#Like Kamala Harris Persona coming out in like 4 days

[rachelraygifs]

Gonna play my favorite Atelier trilogy ever again, the Dusk trilogy, since it's been rereleased on steam. Excited since I haven't played these since I was in college. I'm sure Shallie is still kinda garbage but that's part of the charm.

But first off --

My daughter....

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarahf (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): With the spread of the new coronavirus in the U.S., the 2020 Democratic primary is on a bit of a hiatus. Many states have postponed their primaries, and now we might not wrap things up until late June. But the expected outcome is hardly a surprise — former Vice President Joe Biden is for all intents and purposes the presumptive nominee.

Sen. Bernie Sanders is still in the race, but at this point, the question is less about what Sanders can do to mount a comeback and more about what can Biden do — if anything — to win over Sanders voters, particularly as we start to transition to the general-election phase of 2020.

So, let’s unpack this question in three parts:

First, how much does Biden need Sanders supporters? Or in other words, what does it mean for Biden’s base of support if he’s able to win over Sanders supporters? What does it mean if he can’t?

Second, how does Biden actually win over Sanders supporters?

And third, how important is party unity — or Democrats rallying behind one candidate — for what happens in 2020?

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, elections analyst): Well, this is so obvious that it sounds stupid to say out loud, but: Biden needs some Sanders primary voters to support him in November, since Sanders has won about 31 percent of the national popular vote so far. But he doesn’t need every single one.

Some Sanders-or-bust voters might stay home in November; that happens to some degree in every election.

But most Sanders voters don’t fit that description. According to a recent Morning Consult poll, 82 percent of Sanders supporters say they would vote for Biden in the general election, and just 7 percent said they would vote for Trump. And Quinnipiac University found that 86 percent of Sanders voters would vote for Biden, 3 percent would vote for Trump, 2 percent would vote for someone else, 4 percent wouldn’t vote, and 5 percent didn’t know who they’d vote for.

geoffrey.skelley (Geoffrey Skelley, elections analyst): Yeah, I mean, you have polls showing Biden winning ~90 percent of Democrats in general election trial heats against Trump. So he’s likely winning over most Sanders voters. But if a Trump-Biden matchup were to be a close election like 2016, any shortfall in support from Sanders voters would be magnified.

nrakich: Yeah, Biden should certainly want to win over as many Sanders supporters as possible.

Every little bit counts!

sarahf: One thing you’ve written about for the site, Perry, is the age divide we’ve seen play out in the Democratic primary with Sanders consistently winning voters under 45.

But you’ve also written that these voters generally vote Democratic in a general election, so maybe Biden doesn’t have to worry all that much about making special inroads here? That is, it will come with time?

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): Every bit of enthusiasm and turnout from younger voters helps Biden. That said, it’s worth separating the cohort of people under 45 from the “Sanders-or-bust” people. Overall, I think the under 45 group will be fine with Biden because they hate Trump more.

geoffrey.skelley: Data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study suggested that about three-fourths of Sanders’s voters backed Hillary Clinton in 2016. Might that number be higher in 2020? Maybe.

On the one hand, it’s possible that some of the anti-Hillary, conservative Democratic voters that Sanders won in places like Oklahoma and West Virginia are now Republicans who didn’t participate in the 2020 primary. But it’s also possible that a handful of those voters back Biden. For instance, he’s already been doing better than Sanders among white primary voters without a college degree, a group Sanders won handily in 2016.

So the tradeoff for Biden in 2020 may be that he loses youth turnout but gets more votes from suburban moderate types who are older. Given that older voters are more reliable voters, that might be an OK trade for Biden.

nrakich: Yeah, I think there are a lot more votes up for grabs among suburban Romney-Clinton voters than there are among young voters.

Biden winning suburban areas in the primary doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll win them in the general (the actual voters are different — primaries are just a fraction of the general electorate). But as a more moderate candidate who doesn’t rail against the rich, he is likely to appeal more to these more moderate, well-to-do voters than Sanders.

sarahf: That makes sense, especially based on your analysis, Nathaniel, of turnout in the primary so far, but I can’t help but wonder about your other point — voters in the primary are different than the general — so maybe some of Biden’s support among the Romney-Clinton style voters is inflated?

Or the fact that Biden has won rural areas that Clinton did poorly in in 2016 isn’t actually that good of a sign for his coalition in a general election context? So maybe young and very liberal voters will actually be very important to Biden’s coalition?

nrakich: People shouldn’t use primary election results as a portent of the general election. Biden won every county in Michigan in the primary, but he obviously won’t do that in the general. Winning white working-class Democrats isn’t the same as winning white working-class independents or Republicans. That said, I don’t think it’s a bad sign for him that turnout was up so much in highly educated suburban areas.

perry: Biden should try to win older voters and younger voters, moderate voters and liberal voters, and I don’t necessarily see those things as trade-offs. Obama was stronger than Clinton across all kinds of voting blocs in 2008.

So getting younger voters excited about his candidacy is important and useful for Biden. He will likely win the under 45 vote (historically, Democrats do), but growing that margin should be a goal of his campaign.

sarahf: OK, so what does Biden do to actually win over Sanders supporters?

nrakich: Well, the first and most obvious answer is to adopt some of Sanders’s positions. He has already started moving left (although, it should be noted, not as far left as Sanders) on issues like free college tuition — quite savvily, in my opinion, because that is one progressive policy that actually has strong support among all voters, not just Democrats.

geoffrey.skelley: Exactly. That seems like a pretty transparent play for younger voters, and possibly older millennials who like Sanders and who also have kids and are starting to think about how they’ll pay for college some day.

nrakich: Two other progressive positions that Biden could take without alienating general-election voters are coming out in favor of legalizing marijuana and implementing an Elizabeth Warren-style wealth tax.

geoffrey.skelley: Of course, the latter might alienate some donors.

nrakich: True.

I also don’t think Biden will ever fully replace Sanders in many voters’ minds — a lot of Sanders’s appeal is based on his personality and tear-down-the-system rhetoric.

geoffrey.skelley: Yeah, and Biden’s appeal has been that of a safe harbor in a storm — even more so now that we face the new coronavirus threat. He’s interested in reforming the system, not breaking it up and then rebuilding it.

perry: I honestly don’t think Biden has to do much of anything to win the votes of the overwhelming majority of Sanders voters — except to not be Trump. The question is more about, “How does he get them excited?” The danger of Biden is that he is like Clinton in 2016 — he wins the votes of the older, traditional Democrats in the primary, but he is not a candidate people are jazzed about — and that shows up in voter turnout, in donations, in the general mood of the campaign.

Biden can’t be Obama in 2008, but he should avoid being Clinton in 2016 or Kerry in 2004. I think he should aim for a running mate people are really excited to vote for.

geoffrey.skelley: Is that Sen. Kamala Harris? I don’t see it being Sen. Amy Klobuchar.

perry: Geoff, I honestly don’t know who that person is. But I think it should be an Obama-like person — exciting less in terms of policy (the party is divided on policy) but more in terms of persona and charisma.

As I was saying earlier, Biden should focus on energizing “Democrats under 45,” not “Sanders supporters.”

nrakich: The problem is that everyone has a different definition of who is “exciting.” The stereotypical leftist Sanders voter isn’t going to be jazzed about Harris, who has her own problems among the progressive flank. Maybe not even someone like Stacey Abrams, who appeals to the “woke” wing of the party but is certainly closer to Biden than Sanders on policy.

And then there is the fact that it’s debatable how much of an impact vice-presidential candidates even have.

sarahf: That makes sense, Perry, definitely from a messaging vantage point, anyway. But right, to Nathaniel’s point, it’s hard for me to imagine Sanders voters being excited by Harris as his VP pick. But maybe that’s the point — it isn’t about the diehard loyal fans as much as it is about just generally energizing younger voters.

That especially holds true given that turnout in these primaries hasn’t been historic, as many thought it would be.

It’s easy to read too much into the primary and try to apply that to the general election, but the turnout question for 2020 does give me pause, especially if Biden, like you say, is someone the Democratic Party rallies around but isn’t necessarily jazzed about.

nrakich: But how many young voters are against Biden because he’s not far left enough, and how many are against him because they just want a new generation of leadership? I genuinely don’t know.

perry: I think the second group (new generation of leadership) is both bigger and easier to satisfy (because moving left might create electoral problems).

geoffrey.skelley: Right. Pew Research found back in 2017 that while younger Democrats and those who leaned Democratic were more liberal than older Democrats, they weren’t that much more liberal.

sarahf: So how important is party unity for what happens in 2020? As has been said in this chat, in many ways the biggest factor for the Democratic nominee is that they’re not Trump. That said, is there a risk that Democrats don’t rally behind Biden? After all, that was a critique of what happened in 2016, with some arguing Sanders cost Clinton the election. Could that happen again in 2020?

perry: Party unity is super important. But I think Trump will create party unity. Sanders and Warren will eventually be strongly behind Biden. And the biggest difference between 2016 and 2020 is not between Clinton and Biden (they are very similar candidates) but between Trump 2016 (theoretical) and Trump 2020 (a reality Democrats hate). Because of Trump, some of the problems Clinton faced in getting the base behind her won’t be as much of an issue for Biden.

nrakich: Yeah, I think we’ve been getting at this question indirectly. Party unity will be important, sure, but according to the polls cited above, Democrats largely already have it. And some of those Sanders voters who may have cost Clinton the 2016 general election may have just been anti-Clinton voters in the primary as well. It doesn’t seem like there is a rash of anti-Biden protest voting this year.

geoffrey.skelley: It helps to not have been a target of attacks for a quarter century before becoming your party’s nominee.

Also, while we do have some exit-poll data suggesting some Sanders voters might not want to vote for Biden, it’s important to remember that some might answer that question differently once they are no longer in the thick of the primary. I’m reminded of “Party Unity My Ass” Clinton voters (PUMAs) in 2008. Obviously, Democrats were largely unified behind Obama that November.

nrakich: Right, and also, no one asked whether PUMA voters cost Obama that election — he won handily! So it’s clearly possible to win after a divisive primary.

In fact, according to one study, only 70 percent of Clinton voters in 2008 voted for Obama — comparable to, and even a bit lower than, the three-quarters of Sanders voters who we think voted for Clinton in the 2016 general election. So it wasn’t party unity per se that cost Clinton the 2016 election — the party was about equally united in 2008 and 2016. Instead, it was how close the election already was that made the difference. And it could come down to that again in 2020.

[day0one]

Biden wins Michigan, Wisconsin, now on brink of White House  1 hr ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — Joe Biden won the battleground prizes of Michigan and Wisconsin on Wednesday, reclaiming a key part of the “blue wall” that slipped away from Democrats four years ago and dramatically narrowing President Donald Trump's pathway to reelection.

A full day after Election Day, neither candidate had cleared the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the White House. But Biden's victories in the Great Lakes states left him at 264, meaning he was one battleground state away from crossing the threshold and becoming president-elect.

Biden, who has received more than 71 million votes, the most in history, was joined by his running mate Kamala Harris at an afternoon news conference and said he now expected to win the presidency, though he stopped short of outright declaring victory.

“I will govern as an American president,” Biden said. ”There will be no red states and blue states when we win. Just the United States of America."

It was a stark contrast to Trump, who on Wednesday falsely proclaimed that he had won the election, even though millions of votes remained uncounted and the race was far from over.

The Associated Press called Wisconsin for Biden after election officials in the state said all outstanding ballots had been counted, save for a few hundred in one township and an expected small number of provisional votes.

Trump’s campaign requested a recount, thought statewide recounts in Wisconsin have historically changed the vote tally by only a few hundred votes. Biden led by 0.624 percentage point out of nearly 3.3 million ballots counted.

For four years, Democrats had been haunted by the crumbling of the blue wall, the trio of Great Lakes states — Pennsylvania is the third — that their candidates had been able to count on every four years. But Trump's populist appeal struck a chord with white working class voters and he captured all three in 2016 by a total of just 77,000 votes.

Both candidates this year fiercely fought for the states, with Biden's everyman political persona resonating in blue-collar towns while his campaign also pushed to increase turnout among Black voters in cities like Detroit and Milwaukee.

Pennsylvania remained too early to call Wednesday night.

It was unclear when or how quickly a national winner could be determined after a long, bitter campaign dominated by the coronavirus and its effects on Americans and the national economy. But Biden's possible pathways to the White House were expanding rapidly.

After the victories in Wisconsin and Michigan, he held 264 Electoral College votes, just six away from the presidency. A win in any state except for Alaska — but including Nevada with its six votes — would be enough to end Trump’s tenure in the White House.

Trump spent much of Wednesday in the White House residence, huddling with advisers and fuming at media coverage showing his Democratic rival picking up key battlegrounds. Trump falsely claimed victory in several key states and amplified unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about Democratic gains as absentee and early votes were tabulated.

Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien said the president would formally request a Wisconsin recount, citing “irregularities" in several counties. And the campaign said it was filing suit in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia to halt ballot counting on grounds that it wasn't given proper access to observe.

Chester County, Pa. election workers process mail-in and absentee ballots for the 2020 general election in the United States at West Chester University, Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2020, in West Chester, Pa. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)© Provided by Associated Press Chester County, Pa. election workers process mail-in and absentee ballots for the 2020 general election in the United States at West Chester University, Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2020, in West Chester, Pa. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum) At the same time, hundreds of thousands of votes were still to be counted in Pennsylvania, and Trump’s campaign said it was moving to intervene in the existing Supreme Court litigation over counting mail-in ballots there. Yet, the campaign also argued that it was the outstanding votes in Arizona that could reverse the outcome there, showcasing an inherent inconsistency with their arguments.

In other closely watched races, Trump picked up Florida, the largest of the swing states, and held onto Texas and Ohio while Biden kept New Hampshire and Minnesota and flipped Arizona, a state that had reliably voted Republican in recent elections.

The unsettled nature of the presidential race was reflective of a somewhat disappointing night for Democrats, who had hoped to deliver a thorough repudiation of Trump's four years in office while also reclaiming the Senate to have a firm grasp on all of Washington. But the GOP held on to several Senate seats that had been considered vulnerable, including in Iowa, Texas, Maine and Kansas. Democrats lost House seats but were expected to retain control there.

President Donald Trump speaks in the East Room of the White House, early Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)© Provided by Associated Press President Donald Trump speaks in the East Room of the White House, early Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) The high-stakes election was held against the backdrop of a historic pandemic that has killed more than 232,000 Americans and wiped away millions of jobs. The candidates spent months pressing dramatically different visions for the nation’s future, including on racial justice, and voters responded in huge numbers, with more than 100 million people casting votes ahead of Election Day.

Election personnel handle ballots as vote counting in the general election continues at State Farm Arena, Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2020, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)© Provided by Associated Press Election personnel handle ballots as vote counting in the general election continues at State Farm Arena, Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2020, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson) Trump, in an extraordinary move from the White House, issued premature claims of victory — which he continued on Twitter Wednesday — and said he would take the election to the Supreme Court to stop the counting. It was unclear exactly what legal action he could try to pursue.

Eric Trump, left, son of President Donald Trump and wife Lara Trump depart after a news conference on legal challenges to vote counting in Pennsylvania, Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2020, in Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)© Provided by Associated Press Eric Trump, left, son of President Donald Trump and wife Lara Trump depart after a news conference on legal challenges to vote counting in Pennsylvania, Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2020, in Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum) Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell discounted the president’s quick claim of victory, saying it would take a while for states to conduct their vote counts. The Kentucky Republican said Wednesday that “claiming you’ve won the election is different from finishing the counting.”

Play Video Biden wins Michigan, Wisconsin, now on brink of White House Click to expand Vote tabulations routinely continue beyond Election Day and states largely set the rules for when the count has to end. In presidential elections, a key point is the date in December when presidential electors met. That’s set by federal law.

Dozens gathered in Detroit Wednesday afternoon, in a square across from the city’s election commission office. Many wore yellow sweatshirts and carried signs reading “Count Every Vote.” Rai Lanier, one of the organizers, said they had planned the gathering so anxious people could come together and channel that energy into hope.

“This is how democracy is supposed to work,” she said

Several states allow mailed-in votes to be accepted as long as they were postmarked by Tuesday. That includes Pennsylvania, where ballots postmarked by Nov. 3 can be accepted if they arrive up to three days later.

Play Video Biden wins Michigan, Wisconsin, now on brink of White House Click to expand Trump appeared to suggest those ballots should not be counted, and that he would fight for that outcome at the high court. But legal experts were dubious of Trump's declaration. Trump has appointed three of the high court's nine justices including, most recently, Amy Coney Barrett.

Play Video Biden wins Michigan, Wisconsin, now on brink of White House Click to expand The Trump campaign on Wednesday pushed Republican donors to dig deeper into their pockets to help finance legal challenges. Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, during a donor call, spoke plainly: “The fight’s not over. We’re in it.”

Play Video Biden wins Michigan, Wisconsin, now on brink of White House Click to expand The momentum from early voting carried into Election Day, as an energized electorate produced long lines at polling sites throughout the country. Turnout was higher than in 2016 in numerous counties, including all of Florida, nearly every county in North Carolina and more than 100 counties in both Georgia and Texas. That tally seemed sure to increase as more counties reported their turnout figures.

Voters braved worries of the coronavirus, threats of polling place intimidation, and expectations of long lines caused by changes to voting systems, but appeared undeterred as turnout appeared it would easily surpass the 139 million ballots cast four years ago.

——-

[theliberaltony]

via FiveThirtyEight

The 2020 Democratic primary is really an electoral story. Nothing the candidates say about policy on the campaign trail will become law during the campaign.1 But the language of presidential primaries is not electoral — candidates tend not to say, “people of The Left, vote for me, I’m very liberal” or, “Democrats, pick me; sure, I’m progressive, but I’m not so progressive that it ruins my appeal with Republican-leaning independents in the Midwest.”

Instead, the language of presidential primaries is largely one of policy. Sen. Elizabeth Warren proposes a tax on wealth over $50 million and defends that policy on its merits. She doesn’t say out loud the real, immediate goal of the proposal for her — wooing liberal Democratic primary voters concerned about growing income inequality.

The 2020 candidates are likely to talk a lot about policy over the next year — it’s basically how you run for president. And you should pay attention to what they say, but not for the reasons you might think. Here’s a guide to the “policy primary,” with some thoughts from academics and one-time advisers to presidential candidates.2

1. Most importantly, policy proposals matter because the winning candidate will try to implement them as president.

There is a common view that candidates just promise whatever it takes to win and then abandon all those pledges once in office. But political science research has shown over and over again that politicians, including presidents, try to implement their campaign promises, even the more outlandish ones. We just had a record-long partial government shutdown over a campaign pledge that President Trump has unsuccessfully tried to implement — the border wall.3

So, all else being equal, you can expect follow-through from whoever is elected president on many of the policies he or she put forth during the campaign.

2. Even so, pay more attention to broad goals than fine print.

During the 2008 Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both came up with proposals to vastly increase the number of Americans with health insurance. They disagreed on the how: Clinton said a comprehensive new health insurance law should require everyone to have insurance or pay a fine; Obama had no such mandate. You know how this turned out — the law now known as Obamacare included an individual mandate.4 Somewhat similarly, during the 2016 race, Trump’s campaign named 21 people that he would consider appointing to the U.S. Supreme Court. Eventual Trump nominee and now Justice Brett Kavanaugh was not among the 21.

That said, one of the 21 was Neil Gorsuch. And the overall group was full of white, male and fairly conservative legal figures — the exact kind of people Trump has appointed to the Supreme Court and lower courts as president.

“One big takeaway from my research is that the ‘policy primary’ gives us less information about the specifics of the plans that might be on the agenda than it does about what issues are likely to be at the top of the agenda,” said Philip Rocco, a political scientist professor at Marquette University who specializes in research on the policymaking process, in an e-mail message.

Looking forward, therefore, I think it’s safe to assume the Democratic candidates running on Medicare-for-all, if elected, will at the very least push for some kind of program in which uninsured Americans can enroll in a public plan along the lines of Medicare. It’s likely Warren will try to implement some kind of new tax on the very wealthy if she is elected.

3. Rank-and-file voters probably aren’t choosing candidates based on their policy plans.

Generally, “the differences on issues [among candidates] in primaries are not huge,” said Elaine Kamarck, who was a top policy adviser to Al Gore during his 2000 presidential run. So most voters probably will not be able to assess subtle differences on policy issues among the 2020 Democratic contenders. After all, political scientists have found American voters broadly know little about politics and policy.

However, Kamarck argued that voters are often well-informed and passionate about issues that particularly affect their regions or states. So a Democratic primary candidate might do poorly in the primaries in Kentucky or West Virginia if he or she has a plan that voters in those states think will severely harm the coal industry.

4. But the policy plans tell voters about a candidate’s priorities and values — and that probably does matter electorally.

“People are not voting for a package of policy preferences, they’re voting for an individual, and the policies or issues help mark out the kind of person they are,” Mark Schmitt, who was a policy adviser on Bill Bradley’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2000, said in an e-mail message.

So a candidate like Warren or Bernie Sanders with proposals to vastly increase taxes on the wealthy is communicating to voters a persona — “fighting for the little guy,” “taking on the establishment” — that might resonate with voters who are liberal or anti-establishment, even if these voters don’t really know much about, say, marginal tax rates.

Lee Drutman, a scholar at the think tank New America, concluded based on polling data that 2016 Democratic primary voters who preferred Sanders were not significantly more liberal on policy issues than those who backed Hillary Clinton. (Sanders himself certainly was to the left of Clinton.) Instead, voters’ views of the American political system and whether they thought it was fundamentally “rigged” was a strong predictor of which candidate they supported. More anti-establishment Democrats strongly preferred Sanders. That is probably, in part, because his policy proposals, like a single-payer health care system, communicated a break from the more establishment politics of Clinton.

5. Policy details matter to important groups that can offer endorsements — and those endorsements can matter electorally.

In 2016, the National Nurses Association backed Sanders over Clinton, and this wasn’t much of a surprise. The NNA has long pushed for single-payer health care, and Sanders favored that idea and Clinton did not. In making its endorsement, NAA’s leadership specifically noted Sanders’s support of single-payer and his opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an Obama-era trade agreement that Clinton did not oppose as forcefully as Sanders.

So specific issue stands do really matter to key activist groups making endorsements. And that can make an impact electorally. Unions, for example, can organize their members to back candidates. When a Democratic candidate comes out with an education policy plan, that may be an appeal to parents, but it is also likely signaling to teacher unions, a powerful, organized liberal constituency in some states.

“Activists do pay attention” to specific policy ideas and stances, said Andrew Dowdle, a political science professor at the University of Arkansas who has written extensively about the presidential nomination process.

6. Pay more attention to the “flop” than the “flip.”

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have been criticized for supporting overly punitive approaches to criminal justice in the past, Cory Booker for promoting charter schools, Kirsten Gillibrand for backing conservative immigration legislation, Sanders for opposing some gun control measures earlier in his career. I could go on. The Democratic Party has moved decidedly to the left in recent years, so many of the 2020 presidential candidates have, in their past, violated some of the party’s new tenets.

Scrutinizing candidate’s past records is a big part of any nomination contest. But it may not be a particularly useful exercise in predicting what these candidates would do on policy if elected president. (Note the emphasis on policy — Bill Clinton’s philandering and Trump’s lying before entering office were fairly useful predictors of what came later.)

These candidates are politicians, after all. They probably were taking stands in the past that reflected a mix of conviction and political expediency. Biden likely believed that the “crime bill” he sponsored in 1994 (and is now slammed as helping lead to the over-incarceration of African-Americans) was good policy (it was endorsed by a lot of black political leaders too). I suspect he also thought the legislation was in the political mainstream, helping him to rise up the ranks of the Democratic Party.

David Karol, an expert on the presidential nomination process who teaches at the University of Maryland, told me these “flip-flops” by candidates are often explained by their changing constituencies. He referred specifically to Gillibrand, who was first elected in 2006 in a relatively moderate district in upstate New York before becoming the senator for the entire state, which is fairly liberal-leaning.

“It’s hard to know whether the politician ‘really’ believed in their position at Time 1 or Time 2,” Karol said.

Either way, Democratic elected officials have moved away from a tough-on-crime approach and the party’s voters are now very pro-immigration . I have no doubt a President Biden would govern on criminal justice policy more like how he sounds in 2019 than he did in 1994, and that a President Gillibrand would be more pro-immigration than Candidate Gillibrand in 2006.

The obvious example here is Trump, who took some fairly liberal stands in earlier phases of his life but has generally followed GOP orthodoxy as president, as he promised to do on many issues during his 2016 campaign.

President Ronald “Reagan’s promises on abortion were far better predictors of his policies than his more pro-choice past as California’s governor were. Al Gore was pro-gun and anti-abortion at one point in his career when it made sense for a white southern Democrat to be so. But his campaign promises were better predictors,” Seth Masket, a University of Denver political scientist who is currently writing a book about presidential primaries, said in an e-mail message.

So the bottom line: Take what the presidential candidates are saying on the campaign trail seriously and literally. But more seriously than literally.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Sen. Kamala Harris of California, who officially said she is running for president in an announcement on Good Morning America on Monday, has the potential to be among the strongest contenders in the Democratic field. There may be no other candidate who better embodies how the modern Democratic Party has changed over the last few decades in identity and ideology.

Harris, the daughter of an India-born woman and a Jamaica-born man, spent much of her childhood in Berkeley, California, before going to college at Howard University. She was the first woman, first person of South Asian descent and first black person to be elected district attorney in San Francisco. In that job, she irritated one of the Bay Area’s most influential Democrats, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, by refusing to push for a death sentence for a man accused of killing a police officer because of Harris’ personal opposition to capital punishment. In endorsing Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2007, she broke with much of the state’s political establishment, which was then behind Hillary Clinton. Harris, as a senator, has embraced the causes of the party’s liberal wing on issues of gender and racial equality. She gave a speech last year criticizing people who say Democrats spend too much time and energy on “identity politics.”

In short, post-Obama, the Democratic Party is increasingly the party of women and the “woke”, and Harris’ biography and politics align well with where the party has moved.

So Harris could have broad appeal across the Democratic primary electorate. You can see that in my colleague Nate Silver’s analysis of how each potential 2020 candidate might appeal to five key constituencies in the primary — Harris comes out looking stronger than any other potential candidate:

Her biography and record make it easy to imagine Harris doing well with African-Americans, who likely will represent about one-in-five primary voters in the Democratic primary electorate, as well as Asian-Americans. Harris narrowly lost the Latino vote in her 2016 election to a fellow Democrat1 who is Mexican-American (Loretta Sanchez), but there isn’t any particular reason to think she is disliked by Latino voters. The way Harris is likely to position herself on policy issues during the campaign — liberal as any candidate on noneconomic issues but not as liberal on economic issues as, say, Bernie Sanders — echoes Hillary Clinton’s platform in 2016 (Harris’ sister Maya was Clinton’s policy director.) So I’m sure party loyalists, particularly black voters and older women, who backed Clinton will give serious consideration to Harris. The California senator is not particularly young (54), but you could imagine millennials galvanizing around electing the first Asian and first female president in the same way they embraced Obama in 2008. (We’ll come back to The Left in a moment.)

Moreover, looking at the current primary calendar,2 I’m not sure about her prospects in Iowa and New Hampshire (more on that in a bit), but the order of the states is set up well for Harris after that. The third contest is in Nevada, a state that borders California, so voters there may more familiar with Harris than other candidates. South Carolina is next, and African-Americans will likely constitute a majority of voters there.

After those four early contests, nine states are currently scheduled to vote on March 3, and that could be a great day for Harris. Those nine primaries and caucuses include California — Harris’ home state, which also has a large Asian-American population — as well as four states in which the Democratic electorate will likely be more than a quarter black:

The racial breakdown of the March 3 primaries

Percentage of Democratic voters by race according to 2016 exit polls

State Asian Black Latino White Alabama 1% 54% 1% 40% California* 11 9 26 56 Massachusetts 4 4 6 85 North Carolina 1 32 3 62 Oklahoma 1 14 4 74 Tennessee 1 32 2 63 Texas 3 19 32 43 Vermont 1 1 0 95 Virginia 2 26 7 63

*No exit poll was conducted for California in the 2016 Democratic primary; these figures come from a pre-election Field Poll that found top-line results well in line with the actual vote. The Field Poll also released results by race with “Asian” and “Other” respondents combined; that number is the one shown here.

Sources: Edison Research, Field Poll, Pew REsearch Center

Also in terms of her strengths, Harris has stood out among colleagues during Senate hearings, putting her prosecutorial skills on display with her sharp and quick questioning of witnesses. Debate performances can really matter in primaries, and the hearing performances suggest she might be strong in debates.

She’ll need to be. To be clear, all of Harris’ strengths outlined above are really potential strengths. In most national primary polls conducted so far, she’s been in the single digits. Those polls mostly reflect a lack of national name recognition, but Harris will have to build her support almost from scratch. And a lot could go wrong for her.

The biggest potential problem for Harris may be that her campaign simply never really catches on with voters. Despite seeming to reporters like me to be a strong candidate on paper, Harris could be the 2020 Democratic version of Marco Rubio or Scott Walker, who both struggled in the GOP’s 2016 primary despite being hyped for years as potential GOP nominees because of their potential to appeal to a broad swath of their party.

After all, Harris likely will be competing for attention with a lot of candidates. And if she doesn’t do well in one of the first two contests, in mostly white Iowa and mostly white New Hampshire, then I don’t think there is any guarantee African-American voters or even California voters will get behind her. Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey or former Vice President Joe Biden (his close relationship with Obama will help) could become the top choice among black voters — or African-Americans could split their votes among several candidates. I think a candidate who won Iowa and another early state and had momentum could carry Harris’ home state of California.

Harris’ performances in Iowa and New Hampshire are also relevant in regard to a second challenge for the California senator: Overcoming doubts from some Democrats about her “electability.” As I have written before, research on elections does not support the idea that female candidates do worse than male ones. Black and Latino candidates seem to do slightly worse with white voters but boost turnout among their identity groups, so the story is complicated there too. But discussions of electability are often used as a cudgel against candidates who are not male, Christian and/or white, because such candidates are perceived as having less appeal to swing voters. Right now, some prominent Democrats are publicly fretting about nominating a woman in 2020, fearing the American electorate is too sexist to elect a female candidate and voters with sexist views will find Trump’s persona and politics appealing, as they did in 2016. And some Democrats privately say they are even more concerned that swing voters in the Midwest won’t embrace a black woman. Harris has to worry that Democrats might decide she is too “risky” and embrace one of the male candidates mainly for this reason.

To be clear, this is a surmountable problem. Some African-American voters were doubtful of Obama’s viability in a general election in 2008 — until he won the Iowa caucuses. This is both an unfair part of the process (why should a minority candidate have to do well in a state with basically no minorities to prove viability) and kind of an odd one (winning the Democratic caucuses in Iowa does not tell you that much about a candidate’s ability to win the general election.) But I tend to think Democratic voters will be much less focused on Harris’ perceived electability if she wins a lot of voters in Iowa or New Hampshire.

Third, I expect Harris to struggle with The Left. Some voters in this group are broadly wary of criminal prosecutors, arguing they have played a key role in America’s much-maligned criminal justice system. Harris’ professional life has been as a prosecutor and some on the left already are highlighting what they view as flaws in her record — being too hard on low-level offenders of crimes like truancy but not aggressive enough in taking on those accused of white-collar offenses, for example.

Harris can overcome The Left if she is strong among other blocs of the party. But if she wins a few primaries, I can see liberals casting her as too establishment and opposing her fiercely, similar to how this bloc unsuccessfully tried to stop Clinton in 2016.

Overall, I would not be surprised if Harris won the nomination. But I don’t see her as the favorite. She ranks No. 1 in some betting markets, but with so many candidates, “the field” is really favored against any individual contender.