Some Lessons and Questions After the Kansas Abortion Referendum

From “Kansas Voters Just Rewrote the Script for the Midterm Elections” by Daniel Strauss at The New Republic:

Political junkies were settling in for one of those super-long nights of see-sawing election results in Kansas. The main event was not the state’s tense gubernatorial race or the prospect of anti-immigration hardliner Kris Kobach making yet another play for electoral office. Rather, it was a ballot referendum. Kansans were the first group to vote on whether to keep or overturn abortion rights in the state since the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade.

The common refrain was that the outcome would be razor thin and come in the latest minutes of Tuesday night or the earliest hours of Wednesday morning. But at 9:26 p.m., Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report—the most authoritative voice on early election results in America, whose Twitter feed is monitored by many thousands on nights like this—announced he  had “seen enough,” his signature catchphrase for an election outcome. In record-level turnout for a primary that reached presidential-election levels, Kansans overwhelmingly voted down the effort to strip the state constitution of abortion rights, which would have cleared the way for the GOP-controlled state legislature to pass strict anti-choice legislation. It was, Wasserman tweeted, a “huge victory for the pro-choice side.”

What Kansas voters also just did was to dramatically reshape the midterm elections this November. It’s hard to interpret results this overpowering in this red a state any other way.

Strauss notes that Kansas state senator Cindy Holscher “described the Dobbs ruling as a “lighting rod” moment for voters in the state and the region.” Strauss adds that “The seriousness and immediacy of the Dobbs decision has been felt across the country. Over a dozen Republican-leaning states have taken steps to double down on abortion restrictions. In Kansas, the state has a Democratic governor and abortion is legal past 20 weeks of pregnancy, and it’s a state people have been traveling to from Oklahoma and other nearby states for abortion services as those states have passed restrictive laws.” Also,

….In Johnson County, Kansas at 10:48 p.m. ET, the tally was about 72 percent voting no on the referendum and 28 percent voting yes. Johnson County is the most populous one in the state. By comparison, Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in Johnson County with about 53 percent of the vote to Trump’s 44 percent. That the referendum ran so much more strongly than Biden is a sign that there may well be a hidden army of voters out there who are going to make reproductive rights the issue of these midterms. As former Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill said on MSNBC Tuesday night: “This should be a big flashing signal to every Democratic candidate out there.”

“This is a straight up and down vote on reproductive health,” said Kathleen Sebelius, a former Kansas governor and former secretary of Health and Human Services during the Obama administration. “It is a pretty clean test on how strong voters feel about reproductive health and constitutional protections.”

On the national level, Sebelius said, “I think what it should do across the country is just make people more comfortable talking about this issue as a galvanizing issue in the way we have, as Democrats, talked about healthcare, talked about any number of things. It’s a big difference between Republicans and Democrats. We have had record turnouts.”

As Strauss concludes, “this result was an earthquake that has rewritten, for now, the conventional wisdom about what may happen this November.” MSNBC Political commentator Jonathan Alter termed it a “choice-quake.” And it is one that feminists have been waiting for for decades.

Looking way, way ahead, if Dems are able to leverage this choice-quake sentiment to add a couple of senators to their majority, then expanding the size of the Supreme Court to achieve some balance becomes a real possibility.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

The Latest Messaging Brainstorm from Progressive Democrats.

Probably not gonna work either. I explain at The Liberal Patriot:

“There is a new entrant in the Democratic messaging sweepstakes: “inclusive populism”. The idea here is that Democrats may indeed be bleeding working class voters—points for at least recognizing the problem!—but the solution does not lie in any way with moving to the center on culturally-inflected issues like crime, immigration, race, gender and schooling. That would apparently not be “inclusive”.

Instead, as recounted in Blake Hounshell’s Times article on their initial gathering, the inclusive populists argue for turning it up to 11 on economic populism since “[Democrats] don’t fight hard enough for working-class people, and…aren’t tough enough on big, greedy corporations.” As Hounshell notes:

“The unmistakable tone of the event was a rebuke of the Democrats who have failed to squeeze more progressive policy wins out of their congressional majority over the last 18 months — and essentially, in the left’s telling, let their most conservative member, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, dictate the terms of their governing agenda.”

There are two big problems with this approach.”

Read the whole thing at The Liberal Patriot!

Chris Cillizza shares “Two reasons why all is not lost for Democrats in the midterms” at CNN Politics. Cillizza writes that “as of late, there are a few small signs that the coming election might not be a total disaster for Democrats.” Further,

“The first piece of good news comes via the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, which released its updated Partisan Voting Index earlier this week.

In an analysis of the PVI results, the Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman concludes that there has been a somewhat steep decline in the number of competitive seats across the country following the decennial redistricting process that has taken place over the past 18 months or so….Why is the decline in highly competitive seats a good thing for Democrats? Simple. While Republicans only need a net gain of four seats to take control of the House, if they want to achieve a large, governing majority in 2023, they will need to beat a lot of Democratic incumbents who sit in seats that Biden won by a considerable amount….it’s harder to beat a Democratic incumbent in a seat Biden won by 10 points in 2020 than one in a district Biden carried by 1 point. And to pick up 30+ seats, Republicans are going to have to beat a whole lot of Democratic incumbents in districts that clearly lean to their party — at least at the presidential level.

….The second piece of relative good news for Democrats comes in the generic ballot test. This is a poll question that seeks to gauge support for a generic House Democratic candidate against a generic House Republican candidate and is broadly predictive of which way the national winds are blowing. (The question usually goes something like: “If the election were held today, would you vote for the Democratic candidate or Republican candidate for House?”)….A New York Times/Siena College poll out this week showed that among registered voters nationally, 41% said they would back the Democratic candidate, while 40% chose the Republican one. (Among voters likely to cast a ballot this fall, 44% opted for the Republican candidate while 43% chose the Democrat.)….It’s also worth noting that the generic ballot question has historically favored Democrats by a few points, so a virtual tie between the parties is rightly read as an edge for the Republicans.”

Add to all that the slight improvements in gas prices and employment, the growing reaction to the gutting of Roe v. Wade, the fallout from the January 6th hearings, growing anger about Republicans stonewalling gun safety legislation, along with some exceptionally-lame GOP senate and gubernatorial candidates, and it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that it could indeed be worse.

Cillizza cautions, however, “None of this data changes the underlying reality of this election: Biden is deeply unpopular and, in past midterm elections, when the president is unpopular, his party in the House tends to sustain heavy damage….But for Democrats, who have spent the last seven months being barraged by a seemingly endless stream of bad news, these twin developments suggest that the worst-case scenario may, in fact, not come to pass.”

From “Something Bubbling in the Heartland” by Mike Lux at Daily Kos:

“A messaging strategy that combines economic populism with a focus on kitchen table economic solutions, and an organizing strategy that builds local communities, can help bring back these voters — both swing and base voters who have been less inclined to go to the polls  lately.

All of that, plus the simple idea of making sure Democrats pay enough attention to these kinds of voters and counties, is the path to winning back working-class voters who live outside of big cities.

The even better news is that Democrats are beginning to use this kind of approach in a lot of places in the region right now, and it seems like it has the potential to pay off. Look at what is going on in the states:

• In the local elections held in Wisconsin in April, despite a widely predicted “red wave” in a low turnout election, which traditionally favors Republicans, Democrats won 53% of the 276 contested local elections on the ballot, holding their own in the purple areas in the state. Meanwhile, Wisconsin Governor Evers is leading both Republican candidates fighting it out in the primary, one of them by four and the other by seven percentage points. Ron Johnson — who has a trail of controversies and damaging quotes a mile-long — trails three of the four Democrats running in the primary for the Senate seat.
• In Pennsylvania, Republicans are fleeing their far-right extremist gubernatorial nominee as fast as they can, while Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman is running a great populist campaign, and currently sports a 9-point lead in the public polling.
• In Ohio, where Republicans presided over what the Columbus Dispatch called the biggest scandal in the country, the Republican governor is sitting at only 45% in the polls in spite of having universal name ID after a 46-year political career in the state. Meanwhile, the latest public poll has Tim Ryan leading by 44-41 for the open Senate seat, and Democrats had a great year in mayoral races there last year.
• In Iowa, Democratic primary voters surprised the DC Democratic establishment by rejecting former Congresswoman Abby Finkenauer, who had much higher name recognition and a big fundraising start, and picking former Navy Admiral Mike Franken 55-40. Franken’s background and strong presence on the stump is making a big impression on Iowa voters. Given that only 27% of voters wanted 88-year-old Chuck Grassley to run again in an earlier poll, this could be a sleeper race.
• In Missouri, Republicans look likely to nominate Eric Greitens, the former governor forced to resign by the Republican legislature over multiple scandals. Democratic candidate Lucas Kunce, a 13-year Marine veteran who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan and has a powerfully populist message, is leading in the Democratic primary. There is polling showing him essentially tied with Greitens right now. In the meantime, an added twist to the race is that a heavyweight Republican lawyer who was a clerk for Clarence Thomas, is entering the race as an Independent, saying he can’t stand the idea of Greitens becoming a senator. So Republicans will be splitting their votes.
• In Nebraska, there was a special election a couple of weeks back that was a huge surprise in historically Republican CD 1. In a special election ignored by the DCCC and most Democratically aligned groups, where the Republican heavily outspent the Democratic candidate, Democratic candidate Patty Pansing Brooks lost only 53-47. While this district still leans Republican, it actually got four percentage points more Democratic due to redistricting, and the district includes Lincoln, where the University of Nebraska is located and where Brooks is very strong. A big turnout of young people in the district could put Brooks in the winner’s seat.”

Lux adds, “The other point I want to make about the region as a whole is that Democrats are leaning into the Factory Towns strategy. John Fetterman, Tim Ryan, Nan Whaley, Mike Franken, and Lucas Kunce are all from medium-sized factory towns, and they are all running strong economically populist campaigns against far rightwing candidates who have embraced Trump and all his bullshit.

“The working-class industrial heartland — the Midwest plus Pennsylvania — has historically been the biggest battleground region in the country,” Lux concludes. “It moved strongly toward Reagan in the 1980s, toward Clinton in the 1990s, to Obama in 2008 and 2012, and then veered toward Trump in 2016. There is something bubbling out there this year that is going to surprise a lot of people.”

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his facebook page:

To Regain the Support of “Culturally Traditional but Not Extremist” Working Class Voters Democrats Need to Understand the Compelling Political Narrative That Leads Them to Vote for the GOP.
Andy Levison is just right about this. I highly recommend you read his excellent memo.

Levison summarizes his argument as follows:

1. As the 2022 elections approach, a critical question for Democratic strategists is why a significant group of working class voters choose to support Republican extremists even though they themselves are more accurately described as “cultural traditionalists” rather than extremists. In opinion surveys and focus groups this group of white (and now also increasingly Latino) working class voters make clear that they do not actually believe MAGA/Q-Anon/Tucker Carlson conspiracy theories or view all Democrats as literal “enemies” but they nonetheless vote for extremist candidates who assert these views on election day.

2. A major reason for this is that working class voters do not make their political choices primarily based on examining specific issues and policies. They evaluate candidates based on their broader outlook and philosophy – a perspective that the candidates frequently present as a basic “story” or “narrative” about America.

3. The basic extremist narrative is actually undergirded by three profoundly important subsidiary narratives that are nested within the larger narrative and which long predate the modern MAGA ideology. These three linked sub-narratives are not inherently extremist. They express a genuine and understandable frustration and sense of abandonment by the Democratic Party.

4. Democratic candidates can identify with these narratives and seek ways to address the legitimate concerns that are a deeply felt part of the working class experience in modern America without endorsing the extremist narrative that has incorporated and exploited them with such marked success.

Read it all here.

From “The End of Roe v. Wade Could Help Democrats in These Midterm Races: Instead of fighting each other over abortion, Democrats can fight these Republicans.” by Bill Scher at The Washington Monthly:

‘Legitimate arguments can be made about whether Democrats should take every conceivable action—without regard to existing law and Senate rules—to protect abortion rights now or whether party members should only work within the system because further erosion of norms would make all rights, reproductive and beyond, at the mercy of shifting political winds.

But why should Democrats get mired in an intraparty debate about tactics when they can unite against Republicans banning abortion?

Republicans are turning the clock back to the early 20th century—and in some cases, where dormant laws are being dusted off, the 19th—in about half of the states. The political scientists Jake Grumbach and Christopher Warshaw crunched survey data from multiple sources for The Washington Post and determined that “a majority of the public in about 40 states supports legal abortion rights.” In other words, several states present opportunities for Democrats to restore reproductive freedoms.”

Scher spotlights some of the key races he believes Dems can win by focusing on Republicans banning abortion, including the governorships of Florida, Georgia and Texas and maybe Arizona, Iowa, Ohio, South Carolina, and South Dakota. He also believes Dems can win the races for Attorney General in Florida, Georgia, Ohio and Texas, along with majority control of the state legislatures of Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Read the article for his detailed analysis of these races.

Scher concludes:

“To be clear, none of the above races are easy wins for Democrats. And we can’t know if the abortion issue on its own will be enough to make them more competitive. But that uncertainty only makes it more imperative for Democrats to employ strategies that maximize unity and appeal to swing voters. Party infighting over parliamentary procedures and norms fuels “Democrats in disarray” punch lines that accomplish the opposite.

To motivate the pro-choice majority—which extends well beyond progressive base voters in deep blue states—to prioritize abortion, Democrats need a laser focus on states where abortion is banned or severely restricted.

If such a strategy is successful, Democrats will broaden their geographic support. That would help secure abortion rights in more states and improve the odds of Democrats retaining U.S. Senate control. Holding the Senate keeps Democrats’ judicial confirmation power. If they can keep it long enough, they will be in a position to replace the eldest Supreme Court justices: Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas.”

No doubt there are good arguments for targeting  U.S. Senate and House races Dems can win using the same attack strategy. What is certain is that the circular firing squad strategy is the one Republicans hope Dems will adopt.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

Democrats’ emerging problems with Hispanic working class voters are, in my opinion, both poorly understood and vastly underestimated in Democratic circles. That’s the subject of my latest at The Liberal Patriot:

“Hispanic working class (noncollege) voters are emerging as an Achilles heel for the Democrats. Here are some facts about Hispanic working class voters that help bring this challenge for Democrats into focus.

1. In the 2020 election, Hispanic voters moved sharply away from the Democrats. Both Catalist and States of Change (forthcoming) data agree that it was around a 16 point pro-GOP margin shift (two party vote). States of Change data indicate this shift was heavily driven by Hispanic working class voters, whose support for the Democrats declined by 18 points. This pattern could be seen all over the country, not just in states like Florida (working class Hispanic support down 18 margin points) where they fell short but also in states they narrowly won (Arizona down 22 points; Nevada down 15 points)….

10. Along these lines, consider these data from Catalist. Between the 2012 and 2020 elections—which Democrats won by similar popular vote margins—Democrats’ advantage among nonwhite working class voters was trimmed by 18 margin points. Over the same period, Democrats’ performance among white college-educated voters improved by 16 margin points. For a party that has already sustained drastic losses among white working class voters and has been clinging to its dominance of nonwhite working class voters as proof that it is still a working class party, these are very uncomfortable facts.

But facts they are. Here’s another fact: Hispanic working class voters are overwhelmingly upwardly mobile, patriotic, culturally moderate to conservative citizens with practical and down to earth concerns focused on jobs, the economy, health care, effective schools and public safety. Democrats will either learn to hit that target or they will continue to lose ground with this vital group of voters—and in the process invalidate their increasingly tenuous claim to represent the American working class.”

Read the whole thing at The Liberal Patriot. And subscribe!

From “Why Republicans Are Favored To Win The House, But Not The Senate” by Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight:

Republicans are substantial favorites to take over the U.S. House of Representatives following this November’s midterm elections, but the U.S. Senate is much more competitive, according to FiveThirtyEight’s 2022 midterm election forecast, which launched today….

Democratic hopes of keeping the Senate are much more viable, however. Part of this, as I mentioned, is because they appear to have stronger candidates in a handful of key races. Pennsylvania, for instance — which is an open seat after the retirement of Republican Sen. Pat Toomey — is ordinarily the sort of seat that you’d expect Republicans to win since Pennsylvania is a purple state in a Republican year. However, the Democratic candidate, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, is ahead of Republican Mehmet Oz, the doctor and TV personality, in every poll conducted so far. The model, though, is trained to be a bit skeptical given the fundamentals of the race, so it hedges against those polls and, at this point, has determined that Pennsylvania is best thought of as a toss-up. Still, that means Democrats have roughly a 50-50 chance of gaining a GOP-held Senate seat, offsetting potential losses elsewhere.

Indeed, our forecast sees the overall Senate landscape to be about as competitive as it gets. The Deluxe forecast literally has Senate control as a 50-50 tossup. The Classic and Lite forecasts show Democrats as very slight favorites to keep the Senate, meanwhile, with a 59 and a 62 percent chance, respectively.

Part of this is because Senate terms last for six years, and so most of these seats were last contested in 2016,³ a mediocre year for Democrats in which they lost the popular vote for the House and also lost Senate races in swing states such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona. Of the 35 Senate seats up for grabs in November, 21 are currently held by Republicans. True, most of these are not competitive, but in addition to their chances to gain a GOP-held seat in Pennsylvania, Democrats also have credible chances in Wisconsin and North Carolina (and outside chances in Ohio and Florida, although those are a stretch given how GOP-leaning both states have become).

Republicans don’t have any surefire pickups, meanwhile. Our model regards their best chances as being in Georgia, but that race is rated as a toss-up. And the races in Arizona and New Hampshire merely lean toward the Democratic incumbent, meaning they are still highly plausible GOP pickup opportunities.

Still, the picture isn’t as bad as you might expect for Democrats. If the political environment really deteriorates for them, they’ll be in trouble, lose most of the competitive races and even blue states like Colorado could come into play. But if things are merely pretty bad for Democrats instead of catastrophic, the outcome of the Senate will remain uncertain enough that stronger candidates could make the difference for them.

The pundit prognosis for the House, Governorships and state legislatures is still pretty bad for Democrats. But recent Supreme Court decisions on abortion, guns and school prayer underscore the importance of having a Democratic majority in the senate to prevent the high court from getting even worse. Democratic strategists face some tough choices about where to allocate resources in this cycle. But investing more in holding the Senate majority looks like a wiser option.

From “Does the Roe Ruling Have a Silver Lining for Democrats” by Chris Cillizza at CNN Politics:

“Seventy-two hours removed from the landmark overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court, there are signs that the judgment may have woken up the long-dormant Democratic base in advance of this year’s midterm elections.

A new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll had two striking findings:

1) More than 3 in 4 Democrats (78%) said the court’s decision made it more likely that they would vote in the fall. A slim majority of Republicans (54%) said the same.

2) Democrats now lead on the generic ballot question (“If the election were today, would you vote for the Democrat or the Republican for House”) 48% to 41% over Republicans, a remarkable 10-point swing since an NPR poll in April.