Chris Cillizza explains why “The Supreme Court may have just fundamentally altered the 2022 election” at CNN Politics:

At issue for Democrats is that, with less than 200 days before the midterms, their base is significantly less motivated to vote than the Republicans.

Two numbers from a recently released Washington Post/ABC News poll make that disparity plain.

1. Republicans and Republican-leaning independents were 10 points more likely than their Democratic counterparts to say they are certain to vote in the fall.

Andrew Prokop explains “Why Republicans are favored to win the Senate — and how Democrats could stop them” at Vox:

In the past decade, there have been 20 individual Senate elections where a seat ended up flipping to the other party. The vast majority of those races (16 of 20) had the same partisan outcome as either the presidential race that year or, in midterm years without a presidential contest, the most recent one. Senate races have been falling in line with the state’s presidential party preference. “Mismatched” senators, who represent a state their party’s presidential nominee lost, are becoming rarer.

From that perspective, Democrats have a pretty okay map in 2022. In the two most recent midterm cycles, they were badly exposed, with several incumbents in states the Republican presidential candidate just won. This year, they have none at all. (They do have three such seats coming up in 2024, which will be a major challenge, but that’s a problem for another time.) Meanwhile, there are two GOP-held seats in states Biden narrowly won, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, on the ballot.

But that’s likely too optimistic for Democrats. Another way to think about the map is that there are six true swing states with races this cycle. At least once in either 2016 or 2020, Trump either won or came quite close to winning Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, and New Hampshire. Nevada, meanwhile, trended right relative to the country between 2016 and 2020, though Biden still won it….Senate seats in these states are in great danger of slipping out of Democrats’ grasp.

But while Senate race outcomes have become more correlated with national partisanship, individual candidates do frequently overperform or underperform the overall trend. Democrats’ Senate chances likely hinge on whether enough of their candidates can escape this partisan gravity, arguing either that they’re not just another Democrat, or that their opponent is a uniquely unfit Republican.

Prokop shares some indepth analysis of races in the six states, and provides this chart to illustrate Democratic hopes for picking up Senate seats:

History, as well as current polls, indicate that Democrats are facing an unusually tough combination of Biden’s lagging approvals numbers and a deteriorating party image. As Prokop writes, Democratic hopes require that “unique dynamics among candidates in individual races break in their favor.”

Ed Burmilla shares some creative ideas for “How Biden Can Save Democracy From the GOP” at The Nation.

Experience indicates that, with few exceptions, midterm election outcomes are reliably linked to the incumbent President’s approval rate. Noting that “Biden’s approval rating has plummeted among younger voters more than among any other group. Sanctimonious lectures about the obligation to Vote Blue No Matter Who seem unlikely to motivate young people to the polls,” Burmilla advises:

“Federally reschedule marijuana and expunge federal marijuana-related convictions. Pitch it to timid moderates as boosting tax revenue and freeing up police resources to deal with serious crimes, if you must. The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service conservatively concluded that “the President cannot directly remove marijuana from control under federal controlled substances law, [but] he might order executive agencies to consider either altering the scheduling of marijuana or changing their enforcement approach.” Surely all the Ivy League brainpower that makes up modern Democratic administrations can construct a plausible case for doing even more than the CRS is willing to advise. This is low-hanging fruit; the House has passed a bill along these lines. Yet Biden remains coy. Younger voters and communities most directly affected by the woefully unequal ways “justice” is doled out in this country are overwhelmingly opposed to our antiquated federal drug laws. Democrats have no path to victory without those votes. This doesn’t even rise to the standard of a tough choice; it’s an easy call, and long overdue.”

Also, strengthening worker leverage in collective bargaining could help Biden’s image and the Democratic brand with all workers, including the young. As Burmilla writes,

“Keep pushing with the National Labor Relations Board. The recent organizing success in the service industry signals the direction of the wind among the younger, mostly non-college-educated voters we’ve heard so very much about Democrats’ struggling to woo. The NLRB just recently called for an end to employer-mandated anti-union sessions. Keep going. Do more than give Amazon warehouse workers a pat on the back for their organizing efforts. Redefine the Reagan-era Meyers Industries standard of “concerted activities” that gives workers the right under the National Labor Relations Act to “engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection.” Interpretations of this vague phrase were narrowed to employers’ advantage in 2019; the current administration has the same powers today that the Trump NLRB had then. Close the numerous and embarrassingly obvious loopholes in Duty to Bargain, the fundamental concept that gives workers input into decisions made on their behalf by an employer. Currently, management can shutter a workplace and relocate it by fiat simply by claiming that work at the new location “varies significantly from the work performed at the former plant.” Upsetting the Chamber of Commerce by revising employer wish-list fodder like that is a risk worth taking today. Anti-labor sentiment exists in the electorate, but how many voters for whom that is a deal-breaker are not already voting Republican?”

In addition,

“Act on student debt. You’re tired of hearing it. You’ve heard all the arguments. A president staring down a 34 percent youth approval rating needs to suck it up and do it already. We are creeping toward de facto loan forgiveness anyway with the repeatedly extended deadlines for restarting federal student loan repayment. Even the person Trump put in charge of the issue calls for loan forgiveness, admitting that the overwhelming majority of student debt is never, ever being repaid and serves only to burden and discipline borrowers. And even the noted Marxist-Leninists at… Forbes note that Biden not only has the power to do this unilaterally but there are multiple ways he could do it. A choice between standing before young voters cajoling “C’mon, vote, man!” and “Look at what I just did for you, like I promised… Now it’s on you,” is no choice at all.”

Burmilla writes in his conclusion, “This isn’t guaranteed to work. But the strategy in which the threat is enormous and the response is timid is—historically, even logically—bound to fail. If the stakes are as high as we are regularly told, leaving bold options on the table makes no sense.”

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

Are Democrats Fiddling While Rome Burns?

That’s been more or less my point of view and that of a few others like David Shor. It’s a positive step though that more and more left-leaning analysts are coming to share that viewpoint. The latest is G. Elliott Morris, as expressed in a recent commentary on his substack newsletter.

“[M]any Democrats do not seem to be taking the prospect of being locked out of power for the short- to medium-term seriously enough. If Republicans win back the House in 2022, take back the White House in 2024, and defend a very favorable map in 2026, Democrats may not regain full control of the federal government until 2028 or 2030. To quote [Ross] Douthat: “The political landscape after 2024, however, might look more like liberalism’s depictions of its Trump-era plight.”…

I have to say [that progressives’ current strategy]…. sounds like more of the same strategy that got Democrats where they are today. That is not to say [their policies are] not the normatively or morally right thing to do. If I had my way, Democrats (including Joe Manchin) would immediately expand universal child care, pass a public option for government-subsidized health care, and dramatically radicalize their approach to climate policy. As a bonus, most of those things in isolation are popular with a majority of voters.

Instead, my argument is that this unified progressive agenda does nothing to bring back into the fold the conservative working-class voters — mainly white, but growing significantly more Latino recently — who have abandoned the Democrats and caused the structural disadvantages that are dragging them down today. The party needs a renewed identity as a pro-worker party, not one where coastal elites control the party line on policy and messaging. And it needs to be substantially more diverse in its approach to talking to voters in different areas of the country; messages that work in young, diverse urban cores do not work in educated white suburbs or shrinking exurbs.”

Ah but how to do that? That is what every Democrat should be thinking hard about instead of acting like they live in a different country than they do.

At Politico, Jeff Greenfield gives George Orwell’s “Road to Wigan Pier” a fresh read, finds parts of it to be highly relevant to our recent experience in the U.S. and uses it as a springboard for some well-stated observations about the Democratic Party’s failure to rally the working-class. As Greenfield sets the stage:

“Why are we Democrats losing the working class? Why do they like our policies but vote for the party that comforts the comfortable? What’s wrong with our messaging? What’s wrong with our candidates?”….Odd as it may seem, a partial answer can be found in the works of a writer who never set foot in the United States and who has been dead for more than 70 years. When George Orwell traveled to the Depression-ravaged north of England in 1936, his intention was to chronicle the horrific conditions in the mines, the towns and the homes of the people who lived and worked there. (His account of the near starvation, the hellish conditions in the mines, the sights, sounds and smells of life are still riveting all these decades later).

“It is in the second half of his book, “The Road to Wigan Pier,” where Orwell deals with a broader question: If socialism is the way toward providing a fairer, more decent life for those with the least, why has it not succeeded politically? His answer — one that unsettled his Left Book Club’s publisher — was that there was a deep cultural chasm between the advocates of socialism and those they were seeking to persuade….“I am,” Orwell wrote, “making out a case for the sort of person who is in sympathy with the fundamental aims of Socialism … but who in practice always takes flight when Socialism is mentioned.

Nowhere is this ‘deep cultural chasm’ wider than in the gap between the language of workers and upper middle-class lefties:

“Orwell, himself a socialist, argues first that “Socialism in its developed form is a theory confined entirely to the [relatively well-off] middle class.” In its language, it is formal, stilted, wholly distant from the language of ordinary citizens, spoken by people who are several rungs above their audience, and with no intention of giving up that status….“It is doubtful whether anything describable as proletarian literature now exists … but a good music hall comedian comes nearer to producing it than any Socialist writer I can think of.”

Might that help explain why George Bush II and Trump connected to white working-class voters better than did Al Gore, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton? Bush II and Trump were arguably America’s worst presidents. But their language sounded more ‘real’ than that of their adversaries. True, Gore and Clinton won the overall popular vote. But their share of white working-class votes declined in relation to that of  previous Democratic presidential nominees.

Greenfield adds that “Democrats have not found a way to draw clear, convincing lines separating the most militant voices in their party from the beliefs of a large majority of their base. Consider Orwell’s argument that the language of the left is “wholly distant from the language of ordinary citizens.” Many of today’s Democrats seem intimidated by the preferred phrases of the week, even if few of them embrace or recognize such language. (A recent survey revealed that only 2 percent of Hispanics prefer the term “Latinx” to describe themselves.)” Greenfield writes further,

We saw how clearly the extremes can drag down the party after the disappointing results of the 2020 down-ballot elections, and again after last November’s Democratic loses in Virginia, Long Island and local races across the country. Most Democrats, including President Joe Biden, do not support defunding the police. But a failure to make that argument repeatedly, in the bluntest of terms, permitted that notion to take root. As House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn noted, “defunding the police” comes across a lot like the “burn, baby, burn!” chants of the 1960s riots. Most Democrats are not proponents of teaching critical race theory in public schools. But the broader argument that the United States is fundamentally a nation conceived in white supremacy, where skin color is the essential aspect of a citizen’s life, has in fact been on display in some of the redoubts of the left’s political power. It’s instructive that San Francisco Mayor London Breed helped lead the successful fight to recall three school board members who were pushing for the renaming of local schools named after, among others, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. Breed more recently declared a “state of emergency” in her city’s Tenderloin District where random acts of violence against property and people have become endemic.

In her blunt comments, Breed seemed to align herself with New York City Mayor Eric Adams who has promised a “crackdown” on lawlessness and a return to some of the policing tactics that former Mayor Bill de Blasio had rejected. (It’s an intriguing political possibility for Democrats that two of the voices most in sync with a more “working class” perspective on crime are the Black Mayors of two famously liberal cities.)

Greenfield notes “one of the more striking shifts within the Democratic Party: the loss of effective political figures that speak to working- and middle-class voters.” Also,

Democrats have another problem that Orwell might have recognized; its “messaging” is increasingly crafted by people who are too much like me: born and raised in the big city, product of an elite law school, a working life whose tools are words, ideas — not hammers and nails. To say that my friends, colleagues and I are distant from the life of “regular” Americans is a significant understatement.

Former Democratic Montana Gov. Steve Bullock has described the image of his party this way: “coastal, overly educated, elitist, judgmental, socialist — a bundle of identity groups and interests lacking any shared principles. The problem isn’t the candidates we nominate. It’s the perception of the party we belong to.”

It is of course painfully obvious that in turning to Donald Trump and his Republican acolytes, voters are rewarding a party awash in hypocrisy that barely disguises its own elite roots and its own coddling of the privileged. It is, in fact, a measure of the Democrats’ failure that so many ordinary Americans embrace a figure whose father illicitly supplied the money that enabled his rise, who repeatedly imported undocumented immigrants to work on his properties, who reputedly stiffed those who worked for him, whose father’s doctor helped him evade the draft, and whose tax cuts flatly violated his campaign pledge to make the rich pay more.

Greenfield adds that “The economic core of Democrats’ arguments — a higher minimum wage, lower prescription drug costs, a better chance for college education, with programs paid for by higher taxes on the affluent and mega-rich — enjoy broad public support.” He concludes “But the danger to the left that Orwell described remains, as Democratic polling warns, “alarmingly potent.” An electorate where many find the party “preachy” and “judgmental” will falter on this side of the Atlantic now, just as it did thousands of miles away and decades ago.”

Read the rest of Greenfield’s Politico article.

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

In my latest at The Liberal Patriot, I look at Democratic prospects for the 2022 election, what, if anything, they can do to improve those prospects and what they need to learn from the likely election outcome.

“How bad will the 2022 election be for the Democrats? In all likelihood, quite bad. Biden’s approval rating is bad, his rating is worse on the most important issue, the economy, and it is truly terrible on high profile, contentious issues like crime and immigration. Democrats are behind on the generic Congressional ballot, despite the tendency of this measure to overestimate
Democratic strength. The results of special and off-cycle elections indicate a very pro-GOP electoral environment. And midterm elections are typically bad for the incumbent party anyway.

So there are not a lot of good signs here. In fact, hardly any. The prospect of a very serious wipeout does seem plausible. A case along these lines for the Senate was made by Simon Bazelon on Matt Yglesias’ substack newsletter. His approach was very simple. Estimate what the Democratic disadvantage on the Congressional ballot is likely to be at the election (-4.5) and compare that to Biden’s advantage in 2020 (+4.5). That suggests a 9 point pro-GOP shift in the national electoral environment which, applied across states would imply no Senate pickups for the Democrats from the Republicans and the loss of their on-cycle Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and New Hampshire Senate seats (and control of the Senate) to the GOP. The outlook for 2024 is even worse, implying that even good Democratic performance in the Presidential contest could still leave the Democrats with only about 42 Senate seats.

As for the House, variants of the same approach by Amy Walter and Henry Olsen suggest Democratic losses could reach 25-40 or so seats. That of course is much, much more than the Republicans need to flip control of the House.

What passes for optimism here can be gleaned from Alan Abramowitz’ 2022 election forecasting model, presented on Sabato’s Crystal Ball. Abramowitz uses a very simple model, predicting House and Senate seat swings from generic Congressional polling and seat exposure in each body for the incumbent party. Walking in Bazelon’s estimate for the future Congressional ballot margin, Abramowitz’ model predicts a loss of around 23 House seats and little, and perhaps no change, in the Senate.

What can the Democrats do to avoid their apparent upper bound of losses and wind up closer to Abramowitz’ prediction? One approach it to emphasize the “roaring” economy with strong growth and historically low joblessness. The problem here is that inflation has eaten up workers’ wage gains from the hot economy so that real wages have actually gone down in the last year by 2.7 percent. And people just generally hate inflation and encounter it constantly in their daily lives. That and continued supply chain difficulties account for voters’ sour outlook on the economy. It is unlikely that Democrats can talk people out of these views by emphasizing something they already know (the job market is good!)”

Read the rest at The Liberal Patriot!

A sobering conclusion from “Are Democrats Headed for a Shellacking in the Midterm Election? What the generic ballot model predicts” by Alan Abramowitz at Sabato’s Crystal Ball:

Democrats are very likely to lose their majority in the House of Representatives in the 2022 midterm election and could lose their majority in the Senate, although that is less certain. In neither chamber, however, are they likely to experience a shellacking of the sort that both parties have experienced in some postwar midterm elections. That is simply because they won only 222 seats in the House in 2020 and are defending only 14 seats in the Senate. The fact that very few of those Democratic seats in the House and none of the Democratic seats in the Senate are in districts or states that were carried by Donald Trump in 2020 makes it even less likely that the party will experience a shellacking the size of which we’ve seen in some previous midterms or anything close to it — even as the Republicans could very well flip both chambers of Congress this fall.

Despite all of the defeatist nail-biting about Democratic prospectsin the House of Reps, there is a plausible optimistic scenario in which Democrats hold their senate majority and maybe pick up a seat or two. Sure, there are factors which could produce the feared ‘shellacking” in both houses of congress. But it’s good news when a political scientist of Abramowitz’s caliber believes that is unlikely.

From “Is Larry Summers Really Right About Inflation and Biden? The Harvard economist is getting plaudits for the warnings he issued early last year, but some Administration officials and economists are questioning the basis of his arguments” by John Cassidy at The New Yorker:

The first imperative, in assessing Summers’s contribution, is to clarify what he predicted. Appearing on Bloomberg’s “Wall Street Week” show on March 19, 2021, he said, “I think there is about a one-third chance that inflation will significantly accelerate over the next several years, and we’ll be in a stagflationary situation like the one that materialized between 1966 and 1969.” Summers said that there was also a one-third chance “that we won’t see inflation, but the reason we won’t see it is that the Fed hits the brakes hard, markets get very unstable, the economy skids downwards close to recession.” Finally, he added, there was “a one-third chance that the Fed and the Treasury will get what they are hoping for, and we’ll get rapid growth, which will moderate in a non-inflationary way.” Discussing Summers’s predictions, Tim Duy, a longtime Federal Reserve watcher who is now chief U.S. economist at SGH Macro Advisors, recently commented, “He certainly had those inflationary concerns very early. The counter is that he also put out plenty of other scenarios—enough that he almost couldn’t be wrong.”

As 2021 went on, and the inflation rate picked up sharply, Summers amped up his inflation warnings. “Look, we are seeing exactly what you would have expected with a central bank behind the curve,” he said, on Bloomberg, after the inflation rate rose to 5.4 per cent in September. Now he is warning that the war in Ukraine, through its impact on the prices of energy and commodities, will add to inflationary pressures, and he is comparing the current situation to the nineteen-seventies, when gas lines and rising inflation took a brutal toll on the Carter Administration.

….At this stage, most economists agree with Summers that, during 2021, strong demand, boosted by the American Rescue Plan, played at least some role in the inflation surge. “You’ve seen a broadening of inflation pressures in the economy, and an acceleration of wage growth,” Tim Duy, the SGH economist, said. “That’s all consistent with demand-driven inflation.” Even Sahm conceded to me that some of the extra federal spending eventually showed up in higher prices, but she added that the main cause of higher inflation was “fundamental disruptions under the hood” of the economy caused by the pandemic.

Ultimately, what matters now is whether we really are on the verge of returning to the nineteen-seventies. “I said a year ago, Vietnam is the right analogy. Inflation goes from one per cent to six per cent in four years of super-expansionary fiscal policy,” Summers told me. “Brad DeLong and the President’s Council of Economic Advisers said [to] look at World War Two and the Korean War. Those parallels, where price controls were central, so far have not proved out.”

In his most recent column in the Washington Post, Summers reiterated his call for sharply higher interest rates. He told me: “Prompter action from the Fed in the nineteen-seventies would have obviated the need for the Volcker recession, so prompt action against the threat of inflation is essential now.” With the Labor Department set to release the Consumer Price Index for March next week, the inflation-policy debate will only intensify. In the end, though, a lot of the animus toward Summers in Democratic policy circles is political. Many Democrats think that he has been giving ammunition to the Republicans, who cite him regularly, and understating the broader benefits that Biden’s policies have delivered, which include record job growth in the first year of his Presidency.

Summers said, “The benefits from the American Rescue Plan depend on a strong economy, which is threatened as overheating leads to declining real wages and, quite possibly, recession.” He added, “The Rescue Plan has crowded out political space for desirable long-term investments in the Build Back Better plan. And Carter’s demise suggests that inflation is a grave threat to progressive politics.”

Cassidy concludes, “Actually, it was Republican opposition and Senator Joe Manchin that sank the Build Back Better plan, and it’s far from certain that Manchin would have supported the initiative if the American Rescue Plan had been smaller. It’s certainly true, however, that Biden and the Democrats have been damaged politically by the inflation surge. How it plays out from here, and who is blamed, will go far to determine ultimate attitudes toward Biden’s economic record, and to the Summers critique.”

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

National Review (yes, National Review) just published a lengthy essay of mine on how the Democrats could fix their woefully bad party image, if they had a mind to do so. And if you’re wondering why this essay isn’t in some left-leaning magazine, the answer is pretty simple: they wouldn’t dream of publishing it.

“As a lifelong man of the Left who very much wants the Democratic Party to succeed, I regret to report this: The Democrats and the Democratic brand are in deep trouble. That should have been obvious when Democrats underperformed in the 2020 election, turning what they and most observers expected to be a blue wave into more of a ripple. They lost House seats and performed poorly in state legislative elections. And their support among non-white voters, especially Hispanics, declined substan­tially.

Still, they did win the presidency, which led many to miss the clear market signals this underperformance was sending. That tendency was strengthened by the Democrats’ improbable victories in the two Senate runoffs in Georgia, which gave them full control of the federal government, albeit by the very narrowest of margins.

At the same time, Trump’s refusal to concede the election — his bizarre behavior in that regard probably contributed to the GOP defeats in the Georgia runoffs — and his encouragement of rioters who stormed the Capitol on January 6 led many Democrats to assume that the Republican brand would be so damaged by association that the Democratic brand would shine by comparison. And yet, two years later, the Democrats are in brutal shape.

Biden’s approval rating is in the low 40s, only a little above where Trump’s was at the same point in his presidential term, which of course was the precursor to the GOP’s drubbing in the 2018 election. Biden has been doing especially poorly among working-class and Hispanic voters. His approval ratings on specific issues tend to be lower, in the high 30s on the economy and in the low 30s on hot-button issues such as immigration and crime. Off-year and special elections since 2020 have indicated a strongly pro-Republican electoral environment, and Democrats currently trail Republicans in the generic congressional ballot for 2022. It now seems likely that Democrats will, at minimum, lose control of the House this November and quite possibly suffer a wave election up and down the ballot.

Most Democrats would prefer to believe that the current dismal situation merely reflects some bad luck. The Delta and Omicron variants of the coronavirus did undercut Biden’s plans for returning the country to normal, interacting with supply-chain difficulties to produce an inflation spike that angered consumers, but that is not the whole picture. Democrats have failed to develop a party brand capable of unifying a dominant majority of Americans behind their political project. Indeed, the current Democratic brand suffers from several deficiencies that make it somewhere between uncompelling and toxic to many American voters who might otherwise be the party’s allies. I locate these deficiencies in three key areas: culture, economics, and patriotism.”

Read the whole thing at NR. I think you’ll find it thought-provoking even if you don’t agree with it.