It’s never too late to do some fresh thinking about old political assumptions, and that’s what I tried to do this week at New York:

There are two bits of conventional wisdom about “swing voters” in this day and age that are often accepted without discussion. The first is that these critters have been all but hunted to extinction, or more specifically, have fled into one of the two partisan trenches from the “middle ground” poisoned by polarization. The second is that swing voters are discerning and sensitive souls who equally disdain the fanatics in the donkey and elephant herds, and long for sweetly reasonable compromise “solutions” between left and right. You know, people who nod their heads at newspaper editorials and think Howard Schultz makes sense.

With the benefit of a robust data set of registered voters provided by the Kaiser Family Foundation, Charlie Cook does a pretty good job of blowing up both of those preconceptions.

First off, there are a lot more swing voters than you might think — as long as you understand how they are defined:

“Thirty percent of the respondents, a total of 603, can be called swing voters, who were either undecided or only ‘probably’ going to vote for either Trump or the Democrat. Of the 9 percent who said they would probably vote for Trump, just over half (5 percent of all voters) said there was a chance they would vote for the Democrat, while 4 percent said no chance. Of the 13 percent who would probably vote for the Democrat, just a quarter (3 percent of all voters) said that there was a chance they would vote for Trump, while the others said there was no chance. Those who only probably would vote for one candidate but definitely would not vote for the other have a good chance of either not voting or throwing a vote to a third-party candidate.”

There’s a lot to unpack here. The genuine “undecided” vote is only 8 percent — a number which, historically, is likely to go down as we near the general election. And of the 22 percent who are leaners, 14 percent are not “swinging” between the two major parties, but swinging between voting for one of those parties, voting for a minor party, or staying home. So nearly half of “swing voters” are really more like base voters who need to be convinced to show up at the polls without straying into the ranks of the Greens or the Libertarians. And of the other half, roughly equal shares are truly undecided or are predisposed toward one party or the other (with Democrats holding a significant advantage in that respect).

“When asked, ‘How much attention do you normally pay to what is going on in national government and politics?’ 57 percent of voters and 68 percent of decided voters said they pay a lot of attention, but only 39 percent of swing voters said so. Twice as many swing voters said they pay only a little attention or none at all—17 percent, compared with just 8 percent of those who are decided.

“Not surprisingly, fewer swing voters believe it is important who wins. When asked whether it really matters who wins, somewhat matters, or doesn’t really matter, 82 percent of all voters and 92 percent of decided voters said they believe it matters, but just 66 percent of swing voters said they believe it really matters.”

So these are on average less informed, less discerning voters who often can’t tell the difference between two parties that offer wildly different visions for America’s future and the rights our citizens should possess. They tend to be younger, which means higher personal mobility, fewer connections to civic life, and a significantly lower probability to vote. I strongly suspect their relatively high level of self-identification as “moderates” has little or nothing to do with some “centrist” policy agenda, and more to do with a disinclination (or incapacity) to think ideologically at all.

This goes to a third misconception about swing voters that Cook doesn’t explicitly address, but that follows from his analysis. Traditionally, it is assumed that parties and candidates must choose between “mobilization” strategies aimed at base voters and “persuasion” strategies aimed at swing voters. Ideally, you want to do both, but there is an inevitable tension between beating on people with big sticks to go smite the partisan foe (one of the oldest and most important “mobilization” techniques is known as “knock and drag,” which means exactly what it sounds like), and convincing voters who are likely to vote to go your way rather than the other.

But if the most typical swing voters are, as Cook suggests, those who aren’t motivated to vote, and need convincing not that one candidate is better than the other but that the choice is consequential, then beating on them with big sticks makes a lot of sense, too — particularly for Democrats who lost a lot of crucial voters in 2016 because they figured Clinton had already won. Will such efforts sometimes fail? Yes, but again, the odds are that the turned-off swing voter won’t join the ranks of the opposition but will go to work or stay home on Election Day and make evening plans to watch washed-up pols compete on Dancing With the Stars.

As Cook concludes, we may not know how many “swing voters” are actually going to vote until the last minute:

“The key takeaway from this analysis is that while swing voters don’t look too different from the overall electorate in terms of demographics, they are very different temperamentally. Since they pay less attention than other voters and are less likely to believe that the outcome is important, you just have to wonder how many of these undecided will really vote. Further, we can expect those who do to check into the race very late.”

If the 2020 race goes down to the wire looking very close, swing voters “checking in” to politics at the last minute will be hit with an intense barrage of claims that this is the most important moment in American history since at least 1861. And that’s more likely to get them off the sofa than all the split-the-differences compromise policy proposals you can imagine.

Something in a report about Trump 2020 plans caught my eye as ironic, so I wrote about it at New York:

When you look back at why so many people thought Hillary Clinton was a lock late in the 2016 campaign despite tightening polls, two reasons stand out. The first is that in the month before the election, half the Republicans in captivity distanced themselves from their nominee (with many denouncing him as a disgusting pig) following the release of the Access Hollywood tape. The other was the belief that Hillary Clinton’s massive field operation gave her a thumb on the scales in the event that things really did get iffy.

In the postelection mythology of 2016, there was a tendency to go far in the other direction and argue that HRC’s “ground game” somehow lost the election for her. Nate Silver responded to that strange claim in his series on “the real story of 2016”:

“[W]hat went wrong with Clinton’s vaunted ground game? There are certainly some things to criticize. There’s been good reporting on how Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn ignored warning signs on the ground and rejected the advice of local operatives in states such as Michigan. And as I wrote in a previous installment of this series, Clinton did not allocate her time and resources between states in the way we would have recommended. In particular, she should have spent more time playing defense in states such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Colorado and less time trying to turn North Carolina into a blue state or salvage Iowa from turning red.

“Here’s the thing, though: The evidence suggests those decisions didn’t matter very much …

“For one thing, winning Wisconsin and Michigan — states that Clinton is rightly accused of ignoring — would not have sufficed to win her the Electoral College. She’d also have needed Pennsylvania, Florida or another state where she campaigned extensively.”

Another part of the counter-mythology of 2016 held that the Clinton campaign was playing conventional checkers with its ground game, while Team Trump was playing some sort of three-dimensional social media chess with all those Facebook ads and maybe a little outside help from people who happen to drink a lot of vodka. Unsurprisingly, one person responsible for promoting this view of the election has been 2016 Trump digital director Brad Parscale:

“In an interview with CBS News’ ’60 Minutes’ that aired Sunday, Brad Parscale said Facebook ‘was the method’ for President Donald Trump’s stunning rise to the White House. Parscale, who spearheaded the small Trump campaign team’s digital and fundraising efforts, contended that the team took advantage of Facebook in a way Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign did not.

“’Facebook now lets you get to places and places possibly that you would never go with TV ads,’ Parscale, web director at San Antonio-based marketing and design firm Giles Parscale, told CBS. ‘Now, I can find, you know, 15 people in the Florida Panhandle that I would never buy a TV commercial for. And, we took opportunities that I think the other side didn’t.’”

Parscale has since been named as Trump’s overall 2020 campaign manager, and has continued to make noise suggesting he’s some sort of political Zen master who has transcended polls and other timeworn tools of the trade. But Team Trump is also rolling in the kind of money that its 2016 predecessor could barely imagine. So how are they planning to spend it? Pretty much like Hillary Clinton did in 2016, or so it sounds in this account from Brian Bennett, which emphasizes the blue states Trump is targeting but also indicates a very personnel-heavy field operation:

“Trump’s campaign is betting it can win in New Mexico. Flush with cash, the campaign is planning to announce a state director and additional ground staff there in the coming weeks, a campaign official tells TIME. Internal campaign data has convinced Trump’s political advisors they can energize a slice of the state’s Hispanic voters to vote for Trump in 2020 by emphasizing Trump’s handling of the economy, border security and his trade confrontation with China. According to U.S. Census data, 49.1 percent of New Mexico’s residents identify themselves as Hispanic or Latino …

“The move is part of a series of bets Trump is making to win states that went for Clinton in 2016. Trump’s son-in-law and senior White House advisor Jared Kushner says that voter data has convinced the reelection effort to fund robust field operations in a much larger number of states than in 2016. ‘I can see us very aggressively playing in 18 swing states,’ Jared Kushner tells TIME, adding that in his view, the 2016 Trump campaign “seriously played” in about 11 swing states.

It sure sounds like Team Trump disparaged the kind of ground game Hillary Clinton had in 2016 up until, but not beyond, the moment it could afford one of its own.

A potentially close battle for control of the U.S. Senate next year is colliding with some unusual events in my home state of Georgia, and I wrote up the latest news and speculation at New York:

The intrigue involving the Senate seat Johnny Isakson is vacating for health reasons at the end of this year continues to roil Georgia politics, with some of the national implications beginning to sink in as well. One set of questions involves the decision Republican governor Brian Kemp will make about an interim replacement for Isakson until a special election takes place in November of next year (concurrently with the 2020 general election, in which the other Georgia Senate seat, held by Republican David Perdue, will be at stake as well).

The list of potential choices by Kemp continues to expand. The latest from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Greg Bluestein tosses in a couple of names that might be considered if the GOP would like to go beyond its usual white-guy boundaries while appealing to suburbanites: Karen Handel, Kemp’s predecessor and boss as secretary of State, who is currently plotting a rematch with Democrat Lucy McBath for the U.S. House seat she briefly held before 2018; and U.S. Attorney and former state legislator BJay Pak, a Korean-American.

But there remain plenty of white guys in the mix, including multiple congressmen. One especially aggressive suitor is Doug Collins, who probably got Donald Trump’s attention with his aggressive defense of POTUS as ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee during the Mueller hearings. Indeed, the New York Times conducted an elaborate examination of the potential Beltway ripple effect of a Collins appointment to the Senate:

“A Senate appointment would not only elevate Mr. Collins, 53, to an influential perch but also set off a cascade of openings in House leadership that could empower some of the president’s best-known conservative allies, including Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio and Mark Meadows of North Carolina.

“Allies have pointed to the pugnacious Mr. Jordan as a natural choice to replace Mr. Collins in the top Judiciary position. If he were to get the slot — which requires the blessing of Republican leaders — Mr. Meadows could then ascend to Mr. Jordan’s position as the top Republican on the Oversight and Reform Committee, another battleground where Democrats are aggressively investigating Mr. Trump.

“Another Republican ally of both men, Representative John Ratcliffe of Texas, could also get a look for the top Judiciary job.”

The Times is right in suggesting that Trump could have an impact on Kemp’s decision; aside from his wild popularity among Republicans everywhere, Kemp owes the president big time for his crucial endorsementof the “politically incorrect conservative” last year when he was in a runoff with then–Lieutenant Governor Casey Cagle. Indeed, if the White House and the Perdue cousins (U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny and that other senator, David) got behind a single aspirant, they’d be hard to resist.

Several big-time Democrats with prior statewide experience are in the mix as well, including Perdue’s last opponent, Michelle Nunn; 2014 gubernatorial candidate Jason Carter; and Dekalb County CEO Michael Thurmond, who was elected Labor Commissioner three times back in the day, and was also Isakson’s 2010 opponent. Like McBath, Thurmond is African-American. So, too, is Stacey Abrams, the very popular 2018 gubernatorial candidate who earlier ruled out a challenge to Perdue and disclaimed interest in the Isakson seat instantly after the senator made his announcement. You can be sure national and Georgia Democrats will periodically check in with Abrams to see if she might change her mind.

As Kemp ponders his options and Democrats play musical chairs, there is one aspect of the 2020 Georgia Senate landscape that is gradually dawning on observers near and far. The special election for the Isakson seat will be a “jungle primary” in which any and all Democrats and Republicans — and for that matter members of minor parties — will compete. If no one wins a majority (and that’s a distinct possibility, particularly if the two major parties cannot clear the field for their candidates), there will be a runoff on January 5, 2021. But here’s the thing: Georgia also requires a majority of the vote to win general elections, which means that the Perdue race could go to a January runoff as well (as very nearly happened to Kemp last year).

If Georgia did have these two Republican seats at risk in runoffs, the odds would go up significantly that control of the Senate might be on the line — and with it the power of either a reelected Trump or a Democratic successor to enact an agenda and get executive and judicial appointees confirmed — in one state, two months after an exhausting election cycle. Any still-standing political operative — or unspent dollar — would be pulled into the Peach State to fight in an overtime contest for which there is really no precedent.

The Iowa caucuses are complicated enough without the “virtual caucus” option the DNC forced on the state’s Democrats. But now the DNC is disallowing the method Iowa and Nevada have proposed for implementing it, as I explained at New York:

In a potentially major development affecting two of the four protected “early states” in the 2020 Democratic presidential nominating process, the Democratic National Committee let it be known that it’s going to disallow the “virtual caucus” option for remote access to delegate selection events in Iowa and Nevada next February. The Des Moines Register broke the story:

“The decision was confirmed to the Des Moines Register late Thursday by two sources close to the conversations. It follows a meeting of the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee last week in San Francisco, where members voiced concerns about the security of the Iowa plan and the potential for hacking.”

First Iowa, and then Nevada, have developed plans to let otherwise eligible voters cast their votes in caucuses by phone rather than showing up in person. What will make the apparent red light maddening to party officials in the two states is that the DNC forced them to make this option available in response to complaints — many of them from 2016 Bernie Sanders supporters, though Hillary Clinton offered similar criticism back in 2008 — that the traditional caucuses (and more generally, the traditional nominating process) excessively restricted participation. Iowa (followed by Nevada) wound up choosing a teleconference model for remote caucusing as more feasible than an absentee-ballot system or caucusing-by-proxy. But then this happened, as Bloomberg reported last weekend:

“At a closed-door session of the Rules and By-Laws Committee on Thursday, the DNC told the panel that experts convened by the party were able to hack into a conference call among the committee, the Iowa Democratic Party and Nevada Democratic Party, raising concerns about teleconferencing for virtual caucuses, according to three people who were at the meeting.”

The trouble — for Iowa, at least — with something less techno-dependent like mail ballots is that it could make the caucuses begin to resemble a primary and run afoul of New Hampshire’s law requiring its secretary of state to do whatever is necessary, including moving its primary to the previous year, to maintain its first-in-the-nation status.

It probably didn’t help the reputation of the “virtual caucus” system that it was even more fiendishly complicated than the traditional Iowa event, as Vox explains:

“The plan the Iowa Democratic party came up with would have given virtual caucus-goers six different days/times to call and choose their candidates. The last available day would have been February 3 — caucus day itself. Users would have dialed a phone number, entered a unique pin and their date of birth to verify their identities, and ranked up to five 2020 candidate choices over the phone.

“What was trickier is how these people’s votes were to be counted and how much they would have accounted for. Here’s how it was supposed to work: All of Iowa’s four congressional districts would have been allocated up to an additional 10 percent of the overall state delegate equivalents (or, the delegate totals from each county). In other words, if one congressional district had 400 people going to their delegate convention, they would get an extra 40 delegates that could be awarded based on the results from the virtual caucus.”

This wrinkle exacerbated complaints about Iowa’s “delegate equivalent” system for reporting caucus results; the DNC had already required that raw caucus totals be made public (to this day, many Bernie Sanders supporters believe he, not Clinton, would have won Iowa in 2016 had raw votes been reported). Two pots of raw votes — one of live caucusgoers, one of virtual caucusgoers — made the whole thing even more unwieldy.

Nevada had a simpler system whereby people could call in votes during one two-day window, but it has to go back to the drawing board as well.

With the Iowa and Nevada caucuses less than six months away, the DNC may simply decide to give Iowa and Nevada a waiver from its rules for 2020 and then work on fixing the system for the future — or perhaps even make more fundamental reforms in the nominating system. If that happens, a lot of campaign planning based on the virtual caucuses will have been wasted. Iowa political analyst Pat Rynard speculates about the potential impact:

“Politically speaking, the biggest beneficiary of this debacle is Joe Biden. One of the best strategies to winning the Iowa Caucus is to inspire, organize and bring out a lot of new, first-time caucus-goers. Candidates like Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker and Julian Castro are all very well-suited to do just that. While Biden has strong support among the older and long-time caucus veterans who always show up, it is harder to see how he would turn out a whole new generation of caucus-goers like Barack Obama did in 2008 or Sanders did in 2016.

“The virtual caucus would have greatly aided candidates who were focused on new voters. Even though they were still emphasizing showing up in person, campaigns would happily direct their supporters who simply can’t make it out on caucus night into the phone option.

“However, even if this caucus runs like a more traditional year, Warren’s superior ground game still poses the greatest threat to Biden. But Biden’s chances are certainly better without the virtual option, and any margin of victory from anyone who might pass him may be smaller.”

It’s possible as well that having provoked the reforms that led to the virtual caucus system, Sanders supporters will view the DNC action as another Establishment effort to “rig” the results. But this really isn’t a very good time in political history to adopt potentially hackable technologies for voting events.

Pity the pollsters and campaign tacticians who have to do their work without knowing the shape and size of the caucus-going universe, at least until this mess is sorted out.

A major development in my home state of Georgia led me to explain its significance at New York:

Like Arizona, another potential sunbelt target, it has been slowly but steadily trending Democratic, making it an increasingly plausible presidential prize among the states carried by Donald Trump in 2016. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’s impressive 2018 midterm showing was another sign of Georgia’s increasingly purple hue; she also proved you don’t have to run away from the national party’s progressive issue stance to do well in this former Blue Dog bastion. Republican senator David Perdue is up in 2020, and he’s thought to be potentially vulnerable. There are also two highly competitive U.S. House races on tap in north metro Atlanta, where Democrats picked up one seat in 2018 and are aiming for another next year.

Now, veteran Republican senator Johnny Isakson (who has Parkinson’s disease) has announced he will resign his seat at the end of 2019, which means the state will hold a special election in conjunction with the 2020 general election to fill the last two years of his term. That race, along with Atlanta’s status as a regional media center, should guarantee major bipartisan political spending in the state in 2020.

The Republican candidate to succeed Isakson will likely be chosen by Governor Brian Kemp, who will appoint an interim senator when the incumbent steps down at the end of the year. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Greg Bluestein reports that a list of familiar statewide GOP pols is likely under consideration for the appointment:

“It’s not yet clear who Kemp will appoint to fill Isakson’s seat, though potential candidates include Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr, state Senate Pro Tem Butch Miller, Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, U.S. Rep. Doug Collins and U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue.”

This last name will surely raise eyebrows. The former governor is the cousin of that other Senator Perdue, and while two Perdues in the Senate would accurately reflect this extended family’s domination of the Georgia GOP, it would be a mite risky, too. This possibility could depend on how badly Sonny wants to get away from the angry farmers he is facing as Agriculture secretary, thanks to his boss’s trade policies. He’s also 72 years of age, a bit long in the tooth for a freshman senator.

The name of a much younger man with impeccable GOP credentials may also eventually come up: Nick Ayers, who, as a college student, was Sonny Perdue’s “body man” during his first gubernatorial bid. Ayers moved on to become a national Republican operative and wunderkind, and was most recently chief of staff to former political client Vice-President Mike Pence. His knack for being in the right place at the right time would certainly be enhanced by a Senate appointment, and he knows how to raise money.

Kemp has a while to ponder his choices, but Democrats looking at a second 2020 Senate race need to get it in gear. Stacey Abrams, the candidate most Democrats in Georgia and across the country would have preferred (for this Senate race, or as a challenger to David Perdue) instantly ruled it out, preempting a world of pressure.

One immediate question is whether any of the three initially viable Democrats who have been considering running against Perdue — former Columbus mayor Teresa Tomlinson (likely the front-runner), outspokenly progressive Clarkston mayor Ted Terry, or 2018 nominee for Lieutenant Governor Sarah Riggs Amico — will switch to the other Senate race. But as Bluestein notes, the prospect of an open seat (or at least one occupied by an appointee) could attract some even more familiar names from the not-so-distant Democratic past:

“Among the potential Democratic contenders for the seat are the Rev. Raphael Warnock, the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church; Jon Ossoff, a former candidate for Georgia’s 6th Congressional District; Jason Carter, the runner-up for governor in 2014; and Michelle Nunn, who was defeated by David Perdue in the 2014 Senate race.”

Ossoff, Carter, and Nunn are known as formidable fundraisers, but all lost after stirring up a lot of local and national Democratic excitement.

One important wrinkle about the race to fill Isakson’s seat is that, as a special election, it will not be part of the standard party primaries but a single “jungle primary” on general-election day, followed by what is likely to be a low-turnout runoff in January. So among Democrats in particular, there will be an effort to clear the field to give a single candidate a clear shot at a November win. It could all get crazy.

The impending end of Isakson’s career represents a landmark of its own. Arguably his retirement (along with that of Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander) removes one of the last vestiges of an old-school, moderate southern Republicanism that wasn’t based on racism and didn’t involve snarling partisanship. He’s gone along to get along in the Trump era, but he was increasingly a rather sad figure from an increasingly distant past. You can be sure that whoever the self-styled “politically incorrect conservative” Brian Kemp chooses to replace Isakson will not be his equal in basic decency.

Jamelle Bouie struck a chord with a column, so I decided to expand on it at New York with some examples of what he’s talking about:

Jamelle Bouie explains something important it in a very useful column for the New York Times:

“Spend enough time talking politics on the internet — or in any other public forum — and you’ll run into this standard reply to anyone who wants more democracy in American government: ‘We’re a republic, not a democracy.’

“You saw it over the weekend in an exchange between Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Dan Crenshaw of Texas. In a brief series of tweets, Ocasio-Cortez made the case against the Electoral College and argued for a national popular vote to choose the president. ‘Every vote should be = in America, no matter who you are or where you come from,’ she wrote. ‘The right thing to do is establish a Popular Vote. & GOP will do everything they can to fight it.’

“Crenshaw, who has sparred with Ocasio-Cortez before, jumped in with a response: ‘Abolishing the Electoral College means that politicians will only campaign in (and listen to) urban areas. That is not a representative democracy.’ And then he said it: ‘We live in a republic, which means 51% of the population doesn’t get to boss around the other 49%.'”

Bouie points out that this argument for the Electoral College is simply wrong on its own terms (like most arguments for the Electoral College). But he challenges the premise that the United States has a form of government that makes democratic principles irrelevant. In part, he does this by distinguishing between the direct democracy the Founders did fear and the representative democracy they gave us. But he also gives us a quick account of the unsavory history of the “republic, not a democracy” slogan:

“The term went from conservative complaint to right-wing slogan in the 1960s, when Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, used it in a September 1961 speech, ‘Republics and Democracies.’ In a democracy, Welch protested, ‘there is a centralization of governmental power in a simple majority. And that, visibly, is the system of government which the enemies of our republic are seeking to impose on us today.'”

For us baby-boomers, the Birchers’ use of the term republic to justify all sorts of artificial restraints on popular majorities rings familiar. But aside from its precise origins, the general intention in opposing a “republic” to a “democracy” is clear:

“The point of the slogan isn’t to describe who we are but to claim and co-opt the founding for right-wing politics — to naturalize political inequality and make it the proper order of things. What lies behind that quip, in other words, is an impulse against democratic representation. It is part and parcel of the drive to make American government a closed domain for a select, privileged few.”

Some specific examples beyond the defense of the Electoral College come to mind that reflect the conservative tendency to use “republican” limitations on democracy to justify and even expand privilege.

(1) States’ Rights Champions: The oldest and most thoroughly abused doctrine seeking to take “republican” restraints on democracy and justify privilege is the ancient rebel yell of “states’ rights.” Pre–Civil War defenders of slavery often claimed that the power of states to protect the peculiar institution was essential to the ability to maintain liberty and even democracy for white people (often citing the Athenian precedent). Similarly, the Southern revolt against Reconstruction and the imposition of Jim Crow were rationalized as self-protection against the tyranny of the (black and/or carpetbagger) majority that prevailed in many parts of the region or, alternatively, against the race-mixing national political consensus. That this doctrine produced local tyranny and entrenched racial privilege was obvious, if often ignored by its defenders.

(2) The Lochnerians: This conservative legal movement — which harks back to the era of constitutional jurisprudence defined by the 1905 Supreme Court decision in New York v. Lochner (eventually overturned after its application, as invalidating much of the early New Deal produced a near constitutional crisis) — holds that fixed private-property rights embedded in the Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment cannot be abrogated by federal or state legislatures. There is a neo-Lochnerian movement active in laws schools and corners of the federal and state judiciaries today, aimed at protecting wealthy individuals from democratic “violations” of their rights via regulation and taxation.

(3) Constitutional Conservatives: During the heyday of the Tea Party movement, conservative politicians (notably Sarah Palin and presidential candidates Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry) took to calling themselves “constitutional conservatives” to signify their adherence to a view of limited government that takes Lochnerism and expands it beyond property rights to prohibit all sorts of democratic interference with “natural rights,” ranging from state self-determination to the fetal “right to life.” It’s sort of a plenary juxtaposition of a republic dedicated to capitalism and cultural traditionalism as against any effort by majorities to change anything, forever. The privileges that posture protects stretch from the nearest property line to the most sweeping idea of cultural patriarchy.

(4) Religious-Self-Determination Supporters: Perhaps the most vibrant current example of conservative efforts to use “republican” limits on democracy to entrench special privileges involves expansive notions of “religious freedom” to give Christian conservatives far-reaching exemptions from anti-discrimination laws, hand in glove with public subsidies for religious education. The ultimate objective seems to be to create a sort of collective “Benedict Option” wherein militantly religious people can form parallel communities beyond the common law, where LGBTQ folk remain closeted and women and children remain under the firm hand of servant-leader menfolk.

In other words, “It’s a republic, not a democracy” reflects a persistent strain of conservative thinking that is focused less on vindicating individual rights than on protecting oligarchies of privilege, whether they be national, regional, or local. That many of the same people who cite this slogan are among the first to complain about liberal “activist judges” who interfere with “democracy” when conservatives are in the ascendancy just exposes the game for its hypocrisy.

The more Republicans argue for maintaining the Electoral College, the more they tend to undermine their own positions. I wrote about an example this week at New York:

The case for the perpetual continuation of that grand anti-democratic institution, the Electoral College, is ancient and generally (as my college Eric Levitz definitively demonstrated earlier this year) threadbare. But it’s useful to blow up defenses for it one by one as they arise, with the latest being a remonstration by Senator Joni Ernst aimed at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s arguments for abolishing the electoral dinosaur:

Actually @AOC, eliminating the Electoral College would silence our voices here in Iowa and in many other states across the country.

This is just more evidence of how out of touch the Democrats have become. https://t.co/yfm4oDCpkm

— Joni Ernst (@joniernst) August 21, 2019

To state the most obvious issue, there’s something fundamentally stupid about the claim that giving voters everywhere the exact same power to elect a president is going to “silence” anyone. Besides, is voting for president the only way citizens can “voice” their opinions? What the hell is Joni Ernst doing in the U.S. Senate? Are her efforts just a waste of time unless presidential candidates are lusting after Iowa’s six electoral votes every four years?

Now it’s true that the “losers” — relatively speaking — in a shift from Electoral College to a popular-vote system would be closely contested “battleground states” that naturally attract candidate attention more than safely Democratic or Republican states. Presumably, Ernst thinks of Iowa as a battleground state, which it has indeed often been in recent years. But these things change. In the 2016 presidential election, Iowa was ten points more Republican than the nation as a whole. It was redder than Texas. Is Joni Ernst going to urge Iowans to tilt more Democratic so that the state remains a battleground, thus keeping their voice from being silenced? I don’t think so.

Generally speaking, Iowa needs the Electoral College to make sure presidents are aware of it about as much as the current president needs more self-esteem. Joni Ernst or whoever runs her Twitter account should take down that tweet before it really embarrasses her.

In case you need an explainer for the president’s weird claim that American Jews are “disloyal” this week, I tried to oblige at New York:

This week the president strangely accused American Jews of being “disloyal”–to Israel, or to himself; it’s not clear which (and he may think they are the same thing). Why does the man keep excoriating Jews for voting for Democrats? Does he really not understand the bloody history of right-wing “nationalist” and “populist” movements when it comes to Jews?

Maybe he doesn’t; for an Ivy Leaguer, the president is impressively ignorant about an awful lot of things. But it’s more likely that all his talk about the Jews is really aimed at a very different audience: his white conservative Evangelical Christian electoral base, which has its own distinctive and unsettling form of philosemitism. As the Washington Post’s Philip Bump wrote in his explanation of Trump’s discussion of Jewry and Israel:

“One of Trump’s most fervent pockets of support is white evangelical Protestants, a group which consistently sides with Trump on political and policy questions. His approach to Israeli politics often lines up with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but it also reflects priorities that have been central to evangelical politics for years.

“In other words, Trump’s approach to the politics of Israel is likely driven in part by the same motivation that drives so much of what he does: Delivering for his base …

“It’s somewhat akin to his campaign-trail outreach to black Americans, a superficial outreach that seemed, at least in part, to be aimed at demonstrating to his base that he wasn’t racist. His reflexive insistence that Democrats are anti-Semitic seems to be much more about demonstrating to his base the fervency of his adherence to Israel than to be offering real, considered criticisms of his opponents.”

So why do Trump’s ruminations about Jews and Israel resonate so much with conservative Evangelicals? Strictly speaking, of course, they are largely of the opinion that Jews are going to burn in hell for all eternity if they don’t accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior. But they also tend to view Jews through the prism of their own self-conception as the Chosen People of God — sort of the new, complete model for which Jews were a rough cut. Theologically, this is called “supersessionism,” the belief that a New Covenant God made with believers through Christ has replaced his Old Covenant with the Hebrews. It’s not an exclusive Evangelical belief; Catholic James Carroll wrote an entire book about it as the ultimate source of Christian anti-Semitism throughout the ages. But it shows no sign of fading among Evangelicals, who generally view the Hebrew scriptures as their own inheritance, and themselves as new, perfected Jews.

In this scheme (mostly laid out in the New Testament Book of Revelation, an elaborate allegory probably written in the traumatic aftermath of the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in A.D. 70), Jerusalem plays a key role. This is why American Evangelicals were significantly more excited than American Jews at Trump’s decision to move the U.S. embassy there, as theologian Diana Butler Bass explained at the time, drawing on her own Evangelical upbringing:

“Jerusalem was our prophetic bellwether. God’s plan hung on its fate. Whenever Israel gained more political territory, whenever Israel extended its boundaries, it was God’s will, the end-times unfolding on the evening news. Jerusalem, as the spiritual heart of Israel, mattered. Jerusalem was God’s holy city, of the ancient past, in its conflicted present, and for the biblical future.

“For many conservative evangelicals, Jerusalem is not about politics. It is not about peace plans or Palestinians or two-state solutions. It is about prophecy. About the Bible. And, most certainly, it is about the end-times.”

And so, in tightening Israel’s grip on Jerusalem, and more generally supporting an aggressive and expansionist Jewish State, Trump may be appealing to Jewish solidarity with Israel, but more important to him politically is the demonstration to Evangelicals that in this, as in many other things (notably the fight to reverse LGBTQ and reproductive rights), he is an agent of the divine will, despite (or sometimes because of) his heathenish personal behavior.

From this perspective, Trump’s strange rhetoric begins to make sense: When he accuses American Jews of “disloyalty,” he really means they are not playing the role Christians have assigned them in the great redemptive saga of the human race. Voting for Democrats, from this point of view, isn’t a matter of abrogating Jewish self-interests as reflected in Israel’s interests (as exclusively vested in Trump and his close ally Bibi Netanyahu), but is an unholy betrayal of God Himself, who wants confrontation, not peace, in the Holy Land.

In other words, Trump’s not as interested in Jewish opinion as he often sounds. He’s just using Jews and Israel to express his solidarity with Israel’s, and God’s, truly loyal followers over there in that nice Evangelical church. He needs every one of them in 2020.

Now and then I get so tired of a particularly threadbare historical analogy that I push back, as I did this week at New York:

We hear all the time that Democrats are heading “off the deep end” on a left-wing ideological bender that will mean disaster in the general election. The warning is very often associated with the specter of 1972 Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern, who lost 49 states four years after Hubert Humphrey lost by an eyelash and four years before Jimmy Carter won the presidency. The obsession with the idea that 1972 may repeat itself is a bipartisan phenomenon. Some McGovern Redux takes are from conservatives who are simply promoting the perennial claim that Democrats have become an anti-American cabal of baby-killing hippie socialists with a fresh urgency given the current extremism of the GOP. And some of these takes are (and have been for many years) from self-styled moderate Democrats grinding axes against self-consciously progressive aspirants to the presidential nomination.

Sometimes the latter includes a separate grievance against McGovernism beyond ideological extremism: divisiveness. A good example of this argument was recently provided by former Clinton and Obama staffer, “moderate” congressman, and former mayor of Chicago Rahm Emanuel as quoted by Todd Purdum:

“Rahm Emanuel, the former Clinton adviser and Obama chief of staff, told me he likens the current environment to the period following 1968, when Lyndon B. Johnson was succeeded by Richard Nixon, in a right-wing victory that exploited and exacerbated deep internal divisions in the Democratic Party, just as Trump’s ascendance has. Emanuel acknowledged that Johnson’s war in Vietnam makes the analogy imperfect — ‘unless you think the surge in Afghanistan counts as that, and I don’t’ — but added, ‘We have seen this movie before.’

“’Here’s the thing,’ Emanuel told me. ‘Today’s progressives are more angry at Clinton and Obama than they are at Bush 43. Whether it’s Clinton’s “small ideas” and welfare reform, or Obama’s Affordable Care Act without a public option — those are the things where they feel like there were missed moments for big, bold ideas. Really? And that’s what drives the energy. Yes, they’re angry at Trump. Yes, they’re angry at Bush. But a lot of the energy is directed at the fact that they don’t love those two presidents — which I’d remind everybody are the only two Democrats to get reelected since Franklin Roosevelt.'”

Embedded in this complaint is the idea that McGovern represented a revolt against the long line of successful Democratic presidents from FDR through LBJ, dividing the Democratic electorate and handing victory to Nixon. Today’s progressives, the thinking goes, are McGovernesque because they, too, are more interested in a hostile takeover of the party than in winning the general election.

Here are a few relevant points:

1. McGovern Didn’t Bust Up the New Deal Coalition; It Was Already Broken, and Never Reformed

The real disaster for Democrats wasn’t in 1972 under the lefty McGovern; it was in 1968 under the consummate New Dealer Hubert Humphrey, when the Democratic share of the popular vote dropped from 61.1 percent (under LBJ in 1964) to 42.7 percent. What happened? The civil-rights revolution happened, and the southern (and southern-adjacent) wing of the party made its exit, only returning (briefly) for native son Jimmy Carter, as I noted in 2012 when McGovern died:

“McGovern took the blame for the first and most dramatic election in which the collapse of the New Deal Coalition became fully manifest. Humphrey’s near-win in 1968 distracted attention from the fact that he won the lowest percentage of the popular vote of any major-party candidate since Alf Landon. In 1976 Jimmy Carter disguised the structural trends by winning the South and southern-inflected voters in border states and the midwest–voters who, by and large (aside from the Deep South regional loyalists who stayed with Carter in 1980), weren’t going to vote Democratic in a presidential election again. When Fritz Mondale got blown out in 1984, it represented the fourth time in five cycles that the Democratic candidate won less than 43% of the popular vote nationally. Yet this era of defeat is very often associated with McGovern alone.”

Mondale, by the way, was no lefty, but rather the favorite candidate of the Democratic Establishment, as opposed to his primary rival, Gary Hart, who had been McGovern’s 1972 campaign manager. More importantly, it is often forgotten that Nixon’s big 1972 landslide was mostly accomplished by appropriating George Wallace’s southern-based 1968 third-party vote, which Carter largely flipped back to the Democrats in 1976 after being endorsed for the general election by Wallace and virtually every other southern racist (along, remarkably, with every civil-rights activist). As Carter’s regional religious appeal faded, Democrats fell back on the minority of the electorate that had regularly supported them after 1964.

2. McGovern Wasn’t All That Far to the Left

For the most part, George McGovern was a standard-brand Democrat of his era who understood that his narrow path to the 1972 Democratic nomination required becoming the favorite of antiwar activists (who knew him well as the placeholder for Bobby Kennedy delegates at the 1968 Democratic convention after RFK’s death). But by 1972, McGovern’s Democratic rivals (with the exception of Scoop Jackson) had mostly turned against the Vietnam War as well.

McGovern was no pacifist (he had, after all, been a World War II bomber pilot), and his tentative support for an amnesty for draft evaders just anticipated Jimmy Carter’s (and to some extent even Gerald Ford’s) actual policy by a few years. The closest he came to a “socialist” domestic policy proposal was a famous $1,000-a-person Universal Basic Income proposal, which he abandoned during the course of the general-election campaign. Aside from anticipating Andrew Yang by nearly a half-century, it was pretty close to the Family Assistance Plan that Richard Nixon himself had earlier endorsed.

3. McGovern Didn’t Divide the Party: His Opponents Did

The ex post facto mythology of the McGovern campaign represented it as a takeover by a wild-eyed bunch of radicals determined to purge the Democratic Party of the “Establishment” elements (including the labor movement) that had sustained it for so long. As noted above, the white southern wing of the party had already seceded (at the presidential level, anyway). Also as noted above, McGovern and his supporters weren’t repudiating LBJ’s War in Vietnam; by then it was definitely Nixon’s War.

What did happen was a widespread abandonment of the Democratic presidential nominee, led by a labor movement (or at least by the leadership of the AFL-CIO) that was still loyal to Johnson and Humphrey and didn’t feel its interests would be particularly compromised if Nixon won reelection. Political historian Rick Perlstein reminds us that McGovern wasn’t the aggressor in intraparty strife:

“Humphrey himself, backed by [AFL-CIO president George] Meany, ran a stupendously vicious primary campaign against McGovern in the late innings. Edmund Muskie, Scoop Jackson, and Humphrey even cast aspersions against McGovern on ‘Meet the Press’ segments during the convention. Others were more casual — like the Catholic Missouri senator, one of the few up and comers associated with the regulars’ old order, who gave a blind quote to Evans and Novak at the height of the primary season, when McGovern looked to be clinching the nomination: ‘The people don’t know McGovern is for amnesty, abortion, and legalization of pot. Once Middle America — Catholic Middle America, in particular — finds this out, he’s dead.'”

Part of the reason Democrats indulged themselves in dumping McGovern is that this was (in sharp contrast to today) an era of heavy, heavy ticket-splitting. Democrats actually made a net gain of two Senate seats in 1972. They won Senate races in Alabama (where McGovern won 26 percent of the presidential vote); Arkansas (McGovern: 31 percent); Georgia (McGovern: 25 percent); Louisiana (McGovern: 28 percent) and Mississippi (McGovern: 20 percent). In 2016, not a single state elected a senator who was not from the party of the candidate who carried it in the presidential election. If they can just stop calling each other unelectable (and again, that’s mostly centrists calling progressives that), 2020 Democrats should be — and better be — united.

4. McGovern Ran a Bad General-Election Campaign

The criticisms of McGovern that are most justified had little to do with his ideology: He ran an amateurish general-election campaign, punctuated and exemplified by his sloppy vice-presidential election process that led to the selection and then the dismissal of running mate Tom Eagleton (the Missouri senator, by the way, who dissed McGovern in Perlstein’s account). Another really bad sign was McGovern’s delivery of his nomination acceptance speech (perhaps his best speech of the entire campaign) at 2:48 a.m. Eastern Time. The contrast with Nixon’s highly regimented 1972 Republican convention was astonishing, which leads to perhaps the most important distinction of them all between 1972 and 2020.

5. The 1972 Richard Nixon Was No Donald Trump — Yet, Anyway

Perceptions of McGovern’s 1972 opponent have been heavily influenced by Nixon’s subsequent disgrace and resignation from office. But in 1972 itself, Nixon was brilliant, in a devious, unprincipled sort of way. He had already defied conservative orthodoxy by imposing wage and price controls (1971) and visiting the previously forbidden kingdom of the People’s Republic of China (a maneuver so audacious that Nixon-to-China became a general term for politicians going sharply against type).

Nixon’s campaign relentlessly appealed to Democratic constituencies, especially labor (the AFL-CIO was neutral in a presidential general election for the first time ever), southern white voters (a Democrats-for-Nixon organization was headed by LBJ crony John Connally), and Catholics. He falsely promised imminent peace in Vietnam and used fiscal stimulus to pump up the economy (helping to create later inflation that would bedevil his successors). He gave every appearance of being a very successful president, disguising the moral rot within his White House. His job-approval ratings in 1972 breached 60 percent in May and were at 62 percent on Election Day. Trump has never been within hailing distance of this sort of popularity, and has never shown any interest, much less ability, in appealing beyond his electoral base.

The more you look at him, the more George McGovern is an unfairly maligned figure of Democratic failure, whose actual failures are not relevant to any 2020 nominee of his party. Yes, many baby-boomer Democrats will always be haunted by Election Night 1972, when their ancient enemy Tricky Dick won New York, California, Michigan, and McGovern’s own South Dakota — just as millennial Democrats will never forget HRC’s shocking 2016 defeat. Neither defeat offers any clear guidance for 2020, truth be told. But 1972 is about as illustrative of what to do or not do as 1928 or maybe the Battle of Agincourt. The best evidence we have is that thanks to extreme partisan polarization exacerbated by the terrifying example of the 45th president, any competent Democrat, whether she or he is a centrist or a progressive — a moderate or a democratic socialist — can beat Trump and can probably lose to him as well if everything goes wrong. If there’s anything about McGovernism to be avoided, it’s simply this: The 2020 Democratic nominee needs a lot more practical campaigning skill and also a bit of the luck that relentlessly eluded the very decent and well-meaning 1972 candidate.

 

After 2016 Democrats constantly remind themselves that presidential contests are about the Electoral College, not the popular vote. That’s not necessarily good news for Trump, as I noted at New York earlier this week:

There has been a lot of discussion in political circles about Donald Trump’s job-approval ratings, what they portend, and Trump’s Electoral College strategy for 2020, which doesn’t necessarily require a popular-vote plurality. But in the end, of course, the conjunction of the Electoral College with Trump’s state-by-state popularity is where the deal will go down.

The online polling firm Civiqs has published a new set of state-by-state job-approval ratings for Trump as of August 11, and it shows how the president’s overall standing (a 43 percent approval rating nationally, which happens to match the current RealClearPolitics polling average) might translate into electorate votes. It’s not a pretty picture for the president, to put it mildly.

Civiqs shows the president’s net approval ratios being underwater (i.e., negative) in 10 states he carried in 2016: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin. If that were to represent how the 2020 elections turn out, Trump would have a booming 119 electoral votes. And it’s not as though he’s on a knife’s edge between victory and defeat in all these Trump 2016 states where he’s doing poorly: He’s underwater by 12 points in Pennsylvania, 11 in Michigan, and nine in Arizona, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. And there’s virtually no indication that states that narrowly went for Clinton in 2016 are trending in Trump’s direction: His approval ratios are minus 18 in Colorado, minus 15 in Minnesota, minus 12 in Nevada, and minus 27 in New Hampshire. These are, by the way, polls of registered voters, not just “adults,” so they should be a relatively sound reflection of the views of the electorate.

If you credit these polls at all, Trump’s reelection will require (1) a big late improvement in his approval ratings, which is possible but unlikely based on long-standing patterns during his polarizing presidency; (2) a campaign that succeeds in making the election turn on theoretical fears about his opponent rather than actual fears about a second Trump term, which won’t be easy either; (3) a big Republican turnout advantage, which is less likely among the larger presidential electorate than it was in 2018; or (4) some diabolical ability to thread the needle despite every contrary indicator, which superstitious Democrats fear for obvious reasons.

If the fourth scenario — a win against all the evidence — is Trump’s best hope for reelection, he’s the one who needs to experience some fear and trembling heading toward 2020. If anything, there’s evidence that he is likely to undershoot rather than overshoot his approval ratings as the sitting president of a country whose direction lacks any kind of public confidence.