From “Red wave hits breaker: GOP midterm worries rise” by Emily Brooks at The Hill: “Republican worries of a midterm flop are growing heading into the critical post-Labor Day campaign season, with analysts who had previously predicted massive GOP gains shifting their forecasts toward Democrats….Rick Tyler, a Republican strategist and analyst, said the environment looks “not even close” to a red wave election year….“The enthusiasm is just not there,” Tyler said. “Last time Republicans had a good year, they were 6 points ahead in the generic poll. Now we’re barely 2 points ahead. So it’s definitely not going to happen.”….RealClearPolitics averages of pollsmeasuring whether voters would prefer Republican or Democratic control of Congress show the GOP advantage slipping from 4.8 points in late April to less than a point as of Friday. At around this point in 2010, when Republicans saw historic gains in Congress, generic polls showed an advantage of 4 to 6 points for the GOP….Weaknesses for GOP candidates along with results from recent elections have led election analysts at Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics and The Cook Political Report to shift several forecasts for key congressional midterm races toward Democrats. Cook revised its expected GOP gain in the House from 15 to 30 seats to 10 to 20 seats, and its Senate outlook from Republicans having an edge to a toss-up….Kyle Kondik, managing editor at Sabato’s Crystal Ball, said that weaknesses in GOP Senate and gubernatorial candidates, as well as many Republicans’ position against abortion, has given Democrats the opportunity ”to make the election more of a choice than a referendum.” But he cautioned against fully reevaluating the midterm environment before Labor Day and said that Republicans could still flip both chambers even if they fall below expectations of a “red wave.”….“It is possible that the Democrats’ addition of more college-educated voters, at the expense of losing more non-college voters, has skewed some of these special elections, as the college cohort is a more reliable voting bloc,” Kondik said. “That said, if the GOP had some big enthusiasm edge over the Democrats — and if it was bringing a lot of lapsed GOP voters back into the fold — one would think they’d be doing better than they are.”

In “Ratings Update: Democrats Gain Big in House Races” at Elections Daily, Eric Cunningham writes: “The national climate has undeniably shifted, perhaps from a Republican wave to a so-called “ripple” or neutral environment. We regard Republicans as the unequivocal favorites to hold the House, still, but our ratings changes predominantly benefit Democrats. The vast majority of our changes here are shifting potential upset races or fringe races we considered to be on the table. Additionally, we’re moving a handful of urban or suburban-oriented Republican seats back onto the board….Currently, we favor Republicans in 218 seats (the absolute bare-minimum for a majority) and Democrats in 193. We have 24 seats rated in the Tossup column….”

Amy Walter observes at The Cook Political Report that “Democrats are getting help flipping the script thanks to the Supreme Court and Trump. For the first time in history, warnings by Democrats about a rollback of abortion rights aren’t theoretical. Poll after poll continues to show that the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade is widely unpopular. And, as my colleague David Wasserman has noted, Democratic engagement in the post-Dobbs era has jumped considerably. In the four special elections since the June 28th Supreme Court decision, Democrats have outperformed 2020 results by as many as 6 points….Then, there’s Trump. While Youngkin was able to keep the polarizing former president at arm’s length, most of the other high-profile Senate candidates are embracing him. For the last few weeks, Trump and his ungrounded claims of voter fraud have dominated the political and media discourse. July has been dominated by coverage of January 6th commission hearings, the primary defeat of the committee’s GOP chairwoman Liz Cheney, the FBI discovery of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, and Trump’s ongoing legal troubles in Fulton County, Georgia. The party out of power — rather than the in-party — is in the spotlight….The more Trump is in the news, the more dangerous the political climate for the GOP….While neither Biden nor Trump are popular, Trump is the more polarizing. New polling from NBC News finds Trump’s net favorable ratings (-18) to be twice as bad as Biden’s (-8). That same dynamic is showing up in swing states like Arizona, where a recent FOX News poll finds Trump’s net favorable at -20 to Biden’s -10, and Wisconsin, where the FOX poll showed Biden’s net favorable ratings at (-6) compared with Trump’s (-10)….Democrats, especially incumbent Senators in key swing states, have built up solid foundation for themselves. Polling in Senate races not only finds Democrats leading in the ballot test, but also holding strong favorable ratings, especially among independent voters….A big reason for that bump in popularity is that Democratic incumbents have had the airwaves to themselves for most of the last two years. Since the beginning of 2021, significantly more money has been spent on positive ads for Democratic Senators in Arizona, Georgia, New Hampshire and Nevada than on negative ads against them….According to information provided to the Cook Political Report by AdImpact, every one of those Senators has had at least a two-to-one advantage on the airwaves.”

Gabrielle Gurley’s “Democrats in Danger of Missing the Marijuana Moment” at The American Prospect spotlights a danger — and an opportunity — for Democrats. As Gurley writes, “The Supreme Court’s revocation of abortion rights and the rush of red states to ban it altogether have opened the eyes of young voters to the perils of sideline-sitting at election time. President Biden’s decision to forgive $10,000 of student loan debt may also energize more young people to vote in the midterm elections. But failure to deliver on a slam-dunk issue like the federal decriminalization of marijuana could convince other voters to skip the general election….Removing research restrictions is a monumental step, but what voters across the political spectrum, and especially people under 25, are waiting for is the end of prohibition. The Cannabis Administration and Opportunity Act (CAOA) offers that pathway. The mammoth federal regulatory proposal, introduced in July by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Ron Wyden of Oregon, would end the federal prohibition of marijuana and remove cannabis from the Controlled Substances Act….Currently, recreational marijuana is legal in 19 states and medical marijuana in 39. An astonishing majority of Americans agree that marijuana should be legal for medical or recreational purposes. A July Gallup poll found that more than 50 percent of people 18 to 34 regularly use some type of marijuana product. Legalization is popular with young people, but it depends on who you ask: Americans ages 25 to 29 support legal cannabis by a 50 percent to 28 percent margin, with 21 percent unsure. Among people 18 to 24, the figure drops to 38 percent, with 39 percent opposed and 22 percent unsure. (On abortion and student debt relief, young people are much more uniformly aligned: 78 percent of young people support legal abortion, while 85 percent support some type of student loan debt relief.)….Cannabis descheduling by Congress or by a presidential executive order might serve as a motivational lever for both young potential voters and other unmotivated ones, demonstrating what they can expect next year if Democrats remain in power—or what they can expect if the Republicans take one or both houses of Congress.”

Rarely in today’s political debates do Democrats throw such a well-targeted counterpunch as did the White House in response to Republican criticism of President Biden’s student loan forgiveness initiative. As Zoe Richards reports at nbcnews.com:

The White House hit back at Republicans in an uncharacteristic manner Thursday by using its Twitter account to go after GOP lawmakers who are bashing President Joe Biden’s move to cancel some student debt after they personally benefited from having Paycheck Protection Program loans forgiven during the Covid pandemic.

In a series of tweets, the White House highlighted several congressional Republicans — Reps. Vern Buchanan of Florida, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania, and Markwayne Mullin and Kevin Hern of Oklahoma — who it said had six- and seven-figure PPP loans forgiven as part of a federal program intended to help those harmed by the coronavirus.

They blundered right into that one. Richards shares some of the specifics:

Greene, who said on Newsmax that “it’s completely unfair” for student loans to be forgiven, had $183,504 in PPP loans forgiven, according to the White House….Kelly, who tweeted that Biden’s move was poised to benefit “Wall Street advisors” at the cost of “plumbers and carpenters,” had $987,237 forgiven, the White House said….Buchanan, who according to the White House had more than $2.3 million in PPP loans forgiven, tweeted that Biden’s move was “reckless” and a “unilateral student loan giveaway.”….The White House also highlighted criticism and PPP loan forgiveness amounts from Mullin (more than $1.4 million) and Hern (more than $1 million).

This provides an excellent and instructive lesson for all Democratic candidates in the art of the political counterpunch. Be prepared for attacks in advance, hit back soon and hard. And keep in mind that the permanent weakness of Republican politicians is that their fingers are never far from the cookie jar.

In “This one issue could save Democrats in November,” Zachary B. Wolf writes at CNN politics: “the larger lesson of 2022 so far is that a focus on protecting abortion rights from the US Supreme Court and Republican-controlled state governments could, maybe, stop a “red wave” in November….In upstate New York, an Iraq War veteran, Democrat Pat Ryan, passed his Republican opponent, Marc Molinaro, in a House special election Ryan framed almost entirely around abortion….Ryan did better in the district against Molinaro than President Joe Biden did versus former President Donald Trump in 2020….Ryan told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Wednesday that his decision to focus on abortion came from watching the effect of the Supreme Court’s decision on the ground in his district….While the Kansas election put abortion directly on the ballot, it was simply a campaign focus in the special election in New York. Now, with a win in that hotly contested seat where both parties spent money, Democrats see a path in places that seemed to be slipping out of their reach earlier this year.” Woldf quotes CNN’s Harry Enten, who said “All told, Democrats are averaging a 4-point overperformance in House specials since Roe was overturned. This is a 10-point shift from where they were on average before the ruling.” Read the full story.”

“Yes, Special Elections Really Are Signaling A Better-Than-Expected Midterm For Democrats,” Nathaniel Rakich writes at FiveThirtyEight, and observes, “We at FiveThirtyEight often track the results of special elections (i.e., elections that occur at unusual times because an office unexpectedly becomes vacant) because of the hints they provide to the national mood. When a party consistently does well in special elections — defined not by winning or losing, but by outperforming a state or district’s baseline partisanship — it’s often a sign that the national political environment favors that party, and is therefore a good omen for that party in the upcoming regular general election….There have been four first-past-the-post special House elections since that decision [Dobbs v. Jackson on abortion rights], and Democrats have outperformed their expected margins in those elections by an average of 9 points….special-election results are clearly indicating that the political winds are now at Democrats’ backs. And it’s not just special-election results. Democrats and their allies have also done well in other, non-special elections since Dobbs….On the day of the Dobbs decision, Republicans led polls of the generic congressional ballot, or polls that ask Americans which party they plan to support for Congress, by 2.3 points, according to FiveThirtyEight’s average. But since then, Democrats have gained 2.7 points, and on Wednesday,³ they hold a small lead in these polls….This is unusual, given that the polls usually get worse, not better, for the president’s party as a midterm election draws closer. That could be a sign that 2022 could be the rare midterm that bucks the usual trend of the president’s party getting a “shellacking.” And if so, Democrats may have the Supreme Court to thank.”

Kyle Kondik writes at Sabato’s Crystal Ball, “Democrats turned in another pair of congressional special election overperformances last night, giving them an at least somewhat surprising victory in the closely-watched NY-19 special and a decent showing in the much sleepier NY-23 special, which Republicans held by a smaller margin than the GOP presidential showing in the district in 2020….In NY-19, a classic swing district that Joe Biden won by about 1.5 points in 2020, Ulster County Executive Pat Ryan (D) beat Dutchess County Executive Marc Molinaro (R) by a small margin. Some sites were reporting 51%-49% on Wednesday morning, others 52%-48%, and there probably are some scattered votes left to count, such as late-arriving mail votes….This came despite Republican outside groups spending more in the race and polling that pointed to Molinaro….Ryan ran heavily on the abortion issue, an increasing focus for Democrats in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision that eliminated constitutional protections for abortion rights, while Molinaro ran more on other issues, like inflation….there is an accumulating amount of evidence that Democrats are holding up better than expected in this midterm environment, likely in no small part because of the Dobbs decision. We now have these decent Democratic special election performances to consider, as well as House generic ballot polling that, collectively, no longer shows a Republican edge. This comes despite President Joe Biden’s poor approval rating — his numbers have been better lately, although he’s still in just the low 40s (as opposed to the high 30s).” Regarding the Ohio Senate race, Kopndik writes, “We’re moving the race from Likely Republican to Leans Republican. Our confidence in Vance winning remains, but we do not feel as strongly about it as we previously did.”

Reports of Democrats’ midterm death may be greatly exaggerated.” Gabby Goldstein and Mallory Roman write at Salon in their article, “Democrats have seized the momentum — now that needs to flow down-ballot. Our analysis shows a narrow path for Democrats to win back state-level power. It’s crucial — but it won’t be easy.”  Goldstein and Roman continue, “In fact, Democrats have momentum. Public reaction to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision has demonstrated the deep unpopularity of Republican abortion restrictions, including Kansas voters’ recent and resounding rejection of a change to the state constitution that would have made an abortion ban possible. And a summer of explosive Jan. 6 hearings has shown the depths to which MAGA Republicans aim to go in dismantling democracy. Meanwhile, the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act has been a tremendous victory. FiveThirtyEight now has Democrats ahead on the generic ballot….Democrats have a path to retain control in Washington. But the fight must be for much more than that. From abortion access to fair elections, state legislatures are increasingly the venues that control ever-broader swaths of our social, economic, and personal lives. Building progressive power in state legislatures is a key to securing the very future of our civil rights and democracy. Remember: whoever we elect to legislatures this year will be in office during the critical post-2024 election period….The good news is that control of legislative chambers is not wildly out of reach. Our recent analysis shows that Democrats have been much closer to controlling chambers than has been commonly understood. Follow the data: Legislative majorities often hinge on the outcomes in a handful of competitive seats. With so much on the line, Democrats must use their newfound momentum to fight hard for control of critically important state legislative seats….to combat ballot drop-off, Democrats need to make sure that our voters understand the importance of state legislatures, policy and power. Unlike Republicans, Democrats do not have an embedded, emotional connection to state-level power. But we can build one. We can shift the narrative to embrace the value of state power as necessary for a free future, we can celebrate progressive federalism, and we can commit to building and maintaining progressive state power.”

I’m always encouraged when I see a really good Democratic political ad. But does it really matter, and if so, how much? Maybe it’s impossible to say for sure. What we can know is, what the best data says about it.

Writing in 2020, Mike Cummings takes the skeptical view in “Political ads have little persuasive power” at Yale News: ”

Every four years, U.S. presidential campaigns collectively spend billions of dollars flooding TV screens across the country with political ads. But a new study co-authored by Yale political scientist Alexander Coppock shows that, regardless of content, context, or audience, those pricey commercials do little to persuade voters.

The study, published Sept. 2 in the journal Science Advances, measured the persuasive effects of 49 high-profile advertisements from the 2016 presidential campaign on a nationally representative sample of 34,000 people through a series of 59 randomized experiments. Expanding on prior research suggesting that political ads have little impact on voters’ preferences, the study shows that those weak effects are consistent irrespective of a number of factors, including an ad’s tone, timing, and its audience’s partisanship.

“There’s an idea that a really good ad, or one delivered in just the right context to a targeted audience, can influence voters, but we found that political ads have consistently small persuasive effects across a range of characteristics,” said Coppock, an assistant professor of political science in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “Positive ads work no better than attack ads. Republicans, Democrats, and independents respond to ads similarly. Ads aired in battleground states aren’t substantially more effective than those broadcast in non-swing states.”

OK, 2016 was weird, and Cummings’s article was focused on TV ads. Regarding the study’s methods, Cummings writes:

Coppock and his co-authors — University of California-San Diego political scientist Seth J. Hill and UCLA political scientist Lynn Vavreck — conducted the study throughout the 2016 presidential primaries and general election.

Over 29 weeks, a representative sample of Americans was divided at random into groups and assigned to watch campaign advertisements or a placebo advertisement — a car-insurance commercial — before answering a short survey.

The researchers selected ads using real-time, ad-buy data and news coverage of each week’s most important ads. They tested ads attacking or promoting Republican candidate Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton as well as commercials concerning primary candidates, such as Republican Ted Cruz and Democrat Bernie Sanders. They analyzed the ads’ effects on survey respondents across several variables, including the candidate, party, or political action committee that sponsored them; whether they were positive or negative in tone; the partisanship of those viewing the ads; the time to Election Day when they aired; whether they were viewed in a battleground state or not; and whether they aired during the primary or general election.

Cummings summarizes their findings:

They found that, on average and across all variables, the ads moved a candidate’s favorability rating among respondents only .05 of a point on the survey’s five-point scale, which is small but statistically significant given the study’s large size, note the researchers. The ads’ effect on whom individuals intended to vote for was smaller still — a statistically insignificant 0.007 of a percentage point.

Campaigns should carefully consider efforts to tailor advertisements to specific audiences given that the evidence shows that ads’ persuasive effects vary little from person to person or from commercial to commercial, the researchers concluded.

Of course a candidate’s favorability rating is not the same thing as a vote for or against a candidate. As Cummings notes further,

The findings do not demonstrate that political advertising is always ineffective, Coppock said, noting that the study didn’t analyze the influence of an entire advertising campaign.

“TV ads help candidates increase their name recognition among the public, which is extremely important,” said Coppock, a resident fellow at Yale’s Institution for Social Policy Studies and the Center for the Study of American Politics. “Moreover, the effects we demonstrated were small but detectable and could make the difference between winning and losing a close election.”

Another study of TV ads in the 2020 election in 75 market areas and 1607 counties by Northwestern University scholars Brett Gordon, Mitchell J. Lovett, Bowen Lou and James Reeder found, as reported by Roberta Kwok :

….Gordon and his colleagues report that TV ads do influence voter turnout and choices—and that the tone of the ad makes a difference. Based on data from the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, the team found that positive ads encouraged more people to show up on Election Day, while negative ads slightly suppressed turnout. And while both types of commercials affected whom people supported, the negative ones were more effective at swaying voters’ decisions.

In hypothetical scenarios, the researchers found that ad tone was sometimes enough to tip a close election. For example, the team predicted that if only positive ads had been shown, Al Gore would have won in 2000.

Regarding the thorny problem of campaigns continuing to spend billions of dollars on TV ads in elections every year, highly-experienced campaign managers know about such studies, but they still think TV ads are very important. The cynical argument goes, “Well, the system is corrupted by massive amounts of money they have to spend somewhere.” No doubt, however, many campaign managers can point to evidence that specific ads helped their candidates.

So who do you trust more – academics defending their studies, or campaign managers and consultants defending their investments?  No shortage of self-interest on either side of that argument. Kind of a draw, isn’t it?

From “GOP’s Senate outlook grows dimmer amid ‘candidate quality’ concerns” by Mychael Schnell at The Hill: “On Thursday, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report changed its rating for the Pennsylvania Senate race from “toss up” to “lean Democrat,” signaling headwinds for Republican Mehmet Oz in his race against Lt. Gov. John Fetterman (D)….The shift came amid the crudité controversy in the Keystone State. Oz came under fire after Fetterman’s campaign recirculated a video the TV doctor posted in April showcasing him grocery shopping for crudité in an effort to show the effects of inflation….The Democratic campaign seized on the video, with the candidate writing on Twitter “In PA we call this a… veggie tray,” the most recent move in his attempt to paint Oz as a carpetbagger from New Jersey….Fetterman’s team said it raised more than $500,000 in the 24 hours after the video went viral. The lieutenant governor remains comfortably ahead of Oz in FiveThirtyEight’s average average, 49.1 percent to 37.7 percent.” Actually, the ‘crudite’ dust-up is more about the Republican candidate’s elitist language, in stark contrast to Fetterman’s authentic working-class appeal. Fetterman’s campaign was smart to capitalize on Oz’s blunder, and it wouldn’t hurt to make some humorous ads portraying Oz as poster boy for the crudite crowd.

In his op-ed, “The barely hidden fascism of Ron DeSantis makes a Pa. pit stop on a race to ’24,” Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch explains why Americans should be very concerned about a potential presidential candidacy of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis: “The time for mincing words is over. This is the latest and most alarming manifestation of a now barely hidden fascism by the head of America’s third-largest state, and one of the handful of serious contenders for the White House. DeSantis’ push for voter suppression and the increasingly paramilitaristic vibe of his public appearances prove the Floridian is the one we’ve been warning about: A post-Trump Republican taking a war on democracy to an even more dangerous place, minus the buffoonish narcissism of the 45th president….DeSantis has embraced a politics that has absolutely nothing to do with traditional conservative blather about freedom and everything to do with raw power. This 43-year-old rising force has already surpassed the dark promise of Trump by going after corporations who’ve dared to criticize him, seeking to chill classroom discussions about race or gender, and even overriding the resultsof a democratic election for a large-county prosecutor whose offense was having a differing opinion….In this context, DeSantis’ national campaign swing — which came to Pennsylvania this weekend with his controversial embrace of our extremist and Christian nationalist GOP gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano — marks a major turning point as America looks warily toward a 2024 election that already has a kind of 1860 feel to it. Right now, DeSantis — the only serious Republican rival to Trump, according to the polls — is demolishing the myth that The Former Guy would be challenged by a moderate. Instead, DeSantis is taking the loose ideology of Trumpism to new extremes of demonizing The Other and positioning the GOP as an anti-democracy movement….Just the fact that DeSantis, the head of a state with a large Jewish population, thought it important to endorse Mastriano — despite the shocking revelationsabout the Pennsylvanian’s ties to the website Gab, a cesspool of anti-Semitism that inspired the 2018 mass murderer of 11 Jewish people at a synagogue just a few miles from where he spoke — was a powerful illustration of a political party’s downward spiral into madness….the two true leaders of today’s GOP are tripping over each other to embrace a homophobicanti-Semite bidding to run the state where the American Experiment began.”

WaPo columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. turns the spotlight on Senator Maggie Hassan’s re-election campaign, and writes, “The New Hampshire Democrat, who got elected six years ago by a margin of just 1,017 votes, uses an unmistakably New England locution to describe her state’s voters: “Wicked independent.” So it’s not surprising that one of her very favorite words is “bipartisan.”….Hassan adds a thought far more likely to be embroidered on a sampler than shouted out on Twitter: “You can’t care more about winning the argument than about solving the problem.”….The proudly purple reelection campaign Hassan is waging is a reminder that to win a majority in a U.S. Senate that structurally tilts toward conservatives — Wyoming and South Dakota have the same number of senators as California and New York — Democrats need to prevail in states that are by no means reliably progressive….This makes bipartisanship a good calling card for potentially vulnerable Senate incumbents, and it’s valuable in swing House districts, too. Hassan’s two Democratic House colleagues here, Reps. Chris Pappas and Ann Kuster, are also stressing the bipartisan victories in Congress….In this very swingy state, no one in this trio pretends that 2022 will be easy for any of them. But they all sense a mood swing in the Democrats’ favor…for Hassan, the fact that congressional Republicans unanimously opposed the [Inflation Reduction Act] bill — and that her leading GOP opponents vying in a Sept. 13 primary have criticized the bill — allows her to give her moderation a populist tilt. She assails “extreme” Republicans who are “regurgitating Big Pharma’s talking points and Big Oil’s talking points.” Count on “Big Pharma” and “Big Oil” to play starring bad-guy roles in Democratic campaigns all over the country….And if there is any state where the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade is likely to change the political winds, this is it. A poll this month by the Saint Anselm College Survey Center found that 71 percent of New Hampshire voters identified themselves as “pro-choice” while just 25 percent picked “pro-life.” Only 38 percent said they supported the Supreme Court’s ruling….The Democrats’ hope that abortion will be a wedge issue among libertarian-leaning conservatives — they loom large here — was underscored by the evocative tag line of a Hassan television ad against the court decision. “Protecting our personal freedoms isn’t just what’s right for New Hampshire,” she says. “It’s what makes us New Hampshire.”….Demonizing Hassan as an ideologue will be hard, not only because voters here know her well from her four years as a moderate governor, but also because she tried to immunize herself on prices by criticizing Biden for not doing more about inflation and by calling for a gas tax holiday. Dionne closes with a quote from rep. Kuster: ““For the first time, I’m running on freedom and safety, which used to be bedrock Republican issues,” she said. “The Republicans are running on chaos.” Wicked independents aren’t big on chaos.”

Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight is bearish on Ohio Democrat Tim Ryan’s chances of winning his race for the U.S. Senate, but The New Republic’s Timothy Noah is more optimistic. As Noah writes, “Trump won the working class (defined conventionally as voters who lack a college degree) by 3 percentage points in 2016 and 4 in 2020. Granted, he won it partly through appeals to white bigotry. But Trump also increased Republicans’ share of working-class voters of color (mostly Hispanic) from 16 percent in the 2012 presidential race to 18 percent in 2016 to an alarming 25 percent in 2020. This is a serious problem. As the sociologist Ruy Teixeira, a leading scholar of working-class voters, puts it: “They just don’t feel Democrats give a shit about them.”….One Democrat who’s trying to reverse this tide is Ohio Senate candidate Tim Ryan, a 10-term congressman whose district includes Youngstown, the former steelmaking hub…..This year, Ryan is running to replace retiring Republican Senator Rob Portman. The move requires him to give up his safe House seat and is therefore a significant risk, given the Republicans’ tightening grip on the state. But Ryan has a record of risk-taking; he tried unsuccessfully to unseat Nancy Pelosi as Democratic leader in 2016, and made a brief, quixotic bid for the 2020 presidential nomination, dropping out three months before the Iowa Caucus. When I asked Ryan what he considered his most important legislative accomplishment, he cited an obscure but important measure, included in last year’s Covid relief bill, that shored up Rust Belt multiemployer pension funds at serious risk of defaulting and bankrupting their insufficiently funded federal insurer, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. The beneficiaries, he told me, included “about 100,000 people” in Ohio….Ryan parts company with Trump Republicans most obviously in his vigorous support for labor. The AFL-CIO gives him a lifetime score of 98 percent, the same as Representative Bobby Scott, the Democratic chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee. The very first entry on the “issues” page of his campaign website is titled “Cutting Workers in on the Deal,” and in the first paragraph he voices support for the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which would eliminate many significant legal barriers to unionization, and for a $15 minimum wage. Unions build communities, Ryan told me….To win back the working class, Democrats need to lead with their economic pitch: stronger unions, higher minimum wage, higher taxes on the rich. Ryan is doing all that….the Democrats have grown sufficiently weak in Ohio that even an inauthentic Vance will be hard to beat. If Ryan succeeds, it will be his job, alongside senior Senator Sherrod Brown, to persuade Ohioans that the Democrats really are the party of the working class. If they can do that, then maybe the Democratic standard-bearer in 2024 (I don’t assume it will be Biden) can shore up the party’s working-class support and make the Buckeye State competitive again by November 2024. If they fail, don’t rule out four more years of Trump.”

In “Liz Cheney Already Has a 2024 Strategy. To save the Republican Party, the defeated Wyoming representative may first have to destroy it,” Ronald Brownstein writes at The Atlantic: “The magnitude of Cheney’s defeat yesterday underscores how strong Trump remains within the party, and how little chance a presidential candidacy based explicitly on repudiating him would have of capturing the nomination….Yet many of Trump’s remaining Republican critics believe that a Cheney candidacy in the 2024 GOP presidential primaries could help prevent him from capturing the next nomination—or stop him from winning the general election if he does. “Of course she doesn’t win,” Bill Kristol, the longtime strategist who has become one of Trump’s fiercest conservative critics, told me. But, he added, if Cheney “makes the point over and over again” that Trump represents a unique threat to American democracy and “forces the other candidates to come to grips” with that argument, she “could have a pretty significant effect” on Trump’s chances….In some ways, a Cheney 2024 presidential campaign would be unprecedented: There aren’t any clear examples of a candidate running a true kamikaze campaign….Kristol predicted that the party might try to exclude her by requiring any candidate participating in a RNC-sanctioned debate to commit to supporting the party’s eventual nominee in the general election—something Cheney’s determination to stop Trump would not allow her to do. (In 2016, the RNC imposed such a loyalty oath primarily out of fear that Trump wouldn’t endorse the nominee if he lost. Trump signed it but characteristically renounced it in the race’s latter stage.)….Even so, it would be difficult for any media organization that sponsors an RNC debate to agree to keep her off the stage. And if Cheney is registering reasonable support in the polls—say 5 percent or more—even state parties might think twice about barring her. “Every other candidate not named Trump is going to want Liz Cheney on the debate stage,” the GOP consultant Alex Conant, the communications director for Senator Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign, told me.” It is hard to see how Cheney’s loss will have any effect on the midterm elections. In 2024, many Democrats would rather have Trump to run against, since having him at the top of the ticket in 2020 cost his party the presidency, the House and Senate majorities already. But at this juncture, it looks like Trump’s legal troubles are a bigger threat to his candidacy than Cheney’s shrinking megaphone.

“Overall, our best guess right now is that there will not be a ton of net change in the governorships,” Kyle Kondik writes at Sabato’s Crystal Ball, regarding GOP prospects in the midterm elections. “Democrats appear very likely to flip the open seats of Maryland and Massachusetts and they have another prime open-seat target in Arizona, but Republicans may be able to make up for losses (and then some) by flipping a number of the vulnerable Democratic-held governorships we’ve noted above — with many of the best targets coming west of the eastern time zone.” Kondik adds, “Democrats continue to have the 2 clearest pickups, the open seats in Maryland and Massachusetts. However, Democrats also are defending 4 of the 5 Toss-ups.” Kondik shares this map, illustrating Crystal Ball’s current gubernatorial ratings:

A couple of encouraging recent Polls noted at The Hill: Caroline Vakil writes, “President Biden’s approval rating ticked up 3 percentage points in the past week, according to a Politico-Morning Consult poll released on Wednesday, as Democrats scored a major legislative win with the passage of their climate, health care and tax reform package….The poll showed that 42 percent of registered voters said they approve of the job Biden is doing as president. The same poll released last weekshowed Biden’s approval rating was at 39 percent….At the same time, the number of registered voters who said they disapproved of his job performance dropped from 59 to 56 percent….More people in the latest poll also said the country was on the right track — 30 percent, compared to 25 percent last week. Seventy percent of registered voters said it was on the wrong track, compared to 75 percent the previous week.” Also at The Hill, Jared Gans reports, “Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes (D) leads incumbent Sen. Ron Johnson (R) by 7 percentage points in their race for Johnson’s seat, according to a poll from Marquette University Law School released Wednesday….The survey found that Barnes received support from 51 percent of respondents, compared to Johnson’s 44 percent. Barnes expanded his lead from Marquette’s June poll, in which he led Johnson by only 2 points, within the margin of error….The poll released Wednesday shows a sharp partisan divide between the candidates, with 95 percent of Democrats supporting Barnes and 92 percent of Republicans supporting Johnson. But Barnes leads among independents, 52 percent to 38 percent. …The two candidates were tied among independents in the June poll….The conservative senator has faced sharp pushback after he said earlier this month that Social Security and Medicare should be categorized as discretionary spending, requiring Congress to approve their budgets every year instead of allowing them to rise annually….Democrats also released an ad this week targeting Johnson for his vote against implementing a $35 per month cap on out-of-pocket insulin costs for individuals with private insurance.”

Abby Vesoulis’s “The Inflation Reduction Act Was a Huge Win for Democrats. Will It Help Them In the Midterms?” at Mother Jones offers some messaging advice for Democratic campaigns: “battle. Now Democrats must convey this major legislative victory to voters as they struggle to preserve their congressional majorities in the upcoming midterm elections….There are, however, strategies Democrats could take to turn their legislative successes into electoral ones, half a dozen political strategists and experts say….The most obvious move is to start pointing out the highly popular policies that Republicans have tried to thwart, three strategists emphasize….Fully 83 percent of voters support Medicare negotiating for lower drug prices, 61 percent say Congress should do more to fight climate change, and 62 percent backraising corporate taxes. Not a single Republican voted for the IRA, which does all three….Even the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure deal hardly lived up to its billing as bipartisan. Democrats ought to point that out, says Mike Lux, a political strategist who has served senior roles on six different presidential campaigns. “Ninety percent of House Republicans voted against it. A majority of Senate Republicans voted against it,” says Lux, “Democrats need to serve up the contrast: ‘Look, we’re working to get stuff done. Republicans are trying to stop things from getting done.’”….Republicans’ vote against expanding the reconciliation bill’s insulin price-capping provision to include privately insured patients is one of the most obvious examples of GOP obstruction….More than 7 million US diabetics require daily insulin and roughly 14 percent of insulin users spend “catastrophic” levels of their income on insulin, according to a Yale study, meaning their insulin accounts for at least 40 percent of their income after deducting food and housing costs….“I think we can kill the Republicans on the insulin thing,” argues Lux.” Vesoulis continues, “Every GOP lawmaker just voted against a bill that will surely prevent some people from dying from treatable diseases, says Dr. Rob Davidson, the executive director of Committee to Protect Health Care, a group that advocates for policies that put patient care over profits….In his day job as an emergency medicine physician in rural Michigan, Davidson says he sees patients rationing medication due to financial difficulties end up in the his emergency room on a weekly basis….Lower prescription drug and insulin costs procured by the IRA will “save a certain number of people’s lives,” he says. “It’s incontrovertible. Nobody can say that’s not true.”….Whether the IRA can save Democrats’ congressional majorities is less straightforward. That will not so much depend on what Democrats got done—but if they can finally learn how to talk about it.”

In the wake of her overwhelming defeat in the GOP primary for Wyoming’s sole House seat, Rep. Liz Cheney has some important decisions to make about her future. One of them is what to do with her remaining war chest, estimated at $7 million.

This morning pundits are buzzing about whether Cheney will run for President in 2024 as a Republican, Independent or Democrat. If her primary goal is truly to stop Trump from becoming president, the latter two options don’t make much sense. As an independent candidate, she would likely help Trump by draining votes that would otherwise go to the Democratic nominee. Her running as a Democrat is a non-starter as well, since she has a solid record of opposition to Democratic policies, which would alienate too many Democratic voters. But running for President in the GOP primaries could help defeat Trump, even if he wins the Republican nomination. Writing at The Daily Beast, Sam Brodey explains:

….Heading into the final stretch of the primary, Cheney was sitting on a remarkable campaign warchest of over $7 million, fueled largely by national donors.

That eye-popping sum of untouched cash is just one of the many things fueling speculation that Cheney might challenge Trump in the upcoming 2024 presidential election. While she herself has been coy about her plans, her 2022 campaign has at times looked more like a foundation for a longshot bid to stop Trump in 2024 than a reelection bid.

In Wyoming, Cheney was scarce on the campaign trail. Because of her pariah status among state and county-level GOP organizations—and amid serious concerns about her physical safety—her campaign consisted of private, invite-only events around the state….In Cheney’s defeat, Trump and the MAGA movement got the vengeance they craved for most. But, for Cheney, this may all be part of the plan.

“The one certainty is that she will not go away quietly,” said Tim Stubson, a former state lawmaker who ran against Cheney in the 2016 House primary and has since become an ally.

“Frankly, Trump has made it his goal to get her out of Congress,” Stubson said. “I think he may live to regret that decision.”

Brodey notes, further, “Cheney’s defeat caps a six-year run in Congress that found her, more often than not, allied with Trump and his GOP agenda. During her tenure, Cheney voted with Trump’s position over 92 percent of the time, according to FiveThirtyEight, and was a staunch critic of Democrats’ efforts to investigate and impeach him over his effort to pressure Ukraine into investigating Joe Biden.”

Cheney has given up a lot to her quest to stop Trump. Not so long ago, she was on the short list of possible candidates to be Speaker of the House, as an alternative to Kevin McCarthy. To her credit, she put her love for American democracy ahead of her career in congress. Yes, she still has a shot at the presidency. But at this point, she looks a lot more like a genuine patriot than a careerist. That’s a pretty fresh look for today’s GOP. If it doesn’t help her in 2024, but it may do so in 2028.

Brodey notes, “Publicly, Cheney had always been clear-eyed about the bargain she made. “If the cost of standing up for the Constitution is losing the House seat, then that’s a price I’m willing to pay,” she told the New York Times in one of the rare pre-primary interviews she sat for.” Apparently she meant it.

If Trump somehow survives the legal deluge gathering around him and his associates, he will likely have a bruising primary season thanks to Liz Cheney. That will be good for Democrats, and they can invest more in supporting their congressional candidates. If he goes down before then and Democrats have to run against Cheney in 2024, or if she simply gives her money to another Republican candidate, Dems will have a much tougher campaign in 2024, no matter who heads the top of the ticket.

In his post, “Will This Be An Asterisk* Election?* It takes something unusual for the president’s party to do well in the midterms,” Nate Silver writes at FiveThirtyEight: “Democrats started out with 222 House seats following the 2020 election, four more than the number required for a majority. According to our model, there’s a 7 percent chance that Democrats wind up with fewer than 222 seats after November but still enough seats to maintain a narrow majority. Meanwhile, there’s a 13 percent chance that they actually gain seats.¹ Those numbers combined give them their 20 percent chances….Time for a quick historical gut check. In 19 midterm elections since World War II, the president’s party lost fewer than five seats in the House once, in 1962. And they gained seats twice, in 1998 and 2002. That means three out of 19 times the president’s party would have a successful enough midterm to keep the House, or 16 percent of the time. That squares pretty well with our model’s 20 percent estimate….Silver discussess the exceptional midterms, and adds, “….all these elections featured some sort of special circumstance: the Great Depression, the Cuban missile crisis, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the first impeachment of a president in 130 years. But such a definition is inherently fuzzy as you can potentially retrofit almost any political or news development to constitute a “special circumstance,” in the same way that almost every election gets called “the most important election of our lifetimes.”Immediately after the court overturned Roe, Democrats began to gain ground on the generic congressional ballot, which asks voters which party they’d support in an election, and it’s now translated into some electoral successes, too. In Kansas last week, voters overwhelmingly rejected a ballot initiative that would have allowed the legislature to restrict abortion in the state amid very high turnout. And in Minnesota this week, Republicans won a special election in the 1st Congressional District by only 4 percentage points, a district that Trump won by 10 points in 2020. Likewise, on June 28, just a few days after Roe was overturned, Republicans won a special election in Nebraska’s 1st District by only 5 points in a district that Trump carried by 15 points.^3…It’s not just the courts, either. Republicans are also aggressively exercising power through state governments, especially on abortion, gay and transgender rights and education policy. And although voters don’t regard Jan. 6 as an event as important as Sept. 11 — public opinion about it is also much more polarized — it’s a reminder that Republicans can also potentially seek to achieve power through extralegal means….If nothing else, Democratic voters have no shortage of motivation to turn out: Many feel as though their basic rights are being threatened, something a party’s voters ordinarily aren’t concerned about when it controls both the presidency and Congress. The “enthusiasm gap” often accounts for much of the presidential party’s disadvantage at the midterms, but it’s not clear it exists this year after Roe was overturned….All that said, Republicans are still fairly clear favorites to keep the House. Notably, President Biden is quite unpopular despite a modest improvement in his approval ratings, whereas FDR, JFK, Clinton and GWB were all popular at the times of their midterms. The public still has very negative views about the economy and the direction the country is headed in, and that’s usually rough for the party in power to overcome….But the circumstances of these midterms are also potentially unusual, with high uncertainty, and that’s why Democrats keeping the House is a thinkable outcome.”

At The Cook Political Report, the newly-appointed Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, Amy Walter writes thaT “the data is giving us mixed signals. Despite these favorable winds, Biden’s job approval rating remains mired under 40 percent. Americans remain deeply pessimistic about the economy and Biden’s handling of it. The one improvement in fortunes for Democrats has been the generic ballot which shows Democrats making up significant ground over the last few weeks. And, as my colleague David Wasserman has noted, better-than-expected showings by Democratic candidates in NE-01 and MN-01 House specials mean “we’re no longer living in a political environment as pro-GOP as November 2021….At the start of the summer, Republicans had a 2 point advantage on the generic congressional ballot. Today, the two parties are basically tied (Democrats up 0.1 in the FiveThirtyEight average)….polling taken this month and last by Monmouth found a ‘generic Democrat’ running anywhere from 11 to 14 points better among independent voters than Biden’s job approval ratings with these same voters. For example, the most recent Monmouth poll found a Democrat pulling 47 percent of the vote from independent voters — which is 14 points higher than Biden’s anemic 33 percent job approval rating with these voters. A late July Quinnipiac poll, which found Republicans ahead by just one point on the generic ballot question (44 to 43 percent), also found Democrats doing 12 points better among independents than Biden’s anemic 23 percent….Overall, Democrats were winning independent voters in the most recent Monmouth survey by 6 points (47 percent to 41 percent). The July Quinnipiac poll showed Democrats losing independent voters by 9 points (35 percent to 44 percent). …So, how are Democrats able to defy political gravity with independent voters? And, can they sustain it?…. First, not all those who disapprove of Biden are taking out their frustration on his party. One pollster told me that his most recent polling showed “Dems winning generic Congress ballot among ‘somewhat disapprove’ of Biden by 17 points. That’s what is keeping Dems competitive in Congressional ballot generically….Another is that independent voters are simply fed up with both parties and, as such, aren’t focusing their frustration at just the party in charge….Overall, however, Republicans can take heart in the fact that the top issues for independent voters remain inflation and the economy — issues for which they give Biden very low marks, and say they trust the GOP more. And, while things are improving on the economic front, they still aren’t great.,,,Vulnerable Democratic Senate candidates have been raising gobs of money and spending it liberally to raise their bonafides with independent voters. But, at the end of the day, they can only control so much. They have been able to fly above Biden’s dismal ratings thus far, but once the GOP ad assault has been underway for a while, we’ll find out whether they can continue to defy political gravity.”

At The Cook Political Report, Charlie Cook addresses a question of considerable interest, “Whose Baggage Will Weigh Heaviest This Fall?” As Cook writes:

From September of last year through July of this year, the coronavirus and Afghanistan receded from the news, but other challenges more than took their place. Inflation surged to the highest levels in 40 years, amid fears of an oncoming recession. Biden’s approval ratings plummeted and Americans turned increasingly pessimistic, with only one in five saying the country was headed in the right direction. Yet pollsters in both parties had begun privately remarking about how incongruous it was that all of these elements that looked so horrible for Democrats weren’t translating into the kind of GOP advantage that one might have expected—just two or three points on the generic ballot.

In the last six weeks though, we have started seeing more aberrational signs that may or may not signal a directional change in this campaign. First was the realization that several Republican Senate primary winners in key contests may be a bit too exotic and problematic to succeed in a broader November election pool of voters. Just using the betting markets as a benchmark, as recently as mid-June Senate Republicans had been favored to unseat Democratic incumbents Mark Kelly in Arizona and Raphael Warnock in Georgia as well as retaining the open seat in Pennsylvania. Republicans now have uphill climbs in the three states thanks to weak nominees.

While Republicans are still favored to hang onto their open seat in Ohio, some are a bit unnerved by signs of a metabolism problem with their candidate J.D. Vance. His energy levels for fundraising and campaigning is causing some angst, especially since Rep. Tim Ryan, the Democratic nominee, has run an impressive campaign and is certainly working much harder.

The overall odds of Republicans winning a majority have dropped from over 70 percent in late June to 47 percent now.

Bam! That’s a big tumble. But there are two senators Dems must shore up, if they hope to for a net gain of Senate seats in November:

The biggest question marks on the Senate map concern two other Democratic incumbents, Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada and Maggie Hassan in New Hampshire. The Nevada contest between Cortez Masto and Republican Adam Laxalt, a former state attorney general, is a straight-up coin-flip race without any problematic candidates. How the political winds are blowing come November will matter a lot; the race is less between two people than two dueling and evenly matched parties.

New Hampshire’s Sept. 13 primary will tell us whether Hassan’s reelection is in deep trouble or very lucky. If Republicans pick the more mainstream state Senate President Chuck Morse, the dynamics will resemble those in Nevada, red versus blue, with neither candidate horribly flawed or enormously advantaged. But if New Hampshire Republicans go with retired Gen. Don Bolduc, a highly decorated Army Special Forces commander with ten tours in Afghanistan but a less impressive political pedigree, then the GOP’s hopes would depend upon a gigantic wave.

Like many pundits, Cook tweaks the ‘Democrats are screwed’ narrative to better fit post-Kansas reality, and writes, “The second sign was the surprise 19-point defeat in Kansas of a ballot initiative that would have allowed the state Legislature to ban abortion. That would seem to support Democrats’ hope that the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade could draw a surge in pro-choice voters to the polls in November. But whether a vote on a primary election day ballot that was about nothing but abortion really underscores the larger point is debatable.” Further,

Finally, are Democrats finally learning to get out of their own way and do something with the unified government voters have given them? Biden is expected to sign the CHIPS and Science Act on Tuesday. The House could send the Inflation Reduction Act (aka “Build Back Somewhat Better”) to his desk on Friday. Democrats argue that these two packages, when added to the coronavirus relief and infrastructure packages, add up to an impressive set of accomplishments for any president in the first half of a term.

So what’s it all add up to? I must echo keen political observer Doug Sosnik, who told The New York Times, “I can’t figure this one out.” In her newsletter, GOP pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson writes, “I’d still rather be Republicans than Democrats heading into November [but] it might be time to sound some gentle alarms for Republicans.”

Cook concludes, “My own hunch is that Republicans will still take the House, but not by the margin they had hoped. In the Senate, look for another photo finish, maybe on Nov. 8 but maybe even in a Dec. 6 runoff in Georgia.”

New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall writes, “In a paper that came out in June, “Explanations for Inequality and Partisan Polarization in the U.S., 1980 — 2020,” Elizabeth Suhayand Mark Tenenbaum, political scientists at American University, and Austin Bartola, of Quadrant Strategies, provide insight into why so much discord permeates American politics: “Scholars who research polarization have almost exclusively focused on the relationship between Americans’ policy opinions and their partisanship. In this article, we discuss a different type of partisan polarization underappreciated by scholars: “belief polarization,” or disagreements over what people perceive to be true….” Suhay, Tenenbaum and Bartola cite data from American National Election Studies and the Pew Research Center to track the increasing polarization between Republicans and Democrats on various questions, which require respondents to agree or disagree with statements like these: “one of the big problems in this country is that we don’t give everyone an equal chance”; “most people who want to get ahead can make it if they’re willing to work hard”; and “poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.”….In 1997, 68 percent of Republican and 43 percent of Democratic survey respondents chose “have it easy,” a 25-point difference. By 2017, 73 percent of Republicans said the poor “have it easy,” while 19 percent of Democrats shared that view, a 54-point difference.”

Edsall continues, “There is further evidence that even people who are knowledgeable about complex issues are sharply polarized along partisan lines….Nathan Lee at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Brendan Nyhan at Dartmouth, Jason Reifler at the University of Exeter and D.J. Flynn at IE University in Madrid argue in their paper “More Accurate, but No Less Polarized: Comparing the Factual Beliefs of Government Officials and the Public” that while “political elites are consistently more accurately informed than the public,” the “increase in accuracy does not translate into reduced factual belief polarization. These findings demonstrate that a more informed political elite does not necessarily mitigate partisan factual disagreement in policymaking.”….Lee, Nyhan, Reifler and Flynn assessed the views of elites through a survey in 2017 of 743 “elected policymakers, legislative staffers, and top administrative positions in local and state government in the United States.” Three-quarters of the sample held elective office. The survey tested belief accuracy by partisanship and elite status on eight issues including health care, the share of taxes paid by the top 1 percent, climate change and voter fraud.” Edsall adds, “I asked Nyhan about the consequences of the findings and he wrote back by email: “The most important contribution of our study is to challenge the assumption that we will disagree less about the facts if we know more. Elites are better informed than the public on average but Democrats and Republicans still are still deeply divided in their beliefs about those facts. In some ways, the conclusion of our study is optimistic — government officials are better informed than the public. That’s what most of us would hope to be true. But the findings do suggest we should avoid thinking that people becoming more informed will make the factual divides in our society go away. Belief polarization is a reality that is not easily overcome.”

Edsall also explores the role of racial attitudes in a more generalized political polarization and notes, “In their January 2022 paper, “The Origins and Consequences of Racialized Schemas about U.S. Parties,” Kirill Zhirkov and Nicholas Valentino, political scientists at the Universities of Virginia and Michigan, make an interesting argument that, in effect, “Two parallel processes structure American politics in the current moment: partisan polarization and the increasing linkage between racial attitudes and issue preferences of all sorts.”….Racial attitudes, the authors argue persuasively, “are now important predictors of opinions about electoral fairness, gun control, policing, international trade and health care.”….There are, Zhirkov and Valentino note, long-range implications for the future of democracy here: “As soon as ethnic parties start to compete for political power, winning — rather than implementing a certain policy — becomes the goal in and of itself due to associated boost in group status and self-esteem of its members. Moreover, comparative evidence suggests that U.S. plurality-based electoral system contributes to politicization of ethnic cleavages rather than mitigates them. Therefore, the racialization of American parties is likely to continue, and the intensity of political conflict in the United States is likely to grow.” No doubt, de facto racial segregation of many neighborhoods in American cities and the absence of African Americans in many rural communities plays a significant role in polarization. As MLK once said, ” We have to be together before we can learn to live together.”

In “The Ads That Won the Kansas Abortion Referendum: Avoiding progressive pieties, the ad makers aimed at the broad, persuadable middle of the electorate,” Bill Scher writes at The Washington Monthly: “Kansans for Constitutional Freedom, the group that led the campaign to defeat the constitutional amendment intended to permit abortion bans, developed a messaging strategy that resonated across the political spectrum and eschewed purity tests….“We definitely used messaging strategies that would work regardless of party affiliation,” Jae Gray, a field organizer for the group, told The Washington Post. The results validated the strategy, with the anti-abortion constitutional amendment losing by some 160,000 votes, even while Republican primary voters outnumbered Democrats by about 187,000….What did the abortion rights campaign say to woo voters in a conservative state?….I reviewed eight ads paid for by Kansans for Constitutional Freedom. One used the word choice. Four used decision. Three, neither. The spots usually included the word abortion, but not always….To appeal to libertarian sentiments, the spots aggressively attacked the anti-abortion amendment as a “government mandate.” To avoid alienating moderates who support constraints on abortion, one ad embraced the regulations already on the Kansas books….And they used testimonials to reach the electorate: a male doctor who refused to violate his “oath”; a Catholic grandmother worried about her granddaughter’s freedom; a married mom who had a life-saving abortion; and a male pastor offering a religious argument for women’s rights and, implicitly, abortion.” Scher provides six ad videos used by the successful campaign, including these two: