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

Time for Vaccine Requirements and/or Passports: It’s a Health, Economic and Political Necessity.

At The Liberal Patriot today. John Halpin explains why this step is past due in the United States and will have woeful consequences if the Biden administration does not step up.

“As TLP has argued since the first days of the Biden administration, there are only two issues that matter for the success of the country and for Democrats in 2022: controlling the pandemic and getting the economy back on track. Everything else is a sideshow and distraction.

Until now, the Biden team has done an admirable job on both fronts. The economy is running full steam ahead and large percentages of Americans are vaccinated.

But all this progress is seriously at risk with the latest delta variant surge and the confusing and contradictory positions of the CDC and health officials on how to confront it. Rather than pushing and promoting the most important goal of near universal vaccination, the CDC has reversed course to recommend masks indoors for the vaccinated—simultaneously undermining their rationale from May for getting the vaccine and diminishing their trustworthiness by not presenting their data and not considering the obvious question of why those who do not want a vaccine would change course or start wearing masks.

Consequently, the country faces yet another culture war fight between the “vaccinated and the unvaccinated” and over the need for masks without getting any closer to doing what is necessary to control the pandemic: near universal vaccination. A lose-lose proposition….
Just as the U.S. economy is going gangbusters, the coronavirus response is producing unnecessary political splits and rising anger and confusion among Americans.

The CDC and Biden should admit their stumbles in issuing the new guidelines, better explain their rationale and fully present all evidence for scrutiny, and pledge to the public full transparency in grappling with the difficult and shifting task of confronting Covid going forward.

Above all, public health officials and leaders need to level with Americans that the only goal that really matters is getting the country to near complete vaccination levels. No one wants to wear masks. No one wants to shut down schools or businesses again. And we have a very effective way to avoid this if everyone gets vaccinated.

Just as people must have driver’s licenses to get on the roads—or present proof of other vaccinations to go to school, to work, or to travel—Covid vaccination must become a requirement for the general welfare of the entire nation. This will require full approval of the vaccines by the FDA followed by clear requirements from employers, insurers, state officials, government agencies, schools, and others that all citizens must show proof of vaccination by the beginning of 2022.”

Read the whole thing at The Liberal Patriot! I also recommend this piece by David Frum at The Atlantic site.

“First Canada overtook the United States in the vaccination race. Now the European Union has done so. Even poor European countries such as Greece, Lithuania, and Poland have surpassed vaccine-resistant U.S. states such as Ohio, Arkansas, and Missouri.

Why is this happening? Facebook exists on the other side of the Atlantic as much as it does on ours. Europeans do not lack for far-right political parties swayed by Russian misinformation. They are not better educated: Most EU countries send fewer of their young people to postsecondary institutions than the United States does. Anybody who has ever visited a European pharmacy has seen that Europeans are at least as susceptible to quack medicine as Americans.

One big difference between the U.S. and the EU is that European governments have been readier than U.S. governments to impose direct consequences on those who refuse vaccines. On July 1, the European Union adopted a digital pass confirming one’s vaccinated status, and individual member states are restricting access to public facilities for those who do not carry the pass. In Italy, for example, after August 6, anyone over the age of 12 who wants to enter a restaurant, gym, swimming pool, or cinema will need to have their green pass scanned at the door.

The EU system turns proof of vaccination into a QR code that EU citizens can store on their phone. The same code works in all EU countries and is available free of charge to EU citizens in both their national language and English.

By contrast, U.S. governments have been very reluctant to go the proof-of-vaccination route. Many Republican-governed states have gone out of their way to protect the right to infect. And even if a state were to try to roll out such a mandate, how would it do so? My CDC-issued proof of vaccination is a piece of cardboard inscribed with a nurse’s handwriting. I can scan it with my phone and instantly email it anywhere on Earth—but the document itself remains the product of Depression-era library-card technology.”

This is unacceptable! We can do better. We must do better.

At Axios, Hans Nichols shares the content of a memo by Mike Donilon, and advisor to President Biden. An excerpt:

In a Georgetown University Battleground poll:

• Voters see political polarization as the leading challenge for the country. 32% pick polarization in their top two issues, 7pp higher than the next most important issue.
• Despite wide gaps on the importance of many other pressing issues, the Georgetown poll found that voters across party and demographic lines ranked polarization highly.
• An overwhelming majority of respondents said they want a leader who is willing to compromise to get things done (69%).

A CNN poll found that 74% of voters choose “working across the aisle to get things done in Washington, even if it means losing out on some high-priority policies” against “standing firm on their beliefs without compromise, even if it means not much gets done in Washington.”

Voters across the political spectrum want a bipartisan infrastructure deal A July Yahoo/YouGov national poll asked Americans if they support a bipartisan infrastructure deal put together by a group of senators. According to the poll, 53% of Republicans, 51% of Independents, and 64% of Democrats favor the agreement.

This is consistent with their June findings that showed the strong backing of Republicans, Independents, and Democrats for the deal. Similarly, a recent Navigator poll backs this claim. A bipartisan infrastructure agreement elicits broad support among a diverse coalition.

The individual components are even more popular: there is strong, bipartisan support for the inclusion of funding for roads, bridges, ports; for clean water pipes; for the electric grid; and for high-speed Internet service (AP/NORC).

Funding for roads, bridges, and ports
• Republicans: 79%
• Independents: 80%
• Democrats: 87%
• Overall: 83%

Funding for pipes for drinking water
• Republicans: 70%
• Independents: 79%
• Democrats: 85%
• Overall: 79%

Funding for the electric grid
• Republicans: 59%
• Independents: 62%
• Democrats: 73%
• Overall: 66%

Funding for high-speed Internet service
• Republicans: 44%
• Independents: 54%
• Democrats: 78%
• Overall: 62%

A strong 57% of Independent support President Biden’s infrastructure proposal, demonstrating how important it is for these voters to pass a bipartisan deal.

Nichols adds that, “Wednesday’s bipartisan agreement is an important signal to voters that they’re being heard and that their government can work as they think it should – with elected officials from both sides of the aisle coming together to address the concerns that matter most in their lives.”

Democrats have had a hell of a tough time getting any traction in Florida in recent years, partly, but not exclusively because of voter suppression and gerrymandering. It would be hard to pick another state where Democrats have underperformed with more adverse consequences. The Governor, Lt. Governor, both U. S. Senators, 16 out of 27 members of congress are Republicans, who also hold 26 out of 40 state senate seats and 76 of 120 state house seats. This despite the fact that “active registered” Democratic voters outnumber Republicans in 2021 in the state by 5,247,592 to 5,171,308, respectively.

Florida has uniquely complicated demographics, including a disproportionately-large percentage of white voters without college degrees, Cuban-American, Puerto Rican-American and African-American voters. Clearly, Democrats are in need of some fresh ideas about how to build a winning coalition for both state-wide and local election campaigns.

At Current Affairs, Nathan J. Robinson interviews Richie Floyd, a schoolteacher and Democratic Socialists of America member and candidate for St. Petersburg’s city council. In the interview Floyd shares some insights about how Democrats can do better in the Sunshine state:

You know, I really believe this state is ripe for working-class politics because the majority of people here are working-class, the overwhelming majority. We’re a service-based economy, mostly like tourism—used to be agriculture, that’s shifted away significantly. In St. Pete and Pinellas County and the Tampa Bay area, we’re trying to attract visitors here to come to our beaches to go fishing. And then you have Orlando, the whole I-4 corridor and center of the state. Orlando is based on tourism as well. And so there’s a lot of working-class people that look like me in this state and they just basically don’t have political representation at this point. The Democratic Party has been incapable of winning at a state level for a long time. They don’t necessarily speak to the issues of working people. They get caught up in a lot of things that the Republicans bait them into.

I think there’s a coalition for that. And we kind of saw it in 2018 with Andrew Gillum‘s campaign. He started out on that path, got a little lost towards the end of the general election. And so just came up short. But I think that really shows that there is something here for working people if they’re organized. And now when it comes to Bernie Sanders and stuff, something you have to know about Florida is the overwhelming majority of Floridians were not born in Florida. We don’t have real connections to this state. And our political institutions are kind of decrepit. There’s no machine politics here. It’s usually people flying in, dropping a bunch of money on mailers and ads without ever making a connection to the community, and then leaving the second that the election is over. And so that’s where our opportunity lies: if we actually get out and organize in our real community. And that’s how we’ve been relatively successful here.

Floyd also emphasizes the link between Florida’s environmental destruction and the screwing of the state’s working class:

Well, the history of Florida is one of environmental degradation and profit put over our natural resources and our working people. The entire time that the state’s existed. And so that’s part of the reason why our politics are able to resonate with people. We talk about the reason why the state is like this, which is the fact that everything that’s gone on over the state’s history has been for land developers and real estate interests to make a profit. And there’ve been bright spots—environmentalists have won victories here. The one I point to the most is in the ‘80s, our estuaries, like Tampa Bay, were just completely in shambles. And we brought back our fish population significantly since then, but we’re turning back towards a situation like we had back then….It can get bleak sometimes, when we’re worried about storms and we’re worried about pollution spills that we’ve had recently, and our red tide, and how expensive housing is. But it doesn’t have to be like this. And I think you catch a lot more flies with honey. You should express why people should be excited to get up and vote for you.

Floyd has avoided leftist buzz terms in his campaigning, and tried to reach voters as a rooted community activist:

The most important thing for us is to actually be rooted in the community and connected to the community. And so as a candidate, what that looks like is I’m a member of my neighborhood association and of the teacher’s union, and I’m active in them. I talk to people around town about a variety of issues and just make myself a known community member so that it’s not anything scary. “That’s just Richie, a tall, goofy middle school teacher.” So that’s the first thing. And then the issues that we talk about, we speak in plain terms. I don’t say the word “proletariat,” like it’s not about “the means of production.” I’m like “I’m here for working families and working people and making sure that the wealth built in the city goes to the people who created it, the people who work and run the city.” And that’s a very left-wing demand, but it’s something that people naturally gravitate to when you say it in plain language.

None of this is to say that the red-baiting that was instrumental in defeating Democratic U. S. House incumbents in Florida last year won’t be used again, nor that it won’t work. True, Floyd is just a city council candidate. But it’s not like the Florida Democratic Party has figured out a better messaging approach that has produced enough actual victories. In any case, Floyd’s point about Democrats focusing their messaging and policies to help Florida’s huge working class is surely a good one.

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

Hillary Clinton famously likened Trump supporters to “a basket of deplorables”, a gaffe that contributed to her stunning defeat in 2016. But she actually said only *half* of Trump supporters were in a basket of deplorables. Today’s liberal Democrats and activists, in my experience, are not satisfied with this. As far as they’re concerned *all* Trump supporters belong in said basket. They’re all deplorable, every last one of them. Lo, they have sinned and are forever cast out of civilized humanity. That seems to be the general attitude.

This is not, to say the least, a way to win any converts. People know when you look down on them and they react accordingly. They may harbor their doubts about Trump but shaming them for their erstwhile Trump support just gets their back up.

In the Post today, Gary Abernathy, one of those erstwhile Trump supporters, points out just how dumb and counterproductive this self-righteous liberal attitude is:

“When supporters of former president Donald Trump hear media pundits analyze them with the usual collection of belittling observations, they must be tempted to respond, “Hey, we’re right here! We can hear you!”

Yes, they are indeed here, and living among us. And they have every right to be insulted by being accused of believing a “big lie,” and by the implication that they are violent, or traitors, or mindless sheep — racist sheep, of course….

I live in Trump Country. I was a Trump supporter, until he lost me with his actions after the 2020 election. But most Trump voters have stuck with him. With Trump’s encouragement, they sincerely believe the election was stolen. They’re not racists. They’re not traitors. Some of them think anyone who accepts Biden’s win is a traitor. Some of them think I’m traitorous — or at the very least I’ve succumbed to the evil influences of the mainstream media — for accepting Trump’s defeat…..

It’s my unscientific conclusion that about half of Trump’s supporters will go to their graves believing the election was stolen. The other half can be persuaded otherwise, but only by time and reflection, like accepting a death. Shaming will never work….

[S]top calling people liars. The media should return to the non-accusatory style that worked for decades. Instead of writing that election fraud is a lie, or Republicans are “falsely claiming” fraud, go back to the style that worked for decades: “Republicans again claimed the 2020 election was rigged, but no evidence has emerged to support that allegation and courts have dismissed all suits challenging the results.”

Next, abandon the narrative that Trump supporters are insurrectionists, and stop elevating groups such as QAnon and the Proud Boys beyond the fringe elements they are. As shameful as the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol was, only about 800 people were involved — hardly representative of millions of Trump supporters. Despite their suspicions, the vast majority of Trump voters are not interested in invading federal buildings or overthrowing the government. They’re interested in going to work and church and soccer games, taking care of their families and voting in the next election.

There’s no big mystery to effectively communicating with Trump supporters — or for Trump supporters to communicate with everyone else. Treat each other with politeness and courtesy. Respect other opinions even if you disagree. Acknowledge each other’s patriotism and love of country. Don’t assume you understand each other because you’ve read some think-tank analysis. Reach out, be curious and start a dialogue.

Trump supporters aren’t going away, and those who continue to paint them as the lowest forms of life reveal themselves to be more interested in perpetrating stereotypes and nurturing divisions than in achieving what’s needed for our nation to survive — reaching across our political chasm, respecting our differences and finding common ground where we can.”

I agree with all this. It may make you feel good to regard all Trump supporters–perhaps unto the seventh generation–with withering contempt. But it is monumentally ineffective if you care about building a better politics for a better future.

And you should.

Harold Meyerson writes at The American Prospect:

It’s only the midpoint of 2021, but the outlines of both parties’ 2022 campaigns are already clear. Consequently, it’s also clear that the two parties’ electoral pitches will deal with entirely separate universes.

The Democrats will campaign on the real benefits they’ve delivered to the American public, more particularly the American working class (assuming, of course, that Sens. Manchin, Sinema, and their ilk don’t deep-six the entire Democratic program). Those benefits will include their largely successful effort to diminish the pandemic, their funding for infrastructure, the establishment of an expanded Child Tax Credit and affordable child care, universal pre-K, tuition-free community college, paid family and medical leave; the expansion of Medicare to include dental, vision, and hearing care; more affordable housing; and numerous advances in clean energy. It will also include some of the executive orders that Joe Biden issued last Friday, including a ban on the noncompete agreements currently imposed on tens of millions of workers, and a “right to repair” rule that will enable Americans or their mechanics to fix their own cars or tractors instead of having to take them back to the manufacturer whose proprietary software has blocked anyone else’s attempts to fix the damn things.

All to be funded by Medicare savings derived from negotiating down drug prices, by higher taxes on the wealthiest one percent, and higher taxes on corporations.

In short, a lot of very real and very helpful stuff. As Biden himself once observed, “a big fucking deal.”

Republicans will not address any of these issues with substantial alternatives, Meyerson believes.

Instead, Republicans will run on culture war issues, attacking critical race theory, defunding the police, the influx of immigrants, the threat posed by minorities voting (which will be dog-whistled under the heading of voter fraud)—in short, the threat that Democrats presumably pose to white people. Which, they have to hope, will persuade a sufficient number of those white people to disregard the Medicare expansions, Child Tax Credit, and other actual benefits with which Democrats, and Democrats alone, have provided them.

Put another way, “Democrats will run against Republicans because they opposed all those benefits. And Republicans will run against Democrats for supporting all those culture war threats, a number of which, like defunding the police, the vast majority of Democrats don’t actually support.”

In addition to the effectiveness of each party’s messaging, Meyerson believes the outcome will be determined by “who will vote,” and it will come down to Republican voter suppression versus Democratic turnout mobilization. “On this issue alone, they’ll directly engage.”

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

EJ Dionne argues in the Post that social democracy is back. I am not so sure. His basic argument is that neoliberal economics has been discredited by the pandemic crisis and the consequent need for large scale government activism. Combined with other recent failures of the neoliberal paradigm the result is:

“a resurgence of social democracy’s core idea: that market economies can thrive only when governments underwrite them with strong systems of social insurance, new paths to opportunity for those cast aside by capitalism’s “creative destruction,” and updated rules to advance social goods that include family life, education, public health — and the planet itself.”

He goes on to cite the relative unity of the Democrats around social democratic-ish legislation and the words of German Social Democratic finance minister Olaf Scholz about progressives’ “common political project”.

Leaving aside how seriously one should take the pronouncements of Scholz, whose party has been on a steadily declining trajectory, I would describe all this as necessary but not sufficient conditions for a truly social democratic moment. This includes the discrediting of neoliberal economics. The difficult task here is *replacing* neoliberal economics with a different economic model and that will take considerable effort and time.

For example, even with generous assumptions about what Democrats are actually able to pass in the current Congress, it is safe to say that even that will not achieve the transformation of the American political economy that is necessary to provide a good life for American citizens across region, race and class. That is a longer-term project that will require more reforms, more successful elections and broader majorities than the Democrats currently command.

To put a finer point on it, if the Democrats lose control of Congress in 2022, their ability to accomplish big or even medium size things after that date drops toward zero. This is not a recipe for a transformative period in American society; transformations need some time and a period of true political dominance to succeed.

This brings up something Dionne does not mention at all–working class support. I find it implausible that Democrats can retain and exert power long enough for such a “social democratic moment” when their working class support is so shaky. The 2020 election is just the latest evidence of that shaky support. And that election was, in turn, consistent with a deep trend that has greatly undermined the center-left.

As I have previously noted, a realignment to the left has seemed to be in the offing even since the Great Recession and it hasn’t happened. That potential realignment has been in stall mode.

This is because the stalled realignment has been driven by the shift of working class voters out of left parties and the increasing reliance of such parties on highly-educated voters. That has created the stall situation where the left, even when it wins elections, is continually undermined by the bleeding of working class voters. The result is unstable governance that has fallen far short of realignment.

The proximate reason for the bleeding has been laid out in rich descriptive detail in a various papers by Thomas Piketty and his colleagues, available on the World Inequality Database website. They finger the emergence of a new “sociocultural” axis of political conflict that has been embraced by right and left parties alike and that has drawn working class voters out of the left and into right and right populist parties

Those working class defections have crippled the left for many years now. I am not convinced that, even with effects of the pandemic, we are now in a fundamentally different situation. That will take an accommodation of the left to working class values that reduces sociocultural conflict and brings enough working class voters back to the left that a dominant electoral coalition can actually be sustained.
Then and only then are we likely to see a true social democratic moment.

Bill Scher writes at Real Clear Politics:

Last week Vice President Kamala Harris announced that, to counter the spate of restrictive voting measures which have been enacted in several Republican-controlled states, the Democratic National Committee would spend $25 million on “tools and technology to register voters, to educate voters, to turn out voters, to protect voters.”

In  remarks at Howard University, Harris said, “People say, ‘What’s the strategy?’” to which she answered, “We are going to assemble the largest voter protection team we have ever had sure to ensure that all Americans can vote and have your vote counted in a fair and transparent process.”

Few Democrats would argue against the mobilization of the largest ‘voter protection team’ ever, given the all-out GOP voter suppression campaign, which has produced dozens of vote-smothering laws in state legislatures across the U.S. However, many Democrats strongly believe a successful strategy must include putting more muscle in the campaign to pass voting rights reforms at the national level. As Scher writes,

Strikingly, Harris did not mention as part of the strategy enactment of the For the People Act, the voting rights legislation Democrats passed in the House but cannot get around the filibuster in the Senate. After Harris’ Howard speech and a West Wing meeting with President Biden, voting rights advocates were not soothed. “There is no substitute for federal legislative action,” said Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center for Justice. Several demanded Biden use his bully pulpit more aggressively. Sherrilyn Ifill of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund said, “I told the president: We will not be able to litigate our way out of this threat to black citizenship. We must have the president use his voice.”

Democratic members of Congress are also pressuring Biden to not only push for the voting rights bill, but also a weakening of the filibuster in order to pass the bill. In an interview with Politico, House Majority Whip James Clyburn said Biden should “pick up the phone and tell [Sen.] Joe Manchin, ‘Hey, we should do a carve-out’’” of the filibuster, which means forbidding the tactic when legislation is on the Senate floor related to constitutional rights.

Scher notes, “according to reporting by The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein, the Biden administration doesn’t have the same sense of impending doom. “Although White House officials consider the laws offensive from a civil-rights perspective,” he wrote, “they do not think most of those laws will advantage Republicans in the 2022 and 2024 elections as much as many liberal activists fear….Brownstein interviewed one anonymous White House official, who noted Biden’s ability to navigate the voting laws in 2020.  “Show us what the rules are and we will figure out a way to educate our voters and make sure they understand how they can vote and we will get them out to vote,” said this Biden aide.”

Scher write further in support of the ‘work-around’ strategy, “Democrats can and have overcome Republican-backed restrictive voting laws. In particular, academic research shows that strict laws requiring ID to vote have outright backfired on Republicans by firing up the Democratic base…The Republican intent behind restrictive election laws may be nefarious, but the impact to date has been negligible.”

However, Scher concludes, “If Democrats are to make history and keep their congressional majorities, their ranks cannot be demoralized. It’s time for the Biden administration to talk straight to the Democratic base.”

Dems have no choice, but to plan and fund an exensive ‘work-around’ strategy. But major Democratic constituencies are also demanding a more energetic full-court Biden Administration press on key senators for national voting rights reforms, along with a voting rights ‘carve-out’ for filibuster reform needed to enact both bills. Such a double-pronged strategy could shore up Democratic unity, leading up to 2022.

From Donna Brazile’s “Ramp it up: It’s time for Biden and all of us to mobilize like MLK to save voting rights. Many Republicans wear flag pins and call themselves patriots. But if they support voter suppression, they are stabbing American democracy in the heart” at USA Today:

The nonpartisan Voting Rights Lab found that states have enacted at least 35 laws restricting access to voting this year, affecting mail-in voting, in-person voting, voter ID, voter registration and other voting practices. Nearly all the support for these laws comes from Republicans.

Most alarming is the effort by Republicans in some states to allow legislatures, their appointees, or other state officialsto overturn election results by claiming fraud and declaring the loser of a race the winner. If this succeeds, our elections will be as meaningless as those in North Korea, Russia, China and Iran. Election outcomes will be decided by those in power, not the people.

“It’s no longer just about who gets to vote or making it easier for eligible voters to vote. It’s about who gets to count the vote, who gets to count whether or not your vote counted at all,” Biden said Tuesday in Philadelphia. “It’s about moving from independent election administrators who worked for the people, to polarized state legislatures and partisan actors who work for political parties. To me, this is simple, this is election subversion. It’s the most dangerous threat to voting … in our history.

Brazile, former interim DNC Chair and Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign manager, adds, “Following the example of Dr. King, everyone who believes in voting rights needs to mobilize for nonviolent marches and demonstrations around the country to make it clear that Republican voter suppression, which President Biden has correctly likened to racist Jim Crow laws, is intolerable.”

Further, Brazile writes, the “only hope is if Democrats can convince Manchin and Sinema to create a “carve-out” to allow voting rights bills to pass with a simple majority in the Senate. President Biden should join with fellow Democrats to urge Manchin and Sinema to agree to this needed exemption in order to prevent Republicans from rigging future elections in their favor.”

Good suggestions all. It would also help if progressives in WV and AZ redoubled their campaigns to persuade Mancin and Sinema of the critical importance of filibuster reform for the survival of American democracy.

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

My latest at The Liberal Patriot!

“The Democrats have a plan for 2022. It’s called the Biden boom. Into that boom will be folded Democratic policy successes like the vaccine rollout, the American Rescue Plan and, possibly, a bipartisan infrastructure bill and a budget reconciliation bill providing substantial new investments in education, child care and clean energy.

This is not a crazy strategy. The Biden boom does seem to be happening….And yet…we see no evidence of any surge in the Democrats’ direction. Biden’s approval rating has been steady, but only middling good. The generic Congressional ballot has been favorable for the Democrats, but not by the kind of margin that would inspire confidence in their prospects. So we’re not as yet seeing the kind of voter movement in reaction to the Biden boom that could suggest Democrats can both overcome the traditional penalty incumbent parties typically pay in their first midterm election plus the additional thumb on the scales that Republicans will have from redistricting….

This suggests Democrats’ successes in the economic and health areas, as recounted above, will likely not be enough to tilt the playing field decisively in their favor. To do that, they will need to overcome suspicions of the party that have to do with other, more culturally-inflected concerns. This, in turn, will require the party to take some stances that the ascendant left in the party will likely oppose for ideological reasons.

Nowhere is this clearer than on the issue of crime….”

Read the whole thing at The Liberal Patriot!

At The Cook Political Report, Amy Walter shares her insights about the role of “candidate quality” in next year’s midterm elections:

Then there’s candidate quality. As ticket-splitting has decreased, the quality of the individual candidate has become less important to the outcome of a contest than the partisan make-up of the state and how the presidential candidate of his/her party performed there in the previous election. It wasn’t that long ago when a great candidate could beat a mediocre one, even when the partisan lean of the state was not in that candidate’s favor. Today, that’s become an almost impossible feat, with Senators Joe Manchin and Susan Collins as rare examples.

Even so, with the Senate divided 50-50, all it takes is one really bad candidate — or one exceptional one — to decide control of that body in 2023.

As my colleague Jessica Taylor has written, Trump is going to have a big influence on the kind of candidates who make it through the GOP primary process. Given that his choice of a candidate to promote — or denounce — is driven not by political analysis but by how loyal Trump perceives that candidate to be to him, there’s a good chance that many GOP Senate candidates will come with liabilities both known and unknown, that will make them vulnerable to defeat. Already, some strong potential candidates who have angered Trump in the past, like Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, have taken a pass on running for the Senate.

At the same time, Trump casts a smaller shadow than he did back in 2017-18 when potential candidates and incumbents decided not to run — or announced their retirement — because of how toxic they perceived the Trump brand to be in the midterm election. This year, it’s Biden, not Trump in the White House, and those candidates no longer have to answer for the unpredictable and unpopular decisions coming from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. For example, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu — a top-flight recruit for Senate Republicans — would probably have had to think twice about running in a year like 2018. If he runs in 2022, he’d instantly vault that race into one of the best pick-up opportunities for his party in the country.

At the same time, Biden’s solid — though not particularly impressive job approval ratings — also help to encourage Democratic candidates and incumbents to stick around. The fact that Democrats currently don’t have to defend any open Senate seats in 2022 is one of those small, but potentially decisive things that can make the difference between Democrats serving in the minority or the majority come 2023.

Certainly Dems would rather have more impressive candidates in 2022. Perhaps ‘candidate quality’ matters more when matched by good campaign staff quality, as was evident in the last Democratic presidential campaign.