In his latest column, “There’s a Reason There Aren’t Enough Teachers in America. Many Reasons, Actually,” New York Times opinion essayist Thomas B. Edsall shares a daunting litany of problems facing teachers, as well as school administrators and parents. These include: “a generalized decline in literacy; the faltering international performance of American students; an inability to recruit enough qualified college graduates into the teaching profession; a lack of trained and able substitutes to fill teacher shortages; unequal access to educational resources; inadequate funding for schools; stagnant compensation for teachers; heavier workloads; declining prestige; and deteriorating faculty morale….Nine-year-old students earlier this year revealed “the largest average score decline in reading since 1990, and the first ever score decline in mathematics,” according to the National Center for Education Statistics. In the latest comparison of fourth grade reading ability, the United States ranked below 15 countries, including Russia, Ireland, Poland and Bulgaria.” Edsall quotes from and August 2022 paper, “Is There a National Teacher Shortage?,” Tuan D. Nguyen and Chanh B. Lam, which notes that “We find there are at least 36,000 vacant positions along with at least 163,000 positions being held by underqualified teachers, both of which are conservative estimates of the extent of teacher shortages nationally.” Edsall also writes, “I asked Josh Bleiberg, a professor of education at the University of Pittsburgh, about trends in teacher certification. He emailed back: The number of qualified teachers is declining for the whole country and the vast majority of states. The number of certified teachers only increased in the District of Columbia, Massachusetts, North Dakota, and Washington. Those increases were relatively small and likely didn’t keep up with enrollment increases.” Edsall has more to say about inadequate compensation of teachers, international comparisons, the adverse effects of culture wars, burnout, training and workload. Democrats have long been the more “pro-teacher” party, at least in terms of supporting teacher unions. I hesitate to suggest anything that reduces the supply of qualified teachers even more. But might it be time for Democrats to recruit and help prepare more public school teachers to run for office? Most teachers are already good at speaking to small groups and interacting with parents, good base skills for candidates. Ironically enough, it may take more teachers in politics to get more teachers in schools.

For another view of the political implications of public education issues, check out “Randi Weingarten Explains Why Most People Are Pro Public Education,” Glenn Daigon’s interview of the American Federation of Teachers President at The Progressive. Daigon’s opening question: “Glenn Daigon: The political momentum seemed to be on the right after Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia governor’s race in 2021. Do you think the midterms saw any shift in the political winds? If so, how do you think the results of the midterm elections will impact education policy both at the local and national level?….Randi Weingarten: Based on data analytics from TargetPoint, Youngkin used the culture wars to win people in rural areas who were very fearful. The culture wars didn’t persuade parents to vote for Youngkin, but they persuaded the elderly to vote for Youngkin. He used it effectively as a divisive tactic. But part of the reason he was successful was that Terry [McAuliffe], made an election-deciding mistake [by] saying, wrongly, that parents don’t have a role in their kids’ education….Parents of course have a role in their kids’ education, and I think what you saw in 2022 was that public education did quite well. Not in all places, but by and large parents want [teachers] to help their kids recover [from the disruption of the pandemic] and thrive by focusing on things that both Republicans and Democrats talk about: reading and literacy; pathways to career and college; and helping kids have confidence again and feel better about themselves….There is an agenda—a true education agenda—that is bipartisan, with perhaps Florida being an exception. But even in Florida, pro-education budgets were passed even though Republican Governor Ron DeSantis won comfortably. In virtually every other state where these issues were hotly contested, the pro-public education governors and legislators won….If you look at Michigan, Wisconsin, Maine, and Arizona, where Republican candidates ran on denigrating, defamatory, and demeaning planks; the undermining of teachers and vulnerable students; defunding public education; and all of the culture wars, pro-public education governors won. Those wins were just in states where races were really hotly contested. In less contentious races—in Illinois, New York, Connecticut, and Minnesota—pro-public education governors also won.”

The Progressive’s Weingarted interview also includes this exchange:”Q: Is there a set of any races in the 2022 election cycle where you can point to  moderates and progressives successfully countering the anti-critical-race-theory and anti-LGBT messaging from rightwing education backers?….Weingarten: Take New Hampshire, where they easily reelected Republican Governor [Chris] Sununu, but over the course of several months, every school board member who was elected was a pro-public education school board member. [This was in a state] where Moms for Liberty put $500 bounties on the heads of teachers and where a state school superintendent tried to chill the efforts of teachers to teach honest history—school board races were won by pro-public-education school board candidates.”….In Berrien County, Michigan, which had been electing Republicans since the 1800s—so it is a very red area—twenty-one out of twenty-five extremist school candidates lost their elections. In West Virginia, the anti-public education forces lost two referendums, while at the same time, the state has turned ruby red. In New York State, we saw a lot of Congressional races go to Republicans, but 85 percent of the pro-public-education school board candidates won, and 99 percent of school budgets passed….Sure, in Florida, where DeSantis put hundreds of thousands of dollars into school board races, he won more than he lost because nobody has that kind of money to compete, and most of the time these races are basically locally run races. But by and large, in the marquee races around the country, what you saw was the pro-public-education forces win. And in places where they didn’t, like in South Carolina, I believe you’ll see a lot of resistance develop.”

From Amy Walter’s “What Can Losing ‘22 Dem Candidates Tell Us About ‘24 Priorities?” at The Cook Political Report: “In politics, losing isn’t always a career ender. Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush both lost U.S. House contests before winning statewide office. President Biden, of course, ran and lost his bid for the Democratic nomination for president twice before his 2020 win. For years, the saying went that in order to win statewide in Ohio you first had to lose. Former Ohio Senators John Glenn, Howard Metzenbaum and George Voinovich all lost at least one senate race in the state before ultimately succeeding….In recent years, however, thanks to the increasing nationalization of our politics, down-ballot candidates can quickly build a brand that goes far beyond the borders of their state.  In 2018, liberal Democrats across the country were wearing BETO for Senate t-shirts and sending contributions to a Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate named Stacey Abrams….Even as they lost their bids, Beto O’Rourke and Stacey Abrams proved that Democrats could turn fast-growing and diverse Sunbelt states blue….Today, however, Democrats’ most lauded loser is a white guy from Ohio who gave Democrats some hope of winning back their blue-collar followers. Democratic Senate nominee Tim Ryan ran just a couple points ahead of Biden’s showing in the Buckeye state, but his strong campaign operation helped down-ballot Democrats win in key House races in the state….What does Ryan do with his newfound fame? For now, the path to the White House is closed. And, there are no obvious opportunities back home either….In fact, the types of ‘losers’ that Democrats have become attached to in recent years tells us more about what the party is most hopeful or worried about for the upcoming election than it does about the future for these up-and-coming candidates. In 2018, Democrats saw in Abrams and O’Rourke a pathway to opening up the sunbelt. Two years later, Democrats hold both senate seats in Arizona and Georgia, and hold the Governor’s seat in Arizona. At the same time, hopes of turning Texas and Florida blue have been deflated. In 2022, as was the case in 2016, Democrats are more focused on keeping their midwestern bunkers intact. It may not be possible to win back Ohio, but Democrats now see midwestern governors like Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan and Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania as their best potential presidential contenders for the near future.”

Matthew Yglesias opines at Slow Boring: “Now that all the races are resolved, the 2022 midterms were pretty clearly the most catastrophic defeat yet for mobilization theory. As Nate Cohn explained in detail in the New York Times last Thursday, Republicans decisively won the turnout battle in key states, even while losing the preponderance of important races. Most years require an in-the-weeds effort to parse whether mobilization or persuasion mattered more because they both point in the same direction (a subject we’ll return to), but this year there was no such dilemma. Differential turnout explains less than 0 percent of Mark Kelly, Raphael Warnock, or Catherine Cortez Masto’s wins — it was an R-leaning turnout year, but they all won….We don’t yet have the same level of visibility into exactly who voted in Pennsylvania, where Democrats had an even better performance in statewide races. But we do know that comparing 2020 to 2022, the PA county with the largest turnout decline was the city of Philadelphia. That’s what you would expect to see if PA had the same turnout dynamics as those other six states, and it would be very unusual for a trend to hit all six states that we have full data for and not represent a national trend….Democrats won key races by persuading a small but nonzero number of Republicans to vote for them….Democrats’ current majority rests on the backs of Sherrod Brown, John Tester, and Joe Manchin, all of whom represent Trump states and face very steep re-election battles in 2024. It’s also notable that there aren’t a lot of targets that are clearly better than Ohio. In 2022, North Carolina, Florida, and Texas were all closer than Ohio. But Florida’s politics seem to have moved further to the right since then, Democrats have come up decidedly short in the last two North Carolina Senate races, and Texas remains a pretty firmly red state….Once you give up on the magical idea of mobilizing the base instead of finding ways to make swing voters like you, it’s easier to see that there actually isn’t a tradeoff here anyway. In other words, you should absolutely try to maximize the turnout of sporadic voters who are likely to vote for you. But there’s no reason to believe there’s a tension between that goal and trying to appeal to swing voters, because the boring truth is that sporadic voters are less politically engaged and less ideological than non-voters….Democrats really did do badly in most Georgia races in November. That’s how we know so precisely that Warnock won thanks to crossover voters. Taken on the whole, Democrats flopped on both turnout and vote choice. Warnock himself just did really well.” Put a little differently, it’s a false choice between turnout mobilization and persuasion. Winning campaigns do both well enough.

In his article, “in “Georgia’s Election Laws Couldn’t Stop Raphael Warnock,” at The Washington Monthly, Bill Scher writes “African American turnout in yesterday’s runoff election appears to have been robust and decisive. While we don’t have final demographic numbers yet, we can compare early vote data from all four Georgia elections over the past two years. Black voters composed 31.9 percent of the runoff early vote, precisely one point more than the January 2021 special election runoff. (Warnock won his first runoff by two points, and according to The New York Times estimate, he will win this time by three.) The Black share of the December 2022 runoff early vote is also higher than their share in November 2022 (29.1 percent) and November 2020 (27.7 percent)….if the point of Republican restrictive voting laws in Georgia and elsewhere was to suppress the vote to such an extent that Democrats couldn’t win, the plan failed. In states with strict voter ID laws that don’t allow for alternatives such as signed affidavits, this year, Democrats won hard-fought governor’s races (Arizona, Wisconsin, and Kansas) and Senate races (Arizona and Georgia). Democrats also performed well in swing states with non-strict voter ID laws, such as Pennsylvania and Michigan, keeping both governorships and winning key congressional races. Perhaps most importantly, Democrats needed to succeed in voter ID states to maintain control of the Senate, and they did….In short, everything both parties have told themselves about election laws—at least in regards to which parties are helped by restrictive and expansive reforms—has been proved wrong repeatedly. Voter ID laws don’t suppress voters, regardless of the intent behind them; academic research has shown that they boomerang and galvanize the voters thought to be targeted for suppression….In fact, after absorbing the 2022 midterm results, Republicans appear to be increasingly aware that instead of disparaging early voting, they should be competing for early voters.” Another point that fits under Scher’s title is that Atlanta’s activist community poured it on again for Warnock. Nobody outworks them, and without them, Warnock would have lost. And they don’t focus only on Black GOTV; they worked in close coalitions with other demographic groups, including Latinos, Asian-Americans and persuadable whites, including suburban soccer moms and and young white women, who had a lot at stake.

At FiveThirtyEight, Geoffrey Skelley and Holly Fuong report on findings from an Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel  collaboration asking 2,000 respondents “how they felt about the election, what policies the next Congress should pursue and their early views of the potential 2024 presidential candidates.” Regarding non-voters,  Skelley and Fuong report that “Among Americans who did not vote this year, 34 percent stated that they never vote in elections⁴ — a reminder that while turnout was high in 2022 (for a midterm) and record-setting in 2020 (for a modern presidential race), a large swath of potential voters is consistently uninvolved. Meanwhile, about 1 in 4 nonvoters felt that “none of the candidates were good options,” and another 1 in 4 “did not have enough information about the candidates and/or ballot initiatives.” Excuses, excuses. At The Hill, demographer Joseph Chamie noted last year that “The U.S. level of not voting in elections is higher than those of many OECD countries. For example, low percentages of the eligible populations not voting in recent elections where voting is not compulsory include Sweden (13 percent), Denmark (17 percent), South Korea (20 percent), and the Netherlands (21 percent). However, some countries have substantially higher levels of non-voting in recent elections than the U.S., including Switzerland 61 percent, Mexico and Poland both 51 percent, and Japan 47 percent….The major reason why 77 million Americans didn’t cast ballots in the 2020 presidential election was that they were not registered to vote. Approximately 27 percent of all Americans aged 18 years or older, numbering 63 million men and women, had not registered to vote. Those 63 million unregistered U.S. citizens account for 82 percent of those who did not vote in the 2020 presidential election. The U.S. is one of the few countries that requires citizens to register for voting separately from the actual voting….Other reasons offered by those who did not vote or failed to register to vote in the election included not being interested due to voter apathy, alienation, skepticism and voter fatigue, purged voter rolls, strict ID laws, and is a hassle. Some non-voters also believed that their vote would not make a difference on the election’s outcome or the country’s policies, they did not like any of the candidates or were undecided on whom to vote.”

“A new report from Inside Elections details how, in the five closest GOP House wins, the Republicans won by a combined measly 6,652 votes,” Prem Thakker writes at The New Republic. “Republicans’ gain of any seats at all came from just 22,370 votes, the combined margin of their nine closest victories….The most razor-thin victory was Colorado Representative Lauren Boebert’s closing win over Democrat Adam Frisch. The far-right candidate, expected to win 97 times out of 100 in FiveThirtyEight’s election simulator, had won the district previously by six points. This November, she won by 546 votes—a 0.16 percent margin that triggered an automatic recount. (The Inside Elections report did not take into account Boebert’s even lower margin of victory after the recount, and we’ve updated the numbers in this piece accordingly.)….Elsewhere, in New York, the state Democrats allowed a disastrous string of losses, with two races being lost by less than one percent, including the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Sean Patrick Maloney….A combination of state party mismanagement, a lack of strong top-of-ticket campaigning from re-elected Governor Kathy Hochul, and a disadvantageous redistricting spurred by former Governor Andrew Cuomo’s appointed judges all contributed to New York Democrats’ disastrous results….In total, New York Democrats lost six races in redistricted sections that voted for Biden in 2020….Of course, Democrats won narrow races too. And these wins came not just from coasting off of attacking MAGA candidates as such, but actually doing the work of campaigning….As Slate’s Alex Sammon points out, one of Democrats’ major upsets—Marie Glusenkamp Perez’s House win in rural Washington—benefitted from a massive organic ground game. The operation came despite lackluster financial support from the DCCC (losing-candidate Maloney’s committee), which dismissed the race as a “reach.”

David Bromwich makes the case that “Democrats Dodged a Bullet in the Midterms, But the Culture War is Far From Won” at The Nation. But I think his article’s subtitle, “A Functioning Democracy Requires the Consent, If Not the Votes, of a Good Deal More Than Half the Country” captures the big picture Democrats ought to be thinking about. As Bromwich writes that “Democrats have gotten American culture wrong for several years now; and….their lucky escape in November was owing mainly to the choice of untenable candidates by the rival party—a party still cowed by Donald Trump, who never had much interest in politics and who carried his repulsive election-denial program into Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Arizona. Democrats ought to look again at the warnings they received in 2018 and 2020, since the likely effect of persisting in their errors could be read (even in 2022) in Ohio and Florida, and in the First, Second, Third, and Fourth Congressional Districts of Long Island. The final tally of the 2022 congressional races yielded the Democrats 47.8 percent of the popular vote, while the Republicans took 50.7 percent…. the national majority the Democrats can now command adds up to 55 percent on a good day. They have no plan for dealing with the remaining 45 percent—only a small proportion of whom can be dismissed as conspiracy theorists, election deniers, and incurable cranks. A functioning democracy requires the consent, if not the votes, of a good deal more than half the country. How, then, will the 55 percent cope with disagreement on the following issues?” Bromwich notes “the paternalist ethic that judges people by tribe or ancestral group rather than personal qualities; the North Carolina and Harvard college admissions cases, now before the Supreme Court, brought out the indignation that identity politics cannot help provoking in a society that values merit. Merit: the necessary qualification for the job you undertake—not to be confused with meritocracy, the bugbear of the cultural left. The shorter word denotes a recognition of demonstrated competence that is assigned to an individual and not an ascriptive group.”

“Taken as a whole, the midterms have provided a ringing endorsement of the approach to politics favored by President Joe Biden,” Andrew Gawthorpe writes in “The Georgia runoff shows that Democrats have figured out a winning strategy” at The Guardian. “From the first moment it looked like he would enter the 2020 Democratic primary, Biden was maligned and mocked for suggesting that the path to a Democratic victory lay through gains with independent and suburban voters. Critics argued that the country was so deeply polarized that swing voters no longer existed, and that appeals for bipartisanship would fall on deaf ears. In their view, the only viable strategy was to mobilize the Democratic base with leftwing appeals, even at the cost of losing voters in the center….Over two election cycles, however, Joe Biden has proven to have a much firmer grasp on American politics than some of his critics. His victory in 2020 was driven by flipping suburban and independent voters, as well as staunching Democratic losses among the non-college-educated white voters who make up Trump’s base. And even though commentators worried that this coalition was “precariously thin” and lacked durability, a broadly similar coalition came together in key midterm races to produce one of the best results for an incumbent president in modern American politics….As they look forward to 2024, Democrats should stick with Biden’s approach. One of the president’s key insights into today’s politics is that the flagrant extremism of the Republican party creates the space for precisely this sort of centrist approach to work. In 2020, naysayers charged that Biden hadn’t really created a durable new coalition, but merely capitalized on opposition to Trump. But with Trump still defining the Republican party, it will remain important for Democrats to continue to give right-leaning voters an excuse to defect….For their part, the main question Democrats face is whether or not Biden continues to be the best person to put at the top of their ticket. This highlights a paradox, which is that Bidenism is more popular than Biden himself. Despite the key role that independents have played in Biden’s victories, three-quarters of them do not want Biden to run again in 2024, and the group as a whole views Biden only somewhat more favorably than Trump. This is a red flag for many Democrats, who worry that questions about Biden’s age and verbal gaffes could drag them down in 2024….Biden’s coalition is not held together by a charismatic individual who will eventually pass from the scene, but by the structural forces shaping American politics today.”

Interviewed on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Senator Jon Tester (D-MT), addressed a critical problem for Democrats as they look toward the 2024 elections. As Summer Conception writes at nbcnews.com: “Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., said Sunday that he believes his party’s “very bad” messaging cost Democrats support in rural America in the midterm elections in November….In an interview on NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” Tester said Democrats need to focus their messaging “more on the things we’re doing for rural America.”….He also said he doesn’t believe Democrats talk about their accomplishments in a way that appeals to rural voters “nearly enough,” citing the bipartisan infrastructure law that passed Congress last year….“It’s going to help rural America big time, when it comes to broadband and electrical distribution and roads and bridges. We didn’t talk about it,” he said. “We didn’t talk about it from a rural perspective.”….President Joe Biden is still struggling to gain strong support in rural areas almost two years into his presidential term. In a final NBC News poll before the Nov. 8 midterm elections, 44% of registered voters approved of the president’s performance. Biden earned his lowest lower numbers among rural voters (29%) and independents (28%).” In “Democrats show signs of life in rural America” however, Josh Krushaar writes at Axios, “A new analysis of the midterms by centrist Democratic think tank Third Way finds that most Democratic candidates improved on President Biden’s 2020 performance in rural America — with some notable exceptions….Third Way’s data dive labeled counties as rural, suburban/exurban or urban and aggregated the countywide results. The analysis covered 10 states (Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Kansas, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) and 16 races….Pennsylvania Sen.-elect John Fetterman was one of the party’s top rural success stories. He outdistanced Biden by seven points in the state’s rural counties — overperforming Democrats more in the state’s rural counties than in the suburban and urban centers….Among Senate candidates, the party’s top overperformer in the suburbs was Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, who ran 4.7% ahead of Biden….Only 33% of rural voters backed Biden in the last presidential election, according to a Pew Research Center analysis, a worse showing than Hillary Clinton in 2016.”

In “The Future Is … Doorknocking?,” Alexander Sammon writes at Slate: “Of all the election night surprises of this year’s midterms, none was bigger for Democrats than Marie Gluesenkamp Perez’s shock victory over the Republican Joe Kent in Washington state’s third congressional district. Five Thirty Eight’s modeling had Kent winning in 98 out of 100 scenarios. But Perez, a 34-year-old mother and auto shop owner with now-famous bangs, eked it out—by just under a percentage point….The result, Democrats’ biggest upset in the House, came in a largely rural district outside Portland, Oregon, the sort of place where Democrats have fared particularly poorly of late and were polling dreadfully. But while post-election autopsies have credited the victory to voters’ rejection of Kent’s ties to MAGA extremist groups and Gluesenkamp Perez’s tactful embrace of pro-choice and pro-gun positions, it’s not the whole story. One big reason the Gluesenkamp Perez campaign triumphed has to do with a pretty retro strategy: a big volunteer army of doorknockers….Over the course of the campaign, over 500 people knocked on a total of 40,000 doors spread across Vancouver, Washington, and its rural surrounds. The victory, called officially on November 12, came despite a complete absence of cash support from the Democrats’ official campaign arm, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which deemed the race a “reach,” and directed its ad budget elsewhere….Much of that money went to those same online and digital tactics: television spots, digital ads, phone calls, texts, and mailers. Making actual contact with voters, meanwhile, got even more difficult. Hardly anyone even picks up the phone anymore: As numerous pollsters reported, the deluge of paid messaging, combined with the demise of the landline, has made getting people to pick up calls to answer polling queries nearly impossible; phonebanking has also become exceedingly difficult….Rather than spend time on a futile effort to contact and cajole potential voters, the Gluesenkamp Perez campaign decided to prioritize calling known supporters, convincing them not to pledge their vote but to volunteer their time. A dedicated group of ten volunteers, called the “Call Squad,” focused their energy on encouraging likely voters to show up and knock on doors, and then to come back and do it again. That helped swell the number of doorknockers to nearly 500. Among them: young moms, alienated Republican voters, and political newcomers who had never volunteered before. Many of them made it a habit. “We prioritized getting people to come out again and again,” said Gowan….Recruiting and training unpaid volunteers, especially in smaller House races and communities where those union operations don’t exist, can still clearly make a difference.” I’m wondering if it is less the raw number of doorknockers and more the number of doorknockers with engaging personalities who can energize an upset victory in a district. If so, Democratic campaigns would be wise to identify, court and pamper such individuals as soon as possible.

At Sabato’s Crystal Ball, Carah One Whaley warns “No, the Big Lie Hasn’t Gone Away.” As Whaley explains, “An analysis of 552 Republican candidates running for Senate, House of Representatives, governor, secretary of state, and attorney general in the 2022 elections shows that close to half (221 candidates) who made statements on a spectrum from those who accepted the 2020 election outcome with reservations to those who fully denied the results won in 2022….The good news is that surveys show a majority of Americans are confident their votes will be accurately cast and counted. The bad news is that confidence is still at historic lows and, not surprisingly, there is a partisan divide….Public concerns about election fairness, security, and safety of course need to be taken seriously. And, election administration can always be improved, from increasing voting machines to better ballot design and process management, and consistent application of voting laws, just to name a few. The bigger challenge ahead, however, is to address the continued concerted efforts by those in power (or seeking it) to use unfounded claims of voter fraud to erode public trust in elections for their own political purposes. The extent to which unfounded claims of election fraud have become integrated into campaigns and used as a tools for fundraising efforts are particularly corrosive to democratic institutions when they translate into attempts to reshape voting laws that create divergent access and rights, and contribute to rising violent threats against election workers. And while it may be a challenge endemic to one party now, that doesn’t mean the roles won’t reverse in the future….Finally, Newton’s third law may very well apply to the politics of election denialism. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction; for every voter mobilization, there is a counter voter mobilization. In response to the election denialism as a campaign strategy, millions of voters showed up to the polls in 2022 mobilized by the belief that democracy itself was on the ballot. This itself may reverberate into the future by setting the stage for a partisan arms race that further exacerbates conflict and tensions over claims to electoral legitimacy.”

In his Washington Post column, “Raphael Warnock, with Herschel Walker’s help, is now a national voice,” E. J. Dionne, Jr. writes, “Sen. Raphael G. Warnock’s reelection is a rebuke to the idea that partisanship overwhelms personal character, another blow to Donald Trump’s domination of the Republican Party and a warning to the GOP that moderate suburban voters will continue to resist flawed candidates and right-wing extremism….His victory in a contest many thought a year ago would be unwinnable for a Democrat will transform him into a major voice in his party, which hopes to make more inroads in the Deep South by mobilizing a multiracial political coalition of the sort that sent Warnock back to Washington….Republican control of the House will limit what the party can accomplish legislatively in the final years of President Biden’s term. But by winning the party a 51st seat, Warnock will give Democrats an outright majority on Senate committees that are split evenly in the current Congress. This will speed the confirmation of judges and ease the way for midterm personnel changes in the Biden administration. Getting Biden’s appointees through Senate committees will be much easier….Democrats will also be able to issue committee subpoenas without Republican support, creating a useful counter-force to a Republican House intent on launching a large number of highly partisan investigations. The Senate, if it wished, could also pick up on investigations begun by Democrats in the House over the past two years….Although the role of Walker’s shortcomings cannot be underestimated, the ability of Democrats to prevail again in a Georgia runoff speaks both to demographic change in the state and exceptional organizing work by the party and civil rights groups over the last decade….”

Now for the bad news: “Republicans Still Have A Clear Path To Retaking The Senate In 2024,” Geoffrey Skelley reports at FiveThirtyEight, and writes, “The good news for Republicans, however, is that the 2024 Senate map puts them in a better position to take control of the chamber than it does for Democrats to hold onto it….Democrats have more than twice as many Senate seats to defend in 2024 as Republicans, an imbalance that gives the GOP a clear path to capturing the Senate — even if the Georgia result has given Democrats a little breathing room. At present, 34 Senate seats will be up for election,¹ and of those, Democrats (including the independent senators who caucus with them) hold 23 to the GOP’s 11, as the table below shows….That Democrats have so many seats to defend in 2024 is a byproduct of past electoral success. Each class of Senate seats is up every six years,² so the group of seats up in 2024 was previously up in 2018 and each six-year mark prior to that….Democrats now must defend the now red-leaning seats of Sens. Jon Tester of Montana, Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Joe Manchin of West Virginia. All three won reelection in 2018, but those elections took place in a heavily Democratic-leaning environment that they can’t count on having again in 2024. In addition to those three redder seats, Republicans will surely also target swing-state seats in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin….Though Republicans have ample pickup opportunities, Democrats can realistically hope to flip only two GOP-held seats in 2024: Florida and Texas. Still, given the strong Republican showings in Florida recently and the inability of Texas Democrats to break through statewide, even as the state has become a lighter shade of red, the GOP incumbents will likely start as favorites in these seats in a way that isn’t true for Brown, Manchin and Tester….With Georgia’s runoff in the rearview mirror, the 2024 election cycle can truly begin. And while the Democrats’ victory in the Peach State has helped give them a bit of wiggle room in the Senate, the overall map remains favorable to Republicans. To hold onto the Senate, Democrats need a lot of things to go right in 2024. While the 2022 midterm result showed how that can happen, Democrats will probably have to retain at least a couple of seats that are redder than any they had to defend this year — a difficult task in a world with fewer split-ticket outcomes between presidential and Senate voting.”

At The New Republic’s “The Soapbox,” editor Michael Tomasky interviews Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA17). Tomasky  observes, “Economic patriotism, to Khanna, means repatriating manufacturing to the United States on a major scale, reversing the lamentable trend of the last half-century that left the U.S. importing all the stuff it used to make. “We can build industry in every part of America,” he told me….Khanna is part of the new breed of Democrats who say: Working- and middle-class economics comes first. Yes, much else is important, but it’s all connected to the party’s approach to economic questions, and convincing—no, showing—working- and middle-class Americans that the Democratic Party has changed and is on their side. “People are right to be upset at the governing classes,” he said. “We need to say, ‘Look, we have an actual agenda to fix this.’”…We talked a lot about what the Democrats can do in these next two years, when big legislative victories won’t be possible. Khanna has clearly been thinking about this and has interesting takes on it.” The interview:

At the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Greg Bluestein explains “How Raphael Warnock Defeated Herschel Walker,” and writes:

…Warnock and his allies recognized from the outset that winning reelection against Republican Herschel Walker, even with his troubling personal issues and blunders, would require a new strategy….Doing so would mean veering from a 2020 approach that focused almost exclusively on Democratic priorities — and little about his opponent. Instead, Warnock set out to energize liberal Georgians and swing voters by emphasizing his sharp contrast with Walker.

The Democrat was helped by Walker’s pile of personal issues, bizarre behavior and campaign blunders during the runoff. Warnock’s most effective ads, to many, consisted simply of footage of Walker’s confusing remarks on the campaign trail….Inside the Republican’s campaign, aides lurched from crisis to crisis so often it felt like a “death march,” said one staffer, one of a half-dozen Walker allies who were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the inner workings of the operation.

Bluestein adds that “Warnock, meanwhile, held dozens of events to mobilize voters when they most needed the push. A Democratic majority in the Senate, and the absence of other candidates on the ticket, changed the stakes. And a shrewd scheduling move by the Democrat caused chaos in Walker’s campaign.” Further,

“Herschel was like a plane crash into a train wreck that rolled into a dumpster fire. And an orphanage. Then an animal shelter. You kind of had to watch it squinting through one eye between your fingers,” said Dan McLagan, an adviser to Agriculture Commissioner Gary Black, one of Walker’s defeated rivals in the GOP primary.

Bluestein notes, “To overcome the staunch support for his rival, Warnock had to motivate both liberal voters who form the Democratic Party’s base and middle-of-the-road Georgians who harbored concerns about both candidates.” Also,

He steered clear of Biden, saying talk of the president’s future should be left to pundits. He spoke more on the campaign trail about work he had done with Republicans in the U.S. Senate than allying with Biden, often to the shock of supporters. And he cast the race as a referendum on Walker.

….Warnock, meanwhile, laid claim to the political center despite a liberal voting record. Jason Shepherd, the former chair of the Cobb County GOP, marveled at Warnock’s “solid, focused and disciplined campaign” in contrast to Walker’s failure to woo swing voters.

….t was clear that one of Walker’s biggest weaknesses was middle-of-the-road voters who had defected en masse to Warnock, voted for the third-party candidate or just skipped the race altogether. But no campaign reset was underway.

Bluestein shares an inter-active map which clearly shows that Walker fell way short of Georgia’s Republican Governor Brian Kemp’s total votes, not only in metro Atlanta, but also in the heavily-Republican counties north of Atlanta.

At FiveThirtyEight, Geoffrey Skelley notes that “The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade gave Republicans an unusual win for the party outside of power, one that ran against public opinion and clearly motivated the Democratic base. At the same time, Trump remained in the political picture and cast his broadly unpopular shadow over Republican Senate primaries, which helped produce a series of poor candidates in key Senate races.” Also at FiveThirtyEight, Nathaniel Rakich adds, “Republicans nominated poor candidates, with Walker being a prime example. He was a political novice with multiple skeletons in his closet who didn’t even live in Georgia….”

None of this should detract from Sen. Warnock’s impressive accomplishment, nor his campaign’s tireless efforts. But Somewhere Mitch McConnell is grinding his teeth.

Julia Mueller notes that “Betting markets heavily favor Warnock over Walker in Georgia runoff” at The Hill: “Online betting markets are heavily favoring incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock (D) over Republican Herschel Walker in Georgia’s Senate runoff with two days until the election….The Democrat’s chances of winning the runoff were at 89.5 percent to Walker’s 10.5 percent as of Sunday afternoon, according to the tracker Election Betting Odds, which culls odds from other popular betting markets….The site, run by conservatives John Stossel and Maxim Lott, notes Warnock’s lead has climbed 1.4 percent in the last day….PredictIt and Polymarket both show Warnock at 89 percent. Smarkets, another betting market used by Election Betting Odds, puts Warnock’s odds even higher — at 92.6 percent to Walker’s 8.3 percent….Recent polling has also put Warnock in the lead, though only slightly….Results from Emerson College and The Hill released last week showed the Democrat up by 2 percentage points, and a CNN poll released Friday found Warnock leading by 4 points.” Lest Dems get too giddy with optimism about this report, Robert S. Erikson and Christopher Wlezien argue in the abstract to their Public Opinion Quarterly article, “Are Political Market Really Superior to Polls as Election Predictors?”  “Election markets have been praised for their ability to fore-cast election outcomes, and to forecast better than trial-heat polls. This paper challenges that optimistic assessment of election markets, based on an analysis of low Electronic Market (IEM) data from presidential elections between 1988 and 2004. We argue that it is inappropriate to naively compare market forecasts of an election outcome with exact poll results on the day prices are recorded, that is, market prices reflect forecasts of what will happen on Election Day whereas trial-heat polls register preferences on the day of the poll. We then show that when poll leads are properly discounted, poll-based forecasts outperform vote-share market prices.”

Alex Samuels ponders “How Either Candidate Could Win Georgia’s Senate Runoff” at FiveThirtyEight, and writes: “However, because of what happened during the 2020 cycle and the fact that recent polling shows that this race could be a tight one, it’s hard to rely only on historical data. The first poll of the runoff, a November Fabrizio Ward and Impact Research survey for AARP, showed the incumbent with 51 percent support from voters versus Walker’s 47 percent. But a second, more recent, Phillips Academy Poll of likely voters, on the other hand, showed Walker and Warnock essentially neck-and-neck (48 percent to 47 percent, respectively) with 5 percent of voters still undecided. And a third FrederickPolls, Compete Digital, and AMM Political survey of likely runoff voters had the two men tied at 50 percent support each….The 2021 Georgia runoff was different. Next week’s election will tell us if it was an outlier — or the potential harbinger of more Democratic statewide victories to come. If past runoffs are any guide, we’d expect there to be at least some dropoff in turnout. In 2021, for example, turnout was down about 10 percent from the total votes cast in November 2020, and historically that was an unusually small decline in runoff turnout. “There are fewer incentives to turn out this year than there were in 2021,” Bullock said. “So we might expect less people to show up to the polls this year.”….Still, the outcome of this race will tell us which side can better mobilize their base, even during a midterm year when control of the Senate isn’t at stake. And that could start to answer a much bigger question: Is the Peach State red enough to where we can regard recent Democratic wins as an off-chance phenomenon? Or is it now more competitive — or even purple — meaning races can swing in either party’s favor based on the circumstances and candidates?”

In “How Donald Trump is helping Raphael Warnock in Georgia” at CNN Politics, Harry Enten shares his perspective on the closing days of the Georgia run-off campaign: “Trump’s unpopularity in Georgia is causing him to stay out of the state in the campaign’s final days and is part of a deeper reshaping of political alignments in America….To understand the Trump impact on Georgia, take a look at the CNN/SSRS poll of the Senate runoffreleased on Friday. Trump came in with a favorable rating of just 39% and an unfavorable rating of 54% among likely voters….Not surprisingly, Walker leads among White voters and Warnock with Black voters. This is what you’d expect in most closely divided states….But what might have floored a political analyst a mere eight years ago is the extent of the educational divide among White voters in Georgia. Walker was ahead 83% to 17% among White voters without a college degree. His lead shrunk to 51% to 47% among White voters with a college degree….Indeed, arguably the biggest reason Democrats are now competitive in Georgia elections is how much more Democratic college-educated White voters have become….Unlike in most states, though, there wasn’t a lot of ground Republicans could gain among non-college-educated White voters in Georgia. They were already solidly Republican. There was a ton of ground, however, that the GOP could lose among White voters with a college degree….This made Georgia a perfect place for Democrats to make gains because a significant portion of the state’s White population holds a college degree. In the CNN poll, 45% of likely White runoff voters have a college degree….When Warnock combines support from these White college-educated voters with the deeply Democratic Black vote (who made up nearly 30% of the likely electorate in the CNN poll), it gives him a small advantage as the campaign comes to a close.”

But Democrats should also get real about the limitations of a Warnock victory, should they be so lucky. As Lauren Gambino notes at The Guardian, “Likely to remain in place, even with a 51st seat, is the Senate filibuster. Despite mounting calls from across the party to weaken the rule to protect voting rights and codify Roe v Wade, Democrats do not have the support of 50 senators to do so. Manchin and his Democratic colleague, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, oppose changes to the filibuster, which imposes a 60-vote threshold to pass most legislation. Democrats would have needed to gain at least two additional senators to overcome their resistance and even then, such legislation would be unlikely to advance in a Republican-controlled House….Without a majority in the House, Democrats’ streak of legislating will all but certainly grind to a halt. In the senate, Democrats’ priority will be to confirm federal judges and executive branch appointees nominated by the president. Here again having a one-seat cushion would help Democrats bypass a degree of obstinance within their ranks, in contrast to earlier this year when one of Biden’s nominees to the Federal Reserve was forced to withdraw her candidacy after Manchin announced his opposition.” However, looking toward the near future, Gambino adds, “Holding Warnock’s seat would also have longer-term political implications. Democrats face a daunting political map in 2024, when 21 senators who caucus with the party face reelection, including three who represent states Donald Trump won in 2020….“Winning or losing this race isn’t just about whether or not it puts Democrats at 50 or 51 for the next two years,” said Mary Small, national advocacy director at Indivisible, a progressive advocacy group with affiliates across the country. “It also locks in the seat for the next six years in a way that will shape the composition of the Senate in future Congresses as well.”….Having an extra vote in the Senate will free Harris, allowing her to travel even when the chamber expects a party-line vote. In her role as president of the Senate, Harris has broken 26 ties, the most for any vice president in a single-term….“Not having the vice president tied to DC all the time as a tie-breaking vote is another sort of overlooked piece of why senator Warnock’s win will be so important,” Small said, adding: “The ability of the executive branch to have high-profile people out there telling that story of what was accomplished will be a critical part of what [Democrats] need to do heading into 2024.”

For a really good update on the U. S. Senate run-off in Georgia, check out Greg Bluestein’s “Boots on the ground could be key to how US Senate runoff is won” at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Some excerpts: “After years of playing catch-up to Democrats’ vaunted get-out-the-vote efforts, Republicans poured more resources than ever into closing the gap in the midterm. Gov. Brian Kemp invested more than $10 million into building his own apparatus….It appears to have paid off. Amid underwhelming turnout, Republicans won every statewide race except for the U.S. Senate contest between Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker. Since neither won a majority of the vote, a Dec. 6 runoff is required….“Runoffs are about turnout. It’s a sprint, not a marathon — and whoever does a better job getting their folks to the polls wins,” said Ralph Reed, founder of the Faith and Freedom Coalition. “We intend for it to be us.”…His group plans to spend $2 million during the runoff to boost Walker’s campaign, with goals to knock on 400,000 doors and make 1 million calls through the election……the ongoing efforts to personally connect with voters play a paramount role in campaigns. Armed with sophisticated voter data and old-fashioned flyers, these door-to-door trips are no blind scavenger hunts for voters. Staffers and volunteers use apps and well-rehearsed scripts to target their most likely supporters with pinpoint accuracy.”

Bluestein adds, “About 200,000 Georgians backed Kemp and not Walker in the midterm, a crucial bloc of voters whose wariness of the Senate nominee helped plunge the race into overtime….Walker’s drop-off was sharply pronounced in Atlanta’s suburbs, an area where GOP canvassers have been particularly active during the runoff campaign….The RNC and state GOP boast 400 staffers to augment Walker’s team of about 30 field operatives. Pro-Walker outside groups are providing at least 100 more paid canvassers, some assigned to specifically target voters of color. Warnock’s campaign added about 300 more people to its payroll, for a total of more than 900 assigned to knock on doors, send texts and find other ways to connect with voters….Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition will distribute voter guides in 5,000 churches. Warnock’s campaign planned what an aide called an “impossible to miss” blitz, complete with airborne messages, to appeal to hard-to-reach voters….“The ground game is mission-critical during this runoff election, especially for Black and brown voters. And we knew we had to prepare for a runoff election well before the general election ended,” said Hillary Holley of Care in Action, part of a coalition that has knocked on 1.5 million doors since the day after the midterm.” On Wednesday, we reported on a recent poll showing an edge for Warnock. Democrats get extra traction from extremely dedicated and effective Black community GOTV organizers, including LaTosha Brown and Nse Ufot, who helped engineer the ‘Georgia flip’ of 2020-21, which elected two Democratic senators in the heart of the deep south. On the GOP side, however, Ralph Reed is also a highly experienced lead organizer for Walker, and he has lots of campaign money to spread around.

At The Hill, Julia Mueller reports ” Even though Senate control is not on the line, as many predicted it would be, Georgia is seeing high early voting turnout in the runoff. Data from the Georgia Secretary of State’s website showed early Sunday that some 90,000 voters had already cast their ballots just a day after early voting opened in some Georgia counties — after the Georgia Supreme Court denied a Republican bid to block Saturday early voting….More Georgians voted on Sunday than on any Sunday in the 2018, 2020 and 2022 general elections, or in the 2021 Senate runoff, according toWarnock’s campaign director Quentin Fulks. The Hill has reached out to the Georgia secretary of state for confirmation of that data….Polls show the two candidates are again neck-and-neck heading into the runoff….The latest FiveThirtyEight polling averages put Walker up 1 percentage point over Warnock, 47.8 percent to 46.8 percent. However, a poll released last week by AARP put Warnock ahead by 4 percentage points, though Walker was leading among voters older than 50….Warnock touted his character in a new television ad, after Walker has defended himself against abuse allegations from his ex-wife and claims from a former girlfriend that he paid for her abortion….“Character is what you do when nobody is watching. It’s about doing the right thing simply because it’s the right thing, and doing it over and over again,” the Democrat says in a recent ad, without naming Walker.”

Holly Otterbein and Madison Fernandez take a look at “The overlooked constituency both parties are now targeting in the Georgia runoff” at Politico. As the authors write: “Powered by a multimillion-dollar get-out-the-vote program, turnout among Asian Americans nearly doubled in Georgia from 2016 to 2020, according to the Democratic firm TargetSmart — a major boon for Democrats, who they backed overwhelmingly….The same analysis found that the number of ballots cast by Asian Americans in the state increased by upwards of 60,000 votes in 2020, more than the amount by which President Joe Biden carried Georgia. Now Asian American and Pacific Islander elected officials, donors and activists who support Warnock are trying to prove that those voters can be the margin of victory in this year’s runoff — and grow their clout in the process….“We’re the only demographic group that keeps going up,” said Georgia state Sen.-elect Nabilah Islam, who will be the first South Asian woman in the chamber. “So I’m confident that we’re going to be a huge voting bloc that will help deliver a win for Sen. Raphael Warnock.”….Though the GOP made some gains among Asian Americans this cycle, the voting bloc tends to lean Democratic nationally. In Georgia, exit polls in the November general election showed that Warnock beat Walker among Asian American voters by 20 percentage points, 59-39. By contrast, Kemp lost the voting bloc by only 8 percentage points, carrying the state in the process.” Making the campaign for this constituency more difficult, the term “Asian-American” represents a diverse constituency that speaks many different languages and embraces equally diverse cultures. As Executive Director of the Asian American Advocacy Fund Aisha Yaqoob Mahmood noted, “many people outside of the community underestimate the time and effort required to mobilize Asian American voters: “We are not a monolith. We have so many different language and cultural competency needs that often don’t get addressed in these political conversations.”

In his New York Times opinion article, “Trump Was a Gift That Might Not Keep Giving,” Thomas B. Edsall writes, “The 2022 midterm election revealed dangerous cracks in the Democratic coalition, despite the fact that the party held the Senate and kept House losses to a minimum….Turnout fell in a number of key Democratic cities. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the city’s “vote count dropped 33 percent from 2020, more than any other county and the statewide average of 22 percent. It’s not just a 2020 comparison: This year saw a stark divergence between Philly turnout and the rest of the state compared to every federal election since at least 2000.”…The Chicago Board of Election Commissioners reported that turnout of registered voters in 2022 was 46.1 percent, down from 60.67 percent in the previous 2018 midterm….According to the Board of Elections in Ohio’s Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, turnout fell from 54.5 percent in 2018 to 46.1 percent in 2022….The Gotham Gazette reported that from 2018 to 2022, turnout fell from 41 to 33 percent in New York City.”

Edsall continues, “Paul Begala, a Democratic strategist, made a similar case by email. “Swing voters in swing states and districts didn’t marry the Democrats; they just dumped the Republicans,” he wrote. “In the post-Dobbs environment, extremism is not a theoretical concern anymore. The two most valuable players of this cycle for the Democrats are Sam Alito and Donald Trump. Democrats should send them each a fruit basket.”….“I cannot think of a worse way for the House G.O.P. to introduce themselves as a governing party than braying about investigations into Hunter Biden and Anthony Fauci,” Begala argued. “Their candidates won by promising action on inflation, crime and borders.”….To counter the House Republican agenda, Begala wrote,Biden needs to say, “They’re obsessed with my family’s past; I’m obsessed with your family’s future.” At every hearing in which the Republicans are tormenting Hunter Biden or Dr. Fauci, I would have Democratic members ask, “How will this hearing lower the price of gas at the pump? How will it reduce crime? How will it secure the border?”

Edsall adds, “Should Democrats repeat a tactic used successfully this year to lift the chances that Republicans nominate their weakest general election candidate?…Both Begala and Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster, stood firmly opposed. “We should leave this to Republicans to nominate their own Trump,” Lake said by email….Begala gave three reasons for his opposition. First, “it undermines President Biden’s powerful message that Trump leads a mega-MAGA fanatical fringe that is a clear and present danger to our democracy.” Second, “Trump is still a massive, major force in American politics — especially in the Republican Party. I don’t want Trump anywhere near the White House.” Third, “while I respect the political success of governors like DeSantis, Youngkin, Hogan and Christie, if the Democrats can’t beat them, we don’t deserve the White House.” Begala’s first point resonates — Dems can’t hang the fanatic label solely on Republicans if Dems are enabling it. In addition, unorthodox tactics work well with the element of surprise, which you can’t count on repeatedly. And, as the post below indicates, Dems don’t have a lot of extra cash laying around to squander in Republican primaries.

Puzzling questions persist in the wake of the 2022 midterm elections, including, “Why are Democrats so weak in Florida, and why is it getting worse?” As Ryan Best , Humera Lodhi and Geoffrey Skelley  observe at FiveThirty Eight, “In Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis won reelection by 19 points, while GOP Sen. Marco Rubio won by 16 points. Their performance in South Florida may have also helped Republican Reps. Mario Diaz-Balart and Carlos Gimenez achieve the largest overperformances of any candidates in the House races we examined (although Diaz-Balart has long been a dynamo when it comes to easily winning elections).” Max Greenwood notes further at The Hill, “The scale of the Democratic wipeout in Florida is hard to understate. Tuesday’s elections saw Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R) win landslide victories and Republicans clinch supermajorities in both chambers of the state legislature. For the first time since Reconstruction, no Democrat will hold statewide office in Florida….In 2008, when former President Obama carried Florida for the first time, there were about 700,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans. As of Sept. 30, 2022, there were roughly 300,000 more registered Republican voters than Democratic voters.” Florida State Democratic Party Chairman Mann Diaz “released a memo on Tuesday in which he called out national Democratic groups for spending so little in Florida this year — about $1.35 million in 2022 compared to nearly $59 million in 2018…DeSantis, a star among conservatives nationally and prospective Republican presidential candidate, drastically outraised Crist throughout the campaign, pulling in more than $200 million for his reelection bid. Crist, on the other hand, raised about $31 million.” In “How to Fix the Pathetic Florida Democratic Party,”  Hamilton Nolan writes at In These Times,, “Georgia has two Democratic senators. Do you think Georgia is naturally more liberal than Florida? It ain’t. The party needs to get its act together….Only 5.2% of Florida workers were union members in 2021. That has to change….Labor and the environment: that is the coalition that the Florida Democratic Party should represent…No wonder potential Democratic voters in the state aren’t energized. For what? Give them a genuine vision…It means representing the people working at the gas station and the grocery store and the cafe. They need help, and Republicans aren’t helping them! “

In their article, “Democrats Must Do Better in Rural America,” Anthony Flaccavento, Erica Etelson and Cody Lonning write at The Nation: “According to the AP/NORC VoteCast Survey, Democratic support among rural and working-class voters continued to fall in 2022, the latter by seven points compared to 2018. Among working-class voters of color, the decline was even bigger, dropping 12 points across that same period, In North Carolina, the state Supreme Court is now entirely Republican. In more than 40 small towns and rural communities in Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio, and elsewhere, local governments are passing “pro-life sanctuary” resolutions that proclaim that life begins at conception and pledge to prohibit abortions, in defiance of state law….If this midterm was a success for Democrats, it is a retreat from what they ought to expect. Success for the Party of the People can’t merely mean that they barely hold on to a tie in the Senate or lose the House of Representatives by only a few seats. This vision of success is far too modest to meet the enormous challenges our nation faces….For Democrats to do more than hang on by their fingernails in 2024 and beyond, it’s essential that they expand their base to include rural and working-class voters of all races. The Rural Urban Bridge Initiative (RUBI), which we cofounded, is one of a growing network of groups working to reach, understand, and engage rural voters. One important tool for doing that is our just-released report, “Can Democrats Succeed in Rural America? A Review of Strategies and Practices that Work.” It distills best practices from interviews with 50 Democratic candidates who ran for state or federal office in rural districts between 2016 and 2020….Rural races are different from urban and suburban races; running competitively in them requires a different approach in both style and substance. Two-thirds of rural voters hold Democrats in low esteem and are profoundly antagonized by liberal elites who scorn the “rubes of flyover country.” Though Democrats’ rural deficit runs deep, it’s important to remember that as recently as 2008, Barack Obama garnered 43 percent of rural votes. And this cycle, John Fetterman’s consistent presence in rural places produced a two-and-a-half-point improvementover the 2020 presidential race—enough for him to win statewide in Pennsylvania….“Can Democrats Succeed in Rural America?” describes more than a dozen strategies used by rural candidates and office holders, four of which we highlight here.

Flaccavento, Etelson and Lonning continue, “First, candidates must have local credibility. Whether through generational ties to the area or long-standing community involvement and problem solving, Democrats fare better when they have local roots and are fluent in the concerns and values of the people living there. This means being able to connect state or national issues to specific local realities, and responding to the everyday concerns of people, without regard to party affiliation. For example, Chloe Maxmin, a progressive who won rural seats in the Maine House and then Senate, suspended much of her campaign activities in the spring of 2020 to help provide essential services to sick and elderly residents….Second, candidates put local concerns and issues first, rather than trying to mobilize people around their own—or their party’s—policy agenda. These local concerns vary, though they almost always include “kitchen table” issues like jobs and health care. Making local concerns central to a campaign does not mean ignoring or adopting conservative positions on critically important national issues. Rather, it means respecting voters enough to put their priorities at the center of the campaign. In so doing, candidates sometimes find meaningful ways to tackle state and national issues by drawing upon local experience, as when a candidate in rural Appalachia stood up for local businesses by fighting the outrageous subsidiesused to recruit big box competitors….Third, candidates and campaigns seek people where they are, rather than strictly following the advice to “go where the votes are.” Canvassing and phone-banking strategies typically focus on people who vote regularly and lean Democrat. By contrast, many of our study’s successful candidates reached out to people usually overlooked by campaigns. In big districts, where comprehensive canvassing may not be possible, candidates routinely “showed up” in even the most out-of-the-way places, joining community events or hosting town hall meetings. While campaign consultants might view this strategy as inefficient, New Rural Project’s work in predominantly Black rural communities in North Carolina is modeling an approach that builds trust and activates people who’ve disengaged, especially when done year-round.Fourth, successful candidates listen more and talk less. Genuine listening entails more than a slight pause before rattling off your talking points. It requires respect for the experiences, values, and choices of the people with whom candidates are engaging. When effective rural candidates do speak, they do so with humility and respect for other points of view, steering clear of partisan talking points or jargon. They talk like a neighbor, not an activist, with clear, concise language and concrete examples rather than policy abstractions.”

By now, you’ve probably read a lot of election spin that says Dems did so much better than expected in the midterm elections because they did so well with young voters. We’re going to need better data to verify or debunk that assertion, since the exit polls have their limitations. We need a solid estimate of the percentage of the pro-Democratic turnout that came from young voters, as well as the gender breakdown of the youth vote. Meanwhile, consider Katha Pollitt’s take, also at The Nation, about the pivotal importance of women voters: “Here’s what actually happened. On November 8, with a rush of new voter registrations and a high turnout, five states chose reproductive rights, women’s health, and freedom. In California, 66 percent of voters passed Proposition 1, enshrining abortion and contraception rights in the state Constitution. In Vermont, voters went one better, locking down in their Constitution the rights to abortion, contraception, sterilization, and decision-making around pregnancy. In Michigan, voters won constitutional protections for abortion, contraception, and pregnancy and childbirth decisions….Most surprising, in cherry-red Kentucky, where post-Roe trigger laws currently ban most abortions, voters rejected a constitutional amendment that would have explicitly denied protection for abortion, and in even cherrier-redder Montana, where Republicans control the governorship and both houses of the state legislature, voters rejected a deceptively worded “born alive” law that could have given doctors who provided palliative care to infants with fatal fetal anomalies a $50,000 fine and 20 years in prison….Far from sinking Democrats’ hopes with their pesky uterine concerns, in many states pro-choice voters helped Democrats on to victories….According to a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll, support for abortion rights has surged since Dobbs: 66 percent of Americans now support all or almost all abortion, the highest since 1995—among women it’s 74 percent. Moreover, ABC News reports that “in the 14 states that have ceased nearly all abortion services, 63 percent now support legal abortion, up 20 points since April.” Reality bites….Abortion rights are popular, and Democrats should act that way. As Maya Rupert of the Center for Reproductive Rights put it to me in a phone call, “We have to let go of the idea that abortion is a uniquely divisive issue that people shouldn’t talk about.”

New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall shares some of Stanley B. Greenberg’s analysis of the midterm elections: ” From Nov. 6 to 8, Stanley Greenberg conducted a survey of 2,520 registered voters for Democracy Corps, including a 1,130 oversampling of voters of color, the results of which were releasedon Nov. 15. The conclusions Greenberg drew from the survey and earlier polling this year are a mixed bag for both parties….“Two-thirds rate the economy negatively,” according to Greenberg, “yet Democrats did not prioritize the economy in this election, and the president is still trying to convince people this is a good economy. This may be the toughest to make progress on.” In addition, the “failure of national Democrats to address the economy meant rural areas and white working-class communities were a political wasteland.”….The Democratic Party, according to Greenberg, “got respectable support with Hispanics, as well as young people, but women across the whole spectrum played the biggest role. Unmarried women, white college women and under-50, white working-class women all raised their vote level since October, no doubt motivated by the abortion issue.” But, Greenberg warned, Democrats remain “at risk with Hispanics and Asian voters if they do not rethink what they prioritize, what their policies offer, consciously battling for all in our coalition and acknowledging past mistakes and having an inclusive vision where all make progress in America,” noting that the Biden administration’s 2021 expansion of the child tax credit is “uniquely popular among Hispanics.”….Crime, Greenberg wrote,

was a top issue for many Democratic base voters. A quarter of Blacks and half of Hispanics and Asians voters trusted Republicans more than Democrats to address the issue. With Democrats trailing Republicans by 10 points on crime, Democrats have a lot of work to do.”

In “Georgia’s Runoff is the Opening Battle of the 2024 Senate Cycle” Kyle Kondik writes at Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “In a 50-50 Senate, the parties have equal representation on committees, based on a power-sharing agreement that the 2 parties reached early in the current Congress. An extra seat for Democrats would render such an agreement unnecessary and would give Democrats the advantage on committees. It also would make it easier for Democrats to confirm judicial nominees if they had an actual majority, because there are logistical challenges the party must surmount in a 50-50 Senate that would not exist in a 51-49 Senate. A big part of modern Senate majorities is simply keeping the judicial confirmation conveyor belt running at full speed: An extra Democratic senator would improve efficiency in that regard….A 51-seat Senate majority would also allow Senate Democrats to occasionally bypass their few members who are not always team players, most notably Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ). However, this is probably less important in the new Congress as opposed to the current one because the likely Republican takeover of the House means that the GOP will have a seat at the governing table — meaning that the kind of legislation Democrats would want to try to get through the Senate is not likely to pass the House anyway. There is also the filibuster, but eliminating it next year would not make any sense because Republicans control the House — even if Democrats had the votes to do so in a 51-49 Senate, which they likely would not….One other thing: A 50-50 Democratic Senate majority means that they are but one death or resignation away from losing the majority. A 51-49 edge gives the party a buffer on that as well….But the more important buffer, for Democrats, is electoral….In saving at least the tiniest of Senate majorities, Democrats completed the first step of a tricky 2-cycle challenge. It very well may not be enough to save them from eventually losing the Senate next cycle, but it does give them another 2 years of control and at least a fighting chance in 2024. But that fighting chance may be predicated on what happens on Dec. 6, when Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) and former NFL star Herschel Walker (R) face off for a second time. This is a race we leaned to the Republicans prior to Election Day, but we are now characterizing it as a Toss-up.”

Kondik also provides a map that, gulp, shows which states have Democratic senate seats up in the 2024 election:

At The American Prospect, Harold Meyerson explains “Why Inflation Didn’t Wipe Out the Democrats.” As Meyerson writes, “It becomes clear when we examine two questions buried deep in the AP VoteCast exit poll. In the first, voters were asked how confident they were that they could find a good job if they needed to. In response, 65 percent answered they were very or somewhat confident, while just 35 percent said they were not too or not at all confident….Voters were also asked “how confident are you that you can keep up with your expenses?” To this, 67 percent said they were very or somewhat confident, while just 33 percent said not very or not at all confident….Inflation was clearly a problem, then, but for most voters, a manageable one. Even more important, these questions don’t reveal a level of economic anxiety that can turn an election when there are other pressing issues in play….But how is it that voters felt so confident about getting a good job and keeping up with their expenses? The answer, I suggest, is that the very same economic policies for which Biden has been raked over the coals for causing inflation also created a robust economic recovery in which jobs are plentiful and incomes are rising. The very same $1.9 trillion bill to offset the pandemic downturns—the bill on which every Republican on the Hill voted no; the bill that Larry Summers et al. predicted would have inflationary impacts—also created an economy in which jobs and incomes were, and still are, growing. And they still may, unless the Fed slams on the brakes so hard that growth turns negative….This isn’t to say that the bill wasn’t inflationary. It is to say that it also gave a boost to the economy—and to middle- and working-class Americans who were the intended beneficiaries of that boost—on a scale large enough to enable those Americans to feel confident about getting a good job and weathering the rising prices….Dare we say that the much-maligned Bidenomics actually worked? I think we dare.”

The blogosphere is not yet brimming with ideas for Democratic strategy in light of the Republicans taking over the speakership and House committees when congress reconvenes. But at FiveThirtyEight, Nathaniel Rakich shares some insights about the challenges facing Democrats: “So how should we assess the House results for Republicans? On the one hand, Republicans took control of the chamber and ended Democrats’ ability to pass legislation without GOP approval. That’s a big deal! On the other hand, though, Republicans have to be pretty disappointed with their showing. They will likely gain around eight seats, which is relatively low by historical standards. Since the end of World War II, the president’s party has lost an average of 26 House seats in midterm elections.² Of course, Republicans had an unexpectedly good 2020 election in the House, so they were starting from a higher baseline (you can’t flip a seat that you already control). But even their raw seat total is underwhelming by the standards of recent midterms. Republicans controlled 242 seats after the 2010 midterms and 247 after 2014; Democrats held 233 after the 2006 midterms and 235 after 2018….More importantly, it will likely be a difficult feat for House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy to muster up 218 votes to pass anything — or even be elected speaker. While a GOP House would mostly be playing defense (killing Democratic bills, conducting investigations into the Biden administration) rather than offense (passing its own bills), it would still need to pass bipartisan legislation like the budget. And conservative hardliners made it difficult for Republicans to govern even when they had wider majorities in 2015-2016 and 2017-2018. So we could be in for a chaotic two years in the south wing of the Capitol and look back at the 2022 elections as a Republican victory in name only.”