Is the great winnowing of presidential candidates happening to soon, or right on time? Put another way, is 14 month out from the presidential election (less for the primaries) to soon for TV networks to dismiss presidential candidacies?  Chris Cillizza reports at CNN Politics: “At the moment, 10 candidates — out of the 21 still running — have met the qualifications (130,000 individual donors, four national or early-voting state polls at 2% support or more) to make the debate stage in Houston on September 12. ..The simple fact is that if you are running for president but can’t make it onto a debate stage that 10 of your fellow candidates made, it’s going to be very, very hard to justify staying in the race all that much longer. How do you go to donors and ask them to give — or give more — to a candidacy that is, by the Democratic National Committee’s standards, not in the top 10 most viable? And if you can’t raise money, how do you pay your staff and run a real campaign?…(Side note: This standard doesn’t really apply to Tom Steyer, who has the personal wealth to continue to fund his campaign for as long as he chooses.)” Remember, however, that candidates disqualified for the September debates could theoretically come back and qualify for the debates in October.

Regarding the shape of the current Democratic presidential race, Kyle Kondik writes at Sabato’s Crystal Ball that”Warren’s rise, from 4% to 16%, is the kind of change that any half-decent poll would suggest is statistically significant. That does not mean she is leading — Biden still clearly is, based on the bulk of the data — or even necessarily that she has surpassed Sanders for second place. But she is also, along with Sanders and Biden, one of the frontrunners, a group that at the moment is hard to expand beyond three…That said, we also cannot necessarily make the assumption that the shape of the race is set in stone — months remain until Iowa votes in early February. Harris has shown the potential to climb higher, and may yet again. Some of the low-polling candidates — like Sens. Cory Booker (D-NJ) or Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) — may yet get their moment. Remember, for instance, the 2012 Republican race: While Mitt Romney ended up winning, at this point of the race he was trailing Rick Perry, and the two contenders who would become Romney’s chief rivals — Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich — were combining for only about 7.5% of the vote. Of course, that’s a share of the vote that Klobuchar and Booker (now combining for only 3%) would envy, but it also does show at least the potential for low-performing candidates to break out later in what has become a long slog of a nomination process. The hope of a moment in the sun is sustaining many of the candidacies right now, although we’ve already started to see some candidates fall by the wayside, and expect to see more.”

In his NYT column, “We Aren’t Seeing White Support for Trump for What It Is: A crucial part of his coalition is made up of better-off white people who did not graduate from college,” Thomas B. Edsall writes, “The 2020 election will be fought over the current loss of certainty — the absolute lack of consensus — on the issue of “race.” Fear, anger and resentment are rampant. Democrats are convinced of the justness of the liberal, humanistic, enlightenment tradition of expanding rights for racial and ethnic minorities. Republicans, less so. This may well prove to be a base-vs.-base election, but even so the outcome may lie in the hands of the substantial proportion of the electorate that is undecided — 7 percent according to Pew. And if Democrats want to give themselves the best shot of getting Trump out of the White House, it is toward these voters that they must make concerted efforts at pragmatic diplomacy and persuasion — and show a new level of empathy.”

At Mother Jones, Kevin Drum mulls over Edsall’s article and observes “Working-Class Men Have Lost Nearly $20,000 Over the Past 40 Years” and observes, “College-educated men haven’t been doing great: their incomes have been treading water for the past 40 years. But men with only a high-school diploma have simply cratered: their incomes have dropped by nearly $20,000 since 1973. Trump appeals to the white segment of this group with his racial demagoguery because he has no real economic message for them and neither do Democrats…The white working class may not be essential to Democrats these days, but it’s unquestionably a group that has suffered a lot in recent decades and would be receptive to a genuinely populist economic appeal—including, but not limited to, a truly full-throated commitment to unionization. It’s no wonder that Elizabeth Warren is making the inroads that she is.”

Again at CNN Politics, Cillizza explains “How the surprise resignation of Johnny Isakson could change the 2020 Senate math,” and notes, “Georgia Republican Sen. Johnny Isakson’s announcement Wednesday that he will resign from the chamber at the end of the year is just the sort of break Democrats hoping to retake the majority next November badly needed…Here’s why: Isakson wasn’t up for reelection again until 2022. And had he run again, he would have been tough to beat given his long service to the state. But now, his seat will be on the ballot in 2020, not 2022. And whoever Gov. Brian Kemp (R) appoints to fill the immediate vacancy will have — at best — a year to convince voters that he or she deserves to serve out the final two years remaining on Isakson’s term. (Also worth noting: The electoral record of appointed senators is not so good.)…Republicans will now have 23 seats to defend in November 2020 as compared to just 12 for Democrats. Prior to Isakson’s surprise announcement on Wednesday, the Cook Political Report, a non-partisan campaign handicapping service, rated just three GOP seats as “toss up”: Arizona, Colorado and Maine. Widening the aperture, Cook rated 7 more seats — including Georgia Sen. David Perdue’s — as potentially competitive. Democrats, on the other hand, had just four total seats rated by Cook as even marginally competitive with Alabama as the only one, at the moment, in real danger.”

E. J. Dionne, Jr. makes it plain in his WaPo column, “The electoral college is in trouble” that “Defenders of such a departure from one-person, one-vote say that if Democrats run up big leads in a few states and regions — especially California but also, say, New York, Illinois and New England — that shouldn’t count. Their strained claim is that a president is somehow more “representative” of the country if he wins by eking out tiny margins in several Midwestern states. This transforms our democracy into a casino. If you narrowly hit the right numbers in some places, you take the pot…What they are really defending, without explicitly saying so, is the idea that states with a higher percentage of white, non-Hispanic voters should have a disproportionate influence on who becomes president…in addition to being undemocratic, the electoral college encourages a particularly odious politician with no interest in uniting the country to do all he can to promote minority rule…Our founders admitted that the electoral college system they created in the original Constitution was defective by altering it with the 12th Amendment in 1804 . It’s time we followed their lead in showing the same willingness to scrap a system that is sending us headlong into a national crisis.”

Writing in the Boston Review, Lenore Palladino shares some perceptive observations that Dems can use in talking points in her article, “RIP Shareholder Primacy,.” Palladino explains that “shareholder-focused corporations are not laws of nature, nor does that governance model accurately reflect today’s business dealings. This misguided focus is the result of decades of flawed theory in economics and law. It stems from an incorrect analysis of the relationships between shareholders, employees, management, and the corporation itself. And it is based on a flawed theory of the underlying economy: that markets work perfectly, and the heavy hand of government must get out of the way…This ideology has caused immeasurable harm. The singular focus on stock price means that wealth is extracted by a small number of shareholders while those who work to produce that wealth are squeezed to the bone. Large corporations operating in this way so dominate U.S. political, economic, and social life that it is difficult for most of us to remember that the rules that shape corporate governance are democratically determined—that we, the electorate, can actually change them.”

Democrats should read “Latinx voters are leaning Democratic in 2020 battleground states: They could be a force for Democrats next year, but the party needs to make sure its outreach keeps up” by Li Zhou at Vox. Zhou writes, “A new poll of Latinx voters has some potentially good news for Democrats: According to the survey, voters in battleground states are souring on Trump and open to other options in 2020…Whether that translates into an election-changing dynamic, however, remains to be seen. After all, the party hasn’t exactly had a great track record on executing successful Latinx mobilization strategies, and such efforts will be important to drive voters to the polls…The survey, conducted by Equis Labs, an organization dedicated to studying the Latinx electorate, included more than 8,000 Latinx voters in several highly competitive states such as Arizona, North Carolina, and Florida…Per the results, Latinx voters favor a Democratic candidate over Trump at this point in the election cycle, though that sentiment was more muted in certain states like Florida, where Republicans have historically had a strong foothold among Cuban Americans. Between 10 percent and 20 percent of voters across every state were also undecided.”

Zhou continues, “Expected to make up 32 million voters nationwide in 2020, including 23 percent of eligible voters in Arizona, 20 percent in Florida, and 19 percent in Nevada, Latinx voters are a theoretically pivotal demographic for the upcoming election. The survey, however, cautions that they aren’t a uniformly Democratic voting bloc, unlike African American voters, for example, who tend to vote pretty overwhelmingly for Democrats. The universe of Latinx voters has historically been more ideologically diverse, driven by factors including religion…Clinton wound up winning 66 percent of the Latinx vote, while Trump took 28 percent of it, according to a national exit poll. This breakdown is roughly in line with Latinx voters’ overall voter affiliation, though it has been contested by some polling experts…The 2018 midterms indicated a more dramatic shift. Turnout in the midterms spiked from 27 percent in 2014 to 40 percent in 2018. And Latinx voters supported Democratic candidates in the general election by a slightly higher margin: 69 percent voted Democrat compared to 29 percent who voted Republican.”

Jamelle Bouie struck a chord with a column, so I decided to expand on it at New York with some examples of what he’s talking about:

Jamelle Bouie explains something important it in a very useful column for the New York Times:

“Spend enough time talking politics on the internet — or in any other public forum — and you’ll run into this standard reply to anyone who wants more democracy in American government: ‘We’re a republic, not a democracy.’

“You saw it over the weekend in an exchange between Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Dan Crenshaw of Texas. In a brief series of tweets, Ocasio-Cortez made the case against the Electoral College and argued for a national popular vote to choose the president. ‘Every vote should be = in America, no matter who you are or where you come from,’ she wrote. ‘The right thing to do is establish a Popular Vote. & GOP will do everything they can to fight it.’

“Crenshaw, who has sparred with Ocasio-Cortez before, jumped in with a response: ‘Abolishing the Electoral College means that politicians will only campaign in (and listen to) urban areas. That is not a representative democracy.’ And then he said it: ‘We live in a republic, which means 51% of the population doesn’t get to boss around the other 49%.'”

Bouie points out that this argument for the Electoral College is simply wrong on its own terms (like most arguments for the Electoral College). But he challenges the premise that the United States has a form of government that makes democratic principles irrelevant. In part, he does this by distinguishing between the direct democracy the Founders did fear and the representative democracy they gave us. But he also gives us a quick account of the unsavory history of the “republic, not a democracy” slogan:

“The term went from conservative complaint to right-wing slogan in the 1960s, when Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, used it in a September 1961 speech, ‘Republics and Democracies.’ In a democracy, Welch protested, ‘there is a centralization of governmental power in a simple majority. And that, visibly, is the system of government which the enemies of our republic are seeking to impose on us today.'”

For us baby-boomers, the Birchers’ use of the term republic to justify all sorts of artificial restraints on popular majorities rings familiar. But aside from its precise origins, the general intention in opposing a “republic” to a “democracy” is clear:

“The point of the slogan isn’t to describe who we are but to claim and co-opt the founding for right-wing politics — to naturalize political inequality and make it the proper order of things. What lies behind that quip, in other words, is an impulse against democratic representation. It is part and parcel of the drive to make American government a closed domain for a select, privileged few.”

Some specific examples beyond the defense of the Electoral College come to mind that reflect the conservative tendency to use “republican” limitations on democracy to justify and even expand privilege.

(1) States’ Rights Champions: The oldest and most thoroughly abused doctrine seeking to take “republican” restraints on democracy and justify privilege is the ancient rebel yell of “states’ rights.” Pre–Civil War defenders of slavery often claimed that the power of states to protect the peculiar institution was essential to the ability to maintain liberty and even democracy for white people (often citing the Athenian precedent). Similarly, the Southern revolt against Reconstruction and the imposition of Jim Crow were rationalized as self-protection against the tyranny of the (black and/or carpetbagger) majority that prevailed in many parts of the region or, alternatively, against the race-mixing national political consensus. That this doctrine produced local tyranny and entrenched racial privilege was obvious, if often ignored by its defenders.

(2) The Lochnerians: This conservative legal movement — which harks back to the era of constitutional jurisprudence defined by the 1905 Supreme Court decision in New York v. Lochner (eventually overturned after its application, as invalidating much of the early New Deal produced a near constitutional crisis) — holds that fixed private-property rights embedded in the Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment cannot be abrogated by federal or state legislatures. There is a neo-Lochnerian movement active in laws schools and corners of the federal and state judiciaries today, aimed at protecting wealthy individuals from democratic “violations” of their rights via regulation and taxation.

(3) Constitutional Conservatives: During the heyday of the Tea Party movement, conservative politicians (notably Sarah Palin and presidential candidates Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry) took to calling themselves “constitutional conservatives” to signify their adherence to a view of limited government that takes Lochnerism and expands it beyond property rights to prohibit all sorts of democratic interference with “natural rights,” ranging from state self-determination to the fetal “right to life.” It’s sort of a plenary juxtaposition of a republic dedicated to capitalism and cultural traditionalism as against any effort by majorities to change anything, forever. The privileges that posture protects stretch from the nearest property line to the most sweeping idea of cultural patriarchy.

(4) Religious-Self-Determination Supporters: Perhaps the most vibrant current example of conservative efforts to use “republican” limits on democracy to entrench special privileges involves expansive notions of “religious freedom” to give Christian conservatives far-reaching exemptions from anti-discrimination laws, hand in glove with public subsidies for religious education. The ultimate objective seems to be to create a sort of collective “Benedict Option” wherein militantly religious people can form parallel communities beyond the common law, where LGBTQ folk remain closeted and women and children remain under the firm hand of servant-leader menfolk.

In other words, “It’s a republic, not a democracy” reflects a persistent strain of conservative thinking that is focused less on vindicating individual rights than on protecting oligarchies of privilege, whether they be national, regional, or local. That many of the same people who cite this slogan are among the first to complain about liberal “activist judges” who interfere with “democracy” when conservatives are in the ascendancy just exposes the game for its hypocrisy.

In his post, “How 2020 Democrats Are Building Volunteer Armies: MobilizeAmerica is quickly becoming the go-to tool for campaigns and organizers to gather supporters” at The Daily Beast, Gideon Resnick reports on a potentially-powerful new tool for electing Democrats:

The Democratic Party is trying to build a volunteer army to match the one it has created for online giving, and so far, the results seem promising.

MobilizeAmerica, an online organizing platform that was founded in 2017 by two Democratic presidential campaign alums, has seen a major growth in usage so far in the 2020 Democratic primary. The platform gives campaigns and organizers a single venue to sign people up for canvassing, door-knocking, phone banking, and more. Already 14 current presidential campaigns and 881 overall organizations are actively using it, including the Democratic National Committee and a number of progressive groups, The Daily Beast has learned.

The events being posted on the site include a “Wine & Ring for Warren in Waterloo,” a “Phone Bank with Team Biden in Charleston County,” and a “Coffee Chat with Team Cory in Iowa City.”

Although those sound like fairly mundane campaign gatherings, they have been parlayed into larger political organizing forums. People participating are leaving their names, email addresses, and phone numbers, and are asked if they want to receive text messages with more information about events and how to stay involved. That data is not transferable between candidates or campaigns. But MobilizeAmerica has centralized a database of grassroots volunteers that has often proven cumbersome for candidates, campaigns, and committees to gather.

Resnick notes further,

Since MobilizeAmerica launched, 827,000 individuals have signed up for 1.27 million actions. And the platform has recently added a distributed organizing feature that lets volunteers create and manage their own events. That has allowed for the platform to play host to more than 6,700 watch parties with more than 39,000 signups around the first two presidential debates, and more are expected for the upcoming debate in September.

It has not quite reached the scale of ActBlue, a fundraising platform launched in 2004 that has revolutionized online giving for Democrats and progressives. But the goals are similarly lofty.

Cofounder Alfred Johnson explains that “putting all the data in one place in a single platform allows for campaigns to keep in better touch with their known supporters. If someone signs up to attend a rally, they could get follow-ups about participating in another volunteer event without the hassle of a campaign maintaining a list in a spreadsheet or elsewhere. And a supporter can opt in to provide feedback via text message about a rally they attended.”

Feedback would include automated text messages and emails to rate the process and make it better. Judging by the outcome, MobilizeAmerica performed well in its first test, the 2017 Virginia elections. In addition, the platform served 480 Democratic campaigns in the 2018 midterm elections, and they are primed for 2020. Resnick reports that, so far, the GOP, which prefers to “build systems around individual campaigns,” has no real equivalent.

As with all such tools, potential becomes power in the execution. But Democratic candidates and campaigns everywhere should take notice and investigate further how MobilizeAmerica can help them win elections.

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

So much data, so little time! Probably the single thing you should be sure to look at is the RCP rolling average of candidate preference. Right now, Biden’s still ahead of course with almost twice the support of Sanders and Warren, who are now quite close in the polling average. Harris is a fairly distant fourth.

But also worth paying attention to are several media outlets who are starting to release data from their polls in graphical, cumulated form with interesting internal demographic trends. Politico, for example, has some nice material up from the Morning Consult poll. These data have Sanders still leading Warren by a significant amount, though they do have Warren gaining ground as pretty much every other poll does.

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

Hey Hey, Ho Ho, the Senate Filibuster’s Got to Go!

Kind of catchy huh? But more importantly, absolutely true. Ron Brownstein does the best job I’ve seen of making the case Democrats have no choice but to get rid of the filibuster–well, if they want to get anything done that is.

In this context, it’s interesting to note that Warren has probably been the most forceful in advocating the elimination of the filibuster while Biden has been perhaps least enthusiastic (he called it “very dangerous” recently). So if it comes down to Biden vs. Warren, we could, based on current data, have a candidate who is most likely to get elected but couldn’t govern vs. a candidate less likely to get elected but who could actually govern. Interesting tradeoff.

The more Republicans argue for maintaining the Electoral College, the more they tend to undermine their own positions. I wrote about an example this week at New York:

The case for the perpetual continuation of that grand anti-democratic institution, the Electoral College, is ancient and generally (as my college Eric Levitz definitively demonstrated earlier this year) threadbare. But it’s useful to blow up defenses for it one by one as they arise, with the latest being a remonstration by Senator Joni Ernst aimed at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s arguments for abolishing the electoral dinosaur:

Actually @AOC, eliminating the Electoral College would silence our voices here in Iowa and in many other states across the country.

This is just more evidence of how out of touch the Democrats have become. https://t.co/yfm4oDCpkm

— Joni Ernst (@joniernst) August 21, 2019

To state the most obvious issue, there’s something fundamentally stupid about the claim that giving voters everywhere the exact same power to elect a president is going to “silence” anyone. Besides, is voting for president the only way citizens can “voice” their opinions? What the hell is Joni Ernst doing in the U.S. Senate? Are her efforts just a waste of time unless presidential candidates are lusting after Iowa’s six electoral votes every four years?

Now it’s true that the “losers” — relatively speaking — in a shift from Electoral College to a popular-vote system would be closely contested “battleground states” that naturally attract candidate attention more than safely Democratic or Republican states. Presumably, Ernst thinks of Iowa as a battleground state, which it has indeed often been in recent years. But these things change. In the 2016 presidential election, Iowa was ten points more Republican than the nation as a whole. It was redder than Texas. Is Joni Ernst going to urge Iowans to tilt more Democratic so that the state remains a battleground, thus keeping their voice from being silenced? I don’t think so.

Generally speaking, Iowa needs the Electoral College to make sure presidents are aware of it about as much as the current president needs more self-esteem. Joni Ernst or whoever runs her Twitter account should take down that tweet before it really embarrasses her.

In his article, “Abolishing the Filibuster Is Unavoidable for Democrats” at The Atlantic, Ronald Brownstein writes: “Even if Democrats regain unified control of the White House and Congress in 2020, the fate of their ambitious legislative agenda will still likely hinge on a fundamental question: Do they try to end the Senate filibuster?…If the party chooses to keep the filibuster, it faces a daunting prospect: Democrats elected primarily by voters in states at the forefront of the country’s demographic, cultural, and economic changes will likely have their agenda blocked by Republican senators largely representing the smaller, rural states least touched by all of those changes. In fact, since the Senate gives each state two seats, the filibuster allows Republican senators from states representing only about one-fifth of the country’s population to be in a position to stymie Democratic legislation.”

“Much as some Democrats want to do this, the public is not very enthusiastic. In fact, they flat out don’t want to do it…In the latest Monmouth poll (rated A+ by 538), just 35 percent want to impeach Trump and remove him from office, compared to 59 percent who are opposed. And this is not a particularly pro-Trump poll. His approval rating in the poll is just 40 percent and his re-elect number is only 39 percent…But voters just aren’t behind the impeachment idea. Consider the crosstabs from the poll. Noncollege whites are opposed by 67-27–but so are white college graduates, 67-26. Independents are opposed 64-20, residents of swing counties by 65-26 and moderates by 55-36. Even nonwhites are only narrowly in favor, 51-44.” – from Ruy Teixeira’s Facebook page.

Alan I. Abramowitz writes at Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “When it comes to ideological identification, Democratic voters are far more divided than Republican voters. Around two-thirds of Republican voters identify as conservative while fewer than half of Democratic voters identify as liberal. Many observers of the current presidential campaign have cited this fact to argue that ideological divisions are a serious potential threat to Democratic unity, especially if the party nominates a strongly liberal candidate. But a closer examination of recent polling data indicates that when it comes to specific policy issues such as abortion, gun control, and health care, Democratic voters are actually considerably less divided than Republican voters. Moreover, these data show that divisions among Democrats based on age, education, and race are much less significant when it comes to policy issues. What makes this all the more important is that policy preferences appear to have a much stronger influence than ideological identification on voters’ broader political outlook including their opinions of President Trump. These findings suggest that the task of uniting Democrats behind the party’s eventual nominee may not be as difficult as some pundits and political observers have suggested.”

So, “What Does Invoking The 25th Amendment Actually Look Like?,” asks Julia Azai at FiveThirtyEight: “Pundits debate the possibilities of the removal and succession of the president if he is incapacitated. Even former FBI Director James Comey has weighed in on whether Donald Trump is “medically unfit to be president.” (He doesn’t think so.) In the unlikely — but politically fascinating — event that a Cabinet were to use the power to oust a sitting president, what would come next?…Constitutional scholar Brian Kalt points out: “Section 4 is drafted less than perfectly. The best reading of Section 4’s text — and the clear message from its drafting history — is that when the president declares he is able, he does not retake power until either (1) four days pass without the vice-president and Cabinet disagreeing; or (2) he, the president, wins the vote in Congress. But the text is ambiguous on this point and commentators have frequently misread it as allowing the president to retake power immediately upon his declaration of ability.”…The Cabinet, especially as it’s currently constituted, is pretty unlikely to take action against Trump. But Congress has its own set of political pressures, and if the Democratic “wave” happens, we may see a serious attempt to go after the president. If impeachment proceedings don’t get off the ground, Congress could turn to the 25th Amendment: While Congress can’t initiate removal of the president under the amendment, it can convene a body to investigate the president’s fitness to serve — and such legislation has already been proposed.”

Did former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper help or hurt his senate candidacy by running for president? Nathaniel Rakich explores the question, also at FiveThirtyEight: “…Colorado Democrats will have plenty of choices of whom to send up against [Sen. Cory] Gardner: About a dozen Democrats were already running for the Senate nomination in Colorado, and so far they don’t look likely to yield to Hickenlooper. Former state House Speaker Andrew Romanoff, who led one of the few polls of the primary that didn’t include Hickenlooper, has previously said he would not drop out if Hickenlooper entered the race. And state Sen. Angela Williams released a defiant statement last week warning him to stay out: “If he’s going to switch gears and run for the senate, he has a lot to explain to Colorado voters. This won’t be a coronation.”…Gardner is already one of the most vulnerable senators in the country, a Republican in a Democratic-leaning state who will be forced to share a ballot with President Trump in 2020. So while Hickenlooper could very well beat him, I doubt he’s the only one who could do so.”

Matt Ford observes at The New Republic: ” Trump’s haphazard style of governance forces journalists, lawyers, and government officials to expend innumerable hours on doomed initiatives and errant tweets. His corrosive effect on American politics forces Americans to devote far more hours of their life to thinking about him than they should. All of this amounts to a tax of sorts on the national psyche—one that can never be repaid…The constant exposure to Trump’s rhetoric and governance carries its own measurable toll. Surveys by the American Psychiatric Society (APS), Politico reported last fall, have found a marked increase in stress and anxiety among respondents with regard to the future in recent years. One poll taken shortly after Trump became president found that nearly six in ten Americans thought 2017 was the lowest point in living American memory, surpassing the Vietnam War and the September 11, 2001 attacks. Nearly three-quarters of Democrats said they were stressed about the nation’s future, a view shared by clear majorities of Republicans and independents as well.”

In case you need an explainer for the president’s weird claim that American Jews are “disloyal” this week, I tried to oblige at New York:

This week the president strangely accused American Jews of being “disloyal”–to Israel, or to himself; it’s not clear which (and he may think they are the same thing). Why does the man keep excoriating Jews for voting for Democrats? Does he really not understand the bloody history of right-wing “nationalist” and “populist” movements when it comes to Jews?

Maybe he doesn’t; for an Ivy Leaguer, the president is impressively ignorant about an awful lot of things. But it’s more likely that all his talk about the Jews is really aimed at a very different audience: his white conservative Evangelical Christian electoral base, which has its own distinctive and unsettling form of philosemitism. As the Washington Post’s Philip Bump wrote in his explanation of Trump’s discussion of Jewry and Israel:

“One of Trump’s most fervent pockets of support is white evangelical Protestants, a group which consistently sides with Trump on political and policy questions. His approach to Israeli politics often lines up with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but it also reflects priorities that have been central to evangelical politics for years.

“In other words, Trump’s approach to the politics of Israel is likely driven in part by the same motivation that drives so much of what he does: Delivering for his base …

“It’s somewhat akin to his campaign-trail outreach to black Americans, a superficial outreach that seemed, at least in part, to be aimed at demonstrating to his base that he wasn’t racist. His reflexive insistence that Democrats are anti-Semitic seems to be much more about demonstrating to his base the fervency of his adherence to Israel than to be offering real, considered criticisms of his opponents.”

So why do Trump’s ruminations about Jews and Israel resonate so much with conservative Evangelicals? Strictly speaking, of course, they are largely of the opinion that Jews are going to burn in hell for all eternity if they don’t accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior. But they also tend to view Jews through the prism of their own self-conception as the Chosen People of God — sort of the new, complete model for which Jews were a rough cut. Theologically, this is called “supersessionism,” the belief that a New Covenant God made with believers through Christ has replaced his Old Covenant with the Hebrews. It’s not an exclusive Evangelical belief; Catholic James Carroll wrote an entire book about it as the ultimate source of Christian anti-Semitism throughout the ages. But it shows no sign of fading among Evangelicals, who generally view the Hebrew scriptures as their own inheritance, and themselves as new, perfected Jews.

In this scheme (mostly laid out in the New Testament Book of Revelation, an elaborate allegory probably written in the traumatic aftermath of the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in A.D. 70), Jerusalem plays a key role. This is why American Evangelicals were significantly more excited than American Jews at Trump’s decision to move the U.S. embassy there, as theologian Diana Butler Bass explained at the time, drawing on her own Evangelical upbringing:

“Jerusalem was our prophetic bellwether. God’s plan hung on its fate. Whenever Israel gained more political territory, whenever Israel extended its boundaries, it was God’s will, the end-times unfolding on the evening news. Jerusalem, as the spiritual heart of Israel, mattered. Jerusalem was God’s holy city, of the ancient past, in its conflicted present, and for the biblical future.

“For many conservative evangelicals, Jerusalem is not about politics. It is not about peace plans or Palestinians or two-state solutions. It is about prophecy. About the Bible. And, most certainly, it is about the end-times.”

And so, in tightening Israel’s grip on Jerusalem, and more generally supporting an aggressive and expansionist Jewish State, Trump may be appealing to Jewish solidarity with Israel, but more important to him politically is the demonstration to Evangelicals that in this, as in many other things (notably the fight to reverse LGBTQ and reproductive rights), he is an agent of the divine will, despite (or sometimes because of) his heathenish personal behavior.

From this perspective, Trump’s strange rhetoric begins to make sense: When he accuses American Jews of “disloyalty,” he really means they are not playing the role Christians have assigned them in the great redemptive saga of the human race. Voting for Democrats, from this point of view, isn’t a matter of abrogating Jewish self-interests as reflected in Israel’s interests (as exclusively vested in Trump and his close ally Bibi Netanyahu), but is an unholy betrayal of God Himself, who wants confrontation, not peace, in the Holy Land.

In other words, Trump’s not as interested in Jewish opinion as he often sounds. He’s just using Jews and Israel to express his solidarity with Israel’s, and God’s, truly loyal followers over there in that nice Evangelical church. He needs every one of them in 2020.

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

Good News from Arizona!

A new Arizona poll from OH Predictive Insights has Mark Kelly ahead of Martha McSally 46-41 in a 2020 Senate trial head matchup. Notably, as shown in the graphic below, Kelly is ahead in Maricopa county (Phoenix metro) by 9 points and in Pima county (Tuscon metro) by 10 points.

This is huge because these two counties together totally dominate the Arizona vote–over three-quarters of voters between them and over 60 percent in Maricopa alone. Note that these patterns are similar to those we saw in 2018 when Kyrsten Sinema won her Senate seat over McSally.