House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi is on a roll. In addition to her impressive stand at the White House meeting to avert a government shutdown, “Pelosi has very likely sewn up the support she needs to become speaker of the House next year when the new Congress is sworn in, reports Scott Detrow at NPR. “In a deal struck with a group of House Democrats who had vowed to vote against the longtime Democratic leader in next month’s House speaker election, the California lawmaker agreed to term limits that would see her hold the post through 2022 at the latest. The agreement ensures Pelosi will easily have the 218 votes she needs to win the speakership on the House’s first ballot…”Over the summer, I made it clear that I see myself as a bridge to the next generation of leaders,” Pelosi said in a statement Wednesday evening announcing the agreement, “a recognition of my continuing responsibility to mentor and advance new Members into positions of power and responsibility in the House Democratic Caucus.” Detrow adds, “The term limits agreement, which still needs to be formalized by a vote of House Democrats, would limit caucus leaders to three terms, and a fourth term if two-thirds of the caucus agrees to it. The new limits would apply retroactively to Pelosi as well as incoming Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland and incoming Majority Whip Jim Clyburn of South Carolina.”

The Washington Post Editorial Board explores a possible bipartisan solution regarding Trump’s Wall for both Trump and Democrats. Here’s a compromise they pitch to Democrats: “The wall as Mr. Trump imagines it may be wasteful overkill, but it’s a stretch to frame it as a moral issue, as Ms. Pelosi does. The initial funding the president seeks, $5 billion, is hardly a break-the-bank sum by Washington standards — especially given that Democrats are already prepared to offer $1.6 billion for border security. And even if funds for a wall were appropriated, construction would immediately be challenged by ranchers and other property owners along the border, who could tie it up in court…If there is a moral imperative in any trade-off involving immigration and security, it’s the urgent necessity of finding a way to ensure a future in this country for dreamers, who are Americans by upbringing, education, loyalty and inclination — by every metric but a strictly legal one. Striking a deal that achieves that outcome should be a no-brainer for both sides. If it means a few billion dollars to construct segments of Mr. Trump’s wall, Democrats should be able to swallow that with the knowledge that it also will have paid to safeguard so many young lives, careers and hopes. That’s not a tough sell even in a Democratic primary.”

But Greg Sargent isn’t having it. As he writes in his column, “After Trump’s meltdown over his wall, Democrats cannot give any ground” at The Plum Line: “Tuesday’s events really underscore that Democrats must not give any ground in this showdown. Everyone knows Trump’s call for a wall has zero in the way of real policy justification. As I’ve argued, Democrats must use their new House majority to get back into the fight against Trump’s war on facts, and mount a stand on behalf of empiricism and good faith governing. Trump’s display of lies, bad faith and destructive threats cannot be rewarded. Especially coming after a midterm that Republicans themselves say demonstrated the bone deep toxicity of Trump’s xenophobic nationalism, it must be unambiguously repudiated.”

And Post columnist Jennifer Rubin also sees Trump’s Oval Office meltdown as an unambiguous victory for Democrats: “It is not clear how Trump could have appeared any more irrational and unhinged. (If he thinks the military can build the wall, why shut down the government?) The video of him declaring his desire to shut down the government will be played over and over again should he get his wish. Good luck convincing the American people that the Democrats, who control nothing and advocated keeping the government open, are at fault…In some ways, a shutdown at the end of 2018 would put an exclamation point on one of the worst years in memory for Republicans. The president is under investigation in multiple venues. Republicans lost 40 seats and with them the House majority. Indeed that number might be 41 thanks to substantial evidence of election fraud by Republicans in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District. Legislatively, Republicans have accomplished next to nothing this year. If they shut down the government, they’ll wind up confirming that the party of Trump is not only unethical but also incompetent and dysfunctional. Christmas sure came early for Democrats.”

Tallahassee’s Democratic Mayor Andrew Gillum lost his bid to win the governorship of Florida by 0.39 percent out of over 8 million votes cast — the smallest margin in the history of Florida’s gubernatorial elections. But it now turns out that he was unjustly smeared by his GOP opponent Ron DeSantis. As Marc Caputo reports at Politico, “Federal authorities unveiled a 44-count, 66-page indictment Wednesday of a Tallahassee politician and a city official that involved six companies, five other players and a bank in a wide-ranging bribery, extortion, fraud and racketeering scheme…But amid all the detail and alleged corruption in the indictment, one name is conspicuously absent: Andrew Gillum, who was Tallahassee’s mayor at the time and who was accused repeatedly on the gubernatorial campaign trail this year by Republican opponent Ron DeSantis — and even President Donald Trump — of being tied to the suspected wrongdoing the FBI was investigating…Republicans spent at least $7 million on TV ads — 27 percent of the total $26 million dropped on air in the general election — attacking Gillum in connection with the FBI probe. But the investigation, records indicate, ultimately had little to do with the former mayor.”

At FiveThirtyEight, “White Voters Without A Degree Remained Staunchly Republican In 2018” by Nathaniel Rakich and Julia Wolfe shares some data and insights about the role of the white working-class in the 2018 midterm elections, including: “We found a clear negative relationship (R = -0.72) between the Democratic margin of victory in a district and the share of the district’s population age 25 or older who are non-Hispanic white and lack a bachelor’s degree — a group that pundits often call the “white working class.”…Indeed, a district’s share of non-Hispanic whites without a bachelor’s degree was slightly more predictive of how it voted in the 2016 presidential election than in the 2018 U.S. House election: The correlation coefficient between Hillary Clinton’s vote margin and the percentage of the district that was white people without a bachelor’s degree was -0.79 in 2016, compared with -0.72 in 2018…In terms of white voters’ educational attainment predicting election outcomes, 2018 represented a middle ground between 2016 and 2012.” The authors conclude “Would Democrats be able to build on their 2016 gains in diverse, upper-class suburbs to make states like Texas competitive? Based on the 2018 election results, it looks as if the answer might be yes.”

“Don’t Discount Older Voters. They Could Decide the White House: Senior power is the sleeping giant of American politics,” writes Frederick R. Lynch in The New York Times. “Senior power is the sleeping giant of American politics. In the midterm elections, according to CNN exit polls, 56 percent of voters were over age 50, and about a quarter (26 percent) were 65 or over. By comparison, voters under age 30 accounted for just 13 percent — and it was a good year for youth turnout…Those age 50-plus voters split their votes evenly between Democrats and Republicans. The party that maximizes its share of those high-turnout voters wins an emerging swing constituency, and especially in key battleground states…In 2018, 59 percent of whites 45 to 64 years old voted Republican, as did 56 percent of whites over 65. (In the past two presidential contests, about 60 percent of white baby boomers and a slightly higher percentage of voters over 65 voted for Mitt Romney and Mr. Trump.)…Democrats must reclaim those voters, especially the economically anxious working- and middle-class whites who were once a core constituency. And doing so does not mean narrowing the party’s coalition: It can be done in a way that would also appeal to younger voters, minorities and women. It is a positive national message that worked well for several 2018 congressional candidates…To do this, Democrats must remind voters of the party’s heritage and re-emphasize the wildly popular landmark New Deal and Great Society programs: Medicare and Social Security.”

At The Atlantic, Ronald Brownstein considers the political repercussions of how Democrats respond to Trump’s gowing liabilities resulting from the Mueller probe: “Democratic audiences are sure to press the 2020 candidates, once they start announcing early next year, to indicate whether they would prosecute Trump if they beat him. It won’t be too long until a crowd in Iowa or New Hampshire flips the gender in Trump’s derisive chant about Hillary Clinton: “Lock her up…At that point, Democrats will face a choice that some strategists believe could provide one of the campaign’s first defining moments. Do they suppress the chant? Join in? Find a middle ground? One top strategist for a potential top-tier Democratic candidate, who asked not to be identified to discuss internal strategy, said in such a crowded field it’s inevitable some candidates will target the progressive base by promising to pursue Trump. “Someone looking for attention is going to set a bar on this,” the strategist said.” But there is a wiser course for Democratic candidates, as Brownstein notes that “Neil Sroka, communications director for the grassroots liberal group Democracy for America, predicts that progressives won’t pressure Democrats to echo Trump’s belligerent threats against Clinton (which have continued in office). “I could see a really powerful moment…when a chant of ‘lock him up’ emerges from the audience, a candidate stepping back and saying ‘No, this is what makes us different from the other side,’” Sroka said.”

In his Washington Post op-ed, “A crowded road to 2020 will yield the best Democrat,” Ronald A. Klain writes,

Since the midterm elections, the biggest thrust has been against some of the older potential candidates: Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Reporters for the Wall Street Journal said they “called all 99 Iowa Democratic county chairs” and were told “the party must nominate a 2020 candidate who is young.” (Never mind that this was, in fact, the view of only 43 of the chairs). Vanity Fair piled on, suggesting that Democrats face a “generational reckoning” in 2020. Is the Democratic Party “done” with its most visible presidential prospects?

If so, no one has bothered to tell Democratic voters that. At least one of the latest polls of the people who will actually pick the 2020 nominee shows that Biden and Sanders are overwhelmingly preferred by millennials, jointly taking a larger share of these younger voters (53 percent) than of the electorate as a whole (45 percent). Other polls have found similar results.

As for the pundits bashing 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, Klain notes that “Clinton won more votes than Trump and nearly won the electoral college (even with Russian interference and James B. Comey’s infamous letter); while no Democrat should repeat her 2016 campaign, her path to nearly 66 million votes should not be fully discarded, either.” And while there are legitimate concerns that Clinton did not learn the lesson from the reaction to her “deplorables” comment, “experienced leadership could be precisely what voters are looking for after four years of Trumpian chaos.”

Klain’s take on Warren-bashing:

The attacks on Warren are similarly absurd. Her hometown paper, the Boston Globe, called on her to stay out of the presidential race because she is “divisive” — a bizarre position from a paper that ran a report describing her as “popular at home and beyond” six months ago and urged her to run for president in the last campaign. Even the Trump-loving Rasmussen poll shows that Warren would beat Trump head-to-head.

Klain, a former Biden aide, goes on to note the ability of both Biden and Sanders to connect with younger voters and Warren’s impressive capacity for discussing fresh ideas. Further,

The idea that Democrats must find a certain type of candidate — young and charismatic, more potential than experience — in order to run “the next Obama” ignores the reality of the 2008 campaign. For while Obama’s youth and oratorical skill were critical early, he won that race in the wake of the financial collapse of late September 2008: when John McCain seemed unsteady and political in responding to the crash, and Obama was stable, somber and sagacious. Thus, it was ultimately Obama’s preternatural calm-in-a-crisis and wisdom beyond his years that were his key qualities by Election Day…

Klain concedes that ” “New face” candidates have something important to bring to the contest, and one of them may ultimately emerge as victorious — perhaps one might even be the best candidate.”

Klain’s colleague, Jonathan Capehart earlier brought some clarity to the discussion about Democratic prospects in 2020:

Democrats have this annoying habit of always looking for “The One.” The one who will sweep them off their feet in a fit of electoral ecstasy. Only their “one” should make a go of it. All others are deemed inadequate or somehow all wrong for the party or the times. Then there’s this other annoying habit. If their “one” doesn’t win the nomination, then the person who actually does win is dead to them…I hear way too many nail-biting Democrats complain that the party doesn’t have a leader, that there are too many people thinking of running, that so-and-so is the best and the others should stand down. And don’t get me started on the political teenage crush du jour. One minute it’s all about Oprah Winfrey. Then there are dreams of Michelle Obama. Don’t forget the boomlet over Michael Avenatti. Today, it’s all about Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Tex.). That’s not to say that O’Rourke or even Avenatti aren’t serious. But, c’mon, people.

Capehart complements the GOP’s very different approach:

Sure, folks have their favorite candidate and talk smack about the others. Their allegiances shift as the field winnows. But once the party faithful settle on a standard-bearer, that person is “The One.” The wagons are circled, and an all-out effort is made to get that person the keys to the White House.

The ‘big tent’ party should take that lesson more seriously, argues Capehart, who asks, “who cares if the eventual nominee isn’t your “one.” Who cares if the eventual nominee only meets 80 percent — heck, 50.1 percent — of your checklist? Evicting Trump should be the most important item on that checklist.”

Capehart dismisses the bogus critique that Democrats don’t have a message, and concludes that “evicting Trump from 1600 in 2020 will be a heavy lift. Democrats need not make it harder by hobbling their nominee with needless infighting that distracts them from what must be their No. 1 goal.”

Democrats did an excellent job of avoiding the circular firing squad in 2017 and 2018, which provides reason to hope that they can still provide adult leadership in 2020. The primary season will be ferociously contentious, as it should be. But once the nominee is set, the challenge is to show America which party is unified — and ready to govern.

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

It’s taken awhile for the picture to come into focus, but with generally finalized election returns, more data availability and accumulated analysis, we can now delineate the main features of the 2018 blue wave with some confidence. Here are 10 things we now know about the election..

1. Besides netting an impressive 40 seat gain in the House, the Democrats had an extraordinarily high margin in the House popular vote. The latest figure is almost 9 points–8.6 to be precise. Amazing. This is the greatest margin on record for a minority party contesting a Congressional election. As Harry Enten of CNN put it, this wasn’t a blue wave–it was a blue tsunami.

2. Overall turnout was through the roof. The latest figure is 50.1 percent, the highest midterm turnout since 1914. That means turnout was up a mind-blowing 13 points over the last midterm in 2014.

3. The Catalist data make it clear that this historic turnout increase was driven heavily by younger voters, those under 40. These voters are predominantly members of the Millennial generation, with smaller groups of post-Millennials and the younger segment of Generation X. Precise figures are not yet available but we can be confident the turnout of these younger voters went up significantly more than 13 points.

4. Younger voters also drove improved Democratic performance in this election, relative to the 2016 Presidential election. Whether looking at 18-24 year olds, 25-29 year olds or 30-39 year olds, their margins for Democratic House candidates were all well over 30 points. These margins were improvements of 15-19 points over the 2016 Presidential.

5. The greatest margin increases for the Democrats among young voters occurred among white voters. This includes a massive 25 point swing toward the Democrats among white 18-29 year olds. In a development of great potential significance, Democrats appear to have carried all white voters under 45 in this election.

6. Both unmarried women and unmarried men played key roles in this high turnout election, much more so than their married counterparts. Unmarried voters were also primarily responsible for the Democrats’ improved margins over the 2016 Presidential election.

7. Nonwhite turnout was way up in this election–significantly more than 13 points–including among blacks, Hispanics and Asian/other race voters. The same was true of white college voters. White noncollege turnout apparently lagged far behind.

8. Relative to 2016, the greatest shifts in margin toward the Democrats were among white college graduates, especially women, and Asian/other race voters. White noncollege voters had a smaller, but still significant, shift toward the Democrats.

9. Overall, the Democrats’ gains among white voters.in 2018 can account for essentially all of their improved performance over the 2016 Presidential election.

10. While Democrats did not win rural areas, or even come close, it is still the case that the largest swings toward the Democrats over 2016 took place in rural, not suburban, areas.

Democratic consumers should take a look at David Leonhardt’s NYT column “The Corporate Donors Behind a Republican Power Grab,” which notes that Walgreens “has allied itself with Wisconsin’s brutally partisan Republican Party. That party is now in the midst of a power grab, stripping authority from Wisconsin’s governor and attorney general solely because Republicans lost those offices last month. The power grab comes after years of extreme gerrymandering, which lets Republicans dominate the legislature despite Wisconsin being a closely divided state…A few weeks later, Walgreens donated $1,000 to Vos. Over the summer, it donated another $6,000 to the Committee to Elect a Republican Senate. A couple of weeks before Election Day, the company gave $1,000 to Fitzgerald. These donations weren’t simply a matter of spreading money around. Walgreens did not donate to state-level Democrats this year, as it has in the past…The sums here may not be enormous. But neither are the budgets for local campaigns. Even more important is the message that Walgreens is sending to politicians: We don’t care if you undermine democracy, so long as we get to keep our tax break.'”

“Are these political shenanigans norm shattering?,” asks The New York Times Editorial Board, concerning the GOP post-election power grabs in WI, MI and NC. “Absolutely. They’re obnoxious and cynical, too. And it is regrettable that one political party in particular is so insecure about the merits of its ideas — and the concept of representative democracy — that it feels the need to push a political system under strain even further toward extremism…Part of what makes the moves in Wisconsin, Michigan and North Carolina unusual is that all three states can have lame duck sessions of their legislatures in the first place. Most state legislatures don’t meet throughout the year and so don’t have the chance to thwart the will of voters after an election. If they did, this sort of thing might be more common.”

“Are Republicans abandoning democracy?” by E. J. Dionne, Jr. in his syndicated Washington Post column. Dionne explains, “Especially after last week’s court filings in the ongoing investigations of President Trump, his critics have good reason to focus on the threats he poses to democracy and the rule of law. But the president is not alone in his party…In case after case, Republicans have demonstrated an eagerness to undercut democracy and tilt the rules of the game if doing so serves their ideological interests. The quiet coup by the GOP-controlled legislature in Wisconsin is designed to defy the voters’ wishes. It reflects an abandonment of the disciplines that self-government requires.” Dionne adds that “The Democrats won the popular vote in State Assembly contests by a margin of 54 percent to 46 percent but emerged with only 36 seats to the GOP’s 63…The party’s efforts to lock in power regardless of election outcomes also eerily echo some of the behaviors of anti-democratic politicians abroad.”

In his Washington Monthly article, “How Will a Recession Affect the 2020 Election?,” David Atkins writes that “for potentially the first time in American history at least since the Civil War, it is possible that underlying economic conditions may not be quite the predictive factor they once were…The problem for Trump and the Republicans is that they already didn’t have much margin to begin with. Winning the electoral college without the popular vote is a fairly difficult feat, and it requires no small amount of luck. Republicans have done it twice in the last six cycles, but doing it again will be difficult. The 2018 midterms demonstrated that Trump has alienated large groups of voters who may have supported him previously, especially upscale suburban voters, those with college degrees, and a large number of Obama-Trump switchers who seem to be coming back home to the Democratic Party. Trump will have the advantage of incumbency, but as we have seen that advantage has shrunk. The economy may not be quite the factor it used to be, but even a small effect would be devastating given the headwinds faced by the GOP.”

WaPo’s David Weigel has an impressive statistical update on the Midterms elections. Among his findings: “Here’s the scorecard, starting with the state of the parties as compared with their status after the 2016 elections…House popular vote margin: Democrats by 8.6 points, as calculated by the Cook Political Report. That’s the largest popular vote margin for any party since 1974. Not since 1930 have Republicans lost control of the House — not just lost seats, but handed the gavels to Democrats — by as wide a margin as they lost it this year.” Weigel’s tally: Senate: 53 Republicans, 47 Democrats and independents (R 1);  House: 235 Democrats, 199 Republicans (D 41); Governors: 27 Republicans, 23 Democrats (D 7); Attorneys general: 26 Democrats, 24 Republicans (D 4); State legislative chambers: 61; Republican, 38 Democratic (D 8); State “trifectas”: 23 Republican, 14 Democratic (D 7).

Democratic office-holders and candidates who want to win support from those high-turnout senior voters should read United Steelworkers President Leo Gerard’s “Workers Petition Congress: Protect Our Pensions” at Blog for Our Future. As Gerard writes, “The total number of workers at risk is 1.2 million. In my union, the United Steelworkers (USW), 100,000 are threatened…Now, they’re vulnerable because 8 percent of multiemployer pensions are collapsing. This is not the workers’ fault. Often, it’s not even the employers’ fault. It’s because of economic forces that couldn’t be predicted and Congressional decisions to deregulate Wall Street and ignore trade violations…Loss of a pension strikes fear in the hearts of workers who shaped their lives around the covenant between them and their employer that they would receive in retirement compensation they deferred while working for decades.”

“Across the country, women who mobilized around the 2018 midterms are now mobilizing to make sure that the so-called Year of the Woman is not just that — one year,” writes Kate Zernike in The New York Times. “They want the energy that surged with the women’s marches after President Trump’s inauguration and powered a Democratic wave in November to continue not only through the 2020 presidential campaign, but until women make up at least the same proportion among lawmakers that they do in the general population…And for all the victories this year, women will occupy just 24 percent of seats in Congress come January — nowhere close to their proportion among voters or in the population, which is just over 50 percent…polls have shown women shifting their party identification to the Democrats by wide margins, and at least one analysis of exit polls showed that women of all education levels moved toward the Democrats on Election Day — even working-class white women who helped elect Mr. Trump.”

Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin explains why “Senate Republicans are responsible for the most unethical and incompetent administration ever.” Rubin presents a devastating litany of Trump’s appointments disasters to date, and observes: “We shouldn’t be surprised that the least qualified president in history — with a long record of bankruptcies, refusal to pay his bills and schemes such as Trump University — should select unqualified and ethically challenged advisers and/or retain those whose ethical misdeeds and incompetence become apparent once in office. However, we cannot blame Trump alone for lousy appointments and staffing the government with unfit characters. The Constitution provides a check on the president’s ability to put shady characters in positions of power. It’s the current Republican Party that rejects that role and decides its job description is to enable Trump’s worst instincts. Just as House Republicans proved themselves incapable of fulfilling their oversight responsibilities, Senate Republicans prove themselves incapable of fulfilling their advice-and-consent duties.”

“Looking at voter turnout in Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, and throughout the Midwest and South, what we have learned is that, yes, there are real progressives in rural communities. And Democratic voters, too. We also learned that for statewide candidates, attempts to become more conservative in order to reach Republican voters who might vote for them are largely fools gold—you might attract a few, but the number of progressive voters you lose ends up nullifying those gains…In the primary, I worked to stay as neutral as possible. However, I could see the polling data and had a pretty good idea where the race was heading. In talking to communities, I received the same message…We risk creating a divide in this party for absolutely no reason. It’s a divide that insists that rural Democratic registered voters are vastly different than any other kind of Democratic faithful, anywhere in the country. It’s rubbish. — From Yes, Virginia, there are progressives in rural America by Chris Reeves at Daily Kos.

Democrats are still on a bit of a sugar high following 40-House and 7 governor pick-ups in the midterm elections. But the euphoria dissolves on pondering the brick wall of the GOP’s young lifer majority on the Supreme Court, which can invalidate a broad range of progressive reforms with a 5-4 majority. The Senate we can change with smart politics and a little luck. But flipping, or even restoring some balance to the high court, will likely require more drastic action.

Most of the public debate concerns two possible reforms —  changing the size of the court and or the length of terms for the justices. Changing the size of the Supreme Court has been accomplished a few times by congressional statutes. Term limits, however, would require a constitutional amendment.

Clare Malone discusses the possibilities at FiveThirtyEight, and notes,

Former Supreme Court clerk and law professor Ian Samuel is more certain about court-packing: He sees it as an unmitigated good and has written about its potential upsides. “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.”

OK, he makes it sound a little too easy. FDR caught hell for trying the same thing, although his efforts did ultimately pay off, by influencing public opinion enough to sway the high court to tilt leftward. Malone adds:

But the political feasibility of the court-packing plan remains a concern. [Rep. Ro] Khanna, one of the few, if not the only national elected official to come out in favor of a fundamental revamping of the court, says that what’s needed is a reframing of the issue, one that moves away from the historically tainted term “court-packing.”

In a war of terms between ‘court-packing’ and ‘court reform,’ however, I wouldn’t bet on the more vague term, ‘court reform’ carrying the day. ‘Court-packing’ just sounds like too much of a naked power grab. Unfortunately, it’s the term constituents would remember and the one the media would repeat.

Malone notes that “one of Khanna’s proposals is an 18-year term limit for justices, after which they would be sent back to sit on circuit courts. “Most Americans love term limits,” he said.”

Polls indicate that Americans do like term limits as a general principle, though not so much for their individual elected officials. Ed Kilgore cites a C-SPAN poll, which indicates that “By nearly a three-to-one margin, respondents favored some sort of restriction on SCOTUS tenure (as opposed to the current lifetime appointments).” In any case, ‘term limits’ is an easier sell than ‘court-packing.’

But term limits require a constitutional amendment. People do seem reluctant to mess around with the Constitution these days, despite the fact that it has been amended 27 times (six other amendments passed by congress failed ratification in the state legislatures). Most of the 27 amendments seemed unlikely to be enacted at some point. Yet now they are the law of the land.

Fundamental progressive reforms are always highly problematic, but you have to begin somewhere. What has changed for the better is that social media provides a powerful tool for shaping public opinion — a tool that wasn’t available to help pass fundamental reforms in the past.

So it’s a choice between enlarging the Supreme Court by congressional statute or enacting Supreme Court term limits by constitutional amendment. Both are daunting challenges, though maybe more realistic than hoping Chief Justice Roberts or Justice Gorsuch will somehow become more liberal, as did Earl Warren and David Souter.

Zack Beauchamp reports at Vox: “The Wisconsin Republican Party is nullifying the results of the 2018 election…On Wednesday morning, the Republican-controlled state legislature passed a bill that would seize key powers from incoming Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, who defeated incumbent Gov. Scott Walker in November. Walker is expected to sign it in the coming days…The bill blocks Evers’s ability to change state welfare policy and withdraw from a lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act — two things he campaigned on. It limits the state’s early voting period, a move that would make it harder for Democrats to win future elections. And this is all happening during the lame-duck session before Evers takes power, rushed through quickly in an explicit effort to weaken Democrats and prevent the new governor from doing what he was elected to do. In essence, Wisconsin Republicans are telling the state’s voters that their preferences will be ignored…This would be troubling enough if it were a one-off. But it’s not.” Beauchamp goes on to discuss similar GOP lame duck power grabs in Michigan and North Carolina, which “highlight one of the most disturbing facts about American politics today: The Republican Party has become institutionally indifferent to the health of democracy. It prioritizes power over principle to such an extreme degree that it undermines the most basic functioning of democracy.”

Ronald Brownstein weighs in on the GOP power grab at The Atlantic, and notes, “The naked power grab unfolding in Michigan and Wisconsin shows the urgency many in the GOP feel to block the priorities of a metro-based Democratic coalition that embodies and embraces the big cultural and demographic changes reshaping the country. The determination of a Republican Party rooted in rural America to shred the rule book is likely to only deepen as more population and economic power concentrates into the metropolitan centers hurtling away from the GOP in the Trump era…the sharp, and strikingly consistent, geographic and demographic contrasts between the Republican and Democratic coalitions in Michigan and Wisconsin make clear that these explosive fights are also something more. They represent just the newest front in a larger national confrontation: the struggle between metropolitan and nonmetro America for control of the country’s direction.”

Paul Waldman explains it well in his article, “Republicans Against Democracy” at The American Prospect: “Since Donald Trump became president we’ve heard a lot about norms, the informal expectations and patterns of behavior that govern much of the political world. We’ve discussed them because Trump so often breaks them, in ways small and large. There’s no law saying the president has to release his tax returns, or can’t publicly demand that the Justice Department investigate his political opponents—it’s just how everyone accepted that things would work…But it didn’t start with him. Republicans have been pushing against norms for years, in ways that have consistently demonstrated an undeniable creativity. They not only do what Democrats wouldn’t dare, they come up with new ways to distort the system that nobody had ever thought of…Which is what is happening right now in multiple states: a shocking and repugnant attack on the will of the electorate and on democracy itself, from a party that plainly believes it can get away with just about anything…This is a three-step maneuver: Gerrymander brutally when you have the chance; hold on to power even when you lose the vote; then hamstring the Democrat the voters elected. It’s the kind of thing that until a few years ago no one would have even contemplated…Put them all together and you have a meta-lesson that Republicans took to heart: We can get away with anything. It doesn’t matter whether we’re the target of a stern editorial from The New York Times, or whether Democrats squawk. What matters is winning.”

Politico’s David Siders likens the potential Democratic presidential field to “a big game of chicken,” noting the bailout of former MA Governor Deval Patrick, who the article concludes is on “everyone’s short and long list for V.P.” Also gone is Michael Avenatti, who flamed out before he got started. Siders notes new buzz for Sens. Michael Bennet and Bob Casey and Biden affirming his “most qualified” resume. Democrats also have abundant talent in the lower chamber, and at New York Magazine,  Ed Kilgore explores the possibilities of a candidate from the House winning the nomination. Perhaps the salient point at this juncture is that Dems have a bumper crop of highly-qualified, if not particularly charismatic potential presidential candidates. With just a little less voter suppression in TX and FL, the punditry would be all abuzz about a ticket featuring Beto O’Rourke and/or Andrew Gillum. Sigh.

No one should be shocked by Trump’s petulant behavior at the funeral for former President George H. W. Bush. But the photos and videos of the Trumps glowering during the Apostle’s Creed and other songs and prayers are quite striking. It may be that Trump’s remaining Evangelical support has already been whittled down to the hard core. But it is interesting to wonder how the photos will play with Evangelicals in a purplish state with lots of church-goers, like say, North Carolina.

Astead W. Herndon has a NYT update on the “controversy” surrounding Elizabeth Warren’s Native American heritage. It’s only news because Trump has repeatedly ridiculed Warren, who he fears might be a presidential candidate who could beat him. Some critics believe she lent support to the notion of genetic testing affirming racial distinctions. Yet, many Americans have taken genetic tests just to learn what they can about their family roots. One of the more sensible comments about the dust-up comes from Deb Haaland, newly elected Native American House member from New Mexico, who said “I absolutely respect tribes’ authority to determine who are tribal members,” Ms. Haaland said. “But I don’t think that’s what Elizabeth Warren was doing. She was merely looking to find a connection to her past and that’s exactly what she did.” In any case, Warren can always respond “I’ll let Trump and his followers worry about all that stuff. I’m more interested in advancing policies that can help make life better for Americans.”

In his New York Times op-ed, “Citizens United Is Still Doing the Dirty Work,” Thomas B. Edsall shares some lucid observations about the reverberating effects of the Citizens United ruling on American politics: “In the eight years since it was decided, Citizens United has unleashed a wave of campaign spending that by any reasonable standard is extraordinarily corrupt…Citizens United has turned campaign finance into a system universally disdained by the public, a system even more ethically unmoored than the one obtained before Watergate…The difference now is that the checks are bigger…How did this come about? Essentially, by legal fiat: a declaration by five Supreme Court justices that what looks, smells and feels like corruption is not in fact corruption…The American system of campaign finance, undergirded by a Supreme Court whose conservative members feign innocence, has become the enabler of corrosive processes of economic and political inequality.”

So, “How Much Was Incumbency Worth In 2018?” Nathaniel Rakich addresses the question at FiveThirtyEight, and observes, “For decades, running as an incumbent was undoubtedly a huge advantage in electoral politics. As recently as 20 years ago, holding office added an average of 8 percentage points to a candidate’s margin. But in this century, experts say, the incumbency advantage has significantly diminished. Now the verdict is in for the 2018 election: According to our method of calculating it (which is different from other researchers’, so keep in mind that these numbers can’t be compared directly to those from previous years), the electoral benefit of already being a member of Congress this year was down to less than 3 points.”

From “Trump to the rescue? Presidential campaigning and the 2018 U.S. Senate elections” by Alan I. Abramowitz at Sabato’s  Crystal Ball: “The evidence examined in this article suggests that President Trump’s attempts to intervene in the 2018 Senate elections had, at best, mixed results for the GOP. On average, Trump’s campaign rallies appear to have had a minimal impact on the outcomes of Senate contests. A few Republican candidates did better than expected based on “fundamentals” but others did worse than expected. Only one Republican candidate, Rick Scott in Florida, did substantially better than expected but that may well have been due to factors other than the president’s intervention. And while the president’s visits may have marginally helped GOP candidates in red states like Indiana and Missouri, they may have marginally hurt Republicans in swing states like Nevada and Arizona…The bigger picture here is that Republican candidates actually underperformed in the 2018 Senate elections. Given a map in which Democrats were defending 26 seats, including 10 in states carried by Donald Trump in 2016, Republicans might well have picked up six or seven seats in 2018 in a neutral political environment. But the political environment in 2018 was far from neutral, as can be seen in the results of the House and gubernatorial elections where the map did not give Republicans the same sort of advantage. And the fact that the overall political environment was toxic for Republicans in 2018 was due largely to the unpopularity of President Trump. That reality was far more important than the effects of the president’s campaigning for GOP candidates.”

Ari Berman, author of “Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America,” explains why “A Runoff Election Tuesday Could Reverse Brian Kemp’s Voter Suppression in Georgia” at Mother Jones, and notes “John Barrow is the only former member of Congress with the unfortunate distinction of being drawn out of his district not once, but twice…Barrow, 63, calls himself “the most gerrymandered member of Congress in history.” His personal experience dealing with attempts to manipulate state voting laws led him to run this year for Georgia secretary of state, in a bid to become the state’s top election official. He trailed on Election Day by just 19,000 votes to Republican state Rep. Brad Raffensperger, but because neither candidate won an outright majority, a runoff election on Tuesday will decide the race—and the fate of Georgia’s suppressive voting practices…“For many years, most folks haven’t put much thought into the office of Secretary of State,” Barrow wrote in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution after the election’s first round. “But on November 6th, all of us received a civics lesson on the importance of this office…Democrats flipped secretary-of-state offices in Arizona, Colorado, and Michigan in 2018. These victories will help reshape voting laws in key swing states. But given the voter suppression we saw in Georgia in 2018—and with Kemp now governor—a victory for Barrow would be the most significant of the bunch.”

“President Trump announced his intention late Saturday to quickly withdraw the United States from the North American Free Trade Agreement, a move intended to force House Democrats to enact a revised version of the pact despite concerns that it fails to protect American workers,” reports Glenn Thrush at The New York Times. “If the president follows through on his threat, congressional leaders will have six months to pass the measure. The agreement has been losing support in recent days as Democratic lawmakers, ready to take control of the House in January, reckon with fallout from the announcement last week that General Motors was planning to idle five plants in North America…Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader who is likely to be elected speaker, cast doubt on the likelihood that the deal could be passed without significant new assurances from Mexico that labor standards in the agreement will be strictly enforced.”

At Post Partisan, Republican strategist Ed Rogers writes, “One bad thing about writing is that some of what you write doesn’t age well. My post on election night said that Democrats won the House, but Trump won the election. I need to walk that back. As the days have gone by, the election results have gotten worse for Republicans, and the analysis of what went wrong includes many bad omens for the GOP in 2020…The Democrats’ fundraising in 2018 — particularly among small donors — was also stunningly effective. Their ActBlue platform succeeded beyond anyone’s forecast, raking in a record haul of more than $1 billion…Michael Bloomberg’s last-minute money bombs were strategically placed and made a meaningful difference in several races…While midterms are not necessarily a good predictor of what will happen in the general election, Republicans would be wise to reflect on the fact that Democrats just won the House by the largest midterm margin ever.”

“We submit that the party’s huge vote total advantage is the bigger story of these midterms, as this metric is more indicative of the longer-term strength of a party than seats won,” writes B.J. Rudell,  associate director of POLIS: Duke University’s Center for Political Leadership at The Hill. “Democrats increased their vote totals in over 96 percent of House districts. We could not find evidence of any comparable midterm-to-midterm jump in U.S. history…Were the 2018 midterms a Blue Wave? The answer is clear  — 2018 might not have yielded the electoral gains of 2010, but no midterm election in the past century or more has been so lopsided, which almost certainly suggests its impact will be felt in 2020.

In his article, “Want a Democrat in the White House? Reform the Primaries: With anywhere from ten to 30 presidential candidates, only ranked-choice voting can produce a viable nominee,” at The American Prospect, Harold Meyerson writes “The one way to ensure that the nominee actually is favored by a majority of Democratic voters is for the party to adopt a form of ranked-choice voting. Under this system, voters would be able to designate one candidate as their first choice, another as their second, and another as their third. Maine recently adopted such a system. The political parties would have to devise the system they want to use, but they would need the cooperation of the states, which would have to rework their computer systems to accommodate rankings.”

“Democrats have a plan to stop GOP voter suppression,” reports Dan Desai Martin at Shareblue. “In the 116th Congress, our first order of business is giving democracy back to the people,” Rep. Terri Sewell (D-MS) said at a Friday press conference introducing “HR 1,” the symbolically important first bill of the new session…HR 1 will focus on strengthening democracy, which Republicans have abandoned in their complicit acquiescence to the Trump agenda…“We will promote national automatic voter registration, bolster our critical election infrastructure against foreign attackers, and put an end to partisan gerrymandering once and for all by establishing federal guidelines to outlaw the practice,” Pelosi and Rep. John Sarbanes (D-MD) wrote in a recent Washington Post op-ed…“Let’s make it easier, not harder, to vote in America,” Sarbanes said at the Friday press conference…Beyond strengthening voting rights, HR 1 also seeks to protect our democracy by fighting the corruption that tilts the playing field in favor of wealthy dark money organizations…According to draft legislation viewed by the Washington Post, the bill will set “new donor disclosure requirements for political organizations,” and help strengthen the impact of small donations to political campaigns…“Wealthy special interests shouldn’t be able to buy more influence than the workers, consumers and families who should be our priority in Washington,” Pelosi and Sarbanes wrote…To boost transparency, the bill will also require the president to release his or her tax returns.”

Paul Rosenberg’s Salon/Alternet article, “A prescription for stagnation and disaster: Here’s why Democrats must resist the ‘bipartisan’ trap” probes the realistic limits to cooperation between the two major parties. In this excerpt, he identifies some legislative priorities that poll so well that progressives can expect strong popular support at a level that could force enactment. As Rosenberg writes,  “There are some things progressives want that even majorities of conservatives support, as with the top tier of the Progressive Change Institute’s Big Ideas poll in early 2015, which I wrote about in July of that year in discussing Bernie Sanders’ popular appeal…The poll identified 16 ideas with 70 percent support or more, and don’t depend on any sort of “bipartisan compromise” as defined inside the Beltway. These range from allowing the government to negotiate drug prices (at 79 percent approval) to universal pre-K (77 percent), an end to gerrymandering (73 percent), debt-free public college (71 percent), Medicare buy-in for everyone (71 percent), and the “Green New Deal,” with its promise of millions of clean-energy jobs (70 percent).

At Brookings, Senior Fellow Isabel V. Sawhill has a warning and a recommendation for Democrats: “Democrats have re-taken the House, and already we’re hearing calls for investigations and greater accountability…But to the new members of the House prioritizing their long to-do lists, I’d like to offer some caution: If serving as a check on President Trump is all you manage to accomplish between now and 2020, your electoral victory may ultimately disappoint those who voted you into office, shrinking rather than growing your base and further increasing the public’s cynicism about government….Americans are most concerned with their low pay and poor benefits. They noted that there are plenty of jobs out there, and that jobs are easier than ever to find because of the Internet (and a strong economy). The problem, they insist, is that there aren’t enough good jobs….Yes, we need to address climate change, affordable health care, immigration reform, and other issues, but providing decent-paying jobs should be the top priority. In focus groups I have done with “the forgotten Americans” that’s what they say they want and that’s what it will take to restore their faith in government.”

From David Jarman’s “Here’s how the new Democratic members of the House sort out ideologically” at The Daily Kos:

Democrats had a lot going for them in their midterm quest for a House of Representatives majority, including: historical midterm election patterns; the public’s desire to check President Trump and GOP domination of all branches of government; the Republican failure to offer a credible health care reform package; their multi-billion dollar tax give-away to the wealthy; unease about Trump’s reckless trade policy; a bumper crop of really good Democratic candidates and competent campaigns; and additional millions of fed-up women voters.

But for many Democrats who won close races, a leading factor in their success would have to include the generosity of former New York Mayor/publishing tycoon Michael Bloomberg. As Stephanie Saul and Rachel Shorey explain in their NYT article, “How Michael Bloomberg Used His Money to Aid Democratic Victories in the House“:

Big donors like the Adelsons, the Uihleins, the Koch brothers on the Republican side and Tom Steyer and George Soros on the Democratic side have become integral and influential players in every election cycle. But in this year’s midterm elections, Mr. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, emerged as a powerful and effective force, as well as the biggest outside spender promoting Democratic House candidates, according to disclosures filed with the Federal Election Commission.

Records filed so far show that organizations controlled and funded by Mr. Bloomberg spent more than $41 million on 24 House races, much of it on eye-catching ads rolled out on social media and broadcast on television in the crucial final days of the campaign.

And while it’s impossible to conclude that any one factor tipped the balance in a race, Mr. Bloomberg appears to have reaped the benefits of his millions in giving. Democrats won 21 of the 24 races he sought to influence. Of those, 12 had been considered either tossups or in Republican districts.

“The mission was to flip the House. Success or failure would be defined by that,” said Howard Wolfson, a senior adviser to Mr. Bloomberg.

…When the final reports are filed next month, Mr. Bloomberg’s organization says they will show that the former mayor and his organizations spent $44 million on television ads and another $12 million on digital advertising in support of House candidates. Overall spending by Mr. Bloomberg and his organizations in the 2018 elections topped $112 million, an amount that also includes donations to help Senate candidates and progressive organizations…That puts him on the same level as Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, longtime Republican megadonors who had given $112 million to Republican Super PACs as of Oct. 17.

No doubt some of the 40 Democratic pick-ups and incumbents who won narrow victories would have won without contributions from Bloomberg and other wealthy donors.  However, note Saul and Shorey, “Assessing the election outcome, Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, cited Mr. Bloomberg’s spending as a significant factor. “Michael Bloomberg’s money went a long way. He defeated a lot of people by writing those $5 million checks,” Mr. McCarthy told CNBC. Kyle Kondik of Sabato’s Crystal Ball sees a more moderate Bloomberg effect, adding that “Mr. Bloomberg and his late money may have made a difference in a few of the surprising results that helped pad the size of the Democratic majority.”

And Bloomberg’s investments were smart and strategically-sound, as Storey and Saul explain. His strategy “involved spending on digital advertising beginning in September and spending “big” and “late” on television advertising. Records show that more than $30 million of Mr. Bloomberg’s spending on House races came after Oct. 22…They identified districts previously ignored by national Democrats where there were opportunities to stretch the Democratic map.”

In terms of digital and TV ad strategy, “Digital ads are cheaper and carry metrics showing how many people clicked, how long they watched and how many people shared. Using those metrics, Mr. Bloomberg’s operation was able to identify successful digital ads that they could move to television.” Saul and Storey provide a number of specific examples, including:

Health care and taxes were major themes of the Bloomberg ads. In Illinois’s 14th Congressional District, a suburban Chicago area, one Bloomberg-funded ad emphasized the Democratic challenger Lauren Underwood’s record as a registered nurse who would fight for health care.

A separate ad attacked the four-term incumbent, Randy Hultgren, for his vote in favor of the bill limiting deductions for state and local taxes, which the ad claimed would lead to “higher taxes for many Chicagoland families.”

…In Houston, a media market saturated with political advertising, one ad stood out for its quirkiness. It featured a cartoonlike depiction of the Republican incumbent, Representative John Culberson, riding a spaceship.

Mr. Culberson had pushed millions of dollars in funding for a NASA mission to find signs of life on Jupiter’s moon Europa.

“John Culberson: Out of this World,” the ad trumpeted.

“It was definitely the most-talked-about ad in the Houston area,” said Tony Essalih, a former aide to Mr. Culberson and now a principal with Cornerstone Government Affairs, a lobbying firm. “In terms of driving up his negatives, I think it had an impact.”

It’s impossible to pinpoint the overall effectiveness of Bloomberg’s contributions with any precision. But it’s clear his support had a significant impact in a number of races. It looks like Democrats owe him a debt of gratitude. Meanwhile, Bloomberg is behaving like a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, and he has an upcoming speaking engagement in Iowa. If he runs, former Republican Bloomberg will likely be cast as a centrist, business-friendly Democrat, even though he is now the NRA’s top boogeyman.

Bloomberg will undoubtedly make some Democrats nervous, especially those who could use his support, but don’t want to get locked into an endorsement trajectory. Bloomberg may end up more a king-maker than a King. But either way, his influence in Democratic Party politics is on the upswing — and so far, for progressives, as well as moderates, that’s been a good thing.

In their article, “The Suburbs Are Changing. But Not in All the Ways Liberals Hope” in The Upshot, Emily Badger, Quoctrung Bui and Josh Katz provide some insights into the force driving political preferences of the suburban voters who were so influential in the midterm elections. In this excerpt, they spotlight a demographic trend that is helping to reverse the damage done by the GOP’s gerrymandering project: “Many of the districts that flipped Democratic this year, particularly in Sun Belt suburbs of Atlanta, Dallas, Houston and Orange County, have grown much more racially and economically diverse, defying conventional portraits of suburbia…“The imagination of the suburbs is stuck in a model that emerged in Orange County in the 1960s: Goldwater-Reagan voters, white-collar, conservative activists,” said Matthew Lassiter, a University of Michigan historian who has also studied suburban voters…The demographic change that Democrats hope will advantage them nationally — as long as Republicans continue to seem uninterested in courting minorities — is already well underway in these places.”

Writing at nbcnews.com, Donna Ladd, editor-in-chief of the Jackson Free Press, sees a ray of hope for Democrats in Mike Espy’s loss in the U.S. Senate rce in Mississippi: “Exit polls for the general election on November 6 showed the usual for our state — people under age 45 supported Democrat Mike Espy while people over 45 voted Republican…But this time, the volume of dissent to the status quo in Mississippi is louder than it’s ever been — including among many white natives — and that is going to make Republicans’ use of racist political strategies much harder in upcoming elections. Espy may have lost the race but, like successful battles first to end slavery and then Jim Crow in this region, his ideas may still win the war.”

WaPo syndicated columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. notes that “Espy, the first African American congressman from Mississippi since Reconstruction, ran better than past Democratic candidates not only by producing an impressive turnout in predominantly black counties but also by cutting into Republican margins in more urbanized and suburban parts of the state. Hyde-Smith partly offset these gains with overwhelming margins in the white, rural counties that dominate politics in the Magnolia State…What’s striking is that the weakness of a Trumpified GOP among better-educated, suburban voters was on display in Mississippi, which no one expects to vote for a Democratic presidential candidate anytime soon…These middle-class and upscale voters produced a large new bloc of Democrats in the House of Representatives. Many of the newcomers came from traditionally blue states, but metropolitan districts in the red states of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Utah and Georgia also fell their way. These victories helped account for the Democrats’ astonishing popular-vote margin of s ome 9 million in House contests , and they triumphed in districts that were once hospitable to a moderate brand of Republicanism that has been crushed in the Trump era. You could say that moderate and progressive Republicans now live inside the Democratic Party.”

Meanwhile, a big Democratic win in Oklahoma opens up the possibilities in the southwest:

At The Daily 202, James Hohman observes, “The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee wading into primaries in swing districts caused months of angry grumbling from the left, including a public rebuke from Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez and an onslaught of negative coverage from left-leaning outlets like The Intercept. But the leaders of the party committee cared more about winning the House majority than ruffling feathers, and it’s becoming clearer as the dust settles that their strategy succeeded.” Hohman notes that DCCC intervention, which included finding win-win strategies and ‘sweeteners’ for candidates to run in other races paid of in at least two California distrcts, one in Sacramenta, the other the the Central Valley. Credit the DCCC with smart navigation of CA ‘jungle primaries’ to benefit the party.

Elaine Kamarck shares some of the reasons why “Why Nancy Pelosi Deserves to Be Speaker” in her New York Times op-ed,  including “Even her detractors say that she’s best at one of the most critical, if not most critical, roles of speaker, which is to court votes and count votes. Counting is a lot more complicated than conducting a survey. It involves understanding the political challenges of each and every member of Congress and then devising a legislative package that can pass. Sometimes this entails compromise; sometimes this entails structuring the vote so that a member can cast a vote against an amendment and sometimes this entails allowing a member to vote against their party — if it already has the votes to prevail…in 2005, she played a central role in the battle against privatizing Social Security. For the Affordable Care Act, she united both the left and right wings of her caucus. Later, as minority leader, she managed to keep the caucus together enough to prevent the Republican Congress from chipping away at Obamacare…To court votes, an effective legislative leader cannot stick to an overtly ideological line. If she were rigid, she wouldn’t be able to hold together a caucus that consists of conservative “blue dogs” and “democratic socialists.”..Ms. Pelosi and her leadership partner Steny Hoyer of Maryland were a very big part of the reason that the party gained at least 39 seats. Mr. Hoyer recruited and campaigned with candidates from the purple or red districts where Ms. Pelosi was viewed as too liberal. She helped raise the millions to make it all happen. They both imposed a stern message of discipline on their candidates, downplaying talk of impeachment and focusing Democrats on pocketbook issues like health care.”

Good points all, but Matthew Yglesias makes a case at Vox that “Nancy Pelosi is going to be speaker again. What Democrats need now is a TV talking head.” Pelosi is a great organizer but, Dems would do well to spotlight some younger members, if only for the sake of greater age diversity. As Yglesias explains, “Pelosi’s closest allies have never maintained that her great strength in politics is as a stump speaker or a high-energy television presence. Pelosi’s critics are a grab bag of conservative members, restive progressives, and newly elected members from swing districts — all of whom are united more by a lack of seniority in Congress than by a distinct ideological perspective. They don’t really have a coherent critique of her leadership or a different direction in mind; they just don’t want her to be a national lightning rod when a more effective messenger could represent them…Pelosi’s discursive style of speaking does not lend itself to sound bites. There are no viral Pelosi clips, no iconic Pelosi speeches, and no vast cheering crowds at Pelosi rallies. The speaker doesn’t necessarily need to be a high-wattage, charismatic public communicator. But — especially if she isn’t going to be those things — someone else has to step up.” Pelosi is not going to give up the most high-profile media opportunities that come to her as speaker. But she could designate several of the younger members to make announcements and do interviews on  occasions, which would also help convey an image of greater Democratic unity, just as Dems alow younger members to respond to the State of the Union speech.

Paul Waldman examines the difference between a political ‘centrist’ and a ‘moderate’ at The Plum Line. “A moderate may agree with liberals at some times and with conservatives at others,” says Waldman, while “a centrist is more committed to the fantasy that our problems have easy solutions if we’ll just put aside our party labels and get together to “solve problems.” But the idea that there are non-ideological solutions to our problems, solutions everyone will embrace if only they can throw off their team colors, is just wrong. Not in every case, but in most of them. When we decide how our economy should work or how our health-care system should be set up or whether we should pollute the air and water, we have to make not just practical judgments but value judgments too…And there’s a reason why liberals like me find centrists far more exasperating than conservatives do. Not only does the centrist position usually seem to be four parts conservatism to one part liberalism (look at the No Labels policy agenda if you doubt), but centrists take Republicans at their word when they’re plainly operating in bad faith.”

It’s a little early, but Nathaniel Rakich explains why “The Senate Will Be Competitive Again In 2020, But Republicans Are Favored” at FiveThirtyEight. “There will be at least 34 seats up for election in 2020, 22 of which are currently held by Republicans and 12 of which are currently held by Democrats — a stark contrast to the 2018 cycle, when Democrats were on the hot seat. That said, to make the kind of gains they need, Democrats will have to overcome the partisan lean of some fairly red states, plus successfully defend two seats of their own in Republican territory…My educated guess this far out is that Democrats’ best path to a Senate majority in 2020 lies in winning Maine, Colorado and Arizona, plus the vice presidency…In this scenario, either Jones would have to win or Democrats would also have to flip either Iowa or North Carolina. In a political environment where Trump remains unpopular and the Democratic presidential nominee wins by enough to have coattails, that’s not too hard to imagine. But barring a clear blue tinge to 2020, Republicans remain favored in the Senate for the foreseeable future.” But if the demographic trends noted above in the NYT article on the ‘burbs’ proceed apace – or accelerate – all bets would be off.

Katha Pollitt argues in The Nation that “You Can’t Get Conservative White Women To Change Their Minds: The great electoral opportunity of 2020 is not in converting Trump voters. It’s motivating the large numbers of Americans who don’t vote at all.” As Pollitt explains, “Mostly, what changes people’s minds about important convictions is experience: something new and unusual that shakes their settled views…Of course, people do change their minds, but probably not after being proselytized by someone they barely know (or, in the case of family, know all too well). You won’t get far inviting your Trumpie co-worker out for coffee so you can politely suggest she’s a racist, or giving your Trumpie cousin a hard time about her Facebook posts at a baby shower…So why is it so hard to believe that white women who voted for Trump are mostly as fixed in their views as you are? They voted for him for dozens of reasons: to fit in with their family and community, to preserve or gain status, to piss off the libtards, to ally with their menfolk, to keep MS-13 from killing their children, to bring back jobs stolen by Mexico and China, to keep taxes low and black children out of their schools, or because it’s what Jesus wants…Rather than devoting yourself to chipping away at Trump’s base, it makes more sense to forget about them and outvote them…The great electoral opportunity of 2020 is not in the marginal number of repentant Trump voters you might be able to convert. It’s in the nearly 40 percent of eligible voters—many of them younger voters, rural residents, and people of color—who in 2016 did not vote at all.”

Politico headline: “GOP leader concedes ‘we have room for improvement” on House diversity.” Ya think?

In her New York Times op-ed, “Ohio Isn’t a Red State Yet: But it will be if Democrats do not fight for working people in every corner of the state,” Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley argues that “the results of this year’s election don’t support the argument that Ohio is firmly in the Republican Party’s column. Instead, they suggest how Democrats can still win statewide with a reorientation of our resources and our message…Those who see 2018 as a blood bath for Ohio Democrats are forgetting that Senator Sherrod Brown won by 6.4 percentage points. This was a larger margin of victory than he had in 2012 — when he shared the top of the ticket with President Barack Obama, who also carried the state…In Senator Brown, we see a model for success across the industrial Midwest: He maintains a laserlike focus on economic issues without compromising on civil rights and other core progressive values. He laid it out in his victory speech: “As we celebrate the dignity of work, we unify. We do not divide. Populists are not racists. Populists are not anti-Semitic. We do not appeal to some by pushing down others.”…If we’re serious about being the party of working people, we must meet them where they are — including engaging deeply in places like Chillicothe, Canton and Steubenville.”

Speaking of Senator Brown, Esquire’s Charles Pierce commends his candor in refusing to walk back his comments questioning the integrity of the ballot-count in the Georgia governor’s race. When MSNBC’s Chuck Todd questioned whether Brown’s description might undermine public trust in elections, Brown responded, “I was the secretary of state in Ohio 30 years ago. I know what you do, as secretary of state. You encourage people to vote. You don’t purge millions of voters. You don’t close down polling places in rural areas where voters have difficulty getting to the polls, which were mostly low-income areas. You don’t do what Republicans are doing all over the country…the secretary of state of Georgia should have recused himself from running that election, as Jimmy — as former — Georgia resident, former-President Jimmy Carter said he should.” Brown added that Republican Secretary of State Kemp “did everything he could to put his thumb on the scale and…quote, unquote “won” that election by only about a point…So don’t play this false equivalency. Because a former secretary of state, like me, said that about this election, which clearly is an effort to suppress the vote, not of people that look like you and me…” Todd was respectful and fair in giving Brown his say, but, with the notable exception of MSNBC, major broadcast media have generally glossed over voter supression, at best.

Danielle Root and Aadam Barclay have a post up at the Center for American Progress, a comprehensive survey entitled “Voter Suppression During the 2018 Midterm Elections.” The authors note that “This year—perhaps uncoincidentally—severe voter suppression occurred in states with highly competitive political races, including Georgia, Texas, Florida, and North Dakota.” The authors share details regarding: Voter registration problems; voter purges; voter ID and ballot requirements; voter confusion; voter intimidation and harrassment; poll closures and long lines; malfunctioning voter equippment; Disenfranchisement of justice-involved individuals; and gerrymendering. In one excerpt they note, “more than 10 percent of voter registrants in the “heavily African-American neighborhoods near downtown” Cincinnati were purged for failing to vote since 2012, compared with only 4 percent of registered voters living in the surrounding suburb of Indian Hill.” in another, they note, “In October 2018, Kansas officials moved the last remaining polling location in Dodge City—a majority-Hispanic community—outside the city limits and far away from public transportation. Compounding the problem, officials sent mailers to newly registered voters, incorrectly informing them that they were allowed to vote at the old location.” Also, “In Georgia, more than 1,800 voting machines sat unused in a warehouse on Election Day in three of Georgia’s largest and most heavily Democratic counties.”

“Voting reforms also ought to be top priority in the 14 “trifecta” states where Democrats now control the state house, state senate and governorship,” urges Jill Lawrence in her article, “Democrats need to be ruthless on fixing voting. They’re paying a steep price for neglect” in USA Today. “And whether through the party or other organizations, by whatever means are legal, rich Democrats ought to direct money to equipment upgrades, professionalizing voter administration (including ballot design) and candidates who are committed to reforms…The soonest Democrats could run the table nationally from Washington would be 2021. In the meantime, the House Democrats should pass all reforms they can and force Republicans to show what side they’re on. And state activists should aim to put reforms directly before voters in 2020 ballot measures wherever possible. This year, while a few states added voting restrictions, more states made it easier to vote and changed how districts are drawn to prevent gerrymandering situations like North Carolina.”

Alex Rogers and Clare Foran write at CNN Politics: “Massive fundraising in Maine. A countdown clock in Alabama. Calls and texts encouraging potential challengers in Colorado. Just a few weeks after 2018’s Election Day, the signs are clear: the 2020 Senate campaigns are already underway….Democrats start 2020 in a solid position, though they remain in the minority in the upper chamber of Congress. Of the 12 Democratic seats up for re-election, only two are from states President Donald Trump won in 2016 — Alabama’s Doug Jones and Michigan’s Gary Peters. Republicans have more seats to defend, with 22 GOP seats on the line…”The map looks good for the Democrats — I’ll tell you that,” Sen. Catherine Cortez, the new chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, told CNN.”

At The New Republic, Alex Shephard outlines Democrat Mike Espy’s campaign strategy for tommorrow’s run-off in his race for the U.S. Senate: “Espy has an uphill climb. According to Vox, Democratic strategists have a clear goal for turnout: “Thirty-five percent of Mississippi’s population is black, and Democrats need them to make up at least that much of the electorate—preferably more, of course—to have a chance.” The centrist Espy is also hoping to pick off moderate Republicans. In Tuesday’s debate, he distanced himself from his party and made the case that he would be a forceful advocate for his state’s interests, touting a “Mississippi First” approach. “That means Mississippi over party. Mississippi over person,” he said. “I don’t care how powerful that person might be. It means Mississippi each and every time.”…During the debate, he also underscored his strong positions on gun rights and promised to push for a “strong immigration policy.” Meanwhile, concerns about health care, one of the defining issues in the midterms, may help Espy, who has returned to the subject again and again on the campaign trail. Hyde-Smith claims that she supports coverage of pre-existing conditions while also demanding that the Affordable Care Act be repealed. (This common Republican position is, of course, nonsensical, and voters punished the GOP for it in other states.)” David Weigel notes at The Washington Post, “Hyde-Smith’s party has the numbers, if it can tune them in to a post-Thanksgiving election. Espy’s campaign is working to convert a small pool of moderate voters, while it and multiple third-party groups try to fire up black voters. To win, Espy would need to combine historic turnout among African Americans with perhaps 30 percent of the white vote — easier to achieve if some white conservatives sit the election out.”

In his  WaPo wrap-up of the midterm elections, Dan Balz notes that “the Trump-centric strategy backfired spectacularly in the race for control of the House, as suburban voters revolted against the president, delivering a rebuke to his party’s candidates in district after district…If the enthusiasm for Trump in rural and small-town America constituted the story after 2016, the revolt against him in the suburbs, led by female voters, has become the story of the 2018 elections. The more you analyze the House results, the more the GOP’s suburban problem stands out…There were 30 districts categorized as suburban-sparse. Heading into the election, Republicans held every one of them. As a result of the election, Democrats will have 16 to the GOP’s 14. In the 15 districts described as suburban-dense, something similar happened. Republicans held all 15 before the election. In January, they will have control of just three. In the nine districts categorized as urban-suburban, Republicans will go from holding seven to holding just one.”