A few tips from, “Is This When Democrats Finally Learn How to Message? Republicans have been running circles around Democrats for decades. But finally the right has handed them a potent weapon. Will they recognize it and use it?” by Michael Sokolove at The New Republic:

“Sell the brownie, not the recipe,” is the top-line advice that [progressive candidate strategist Anat] Shenker-Osorio gives to her clients. She has consulted for various candidates and organizations, both overseas and in the United States, including the Senate Democratic Caucus. She tries to coax progressives out of their long-windedness—their instinct to aim messages at the head rather than the heart—and their tragic inability to get to the point.

“I want them to say fewer things and say them more often,” she said. “But Democrats get bored with that. They’re not good at it. I say this with so much sadness, but Elizabeth Warren spent an entire campaign selling the recipe rather than the brownie. I tell people: Don’t take your policy out in public. It’s not seemly. Your policy is not your message. The message is the outcome of your policy. For example, ‘We’re going to give you family leave so you’re going to be there the first time your baby smiles. We’ll raise the minimum wage so you can put food on your table, and you’ll be home to eat dinner with your family.’”

Drawing a contrast between the messaging style of the two major parties, Sokolove notes,

….The two major parties “do not operate as simple mirror images,” the political scientists Matt Grossman and David Hopkins observe in their 2016 book, Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats. They write that even as Democrats have moved to the left on certain social issues, the party’s governing style can be described as “technocratic incrementalism over one guided by a comprehensive value system.” Democratic voters largely expect their elected officials to compromise—both among themselves, and, where possible, with the opposing party.

Is there an important distinction to be made between messaging by Democratic candidates on the one hand and progressive groups on the other?

….Steven Greene is a professor of political science at North Carolina State University with an expertise in public opinion and elections. When I told him the questions I was exploring, he responded by highlighting the divisions in the Dem tribe: “Are Democrats horrible at messaging? No. Liberal advocacy groups, who are not trying to win elections, are horrible at it. They’re the ones talking about ‘chest feeding,’ the ones arguing for Lia Thomas and other trans athletes to compete against women.” Establishment Democrats, he continued, “did not argue for defunding the police or use that phrase. But the left and its organized groups do. These are deeply unpopular opinions.” The party, he said, is currently engaged in “generational warfare. They’re eating themselves from the inside.”

Regarding the allegation that people who vote for Republicans do so against their self-interest,

There’s a raft of political science research that voters, and maybe especially Republican voters, are led by emotion as much as rationality. They go with the team they feel is pulling for them. Is it really voting against their self-interest when they cast ballots to put people in office who speak their language and make them feel better?….“When it’s said that people are voting against their self-interest, it’s a mistake to define self-interest in purely economic terms,” said Laurel Elder, a political science professor at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York, and the co-author, with Steven Greene, of The Politics of Parenthood. “They vote on emotion, on what gives meaning to their lives.”

Sokolove also taps the insights of a top Republican wordsmith, and writes:

Freedom is one of the big words that Republicans have owned. “Democrats don’t want to talk about religion, faith, and freedom,” [Republican strategist Frank] Luntz told me. “That comes off the Republican tongue like butter. Democrats choke on it.”….Freedom, though, is the winning word for Democrats. It is the beacon that brought immigrants pouring into this country. In its fullest form, it is what the descendants of enslaved Africans have fought for over the whole of the nation’s 246-year history. It’s the through line for the nation’s proudest accomplishments and purest ambitions.

Freedom for women to have control over their own choices and bodies. Freedom to vote. Freedom to love who you want. Freedom to read what you want. Freedom to earn a living wage. Freedom to send your children off to school without fear they’ll be riddled with bullets from an AR-15. Freedom for your kids and grandkids to dwell on a livable planet.

As Sokolove concludes, “Sell the brownie, not the recipe—and see how that works.”

Some observations from Ronald Brownstein’s “Can Democrats break the GOP stranglehold on the states?” at CNN Politics:

Now, a new analysis has found that over the next decade, Democrats will face an uphill challenge to dislodge the GOP state house advantage that has allowed conservatives to advance this agenda so broadly and so quickly. In the battle for control of state legislatures, “Democrats face a defensive outlook over the decade ahead,” the Democratic group Forward Majority concludes in a report released Monday. “Good years for Democrats are ones in which power will come down to razor-thin margins; in contrast, good years for Republicans will be total routs.”

The study is based on an exhaustive effort by the group to model how the electoral competition between the two parties will evolve through 2030.

At the national level, the study forecasts another grueling decade of trench warfare in presidential elections between two closely matched coalitions, with Democrats positioned to improve across Sunbelt states adding more racial minorities and white-collar workers, and Republicans likely to gain ground across preponderantly White and heavily blue-collar states in the upper Midwest and potentially parts of the Northeast.

Democrats begin this competition for state power in a steep hole. Today Republicans control 61 state legislative chambers and Democrats just 37. (The final state, Nebraska, has a unicameral nonpartisan legislature effectively controlled by Republicans). Republicans hold both legislative chambers in 30 states and Democrats in just 17. (In two other states, Minnesota and Virginia, control of the two legislative chambers is split between the parties.) Adding in governors, Republicans hold unified control in 23 state governments and Democrats just 14.

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

Some observations from “Lessons from the 2022 Primaries – what do they tell us about America’s political parties and the midterm elections?” by Elaine Kamarck at Brookings:

The leftward movement on the Democratic side is far less dramatic than the movement to the right on the Republican side, a trend our colleagues Tom Mann and Norm Ornstein have been writing about for much of the 21^stcentury….there are still a large number of Mainstream Democrats running in the Democratic primaries, and they do fairly well. In addition, there are a large number of candidates who call themselves progressives and they too do fairly well. In a finding sure to make Republican ad makers unhappy, there are very few Democratic Socialists running in Democratic primaries and they lose more than half their races. Of the 13 candidates using that label only five won, and all of those races were in very Democratic districts where the Cook Political Report rates them above D+20. The revolution appears to be losing steam.

….Conclusion. In the past decade each major political party has found itself embroiled in factional wars. But the impact on the parties has been very different. On the Republican side candidates have embraced Trump – even when he has not embraced them – and done very well in the primaries because of it.  On the Democratic side, the impact of Bernie Sanders’ revolution has been smaller, more muted, and less successful in primaries. These facts are often overlooked for two reasons. First, the Republican Party works hard to paint all Democrats as socialists who would wreck our economy, defund the police, and open our borders to everyone. Second is the inclination in the press towards what our colleague and distinguished journalist Marvin Kalb has called the “journalistic curse called bothsideism.”[4] The way this has worked in recent years is to assume symmetry – if the Republican Party is being jerked to the far right; the Democratic Party must be being jerked to the far left. As we’ve seen, there’s not much evidence to support that trend among the Democrats but plenty of evidence to support it among the Republicans.”

Some years ago, political scientists Norm Ornstein and Tom Mann popularized the notion of “asymmetric polarization” and argued that it was worse among elites such as lawmakers on the Republican side than it was among lawmakers on the Democratic side.[5] The ongoing work in the Primaries Project offers evidence that polarization is worse on the Republican side than on the Democratic side, and that moving far right is received more enthusiastically among Republican voters than moving far left is among Democratic voters.

The question this poses for the elections of 2022 and beyond is whether the Republican Party’s enthusiastic embrace of Trumpism will, at some point, go so far as to backfire and create a large and sustainable Democratic majority. Early indications are that abortion politics may be the cutting edge of this kind of overreach.

There is reason to hope we are seeing the first stirrings of such a stable congressional Democratic majority, moving into the home stretch of the 2022 midterm campaigns. Experience teaches that personality cults and extremism don’t have a long shelf life. It’s more a matter of when, than “if.”

Drew Westen explains “How Democrats can persuade voters to turn out at the polls” in an August 15th column at CNN Opinion:

Democrats can use their accomplishments to blunt voters’ economic anxiety and begin to restore hope — two of the most important emotions that drive voting. Aside from its popular provisions, the Inflation Reduction Act — if Democrats can restrain themselves from calling it “the reconciliation bill,” or a resorting to a “catchy” acronym like “IRA22” — is an emotionally evocative name that connects the dots to voters’ primary source of anxiety.

It also allows Democrats to put their opponents on the defensive by simply asking, “So why are you against reducing inflation? Most of the people we represent are pretty concerned about it.”

Westen argues that Democrats must “retain the emotional intensity” that energized the Kansas vote on abortion rights and turn up the heat on election deniers and Trump worshippers, because voters’ “polarized feelings about Trump will undoubtedly enter voters’ unconscious calculus as well.”

Westen concludes that “Voters can’t consciously report what they are unconsciously thinking and feeling. But if Democrats want to break the historical curse of first-term presidents in the midterms and the equally powerful curse of inflation, they will need to go for the gut.”

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

Links of the Day

Here are two very solid empirically-based assessments of where we are politically as we move into the homestretch of this electoral cycle. Democrats are looking good but there are still considerable grounds for caution….

Can Democrats defy midterm gravity? Making sense of recent shifts in the national political terrain by Michael Baharaeen at substack.com

Roe fell two months ago. Here’s how much it’s hurting the GOP by David Tyler at The Washington Post.

From “Cook Political Report moves five House races toward Democrats” by Emily Brooks at The Hill:

The nonpartisan election handicapper Cook Political Report on Thursday shifted its forecasts for five competitive House races in favor of Democrats.

The changes follow a spike in Democratic voter enthusiasm following the Supreme Court’s decision in June that overturned the landmark federal abortion rights protections in Roe v. Wade, Cook Political Report senior editor Dave Wasserman wrote. Democrats have outperformed expectations in every special election since the ruling.

They also also come as Republicans, some of whom predicted a potentially record “red wave” election year, have tempered expectations about the midterm elections this year.

Last week, a separate Cook Political Report analysis said Republicans still look like the favorites to win control of the House in the midterm elections. But the publication revised its forecast down from Republicans winning 15 to 30 seats to winning 10 to 20 seats.

The Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman said the five ratings changes favoring Democrats include: AK-1( from “likely Republican to tossup”); AZ-4 (to “likely Democratic”); MD-6 (to “likely Democratic”); NY-4 (to “Lean Democratic”) and VA-7 (to “Lean Democratic”).

In “Will ‘Dobbs’ Drive Young People to the Polls?,” Madeline Rosenberg writes at The American Prospect:

Vote.org, a nonpartisan voting registration site, reported a roughly 1,000 percent increase in Kansas voter registrations on its site immediately following the Dobbs decision in June, as well as registration spikes of 500 percent or more in ten other states. About 81 percent of people who register on the site, where a large percentage of users are women under age 35, also turn out to vote, according to Vote.org’s Andrea Hailey.

“To see almost twice as much voter turnout compared to the prediction, I have to believe young people played a role in that,” said Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, director of Tufts University’s CIRCLE, which tracks youth civic education and engagement.

Though voters ages 18 to 35 comprise one of the largest voting blocs in the country, they have historically turned out in lower numbers compared to older Americans. But in a post-Roe era of abortion bans and threats to other forms of reproductive health care, including birth control and IVF, Kansas may be an indicator of what’s to come, as young people are mobilizing their peers and registering to vote in higher numbers because this issue affects them personally…A July Voters of Tomorrow poll surveying young adults ages 18 to 29 found that “the data is clear: young people fear for their future,” listing gun violence and abortion as top concerns.

It makes perfect sense that women of child-bearing age would be disproportionately energized to vote in midterms as a result of the Dobbs decision, and that their partners would agree with them. Looking towards the near future, Rosenberg outlines some of the challenges facing Democrats:

Polling that predicts young people are energized to vote ahead of the midterms comes after 2018 already saw historic youth voter turnout. Democratic pollster Celinda Lake explained that voters who cast their ballots in a midterm for the first time in 2018 are among those planning to vote again this cycle. “We just need to get all of the young people who turned out in 2018 and had no previous midterm history to vote again, and we will win,” Lake said.

There’s also time before November for campaigns and candidates to reach young people who didn’t vote in 2018. In half of the states, youth voter registration was lower in June than it was at the same point in 2018, particularly for newly eligible 18- and 19-year-olds, according to polling from Tufts CIRCLE.

….But getting people registered remains a major barrier to voting—and the subject of voter suppression efforts in some states. Since the uptick in youth voter turnout in 2018, at least 18 states have passed 30 laws that make it harder to vote, and introduced more than 400 bills that restrict voting access.

Democratic ad strategy and outreach should more energetically target this age demographic, which has now become a pivotal concern for the midterm elections. It’s important also to tailor messaging to resonate with moderate and even conservative young voters (“Republican candidates are meddling in your most personal decisions”), as well as more liberal young voters (‘choice in family planning is a central human right’).

With the Dobbs decision, Republican judicial appointees have given the Democrats a cutting edge issue that will swing some young women voters and their partners towards voting Democratic and make others stay home instead of voting Republican. Republicans will try to drown out abortion protests by hammering inflation fears — that is already underway. But Democrats must remind the public — moderates as well as liberals — that it was exclusively Republican-appointed justices, supported by Republican elected officials, who took away their family planning options and created this mess.

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

Chart of the Day

Hmmm….