| Get Jonathan Bernstein's newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. The thing about the Lincoln Project, the group of anti-Trump Republicans that jumped into the campaign with a series of advertisements criticizing the president, is that it really isn't asking anything of anyone.
That's why the on-and-off debate among Democrats about what to make of the group's efforts is basically irrelevant. Seth Masket at Mischiefs of Faction has an excellent item about coalition politics, using the Lincoln Project as an example. But to call what they're doing a "short term marriage of convenience" is a stretch. Even a marriage of convenience implies some sort of cooperation. Yet the Lincoln group doesn't seem to be asking for or offering anything like that. They're pursuing their own strategy, regardless of whether Joe Biden's campaign or the Democratic Party thinks it's helpful. And if they did want any influence within the Democratic Party, they're not doing any of the things that would get them there.
So what are they up to?
What they say motivates them is both fear of a second term for Donald Trump and, especially for some of the campaign professionals involved, a sense of responsibility for what the Republican Party has become. It's possible that there's really nothing more to it than that. Surely the policy advocates in the group will continue to push for choices they favor regardless of who is in office, but for the political operatives, this might be the end of the line — they may be burning bridges with one party without building any connection to the other.
It's possible that some of them will eventually gravitate toward the Democrats. But it's unlikely that they'll exert much influence over them. Party actors fight hard for power within the organization, and while it's true that parties are permeable and new people enter all the time and can change policy positions and priorities, there's very little appetite among Democrats for this particular group of outsiders to wield significant influence.
My sense is that the group would be happiest with some sort of reformed Republican Party, but that they don't quite know how to get there from here. The obvious problem is that the more elections Republicans lose, the more the remnant in office will tend to be from the safest districts, which usually produce the most extreme politicians. And if, on the other hand, Republicans win this year or in 2022, they'll likely conclude that there isn't actually a problem to be solved. They may reach that conclusion even if they lose several consecutive elections as long as the conservative marketplace is still profitable.
So my guess is that ultimately the Lincoln Project will be a curiosity — a marker of the deep dysfunction of the Republican Party, but not a group able to do much about it or to find a home elsewhere. Perhaps I'm wrong and they'll be able to find a way out of the trap that Republicans have gotten into. I certainly hope so: Democracy in the U.S. requires two reasonably healthy political parties, both firmly committed to the rule of law, full citizenship for all and other important principles. 1. Mona Lena Krook at the Monkey Cage on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and violence against women in politics.
2. Lynn Vavreck and Christopher Warshaw on vote choice and the pandemic.
3. Henry Olsen on bias — or not — in presidential-election polling.
4. Aaron Carroll on getting testing right.
5. And my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Conor Sen on men, women and the recession. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You'll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close. | 
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