As the New Year began, I mulled a perennial topic of Democratic strategy in a piece for New York:

As the voting phase of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary gets underway next month, fears about conflicts between candidates (and their supporters) weakening the party will begin to multiply. So aside from perpetual (and, in some respects, futile) efforts to assess each candidate’s “electability,” it makes sense to begin examining the most viable candidates in terms of their ability to unite Democratic voters for the mega-intense drive to November. Here are some strategies to consider.

Determine Which Groups Need to Come Together

The first step for any candidate hoping to unify the party is determining which factions are most essential for a 2020 win. Is it average voters? Certain demographic groups? Some combination of activists, opinion leaders, donors, and elected officials?

At this point, most Democratic primary voters don’t seem terribly inclined toward internecine conflict. An Economist-YouGov survey taken at the end of 2019 asks registered voters who say they plan to participate in Democratic primaries or caucuses: “Are there any presidential candidates that you would be disappointed if they became the Democratic nominee?” Multiple answers are allowed. Ex-Republican Mike Bloomberg attracted the most “disappointment,” at 34 percent, with Joe Biden coming in at 23 percent, Bernie Sanders at 20 percent, Andrew Yang at 18 percent, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar at 17 percent, and Elizabeth Warren at 14 percent. Some findings don’t exactly match what you’d expect. Buttigieg is thought by some to have fatally alienated African-American voters. Yet in this survey, only 14 percent of black voters say they’d be disappointed if Mayor Pete is the nominee, less than the 17 percent who said the same of Sanders, whose African-American support levels (mostly among young black voters) are notably stronger this year than in 2016.

Among party elites, you’d get a different picture. Big donors are famously hostile to both Sanders and, perhaps even more particularly, to the Wall Street–focused Warren, despite her generally high ratings among rank-and-file Democrats. Elected officials are more prone to support Biden, and to fear Sanders, so far. The “Twitter Left” of typically young, typically ideological activists is hostile to Biden, as you might expect, but also arguably even more hostile to Buttigieg, whose combination of youth and centrism seems to annoy millennial progressives in a particularly intense way.

In a piece presenting the argument for Sanders’s nomination, Matthew Yglesias suggests that lefty elites are potentially more troublesome in a general election than their less ideological counterparts, and thus need placating:

“Lots of moderate Democrats … find it annoying that Sanders and some of his followers are so committed to painting mainstream Democrats in such dark hues. And it is annoying! But annoying people won’t stop being annoying if he loses the nomination. If anything, they will be more annoying than ever as some refuse to get enthusiastic about the prospect of beating Trump. But if Sanders wins, partisan Democrats who just want to beat Trump will magically stop finding Bernie superfans annoying — the causes will be aligned, and the vast majority of people who want Trump out of the White House can collaborate in peace.”

If you are focused on the small factors that might make a difference in Democratic esprit de corps in a general election, eliminating the fights between Bernie-or-Bust folk and regular Democrats on social media that persisted in 2016 would make sense. But there is also the possibility that a Sanders (or Warren) nomination could give impetus to some sort of “centrist” third-party campaign like the one Howard Schultz threatened to wage earlier in the cycle, which for all its lack of natural voter appeal could serve as a lightning rod for Democratic-donor unhappiness. In other words, the target of each candidate’s unity effort will depend on identifying which voters are most put off by them.

Find Candidates With the Most “Unity” Potential

There are at least two traditional ways of assessing a candidate’s capacity to unify a potentially divided party that we can apply to the 2020 field: ideological positioning and second-choice support.

On the former point, being perceived as at the center of the party with respect to ideology can be a real asset. A new CBS-YouGov poll of Iowa asks if the various candidates are “too progressive,” “not progressive enough,” or “about right.” The rankings for “about right” are as follows: Buttigieg (65 percent); Biden (63 percent); Klobuchar (54 percent); Warren (44 percent); and Sanders (42 percent). Two candidates are far above average in the “too progressive” column: Sanders (50 percent) and Warren (41 percent). Two others stand out as “not progressive enough”: Klobuchar (35 percent) and Biden (31 percent).

But there are other respects in which candidates may or may not have the kind of broad appeal you’d want heading into a general election. Per the Morning Consult tracking poll, for example, Sanders is vastly more popular among younger voters and struggles toward the higher end of the age spectrum; to a less extreme extent, that is true of Yang as well. Biden and Buttigieg have the opposite problem. Warren displays fairly even levels of support by age. Biden, Sanders, Warren, and Yang have support spread reasonably well among white as well as nonwhite voters, while Buttigieg famously struggles with nonwhite voters.

Morning Consult regularly asks its large tracking-poll sample about second-choice candidates. In the latest poll, Sanders is the top second choice of Biden supporters (at 29 percent), followed by Warren (19 percent), Buttigieg (12 percent), and Bloomberg (11 percent). For Sanders supporters, the second choice is Warren (at 32 percent), followed by Biden (28 percent). Among Warren voters, the second preference is Sanders (33 percent) and Biden (24 percent). The runners-up for Buttigieg backers are Biden (27 percent) and Warren (20 percent).

More than anything else, these findings suggest that Biden and Sanders are both stronger unity figures than you might think. But candidates like Buttigieg, who are perceived as ideologically near the party’s center, have some strengths to build on as well.

Endorsements and Running Mates Can Help

As the nomination contest winds down, candidates will have other opportunities to broaden their appeal. First, they can seek endorsements from defeated candidates. Julián Castro’s endorsement of Warren shortly after he withdrew from the race may not bring her that much tangible help, given his own poor standing in the polls, but if others join him, that could burnish her reputation as a unity candidate. Conversely, in 2016, Sanders’s reluctance to endorse Hillary Clinton as soon as he might have (he waited until mid-July) contributed to a persistent sense of a divided party, even though Sanders energetically campaigned for the nominee later on.

Once a candidate has secured the nomination, they can reach out to disappointed party factions of identity groups via their choice of running mate. It is generally expected that any male nominee in 2020 will seek a woman as a running mate, and vice versa; the days of two white men forming a ticket are probably over for the time being among Democrats. But trans-ideological and multigenerational ticket-making could be a factor as well, if the nomination contest is close and tensions have developed.

The late-septuagenarians Biden and Sanders could have a particularly rich opportunity to promote unity in their veep selection, as either might be limited to a single term. Running with a younger, perhaps ideologically distinctive veep could essentially signal to Democrats jittery about them that their nomination wouldn’t necessarily represent some sort of definitive settlement on the party’s direction.

One unity tool that has never been tried by a Democrat (though Ronald Reagan briefly and unsuccessfully attempted it in 1976) is the choice of a coalition-building running mate before the nomination is secured. Hints were dropped by Biden’s campaign that he might try that gambit in 2020, with former Georgia gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams being the putative veep whose name was most mentioned. Abrams ruled it out for the time being, but not for good, and Biden (or some other candidate) could come back around to the idea between now and the convention.

Surviving Contested Conventions and Other Late Threats to Solidarity

The need for party unity could skyrocket if certain events threaten to further divide Democrats. A contested convention is unlikely but possible, and would certainly make unity gestures very important in restoring normalcy before the sprint to November began. Or if the primaries produce a nominee (Sanders? Biden? Buttigieg?) who provokes threats of defections to a third-party candidate or to the living-room couch on Election Day, then deploying opinion leaders with credibility among disaffected voters would be important. In general, the closer the ultimate contest looks, the more essential it will be to convey the impression that all hands must be on deck.

There Could Be Several “Unity Candidates”

A unified Democratic Party is within the grasp of any nominee, mostly thanks to the Great Unifier in the Oval Office, whose sins make those of any competitor pale by comparison, and whose second term could represent a veritable hellscape for the party and the country. But the need for unity should cross the minds of eager Democrats every time they speak to a reporter or post on Twitter about the unacceptable characteristics of candidates other than their own. It’s not just that the infernal forces of MAGA will repeat, amplify, and exaggerate any such negative talk no matter how hypocritical it may be to do so; it’s also that it may not take much to convince low-information voters that “they’re all just lying politicians” — so why not stay home, or vote for the devil that you know?

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

States of Change data featured in the Wall Street Journal in an excellent article on Trump’s demographic challenge by Aaron Zitner and Dante Chinni. Nice graphic (see below)

“President Trump’s 2020 election strategy relies largely on the white, working-class base that he excited in 2016. But he faces a demographic challenge: The electorate has changed since he was last on the ballot in ways likely to benefit Democrats.

In a New York Times opinion piece, Sean McElwee and Brian F. Schaffner explain “How Democrats Can Win Back Obama-Trump Defectors” and argue that “They don’t have to lose their souls to do it. Just the opposite.” It’s a familiar theme for TDS readers, but McElwee and Schaffner make a fresh case for it:

In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory, analysts fiercely debated the role of the approximately six million voters who supported President Barack Obama in 2012 but shifted their support to Mr. Trump in 2016. Democratic strategists also had to worry about their future behavior: Was 2016 a temporary blip or were these voters gone forever? With newly available data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study survey, the largest publicly-available election survey, we can now analyze what happened with these Obama-Trump voters in 2018 and what that might portend for Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign.

To understand the potential ramifications of Obama-Trump voters in 2020, it’s worth understanding how they voted in 2018. Among those who voted, three-quarters stuck with the Republican Party. But Democrats did win back about one-fifth of the Obama-Trump group in 2018, which would amount to a net swing of about 1.5 million votes. While the idiosyncratic governing style of Mr. Trump may have been one key factor in bringing Obama-Trump voters back into the Democratic fold, it wasn’t the only reason. It’s true that most Obama-Trump voters who stuck with the Republican Party in 2018 strongly approved of the job Mr. Trump was doing as president, but interestingly even half of those who flipped back to the Democratic side at least somewhat approved of Mr. Trump. Democrats won back a significant share of Obama-Trump voters not because those voters disliked Mr. Trump, but in spite of the fact that many actually approved of him.

Instead, these voters appeared to be drawn back toward the Democrats by some of the party’s bread-and butter-issues, and in spite of others. On issues like gun control, health care and the environment, these voters look remarkably like the Democratic Party’s base — those who voted for Obama in 2012, Hillary Clinton in 2016 and a Democratic House candidate in 2018. Eighty-four percent of Obama-Trump voters who voted for Democratic House candidates in 2018 want to ban assault rifles, compared to 92 percent of the Democratic base. By contrast, 57 percent of Obama-Trump voters who stayed with Republicans in 2018 support an assault weapons ban (which has far less support among the Republican base).

McElwee and Schaffner have some welcome poll numbers for Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in particular, noting that “Medicare for all is surprisingly popular among all Obama-Trump voters…especially those who voted for Democrats in 2018.” Further, “Eighty-three percent of those who switched back to the Democratic Party in 2018 support Medicare for all…”

Environmentalist Democratic candidates will be gladdened to note that “Seventy-three percent of Obama-Trump voters who came back to the Democratic Party in 2018 oppose the president’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement.”

With respect to immigration reform, however, a majority of the Democratic 2018 returnees “support building a border wall and Mr. Trump’s ban on immigration from predominantly Muslim countries.” But “two-thirds of these voters support Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which allows undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children to receive deferred action on deportation.”

With respect to racial injustice, “less than half of these voters agree that whites have advantages because of the color of their skin.” In terms of gender justice, “an even smaller share think that feminists are making reasonable demands of men.”

McElwee and Schaffner say, “These are your classic cross-pressured voters, aligned with Democrats on many policies that are part of the progressive wish list but likely to be turned off by the party’s rhetoric on identity politics.” This is not to argue that Democrats should avoid racial and gender justice concerns and immigration reform — just that the best time to address them is after winning the 2020  elections.

The authors also address the problem of 2012 Obama voters who didn’t vote in 2016, and note, “In 2018, Democrats regained some support among this group as well. About one-third turned out for the 2018 election, and Democrats won them 4 to 1.” In addition,

Half of the remobilized Obama-nonvoters are people of color and more than 70 percent are women. Unlike the Obama-Trump voters who supported Democrats in 2018, the Obama-nonvoters appear to have been remobilized by their dislike of Trump — more than 80 percent reported that they strongly disapproved of the job he was doing as president. Strong disapproval of Mr. Trump was a strong predictor of Obama-nonvoters coming back into the electorate to vote for Democrats in 2018.

The story of Democratic success in winning back the House in 2018 seems to be driven by two patterns — the ability to win back some cross-pressured members of the Obama coalition who voted for Trump in 2016, while also remobilizing former Obama voters who failed to show up at the polls two years earlier. Progressive economic and climate views unite these two coalitions, while the groups are more divided when it comes to racial justice and gender equity. Both Obama-nonvoter-Democrats (92 percent) and Obama-Trump-Democrats (88 percent) support a $12 minimum wage and a millionaire’s tax (92 percent and 79 percent).

McElwee and Schaffner note that Clinton’s 2016 campaign “aired fewer issue-based ads than any other presidential candidate since they started collecting the data in 2000,” while “In 2018 the Wesleyan researchers found that Democratic campaign ads were “laser focused” on issues, especially health care, which was the focus of more than half of the advertisements run by Democratic candidates.”

Looking towards the November election, the authors conclude, “if Democrats continue to learn from these elections, they will focus this year’s campaign on their plans to address issues like health care, wages and the environment” — these are the leading priorities that will give Dems real traction in 2020.

Some data for Dems about U.S. military spending and costs in the Middle East, as reported by Jake Thomas at The Intellectualist in November: “A new study on military spending in the post-9/11 era found that American taxpayers have shelled out $6.4 trillion on wars in the Middle East and Asia, according to CNBC…Published by the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, the report also found “that more than 801,000 people have died as a direct result of fighting — with more than 335,000 being civilian deaths. A further “21 million people have been displaced due to violence.”…The figure cited in the report — which CNBC noted is $2 trillion more than the entirety of the federal government’s spending in 2019 — “reflects the cost across the U.S. federal government since the price of America’s wars is not borne by the Defense Department alone.”…“Even if the United States withdraws completely from the major war zones by the end of FY2020 and halts its other Global War on Terror operations, in the Philippines and Africa for example, the total budgetary burden of the post-9/11 wars will continue to rise as the U.S. pays the on-going costs of veterans’ care and for interest on borrowing to pay for the wars,” Crawford wrote.”

Democrats looking for soundbite-sized comments on Trump’s latest disaster should give Sen. Chris Murphy’s comment a read:

From “It’s not just the polls that show Biden and Sanders leading the primary” by Harry Enten at CNN Politics: “We have less than a month until the primary season, and it’s becoming more apparent that former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont are the candidates to beat. It’s not just that they are Nos. 1 and 2 in the national polling. It’s that each holds a lead on the two most important metrics beyond the polling: fundraising and endorsements…Sanders reportedly pulled in about $34.5 million in the fourth quarter of 2019, which makes for a total sum of nearly $100 million over the 2020 campaign. No one else is even close. His nearest competitor (former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg) is closer to $75 million for the year, according to self-reports…Those who lead in fundraising at this point often win. In primaries in which an incumbent is not running in the given primary, 9 of 14 leaders at this point have gone on to win the nomination. Even when a candidate is trailing in the national polls (like Sanders), the leader has won 3 out of 5 times. This includes candidates like Democrat Bill Clinton in 1992 and Republican Mitt Romney in 2012…Dating back to 1980, endorsement leaders at this point have a strong track record of winning primaries. They’ve gone on to win the nomination 10 of 14 times. When a candidate like Biden leads in the polls and endorsements, they’ve won 7 of 9 nominations…And as I have stressed over and over again, early polling actually does a fairly good job of predicting winners and losers. Biden is clearly ahead there, with Sanders a bit behind.”

“If polarization helps Trump,” E. J. Dionne, Jr. writes in his Washington Post syndicated column, “then the opposite follows for progressives. They win only with coalitions that cross the lines of race, place and faith. Democratic candidates need strong support and turnout from African Americans, Latinos and city dwellers. But they cannot prevail in swing states without help from blue-collar and non-college-educated whites…It’s thus a big mistake for progressives to think that their own form of “base politics” is sufficient, and one politician who firmly grasps this is Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). He has a lot to teach this year’s Democratic presidential candidates, and he gathered his thoughts in his delightful book, “Desk 88,” published last year.”

FiveThirtyEight has a well-deserved rep for poll analysis. Here’s their update, by Amelia Thomson-Deveaux and Laura Bronner, on the latest polling data on impeachment: “…According to our impeachment and removal polling trackers, there isn’t broad public support for that either — just 47 percent of Americans favor removing Trump…But in the latest installment of our survey with Ipsos, where we use Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel to poll the same group of respondents every two weeks, a majority (57 percent) of Americans said they think Trump committed an impeachable offense. Fifty-two percent said they think Trump’s actions regarding Ukraine or his refusal to cooperate with the impeachment inquiry constitute enough evidence to remove him from office…Consistent with previous rounds of our survey, we found that about 15 percent of Americans think that there is enough evidence to remove Trump from office on matters related to Ukraine or his attempts to stymie the impeachment inquiry, but also think his fate should be decided by voters in the 2020 election, not Congress.”

Thomson-Deveaux and Bronner add, “According to the survey, 57 percent of Americans think it would be better if the upcoming trial included new witnesses who could potentially shed light on Trump’s conduct, while 39 percent said it would be better to keep the focus solely on the evidence introduced in the House hearings and included in the articles of impeachment, without calling new witnesses. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 65 percent of Democrats support calling new witnesses in the Senate trial. But 48 percent of Republicans also support calling new witnesses — although about the same number still want the trial to proceed with only the evidence introduced in the House hearings (50 percent)…The survey also found that Americans are divided on House Democrats’ current strategy of refusing to transmit the articles of impeachment until their concerns around a fair trial have been addressed. Roughly half of Americans say the Democrats should not wait to deliver the articles of impeachment, compared with 45 percent who say they should withhold the articles”

Also at FiveThirtyEight, Geoffrey Skelley explores “What Decades Of Primary Polls Tell Us About The 2020 Democratic Presidential Race,” and concludes “But having examined all the national polls from the last six months of 2019, the bottom line is that, at this point, Biden remains the favorite to win the Democratic nomination. That said, his grasp on the lead is tenuous. For instance, when thinking about Biden’s odds, it’s important to remember that the historical data suggests that the rest of the Democratic field combined has a larger chance of winning than Biden does on his own — 44 percent for all of the other candidates still in the race compared with Biden’s 35 percent shot.² And this uncertainty around Biden as the front-runner lines up with what else we know about the race — Biden, Buttigieg and Sanders are fighting for the lead in Iowa while Biden and Sanders are neck-and-neck in New Hampshire, and Biden raised less money than either Sanders or Buttigieg in the final quarter of 2019. So as we jump into the new year and brace ourselves for the first two nominating contests, remember that Biden has the best chance of winning his party’s nomination, but it’s also quite possible that someone else will be facing off against President Trump this November.”

At The Atlantic, Ronald Brownstein writes, “”On the whole, polls suggest that the 2020 election will closely track 2016, with small changes among key groups potentially tipping the result. Democrats hope that revulsion at Trump’s behavior will help them make gains with traditionally Republican-leaning blue-collar white women and college-educated white men, and further boost their margins with college-educated white women, who have left the GOP in droves. Republicans believe that the strong economy and Trump’s swaggering style will lead them to make small gains with Hispanic and African American men, suppress any defections from the working-class white women who backed him in 2016, and prompt greater turnout among the party’s base….”Trump’s persistently low approval rating—he is the only president in the history of Gallup polling never to crack 50 percent at any point in his tenure—means he faces an uphill climb to win the popular vote. But he could still squeeze out another Electoral College victory without it. Like in 2016, the election will likely hinge on just a few states that could be decided by very small margins: Pennsylvania and Michigan, which both polls and the 2018 election results suggest lean slightly toward the Democrats; Florida and North Carolina, which lean toward Trump; and Wisconsin and Arizona, which sit precariously at the absolute tipping point between both parties…Republicans think they cansqueeze out larger margins from shrinking groups; as a long-term strategy, that’s a dicey proposition. But it could prevail in the near term, especially since both the Electoral College and the Senate benefit small states that remain mostly white and Christian.”

In his article, “Have Democrats Found Their ALEC? The party has long pined for a nationwide network for state-level legislation. One group is finally succeeding where so many others have failed” at The New Republic Alan Greenblatt reports on a pro-Democratic group that is primed to help Dems win back control of state legislatures: Former Obama staffer Nick Rathod accepted the challenge and “built SiX out of the ashes of three prior progressive groups. “There’s a reason the right has been able to define policy,” he told me. “They’ve been doing it at the state level for so long.” (Jessie Ulibarri, a former Colorado state senator, took over the reins in 2018.)…As it has grown, SiX has honed its approach by embedding much of its staff in individual states and focusing on a limited number of issue areas, such as reproductive health and voting rights. Even where progressives can’t write the laws, SiX helps them gather data in an effort to shape policies in areas that don’t always capture headlines, such as maternal mortality rates. “Its mission really did fill a void,” said Ohio state Representative Stephanie Howse. “There is no basic school in how to be a legislator, in making policies, and even how to build a network.”…SiX’s materials now go out to more than 3,000 legislators or staffers, while its own staff has grown from 10 in 2017 to 27 today. The group has a $6.5 million budget, dwarfing the size of earlier groups that have fallen by the wayside—but still short of ALEC’s $10 million in annual revenue.”…“One of my biggest fears is that if we do take the presidency, and hopefully we do, things go back to the status quo: ‘Let’s just forget about the states again,’” Rathod said. “If the left is serious about long-term power-building and having political power in the country, they better not do that.”

Trump’s sudden announcement that the U.S. has “taken out’ a revered Iranian military commander led me to this observation for New York:

The president who has endlessly and redundantly attacked open-ended military commitments and expensive and extended conventional warfare has taken an action that many experts think will push Iran to launch a full-on regional war, perhaps even involving interested bystanders like Israel and Saudi Arabia. It could be the mother of all quagmires. So how did this happen and what will Trump do if the sudden strike he authorized sparks significant retaliatory measures from Iran?

We may not know for years, if ever, exactly what transpired in the White House, but the two relevant things to remember about the commander-in-chief are (a) he is by nature a bully, whose creed has always been winning by intimidation with superior force (or in business, via ruinous lawsuits) and (b) to the extent he thinks about war and peace he’s a total throwback to Andrew Jackson and represents Old Hickory’s peculiar combination of non-interventionism and violent militarism. I explained this latter characteristic when he launched an attack on Syria back in 2017:

“Trump [is] a self-consciously ‘Jacksonian’ president who simultaneously reveres military force while despising the ‘globalist’ ideologies that have both justified and restrained its use so often in U.S. history. ‘Jacksonians’ typically oppose entangling alliances and international nation-building exercises, but not only accept but welcome massive violence when America is ‘crossed.’ For Trump in particular, intimidation of enemies is as important to international affairs as it is to business life. That is why Trump constantly attacked Barack Obama for failing to back up his ‘red line’ threats against Syria’s use of chemical weapons (an attack he repeated before launching the cruise missiles last night) even as Trump himself denied any interest in ‘taking sides’ in that country’s messy civil war …

“Trump’s decision to act without consulting, much less asking authorization from, Congress makes perfect sense. For one thing, the ‘strategy’ or ‘comprehensive plan’ that so many senators asked for in their own initial reactions to the attacks on Syria last night may very well not exist. If the missiles were simply intended to put things right after Obama’s ‘cowardice’ and send a message to the world, then there is not and will never be a ‘strategy’ or ‘plan’ with respect to Syria; the violence was an end in itself.”

It’s very likely that is the case today, too. And projecting his own taste for high-stakes gamesmanship onto the Iranians, he may well believe one show of righteous and lethal American power will make them back down.

You don’t reason with these people, he seems to believe: You just have to show ‘em Uncle Sam is the boss.

But what if Trump has miscalculated by assassinating a figure so central to Iran’s national and religious sensibilities that their own sense of honor demands they do not back down? Or what if they believe they can bully the bully thanks to his well-known distaste for getting tied down into an extended military conflict?

Clearly Trump hopes this is a one-off game that he’s already won. In his brief remarks today from Mar-a-Lago, he treated the assassination of Soleimani as a preventive act that interrupted “sinister attacks” on U.S. personnel. And he pointedly said: “We took action last night to stop a war. We did not take action to start a war.” But it might not be entirely up to him.

It’s at this juncture that things could get really scary. Even if Trump somehow erroneously thinks a conventional war with Iran would ensure his reelection, he is unlikely to want to burden his second term with the kind of endless no-win commitment that sank the despised George W. Bush, in Trump’s own contemptuous estimation. So in the Jacksonian tradition, the most appropriate response to any serious Iranian escalation toward all-out war would be a counter-escalation of great ferocity, which would deliberately ignore any sense of proportion or calibration and display America’s might at its fullest. And if that is Trump’s inclination, it’s unclear whether any of the people around him — or his Republican allies in Congress — who have mostly been frothing for war with Iran for years, would restrain him. It’s certainly doubtful that two of Trump’s favorite allies this side of Russia, Saudi Arabia and Israel, would object to the U.S. getting medieval on their ancient enemy.

Given Trump’s combined taste for violence and distaste for messy conventional warfare, and his limited concern for the lives of non-Americans, you have to assume the worst is possible. Remember this comment (per Alex Ward) he made last summer about Afghanistan?

“Ahead of a Monday meeting with Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, Trump told reporters at the White House that he could win the war in Afghanistan in just one week if he really, really wanted to. But Trump says he won’t do that because he doesn’t want millions to die.

“’I don’t want to kill 10 million people,’ he said. ‘I have plans on Afghanistan that if I wanted to win that war, Afghanistan would be wiped off the face of the earth, it would be gone, it would be over in literally 10 days.’”

If Trump has plans to nuke Afghanistan, he most definitely has plans to nuke Iran, particularly given global worries about Tehran’s own nuclear program. I’m not predicting he’d do anything quite that insane, but the Jacksonian logic of sudden and terrifying force as a first and last resort means nothing lethal is going to be off the table. Lord have mercy on us all.

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

Mason Dixon has released a new Florida poll that has trial heat numbers plus broad crosstabs for Trump vs. Biden, Warren, Sanders and Buttigieg. Biden has a slim lead of 2 points, while the others lose to trump by 9, 5 and 4 points, respectively.

The internal comparisons are interesting (graphic below). Biden has Obama-level support among blacks (92-4) while Warren’s numbers look very similar to Clinton’s 2016 black support 87-8. And, while Biden leads Trump by 61-32 among Hispanics, Warren has a more modest 54-35 lead among this demographic–again, similar to Clinton’s performance in 2016.

Amidst all the retrospectives of the last decade, I had to note at New York the upcoming decennial anniversary of a bad moment for Democrats:

I’ve only seen one take on the 2010s, from USA Today’s Jill Lawrence, that gives proper weight to the shocking event that showed in the world of politics, the “teens” would not reflect a continuation of the strong Democratic trends of 2006 (which made Nancy Pelosi Speaker of the House) and 2008 (when Obama won the presidency in a near-landslide).

That would be Republican Scott Brown’s January 2010 conquest of the Massachusetts Senate seat held since 1962 by the “liberal lion” of that chamber, Ted Kennedy. At the time there were some Democratic hopes that the special election was an aberration based on irregular turnout and a feckless campaign by Democrat Martha Coakley. But as Lawrence pointed out, it was the ultimate omen:

“To call Brown’s win a trauma for Democrats would be an understatement. And yet, although it was a DefCon 1 warning about the midterm to come, they went into those 2010 November elections unprepared for the debacle. Wipeouts in the state legislatures that would draw up new and in some cases egregiously gerrymandered election maps based on the 2010 Census. Wipeouts in races for the governors who would have been able to temper or veto those maps. Wipeouts in the House, installing a GOP majority hellbent on thwarting Obama.

“The trend continued through 2014, from state legislatures, governors and the House to a 2014 Republican Senate takeover that offered a glide path for conservative judges and justices when the next jolt arrived two years later in the form of Trump.”

Yes, Obama was reelected in between those two strong Republican years, though by a significantly reduced margin (dropping from 7.2 percent to 3.9 percent in the popular vote). And of course, Brown lost his Senate seat to Elizabeth Warren in 2012. At the time, many observers (myself included) deduced that the demographic disparity between midterm and presidential electorates explained a lot of the apparent oscillation of results, which augured well for Democratic prospects in 2016. And then you-know-what happened.

Now, three weeks before the tenth anniversary of the Brown shocker, there is no easily discernible pattern in American party politics going forward. Democrats did better in 2018 than Republicans did in 2014, by any standard other than net Senate seat gained (Republicans picked up nine net seats in 2014 and actually gained two more in 2018 thanks to a heavily skewed landscape). But that wasn’t unusual for a president’s first midterm, particularly a president as unpopular as Donald Trump. The 2020 election is widely expected to be a barn-burner, and while Democrats should continue to benefit gradually but steadily from demographic changes in their favor, Republicans have proven quite good at maximizing their power via a combination of voter suppression, gerrymandering, the unrepresentative nature of the Senate and the Electoral College, and ruthless demagoguery. If Trump hangs onto the White House next year and his party hangs onto the Senate, the GOP could establish a hold on the federal judiciary lasting for decades, while continuing to punch above their popular weight in other arenas thanks to the structural advantages they maintain.

Brown’s victory and the ensuing struggle to enact Obamacare (and other, less successful, elements of the president’s agenda) without a Democratic Senate supermajority also offered a tutorial on the obstruction a disciplined Republican majority could mount, and the price Democrats would have to pay in policy compromises to govern even with a strong position in Congress (which they were soon to lose).

Without question, Democrats will be ebullient if they manage to defenestrate Trump, particularly if that win is accompanied by the first Democratic trifecta (control of the White House and both Houses of Congress) since 2008. But as 2010 quickly showed, political fortune can change almost instantly, and the work of building a governing majority never ends.

At The Guardian, Cas Mudde writes, “…New voters and non-voters are disproportionately non-white and non-suburban. Many of them are not even registered, or – thanks to Republican purges of voting rolls – no longer registered. This is particularly relevant to African Americans, who – contrary to popular perception – actually have rather high voter turnout, higher than other minorities, but are disproportionately affected by voter suppression (including incarceration)…Despite the efforts of some organizations, most notably Stacey Abrams’ new group Fair Fight, Democrats devote most of their time to reaching already registered voters, rather than registering new voters. Imagine how much the millions of dollars of Mike Bloomberg and Tom Steyer could have achieved had they spent that money on registering new voters rather than vanity campaigns…The 2020 elections will not be about changing minds about who to vote for but about whether to vote. The damage done to voter registration in the South alone, following the gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, could swing elections.”

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, however, sees a vein worth mining in disgruntled Trump voters, especially in New Hampshire. As Trent Spiner reports at Politico, she “recognizes that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are going to clean up here. But she sees a path to success by finding voters to whom they have little appeal — like those who are so independent-minded they voted for both Barack Obama and Donald Trump…It shows in every piece of her strategy, from the towns she visits to her stump speech. And in a state where the biggest voting bloc, 43 percent, is independents, it’s a game plan her campaign thinks will create an Election Day surprise…Klobuchar’s state director said they’re focused on places other candidates have avoided, especially the towns that went to Obama in 2008 and 2012, but then voted for Trump in 2016.” Spiner notes that Klobuchar is also socially and ideologically-close with the state’s two Democratic women senators, Maggie Hassan and Jean Shaheen.

Andrew O’Hehir has a jaunty rant at salon.com, “A New Year’s resolution for Democrats: To win in 2020, get the f**k over 2016 already: Democrats must escape the poisonous hangover of Bernie v. Hillary. I’ve got terms for a truce: You’ll hate it.” O’Hehir writes, “the amount of grudge and grievance and name-calling and recrimination and hive-mind clapback and paranoid mythology, nearly all of it rooted in the leftover bad feelings of the Hillary v. Bernie conflict of 2016, is astonishing. It’s damaging and dangerous and downright Trumpy, and yet more evidence that the virus that produced him has infected us all…we have been subjected to endless, pointless, airless debates about who is more “electable,” which all boil down to the Bernie-Hillary split in barely concealed form, and which all run aground on the great reef known as Nobody-Has-a-Solitary-Clue Land…Rescuing the Democratic Party from its current aimless drift — in the election year just ahead or in this new decade or just sometime in this century — is not a matter of embracing one side of that divide and rejecting the other. It’s about facing an altered political landscape with honesty and clarity, and leaving behind the realm of denial, delusion and fantasy that have rendered our politics so empty and so stupid for so long.”

In E. J. Dionne, Jr.’s Washington Post column, “Our political debate doesn’t have to be this stupid,” he brings the challenge of 2020 into focus: “I am not starry-eyed about bipartisanship and its supposed joys. On the contrary, the current Republican Party’s abject fealty to Trump and its shift far to the right of where it once was mean that promises of a glorious bipartisan future will, for some time, be false. I have little faith in Republican politicians, including many I once thought were serious about governing…there are stirrings on the right that it is long past time for its partisans to break with climate-change denialism. We should be arguing over what to do, not about whether something needs to be done…Yes, Trump’s defeat and a radical renewal inside the Republican Party are the necessary preconditions for progress. But I refuse to see my wishes for a more reasonable politics and a better form of conservatism as fantasies. Let’s become a nation of problem-solvers again.”

It’s just one poll, but the findings merit a mention. As Jonathan Easely writes in his article, “Black Democrats energized to vote Trump out” at The Hill: “Black Democratic voters are energized to vote President Trump out of office in 2020, as less than a quarter of African Americans say their financial situation has improved over the past two years, according to a new study…A national survey released by Third Way and the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies found that of the 46 percent of black voters who identify as strong Democrats, 57 percent are more energized to vote in 2020 than they were in 2016…However, about a third of black voters said they only have weak ties to the Democratic Party, and of these, only 34 percent said they’re more energized to vote in 2016…Sixty-two percent of black voters said that Democrats understand their lives, while only 13 percent said the same of Trump and the Republicans.”

Easely adds, “And a strong majority of black voters say racial relations have deteriorated under Trump, with 80 percent saying that Trump’s election has made people with racist views more likely to speak out. Fifty-five percent said they face more racism in their daily lives than they used to…Third Way did not conduct a horse-race survey of the Democratic primary field, but found that black voters tend to be more moderate in their views…Of the 79 percent of black people who identify as Democrats, 34 percent lean conservative, 34 percent are mixed and 31 percent lean liberal…Overall, 31 percent of black Americans described themselves as moderate, followed by 24 percent liberal, 17 percent conservative and 11 percent progressive…About two-thirds of black Americans prefer a candidate they agree with over a candidate who shares their background and life experiences.”

At CNN Politics, Harry Enten explains why it’s wrong to blame “religious voters” for Trump’s presidency. Enten concedes that “Trump won white born-again evangelicals with more than 75% of the vote in 2016 and his approval rating with them remains at 75% in CNN/SSRS polling taken in the middle of last year.” However, “Trump’s standing with all religious voters — and, in particular, nonwhite religious voters — is considerably weaker than it is among white evangelicals…Heading into the 2020 general election, Trump can certainly count on the strong backing of white born-again evangelicals. If he loses, however, it’ll be in part because his approval rating is only in the low 40s among those who attend religious services at least once a week and are not white born-again evangelicals…Trump’s approval rating was measured at 46% with those who attend religious services at least once a week and are not born-again evangelicals. His disapproval rating was 49% among this group, which means his net approval (approval – disapproval) rating was -3 points. Keep in mind, the majority of this group (about 55%) is white, so this isn’t just about this group containing fewer whites than the born-again evangelical bloc.”

AJ Willingham reports at CNN that “The first day of 2020 marked a bevy of new legislation, including the statewide legalization of recreational weed in Illinois…the state’s lieutenant governor was one of the first in line. The day before the law went into effect, Illinois Gov. J. B. Pritzker granted more than 11,000 pardons for low-level marijuana convictions.” Also at CNN, Leah Asmelash and Melissa Alonso note that “Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton was among hundreds of early morning customers at Sunnyside Dispensary, a Chicago marijuana dispensary, on the first day of legal recreational sales in the state, according to a release from Cresco Labs, which owns the dispensary…Stratton bought a 100-milligram tin of Mindy’s Edibles Glazed Clementine Orange Gummies…Each gummy is 5 milligrams, a “very popular microdose for beginning edible consumers,” he said…Illinois is now the 11th state to legalize recreational marijuana.” Democrats should remind younger voters throughout 2020 that they have fought for this reform against Republican opposition, across the U.S.

Don’t forget that the 2020 elections will also play an enormous role in federal and state redistricting, and for Democrats that means correcting entrenched pro-Republican bias, which helped elect Trump and facilitated the GOP domination of state legislatures. To get up to speed on redistricting concerns, check out the Princeton Election Consortium, where top redistricting expert Sam Wang is offering data-driven articles on the Princeton Gerrymandering Project – 2019, in Review, What North Carolina’s redistricting cases suggest for 2021 strateg and Lessons from 2016 and application to 2020, among others.

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

Is Iowa a Swing State Again?

An interesting new AP article by Thomas Beaumont makes the case, drawing on recent demographic and political trends.

“In [2018], Iowans sent the state’s first Democratic women to Congress: Cindy Axne, who dominated Des Moines and its suburbs, and Abby Finkenauer, who won in several working-class counties Trump carried.

Democrats won 14 of the 31 Iowa counties that Trump won in 2016 but Obama won in 2008, though Trump’s return to the ballot in 2020 could change all that.

“We won a number of legislative challenge races against incumbent Republicans,” veteran Iowa Democratic campaign consultant Jeff Link said. “I think that leaves little question Iowa is up for grabs next year.”

There’s more going on in Iowa that simply a merely cyclical swing.

Iowa’s metropolitan areas, some of the fastest growing in the country over the past two decades, have given birth to a new political front where Democrats saw gains in 2018.

The once-GOP-leaning suburbs and exurbs, especially to the north and west of Des Moines and the corridor linking Cedar Rapids and the University of Iowa in Iowa City, swelled with college-educated adults in the past decade, giving rise to a new class of rising Democratic leaders.

“I don’t believe it was temporary,” Iowa State University economist David Swenson said of Democrats’ 2018 gains in suburban Des Moines and Cedar Rapids. “I think it is the inexorable outcome of demographic and educational shifts that have been going on.”

There’ much to agree with here but I do think the writer overestimates the centrality of the college vote and underestimates the challenge of the noncollege vote.

My take:

2018 was a surprising comeback election for the Democrats. They won the House popular vote by a stunning 10 points and flipped two GOP-held House seats in the state. The Democrats also gained a net of five state legislative seats. However, Republican Kim Reynolds beat Democrat Fred Hubbell for the governorship by 3 points.

The Democratic candidate in 2020 has a lot of ground to make up relative to 2016, but the 2018 results provide some reason to think that it may be possible. For Trump, he needs to simply approximate the voting patterns that brought him his solid 2016 victory. But one challenge for him is his current negative net approval in the state of -3 points.

Iowa is an exceptionally white state; nonwhites made up just 7 percent of voters in the state in 2016. These voters were divided up roughly 3-2-2 between Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians/other races. Blacks and Hispanics supported Clinton by 76 points and 20 points, respectively. Asians/other races, however, were essentially tied between Trump and Clinton. Iowa’s white college graduates (31 percent of voters) gave Clinton a solid lead of 7 points, 50 percent to 43 percent. But among the enormous white noncollege group, 62 percent of voters, Trump ran up a 23-point lead, 58 percent to 35 percent. That was clearly the big story in the state.

White noncollege eligible voters in 2020 should decline by 2 points relative to 2016, while white college graduates should increase by a little more than half a point. All nonwhite groups in the state should increase by small amounts relative to 2016: Blacks by 0.3 points; Hispanics by 0.6 points; and Asians/other races by 0.5 points. While these changes are all favorable for the Democrats, they will do relatively little to whittle their considerable 2016 deficit—a mere 0.6 points—if voting patterns by group in 2020 remain the same as in 2016.

Thus, if Trump can maintain or come close to his support among white noncollege voters in Iowa, he should carry the state easily again. A shift of 10 margin points against Trump among white college graduates, swelling the Democrats’ already solid advantage among that group, would still leave Trump about 6 points ahead in 2020.

For the Democratic candidate, his or her fortunes are clearly dependent on moving the very large white noncollege group in their direction. Indeed, if the Democrats could replicate Obama’s 2012 white noncollege margin in the state, they would actually carry the state by slightly less than 5 points, all else remaining equal. Even getting part of the way there could make the state competitive in 2020. That’s a tough challenge, but certainly the 2018 results in the state suggest this is possible.

So keep your eye on Iowa. It could be more in play than people have been thinking.

In his year-ender, “2019: The Year of Stability: Big events of the year, including impeachment, don’t materially change the odds in races for president, Congress,” Kyle Kondik concludes at Sabato’s Crystal Ball that “despite all of the big political events of the past year, the overall political picture for November 2020 has not changed all that much. The presidential race remains in flux, and the two parties — Republicans in the Senate, Democrats in the House — retain various advantages as they seek to maintain their respective congressional majorities.” Overconfident Democrats should take note that the final Electoral Votes forecast by Kondik and the Crystal Ball for 2019 sees a dead-even 248 EV tie, with 42 toss-ups.

Kondik shares a map depicting Crystal Ball’s most current data-driven estimates for the Electoral College votes. Crystal Ball’s predictions have proved impressive in recent elections.

Kondik believes Dems will hold their House majority next year: “We currently list 225 House seats at least leaning to the Democrats, 192 at least leaning Republican, and 18 Toss-ups. Splitting the Toss-ups nine to nine would give the GOP a net seat of one; they need to net 18 seats to win the House. So we still see the Democrats as favorites in the House.”

As for the 2020 U.S. Senate races, “Our best guess at this point would be for something like a net Democratic gain of a seat, short of the three net seats Democrats need to forge a 50-50 tie. So we still favor the Republicans overall in the battle for the Senate, but the Democrats have enough targets to win control. The map:

All in all, Democrats are in good position to win a 2020 trifecta.

At Vox, Matthew Yglesias highlights the weak, even-for-Republicans, health care policies of Trump and Co, which should be a major asset for Dems willing to call them out: “Trump really does not want to talk about his record on health care. On most topics at hand, Trump’s team has something — whether true or not — to say in favor of the Trump administration’s policy initiatives…The argument is entirely negative — Democrats are bad; Medicare-for-all is bad…Trump can’t really tout his priorities. Over the past three years, he has pursued policies that would reduce the number of people who have health insurance and the quality of the insurance enjoyed by the insured.” Yglesias notes that  Republicans are reduced to arguing that reading, understanding and doing Medicare paperwork is more tedious than doing so for insurance companies, which is a very tough sell, to put it generously. “Personally,” Yglesias observes dryly, “it has not been my experience that filing reimbursement paperwork with Cigna is a notably superior customer service experience to what’s provided at the Department of Motor Vehicles.” In conclusion, Yglesias notes that “the uninsured rate in America is actually rising even though the labor market is getting stronger — a clear sign that health care remains an important policy area that won’t be fixed just by good generic economic conditions. And it’s a policy area where Trump is pursuing priorities — less insurance — that his own team has no defense for.”

Robert Alexander, author of “Representation and the Electoral College, argues “The case for letting senators vote secretly on Trump’s fate” at CNN Opinion. It’s probably not gonna happen, barring an overwhelmingly disgraceful revelation, such as a video clip of Trump stealing the White House silverware, and then fencing it a pawnshop. And even then, who knows, given the fact that ripping off charities and paying fines for it has not budged his approval rating.  Alexander believes that Republicans would then be free to vote their consciences, and he cites Jeff Flake’s dicey claim that a yuge majority of Republican Senators would dump Trump. Not likely – the media and their constituents would pester the GOP senators mercilessly to find out how they voted, putting pressure on all 53 of them to stay mum in perfect harmony with zero staff leaks. It’s a stretch for a party now raging that whistle-blowers should be outed to then say that their impeachment trial vote should be secret. In any case, Dems need not lead the charge. That’s a project for trembly Republican Senators and the media. Looking toward November, Dems should make them publicly defend a president, not only for the two impeachment charges, but also for his whole rap sheet.

Speaking of whistle-blowers, Trump may have just added to the impeachable offenses on his rap sheet, as Laura Davison reports at Bloomberg:  “President Donald Trump faces criticism from political opponents — and queasiness even among some supporters — for naming the alleged whistle-blower whose complaint triggered the congressional inquiry that resulted in his impeachment…A retweet late Friday to Trump’s 68 million Twitter followers identified a person it says is the whistle-blower. That could run afoul of two laws, said David Colapinto, a lawyer who represents whistle-blowers at law firm Kohn, Kohn & Colapinto LLP in Washington…Trump’s Twitter move, while a retweet and not an original message, could potentially run afoul of two sets of laws, one protecting whistle-blowers in the intelligence community and another portion of the criminal code that protects confidential informants from retaliation.”…“By making public the unsubstantiated name of the whistle-blower Trump encapsulated the pathology of his presidency — a callous and cruel disregard for the well-being of anyone or anything untethered from his own personal needs and interests,” tweeted Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow focusing on foreign policy at the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a former State Department analyst.”

Democratic supporters of both front-runners for the presidential nomination should appreciate Zach Budrick’s article “Biden hits back at Sanders’s claim that Trump ‘will eat his lunch‘” at The Hill. “If you’re a Donald Trump and you got Biden having voted for the war in Iraq, Biden having voted for these terrible, in my view, trade agreements, Biden having voted for the bankruptcy bill. Trump will eat his lunch,” Sanders said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times editorial board last week…Sanders went on to claim that Biden’s health care plan would keep the “status quo,” which Biden denied. Biden’s plan, in contrast to Sanders’s universal “Medicare for All” proposal, would create a public option similar to the one floated but ultimately left out of the Affordable Care Act.” No matter who wins the Democratic presidential nomination, he or she will be strengthened by engaging other candidates in tough, but respectful debate, which Dems have done well in 2019, despite the hand-wringing about circular firing squads. Trump won’t have that advantage, since some states won’t even hold GOP primaries and his most ‘serious’ opponent, William Weld, doesn’t seem much interested in fighting for his party’s nomination. If you’re a Biden supporter, be grateful that your candidate is working out with Bernie Sanders, and vice versa. Same goes for all of the Democratic candidates who address tough ctiticism.

One of the casualties of the 2016 election was the myth that the home state of presidential candidates matters much, since hard-core New Yorker Trump swept the south (except VA). The regional roots of voters, however, still matter — a lot. As Frank Hyman, a carpenter and stonemason, who also does policy analysis for ‘Blue Collar Comeback,’ noted in his Richmond Times-Dispatch article, “The Confederacy was a con job on whites. And still is” (reprinted in a dozen newspapers) that “a map of states that didn’t expand Medicaid – which would actually be a boon mostly to poor whites – resembles a map of the old Confederacy with a few other poor, rural states thrown in. Another indication that this divisive propaganda works on Southern whites came in 2012. Romney and Obama evenly split the white working class in the West, Midwest and Northeast. But in the South we went 2-1 for Romney.”

Yet today there are exciting pro-Democratic developments across the south, including the blue-ing of Virginia and progressive trends underway in NC, GA, FL and even TX. Democrats now hold a U.S. Senate seat in AL and the Governorships of NC and LA, and nearly elected governors of FL and GA in 2018. In addition, most of the largest southern cities have Democratic mayors. At Facing South, Chris Kromm reports that “Florida and Louisiana recently passed measures that expand voting rights for citizens with former felony convictions, and incoming Kentucky governor Andy Beshear is reportedly considering an executive order that would reenfranchise 100,000 voters. [Done] Georgia has adopted automatic voter registration. Texas has strengthened campaign finance disclosure rules.” However, Republicans still control all southern state legislatures outside of VA.