On Wednesday, former Vice President Biden got a moving – and important – endorsement from Rep. Jim Clyburn, South Carolina’s most influential African American leader. Clyburn’s heartfelt testimony about his friendship, trust and love for Biden left many who were present for the event tearing up. It also showcased Biden’s greatest strength as a candidate, the ability to call Democrats to return to their identity as the party of compassion and connection to the disadvantaged. At U.S. News, Lisa Hagen makes the case that the “Clyburn Endorsement Has Value for Biden Beyond South Carolina,” and observes that “his large network of endorsements could end up being particularly useful if the nominating contest drags on until the national convention and party leaders – like Clyburn – play a pivotal role in helping to name the Democratic presidential nominee…If he can pull out a victory in South Carolina and, more importantly, a decisive one, Biden could convert that momentum to buoy him in many of the contests held on Super Tuesday, in which more than a third of the pledged delegates will be up for grabs. And if he can demonstrate his strength among African American voters, he has the potential to perform well in a number of Southern states holding contests on March 3 that also have large constituencies of black voters.”

Could Sen. Bernie Sanders take a page from FDR to add credibility to his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination? Sophie Vaughan thinks so, and she explores the possibilities in “How Bernie Sanders Is Reviving the Promise of FDR’s Economic Bill of Rights: There are deep parallels between what Bernie Sanders is proposing and what Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised” at Common Dreams. As Vaughan writes, “Increasingly, Sanders surrogates on the campaign trail have framed the candidate’s ideas as an extension of the Economic Bill of Rights,” Vaughan writes, “a concept first proposed in 1944 by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his State of the Union address…The remaining Democratic candidates—Vice President Joe Biden, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, and billionaire investor Tom Steyer—all oppose a Medicare for All plan. But many propose that those who can’t find private insurance should be able to qualify for expanded government insurance plans…None of these candidates, however, have placed their policies so explicitly in the lineage of Roosevelt’s Economic Bill of Rights as Sanders. While Sanders has not proposed a constitutional amendment for his economic rights as Roosevelt did, the point is already subject of debate among those who study Roosevelt.”

Vaughan continues, “We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence,” Roosevelt said in the 1944 speech. “Necessitous men are not free.”…The Economic Bill of Rights never came to fruition because Roosevelt’s illness and eventual death prohibited him from pushing further for the amendments. With his campaign, Sanders has now taken on the mantle of this bill of rights…One of the proposals that Roosevelt outlined, “the right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health,” sounds similar to the hope expressed by many Sanders supporters at the community conversation…[FDR scholar Harvey] Kaye says Roosevelt was serious about the constitutional amendment, but some scholars, such as Harvard Law School Professor Cass Sunstein, argue that the President never planned to actually go through with pushing for this amendment. Sunstein says the rights were merely a framework to advocate economic rights be respected to the same extent as social rights.” One demographic reality that makes the strategy palatable, is that many high-turnout senior voters, remember well that their parents regarded FDR as a peerless visionary, whose inspiring courage in the face of many doubters, saved America from ruin. Strongly invoking a connection to FDR can’t hurt Sanders — and it might help.

But Sanders will also have to more persuasively address this concern, cited in E. J. Dionne, Jr.’s column, “Democrats are dealing with a generational divide” in The Washington Post: “In January, Gallup asked: “If your party nominated a generally well-qualified person for president who happened to be a socialist, would you vote for that person?”Among adults under 35 years old, 63 percent said yes. But only 42 percent of those aged 35-54 answered affirmatively, and just 35 percent of those over 55 said yes. Even among Democrats, 21 percent said they would not vote for a socialist; for independents, that figure was 51 percent…The S-word would thus be a heavy burden to carry into a tightly fought campaign, as a timely study by political scientists David Broockman and Joshua Kalla published Tuesday in Vox suggested…In analyzing an early-2020 40,000-person survey, they found that “nominating Sanders would drive many Americans who would otherwise vote for a moderate Democrat to vote for Trump.”…To offset these losses, Sanders “would need to boost turnout of young left-leaning voters enormously,” Broockman and Kalla wrote. They conclude: “There are good reasons to doubt that Sanders’s nomination would produce a youth turnout surge this large.”

In their article, “The Sanders Tax: How our Electoral College ratings might change if he becomes the presumptive nominee‘” Kyle Kondik and J. Miles Coleman write at Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “If Democrats nominated Bernie Sanders, they would, initially, start off with somewhat of a penalty in our Electoral College ratings…Sanders’ policy prescriptions and rhetoric may complicate Democratic prospects in the Sun Belt, where the party’s recent growth has been driven by highly-educated suburbanites…Given the composition of the 2020 Senate map, which features more Sun Belt states, Sanders’ relative strength in the Rust Belt — assuming that even ends up being the case — nonetheless doesn’t help Democrats much in the race for the Senate.”

With respect to Sanders’s prospects in the largest swing state, Kondik and Coleman write, “State analyst and mapper Mathew Isbell attributes the Democratic losses in Florida in 2018 to their underperformance in Miami-Dade County. In 2018, then-Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL), and the Democrats’ gubernatorial nominee, then-Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, gained over Clinton elsewhere in the state, but they couldn’t match her showing in the Miami area. Instead of Clinton’s 29 percentage point margin there in 2016, Nelson and Gillum each carried it by a smaller 21 percentage point spread. Rather astoundingly, they each flipped four large Trump counties — St. Lucie, Pinellas (St. Petersburg), Seminole (Orlando suburbs), and Duval (Jacksonville) — but both came up short because of their weaker margins in Miami-Dade County. One-third of the county’s electorate is Cuban; Sanders’ comments praising some aspects of Fidel Castro’s regime could be uniquely toxic with this bloc, and may effectively push Florida out of reach.”

Kondik and Coleman continue: “Sanders is also a candidate whose strongest appeal is with the young, whereas Florida has an older electorate. According to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, Florida’s median age is 41.8 years, and only four states rank higher. Interestingly, other comparatively old states include Maine, New Hampshire, and Sanders’ home state of Vermont, but retirees who can afford to move to Sun Belt states like Florida have typically voted Republican — and perhaps more importantly, they turn out. In 2016, senior citizens powered Trump’s coalition in the Sunshine State. Over 80% of voters 65 and older turned out, and exit polling showed Trump winning this group in a 57%-40% vote. Voters under 30 favored Clinton, but turned out at just 56%; Sanders likely would inspire higher turnout with millennials, but the GOP’s dominance with seniors in Florida has proved to be a potent electoral force.”

Former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg has taken his share of heat in the battle between the so-called “moderate” Democratic presidential candidates, and he is still standing. Buttigieg may have underestimated the intensity of the resentment he would encounter as a result of his comparative inexperience. As a former Mayor of the 4th largest city in Indiana, he has made the most of his ‘outsider’ status. But it’s a tough sale to close, when voters compare his governing record to that of his opponents. Yet, a fair-minded review of Buttigieg’s policies indicates that he is a solid progressive, and face it, he is the most articulate communicator of the lot. However, the 2020 campaign has revealed that he has work to do in broadening his credibility with African American, Latino and blue collar voters. His recently-deleted tweet which dissed Sanders’s “nostalgia for the the revolutionary politics of the ’60s” seemed to overlook that it was also a time when MLK’s leadership of the Civil Rights Movement transformed America (Sanders was an active member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), who was arrested in a school desegregation protest in Chicago in 1963 and also participated in the March on Washington in that year). At 38, however, Buttigieg has plenty of time to build his resume and his cred with these key constituencies. It’s not hard to envision him as the front-runner in a future presidential campaign.

From Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, a Columbia University political scientist, interviewed by Mary Harris in “ALEC: How Republicans Use It to Gain Power” at slate.com: “When Republicans take over state governments, they first try to weaken unions and other progressive activist groups, and then change election rules in ways that will make it easier for them to win again…Many state legislatures don’t give lawmakers the proper resources to make policy. ALEC provides all of those resources: the ideas behind the bills, the polling that they would need to pass, a hotline that lawmakers can call if they want help drafting a piece of legislation or coming up with a good argument. ALEC essentially serves as a private research assistant for state legislators…There have been a number of progressive efforts over time to construct counterweights to ALEC, [the American Legislative Exchange Council] but they’ve often fizzled out because they haven’t received sufficient attention from donors or were too focused on organizing power in states that were already progressive, like New York or California. The State Innovation Exchange supports local legislators in a number of key states. Future Now is trying to replicate ALEC’s success by building a national network and thinking about the ways policy can be used to either advantage one’s allies or defang one’s opponents.”

As most commentators moved on after Nevada, I reflected on the future implications at New York:

This year’s Democratic caucuses are not entirely in the rearview mirror yet: There is one more on April 4 in Wyoming. But after the Caucus Night meltdown in Iowa, and then a near brush with disaster in Nevada, the odds of this form of nominating contest surviving into the next presidential cycle is somewhere not far north of zero.

Nevada Democrats were lucky on several counts. Most obviously, they had Iowa’s example to put them on high alert. Their basic caucusing procedures were modeled on Iowa’s; they had the same huge new complications based on the multiple reporting requirements imposed on them by the national party, exacerbated by a large field of candidates, and were originally planning to use the same technologies. On top of that, Nevada was experimenting with an “early caucusing” option utilizing ranked-choice voting that created another layer of complexity.

Horrified by the possibility of a second meltdown, the DNC offered a lot of technical assistance to the Nevada party and helped mobilize volunteers from other states to staff the event. But with all that, on Caucus Day the results came in v-e-r-y slowly. There were just enough returns, however, to justify the release of full entrance polls, and the really lucky thing for Nevada is that there was a clear winner, which allowed media types to spend many fine hours agitating the air about the Greater Meaning of a Bernie Sanders nomination — as though the thought had never occurred to them before — instead of complaining about the slow count.

“The statement is as follows:

“’I am so proud of the Nevada Democratic Party, its talented staff, and the thousands of grassroots volunteers who have done so much hard work over the years to build this operation. We have the best state party in the country, and that was shown again this past week after another successful caucus that featured a historic four days of early voting with more than 10,000 new voter registrations.

“”With so much Democratic enthusiasm in Nevada, demonstrated again by the tremendous caucus turnout this year, I believe we should make the process of selecting our nominee even more accessible. We’ve made it easier for people to register to vote here in Nevada in recent years and now we should make it easier for people to vote in the presidential contests. That’s why I believe it’s time for the Democratic Party to move to primaries everywhere.'”

No, of course, there’s no problem with holding caucuses: It’s just that primaries are even better! They didn’t just get that way, of course, but Reid knows when it’s time to count your blessings and move on. Besides, he and other Nevada Democrats have more important fish to fry:

“’I’m glad to have fought to make Nevada the first Western state in the Democratic nominating process since 2008, and we have proven more than worthy of holding that prominent early state position. I firmly believe that Nevada, with our broad diversity that truly reflects the rest of the country, should not just be among the early states — we should be the first in the nation.'”

A big part of the Great Iowa Freak-out of 2020 was attributable not just to the Caucus Night brouhaha but to long-standing and rapidly intensifying complaints about the state’s exceptionally pale demographics. Part of the reason Nevada and South Carolina got moved into the charmed circle of privileged and officially designated “early states” was to protect the status of Iowa (“First-in-the-Nation Caucus”) and the equally honkyfied New Hampshire (“First-in-the-Nation Primary”) by giving more diverse jurisdictions some representation. Now Nevada wants it all: to move past Iowa and New Hampshire to go first in a system without caucuses. Certainly Iowa is in no position to insist on a future with caucuses, and New Hampshire cannot hold on to the status quo forever on its own.

The abolition of caucuses may have been inevitable even without this year’s caucus issues. As Geoffrey Skelley noted last spring, fully 11 states that held caucuses in 2016 moved to primaries this year, mostly because the national party kept insisting on safeguards to improve access and accountability (e.g., all those raw-vote tabulations) that are difficult to reconcile with old-school party-run caucuses. You might wonder what states whose legislatures refuse to conduct and pay for partisan presidential primaries do instead of caucuses. There is the option (which four states will exercise this year) of a party-run primary — sometimes called a “firehouse primary,” because they typically use limited publicly owned polling places to hold down expenses.

Those of us who were fond of caucuses for the deliberative voting process and the sheer sense of community they fostered will have to move on in the great cattle drive of life.

In his irresistibly-titled New York Times column, “Dems, You Can Defeat Trump in a Landslide,” Thomas L. Friedman argues that “Democrats have to do something extraordinary — forge a national unity ticket the likes of which they have never forged before. And that’s true even if Democrats nominate someone other than Bernie Sanders.”

Many left Dems will see Friedman’s column as a reflection of the panic of moderate Democrats, and indeed there is a fair amount of nail-biting about Sanders momentum out there, as Paul Waldman notes in “Democrats, stop freaking out about Bernie Sanders” at The Washington Post. Their concerns may be justified, as indicated by the available polling data, which has been well-analyzed by Ruy Teixeira and others at TDS and elsewhere. Should a moderate somehow win the Democratic nomination, the fallout could be equally-divisive, particularly if Sanders wins a plurality of the delegates, but not a majority.

Trump has screwed up once-predictable politics so bad that nobody really knows what is going to happen. Friedman notes that “Veteran political analyst E.J. Dionne, in his valuable new book, “Code Red: How Progressives and Moderates Can Unite to Save Our Country,” got this exactly right: We have no responsible Republican Party anymore. It is a deformed Trump personality cult.” Anyway, here’s the gist of Friedman’s idea:

“I want people to know that if I am the Democratic nominee these will be my cabinet choices — my team of rivals. I want Amy Klobuchar as my vice president. Her decency, experience and moderation will be greatly appreciated across America and particularly in the Midwest. I want Mike Bloomberg (or Bernie Sanders) as my secretary of the Treasury. Our plans for addressing income inequality are actually not that far apart, and if we can blend them together it will be great for the country and reassure markets. I want Joe Biden as my secretary of state. No one in our party knows the world better or has more credibility with our allies than Joe. I will ask Elizabeth Warren to serve as health and human services secretary. No one could bring more energy and intellect to the task of expanding health care for more Americans than Senator Warren.

“I want Kamala Harris for attorney general. She has the toughness and integrity needed to clean up the corrupt mess Donald Trump has created in our Justice Department. I would like Mayor Pete as homeland security secretary; his intelligence and military background would make him a quick study in that job. I would like Tom Steyer to head a new cabinet position: secretary of national infrastructure. We’re going to rebuild America, not just build a wall on the border with Mexico. And I am asking Cory Booker, the former mayor of Newark, to become secretary of housing and urban development. Who would bring more passion to the task of revitalizing our inner cities than Cory?

Friedman goes on to suggest Admiral Andrew McRaven at the Pentagon, Sen. Romney for Commerce Secretary and Andrew Yang at Energy, with Ocasio-Cortez as our United Nations Ambassador. Also “I want Senator Michael Bennet, the former superintendent of the Denver Public Schools, to be my secretary of education. No one understands education reform better than he does. Silicon Valley Congressman Ro Khanna would be an ideal secretary of labor, balancing robots and workers to create “new collar” jobs.”

With a few tweaks, including more women in the cabinet, it’s a plausible enough ‘unity ticket’ and cabinet. Republicans will attack the idea as desperate. But it is certainly possible that polarization-weary voters might welcome such an approach. The specifics would be endlessly debatable. But the ‘Team of Rivals’ idea that Obama leveraged quite effectively could also help unify the party and impress some swing voters.

There’s lots to like in Friendman’s proposal. Quibble about the details, but what now seems inarguable is Friedman’s point that “if progressives think they can win without the moderates — or the moderates without the progressives — they are crazy.”

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

Can Sanders Beat Trump?

It is certainly possible. But that’s really not the right question. The right question is: how likely is it that Sanders would beat Trump if he were the nominee?

Jon Chait makes this point with admirable clarity in his latest column:

“The truth is we are all clueless about what voters want or will accept,” argues conventional-wisdom-monger Jim VandeHei, in a signal of how deeply the anti-probabilistic fallacy has spread. It is true that there is uncertainty attached to every outcome. The talking heads who guarantee Sanders will lose are wrong — any nominee might win, and in a polarized electorate, both parties have a floor of support that gives even the most toxic candidate a fighting chance. In 2016, Trump was the most unpopular candidate in the history of polling, but he squeaked into office because everything broke just right for him. It could happen for Bernie, too.

But to concede that we cannot be certain about the future does not mean we know nothing. An imperfect comparison might be to predicting the outcome of sporting events. You don’t know the outcome in advance, but it is usually possible to make probabilistic predictions. Those predictions are wrong all the time. But it would be silly to conclude that, just because upsets happen, every game should be treated as a coin flip. A huge amount of pro-Sanders commentary is based on simplistically conflating the correct claim that we lack perfect clarity with the incorrect claim that we have no clarity at all.”

With that in mind, what do we know that might shed light on how Sanders would do against Trump? First, of course, there is the trial heat polling. That polling, according to RCP averages, has Sanders and Biden running ahead of Trump nationally by essentially identical amounts and both ahead of other tested Democratic candidates.

The same pattern with Biden and Sanders relative to the other Democratic candidates can be seen in swing state polling, with the difference that Biden generally generally runs a little bit better than Sanders in most swing states. You can see this both in the RCP trial heat averages and in preliminary state-level breakdowns of the Voter Study Group Nationscape survey (more than 170,000 interviews so far, 6000 nespondents per week)

This suggests that both Sanders and Biden, neither of whom has name recognition problems, are currently capturing anti-Trump, pro-Democratic preferences fairly efficiently. Put another way, simply hearing their names and knowing who they are, does not, at this point, deter large numbers of respondents from expressing pro-Democratic sentiments.

But in a general election campaign, of course, the Trump campaign will be working strenuously to sow doubts about the Democratic candidate and convince undecided voters and those with soft Democratic preferences that Trump, whatever objections such voters may have to him, is by far the lesser evil when compared to the Democrat. This is where Sanders will run into trouble, since since he is poorly set up to parry such attacks among persuadable voters.

David Leonhardt summarizes his problem succinctly:

“[Sanders] has taken a nearly maximalist liberal position on every major issue. It’s especially striking from him, because he has shown over his career that he grasps the importance of building a coalition.

Sanders once won over blue-collar Vermonters with help from a moderate position on guns. “We need a sensible debate about gun control which overcomes the cultural divide that exists in this country,” he said in 2015, “and I think I can play an important role in this.” He was also once an heir to organized labor’s skepticism of large-scale immigration. “At a time when the middle class is shrinking, the last thing we need is to bring over in a period of years, millions of people into this country who are prepared to lower wages for American workers,” he said in 2007.

Now, though, Sanders has evidently decided that progressives will no longer accept impurities — or even much tactical vagueness. He, along with Elizabeth Warren, has embraced policies that are popular on the left and nowhere else: a ban on fracking; the decriminalization of border crossings; the provision of federal health benefits to undocumented immigrants; the elimination of private health insurance.

For many progressives, each of these issues has become a moral litmus test. Any restriction of immigration is considered a denial of human rights. Any compromise on guns or health care is an acceptance of preventable deaths.

And I understand the progressive arguments on these issues. But turning every compromise into an existential moral failing is not a smart way to practice politics. It comforts the persuaded while alienating the persuadable.

F.D.R. and Reagan understood this, as did Abraham Lincoln and many great social reformers, including Frederick Douglass, Jane Addams, Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez. Strong political movements can accept impurity on individual issues in the service of a larger goal: winning.”

That’s the nub of his problem right there. He really is extremely vulnerable to brutal attacks from his Republican opponent, which will require unusual deftness and savvy to counter successfully. So far, we haven’t seen a Sanders who seems capable of doing that.

Of course, Sanders does have a response to the potential difficulty summarized here: turnout, turnout, turnout! But as I and others have shown, this is a chimera. If Sanders is to beat Trump, he’ll have to it the old-fashioned way: convincing many voters who don’t adore him that he is indeed a superior choice when compared to Trump.

Who are these voters? Some clues may be found a recent piece by Patrick Ruffini based on Nationscape data. Ruffini finds that while both Biden and Sanders have solid leads over Trump in the national data, their coalitions are not identical. Specifically, Sanders does quite a bit better than Biden among young voters but lags seriously lags behind among voters over 45. And while Sanders is comparably strong among nonwhite voters and lags Biden only slightly among white noncollege voters, he trails Biden’s performance by 8 points among white college voters.

If Sanders is the nominee and wants to maximize his probability of beating Trump, he is going to have to face up to these difficulties. If not, I fear we’re in for a long and painful next four years.

Looking at the contests for majority control of the U.S. Senate, Charlie Cook writes at The Cook Political Report: “With the Senate currently split between 53 Republicans and 47 Democrats, this year the GOP has 23 seats to defend to only 12 for Democrats. It’s a plausible bet that Democrats come out of November’s election with either 48 or 49 seats in the Senate, a net gain of one or two. But another seat-or-two gain for Democrats and a majority is distinctly possible, particularly if college-educated suburban women are on fire for Democrats the way they were in 2018. The current generic congressional ballot test, a rough measure of what direction the political winds are blowing and whether the velocity is light, moderate, or heavy, shows Democrats ahead by about the same margin as they were in 2018…Two years from now in 2022, the GOP is playing more defense again. They’ll have 22 senators up for reelection to a dozen for Democrats. It isn’t until 2024 that the shoe is on the other foot, when Democrats will have 21 seats up to Republicans’ 10, pending the winners of this year’s special elections in Georgia and Arizona.”

In his article, “Sanders and the Senate” at Sabato’s Crystal Ball, Kyle Kondik and J. Miles Coleman observe, “Bernie Sanders may be a poorer fit for the Democrats’ Senate targets than some other Democratic contenders if he wins the nomination…There are two Senate rating changes this week: Colorado moves from Toss-up to Leans Democratic, while Alabama moves from Leans Republican to Likely Republican…Republicans remain favored to hold the majority.”

Table 2: Biden and Sanders vs. Trump in RCP polling average

Source: RealClearPolitics as of the afternoon of Wednesday, Feb. 19.

From E. J. Dionne, Jr.’s column, “Why Trump is gloating about Nevada” in The Washington Post: “The Vermont senator’s sweep of Nevada’s caucuses on Saturday is no proof he can win in November. But it does reveal a campaign that can back what for many voters is a trusted brand with the political machinery to close the sale…While Sanders’ more moderate opponents wring their hands over what to do next, they might consider that Sanders built this brand in part through a series of specific promises: single-payer health care, free college, a Green New Deal, universal child care and much more…Sanders may not have explained in detail how he’d pay for all this, let alone, as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) pointed out on Saturday night, how he’d shepherd it through Congress. But Sanders understands the hunger for very specific forms of relief within a significant part of the Democratic electorate, particularly the young who suffered most from the fallout of the Great Recession.”

Dionne notes further, “Because so many Latinos think of themselves as moderates or conservatives — roughly 40 percent of them labeled themselves this way in Nevada, according to the Edison Entrance Poll — their strong support for expansive government programs and economic progressivism is often ignored. Sanders never made that mistake. He thus carried even self-described moderate and conservative Latinos by better than 2-to-1…A key test for Sanders will come on Super Tuesday in Texas, where Latinos rejected him in 2016 for Clinton. But here is the dilemma for the divided moderates: Roughly two-thirds of Nevada caucus-goers said their priority was to find a candidate who could beat Trump, and Sanders received less than a quarter of their preferences. But the rest of that beat-Trump-above-all crowd was relatively evenly scattered across the candidacies of Biden, Buttigieg, and then Warren and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.)…Sanders is beating them all because they are all beating each other.”

In his New York Times column, Thomas B. Edsall writes, “Thomas Mann, a senior fellow at Brookings and the author, with Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, of the book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism,” was blunt in his assessment of the broad contemporary political environment. ‘Partisan polarization has become hard-wired in the American political system and is likely to be with us for the foreseeable future. Our constitutional system is not well matched with our current party system. Partisan asymmetry makes it even worse. The GOP has radicalized into an anti-system party that does not accept the legitimacy of its opposition and enables a slide toward autocracy. Very dangerous times for American democracy.'”

Edsall adds, “It is an environment in which negative campaigning, on TV and on social media, has become the instrument of choice, not a tool, but the beating heart of political partisanship…Two political scientists, Gaurav Sood and Shanto Iyengar, describe this shift to antagonistic campaigning in “Coming to Dislike Your Opponents: The Polarizing Impact of Political Campaigns”…’Negative ads are especially effective in increasing partisan affect. A strong negativity bias influences information processing, making people more likely to attend to negative rather than positive appeals.'”…Sood and Iyengar see the use of divisive campaign tactics increasing in the future: ‘It is likely that as a consequence of the data revolution, and burgeoning social scientific research, campaigns will learn to target individuals better, and will be able to deliver more “potent” messages to them.'”

“Nonvoters lean slightly Democratic overall, but they favor President Trump in some key states,” Dhrumil Mehta writes at FiveThirtyEight. “The poll also asked nonvoters who they would vote for if they were to vote, and found they were almost evenly split — 33 percent say they would vote for the Democratic nominee, 30 percent say they would vote for Trump and 18 percent say they would vote for someone else. However, this breakdown varied quite a bit in battleground states, which Knight sampled heavily. Nevada’s “chronic nonvoters,”¹ for example, split evenly, but those in Pennsylvania and Florida skewed heavily toward Trump while those in Georgia would skew Democratic if they all voted.”

At medium.com Dr. Karin Temerius, a former psychiatrist, who is interested in political attitude change, probes how to “Flip Trump Voters the Easy Way: Leverage existing ambivalence with a few simple questions.” Temerius is more interested in peer to peer persuasion here than mass communications in a political campaign. Among her insights: “Most people are as ambivalent about politics as they are about changing bad habits. Even hardcore Trumpers will admit there are things they don’t like about the President — his use of Twitter, his disrespect of members of the military, his indifference to the ballooning national debt. But when they get into a conversation with a Trump opponent, they usually spend all their time thinking and talking about the ways in which Trump is great. As a result, they are likely to emerge from a transpartisan dialogue supporting the President even more strongly than they did before…So, how do we get people thinking and talking about what’s wrong with Trump instead of what they think is right?” She suggests “Use the commitment scale: On a scale from 0 to 10, with 0 being not at all and 10 being more than any other president ever, how strong is your support for President Trump?” It’s not easy to get a political conversation to this point, but if you can, “Then, when they answer, resist the urge to ask them what it is that they find so appealing about the President. (Trust me, that impulse will be strong and you will have to resist it.) Instead, nurture their ambivalence and support the part of them that wants to change with this response…When I use this approach with Trump supporters I am often shocked by how many aspects of the President they dislike. Things that — if I’d mentioned them in the form of an argument — would have triggered resistance and an unflinching defense of everything Trump stands for…As the French polymath Blaise Pascal once wrote, “People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others.” The key to MI is giving people incentive and space to discover their own reasons for change rather than their reasons for staying the same.”

There was a lot of Republican crowing about Democrats in Disarray after the February 19 Democratic candidate debate in Las Vegas. So at New York I offered a reminder of what real fighting looked like:

It’s probably a good time to remind everyone that last night’s battle in Vegas pales in comparison to the regular spectacle of insults, eye gouging, and kneecapping that characterized many of the 2016 Republican debates. Yes, Bloomberg got taken down a few notches as Elizabeth Warren showed why she got a debate scholarship for college. But it was nothing like the incredible disrespect and downright hatred expressed toward Trump by his 2016 rivals, which (unlike Bloomberg last night) he reciprocated in full, giving us all a preview of the depths to which he would plunge presidential communications.

“On the debate stage, Trump stretched his hands out for the audience to see — then insisted the suggestion that ‘something else must be small’ was false.

“’I guarantee you there’s no problem,’ Trump said to howls from the audience at the Fox debate.”

Then there was the endless insultfest between Trump and Ted Cruz, which extended beyond the debate season when “Lyin’ Ted” (Trump’s nickname for the senator) refused to endorse the nominee at the Republican convention (likely because of Trump’s bizarre, outrageous suggestion that Cruz’s father might have been involved in the JFK assassination).

And how about the endless war of contemptuous words Trump aimed at “low-energy” Jeb Bush and the two former presidents in his family? It all finally provoked the normally pacific Jebbie to fire back:

“Former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida blasted Donald J. Trump for insulting the Bush family and ridiculed the idea that Mr. Trump could be commander-in-chief during a contentious and sometimes nasty Republican presidential debate in Greenville, S.C., on Saturday, a week before a crucial primary in the state.

“With Mr. Trump leading in the polls in South Carolina and elsewhere after his victory in the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday, he was a ripe target for his Republican rivals, especially Mr. Bush and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who are under intense pressure to halt his political momentum. But the vitriol was so intense that it seemed to surprise even Mr. Trump, a combative figure who had not been so roundly pummeled at a debate before.”

Were you impressed by Warren’s challenge to Bloomberg’s reputation for sexism? Well, its direct predecessor in presidential politics was Carly Fiorina’s angry rebuke of Trump during a September 2015 debate for insulting her appearance and treating it as a disqualifier.

To be clear, the 2016 Republican combat didn’t always require Trump to be a direct participant. Rubio and Cruz regularly took nasty personal shots at each other over the authenticity of their relative positioning on immigration policy. And one of the nomination contest’s key moments occurred in a debate just prior to the New Hampshire primary, when Chris Christie took down putative front-runner Rubio effectively and remorselessly:

“Christie, in the worst condition of any of the establishment challengers, in fifth place in the polls and with no obvious path to the nomination, landed the strongest blows on Rubio we’ve seen yet. Worse yet, Rubio responded to a pounding from Christie for being a paper-thin senator with no accomplishments by playing the part to a T: robotically repeating talking points even as the New Jersey governor mocked him for robotically repeating talking points.”

Now, in the end, all these Trump rivals other than Bush (Fiorina had withdrawn her endorsement of the nominee after the Access Hollywood video confirmed his arrogant piggishness) clamored onboard his foul-smelling bandwagon, and Rubio and Cruz are administration toadies in the Senate. And most obviously, in 2016 Republicans won the White House and both Houses of Congress despite all the discord. So I wouldn’t write off Democratic prospects this November simply because the candidates gambled a bit on aggressiveness in Las Vegas.

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

Is Trump’s Approval Rating Really Going Up?

I’ve written about this before but there are reasons to be skeptical that his remarkably stable approval ratings are suddenly headed upwards. The excellent G. Elliott Morris explains in The Economist.

“[E]ven after correcting for demographic biases, pollsters’ data can still be unrepresentative. They may have the right shares of Latino voters and boomers, but nevertheless have too many Republicans or Democrats. This concern is pronounced when an event causes especially good, or bad, news for a political party. At such times surveys can suddenly be swamped with partisans who are eager to voice their love, or hate, for the president.

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

I’ve questioned the wonder-working powers of high voter turnout before but, shockingly, not everyone has agreed. But here is some more evidence undercutting the more-turnout-will-solve-everything thesis from a massive study by the Knight Foundation.

There’s a great deal in their report, including a very interesting typology of nonvoters, both their characteristics and reasons for not voting, which suggest a complex phenomenon not reducible to voter suppression and/or insufficiently radical candidates.

But, regardless of motivation,what if all those nonvoters really did vote? Surely the Democrats would kick Trump’s ass back to Mar-a-Lago for good. Sorry, it’s not that simple, as the chart of key swing states below shows. Democrats would benefit some in the national popular vote but wouldn’t be helped sufficiently in the Electoral College to take Trump out.

If this doesn’t make you question the turnout mythology currently popular in Sanders wing of the Democratic party, I don’t know what will.

After neurotically avoiding the topic for a two days, I buckled down at New York to consider POTUS’s significantly improving job approval numbers and what they might mean.

One of the stone verities of national life over the last three years, right up there with regular California wildfires and a dysfunctional Congress, has been the stability of Donald J. Trump’s job-approval assessments by the public. Yes, they sometimes went up well into the low 40s, and sometimes went down into the mid-to-high 30s, depending mostly on the presence or absence of conspicuously bizarre and destructive Trump behavior. But as Geoffrey Skelley noted in March last year, Trump has stood out from past presidents in this respect:

“Trump’s approval rating has the least variation of any post–World War II president. Granted, Trump hasn’t yet served a full term, but changes in his approval rating have been remarkably small.”

That may be changing, and at the perfect time for Trump. His average job-approval rating according to RealClearPolitics had but rarely drifted just above 45 percent since Inauguration Day. Today, it stands at 46 percent. And you can’t blame that on some unusual mix of pro-Trump surveys like Rasmussen or The Hill–HarrisX. The venerable Gallup Poll has for two straight months placed the president’s job-approval number at 49 percent, far above his average Gallup rating of 40 percent over the course of his presidency.

RCP does not weigh job-approval polls for reliability and partisan bias, so sometimes its numbers are suspect. But FiveThirtyEight conducts multiple adjustments to boost accuracy, and its job-approval ratings for Trump are also spiking in the direction of previously unreached levels. It’s at 44.3 percent utilizing all polls, and at 45.9 percent if you limit the sample to those of registered voters or likely voters (as opposed to “all adults”). Both these numbers are highs for Trump since early 2017.

The comparison to which some observers leap is, ironically, Barack Obama, whose job-approval rating also began to drift upward just before he faced voters for a second time in 2012. A year out, his job-approval rating was at 43 percent (per Gallup), much where Trump’s was in November 2019. By Election Day 2012, it was up to 52 percent, and he won 51 percent of the popular vote.

At The Daily Beast, Justin Baragona saw it this way: “Moments after former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg was absolutely savaged by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) in his first Democratic presidential primary debate on Wednesday night, CNN political commentator Van Jones didn’t pull back any punches in his description of the billionaire’s performance….“Listen, this was a disaster for Bloomberg,” Jones exclaimed during CNN’s post-debate coverage. “Bloomberg went in as the Titanic — billion-dollar-machine Titanic. Titanic, meet iceberg Elizabeth Warren.”…Jones went on to say that despite the stop-and-frisk issue, which Warren also hit Bloomberg on at the debate, a lot of African-American voters were “placing great hope” and “trying to move over” to the ex-mayor but he showed “he just wasn’t ready.”…“He was tone-deaf on issue after issue, and the reason why — he’s not been in those living rooms, he hasn’t been doing those town halls,” the former Obama adviser noted.”

Julia Manchester observes at The Hill: “Democratic presidential contender Pete Buttigieg swiped at progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg in his opening comments at Wednesday’s Democratic debate, saying primary voters don’t want the contest to come down to “one candidate who wants to burn this party down and another candidate who wants to buy this party out.”…“Most Americans don’t see where they fit if they’ve got to choose between a socialist who thinks that capitalism is the root of all evil and a billionaire who thinks that money should be the root of all power,” the former South Bend, Ind., mayor said at the forum, hosted by NBC News, in Las Vegas. …”Let’s put forward someone who actually lives and works in a middle-class neighborhood in an industrial, midwestern city. Let’s put forth someone who is actually a Democrat,” he continued.”

At Politico, John F. Harris notes one of Mayor Buttigieg’s more impressive responses: “We’ve got to wake up as a party,” Buttigieg implored. “We could wake up two weeks from today, the day after Super Tuesday, and the only candidates left standing will be Bernie Sanders and Mike Bloomberg, the two most polarizing figures on this stage. And most Americans don’t see where they fit if they’ve got to choose between a socialist who thinks that capitalism is the root of all evil and a billionaire who thinks that money ought to be the root of all power.”

But The Guardian’s Arwa Mahdawi was less impressed: “Pete Buttigieg’s performance was also noteworthy. The mayor may be able to read Norwegian but he can’t seem to read a room. Buttigieg’s constant attacks on Amy Klobuchar made him look like a mansplaining bully…“Mayo Pete” has been gliding through this election but I wouldn’t be surprised if more people start to find his patronizing demeanour a little hard to stomach.”

“Holy moly — what a debate for the Massachusetts senator. From the jump, Warren seemed to understand that she desperately needed a spark in the race. And she came out fighting — mostly against Bloomberg. “I’d like to talk about who we’re running against,” Warren said moments into the debate. “A billionaire who calls women fat broads and horse-faced lesbians, and no I’m not talking about Donald Trump, I’m talking about Mayor Bloomberg.” But that wasn’t even the most savage hit Warren scored on Bloomberg! That came later, when she absolutely destroyed his equivocation on whether he would release women who had worked for his company from non-disclosure agreements they had signed. It was a takedown — aided by Bloomberg’s inability to mitigate the damage — that you rarely see at this level of politics. If debates matter, Warren should overperform her current polls in Nevada.” – from Chris Cillizza at CNN Politics.

Also at The Guardian, Pulitzer Prize-winner Art Cullen also credits Warren with a great debate performance, and notes thart she “said Pete Buttigieg’s healthcare plans boiled down to a Power Point presentation and that Amy Klobuchar’s could fit on a postage stamp [actually, she said “post-it note”]. Mike Bloomberg was awful. Klobuchar was on the defensive. And the elephant in the room, Bernie Sanders, was able to point out that Medicare for All will actually save $450bn – and universal healthcare is what put him at the front of the pack in the first place. He did not appear to lose stride. Warren saw Klobuchar’s breakthrough in the New Hampshire debate. She spared no one, and savaged Bloomberg. Everyone was throwing punches but nobody hit as hard as Warren. With Super Tuesday less than two weeks away, this raucous debate was a clincher, and Warren might have saved her struggling campaign with direct appeals to minority women so important in the Nevada caususes. Joe Biden, not so much.”

If you were wondering what the protesters were screaming when Biden began responding, Time Magazine’s Madeline Carlisle reports: “As former Vice President Joe Biden prepared his closing statement at the Nevada Democratic primary debate on Wednesday night, protesters began to yell “You deported 3 million people.”…The crowed booed as protested continued to yell, and Biden began speaking again once they left the room…The undetermined number of protesters seem to be referring to to Biden’s role in the Obama administration, which deported over 3 million people…The immigrant rights organization the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, or RAICES, took credit for the protest on social media…“BREAKING: We are interrupting @JoeBiden at the #DemDebate chanting #DontLookAway and #NoKidsInCages. We need a Democratic candidate to adopt the #MigrantJusticePlatform and commit themselves to improve the lives of migrants and refugees!” they tweeted.”

Geoffrey Skelley of FiveThirtyEight saw a good night for Biden: “Biden had a good debate. Like an actual good debate, not just a relatively OK one compared to his many mediocre showings this cycle. He came into tonight needing a good performance that could produce positive headlines, and he might have done that. Thing is, I wonder if Warren’s strong showing will get the “comeback” treatment more so than Biden’s. She was involved in a number of potentially viral moments, going after Bloomberg as well as other candidates, that might have resonated more. So Biden probably did what he needed to, and now it’s just a question of how things are portrayed going forward…I liked Nathaniel’s take that Bloomberg may be making Biden look more liberal to viewers. Bloomberg is doing the dirty work of attacking Sanders from the right, so Biden doesn’t need to fill that role, which may be freeing for him. For the most part, Biden has continued to look quite sharp tonight. He fumbled a bit on the question about climate change policies, but he was arguably smart later when he didn’t take the bait when Lester Holt asked him what he thought about “socialist candidates.” Instead, he talked about his background as “the poorest man in Congress” and the fact that he thought taxes should be higher on people like Bloomberg and that, in his classic way of saying it, “the middle class is getting killed.”

As for the immediate impact of the debate, James Pindell writes at The Boston Globe: “One weird thing about this NBC/MSNBC/Nevada Independent debate was it took place after four days of early voting had already ended, which meant that an estimated 70,000 people had already participated in the state’s Democratic caucuses. For context, in 2016, when there was no early voting, an estimated 84,000 people caucused, so a candidate doing well or flopping won’t impact a huge chunk of voters…A second weird thing about this debate: Bloomberg isn’t even on a ballot for another two weeks.” The question arises, will similar attacks against Bloomberg seem stale in his next debate?