Bernie Is Favored To Win In New Hampshire-- Both On Tuesday And In November

Trump keeps whining that New Hampshire is a state he can win in November and tells his campaign manager he wants to contest the state. That's because he remembers winning the first-in-the-nation primary in 2016 and because he remembers how close it was in the general election. The final score was 348,521 (47.6%) for Clinton to 345,789 (47.2%) for Trump. Trump won 6 of the state's 10 counties, including the two biggest, Hillsborough and Rockingham. But Granite Staters have largely come to understand that Trump is a toxic sack of shit and his campaign knows it would be pointless to spend money there. Since inauguration day, Trump's favorability in the state has decreased by 14 points and is now underwater-- by a lot. 42% of New Hampshire voters approve and 55% disapprove. That's minus 13.

True, his 2016 primary victory smashed his opponents and put them back on their heels:

• Trump- 100,406 (35.3%)
• Kasich- 44,909 (15.8%)
• Cruz- 33,189 (11.7%)
• Bush- 31,310 (11.0%)
• Rubio- 30,032 (10.6%)
• Christie- 21,069 (7.4%)
• Fiorina- 11,706 (4.1%)
• Carson- 6,509 (2.3%)
• Paul- 1,900 (0.7%)

On the same day, Bernie was pulverizing Hillary. He beat her 151,584 (60.4%) to 96,252 (38.0%). Bernie had more votes than Trump and his top competitor (Kasich combined). And Bernie beat Hillary in all 10 counties. He also beat Trump in all 10 counties.

Hillary is still fighting that battle and has relentlessly and bitterly attacked Bernie ever since. As Ryan Teague Beckworth pointed out Friday just before the Democratic debate, "Clinton and two longtime allies have hammered Sanders over his ideology, his second-place finish in Iowa and his ability to get elected. Clinton, who said in January that Sanders was unlikable and insufficiently supportive of her nomination, hit him indirectly in an interview Thursday with talk show host Ellen DeGeneres. Without naming Sanders, she said she was concerned about candidates who promise too much. 'We need to rebuild trust in our fellow Americans and in our institutions, and if you promise the moon and you can’t deliver the moon, then that’s going to be one more indicator of how, you know, we just can’t trust each other,' she said. She urged voters to ask themselves, 'Who do you think can win? Because if you don’t win, you can’t govern.'"

Beckworth noted that James Carville, a hopelessly reactionary old Clinton hack, went on Comcast's anti-Bernie TV station to say that "the Democratic Party risks becoming an 'ideological cult... This party needs to wake up and make sure that we talk about things that are relevant to people. We don’t need to become the British Labour Party. That’s a bad thing. It’s not going well over there.'"

New Hampshire voters rejected Clinton and her status quo establishment politics and embraced Bernie. And then she nearly lost to Trump. She's still furious about it. And she may hope Trump beats Bernie. At least he'd keep her taxes down. And, after all, she's always been a Republican anyway-- except for the issues that directly impact women and, more recently, gays.





At the debate, the establishment candidates who stand for the status quo ante went after Bernie-- and failed to stop his momentum. Bloomberg News reporter Gregory Korte: "The desperation to prevent Sanders from being the nominee was on full display. They saved some of their fire for the other leader in Iowa, Pete Buttigieg, but it seemed clear they’re most worried about the possibility-- not entirely out of the question-- that the Democrats’ nominee to take on President Donald Trump would be a self-described socialist they all plainly fear would lose. And if any of his rivals hoped for a breakout performance to halt Sanders’ momentum, it didn’t come. At the end of the two-and-a-half-hour debate, there was no clear alternative.

Sanders stuck to his populist message. “The way you bring people together is by presenting an agenda that works for the working people in this country, not for the billionaire class,” he said.

As vigorous as the attacks on Sanders were, they were conventional arguments that his passionate supporters have already rejected.

He’ll explode the deficit: “Bernie says that you have to bring people together and we have to have Medicare for All,” Biden said. “And he says he wrote the damn thing. But he’s unwilling to tell us what the damn thing is going to cost.”

He’s too extreme: Sanders’ approach to governing is “my way or the highway,“ Buttigieg said.

His “democratic socialist” label is a liability: “I think that’s the label that the president’s going to lay on everyone running with Bernie, if he’s a nominee,” Biden said.

He’s yesterday’s candidate: “The biggest risk we could take at a time like this would be to go up against that fundamentally new challenge by trying to fall back on the familiar,“ Buttigieg said.

But the Iowa caucuses showed that those attacks won’t deter Sanders’ base of young voters who see Sanders’ “revolution” as the antidote to millionaire and billionaire politicians.

Sanders characteristically didn’t back down or tack away from his more unpopular positions. One exception: His 2005 vote to protect gun manufacturers from product liability lawsuits. “The world has changed and my views have changed,“ he said.

On economic issues, Sanders has hewed to the same message for 40 years, and that makes him hard to stop, especially in a state that’s less than 80 miles from his Vermont home and where he beat Hillary Clinton by 22 percentage points in 2016.

He Can Do It by Nancy Ohanian

AP's coverage also addressed the "socialist" issue, if only superficially and without historical context. The GOP attacked every Democrat as a socialist since FDR and today is referring to every Democrat for every office as a socialist. It's a shame when the Democrats from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party give their screeds credibility. During the debate the muddle-headed Biden warned that Bernie would put the entire party at risk because of his self-proclaimed agenda of democratic socialism. "I think that’s the label that the president’s going to lay on everyone running with Bernie, if he’s a nominee." The GOP, as I said, is already doing that. Savvy congressional candidates are more worried that Biden and his status quo conservatism will be at the top of the ticket and many long for a progressive like Bernie or Elizabeth Warren leading the party.

Sanders was asked to respond to Trump’s comments earlier this week to Fox News, when the president said, “I think of communism when I think of Bernie.”

Sanders brushed off concerns about Trump’s attacks: “Donald Trump lies all the time,” he charged.

Asked if they had concerns about a top-of-the-ticket candidate with a “democratic socialist” moniker, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar and businessman Tom Steyer raised their hands.

Former Vice President Joe Biden warned that Donald Trump and his allies would use the socialism label against Sanders and the party in a prospective general election matchup.

“Bernie’s labeled himself, not me, a democratic socialist,” Biden said before acknowledging his own political challenges.

Neither Elizabeth Warren nor Pete Buttigieg proved willing to criticize Sanders for embracing democratic socialism.

Warren, a Massachusetts senator, was asked about saying previously that she is “a capitalist to my bones.” But she refused to make a major contrast at Friday’s debate in New Hampshire, saying only, “Bernie and I have been friends for a long time.”

Warren said the “fundamental question” is “how we bring our party together” and talked about fighting government corruption, saying it is “an issue we can all agree on.”

Miles Kampf-Lassin, writing for In These Times about Bernie's win in Iowa, noted that by taking wining the popular vote there, Bernie has upended the notion that running as a socialist is a liability.

By claiming the most votes in Iowa-- a rural, Midwestern state-- Sanders has shown that fears over a Scarlet S have been largely overblown. In reality, the democratic socialist agenda that undergirds Sanders’ political philosophy-- free and universal healthcare, taxing the rich, canceling debt, ending wars, expanding workplace democracy and investing in a livable future for the planet-- is incredibly popular.

The pundits are already waving their arms, warning that Sanders is uniquely vulnerable to a Red Scare-style takedown because of his political beliefs. On Monday morning, MSNBC host Chris Matthews compared Sanders’ campaign to George McGovern’s failed 1972 presidential bid, saying the Democratic frontrunner reminds him of “some old guy with some old literature from this socialist party or that,” as if Sanders was more akin to a leafleter for the Revolutionary Communist Party than a U.S. senator first elected to Congress 30 years ago.

Meanwhile, at The Atlantic, neocon David Frum proclaims that “Bernie can’t win,” referring to him as “a Marxist of the old school of dialectical materialism, from the land that time forgot.” And Matt Bennett and Lanae Erickson, hucksters for the Wall Street-funded, Democratic centrist think tank Third Way, write in USA Today that Sanders’ socialist ideas are “toxic,” cautioning that “Democrats must not be fooled by him now.”

Even Biden himself, reeling from a disastrous finish in Iowa, is joining in on the swipes. On Wednesday, Biden said: “If Sen. Sanders is the nominee for the party… every Democrat will have to carry the label Sen. Sanders has chosen for himself. He calls him-- and I don’t criticize him-- he calls himself a democratic socialist. Well, we're already seeing what Donald Trump is going to do with that.”

Such admonition is understandable coming from a political and media establishment that views Sanders’ redistributive platform with scorn: Their concern over “electability” really just masks their ideological opposition to Bernie Sanders’ political project. But that doesn’t make their claims correct.

Majorities of young people, women and Democrats all now say they prefer socialism over capitalism. And survey results from Data for Progress show that in a general election matchup, Sanders’ identification as a socialist would not be a liability against Trump. Interestingly, the results indicate that Sanders performs better against Trump when he’s identified as a “socialist” and the president as a “billionaire,” versus Democrat and Republican, respectively. As Vox concludes from the study, “tagging Sanders as a socialist did not seem to undermine his campaign.”

University of California political scientist Gabriel Lenz’s research has shown that, in general, voters “adopt their preferred party’s or candidate’s position as their own.” As a result, voters are less likely to be turned off by a candidate identifying as “socialist” if they generally agree with or approve of that candidate.

Sanders is the most popular hopeful in the race and is the most trusted on the issues most important to Democratic voters. And Sanders is reliably beating Trump in polls both nationally and in battleground states across the country. Rather than serving as a hindrance, Sanders’ political philosophy could actually benefit him in the country’s heartland. Chicago City Council member Carlos-Ramirez-Rosa, himself an outspoken democratic socialist, writes in NBC News that “Far from being allergic to socialism and class struggle… the Midwest has always been a region steeped in it-- even leading the way.”

By positioning himself as a candidate of and for the working class, Sanders has won the backing of low-wage workers and young people of color-- constituencies that will be key to winning the White House in November. In many ways, Trump’s perfect foil is Bernie Sanders: the son of an immigrant family who grew up poor, has been consistent in his political beliefs his entire life and has made workers the center of his campaign-- and billionaires like Trump the enemy.

The threat Sanders poses to Trump has been raised by none other than Trump himself. Leaked audio from a 2018 phone call showed Trump expressing relief that Hillary Clinton chose Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) rather than Sanders for her vice presidential nominee in 2016. “Had she picked Bernie Sanders it would've been tougher. He's the only one I didn't want her to pick,” Trump said. “Because [Sanders'] a big trade guy. You know he basically says we're getting screwed on trade. And he's right.

So, if Sanders does indeed have a real shot at beating Trump, why are so many in the Democratic brass sounding alarms over his rise? It could have something to do with the fact that Sanders has made the corporate wing of the Democratic Party his foe ever since he launched his first presidential campaign in 2015. In June 2019, Third Way president Jon Cowan called Sanders an “existential threat to the future of the Democratic Party.” More recently, centrist guru Rahm Emanuel said on ABC’s This Week, “The fact is one of the threats to the party right now is a rupture in the core.”

A rupture in the core of the corporate-centric Democratic Party establishment that Emanuel represents is exactly what a Sanders presidency promises. Which is the reason moderates like John Kerry are opening the door to jumping in the race to stop Sanders if his momentum continues to grow. Such gambits give the lie to the idea that party insiders are interested in representing the democratic will of the people. Instead, they want to protect the neoliberal consensus that’s dominated the party for the past 40 years-- and which Sanders’ campaign threatens.

Donald Trump has already laid out his strategy for the coming general election. “A vote for any Democrat in 2020 is a vote for the rise of radical socialism and the destruction of the American dream,” Trump said at a rally in June 2019. And in Tuesday night’s State of the Union address, Trump proclaimed: “socialism destroys nations, but always remember, freedom unifies the soul.”

Trump is running against socialism, that much is clear. That game plan won’t change whether or not Bernie Sanders is the Democratic nominee.

But Sanders boasts an asset that no other Democrat running can claim: He knows how to explain-- and defend-- democratic socialism in a way voters can understand.

At January’s Democratic debate in Des Moines, Iowa, CNN’s Abby Phillip asked Sanders if his description of himself as a democratic socialist would serve as a handicap. Sanders responded: “My democratic socialism says healthcare is a human right. We’re going to raise the minimum wage to 15 bucks an hour. We’re going to make public colleges and universities tuition-free. We’re going to have a Green New Deal. That is what democratic socialism is about, and that will win this election.”

In a widely-touted speech last summer, Sanders explained that in contrast to demagogues like Trump who “meld corporatist economics with xenophobia and authoritarianism,” his democratic socialist vision seeks “a higher path, a path of compassion, justice and love.”

Achieving that higher path means rejecting the kind of market fundamentalism that has dominated U.S. politics for decades, pitting working people against each other to fight over scraps while oligarchs grow their fortunes and fortify their political influence. Sanders’ socialism seeks to redistribute not just the wealth of the billionaire class but also its power, injecting more democracy-- and, as a result, freedom-- into American society.

As political science professor, Corey Robin explains at the New York Times, “The socialist argument against capitalism isn’t that it makes us poor. It’s that it makes us unfree. When my well-being depends upon your whim, when the basic needs of life compel submission to the market and subjugation at work, we live not in freedom but in domination. Socialists want to end that domination: to establish freedom from rule by the boss, from the need to smile for the sake of a sale, from the obligation to sell for the sake of survival.”

Establishing such a system and curtailing the role of unfettered capitalism in governing our lives may seem a Herculean task, even impossible. But after Sanders’ performance in Iowa, it’s possible that this more egalitarian future is firmly within our grasp.

Matthew Yglesias isn't anyone's idea of an avatar for progressivism but he's an accomplished journalist who noted at Vox after the debate that Bernie "is a highly skilled politician, and at Friday night’s debate he showed it. The Democratic Party is polarized right now between Bernie fans who insist that democratic socialism is the way forward and an establishment that’s terrified Sanders will bring electoral doom. The truth, however, is a bit more boring. Far-left politics isn’t really a winning hand, but Sanders himself is an effective player who consistently outperforms the partisan fundamentals in his races. Those talents were on display Friday evening at the New Hampshire debate, where he stayed relentlessly on message, emphasized the popular aspects of his agenda, and avoided major pitfalls. As long as he can avoid the trap of believing too much of his own hype, he has the ability to craft a winning message for November." He quoted Bernie responding to Mayo's reactionary sloaneering:

The way you bring people together-- Republicans, independents, Democrats, progressives, conservatives-- you raise the minimum wage to $15 bucks an hour. The way you bring people together is to make it clear that we’re not going to give tax breaks to billionaires and large corporations. They’re going to start paying their fair share of taxes. That’s what the American people want.

And I’ll tell you something else. The way you bring people together is by ending the international disgrace of this country being the only major nation on Earth not to guarantee health care to all people as a human right.

And you bring people together by telling the pharmaceutical industry they’re not going to charge us 10 times more for the same prescription drugs as the people in Canada that borders on New Hampshire. That’s how you bring people together and you defeat Donald Trump.

The Real Clear Politics polling average for New Hampshire as of today:

• Bernie- 26.0%
• Mayo Pete- 22.5%
• Elizabeth- 13.0%
• Status Quo Joe- 13.0%
• Klobuchar- 8.0%
• Yang- 3.5%
• Steyer- 2.8%

And last week's Emerson poll, the most recent and the most accurate, showed Bernie with a much greater lead:

Almost Everything About Vox's Bernie Piece Is Problematic-- Except The Conclusion: Bernie Is The Best Democratic Candidate

On Tuesday morning, Vox began a series of articles on the 2020 primary election campaign that they promise will endeavor to make the best case for the election of each of the top Democratic presidential contenders. Matthew Yglesias might be the last person on earth you would imagine endorsing Bernie Sanders but he kicked off the series with an early morning tweet that probably shocked virtually all of his many detractors:

The case for Bernie, he wrote, "is that he is the unity candidate... unique in combining an authentic, values-driven political philosophy with a surprisingly pragmatic, veteran-legislator approach to getting things done... Sanders breaks from the pack in constructive ways on foreign and monetary policy, where the president has an unusual amount of freedom to act. And in the legislative arena, where any president is going to be sharply constrained, he stands the best chance of getting the left on board with the sure-to-be-disappointing compromises that will be necessary to advance the ball at all on important issues... This pairing makes him the enthusiastic favorite of non-Republicans who don’t necessarily love the Democratic Party, without genuinely threatening what’s important to partisan Democrats. If he can pull the party together, it would set him up to be the strongest of the frontrunners to challenge" Señor Trumpanzee. Unfortunately, Yglesias' case for Bernie is already making many Bernie supporters puke. It wouldn't surprise me if Yglesias meant that to happen.

The truth is that on most issues, the policy outputs of a Sanders administration just wouldn’t be that different from those of a Joe Biden or Pete Buttigieg administration. Whether a new president promises continuity with Obama or a break with neoliberalism, the constraints will realistically come from Congress, where the median member is all but certain to be more conservative than anyone in the Democratic field.

But Sanders does have some ideas with unique appeal, particularly on foreign policy.

The evidence is overwhelming that most primary voters don’t particularly care about foreign policy, and consequently, it isn’t discussed very much during the campaign. That’s a shame; it’s an important topic on substance, and it’s also the area in which the president has the most flexibility. Presidents are constrained in their conduct on foreign policy by dozens of institutional and political factors, but less so than elsewhere.

Whatever Obama said or did or wanted, there’s no way he could have gotten Medicare-for-all enacted. But he could have intervened more forcefully in Syria had he desired to do so, just as he could have avoided intervening in Libya.

It’s clear that Sanders has a real desire to challenge aspects of the bipartisan foreign policy consensus, compared with the rest of the field. He’s much more critical of Israel than most people in national politics, he’s a leading critic of the alliance with Saudi Arabia, and he’s aligned himself with the Latin American left in ways that Warren doesn’t.

These ideas are coded as “extreme” in Washington, where there’s significant bipartisan investment in the status quo. But polls show that most voters question the narratives of American exceptionalism, favor a reduced global military footprint and less defense spending, and are skeptical of the merits of profligate arms sales.

In practice, essentially every president ends up governing with more continuity than his campaign rhetoric suggested (Trump hasn’t broken up NATO; Obama never sat down with the leadership of Iran), so the differences are likely to be more modest than the rhetorical ones.

But differences are welcome and needed. The misbegotten invasion of Iraq should have, but largely didn’t, shake up the establishment “blob” that’s obsessed with pursuing US military hegemony and endless entanglements in the Middle East. Recent reporting by the Washington Post revealed that military and political leaders across three administrations have been lying to the public about the course of the war in Afghanistan-- and it barely made a dent in domestic politics.

Nobody should have illusions about Sanders somehow unilaterally ushering in a bold new era of world peace, but he is by far the most likely person in the race to push back against expansive militarism-- and that’s worth considering.

Foreign policy isn’t the only hidebound institution he is poised to shake up, either.

Monetary policy attracts even less attention in the primary than does foreign policy. But the Washington Post did survey the candidates’ views on interest rates when it asked whether the Federal Reserve’s current rates are too high. The results were fascinating.

Buttigieg, Biden, and Warren all demurred, citing the dogma that the Federal Reserve should stay independent of politics (though Warren, to her credit, made a strong statement in a subsequent speech on the economy about the need to emphasize full employment).

Sanders, by contrast, offered a clear statement, saying he “disagreed with the Fed’s decision to raise interest rates in 2015-2018” because “raising rates should be done as a last resort, not to fight phantom inflation.”

Sens. Cory Booker and Michael Bennet, two minor candidates who aren’t really seen as Sanders’s fellow travelers when it comes to ideology, had somewhat similar things to say. “Historically, the Federal Reserve raises interest rates when the economy has reached full employment,” Booker said, adding that “our economy’s not there yet.” Bennet nodded toward independence before saying that the Fed “has often fallen short of its full employment mandate, which has harmed workers, especially those trying to make ends meet.” He also said that his appointees to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors “will prioritize the employment mandate and consider every tool available to meet that mandate.”

Unfortunately, this is a niche issue many people don’t care about. Almost everyone does and should care about “the economy,” though, and the main government institution responsible for the state of “the economy” is the Fed.

What’s more, this is a particularly important issue precisely because it’s a little bit obscure. Any Democratic president’s Environmental Protection Agency director will come from the universe of “people the main environmental groups like and for whom moderate senators are willing to vote,” because that’s how politics works. But there are no strong interest groups that lobby around monetary policy.

A president who wants to install well-qualified people inclined to side with Sanders/Bennet/Booker will probably be able to do so, but a president who doesn’t care (like Obama) will probably end up appointing people whose views are all over the map (which is indeed what happened with Obama).

These aren’t the only two issues in America that matter, but they’re the main ones in which different nominees are likely to lead to different results. Almost everything that’s currently being debated, by contrast, is pointless.

...The reality is that four candidates-- Sanders, Biden, Buttigieg, and Warren-- have pulled away in a year in which Democrats say they are focused on electability. All of these candidates have obvious weaknesses. Of the crew, Sanders has arguably the best case to make for electability. His electoral track record is strong, whereas Warren’s is weak, Buttigieg’s is almost nonexistent, and Biden’s is mostly lacking in relevant information.

Winning races in Vermont is less impressive than winning them in Montana. And there are certainly plenty of left-wing Democrats who win while underperforming simply because they hold safe seats (Warren fits that mold), as well as plenty of moderate Democrats who overperform in tough races even while losing (former Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill is a good example).

But Sanders appears to be a candidate who overperforms in easy races. He consistently runs ahead of Democratic presidential nominees in his home state, which suggests he knows how to overcome the “socialist” label, get people to vote for him despite some eccentricities, and even peel off some Republican votes. Sanders first got to Congress by winning a tough three-way race in 1990, when Vermont was an only slightly blue-leaning state. He went on to consistently run ahead of Democratic presidential campaigns as a candidate for Vermont’s at-large seat in the US House of Representatives:

• In 1992, Sanders got 58 percent to Bill Clinton’s 46 (it was a strong state for presidential candidate Ross Perot, but Bernie also faced a “third-party” challenge from a Democrat).
• In 1996, Sanders got 55 percent to Clinton’s 53 percent.
• In 2000, Sanders got 69 percent to Al Gore’s 51 percent.
• In 2004, Sanders got 67 percent to John Kerry’s 59 percent.
• Sanders got elected to the Senate in 2006, so he wasn’t on the ballot in 2008 or 2016. But in 2012, he won 71 percent to Obama’s 67 percent.

This is not definitive proof of Sanders’s skills-- over the past 20 years, these haven’t really been vigorously contested races. Yet because those weren’t tough races, it would have been easy for Vermonters who had doubts about Sanders to cast meaningless protest votes for his opponents.

Sanders also appears to be able to make lemonade out of the whole “not officially a Democrat” thing by getting the votes of some non-Republicans who backed Perot in the 1990s and, more recently, other third-party candidates such as Jill Stein, Ralph Nader, and Gary Johnson. Indeed, one noteworthy thing about Sanders is that in head-to-head polling matchups against Trump, he tends to do better than you’d expect simply by looking at his favorable ratings.

Sanders’s popularity seems to be concentrated among certain blocks of persuadable voters (likely those considering a third-party vote), while a chunk of those who disapprove of Sanders are hardcore partisan Democrats who don’t like his lack of party spirit but will vote for him anyway.

At times Sanders embraces unpopular positions, like passing broad tax increases to finance Medicare-for-all or decriminalizing unauthorized entry into the United States. Compared with some hypothetical other Democrat, this could make him a weak choice. But he’s running against a field that also takes unpopular positions. It’s worth noting that even Biden has come out in favor of opening government insurance programs to the undocumented, allowing taxpayer funds to subsidize abortions, and ending the death penalty.

Bernie is a unifying choice

At the end of the day, Sanders’s record is not nearly as scary as many establishment Democrats fear. His “revolution” rhetoric doesn’t make sense to me, but he’s been an effective mayor and legislator for a long time, and he knows how to get things done-- and how hard it is to get them done.

Some of his big ideas are not so hot on the merits, but it’s not worth worrying about them because the political revolution is so unrealistic. And on a couple of issues where the next president will probably have a fair amount of latitude, Sanders breaks from the pack in good ways. He’s perhaps not an ideal electability choice, but his track record on winning elections is solid and his early polling is pretty good. There’s no particular reason to think he’d be weaker than the other three top contenders, and at least some reason to think he’d be stronger.

A Sanders presidency should generate an emphasis on full employment, a tendency to shy away from launching wars, an executive branch that actually tries to enforce environmental protection and civil rights laws, and a situation in which bills that both progressives and moderates can agree on get to become law.

That’s a formula the vast majority of mainstream Democrats should be able to embrace.

Lots of moderate Democrats nonetheless find it annoying that Sanders and some of his followers are so committed to painting mainstream Democrats in such dark hues. And it is annoying! But annoying people won’t stop being annoying if he loses the nomination. If anything, they will be more annoying than ever as some refuse to get enthusiastic about the prospect of beating Trump. But if Sanders wins, partisan Democrats who just want to beat Trump will magically stop finding Bernie superfans annoying-- the causes will be aligned, and the vast majority of people who want Trump out of the White House can collaborate in peace.

That leaves us where we started. The president really does have a good deal of latitude in conducting national security policy. If it’s very important to you that the U.S. maintains a hawkish military posture in the Middle East, that’s a good reason to worry a lot about Sanders.

But most likely, a Sanders presidency will simply mean that young progressive activists are less sullen and dyspeptic about the incremental policy gains that would result from any Democrat occupying the presidency. It’ll also mean a foreign policy that errs a bit more on the side of restraint compared with what you’d get from anyone else in the field, as well as an approach to monetary policy that errs a bit more on the side of full employment. That’s a pretty good deal, and you don’t need to be a socialist to see it.

Hey it's a point of view from someone who thinks a lot so, maybe worth mulling over and considering. Obviously, it isn't a perspective we agree with here at DWT... except with the actual conclusion itself. But we're going to need neocons and Obama worshippers to not sit out this election so... good job, Matty! There's an ActBlue thermometer I inserted above for Bernie contributions. Yglesias is right that Bernie is the most electable, but that isn't why we're so enthusiastic about him. For us it's far more about his integrity, honesty, decency, and all the things Yglesias has no interest in at all, like Medicare-for-All and the Green New Deal... and democratic socialism.

2020-- Another Anti-Trump/Anti-Red Wave? Or An Actual Blue Wave Too This Time?

The Democratic tent-too-big Party didn't have anything much to offer voters in 2016 and millions of voters flocked to Trump. Two years later, many of those voters-- as well as some non-voters-- understand the scope of the catastrophe that Trump is. And they flocked to vote for Democrats running for Congress. Over 40 red seats flipped. I spent much of 2018 expelling why the coming wave was not a blue wave at all, but an anti-Trump wave, at best an anti-red wave. But "blue wave" is far too positive to a description. As a party, the Democrats still weren't offering anything to voters-- except "we're better than Trump." It was enough to flip those 40-some-odd seats. Could they have flipped more seats with the kind of positive message that actually would have inspired a blue wave? Absolutely. They could have picked up 60 seats instead of 40, or 70 seats... maybe 80.

Not random seats, seats with enough independent voters to swing elections-- like GA-07, where Republican incumbent Rob Woodall was reelected with just 50.1% of the vote, or MI-06, where GOP incumbent Fred Upton won with just 50.2% or TX-23, where Republican incumbent Will Hurd was elected with a paltry 49.2%. Republicans like Jaime Herrera Beutler (WA-03), Ann Wagner (MO-02), John Carter (TX-31), Michael McCaul (TX-10), Chris Collins (NY-27), Devin Nunes (CA-22), Rodney Davis (IL-13), Don Bacon (NE-02), John Katko (NY-24), Doug LaMalfa (CA-01), Vern Buchanan (FL-16), Brain Fitzpatrick (PA-01), George Holding (NC-02), Kenny Marchant (TX-24), Lee Zeldin (NY-01) wouldn't have stood a chance in a blue wave. All of them had stomach-churning close calls.

The Democrats may offer the same next year: nothing. Or, as Matt Yglesias, put it last week: Joe Biden is the Hillary Clinton of 2020. He's another Iraq War hawk, another Wall Street shill (the senator from MBNA), and another flip-flopper with terrible instincts who has wrong on every big issue. (Yesterday, in an e-mail from her campaign with the subject line "Joe Biden," Team Warren wrote "Elizabeth doesn’t host private fundraisers or take money from federally registered lobbyists or PACs. Instead, we’re building a broad grassroots movement where a lot of people chip in a little at a time to build something big... How did Joe Biden raise so much money in one day? Well, it helps that he hosted a swanky private fundraiser for wealthy donors at the home of the guy who runs Comcast's lobbying shop. Elizabeth is building a grassroots movement without holding any big-money private fundraisers where you can only talk to her if you write a big check first. Without taking a dime from federally registered lobbyists or PACs of any kind. It’s the right thing to do."

Elizabeth Warren, like Bernie, actually offers, reasons for a blue-wave. In fact, yesterday, reporting for BuzzFeed News, Ruby Cramer wrote that in hosting something like 4,700 simultaneous organizing events on Saturday, Faiz Shakir, Bernie's campaign manager "boldly predicted that their candidate would help bring 'a wave up and down the Democratic ballot' on Nov. 3, 2020... You're not only going to have Sen. Sanders winning the White House, you are going to see a wave-- a wave up and down the Democratic ballot. That is what we are fighting for."

Claire Sandberg, the campaign’s national organizing director, called the Saturday organizing event “historic”-- the “largest distributed day of action ever in a presidential campaign,” she said, referring to a model of “distributed organizing” that aims to build volunteer networks in areas without official campaign staff.

Sandberg, who also spoke at the pre-taped Boston event, said that house parties were scheduled to be held in all 50 states, including at hundreds of college campuses, as well as 30 other countries from Japan to Senegal.

"Many voices will attempt to diminish what we're building here together and argue that our movement has run its course,” Sandberg said. “The reality is that we grow larger every day.”

To ensure that the campaign is able to harness the energy they are confident Sanders still inspires-- and in a show of organization they lacked during his first presidential campaign-- officials have built a new online app called "Bern."

Through the app, aides said, volunteer leaders ("ambassadors for this campaign") will be encouraged to recruit other volunteers and identify new supporters. The app will also help volunteers help register people to vote, request a Democratic primary ballot, and remind people of voter registration deadlines in key states.

"A movement that grows is a movement that wins," Shakir said.

Sanders is scheduled to spend Saturday afternoon calling into various house parties, an aide said.

"We talk about us, not me. Because this is a very profound statement. What does it mean? It's not just a bumper sticker. What it means-- and I believe this as someone who's been involved in politics 13 years in the Senate, 16 years in the House-- is that no president, not the best intentioned, not the most honest person in the world, no one person can do it alone."

"And remember," Sanders said moments later, pumping his hand in the air. "It's not Bernie! It's us! Don't forget that: Us! Us! Us!"

How Far Will Trump Go To Avoid The Consequences Of His Criminal Behavior? We All Know The Answer

This morning we looked at some polling data from Politico and Morning Consult but I was focused on Trump and on gun control and didn't get into the section of the poll that dealt with Robert Mueller. The pollsters asked how registered voters felt about some prominent figures who haven't been elected to office:

• Melania Trump: Favorable- 48%, Unfavorable- 32%
• Ivanka Trump: Favorable- 38%, Unfavorable- 41%
• Kushner-in-law: Favorable- 18%, Unfavorable- 43%
• Kellyanne Conway: Favorable- 21%, Unfavorable- 41%
• Jeff Sessions: Favorable- 16%, Unfavorable- 47%
• Robert Mueller: Favorable- 32%, Unfavorable- 31%

36% had either never heard of Mueller or had no opinion. The pollsters also asked a question about Putin-Gate. 1- How important of a priority should investigating some of President Trump's campaign officials for alleged connections or contacts with the Russian government during the 2016 elections be?

• A top priority- 34%
• An important but lower priority- 17%
• Not too important a priority- 16%
• Should not be done- 22%

Right afterwards I came across a new Navigator Research survey finding that 59% of Americans believe that special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation has not yet uncovered evidence of crimes. This is sad since Mueller has already obtained five guilty pleas and 17 criminal indictments. Writing for Vox, Matthew Yglesias commented on the finding: "That suggests that the press as a whole has not done a good job of actually conveying factual information to our audience, that Democrats’ messaging on the investigation has not been clear enough on the most damning point (Trump, even if otherwise innocent, is guilty of hiring crooks and trying to prevent an investigation into their activity), and that Trump’s counterstrategy of muddying the waters around the investigation has been fairly successful."

Yesterday Trump spoke at the dinner the anti-Choice Susan B. Anthony List gave and you can see how inevitable it is for Trump to muddy any water even when he isn't trying to:



Worse still that so many different people imply they speak for Trump, even Bannon who Trump fired, noting that Bannon had "lost his mind." Speaking on the record to the BBC in the U.K. yesterday, Bannon predicted that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein could be fired "very shortly." He said that Rosenstein "either…is going to take the direct order of the President of the United States or I think Rosenstein will be fired."

2 fascists

And speaking of the BBC, their sources in Kiev claim that Trump's personal attorney and fixer, Michael Cohen, "received a secret payment of at least $400,000 [another source said $600,000] to set talks between the Ukrainian president and President Trump... The payment was arranged by intermediaries acting for Ukraine’s leader, Petro Poroshenko, the sources said, though Cohen was not registered as a representative of Ukraine as required by US law." And sure enough the meeting between Trumpanzee and Poroshenko took place in the White House 11 months ago.

Shortly after the Ukrainian president returned home, his country's anti-corruption agency stopped its investigation into Trump's former campaign manager, Paul Manafort.

A high-ranking Ukrainian intelligence officer in Mr Poroshenko's administration described what happened before the visit to the White House.

Mr Cohen was brought in, he said, because Ukraine's registered lobbyists and embassy in Washington DC could get Mr Poroshenko little more than a brief photo-op with Mr Trump. Mr Poroshenko needed something that could be portrayed as "talks."

...Avenatti said that Suspicious Activity Reports filed by Mr Cohen's bank to the US Treasury showed he had received money from "Ukrainian interests."

...As was widely reported last June, Mr Poroshenko was still guessing at how much time he would have with Mr Trump even as he flew to Washington.

The White House schedule said only that Mr Poroshenko would "drop in" to the Oval Office while Mr Trump was having staff meetings.

That had been agreed through official channels. Mr Cohen's fee was for getting Mr Poroshenko more than just an embarrassingly brief few minutes of small talk and a handshake, the senior official said. But negotiations continued until the early hours of the day of the visit.

The Ukrainian side were angry, the official went on, because Mr Cohen had taken "hundreds of thousands" of dollars from them for something it seemed he could not deliver.

Right up until the last moment, the Ukrainian leader was uncertain if he would avoid humiliation.

"Poroshenko's inner circle were shocked by how dirty this whole arrangement [with Cohen] was."

Mr Poroshenko was desperate to meet Mr Trump because of what had happened in the US presidential election campaign.

In August 2016, the New York Times published a document that appeared to show Mr Trump's campaign manager, Paul Manafort, getting millions of dollars from pro-Russian interests in Ukraine.

It was a page of the so-called "black ledger" belonging to the Party of the Regions, the pro-Russian party that employed Mr Manafort when he ran a political consultancy in Ukraine.

The page appeared to have come from Ukraine's National Anti Corruption Bureau, which was investigating him. Mr Manafort had to resign.

Several sources in Ukraine said Mr Poroshenko authorised the leak, believing that Hillary Clinton was certain to win the presidency.

If so, this was a disastrous mistake-- Ukraine had backed the losing candidate in the US election. Regardless of how the leak came about, it hurt Mr Trump, the eventual winner.

Ukraine was (and remains) at war with Russia and Russian-backed separatists and could not afford to make an enemy of the new US president.

So Mr Poroshenko appeared relieved as he beamed and paid tribute to Mr Trump in the Oval Office.

He boasted that he had seen the new president before Russia's leader, Vladimir Putin. He called it a "substantial visit." He held a triumphant news conference in front of the north portico of the White House.

A week after Mr Poroshenko returned home to Kiev, Ukraine's National Anti Corruption Bureau announced that it was no longer investigating Mr Manafort.

At the time, an official there explained to me that Mr Manafort had not signed the "black ledger" acknowledging receipt of the money. And anyway, he went on, Mr Manafort was American and the law allowed the bureau only to investigate Ukrainians.

Ukraine did not terminate the Manafort inquiry altogether. The file was handed from the Anti Corruption Bureau to the state prosecutor's office. It languished there.

Last week in Kiev, the prosecutor in charge of the case, Serhiy Horbatyuk, told me: "There was never a direct order to stop the Manafort inquiry but from the way our investigation has progressed, it's clear that our superiors are trying to create obstacles."

None of our sources say that Mr Trump used the Oval Office meeting to ask Mr Poroshenko to kill the Manafort investigation. But if there was a back channel, did Michael Cohen use it to tell the Ukrainians what was expected of them?

Perhaps he didn't need to.

One source in Kiev said Mr Poroshenko had given Trump "a gift"-- making sure that Ukraine would find no more evidence to give the US inquiry into whether the Trump campaign "colluded" with Russia.

Mr Poroshenko knew that to do otherwise, another source said, "would be like spitting in Trump's face."

This week two good Trump-watchers in the media, Jonathan Chait and Gabriel Sherman have both finally let the cat out of the bag: Trumpanzee is-- as many have suspected-- is crazy and that Trump world runs of crackpot conspiracy theories. Sherman went first: "People in Trump’s orbit have become convinced that anti-Trump forces in the F.B.I. entrapped his advisers using informants to plant evidence about Russian collusion—and that former C.I.A. director John Brennan is somehow behind the plot. “If I were him, I’d break the capsule and swallow it now,” one longtime confidant says." Roger Stone told Sherman that "The F.B.I. thing really set him over the edge."

Trump’s scorched-earth strategy has been in place since Rudy Giuliani replaced Trump’s long-suffering lawyers John Dowd and Ty Cobb. At first, it looked as if it were careening off course, as Giuliani gave off a series of erratic and combative interviews. Some speculated that Trump might be unhappy with his performance, but sources I spoke to say Trump is pleased. This is the plan. “Rudy doesn’t do anything without Trump’s permission,” said one Republican close to the White House. The strategy grew out of conversations Trump has held in recent weeks with a group of outside advisers that include Freedom Caucus Chair Mark Meadows, House Intelligence Chair Devin Nunes, Sean Hannity, Dave Bossie and Corey Lewandowski, among others. “People think Trump is angry, but he likes the direction this is going,” an outside White House adviser said.

According to people familiar with Trump’s thinking, his team is attempting to build the case that anti-Trump forces in the F.B.I. entrapped his advisers using informants to plant evidence about Russian collusion. The theory goes that the F.B.I. later used these contacts with the Russians to delegitimize his presidency. Trump’s advisers say the intelligence community believed Hillary Clinton would win the presidency, but in case she didn’t, they concocted this elaborate plot to remove Trump from office. “Just when you think it can’t get stranger, it does,” a Trump adviser told me. Stone claims the anti-Trump conspiracy includes senior intelligence officials from the Barack Obama administration. “The guy who will end up burning in all down."

...Trumpworld’s current mind-set makes continued extra-legal conflict with Mueller and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein inevitable, and the well-dissected dangers of firing one or both have not served to take this nuclear option off the table. Trump has been bonding over how corrupt Mueller's investigation is. “Rudy is telling him what he wants to hear,” said a Trump ally. But “it would be catastrophic if he fires Mueller.” In the past, many Republicans shared this view. Now, they might not be so opposed.

Chait pointed out that Trump's FBI spy theory is completely insane. Folks in he media should be using that word more frequently.

In the face of widening evidence of Trump campaign culpability in the Russia investigation, Republicans have churned through a frequently mutating series of conspiracy theories to defend him. The latest, and possibly final, such theory, involves an informant used by the FBI to report on the campaign’s connections to Russia, whom Trump has promoted to “spy,” or possibly multiple spies. “A lot of people are saying they had spies in my campaign. If they had spies in my campaign, that would be a disgrace to this country,” Trump told reporters yesterday. “That would be one of the biggest insults that anyone has ever seen.” Trump has mixed his insinuations with dark threats of revenge. “Look how things have turned around on the Criminal Deep State,” he tweeted this morning, “They go after Phony Collusion with Russia, a made up Scam, and end up getting caught in a major SPY scandal the likes of which this country may never have seen before! What goes around, comes around!”

Trump’s ability to comprehend objective reality is characteristically cracked. But his confidence that the array of forces are shifting to his benefit, and that he may turn the tables on his enemies, has a real basis in reality. He is bringing his party, and the powers it commands, around to his warped manner of thinking.

The spy theory holds that the FBI, working on orders from the Obama administration, implanted a spy into the Trump campaign in order to help Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

...Trump may be forming an even more radical theory. Gabriel Sherman reports that Trump’s team “is attempting to build the case that anti-Trump forces in the F.B.I. entrapped his advisers using informants to plant evidence about Russian collusion.” Let this roll around in your mind for a moment. Trump is not merely accusing the FBI of planting a spy, but of planting evidence.

“The president himself is convinced that the secret F.B.I. informant who reportedly met with several Trump campaign advisers in 2016 was not merely an informant, but an Obama political operative,” Sherman reports. “One administration official told me the theory has become so widely accepted that people in the West Wing are paranoid that the F.B.I. has multiple informants working to take down Trump.”

Planting evidence? Multiple spies? Obama political operatives? You might think this is all so unhinged Trump could not possibly believe it, but then, you would have to explain Trump’s longtime infatuation with the conspiracy theories he imbibes in his binge-watching of Fox News, where hours of air time can pass by without the appearance of anybody who is hinged. And you might also think Trump could not get his party to go along with this theory, to dismiss all the evidence of culpability as having been fabricated by a pro-Obama cabal in the FBI. But then you would be ignoring how far down the Trump rabbit hole the Republican Party has gone so far.

How many people have you heard saying, "At least Nixon was patriotic" lately. Trump would sooner engineer a civil war than step down or allow himself to be forced out no matter what Mueller finds.

All DCCC Staffers Who Undermine Democrats Must Be Fired-- The DCCC Should Only Fight Republicans

In Texas' Tuesday primary the DCCC's biggest bet was in TX-23 and on Jay Hulings, a right-of-center dull corporate shill endorsed not just by the DCCC but also by the Blue Dogs, the New Dems, the Castro San Antonio political machine and every corrupt surrogate the DCCC could round up. (Don't ask me why the Congressional "Progressive" Caucus didn't back him; they must have forgotten.) Anyway, no one won outright and the nomination to face GOP incumbent Will Hurd in November will go to a May 22 primary runoff. But Hulings won't be in that runoff. He came in 4th with just 15.04% (6,584 votes). Yep, the DCCC failed again-- and spectacularly so. Hulings spent the most money of course-- $396,988 (as of the February 14 FEC reporting deadline). The two winners who will face off on May 22 are moderate EMILY's List candidate, Gina Jones, who spent $381,072 and progressive Berniecrat Rick Treviño, who spent $20,417. That chart just below indicates how much each candidate spent per vote-- $59.83 for Hulings who cluelessly followed every step the DCCC insists their candidates follow-- and grassroots candidate Treviño-- $2.64, the least of any candidate in the primary, and ignoring the DCCC and the DC Democratic establishment entirely, running a race that was 100% about people in his district, not about lobbyists, not about Steny Hoyer or Nancy Pelosi or the DCCC or the Blue Dogs and New Dems and not about any of the typical establishment corruption that makes Americans hate the two DC political parties. Treviño is the TX-23 candidate, not a hand-picked Washington DC puppet. [And no, he's not the country singer of the same name, just a fan of his music.]

And that brings us to a post Matty Yglesias did for Vox this week, The DCCC should chill out and do less to try to pick Democrats’ nominees. Yglesias is a moderate Democrat, not a conservative, a moderate. He understands when he's looking at a serially-failed, utterly dysfunctional operation when he sees one. And, in this case, that's the DCCC. The fools at the DCCC don't understand that their ham-fisted interference in the TX-07 race handed a win to Laura Moser but Yglesias wrote that they instantly turned a vote for her into a symbolic rejection of the party establishment." The DCCC is loved by corrupt lobbyists and contemptible DC-insiders and they don't understand that America hates those people-- and hates them as well. Congress has an astoundingly low approval rating; the DCCC (and NRCC) have even lower approval. And they've earned it. "Moser," he wrote, "will be the underdog, though she certainly might win. And if she does, it’s likely the DCCC will take its toys and go home. As House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told reporters from the Austin American-Statesman in February, 'We have to be cold-blooded in what we do. In other words, if the wrong person wins-- well, nobody’s wrong-- but if the person who can’t win, wins, it’s not a priority race for us anymore, because we’ve got 100 races.' This is a perfect statement of the standard Washington political professional’s view of how to target resources-- some candidates are electable and some aren’t, and it’s a waste of time to back the ones who aren’t. But to walk away from TX-7 or other purplish seats based on the identity of the nominee would be a serious mistake. Targeting resources is reasonable, but so is humility about one’s ability to foresee the future. That attacks on Moser backfired is a reminder that the political judgment of the pros in Washington is flawed, and both narrative history and broad quantitative research shows that their ability to accurately identify which races are winnable and which candidates are worth backing is sharply limited."

Blue America had backed the other progressive in the primary, Jason Westin, but the day after the primary, we added Laura Moser to the Blue America Take Back Texas ActBlue page, which you can access by tapping on the thermometer on the right. Please consider sending the DCCC a message by contributing what you can to Laura Moser and Rick Treviño right now. Back to Yglesias, who is writing standard DWT fare we've been shouting from the rooftops for over a decade:

Back on June 12, 2006, Stu Rothenberg wrote an update for the then-authoritative Inside Elections website about “surprising good” news for Republicans out of California primaries. What news? Well, “in the 11th district, Democrats nominated Jerry McNerney over the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s preferred candidate, airline pilot Steve Filson.” Rothenberg allowed that “McNerney is a nice man, and he deserves a lot of credit for defeating Filson, who had the backing of powerful state and national Democratic insiders” but explained that realistically, “McNerney is simply too far to the left to knock off Pombo in this district, and he doesn’t project the kind of persona that a challenger needs to win against an incumbent.”

The DCCC walked away from the race, but McNerney won anyway. Then he won again in 2008, won narrowly-- this time with enthusiastic DCCC support as a frontliner-- in 2010, and is still serving in Congress today. And he wasn’t alone.

Carol Shea-Porter and John Hall, like McNerney, won their races despite being abandoned by the DCCC. Shea-Porter is stepping down from her seat next year, and Hall lost in the 2010 wave. Larry Kissell was abandoned by the DCCC, lost in 2006, but then won in 2008 (this time with DCCC support) and even survived the 2010 midterms, only to fall victim to redistricting in 2012.

Observers on the left of the Democratic Party tend to paint these turns of events in rather dark, sometimes conspiratorial terms (Ryan Grim at the Intercept is the most skilled and persuasive chronicler of this viewpoint).

A more generous interpretation would simply be that the DCCC pros just aren’t as smart as they like to think they are. That’s why even when their goals are clear, as they were in the TX-7 primary when the DCCC was trying to take Moser out but seems to have accomplished the reverse, they don’t reliably get the job done.

The basic pattern of errant judgment-- not, I think, because of malfeasance but simply because predicting the future is hard-- came from last year’s House special elections. A Kansas race that the national party wrote off as unwinnable turned out to be unexpectedly close, while the Georgia Sixth primary, which national Democrats were very enthusiastic about, turned out to be one of the party’s worst special election results of the whole year.

A much lower-profile House race playing out that very same day in South Carolina ended up with an identical margin of victory.

And over the course of 2017, Democrats wound up having a lot of special election success in places that few people would have predicted at the beginning of the year-- flipping a series of state legislature seats in Oklahoma and even winning a US Senate race in Alabama.

Some of this speaks to a big question about how to model national politics. The theory of John Ossoff’s campaign in Georgia was that Republicans would be vulnerable in places that went overwhelmingly for Mitt Romney but only narrowly for Donald Trump. That was a reasonable guess, but now that more data is in, we know it was wrong — Democrats have instead made the most down-ballot progress in the places that swung hardest to Trump, with longer-standing political patterns reasserting themselves.

It’s easy to say the DCCC should have been more clairvoyant about these national trends. It’s also easy for people with factional concerns to cherry-pick specific races and argue that their favored brand of candidate would be winning everywhere.

The real truth, however, is that politics is hard to predict. Extensive empirical research shows that it matters less than you might think whether a party goes with an “electable” moderate.

• A 2002 study by Brandice Canes-Wrone, David W. Brady, and John F. Cogan found a 1 to 3 percentage point vote penalty for congressional candidates perceived as extreme in elections between 1956 and 1996.
• Arjun Wilkins pushed this research forward to 2012 and found that “as polarization substantially increased during the 1990s and 2000s, the penalty for extremism in the 1990s got smaller and in the 2000s, the penalty was no longer significant.”
• Both of those were studies of congressional incumbents who have clear voting records for citizens to assess. But in 2015, Brendan Pablo Montagnes and Jon C. Rogowski studied congressional challengers’ platforms and “uncover[ed] no evidence that challengers increase their vote shares by adopting more moderate platform positions.”
• Chris Tausanovitch and Christopher Warshaw in 2016 found, again, that “ideological positions of congressional candidates have only a small association with citizens’ voting behavior,” largely because detailed assessments of individual candidates are swamped by basic partisanship.

This suggests primary voters should probably be inclined to vote for candidates who they think will be smart, hard-working advocates for causes they believe in rather than focusing too much on “electability” concerns.

It’s natural, in particular, for a national party committee whose work heavily features fundraising to be strongly biased toward candidates who are good at fundraising. But there’s very little evidence that this is genuinely the key to political success (Donald Trump, for example, was a terrible fundraiser in 2016), and overemphasis on donor-friendly candidates ends up putting a thumb on the ideological scale in an unseemly way.

The best approach is probably to relax a bit more, be more comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty, and back whoever the local process coughs up.

Solution? Pelosi should no longer have any connection to the DCCC. Nor should Hoyer. The only DCCC regional vice chair who is doing his job properly-- and neutrally-- is Ted Lieu. He should be elected DCCC chairman (if not party leader).