On reading a description of plans for the first Democratic presidential candidate debates of the 2020 cycle, I put down some thoughts at New York:

[A]nyone who has thought for a few moments about the giant Democratic presidential field that is currently assembling has probably wondered how it will affect candidate debates. Faced with a similar problem in 2016, Republicans devised a poll-based formula for participation in the first several debates. But since there were 17 (or a bit later, 16) candidates in the field, the networks sponsoring the debates divided them into two groups, with the top tier (ranging from 8 to 11 candidates) getting a spot in the main prime-time debate, and the remainder appearing in a prior (but little-watched) “undercard” or “kiddie table” debate.

As you can imagine, there was a lot of complaining about this arrangement from those left off the big stage. But it probably helped Republicans gradually winnow their enormous field into, well, Donald Trump and an assortment of candidates who were supposed to beat him.

Now Democrats are preparing for their first round of 2020 Democratic debates for June, to be sponsored by NBC News, MSNBC, and Telemundo. And with a field that could potentially include well over 20 candidates, the Democratic National Committee has had to face some of the same decisions Republicans encountered last time around. Perhaps because of residual bitterness from former and current Bernie Sanders supporters over the DNC’s role in minimizing the number of debates in 2016 — presumably in the interests of Establishment favorite Hillary Clinton — the party is taking a lighter hand this time around. So while there is a formula for getting on the stage, there’s no “kiddie table,” and if the field is really large, random rules for sorting out participation could lead to some rather interesting combinations:

One of the first developments of the 2020 congressional election cycle was a retirement from a veteran House member from Georgia. It was more significant than the end of a particular man’s career, as I discussed at New York:

One sign of Georgia’s changing political environment occurred on Tuesday night, when 2018 Democratic gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams was tapped to provide the national party’s response to Donald Trump’s State of the Union Address. Another occurred today when five-term Republican congressman Rob Woodall from the north Atlanta suburban 7th district announced he would retire in 2020, after very nearly losing last year.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Woodall’s Gwinnett County base was synonymous with the growth of the Republican Party. I distinctly recall a moment when environmentalists complained about the destruction of trees in the county, and the top local developer responded: “Gwinnett is not for trees.” It was for massive subdivision and strip mall development, and rapid middle-class (and upper-class) population growth.

Woodall was certainly a fixture in Gwinnett GOP politics, serving on the staff of hard-core conservative congressman John Linder for 16 years before succeeding the boss and winning at least 60 percent of the vote in his first four races. He clearly underestimated his 2018 Democratic opponent Carolyn Bordeaux. But he had a bigger problem, as the Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman observes:

“The 7th CD is the epitome of a high-education melting pot. In 2010, when Republicans first drew the seat, it was 50 percent white and in 2012, Mitt Romney carried it by 22 points, 60 percent to 38 percent. But in 2016, President Trump carried the district by just six points, 51 percent to 45 percent. Now, Census estimates peg it at just 47 percent white, 19 percent Hispanic, 19 percent African-American and 13 percent Asian.”

Among other things, this slice of Gwinnett County is home to Koreatown (or K-Town), an enclave of economically rising Korean-Americans who are very active politically. Woodall and other local Republicans just couldn’t keep up; he won by 419 votes, and only after a recount.

With Woodall retiring and Bordeaux preparing to run again, Wasserman says of GA-07 that it “may be [Democrats’] best pickup opportunity in the country.” And the whole state of Georgia may represent a serious pickup opportunity in the Senate–and for the presidency, too.

Amidst all the fatuous talk of bipartisanship in anticipation of the State of the Union Address, I had an idea that I explained at New York:

Anyone who expects bipartisanship somehow to break out between now and the 2020 election has clearly been asleep for the past four years.

That is not to say, however, that we should give up on promoting ideas that might have appeal in both parties, particularly if they don’t depend on the approbation of the president. One such idea could be of urgent relevance before you know it: getting Republican as well as Democratic leaders to denounce right now any prospective challenge to the legitimacy of the 2020 election based on vague and unsubstantiated claims and theories of “voter fraud.”

As Phillip Bump noted today, not only Trump but other Republicans are getting into the comfortable habit of making up or massively embellishing illegal-voting claims:

“It took just over a day for an announcement from the office of the Texas secretary of state hinting that thousands of noncitizens might have voted to make it into President Trump’s Twitter feed.

“’58,000 non-citizens voted in Texas, with 95,000 non-citizens registered to vote,’ Trump wrote, apparently lifting the data from an episode of Fox & Friends. ‘These numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. All over the country, especially in California, voter fraud is rampant. Must be stopped. Strong voter ID!’

“A bit later, he retweeted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who hyped the same numbers with an all-caps intro: ‘VOTER FRAUD ALERT.'”

As Bump goes on to explain, the “reports” from Texas, like those from other jurisdictions in recent years, melt away into near-nothingness once they are are scrutinized. And that’s again the backdrop of years of mostly Republican-inspired investigations of alleged in-person voter fraud that never, ever, ever turn up more than a handful of violations. As recently as the month before last, first House Speaker Paul Ryan and then his successor as House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy bought into a conspiracy theory blaming GOP losses in California on voting “irregularities” such as the sinister-sounding procedure called “ballot harvesting,” which really just means letting third-parties deliver signed-and-sealed-under-oath mail ballots.

As you may recall, Trump repeatedly claimed, with zero evidence, that he was robbed of a 2016 popular vote plurality by “millions” of illegal votes cast by non-citizens. This was the basis for his so-called Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, led by voter-fraud fabulist and anti-immigration zealot Kris Kobach, which was dissolved after a few months mostly consumed with fights with Republican and Democratic election officials who refused to turn over sensitive personal data to this bunch of yahoos. That largely put an end to the 2016 “controversy,” but no one at the time much thought through what would have happened had Trump lost the electoral college, making the illegal voting claims far from academic.

It’s likely that responsible Republican office-holders, many of whom didn’t take Donald Trump seriously until they had to, wouldn’t have let him create a disputed election and a constitutional crisis absent clear and compelling evidence that he wasn’t just pulling these allegations out of his prejudices and the files of his sketchy white-nationalist backers. We’ll never really know. But now, after two years of falling into line with Trump and adopting his passions and fevers as their own, is it clear at all that Republican opinion-leaders, from Fox & Friends to the Capitol, would tell Trump to leave office quietly if he lost decisively in 2020 and still claimed he was robbed by swarthy rape-loving “criminal illegals” pouring across the southern border? With the Supreme Court, the U.S. Tax Code and a long-desired rollback of regulatory restrictions on corporate misbehavior in the balance? I don’t know.

This is a possibility that needs to be taken right off the table right now. That means Democrats should waste less time trying to convince Republicans to help them get Trump on a one-way ticket to Palookaville before the 2020 election and more time getting them to agree he should get on the train to retirement immediately afterward if he loses. Yes, maybe he’ll go quietly on his own, but anyone who doubts he’s capable of calling the military in to defend his continued occupation of the White House needs to read his tweets for a few days and reconsider.

Like a lot of observers, I had a sense of deja vu after hearing calls for a strike of TSA workers who are toiling without pay, and I wrote about it at New York:

As Trump’s partial government shutdown drags on with no end in sight, attention is beginning to shift from furloughed federal workers and unperformed tasks to “essential” federal employees who are being forced to work without pay. Their ranks swelled this week as the administration “recalled” an estimated 46,000 furloughed workers, the majority of them at the IRS, where the GOP’s precious tax cuts are being doled out via endangered refunds.

Many of the “essential” employees are at work on chores remote from the public eye, such as processing oil-drilling paperwork for the nation’s extremely vital fossil-fuel industry, already reeling from years of Democratic persecution. Even IRS staff are invisible to most taxpayers lucky enough to avoid audits or other enforcement actions. And so the most visible symbol of involuntary servitude during the shutdown has become the 51,000 employees of the Transportation Security Administration. For anyone who flies, they are essential employees indeed, and the rising number who are calling in sick to protest the situation have already caused serious airport delays.

The union representing TSA employees has gone to court to challenge the work-without-pay system, but a parallel petition by the union representing IRS employees was rejected earlier this week by a federal judge who warned of chaos if unpaid workers were allowed to go home until pay is appropriated. So each day that passes without progress toward a resolution of the stalemate in Washington increases the possibility of the previously unimaginable: a TSA strike.

This specter was raised publicly in a New York Times op-ed by Barbara Ehrenreich and Gary Stevenson, who noted the relatively low pay (a starting wage of $23,000) and high visibility of TSA agents, plus the possibility that they could build on last year’s wave of public-sector labor activism:

“T. S.A. workers should use last year’s teachers’ strikes as a model. They were called not by the leadership of the teachers’ unions but by the rank and file. It was a new kind of labor activism, starting at the bottom and depending heavily on community support. By sticking together and creating their own communication system, the teachers succeeded in sending a powerful message of solidarity and strength.”

But Ehrenreich and Stevenson also acknowledge a specter haunting the potential TSA strike that could shut down the nation’s airports:

“In 1981, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization struck over wages and working conditions, prompting President Ronald Reagan to fire 11,000 highly skilled workers, replacing them with military personnel. Patco was destroyed and unions in general retreated into a defensive crouch. Who wants to risk something like that again?”

That’s a good question. Reagan’s decision to fight the illegal strike was risky and curtailed air travel for quite some time. But it worked wonders for him politically, as Joseph McCartin observed years later:

“He showed federal workers and Soviet leaders alike how tough he could be. Although there were 39 illegal work stoppages against the federal government between 1962 and 1981, no significant federal job actions followed Reagan’s firing of the Patco strikers. His forceful handling of the walkout, meanwhile, impressed the Soviets, strengthening his hand in the talks he later pursued with Mikhail S. Gorbachev.”

Whatever it did or didn’t accomplish in concrete terms, the PATCO strike and its aftermath became a key part of the Reagan mythos and the enduring adulation he earned from conservatives. You could see how that example might be appealing to his current successor, who views himself as a world-historical figure fighting resolutely for America against a host of subversive forces.

So just to play this out, if TSA workers did go on strike, could Trump respond the way Reagan did? That’s unclear. On the one hand, there is no military equivalent to the armies of TSA screeners deployed at U.S. airports. On the other, screening is a vastly less complex process than air traffic control functions; presumably military personnel could be trained to take on screening responsibilities with reasonable dispatch.

The politics of breaking a TSA strike are not entirely clear, either. PATCO members struck over standard collective-bargaining issues like pay, benefits, and working conditions. The federal government has clearly breached its contract with TSA employees, and nobody supports the travesty of extended involuntary work without pay, even if pay is guaranteed (as it has been in legislation passed by Congress and signed by Trump) when the shutdown is finally resolved. In addition, Trump has the alternative remedy of simply letting the federal government reopen and continuing his fight with Democrats over his border-wall fetish without the hostages he’s chosen to take. And in the final analysis, Trump, the border wall, and the shutdown are all significantly less popular than Ronald Reagan was in 1981.

Still, one can imagine malevolent aides whispering in Trump’s ear that breaking a public employee strike could be a legacy-making “accomplishment,” much like it was for Reagan, and long before that, for Calvin Coolidge, whose successful battle against a Boston police strike in 1919 led to his vice-presidential nomination in 1920 and his ascension to the presidency on the death of Warren Harding.

A TSA strike might push him to an impulsive action a more prudent executive would avoid like the plague. But for unpaid workers and those spoiling for a definitive fight with Trump, it might be worth the risk to defy him.

For the most part the Trump administration’s public line is that the current partial government shutdown is not as big a deal as his desired border wall, but that to the extent it’s inconveniencing people it’s the fault of congressional Democrats. But that’s not the only administration voice we are hearing, as I wrote about at New York.

Yesterday at the Daily Caller, however, a sinister, anonymous senior Trump administration official offered a different rationale for continuing the shutdown indefinitely:

“As one of the senior officials working without a paycheck, a few words of advice for the president’s next move at shuttered government agencies: lock the doors, sell the furniture, and cut them down.

“Federal employees are starting to feel the strain of the shutdown. I am one of them. But for the sake of our nation, I hope it lasts a very long time, till the government is changed and can never return to its previous form.”

This latest Anonymous goes on in that vein for paragraph after fatuous paragraph, weaving a right-wing fantasy vision of lazy, evil bureaucrats sabotaging the noble president and his patriotic political appointees. Without a shred of documentation, this very Trump-y individual stipulates that 80 percent of the employees in her/his agency, and apparently all of the furloughed employees, do no work at all because they cannot be fired, and conspire with Congress (the Congress that until 11 days ago was controlled by Republicans) to create and maintain worthless programs. Thus, although it will impose sacrifices on the handful of essential employees currently working without pay, an extended shutdown is necessary to prove to the American people that the only government they need is the “free market night watchman” state “our founders envisioned.”

But what strikes the reader most about this cri de coeur for an indefinite shutdown is how nicely it fits into the annals of gutless conservative strategies for shrinking government indirectly and dishonestly. The most famous was the late-20th-century “starve the beast” strategy, which meant cutting taxes and deliberately engineering large federal budget deficits in order to force spending cuts (ideally by liberals) that conservatives couldn’t or wouldn’t propose straightforwardly. I once called this “the fiscal equivalent of a bottomless crack pipe” for Republicans, because it enabled them to tell themselves and their “base” they were doing brave things like attacking entitlement programs while never actually taking the political heat for it. Similarly, the Daily Caller’s correspondent wants to use the essentially mindless vehicle of a partial government shutdown to do what Trump and Republican pols don’t have the courage to propose. You could call it a “furlough the beast” strategy.

The supposition that “[m]ost Americans will not miss non-essential government functions” is already proving to be erroneous — unless “most Americans” is meant to exclude those who might want safe food or adjudication of tax disputes or federal-guaranteed mortgages or any number of other services and benefits that would be strained or eliminated in an extended shutdown. That’s aside from the fact that “essential employees” can’t be expected to toil without pay perpetually, as this “senior official” apparently has the wherewithal to do.

In the end, this op-ed may just be an ideological self-indulgence for those who always want to believe that the government Americans keep voting to maintain is just one gimmick away from vanishing. But at a time when the president is twisting in the wind, unable to figure out how to deal with a government shutdown that he stumbled into after a temper tantrum, this is one whisper in his ear we don’t need. Trump has already retweeted this recommendation of the Daily Caller piece from his son:

 

After watching Donald Trump’s lame-o Oval Office Address and observed the trajectory of events, I commented at New York on what’s likely next.

No one had any reason to expect significant progress in border wall/government shutdown negotiations in the wake of last night’s Oval Office address from the president warning the country of evil immigrants pouring over the border to murder innocent people and pillage the land. But things deteriorated really quickly, as the Washington Post reported:

“Talks between President Trump and congressional Democrats aimed at ending a partial government shutdown collapsed in acrimony and disarray Wednesday, with the president walking out of a White House meeting and calling it “a total waste of time” after Democrats rejected his demand for border wall funding.”

The surrounding dynamics were pretty bad. Pelosi mocked Trump for failing to show any sympathy for the federal workers and contractors being hurt by the shutdown: “He thinks maybe they could just ask their father for more money. But they can’t.”

And Trump had this to say on Twitter:

“Just left a meeting with Chuck and Nancy, a total waste of time. I asked what is going to happen in 30 days if I quickly open things up, are you going to approve Border Security which includes a Wall or Steel Barrier? Nancy said, NO. I said bye-bye, nothing else works!”

Aside from that data point, and the steadily increasing human suffering it involves, Senate Democrats are filibustering everything that Mitch McConnell brings to the floor until such time as a House-passed bill to reopen the government, pending additional border-wall negotiations, receives a vote. So one way of viewing today’s drama is that Trump is going through the motions of a conventional food fight with Democrats before reaching for his not-so-secret weapon:

Short of compromising, which he seems less and less inclined to do, the emergency declaration option, for all its legal and political uncertainties, may be the only way Trump can back his way out of the government shutdown he triggered after losing his temper at a December 11 meeting with “Chuck and Nancy,” and then getting trashed by conservative mediawhen he tried to creep away from his belligerent position. It would let him declare victory after unilaterally ordering the redirection of Pentagon money for border wall construction, then magnanimously let the government reopen. That’s assuming the courts let him get that far before hauling his administration into the dock, and fellow Republicans don’t freak out at the potential abuses of power the declaration could make possible.

Whether it’s a good idea or not, Trump seems to be working quickly to dynamite any other paths out of the morass. There’s quite an irony, though: Having signally failed in his big speech to convince anyone other than his “base” that there’s any sort of real emergency on the southern border, the president will now simply declare one.

n reviewing what House Democrats said they wanted to do in 2019, one item really stood out to me, and I wrote about it at New York:

In recent years the struggle over voting rights has been played out across the complicated landscape of state governments, and in the federal and state courts. The new Democratic majority in the U.S. House is signaling that it wants to change that, and return to the now-lost era when the federal government acted to guarantee voting rights everywhere.

The House Democrats’ first bill, the “For the People Act,” has three major sections. One (as my colleague Sarah Jones has explained) involves campaign-finance reform. Another focuses on ethics and lobbying reform. The third, as voting-rights expert Ari Berman notes, covers a broad range of efforts to protect the franchise against recent, mostly Republican abuses:

“This includes nationwide automatic voter registration, Election Day registration, two weeks of early voting in every state, an end to aggressive voter purging, funding for states to adopt paper ballots, the restoration of voting rights for ex-felons, and declaring Election Day a federal holiday. While states control their voting laws, Congress has the power to set voting procedures for federal elections.

“The bill would also target partisan gerrymandering by requiring independent commissions instead of state legislatures to draw congressional maps.”

These are all familiar ideas, already in place in many states (other than, obviously, the idea of a federal holiday to vote). But taken altogether as a package, they are unprecedented:

“The bill represents the most far-reaching democracy reform plan introduced in Congress since the Watergate era. Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig calls it ‘the most important civil rights bill in half a century.’ It also builds on recent state-level efforts to expand voting rights: In the 2018 midterms, eight states passed ballot measures to make it easier to vote and harder to gerrymander.”

In a separate measure that will be introduced later, House Democrats plan to offer a bill that would reconstruct the federal “preclearance” system for potential voting-rights violations that was struck down as obsolete in the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder Supreme Court decision, as Talking Points Memo explains:

There’s actually faint Republican support in Congress for fixing the VRA — veteran GOP congressman James Sensenbrenner co-sponsored a bill in the last Congress with Democrat John Conyers to do just that — but it has been of zero interest to party leaders or the Trump Justice Department.

And in fact, none of the voting-rights initiatives House Democrats are promoting have any sort of immediately viable future so long as the GOP controls the Senate and Trump is in the White House. But the priority Democrats are placing on this set of issues is potentially significant, for two reasons.

First of all, making voting rights a national political issue instead of a state-level preoccupation or an obscure subject of litigation could pave the way to major reforms if and when Democrats have a governing majority in Washington. The last big federal voting-rights push occurred after the 2000 Florida fiasco, and resulted in the Help America Vote Act of 2002, a pallid set of largely hortatory encouragements, supplemented by inadequate grants, aimed at getting states to clean up their act in administering elections. It notably failed. Maybe next time Congress will get both tougher and more generous in creating carrots and sticks for more voter-friendly registration and election systems.

But as the HAVA example sadly illustrates, voting rights simply have not been a day-in-and-day-out preoccupation, even for Democrats, but rather an occasional topic of discussion during and occasionally just after electoral outrages. The current House Democratic focus on voting rights, and particularly its comprehensive nature, is a very good sign that this crucial issue is finally getting the attention it deserves, at least on one side of the partisan barricades. And perhaps, though this is less likely, Republicans can even be shamed into rethinking their increasingly reflexive opposition to voting rights, which used to be limited largely to its neo-segregationist southern conservative wing.

Today’s celebration over Nancy Pelosi’s return to the Speakership spurred some interesting ruminations about where House Democrats were ten years ago, which I wrote about at New York:

Nancy Pelosi was formally elected House speaker today, regaining the gavel she wielded from 2009 until 2011, then lost in the 2010 elections. As Ron Brownstein notes, it is a significantly different House Democratic Caucus she will lead than the one that was sworn in ten years ago with Pelosi as its speaker:

“Though slightly smaller, the Democratic caucus that’s assuming power is far more ideologically and geographically cohesive than the party’s previous majority 10 years ago. While the 2009 class included a large number of Democrats from blue-collar, culturally conservative, rural seats that were politically trending away from the party, the new majority revolves around white-collar and racially diverse urban and suburban districts that are trending toward them….

“In 2009, 49 House Democrats represented seats that had voted for John McCain in 2008. Even after November’s gains, only 31 Democrats now hold seats that voted for Donald Trump. Moreover, Republican DNA was more deeply engrained in those earlier split-ticket seats: Of the 49 Democratic-held seats that voted for McCain, 47 also voted for George W. Bush in 2004. This time, only 14 Democrats represent districts that voted for both Trump in 2016 and Mitt Romney in 2012, according to calculations by Tom Bonier, the chief executive officer of the Democratic voter-targeting firm TargetSmart.”

The new House Democratic majority is significantly more rooted in suburban and urban America. The number of members from relatively rural districts, says Brownstein, dropped from 89 in 2010 to just 35 today. That doesn’t mean ironclad party unity, but does mean Democratic divisions will largely be limited to less emotional fiscal and economic issues rather than the culture-war hot buttons that often divided them in the past.

There’s really nothing about the new majority, however, that should keep Democrats from full-throated resistance to Trump and his radical agenda on immigration, the environment, and the rule of law. And above all, they do not have their predecessors’ burden of advancing a Democratic president’s controversial agenda.

The Democrats elected with Speaker Pelosi in 2008 did a lot of heavy lifting in enacting the Affordable Care Act and passing a cap-and-trade bill addressing climate change (which the Senate never took up). This (alongside economic distress and white conservative resentment of the first African-American president) made them ripe targets for Republicans in 2010.

If Democrats retake the White House in 2020, perhaps their House Caucus will have a similarly critical and politically perilous set of assignments (particularly if Democrats take back the Senate as well). For now they will probably be united just enough for the limited if dramatic role they will play in the next two years. They won’t be able to make laws, but they can break virtually all of Trump’s legislative designs, while utilizing the House’s investigatory powers to expose the corruption and possibly the criminality underlying his 2016 campaign and the strange administration it produced.

Thinking about the perpetual challenges to Democratic Party unity, I discovered and nourished a new concern: 2018 provided some fresh fodder for those who want to enforce ideological rigor. I wrote it up at New York.

This is the time when political analysts take a long look back and a longer look forward at what the midterm results mean for the two political parties, led often by ideological factions determined to prove their way is the highway to success in the next contest.

This is an especially urgent task for moderates of the center-left and center-right, who often take credit for wins in hostile territory and warn that they alone can win the big presidential prize just down the road — or at least that used to be the case. Nowadays, moderate Republicans are an endangered species, and at the presidential level, being at least “moderately conservative” or having some distinctively savage brand of right-wing politics like Donald Trump has become mandatory. The ideological “struggle for the soul of the party” is more common among Democrats, who haven’t had a loud-and-proud lefty president since FDR.

With no clear presidential front-runner for 2020 and a huge array of potential candidates lining up, Democrats will have plentiful opportunities to argue over which ideological persuasion gives them the best opportunity to topple President Trump and salt the earth that brought his monstrous presidency to life. But the empirical case for any particular type of Democrat having an advantage in 2020 did not get much of a boost from what happened in 2018, according to top-shelf political scientist Alan Abramowitz:

“The outcomes of House contests in 2018 were overwhelmingly determined by two factors — the partisan composition of House districts and the unpopularity of President Trump in many of those districts, including some that had supported him in 2016 …

“[The results] had very little to do with the characteristics of the local House candidates. In making their choices, voters apparently were far more concerned about which party would control the House than about who would represent their district. As a result, the advantage of incumbency reached its lowest level in decades — less than three points in terms of margin, according to an analysis by Gary Jacobson.

A corollary to the irrelevance of incumbent characteristics was that ideology didn’t much matter either:

“[F]or both Republican and Democratic incumbents, election outcomes were overwhelmingly explained by the presidential vote in the district. Moreover, the incumbent’s voting record had little or no influence on the results. For Republican incumbents, conservatism had a very small and statistically insignificant negative impact on incumbent vote share. For Democratic incumbents, liberalism had a very small and statistically insignificant positive impact on incumbent vote share.”

These findings have limited implications for Republicans, who, barring something unforeseen, are stuck with Trump in 2020. And however you choose to define Trump’s ideology, he has shown little to no interest in appealing to Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (other than those who already share his white nationalist tendencies).

For Democrats, though, the idea that running “to the center” generates no measurable electoral gains will be a central talking point for those who want to run hard to the port side of the ship. Indeed, for many self-conscious progressives these days, there are only two plausible reasons for a Democrat being anything other than a progressive: pure political expediency, or corrupt submission to corporate power. Only the former justifies the presumed sin of centrism.

This is a pretty important issue in intra-Democratic debates. While progressives may excuse, say, a Democrat’s refusal to fully embrace an immediate leap to single-payer health care in conservative areas of the country, they tend to assume such a centrist posture must be accompanied by public or private acknowledgement that of course Medicare for All is the ultimate goal. It is far less acceptable to claim that some other form of expanded health coverage — say, Obamacare with a strong public option — is actually a superior policy. That sort of talk must reflect a sellout to private insurance interests, or so it seems to those who assume that Democrats should press for as much democratic socialism (to choose the most prevalent label) as political markets will bear.

There are going to be other leftward pressures on Democrats going into 2020. As Jamelle Bouie argues, white Democratic presidential candidates seeking to display solidarity with an increasingly nonwhite primary electorate may seek to do so with more controversially progressive positions. But in the general election, if it just doesn’t matter what flavor of Democratic policy thinking you use to spice up your messaging, since everyone is polarized for or against Trump as a matter of first principle, then left activists are going to want to know why any Democratic candidate doesn’t steer steadily to the left.  Moderates need a better answer than “I have a poll!” Because this time around, they probably don’t.

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.