Ron Brownstein and others have offered important thoughts on potential 2022 turnout patterns, so I wrote about one of them at New York.

The 2008 presidential election introduced the idea of an “Obama Coalition” of young and non-white voters that would allegedly make Democrats increasingly unbeatable as demographics shifted in the U.S. It has not, of course, worked out that way. While Democrats have indeed won the popular vote in every subsequent presidential election since 2008, they haven’t approached Obama’s 7.2 percent popular-vote margin, and they came close to losing the Electoral College in 2012 and 2020, along with actually losing it in 2016. Meanwhile, Democrats have lost two of the three midterms since 2008. And things aren’t exactly looking sunny for 2022.

There are several reasons why predictions about Democrats’ increasing demographic invincibility haven’t panned out. One key problem, which became clear after the Democrats’ catastrophic 2010 midterms loss, is that they’ve aligned themselves with elements of the electorate least likely to turn out to vote in non-presidential elections. This “midterm falloff” problem with respect to young and non-white voters abated significantly in 2018, which helped to make it the rare good midterm for Democrats.

Then in 2020, a different problem for Democrats began to emerge: flagging performance among non-white voters, particularly the fast-growing Latino category. This trend has made Democrats more dependent than ever on young voters, who also are disproportionately people of color and/or multiracial.

Millennials and Gen-Zers together went for Biden by about 20 points in 2020 and were carried by Democrats about two-to-one in 2018. Though they aren’t identical, the two younger generational groups are more like each other than any of the older cohorts, as Ron Brownstein notes at CNN:

“Nearly half of Generation Z (currently defined as young people born between 1997 and 2012) are kids of color, more than one-third identify as secular without affiliation to any organized religion and a striking one-fifth in a recent Gallup survey identified as LGBTQ. Millennials (generally defined as those born between 1981 and 1996) don’t tilt quite so far toward change but are still far more diverse on each metric than older generations.”

Both groups are also much more likely than their predecessors to believe in a strong problem-solving government and in the urgency of challenges like climate change. They seem poised to eventually come to the rescue of Democrats as they replace the older, whiter, and more conservative cohorts that are literally beginning to die out, as Brownstein explains:

“The nonpartisan States of Change project … calculated that in 2016, millennials and their younger Generation Z counterparts accounted for a little less than one-third of eligible voters, far less than the nearly 45% represented by the baby boomers and older generations. By 2024, those numbers will more than flip: The group projects that millennials and Generation Z will account for nearly 45% of eligible voters, while baby boomers and older generations will shrink to about one-fourth. (Generation X, those born between 1965 and 1980, stay constant at about one-fourth of the electorate throughout that period.)”

But these younger people will only save Democrats if they turn out to vote. And that seems unlikely in 2022, for two reasons. First, the strong across-the-board voter turnout in the 2018 midterm election appears to be an outlier; the election was basically a referendum on Donald Trump, whom younger voters really disliked. Second, while under-30 voters are not a ripe target for the Trump-era GOP, they aren’t very fond of Joe Biden, either. The president’s approval rating among 18- to 34-year-old voters according to CNN is currently 40 percent, quite low for such a pro-Democratic group. This makes robust youth turnout even more unlikely than it would have already been.

As Brownstein reports, under-30 turnout leapt from 13 percent in 2014 to 28 percent in 2018. And a study from Tufts University found that under-30 turnout also rose from 39 percent in 2016 to 50 percent in 2020. Without these surges, accompanied by a steady increase in the under-30 portion of the electorate, Republicans would almost certainly control Congress and Donald Trump would still be president.

Something closer to 2014 than to 2018 turnout among young voters is more likely in 2022, particularly given the restrictions on “convenience voting” (e.g., early voting by mail or in person) so many Republican-controlled state governments are enacting, which probably affect inexperienced voters more than others.

There are, however, some rays of midterm hope for Democrats. High levels of youth voting in 2018 and 2020 could help ensure that 2022 turnout won’t drop all the way back to 2014 levels, since past voting is correlated somewhat to future voting even in midterms. And one factor that boosted all sorts of Democratic turnout in 2018 — the bad policies, unsavory racism and sexism, and authoritarian contempt for democracy represented by Trump — isn’t entirely absent in 2022. This is one thing that the ex-president and his bitterest partisan opponents entirely agree on: the enormous desirability of a Trump-o-centric midterm election. Many Republicans, even those who love the man, privately wish he’d take a long vacation until mid-November. But he is almost biologically incapable of keeping a low profile.

Generational change in the electorate is more likely than ever to help Democrats, but not until 2024. What happens in the 2022 midterms is much iffier. Biden’s party needs some good real-world news between now and November, and if at all possible, an ever more reckless Trump restlessly preparing for 2024 with his usual mix of threats and self-aggrandizing lies.

The escalating use of the term “Republicans In Name Only” epithet and its evolving meaning has struck me for a while, so I wrote about it at New York.

Political party members accusing each other of insufficient fidelity to party goals or creeds is a very old tradition. But amid the ideological sorting out of the two major U.S. parties during the 20th century, the accusations of party heresy sharpened considerably.

This has been true for both parties. During the debates over the Iraq War and President George W. Bush’s policies, you often heard progressive Democrats complain about “DINOs” (Democrats in Name Only), “Vichy Democrats,” or “ConservaDems.” While ideological tensions remain in the Donkey Party, it’s now rare to see the kind of desire for excommunication that “DINO” implies. Yet it’s strong as ever in the Republican Party, where “RINO” has become an extraordinarily common epithet on conservative media and in GOP primaries.

But something very different seems to be happening right now: Instead of being a slur aimed at ideologically heterodox Republicans (who have already been hunted to near extinction), RINO increasingly means “disloyal to Donald Trump,” as Politico notes.

“While the RINO term has been employed in some form for more than 100 years, its meaning has shifted over time. In previous decades, a Republican risked getting tagged as a RINO for supporting tax increases, gun control or abortion rights. Today, in a reflection of the GOP’s murkier ideological grounding in the Trump era, it’s a term reserved almost exclusively for lack of fealty to Trump.”

The ideology of the GOP has quickly migrated from traditional Goldwater-Reagan-Bush conservatism to the peculiar right-wing populism of the MAGA cause, in which Trump’s cult of personality is a crucial ingredient. And Trump himself is perhaps the most promiscuous purveyor of the RINO smear: He generally deploys it toward Republicans who have rejected or even failed to adopt his 2020 “stolen election” mythology. Sometimes the term is deployed against people with stronger conservative credentials than the 45th president himself.

Consider Georgia governor Brian Kemp, whom Trump referred to just last week as “a horrendous RINO who has betrayed the people of Georgia, and betrayed Republican voters [while] repeatedly [surrendering] to Stacey Abrams and the Radical Left.” In fact, the only substantive issue on which Kemp has differed from Trump was on the preferred speed of his state’s emergence from COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, when Kemp wanted to move faster than the federal government. As for election laws, Kemp was once known as a master vote suppressor, so his RINO-dom is solely a matter of refusing to follow Trump’s orders to purloin the 2020 election in Georgia.

Many members of Congress who have been labeled RINOs by Trump and his surrogates have also supported him on non-election-heist matters. According to FiveThirtyEight’s analysis of congressional support for Trump, the alleged queen of RINOs herself, Liz Cheney, voted with her tormentor 92.9 percent of the time during his presidency. Tom Rice of South Carolina, whom Trump called an “atrocious RINO” at a rally on March 12, voted with Trump 94.1 percent of the time. That hardly makes them latter-day Nelson Rockefellers. What Cheney and Rice have in common, of course, is a vote for Trump’s second impeachment after the January 6 insurrection.

Even Trump’s friends and close advisers haven’t been able to avoid the label. Last month, the former president called Senator Lindsey Graham, his on-again, off-again golfing buddy, a RINO for mildly criticizing Trump’s expressed willingness to pardon the January 6 insurrectionists if he regains the White House in 2024. Trump has even dismissed his former attorney general Bill Barr — one of the most thoroughgoing reactionaries around — as a RINO. Again, it’s due to Barr’s refusal to credit his 2020 conspiracy theories.

A new batch of suspected RINOs is identified every time a Republican primary candidate secures Trump’s endorsement against an intraparty opponent. What this really means is that being a “true Republican” now means being a Trump Republican, particularly on tough issues like the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s election as president. And “conservative” increasingly just means conserving Trump’s control over the GOP and restoring him to power. It’s been a startling change in perspective that I can’t imagine the movement conservatives of the not-so-distant past would accept.

On the eve of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Republican strategy for fighting her confirmation is coming into view, and I wrote about it at New York:

Republicans must have done some focus-group work while preparing for their campaign against the Supreme Court confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson. The minute Justice Stephen Breyer’s retirement became known, Joe Biden’s campaign promise to put the first Black woman on the Supreme Court drew a great deal of GOP scorn with much talk about “affirmative action” and “wokeness” as well as snide suggestions that a truly qualified justice wouldn’t need an identity-based advantage.

It got pretty offensive. Once Jackson’s nomination was announced and formalized, Republicans led by Senator Mitch McConnell came up with a new strategy of attacking her confirmation without direct and personal nastiness, as the Los Angeles Times explained:

“In statements and Senate floor remarks since President Biden announced his intent to nominate Jackson to succeed retiring Justice Stephen G. Breyer last month, McConnell (R-Ky.) has signaled he is not going to try to bludgeon Jackson’s character or experience ahead of her confirmation hearings, which are set to begin March 21.

“Instead, he is using the nomination as an opportunity to bash liberal activists championing her cause.

“’ I intend to explore why groups that are waging political war against the court as an institution decided Judge Jackson was their special favorite,’ McConnell said on the Senate floor.”

There appear to be two rationales for this approach other than the fear of looking racist or sexist, charges to which the GOP so often exposes itself. First, Republicans plan to contrast their relative civility to the “personal” attacks Democrats launched against Brett Kavanaugh in 2018 (it’s kind of hard not to be personal when the nominee is accused of sexual assault, but whatever). And second, they understand that, unlike Democrats in 2018, they have no realistic chance of winning a confirmation fight. So they will use this opportunity to reinforce their more general message that Democrats are wild socialistic radicals with sinister anti-American motives. If that happens to create the impression that the future Justice Jackson is a puppet of said socialist radicals, that will feed the GOP’s base’s desire to smite her hip and thigh without being “personal.”

Another reason for a less savage anti-Jackson message might be that Republicans are playing with house money: Their appointees control the Court by a six-to-three margin, and Jackson is replacing another Democratic-appointed justice. As Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse told Politico, “At the end of the day, it’s six-three before, six-three after.” And in the midst of what looks to be an aggressively conservative, even counterrevolutionary Supreme Court session, it would be unseemly for the GOP to complain too much about one Democratic appointment following three in a row for their team. Per Politico:

“”While you’ve got your gang in the house basically shoving the loot out the window, why would you want to kick up the ruckus on the front lawn?’ Whitehouse said, referring to the high court’s conservatives. ‘I do think they’ll be using it to leverage political messages for November more than attacking her specifically.'”

Indeed, if Republicans win the Senate in November, they will be in a position to come out overtly ranting and snarling if Biden gets another Supreme Court opening in the second half of this presidential term.

As someone who has spent a long time paying attention to the Iowa Caucuses, I have discounted a lot of ritual Iowa-bashing, but suspect the latest move against its privileged status in the presidential nominating process is real, and I wrote about that at New York.

The Iowa Caucuses have been the first stop on the road to the White House since the early 1970s, and efforts to strip the state of its privileged place are just about as old. Over the years, Iowa has protected its privileged status by linking arms with New Hampshire, which holds the first-in-the-nation primary, and by going along with a 2004 expansion of the group of “protected” early states to include two more-diverse states, Nevada and South Carolina.

But hatred of the Iowa event — some born of envy over the money and media attention the caucus attracts, and some related to Iowa’s very white demographics and its arcane and not terribly well-attended caucus system — kept building up like barnacles on a rusty boat. Then Iowa appeared to create a huge opening for its disparagers in 2020, when its Democratic caucuses collapsed under the burden of national party-reporting mandates, questionable technology, and a rickety infrastructure of volunteer labor. The state party could not report results at all on Caucus Night, and TV talking heads denied anything on which to pontificate furiously condemned Iowa, joining the long-standing criticism of its primacy.

Then a pandemic and a wild presidential election culminating in an attempted coup intervened; suddenly, Democrats had much more important things to worry about than hating on the Iowa Caucuses. It began to look like the furor over what happened on February 2, 2020, might fade before the next presidential cycle. The odds of some seismic change in the nominating process were also reduced by Republicans’ happiness with the status quo, since any move to a state-financed primary and/or coordination of calendar dates for nominating events required bipartisan cooperation.

But now it appears the desire for a “reformed” Democratic presidential nominating process has gotten a second wind. Indeed, there is an emerging plan for dumping Iowa, as the Des Moines Register reported last week:

“National Democratic leaders have drafted a proposal that could significantly reshape the party’s presidential nominating process and put an end to Iowa’s prized first-in-the-nation caucuses …

“A draft resolution, obtained and corroborated by the Des Moines Register, would set new criteria for early-voting states that favor primaries over caucuses and diversity over tradition.”

The idea is to eliminate entirely the current system whereby four “early states” are in the privileged window at the beginning of the nominating calendar. Instead, states would have to reapply for the privilege under criteria Iowa cannot possibly satisfy: the ability to run a “fair, transparent and inclusive primary” (not possible without action by the Republican-controlled state legislature); demographic diversity (Iowa is 90 percent white); and general-election competitiveness (the state has veered hard red during the last two presidential elections, and all but one member of its congressional delegation are Republicans). This is like everyone on a president’s Cabinet or corporate board being forced to resign so one miscreant can be fired. Yes, New Hampshire might experience some heartburn under these criteria, but it is a very competitive state and obviously already has a primary. More to the point, New Hampshire has a state law, fiercely and equally supported by both parties in the Granite State, that requires the secretary of State to move the primary as far back as possible to maintain its first-in-the-nation status.

So the draft proposal is clearly designed to be a “solution” to the Iowa “problem.” It was discussed at a March 11 meeting of the Democratic National Committee panel that is responsible for the nominating process, as the Washington Post reported: “The meeting of the Democratic National Committee’s Rules and Bylaws Committee came to no final decisions, but for the second time this year, a majority of speakers made clear their openness to shaking up the presidential primary calendar to better reflect what speakers described as the party’s values.”

The Rules and Bylaws Committee is tentatively planning on formally announcing the new criteria for early-state status next month. We’ll soon see how much pushback the anti-Iowa advocates encounter, and whether they have the appetite to fight and win.

Since it is very unlikely that the Iowa legislature’s ruling Republicans will accommodate some shift to a taxpayer-financed primary in order to boost the state Democratic contest’s chances for survival, the hostile move would leave Iowa Democrats with limited and unsatisfactory options. This would include keeping their current caucus event but moving it to later in the calendar, which would greatly diminish its significance; or holding a party-paid and -sponsored “firehouse primary” (so called because they typically utilize cheap or free public facilities like firehouses for their limited polling places), which might not satisfy Iowa-haters anyway.

 Iowa has overcome the haters time and again, but this may represent its biggest challenge.

 

The U.S. Supreme Court’s “shadow docket” of rulings on emergency petitions yielded a significant decision with mixed political implications, and I tried to unravel it at New York.

When North Carolina and Pennsylvania Republicans petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn state-court decisions against their attempted congressional gerrymanders, there were two issues at hand. The most immediate matter involved the gerrymanders themselves: Was there any federal constitutional bar to state courts interpreting state laws to smack down state legislative regulation of federal elections? There was also a longer-term issue casting a big shadow on the 2024 presidential elections: Do state legislatures have constitutional superpowers that may let them override state and even federal laws governing the designation of presidential electors, as Donald Trump’s campaign claimed in 2020 as part of its efforts to overturn that year’s results?

As Mark Joseph Stern noted at Slate when rulings came down on both petitions, the Pennsylvania GOP effort to reverse a state-court redistricting decision was a stretch: “The plaintiffs demanded at-large congressional districts for the first time since the 18th century because there was no backup map in place and no time for the legislature to draw one.” So the Supreme Court rejected the Pennsylvania petition without dissent or comment.

But in the North Carolina case, the Supreme Court said “no” to the GOP gambit to overturn new court-imposed maps and “maybe” to the broader claim of legislative superpowers. Six justices — John Roberts, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — rejected the North Carolina legislature’s petitions to overturn its state court’s redistricting ruling that could shift as many as four U.S. House seats toward Democrats as compared to the original legislative map. Three justices (Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch) dissented, with an opinion from Alito citing the famous “independent state legislature” doctrine, under which neither federal nor state courts can overrule legislative determinations of rulings affecting federal elections.

It’s not clear, however, that the Court’s majority rejected that doctrine. Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion explicitly reserved judgment on it, instead basing his rejection of the North Carolina petition on the close proximity of the 2022 elections. Chief Justice Roberts (who has expressed support for strong legislative election prerogatives in the past) and Barrett were silent.

So a short-term victory for the prerogatives of state courts interpreting state election laws (which in these two cases benefited Democrats) could later give way to a bigger defeat that puts legislatures in the driver’s seat in future election controversies — you know, like controversies over who actually won a presidential election. Trump’s frustrated 2020 effort to get Republican legislatures to overrule state-certified electoral-vote rewards might fare better in 2024 with more time to prepare the groundwork for a coup. And even if that doesn’t happen, legislatures — not courts, governors, or secretaries of State — could have the final word on election and voting procedures. As election-law expert Rick Hasen warned after the North Carolina order, we could see a “big, bad election law precedent potentially coming down the line.”