Now and then it’s useful to take a cold, hard look at some of Team Trump’s constant wild assertions and baldfaced lies and deconstruct them. At New York, I did this with his and his campaign manager’s attacks on polling:

As part of his general effort to undermine confidence in any sort of information that suggests he is not the most brilliantly successful leader in recorded history, President Trump famously disparages public opinion research that tells him things he doesn’t want to hear. Polls (with the exception of those from Rasmussen Reports, which systematically produces pro-Republican, pro-Trump findings) are for him a species of Fake News, and the product of the Fake Media that often sponsors them. He is willing, in fact, to elevate all sorts of phony-baloney pseudo-research above professional polling, or simply misrepresent findings, as Philip Bump noted earlier this week:

“Tuesday morning dawned, and President Trump decided, for some reason, to re-litigate the 2016 presidential debates.

“’As most people are aware, according to the Polls, I won EVERY debate, including the three with Crooked Hillary Clinton,’ Trump said on Twitter …

“Trump insists, here in the year of our Lord 2019, that he won all three debates ‘according to the Polls.’ According to the Polls, Trump lost all three debates, by varying margins….

“The ‘polls’ to which Trump is referring are probably the same ones he cited after losing that first debate (which, remember, was in part a function of his faulty mic except also he won the debate). At the time, Trump pointed to useless online surveys like the one typically hosted at the Drudge Report or to little surveys posted on local news sites.”

When Trump can’t find the numbers he craves, from whatever shady source, he makes them up:

“In an interview with Fox News’s Tucker Carlson that aired on Monday night, Trump also claimed that approval polls showed him excelling — or at least they would if polls were fair.

“’A poll just came out today I’m at 54 or 55, and they do say you can add 10 to whatever poll I have, okay?’ Trump told Carlson.”

Actually, in the vast collection of approval rating polls compiled by RealClearPolitics — a site with strongly conservative ownership, by the way — Trump has never during his presidency achieved an approval rating as high as “54 or 55,” even from Rasmussen. And Trump’s “they do say you can add 10 to whatever poll I have” claim is a complete mystery. “They” in that assertion might as well be “I.”

All across the landscape of MAGA-land, of course, it’s considered axiomatic that adverse polls are “fake” or biased because they all missed the 2016 presidential results. Brad Parscale, Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, recently waxed adamant on the subject, declaring “[i]t was 100 percent wrong. Nobody got it right — not one public poll.”

Now technically speaking no poll — or prediction, or tarot-card prophecy — is going to get an election totally right, so it’s a matter of degree. Again using RCP averages, late 2016 general-election polls had Clinton leading Trump by 3.3 percent in the popular vote. She actually won by 2.1 percent. As Nate Silver pointed out in an exhaustive postmortem, the national polls did just fine, and the sparse state polling wasn’t all that far off either:

“Trump outperformed his national polls by only 1 to 2 percentage points in losing the popular vote to Clinton, making them slightly closer to the mark than they were in 2012. Meanwhile, he beat his polls by only 2 to 3 percentage points in the average swing state. Certainly, there were individual pollsters that had some explaining to do, especially in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where Trump beat his polls by a larger amount. But the result was not some sort of massive outlier; on the contrary, the polls were pretty much as accurate as they’d been, on average, since 1968.”

Predictions of who would win in 2016 based on polls, history, various models, and coverage of the campaigns tended to be wrong for a lot of reasons, but the simplest was that Trump drew an improbable inside straight in losing the national popular vote by 2,868,000 votes and then winning every close state other than New Hampshire — notably winning Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin by a combined 77,000 votes. Nobody predicted that because nobody could have predicted that. As veteran pollster and poll analyst Mark Blumenthal told me in a phone conversation this week: “Skepticism about the use of polls to forecast elections is warranted, particularly when it comes to state-by-state data that’s harder to come by. But that says little or nothing about the fundamental quality of polls.” And it’s no reason for calling them “fake” or “biased.”

The closest Team Trump has come to making anything like a substantive case about polling quality was in a dismissive mid-June remark from Brad Parscale to CBS News:

“’The country is too complex now just to call a couple hundred people and ask them what they think. There are so many ways and different people that are going to show up to vote now,’ Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign chief, told CBS News in an interview taped Tuesday.

“’And the reason why is it’s not 1962 anymore. It’s not a place where there’s only a few ways and decisions and every[one] lines up to vote like a good old American. Now there’s a lot of distractions from going to vote. The world’s changed.’”

Now this may have just been an impromptu word salad motivated by the need to spin the Trump campaign’s decision to fire three pollsters who had allegedly leaked data showing Trump doing badly against Joe Biden in a large number of battleground states. Parscale was also highly motivated to wave away an especially deadly general-election poll from Quinnipiacshowing Trump doing poorly in Florida, the state where he was about to hold his formal reelection launch rally. “None of these polls mean anything,” Parscale added. “It’s the biggest joke in politics. It’s the fakest thing. It’s the fakest thing.” Makes you wonder why his campaign kept two pollsters on the payroll while firing the leakers.

Giving Parscale the maximum benefit of the doubt, maybe he’s suggesting that polls miss the social media magic he supposedly deployed in 2016. He hinted at this in his remarks to CBS:

“The way turnout now works and the abilities that we have to turn out voters, the polling can’t understand that, and that’s why it was so wrong in 2016.”

Putting aside the fact — not the possibility, but the demonstrable fact — that the polling was not so wrong in 2016, is there something about turnout methods today that polling can’t capture? Has Parscale developed the dark arts of voter mobilization in a manner that eludes detection until the deed is done?

That’s extremely implausible. Yes, pollsters constantly struggle to estimate turnout; it’s the single hardest thing to do, though it’s harder in low-turnout midterms than in (relatively) high-turnout presidential elections. But if anything, they seem to be getting better at it, via a combination of objective data about established voting proclivities (via official voter files that campaigns have used for years, and that pollsters are increasingly using, too) and subjective data on voters’ enthusiasm for participation. Best we can tell, variable turnout patterns were not, in fact, crucial to Trump’s 2016 win, as the New York Times’ Nate Cohn noted after a good look at the final numbers:

“[T]urnout improved Mr. Trump’s standing by a modest margin compared with pre-election expectations. If the turnout had gone exactly as we thought it would, the election would have been extremely close. But by this measure, Mrs. Clinton still would have lost both Florida and Pennsylvania — albeit very narrowly.”

Could Parscale know something we don’t know about 2020 turnout? That’s not likely either. If there was any mistake about turnout patterns made by election analysts going into 2016, it was probably assuming they would closely resemble those of 2008 and 2012, in which African-American voting participation was elevated by Obama’s candidacy and presidency. Now nobody’s assuming black turnout will be higher in 2020 than in 2016, and all indications are that voter enthusiasm will be high among both party bases. If anything, the arrows are pointing in the direction of a Democratic turnout advantage for the simple reason that anti-Trump voters are not about to assume he’s toast, no matter what the polls and pundits are saying, given the 2016 shocker.

All in all, it’s likely that Parscale is emulating the signature Trump campaign knack for pure BS in pretending polls that don’t show the president cruising to total victory in all states are a “joke.” Or worse yet, he’s scamming the master scam artist himself and justifying his exalted role in Trump 2020 by depicting himself as a turnout sorcerer whom mere mortals — including the president — cannot comprehend. Either way, he’s literally incredible.

It’s true that it sometimes seems like many years since Donald Trump was elected president. But his 2016 campaign shouldn’t be that hard to remember, as I observed this week at New York:

The conventional wisdom about Donald Trump is that he took a steadily growing extremist strain in the Republican Party, put it into hyperdrive, and won the presidency by polarizing the country to an unprecedented extent, boosting right-wing turnout and by various means suppressing Democratic turnout. In a classic contrarian take, Vox’s Matt Yglesias suggests that CW is based on selective memory and post-ex-facto reinterpretations based on the kind of president Trump has become, because many people who voted for him in 2016 perceived him as “moderate.”

“[I]t’s not true that Trump ran and won as an ideological extremist. He paired extremely offensive rhetoric on racial issues with positioning on key economic policy topics that led him to be perceived by the electorate as a whole as the most moderate GOP nominee in generations. His campaign was almost paint-by-numbers pragmatic moderation. He ditched a couple of unpopular GOP positions that were much cherished by party elites, like cutting Medicare benefits, delivered victory, and is beloved by the rank and file for it.”

Yglesias cites Pew data from the summer of 2016 to make the point that Trump was perceived by voters as more moderate than Hillary Clinton, and Gallup data to show that Trump was perceived as more moderate than past Republican nominees Mitt Romney, John McCain, or either Bush. Yes, Trump also ran on crude racial and cultural appeals that more conventionally conservative Republicans tend to deploy more subtly. But that enables him to appeal to a relatively small but crucial subset of Democrats who are moderate to liberal on economic and fiscal issues while being conservative on matters of culture and racial resentment:

“Had Trump ran on a conventional Republican platform of cutting Social Security and Medicare, Democrats would have hammered him for it — just as they hammered Bush and McCain and Romney — and won the votes of many older non-college whites who are racist enough to like Trump but sufficiently non-racist to have voted for Democrats in the past.”

Yglesias goes on to use this 2016 reminder to push back against the common assumption that Trump’s example shows Democrats that the old moderation-wins tenets of political science are outdated. Indeed, he revisits the academic support for the proposition that all other things being equal, being perceived as a moderate significantly enhances the prospects for victory. And then he makes a familiar if pointed observation about the left-leaning direction of the 2020 Democratic primaries:

“Win or lose the election, there’s just no way Democrats are going to be able to implement the Section 1325 repeal many of them promised at last week’s debate. But if they lose the election over charges of being soft on border enforcement, then they can’t do anything at all for Dreamers, for humane treatment of asylum seekers, or for a path to citizenship for the long-settled undocumented population. Taking an unpopular stand or two in pursuit of progress is fine.

“But extremism, like anything else, is best in moderation and ought to be saved for moments where the stakes are really high. Trump’s success in politics, meanwhile, confirms rather than debunks the basic political value of trying to take popular positions on the issues.”

The 2020 Democratic nominee, however, is not going to be running against the 2016 version of Donald Trump. Yglesias acknowledges that Trump the president has been far more satisfying to the right wing of his party than Trump the candidate, but doesn’t quite factor that into his prescription for Democrats. And it’s hardly incidental to any sound analysis of 2020, if only because Trump’s strategy for reelection is focused on base mobilization to an extraordinary extent. As my colleague Jonathan Chait pointed out last year, Trump has consolidated his Republican support in no small part by abandoning many of the policy positions that made him look moderate to voters in 2016:

“In office, he has instead governed as an orthodox right-winger. This explains why Trump has lost so much of his nonconservative support. But it also helps explain the Republican Party’s willingness to defend him. Instead of keeping his popular promises that helped get him elected, Trump instead adopted the unpopular stances of the conservative movement, which has in turn embraced him.”

The odds are very high that Trump will not be perceived as a “moderate” by voters after the kind of savage campaign he is almost certainly going to run, which should help the Democratic nominee appear more “moderate” by comparison. Alternatively, after months and months of Republican efforts to brand the Democratic candidate as a “socialist,” there may be no candidate “moderate” enough to overcome the imputed red hue.

All in all, Democrats would be well advised to stop worrying about ideological labels and focus on selecting a candidate who (a) looks strong against Trump in actual, empirical terms, and (b) would likely give them the greatest policy bang for the buck as president.

Reading about Trump’s reelection strategy earlier this week, a fairly obvious problem with it came to mind, which I then wrote about at New York:

A lot of the analysis of the first round of Democratic presidential debates last week focused on the possible fodder the candidates and the subjects they debated might offer to the sinister general election opponent awaiting the eventual nominee in 2020. Here’s Larry Sabato and Kyle Kondik, after observing some of the more controversial positions many of the debaters embraced:

“The next election may be similar to the last couple of elections featuring incumbent presidents: 2004 and 2012. The incumbents those years, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, wanted the election to be a choice between them or their challengers; the challengers, John Kerry and Mitt Romney, respectively, wanted the election to be a referendum on the incumbent. Bush and Obama found enough cracks in their opponents that they avoided the kind of straight referendum that could have doomed either. Trump is clearly trying to make this election a choice, too; if it’s a referendum on him, he probably won’t win, given his middling approval ratings. It may be that the policies some of the Democrats support give Trump weapons to use as he tries to present the election as a choice.”

And here’s Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter:

“In a post-debate panel I moderated here at the Aspen Ideas Festival, North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp made the case that to win re-election, Trump needs to make 2020 a choice election, not a referendum. And, every Democrat gave him the opening for making that contrast. He will attack the eventual nominee as weak on border security, in favor of giving away ‘free’ stuff to people here illegally. Additionally, in the case of Sen. Sanders, Warren, and Harris, supportive of taking away American’s ability to carry private insurance.

“Going forward, it will be important to watch how the Democrats answer the attacks and defend their positions. And to see how effectively Republicans will be at getting these attacks to stick. Can Republicans set the narrative about Democrats before the eventual nominee is able to do that him/herself?”

This all makes good sense. But then again, we all understand that Donald J. Trump is not a president like either of the immediate predecessors that Sabato and Kondik cited. Whatever else you think of them, Bush and Obama were (1) men with egos reasonably well under control, all things considered, and (2) politicians used to following the consensus opinions of their advisers. Trump would probably score near the bottom of U.S. presidents and perhaps U.S. human beings in these and other indicators of modesty.

It may be that Trump won the presidency in 2016, in large part, by making Hillary Clinton more unpopular than he was. But aside from the fact that he actually lost the popular vote, circumstances were very different: He wasn’t the president of the United States or the leader of the party of the president of the United States. Any negative referendum effect helped rather than hurt him; he won’t have the same presumption of not being the problem in 2020, particularly after years of daily public exposure to his depressing and tedious act. Perhaps a Joe Biden or a Bernie Sanders might have enough accumulated baggage to be included in the same discussion as Hillary Clinton in terms of unique vulnerability to demonization. But HRC was really set up as a punching bag by decades of incessant conservative and media contempt, and billions of dollars of investments in making her a figure rivaling Trump himself in unpopularity. And the odds are probably about even that someone other than these familiar political warhorses will win the Democratic nomination anyway.

For better and (mostly) worse, we are living in the Trump era, a period in which political life is dominated by one very strange and offensive man (even his fans love him for his offensiveness, precisely because of the effect he has on their own enemies) who probably can’t take the spotlight off himself even if he wanted to, which he manifestly does not.

There’s been more talk than usual among 2020 Democratic presidential candidates about their “theory of change”–how they will implement their proposals. But there’s still a hole in the discussion, which I discussed at New York after the first night of candidate debates:

Like a lot of political obsessives, I came up with my own question I wanted to hear posed to the Democratic candidates debating on Wednesday and Thursday nights:

“One highly relevant question the 20 Democratic presidential candidates who are debating this week might be offered is this: Do you have a plan B for the agenda you will pursue if Republicans retain control of the Senate?”

Well, on the first debate night, to my shock, two moderators went there. First, Rachel Maddow asked Cory Booker this question:

“Senator Mitch McConnell says that his most consequential achievement as Senate majority leader was preventing President Obama from filling a Supreme Court seat. Having served with Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, do you believe they would confirm your court nominees?”

Booker hemmed and hawed and then said he was confident Democrats would win the Senate in 2020 (not a strong bet, actually), an assertion that Julián Castro had made earlier. Asked the same question by Maddow, Bill de Blasio was slightly more responsive:

“[T]here is a political solution that we have to come to grips with. If the Democratic Party would stop acting like the party of the elites and be the party of working people again, and go into states, including red states, to convince people we’re on their side, we can put pressure on their senators to actually have to vote for the nominees that are put forward.”

This suggests some sort of political transformation that is very unlikely in the wake of what is sure to be a bitter, closely fought election. It’s precisely the sort of argument Barack Obama made in 2008 about how he’d overcome Republican obstruction, and he struggled against McConnell even with an initial supermajority in the Senate.

Then Chuck Todd asked Elizabeth Warren a more direct and general question:

“It’s very plausible that you’ll be elected president with a Republican Senate. Do you have a plan to deal with Mitch McConnell?”

Warren responded instantly: “I do.” But she really didn’t.

This often practical-minded senator, who by my account was the overall debate winner, gave it a good try, saying she’d call on her supporters to stay engaged and never stop fighting. The saturnine Mr. McConnell could not possibly care less….

Todd tried asking John Delaney about dealing with McConnell, and as usual he talked about bipartisanship, but didn’t have any insights for winning Republican votes in the Senate beyond calling for “ideas that work.” Todd went back to Booker, who managed to come up with the unicorn of an underwhelming bipartisan criminal-justice-reform bill in 2018 as though it offered some sort of template. Criminal-justice reform, of course, is a cause that developed a grassroots conservative constituency over a long period of time. If there’s some similar area where both parties are already poised to come together, I don’t know where it is.

Now the truth is, there are no easy answers to Maddow’s and Todd’s questions about McConnell. But there are plausible approaches: (1) You can aim at picking off one or two Republicans with the kind of public pressure that Warren (and Sanders and de Blasio) like to talk about, and hope for the best, following the example that saved the Affordable Care Act in 2017 when Republicans could not hold their own conference in line; (2) you can focus on executive actions — Amy Klobuchar should have busted into the discussion of a Republican Senate and drawn attention to her vast agenda of executive orders and agency policies she has already promised to implement during her first 100 days in office; or (3) you can promise to lead a holy crusade to retake the Senate in 2022 if Republicans obstruct the new president’s agenda and maybe build a durable Democratic governing majority.

But just promising to fight is not going to strike fear into Mitch McConnell’s dark, hardened heart. The candidates ought to think more deeply about this problem, because it could be more important than anything else the winner encounters.

During the last week of the Supreme Court’s 2018-19 term, the Court’s conservative majority committed an act of injustice that will definitely make life harder for Democrats and for voters, as I explained at New York:

For a while, the possibility that the U.S. Supreme Court would find partisan gerrymandering to be unconstitutional rested in the hands of Anthony Kennedy, a swing justice who seemed offended by the practice but could never quite find a method he liked to measure or remedy it. With his retirement last year, Court watchers figured the odds of the justices doing something about it had dropped significantly. Today they dropped to zero, as NPR’s Nina Totenberg succinctly explained:

“Prior to Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court, Justice Anthony Kennedy was the swing vote on this issue. He seemed open to limiting partisan redistricting if the Court was presented with a “manageable standard.” But with Kavanaugh on the Court, the search for that standard is over.”

Writing for the new 5-4 conservative majority on the Court in two combined cases (Ruccho v. Common Cause and Lamone v. Benisek), Chief Justice John Roberts argued that partisan gerrymandering, while offensive to traditional notions of democracy, was a “political issue” best left in the hands of political branches of the federal and state governments.

“Federal judges have no license to reallocate political power between the two major political parties, with no plausible grant of authority in the Constitution, and no legal standards to limit and direct their decisions.”

There wasn’t much doubt in the cases before the Court that Republican legislators in North Carolina and their Democratic counterparts in Maryland had drawn district lines purely and simply to maximize partisan outcomes. In North Carolina, in particular, GOP legislators openly spoke of their plans to screw over Democrats in congressional redistricting, in part to rebut (or perhaps simply disguise) racially invidious motives that would invite judicial intervention. And as Justice Elena Kagan emphasized in a scathing dissent joined by the Court’s other liberals (Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor), the majority admitted partisan gerrymandering was a travesty:

“[T]he majority concedes (really, how could it not?) that gerrymandering is ‘incompatible with democratic principles.’ Ante, at 30 (quoting Arizona State Legislature, 576 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 1)). And therefore what? That recognition would seem to demand a response. The majority offers two ideas that might qualify as such. One is that the political process can deal with the problem … The other is that political gerrymanders have always been with us.”

Indeed, Roberts suggested federal and state legislatures could police partisan gerrymandering more effectively than could federal courts, but Kagan put her finger on the emotional core of the conservatives’ argument: Political gerrymanders have always been with us. But the circumstances have entirely changed, she observed:

“Yes, partisan gerrymandering goes back to the Republic’s earliest days. (As does vociferous opposition to it.) But big data and modern technology — of just the kind that the mapmakers in North Carolina and Maryland used — make today’s gerrymandering altogether different from the crude linedrawing of the past. Old-time efforts, based on little more than guesses, sometimes led to so-called dummymanders — gerrymanders that went spectacularly wrong. Not likely in today’s world. Mapmakers now have access to more granular data about party preference and voting behavior than ever before. County-level voting data has given way to precinct-level or city-block-level data; and increasingly, mapmakers avail themselves of data sets providing wide ranging information about even individual voters.”

In view of the majority’s hard-line opposition to getting into the subject, the growing sophistication of partisan gerrymandering, and with it the ever-more-severe practical disenfranchisement it enables, isn’t going to matter any more in the future than it does right now. So what this decision does as a practical matter — beyond launching celebrations among the Republican lawmakers and lawbreakers who control a majority of the country’s state legislatures — is direct concern over gerrymandering into different channels.

The silver lining of the Supreme Court’s retreat from interest in partisan gerrymandering is that it has led the Court to defer to recent efforts to attack the practice on state constitutional grounds. That’s what happened last year when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down a GOP-drafted congressional map and substituted its own: As Republicans everywhere howled, the U.S. Supreme Court shrugged and refused to review the case. Today’s decision obviously leaves open the avenue of state redistricting reforms (whether undertaken by legislatures or ballot initiative) that drastically limit politically motivated discretion in redistricting procedures. But the timing is inauspicious for slowly building momentum for redistricting reform with the decennial Census and the next round of map-drawing just around the corner.

No matter what happens at the state level (or in Congress, which could theoretically limited partisan gerrymandering in federal elections), the decision is deeply dissatisfying to anyone who believes justice should be the overriding motive of the Supreme Court in cases touching on the most fundamental rights. And that was the real travesty of Robert’s decision, as Kagan rightly pointed out:

“For the first time ever, this Court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because it thinks the task beyond judicial capabilities.

“And not just any constitutional violation. The partisan gerrymanders in these cases deprived citizens of the most fundamental of their constitutional rights: the rights to participate equally in the political process, to join with others to advance political beliefs, and to choose their political representatives. In so doing, the partisan gerrymanders here debased and dishonored our democracy, turning upside-down the core American idea that all governmental power derives from the people.”

Anthony Kennedy should be ashamed of himself for taking a pass on the opportunity to deal with this problem before heading off to retirement.

“Base versus Swing” has been an ancient strategic choice in politics, and it’s coming up again, as I discussed this week at New York.

In these days of intense partisan polarization, driven in no small part by an intensely polarizing president, it’s become commonplace to argue that the politics of persuasion don’t matter anymore, and that elections are won by “energizing” or “mobilizing” one’s own party base. And it’s true that with the number of swing voters dwindling, turnout strategies have become indispensable in any competitive election.

But there are limits to base-mobilization, as veteran political reporter Ron Brownstein notes in an observation on Trump’s incessant efforts to keep his troops in a hate frenzy:

“Trump’s unrelenting emphasis on stoking that base—both in his rhetoric and through his policies…[is] providing the fuel for Democrats to mobilize their own core constituencies, particularly young people and nonwhite voters.”

In other words, every vote you get by motivating core constituencies to turn out to vote via highly emotional messages is at least partly offset by the stimulus you provide for your opponent’s core constituencies. Meanwhile, even if there aren’t a lot of swing voters who are very likely to vote, every one you “flip” by persuasion gives you two net votes — one for you, one less for your opponent. Less than one versus two: It’s always worth the trouble to devote some attention to persuasion.

Brownstein goes on to discuss a second problem with Trump’s base-mobilization emphasis: it erodes the incentives for people who don’t much care for him nonetheless to pull the lever for him because they like his policies or their effects:

“Trump [is trying] to pump up his base by acting in exactly the manner that pushes away so many voters who are content with the economy but disenchanted with his behavior….

“[P]olling throughout Trump’s presidency has consistently shown that economic improvement hasn’t lifted him as much as earlier presidents. Across many of the key groups in the electorate, from young people to white college graduates, Trump’s job-approval rating consistently runs at least 25 points below the share of voters who hold positive views about either the national economy or their personal financial situation.

“The result is that Trump attracts much less support than his predecessors did—in terms of approval rating and potential support for reelection—among voters who say they are satisfied with the economy.”

Because — to put it mildly — rational persuasion isn’t the 45th president’s style, he will likely supplement his base-tending with savage attacks on his Democratic opponent aimed at making her or him equally unpleasant to swing voters. If 2016 was any guide, he’ll supplement this strategy with overt and covert efforts to suppress Democratic turnout (apparently a major focus of Trump’s social media strategy) by repeating intra-party Democratic complaints about the ultimate nominee. His Republican allies at the state level, of course, will seek to suppress Democratic turnout in more literal ways by planting mines along the path to the ballot box for young and minority voters.

Still, a “persuasion” prong of his strategy would improve Trump’s odds of victory. And Democrats, too, should keep in mind that a pure turnout battle could be perilous.

While this site is devoted to helping Democrats plot strategy, it’s important to recognize that on occasion the quality of opposition can make the toughest contests easier. As I noted at New York, that could definitely be happening again in Alabama:

To the great joy of Alabama Democrats and aficionados of strange politics everywhere, former Alabama Supreme Court chief justice Roy Moore announced today that he will again run for the U.S. Senate in 2020. It’s hardly anything new for the 72-year-old theocrat and alleged mall creeper. This will be his sixth run for statewide office in Alabama, counting two successful races for the state bench (though the first time he was removedfrom office, and the second time suspended, as he regularly defied federal court orders related to his theocratic views), two unsuccessful gubernatorial bids, and then his 2017 Senate race in the special election to choose a replacement for then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

In this last campaign, he managed to upset Donald Trump’s handpicked candidate in a primary and runoff, and then lost a shocker to Democrat Doug Jones, whom he now seeks to take on again. He is as ornery as ever, as the New York Times reports:

“His decision was an unsurprising act of overt defiance toward many of his party’s national leaders, including President Trump, who recently publicly warned him away from another Senate bid.

“Republican officials fear that Mr. Moore, were he to win the party’s nomination in March, risks their prospects of defeating the Democratic incumbent, Senator Doug Jones, and recapturing a seat they long controlled with ease …

“Before he made his announcement, Mr. Moore detailed his grievances against Republican officials in Washington, and he predicted that the campaign arm of Senate Republicans would run ‘a smear campaign’ against him.”

That’s hardly a paranoid statement, since Moore is broadly viewed as the Republican candidate most likely to help Jones to a full-term in this very red state. But Judge Roy is trying to turn that into a token of Christian martyrdom, as al.com reports:

“’Everyone in Alabama knows that last election in 2017 was fraudulent,’ Moore said. He added disinformation tactics will not be tolerated and will be punished. When asked if he believed the fraud came solely from Democrats, Moore said he thought there was also Republican collusion.”

It’s likely that at least some of the allegations of sexual misconduct that bedeviled him in 2017, which ranged from sexual assault to predatory behavior toward teenagers at the local mall, will return. But Moore is heartened by the ability of a certain Supreme Court Justice to overcome similar allegations, according to a recent fundraising missive:

“’It was no strange coincidence that only 10 months later these same false and scurrilous tactics would again be used in the midst of a very important Supreme Court nomination process of Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. Judge Kavanaugh would survive to be appointed to that high court.’”

In truth, Moore was considered an extreme and eccentric character even by Alabama’s tolerant standards — albeit one with a strong electoral base in the fever swamps of the Christian right — before the sexual allegations arose. The general feeling is that he made it to the general election against Jones in 2017 mostly because his major Trump-backed opponent, appointed incumbent Senator Luther Strange, was unusually weak, mostly because of suspicions of a corrupt deal with the disgraced governor, Robert Bentley, to get the job.

This time around, the Republican field facing Moore is less tainted, if not overpowering. The presumed GOP Establishment candidate is Congressman Bradley Byrne, who like everyone else in his party in the state, is a slavish Trump loyalist. Hard-core conservatives, including 2017 also-ran Congressman Mo Brooks, are backing state legislator Arnold Mooney. Former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville will begin the race with name ID nearly as high as Moore’s in this gridiron-mad state. And the latest hot rumor was begun this week by Jones’s Republican Senate colleague Richard Shelby, as the Washington Post reported:

“Former attorney general Jeff Sessions has not ruled out running next year for his old Senate seat from Alabama, the state’s senior senator said Wednesday, as Republicans braced for the expected entrance into the race of Roy Moore, their failed 2017 candidate.

“’Sessions, I don’t think, has ruled it out,’ Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) told reporters. ‘I’ve talked to him about it. I think if he ran, he would be a formidable candidate. Formidable. I’ve not encouraged him to run, but he’s a friend, and if he ran, I think he’d probably clear the field.'”

Sessions has declined to comment on the speculation so far, which will only encourage it. He may be trying to figure out what his old boss the president, who said so many hateful things about him after holding him responsible for the Mueller investigation, might say about a Sessions political comeback.

Even Sessions probably won’t intimidate Roy Moore into withdrawing, though. He’s very much on a mission from God, and it’s an angry, vengeful God he worships. Moore’s out for blood, and he doesn’t much care if it’s red or blue.

For Democrats who really need to hang onto this seat to improve their odds of taking back the Senate in 2020, this is good news indeed.

This week at New York I addressed a controversy that comes up every four years like clockwork:

One of the great quadrennial rituals of our presidential-nominating system is the descent of candidates on Iowa (e.g., the 19 who appeared in Cedar Rapids at this year’s Iowa Democratic Hall of Fame Dinner) at about this point in the cycle. Close behind it in predictability is the rise of complaints about Iowa’s First-in-the-Nation caucuses and their privileged status. This year it’s Michelle Cottle who has offered an exceptionally high-profile objection to the whole thing. Here’s a sample, though if you’ve read this sort of argument before, you can practically recite it without a script:

“Demographically speaking, the Iowa electorate looks about as much like the face of America as does the Senate Republican conference. Which says a lot.

“Iowa’s caucuses are mind-numbingly convoluted and anti-democratic, favoring the most motivated, well-organized few over the less-obsessive majority of Iowans. More fundamentally, granting one state — any state — a perennial lock on the pole position of presidential voting fosters a sense of entitlement resulting in a quadrennial parade of pandering that borders on the absurd. Ethanol subsidies? Seriously?”

To her credit, Cottle understands that we’ve been hearing such complaints for eons, saying: “Hating on the Iowa caucuses has become a cliché.” Some of the particulars of her indictment are a bit off, though. Yes, caucuses don’t enlist as much participation as government-sponsored primaries, but party-sponsored primaries don’t do much better. Who’s going to force the taxpayers of Iowa to pay for official presidential-nominating contests? Since Iowans are by and large very happy with the status quo, that ain’t happening.

Her dismissal of Iowa Democratic Party efforts (via a “virtual caucus”) to comply with new rules allowing for participation in the caucuses without physically attending them seems a bit churlish as well: It’s an entirely new and untested system, so it might be wise to let it operate at least once before denouncing it as a sham.

The idea that Iowa (alongside New Hampshire, site of the first primary) maintains a death grip on the nominating process by unrepresentative, too-white electorates is a bit outdated as well. Between the 2004 and 2008 cycles, both national parties agreed to move two other states, Nevada (holding caucuses) and South Carolina (with a primary) into the charmed circle of contests sanctioned to kick off the nominating process to provide geographic and racial-ethnic balance (Nevada has a sizable Latino population; South Carolina an even more sizable African-American population). This reform was also a good example of how Iowa has adapted to all the criticism over its preeminence by giving up a bit of power in order to create allies willing to help it defend the power it retains. If they had to, I have no doubt Iowa Republicans and Democrats would support allowing other states to go “early” — though not first — in order to hang onto that First-in-the-Nation designation.

Ultimately, though, Iowa’s primacy depends on the perpetual willingness of presidential candidates to reinforce it. Since the caucuses became major events in 1976, only one successful presidential nominee — Bill Clinton in 1992 — has skipped Iowa, and that was a unique case because Iowa’s own Tom Harkin was running, making the caucuses irrelevant that year. But just participating in the caucuses isn’t enough: Iowans expect prospective candidates to come early and often, and if possible, to spend money and time promoting their own local candidates and their own party infrastructure. And naturally, once candidates have invested in Iowa, they have every interest in recouping that investment instead of supporting some effort to remove the caucuses from their traditional role.

And so the current system, with occasional tweaks and even reforms, lurches along. Those like Cottle who crave a more rational system sometimes fail to comprehend that the nominating process requires action not just by the national party but by state parties and bipartisan state legislatures. She personally favors the idea of rotating regional primaries, an idea that’s been kicking around forever. Actually making that happen across state and party lines would be a gargantuan undertaking. At a minimum, it would require a big push from a powerful figure like, say, a very popular incumbent president with no fear of alienating people in the early states.

There are already gradual developments underway that further erode the old Iowa–New Hampshire duopoly, most notably early voting: On the very same day of the Iowa caucuses next year, by-mail voting for the immense California presidential primary will begin. In the end, though, somebody has to have the first official nominating-contest results, with whatever consequences that might have for winners and losers. Iowans figure it might as well be themselves going first. They have the experience.

I finally saw an opportunity to address a pet peeve of mine at New York this week, and took it:

Progressives should keep in mind that sometimes ideological or strategic differences of opinion among Democrats are just that, and do not betray an overweening desire to sell out “the base” for a mess of bipartisan pottage or pundit admiration. And being “tough” or a “fighter” or “unafraid” does not necessarily dictate the most successful course of action. Even though progressives have earned the right to lead the Democratic Party, an aggressive attitude simply won’t be enough.

It’s an important distinction to remember in the Trump era, when it’s a rare left-of-center political person who does not openly and loudly disparage the president and his party. Trump is the American Beauty rose of will-to-power politics, who has satisfied those in the GOP who cared most about “owning the libs” and defying “political correctness.” But the habit of identifying the leftmost course as defining Democratic courage lives on in the attacks on Nancy Pelosi for resisting demands for an immediate lurch down the path to impeachment. Does anyone who has paid attention to Pelosi’s career really believe she’s afraid of anybody or anything? Quite possibly she is wrong that impeachment might materially improve the odds that Donald Trump will serve a second term in which he can further stack the judiciary with stone ideologues and shred every constitutional and democratic norm. If she’s wrong, she’s wrong, but it’s not a matter of inadequate spine.

You can hear the same sort of mistake being made in the criticism of Joe Biden’s irrepressible faith in an honorable GOP that will spring back to life once the Evil One in the White House is gone. He’s absolutely wrong about that, of course. But it’s not because he’s soft or too nice or lacks spine. No one Biden’s age is likely to be afraid of anything other than the Grim Reaper.

More to the point, though, toughness is not going to beat Trump or the GOP, either. It’s going to require brains and and a workable strategy, both in the 2020 election and beyond. And it’s the apparent lack of brains exhibited by Biden’s persistent bipartisanship that’s troubling.

Nobody’s going to call progressive writer Brian Beutler a milquetoast centrist. He is practically the Cato the Censor of pro-impeachment agitprop. But he understands why Biden’s misapprehension about Republicans is a problem, and what needs to be done about it:

“[It] … foreshadows how things will go for any winning Democratic candidate who clings, sincerely or otherwise, to the view that a golden era of compromise will dawn once Trump is gone. These candidates will lock themselves into a mode of governing that can not work anymore. Their supporters and intra-party critics will be demoralized, their presidencies will stagnate, and they will waste precious time grasping for a better approach. (That’s if they don’t react to predictable GOP resistance by passing new, ill-conceived pseudo-compromises like the Hyde amendment.)

“It’s obviously just as naive to assume that hard-nosed realism about the nature of the modern GOP will unlock a progressive revolution all on its own. But candidates who understand what they’re signing up for can take steps to prepare for governing around Republicans now, knowing it’s delusional to imagine they’ll govern in coalition with them. If Democrats win the White House but not the Senate, Democrats should be prepared to implement creative foreign and administrative policies; if they consolidate power, they should be prepared to legislate in an aggressive and likely partisan way. The next time a Democrat is president, Republicans will again want to filibuster his or her presidency into failure, so the filibuster must be on the chopping block, and the party should be prepared to legislate around its own internal center, rather than let its most conservative members set the agenda in the vain hope of securing bipartisanship.”

This is a challenge to intelligence and imagination and political skill, not just to courage and strength and “spine.” Out-thugging Donald Trump may well be impossible in any event. So instead of simply demanding that Democrats “stop bringing a knife to a gunfight,” progressives should ask them to bring all their assets to the table. They’ll need them.

This week, I returned at New York to an old obsession of mine: the long-long Democratic tradition of advocating significant government reform:

One of the problems progressive Democrats have had for a long while is the inveterate American suspicion of and sometimes hostility toward government, and particularly the federal government. It’s not a phenomenon isolated in any one demographic group, region, or cultural persuasion. As the party of activist government, Democrats have often vacillated between opportunistic appropriation of selected conservative anti-government themes, emphasis on government functions that happen to be popular, and, well, changing the subject to go after institutions (e.g., Big Pharma or banks) that are at least as unpopular as Washington.

When Bill Clinton and Al Gore made “reinventing government” a major theme of their administration in the 1990s, it was a point of departure for Democrats that soon more or less evaporated, in part because they oversold the initiative and in part because it focused too narrowly on cost saving rather than improvement of public services. When the more virulent forms of anti-government activism like the tea party movement arose in the 21st century, progressives tended to defend government rather than trying to fix it. As social scientist Paul Light noted in 2015, the constituency for reinventing government faded thanks to this pincer movement, and along with it, any immediate incentive for progressives to embrace public-sector innovation. And as Yoni Appelbaum observed a few years earlier, Democrats were losing ground in the eternal fight over the shape and size of government:

“The current progressive movement has … tended to promise better policies and improved implementation, while rallying to the defense of government from its critics. It insists that government should do better, but not that we need a better government. Whatever its intellectual merits, this approach has a fatal political flaw: most Americans number themselves among government’s critics. They don’t think government works terribly well, and they are disinclined to support politicians who do.”

One of the side benefits of Democrats losing control of the federal government in 2016 was that it liberated them from the reflexive habit of defending Washington. Indeed, one of the hottest topics in progressive political discourse these days is the once-radical belief that our current institutional arrangements all but guarantee a conservative oligarchical control of the country for decades to come. Add in a huge Democratic presidential field and voters hungry for new ideas, and you have a prescription for a revival of interest in government reform.

“It has not always been thus. During the Progressive period of the early 20th century, liberals rallied around a series of major systemic reforms. They pushed to break up trusts. They expanded the vote, and demanded recall elections and popular referenda. They passed the Seventeenth Amendment, mandating the direct election of senators by voters, rather than by state legislatures.

“Democrats took up this mantle, from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal to Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. Republicans could still win presidential elections, but as with Dwight Eisenhower, they were often offering just a scaled-back version of Democratic big-government ideas. The GOP was supine.”

Part of the new interest in government reform on the left comes from the very old fear that the public sector has been “captured” by wealthy interests, and needs refocusing as much as it needs expansion. That’s at the heart of the wonkiest of Elizabeth Warren’s wonky policy ideas, a proposal to reorganize federal trade policy functions. It’s unlike anything we’ve seen in this area since at least the Carter administration:

“[A] new Department  —  the Department of Economic Development  —  will replace the Commerce Department, subsume other agencies like the Small Business Administration and the Patent and Trademark Office, and include research and development programs, worker training programs, and export and trade authorities like the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. The new Department will have a single goal: creating and defending good American jobs.”

In this case, reform serves as the handmaiden of the populist goal of ridding the federal government of a pro-corporate structural bias that has been built right into our fragmented system. But it reflects a more general resurgence of interest in government reform among presidential aspirants, as Graham notes:

“Many of them are proposing things that would require constitutional amendments, all the more notable since there hasn’t been a substantive amendment since 1971. To name just a few: O’Rourke wants term limits. As I wrote earlier this week, radical reforms to the Supreme Court, including court packing, have become central to party thinking, even for cautious candidates such as O’Rourke and Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Obama achieved universal insurance coverage through the private-insurance system; several Democrats want to bulldoze it entirely with Medicare for All schemes. Senator Elizabeth Warren has been perhaps the most aggressive of the bunch, pushing everything from abolishing the filibuster to busting trusts to enshrining a right to vote.”

Medicare for All is not only the largest and most revolutionary government reform idea kicking around left-of-center circles this year; it’s also one that cleanly illustrates the conflicting impulses progressives continue to have between reforming and simply expanding government. On the one hand, single-payer health care is a classic reform aimed at sweeping away the hodgepodge of public and private health-insurance services that has so ill-served Americans over the years, and creating a much simpler and fairer model that has been tested in many other countries. On the other hand, its proponents have chosen to brand it (somewhat misleadingly) as simply an expansion of an existing government program, albeit one that is relatively quite popular. Unsurprisingly, public support for this reform tends to shrink when conservatives and their health-industry allies pound it as a government takeover of health care that will reduce consumer choice and carry an enormous price tag: the standard anti-big-government theme that always strikes a chord with so many Americans.

In this as in so many other areas, Democrats would be wise to remember that a majority of voters don’t inherently trust government any more than they do big corporations. The political power of “populism” — in both its left- and right-wing expressions — derives from a perpetual national craving for leaders who will bend government to the popular will and force it to address genuine needs. This by no means requires hostility to public employees or any reluctance to expand government where it’s needed. But it does mean boldly taking issue with government as it exists.