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

The 2020 election could be a very good one for the Democrats. The 2018 election exposed the vulnerabilities of Trump and the Trumpified GOP and Democrats made significant gains both inside and outside their core constituencies.

It’s a good setup but it’s a long way to the actual election. A lot could happen, not least strategic errors that could derail all the promise.

David Leonhardt cuts to the chase in his column, “The People vs. Donald J. Trump: He is demonstrably unfit for office. What are we waiting for?” in The New York Times: “He has already shown, repeatedly, that he will hurt the country in order to help himself. He will damage American interests around the world and damage vital parts of our constitutional system at home. The risks that he will cause much more harm are growing…The unrelenting chaos that Trump creates can sometimes obscure the big picture. But the big picture is simple: The United States has never had a president as demonstrably unfit for the office as Trump. And it’s becoming clear that 2019 is likely to be dominated by a single question: What are we going to do about it?” Leonhardt recommends that House Dems conduct “a series of sober-minded hearings to highlight Trump’s misconduct. Democrats should focus on easily understandable issues most likely to bother Trump’s supporters, like corruption.”

“The Next Two Years Are About Democracy Itself,” argues E. J. Dionne, Jr. in his Washington Post column. “The contrast between the diversity of the Democratic side of the House (by gender, race, ethnicity and religion) and the visible homogeneity on the Republican side has been much noted. It was genuinely thrilling to see how free elections can allow citizens to bring about so much transformation in such a short time. And this new House was the product of the highest midterm turnout since 1914, back when all citizens aged 18-21 and most women and African-Americans were denied access to the ballot…It is thus appropriate that the new majority gave the hallowed designation H.R. 1 to the bill they presented Friday with the purpose of expanding democracy while pushing back against corruption. The headline aspects of the legislation took aim at Trump era sleaze, including a requirement that presidential candidates release their tax returns, and tightening of White House ethics rules…But the guts of the bill are all about making our system more democratic: automatic voter registration along with limits on voter purges and other methods that states use to block access to the ballot box, especially for minorities and the young. It would also ban contributions from corporations controlled by foreign entities…Central to the proposal is a new campaign-finance system designed to limit big money’s power in elections. It would create a series of incentives, including matching funds for donations of $200 or less, to encourage candidates to rely on small donors rather than the typically self-interested generosity of the wealthy…At this moment of trial for all who treasure democratic institutions, the world could use an example of politicians whose solutions to our problems involve more democracy, not less.”

Another Post columnist, Jennifer Rubin agrees in her column praising H.R.1 and its principle author rep. John Sarbanes. Rubin also notes that “The sheer size and scope of the bill may be an obstacle to passage, so Democrats, at some point, may want to break up the effort into manageable chunks so voters know exactly where their representatives stand — for example, on requiring the president and vice president to release 10 years of tax returns, or on knocking down barriers to voting. That can be sorted out later, however. If the House passes all or most of the items in H.R. 1 and sends them to the Senate, voter may begin to ask: Why are Republicans going along with Trump’s unethical practices and why do they want to suppress voting?”

In her New York Times op-ed, “Middle-Class Shame Will Decide Where America Is Headed: Who can appeal to the people who feel the most like they’ve gotten a raw deal?,” Alissa Quart, author of “Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America,” writes, “what I have called the “middle precariat” vote — or what could be called the anxiety vote — gave us this president, and now it has also given us a Democratic House. It is a powerful force…Any Democrat who wants to win the White House in 2020 is going to need to harness the power of these voters. Indeed, the race has very much started, including the recent announcement of a presidential campaign exploratory committee by Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who has already started to emphasize how the middle class is “hollowed out”…the frustration that comes from people who find themselves slipping down the economic gradient is one of the most powerful untapped resources in American politics today.

“Compromise, common sense and listening to all sides of an issue don’t seem like countercultural values. Certainly, in the home I grew up in they weren’t. My parents belonged to separate political parties, and those values were part of the air I breathed. But in my state’s Republican Party, such values have become increasingly difficult to find. And that’s why I’ve decided to leave the party…I want to work with other moderate, pragmatic leaders on policy that helps remove bureaucratic hurdles and helps government better serve Kansans rather than having to constantly disavow rhetoric designed to divide people. I can do that in the Democratic Party,” writes Kansas State Senator Dinah Sykes in “Why I left the Kansas Republican Party,” her Washington Post op-ed…”My change to the Democratic Party has already shown me reasons for optimism. I have found that I am respected, my opinion is valued, and open discussions are encouraged. I see a future in which sound policy is valued above scoring cheap political points.”

Egberto Willies warns progressives that  “We must not allow the ‘Hillary-fication’ of Elizabeth Warren at Daily Kos. The GOP clearly wanmts to degrade Warren’s appeal, in large part because she is among the most savvy potential Democratic candidates on the all-important issues of financial reform and regulation, as well as how progressive Dems can win a larger share of white working-class votes. If they can reduce her to a wanna-be cliche, they hope they can trvialize her candidacy. As Willies writes, “The Pocahontas caricature that Donald Trump seeded is an issue that progressives must not allow to take hold and distract. The attack is a backdoor attempt to diminish her accomplishments without resorting to direct sexism. Some Democrats will see Warren as too anti-corporation, especially given her Accountable Capitalism Act. They will label her as too liberal and will likely attack her as they did Sanders, insisting that she is on the fringe…The media must be called out immediately as soon as it allows the Right to drive that narrative. Absent that, the story will metastasize, just like “death panels, throw grandma off a cliff” did with the Affordable Care Act. The media was instrumental in giving Hillary Clinton’s email issues legs it should never have had.”

“Democrats were elected in large part to provide a check on Trump’s corruption and shredding of democratic and institutional norms,” notes Greg Sargent at The Plum Line. “Trump’s blithe refusal to release his returns is basically a big fat middle finger aimed at our norms and institutions, and even in a sense a straight-out declaration that he can damn well do all the self-dealing as president that he pleases. You, the public, will never be the wiser…Yes, it will be very hard to get Trump’s returns, and yes, Trump will put up a protracted struggle over them. But this is a fight Democrats must wage, not to “get Trump,” as his defenders like to whine, but rather as a blow on behalf of the broader anti-corruption agenda that Democrats hope to stand for.”

WaPo columnist Dana Milbank shares a warning to Democrats: “If they can stay unified, they will be an effective counterweight to the Trump lunacy, establishing the Democrats as the party to be entrusted with governing. But if they are split by internal divisions, they could become an easy foil for President Trump, lose suburban seats that gave them the House majority and possibly hand Trump a second term…The country is on fire. This is the time for Democrats to be the grown-ups voters want…Democratic unity is what gives them the upper hand in the shutdown battle, as some Republicans openly question Trump’s strategy. Democratic unity also allows them to appeal to the large majority of Americans disgusted with Trump, as Pelosi did during her acceptance speech, uttering “bipartisan” seven times, praising George H.W. Bush and approvingly quoting Ronald Reagan on immigration…There was silence on the Republican side, now a shrunken sea of old white men. “You don’t applaud for Ronald Reagan? ” Pelosi taunted…A disastrous presidency has given progressives an extraordinary opportunity — if they don’t blow it by fighting among themselves.”

From “The House Democrats’ Best Path Forward: To counter Donald Trump, and to prepare for 2020, the Party needs to think big.” by Margaret Talbot at The New Yorker: “Still, whatever compromise is eventually reached to reopen the government, the best path forward for the Democrats as they take over the House of Representatives—the most effective way to counter the Administration’s frantic, unmoored agenda-setting, while also motivating voters for 2020—will be to pursue ambitious ideas. These could include the once utopian-sounding Medicare for All; a Green New Deal, to combat climate change while creating jobs; a national fifteen-dollar minimum wage; and a Voting Rights Advancement Act, to revive some of the protections that the Supreme Court eradicated in 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder…Such proposals are backed by the Party’s fired-up progressives, but not all Democrats in the House support them, and they are highly unlikely to pass the Republican-controlled Senate, let alone be signed into law by Trump. Yet they strike many people as fair and humane, if politically complicated. In a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, seventy per cent of respondents were in favor of Medicare for All…Even if such proposals can’t make it out of Congress this term, they can help form a blueprint for a future in which the Democrats control the White House or the Senate.”

In reviewing what House Democrats said they wanted to do in 2019, one item really stood out to me, and I wrote about it at New York:

In recent years the struggle over voting rights has been played out across the complicated landscape of state governments, and in the federal and state courts. The new Democratic majority in the U.S. House is signaling that it wants to change that, and return to the now-lost era when the federal government acted to guarantee voting rights everywhere.

The House Democrats’ first bill, the “For the People Act,” has three major sections. One (as my colleague Sarah Jones has explained) involves campaign-finance reform. Another focuses on ethics and lobbying reform. The third, as voting-rights expert Ari Berman notes, covers a broad range of efforts to protect the franchise against recent, mostly Republican abuses:

“This includes nationwide automatic voter registration, Election Day registration, two weeks of early voting in every state, an end to aggressive voter purging, funding for states to adopt paper ballots, the restoration of voting rights for ex-felons, and declaring Election Day a federal holiday. While states control their voting laws, Congress has the power to set voting procedures for federal elections.

“The bill would also target partisan gerrymandering by requiring independent commissions instead of state legislatures to draw congressional maps.”

These are all familiar ideas, already in place in many states (other than, obviously, the idea of a federal holiday to vote). But taken altogether as a package, they are unprecedented:

“The bill represents the most far-reaching democracy reform plan introduced in Congress since the Watergate era. Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig calls it ‘the most important civil rights bill in half a century.’ It also builds on recent state-level efforts to expand voting rights: In the 2018 midterms, eight states passed ballot measures to make it easier to vote and harder to gerrymander.”

In a separate measure that will be introduced later, House Democrats plan to offer a bill that would reconstruct the federal “preclearance” system for potential voting-rights violations that was struck down as obsolete in the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder Supreme Court decision, as Talking Points Memo explains:

There’s actually faint Republican support in Congress for fixing the VRA — veteran GOP congressman James Sensenbrenner co-sponsored a bill in the last Congress with Democrat John Conyers to do just that — but it has been of zero interest to party leaders or the Trump Justice Department.

And in fact, none of the voting-rights initiatives House Democrats are promoting have any sort of immediately viable future so long as the GOP controls the Senate and Trump is in the White House. But the priority Democrats are placing on this set of issues is potentially significant, for two reasons.

First of all, making voting rights a national political issue instead of a state-level preoccupation or an obscure subject of litigation could pave the way to major reforms if and when Democrats have a governing majority in Washington. The last big federal voting-rights push occurred after the 2000 Florida fiasco, and resulted in the Help America Vote Act of 2002, a pallid set of largely hortatory encouragements, supplemented by inadequate grants, aimed at getting states to clean up their act in administering elections. It notably failed. Maybe next time Congress will get both tougher and more generous in creating carrots and sticks for more voter-friendly registration and election systems.

But as the HAVA example sadly illustrates, voting rights simply have not been a day-in-and-day-out preoccupation, even for Democrats, but rather an occasional topic of discussion during and occasionally just after electoral outrages. The current House Democratic focus on voting rights, and particularly its comprehensive nature, is a very good sign that this crucial issue is finally getting the attention it deserves, at least on one side of the partisan barricades. And perhaps, though this is less likely, Republicans can even be shamed into rethinking their increasingly reflexive opposition to voting rights, which used to be limited largely to its neo-segregationist southern conservative wing.

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

Will the Democratic Majority Be Able to Work Together?

Sure there’ll be conflicts. But the question is, will they be worse or better than normal for a caucus that controls the House? I say better.

Ron Brownstein’s new Atlantic article runs down the situation in detail and agrees with this assessment.

Today’s celebration over Nancy Pelosi’s return to the Speakership spurred some interesting ruminations about where House Democrats were ten years ago, which I wrote about at New York:

Nancy Pelosi was formally elected House speaker today, regaining the gavel she wielded from 2009 until 2011, then lost in the 2010 elections. As Ron Brownstein notes, it is a significantly different House Democratic Caucus she will lead than the one that was sworn in ten years ago with Pelosi as its speaker:

“Though slightly smaller, the Democratic caucus that’s assuming power is far more ideologically and geographically cohesive than the party’s previous majority 10 years ago. While the 2009 class included a large number of Democrats from blue-collar, culturally conservative, rural seats that were politically trending away from the party, the new majority revolves around white-collar and racially diverse urban and suburban districts that are trending toward them….

“In 2009, 49 House Democrats represented seats that had voted for John McCain in 2008. Even after November’s gains, only 31 Democrats now hold seats that voted for Donald Trump. Moreover, Republican DNA was more deeply engrained in those earlier split-ticket seats: Of the 49 Democratic-held seats that voted for McCain, 47 also voted for George W. Bush in 2004. This time, only 14 Democrats represent districts that voted for both Trump in 2016 and Mitt Romney in 2012, according to calculations by Tom Bonier, the chief executive officer of the Democratic voter-targeting firm TargetSmart.”

The new House Democratic majority is significantly more rooted in suburban and urban America. The number of members from relatively rural districts, says Brownstein, dropped from 89 in 2010 to just 35 today. That doesn’t mean ironclad party unity, but does mean Democratic divisions will largely be limited to less emotional fiscal and economic issues rather than the culture-war hot buttons that often divided them in the past.

There’s really nothing about the new majority, however, that should keep Democrats from full-throated resistance to Trump and his radical agenda on immigration, the environment, and the rule of law. And above all, they do not have their predecessors’ burden of advancing a Democratic president’s controversial agenda.

The Democrats elected with Speaker Pelosi in 2008 did a lot of heavy lifting in enacting the Affordable Care Act and passing a cap-and-trade bill addressing climate change (which the Senate never took up). This (alongside economic distress and white conservative resentment of the first African-American president) made them ripe targets for Republicans in 2010.

If Democrats retake the White House in 2020, perhaps their House Caucus will have a similarly critical and politically perilous set of assignments (particularly if Democrats take back the Senate as well). For now they will probably be united just enough for the limited if dramatic role they will play in the next two years. They won’t be able to make laws, but they can break virtually all of Trump’s legislative designs, while utilizing the House’s investigatory powers to expose the corruption and possibly the criminality underlying his 2016 campaign and the strange administration it produced.

From Greg Sargent’s “Democrats must wage war against Trump’s lies. Here’s what they can do” at The Plum Line:

When they take over the House, they can use the oversight process not just to investigate Trumpian corruption and abuses, but also to try to restore facts, empiricism and good-faith information-gathering to a place in governing processes and debates…Even if a short-term deal is reached to keep the government open, Trump will continue demanding wall money, meaning that will remain a sticking point. So restoring facts and empiricism to the debate over immigration will be particularly pressing.

First and foremost, Democrats must use their majority to restore a reality-based conversation around the topic of how secure the southern border really is…Democrats have an opening. They should formally request that the Congressional Research Service do a comprehensive report on the current state of border security. This is exactly what the CRS is for.

…“This would be quite valuable, because it would come with the imprimatur of the U.S. government,” Josh Chafetz, a law professor at Cornell who wrote a good book on how Congress can use its powers in hidden ways, told me. “Part of the goal here is to give journalists something they can report,” Chafetz noted, and CRS reports are an underappreciated resource for the public as well, given that they are particularly “reader friendly.”

Sargent points out that “CRS would likely conclude that we’ve already dramatically beefed up border security, and that this has worked, with illegal border crossings now at historically relative lows.”

Sargent adds that “Democrats can also hold hearings at which Homeland Security officials are directly asked to testify to the state of border security. As it happens, a 2017 Homeland Security report found that the border is more secure than it has ever been, which also undercuts Trump’s wall rage-fantasies.”

“Well-staged, effectively presented truths can also go viral,” concludes Sargent. “Democrats should do all they can to make that happen wherever possible and get into the fight against Trump’s war on facts and empiricism wherever they can.”

It’s about Democrats getting more pro-active about shaping news coverage. Simply assuming the media will give appropriate coverage to the realities of border security doesn’t work. Bomb-thrower Trump may be the master of political distraction. But that doesn’t mean Democrats should make it easy for him.

As a group, nonvoters also tend to be generally disengaged from public affairs and cynical about the government and their own roles in civic life. Nearly half of nonvoters in the most recent election said their personal dislike of politics played at least a minor role in their decision not to vote, according to Pew, with 44 percent saying they didn’t think their vote would make a difference and 41 percent saying that voting was inconvenient. (Nonvoters could select multiple reasons they didn’t vote.)

Three in 10 nonvoters said they weren’t registered or eligible to vote, 35 percent said they didn’t care who won the congressional elections and 22 percent said they’d forgotten to vote.

The Pew online survey, which included 10,640 adults online Nov. 7-16, (1,767 nonvoters included), is likely to be the most insightful study of why people didn’t vote in the 2018 midterm elections.

Edwards-Levy’s article includes this chart, which illustrates some of the major reasons why adults don’t vote.

PEW RESEARCH

Looking at the six reasons provided in the chart, it’s instructive to consider which of those problems can be solved with cost-efective remedies. There’s may not be much that can be done to reduce the percentages of those who say they “don’t like politics” and those who believe their vote “doesn’t matter,” outside of improved educational outreach and more educational videos on civic responsibility and voter empowerment.

The same may be true for those who “don’t care” who wins congressional elections. However, Edwards-Levy notes that “A 61 percent majority of the nonvoters said they wished they had voted, with the remaining 38 percent saying they had no regrets.” That indicates that there is room for improvement

But Democratic activists must get more engaged in projects to address the complaints about inconvenience and registration issues. Every Democratic state and local party should have a task force  to help identify and correct all such access problems. As for the 22 percent who “forgot to vote,” wherever possible, the offices of the Secretary of State should send out text messages alerting voters about registration and early voting deadlines, times and places. Dems must also escalate the fight for automatic registration in every state.

Edwards-Levy also reports that “Half of white Americans who cast a ballot in-person said they didn’t have to wait in line at all to vote, compared to 43 percent of black voters and 39 percent of Hispanic voters.” The challenge here is to figure out exactly where and when the lines were longest, and press the case for better hours, locations, parking, and more early voting.

More information about the methodology of the Pew Survey is available here.

NYT’s Nicholas Fandos and Catie Edmondson report that “Democrats still plan to make a wide-ranging anticorruption and voting rights bill their opening legislative priority,” along with legislation to end the GOP’s government shutdown. “They will introduce the first bill of the Democratic House — which includes changes to campaign finance law, outlaws gerrymandering, and restores enforcement authority to the Voting Rights Act — on Wednesday, followed with a marquee unveiling ceremony on Friday on the steps of the Capitol…House Democrats, who take control on Wednesday, are weighing three approaches to getting funds flowing, none of which would include additional money for President Trump’s proposed wall along the southwestern border.”

In his NYT column, “The New Fight for Democracy,” David Leonhardt notes promising initiatives for electoral reform in several states: “…Republicans in many states also pushed to make voting more difficult. They closed polling places, reduced voting hours and introduced ludicrous bureaucratic hurdles — like requiring Native Americans who have no street address to have one in order to vote…In Florida, 65 percent of voters — which means large numbers of Democrats, Republicans and independents — approved a ballot initiative restoring the voting rights of people who had been convicted of a felony. In Missouri, 62 percent of voters approved a law to reduce corruption and gerrymandering. Pro-democracy initiatives also passed in a few other states. At the federal level, House Democrats have promised to make electoral reform the subject of the first bill they offer, after taking control next month…This country has the beginnings of the pro-democracy movement that it needs.”

Alex Shephard has a warning for Democrats at The New Republic, noting that “the idea that Trump has a political advantage over Democrats on the broader issue of immigration is not so easily dismissed. Support for the border wall, while still a minority of Americans, recently hit an all-time high. Although Trump’s fear-mongering over the migrant caravan failed to block the blue wave in last month’s midterm elections, there are reasons to believe that immigration will be a potent, even decisive issue in 2020, just as it was in 2016…And then there’s the question of where Democrats stand on the issue—which isn’t entirely clear. They’re betting that Trump’s radicalism makes them the de facto party of reasonable immigration policy. But the risk is that the opposite will happen: that in the absence of a clear, affirmative message from Democrats, the public will see Trump and the Republicans as the ones doing something rather than nothing to address America’s broken immigration system…This is still largely the Democratic position on immigration: “common sense” border security measures, and some kind of path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. It’s no accident that Schumer keeps bringing up 2013’s Gang of 8 bipartisan reform bill, which failed to pass: The Democrats’ immigration policy hasn’t really evolved since then. While some innovations have cropped up, notably “Abolish ICE,” the party’s position on immigration remains opaque. They’re against Trump’s policies, to be sure. But it’s rarely clear what precise policies the party supports.”

“A sprawling field of potential Democratic presidential candidates is simultaneously confronting the need to raise staggering sums of money — and to do so under demands from party activists to curb many of their traditional sources of campaign cash,” reports Matt Viser at The Washington Post…Most of the candidates will probably run on a package of proposals to restrict money in politics and would support legislation to help overturn Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the 2010 Supreme Court decision that allowed unlimited spending by outside campaigns…But several are going beyond that, responding to demands that they spurn outside assistance from independent groups or cease accepting donations from employees of specific companies, among other strictures. The fiercest battle so far has been over whether candidates should accept money from those employed in the oil and gas industry — one seen as acting contrary to the party’s position on climate change.” Viser notes that Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Tex.) are expected to reject PAC funding, while Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and others will accept it.” Most of the other possible presidential candidates have not yet announced their campaign’s policy on funding.

Re the shutdown, Paul Waldman argues at The Plum Line that “the only answer may be for everyone, Democrats and Republicans alike, to ignore President Trump. Act as though he doesn’t exist and this has nothing to do with him. By which I mean that members of Congress should shut their ears to Trump’s tweets and threats and fulminations, pass something that House Democrats and Senate Republicans can live with, and then dare Trump to veto it. Because I doubt he has the guts…He’ll have to agree to something eventually, but the only way forward might be to cut him out of the process until the end, then force his hand.”

In his Washington Post syndicated column, “There is much to fear about nationalism. But liberals need to address it the right way,” E. J. Dionne, Jr. highlights a key distinction, noted in new book, “The Nationalist Revival” by John Judis: “Globalization married to rapid technological change has been very good to the well-educated folks in metro areas and a disaster for many citizens outside of them….Judis sees the rise of nationalism as a reaction to “the illusions and excesses of globalization…He proposes a useful distinction between “globalism” and “internationalism.” He’s against the first but for the second. Globalism, Judis argues, “subordinates nations and national governments to market forces or to the priorities of multinational corporations.” Internationalism, on the other hand, accepts that nations may sometimes have to “cede part of their sovereignty to international or regional bodies to address problems they could not adequately address on their own…friends of liberal democracy need to keep two ideas in mind at the same time…On the one side, they should not automatically cast those who worry about the decay of national sovereignty as reactionaries. On the other, they must continue to insist — and urgently so in 2019 — that American patriotism and the defense of constitutional democracy are one and the same.”

At Talking Points Memo, Kyra Lerner reports on “The Powerful Role Confusion Plays In American Elections,” and notes: “As laws making it harder to vote spread across the country, an additional and often unnoticed barrier comes with them: confusion. Georgia wasn’t the only state that created chaos and uncertainty at the ballot box. Similar scenarios played out this year in parts of Missouri and Florida. Two of 2018’s most competitive gubernatorial elections may have swung on voter confusion…The United States’ byzantine election system is governed by overlapping rules on the county, state, and federal levels. Elections in different states and even different cities are held on different days, with polling places in varying locations and voting hours that change from one year to the next.” Lerner adds that confusion over voter identification requirements, court rulings, broken voting machines, ballot design and provisional ballots, implemented by poorly-trained poll-workers frequently takes a sugnificant toll on voter turnout. Lerner suggests same-day registration and automatic voter registration as two effective remedies. On a grand scale, Democrats would be wise to launch an energized public education campaign to explain the electoral reforms of H.R. 1, their top  legislative priority.

Political strategist Robert Creamer explains why “America Isn’t As Polarized As You Think It Is” at HuffPo. Among his examples: “82 percent of Americans think wealthy people have too much power and influence in Washington…78 percent of likely voters support stronger rules and enforcement for the financial industry…82 percent of Americans think economic inequality is a “very big” (48 percent) or “moderately big” (34 percent) problem…76 percent believe the wealthiest Americans should pay higher taxes…87 percent of Americans say it is critical to preserve Social Security, even if it means increasing Social Security taxes paid by the wealthy…61 percent of Americans ― including 42 percent of Republicans ― approve of labor unions…78 percent of likely voters favor establishing a national fund that offers all workers 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave…According to a CNBC poll, 70 percent of Americans support Medicare for All…The vast majority support progressive solutions. This is true even when it comes to immigration. A Harvard-Harris poll found 73 percent of the population supports “comprehensive immigration reform.” And a CNN poll found that 83 percent want to protect Dreamers, the young immigrants brought to the country as children…It turns out that what is necessary to end political polarization is not milquetoast compromises with the political right. It is standing up straight and fighting with everything we have to make American policy come into alignment with the views of ordinary Americans.”

Writing in The Atlantic, Edward-Isaac Dovere flags “10 New Factors That Will Shape the 2020 Democratic Primary,” including: the Democratic National Committee last week announced that there will be 12 official primary debates. Each will mix frontrunners with back runners, attempting to put anyone who meets a basic set of qualifying criteria on equal footing…They won’t have to wait long to start their arguing: The DNC schedule has the first two debates set for June and July, less than 200 days away.” Devere notes also that “There’s never been a presidential primary race with more than one female candidate. There’s never been a presidential primary race with more than one black candidate. There’s never been a presidential primary race with more than one candidate running from the left of the base.” All of that is about to change with more than 20 Democratic presidential candidates expectedto join the fray.”

Thinking about the perpetual challenges to Democratic Party unity, I discovered and nourished a new concern: 2018 provided some fresh fodder for those who want to enforce ideological rigor. I wrote it up at New York.

This is the time when political analysts take a long look back and a longer look forward at what the midterm results mean for the two political parties, led often by ideological factions determined to prove their way is the highway to success in the next contest.

This is an especially urgent task for moderates of the center-left and center-right, who often take credit for wins in hostile territory and warn that they alone can win the big presidential prize just down the road — or at least that used to be the case. Nowadays, moderate Republicans are an endangered species, and at the presidential level, being at least “moderately conservative” or having some distinctively savage brand of right-wing politics like Donald Trump has become mandatory. The ideological “struggle for the soul of the party” is more common among Democrats, who haven’t had a loud-and-proud lefty president since FDR.

With no clear presidential front-runner for 2020 and a huge array of potential candidates lining up, Democrats will have plentiful opportunities to argue over which ideological persuasion gives them the best opportunity to topple President Trump and salt the earth that brought his monstrous presidency to life. But the empirical case for any particular type of Democrat having an advantage in 2020 did not get much of a boost from what happened in 2018, according to top-shelf political scientist Alan Abramowitz:

“The outcomes of House contests in 2018 were overwhelmingly determined by two factors — the partisan composition of House districts and the unpopularity of President Trump in many of those districts, including some that had supported him in 2016 …

“[The results] had very little to do with the characteristics of the local House candidates. In making their choices, voters apparently were far more concerned about which party would control the House than about who would represent their district. As a result, the advantage of incumbency reached its lowest level in decades — less than three points in terms of margin, according to an analysis by Gary Jacobson.

A corollary to the irrelevance of incumbent characteristics was that ideology didn’t much matter either:

“[F]or both Republican and Democratic incumbents, election outcomes were overwhelmingly explained by the presidential vote in the district. Moreover, the incumbent’s voting record had little or no influence on the results. For Republican incumbents, conservatism had a very small and statistically insignificant negative impact on incumbent vote share. For Democratic incumbents, liberalism had a very small and statistically insignificant positive impact on incumbent vote share.”

These findings have limited implications for Republicans, who, barring something unforeseen, are stuck with Trump in 2020. And however you choose to define Trump’s ideology, he has shown little to no interest in appealing to Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (other than those who already share his white nationalist tendencies).

For Democrats, though, the idea that running “to the center” generates no measurable electoral gains will be a central talking point for those who want to run hard to the port side of the ship. Indeed, for many self-conscious progressives these days, there are only two plausible reasons for a Democrat being anything other than a progressive: pure political expediency, or corrupt submission to corporate power. Only the former justifies the presumed sin of centrism.

This is a pretty important issue in intra-Democratic debates. While progressives may excuse, say, a Democrat’s refusal to fully embrace an immediate leap to single-payer health care in conservative areas of the country, they tend to assume such a centrist posture must be accompanied by public or private acknowledgement that of course Medicare for All is the ultimate goal. It is far less acceptable to claim that some other form of expanded health coverage — say, Obamacare with a strong public option — is actually a superior policy. That sort of talk must reflect a sellout to private insurance interests, or so it seems to those who assume that Democrats should press for as much democratic socialism (to choose the most prevalent label) as political markets will bear.

There are going to be other leftward pressures on Democrats going into 2020. As Jamelle Bouie argues, white Democratic presidential candidates seeking to display solidarity with an increasingly nonwhite primary electorate may seek to do so with more controversially progressive positions. But in the general election, if it just doesn’t matter what flavor of Democratic policy thinking you use to spice up your messaging, since everyone is polarized for or against Trump as a matter of first principle, then left activists are going to want to know why any Democratic candidate doesn’t steer steadily to the left.  Moderates need a better answer than “I have a poll!” Because this time around, they probably don’t.