Scattered across the United States, your faithful Mischiefs crew watched the last two days of presidential debates and formed some opinions. We offer those here.

Julia Azari

Identity politics was the winner of the debates.

This is a loaded phrase and I use it deliberately and advisedly. One big question in a field of 20+ candidates — perhaps half of whom are qualified and potentially viable — is which kinds of fault lines will arise. Tension between economic populism and (for example) racial justice has been part of the party’s move to the left.

No one really explicitly addressed that tension in the debates, but it’s notable that the two standard-bearers for left positions on economic issues did not shine on the more identity-related questions. Elizabeth Warren was basically left out of the immigration discussion in the first debate, with Julián Castro setting the agenda and forcing others to respond to him. Bernie Sanders was also tangential to the heated exchange of the second night, in which Kamala Harris took Joe Biden to task for both recent comments and past actions on racial issues. Buttigieg’s answer to questions about his record as mayor of South Bend and a recent incident of police violence is another standout moment of the second night.

Candidates also positioned themselves on gender and LGBT issues. Booker and Castro both mentioned the needs of transgender Americans on the first night. The discussion on Wednesday night also featured the candidates jockeying for who could most forcefully come out in favor of abortion rights and against the Hyde Amendment. On the second night, candidates pushed the envelope less but embraced liberal positions in clear terms. Kirsten Gillibrand highlighted women’s issues (using fairly traditional, gender binary language, in a stark but probably unintentional contrast with Castro). Buttigieg talked about his marriage in his closing statement.

Each night, the candidates answered questions about health care, the overall orientation of the economy (phrased in the second night in terms of socialism), and the need to address the needs of middle class and working American — whatever those terms may mean. The debate structure probably shaped this. If Warren had been on the second night with the other major players, she might have pushed them to address more economic questions and the populist framework in which she (and Sanders) present them. Similarly, if Warren and Sanders had been on the same stage, we might have seen an exchange between them about how exactly the rich and the corporations are messing everything up, and what to do about it.

It’s also worth noting that identity and economics don’t operate in parallel in real life. Marginalization and underrepresentation have economic consequences. But for right now, the discourse in the Democratic primary still kind of treats these as separate tracks, and this week’s debates brought the identity questions into the spotlight. 

Jonathan Ladd

In a crowded presidential field (and this is an extremely crowded field), the first task for most of the candidates is to be considered one of the top three or four contenders. You need to get voters to see you as a serious candidate so you are worth investing attention in learning about, and supporters will not be wasting their votes. 

So the big task for all of the candidates except Joe Biden is getting noticed by viewers and getting attention in post-debate news coverage. No matter how much people like your position or your ability to defeat Trump, you can’t ask people to throw their vote away. In that regard, in the first debate, Warren, Castro, and Booker did what they needed to do, and in the second debate so did Harris, Buttigieg, and Sanders. Add Biden to these six and it’s hard to see how the remaining 13 candidates can get attention going forward.

Kamala Harris’s performance stood out from all 20 candidates over these two nights. That is very hard to do in such a big field. But her ability to clearly press her points, which she has shown as a prosecutor and in Senate hearings, was on display here. Harris, Warren, Castro, and Booker were all able to clearly explain their plans in very limited time. But only Harris showed that she could also effectively go on the attack. Her attack on Biden’s record working with segregationists in the Senate and opposing busing worked both to hit Biden on a weak point and build up her own appeal to the African American community, given that some on the left have criticized her previously as being too aggressive as California Attorney General.

Finally, this was a bad night for Joe Biden. It was completely predictable that he would be attacked. Yet when he was attacked on his most obvious weaknesses — his age, his record on race, and his 2002 vote for the Iraq War — he had no good response to any of them. Compared to the others onstage, especially Harris, his answers were unfocused and his tone was tentative. These weaknesses have the danger of playing into concerns about his age.

Will this hurt Biden in the polls? It’s hard to say. It seems like his African American support is particularly vulnerable to the kind of attacks Harris laid on him. Time will tell. Debates often don’t lead to any movement in the polls, but Biden’s campaign can’t be happy with his performance last night.

Seth Masket

Overall, I didn’t see a lot from these two debates to shake up the larger presidential field. The real action was centered on a handful of candidates: Biden, Booker, Buttigieg, Castro, Harris, Sanders, Warren, maybe Klobuchar, and maybe O’Rourke. These candidates, for the most part, are the ones who have some party support behind them, in terms of endorsements, money, staff, etc. 

I’ll note that the candidates who stand to benefit the most from these debates — especially Booker, Harris, and Warren — are the ones who have been standing out in my surveys of early-state activists but not necessarily dominating public opinion surveys. The strong public performances we saw onstage this week are similar to what those activists have seen in the candidates; they’re just now being made available to the rest of us.

The other candidates got in a few good moments and few did anything to actually embarrass themselves, but they didn’t really do anything to destabilize the rankings, either. Swalwell got in an effective dig at Biden’s age, but that is likely to hurt Biden more than it helps Swalwell. My guess is that this bottom tier of candidates will have a harder time qualifying for later debates as more donors and backers concentrate their support on the upper tier.

It was hard not to be impressed by the exchange between Harris and Biden. Biden’s greatest strength so far in this contest has been his perceived electability; even those who do not necessarily prefer him as a nominee have been willing to support him because they believe he’s the most likely to defeat Trump. Harris, by sharply critiquing him on his recent comments regarding his collegiality with his segregationist colleagues, not only attacked him on an issue of great importance to a vast segment of the Party, but also made him look vulnerable and defensive about his record. His nomination may well still happen, but its aura of inevitability was punctured.

Hans Noel

The last two nights have revealed a new model for debates, building on the foundation that the Republicans began last cycle. Two debates, without even a hint of a top tier and an “undercard,” is the way to go. Even with a field as small as eight or 10 people, I think it makes sense.  

Some worried that spreading the debates over two nights, without an obvious top tier, would be trouble. Would it matter who you were drawn against? I don’t think it was a problem at all. 

Presidential nomination debates have never really been debates, in the sense of conflict over a proposition. They’re definitely not like high school or college competitive debates, or even a legislative debate, where different sides of an issue clash against each other. They have always been more like side-by-side press conferences, especially when there are more than two candidates.

So why not just have a series of press conferences? The “debate’’ format allows for accountability. While journalists can ask follow up questions in a town hall meeting, they often don’t. There is nothing like the incentive of an opponent to make sure a candidate doesn’t get away with anything. When Beto O’Rourke touted his plan for immigration reform, Julián Castro called him out over the details, notably Castro’s call for repealing Section 1325. If the moderators won’t ask Joe Biden about his record on race, Kamala Harris can do it.

None of this requires that all of the candidates be present. At this stage, all we want is to sort out the candidates who deserve more attention from those who do not. If Tim Ryan can’t stand up to criticism from Tulsi Gabbard, he should probably drop out. 

If everyone were on the stage at the same time, or if the “top’’ candidates were together, I don’t think my conclusions would change about who deserves more attention (Harris, Castro, Klobuchar, Gillibrand) and who does not (O’Rourke, Ryan, Yang, Williamson, and, yes, Biden).

We’re going to have a lot more debates, both this cycle and — probably even with reforms to the system — into the future. The split format is a great way to handle a field of eight or more. 

Richard Skinner

These were two bad nights for two old men. Biden and Sanders both looked and acted their age and then some. Biden began well by seeming above some of the squabbling among the other candidates and continually tying himself to Obama. But as the debate went on, he just seemed older and more sluggish. We’ll see how people react to the substance of the Biden-Harris exchange (I’d be pretty surprised if Harris talks about bringing back busing), but their optics were obvious: Harris seemed young, energetic, and unintimidated, while Biden appeared old, defensive, and caught off guard.

Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders kept shouting about the same handful of topics that have always obsessed him. Red-faced and surly, he was probably the most unpleasant presence onstage. Biden seemed like an out-of-touch grandfather whose time has passed, while Sanders was more like an ill-tempered neighbor yelling on his front porch. Everyone will probably forget Wednesday night’s debate, but the candidates who did best were generally the most liberal — Elizabeth Warren, Julián Castro, Cory Booker — and perhaps will compete with Sanders for support.

Kamala Harris put on one of the best debate performances I have ever seen. Sharp, energetic, well-informed, immaculately prepared, she seemed ready to take on Donald Trump. (Her experience as a prosecutor clearly has its advantages). Her attack on Biden’s record on race was expertly choreographed and beautifully delivered. (Smart move making it more about empathy than policy).

Before this debate, most Democratic voters liked Harris but relatively few supported her. This debate could change that. She’s already received an impressive number of endorsements; will her performance garner more? Two potential problems for her: Her call for ending private health insurance could be a real liability in the general election (will she flip-flop again?) and older voters may react differently to her exchange with Biden than did the throngs on Twitter. This could mean that her appeal will be less to the older moderates who currently back Biden and more to the younger liberals who like some of the other candidates.

Oh, there were other candidates? Pete Buttigieg seemed polished and well-informed, but the racial tensions in South Bend are clearly a lingering problem for him. Michael Bennet knew his stuff and made pointed criticisms of the two old men. But I doubt many will remember him. Andrew Yang mercifully said little, while Marianne Williamson not-so-mercifully did not. Eric Swalwell kept trying to make “pass the torch” happen. (Harris could have told him about exploiting the generation gap: “Show, don’t tell.”) Kirsten Gillibrand and John Hickenlooper performed well enough but were dwarfed by the bigger egos onstage.   

Debates rarely have a huge impact, but these may end up boosting Harris and perhaps some of the other mid-range candidates (Warren, Booker, Castro, Buttigieg), while dinging the support of Biden and Sanders. (Does Biden have anyone on his staff who can talk frankly with him about his performance?) I don’t think any of the candidates in the bottom half of the field got much out of these debates, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see many not qualify for the third round in September.

Jennifer Nicoll Victor

The Democratic Party’s first debates are a peek inside the sausage factory of American electoral politics. The process now playing out in public view is one that Democrats have done mostly behind closed doors for the last several generations. Winnowing a wide field of candidates to a single nominee is a complex process involving political connections, experience, policy knowledge, fundraising, and, of course, charisma. Democrats came under fire for following an elite-driven, somewhat closed process in 2016, and as a result they are airing their laundry now to settle on a candidate to oppose Trump. 

On Wednesday night, candidates concentrated on introducing themselves and displaying their qualifications. On Thursday, we saw more candidates position themselves vis-à-vis one another and Trump. The most meaningful exchange of the night was between Harris and Biden on the topic of civil rights. Harris directly challenged the frontrunner using a personal anecdote laced with experience and knowledge. Her example both dated him and exposed a fissure in the Democratic Party that she is trying to use to her advantage: How far are Democrats willing to go to correct civil rights injustices? Importantly, race is also the issue Donald Trump uses to appeal to supporters. In this way, Harris challenged the frontrunner in her party and previewed how she might confront the president.

The last two candidates Democrats have nominated are Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama: big-city, over-educated, policy-wonkish, non-white-men. Of the current field, candidates like Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Julián Castro, and Elizabeth Warren look most like the party’s most recent choices.

But prior to the debates, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders were clear frontrunners. While they performed fine in Thursday’s debate, they did not shine. Candidates like Harris and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg were notable breakouts. Biden is already well known, and so is Sanders to some extent, so the early debates cannot help them that much. But for lesser-known candidates like Harris, Warren, and Booker, the debates can move their needles.

Debates are not likely to shake up the rankings in the field too much because the debate audience is primarily made up of people like those who write for and read Mischiefs of Faction. But, if Kamala Harris becomes the nominee, everyone will point to Thursday’s debate as a key moment on her road to success. 

The Democratic National Committee’s newly released rules for participation in the September presidential primary debate reveal a party experimenting with ways to exert control over a large field of candidates. But what’s most notable about these rules is how they show the party wrestling with the lessons of 2016.

The new rules ramp up the polling and fundraising thresholds for candidates to be invited to September’s DNC-sanctioned debate:

To appear in the party’s third debate, which will be broadcast by ABC News and Univision, candidates will have to earn 2 percent support in four party-sanctioned polls between late June and August. In addition, they will have to show they’ve attracted at least 130,000 donors since the start of the campaign, including at least 400 from 20 different states.

These thresholds are twice as high as they are for the summer debates, and now candidates will have to clear both the polling and fundraising hurdles, instead of just one of them.

Based on research and interviews I’ve been conducting, these debate rules appear to signal a party adapting to what are generally seen as three main lessons from the 2016 election. Those lessons are:

1. Anyone is electable: Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 general election, despite his association with many damning scandals and his determination to alienate huge segments of the electorate, suggested to candidates and donors that pretty much anyone with a major party’s label next to his or her name can win. This has been a huge motivator for Democratic candidates, encouraging quite a few to run who might have otherwise sat the race out or focused on more winnable races like Senate seats. This is a major contributor to the fact that roughly two dozen people have now declared for president.
2. Large fields of candidates are unpredictable and dangerous: Donald Trump received the 2016 GOP nomination even while many Republican leaders were clearly uncomfortable with or even hostile to him. He did so in part because the field of candidates was so large; this made it harder for party elites to coordinate their support on an alternative to Trump. Democratic leaders are probably less concerned that a failure to coordinate will result in someone like Trump as their nominee (there’s not really anyone quite like that in the running this year), but they do wish to maintain some control.
3. Party preference for some candidates over others is perceived as illegitimate: The DNC was widely derided for appearing to be biased in favor of Hillary Clinton in 2016, and suspicion of insiders influencing the party demobilized supporters of Bernie Sanders in the general election. While the DNC actually did little of any real substance to enable Clinton’s nomination, it has gone out of its way to appear neutral in the 2020 nomination contest. This was what motivated the reforms last summer that reduced the power of “superdelegates” in the Democratic National Convention by stripping them of their first ballot vote.

So the party is attempting to satisfy several (contradictory!) goals at once. It seeks to cull an oversized field but in a way that does not appear systematically biased against any particular set of candidates. Well, it’s apparently okay to be biased against one set of candidates — the unpopular. Those who have been less successful in introducing themselves to primary voters have also been less successful in raising money.

Presumably, those less successful candidates are the ones most likely to drop out in the early 2020 contests, so making them ineligible to participate in the 2019 debates just accelerates that process by a few months. (And the party is even hedging against that a bit by pitting less popular candidates against more popular ones in the early debates, unlike the GOP’s 2015 approach of creating overcard and undercard contests.)

To be clear, major parties have used rising polling thresholds in past nomination contests, as Julia Azari and I noted here and here. But the fundraising targets are new, and these goals are being announced well in advance, giving candidates a clear set of targets to hit.

Does the DNC’s approach harm other groups of candidates? There’s some evidence that women and people of color face somewhat greater challenges in fundraising than white men do, as Eugene Scott has noted. However, these lessons may not apply at the presidential level for the 2020 contest. Nearly all declared candidates seem to have qualified for next month’s debate, and those that haven’t yet include white men like Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) and Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA). And as for the September debate, this FiveThirtyEight analysis suggests only a handful of candidates have qualified for it so far, with those ineligible candidates being overwhelmingly white men.

Of course, who ends up qualifying for the September debate will hinge on how the summer debates go — lesser-known candidates could have break-out performances and attract supporters and donors, while leading candidates could stumble. We just don’t know what that field of candidates will look like.

But what we’re watching is a party, in an unusually assertive way for the modern era, trying to shape a presidential field and proclaim in a clear and unbiased way who may and may not participate. This is a difficult needle to thread, and it will almost certainly be put to the test at some point — perhaps an omitted candidate with an enthusiastic base of supporters will protest or file a lawsuit, as has happened before. At that point, we’ll see whether the DNC prioritizes the winnowing or the appearance of neutrality more.

We know there are problems with electability arguments, but to what extent should party elites still be thinking about it? We decided to sit down and discuss it.

Hans Noel: You just wrote a piece arguing that electability isn’t a very useful concept in choosing presidential nominees, mainly because it is used as a proxy for ruling out women and underrepresented minorities. The piece was pretty nuanced, but the takeaway, from the headline to how you and others have discussed it on social media, has been that we should just abandon “electability.” Are you really saying that a party shouldn’t have a discussion about whether its candidate can win in the general election?

Seth Masket: We could have a whole conversation about how to write a nuanced headline — but my take is not that people shouldn’t discuss or think about electability at all. Rather, it’s that the concept of electability is a) not well defined, b) not well supported by evidence, and c) conflated with stereotypes about female candidates and candidates of color. So we should be extremely cautious when making this kind of argument.

HN: I suppose not supported by evidence depends on what definition we’re using. The term “electability” is confusing. It sounds like you either have it or you don’t. But broadly speaking, I think it’s coherent to talk about candidate-specific characteristics that affect election outcomes. And there are a lot of them.

Some of them we have some evidence on, no?

SM: Well, we have some evidence that ideologically extreme or hyperpartisan congressional candidates do worse than moderates, although the evidence isn’t that strong in presidential races.

HN: And some evidence that scandals hurt, although that could be because most allies and donors abandon the candidate.

SM: Right. And there’s some evidence that white voters are less supportive of African American candidates, although it’s possibly because they think the African American candidates are too liberal. So maybe that’s race, maybe that’s ideology, or maybe they’re hopelessly conflated.

HN: But these effects are all pretty small, and maybe especially small in presidential elections.

SM: Exactly. If 2016 showed anything, it’s that it’s pretty hard to get Democrats to vote for a Republican and vice versa, even if your own party’s nominee is quite unpopular.

HN: So I think we’re starting from the same place. When you think about the most important things to understand about a presidential election, candidate quality is not at the top of the list. Is the incumbent running? What is the state of the economy? Are we involved in a foreign war? What is the partisan division in the country? You can answer all those without knowing the candidates’ names. But I think part of that is that the nomination process, for all its flaws, usually picks candidates who are pretty appealing. If a party actually nominated Jonah Ryan, we’d see what that looked like.

SM: Sure, but arguably, 2016 provided that. Donald Trump kind of went out of his way to be unappealing, and 90 percent of Republican voters convinced themselves that he was still better than the Democrat.

HN: True. Although, Trump underperformed the fundamentals. If 80,000 people in four states had voted differently, we’d be saying that Trump proves candidate quality matters. What should have been an easy GOP win was actually incredibly difficult and maybe even a little lucky.

Meanwhile, one argument we hear is that Hillary Clinton could have won in 2016 if she had the mobilization of black voters that Obama had. That’s candidate quality too, although I don’t think anyone would say Clinton was “unelectable.”

SM: That’s fair. I suppose my main concern is the way “electability” concerns are used during the nomination process. I’ve seen and heard a number of arguments that only a white male Democratic presidential nominee can beat Trump. The evidence doesn’t really show that. But it’s apparently a pretty compelling argument for many, and it can be hard for candidates to overcome that perception.

HN: I’m in agreement with you here. There’s a case to be made that a woman or candidate of color has an advantage in the general election, because they would mobilize voters that a white dude can’t mobilize. If black voters had voted in 2016 like they did in 2008, they would have tipped Michigan and Wisconsin. But it’s not surprising that they were less excited about Clinton than they were about Obama. So race and gender should be part of the conversation.

SM: This is tricky, though. I’ve been leaning toward, “Let’s try to avoid the ‘electability’ argument since it hurts women and POCs,” and you seem to be suggesting, “No, let’s talk about it, but women and POCs may be more electable than white guys.” Is this right?

HN: At least partly, yes. The one thing that a wide-open nomination process does that also helps in the general election is that it can help nominate a candidate who is broadly acceptable to the party, which in turn mobilizes all the party in the general election. And I think it’s time that we think seriously about the Democratic Party, anyway, as being a party in which women and people of color, and maybe especially black women, have played a huge part. If you want to excite Democrats, maybe you think about what those parts of the party want.

SM: That’s a good message. But at least so far, the conversation has largely worked against women and people of color. That is, not only are many party elites convinced that white guys are more electable, but that information gets through to prospective candidates, and some women and people of color choose not to run as a result, knowing they’ll get less support. If African Americans (especially African American women) are more moving into the ranks of party elites — and they are in some parts of the country — that conversation changes. But not overnight.

HN: I agree. What’s interesting is that on race, we resist the changes. But on ideology, many people think that Bernie Sanders, who has a reputation as the most ideologically extreme person in the race, has no problem. The party has moved to the left, so it’s time.

But I think Sanders has an electability problem, not just because he’s ideologically extreme, but because he’s alienated a big part of the Democratic constituency. So he maybe can pick up some working-class white Trump voters, but he’s not going to do better than Clinton did with women and people of color.

SM: I think this is right. People employ the electability idea rather selectively. We have pretty good evidence that being an ideologue hurts, and less good evidence that downscale whites will vote for a white guy. I tend to think that Republicans will try to smear any Democratic nominee as a socialist, but it might be a more convincing argument if they can produce video of the Democratic nominee himself making that claim.

HN: I’m reminded of Matt Yglesias’s quip that “What Democrats need to do to win is enact my personal policy preferences.” That kind of myopic view is a problem. And someone who really wants to nominate a woman, an underrepresented minority, or a socialist could all be charged with it. But as you noted originally, we only interrogate the electability when it comes to women and POC.

SM: A couple of additional frustrating things about electability. One is that there’s an awful lot of faith placed in early primary polling as a predictor of general elections. People point to Sanders’s favorables in 2016 and say he would have been a much more popular nominee than Clinton, but Sanders never had to endure a major negative campaign from the GOP. He might have been less popular by November than she was. Similarly, we assume that just because Biden has high positives now, he will 18 months from now. We really don’t know.

Second, outside large-N academic studies, this is really hard to prove. Let’s say I somehow convince “the Democratic Party” that white men aren’t more electable. And they go ahead and nominate Kamala Harris, and she loses narrowly to Donald Trump. Then the party comes back and says, “You told us a black woman could win!” And I’d say, “No, I just said she’d do no worse than a white man.” And they’d say, “But Biden would have won!” And I’d say, “You can’t prove that.” And then we’re right back where we started.

HN: That’s true. That’s the same reasoning that concludes that Trump could win, even with all his baggage (so electability must not be about scandal) but Clinton could not (so electability must be about gender).

But what happens if we just stop talking about electability? Then we end up relying even more on early polls and primary outcomes. Whoever wins early elections, in unrepresentative states with tiny electorates and against different choices, is presumed to be electable. Maybe that’s the answer. The party should just step aside. But I don’t think so. I think primaries aren’t a very good way to figure it out, because the choice set and the constituencies are so different. Especially with the strange sequential system we have now.

SM: So this is an important question. If we allow that some discussion of electability is important, what is actually a good test? Like you allude to, there were some party elites in 2008 who were hesitant to back Obama until after he won the Iowa caucuses; they took that win as a sign that he could translate enthusiastic support into actual votes (unlike, say, Howard Dean). You’re right that it’s not really like a general election win, but is it irrelevant?

HN: No. In that case, it’s a lot like Kennedy winning in West Virginia in 1960. He showed he could win voters in a Protestant state. The problem is that Iowa and New Hampshire are super white, so they’re especially hard for candidates of color. So someone needs to interpret the results. Such interpretation is, in the end, a conversation about electability.

SM: Ah, you’ve been reading my book (which comes out next year). But yes, the interpretation of the last election is really important for how people assess electability!

For some, 2016 showed that a woman can do just as well as a man. (Clinton overperformed economic models and beat Trump by 3 million votes.) For others, her failure to win the Electoral College shows that women just can’t win.

HN: No (I mean, yes, your book is great, but), what I mean is, in the moment, people needed to interpret Obama’s win in Iowa as a signal that he could win elsewhere, but a narrow Obama loss in Iowa wouldn’t have meant he couldn’t win the general. If we don’t interpret the results during the process, we don’t get that nuance.

SM: Okay. Which means the people in charge of the interpretation are really powerful in determining the course of the nomination, right? So who does this? Is this a media role? Party elites? Bloggers? The Twitterati?

HN: Well, one argument is that’s it’s party elites. But they clearly don’t have a monopoly and maybe don’t have the influence they once did.

In our textbook (in progress), we say that the party has two tasks in choosing a nominee. They want the “best” candidate, defined in terms of how they would govern, who can also win, defined in terms of the general election. I think that balance is important and necessary. And I think “the party,” broadly constructed, should be thinking about it.

SM: We should probably wrap up. But here’s an analogy I’ve been thinking about. Electability is a lot like student numerical evaluations of professors. We know those scores are heavily biased against women, scholars of color, the LGBTQ community, and other underrepresented groups in academia. So I’d be tempted to just to ignore them altogether.

But there’s also some useful information in there. If a professor has been pulling all 5s in one class and then drops to a 3 one year, I’d want to know why. Did she try a new teaching method? Is she having some difficulties? Did she just draw a hostile set of students? Are there things we can do to intervene?

It strikes me as difficult, but not impossible, to separate out the useful information from the biases. It may be harder in presidential nominations. (Professors aren’t directly running against each other, generally speaking.)

HN: That’s a good analogy. And it’s maybe even harder because we don’t even have a plausible metric for electability that one could get a 5 or a 3 on, before the election itself, when it is too late. In the professor case, I think we’d recommend using the scores as a warning, and then looking more closely, but not using them directly as inputs into tenure, promotions, or raises. In the candidate case, I think we might say that there is no real way to get biases out of a political discussion. Which is a shocker, I know.

SM: I suppose we’re back at the point where we want people (party elites, in this case) to be making judgments using empirical evidence and trying to weed out bias, but I don’t know why they should be different from anyone else in any other field.

HN: They probably aren’t any different. But maybe in most cases, awareness of the bias, and especially increasing the diversity of those making the judgments, can go a long way.

Four hundred years ago this July, 22 elected officials gathered at the edge of the James River to write some rules affecting the lives of residents of the Virginia Colony. The weather was hot and unpleasant, several members were ill, and one died during the brief session. Nonetheless, the group ratified a charter and passed a number of laws, including the levying of a tax, before adjourning. This was, for all intents and purposes, the first session of the first American state legislature.

I was honored to recently join a group of scholars in putting together a symposium at PS: Political Science & Politics on what we’ve learned about state legislatures in the past four centuries. (These articles are ungated for the next month.) The articles include:

• Richard Clucas on the enduring relevance of state legislatures
• Peverill Squire on their early colonial history
• Keith Hamm on the state of research on these chambers
• Beth Reingold on the legislative representation of women and racial and ethnic minorities
• Gary Moncrief on the institutional development and capacity of legislatures
• Shanna Rose on the influence of state legislatures in national politics

I commend each of these to your attention. But I wanted to talk a bit about my own article, which is an assessment of party polarization in state legislatures. 

We hear pundits and politicians and reformers make all sort of claims about the causes of partisanship in Congress, from the length of legislative sessions to redistricting to campaign spending to primary election rules and more. And it’s very difficult to prove or disprove any of these ideas if you’re only focusing on one legislature. When we turn our attention to the statehouses, though, we get a lot more variation in the institutional rules and political environments affecting legislators, and we can say with greater certainty just what is and what isn’t causing polarization.

To be sure, polarization is increasing in our state legislatures, as it is in Congress, but not uniformly. In a handful of states, we’ve actually seen depolarization in the past few decades, as Boris Shor and Nolan McCarty’s evidence shows us. So why have some states, like California and Colorado, polarized rapidly? Why have Connecticut’s and Kentucky’s state Senates depolarized?

I explore a few explanations, and I find little if any evidence to support various folk theories about polarization. For example, does spending by parties cause greater polarization? This is certainly a common theory among political observers, and it’s helped support a large number of state restrictions on party spending in elections on the belief that doing so would free up officeholders from strict partisan behavior. In fact, the simple scatter plot below shows that states with higher donation limits on parties are no more or less polarized than states with lower donation limits. (In their recent book, Ray La Raja and Brian Schaffner actually find the reverse to be true: Limits on party spending cause more polarization.)

Figure: State Party Donation Limits Predicting Polarization in State Legislatures

I go through a few of these folk theories and find that legislative polarization is unrelated to:

• Legislative professionalism
• Chamber size
• Redistricting
• The openness of primaries.

So what is causing legislative polarization? Notably, it isn’t the sort of thing that’s easy to fix. A review of some research suggests that modern polarization in statehouses is being driven by:

Economic inequality. We’ve known for years that inequality and polarization track each other, but some recent research suggests that the former is causing the latter.

The distribution of public opinion. If legislators have a pretty good sense of public opinion in their districts, they can follow that pretty well to ensure their own reelections. But if they have more complex districts and it’s not easy to figure out what most voters want, legislators may just follow what their party wants.

The decline of state political journalism. Coverage of state legislatures has been declining for decades, and the gutting of various local newspapers recently has made this worse. Good coverage makes legislators want to vote with their constituents lest they appear to be a bad fit for their district. But if no one’s watching them, it’s hard for voters to care about this.

On top of these other factors, the parties have been sorting into rigid ideological camps nationally and within states for the past half century, and those camps are reinforced by race, gender, class, geography, religion, and more.

These factors don’t lend themselves to easy fixes by a long shot. But if we’ve decided that polarization really is a problem, it would be good to focus on what is actually associated with it rather than what’s easy to change. And if we’re going to try to fix national problems, it would be good to look at evidence from the states.

While the Constitution contains procedures to amend it, the bar for doing so has proven quite high. There have been only 10 amendments ratified in the past century, and only two in the past half century. But there are ways to change the manner in which the Constitution is implemented without formally amending it.

One fascinating recent and ongoing example of such a workaround is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPV), developed as a way of undermining the Electoral College. States that join NPV commit to casting their electoral votes in favor of the presidential candidate who wins the popular vote, which would end the problem of elections in which the candidate who receives fewer votes ends up as president. It goes into effect once enough states have joined to comprise a majority of the Electoral College. Colorado and Delaware just joined the compact within the last few weeks, putting NPV 86 electoral votes short of enactment.

Some critics have complained that this would essentially change the Constitution and violate the founders’ vision without going through the processes of amendment. And, well, yes, it would. But it’s hardly the first movement to do this. Indeed, the way that the Electoral College is currently implemented and has been practiced over the past two centuries bears little similarity to the way the founders originally described it. This is no council of elites carefully deliberating over the ideal president; electors, with very few exceptions, simply vote the way their states’ voters did, in many cases risking legal penalty for not doing so. This was an adaptation of the Constitution, not an amendment to it.

NPV is a bold reform idea, but how would it work in practice? Politically, it may prove to be a minefield should it actually go into effect.

Imagine, for example, that it goes into effect for the 2020 election (highly unlikely), and Donald Trump manages to eke out a national popular vote win (somewhat unlikely), even while a majority of Coloradans vote for the Democratic nominee (pretty likely). Colorado’s Democratic-controlled state legislature has pledged to cast its electoral votes for Trump in this scenario, even though a majority of their constituents preferred the Democrat.

Would state legislators actually follow through with this very high-profile vote that explicitly flouts the wishes of their most passionate supporters? Or would they abandon the interstate compact because it has become politically inconvenient to stick with it, which is basically the entire point of having a compact in the first place? And what would be the penalty for abandoning it? And should the legislature change partisan hands after the next election, would they feel obligated to the NPV? What would prevent them from abandoning it?

Such political ramifications might actually make the NPV unusable. But the movement nonetheless forces a conversation, and even if there’s not sufficient bipartisan support for an amendment, political leaders are recognizing that ignoring this issue is becoming increasingly untenable.

Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper formally enters the 2020 Democratic presidential race Monday. It’s a pretty crowded field, and he’s going up against some strong candidates with substantial financial reserves and high name recognition in early contest states. What does he bring to the table?

One notable feature of the current top tier of Democratic presidential candidates is that it’s very Congress-heavy. Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Sherrod Brown, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Bernie Sanders are all in the Senate. Julián Castro is a House member. Joe Biden was a multi-decade senator. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee’s entry last week changed the field somewhat, but it’s still possible for a governor to stand out in this crowd.

Governors often have certain advantages when they seek the presidency, in that their job is more like the presidency than any other in the country. They can point to records of leadership, of negotiating with legislators, of balancing budgets, and so forth, that make them sound prepared for the presidency. And unlike members of Congress, they haven’t cast hundreds or thousands of roll call votes that can be caricatured to make them sound like an extremist or a flip-flopper.

These advantages work particularly well for Hickenlooper. During most of his tenure as governor, he worked with one chamber controlled by Democrats and the other by Republicans. He earned a reputation of bipartisan accomplishment, particularly in 2017 and 2018 when the state government proved highly productive despite being strongly polarized. Hickenlooper himself has sought to avoid many partisan fights and to eschew negative advertising in campaigns.

In many ways, his presidential bid is reminiscent of George W. Bush’s in 1999-2000. Bush, in his second term as Texas’s governor working with a split-party legislature, had also developed a reputation as a pragmatic, non-ideological executive, making friends on both sides of the aisle. He could point to his work on Republican issues, such as tort reform and faith-based welfare programs, as well as Democratic issues, such as boosts in education funding and standards and support for renewable energy. He ran for president on this image, saying he wanted to be a “uniter, not a divider.”

Now, of course, one big lesson from this is that how someone governs a state is not always a great indicator of how they’ll govern a nation. The party system can be much more deeply entrenched in Washington. And as president, Bush mostly had a Republican Congress to work with and didn’t need to seek compromises with Democrats to get things done. Beyond that, his approval ratings following the 9/11 attacks gave him a great deal of leeway to do what he wanted, and that didn’t include many Democratic priorities.

There are important differences, of course, between Bush’s presidential bid and Hickenlooper’s. For one thing, Bush entered the race with enormous institutional advantages — nearly every sitting Republican governor endorsed him in 1999. He emerged as the party’s favorite long before anyone started voting. Hickenlooper has nowhere near that kind of support right now, although there’s a decent amount of interest in his candidacy given how little-known he is outside Colorado.

What could potentially hurt Hickenlooper in the primaries is the same thing that might help him as a general election candidate — his moderation. Hickenlooper was able to gain bipartisan support, both as Denver’s mayor and as Colorado’s governor, in part because of his support from the business community. In particular, he has long been friendly with the oil and gas industry. He first came to Colorado as a geologist with Buckhorn Petroleum, later becoming a brewer and prominent restaurateur. He even drank fracking fluid to demonstrate how safe it was.

It seems reasonable to suggest that a moderate older white man with ties to the oil and gas industry just might not be what the Democratic Party is looking for right now. At the same time, it’s not impossible to see Hickenlooper emerging as a viable candidate. The top tier of candidates will spend the rest of this year trying to knock each other down and out-progressive each other. Hickenlooper could emerge as one of the last people standing.

It will be interesting to watch how he introduces himself to the field this week. He has some legitimate liberal credentials — just how many other candidates can boast of signing gun control bills into law? — but running as a more moderate governor and playing up his perceived electability may be the way to distinguish himself in this crowded field.

We are well into the Democratic Party’s inaptly named “invisible primary” for the 2020 presidential nomination. Some candidates have declared officially, some are publicly mulling a run, and many are visiting early primary states and reaching out to potential donors and endorsers. Some have even quit. Rather than focus on what’s happening in the race, I want to focus here on how we study and describe it, especially in the wake of the tumultuous 2016 nomination cycle.

Last week, Vox’s Matt Yglesias suggested that the fact that Elizabeth Warren wasn’t the runaway frontrunner for the Democratic nomination was somehow evidence that The Party Decides’ theories no longer applied. Dave Weigel did a bit of dunking on those who had downplayed Donald Trump’s chances in 2015. Other political observers seem to be of the mind that because of 2016, we no longer have a theory about how party nominations work. 

This strikes me as either triumphalist or nihilistic. Or maybe both. But let’s step back for a second and think about just what we do and don’t know about presidential nominations, and what happened in 2016.

First of all, yes, if you followed the logic of The Party Decides, that would have led you to substantially underestimate Donald Trump’s chances to become the 2016 Republican presidential nominee. And it might have led you to make some wildly inaccurate predictions about how that nomination contest would turn out, as I did. 

But what do we do with that information today? If a useful theory leads to a spectacular belly-flop of a prediction, does that mean we throw out the theory? Do we update it? Do we conclude that it’s still a pretty useful theory that had a bad data point? 

Before answering, it’s worth noting that the theory nicely explained what happened on the Democratic side. Party elites conferred with each other and made an early determination that Hillary Clinton should be their nominee, and they did everything they could do to signal that they’d made this choice long before anyone in Iowa or New Hampshire had started voting. It kept many viable Democratic candidates from entering the race, and the only real challenge Clinton faced for the nomination was notably from someone barely even a member of the party. For the Democrats in 2016, the party decided, and it got the nominee it wanted.

That doesn’t mean the decision was uncontroversial, of course. And the fact that Clinton lost the general election and faced lingering criticism from a sizable portion of Democratic activists means that it may be harder for the party to make such a decision in 2020. 

The simple fact is that we’re not entirely sure what rules and norms are governing the 2020 invisible primary. That’s not the same as saying that no rules or norms govern it. Do Howard Schultz or Michael Bloomberg or Sally Yates have the same chances of winning the nomination as Elizabeth Warren or Cory Booker or Kamala Harris? I doubt it, in large part because party actors still have a good deal of agency in determining who is and isn’t a viable candidate.

They still seem to be preferring traditionally credentialed candidates, like senators and governors, and many party insiders are partial to nominating a woman or a person of color. If the party had no voice, being wealthy and famous might be enough to make one a serious contender, as it was among Republicans four years ago. It’s still early, but that doesn’t seem to be happening on the Democratic side.

Perhaps more importantly, as Jonathan Bernstein and Josh Putnam have noted, the presidential candidates are acting like party insiders still matter. Warren and other top-tier candidates are assiduously courting African-American leaders. They have spoken to various key constituency groups within the Democratic Party in an attempt to prove that their ideas are consistent with where the party is. They have been visiting Iowa and New Hampshire and other early-contest states and attempting to win the friendship and support of longstanding party activists there. Some candidates who had been flirting with a run have already been winnowed out due to a lack of insider support.

In 2015 and 2016, Trump very visibly and repeatedly refused to bend the knee to key interests within the Republican coalition, whether he was insulting John McCain or flouting longstanding party views on foreign policy and trade. The party nonetheless rallied behind him eventually anyway. This is not the dynamic we are witnessing within the Democratic Party so far.

But how should we evaluate what we are seeing? As I see it, there are a number of different potential outcomes for the Democratic nomination contest that could occur, listed here in declining order of party control:

1. Party insiders settle on a candidate before Iowa and primary voters nominate that candidate.
2. Party insiders cannot agree on a candidate but manage to winnow the field to a few traditionally credentialed candidates who are ideologically in sync with the Democratic Party.
3. Party insiders settle on a candidate before Iowa but primary voters nominate someone else.
4. Party insiders cannot agree on a candidate or winnow the field, but Democratic voters pick a traditionally credentialed nominee anyway.
5. Party insiders cannot winnow the field, and Democratic voters nominate a non-traditional candidate who holds views hostile to the Democratic coalition.

The very large number of candidates involved in this race and the lack of an obvious coordination point (such as a candidate named Clinton) make it a different sort of nomination cycle than Democrats have faced in recent decades and make options 2, 4, or 5 more likely than usual. Voter distrust of party elites and lingering resentments from 2016 make option 3 somewhat more likely than usual. But we may well be on the path to option 1, and the activities we’ve seen so far are consistent with that.

So, by all means, let’s evaluate existing theories in light of what happened in 2016, and let those of us who were spectacularly wrong in describing those events be particularly humble and careful in examining 2020. But let’s not just assume that because one party exerted no control in one nomination cycle that parties are functionally dead as organizations. We have too much evidence telling us otherwise.

A survey of Democratic activists in early primary states and Washington, DC, finds the vast majority of them still undecided about a 2020 presidential nominee. However, they’re considering candidates from a fairly narrow group, despite the very large number of potential candidates.

As part of the research for my book project about the Democrats between 2016 and 2020, I conducted lengthy interviews with roughly 60 Democratic Party activists in 2017 and 2018. These are people in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada, and Washington, DC, who have been closely involved with presidential nomination politics in previous election cycles. I’m currently in the process of following up with these respondents, and I’ll keep doing so over the next year to see how and when they line up behind a presidential candidate. For now, I’m interested in understanding where the baseline is at what we might consider the beginning of the invisible primary.

I make no claims about the representativeness of this sample. My goal is not to forecast the next Democratic presidential nominee, but rather to understand what Democratic insiders are thinking and how they go about interpreting the 2016 and 2018 elections and making choices for the next one. Below are a few lessons from the study so far.

Activists are uncommitted

Of the 38 activists I’ve followed up with so far, only six are backing a presidential candidate. Three of those are 2016 supporters of Bernie Sanders who are backing him again for 2020. Of the other three, two are backing Joe Biden and one is supporting Cory Booker. The remainder are still evaluating the various candidates.

I asked the uncommitted activists which candidates they are considering at this point. Below, I report the percentage of activists who say they’re considering various presidential candidates. (I provided respondents with a lengthy list of candidates, although a few of them mentioned people not on the list. I’ve only listed those candidates mentioned by at least 10 percent of respondents here.)

We shouldn’t confuse this list with overall levels of support. Just because Kamala Harris is at the top doesn’t mean that most activists rank her as their favorite candidate. It simply means that more of them are considering her than anyone else. This is more a measure of breadth of support than depth. Below, I’ve listed the three most mentioned candidates under consideration by state.

Again, we see Harris’s broad strength here, as she’s among the three most mentioned candidates in each place I’ve spoken to people. Booker shows up in three of them. All names show up at least twice. Indeed, one of the most surprising things here is the lack of substantial regional differentiation.

Narrowing of election narratives

When I conducted my first round of interviews, I asked subjects why they believed Donald Trump had beaten Hillary Clinton in 2016. I was given a wide range of answers at that time, including that the Democrats had a bad message, that they’d executed their campaign poorly, that they relied too much on identity politics, that they were too dependent on data, that people ranging from Bernie Sanders to Jill Stein to Vladimir Putin had affected the outcome, and so forth. But one of the relatively popular answers was that Clinton was a poor candidate.

In this recent survey, I gave respondents a variety of possible reasons for the 2016 election outcomes and asked them to pick the most likely cause. They overwhelmingly chose to blame Clinton for the outcome. This suggests that the post-election discussion and media coverage has narrowed the range of opinions on this question among activists — they have come to believe that candidate strengths and weaknesses account for the outcome, suggesting that picking a stronger candidate would yield a different result.

I also provided respondents with a range of possible explanations for Democratic victories in the 2018 midterm elections, including Democratic messaging, candidate recruitment, and Trump’s unpopularity. Overwhelmingly, they selected Trump’s words and actions as the cause for Democratic victories. Again, the belief is that the things leading politicians say and do during a campaign are largely determinative of the outcomes.

What are they waiting for?

I asked the uncommitted activists what they are waiting for before deciding on a presidential candidate. More than half said they want to meet with the candidates in person before they make a decision. This sentiment was expressed by roughly three-quarters of the activists in New Hampshire and Iowa.

Nearly half said they were waiting to see the candidates’ performances in speeches, debates, and other campaign events, while others were waiting to hear the candidates’ stances on particular issues, especially climate change. Roughly a third said they wanted to know how strong the candidates were at fundraising. Only about 10 percent of respondents said they were going to follow another Democrat’s endorsement, and most of those who said that suggested Barack Obama’s endorsement was the most important to them.

This is only a preliminary study. I specifically chose to do this relatively early in the cycle because I wanted to speak to most people before they had made a decision and then later hopefully catch them in the act of making one. But early evidence suggests that, despite this being one of the largest and most open presidential fields Democrats have faced in modern times, party activists are working to make an informed decision well before the voting starts in 2020. And while there are still a good number of names under consideration, quite a few more are not.

Update 12/19: Updated first table to include Elizabeth Warren.

One of the central questions in understanding the Democratic presidential nomination race for 2020 is simply: Are Democrats now where Republicans were four years ago?

Will the party be confronted next year with one or two dozen viable candidates on the debate stage, each with their own financial base of support, and no way to cull the field before voting begins in Iowa? Will that create the conditions for a wealthy celebrity or some other untested non-traditional populist to emerge from the pack and win the nomination?

Jennifer Victor, Richard Skinner, and I had some debate along these lines during our podcast discussion with Ezra Klein last summer. (I had a separate discussion with Lilliana Mason on this topic around the same time.)

I didn’t have much of an answer then, but I wanted to return to the question. I believe the answer is no, as I will explain below. It’s not that Democrats don’t face some of the same coordination problems that Republicans faced in 2015-16, but rather that they have greater incentive to overcome those problems than Republicans did. Failure to coordinate is more dangerous for Democrats than it is for Republicans right now, and both parties know it.

Julia Azari nicely summarized the challenges faced by Democrats in a recent piece at FiveThirtyEight. Simply, the system that the major parties have used to pick presidential nominees over the past few decades is under a great deal of strain.

As the authors of The Party Decides recently noted, changes in fundraising rules and the rise of social media have made coordination more difficult. And the populist resistance to anything smacking of elite influence in either party makes party coordination even more challenging.

Democrats, after all, did in 2016 what a healthy party normally does — coordinate early behind an ideologically acceptable candidate and give her material support for the primaries — but her opponent and many of his supporters continued to claim the process was corrupt up until and through Election Day.

And judging from early Democratic activity for the 2020 race, it looks like it’s going to be a very crowded field. At least two dozen candidates have made their intentions known, even if few have officially declared. The first primary debates next summer could well have more competitors than the Republican ones did in the summer of 2015.

So why would I expect Democrats to do more actual winnowing during the invisible primary than Republicans did? For one thing, there were numerous moments in 2015-16 when the Republicans could have coordinated around an alternative to Donald Trump.

At least early in the process, there was a substantial portion of the party, including Fox News, that was opposed to his candidacy. There were numerous opportunities for party leaders to rally behind Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, or even Ted Cruz, or perhaps to encourage Mitt Romney or John McCain to run as a consensus anti-Trump candidate.

Almost no influential Republicans ever made such commitments, other than a few expressing doubts about Trump. There are and were important factional rifts in the GOP coalition that would have made such coordination difficult, but it was barely even attempted in 2016.

Although the Democratic field for 2020 is very wide open right now, with no obvious coordination point (and, in a rarity, no one named Clinton running), there will be many opportunities for influential Democrats to pick a favorite and rally behind him or her. This is, indeed, what’s happening right now as candidates meet with donors and activists in early primary and caucus states. The candidates are being evaluated, although whether those doing the evaluating will actually coordinate with each other remains to be seen.

I believe Democrats will see more actual coordination and winnowing than the Republicans did because the costs for Democrats getting the nomination decision wrong are higher.

First, as Hans Noel reminded us, the geographic arrangement of the national political institutions has a substantial partisan bias built into it.

The Senate represents states, rather than people, and in an era when the population size of a state increasingly correlates with its partisan lean, Republicans are simply getting extra representation. (The majority of the Senate that approved Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court, for example, represented just 44 percent of the American population.)

And, of course, the Electoral College has much the same bias, giving a louder voice to smaller (and often more Republican) states. This helps explain why Republicans have managed to win the White House in three of the past five presidential elections while only winning the popular vote in one of those.

As the 2016 election showed us, a presidential candidate can make monumental errors — deviating from the party’s core principles, insulting various constituencies needed to win, threatening to jail one’s opponents, being overtly racist — and only pay a modest electoral penalty for it.

But thanks to the current arrangement of the Electoral College and the distribution of the population, Republicans simply have more of a safety margin. They can pick a bad candidate and still have a decent shot of winning.

No Democratic candidate could seriously expect to lose the popular vote by 3 million votes and still take the Electoral College. Every Democratic party leader knows that this geographic disadvantage exists and that they may have to win the popular vote by more than three or four points to win the Electoral College.

The second reason is somewhat more delicate and has to do with racism. There has long been a nontrivial faction of nihilistic white supremacists in American politics, arguably since the nation’s beginnings.

That faction has jumped around in its loyalties. It was a major part of the Democratic Party for many decades, and it has sometimes been largely unaligned. Today, it is a component of the Republican Party. To be clear, I am not claiming that the Republican Party is a nihilistic white supremacist party (it isn’t) or that most of its members are nihilistic white supremacists (they’re not).

But the party with that faction in it will be more likely to take extreme stances or to pursue extreme tactics in support of their goals because they feel they have less to lose if American political institutions fail. It was that same faction that pushed to break apart the United States rather than give up slavery and to violently repress peaceful marchers and ignore federal law rather than grant African Americans voting rights a century later.

Similarly, as I argued here, Tea Party Republicans were no more ideologically extreme in 2013 than the Congressional Black Caucus, but only the former shut down the federal government and threatened the nation’s credit rating in pursuit of its policy goals. If you believe you’ll be okay whether or not political institutions survive, you may be more reckless with the care of those institutions.

This is why Republican elites did less than they could have to prevent Trump’s nomination, and ultimately rallied behind his candidacy in the general election. Most of them probably didn’t appreciate his dismissal of various American institutions and norms, but they likely figured that the costs of undermining those norms and institutions weren’t that great for them.

Democrats, thus, have more to lose from a failure to coordinate. Nominating a wealthy celebrity with no real political experience and no real policy commitments other than despising the other party is less acceptable to the Democratic coalition, which (currently) holds institutions and norms in higher esteem than Republicans tend to.

This certainly doesn’t guarantee that Democratic leaders will be able to agree on a presidential candidate during the current invisible primary or that they will be able to ensure that such a candidate prevails in the subsequent primaries and caucuses. But the “let’s just see what happens” approach is far less acceptable to the Democrats, and they’re going to be doing what they can to thwart it.

On Wednesday, Ezra Klein argued that the 2018 elections showed that Republicans are paying the “Trump tax,” suffering at the polls because they are attached to a president who is surprisingly unpopular given national political and economic conditions. I think this is right, but I wanted to expand a bit on what it means and try to put a “price” on that tax.

The Trump tax is conceptually the difference between where President Trump’s approval ratings are and where a more typical Republican president’s would be given national conditions. A Vox analysis in 2016 suggested that Trump was running several points behind a generic Republican presidential nominee in that election.

As John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck demonstrate in their new book Identity Crisis, this tax has persisted during Trump’s presidency. As of the beginning of 2018, they write, “His ratings were mired around 40 percent, whereas a president presiding over similarly favorable consumer sentiment would typically be polling near 60 percent.”

What would that have meant in terms of the 2018 midterm elections? My forecast model uses presidential approval, economic growth, and current party seat shares to predict how the president’s party will fare in House elections. It’s a noisy model (although I got pretty close this year), but it suggests that each additional point of presidential approval (as measured by the Gallup approval rating at Labor Day) translates to about 1.1 saved House seats for the president’s party.

This year, Trump’s Labor Day approval rating was 41 percent. What if, as the Sides et al. estimate suggested, it was at 60? If we take this estimate and the regression coefficients literally, that would translate to 21 saved House seats. In other words, instead of losing an estimated 37 House seats, Republicans would have lost just 16 and kept control of the House. Indeed, if Trump had just been 14 points more popular than he is now, that would have been enough for Republicans to hold the House.

Now, I can’t say with certainty that this is what would have happened if Republicans had nominated, say, Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio or someone else in 2016. The relationships between economic growth and presidential approval, and presidential approval and midterm seat losses, are likely quite real, but measuring them precisely is difficult, and a different president might have underperformed, or overperformed, historical norms.

Nonetheless, these estimates are pretty reasonable and backed by historical evidence, and they suggest that the tax that Republicans paid cost them dearly. The bulk of their legislative agenda has been put on hold, and Democrats now have the ability to subpoena Trump administration staffers and family members.

A different Republican presidential nominee in 2016 likely would have won (by a more comfortable margin) and likely would have delivered at least as much for Republicans as Trump has in terms of policy goals. And such a president likely would have cost Republicans a lot less.