In the last two decades, the Republican ranks in Colorado have shrunk drastically, to just a quarter of registered voters, as the once reliably red state has turned a distinct shade of blue.

In the last two decades, the Republican ranks in Colorado have shrunk drastically, to just a quarter of registered voters, as the once reliably red state has turned a distinct shade of blue.

The transformation is part of a larger political shift across the West: along the Pacific Coast, through the deserts of Nevada and Arizona, into the Rocky Mountain states of Colorado and New Mexico. Once a Republican bulwark, the region has become Democratic bedrock. That, in turn, has reshaped presidential politics nationwide.

With a big chunk of the West — California, Colorado, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington — seemingly locked up, Democrats are free to focus more heavily on the perennial battlegrounds of the Midwest and venture into once-solidly Republican states such as Georgia.

Barabak plans to visit western states for a series “to explore the forces that remade the political map.” Further,

The changes didn’t just happen, like the snow embroidering the Rockies in winter, or the runoff that swells Colorado’s icy rivers in the spring. It took money, strategy, demographic changes and, not least, a sharp rightward turn by Republicans.

The series, called “The New West,” begins in Colorado, as no state in the region has changed its partisan coloration as emphatically over the last two decades. “From a western swing state, it has become a Democratic stronghold,” said pollster Floyd Ciruli, who’s sampled public opinion in Colorado for more than 40 years.

In 2004, Democrats essentially gave up and wrote the place off; they’ve carried Colorado in every presidential contest since. In 2020, Joe Biden romped to a 13-point win over President Trump, the largest Democratic victory here in more than half a century.

Barabak explains that “Colorado has long been a magnet for twenty- and thirty-somethings, drawn by the state’s mouthwatering scenery, outdoorsy lifestyle and, more recently, its thriving tech and service industries.” Also,

What has changed are those who’ve found their home in the Democratic Party: They are younger, more affluent, better educated, and more liberal on issues such as abortion and gay rights….In short, Democrats are now much more in tune with Colorado, one of the best-educated and socially liberal states in the country, as the Republican base has gotten older, less educated, more evangelical and more Trumpy.

However, “The state is “not a playground for the fringe left,” said Chris Hughes, a former Colorado Democratic Party chairman. “It’s not a state like Maryland, where whoever the Democrat is they’ll win.”….“Coloradans tend to be very moderate,” said Democratic strategist Craig Hughes. “Anyone who puts personal ideology over solutions is going to run afoul of the Colorado electorate.”

In terms of party preference, “Unaffiliated voters are the majority at 45%, followed by Democrats at 28% and Republicans at 25%; for decades the parties were at rough parity, with about a third of the electorate each.)….Republicans were in decline in Colorado well before Trump bulled his way into the White House. The former president’s deceit and the mayhem he spawned hastened the free fall.”

Despite the grotesque underrepresentation of California in the U.S. Senate, the west may soon lead the way to a stable Democratic majority in both houses of congress and a more secure Democratic hold of the presidency. But it won’t happen automatically, and it will require that Democrats successfully ‘brand’ their party as the rational alternative to the G.O.P.’s extremist drift.

In “It’s long overdue we’ve corrected this injustice. Minnesotans celebrate new law restoring voting rights to felons” as kstp.com Richard Reeve writes, “On March 3, Governor Tim Walz signed the Felon Voting Rights Bill….According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, Minnesota now joins 21 other states in automatically restoring voting rights after release from prison.” According to the ACLU Felony Disenfranchisement Map, in Maine and Vermont, imprisoned people can legally vote. In NY and CT, people who have served their time and who are not on parole can vote. Those who are not in prison can vote in: CA; OR; NV; UT; CO; MT; IL; MI; IN; OBH; PA; MD; NJ; MA; NH and RI.  “Some. people with felony convictions” can not vote in: WY; AZ; IA; MS; AL; TN; and FL. In all other states, “people with felony convictions can vote on completion of sentence.” In October, The Sentencing Project reported a study indicating that 4.6 million Americans, about 2 percent of the voting age population, were denied their voting rights because of a felony conviction. “According to the report, “1 in 19 African-Americans of voting age is disenfranchised, a rate 3.5 times that of non-African Americans….Among states, Florida has the highest number of disenfranchised citizens, with more than 1.1 million people currently prohibited from casting a ballot. Most of those individuals, researchers say, are disenfranchised simply because they cannot afford to pay court-ordered fees or fines….According to the Sentencing Project, state-level disenfranchisement rates range from 0.15% in Massachusetts to more than 8% in Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee.”  For a discussion of “Constitutional Considerations,” related to the issue, check out “Is the Disenfranchisement of People with Felony Convictions Unconstitutional?” at felonvoting.procon.org. What is needed to gauge the electoral effects off felon disenfranchisement is a study showing what percent of convicted felons vote where they are allowed to do so.

“President Joe Biden is taking a number of steps to negate potential Republican attacks and he’s telling progressives they’ll have to stomach some tough policy compromises. But the White House insists you not call it triangulation,” Jonathan Lemire and Daniella Diaz report in “Here Dems are, stuck in the middle with Biden: The president is calculating that liberals will stick with him despite decisions on oil drilling, immigration, crime bill and more” at Politico….”Over the past few weeks, the president has said he would not stop a bill overriding changes to D.C. criminal code, announced a historic new drilling initiative in Alaska, and entertained reinstating family detention to deter migration along the southern border….The White House argues that there has not been a coordinated, deliberate strategy to move to the center as a likely reelection campaign approaches. Rather, it says the series of moves were the product of inadvertent timing or simply Biden acting on long-held positions, like on crime. Aides have also pointed to his previous willingness to break with progressives, such as during his 2020 primary campaign or even his first two-plus years in office. But the president’s political advisers are also calculating that liberals in his party will have no choice but to stick with him when it’s time to hit the polls.” My hunch is that this is a fairly well-reasoned risk. What are progressives going to do, not vote and let Trump or DeSantis run the country? In America’s highly-polarized electorate, centrist votes are more malleable than those on the left or right.

On that topic, Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. argues in “First, Biden was FDR. Now he’s Clinton. (Spoiler alert: He’s neither.)” that “The evidence that Biden has veered to the center rests largely on three moves: his refusal to defend the right of the D.C. Council to rewrite the city’s criminal code and reduce penalties for some offenses; the apparent toughening of his stance on immigration (although the particulars are still under debate inside his administration); and his approval of oil drilling on certain federal lands in Alaska, which angered environmentalists….Standing up for D.C.’s democratic autonomy against carping Republicans in Congress would have been the right thing to do, and most House Democrats voted against rescinding the code….In going along with the Republican effort to scrap the reform, Biden’s defenders say he is simply being true to his history of toughness on law-breaking. But let’s face it: Most Democrats, including Biden, are adapting to an increasingly tough public mood on crime….Yet even if you stipulate that Biden is executing some tactical maneuvers to fend off Republican attacks, there is a forest-and-trees problem in using a handful of decisions to declare a wholesale change in his presidency….That’s why, despite some grumbling, there is not a revolt against him among progressives. They see Biden as closer to their view than any president in decades on core economic questions, including taxes, trade, labor, inequality and regulation.”

At The Guardian, David Smith reports , “Indivisible is targeting little-known GOP House members in swing districts for the 2024 election. Co-founder Ezra Levin says: ‘They are basically Marjorie Taylor Greenes in how they vote’…Juan Ciscomani. Tom Kean Jr. Brian Fitzpatrick. Marc Molinaro. David Schweikert. Brandon Williams … Many Americans would struggle to identify who these people are or what they do….They are all, in fact, Republican members of Congress. And progressive activists argue that their fate is more crucial to the future of American democracy than more high-profile rightwing political figures such as Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene….Indivisible, a leftwing political umbrella movement founded in response to Donald Trump’s election as president in 2016, has launched a campaign to unseat 18 Republican members of the House of Representatives from districts that Joe Biden won in the election of 2020….The “Unrepresentatives” initiative is based on the premise that these 18 districts – not the safe, deep red ones of Gaetz and Greene – will determine if Republicans maintain control of the US lower chamber next year. They are the “Achilles heel” of the Maga (Make America great again) House….Although the 18 are in swing districts, they are not really moderates. They are under pressure to raise money for their next election campaign. That means they have to make commitments to donors about how they will vote in Congress – which is in line with Greene and the Maga wing of the party about 95% of the time….These Republicans work hard to cultivate a low profile away from the bright lights of Fox News or other rightwing media, steering clear of hot button topics such as abortion or Maga circuses such as the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC)….But now Levin, a former congressional staffer, intends to shine a light on them and ensure they have no hiding place….“We have a clear goal and that is: let’s make these folks famous – famous locally, specifically. Let’s make it as clear as possible to their constituents that they are in fact backing up the Maga majority.”

In his New York Times column, “The Era of Urban Supremacy Is Over’,” Thomas B. Edsall addresses a major demographic trend that will put increasing pressure on the Democratic Party: “Most of the nation’s major cities face a daunting future as middle-class taxpayers join an exodus to the suburbs, opting to work remotely as they exit downtowns marred by empty offices, vacant retail space and a deteriorating tax base….The most recent census data “show almost unprecedented declines or slow growth, especially in larger cities,” William Frey, a demographer and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, emailed in response to my query….From July 1, 2020, to July 1, 2021, “New census data shows a huge spike in movement out of big metro areas during the pandemic,” Frey wrote in an April 2022 paper, including “an absolute decline in the aggregate size of the nation’s 56 major metropolitan areas (those with populations exceeding 1 million).”….This is the first time, Frey continued, “that the nation’s major metro areas registered an annual negative growth rate since at least 1990.”….The beneficiaries of urban population decline are the suburbs….Even more damaging to the finances of major cities is the fact that the men and women most likely to move to the suburbs are among the highest-paid key sources of income and property tax revenues: workers with six-figure salaries in technology, finance, real estate and entertainment. Those least likely to move, in turn, are paid much less, working in service industries, health care, hospitality and food sales….There is a striking interaction between the Covid-driven exodus from the cities and changing racial and ethnic urban populations. From 2020 to 2021, the nation’s 56 largest metropolitan areas saw a cumulative decline of 900,000 in their white populations, Frey reported….In an August 2022 essay titled “White and Youth Population Losses Contributed Most to the Nation’s Growth Slowdown,” Frey wrote that, among the metropolitan areas with populations in excess of one million, “43 saw absolute declines in their white populations. Sixteen saw absolute declines in their Black populations, and six saw declines in Latino or Hispanic and Asian American populations.”

“The question facing large cities, especially the older cities in the North,” Edsall continues, “is whether they can break what urban experts now call an urban doom loop. The evidence to date suggests that things are not improving much….the percentage of days employees worked from home shot up from 5 percent to 60 percent in the early months of the pandemic and then began to decline, stabilizing at just over 25 percent for the last year….At the same time, employers are finding that the opportunity to work two to three days at home is a very attractive perk to be able to offer prospective hires and to keep valued workers. [economist Nicholas] Bloom found that, on average, employees view an offer to work part of the week at home as equivalent to an 8 percent raise….If that were not enough, Bloom reported that a survey of engineers and marketing and finance professionals found that working from home reduced quit rates by 35 percent….Looking at urban population shifts from 2019 to 2021, [founding fellow at the Urban Reform Institute Wendell] Cox observed that almost all substantial gains were in Sun Belt cities: Among the top 15 metropolitan population percentage gainers, 13 were in the South, with two in the West (Phoenix and Las Vegas). Austin had the strongest population growth (3.0 percent), followed by Raleigh (2.4 percent), Phoenix (2.4 percent) and Jacksonville (2.0 percent)….Ryan Streeter, the director of domestic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, noted in an email that large cities, many in the North, “have grown too expensive (mostly because of housing but also because of taxes) and have been experiencing out-migration even before the pandemic. The pandemic accelerated that in important, and apparently lasting, ways.”

Edsall adds, “I asked Joel Kotkin, a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University and the executive director of the Urban Reform Institute in Houston, about the economics of major cities, and he replied by email: “The era of urban supremacy is over. The party that addresses this will win. These areas need infrastructure and tax structures that encourage building houses, particularly affordable single-family ones” — “houses that a couple who work at Walmart can afford….Migration to dense cities started to decline in 2015, when large metropolitan areas began to see an exodus to smaller locales. By 2022, rural areas were also gaining population at the expense of cities. The pandemic clearly accelerated this process, with a devastating rise in crime and lawlessness ….Politically, it would be devastating for the Democratic Party, which already faces voter anger over manifestations of urban dysfunction: homeless encampments, rising homicide rates, rampant crime and a sense of disorder on city streets and in city schools….In 2022 the poverty rate in Philadelphia was 22.8 percent; in Houston, 19.5 percent; Boston, 17.6 percent; New York, 17 percent, all well above the 11.6 percent national rate. In Los Angeles, 397 residents per 100,000 are homeless; in New York, 394; in Seattle-Tacoma, 349….The challenge facing cities is that dysfunction tends to engender dysfunction; downward spirals accelerate. Covid and remote work have transformed the face of urban America, just as the nation’s cities were becoming increasingly racially and ethnically diverse. In many ways, this is a test. It would be difficult to measure the costs of failing to pass such a test.” Can Democrats lure workers and families back to the cities? Or can they figure out creative ways to build support among the new urban refugees who are sinking roots in rural and exurban communities? Can they do both? The Democratic party’s very survival likely depends on an affirmative answer to these three questions.

“There are two important off-cycle legislative elections this year— one in New Jersey and one in Virginia.,,” Howie Klein writes in “The Dems Have Ignored State Legislative Races For Too Long– And Has Paid A Price– That’s Changing” at Crooks & Liars Blue America. “New Jersey’s 80-seat Assembly currently has 46 Democrats and 34 Republicans and the 40 seat state Senate has 25 Dems and 15 Republicans. The Democrats lost 6 Assembly seats and one Senate seat in 2021. Hopefully they’ll be smarter about it this cycle— but I’m not counting on it. The state Democratic Party is so riven with corruption that it’s hopeless….Virginia has a better situation and, in fact, Blue America has already endorsed 8 candidates between the 2 Houses. The primary is June 20 for the November elections in the 2 chambers. All 40 Senate seats and all 100 House seats are up for grabs….In 2019, the Democrats netted 2 Senate seats, gaining control of both Houses and the governors’ mansion for the first time since 1993. It didn’t last long and 2 years ago, the Democrats lost the House of Delegates (and the gubernatorial race). Currently there are 22 Dems in the Senate and 18 Republicans. There are 52 Republican delegates and 48 Democrats. Post-redistricting, the Dems have a good shot at expanding their Senate majority and winning back the House of Delegates….Yesterday, reporting for CBS News, Aaron Navarro wrote that “Democrats defended every state legislative chamber in their control in 2022, the first midterm elections since 1934 in which the party in control did not lose a chamber. To replicate that record next year, they say they’ll need more money. A memo from the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC) sent to donors asks for an additional $10 million for 2024, as well as for Virginia’s legislative elections this fall and any special elections that may emerge in New Hampshire, where Democrats are just three seats away from flipping the state House. The memo pitches it to donors as an early investment to ‘protect the path to the presidency’ through building the party’s grassroots presence in presidential battleground states like Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania.”

In “How Red States Are Fighting Their Blue Cities” at FiveThirtyEight, Monica Potts discusses a political conflict that is being played out in states across the nation. As Potts explains,

Preemption is an old, broadly used tool, and in the past decade, preemption bills have passed across the country, blocking local legislation on everything from culture-war issues to basic city governance. In Florida, a state Senate bill passed last week would prevent local governments from enacting rent control or rent stabilization. This year, other states are considering laws revoking local authority over school curriculum and punishing local district attorneys who don’t prioritize laws passed by the state legislature. Other states are threatening to take over whole chunks of city government. And there may not be much cities can do about it.

The tug of war between state and local power is an old one. Local governments, whose responsibilities are not outlined in the U.S. Constitution, have different levels of authority depending on the state, and it’s not always clear exactly what authorities localities have. “It is very much a gray zone,” said Christine Baker-Smith, a research director at the National League of Cities. “The only place where it’s clearly not a gray zone is when there is clear, clear guidance around a certain policy area.”

What has happened in the past decade is what many experts call a shift from “minimalist” preemption to “maximalist” preemption. An example of a minimalist preemption law is the minimum wage. No state can have a minimum wage that’s lower than the $7.25 set by the federal government,¹ but they can go higher, and cities and counties can pass laws that set even higher minimums than their states … as long as their state hasn’t forbidden it through preemption laws.

Potts notes that the trend accelerated “during President Barack Obama’s presidency,” when Republicans organized their takeovers of many state legislatures. She notes further, that “A 2020 Economic Policy Institute analysis found the use of preemption was more prevalent in southern states.” The conflict plays out in a range of policies, including:

In the past few years, at least 25 states have prohibited local governments from raising the minimum wage. Eighteen states bar municipalities from banning plastic bags. At least 20 states have laws that prevent cities from banning gas stoves. Oklahoma is considering a bill that would prevent cities from banning combustion engines. Forty-two states preempt local legislators from passing gun regulations.²

Florida is one of 34 states that preempts many local housing laws, allowing rent stabilization only in an emergency; the bill that passed the state Senate last weekwould remove even that ability. The bill passed unanimously, but that was likely because the housing preemption was wrapped in a much larger bill, which includes measures to encourage mixed-use zoning and incentivize development of affordable housing. The bill’s proponents said it would help fix the housing shortage.

Potts adds, “This year, as of March 8, at least 493 preemption bills have been introduced into state legislatures around the country on a range of issues, according to the Local Solutions Support Center (LSSC), an organization that tracks certain preemption laws and advocates against them. Potts concludes,

For those who oppose what they call its overuse, preemption undermines the basic idea behind local governance — that communities get to set priorities that reflect their own values. Laurent said that preemption laws have a longer-term, corrosive effect on local participation. State legislatures are often influenced by special interests, she said, and preempting local action removes a tool people have to fight against that. “The entire purpose of having representatives is for folks to go up there and reflect the needs that your community has,” she said. “But unfortunately, that’s being silenced.”

Underlying this conflict is the brutal reality that the states have grossly disproportionate power in America. Thus Wyoming (population 570 thousand) has as many senators as California (population 39 million). Cities are also limited by their political boundaries. Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas statistics are more relevant to the life of cities than tightly-drawn city boundaries, which balkanize urban political power to give state legislatures additional leverage. ‘Greater’ Atlanta, Philadelphia or Orlando are much bigger than their city limits. Los Angeles County, which includes about 140 incorporated cities, has more people than the 20 smallest states put together.

There are some fixes to help rectify this grotesque imbalance of political power, such as filibuster and Electoral College reform, urban annexation, preemption limits,  or admission of new states. But all of them require Democratic landslides to get anywhere. Plenty of Republicans are drinking Trump’s Kool-aid to help set the stage for big Democratic gains. But it’s up to Dems to get smart and close the deal.

There they go again. As Erin Doherty explains in “Why some in the GOP are floating upping retirement age for some Americans” at Axios: “Some Republicans say changes to entitlement programs, like upping the retirement age to prolong the initiatives, should be “on the table.” In other words, ‘Let’s keep seniors in the labor force longer, thereby reducing the employment opportunities for young people who are looking for decent entry-level jobs.” Dherty continues, “The big picture: Entitlement reform is a politically potent topic — and it’s one that could be a key part of presidential candidates’ messaging ahead of 2024….Medicare is one of the largest line items in the U.S. budget, and as the population ages, it’s expected to only get more expensive, Axios’ Caitlin Owens reports….Biden has zeroed in on Republicans’ views on health care and entitlements, saying his GOP foes want to cut Social Security and Medicare….Top Republicans, however, have insisted they are not going to propose cuts to Medicare or Social Security during debt ceiling talks….The retirement age has been raised before. In 1983, Congress voted to phase in raising full retirement age from 65 to 67, citing an increase in life expectancy and workers staying at jobs for longer periods of time….Driving the news: Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley (R), who is running for president in 2024, said she supports changing the retirement age for Americans who are in their 20s….”It is unrealistic to say you’re not going to touch entitlements,” Haley said on Fox News….”The thing is you don’t have to touch it for seniors and anybody near retirement. You’re talking about the new generation, like my kids coming up,” she added….Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy (R) also said Sunday that lawmakers should discuss raising the retirement age for Americans in their 20s….”Does it really make sense to allow someone who’s in their 20s today to retire at 62?” he added….Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) also said that raising the retirement age when it comes to receiving social security benefits “has to be on the table.”….”We do not want to take away those that are in retirement, or those that are heading into retirement, but if we’re talking about younger generations … then that should be on the table.”…./Go deeper… Biden sets new trap with GOP budget taunt.” If this sounds to you like a garden-variety GOP scam to screw young workers, while kissing up to senior voters, you re not alone.

For a deeper dive into GOP scams to shred Social Security, check out “Why The Right Hates Social Security (And How They Plan to Destroy It)” at Current Affairs, where Nathan Robinson interviews Alex Lawson, executive director of Social Security Works.  Some highlights: “ROBINSON.  People do not talk enough about Social Security. Republicans want to kill Social Security but don’t like to talk about Social Security, partly because they know the conversation is a losing one for them. But that does not change the fact that every minute of every day, slowly, behind the scenes, they are working to destroy the program.” LAWSON. “Pitting the old against the young by telling the old they’re definitely not going to cut benefits and not to worry, and instead, they’re only going to cut the young people’s benefits; and telling the young Social Security is going to run out of money, they’re never going to get anything, and so they need to cut old people’s benefits—really stoking that intergenerational warfare with a divide and conquer strategy. But the main purpose of that Leninist strategy document is to say: lie to the people about what it is that we’re trying to do, because we have to destroy and gut Social Security, and the only way to do it is to lie. That has been their mantra and MO up to now.”ROBINSON. “It’s understandable why they feel hell-bent on destroying Social Security. As you point out, it’s not just to make exploitation easier—that’s part of it. But also, the success of Social Security disproves so many conservative talking points. It’s the government providing welfare or universal benefits to people, and it works. It makes people’s lives better and reduces poverty. One of the core conservative talking points is nothing government does can be done right. Everything it does to try and fix a social problem will inevitably backfire and cause disaster, misery, and bureaucracy. Social Security really undermines their case. LAWSON. “It’s a universal program of huge magnitude— there’s nothing really else like it, and it does all of that for less than 1 percent in administrative costs. Less than one penny of every dollar that you pay into the system is used to pay for the whole thing. And look at Wall Street—that’s why they hate it. They like people scrambling and not being able to have enough time and comfort to think about, “Why do these guys have all the money?” That’s true, but they’re also just straight up greedy. They look at it and think, “We should be the only ones who offer products like that, and tack on a 35 percent fee….They hate that they can’t get their greedy little hands on it. It really does disprove, backwards and forwards, the entire small “c” conservative, reactionary mindset. Yes, just like what the private health insurance industry operates on, “How can we get sick people to give us a portion of their wealth?”—which they successfully do. And that’s why they hate Medicare For All so much…”

Lawson’s comments continue, “They’re terrified of the people finding out about anything that guarantees healthcare, does a better job, works more efficiently than private insurance. They really don’t want people to find out that the VA [Veterans Affairs], which is fully socialized healthcare—different from Medicare For All, which is just one single payer—is consistently ranked higher than private insurance in terms of outcomes, quality, and what people feel about it….The New Dealers saw that there could be systemic responses, that not only mitigated the immediate effects of the Great Depression, but put in place systems that actually ameliorated all of those negative effects going forward….That’s what Social Security is. It not only took care of this desperate need in the Great Depression era, but it eliminated the poor houses going forward. The philosophical bent of Social Security is an ever-expanding system that delivers greater and greater economic security for more and more people. When FDR signed it into law, he said, “With this law, I laid the cornerstone that future generations can build upon.” And that’s what we have to recognize. For example, Medicare For All or a guaranteed national health system, is the most obvious one—you cannot pretend that you can have retirement or economic security if you can go bankrupt by getting sick or having an illness, especially now in the midst of the pandemic. And what we’ve seen, it’s more obvious than ever….You also, though, can’t have a secure retirement if you’ve been working your whole life for poverty wages. Poverty wages will follow you into poverty in retirement. So we need to increase wages. Instead of the Republican’s North Star of destroying things that work and hurting people, if you use as your North Star Frances Perkins’ vision for an America where if you played by the rules, did the things that most people want to do, and worked hard, the system would be there for you—including if it’s something that no one wants to think about, but happens to far more people than they think, like becoming disabled, ill or injured and can no longer work. Francis Perkins didn’t have that in the bill that was signed by FDR. We added disability later because we saw you can’t have economic or retirement security if you lose your wages because you become disabled….Hear the full conversation on the Current Affairs podcast.”

Sasha Abramsky reports that “The Progressive Takeover of Nevada’s Democratic Party Is Falling Apart” at The Nation, and notes that “Last weekend, the party took its vote and booted [Democratic Party Chair Judith] Whitmer from office, replacing her with Assemblywoman Daniele Monroe-Moreno. The result wasn’t close: Whitmer lost by a more than three-to-one margin. Every one of the candidates for state party office backed by Monroe-Moreno’s “Unity” campaign won; every one of Whitmer’s candidates lost….The sort of posture politics practiced by Whitmer doesn’t cut it—probably not anywhere, certainly not in a complex swing state such as Nevada, with its core group of Democratic voters in Las Vegas and in Reno, and with deeply conservative hinterlands surrounding the big cities….Posturing aside, there’s a lot of good politics going on in Nevada—witness the recently introduced bill to expand postpartum Medicaid coverage for low-income mothers for the first year after they give birth; the cutting-edge water-recycling programs that are in place; the ambitious CO₂ reduction strategythat has been adopted. But that good politics gets put at risk, and the likelihood of GOP election victories grow, when leaders such as Whitmer fail to live up to the expectations of those who put them in power in the first place….Last year, Oregon Democrats nearly fell apart at the seams as their gubernatorial candidate, Tina Kotek, struggled to consolidate support, following the reputational collapse of outgoing Governor Kate Brown. It wasn’t that voters didn’t like Brown’s basic political philosophy; it was more that they saw her as having failed to deliver on basic quality-of-life issues—failing to tackle the housing crisis, to respond to rising crime, and so on. In other words, she talked a good talk but ended up walking a lousy walk. Throughout 2022, she was the most unpopular governor in the country. Kotek did eventually win, but only after a massive effort to distance herself from Brown and her legacy. In California, San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin was recalled, not because he was far to the left of San Franciscans but because he was widely perceived to be incompetent at his job and unable to deliver outcomes that matched his soaring rhetoric….There are lessons in these elections: There is plenty of room for radical politics out West, and plenty of room for candidates looking to shake up the status quo. In many ways, it remains a petri dish in which new, and experimental, political ideas and alliances are cultivated. But at the end of the day, voters also want tangible results. Whitmer’s mediocre tenure, and her election defeat last week, is a wake-up call: If Democrats want to continue to hold power in places like Nevada, they need a party political machinery led by leaders who aren’t just idealistic but are also competent.”

Claim it, Dems, the way David Dayen does in his article, “The American Rescue Plan’s Hidden Triumphs: Medicaid expansion in North Carolina and Eli Lilly’s insulin price cuts are largely due to the March 2021 law” at The American Prospect: “Because of the unlikely prospects for legislative progress between now and 2025 (sigh), pundits are closing the books on Joe Biden’s first-term legacy, which in most accounts begins and ends with three bills: the bipartisan infrastructure law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act. This narrative has a nice symmetry to it, establishing Biden as the restorer of industrial policy, preoccupied with reshoring U.S. manufacturing and improving underlying infrastructure….That’s certainly a big part of Biden’s first-term record, but it leaves out his most wide-reaching bill: the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan (ARP), passed with little debate in March 2021. Because inflation happened to spike subsequently, commentary on the ARP has been mostly reduced to whether it was wise to engage in massive fiscal stimulus. (It was.) And because the bulk of the ARP constituted temporary programs, placing it into Biden’s lasting policy legacy might have seemed unnecessary….But over the last week, we’ve seen two unlikely victories for the administration and the public that can be directly traced back to the ARP, proving it to be an underrated piece of legislation that not only changed the government’s blueprint for how to manage a crisis, but altered several unrelated crises in America for good….Last week, the Republican-led legislature in North Carolina announced a deal to expand Medicaid, which, once it’s passed and signed by Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, will make it the 40th state (plus D.C.) to do so. Over 600,000 people are expected to get health care coverage under this deal, at no cost to the state….Another health care development last week seems at first glance more divorced from the ARP. Eli Lilly announced that it would cap out-of-pocket costs on its insulin medications for patients with private insurance, and reduce list prices for its most-used insulins. As Robert Kuttner explained in the Prospect, the list price change is the most impactful. An out-of-pocket cap means that the patient only pays a certain amount, but the insurer pays the rest, and usually spreads it out to patients through higher premiums. A list price cut means the drug company loses money. The Inflation Reduction Act’s cap on insulin out-of-pocket costs in Medicare certainly had an influence on Eli Lilly mirroring that for private insurance patients.”

At The Nation, Chris Lehman observes, “In making his reelection pitch, Biden has set a challenge for himself that few recent incumbent presidents have faced: He’s betting that he can defy the overall trend of public opinion and demonstrate that government can actually work, delivering material improvements in the everyday lives of Americans….On paper, that shouldn’t be a tall order for a president who has a battery of ambitious economic achievements to promote—not only the infrastructure package but the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS Act’s many subsidies to the tech sector, not to mention an economy performing close to full employment. But American politics has long pivoted on a wholesale distrust of government—or, perhaps more accurately, a commitment to divert it to blunter ideological aims, such as the great rolling hellscape known as Ron DeSantis’s policy agenda, or Donald Trump’s own fledgling reelection crusade to marshal federal resources behind right-wing education demagoguery. In a political era of movement-baiting viral memes, Biden’s infrastructure tour felt a bit like a civics class filmstrip….Still, there are potential hidden strengths in Biden’s focused appeal to government-directed enterprise. “I think he’s savvy enough to know the traditional paradox that Americans complain about government and don’t trust it, but they like its specifics,” says Julian Zelizer, a historian at Princeton University. “I would think that an effective strategy is to keep telling people what he’s given them. I don’t know if he’ll do it, though. Democrats are still nervous about playing in the shadow of Republican presidents….Having been vice president when Obama pushed a big stimulus program and didn’t get credit for it—or even take credit for it—is on his mind. Second, I think he saw how, with the Affordable Care Act rollout, the more people experienced the benefits, the more popular it became—to the point that Republicans didn’t want to cut it. And finally, his age puts him in an era when that’s what you did: You boasted about what you did. That was just politics. He’s a different generation.” Lehman  continues, “But even if Biden is the man for this particular message, it’s still far from clear that the message will resonate in this historical moment. Despite his record, polling consistently shows that the public is underwhelmed by Biden’s Oval Office tenure so far, with more than 62 percent of Americans agreeing that he’s done little or nothing over the past two years. Especially troubling is the steady stream of polling indicating that majorities don’t think Biden has performed well in precisely the sort of economic initiatives that he’s going to run on—measures like infrastructure renewal and job creation….Of course, this is also what political campaigns are for—to hammer home achievements and policy agendas across the national landscape—and the 2024 cycle has yet to begin in earnest.”

Charles Pierce has some incisive comments on the soaring popularity of Kentucky’s Democratic governor at Esquire: “Politico spent several hundred words on Wednesday expressing wonder and awe that Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear is favored in his run for re-election in a state the former president* carried by 26 points. The very fact this is considered remarkable is, in and of itself, remarkable….I know I’m just spitballing here—and I realize that this is completely contrary to the spirit of the age—but maybe it’s just because the guy is good at being governor and people like the job he’s doing?” Pierce quotes from the Politico article, which notes “Beshear will have all the advantages generally granted to incumbent governors: the power of the bully pulpit, sky high name ID and approval, and a deep warchest — as of the end of last year, he had over $4.7 million in the bank. A late January survey from Mason-Dixon Polling found that 61 percent of voters in the state approved of the job he was doing, and he had notable leads over potential challengers. Beshear has hosted regular “Team Kentucky” updates and has been ever-present for Kentuckians, who during his tenure in office have navigated the coronavirus pandemic and a string of natural disasters. And Democrats in the state point to a boom of economic growth during his tenure in office. A page on Beshear’s official website brags about delivering “the highest and second-highest revenue surpluses in the history of Kentucky, thanks to strong fiscal management and a hot, record-breaking economy,” which is anticipated to be a major theme in his campaign.” Pierce adds, “I suspect that Beshear’s popularity is enhanced by his resemblance to New Deal Democrats who did so much for Kentuckians in the hard times.”

Here’s a stunner: “More Americans now favor legal cannabis than legal tobacco, surveys show, signaling a sharp societal shift from an era when cigarette-smoking was legal pretty much everywhere and pot-smoking was legal absolutely nowhere,” Daniel De Vise reports at The Hill. ” Fifty-seven percent of American adults would support “a policy prohibiting the sale of all tobacco products,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported in a research brief last month….A slightly larger majority, 59 percent, believe marijuana should be legal for both medical and recreational use, according to a Pew Research surveyconducted in October. Another 30 percent approve of cannabis for medical use alone. Only 10 percent of the American public believes marijuana should not be legal at all. …The findings reflect growing public consensus that cannabis is safer than tobacco, which the CDC considers the leading cause of preventable death. Studies have found marijuana less addictive than cigarettes and marijuana smoke less harmful to the lungs, although doctors caution that cannabis still poses many potential health hazards….Recent years have seen a remarkable rise in public opinion toward marijuana, whose legalization as a product for recreational sale began with the passage of state measures in Washington and Colorado in 2012.” Although cannabis is still illegal under federal law, “State by state, the national prohibition against cannabis is eroding. Marijuana remains entirely illegal in only three states, Idaho, Kansas and Nebraska, according to the National Council of State Legislatures. Twenty-one states and the District of Columbia have legalized cannabis for recreational use. Thirty-seven states allow medical marijuana, and 10 more permit low-potency marijuana derivatives.” The political fallout of the poll could get a bit tricky, since three of the top seven tobacco-producing states are purplish, NC, VA and GA.

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.”