Within the Margin

Watching the right and left battle on social media spaces ranks as one of the least enjoyable activities available to us on the internet today. With few exceptions, I don’t wade into threads anymore, be they populated by friends or strangers. Persuading the person I actually disagree with seems nigh-impossible, especially given the bad-faith argumentation that dominates such discussions, so the only hope is that silent and undecided observers of the thread might come around to my way of thinking. That’s a worthy goal, but it’s one that I put into practice through my governing and political activities damn close to 365 days a year. So I simply don’t have much interest in doing it online, and never less so that November and December when I’m coming off of months of 12-18 hour days on the campaign trail without days off let alone these mythical “weekends” that people sometimes reference as part of their lives.

But shortly after the recently-concluded campaign, I found myself sitting at a table with several conservative Republicans in a dynamic lending itself to banter and occasional verbal jousting. No more Democratic bubble of the campaign office, full of agreeable voices – now I was in the Dutchess County Board of Elections for an absentee and affidavit ballot count. Or, more accurately, for the dwelling-upon of said ballots to find excuses not to count them. My candidate was trailing in a tight state senate race – we wanted every legal ballot opened as that was the only path for us to make up the numbers. The Republicans were in a different position. Knowing that absentee ballots in Dutchess County include a high proportion of Dem-leaning second homers and college students, they had two goals:

• slow the process down, so that the inevitable shrinkage in margin unfolds tediously and the status quo is cemented in public perception (“Serino’s still ahead – this thing’s not changing.”)
• find reasons to throw out ballots (like a blurry postmark, or an affidavit ballot envelope missing information that the election inspector should have alerted them to cure, since a basic tenet of democracy ought to be that election workers facilitate eligible voters in casting ballots rather than hindering them).

Having once worked at the BOE myself as a staffer, I had seen many of these counts up close, and heard many of the frivolous arguments for challenging ballots. But either the quality of discussion around the ballot-tossing table was higher ten years ago, or my tolerance for cliched, predictable, bad-faith banter has declined.

Each day, my face would tire from the brow-furrowing that came with reacting to the GOP election commissioner and a local Republican operative argue for or against this ballot or that one. Dozens of ballots would be treated one way, and then *poof* – conditions change!

Let’s take military and overseas ballots. We all want to ensure that those serving our country in the armed forces or foreign service can participate in our democracy, right? Quick digression: this has been a professional concern of mine for years, as I work in the New York State Senate. There, the Democratic conference has tried for years to join the Assembly in passing a bill to consolidate the federal and state/local primaries in June, rather than the June/September split that currently exists. Senate Republicans – in the majority the last eight years and seventy-seven of the last eighty – have insisted on an August consolidation, even though this does little to protect those military/overseas voters from a drawn-out primary certification that could result in them getting their ballots too late to return them on time. We had ballots postmarked by the deadline that arrived days after the later military/overseas postmark this year…in other words, the voter did everything right but the post office just takes too long to move the mail. We need as much time as possible between primaries and general elections to ensure that those voters have the lead time necessary to receive and submit ballots.

Back to the counting table: dozens of absentee ballots get tossed because an envelope is unsealed, or the voter failed to fill out the inner envelope correctly. And then comes a military/overseas ballot with the same problems…and the GOP commissioner wants to count it. OK, I say: I understand that we feel badly about this individual, likely in the armed forces, losing their vote. But what’s the legal argument for treating it differently, I inquire. “I have none,” says the GOP commissioner. “Ok…well, what’s the logic, then? I’m trying to find a path here to count this vote that isn’t arbitrary, since plenty of similar ballots have been challenged.” “I have none, comes the reply. “I just want it to count,” he says.

Well, that’s great. So do I! But I wanted the other ones to count, too. Remember, we have no idea what their party affiliation is at that point. Those college absentees include plenty of Republicans, and those military absentees include plenty of Democrats – including the former treasurer of the county Young Dems, a good friend of mine now residing on a naval base. My goal is to maximize the franchise, so if we want to let unsealed inner envelopes slide because we think maybe they got jostled open in transit, hey: I can do the benefit of the doubt thing even if the legality is iffy – if we’re being logical and consistent. What I can’t do is support an arbitrary process, treating one class of human being differently from another when it comes to voting. This country shed blood over that very issue, and established legal protections accordingly. But to call for consistency in one direction or the other is met with mocking disdain: because it implies an interest in governing or in good faith, and this is not about either of those things. For them, it’s about point-scoring and controlling the discussion – owning the libs, in other words. It’s not as nasty in person, at that counting table, as what we see in online spaces, but it has the same effect of rendering discussion devoid of any greater meaning.

This sort of thing was punctuated by interludes of talking about state politics, given the impending Democratic majority in the state senate, which has promised to unlock voting reforms long-stalled under Republican rule in the chamber. The Republican commissioner and party operative would raise the perils of early voting and their assurances that it would lead to voter fraud – never mind the infinitesimally-rare occurrences of it in states already using early voting. They’d extol the virtues of no-excuse-needed absentee balloting as being sufficient to open the franchise to all who desire to cast a ballot…while literally sitting a table tossing out absentee ballots because the post office failed to execute its job properly. 

To sit with these talking points merchants for hours and argue over absentee ballots and public policy is not to engage in political discourse with the hope of persuading one another on the merits. Nor is it to arrive at a place where each says, “hey, we’re just weighting certain components of this question differently and arriving at a different conclusion accordingly.” Instead, one simply furrows one’s brow and shakes one’s head as contradictions are uttered with a bewildering joyfulness, as the subject is changed every time a previous statement is challenged, and as their interest in actual governance recedes further into the rear-view mirror amid the pursuit of landing one more blow for willful public ignorance. I knew that good faith discussions among strangers had largely disappeared, and even among acquaintances and friends behind keyboards. It wasn’t until this fall that I realized the extent to which it has disappeared from in-person discussion among people making decisions in that moment, in that space, about the very functioning of our democracy.

I spent a good chunk of 2018 running the field operation for a state senate campaign in New York’s Hudson Valley. Democrats needed to flip one seat to finally retake the senate after spending 77 of the last 80 years as the chamber’s minority conference while stalled legislation piled up at the feet of a Republican majority unwilling to move the state forward on voting reforms, on ethics and campaign finance reforms, on reproductive rights and contraceptive access, on justice for victims of child sexual assault. It has been my calling and my mission for many years to flip this body, and toward that end I put everything I had into winning the 41st Senate District this year.

Statewide, we succeeded! We flipped eight seats. But in the 41st, the result was not so triumphant. We lost by less than 700 votes, or about 0.58% of the total votes cast. It was heartbreaking, but make no mistake: it was vastly better to come close than to be blown out. 683 votes is a better margin than 684. And I’d rather it be 682. Or 681…you get the idea.

And make no mistake on this point, either: it was never supposed to be this close. The incumbent, Sue Serino, is vapid but popular. She’s reasonably visible in much of the district, and she hides behind her conference’s unanimous procedural votes to block popular legislation rather than actually ever having to vote against the bills themselves (with the occasional exception). As a member of the majority, she has been able to deliver dollars to her district. She maintains a friendly demeanor and until this campaign, generally received a pass for a decidely unfriendly voting record. On top of Serino’s strengths, the 41st Senate District (featuring most of Dutchess County and three towns in Putnam County) had a unique relationship to the governor’s race atop the ballot. Andrew Cuomo is not popular here, and his Republican opponent was the Golden Boy – Dutchess County executive Marcus Molinaro. While the latter’s gubernatorial campaign was underfunded and often flailed as he tried to thread the needle between appeasing his Trump-loving base and moderating himself for a blue state in a blue year, he was always going to do reasonably well in Dutchess. Previous elections offered a mixed bag in terms of Molinaro’s coattails, but the general political public’s expectation was that he would bring out otherwise-demoralized local Republicans and provide a boost to Serino by actively campaigning for GOP representation in Albany. Serino + Molinaro was supposed to be an unbeatable combo in a district with a long GOP history, and that voted for Hillary Clinton by a tiny margin, with a sizable third party vote.

But Karen Smythe ran a great campaign, and ran far ahead of Cuomo in Dutchess (and Putnam). Serino’s real estate allies spent big in an effort to bail her out in the campaign’s final weeks, but their paid out-of-district army of lit-droppers leaving generic door hangers at voters’ homes was not quite as inspiring as the legions of local Smythe volunteers talking to their neighbors about Karen’s background and ideas, and Serino’s problematic issue stances. We built a phenomenal field operation to back our engaging and indefatigable candidate.

***

There wasn’t any time to waste thinking about bizarre scenarios that would upend the race and weaken Sue enough to defeat her. There wasn’t going to be a corruption scandal (beyond all the forms of corruption that are perfectly legal in state politics). There wasn’t going to be a dramatic gaffe. There wasn’t going be a sexual harassment claim, or a shouting match with a constituent, or a comment about public hangings. Nothing was going to fall from the sky and gift us the glorious ending that we wanted. We had to win the race ourselves, one voter at a time, through the interactions Karen and her volunteers were having with volunteers, and through our mailers and advertisements. We came incredibly close.

We may find that the current president of the United States – who indeed offers a teeming pile of corruption, gaffes, sexual harassment claims, and horrific statements about racial violence – has already had all of his weaknesses priced in by voters, and it seems clear that his fervent base simply won’t leave him. Yes, he prevailed in 2016 against a similarly unpopular opponent and thanks in no small part to the third party votes cast by individuals who thought it safe to do so. But he did, nonetheless, prevail. One assumes Democrats will nominate a better candidate in 2020, but they might not. One assumes third party votes will drop, as they did in the 2018 midterms, but they might not – especially if a high-profile independent bid emerges (Kasich?) One assumes that the Mueller investigation, when concluded, will paint the president in an unflattering light, but one cannot assume it will lead to legal action or anything that damages the president beyond his already historically weak standing…standing that does not rule out his election.

He already has all the problems that we could never truly hope a Serino to have, and that hasn’t been enough to finish him off. To hope for more – a deus ex machina scenario where the shortcomings of the electorate, or the opposition party, or both are rendered moot, or a sudden reawakening of American idealism – cannot be the strategy. We have to win in 2020 the same way we tried to, and very nearly did, win 2018 in Dutchess and Putnam counties: one voter at a time, with a great candidate and fantastic volunteers having meaningful discussions with that segment of the electorate that can be persuaded and mobilized if only we put in the work – if only we make the ending ourselves.

Just a quick thought for tonight.

A new Economist/YouGov poll finds healthy Democratic leads in the generic congressional ballot – and poor Trump approval numbers – for the population at large. Even more notably, it finds Trump and congressional Republicans continuing to lose ground among college-educated white voters, who once provided the bulwark of support for Republicans. A 49%-40% edge for Democrats among these voters in the upcoming Congressional elections is remarkable, given much of American political history…and given their propensity to actually vote in midterm elections. These folks are a good bet to show up – education tends to be a strong indicator of turnout in midterms.

But it also means that 40% of college-educated white voters have looked at the first 19 months of the Trump presidency and Congressional Republicans playing dead in the face of the excesses of said presidency…and have decided they’re still totally cool with that.

We win these things on the margins, in the end. We sign up for that level of uncertainty, and we rise and fall with small changes. This set of changes looks promising. But this poll is a sobering reminder of how fine those margins are – because we cannot count on sensibility on the part of a significant minority who are otherwise thought to be credentialed, informed individuals.

The finish line is finally in sight for the Democratic primary in NY-19, after dozens of candidate forums, hours of aired television ads, countless touches via doorknocking, phonebanking and Hustle texts, and the stuffing-full-of-mailers of seemingly every Democratic mailbox across eleven counties. And to my excitement, it’s really not clear who’s going to win tomorrow night. I could make a case for just about any of them pulling it off (and in most cases, deservedly so).

One could certainly imagine it being Pat Ryan. To the extent that there’s a consensus out there on where the race stands, folks tend to see him as one of the two frontrunners. He and his surrogates have argued from the start that his biography – military service, business experience, and local roots – would make him the most formidable Democrat to take on John Faso in the general election. He has grown on the campaign trail, gradually dropping an overly-cautious approach that left him saying nothing of substance and hanging everything upon his bio. In its place: a post-Parkland focus on gun safety, amplified by some striking ads including this masterpiece. In taking some of his cues from Jason Kander (using his veteran bona fides to allow him to prosecute the case for an assault weapons ban with greater authority than those who have never touched a firearm) he has charted a course that very nearly carried Kander to victory in tougher terrain in November 2016.

But that was a general election, and this is still – for one more day – a primary election. For a certain segment of the Democratic party at large, and especially in the activist-heavy Hudson Valley and Catskills, Ryan’s ads and mailers are met with suspicion as a reminder of his fundraising abilities and beltway support. Anecdotally, I know Democrats who have ruled him out for both July and November as a result of an Intercept hit piece that highlighted his onetime openness – as a datamining company’s employee many years ago – to a scheme to aid the Chamber of Commerce in spying on labor activists. In terms of prognosticating the primary, it’s important to remember that a lot of the folks most convinced by anti-DCCC messaging and a questionable Intercept (read: Glenn Greenwald’s outfit) article were never voting for Ryan anyway. But the article did give some folks an excuse to rule Ryan out in a large, closely-contested field.

Antonio Delgado is the other guy people expect to be in or around the top spot. He’s the guy who most lights up a room, with a huge smile and at times soaring oratory. The resume is there – Rhodes scholar, Harvard Law, Akin Gump, son of working-class upstaters. The money is there – Delgado has prided himself from the start on assembling the resources to win. That has included early and substantial field investments; this was never a campaign that was going to struggle with petitioning or identifying voters. He hires good people. His resume goes beyond the impressive credentials mentioned above; the man has worked in hip-hop as an artist and producer. He’s an actual person, not the creation of campaign consultants – but there is most certainly a well-molded candidate and campaign there, which like Ryan turns off a certain segment of the primary electorate. Akin Gump is as politically-connected as they come, so any hedging on policy by Delgado is perceived by some as an indicator of “corporate ties.” (I might argue that it reflects a thoughtful fellow who understands that sloganeering about different health care options is only going to end up disappointing those same corporation-fearing citizens when the time comes to evaluate what actually has 218 votes in Congress. Yelling about single payer versus Medicare-for-all versus some other path to the widest pool of insured people possible sometimes seems like an exercise in virtue-signaling.) It’s hard to dismiss his commitment to health care, though, when one remembers this his very first video was with Andrea Mitchell, the woman to whom John Faso lied through his teeth about protecting during last summer’s health care “reform” efforts.

And then there’s the race thing. It’s hard to convey the disappointment of hearing Democrat after Democrat after Democrat say “well, I just don’t know that a black man can win in that district. They’ll attack him over the hip-hop records!” Yes, it’s the whitest district in the state. It also voted twice for Barack Obama and – maybe sit down for this one – white people listen to hip-hop, too. At the risk of giving people who did indeed also vote for Trump too much credit, I think the world is chock-full of white rural white people who will vote you if they think you’re credible on jobs, farm security, and health care – regardless of what music you prefer.

The better argument against Delgado has always been the lack of in-district roots. He’s originally from upstate, yes, but he’s not from the district. He had been out of NY for a long time before moving to Dutchess County to run for this seat. A recent mailer calling touting Hudson Valley roots was an apt description of his wife (a Woodstock native) but not of him. Democrats get pummeled on the carpetbagging issue in upstate NY, and the best way to deal with that weakness is to own it – and then turn around and offer a contrast between your values and Faso’s, and ask voters which better captures the Hudson and Mohawk valleys, Catskills and Leatherstocking Region. When Delgado does that, he excels…when he tries to fudge his local credentials, he looks foolish.

Brian Flynn is the third candidate with the resources and organization for automatic competitiveness, having put plenty of his own money into the race. He has family roots in the district but offers a blurry picture with respect to how long he himself has been a full-time resident. He has carved out an effective niche as a job creator and policy wonk who starts from a set of coherent policy goals (his Plan for the American Worker) and builds his message from there, rather than checking off progressive boxes the way a lot of candidates in NY-19 and elsewhere seem to do. He also may have an additional and electorally potent niche: he has a quite a bit of anecdotal support in the western part of the district. Counties like Otsego and Schoharie are small and don’t have many registered Democrats – but winning them comfortably while the other candidates are splitting Dutchess and Ulster four or five ways might give Flynn an edge in the final tally. In a race where some of the candidates are notorious for focusing on Dutchess and Ulster, Flynn may prove to have been wise to recognize that as important as those populous, Dem-heavy counties may be, the general election requires a candidate who won’t get wiped out in the redder counties…and the primary might require that, too. None of which is to say Flynn is devoid of support in the Big Two; he has the support of a lot of Dutchess committee members as evidenced by a strong second-place showing in the committee’s March 1 endorsement vote.

Armed with fewer resources but the greatest commitment to seeking support in every corner of the district – and the useful distinction of the guy you’re most likely to run into when you’re out and about, whether at a small diner in Sullivan County or a bar in Kingston – is Gareth Rhodes. Fresh off his 163-town tour of the district, Rhodes represents those in the party who believe part of winning – indeed, part of past victories – is showing up. Not everyone in the Democratic Party is resigned to getting to 218 seats by running the table in the 218 most-metropolitan and/or non-white districts. Some folks in the party think Democrats can win in rural areas, too. Rhodes is pretty good at weaving together his biography and platform, aided by having (along with Ryan) the strongest in-district roots of the seven candidates. He shows a genuine interest in esoteric policy discussions not to check off boxes and make sure the activists know that he knows what they care about, but from a genuine place of intellectual curiosity.

The folks who need to find a reason not to trust someone point to Rhodes’ previous work as a press flak for Andrew Cuomo, back in the days when Cuomo antagonized progressives daily (before his 2018 lurch to the left that has convinced few of his good intentions, and has convinced many of his unending opportunism). As someone who has also been in the role of “young staffer to government official,” I would suggest that staffers do not necessarily embody all of the beliefs (or lackthereof) of those they staff…and the younger you are, the more likely that you’re gaining a foothold in government and need not hold a personal referendum every day on whether you are on the most perfect path to attaining progressive goals as someone else defines them.

It’s important to note, though, that Cuomo fared badly in the 2014 primary and general in this district. Rhodes has faced a stern test to earn the goodwill of primary voters who dismiss him by association – unfairly – and would face a sterner one to do the same with the general electorate. But a cascade of endorsements from major labor unions and the New York Times serves as a reminder of what anyone who interacts with Rhodes already knows: he’s not to be pigeonholed, and he’s not riding on youthful exuberance alone. He brings as much gravitas as the other candidates. But the very limited polling made available shows him barely registering, perhaps an indication that breaking through with somewhat limited funds relative to Ryan, Delgado and Flynn is simply too hard, even if you’re the guy who pops up everywhere. Democratic primary voters rightfully view the stakes as incredibly high this year, which may be clouding their ability to see youth and energy as an asset when fundamentals like fundraising and a vast ground game are missing.

At the opposite end of the age spectrum from Rhodes, and in fact most of this youthful field, is Dave Clegg. A 30-year Ulster resident and self-described “country lawyer,” Clegg has established his regional bona fides and has a career that leaves little doubt as to his qualifications and tenacity. He also has a committed base of support among some of Ulster County’s long-tenured progressive activists and elected officials. Given that Ulster County has the largest number of voters eligible for this primary – 30.5% of the total NY-19 Democratic electorate – it’s not a bad place from which to garner the bulk of one’s support. On the flipside, that he barely registers in Dutchess County beyond the “he’s a good guy” level and doesn’t seem to have secured a niche elsewhere in the way that, say, Flynn has, leaves me skeptical that he can prevail on Tuesday. Clegg methodically and cogently argues the case against Faso, and would likely make the party proud enough in a general election. It’s unlikely that he gets the chance, though, when the zeitgeist seems to call for someone who offers more superficial contrast to the older white men who have put the country where it is today.

If the starkest contrast to Faso and Trump’s base turns out to be what voters are seeking, Erin Collier is the obvious choice. She’s the only woman in the race and she’s the second-youngest candidate, behind Rhodes. As an agricultural economist, she offers a remedy to the anti-intellectual strain that, through Republican victories, dominates the federal government at this time (not to mention making her a useful asset to the district). She offers contrasts to her fellow primary candidates as well: not simply through her gender, but also through her roots in the western part of the district. She’s eighth-generation Otsego County, and claims a local hamlet is named for her family.

But her late entry into the race seems to have nullified those advantages. She was first rumored to be considering a bid late late in 2017, but didn’t officially declare until early March of this year…as petitioning was already underway. As a result, she lags in name recognition, fundraising, and organizing, though she has gotten a few mailers out.

Collier made some news last week by leaking a poll showing her far behind when preference was first gauged but closing to within a point of Delgado and Ryan after an “informed ballot” question in which voters were prompted with biographical information about some of the candidates. In a year when women are absolutely crushing it in Democratic primaries, it makes sense that the extra reminder – through informed ballot instead of just a litany of names – would lead to some voters switching over to Collier. It seems a longshot that enough people will do so in the confines of their poll sites tomorrow, but it’s worth noting that throughout the campaign men and women alike have lamented the lack of a woman in the field (Sue Sullivan dropped out in late September).

The final candidate in the race is Jeff Beals, who quickly established himself last year as the most abrasive candidate, throwing punches at his fellow candidates as corporate-owned and insufficiently liberal. In a district where Bernie Sanders triumphed in the 2016 Democratic primaries, Beals most clearly draws from the Sanders playbook. But to that strategy he adds biographical inconsistencies, resume inflation, poor fundraising and a tendency to whine about his bad breaks. There’s a certain type of angry Democrat for whom Beals is a dream candidate, and he has plenty of support among activists and some past and present local electeds. The possibility exists that in a sufficiently-splintered field, the guy who has tried to clam the Sanders mantle might succeed in a district who primary voters went heavily for Sanders and fellow crusading outsider Zephyr Teachout. It’s also worth noting, of course, that given the opportunity to send Teachout to Congress, the general electorate chose Faso decisively.

***

I’d be surprised if anyone topped 30%; I’m not sure a candidate will even manage a quarter of the vote. To some degree, that’s a testament to the strength of the field, not its weakness. The story at the outset of this campaign was that none of the candidates seemed ready for prime-time, but most of them have developed nicely and seem to be plausible Faso foes. If I had to engage in the fool’s errand of predicting the outcome, I might assign vote shares as follows:

That’s a guess with a pretty high margin of error in what still feels to me like a very tight race. It’s a fairly highly-educated guess, combining endorsements, campaign filings, extremely limiting polling data, and anecdotal information from around the district. But it’s emphatically just that: a guess.

***

Worth noting as you peruse the county-by-county results tomorrow night – the share of each county’s active Democratic voters relative to the district as a whole:

To help make those numbers a bit less abstract, some raw numbers: Ulster County had 43,203 active Democrats registered as of April 1. The district’s portion of Broome County – most of the town of Sanford, with the rest of the town and county lying in NY-22 – has 327 active Dems. But to repeat a point from above, it’s entirely possible that with four candidates residing in Ulster, the vote there will be so split that no one comes out of it with a big lead, meaning the smaller counties could prove decisive.

…that headline being the closest those items (Icahn and the American left) will likely ever come to each other.

In the midst of reading (here and here, for example) about the various travails of Trump advisor Carl Icahn, my mind wandered into consideration of the American left’s prior failures to deny its bête noir presidents a second term. Icahn has now served twice as the illustration of America’s descent into clientelism under the present administration; one of the most obvious fears of what Trump’s election would wrought seems to be coming to pass.

This got me pondering the last few decades of American presidential elections. Nixon’s reelection was dreaded on the left and managed to shock any number of people – from Hunter S. Thompson to John and Yoko – despite his comfortable polling leads. Reagan got slapped around in midterms but as 1984 dawned, his second victory seemed almost assured, even as the left saw him as a smiling but sinister threat to labor, global peace, and domestic race relations. George W. Bush engendered abject hatred and cries of fascism, and his quest for reelection offered far more suspense than the other two, but he survived. The only Republican president of the last 50 years to be denied a second term was the one who provoked the least hostility among his foes – George H.W. Bush.

Yet each of those three triumphantly-ratified presidents would see their political fortunes evaporate soon enough. Watergate began to unravel Nixon at the outset of his second term; he would resign the August before midterms and his party went on to lose 49 House seats – on top of the five lost in special elections as the scandal unfolded. Iran-Contra didn’t end the Reagan presidency, but it consumed several years and weakened his standing. Democrats retook the Senate in midterms with a net gain of eight seats. Hurricane Katrina, the Iraq War, and a foolish ploy to privatize Social Security sent Bush into freefall in his first year after reelection. Nothing improved for him the second year, and his toxicity combined with an assortment of Congressional scandals to lose his party both the House and Senate in 2006.

In all three cases, the president’s second term was at best a struggle (Reagan) and at worst an outright disaster (Nixon and Bush). In all three cases, the president and his party suffered heavy political defeats. To a certain degree, that is to be expected for most presidencies, as the public grows restless for change by the time the second midterm rolls around. What seems notable in these three cases is the rapid, steep decline following so soon after voters put their imprimatur on the administration’s work to date.

Is the left skilled, then, at sowing the seeds of political defeat, but cannot reap them in timely fashion? Is there something intrinsic to how the left prosecutes its case against these presidents? I find myself wondering if the intensity and assured nature of its argumentation is taken for granted by the so-called swing voters, who dismiss it as simply being the way of things: “Ah, yes, my liberal friends are once again foretelling the downfall of civilization. Once again, they think all is not well in the kingdom! Such alarmists.” And then Watergate, or Iran-Contra, or Iraq/Katrina happen, and all is confirmed. It seems safe to argue that the intellectual left is quite well known for being loud and abstract, and only when events prove loud enough and tangible enough to match do the political winds actually change.

How will it be with Trump, then? He started with less political capital than these others, and soon began losing ground. He is said to be “rebounding” when he occasionally manages to hit 40% in an approval poll (Gallup currently puts him at 39%). His party trails badly in generic Congressional ballot polls. More importantly, though, his administration has been beset with scandal almost immediately. He hasn’t faced and failed crises like Bush did, but the worst fears of his opposition with respect to ethics and corruption have been confirmed through various dramas and departures from the norm. Have events proven loud enough and tangible enough for the left’s arguments to be heard? Will they be forgotten if things smooth out somewhat before 2020, and the new norms – exemplified by Carl Icahn and his ilk – are fully entrenched?

Before I offer some quick thoughts on Trump and Priebus declaring war on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals this week, I present three pieces of information:

• The 9th Circuit’s overturn rate is above average, but it’s not the highest in the country; it’s third, behind the 6th Circuit (Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee) and 11th Circuit (Alabama, Florida and Georgia).
• The sanctuary city ruling didn’t even come from the 9th Circuit per se, but from a judge on the 5th District Court.  A piece of the 9th Circuit, yes – one of thirteen district courts in that circuit – but not the court itself. The 9th would hear the case on appeal. I’d be happy to excuse the imprecise language but for the fact that this administration is so fast and loose with verbiage and would do well to speak with specificity when they’re talking about unleashing massive judicial changes, such as breaking up a circuit court.
• Conservatives who are “in the know” like to reference the out-of-control 9th to excuse away rulings they don’t like as the doings of some granola-chomping eco-terrorist toiling away on a commune in northern California. The states I mentioned above in the 6th and 11th don’t quite serve the same function in their hyped-up fantasies; you don’t often hear conservatives talking about the need to rein in the un-American extremists of Kentucky and Alabama.

So when Priebus says the 9th Circuit is “going bananas,” and Trump says he is considering proposals to break up the 9th, as “many people” support, they’re speaking in code to activists on their side who accept as gospel truth that the 9th Circuit is beyond the pale and that drastic action is required. Never mind that the 9th Circuit isn’t as far out of the so-called judicial mainstream as they imply, or that changes to the 9th Circuit would shake up courts in Idaho and Wyoming that are a bit harder to caricature than San Francisco, or that it would require 60 votes in the Senate – requiring at least 8 Democrats, and possibly more if western Republicans have parochial reasons to avoid disruption, or that the country has historically held the federal judiciary sacred and it’s one of the few things I can imagine that could actually drive Trump’s approvals even lower. He is conceivably foolish enough to imagine that the successful confirmation of Neil Gorsuch means he can do no wrong when it comes to remaking the courts, but his language sounds radical and drastic (“break up” a court), and the general public may well agree.

And so what this really amounts to…is a conversation with his base. Trump is talking to the 46% of the country that voted for him, and ignoring the rest. There are no national discussions in this administration; he’s only interested in the folks that buy into certain truths about conservative activists, particularly judicial activists. He only wants to speak to those willing to speak in his language; there is no outreach to the other 54%. The framing of the 9th’s rulings as radical will bounce around the conservative echo chamber, and restructuring courts will become accepted wisdom among that 46% as a viable, necessary strategy.

I know consensus is impossible at this time, and sometimes there’s little value in going through the motions of pretending to seek or obtain it. But in the first hundred days, at least, can we uphold one of the ideals of this office? Just one?