A lot of political observers obsessively watch the president’s approval rating. One offered a different and alarming take, which I addressed at New York:

If there has been one bit of conventional wisdom about 2020 that has most comforted left-of-center analysts like me, it’s that Donald Trump’s job approval ratings seem exceptionally stagnant and too low to support the evident optimism of his conservative media boosters….

But now comes the formidable number cruncher Nate Cohn with a challenge to this assumption from a couple of different directions. It will be received by many Times readers as something of a terroristic threat, but it’s important to face it directly.

First up, he calls attention to something most of us have ignored since Trump took office: the president’s personal favorability ratings. Yes, we all know that Trump won despite astonishingly low favorability numbers (an Election Eve ratio of 36/61 according to Gallup). But Cohn notes these numbers now look better for POTUS:

“Millions of Americans who did not like the president in 2016 now say they do. Over all, his personal favorability rating has increased by about 10 percentage points among registered voters since Election Day 2016, to 44 percent from 34 percent, according to Upshot estimates.”

That is still well under a majority, though not far below the 45.9 percent of the popular vote he won in 2016. But more important, Cohn suggests, a lot of these voters who have a newly favorable view of Trump may not have voted for him last time around:

“Republicans with an unfavorable opinion of Mr. Trump were more than twice as likely to stay home on Election Day as those with a favorable view, according to New York Times/Siena surveys of North Carolina, Florida and Pennsylvania in 2016.

“It seems likely that a substantial number of these voters now have a favorable view of the president: Over all, 28 percent of Republican-leaning voters with an unfavorable view of Mr. Trump in 2016 had a favorable view of him by 2018, according to data from the Voter Study Group.”

Cohn acknowledges that the odds are pretty good Democrats will nominate a more popular opponent for Trump than Hillary Clinton was in 2016, though nobody knows how she or he will compare to the president in personal favorability. I think it’s pretty important to remember that Trump won among the 18 percent of the electorate who disliked both candidates by a robust 47/30 margin, which could reflect either relative unfavorability or the natural tendency of unhappy voters to support change (which would be my guess). The latter explanation would be bad news for Trump as the incumbent.

In any event, Cohn concedes that presidential job approval ratings are more relevant to a president’s reelection prospects, and makes two separate arguments about them. The first is that Trump’s job approval ratings have been rising since the end of the government shutdown this year. While this is true, they were clearly depressed by the government shutdown, just as they were when Republicans were trying to kill Obamacare. Without question, when Trump is supervising one of his party’s least-popular policies or tactics, he will suffer. But if his approval ratings have rebounded to their natural state, that’s not a sign they will continue to rise to that of presidents who are cruising toward reelection. According to Gallup last month, Trump’s approval rating was at 42 percent, just two points above the average approval rating for his presidency. The average approval rating for modern elected presidents in their tenth quarter is 54 percent. It’s not at all clear Trump is showing much progress in “normalizing” his popularity.

Cohn’s second argument is one that only data dogs like himself are much in a position to contest:

“In some periods over the last few months, his job approval rating increased to among the highest levels of his term, according to live-interview telephone polls, long considered the gold standard of public opinion research …. Curiously, online polls have not shown this same increase; in fact, they’ve shown no increase at all.”

Trump’s relative strength in online polls prior to the 2016 election was the basis for the “shy Trump voter” hypothesis holding that voters embarrassed to tell potentially disapproving interviewers they were MAGA people gave Trump some of the hidden strength he showed at the polls. So as Cohn suggests, the new inverse live/online gap undermines that theory. What else it might mean is beyond my ken.

In any event, even if you buy Cohn’s argument that Trump is near the ceiling of his narrow band of job approval numbers, there’s no evidence he’s about to bust right through it. Some observers seem to think that a steadily improving economy will save him, but aside from the possibility of bad economic events occurring, it’s important to remember that solid majorities of Americans continue to express unhappiness with the general direction of the country. There’s really no reason to assume that incumbency is going to help Trump more than it hurts him. As Kyle Kondik noted recently, there’s increasing evidence from trial heats testing Trump against Democrats that his performance will undershoot, not exceed, his approval ratings.

From a longer perspective, my guess is that the narrow band of favorability and job approval numbers for Trump is just another testament to the partisan polarization that made it possible for him to win in 2016, despite his unpopularity. He cannot fall too far, even when he’s behaving in his signature beastly manner, because Republicans will sustain him. But he’s the wrong figure to expand his party’s base, having already pretty much maxed out with those residual white working-class conservative independents and Democrats he so famously won over in 2016. Sure, we all understand there are circumstances under which he can transcend his many handicaps by demonizing his opponent, revving up the MAGA people, and taking advantage of an Electoral College system which does not weigh popular votes equally. But having thought through Cohn’s argument, I’m less terrified than when I read his tweets and fear he has stumbled into some pro-Trump breakthrough.

It probably won’t break your heart that the “Owner of SoulCycle and the Miami Dolphins faces outrage and calls for boycott over Trump fundraiser,” as Brian Ries reports at CNN Politics. What it ought to do is gladden the hearts of, not just Democrats, but every sentient being who cares about American democracy and human decency.

As Ries, writes,

Real estate developer Stephen Ross — who is chairman and majority owner of the Related Companies, which oversees Equinox Fitness — will host a luncheon on Friday, according to the invitation, at which attendees will pay up to $100,000 for a picture with the President and $250,000 to listen in on a roundtable discussion.

The Washington Post first reported the fundraiser, sparking the outrage. The news didn’t sit well with some people who frequent the gym, who assailed it as supporting a President whose inflammatory rhetoric and policies targeting people of color are out of sync with the gym’s progressive and oftentimes famous clientele.

Related Companies Chairman Stephen Ross tried to minimize his suport of Trump, parroting a lot of yada yada about his embrace of diversity etc. But hosting and organizing a Trump fund-raiser is a lot worse than writing Trump’s campaign a check, which alone would merit a progressive boycott.

For too long, Democrats have forfeited one of their most potentially powerful tools for social and economic progress — economic withdrawall. However, we live in a political climate that allows the Republican President of the U.S. and members of his administration to boycott congressional subpoenas and refuse all requests for information. The Republican Senate Majority Leader also feels free to unilaterally stonewall all progressive legislation and prevent meetings and hearings with a Democratic president’s nominee to the U. S. Supreme Court. Isn’t it time for Democratic rank and file to leverage their dormant power as consumers to achieve needed reforms?

Yes, boycotts are problematic. For one thing, it’s important to make sure that affected labor unions are OK with it. And it’s tough to get a critical mass of awakened consumers mobilized enough to have an effect.

But, you know what is even more problematic? Funding politicians who actively promote racism,  bigotry and white supremacy. Also, Democrats bankrolling a presidential campaign that would screw millions of Americans who have serious health problems, and cheat hard-working Americans of all races out of a living wage. Progressives Financing a reckless president to deny the climate crisis and grease the skids for polluting industries is also a big problem.

The way it is now, the GOP’s sugar daddies get a free ride. They support Trump’s worst initiatives with their hefty contributions, while paying no price whatsoever in term of public opinion. The day that this free ride comes to a halt is the day that American democracy will be renewed and energized. It’s a challenge that must be met by progressive consumers, as well as voters.

Steve Rosenthal addresses a question of critical consequence at The American Prospect: “Will Trump Steal a March on Democrats in the Midwest? It’s time for Democrats to begin their ground game in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.” As Rosenthal writes, “If you want to talk about “winnability,” let’s note how all three of these states are winnable for Democrats next year. Until 2016, Democratic presidential candidates had carried each of these states in every election since 1992. Have the demographics or voting patterns in each of them changed in such a way that makes them unwinnable for Democrats? Not at all. Hillary Clinton lost Michigan by just 10,704 votes, out of 4.8 million cast; she lost Pennsylvania by 44,292, out of 6.1 million cast; and she lost Wisconsin by just 22,748, out of 3.0 million cast. For those of you doing the math, Clinton lost these three states by approximately 78,000 votes, out of more than 13.9 million cast, and her campaign largely neglected all three states.

“Rosenthal continues, “In 2018, however, statewide Democratic candidates stormed to victory in all three states—gubernatorial nominees won by a collective margin of more than 1.2 million votes. By no means, then, are the “big three” moving away from the party, despite their 2016 results. If Democrats do their work right, and begin now, they can lock these states down, denying Trump a path to victory.” However, Rosenthal adds, “But while Democrats are having this debate over vague ideas about electability, Trump’s campaign, which has already raised $124 million, is actively engaging voters in all three of these states. Trump has visited each of them this year and his campaign has been spending huge amounts of money on digital ads there. And yet the latest Morning Consult tracking poll showed Trump’s approval rating under water in Michigan (40 percent), Pennsylvania (44 percent), and Wisconsin (42 percent)…The Democrats’ path to victory in all three states is clear. First and foremost, Democrats must turn out large numbers of voters of color; their drop-off in 2016 doomed Clinton in Michigan (where minority turnout fell by 12.4 percentage points from 2012) and Wisconsin (down by 12.3 percentage points). Next, they must keep in their column the suburban, exurban, and white working-class voters who went from voting for Obama in 2012, to Trump in 2016, then back to the Democratic gubernatorial candidates in 2018.”

E. J. Dionne, Jr. makes it clear in his syndicated WaPo column, “On guns and white nationalism, one side is right and one is wrong“: As Dionne writes, “In pursuit of a mythical middle ground, the faint-hearted will counsel against calling out the moral culpability of those who divide, deflect and evade. Meanwhile, the rationalizers of violence will continue to claim that only troubled individuals, not our genuinely insane gun policies, are responsible for waves of domestic terrorism that bring shame on our country before the world…But sane gun laws are the middle ground, and most gun ownerssupport them. Opposing the political exploitation of racism is a moral imperative. And refusing to acknowledge that only one side in this debate seeks intentionally to paralyze us is the path of cowardice.”

From “The Left Needs a Language Potent Enough to Counter Trump: The president’s rhetoric is dangerously populist in nature, and the left doesn’t know how to fight it.”  by George Packer at The Atlantic: “…The language of the contemporary left is anti-populist. Its vocabulary, much of it taken from academia, is the opposite of accessible—it has to be decoded and learned. Terms such as centered, marginalized, intersectional, non-binary, and Eurocentric gender discipline separate outsiders from insiders—that’s part of their intent, as is the insistence on declaring one’s personal pronouns and showing an ability to use them accordingly. Even common words like ally and privilege acquire a resonance that takes them out of the realm of ordinary usage, because the point of this discourse is to create a sense of special virtue. The language of the left also demands continuous refreshing and can change literally overnight: A writer is told that the phrase born male is no longer okay to use and has to be replaced with assigned male at birth. Many of these changes happen by ambush—suddenly and irrevocably, with no visible trail of discussion and decision, and with quick condemnation of holdouts—which gives them a powerful mystique…The language of the left creates a hierarchy of those who get it and those who don’t. Mastering the vocabulary is a way of signaling entry into a select world of the knowing and the just. The system is closed—there’s an internal logic that can be accepted or rejected but isn’t open to argument or question. In this sense, though much of the language of the left has academic origins, its use in the public square is almost religious. The abandonment of language that brings people in rather than shutting them out is one of the left’s many structural disadvantages in American politics today. In fact, it divides the Democratic coalition in a profound way.”

For most of U.S. history, from Thomas Paine to Eugene Debs to Martin Luther King Jr., the left had a populist language of its own,” Packer continues. “It used a simple vocabulary and spoke in universal moral terms that appealed to the basic goodness in people rather than inventing a sophisticated hierarchical code to label their ills. It created insiders and outsiders, but they weren’t divided between the knowing and the unilluminated, the woken and the sleeping. The populism of the left posed the same opposition as Trump’s—the people against the elites—but with very different sets of characters.

Packer concludes, “You still hear notes of this language in the speeches of Senator Elizabeth Warren, with her talk of a “rigged” economy. Though she’s spent most of her adult life in universities, she speaks with a natural plainness that reminds you of her prairie origins. But she’s running for the presidential nomination of a party whose new activists think in and are constrained by a hermetic language of the chosen few. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, another candidate, has embraced it with the zeal of a convert, and at times Warren seems to come under its influence. Trump, with his sadistic instinct for the weaknesses of others, has learned how to hurt Democrats by using divisive rhetoric and waiting for them to walk into a trap of self-enclosure they can’t see. He won’t hesitate to use an event as terrible as El Paso to keep this logic working in his favor. A force as dark and powerful as Trump’s populism can be defeated only by an equal and opposite force.

Emily Stewart explains “Why Joaquin Castro’s tweet of a list of Trump donors is so controversial,” and writes, “Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) is under fire for tweeting out a list of donors to President Donald Trump. Why the maneuver is so controversial isn’t entirely clear: It’s all information that was already public…The Texas Democrat and brother to 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Julián Castro on Monday tweeted a list of 44 San Antonio donors who contributed the maximum amount under federal law to Trump in 2019. “Sad to see so many San Antonians as of 2019 maximum donors to Donald Trump,” he wrote, calling out a couple of the city’s better-known donors by their Twitter handles. “Their contributions are fueling a campaign of hate that labels Hispanic immigrants as ‘invaders.’..The point of all of this is pretty straightforward: It’s a way to keep campaigns accountable and make sure they’re following the laws, and it also increases transparency for voters to see who is backing campaigns.” In my view, we need more “outing” of big contributors to political campaigns, not less. Most of the information in question is publicly available. But candidates and their staffs should not do it. It’s just asking to be taken off message. The major media has been unduly timid about their responsibility to amplify large donor contributions. But political activists should not hesitate to take it on.

We’ve had our hopes for corrective action dashed before, many times. With that in mind, FiveThirtyEight’s Weekly Political Chat inquires “Will The El Paso Shooting Change How Politicians Talk About White Extremism?” Among the observations, Nate SIlver notes, “There is a cumulative effect even if there’s also a short-term boom-and-bust cycle after significant events. During the midterm elections, for instance, more Democrats than Republicans rated gun policy as a high-priority issue, which is a departure from the old-school conventional wisdom that guns were supposed to rally Republican voters.” Perry Bacon, Jr. adds that “But even though some Republicans — maybe even Trump, I’m not sure — will probably dial down the white nationalist rhetoric, I think the only movement on gun control will happen on the left. Or Democrats will become even more unabashedly party of gun control…generally most Democrats support: 1) expanding background checks, 2) banning assault weapons, and 3) ban high-capacity magazines.”

Daniel Rakich addresses “How Views On Gun Control Have Changed In The Last 30 Years” at FiveThirtyEight and explains: “In a December 2018 poll, Gallup found that 66 percent of Americans said it was “extremely” or “very” important that Congress and the White House deal with the issue of gun policy in the following year, which was a significant increase from the 54 percent of Americans who said gun policy was extremely or very important to them in January 2014. However, we still have a while before guns are the most important issue to Americans. In July 2019, only 1 percent said guns were the number-one problem facing the country — barely changed from the 0 percent who said so for most of the 2000s. And while this number does spike in response to mass shootings — it got as high as 7 percent in the six months after Sandy Hook and hit 13 percent after Parkland — so far, it has never stayed at those elevated levels for very long. So while public opinion has swung more toward the side of gun control in recent years, it may not yet be dramatic or consistent enough to force politicians to act.”

One of the big questions about Trump’s 2016 win was the impact of minor-party candidates. I took a long look at the past and the present situation, and wrote it up at New York:

Like those who voted for an earlier Green candidate, Ralph Nader, in 2000, 2016 Jill Stein voters, and Clinton-hating progressives who tossed a vote to Libertarian Gary Johnson, will always get far more blame for the election outcome than they objectively deserve. The obvious reason is that just about any change in voting patterns can be given outsize importance in crazy-close elections (this one was famously decided by 77,000 votes in three states). As with most lurid theories of betrayal, there’s a kernel of truth to this one, as the Guardian noted on The Day After:

“In Michigan, where the election was so close that the Associated Press still hasn’t called the result [AP did call it later, of course], Trump is ahead by about 12,000 votes. That’s significantly less than the 242,867 votes that went to third-party candidates in Michigan. It’s a similar story elsewhere: third-party candidates won more total votes than the Trump’s margin of victory in Wisconsin, Arizona, North Carolina and Florida. Without those states, Trump would not have won the presidency.”

Fury at protest voters has spilled over into the 2020 Democratic race, exacerbated by data showing that 4.5 percent of Bernie Sanders primary voters pulled the lever for Stein and another 3.2 percent went for Johnson in November 2016 (perhaps more to the point, 12 percent of them voted for Trump, but that’s a different story). Some Democrats still fear defections by “Bernie or Bust” voters in this cycle. So as the general election draws nigh, you can expect renewed attention to what’s going on in the minor parties and how they might (or might not) take advantage of major-party divisions.

Having said all that, in 2016 Stein and Johnson both got a lot of votes. Johnson (and running mate William Weld), who was on the ballot in all 50 states, won nearly 4.5 million votes; only once (four years earlier, with Johnson as the nominee) had the Libertarians topped 1 million votes. Stein and Ajamu Baraka, on the ballot in 45 states, didn’t match Nader’s enormous 2000 vote, but with around one percent of the total, they beat the previous three Green presidential tickets combined. So even if Democrats are wrong about Stein and/or Johnson giving us President Trump, their parties bear watching in 2020, where a different configuration of forces may make them significant.

Interestingly enough, both Libertarians and Greens seem to be having a bit of a purist moment as they prepare for 2020. Libertarians have probably benefited electorally from their recent habit of running prominent ex-Republican elected officials for president (former New Mexico governor Johnson the last two times, former congressman Bob Barr in 2008, and former and future congressman Ron Paul in 1988). But a lot of Libertarian activists aren’t happy about the ideological compromises that has involved. Here’s Reason’s Matt Welch discussing an early presidential-candidate forum he moderated last month:

“’We aren’t Republican light; we’re not Democrat light,’ said [Kim] Ruff, an Arizona-based manufacturer who would go on to win that evening’s informal post-debate straw poll, eight to five ([Arvin] Vohra) to four ([Adam] Kokesh) to one apiece for [Max] Abramson and [Dan] Behrman. ‘We’re advocates of full, unencumbered liberty. And that means taking positions that make the public squeamish. I would never do black tar heroin, but I’m not going to stop you from doing it, because what you do with your life is your business.’”

What the candidates were alluding to is the buzz about Representative Justin Amash of Michigan, who recently left the Republican Party (right before a political lynch mob might have ejected him for endorsing a Trump impeachment). For the moment, he is running for reelection, but that could change, as National Interest reported last month:

“In the few days since leaving the GOP, he’s talked about ‘room for a third party’ and refused to rule out running for president. But sources close to Amash and the Libertarian Party deny that a presidential run is in the works — although the door is still open. For the time being, the Libertarian-leaning representative is looking to build a fiscally conservative, pro-restraint coalition across party lines.”

The 2020 Libertarian Party convention is scheduled for May of next year (with state gatherings to select delegates held earlier), so Amash doesn’t have a lot of time to decide on a path. Gary Johnson has ruled out another run. But the announced candidates seem to be stressing their radicalism to distinguish themselves from potential ex-GOP interlopers like Amash. Candidate Dan Behrman’s motto is “Taxation Is Theft.” Adam Kokesh’s platform features this plank:

“When elected, I will swear in, walk to the White House, and sign one executive order. This executive order will lay out the process for dissolving the federal government in a peaceful, orderly manner. With it, I will be resigning as President to become ‘Custodian of the Federal Government.’”

I don’t believe Amash would endorse that idea.

The Greens aren’t worried about Democrats or ex-Democrats appropriating their ballot line but are concerned about appropriation of their ideas, as Emily Atkin explained earlier this year:

“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the wunderkind congresswoman from New York, has been getting most of the credit for the Green New Deal, an ambitious plan to fight global warming that has become increasingly popular among Democrats. But Howie Hawkins wants to set the record straight. ‘A lot of people think AOC thought it up,’ he told me by phone Wednesday. ‘But I’m the original Green New Dealer.’”

Hawkins started talking about a Green New Deal as a New York gubernatorial candidate for the Greens in 2010. He’s now running for president, and he stresses that his and his party’s version is more serious than the Democrats’, mostly because it involves a socialist transformation of the U.S. economy:

“The two plans have the same goal of 100 percent renewable energy by the year 2030, and they both call for universal health care and a federal job guarantee. But the Green Party’s plan calls for single-payer Medicare for All, tuition-free college, and ‘democratically run, publicly owned utilities.’ To pay for it, the Greens call for major progressive tax and financial reform, including a 90 percent tax on bonuses for bailed-out bankers, and a reduction in military spending by 50 percent.”

Hawkins is running for president, and Jill Stein is not; another interesting Green presidential aspirant, Dario Hunter, describes himself as a “black, gay, Jewish son of a Persian immigrant.” He’s a rabbi and a local school-board member and also supports a “REAL Green New Deal,” among other intensely progressive priorities.

The 2020 context for these minor parties set by the major parties is, of course, very important to their relative appeal. Republicans are far more united behind Donald Trump than they were in 2016. You’d have to figure a self-consciously progressive Democratic nominee (Sanders or Warren, most notably) would take some of the oxygen away from the Greens. What is less clear is whether a nominee like Biden would drive voters to a Hawkins or a Hunter, or whether the vast ideological and psychological gulf between Trump and the entire Democratic field will induce unprecedented solidarity, even if the primaries turn out to be more fractious than they were in 2016.

The one thing we know for sure is that no one is going to take any particular outcome for granted after what happened in the Trump-Clinton race. The number of protest votes could drop significantly, even as turnout goes up. Dedicated supporters of the Libertarian and Green platforms will stay with their party, though even among true believers, those who are horrified by one of the major-party candidates more than the other may be tempted to “make their votes count” in 2020.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is feeling the heat these days, with declining poll numbers, increasingly critical media coverage, including allegations of corruption and hard-hitting billboards (see here, here and here,) in his home state. He has also acquired a disparaging nickname, “Moscow Mitch,” thanks to his Putin-friendly policies.

McConnell gloried in his former nickname, “the Grim Reaper.” But the “Moscow Mitch” moniker seems to have legs, judging by the latest tally of Google hits (58,700,000) the term generates. Indeed, the usually unperturbable McConnell is ticked off about it, according to recent reports.

McConnell’s failed “leadership” history does add up to a disturbing portrait of an out-of-touch politician, whose arrogance and callousness toward anyone outside the shrinking base of Republican voters invites harsh criticism and growing protests. But he may be on the verge of an even steeper deterioration of his image, thanks to his rigid views opposing gun safety reforms in the wake of the three mass shooting during the last 9 days.

For a look at McConnell’s awful record on the issue, check out the blog, “On the Issues: Every Political Leader on Every Issue,” a blog affiliated with Snopes, which provides a some of the history of McConnell’s obstruction of gun safety, including:

Voted NO on banning high-capacity magazines of over 10 bullets in 2013.

Opposed the United Nations’ Arms Trade Treaty in 2013.

Voted YES on allowing firearms in checked baggage on Amtrak trains in 2009.

Voted YES on prohibiting foreign & UN aid that restricts US gun ownership in 2007.

Voted YES on prohibiting lawsuits against gun manufacturers in 2005.

Voted NO on banning lawsuits against gun manufacturers for gun violence in 2004.

Voted NO on background checks at gun shows in 1999.

Voted YES on loosening license & background checks at gun shows in 1999.

Voted YES on maintaining current law: guns sold without trigger locks in 1998.

But McConnell has probably done even more damage to gun safety prospects with his most damaging   power as majority leader —  killing debate and votes on gun reforms in the Senate. Recently, he  blocked a bill that would prohibit most person-to-person firearm transfers without a background check. The bill passed the House by wide margins. McConnell placed the bills on the Senate calendar, instead of referring the legislation to a committee for action.

Democrats, of course, are hopeful that McConnell can be defeated at the Kentucky polls in 2020, even though KY is a red state. McConnell has a strong opponent in Democrat Amy McGrath. If McConnell survives McGrath’s challenge, however, there are two other ways he can be removed from the majority leadership: 1. Democrats win a Senate majority, and 2. Republicans hold their Senate majority, but suffer such deep national losses across the board that they decide they need a new leadership face. Any one of these three possibilities is a plausible outcome.

Regardless of his re-election prospects, McConnell may now be a significant liability for his party at the national level. As the most well-known Republican after Trump, he will be the “face” of his party if Trump is defeated and he is re-elected. As a GOP politician with high name recognition, he already fills that role to some extent.

In his post, “Mitch McConnell Will Be The Boogeyman Of The 2020 Election,” Kevin Robillard, senior political reporter for HuffPo, notes that a poll of 12 presidential battleground states by the Democratic campaign finance reform group End Citizens United indicates some trouble ahead for the Majority Leader.

After being exposed to messaging about McConnell, the Democratic advantage grew to 12 percentage points. That was more effective than messages about President Donald Trump (6 percentage points) or congressional Republicans overall (9 percentage points)… McConnell’s approval rating among swing-state voters in the survey is just 26%, with 50% viewing him unfavorably. Among independents, just 18% view him favorably, and 58% have a negative opinion. In counties that swung from former President Barack Obama to President Trump, his approval rating is 25%, while 53% have a negative opinion.

Meanwhile Democrats should prioritize support for the “Ditch Mitch” movement, fund his Democratic opponent and crank up the heat on McConnell on all fronts, especially regarding gun safety, which is increasingly viewed as a national security issue.

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

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

The spate of House Republican retirements in Texas has gotten people thinking again about Texas’ political trajectory. How seriously should we take this?

Certainly one should take this seriously as a big boost to Democrats’ chance of retaining control of the House in 2020. But what about winning a statewide race in Texas in 2020, particularly of course in the Presidential race? This is still a very heavy lift though these developments should remind us that Texas is rapidly changing in this era, so such a result is no longer out of the question. As Sean Trende, the election analyst for the conservative RCP site, and one uninclined to pump up Democrats’ chances, recently tweeted:

“People grossly oversold GOP vulnerability in TX pre-Trump and are grossly underselling it now. Texas is an overwhelmingly urban/suburban state, so GOP weakening in the suburbs is felt disproportionately in TX. It could go blue, quickly, under this current configuration.

People really underestimate how many people live in rural/small town areas east of the hundredth meridian (so wi, oh get redder), and overestimate how many live west of it (tx, az get bluer)”

Trende’s point is underscored by data from University of Houston professors Renee Cross and Richard Murray:

“Metro Texas and the state’s outlying Anglo counties were similar in both demographics and partisan voting patterns for most of the latter half of the 20th century, even as high birth rates and migration from elsewhere in Texas and nearby states propelled urban growth after World War II.

Those metro counties boomed in the 1990s, a trend that has only accelerated. Between 2010 and 2018, the 27 metro counties added almost 3 million people, compared to just 375,000 for the 199 non-metro, non-bordercounties — growth that profoundly altered the demographic makeup of the state’s metropolitan areas. Anglo growth slowed as birth rates dropped and migration from elsewhere in Texas and neighboring states slowed; metro growth now is driven by international immigration and higher birth rates among non-Anglo urban residents…

Republicans are now a clear minority in the large metro areas of Texas.

The shift is illustrated by Fort Bend County, a suburban area southwest of Houston with large Latino, Asian American and African American populations. Mitt Romney defeated President Obama there by 15,000 votes in 2012, and all local Republicans easily won election. In 2016, Trump lost Fort Bend by 18,000 votes. In 2018, O’Rourke topped Cruz by 31,000 votes, and all 10 Republicans in contested countywide elections were defeated.

What does this mean for 2020? Metropolitan growth in Texas will certainly continue, along with its ever-growing share of the vote — 68% of the vote in 2016. And the latest census estimates suggest the Latino population is increasingly choosing to live in metro areas. Expect a growing difference in how metro Texas votes compared with the outlying counties.”

So, could this really happen in 2020? Well, a lot of things would have to go right. Clinton lost Texas by 9 points in 2016. Ongoing demographic change should knock that deficit down to about 7.4 points in 2020, even if all other voting behavior remains the same. Then if Democrats managed a big margin swing in their favor (15 points) among Hispanic, Asian and other race voters, that should bring the deficit down further to around 3.2 points. Then you are in a position where some combination of increased support among whites (college or noncollege, but likely mostly college) and stronger Latino turnout could put the Democratic candidate over the line.

That’s a lot of “if”s. But it is no longer out of the question.

It’s all thoughts, prayers and no action for Mitch McConnell and his fellow Republicans. “As the nation reeled Sunday morning from news of a second mass shooting in the span of 13 hours, Democratic lawmakers began demanding that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell take action this week on long-stalled gun control legislation they argue could help prevent the next large-scale tragedy,”  Devan Cole and Caroline Kelly report at CNN Politics. “Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, wrote in a tweet Sunday that she’s “ready to go back tomorrow” to take legislative action. “Inaction is unacceptable. No more talk. The time for passing legislation is now. I’m ready to go back tomorrow…On a state level, just nine states and the District of Columbia ban large-capacity ammunition magazines. The Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence lists California, Colorado, Connecticut, Washington, DC, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Vermont as places with bans that include the sale, possession, and/or manufacture of such magazines. The laws vary from state to state and define the magazines as holding either 10 or 15 rounds.”

Rep. Tim Ryan, another Democratic presidential candidate, was even more explicit: As Tom Boggiani reports at The Raw Story, “We have got to put pressure on Mitch McConnell to start with the background check bill,” he exclaimed…The GOP needs to get their shit together and stop pandering to the NRA,” he added, before going after Trump and Republicans who stand by and say nothing when the president encourages violent white nationalism…“It’s like when the president made the comments about good people on both sides in Charlottesville. how many Republicans really stood up and said what was on their heart? You know, in their heart and minds? Not many, hardly any.” he stated.”

In his NYT column, “The Heartland is Moving in Different Directions,” Thomas B. Edsall observes: “The Democrats’ ability to wrest back Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa faces a steep hurdle. The population of the Rust Belt is aging at a much faster pace than the rest of the country. Exit polls show that people over the age of 50 put Donald Trump in the White House, and the Midwest has them in droves…In five states — Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Minnesota and Wisconsin — the number of 18-to-35-year-olds, the most liberal age group, grew by 56,448 between 2016 and 2018, according to Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings…That growth pales in comparison with the rising number of people 65 and older, a core of Republican support, which grew by 685,005 — an advantage of better than 12 old people for each young person. Nationwide, from 2016 to 2018, 18-to-35-year-olds grew by 677,853 while the 65 and over population grew by 3,207,209 — a smaller advantage of 4.7 old people for each young person, according to Muro…Polls consistently show that older voters are more Republican than younger voters: In 2017, for example, Pew found that 18-to-35-year-olds skewed Democratic 54 percent to 39 percent; voters over 70 were 48 percent Republican and 41 percent Democratic.”

It gets worse, as Edsall explains: “The aging of the Rust Belt population is a major factor in a closely related trend, the declining share of self-identified liberals in the region…Pew Research reports that from 2010 to 2017, the percentage of people who say they are liberals in the Midwest — defined broadly as Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North and South Dakota, Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska, Missouri and Kansas — dropped from 23 to 19 percent, while the percentage describing themselves as conservative fell by a statistically insignificant 1 percent, from 38 to 37 percent. Moderates grew from 33 to 37 percent.”

But Edsall does see some hope for Democrats in that “the growing urbanization of the Midwest, combined with the decline of pro-Republican rural communities…may improve the odds for the Democratic Party and its candidates.” He cites a Brookings study, which found that in the 2018 midterm elections “10 of the 15 districts that flipped from Republican to Democratic in Michigan, Illinois, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Iowa “have income growth rates that exceed their state averages…Of the remaining five flipped districts, in which growth was below the state average, three were in Pennsylvania, where Democratic victories resulted from a state Supreme Court decision ordering the replacement of the Republican gerrymander of congressional districts, making those districts much more favorable to Democratic candidates.” Edall concludes, “While the trends and the data are often conflicting and inconclusive, I’d say on balance that the developments are encouraging for Democrats, albeit modestly.”

From “The 2020 Congressional Elections: A Very Early Forecast” by Alan I. Abamowitz at Sabato’s Crysgal Ball: “Barring a dramatic shift in the electoral landscape, Democrats appear very likely to hold onto their majority in the House of Representatives in the 2020 elections and make at least modest gains in the Senate. However, there are significant caveats with both projections. Obviously, one of those is that it is very early and that the president’s approval rating and the generic ballot could very well be different late next summer…In the House, we are in an era with limited ticket-splitting and a weak incumbency advantage. Additionally, the overall House map has a Republican lean: Republicans could win the House back by defeating fewer than two-thirds of the 31 Democrats who hold seats that Trump carried in 2016 (and only three Republicans hold seats that Hillary Clinton carried). The confluence of these factors could allow Republicans to overperform the projection in this model, particularly if Trump is reelected…While the model predicts a good chance of a Democratic majority in the Senate in 2021, that prediction should be taken with considerable caution considering the margin of error of the model and the fact that only a handful of Republican seats that are up next year are in Democratic-leaning or swing states. Moreover, if Democrats do take back the Senate, it will almost certainly be by a very narrow margin, which would make it difficult to pass the sort of progressive legislation advocated by many of the party’s 2020 presidential candidates.”

“Paralyzed by caution, and its worst instincts justified through a gradual takeover by corporate interests, the Democratic Party has in many ways been its own worst enemy,” Branko Marcetic writes in his article, “Corporate Democrats Have Been in the Driver’s Seat for 30 Years. Not Anymore” at In These Times: “Rather than proposing far-reaching redistributive policies, national Democrats have by and large moved to the right while pushing means-tested, tepid proposals meant not to offend corporate backers or scare off mythical “Reagan Democrats.” The result has been a party that’s failed to inspire its core constituency—working-class voters—to show up at the polls.” in the third presidential debate, however, “both Sanders and Warren tied signature policies like Medicare for All, a wealth tax, free tertiary education and student debt cancellation to their broader vision of political change, rebuking Democrats’ three-decade-long strategy of scurrying in fear at the sight of their own shadow. Warren thundered that the Democrats need to be the party “of big, structural change.” Sanders argued that “to win this election and to defeat Donald Trump … we need to have a campaign of energy and excitement and of vision. We need to bring millions of young people into the political process in a way that we have never seen.”

Alex Pareene says it exceptionally well in “The Simple, Odious Reason Mitch McConnell Opposes Election Integrity: The sinister influence on the Senate majority leader is not the Kremlin, but a Republican Party that seeks to keep certain Americans from voting” at The New Republic: “America’s elections are a patchwork of fiefdoms, many run by secretaries of state (many of whom are Republicans), some directly run by state parties themselves. Republicans oppose federal reform of the system because it could deny them the ability to create chaos—chaos that sends the other side’s votes to the wrong polling places, purges thousands or hundreds of thousands from the rolls, and strands urban voters in long lines. Chaos that could create opportunities for—and plausible deniability about—more serious fraud and criminality. Chaos that makes it hard to believe this Senate will ever allow truly secure paper ballot regulations, with strict regular audits, to become a national requirement.”

Just some final thoughts on all of the hand-wringing about Democratic presidential candidates beating up on each other and embracing less than popular reforms. 1. It’s early. Dems must be unified a year from now, but not now. In fact, if they were, it would be weird, maybe even creepy. Let the GOP be the Children of the Corn. 2. A lot of the less popular ideas are being field-tested and the candidates need to be battle-tested before they face Trump, as de Blasio said to Biden in the fourth debate. Sometimes leaders can buck opinion trends for a while enroute to building a new consensus. The presidential candidates will surely tweak their health care proposals in the months ahead, as Harris recently did. Elizabeth Warren, for example, is smart enough to know that she has to make more room for those who want to keep their health insurance policies. American needs a well-argued debate between advocates of Medicare for all and the public option, and that’s exactly what we are getting from Democrats, while Republicans grumble vague put-down on the sidelines. 3. The chaotic big field we see in the debates is actually a good thing because it shows which party has the vitality needed to make major changes. The sky isn’t falling just yet…although the climate crisis could be a game-changer a year from now.

With all the attention naturally focused on the 2020 presidential races–and secondarily the fight for the Senate–it’s worthwhile now and then to check in on House races, as I did this week at New York:

House Republicans have been plotting to retake control of the chamber they lost last year. As I noted earlier this year, flipping the House next year is not impossible but would defy recent precedents:

“[H]istory suggests it will be very difficult for Republicans to make the net gains of 19 seats necessary to flip the House, which hasn’t changed hands in a presidential election since Dwight D. Eisenhower’s landslide win in 1952. But on the other hand, there are 31 House Democrats in districts Trump carried in 2016 (and after 2018, just three Republicans in Clinton ’16 districts), so it would be wise to keep an eye on the House races.”

Obviously Trump would need to do very well at the presidential level to give his party’s House candidates the requisite lift. His perpetually mediocre job approval ratings are echoed in the congressional generic ballot (the typically predictive poll that indicates partisan House voting intentions), where Democrats currently have a 6.7 percent lead, according to the RealClearPolitics averages.

But there’s another factor that could hobble Republicans in their efforts to flip the House: retirements. Because incumbents on average run better than newbies or challengers, reducing the number of them will often reduce the potential for partisan gains. Additionally, members of Congress often anticipate a bad year before it materializes (much like animals sensing an approaching storm), so a wave of retirements is almost always a bad sign for the party experiencing it. In 2018 26 House Republicans headed for the exits (not counting those running for higher office), the fifth-largest total since 1974, which contributed to the Democrats’ big year. And now, as Reid Wilson reports, there are fears another wave of House GOP retirements is building:

“House Republicans plotting to win back their majority in Congress fear they are on the brink of a massive wave of retirements that could force them to play defense in a high-stakes presidential election year.

“Three House Republicans said last week they would not seek another term next year, catching party strategists off guard. Those announcements came earlier than in a typical election cycle, when members who are ready to hang up their voting cards usually wait until after the August recess or after the Christmas break.”

So far just four Republicans have announced an imminent retirement (not counting two who are running for higher office), but party officials have a bad feeling about what might happen very soon:

“Republican strategists say they are bracing for a new wave of exits after members check in with their families over the August recess. Two dozen Republicans won their reelection bids in 2018 by fewer than 5 percentage points; another 25 won by fewer than 10 points.

“’There are going to be a lot more [retirements] to come,’ said one consultant who works for House Republicans. ‘Between people finding themselves having to actually work hard for the first time in their long, lazy careers and members who came in in the majority and now hate life in the minority, it’s just getting started.’”

Some members hanging it all up, of course, come from safe districts that Republicans will undoubtedly keep, but one of last week’s retirees is probably more typical: Texas’s Pete Olson, who represents an increasingly marginal suburban district near Houston. Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman immediately labeled the race to succeed Olson as highly competitive:

“House Democrats got a boost on Thursday when Texas GOP Rep. Pete Olson announced he wouldn’t seek reelection in 2020. In 2018, Olson barely held off Democratic former foreign service officer Sri Preston Kulkarni 51 percent to 47 percent, and a competitive rematch was already brewing. In the second quarter of 2019, Kulkarni out-raised Olson $420,000 to $373,000. Now, this seat will move to the top of Democrats’ takeover target list.

“The rapidly growing southwest Houston suburbs are undergoing a rapid demographic shift: the 22nd CD, once held by Tom DeLay, is now just 40 percent white (down from 45 percent in 2010) and voted for President Trump by just 52 percent to 44 percent, a third of Mitt Romney’s 25 point margin in 2012. The district is 26 percent Hispanic, 19 percent Asian and 12 percent black, and 43 percent of adults hold college degrees, among the highest in the state.”

If there are a few more developments like this one, the GOP’s odds of grabbing the Speaker’s gavel for Kevin McCarthy will dwindle even more.

After I wrote this piece, Texas congressman Will Hurd, the only African-American Republican Member in the House, representing a very marginal district, announced his own retirement. It may or may not have been related to the president’s recent spasm of racist utterances. But it’s bad news for the GOP in any event.

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

So, Where Are We After the Latest Round of Debates?

John Judis’ piece on the Talking Points Memo site is a good place to start, which runs down many of the disquieting and counter-productive (from the standpoint of Democratic victory) stances taken by various Democratic candidates. By my count, he hits points 1,2, 5, 6 and 7 of the Common Sense Democrat creed in his discussion.

As for effects on the nomination race, I think Biden will remain the front-runner with Warren, Harris and Sanders below that and Harris perhaps slipping a bit. Booker preformed well and may get some sort of bump. But, for all the strident positions taken and various attack lines launched, particularly at Biden, I doubt if things will change too much.

It’s interesting to speculate about why so many candidates feel obliged to take non-viable political stances in their quest for the nomination. Kevin Drum has a theory which I cannot completely discount: He blames it on “the twitterization of the progressive movement”.

“No matter how carefully you curate your Twitter feed, and no matter how much you try to take Twitter with a grain of salt, it will inevitably overexpose you to a very specific subset of the progressive movement. This is not just the activist subset. It’s a group that’s way leftier, way louder, way less tolerant, way woker, way younger, and way whiter than the Democratic Party as a whole. Even if you think you’re sophisticated enough to understand this and account for it, spending time on Twitter almost certainly skews your view of the progressive movement….

Many of the Democratic candidates seem like they’re in thrall to the lefty twitterverse, deathly afraid of doing anything that might bring down a viral storm on their heads. And it’s hard to blame them, since campaign reporters also love Twitter, and will turn these viral shitstorms into page A1 stories in the New York Times.”

An interesting twist on this is to consider how this might be leading candidates especially banking on black support like Harris and Booker astray. They appear to be assuming that attacks on Biden on race and on his association with various controversial aspects of Obama’s record will eventually pay off with black voters.

But what if they’re wrong? What if in reality this sort of stuff appeals more to a particular sector of woke white liberals than to black voters? That certainly seems to be the pattern so far. And the latest debates may just confirm that. From a Politico article on reaction to attacks on Obama’s record:

“Henry Crespo, former chair of the Democratic Black Caucus of Florida, who watched the debate with about a dozen fellow black Democratic officials and operatives, cold-called a POLITICO reporter outraged with what he saw transpire on the debate stage Tuesday and the following day, when Harris and Booker appeared to him to be insufficiently supportive of Obama.

“Obama is an icon in our community. And they’re attacking his legacy Obamacare? And Joe Biden is the one defending it?” he asked.

“We were sitting here watching this and wondering: ‘What the hell are you doing? What is wrong with our party?’ It’s like they want to lose,” Crespo said, adding that Democrats like him resent Harris and Booker for attacking Biden’s record on race.

“Joe Biden is not Bull Connor,” Crespo said. “You just can’t make us believe it.”

Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-La.), Biden’s campaign co-chair and the former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, said Obamacare is widely supported among African Americans because it’s good policy and people know how hard it was for Obama to pass his signature health law.

“I don’t think it’s the wisest move to go after it. You’ve got to realize when you go after it, you’re doing exactly what Trump and Republicans have tried to do, which is repeal Obamacare,” he said. “When you talk about the Affordable Care Act, there’s deep, deep appreciation for it. That was a hard-fought win.”…

“The attacks, particularly from Harris and Booker, have been backfiring with black voters who always show up in Democratic primaries,” said Patrick Murray, a Monmouth University pollster who released a survey last week showing Biden capturing 51 percent of the African-American vote in South Carolina’s Democratic primary, where more than 60 percent of the electorate is black.

“Black voters are significantly less liberal than white voters in the Democratic primary,” Murray said. “So if their strategy is to attack him because he’s not woke enough on race or left enough on issues like Medicare for All, it’s not going to help you with these voters.”

Murray said polls show the dismissal of Obamacare made no sense more broadly with Democratic voters who like the program. Surveys also show voters prefer Biden’s proposal to add a Medicare-like public option to Obamacare rather than scrapping all private insurance and instituting a Medicare for All plan.”

More broadly, Ron Brownstein reminds us that, beyond the leanings of black voters, the overall structure of the Democratic primary electorate makes an approach that works best with woke white liberals and the twitterverse unwise.

“While the attacks on Biden from his left could further erode his position with the party’s progressive wing, his rivals may have simultaneously painted themselves more deeply into an ideological corner that constrains their capacity to grow among more centrist Democratic voters.

In the 2016 race, voters who identified as “very liberal” were the only ideological group in which Sanders ran evenly with Hillary Clinton. But they represented only about one-fourth of all primary voters, according to a cumulative analysis of 2016 exit polls by CNN. Voters who identified as “somewhat liberal” (just over one-third) or “moderate and conservative” (about two-fifths) cast a larger share of the vote. Likewise, voters over age 45 cast fully 60 percent of all primary votes in 2016, compared with about one-sixth for voters under 30.”

In short, it could be that some of the leading candidates are drastically underestimating the number of Common Sense Democrats and vastly overestimating the number of woke progressives. So far, that’s to Biden’s advantage.