Just how should Democrats make the case for impeachment? Marik Von Rennenkampff, a former State Department analyst and Obama appointee to the Defense Department  shares some thoughts in his link-rich article “Why aren’t Democrats weaponizing Fox News on impeachment?” at The Hill:

If historically-timid Democrats take their dedication to the rule of law and the Constitution seriously, they’ll realize that much of Trump’s political base is impervious to arguments – no matter how logical or factually sound – made outside of the truth-starved, conspiracy theory-peddlingright wing media bubble. Welcome to Trumpian America.

With that reality in mind, Democrats should relentlessly promote the astutely spirited analysis of Fox News’ chief judicial correspondent. Judge Napolitano has stated on multiple live television interviews that in pushing a foreign leader to perform a political “favor” for him, Trump engaged in “criminal and impeachable behavior.” In an era where powerful right wing echo chambers reign supreme, Napolitano’s assessment is a messaging gold mine for constitutionally-minded (yet painfully PR-illiterate) Democrats.

Yes that Fox News. Now take a deep breath and read on.

Indeed, given Fox News’ catnip-like effect on Trump’s red-meat base, one must ask why Democrats are not squeezing every ounce of messaging value out of Napolitano’s spot-on legal analysis. Democrats, apparently, continue to lack the go-for-the-jugular mentality that their right wing counterparts have successfully embraced for decades.

Judge Napolitano’s blistering take, especially in the context of the roiling internal conflict between Fox News’ reporting and commentary divisions, should be a Democratic talking point, repeated ad nauseam, in every single media appearance. The same goes for Fox News characterizing a series of text messages exchanged by U.S. diplomats as “devastating” to Trump. Equally noteworthy is a former Republican senator’s stunning suggestion that “at least 35” of his former GOPcolleagues would privately vote to impeach Trump.

The beauty part is that weak-kneed Republican Senators and House members are extremely worried about the votes of Trump’s MAGA-hats, most of whom either watch the hell out of Fox News or take their voting tips from friends and family members who do so. As Rennenkampff notes, “Relentless promotion of these explosive Fox News pieces knocks the GOP on its heels and forces Trump’s base into the challenging position of defending its own propaganda machine.”

It may be that few hard-core Trump supporters will be swayed by such a campaign. But confronting GOP politicians with Napolitano’s “blistering take” accompanied by the Fox logo should make them squirm. Further, Rennenkampff writes,

Democrats can start with the issue of U.S. security assistance to Ukraine. Why, after five years, did Trump suddenly and unilaterally halt critical American military aid to an ally at war? Trump’s own national security team – let alone Congress, which authorized the funding – was left utterly baffled and blindsided by the decision. The same goes for the Ukrainians.

Make that “an ally who fought alongside Americans against Isis.” Rennenkampff adds that, “While Fox News has reported that Trump engaged in an impeachable “quid pro quo,” his abrupt halt of U.S. assistance to Kyiv strikes at the heart of the crisis.” Also, there’s the corruption redolence: “Democrats should also investigate whether Trump pushed the Ukrainian government to drop criminal investigationsinto his campaign manager’s enormously corrupt dealings in exchange for then-newly approved lethal military aid..In much the same vein, the firing of a widely-respected American diplomat in order to enrich Trump’s cronies reeks of swampian corruption.”

Even if Trump’s base is unmoved by all of the above, holding the Republican politicians who rep them accountable to Fox News reports favoring impeachment could help Dems, if not with impeachment, then perhaps with 2020 election ads.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his Facebook page:

Political scientist Alexander Agadjanian conducted an interesting survey experiment recently, whose results he reported in the New York Times. Here’s the description:

“The experiment’s procedure was simple. A random half of participants read a news snippet illustrating the leftward shift, while the other half read about unrelated topics, such as the schedule of election dates. The news item was a few sentences that included policies discussed by the candidates: decriminalizing unauthorized border crossings; expanding undocumented immigrants’ access to government services; replacing private health insurance with a government-run system; and establishing free public college for all children from working-class families. The content was drawn directly from real news coverage.

From E. J. Dionne, Jr.’s column, “Trump’s Base Is Smaller Than He Thinks” in The Washiongton Post: “Polls conducted throughout Trump’s presidency show that his critics feel far more strongly about their opposition to him than his defenders feel about their support. The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll, conducted between Sept. 30 and Oct. 1, found that only 24 percent of registered voters strongly approved of Trump’s performance, while 44 percent strongly disapproved. Significantly, 74 percent of Democratic registered voters strongly disapproved of Trump, but only 50 percent of Republican registered voters strongly approved of him. Which base would you rather have going into this fight — and into 2020?”

At The Atlantic, Ronald Brownsein notes that, “as President Donald Trump went on the offensive to bolster his case against impeachment, he tweeted a county-by-county map of the 2016 presidential race that showed a sea of red interrupted by only a few blue inlets, mostly along the coasts. The map, captioned with the headline “Try to Impeach This,” documented the measure on which Trump performed best: He won more than 2,600 counties, while Hillary Clinton carried fewer than 500.” However, “Maps that measure the 2016 result by population—particularly the so-called prism map that displays huge vertical bars over the major urban centers that backed Clinton—show the nation much more evenly balanced. That reflects the reality that while Trump won far more counties, Clinton won substantially more votes—nearly 3 million more in total, a margin roughly equal to President George W. Bush’s popular-vote victory in 2004.” Click here to see population map.

“The latest batch of fundraising reports released this week confirmed a new reality of presidential politics: the traditional, big-dollar model of funding a presidential campaign is going the way of landlines and the VCR,” David Siders writes at Politico. “With Elizabeth Warren’s announcement Friday that she had raised nearly $25 million in the last three months — slightly less than Bernie Sanders reported Tuesday — two candidates who didn’t hold traditional donor events became the top two fundraisers in Democratic primary. And they both blew past the ones who did…Warren and Sanders, who raised $25.3 million, both finished about $10 million ahead of former Vice President Joe Biden for the quarter…Biden, meanwhile, fell back in his fundraising, posting $15.2 million – about $7 million less than he raised the previous three months. And other Democrats who relied on traditional, big-dollar fundraisers also slipped, presaging difficulties financing robust campaigns.”

In “Black women take US mayoral reins in record numbers,” Danny Jin reports at The Monitor: “Black women have historically driven the American political agenda as organizers and as voters. Now, an increasing number are leading the biggest cities in the United States. In 2013, just one black woman was mayor of a major U.S. city, but black women today run seven of the nation’s 100 largest cities, including Washington, Atlanta, and San Francisco.  (Women of color were also elected to lead in three Californian cities: Bakersfield, Chula Vista, and Fremont.) Their election victories and accomplishments in office mark a step forward in the push for equitable governance, experts say…Black women, who largely vote Democratic, went to the polls at higher ratesthan any other demographic group in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections. And they played a key role in deciding 2018’s midterms.”

According to Denise-Marie Ordway’s “The consequences of ‘horse race’ reporting: What the research says” at Journalist’s Resource: ““The horserace has been the dominant theme of election news since the 1970s, when news organizations began to conduct their own election polls,” [Harvard professor Thpomas E.] Patterson writes in a December 2016 working paper, “News Coverage of the 2016 General Election: How the Press Failed the Voters.” “Since then, polls have proliferated to the point where well over a hundred separate polls — more than a new poll each day — were reported in major news outlets during the 2016 general election.”…Horse race reporting helped catapult billionaire businessman Donald Trump to a lead position during the nominating phase of the 2016 presidential campaign, finds another paper in Patterson’s research series, “News Coverage of the 2016 Presidential Primaries: Horse Race Reporting Has Consequences.”

Most physicians voted Republican in past decades. But now, Janet Adamy and Paul Overberg reveal that “Doctors, Once GOP Stalwarts, Now More Likely to Be Democrats” at The Wall St. Journal. The reasons, noted in the article subtitle, include: “Historic shift, driven by changes in business of medicine and women entering profession, comes with overall movement of college-educated people to Democratic Party.”

Shareblue’s Dan Desai Martin reports that “Demand for gun safety could flip Virginia legislature from red to blue,” and notes, “As Virginia voters head to the polls on Nov. 5, gun policy is top of mind, according to a new Washington Post poll released Friday. Republicans currently hold a narrow lead in both legislative chambers, but every seat in both chambers is in play this year, meaning Democrats have a chance to seize control of one or both next month…When asked which issues are most important, 75% of registered voters said gun control, eclipsing education, at 70%, and health care, at 66%, as the top issue…”This poll is further evidence that Virginia’s elected officials who side with the gun lobby in opposing widely popular and common sense solutions should be extremely worried,” John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety, said in a statement. “For the first time, pro gun safety voters are now more motivated than anti gun safety voters and that gap is widening. We expect this trend to continue in Virginia and across the country.”

Martin continues, “The issue of gun safety hit home for Virginians in late May when Virginia Beach was added to the growing list of American cities devastated by a mass shooting incident. A dozen people died on May 31 when a gunman started shooting at a city government building, prompting the governor to call a special legislative session focused on gun safety…But rather than consider even one piece of legislation, Republicans voted to end the special session after just 90 minutes. Weeks later, the NRA made a massive $200,000 campaign donation to the Republican majority leader of the House of Delegates…”It couldn’t be clearer — the NRA is rewarding Virginia Republicans for standing with them instead of their constituents,” Jessica Post, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, said at the time of the NRA donation. “Virginia Republicans are extreme and out of touch when it comes to gun safety.”…Post’s statements are backed up by the latest poll, which shows 58% of Virginians support stricter gun laws in the state…When it comes to specific policies, Republican lawmakers are even more out of touch. Expanding background checks is supported by 88% of Virginians, while laws to temporarily seize guns from someone law enforcement deems a threat, known as “red flag” laws, has the support of 82% of Virginians.”

Yes, Trump actually went there. At CNN Politics, Marshall Cohen quotes from Trump’s impromtu White House lawn yakfest with reporters: “”Let me tell you, I’m only interested in corruption,” Trump said. “I don’t care about politics. I don’t care about Biden’s politics…. I don’t care about politics. But I do care about corruption, and this whole thing is about corruption… This is about corruption, and this is not about politics.” Cohen notes six reasons why Trump’s mention of ‘corruption’ invites ridicule, including: “Trump defended Manafort, who made millions from Ukraine. Trump has defended and expressed sympathy for his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who spent a decade working for former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. After Yanukovych’s ouster in 2014, the new government accused him of looting billions of dollars from Ukrainian coffers. Manafort is currently in prison for tax fraud after hiding his Ukraine income in offshore accounts.” Add to Cohen’s list Trump’s golfing trips, his family’s profiteering and squandering taxpayer dollars on Administration officials and staff staying at his hotels, no name just a few examples.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his Facebook page:

Social Democratic Capitalism!

The excellent Lane Kenworthy has a new book coming out. Pre-order today!

“For nations, as for individuals, it’s good to be rich. Affluent countries are more likely to be democratic, more likely to have government programs that cushion life’s bumps and boost the capabilities and well-being of the less fortunate, and more likely to prioritize personal liberty. Their citizens tend to be more secure, better educated, healthier, freer, and happier.

It’s a historic moment in political history, and I was happy to engage in a historical discussion of past presidential impeachment proceedings at New York:

As we look forward to the possible — I’d say probable — impeachment of Donald J. Trump, it’s natural to look back at precedents from the last century: the near-impeachment of Richard Nixon (who resigned facing certain impeachment and likely conviction) and Bill Clinton (who was impeached by the House and acquitted by the Senate).

But in some ways these examples are unsatisfying. When they had their impeachment crises, both Nixon and Clinton had recently been reelected to second terms by very comfortable margins. They were fairly conventional politicians whose behavior in most respects was also fairly conventional (even the famously paranoid and self-isolated Nixon had been a party stalwart and well-known elected official for 28 years when his Watergate cover-up and related misdeeds struck him down). Clinton famously “compartmentalized” his investigation, impeachment, and trial, and no one seriously argued his continuation in the presidency threatened the safety of the Republic. And Nixon didn’t become noticeably erratic until near the end of his failed efforts to escape the noose he had clumsily created for himself.

To find any situation like Trump’s, you really have to go back to the first presidential impeachment (there was an earlier effort to impeach John Tyler after he ascended to the presidency via the death of William Henry Harrison and proceeded to veto nearly all his party’s legislation, but it failed in the House). Like Tyler, Andrew Johnson was an accidental president (Lincoln’s assassination made him POTUS), and, like Tyler, he had once belonged to the party opposing the one that placed him on a national ticket. But unlike Tyler and much like Trump, Johnson entered office as something of a figure of scandal, having delivered an inaugural address inside the Capitol in a very apparent state of inebriation (“Do not let Johnson speak outside,” Lincoln reportedly said before the public inaugural address that many consider his own greatest speech).

Johnson also anticipated Trump in the violent abusiveness of his rhetoric toward political enemies. He had first attracted the support of Republicans as Lincoln’s 1864 running mate thanks to his frequent and intense denunciations of his fellow Southern secessionists as traitors who deserved to be strung up, if not killed in combat. But once Johnson committed himself to the restoration of white supremacy in the South after the Civil War, he unloosed his tongue on his former allies, as Tim Murphy of Mother Jones recalls:

“In 1866, he decided to go on the offensive, embarking on a national tour to shore up his support. It was called the ‘Swing Around the Circle,’ and it was insane. The closest I can come to describing is, maybe, what if George Wallace spoke at Altamont? It’s tough to find a true analogue. Presidents just don’t really talk like Johnson did on that tour, no matter what lurks in their hearts.”

Among other things, Johnson called for “hanging” his chief congressional Republican critic, Thaddeus Stevens, and abolitionist leader Wendell Phillips. According to prevailing standards of the day, Johnson held the functional equivalent of MAGA rallies. Jamelle Bouie quotes a contemporary evaluation of Johnson’s events that sounds very familiar:

“His low cunning conspired with his devouring egoism to make him throw off all the restraints of official decorum, in the expectation that he would find duplicates of himself in the crowds he addressed and that mob diffused would heartily sympathize with Mob impersonated. Never was a blustering demagogue led by a distempered sense of self-importance into a more fatal error.”

Both before and during this campaign, Johnson struck a variety of observers as having a mind obsessed with resentment of what would later be called “elites,” and incapable of admitting error. But it was the context of his angry fight with Congress that led to his impeachment, and provides the most important link to Trump. Gripped by a determination to let the South reenter the Union with only the barest Reconstruction, Johnson was a law unto himself, and defied every effort to enact and then to enforce the most basic protections for ex-slaves, as Yoni Applebaum explained earlier this year:

“The question facing Congress, and the public, was this: What do you do with a president whose every utterance and act seems to undermine the Constitution he is sworn to uphold? At first, Republicans pursued the standard mix of legislative remedies—holding hearings and passing bills designed to strip the president of certain powers. Many members of Johnson’s Cabinet worked with their congressional counterparts to constrain the president. Johnson began to see conspiracies around every corner. He moved to purge the bureaucracy of his opponents, denouncing the ‘blood-suckers and cormorants’ who frustrated his desires.’

“It was the campaign of white-nationalist terror that raged through the spring and summer of 1866 that persuaded many Republicans they could not allow Johnson to remain in office. In Tennessee, where Johnson had until the year before served as military governor, a white mob opposed to black equality rampaged through the streets of Memphis in May, slaughtering dozens of people as it went. July brought a second massacre, this one in New Orleans, where efforts to enfranchise black voters sparked a riot. A mob filled with police, firemen, armed youths, and Confederate veterans shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, and mutilated dozens, many of them black veterans of the Union Army. Johnson chose not to suppress the violence, using fear of disorder to build a constituency more loyal to him than to either party.”

And that wasn’t all. As Johnson prevented federal intervention, white ex-slaveholders enacted so-called Black Codes throughout the South aimed at, in the words of one advocate, keeping freedmen “as near to the condition of slavery as possible, and as far from the condition of the white man as is practicable.” In the eyes of most Republicans at the time, Johnson wanted to squander the horrendous sacrifices of the Civil War and restore the South’s immense prewar power.

In this, Johnson anticipated Trump’s relentless fight against any accountability, any boundaries for his power, and any institutions or norms that might restrain his sovereignty as president.

It was hard, in the end, for congressional Republicans to figure out articles of impeachment that comprehended Johnson’s threat to the country. As Murphy notes, that too represents a parallel to today’s congressional Democrats in coming to grips with Trump’s lawlessness:

“[T]here was only one true Johnson scandal, just as there is only one true Trump scandal, and though the particulars are very different—the former’s class resentment was the inverse of the latter’s class entitlement—they share a common element: an open hostility to democratic ideals. That was Andrew Johnson’s high crime, and there was nothing conspiratorial or nitpicky about it. He was doing it in plain sight. The rest was noise.”

In the end, the centerpiece of the articles of impeachment against Johnson (and the sole grounds on which he was tried in the Senate) involved his willful defiance of the Tenure of Office Act, a law restricting his ability to fire Cabinet members without congressional approval, which was subsequently held unconstitutional. It was arguably an illustrative and more than definitive ground for impeachment: Because it was triggered by his effort to get rid of Edward Stanton just as the Secretary of War was deploying military force to halt ex-Confederate terrorism, it represented Johnson’s determination to fight for white supremacy. In that sense, it was similar to the apparent inclination of today’s House Democrats to impeach Trump for doing something equally illustrative of his overall pattern of lawlessness: using presidential powers to encourage a foreign government to drop a hammer on a domestic political threat.

Johnson, of course, was acquitted by the Senate, though by a much narrower margin than the one which will likely acquit Trump no matter what the impeachment inquiry uncovers. In the end, Johnson was vindicated not by his acquittal, but by the gradual abandonment of Reconstruction and the imposition of Jim Crow across the South. The fate of Trump’s reckless stand against equality, diversity, the rule of law, and those norms of decency that he contemptuously dismisses as “political correctness” may eventually rest in the hands of voters, if Trump’s party lets them be cast and counted. But don’t for a moment pretend he hasn’t invited impeachment just as Andrew Johnson did.

In his NYT column “Will Trump Ever Leave the White House,” Thomas B. Edsall addresses a question of growing concern, given the President’s penchant for increasingly unhinged rants. Edsall sides more with those who see trouble ahead. But he does quote the more optimistic Brookings scholar William Frey: “There is no doubt that Trump continues to fan the flames of racial anxiety for his perceived benefit. He tries to paint an America that has shifted from the white dominated 1950s when immigration was low and blacks were highly segregated…This is not the America of today and really only applies to a swath of the population ages 55 and above and in whiter parts of the country whose populations are increasingly diminishing…Now Trump is less popular in general and Republicans have done less well in the 2018 midterms including among whites, especially white women, and in nonurban areas…Yes, some people are afraid of a nonwhite takeover for America but they are a small and dwindling piece of the American electorate. Highlighting race as a primary campaign message will not work for Trump again.” A sober assessment, especially considering that Trump doesn’t have the backing of the modern, multi-racial military or the broad media control needed for such a coup. Nor would American business leaders, who are already skeptical about his disruption of international trade, welcome the domestic chaos it would bring.

Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. wonders “Will impeachment finally organize the Democrats?,” and observes: “Normally, Democrats wear their diversity as a badge of honor, even as they feud and scuffle. But with House Democrats in the heat of an impeachment inquiry into President Trump, the habits of political lifetimes collide with the imperatives of discipline and focus…And Democrats being Democrats, they are even arguing about who deserves credit for the decision to open an impeachment inquiry. When CNN posted a feature about how moderates moved the House to act, champions of the party’s outspoken progressives, who had long endorsed this step, asked why they did not get more credit for being there all along…Democrats are determined to challenge Trump every time he claims that impeachment is getting in the way of action on prescription drug prices, guns and other issues that helped elect the new moderates. Pelosi went out of her way to open the news conference by focusing on these questions, not impeachment. She said that if the president used the House’s investigation as an excuse for governing sloth, “the ball is in his court.”…Because things have suddenly become so serious, Democrats just might learn to behave differently. “We have this fragile majority and right now we are all that stands between these attacks by the president and his enablers across the aisle on the fundamentals of our democracy,” [vice chair of the House Democratic caucus Katherine] Clark said. If this responsibility doesn’t concentrate the mind of a party that adores brawling, nothing will.”

From Kyle Kondik’s “The Senate: Ratings Changes and the Shadow of Impeachment” at Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “We would be lying if we said we had a great sense as to how the Democrats’ drive to impeach Trump will impact the elections next year. There are just too many variables and moving pieces to feel strongly about it. But the potential for the battle to harden partisan attitudes may have down-ballot effects for some members of Congress, as noted above…But don’t be surprised if, for all the noise, the impeachment inquiry — and even a successful House vote for impeachment and subsequent Senate trial — does not lead to sharp changes in public attitudes. It is true from limited polling that, at the very least, Democrats are coalescing around impeachment after the revelation of the now-famous telephone readout between Trump and the Ukrainian president. What seems to be happening is that Democrats are taking their cues from party leadership, which has resisted calling for impeachment until now, and increasing their own support for impeachment as a result. There has been some movement in favor of impeachment among independents and Republicans, although one would have to cherry-pick data to argue that overall support for impeaching and removing the president is significantly more than mixed…Meanwhile, the president’s approval rating — as it seems to do — has remained largely fixed where it’s been, in the low-to-mid 40s, with disapproval over 50%. Could the Ukraine bombshell and subsequent discoveries from the impeachment process cause it to dip over time? Sure…But after years of observing the president’s durability in polls, thanks in large part to strong GOP support, it’s safer to expect continuity as opposed to change in the president’s standing.” Kondik notes, “There are two Senate ratings changes this week, one benefiting each side. The most vulnerable senator, Sen. Doug Jones (D-AL), moves from Toss-up to Leans Republican, while Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) moves from Leans Republican to Toss-up.”

Ronald Brownstein explains why “The Risks of Impeachment Are Overblown” at The Atlantic: “For months, the biggest hurdle for Democrats pushing the House to open impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump was the party leadership’s concern that such a process would politically endanger the members at the far edge of their majority, especially the 31 representing districts that voted for the president in 2016…But there’s considerable evidence—both in contemporary polling and the experience of former President Bill Clinton’s impeachment—that impeaching Trump might not be nearly as risky as it’s been portrayed for them…Despite the cascade of new revelations damaging to Trump, some Democratic strategists focused on holding the House still privately worry that impeachment could endanger too many of the members from districts that divide closely between the parties or lean Republican. That’s been the dominant perspective at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which is chaired by Representative Cheri Bustos, who herself represents an Illinois district Trump won in 2016. Yet other party strategists now see a pathway to expanding support for impeachment, which a majority of Americans have consistently opposed in polls, or at least neutralizing any recoil against it.”

Brownstein continues, ““If voters see this as being about significant abuses of power and serious attempts to undermine the rule of law, then I don’t worry particularly about a backlash against Democrats who vote for impeachment,” says the longtime Democratic pollster Geoff Garin. “If it is seen purely as a partisan exercise, the answer may be different. But I have a good level of confidence that it will not be seen that way, that the moderates in the Trump districts who eventually support impeachment will be seen as having done so for serious and sober reasons.” Noting that “Clinton’s job approval rating about 20 percentage points higher than Trump’s is today,” Brownstein adds, “The other big difference is that, unlike Clinton, Trump will be on the ballot in 2020 (absent the unlikely event of enough Senate Republicans voting to remove him from office if the House does eventually impeach him.) “There is no escaping Trump,” says Sarah Binder, a senior fellow in governance studies at Brookings. “He is the 800-pound elephant … There is no escaping his relevance to this election. It just seems that might be quite different than what happened in 2000 once you had Clinton departing from the scene.”

Further, says Brownstein, “Other analysts point to Trump’s uncertain position even in the Democratic-held districts that he carried. Trump was hardly a colossus in those 31 seats in 2016: He exceeded 51 percent of the vote in only six of them, and reached 50 or 51 percent in just seven more. He beat Hillary Clinton while drawing less than half of the total vote in the other 18 of those seats…That distinction hasn’t escaped the Democratic members in those districts: By the time Pelosi made her announcement on Tuesday afternoon, 10 of the 18 Democrats from districts where Trump won with less than half of the vote had endorsed an impeachment inquiry. By comparison, at that point, only four of the members from the 13 Democratic-held seats where Trump did reach a majority had joined the call for impeachment proceedings, according to the tracker maintained by Politico…After starting in such an equivocal position in many of these districts, Trump’s position appears to have eroded since 2016. A recent round of polls conducted for a consortium of Democratic groups placed Trump’s approval rating below 45 percent in several of the Democratic districts he won, and above 50 percent in only one: the Oklahoma City seat of Representative Kendra Horn, according to figures provided to me.” Even better, “The upcoming debate could create risks for Republicans too, in the states and House districts trending away from Trump, such as the concentration of suburban seats in Texas that Democrats are targeting. If impeachment reaches the Senate, Republican incumbents such as Susan Collins of Maine, Martha McSally of Arizona, and Cory Gardner of Colorado may be unlikely to vote to convict the president—which will bind them to him more tightly in states where his position is equivocal at best.”

At FiveThirtyEight, Perry Bacon, Jr. explains why “Why Black Voters Prefer Establishment Candidates Over Liberal Alternatives,” and notes, “Black voters effectively delivered Hillary Clinton the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016. She and Sen. Bernie Sanders ran about evenly among white voters, but black voters overwhelmingly backed Clinton. So did the Democratic establishment…That team-up — black voters and the more establishment candidate — is not unusual…We don’t have detailed exit polls of Democratic primaries for most other offices, but according to pre-election polls and precinct results in a number of high-profile House and gubernatorial primaries since 2016, black voters have tended to back the candidate from the party’s establishment wing over a more liberal alternative. And at least for now, we’re seeing the same pattern in the 2020 Democratic presidential race: Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Sanders are fairly competitive with Joe Biden among white Democrats, but trail the former vice president substantially among black Democrats…Why, though? After all, African Americans have dramatically less incomeand wealth than white Americans, so messages of “big, structural change” (Warren) or a “political revolution” (Sanders) should, in theory, be particularly appealing. Because a higher percentage of black Americans than white Americans don’t have health insurance, a program like Medicare for All, for example, would disproportionately benefit black people.”

Bacon elaborates, “So what gives? I’m going to offer some potential answers to that question, but let’s first get a couple caveats and complications out of the way…First, it’s hard to come up with a definitive explanation for the establishment-black voter alliance because the “establishment” is a fuzzy concept. Exactly which candidate is a center-left, establishment Democrat and which is anti-establishment or “the liberal alternative” is all a bit subjective…Second — and this is important — black Democrats are not a monolith and are divided in some of the same ways white Democrats are divided. Young black voters are less supportive of Biden (and were less supportive of Clinton in 2016) compared to older black voters. Similarly, black voters without college degrees are more supportive of Biden than those with degrees…That said, blacks of all demographics are more supportive of Biden than their white counterparts, according to Morning Consult polling data. Young black voters are more supportive of Biden (and were more supportive of Clinton) than young white voters. Older black voters were more supportive of Clinton than older white ones in 2016 and now are strongly behind Biden. Black college graduates are more supportive of Biden than white college graduates. Nuances aside, the weakness of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party with black voters is a well-known phenomenon that people in the Warren and Sanders camps and anti-establishment liberal activist groups are openly grappling with.”

Bacon provides five other factors, in order of importance: “1. Establishment candidates typically have existing ties to the black community; 2. Black voters are pragmatic; 3. Black leaders are part of the establishment and support its candidates; 4. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party appeals to the well-educated more than other groups, and the vast majority of black Democrats don’t have college degrees;5. The left wing isn’t running enough black candidates. In addition, Bacon writes, “We could come up with some other explanations, but I think those are the strongest. And this analysis points to a blueprint for the left wing of the Democratic Party if it wants to win more black votes:

1. Align with black candidates or non-black candidates with strong ties to black voters and leaders
2. Aggressively court black leaders for endorsements
3. Directly address black voters’ concerns that more liberal candidates have a greater chance of losing races to Republicans
4. And target black voters under 45 and those with college degrees, who might be less inclined to vote for establishment candidates.

Bacon concludes, “So could that approach work for Sanders and Warren against Biden? Maybe. You could imagine Warren in particular getting endorsements from younger liberal black figures like Gillum or Pressley (particularly if Warren wins one of the early primary states and Harris finishes far behind and is no longer viable). And maybe those endorsements and Warren’s campaigning then lead her to become the candidate of black voters under 45 and those with college degrees, even if Biden still gets most votes from older and less educated black voters…Remember, Sanders or Warren don’t necessarily have to win the black vote to become the Democratic nominee — they just can’t lose it by 60 percentage points, as Sanders did in 2016. (Biden is getting between 40 and 50 percent of the black vote in most polls now, so nowhere near Clinton 2016 levels. But Clinton was in a two-candidate field, and I would expect Biden’s support among black voters to go up as this gigantic field shrinks.)…But even if Sanders or Warren gets more support among black voters in 2020 than the Vermont senator did in 2016, I tend to think Biden will remain fairly popular with black voters overall — because of his ties to Obama and other black leaders and the perception that he can defeat Trump.”

As part of the effort to become an expert on All Things Impeachment, I did some recent historical research, and wrote up what I learned at New York:

Now that Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats have, as Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff put it, “crossed the Rubicon” to support impeachment proceedings against President Trump, the big questions are how public opinion might evolve on the subject and then how it might affect the 2020 elections. Indeed, as long as the odds against the Senate convicting Trump on impeachment charges are roughly a billion to one, the political fallout is really the only ultimate question, other than, perhaps, some post-presidential legal consequences for Trump.

As my colleague Sarah Jones has noted, there’s some initial polling showing a quick uptick in support of impeachment in the immediate wake of the Ukraine scandal breaking. And that’s not too surprising: You’d figure the sudden lurch in the direction of impeachment among House Democrats in marginal districts that pushed Pelosi off the fence would be echoed among Democratic voters hearing the same evidence of presidential malfeasance.

But what can we expect in the near future? Obviously, much will depend on the nature of the evidence that unfolds and how the two parties and the media handle it. But there are the two recent precedents: the march toward impeachment of Richard Nixon (who resigned right as the House was poised to impeach him) and Bill Clinton (who was impeached by the House and acquitted by the Senate). In looking at how public opinion evolved during these two sagas, it’s helpful to distinguish three things: public support for impeachment and removal, the president’s job-approval ratings, and the most immediate electoral consequences.

It’s also important to understand the different timelines of the Nixon and Clinton “scandals.” The televised Senate Watergate hearings began in May 1973, with articles of impeachment not drafted by the House Judiciary Committee until late July 1974, just days before Nixon’s resignation. The Monica Lewinsky scandal went public in January 1998. The special prosecutor’s report from Ken Starr recommending impeachment of Clinton was released that September, with impeachment concluded in December and then the Senate trial in January and February of 1999.

One clear thing about public opinion in both of these incidents is that support for impeachment took a long time to develop in Nixon’s case and never developed at all in Clinton’s. On average, Americans are resistant to impeachment, even of presidents they really dislike.

As a Pew Research postmortem noted, Americans opposed impeachment and removal of Nixon by a 51-to-38 margin in November 1973, even after weeks of heavily watched Watergate hearings and the incident often thought of as the beginning of the end of the Nixon presidency: his “Saturday Night Massacre” — the firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox, followed by the resignation of the attorney general and the top assistant attorney general in protest. Majority support for impeachment and removal did not emerge in Gallup polling until just prior to Nixon’s resignation.

In Clinton’s case, support for impeachment and removal over the Lewinsky scandal was never very high and actually got lower as Congress moved in that direction. Pew started asking this question in March 1998, when allegations of Clinton lying under oath about Lewinsky were far from being generally accepted: “If it turns out that President Clinton lied under oath about having a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky, do you think that he should be impeached and removed from office, or not?” The yes-no ratio in answering that question went from 40-55 in March to 31-63 in late July to 30-66 in late August. Even after the Starr report was released and the House held impeachment hearings, support for actual impeachment generally ranged from the mid-30s to the low 40s. It never became a popular option.

The biggest contrast between public opinion during Watergate and the Lewinsky scandal, though, involved presidential-approval ratings. In January 1973, the newly reelected (by a 49-state landslide) Richard Nixon had a Gallup job-approval rating of 68 percent. By April, after heavy publicity about Watergate and the forced resignations of Nixon’s top-two aides, his approval rating was down to 48 percent. And by and large, it just kept sinking: down to 31 percent in August 1973, then to 25 percent in May 1974. The Watergate scandal was not, of course, the only thing going on: the economy fell into recession accompanied by “stagflation” (high inflation and slow growth) in November 1973 (just after the OPEC oil embargo, which boosted oil prices fourfold in months), and the Vietnam War was lurching toward its unsatisfactory conclusion. But in any event, Nixon’s unpopularity far outstripped support for impeachment and removal until very near the end of the saga.

Clinton’s Gallup job-approval rating was at 58 percent the week after the Lewinsky story first broke, and if anything improved during the entire saga of investigation and impeachment. It was at 66 percent the week after the Starr report with its salacious details was published and widely read, it rose to a dizzying 73 percent the day after the House impeached Clinton, and it was at 68 percent the day after the Senate acquitted him. The more rarely measured (for sitting presidents, anyway) personal-favorability ratings for Clinton were unsurprisingly softer, but Pew had his favorable-unfavorable ratio at 55-43 the week he was impeached.

As with Nixon, there were other things going on: a sustained economic boom; an extended period of peace and prosperity; an atmosphere of relatively robust bipartisanship despite divided partisan control of the federal government (even as they were trying to remove him from office, congressional Republicans were begging Clinton to work with them on “entitlement reform”); a president who seemed able to “compartmentalize” very well (unlike Nixon, who slowly fell apart under the pressure of Watergate). But ultimately, it’s hard to avoid the impression that Americans didn’t condemn Clinton mostly because they didn’t regard lying about sex as an impeachable offense. An October 1998 Gallup–CNN–USA Today survey asked respondents to compare the gravity of Nixon’s and Clinton’s misconduct, and Nixon was the One by a landslide (his sins were adjudged as worse by a 64-to-10 margin, despite the obvious temptation for Republicans to go the other way).

These very different trends in job approval during an impeachment crisis turned out to be a pretty good guide to the electoral consequences as well. Obviously, Nixon left office, but in part because his successor immediately took the very unpopular step of pardoning him, Republicans were drubbed in the 1974 “Watergate election” midterms, losing 49 House seats, four Senate seats, and four governorships. Democrats subsequently regained control of the White House in 1976 in a sharp reversal of the 1972 Nixon landslide.

The 1998 midterms fell smack in the middle of the Republican Congress’s drive toward impeachment of Clinton, and the party that did not control the White House failed to gain House seats in a midterm for the first time since the 1930s. It was considered such a disaster for Republicans that Speaker Newt Gingrich resigned. This development is often cited as a warning to today’s House Democrats about pursuing an impeachment that is not supported by the public. On the other hand, as Ron Brownstein points out, the 1998 midterm was really more of a status-quo election than a rebuke of the GOP:

“[W]hen the House considered impeachment in December 1998, almost all of them voted for at least one of the two articles of impeachment that the chamber approved. (Just four House Republicans, each of them representing districts that voted for Clinton, opposed both articles.)

“And then, after effectively voting to cancel out their constituents’ presidential votes, almost all of the Clinton-district Republicans who sought reelection won it in both 1998 and 2000.”

Republicans, of course, also regained the White House in 2000 (though not without a big assist from the U.S. Supreme Court) after an election campaign in which Al Gore visibly struggled to separate himself from Clinton.

So what are the implications of this history?

First, support for impeachment and removal appears to be a lagging indicator of how the public feels about an embattled president caught in unsavory misconduct. House Democrats probably shouldn’t worry about it that much early on unless the trend lines go south on them.

Second, the number to watch in terms of political fallout is probably not support for or opposition to impeachment or removal but Trump’s job-approval rating. It has, as is universally understood, been amazingly stable (and underwater) throughout his presidency. If it moves up or down sharply, that could be significant. And if it stays the same, at least House Democrats can stop worrying about endangering their party by doing the right thing.

And third, it probably matters less what Americans think Congress should and should not do about Trump than what they think about Trump’s behavior. If House Democrats are right that the Ukraine scandal is both easy to understand and highly incriminating, the trajectory of the president’s popularity may look more like Nixon’s than Clinton’s.

Finally, it’s worth remembering that this is a very small sample of precedents from which we can learn. Chief executives like Nixon, Clinton, and Trump are not the norm. And while there’s almost always some impeachment sentiment kicking around the fever swamps in times of high partisan polarization, this is a situation nearly as strange as the very existence of a Trump presidency. So it would be smart for everyone in the line of fire in the next year or so to keep an open mind and nimble feet.

Mark Niesse reports that “Voter registration surges in Georgia ahead of 2020 elections” in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and notes that “More than 352,000 people signed up to vote in the past 11 months, the vast majority of them automatically registering when they obtain a driver’s license, according to data from the secretary of state’s office. The influx has boosted Georgia’s voter rolls to a record high of nearly 7.4 million.” Even better, for Democrats:

Many of the new voters are racial minorities or under age 30, both groups that are more likely to support Democrats than Republicans, according to a Pew Research Center poll.

About 47% of the new voters who identified their race are minorities and 45% are age 30 or younger, according to an analysis by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution of a list of voters registered from Nov. 6 to Aug. 12. By comparison, 40% of all Georgia voters are minorities and 14% are age 30 or younger. The voter list was obtained from the secretary of state’s office and provided to the AJC by Fair Fight PAC, a political action committee that supports Democratic parties nationwide.

Niesse adds that “Registrations at driver’s license offices far outpaced voter registration drives, indicating that many of the new voters recently moved to Georgia or turned 18 years old,” which may bode well for Georgia’s Democratic Party. Georgia will elect two U.S. Senators, and every seat in the General Assembly is up for election. Although Trump bat Clinton by  percent in GA in 2016, Democratic candidate for Governor Stacy Abrams came within 1.4 percent (55,000 votes) of winning the governorship last year. Also,

“Rapid population growth and changing demographics in Georgia provide Democrats huge opportunities,” said Lauren Groh-Wargo, Abrams’ former campaign manager and a senior adviser for Fair Fight PAC. “Each eligible Georgian who moves to Georgia and becomes a voter is more likely to vote Democratic than Republican.”

Niesse notes further that “About 365,000 new voters have registered each year at Georgia’s driver’s license offices since the beginning of 2017, for a total of 989,000 new voters, according to the secretary of state’s office.” But not all of the registration increase arises from population growth, as Niesse explains:

Meanwhile, traditional voter registration efforts are reaching hundreds of thousands more potential voters…The Voter Participation Center, a voter registration group that targets unmarried women, people of color and young people, sent registration forms to more than 560,000 Georgians last month.

…Of Georgia’s newly registered voters since Election Day 2018, more than 31,000 of them mailed their registration forms to election officials, which reflects some of the impact of voter registration drives such as those run by the Voter Participation Center. The center said more than 5,500 forms were returned to the secretary of state’s office as a result of its efforts last year.

ProGeorgia, a group that coordinates registration outreach with more than a dozen organizations, said it’s on track to register 21,000 new voters this year.

“Georgia’s population as a whole is aging,” Niesse notes, “but most older residents are already registered to vote, and new residents are more likely to be young or minorities.” All of which is good news for Georgia Democrats.

However, Georgia Democrats have had their high hopes dashed in recent statewide races, and the GA Republican Party has proven ruthless in suppressing voter turnout. Yet, Trump won Georgia’s 2016 electoral votes by a margin of less than 212,000 votes. With two U.S. Senate seats at stake and good prospects for Dems picking up a House of Representatives seat, turnout is likely to be higher than usual. Some additional resources for Georgia from the national Democratic Party and it’s contributors could prove to be a cost-effective investment.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

The Democrats have been making some significant gains in suburban America. But it’s important to remember that suburbia is a vast section of America and should not be thought of as just the suburban outgrowths of our largest and most dynamic cities. There is much, much more to suburbia than that. And once you get away from these more cosmopolitan suburbs, the voters (more white, less educated) and Democratic progress look quite different.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his Facebook page:

Anne Kim has a good article up on the Washington Monthly site that draws out perhaps the key political implication of the Muro-Whiton Brookings study on economic divergence between Democratic and Republican districts. After summarizing some of the Brookings findings (which I covered in a previous post) and related analyses and connecting them to regional divergence, she points out:

“These kinds of imbalances cry out for a policy agenda aimed at spreading economic opportunity more evenly across the country. But so far, the top contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination have stuck to universalist policy ideas like Medicare for All, while discussions of inequality have centered on race or class, but not on geography.

To be sure, a few candidates, including Vice President Joe Biden, have a “rural agenda” in their platforms. But the ideas encapsulated in them include relatively narrow default tropes like expanding broadband and helping family farmers. The one nod toward the disparate regional impacts of economic change is on trade policy, but there again, the prescriptions are less about creating new jobs than about posturing on China or regurgitating standard talking points bashing trade agreements. None of the candidates have put forth signature policy priorities that would rejuvenate the moribund economies of the industrial Midwest, or help heartland economies generate the kind of prosperity that their coastal neighbors enjoy.

The absence of a credible Democratic agenda on regional prosperity is one reason Trump has had free rein to exploit and magnify the economic discontent in large parts of the country for his political gain. As wrong-headed and destructive as his policies have been, his supporters can rightly say that Trump has at least acknowledged the significance of their economic decline.

Democrats shouldn’t continue to leave the field to Trump to romp at will.”

She concludes, and very rightly I think:

“Superimpose a map of the electoral college in 2020 and two things immediately become clear. First, Democratic strongholds such as California, New York, and Illinois are nowhere near sufficient to deliver the 270 votes Democrats need to secure the White House. The University of Virginia’s Larry Sabato, for instance, counts 183 “safe” Democratic electoral votes so far.

Second, many of the swing states Democrats will need to win fall squarely within the “other America” in need of help. These states include the industrial upper Midwest—Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan—as well as Pennsylvania and Colorado. Four of these also happen to be states that Hillary Clinton lost in 2016.

Some liberals no doubt worry that nodding to the economic woes of blue-collar heartland America somehow validates the nationalism, MAGA-ism, and outright racism that Trump has unleashed. Nothing is further from the case. Reviving the heartland to help all Americans prosper is ultimately not about blue states versus red states, but about reviving the national project now in jeopardy.”