Category: Democrats

NEW PRESIDENTIAL MATH: COUNTING SEXUAL ASSAULT ACCUSATIONS

Tara Reade’s sexual assault accusation against Joe Biden has produced some apoplectic commentary predicting the death of the #MeToo movement (here, here and here).  It’s time for a collective deep breath. The movement may be undergoing some natural growing pains, but it is very much alive and well.  If you don’t believe me, ask Harvey Weinstein (New York State Correctional Facility) and Bill Cosby (Pennsylvania State Prison).

The theory of the case for a faltering movement lies with an ambitious rhetorical flourish that guided #MeToo’s branding: “Believe Women.” It perfectly captured the abrupt – if long overdue – paradigm reversal involving sexual misconduct. Suddenly, hundreds of powerful men were losing their jobs and reputations based on women’s sexual harassment and assault complaints, along with substantial corroborating facts.  

For way too many years, women complaining of sexual abuse were not only disbelieved, they weren’t taken seriously. The men said it never happened, or if it did, it was consensual: “He said, she said.” And “he said” was the default position for being taken seriously. The #MeToo movement reversed those power dynamics and made “she said” the default position.  Hence, “Believe Women.”

Yet, the phrase was never intended as a legal standard of proof. It didn’t advocate that a woman’s accusation of sexual abuse, in and of itself and without regard to evidence, meant the guy did it, end of story. In hindsight, “Listen To Women” might have been a more elegant choice of words.  But “Believe Women” had a righteous symmetry to it in a culture where many sexual assaults went unreported due to the cultural propensity to believe men and disbelieve women. 

Now comes our malignantly divisive political environment where everything in sight is a potential weapon.  During the 2018 confirmation hearing on Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation, a parade of Democratic leaders, including Joe Biden, trotted out the “Believe Women” mantra after Christine Blasey Ford accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when the two were in high school.  Kavanaugh denied the allegation, just as Biden denied Reade’s accusation.  That has produced an uproarious Republican chorus of hypocrisy charges against Biden and his defenders.  Tara Reade is a woman, their syllogism notes, so she must be believed, just as Biden and the Democrats insisted that Blasey Ford must be believed. 

Inconsistencies, particularly those based on disparate facts, is a way of life in politics. They also constitute fair game for criticism. But here’s what they won’t do: turn the clock back on the #MeToo reckoning that women’s sexual abuse charges must be taken seriously. The very fact that Reade’s accusation against Biden has been the biggest non-pandemic story for the past 10 days is evidence that she is very much being listened to.

What, then, do we do about that story?  For starters, we ought to feel sad. Really sad.  The Democratic primary process discarded every candidate who was not a white male pushing 80. In an understandable obsession to dump Trump, the working assumption was that this wasn’t the year to “risk” nominating a woman or a person of color.  The final two white geezers standing were Biden, 77, and Bernie Sanders, 78. Since the former vice president was seen as electable, and Sanders was seen as a socialist, the endgame didn’t last long.  As a result, in the most important election of our lives, the presidential sexual abuse allegation box score now stands at: Biden 1; Trump 20+. Although the forced choice is clear, just doing the math is sad. (Elizabeth Warren may have a plan for this, but if she were the nominee it wouldn’t be needed.  Just sayin’.)

We need to take Tara Reade’s accusation seriously. Based on everything I’ve read, her complaint, although definitively unprovable, is nevertheless credible. Reporters spoke with two of her friends who said Reade described the alleged 1993 assault to them back in the 1990s. Most of the 20-some sexual assault and misconduct complaints made against Trump involved similar corroboration. 

The natural inclination in this overheated political moment is to grab hold of those facts that support our desired election outcome. The Trump campaign has already produced video ads portraying Biden as a creepy groper. Some Biden supporters are attacking Reade’s veracity and questioning her motives. In the Twittersphere, there is a battle between “I Believe Tara Reade” and “Tara Reid is a Liar.” Viewing sexual assault charges through a political lens diminishes the gravity of all such offenses. 

Biden’s response to Reade’s accusation was a mixed bag. On the positive side, he didn’t call her a liar, question her motives or denigrate her in any way. In other words, he totally discarded Trump’s playbook on dealing with sexual assault charges.  On the down side, he waited too long before responding, relying instead on leading Democratic women, many of them his potential vice presidential candidates, to sing his praises.  

When he finally issued a 1,006-word response, 659 of those words were about pro-women policies he supported. Although his record on women’s issues is certainly relevant to the campaign, making it the major portion of his defense to a sexual assault charge was cringeworthy. At best, it was a non sequitur. At worst, it was using a voting record to get a pass on a sexual abuse accusation. Either way, it was tone deaf.

Yet, on balance, it was a more enlightened Joe Biden than the one who ramrodded Clarence Thomas’ Supreme Court nomination through his Senate Committee in 1991, never taking Anita Hill’s accusations of sexual misconduct against Thomas seriously.  Even at 77, the former vice president remains an educable work-in-progress. The same cannot be said of Trump.

Therein lies the reason why there is no lingering mystery about what to do on November 3. Our choice is between Trump and Biden. It’s the difference between darkness and light, between ineptness and competence, between evil and mostly good. So, take Tara Reade seriously. You can believe her every word and still be compelled to vote for Biden.

Here’s why: Donald Trump is an accused serial sexual assaulter and admitted groper, who just let tens of thousands of Americans die while he denied the Coronavirus. He needs to go, and a vote for Joe Biden is the only way that will happen.

As Don Rumsfeld said in another context, you go into an election with the candidate you have, not the candidate you want.

THE MIRACLE OF TRUMP: HE MAKES BLOOMBERG LOOK GOOD

The Democrats’ exhausting search for a presidential candidate has been a free-fall through Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. In the beginning were the aspirations of self-actualization:  racial and economic justice, universal health insurance, combatting climate change, education reform. Now?  Survival is all that matters. That means grabbing any warm body, regardless of how broken, who can beat Trump.  

How many of us on the liberal spectrum could have imagined just four years ago supporting Mike Bloomberg for president?  The guy is an arrogant billionaire, a former George W. Bush-backing Republican who, as a business owner and mayor of New York, indulged in racism, sexism and transphobia.  But, hey, he is nowhere near as bad as Donald Trump.  The same could be said for at least 75 percent of the country’s prison population.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren succinctly and accurately summarized our free-fall in last week’s debate when she noted that Bloomberg “has a history of hiding his tax returns, of harassing women, and of supporting racist policies like redlining and stop-and-frisk.”  And then came the qualifier that perfectly captured our new normal: “Look, I’ll support whoever the Democratic nominee is.”

She is, of course, exactly right.  Bloomberg would be the most flawed Democratic presidential nominee in modern history.  But, regardless of his physical stature, “Mini Mike” would be head and shoulders above Trump.  This is how far our civilization has crumbled since 2017. Elections used to be about dreaming of a better future.  This one is about ending a nightmare so that we might dream again. Someday.

We Democrats have been smugly disdainful of the hordes of evangelical leaders and once-honorable Republican office holders who ignore the hard evidence of Trump’s utter moral depravity. His repeated lies, ignorance and trashing of laws and decency may make them cringe privately, but publicly they back him because he delivers on the political ends that matter to them:  anti-abortion policies, conservative judges, tax cuts for the wealthy, and deregulation of almost everything. 

Well, now it’s our turn to craft a Faustian bargain.  Despite a dismal first appearance on the debate stage last week, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver reports that Mike Bloomberg remains very competitive in many Super Tuesday states. The billionaire has already spent $464 million of his own funds in his quest to capture the nomination of the party aligned against big-money corruption of politics. Will we ignore the millions of young black and brown men thrown against the wall and frisked by New York cops under Bloomberg’s unconstitutional policing policies?  How about his criticism of minimum wage laws, or his defense of fingerprinting food-stamp recipients?  Do we pretend he never ridiculed those who advocate for transgender rights, that he didn’t refer to women as “horsey-faced lesbians” and “fat broads”?

Put another way, would we support a candidate who has trampled on some, but not all, of our values in order to end the presidency of a megalomaniac who values absolutely nothing outside of himself?  Of course we would.  An election is not a completion test. It’s multiple choice.  It’s about making the best deal that you can, not necessarily the one you want.  

As abhorrent as some of the former New York mayor’s behaviors have been, as disqualifying as they would be in any other presidential election, if the package deal of Mike Bloomberg – a mixture of despicable negatives and considerable positives – is the price for ending our Trumpian nightmare, it’s a deal worth making. (Those positives, by the way, include 12 years of running – in a mostly competent fashion – New York City, an entity larger than 37 states; a strong climate change record; a proven commitment to using scientific research in enacting public policy; and philanthropic support of progressive causes such as public health and gun control.)  

Bloomberg may well turn out to be little more than a supporting actor in this process, one whose quixotic presidential run loses steam in the spring primaries. Yet, his current standing as a major contender is but one more sign of how far we have fallen down the rabbit hole.  In Donald Trump’s America, being a merely bad candidate is relatively good since the incumbent is horrendously terrible. 

For example, Bloomberg was quoted by the Washington Post as saying the following at a New York event in March of 2019:  “If your conversation during a presidential election is about some guy wearing a dress and whether he, she or it can go into the locker room with their daughter, that’s not a winning formula for most people.”  Setting aside the fact that 76 percent of Democrats support transgender rights, this cruel, ridiculing remark would have ended a candidacy in that party in almost any other context.

In a forced choice between Bloomberg and Trump, however, the former comes off looking positively empathetic and supportive of human rights.  Trump, after all, overrode his own Defense Department and banned transgender persons from serving in the military.  His administration, through regulations and court cases, has gone after transgender and sexual orientation discrimination protections in a vast array of other contexts. (Here, here and here). 

So it goes, this relativism of moral leadership.  Bloomberg has made gross, sexist comments to women.  Trump is on tape boasting about forcibly kissing them and grabbing their genitals. Dozens of women have accused him of sexual assault.  Bloomberg may have stretched the truth from time to time.  Trump, according to the Washington Post, told 16,241 lies in his first three years in office.  Bloomberg got to serve 12 years as New York’s mayor by pushing the City Council to change the term limit rule.  Trump has openly and flagrantly abandoned any pretense of following any rule of law.  

Remember how hard it was four years ago to imagine that Donald Trump would actually be elected president of the United States?  As we experienced that reality – and felt the earth tremble beneath us – nobody could ever have anticipated that Michael Bloomberg would emerge as our savior. Ultimately, that may not happen, but if it does, I will have my bumper sticker ready: “BLOOMBERG: NOT AS BAD AS TRUMP”.   Inspirational?  No, but it’s the damn truth.

(Inspiration for this post was provided by the hilarious musical parody, “The Day Democracy Died”, by The Founding Fathers. If you haven’t seen it, you can check it out here.)

SANDERS COULD WIN, BUT THE RISK ISN’T WORTH IT

Bernie Sanders has done more than any modern political figure to advance the cause of economic justice.  In less than four years, he managed to move issues like single payer health insurance, free college tuition and the sanctity of a living wage from the fringes of the political left into the mainstream of American thought. He is arguably one of the most important and effective change agents in our time.  But I so hope he isn’t the Democratic nominee for president.

In another time and context, I could have been a screaming, stomping, shouting Bernie Bro. But not now, not this year. Our democracy is hanging by the thinnest of threads. We have a deranged, narcissistic authoritarian in the White House; a cruel, mean, vindictive man who defies every norm of decency, every rule of law; a man firmly committed to lying, cheating and stealing his way to a second term. We have one shot to stop him. Please tell me we aren’t going to bank it all on an almost-80-year-old socialist who is recovering from a heart attack and hellbent on revolution.

On an aspirational level, I’m totally good with the dictatorship of the proletariat.  But right now, in this moment of despair, revolutionary change has to mean ending the Trump revolution before starting a new one.  Our immediate focus needs to be less on toppling the moneyed elites and redistributing the wealth, and more on capturing electoral college votes in places like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida and Arizona. 

A number of pundits (here and here) have insisted that Sanders can’t win.  I disagree. They said the same thing about Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.  Nobody thought Donald Trump could win, not even Donald Trump.  Sanders could, indeed, win.  The likelihood of such an outcome, however, seems far riskier than it would be with others in the Democratic gaggle of presidential candidates. 

Numerous studies (here and here) have shown that candidates with hardened ideologies – on both the left and right – suffer electorally, substantially raising the risk of loss. (Think Goldwater and McGovern.) If ever there were a time to be risk adverse, it is now.

While some of Sanders’ positions have popular support, many are apt to pose a serious problem in a general election.  He is unabashedly in favor of raising taxes to pay for a Medicare for All program that would eliminate private health insurance, a move polls show is opposed in most swing states.  There is a long list of other Bernie proposals that certify his leftist credentials but are likely to be an albatross for him:  banning fracking, letting prisoners vote, decriminalizing the border, eliminating ICE and giving free health care to undocumented immigrants. 

Then there’s the socialist thing.  Trump, of course, will redbait any Democrat who runs against him. He calls anyone who opposes him a “socialist,” among other labels picked from his limited vocabulary: “scum,” “horrible,” “dirty,” “crazy,” and “lowlife.”   Bernie is a Democratic Socialist, a political philosophy not that far removed from Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. In the distant past, however, he supported the Socialist Workers Party, a Marxist-Trotskyite group that now criticizes Sanders for being too conservative.  

To be sure, such nuance will do little damage control in an election campaign.  Bernie is on tape supporting Fidel Castro’s communist revolution in Cuba in the 1960s. Twenty years later, he backed the Sandinistas’ Marxist regime in Nicaragua while the U.S. was financing a rightwing overthrow there.  He attended a Nicaraguan rally where the crowd chanted “Here, there, everywhere, the Yankee will die.”   Such ancient history is hardly disqualifying in this post-cold-war era.  Still, it might well be enough to give Trump a lock on electoral-vote-rich Florida where there is a large contingent of anti-Castro Cuban-Americans.

Beyond his radical past and out-of-the-mainstream positions, there is a far deeper problem with Sanders’ candidacy.  He is, in many ways, the leftwing version of Donald Trump, albeit a kinder and more intelligent one.  They share many characteristics. They are both populists. They are both angry and yell a lot. They both see the government as a swamp needing to be drained. They both play not to a diverse spectrum of Americans, but to a much smaller, passionate and very fired-up base.  

A Sanders versus Trump contest is an easy call for liberals. It’s Bernie in a heartbeat. But what about independents, or Republicans feeling the same Trump stress disorder that keeps us up at night?  An angry old white guy trying to bring Wall Street to its knees by braying at the moon could have been refreshing after four years of a Jeb Bush administration. But not now. If you believe the psychotherapists, Trump has so stressed out millions of Americans with his constant bellicose bellowing that they long for a merely competent president, a quieter, more serene leader. Although competent, Bernie Sanders does not do quiet or serenity.  

Angry Socialist
Angry Narcissist

The Vermont senator’s 2016 presidential run was not about winning. It was, as Politico noted, about organizing a movement to shift power from corporate billionaires to the working class, Bernie’s life-long goal.  He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.  Issues of his that were seen as extremist four years ago are now on center stage of the 2020 campaign. The very fact that Sanders is now a frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination has moved the party to the left.  If he becomes the nominee, the leftward tilt will be that much stronger. Even if he loses.

Yes, even if he loses, Bernie Sanders will have won, simply by advancing his agenda and moving a major political party that much further to the left.  For well over a century, leaders of the class struggle have counseled patience in building the revolution. It’s one small step, followed by another, and another, for as long as it takes.  Famed Marxist theorist Leon Trotsky, taught that “strife is the father of all things,” and that “revolution is impossible until it is inevitable.” From that perspective, Bernie’s revolution would be well positioned if he gets the nomination and loses in November.  Four more years of Trump will certainly produce sufficient strife to father that inevitable revolution. 

Either that or we slip deeper and deeper into the autocracy of the Trumpian abyss.  With all due respect to Brothers Sanders and Trotsky, let’s go with a Democratic candidate who appeals to a broader swath of the electorate. The revolution will wait.

TRUMP’S DIGITAL CAMPAIGN LEAVES DEMOCRATS IN THE DUST

Although he has been an acute and chronic failure in so many ways, Donald Trump is an accomplished high achiever in the arena that matters most to him: building a base that will deliver votes. 

Leading Democratic strategists scornfully view Trump as a vile malignancy on the body politic, but they are in reverential awe of his ability to use social media as an organizing platform.  David Plouffe ran the 2008 Obama campaign, heralded at the time for its innovations in social media use. In an interview with Politico, Plouffe said that advantage now clearly belongs to Trump. He called the digital imbalance a “DEFCON 1 situation.” Numerous Democratic operatives have recently expressed similar concern over Trump’s ability to digitally out maneuver their party (here, here and here). 

Here’s what they’re talking about:  The fulcrum of Trump’s campaign is a social media engine capable of targeting messages to millions of MAGA types and wannabes. These ads, mostly on Facebook, are far different than conventional political advertising in that they are aimed not just at persuading, but at organizing a movement. With Facebook’s help, they are seen only by those whose online activity has been Trump-friendly. That’s just the starting point. Those ads come with an ask: sign up for a rally, take a survey, make a donation, buy MAGA merchandise.  The responses give the campaign names, zip codes, email, phone numbers, and a ton of demographic data. 

With all of that information – in tandem with Facebook analytics on users who “like” memes and posts about gun rights, undocumented immigrants, and white supremacy, etc. – the campaign’s targeting escalates into microtargeting.  That opens the door on tailoring each social media ad to hyper-specific groups, like 50-something, white male gun owners in the Florida panhandle who own a motorcycle and a dog and attend church infrequently.  This sort of microtargeting is not a Trump exclusive by any means.  His campaign has simply taken it to heights never before seen. In 2016, for example, according to an internal Facebook report, the Clinton campaign placed 66,000 unique ads on the platform, a drop in the bucket compared with Trump’s total of 5.9 million different ads. 

Although Trump and Facebook executives have had their differences, they share one critical value: lying.  The social media platform has been adamant about its policy of running political ads even if they are utterly false.   His campaign, of course, has been only too happy to provide the falsehoods.  Trump’s Facebook ads have spun fairytale story lines about his protection of pre-existing conditions, abating the North Korean nuclear threat, saving America from an imminent Iranian attack, among a plethora of other fantasies. He turned his own impeachment into a fund-raising bonanza, peppered with blatantly false claims about his supposed victimhood and Joe Biden’s imaginary corruption.

As of January 5, Trump’s campaign has spent $35 million to reach 2020 voters through precision-targeted ads on Google and Facebook. The top Democratic candidates have spent a tiny fraction of that amount on digital advertising.  Joe Biden, the purported front-runner, has spent less than $5 million on social media ads. In fact, he recently pulled what little advertising he had on Facebook and moved it to television.  

People spend an estimated one-third to one-half of their lives on their phones and other internet-connected devices. Through microtargeting, Trump is constantly reaching out to, and expanding, his base there.  Meanwhile, Biden and many of his fellow Democratic candidates have slight to no visibility in that digital infrastructure.   While they use more conventional advertising to quibble over Medicare for all versus a public option, Trump is using his online advertising to organize, to fire up his expanding MAGA army through incendiary links to false information about “criminal immigrant invaders” and the “far-left corrupt socialists” who love them.

This Trump advantage gets worse, exponentially worse.  Through artificial intelligence, the campaign is able to have Facebook match target constituencies with what are called “look-alikes”, hundreds of thousands of people who share the same backgrounds and political beliefs as those in the target group.  Once the Trumpers pull new recruits from the look-alikes, that new subset is used to cull more of the same.  Rinse and repeat. Therein lies the growing core of fired-up true believers who Trump hopes will walk through fire on election day to give him a second term.

The campaign has been building this social media organizing machine for more than three years. Trump’s every crazy, insipid, illegal action is put on a digital assembly line where it is completely fictionalized, re-spun, and fed to his fans so that they can be identified and used to reproduce themselves in their own images. For Team Trump, this is the path that will deliver four more years to the only president whose approval ratings never made it to the 50 percent mark.

But hark, help is on the way.  Under the heading of better late than never, there are two recent encouraging signs that Democrats may get their digital act together. Former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg has spent $25 million on Google and Facebook advertising. Although he’s a late entrant and a long-shot candidate for the Democratic nomination, his ads are designed to take sharp swipes at Trump, an approach the billionaire says he will continue even if he is not the nominee.

Although Bloomberg’s ad buy is a significant improvement, it will not, by itself, counter the Trump social media onslaught.  Enter “Four is Enough” a unique digital organizing campaign headed by Plouffe, Obama’s former campaign manager, and Tara McGowan, a 33-year-old digital guru who cut her political teeth on the Obama campaign. She is also the CEO of a nonprofit called Acronym that helps progressive groups organize online. They are in the process of raising $75 million to build an online organizing effort, particularly in the swing states that will determine electoral college results.    McGowan told the New York Times that the Four is Enough campaign was the result of “screaming into the abyss” about the Democrats’ weak digital presence, and “finally deciding to take matters into our own hands.”

Let’s hope that it works. As we learned in 2016, being right on the facts doesn’t win elections. Organizing does, and that means using every available digital tool to mobilize disgusted, disgruntled and depressed Americans who know full well that, when it comes to Donald Trump, four years is way more than enough.

THE UNTHINKABILITY OF A SECOND TRUMP TERM

Democratic primary voters are facing an excruciatingly painful decision: What’s more important, revolutionary change to benefit the poor and middle class, or getting rid of Donald Trump? As much as we want to believe that both are within reach, the ghost of Election Night 2016 keeps whispering: “Are you sure?”.  If we are wrong, we will have lost it all.

Back in the aspirational 1960s, the Kennedy brothers – John, Robert and Ted – frequently used a poetic line borrowed from Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw: “Some men see things as they are and say ‘Why?’. I dream things that never were and say ‘Why not?’.”

That was then and this is now, a pathetically melancholic era in which our aspirations have been Trumped by a villainous, self-absorbed president.  Sadly, our dreams for a better tomorrow may need to be put on hold so we can singularly focus on eradicating this malignancy from the White House.  Former George W. Bush speech writer and current Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson perfectly captured our dilemma with these words: “Our greatest political passion seems dedicated not to the pursuit of dreams but to the avoidance of nightmares.”

If not for our Trumpian nightmare, 2020 would be the perfect time for Democrats to dream big and bold, to replace the spoils of underregulated capitalism with the dreams of things that never were, like Medicare for All, free college tuition and a Green New Deal.  

Competing for the progressive vote, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have tapped into the understandably unbridled passion for single payer health insurance, known colloquially as Medicare for All.  Finding a way to extend health care to everyone is a concept whose time arrived decades ago.  Originally proposed by Richard Nixon in 1972, it has long been the way of life in most every other industrialized country.  

Passage of Obamacare in 2010 substantially increased the number of insured Americans.  But it did not go nearly far enough.  An estimated 30 million people lack coverage, and another 44 million are so under-insured that they face risk of financial ruin.  Americans borrowed $88 billion in 2018 to cover health care expenses. There are more than 500,000 bankruptcies every year because of medical debt. Most people are insured under employer group plans that carry an annual price tag of more than $20,000 for family coverage. The average employee annual premium share is between $6,000 and $7,000, in addition to deductibles and co-insurance that can run as high as $10,000 or more. 

Based on facts, figures and sound reasoning, the Medicare for All case could not be more compelling. Yet, repeated polling shows strong negative reaction to the proposal (here, here and here), fed mostly by anxiety over the costs and uncertainties of such a major change.  In an election, it’s the perception, not the reality, that wins the day.  Remember what a political albatross Obamacare was for years before winning broad approval. 

It’s a stretch to see either the Sanders or Warren health care plan becoming law even if one of them captures the White House and Democrats win majorities in both houses. The bulk of the party’s 2018 House gains came in either Republican or swing districts, making a vote for single payer health insurance politically difficult. Still, in an ordinary election year, it would make sense for a presidential candidate to campaign for a bold change and, once elected, bargain downward to obtain what’s doable. Alas, the 2020 election will be anything but ordinary.

“Thinking about the Unthinkable” was the title of a 1962 book about nuclear war. It also captures perfectly the prospect of a second Trump term.  Do we spend four more years counting his lies while watching him continue to: ignore the law, dismantle human rights, destroy the planet, insult our allies, rob from the poor and give to the rich?     It’s hard to imagine a more unthinkable scenario.  Yet, in order to escape from our dystopian abyss, we must think about the unthinkable.

There are two paths to defeating Trump, both backed by facially credible theories.  One is for Democrats to nominate a left-of-center candidate, someone promising revolutionary – or at least big and bold – structural changes like Medicare for All, tuition-free colleges and forgiveness of students loans. The strategy here would be to pull in new voters from disaffected and marginalized groups, folks who disdain and distrust traditional politics but whose passion has been ignited by the prospect of a massive system overhaul. Since many in this demographic didn’t vote in 2016, their ballots would have a value-added impact on the Democratic tally, or so the thinking goes.

The other path is aimed at independents, never-Trumper Republicans and Obama voters who switched to Trump in 2016.  The math on this is fairly simple.  The Donald won the last election with 46 percent of the vote. Most polling puts his hardcore base at 25-30 percent of voters. The difference between those two measurements represents a sizeable chunk of 2016 Trump voters, a faction seen through polling as disillusioned and irritated with the president.  The theory here is that a moderate Democrat, one not pushing for huge progressive changes, could well flip a sizeable portion of Trump’s non-base voters.

Nine months ago in this space, I advocated for the first of these two paths, a charismatic progressive candidate pushing for profound structural change.  My reasoning was two-fold. One, we desperately need profound structural change. Secondly, I liked the idea of building passion among those outside the political mainstream and pulling them into a growing Democratic tent.

I’m rethinking that position now for two reasons.  First, Trump is even more of an existential threat to our way of life than he was nine months ago (see Ukraine, Turkey and the pardoning of war criminals).  Then there is the Electoral College. Getting more votes in places like California, New York and Massachusetts does nothing to move the 2016 Electoral College needle.  Repeated polling in six swing states (Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida, Arizona and North Carolina) shows Trump either ahead or within the margin of error of his potential opponents.  Democrats will probably need to take at least three of those states in order to recapture the presidency.  

Although the landscape will evolve between now and the election, I find myself growing more risk adverse by the day.  The best candidate in 2020 may not be the one with the best platform. It will be the one who is best able to defeat Trump.  The alternative is just too unthinkable.