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

The debate last night didn’t seem like much of a game-changer. But maybe Elizabeth Warren’s Social Security proposal, rolled out on the eve of the debate, will actually turn out to be important. It’s exactly the kind of idea a Democrat should be running on in the general election against Trump. Social Security: Popular! Taxing the rich: Popular! Increasing and expanding Social Security benefits: Popular! This one could provide just the contrast a Democrat wants with Trump and should be exceptionally appealing to persuadable working class voters.

A loss is a loss. But sometimes a loss can reveal the seeds of a future victory. FiveThirtyEight’s  Nathaniel Rakich sets the stage regarding the NC-9 special election, one of two congressional seats the GOP held on to yesterday.

That race was the do-over election in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District, where alleged election fraud tainted the results of the 2018 contest to such a degree that the state elections board opted to hold a new election. After the Republican candidate got just 905 more votes than the Democrat in the 2018 election, Republicans pulled off a clearer win this year: Based on unofficial results as of 11:30 p.m. on Tuesday night, Republican state Sen. Dan Bishop defeated Democrat Dan McCready 51 percent to 49 percent. However, Democrats did 11 points better in the district than we’d expect them to in a neutral political environment, as this is normally a heavily Republican district; it is 14 points redder than the nation as a whole, according to FiveThirtyEight’s partisan lean metric. And Trump won the district by 12 points in 2016.

The results also represent a continuation of the mini-realignment we’ve seen in the Trump era of suburbs getting bluer and rural areas moving even more toward the GOP. For instance, McCready lost the district even as he won suburban Mecklenburg County by 13 percentage points, an improvement on the 2018 results, when he won Mecklenburg by 10 points. (The portion of Mecklenburg that falls in the 9th District consists of affluent white areas of metro Charlotte.) But as noted by Ryan Matsumoto, an analyst at Inside Elections, McCready did worse than his 2018 performance in every other county, most of which are sparsely populated.

It is good news for Dems about the Mecklenburg suburb. But it’s also a little worrisome that McCready lost support in some rural districts. Bishop may have gotten a ‘Trump bump’ in the wake of the President’s visit to the district. It’s unclear how McCready’s campaign allocated resources, which could explain the changes from the midterms. Or it could be that Republican Bishop just had a better turnout effort in the rural districts.

The North Carolina State Board of Elections has a useful ‘hover map,’ which breaks down the vote by county. There is very little data on turnout or demographic breakdowns available yet.

Dems are less disappointed by the NC-3 loss, because they had more assets in play in NC-9, which has a Cook Partisan Voting Index score of R+8, compared to NC-3’s R+12.

In their article, “Why Republicans shouldn’t breathe a sigh of relief after N.C. win,” Steven Shepard, Laura Barron-Lopez and Alex Isenstadt write at Politico,

Meanwhile, Democrats were quick to find the silver lining in McCready’s narrow defeat. Rep. Cheri Bustos (D-Ill.), the chairwoman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee noted that there are nearly three dozen GOP-held House seats that are less Republican-leaning than North Carolina’s 9th District.

“We fell an inch short tonight, but it took more than $6 million in outside Republican spending and a last-minute Trump rally to scrape by in a district that the president carried by 11.9 points,” Bustos said.

We have learned that, with Republicans, you can never rule out voter supression and other vote rigging “irregularities.” Hell, fraud was the reason for the NC-9 do-over in the first place. At least one legit poll indicated that MaCready was in position for an upset. Yet, considering the big picture, Rakich explains:

Other indicators also suggest that the national environment has gotten slightly less blue since 2018 but still favors Democrats, though they disagree how much. As of April, Democrats were also overperforming in the average state-legislative special election (of which we have dozens of examples since 2018) by 5 percentage points, and they have had several even stronger performances recently. And our average of polls of the generic congressional ballot⁴ gives Democrats a 6.5-point lead; just before the 2018 election, Democrats had an 8.7-point lead, which almost exactly matched the eventual House popular vote.

So, let’s not read too much into the results of a special election. Sure, there would have been delerious dancing in the Democratic streets had NC-9 gone the other way. But maybe cautious optimism is the best consolation tonic for Dems at this juncture.

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

David Leonhardt Throws Down the Gauntlet

And I throw it down with him. Let’s hypothesize that it will not be easy to defeat Trump in 2020 (not to mention taking back the Senate). Let’s also hypothesize that a second term for Trump will be a huge disaster for the country and the world, making genuine progress on most progressive goals essentially impossible.

If these hypotheses are true–and I sure as hell think they are–one might further hypothesize that Democrats would be obsessively focused on crafting the probability-maximizing strategy for defeating Trump. No unforced errors. No risky position-taking that would push the public far out of its comfort zone.

But one would be wrong about this third hypothesis. Democrats are not, in fact, focusing obsessively on the probability-maximizing strategy of defeating Trump. Oh sure, there are many strategies that could possibly win under the right circumstances, with luck and just the right reactions from the voting public. You can always make a case.

But that’s different from the probability-maximizing strategy: the strategy that will make it most likely that Trump with lose if the Democrats run a reasonably competent campaign, have reasonable luck and run on ideas that can reasonably be expected to elicit positive voter reaction.

In a lot of cases, that ain’t what we got. Leonhardt:

“You would think that Democrats would be approaching the 2020 campaign with a ruthless sense of purpose. But they’re not, at least not yet. They are not focusing on issues that expose Trump’s many vulnerabilities. They have instead devoted substantial time to wonky subjects that excite some progressive activists — and alienate most American voters….

Over the past two decades, incomes for most Americans have barely grown. Median wealth has declined. Americans are frustrated, and a majority supports a populist agenda: higher taxes on corporations and the rich, expanded government health care and financial aid, a higher minimum wage, even a Green New Deal.

The Democrats are on solid ground, substantively and politically, by pushing all of these issues. They should be casting Trump as a plutocrat in populist’s clothes, who has used the presidency to enrich himself and other wealthy insiders at the expense of hard-working middle-class families. It’s a caricature that has the benefit of truth….

The mistake that Democratic candidates have made is thinking that just because they should activate their progressive id on some issues, they should do so on all issues.

There are two main examples, both of which have received a lot of airtime during the presidential debates. The first is the idea of decriminalizing border crossings, so that the illegal entry into this country would be only a civil violation. Most top Democratic candidates — Cory Booker, Julián Castro, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — support the idea. If illegal entry weren’t a crime, they say, Trump couldn’t lock people in cages.

Supporters of the idea make intricate, technocratic arguments about how decriminalization won’t make the border less secure. But most voters tune out. They don’t buy the long explanations for why the policy doesn’t mean what it certainly seems to mean: less border enforcement. In an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll, 67 percent of registered voters called decriminalization “a bad idea.”

The second example is a proposal to eliminate private health insurance and require people to have Medicare. Sanders and Warren back it. Again, supporters offer complex arguments about why Americans will love this idea (especially if it’s phrased in just the right way) — and, again, most Americans say no thanks. They’re dealing with enough economic anxiety, without having their health insurance taken away and replaced by something uncertain.

The shame is that both health care and immigration should be Democratic advantages. Most voters recoil at Trump’s racist immigrant-bashing, and most want the option to join Medicare. And if Democrats want to reverse Trump’s policies, they need to beat him, not offer policies, like decriminalization, that would hypothetically constrain him.”

Got it? We gotta beat Trump and any strategy/policy proposal has to be evaluated in that light. Will it reduce or increase the probability that Trump will be defeated? Activists that can’t plausibly make the case that their proposals will increase that probability should stop pushing them and Democratic candidates should have the courage to start ignoring them.

Nothing else will do. This election is too important for self-indulgent progressive grandstanding.

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

There is a reasonable case that Wisconsin could be the tipping point for a Democratic victory in 2020. That is, of the “Rustbelt three” target states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Wisconsin is the toughest challenge for the Democrats Therefore, if Democrats take Wisconsin, they are also likely to take Michigan and Pennsylvania and, through that, the Presidency.

The latest poll out of Wisconsin, the highly respected Marquette Law School poll run by Charles Franklin, has some encouraging news for Democrats. Biden runs ahead of Trump by 9 points, 51-42, while Sanders bests Trump by 4 points and Warren and Harris run even with the President.

It’s worth looking at these results a bit more closely, especially why Biden is running so far ahead of Warren (folks may disagree but I consider these two the two likeliest candidates to get the nomination at this point). Biden runs significantly stronger among both white voters (he actually carries them by 5 points) and noncollege-educated voters than Warren, suggesting he is a more appealing candidate to white noncollege voters (the poll does not provide a separate white noncollege break) than Warren.

To get a sense of the significance of this consider the following. If a Democratic candidate could simply replicate Obama’s 2012 performance among white noncollege voters in 2020, that candidate, all else equal, would win the state by six-and-a-half points. By comparison, if the Democratic candidate could match 2012 Obama election black turnout, the candidate would win the state, but only by half a percentage point. This gives you a sense of the relative magnitude of two demographic forces in Wisconsin.

Of course, the standard reply to the Biden vs. Warren numbers is that it’s too early, it’s all name recognition, any Democratic candidate can match Biden’s pull with these groups once the electorate gets to know them, etc., etc.

I’m not so sure. I think Josh Marshall has the right of it here:

“Biden’s stronger numbers in general election horse race polls have been open to differing interpretations. One is simply that he’s better known and credentialed by Barack Obama. So name recognition and trust allows a few more millions of voters to opt for him. But presumably that level of familiarity and trust is one less well known Democrats will be able to build up over time.

That theory is certainly right to a degree. The question is how much.

This poll along with other polls has the other, perhaps greater part of the explanation. In a handful of critical Midwestern states (Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, et al.) he simply runs better against Trump. Why that is we can debate – more ideologically conventional policy positions, Obama, race, gender, Senate experience. But that it is the case doesn’t seem open to much doubt. Those margins in a number of key states are what translates into that relative advantage in the national polls.

Whether this will persist we can’t know. But for now, polls suggest Biden is well positioned to beat Trump in Wisconsin. If he does, if any Democrat does, they are likely the next President.”

Marshall stresses–as do I–that he does not speak as a “Biden supporter” but rather as someone who thinks these patterns are important and should not be dismissed. I agree.

The staff at Grist, one of the top environmental websites has a post, “How did Democrats fare at CNN’s climate town hall? We asked the experts.” The Grist staff notes that “Rather than arguing or talking over each other, the candidates actually had the time and space to speak substantively on this complex issue at CNN’s Climate Crisis Town Hall, discussing carbon taxes, geoengineering, lawsuits against the fossil fuel industry, and much more…So which Democratic candidates did the heavy lifting on climate policy and wowed us with their know-how?”

“I think Warren was the best by far,” noted Leah Stokes, a University of California at Santa Barbara political scientist. “She was so sharp. One point of weakness: her answer on nuclear was a little unclear. She sidestepped the issue of whether she’d extend the licenses of existing plants, which is what Sanders said he wouldn’t do. Nuclear is unpopular, so I think she was trying to thread a needle, but it left people saying she’s anti-nuclear. Otherwise, she knocked it out of the park.

Climate activist and cofounder of Zero Hour Jamie Margolin complained that “many candidates kept mentioning stupid late targets for net-zero carbon, like 2050, that are way, way past what we actually need in order to solve the climate crisis.”

At The Guardian, Emily Holden and Oliver Millman noted that “Bernie Sanders painted an apocalyptic future wreaked by the climate crisis and pledged to wage war on the fossil fuel industry,” while “Biden meanwhile pitched himself as the candidate who could lead negotiations with the diplomatic might of the US. He said his first step as president would be to call an international meeting to strengthen the Paris climate agreement…“We should be organizing the world, demanding change, we need a diplomat-in-chief,” Biden said. “Look what’s happening now in the Amazon, what’s going on? Nothing.”

At CNN politics, Meg Wagner, Dan Merica, Gregory Krieg and Eric Bradner noted some of the policies other candidates are advocating:

Kamala Harris said  “she would direct the Department of Justice to go after oil and gas companies who have directly impacted global warming. “They are causing harm and death in communities. And there has been no accountability…”

Amy Klobuchar called for a reversal to the Trump administration’s move to rollback regulations on methane emissions. “That is very dangerous,” she said of the administration’s move.

New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker said that people who don’t think nuclear power needs to be part of the fight against climate change — a group that includes many of his presidential opponents — “aren’t looking at the facts.” Booker said that he warmed to nuclear power after reading studies about it and talking to nuclear scientists about technological advancements “that make nuclear safer.”

Millman and Holden noted that “According to Yale University polling, the climate emergency is now the second most important voting issue for Democrats, behind healthcare. Among all voting Americans, nearly seven in 10 are worried about climate change, the highest ever recorded level of concern. There are strong bipartisan majorities in favour of setting pollution limits on industry, businesses, cars and trucks.”

Several of the Democratic presidential candidates received high scores from the League of Conservation Voters for their votes on environmental legislative proposals in 2018, including: Booker (100%); Harris (100); Warren (99); Klobuchar (96); O’Rourke (95); and Sanders (92).

In his Wall St. Journal column, “Here’s What’s Sure to Happen in 2020: Whoever Trump faces, voter turnout and the economy will be decisive,” William A. Galston, a Brookings Institution senior fellow and advisor to President Clinton and other Democratic presidential candidates, spells out “some propositions we can advance with reasonable confidence,” including,

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

Dan Balz’ lengthy article in the Sunday Post is a useful summary of the 2020 electoral map. He identifies four states as being key to the upcoming contest: Florida and, quite properly, the Rustbelt trio of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Let me focus here on that trio of states and run down some of the key demographic differences between them which are perhaps harder to see than their obvious similarities.

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

So much data, so little time! Probably the single thing you should be sure to look at is the RCP rolling average of candidate preference. Right now, Biden’s still ahead of course with almost twice the support of Sanders and Warren, who are now quite close in the polling average. Harris is a fairly distant fourth.

But also worth paying attention to are several media outlets who are starting to release data from their polls in graphical, cumulated form with interesting internal demographic trends. Politico, for example, has some nice material up from the Morning Consult poll. These data have Sanders still leading Warren by a significant amount, though they do have Warren gaining ground as pretty much every other poll does.

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

Hey Hey, Ho Ho, the Senate Filibuster’s Got to Go!

Kind of catchy huh? But more importantly, absolutely true. Ron Brownstein does the best job I’ve seen of making the case Democrats have no choice but to get rid of the filibuster–well, if they want to get anything done that is.

In this context, it’s interesting to note that Warren has probably been the most forceful in advocating the elimination of the filibuster while Biden has been perhaps least enthusiastic (he called it “very dangerous” recently). So if it comes down to Biden vs. Warren, we could, based on current data, have a candidate who is most likely to get elected but couldn’t govern vs. a candidate less likely to get elected but who could actually govern. Interesting tradeoff.

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

Good News from Arizona!

A new Arizona poll from OH Predictive Insights has Mark Kelly ahead of Martha McSally 46-41 in a 2020 Senate trial head matchup. Notably, as shown in the graphic below, Kelly is ahead in Maricopa county (Phoenix metro) by 9 points and in Pima county (Tuscon metro) by 10 points.

This is huge because these two counties together totally dominate the Arizona vote–over three-quarters of voters between them and over 60 percent in Maricopa alone. Note that these patterns are similar to those we saw in 2018 when Kyrsten Sinema won her Senate seat over McSally.