The following article by Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, co-founder and politics editor of  The Liberal Patriot, is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

On Tuesday, John Halpin introduced our new survey project on the important issues and political ideas shaping the 2024 presidential election. He recounted some of the findings from our initial 3,000 voter survey, the first of five we plan to do over the next year or so.

I’ll do the same here, focusing on a set of questions we asked to tap voters’ views on three culturally freighted issues that are sure to loom large in the impending campaign: immigration, climate, and transgender controversies. The data strongly indicate that Democrats’ positions on these issues appear to correspond closely to the views of the left of the party but not to the views of the rest of the electorate, especially those voters who occupy the electorate’s center ground.

Taking immigration first, we asked voters to choose from three options:

1. People around the world have the right to claim asylum and America should welcome more immigrants into the country;
2. America needs to secure its borders and create more legal and managed immigration paths to bring in skilled professionals and workers to help our economy grow; or
3. America needs to close its borders to outsiders and reduce all levels of immigration.

Under a quarter (24 percent) chose the first option, emphasizing the right to asylum and admitting more immigrants, which is closely associated with the Democratic Party. By far the most popular option was the second one, emphasizing border security and skilled immigration, which 59 percent favored. The draconian third option, which favors just closing the border and reducing all immigration was chosen by 17 percent. The latter two positions outnumber the permissive first position by three to one.

Among moderates, the second position was chosen by an overwhelming 66 percent and just 18 percent favored the permissive first position, not much more than the 16 percent who favor the draconian third position. Among the swing-y pure independent group, the story was similar: 62 percent chose the second position and the same number—19 percent—chose the first and third positions.

It’s clear Democrats do not occupy the center ground here.

Turning to climate and energy, we offered voters these three choices:

1. We need a rapid green transition to end the use of fossil fuels and replace them with fully renewable energy sources;
2. We need an “all-of-the above” strategy that provides abundant and cheap energy from multiple sources including oil and gas to renewables to advanced nuclear power; or
3. We need to stop the push to replace domestic oil and gas production with unproven green energy projects that raise costs and undercut jobs.

Once again, the Democratic-identified first position, emphasizing ending the use of fossil fuels and rapidly adopting renewables, is a distinctly minoritarian one, embraced by just 29 percent of voters. The most popular position is the second, all-of-the above approach that emphasizes energy abundance and the use of fossil fuels and renewables and nuclear, favored by 46 percent of voters. Another 25 percent—not far off the number backing the first position—flat-out support production of fossil fuels and oppose green energy projects.

Moderates are even more heavily skewed toward the all-of-the-above approach, favoring it by 58 percent, compared to 23 percent support for the rapid green transition and 19 percent for fossil fuels production. Similarly, 54 percent of independents support the all-of-the-above, energy abundance approach, with a mere 18 percent favoring a rapid green transition away from fossil fuels and a larger 27 percent group backing continued fossil fuels production.

Once again, Democrats seem out of touch with the median American voter on a critical issue.

This distance from the center is even more obvious when we take a look at voter views on transgender controversies. Here are the three choices we offered voters:

1. States should protect all transgender youth by providing access to puberty blockers and transition surgeries if desired, and allowing them to participate fully in all activities and sports as the gender of their choice;
2. States should protect the rights of transgender adults to live as they want but implement stronger regulations on puberty blockers, transition surgeries, and sports participation for transgender minors; or
3. States should ban all gender transition treatments for minors and stop discussion of gender ideology in all public schools.

The first position here, emphasizing availability of medical treatments for transgender children (euphemistically referred to as “gender-affirming” care) and sports participation dictated by gender self-identification, is unquestionably the default position of the Democratic Party today. Indeed, to dissent in any way from this position in Democratic circles is enough to earn one the sobriquet of “hateful bigot”—or worse. Yet only about a quarter (26 percent) of voters endorse this position. Indeed, the most popular position of the three is the most draconian: that medical treatments for transgender children should simply be banned, as should discussion of gender ideology in public schools. That’s embraced by 41 percent of voters; another third of voters favor the second position, advocating stronger regulation on puberty blockers, transition surgeries, and sports participation for transgender minors. Together, the latter two positions make it three-to-one among all voters against the Democratic position.

A mere 18 percent of moderate voters back the Democratic position. In contrast, a healthy 47 percent favor the stronger regulation of transgender medical treatments approach and another 35 percent want transgender medical treatments banned for children. And only 15 percent of independents are in favor of the “gender-affirming” Democratic position while roughly equal proportions (42 and 43 percent, respectively) back the middle regulatory approach and the total ban approach.

The rather startling unpopularity of Democratic positions in these areas and their obvious distance from the views of the electoral center raises the question of where these unpopular views came from. Part of the answer is that not all Democrats have been enthusiasts for these positions, but the ones that have been punch way above their weight in the party.

Consider how the views of “very liberal” Democrats—only slightly more than a quarter of the party—differ from other Democrats, spanning ordinary liberals, moderates, and the small number of conservatives. In each of these areas, overwhelming majorities of very liberal Democrats back the standard Democratic position. On immigration, 65 percent of very liberal Democrats support the permissive Democratic position but only 35 percent of other Democrats—and these Democrats are almost three-quarters of the party! On climate and energy, 69 percent of very liberal Democrats are all-in on ending fossil fuels and rapidly transitioning to renewables—but just a minority (44 percent) of other Democrats; instead more (48 percent) favor the all-of-the-above energy abundance approach. And on transgender issues, 71 percent of very liberal Democrats endorse the “gender-affirming” care approach but only 42 percent of other Democrats do so. Instead they favor stronger regulations on the treatment of transgender children (43 percent) or an outright ban on drugs and surgery for these children (16 percent).

So cultural leftism not only does not represent the views of most voters; it also doesn’t represent the views of vast segments of the very party—the Democrats—that is now identified with promulgating said cultural leftism. This is not how a big tent party should act. Many Democratic politicians appear to believe they can get away with indulging, if not promoting, such cultural leftism because Trump and the Republicans are so terrible. This is short-sighted. The best and surest way to beat Trump and Trumpism is to embrace the electoral center of the country (not to mention the views of tens of millions of their own partisans) and assure these voters that Democrats are their party and not beholden to an aggressive leftist minority in their own ranks.

The following article by NYT opinion columnist David French, author of “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation,” is cross-posted from The New York Times:

I’ve shared this fact with readers before: I live in Tennessee outside Nashville, a very deep-red part of America. According to a New York Times tool that calculates the political composition of a community, only 15 percent of my neighbors are Democrats. I’ve been living here in the heart of MAGA country since Donald Trump came down the escalator. This is the world of my friends, my neighbors and many members of my family. That is perhaps why, when I’m asked what things are like now, eight years into the Trump era, I have a ready answer: Everything is normal until, suddenly, it’s not. And unless we can understand what’s normal and what’s not, we can’t truly understand why Trumpism endures.

It’s hard to encapsulate a culture in 22 seconds, but this July 4 video tweet from Representative Andy Ogles accomplishes the nearly impossible. For those who don’t want to click through, the tweet features Ogles, a cheerful freshman Republican from Tennessee, wishing his followers a happy Fourth of July. The text of the greeting is remarkable only if you don’t live in MAGAland:

Hey guys, Congressman Andy Ogles here, wishing you a happy and blessed Fourth of July. Hey, remember our Founding Fathers. It’s we the people that are in charge of this country, not a leftist minority. Look, the left is trying to destroy our country and our family, and they’re coming after you. Have a blessed Fourth of July. Be safe. Have fun. God bless America.

Can something be cheerful and dark at the same time? Can a holiday message be both normal and so very strange? If so, then Ogles pulled it off. This is a man smiling in a field as a dog sniffs happily behind him. The left may be “coming after you,” as he warns, but the vibe isn’t catastrophic or even worried, rather a kind of friendly, generic patriotism. They’re coming for your family! Have a great day!

It’s not just Ogles. It’s no coincidence that one of the most enduring cultural symbols of Trump’s 2020 campaign was the boat parade. To form battle lines behind Trump, the one man they believe can save America from total destruction, thousands of supporters in several states got in their MasterCrafts and had giant open-air water parties.

Or take the Trump rally, the signature event of this political era. If you follow the rallies via Twitter or mainstream newscasts, you see the anger, but you miss the fun. When I was writing for The Dispatch, one of the best pieces we published was a report by Andrew Egger in 2020 about the “Front Row Joes,” the Trump superfans who follow Trump from rally to rally the way some people used to follow the Grateful Dead. Egger described the Trump rally perfectly: “For enthusiasts, Trump rallies aren’t just a way to see a favorite politician up close. They are major life events: festive opportunities to get together with like-minded folks and just go crazy about America and all the winning the Trump administration’s doing.”

Or go to a Southeastern Conference football game. The “Let’s Go Brandon” (or sometimes, just “[expletive] Joe Biden”) chant that arises from the student section isn’t delivered with clenched fists and furious anger, but rather through smiles and laughs. The frat bros are having a great time. The consistent message from Trumpland of all ages is something like this: “They’re the worst, and we’re awesome. Let’s party, and let’s fight.”

Why do none of your arguments against Trump penetrate this mind-set? The Trumpists have an easy answer: You’re horrible, and no one should listen to horrible people. Why were Trumpists so vulnerable to insane stolen-election theories? Because they know that you’re horrible and that horrible people are capable of anything, including stealing an election.

At the same time, their own joy and camaraderie insulate them against external critiques that focus on their anger and cruelty. Such charges ring hollow to Trump supporters, who can see firsthand the internal friendliness and good cheer that they experience when they get together with one another. They don’t feel angry — at least not most of the time. They are good, likable people who’ve just been provoked by a distant and alien “left” that many of them have never meaningfully encountered firsthand.

Indeed, while countless gallons of ink have been spilled analyzing the MAGA movement’s rage, far too little has been spilled discussing its joy.

Once you understand both dynamics, however, so much about the present moment makes clearer sense, including the dynamics of the Republican primary. Ron DeSantis, for example, channels all the rage of Trumpism and none of the joy. With relentless, grim determination he fights the left with every tool of government at his disposal. But can he lead stadiums full of people in an awkward dance to “Y.M.C.A.” by the Village People? Will he be the subject of countless over-the-top memes and posters celebrating him as some kind of godlike, muscular superhero?

Trump’s opponents miss the joy because they experience only the rage. I’m a member of a multiethnic church in Nashville. It’s a refuge from the MAGA Christianity that’s all too present where I live, just south of the city, in Franklin. This past Sunday, Walter Simmons, a Franklin-based Black pastor who founded the Franklin Justice and Equity Coalition, spoke to our church, and he referred to a common experience for those who dissent publicly in MAGA America. “If you ain’t ready for death threats, don’t live in Franklin,” he said.

He was referring to the experience of racial justice activists in deep-red spaces. They feel the rage of the MAGA mob. If you’re deemed to be one of those people who is trying to “destroy our country and our family,” then you don’t see joy, only fury.

Trump’s fans, by contrast, don’t understand the effects of that fury because they mainly experience the joy. For them, the MAGA community is kind and welcoming. For them, supporting Trump is fun. Moreover, the MAGA movement is heavily clustered in the South, and Southerners see themselves as the nicest people in America. It feels false to them to be called “mean” or “cruel.” Cruel? No chance. In their minds, they’re the same people they’ve always been — it’s just that they finally understand how bad youare. And by “you,” again, they often mean the caricatures of people they’ve never met.

In fact, they often don’t even know about the excesses of the Trump movement. Many of them will never know that their progressive neighbors have faced threats and intimidation. And even when they do see the movement at its worst, they can’t quite believe it. So Jan. 6 was a false flag. Or it was a “fedsurrection.” It couldn’t have really been a violent attempt to overthrow the elected government, because they know these people, or people like them, and they’re mostly good folks. It had to be a mistake, or an exaggeration, or a trick or a few bad apples. The real crime was the stolen election.

It’s the combination of anger and joy that makes the MAGA enthusiasm so hard to break but also limits its breadth. If you’re part of the movement’s ever-widening circle of enemies, Trump holds no appeal for you. You experience his movement as an attack on your life, your choices, your home and even your identity. If you’re part of the core MAGA community, however, not even the ruthlessly efficient DeSantis can come close to replicating the true Trump experience. Again, the boat parade is a perfect example. It’s one part Battle for the Future of Civilization and one part booze cruise.

The battle and the booze cruise both give MAGA devotees a sense of belonging. They see a country that’s changing around them and they are uncertain about their place in it. But they know they have a place at a Trump rally, surrounded by others — overwhelmingly white, many evangelical — who feel the same way they do.

Evangelicals are a particularly illustrative case. About half of self-identified evangelicals now attend church monthly or less often. They have religious zeal, but they lack religious community. So they find their band of brothers and sisters in the Trump movement. Even among actual churchgoing evangelicals, political alignment is often so important that it’s hard to feel a true sense of belonging unless you’re ideologically united with the people in the pews around you.

During the Trump years, I’ve received countless email messages from distraught readers that echo a similar theme: My father (or mother or uncle or cousin) is lost to MAGA. They can seem normal, but they’re not, at least not any longer. It’s hard for me to know what to say in response, but one thing is clear: You can’t replace something with nothing. And until we fully understand what that “something” is — and that it includes not only passionate anger but also very real joy and a deep sense of belonging — then our efforts to persuade are doomed to fail.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, co-founder and politics editor of  The Liberal Patriot, is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

Last Thursday, the Supreme Court struck down race-conscious college admissions. The reaction in Democratic circles has been to denounce the decision in histrionic terms and circle the wagons in defense of race-based affirmative action. A representative sample:

• “I fear what will happen… Will there be many lawyers who [are black] in the future? Or doctors? Or accountants?”—Catherine Christian, legal analyst, MSNBC
• “We will return to elite institutions… being the space for a particular population, for predominantly white and Asian students. We will begin to see a kind of segregated higher-education landscape.”—Princeton professor Eddie Glaude Jr.
• “Can’t wait until [the daughter of an Asian activist supporting the Court decision] reads that you gladly carried the water for white supremacy”— Jemele Hill, Atlantic writer, Twitter
• “[I]t just makes… a Native American kid, a Black kid feel like you don’t matter…Is it leading to no women in colleges soon? Who knows?”—Whoopi Goldberg, The View
• “This is a devastating blow for racial justice and equality…We condemn the Supreme Court’s decision to end these affirmative action policies and make it even more difficult for Americans to access higher education. While this decision is a setback… it is not the final word.”—Jaime Harrison, Democratic National Committee chair

But perhaps this is not a hill Democrats should choose to die on. Rather than implicitly or explicitly pledging to resist the law of the land and promote racial preferences by any means necessary, they would be far wiser to use the decision as an opportunity to rebrand the party as the party of America’s working class—the entire working class.

Start with the brutal fact that racial preferences are very, very unpopular. In a typical result, this spring’s Harvard/Stanford/University of Texas SCOTUSPollfound 69 percent of the public agreeing that private colleges and universities should not be able to use race as a factor in admissions, compared to 31 percent who thought these institutions should be able to do so. The same question about public colleges and universities elicited at 74-26 split. Pretty definitive.

In polling from Pew in 2022, just seven percent of the public thought high school grades should not be a factor in college admissions and a mere 14 percent thought standardized test scores should not be a factor. But an overwhelming 74 percent thought that race or ethnicity should not be a factor in college admissions.

This pattern applied to all nonwhite racial groups. Among blacks, 59 percent said race should not be a factor in college admissions compared to 11 percent who said high school grades should not be a factor and 21 percent who said the same about standardized tests. Hispanics (68 percent) and Asians (63 percent) were even more adamant in opposing the use of race in admissions.

Another indicator is how race-based affirmative action has fared in state referenda which is… not well. The most recent example was in the very blue state of California in 2020. Democratic leaders put an initiative on the ballot, Proposition 16, that would have repealed the state’s ban on using affirmative action in school admissions and government contracting and employment decisions. The measure, endorsed by Governor Gavin Newsom, then-senator and vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris, pretty much every other Democratic official in California and a staggering array of elites from business and labor to beloved sports teams, was widely seen as allowing schools to adjust merit-based admission policies to admit more blacks and Hispanics and fewer Asian Americans in order to make black and Hispanic enrollment proportional to their share in the population. But in spite of its prominent endorsements and generous funding—supporters of the measure outspent opponents by 10:1—the measure failed by 57 to 43 percent. Across racial groups, support for Proposition 16 ran 15-25 points behind support for Bidenin the 2020 election. This speaks volumes about the stunning cross-race unpopularity of racial preferences.

Why is this? It’s very simple. Most voters, especially working-class voters, think racial preferences are not fair and fairness is a fundamental part of their world outlook. They actually believe, with Martin Luther King Jr., that people should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” In a recent University of California Dornsife survey, this classic statement of colorblind equality was posed to respondents: “Our goal as a society should be to treat all people the same without regard to the color of their skin”. This MLK-style statement elicited sky-high (92 percent) agreement from the public, despite the assaults on this idea from Critical Race Theory (CRT) and the likes of Ibram X. Kendi and large sectors of the Democratic left. In a fascinating related finding, the researchers found that most people who claim to have heard about CRT believe CRT includes this colorblind perspective, rather than directly contradicting it. Perhaps they just can’t believe any theory that has anything to do with race would reject this fundamental principle. Guess they didn’t get the memo that it’s no longer cool to believe in this stuff.

Similarly a recent Public Agenda Hidden Common Ground survey found 91 percent agreement with the statement: “All people deserve an equal opportunity to succeed, no matter their race or ethnicity.” This is what people deeply believe in: equal opportunity. In the wake of the Supreme Court decision, Democrats can seize on this strand of the American character and trade a 2:1 or 3:1 unfavorable issue for a 9:1 favorable one. That seems like a pretty good deal.

The way to do this is clear. First, substitute class-based affirmative action for race-based affirmative action. This would boost proportionately more black and Hispanic students than white ones, thereby making up some of whatever losses in black and Hispanic representation might follow from simply eliminating race-based consideration.

But it would also boost some disadvantaged white students and that would be a good thing both substantively and politically. As President Obama memorably put it in 2008: “I think that my daughters should probably be treated by any admissions officer as folks who are pretty advantaged… I think that we should take into account [in admissions] white kids who have been disadvantaged and have grown up in poverty.” In other words, a black kid who grew up in a poor neighborhood in Baltimore and a white kid who grew up in a shattered working class neighborhood in Ohio are both more deserving of a boost than upper middle class kids of whatever race.

That makes sense and would strike most working-class voters as eminently fair. It is especially fair in light of the breathtaking lack of economic diversity at elite schools. Consider that at Harvard there are as many students from the top 1 percent of the income distribution as from the bottom 60 percent and at the University of North Carolina there are 16 times more students from the highest income quintile than from the lowest. Reflecting this pattern, the black, Latino, and Native American students at Harvard are also unrepresentative: 71 percent are from college-educated homes with above median income, a group representing perhaps a fifth of these populations. The working class is conspicuous by its absence.

That’s why it’s important to think of class-based affirmative action as not just a substitute for a race-based system that would accomplish some of the same goals. It would be a step forward in and of itself by pushing back against the incredible class bias of elite education. As David Leonhardt put it in his New York Times column:

Economic diversity matters for its own sake: The dearth of lower-income students at many elite colleges is a sign that educational opportunity has been constrained for Americans of all races. To put it another way, economic factors like household wealth are not valuable merely because they are a potential proxy for race; they are also a telling measure of disadvantage in their own right.

This approach could turn affirmative action from an issue that divides the working class into one that potentially unites it. Given how Democrats have been hemorrhaging working-class voters, this change of focus seems like a highly desirable course of action.

The second thing moving to a class focus could accomplish is encouraging Democrats to concentrate on where the overwhelming majority of kids across races get their college educations, if they do get them: unselective colleges where affirmative action isn’t even an issue. Just six percent of students attend colleges where the admit rate is under 25 percent and only another ten percent attend colleges where the admit rate is between 25 and 50 percent. The majority of black, Hispanic, and white students attend colleges where the admit rate is 75 percent or more.

As education professors Richard Arum and Mitchell L. Stevens put it:

The [Supreme Court] ruling provides America with an opportunity to redirect the conversation from a relatively small number of schools and instead direct urgently needed attention to the vast middle and lower tiers of postsecondary education. Non-selective colleges and universities can be genuine engines of economic mobility, but they do so in the face of significant headwinds.

This is how to get the working class on your side: help everyone, regardless of race, to get ahead. That’s a brand the Democratic Party should lean into, instead of a quixotic quest to preserve racial preferences that voters don’t want and that are now unlawful.

From “Buttigieg’s master class in how Democrats should message the Republican Party’s implosion” by Kerry Eleveld at Daily Kos:

Democrats have been faced with a unique conundrum as the Republican Party self-immolates: How can they get headlines about all their government good works while the GOP black hole of degeneracy sucks all the air out of the political universe?

It’s a problem. Trump and his mess have been dominating the headlines for more than 8 years. One begins to wonder if frequency of being mentioned in the big media is more important for image creation than the content of what is being said about and by him. But there is an effective response, as Eleveld explains,

This is how: When Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, who is openly gay, was asked for his reaction to a weirdly homoerotic anti-LGBTQ+ adreleased by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign, Buttigieg lampooned it with a straight face, then contrasted the “strangeness” with Democrats’ efforts to improve the lives of working Americans across the country.

“I’m going to leave aside the strangeness of trying to prove your manhood by putting up a video that splices images of you in between oiled-up, shirtless bodybuilders,” Buttigieg said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” “and just get to the bigger issue that is on my mind whenever I see this stuff in the policy space, which is, again: Who are you trying to help, who are you trying to make better off, and what public policy problems to you get up in the morning thinking about how to solve?”

Buttigieg then launched into the Biden administration’s efforts traveling around the country to help communities, particularly in several underserved areas such as Appalachia, rebuild desperately needed infrastructure.

Buttigieg put a bow on the contrast between Democrats and the man-Santis video, saying, “I just don’t understand the mentality of someone who gets up in the morning thinking that he’s going to prove his worth by competing over who can make life hardest for a hard-hit community that is already so vulnerable in America.”

DeSantis could learn a thing or two from someone who actually has a natural talent for campaigning.

Bam! Eleveld adds, “But DeSantis aside, Buttigieg just gave a masterclass on how Team Biden and Democrats should consistently be messaging the wealth of depravity Republicans are dialing up on a daily basis. Donald Trump’s indictments and the GOP rush to defend him; House Republicans’ obsession with fringe hobby horse investigations; the right-wing Supreme Court’s attack on personal freedoms, bodily autonomy, and equity—pick your flavor. They are all ripe for contrast despite the fact that Biden has effectively issued a gag order about discussing Trump’s indictments.”

Here’s the video Eleveld posts with the story, showing how Buttigieg rolled out the take-down:

Elegant.

Some insights from “Oz, Fetterman, and the Future of Pennsylvania Politics: Candidate Quality Matters. A Lot” by Nate Moore and Ruy Teixeira at The Liberal Patriot:

This post is based on a new report breaking down the data from the 2022 Pennsylvania Senate race. The full report can be read here.

The most impressive Democratic over-performance of the 2022 midterms came in the perennial presidential battleground of Pennsylvania. In a state rarely decided by more than a couple points in either direction, John Fetterman’s five-point win over Mehmet Oz shattered even the most optimistic of Democratic projections. In the other marquee statewide race, Josh Shapiro beat state Sen. Doug Mastriano for the governor’s seat by an astounding 15 points. As Democrats rejoiced, Pennsylvania Republicans were left wondering what had gone wrong.

Teixeira and Moore argue that “Advertising, in particular, helped carry Fetterman to his eventual five-point victory. Pennsylvania contains six primary media markets: Erie, Harrisburg, Johnstown-Altoona, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Scranton–Wilkes-Barre. Candidates devote the vast majority of spending to these media markets, rather than waste valuable dollars on the few counties in largely out-of-state markets. This dichotomy creates a natural, if imperfect, testing ground on the efficacy of political advertising.”

Further,

….While nearly the entire state shifted left, the county-level variations convincingly correlate to media markets. The six counties that dodged most television advertising shifted leftward by 3.4 points. The remaining 61 counties shifted left by an average of 6.4 points. On average, the more voters learned of the two candidates, the more likely they were to vote for Fetterman.

Mercer County offers an interesting case study….Mercer is part of the Youngstown media market, one of Pennsylvania’s smaller media markets. Mercer’s four neighboring counties—Butler, Craw-ford, Lawrence, and Venango—are split between the Erie and Pittsburgh media markets and shifted 8.1 points toward Fetterman. Mercer, however, spared from incessant advertising, shifted to Fetterman by only four points. The five aforementioned counties are demographically quite similar—suggesting advertising produced dramatically different Senate results.

Issue advertising also plays an important electoral role. Rising violent crime, for example, should have been a home-run issue for the Pennsylvania GOP. Philadelphia and Pittsburgh both recorded historically high homicide numbers in 2022. Overall, violent crime, and particularly armed robberies, spiked compared to previous years. With progressive District Attorney Larry Krasner at the helm in Philadelphia, the conservative attack ads could have written themselves. But the Oz campaign failed to capitalize on this.

….In the closing stretch of the campaign, however, as the total number of ads increased, the share of public-safety airings cratered to a measly 27 percent. Meanwhile, the total share for pro-Democratic issues skyrocketed to 48 percent in October. Voters saw nearly two abortion, gun control, or health care ads for every one public-safety ad. The Fetterman campaign had a pure volume advantage as well. Between Labor Day and Election Day, 63,868 Senate ads aired in Pennsylvania. Of those, 37,055 were from Fetterman—a 10,242 ad advantage for the Democrat.

Moore and Teixeira note that “Fetterman’s greatest success—or, perhaps more accurately, Oz’s greatest shortcoming—came in Pennsylvania’s rural counties…..vote totals declined across the state compared to the 2020 presidential election. But across the four county groups—urban, suburban, small metro, and nonmetro—Fetterman was far closer to matching Biden’s raw vote totals than Oz was to matching Trump’s. Across the 30 counties classified as rural (nonmetro), Fetterman received 26,606 fewer votes than Biden did. Oz, on the other hand, saw a 136,005 vote decrease from Trump. The 12.5-point gap between Fetterman’s share of Biden’s rural vote and Oz’s share of Trump’s rural vote is the largest of any of the four county types.” In addition,

The average rural county moved toward Fetterman by 7.1 points relative to Biden’s performance, compared to an average of 6.1 points toward Fetterman in suburbs of large metro areas, 4.6 points in small metro areas, and just 3.7 points in urban areas. Intriguingly, rural counties, where Fetterman’s margin improvement was the largest, also have the heaviest concentrations of white working-class voters. These counties average 77 percent white working-class adults, 17 percent white college graduates, and only 6 percent non-white adults. A good example is rural and conservative Warren County, in the northwest corner of Pennsylvania, which is 79 percent white working-class voters and swung 10 points toward Fetterman.

One fascinating question is how much of Fetterman’s relative rural success was owed to persuading Republicans rather than simply mobilizing Biden supporters. Fox News/Associated Press (AP)/NORC VoteCast data offer a good place to start: 9 percent of self-identified Republicans voted for Fetterman, compared to 3 percent of self-identified Democrats supporting Oz. But VoteCast offers little information about the type of Republican who voted for Fetterman.

To approximate the number of Obama-Trump voters in each county, we use net Republican voter registration gain from 2008 to 2021 as a share of total registered voters. Republicans increased their share of registered voters in all 30 rural counties, but the net gain ranged from 2 percent to almost 14 percent. Counties with a larger increase in Republican voters are likely home to more Obama–Trump voters. Fetterman’s campaign rhetoric and style were explicitly designed to win over these once-Democratic counties that have shifted right rapidly over the past 15 years….

Moore and Teixeira note that “The Fetterman campaign did better in counties with larger increases in GOP voter registration—and by extension, counties with many Obama–Trump voters.” They cite “convincing evidence that Pennsylvania Democrats’ rural over-performance in 2022 is at least in part owed to Obama–Trump voters voting blue once again. Many national Democrats have written off these voters, but the 2022 Senate race proves a chunk of rural white working-class voters will indeed support a Democratic with the right aesthetic and messaging.”

Regarding “Fetterman’s Minority Struggles,” the authors write:

The Oz-Fetterman story is incomplete without a look at minority voting patterns. According to VoteCast data, in 2020, Biden carried Pennsylvania’s black voters 94 percent to 5 percent (an 89-point advantage), but Fetterman won black voters by just 87 percent to 10 percent (a 77-point advantage) in 2022—a 12-point swing against Democrats. Among Hispanic voters, Biden beat Trump 65 percent to 35 percent (a 30-point advantage), while Fetterman carried the group just 55 percent to 41 percent (a 14-point advantage)—a dramatic 16-point swing toward Republicans. As a whole, non-white voters shifted 14 points to the right between 2020 and 2022, driven by an enormous 21-point swing toward the GOP among non-white working-class (noncollege) voters. Fetterman’s victory derived primarily from a strong performance among white voters.

Turnout presented problems for Fetterman as well. Low minority turnout, especially black turnout, has long been a hurdle for Democratic candidates in midterm years. In the post-Obama era, few candidates have energized the core Democratic base of black voters anywhere close to 2008 or 2012 levels. But even accounting for expected differential turnout, Pennsylvania’s minority turnout was especially low in 2022—a warning sign for Democratic candidates in future cycles.

Turnout was even poorer in Philadelphia’s majority-Latino wards. Latinos, who comprise 16 percent of the city as a whole, are primarily concentrated in working-class northeastern neighborhoods. In the four wards with the largest share of Hispanic voters, turnout averaged an abysmal 49.4 percent of 2020 totals. A turnout drop of more than 50 percent is shocking, especially as statewide turnout remained so high and hundreds of millions of dollars poured into the Philadelphia media market. If Pennsylvania Democrats continue to ignore Latinos’ concerns, they risk a repeat of 2022’s rightward swing in 2024.

“Biden’s disapproval rating among 2022 midterm voters was 60 percent. Just 14 percent of voters strongly approved of his job performance, while 45 percent strongly disapproved,” Moore and Teixeira note. “But Fetterman was able to overcome this imbalance with an exceedingly strong performance among the “meh” voters—those who somewhat approve or disapprove. Fetterman carried the “somewhat approve” crowd by a whopping 92-point margin. More impressively, he won those who “somewhat disapprove” by 28 points—61 percent to Oz’s 33 percent. Soft disapproval of Biden was not a particularly salient factor in Senate vote choice. Plenty of Pennsylvanians disliked Biden but still voted blue up and down the ballot in 2022.”

In tbeir conclusion, Teixeira and Moore write, “Cynicism abounds amid record polarization, but the 2022 midterms in Pennsylvania reinforced that candidate quality matters. The GOP’s nomination of Oz and Mastriano—when matched against a pair of surprisingly strong Democrats in Fetterman and Shapiro—proved electorally disastrous.”

In his article, “Democrats, Wake the Hell Up!,” at The New Republic’s ‘Soapbox,’ Editor Michael Tomasky calls President Biden “the most accomplished” President” since LBJ and the most “pro-labor President since Harry Truman,” who has “amassed an historic record in his first term,” and writes further:

“…Biden has been a terrific president. The big legislation. The way he played Kevin McCarthy on the debt deal. The global leadership against Putin. The plain human decency restored to the White House after four years of self-obsessed thuggery. Oh—the 13 million jobs created since he took office, which is more jobs in 28 months than created under any other president, in all of our history, in a full four-year term.

I bet you didn’t know that last fact. The president and his administration mention it, as in this press statement. But do they crow about it? Do congressional Democrats crow about it? What percentage of the American electorate do we think knows this fact—2, 3? And let me ask you this. If a Republican president had accomplished that, what percentage of voters would know it? A hell of a lot more, because congressional Republicans and the propagandists on Fox and elsewhere would be saying it every day, several times a day.

Democrats are walking around in some state of somnolent indifference about Joe Biden. They need to snap out of it. From senators and House members on down to state and county committee members, they have a huge fight on their hands. Go look at the Biden-Trump polls. They’re neck and neck, or margin of error at best. And the media, of course, which just can’t shake the #demsindisarray default narrative, no matter how huge a hot mess the congressional GOP is, invariably touts the outliers that show Trump ahead. But the point is, a Biden-Trump race, or a Biden-anyone race, will be down to the wire.

Tomasky goes on the blister Biden’s challengers and potential challengers for the Democratic presidential nomination, and observes “Why does the media promote these campaigns? Partly because of the #demsindisarray reflex. But the press has that reflex because Democrats let things happen that way. There’s no central message that everyone repeats. And there’s far less touting of the administration’s accomplishments than there ought to be.”

If Democratic campaigns and their consultants aren’t gearing up a social media tsunami touting Biden’s remarkable accomplishments and showing how Republican candidates are Trump’s shameless enablers in a war against democracy itself, then they are committing political malpractice.

Moving to his conclusion, Tomasky adds, “Joe Biden is going to be the nominee (barring of course some major health issue in the next few months). He’s the most accomplished president since Lyndon Johnson, and without the immoral war….And the next president of the United States is either him or someone who’s going to dismantle democracy and usher in authoritarianism and fascism, either immediately (Trump) or slowly (most of the others)….he is what stands between us and fascism, and he’s gotten far more done than anyone would have dared imagine. Democrats, get it together.”

From “To Win, House Democrats Need More Matt Cartwrights. Wait, Who? Our new research shows that the Scranton–Wilkes Barre Democrat has the formula that can attract more working-class voters” by Dustin Guastella and Isaac Rabbani at The New Republic’s ‘The Soapbox’:

Cartwright represents Pennsylvania’s 8th (formerly 17th) district, which encompasses the deindustrialized hubs of Scranton and Wilkes-Barre. The district swung for Trump by 10 points in 2016 and four points in 2020. Its median income is about $63,000, below the national median, and only 28 percent of Cartwright’s constituents hold a bachelor’s degree, with a significant share still working in manufacturing.

Beltway conventional wisdom would have us believe that a candidate like Cartwright couldn’t win unless he sounded as much like a Republican as possible. But Cartwright doesn’t sound like a Republican at all. He ran on fighting inflation by investing in local manufacturing and expanding Medicare. He backed ambitious infrastructure proposals, far-reaching spending on education, reforms to reduce drug prices, and public health–based solutions to the opioid crisis. Railing against corporate greed and price gouging has been central to his campaign strategy. And he’s co-sponsored legislation to expand Social Security.

So what’s the secret to Cartwright’s success, and can his winning formula be deployed elsewhere? A new study that we helped author from the Center for Working Class Politics sought to answer these questions. What we found was that, for Democrats to have any hope of winning a lasting majority, they need more Cartwrights.

Guastella and Rabbani, both researchers for the Center for Working-Class Politics, explain the experiment they conducted “To suss out what messages and policy platforms are most successful with working-class voters,” and share some of their conclusions:

First, regardless of their partisan allegiance, working-class voters respond positively to candidates who focus on jobs, including those who run on an expansive policy to provide a federal jobs guarantee. Jobs-focused candidates were particularly effective when they combined this policy platform with anti-elite, populist messaging that calls out the wealthy for rigging the system against working Americans. This combative, economic-populist messaging was particularly effective among key groups that Democrats struggle with most: manual workers, rural voters, and low-engagement voters.

Second, our survey also found that working-class voters respond most favorably to candidates from similar class backgrounds, and least favorably to candidates who come from an elite educational or economic background. In other words, working-class voters want working-class candidates.

Finally, the right-wing messages that we tested did not undermine the appeal of jobs-focused campaigns, economic-populist language, or non-elite, working-class candidates. In fact, our study suggests that running on a progressive jobs policy actually grows more effective in the face of certain opposition messaging. (Voters appear to see through some Republican attempts to pivot from their issues.)

The authors note that “In the 2022 midterms, only 18 percent of swing-seat Dems even mentioned jobs in their TV ads, and Cartwright was among them. His campaign put jobs front and center, emphasizing the need to invest in domestic manufacturing and transport infrastructure. He pitted workers against corporate greed—successfully casting his opponent in the latter role—and touted his record trying to expand Social Security.” Further,

The Democrats need more Matt Cartwrights, for two main reasons. First, Democrats cannot win a Senate majority without consistently winning in states where non–college educated workers are the overwhelming majority. In 2024, for example, Democrats will be defending vulnerable incumbents in West Virginia, Ohio, and Nevada (among others), where these workers make up 76, 69, and 72 percent of adults. Compare those numbers to the national average of 54 percent, and the urgency of reaching non-college workers is suddenly thrown into stark relief.

Second, while it’s true that the majority of Americans live in urban or suburban congressional districts, where levels of liberalism, education, and income are higher, the majority of districts themselves are not so. Only 43 percent of congressional districts have a median household income above the national median. And in 90 percent of districts, a majority of adults do not have a bachelor’s degree; among competitivecongressional districts, that number rises to 92 percent. A strategy that prioritizes high-income and highly educated districts will inevitably make Democrats a minoritarian party.

The case for more Cartwrights, then, is just this: His unique combination of populist messaging and progressive economic policy aimed at working people can win because in electoral terms, much of America resembles his district. Cartwright’s success comes down to his ability to convince blue-collar Democrats to stay in the tent. Democrats need to make a choice going forward: Focus on working-class voters and work toward building a solid majority, or continue to squeak by—and risk government by an ever more dangerous opposition.

We can’t clone Matt Cartwright. But Democratic candidate recruitment teams should take note of the findings Guastella and Rabbani present and try to find and develop candidates with similar backgrounds and skill sets.

At The Daily Beast Ursula Perano reports that “Abortion may have bailed Democrats out in the 2022 midterms to an extent. But it may also be the big issue in 2024 if Democrats have their way.” Further,

“Even though abortion was a potent political issue in the midterm elections, Republicans haven’t shied away from offering legislation to tighten access to abortion. There’s a GOP effort to restrict abortion pillsat the national level. And a bill to further limit “taxpayer-funded abortions.” And the national abortion ban that plenty of House Republicans continue to support.”

Democrats say the issue is slated to be a centerpiece of their campaign strategy. They think that, after a year of abortion restrictions going into effect—and a term of House Republicans attempting to legislate on the issue—voters in battleground districts might be ready to sway in Democrats’ favor.

When The Daily Beast interviewed the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-WA), she was definitive that abortion would be a main driver for Democrats.

“Republican extremism on abortion is going to lose them the House majority in 2024,” she said last week.

“And remember, we we only need five more seats to take back the majority,” DelBene said. “So critical issues like this that are important across the country are going to be critical in many, many races.”

After House Republicans took back the majority in 2022 by only a fraction of the margin predicted by leadership and pollsters, politicos suspected outrage over abortion restrictions was a driving factor. House Democrats say that’s still salient—and that even in states where abortion has remained relatively safe, national attempts to restrict reproductive rights can be an issue.

Issues come and go, explode, then fade. But, what gives abortion rights such an impressive shelf-life is the fact that the Republicans keep fueling the conflict in state politics.

As Perano notes, “For many states over the past year, strict abortion bans have gone into place, sometimes limiting the procedure to as little as six weeks or banning it altogether….Rep. Lois Frankel (D-FL) said abortion restrictions in Florida have proven to be a potent issue with residents, and the potential for Republicans to add more restrictions, especially in states like hers, hits hard. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) signed a six-week ban in April that is working its way through the state Supreme Court.”

Abortion rights are still at center stage even in swing states, as Zach Montelaro explains at Politico:

Gov. Glenn Youngkin aims for unified Republican control in a state that hasn’t gone for a GOP presidential candidate since George W. Bush, and Democrats hope to retake enough seats to defend abortion rights in the state.

Both parties are expected to dominate the airwaves over the next five months, with every single legislative seat across the two chambers up for grabs in November. Virginia is one of two states with a split legislature — Democrats have a slim majority in the state Senate while Republicans have a narrow one in the state House — and both parties believe they have a viable path to controlling either chamber….Democrats are hoping to claw back power after surprise Republican wins in 2021, testing the saliency of abortion as a winning message ahead of 2024.

Perano notes, “Democrats signaled that they intend to focus heavily on the issue in the general election. “The DLCC gave Republicans a reality check by running on protecting abortion access and creating a winning blueprint for state Democrats,” a recent strategy memo from the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee reads.”

Most Republican candidates are stuck with appeasing the anti-abortion extremism of their evangelical base in the primaries. In general elections, they hope to distract voters with other culture war controversies. The Dobbs decision makes that a tough sell.

In “Pumping the Brakes Post-Milligan,” Kyle Kondix makes the case  at Sabato’s Crystal Ball that “The Supreme Court’s Allen v. Milligan decision should give Democrats at least a little help in their quest to re-take the House majority, but much remains uncertain” and writes in his conclusion:

Since the Supreme Court’s aforementioned Wesberry v. Sanders decision, which applied the concept of “one person, one vote” to congressional redistricting, there have been 30, two-year congressional election cycles (every even-numbered year from 1964 through 2022). Based on research I did for my history of recent House elections, 2021’s The Long Red Thread, at least one congressional district (and often more) changed from the previous cycle in 23 of those 30 election cycles. Most of these changes (though not all) were forced by courts. The 2024 cycle will make it 24 of 31 cycles, with potentially several states changing their maps in response to court orders. We bring this up to say that despite the now-familiar rhythm of all the states with at least two districts redrawing to reflect the census at the start of every decade, it’s common for at least some districts to change more often than that.

Beyond the states mentioned above, at least some of which will have new maps next year, Ohio is also likely to have a new map that quite possibly will be better for Republicans than the current one, which the Ohio Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional but which was eventually used anyway in 2022 (just like in North Carolina, the Ohio Supreme Court has since changed in such a way to make it more amenable to GOP redistricting prerogatives going forward). Democrats in New York are trying to force a new map, in part because of changes to that state’s highest court that may make that court more amenable to Democratic redistricting arguments than the previous court, which undid a Democratic gerrymander. The particulars in both states require longer-winded explanations that we’ll save for another time.

And aside from the changes forced by courts, one also wonders if we will eventually see a redistricting technique that at one time was common but really has not been in recent decades: a state legislature enacting an elective, mid-decade remap without prompting by the courts.

The most famous modern example of this is when Texas Republicans redrew their state’s congressional map following the 2002 election. That gerrymander, which is most closely associated with former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R), came after Republicans took full control of Texas state government in 2002. They replaced a court-drawn map that reflected a previous Democratic gerrymander and imposed their own partisan gerrymander, turning a 17-15 deficit in what had become a very Republican state into a 21-11 advantage. Georgia Republicans did something similar later in the decade, though to much less effect; Colorado Republicans tried to but were blocked by state courts — some states do not allow mid-decade redistricting, but others do (there is no federal prohibition on mid-decade redistricting). North Carolina’s looming redraw is somewhat similar to those in Texas and Georgia from the 2000s: The voters changed the political circumstances — Republicans taking control of Texas and Georgia state government in 2002 and 2004, respectively, and Republicans flipping the North Carolina Supreme Court in 2022 — paving the way for the partisan gerrymanders that did (or will) follow.

The redistricting stakes are extremely high at a time when U.S. House majorities are so narrow.Democrats won just a 222-213 majority in 2020, and Republicans won the same 222-213 edge last year. It’s possible that the net impact of mid-decade redistricting — including some of the changes we’ve laid out above — could be decisive in who wins the majority next year. It may also prompt other states to try to go back to the redistricting well without prompting by courts — and if they determine they can based on state law — if they believe that new maps could make a difference in determining majorities.