Some statistical nuggets from the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) regarding the increase of women in state legislatures:

• As a result of the 2022 election, a record number of women serve in state legislatures, holding 32.7% of all seats.
• The net gain in women’s state legislative representation as a result of election 2022 matched that of 2020, but the partisan trend differed. Gains for Democratic women were up in 2022 from 2020, while Republican women’s gains were smaller as a result of election 2022 than they were as a result of the 2020 election.
• A record number of women were state legislative nominees in 2022, but women were still just one-third of all state legislative nominees. While women were 48.3% of Democratic state legislative nominees, they were 24% of Republican nominees.
• The number of women in state legislatures went up in 32 states, down in 12 states, and stayed the same in six states between 2022 and 2023.
• In 2023, Colorado became the second state in U.S. history whose state legislature reached parity in women’s and men’s representation. Women maintained a majority in Nevada, the first state to reach gender parity in 2018.
• As of February 2023, women match or exceed men’s representation in six state legislative chambers: the Nevada House and Senate, the Arizona Senate, the New Hampshire Senate, the Colorado House, and the New Mexico House.
• CAWP’s data on women state legislators by racial and ethnicity will be available later this year upon receipt of racial/ethnic self-identification from newly-elected women legislators.

Also, “As of February 2023, a record high 2,414 (1,583D, 805R, 20NP, 6Ind) women serve in state legislatures, holding 32.7% of all seats; 1,822 (1,199D, 616R, 2NP, 5Ind) women serve in state houses and 592 (384D, 189R, 18NP, 1Ind) women serve in state senates, both record highs.1 Women are 20% of Republican and 48.4% of Democratic state legislators….Of all women serving in state legislatures as of February 2023, 65.6% are Democrats and 33.3% are Republicans, representing almost no change in the partisan gap in women’s state legislative representation; as of Election Day 2022, 66% of women state legislators were Democrats and 33.1% were Republicans. In contrast, nearly two-thirds of men state legislators are Republicans.”

Looking ahead, the CAWP report on state legislatures concludes:

“As a result of the 2022 election, women are nearing one-third of state legislators nationwide. While this is a notable milestone, gender parity in state legislative representation – achieved in only two states to date – remains distant. Partisan differences contribute to this reality, with Democratic state legislators almost at gender parity while women represent less than one-quarter of Republican state legislators nationwide. Expediting gender parity in state legislative representation will require closing this party gap from candidacy to officeholding.

Women’s state legislative power is not determined by numbers alone. Already in 2023, many women have ascended to key leadership posts in state legislatures, including 18 women who hold the top leadership position (speaker, senate president, or senate president pro tem) in their chambers. In these roles, women have even greater capacity to shape legislative agendas, determine policy strategy, and influence the trajectory of major policy issues that have been delegated to states from the federal government.

State legislative elections in 2023 – to be held in Louisiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, and Virginia – offer the next opportunity for monitoring women’s representation as candidates, nominees, and officeholders. Moreover, being attentive to the retention of women already in state legislatures is important to understanding the overall progress toward gender parity. Finally, making significant gains in women’s state legislative representation will require identifying and taking advantage of opportunities for growth, building and/or bolstering in-state support infrastructures for women candidates and officeholders, and expanding focus beyond statewide and federal offices to make clear the importance of increasing women’s representation in state legislatures for both policymaking and building the pool of potential candidates for higher office.”

The state legislative figures for Democratic women are encouraging, since Democratic women lost one seat in both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, while Republican women picked up two seats in both the Senate and House.

Some insights from “Biden gets a rare hand from Big Business in quest to ease consumer pain: The bully pulpit has produced some interesting results. But how consequential are they?” by Adam Cancryn at Politico: “Just weeks after Biden used his State of the Union to call for crackdowns on insulin prices and “junk fees,” a handful of companies are starting to comply on their own. They’re taking voluntary steps meant to lower patients’ medical bills and make it easier for families to fly together.” This is kind of a BFD. When was the last time you remember a President persuading big biz to lower prices on life-saving meds? Cancryn continues, “The moves have handed Biden a surprise set of wins ahead of an expected reelection bid likely to hinge on his handling of the economy and elevated consumer prices. And within the White House, they’ve injected fresh momentum into a broader domestic agenda built on delivering what the president frequently describes as “a little bit of breathing room” for cash-strapped families….“The president has made clear for over a year now that a top priority is bringing down costs for folks,” said Bharat Ramamurti, deputy director of the National Economic Council and one of the officials spearheading the junk fee initiative. “The fact he’s willing to sharply call out certain behavior and highlight it is encouraging these corporations — at least some of them — to come along with us.”….In a similar vein, three major airlines — United, American and Frontier — are eliminating extra fees often faced by parents wanting to ensure they can sit with their children on flights, a practice Biden slammed last month as akin to treating kids “like a piece of luggage.” Still, they’re keeping the web of other seat and baggage charges that have become the industry norm.” True, such jawboned reforms are not as solid as legislative reforms, and they can be retracted any time. But considering the GOP’s obstructionist posture, credit Biden with doing what he can help consumers and people with health issues, while Republicans can’t come up with even modest health care or consumer reforms. The challenge for Dems is to publicize it.

James G. Chappel discusses “The Frozen Politics of Social Security” at The Boston Review, and writes: “Social Security is back in the news. Some Republicans are angling to reduce benefits, while Democrats are posing as the valiant saviors of the popular program. The end result, most likely, is that nothing will happen. We have seen this story before, because this is roughly where the politics of Social Security have been stuck for about forty years. It’s a problem because the system truly does need repair, and the endless conflict between debt-obsessed Republicans and stalwart Democrats will not generate the progressive reforms we need….More than any other single institution, Social Security keeps the United States from becoming a truly Dickensian world of poverty and despair….Social Security, believe it or not, has a utopian heart: the idea that all Americans deserve a life of dignity and public support once they become old or disabled. This vision does, for now, remain utopian: many Americans are right to worry that, without savings or private pensions, their older years will be just as precarious and austere as their younger ones. Social Security is nonetheless the lynchpin of the U.S. welfare system, such as it is. In 2022 some $1.2 trillion flowed from the system to nearly 66 million people. Most of those people are retired workers, but not all of them. Millions are the spouses or dependents of retired workers; millions more are disabled people, or the spouses or dependents of the disabled. All in all, about one in four Americans over the age of eighteen receives benefits from Social Security. If not for Social Security, almost 40 percent of older Americans would be living in poverty….It is not going too far to say that the Social Security system, more than any other single institution, keeps the United States from becoming a truly Dickensian world of poverty and despair.”

“Despite this dire situation,” Chappel continues, “there has not been a congressional vote, even in committee, on major reforms to Social Security since 1983. This has not been for lack of trying, at least among Democrats. In both the House and the Senate, there are serious bills, with significant support, to salvage the program. The most well-developed, known as Social Security 2100, has more than 200 cosponsors in the House. It’s an audacious bill, planning to expand Social Security benefits for the first time since the 1970s, focusing especially on the caregiving workforce. And in the Senate, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have put forth an even more ambitious plan, which would raise taxes and benefits while expanding the program’s solvency for decades….Still, the odds of anything happening with these bills are low, at least for now. In addition to the expected Republican intransigence, Democrats themselves are not united. The relevant division is between a politics of incrementalism and a politics of bold reform and expansion. Social Security 2100 is on the less ambitious end of the spectrum, especially as it has recently been rewritten to keep Biden’s promise of not raising taxes on people making less than $400,000 per year. As such, the bill does little to address the solvency issue. The Social Security Expansion Act in the Senate is bolder and does more to address both equity and solvency—but few Democratic senators have cosponsored the bill, leaving it oceans away from the required votes….For all their differences, these bills in the aggregate show that Social Security is perfectly capable of providing a vehicle for progressive welfare reform: any of them would do wonders, most obviously for seniors and disabled workers. But all of us, too, would benefit from knowing that something like a livable income was headed our way at the tail end of a serpentine labor market that has almost completely stopped providing traditional pensions. Despite all this, the enormous energy in recent years around expanding Medicare and Medicaid has not been matched by attention to Social Security: the politics around it have languished.” Chappel has much more to say about the history of Social Security, the reasons for the current predicament and potential fixes in this political moment. read his article for more observations.

Rachael Russell shares an update on abortion polling and politics at ‘The Downballot” at Daily Kos. Among her observations: “So we’ve done a lot of polling on abortion, like a lot of other groups in the last year or two. We actually started back in September of 2021 when Texas enacted its crazy vigilante abortion bill for a six-week ban. And since then we’ve really been tracking pretty consistently around abortion rights and access and perception of those, how there has been a steep increase in Americans feeling like the right is at risk in their own state, and nationally….We have consistently found that Americans support access to abortion, and don’t believe the government should take that decision from a patient seeking care. Most recently with the attacks on prescription abortion medication at the state level, we have been tracking support for keeping this medication legal and support for allowing patients to access this medication….We found that by, I believe it was a 37-point margin, Americans support allowing women to legally use prescription abortion medication to end an early abortion at home. This was, I believe around three in five, almost two in three Americans saying that they support this right. This included independents, Democrats and very narrowly Republicans are split, though Republican women have also said that they support this access to abortion medication by a 10-point margin. So we’ve tested some messages to see what Americans view as the most convincing reason to support or to keep abortion medication legal, and we found the most successful message is to focus on its safety and effective record for over 20 years, and being FDA-approved as well as being able to be used as lifesaving treatment for miscarriages….I believe it’s seven in 10 Americans found that those reasons were convincing to keep medication abortion legal. Americans overwhelmingly support the right to access abortion. They absolutely oppose national abortion bans, and this sort of backdoor national abortion ban is something that the American public, if it is to happen, is not going to be happy about. Along with our abortion tracking, we’ve also been tracking favorability of the Supreme Court. While this is a federal court, I know it’s different, but I think it’s really instilling a federal court as a political institution. If these federal courts as well as the Supreme Court continue to curtail access to abortion, we’ll continue to see a decline in their favorability and trust in the institution just generally.”

In one of his recent Washington Post columns, E. J. Dionne argued that “President Biden and the nation’s Democratic governors want to talk about jobs, incomes, child care, health care and who wields economic power. Republicans, led by many of their own governors, want the fight to be all about a packet of cultural issues connected to race, LGBTQ rights, the schools and religion — “woke fantasies,” in the shorthand of Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s response to Biden’s State of the Union address.”Further,

“There is a subtext to this debate: Leading figures in both parties have decided that the future of American politics rests in the hands of working-class voters. With the most affluent voters now largely sorted by ideology, the “working middle class” in the poll-tested phrase popular among politicians, will be getting a lot of love.”

Biden’s bet — and it’s a wager many successful Democratic governors made last year — is that Democrats can win back blue-collar voters. This means not just gaining ground among Whites without college degrees but also winning back Hispanic voters who have drifted toward the GOP, and boosting turnout among the Black working class.

Dionne says “Declining faith in government’s capacity to make a difference in their economic lives has pushed many working-class voters to cast ballots on cultural issues, some closely connected to race….And many Democrats argue that non-economic issues, particularly abortion rights, have been key to the party’s advances among suburban swing voters.”

“Non-economic issues” its a useful term,. especially for abortion rights, which is far more real to most voters than any of the other issues lumped in the sloppy “culture war” basket. It also highlights the importance of economic issues, which remain the Democrats’ best hope for electoral success.

Republicans are masters of the art of political distraction. It is essential for their political survival. They love talking about ‘critical race theory’ and ‘the transsexual agenda’ and making phony claims about duly-certified elections being a conspiracy against everyone who isn’t a self-identified liberal. Republicans hate talking about economic issues because they have nothing to offer in that all-important category, other than the lower taxes, which they end up giving to the already wealthy far more often than the ‘working middle class.’

Dionne makes a convincing case that Democrats should look to their Governors, who think of themselves as “the get-stuff-done caucus,” not without good reason. Republicans hold a House majority and Senate Democrats can’t get any traction anyway, thanks to the idiotic 60-vote requirement for cloture. But there are a very few states, Michigan being exhibit “A,” in which Democrats have the authority to pass popular legislation.

The Senate is paralyzed. Maybe Tim Ryan should be glad he isn’t stuck on that hampster wheel. It’s not a great place right now for Democrats who want to get stuff done. All that could change if Dems take back a House majority in ’24 and somehow hold their Senate majority, against the odds. Until then, it’s Governors, like Whitmer, backed by a Democratic legislative majority, who are in a position to shine.

Dionne quotes NY Governor Kathy Hochul, waxing nostalgically about FDR’s superpower, connecting with working-class voters. FDR was a unique rich guy, who actually cared about working people and it showed. JFK tried to mine that vein, before he was cut down, and LBJ actually delivered some meaningful reforms to help the ‘working middle class,’ before he got bogged down in Vietnam.

But maybe Democrats shouldn’t talk so much about their great leaders of the past, since it highlights their absence in the present. Intelligent voters know that there are no more Lincolns and FDRs, and that today’s situation is very different anyway. What hasn’t changed is the need for political leaders who, rather than get distracted by culture wars, stay focused on economic reforms that can help improve the lives of the ‘working middle-class’ and also support abortion rights. Therein lies the path to Democrats’ future success.

In her article, “Why Are Republicans Going After ‘Wokeness’ Instead of Going After Biden?,” Amy Walter writes at The Cook Political Report: “What makes Americans angry also propels them out to vote. The key for political campaigns, however, is to make sure that the issue motivating their base isn’t also: a) getting the other side’s base super engaged; and/or b) turning off independent-leaning voters you need to win a general election….After the 2020 election, for example, many moderate Democrats blamed their losses at the House level on liberals’ over-emphasis on things like “defunding” the police and support for fewer restrictions on immigration. While those issues may have motivated younger voters and/or voters of color to show up to the polls for Democrats, they also turned off swing voters in battleground districts….In 2022, the abortion issue—normally a base motivator for the GOP—did more to turn out the Democratic base than to motivate an already engaged GOP one….For example, a post-election survey by the progressive group Navigator Research found that among those who “somewhat” disapproved of President Biden’s handling of the economy—13 percent of the electorate—voters backed Democrats over Republicans by a greater than two-to-one margin (net +36; 65 percent Democratic candidates to 29 percent Republican candidates)….I asked Bryan Bennett, the senior director of polling analytics at the Hub Project (the sponsor of the survey), for a profile of these somewhat disapprovers to try and figure out what may have caused them to vote for a Democratic candidate, even as they were “meh” on Biden….What they found was that these voters “pretty overwhelmingly voted for Biden in 2020 (net +40; 68 percent Biden to 28 percent Trump to 4 percent other) and had a more Democratic-leaning profile.” In other words, these are the types of voters who Democrats should be getting to vote for them….The Navigator survey found that the overall electorate picked inflation as the top issue (45 percent), with abortion and jobs tied for second place at 30 percent. However, among those “somewhat disapprovers,” abortion was their top issue at 41 percent, with inflation a close second at 37 percent. In other words, for the overall electorate, inflation was 15 points more important than abortion, while for ‘somewhat disapprovers’, abortion was four points more important than inflation.”

As regards transgender rights, “One of the biggest targets for “anti-woke” legislation is transgender issues and kids,” Walter continues. “According to the website Track Trans Legislation, 38 states have seen anti-trans bills proposed in 2023, including 107 bills that focus on health care restriction for youth and 75 bills that address school/curriculum issues….On its face, this is an issue that not only gets support from conservatives, but also finds acceptance across a more broad cross-section of the public. Washington Post columnist David Byler wrote that the public “has recently become less open to transgender rights” quoting surveys showing that “sixty percent of American adults reported last summer that they oppose including options other than ‘male’ and ‘female’ on government documents. Fifty-eight percent favor requiring transgender athletes to compete on teams that match their sex at birth. Forty-one percent say transgender individuals should be required to use the bathroom corresponding to their sex at birth (31 percent disagree and 28 percent don’t have a position). And Americans are roughly evenly split on whether public elementary schools should teach about gender identity.”….One of the reasons to talk this up, of course, is not simply to motivate the base, but to lure Democrats into a fight on terrain that is more challenging for them. Democrats would rather fight Republicans on issues where they have a noted advantage, like protecting Social Security and Medicare, than on things like gender identity where their coalition is divided….the Economist’s G. Elliot Morris noted that a recent Economist/YouGov poll found that while 58 percent of independents say “whether someone is a man or a woman is determined by the sex they were assigned at birth,” almost 75 percent of independents also think there is “a little” or “a lot” of discrimination against transgender people in the US….The survey also found, Morris said, that “independents are generally opposed to things like puberty blockers for minors and transgender kids playing on sports teams, but also oppose banning books about trans youth.”….In other words, independent voters see a line between keeping kids safe and discriminating or targeting kids.”

From “The Five Day Workweek Is Dead” by Christian Paz at Vox: “And the pandemic has only intensified that push. Record numbers of Americans across economic sectors quit their jobs in what was eventually dubbed the Great Resignation. Whether it’s hourly retail workers frustrated with contingent schedules or more highly paid salaried employees tired of working 60-hour weeks, there is “a broader consensus now that our work should sustain us,” Deutsch said. “Our whole life should not be at the mercy of a job that does not allow us to thrive.”….More livable schedules have had success elsewhere in the world. Companies in Japan, New Zealand, and elsewhere have experimented with shorter workweeks in recent years, often reporting happier workers who are actually better at their jobs. But one of the largest and most high-profile recent experiments took place in Iceland, where local and federal authorities working with trade unions launched two trials of a shortened workweek, one in 2015 and one in 2017. In the trials, workers shifted from a 40-hour work week to 35 or 36 hours, with no cut to their pay. It wasn’t just office workers who participated — the trials included day care workers, police officers, care workers for people with disabilities, and people in a variety of other occupations….The results were impressive, according to a report on the trials published by Autonomy, a UK-based think tank that helped analyze them. Workers reported better work-life balance, lower stress, and greater well-being. “My older children know that we have shorter hours and they often say something like, ‘Is it Tuesday today, dad? Do you finish early today? Can I come home directly after school?’” one father said, according to the report. “And I might reply ‘Of course.’ We then go and do something — we have nice quality time.” Democrats would be wise to pay close attention to the movement for a shorter workweek. People want more time with their families, and for personal growth and development, and the shorter workweek is the key reform that can bring it to them.

You have probably read or heard about the daunting odds Democrats face in holding on to their U.S. Senate majority in 2024. In the House, however, Dems have better prospects, as Kyle Kondik writes at Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “The overall battle for House control in 2024 starts as a Toss-up….Relatively similar numbers of Democratic and Republican seats start in the most competitive Toss-up and Leans categories, although Republicans start with a few more targets in large part because of the likelihood that they will benefit from redistricting in North Carolina and Ohio….Big blue states California and New York, where Republicans have made key gains over the past couple of cycles, loom large as Democrats plot a path back to the House majority….Sources on both sides of the aisle generally believe that the House playing field is not going to be that large. Part of it is that redistricting slightly reduced the number of truly competitive districts, and the North Carolina and Ohio maps could chip away at that number a little further. But Republicans also probably will not be casting as wide of a net as they did in 2022, as they came up empty in many districts where Biden did better than he did nationally. That includes arguably red-trending but still blue districts like the ones held by Reps. Frank Mrvan (D, IN-1), Henry Cuellar (D, TX-28), and Vicente Gonzalez (D, TX-34). Republicans were hoping that another turn of the realigning wheel in these places after Donald Trump made them more competitive in 2016 and/or 2020 would flip them red in 2022, but that didn’t happen. So Republicans may not push as hard in these districts as they did last time….Our overall ratings show 212 seats rated Safe, Likely, or Leans Republican, 201 rated Safe, Likely, or Leans Democratic, and 22 Toss-ups. Splitting the Toss-ups evenly, 11-11, would result in a net GOP gain of a single seat. Democrats need to net 5 seats to win the majority. Again, we think this is reflective of an overall Toss-up House race to start.”

“Why isn’t Joe Biden getting credit for the economic recovery?” Christian Paz probes the possible answers at Vox, and writes: “President Joe Biden has a lot to be proud of. Riding off a State of the Union speech earlier this month that felt like a victory lap, he and his Cabinet have been blitzing across the country to sharpen his economic message. The Biden administration has sought to contrast Republican threats to Social Security and Medicare with its own legislative work to invest in infrastructure and manufacturing, and bring down the costs of education, health care, and energy….The image of the accelerating “Biden boom” that the White House has been trying to project is rooted in economic data: unemployment is now at its lowest level since 1969, January saw the seventh straight month of slowing inflation, the economy has continued to grow despite fears of a recession, and over 12 million jobs have been created since Biden took office two years ago….But why doesn’t it feel that way? The average American is still likely to say the economy is in relatively dire straits, according to Gallup polling data, and large numbers fear worsening inflation, higher interest rates and unemployment, and the possibility of a recession in 2023. Some 80 percent of American adults think the economy is either in poor or fair shape, according to January data from Pew Research Center….The short answer is, of course, inflation. Prices are still much higher at this point than they were two years ago, and news about expensive eggs and expensive housing are likely still putting a damper on our collective sense of an improving economy….“The bad news of the economy (rising inflation, declining real incomes) has outweighed the good news (mostly consistent growth in GDP, low unemployment),” John Sides, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, said. “Negative economic news is both more prevalent in news coverage and is also more salient to consumers, relative to positive economic news. So even in an economy with mixed signals, the bad news wins out.”

Paz adds, “Sides, who has studied the relationship between political prospects and economic news extensively, uses the University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment to analyze how down people are on the economy. The index, which measures how people feel about the general economic climate from a monthly random survey of Americans, tells an unsurprising story: though consumer sentiment remains way below the historical average, it has been steadily rising for three consecutive months, and is significantly higher than it was a year ago, matching the trend of cooling inflation. That matches up pretty closely with how people feel about Joe Biden as a president….For most of the time that index has been collecting data, there was a straightforward correlation between presidential approval ratings and feelings about the economy: better economic news reliably translated into higher approval ratings. But Barack Obama and Donald Trump’s presidencies disrupted this relationship, Sides found. Higher consumer sentiment didn’t translate into a political advantage for either of them, despite the post-Great Recession recovery under Obama and the Trump economic boom…“Inflation is an everyone problem and unemployment is a some-people problem,” the economic columnist Annie Lowrey argued in the Atlantic last year. When things were bad during the Covid recession in 2020, everyone felt fear, but only some people lost their jobs. “The pain was uneven. In contrast, nobody escapes inflation, even if rising prices affect some people far more than others,” Lowrey wrote….Speaking to the New Yorker, Biden’s recently departed chief of staff, Ron Klain, alluded to a larger problem across the world….“We’re just at a place where, in democracies, we’re going to find that forty-three or forty-four [percent] will turn out to be a very high approval rating, just because people are polarized: the people on the other side are never going to say you’re doing a good job, and for the people in the middle it’s just easier to say, ‘Eh’,” he told the New Yorker’s Evan Osnos….The better measure of success is elections, Klain said. And Biden will have another chance to prove his messaging and agenda are working next year.”

In “Most Americans Think House Republicans Aren’t Investigating Real Problems,” Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux writes at FiveThirtyEight: “According to a Fox News/Beacon Research/Shaw & Company Research poll conducted in late January, more than two-thirds of registered voters said it’s at least somewhat important for Congress to investigate the origins of COVID-19, federal agencies’ potential bias against conservatives and the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. But Republicans’ targets don’t really line up with the issues that registered voters are most concerned about, according to a Politico/Morning Consult poll conducted in November. When voters were asked about their “top priority” for congressional investigations, fentanyl trafficking into the U.S., operations at the U.S.-Mexico border and the infant formula shortage of summer 2022 topped the list. This suggests that the Republicans’ border-security investigation could have some legs — but other issues, like the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, the impeachment of Mayorkas and Hunter Biden’s finances, were ranked lower….Other polls, meanwhile, suggest that Americans are concerned that Republican investigations will focus too much on digging up dirt on political rivals. A Pew Research Center poll conducted in January found that 65 percent of Americans were concerned that the GOP will focus too much on investigating the Biden administration, while only 32 percent were worried that the GOP wouldn’t focus enough on Biden. And when a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll asked about the GOP’s investigation into so-called targeting of conservatives by federal agencies, Americans were much likelier to say that the investigation is an attempt to score political points (56 percent) than a legitimate investigation (36 percent). Similarly, a USA Today/Suffolk University poll conducted in December found that a majority (51 percent) of registered voters agreed with a statement that impending House GOP investigations will be “mostly a political effort to embarrass the Biden administration,” while 38 percent called the investigations “an appropriate way to hold the Biden administration accountable.”

Thomason-DeVeaux notes further, “To be clear: Republicans’ investigations are going to happen whether Americans want them or not. Congressional investigations of presidents during periods of divided government are something of an American tradition. Two political scientists, Douglas Kriner and Eric Schickler, looked at congressional-investigation data between 1969 and 2014, and found that the number of days the House spent investigating the executive branch spiked whenever the two were controlled by different parties….Kriner and Schickler found that, in the past, aggressive investigations were pretty effective for attacking a sitting president. According to their analysis, 20 days of investigations in a month caused a drop in the president’s approval of about 2.5 percentage points. But it’s also possible that congressional investigations don’t pack the punch they used to. After all, Trump’s first impeachment didn’t do much to change Americans’ perspectives on him. And if Americans are already skeptical about Republicans’ investigations, GOP House members will have an even higher bar for convincing the public to pay attention….When Democrats took control of the House in 2019, Americans were similarly suspicious that their investigations for Trump would be politically tinged. A Suffolk University/USA Today poll conducted in December 2018 found that nearly half (49 percent) of registered voters thought Democrats would go too far in their investigations of Trump, while 36 percent thought that Democrats wouldn’t go far enough. And by the end of Democrats’ four-year stint in control of the House, one of their biggest investigations hadn’t made a huge impact on public opinion: According to a Public Religion Research Institute poll published this past October, 56 percent of Americans said that their views of Trump hadn’t changed because of the investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol….So while some Republicans will no doubt cheer the House GOP’s investigative zeal, the inquiries will probably seem to most Americans like more political noise.”

At FiveThirtyEight’s “Other Polling Bites,” Monica Potts notes, “Sixty-three percent of Americans are dissatisfied with the level of immigration to the country; of that group, a 64 percent majority say they want the level of immigration to decrease, according to a Gallup survey from January. Overall, the number of Americans who want immigration to decrease stands at 40 percent, more than double the number two years ago. There’s also a partisan split in how Americans view immigration: 71 percent of Republicans say there should be less immigration. Only 19 percent of Democrats agree. And while that’s a jump from only 2 percent of Democrats two years ago, Americans seem to be aware of a partisan split on this issue: An Ipsos poll from Feb. 3 to 5 found that 78 percent of adults think Americans are far apart on the issue of immigration, ranking it as one of the more divisive political issues asked about.” Democrats, take note that the high-turnout senior demographic is significantly more “dissatisfied with level of immigration and wanting it decreased” than other age groups, according to the Gallup Poll data.

Nonetheless, David J. Bier and Alex Nowrasteh report that “Biden’s Plan to End the Border Crisis Is Already Working” at The Daily Beast, and note: “In December 2022, the last full month before humanitarian parole, Border Patrol had 84,176 encounters with migrants from those four countries which accounted for over 36 percent of all encounters that month at the U.S.-Mexico border. In January, the number had already dropped to 11,909—an 86 percent decline. As a result, overall U.S.-Mexico border encounters are down 42 percent….This was similar to the decline in Ukrainians fleeing the Russian invasion showing up at the Southwest border in Spring 2022 after a similar program was announced. Their numbers dropped from 20,118 in April 2022 to 375 in May, a 98 percent reduction, after the Uniting for Ukraine parole program allowed them to come directly from abroad with a U.S. sponsor….The Ukrainian program was the model for Biden’s Latin American humanitarian parole and it’s having similarly dramatic effects on improving border security.” The authors, both affiliated with the libertarian Cato Institute, note some of the problems of the policy, but conclude: “The Biden administration has turned a massive flow of illegal immigrants into a smaller flow of legal immigrants using a 71-year-old legal power granted to him by Congress. Migrants on humanitarian parole are legal migrants, lawfully allowed to live and work in the United States….By extending humanitarian parole to other countries, increasing the numbers, attaching work authorization to parole, and reinstituting normal immigration fees, President Biden can be the first president to gain control of the border in generations.”

From “Both White and Nonwhite Democrats are Moving Left” by Alan I. Abramowitz at Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “Growing partisan-ideological congruence has been one of the most important trends affecting American politics over the past several decades. The ideological divide between Democrats and Republicans has increased dramatically since the 1970s as Republicans have grown increasingly conservative and Democrats have grown increasingly liberal. This increase in partisan-ideological congruence has affected rank-and-file voters as well as party elites and activists….In this article, I use data from American National Election Studies surveys to examine trends in partisan-ideological congruence among Democratic and Republican voters since 2012. To measure partisan-ideological congruence, I examine trends in ideological identification and policy preferences among Democrats and Republicans. In addition, I examine whether there is evidence of an emerging ideological divide between white and nonwhite Democratic voters. The findings indicate that from 2012 to 2020, there was a dramatic increase in liberalism among Democratic voters. This leftward shift has been somewhat greater among white Democrats than among nonwhite Democrats. However, both white and nonwhite Democrats moved to the left over that timespan. As a result, for the first time in recent history, partisan-ideological congruence is as great among Democrats as among Republicans. This trend has important implications for voting behavior….The sharp leftward movement among Democratic voters in recent years has led some political observers to suggest that Democrats need to be concerned about a growing racial divide in political ideology.

Abramowitz continues, “Nonwhites make up a large share of Democratic voters — 43% in 2020 according to the ANES data — and nonwhite Democrats have traditionally been less likely than white Democrats to self-identify as liberal. A growing racial divide in ideology could lead to an erosion in support for Democratic candidates among nonwhites, who have been some of the most loyal Democratic voters….Nonwhite Democrats continue to be somewhat less likely than white Democrats to self-identify as liberal and to support abortion rights. However, they are just as liberal as white Democrats on other issues such as government responsibility for jobs and living standards and aid to Blacks. The most significant trend in attitudes on these issues has been a dramatic shift to the left among white Democrats.” In his conclusion, Abramowitz explains, “The increase in loyalty among white Democratic identifiers is due largely to their increased liberalism because defections among white Democrats have been heavily concentrated among those with relatively conservative ideological orientations. This increased loyalty has also been apparent in other types of elections including those for U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. In 2022, according to data from the American National Election Studies Pilot Survey, 96% of Democratic identifiers, including leaning independents, voted for Democratic candidates for U.S. House and U.S. Senate. Growing ideological congruence among Democrats, and especially among white Democrats, suggests that these high levels of loyalty are likely to continue in 2024 and beyond.” Abramowitz establishes that the trend is clear. But centrist Democrats see the party’s left lean as more of a problem, because it gives the Republicans much more opportunity to win votes from moderates.

Democrats should aspire to be the party of a majority of working-class voters of all races. But that isn’t going to happen overnight; it will take a few election cycles, and that is an optimistic scenario.

It should nonetheless remain a primary long-term goal of the party. If Democrats don’t represent working-class people, then what are they really about? Abandoning that goal would guarantee continued political impotence and stagnation. Demographic realities do not support a “skip the white workers” strategy.

White workers, narrowly defined as non-college voters, are about 40-45 percent of the most recent electorate, nation-wide. But let’s keep in mind that “non-college” is a statistically-useful designation, but not a perfect definition of working-class voters. There are substantial numbers of white, college-educated workers doing service work and ‘pink collar’ jobs in the U.S. economy. It’s likely that a majority of today’s voters hail from the white working-class.

Moreover, the morality of seeking a work-around the white working class is pretty shameful. Democrats must keep moving toward becoming a party that workers of all races can look to for leadership that can make their lives better.

In the short term, however, a more achievable goal is needed to prevent disaster for Dems: Democrats should try hard to win a modestly-larger share of working-class voters: taking away just 5 percent of white working-class voters from Republicans in 2024 would be a great victory. Taking 10 percent of their white worker voters would be politically-transformative, and go a long way toward enacting a full-blown progressive economic agenda.

These percentages can be even smaller if Democrats do a better job of mobilizing a larger turnout of sizable Dem-friendly constituencies, like Black voters, Mexican Americans, college students and women concerned about reproductive rights. It won’t be easy, since turnout of some traditionally pro-Democratic groups has declined in recent elections. But there is so much room for turnout improvement with all of these constituencies that abandoning that goal would be political malpractice.

Few Democratic elected officials and Democratic voters actually embrace unpopular policies like ‘open borders’ or ‘defunding the police.’ Some organizations do, they are very loud and big media amplifies their voices. That gives the impression to many that most Democrats are in favor of such policies, and that screws up the Democratic ‘brand.’

Some progressive Democrats advocate policies that are unpopular with white workers, like banning fracking, gun control or tuition-free college education, to name a few. Their views are usually tailored to appeal to their particular constituencies and they are sometimes right. But the arrogant way they sometimes express their views too often invites hostility from blue collar workers. Hence the bumper sticker, “Drill everywhere: My truck won’t run on unicorn piss.”

However, few who advocate culturally ‘progressive’ views are going to change because of anything commentators say about them. Nor will many Democratic moderates change their views because of anything progressive Democrats say. That debate is never going to be resolved, and that’s not a bad thing. We’re supposed to have vigorous policy debates, unlike Republicans who don’t stand for much besides tax give-aways to the wealthy, cuts in social spending and deregulation.

Meanwhile, Democratic strategists should explore promising approaches, like developing targeted policy mixes and pitching strategies that can appeal to small business entrepreneurs, seniors or rural voters. Democratic elected officials already support an impressive range of policies that benefit white working-class voters. But they have to do a better job of spelling out these reforms, publicizing their support and calling out Republican opposition. Picking off a percent or two of Republicans share of the vote here and there can make a big difference.

Democrats are not going to suddenly become ‘the party of the working-class’ in time for next year’s elections. That’s going to take longer. But Dems must implement a short-term 2024 strategy that can win or at least prevent Republicans from being able to further gerrymander Democrats out of power. That has to include a full range of short-term tactics, including potentially-risky projects like opposition primary meddling where it will work – while making steady progress toward becoming the party working-class voters trust.

Democrats have to play a better short game as well as a more effective long-term one. There are overlapping strategies for both, but Dems must stay nimble and be ready to seize every short-term opportunity to make gains in the next election.

Some polling data from “Just How Far Apart Are The Two Parties On Gun Control?” by Ryan Best, Mary Radcliffe and Kaleigh Rogers at FivdeThirtyEight: “What percentage of Republican and Democratic respondents do you think said they “strongly” or “somewhat” support requiring background checks for all gun purchasers? 77% of Republican and 91% of Democratic respondents said they “strongly” or “somewhat” support universal background checks, a difference of 14 percentage points. (Source: Morning Consult/Politico, March 6-8, 2021, among 1,990 registered voters)….What percentage of Republican and Democratic respondents do you think said they “strongly” or “somewhat” support allowing a family member to seek a court order to temporarily take away guns if they feel a gun owner may harm themselves or others? 70% of Republican and 85% of Democratic respondents said they “strongly” or “somewhat” support red-flag laws, a difference of 15 percentage points. (Source: APM Research Lab, July 16-21, 2019, among 1,009 U.S. adult residents) ….What percentage of Republican and Democratic respondents do you think said they “strongly” or “somewhat” favor banning assault-style weapons? 37% of Republican and 83% of Democratic respondents said they “strongly” or “somewhat” favor banning assault weapons, a difference of 46 percentage points. (Source: Pew Research Center, April 5-11, 2021, among 5,109 adults). What percentage of Republican and Democratic respondents do you think said they believe the right of people to own guns is more important than protecting people from gun violence? 9% of Democratic and 39% of Republican respondents said they believe the right to own guns is more important, a difference of 30 percentage points. (Source: YouGov/The Economist, April 16-19, 2022, 1,500 U.S. adult citizens). And anyone concerned about improving gun safety in America should read Nicholas Kristof’s “A Smarter Way to Reduce Gun Deaths” in the New York Times.

And at The Hill Olafimihan Oshin reports that “Americans’ dissatisfaction with gun laws at new high: Gallup poll,” and writes: “A majority of Americans surveyed expressed dissatisfaction with current gun laws in the U.S. amid a recent string of mass shootings affecting the country, according to a new Gallup poll….The poll, published Wednesday, found that 63 percent of respondents said they are dissatisfied with the nation’s laws and policies on firearms, while 34 percent of those surveyed said the opposite….The results marked the highest percentage of Americans that are dissatisfied with current gun laws in the last seven years, with a seven-point increase from last year, when 56 percent of respondents claimed they were unhappy….Satisfaction with gun policies in the country has also fallen since last year’s poll, tying the lowest on record, according to Gallup….Among political party lines, 54 percent of Republican or Republican-leaning Independent respondents said they are satisfied with the nation’s laws and policies on handguns, while 44 percent of those surveyed expressed their dissatisfaction with current law….On the other side, 84 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning Independents expressed their dissatisfaction with the nation’s laws and policies, while 14 percent of those surveyed said they are satisfied with the nation’s current policies…Around 60 percent of Independent respondents express their dissatisfaction with the nation’s laws and firearm policies, while 36 percent of those surveyed said they are satisfied.”

Jason Linkins argues “The Case Against a Biden Run Is Obvious—and Weak” at The New Republic, and observes: “The political media are chaos junkies who treat conflict as catnip and would relish the crisis caused by Biden’s departure. Meanwhile, the lesson of the midterms is that voters are turned off by disarray. Biden’s own polling struggles reflect this: Nothing damaged his approval ratings more than the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. He is still struggling to recover from that one moment when it did not appear that the adults were in charge….But Afghanistan is instructive in a different way as well. The withdrawal may have hurt Biden’s numbers, but the fact that he was unwilling to keep paying the sunk costs of the Afghanistan scam was a real break from the status quo. Biden’s State of the Union address suggested that the president still has that yen for fresh thinking. As HuffPost’s Kevin Robillard noted: Clinton used his address “to declare the era of big government over, Obama used them to sell a grand bargain and a free trade deal.” Biden, by contrast, “used it to attack big pharma, rule out social security cuts, talk about antitrust policy, and declare the tax code unfair.”….This is a phenomenon that we’ve noted before: Many of Biden’s throwback instincts about the way America could be are incredibly well suited to the moment, and seem fresher than his predecessors’ ideas. Would-be Biden successors should take heed, because at the moment it’s Biden who sounds most like a bona fide party standard-bearer and a better tribune of the middle class than any of the GOP’s weird culture warriors, and more prepared to battle the larger universe of chiselers and cheats who have gotten away with nickel-and-diming ordinary Americans.”

So many of the internal arguments among Democrats boil down to how to spend money. At Campaigns & Elections, Swati Mylavarapu makes the case that “Democrats Need a Better Investment Strategy‘ and writes: “Currently, Democrats over-invest at the top of the ticket and prioritize federal races at the expense of state races. We fall in love with candidates and over-invest in individual campaigns at the expense of organizing infrastructure and pipeline building. And we invest late in an election cycle when resources can have limited impact….In practice, this means that for every campaign that’s raising millions in a given cycle, including long shots, we’re neglecting winnable state races and infrastructure investments that can help Democrats build lasting power for generations….First, we must invest early in the election cycle—and by early, I mean now. As Election Day approaches, campaigns become increasingly limited in how they can leverage resources, resulting in the majority of late money going to advertising….Reallocating a portion of that late money towards early investments would give Democrats the flexibility to prioritize tactics like voter registration and deep canvassing to message policy wins—efforts that can reduce election-year spend and build our base….Second, donors must distribute resources up and down the ballot. Last year’s historic state legislative gains came from a long-overdue recognition that state legislatures govern issues that have a profound impact on our lives. Prioritizing down-ballot investments can help us lock in those gains and flip other chambers — all while helping Democrats build a bench of talent and drive up vote tallies on top of the ticket races….Third, in addition to supporting candidates, we must invest in groups that strengthen Democratic infrastructure and help us build long-term power. We need permanent, year-round efforts to register voters, mobilize communities of color, expand the Democratic talent pipeline, and train campaign staff and volunteers. Investment in groups that do this work–like Arena, Run for Something, SwingLeft, and Sister District–pays both short and long-term dividends….Finally, rather than ceding ground, we should buy in the bear market with investments in states that are or are trending red, like Florida. Georgia is a perfect example of what Democrats can accomplish when we play the long game. Winning back power is a marathon, not a sprint — we can’t be short sighted and only focus on races that can be won immediately….Together, these shifts in tactics and strategy can help Democrats secure sustainable power for generations.”

In bis article, “Americans Usually Blame Republicans After Showdowns Over Federal Spending,” Nathaniel Rakich writes at FiveThirtyEight, “….Since 2010, there have been no fewer than five major fiscal standoffs between Republicans and Democrats akin to the one(s) we’ll probably brave later this year. These crises had tangible economic consequences, including the furloughing of 800,000 federal workers and the downgrading of the U.S.’s credit rating. But they also had political repercussions for the elected officials who caused them. And that track record could give us an idea of whom Americans would blame if brinksmanship in Washington, D.C., again upsets the economic apple cart….So I looked at what caused each of the five prior crises and what the polls said after they were resolved. The results bode poorly for Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his fellow Republicans: Since 2010 at least, the public has always blamed and soured on the GOP more than Democrats in the wake of these standoffs.’ Rakich reviews the previous stand-offs and notes the polling responses following each one. He concludes: “Here in 2023, House Republicans have already made it clear that they will demand spending cuts, as they did in 2011, before raising the debt ceiling. And if history is any indication, Americans will see that as a reason to blame them for any ensuing chaos….But Americans may not penalize the GOP at the ballot box for it. That’s because the political effects of these crises are short-lived; there’s always another news cycle that replaces it….events, dear reader, events will probably put the memory of 2023’s fiscal turbulence in the rearview mirror by the time of the 2024 election. But that doesn’t make public opinion surrounding the debate irrelevant — far from it. Impasses like 2013’s and 2019’s were likely broken because Republicans felt intense public pressure to give in. So while Republicans probably don’t need to worry about losing an election due to their hard line on spending, they still ought to fret about losing public support: It will make it harder for them to stand firm in the showdown to come.”

At Vox, Nicole Narea writes: “Democrats have just notched yet another win at the state level after a strong showing in the 2022 midterm, claiming control of the Pennsylvania House….Democrats followed statehouse takeovers in Minnesota and Michigan by winning all three special elections in the Pennsylvania state House Tuesday. Those victories gave them a one-seat majority and brought a close to the conflict for control of the chamber that has persisted since November. It was an upset: Redistricting had made the electoral map more competitive for Democrats, and the Pennsylvania House was rated “leans Republican” ahead of the November election by Sabato’s Crystal Ball. Democrats haven’t controlled the chamber since 2010….And it’s another moment of reckoning for Republicans in a critical swing state, which also sent two Democrats to the US Senate for the first time in more than 70 years and saw Democrat Josh Shapiro win the governorship by nearly 15 points over his Republican opponent, election denier Doug Mastriano….The result builds on Democrats’ success in state capitols in the midterms. The party previously struggled to compete with more than a decade of Republican dominance at the state level. It was the first time since 1934 that the party of the incumbent president didn’t lose a single state legislative chamber. In fact, they gained five. Democratic state legislatures now govern more people than those controlled by Republicans, even though the GOP still won marginally more seats in 2022 overall….Even so, Pennsylvania will have a divided government: Shapiro won the governor’s race, and Republicans maintained control of the state Senate. That could limit the realm of what’s possible from a policy standpoint, especially since even a single defection from party ranks in the House could doom any given Democratic agenda item….Pennsylvania Democrats are already managing expectations in that regard. They’re projecting that they won’t be able to codify Roe v. Wade after the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn it last year, but hope that on labor and the economy, they have a real opportunity to achieve reforms because those are areas of wide agreement in the caucus and where they might even be able to attract some Republican votes….“We’ll be able to dodge so many bullets just by going from defense to offense,” Lee told WESA, Pittsburgh’s NPR News station. “We’ll get to move forward a workers’ rights agenda.”

The Nation’s Jeet Heer has some cogent observations about “The GOP’s Phony Class War,” including “the GOP shows little interest in economic populism. In the debt ceiling fight, the GOP has shown that austerity rather than economic populism still guides the party’s approach to social spending. Only six Republican senators, including Hawley and Rubio, voted to force railway companies to give union workers paid sick leave. In a recent committee assignment for chair of the House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee, Speaker Kevin McCarthy picked Thomas Massie, a standard pro-corporate Republican, over Ken Buck (described by Emily Birnbaum of Bloomberg as “one of the most fervent tech critics in the House”). As Branko Marcetic of Jacobin notes, in 2022 only seven Republican senators voted “to cap the extortionate price of insulin for Americans on private insurance to $35, a potentially transformative policy at a time when four out of five Americans are going into debt to pay for the medicine.” Marcetic further observed that in 2021 not a single Republican senator supported a motion to raise the minimum wage (Hawley said he’d support such a measure if it had a carve-out for small business that would have left nearly half the work force uncovered)….the working class is divided on partisan lines, with a majority of white working-class voters supporting the GOP on racial and cultural grounds, while a majority of working-class people of color vote for the Democrats. Princeton political scientist Frances Lee told The New York Times that “the party system in the U.S. simply does not represent that ‘haves’ against the ‘have-nots.’ Both parties represent a mix of haves and have-nots in economic terms.”….Because both parties are broad cross-class alliances, economic populism is likely to be muted for the foreseeable future. For the Republicans, stoking the culture wars remains the easiest way to keep white working-class support without alienating the wealthy. It’s hardly a surprise that the two front-runners for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination are Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis: both masters of pouring fuel into the fire of transphobia, xenophobia, and racism….they represent the future of the GOP.”

Jarod Facundo shares interesting election and polling data in “Will the Education Culture War Backfire on Republicans?” at The American Prospect: “In last November’s midterm elections, conservative candidates for school board elections performed worse than they had hoped in most places across the country. The most visible issues in these matchups were culture war panics about so-called “woke” schools infected with critical race theory curricula, sports teams with transgender athletes, and lingering COVID-19 restrictions. The legitimate discontent parents had with wanting their children inside schools was tapped into by right-wing groups such as the 1776 Project PAC and Moms for Liberty, which supported candidates who would purge “cultural Marxism” and promise to bring a “culture of Liberty.”….Instead of overwhelming success that would prove the lasting power of a grassroots constituency of fed-up parents all across the country, those conservative groups overcalculated the saliency of the issues they ran on. Before the midterms, the 1776 Project posted a 70 percent success rate in elections it worked on. In November, the group won 20 races of the 50 endorsed, good for 40 percent. Moms for Liberty fared a bit better. They won 50 percent of endorsed races nationwide….The new culture war over the future of education is a stalking horse for the same old battle over school choice. The not-too-hidden goal of denigrating public schools is to weaken support for teachers and their unions, and to redirect funds into school vouchers and other programs that pummel public education even further….Polling conducted by the American Federation of Teachers in mid-December found that the culture-war framing was unpopular. Instead, voters and parents saw strong academic, critical reasoning, and practical life skills as most important, when compared to anti-wokeness. Furthermore, among the sample group, when given the option between improving public education and giving parents more school choices, 80 percent preferred improving public schools. Most revealing was that two-thirds of voters said that culture-war battles distracted public schools from their foremost role: educating students.”

Robert Reich’s “Republicans aren’t going to tell Americans the real cause of our $31.4tn debt” at The Guardian includes some message points Dems should find useful, including: “In the first full year of the Trump tax cut, the federal budget deficit increased by $113bn while corporate tax receipts fell by about $90bn, which would account for nearly 80% of the deficit increase….Meanwhile, America’s wealthy have been financing America’s exploding debt by lending the federal government money, for which the government pays them interest….As the federal debt continues to mount, these interest payments are ballooning – hitting a record $475bn in the last fiscal next year (which ran through September). The Congressional Budget Office predicts that interest payments on the federal debt will reach 3.3% of the GDP by 2032 and 7.2% by 2052….The biggest recipients of these interest payments? Not foreigners but wealthy Americans who park their savings in treasury bonds held by mutual funds, hedge funds, pension funds, banks, insurance companies, personal trusts and estates….Hence the giant half-century switch: the wealthy used to pay higher taxes to the government. Now the government pays the wealthy interest on their loans to finance a swelling debt that’s been caused largely by lower taxes on the wealthy….This means that a growing portion of everyone else’s taxes are going to wealthy Americans in the form of interest payments, rather than paying for government services that everyone needs….So, the real problem isn’t America’s growing federal budget deficit. It’s the decline in tax revenue from America’s wealthy combined with growing interest payments to them….Both are worsening America’s already staggering inequalities of income and wealth….What should be done? Isn’t it obvious? Raise taxes on the wealthy.”

NYT columnist Thomas B. Edsall addresses a pivotal question facing the Democratic Party, “How Much Longer Can ‘Vote Blue No Matter Who!’ Last?” and quotes University of Mississippi political scientist Julie Wronski, who who sees Democrats as “a coalition of racial minorities (especially Blacks) and whites who are sympathetic to the inequities and challenges faced by minority groups in America. Racial identities and attitudes are the common thread that link wealthier, more educated whites with poorer minority constituencies….The Democrats’ biracial working-class coalition during the mid-20th century, in Wronski’s view, “was successful because racial issues were off the table.” Once those issues moved front and center, the coalition split: “Simply put, the parties are divided in terms of which portion of the working class they support — the white working class or the poorer minority communities.” But do Republicans really “support” the white working-class in any substantial way? Edsall continues, “the level of educational attainment is the line of demarcation between the two groups of white voters….By 2020, the white working class — defined by the Federal Reserve of St. Louis as “whites without four-year college degrees” — voted for Donald Trump over Joe Biden, 67 to 32 percent, according to network exit polls. In the 2022 election, white working-class voters backed Republican House candidates at almost the same level, 66 to 32 percent.” The Republican’s ability to win 2/3 of the white workers who actually show up to vote is unchanged.