The heart of the message is in the title of Kelly Candaele’s “Sherrod Brown Is Out for 2020, But the Fight for Workers’ Rights Is Not” at In These Times. Candaele writes, “This week, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) announced he would not run for president in 2020. He had just recently wrapped up his “dignity of work” tour across the country, telling audiences “hard work should pay off.” He decided not to run for a number of reasons, but seemed pleased that other Democratic candidates for the White House were borrowing his worker-centric themes and approach. Brown had tailored his message to “regular” folks—fry cooks, nurses, construction workers, people who were once the political base of the Democratic Party.” American workers of all races spend more than half of their weekday waking hours on the job and preparing for work. Brown is surely right that focusing on the injustices of worklife in America and the reforms that can improve it for working people has to be a winning theme. It may not be the only theme, but any Democrat who overlooks it will be giving an adversary who doesn’t a significant messaging edge.

Michael Tomasky explains why “Elizabeth Warren Is Running for President. The Other 2020 Democrats Are Just Jockeying for Position” at The Daily Beast. Noting that “Yes, I’m bummed out Sherrod Brown decided not to run. I thought he had, potentially, the most persuasive argument by far,” Tomasky adds, that “all the others are running for wokest progressive. Warren’s running for president…She’s put out a bunch of tough, meaty proposals. They mean something. They communicate: “This is what I will do, and it will constitute serious change.” Last week’s proposal to break up the tech companies was ambitious and brave. Most Democrats are afraid of tech money… Warren went right at it. Monopoly power. It’s (yet another) huge and under-discussed crisis in this country, a grotesque distortion of the market that hurts consumers in a hundred ways every day…She’s putting the meat on the bones of new Democratic economic message, and no one else is even a close second so far.”

“There’s one other thing she’s been doing well. She knows how to handle the socialist question,” Tomasky continues. “This is important, because “socialism/Venezuela” is going to be a good chunk of the Trump-Fox campaign. She knows what to say. I’m a capitalist “to my bones,” as she once put it. What I’m doing is fixing capitalism. Boom. Easy answer. That John Hickenlooper disaster on Morning Joe last week was jaw-dropping. Dude! It’s not hard. Here’s what you say: “I’m not a socialist. I’m a capitalist. What Democrats want to do is fix capitalism, just like Franklin Roosevelt did. Because what we’re living under now isn’t real capitalism. Real capitalism provides opportunity for working- and middle-class people, not just the ones at the top. We’re in the business of saving capitalism. It’s the Republicans who’ve been distorting and destroying it…Some people on the left won’t like it, but they’re a small group, comparatively speaking. And while they might not like the word “capitalism,” they’ll be perfectly fine with Warren’s specific ideas.”

Tomasky makes it clear he is endorsing a message strategy, not a candidate, and underscores that “Warren has her downsides…She’s also uniquely hated by corporate America and Wall Street. Lots of those people don’t like Donald Trump and would back a Democrat, even a fairly leftish one, I think. But if Warren’s the nominee, they’ll be all-in for Trump. This is not a moral judgment. If anything, it speaks well of her. I’m just saying it would make winning harder. And finally, well, the Democratic Party is one-for-three on Massachusetts liberals, and the one who won the presidency wasn’t really all that liberal, and he won 60 years ago…I’m not at all sure she could beat Trump and Fox (since Fox News will be an arm of his campaign, I’ll try to remember to always say “Trump and Fox,” and everyone else should, too). And the latent sexism in the vote that helped sink Hillary Clinton hasn’t gone anywhere. In the Trump era, it’s probably gotten worse, if anything…Who knows about all that? Not me, not you, not nobody. But this I do know: Elizabeth Warren is defining what the Democratic Party ought to stand for and do so far. Her proposals are strong and smart. They’re not “radical” or “anti-business.” They are anti-multi-millionaire. To that, I say it’s high time.”

If you want to ridicule a good idea, trot out an absurdly-high cost estimate. That’s standard practice for the Republicans, so no one should be surprised that they have slapped a $93 trillion cost estimate on the Green New Deal. As Zack Colman writes at Politico: “the number originated with a report by a conservative think tank, American Action Forum, that made huge assumptions about how exactly Democrats would go about implementing their plan. But the $93 trillion figure does not appear anywhere in the think tank’s report — and AAF President Douglas Holtz-Eakin confessed he has no idea how much exactly the Green New Deal would cost.” Colman details how they came up with the ridiculous estimate. But Democrats would be wise not to fool with cost estimates for a broad vision statement. Yes, the GND proponents went too wide, and threw in everything but a pony for everyone. But the heart of the proposal is a much-needed infrastructure plan, with a strong emphasis on environmental modernization — and that’s a good overall vision for the progressive party. Smart Dems need not get down in the weeds with the naysayers.

Stef W. Knight cites the findings of a new Harris poll for Axios, which indicates that “Generation Z has a more positive view of the word “socialism” than previous generations, and — along with millennials — are more likely to embrace socialistic policies and principles than past generations, according to a new Harris Poll given exclusively to Axios.” Amond the data points: 73.2 percent of millenials and generation Z believe that “Govt. should provide universal health care. 67.1 percent of them agree that ” Govt. should provide tuition-free college.” 49.6 percent of them would “prefer living in a socialist country.” Also, “The top three voting issues for Gen Z, according to the Harris poll, are mass shootings, racial equality, and immigration policy and treatment of immigrants.” In addition, “Millennials‘ top issues are access to health care, global warming/climate change and mass shootings” and “Gen X’s top issues are: access to health care, terrorism/national security and the national debt — the same top issues for boomers and older.”

A revealing exchange from Zach Beauchamp’s interview of Brad DeLong in “A Clinton-era centrist Democrat explains why it’s time to give democratic socialists a chance” at vox.com: “Zack Beauchamp: But despite that substantive view, you think that instead of freaking out about the leftists at the gates, it’s smarter to side with them — to treat them as political coalition partners”…Brad DeLong: “Our current bunch of leftists are wonderful people, as far as leftists in the past are concerned. They’re social democrats, they’re very strong believers in democracy. They’re very strong believers in fair distribution of wealth. They could use a little more education about what is likely to work and what is not. But they’re people who we’re very, very lucky to have on our side…That’s especially opposed to the people on the other side, who are very, very strange indeed. You listen to [Never Trump conservatives] like Tom Nichols or Bruce Bartlett or Bill Kristol or David Frum talk about all the people they had been with in meetings, biting their tongues over the past 25 years, and your reaction can only be, “Why didn’t you run away screaming into the night long ago?”

“When asked whether they would prefer a presidential candidate who “comes closest to [their] views on issues” or one “with the best chance to defeat Donald Trump,” a full 40 percent of Democratic primary voters said it was most important to them to beat President Trump, according to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll conducted Feb. 24-27,” note Nathaniel Rakich and Dhrumil Mehta in “Democrats Care More About Winning Than Usual” at FiveThirtyEight. “A larger 56 percent said it was most important to agree with their candidate on the issues, but still — two-fifths of the party’s core voters prized electability over ideological purity…True, this is far fewer than the share of Democrats who said this in a Monmouth University poll from late January. In that survey, 56 percent chose the more electable candidate, while 33 percent chose the candidate who agreed with them on the issues. However, the difference might be due to how the question was worded. Monmouth gave respondents a choice between “a Democrat you agree with on most issues but would have a hard time beating Donald Trump or a Democrat you do NOT agree with on most issues but would be a stronger candidate against Donald Trump.” Given that stark choice, it’s not all that surprising voters didn’t choose the candidate who they were explicitly told would have a difficult time defeating Trump.”

However, Mehta and Rackich also note in “Other Polling Nuggets” that “56 percent of Americans approve of how Trump is handling the economy according to a Gallup poll. That’s the highest number the pollster has recorded on this issue since Trump took office.”

Political writers have gotten used to outrageous and mendacious statements by the 45th president on a daily, if not hourly, basis. But one today took the cake, and I wrote it up for New York.

It’s no surprise that Republicans continue to try to make hay out of the Ilhan Omar controversy, even though, arguably, Democrats turned the tables on them by developing an anti-hate resolution which they unanimously supported, whereas 23 Republicans just couldn’t endorse such a sweeping condemnation of bigotry.

Characteristically, the leader of the GOP, one of the most skillful hate-mongers in major-party political history, is asserting that Democrats lost the battle over Omar while exposing their deep animus toward Jews and Israel, per CNN:

“’I thought yesterday’s vote by the house was disgraceful because it has become, the Democrats have become an anti-Israel party. I thought that vote was a disgrace. If you get an honest answer from politicians, they thought it was a disgrace. The Democrats have become an anti-Israel party and anti-Jewish party,’ Trump said.”

Let’s look at the record.

There are 27 Jews currently serving in the U.S. House. Twenty-five of them are Democrats; 2 are Republicans. There are nine Jews in the U.S. Senate. All of them are Democrats (if you consider Bernie Sanders a Democrat). Republicans: zippo.

Are all these Democratic Jews in Congress self-loathing?

A look at Jewish voting patterns is equally revealing. According to the best available data, Democrats have carried the Jewish vote in 24 consecutive presidential elections, dating back to 1924. In six of the last seven presidential elections, the Jewish vote was more than 70 percent Democratic (the one exception was in 2012, when Barack Obama won 69 percent of the Jewish vote). Hillary Clinton trounced Trump among Jews by a 71/24 margin. 2018 exit polls showed 79 percent of Jews voting Democratic in the midterms.

Did Democrats just become the “anti-Jewish party” since November of last year?

Trump’s “anti-Israel” smear is only slightly more credible. Yes, a significant minority of congressional Democrats are less slavish to Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies than nearly all Republicans (who are beholden, for the most part, to militantly pro-Likud conservative evangelicals rather than to Jews on the whole). But the vast majority of Democratic elected officials have supported a robust U.S. alliance with Israel dating back to Israel’s founding, in which Democratic president Harry Truman played a key role. The most recent congressional vote on military assistance to Israel, in 2018, showed the measure passing both Houses on voice votes; 36 Democratic senators, including their Jewish leader, Chuck Schumer, were original co-sponsors.

Were all these Democrats hiding an anti-Israel bias while voting for a measure that AIPAC praised as “ensur[ing] that Israel has the means to defend itself, by itself, against growing threats”? And speaking of AIPAC, if Democrats are anti-Semitic and anti-Israel, why did that organization greet the results of the 2018 midterms with this comment:

“’Americans elected a solidly pro-Israel Congress,’ declared the lead article in Near East Report, a monthly publication distributed by AIPAC to its followers across the United States. ‘While polarized on many issues, the 116th Congress remains committed to the U.S.-Israel relationship on a bipartisan basis,’ it stated.”

The president’s smear against Democrats may even be a projection of his own issues with Jews, who are naturally suspicious of the Christian nationalism he keeps flirting with, which is historically associated with anti-Semitism.

But he’s a long way from being able to say his party is the natural political home for American Jews, much less a bulwark against those antisemitic Democrats.

Democrats concerned about voter suppression and vote theft should read Steven Rosenfeld’s salon.com post, “Why an overlooked digital election theft controversy offers important lessons for Democrats.” Rosenfeld, author of  Democracy Betrayed: How Superdelegates, Redistricting, Party Insiders, and the Electoral College Rigged the 2016 Election, calls attention to a very real possibility of vote theft in the 2020 elections.

Rosenfeld explains that online digital vote theft has allegedly corrupted provincial elections in Alberta, Canada, where “renewed allegations about the 2017 election of the leader to a newly formed conservative party offer warnings for 2020’s U.S. presidential caucuses,” and “the lessons go beyond technical glitches and human errors that have dogged telephone and online voting—which some Democratic caucuses may debut next year. Instead, they reveal how an aggressive campaign could hijack online votes.” Further,

…In Canada, recent party elections typically have involved telephone or online voting—which Democrats want to offer in 2020’s caucuses to increase participation. Such remote voting is the terrain where thousands of votes were allegedly stolen.

Prab Gill, an Alberta Legislative Assembly member from Calgary-Greenway who left the UCP, described the 2017 vote-stealing tactics in a February 11 letter to Canadian federal police. Kenney’s team allegedly found a way to divert thousands of online ballots from being emailed to eligible voters who registered with the new party, instead sending the ballot access codes to [United Conservative Party Leader-elect Jason] Kenney’s team’s computers, where online security precautions were evaded and votes were clandestinely cast for Kenney.

Rosenfeld notes that the alleged election rip-off involves manipulating pin numbers, log-in and authentication codes and fake email addresses. He adds that,

These details about the Alberta party election stand apart from other documented problems with online voting—such as voters’ inability to log in, or app stores getting overwhelmed by voters at the last minute, or a vendor’s servers not being properly programmed to handle volumes of vote-casting data. They provide a clear example of how online votes can be hijacked by an aggressive insider campaign—amid an atmosphere of unfamiliarity surrounding a new voting system in a first-time party-run contest.

Whether computer-savvy activists working for an American presidential candidate could pull off something akin to Kenney’s alleged hijacking of online votes in 2020’s caucuses is an open question…”

Open indeed. I would be very surprised if Putin’s hackers were not exploring the possibilities as you read this. If Democrats aren’t putting together a task force of top experts to meet this challenge, they aren’t going to like the headlines on the first Wednesday morning of November 2020.

Thinking through the various ways in which the 2020 presidential election may unfold, I thought one unlikely but feasible possibility demanded attention now, and wrote it up at New York.

Trump remains one of the most unpopular presidents ever. His party is unpopular, too, as evidenced by Republicans’ poor performance in the 2018 midterms. Democratic voter enthusiasm seems high, fed by Trump’s daily antics. And the reasonably high odds that voters will eject him from the position he improbably won in 2016 while losing the popular vote are the very reason so many candidates want to run against him.

That’s the “glass half full” way of looking at the landscape. But there’s a “glass half empty” take that’s plausible as well.

After what should have been a calamitous stretch in which he shut down the government for an unpopular border wall, declared a nonexistent national emergency, and underwent a whole new round of high-profile airings of his alleged 2016 sins, Trump’s approval ratings have bounced back to the low-to-mid 40s levels that appear to be his long-term floor. Lest we forget, according to Gallup, his favorability number just before winning the presidency in 2016 was 36 percent (61 percent of respondents gave him an unfavorable rating).

And speaking of 2016, Republicans arguably retain an Electoral College advantage. The initial 2020 presidential battleground map from Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball showed Republicans with 248 electoral votes and Democrats with 244, with 46 in the “toss-up” category. Kyle Kondik explained Trump’s strong position:

“[T]he president’s base-first strategy could again deliver him the White House, thanks in large part to his strength in the nation’s one remaining true swing region, the Midwest. He’s an incumbent, and incumbents are historically harder to defeat (although it may be that incumbency means less up and down the ticket in an era defined by party polarization). Still, Crystal Ball Senior Columnist Alan Abramowitz’s well-regarded presidential ‘Time for Change’ model, which projects the two-party presidential vote, currently projects Trump with 51.4% of the vote based on the most recent measures of presidential approval and quarterly GDP growth (the model’s official projection is based off those figures in the summer of 2020). Arguably, the state of the economy is the most important factor: If perceptions of its strength remain decent, the president could win another term. If there is a recession, his odds likely drop precipitously. Meanwhile, it’s not a given that the Democratic nominee can consolidate the votes of Trump disapprovers, particularly if a third party candidate (Howard Schultz?) eats into the anti-Trump vote.”

Making the 2020 Democratic effort even more problematic is growing evidence that some targets thought to be ripe may be more resistant to Democrats, and more supportive of Trump, than previously thought. Ron Brownstein has some new Gallup data suggesting the incumbent’s resilience in Sunbelt states where many Democrats have espied strong trends in their favor:

“Across the potentially competitive Sun Belt states, Trump’s position among whites is consistently much stronger. In particular, his support among non-college-educated whites was much higher than it was in the Rust Belt: Gallup found that he drew positive job ratings from 73 percent of these voters in Georgia, 67 percent in North Carolina, 66 percent in Texas, and 61 percent in Florida. Likewise, among college-educated whites, Trump ran well above his Rust Belt numbers in all four states.”

And that’s against a generic Democratic opponent, as opposed to the flesh-and-blood candidate who might not, as Hillary Clinton demonstrated, be as strong as his or her party hoped, after a billion-dollars-or-so of attacks from the Trump campaign and its social media/Fox News allies.

As Brownstein notes, these numbers (and the intensely pro-Trump white Evangelical voters they reflect) mean that Democrats will probably need to mobilize nonwhite voters at extraordinary levels to win Sunbelt states Trump carried in 2016. It’s not clear the kind of candidate who can exploit Rust Belt opportunities can do that. And Trump has residual areas of strength in the greater Midwest as well….

Again, this is a glass-half-empty look at how 2020 is shaping up for Democrats. But it raises an important question about how Democrats — at both the elite and grassroots level — react to the real possibility of a second Trump win, particularly if it grows more plausible as 2020 approaches. Will they calmly resolve to unite behind whoever emerges from the abattoir of the nominating process, based on their popularity among Democratic primary voters? Or will they panic and become obsessed about “electability” as opposed to any other candidate quality?

They probably shouldn’t. As my my colleague Eric Levitz has argued, “electability” is a slippery concept that often involves bad-faith efforts to tear down other candidates based on selective deployment of limited evidence. But if it looks like Trump is in a relatively good position, it may be difficult for Democrats to think about anything other than electability, as I noted late last year:

“For most Democrats, the prospect of a second Trump term in the White House is an existential threat, whereas in 2016 his initial election was a bad but implausible nightmare. A second Trump term would not only drive progressives wild with frustration and fear: It could tangibly mean enough additional Supreme Court decisions to guarantee an end to abortion rights and other cherished constitutional protections, along with a federal judiciary skewed to the right for a generation and enough backsliding on critical challenges like inequality and climate change to darken every American’s future.”

Faced with that nightmare — and ineradicable memories of that shocking Election Night in 2016 — will progressive journalists and Democratic activists neurotically look at horse-race polls every other hour and adjust their views of presidential aspirants accordingly? It’s entirely possible. So in addition to developing an exciting agenda and raising money and figuring out where on a complex primary and caucus map to deploy candidate time and other resources, 2020 Democrats need to develop, update, and document a strong case that they are a good bet to beat Trump.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says he won’t allow Senate consideration of ‘The Electoral Reform Act,’ because “”Because I get to decide what we vote on,” reports Marianne Levine at Politico. The House version, H.R. 1 is expected to pass this week. Levine notes that “The legislation contains a series of voting reforms Democrats have long pushed for, including automatic voter registration, expansion of early voting, an endorsement of D.C. statehood and a requirement that independent commissions oversee House redistricting. In addition, the bill requires “dark money” groups to disclose donors.” McConnell says ““What is the problem we’re trying to solve here?…People are flooding to the polls.” Clearly all hope for Demopcratic enactment of the legislation require a Democrats winning a senate majority and the presidency in 2020. There is merit in begining to educate the public about the bill’s provisions now. But it might also be a good idea to break it into separate bills to force the Republicans to take a position on it’s more popular elements, such as disclosure of dark money donors.

Nathaniel Rakich provides the best update yet on “The Movement To Skip The Electoral College Is About To Pass A Major Milestone: With Colorado expected to join, the National Popular Vote compact is about to snag its first purple state.” Rakich pinpoints and assesses the complex state politics and legal challenges that the movement faces in meeeting it’s ultimate goal – election of the president exclusively by popular vote. A more traditional constitutional amendment approach would also be fraught with complex state politics. But opinion polls indicate solid popular support for election of the president by direct popular vote. that At the very least, however, the popular vote compact movement will help build support for abolishing the Electoral College.

At Brookings, William H. Frey reports that “A vast majority of counties showed increased Democratic support in 2018 House election,” and notes that “83 percent of all voters resided in counties that increased their D-R margins between 2016 and 2018—including 26 percent that increased their D-R margins by more than 10, and 57 percent that increased their margins by 0 to 9…there was a shift between the 2016 and 2018 elections for suburban counties in large metropolitan areas from a negative to a positive D-R margin. Also, the D-R margin became more positive in large urban cores and less negative for counties outside large cores and suburbs…As for the nation as a whole, most voters in each category resided in counties where D-R margins became more positive or less negative between the 2016 and 2018 elections (see Figure 4). This is especially notable for large suburbs, where 87 percent of voters resided in counties with increased D-R margins. For residents in both small metropolitan areas and outside metropolitan areas, that percentage was 81 percent…Additionally, more than a quarter of suburban or small metro voters resided in counties where the D-R margin rose by more than 10.”

One core asett behind Trump’s success with white working-class voters in 2016 is that he was perceived as a champion of trade policies that would protect their jobs. But the bloom may soon come  off that rose, as indicated by Jordan Weissman’s “So Far, Donald Trump’s Trade War Is an Utter Failure” at slate.com. “Consider the trade deficit, which Trump has promised to shrink. On Thursday, the Commerce Department reported that it actually grew by $68.8 billion in 2018, reaching $621 billion, as imports continued to outpace exports. In December, the monthly gap hit a 10-year high. The timing of the announcement was almost poetic: It came just over a year after Trump tweeted that “trade wars are good, and easy to win.” Democrats running in industrial states now have solid economic data for strongly criticizing Trump’s reckless trade policy.

Those who are interested in the future direction of the American left  should take time to read the much-buzzed about “The Future of the Party: A Progressive Vision for a Populist Democratic Party.” Written by Sean Mcelwee and Colin McAuliffe, co-founders of Data for Progress, the report offers three general conclusions, along with polling data on opinions and issues: 1. “This report shows that a pivot toward the “center” is poison with the Democratic primary electorate, using historical data to show the increasing liberalism of Democratic voters on core progressive values.” 2. “This report shows that marginal voters and nonvoters support key progressive policies and could form a durable base for the Democratic Party.” 3. “This report shows that many Democratic incumbents are failing their constituents by opposing progressive policies with broad-based support.”

in his article, “Mitch McConnell wants a Green New Deal vote. Democrats should take him up on it” at vox.com, David Roberts writes, “Though Democrats seem constitutionally incapable of recognizing it, they have the political advantage on climate change. They are on the right side of history. They own the issue, and it’s not going away. Polls show a steady surge of opinion toward concern over climate changeand support for clean energy (to say nothing of anger over income inequality and wage stagnation). Polls repeatedly show that the elements of the Green New Deal are wildly popular with the public, across parties….The GOP position on climate policy is “they’re taking your cows!” because they’ve got nothing else to say about it. Even many Republicans are realizing that’s an untenable position…For once, instead of tiptoeing hesitantly with their eyes over their shoulders on the latest polls, Democrats should show some confidence and leadership. They have science on their side and an exciting story to tell about economic renewal, jobs, and common purpose. It’s not Dems who should be scared of a serious debate on these subjects.”

Lest you be misled by the myriad versions of the ‘Democrats in Disarray’ meme, there are reforms that unify Democrats, such as the American Family Act, sponsored by Sens. Sherrod Brown and Michael Bennett, which would “slash child poverty in the United States by over a third” and bring the U.S. “in line with our peers in Canada, the United Kingdom, and most of the rich world in guaranteeing a basic payment for the care of children,” according to Dylan Matthews, writing at vox.com. Mathews notes, “Most important, in its latest incarnation, the bill has the support of the majority of the Democratic House and Senate caucuses, including the No. 2 Democrats in the House and Senate (Steny Hoyer and Dick Durbin, respectively); just about every possible Democratic 2020 contender currently in Congress from Tim Ryan in the House to Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren in the Senate; and leaders of both the moderate (Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Chris Coons) and left (Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) wings of the party. Thirty-five Democratic senators (out of 48 Democrats total) and 168 Democratic House Reps (out of 235) are sponsors or co-sponsors.”

In “The Pot Primary: 2020 Dem Candidates Flaunt Weed Bona Fides” at The Daily Beast, Matt Lasio reports that “The Democratic presidential candidates are racing to come up with headline-grabbing marijuana proposals as they chase America’s fast-changing beliefs.” Lasio notes that Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Tulsi Gabbard, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have led the way among Democratic presidential candidates in pushing for liberalization of weed laws, while Biden, Inslee and Hickenlooper have more slowly moved toward supporting relaxed pot laws.

In “Why Democrats Should Ignore the Chatter About Moving ‘Too Far Left’,” Joshua Holland notes at The Nation that “There’s good evidence suggesting that voters punish the two major parties for enacting their agendas, and it doesn’t seem to matter that much what those agendas are. In other words, in this highly polarized environment, electoral backlash is inevitable, regardless of whether or not a party is seen as moderate or tries to “find common ground” with its political opponents.” In addition, “several studies have found that voters don’t punish presidential candidates, at least, for taking positions that the pundits view as “extreme.” Summarizing the data in The Washington Post, George Washington University political scientist John Sides wrote that the data show “there is scarcely any penalty for being extreme…Political scientists Christopher Achens and Larry Bartels have argued convincingly that most voters just don’t have a solid grasp of public policy and take their cues from politicians they admire and other influential voices. So there is a danger that the media’s relentless drumbeat about these proposals supposedly being outside the mainstream could convince voters that the criticism has merit.

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

Neoliberals in Democratic Party Surrender

Or at least if we mean by that the strenuously centrist, business-friendly, no-big-ideas-please approach to economic policy that dominated Democratic party thinking from the Clinton years onward, there does appear to be some sort of surrender going on. You can see it in the kind of ideas dominating the Democratic policy discourse today, including the pronouncements of Presidential hopefuls. And you can see it in the writings of various economists and policy intellectuals close to the party.

A very clear example of this is recent statements by Berkeley economist Brad DeLong, once Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Department in the Clinton administration. DeLong, who has long insisted on referring to himself as a “neoliberal” (despite, I might add, a tendency to have a pretty left position on a lot of specific issues) said the following on his twitter feed:

“On the center … those like me in what used to proudly call itself the Rubin Wing of the Democratic Party — so-called after former Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin, and consisting of those of us hoping to use market means to social democratic ends in bipartisan coalition with Republicans seeking technocratic win-wins — have passed the baton to our left. Over the past 25 years, we failed to attract Republican coalition partners, we failed to energize our own base, and we failed to produce enough large-scale obvious policy wins to cement the center into a durable governing coalition. We blame cynical Republican politicians. We blame corrupt and craven media bosses and princelings. We are right to blame them, but shared responsibility is not diminished responsibility. And so the baton rightly passes to our colleagues on our left. We are still here, but it is not our time to lead.”

He followed this up with an interview with Zack Beauchamp on Vox, where he explains the thinking behind his surrender. The conclusion of the interview captures the terms of this surrender well:

“I could be confident in 2005 that [recession] stabilization should be the responsibility of the Federal Reserve. That you look at something like laser-eye surgery or rapid technological progress in hearing aids, you can kind of think that keeping a market in the most innovative parts of health care would be a good thing. So something like an insurance-plus-exchange system would be a good thing to have in America as a whole.

It’s much harder to believe in those things now. That’s one part of it. The world appears to be more like what lefties thought it was than what I thought it was for the last 10 or 15 years.

The other part is that while I would like to be part of a political coalition in the cat seat, able to call for bids from the left and the right about who wants to be part of the governing coalition to actually get things done, that’s simply not possible as of now.

We shouldn’t pretend that it is, or that it’s going to be. We need to find ways to improve left-wing initiatives, rather than demand that they start from our basic position and do minor tweaks to make them more acceptable to their underlying position.”

Very nice Brad. We accept the terms. But I do think that, of all people, Ross Douthat in the Times does put his finger of what could be a problem with this evolving detente within the Democratic party.

“From the mid-2000s onward, the leftward flank of the Democratic Party looked at the country’s changing demographics and growing social liberalism and decided that Clinton’s compromises with cultural conservatism weren’t as politically necessary as they had been (which was true), and that therefore they were free to become increasingly ideologically maximalist on everything touching gender or race or sexuality or immigration (which was … not true).

In this sense the story of the Democrats’ struggles over the last 15 years is a story of a party that has consistently moved leftward faster than the also-changing country, and consistently overread victories — on same-sex marriage above all — as a template for how every cultural battle should play out. It’s a story of a new feminism that’s pushing the party ever-further from the center on abortion, of a new cohort of white liberals who are actually to the left of many African-Americans on racial issues, of an activist base that brands positions that many liberals held only yesterday as not only mistaken but bigoted or racist or beyond-the-pale….

[T]he Democratic Party as a whole…[has written off] the possibility of winning over voters who would almost certainly be Democrats if the party still occupied the cultural terrain that it held in 2000 or even as late as 2008.

Because the country as a whole has also shifted left since 2000, that kind of writing-off will not prevent the Democrats from winning elections; it probably won’t prevent them from beating Donald Trump. But it will stand in the way of any dramatic left-of-center consolidation, any kind of more-than-temporary Democratic governance. And if the center-left feels itself irrelevant in an age of socialist ambition, then taking up the task of rebuilding a cultural center, and a Democratic Party capable of claiming it, seems like the task that might actually be suited to the times.”

Douthat has a point. The winds are shifting to the left on economics, but handling culture and tradition intelligently will still be key to the left’s future. Leave no votes behind!

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

Could Trump Lose Texas in 2020?

Sure he could, though I’d say the odds are still against it. But this could be a surprisingly competitive contest in 2020. The latest evidence for this is a recent Quinnipiac poll of Texas registered voters, which ran several trial heats of Trump against named Democratic contenders. Three candidates, Biden, Sanders and O’Rourke almost tie Trump, losing by 1, 2 and 1 points, respectively. Harris and Warren lose by 7 points and Castro by 5 points.

‘In the key Rust Belt states that Trump captured in 2016, his job-approval rating during 2018 was consistently worse than his national average among whites with and without a college degree, according to detailed figures provided to me by Gallup. This suggests that the most straightforward path for Democrats to recapture these states—particularly Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—may be to find a nominee who can reassure white voters who are cooling on Trump,” Ronald Brownstein writes in “Democrats’ Two Roads to Beating Trump” at The Atlantic. “In almost all the Sun Belt states that Democrats are hoping to contest, by contrast, Trump’s approval rating among both college- and non-college-educated white voters exceeds his national average, according to the same previously unpublished results. This suggests that to flip targets such as Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina, Democrats must find a nominee who can mobilize much greater turnout among those states’ large and growing populations of nonwhite voters.”…Democratic strategists and liberal media commentators are already debatingwhether a focus on swing states in the Rust Belt or the Sun Belt offers the most promising road to ousting Trump in 2020. Some have argued that it’s a false choice for Democrats to prioritize one over the other. They say a strong economic message could allow them to simultaneously appeal to disaffected white voters in the Midwest—especially from working-class families with slow-growing incomes—and excite greater turnout among nonwhite voters in the Sun Belt, particularly young people.”

David Atkins writes at The American Prospect that “The center-left, which has dominated the Democratic Party since at least the late 1970s, has long depended on being the “responsible” party: the cogent, the level-headed, the ones who, as Michelle Obama famously said, “go high” when they go low. Like the real mother in the biblical Judgment of Solomon, they are willing to sacrifice almost any legislative priority in order to maintain the norms of late-20th-century governance, especially so long as no one’s stock market portfolio takes a hit…The problem is that this dynamic between right and center-left is codependent and convenient to the status quo. The far right gets to keep the angry old racists happy; the center-left keeps the concerned vaguely cosmopolitan educated crowd happy. Notably, the donor class and those with an interest in maintaining the current order always seem to come out ahead…The progressive left is simply refusing to play the game. This is partly a matter of fundamental fairness, partly a recognition that this unhealthy political codependency causes a continual rightward drift in most policy areas. But most importantly, it’s a recognition that resolving the environmental and economic crises facing the country is more important than protecting rhetorical niceties and parliamentary traditions.”

At Daily Kos, Egberto Willies explains why “A move to the center is a continued fraud on Americans,” and observes that “Progressives must disregard all calls to move to the center. The status quo is not sustainable, and will continue to screw the poor and the middle class…Too often Democrats panic and instead of expending the effort to defend the practical and mathematical superiority of their ideas, they acquiesce to timidity. For that reason, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other newly elected, unabashedly progressive stalwarts should give hope to many. Republicans are expending a lot of energy to manipulate Democrats into giving up on moving left. Moving to the center would be fatal, and the GOP knows it…It is imperative that we continue to tell Americans, issue-by-issue, how we intend to make life better for them. But most importantly, we need to make the truthful case that our current economic model is a clear and present danger to the personal economy and well-being of most. A move to the center is a continued fraud on Americans.”

In “‘Dems in Disarray’ Is an Exhausting and Flawed Beltway Meme” at Esquire, Charles Pierce writes about the media’s hyping up divisions between Democrats. “The Washington Post would like you to know that the new Democratic majority in the House of Representatives has degenerated into open gang warfare, and that they’ll be very lucky if they all come out of all this success alive…We all should be accustomed by now to the Dems In Disarray template. (Note the perpetual binary by which the caucus is divided into “liberals” and “moderates.” Conservative Democrats apparently do not exist.) But the apocalyptic prose here has been dialed up to 11.” Pierce also asks, “is it time yet to wonder whether “districts Trump won” is an accurate metric by which to judge the ideological makeup of a congressional district, let alone a proper basis on which a congress critter should vote? What if, in many of these places, the Trump election was a fluke? What if the Trump vote was not ideological in the least but, rather, a desire to hock a loogie at the current political situation, the personal economic circumstances of millions of voters, the dreaded libtard hordes, and everything that’s gone wrong from the mill leaving town to your mother-in-law’s pot roast? What if the unprecedented confluence of events and circumstances that produced this administration* can’t be duplicated, even by the president* whom it installed in the White House?”

Ed Kilgore warns at New York Magazine that as the 2020 race narrows, “if it looks like Trump is in a relatively good position, it may be difficult for Democrats to think about anything other than electability…Will they calmly resolve to unite behind whoever emerges from the abattoir of the nominating process, based on their popularity among Democratic primary voters? Or will they panic and become obsessed about “electability” as opposed to any other candidate quality?..will progressive journalists and Democratic activists neurotically look at horse-race polls every other hour and adjust their views of presidential aspirants accordingly? It’s entirely possible. So in addition to developing an exciting agenda and raising money and figuring out where on a complex primary and caucus map to deploy candidate time and other resources, 2020 Democrats need to develop, update, and document a strong case that they are a good bet to beat Trump. This could soon dwarf arguments over Medicare for All and college affordability and income inequality and other substantive issues even among — perhaps especially among — the most serious progressive Democrats.”

Robert Griffin and Joe Goldman of the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group share data from an updated survey which “shows how the public currently perceives the Mueller investigation, including its fairness and integrity, the seriousness of the allegations, and the appropriateness of certain actions that the president might take. It is based on the January 2019 VOTER Survey (Views of the Electorate Research Survey) of 6,779 Americans, most of whom had been surveyed previously as part of a longitudinal panel.” Among their “key findings”: “A consistent plurality of Americans remains confident that the investigation is being conducted fairly (49 percent) and have a favorable opinion of Robert Mueller (41 percent). Interestingly, in the face of intense media coverage and efforts to undermine the investigation, almost a quarter (23 percent) of Americans still don’t have an opinion of Mueller. However, a clear majority (61 percent) still believe it would be inappropriate for Trump to remove him from the investigation…About half (52 percent) of Americans think that members of the Trump campaign had improper contact with Russia during the 2016 election. Almost seven in ten Americans (69 percent) think that it would be serious if the Mueller investigation concluded that Trump or his campaign accepted or sought assistance from the Russian government. An identical number (69 percent) of Americans say it would be serious if Mueller found that Trump or his staff obstructed the investigation into Russian involvement in the 2016 election. About six in ten (60 percent) say it would be inappropriate for the president to issues pardons to senior members of his administration…A consistent 44 percent of Americans believe the president should “definitely” or “probably be impeached” — including more than three-quarters of Democrats (78 percent), about three in ten independents (31 percent), and just 7 percent of Republicans.”

If you were wondering how often “every member of the House and the Senate votes with or against the president,” check out this updated chart, “Tracking Congress In The Age Of Trump” at FiveThirtyEight. Among U.S. Senators, for example, Joe Mancin was the Democrat who supported Trump’s position most frequently during his administration (59.8 percent of the time). followed by the recently-elected Kyrsten Sinema (59.2) and the 2018-defeated Heidi Heidkamp (54.8). The Democratic Senators who supported Trump’s position the least were Kristen Gillibrand (12.0), Elizabeth Warren and Jeff Merkley (both 13.0). “Independent” Bernie Sanders supported Trump 14.3 percent of the time, while Independent Angus King supported Trump in 42.4 percent of votes. In terms of votes supporting or opposing Trump, the Democratic Senator with the closest to the median score between Gillibrand and Mancin is Jon Tester, who voted for Trump’s positions 35.8 percent of the time.

From “Time for a change: Can 2020 Democrats break free from the failures of neoliberalism?” by Paul Rosenberg at salon.com: “One of the most striking things about the blossoming 2020 Democratic primary campaign is how much the candidates have broken with the party’s defensive, neoliberal posture of the past quarter-century — a period of time in which Republicans have only won the popular vote for president once, but have nonetheless dominated the parameters of debate. Now, all that has changed. In 2016, Bernie Sanders’ advocacy of Medicare for All was read as a fringe position by a fringe candidate. Heading into 2020, it has polled as high as 70 percent support, and is now a mainstream candidate position, ..Ideally, the Democrats’ 2020 primary campaign could and should involve a full-throated debate about the best ways to realize the full meaning of inclusive growth, including all the non-economic dimensions of recognition as well. It should flesh out specific aspects of what progressive populism means, and how to achieve its goals. It should promote sound policies to advance inclusive growth. And it should reclaim the once commonsense idea that while the market can be a good servant, it makes a terrible, tyrannical master…What voters care most about is the future — what candidates promise to do, and why — and the past matters most for making sense of what they say, for showing they saw things in the past, how they came to change, and how they see us all moving forward in the future.”

“Given the damage the Republican Party has caused with pass two deficit-busting tax cuts for the wealthy over the past two decades, Democrats can argue that they’re the party of fiscal seriousness not in spite of any plan to soak the rich, but because of it,” Alex Shephard observes at The New Republic “Democrats are largely talking about their bold programs in a fiscal vacuum. That should change. Raising taxes to fund Medicare for All and the Green New Deal isn’t just a moral argument, but an economic one. These proposals are necessary to fix a broken health care system that bankrupts hundreds of thousands every year and an broken capitalist system in which a wealthy minority reaps nearly all the benefits of continued growth. While continued discussion of potential drawbacks will undoubtedly make these programs less popular, Democrats need to unite around a message to counter bad-faith attacks from the GOP…The answer is to merge a number of the Democratic plans floated by presidential candidates and politicians like Ocasio-Cortez into a larger program aimed at creating a fairer economy, providing universal health care, and decarbonizing the economy—and to be clear about exactly how they plan to pay for it. The politics of taxes are changing. Now the Democrats need to change their message accordingly.”

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

Time to revisit the Rustbelt vs. Sunbelt debate on Democratic 2020 strategy. This time we have some new data to look at, courtesy of Ron Brownstein on the Atlantic site. Brownstein got the good folks at Gallup to give him white college/noncollege breaks from their state by state 2018 approval ratings (which I previously posted about); the results are quite interesting.

Some relevant topline:

“In the key Rust Belt states that Trump captured in 2016, his job-approval rating during 2018 was consistently worse than his national average among whites with and without a college degree, according to detailed figures provided to me by Gallup….
In almost all the Sun Belt states that Democrats are hoping to contest, by contrast, Trump’s approval rating among both college- and non-college-educated white voters exceeds his national average, according to the same previously unpublished results.”

More specifics on Rustbelt states:

“Among whites holding at least a four-year college degree, Gallup placed Trump’s 2018 approval rating at 39 percent in Michigan and Wisconsin, and at only 36 percent in Pennsylvania—each slightly below his national average of 40 percent among white-collar adults. Among his core supporters, whites without a four-year college degree, Gallup placed his 2018 approval rating at 54 percent in Michigan and Pennsylvania, and at 50 percent in Wisconsin. Those were each below his national average of 57 percent with blue-collar whites.”

Comparing these numbers with States of Change estimates for Trump support among these groups in the 2016 election, there are big white noncollege drops (2016 Trump support vs. 2018 Trump approval) in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and big white college drops in Michigan and Pennsylvania. So all three states look quite vulnerable for Trump.

Specifics on Sunbelt states:

“[Trump’s] support among non-college-educated whites was much higher than it was in the Rust Belt: Gallup found that he drew positive job ratings from 73 percent of these voters in Georgia, 67 percent in North Carolina, 66 percent in Texas, and 61 percent in Florida. Likewise, among college-educated whites,Trump ran well above his Rust Belt numbers in all four states….In Arizona, which has moved into play for Democrats in 2020 after Democrat Kyrsten Sinema’s Senate victory there last fall, 59 percent of non-college-educated whites said they approved of Trump’s performance, but only 42 percent of those with degrees said the same.”

These numbers too show some attenuation compared to 2016 Trump support, which is also consistent with some of the data from the 2018 election about these groups in these states. So there are clearly opportunities for the Democrats here too, especially in conjunction with nonwhite populations that are large and generally very hostile to Trump. As Brownstein notes, white voters, especially white noncollege voters, will probably be much harder to move in these states, making very strong nonwhite turnout particularly important.

But there are reasons to doubt that even strong nonwhite turnout may be enough to flip these states. After all, in Georgia in 2018, Stacey Abrams lost her election, despite stellar black turnout (the share of black voters in that election was actually slightly higher than in the previous Presidential election, which is quite unusual). There just wasn’t enough swing in the white vote. A better model perhaps is Arizona, where Kyrsten Sinema both got very strong Latino turnout and big shifts among white voters (both college and noncollege).

Looking at the big picture then, this seems like a fair summary of priorities:

“Considering all these factors, Democratic strategists generally agree that any road to 270 Electoral College votes begins by recapturing Pennsylvania and Michigan, the two former blue-wall states that reverted most sharply toward Democrats last November. But even if the party retakes both, it would still need to win one more state to beat Trump.

Priorities USA, the Democratic super PAC, recently released a strategy memo (linked to below) in which it reaffirmed this consensus by identifying Pennsylvania and Michigan as the two states Democrats are most likely to regain from Trump in 2020. The group then pinpointed Wisconsin as the state most likely to push the Democratic nominee’s vote count over the edge, with Florida ranking next as the state most likely to tip toward the Democrats. The group announced that it will shortly launch a $100 million advertising and organizing effort in those four states.

Josh Schwerin said that toward the end of 2019, the group will also invest in a second tier of states: North Carolina, Arizona, and Georgia, three Sun Belt states that Trump won; and Nevada, which Clinton carried….Though Schwerin’s group doesn’t believe Democrats have to choose between the Sun Belt and the Rust Belt, it does believe targets in the latter region may be “somewhat closer” in 2020. “These are states that were blue before,” Schwerin explained. “As Arizona is moving towards us, we are making sure that some of these states don’t move away from us.”

Sounds right to me. Now what candidate is best-suited to pursue this kind of strategy–kind of Rustbelt plus–that is an interesting question. That seems a bit more debatable to me than the general strategy. Let the debate begin!

After a number of writers warned of Democratic incivility given the huge 2020 presidential field, I weighed in at New York with a summary of good advice for avoiding the problem:

We’re now well under a year away from the Iowa caucuses, and an unusually — perhaps uniquely — large Democratic field is forming to compete for the opportunity to face Donald J. Trump in 2020. It is highly appropriate that before the festivities intensify, multiple voice are being raised to remember the wolf at the door before engaging in any intramural fisticuffs.

At the American Prospect, veteran labor political operative Steve Rosenthal offers four “rules” for 2020 Democrats in order to avoid a “circular firing squad” that helps Trump win the general election.