As someone who warned for months that Trump would try to steal the presidency in 2020 if he lost, I’m worried about the possibility of it happening again, and took a close look at New York at what has changed since then:

Hanging over the 2024 presidential rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump is the possibility of another contested result. Aside from a handful of liberal pundits who have fantasized about Congress refusing to certify a Trump victory on grounds that the 14th Amendment bans high federal office for past “insurrectionists,” the major reason for worry emanates from the horrible example set by Trump in 2020 and by his ever-more-adamant if still unsubstantiated claims that the race was “rigged.” There’s no reason to assume he’ll accept defeat in 2024, particularly now that he’s beginning to repeat some of his 2020 hogwash about voting by mail being inherently fraudulent and his even older fabrications about Democrats relying on illegal votes from noncitizens.

Even more basically, the central message of Trump’s 2024 campaign is that he represents an overwhelming majority of Americans who long for his brand of American greatness, against the self-perpetuating power of corrupt elites who illegally denied them a second Trump term. A graceful acceptance of defeat seems extremely unlikely. Rolling Stone is reporting that the Biden campaign is examining a “comically long” list of “nightmare scenarios” that might develop.

But while Trump remains entirely capable of trying to steal the presidency, his options have narrowed. Several of the tactics he used four years ago are now more or less off the table.

Most obviously, Trump will not have the office of the presidency or its powers at his disposal, and he’ll be trying to conquer, not retain, the White House. That’s a handicap that should not be underestimated. When he claimed a grossly premature victory on Election Night in 2020, it was from the East Room of the White House, which may have enhanced the authenticity of this banana-republic move. More importantly, throughout his effort to overturn his defeat, he had access to the resources of the U.S. Justice Department (although its operatives cooperated with him to widely varying extents). All that will be lost to him in 2024. Also beyond his reach is an option he considered but was reportedly talked out of taking in 2020: ordering the U.S. military to seize voting machines in the search for phantom voter fraud. So too is the more drastic step some feared of Trump invoking the Insurrection Act and deploying military units to suppress protests against his election thievery.

More generally, if some sort of institutional paralysis grips Congress or the U.S. government in implementing a 2024 election defeat for Trump, inertia will favor the incumbent. It’s easier to hold power than to seize it.

One particular byproduct of not being in power makes Trump’s planned maneuver in Congress on January 6 a nonstarter: The vice-president who will count electoral votes is Kamala Harris, not Mike Pence. So there will be no gavel-wielding president of the Senate “sending it back to the states” for an unconstitutional redo of election certification. Pence wouldn’t do Trump this favor; Harris won’t either, of course.

Other options available to Trump in 2020 have been removed or at least limited by the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022, enacted by Congress with significant bipartisan support to address the events of January 6 and some of the confusion that preceded it. That new law makes it clear the vice-president who presides over the electoral vote count is acting simply as a clerk, not a judge. But more importantly, the ECRA provides clear direction on who has the power to certify electors at the state level, heading off the “fake electors” gambit the Trump campaign attempted via friendly legislators in 2020. It also provides for expedited federal judicial review of disputes over certification of electors so that they are resolved long before Congress confirms the results. And it strengthens the presumption that each state will only certify electors pledged to the candidate who wins its popular vote.

Overall, it appears the joint session of Congress to confirm the presidential results will be a less fruitful avenue for MAGA mischief in 2025, though we don’t know which party will control Congress at that time (Democrats controlled both chambers in 2021).

An even bigger legal change since 2020 has been the relatively more restrictive attitude of the states toward voting by mail now that the COVID-19 pandemic has more or less ended. The 2020 Trump campaign constantly claimed that the institution of temporary no-excuse absentee ballots or unsolicited distribution of mail ballots to all registered voters either constituted or encouraged voter fraud; their challenges typically failed as federal and state courts deferred to determinations by state and local election officials on public-safety needs. Now, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 15 states that temporarily relaxed excuse requirements for voting by mail have reinstated them. That means fewer mail ballots and fewer grounds for lawsuits alleging ballot fraud. Similarly, most states that sent unsolicited mail ballots to all registered voters in 2020 have stopped doing that; the only battleground-state exception is Nevada.

One mail-ballot issue that bears watching in 2024 is the practice in 17 states of allowing mail ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted. While in 2020 the federal courts generally dismissed complaints against this procedure on grounds of COVID-related delays in mail-delivery service, there hasn’t been a definitive ruling on the argument that allowing late receipt of mail ballots represents an unconstitutional extension of Election Day. There are only, however, two battleground states (Nevada and North Carolina) that have a post–Election Day cutoff for mail ballots.

It’s worth noting that due to Democrats’ remarkably good performance in 2022, election deniers had less opportunity to monkey with election laws in the last two years. As New York’s Eric Levitz noted after the midterms:

“Democrats … gained four new trifectas, won bitterly contested governors’ races (in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and deep-red Kansas), fought off Republican supermajorities in the North Carolina House and the Badger State’s assembly, defeated every single election denier campaigning for secretary of State in an Electoral College battleground, and did not lose control of a single state legislative chamber. That last feat is especially noteworthy: In every midterm election since 1934, the president’s party has forfeited at least one statehouse to the opposition.”

So what new election-coup tactics could Trump pursue in 2024? There is one terrifying possibility: the deployment of MAGA shock troops to disrupt the casting or counting of Election Day votes in order to justify nondemocratic methods of determining the presidency. To put it another way, the more legislators and judges close off nefarious legal methods of subverting an adverse election result, the more Trump and his supporters may be tempted to resort to good old-fashioned ballot-box-stuffing violence. It would be immensely helpful to secure as many pledges against this lurch into open authoritarianism as possible among Republican elected officials and party leaders. And as an added safeguard, Joe Biden might want to win by a landslide.

I was sorry to learn of the sudden death of 2000 Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Lieberman. But his long and stormy career did offer some important lessons about party loyalty, which I wrote about at New York:

Joe Lieberman was active in politics right up to the end. The former senator was the founding co-chair of the nonpartisan group No Labels, which is laying the groundwork for a presidential campaign on behalf of a yet-to-be-identified bipartisan “unity ticket.” Lieberman did not live to see whether No Labels will run a candidate. He died on Wednesday at 82 due to complications from a fall. But this last political venture was entirely in keeping with his long career as a self-styled politician of the pragmatic center, which often took him across party boundaries.

Lieberman’s first years in Connecticut Democratic politics as a state legislator and then state attorney general were reasonably conventional. He was known for a particular interest in civil rights and environmental protection, and his identity as an observant Orthodox Jew also drew attention. But in 1988, the Democrat used unconventional tactics in his challenge to Republican U.S. senator Lowell Weicker. Lieberman positioned himself to the incumbent’s right on selected issues, like Ronald Reagan’s military operations against Libya and Grenada. He also capitalized on longtime conservative resentment of his moderate opponent, winning prized endorsements from William F. and James Buckley, icons of the right. Lieberman won the race narrowly in an upset.

Almost immediately, Senator Lieberman became closely associated with the Democratic Leadership Council. The group of mostly moderate elected officials focused on restoring the national political viability of a party that had lost five of the six previous presidential elections; it soon produced a president in Bill Clinton. Lieberman became probably the most systematically pro-Clinton (or in the parlance of the time, “New Democrat”) member of Congress. This gave his 1998 Senate speech condemning the then-president’s behavior in the Monica Lewinsky scandal as “immoral” and “harmful” a special bite. He probably did Clinton a favor by setting the table for a reprimand that fell short of impeachment and removal, but without question, the narrative was born of Lieberman being disloyal to his party.

Perhaps it was his public scolding of Clinton that convinced Al Gore, who was struggling to separate himself from his boss’s misconduct, to lift Lieberman to the summit of his career. Gore tapped the senator to be his running mate in the 2000 election, making him the first Jewish vice-presidential candidate of a major party. He was by all accounts a disciplined and loyal running mate, at least until that moment during the Florida recount saga when he publicly disclaimed interest in challenging late-arriving overseas military ballots against the advice of the Gore campaign. You could argue plausibly that the ticket would have never been in a position to potentially win the state without Lieberman’s appeal in South Florida to Jewish voters thrilled by his nomination to become vice-president. But many Democrats bitter about the loss blamed Lieberman.

As one of the leaders of the “Clintonian” wing of his party, Lieberman was an early front-runner for the 2004 presidential nomination. A longtime supporter of efforts to topple Saddam Hussein, Lieberman had voted to authorize the 2003 invasion of Iraq, like his campaign rivals John Kerry and John Edwards and other notable senators including Hillary Clinton. Unlike most other Democrats, though, Lieberman did not back off this position when the Iraq War became a deadly quagmire. Ill-aligned with his party to an extent he did not seem to perceive, his presidential campaign quickly flamed out, but not before he gained enduring mockery for claiming “Joe-mentum” from a fifth-place finish in New Hampshire.

Returning to the Senate, Lieberman continued his increasingly lonely support for the Iraq War (alongside other heresies to liberalism, such as his support for private-school education vouchers in the District of Columbia). In 2006, Lieberman drew a wealthy primary challenger, Ned Lamont, who soon had a large antiwar following in Connecticut and nationally. As the campaign grew heated, President George W. Bush gave his Democratic war ally a deadly gift by embracing him and kissing his cheek after the State of the Union Address. This moment, memorialized as “The Kiss,” became central to the Lamont campaign’s claim that Lieberman had left his party behind, and the challenger narrowly won the primary. However, Lieberman ran against him in the general election as an independent, with significant back-channel encouragement from the Bush White House (which helped prevent any strong Republican candidacy). Lieberman won a fourth and final term in the Senate with mostly GOP and independent votes. He was publicly endorsed by Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani, among others from what had been the enemy camp.

The 2006 repudiation by his party appeared to break something in Lieberman. This once-happiest of happy political warriors, incapable of holding a grudge, seemed bitter, or at the very least gravely offended, even as he remained in the Senate Democratic Caucus (albeit as formally independent). When his old friend and Iraq War ally John McCain ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, Lieberman committed a partisan sin by endorsing him. His positioning between the two parties, however, still cost him dearly: McCain wanted to choose him as his running mate, before the Arizonan’s staff convinced him that Lieberman’s longtime pro-choice views and support for LGBTQ rights would lead to a convention revolt. The GOP nominee instead went with a different “high-risk, high-reward” choice: Sarah Palin.

After Barack Obama’s victory over Lieberman’s candidate, the new Democratic president needed every Democratic senator to enact the centerpiece of his agenda, the Affordable Care Act. He got Lieberman’s vote — but only after the senator, who represented many of the country’s major private-insurance companies, forced the elimination of the “public option” in the new system. It was a bitter pill for many progressives, who favored a more robust government role in health insurance than Obama had proposed.

By the time Lieberman chose to retire from the Senate in 2012, he was very near to being a man without a party, and he reflected that status by refusing to endorse either Obama or Mitt Romney that year. By then, he was already involved in the last great project of his political career, No Labels. He did, with some hesitation, endorse Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in 2016. But his long odyssey away from the yoke of the Democratic Party had largely landed him in a nonpartisan limbo. Right up until his death, he was often the public face of No Labels, particularly after the group’s decision to sponsor a presidential ticket alienated many early supporters of its more quotidian efforts to encourage bipartisan “problem-solving” in Congress.

Some will view Lieberman as a victim of partisan polarization, and others as an anachronistic member of a pro-corporate, pro-war bipartisan elite who made polarization necessary. Personally, I will remember him as a politician who followed — sometimes courageously, sometimes foolishly — a path that made him blind to the singular extremism that one party has exhibited throughout the 21st century, a development he tried to ignore to his eventual marginalization. But for all his flaws, I have no doubt Joe Lieberman remained until his last breath committed to the task he often cited via the Hebrew term tikkun olam: repairing a broken world.

One of the odder phenomena of the 2024 presidential election is a certain 2020 Democratic candidate who has strayed very far since then. I took a look at her options at New York:

A month ago, when ex-Democratic congresswoman and 2020 presidential wannabe Tulsi Gabbard showed up at a Mar-a-Lago event, I wrote about the logic that could make her a highly unconventional but not entirely implausible 2024 running mate for Donald Trump. Once a major backer of Bernie Sanders, Gabbard’s trajectory toward MAGA-land has been steady since she left the Democratic Party in the fall of 2022, a main course she served up with a side dish of jarring candidate endorsements (e.g., of J.D. Vance). Even when she was still a Democrat running for president, though, her orientation was more MAGA-adjacent than you might expect, as Geoffrey Skelley explained in 2019:

“Gabbard’s supporters … are more likely to have backed President Trump in 2016, hold conservative views or identify as Republican compared to voters backing the other candidates. …

“In fact, Gabbard has become a bit of a conservative media darling in the primary, with conservative commentators like Ann Coulter and pro-Trump social media personalities like Mike Cernovich complimenting her for her foreign policy views. In a primary in which some 2020 Democratic contenders have boycotted Fox News, Gabbard has regularly appeared on the network. Just last week, Gabbard even did an exclusive interview with Breitbart News, a far-right political outlet. She’s also made appeals outside the political mainstream by going on The Joe Rogan Experience — one of the most popular podcasts in the country and a favored outlet for members of the Intellectual Dark Web, whose purveyors don’t fit neatly into political camps but generally criticize concepts such as political correctness and identity politics.”

So her parting blast at Democrats as controlled by an “elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness” didn’t come out of nowhere.

But much as Gabbard might be an outside-the-box running mate for the 45th president, it does seem there is another 2024 presidential candidate whose extreme hostility to mainstream institutions and difficult-to-categorize views might make him a better match for her: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And sure enough, according to NBC News, the wiggy anti-vaxxer is interested in Gabbard:

“The four-term former member of Congress from Hawaii is now getting consideration for both former President Donald Trump’s and independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s tickets, two sources familiar with the candidates’ deliberations told NBC News.”

The prospect of choosing between these two politicians appears to have left Gabbard feeling she’s in the catbird seat:

“As one source said, Gabbard would be more likely to seriously consider running as Kennedy’s vice presidential nominee had she not been swept up by the possibility of serving with Trump. This person said Gabbard ‘was enticed’ by the chance of serving on Kennedy’s ticket but is now focused on the possibility that Trump will select her.

“’My understanding is that Tulsi is convinced that Trump is going to pick her,’ this person said. ‘Had that not been the case, she probably would have gone with Kennedy.’”

Since Kennedy has scheduled a running-mate reveal for March 26 in Oakland, we’ll know soon enough whether he chose Gabbard and Gabbard chose him. Others rumored to be on his short list include New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers, former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura, and California entrepreneur and major RFK Jr. donor Nicole Shanahan.

As NBC notes, it’s more than a bit unusual for people to be considered for multiple presidential tickets:

“[I]t’s exceedingly rare for a politician to attract interest from more than one presidential ticket or party. (Ahead of the 1952 election, Democrats and Republicans led dueling efforts to draft another politically ambiguous veteran, Dwight Eisenhower, the former supreme Allied commander in Europe during World War II, for the presidential race.)”

It’s hard to say what Tulsi Gabbard would think of this comparison. After all, Ike was a bit of a warmonger.

We started hearing a familiar question from Republicans recently, and figured I’d answer it at New York:

What was the worst year of your life?

The answer will obviously vary, but it’s a good bet the year 2020 will rank pretty high in any list of wretched years. After all, it’s when COVID-19 arrived. The pandemic eventually took over a million lives just in America. Our economy collapsed. Schools and businesses closed, unemployment sky-rocketed, most people were isolated and terrified. As scientists struggled to figure out how the virus spread, how to keep from contracting it, and how to treat it, most Americans were hoarding hand sanitizer, paper towels, and toilet paper; avoiding door knobs, hand rails, and other shared surfaces; and obsessively cleaning their groceries and their mail.

It was indeed a time most of us would prefer to forget. And it seems the Republican Party is counting on that. As Noah Berlatsky of Public Notice points out, Republicans are now regularly trotting out Ronald Reagan’s famous 1980 debate question, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?,” as though it’s a slam-dunk winner for them:

“’Are you better off today than you were four years ago?’ Rep. Elise Stefanik asked during a news conference last week. She answered her own question by saying ‘the answer is a resounding no.’ Lara Trump, the new co-chair of the Republican National Committee, said virtually the same thing to Sean Hannity on Tuesday. South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott echoed that sentiment on Fox News as well, saying, ‘We have to go back to that future, 2017-2020. We want those four years one more time.’”

Seriously? All of the Trump years?

Despite the many problems with her weird, mendacious response to the State of the Union Address, Republican senator Katie Britt was smart enough not to claim 2020 as the joyous climax of four great years. Instead she asked viewers if they were “better off than they were three years ago,” dating back to Joe Biden’s first address to Congress in 2021. Ah, but that comparison, while it lends itself to the negative case against Biden, does not make the comparative case for Donald Trump’s alleged superiority. So throwing caution to the wind, Republicans will grit their teeth and ask persuadable voters to misremember 2020 as a monument to an American greatness that we have sadly lost once again.

Now it’s true that everything bad about 2020 was not attributable to Trump, and that voters may not necessarily put responsibility on him for the failure to manage a pandemic that baffled us all (though his tardiness in taking it seriously definitely cost lives and should never be forgotten). But nor is Biden responsible for all the ills of the world right now (including some maladies left to him by the Trump administration, like economic volatility and supply-chain problems). Rightly or wrongly, presidents are held responsible for nearly everything that happens on their watch; that’s the big downside to the job of being “leader of the free world,” with all its cool perks like Air Force One and Camp David. If Republicans are going to attack Biden over discontents ranging from gasoline prices to the horrors of war in Ukraine and Gaza, they’ll have to accept that the final year of that magical Trump presidency was quite the bummer. As a matter of fact, 2017 through 2019 weren’t exactly a golden era of good government, but for most Americans conditions of life were better than they became four years ago.

The GOP really needs to rethink its talking points. It takes a special kind of amnesia or insensitivity to look back at 2020 with great fondness. For most of us, the answer to the question “Are you better off than you were four years ago” is “Hell yes.”

Decided to explore a hardy perennial topic in a period of intense speculation about various candidates for Vice President, and wrote it up at New York:

In political circles, it’s high season for veep speculation. Democrats worried about Joe Biden’s age and their ticket’s electability fret about whether incumbent Vice-President Kamala Harris is the best bet to serve as the presidential understudy in 2024 as Republicans yell and point at her as an alleged radical leftist. Republicans worried about their party’s post-Trump direction fret about the erratic former president’s choice of a running mate to replace his 2016–20 toady, the since-discarded Mike Pence. Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is doing his own veep reveal on March 26; it has drawn interest partly because it could indicate which major party’s success might be spoiled by his bid and partly because ultracelebrity NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers could be in the mix. And the nonpartisan organization No Labels will soon be unveiling its own potential 2024 plans, which are likely to deploy a Democratic vice-presidential candidate to balance a Republican at the top of its “unity ticket.”

Do veep candidates really matter in determining the outcome of presidential elections?

To be clear, this is a very different question than the real-world relevance of vice-presidents. Fifteen veeps have gone on to become president, eight of them suddenly on the death of the boss and another when the boss was forced to resign. It is difficult to exaggerate the significance of Abraham Lincoln choosing Andrew Johnson as his 1864 running mate (making congressional Reconstruction necessary), or FDR replacing Henry Wallace with Harry Truman in 1944 (removing a Soviet sympathizer from the line of succession). The political insiders who often influence the choice of vice-presidential candidates understand why they matter, which is why they definitely care about them even in the absence of evidence that voters care at all.

And to be honest, there has never been much evidence that most voters care at all. Political scientists are generally in agreement that the identity of the second person on a presidential ticket matters mostly on the margins. Even St. Louis University’s Joel Goldstein, who is to vice-presidents what Andy Cohen is to Real Housewives, concedes that their identity is usually an electoral cipher. He has said, “Vice-presidential choice is unlikely to make much of a difference where potential swing voters have a strong preference for one presidential candidate over the other.” He points to very close elections with lots of swing voters, notably in 1960 when LBJ might have helped swing Texas into JFK’s column, as exceptions to a general rule.

On the other hand, there’s quite a bit of recent evidence that the selection of a particular running mate may play a role in preventing defections of voters from a presidential candidate with a shaky electoral base.

Most obviously, in 2016 Donald Trump was facing a potential revolt among movement-conservative and Evangelical voters, which he addressed by choosing the movement-conservative Evangelical politician Pence (who had the added reassuring value of a long résumé of elected offices). We can’t prove Trump would have lost without Pence onboard, but his victory was narrow enough that a Pence-less loss is a plausible counterfactual scenario. Similarly, in 2020 Biden’s choice of Harris made sense after a grueling nomination contest in which old white guy Biden prevailed over multiple women and people of color (not to mention two Jews), reversing the diversity trend established by his predecessors Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Biden himself, of course, was chosen by the first Black presidential nominee, who was also a freshman senator, in no small part because he was an old white guy with a Washington résumé as long as his arm.

What Trump must decide is whether he needs to worry about potential Republican defections in choosing a running mate or is instead more motivated by a determination to avoid the “disloyalty” Pence eventually displayed on January 6, 2021. And Democrats contemplating either a replacement of their entire 2024 ticket as a likely loser or just the selection of a new VP less likely to cause worries about a possible presidential disability or death need to assess the potential backlash to making Harris the first sitting vice-president in three-quarters of a century (since Henry Wallace) to get the heave-ho. (Yes, technically speaking, Gerald Ford booted Nelson Rockefeller from the 1976 ticket to placate conservatives, but it was theoretically a voluntary retirement and neither of these men was elected by voters in the first place.)

For non-major-party campaigns, like RFK Jr.’s or the putative No Labels effort, the veep selection could be more significant simply by giving a clearer definition to a fuzzy presidential candidacy.

In general, though, there’s a reason presidential candidates tend to play it safe with their running-mate selections: It usually doesn’t matter much unless it draws more attention than people aiming to become the “leader of the free world” typically want. John McCain’s “high risk, high reward” choice of an obscure first-term Alaska governor named Sarah Palin in 2008 is an eternal warning to would-be presidents that you don’t want a veep voters notice because she’s being regularly lampooned on Saturday Night Live.

One phase of the 2024 presidential campaign came to an end while another very long one began, as I noted at New York:

Without a great deal of fanfare, Joe Biden and Donald Trump each clinched their parties’ presidential nominations in the March 12 caucuses and primaries. This sets up what is officially the longest general-election campaign ever, a 238-day marathon (2000 and 2004 were a day shorter) that will seem even longer because it’s a rematch between two universally known presidents.

Biden and Trump became “putative” nominees a week earlier when their last intraparty opponents, Dean Phillips and Nikki Haley, respectively, dropped out of contention. At this point, they are “presumptive” nominees pending the formal designation made at their national conventions (July 15-18 in Milwaukee for Republicans, August 19-22 in Chicago for Democrats). Biden has won 2,107 of the 2,130 Democratic delegates allocated so far (1,968 were needed for the nomination) with “uncommitted” running second with 20. Trump has won 1,241 of the 1,347 Republican delegates allocated to date (1,215 were needed for the nomination) with Nikki Haley second at 94.

The final day of the two nominating contests was a bit short on drama. Hawaii’s Democrats gave seven of 22 delegates to “uncommitted” after 29 percent of caucusgoers opted to make that gesture aimed at pushing Biden to support a permanent cease-fire in Gaza. But in Washington state, where a stronger protest vote had been expected, only 7.5 percent of primary voters went “uncommitted” (with 79 percent of ballots counted) and Biden was winning all 92 delegates at stake.

Former candidate Haley managed double-digit showings in two March 12 primaries in Georgia (13 percent) and Washington (22 percent), though keep in mind that both states allowed Democrats and independents to participate in the GOP contest and many of the votes were cast early, before Haley suspended her candidacy.

Because there have been rumblings in both parties about a hypothetical convention revolt against the presumptive nominee (Biden owing to electability jitters and Trump due to his legal problems), it’s worth noting that Trump’s delegates are “bound” to him by party rules (and can be liberated only by a candidate withdrawal or a two-thirds convention vote), while Biden’s are his strictly as a matter of moral obligation. Both conventions will, however, be totally wired by the campaigns of the two nominees. By the time these summer coronations roll around, Biden and Trump will be two of the most thoroughly known quantities in American political history.

Since J.P. Green covered the SOTU Address and response, I’ll end the week with a report on the potentially significant maneuverings of the No Labels organization, which I wrote up at New York:

The nonpartisan group No Labels has announced a decision by a group of “delegates” from around the country to move forward with a 2024 presidential ticket, despite having no discernible candidates lined up.

Former Dallas mayor Mike Rawlings, the chairman of the virtual convention that made this decision on Friday, put out a statement saying: “They voted near unanimously to continue our 2024 project and to move immediately to identify candidates to serve on the Unity presidential ticket.” At some point in the next couple of months, assuming the group can identify qualified candidates to fill out the “unity ticket,” it is expected to reconvene the delegates for an up-or-down vote that will conclude the deliberative process. Says Rawlings: “Now that No Labels has received the go-ahead from our delegates, we’ll be accelerating our candidate outreach and announcing the process for how candidates will be selected for the Unity Ticket on Thursday, March 14.”

The political logic of this two-step process is pretty simple: The idea of a bipartisan “third option” has always been more popular than any actual ticket. A poll from Monmouth last summer showed support for such a ticket dropping by half when specific candidates (in that case, West Virginia senator Joe Manchin and former Utah governor Jon Huntsman, both No Labels leaders) were identified. And just this week, Third Way, a centrist Democratic group that has been relentlessly warning that No Labels may pave the way to a second Trump administration, released new polling with the same bottom line:

“Only a third of the electorate would even entertain voting for an unnamed No Labels ticket. (Again, we tested this before we named Haley.) That recedes quickly when details are added …

“When we asked about a third-party ticket led by Nikki Haley, we found it to be non-competitive. Indeed, it performs worse than an unnamed moderate, independent ticket:

“Nikki Haley has 80% name ID and boosts a better net approval rating than either Biden or Trump. Despite her strengths, a No Labels ticket with Haley as the nominee gets just 9% of the vote, losing badly to Trump and Biden and trailing even RFK Jr. (13%). Thus, a No Labels ticket led by one of the most well-known and respected GOP leaders available is more likely to finish fourth than win a single electoral vote.”

Nikki Haley, of course, spent a good part of her last week as an active presidential candidate disclaiming any interest in a No Labels candidacy, reminding everyone that she is a lifelong “conservative Republican” who would never consider running on a ticket with any kind of Democrat. But if her name isn’t capable of mobilizing support for a unity ticket, whose would? No one comes to mind.

The presidential general election has just entered a new phase, with Joe Biden and Donald Trump dispatching their final opponents on Super Tuesday and the incumbent throwing down the gauntlet in a State of the Union Address that seemed to galvanize Democrats. This contest is too volatile to tell exactly how a future No Labels ticket would affect the outcome, though Third Way and other Democrats will continue to warn of its perils. For now, it does make sense for No Labels to make every effort to show support for a no-name presidential ticket before taking the final plunge, even if it knows an identified ticket is likely to lose altitude once the blanks have been filled in.

At the moment, No Labels has ballot access in 16 states: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, North Carolina, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Utah. ABC News reports the group believes it is still on a trajectory to secure a spot on the ballot in 33 states ultimately. It’s a high-stakes, dangerous game No Labels is playing, and there remains a chance it will flip the board at the crucial moment and back off the unity-ticket plans. Everyone connected to No Labels claims to be revolted by the idea of playing spoiler, and most say they’re particularly horrified by the idea of Trump as the 47th president. But the lack of empirical data that their “third option” would actually work with real candidates is a problem these self-styled “problem-solvers” need to address definitively very soon.

Again, I don’t regularly share posts here that are strictly about Republicans, but it’s important that Democrats don’t share Nikki Haley’s misconceptions about the GOP, which I addressed at New York:

After being trounced by Donald Trump on Super Tuesday, Nikki Haley announced on Wednesday morning that she is suspending her presidential campaign. Haley outperformed low expectations in the 2024 race. Initially, she didn’t stand out in a crowded field of candidates who hoped Trump would self-destruct or that Republicans would return to the old-school conservatism of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. But as other candidates (notably Ron DeSantis and her fellow South Carolinian Tim Scott) flailed around in Iowa trying to resurrect archaic strategies for winning the nomination, Haley timed her brief moment in the spotlight well. She survived a demolition derby among non-Trump candidates via strong debate performances and an increasingly explicit appeal to Republicans who cherished their party’s past and dreaded its MAGA future.

But Haley never resolved her perpetually ambiguous attitude toward her vanquisher, promising to support him in the general election even if he’s a convicted felon yet criticizing him in increasingly sharp and personal terms as her own campaign lost steam. The ambiguity continued in her announcement of that campaign’s end; she refused to “endorse” Trump right now but pointedly observed that she has always backed her party’s nominees. Her demand that Trump “earn” the votes of her supporters doesn’t make much sense; half of them are Biden supporters, and the other half want Trump to become somebody else….

So despite her habit of congratulating herself regularly for the courage she has exhibited in promoting her own career, Haley is ending her campaign in a state of strange irresolution. She might have made her peace with Trump earlier and climbed aboard his bandwagon, perhaps even becoming his running mate and heir apparent. Conversely, she seemed to have the money to continue losing to Trump in post–Super Tuesday primaries, for a while at least. And she definitely could have made a very big splash by offering to head up a unity ticket sponsored by the nonpartisan No Labels organization, which may be deciding this very week whether to run a candidate for president. Instead, she’s just going away, surely leaving some of her backers wondering what Haley 2024 was all about.

Perhaps, as David Freedlander’s recent foray into Nikki-land for New York suggests, Haley shares the delusion of some of her core supporters that her campaign represents a righteous remnant of Goldwater-Reagan conservatives who will recapture the Republican Party when the temporary madness of the MAGA movement melts away. It’s often forgotten that Haley originally emerged from the right-wing DeMint-Sanford wing of the South Carolina Republican Party and won her first gubernatorial race as the protégé of Sarah Palin. As she insisted in slapping aside overtures from No Labels, she’s always viewed herself as a “conservative Republican,” not any sort of moderate. And in her brief announcement ending her campaign, she gave shout-outs to the drab agenda of fiscal discipline, term limits, and national-security hawkishness that characterized the conservative movement before Trump came along and blew up “entitlement reform” and “forever wars” as the unpopular causes they undoubtedly are.

Nikki Haley would be well advised to adjust to the evolution of her party or to leave it. Instead, she is suspending her political career along with her campaign, and it’s anybody’s guess if she knows where she is going next.

Congress is narrowly avoiding a government shutdown for the moment, but the bigger news this week is elsewhere, as I explained at New York:

Not even Mitch McConnell is eternal. He has decided to avoid further concerns over his fragile health and his fraught relationship with party boss Donald Trump by stepping down as Republican Senate leader in November. McConnell announced the news in a Wednesday-afternoon speech on the Senate floor.

McConnell has been in that position since 2006, the longest tenure of any Senate leader from either party. But unlike his former House counterpart Kevin McCarthy, McConnell isn’t quitting his job altogether the moment he’s no longer top dog. As he told the Senate, he plans to finish his current term, which runs until the end of 2026, “albeit from a different seat in the chamber.”

The timing makes sense. This hasn’t been a very enjoyable congressional session for McConnell, who cherishes his reputation as a master deal-maker like his Kentucky idol, Henry Clay. His extended effort to put together a bipartisan and bicameral foreign-aid and border-security package failed almost entirely (though it’s possible some of its component parts can yet be resuscitated). He is in the process of negotiating a humiliating endorsement of Trump, whom he denounced in no uncertain terms for the then-president’s misconduct of January 6. In return, the former president has let it be known he’s not sure he could work with McConnell if both are in power in 2025. A coup to take down the man Trump has often called an “old broken-down crow” could have been in the offing just down the road, particularly if the 82-year-old senator’s recent health problems were to recur.

You would have to assume McConnell will have some influence over the identity of his successor. The most likely aspirants for the job are the senators known as the “three Johns”: John Cornyn of Texas, John Thune of South Dakota, and John Barrasso of Wyoming. Cornyn — who on Thursday confirmed he is already campaigning for the job — was McConnell’s whip from 2012 to 2018, until he was term-limited out of that position and replaced by Thune, who has also announced he is considering a campaign to become leader. Barrasso is currently the third-ranking Senate Republican as chairman of the party conference. Cornyn is 72, Barrasso is 71, and Thune is a relatively youthful 63. All of these men have been loyal McConnell sidekicks while maintaining better relations with the party’s MAGA wing than has their chief. All three of the Johns have already endorsed Trump’s presidential candidacy, though Barrasso is viewed as closer to the 45th president.

It’s possible that MAGA senators could offer their own candidate as leader. Rick Scott unsuccessfully challenged McConnell in November 2022 after advocating an extremist policy agenda that annoyed other Republicans significantly. Scott could try again, but he’s likely preoccupied with securing his own reelection this fall. Trump could intervene to promote a loyalist, but even in this MAGA era of the GOP, senators have a puffed-up self-regard that limits too much open subservience to others. By the time Republicans finally choose a McConnell successor, they’ll know whether they have a majority in the chamber, and barring another contested presidential election, they’ll also know whether their party enjoys a governing trifecta that would enormously expand their power.

Mitch McConnell was a powermonger of the highest order. But whatever happens in November, his own powers had become too faint to satisfy himself or his fellow Republicans.

There was some planned overreaction to the Michigan Democratic presidential primary on February 27 that I tried to address at New York:

It’s rare that someone winning a primary with around 80 percent of the vote has to be on the defensive. But that’s where Joe Biden is after a smashing victory in Michigan marred by an organized effort to protest his Middle East policies via “uncommitted” votes.

Organizers of anti-Biden protests in Michigan wanted to show that his largely unconditional support for Israel in its war with Hamas might alienate enough voters (especially the state’s large Arab-American population) to cost him the election in November. So they urged a vote for “uncommitted” in the February 27 primary. And they were really smart to set expectations low, as Politico Playbook explained:

“We’re told that phone bankers for the Listen to Michigan campaign contacted some 100,000 voters, but their big takeaway was that most said they were simply going to stay home. Some backers of the protest campaign have publicly set a goal of 10,000 uncommitted votes, but that is a low bar: In 2020, without any organized effort, there were over 19,000.”

From a percentage point of view, the “uncommitted” vote in Democratic presidential primaries in Michigan peaked at 10.7 percent when Barack Obama was running for reelection in 2012. It was only slightly higher this time around: “Uncommitted” took 13 percent of the vote, with 95 percent of the vote tallied. And it has been predictably strong in pockets of strong support for a permanent cease-fire in Gaza and a break in unconditional U.S. support for Israel. “Uncommitted” is winning heavily in Dearborn, where Arab American Muslims are a majority of the population, and it’s doing relatively well in Washtenaw County, where the University of Michigan is located.

Still, Biden trounced “uncommitted” — not to mention actual named opponents Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson — handily. If you translate the “uncommitted” vote into support for Biden’s general-election opponents (either Donald Trump or the multiple non-major-party candidates likely to appear on the ballot), these results are ominous. That’s exactly what “uncommitted” organizers hoped would be the case in order to influence the administration’s policies toward Israel and Gaza or punish Biden for his recalcitrance.

Biden’s reelection campaign is a vast gamble on the power of comparisons between the incumbent and Trump, even among voters unhappy with Uncle Joe’s record or current trajectory. Losing less than one in every five votes in a Democratic primary may become a data point for the general-election campaign in Michigan, and even a reminder to Team Biden that it cannot take Black, youth, Arab-American, or Muslim-American votes for granted. It sent a message to the president’s campaign, but it’s not quite the crack of doom you may hear suggested by Biden-haters in and beyond both parties.