From Ella Nilsen’s “Republicans dominate state legislatures. That decides political power in America” at Vox: “Republicans now have total control of 30 state legislatures — both the House and Senate — compared to just 18 by Democrats. Just two states, Minnesota and Alaska, have split chambers…The Democratic Party and DLCC flipped eight state chambers in 2018 and broke Republican supermajorities in three other states. Post says they’re planning to expand on that in 2020, with a targeted list of 12 states:

• Arizona: Democrats are two seats away from taking a majority in the state House and three seats away from a majority in the Senate.
• Florida: Democrats are 14 seats away from a majority in the state House.
• Georgia: Democrats are 28 seats away from taking a majority in the state House, but they’re hoping to gain seats in 2020.
• Iowa: Democrats are four seats away from a majority in the Iowa state House.
• Kansas: Democrats are trying to break Republican supermajorities in both chambers; Democrat Laura Kelly won the governor’s seat in 2018.
• Michigan: Democrats broke a Republican supermajority in the state Senate in 2018 and are four seats away from flipping the chamber.
• Minnesota: Democrats are two seats away from a majority in the state Senate. They won control of the state House in 2018.
• North Carolina: Democrats are six seats away from taking control of the state House.
• Pennsylvania: Democrats broke a Republican supermajority in the state Senate in 2018. They are 9 seats away from a majority in the state House, and four seats away from a majority in the state Senate.
• Texas: Democrats are nine seats away from a majority in the Texas state House.
• Virginia: Democrats are two seats away from a majority in the state House of Delegates, and two seats away from a majority in the state Senate as well. Elections are coming up in 2019.
• Wisconsin: Democrats are three seats away from a majority in the Wisconsin state Senate.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s historic legacy and impressive accomplishments can only be diminished by her making divisive comments about other Democrats. It’s hard enough for Democratic primary candidates to avoid the circular firing squad, without party leaders getting drawn into a pointless snarkfest.

In his New York Times column, “Trump Needs His Base to Burn with Anger,” Thomas B. Edsall comments on the futility of Democrats spending too much effort on converting Trump’s persuadable supporters: “John Kane, a political scientist at N.Y.U. and a co-author of a new paper, “Ingroup Lovers or Outgroup Haters? The Social Roots of Trump Support and Partisan Identity,”…described Trump’s lock on a key set of voters: “For Republicans that absolutely loathe and detest” such progressive constituencies as minorities, immigrants and members of the LGBT community, Kane wrote, “an appeal from Democratic Party elite is likely to be dismissed out of hand.”…Among Republicans more sympathetic to these liberal groups, Kane continued, “the share that could, under any circumstances, actually vote for a Democrat is quite small, below 10 percent, and this is likely concentrated among those who only weakly identify with or lean toward the Republican Party.”

At The Daily Beast, Eleanor Clift warns “Embracing Medicare for All Will Put the Democratic Party on Life Support: Yes, Medicare for All polls well—until people learn details, when support craters. Democrats must steer clear of this disaster waiting to happen.” Clift explains: “Taking away something that millions of people like is never a good idea. With health care the top issue for voters, “Talking about Medicare for All hands the Republicans an ICBM, a nuclear warhead they can fire in different directions,” says Matt Bennett, a co-founder of Third Way, a moderate Democratic group. There’s the cost, $32 trillion over 10 years, according to the left-leaning Urban Institute. The payroll tax would likely be doubled, and the choice of private insurance ended or severely restricted. Republicans would have a heyday stoking generalized anxiety about an empowered federal government, or worse, when they’re in charge they could cut back the program.”

Meanwhile movements for Medicaid expansion are gathering momentum. Rebekah Barber reports at Facing South that “state legislatures refused federal money to expand Medicaid, leaving 2 million people nationwide in the coverage gap, meaning they earn too much to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to qualify for ACA Marketplace premium tax credits. And 90 percent of those in the coverage gap live in the South, where just five states have expanded Medicaid under the ACA.” Barber reports on active Mediucaid expansion movements in the southern states, including Virginia, where Medicaid expansion took place this year under the leadership of Democrats and West Virginia, Kentucky and Louisiana where Democratic governors have used executive orders to expand coverage. Barber adds that “That leaves the Southern states of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas without expanded Medicaid programs. But there are efforts underway in some of those states to change that.”

For a data-rich profile of today’s Democratic rank and file — those who will pick the party’s presidential nominee — check out Michael Tomasky’s article, “The Rules of the Game” in The New York Review of Books, which notes, “I asked Alan Abramowitz, the esteemed electoral demographer at Emory University, and he shared with me some numbers from the 2017 Pew Political Typology Survey, which he describes as being based on “a very large and high-quality sample” (the Pew numbers include Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents)…Democrats in the Pew survey skew younger than their Republican counterparts. About 43 percent are under forty, and just 12 percent are over seventy (the numbers for Republicans in those categories are 32 and 17 percent, respectively). A rather remarkable 56 percent are female. Just 54 percent are white, as opposed to more than 70 percent of Democrats on social media, with blacks and Latinos constituting 19 percent each (Republicans are 81 percent white). Of four designated income levels, the most represented by far is the lowest, under $30,000, at 36 percent. Likewise, of four designated education levels, the most represented by far is high school or less, at 37 percent—although interestingly, 15 percent of Democrats have graduate degrees, while only 8 percent of Republicans do. About a third of Democrats don’t express a religious affiliation, which means two-thirds of them do, which again is quite different, at least in my experience, from Twitter Democrats, who seem for the most part irreligious…What’s really arresting, however, is that—again according to the Pew numbers—only 46 percent of these Democrats describe themselves as very liberal or liberal. Another 37 percent call themselves moderate, and fully 15 percent—of Democrats—say they’re conservative.”

Tomasky continues, “Now consider some more numbers. Last November, Gallup asked Democrats and Republicans if they’d like their party to be more moderate or more (respectively) liberal or conservative. Republicans and Republican-leaning independents wanted their party to be more conservative, by 57 to 37 percent. But among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, the numbers were 54 percent more moderate, and 41 percent more liberal…In other words, overall, and contrary to much of what one sees on the cable networks, the Democratic Party is still a liberal-to-moderate party. Add to this what appears to be an emphasis among the rank and file on choosing the candidate who seems most likely to beat Donald Trump, and one can readily see why Joe Biden shot to the top of the polls after announcing that he was running. The party’s base seethes with hatred for Trump, but it doesn’t necessarily want a radical program of change—which it will not get in any case, since Mitch McConnell seems likely to remain the Senate majority leader. It just wants to win, rid the republic of this curse, and worry later about what comes after. To such people, a former vice-president and establishment figure who might be able to win back those famous lost voters of 2016 looks, for now, like the safe choice.”

Lest we forget how the stage was set for the current mess, Paul Waldman writes in “How Florida 2000 Created Our Modern Dysfunction: It’s when the GOP learned that winning washes away all your sins” at The American Prospect that “There was no reckoning, no comeuppance, no price to be paid. Bush proceeded through the highs and lows of his presidency, among other things appointing two justices to the Supreme Court. And when Barack Obama got elected, Mitch McConnell and the rest of congressional Republicans mounted a strategy of unceasing obstruction, including shutting down the government, threatening the faith and credit of the United States of America, and slowing Obama’s ability to fill judicial vacancies to a crawl, culminating with their theft of a Supreme Court seat…Their punishment for all that? The Oval Office in the hands of Donald Trump, quite possibly the single most morally repellent human being to ever sit there, and yet another Republican who became president while losing the popular vote. In other words, no punishment at all…It turns out that when winning is all that matters to you, you can win quite a lot.” What should Democrats have done? Maybe the better questions are what should the media have done and what should progressive activists have done? Raised a lot more hell about it is one answer. Looking forward, a Democratic landslide which can establish election by the popular vote is the best response. 

From Michelle Chen’s “Hardhats vs. Hippies”: How the Media Misrepresents the Debate Over the Green New Deal” at In These Times: “Backing the Green New Deal is a way to extend union support for working people beyond wages and benefits, because the Green New Deal is a social contract to form the foundation of a sustainable economy. From a practical standpoint, as a dwindling labor movement strives to remain relevant to the working masses, there simply is no bigger bread-and-butter issue than our land, air, water and health…It is shortsighted for the media to present labor’s skepticism toward the Green New Deal as akin to the far-right’s climate skepticism. Globally, a consensus is crystallizing on the left: There is no future in which workers are not on the frontline of climate-driven social transformation, either as survivors, or as agents of change.”

“No issue contributed more to the Democrats’ gains in the 2018 midterm elections than the party’s defense of the Affordable Care Act, particularly its provisions protecting patients with preexisting medical conditions,” explains Ronald Brownstein in his article, “The Most Critical Argument Democrats Will Have in 2020” at The Atlantic. “In exit polls during the 2018 election, nearly three-fifths of voters said they trusted Democrats more than Republicans to protect consumers with preexisting conditions. Those voters backed Democrats in House races by a crushing margin of 89 percent to 4 percent. The polling found that the issue was especially important in helping Democrats regain some ground among white women without a college degree, whose support for President Donald Trump was critical to his victories in the three Rust Belt states that effectively decided the 2016 election: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Democrats are optimistic that Trump has provided them a comparable opportunity again in 2020 by repeatedly pledging that he will try again to repeal the law if he’s reelected.”

Brownstein continues, “But polls have consistently found that most Americans oppose eliminating private health insurance. In a January survey by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, just 37 percent of Americans supported a national Medicare for All plan with a ban in place. In a CNN survey released this week, only 21 percent of all Americans said they preferred a national health-care plan that would eliminate private insurance. Such results have prompted alarm from many Democrats—especially but not exclusively centrists—that running in 2020 on a platform of eliminating private insurance could neutralize the advantage Democrats have achieved on health care by defending the ACA…The sheer magnitude of eliminating private insurance is difficult to overstate. Fully 181 million Americans receive health coverage through their employers, according to census figures. Employer-provided coverage is the source of insurance for the vast majority of well-educated voters on whom Democrats now rely.”

“In the January Kaiser survey,” Brownstein adds, “a solid 57 percent majority of self-identified Democrats said they would still support a Medicare for All system if it eliminated private insurance. But in the more recent CNN survey, which was conducted entirely after last week’s debates, just 30 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents said they preferred a “national health insurance program for all Americans” that would “completely replace private health insurance.” A much larger group of Democrats and leaners, 49 percent, said they would prefer a national program that does “not completely replace private health insurance.” The rest either did not want to create a national health-care system in the first place or said they did not know what system they would prefer…In that CNN poll, eliminating private insurance did not attract plurality support from any large group within the Democratic coalition. A system that banned private insurance drew support among Democrats from just 33 percent of whites and 26 percent of nonwhites; 27 percent of men and 32 percent of women; and 37 percent of self-identified liberals and 24 percent of self-identified moderates and conservatives. Only among two groups—whites without a four-year college degree and adults younger than 45 years old—did nearly as many Democrats support eliminating private insurance as maintaining it. The idea was especially unpopular among Democrats older than 45, with just 22 percent supporting it and 52 percent opposing it.”

At The Daily Beast, Michael Tomasky notes, “the lower reimbursement rates to hospitals under Medicare will mean that many hospitals would face financial crises and might close. How do you think that will play in swing House districts, where 30-odd Democrats will be struggling to hold onto their seats, being forced to defend this position if someone who holds it wins the nomination? And on top of that, there’s the question of the millions of people who work in the private-insurance business. Unemployment could spike in hundreds of decent-sized towns in the country, local economies noticeably disrupted…I’m just talking about raw politics in the context of a presidential campaign (and, let’s not forget, a simultaneous congressional campaign in which it’s imperative that Democrats keep their House majority, which means they need to hold the swing districts they carried last time). And in raw political terms, these positions stand to lose the Democrats votes. Lots of votes…Health care was the Democrats’ best topic in 2018. It should be their best topic again. Let’s hope they don’t make it their worst.”

In their article, “Can Democrats Stop McConnell and Trump’s Quiet Regulatory Takeover?” at The American Prospect, Jeff Hauser and David Segal write “the judiciary is not the only terrain upon which Trump and McConnell have deployed metaphorical nuclear arms. Beneath the radar, they are also trampling norms to reduce the influence of Democratic appointees at critical independent agencies which protect consumers, workers, and the broader economy. And while Democrats are waking up to the consequences of Republican court-packing, they have required prodding to even notice this other right-wing takeover. Until Democrats recognize these hardball tactics from Trump and McConnell, they are unlikely to develop a legal or political plan to confront them…Democrats need to be elevating Trump and McConnell’s devious stealth nuclear option right now. In the short run, if Republicans blow up the norms surrounding these appointments, they should be forced to own the reputational consequences rather than quietly proceed…In the long run, Democrats running for president must decide whether or not to return to bipartisan norms of the past…Blithely forgetting the current slow-walking of minority agency appointments, rather than applying consequences to Republicans for Trump and McConnell’s partisan undermining of independent agencies, would only encourage more such extreme actions by Republicans in the future.”

At The Washington Monthly, Tabitha Sanders explains “How Democrats Can Really Win Back Power: The party has long neglected its candidates for local office. Amanda Litman wants to change that.” As Sanders writes, “In 2019 alone, Run For Something has endorsed nearly 200 candidates running for positions ranging from the school board to the state house. Winning local seats, [Founder Amanda] Litman believes, is the key to rebuilding the Democratic Party in the long-run…While the national party has invested millions in local races, it is focused narrowly on candidates for legislative seats. The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC), for instance, allocates resources to all 50 state parties but puts a special emphasis into states “where increasing Democratic representation of post-2020 redistricting is crucial.”…In other words, these traditional engines of Democratic mobilizing have left a vacuum at the local level that Litman wants to fill. In turn, she may just be creating an infrastructure to maintain Democratic power in states and cities—and the country—for decades…Republicans have invested much more heavily into winning locally. The Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC) spent $40 million on state races between 2015 and 2016. Its counterpart, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC), spent roughly $17 million on similar races during that same cycle, according to someone familiar with the group’s spending…Litman, who has knocked on doors in red districts for candidates her organization has endorsed, was surprised when Republican voters told her in the run-up to last year’s midterms that they had never met a Democrat asking for their vote before.”

Dave Wasserman, the U.S. House editor for the Cook Political Report and a contributor to NBC News has a warning for Democrats, expressed in his interview by Isaac Chotiner in The New Yorker: “You can easily flip the coin and make the case that many Trump voters, particularly white men without college degrees, did not turn out in 2018 because Trump was not on the ballot. And there is real risk for Democrats that those voters are the largest drop-off universe from 2016 to 2018, and will return in 2020. So I am not convinced that 2018 signals a trend toward Democrats in 2020, especially because Trump has proven he is better than anyone else at incinerating his opponents’ images…there was also a decline in African-American participation in those states versus 2012, and that is another key to 2020….And if I wanted to know the turnout rate for one demographic in 2020 for the sake of predicting the result, it would be African-American voters under forty.”

At New York Magazine, Ed Kilgore has some perceptive comments on how the next Democratic presidential debates could be quite different, including: “…The Detroit events may be the last chance lower-tier candidates have to achieve some sort of “breakout moment,” worth its weight in gold as a generator of earned media and campaign contributions…To put it another way, the time for candidates to introduce themselves to the media and the voting public is rapidly expiring. In Detroit, it will be a matter (particularly for the bottom-feeders) of demanding attention via contrived rhetorical stunts and perhaps sharp conflict. In any event, talk of “winners and losers” may change to judgments of “survivors and casualties.”

Democrats looking for a visual edge for debates with younger opponents should consider this:

According to an Pew Research Center opinion survey of 10,170 respondents, including 5,675 Democrats and Democratic leaners, “Nearly Half of Democrats Say the Best Age for a President Is ‘In Their 50s’.”

Drilling down, the survey, which was conducted April 29-May 13, 2019, also found:

When asked about the ideal age for a president, most Democrats say they prefer someone in their 40s through their 60s, with nearly half (47%) saying the best age for a president is “in their 50s.”…Two of the Democratic Party’s best-known candidates, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, are in their 70s, yet only 3% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say this is the best age range for a president. And just 6% say it would be ideal for a president to be in their 30s.

Breaking the data down by age of poll respondents:

The survey also finds that, in general, younger Democrats are more likely than older Democrats to prefer that a president be in their 30s or 40s. A majority of Democrats ages 18 to 29 (55%) say it is best for a president to be in their 30s (13%) or 40s (42%). Among Democrats in their 30s, 40% say it is best for a president to be in their 30s or 40s, while 30% of those in their 40s say this. But among Democrats 50 and older, 12% view these as the ideal ages for a president.

For Democrats – apart from those 18 to 29 –the preferred age for a president is in the 50s. Although Democrats who are 70 and older are more likely than those in other age groups to say it is best for a president to be in their 60s (33% say this), nearly half (47%) say the 50s is the ideal age. Among Democrats 70 and older, just 4% say it is best that a president be in their 70s.

So which Democratic candidates might benefit by these findings? Back in February, The National Review’s Jim Geraghty put together a feature entitled “The Age of Democratic Presidential Candidates,” which provides the ages of most of today’s candidates on election day:

Vermont senator Bernie Sanders: 79 years, 1 month, 26 days.

Former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg: 78 years, 8 months, 20 days.

Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren: 71 years, 4 months, 12 days.

Former attorney general Eric Holder: 69 years, 9 months, 9 days.

Washington governor Jay Inslee: 69 years, 8 months, 25 days.

Former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper: 68 years, 8 months, 27 days.

Ohio senator Sherrod Brown: 67 years, 11 months, 25 days.

Potential independent candidate and former Starbucks CEO Howard Schulz: 67 years, 3 months, 29 days.

Former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe: 63 years, 8 months, 25 days.

Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar: 60 years, 5 months, 9 days.

New York City mayor and notorious groundhog killer Bill de Blasio: 59 years, 5 months, 26 days.

Maryland congressman John Delaney, who really exists: 57 years, 6 months, 18 days.

California senator Kamala Harris: 56 years, 14 days.

New Jersey senator Cory Booker:  51 years, 6 months, 8 days.

Former mayor and HUD secretary Julian Castro: 46 years, 1 month, 20 days.

Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard: 39 years, 6 months, 22 days.

South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg: 38 years, 9 months, 15 days.

Scratch non-starters Bloomberg, Schultz, Brown, McAuliffe and Holder from the list, and add Eric Swallwell (38), Marianne Williamson (67), Steve Bullock (54), Seth Moulton (40), Tim Ryan (47), Andrew Yang (45) and Michael Bennet (45), each of whom will be a year older on election day.

“To get a sense of the generational difference,” Geraghty adds, “when Joe Biden was first elected to the Senate, Buttigieg, Gabbard, and Castro had not been born yet and O’Rourke was two months old.” At least we can credit Democrats with decent age diversity. But yes, let’s remember that Sen. Sanders got more support from young voters, than Trump and Clinton combined, though his support from younger voters slipped in a recent Morning Consult poll.

If the Pew survey findings hold even roughly, Democrats may have a problem if the front-runners in the primaries are in their seventies. For one thing, having an older presidential nominee also makes the selection of the vice presidential candidate more strategically-important than usual.

I like Biden, Bernie and Warren, and I believe all three would make excellent presidents. And let’s remember that mature judgement and experience can be a critical asset for a president, despite Rep. Swalwell’s “pass the torch” debate mantra. Age can provide strengths, as well as weaknesses. But that much-disparaged concept, “electability” can’t be easilly dismissed, even though nobody seems to be able to define it.

Thinking ahead, however, I’m less concerned about election day 2020, than the first Tuesday of November 2024, when two of the current leading Democratic presidential candidates will be in their 80s. That re-elect could be a tough sell for Dems, particularly if the Republicans field a young, energetic candidate.

Of course, chronological age doesn’t necessarily measure physical or mental health. But it wouldn’t be a bad thing for Democratic voters to think a bit about 2024 in making their choices. Democrats are in good positon to win the white house and congressional majorities for the forseeable future. Giving more thought to an 8-year strategy can’t hurt.

So how will the 2020 electorate differ from 2016? At The Atlantic, Ronald Brownstein notes that “the nonpartisan States of Change project released new forecasts on the unrelenting diversification of the electorate. The new projections, released yesterday, estimate that noncollege whites, the core of Trump’s base, will decline two percentage points in 2020 as a share of all voters (from 44 percent in 2016 to 42 percent), while minorities, who strongly lean Democratic, will grow by two points (from 26 to 28 percent) and college-educated whites, who are now divided closely between the parties, will remain stable at 30 percent. Through 2036, the project expects those working-class whites to shrink to a little more than one-third of all voters, while minorities will rise to match them.”

Is Kamala Harris peaking too soon? Her positive debate buzz is translating into a fund-raising bonanza. “Donations flowed to Harris from 63,277 people, nearly 60 percent of which were first-time donors. The average donation was $30. Her previous largest day was $1.5 million after launching.” But the bad news is that she is now the target of choice for her competitors, several of whom are highly-skilled debaters. There will be a candidate winnowing soon, in terms of meeting rising standards for inclusion on the next big stage debate. Harris’s ‘law & order’ track record would serve her well in the general election, but it could be a problem in some primaries. What she has accomplished is presenting an image of a nominee who is tough enough to bring it to Trump.

Meanwhile, At Vox, Gabriela Resto-Montera reports that “Harris now polls at 12 percent, up 6 points from the previous week. This puts her in third place alongside Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who also polled at 12 percent, a one percent dip compared the previous week (a change within Morning Consult’s margin of error). Warren and Harris now stand behind Sen. Bernie Sanders — his support stands at 19 percent…Joe Biden remains in the lead with 33 percent; however, his support saw a decline nearly as steep as Harris’s rise — he lost 5 points following the debates. Some of this erosion of support may have been Harris’s gain, and a segment of Biden’s base does view the California senator in a positive light: 15 percent of Biden backers said they would pick Harris as their second choice choice of candidate…Biden maintains the highest favorability rating among likely voters at 71 percent, with Sanders trailing him at 67 percent. Warren came in third at 63 percent, and was followed by Harris with 55 percent.”

Also at Vox, Anna North argues “The case for a woman running against Trump: When it comes to debating Trump, women have an advantage,” and notes that “this week’s debates were another reminder that not only can a woman hold her own in a debate against Trump, a woman might actually be uniquely suited to beating him…. In a June Daily Beast/Ipsos poll, 74 percent of voters said they would be comfortable with a female president, but just a third said their neighbors would. Meanwhile, as Vox’s Tara Golshan wrote earlier this month, former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders, two white men in their 70s, were leading in polls going into the debates, even though polls suggest that, given a choice, Democrats might prefer a candidate who isn’t an older white man…The women onstage largely showed that their experience has made them into effective debaters, easily able to shut down male opponents.”

In his post, “Yes, Democrats Are Paying Plenty Of Attention To The 2020 Election” at FiveThirtyEight, Geoffrey Skelley reports that “a new survey from the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that just 35 percent of Democrats¹ said they were paying “a good deal” or “a lot” of attention to the campaign so far. Or in other words, only about one-third of Democrats are seriously following the goings-on of the campaign…But one-third seemed a bit low to me, given that other pollsters have found that Democrats care a lot about picking a candidate they think can defeat President Trump this year, so I took a look at what other pollsters have found this cycle. I found that Quinnipiac University has asked a version of this question three times so far in 2019, finding each time that Democrats are paying quite a bit of attention to the race. For example, 74 percent saidthey were either paying “a lot” or “some” attention in the most recent survey.”

In “Other Polling Bites,” Skelley notes that “A new report from the Pew Research Center shows a huge partisan gap over Americans’ attitudes toward capitalism and socialism. Republicans had sharply positive views of capitalism, with 78 percent holding a positive view and just 20 percent holding a negative one. But Democrats held mixed views: 55 percent had a positive impression while 44 percent had a negative one. Conversely, socialism was thoroughly disliked by Republicans, with only 15 percent holding a positive view and 84 percent holding a negative one. But Democrats were much more positive. Sixty-five percent had a positive impression and 33 percent had a negative one.”

For those who harbored any doubts that health care was still the number one issue, Skelley notes also that “According to a survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation conducted just before the first Democratic debates, health care was the topic Democrats⁵ wanted to hear about most — 87 percent said it was very important for the candidates to talk about it. Other issues that were top priorities included: issues affecting women (80 percent), climate change (73 percent), gun policy (72 percent) and income inequality (70 percent).”

Dems should consider that this punch-out between the ‘Proud Boys’ and ‘Antifa’ may be a preview of coming attractions, and begin to develop a strategy for addressing election day violence. Antifa is active in the west and especially the northwest. But in other swing states, right-wing thugs may find little opposition, as in the Brooks Brothers Riot in 2000, when wingnut goons were flown into Miami by their Republican benefactors for the purpose of intimidating those responsible for the vote recount. Democrats were caught flat-footed, and the results have been catastrophic for the entire world, and  particularly for Dems, who would be wise to anticipate that the ‘Proud Boys’ will be organized for election day mayhem in key cities in swing states. It would be better if they were met by police, community leaders and unions than by rock-throwing radicals.

From Michael Tomasky’s “Biden Doesn’t Get It: McConnell’s Gotta Go if Democracy Is Gonna Live: This problem isn’t Democrats tacking left, or Washington dysfunction. It’s McConnell. And Democrats need to let America know” at The Daily Beast: “As long as the Democrats—presidential candidates, Senate candidates, House Democrats, whomever—run around acting like Mitch McConnell isn’t a huge impediment to progress in this country, in his way a bigger one than President Trump, and not calling him out as the one-man Berlin Wall of reaction that he is, they’re wasting everyone’s time…McConnell knows this is his role, and right now, he’s enjoying it way too much, the way he’s taken to repeatedly calling himself the “Grim Reaper” of the Senate…He, and Fox and all the Republicans, will say it’s the Democrats who are being extreme, and they’ll make it look to much of the country like it’s just your basic dysfunction again and it’s everyone’s fault. No. It’s McConnell’s fault.”

In “Kamala Harris’s home run” at CNN Opinion, Paul Begala writes, “The debate soon descended into a free-for-all, with multiple politicians talking over each other. But when the smoke cleared, Kamala Harris had the first home run of the night. “Guys,” she said, “America doesn’t want to witness a food fight; they want to know how we’re gonna put food on their table.”  That’s how you create a Moment in a debate.” Harris also scored against Biden with her takedown of his recent remarks about bussing and working with segregationist Senators during the 1960s.

A panel assembled by The Guardian also gave Harris the night. But one panelist, Pulitzer Prize winner Art Cullen observed, “One of the real winners was actually Elizabeth Warren…Kamala Harris wowed early when, during shouting chaos among the 10 candidates, she reminded the other candidates that Americans “don’t want a food fight; they want to know how to put food on the table”. She was powerful, precise and put her formidable legal skills to work on camera attacking Joe Biden’s record on race and bussing…Biden worked hard to tie himself to President Obama and aggressively defend his civil rights record, but he struggled under Harris’s withering prosecutor-style cross-examination…One of the debate’s other winners wasn’t even present: Elizabeth Warren – who, along with Harris, has clearly taken Bernie Sanders’ mantle as flag-bearer for the progressive base. Sanders started the revolution, but Warren and Harris seem poised to execute it.”

You wouldn’t want to bet the ranch on any candidate at this early political moment. But Reed Richardson reports that “Kamala Harris Jumps to Second Place in Major Online Betting Markets After Debate, Biden Drops” at Mediaite: “PredictIt now shows Harris in second place for the 2020 Democratic nomination with a betting price at 19 cents, having jumped seven cents from just before the debate. She now stands at second place, just behind Joe Biden (21 cents, dropped three cents) and just ahead of Warren (18 cents, dropped three cents) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (15 cents, dropped three cents) and Mayor Pete Buttigieg (15 cents, up three cents)…Betfair also showed a strong shift to Harris, who now stands in second place there as well. Biden still leads with odds of nearly 4-to-1, but Harris is now roughly a 5-to-1 bet, with Warren just behind at 5.5-to-1. Similar to PredictIt, Sanders and Buttigieg trail the top three with odds at 7 and 9-to-1, respectively.”

“Sens. Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris raised their hands at the second night of the first Democratic presidential debate to declare they wanted to abolish private health insurance, and for the next 20 minutes, some of the other candidates on stage tried to talk them out of it.,” reports Dylan Scott in his post, “Medicare for all” vs. “Medicare for all who want it” at vox.com. “I feel strongly that families should have the choice,” Sen. Michael Bennet, who has aggressively positioned himself as opposed to single-payer, said. “That’s what the American people want.”…Bennet, former Vice President Joe Biden, South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and even Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, another cosponsor of Sanders’s Medicare-for-all bill, emphasized choice again and again. They argued people should be allowed to choose whether to keep their private insurance (about 150 million Americans currently get coverage through their job) or join a new government plan. They were clearly uncomfortable with Sanders’s prescription, which would put everybody into a government plan after four years.”

Rep. Eric Swallwell scored a zinger against Mayor Pete Buttigieg. As Jessica Campisi reports at The Hill, “Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) needled Mayor Pete Buttigieg on his handling of a police-involved shooting in his hometown of South Bend, Ind., telling Buttigieg on the Democratic debate stage that he should fire the city’s police chief…While Buttigieg said he “accept[s] responsibility” for the shooting, in which a white police officer fatally shot a 54-year-old black man, Swalwell interrupted to tell the mayor: “You should fire the chief.”…“So, under Indiana law, this will be investigated and there will be accountability for the officer involved,” Buttigieg replied.“ But you’re the mayor,” Swalwell fired back…He reiterated: “You’re the mayor. You should fire the chief, if that’s the policy and someone died…As Swalwell jabbed at Buttigieg, the mayor’s facial expression quickly gained traction on Twitter. CNN editor-at-large Chris Cillizza described Buttigieg’s look as a “death stare.””

Swallwell also had a zinger for Biden disguised as praise. As Tim Dickinson reports at Rolling Stone: “Swalwell, a 38-year-old congressman from California, showed he belonged on the big stage. Talking about the need to prepare our children for the future, Swalwell rocked the crowd to sleep with what seemed like an anodyne vignette from his childhood, but then exploded to the rim, dunking on the former vice president…“I was 6 years old when a presidential candidate came to the California Democratic Convention and said it’s time to pass the torch to a new generation of Americans,” he said. “That candidate was then-senator Joe Biden.”..“Joe Biden was right when he said it was time to pass the torch to a new generation of Americans 32 years ago,” Swalwell added. “He is still right today.” Biden smiled, and shook his head, and seemed like he might salvage the moment. But his lame comeback only underscored how badly he’d just been posterized: “I’m still holding on to that torch,” he said.” But Swallwell’s ‘pass the torch’ zinger may have backfired, with large numbers of young voters who support Sen. Bernie Sanders, as well as seniors who support Biden.

For those who want more instant metrics, Lauren Frias shares “The 5 most interesting Google Trends from day 2 of the first 2020 Democratic debates” at Business Insider: “Google Trends tracked the debate-related search interests throughout the debate and tweeted out the most interesting stats…Google Trends ranked the 10 candidates by search interest, with author Marianne Williamson being the most searched…However, during the debate, Sen. Kamala Harris was the top trending topic in search ‘on all of Google’ in the United States…Harris brought up the topic of busing during the debate, causing a surge in search of the topic by over 3,000%.”

If you watched the first Democratic presidential debates last night, you probably noticed that the excitement on the stage increased dramatically when the topic turned to health care reform. Cara Voght’s “We Just Got a Ton of Clarity on Where the Democrats Stand on Medicare for All” rolled it out at Mother Jones: “Twenty minutes into the first night of the first 2020 Democratic debate, NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt asked a straightforwards yes or no question of the field: “Who here would abolish their private health insurance in favor of a government run plan?”…Elizabeth Warren’s hand shot up immediately from the center of the stage. It was a hand many progressives had been waiting to see. The Massachusetts senator has defined her run for the White House with a bevy of detailed plans, but her stance on health care had been a bit more elusive. “There are a lot of different ways to get there,” she told the New York Times without specifically naming the single-payer plan pushed by her 2020 rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders. “‘Medicare for All’ has a lot of different paths.”…But she couldn’t have been clearer when she explained her answer from the debate stage on Wednesday night. “I’m with Bernie on Medicare for All,” she said. She added that the profit-driven private health care industry had left families rising premiums “rising premiums, rising copays, and fighting with insurance companies…Medicare for All solves that problem,” she explained from the stage.”

Voght continues, “But Warren and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio—the only other candidate to raise his hand in response to Holt’s question—were in the minority. Most of the rest of the candidates appeared to coalesce around Medicare for America instead, a universal health care plan authored by Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.). It would offer a comprehensive federal insurance option to uninsured Americans, while allowing those who have employer-provided insurance to keep it if they choose. Former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke voiced support for it, noting that it would allow anyone who needs insurance to easily obtain it. “But if you’re a member of a union, and you negotiated for a health care plan that you like because it works for you and your family, you’re able to keep it,” O’Rourke said.” All the candidates on stage appeared ready and eager to flesh out their views on the topic, and there were no gaffes.

Who got to talk the most? Erin Doherty has a chart for that at FiveThirtyEight:

Washington Post syndicated columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. shares some short takes on the candidate strategies for the first Democratic presidential debates beginning this week. He cautions front-runner Biden that “Thursday night is now a big deal, thanks to Biden’s unforced error in hauling his relationships with onetime senators James Eastland and Herman Talmadge out of the segregationist past…This was political malpractice. Biden’s lead in the polls is built on overwhelming support from African Americans, as my Brookings Institution colleague William Galston detailed. Yet it appeared more important to Biden to make his “I can work with everybody” point the way he felt like making it than to protect his greatest political asset: the trust and affection of black voters…He’ll have to work hard in the debate to reinforce his loyalists in the black community while showing all Democrats he has the discipline to go the distance.”

At Time, Jennifer Palmieri, a veteran Democratic debate coach, writes that “on the debate stage, the front runners will have to answer the moderators as well as face the specter of attacks from other candidates. Not that I recommend going after the other candidates in this first outing, particularly Biden. He’s the front runner for a reason–people like him. If attacks on him or his record aren’t delivered deftly, they will elevate him and make the attacker look desperate. Attacking front runners–particularly in early debates–is tricky to pull off…Start by using journalists’ interest in the lead-up to the debate to reset your message and rationale with the press. Second, lay down your best arguments in the debate, and plant some seeds for issues you want to come back to on the trail and in future debates. Third, pick a couple of moments coming out of the debate to capitalize on–great ones by you or openings from an opponent’s gaffe–to drive your message in the next few weeks. Fourth, come back in July and do it again.”

Anyone who is expecting an in-depth debate, however, is likely to be diappointed. As Peter Funt puts it in his article, “Impeachment, socialism and Biden-baiting: What to look for at the 2020 Democratic debates” at USA Today: “Fact is, the word “debate” is misappropriated in this event since genuine back-and-forth on key issues is virtually impossible with so many participants. A hint of what the mashup is likely to resemble came earlier this month at Iowa’s Hall of Fame gathering in Cedar Rapids. The 19 candidates were each given a carefully-timed five minutes to introduce themselves, and most mixed predictable anti-Trump rhetoric with a dash of progressive policy. The upshot: All 19 were in general agreement in what amounted to a lightning round. Or, as Carrie Ball of Cedar Rapids summed it up in the Des Moines Register, “It’s like a carnival.”

But the most important take-away from the debates this week may be what the debates do for the Democratic Party, not individual candidates. Although African and Latino Americans and women are not quite at parity level among presidential candidates, Dems have never had a broader showcase for the field, in stark contrast to the GOP.  Also, having  several impressive younger candidates is a big plus, even if one of the older candidates wins the nomination. As Oliver Darcy notes at CNN Politics: “”We’ll actually see all these candidates on stage together,” WaPo W.H. reporter Toluse Olorunnipa said on “Inside Politics” Sunday morning. “We’ll have a historic number of minorities, we’ll have veterans, people born in the 1940s all the way through the 1980s. It will be a very historic moment just to see that on the stage together…”Americans who tune in to the two-night debate will see something else unprecedented: multiple women candidates appearing on the debate stage at the same time,” Barbara Lee writes in an analysis piece for NBC’s Think vertical. “Research has shown that critical mass makes a difference in being taken seriously: Two or more women or minority candidates have a better shot at getting hired than one alone…”

Micah Zenko has “A Foreign Policy Cheat Sheet for the Democratic Debates” at foreignpolicy.com, in which he presents 12 questions with follow-ups, including some tough ones: “What is it exactly about these forever wars that you oppose? Is it their initial intervention decisions, how they have been conducted, that they have not been effective, that they are relatively open-ended, or something else?” and “What would be the expected roles and responsibilities of mutual defense treaty allies in your grand strategy? Would you expect they further increase their defense spending or enhance reimbursements to the United States? Would you commit to coming to a treaty ally’s defense during militarized disputes over territory that the United States does not recognize as belonging to that ally?”

Early though it is for Democrats to make hard and fast decisions about presidential campaign resource  allocation, Nathaniel Rakich’s post, “No, Florida is not redder than Texas” at FiveThirtyEight provides an instructive preview of one major choice Dems will have to make abut the southern states:

SOURCE: QUINNIPIAC UNIVERSITY

From Scott Bland’s “Democratic group’s poll shows Trump vulnerable with his base on health care: American Bridge is planning a $50 million advertising campaign targeting small-town Trump supporters and swing voters” at Politico: “The battleground-state polling is a new step in American Bridge’s plans to target Trump voters in small towns and rural areas with ads linking local events to unpopular Trump policies. The group’s president, Bradley Beychok, is not aiming to win a majority of those people in 2020. But even making modest inroads with these voters compared to 2016 would be a huge boost to the party’s hopes of beating Trump next year…“We’re trying to go from losing these segments [of voters] 85-15 to maybe 75-25,” Beychok said, acknowledging that, even if the project succeeds, the party will still likely lose that segment badly. “2018 gave us some good indications, and there’s data that these voters are attainable. But they want you to reach them and speak to them in a localized manner. You have to compete for these folks every day, and you can’t wait until the general…There’s this construct in the Democratic Party: focus on the base, or focus on white working-class voters,” Beychok said. “The idea you can’t do both is false.”

Are Democratic politicians too conflict-averse? Alex Pareene thinks so, and writes in his article “Give War a Chance: In search of the Democratic Party’s fighting spirit” at the New Republic: “The celebration of charismatic, conflict-averse uniters in Democratic-led White Houses omits a key, and punishing, shift in Democratic politics from anything resembling a viable effort to build a long-term majoritarian liberal coalition. Over the past two decades, Democrats steadily lost disaffected former supporters, while failing to consistently mobilize young or economically precarious people alienated from the entire political process, as the Republican Party increasingly became a nihilistic, anti-democratic machine designed to bamboozle a white elderly base and thwart the desires of the larger public for the sake of an entrenched oligarchy.
..All the while, Democratic leaders continue to campaign and govern from a crouched, defensive position even after they win power.”

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.”