It’s an aggressively technocratic proposal for an ideological problem, in keeping with Buttigieg’s sales pitch as a reasonable man and his past work at McKinsey. Maybe it’s no surprise that former Representative Beto O’Rourke, another handsome young man running a moderate campaign, has also expressed interest in the same general Court-packing plan.

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Court packing is not quite so unprecedented as its opponents would have the public believe. (In 1866, the Senate reduced the Court from 10 justices to seven as a swipe at President Andrew Johnson, then boosted it back to nine when Ulysses Grant replaced Johnson— a maneuver that might make even current Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blush.) It is, however, a curious cause for the Democratic Party to take up at the same time that it is railing against Donald Trump for his destruction of long-standing political norms.

Nonetheless, and despite the technocratic bent of the 15-justice plan, the fact that Buttigieg and O’Rourke, two cautious candidates with vague policy platforms, have aligned themselves with it shows how central the Court has become to Democratic voters. For both men, it’s a means of offering an apparently bold policy proposal that will be relatively uncontroversial among primary voters.

As recently as the 2016 election, the existing Supreme Court was not at the center of Democratic Party politics, to say nothing of Court-packing schemes. According to Pew, 62 percent of Democrats called the Court “very important” to their voting in the election—which sounds impressive, but it placed behind gun policy, Social Security, and the treatment of racial and ethnic minorities, to name a few other issues.

This was true even though the election was held as McConnell was blocking a confirmation process for Merrick Garland, President Barack Obama’s nominee to a seat on the Court. In large part, Democrats assumed that Hillary Clinton would win, and then either Garland or a new appointee of Clinton’s would join the Court. Clinton spoke about the importance of some Supreme Court decisions—calling, for example, for the reversal of the campaign-finance case Citizens United—but it wasn’t at the heart of her campaign, or of Bernie Sanders’s.

It was a different story on the Republican side of things. Donald Trump promised to nominate conservative judges to the bench, even releasing a short list of possible nominees. Speaking to conservatives who remained uncomfortable with him, Trump repeatedly reminded them of the importance of the Court, an assurance that began to seem like a taunt by the end of the campaign. But Trump was right. The Court was of such importance to these voters that they held their nose and voted for him. It has paid off for both sides: Trump has indeed named judges that conservatives love, and they have rewarded him with strong support, including from some erstwhile never Trumpers.