The intersection of religion and politics is one of my favorite subjects, and I have a good opportunity to write about it this week at New York:

it’s important now and then to challenge the conservative assertion — often shared in ignorance by secular media — that religiosity, and particularly Christian religiosity, dictates reactionary positions on culture and politics. So I found it interesting and provocative that 2020 presidential candidate Cory Booker goes out of his way to talk about his own religious faith:

“[Booker] bids fair to become the most overtly Christian Democratic presidential candidate since Jesse Jackson and perhaps even Jimmy Carter, at a time when his party is trending irreligious and the opposition claims a monopoly on all things biblical. What makes Booker different from many left-of-center figures who are “personally” religious is that he purports to be progressive because of his faith, not despite it or incidentally alongside it (e.g., the way John F. Kennedy referred to his own faith as an ‘accident of birth’). If this becomes central to his identity as a presidential wannabe, it will be provocative to both the Christian right and to secular Democrats. And that could be both a benefit and a handicap for Booker ’20.”

As E.J. Dionne observes, there is another 2020 Democratic presidential candidate who’s conspicuously talking about his faith, the fast-rising dark horse Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana.

“During an appearance on MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ last week, the 37-year-old from South Bend, Ind., made a modest plea: ‘I do think it’s important for candidates to at least have the option to talk about our faith,’ he said. He specifically targeted the idea that ‘the only way a religious person could enter politics is through the prism of the religious right.’

“An Episcopalian and a married gay man, Buttigieg pointed to the core Christian concept that ‘the first shall be last; the last shall be first.’

“He added: ‘What could be more different than what we’re being shown in Washington right now — often with some people who view themselves as religious on the right, cheering it on? . . . Here we have this totally warped idea of what Christianity should be like when it comes into the public sphere, and it’s mostly about exclusion. Which is the last thing that I imbibe when I take in scripture in church.'”

Dionne notes that Booker and Elizabeth Warren share Buttigieg’s willingness to talk about Christian faith. But what makes Mayor Pete especially interesting is that he challenges the idea that Christianity is inherently homophobic in a direct and personal manner. To him, LGBTQ folk aren’t third parties who are the subject of some argument between Christians and progressives: He’s Christian, progressive, and gay. So conservative Christians who like to imply that their more accepting co-religionists aren’t “real” or “orthodox” because they don’t exclude gay people need to be willing to tell Buttigieg he’s taking the Lord’s name in vain. And that may be — and certainly should be — uncomfortable for them.

The Episcopal Church of America accepts gay parishioners, priests, and bishops in churches that recite the Nicene Creed every Sunday and have as authentic a claim to “orthodoxy” as any other church and more than many. So, too, do such solid elements of the American and global religious landscape as the United Church of Christ (a.k.a. Congregationalists), the Presbyterian Church (USA) (the largest gathering in that faith tradition), the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ditto), the Unitarian-Universalist Association, and many congregations and whole regions of the United Methodists and my own Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) that embrace gay people as equals in every way. There are many smaller denominations and nondenominational gatherings that do the same. And that’s aside from the millions of individual Catholics, Evangelicals, and Pentecostals who reject, quietly or openly, the homophobia of their own denominations.

Any Democratic presidential nominee who can authentically talk about his or her faith would be well advised to do so if only to confound Christian-right leaders and followers who have cast their own lots with the heathenish warlord in the White House. But Pete Buttigieg offers a particularly interesting contrast with the 45th president. Would anyone be confident in accusing this married, churchgoing, Afghanistan veteran of being ethically inferior to Donald Trump? Not without risking hellfire.

There’s been a lot written about the Democratic House’s new voting rights push. But as I argued at New York, much of the discussion doesn’t quite capture its scope and historical significance.

The remarkable partisan polarization over HR1 — House Democrats’ ambitious but hardly novel package of “pro-democracy” reforms, centered on voting rights — shows that this issue, once a matter of bipartisan do-gooder sentiment, has now become a deadly serious point of contention in our politics. This has happened rather quickly as the two parties each came to recognize their future might depend on expanding or restricting ballot access.

All 234 House Democrats present voted for HR1 while all 193 Republicans present voted against it. That’s remarkable given the bipartisan support voting rights (and even other features of the bill like campaign finance reform) had until very recently. To be sure, politicians in both parties still think ballot access is critically important. But Republicans, having placed their bets on an electoral base that is overwhelmingly white and significantly upscale, are becoming deeply invested in suppression of voting opportunities for those who are unlikely to join their coalition.

A recent study showed that of 20 states identified as making it most difficult to vote, Trump carried 17. Hillary Clinton carried 12 of the 20 states where it is easiest to vote.

The homeland of Republican voter suppression is in the South, where keeping African-Americans from the ballot box is an ancient tradition practiced mostly by Democrats in the long period from the emancipation of slaves until the end of Jim Crow. Now across the region the Republicans who control every state legislature in the former Confederacy are pursuing an ensemble of measures to restrict the franchise, from cutbacks in early voting, to aggressive voter purges, to voter-ID requirements, to reductions in polling places. This trend rapidly proliferated after the 2013 Supreme Court decision (supported by all five Republican-appointed Justices, with all four Democratic-appointed Justices dissenting) that killed the chief enforcement mechanism of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Without the requirement that states with a history of racial discrimination submit election system changes to the U.S. Justice Department for “preclearance,” it’s been open season on ballot access, particularly as racial polarization in partisan preferences has intensified.

As veteran political journalist Ron Brownstein has observed, the current split in Congress over HR 1 is just the beginning of an era in which one party supports and the other opposes voting rights: it’s a struggle that may determine political dominance in many states and nationally for years to come:

“Particularly in states across the Sun Belt — from North Carolina, Florida and Georgia to Texas and Arizona — the electoral competition is shaped by a stark demographic divide. In all of those states, Democrats are increasingly reliant on growing populations of younger and nonwhite voters. But in each of those states and others demographically similar to them, a Republican coalition almost entirely dependent on white voters — especially older, blue-collar and non-urban whites — still has the advantage, particularly in state elections.

“In each state the Republican majorities have used that power to approve either restrictions on voting — such as tougher voter identification laws — partisan gerrymanders or both, making it more difficult for that emerging nonwhite electorate to overturn their dominance.”

As in the Reconstruction era after the Civil War, one party is committed to the use of federal power to vindicate voting rights, and the other is opposed. Today’s Republicans don’t openly tout white racial supremacy rationales the way many Democrats of the 19th century did, but they do similarly claim they are simply defending states’ rights to control elections, and warn of electoral fraud and corruption, and less vocally, of a partisan conspiracy whereby minority voters will use their political power to redistribute the wealth of virtuous tax-paying white folks. Southern opponents of the first Reconstruction resorted to terrorism along with less violent forms of intimidation aimed at black would-be voters and officeholders. But formal disenfranchisement was accomplished throughout the region by 1900, aided by Supreme Court rulings sharply limiting federal jurisdiction over elections. Now strategies for disenfranchisement are covert and partial. But like yesterday’s Democrats, today’s Republicans are acutely aware that their local and national power depends on holding back a tide of minority voting power than might submerge their party.

These partisan dynamics are what separate today’s climate from that of what many have called the Second Reconstruction, the civil-rights era that culminated with the successful implementation of school desegregation, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The battle lines then were mostly regional rather than partisan, though the prominence of Democratic president Lyndon B. Johnson in the key landmark legislation initiated a partisan realignment of the South that led formerly Democratic white conservatives overwhelmingly into the GOP. That party was slowly but surely transformed into a militantly conservative bastion of support for states rights and property rights, and opposition to the kind of public spending that might disproportionately help minorities.

The white conservative backlash to the First Reconstruction succeeded almost totally in the disenfranchisement of African-Americans and the imposition of a virtual apartheid regime at the end of the 19th century. The Second Reconstruction’s accomplishments have been undermined more subtly, via voter suppression measures in the states and recent illustrations of residual racism from redlining to efforts to drain public schools of resources to police misconduct aimed at minority citizens and undocumented immigrants.

And so, arguably, we are seeing the first stages of a Third Reconstruction, again focused on (but not limited to) the South, with the goal of finally realizing the promise of equality extended in the so-called Reconstruction Amendments (the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, which abolished slavery, mandated equal protection for all citizens, and banned discrimination in voting) enacted after the Civil War. Because the bipartisanship of the Second Reconstruction has been lost, the Third Reconstruction may be as bitterly divisive as the First, and could quickly grow to overshadow other political issues. And while this Third Reconstruction may extend to multiple issues touching on equality, it will almost certainly be rooted in the fight for voting rights, which will determine the balance of power in many states and nationally.

Reverend William Barber II, the North Carolina pastor who founded that state’s Moral Mondays movement in opposition to a conservative takeover that made voter suppression prominent and explicit, titled his 2016 memoir/manifesto The Third Reconstruction. In it he accentuated the importance of voting rights as a threshold issue:

“Because political power is a democracy’s chief safeguard against injustice, we must continue to engage the voting rights issue after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which removed protections against voter suppression in southern states that had been in place for half a century. This fight is, in many ways, bigger than Selma and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That expansion of voting rights fifty years ago was a concession to the civil rights movement. We didn’t get all we were asking for. Now, fifty years later, we’re fighting to hold on to the compromise. What we really need is a constitutional amendment to guarantee the same voting rights in every state. This must be the cornerstone of the Third Reconstruction.”

Constitutional amendments in our system are very difficult to secure. But HR1 and Sewell’s legislation restoring the VRA together represent an effort to nationalize voting rights as much as the Constitution allows, as both its supporters and opponents acknowledge. HR1 takes a chainsaw to the thicket of voter-suppression techniques Republican-controlled states have contrived, which in intent echo the formal disenfranchisement the first Reconstruction fought and the poll taxes and literacy tests targeted by the second. And the restored voting rights enforcement mechanism in the Justice Department that Sewell’s bill would provide is aimed at rebuilding the federal government’s oversight of state and local electoral procedures, giving the victims of voters suppression an ally as powerful as the Freedmen’s Bureau of the first Reconstruction.

As in the first two Reconstructions, action in Washington will depend on the success of local grassroots pressure in the states where the battle against voter suppression rages. And that means today’s voting rights push must become not merely an issue among issues, but a social movement with a sense of moral urgency.

It’s a point made by political scientists repeatedly over the years, but it’s worth reiterating with fresh evidence, as I did at New York.

Pew has a new report out looking at self-identified political independents. It doesn’t break any new ground, but it should be waved in the face of Howard Schultz and others who look at the high percentage of Americans who prefer to call themselves independents and see a huge constituency for some centrist “third force.” It’s largely a mirage.

According to Pew’s numbers, while 38 percent of Americans identify as indies, only 7 percent “decline to lean towards a party.” Party “leaners” are a lot like self-identified partisans. For example, 70 percent of GOP-leaning indies give Donald Trump a positive job rating; 75 percent of them favor an expanded border wall; and 78 percent would prefer a smaller government providing fewer services. And far from being “plague on both your houses” nonpartisans with disdain for elephants and donkeys, independent leaners like one party and really dislike the other:

“Currently, 87% of those who identify with the Republican Party view the Democratic Party unfavorably. Republican-leaning independents are almost as likely to view the Democratic Party negatively (81% unfavorable). Opinions among Democrats and Democratic leaners are nearly the mirror image: 88% of Democrats and 84% of Democratic leaners view the GOP unfavorably. In both parties, the shares of partisan identifiers and leaners with unfavorable impressions of the opposition party are at or near all-time highs.”

The idea that independents are mostly “moderates” is increasingly out of whack with reality, too. A majority of GOP-leaning indies self-identify as conservative now, and while “moderates” still outnumber “liberals” among Democratic leaners (by a 45-39 margin), the latter category is steadily growing, as is the case with self-identified Democrats.

One implication of the report that’s worth internalizing is that polls and other opinion indicators that don’t break out leaners from true indies create an impression of the whole category as being in the middle on issues and candidates alike. In truth, much of what you read about independents reflects the dynamics of partisan leaners canceling each other out. So that big, potentially irresistible force poised between the two parties is mostly a figment of the imagination. And the partisan polarization so many self-identified pundits love to deplore extends well into the ranks of the technically unaffiliated.

 

You had to be of a certain age to remember Birch Bayh when he died this week at 91. As it happens, he sponsored the first piece of congressional legislation I was ever involved in. But his bigger accomplishments were near-legendary, as I wrote about at New York.

If you voted between the ages of 18 and 21 or benefited in any way from the Title IX program banning gender discrimination in higher education, Birch Bayh had an impact on your life. And he played an indirect role in the breakthrough in reproductive rights represented by the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision.

Bayh was elected to the U.S. Senate at the age of 34, after serving as the youngest-ever Speaker of the Indiana House. His first high-profile national moment came in 1964, when he pulled his colleague Ted Kennedy to safety from a plane crash that killed the pilot and a Kennedy staffer.

He soon became a power on the Judiciary Committee and chairman of its Constitution Subcommittee. In that role he became one of the last great advocates for constitutional amendments, co-authoring the 25th amendment providing for appointment of a vice president upon a vacancy in that position, and the 26th amendment lowering the voting age to 18 in federal and state elections. Bayh was also the chief Senate sponsor of the Equal Rights Amendment, which cleared Congress in 1972 only to succumb to a powerful backlash closely associated with the rising conservative movement when the drive to ratify it stalled (there’s still an effort underwayto complete ratification of the ERA, though some argue the deadline for state approval is long past).

But Bayh considered Title IX, best known for its impact on opportunities for women in college athletics, his most important legacy, as NBC News observed:

“The law’s passage came at a time when women earned fewer than 10 percent of all medical and law degrees and fewer than 300,000 high school girls — one in 27 — played sports….

“Now, women make up more than half of those receiving bachelor’s and graduate degrees, and more than 3 million high school girls — one in two — play sports….

“Bayh said the law was aimed at giving women a better shot at higher-paying jobs. He continued speaking in support of Title IX’s enforcement for years after leaving Congress.”

From his position on the Judiciary Committee, Bayh had a definite if more subtle affect on the shape of constitutional law via the composition of the U.S. Supreme Court. He led the successful opposition to two Nixon SCOTUS nominees, Clement Haynesworth and Harrold Carswell, who were widely perceived as payoffs to southern reactionaries who had stood by Nixon in 1968. Nixon ultimately substituted Warren Burger and Harry Blackmun for the rejected pair; Blackman soon authored Roe v. Wade, with Burger concurring.

Bayh’s final years in national politics were deeply disappointing given the high esteem he had gained from liberals in particular and from political observers generally. After a flirtation with a 1972 presidential run cut short by his wife’s cancer diagnosis, Bayh ran for real in 1976, but was soon eclipsed as the liberal champion in the field by Mo Udall. It’s also clear his Hoosier-style persona and campaign methods didn’t travel well, as Adam Clymer notes:

“The Bayh campaign never caught on. It was troubled by poor fund-raising and a style described by Charles Mohr of The New York Times as ‘juvenile, corny.’ His campaign theme song, to the tune of ‘dHey, Look Me Over,’ began: ‘Hey, look him over, he’s your kind of guy./His first name is Birch and his last name is Bayh.’ He dropped out of the race in March.”

No wonder.

Bayh lost his Senate seat in 1980, suffering the ignominy of a defeat at the hands of a then-obscure young conservative named Dan Quayle. It was a bad year for Democrats generally: late in the campaign year Bayh had to take time to head up an inquiry into the so-called “Billygate” scandal, involving President Carter’s brother Billy, who had acted as an unregistered lobbyist for Libya’s Muammar Ghaddafi.

After leaving Congress, Bayh stayed out of electoral politics (other than supporting his son Evan’s career), but was still visible in defending Title IX and advocating the abolition of the Electoral College. The one public shadow on his long and dignified retirement came in 2016, when the champion of equal rights for women was accused of sexual assault (as Clymer notes):

“He…become the subject of a sexual-assault accusation in 2016 by a technology journalist, Xeni Jardin, who said in a series of tweets that he had groped her in the 1990s in the back seat of a car in the presence of unidentified male colleagues of hers. News websites, including Vox, reported the allegation at the time, but Mr. Bayh did not respond publicly.”

That Bayh did not reply is not surprising, given his advanced age at the time. 88-year-olds rarely do. Here is tennis legend Billie Jean King’s statementupon hearing of Bayh’s death:

“Sen. Birch Bayh was one of the most important Americans of the 20th century and you simply cannot look at the evolution of equality in our nation without acknowledging the contributions and the commitment Sen. Bayh made to securing equal rights and opportunities for every American….

“Birch Bayh was a man of integrity, a leader with unquestionable character and an American treasure.”

God only knows how ultimately to judge Birch Bayh, but for all the nostalgia about the passing of deal-cutting back-slapping senators, he was a lawmaker of principle who got things done.

I usually mock the idea of a contested political convention in this day and age. But 2020 could be different for Democrats, as I explained at New York:

At this early point of the 2020 cycle, it’s natural to hear those old siren songs from a more interesting past when conventions actually decided something instead of serving as a four-day party infomercial as tightly scripted as any other TV drama. The fact that the last-multi-ballot convention occurred in 1952 (when Democrats nominated Adlai Stevenson on the third ballot), and the last seriously contested nomination in 1976 (when Gerald Ford survived a close challenge from Ronald Reagan on the first ballot), is often forgotten. And yes, it’s fun to engage in reveries over the “smoke-filled rooms” that picked Warren Harding out of nowhere in 1920, the 103 ballots Democrats needed to find their doomed nominee (John W. Davis) in 1924, or the stampeding of Republican delegates by galleries chanting “We Want Willkie!” in 1940.

But aside from the question of who, exactly, would “broker” a “brokered convention” these days, fantasies of any sort of contested nomination at a convention run up against a fundamental change in the process that made primaries and caucuses ubiquitous and delegate selection less arbitrary and “bossed,” as I noted a few years back:

“The main reason for this shift away from deliberative–or if you wish, ‘brokered’–conventions was the rise of a primary system that all but eliminated undecided delegates and favorite-son or stalking-horse candidacies. So it requires really, really special circumstances even to get within shouting distance of a convention where someone hasn’t locked up the nomination long before the balloons are inflated.”

The big shift was in 1972, when virtually all states moved to primaries or voter-driven caucuses. (That’s also the same year that Democratic nominee George McGovern gave his acceptance speech at about 3:00 AM Eastern Time, which led both parties to move quickly to squelch virtually all spontaneity at later conventions, wherever possible).

Despite some late hijinks involving dubious plans (similar to those Democrats entertained in 1980) to unbind Trump delegates, the convention itself was a Trump coronation (despite a spoilsport star turn by Ted Cruz). And this outcome probably led most observers to assume that despite their own vast 2020 candidate field, Democrats won’t have any trouble settling on a nominee well before their Milwaukee convention in July.

But there is a basic problem in assuming that the Republican delegate selection process in 2016 tells you anything about the Democratic process in 2020. Once he got rolling in 2016, Trump benefitted enormously from winner-take-all (usually by congressional district) delegate award rules. Democrats insist on strictly proportional delegate awards, which makes it much easier for candidates with limited but consistent support to hang around and hang around until late in the primary season hoping to catch fire (or to benefit from a front-runner’s calamities). That’s particularly true if they have a reliable source of money and/or an ideologically motivated national support base (like Bernie Sanders). So those who scoff at the possibility of a contested convention need to factor in several things: the size and strength of the field, the absence of a big-time front-runner, the likely split of delegates and a relatively front-loaded primary calendar that could make survivors of the early events quite durable.

It’s important to note that proportionality of delegate awards has its limits. There is a 15 percent minimum threshold for winning delegates at all, and in many congressional districts awarding delegates there really aren’t that many at stake to spread them around in strict proportion to the popular vote. But there are some counter-pressures that might encourage “losing” candidates to hold out, as well. As Nate Cohn notes, Democrats have “killed” superdelegates’ independence on first ballots. But if there are subsequent ballots, these ex officio delegates will spring back to life:

“In 2020, Democrats have sought to tamp down the superdelegate hysteria by barring these leaders and officials — currently 765 of them — from casting votes on the initial ballot at the convention. But here’s the ultimate irony: They can still cast votes on successive ballots, so they could be more influential than ever if the Democratic primary devolves into a floor fight.”

So sure, maybe history will hold true and only two candidates emerge from the earliest contests and one croaks the other by April. But for the first time in a long while a contested convention is an actual if still remote possibility. That in turn could influence candidate strategies in ways that are hard to anticipate. Despite its reputation for mild summer weather, it could get hot in Milwaukee in July of 2020.

Political writers have gotten used to outrageous and mendacious statements by the 45th president on a daily, if not hourly, basis. But one today took the cake, and I wrote it up for New York.

It’s no surprise that Republicans continue to try to make hay out of the Ilhan Omar controversy, even though, arguably, Democrats turned the tables on them by developing an anti-hate resolution which they unanimously supported, whereas 23 Republicans just couldn’t endorse such a sweeping condemnation of bigotry.

Characteristically, the leader of the GOP, one of the most skillful hate-mongers in major-party political history, is asserting that Democrats lost the battle over Omar while exposing their deep animus toward Jews and Israel, per CNN:

“’I thought yesterday’s vote by the house was disgraceful because it has become, the Democrats have become an anti-Israel party. I thought that vote was a disgrace. If you get an honest answer from politicians, they thought it was a disgrace. The Democrats have become an anti-Israel party and anti-Jewish party,’ Trump said.”

Let’s look at the record.

There are 27 Jews currently serving in the U.S. House. Twenty-five of them are Democrats; 2 are Republicans. There are nine Jews in the U.S. Senate. All of them are Democrats (if you consider Bernie Sanders a Democrat). Republicans: zippo.

Are all these Democratic Jews in Congress self-loathing?

A look at Jewish voting patterns is equally revealing. According to the best available data, Democrats have carried the Jewish vote in 24 consecutive presidential elections, dating back to 1924. In six of the last seven presidential elections, the Jewish vote was more than 70 percent Democratic (the one exception was in 2012, when Barack Obama won 69 percent of the Jewish vote). Hillary Clinton trounced Trump among Jews by a 71/24 margin. 2018 exit polls showed 79 percent of Jews voting Democratic in the midterms.

Did Democrats just become the “anti-Jewish party” since November of last year?

Trump’s “anti-Israel” smear is only slightly more credible. Yes, a significant minority of congressional Democrats are less slavish to Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies than nearly all Republicans (who are beholden, for the most part, to militantly pro-Likud conservative evangelicals rather than to Jews on the whole). But the vast majority of Democratic elected officials have supported a robust U.S. alliance with Israel dating back to Israel’s founding, in which Democratic president Harry Truman played a key role. The most recent congressional vote on military assistance to Israel, in 2018, showed the measure passing both Houses on voice votes; 36 Democratic senators, including their Jewish leader, Chuck Schumer, were original co-sponsors.

Were all these Democrats hiding an anti-Israel bias while voting for a measure that AIPAC praised as “ensur[ing] that Israel has the means to defend itself, by itself, against growing threats”? And speaking of AIPAC, if Democrats are anti-Semitic and anti-Israel, why did that organization greet the results of the 2018 midterms with this comment:

“’Americans elected a solidly pro-Israel Congress,’ declared the lead article in Near East Report, a monthly publication distributed by AIPAC to its followers across the United States. ‘While polarized on many issues, the 116th Congress remains committed to the U.S.-Israel relationship on a bipartisan basis,’ it stated.”

The president’s smear against Democrats may even be a projection of his own issues with Jews, who are naturally suspicious of the Christian nationalism he keeps flirting with, which is historically associated with anti-Semitism.

But he’s a long way from being able to say his party is the natural political home for American Jews, much less a bulwark against those antisemitic Democrats.

Thinking through the various ways in which the 2020 presidential election may unfold, I thought one unlikely but feasible possibility demanded attention now, and wrote it up at New York.

Trump remains one of the most unpopular presidents ever. His party is unpopular, too, as evidenced by Republicans’ poor performance in the 2018 midterms. Democratic voter enthusiasm seems high, fed by Trump’s daily antics. And the reasonably high odds that voters will eject him from the position he improbably won in 2016 while losing the popular vote are the very reason so many candidates want to run against him.

That’s the “glass half full” way of looking at the landscape. But there’s a “glass half empty” take that’s plausible as well.

After what should have been a calamitous stretch in which he shut down the government for an unpopular border wall, declared a nonexistent national emergency, and underwent a whole new round of high-profile airings of his alleged 2016 sins, Trump’s approval ratings have bounced back to the low-to-mid 40s levels that appear to be his long-term floor. Lest we forget, according to Gallup, his favorability number just before winning the presidency in 2016 was 36 percent (61 percent of respondents gave him an unfavorable rating).

And speaking of 2016, Republicans arguably retain an Electoral College advantage. The initial 2020 presidential battleground map from Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball showed Republicans with 248 electoral votes and Democrats with 244, with 46 in the “toss-up” category. Kyle Kondik explained Trump’s strong position:

“[T]he president’s base-first strategy could again deliver him the White House, thanks in large part to his strength in the nation’s one remaining true swing region, the Midwest. He’s an incumbent, and incumbents are historically harder to defeat (although it may be that incumbency means less up and down the ticket in an era defined by party polarization). Still, Crystal Ball Senior Columnist Alan Abramowitz’s well-regarded presidential ‘Time for Change’ model, which projects the two-party presidential vote, currently projects Trump with 51.4% of the vote based on the most recent measures of presidential approval and quarterly GDP growth (the model’s official projection is based off those figures in the summer of 2020). Arguably, the state of the economy is the most important factor: If perceptions of its strength remain decent, the president could win another term. If there is a recession, his odds likely drop precipitously. Meanwhile, it’s not a given that the Democratic nominee can consolidate the votes of Trump disapprovers, particularly if a third party candidate (Howard Schultz?) eats into the anti-Trump vote.”

Making the 2020 Democratic effort even more problematic is growing evidence that some targets thought to be ripe may be more resistant to Democrats, and more supportive of Trump, than previously thought. Ron Brownstein has some new Gallup data suggesting the incumbent’s resilience in Sunbelt states where many Democrats have espied strong trends in their favor:

“Across the potentially competitive Sun Belt states, Trump’s position among whites is consistently much stronger. In particular, his support among non-college-educated whites was much higher than it was in the Rust Belt: Gallup found that he drew positive job ratings from 73 percent of these voters in Georgia, 67 percent in North Carolina, 66 percent in Texas, and 61 percent in Florida. Likewise, among college-educated whites, Trump ran well above his Rust Belt numbers in all four states.”

And that’s against a generic Democratic opponent, as opposed to the flesh-and-blood candidate who might not, as Hillary Clinton demonstrated, be as strong as his or her party hoped, after a billion-dollars-or-so of attacks from the Trump campaign and its social media/Fox News allies.

As Brownstein notes, these numbers (and the intensely pro-Trump white Evangelical voters they reflect) mean that Democrats will probably need to mobilize nonwhite voters at extraordinary levels to win Sunbelt states Trump carried in 2016. It’s not clear the kind of candidate who can exploit Rust Belt opportunities can do that. And Trump has residual areas of strength in the greater Midwest as well….

Again, this is a glass-half-empty look at how 2020 is shaping up for Democrats. But it raises an important question about how Democrats — at both the elite and grassroots level — react to the real possibility of a second Trump win, particularly if it grows more plausible as 2020 approaches. Will they calmly resolve to unite behind whoever emerges from the abattoir of the nominating process, based on their popularity among Democratic primary voters? Or will they panic and become obsessed about “electability” as opposed to any other candidate quality?

They probably shouldn’t. As my my colleague Eric Levitz has argued, “electability” is a slippery concept that often involves bad-faith efforts to tear down other candidates based on selective deployment of limited evidence. But if it looks like Trump is in a relatively good position, it may be difficult for Democrats to think about anything other than electability, as I noted late last year:

“For most Democrats, the prospect of a second Trump term in the White House is an existential threat, whereas in 2016 his initial election was a bad but implausible nightmare. A second Trump term would not only drive progressives wild with frustration and fear: It could tangibly mean enough additional Supreme Court decisions to guarantee an end to abortion rights and other cherished constitutional protections, along with a federal judiciary skewed to the right for a generation and enough backsliding on critical challenges like inequality and climate change to darken every American’s future.”

Faced with that nightmare — and ineradicable memories of that shocking Election Night in 2016 — will progressive journalists and Democratic activists neurotically look at horse-race polls every other hour and adjust their views of presidential aspirants accordingly? It’s entirely possible. So in addition to developing an exciting agenda and raising money and figuring out where on a complex primary and caucus map to deploy candidate time and other resources, 2020 Democrats need to develop, update, and document a strong case that they are a good bet to beat Trump.

After a number of writers warned of Democratic incivility given the huge 2020 presidential field, I weighed in at New York with a summary of good advice for avoiding the problem:

We’re now well under a year away from the Iowa caucuses, and an unusually — perhaps uniquely — large Democratic field is forming to compete for the opportunity to face Donald J. Trump in 2020. It is highly appropriate that before the festivities intensify, multiple voice are being raised to remember the wolf at the door before engaging in any intramural fisticuffs.

At the American Prospect, veteran labor political operative Steve Rosenthal offers four “rules” for 2020 Democrats in order to avoid a “circular firing squad” that helps Trump win the general election.

Seeing a few straws in the wind, I wrote up for New York some concerns about the likely Trump/Republicans demagoguery about racial reparations.

Some 2020 Democratic presidential candidates in discussing anti-inequality measures have mentioned the moral rationale for a particular effort on behalf of African-Americans who were enslaved and then (under Jim Crow) semi-enslaved, and are suffering from systemic racism even now. Elizabeth Warren, for example, has made the obvious point that the legacy of slavery and its successor regimes has had a negative impact on the ability of black families to accumulate wealth over generations. Her proposed remedies, especially universal child care, are not actually “race conscious,” and aren’t similar to the cash compensation to descendants of slaves that is usually connoted by the term “reparations.” But there are signs that Republicans looking for a fresh way to appeal to white voters worried about alleged redistribution of resources from themselves to minorities may use the r-word to describe any and all race-conscious rationales for public initiatives. Fox News’ highly influential Tucker Carlson devoted an entire segment to the subject last week based on the premise that Democrats are stampeding in the direction of reparations.

Tucker Carlson agrees with his guest after he goes on a rant about how African Americans just need to get over slavery pic.twitter.com/8riQIlUr2I

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 22, 2019

Carlson and his guest are probably canaries in the coal mine in terms of the likely interest of Republicans in adding “No Reparations!” to their “No Socialism!” battle cry for 2020. At FiveThirtyEight, Perry Bacon Jr. explains that relatively strong public awareness of past and present racism does not translate into support for anything like reparations.

But when it comes to acting on these beliefs, notes Bacon, public opinion is significantly more mixed. And sizable majorities reject the idea of “reparations” as they are commonly understood:

“A July 2018 survey from the left-leaning Data for Progress found that 26 percent of Americans supported some kind of compensation or cash benefits for the descendants of slaves. A May 2016 Marist survey also found that 26 percent of Americans said the U.S. should pay reparations as ‘a way to make up for the harm caused by slavery and other forms of racial discrimination.'”

That Marist poll showed 68 percent of respondents, and 81 percent of white respondents, opposing reparations, defined as “money [paid] to African-Americans who are descendents of slaves.”

Now it should be noted immediately that an idea’s unpopularity is not an inherent reason for Democrats rejecting it (as Bacon puts it, “That’s kind of the point of bold ideas — they wouldn’t be bold if everyone already agreed with them.”) And Lord knows Republicans insist on promoting very unpopular ideas, from total opposition to gun regulation to supply-side economics to a ban on all abortions.

But being attacked for a position you do not actually hold is another thing altogether. So far, no 2020 Democratic candidate has embraced “reparations” as the public understands the term (cash payments to all descendants of slaves). But it appears some candidates, led by Warren and Kamala Harris (who called for “reparations” in the form of “investing in historically black colleges, improving maternal mortality rates for black women, and reducing racial disparities in the criminal justice system”) may finally begin to entertain the broader question of America’s moral and material debts to those it not only oppressed but robbed.

In his landmark 2014 essay, “The Case for Reparations,” Ta-Nehisi Coates sought to document those debts in some detail, but concluded that the most important step white America needed to take was simply to acknowledge its falsified history and come to grips with what that means today:

“Reparations — by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences — is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely …

“What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices — more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling ‘patriotism’ while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.”

This idea may not be as controversial as cash reparations, but even if stated honestly, it will become a target for fury among the MAGA folk who believe the abolition of slavery discharged all obligations to African-Americans, and that the falsified past Coates speaks of was one long reign of glory endangered by political correctness and the demands of the previously marginalized. One of the most pervasive ideas of contemporary conservatism (championed, for example, by one of its leading lights, former House Speaker Paul Ryan), in fact, is that liberating impoverished people is best accomplished by denying them any government assistance at all, so as to spur them on the road to self-sufficiency.

So Democrats and the media need to set the record straight on what “reparations” actually mean when discussed by Warren, Harris, and others. But they shouldn’t run away from the inevitable conflicts over what they domean and do propose. They owe a reckoning over racism’s legacy not just to the descendants of slaves and sharecroppers and victims of official and unofficial discrimination; they owe it to their country and its willingness to live up to its purported values.

If that offers Donald Trump another demagogic talking point for 2020, so be it. He’s not going to start telling the truth simply because Democrats tell less of the truth than they should.

It hasn’t made headlines because it’s a complicated story, but gradual changes in how the Democratic presidential nominating process is going to work were in my opinion worth an analysis at New York:

From the beginning of the modern era of popular control of the presidential nominating process (basically inaugurated in 1972) to very recently, the unrepresentative nature of the first two stops on the road to the presidency, the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses and the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary, was a chronic complaint. This was especially true for an increasingly diverse Democratic Party that nonetheless gave two small and very white states (as of the 2000 census, Iowa was 94 percent white and New Hampshire was 96 percent white) protected status as dominant factors in the nominating process.

After the 2004 cycle, Democrats (followed eventually by Republicans) got serious about this problem, and introduced calendar reforms that added two more diverse states — Latino-heavy Nevada and African-American–heavy South Carolina — to the early mix. Super-honkified Iowa and New Hampshire still got to go first, but nonwhite voters got to have a say before the whole deal was done. Indeed, Barack Obama’s successful nomination strategy combined an Iowa win with a dominant performance in southern states with large African-American voting populations, beginning with South Carolina. Hillary Clinton followed the same pattern in overcoming a terrible New Hampshire performance in 2016 by wins over Bernie Sanders in Nevada and South Carolina that put her ahead for good.

The 2020 nominating contest will represent a big leap forward in the development of a more diverse early calendar for Democrats, as Ron Brownstein explains:

“As in every recent Democrat primary race, the 2020 contest will begin in two virtually all-white states, with the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary in early February. But after that the next month of the primary calendar is dominated by states across the Sun Belt where non-white voters comprise a large share, and often an absolute majority, of the electorate.

“This decisive turn toward diversity, reinforced by California’s decision to move up its primary to Super Tuesday, represents a potentially critical new wrinkle in the nomination process. The pivot begins with Nevada and South Carolina, where contests will be held in the second half of February. The tilt toward diversity then explodes in early March when big Sun Belt states from Florida, North Carolina and Virginia in the southeast to Arizona and Texas along with California across the southwest will all crowd together on the calendar.”

This shift may actually be intensified by the fact that while Iowa and New Hampshire have never embraced early voting, their new competitors emphatically have, as my colleague Gabriel Debenedetti has pointed out:

“[S]trategists aligned with potential contenders’ teams are already starting to plan for 2020 by operating under the assumption that early voting in California — the state with the most delegates up for grabs — will start the very morning of Iowa’s evening caucuses, the traditional kickoff. (Vermont’s primary voting will have already begun by that point, if the current expected schedule holds.)

“Usually, all the attention then shifts to New Hampshire directly after Iowa. This time, though, Ohio and Illinois could both begin their own early voting before the Granite State’s day in the spotlight, and Georgia and North Carolina could start the day of New Hampshire’s primary. Then the windows could open in Tennessee, Texas, Arizona, and Louisiana before Nevada’s caucuses, let alone South Carolina’s primary.”

All these wrinkles are likely to reinforce nonwhite voting power, notes Brownstein:

“Through March 17, the Democratic candidates will face significant Latino populations in Texas and California on Super Tuesday and then Florida and Arizona on March 17 …

“Starting on Super Tuesday [March 3], large black populations will vote through mid-March in Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida and Illinois. In all of these states, minorities comprised at least about two-fifths of the 2018 vote, and they reached majority status in several of them, including Alabama, Mississippi, Florida and Texas. Given the overall trends in the party, Democratic strategists consider it likely that the nonwhite share of the vote in virtually all of these states will be higher in 2020 than it was in 2016.”

If that’s not enough diversity, New York may move its primary to March as well.

These dynamics will likely help candidates who really do well among nonwhite voters while hurting those who don’t. It could, as in 2008, put a minority candidate in the driver’s seat, though the fact that there are at this point a Latino (Julian Castro) and two African-American (Cory Booker and Kamala Harris) candidates could keep the nonwhite vote split up for a good while.

[T]he former longtime duopoly of Iowa and New Hampshire will still matter in 2020. But they’d do well to elevate candidates who are prepared to excel in the next very difference phase of the nominating process.