Inflation, inflation, inflation. It’s practically all we hear about from Republicans on the campaign trail, but Democrats need to point out the GOP’s ant-inflation strategies won’t make voters happy, as I noted at New York:

It’s now pretty clear that if current trends showing Republicans locking down control of the House and making gains in Senate races continue through Election Day, it will mostly be because of increasingly concentrated public concern about the economy and particularly inflation.

It’s not exactly news that sharp increases in the cost of living are deadly to governing political parties. Indeed, current international polling shows that parties unlucky enough to be in control of governments right now — whether they’re on the left, right, or center — are suffering major losses of popularity, as John Halpin of the Center for American Progress wrote at the Liberal Patriot website:

“As recent Global Progress/YouGov data from 11 leading democratic countries shows, inflation is a political wrecking ball for incumbent governments. Although citizens don’t have a consistent idea of what should be done about inflation — and many opposition parties have no clear alternative policy ideas on the matter — most voters don’t like the situation and are apt to punish sitting parties for rising costs regardless of their actions.

“Respondents in the survey were given three options about inflation and asked which one best reflects their own view. Across all 11 countries, 62 percent of citizens say they lack confidence in their own government’s ability to get inflation under control. In contrast, one-tenth of global citizens believe not much can be done on inflation and about another fifth say they have confidence in their government on inflation. ”

That’s part of the reason why Republicans in the United States are licking their chops in anticipation of Election Day. But you have to wonder how the voters inclined to reward the GOP with power thanks to inflation fears would actually feel about Republican policies aimed at fighting inflation.

As Halpin notes, it’s clear in virtually all the advanced societies battling inflation that voters do not support what used to be called “austerity” measures, like cutting public spending benefitting low-to-moderate income people, raising interest rates, or raising broad-based tax rates:

“[L]arge majorities of citizens across all 11 countries say they would oppose their own government taking action to reduce consumer prices if it means that ‘rent and mortgage payments increase’; ‘taxes paid by people like you increase’; or that ‘unemployment increases.’ The only consequence that global citizens are willing to stomach to reduce inflation is ‘rich people pay more taxes’ — an idea backed by two-thirds of people across the 11 countries.”

This does not augur well for how Republican anti-inflation plans will be received in this country. As CNN reports, far and away the most common GOP anti-inflation talking point is that “runaway Democrat spending” is responsible for today’s price hikes, and “cutting wasteful spending” is the way to rein it in:

“In mid-July, Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy tweeted, ‘Inflation is running rampant due in part to out-of-control spending from President Biden and Speaker Pelosi.”

“About two weeks later, the chair of the House Republican Conference, Rep. Elise Stefanik, went a step further in blaming Democrats, saying in a press conference that ‘inflation is skyrocketing because of Democrats reckless and wasteful spending’ and ‘this rampant inflation is a result of Democrats reckless tax and spend policies.’

“Later that day, in an interview with Newsmax, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz suggested Republicans should not support Democrat-led initiatives that call for more spending and cited Biden’s several trillion dollar proposed budget, claiming ‘when it comes to spending, spending trillions is what is driving inflation.'”

Nobody, of course, likes “wasteful spending.” But the problem Republicans will eventually run into is that the “Democrat policies” most associated with stimulating (and possibly overstimulating) consumer demand and thus reigniting inflation have been wildly popular. The direct “stimulus” payments that were supported by both parties in 2020 and continued by Democrats in 2021 are a case in point: According to Data for Progress polling in March of 2021, Americans supported the final “stimulus checks” by a 78-16 margin; supported increased funding for state and local governments by a 76-17 margin; and supported increased family tax credits by a 68-21 margin.

But more problematic for Republicans is that their anti-spending plans invariably wind up threatening programs that are even more popular than stimulus checks: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Part of Donald Trump’s appeal was that he was the first major Republican politician in a long while who did not talk about “entitlement reform” (though the health-care plan he unsuccessfully promoted to replace Obamacare did indeed hammer Medicaid). But the itch to mess with the New Deal and Great Society legacy programs never goes away in the Republican Party. And as my colleague Jonathan Chait points out, House Republican leaders are already talking about using a mandatory debt-limit vote to extort “entitlement reform” from Joe Biden and congressional Democrats:

“Republicans are committed to scaling back the safety net. But they realize this agenda is toxically unpopular — even less popular than defunding the police, a policy Democrats have repudiated en masse.

“They could try to accomplish this through compromise — the previous two Democratic presidents showed some willingness to trade social-spending cuts for higher taxes on the rich. But higher taxes on the rich are completely verboten in the GOP. And so their strategy is to force Democratic presidents to sign spending cuts into law against their will.”

Other than attacking “wasteful” — and popular — spending, what else might Republicans propose to fight inflation? As Chait noted, the most popular solution here and globally — paying for relief for regular folks by taxing the rich — is off the table until the end of time. Maybe they can have some success with expanding fossil-fuel production to reduce transportation and heating/air-conditioning prices, at the expense of the global climate. But the most effective yet politically dangerous weapon in their arsenal is to lead cheers for the interest-rate hikes that the Fed is already in the process of aggressively implementing.

The GOP’s taste for tight-credit policies is one of its dirty little secrets, dating all the way back to the 19th-century days when “hard money” defined its economic worldview. It is for many conservatives a fundamentally moral issue, fed by disdain for interest rates that let those people borrow money and live beyond their means (the fundamental complaint in the Rick Santelli rant that touched off the tea-party movement). But even on pure economic-policy grounds, Republicans have regularly groused about the Fed loosening credit to battle or head off unemployment instead of monomaniacally making inflation-fighting its only goal. And occasionally they are plain about wanting high interest rates, as conservative columnist Henry Olsen called for in March of this year:

“Rapidly rising interest rates will increase the returns to saving, which will cause some people to stop spending. But that’s in the purview of the Federal Reserve, not Congress. Congressional Republicans should call loudly for rapid interest rate hikes and pledge to conduct oversight hearings of the Fed to monitor its activity.”

You won’t hear Republican candidates specifically praising higher mortgage and car-loan costs, but it’s the predictable product of an austerity strategy for fighting inflation, along with the serious risk of a recession that is already spooking investors.

To be clear, Republicans would have to be a lot more dangerously specific about their policies on inflation if Democrats challenged them to a highly visible debate instead of changing the subject to abortion or threats to democracy, important as those topics undoubtedly are. That’s what Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg has been arguing:

“Democrats cannot be the custodians of the status quo. This insight informs Greenberg’s advice to candidates about the all-important inflation issue. Instead of boasting about signs of progress or discussing macroeconomic statistics, Democrats should recognize that the living standards of wage earners have been deteriorating for years and focus on those who are grinding them down by both holding down wages and boosting prices: rich and powerful corporations.”

At the very least, a populist counterattack on the inflation issue could force Republicans to oppose anti-inflation measures that are actually popular and admit their reliance on policies that are politically toxic. But it’s getting late in the day for that when it comes to the 2022 midterms. Democrats should at least get ready to join the inflation debate in earnest before 2024, when control of the whole federal government will be at stake.

The Oregon gubernatorial contest has horrified me all year as a sort of slow-motion nervous breakdown for Democrats, so I wrote about it at New York:

You have to wonder what would have happened in Oregon’s gubernatorial race if New York Times columnist Nick Kristof hadn’t been booted off the ballot for nonresidency back in January. Yes, the messianic air Kristof exuded when offering to come parachuting into the troubled political waters of his home state was annoying to some. But Oregon, specifically its Democratic Party, could use some “outsider” energy right now. As it stands, Democrats are in danger of losing the governorship they have held since 1986.

As confirmed by fresh polling from Morning Consult, two-term (and term-limited) incumbent governor Kate Brown is the most unpopular chief executive in the U.S. amid a widespread sense that Oregon’s political Establishment has done a poor job of handling chronic and worsening problems. These include the intertwined housing and drug-addiction crises that have made the state’s dominant city, Portland, a source of anger and embarrassment to many voters. Democratic nominee and former longtime Oregon House Speaker Tina Kotek, who is backed by unions and the party’s more-or-less dominant progressive activists, is being described by many critics as “Kate Brown 2.0,” which some of her allies resent as a slur on the LGBTQ self-identification Kotek and Brown share.

But a correlation with an unpopular incumbent is just one of Kotek’s problems in seeking to win her party’s tenth-straight governor’s race. An independent ex-Democratic state senator, Betsy Johnson, is running a well-financed campaign (she got a big chunk of change from Nike founder Phil Knight) on an outspokenly centrist platform. Johnson is probably drawing voters from both parties, but at a time when Democrats elsewhere are benefiting significantly from the backlash to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, Johnson offers voters a pro-choice option combined with a pro-business, get-tough-on-government message that could most hurt Kotek. And that could provide an opening for Republican nominee and legislator Christine Drazan, who won her party’s nomination as a sane alternative to multiple MAGA candidates. Drazan shows the standard GOP hostility to legalized abortion (not entirely a disadvantage in a race against two pro-choice rivals) but has promised to respect Oregon’s existing Roe-era laws.

Polls consistently show Kotek and Drazan in a close race with Johnson (who may have the most money on hand for late ads) in a distant but substantial third. All the national election forecasters call the contest a toss-up. But the risk of losing such a deep-blue state, likely alongside cries for help from Democratic constituency groups, convinced Joe Biden to go to Oregon and give Kotek a boost. It’s an interesting decision since Biden is more generally aligned with centrist Democrats who have been at odds with Kotek for years. (Biden endorsed rogue centrist congressman Kurt Schrader during his most recent trip to Oregon, shortly before Schrader lost his primary to progressive rival Jamie McLeod-Skinner.) But it’s all hands on deck for Oregon Democrats.

Biden may woo Democrats away from support for Johnson and also dramatize issue differences between Kotek and Drazan. But Kotek’s main problem may be the sour mood of Oregon voters who are susceptible to arguments from both of her challengers that it’s time for a change in Salem. The one thing we know for sure is that the next governor will be a woman with state legislative experience. And Kristof will be left wondering if he would be in charge of this race had he just spent more time in the state before endeavoring to rescue it.

It’s looking more and more like Republicans may regret kicking over the abortion hornet’s nest, and I wrote about it at New York:

When Gavin Newsom started deploying billboards in seven red states advertising California as an abortion-rights sanctuary, the standard cynical reaction was that the famously ambitious politician was laying the groundwork for a presidential bid in 2024 or later. You can’t say that about his latest abortion-related expenditure of reelection-campaign funds, though: an ad rollout strictly for Californians urging a “yes” vote on Proposition 1, a ballot initiative amending the state constitution to enshrine abortion rights.

To be clear, the governor doesn’t need to run any ads to get himself reelected. He’s very comfortably ahead of Republican Brian Dahle in a state that is emphatically Democratic (the GOP badly lost in its best opportunity to dislodge Newsom, the 2021 recall election). For that matter, there is zero doubt Prop 1 is going to pass. A September poll from the Public Policy Institute of California showed the initiative leading among likely voters by a 69-25 margin (even one-third of self-identified Republicans supported it, according to this and other polls).

Newsom is spending money promoting Prop 1 for the very good reason that it’s a turnout generator for the Democratic-leaning voters who could also help the party win close congressional, state legislative, and local government contests. That’s why Democrats in other states are figuring out how to get an abortion referendum on their own ballots — if not in 2022 (where it will appear in one shape or another in Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, and Vermont as well as California), then in 2024, as the Washington Post reports:

“While in the early stages, discussions around whether to pursue an abortion rights ballot measure are occurring in states including Ohio, Florida, Arizona, Oklahoma, Colorado and Missouri, according to interviews with over a dozen advocates, liberal groups and others, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail private conversations. One person familiar with the discussions said at least a dozen states are exploring — or are expected to soon explore — whether a citizen-led petition is a viable path to restoring or protecting abortion access in their state.

“’Every state that has access to direct democracy as a tool will consider if that is a strategy that makes sense for 2024, for 2026 and beyond,’ said Sarah Standiford, the national campaigns director at Planned Parenthood Action Fund.”

States with Democratic-controlled legislatures may also act to create abortion-rights ballot measures in future years. And it’s possible that anti-abortion activists and legislators may miscalculate and create a ballot test on abortion that they will proceed to lose. That famously happened in Kansas in August and could happen in November in Kentucky and/or Montana.

For decades, the anti-abortion movement claimed it wanted nothing more than to abolish the illegitimate judicial usurpation of abortion policy-making and “return it to the people” where it belonged. Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has done just that in the Dobbs decision, it turns out that, in many places, “the people” want to choose reproductive rights and, in doing so, have boosted the electoral prospects of the pro-choice party. In this as in many other respects, the anti-abortion GOP is the eager dog that finally caught the bus.

One of my pet peeves is the revival of veneration for the symbols of the Confederacy that sought to perpetuate slavery and yoked my home region to so many decades of oppression and poverty. So when new research on the subject popped up, aI sought to interpret it at New York:

New public-opinion findings from the Public Religion Research Institute and E Pluribus Unum confirm a counterintuitive phenomenon that is becoming hard to ignore or deny: Affection for the insignia and monuments associated with the Confederate States of America is not at all confined to the southern states that once formed a seditious compact to defend slavery. As white (and especially rural) conservatives nationwide have begun to share stereotypically southern feelings of racial grievance, support for maintaining memorials to the Lost Cause of white supremacist laws and institutions has spread as well. The Atlantic’s David A. Graham succinctly summarized the takeaways:

“Where things get interesting is when the survey measures support for reforms, whether destruction of these markers or removal to a museum: Across race, party, and education levels, numbers diverge, but views about reform are nearly identical in the South and in the rest of the country. Nearly identical portions of southerners and Americans elsewhere (22 percent versus 25 percent) back reform, and nearly identical portions oppose it (17 percent versus 20 percent). The remainder are split between leaning one way or another, again closely mirrored. In other words, non-southerners feel the same way about Confederate monuments that southerners do.”

Graham hits the nail on the head: “The South is no longer simply a region: A certain version of it has become an identity shared among white, rural, conservative Americans from coast to coast.”

It’s important to understand that “neo-Confederacy” — the aggressive defense of the monuments and “heritage” of the Confederate States of America — is not really about Civil War history at all. Most of the monuments were built long after the war when Jim Crow laws were being aggressively imposed and defended. The heyday of the famous Confederate battle flag was in Jim Crow’s final days in the mid-20th century, when southern states were attaching it to state flags and white supremacists (very much a mass movement at the time) flourished it at every opportunity.

I know this because the high point of the neo-Confederacy coincided with my own childhood in small-town Georgia. No high-school football game was complete without a performance of “Dixie.” The dominant radio station in a nearby city called itself “The Big Johnny Reb.” Georgia required no front license plates, so many vehicle owners used that spot to display a cartoon rebel holding the battle flag and declaiming, “Hell no, I ain’t forgetting!” None of this was really about history. It was about defending segregation, under assault from the federal courts and eventually Congress, and insisting on racism against Black people as the essence of regional pride. It was contemporary, not an exercise in nostalgia.

But neo-Confederacy seemed to be dying out until quite recently when it became part of the cultural-political uprising that gave the country President Donald Trump. As I noted when Trump blessed the defenders of Confederate monuments in Charlottesville in 2017, the 45th president and many of his supporters essentially revived the neo-Confederacy as part of its demand to “Make America Great Again”:

“In 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.

“And so the relatively uncontroversial movement to get Jim Crow era Confederate insignia and memorials out of the public square and back into museums and history books suddenly faced renewed opposition — not just from the motley crew of open white supremacists who viewed the 45th president as their hero, but from politicians who saw a broader constituency for a brand-new era of white backlash.”

In effect, the white backlash to “political correctness,” and the notion that America still has some work to do in recognizing and atoning for racism, has appropriated neo-Confederate symbols — just as it has appropriated Christianity, the U.S. armed forces, and “Americanism” itself. It’s a crowning irony that the MAGA movement has adorned itself most of all with the red-white-and-blue insignia of those who fought and died to crush the actual Confederacy, whose ghosts live on in the resentments of angry conservatives everywhere.

Having experienced some vertigo in sorting through polling data this year, I looked into some of the reasons for all the disparate findings, and wrote about it at New York:

There’s been a lot of talk about polling accuracy this election year, as there has been in the last five election cycles. Four of those election years (2012, 2014, 2016, and 2020) produced results significantly different from the expectations created by the best-known and (previously) most reliable outfits conducting national and state-level public-opinion research. In 2012, Democrats overachieved their standing in the polls, as did Republicans in 2016 and 2020. In 2018, the polls pretty much nailed the results nationally, though there were some misses in Senate races won by Republicans.

There are several reasons fears about polling accuracy are strong right now. First, 2022 is a midterm election where very small changes in the results could yield big consequences, thanks to the dead-even Senate and the tiny Democratic margin of control in the House (there are also many potential 2024 presidential battlegrounds where partisan control of the election machinery is up for grabs this year).

Second, there is a bit of residual trauma in the political commentariat about pro-Democratic polling errors before the astonishing victory of Donald Trump in 2016 and before his near-reelection (echoed by strong House gains by Republicans) in 2020. Pro-Republican errors in 2012, and the mostly accurate 2018 surveys, have been all but forgotten. Pro-Republican polling errors in 2022 special elections have all but been ignored or minimized.

Third, there are some pretty significant differences in what the pollsters are showing nationally and in individual contests this year. Consider the most-cited (and typically most reliable) indicator of the House national popular vote, the polling question known as the generic congressional ballot. The polling averages (per RealClearPolitics) on this indicator have been nearly even since the beginning of August. But one pollster, Trafalgar Group, has been showing Republicans with a five-to-eight point advantage in monthly soundings since July. (Another pollster Republicans love to love, Rasmussen, has consistently shown the GOP leading in the general ballot as well, though not by as large a margin.)

Similarly, Trafalgar has Republican Senate candidate Tiffany Smiley statistically tied with Washington’s Democratic incumbent Patty Murray, while all but one of the other polls of this race have Murray up by double digits. The Cook Political Report rates the contest as “Solid Democratic,” which means not remotely competitive. Then there’s the Pennsylvania governor’s race, which is turning into a Democratic rout, thanks to the incompetent campaigning and extremist antics of Republican nominee Doug Mastriano. Six of the last seven public polls have shown Democrat Josh Shapiro up by double digits. The exception? Trafalgar Group, which showed a statistical tie in mid-September.

There are some races where Tragalgar isn’t so much an outlier as one end of a pretty broad spectrum of findings. In the Ohio Senate race, for example, the RCP averages have Republican J.D. Vance leading Democratic Tim Ryan by 1.2 percent. Trafalgar Group shows Vance up by 5 percent, while Siena has Ryan up by 3 percent.

Now as it happens, Trafalgar got a lot of positive attention after the 2016 presidential election for accurately showing Donald Trump ahead in Florida, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, when nearly every other national polling outfit had Hillary Clinton winning all three states. And the same pollster wound up with a relatively low average error in 2020, particularly as compared to some of the big established firms like Monmouth, Quinnipiac, and SSRS (though Trafalgar Group founder and former Republican operative Robert Cahaly incorrectly predicted a Trump reelection, and erroneously showed him ahead in Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania). While Cahaly stubbornly keeps his full methodology private (he uses live calling, robocalling, and online sampling), he is famous for claiming he adjusts his findings to reflect alleged “social desirability bias,” which mostly means putting a thumb on the scales of red voters who allegedly assume pollsters want them to support blue candidates. So Trafalgar assumes a general pro-Democratic polling bias that he aims to correct. You can see how that might or might not work out well.

Another common source of polling differences involves the basic sample. Often Republicans look better in polls of “likely voters” rather than “registered voters” or “all adults,” particularly in a midterm election with Democrats controlling the White House, a scenario that usually (but not universally) gives the GOP a turnout advantage. But at this stage of the election cycle, virtually all pollsters have already “switched over” to likely voter models, eliminating one artificial reason for differences in findings.

The thing about a recent record for polling accuracy is that it earns pollsters more business, so Trafalgar Group (and to some extent Emerson College, which did pretty well in 2020) is expanding its footprint this year, and its arguably affecting the polling averages more than in the past. But in some of the more heavily polled contests, averages probably still smooth out the differences between pollsters and their methodologies. In the red-hot Georgia U.S. Senate contest between Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock and Republican challenger Herschel Walker, there have been eight published polls in the RealClearPolitics database since the beginning of August. Four (including Trafalgar Group, Emerson, Insider Advantage, and the University of Georgia) show Walker ahead, and four (Quinnipiac, Marist, YouGov, and Fox News) show Warnock ahead. The average puts Warnock ahead by 0.7 percent; in other words, the race is tied. For variety’s sake, you can consult the polling averages at FiveThirtyEight, which weights poll findings according to pollster accuracy and partisan bias. It’s still a tie race, with the projected vote share being 49.8 percent for Warnock and 48.6 for Walker. Indeed, if you are placing a bet on the contest the best wager is that neither candidate will win a majority and Georgia will again hold one of its notorious general election runoffs.

We won’t know until after the elections how to assess pollsters, or how to retroactively adjudge the impact on expectations of the very real differences in their findings. But at this point we can say that if Trafalgar Group’s polling is correct, there is a broader range of competitive statewide elections in play (if Patty Murray is truly in trouble, which Democrats are really safe?), and Kevin McCarthy can go ahead and put in an order for a Speaker’s gavel. But like partisan activists, a lot of people in the political prediction business will be white-knuckling it and composing their spins on and after November 8.