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

I usually mock the idea of a contested political convention in this day and age. But 2020 could be different for Democrats, as I explained at New York:

At this early point of the 2020 cycle, it’s natural to hear those old siren songs from a more interesting past when conventions actually decided something instead of serving as a four-day party infomercial as tightly scripted as any other TV drama. The fact that the last-multi-ballot convention occurred in 1952 (when Democrats nominated Adlai Stevenson on the third ballot), and the last seriously contested nomination in 1976 (when Gerald Ford survived a close challenge from Ronald Reagan on the first ballot), is often forgotten. And yes, it’s fun to engage in reveries over the “smoke-filled rooms” that picked Warren Harding out of nowhere in 1920, the 103 ballots Democrats needed to find their doomed nominee (John W. Davis) in 1924, or the stampeding of Republican delegates by galleries chanting “We Want Willkie!” in 1940.

But aside from the question of who, exactly, would “broker” a “brokered convention” these days, fantasies of any sort of contested nomination at a convention run up against a fundamental change in the process that made primaries and caucuses ubiquitous and delegate selection less arbitrary and “bossed,” as I noted a few years back:

“The main reason for this shift away from deliberative–or if you wish, ‘brokered’–conventions was the rise of a primary system that all but eliminated undecided delegates and favorite-son or stalking-horse candidacies. So it requires really, really special circumstances even to get within shouting distance of a convention where someone hasn’t locked up the nomination long before the balloons are inflated.”

The big shift was in 1972, when virtually all states moved to primaries or voter-driven caucuses. (That’s also the same year that Democratic nominee George McGovern gave his acceptance speech at about 3:00 AM Eastern Time, which led both parties to move quickly to squelch virtually all spontaneity at later conventions, wherever possible).

But there is a basic problem in assuming that the Republican delegate selection process in 2016 tells you anything about the Democratic process in 2020. Once he got rolling in 2016, Trump benefitted enormously from winner-take-all (usually by congressional district) delegate award rules. Democrats insist on strictly proportional delegate awards, which makes it much easier for candidates with limited but consistent support to hang around and hang around until late in the primary season hoping to catch fire (or to benefit from a front-runner’s calamities). That’s particularly true if they have a reliable source of money and/or an ideologically motivated national support base (like Bernie Sanders). So those who scoff at the possibility of a contested convention need to factor in several things: the size and strength of the field, the absence of a big-time front-runner, the likely split of delegates and a relatively front-loaded primary calendar that could make survivors of the early events quite durable.

It’s important to note that proportionality of delegate awards has its limits. There is a 15 percent minimum threshold for winning delegates at all, and in many congressional districts awarding delegates there really aren’t that many at stake to spread them around in strict proportion to the popular vote. But there are some counter-pressures that might encourage “losing” candidates to hold out, as well. As Nate Cohn notes, Democrats have “killed” superdelegates’ independence on first ballots. But if there are subsequent ballots, these ex officio delegates will spring back to life:

“In 2020, Democrats have sought to tamp down the superdelegate hysteria by barring these leaders and officials — currently 765 of them — from casting votes on the initial ballot at the convention. But here’s the ultimate irony: They can still cast votes on successive ballots, so they could be more influential than ever if the Democratic primary devolves into a floor fight.”

So sure, maybe history will hold true and only two candidates emerge from the earliest contests and one croaks the other by April. But for the first time in a long while a contested convention is an actual if still remote possibility. That in turn could influence candidate strategies in ways that are hard to anticipate. Despite its reputation for mild summer weather, it could get hot in Milwaukee in July of 2020.

Perry Bacon, Jr. offers a typology of various kinds of Democrats in his FiveThirtyEight post, “The Six Wings Of The Democratic Party.” Bacon writes that “The goal is to better reflect the disagreements playing out among party elites in the real world, which aren’t well captured by “liberal vs. moderate” or other broad terms like that.”  The six categories include: The Super Progressives; The Very Progressives; The Progressive New Guard; The Progressive Old Guard; The Moderates; and Conservative Democrats. Bacon notes that “The two most liberal groups have a ton of new policy ideas and energy, and they are determined to push the party left. But the Democrats have a majority in the House in part because of moderate Democrats winning in closely contested districts, and the party probably needs more moderate, and even some conservative, Democrats to gain ground in gubernatorial and Senate seats. Trapped in the middle are the party’s congressional leaders and most of its presidential contenders, facing pressure from the party’s left and the right.”

Some salient comments from New York Magazine’s Intelligencer chat on “Should Democrats Impeach President Trump?,” featuring Jonathan Chait, Benjamin Hart, Margaret Hartmann, and Ed Kilgore: Ben:..At Crooked Media, Brian Beutler opined that there’s little evidence impeachment would be damaging to Democrats, and that opposition to it is short-sighted. He writes that “Democratic leaders have all but doomed themselves to the worst-possible approach: One in which they unearth damning evidence and then make the conscious decision not to act on it; one in which they tacitly bless all of Trump’s wrongdoing and pray both that voters do all the hard work for them, and that nothing tragic happens as a consequence of their inaction.” His take on the political dynamic is that it would not deepen divisions any further…Ed: “I think the odds of Republicans flipping on Trump in numbers sufficient to make impeachment (a) feasible, or (b) perceivable as anything other than partisanship by Republicans are roughly zero for obstruction of justice, and maybe 10 percent for evidence of actual collusion…Just look at what happened to Republicans in 1998. Have we forgotten they managed to blow a midterm — an almost completely unprecedented event for the “out” party — because of their determination to impeach Clinton?”…Margaret: Yeah, I don’t even know if removing him from office would be beneficial at this point. I think a good chunk of the country would freak out and feel that he was unfairly ousted, even if they got a few GOP senators onboard…I agree with Pelosi that it’s just going to divide the country further…Jon: That’s a whole other can of worms, but I don’t think there are going to be 67 votes to remove for any reason.”

At The Atlantic, Edward-Isaac Dovere spotlights “The Myth of Joe Biden’s Working-Class Support,” and observes, “People always talk about Joe Biden’s special connection to the white working class, those vaunted lost voters throughout the industrial Midwest whom Democrats are desperate to get back if they want the White House again.” However, Dovere writes, “No one has any proof that this connection gets anyone to vote for Biden, or vote at all…The idea that he can win white working-class votes is part of every calculation about Biden’s likely 2020 run, in public and among his inner circle. It has become automatic filler in conversations and news stories about how he’d measure up against the rest of the Democratic field and how he might perform against Donald Trump, or which states he’d put in play.” But Dovere also notes that “John Anzalone, a pollster who has been advising Biden on a 2020 run, pointed to a Harvard-Harris poll from last month that showed that three-quarters of people who said they’d support Biden don’t have a college education, and that he’s winning 42 percent of non-college-educated voters—as opposed to the closest runner-up, Bernie Sanders, who had 22 percent. Likewise, Anzalone noted that Biden was leading among non-college-educated voters with 30 percent in a Monmouth University poll that came out earlier in the week.” Yet, Biden might do better to emphasize his proven political gift, a talent for projecting authentic compassion and warmly connecting with people on a human level. As Fire Fighter’s union president Harold Schaitberger observed, “His voice is more than connecting with the neighborhoods,” he said. “He really connects with the individuals.”

When Beto O’Rourke was quoted in Vanity Fair as saying “I’m just born to do this” and it was widely reported, I imagined milllions of Americans thinking “Oh great, another rich guy who thinks he’s entitled to rule.” But having just watched his roll-out in a Keokuk coffee shop, I don’t think the perception of elitism is going to be much of a problem for him. Like Biden, he has a natural ability to connect with people on a human level, plus he conveys tremendous energy and passion. He has staked out a vaguely-stated center left agenda, which may be just the thing at this stage of the campaign. But some extremely shrewd and tough politicians will be coming after him, including competitors Harris, Biden, Klobuchar, Sanders and Warren. He may not do so well against them in debates, but he will make up for it on the trail, long though it is. Campaign 2020 just got a lot more engaging.

The AFL-CIO just weighed in on the Green New Deal, and their response will not gladden the hearts of GND advocates: “We welcome the call for labor rights and dialogue with labor, but the Green New Deal resolution is far too short on specific solutions that speak to the jobs of our members and the critical sections of our economy,”  the AFL-CIO Energy Committee told the congresswoman and the senator in a letter dated March 8…We will not accept proposals that could cause immediate harm to millions of our members and their families. We will not stand by and allow threats to our members’ jobs and their families’ standard of living go unanswered,” they wrote. “We are ready to discuss these issues in a responsible way, for we all recognize that doing nothing is not an option.” It seems a little harsh of a critique for an overall vision resolution. But one of the lessons here for GND proponents is to solicit the input of major stakeholders before publicizing it. The wise course for GND supporters is to graciously accept criticism and tweak it, based on the merits of each critique.

Matthew Miles Goodrich, NY State Director of the Sunrise Movement, shares quite a different  perspective on the GND at Dissent: “Defining the Green New Deal is one challenge, but making it the law of the land is another. To do this the climate movement, and indeed the left in general, must fully shed its electoral agnosticism. The earliest any of the Green New Deal’s policies could make it into law is 2021. In that time, Democrats must retain their majority in the House, take control of the Senate, and win the presidency. The disproportionate power that rural states hold in Senate and presidential races means that the traditionally urban left must make in-roads fast in less populated states. Here, the Green New Deal, with its emphasis on agriculture reform and renewable electrification, will be an asset. Ending the minority party’s de facto veto power in the Senate filibuster will also be necessary. So will statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico. The primaries over the next two years provide the climate movement with a window to push agenda-setting candidates to race each other to develop a plan to actualize the Green New Deal’s full scope. Sitting on the sidelines again would be nihilism…Though still far from our goal, the chasm between necessity and reality no longer seems so insurmountable. The Green New Deal has set a course for the country to combat climate change at scale. The journey will require more protest, more power, and especially more politics.”

In “Americans’ Support for Immigration Is at a Record High. There’s No Need to Appease Fascists,” Noah Lanard writes at Mother Jones: “Last year, only 24 percent of Americans supported cutting legal immigration, down from 40 percent in 2006, according to data provided to Mother Jones by the Pew Research Center. Among Republicans without a college degree, the heart of Trump’s base, 59 percent say legal immigration should be increased or kept at the present level. That makes them slightly more supportive of legal immigration than the average Democrat was 12 years ago. Since Frum praised Alien Nation, the share of Americans who say immigrants are a burden on the country has dropped from 63 percent to 28 percent.” Lanard presents some excellent hover-charts to illustrate the data.

It had to happen. The Wall St. Journal takes The Bogeyman for another preaching-to-the-choir stroll  in “Socialism? Yes, Be Afraid: The next Democratic president will come from a zombie army of anti-capitalists” by their go-to lefty-basher Daniel Henninger. Measure the ruling class fear of the rising acceptability of socialist ideas in the title against the nervous ridicule in the subtitle, and you have a preview of conservative attacks against progressive Democratic candidates in the months ahead.

In more wingnut paranoia news, Gabby Del Valle reports that “A Yelp-style app for conservatives wants to protect right-wingers from “socialist goon squads” at vox.com. “As its name suggests, 63red Safe isn’t just about finding Trump supporter-friendly establishments — its founder appears to be worried about threats to conservatives’ physical well-being. “I’m trying to position it as an everyday ‘where can I go eat safely,’” the app’s founder, Scott Wallace, told the Daily Beast.” As Bette Midler said back in August, “Now Trump’s saying Democrats are going to be “violent” if they win big in November? What are we going to do? Throw our PBS tote bags at them?”

Foreign Affairs online is hosting a forum, “E Pluribus Unum? The Fight Over Identity Politics” in the March/April issue featuring contributions by Stacey Y. Abrams; John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck; Jennifer A. Richeson; and Francis Fukuyama. In her essay, “Abrams takes the opportunity to explain how “Identity Politics Strengthens Democracy,” and shares her critique of Fukuyama’s insights on the topic from one of his articles from the September/October issue:

Fukuyama’s criticism relies on a number of misjudgments. First, Fukuyama complains that “again and again, groups have come to believe that their identities—whether national, religious, ethnic, sexual, gender, or otherwise—are not receiving adequate recognition.” In the United States, marginalized groups have indeed come to believe this—because it is true. Fukuyama also warns that Americans are fragmenting “into segments based on ever-narrower identities, threatening the possibility of deliberation and collective action by society as a whole.” But what Fukuyama laments as “fracturing” is in reality the result of marginalized groups finally overcoming centuries-long efforts to erase them from the American polity—activism that will strengthen democratic rule, not threaten it.

Fukuyama claims that the Democratic Party “has a major choice to make.” The party, he writes, can continue “doubling down on the mobilization of the identity groups that today supply its most fervent activists: African Americans, Hispanics, professional women, the LGBT community, and so on.” Or it can take Fukuyama’s preferred tack, focusing more on economic issues in an attempt to “win back some of the white working-class voters . . . who have defected to the Republican Party in recent elections.”

Fukuyama and other critics of identity politics contend that broad categories such as economic class contain multitudes and that all attention should focus on wide constructs rather than the substrates of inequality. But such arguments fail to acknowledge that some members of any particular economic class have advantages not enjoyed by others in their cohort. U.S. history abounds with examples of members of dominant groups abandoning class solidarity after concluding that opportunity is a zero-sum game. The oppressed have often aimed their impotent rage at those too low on the social scale to even attempt rebellion. This is particularly true in the catchall category known as “the working class.” Conflict between black and white laborers stretches back to the earliest eras in U.S. history, which witnessed tensions between African slaves and European indentured servants. Racism and sexism have long tarnished the heroic story of the U.S. labor movement—defects that contributed to the rise of a segregated middle class and to persistent pay disparities between men and women, disparities exacerbated by racial differences. Indeed, the American working class has consistently relied on people of color and women to push for improved status for workers but has been slow to include them in the movement’s victories.

The facile advice to focus solely on class ignores these complex links among American notions of race, gender, and economics. As Fukuyama himself notes, it has been difficult “to create broad coalitions to fight for redistribution,” since “members of the working class who also belong to higher-status identity groups (such as whites in the United States) tend to resist making common cause with those below them, and vice versa.” Fukuyama’s preferred strategy is also called into question by the success that the Democratic Party enjoyed in 2018 by engaging in what he derides as identity politics.

Abrams goes on to share her experience running for Governor of Georgia, and notes further that,

My campaign built an unprecedented coalition of people of color, rural whites, suburban dwellers, and young people in the Deep South by articulating an understanding of each group’s unique concerns instead of trying to create a false image of universality. As a result, in a midterm contest with a record-high turnout of nearly four million voters, I received more votes than any Democrat in Georgia’s history, falling a scant 54,000 votes shy of victory in a contest riddled with voting irregularities that benefited my opponent.

She concludes that rather than dodging identity politics, “Instead, Americans must thoughtfully pursue an expanded, identity-conscious politics. New, vibrant, noisy voices represent the strongest tool to manage the growing pains of multicultural coexistence. By embracing identity and its prickly, uncomfortable contours, Americans will become more likely to grow as one.”

Fukuyama responds to the three essays that critique his take on identity politics, and has this to say about Abrams’s contribution:

Stacey Abrams criticizes my desire to return to class as the defining target of progressive politics, since class and race overlap strongly in the United States. But it is absurd to see white Americans as a uniformly privileged category, as she seems to do. A significant part of the white working class has followed the black working class into underclass status. Communities facing deindustrialization and job loss have experienced increases in crime, family breakdown, and drug use; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated that 72,000 Americans died in 2017 of drug overdoses related to the opioid epidemic. So although part of the populist vote both in the United States and in Europe is driven by racism and xenophobia, part of it is driven by legitimate complaints that elites—the mainstream political parties, the media, cultural institutions, and major corporations—have failed to recognize these voters’ plight and have stood by as this decline has occurred…In practical terms, overcoming polarization means devising a posture that will win back at least part of the white working-class vote that has shifted from the left to the right. Peeling away populist voters not driven by simple racism means taking seriously some of their concerns over cultural change and national identity. I agree that the burden is on Republican politicians to stop defending Trump, but they will do so only when they realize that their own voters are turning against him.

Fukuyama concludes by saying Trump practices “identity politics on steroids” and “unless the United States counters this trend domestically, it will continue to set a bad example for the rest of the world.” The other contributions to the forum are well worth reading, especially for Democrats seeking clarity on the benefits and pitfalls of ‘identity politics.’

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.