Yes, it was one of the biggest developments of the midterm primary season, and I wrote about it at New York:

In the first election test on abortion since the U.S. Supreme Court abolished the right to choose at the federal level, voters in deep-red Kansas soundly rejected a state constitutional amendment that would have paved the way for a ban on abortion. The so-called “Value Them Both” amendment, backed heavily by Republican politicians and the Catholic Church, lost by 18 points with unusually heavy turnout for a midterm primary. That this happened in a state that Donald Trump carried by a 56-42 margin in 2020, and in a year when election dynamics have strongly favored Republicans, represents a big victory for the pro-choice cause and a hopeful sign for Democrats in November.

Voters in three conservative states (Tennessee in 2014, West Virginia in 2018, and Louisiana in 2020) have passed “no right to abortion” constitutional amendments, but that was at a time when Roe v. Wade was still in place and abortion rights were protected by the federal courts. That changed with the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, but anti-abortion advocates in Kansas faced an additional hurdle: In 2019, the Kansas Supreme Court had established a right to abortion based on a state constitutional provision protecting bodily autonomy. Republican legislators attached the ballot measure ratifying the “Value Them Both” amendment to the primary instead of the general election in the hope that a small and Republican-skewing electorate on August 2 would make victory a near-certainty. But instead the gambit aroused the pro-choice majority.

The first clear sign that the Kansas anti-abortion measure might fail came in the form of very heavy early in-person and by-mail voting:

Strong turnout continued on primary day. Suburban Johnson County, the state’s largest, is expected to hit 65 percent turnout when it’s all said and done — more than double the usual midterm vote. And there’s not much doubt about which side was driving the high turnout. Johnson County gave 53 percent of its 2020 vote to Joe Biden. But “no” on the abortion amendment took 68 percent. Perhaps even more impressively, the state’s second largest county, Sedgewick, which was carried by Trump by 11 points in 2020, gave “no” 59 percent of its vote with most precincts reporting. What was expected to be a very close vote with better-than-average midterm turnout became a real blowout:

The implications of the Kansas vote are twofold. It shows that if given a direct role in determining abortion policy, voters even in states as conservative as Kansas will defend abortion rights. It calls into doubt the expected anti-abortion victory in November in Kentucky, which will vote on a very similar constitutional amendment; and in Montana, where Republicans are trying to do the same. Indeed, the results may encourage abortion-rights advocates to seek state voter-approved pro-choice state constitutional amendments; they are already in the works in Vermont and California and could happen as early as November in Michigan. And this trend could also create incentives for judges to interpret state constitutions favorably to abortion rights, just like those in Kansas did, with the assurance that voters have their backs.

Beyond the immediate issue, though, both the outcome and the enthusiasm exhibited by those who turned out to vote “no” to abortion bans in Kansas suggest that if Democrats make this a signature issue for the 2022 midterms, their currently bleak prospects in November — much of it based on the assumption that discouraged Democrats won’t vote — could turn around quickly. It’s clear the anti-abortion movement and its wholly owned subsidiary, the Republican Party, may have miscalculated with an assault on a right deemed basic by a majority of Americans, who may sooner than expected wake up and fight back.

Sometimes small changes in a factor affecting elections can have big consequences. I wrote about one that has and might at New York:

Since 2016 that the state-by-state landscape of the Electoral College system has made winning presidential contests harder than it should be for Democrats. It’s not just a coincidence that Hillary Clinton won the 2016 national popular vote by 2.1 percent but lost the election by 77 electoral votes, or that Joe Biden won the 2020 national popular vote by 4.4 percent yet came within 42,918 votes of losing the Electoral College. Part of the problem is that the Electoral College system reinforces the small-state bias of the U.S. Senate by giving each state three electoral votes before population is considered. But more subtly, the distribution of voting strength around the country makes the states that decide presidential election more Republican than the country as a whole.

The presidential election map as of 2021. Graphic: The Cook Political Report

This disadvantage for Democrats is getting worse, says Amy Walter, after presenting the Cook Political Report’s revised PVI (Presidential Voting Index) ratings for states (an analysis of the partisan “lean” of all 50 states based on the last two presidential elections):

“[W]hen looking exclusively at the Electoral College map, Republicans are enjoying a stronger advantage than at any point in the 25-year history of the Cook PVI. In 1997, the median Electoral College vote (located in Iowa) had a PVI score of D+1; meaning that the median Electoral College vote was one point more Democratic than the nation as a whole. By 2005, the median Electoral College state (Florida) had a PVI of R+1. In 2021, Wisconsin, with a PVI score of R+2, is the median Electoral College vote. So, if, for example, a Republican presidential candidate were to get 49 percent of the national popular vote, we should expect that Republican to get 51 percent of the vote in Wisconsin.”

And that would be enough for the national W, assuming a uniform distribution of voting support. But since most political junkies have fixed notions of “battleground states” they carry around in their minds, it’s important to notice which states are now the most competitive. It’s not what you might expect if your view of the states hasn’t been regularly updated. Cook has a list of “hypercompetitive” states dating back to 1997 based on those with PVIs between D+3 and R+3; it’s updated after each presidential election. Iowa and Ohio were regularly on that list until both finally fell off n 2021. That same year, Arizona and Georgia appeared for the first time. The number of such states has declined from 19 in 1997 to 13 in 2021. And the states clustered around Wisconsin as potential tipping points that are just a bit more Republican than the national average include Pennsylvania (R+2), Arizona (R+2), Michigan (R+1), and Nevada (R+1). Wisconsin went Democratic in seven straight presidential elections prior to 2016; Pennsylvania and Michigan did the same for six straight elections. And Arizona went Republican in 16 of 17 presidential elections from 1952 through 2016. It’s a new landscape, all right, and a tougher one for Democrats. Sure would be nice for them if the presidential candidate favored by a plurality of voters simply won.

Sometimes a basic political truth takes a while to gain traction, so I wrote about an important one at New York:

Not long ago there was a robust debate among Democrats over whether they should enter a dangerous midterm cycle emphasizing economic or cultural appeals. There were a lot of voices arguing for various reasons (ranging from the simple poll analysis of “popularists” who wanted Democrats to stress their most popular positions, to those fearful that progressive cultural positions would repel key swing-voter blocs) that the Democratic Party should campaign on the “kitchen-table issues” that were central to the Biden administration’s legislative agenda, from child tax credits and child-care subsidies to minimum-wage increases, pro-unionization efforts, and clean-energy subsidies. It all made good practical sense, particularly if Democrats managed to make progress on enacting some of their favorite economic-policy proposals. And it reflected a very old tradition in which economic issues provided the glue that kept a culturally heterodox (albeit increasingly anachronistic) New Deal coalition together.

Then inflation arrived as the only economic issue that mattered to most voters.

The advent of the first really major wave of price inflation since the late 1970s didn’t make any Biden-Democratic economic-policy proposals less popular, except insofar as together they were presumed to be contributing to an overheated economy or overstimulated consumer demand. When Joe Manchin began gradually decimating the Build Back Better budget reconciliation bill citing inflation fears, he was appealing less to sophisticated economic opinion than to a crude public belief that too much government spending and/or deficits was the only intelligible explanation for this curse (never mind that later versions of BBB were often designed to reduce budget deficits and hold down prices).

Worse yet, even though most Americans under the age of 50 could not remember inflation as a major national problem, it has historically been a problem that left-of-center parties have little credibility to challenge, much like right-of-center parties have little credibility on reducing unemployment or maintaining the social safety net. The perceived evasiveness of Democrats and their “experts” on the subject most recently — apparently denying and then rationalizing inflation as temporary, while dismissing the threat of a real deterioration of the purchasing power of wages, savings, or pensions — has increased that credibility gap.

Unless inflation significantly abates well before November (and there’s certainly no guarantee of that), Democrats will face midterm voters, who are already disposed to smite the party controlling the White House, in a poor position to argue they are the party that can be trusted to help middle-class families make ends meet. That doesn’t mean that if they can wrest some popular domestic proposal out of Congress such as negotiated prescription drug prices for Medicare, it won’t help; they should fight for that and do everything in their power to demonstrate Republican loyalty to Big Pharma via this issue. But it’s likely to be a small life raft against a large wave of distress about inflation, the one economic problem that afflicts nearly everyone.

Democrats thus have little choice but to shift their attention to those “divisive” cultural issues where they at least can get the attention of voters and command majority support. Thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court’s radical Dobbs decision, that now includes abortion rights, an issue where Republicans are in a weak position. Abortion rights are also an issue that can be used to illustrate the GOP’s more general hostility to majoritarian values and more general reliance on anti-democratic institutions like the courts, the Electoral College, the filibuster-controlled U.S. Senate, and reactionary state legislatures. On this front it’s the GOP, not Joe Biden or his party, that is clearly responsible for a clear and present danger to swing-voter interests. Add in a renewed threat of a return to power by Donald Trump or some MAGA successor, and you have the ingredients for a fighting chance for Democrats.

To be sure, emphasizing cultural rather than economic issues is an emotional reach for some Democrats. The Democratic left has an ancient materialist tendency to consider economic concerns the only legitimate issues, while the Democratic center has long feared the negative impact of progressive cultural positions on various swing voters. (Both, in their own way, echo the Marxists of the 1960s who told proto-revolutionary hippies to cut their hair so as not to “alienate the workers.”) But while Democrats can and should obviously hold onto a firm commitment to economic equality as the party’s long-term goal — while understanding that some cultural issues like abortion are economic issues in their own right — at present, too many voters just don’t hear or trust Democrats when they gather, to use the old cliché, round the kitchen table to discuss their daily concerns. Meanwhile those who depend on the rights that Republicans and their judicial hirelings are threatening have no one else to defend them.

Political opportunity and moral responsibility are converging. This time, at least, Democrats need to make their strongest appeal a matter of values and rights that go deeper than the wallet.

Every time Democrats give a helping hand to an extremist Republican candidate on grounds of non-electability, I get nervous, and so I pointed out at New York where this logic might lead:

There are three big realities facing Democrats right now that might lead them to look fondly on an old enemy. First, Democrats need a major distraction to mitigate the damage they’re likely to suffer in November’s midterm elections. Second, in this primary season, Democrats have been perfecting the art of promoting wack-a-doodle Republican extremists that they think will make weak general-election opponents. And third, Donald Trump is thought to be the one Republican 2024 presidential aspirant whom Joe Biden might be able to beat.

Nobody is more distracting or erratic than Donald Trump, who is also the man Biden defeated in 2020. So it’s logical to ask this: Will Democrats start promoting him as the putative Republican presidential nominee in 2024?

The idea is a bit shocking, as the fundamental premise of Biden’s 2020 campaign was to end the Trump nightmare and help the country regain something like its past equilibrium. And the months since Biden won have been littered abundantly with evidence that the 45th president has nothing but contempt for democracy, the rule of law, and basic arithmetic. His postelection antics could yet land him in the hoosegow. But he’s the devil Democrats know: a politician so polarizing that he has a low ceiling on support and galvanizes the opposition and its voters like no one else. Honest Republicans admit that a Trump-free landscape is ideal for midterm gains. In the somewhat longer term, Republicans hope to pocket the electoral advantages of Trumpian “populism” without its dangerously volatile source. Democrats naturally want to thwart this effort to sanitize the MAGA movement.

So as Gabriel Debenedetti put it: “A formal reentry by Trump into the political arena could be very good news electorally for both the party and the president — arguably even the best realistic chance of a political turnaround right now.” And if that’s true right now, it will probably remain true after the midterms have ended and we enter the next presidential cycle.

Philip Bump of the Washington Post puts two and two together and gets yikes!

“Let’s assume that Biden easily locks up the Democratic nomination (which is not a sure thing). Let’s assume, too, that this year’s elevation of right-wing candidates doesn’t backfire on Biden’s party. Would Democrats actively work to ensure Trump gets past Republican primary opponents? Would we see ads sponsored by deep-pocketed Democrats disparaging [Ron] DeSantis as insufficiently MAGA in New Hampshire?”

Now to be clear, it’s unwise to extrapolate Democrats’ elevate-the-kooks midterms strategy too strictly for 2024. In several midterm primaries, Democrats have given a crucial lift to little-known and underfunded candidates with fringe views, like Pennsylvania’s Doug Mastriano and Illinois’s Darren Bailey. Donald Trump isn’t going to be underfunded in 2024, and it’s not like he will need paid ads by Democrats to get attention. But National Review’s Jim Geraghty has already speculated that the all-powerful liberal media might put a thumb on the scales in the 2024 primaries:

“In 2024, which Republican will be perceived by the media as the easiest rival for Joe Biden, or Kamala Harris, or some other Democrat to defeat? I suspect it will be Trump, who just lost a presidential election, will be getting into his late 70s, who won’t stop obsessively ranting about how he was the real winner in the 2020 election, and whose actions and words led to the January 6 Capitol Hill riot …

“The typical Republican may hate the mainstream media, but that doesn’t mean the mainstream media don’t have considerable influence over who Republicans nominate for president.”

Whether or not Democrats or their media allies really do have that kind of power over Republican voters, there’s obviously a moral hazard in even attempting to put Trump a general election away from occupying the Oval Office for a second time. Even if the polls say Trump is the weakest Republican available, the polls were sure wrong in 2016 (and to a considerable extent in 2020). And it’s hard to imagine how liberated the ex-president might feel if he’s lifted to power again after eight straight years of entirely unprecedented misconduct. Could we possibly be lucky enough to survive a second Trump administration with the Constitution (minus some basic rights Trump’s Supreme Court nominees have now denied us) more or less intact?

It’s not an easy thing to figure out. As New York’s Jonathan Chait points out in comparing Trump and DeSantis, there just aren’t any non-authoritarian options for Republican presidential nominations at the moment. Democrats should probably tend to their own problems and let Republicans pick the poison they wish to administer to America in 2024.

Mulling the angst among Democrats over the continuing shrinkage of their FY 2022 budget reconciliation bill, I wrote at New York the not-so-distant time the opposition was in the same sport:

Democrats are in a state of agony over the possibility that their hard-earned governing trifecta, which is very likely to expire after the November midterm elections, will produce far less in the way of legislation than they had envisioned. And while there are, as my colleague Jonathan Chait put it, “a thousand fathers” for the disappointing end to the saga of the once-robust Build Back Better package, much of the blame for Democrats’ steadily shrinking agenda is being cast toward a tiny group of self-styled “centrists” led by West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin.

Democrats famously have a tendency to regard themselves as a party in disarray and are uniquely prone to letting down their activist base by underachievement. But the truth is that narrow congressional majorities often produce devastating legislative setbacks. Ask the Republicans who watched their own domestic policy Great White Whale, a repeal of Obamacare, go down the tubes in the wee hours of July 28, 2017. The coup de grâce was administered by the late John McCain, whose famous “thumbs-down” gesture signaling his decisive vote against the last-gasp “skinny repeal” bill became the symbol of Republican frustration (much like Manchin’s pronouncements against this or that Democratic priority today) in the 115th Congress.

But then as now, the failure was not so simple. Obamacare repeal — like the Build Back Better package, an initiative utilizing the filibuster-skirting budget reconciliation process — was beset by a host of problems. These ranged from hostage taking by Republican dissidents in both Houses who used their leverage over the bill to reshape and sometimes delay it; the nonnegotiable demands of the Senate parliamentarian who used the power to block inclusion of provisions that didn’t meet the obscure germaneness requirements of the Byrd Rule; intra-party factional fights over the scope and audacity of the legislation (which in most versions included explosive add-ons like a Medicaid spending cap); and nervous glances at polling with the upcoming midterm elections in mind. This should all sound familiar to those watching the Democratic dance over BBB.

Republicans in 2017 had the additional handicap of dealing with the most unpredictable president in recent memory, whose support for long-agreed-upon plans could never be taken for granted. And while some may think Democrats are uniquely devastated today because of the enormous possibilities that appeared to open up when their party took over the White House and the Senate in 2021 (with much debate as to whether FDR’s New Deal or LBJ’s Great Society blitz provided the best precedent), Republicans had their own sky-high expectations after winning a trifecta in 2016. As I wrote days after the 2016 election:

“With Trump in the White House and the GOP controlling Congress — the condition that will prevail in January, based on the results of Tuesday’s election — Republicans are now in a position to work a revolution in domestic policy. It will likely be at least as dramatic as anything we’ve seen since Ronald Reagan’s first year in office, and perhaps since LBJ and congressional Democrats enacted the Great Society legislation that is now in peril …

“[A]s Paul Ryan told us all in early October, he has long planned to use the budget reconciliation process — where there is no filibuster available in the Senate — to enact his entire budget in one bill. Again, a bill that cannot be filibustered. He referred to it, appropriately, as a bazooka in his pocket. And while there are some things you cannot do in a reconciliation bill, there aren’t many of them: Congressional Republicans did a trial run last year (nobody paid much attention, because they knew Barack Obama would veto it), and it aimed at crippling Obamacare, defunding Planned Parenthood, and disabling regulators, in addition to the nasty surprises for poor people mentioned above.”

Alarmist as this might sound in retrospect, it was realistic at the time … until Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and Donald Trump found out how hard it was to rush through a budget reconciliation bill with narrow majorities in both Houses.

The analogy between each party’s recent struggles with passing a reconciliation bill is hardly precise, of course. In late 2017, Republicans would bounce back from repeated failed efforts to repeal Obamacare and use reconciliation to enact the very tax cuts that most (though crucially, not all) Democrats want to revise or repeal now. Then they lost control of the House (and thus their trifecta) in November 2018. In the case of today’s Democrats, they got their successful reconciliation bill earlier, in March 2021, in the form of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan that combined COVID relief and recovery measures with small bites of Biden’s economic agenda. Because so much of it was keyed to the pandemic, it was easier to enact than the various long-term measures contemplated in the second planned reconciliation bill (Build Back Better), but its luster as an accomplishment has been diminished by claims that it contributed to the current inflation crisis.

So what’s the lesson for Democrats? The trouble they’ve had isn’t simply about their alleged disunity, or the president’s alleged lack of leadership, or even about the pernicious use of leverage by Manchin or others to throw sand into the legislative machinery. It all comes back to the shakiness of small congressional majorities, and the power of the Senate filibuster, and the creaky imperfections of the budget process as one of the few ways around around the filibuster. Institutional reforms are ultimately the only solution — and yes, Manchin is a huge obstacle to those as well — rather than some surgery on the soul of the Democratic donkey and its various limbs and organs.