At The Atlantic, Ronald Brownstein writes about the rumblings of what may be a political earthquake in Texas: “Regardless of whether the Democratic nominee invests in Texas, the party is mobilizing a serious effort to win back the state House of Representatives, where Republicans now hold a nine-seat advantage; contest five or more Republican-held seats in the U.S. House; and challenge Republican Senator John Cornyn more formidably than it did in 2014. The continuing wave of congressional retirements among Texas Republicans—a “Texodus” that reached five in number on Wednesday with the announcement from Representative Bill Flores of Waco—has added to the sense that the state is becoming competitive once again after an extraordinary two decades of complete Republican control…The fundamental force that has shaken the GOP’s hold on Texas is that for the first time in decades, voters there are behaving in patterns familiar from other states. Democrats are showing gains in the state’s diverse, well-educated metropolitan areas, even as Republicans retain a crushing lead in small-town, exurban, and rural areas, as well as some suburbs…while the state overall still clearly tilts toward the GOP, the places driving its population growth are those where Democrats are gaining,according to state demographers.”

“Democrats’ gains in metro Texas have been helped by two currents,” Brownstein continues. “The first is growing diversity. Since 2010, census figures show, the state has added 1.9 million new Latino residents, 541,000 African Americans, and 473,000 Asians, along with just 484,000 whites. That translates to nonwhites accounting for six of every seven residents the state has added over nearly the past decade. The demographer William Frey of the Brookings Institution shared figures with me that show whites accounting for only about one-third of the state population younger than 30. Many of the suburban counties that once delivered reliable Republican majorities have changed substantially. “These are not the suburbs of the 1960s and 1970s,” Blank says. “These suburbs are significantly more diverse; they are significantly younger.” Since 2010, the number of eligible Latino voters has increased by at least 10 percent in five of the six suburban U.S. House districts Democrats are targeting next year, while the African and Asian American populations have grown even faster in most of them.”

However, Brownstein adds, “Both in 2016 and 2018, exit polls show that nonwhites cast 43 percent of the statewide vote. But the march toward a majority nonwhite electorate has been significantly slowed by lackluster turnout, particularly among Latinos. The Democratic firm Latino Decisions recently reported that while turnout from eligible Latinos in Texas soared from 1.1 million in 2014 to 1.9 million in 2018, the number of nonvoters dwarfed those who participated: 1.7 million Latinos who were registered to vote did not turn out, and 2 million more who are eligible have not yet registered. That huge gap threatens to again dilute the community’s impact in 2020, and despite all of Trump’s provocations, many Democrats are skeptical that the party knows how to significantly increase Latino engagement in Texas—a state with few unions that can organize these voters (as they do in Nevada) and with restrictive laws that hobble voter-registration drives.” Yet, “If there’s stronger turnout in 2020 among Latinos, Asians, and African Americans, even something close to a split among college-educated whites might be enough to allow a Democratic presidential candidate to withstand a towering Trump margin among nonurban, evangelical, and blue-collar white Texans.”

Nathaniel Rakich explains why “Americans’ Views Of The Economy Are Partisan, But They’re Not Immune To Bad News” at FiveThirtyEight: “So what’s perhaps more troubling for Trump is that independents’ opinions on the economy look a lot like Democrats’ — they often react to current events in a similar way, though their recent baseline is about 20 points higher. While it’s plausible that partisan polarization is so strong these days that even a recession would not change many voters’ minds about Trump, the fact that independents appear persuadable on the economy is a point in favor of the theory that a recession would indeed damage his reelection chances…Indeed, it might be a coincidence that Trump’s overall approval rating has ticked down in recent weeks amid speculation about a looming recession, but it also comes at a time when only 57 percent of independents have kind things to say about the state of the economy — the lowest number Quinnipiac has found since the summer of 2017.”

Anita Kumar’s Politico report on the Trump campaign’s new app to “keep supporters donating, volunteering and recruiting” includes some cogent observations about the value of apps in general as a campaign tool, including this one: “Betsy Hoover, who was online organizing director for Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign and later co-founded Higher Ground Labs, which invests in technology tools for Democrats, said candidates generally can’t rely on an app alone — even though it may be easier to have everything in one place — in part because of the arduous task of persuading someone to download it…“An app itself is not the answer,” she said. “You need a program and a strategy that engages supporters and builds community around your campaign. An app can help you achieve that strategy — but the strategy must be the primary focus and drive the usage of the app. If your goal is to recruit and train new people, an app is probably not your tool. If your goal is to increase the action your best supporters are taking, an app might be a great tool for management.”

Max Sawicky’s article, “The Wrong Way to Contrast With Trump on Trade” at The American Prospect” reviews Kimberly Clausing’s book, “Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital,” but argues for a different policy direction for Democrats: “Corporatist trade deals have assumed a very different form, giving scant attention to social concerns and maximum emphasis to freedom of movement for capital (open borders!) and protection of intellectual property rights. This, above all, must be the target for Democratic attacks on the free-trade agenda…To compete with Trump on trade, Democrats need to stand for a trade regime that does not disadvantage U.S. workers by indulging inordinately low wages and lax environmental regulations among trade partners. Tariffs are a tactical weapon, purely a negotiating tool or a response to some kind of unfair trade, such as foreign firms dumping products below their own cost of production to eliminate competition. The overall objective should be more trade, not less, but where goods and the jobs that produce them flow in both directions in a more balanced fashion.”

In his New York Times column, “The Trump Voters Whose ‘Need for Chaos’ Obliterates Everything Else: Political nihilism is one of the president’s strongest weapons,” Thomas B. Edsall asks “How worried should we be about a fundamental threat to democracy from the apparently large numbers of Americans who embrace chaos as a way of expressing their discontent? Might Trump and his loyal supporters seek to bring down the system if he is defeated in 2020?…What about later, if the damage he has inflicted on our customs and norms festers, eroding the invisible structures that underpin everything that actually makes America great?…A political leader who thrives on chaos, relishes disorder and governs on the principle of narcissistic self-interest is virtually certain to find defeat intolerable. If voters deny Trump a second term, how many of his most ardent supporters, especially those with a “need for chaos,” will find defeat unbearable?” If Trump refuses to concede, it could get ugly for a short while. But my guess is most of the resistance would fade away after election results have been certified.

WaPo columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. writes that “like it or not, the most important watchers of the Democratic debate on Thursday will be electability voters, who happen to constitute a majority of the party. And they are right to believe that the priority in 2020 is defeating President Trump. A man who invents the trajectory of a hurricane is not exactly someone whom we should entrust with four more years of power…Still, if the question of who can win is a constant, the dynamic going into this encounter is very different from that of July’s face-offs — and not just because 10 candidates who were there before will be missing. Rather quickly, the Democratic presidential race has come down to three candidates, and then everyone else…The battle for supremacy is between former vice president Joe Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), with Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) holding on to his loyalists but having trouble reaching beyond them…For now, nearly two-thirds of Democrats support one of the three leaders.”

A potentially close battle for control of the U.S. Senate next year is colliding with some unusual events in my home state of Georgia, and I wrote up the latest news and speculation at New York:

The intrigue involving the Senate seat Johnny Isakson is vacating for health reasons at the end of this year continues to roil Georgia politics, with some of the national implications beginning to sink in as well. One set of questions involves the decision Republican governor Brian Kemp will make about an interim replacement for Isakson until a special election takes place in November of next year (concurrently with the 2020 general election, in which the other Georgia Senate seat, held by Republican David Perdue, will be at stake as well).

The list of potential choices by Kemp continues to expand. The latest from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Greg Bluestein tosses in a couple of names that might be considered if the GOP would like to go beyond its usual white-guy boundaries while appealing to suburbanites: Karen Handel, Kemp’s predecessor and boss as secretary of State, who is currently plotting a rematch with Democrat Lucy McBath for the U.S. House seat she briefly held before 2018; and U.S. Attorney and former state legislator BJay Pak, a Korean-American.

But there remain plenty of white guys in the mix, including multiple congressmen. One especially aggressive suitor is Doug Collins, who probably got Donald Trump’s attention with his aggressive defense of POTUS as ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee during the Mueller hearings. Indeed, the New York Times conducted an elaborate examination of the potential Beltway ripple effect of a Collins appointment to the Senate:

“A Senate appointment would not only elevate Mr. Collins, 53, to an influential perch but also set off a cascade of openings in House leadership that could empower some of the president’s best-known conservative allies, including Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio and Mark Meadows of North Carolina.

“Allies have pointed to the pugnacious Mr. Jordan as a natural choice to replace Mr. Collins in the top Judiciary position. If he were to get the slot — which requires the blessing of Republican leaders — Mr. Meadows could then ascend to Mr. Jordan’s position as the top Republican on the Oversight and Reform Committee, another battleground where Democrats are aggressively investigating Mr. Trump.

“Another Republican ally of both men, Representative John Ratcliffe of Texas, could also get a look for the top Judiciary job.”

The Times is right in suggesting that Trump could have an impact on Kemp’s decision; aside from his wild popularity among Republicans everywhere, Kemp owes the president big time for his crucial endorsementof the “politically incorrect conservative” last year when he was in a runoff with then–Lieutenant Governor Casey Cagle. Indeed, if the White House and the Perdue cousins (U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny and that other senator, David) got behind a single aspirant, they’d be hard to resist.

Several big-time Democrats with prior statewide experience are in the mix as well, including Perdue’s last opponent, Michelle Nunn; 2014 gubernatorial candidate Jason Carter; and Dekalb County CEO Michael Thurmond, who was elected Labor Commissioner three times back in the day, and was also Isakson’s 2010 opponent. Like McBath, Thurmond is African-American. So, too, is Stacey Abrams, the very popular 2018 gubernatorial candidate who earlier ruled out a challenge to Perdue and disclaimed interest in the Isakson seat instantly after the senator made his announcement. You can be sure national and Georgia Democrats will periodically check in with Abrams to see if she might change her mind.

As Kemp ponders his options and Democrats play musical chairs, there is one aspect of the 2020 Georgia Senate landscape that is gradually dawning on observers near and far. The special election for the Isakson seat will be a “jungle primary” in which any and all Democrats and Republicans — and for that matter members of minor parties — will compete. If no one wins a majority (and that’s a distinct possibility, particularly if the two major parties cannot clear the field for their candidates), there will be a runoff on January 5, 2021. But here’s the thing: Georgia also requires a majority of the vote to win general elections, which means that the Perdue race could go to a January runoff as well (as very nearly happened to Kemp last year).

If Georgia did have these two Republican seats at risk in runoffs, the odds would go up significantly that control of the Senate might be on the line — and with it the power of either a reelected Trump or a Democratic successor to enact an agenda and get executive and judicial appointees confirmed — in one state, two months after an exhausting election cycle. Any still-standing political operative — or unspent dollar — would be pulled into the Peach State to fight in an overtime contest for which there is really no precedent.

The staff at Grist, one of the top environmental websites has a post, “How did Democrats fare at CNN’s climate town hall? We asked the experts.” The Grist staff notes that “Rather than arguing or talking over each other, the candidates actually had the time and space to speak substantively on this complex issue at CNN’s Climate Crisis Town Hall, discussing carbon taxes, geoengineering, lawsuits against the fossil fuel industry, and much more…So which Democratic candidates did the heavy lifting on climate policy and wowed us with their know-how?”

“I think Warren was the best by far,” noted Leah Stokes, a University of California at Santa Barbara political scientist. “She was so sharp. One point of weakness: her answer on nuclear was a little unclear. She sidestepped the issue of whether she’d extend the licenses of existing plants, which is what Sanders said he wouldn’t do. Nuclear is unpopular, so I think she was trying to thread a needle, but it left people saying she’s anti-nuclear. Otherwise, she knocked it out of the park.

Climate activist and cofounder of Zero Hour Jamie Margolin complained that “many candidates kept mentioning stupid late targets for net-zero carbon, like 2050, that are way, way past what we actually need in order to solve the climate crisis.”

At The Guardian, Emily Holden and Oliver Millman noted that “Bernie Sanders painted an apocalyptic future wreaked by the climate crisis and pledged to wage war on the fossil fuel industry,” while “Biden meanwhile pitched himself as the candidate who could lead negotiations with the diplomatic might of the US. He said his first step as president would be to call an international meeting to strengthen the Paris climate agreement…“We should be organizing the world, demanding change, we need a diplomat-in-chief,” Biden said. “Look what’s happening now in the Amazon, what’s going on? Nothing.”

At CNN politics, Meg Wagner, Dan Merica, Gregory Krieg and Eric Bradner noted some of the policies other candidates are advocating:

Kamala Harris said  “she would direct the Department of Justice to go after oil and gas companies who have directly impacted global warming. “They are causing harm and death in communities. And there has been no accountability…”

Amy Klobuchar called for a reversal to the Trump administration’s move to rollback regulations on methane emissions. “That is very dangerous,” she said of the administration’s move.

New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker said that people who don’t think nuclear power needs to be part of the fight against climate change — a group that includes many of his presidential opponents — “aren’t looking at the facts.” Booker said that he warmed to nuclear power after reading studies about it and talking to nuclear scientists about technological advancements “that make nuclear safer.”

Millman and Holden noted that “According to Yale University polling, the climate emergency is now the second most important voting issue for Democrats, behind healthcare. Among all voting Americans, nearly seven in 10 are worried about climate change, the highest ever recorded level of concern. There are strong bipartisan majorities in favour of setting pollution limits on industry, businesses, cars and trucks.”

Several of the Democratic presidential candidates received high scores from the League of Conservation Voters for their votes on environmental legislative proposals in 2018, including: Booker (100%); Harris (100); Warren (99); Klobuchar (96); O’Rourke (95); and Sanders (92).

In his L.A. Times column, “Medical bankruptcy is an American scandal — and that’s not debatable,” Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael Hiltzik” probes the data on medical bankruptsies and shares his observations, including, “In a civilized country, public appeals for help with medical bills shouldn’t exist. Yet GoFundMe reports that it hosts more than 250,000 medical campaigns per year, raising more than $650 million a year…Even households seemingly well-covered by employer health plans can face financial trouble. A survey conducted jointly by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Los Angeles Times found this year that among those consumers, “four in 10 report that their family has had either problems paying medical bills or difficulty affording premiums or out-of-pocket medical costs, and about half say someone in their household skipped or postponed some type of medical care or prescription drugs in the past year because of the cost. Seventeen percent say they’ve had to make what they feel are difficult sacrifices in order to pay health care or insurance costs; for some, the sacrifices they report making are extreme…Unquestionably, the individual burden of medical costs in the U.S. can be unsupportable and, in the richest country in the world, should be unnecessary. Sanders and Warren are right to point the finger at a dysfunctional healthcare financing system. Those who say things aren’t that bad are wrong; it’s worse. Debating whether the number of Americans forced into bankruptcy by medical debt is 500,000 or some other figure is nitpicking, and woefully beside the point. What everyone knows is that the threat is bad enough, and it can strike at anyone.”

At The Atlantic, Ronald Brownstein explains why “L.A.’s Health-Care Reform Is a Lesson for Democrats,” and notes one of the most difficult challenges in the implementation of the public option feature of the plan: “The experience of L.A. Care shows the possibility of the public option to leverage change, but also the tough choices that loom in implementing the idea. The plan has created a sturdy competitor to private insurers, but it hasn’t had a transformative effect on cost. L.A. Care “ended up being a good and lower-cost option, but it’s not the revolution,” Anthony Wright, the executive director of Health Access California, a consumer-advocacy organization, told me. “It shows both the potential and the limits of a public option.”…L.A. Care can hold down costs because it doesn’t have to turn a profit and it has been innovative in trying to restrain expenses. But its ability to squeeze costs is limited by the fact that it is negotiating reimbursement rates with the same medical providers the private plans are using…That dynamic points to what could be the most contentious issues for Democrats in any future attempt to create a nationwide public option. Many health reformers want a public option to reimburse doctors and hospitals at the rates paid by Medicare, which are much lower than what private insurers pay. Lucia told me that doing so would offer the best chance of significantly reducing national health-care costs…L.A. Care’s growing web of services for the families most in need may look like modest change compared with the calls from Sanders and others for a “revolution” in health care. But the steady gains evident in Lynwood may offer a more revealing preview of what the next Democratic president and Congress could likely achieve.”

Writing at vox.com, Alexia Fernandez Campbell provides a detailed analysis of every frontrunning Democratic presidential candidate’s policy proposals for for labor reform, and she observes, “Reading the labor platforms for each of the 10 candidates who qualified for the third Democratic primary debate next week, two groups emerged: the labor reformers and the labor supporters. Most of the frontrunners fall into the first category — Beto O’Rourke, Buttigieg, and Sanders have all put out astonishingly detailed proposals that would shift the balance of power from businesses to workers. Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar, and Andrew Yang are in the second group. They seem to see themselves more as allies to workers and labor unions than true change-makers.” Campbell notes that nearly all of the candidates support: The Protecting the Right to Organize Act; The Schedules That Work Act; The Paycheck Fairness Act; The Family Act, which guarantees up to 12 weeks of paid family leave to workers; The Healthy Families Act; The Domestic Workers Bill of Rights Act; and The Raise the Wage Act. “Without a doubt,” Campbell asserts, “Democrats would need to control both chambers of Congress to make most of these promises a reality.”

CNN Politics writer Maeve Reston shares some revealing data regarding climate crisis views of voters: “The growing alarm is most pronounced among younger voters. John Della Volpe, who directs the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics poll, noted that climate change “is now viewed as a top area of concern within both a domestic and foreign policy framework” for those within the 18-29 year-old age group, though it generally still ranks behind health care, the economy and immigration…In the Institute’s spring poll, protecting the environment ranked third (33%) among foreign policy priorities, behind protecting human rights and preventing the rise of terrorist groups…Jon Krosnick, a political science and communications professor at Stanford University who directs the Political Psychology Research Group, notes that while no single issue dominates the psyche of American voters, his research shows that climate change is becoming a bigger motivator for a larger group of people…The growing alarm about climate change has showed up in poll after poll.

Reston adds, “A Quinnipiac University poll in late August found that 56% of registered voters nationwide believe climate change is an emergency, and those numbers were much higher among Democrats (84%) and independents (63%). By contrast, 81% of Republicans said they did not believe climate change is an emergency…In a new high since Quinnipiac began asking the question in 2015, 67% of voters said the US is not doing enough to address climate change…The alarm among younger voters is particularly pronounced: 79% of adults 18 to 34 said they worry a great deal or a fair amount about global warming, compared with 62% of those 55 and older…There is still a strong partisan divide on the issue, which has lined up with Trump’s continual tweeting about the issue and his assertion that the press is dramatizing the issue. Gallup found that 12% of Republicans said they were “a great deal” concerned about global warming, compared with more than two-thirds of Democrats (69%)…There are also regional differences in attitudes toward climate change. Gallup found that 67% of people in both the Northeast and the West, for example, believe that global warming has already begun, compared to 60% in the Midwest and 53% in the South.”

“The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in 2019’s Rucho v. Common Cause was a painful setback for voting rights advocates,” Mark Joseph Stern writes in his article, “Elena Kagan’s Blueprint to End Partisan Gerrymandering: North Carolina paid attention” at slate.com. “By a 5–4 vote, SCOTUS slammed the federal courthouse door on partisan gerrymandering claims, ruling that they cannot be brought under the U.S. Constitution. But Rucho had a silver lining in Justice Elena Kagan’s powerful dissent, which showed statejudges how to kill off the practice under their own constitutions. Her dissent served as a blueprint for the North Carolina court that invalidated the state’s legislative gerrymander on Tuesday. That decision charts a path forward for opponents of political redistricting. Every state constitution protects the right to vote or participate equally in elections, and state courts can take up Kagan’s call to arms to enforce those protections under state law…In his Rucho opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts insisted that federal courts were unable to determine when a partisan gerrymander goes “too far.” Kagan pointed out that, in fact, plenty of lower courts have already done exactly that. These courts deployed a three-part test. First, they ask whether mapmakers intended to entrench their party’s power by diluting votes for their opponents. Second, they ask whether the scheme succeeded. Third, they ask if mapmakers have any legitimate, nonpartisan explanation for their machinations. If they do not, the gerrymander must be tossed out…“If you are a lawyer,” Kagan wrote, “you know that this test looks utterly ordinary. It is the sort of thing courts work with every day.” In practice, the most important part of the test—its evaluation of a gerrymander’s severity—often boils down to a cold, hard look at the data. Take, for instance, North Carolina’s congressional map, which contained 10 Republican seats and 3 Democratic ones. Experts ran 24,518 simulations of the map that used traditional, nonpartisan redistricting criteria. More than 99 percent of them produced at least one more Democratic seat. The exercise verified that North Carolina’s map isn’t just an outlier but “an out-out-out-outlier.”

The Iowa caucuses are complicated enough without the “virtual caucus” option the DNC forced on the state’s Democrats. But now the DNC is disallowing the method Iowa and Nevada have proposed for implementing it, as I explained at New York:

In a potentially major development affecting two of the four protected “early states” in the 2020 Democratic presidential nominating process, the Democratic National Committee let it be known that it’s going to disallow the “virtual caucus” option for remote access to delegate selection events in Iowa and Nevada next February. The Des Moines Register broke the story:

“The decision was confirmed to the Des Moines Register late Thursday by two sources close to the conversations. It follows a meeting of the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee last week in San Francisco, where members voiced concerns about the security of the Iowa plan and the potential for hacking.”

First Iowa, and then Nevada, have developed plans to let otherwise eligible voters cast their votes in caucuses by phone rather than showing up in person. What will make the apparent red light maddening to party officials in the two states is that the DNC forced them to make this option available in response to complaints — many of them from 2016 Bernie Sanders supporters, though Hillary Clinton offered similar criticism back in 2008 — that the traditional caucuses (and more generally, the traditional nominating process) excessively restricted participation. Iowa (followed by Nevada) wound up choosing a teleconference model for remote caucusing as more feasible than an absentee-ballot system or caucusing-by-proxy. But then this happened, as Bloomberg reported last weekend:

“At a closed-door session of the Rules and By-Laws Committee on Thursday, the DNC told the panel that experts convened by the party were able to hack into a conference call among the committee, the Iowa Democratic Party and Nevada Democratic Party, raising concerns about teleconferencing for virtual caucuses, according to three people who were at the meeting.”

The trouble — for Iowa, at least — with something less techno-dependent like mail ballots is that it could make the caucuses begin to resemble a primary and run afoul of New Hampshire’s law requiring its secretary of state to do whatever is necessary, including moving its primary to the previous year, to maintain its first-in-the-nation status.

It probably didn’t help the reputation of the “virtual caucus” system that it was even more fiendishly complicated than the traditional Iowa event, as Vox explains:

“The plan the Iowa Democratic party came up with would have given virtual caucus-goers six different days/times to call and choose their candidates. The last available day would have been February 3 — caucus day itself. Users would have dialed a phone number, entered a unique pin and their date of birth to verify their identities, and ranked up to five 2020 candidate choices over the phone.

“What was trickier is how these people’s votes were to be counted and how much they would have accounted for. Here’s how it was supposed to work: All of Iowa’s four congressional districts would have been allocated up to an additional 10 percent of the overall state delegate equivalents (or, the delegate totals from each county). In other words, if one congressional district had 400 people going to their delegate convention, they would get an extra 40 delegates that could be awarded based on the results from the virtual caucus.”

This wrinkle exacerbated complaints about Iowa’s “delegate equivalent” system for reporting caucus results; the DNC had already required that raw caucus totals be made public (to this day, many Bernie Sanders supporters believe he, not Clinton, would have won Iowa in 2016 had raw votes been reported). Two pots of raw votes — one of live caucusgoers, one of virtual caucusgoers — made the whole thing even more unwieldy.

Nevada had a simpler system whereby people could call in votes during one two-day window, but it has to go back to the drawing board as well.

With the Iowa and Nevada caucuses less than six months away, the DNC may simply decide to give Iowa and Nevada a waiver from its rules for 2020 and then work on fixing the system for the future — or perhaps even make more fundamental reforms in the nominating system. If that happens, a lot of campaign planning based on the virtual caucuses will have been wasted. Iowa political analyst Pat Rynard speculates about the potential impact:

“Politically speaking, the biggest beneficiary of this debacle is Joe Biden. One of the best strategies to winning the Iowa Caucus is to inspire, organize and bring out a lot of new, first-time caucus-goers. Candidates like Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker and Julian Castro are all very well-suited to do just that. While Biden has strong support among the older and long-time caucus veterans who always show up, it is harder to see how he would turn out a whole new generation of caucus-goers like Barack Obama did in 2008 or Sanders did in 2016.

“The virtual caucus would have greatly aided candidates who were focused on new voters. Even though they were still emphasizing showing up in person, campaigns would happily direct their supporters who simply can’t make it out on caucus night into the phone option.

“However, even if this caucus runs like a more traditional year, Warren’s superior ground game still poses the greatest threat to Biden. But Biden’s chances are certainly better without the virtual option, and any margin of victory from anyone who might pass him may be smaller.”

It’s possible as well that having provoked the reforms that led to the virtual caucus system, Sanders supporters will view the DNC action as another Establishment effort to “rig” the results. But this really isn’t a very good time in political history to adopt potentially hackable technologies for voting events.

Pity the pollsters and campaign tacticians who have to do their work without knowing the shape and size of the caucus-going universe, at least until this mess is sorted out.

In his Wall St. Journal column, “Here’s What’s Sure to Happen in 2020: Whoever Trump faces, voter turnout and the economy will be decisive,” William A. Galston, a Brookings Institution senior fellow and advisor to President Clinton and other Democratic presidential candidates, spells out “some propositions we can advance with reasonable confidence,” including,

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

Dan Balz’ lengthy article in the Sunday Post is a useful summary of the 2020 electoral map. He identifies four states as being key to the upcoming contest: Florida and, quite properly, the Rustbelt trio of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Let me focus here on that trio of states and run down some of the key demographic differences between them which are perhaps harder to see than their obvious similarities.

Does American labor have an image problem? Dylan Scott writes at Vox: “A new Gallup poll finds support for unions is about as high as it’s been in 50 years, but while that is surely welcome news for labor leaders, that favorable opinion hasn’t necessarily translated into any expansion in their ranks…It can be remarkably difficult to form a labor union in the United States, particularly in places like the Republican-led states that have sought to restrict collective bargaining rights with “right to work” laws in recent years; corporations are also inherently hostile toward them…Still, politically, labor has clout and goodwill in an era defined by income inequality. The leading Democratic presidential candidates — Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and former Vice President Joe Biden — foreground the value of work and workers in their messages…In doing so, they are picking up on something real: The public’s approval of labor unions had fallen below 50 percent in 2009, but Gallup has found it now sits at a healthy 64 percent following the worst crisis of confidence for the labor movement in a generation.”

At The Monitor, Mark Trumbull writes, “In the coming presidential election organized labor looks set to wield influence in a way that never really happened in 2016…Despite setbacks in court and federal policy, unions have scored some wins in grassroots organizing and in state and local policies. And unlike in 2016, they are pushing for more than just lip service from any candidate that hopes to win their endorsement – prompting a flurry of pro-labor proposals from Democratic candidates…“Kitchen-table economics are first and foremost” in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka said Thursday, at a Monitor Breakfast with reporters in Washington. Americans “want somebody who’s going to change the rules of the economy to make the country work for workers.”

Trumbull continues, “At least one change is that candidates on the left have begun rolling out more detailed plans than in the past, focused on worker empowerment…Mr. O’Rourke, for example, has come out with a set of proposals designed to bolster unions…Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has an “accountable capitalism” agenda that would make workers a significant force on corporate boards, among other things. ..Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont recently laid out proposals that include radically changing the playing field, so that worker empowerment doesn’t hinge on gaining representation one employer at a time. His idea is to “establish a sectoral collective-bargaining system that will work to set wages, benefits and hours across entire industries, not just employer-by-employer…Similarly, Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., has embraced “multi-employer” bargaining, and stood alongside Uber drivers in California this month, arguing for union representation in so-called gig jobs where workers are often classified by companies as contractors rather than employees.”

Steven Greenhouse’s “The Worker’s Friend? Here’s How Trump Has Waged His War on Workers” at The American Prospect provides some useful insights for Democrats seeking to win working class support. Greenhouse, author of “Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor,” writes. “Yes, it is perplexing to many of us that so many workers are still wowed by President Trump even when his administration has rolled back overtime protections for millions of workers and made it easier for Wall Street firms to rip off workers’ 401(k)s (to cite just two of many such actions)…A labor leader recently explained to me, with considerable dismay, how Trump performs his magic on workers. Day after day, Trump pounds and pummels China over trade, and his macho trade war often dominates the headlines. That, this labor leader said, convinces many workers that Trump is their guy: While previous presidents refused to stand up to China, he alone has bravely launched this trade war to make sure that China stops cheating America—and American workers. The media trains its spotlight on this trade war day after day, while paying scant attention to the continuous stream of anti-worker and anti-union actions that Trump and his administration have taken. Not surprisingly, millions of Americans have little knowledge of Trump’s flood of actions undermining workers.”

Forbes Magazine is not the place where you would expect to find a tribute to labor unions. But there you can read Patricia Corrigan’s “On Labor Day, Workers Celebrate The Benefits Of Union Membership,” in which she writes, “In my family, we were thankful for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. My dad’s wages allowed him to buy our three-bedroom house, splurge on a 1966 Candy Apple Red Mustang and pay to send me to college. He was a longtime union shop steward, and I remember reading his copy of the Teamsters’ contract, which he kept on our kitchen table. As a journalist, I am a proud member of the United Media Guild Local 36047, part of the Communications Workers of America…Even the 170-plus cable car conductors carrying tourists up and down steep hills in San Francisco, where I live, are union members. Roger Marenco, president of the Transport Workers Union Local 250-A in San Francisco, reminds all of us today: “If you like having weekends off, thank the unions for that. If you like working eight hours a day as opposed to 12, 14 or 16, thank the unions for the 40-hour work week. And if you like being paid overtime, unions got you that, too.”..In 2018, the union membership rate among wage and salary workers was 10.5% ( some 14.7 million individuals), about half the rate reported in 1983, the first year comparable data was available. That said, The Conversation, an international journalism site, reported last year that interest in joining a union is at a four-decade high.”

In “The dark side of progress: We’re ignoring the most potent threat to working-class Americans” at The Hill, Glenn C. Altschuler writes: “Americans, it seems clear, want politicians to do something about automation. A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2017 found that, although respondents were divided on whether government should take responsibility for assisting workers displaced by automation, 85 percent of Democrats and 86 percent of Republicans (including 7 in 10 with a high school diploma or less) indicated that automation should be limited to dangerous or unhealthy tasks, even if machines were less expensive and more efficient….one can only hope a substantive public debate about automation will now take place — and that politicians will present proposals to mitigate the threat to the lives and livelihoods of working-class and middle-class Americans, including, for example, a substantial expansion of wage insurance (which is now available under the Trade Adjustment Assistance Act to workers over 50, earning less than $50,000 a year, and negatively affected by imports) paid for by corporations; tax credits for displaced workers; vouchers to be used for re-training; lower barriers to switching jobs; relocation allowances; and increased investments in kindergarten thru college education.”

Nick Lehr interviews Jennifer Silva, author of “We’re Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America.” Among her observations: “One of the things that was very striking to me was how much distrust there was. Among everyone I interviewed – white, Latino, and black – there was a fierce distrust and hatred of politicians, a suspicion that politicians and big business were basically working together to take away the American Dream. Everyone was very critical of inequality.” Asked why some of her interview sublects voted for Trump, Silva responds, “The general take on Trump was, “We like Trump’s personality, we like his aggressiveness, we like how he doesn’t care about the rules.” Asked, “what’s the biggest obstacle that’s preventing working class voters from organizing en masse?,” she replied, “I think that it’s the absence of what you could call “mediating institutions.” The people in my book have a lot of critical and smart ideas. But they don’t have a lot of ways to actually connect their individual voices. So they don’t have a church group or a club that they would join that would then give them political tools or a louder voice.”

From “How Writing Off the Working Class Has Hurt the Mainstream Media” at Nieman Reports (excerpted from Christopher R. Martin’s 2019 book, “No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class”: “Today there are just six full-time labor reporters in the top 25 newspapers across the U.S., none in network or cable news, none at NPR or PBS, and just a few at digital news organizations and magazines on the left. What happened?…By the late 1960s and early 1970s, newspaper companies, then becoming publicly-traded, bigger chains, moved to a new business trajectory that changed the target news audience from mass to upscale, and altered the actual news narratives about the working class in US journalism. Today, the upscale news audience is the normal objective of news organizations’ marketing efforts. Nearly every mainstream news organization’s media kit claims they have an above-average audience of high-income, highly-educated consumers and influencers…As the labor beat was left to wither, newspapers pursued more upscale readers with workplace “lifestyle” columns featuring the lives of young professionals and their concerns about office gossip, job interview strategy, expense accounts, and office party etiquette…The mainstream news media’s write-off of the working class set the conditions for the decline of labor and working class news and the rise of a deeply partisan conservative media that hailed the abandoned white, working-class audience…People of all races, genders, and political persuasions inhabit the working class, and they exist as real people, not just occasionally visible and selectively cast props for presidential campaigns. But with few exceptions, America’s working class is invisible, deemed no longer newsworthy.”

At In These Times, Adam Ginsbug writes that “six Democratic primaries and caucuses will use RCV (ranked choice voting) next year…RCV would ensure that the crowded primary field ultimately produces a nominee with true majority support.”

Reporting at the end of July, Ginsburg was interested in assessing the support for ranked choice voting among the Democratic presidential candidates. He found that “there are four Democratic candidates who actively advocate for RCV, five candidates who are supportive and two candidates who are receptive to the method. Only two candidates have expressed indifference. The other 12 major Democratic candidates have not commented publicly on RCV.” None of the front-runners at the time advocated RCV, while Sens. Sanders, Buttigieg and Booker expressed “positive sentiment” towards the idea, while Warren and O’Rourke were “open” to it.

Ginzburg notes further that “After the contentious 2016 primary fight, the Democratic National Committee called on its state affiliates to make the presidential candidate selection process more accessible to voters. Six states—Alaska, Hawaii, Kansas, Nevada, Iowa, and Wyoming— will turn to RCV to heed that call.”

Simon Waxman notes at Democracy that RCV “has been used in municipal elections in California, Minnesota, Washington state, and elsewhere. And for nearly a hundred years, Australians have elected their lower house of parliament using the method.”

Ginsburg gets into the particular tweaks each of the six states uses for their RCV and adds,

Although the preliminary proposals indicate some states plan to implement RCV in slightly different manners, all plans adhere to the rules set by the Democratic Party: all candidates above the 15% threshold will accrue delegates. Accordingly, as FairVote Senior Fellow David Daley put it, using RCV means that “last-place candidates will be eliminated and backers of those candidates will have their vote count toward their next choice until all remaining candidates are above the 15% vote threshold to win delegates.”

While these plans are all preliminary until they are formally accepted by the DNC, it is heartening to see ranked choice voting adopted as a viable alternative to the current winner-take-all system—especially in a field this crowded.

My take is that ranked choice voting in presidential primaries is a good idea because it enhances voter participation, gives more consideration to each voter’s personal preferences and promotes solidarity among Democratic voters, who will have more of a sense that their range of views have been taken into consideration by the party.

As one of those voters who is struggling to choose between two of the current presidential candidates, it would give me a way to support them both over the others. If none of my choices win, at least I will have more of a sense that the party cared about my views and my candidates got more consideration than is now the case in most states.

One possible downside is that there might be more dithering at the polls, resulting in longer lines. That could be ameliorated to some extent with a publicity campaign urging voters to make their choices before they get to the polls and stick to it. Even better, if RCV is combined with expanded early voting, mail-in ballots, weekend voting and other reforms to make the voting experience less cumbersome.

Waxman argues that RCV often enhances voter disappointment, when their favored candidiates don’t make the cut. He notes further, that “In 2010 the Australian Labor Party won the House of Representatives with just 38 percent of first-place votes on the initial ballot, while the second-place Liberal-National coalition captured 43 percent. That hardly sounds like a firm mandate…So much for guaranteed majority rule.”

Yet, he also reports that “In the 2013 Australian federal election, 90 percent of constituencies elected the candidate with the most first-preference votes, which suggests that choice ranking had little effect on the outcome.” Perhaps the problem of undermining majority rule could be addressed by giving additional weight to first choices.

I like the idea of more voters discussing their ranked choices in coffee shops, carpools, workplace break rooms and water coolers before and after casting their ballots. Instead of Democratic voters segmenting into one camp and rejecting all others, giving due weight to the idea that we share respect for each others spectrum of choices creates more of a spirit of solidarity.

Right now, for example, there is likely some bitterness among suporters of candidates who got cut from the network debates. With RCV playing a role in the selection process, they would have more of a feeling that their preferences have gotten fair consideration.

It would be really good for the Democratic Party to take a stronger lead in adopting ranked choice voting in the primaries, thus providing a message that this is the party that really cares about democracy. At the very least, the states should widen the experiment.

A major development in my home state of Georgia led me to explain its significance at New York:

Like Arizona, another potential sunbelt target, it has been slowly but steadily trending Democratic, making it an increasingly plausible presidential prize among the states carried by Donald Trump in 2016. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’s impressive 2018 midterm showing was another sign of Georgia’s increasingly purple hue; she also proved you don’t have to run away from the national party’s progressive issue stance to do well in this former Blue Dog bastion. Republican senator David Perdue is up in 2020, and he’s thought to be potentially vulnerable. There are also two highly competitive U.S. House races on tap in north metro Atlanta, where Democrats picked up one seat in 2018 and are aiming for another next year.

Now, veteran Republican senator Johnny Isakson (who has Parkinson’s disease) has announced he will resign his seat at the end of 2019, which means the state will hold a special election in conjunction with the 2020 general election to fill the last two years of his term. That race, along with Atlanta’s status as a regional media center, should guarantee major bipartisan political spending in the state in 2020.

The Republican candidate to succeed Isakson will likely be chosen by Governor Brian Kemp, who will appoint an interim senator when the incumbent steps down at the end of the year. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Greg Bluestein reports that a list of familiar statewide GOP pols is likely under consideration for the appointment:

“It’s not yet clear who Kemp will appoint to fill Isakson’s seat, though potential candidates include Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr, state Senate Pro Tem Butch Miller, Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, U.S. Rep. Doug Collins and U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue.”

This last name will surely raise eyebrows. The former governor is the cousin of that other Senator Perdue, and while two Perdues in the Senate would accurately reflect this extended family’s domination of the Georgia GOP, it would be a mite risky, too. This possibility could depend on how badly Sonny wants to get away from the angry farmers he is facing as Agriculture secretary, thanks to his boss’s trade policies. He’s also 72 years of age, a bit long in the tooth for a freshman senator.

The name of a much younger man with impeccable GOP credentials may also eventually come up: Nick Ayers, who, as a college student, was Sonny Perdue’s “body man” during his first gubernatorial bid. Ayers moved on to become a national Republican operative and wunderkind, and was most recently chief of staff to former political client Vice-President Mike Pence. His knack for being in the right place at the right time would certainly be enhanced by a Senate appointment, and he knows how to raise money.

Kemp has a while to ponder his choices, but Democrats looking at a second 2020 Senate race need to get it in gear. Stacey Abrams, the candidate most Democrats in Georgia and across the country would have preferred (for this Senate race, or as a challenger to David Perdue) instantly ruled it out, preempting a world of pressure.

One immediate question is whether any of the three initially viable Democrats who have been considering running against Perdue — former Columbus mayor Teresa Tomlinson (likely the front-runner), outspokenly progressive Clarkston mayor Ted Terry, or 2018 nominee for Lieutenant Governor Sarah Riggs Amico — will switch to the other Senate race. But as Bluestein notes, the prospect of an open seat (or at least one occupied by an appointee) could attract some even more familiar names from the not-so-distant Democratic past:

“Among the potential Democratic contenders for the seat are the Rev. Raphael Warnock, the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church; Jon Ossoff, a former candidate for Georgia’s 6th Congressional District; Jason Carter, the runner-up for governor in 2014; and Michelle Nunn, who was defeated by David Perdue in the 2014 Senate race.”

Ossoff, Carter, and Nunn are known as formidable fundraisers, but all lost after stirring up a lot of local and national Democratic excitement.

One important wrinkle about the race to fill Isakson’s seat is that, as a special election, it will not be part of the standard party primaries but a single “jungle primary” on general-election day, followed by what is likely to be a low-turnout runoff in January. So among Democrats in particular, there will be an effort to clear the field to give a single candidate a clear shot at a November win. It could all get crazy.

The impending end of Isakson’s career represents a landmark of its own. Arguably his retirement (along with that of Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander) removes one of the last vestiges of an old-school, moderate southern Republicanism that wasn’t based on racism and didn’t involve snarling partisanship. He’s gone along to get along in the Trump era, but he was increasingly a rather sad figure from an increasingly distant past. You can be sure that whoever the self-styled “politically incorrect conservative” Brian Kemp chooses to replace Isakson will not be his equal in basic decency.