When a new group of Democratic centrists calling itself New Democracy was formed recently, I watched carefully, and had this initial assessment at New York:

Right away, the ranks of those who are ever-ready for a “struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party” rejoiced, glimpsing a new factional fight. That included conservatives eager to suggest the group would be a redoubt for pro-life candidates progressives wanted to exclude; progressives quick to label it as advocating the “rich-friendly neoliberalism inflected with white identity politics” that Democrats have begun to repudiate; and mainstream-media folk looking for a new entrant in the “fight over the party’s direction….”

Those who were familiar with the New Democrats (and the organization that launched them, the now-defunct Democratic Leadership Council) can be forgiven for assuming the new group would again be taking up the cudgels against “fundamentalist liberalism” and an interest-group-dominated Democratic Party — particularly given the new prominence of democratic socialist Bernie Sanders and his followers. After all, New Democracy’s founder, Will Marshall, was a co-founder of the DLC more than three decades ago, and he still espouses some of the same policy views (bemoaning economic anti-globalization and pessimism) and political perspectives (embracing a “big tent” party committed to persuasion as well as mobilization of voters) familiar to participants and spectators of intra-party fights in the past.

But in an interview with Ezra Klein, Marshall disclaimed any interest in struggling for souls:

“I was interested to see that Marshall has formed a new organization: New Democracy, which promises to “expand the party’s appeal across Middle America and make Democrats competitive everywhere.” The DLC wing of the Democratic Party has been surprisingly quiet as its legacy has come under attack, and as the argument over the future of the party has centered on how far left it should go. The debate, I assumed, was about to be joined. But when I reached him, that’s not what happened.”

“’I don’t know the one true path to durable progressive majorities, and I don’t think anyone else does either,” Marshall says. “’When you’re in the minority, you need to expand in every direction.’”

When asked to live up, or down, to his reputation as a lefty-basher, Marshall demurred:

“A few decades ago, Marshall helped lead a confident ideological insurgency that reshaped the Democratic Party from top to bottom. Today, he sounds chastened. ‘We’re not interested in engaging in sectarian battles for control of the Democratic Party’s steering wheel,’ he says. ‘New Democracy isn’t aimed at safe blue districts. The Democratic Party is doing well there. We’re focused on the competitive ground where we need to make big gains.'”

Among the current and former elected officials New Democracy has signed up, most are indeed from red and purple states. But they hardly resemble the “southern white boys” the DLC was often accused of representing. Their southern contingent prominently includes two African-Americans from the reddest of red states, U.S. Representative Terri Sewell of Alabama and Columbia, South Carolina, mayor Steve Benjamin. Perhaps their best-known white Southerner is New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu, whose conspicuous stand against neo-Confederate monuments makes the idea this group promotes “white identity politics” a bit absurd. Most typical of the New Democracy supporters is probably former Iowa governor and Obama Cabinet member Tom Vilsack, who has watched his state’s hard-won Democratic majorities unravel rapidly over the last few years, from the top to the bottom of the ballot.

I should note that I was a colleague of Marshall at the DLC back in the day. I almost certainly preceded and exceeded him in the sort of humbled reevaluation of the organization’s tenets that Klein observes, as reflected in my own conflicted assessment of the DLC when it closed its doors, in 2011. But his ecumenical spirit was exemplified by a joint statement on economic policy he co-signed with the American Prospect’s Robert Kuttner — yes, the same rigorously progressive Robert Kuttner whose commitment to economic “populism” made Stephen Bannon think he might make common cause with Trump in China-bashing — back in 2004. Some of us who knew both men thought this meeting of the Democratic minds could be a sign of the End Times.

In any event, Marshall and his colleagues appear to come in peace, asking for a job some Democrats are loath to do. As Jesse Jackson once said to a DLC gathering, “it takes two wings to fly.” That doesn’t mean party conflicts can be perpetually avoided. As Klein observes, when it comes time to nominate a presidential candidate for 2020, there can only be one winner. And Marshall’s suggestion of a red-state/blue-state division of labor won’t convince populists who believe that their own message, not some squishy business-friendly centrism, is the ideal ice-breaker for white working-class voters. But with Donald Trump still raging around the White House, and Republicans still controlling most of the levers of power in Washington and a majority of the states, a delay in the intra-party fisticuffs as long as possible probably makes sense.

After considerable meditation on why Trump’s sympathetic attitude towards Neo-Confederates hasn’t disturbed his base, I offered these conclusions for New York:

GOP elected officials have been unusually willing to put some distance between themselves and Trump on the validity of protests to defend Confederate and neo-Confederate symbols. But as my colleague Eric Levitz pointed out last week, that sentiment has not been shared by the large pro-Trump segment of the Republican base. Indeed, these voters are far more likely to agree with Trump’s reaction to Charlottesville than with the health-care legislation he has been promoting all year.

That’s the most important reason the president’s shocking expression of solidarity with the “fine people” among the open white supremacists carrying torches in Charlottesville has not much affected his approval ratings. It’s true, as Nate Silver observed this week, that Trump’s public standing is so generally low that a negative reaction to any one development might not move the needle much. But there was a visible erosion of support for Trump that appeared after earlier missteps, such as the firing of James Comey, and his embrace of a very unpopular health-care bill. Voters expect Trump to be — well, if not racist, then anti-anti-racist. And his supporters responded to demands to take down symbols of unvanquished southern white pride much as Trump did in his infamous August 14 press conference: as just another “politically correct” imposition on perpetually hard-pressed white people. As Silver puts it:

“Issues related to race, gender, sexuality, religion and social class have long been an animating force in American politics, of course. But they’ve come back in an especially strong way in the Trump era, so much so that views on these questions tend to be stronger markers of support for Trump than views on economic and policy issues.”

Drawing on research about the attitudes of 2016 Trump voters, Thomas Edsall goes further, suggesting that the president’s base easily identifies with white protesters against alleged offenses to “our history, our legacy,” as Trump himself put it in this week’s rally in Phoenix. Indeed, political scientists looking at Trump’s emergence as the shocking front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination last year noted at the time that “white racial identity and beliefs that whites are treated unfairly are powerful predictors of support for Donald Trump in the Republican primaries.”

A more recent study by prominent political scientists zeroes in on the importance of white racial grievances to core Trump supporters, as Edsall explains:

“The three authors describe a rapidly “growing sense of white victimhood.” They cite surveys showing that among Republicans, the perception of discrimination against whites grew from 38 percent in 2011-12 to 47 percent in January 2016.

“A February 2017 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute separately asked voters whether “there is a lot of discrimination” against various groups. 43 percent of Republicans said there is a lot of discrimination against whites, compared to 27 percent of Republicans who said that there is a lot of discrimination against blacks.”

These findings help us to understand the special rage Trump supporters exhibit when they (or their leader) are accused of racism. They think of themselves as the victims of anti-white racism. And Trump has frequently fed that perception, as Christopher Ingraham reports:

“Trump has used the word “racist” or “racism” at least 56 times on Twitter, according to the Trump Twitter Archive, a website that tracks and archives all the president’s tweets. In two-thirds of those Tweets, Trump levied accusations of racism at individuals or groups of people. And those accusations followed a very clear pattern: Trump has directed accusations of racism toward black people three times as often as he has done so against whites.”

Trump’s current determination to view anti-racists demonstrating in Charlottesville as just as objectionable as, if not more objectionable than, the white marchers whining about being “replaced” fits into this pattern, and has evoked a predictable, if shocking-to-elites, response from his core supporters.

You can argue all day long that this makes them, and him, prima facie racists. But racists or not, they are definitely anti-anti-racists who manifest a knee-jerk negative reaction to protests against racism as advancing the interests of non-white people who, in their view, have been coddled for too long. They oppose the removal of the statues of the Confederacy, not because they particularly care about them, but because anti-racists would like to see them removed. That is an attitude that is just beneath the surface in their attitudes toward race-tinged conflicts involving police violence and immigration, as well as monuments to the Confederacy and Jim Crow.

But even Trump must be careful not to take anti-anti-racism too far; there are limits to what even his core followers will support out of antipathy to his opponents. A quarter century ago, when David Duke (who was, like a political zombie, present among the white rioters of Charlottesville) was on the very brink of being elected governor of Louisiana, he wasn’t brought down by his past as a Ku Klux Klan leader. It was when photos of him wearing a swastika arm band as an LSU grad student started circulating (punctuated by opponent Ed Edwards saying to him in a televised debate, “I was working on welfare reform back when you were still goose-stepping around Baton Rouge”) that white Louisianans had second thoughts about making him their governor and national symbol. There were, of course, a lot more World War II veterans alive back then. Still, Trump must learn to keep his anti-anti-racism semi-respectable. It’s not an easy balancing act, particularly for a man of our president’s temperament.

But it could take many steps over the line to convince Trump’s base that he’s doing anything other than standing up for their rights. He may lose support for breaking economic policy promises, but on the cultural and racial front, they are quick to take his side against those they view as oppressors of the white majority.

It’s always worth looking at electoral history before looking ahead, and I did so today at New York.

[T]he [2018] Senate landscape seems impossibly difficult for the Donkey Party, which is defending 25 of 33 seats up next year, ten of them in states carried by Donald Trump last year. And of the Republican incumbents who are defending their seats, only two appear vulnerable at this point (though both, Jeff Flake and Dean Heller, are now really vulnerable, facing both primary and general-election opposition). Everyone understands that the pro-GOP landscape and the anti–White House midterm dynamics are pushing these races in different directions. But it’s hard to get a handle on the magnitude of these contending forces.

Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball filled in some of our knowledge gap today, with a study by Geoffrey Skelley of Senate races in midterms dating all the way back to 1914. The numbers are pretty clear: “91% (287 of 314) of non-presidential party incumbents won reelection in midterms.” That’s much better than the 75 percent midterm reelection rate of senators from the presidential party.

Lest you imagine this is all a vestige of a bygone era of wide-scale ticket-splitting, there’s this factoid:

“If anything, out-party incumbents losing in a midterm is becoming less common: In six of the last eight midterms, including the last three (2006, 2010, and 2014), no such incumbent lost reelection.”

Here’s the fun part of the Crystal Ball analysis:

“Applying the historical averages to next year’s Senate elections would result — drumroll please — in a net party change of…zero seats. If 91% of the Democrats/Democratic-caucusing independents are reelected, that would be 23 out of 25, and if 75% of the Republicans are reelected, that would be six of eight, leading to no net change.

“Without making any predictions, such a scenario is plausible: Democrats could lose two of the incumbents defending dark red states, in states such as Indiana, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, and West Virginia, but otherwise hold everything else, while Republicans could lose the only two seemingly vulnerable seats among their much smaller stable of incumbent-held states: Arizona and Nevada.”

It is clear that the tendency to lump all of the so-called Trump Ten senators into the same endangered category has never made much sense. Trump carried Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin by narrow enough margins that even the mildest midterm anti–White House breeze could carry Democratic incumbents over the finish line. Ohio (an 8-point Trump margin in 2016) is more promising for Republicans, with Indiana (a 19-point margin) and Missouri (18 points) even more promising, and Montana, North Dakota, and West Virginia (20-point-plus margins) really ripe targets. But Democratic incumbents in all these states have their own distinctive strengths, and at the moment not one of them is trailing according to the authoritative Cook Political Report.

There is one more imponderable to throw into the mix: Will the tendency of demographic groups that have recently become central to the Democratic coalition to significantly underperform in midterms change? There is reason to believe, in part based on special elections since Trump took office, that the spirit of resistance to the 45th president will offset some if not all of that phenomenon. But it’s something to keep in mind.

In general, the shape of the Senate after 2018 is going to be conditioned by a variety of competing and conflicting factors. One thing, however, is very clear: Had Hillary Clinton won last November, we would probably be looking at big Senate — and House — gains for the GOP next year. Using the in-party/out-party historical percentages, here’s what you’d get according to Crystal Ball’s Kyle Kondik:

“Just going by the averages, we’d expect the Democrats to lose a half-dozen seats and the GOP to lose one or even zero incumbents. And the net Democratic losses probably would have been even bigger because it’s easy to imagine one or more red state Democrats seeing the writing on the wall and retiring in advance of a tough midterm, giving the Republicans an easy open-seat pickup or two.”

In other words, had Clinton won, we might be talking about a GOP drive to get a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate. There are always silver linings for the party that falls short in presidential elections.

As part of our continuing look ahead at 2018, I offered these thoughts about 2017 developments at New York.

Projecting what will happen in midterm elections is always tricky. Yes, the party controlling the White House almost always loses House seats — though that didn’t happen in 1998 and 2002. Sure, the president’s approval ratings seem to have a very significant impact on the White House party’s losses or (in rare occasions) gains. But predicting approval ratings is tough.

But one bit of objective data you can track that’s not simply a matter of projections is the performance of the two parties in special elections heading toward the midterms. And while no one special election necessarily has predictive value, if you add them up it starts mattering.

That’s what Harry Enten did today at FiveThirtyEight, and better yet, he scored all these elections like a bookie would score a sporting contest: with a “spread.” In this case the spread was the partisan “lean” of every congressional or state legislative district that’s had a special election so far this year, based on its performance in the last two presidential elections, with the last one weighted most heavily (as one would expect). There have been five U.S. House special elections this year. Democrats beat the spread in all five, by an average margin of 16 percent of the total vote (ranging from 6 percent in Georgia’s sixth district to 23 percent in Kansas’s fourth district). That’s a lot.

There have also been 25 state legislative special elections this year. Democrats beat the spread in 21 of them, by an average of — again — 16 points. None of the four races where Democrats failed to do better than the partisan lean were competitive contests.

Enten notes that Trump’s approval ratings would historically suggest an 11-point GOP deficit. The generic congressional ballot has been showing a 9-point GOP deficit at present. So the special elections are showing a stronger swing to Democrats than the standard data points.

In any case, it represents a lot of arrows pointing in the same direction.

Like most everyone else, I was shocked by the president’s nonchalant and false-equivalence-laden initial reaction to this last weekend’s white riot in Charlottesville, and wrote a take for New York that delves a bit into the history involved:

There is a sinister congruence between the president’s reaction to the white-supremacist riot in Charlottesville yesterday and the object the rioters assembled to defend: the city’s doomed Robert E. Lee statue. Both are manifestations of Neo-Confederacy, the fierce, century-long effort of the Southern ruling class to normalize white racism so long as it did not degenerate into extralegal violence.

Like most of its counterparts across and beyond the South, Charlottesville’s Lee statue was not erected during the Civil War or in the period when ex-Confederates might be expected to remember the famed military leader of the planter’s rebellion. It was commissioned in 1917 and erected in 1924 as a monument, not to the Confederacy, but to the rebellion’s posthumous victory over Reconstruction and the Civil War amendments to the Constitution.

The Neo-Confederates and their many Yankee sympathizers viewed Jim Crow as a peaceable compromise between slavery and racial equality. In that regime’s latter days, whole generations of white Southern politicians posed as civil upholders of law and order equally opposed both to civil-rights “agitators” and to the white-trash hoodlums of the Ku Klux Klan, who were successors to the white terrorists that the “better element” of Southerners strongly supported during and immediately after Reconstruction. These politicians often condemned, as Donald Trump did yesterday, the “egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence, on many sides,” that threatened the quiet tyranny of Jim Crow. They preferred a “civil” resistance to equality in Congress and the courts, and in the genteel Citizens’ Councils that, as one sociologist aptly put it, “pursued the agenda of the Klan with the demeanor of the Rotary Club.”

The Neo-Confederates lost the battle against civil rights, but maintained a cultural rearguard for many years. You heard at least a faint echo of their words every time a conservative Southern politician hailed “law and order,” or attacked “the welfare,” or demanded maximum incarceration of African-American “predators.” This sort of politics maintained an unmistakable connection to nostalgia for the Old South, an imagined tranquil place of good manners and interracial understanding.

But until Donald Trump’s election, it seemed Neo-Confederacy had finally about run its course. The display of Confederate regalia on state flags, public buildings, and even football mascots gradually became distasteful, even to many conservative politicians. In 1993, when Georgia governor Zell Miller (later a conservative hero) proposed getting rid of the Confederate symbolism on Georgia’s state flag (imposed not during or after the Civil War, but during the period of white resistance to desegregation), soon-to-be House Speaker Newt Gingrich supported him. And by the time South Carolina governor Nikki Haley finally had the Confederate Battle Flag taken down from the statehouse after an outburst of racist violence — nearly 20 years after a Republican predecessor had proposed the same thing — it aroused little public opposition.

Yes, even hard-core conservatives began to understand that Confederate insignia were not just parts of history that today’s Southerners should “cherish,” to use the president’s startling allusion to the Lee statue, but part of a retroactive effort to whitewash history in the pursuit of racist lies.

But then, in 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.

And so the relatively uncontroversial movement to get Jim Crow era Confederate insignia and memorials out of the public square and back into museums and history books suddenly faced renewed opposition — not just from the motley crew of open white supremacists who viewed the 45th president as their hero, but from politicians who saw a broader constituency for a brand-new era of white backlash. It is no mistake that Corey Stewart — who was Trump’s 2016 Virginia campaign chair until he was dumped for excessive public hostility to anti-Trump elements in the Republican National Committee — seized on the decision of the Charlottesville City Council to remove the Lee monument as an example of contemptible “political correctness” in his surprisingly successful 2017 GOP gubernatorial campaign (which fell just short of upsetting the heavily favored Ed Gillespie). Stewart, who is now running for U.S. Senate, not only defended Trump’s refusal to distinguish between white supremacists and their opponents in the Charlottesville violence, but took it to the next level in an interview with Breitbart News:

“We have the violent left which recently attacked a U.S. Congressman [Steve Scalise], which has been attacking Trump supporters across the country, and I never hear Democratic politicians condemning them. I’m not going to play their game. I am not going to condemn anyone other than the criminal. We always have to protect citizens who are trying to exercise their First Amendment rights. From my perspective, there were a lot of left-wing agitators who violently attacked citizens who were trying to espouse their views last night and today.”

So there you have it: Not only were the Nazis, Klansmen, and other white supremacists who chose Charlottesville for their big rally simply trying to “espouse their views,” but also conservatives should not say a discouraging word to them so long as they aren’t “the criminal,” however that is defined.

Perhaps the president will eventually be convinced by his more politically pragmatic allies to draw a clear line between himself and the racists who revere him. It would be immensely more valuable if he condemned not just idiot Klansmen and neo-Nazis but demagogues like Stewart whose idea of “Trumpism” is to champion any and all types of white backlash to “political correctness” and “the Left” as legitimate.

As we now know, Trump did briefly (and not very convincincly) clarify his feelings about the white supremacists of the Unite the Right demonstration. And then he showed his truer colors in a subsequent press conference wherein he expressed solidarity with the “fine people” amongst the Klansmen and neo-Nazis who just wanted to revere the memory of Gen. Lee. And so he rejoined the neo-Confederacy after a couple of days apart.

As always, Ron Browntein slices and dices public opinion data in an especially useful way, as I was happy to share with readers at New York:

It’s generally conceded (though not by the president himself, who argues the size of his rallies is the best indicator of his popularity) that Trump’s already weak public standing has softened somewhat. But there is less agreement about where he stands with this or that part of the electorate — particularly his “base,” however that is defined.

But now Ron Brownstein, working with some previously unpublished Gallup data from 13 current and projected battleground states (Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin), has given us the best snapshot yet of exactly where, geographically and demographically, Trump stands as compared to his performance last year. It shows that he is hemorrhaging the most support from college-educated white voters, though he’s lost a crucial bit of his strength from the non-college-educated white voters often considered his “base.”

“Trump’s approval rating among college-educated whites has declined relative to his 2016 vote in all 13 states. In seven of those states, his approval rating stands at least 10 points lower than his vote –a list topped by North Carolina and Florida (both 19 points lower), Georgia (18 points lower), Ohio (15 points), Virginia (12 points), and Michigan and Minnesota (11 points each.) His approval rating among these white-collar whites reaches above 50% only in Texas and Georgia, and exceeds 45% in just two other states, Nevada and Arizona. In seven states, his approval among these well-educated white voters has tumbled to 40 percent or less. (That includes four states essential to his victory: North Carolina, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.)”

Some might object that Trump managed to win last year despite poor approval numbers then. But that cuts both ways: In 2016, Trump was competing with a pol who was nearly as unpopular as he was. Hillary Clinton will not be on the ballot or in the consciousness of voters in 2018 —or presumably in 2020, either.

“These anemic numbers suggest how much Trump benefited last fall from the doubts these voters also held about Clinton; standing alone, without her as a foil, he’s facing much harsher assessments. (In a separate national Quinnipiac University poll released last week, 59% of college-educated whites said they “strongly” disapproved of Trump’s performance.) “I think the doubts about her blocked how big the potential was for those voters to vote against Trump,” says long-time Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg.”

Relatively speaking, Trump’s support is holding up better among white working-class voters, the core of his base. But there are still problems:

“[Trump’s] standing still represents an erosion from his 2016 vote among blue-collar whites in 12 of those states; in five of them, he’s declined by double-digits. Perhaps most important are the trends in four of the Rust Belt states that proved decisive last year: Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. In all of them exit polls found Trump won between 62 and 64% of non-college whites. In each case, that was a substantial increase from Romney’s performance with those voters in 2012, when former President Barack Obama carried the states.”

In those four crucial states, which were where the 2016 upset was consummated, Trump’s white-working-class approval numbers are down around the levels of support Romney achieved in losing all four in 2012.

We sometimes forget in our awe at Trump’s astonishing rise to the presidency that it was a near thing, particularly in the general election. He doesn’t have much margin for error, and nor does his party in a midterm election that usually represents a referendum on the party controlling the White House (and in this case, the much-despised do-nothing Congress as well). The drops in support among white voters in battleground states that Brownstein documents aren’t massive, but they could spell the difference between Republican success and calamity just down the road.

It’s awfully early to be thinking about the 2020 election, but potential candidates are already seeing the next president of the United States in their bathroom mirrors, so observers must take notice, as I did at New York:

[T]here’s nothing unusual about speculation surrounding two fairly obscure Democratic House members, Seth Moulton of Massachusetts and Tim Ryan of Ohio. Compadres in an unsuccessful revolt against Speaker Nancy Pelosi last November (Ryan was the alternative candidate, Moulton a vocal supporter), they are both already being mentioned in connection with 2020…. They will join another colleague who has attracted some national attention, Cheri Bustos of Illinois, as featured speakers at September’s Polk County Steak Fry, in Des Moines. This event is an effort to revive the annual Steak Fry event former senator Tom Harkin used to host in his home town of Indianola, which was a big-time magnet for future Democratic presidential candidates.

Everybody should get used to the idea of a putative 2020 Democratic field the size of an Iowa cornfield. There are three potential candidates who would each become front-runners in the 2020 race if they decide to run: Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, and Elizabeth Warren. There are questions as to whether any or all of them are too old, particularly for a party looking to show it’s shed the barnacles exposed by the 2016 Clinton campaign. Sanders will be 78 when the 2020 Iowa Caucuses are held; Biden will be 77, and Warren will be 71 (for that matter, Donald Trump will be 73). But none of them has any particular reason to diminish their influence by declining interest in 2020. Their long shadows will make it harder for little-known alternatives to emerge. But the possibility of retirement or illness among the Big Three keeps open the gate to dark-horse fantasies.

If Sanders, Biden, and Warren do fall by the wayside, Democrats may suddenly find themselves with a presidential field that resembles the mob that ran for the GOP nomination in 2016. And as National Review’s Jim Geraghty reminds us, that did not work out to well for those Republicans who kept expecting someone to emerge to knock off Donald Trump, right up to the moment he was nominated:

“One chunk of the field convinced itself there was an ‘establishment lane,’ leaving Jeb Bush, John Kasich, Marco Rubio, and Chris Christie all elbowing each other for the same base of support that proved insufficiently influential. On the other side, Ted Cruz, Rick Perry, Bobby Jindal, and Scott Walker tried to occupy the ‘conservative lane.’ Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina competed with Trump for an ‘outsider lane.’ But in the end, it turned out there were no real lanes, just a traffic jam. Every non-Trump candidate’s determination to be the last one standing against Trump was the strategic miscalculation of the cycle.”

There is no Donald Trump analogue gearing up for a presidential run on the Democratic side in 2020, so far as we know. But if one emerges, she or he will be helped enormously if there is a large field against which to pose as Gulliver among the Lilliputians. Geraghty counts 18 possible candidates right now, and while some will certainly not run, others may come out of the woodwork if the Big Three give the race a pass. Indeed, the Trump precedent has made the narcissism of long shots seem a lot more reasonable.

There are some things about the Donkey Party’s procedures that might help mitigate the risk of an accidental nominee. Most importantly, Democrats award delegates on a strictly proportional basis, making the occasional sweeps that helped Trump win in 2016 impossible. The Democratic practice of awarding nonelected “superdelegates”— if they preserve it — is also a hedge against a hostile-candidate takeover of the party.

But even if they have no reason to fear the fate that befell the GOP in 2016, Democrats should begin to think through the practical consequences of a very large presidential field. If nothing else, the two-tier debates Republicans were forced to undertake would be very controversial in a party where last year’s debate scheduling and formatting were a huge bone of contention. And an undifferentiated glut of candidates might be good for party unity but not so hot for voter interest.

Maybe one or two of the Big Three (it’s hard to envision all of them running) will enter the 2020 race and either lock up the nomination early or at least cull the field of electoral weaklings. If not, then just two short years from now, at the Iowa State Fair, the candidates may be so thick on the ground that you won’t be able to stir ’em with a stick.

One strategic conflict that Democrats can’t seem to shake involves abortion policy. I addressed this controversy at some length at New York:

Earlier this week Ben Ray Luján, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (the fundraising wing of the House Democratic Caucus) touched a chronically sore point with the vast majority of Democrats who are pro-choice:

“Democrats will not withhold financial support for candidates who oppose abortion rights, the chairman of the party’s campaign arm in the House said in an interview with The Hill …

“‘There is not a litmus test for Democratic candidates,’ said Luján, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman. ‘As we look at candidates across the country, you need to make sure you have candidates that fit the district, that can win in these districts across America.'”

Luján’s initial mistake, I would argue, was in framing the question as a matter of “litmus tests.” Unlike their counterparts in many other countries, America’s major political parties don’t have formal membership protocols, much less binding “tests” of what is or isn’t a common position on controversial topics. When it comes to candidates, the national party — and for that matter, state parties, in most cases — has no control over who calls her- or himself a “Democrat”; that’s the job of party primary voters.

The DCCC does make decisions every day about how to use its financial resources to maximize the number of House Democrats, and would probably cheerfully funnel money to a Koch brother if it added a vote to Nancy Pelosi’s column in the next House balloting for Speaker. Confusing that hammer-headed perspective with some sort of official pronouncement on the relative importance — or nonimportance — of reproductive rights is a bad idea from the get-go.

But as some of Luján’s critics immediately noted, it is not a good thing that a commitment to reproductive rights is often so high on the list of progressive principles Democratic officials seem willing to throw over the side in the pursuit of electoral victory — or as Luján put it, creating a “big family in order to win the House back.” Would anyone go out of their way to suggest, for example, that Democrats are happy to find and back candidates who oppose progressive taxation or want to radically reduce immigration? How about opponents of Social Security or of civil rights? Why is the right to choose so disposable?

It’s not a matter of intra-party democracy. According to the most recent Pew survey of how Americans feel on the basic matter of whether abortion should be mostly legal or mostly illegal, self-identified Democrats are pro-choice by a 79/18 margin. Pew also finds that Democrats oppose overturning a constitutional right to choose by an even larger 84/14 margin — an opposition that has been in every Democratic national platform since 1976, just as overturning Roe v. Wade has been a staple in Republican national platforms since the same year. No one is stopping individual Democrats, including candidates, from dissenting from that long-established consensus position. But the implicit encouragement of heterodoxy on abortion policy that Luján (like other party leaders) offers cannot help to be maddening to the many millions of Democratic women for whom this is a question of basic personal rights, not some policy preference. That this suggestion came from a man makes it even worse.

Political parties inevitably encompass multiple views on multiple things. But some are more fundamental than others, touching on values and mutual respect…. The conviction that women should have control of their reproductive health is clearly a value; protecting it is also clearly a policy goal. Exactly how to do that is another matter, and I don’t think any pro-choice Democrats are insisting on uniformity as to the details of abortion policy.

If Democrats continue, as they probably will, to argue about this topic, there is another level of self-discipline that Democratic men should exercise. The most appropriate slogan for progressive men is the one the late Dr. George Tiller adhered to, right up until the time he was murdered during Sunday services at his own church: “Trust women.” And if you can’t bring yourself to trust them with decisions over their own bodies, Democratic men, at least respect them enough to keep your own counsel about it.

After watching CSPAN2 into the wee hours of last night, tuning out only when a bitter Mitch McConnell abruptly ajourned the Senate, I offered this immediate take for New York:

The drama on the Senate floor was palpable as the vote on Mitch McConnell’s “skinny repeal” substitute amendment neared. A previous vote was held open for more than an hour as rumors circulated among the journalists watching nearby and following on Twitter and C-Span. Was Vice-President Mike Pence in the chamber to cast the deciding vote? Was John McCain yucking it up with Democrats? Might Lisa Murkowski succumb to pressure or bribes and rejoin Team Mitch?

When the ayes and nays finally started on the “skinny repeal,” some observers figured McConnell must have gotten the 50 senators he needed; otherwise why was he forcing a vote? But in the end, Collins and Murkowski held fast against the bill, and John McCain put it down with a loud “No!” and a visible thumbs down, provoking a shocked roar among his colleagues…..

[T]he high drama of this vote provided a sharp contrast to the low comedy that led Republicans to this breaking point after so many weeks and months of efforts to enact health-care legislation. In January, they abandoned the “repeal and delay” strategy for dealing with Obamacare. In May, after a false start, they finally got a partial-repeal-and-replace bill out of the House on a wave of shady deals, and with the promise of Senate improvements. In unprecedented secrecy, Mitch McConnell tried to fine-tune the scheme of tax and Medicaid cuts and insurance deregulation known as Trumpcare. But its unpopularity steadily grew, its baleful effects were serially exposed by the Congressional Budget Office, and deal after deal lost as many senators as could be gained. Just this week, the Senate voted down both Trumpcare and a revised repeal-and-delay scheme, leaving Republicans with no real proposal to enact.

That is what brought the Senate to the “skinny repeal” idea, McConnell’s phantom legislation that was at best a deceptive means of kicking the can down the road to a House-Senate conference that might revive Trumpcare, and at worst (if, as McCain and others feared, the House simply rubber-stamped it) a nasty piece of work that would boost insurance premiums and deny 16 million Americans health coverage. For all the drama of the vote that killed “skinny repeal,” it was really a moment when the Republican drive to do something — anything — to claim a victory over Obamacare finally lost momentum and ground to a halt. To borrow a phrase from T.S. Eliot, the GOP health-care crusade ended “not with a bang but a whimper.”

In the shocked Senate chamber after the crucial vote, McConnell seemed near tears, furious at the three apostates who frustrated his Republicans-only process, and completely out of ideas. He instantly canceled the scheduled “vote-a-rama” series of amendments scheduled for the wee hours, and dispensed with any “final passage” vote; with the failure of “skinny repeal,” the only thing on the floor to pass was the House-passed American Health Care Act, the bill Donald Trump himself called “mean.” Even as he bitterly taunted Democrats to come forward with their own ideas, McConnell seemed to take one immediately critical bipartisan idea — funding Cost-Sharing Reduction subsidies to keep individual insurance markets functioning — off the table.

Moving from a failed effort to enact transparently phony legislation to the sabotaging of anything else would indeed be a logical next step for McConnell, and likely would put him in tune with the vengeful, destructive mood we can expect from Donald Trump the next time he approaches his Twitter account. But Republicans earned this defeat a long time ago, when they chose to pretend they could improve health care while denying universal coverage and restoring discrimination against the sick and the poor. They have also earned a long and bitter series of internal recriminations over their failure to bring down the Great White Whale of Obamacare. If the GOP chooses to blame it all on three senators who refused to vote for a bill no one actually wanted to see enacted, their road back to relevance on health-care policy will be very long.

As the madness surrounding the U.S. Senate’s consideration of health care legislation continued, it occurred to me Republicans are burying their own past, as explained at New York:

Amid the confusion and procedural obscurity surrounding Senate consideration of the FY 2017 budget reconciliation bill this week, something remarkable is happening that should not be missed: The Republican-controlled chamber is in the process of repudiating two solid years of GOP health-care policy.

[T]he latest version of the Better Care Reconciliation Act went down to defeat on a procedural vote with no less than nine Republican senators voting to kill it. Lest we forget, the BCRA is really just a variation of the House-passed American Health Care Act. It represents the closest thing Republicans have to a consensus repeal-and-replace plan for Obamacare.

Before the GOP made the fateful decision to develop an Obamacare “replacement,” its big plan was known as “repeal and delay,” based on the legislation Congress passed late in 2015 to simply repeal key elements of the Affordable Care Act with effective dates delayed long enough to allow for future “replacement” legislation. A replica of that 2015 legislation, now known as the Obamacare Repeal Reconciliation Act, is up for a vote in the Senate today. It is universally expected to fail [it actually lost on a 45-55 vote], and in fact is probably only on the floor because Senator Rand Paul and other hard-core conservatives wanted to register a vote for it badly enough to make that a condition for their support of yesterday’s must-pass motion to proceed.

So in less than 24 hours, the 2015–16 and 2017 GOP plans for dealing with Obamacare will be tossed into the dustbin of history. Yes, it is possible that yet another version of BCRA/AHCA — also known as Trumpcare — will emerge from the ashes for another Senate vote or, more likely, will be adopted by a House-Senate conference if the Senate can pass anything. That’s what is behind the talk of a “skinny repeal” bill that simply kicks the can down the road and into a conference where the real decisions will be made.

It’s instructive, though, that all this misdirection and deception are necessary. For seven years Republicans behaved as though getting rid of Obamacare was a fait accompli once they won both Congress and the White House. Now the two main strategies they devised for achieving this no-brainer are going down to defeat in “their” Washington, and can only be revivified, if at all, by stealth. It’s a sign of both intellectual bankruptcy and political fecklessness that does not bode well for the rest of the GOP agenda.