Reading a piece by the renowned Steven Teles about the possibility of an unorthodox 2020 Democratic nominee got me thinking, and I wrote about it at New York:  

Part of the explanation usually offered for the extremely unlikely elevation of Donald J. Trump to the presidency is that he outflanked a huge field of bland Establishment conservatives and forced an astonished Republican Party to take a wild ride with him all the way through November. And it’s true things might have turned out differently if Establishment conservative voters had been consolidated by a single candidate (say, Marco Rubio) early in the primaries, or had a hard-core ideologue like Ted Cruz gotten into a one-on-one with Trump before the deal was all but done. We’ll never know, of course; it’s possible an angry God determined to subject America to a Trump presidency from the get-go as punishment for our sins.

But in any event, the likelihood of an equally large 2020 Democratic field is quite naturally encouraging fantasies about an equally unorthodox outcome in that contest. No, unless Oprah Winfrey changes her mind and runs, there isn’t a Democratic analogue to Trump — i.e., an extremely well-known pop-culture icon who loosely embodies one party’s values and viewpoint while offering some variations that are attractive to certain constituencies (in Trump’s case, nativists, racists, globaphobes, and conspiracy buffs). But as Steven Teles argues, there could be enough clustering of candidates around the orthodox progressivism that Democratic activists prefer to create an opening for someone closer to the center:

“More than a dozen candidates may run for the Democratic nomination in 2020: governors from the Plains states, senators from the coasts, billionaire entrepreneurs. But the most serious so far—Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, and Bernie Sanders—run the risk of falling into the same trap as the main Republicans did in 2015. All of them—even the previously ideologically flexible Cory Booker—are competing for the same section of the primary electorate, one that wants to trade in centrist triangulation for social democratic economics. Given the repeated failures of deregulation, fiscal conservatism, and crony capitalism, this is an understandable instinct. Any one of these candidates could win the nomination if he or she were the only one in the mix. But there are (at least) four or five of them, all clustered around the same positions; come next summer, they will be fighting for the same voters, and as a result, they could all lose. It’s the same bad math that afflicted Cruz, Kasich, and Rubio four years ago, only now it’s on the other side.”

For this to happen, of course, there has to be a conjunction of supply and demand for a different kind of politics. Teles thinks it could be what he calls (following a terminology created by Michael Lind) “radical centrist” politics:

“[P]eople who are economically more left-wing—angry about the powerful moneyed interests who, they believe, have rigged the economy in their favor—but more traditional on questions of social order and skeptical of the nation’s governing elites. New America’s Lee Drutman recently found that these kinds of voters make up 29 percent of the entire American electorate.”

The “radical centrists” include most of those “populist”-oriented Obama–Trump voters Democrats lost in 2016. Teles describes a hypothetical candidate who could appeal to them via redistributive policies that don’t require big government or its clientele-tending bureaucracies, while also taking crime and immigration concerns seriously without becoming Trump-y. And he argues that there are enough voters craving this mix of policies to win a Democratic presidential nomination if the field is as large and ideologically conventional as seems likely at this point.

But where is the candidate who could become, in effect, the Democrats’ own Trump? For Teles, it could be anyone who sees the opportunity and hasn’t already cast her or his lot with the progressive ascendancy in the party:

“Such a candidate may not exist. But the potential Democratic contenders, like Joe Biden or Amy Klobuchar, who have not yet fully attached themselves to the left’s agenda, could incorporate at least parts of this appeal. And there may be an opening for a purer version of this ideologically unorthodox Democrat, especially someone like outgoing Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper or former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, who has not yet developed a clear political brand.”

Would a standard-brand Clinton–Obama “centrist” of the non-radical variety like Biden generate the kind of grassroots excitement Teles thinks is out there to be captured? It’s hard to say. A Suffolk-USA Today poll released just this week showed Democratic voters expressing roughly equal “excitement” about Biden and a hypothetical “someone entirely new.” Yes, the Democratic presidential nominating process with its strictly proportional delegate-award rules provides a clear path to respectability for any candidate who can win a consistent minority of primary or caucus voters. But then again, the heartland states most likely to support a “radical centrist” candidacy aren’t well-positioned early in the 2020 calendar. And the calendar — particularly now that California has moved up from June to early March — might well enable a progressive candidate to execute the voter consolidation coup that eluded Trump’s opponents.

All in all, a big Democratic field could just as likely produce a front-runner who has high name ID and/or unusually broad support (descriptions that could match not only Biden but Beto O’Rourke or even Bernie Sanders) as some sort of ideological outlier. But this scenario is a reminder that ideological conformity within a political party has its limits. To the extent the major Democratic candidates sound like magpies reciting a formula of single-payer–minimum-wage-job guarantee–stop-ICE, some voters may look for a different tune. And if there is a surprise nominee — left, center, or “radical center” — the horror of a second Trump term will likely keep Democrats in the harness despite their issues with the candidate.

As the federal government partially shut down following a strange series of changes in direction from the president, it’s appropriate to compare and contrast how Donald Trump and Barack Obama responded to his party’s midterm defeat. I wrote about that this week at New York:

The standard reaction to the way the president has behaved since his party’s midterm setback has been to note accurately that he is Donald Trump acting just like Donald Trump. There’s been no “pivot’ (other than his standard minute-to-minute erratic communications), no effort to project a “New Trump,” and of course, no acceptance of responsibility. To the extent the president has even reflected on the results, it has been to deny it’s a defeat at all (which is ridiculous if predictable), or to blame Republican losers for ensuring their own defeat via insufficient sycophancy toward his own self.

Before moving on to the reality that Trump will probably remain Trump right on through to the 2020 election, it’s worth looking back at how the last president reacted to his own midterm defeat in 2010. For one thing, Obama accepted responsibility for his party’s performance, as the Washington Postreported at the time:

“President Obama, appearing somber and reflective after what he described as a ‘shellacking’ at the polls Tuesday night, conceded Wednesday that his connection with Americans has grown ‘rockier’ over the last two years and expressed sadness over the defeats of congressional Democrats who supported him…

“In response to a question about how he felt when some of his Democratic friends and supporters in Congress lost their reelection bids, Obama said: ‘It feels bad. You know, the toughest thing over the last couple of days is seeing really terrific public servants not have the opportunity to serve anymore, at least in the short term.’ Not only is he sad to see them go, he said, ‘but there’s also a lot of questioning on my part in terms of, could I have done something differently or done something more so that those folks would still be here?’ It’s hard. And I take responsibility for it in a lot of ways.’ “

And Obama also made immediate and reasonably durable overtures to the opposition in a way that Trump hasn’t done except in the most superficial (“let’s compromise: do it my way!”) manner:

“He said he told Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Rep. John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), the new presumptive speaker of the House, that he is ‘very eager to sit down with members of both parties and figure out how we can move forward together.’ He added, ‘I’m not suggesting this will be easy. I won’t pretend that we’ll be able to bridge every difference or solve every disagreement.’”

These Obama gestures led to the long and murky search for a “Grand Bargain” over budget and tax policy, which didn’t produce any breakthrough (Republicans couldn’t bring themselves to support any sort of tax increase, and Democrats wouldn’t buy into “entitlement reform”) but did arguably help Democrats clarify their side of the argument and position Obama for reelection in 2012. It wasn’t as dramatic as what Ronald Reagan did after his party lost ground in 1982; he accepted two tax increases before rolling to a landslide reelection win in 1984. But both of these presidents understood that going along with electoral signals that they had initially overreached made a sort of reset possible which set the foundation for reelection.

If there is any discernible lesson President Trump drew from his midterm defeat (beyond denying it) it seems to be that he and his party did not go far enough in energizing its base by driving so deep a ravine between the two parties that any talk of bipartisanship would be a laughable ruse. So instead of discussing a “Grand Bargain,” Trump has created a situation in which even a no-brainer tiny bargain to keep the federal government operating through the holidays looks very unlikely. To the extent that his strategy (or lack thereof) going forward relies on confrontation rather than actual negotiation, with (presumably) 2020 preelection polls and then the election results determining the “winner” rather than any policy accomplishments, Congress could shut down for much of the next two years and it would not make much difference, now that his party has lost the House.

Thinking about Trump’s 2020 campaign slogan led me to ask a simple question, which I wrote about at New York.

After some more messing around with exit poll data (no, it’s not perfect, but it’s got value for sure), something that few observers have noted struck me, and I wrote it up at New York:

Democrats made big gains among college-educated suburbanites in the 2018 midterms. Higher Latino turnout helped in certain parts of the country. Young people voted in numbers better than some expected, and remained solidly Democratic. And even in that famously pro-MAGA demographic, white working-class voters, there were signs of Donkey progress.

But let’s don’t ignore the fact that another recently conservative demographic group became bluer than in the last two elections: seniors. According to exit polls, over-65 voters went Republican by a spare two points (50/48). Republicans carried them 58/42 in 2010; 56/44 in 2012; 57/41 in 2014 and 52/45 in 2016. Even in 2008, the year of the Obama landslide, Republicans won seniors 53/45. This improvement by Democrats was particularly significant in that seniors are a steadily increasing percentage of the electorate; growing from 20 percent in 2010 to 22 percent in 2014 and 26 percent this year. It also suggests that some polarization scenarios that pit old conservatives against young progressives are a bit over-sold.

Even in what we think of as the heartland of Trumpism, among old white people, Democrats made similar progress. They won 36 percent of white seniors in 2014, 39 percent in 2016 and then 43 percent in 2018. A rising percentage of a rising portion of the electorate is a very good sign.

There are, of course, possible avenues for a renewed Republican trend among seniors, particularly if they stay away from proposing major benefit reductions for Medicare and Social Security (as they largely have since Trump became their leader). All other things being equal, senior, and particularly white seniors, are relatively conservative on cultural issues, including immigration. And even on “their” entitlement programs, it’s possible that Democrats will offer too much of a good thing, as Frederick Lynch recently warned:

“Older Americans probably suspect (as was the case with the Affordable Care Act) that Medicare for All might produce ‘socialized medicine’ that could shift Medicare resources from seniors to younger populations. In addition, these fears and resentments would be compounded if the resources were stretched to include millions of unauthorized immigrants who would become eligible for universal health care through citizenship.

“Mr. Trump has already articulated such fears and previewed a likely Republican strategy to attack Medicare for All as a ‘socialist’ scheme that will bankrupt Medicare: At a September rally in Montana, he said that Democrats want to turn the country into (socialist) Venezuela, destroying Social Security, and that they say ‘Medicare for All’ until they run out of money, which will be the third day, and it will be Medicare for nobody.”

Rebutting such myths will be essential for Democrats advocating a universal single-payer program. But most of all, Democrats need to avoid the temptation of mentally writing off old folks–especially old white folks–as they pursue what some have called a “coalition of the ascendant.” In the end, a vote’s a vote, and there are too many seniors voting to make them anything other than a constant target, even if Democrats don’t “win” them.

Now that the 2020 presidential election cycle has begun, there’s a big question hanging over the contest that I decided to explore at New York:

Assuming he is running for a second term, as he has consistently said he is, and assuming he hasn’t been removed from office or forced into a premature retirement by prosecutors and Congress, Donald Trump will need a reelection strategy. He has already announced a slogan (“Keep America Great”) that echoes his aspirational/nostalgic MAGA motto of 2016. And he has a nascent reelection campaign apparatus that looks a lot like his wild-and-woolly 2016 operation, as Gabriel Sherman reported in September:

“His re-election effort is typically Trumpian: sprawling, disjointed, and bursting with confidence. In February, Trump announced that Brad Parscale, the digital guru with the Billy Gibbons beard who led his 2016 online strategy, would be his 2020 campaign manager. Meanwhile, Trump has been crisscrossing the country holding fund-raisers, building up a war chest of $88 million in his first 18 months. Many cast members from the original campaign are expected to reprise their starring roles, including Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, as well as Corey Lewandowski, David Bossie, and Kellyanne Conway. Even [Stephen] Bannon is starting to find his way back into Trump’s orbit after a bitter falling-out.”

Sherman suggests that Trump 2020 will be roiled by rivalries involving its different GOP Establishment, Trump family, and right-wing “populist” spheres of influence. But whoever is in charge, and even if no one is in charge, the reelection effort needs a strategy. The weird thing is that it’s not clear there is one.

So it’s pretty obvious Trump needs to either expand his base of support, or somehow get his existing base to the polls in greater numbers without mobilizing voters who really dislike him. As the team at FiveThirtyEight observed today, nothing Trump has ever done seems designed to expand his base. And this week’s bizarre Oval Office confrontation with Democratic congressional leaders, in which he promised to shut down the federal government if he doesn’t get his border wall money shows the midterms didn’t change Trump at all, at least so far:

“[T]his is a complete play to the base, which Trump arguably already has locked up. If he’s looking to improve his fortunes, pursuing a government shutdown for something that the majority of Americans oppose doesn’t seem wise.”

If Trump is incapable of executing a “pivot to the center,” or just doesn’t want to, then what are his other options? He sometimes seems to believe that conditions in the country (and the world) will, under his stewardship, become so wonderful that voters will keep him around almost against their own will. But after two years in which steadily improving economic indicators and the absence of any fresh international crises haven’t done him much good in the court of public opinion, it seems unlikely that good times will suddenly lift him into popularity. And it’s far more likely that he’ll be dealing with an economic downturn by 2020, while his approach to world affairs isn’t exactly designed to keep things calm, either.

The other distinctively Trumpian strategy might be simply to gamble that he can solidify and rev up his base to previously unimagined levels. He did, after all, win non-college-educated white voters by a record margin in 2016, as Ruy Teixeira noted:

“In 2012, Obama lost whites without a college degree nationally by 25 points. Four years later, Clinton did 6 points worse, losing these voters by 31 points, with shifts against her in Rust Belt states generally double or more the national average.

“Had Clinton hit the thresholds of support within this group that Obama did, she would have carried, with robust margins, the states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Iowa, as well as (with narrower margins) Florida and Ohio. In fact, if Clinton could simply have reduced the shift toward Donald Trump among these voters by one-quarter, she would have won.”

Can Trump go higher with this base demographic? Nobody knows for sure, but the GOP margin among non-college-educated white voters dropped to a Romney-like 24 points in 2018. And the other, overlapping group of intense GOP supporters, white Evangelicals, probably can’t get much Trumpier than they already are.

Trump’s own midterm strategy focused on base turnout, with some limited success. But in the end, the percentage of the 2018 electorate that stronglyapproved of Trump was outgunned by the percentage that strongly disapproved of him by a not-so-close 31/46 margin. It’s not going to be easy for the president to get his fans fired up and marching to the polls in a hate frenzy without helping Democrats do the same.

The silver lining for the Trump reelection campaign is that he faced most of these problems in 2016 and won anyway. And that example may indicate the real 2020 strategy for the president: fire up the base just enough to get within striking distance and hope for luck and a Democratic opponent with popularity problems as large as his own.

The luck part may be difficult to reduplicate. Is there some equivalent to the Comey letter that could benefit Trump at the last minute once again? Will Democrats again misjudge and underinvest in key states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which in effect let Trump draw an inside straight for an Electoral College win? And will Democrats be so overconfident that many of them won’t bother to vote while many others waste their votes on third and fourth parties?

The more you think it through, the likely Trump strategy will be to do everything imaginable to drive down the positive sentiments associated with their Democratic opponent, perhaps enlisting those hated godless liberal news media assets who are driven by “fairness” to reinforce negative narratives about the candidate they are presumed to favor. The virtual certainty of a Trump campaign that exceeds in sheer savagery anything this country has ever seen before should serve as a warning to Democrats about how they think about their own nominating process. I argued earlier this year that Democrats should look for an unbreakable nominee — one with no obvious vulnerabilities in age, background, ideology or character that an absolutely unprincipled Trump campaign might exploit to drag her or him down to his level of unpopularity. Breaking his opponent by any means necessary looks to be Trump’s only avenue for extending his unlikely and heinous hold on the presidency.

Now that House Democrats are focusing on what they will try to achieve when they take control in January, I offered some serious if unsolicited advice at New York:

After a good election result, the conventions of American politics dictates that the winners boast of a popular mandate to do whatever it is they want to do. And if said election delivers less than total power, it’s customary to pledge a robust effort to reach across the aisle to the other party and get things done in the national interest.

You can see both of these conventions reflected in a letter that 46 of the 66 newly elected House Democrats sent to their leadership this week. They claim “a responsibility and mandate for change in the U.S. Congress,” and profess “the importance of addressing concerns that cross party lines.” In reality, of course, bipartisan legislation has become an endangered species, and the remaining Republican minority in the House is more obdurately conservative and partisan than ever. And there isn’t going to be a lot of “change” legislated in partnership with Donald Trump and a Republican-controlled Senate.

Still, these politicians fresh from the campaign trail are on fire to keep talking about “the cost of health care and prescription drugs, our crumbling infrastructure, immigration, gun safety, the environment, and criminal justice reform,” as the letter says. But given partisan realities, the question remains: to what purpose, exactly?

Roll Call’s veteran observer Walter Shapiro raises this question bluntly in terms of the agenda of House Democrats this next year:

“In truth, the only legislative power the House Democrats will have in 2019 is the ability to say ‘no.’

“With a comfortable House majority, the Democrats can veto the further dismantling of the Affordable Care Act, the construction of Donald Trump’s cherished border wall and the new trade treaty to replace NAFTA. But unless Mitch McConnell has a conversion experience rivaling St. Augustine’s, no House-initiated legislation will ever make it to the Senate floor.

“Yet it is easy to envision the House Democrats, goaded by their newer members, spending months arguing over the nuances of a single-payer health plan and wrestling with legislation to overhaul immigration enforcement. Against the backdrop of dire warnings about the acceleration of global warming, far-reaching environmental legislation is likely to be approved by the new House.”

So any progressive legislating the House does will be essentially a matter of “messaging,” or to put it less charitably, agitating the air while awaiting the power to do anything about it. Shapiro acknowledges that this isn’t necessarily a waste of time; policy debates Democrats have now in the wilderness may bear fruit if their party recaptures the White House (and particularly if it gains a trifecta) in 2020. But it’s still a bit of a shadow show. And ultimately, what will likely define the Democratic Party more than anything that happens in Congress will be the policy positions, agenda, and message of the person Democrats nominate for president in 2020. If there’s some “struggle for the soul of the party” on tap, it will take place in Iowa or South Carolina or California, not in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Complicating the picture is that the House will have the power to investigate Donald Trump and his satraps. Yet a lot of Democrats ran campaigns that underplayed or even ignored the Trump circus, and many of the younger members won’t be on the committees where investigations of the president and his administration play out.

So how should the House Democratic leadership deal with the pent-up Democratic desire to do something now that at least one venue is within their control?

Maybe they should take a long look at how Republicans managed their time in purgatory, from the reconquest of the House in 2010 until their achievement of the trifecta in 2016. Unlike today’s Democrats, they did have some opportunities for bipartisanship; President Obama negotiated with the opposition on items big and small far more often than President Trump has done. They did pass a lot of “messaging” legislation they knew the Senate (before 2014) or Obama would kill, but they certainly had no inhibitions about investigating every real and imaginary sparrow that fell to the ground as a result of Obama’s policies.

Most notably, beginning in 2011 Republicans in both Houses signed onto a series of budget proposals — collectively known as the Ryan Budget, in honor of their principal designer, the House Budget Committee chairman and then Speaker — that purported to represent the domestic policy agenda the party would pursue when it gained real power. And in late 2015, holding power in both chambers, they even passed what they advertised as a “trial run” for a huge budget-reconciliation bill that would repeal Obamacare, defund Planned Parenthood, block-grant Medicaid, and begin reshaping the federal government along lines conservative ideologues had promoted for decades. This was the ultimate use of legislation for “messaging:” Here’s exactly what we’ll do as soon as we have the power.

There’s no particular evidence that this sort of exercise helped Republicans win elections from 2012 through 2016, though it probably pleased a lot of conservative advocacy groups and donors. And whatever his ultimate intentions, when Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, given the GOP the long-awaited trifecta, it was not the result of a campaign waged on behalf of the Ryan Budget.

Given Trump’s indifference to conservative ideology, it’s a small miracle that something like the Ryan Budget emerged in 2017 as the united GOP’s first legislative priority. But as we now know, not everyone who voted for the trial run in 2015 voted for the big package of legislation known as Obamacare repeal when push came to shove, and Trump caused constant problems as well with his varying whims on the bill. Now Republicans have lost their trifecta, with Obamacare, Medicaid, and Planned Parenthood funding (among other GOP targets) still intact. And to the extent that they have an agenda going forward, it is lashed to the wavering mast of Trumpism, and whatever follows it. All that show-and-tell about their agenda was mostly a waste of time.

House Democrats should probably learn from their opponents’ experience, and spend less time rehearsing the tasks they will inherit with power, and more time making sure they arrive there in 2020 with the right kind of presidential leadership.

Perhaps I am overreacting to the reports of so very many Democrats contemplating 2020 presidential runs, but I meditated at New York on how that may be Trump’s fault.

In 2016, a presidential candidate who broke just about every rule about who is qualified to run for president and how a successful campaign should be run improbably won the GOP nomination, and then the presidency. More than two years after the fact, it’s still hard to understand how it all happened.

And now, as Democrats look for a challenger to Donald Trump’s reelection in 2020, an enormous field of potential candidates is forming — one that could overwhelm a nominating process designed to choose among relatively few rivals and produce a contested convention whose prize is fought over by a divided party. I can’t imagine that the two phenomena are not closely related.

It’s true that Trump blew up an awful lot of conventional wisdom. He’s the fifth president to have never won a previous elected office. But three of the others (Zachary Taylor, Ulysses Grant, and Dwight Eisenhower) were military heroes, and Herbert Hoover was a universally renowned humanitarian as the organizer of food aid to Europe during and after World War I, and then a two-term cabinet member and favorite of party insiders. Trump’s background, featuring multiple business failures and broken marriages and admitted serial adultery was unusual, too. And the way Trump campaigned was even more unprecedented, featuring nasty personal attacks on members of his own party (beginning with his mockery of the war service of his party’s most notable military hero, John McCain) and his frequent profane and belligerent utterances, alongside lies too frequent to count. And Trump also defied the ideological orthodoxies of his very ideological Republican Party by opposing the Iraq War and free trade. Yet he won.

And so there’s an inchoate sense that Trump broke the mold so thoroughly that anybody can run a viable race for president, perhaps successfully. That’s how you get multiple billionaires with no record of public service (e.g., Tom Steyer, Howard Schultz, and Mark Cuban) seriously considering candidacies; seven sitting Members of the U.S. House, which hasn’t produced a president since 1880, exploring presidential runs; mayors from municipalities as small as South Bend, Indiana (Pete Buttigieg) getting encouragement to run; septuagenarians galore (Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, John Kerry) looking for a fountain of youth; and politicians best known for respectable losses in statewide races (Beto O’Rourke and possibly Stacey Abrams and Andrew Gillum) making 2020 lists as well.

No, all these people won’t run, but few if any authoritative voices are telling them it’s a waste of time. One rich celebrity who did take himself out of the running, actor Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, summed it up well:

“‘I think in a lot of people’s minds, what Trump has proved is that anybody can run for president,’ Johnson says. ‘And in a lot of people’s minds, what he’s also proved is that not everybody should run for president.'”

That second part needs to be heard a bit more often. For one thing, Trump in 2016 had an asset that few potential candidates (even The Rock) possess, which is decades of heavy national publicity as a popular entertainment figure and as a very public businessman. He also had the corner on an high-value ideological position that virtually none of his intra-party rivals shared in his virulent opposition to comprehensive immigration reform, amplified by his dangerously blunt appeals to white Christian nationalist sentiments. It is unclear there is a “lane” in the 2020 Democratic presidential landscape that is equally open and undervalued by other pols.

And let’s face it: Trump got lucky. The 16 candidates he initially faced in the GOP contest gave him an excellent opportunity to remain viable as his support slowly grew. Had either Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz gotten a one-on-one shot at Trump a bit earlier in the contest, the mogul would have probably lost. As for the general election, no matter of Russian interference or Clinton email obsession would have gotten Trump into the White House if Hillary Clinton’s campaign had invested appropriately in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Yes, the conventional wisdom so neatly and confidently presented in The Party Decides has been shredded. More likely, though, Trump ‘16 was the exception that proves rules do exist, and a new, if modified, conventional wisdom that does make sense will emerge.

But politicians have always been willing to gamble on luck, and the phenomenon of a huge field of gamblers paradoxically makes the odds of something strange happening that much stronger. Democrats who don’t want to roll the dice in 2020 might want to consider ways to winnow their field before voters vote and we find out that there are not “three tickets out of Iowa,” as legend has it, but maybe ten.

As a transplant living in California, I’m pretty familiar with the electoral system here. And the things I’ve been hearing Republicans say on the subject are outrageous, as I explained at New York.

Some Republicans were so busy on the evening of November 6 spinning a poor midterm showing into a vindication of their party and president that they apparently missed the fact that the election wasn’t quite over. And later on, they professed mystification at the final results. I say “professed” because it’s hard to believe Speaker Paul Ryan is as stupid as he sounds here:

“The California election system ‘just defies logic to me,’ Ryan said during a Washington Post event.

“‘We were only down 26 seats the night of the election and three weeks later, we lost basically every California race….’

“’In Wisconsin, we knew the next day. Scott Walker, my friend, I was sad to see him lose, but we accepted the results on Wednesday,’ Ryan said. In California, ‘their system is bizarre; I still don’t completely understand it. There are a lot of races there we should have won.’”

The slow count from California should not have come as a surprise: It happened in the June 5 primary as well, and in the 2016 primary and general election. And it was in part the product of a 2015 change in state election laws allowing ballots postmarked by Election Day and received within three days to count. Since the share of Californians voting by mail has been going up regularly in recent elections, we’re talking about a lot of votes. Since mail ballots have to go through signature verification (just like in-person ballots go through at polling places), it takes a while to count them. There’s nothing new or nefarious about either of these practices. Voting by mail (or as the practice’s proponents prefer to call it, “voting from home”) is now quasi-universal in three states: Colorado, Oregon, and Washington. And much longer than California, Washington has for years allowed ballots postmarked by Election Day to count, leading to slow counts in that state as well. A Washington election official had an interesting reaction when asked back in 2012 about the consequences of a slow count:

“‘News reporters are the only people who complain about the vote-counting delay,’ said [Katie] Blinn, adding that Washington’s system is relatively inexpensive, accurate and encourages turnout.”

Apparently Speakers of the House also complain now.

While a spokesman for Ryan hastened to say he didn’t intend to claim a election fraud, his complaints echoed those of a California member of the Republican National Committee, Shawn Steel, who suggested just that in an op-ed for the Washington Times.

Citing Republican congressional candidate Young Kim’s 14-point lead at one point on the evening of November 6, Steel asks:

“How does a 14-point Republican lead disappear? Merciless and unsparing, California Democrats have systematically undermined California’s already-weak voter protection laws to guarantee permanent one-party rule.”

To those unfamiliar with GOP rhetoric, I should explain that “voter protection laws” means laws making it as hard as possible to vote. Consider Steel’s interpretation of the rule allowing ballots postmarked by Election Day:

“In California, voting doesn’t stop on Election Day. Absentee ballots need only be postmarked by Election Day, with ballots counted that arrive up to three days late. If ballots are sent to the wrong county, the ballot is valid for an additional four days….That means you literally have seven days after an election where a county could still be receiving legitimate ballots.”

Again, that’s been the practice in Washington for years, without complaint (other than from reporters). And when you think about it, why should we respect ballots cast on Election Day more than those filled out on or before Election Day that are duly placed in the mail, at their own expense? Should such voters have to guess how long it will take the postal service to deliver their ballots? This complaint only makes sense to someone who wants to make voting inconvenient, and hence rarer. Steel goes on to suggest that voting by mail is itself nefarious:

“In just four years, the number of absentee ballots distributed in California has increased by 44 percent. ‘Nearly 13 million voters have received a ballot in the mail, compared to just 9 million in the last gubernatorial election in 2014,’ notes Paul Mitchell, vice president of Political Data Inc.”

First of all, these aren’t “absentee ballots.” As is the case in a growing number of states, voting by mail is considered normal, not something you have to construct an excuse to do. And of course the number is rising: In California you can register as a “voter by mail” and you will receive mail ballots automatically so long as you keep voting. Steel points to an experiment that allowed a handful of counties this year to mail ballots to all registered voters as though that somehow encourages fraud. Again, that is the universal practice in voting-by-mail states; what’s the beef? You can vote by mail, vote in person, or not vote at all. Nothing has changed.

Here’s another bogus complaint from Steel, about what he calls, without a shred of evidence, “motor voter fraud:”

“Every person in California that interacts with the Department of Motor Vehicles is automatically registered to vote. This has predictably led to tens of thousands cases of voter registration problems. The state’s Motor Voter program has come under fire for double registering as many as 77,000 people and registering as many as 1,500 ineligible voters. The state’s bipartisan oversight agency expressed concerns about ‘serious problems with ensuring that the New Motor Voter Program works as intended and promised.'”

This is called “automatic voter registration” and 15 states (plus the District of Columbia) have similar systems. California’s just went into effect this last April, and those 1,500 ineligible voters (who were duly purged from the rolls) were out of the 1.4 million enrolled by September, when the errors were discovered and cured.

One more bogus complaint that you can hear other Republicans make involves something Steel confusedly calls “conditional voting”:

“California has effectively adopted same-day voter registration with the introduction of ‘conditional voting.’ This election cycle, voters who missed the 15-day voter registration deadline could request to cast a conditional ballot.”

Same-day voter registration is in effect in 17 states (plus D.C.). And “provisional ballots” have been in effect nationwide since the passage of the 2002 Help America Vote Act. It’s actually a means for ensuring against voter fraud, since provisional votes are not counted until their validity can be established. Yes, provisional ballots slow down vote counts, but the alternative — giving voters the benefit of the doubt and counting them all — isn’t likely going to be endorsed by Republicans….

This brouhaha might not matter if it did not feed the same myths of voter fraud that led Donald Trump to claim without a hint of evidence after the 2016 elections that “millions” of illegal votes had been cast for Hillary Clinton in California, robbing him of a popular-vote plurality nationally. Going into 2020, this sort of loose talk needs to be debunked wherever possible, unless we want to risk the possibility of a GOP election defeat that is not simply questioned but denied.

In looking at various analyses of where Republicans lost votes in the 2018 midterm elections, a pattern started to suggest itself, and I wrote about it at New York:

Most 2018 midterm postmortems have identified the same groups of voters as Republican weak spots. Chief among them are college-educated suburban voters, especially women, and millennials, who all stand out because they are swing voters likely to expand their share of the electorate, and because they really, really don’t seem to like the kind of GOP Donald Trump is building.

You know what else they tend to have in common? Progressive views on culture-war issues, which often offset comparatively more conservative views on economic policy, fiscal policy, and the size of the government. There are three notable state-level role models for Republican politics that caters to this combination of voter preferences, as RealClearPolitics’ Adele Malpass notes:

“The oxymoron of the 2018 elections is that three deep-blue states elected Democratic U.S. senators by wide margins while also electing Republican governors. In the so- called ‘People’s Republic of Vermont,’ voters overwhelmingly re-elected both progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders and Republican Gov. Phil Scott. It was the same story in reliably liberal Massachusetts where voters bestowed second terms on Elizabeth Warren and Charlie Baker. Ditto in Maryland for Ben Cardin and Larry Hogan. So how did Republican governors win in states where Hillary Clinton had some of her largest margins of victory in 2016?

“The campaign playbook was the same in all three states: stick to local issues while being socially liberal and fiscally conservative.”

But there’s a real problem with taking that approach at the national level. The sine qua non of “social liberalism” is being pro-choice on abortion policy. And in national GOP politics, that’s a position that has all but been read out of existence.

Yes, there remain two pro-choice Republicans in the Senate: Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. But Collins’s pro-choice street cred was severely damaged by her support for Brett Kavanaugh, and Murkowski’s relationship with her own party back home was strained by her “no” vote on that confirmation. And the anti-abortion movement believes the 2018 midterms significantly increased its power in the Senate and in the party, as the New York Times observed:

“Social conservatives said on Wednesday they were elated by the victories in the Senate and in the governors’ races, which they believe provide openings to push their agenda in the judiciary and the states even if a Democratic-led House ties up legislative priorities of President Trump and Washington Republicans.

“’We are so much stronger than we were before,’ said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion group that led an extensive turnout operation this year in states like North Dakota, Indiana and Missouri, where incumbent Democratic senators were defeated by anti-abortion Republicans. ‘We win when we go back to our roots,’ she added.”

With the Trump administration regarding its hard-core stance on abortion as central to its relationship with white evangelical “base” voters (a relationship policed by Vice-President Pence), the odds of the GOP giving a new breed of suburban political warriors space to maneuver on this issue are virtually nil. The next election, moreover, will be framed in no small part around the ability of Donald Trump to secure a second term in which to consummate a conservative judicial counterrevolution whose most immediate and important goal is the reversal of Roe v. Wade.

Polarization over abortion means that Democrats have all but lost their “pro-life” wing as well. But there are significantly more rank-and-file pro-choice Republicans than there are pro-life Democrats. And as Sarah Jones pointed out recently, Democrats don’t really need strongly anti-abortion voters to forge a majority. Republicans do need pro-choice voters, now and in the future, and at the worst possible time, their ability to accommodate that point of view is vanishing in the fires of the culture wars.

One of the great post-election rituals in recent years has been an assessment of the polls we all obsessed over before the first ballot was cast. I wrote about that at New York.

In retrospect, the national polls didn’t do badly at all that year, as Nate Silver explained:

“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.3 Certainly, there were individual pollsters that had some explaining to do, especially in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where Trump beat his polls by a larger amount. But the result was not some sort of massive outlier; on the contrary, the polls were pretty much as accurate as they’d been, on average, since 1968.”

Still, many Republicans have continued to believe that pollsters are generally part of a media establishment conspiring to undermine their confidence via the “fake news” of cooked data, as their leader has suggested:

The two fake news polls released yesterday, ABC & NBC, while containing some very positive info, were totally wrong in General E. Watch!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 24, 2017

“Nonpartisan House polls have historically missed the mark by an average of 5.9 points. This year it was just 4.9 points. Again, that means the average district poll was a full point closer to the result than usual….

“Statewide polling also had a strong year, although it should be noted that Senate and governors’ polling did pick fewer winners than usual. The average poll in the Senate was off by only 4.2 points. The average Senate poll historically has been off by 5.2 points, which means this year’s polls were a point better than average. Likewise, the average governor’s poll had an error rate of 4.4 points. That’s 0.7 point more accurate than the average governor’s poll since 1998.”

The reason for the “pick fewer winners” problem wasn’t so much polling error as the exceptional number of very close races. The gold-standard Cook Political Report rated nine Senate races and 12 gubernatorial races as toss-ups. There were a few races — which happened to be very high-profile contests — where the polls seemed to be off more than a hair, such as the Florida governor’s race, where the RealClearPolitics polling average on election eve showed Andrew Gillum up by nearly four points; it showed a slight lead for Bill Nelson in the same state; both lost by an eyelash. And the polls missed Mike Braun’s solid Senate win in Indiana. But the RCP averages correctly predicted the outcome of many cliff-hangers like the Georgia’s governor’s race and Senate contests in Missouri, Montana, and Texas.

Where there were mistakes, they didn’t follow any partisan pattern, as Nate Cohn observed in his review of midterm polling:

“On average, the polls were biased toward Democrats (meaning the Democrats did worse in the elections than polls indicated they would) by 0.4 points, making this year’s polls the least biased since 2006 and nothing like the polls in 2016, which were three points more Democratic than the results.”

And if you get into particular types of races, as Harry Enten did, the partisan “errors” were mixed:

“The average governor and Senate polls were about a point more favorable to the Democrats than the result. The average generic congressional ballot and House district polls were less than a point more favorable to Republicans than the actual result.”

Since sky-high turnout (the highest as a percentage of eligible voters in a midterm in over a century) may have been the biggest surprise of the elections, and the one pollsters would have had the hardest time predicting, the overall accuracy and balance were especially impressive. Certain types of voters, however, still seem to marginally elude pollsters, notes Cohn:

“The higher-than-expected turnout might have inadvertently contributed to a 2016-like pattern, since lower-turnout voters in the big urban states tend to be nonwhite and Democratic, while lower-turnout voters in rural, less educated states tend to be white working-class voters.

“In the Times Upshot/Siena polls, undecided voters tended to follow a similar pattern: In the Sun Belt, the undecided voters tended to be nonwhite Democrats; in the North, they were more likely to be white voters without a degree.”

So unsurprisingly, polls again tended to underestimate Republican votes in states with big white working-class populations and to underestimate Democratic voters in states with large nonwhite populations. And very late trends in undecided voters — which polls always miss to some extent — may have mattered here and there as well.

From a consumer’s point of view (and no one consumes polls quite like a daily political writer like yours truly), the big new development in 2018 was the large battery of House polls conducted by the New York Times in conjunction with Siena College. The combine not only supplied rare data on competitive House races (where a lot of the polling is private), but hit the mark quite often, as Enten notes:

“[The] increase in accuracy [in House races] was driven in large part by the Siena College/New York Times polls, whose surveys made up the bulk of district level polling and had an average absolute error of just about 3 points. That’s nearly 3 points better than average, which is off the charts good.”

If, like me, you believe the answer to questionable data is more, not less, data, the proliferation of polls is a good thing, even if quality continues to vary. And while Republicans may continue to follow Trump’s cynical habit of attacking any information that doesn’t confirm their own biases, you’d hope that at least privately they’d concede that more competition produces a better and more reliable result.