpoena power. They are intended to provide an unbiased examination, and recommend proportional punishment—if appropriate. One of the greatest misfortunes of the Franken case is that this process was abruptly terminated in favor of political posturing…The Senate could have modeled how fair procedures can work in a #MeToo case outside the criminal-justice system, illustrating the necessity of restraint and patience when volatile issues are being adjudicated…When people are accused and punished unjustly, a backlash inevitably ensues. When that happens, the crucial and urgent cause of addressing sexual misconduct is undermined.”

Progressive activists are keeping watch over who is sponsoring the Republican Convention. David C. Morris notes at Fortune that “CREDO Action, which is associated with the wireless provider CREDO Mobile, has gathered more than 65,000 signatures for a petition urging Google (GOOGL, -1.34%) and Microsoft (MSFT, -1.70%) to pull out of supporting the RNC, saying “It is irresponsible and dangerous for corporations like Google and Microsoft to promote Trump’s hate by sponsoring the Republican convention.”…Microsoft has already said that it will provide only technology and support, not cash, to the convention. Coca-Cola (KO, -0.24%) has also dramatically scaled back its support of the event… Facebook has confirmed to Recode that it will remain a sponsor of the GOP’s July convention in Cleveland. That’s despite an activist group urging tech companies to pull their support for the event, which they characterize as “sponsoring” Trump’s contentious platform.” Facebook and Google would be difficult to boycott, but activists can certainly make them conclude that supporting the GOP convention is not worth the headaches and bad image they get from sponsoring the most extremist GOP in history.

At FiveThirtyEight, Amelia Thomson-Deveaux addresses a question that may be of interest to the various presidential campaigns, “Who Do Non-Religious Democrats Prefer?” Thomson-Deveaux observes, “People who identify as atheists, agnostics or “nothing in particular” accounted for 35 percent of Democratic primary voters in 2016, according to the Cooperative Congressional Election Study,¹ and as we mentioned in our article, are a growing constituency within the Democratic Party. And according to crosstabs from Morning Consult’s weekly tracking poll for May 20-26, support for Sen. Bernie Sanders is higher among religiously unaffiliated voters than among religiously affiliated voters. Former Vice President Joe Biden, meanwhile, has an edge among religious Democrats…religiously unaffiliated Democrats — in particular, atheists and agnostics, who together accounted for 17 percent of primary voters in the 2016 CCES study — are substantially more liberal than Democrats who are still part of organized religion…Marshaling Democrats by invoking their secular identity, though, would be risky for Democratic politicians…”

The good news from South Carolina is that we have a solid Democratic challenger running for Lindsey Graham’s U.S. Senate seat. As Li Zhou reports at Vox: “Jaime Harrison, a former chair of South Carolina’s Democratic Party, is officially challenging Sen. Lindsey Graham in 2020 — and he thinks he can win by swaying some Republicans in the process…As Harrison told the New York Times’s Astead Herndon, he thinks he could build a coalition of Democratic voters and crossover Republicans in order to ultimately secure a victory…“When your health care is threatened or you’re crushed under the weight of student loans, politics doesn’t matter — and character counts,” Harrison said as part of his launch, which included hefty criticism of the incumbent. In a campaign video, he lambasted Graham for sharply changing his stance on Trump. Clips show Graham calling the president a “race-baiting, xenophobic and religious bigot” in 2016, and then turning around and saying the exact opposite after Trump won the election.” Harrison hopes to win support from state voters who are angry about  Graham’s complete lack of leadership regarding the closing of rural hospitals, water pollution and student loans.

Despite his incumbency and GOP strength in SC, Graham is burdened by an embarrasing surfeit of video clips revealing his creepy flip-flops on key issues and statements about Trump. Here’s an opening salvo from the Harrison campaign:

Contribute to Harrison’s ActBlue page right here.

Perry Bacon, Jr. presents a case that “The House Probably Has A Pro-Impeachment Majority Right Now” at FiveThirtyEight: “Only a few dozen of the 235 Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives have publicly called for the impeachment of President Trump, or even for Congress to launch a formal impeachment investigation. And that number hasn’t meaningfully changed — so far, at least — even after former Special Counsel Robert Mueller gave a closing public statement Wednesday in which he all but said his investigation concluded that Trump obstructed justice regarding the probe of potential Russian interference in the 2016 election…But the relatively small number of Democrats calling for impeachment doesn’t mean the vast majority of House Democrats oppose impeachment — or, more precisely, that they would vote “no” on impeachment. In fact, it’s likely the overwhelming majority of House Democrats would vote to both the launch of an impeachment inquiry and for impeachment itself if either or both came up for a vote.” Bacon’s estimate is based on a core group of 150 House members in “safe Democratic districts — districts that are blue enough to withstand an impeachment backlash even if it did occur,” plue several other groups, which would likely respond to pro-impeachment momentum.”

Can a presidentail candidacy based more on issues than charisma, comfort zones or identity win the Democratic nomination? That’s a pivotal question being addressed by Elizabeth Warren’s run for the white house, explain Gregory Krieg and Jeff Zeleny in “Elizabeth Warren breaks through crowded 2020 field — with a plan” at CNN Politics. “For five months now, Elizabeth Warren has bounced around the country pitching ambitious ideas — typically anchored by well-timed policy rollouts — to achieve the “big, structural change” at the core of her pitch to Democratic primary voters…Now, with the first round of debates in sight, the energetic campaigner is beginning to see a different kind of movement — in the polls. The latest round of surveys have shown Warren creeping up behind her ideological ally and friend Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator whose campaign is increasingly adapting similar smallball tactics as a way of more directly addressing voters’ questions and concerns. Former Vice President Joe Biden remains the frontrunner by a comfortable margin, but in the race to represent the party’s more liberal wing, Warren is quietly on the rise.” The authors cite Warren’s “knack for serving up a complicated policy in a digestible bite” and her “I have a plan for that” mantra, which is getting considerable media play.

“Voter Registration Is Surging—So Republicans Want to Criminalize It,” writes Eliza Newlin Carney at The American Prospect. Carney explains that “In the wake of a midterm that saw surging turnout by non-white, young, and urban voters—all blocs that tend to favor Democrats—a backlash in GOP state legislatures was perhaps inevitable. What troubles voting rights advocates is that Republicans have now set out to penalize not just voters but the groups trying to register them, in some cases with astronomical fines and jail time that effectively criminalize civic engagement…The most extreme example is a law newly enacted in Tennessee that imposes civil and criminal penalties, including fines of up to $10,000 or more and close to a year in jail, on organizers who submit incomplete registration forms, fail to participate in state-mandated trainings, or fail to submit forms within a ten-day window. The law violates both the First and the 14th Amendments, say civil rights advocates who have filed suit, and also runs afoul of the National Voter Registration Act.” Carney notes other efforts to suppress voter registraiton campaigns in Arizona, Georgia and Texas.

So, in the wake of Mueller’s warning about the urgency of the continuing threat of Russian interference in our elections, what is being done to protect the integrity of our elections? Very little at the federal level, it turns out, according to Peter Stone’s “Trump not doing enough to thwart Russian 2020 meddling, experts say: Despite fears of cyber attacks, adequate funding and White House focus to counter any new election interference are lagging” at The Guardian’s U.S. edition. Stone, writing a couple of days before Mueller’s statement, noted that “Election security concerns that critics say require more resources and attention include: a paper ballot system to replace or back up electronic voting machines vulnerable to hacking; more resources and attention for cybersecurity programs at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS); a requirement that campaigns report to the FBI any contacts with foreign nationals; and a strong public commitment from the president to an interference-free election…Russia would be remiss not to try again, given how successful they were in 2016,” said Steven Hall, a retired chief of the CIA’s Russian operations…Russian intelligence operatives, Hall added, are likely to be adept at analysing what worked and what didn’t in 2016, stressing that the Kremlin “will try to be more sophisticated in covering their tracks” in 2020, which could make detecting threats harder and require better security measures.” “We tend to fight the last war,” said John Cipher former CIA Russia expert. “Russia is going to look for new ways and vulnerabilities to damage the US.” Given Russia’s capabilities, Democrats have good reason to worry that election security measures in key states could be equally ineffectual.

At Esquire, Charles Pierce has a few choice words in response to Mueller’s warning about continued Russian attacks on our elections: “More significant, at least from this seat, was Mueller’s discussion of the Russian ratfcking of the 2016 election and the ongoing attempts to ratfck the 2020 election. This section of his report is the basis for the “No collusion” half of the “No collusion. No obstruction” litany that everybody down at Camp Runamuck says with their morning prayers, and that Mueller pretty much left as a pointed open question on Wednesday. There was no hoax. There was no coup. There was an attack, and there soon will be others, so saddle up, you idiots…You may recall some stories at the time that alleged the Russians were engaged in some nihilistic, non-partisan ratfcking in order merely to create chaos in the American political system. No, Mueller said on Wednesday. The Russian ratfcking had one definite purpose: the election of Donald Trump. The Russian ratfckers, and the Volga Bagmen behind them, wanted this incompetent, vulgar talking yam to be president.”

Pierce continues, “To believe still that Mueller’s investigation definitively concluded, “No collusion,” you have to believe that all this effort and expense to influence an election in favor of a guy whose businesses already depended on Russian money, and who at the time was trying to close a major real estate deal in Moscow, was all a happy accident, a blessing from above on the Trump campaign. All of this, of course, was in the report. But watching Mueller say it out loud was a compelling bit of theater…And that brings us to the most disappointing thing about Mueller’s brief appearance on Wednesday: his stated reluctance to appear before Congress. He has no excuse left. He is a private citizen now. And if he only repeats what’s in the report, on television, in front of the country, it will contribute mightily to the political momentum behind the demands that Congress do its damn job or shirk its duty entirely. He still needs to testify. He still needs to take questions. He’s only a citizen like the rest of us now, and he has a duty to do the right thing. We all do.”

Despite evidence of growing support for ‘socialist’ ideas, particularly with young voters, polls indicate that GOP red-baiting could cause problems for progressive Democratic candidates with other constituencies. Peter Dreier’s “How Democrats Should Respond to the GOP’s Red-Baiting: Remind them that many of the most popular US programs were once called ‘socialist’” at The Nation provides an antidote. As Dreier observes, “The phrases “social democracy,” “democratic capitalism,” “shareholder capitalism,” or “progressive capitalism” (economist Joseph Stiglitz’s favorite) more accurately describe the evolving consensus among progressive Democrats…Of course, this won’t stop Trump and other Republicans from pinning the socialist label on every Democratic candidate and every Democratic idea…It makes little sense for Pelosi and other party leaders to get defensive when Trump pins a socialist tail on the Democratic donkeys. It would be better to simply explain their vision and practical solutions for America, point out that popular ideas like land-grant colleges, Social Security, public libraries, child-labor laws, the Voting Rights Act, the minimum wage, the Clean Air Act, and Medicare were once called “socialist,” and remind voters that Trump inherited a real-estate empire built on government-backed middle-class housing, squandered his fortune through bankruptcies and mismanagement, used the White House to advance his family business, and cheated on his taxes and his wives.”

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

David Jarman at DK Elections has a good write-up of the recently-released Catalist data on the 2018 election and their strategic implications. He doesn’t say anything terribly different than what I said about these same data in a recent post, but he does go into a lot more detail than I did. Plus, he has a lot of nice simple tables and graphics to get across his points so it’s well worth looking at.

Jarman’s analysis underscores an important point: the Catalist data are so good and so clear that what they tell us should become the new conventional wisdom about 2018 and the implications for 2020 strategy. Of course, the mobilize-the-base-and-never-talk-to-Trump-voters crowd will still resist. But hopefully these data will convince all but the diehards which way we need to go. As Jarman says: