On the sad news of the death of John Lewis, I’ll republish here the piece I wrote earlier this month for New York on a new documentary about his life.

On the eve of the 44th president’s inauguration in Washington, Georgia congressman John Lewis said, “Barack Obama is what comes at the end of that bridge in Selma.”

This was a remarkable comment from the man who was severely injured by Alabama state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in March of 1965, a police riot that horrified the country and paved the way for adoption of the Voting Rights Act in July of that year. David Remnick’s 2010 Obama biography made Lewis’s quote a departure point; the new president represented the “Joshua generation” that had reached a post-racial promised land through the efforts of the “Moses generation” of civil-rights leaders like Lewis. By implication, that older generation could retire from the spotlight with dignity, its essential work having been completed.

Over a decade later, for John Lewis at least, that dignified retirement turned out to be an illusion. In a new documentary film by Dawn Porter, John Lewis: Good Trouble, the veteran voting-rights champion views himself as facing the potential reversal of his life’s work via an open conservative crusade to restrict the franchise, led by Obama’s successor in the White House. Indeed, Obama himself is a relatively minor figure in the film, which skillfully alternates between footage and narrative of Lewis’s early life and his series of key contributions to the civil-rights and voting-rights movements of the 1960s, and his most recent efforts to fight voter suppression and the white identity politics of the contemporary right, notably in the 2018 midterm elections.

There’s an anecdote in the film in which a Lewis speechwriter asked him if he had ever spoken before a crowd as large as the one he addressed at the 2008 Democratic National Convention (a speech for which I had the privilege of helping rehearse Lewis, the most decent politician I met in many years of convention service). He gently reminded her he had spoken to a throng of a quarter-million people during the March.

At every step of the way, Lewis was brutalized by police and civilian racist violence, earning him respect even from his enemies for his courage, without shaking his commitment to the principles of nonviolence he learned in Nashville. Porter’s film touches on the famous incidents in which Lewis was so intimately involved, including the Freedom Summer in Mississippi that led to the murder of civil-rights volunteers by Klansmen, another moment that helped rouse the conscience of the country.

Likely because the film wants to depict Lewis’s current political battles as something of a throwback to his civil-rights heyday, it doesn’t dwell much on his turn to more conventional political pursuits, other than a segment on the sadly bitter 1986 congressional election in which Lewis defeated his old friend and SNCC colleague (and later NAACP chairman) Julian Bond, and began his long career in the U.S. House.

But in the portions of the film devoted to his more recent campaign work we are shown the merger of Lewis’s social movement and party politics backgrounds. It’s made clear that the development that turned him from a well-deserved semi-retirement was the destruction of the key enforcement provisions of the Voting Right Act by the Supreme Court in 2013. The shocking nature of this reversal is illustrated by footage of George W. Bush proudly signing a bipartisan extension of the VRA in 2006.

By 2018, Lewis was barnstorming the country, pursuing the twin goals of a Democratic takeover of the House (in which he serves in the party leadership) and the battle to vindicate voting rights. A segment on midterm Election Night and the immediate aftermath shows his pride in the party’s victory (which also expanded the ranks of the Congressional Black Caucus), but also his dismay at the defeat of Stacey Abrams, in some respects his heir as a southern voting-rights champion, for the governorship of his own state after an aggressive campaign of voter suppression by then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp.

Toward the end of Porter’s film, he is given tributes by a number of young politicians of color (e.g., Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, and Cory Booker) who stress both his legacy and his continued leadership. Now they, rather than Obama, seem to represent the end of the bridge in Selma. Stacey Abrams encapsulates the message by saying Lewis is a living reminder that “the past isn’t past.”

You get the sense watching Lewis in the more recent footage that like most people his age, he’s slowed down. His wife of 44 years, Lillian, passed away in 2012. There is no explicit reference to his diagnosis late last year of pancreatic cancer, though clearly his staff and friends are solicitous about his health. There’s no question the upshot of the film is that defeating Donald Trump in 2020 and reestablishing inalienable voting rights would represent the capstone of a very public life. Even if his body is now weak, his voice is the same, bred in the sermons of the Black church in Jim Crow Alabama, a voice of prophecy, determination, and charity. I’m sure John Lewis has his regrets like all of us, but his principles haven’t changed since his training in nonviolent social change in Nashville six decades ago.

The title of Porter’s film comes from a frequently repeated saying of Lewis’s, usually preceded by a reference to his 40 arrests over the years: “When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, say something. Do something. Get in trouble, good trouble, necessary trouble.” It’s his fate to be placed in the position of still being a troublemaker at the age of 80. But for this singular man, it’s more appropriate than a quiet retirement.

May he rest in piece as others take up his struggle.

I thought another reminder of Georgia’s funny elections laws and why they might matter this year was in order, and wrote it up for New York:

Democrats are looking at more than a presidential win in November. A Democratic Senate would probably ensure a Biden administration could get its executive and judicial appointees confirmed while giving it a fighting chance of enacting a legislative agenda as well.

Right now, if you go by the Cook Political Report’s renowned cheat sheet, there are 11 competitive Senate races on tap in November, 9 of them involving seats currently held by Republicans and 2 held by Democrats. The Democrats need a net gain of three seats for control of the Senate, assuming Joe Biden’s veep is the tiebreaker. Since one Democratic-held seat in Alabama is in considerable peril, it may require flipping four Republican seats to get the job done. It will be a reach, but assuming Biden wins solidly, not a long reach.

Unless there is a Democratic tsunami, however, we may not know who controls the Senate for a good while after November 2. In part that’s because of likely heavy voting by mail that will delay definitive “calls” on close races. But there’s another reason for delayed gratification: one state with peculiar election laws that is home to two competitive Senate races.

In Georgia, a red state that’s been steadily turning purple in recent years, winning a general election requires a majority of the vote. If no one achieves a majority (which typically happens in razor-close contests with some minor-party voting), a runoff is held in December for state and local offices, and in January for federal offices. There have in the past been two U.S. Senate general-election runoffs, in 1992 and in 2008. If the Senate race involving Republican incumbent David Perdue and well-financed Democratic challenger Jon Ossoff ends with a plurality winner, a runoff will be held on January 5, 2021.

But there’s a second Senate race in Georgia that is quite likely to go to a runoff: the special election to choose someone to finish the term Isakson gave up at the end of last year due to poor health. Under Georgia’s rules, a nonpartisan “jungle primary” will be held the same day as the general election (November 3), and if no one wins a majority, the top two finishers will go to a January 5 runoff. There are 20 candidates who will appear on the ballot, including the interim appointed senator, Republican Kelly Loeffler. She faces fierce competition for Republican voters from congressman Doug Collins. Democratic leaders are mostly backing Ebenezer Baptist Church pastor Raphael Warnock, but early polls have shown Matt Lieberman (son of Joe) with significant support, probably because of name ID. The odds of anyone winning a majority in November are low.

Perhaps one party or the other will nail down a Senate majority on or soon after Election Day. But there’s a nontrivial chance it could all come down to Georgia in January.

The conventional wisdom is that Republicans would be favored in either or both Senate runoffs because their more affluent voters are more likely to turn out for a special election. In the two precedents we have, Republican Paul Coverdell upset incumbent Democratic senator Wyche Fowler in 1992, and Republican incumbent Saxby Chambliss easily dispatched Democrat Jim Martin in 2008. But Senate control was not at stake in either of those contests. And even though Republican Karen Handel prevailed over Jon Ossoff (the self-same candidate now opposing Perdue) in the famous 2017 special House election in the Sixth Congressional District of Georgia, turnout from both party bases was robust.

What would one or two January runoffs with the Senate at stake be like? Probably an insane frenzy with every unemployed campaign worker and every unspent campaign dollar in the whole country being deployed in one place. Whoever is president would definitely have Georgia on his mind 24/7. The vice-president (who could be Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms or 2018 Georgia Democratic gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams, according to many Biden veep lists) would be waiting with gavel at the ready.

Early voting would definitely begin during the holiday season, when Americans traditionally try to think about anything and everything other than politics (particularly after what is likely to be a vicious and possibly contested general election). For all we know, COVID-19 (or fears of its reemergence) could still be inhibiting in-person political activity and complicating voting. And Georgia is quite the testing ground for get-out-the-vote efforts these days, with veteran vote suppressor Brian Kemp in the governorship and his 2018 challenger Abrams heading up the nation’s preeminent voting-rights group.

Those unfamiliar with Georgia may not realize that this Deep South state has some mighty cold weather in January. But it could be a red-hot political site in early 2021.

Got a little hypothetical at New York this week given Biden’s big polling lead over Trump:

Among those of us who obsessively track electoral horse-race analysis, it was the shot heard round the world: “This election is looking more like a Democratic tsunami than simply a Blue wave.”

Coming from veteran observer Amy Walters of the ultra-cautious Cook Political Report, this was an unusually bold assertion, buttressed, it appears, by her belief that “the president is not interested in changing his approach or focus” despite countless indicators that he needs to in order to survive. She even discounts the possibility that Trump’s dismal performance will create a “checks and balances” undertow benefiting down-ballot Republicans among voters worrying about too much Democratic power:

“At least one Republican I spoke with … was wary of a check and balance working this year, telling me that ‘people are looking for a restart and a reset.’ That includes down-ballot candidates as well as the president. “

So it might be time to take a cautious and highly conditional look ahead at what a “Democratic tsunami” might look like, and might produce after the elections. Democrats with a superstitious fear of even thinking over-confidently are excused from a further reading of this piece, lest they tempt the Lord Satan (or at least Vladimir Putin) to intervene demonically on the president’s behalf.

1. A Decisive Result That Makes Any Trump Post-Election Contest Impossible

Let’s say Joe Biden performs exactly as national and state polling averages at RealClearPolitics currently suggest. That would be an 8.7 percent advantage in the national popular vote, the largest major-party victory margin since Ronald Reagan’s blowout win over Walter Mondale in 1984. He’d carry all seven battleground states for which there is public polling in the RCP database: Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, giving him at least 333 electoral votes.

But the most immediate, and perhaps most important, effect of a large Biden win would be to neutralize Team Trump’s pretty visible plans to contest a close loss based on success in early returns, followed by legal maneuverings, state government machinations, and even violence in the streets to produce a 2000-style victory-from-the-jaws-of-defeat. Even if Trump managed to post early leads in some competitive states based on heavy in-person Election Day voting by Republicans, they wouldn’t last long, and the Biden wave in later-counted (mostly mail) ballots would be too large and national to attribute to any sort of wire-pulling, particularly given Republican control of the election machinery in some of these states.

A Biden tsunami is definitely the best, and possibly the only, way to avoid disinformation about the results in a year when a slow count is going to definitely occur.

2. A Solidly Democratic, if Not Filibuster-Proof, Senate

Right now, control of the Senate is teetering in the balance, with Democrats needing (assuming Biden wins and installs his vice-president as the chamber’s tie-breaker) a net gain of three seats to take away Mitch McConnell’s gavel.

Using Cook’s very change-averse ratings, of 11 competitive Senate races, nine are for seats currently controlled by the GOP, with Biden leading in the polls in five of the states with those vulnerable GOP seats. Given the recent trend toward straight-ticket voting — in 2016, every single Senate race was won by the party that carried the state in the presidential election — it’s extremely likely Democrats would win the Senate if they and Biden are performing as they are currently. That’s crucial, for the most obvious reason that a Senate majority would ease confirmation of Biden’s executive and judicial branch appointees.

But let’s say for the sake of argument that Biden’s lead expands and Democratic Senate candidates do even better. If Democrats won all 11 competitive races on Cook’s ratings board, they’d have 56 Senate seats (though one win would likely have to wait until January of 2021 for a runoff in the Georgia seat occupied by Republican appointee Kelly Loeffler). That’s a comfortable margin that would give Democrats a nice cushion on difficult Senate votes, thought not enough to overcome a united Republican minority deploying the filibuster. It might give new Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, however, enough votes to abolish the filibuster even if he loses a few institutionalist Democrats. And it could very likely put reconquest of the Senate in the 2022 midterms out of reach for Republicans.

3. Iron-clad Democratic Control of the House

Nancy Pelosi is scheduled to step down as House Speaker in 2022 subsequent to a deal she cut to head off opposition following the 2018 elections. A big Democratic win in 2020 would make her last two years wielding the gavel much more pleasant.

The current Democratic margin of control in the House (35 seats), along with recently enhanced party unity, means that Pelosi rarely has to worry about Democratic defections. Another ten or twenty seats would likely remove all doubt.

Above all, of course, a Democratic trifecta in Washington for the first time since 2010, means House and Senate Democrats could focus on enacting laws rather than fighting off destructive GOP legislation (as they had to do for the first two years of the Trump presidency) or producing gridlock (as they’ve done since their House takeover).

4. State Government Gains Just in Time for Redistricting

Democrats are targeting seven key states where an achievable flip in control of legislative chambers could have a major effect on the redistricting cycle that plays out between 2021 and 2022: Arizona (House and Senate), Iowa (House), Michigan (House), Minnesota (Senate), North Carolina (Senate), Pennsylvania (House and Senate), and Texas (House). A true Democratic tsunami could pull other chambers into play, with dividends that could pay off for the next decade.

There are only 11 gubernatorial races this cycle, and according to Cook, only two are competitive, both in seats currently held by Democrats (in Montana and North Carolina). But while gains are unlikely, holding onto those two governorships, particularly in the North Carolina battleground, would be quite valuable.

All in all, a Democratic “tsunami” this November would not only end the Trump Era and destroy much of the power of his Senate allies, but could force an extended crisis in a Republican Party that is already looking down the barrel of demographic trends that are not friendly to its reactionary views or narrow constituencies.

I’ve been following this story for a good while, and did an update this week at New York:

With each passing day, it’s becoming more obvious that the old-school, packed-hall national political convention the president is forcing his party to undertake — despite the inconvenience, cost, and risk — may have to be canceled or scaled back, lest it become a supersize version of the Trump fiasco in Tulsa.

First of all, thanks to Trump’s decision to yank key parts of the convention from its original site in Charlotte, financing the event has become a struggle, as the New York Times reports:

“The abrupt uprooting of the Republican National Convention from Charlotte to Jacksonville has created a tangled financial predicament for party officials as they effectively try to pay for two big events instead of one. Tens of millions of dollars have already been spent in a city that will now host little more than a G.O.P. business meeting, and donors are wary of opening their wallets again to bankroll a Jacksonville gathering thrown into uncertainty by a surge in coronavirus cases.”

The financial situation has been exacerbated by the second big problem: Trump has moved his convention from a coronavirus frying pan to a coronavirus wildfire:

“In Jacksonville, fund-raisers are describing the process as the most difficult they have ever confronted: Florida has been setting daily records for new virus cases, freezing money as donors wait and worry about the safety risks of the pandemic.

“’I don’t want to encourage people getting sick,’ said Stanley S. Hubbard, a Minnesota billionaire who has donated more than $2 million to help Republicans, including President Trump, since the beginning of the 2016 election … ‘Unless this thing goes away, I think it’s a bad choice,’ he said.”

The third big problem is that people associated with Trump are now beginning to hint that the convention itself could go away, or at least be held under conditions similar to the virtual convention Democrats moved toward early in the pandemic. On Sunday, Trump-appointed FDA Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn said that it was “too early to tell” if Florida will be a safe place to host the RNC.

Texas Democrats more prudently held a virtual event last month.

It’s also possible, of course, that Trump is so enamored of the kind of convention he wants that he will push on with it despite the risk of delegates not showing up or, worse yet, attending a super-spreader event that makes a lot of people sick.

What makes this whole convoluted mess particularly dubious is that there are growing signs it won’t do Trump much good even if it comes off precisely as planned. As Geoffrey Skelley explains at FiveThirtyEight, the idea of a convention “bounce” for either party’s presidential candidate may be outdated:

“[C]onvention bounces have been getting smaller, which is likely a byproduct of how polarized our politics have become. There are just fewer swing voters, so it’s harder for a candidate to attract support outside of his or her core base of supporters.”

Beyond that, of course, the very idea of conventions as stage-managed infomercials that dominate the airwaves with positive messaging could be dead wrong this particular year. Unless the coronavirus really does miraculously vanish between now and late August (Trump’s big acceptance speech is scheduled for August 27), the risks the GOP is taking will get a lot of attention even if the worst doesn’t happen. And the pandemic and its economic impact will probably rob both conventions of the kind of obsessive media attention they typically get.

Republicans should have stuck with Charlotte and moved to a largely virtual convention that would have been far safer and likely more effective from the party’s point of view. As it is, the whole event may simply demonstrate how the president’s narcissism is the GOP’s real — if inadvertent — reelection message.

California ballot initiatives often set national trends and affect down-ballot races in the Golden State. I wrote about this year’s batch at New York:

California offers reasonably easy access to the ballot for groups wanting to change state policies, and requires public approval of constitutional amendments passed by the legislature. So it has a rich history of ballot initiative fights that sometimes overshadow elections for public office, from the tax revolts of the 1970s to the immigration backlash of the 1990s and beyond. 2020 is no exception, with 12 measures on the ballot in a year when California won’t be competitive in the presidential contest and has no Senate seats up for grabs.

Going into 2020, it was widely anticipated that a so-called “split roll” initiative removing strict limits on property tax increases from commercial property might blot out the sky and produce one of the most expensive and consequential battles ever. Long the apple of the eye of many public-sector unions and good government groups seeking a broader tax base, the initiative would limit the sacrosanct Proposition 13 protections against tax increases to (largely) residential real estate, exposing commercial property to tax assessments based on current market value rather than its value when the property last changed hands.

Backers of a “split roll” figured a presidential year with high Democratic turnout would be the best time to pursue this measure, but didn’t account for the arrival of the coronavirus and a deep economic recession, which may have made voters averse to major changes in the status quo. The defeat by voters of a statewide bond initiative for education in the March primary may indicate California’s entering a period of fiscal retrenchment, though the huge budget deficits the state is now facing could cut the other way. An April PPIC survey showed.a slim majority of voters then favoring the split roll initiative.

While Prop 209 won 55 percent approval from California voters, the state’s demographics have significantly changed since then. Additionally, past hostility to affirmative action among the state’s Asian-American leadership has abated; a majority of Asian-American legislators supported the repeal initiative on grounds that whatever losses their community might have in university admissions would be more than offset in gains in public employment and contracts, but there may be grassroots opposition among white and Asian-American voters. The repeal is being supported by Governor Gavin Newsom, the Regents of the University of California and most elected Democrats.

Two other ballot initiatives of note would be aimed at expanding voting rights. One would extend restoration of voting rights to parolees as well as the probationers who currently qualify. According to one study, about 40,000 Californians would benefit from this initiative if it passes. A separate amendment would allow those who will turn 18 by any general election date to vote in the preceding primaries (or special elections) at the age of 17.

An initiative relaxing state limits on local imposition of rent control was defeated in 2018. A narrower measure is back on the ballot this year that supplements a new state law limiting the size of rent increases generally.

Another initiative that could spur heavy ad spending is one backed by Uber and Lyft and some delivery services that would essentially exempt their drivers from a new California law designed to limit the classification of workers as independent contractors to avoid minimum wage and benefits obligations.

And in one other notable battle, “split roll” isn’t the only ballot initiative that would change the Prop 13 property tax system. Another backed by realtors (who failed with a similar initiative in 2018) would let homeowners over 55 keep Prop 13 protections when buying new properties. As a sweetener to progressives often hostile to Prop 13, the initiative would also eliminate the so-called “Lebowski Loophole” (so named because actor Jeff Bridges was a major beneficiary, though he is all for its elimination) whereby children can continue Prop 13 protections on expensive investment and rental properties they inherit.

The California airwaves will be busy with ads for and against initiatives in the fall, and could help goose turnout, affecting U.S. House and state legislative races if not the presidential contest.

One of the odder takes on Trump’s reelection strategy drove me to a mocking response at New York:

You may have heard that Donald J. Trump is president of the United States. If you are inclined to forget it for a moment, he is ever ready to remind you by incessant tweets, abrasive public comments, loud rallies, expensive ads, and the hallelujahs of his chorus of supporters that he is the man. Not only is he the president, he is, he insists, the greatest president ever, whose administration is dizzy with success and muscle-bound with accomplishments. His midterm self-assessment was modestly entitled “500 Days of American Greatness.” Trump’s presidency is quite possibly the most imperial of imperial presidencies, characterized by contemptuous disregard for any constitutional limits on his power (“I have an Article 2 [of the Constitution] where I have the right to do whatever I want as president” he once said).

I reiterate these well-known attributes of our narcissistic chief executive by way of background for this astonishing Wall Street Journal story:

“President Trump’s case for re-election reprises his pitch for a first term in office, as he and his team try to portray presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden as an incumbent while accentuating his own outsider credentials.

“In advertisements, interviews and social-media posts, Mr. Trump is highlighting Mr. Biden’s four decades as a Delaware senator and vice president — the most consistent message among several the president has driven so far about his competitor.”

Now, it’s not surprising that an incumbent president running for reelection at a time when objective conditions in the country are dreadful — in part because of his own hubris, negligence, and, yes, narcissism — wants to avoid a “referendum” election. And that’s particularly true of an incumbent whose personal favorability indices are as horrible as Trump’s (about half the electorate has a very unfavorable opinion of him). Typically, a president in this sort of jam will try to engineer a “choice” election; when Jimmy Carter was in a world of hurt in 1980, his strategy was to frame the election as a “two futures” choice between him and his controversial challenger Ronald Reagan. It didn’t work, but it made sense.

“’Trump is the president, not simply a candidate,’ said Steve Bannon, the chief executive of the 2016 Trump campaign. ‘He is the protagonist in this drama. You drive action like a president, govern like a president, show leadership like a president and you will be re-elected. It really is that basic.’”

Sure, it’s possible, even credible, for Team Trump to treat Joe Biden as a figure from the past who would drag the country back into the swamp from which the 45th president has sought to rescue it. But that doesn’t absolve the president from what has happened since Biden returned to private life in 2017. The best Trump’s campaign can do is to beg for more time:

“Jason Miller, a Trump campaign adviser, said the campaign plans to paint Mr. Biden as ‘part of every job-killing, failed policy decision of the past 40 years.’ The campaign wants voters to see the race as a choice between ‘President Trump’s record of success in less than four years versus Joe Biden’s record of failure over more than 40 years.’”

But even if you are willing, somehow, to describe the Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama administrations as a long saga of failure before the so-much-winning of the current regime — and blame it all on Joe Biden — the fact remains that Trump is responsible for where the country is today. A new Pew poll asked Americans if “in thinking about the current state of the country these days” they felt angry, fearful, hopeful, or proud. Only 17 percent answered “proud,” which is a terrible rebuke to a president who has made “America First” nationalism his central theme alongside hatred for those who dare to question his or the country’s divinely anointed destiny.

No, Trump isn’t going to get to proclaim his power and glory as president for three and a half years and then rerun his 2016 campaign as though his presidency did not exist. It is in fact the dominant reality of American political life — joyous for some and painful for many — and perpetuating or ending it is unavoidably going to be the big question for voters in November.

A wave of new polling data has been coming out showing Joe Biden’s lead over Donald Trump growing larger and deeper. So I wrote up the implications at New York:

 [T]hree weeks ago, I concluded that Biden’s lead in horse-race matchups with the incumbent was getting “seriously large.” A barrage of new polling data confirms the trend. In the RealClearPolitics polling averages, Biden now has a double-digit (10.1 percent) lead, and has also breached the 50-percent barrier (he’s at 51 percent). FiveThirtyEight, which weights results for pollster accuracy and adjusts them for partisan bias, shows Biden with a slightly smaller 9.7 percent lead, but with the same 51 percent.

To put Biden’s lead into a historical context, the last time a presidential candidate actually won by that margin was 36 years ago, when Ronald Reagan crushed Walter Mondale. And the only Democratic presidential tickets since 1976 to win a majority of the popular vote were the two Biden shared with Barack Obama.

Let’s take a look at the last two incumbent presidents to win reelection, and see if they were ever behind by anything like the margin by which Trump currently trails Biden. In 2012, Obama never fell behind Mitt Romney in the RCP averages by more than a single point. In 2004, George W. Bush’s maximum deficit against John Kerry was 2.7 percent.

Now it’s true that Hillary Clinton periodically held a double-digit lead over Trump in the RCP averages early in the 2016 race, when he was still struggling to consolidate Republican support. But by this point in the cycle, her lead had dwindled to 6.6 percent, and even in polling immediately after the Access Hollywood video scandal broke, which produced a vast wave of GOP repudiations of Trump, Clinton’s maximum lead in the RCP averages was 7.1 percent.

There is still, of course, a lot of time before November. Joe Biden could in theory make a spectacular mistake, though as time goes by his soundness as a candidate is becoming very apparent. Perhaps improving conditions in the country will give the incumbent a late lift, though you’d have to say right now that the odds of the coronavirus going away or the economy sharply recovering are getting lower every day, and in any event, Trump’s perpetually underwater job approval rating seems impervious to anything he does or fails to do.

The famous enthusiasm of Trump voters is also in question after they failed to fill even half an arena in Tulsa when Trump held his first post-pandemic rally. Additionally, Trump is inspiring a sort of negative enthusiasm boom. According to the latest high-quality national poll, from New York Times/Siena College, fully one-half of registered voters have a very unfavorable opinion of the president, as opposed to just over a quarter with a very favorable opinion. If, as is the case with most elections involving an incumbent president, Election 2020 is a referendum on Trump, this sort of finding could represent the greatest obstacle of all to his reelection.

There remains the possibility that Trump could make even a fairly sizable national popular vote loss irrelevant by again squeaking out a narrow electoral college win. But again, the polls aren’t looking so hot for him in the battleground states. According to current RCP averages, Biden is leading Trump by 8.0 points in Michigan, 7.0 points in Wisconsin, 6.2 percent in Florida, 5.6 points in Pennsylvania, and even by 4.0 points in Arizona.

It could in theory all change, or at least get a lot more interesting, but right now Donald Trump has become a clear 2020 underdog, and his situation could just as easily get worse instead of better. In the end we may realize that Trump’s mojo depended on his ability to pose as an insurgent outsider, and wasn’t transferable to an environment in which he was called upon to govern. And he may yet try, somehow, to run against the status quo for which he is now responsible. His 2016 upset is going to be a very tough act to follow.

There is significant momentum for creating an important new national holiday, and I reviewed the situation at New York:

Texas Representative Sheila Jackson Lee has repeatedly offered legislation in Congress to make June 19, or Juneteenth – the celebration of slavery’s end that originated in her state – a federal holiday. As Fabiola Cineas explains at Vox, it’s an event with a long history:

“A portmanteau of ‘June’ and ‘nineteenth,’ Juneteenth marks the day in 1865 when a group of enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, finally learned that they were free from the institution of slavery….

“Newly freed black people celebrated the first Juneteenth in 1866 to commemorate liberation — with food, singing, and the reading of spirituals — and take pride in their progress. But a century and a half later, Juneteenth is still not taught in most schools, nor is the event a federal holiday despite decades of pushing from activists.”

This year, amid a national wave of outrage and awakening over racial injustice, Juneteenth has seen wider national observance than ever before. Lee’s resolution to recognize the historical significance of Juneteenth has gathered 200-plus cosponsors, and on Thursday Senator John Cornyn said he will introduce bipartisan legislation to make it a federal holiday. In the last week the governors of Virginia and New York announced that they will observe Juneteenth as an official holiday with paid time off for state workers (joining Texas, which took the step in 1980). A growing list of corporations have made Juneteenth a paid day off for employees, including the NFL, Twitter, Nike, Uber, and Target, along with media companies such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Vox Media (New York Magazine’s parent company).

The easiest “dodge” for those resisting an official holiday is to offer less significant forms of recognition that do not command general attention, much less the widespread discussion of racial justice issues that both the MLK and Juneteenth commemorations are intended to promote. Currently 42 states “recognize” Juneteenth, but do not offer time off for public employees or close state offices. That was a problem in the early days of the drive for an MLK holiday, too.

Michigan’s John Conyers made the first congressional call for a federal holiday to honor Dr. King just four days after his assassination in 1968. But the original Senate bill, sponsored by Massachusetts Republican Senator Ed Brooke (at that point the only African-American in the chamber) simply called for a “national day of commemoration,” and Republicans in both chambers frequently sought to substitute less significant forms of recognition.

Conyers and other key sponsors never accepted half a loaf. Support for the holiday by President Jimmy Carter and congressional Democrats gave it near-success in 1979, but it took a sustained public campaign in the early 1980s to make it a reality despite Republican control of the White House and the Senate, as the Constitution Center explains:

“Musician Stevie Wonder helped in 1981 by releasing the song ‘Happy Birthday’ to promote the holiday. (He would later sing it at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial dedication in 2011).

“The King Center kept up its efforts. It organized a march on Washington that included an estimated 500,000 people. Coretta Scott King, along with Wonder, presented a petition signed by 6 million people to House leader Tip O’Neill.”

Finally Republicans began to come around to support for the holiday, with Representatives Jack Kemp and Newt Gingrich, and even Senator Strom Thurmond speaking out for it during the next push in 1983. After proponents finally overcame a filibuster by Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina (a bitter opponent of the holiday who was forever trying to draw attention to scurrilous smears of Dr. King cooked up by the FBI at J. Edgar Hoover’s direction), it passed both houses and President Ronald Reagan signed it into law.

One key moment in the House debate involved one of the most common objections to a MLK holiday: its cost in lost federal worker hours. As Don Wolfensburger observed years later:

“Republican manager [William] Dannemeyer complained in his opening statement about the cost of a paid federal holiday. Congressional Black Caucus Member Parren Mitchell (D-Md.) retorted, ‘What do you mean ‘”cost?”’ What was the cost of keeping us blacks where we were? All these extraneous things do not mean a thing to me. I am talking about what is the right and decent thing to do, and to urge a vote for this bill in the form that it is.’”

It took even longer to secure full recognition of the holiday at the state level. As of 1986, when the federal MLK holiday took effect, only 17 states had done likewise. In addition to the usual efforts to dilute the holiday, it became popular in southern states to incongruously draft it onto commemorations of Confederate generals. Notably, Virginia combined the MLK holiday with recognition of both Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson until 2000. To this day Alabama and Mississippi honor Lee and King together.

All told, it took 15 years from the time of Dr. King’s assassination for the federal holiday to be enacted, and then another 17 before all 50 states acknowledged it. That fight yielded three major lessons: (1) don’t accept some watered-down observance; (2) seek enough bipartisan support to overcome conservative opposition; and (3) mobilize the public and link the holiday to the eternal causes of equal rights and racial justice.

Advocates for a federal Juneteenth holiday have already made progress on each of these fronts, so hopefully its path to recognition can be shortened.

Sometimes you see a political phenomenon so often that you can forget to look into what it means. I chose one to write about at New York this week:

By any objective standard, the president’s prospects for reelection are looking down. Joe Biden is continuing to lead him in trial heats nationally (by 8.1 percent in the latest RealClearPolitics averages) and in most battleground states. The president’s job approval numbers are lower than they’ve been since last December. People are still very afraid of COVID-19, and despite one good monthly jobs report, the economy is still in the ditch, with unemployment higher than at any time since the 1930s.

There’s tons of time between now and November, the economy could somehow turn around and that second “wave” of the coronavirus could fail to appear, and Joe Biden could do or say something self-destructive. But the possibility of a Trump revival is not the same thing as its probability, much less certainty. Yet as Politico notes, there’s little doubt in MAGA-land that Trump will win in November, and maybe win big:

“Interviews with more than 50 state, district and county Republican Party chairs depict a version of the electoral landscape that is no worse for Trump than six months ago — and possibly even slightly better. According to this view, the coronavirus is on its way out and the economy is coming back. Polls are unreliable, Joe Biden is too frail to last, and the media still doesn’t get it….

“’The more bad things happen in the country, it just solidifies support for Trump,’ said Phillip Stephens, GOP chairman in Robeson County, N.C., one of several rural counties in that swing state that shifted from supporting Barack Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016. ‘We’re calling him “Teflon Trump.” Nothing’s going to stick, because if anything, it’s getting more exciting than it was in 2016.’

“This year, Stephens said, We’re thinking landslide.’”

Politico found that if you ask Republicans why Trump’s going to win, they generally offer explanations ranging from the hyper-optimistic (everything will be back to normal any day now and a happy back-at-work electorate will reward Trump for saving them), to the aggressively ignorant (all polls showing Biden ahead are fake, because they were dead wrong last time —well which they actually weren’t), to pure disinformation (Democrats are throwing away the election by calling for the abolition of police departments and confiscation of private property, beginning with guns).

So why are Trump-supporting Republicans so relentlessly upbeat, and dismissive of objective evidence that points in the direction of defeat? Here are five theories:

1. They’re drinking his own Kool-Aid

Trump supporters are by definition big fans of a man who never admits mistakes or weaknesses, expresses narcissistic, self-congratulatory hubris every other hour, and hates “losers” as much as Jesus Christ loved them. Perhaps they are simply following the leader, who appears to systematically block out any source of information that doesn’t tell him what he wants to hear.

2. They believe “enthusiasm” is the ball game

As is well known, Trump’s reelection strategy, and his behavior in office, have been heavily oriented towards “base mobilization,” to the extent of sometimes excluding any serious effort to identify or persuade swing voters, much less Democrats. To the extent that mobilization is facilitated by enthusiasm, getting the MAGA faithful to believe they are marching in a perpetual victory parade is presumably valuable. It’s possibly relevant that polls show a majority of Republicans are motivated by a desire to support Trump, while a majority of Democrats are more focused on beating Trump than on electing Biden. Trump voters want to know they are part of a historic reelection campaign that will take America another step closer to the paradise of the 1950s, not into some socialist nonwhite dystopia.

3. They want to “own the libs”

One bond Trump has with his supporters is in deeply enjoying the discomfort of their common enemies. They are aware that the vast majority of left-of-center Americans don’t simply dislike the president, but dislike him intensely. Many view the prospect of this strange “accidental president” serving another four years with genuine horror. So it’s great sport for Trump supporters to confront them with this possibility, raised to the level of certainty. It’s mass schadenfreude, with a dollop of Trump’s own signature cruelty.

4. They truly despise the “elite” sources of adverse information

If you are convinced that polls are all “fake” and most of the media — including Fox News on occasion — just systematically lie, all to benefit Trump’s enemies, then it’s a short leap to assume that the “truth” they are hiding is MAGA-rific or even glorious. Similarly, once one is convinced that “real Americans” are in the president’s corner, then anything (like a bad poll or mockery of a self-destructive Trump video clip) emanating from sources that either “don’t get it” or are actively hostile to this country and its interests simply cannot be credited as “real.” Believing that Trump might lose, therefore, can become an anti-patriotic act, or a sign of being duped by contemptuous wrong-doers.

5. They are preparing to contest any defeat

The most troubling possibility is that Trump supporters understand the president is laying the groundwork for contesting a defeat, and want to help him do so. Here’s how I recently described Trump’s efforts to undermine, in advance, the legitimacy of the November election in case he happens to lose it:

“Trump is now regularly claiming that voting by mail is inherently illegitimate, except for grudging exceptions for people who can’t make it to the polls. So, presumably, states that allow for no-excuse voting by mail in November are holding ‘substantially fraudulent’ elections. That’s 34 states who do so by law (including battleground states Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin), 11 more that so far are waiving excuse requirements this pandemic year (including New Hampshire), and another that may be forced to do so by a lawsuit (Texas).

“So in a very real sense, unless Trump backs off his claims that voting by mail means a ‘rigged election,’ he’s letting us know that he and his supporters will be justified in challenging any adverse results in states that allow this terrible practice to take place.”

Keep in mind that Trump went to a lot of trouble to claim he was robbed of a popular-vote majority in 2016 (thanks to “millions of illegal votes” for Hillary Clinton for which he offered not a shred of evidence), even though it didn’t ultimately matter. One possible rationale was to convince his followers Democrats always cheat, meaning their victories should prospectively be discounted or challenged. If on Election Night 2020, Donald Trump claims victory on the basis of early returns, is there any doubt his fans and media allies will join him in crying out “fraud!” to the high heavens should late mail ballots drift in and reverse the results? I don’t think so. And either consciously or unconsciously, some of them may be anticipating that fraught scenario already. To a significant number of the faithful, Trump is not just a president, but an embodiment of America, and even God’s Annointed. He can’t fail. He can only be failed.

As Democrats took cheer at Joe Biden’s recent strong showing in horse-race polls, I offered a cautionary word at New York:

At a time when Joe Biden is enjoying comfortable leads in both national and battleground-state polls, it’s a good time for us all to remember the most fundamental lesson of what happened four years ago: Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election while winning the national popular vote by 2.1 percent, or more than 2.8 million votes. The current Republican skew in the composition of the Electoral College (or if you prefer, the “wastage” of “excess” Democratic votes in noncompetitive states like California) has not gone away, as David Wasserman noted last year:

“The ultimate nightmare scenario for Democrats might look something like this: Trump loses the popular vote by more than 5 million ballots, and the Democratic nominee converts Michigan and Pennsylvania back to blue. But Trump wins re-election by two Electoral votes by barely hanging onto Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Maine’s 2nd Congressional District.”

With that possibility in mind, it’s useful to look at the analysis of recent battleground-state polls (taken in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin) conducted by Geoffrey Skelley for FiveThirtyEight. According to the data Skelley assembles, Biden leads in six of them (all but Georgia and Texas). But here’s the thing: In just one of them does Biden’s lead match his national polling lead.

“There are two big takeaways here. One, Biden is in an enviable position in many of these battleground states. However, the second takeaway — which is the caveat we mentioned earlier — is that all of these battleground states save Michigan are more Republican-leaning than the national average. In other words, most of the states that will decide the presidential election are to the right of the country as a whole, and that speaks to Trump’s advantage in the Electoral College.”

And that means Democrats shouldn’t get at all complacent about Biden’s national polling lead:

The other reason Biden needs a big national popular vote win is that he really needs a Democratic Senate to accomplish anything legislatively as president, and to the modest but very real extent he may have coattails, it could be crucial in close Senate races. That obviously matters in battleground states with Senate races, like Arizona, Georgia (two races), Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Texas. But it could matter even more in red states where a narrower-than-2016 presidential loss could be the key to a Democratic Senate win, such as Iowa, Kansas, Montana, and perhaps even Kentucky and Alabama.

One advantage Biden has over Hillary Clinton in managing a polling lead is that Democrats are almost certainly going to refuse to be overconfident this time around. Uncle Joe may have to be up by 20 points before they relax for a moment.