Losing twice to Trump would be bad. An outright breakdown of American democracy would be much worse. //

threats to America's democratic order really do come from both parties — from the Republican president Democrats loathe and fear, but also from the Democrats themselves, who might well be driven by political anger, disgust, and frustration to lash out against the rules that have governed American presidential elections for more than 200 years.

Doing so would be incredibly foolish. //

So a loss would be incredibly painful for the party. But would it be illegitimate? Evidence that the system is rigged against the Democrats? Justification for going outside the system by refusing to concede? No. What it would be justification for is starting a movement to abolish the Electoral College or institute a work-around to ensure that the candidate who wins the popular vote receives the requisite electoral votes to win the presidency. I support all of that. But strongly favoring those reforms is quite different than saying that in the meantime Democrats get to reject the outcome of elections when the rules they've accepted for more than two centuries deliver results they don't like.

The Democrats' problems are contingent, not systematic. //

In 2016, the problem was different. Now the Democrats ran up the popular vote with lopsided victories in a handful of very liberal high-population states while falling just short of carrying a handful of more culturally conservative states in the rust belt and upper Midwest. If Trump manages to win in 2020, it will likely happen in the same way. //

If the Democrats had reason to believe that this scenario would automatically be repeated forevermore, they would be justified in rejecting the country's electoral system on the grounds of systematic bias against them. But we all know this isn't the reality. As recently as 2008 and 2012, when the party was led by a broadly popular candidate who motivated all of its many disparate factions to show up on Election Day, the rules worked just fine, delivering solid (and in 2008, resounding) victories in the Electoral College. //

This points toward a way for the party to improve its likelihood of winning — by trading some of those wasted votes for votes it needs far more in other (more culturally conservative) regions of the country. They could do this by soft-peddling positions on the left side of the culture-war, finding, for example, 21st-century equivalents to Bill Clinton's pledge to make abortion "safe, legal, and rare." That is a winning path forward for the Democrats within the current system.