The following article by Michael Tomasky, editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas and author of “If We Can Keep It: How the Republic Collapsed and How it Might Be Saved,” is cross-posted from The Daily Beast:

So now we have nine declared Democratic candidates for president, with presumably a few more on the way. I don’t know yet if it’s a great field. They all have strengths, they all have weaknesses.

But here’s one thing I like so far. I’m not hearing many sappy calls for unity or pledges to bring the country together. This is a grand development.

Pundits of course are supposed to bemoan this and demand that presidential aspirants summon us toward our better angels. I may have believed this once, but those days are gone. Calling for unity is a sucker’s game for Democrats and has been for a number of years.

It’s been clear since the 1990s that the Republican Party has had no interest in uniting the country. The GOP’s interest—since Newt Gingrich, the rise of Rush and the radio talkers, the illegitimate Bill Clinton impeachment, and the Brooks Brothers Riot of the 2000 election—has been to win. To dominate the other guys. Yes, George W. Bush said while campaigning in 2000 that he’d be a “uniter, not a divider,” and of course he employed some of that kind of rhetoric after 9-11.

But he rarely governed that way. This is largely forgotten now, but after the Supreme Court named him president, there were calls for him—the man who had lost by 500,000 votes and had very obviously carried Florida only because of a bad ballot design that had Palm Beach Jews voting for Pat Buchanan—to appoint moderates to key positions and govern from the center. He did nothing of the sort.

Barack Obama did talk more about unity, and about working across the aisle. What did it get him? Steamrolled, mostly. Key Republicans gathered at a restaurant the night of the inauguration and made a pact not to give him any support on his major initiatives. Mitch McConnell said openly that his goal was to make Obama a “one-term president.” They failed at that, but the list of initiatives on which Obama hoped for but did not receive any bipartisan support is long indeed (minimum wage, infrastructure, overtime pay, and on and on).

Then along came Donald Trump. I give him a perverse kind of credit for not making any stupid, empty pledges to unite the country. He needed a deeply divided country to have a chance, and he knew it. So he stoked division.

I’m not saying this cycle’s crop of Democrats should do that. Obviously, no Democrat would talk like Trump anyway, because that kind of bigoted talk would get a person drummed out of the country’s multiracial party even as it got him celebrated and elevated in the country’s white ethno-nationalist party.

I am saying, though, that Democrats should stop pretending they can unite the country. They can’t. No one can. What they can do, what they must do, is assemble a coalition of working- and middle-class voters of all races around a set of economic principles that will say clearly to those voters that things are going to be very different when they’re in the White House.

I like most of what I’m hearing so far on this front. Putting aside for present purposes their possible weaknesses, which we’ll have plenty of time to discuss, several candidates have come out of the gate emphasizing fighting for their America instead of some dreamy, chimerical vision of contentless unity. “Kamala Harris for the People” is a fighting slogan. For my money, she’s not nearly specific enough yet about what precisely she’s going to fight for, especially on economic questions, but it’s a start. Amy Klobuchar’s speech had some good pugilistic rhetoric about the pharmaceutical companies. Elizabeth Warren’s speech used the word “fight” 25 times.

And not-yet-declared candidate Sherrod Brown struck similar notes in a speech to the New Hampshire Young Democrats Saturday night. Brown also did something else very smart, something I’m on a kick about and will write a hundred times between now and the end of the primary season next year: He talked about small towns. He talked about the opioid crisis, which is crushing rural America but isn’t really on New York, California, or Washington radar screens. Brown is out there saying “I can get enough small-town white people back on our side,” while also emphasizing his record on civil rights and abortion and LGBTQ issues.

That’s a kind of reaching out that is absolutely necessary. But it is not the same as making some treacly, sentimental unity pitch. Brown is saying come join the fight. But saying that acknowledges the existence of the fight.

That’s where Democrats need to be. I hope that if Beto O’Rourke jumps in, he gets this. It’s where people’s heads are now anyway. We’re locked in a fight for the direction of the country. We have a president who’s about to use emergency powers to build a wall that a majority of the country doesn’t want. And in economic terms, we’re at a potentially historic and even revolutionary moment. As I wrote in the Times recently, there are strong and encouraging signs that supply side’s hegemony has run its course, and the public may be open again to Keynesian principles.

Is it kind of sad that unity rhetoric has no place in today’s politics? Sure. But the best way to unite the country, to the extent that such is possible anymore, is to win the White House and Congress and start passing laws and imposing rules that will help regular people again.

And I’m all for reducing polarization–I just wrote a book about it–but that’s a project that will need 20 years, and besides, reducing polarization requires defeating extremist radicalism. That requires pugnacity. Let the disunion begin.

In Geoffrey Skelley’s “Is Socialism Still An Effective Political Bogeyman?” at FiveThirtyEight, he writes: “If President Trump’s most recent State of the Union address is any indication, socialism could be at the forefront of his 2020 campaign rhetoric. In his Feb. 5 speech, Trump said that “we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country” and declared that “America will never be a socialist country.”

No shocker there, and it’s not just Trump. Republicans have parroted similar inanities for as long as all of us have been alive. But Skelley may be right that we should expect an uptick in GOP references to the socialist bogeyman in the 2020 campaigns.

The Republicans are desperate after getting creamed in the midterm elections. And now they have to own millions of voters getting screwed by G.O.P. tax “reform,” and their utter failure to enact any improvements in America’s health care. They can’t run on their record, so here come the distractions, including the fear-monger’s twin bogeymen, the Dangerous Undocumented Immigrant and the dreaded Creature of the Socialist Lagoon.

Skelley notes that “Unlike in the 1940s, Americans today are more likely to identify socialism with “equality” than with “government ownership or control,” according to polling by Gallup.”  Skelley notes, further,

Gallup periodically asks Americans how they feel about socialism, and in 2018, the pollster found that 57 percent of Democrats held a positive view of socialism, compared with just 16 percent of Republicans.³ For Democrats, this represented essentially no change from 2016, although it was a bit higher than in 2012, when 53 percent of Democrats said the same. As for Republicans, positive feelings toward socialism ranged from 13 percent to 23 percent in the four Gallup polls of the question since 2010…And in a January poll from Fox News, 80 percent of Republicans and 34 percent of Democrats said it would be “a bad thing” for the United States “to move away from capitalism and more toward socialism.”

…In June 2015, Gallup asked Americans about whether they’d vote for a socialist if their party nominated one — and found that 50 percent of respondents said they would not be willing to. The poll tested 11 different candidate characteristics — for example, whether someone was an evangelical Christian or a woman — to see what voters disliked most, and it found that the biggest disqualifier for both parties was a candidate who identified as a socialist. Thirty-eight percent of Democrats said they weren’t willing to vote for a socialist, and 73 percent of Republicans said the same.

Skelley adds that “59 percent of Democrats and 71 percent of independents said they would have “some reservations” or would feel “very uncomfortable” supporting a self-descibed socialist. He argues that “these numbers suggest that there is still an opportunity for Trump to score points by painting his opponent as a socialist in 2020.”

However, Skelley concludes, “it’s 2019, not 1949; socialism doesn’t automatically evoke the Iron Curtain anymore, and fewer Americans now associate socialism with government control or ownership. Trump’s anti-socialist message may find less success than he hopes.”

Fair enough. But that doesn’t mean that Democratic candidates have anything to gain by proclaiming themselves “Democratic Socialists.” Why even go there? Let the social scientists debate the differences between democratic socialism and social democracy. Democratic candidates should never take the bait and get suckered into arguments about political terminology.

Numerous surveys indicate that most Americans, even many of those who self-identify as conservatives, are “operational liberals,” who support a range of progressive policies that could fairly be termed “socialist” in origin. Thus, defend policies not ideological brands. Even long-time democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders often shruggs off the socialist brand when confronted and pivots to the issue of concern.

To address socialist bogeyman accusations in debates, interviews or tweets, Democratic candidates could ridicule the fear-mongering with brief, well-prepared retorts and soundbites, like “you may call decent health care (or fair taxes, gun control, labor laws or bank regulation) socialism, but I call it responsible government.” if they persist, “I doubt most Americans are so scared of that  bogeyman; what people want are reforms that can improve their lives in the real world.” Or crack wise, “Our party isn’t the one caving to Putin’s entire agenda. That would be the Republicans”

If the discussion still gets prolonged, point out that Republicans once called Social Security, Medicare, the minimum wage and all of the now-popular policies of the New Deal and Great Society as “socialist.” Make them say whether they now believe such programs should be abolished in the name of the ‘free market.’ Redirect the heat where it belongs.

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

1. The most important states for the Democrats to carry in 2020 against Trump lie in the upper Midwest and Rustbelt.
2. The Democrats’ best chance to carry these states lies in a candidate with roots and appeal in that area like Sherrod Brown or Amy Klobuchar.
3. Therefore, a candidate like Brown or Klobuchar should be the Democratic nominee.

Discuss. Seriously, this logic seems pretty strong to me. Not to say these candidates are the only ones who could win, just that, by this logic, they’d have the best chance. And it seems very, very important that the Democrats win this election.

More on this argument from David Leonardt in the New York Times:

“[I] Democrats wanted to identify their best hope for beating Trump, what would that candidate look like?

Above all, it would be a candidate good at persuading Americans that he or she was on their side — on their side against the forces causing the stagnation of American living standards. More specifically, this candidate would be someone who could persuade swing voters of this allegiance.

Swing voters still exist. Enough Americans switched from backing Barack Obama in 2012 to Donald Trump in 2016 to House Democrats in 2018 to help decide those elections. I understand why some Democratic activists are instead drawn to the idea of victory through turnout: It offers the promise of avoiding any political compromise. The problem is, there are virtually no examples of Democrats winning close races without emphasizing persuasion. The 2018 attempts, in Florida, Georgia and Texas, all fell short.

Yet progressives shouldn’t despair — because swing voters are quite progressive, especially on economic issues. For years, we’ve been hearing about a kind of fantasy swing voter, conjured by political pundits and corporate chieftains, who is socially liberal and economically conservative (as many pundits and chieftains are). The actual swing voter leans decidedly left on economics, in favor of tax increases on the rich, opposed to Medicare cuts and skeptical of big business.

Still, these swing voters don’t think of themselves as radical. They are typically patriotic and religious. Many think of themselves as moderate and, strange as it may sound, many thought of Trump as moderate in 2016. When Republicans can paint a Democrat as an out-of-touch elitist — like they did Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Al Gore or Michael Dukakis — the Republican candidate often wins these voters. When Democrats can instead come off as middle-class fighters, they tend to win…..

[I]f I were Trump, I would fear Klobuchar and Brown. Either would be well positioned to take back blue-collar states Trump needs, like Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and maybe even Ohio and Iowa. They could also play well in the Sunbelt suburbs of Arizona, Florida and North Carolina.”

A little more detail on this. The formula for success in the upper Midwest/Rustbelt is clear: Carry white college graduates, strongly mobilize nonwhite voters, particularly blacks, and hold deficits among white non-college-educated voters in the range of 10 to 15 points. Unlike Hillary Clinton in 2016 (she was obliterated among white non-college-educated voters in state after state), Democrats in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota (especially Amy Klobuchar!) got all three parts of the formula right in 2018.

Brown in Ohio got it right, too. According to exit polls, he carried white college graduates by five points and lost white non-college-educated voters by a mere 10 points.

Success against Trump in 2020 in the upper Midwest/Rustbelt region will depend on repeating this formula. The necessity to keep down deficits among white non-college-educated voters, especially in rural and small-town areas, will be hard with Trump on the ballot. But the 2018 results from likes of Klobuchar and Brown show Democrats the way in these states.

QED.

The following article is cross-posted from an email from Democracy Corps:

On behalf of the Voter Participation Center and Women’s Voices. Women Vote Action Fund, Democracy Corps conducted live dial-meter testing of the 2019 State of the Union among the Rising American Electorate (African Americans, Latinos, white unmarried women and white millennials), white working-class women, and white college women. Here are some of the key findings:

• Voters, including those in our dial-meter groups, watched the address with an extraordinary high level of political engagement.
• The Democratic presidential vote was not eroded and Trump’s job performance gains were unimpressive.
• The president made immigration and border security the central pitch of his address, but if the goal was to create a new context for a possible shutdown or emergency declaration, then he failed.

• The biggest gains of the night were on making healthcare more affordable, but Trump made these gains championing positions his administration does not support.
• The president saw a rise by recognizing women in the workplace and in Congress, but we suspect this were driven more by the celebrations of the Democratic women and the president playing along.
• Criminal justice reform delivered some of the highest moments in our dials, particularly among African Americans and white millennials, but he did not improve his standing with these groups.

In the end, the Rising American Electorate said that they want Democrats in Congress to be a check on Trump rather than to work with him by a two-to-one margin, marking even greater resistance to Trump and his agenda than last year (60 check to 40 work in 2018).

READ THE KEY FINDINGS REPORT & VIEW THE SLIDES

STREAM THE DIALS ON YOUTUBE & FACEBOOK LIVE

Senator Mark Warren (D-VA) has a novel proposal to end shutdowns, not just once, but forever. As Sam Stein reports at The Daily Beast: “And then there’s the “Stop Stupidity (Shutdowns Transferring Unnecessary Pain and Inflicting Damage In The Coming Years) Act.” The mangled-acronym inspired bill was introduced this week by Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA). It takes the keep-things-level-approach [via a continuing resolution] and offers a twist. In lieu of a failure by lawmakers to reach a spending deal, the current funding levels of the government would automatically continue — except for those monies meant to pay members of the legislative branch and the office of the president.” Of course, the CR should be indexed for inflation. But if we get another temporary fix, or no agreement, maybe it’s time for a nation-wide petition/citizen lobbying campaign for an automatic CR trigger that kicks in absent an agreement by a specific date.

The Green New Deal being proposed by Democrats Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14) and Senator Ed Markey (MA) is being greeted with both applause and skepticism. Applause because it’s about time somebody cranked up public debate in support of an environmentally-responsible infrastructure initiative, which is really the heart of the GND. Credit Ocasio-Cortez with making good use of her popularity in advancing discussion of these two critical priorities, which deserve more serious media coverage. Skepticism because it is extremely broad and isn’t going anywhere until Dems win a Senate majority and the White House. But despite the GOP’s cheap shots directed at the GND, successful reform movements begin early and a great political party needs to stand for a big vision. At this point, it’s a resolution, not a bill. As a practical matter, the GND would be honed and broken down into more detailed specific measures to be enacted in digestible bites over a realistic period of time.

However, Jonathan Chait offers some more substantial criticism of the proposal in his post, “Democrats Need an Ambitious Climate Plan. The Green New Deal Isn’t It” at New York Magazine. An Excerpt: “The operating principle behind the Green New Deal is a no-enemies-to-the-left spirit of fostering unity among every faction of the progressive movement. Thus, at the same time, the plan avoids taking stances that are absolutely vital to reduce carbon emissions, it embraces policies that have nothing to do with climate change whatsoever. The Green New Deal includes the following non-climate provisions: –A job with family-sustaining wages, family and medical leave, vacations, and retirement security…–High-quality education, including higher education and trade schools…–High-quality health care…–Safe, affordable, adequate housing…–An economic environment free of monopolies…–Economic security to all who are unable or unwilling to work.”

“Sixty-three percent of Americans believe “upper income people” pay too little in taxes, according to a new survey from Morning Consult. The poll also found that 61 percent of Americans either “strongly” or “somewhat” favor 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren’s tax plan, which would levy a new tax on households with a net worth of $50 million or more. The pollster found less enthusiasm for the idea that Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York floated recently to tax income that exceeds $10 million a year at a rate of 70 percent — but more on that in a moment.” —  from Geoffrey Skelley’s “Most Americans Support Warren’s ‘Ultramillionare Tax’: How they feel about hefty taxes on the rich depends on what you call them” at FiveThirtyEight.

Skelley notes further, “However, even though the public has long thought the rich don’t pay enough in taxes, Americans are comparably cooler toward the concept when it’s framed as income redistribution, which Warren and Ocasio-Cortez have both embraced as a way of combating wealth inequality. For example, in 2016, Gallup found that 61 percent of the public felt that wealthy people didn’t pay enough, but only 52 percent said they believed the government should redistribute wealth through “heavy taxes on the rich.” The difference gets at a common disconnect in how people think of taxation and wealth redistribution — both processes that collect a portion of residents’ income and use it to benefit others — and how different terms can produce seemingly inconsistent answers from poll respondents.”

Regarding the mess in Virginia, Amanda Sakuma writes at vox.com: “Virginia residents are at an impasse over whether they feel Gov. Ralph Northam should step down after a racist photo from his past caught up with him last week, though a majority of black voters say they have still his back, according to new polls released this week…The overall divide is an even split: 47 percent of Virginians want to see him stay; 47 percent want to see him go, according to a Washington Post-Schar School poll released Saturday. But what’s significant about the poll results is the racial breakdown of Northam’s support: Even after the governor admitted to using shoe polish to wear blackface in the 1980s, black Virginians still support him more than whites…Roughly 58 percent of African Americans polled said Northam should remain in office, compared to 46 percent of whites who said the same.” There is no polling data yet on how Virginians feel about whether or not Lt. Governor Justin Fairfax should resign as a result of recent allegations of sexual assault against him.

If the Trump Administration wants to keep the Mueller report on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election private, they will have to buck an overwhelming majority of Americans who want it made public. As Geoffrey Skelley reports in “other Polling Nuggets” at FiveThirtyEight “According to a CNN/SSRS survey, 87 percent of Americans want a report that includes the findings from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election to be made public. Nine percent said the report does not need to be made public. And this desire bridges the partisan divide: 92 percent of Democrats, 88 percent of independents and 80 percent of Republicans said investigators should issue a public report.”

A hopeful closing note from Bob Moser’s “A New South Rising: This Time for Real: The midterms made clear that progressive candidates can retake the region with young and minority voters” at The American Prospect: “The urban centers of the Sun Belt won’t stop growing, and becoming more diverse and more progressive, any time in the foreseeable future. The rural South is as stagnant as the rest of rural America—and increasingly, in a state like Texas, that’s all the Republicans will have. One of the most startling assessments of the new reality that I’ve seen recently came from Brandon Rottinghaus, a political scientist at the University of Houston. “If Republicans can’t keep Democratic numbers below 60 percent in urban Texas, winning elections is going to be much more difficult going forward.” Let that sink in: Republicans in Texas, the country’s largest Republican redoubt, reduced to cooking up ways to hold the Democratic vote in Dallas, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio below 60 percent…That, my friends, is not a political shake-up. It’s an earthquake. And the reverberations will be felt for generations to come.”

One of the first developments of the 2020 congressional election cycle was a retirement from a veteran House member from Georgia. It was more significant than the end of a particular man’s career, as I discussed at New York:

One sign of Georgia’s changing political environment occurred on Tuesday night, when 2018 Democratic gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams was tapped to provide the national party’s response to Donald Trump’s State of the Union Address. Another occurred today when five-term Republican congressman Rob Woodall from the north Atlanta suburban 7th district announced he would retire in 2020, after very nearly losing last year.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Woodall’s Gwinnett County base was synonymous with the growth of the Republican Party. I distinctly recall a moment when environmentalists complained about the destruction of trees in the county, and the top local developer responded: “Gwinnett is not for trees.” It was for massive subdivision and strip mall development, and rapid middle-class (and upper-class) population growth.

Woodall was certainly a fixture in Gwinnett GOP politics, serving on the staff of hard-core conservative congressman John Linder for 16 years before succeeding the boss and winning at least 60 percent of the vote in his first four races. He clearly underestimated his 2018 Democratic opponent Carolyn Bordeaux. But he had a bigger problem, as the Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman observes:

“The 7th CD is the epitome of a high-education melting pot. In 2010, when Republicans first drew the seat, it was 50 percent white and in 2012, Mitt Romney carried it by 22 points, 60 percent to 38 percent. But in 2016, President Trump carried the district by just six points, 51 percent to 45 percent. Now, Census estimates peg it at just 47 percent white, 19 percent Hispanic, 19 percent African-American and 13 percent Asian.”

Among other things, this slice of Gwinnett County is home to Koreatown (or K-Town), an enclave of economically rising Korean-Americans who are very active politically. Woodall and other local Republicans just couldn’t keep up; he won by 419 votes, and only after a recount.

With Woodall retiring and Bordeaux preparing to run again, Wasserman says of GA-07 that it “may be [Democrats’] best pickup opportunity in the country.” And the whole state of Georgia may represent a serious pickup opportunity in the Senate–and for the presidency, too.

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

Do the Democrats Have to Choose a Geographic Focus in 2020?

This is the premise of a lengthy report by Bill Galston and Clara Hendrickson recently published on the Brookings site. I recommend the report; it’s well-written and has a great deal of useful data in it, summarized in a series of helpful tables. The tables generally compare a set of states they call the “northern tier” (IA, MI, OH, PA and WI) to another set they call the “southern tier” (AZ, FL, GA and TX). They are compared on 2018 results, including House, Senate and governor, as well as on time trend for these various offices. There is also a nice table on Obama-Trump counties in the northern tier and how many flipped D in the various races in 2018.

Galston’s and Hendrickson’s general argument is that these data–especially the 2018 data–suggest Democrats will likely have an easier time in 2020 expanding their electoral college coalition in the northern tier than the southern tier. That seems reasonable to me and their data do support that claim. I am less sure about the further implication they draw that Democrats need to decide on their geographic focus between the tiers and choose their candidate accordingly. This presupposes that the Democrats are going to go after one of these state clusters and not the other.

I don’t believe this would be wise. Democrats need to put as many plausible states in play as possible to give them a variety of different paths to 270+. Putting all their eggs in one basket, such as the northern tier states, a strategy that Galston and Hendrickson appear to favor, would be a mistake on the Democrats’ part.

Therefore the candidate that Democrats choose should be able to appeal to voters in both sets of states because that is how a Democratic candidate can maximize their chances of winning. And, it cannot be stressed enough, this is not just a matter of choosing the right candidate but of how that candidate chooses to run.

Words of wisdom from David Axelrod in a recent interview on the New Yorker site:

“I think that what is most important [for Democrats] is to not send the signals that were sent in 2016, which is, “We’ve got young people, we’ve got minorities, we’ve got women, so, you white working-class guys, we don’t really need you.” They believed it. They voted for Trump. And that is something that you can affect at the margins by addressing your message broadly, and I think Democrats should do that.

I think the country as a whole is restless on the issue of health care, whether it’s Medicare-for-all or some other prescription, as it were. I think people are eager for another round of health-care reform. I do think people think that there’s something wrong with our system right now, with this tremendous aggregation of wealth at the top while the majority of people are pedalling faster and faster to keep up. So I don’t think those issues are particularly radical. How you address them is another question.”

And that is what we should really be worrying about.

Amidst all the fatuous talk of bipartisanship in anticipation of the State of the Union Address, I had an idea that I explained at New York:

Anyone who expects bipartisanship somehow to break out between now and the 2020 election has clearly been asleep for the past two years.

That is not to say, however, that we should give up on promoting ideas that might have appeal in both parties, particularly if they don’t depend on the approbation of the president. One such idea could be of urgent relevance before you know it: getting Republican as well as Democratic leaders to denounce right now any prospective challenge to the legitimacy of the 2020 election based on vague and unsubstantiated claims and theories of “voter fraud.”

As Phillip Bump noted today, not only Trump but other Republicans are getting into the comfortable habit of making up or massively embellishing illegal-voting claims:

“It took just over a day for an announcement from the office of the Texas secretary of state hinting that thousands of noncitizens might have voted to make it into President Trump’s Twitter feed.

“’58,000 non-citizens voted in Texas, with 95,000 non-citizens registered to vote,’ Trump wrote, apparently lifting the data from an episode of Fox & Friends. ‘These numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. All over the country, especially in California, voter fraud is rampant. Must be stopped. Strong voter ID!’

“A bit later, he retweeted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who hyped the same numbers with an all-caps intro: ‘VOTER FRAUD ALERT.'”

As Bump goes on to explain, the “reports” from Texas, like those from other jurisdictions in recent years, melt away into near-nothingness once they are are scrutinized. And that’s again the backdrop of years of mostly Republican-inspired investigations of alleged in-person voter fraud that never, ever, ever turn up more than a handful of violations. As recently as the month before last, first House Speaker Paul Ryan and then his successor as House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy bought into a conspiracy theory blaming GOP losses in California on voting “irregularities” such as the sinister-sounding procedure called “ballot harvesting,” which really just means letting third-parties deliver signed-and-sealed-under-oath mail ballots.

As you may recall, Trump repeatedly claimed, with zero evidence, that he was robbed of a 2016 popular vote plurality by “millions” of illegal votes cast by non-citizens. This was the basis for his so-called Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, led by voter-fraud fabulist and anti-immigration zealot Kris Kobach, which was dissolved after a few months mostly consumed with fights with Republican and Democratic election officials who refused to turn over sensitive personal data to this bunch of yahoos. That largely put an end to the 2016 “controversy,” but no one at the time much thought through what would have happened had Trump lost the electoral college, making the illegal voting claims far from academic.

It’s likely that responsible Republican office-holders, many of whom didn’t take Donald Trump seriously until they had to, wouldn’t have let him create a disputed election and a constitutional crisis absent clear and compelling evidence that he wasn’t just pulling these allegations out of his prejudices and the files of his sketchy white-nationalist backers. We’ll never really know. But now, after two years of falling into line with Trump and adopting his passions and fevers as their own, is it clear at all that Republican opinion-leaders, from Fox & Friends to the Capitol, would tell Trump to leave office quietly if he lost decisively in 2020 and still claimed he was robbed by swarthy rape-loving “criminal illegals” pouring across the southern border? With the Supreme Court, the U.S. Tax Code and a long-desired rollback of regulatory restrictions on corporate misbehavior in the balance? I don’t know.

This is a possibility that needs to be taken right off the table right now. That means Democrats should waste less time trying to convince Republicans to help them get Trump on a one-way ticket to Palookaville before the 2020 election and more time getting them to agree he should get on the train to retirement immediately afterward if he loses. Yes, maybe he’ll go quietly on his own, but anyone who doubts he’s capable of calling the military in to defend his continued occupation of the White House needs to read his tweets for a few days and reconsider.

Kelsey Snell notes that “House Democrats Divided On Strategy To Force Release Of Trump’s Tax Returns” at npr.org: “Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee face a dilemma that is already familiar in the first weeks of their majority. Members generally agree that the public has a right to see the tax entanglements of a president. Things get trickier when it comes to who should be demanding those returns and how quickly they should force what is likely to be a confrontation with the administration over the issue…There is a mechanism, known as the “committee access” provision, that allows the tax writing committee to request tax records of any taxpayer from the secretary of the Treasury. It is unclear how the agency will respond to that request and whether it will stall or resist efforts to turn over Trump’s personal returns to the panel.” As House Democratic Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y. said. “That said, we’re not going to overreach, we’re not going to overinvestigate, we’re not going to overpoliticize our constitutional responsibilities.” Meanwhile Snell quote Rep Ron Kind D-WI: First of all, there’s no rush…I gotta believe that the Mueller team already has their hands on the president’s tax returns. If they’re looking for a possible connection between Russia and his family, there is a danger in trying to go too far too fast.”

“A new poll is finding broad support for an annual wealth tax on people with assets of at least $50 million, underlining support for taxing the rich,” reports Matthew Sheffield at The Hill. “The Hill-HarrisX survey released Wednesday found that 74 percent of registered voters back an annual 2 percent tax on people with assets over $50 million, and a 3 percent tax on people with assets in excess of $1 billion…The poll showed support for the idea among people of all ages and races and from both political parties…Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) proposed the wealth tax last month. She is one of several high-profile Democrats calling for higher taxes on the wealthy…Just 26 percent of respondents said they were opposed to the wealth tax…Strong majorities of both sexes said they favored the tax, as did a majority of Republicans. Sixty-five percent of GOP voters supported it while only 35 percent opposed it. Independents backed the tax 69 to 31 percent, as did 86 percent of Democratic voters.”

Sheffield cites similar findings from other polls: “A Jan. 22-23 Business Insider-SurveyMonkey poll found that 54 percent of adults favored Warren’s proposal while only 19 percent disagreed with it. Another 15 percent said they were unsure…The policy idea attracted majority support in a Feb. 1-2 Morning Consult-Politico survey of registered voters. Sixty-one percent of respondents backed a wealth tax while only 20 percent were opposed. Nineteen percent were unsure.

Oliver Roeder takes a stab at explaining “Why It’s Unlikely We’ll Get A Deal On The Wall Anytime Soon: That’s what the game theorists think, anyway” at FiveThirtyEight, and notes “Since economist John Nash revolutionized economics, bargaining has been the stuff of game theorists. What makes a deal more likely to happen? And what makes it more likely to fall apart? The fruits of that study hold a couple of lessons for reading the news, and the tea leaves, coming out of the White House and the Capitol over the next few days…Why are we playing this particular game? Why, specifically, is a partial shutdown the outcome that arises in the absence of an agreement? This seems, as an economist would say, inefficient — a little bit of miscoordination can lead to a big consequence. Perhaps, as is the case elsewhere, the previous budget should remain in force if no deal is reached. Or perhaps the parties should be forced into mediation, as is sometimes the case in the private sector. To an economist, these ideas to remake the system sound like attractive efficiency boosters.”

If you want to get a little wonky about analysing border walls, check out “What the research says about border walls” by Denise-Marie Ordway at Journalists Resource, which reviews seven scholarly articles on the topic. Among the findings reported by Ordway: “Scholars from Dartmouth College and Stanford University examine how expanding the U.S.-Mexico border fence has affected migration and the U.S. economy…The key takeaway: The $2.3 billion project curbed migration and benefited low-skill U.S. workers but hurt high-skill U.S. workers. “In total, we estimate the Secure Fence Act reduced the aggregate Mexican population living in the United States by 0.64 percent, equivalent to a reduction of 82,647 people,” the authors write…According to the analysis, another fence expansion “would have larger impacts on migration from Mexico to the United States, they would also result in greater reallocation of economic activity to Mexico; for example, a wall expansion that builds along half the remaining uncovered border would result in 144,256 fewer Mexican workers residing in the United States, causing the United States real GDP to decline by $4.3 billion, or approximately $29,800 in lost economic output for each migrant prevented.”

From “Targeted internet ads may improve millennial voter turnout,” also by Denise-Marie Ordway at Journalist’s Resource: “If you want to get more millennials to vote in municipal races, targeted internet ads may help, according to a new study published in Political Communication…The study, done in partnership with The Dallas Morning News, finds that Dallas voters between the ages of 23 and 35 were more likely to participate in certain local races if they had been targeted by internet ads promoting election news coverage and election reminders…The effect was small — turnout was less than 1 percentage point higher among these millennials compared with those in the control group, which did not receive any ads. But the ads were shown to be more effective than direct mail and automated phone calls, the study’s lead author, Katherine Haenschen, told Journalist’s Resource.”

Further, notes Ordway, “Reaching millennials is of particular interest to community leaders, political party officials and campaign organizers because people born between 1981 and 1996 are projected to become America’s largest voting bloc. Millennials made up 27 percent of the voting-age population in the United States in November 2016, just under Baby Boomers, who comprised 31 percent, a 2018 report from the Pew Research Center shows. Boomers were born between 1946 and 1964…While the number of millennials continues to grow – largely through immigration and naturalization, according to Pew – millennials are much less likely to vote than earlier generations. For example, 51 percent of eligible millennials nationwide voted in the 2016 presidential election, compared with 69 percent of Boomers…This study claims to present the first evidence that online ads can boost voter participation. Haenschen, a communication professor at Virginia Tech, said they can be especially useful in reaching millennials and other hard-to-reach voters, including those who live in remote locations or do not have landline telephones.”

Tara Golshan has a succinct description of “The dumpster fire that is Virginia politics, explained in 500 words” at vox.com. An excerpt: “If all three Democrats resign — which looks unlikely at this point, but isn’t out of the realm of possibility — the governorship would be passed to Republican Virginia House of Delegates Speaker Kirk Cox, whose district, a court determined, was drawn in a way that discriminated against African-American voters…To top it all off, Cox got his speakership only after the state settled a tied election — that determined which party would control the chamber — by drawing a name out of a bowl.”

At Sabato’s Crystal Ball, Larry J. Sabato and Kyle Kondik explain that “Looming over all of this is the upcoming state legislative elections in Virginia this November. Republicans are hanging on to very slim majorities in the state House of Delegates (51-49) and state Senate (21-19). Democrats made a net 15-seat gain in the House of Delegates in November 2017 as Northam, Fairfax, and Herring won statewide. Democrats seemed like favorites to win both chambers — we’ll analyze these races later in the year — particularly because a new state House of Delegates map imposed by judicial order will improve Democratic odds in that chamber. Some Virginia Democratic operatives, even before the current mess, were concerned that the white hot intensity that fueled Democrats in 2017 and 2018 might cool in 2019, particularly without any statewide elections on the ballot. Lower turnout might help Republicans, whose voter base in Virginia (and elsewhere) can be more reliable in off-year elections. Still, the growing nationalization of American politics could help the Democrats by pushing them to maximize turnout in Virginia by focusing again on the unpopular President Trump. But one could imagine the opposite happening, particularly if Northam hangs around and depresses Democrats, or the Fairfax allegations continue to churn. Perhaps a statewide election for lieutenant governor, if it happens, will increase turnout in Democrats’ favor. Or if Northam stays, could we see Democratic state legislative candidates running on impeaching their own party’s governor? It’s not impossible, and it would be just the latest crazy development in a state rocked by them over the last week.”