Looking at some historical data from Cook Political Report‘s Amy Walter, I noticed some trends that may be germane to this election cycle and wrote about them for New York:

The Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter points out that in two recent “wave” midterm elections, in 2006 and 2010 — both of which flipped control of the House — the late trends were very strongly against the party controlling the presidency:

“In July of 2006, The Cook Political Report rated just 14 GOP-held seats as highly vulnerable. By November, the number of GOP-held seats in danger had tripled to 43. We saw a similar pattern in 2010. In August of that year, we listed 36 Democratic-held seats as highly vulnerable. By November, the number of vulnerable Democratic-held seats had more than doubled to 78. On Election Day of 2006, Republicans lost 30 seats; Democrats lost 63 seats in 2010.”

A lot of seats that wound up falling weren’t even on the radar a few months earlier:

“[O]f the 30 seats that Democrats won in 2006, 21 of them (or 70 percent), weren’t classified as the most vulnerable GOP-held seats in July. Almost half of the Democratic seats Republicans won in 2010 were classified as Lean or Likely Democrat in August.”

Right now, Cook has 34 Republican-held House seats looking very vulnerable (3 are likely Democratic, 7 lean Democratic, and 24 are toss-ups). But the landscape could get much bluer in a hurry:

“This year, Republicans already have more seats in the highly vulnerable category than they had at this point in 2006 or than Democrats had in August 2010. If 2018 follows a similar pattern to 2006 and 2010 — where less vulnerable seats move into more vulnerable territory in the fall — the GOP is almost certain to lose its majority. There are currently another 53 GOP-held seats in lean/likely Republican.”

What would account for this kind of late trend? In 2006 and 2010 it was not, interestingly enough, any deterioration of the president’s own approval ratings:

“There wasn’t a point where the bottom just dropped out for one party. The approval rating for President George W. Bush was 40 percent in mid-July 2006 and 38 percent in early November. President Obama was sitting at 44 percent in mid-August 2010 and 45 percent in early November.”

So Donald Trump’s exceptionally stable approval ratings won’t necessarily serve to limit his party’s losses in the House. Late trends could also reflect intensifying excitement over an approaching win for the “out” party. But most likely what we are seeing is simply a public recognition of trends that were developing all along. Forecasters like those at Cook are naturally conservative about predicting change of party control for any given House district, given the power of incumbency and the generally strong grip of partisan inclinations in this century.

There have, of course, been some nasty surprises for the “out” party in late midterm trends, and they’ve been relatively recent. In 1998 when Democrats actually gained House seats in Bill Clinton’s second midterm (Newt Gingrich made his painful concession-of-failure speech in front of a backdrop covered with the legend “America’s Victory”), and in 2002 when Republicans repeated that amazing feat. But then Clinton in 1998 had a approval rating just before the midterms of 66 percent, and George W. Bush enjoyed a 63 percent approval rating going into the 2002 midterms. Add in the reaction to the pending GOP impeachment effort in 1998 and the effects of 9/11 on 2002, and you have sets of circumstances that are extremely unlikely to recur between now and this November.

We could even realize in retrospect that the best 2018 signals to watch may have been the strongly pro-Democratic special-election results in 2017 and 2018, rather than November projections or even the generic ballot, as portending a wave that has been obscured in those less-tangible indicators. Since the pace of special elections has slowed this year, a lot of attention will be focused on next week’s special election in Ohio over yet another GOP-held U.S. House seat (one that Republicans have held for 36 years).

In any event, it will all get very real in the fall, and if both parties seem to be achieving new levels of furious intensity, it could be because the electoral tremors beneath the surface are getting stronger every day.

With all the endless talk of disagreements among Democrats about the right message for the midterm elections, I though it was worth noting that Republicans aren’t exactly all on the same page either, and I wrote it up at New York.

With less than 100 days to go until the midterm elections, there’s an increasingly sharp division of opinion between the White House (aligned with hard-core House Freedom Caucus types) and more conventional congressional Republicans about strategy and messaging. It has been dramatized by Trump’s renewed threats to shut down the government at the end of the fiscal year if he doesn’t get what he wants in the way of immigration policy, which is about as welcome to Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan as syphilis, as The Hill reports:

“Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) want Republicans seeking reelection to focus on the booming economy and the GOP’s tax-cut package passed last December. House GOP leaders are also touting a new campaign slogan for the midterms, asking Americans if they are ‘Better Off Now.’

“They believe that’s a message that will propel them to victory in competitive swing districts and states around the country, helping them stave off a Democratic wave this fall.”

Even among Republicans who don’t mind a little immigration demagoguery, there’s no big desire for presidential antics, as Byron York notes after discussions with GOP election wizards:

“What Republicans would like now is the absence of noise and distraction coming from the White House.

“‘We just need a decent level of calmness so we can message,’ said [one] strategist. ‘If we could just have calmness, we could talk about the economy and ICE. And if we could talk about the economy and ICE, we’d be fine.'”

But Trump and the HFC think otherwise, and it’s not just a matter of temperament or sheer hatefulness (though those do play a part). Some key voters love noise and distraction:

“Trump’s shutdown threat … [is] appealing to loyalists whose support he needs right now as he battles special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation and approval ratings in the low to mid 40s.

“‘His base is reacting positively to it,’ one conservative House lawmaker told The Hill …

“Trump’s message is consistent with the one being made by Jordan, the former Freedom Caucus chairman running for Speaker who said Monday that ‘heck yes’ conservatives would fight tooth and nail to stop GOP leaders from punting a fight over funding the border wall and other Trump priorities until after Election Day.”

This represents a pretty classic division of opinion between pols focused on swing-v0ter persuasion and those devoted to base mobilization. And in turn it reflects the two quite different types of Republican House seats in peril in November.

The New York Times’ Nate Cohn took a long look at the 60 most vulnerable GOP-controlled House seats and while some conform to the stereotype of highly educated suburban districts (many of which were carried by Hillary Clinton in 2016) expected to stray from the GOP banner, others are white working-class-dominated districts where Trump did well in 2016.

A ferocious runup to the midterms dominated by Trump and culture-war issues may help Republicans turn out their vote in places like the First District of Iowa or the Second District of Maine or the Eighth District of Minnesota. But it might also help mobilize Democrats, and might not help the GOP at all in highly educated suburban districts like Virginia’s Tenth or Georgia’s Sixth. And there are many competitive districts with both kinds of voters where the choice of targeting one or the other category can be excruciatingly difficult.

Truth is, it is a bit late in the game for either party to be arguing over electoral messaging, which increases the pressure on individual candidates (and their ad-buying “independent” friends) to tailor an appeal to individual districts that makes the most sense. When all else fails, of course, candidates can just go negative and hope to win by damaging opponents as much as by attracting support. Republicans do have the advantage of very low expectations, along with structural advantages that mean they can lose the national House popular vote and still control a majority of seats (as they did in 2012), just as Trump won the Electoral College while losing the presidential popular vote by 2.1 percent. But if they approach November dissenting from their own president’s message, a bad result will inevitably mean all sorts of blame games and finger-pointing at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

After reading repeatedly about Democratic prospects in 2018 and 2020 being spoiled by “Democratic extremism” or
“Democrats moving too far to the left,” I smelled a rat, and wrote up my findings at New York:

There is a convention going back into the mists of time whereby the Democratic Party is thought of as a disorganized and divided mess. The early 20th-century humorist Will Rogers, himself a Democrat, once said:

“The difference between a Republican and a Democrat is the Democrat is a cannibal. They have to live off each other, while the Republicans, why, they live off the Democrats.”

He wasn’t trying to be funny on that occasion, and it made a fair amount sense to think of the Donkey Party as an unwieldy paradox back when it was the preferred political vehicle of rural populists, southern segregationists, urban machines, and ethnic minorities doing battle with a Grand Old Party that mostly revolved around defending economic privilege and deploring anything that wasn’t WASPy.

But the “Democrats in Disarray” meme has lived on, and for a brief moment in the late autumn of 2016, it was pretty accurate, as Democrats reeled from a shocking defeat against a presidential candidate who looked more like a cartoon villain than a serious aspirant to high office.

As New York’s Eric Levitz explained last November, however, any talk of Democrats being fatally divided or in despair during 2017 was visibly rebutted by the steady drumbeat of Democratic victories in special and off-year elections.

Democrats don’t have nearly as many special elections to show they’re feeling their oats this year, and they’ve lost some of the huge, double-digit lead in the generic congressional ballot that was regularly appearing when Levitz wrote his upbeat assessment of Democratic prospects. And for those (both conservatives and conflict-seeking mainstream-media folk) who deeply cherish the Democrats in Disarray meme, those special elections are helpfully being replaced by party primaries in which Democrats are running against Democrats! Imagine that! Worse yet, in some of these primaries the winners are self-proclaimed progressives! And as we all know, the American people have a deep craving for sensible centrists who want to cross the party aisles and get things done. If Republicans don’t have any of those anymore, then by God, it’s critical that the loyal opposition keep the faith and avoid extremism.

Veteran political writer Walter Shapiro has written a useful skewering of this all-too-common narrative, which has been sent into overdrive by the June primary victory in New York of Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over House Democratic Caucus chairman Joe Crowley:

“[A]n emblematic story led Sunday’s New York Times under the print headline, “Democrats Brace as Storm Brews Far to Their Left.”

“The themes of the Times story and dozens like it are familiar. They all highlight young activists such as 28-year-old giant slayer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who upended potential Nancy Pelosi successor Joe Crowley in the New York primary. Risky issues are highlighted as main stream Democrats recoil from demands for single-payer health insurance and the abolition of ICE (the acronym for Immigration and Customs Enforcement)….

“Yet by the historical standards of Democratic internecine warfare, today’s disputes are like 6-year-olds battling with foam swords.”

Spoken like a man that remembers the fraught intraparty ideological battles over the Iraq War, Clinton’s “New Democrat” movement, Cold War defense spending and national security strategy, and civil rights. Democrats are more unified on a host of issues — including hot buttons like abortion policy, criminal justice, and the social safety net — than they have been for years. And Democratic Socialists represent but one influence bubbling up from the grassroots. As Shapiro notes, for a party allegedly in the grips of an existential crisis, they’re in pretty good shape:

“It’s hard to identify a Senate or House seat that is being lost because of excessive Democratic activism. Even if a Democratic incumbent like North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp is troubled by calls to ax ICE, there is scant evidence that this makes her more vulnerable than before in a state that Donald Trump carried by better than a two-to-one margin.

“No incumbent — not even Heitkamp or Joe Manchin in West Virginia — is being denounced as a DINO. According to a new Monmouth University Poll, moderate Democrat Rep. Conor Lamb, who won a high-profile special election in western Pennsylvania earlier this year, holds a hefty lead in his bid for a full term. Lamb is a prime example of a Democrat who has prospered by defying litmus-test politics in his opposition to Nancy Pelosi as House speaker.”

There’s really not much excuse for the hyperventilation so evident about the Democratic Party falling apart or “going off the deep end.” So why is this narrative so ever-ready?

Some of it is simply the result of a lazy habit of “balancing” the chaos coming out of the White House every day with the “disarray” allegedly found within the opposition party. But a deeper motive, particularly in conservative media, is the need to distract attention from the ideological revolution going on in the GOP by suggesting that something equally if not more alarming is going on across the partisan barricades. The idea is very simple: If you can’t expand your support beyond the ranks of the party “base” by “moving to the center,” then a good fallback position is to deny your opponent “the center” by alleging it’s being taken over by extremists. Aside from blurring the natural public and media focus on the strange people running the country and almost daily destroying old GOP positions on issues ranging from trade and deficits to the environment and NATO, the “here come the socialists!” cry appeals viscerally to the false-equivalence needs of MSM reporters and pundits who are constantly seeking protection against claims of liberal bias.

And so Ocasio-Cortez becomes, somehow, a vastly more significant figure than her most obvious recent conservative counterpart Dave Brat of Virginia, who similarly upset a congressional leader of his party in 2014. That’s true even though Brat almost certainly was emblematic of a strong rightward trend in the GOP, while the jury is definitely still out on whether Ocasio-Cortez is a harbinger of a world to come or simply an adept local pol who upset a complacent incumbent in an incredibly low-turnout primary in an incredibly atypical district.

It’s possible we are about to witness an extremist polarization of both parties to an extent unknown since the Spanish Civil War. But that’s not at all clear at this point, and as for Democratic divisions, none seem to matter nearly as much as a common revulsion toward Donald Trump and his enablers. As Shapiro observes, parties are ultimately defined by presidents. We see what that has meant for the GOP since 2016. Let’s give Democrats a chance to display their own proposed new leadership in 2020 before deciding they are equally feckless or reckless.

Morning Consult’s latest batch of quarterly approval rating data has a very important comparison of senatorial and presidential numbers that I shared at New York:

[T]en Democratic senators are running for reelection in states that Donald Trump carried in 2016 — some by large margins. Amid partisan polarization and the growing trend toward straight-ticket voting, it seems impossible that all (or even most) of these anomalies could survive in 2018.

But there are two mitigating factors we sometimes forget: (1) presidential elections are comparative, while midterms tend to be (usually sour) referenda on the party that controls the White House, which means you cannot assume the partisan balance in any given state will remain the same, and (2) it’s not 2016 anymore, and Trump’s popularity can’t be assumed to have remained static all this time in every state.

You can see the difference a more dynamic view of the “Trump Ten” senators makes in the latest quarterly state-by-state numbers showing Senate approval and disapproval ratings from Morning Consult. They did something interesting: They directly compared the average net approval ratings for senators from April through June with those of the president over the same period of time in the same states. Turns out eight of the Trump Ten are doing better than Trump himself in their states.

Perhaps the most interesting numbers are from North Dakota, which Trump carried by 33 points against Hillary Clinton in 2016. In the second quarter of 2018, however, Trump’s net approval rating in North Dakota was minus-10 points. Now as it happens, Heitkamp isn’t in great shape; her own net approval rating is zero, and she faces a formidable GOP opponent in U.S. Representative Kevin Cramer. But it looks like Cramer, not Trump, is her problem, which gives her some freedom to be more critical of the president than she might otherwise be in a state he had carried so overwhelmingly.

Another good example is Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin. Yes, Trump narrowly carried her state in 2016. But in Q2 2018 his average approval rating there was minus-16 points. By comparison Baldwin’s net approval rating over that period was plus-5, which is immensely better. Similarly, Trump carried Ohio in 2016 by eight points, which was impressive given the state’s recent voting history. But his Q2 2018 average approval rating in the Buckeye State was minus-6, while Senator Sherrod Brown’s is plus-16. No wonder Brown is presently a solid favorite for reelection.

The two Trump Ten Democratic senators who do trail Trump in Q2 2018 approval ratio averages are Joe Manchin and Claire McCaskill. West Virginia was Trump’s second-best state in 2016 (after Wyoming); he won it by an astonishing 42 points. He’s still pretty popular there, with a plus-23 net approval rating in the second quarter of this year, as compared to Senator Joe Manchin’s plus-3. Manchin’s divided GOP opposition and his long familiarity with the state are helping him keep a lead in the polls. Missouri’s Claire McCaskill’s tepid minus-4 approval ratio trails Trump’s (plus-2), but not as much as you’d normally expect in a state he carried by 21 points.

Meanwhile, Trump’s net approval rating in Montana, which he carried by 20 points, has sunk to plus-3, while Senator Jon Tester’s looking pretty good at plus-14. The gap between presidential and senatorial net approval is smaller in Indiana (Trump is at plus-5, Joe Donnelly at plus-8). Florida’s Bill Nelson is at plus-10 (Trump is at plus-2 in Florida), but his problem is not so much Trump as his opponent Rick Scott, who has endless money and a net gubernatorial approval rating (again, in the second quarter of this year) of plus-19.

None of this means Democrats will win control of the Senate; aside from the fact that several of the Democratic senators we’ve been talking about aren’t out of the woods just yet, Democrats need to find a way to beat at least one and preferably more than one Republican incumbent (or win an open seat like those in Arizona and Tennessee). But it’s important to remember that whatever his standing compared to where he was in 2017 or earlier this year, Trump remains generally weaker than he was when facing an equally unpopular Democratic opponent in a year when Democrats weren’t remotely as energized as they are right now.

Watching a political ad for Georgia GOP gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp, in which he labels himself as a “politically incorrect conservative,” made some things fall into place for me, which I wrote about at New York.

Not that long ago, “political incorrectness” (perhaps most conspicuously identified with abrasive lefty gabber Bill Maher, whose Comedy Central/ABC show Politically Incorrect was on the air from 1993 until 2002) was a politically anodyne (and bipartisan) term connoting a rebellious unwillingness to accept norms of civility in public discourse. A 2010 essay on the term in Psychology Today identified it with Maher, Larry David, and the subversive schoolyard humor of South Park.

But by 2016, “political correctness” had become the target of virtually every conservative politician in America. One pioneer was Dr. Ben Carson, who developed an elaborate conspiracy theory in which “political correctness” (an example he often used was restrictions on torturing terrorist suspects) was a weapon for suppressing free speech and disarming Americans in order to enslave them. But Donald Trump took attacks on the PC devil to a new level, in a one-two combo in which he would say something egregiously offensive and then pose as the brave rebel against political correctness. Trump branded this approach in the first GOP presidential debate in 2015:

“I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct. I’ve been challenged by so many people and I don’t, frankly, have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time, either.”

Again and again, Trump deployed this strategy, and by the time he won the GOP presidential nomination, most of the Republican Party had adopted the same evil habit of exulting in “brave” bigotry. By the time President Trump accused the 2017 Charlottesville counter-protesters as being as bad as the white supremacists they were protesting, anti-PC ideology had reached new heights, as I argued at the time:

“[I]n the blink of an eye, the backlash to acts of simple racial decency began. It was not confined to Donald Trump’s campaign, but in many corners of the right, hostility to ‘political correctness’ — defined as sensitivity to the fears and concerns of, well, anyone other than white men — became a hallmark of the “populist” conservatism Trump made fashionable and ultimately ascendent.”

By now being “politically incorrect” among conservative pols has become a totem of ideological orthodoxy as firm and clear as any lefty campus speech code. Georgia Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp has provided an especially clear example of its use in the ad he is running on the eve of his tight primary runoff with Lieutenant Governor Casey Cagle:

The title of this ad, tellingly, is “Offends.”

Its use by Kemp is particularly interesting because his earlier ads were an orgy of over-the-top right-wing madness, culminating in the proud “politically incorrect” claim.

Indeed, his opponent Casey Cagle, a hard-core conservative by national standards, was caught on tape complaining that the whole gubernatorial nomination process had become a competition to demonstrate “who had the biggest gun, who had the biggest truck, and who could be the craziest” — a clear reference to Kemp’s ads. But now Kemp just uses the “politically incorrect” tagline, and everyone knows what it means.

If Kemp wins his runoff on July 24 with this strategy, it is going to reinforce the already powerful Trumpian impulse to treat conservative “base” voters as motivated above all by the desire to go back to the wonderful days when a white man could without repercussions tell a racist joke, “tease” women about their physical appearance or sexual morals, and mock people who in some way (say, a disability) differ from one’s own self. At some point we may all come to understand that it’s not (except in some scattered college campuses) the politically correct who are imposing speech norms on the rest of us, but the politically incorrect who won’t be happy until offending the less powerful is again recognized as among the principal Rights of Man.

Now Kemp has been endorsed by Donald Trump. There is a comfortable consistency in that development.