theatlantic--2020-01-09--Democrats’ Future Is Moving Beyond the Rust Belt

“ If Democrats can make that pivot , they are in the driver ’ s seat for a long time to come , because these Sun Belt states are the growing states , ” William Frey , a demographer at the Brookings Institution , told me .
The challenge facing Democrats is that while the demographic trends are more favorable for them in the Sun Belt , the political attitudes among the white population specifically are not .
This could expose the party to the same risk in 2020 that I wrote about on Election Day 2016 : that the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Belt will crumble faster than its new coalition coalesces in the Sun Belt .
If that happens , it could leave Democrats just short in enough key states in both regions to allow Trump to win reelection , even if he loses the total popular vote by a greater margin than he did last time .
While Democrats posted significant gains in both areas in the 2018 elections , in many ways their Sun Belt victories were more striking because they showed the party improving in places it had not successfully competed in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Houston , Dallas , and Phoenix .
Some strategists are now warning that the Democrats ’ intense focus on Michigan , Wisconsin , and Pennsylvania shouldn ’ t distract them from efforts to advance from those Sun Belt beachheads in 2020 .
They ’ re especially concerned because the results of state legislative races in the region will determine redistricting processes , which will shape the political competition in those states for the next decade .
“ It ’ s hard not to be obsessed with the three states that tipped the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s also easy to be fighting the last war , ” says Vicky Hausman , a co-founder of Forward Majority , a group working to elect Democrats to state seats .
“ I think our job right now is to sound the alarm that there is insufficient attention and focus and investment , particularly at the legislative level … in these Sun Belt states .
And Democrats around the country have a clear interest in making smart investments there.
” The continued growth of the Sun Belt is the biggest takeaway from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Bureau released in late December .
They were the last before the 2020 decennial census , which will be used to reapportion both congressional seats and Electoral College votes among the states .
Using these estimates , Kimball Brace , the president of the nonpartisan political-data firm Election Data Services , has calculated that seven states are on track to gain House seats and Electoral College votes , while 10 are in position to lose them .
( New distributions would first affect the 2022 midterm elections and later the 2024 presidential contest @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trump in 2016 would make a net gain of three Electoral College votes , while the states that voted for Hillary Clinton would lose three , a modest partisan shift in all .

The partisan and generational struggles for control of the nation’s direction will be decided in the Sun Belt instead.
For Democrats, the Sun Belt imperative is growing more urgent.
While most in the party are preoccupied with winning back the three Rust Belt states that tipped the 2016 election to Donald Trump, both people and political power are continuing to migrate inexorably from that region to the younger and more diverse states in the Southeast and Southwest.
This sustained population shift reinforces the consequences of Trump’s political repositioning of the Republican Party. Trump has targeted his polarizing message and agenda heavily toward the priorities of the older and non-college-educated white voters who still dominate most of the Rust Belt. That will make it tough for Democrats to rely on those states, particularly in presidential races, as much as they did during the 1990s and earlier this century.
In the near future, then, Democrats will likely need to offset any Republican gains in the Rust Belt by winning more elections in Sun Belt states, which are adding more of the diverse, white-collar, and urbanized voters at the core of the modern Democratic coalition. Through the coming decade and beyond, the crucial variable that could tilt the national balance of power between the parties may be whether Democrats can leverage those demographic advantages in the Sun Belt to break the hold Republicans have enjoyed on most of the region since at least the 1970s.
“If Democrats can make that pivot, they are in the driver’s seat for a long time to come, because these Sun Belt states are the growing states,” William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, told me.
The challenge facing Democrats is that while the demographic trends are more favorable for them in the Sun Belt, the political attitudes among the white population specifically are not. This could expose the party to the same risk in 2020 that I wrote about on Election Day 2016: that the Democrats’ old coalition in the Rust Belt will crumble faster than its new coalition coalesces in the Sun Belt. If that happens, it could leave Democrats just short in enough key states in both regions to allow Trump to win reelection, even if he loses the total popular vote by a greater margin than he did last time.
Read: Democrats’ two roads to beating Trump
While Democrats posted significant gains in both areas in the 2018 elections, in many ways their Sun Belt victories were more striking because they showed the party improving in places it had not successfully competed in before, including the suburbs of Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, and Phoenix. Some strategists are now warning that the Democrats’ intense focus on Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania shouldn’t distract them from efforts to advance from those Sun Belt beachheads in 2020. They’re especially concerned because the results of state legislative races in the region will determine redistricting processes, which will shape the political competition in those states for the next decade.
“It’s hard not to be obsessed with the three states that tipped the election to Donald Trump, but it’s also easy to be fighting the last war,” says Vicky Hausman, a co-founder of Forward Majority, a group working to elect Democrats to state seats. “I think our job right now is to sound the alarm that there is insufficient attention and focus and investment, particularly at the legislative level … in these Sun Belt states. And Democrats around the country have a clear interest in making smart investments there.”
The continued growth of the Sun Belt is the biggest takeaway from the new population estimates that the Census Bureau released in late December. They were the last before the 2020 decennial census, which will be used to reapportion both congressional seats and Electoral College votes among the states.
Using these estimates, Kimball Brace, the president of the nonpartisan political-data firm Election Data Services, has calculated that seven states are on track to gain House seats and Electoral College votes, while 10 are in position to lose them. (New distributions would first affect the 2022 midterm elections and later the 2024 presidential contest.) The states that voted for Trump in 2016 would make a net gain of three Electoral College votes, while the states that voted for Hillary Clinton would lose three, a modest partisan shift in all.
But on a regional basis, the new numbers have profound implications. Brace projects that Texas will add three House seats and Florida two, while North Carolina, Arizona, and Colorado will add one each. The losers are mostly concentrated across the Northeast and upper Midwest: New York, Rhode Island, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, and Minnesota are all on track to lose a seat.
The reapportionments after both the 2000 and 2010 censuses produced comparable shifts in representation from the Northeast and Midwest to the Sun Belt. If the projections for 2020 prove accurate, it will mean that since the start of this century, more than 30 seats and Electoral College votes will have shifted from the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt, with no Rust Belt state gaining a seat at any point. A map from Election Data Services tracking the cumulative impact of reapportionment from 1910 through 2010 captures an even more dramatic shift of power and population to the Sun Belt states.
Election Data Services
Not long ago, most political observers would have viewed these trends as an unqualified threat to Democrats because the party has relied so heavily on states across the Northeast and Midwest, especially in presidential races. And that’s still true in one respect: Democrats remain dominant in the Northeast states and, thus, are hurt by the population trends draining seats from New England and the mid-Atlantic.
But the steady decline of the Midwest now has consequences for both parties because those states are so integral to Trump’s political strategy. From immigration and trade to race relations and gun control, Trump has focused his agenda on maximizing the GOP’s support among older, blue-collar, nonurban, and Christian white voters, groups that remain powerful, even preponderant, across the Midwest, even as they’re shrinking as a share of the national population. That emphasis helped him flip a total of five Rust Belt states that voted for Barack Obama in 2012, including the three he dislodged from the Democrats’ “blue wall”: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
Read: Trump’s reelection is sitting on a knife’s edge
But if Brace’s projections are right, in this century those five states will shed a combined 13 Electoral College votes. Put another way: Trump is steering the GOP toward greater reliance on the Rust Belt precisely as the region’s overall electoral clout is receding. That’s a geographic parallel to the demographic trade Trump has imposed on his party by trying to squeeze bigger margins out of voter groups that are dwindling.
The price for this trade is the resistance he’s triggered among younger people, voters of color, and college-educated white voters, all of them concentrated in the nation’s major metropolitan areas—and prominent in the Sun Belt.
But even as those groups helped power Democratic victories in 2018, Republicans have still maintained their overall advantage in most southeastern and southwestern states. That trend suggests Republicans are unlikely to conclude that Trump has set the party on an unsustainable course until Democrats prove they can consistently win elections there.
The possible swing states in the Sun Belt look more favorable for Democrats than their Rust Belt counterparts do on virtually every key demographic measure that now divides the parties.
Consider racial diversity in the six Sun Belt states that both sides view, to varying degrees, as potential battlegrounds this year: North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida in the Southeast, and Texas, Arizona, and Nevada in the Southwest.
According to Frey’s calculations, across those six states, nonwhite people already constitute a majority of the population ages 18 to 64 in Texas and Nevada; almost exactly half of that group in Arizona, Georgia, and Florida; and about two-fifths in North Carolina. While white people still compose most of the senior population in each of those states (except Texas), minorities represent most of the under-18 population in all of them (except North Carolina). That means that with each passing year, the population eligible to vote in those states will tilt more toward racial minorities at a time when Trump’s mission for the GOP has deeply antagonized them. “That’s really where all the growth is in all of these states,” Frey told me.
The picture looks very different in the six Rust Belt states that both sides have historically viewed as battlegrounds: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and Ohio (though the final two appear very steep climbs for Democrats against Trump). In all of them, Frey found, white people constitute about three-fourths or more of the 18-to-64 population and at least 84 percent of the senior population. Well over half of the people under age 18 are white as well.
Other demographic measures point toward the same divergence. Using census data, Frey has calculated that white voters without a college degree—one of Trump’s core constituencies—cast a bigger share of the vote in 2018 in each of the Rust Belt battlegrounds than they did in any of the Sun Belt swing states. White Christians are also much more heavily represented in the Rust Belt than the Sun Belt, according to poll results from the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute.
But two factors above all have prevented Democrats from fully capitalizing on favorable Sun Belt trends. One is a persistent problem mobilizing the growing population of minority voters, especially young ones, to turn out. Comparing the past two midterm elections, in 2014 and 2018, Democrats saw gains among black voters in the Southeast and Latinos in the Southwest. But Latino participation in particular remains well below the level for white voters, and experts say it’s unclear that 2020 will show much improvement.
Stephanie Valencia, a co-founder and the president of EquisLabs, a Democratic firm studying Latino voters, told me that dislike of Trump “is not enough” to guarantee bigger turnout. “Democrats cannot afford to rest on the fact that Latinos hate Trump and question his moral character and question his handling of the issues that matter to them,” she said. “We need an aspirational vision of what this country can be, and not just how we are going to stop Trump from being president.”
The other challenge facing Democrats is that both non-college-educated and college-educated white voters in the Sun Belt have traditionally leaned more conservative than they do in the Rust Belt. In 2018 exit polls, Trump’s approval rating among both groups was higher in the Sun Belt than in the Rust Belt, with the gap especially wide among college-educated white voters.
Read: Brace for a voter-turnout tsunami
Still, Democrats’ wins in suburban House races across the Sun Belt—as well as the results of the Senate contests in Texas, Arizona, and Nevada—showed clear cracks in the once-impregnable Republican dominance among white-collar Sun Belt voters.
Hausman argues that Democrats must now try to capitalize on those openings and capture state legislative chambers there. Frey agreed, noting that having control of redistricting could provide Republicans their final “wall” against the growing diversity that is mostly driving the population growth in the Sun Belt. Focusing primarily on suburban seats within major metropolitan areas, Hausman’s group is mounting an effort to flip Republican-controlled chambers in Texas, Arizona, North Carolina, and Florida.
Democrats are focusing heavily on those same diverse and white-collar areas this year as they target Republican-held House seats in North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas, as well as GOP-controlled Senate seats in Arizona, Colorado, Texas, and Georgia. On the presidential level, they envision Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina as fallbacks if they can’t recapture any of the Rust Belt battlegrounds from Trump. (Democrats are also hoping to significantly improve their presidential performance in Texas and Georgia, though both remain long shots for 2020.)
Nicole McCleskey, a New Mexico–based Republican pollster, acknowledged to me that a recoil from Trump, particularly among women, has hurt the GOP in the Southwest suburbs. But she remains optimistic that the GOP can hold Texas and Arizona in both the Senate and presidential contests, noting that Republicans easily carried the governor’s elections in both states last year, despite the nationwide Democratic tide.
Once those suburban voters “put a face to what the Democratic Party is really about, it becomes a much more uphill struggle for them,” she told me. “In these suburban areas, when you start talking about what does Medicare for All mean for you, cost for you, I think it changes the face of what this election is about.”
One of the core underlying dynamics of modern American politics—what Frey has called “the cultural generation gap” and I have termed the collision between the “brown and the gray”—is the ongoing political battle between the predominantly white, conservative-leaning older generations, centered on the Baby Boom, and the more diverse and more liberal Millennial and younger generations.
The Sun Belt is where this confrontation is unfolding most directly: In states such as Texas, Arizona, and Nevada, Frey’s calculations show, white people compose at least twice as great a share of the over-65 population as they do of the population under 18.
The principal battlefield of the 2020 election may remain Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. But the unstinting population shifts that the census recorded last month make it inevitable that the partisan and generational struggles for control of the nation’s direction will be decided more and more in the Sun Belt.


theatlantic--2020-01-09--A New Nuclear Era Is Coming

A New Nuclear Era Is Coming

Iranian missile attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq .
Deadly chaos in Iran .
A sudden halt of the fight against the Islamic State .
Utter confusion over whether U.S. troops will remain in Iraq , and even whether the United States still respects the laws of war .
The fallout from the Trump administration ’ s killing of Qassem Soleimani has been swift and serious .
But one potential knock-on effect may not come into clear view for some time : the emergence of Iran as the next nuclear-weapons state , at the very moment when the world appears @ @ @ @ @ @ @ nuclear age .
It ’ s possible that the Reaper drone hovering over Baghdad ’ s airport last week destroyed not only an infamous Iranian general , but also the last hope of curbing Iran ’ s nuclear ambitions .
Before he ’ d even said “ good morning ” during an address to the nation yesterday , Donald Trump vowed that Iran would “ never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon ” as long as he ’ s president of the United States .
Yet as he urged other world powers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and the Obama administration negotiated with Iran , and that Trump withdrew the U.S. from in 2018 , he offered no details on his plan to obtain a better deal .
When the Iranian government announced that it would suspend more ( though not yet all ) of its commitments under the nuclear agreement , in a move made after Soleimani ’ s death but planned beforehand , I recalled something Richard Burt , the U.S. diplomat behind the largest nuclear-weapons reduction in history , told me back in 2018 .
He noted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he negotiated the START I treaty with the Soviet Union , people were acutely aware of the existential dangers of a nuclear conflict .
That ’ s no longer the case , he warned .

We’ve gone from the first decade since the advent of the atomic age to not yield a new nuclear-weapons state to the brink of war between the U.S. and Iran.
Iranian missile attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq. Deadly chaos in Iran. A sudden halt of the fight against the Islamic State. Utter confusion over whether U.S. troops will remain in Iraq, and even whether the United States still respects the laws of war. The fallout from the Trump administration’s killing of Qassem Soleimani has been swift and serious.
But one potential knock-on effect may not come into clear view for some time: the emergence of Iran as the next nuclear-weapons state, at the very moment when the world appears on the cusp of a more perilous nuclear age. It’s possible that the Reaper drone hovering over Baghdad’s airport last week destroyed not only an infamous Iranian general, but also the last hope of curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Before he’d even said “good morning” during an address to the nation yesterday, Donald Trump vowed that Iran would “never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon” as long as he’s president of the United States. Yet as he urged other world powers to abandon the nuclear deal that they and the Obama administration negotiated with Iran, and that Trump withdrew the U.S. from in 2018, he offered no details on his plan to obtain a better deal.
When the Iranian government announced that it would suspend more (though not yet all) of its commitments under the nuclear agreement, in a move made after Soleimani’s death but planned beforehand, I recalled something Richard Burt, the U.S. diplomat behind the largest nuclear-weapons reduction in history, told me back in 2018. He noted that in the ’80s, when he negotiated the START I treaty with the Soviet Union, people were acutely aware of the existential dangers of a nuclear conflict. That’s no longer the case, he warned.
“No one is focusing on the fact that the existing framework for nuclear control and constraints is unraveling” and giving way to “unrestrained nuclear competition,” Burt observed. What we’re witnessing, he argued, is not some sort of creative destruction, in which an outdated Cold War framework is being discarded in favor of a more modern one. It’s “just destruction.”
Read: A bigger foreign-policy mess than anyone predicted
Indeed, we’ve gone from the first decade since the advent of the atomic age to not yield a new nuclear-weapons state to, in the first days of 2020, the brink of war between the world’s leading nuclear power and a nuclear aspirant. The Trump administration is now poised to face at least two simultaneous nuclear crises along with an escalating and unprecedented tripartite nuclear-arms race, all of which will threaten the miraculously perfect track record of nuclear deterrence since 1945. Even if there are no nuclear tests or exchanges in the year ahead, the systems, accords, and norms that have helped mitigate the risks of nuclear conflict are vanishing, ushering in a more hazardous era that the United States won’t be able to control.
Consider what has transpired in the past year alone:
A newly unconstrained Iranian nuclear program: Iran has gradually cast off the shackles of the 2015 nuclear agreement following Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the pact, though it is still cooperating with international inspectors and leaving itself space to return to compliance if the United States lifts sanctions against Tehran. Experts estimate that with the recent steps away from the deal, the time that Iran would need to generate enough fuel for a nuclear bomb could decrease from roughly a year to a matter of months.
Iran has gradually cast off the shackles of the 2015 nuclear agreement following Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the pact, though it is still cooperating with international inspectors and leaving itself space to return to compliance if the United States lifts sanctions against Tehran. Experts estimate that with the recent steps away from the deal, the time that Iran would need to generate enough fuel for a nuclear bomb could decrease from roughly a year to a matter of months. An emerging North Korean nuclear-weapons power: The North Korean leader Kim Jong Un vowed over New Year’s to further advance his nuclear-weapons program, which is already likely sophisticated enough to threaten the whole world, after nuclear talks with the United States fell apart. The targeted killing of a top Iranian official, just a few years after the Iranians struck the nuclear accord with the United States, will probably only reinforce Kim’s belief that the only way for his regime to avoid a similar fate is to cling to its nuclear weapons. The former North Korean diplomat Thae Yong Ho told me he’s concerned Kim could go well beyond that in the coming year, perhaps declaring that the U.S. economic blockade of his country has left his nation no choice but to survive by selling nuclear and missile technologies to other parties, including U.S. adversaries.
The North Korean leader Kim Jong Un vowed over New Year’s to further advance his nuclear-weapons program, which is already likely sophisticated enough to threaten the whole world, after nuclear talks with the United States fell apart. The targeted killing of a top Iranian official, just a few years after the Iranians struck the nuclear accord with the United States, will probably only reinforce Kim’s belief that the only way for his regime to avoid a similar fate is to cling to its nuclear weapons. The former North Korean diplomat Thae Yong Ho told me he’s concerned Kim could go well beyond that in the coming year, perhaps declaring that the U.S. economic blockade of his country has left his nation no choice but to survive by selling nuclear and missile technologies to other parties, including U.S. adversaries. The specter of other countries going nuclear: Failing efforts to denuclearize North Korea and broker a better nuclear deal with Iran, coupled with concerns among U.S. allies about Trump’s commitment to providing for their security against these adversaries, have generated talk of Japan, South Korea, Australia, and Saudi Arabia exploring nuclear weapons of their own rather than relying on America’s nuclear deterrent. In a forecast of possible geopolitical risks in 2020, published a couple of weeks before Soleimani’s killing, two scholars at the Atlantic Council predicted that South Korea and Australia, “already pondering nukes, may move to the next stage of actively considering them in 2020, as may Japan. If the Iran nuclear crisis is not resolved, expect the Saudis to buy or rent a nuke from Pakistan.”
Failing efforts to denuclearize North Korea and broker a better nuclear deal with Iran, coupled with concerns among U.S. allies about Trump’s commitment to providing for their security against these adversaries, have generated talk of Japan, South Korea, Australia, and Saudi Arabia exploring nuclear weapons of their own rather than relying on America’s nuclear deterrent. In a forecast of possible geopolitical risks in 2020, published a couple of weeks before Soleimani’s killing, two scholars at the Atlantic Council predicted that South Korea and Australia, “already pondering nukes, may move to the next stage of actively considering them in 2020, as may Japan. If the Iran nuclear crisis is not resolved, expect the Saudis to buy or rent a nuke from Pakistan.” Emboldened nuclear states in South Asia: Clashes between India and Pakistan in February 2019, sparked by an attack on Indian security forces by Pakistani militants in the disputed territory of Kashmir, didn’t go nuclear. But they did escalate to an Indian air strike on a terrorist training camp in Pakistan—an act the nuclear experts Nicholas Miller and Vipin Narang have described as “the first ever attack by a nuclear power against the undisputed sovereign territory of another nuclear power.” These were nuclear powers with growing arsenals, no less.
Clashes between India and Pakistan in February 2019, sparked by an attack on Indian security forces by Pakistani militants in the disputed territory of Kashmir, didn’t go nuclear. But they did escalate to an Indian air strike on a terrorist training camp in Pakistan—an act the nuclear experts Nicholas Miller and Vipin Narang have described as “the first ever attack by a nuclear power against the undisputed sovereign territory of another nuclear power.” These were nuclear powers with growing arsenals, no less. The demise of U.S.-Russian arms control: Blaming Russian violations of the agreement and the unfairness of China not being a party to it, the United States officially withdrew in August from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which banned an entire class of ground-launched nuclear weapons. The Trump administration has also signaled that it may not renew New START, a 2010 successor to START I that’s due to expire next year and limits the number of nuclear warheads that the U.S. and Russia can deploy on longer-range missiles. The hope is that this will free up the United States to reach a more comprehensive deal that includes China, but so far that idea seems fantastical. A New START lapse would do away with the only remaining nuclear-arms-control treaty. It would also mark the first time since 1972 that America and Russia, which together account for more than 90 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads, haven’t had any legally binding restrictions on their nuclear forces.
Blaming Russian violations of the agreement and the unfairness of China not being a party to it, the United States officially withdrew in August from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which banned an entire class of ground-launched nuclear weapons. The Trump administration has also signaled that it may not renew New START, a 2010 successor to START I that’s due to expire next year and limits the number of nuclear warheads that the U.S. and Russia can deploy on longer-range missiles. The hope is that this will free up the United States to reach a more comprehensive deal that includes China, but so far that idea seems fantastical. A New START lapse would do away with the only remaining nuclear-arms-control treaty. It would also mark the first time since 1972 that America and Russia, which together account for more than 90 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads, haven’t had any legally binding restrictions on their nuclear forces. The outbreak of great-power competition: The collapse of the INF Treaty coincides with heightened rivalry among the United States, China, and Russia, threatening to accelerate their budding nuclear-arms race. They’re already investing heavily in modernizing their nuclear arsenals and in new technologies such as hypersonic glide vehicles, which evade missile defenses; cyberweapons against command-and-control systems; and artificial intelligence to incorporate into those systems. Meanwhile, the U.S.-China trade war hacks away at the economic interdependence that has helped deter conflict between the two nuclear-armed superpowers.
Read: Inside the collapse of Trump’s Korea policy
These dismal circumstances follow substantial advances in halting the spread of nuclear weapons. In the ’60s, the decade in which the most new nuclear states emerged (France, China, and, unofficially, Israel), John F. Kennedy predicted that there would be “15 or 20” nuclear powers by 1975. Today there are nine, a rate of about one to two entrants into the nuclear club per decade, with the latest being North Korea in 2006. The nuclear-security scholar Jim Walsh has noted that three-fourths of countries that were once interested in developing nuclear weapons ultimately chose not to do so, and that since the ’90s, more states have given up nuclear weapons than acquired them.
The number of nuclear weapons in the world, moreover, has dropped from more than 70,000 in 1986 to fewer than 14,000 today because of arms-control efforts. (That’s still enough, of course, to kill billions of people and envelop the world in a nuclear winter. When it comes to nuclear nonproliferation, progress is only heartening when expressed in relative terms.)
Most of the reductions in these weapons, however, occurred in the ’90s, and the pace of cuts has slowed ever since. We now live in a period when the barriers to acquiring nuclear weapons, a 75-year-old technology, are much lower than they once were. It’s also a time when, as James Holmes of the U.S. Naval War College once explained to me, there are more nuclear-weapons states “of different shapes and sizes … [and] different trajectories,” making the “geometry” of nuclear deterrence “far more complex and harder to manage” than during the comparatively symmetrical Cold War.
Read: The new concept everyone in Washington is talking about
Add to that the fading memory of the Cold War and fiercer competition among the great powers, and it’s no surprise that the guardrails on the world’s most destructive weapons are disappearing.
The past year may be remembered “as the turning point from an era of relative calm” to “the dawn of a dangerous new nuclear age,” Miller and Narang wrote last month in Foreign Affairs. The consequences could be “catastrophic.”


theatlantic--2020-01-09--The Atlantic Politics Daily: The World’s Nuclear Guardrails Are Vanishing

2 .
The Iran nuclear deal of 2015 seemed to gesture at the end of the country ’ s nuclear ambitions—at least in the short term .
That agreement was dying even before the Qassem Soleimani strike , after President Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of it , leading Iran to renege some of the commitments it made under the deal .
Now Iran may be a matter of months away from a working nuclear bomb .
3 .
It ’ s not just Iran .
North Korea is also helping bring about this new era .
Trump ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Kim Jong Un was “ Rocket Man ; ” Trump , a “ dotard ” ) .
Then the two heads of state seemed to develop a better relationship ( “ he wrote me beautiful letters ” ) .
The relationship has since broken down spectacularly : North Korea has tested more missiles since May than perhaps any other year in its history .
Now experts predict a slew of countries may be pondering nukes as well .
Supporters of the ERA in Richmond , Virginia today .
( Steve Helber / AP @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the news .
When an off-year election in Virginia flipped the state legislature blue last November , buzz revived around the concise amendment that ’ s struggled for decades to conjure up support from enough states .
Virginia is the 38th and final state needed to sign off on a constitutional revision “ that was first proposed shortly after women won the right to vote but has , until recently , been dormant for decades , ” Russell Berman wrote last fall .
1 .
“ With some exceptions , a consensus @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that the Soleimani strike was illegal.
” Though the Constitution grants Congress the power of declaring war , the executive branch has spent the last few decades swallowing up new war powers .
Legal scholar Rebecca Ingber outlines the ways Congress can use its power of the purse and reform a 1973 law called the War Powers Resolution to wrestle back control .
2 .
“ Far from being given an exhaustive record on which to make a determination , the Senate has received only part of the story from the House.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trump impeachment has seen no strenuous criminal investigation into Trump ’ s dealings with Ukraine—and neither Trump nor key witnesses have testified under oath .
That ’ s where the Senate comes in .
That ’ s what trials are for , Paul Rosenzweig writes .
3 .
“ In the near future Democrats will likely need to offset any Republican gains in the Rust Belt by winning more elections in Sun Belt states.
” If 2020 Census projections hold steady , this century will see a swing in power from the Rust @ @ @ @ @ @ @ focused on winning over , to the southern Sun Belt states they are mostly neglecting , Ron Brownstein writes .
Donald Trump is seen on a television screen in the Pentagon briefing room as he delivers a statement about Iran at the White House .
( ALEXANDER DRAGO / REUTERS )

The thin hope of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons may be gone. Plus: “I know the man well enough to know that’s something he dreamed up all by himself.”
It’s Thursday, January 9. 176 people died in a downed civilian airliner leaving Tehran on Wednesday. Details are still emerging.
In today’s newsletter: The dawning of the age of … nuclear proliferation? Plus: Virginia and the Equal Rights Amendment, and a theory of Trump’s thinking on Iran.
*
« TODAY IN POLITICS »
Anti-war activists protest in front of the White House. (ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP / GETTY)
The decades-long era of nuclear nonproliferation might meet its stark end this year.
Among the most dangerous of the possible outcomes in the U.S.-Iran conflict is the emergence of another nuclear-weapons state, in a dangerous new nuclear age. The thin hope of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear capabilities may have been destroyed.
“We’ve gone from the first decade since the advent of the atomic age to not yield a new nuclear-weapons state to, in the first days of 2020, the brink of war between the world’s leading nuclear power and a nuclear aspirant,” my colleague Uri Friedman writes.
Here’s how we got here—and what comes next.
1. The arms race of the atomic era calmed in the last decade. Nine countries ended up developing nuclear weapons (John F. Kennedy had predicted that there would be “15 or 20” countries by 1975). And the total number of nuclear weapons in the world plummeted from 70,000 in 1986 to fewer than 14,000 today.
2. The Iran nuclear deal of 2015 seemed to gesture at the end of the country’s nuclear ambitions—at least in the short term. That agreement was dying even before the Qassem Soleimani strike, after President Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of it, leading Iran to renege some of the commitments it made under the deal. Now Iran may be a matter of months away from a working nuclear bomb.
3. It’s not just Iran. North Korea is also helping bring about this new era. Trump’s presidency began with name calling (Kim Jong Un was “Rocket Man;” Trump, a “dotard”). Then the two heads of state seemed to develop a better relationship (“he wrote me beautiful letters”). The relationship has since broken down spectacularly: North Korea has tested more missiles since May than perhaps any other year in its history.
Now experts predict a slew of countries may be pondering nukes as well.
—Saahil Desai
*
« SNAPSHOT »
Supporters of the ERA in Richmond, Virginia today. (Steve Helber / AP)
The Equal Rights Amendment is back in the news. When an off-year election in Virginia flipped the state legislature blue last November, buzz revived around the concise amendment that’s struggled for decades to conjure up support from enough states.
Virginia is the 38th and final state needed to sign off on a constitutional revision “that was first proposed shortly after women won the right to vote but has, until recently, been dormant for decades,” Russell Berman wrote last fall.
*
« IDEAS AND ARGUMENTS »
(WANA NEWS AGENCY / REUTERS)
1. “With some exceptions, a consensus appears to be emerging among war-powers scholars that the Soleimani strike was illegal.”
Though the Constitution grants Congress the power of declaring war, the executive branch has spent the last few decades swallowing up new war powers. Legal scholar Rebecca Ingber outlines the ways Congress can use its power of the purse and reform a 1973 law called the War Powers Resolution to wrestle back control.
2. “Far from being given an exhaustive record on which to make a determination, the Senate has received only part of the story from the House.”
Unlike the Clinton impeachment process, the Trump impeachment has seen no strenuous criminal investigation into Trump’s dealings with Ukraine—and neither Trump nor key witnesses have testified under oath. That’s where the Senate comes in. That’s what trials are for, Paul Rosenzweig writes.
3. “In the near future Democrats will likely need to offset any Republican gains in the Rust Belt by winning more elections in Sun Belt states.”
If 2020 Census projections hold steady, this century will see a swing in power from the Rust Belt states that many Democrats have been focused on winning over, to the southern Sun Belt states they are mostly neglecting, Ron Brownstein writes.
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« EVENING READ »
Donald Trump is seen on a television screen in the Pentagon briefing room as he delivers a statement about Iran at the White House. (ALEXANDER DRAGO / REUTERS)
Inside the Mind of Trump
In a span of a few days this week, Trump went from blasting off a tweet vowing to target cultural sites in Iran—which would be a war crime—to delivering a statement urging for de-escalation.
Our White House correspondent Peter Nicholas has three theories about how the president arrives at the ideas he arrives at, based on extensive reporting from the past week.
I posed the cultural-sites question to Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a Trump confidant who was briefed in advance on the Soleimani drone strike during a golf trip with the president at Mar-a-Lago over the holidays. Graham told me that he didn’t know where Trump got the idea.“I understand it’s an emotional time and he wants to create maximum deterrence. In my view, this doesn’t create deterrence. The goal is to divide the Iranian people from the regime. They’re already divided. I wouldn’t want to do anything to unite them. A former White House official, who, after insisting that no one in the national-security establishment could possibly have advised the president to demolish, say, the ruins of Persepolis, told me: “I know the man well enough to know that’s something he dreamed up all by himself.”
Read the rest.
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theatlantic--2020-01-10--Pete Buttigieg Ran. Eric Garcetti Didn't.

Which is a sort of self-flattering thing to say .
In the meantime , Buttigieg—who responded to the Los Angeles mayor in Iowa by saying , “ I ’ m happy to be known as the younger , gayer version of Eric Garcetti anytime ” —was preparing to walk out onstage at the December presidential debate , while Garcetti was failing to be recognized by patrons at the juice bar .
“ Garcetti must be kicking himself ” is something I ’ ve heard a lot of Democratic observers say to one another , about what he must be thinking @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mayor of a considerably smaller town sitting comfortably in the top tier of presidential candidates .
If Cory Booker has been having a hard time distinguishing himself in the presidential race as “ the other Rhodes Scholar mayor , ” Garcetti—who first met Booker in 1993 , when the future New Jersey senator welcomed him to their dorm at Oxford—has become the other other Rhodes Scholar mayor , the one who didn ’ t run for president .
Read : How to run for president while you ’ re running a city While @ @ @ @ @ @ @ can cobble together a real coalition to make it past Iowa , and Booker struggles to qualify for the next debate , Garcetti is hoping for a consolation prize : the opportunity to be a key Democratic power broker in 2020 .
Now that Kamala Harris , his home-state junior senator , is out of the race , he ’ s free to endorse whomever he pleases in advance of California ’ s primary , on Super Tuesday .
Beyond that , he ’ s been putting out feelers to Democratic National Committee @ @ @ @ @ @ @ himself as a player in an expected platform fight at the Democratic convention in July .
A committed group of California Democrats mock him and see this as the latest example of him being too convinced of his own cleverness and potential , but he ’ s serious about seeing himself as having enough stature to be important .
“ There ’ s really only two scenarios for the convention : Nobody has a majority or it ’ s a really close finish and you have a lot of people that need to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ told me .
“ And not resolving either of those risks losing this whole thing .
And that would be a very Democratic thing to do.
” Garcetti is ambitious .
Before Buttigieg came along , he might have been considered precocious .
The son of a Los Angeles district attorney who became nationally known for prosecuting O. J. Simpson , Garcetti was a city councilor at age 30 , mayor at 42 , and a player in national Democratic politics by age 44 .
In 2015 , he hosted a dinner at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ vice president was contemplating a presidential run , and the following year he was on the long list of potential running mates for Hillary Clinton .
By the time Donald Trump reached the White House , Garcetti had his eyes on his own presidential run .
When I talked to him in New Hampshire in August 2017 , he claimed that he was just taking a break from a vacation in the Berkshires—but most people wouldn ’ t break off their vacation to campaign on behalf of the Democratic candidate running for mayor @ @ @ @ @ @ @ themselves to the young Democrats there , unless they had their eyes on New Hampshire for other reasons .

LOS ANGELES—Eric Garcetti would like to apologize for the cliché. We are in a juice bar in Brentwood, California, and the mayor of Los Angeles is singing along to the Coldplay song on the sound system. He loves this song, he tells me. He’s having tea. It’s all very Southern California.
A year ago, he was finalizing preparations for a presidential run, telling me that mayor was the perfect position from which to run for president, and that he didn’t think managing his city from Iowa would be an issue. He had a team in place and he was all set to declare. And then … he announced at the end of January 2019 that he wasn’t going to do it, citing his obligations to Los Angeles and the time he wanted to spend with his young daughter.
Last month, he was in Waterloo, Iowa, at a presidential forum he had helped organize, finishing his final candidate introduction of the night by pointing out that he, like the candidate, is also a Rhodes Scholar mayor who plays piano and served in the Office of Naval Intelligence. “I’m the older, straighter Pete Buttigieg,” he joked.
Now Garcetti is telling me that Buttigieg’s unexpectedly strong showing in the polls so far is vindication of his own almost-candidacy. “It’s nice to have Pete be like my mayoral avatar, to show that the theory was correct and that there is, I think, a hunger for a new, outside-Washington mayoral leadership,” he said.
Which is a sort of self-flattering thing to say. In the meantime, Buttigieg—who responded to the Los Angeles mayor in Iowa by saying, “I’m happy to be known as the younger, gayer version of Eric Garcetti anytime”—was preparing to walk out onstage at the December presidential debate, while Garcetti was failing to be recognized by patrons at the juice bar. “Garcetti must be kicking himself” is something I’ve heard a lot of Democratic observers say to one another, about what he must be thinking in response to seeing the considerably younger mayor of a considerably smaller town sitting comfortably in the top tier of presidential candidates. If Cory Booker has been having a hard time distinguishing himself in the presidential race as “the other Rhodes Scholar mayor,” Garcetti—who first met Booker in 1993, when the future New Jersey senator welcomed him to their dorm at Oxford—has become the other other Rhodes Scholar mayor, the one who didn’t run for president.
Read: How to run for president while you’re running a city
While Buttigieg struggles to convince people that he can cobble together a real coalition to make it past Iowa, and Booker struggles to qualify for the next debate, Garcetti is hoping for a consolation prize: the opportunity to be a key Democratic power broker in 2020. With Kamala Harris, his home-state junior senator, is out of the race, he was freed to endorse whomever he pleased, and yesterday announced he was endorsing Joe Biden. (“Democrats are blessed to have such an extraordinary field of candidates,” Garcetti said in a statement, “but I will never forget what Joe Biden has done for my city and our nation.) Beyond that, he’s been putting out feelers to Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez in hopes of positioning himself as a player in an expected platform fight at the Democratic convention in July. A committed group of California Democrats mock him and see this as the latest example of him being too convinced of his own cleverness and potential, but he’s serious about seeing himself as having enough stature to be important.
“There’s really only two scenarios for the convention: Nobody has a majority or it’s a really close finish and you have a lot of people that need to be brought on board,” Garcetti told me. “And not resolving either of those risks losing this whole thing. And that would be a very Democratic thing to do.”
Garcetti is ambitious. Before Buttigieg came along, he might have been considered precocious. The son of a Los Angeles district attorney who became nationally known for prosecuting O. J. Simpson, Garcetti was a city councilor at age 30, mayor at 42, and a player in national Democratic politics by age 44. In 2015, he hosted a dinner at his house for Joe Biden when the vice president was contemplating a presidential run, and the following year he was on the long list of potential running mates for Hillary Clinton. By the time Donald Trump reached the White House, Garcetti had his eyes on his own presidential run. When I talked to him in New Hampshire in August 2017, he claimed that he was just taking a break from a vacation in the Berkshires—but most people wouldn’t break off their vacation to campaign on behalf of the Democratic candidate running for mayor of Manchester, taking time to introduce themselves to the young Democrats there, unless they had their eyes on New Hampshire for other reasons.
While the 2020 race has set a record for the largest number of candidates, it has also featured a number of people who got varying degrees of close to running and then balked, such as Sherrod Brown and Mitch Landrieu. (It has also featured three candidates who got close to running, balked, then un-balked and got in late: Tom Steyer, Deval Patrick, and Michael Bloomberg). For the most part, the people who flirted publicly with running and then didn’t, or those who ran and then dropped out, have had their reputations suffer for it, with Washington Governor Jay Inslee, whose brief campaign transformed him into a nationally recognized leader on climate change, being the exception. For his part, Garcetti, having declined to try to build a national profile via a presidential campaign, has managed to build one anyway, via becoming a leader among mayors, working on addressing climate change, and advocating on behalf of Latino issues.
Today, Garcetti says that he’s happy he didn’t run, that he’s pleased with the way things have worked out. That he feels like he’s making progress with his city’s homelessness crisis, which would have almost certainly haunted his presidential campaign. That he’s spending time promoting cities as the economic and innovative engines of the nation, using a nonprofit he started, Accelerator for America, to bring together city, union, and business leaders. (Buttigieg was an early member—in fact, Garcetti launched the nonprofit in November 2017 at the same decommissioned Studebaker factory in South Bend, Indiana, where Buttigieg formally launched his campaign last April.) That he’s taken to sending new mayors an email of advice, which now runs five pages long. That maybe if he didn’t have an 8-year-old daughter, the timing would have been better suited for a presidential run. That maybe if he were in the last year of his mayoral term (as Buttigieg was before his term ended on New Year’s Day), he would have been more comfortable being an absentee executive.
Still, sometimes Garcetti can’t hide his wistfulness. It was evident one night in December, at the Dolby Theatre, in Hollywood, where the DNC held a big fundraising dinner on the stage that was built for the Oscars. Having been there the night before for the Rise of Skywalker premiere, Garcetti launched his welcome speech at the dinner with some corny Star Wars jokes. “I just want to tell you a couple of the spoilers,” he said. “Rey’s father is baby Yoda.” From there, he segued into a speech about how, while Hollywood tells the stories, real America plays out on the streets of Los Angeles. “We won’t win simply because of our policies and our prescriptions,” he said. “We will win because of our people. And when the American people feel like we hear them, listen to them, we will take back the White House.” It’s not America first, but Americans first. “Ladies and gentlemen, are you ready to rise up?”
Read: Eric Garcetti isn't expecting much from Washington
“Sounds like the stump speech he thought he’d be giving,” someone said to me as Garcetti wrapped up.
Yes, that was the stump speech, Garcetti told me at the juice bar. That’s his vision for America— “the Trump White House versus the rest of us”—and he’s not going to stop offering it just because he’s getting calls and visits from Biden and Bloomberg and Andrew Yang, who were vying for his endorsement. Garcetti told me that four different campaigns had reached out to see if he was endorsing Bloomberg, after he said something nice about the former New York mayor at an event the morning before we spoke. (He wasn’t.) When we spoke in late December, he told me that he still hadn’t figured out which candidate he wanted, or which one he thought could win—but by Thursday of this week he had evidently gained enough clarity to announce that he was endorsing Biden.
What does all this mean for his own future? He still talks about a presidential run as a possibility sometime down the road. In the near term, he’s not really qualified for one of the big Cabinet jobs—State, Defense, Treasury, attorney general. “To be HUD secretary or Transportation at some point might be interesting—but not at this point in my career, because it’s kind of like the last job that you have,” he said. He doesn’t want to “get off the elected track.” The Senate seat that Dianne Feinstein currently holds will become open in 2024—presumably she won’t run for reelection at 91—but other ambitious Californians have their eyes on that too, including Attorney General Xavier Becerra and Secretary of State Alex Padilla, and possibly Representative Adam Schiff. In the meantime, Garcetti, who won his last election in 2017, got an extra year tucked into his second term, until 2023, because Los Angeles changed its election date to align with statewide elections.
But seriously, I asked him, aren’t there times he regrets sitting out in 2020? Like when he sees junior peer Buttigieg follow him onstage at the Dolby Theatre to thunderous applause? Or when he watches the debates?
“All the time, I think of great lines that I would, like, insert for my friends—or that I’d say myself, if I were up there. But that’s different than saying, ‘I wish I were out there.’”


theatlantic--2020-01-10--The Electability Argument Elizabeth Warren Isn’t Making

The question for her , then , is whether she ’ s willing to try turning a weakness into a strength by dusting off a piece of her past and making it not merely a whispered admission , but a central part of the story she tells voters .
Yes , I was a Republican , and this is why I ’ m not anymore .
Warren ’ s reluctance so far suggests she thinks that chapter is something to apologize for .
Perhaps she should embrace it instead .
The conservative streak that Katrina Cochran remembers was still with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the young law professor made the biggest jump of her fledgling academic career and moved from the University of Houston to the larger and more prestigious UT Austin .
Indeed , Warren ’ s conservativism might have helped her land the job in the first place .
Russell Weintraub , then a law professor at UT Austin , recruited Warren after seeing her teach .
He told colleagues that “ she was the smartest person in Houston , and we should hire her if we could , ” Johnson recalled to me @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ways , Johnson said .
She did not graduate from Harvard or Yale , where UT Austin usually recruited from , but from Rutgers Law School , in New Jersey—an institution whose reputation for activism had earned it the nickname “ the People ’ s Electric Law School.
” It was , as Johnson put it , “ a left-wing former night school in the downtown of Newark with a left-wing faculty and a left-wing student body.
” Warren was decidedly not left-wing .
She had studied under the conservative legal scholar Henry @ @ @ @ @ @ @ free-market “ law and economics ” discipline he founded , which “ became something of a fad , ” says Julius Getman , a UT Austin law professor who was a friend and jogging partner of Warren ’ s .
( It was at a conference known as Manne Camp that Warren met her second and current husband , Bruce Mann . )
Johnson , who has stayed intermittently in touch with Warren over the years , told me he suspected that UT Austin hired Warren in part because it wanted the law-and-economics @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I think we looked down our nose at her because she ’ s from Rutgers , ” he said , “ and we [ hired ] her because she [ wrote ] well with supply-and-demand curves from a conservative point of view.
” When Johnson arrived at UT Austin , in 1981 , he lived about a block away from the house Warren was renting , and the two of them spent their morning commutes fiercely debating economic policy as Mann drove them to work .
“ We would have no social niceties @ @ @ @ @ @ @ would immediately get into largely bashing each other , ” he said .
“ Bruce is a sweet guy , and he would drive , but he never said a word .
It was just Liz and I going at it.
” On the surface , the recollections of Warren ’ s colleagues about a young woman in the early ’ 80s fiercely defending the primacy of the free market suggest that the senator now trying to grab the Democratic mantle was a supporter of Ronald Reagan , who won the presidency on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it ’ s hard to imagine a Democratic Party that has re-embraced a central role for government nominating a former Reaganite as its candidate .
But Warren told The Intercept last year that although she voted for the Republican Gerald Ford in 1976 , she backed President Jimmy Carter ’ s reelection in 1980 .

Katrina Cochran can still remember clearly how her close friend Liz Herring would needle her about her liberal politics when the two would sit next to each other at Northwest Classen High School in Oklahoma, and during the years after.
“Besides the Democratic Party,” Herring, whose success on the debate team would win her a college scholarship, would say, “what other subversive organizations are you a member of?”
A half century later, Liz Herring is now Elizabeth Warren, and she’s running for the presidential nomination of the party she once derided. Warren’s upbringing in Oklahoma is a major part of her stump speech: She talks about how her father’s poor health forced her mother into the workforce in the 1960s and nearly cost the family their house; how she married at 19 and lost her first teaching job after she became pregnant; how her Aunt Bee saved her when she was struggling to balance the demands of motherhood and her burgeoning career in academia. She discusses her three older brothers, making sure to note that all of them were in the military and that two of them are Republicans. What Warren rarely—if ever—mentions, however, is that during this entire formative period of her adult life, she herself was a conservative. “She was very against a lot of governmental controls,” Cochran, who remained close with Warren through her 20s, told me. “She thought people should have the right to make all the money they could.”
Among longtime liberals, Warren’s political history could present a liability as the race nears its first votes. Unlike some of her top rivals, she cannot claim to have been fighting in the trenches of progressive politics for decades. Yet that very fact could, at the same time, be appealing to less ideological voters who may know little about Warren’s biography from before she burst onto the national political scene. Hers is the story of a convert, not a zealot. The decision to become a Democrat was anything but a default choice; she came to it only after years of study that challenged her more conservative assumptions about how the economy and the government worked. And as Warren seeks to expand beyond her liberal base, that rarely mined part of her past could serve as a comfort to Democrats who worry about her electability, or as a point of connection with independents and moderate Republicans who may not know that, for a long time, she was actually one of them.
Read: A nation of pundits
Warren has this in common with the previous Democratic presidential nominee. Hillary Clinton, just two years older than Warren, famously began her political life as a “Goldwater girl” in high school in the 1960s. But while Clinton’s flirtation with the right was brief, Warren’s was not. Though she was not politically active, well into the ’80s Warren was espousing the views of an ascendant conservative legal movement that championed free markets over the intervention of government regulation, her colleagues from the time told me. In scholarly papers and policy debates with her law-school comrades, Warren regularly took the side of corporations over consumers. “She drank the Kool-Aid. She definitely believed in that,” recalled Calvin Johnson, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a former neighbor and commuting buddy of Warren’s.
Though Warren’s views began to shift in the mid-’80s, she did not become a Democrat until 1995, when she was 46 years old. She was, in comparison to her top rivals in the presidential race, a Johnny-come-lately to progressivism: By the time Warren finally made her switch, Joe Biden had already run for president once and spent a quarter century as a Democrat representing Delaware in the Senate. And while Bernie Sanders, in the early ’90s, was fighting as a member of the House for a “national health-insurance program” like the one Warren is now embracing, she was still a registered member of the party that successfully defeated it.
It’s hardly surprising that Warren wouldn’t broadcast her history of economic conservatism as she tries to win over a primary electorate full of progressives. And so far, Warren’s rivals haven’t brought it up directly; instead, they’ve lightly criticized her past work for corporate clients. But with the contest intensifying, it may be only a matter of time until Warren’s fellow Democrats weaponize her GOP history.
The question for her, then, is whether she’s willing to try turning a weakness into a strength by dusting off a piece of her past and making it not merely a whispered admission, but a central part of the story she tells voters. Yes, I was a Republican, and this is why I’m not anymore. Warren’s reluctance so far suggests she thinks that chapter is something to apologize for. Perhaps she should embrace it instead.
The conservative streak that Katrina Cochran remembers was still with Warren when, in the early 1980s, the young law professor made the biggest jump of her fledgling academic career and moved from the University of Houston to the larger and more prestigious UT Austin. Indeed, Warren’s conservativism might have helped her land the job in the first place.
Russell Weintraub, then a law professor at UT Austin, recruited Warren after seeing her teach. He told colleagues that “she was the smartest person in Houston, and we should hire her if we could,” Johnson recalled to me.
But Warren stood out in other ways, Johnson said. She did not graduate from Harvard or Yale, where UT Austin usually recruited from, but from Rutgers Law School, in New Jersey—an institution whose reputation for activism had earned it the nickname “the People’s Electric Law School.” It was, as Johnson put it, “a left-wing former night school in the downtown of Newark with a left-wing faculty and a left-wing student body.”
Warren was decidedly not left-wing. She had studied under the conservative legal scholar Henry Manne and was a follower of the free-market “law and economics” discipline he founded, which “became something of a fad,” says Julius Getman, a UT Austin law professor who was a friend and jogging partner of Warren’s. (It was at a conference known as Manne Camp that Warren met her second and current husband, Bruce Mann.)
Johnson, who has stayed intermittently in touch with Warren over the years, told me he suspected that UT Austin hired Warren in part because it wanted the law-and-economics discipline represented on its faculty. “I think we looked down our nose at her because she’s from Rutgers,” he said, “and we [hired] her because she [wrote] well with supply-and-demand curves from a conservative point of view.”
When Johnson arrived at UT Austin, in 1981, he lived about a block away from the house Warren was renting, and the two of them spent their morning commutes fiercely debating economic policy as Mann drove them to work. “We would have no social niceties, no small talk, and we would immediately get into largely bashing each other,” he said. “Bruce is a sweet guy, and he would drive, but he never said a word. It was just Liz and I going at it.”
On the surface, the recollections of Warren’s colleagues about a young woman in the early ’80s fiercely defending the primacy of the free market suggest that the senator now trying to grab the Democratic mantle was a supporter of Ronald Reagan, who won the presidency on that platform. Forty years later, it’s hard to imagine a Democratic Party that has re-embraced a central role for government nominating a former Reaganite as its candidate. But Warren told The Intercept last year that although she voted for the Republican Gerald Ford in 1976, she backed President Jimmy Carter’s reelection in 1980.
She has described herself as politically disengaged at the time. “When I was a young mom, I was struggling to keep up with my job, get dinner on the table, take care of my two little ones,” Warren said in response to written questions I sent her about her voting habits and political views over time. “I had been a policy person for a long time, but I didn’t think much about politics.”
Warren’s colleagues told me that although they frequently engaged in wonky discussions about economic policy, they didn’t talk much about national politics, and never heard her say whom she voted for. “She certainly was a conservative, but very much of a moderate one,” recalled Jay Westbrook, Warren’s longtime research partner and co-author. “She was a person who cared about people, who cared about the government looking out for people who needed help. But at the same time, she was somebody who was not in favor of high government spending and that sort of thing.”
More than three decades later, Johnson remembers Warren arguing that courts should not intervene to settle contract disputes, and taking the side of public utilities that didn’t want to pass along to consumers the benefits of a generous tax break. It was, he said, “industry pap.” Johnson told me he was surprised that a former Rutgers student came down so firmly on the side of industry. “Nobody at that school would take that side,” he said. “Everybody should have been on the side of the consumer, and she was anti-consumer. She bought the industry position hook, line, and sinker.”
Read: Elizabeth Warren’s definition of capitalism
But within just a few years, Warren’s political conversion began. Her shift from skeptic to staunch consumer advocate is one that she has been willing to speak and write about over the years—including during this campaign. After becoming a full-time professor at UT Austin in 1983, she began working on bankruptcy research that would not only catapult her to the top of her field, but also transform her view of consumer rights, the very issue on which she built her political career.
Bankruptcies were increasing in the ’80s, and Warren, Westbrook, and the sociologist Teresa Sullivan set out to study their causes. In her 2014 memoir, A Fighting Chance, Warren acknowledged that she brought certain preconceptions to the research. “I might not have said so at the time, but I think I was on the lookout for cheaters and deadbeats as a way to explain who was filing for bankruptcy,” she wrote.
What they found shook the future lawmaker: After reviewing thousands of cases of family bankruptcies, going to bankruptcy courts, and consuming heart-rending questionnaires in which people described in detail the reasons for their financial ruin, “we learned that nearly 90 percent were declaring bankruptcy for one of three reasons: a job loss, a medical problem, or a family breakup,” Warren wrote.
“She went through what I think is the most powerful transformation, which is actually doing research and discovering that what you believed was wrong,” Getman told me. As Warren told an interviewer in 2007, “I did the research, and the data just took me to a totally different place.”
If the data changed Warren’s views on bankruptcy, it was the opposition of the credit industry, and ultimately members of Congress, to reform proposals inspired by the same data that appeared to shift her politics over a longer period of time. Warren’s introduction to Washington, D.C., did not come until 1995, when she joined Harvard’s faculty. She reluctantly agreed to a request from an old Oklahoma friend, Democratic Representative Mike Synar, to serve on the National Bankruptcy Review Commission, which was charged with making policy recommendations to Congress. The culture she discovered is the one she now rails against: The consumer-credit industry, its lobbyists, and its allies in Congress—some Democrats, but mostly Republicans—wanted to reduce, not strengthen, protections for people declaring bankruptcy. “It made her deeply unhappy,” Westbrook told me. “She felt that these were a lot of half-truths and flat falsehoods, and that got her dander up.”
It was during this period that Warren officially changed her registration and became a Democrat. “When Congress was working to reform our nation’s bankruptcy laws, I watched as every single Republican lined up with the big banks and a lot of Democrats joined them too,” she told me in her written responses. “But it was also only Democrats who stood with people who have lost everything because of medical problems, job loss, or family break-up.” (Her campaign would not provide a detailed history of her party registration and voting habits before she registered as a Democrat for the first time, in 1995, saying only that she was an independent “at times” and a registered Republican at others.)
By the time Warren fully emerged as a public figure more than a decade later, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, she left no doubt about where she stood politically. She sparred with Republicans—and some business-friendly Democrats in the Obama administration—as the appointed watchdog of the federal bailout of banks and large financial firms. She became a hero to progressives after she came up with the idea for—and fought hard for the creation of—the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And when Senate Republicans made clear that they would block her nomination to lead the new agency, she went home to Massachusetts to run for the Senate. Three decades after Warren arrived at UT Austin singing the gospel of the free market, the last strains of her conservatism had long since faded away.
After The New York Times published a piece on Warren’s political history, in late August, Johnson emailed her the article, in which he is quoted describing her progressive transformation as “Saul on the road to Damascus.” He included a note saying that he thought the piece would win her votes, he told me.
Warren, however, did not see it that way. “Why did you have to call me ‘savagely anti-consumer’?” the senator replied, according to Johnson’s retelling. Ever the debater, she defended her views from decades ago, arguing that she “was trying to help out consumers through the free market.” After another round of emails, Warren told her old sparring partner, “Well, we'll just have to work it out during another semester of commuting in.”
It’s easy to see why Warren would be so defensive—and so hesitant to broadcast her ideological evolution. Her life before politics has been the source of her biggest political headache: Warren’s claim of Native American ancestry over the years erupted as a controversy during her first run for the Senate, in 2012, as Republican Senator Scott Brown ran ads accusing her of lying about her ethnicity. The flap resurfaced briefly again in 2018, after she released the results of a DNA test in an attempt to prove her claim. (According to a Boston Globe investigation that year, there’s little evidence that Warren’s ancestry claim helped advance her academic career.) And with Donald Trump having given her the racist nickname Pocahontas, it promises to reemerge this year if she’s the nominee.
While the controversy over her lineage hasn’t torpedoed her career, it does illuminate how Warren’s unorthodox path to political stardom makes her both an outsider at the age of 70 and an object of mystery.
Not only did she enter politics relatively late in her career, but Warren was not even a public figure for most of her adult life. Americans did not grow up with her voice as the soundtrack to their Sunday-morning breakfast, as Biden’s was for so many viewers of Meet the Press or Face the Nation. Nor were they likely to have read glowing profiles of her business success, as they did in the case of Trump or Michael Bloomberg.
That previous anonymity has allowed Warren more freedom to introduce herself to voters, but it has also led to criticism (which her fans see as sexist) that she has been overly selective, and even deceptive, in the way she tells her story. Her Republican past goes unmentioned not only in her stump speech, but also in her 2014 memoir and other books of hers that contain considerable biographical detail. She’s discussed it in the occasional interview, but rarely voluntarily.
“I think the Native American thing has robbed her of her ability to talk about” major parts of her past, Colin Reed, a Republican strategist who served as a top aide to Brown, told me.
Yet her reticence to dive more fully into her political transformation could be a missed chance to tell a compelling story of the converted: how a young academic studied the data and went from being suspicious of, if not outright hostile toward, the rights of consumers to conceiving and then building an entire federal agency devoted to protecting them. Warren did mention her shift on the narrow issue of bankruptcy policy when she released a plan this week to overhaul federal laws in favor of consumers. But that was as far as she went; she made no reference to her affiliation as a Republican or her broader conservative worldview at the time.
Read: Where does Elizabeth Warren actually stand in the race?
The question of whether Warren should talk more about her past conservatism is admittedly a tricky one; she wouldn’t, for example, want to give progressives who are still torn between her and Sanders more reason to be suspicious of her. One old Warren colleague doesn’t think much of the idea: former Representative Barney Frank, the retired Massachusetts congressman and liberal stalwart who worked closely with Warren as he was developing the bill that created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. “That’s not a good way to win over Democratic voters,” Frank told me when I asked him if she should talk more about her Republican past. “I don’t think that makes any political sense at all.”
Yet some political strategists I spoke with said that Warren should embrace her political conversion.
“For Elizabeth Warren, this is a tremendous opportunity to reach beyond her progressive base,” Daniel Schnur, a longtime Republican strategist, told me.
Schnur said that Warren’s move left reminded him of Reagan’s move right. A longtime Democrat who led the Screen Actors Guild as a Hollywood actor, Reagan famously explained his political evolution by saying, “The Democratic Party left me.” By the time he ran for president, he was so deeply aligned with the conservative movement that his liberal past helped him win over Democrats and independents more than it hurt him with lifelong Republicans.
“A more centrist Republican would have been attacked for a history in the Democratic Party,” Schnur said. “But a more conservative leader, like Reagan, was able to use it to soften his edges with swing voters without sacrificing his credibility with the Republican conservative base.”
The same could be true for Warren on the Democratic side. Her raft of detailed and deeply progressive policy proposals has given her credibility on the left, but there’s evidence that her agenda is scaring off more moderate voters. And it may limit her ability to reach suburban voters—many of whom may be current or lapsed Republicans—who have become disaffected with Trump and whom Democrats are targeting in 2020. It’s that pool of voters in particular that was so crucial to the Democrats’ victory in the House in 2018 and for whom Warren’s political-conversion story could be most appealing. Many voters who see her only through the prism of her recent biography—the Harvard professor turned progressive senator—may see themselves in a once-conservative woman who moved to the center and then further left over many years.
“It's finding that common ground,” says Katie Paris, a Democratic strategist unaligned with any 2020 candidate. “I think that by talking about the change that happened in her life, she creates permission for others to also have change in their own lives.”
Paris, who recently founded the group Red, Wine, and Blue to mobilize suburban women in Ohio ahead of the 2020 election, told me that many of the women who have switched to voting Democrat in the Trump era were, like Warren, not particularly engaged politically earlier in their life and shifted their views after learning more about the issues. Warren’s story, she said, “could potentially really resonate with a lot of women because they're going through a similar process themselves right now.”
Whether a deeper focus on Warren’s biography can overcome the concerns that centrist and swing voters have about her policies is a tougher question. Her rise to the top of the Democratic primary polls has stalled recently. “I was stupid and then I became educated isn't a great political narrative,” says Matt Bennett, an executive vice president of Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank. “The biggest thing she's got to do, quite frankly, is jettison Medicare for All.”
Warren’s commitment to a detailed policy agenda makes the idea that she’d ditch one of her core proposals nearly impossible to fathom. And while that would surely threaten her support among staunch progressives, a bigger focus on her political history might not. “To the extent that it's brought up by others, it actually reinforces the electability argument for Elizabeth Warren,” says Adam Green, whose Progressive Change Campaign Committee endorsed her candidacy early on in the race, “by making clear that while her progressive bona fides on challenging corporate power and standing up for workers is unquestioned, she also has the additional cred in the general election of having once affiliated as a Republican, as having cross-party appeal.”
Perhaps Warren is saving the story of her political transformation for a later moment in the campaign, if and when she dispatches her competitors and can move on to the broader electorate. Perhaps she’ll weave it into her stump speech, another layer to her journey from Oklahoma to Harvard, and from academia to politics. Or maybe Warren sees this all differently, and this part of her backstory is exactly where she wants it—offstage and in the past, a personal relic that’s not to be embraced or spun, but simply left aside.