At Vox, Nicole Narea gathers comments from four political strategists/pollsters in response to a question of current speculation: “Would Trump’s indictment help or hurt his 2024 campaign?” Some excerpts: GOP pollster Whit Ayers – “I am skeptical that a charge about a years-old event that everybody has already known about for years is likely to have much impact on anything, other than it will probably rally Republicans and supporters of Trump around him, at least in the short term. This would be a very easy case to frame as a partisan political indictment. Much easier to frame that way than, say, the Georgia voting case or the classified documents or January 6.” Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg – “I think it will help [Trump] in the Republican primary, but will continue to degrade him with the broader electorate. MAGA has underperformed in three consecutive elections, and we know it doesn’t work in the battlegrounds. And if the Republicans present themselves as the party all for MAGA in 2024, they’re gonna have a very, very hard time winning the presidency….Trump coming in as the nominee, having been indicted potentially two or three times — there’s no scenario where that’s helpful to him in a national election. It perhaps will help him crowd out DeSantis and other challengers in the primary. But of course, that would be a disaster for the Republican Party. I’d much rather be us than them heading into this next election.” Matt Dole, Ohio Republican strategist: “Trump faced an uphill battle before this for the nomination. I think [his indictment] probably just adds to that. A lot of folks in the Republican coalition want an option that espouses [Trump’s] policies without bringing the antics. Ron DeSantis, obviously, is the model for that….Over the long term, I think this probably helps Trump’s opponents in the Republican primary. There’s certainly a lot to be said for political attacks on President Trump. But I think throughout the entire Republican coalition, this probably hurts him more than it would help….There is a subset of Republicans who are going to support Donald Trump to the very end. And they are loud. And they are well-covered by the media. There will certainly be blowback. But again, all of this is feeding into the fatigue about Donald Trump.”

Pranab Bardhan shares some perceptive insights in “What Will It Take to Save Democracy?,” his review of Martin Wolf’s The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism at The Boston Review. Bardhan, author of  “A World of Insecurity: Democratic Disenchantment in Rich and Poor Countries,” notes that “the cultural narratives used by the right have been more effective in influencing public opinion than the economic narratives of class politics used by left-liberals. Survey results have shown that people tend to vastly overestimatethe size of immigrant and minority populations but dramatically underestimate the extent of wealth inequality and the racial wealth gap. The narrative of a besieged cultural majority and the spell of white nationalist conspiracy theories like the Great Replacement are difficult to break, fueling a victimization complex and toxic cultural forms of status anxiety. The whole situation is exacerbated by social media, where the right seems to have an advantage in spreading falsehoods; the more outrageous they are, the more viral they are likely to go (and the more profits the social media companies make). There is evidence that in the three months before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, false stories on Facebook favoring Trump were shared about 30 million times, whereas false stories favoring Hillary Clinton were shared about 8 million times….The decline of unions has hollowed out a shared sense of meaning and identity among workers. Into this cultural void the demagogues have stepped with their racist, xenophobic culture war agenda. In a world of virulent disinformation and fake news and with social media amplifying anger and resentments and creating echo chambers of extremism, labor unions—in collaboration with other community organizations—can try to be active in providing links to public information services and news provided by demonstrably independent agencies.”

“Biden kicks off ‘Invest in America’ tour next week,” Jeremy Diamond reports at CNN Politics: “As he gears up for a likely reelection campaign, President Joe Biden on Tuesday will kick off a three-week tour to highlight the impact of his signature legislative accomplishments as the impacts of those laws begin to be felt around the country, according to a White House official….The “Invest in America” tour will see Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, first lady Jill Biden and nearly a dozen Cabinet members hit more than 20 states – including key battleground states like Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania – over the next three weeks….The tour is the White House’s most coordinated, concerted push to date to accomplish what White House officials see as their central task this year: implementing legislation and making sure Americans know what Biden has accomplished. Polling published last month indicated the White House has its work cut out: 62% of Americans said they believe Biden has accomplished “not very much” or “little or nothing,” according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll….Biden will make his first of multiple stops on Tuesday with a visit to a semiconductor manufacturer in Durham, North Carolina, which has announced plans to build a $5 billion chips manufacturing facility that will create 1,800 new jobs, spurred on by passage of the CHIPS and Science Act, which incentivizes domestic semiconductor manufacturing….Biden will head to North Carolina a day after convening a meeting of his “Invest in America” Cabinet, which is comprised of key Cabinet officials working to implement the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, the Inflation Reduction Act and the American Rescue Plan….Biden and his Cabinet will highlight the direct and indirect impacts of those laws – including private sector investments spurred on by pieces of legislation – and the impact on state and local economies at each stop.” Sounds like a good plan. But I hope these Democrats will also share some soundbites showing that Republicans are more committed to supporting investments in other countries.

Sherrilyn Ifill reports at slate.com on “The Republican Plan to Make Voting Irrelevant,” and writes, “The ability of the governor to appoint a nominee to fill the unexpired term of a senator without restrictions is the law in 35 states….This effort—to remove powers from elected representatives who are Democrats—has become the new method of disenfranchising voters and maintaining perpetual Republican political power. And it is being undertaken with alarming frequency and speed across the country,” Ifill warns. Further, “This may be the most dangerous and efficient structural attack on our democracy. Its threat, and pernicious ingenuity, lies in its ability to make voting itself irrelevant. Voters may turn out in high numbers and elect their candidates of choice, but if the official is not one whose views align with those of the Republican Party, they may find that their powers of office are removed by antagonistic GOP-controlled legislatures.” Ifill notes “Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, not widely regarded as a reform prosecutor, made the presumably unpardonable decision to convene a grand jury to investigate the effort of Donald Trump to compel Georgia officials to fraudulently award him votes he did not win in the 2020 election. In the wake of what were reported to be “imminent” indictments resulting from Willis’ investigations, the Georgia Legislature passed a legally dubious bill that would create commissions empowered to remove elected prosecutors from office….It was [Sen. Mitch] McConnell who, in essence, removed the power of a sitting president to fill an open seat on the United States Supreme Court when he refused to allow hearings and consideration of President Obama’s nominee, then-Judge Merrick Garland. In essence, the Republicans declared that a Democratic president would be denied the constitutional power to appoint justices to the Supreme Court as long as the GOP controlled the Senate….This is an efficiently sinister effort to solidify one-party rule. Its geographic breadth and reach to offices both high and low requires a national legislative response….this should be powerful motivation for congressional Democrats—and, indeed, for all Americans who wish to live in a democracy—to turn out and vote this year and next, in essence to save the framework of democracy while there’s still time. It should be clear now that for the foreseeable future, democracy remains on the ballot.”

From Mike Lux’s  Executive Summary of  “A Strategy for Factory Towns,” a report by American Family Values:

Hard times, effective right-wing messaging, the demise of local news, and sometimes the Democratic Party itself have led to big changes in the voting and opinions of people living in small and midsized towns that have been most impacted by deindustrialization and increased Big Business power in the economy. But these Factory Towns voters are not lost causes to the Democratic Party, and we cannot afford to write them off. They comprise 48% of the voters in Pennsylvania and the Midwest, and if we continue to lose ground with them, the entire region will become more and more like Iowa and Missouri – tough states for the foreseeable future. However, if these counties start to move back toward the Democrats, that kind of progress could be the linchpin to building sustained Democratic majorities that can usher our country into a more progressive future.

This report is part of a continuing effort by American Family Voices to do on-the-ground research and data analysis to understand the thinking and motivation of working-class voters, and to recommend strategies that can begin to rebuild the Democratic Party’s and progressive movement’s historic connection to America’s working class.

The project focuses on voters in “Factory Town” counties in six key states: Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. These states were Ground Zero in 2016, breaking down the “Blue Wall” critical to Democratic victories. Joe Biden did just enough better in 2020 to help win back Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, but these communities in all six states remain very tough for Democrats and will be among the most highly competitive counties for 2024.

Despite the challenges, this is a moment where Democrats have an opportunity to make more gains. Biden and the Democratic Congress have passed substantial legislation that can bring progressive change, all the way down to the community level, over the next two years. The president’s policies, background, and genuine affinity for these working-class communities make him an ideal leader for this effort.

This report combines data from our most recent polling, Facebook and digital analytics, and comparisons of county-by-county elections results in 2022 to the past decade of state election results. The report closes with recommendations on how Democrats and progressive issue advocates should move forward with Factory Towns voters and counties.

Here is the bottom line in our findings:

1. The presidential horse race numbers are very competitive in these counties, but Republicans are stronger in terms of the economic frame.

2. Voters have negative opinions of both parties: this presents both challenges and opportunities for Democrats. Voters in these counties tend to think Democrats lack an economic plan, but they see the GOP as the party of wealthy corporations and CEOs.

3. Populist economics and the Democratic economic policy agenda play very well in these counties. These voters respond best to an agenda focused on kitchen-table economic issues.

4. Contrary to conventional wisdom, populist economic messaging works much better than cultural war messaging. Our strongest Democratic message on the economy beats the Republican culture war message easily. The Republican economic message is a bigger threat to us.

5. Community building needs to be at the heart of our organizing strategy.

6. I recommend that Democrats and progressives make major investments in local field organizing and door-to-door, special events that build community, online community building, existing local media and progressive media targeted to these counties, and progressive organizations that make sure voters know how to benefit directly from the Biden policy initiatives of the last two years.

Read The Poll.

At The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner shares some ideas about “Turning the Debt Ceiling Crisis Against McCarthy’s Republicans: Biden needs to play serious hardball, or he will get rolled.” As Kuttner writes, “Biden could announce that he is not going to play the Republicans’ game and relitigate spending that has already been approved by Congress. The Republicans would contend that this breaching of the legislated debt ceiling is illegal, and appeal it to the high court….Over to you, Court originalists. Does the Court want to be responsible for ordering a default on the U.S. Treasury bonds that anchor the world’s financial markets?…The other way for Biden to play the kind of hardball that the situation demands is to emulate Bill Clinton’s successful evisceration of then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1995. Gingrich was the first Republican leader to play games with shutting down the government….When Clinton refused to agree to budget cuts demanded by Gingrich in November 1995, the Speaker threatened not to authorize an increase in the public debt, and forced a shutdown of the government that lasted five days. A second shutdown, beginning December 16, lasted 21 days….But polls suggested that the public blamed the Republicans. It was Gingrich who blinked first, and the episode was the beginning of the end of his Speakership….The lesson for today: By refusing to play, Biden would signal that if Kevin McCarthy wants to tank the world economy by allowing the U.S. to default on Treasury bonds, that’s on him….McCarthy, given his deal with the far-right Freedom Caucus, would not blink first. But the 20 or so moderate Republicans, who were willing to vote for McCarthy as Speaker and accept his rules package, might well decide that enough is enough. Peeling off a few Republicans to vote for an increase in the debt ceiling without crippling cuts would have the further virtue of moving the House closer to a de facto House governing coalition of Democrats and sane Republicans….Both versions of this strategy have risks. But allowing McCarthy to call the tune, forcing disabling budget cuts and humiliating Biden’s presidency, has even greater risks.”

In a Facebook post, Drew Westen, author of “The Political Brain” and founder of Westen Strategies LLC and co-founder of Implicit Strategies, says what he really thinks about Attorney General Merrick Garland’s law enforcement regarding the January 6th coup attempt/riot in the U.S. capitol. An excerpt: “His behavior is never explicable in terms of political or legal reasoning, although he couches it that way and believes his own rationalizations….I wrote about this personality style and why it can be so dangerous in Democratic politics 15 years ago in The Political Brain, years before Garland began obsessively collecting affidavits as the seditionists collected AR 15s….Appeasement in the face of real threat is psychologically motivated complicity, driven by cowardice, whether conscious or unconscious. Appeasement only emboldens a bully or a psychopath, who understands it to be a sign of fear, not virtue. Somehow, two new democracies, Peru and Brazil, knew what to do in the face of sedition. They rounded up the seditionists, including those in high places, and put them where they were no longer dangerous, in prison. In so doing, they not only followed the law but shaped public opinion and frightened co-conspirators and would-be accomplices after the fact, so that the vast majority of Brazilians today, for example, believe one narrative, the truth, that the attack on their institutions was an attack on their democracy that cannot be tolerated. Like other obsessional personalities, Garland is a concrete thinker, who cannot understand meta-messages, particularly meta-messages that send emotional signals. He does not understand how light or no sentences for seditionists after waiting months or years to act sent the signal that sedition was not a serious crime, and that allowing them to create an alternative narrative for two years was not only going to split the country in two but would put the seditionists in charge of a House of Congress that would then investigate the DOJ’s investigation of them. Had he been appointed to the Supreme Court, he would no doubt have been the swing vote with the conservatives half the time out of a false sense of “fairness.” Fairness to fascism is no virtue. #NoBallsNoBrains.”

In “Biden world giddy at MTG, Gosar, and Boebert being placed on Oversight” at Politico, Christopher Cadelago, Jordain Carney, Nicholas Wu and Jonathan Lemire write: “House Republicans’ installation of some of their most incendiary conservatives on the Oversight Committee is sparking an unexpected feeling inside the White House: unbridled glee….The panel tasked with probing Biden policies and actions, as well as the president’s own family, will be stocked with some of the chamber’s biggest firebrands and die-hard Trumpists — including Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) and Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) — ideal figureheads for a White House eager to deride the opposition party as unhinged….No administration wants to feel the heat of congressional investigations, and Biden’s team is no different. But privately, the president’s aides sent texts to one another with digital high fives and likened their apparent luck to drawing an inside straight. One White House ally called it a “political gift.”….The jubilation was tempered, somewhat, by Democrats on the Hill who expressed more apprehension about the posting….“The English language runs out of adjectives to describe the debasement, cynical debasement of the whole process these appointments represent,” Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), a senior Oversight panel member, said in an interview. “And it is, I think, a huge black mark on Kevin McCarthy….“[W]ith these members joining the Oversight Committee,” White House oversight spokesperson Ian Sams said in a statement, “it appears that House Republicans may be setting the stage for divorced-from-reality political stunts, instead of engaging in bipartisan work on behalf of the American people.” I think the high-fivers are right. Degrading the Oversight Committee that much is an unexpected gift to Dems, who will surely make the most of it.

So how are Americans feeling about U.S. military support of The Ukraine? Cooper Burton and Zoha Qamar explore public opinion on the topic at FiveThirthyEight, and write: “December polling from Morning Consult found that only 41 percent of voters were “very concerned” about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, down from 58 percent who said the same in March of last year. The same poll showed a decline in the share of voters who felt that the U.S. has a responsibility to protect Ukraine from Russia, from 47 percent in March to 40 percent in December. …Americans are still largely supportive of some sort of aid to Ukraine, though. In a preelection November poll from TIPP Insights, 68 percent of registered voters said it’s important for the new Congress to direct assistance to Ukraine. And in a YouGov/CBS News poll released earlier this week, 64 percent of adults said they preferred their representatives to support U.S. aid to Ukraine rather than oppose it….A Beacon Research/Shaw & Co. poll conducted in December for Fox News showed that 40 percent of registered voters felt the U.S. was doing “about the right amount” to help Ukraine. An additional 26 percent thought it should be doing less; only 29 percent felt the U.S. should be doing more. The Morning Consult poll showed similar numbers, but it also showed that support for aiding Ukraine has slipped since the spring: In March, only 12 percent of registered voters felt the U.S. was doing too much to halt the invasion, but that number had risen to 24 percent in December….The cooler support for more aid may be due to a growing partisan divide on the issue. In the YouGov/CBS News poll, a narrow majority of Republicans (52 percent) wanted their representative in Congress to oppose aid, whereas 81 percent of Democrats wanted theirs to support it. A mid-December poll from CivicScience also showed a wide partisan gap, with 83 percent of Democrats supporting military aid to Ukraine versus 53 percent of Republicans. At the beginning of the war, though, support among Republicans was almost as high as it was among Democrats: In March, another YouGov/CBS News poll showed that 75 percent of Republicans and 80 percent of Democrats supported sending weapons and supplies to Ukraine.”

The following post by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his Facebook page:

Links of the Day

Here are two very solid empirically-based assessments of where we are politically as we move into the homestretch of this electoral cycle. Democrats are looking good but there are still considerable grounds for caution….

Can Democrats defy midterm gravity? Making sense of recent shifts in the national political terrain by Michael Baharaeen at substack.com

Roe fell two months ago. Here’s how much it’s hurting the GOP by David Tyler at The Washington Post.

The following post by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his facebook page:

Chart of the Day

Hmmm….

Took me a while, but it finally hit me that the anti-democratic tone of contemporary Republican politics has deep and disturbing roots, so I wrote about it at New York:

One of the maddening things about Donald Trump’s insistence that the 2020 election was “stolen” is that no proof of election fraud seems required to sustain the lie. Among the former president’s supporters, election denial is practically an article of faith; it relies more on conspiracy theories and mistrust of Trump’s enemies than any demonstrable facts. That’s why Trump can blithely assert not only that he won the 2020 election but that it was a historic landslide. The underlying assumption is that elections in the United States are now illegitimate. So why bother engaging with democracy at all if it produces patently “wrong” results?

This question lurks behind the MAGA movement’s growing hostility to democracy, not just to Democrats. In his discussions with grassroots Republicans in the election-denial stronghold of Arizona, New York Times reporter Robert Draper found that the old John Birch Society battle cry that America is “a republic, not a democracy” is on many tongues:

“What is different now is the use of ‘democracy’ as a kind of shorthand and even a slur for Democrats themselves, for the left and all the positions espoused by the left, for hordes of would-be but surely unqualified or even illegal voters who are fundamentally anti-American and must be opposed and stopped at all costs. That anti-democracy and anti-‘democracy’ sentiment, repeatedly voiced over the course of my travels through Arizona, is distinct from anything I have encountered in over two decades of covering conservative politics.”

The identification of conservative political causes as synonymous with Americanism isn’t new, of course. But it’s turning from a rhetorical device to an actual creed whereby the enemies of right-wing political success are deemed enemies to the country itself. This line of reasoning lets MAGA politicians and activists justify any means of resistance, including the often-threatened “Second Amendment remedies.” Kari Lake, Arizona’s Republican gubernatorial candidate, minces no words in hurling anathemas at Democrats and those who collaborate with them, as Draper notes:

“They have cast the 2022 election as not just history-defining but potentially civilization-ending. As Lake told a large crowd in downtown Phoenix the night before the primary: ‘It is not just a battle between Republicans and Democrats. This is a battle between freedom and tyranny, between authoritarianism and liberty and between good and evil.’ A week later, in response to the F.B.I.’s executing a search warrant at Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, Lake posted a statement on Twitter: ‘These tyrants will stop at nothing to silence the Patriots who are working hard to save America.” She added, ‘America — dark days lie ahead for us.'”

With the very existence of America at stake in every election, does it really matter whether you can prove the “evil” people broke the rules in each individual case? Probably not. And that helps explain why election denial is still flourishing in Arizona. When the state’s bizarre 2020 election audit dragged on for many months and proved nothing that simply led to more assertions that Democrats and RINOs were suppressing the truth. Mark Finchem, the Republican nominee for secretary of State, has summed up the Arizona GOP’s illogic by arguing that the burden of proof should be borne by those who consider legitimate elections legitimate:

A former GOP operative told Draper the particular susceptibility of Arizona Republicans to this sort of madness (aside from a tradition of extremism dating back to Barry Goldwater) may be attributable to a huge retiree population prone to conspiracy theories:

“’These are all folks that have traded in their suit pants for sweatpants,’ he said. ‘They’re on the golf course, or they’re in hobby mode. They have more than enough time on their hands. They’re digesting six to 10 hours of Fox News a day. They’re reading on Facebook. They’re meeting with each other to talk about those headlines. And they’re outraged that, ‘Can you believe that the government is lying to us about this?’”

But there’s clearly something else going on in Arizona and the nation that is deeper than the spread of disinformation. Hostility not just to government but to our democratic system of elections has been growing on the right for quite some time. It was evident during the Supreme Court coup of Bush v. Gore and the contempt Republicans expressed for the 2000 Democratic popular-vote victory. It was more fully manifest in the nasty right-wing reaction to the election of Barack Obama, whose legitimacy as president was regularly challenged and whose social and economic policies were attacked for allegedly redistributing resources from “deserving” taxpayers to undeserving poor people. The feeling on the right that democracy had broken America was expressed perfectly by Obama’s 2012 challenger Mitt Romney in his infamous remarks deploring the ability of the “47 percent” of Americans who owe no net income tax to vote themselves government benefits.

The ideological vanguard of the anti-Obama tea-party movement were the politicians and opinion leaders who dubbed themselves “constitutional conservatives,” typified by Jim DeMint, Michele Bachmann, and Ted Cruz. They held that conservative policy prescriptions were embedded in the Founders’ design for America and were eternally binding, regardless of the contrary wishes of democratic majorities. And the absolutism of the constitutional conservative belief system was typically strengthened by Christian nationalist views. An increasing number of conservatives seemed to believe that small government, gun and property rights, and conservative cultural totems like homophobia and fetal rights were handed down by the Founders with the explicit blessing of Jesus Christ. In this scheme, democracy is a strictly circumscribed means for choosing stewards of these inflexible traditions, never to be traduced without dire consequences for the republic.

Donald Trump and his followers took constitutional conservatism to its next level: an aggressive creed mixing libertarian hostility to government with reactionary cultural views, all wrapped in the super-patriotic rhetoric of American greatness. Today’s MAGA-dominated GOP is a perfect playground for people like Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel and Blake Masters, the Arizona Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate whose campaign Thiel has bankrolled. Thiel proclaimed in 2009, as the tea-party movement began to rage against Obama’s election, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” A few years earlier, Masters said, “People who support what we euphemistically call ‘democracy’ or ‘representative government’ support stealing certain kinds of goods and redistributing them as they see fit.”

This authoritarianism in the name of liberty and godliness certainly seems counterintuitive, but it’s extremely useful as a political weapon. Anyone utilizing the democratic process to promote alternative policy visions is deemed un-American, and their successes are dismissed as illegitimate. Or as Trump put it in August 2020: “The only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.” That could mean fraudulent ballots, or it could mean allowing immigrants who should have never been admitted to America to vote, or it could mean an election controlled by the 47 percent who expect something for nothing. Any democratic process that fails to affirm the righteous views of Trump and his supporters must be “rigged.”

In his post, “Will This Be An Asterisk* Election?* It takes something unusual for the president’s party to do well in the midterms,” Nate Silver writes at FiveThirtyEight: “Democrats started out with 222 House seats following the 2020 election, four more than the number required for a majority. According to our model, there’s a 7 percent chance that Democrats wind up with fewer than 222 seats after November but still enough seats to maintain a narrow majority. Meanwhile, there’s a 13 percent chance that they actually gain seats.¹ Those numbers combined give them their 20 percent chances….Time for a quick historical gut check. In 19 midterm elections since World War II, the president’s party lost fewer than five seats in the House once, in 1962. And they gained seats twice, in 1998 and 2002. That means three out of 19 times the president’s party would have a successful enough midterm to keep the House, or 16 percent of the time. That squares pretty well with our model’s 20 percent estimate….Silver discussess the exceptional midterms, and adds, “….all these elections featured some sort of special circumstance: the Great Depression, the Cuban missile crisis, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the first impeachment of a president in 130 years. But such a definition is inherently fuzzy as you can potentially retrofit almost any political or news development to constitute a “special circumstance,” in the same way that almost every election gets called “the most important election of our lifetimes.”Immediately after the court overturned Roe, Democrats began to gain ground on the generic congressional ballot, which asks voters which party they’d support in an election, and it’s now translated into some electoral successes, too. In Kansas last week, voters overwhelmingly rejected a ballot initiative that would have allowed the legislature to restrict abortion in the state amid very high turnout. And in Minnesota this week, Republicans won a special election in the 1st Congressional District by only 4 percentage points, a district that Trump won by 10 points in 2020. Likewise, on June 28, just a few days after Roe was overturned, Republicans won a special election in Nebraska’s 1st District by only 5 points in a district that Trump carried by 15 points.^3…It’s not just the courts, either. Republicans are also aggressively exercising power through state governments, especially on abortion, gay and transgender rights and education policy. And although voters don’t regard Jan. 6 as an event as important as Sept. 11 — public opinion about it is also much more polarized — it’s a reminder that Republicans can also potentially seek to achieve power through extralegal means….If nothing else, Democratic voters have no shortage of motivation to turn out: Many feel as though their basic rights are being threatened, something a party’s voters ordinarily aren’t concerned about when it controls both the presidency and Congress. The “enthusiasm gap” often accounts for much of the presidential party’s disadvantage at the midterms, but it’s not clear it exists this year after Roe was overturned….All that said, Republicans are still fairly clear favorites to keep the House. Notably, President Biden is quite unpopular despite a modest improvement in his approval ratings, whereas FDR, JFK, Clinton and GWB were all popular at the times of their midterms. The public still has very negative views about the economy and the direction the country is headed in, and that’s usually rough for the party in power to overcome….But the circumstances of these midterms are also potentially unusual, with high uncertainty, and that’s why Democrats keeping the House is a thinkable outcome.”

At The Cook Political Report, the newly-appointed Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, Amy Walter writes thaT “the data is giving us mixed signals. Despite these favorable winds, Biden’s job approval rating remains mired under 40 percent. Americans remain deeply pessimistic about the economy and Biden’s handling of it. The one improvement in fortunes for Democrats has been the generic ballot which shows Democrats making up significant ground over the last few weeks. And, as my colleague David Wasserman has noted, better-than-expected showings by Democratic candidates in NE-01 and MN-01 House specials mean “we’re no longer living in a political environment as pro-GOP as November 2021….At the start of the summer, Republicans had a 2 point advantage on the generic congressional ballot. Today, the two parties are basically tied (Democrats up 0.1 in the FiveThirtyEight average)….polling taken this month and last by Monmouth found a ‘generic Democrat’ running anywhere from 11 to 14 points better among independent voters than Biden’s job approval ratings with these same voters. For example, the most recent Monmouth poll found a Democrat pulling 47 percent of the vote from independent voters — which is 14 points higher than Biden’s anemic 33 percent job approval rating with these voters. A late July Quinnipiac poll, which found Republicans ahead by just one point on the generic ballot question (44 to 43 percent), also found Democrats doing 12 points better among independents than Biden’s anemic 23 percent….Overall, Democrats were winning independent voters in the most recent Monmouth survey by 6 points (47 percent to 41 percent). The July Quinnipiac poll showed Democrats losing independent voters by 9 points (35 percent to 44 percent). …So, how are Democrats able to defy political gravity with independent voters? And, can they sustain it?…. First, not all those who disapprove of Biden are taking out their frustration on his party. One pollster told me that his most recent polling showed “Dems winning generic Congress ballot among ‘somewhat disapprove’ of Biden by 17 points. That’s what is keeping Dems competitive in Congressional ballot generically….Another is that independent voters are simply fed up with both parties and, as such, aren’t focusing their frustration at just the party in charge….Overall, however, Republicans can take heart in the fact that the top issues for independent voters remain inflation and the economy — issues for which they give Biden very low marks, and say they trust the GOP more. And, while things are improving on the economic front, they still aren’t great.,,,Vulnerable Democratic Senate candidates have been raising gobs of money and spending it liberally to raise their bonafides with independent voters. But, at the end of the day, they can only control so much. They have been able to fly above Biden’s dismal ratings thus far, but once the GOP ad assault has been underway for a while, we’ll find out whether they can continue to defy political gravity.”

Some Lessons and Questions After the Kansas Abortion Referendum