Month: June 2019

Win one (sort of), lose one
by Tom Sullivan

The Supreme Court’s Thursday rulings on adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census and partisan gerrymandering was probably the best Democrats could hope for from the Roberts court. Win one (sort of), lose one.

In a mixed decision, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in Department of Commerce v. New York that the Commerce Department’s stated reason for adding the citizenship question was a pretext and impermissible. That was already obvious. Less obvious is what happens now. The court ruled Commerce and Secretary Wilbur Ross have the discretion to add the question but had to provide a valid reason for doing so and did not.

“In these unusual circumstances,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “the district court was warranted in remanding to the agency, and we affirm that disposition.” Translation: “No Do Overs” unless you’re a Republican.

The acting president and Ross are in Japan for the G20 summit, but Trump issued some directives via tweet to delay the census “no matter how long” until Commerce can satisfy the court.

…..United States Supreme Court is given additional information from which it can make a final and decisive decision on this very critical matter. Can anyone really believe that as a great Country, we are not able the ask whether or not someone is a Citizen. Only in America!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 27, 2019

Rick Hasen writes at Slate that Commerce might muster additional explanations for adding the question that could still meet muster:

But whatever the reason, the agency will likely act quickly to rehabilitate its pretexual ruling. The agency has said that printing had to begin in July, but plaintiffs challenging inclusion of the question have long claimed the real deadline is October. The government will surely concede now that October is doable. The agency could come back with new reasons, and the part of Roberts’ opinion joined by the conservatives which recognizes the broad agency discretion to include the question for non-pretextual reasons will be front and center.

If the agency moves to include the question again, the case will be back before the Supreme Court. It would likely be joined by the other case coming out of the Fourth Circuit arguing that the inclusion of the question violated the equal protection clause because it was based on a racially discriminatory purpose. The court did not address the equal protection holding Thursday, despite the outrageous urging of the solicitor general for the court do to so without briefing. Assuming the Commerce Department moves forward with trying to include the question on the 2020 census, the Fourth Circuit could well keep this case alive to create a record of the racial motivations for inclusion of the original question.

TPM reports the government has until Monday to back down or else face another round of discovery in the case. U.S. District Judge George Hazel has already reopened the case after emergence of the Thomas B. Hofeller documents provided evidence that the citizenship question addition is racially discriminatory in intent. Additional discovery could raise the equal protection issues Hasen cites and further complicate the government’s case.

This is not over. If there is time, like the Terminator they’ll be back. Hasen believes there could yet be a rare September argument before the court. Roberts could still give Republicans “another tool to solidify their grasp on power despite demographic forces moving against them.”

In Rucho v. Common Cause, the Supreme Court’s conservative wing punted 5-to-4 on whether partisan gerrymandering is constitutional. Roberts writes in his opinion the case presents “political questions beyond the reach of federal courts.” But the states themselves might act.

Justice Elena Kagan’s replies in her dissent, “Of all times to abandon the Court’s duty to declare the law, this was not the one.” Kagan adds, “The practices challenged in these cases imperil our system of government.”

The Washington Post’s Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent responded to the court’s hands-off decision on Republican partisan gerrymandering, “The court just told them to go nuts.”

Three of the plaintiffs in the North Carolina case are local friends. One responded to the press after the ruling:

Jake Quinn, one of the three Asheville area plaintiffs, called the decision “deeply disappointing” and “anti-climatic.”

“The five justices in the majority of the U.S. Supreme court have shrugged their shoulders, thrown up their hands and said it is too hard for us to figure out,” said Quinn a longtime local political activist and now chair of the Buncombe County Board of Elections.

What the decision means is North Carolina will not have new congressional maps for the 2020 elections. Republicans will have gotten away with a decade’s worth of congressional elections in districts deemed unconstitutional in the lower courts. In 2016, Republicans tweaked 2011 districts struck down as racial gerrymanders just enough to satisfy the courts. Voting rights groups challenged those modifications as partisan gerrymanders. But the blatant efforts to rig elections — rig is the only word for it — will stand unless Democrats gain back enough control in 2020 to prevent another ten years of it.

North Carolina Democrats saw new congressional district lines raising the possibility of turning out Freedom Caucus chair Rep. Mark Meadows in NC-11. Without fair districts or a seismic shift in GOP opinion against him, that possibility now seems remote.

State legislative districts drawn with the help of Hofeller are before the state court on July 15. Plaintiffs hope to have those districts ruled unconstitutional under the North Carolina Constitution. The state Supreme Court has a 6-1 Democratic majority.

“Now the fight against extreme partisan gerrymandering that undermines democracy moves to state courts and the ballot box,” NC Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper wrote. “The battle is far from over.”

All of which adds to the urgency for progressive activists to broaden their focus from winning the presidency to winning control of state legislatures (as well as U.S. Senate seats) in 2020. Asked about the 2016 presidential race, I pointed to how disconnected that contest is from issues closer to home:

I live in a state taken over by a T-party legislature that has passed one of the worst voter ID bills in the country, drafted absolutely diabolical redistricting maps, passed HB2 as a get-out-the-vote tool, and launches regular legislative attacks against our cities where the largest block of blue votes are. President Bernie isn’t going to fix that for me. Neither is President Hillary. And not in Michigan or Wisconsin either. We have to beat them ourselves. Here, not in the Electoral College.

That’s even truer this morning.

The Dems aren’t the extremists fergawdsakes

by digby

With all the pundits having a hissy fit over the Democratic Party’s “move to the left” it might be nice if they took a look at this and presented the context:

The Republican Party leans much farther right than most traditional conservative parties in Western Europe and Canada, according to an analysis of their election manifestos. It is more extreme than Britain’s Independence Party and France’s National Rally (formerly the National Front), which some consider far-right populist parties. The Democratic Party, in contrast, is positioned closer to mainstream liberal parties.

These findings are based on data from the Manifesto Project, which reviews and categorizes each line in party manifestos, the documents that lay out a group’s goals and policy ideas. We used the topics that the platforms emphasize, like market regulation and multiculturalism, to put them on a common scale.

The resulting scores capture how the groups represent themselves, not necessarily their actual policies. They are one way to answer a difficult question: If we could put every political party on the same continuum from left to right, where would the American parties fall?

According to its 2016 manifesto, the Republican Party lies far from the Conservative Party in Britain and the Christian Democratic Union in Germany — mainstream right-leaning parties — and closer to far-right parties like Alternative for Germany, whose platform contains plainly xenophobic, anti-Muslim statements.

The Republican platform does not include the same bigoted policies, and its score is pushed to the right because of its emphasis on traditional morality and a “national way of life.” Still, the party shares a “nativist, working-class populism” with the European far right, said Thomas Greven, a political scientist at the Free University of Berlin who has studied right-wing populism. These parties position themselves as defenders of the “traditional” people from globalization and immigration, he said.

The Republican Party vs. Other Right-Wing Parties

The difference is that in Europe, far-right populist parties are often an alternative to the mainstream. In the United States, the Republican Party is the mainstream.

“That’s the tragedy of the American two-party system,” Mr. Greven said. In a multiparty government, white working-class populists might have been shunted into a smaller faction, and the Republicans might have continued as a “big tent” conservative party. Instead, the Republican Party has allowed its more extreme elements to dominate. “Nowhere in Europe do you have that phenomenon,” he said.

The situation predates the current administration, Mr. Greven said. While we could analyze Republican manifestos only through the 2016 election, since then, President Trump has openly expressed approvalfor politicians like Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader of France’s National Rally, who was recently ordered to stand trial for posting pictures on Twitter of killings by the Islamic State.

The Democrats fall closer to mainstream left and center-left parties in other countries, like the Social Democratic Party in Germany and Britain’s Labour Party, according to their manifestos’ scores.

And the United States’ political center of gravity is to the right of other countries’, partly because of the lack of a serious left-wing party. Between 2000 and 2012, the Democratic manifestos were to the right of the median party platform. The party has moved left but is still much closer to the center than the Republicans.

To calculate these scores, we used a statistical technique called correspondence analysis, analyzing how frequently the party platforms mention each topic coded by the Manifesto Project. Each mention of a particular category pushes the party’s score to the left or the right.
[…]

Left and right roughly map onto today’s notions of progressive and conservative, though newer issues like climate change don’t always fit neatly into those buckets, and the meaning of left and right can shift from country to country. In our study, the categories that contributed most to the left-right scores were both economic, like Marxist analysis, and social, like references to a “national way of life.”

The Republican Party’s position among the European far right is especially striking because of the United States’ two-party system, which leaves less room for fringe groups. As a result, parties are “forced to deal in platitudes, usually in competing for the center,” said Richard Bensel, a professor of political science at Cornell.

But, he added, there’s “something very strange happening in recent American politics”: Theory says that two-party systems generate “moderate, unprincipled parties,” but the Republicans and Democrats have grown more distinct.

“Democracy doesn’t work with that kind of polarization,” he said.

I’m sure you noticed that the Democrats were chasing the Republicans to the right until 2008. This was the critique of the netroots and left-wing activists throughout the Bush years. Since then they’ve been moving back to the center and center-left.

It’s not us. It’s them. It’s always been them.

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Chief Justice John Roberts, hippie socialist sellout

by digby

Via TPM:

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts on Thursday sided with the court’s four liberals in blocking, at least for now, the addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 Census.

“Altogether, the evidence tells a story that does not match the explanation the Secretary gave for his decision,” Roberts wrote, citing what he called the administration’s “contrived” reasoning for attempting to add the question to the survey.

For conservative thinkers, operatives and TV stars around the net, the vote was tantamount to treason.

Far-right columnist Michelle Malkin:

Retired cop and Newsmax TV host John Cardillo:

Conspiracist an radio and TV host Wayne Allyn Root:

Noted green-screen talk show host Bill Mitchell:

Fox Business Network host Lou Dobbs:

Hill.TV presenter Buck Sexton:

American Conservative Union chair and definitely not an elitist Matt Schlapp:

He has lifetime tenure. But the conservative claque really cares about being seen as being loyal to the tribe above all else. If the wingnut legal establishment takes this tack, he’ll hear it and he’ll feel it.

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He already slapping the allies

by digby

… and kissing up to the dictators:

President Trump, arriving in Japan on Thursday, opened his latest foreign trip much as he did his last one, lashing out at America’s allies, including his hosts, just before sitting down with them to talk through differences on issues like security and trade.

In the hours before and after leaving for an international summit meeting, Mr. Trump assailed Japan, Germany and India. He complained that under existing treaty provisions, if the United States were attacked, Japan would only “watch it on a Sony television.” He called Germany a security freeloader and chastised India for raising tariffs on American goods.

The choice of targets seemed directly tied to the president’s schedule of meetings on Friday. He is set to sit down with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, the host of the annual Group of 20 gathering in Osaka, and then jointly with Mr. Abe and Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India. Then he will meet separately with Mr. Modi. After that, he is scheduled to sit down with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany.

By contrast, Mr. Trump said nothing critical about the fourth leader on his diplomatic schedule for Friday, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, whose government waged a systematic campaign to interfere in American elections in 2016 and has arrested two Americans on what critics consider false charges.

Nor did he say anything negative about his breakfast date for Saturday morning, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, who was just accused by the United Nations of having most likely orchestrated the murder and dismemberment of a Saudi journalist living in the United States.

He goes on to note all the other times the president has gone overseas and insulted all of America’s friends and sucked up its adversaries. He’s been doing it constantly for two and a half years.

This one’s going to be a doozy. He’s freaking out about the Mueller testimony and the border. God only knows what he’s going to do.

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E. Jean Carroll’s friends speak up

by digby

The New York Times interviewed them:

Two women in whom E. Jean Carroll confided about having allegedly been sexually attacked by Donald Trump in the 1990s spoke publicly about it for the first time in an interview excerpted on the New York Times podcast “The Daily,” describing the conflicting advice they gave their friend at the time.

On Wednesday, Megan Twohey, a Times reporter, interviewed Ms. Carroll and the two women, Carol Martin and Lisa Birnbach, who had not been publicly identified until now. It was the first time since the alleged assault that the women had discussed it together.

Ms. Carroll told two women that Donald Trump sexually assaulted her in the 1990s. The women went public for the first time with Megan Twohey, a New York Times reporter.

In a forthcoming book titled “What Do We Need Men For?: A Modest Proposal,” an excerpt from which was published on New York magazine’s website, Ms. Carroll, an advice columnist, accuses Mr. Trump of sexually assaulting her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s.

President Trump has forcefully denied the accusation, saying Ms. Carroll was “lying,” that he didn’t know her and that he wouldn’t have assaulted her because “she’s not my type.”

Portions of the interview were played Thursday on “The Daily,” and a fuller article about Ms. Carroll by Ms. Twohey, Jessica Bennett and Alexandra Alter will follow later in the day. For now, here are the main takeaways from the interview:

• The two women in whom Ms. Carroll confided were well-known figures in the ’90s world of New York media. Ms. Martin was a news anchor on WCBS-TV in New York from 1975 to 1995. Ms. Birnbach is a writer best known for “The Official Preppy Handbook,” a best seller released in 1981. She has occasionally written for The Times.

Both knew or had met Mr. Trump during that period: Ms. Birnbach had recently interviewed him at Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Palm Beach, Fla., while Ms. Martin had met him at her news station and had a friend who briefly dated him.

• When Ms. Carroll told the two women about the alleged attack, they had very different reactions: Ms. Birnbach said she told Ms. Carroll to call the police, while Ms. Martin told Ms. Carroll not to talk about it because Mr. Trump was too powerful. Ultimately, Ms. Carroll, thinking she was partially to blame for the encounter, remained silent about it for decades.

“I said: Don’t tell anybody. I wouldn’t tell anybody this,” Ms. Martin said.

• Ms. Carroll eventually stopped believing that what happened to her was her fault, but she does not want to consider herself a victim and does not describe the incident as a rape.

“Every woman gets to choose her word,” she said. “Every woman gets to choose how she describes it. This is my way of saying it. This is my word. My word is fight. My word is not the victim word.”

“I have not been raped,” she continued. “Something has not been done to me. I fought.”

• Ms. Carroll said she originally intended to write a book about touring the country and cheekily asking women if they’d be better off without men. Then accusations against the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein ignited the #MeToo movement, and she realized she needed to reckon with her own experiences. The book morphed to include an account of her own encounters with men, including Mr. Trump.

• Ms. Carroll said she had no expectation that telling her story would have an impact. At 75 years old, she has come not to expect such stories to come to anything.

Powerful men getting away with this is something a woman of her age has seen her whole life. In fact it’s something women have been seeing since time began. Here’s hoping that younger women aren’t watching the president of the United States being credibly accused by well over a dozen women of sexual assault and getting away with it over and over against doesn’t make them believe the same thing. Frankly, I’m hard-pressed to see why they would think otherwise.

Go here for the podcast.

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Can’t win for losing

by digby

All day long, I hear Democratic leaders, strategists and pundits alike hectoring candidates to stick to “kitchen table issues” and talk about things the voters really care about. They are told to present a positive vision of what they want to do because nobody out in the real world ever asks about Trump or impeachment or any of that.

So, last night the candidates mostly took that tack.

And this is what they get. From Jonathan Allen at NBC:

President Donald Trump was the big winner of the first 2020 Democratic debate.

The Republican commander in chief, who was on his way to an economic summit in Osaka, Japan, emerged from the scrap largely unscathed — barely mentioned at all — even though he is a uniquely antagonizing and energizing force for Democratic voters.

At the same time, the 10 candidates who were in the room here at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts often competed against one another to appeal to narrow subsets of the primary season electorate. Their jockeying, punctuated by efforts to outflank each other to the political left and conduct a middebate Spanish-speaking contest, could alienate swing voters important to the party’s chances against Trump in November 2020.

For long stretches, it seemed, they completely forgot about the man who has been at the center of pretty much every discussion among Democrats for the last two-plus years — the man they’re competing to take on next year. The obvious reason: The motivation to beat each other was, on this night, more urgent than defeating Trump — a life-or-death moment for some of their campaigns.

Trump was the chief beneficiary of that dynamic.

You just can’t win with these guys…

I personally think they should have hit Trump harder. I think most Democratic voters want to see it. But apparently, the consensus among Democratic leaders is that this is just another election against an anodyne Republican white guy — it could just as easily be Jeb Bush. So this isn’t really a battle to save the constitution and the system from a malevolent rogue political party and the demagogic conman who’s leading it but rather a competition waged solely about differences on policy.

Personally, I think Warren has been coming up in the polls is because she’s doing both. She is unsparing in her criticism of Trump and was the first candidate to come out for impeachment and she has bold plans.

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No value

by digby

This was an amazing exchange.

Donnie v. Lawrence here on Warren’s “electability”. Lawrence says: with all due respect, what Donnie just said has “zero value”.
pic.twitter.com/BYSqbqVt3Y— Alex Thompson (@AlxThomp) June 27, 2019

In cae you doubt that his political acumen is less than stellar, here’s Deutch on Sarah Palin:

Really worth going to the tape here. Again, Deutsch is now an MSNBC host who just authoritatively told viewers that Elizabeth Warren doesn't have what it takes to beat Trump & then bristled when questioned on that assertion because HE KNOWS HUMAN BEHAVIOR: https://t.co/7kfZuc0QjZ— Rebecca Traister (@rtraister) June 27, 2019

Well that certainly worked out.

He’s a genius.

The other Republican Democrats must defeat
by Tom Sullivan

Sen. Mitch McConnell image by DonkeyHotey via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Ten Democrats tried Wednesday night in Miami to pitch remedies for the country’s ills. But looming over the Democratic presidential debate stage in Miami Wednesday night: Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Even if a Democrats wins in 2020, there remains a strong chance Republicans hold the U.S. Senate. McConnell’s take-no-prisoners style and willingness to stymie every Democratic effort presents a structural challenge for any incoming Democrat no executive orders can solve. Amy Klobuchar has 137 she plans to issue in her first 100 days in office. Then what?

McConnell’s antipathy for working with Democrats dates at least from the beginning of the Obama administration. “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” McConnell said in 2010. He may not have been at the infamous inauguration-night dinner in 2009 when Republican leaders vowed to fight Democrats “on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign.” But Joe Biden quotes seven GOP senators during the transition telling him McConnell “demanded unified resistance” to the incoming Obama administration.

That resistance lasted until it was the outgoing Obama administration trying to fill a Supreme Court seat. Against that, all centrist Democrats’ promises they can work across the aisle to get things done sounds vacuous and ill-informed.

Daily Beast’s Sam Stein observed that at one point in the evening, the Senate Majority Leader was trending in Google searches:

Searches for Mitch McConnell (@senatemajldr) have spiked +2,000% to make him the top trending search query on all of Google during the second half of the debate.https://t.co/I0WiP7r7bt— GoogleTrends (@GoogleTrends) June 27, 2019

Asked what plans they had for countering McConnell, no candidate Wednesday night had a plausible answer. Even Sen. Elizabeth Warren who has a plan for everything. Asked by NBC’s Chuck Todd how she would cope with McConnell, Warren at least admitted she might have to:

WARREN: Well, here’s how I see this happening. Number one, sure, I want to see us get a Democratic majority in the Senate. But short of a Democratic majority in the Senate, you better understand the fight still goes on. It starts in the White House, and it means that everybody we energize in 2020 stays on the frontlines come January 2021. We have to push from the outside, have leadership from the inside, and make this Congress reflect the will of the people.

Big on fight. Thin on details. Outside? Outside the White House, Democrats need more votes in the Senate.

For all the candidates’ plans and earnestness, the question Democratic voters might need to consider as much as policies and electability is whether their candidate will have coattails enough to win additional Senate seats. Enough to pass legislation. Enough to appoint Supreme Court judges. Ed Kilgore believes Republican obstruction in the Senate “could be more important than anything else the winner encounters.”

Ezra Klein writes at Vox:

Making matters worse for Democrats, this may be their last chance to retake the Senate for the foreseeable future. The 2022 election is a tougher map for them, and it’ll be a midterm year. If they win the White House in 2020, they’re likely to lose Senate seats in 2022 — and that’s even truer if their agenda has been stymied by a Republican Senate and the country deems their presidency a failure. It’s 2020 or bust.

In a more sensible system, the presidential candidates would be quizzed on how they would lead their party to down-ballot victory if nominated. They’d release detailed plans for organizing in purple states and crafting a message designed to carry coattails. They’d be discussing statehood for Puerto Rico and DC — which is both the right thing to do on the merits and would strengthen Democrats’ Senate competitiveness in the future. It’d be all hands on deck to take back the Senate.

So far, that does not appear the case. The reality is rank-and-file voters, especially on the left, treat winning the presidency like the big enchilada. Republicans are more strategic. They are after judges, state legislatures, control over redistricting. On that last one, the Supreme Court has a major rulings due this morning at 10 a.m. EDT.

Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com

It was clear from night one of the Democratic debates, several Democrats’ efforts might be better spent contesting Senate seats in their home states. Democrats might want to be sure McConnell has as difficult a reelection in Kentucky as possible. For that, they’ll need to find a credible candidate to support lavishly and nominate a presidential ticket with coattails.

Trump’s most important advisers on the Mueller testimony

by digby

Transcript via Media Matters:

Projection 101.

Via Steve Benen:

[T]he president sat down with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos the same day and insisted he had read the Mueller report.

In context, the anchor, speaking with Trump inside the presidential limousine, asked the Republican about his “pitch to the swing voter on the fence.” Trump quickly turned to the Mueller report, his “no collusion” claim, and his perception that voters “are angry about it.” Stephanopoulos began to correct him, but said the two could discuss it in more detail later.

But the president pressed on, again insisting that the special counsel’s findings concluded “no collusion,” and “they didn’t find anything having to do with obstruction.” The ABC host explained, “They didn’t examine collusion. He laid out evidence of obstruction.”

This exchange soon followed:

TRUMP: He said no collusion.

STEPHANOPOULOS: He said he didn’t look at collusion.

TRUMP: George, the report said no collusion.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Did you read the report?

TRUMP: Uh, yes I did, and you should read it, too.

STEPHANOPOULOS: I read every word.

TRUMP: Alright, let’s go. You should read it, too, George.

At that point, the president decided it was time to leave the car.

Of course he didn’t read it. He doesn’t read.

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Debate night: everybody start your livers!

by digby

As we anticipate the first Democratic debate, here are excerpts of three interesting profiles of the top three candidates on the stage tonight.

O’Rourke:

A narrow loss in a 2018 Texas Senate race made Beto O’Rourke a political star. He decided to try to ride that stardom all the way to the White House as a fresh face who combines charisma and an outsider persona with a fairly conventional Democratic policy agenda.

But while Beto’s campaign seemed almost painfully meta — he’s the guy who party professionals thought seemed like the kind of guy who voters would like — he’s running on a substantive agenda that in some ways comes the closest to representing the polar opposite of Trumpism.

He’s a NAFTA supporter and a longtime resident of a majority-Latinx border city who’s enthusiastic about immigration. His immigration platform commits him to going further than Trump or Obama in aggressively deploying executive power — protecting not only Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients but also their parents from deportation. He also calls for legislation that would dramatically expand a number of categories of immigration, from refugees to family unification to high-skilled workers.

He has also tried to fight his reputation as an ally of the fossil fuel industry (oil and gas are big in his home state of Texas) by becoming the first 2020 Democrat to release a climate change plan. He’s calling for $5 trillion in new investment and focusing tightly on ways existing law can allow a president to impose regulations that limit emissions.

But it’s really O’Rourke’s fulsome embrace of a politics of cosmopolitanism that makes him stand out from the rest of the field. While Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren try to out-protectionist Trump and Joe Biden casts himself as an electability champion ready to win back the Rust Belt, Beto is the candidate of a hypothetical future Democratic Party that wins elections in Texas, Georgia, and Arizona powered by voters in the fast-growing suburbs of Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, and Phoenix.

Warren:

Elizabeth Warren has a story she wants you to hear. She told it over and over across the state of Iowa on Memorial Day weekend. You could find the repetition a sign that she’s on autopilot, but in person, the opposite effect comes across: that this story is so important that she can’t afford to get a detail wrong. Her approach is chock-full of policy, sure; “I’ve got a plan for that” has become a rallying cry. Her flurry of proposals—for a wealth tax that would fund free public college and universal child care and pre-K, for a “Green Marshall Plan,” for canceling student debt, and for fighting the opioid crisis—is earning her headlines and driving her recent success with voters. In a national Economist/YouGov poll in mid-June, she grabbed second place in the Democratic primary field, behind former vice president Joe Biden and ahead of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. In a Monmouth poll of Nevada, the third state to vote in the Democratic primaries next year, she also climbed to second place, and in the latest Des Moines Register/CNN poll for Iowa, she was effectively tied with Sanders for second place. No doubt she’s helped by having the largest staff of all the Democrats; she has more than 50 people on the ground in Iowa, where I watched six meticulously executed events.

Booker:

There have been breakout sensations, profound disappointments and examples of gritty resilience in the Democratic primary, but no candidate to date has been as simply confounding as the New Jersey senator, who has been sized up as presidential timber since he entered politics two decades ago. And few other contenders are under as much pressure to distinguish themselves at this debate, and the one next month, as he is.

Mr. Booker is more comfortable “leading with love,” as he often says in speeches, and he warns against “fighting fire with fire” when it comes to confronting President Trump.

It’s an approach that could pay off with Democratic primary voters, who surveys indicate are far more eager to find a candidate who wants to unite the country than merely fight against Republicans.

But it does not make for cable television or social media catnip, which has shaped the early contours of the race.

“It’s the opposite of viral,” said Jeff Link, a longtime Iowa Democratic strategist. “His message is totally different.”

This strategy has so far obscured Mr. Booker’s considerable attributes. He is a gifted orator, has a glittering résumé and enjoys longstanding ties to some of the most deep-pocketed donors in his party, yet he is stagnant so far in the polls. No other Democratic candidate but him has such a sophisticated organization and support network in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina but is mired closer to zero than double digits in most every early nominating state.

Mr. Booker said he was not discouraged. “People who are usually polling this far down don’t succeed in winning the nomination but I think we’re going to do it,” he said in an interview Saturday, adding: “When people hear my message they convert.”