With Democrats now discussing the “electability” of their 2020 prospects, I thought it was worthwhile to conduct a thorough examination of Trump’s “reelectability,” and I wrote it up at New York.

As you can imagine, there’s no ironclad formula for determining these things (despite the occasional glib and inaccurate assertions that incumbents always win or that “it’s the economy, stupid”), particularly with respect to an outlandish president like Trump. But there are factors that will definitely have a bearing on the odds that he’ll have a second inaugural and can again radically exaggerate attendance.

1. The sheer power of incumbency

A statistic we’ll hear often between now and November 2020 is that four of the five presidents running for reelection after 1980 won — or alternatively, that eight of the 11 running since the end of World War II won. Some gabbers may even stack the deck a bit more by excluding Gerald Ford from the calculation, since he was never elected president or vice-president before his narrow 1976 loss. And there are those who would distinguish Ford and Jimmy Carter from any meaningful precedents because they had to overcome powerful intraparty primary challenges unlike anything Donald Trump is likely to face in 2020.

And there’s still another argument for excluding Carter, as noted by Musa al-Gharbi in predicting a Trump win in 2020:

“Had Ford won in 1976, it would have marked three consecutive terms for the GOP. If George H.W. Bush had won in 1992, it would have meant four consecutive Republican terms.

“Since 1932, only once has a party held the White House for less than eight years: the administration of Democrat Jimmy Carter from 1976 to 1980.”

In any event there are real advantages any incumbent president undoubtedly possesses:

“’Incumbents have the following advantages,’ says Allan Lichtman, a presidential historian at American University. ‘Name recognition; national attention, fundraising and campaign bases; control over the instruments of government; successful campaign experience; a presumption of success; and voters’ inertia and risk-aversion.'”

Name recognition and the ability to command attention are assets that don’t matter quite so much at the end of a high-profile presidential general election, and it’s hard to envision Trump ever being the natural choice of the risk-averse. But “control over the instruments of government” does involve the ability to throw a surprise or two into the mix (e.g., Barack Obama’s DACA directive in June 2012, which was not only quite popular but preempted a Romney move in the same direction that might have mitigated his harsh anti-immigrant image).

So Trump probably should be credited with a modest thumb on the scales simply for being in the White House already.

2. Good times for the economy

While most political scientists reject the idea that economic conditions are the only thing that matters in presidential elections involving an incumbent, virtually all predictive models do take the economy into account. And if there’s been a recent revision of expectations in Trump’s favor in recent weeks in the chattering classes generally, it’s because earlier signs of a possible near-term economic slowdown now appear to be hiccups. Initial estimates that first-quarter 2019 GDP growth came in at 3.2 percent(significantly higher than most economists’ expectations) struck fear into the hearts of many Democrats.

But economic indicators in the year before a presidential election aren’t usually a very reliable guide to how voters will feel when they head to the polls. One well-reputed model, developed by Emory University’s Alan Abramowitz, uses second-quarter GDP growth in the election year as the primary economic variable. Even economists who weren’t surprised by the early-2019 numbers (usually attributed to the effects of the 2017 tax legislation) aren’t predicting they’ll continue all the way into 2020. So what may matter more than any particular numbers right now is a general climate in which steady growth, low inflation, and perhaps a touch of partisan politics convince the Federal Reserve Board to continue expansionary monetary policies, keeping the economy in the pink as the 2020 election grows nigh (it’s frequently assumed that short of a catastrophe, very late economic developments don’t matter anymore than very early ones — hence Abramowitz’s second-quarter focus).

As a separate matter, however, strong economic indicators in 2019 could complicate Democratic messaging in the early phases of the presidential election cycle. Democrats and their presidential candidates may, accordingly, focus less on macroeconomic conditions than on arguments about growing wealth being poorly distributed, which is what a majority of Americans appear to believe even as they perceive economic conditions as relatively rosy.

3. Presidential approval ratings

It’s generally agreed that presidential job-approval ratings are the single most reliable indicator of any POTUS’s reelection prospects, if only because it reflects so many other factors, such as economic conditions, international developments, and the net effect of partisan pressures. Trump’s approval ratings 18 months out are not that different from those of a number of predecessors. The most recent monthly Gallup rating (from early April) has Trump at 45 percent, identical to Ronald Reagan’s number at this juncture in 1983; one point above Barack Obama’s 44 percent in 2011; and one point below Gerald Ford’s 46 percent in 1975. Reagan eventually won 49 states in 1984, Obama won by just under four points in 2012, and Ford lost very narrowly in 1976.

What separates Trump from all of these presidents, and indeed from all presidents, is the remarkable stability of his job-approval numbers; he’s had the least variation of any post–World War II president. His current Gallup rating is at his absolute peak, which he briefly achieved two other times in his presidency but could never sustain. Reagan’s Gallup approval rating rosefrom 45 percent 18 months out to 53 percent six months later, then 55 percent eight months later. Obama’s rose from 44 percent 18 months out to 52 percent on Election Eve. While anything’s possible, there’s no particular reason to think Trump is capable of a similar ascent. And for that matter, Gallup’s latest relatively high job-approval number for Trump could be an outlier on the high side: His average approval rating at Real Clear Politics is 43.1 percent, and at FiveThirtyEight, 41.3 percent. The GOP’s hope that the “exoneration” of Trump they falsely attributed to the Mueller report would finally get POTUS over the hump into something like positive job-approval territory did not turn out to be realistic at all.

Whether it’s a product of Trump’s singular personality or partisan polarization, his inflexible approval ratings do not bode well for an election-year surge, barring some very large external event or a very poor decision by Democrats in nominating an opponent.

4. Comparative popularity with opponents

Midterm elections are for the most part referenda on the party controlling the White House. Presidential elections involving an incumbent are partially that as well, but there is a significant comparative element, too, that is not as important in midterms.

The possibility that Trump could be reelected despite bad job-approval ratings is best illustrated by the still-shocking fact that he won in 2016 despite a horrendous Election Eve Gallup favorability ratio of 36/61. His opponent’s ratio of 47/52 was bad enough to enable him to win with an inside straight in the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote by more than two points. Since his entire 2020 strategy is again to drive down his opponent’s popularity with savagely negative attacks while solidifying his own base, Trump’s own popularity could again be less crucial than might otherwise be the case.

Despite an ever-increasing Democratic preoccupation with the “electability” of their 2020 prospects, it’s very difficult at this juncture to predict whether 2016 could repeat itself. Early trial heats show Trump mostly trailing the best-known Democrats, Biden and Sanders, and mostly leading the lesser-known aspirants. But early presidential trial heat polls do not have a very good record of predictive value. After a Democratic nominee is chosen such polls really will begin to be worth following; despite all the postelection caterwauling about inaccurate polls, they weren’t at all far off in 2016, as Nate Silver observed in a postmortem:

“[The] myth is that Trump’s victory represented some sort of catastrophic failure for the polls. 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.”

After what happened in 2016, however, it’s a good guess that more extensive polling will be conducted in states that are competitive but not assumed to be battlegrounds, like the Rust Belt states that fell to Trump with very little warning.

A big imponderable is the question of whether the various Democratic candidates truly vary in electability, or if instead partisanship will drive the election — i.e., in the end, any Democrat will be a “generic” Democrat. Surely the specific identity of the nominee, and for that matter campaign developments like debates, will matter at least at the margins, where close elections are often won and lost. And it may also matter whether the nominee is or isn’t especially vulnerable to GOP campaign attack lines aimed at painting the Democrat as an “extremist,” or to put it another way, as risky a proposition as a second term for Trump.

5. Other factors

Reporters will pay a lot of attention to fundraising numbers heading toward 2020. But while these may matter in primaries, barring massive advantages by one side or the other, money isn’t usually a decisive factor in presidential general elections, in part because name identification isn’t an issue and in part because there’s so much unpaid media available. How the money is spent could be important, but it’s a bit too early to make comparative conclusions about any of that.

Comparative turnout will matter a lot, and both parties are expected to focus more than ever on driving base voters to the polls, both via mechanical outreach efforts and inflammatory rhetoric. Generally speaking, presidential elections bring out pro-Democratic elements of the electorate more than midterms, though high 2018 turnout from those very elements could mean Democrats shouldn’t count on that much of a boost in 2020. Long-term demographic trends universally assumed to favor Democrats will have marginally affected the shape of the electorate since 2016, which is one of those things that could make a difference in another razor-close Electoral College contest.

There is one factor that is difficult to measure but undoubtedly real that could help get Democrats across the line in 2020: Trump will not ambush them again. It’s unclear how many should-have-been Clinton voters in 2016 didn’t bother to vote, went third-party, or even cast a protest vote for Trump on the assumption that HRC was certain to win. But anecdotally at least, they existed, and that very likely won’t happen again. Similarly, the 2020 Democratic candidate, whoever it is, will almost certainly avoid the underinvestment in what turned out to be crucial battlegrounds that the Clinton campaign mistakenly made.

Last but not least, there’s the little matter of some election-altering set of external events. There’s no way to know if some sudden international development involving military conflict, or some domestic terrorist incident, will happen between now and November 2020 and, in that event, whether Trump will handle it in a way that helps or hurts him politically. Right now, Democrats and neutral observers alike are engaged in an intense argumentabout whether moving toward impeachment of Trump would help crystallize public understanding of his corrupt and even criminal character, or would distract voters from more compelling anti-Trump arguments. How that argument is resolved could be one of the greatest wild cards for 2020.

So adding all this up, how do Trump’s reelection prospects look? I still think he’s an underdog — albeit a menacing, loudly growling underdog — for reelection given his perpetually poor approval ratings; the likelihood that Democrats’ larger base will be exceptionally motivated to turn him out of office lest the existential threat of a second Trump term materialize; and his inability to control some of his worst impulses, even when it’s politically imperative.

But a Trump defeat won’t happen automatically, and we already know that precedent-shattering bad behavior by the incumbent is so fundamental to his identity that it probably won’t matter at all, unless a critical mass of voters just get weary of the whole circus — in which case, he’s toast.

Listening to some of the “opening arguments” for various 2020 Democratic presidential candidates, it struck me that many campaigns use the same words but mean different things. One of the most important of these is “electability,” so I thought it would be useful to sort out the varying assumptions at play, and wrote it up at New York:

As a perpetual advocate for avoiding what Barack Obama calls “a circular firing squad” among Democrats, I was pleased to see a new effort emerge to encourage 2020 candidates to remember the wolf at the door (or in the White House), so I wrote about it at New York:

I’m interested to see that there is at least one organized effort underway to get presidential candidates to pledge to observe certain rules in an effort to bolster the party’s general-election standing, as Ruby Cramer reports:

“A national progressive group, Indivisible, is asking the 20 candidates in the Democratic presidential race to sign a pledge promising a positive, ‘constructive’ primary that ends with all participants coming together to support the eventual nominee — ‘whoever it is — period….’

“The Indivisible document asks candidates to agree to three terms: ‘make the primary constructive’ and ‘respect the other candidates’; ‘rally behind the winner’; and ‘do the work to beat’ President Donald Trump. ‘Immediately after there’s a nominee, I’ll endorse,’ the pledge reads.”

It sounds relatively uncontroversial, but it’s hard to get political candidates, who are, by and large, desperate to win, and their staff, whose lives will take a turn for the worse if they lose, to look kindly on a pledge to hold anything back. And there’s always the suspicion that talk of civility represents a sneaky effort to encourage unilateral disarmament by opponents who won’t return the favor….

The problematic underlying reality is that more than a few Democrats believe that only their faction is capable of beating Trump; different Democrats have very different theories as to “electability.” And then there are those for whom winning the “struggle for the soul of the party” trumps any general-election win.

If the “unity pledge” is to catch on, the majority of Democrats, who do value civility and seek common ground, must impose their will on the party’s candidates and their hard-core supporters. That means supporting the unity pledge, of course, but also perhaps going further: How about a pledge not to vote in the caucuses or primaries for candidates refusing to take the pledge? That might get their attention.

A day later, I was happy to report Indivisible’s progress in getting candidates on board:

[T]he pledge campaign is off to a good start, with five candidates having already signed it (in alphabetical order): Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Julian Castro, Jay Inslee and Bernie Sanders.

It’s significant that Sanders was the first to sign the pledge….

It’s no secret that the pledge was in part motivated by bad memories of discord during and after the 2016 primary fight between Sanders and Hillary Clinton–less between the candidates than between their fiercest supporters….

Perhaps Sanders’ leadership here will help inspire the rest of the field to sign onto the pledge quickly, the first and essential step towards making it stick.

All of us in the chattering classes had an immediate reaction to the release of the redacted Mueller Report. Here was mine at New York.

Mueller lets us know (directly contradicting Barr’s repeated assurances that it was lack of evidence, not the legal standard, that prevented criminal accusations) that he decided not to pursue a “traditional prosecutorial judgment” on possible obstruction of justice in order to comply with the DOJ’s position against prosecution of sitting presidents:

“The Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) has issued an opinion finding that ‘the indictment or criminal prosecution of a sitting President would impermissibly undermine the capacity of the executive branch to perform its constitutionally assigned functions’ in violation of ‘the constitutional separation of powers.’ Given the role of the Special Counsel as an attorney in the Department of Justice and the framework of the Special Counsel regulations, see 28 U.S.C. § 515; 28 C.F.R. § 600.7 (a), this Office accepted OLC’s legal conclusion for the purpose of exercising prosecutorial jurisdiction.

In a sort of Catch-22, Mueller then concluded that it wouldn’t be fair to Trump to accuse him of criminal conduct if he wasn’t going to be hauled into court and given an opportunity to properly defend himself.

“Fairness concerns counseled against potentially reaching that judgment when no charges can be brought. The ordinary means for an individual to respond to an accusation is through a speedy and public trial, with all the procedural protections that surround a criminal case. An individual who believes he was wrongly accused can use that process to seek to clear his name. In contrast, a prosecutor’s judgment that crimes were committed, but that no charges will be brought, affords no such adversarial opportunity for public name-clearing before an impartial adjudicator.”

And then there’s this tantalizing passage:

The footnote to the italicized portion reads: “See U.S. CONST. Art. I § 2, cl. 5; § 3, cl. 6; cf OLC Op. at 257-258 (discussing relationship between impeachment and criminal prosecution of a sitting President).”

So very carefully Mueller is suggesting: Here’s what the president did. I can’t do anything about it, so I will not call it criminal. Use my findings to impeach him if you wish, Congress.

As Nancy Pelosi could tell you, there are solid practical grounds for the U.S. House of Representatives to eschew impeachment proceedings, beginning with the fact that there is approximately zero chance the Republican-controlled Senate would vote to convict Trump, particularly now that we are in the active phase of a presidential election cycle. So it may well be that the best Democrats, and Trump’s other critics, can do is to take Mueller’s findings and whatever else other prosecutors or House investigators can uncover, and present it clearly as part of the case against the man’s reelection.

Watching as the MSM had great sport with snippy-grams going back and forth between House Democratic leaders and their new super-star freshman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, I tried to think through the deeper implications at New York:

Nancy Pelosi’s comments at the London School of Economics explaining the fruits of partisan gerrymandering made their way back across the pond with lightning speed, as reflected in the Washington Examiner:

“Pelosi explained to the London school audience that her district as well as the one represented by [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez vote Democrat no matter what.

“’This glass of water would win with a “D” next to it in those districts,’ Pelosi said. ‘But that’s not where we have to win elections.’”

Just to be clear, Pelosi’s right about the noncompetitive nature of her own San Francisco House district and AOC’s in New York: The former is the sixth-most Democratic district according to the Cook Political Report’s Partisan Voting Index (PVI), and the latter is the 31st-most Democratic. Hillary Clinton won 77 percent of the vote in AOC’s district, and Obama won 81 percent in 2012.

Presumably Pelosi thinks that despite her own safe seat, she can understand the plight of Democrats representing swing districts, but apparently has doubts about aggressively progressive members like AOC:

“’This is about winning,’ Pelosi told the London School of Economics and Political Science. ‘When we have to go into the districts we have to win, we have to cull that to what we have in common with those people.'”

Now Pelosi also had words of praise for her preternaturally talented young colleague. But you have to figure she wishes AOC, who has replaced Pelosi as the principal target of sexist conservative agitprop, had a slightly lower profile.

It’s unclear how any of this threatens Pelosi’s majority, except insofar as conservatives have sought to identify the entire Democratic Party with this one democratic socialist member’s views — which of course they are going to do in any event. Unless the entire House Democratic Caucus is expected to repeat the party line like cicadas, then there will always be members from districts where a more progressive viewpoint is viable than is politically sustainable everywhere. Their job is precisely to keep pressure on the leadership and the party to represent their constituents, too — not just the swing voters who have very nearly been hunted to extinction. And it doesn’t mean Democrats cannot accommodate candidates and members in more competitive districts with views more appropriate to local conditions. The big-tent principle should, however, work both ways.

If AOC begins threatening primary challenges to loyal Democrats from swing districts who happen to disagree with her ideology or policies, or suggesting Democrats take a dive in national elections if their candidates are too “centrist,” then that’s a clear violation of party discipline and Pelosi would be justified in rebuking her. That hasn’t happened, though. So long as gerrymandering and simple concentration of partisan voters produces safe House seats, however, their valuable function is to produce restless insurgents who stretch the imaginations of their elders rather than time-serving perpetual incumbents who go along to get along. In truth, both Pelosi, the precedent-shattering Speaker, and Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive comet, represent the silver lining of the generally rotten system of partisan gerrymandering: It gives leaders the opportunity to emerge from the crowd of election-fearing pols.

Democrats should get ready for the intensive campaign of demonization Republicans are planning for them. I wrote about this again at New York this week.

Perhaps he was just stating the obvious, but it did have the ring of an official announcement when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell suggested a GOP-wide message for 2020, as the Hill reports:

“We need to have a referendum on socialism,’ McConnell told a group of reporters when asked for his assessment of next year’s elections, when Senate Republicans will have to defend 22 seats, compared with 12 for Democrats.”

In case reporters somehow didn’t get it, McConnell restated the proposition:

“’I’m going to be arguing, and I’m encouraging my colleagues to argue, that we are the firewall against socialism in this country,’ McConnell added …

“’We’ve got five credible candidates for president in the Senate signed up for the Green New Deal and Medicare for none. If we can’t make that case, we ought to go into another line of work,’ he said.

“McConnell argues that will be the key to reversing the drop in support among women and college graduates that hurt Republicans in the 2018 midterm elections, when Democrats won back the House and captured GOP-held Senate seats in Arizona and Nevada.”

So there you have it: Red Scare 2020 is going to be a big and abiding thing. This clearly syncs Senate Republicans with the Trump reelection bid. It’s long been clear that his 2020 strategy will be what you’d expect from an abidingly unpopular president leading an unpopular party with unpopular policy positions: a relentlessly negative attack on his Democratic opponent using every weapon available. There’s some irony involved in a Trump-led party accusing its opponents of “extremism,” but it’s an age-old tactic: When you cannot credibly occupy the “political center,” you can always try to push your opponents even further from the center than you are.

And “socialism” is a time-tested epithet for left-of-center politicians and parties. With older voters, of course, it connotes not just big government but the “scientific socialism” of Marxism-Leninism, along with the Soviet imperialism that formed so large a part of the experience of Americans in and before the baby boom. But it’s a big target generally, as David Graham has explained:

“Though it feels like a Cold War throwback, the socialism epithet might be effective. It could resonate with a wider swath of the public than some of Trump’s other signature lines. The border wall, for example, is unpopular with Americans overall, though very popular with the president’s core supporters. By contrast, voter antipathy toward socialism is much broader: In a February Fox News poll, 59 percent of Americans held an unfavorable view. As of 2015, half of Americans said they wouldn’t vote for a socialist (though only 38 percent of Democrats held that view).”

The “socialism” label for Democratic policy proposals could also help expose divisions in the Donkey Party’s ranks over significant variations in how to define the Green New Deal and how to implement Medicare for All, as candidates not named Bernie Sanders (the only self-identified “socialist” in the presidential field, so far at least) try to distinguish their approaches from his.

On the other hand, conservatives have been calling liberals “socialists” for eons, and it’s no automatic magic bullet. Most notoriously, Barack Obama was relentlessly (if ridiculously) called a “socialist” by Republican-aligned media types going into the 2012 election, and it didn’t appear to work. For that matter, Trump himself deployed the “socialist” epithet toward Democrats going into the 2018 midterms, to no discernible effect.

But when you can’t say much about your own party’s record other than pointing at economic indicators and hooting “Mine! Mine!” then creating and burnishing negative associations for the other side may be the only available strategy.

One of the most tiresomely mendacious memes out there arose this week in congressional testimony, so I tried to blow it up one more time at New York.

There is a revisionist historical theory you hear now and then among conservatives — particularly African-American conservatives who are understandably a mite defensive about their position as a minority of a minority — holding that everything we think we know about the partisan politics of the post–civil-rights era is untrue. And it was enunciated again by the recently famous African-American pro-Trump activist Candace Owens, who was brought in by House Republicans to mock and disrupt a hearing Democrats convened on white nationalism, as the Washington Post reports:

“Owens, who tried to diminish the rise of white nationalism as an invention by Democrats to ‘scare black people,’ said there had never been a Republican effort to use racism to the party’s political advantage.

“‘Black conservatives are criticized for having ‘the audacity to think for themselves and become educated about our history and the myth of things like the Southern switch, the Southern strategy, which never happened,’ she told lawmakers.

I do not know if Owens subscribes to the fully developed right-wing theorythat white racist Lyndon Johnson concocted the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and the Great Society program as part of a white racist conspiracy to ensnare African-Americans in the “plantation” of dependency on government. But I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s hard otherwise to deny the basic facts that southern white racists steadily moved, from the early 1960s to the 1980s, from their old stronghold in the Democratic Party to their new home in the GOP — the “southern switch” — or that Republican pols in and beyond the South pursued this development as a “strategy.”

And of course Republican pols, racist or not, promoted this development as a strategic masterstroke. In a 1970 interview with the New York Times, Kevin Phillips, the prophet of The Emerging Republican Majority and wonder-boy Nixon strategist, put it this way:

“From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 per cent of the Negro vote and they don’t need any more than that … but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are.”

Nixon himself was famously in thrall to old-school southern segregationists like Strom Thurmond, who was given a veto over the 1968 vice-presidential nomination and over the administration’s Supreme Court appointments. His landslide reelection in 1972 was in no small part attributable to the capture of the entire 1968 George Wallace vote. Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter in 1980 in part by convincing conservative white southerners finally to abandon Democrats once and for all. And the southern strategy was avidly pursued by later GOP strategists from Lee Atwater to Karl Rove.

Now a lot of people don’t know much about political history, and followers of a president who doesn’t read and routinely disregards facts probably can’t be expected to document their own myths very carefully. But they need to be challenged regularly.

An old debate among Democrats has been revived, and I wrote about it at New York:

Political writers have understandably tried to make sense of the large 2020 Democratic field of presidential candidates by sorting them out ideologically (“left” or “center”) or by indicators of policy audacity (“bold” progressives versus “cautious” or “incremantalist” moderates). And part of the reason for the general belief that the party is “moving to the left” is the clustering of presidential candidates around policy positions (e.g., single-payer health care or a Green New Deal) that were considered “radical” not that long ago.

But as Ezra Klein observes after interviewing Pete Buttigieg, the most important differences may have less to do with what the candidates want to do and more with how they plan to do it — their theory of change:

“The central lesson of Obama’s presidency, Buttigieg argues, is that ‘any decisions that are based on an assumption of good faith by Republicans in the Senate will be defeated.’ The hope that you can pass laws through bipartisan compromise is dead. And that means governance is consistently, reliably failing to solve people’s problems, which is in turn radicalizing them against government itself.”

Which is, of course, precisely the way obstructionist Republicans led by Mitch McConnell planned it.

“Buttigieg’s response — one that you also hear from 2020 hopefuls Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Gov. Jay Inslee — is to restructure government so popular majorities translate more cleanly into governing majorities. He’s discussed eliminating the Electoral College, scrapping the filibuster, and remaking the Supreme Court so each party nominates the same number of justices and vacancies become less ‘apocalyptic.'”

There is not, however, any easy equivalence between the audacity of policy proposals and the willingness of candidates to consider the “process” changes that could make achieving these policies possible, as shown by Bernie Sanders, the “radical” who wants to preserve the filibuster and the current system for selecting Supreme Court justices. And indeed, you could imagine that a newly elected president who’s on fire to enact Medicare for All might not be initially inclined to spend political capital on boring process issues. As Klein says: “It’s easier to run for reelection bragging about a tax cut than about weakening the Electoral College.”

Klein points to a very useful 2007 essay by Mark Schmitt urging Democrats with very similar policy goals to focus on ways and means of achieving them:

“[Schmitt] argued that the contest between Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards was ‘not a primary about ideological differences, or electability, but rather one about a difference in candidates’ implicit assumptions about the current circumstance and how the levers of power can be used to get the country back on track.’ It was, he said, the ‘theory of change primary.'”

You can look back and say (as I just did) that Obama’s “theory of change” turned out to be significantly wrong. But in the circumstances of 2009, it’s unlikely that either Hillary Clinton’s claim of hard work being the answer, or John Edwards’s appeal to pure confrontation, would have done much better. So now, given the enduring reality of Republican obstruction, and their reliance on institutional barriers to democracy and change, having a clear-eyed understanding of the prerequisites to policy achievements is an absolute must for the 46th president. And this should not be a topic confined to elites; Schmitt’s proposed “theory of change primary” can and should be held in the early televised debates and on the campaign trail.

To put it another way, Donald Trump should be the last U.S. president to take office with no clue about how to implement his campaign promises.

I’ve been watching the polls closely to see if the president’s getting the sort of popularity “bump” he anticipated from the news that Mueller didn’t find clear-cut evidence of collusion or obstruction of justice, and wrote it up at New York:

[N]ine days after Barr’s letter to Congress revealing Mueller’s legal conclusions was transmitted and released, a growing number of public opinion surveys are showing virtually no change in Trump’s famously stable (or stagnant, depending on how you look at it) approval ratings. His average approval rating according to RealClearPolitics was 43.6 percent on March 24, the day the Barr letter was released, and was 43.2 percent on April 1. At FiveThirtyEight, Trump’s average approval rating was an identical 42.1 percent on March 24 and April 1.

Nate Silver notes that there’s quite a bit of data supporting a “no game-changer” read on the Barr letter:

“While I’d urge a little bit of caution on these numbers — sometimes there’s a lag before a news event is fully reflected in the polls — there’s actually been quite a bit of polling since Barr’s letter came out, including polls from high-quality organizations such as Marist College, NBC News and the Wall Street Journal, Quinnipiac University and the Pew Research Center which were conducted wholly or partially after the Barr letter was published. Some of these polls showed slight improvements in Trump’s approval rating, but others showed slight declines. Unless you’re willing to do a lot of cherry-picking, there just isn’t anything to make the case that much has changed.”

In terms of explaining this result, Silver offers an assortment of possible interpretations, but the one that makes the most intuitive sense is that the only people who really cared whether Trump colluded with the Russians were Democrats, who aren’t going to turn around and praise his presidency even if they are convinced he didn’t commit one of many horrific acts:

For the same reason, the full Mueller report isn’t likely to cut much ice in public opinion, either, whether it supports or undermines the positive claims Trump and his allies have been making with every breath. And it’s another indication that opinions of the 45th president are so sharply polarized that it will be difficult to change them, which means the identity of his 2020 opponent and the degree of enthusiasm he can inspire in the MAGA crowd may determine his fate. Since the Trump campaign and Republicans generally have already preemptively been pounding the 2020 Democratic field as a bright-red landscape of unremitting socialism, infanticide, and political correctness, while encouraging his supporters to approach the campaign season in a hate rage, the Mueller report and Barr’s summary probably won’t change his reelection strategy, either.

The huge field of Democrats running or considering a 2020 presidential race has a lot of diversity. I discussed one aspect of their differences this week at New York:

In assessing the very large Democratic field assembling to challenge Trump in 2020, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that a lot of politicians with résumés that would not normally bespeak presidential timber have taken a look at the 45th president’s rise to the White House and concluded there are no longer any minimum requirements. Yes, there have been presidents with no prior experience in elected office, but before Trump they were all war heroes (Taylor, Grant, and Eisenhower) or Cabinet members (Taft and Hoover). A few major-party nominees were closer to Trump in the empty résumé department (notably 1904 Democratic nominee Alton Parker, a state judge, and 1940 Republican nominee Wendell Willkie, a utility executive), but for the most part, especially in more recent times, the major parties have nominated former or current senators and governors.

A recent Morning Consult poll suggests that rank-and-file Democratic voters still value that kind of high-level experience, with 66 percent saying that “decades of political experience” was “very important” or “somewhat important” to them in choosing a 2020 nominee. That could help explain why two candidates (one potential and one actual) who together have 81 years of experience in elected office, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, top every poll. And there’s more where that came from: An astonishing seven former or current U.S. senators are in the race.

It’s possible that while Trump hasn’t totally dispelled an interest in experience among voters in either party, Democrats are less worried than they might normally be about sending up a relative novice to oppose him; it’s not like Trump is going to depict himself as the wise, credentialed, steady hand on the tiller. It’s notable that candidates at both ends of the experience spectrum — Biden and Sanders, and O’Rourke and Buttigieg — are thought to be potentially strong among the white working-class voters so important to Trump’s 2016 election and 2020 reelection prospects. Perhaps all that’s going on is that against the terrifying Trump Democrats are valuing perceived electability above all.

It’s also possible that candidates like O’Rourke and Buttigieg are best compared to recent flash-in-the-pan presidential candidates on the Republican side like Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain (in 2012) or Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina (in 2016), who got an audition but were eventually cast aside. But one thing’s for sure: Democrats won’t forget about Trump and what happened in 2016 for a moment in selecting their next nominee.