After reading repeatedly about Democratic prospects in 2018 and 2020 being spoiled by “Democratic extremism” or
“Democrats moving too far to the left,” I smelled a rat, and wrote up my findings at New York:

There is a convention going back into the mists of time whereby the Democratic Party is thought of as a disorganized and divided mess. The early 20th-century humorist Will Rogers, himself a Democrat, once said:

“The difference between a Republican and a Democrat is the Democrat is a cannibal. They have to live off each other, while the Republicans, why, they live off the Democrats.”

He wasn’t trying to be funny on that occasion, and it made a fair amount sense to think of the Donkey Party as an unwieldy paradox back when it was the preferred political vehicle of rural populists, southern segregationists, urban machines, and ethnic minorities doing battle with a Grand Old Party that mostly revolved around defending economic privilege and deploring anything that wasn’t WASPy.

But the “Democrats in Disarray” meme has lived on, and for a brief moment in the late autumn of 2016, it was pretty accurate, as Democrats reeled from a shocking defeat against a presidential candidate who looked more like a cartoon villain than a serious aspirant to high office.

As New York’s Eric Levitz explained last November, however, any talk of Democrats being fatally divided or in despair during 2017 was visibly rebutted by the steady drumbeat of Democratic victories in special and off-year elections.

Democrats don’t have nearly as many special elections to show they’re feeling their oats this year, and they’ve lost some of the huge, double-digit lead in the generic congressional ballot that was regularly appearing when Levitz wrote his upbeat assessment of Democratic prospects. And for those (both conservatives and conflict-seeking mainstream-media folk) who deeply cherish the Democrats in Disarray meme, those special elections are helpfully being replaced by party primaries in which Democrats are running against Democrats! Imagine that! Worse yet, in some of these primaries the winners are self-proclaimed progressives! And as we all know, the American people have a deep craving for sensible centrists who want to cross the party aisles and get things done. If Republicans don’t have any of those anymore, then by God, it’s critical that the loyal opposition keep the faith and avoid extremism.

Veteran political writer Walter Shapiro has written a useful skewering of this all-too-common narrative, which has been sent into overdrive by the June primary victory in New York of Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over House Democratic Caucus chairman Joe Crowley:

“[A]n emblematic story led Sunday’s New York Times under the print headline, “Democrats Brace as Storm Brews Far to Their Left.”

“The themes of the Times story and dozens like it are familiar. They all highlight young activists such as 28-year-old giant slayer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who upended potential Nancy Pelosi successor Joe Crowley in the New York primary. Risky issues are highlighted as main stream Democrats recoil from demands for single-payer health insurance and the abolition of ICE (the acronym for Immigration and Customs Enforcement)….

“Yet by the historical standards of Democratic internecine warfare, today’s disputes are like 6-year-olds battling with foam swords.”

Spoken like a man that remembers the fraught intraparty ideological battles over the Iraq War, Clinton’s “New Democrat” movement, Cold War defense spending and national security strategy, and civil rights. Democrats are more unified on a host of issues — including hot buttons like abortion policy, criminal justice, and the social safety net — than they have been for years. And Democratic Socialists represent but one influence bubbling up from the grassroots. As Shapiro notes, for a party allegedly in the grips of an existential crisis, they’re in pretty good shape:

“It’s hard to identify a Senate or House seat that is being lost because of excessive Democratic activism. Even if a Democratic incumbent like North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp is troubled by calls to ax ICE, there is scant evidence that this makes her more vulnerable than before in a state that Donald Trump carried by better than a two-to-one margin.

“No incumbent — not even Heitkamp or Joe Manchin in West Virginia — is being denounced as a DINO. According to a new Monmouth University Poll, moderate Democrat Rep. Conor Lamb, who won a high-profile special election in western Pennsylvania earlier this year, holds a hefty lead in his bid for a full term. Lamb is a prime example of a Democrat who has prospered by defying litmus-test politics in his opposition to Nancy Pelosi as House speaker.”

There’s really not much excuse for the hyperventilation so evident about the Democratic Party falling apart or “going off the deep end.” So why is this narrative so ever-ready?

Some of it is simply the result of a lazy habit of “balancing” the chaos coming out of the White House every day with the “disarray” allegedly found within the opposition party. But a deeper motive, particularly in conservative media, is the need to distract attention from the ideological revolution going on in the GOP by suggesting that something equally if not more alarming is going on across the partisan barricades. The idea is very simple: If you can’t expand your support beyond the ranks of the party “base” by “moving to the center,” then a good fallback position is to deny your opponent “the center” by alleging it’s being taken over by extremists. Aside from blurring the natural public and media focus on the strange people running the country and almost daily destroying old GOP positions on issues ranging from trade and deficits to the environment and NATO, the “here come the socialists!” cry appeals viscerally to the false-equivalence needs of MSM reporters and pundits who are constantly seeking protection against claims of liberal bias.

And so Ocasio-Cortez becomes, somehow, a vastly more significant figure than her most obvious recent conservative counterpart Dave Brat of Virginia, who similarly upset a congressional leader of his party in 2014. That’s true even though Brat almost certainly was emblematic of a strong rightward trend in the GOP, while the jury is definitely still out on whether Ocasio-Cortez is a harbinger of a world to come or simply an adept local pol who upset a complacent incumbent in an incredibly low-turnout primary in an incredibly atypical district.

It’s possible we are about to witness an extremist polarization of both parties to an extent unknown since the Spanish Civil War. But that’s not at all clear at this point, and as for Democratic divisions, none seem to matter nearly as much as a common revulsion toward Donald Trump and his enablers. As Shapiro observes, parties are ultimately defined by presidents. We see what that has meant for the GOP since 2016. Let’s give Democrats a chance to display their own proposed new leadership in 2020 before deciding they are equally feckless or reckless.

Morning Consult’s latest batch of quarterly approval rating data has a very important comparison of senatorial and presidential numbers that I shared at New York:

[T]en Democratic senators are running for reelection in states that Donald Trump carried in 2016 — some by large margins. Amid partisan polarization and the growing trend toward straight-ticket voting, it seems impossible that all (or even most) of these anomalies could survive in 2018.

But there are two mitigating factors we sometimes forget: (1) presidential elections are comparative, while midterms tend to be (usually sour) referenda on the party that controls the White House, which means you cannot assume the partisan balance in any given state will remain the same, and (2) it’s not 2016 anymore, and Trump’s popularity can’t be assumed to have remained static all this time in every state.

You can see the difference a more dynamic view of the “Trump Ten” senators makes in the latest quarterly state-by-state numbers showing Senate approval and disapproval ratings from Morning Consult. They did something interesting: They directly compared the average net approval ratings for senators from April through June with those of the president over the same period of time in the same states. Turns out eight of the Trump Ten are doing better than Trump himself in their states.

Perhaps the most interesting numbers are from North Dakota, which Trump carried by 33 points against Hillary Clinton in 2016. In the second quarter of 2018, however, Trump’s net approval rating in North Dakota was minus-10 points. Now as it happens, Heitkamp isn’t in great shape; her own net approval rating is zero, and she faces a formidable GOP opponent in U.S. Representative Kevin Cramer. But it looks like Cramer, not Trump, is her problem, which gives her some freedom to be more critical of the president than she might otherwise be in a state he had carried so overwhelmingly.

Another good example is Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin. Yes, Trump narrowly carried her state in 2016. But in Q2 2018 his average approval rating there was minus-16 points. By comparison Baldwin’s net approval rating over that period was plus-5, which is immensely better. Similarly, Trump carried Ohio in 2016 by eight points, which was impressive given the state’s recent voting history. But his Q2 2018 average approval rating in the Buckeye State was minus-6, while Senator Sherrod Brown’s is plus-16. No wonder Brown is presently a solid favorite for reelection.

The two Trump Ten Democratic senators who do trail Trump in Q2 2018 approval ratio averages are Joe Manchin and Claire McCaskill. West Virginia was Trump’s second-best state in 2016 (after Wyoming); he won it by an astonishing 42 points. He’s still pretty popular there, with a plus-23 net approval rating in the second quarter of this year, as compared to Senator Joe Manchin’s plus-3. Manchin’s divided GOP opposition and his long familiarity with the state are helping him keep a lead in the polls. Missouri’s Claire McCaskill’s tepid minus-4 approval ratio trails Trump’s (plus-2), but not as much as you’d normally expect in a state he carried by 21 points.

Meanwhile, Trump’s net approval rating in Montana, which he carried by 20 points, has sunk to plus-3, while Senator Jon Tester’s looking pretty good at plus-14. The gap between presidential and senatorial net approval is smaller in Indiana (Trump is at plus-5, Joe Donnelly at plus-8). Florida’s Bill Nelson is at plus-10 (Trump is at plus-2 in Florida), but his problem is not so much Trump as his opponent Rick Scott, who has endless money and a net gubernatorial approval rating (again, in the second quarter of this year) of plus-19.

None of this means Democrats will win control of the Senate; aside from the fact that several of the Democratic senators we’ve been talking about aren’t out of the woods just yet, Democrats need to find a way to beat at least one and preferably more than one Republican incumbent (or win an open seat like those in Arizona and Tennessee). But it’s important to remember that whatever his standing compared to where he was in 2017 or earlier this year, Trump remains generally weaker than he was when facing an equally unpopular Democratic opponent in a year when Democrats weren’t remotely as energized as they are right now.

Watching a political ad for Georgia GOP gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp, in which he labels himself as a “politically incorrect conservative,” made some things fall into place for me, which I wrote about at New York.

Not that long ago, “political incorrectness” (perhaps most conspicuously identified with abrasive lefty gabber Bill Maher, whose Comedy Central/ABC show Politically Incorrect was on the air from 1993 until 2002) was a politically anodyne (and bipartisan) term connoting a rebellious unwillingness to accept norms of civility in public discourse. A 2010 essay on the term in Psychology Today identified it with Maher, Larry David, and the subversive schoolyard humor of South Park.

But by 2016, “political correctness” had become the target of virtually every conservative politician in America. One pioneer was Dr. Ben Carson, who developed an elaborate conspiracy theory in which “political correctness” (an example he often used was restrictions on torturing terrorist suspects) was a weapon for suppressing free speech and disarming Americans in order to enslave them. But Donald Trump took attacks on the PC devil to a new level, in a one-two combo in which he would say something egregiously offensive and then pose as the brave rebel against political correctness. Trump branded this approach in the first GOP presidential debate in 2015:

“I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct. I’ve been challenged by so many people and I don’t, frankly, have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time, either.”

Again and again, Trump deployed this strategy, and by the time he won the GOP presidential nomination, most of the Republican Party had adopted the same evil habit of exulting in “brave” bigotry. By the time President Trump accused the 2017 Charlottesville counter-protesters as being as bad as the white supremacists they were protesting, anti-PC ideology had reached new heights, as I argued at the time:

“[I]n the blink of an eye, the backlash to acts of simple racial decency began. It was not confined to Donald Trump’s campaign, but in many corners of the right, hostility to ‘political correctness’ — defined as sensitivity to the fears and concerns of, well, anyone other than white men — became a hallmark of the “populist” conservatism Trump made fashionable and ultimately ascendent.”

By now being “politically incorrect” among conservative pols has become a totem of ideological orthodoxy as firm and clear as any lefty campus speech code. Georgia Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp has provided an especially clear example of its use in the ad he is running on the eve of his tight primary runoff with Lieutenant Governor Casey Cagle:

The title of this ad, tellingly, is “Offends.”

Its use by Kemp is particularly interesting because his earlier ads were an orgy of over-the-top right-wing madness, culminating in the proud “politically incorrect” claim.

Indeed, his opponent Casey Cagle, a hard-core conservative by national standards, was caught on tape complaining that the whole gubernatorial nomination process had become a competition to demonstrate “who had the biggest gun, who had the biggest truck, and who could be the craziest” — a clear reference to Kemp’s ads. But now Kemp just uses the “politically incorrect” tagline, and everyone knows what it means.

If Kemp wins his runoff on July 24 with this strategy, it is going to reinforce the already powerful Trumpian impulse to treat conservative “base” voters as motivated above all by the desire to go back to the wonderful days when a white man could without repercussions tell a racist joke, “tease” women about their physical appearance or sexual morals, and mock people who in some way (say, a disability) differ from one’s own self. At some point we may all come to understand that it’s not (except in some scattered college campuses) the politically correct who are imposing speech norms on the rest of us, but the politically incorrect who won’t be happy until offending the less powerful is again recognized as among the principal Rights of Man.

Now Kemp has been endorsed by Donald Trump. There is a comfortable consistency in that development.

A check-in on polling numbers led me to the following cautiously optimistic observations at New York:

[T]oday represented a bit of a landmark in the RealClearPolitics polling averages. The Democratic lead in the generic congressional ballot (asking respondents which party that want to control the U.S. House of Representatives) hit 8 percent for the first time in nearly four months.

Last time RCP showed Democrats up by eight or more points was in mid-March. Since then the lead slowly trended downward, hitting a low of 3.2 percent on the last day of May. But the rebound has been quick. At FiveThirtyEight, where a slightly different mix of polls are weighted for reliability and adjusted for partisan bias, the Democratic lead is up to a similar 8.5 percent. These are numbers considered consistent with pretty sizable net gains in House seats, and according to many analysts, probably enough to flip control, particularly since history usually shows the party not controlling the White House making gains late in the cycle during midterms.

Similarly, what looked earlier in the year like a steadily climbing Trump job-approval rating seems to have leveled off. According to RealClearPolitics averages, Trump’s job-approval percentage is at 42.8 percent. That’s precisely where he was three months ago, on April 12. At FiveThirtyEight, Trump’s average approval rating is at 42.3 percent, down more than a couple of points from his 44.8 percent posting four months ago on March 12. Instead of looking at an outlier 45 percent job-approval rating from Gallup in mid-June — a historic high — it seems more realistic to look at his current 46 percent rating from Rasmussen, the very pro-Republican survey where he hasn’t hit 50 percent since May.

So how does one explain the most recent trends? It’s hard to say, but for the most part it appears that both the generic congressional- and Trump-approval numbers are reverting to the mean after a brief period of pro-GOP and pro-Trump trends, perhaps because of a combination of less unambiguously robust economic news, abatement of high expectations from the North Korea summit, and all those distressing images from the southern border. Perhaps the numbers will turn around again, but at this point the commonly discussed (among Republicans, anyway) idea that 2018 would turn out to be a good GOP year after all seems implausible.

At the level of individual districts, projections unsurprisingly get cloudier. One trend worth watching was identified earlier this week by the Cook Political Report’s House race wizard David Wasserman:

“In the June NBC/WSJ poll, 65 percent of Democratic women and 61 percent of whites with college degrees expressed the highest possible levels of interest in the midterm elections. However, only 43 percent of Latinos and 30 percent of young voters (18 to 29) did.

“This explains why so far, the “blue wave” is gathering more strength in professional, upscale suburban districts where women are mobilized against Trump than in young, diverse districts where Democratic base turnout is less reliable.”

Since Democrats need gains in both kinds of districts, the national averages could be misleading. But on the other hand, the odds are still in the donkey’s favor:

“If the 24 Toss Ups were to split evenly between the parties, Democrats would gain 18 seats, five short of a majority. But that doesn’t take into account that there are 26 GOP-held seats in Lean Republican with strong potential to become Toss Ups, and an additional 28 GOP-held seats in Likely Republican with the potential to become more competitive. In other words, there’s still a lot of upside for Democrats.”

After some anxious weeks for Democrats in the spring and early summer, that’s not a bad characterization of the overall landscape in the House with under four months left to go.

After hearing and reading many Republican efforts to lower the stakes involved in the choice of a replacement for Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court, I offered this cautionary analysis at New York:

As Washington, D.C., girds its loins for the biggest Supreme Court confirmation fight since 1991 (when the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill saga riveted the country), conservatives are already working overtime to lull progressives to sleep by claiming fears a Kennedy replacement would help form a five-justice bloc ready to unravel abortion rights are exaggerated. The Wall Street Journal editorial board is offering the template for other “nothing to see here” takes:

“[T]he predictions of doom for abortion … rights began within minutes of Anthony Kennedy’s resignation last week. These predictions are almost certainly wrong.

“[T]his is what Democrats and their media allies always say. They said it in 1987 when Justice Kennedy was nominated. They said it in 1990 about David Souter, again about Clarence Thomas in 1991, John Roberts and Samuel Alito in 2005, and Neil Gorsuch in 2017. They even claimed the Chief Justice might overturn Roe because his wife is a Roman Catholic. Mrs. Roberts is still waiting to write her first opinion.”

Actually, “they” didn’t say that about Roberts or Alito or Gorsuch. Yes, the likelihood that these nominees would someday take advantage of the opportunity to overturn or greatly modify Roe v. Wade were factors in the debates over their confirmation, but nobody argued abortion rights were in imminent danger from placing any of them individually on the Court. During the period when Kennedy and Souter and Thomas joined the Court, there was every reason to fear that abortion rights were fragile, until Souter and Kennedy (along with Reagan nominee Sandra Day O’Connor) formed a new if narrow majority in the 1992 decision in Casey v. Planned Parenthood.

It is no exaggeration to say that the current era of conservative judicial politics really began with backlash against the “perfidy” of Republican-appointed justices like Souter and Kennedy and O’Connor in reinforcing abortion rights. That is why Donald Trump won so much conservative street cred by creating an official, exclusive list of SCOTUS prospects that would be vetted by the fiercely anti-Roe legal activists of the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation. Here’s how legal journalist Jeffrey Toobin described the views of chief Trump judge-vetter Leonard Leo, who is on leave from the Federalist Society:

“According to Leo, the vast majority of abortions are a consequence of voluntary, consensual sexual encounters, an opinion that influences his view of the procedure.’We can have a debate about abortion,” he told me. “It’s a very simple one for me. It’s an act of force. It’s a threat to human life. It’s just that simple …’

“As Edward Whelan, a prominent conservative legal activist and blogger, wrote recently, ‘No one has been more dedicated to the enterprise of building a Supreme Court that will overturn Roe v. Wade than the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo.'”

The odds of a secret supporter of abortion rights sneaking through a process that leads from Leo to Trump (who promised explicitly to produce a Court that would overturn Roe) are more than zero, but they are extremely low.

Like some other naysayers about the threat to Roe, the Journal editorial places a lot of stock in conservative respect for judicial precedents:

“The liberal line is always that Roe hangs by a judicial thread, and one more conservative Justice will doom it. Yet Roe still stands after nearly five decades. Our guess is that this will be true even if President Trump nominates another Justice Gorsuch. The reason is the power of stare decisis (or precedent), and how conservatives view the role of the Court in supporting the credibility of the law.”

Roe’s survival has in fact become steadily less, not more, certain, for the very simple reason that over the years one of America’s two national political parties has been completely taken over by politicians who want to see it reversed. The once-robust tribe of pro-choice Republicans is about to become extinct in the U.S. House, and is limited to two senators. The official position of the GOP as expressed in its national party platform goes far, far beyond reversing Roe and embraces enshrining fetal personhood in the U.S. Constitution. Now we have a Republican president whose relationship with conservative activists and particularly to white conservative Evangelicals depends heavily on an agreement to conduct a counter-revolution on the Court, a Republican Senate, and a judicial selection system created to root out constitutional heresy. Yet the Journal would have us believe it just won’t happen because it hasn’t happened yet.

Yes, it’s true the post-Kennedy Court with a second Trump justice might not overturn Roe and Casey immediately. They certainly don’t have to go the whole hog in order to significantly restrict abortion rights. The truth is that the Court experienced another key inflection point in 2016 in the Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt case in which Kennedy was one of five justices who headed off a massive wave of TRAP (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) laws being enacted by Republican-controlled state legislatures. A new justice replacing Kennedy could instantly form a majority ready to give a green light to state laws that could make the theoretical right to an abortion a dead letter in many red states with abortion clinics being run out of business. To look at it another way, runaway TRAP laws (justified by spurious health requirements) could create a practical situation much like the pre-Roe environment, when women needed the means to travel to more liberal states to secure an abortion.

Still, the possibility of a full reversal of Roe — at once or in stages — should not be underestimated. Yes, stare decisis (the judicial principle of respect for Supreme Court precedents) will complicate the process, but it’s hardly a straitjacket once a majority decides to overturn a precedent believed to be wrongly decided. As even the Journal notes, the Court just got through overturning a 40-year precedent in the Janus v. AFSCME labor case. Conservative justices, moreover, have in recent years arguably transformed constitutional law on a host of subjects ranging from campaign finance to voting rights to regulation of businesses. Even the Roberts Court’s most famous decision that disappointed conservatives, the NFIB v. Sebelius case on Obamacare, reversed decades of Commerce Clause precedents.

The reality is that conservatives have grown used to hiding the ball on Roe v. Wade and abortion policy — a habit that parallels the old (and still enduring) claim of Confederate apologists that the Lost Cause was about states’ rights rather than slavery. Democrats shouldn’t buy one any more than the other.

The recent craziness in the U.S. House, and the horrible images of kids in cages from the border, have not been good for the GOP. But as I explained at New York, there could be a lot more trouble where that came from.

With the dismal failure of two House Republican immigration bills in the last couple of weeks (bills that were doomed in the Senate in any event), there’s a sense that the Great Immigration Debate of 2018 in the GOP is over. After all, a lot of the recent agitation on the issue in the House was motivated by the desire of two different factions of Republican lawmakers — the moderates led by Representatives Jeff Denham of California and Carlos Curbelo of Florida, and the hard-liners centered in the House Freedom Caucus — to get their views on record before the November midterms. Everybody got to vote on the hard-core Goodlatte bill and the slightly less draconian compromise proposal — nicknamed Goodlatte II — so that’s all that had to happen, right?

Maybe, but maybe not. There are several future developments that could force the issue back into the limelight:

(1) A renewed bipartisan push to vote on Dreamers and more. The latest flurry of failed legislative activity in the House was successful in one limited respect: it did indeed head off a discharge petition (a rare procedure to bypass committees and the congressional leadership) that some of the GOP moderates were pushing — with the support of the entire Democratic caucus — that would have forced votes on a whole spectrum of immigration proposals, with the original DREAM Act being the most likely survivor of the process. Now that it has led to yet another dead end, it’s possible the discharge petition idea could come back.

If that looks like it could happen, you can expect Paul Ryan and the leadership to shout and scream about the perfidy of giving the godless Democrats power over the House floor schedule, at the risk of damaging vulnerable members like Denham and Curbelo, who are needed to keep the gavel out of Nancy Pelosi’s hands. Ultimately opponents of bipartisan immigration legislation would rely on VERY LOUD Trump promises to kill any such abomination should it arrive at his desk.

(2) A renewed uproar over the Trump administration’s treatment of migrant families. When the crisis over family separation at the border blew up in late June, it looked momentarily like Congress would be forced to act to stop the separations — until the president abruptly acted with an executive order that at least temporarily reversed his administration’s toxic policies. If the growing realization that kids are still being detained (just with their parents) revives the big public furor, and/or the courts strike down Trump’s executive order, the pressure for legislation could ramp right back up. But it’s not at all clear that any of the necessary parties to a quick legislative fix (House Republicans, Senate Democrats, or Trump) would go along with a narrow bill instead of insisting on tying it to some broader objective. As Politico reports, Trump might not go along at all:

“Although top White House officials support such a fix, one told POLITICO that he wasn’t sure the president would sign anything without getting concessions from Democrats. Indeed, a House GOP source said Trump was asking for wall money to be included in any standalone legislation keeping families together — a nonstarter for many lawmakers.”

If as some observers suspect, Trump and his top immigration adviser Stephen Miller exult in border chaos and think the prominence of the immigration issue is a good way to motivate the GOP base heading toward the midterms, then the odds of a border fix could go way down. But that would not eliminate the pressure on congressional Republicans to do something.

(3) The courts force a DACA crisis. The family-separation issue isn’t the only one where action in the federal judiciary could force immigration into the headlines and onto the congressional agenda. The long-simmering conservative legal challenge to Obama’s original DACA executive order — which created a protected category for immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally as children — could reach at least temporary fruition as well, as Rachel Bade explains:

“A conservative-leaning federal court in Texas is expected to rule on the constitutionality of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program as early as mid-July, pushing the issue to the fore again.

“The case, brought by Texas and several other Republican-dominated southern states, could contradict a previous court’s decision that halted Trump’s move to end DACA. The result could be that Dreamers again face the risk of deportation unless the Supreme Court — or Congress — weighs in.”

Trump could again use the peril to Dreamers as leverage to demand his own shifting but politically explosive set of immigration policy goals. And the status of Dreamers as the most politically attractive subcategory of undocumented immigrants will again put vulnerable Republicans on the spot.

(4) Trump threatens a government shutdown. Even if Republicans avoid a crisis forced by public opinion or the courts, their own president is perfectly capable of generating one all by himself, and has already threatened to do so. In March and again in April, the president publicly suggested killing must-pass appropriations legislation at the end of September (when the omnibus appropriations measure he grudgingly signed runs out) if he doesn’t get full funding for his border wall. And it apparently came up again in June during a private meeting on spending plans, as Burgess Everett reported:

“Trump fumed at senators and his own staff about the $1.6 billion the Senate is planning to send him this fall, according to two people familiar with the meeting. Trump wants the full $25 billion upfront and doesn’t understand why Congress is going to supply him funds in a piecemeal fashion — even though that’s how the spending process typically works….

“The president said at the meeting that if Congress doesn’t give him the resources he needs for border security, he will shut down the government in September, according to one of the people familiar with the meeting. He did not give a specific number, but has been fixated on getting the $25 billion in a lump sum.”

Even if the Trump threat comes and goes with his moods or negotiating strategy, it could place immigration policy back on the front burner in Washington whether or not other Republicans want it there. And it’s not just Trump, of course, who has tunnel vision about immigration: Breitbart News, many conservative activists, and a sizable chunk of the party’s electoral “base” won’t be happy until deportations soar.

So congressional Republicans can run from the immigration issue, but they sure can’t hide.

In the wake of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s bombshell retirement announcement, a lot of strategic re-calculations are underway. The most immediate involves the 2018 midterm elections, as I discussed at New York:

There is no question that the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy is one of the biggest political stories of 2018, and it will duel for attention with the fall midterms. It is a little less clear how the two big stories will intersect.

Democrats are calling on the White House and Mitch McConnell to delay the confirmation of a new justice until after the midterms, citing the rhetoric McConnell used in 2016 to deny Obama nominee Merrick Garland a timely vote:

My @SenateGOP colleagues should follow the rule they set in 2016 not to consider a SCOTUS nominee in an election year. Sen McConnell would tell anyone who listened that the Senate had the right to advise & consent, & that was every bit as important as POTUS’ right to nominate.

— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) June 27, 2018

If Republicans bent to this logic, the midterms would become, in part, a referendum on the Supreme Court, probably to an unprecedented extent given the gravity of this particular appointment. But so far they have shown zero interest in any sort of delay in getting a second Trump justice onto the bench, with McConnell planning confirmation hearings in August and a Senate debate and vote as soon as possible thereafter.

So if a new justice is in fact confirmed in September or October, will the saga actually affect voting in November?

Nate Silver addressed that question today, and found no clear answer. He stipulates that any development that equally stimulates the two parties’ bases could on balance help the GOP:

“If the midterm elections look more like the special elections we’ve had so far this cycle, in which Democratic turnout significantly outpaced Republican turnout, the GOP is very likely to lose the House and the Democratic wave could reach epic proportions. But without that enthusiasm gap, control of the House looks like more of a toss-up, at least based on the current generic ballot average.”

Since on balance Republican voters have shown more concern about SCOTUS than Democrats (as reflected in 2016 exit polls), a national obsession over the topic might goose GOP turnout disproportionately. But if the confirmation fight is all over by the time voters vote, will it still matter?

“[A]ssuming Trump has his choice confirmed by the Senate before the midterms, the Supreme Court will arguably be more of a backward-looking issue in 2018 than it was in 2016. I say “arguably” because Kennedy probably won’t be the last justice to retire under Trump; liberals Ginsburg and Breyer are retirement risks, as is conservative Clarence Thomas. Still, in 2016, voters were deciding on an open Supreme Court seat and not just the prospect of further vacancies.”

While it’s uncertain how much the SCOTUS fight will affect the midterms, the midterms could most definitely affect the SCOTUS fight. The last thing the large group of Democratic senators running in pro-Trump states need right now is a vote that could either infuriate the GOP’s right-to-life base or discourage anti-Trump Democratic voters. Three of them who are especially vulnerable — Joe Donnelly, Heidi Heitkamp, and Joe Manchin — voted for Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation.

At this point, the strategy for McConnell & Co. is pretty obvious: Proceed with the confirmation process as quickly as possible (The Hill noted today that confirmation of the last four justices took between 66 and 87 days), preserving the option, if the final vote looks dicey and/or something newly controversial about the nominee pops up, of pushing the whole thing into next year and then making the midterms a referendum on abortion and other constitutional issues for real. Even in the current environment, the Senate landscape gives Republicans a reasonable chance of adding to their slim margin in the upper chamber, as evidenced by this startling datum:

Fact: if all '18 election results were an 8% pro-Dem uniform swing vs. '16 prez results, Dems would gain 44 House seats & lose 4 Senate seats.

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) April 13, 2018

If the SCOTUS confirmation fight reaches its potential decibel level, it’s possible ears will still be ringing when early voting begins in October.

A lot of money gets thrown around in nationally critical elections these days. But some infusions of cash are bigger and more strategic than others, as I discussed at New York:

Democrats gained a major asset today in the form of a big new bag of campaign money, as the New York Times reports:

“Michael R. Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York City, has decided to throw his political clout and personal fortune behind the Democratic campaign to take control of the House of Representatives this year, directing aides to spend tens of millions of dollars in an effort to expel Republicans from power.

“Mr. Bloomberg — a political independent who has championed left-of-center policies on gun control, immigration and the environment — has approved a plan to pour at least $80 million into the 2018 election.”

Even in today’s environment, $80 million is a lot of money:

It was big news when Tom Steyer pledged $30m to flip the House.

It was very big news when Sheldon Adelson added $30m of his own to keep it in R hands.

This $80m from Michael Bloomberg to paint it blue qualifies as huge news. https://t.co/4liiH85VCr

— Gabriel Debenedetti (@gdebenedetti) June 20, 2018

And the impact of Bloomberg’s money may be enhanced if it is concentrated, as appears to be the plan, on competitive House districts in the kind of suburban districts where Bloomberg’s name isn’t mud:

“[Bloomberg will bankroll] advertising on television, online and in the mail for Democratic candidates in a dozen or more congressional districts, chiefly in moderate suburban areas where Mr. Trump is unpopular. Democrats need to gain 23 congressional seats to win a majority.”

While Bloomberg has been Democratic-leaning of late, and endorsed Hillary Clinton for president in 2016, this is the first time he’s really committed himself to the donkey team. Yes, he may still back a few Republicans in state and local races, but will “spend little or nothing on Republicans at the federal level, his advisers said.” And his chief adviser for the 2018 effort, by the way, will be longtime Democratic operative Howard Wolfson, who definitely knows the landscape.

When the key competitive House races come into sharp relief in the early autumn, Bloomberg’s money could become pivotal.

Here at TDS we try occasionally to police extremist language. It’s hard to keep up with Trump’s crude and violent rhetoric, but sometimes he crosses the most obvious lines, as I noted at New York:

[Trump’s rhetoric] is really, really getting out of hand, as a tweet today illustrated:

Democrats are the problem. They don’t care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country, like MS-13. They can’t win on their terrible policies, so they view them as potential voters!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 19, 2018

Josh Marshall makes the unavoidable historical connection:

“The use of the word ‘infest’ to talk about people is literally out of the Nazi/anti-Semites’ playbook for talking about the Jewish threat. It was also a standard for talking about Chinese in the western United States and it remains part of the vocabulary for talking about Romani (Gypsies) in parts of Europe. This is the most hard-boiled kind of racist demagogic language, the kind that in other parts of the world has often preceded and signaled the onset of exterminationist violence. The verb ‘to infest’ is one generally used to describe insects or vermin (rats), creatures which are literally exterminated when they become present in a house or building or neighborhood.”

This isn’t the first time Trump has seemed to use dehumanizing language about immigrants. In May there was a brouhaha over his reference to deported immigrants — including members of gangs like MS-13 — as “animals.” His supporters claimed the reference was only to MS-13 members, and Trump’s rambling form of discourse made that limited interpretation possible. In today’s tweet, there’s also a reference to MS-13, but the subject of the sentence is clearly “illegal immigrants” with the gang members just being an example.

But however you want to explain the meaning of his words or their intent, this is a rhetorical line that should never be crossed, regardless of its precise application. As Marshall notes, this is standard racist rhetoric with a deep and disreputable history (and not just in Europe: Rwanda’s genocidaires routinely called their victims “cockroaches”). And if the president’s Ivy League education did not equip him with an understanding of this very important aspect of 20th-century history, he needs some remedial education. He certainly seems willing to violate some similar norms about conditions in Europe today, as a tweet yesterday illustrated:

The people of Germany are turning against their leadership as migration is rocking the already tenuous Berlin coalition. Crime in Germany is way up. Big mistake made all over Europe in allowing millions of people in who have so strongly and violently changed their culture!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 18, 2018

Lecturing Germans on how to maintain their cultural purity is not a good look for anyone. MAGA people really need to look at the kind of things the man says that are redolent of some of the worst moments of human history, and instead of sniggering at the outrage he arouses show an understanding that sometimes being “politically incorrect” is just being dangerously wrong.

Any time new state-by-state data about Trump’s popularity comes out, I am very focused on those once-blue “Heartland” states that shocked the world in 2016 and lifted him to the presidency. So I wrote about some new Morning Consult findings at New York:

The president’s ratings among registered voters are underwater (more negative than positive) in the very heartland states he flipped from a past heritage of Democratic voting in 2016: Wisconsin (-12), Michigan (-9), Iowa (-7), Ohio (-4), and Pennsylvania (-4). In the short term, that matters because all these states other than Iowa have Senate races in November, and there are a total of 12 highly competitive House races among them (according to the Cook Political Report).

There are some other Trump ’16 states where his high standing has eroded significantly, including six that are holding Senate races this year: Arizona (+2), Montana (+3), Florida (+5), Missouri (+5), Texas (+5), North Dakota (+6), and Indiana (+8). There are other 2018 Senate battlegrounds, however, where POTUS is still very popular, such as Tennessee (+20), Mississippi (+23), and West Virginia (+27).

It may be argued that Trump did, after all, win in 2016 despite poor favorability ratings. But presidential elections are comparative, and Trump was fortunate to face a Democratic opponent with pretty bad favorability ratings as well. Since midterms are typically more of a straight-up referendum on the president (and are likely to be so even more with a president who dominates the news like this one has), lack of presidential popularity should be a much bigger deal. Yes, Trump’s national approval ratings have drifted upward in 2018, but are still well south of 50 percent. And there’s one bit of historical data from Gallup that ought to especially worry Republicans: the parties of presidents facing midterms with job approval ratings below 50 percent have on average lost 36 House seats.

Of course, 2020 is a different matter, and what happens then will depend on a thousand variables, including the identity of Trump’s Democratic opponent (assuming he’s running for reelection). But let’s don’t forget he won in the first place by executing what amounts to an inside straight based on extremely narrow wins in heartland states in the context of a national popular-vote defeat. And that’s why we might pay especially close attention to how his party does this November in those very states.