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

Yes, I know, many of these ideas poll well when asked in a standard “here’s an idea, what do you think of it?” format. But life, politics and people are not so simple. There are many reasons to be cautious that a given program is–or will be–very popular simply from the results of few poll questions. My old comrade-in-arms Andy Levison usefully reminds of this in his new essay for the Democratic Strategist site.

With all of the bad rap Facebook and Twitter have received in recent months, should Dems use more social media to amplify their messaging? In that regard, Dems should read “Trump Knows Digital Ads Work. Why Don’t Democrats?: The party’s campaigns are ignoring obvious opportunities to engage with voters” a NYT op-ed by Kendall Collins, board member of Tech for Campaigns, which has 7,500 volunteers and played a key role in the 2017 Democratic victories in the Virginia election. Collins writes,

“President Trump may not be up for re-election until 2020, but since May 31, the Trump Make America Great Again Committee — his re-election campaign — has spent $629,500 on advertising on Google platforms alone, making it the top spender on political ads on Google platforms. That’s nearly $200,000 more than the No. 2 spender, One Nation, a right-wing organization focused on influencing Senate elections…The average nonpresidential Democratic campaign spends only 10 percent to 15 percent of its budget on digital channels while pouring 60 percent to 70 percent of its budget into television ads and direct mail. That is shocking, especially because people now spend an average of 5.9 hours online every single day, with 3.3 of those hours on mobile devices…Democrats should take a cue and double down on digital: It empowers them to reach more people with less money, engage in back-and-forth conversations with voters and test what messaging is resonating in real time. It should also prove critical in turning out a younger voting population, which often sits out midterm elections.”

Bottom line is that the influence of social media isn’t fading away, despite its many problems. For Dems, not using it more effectively would be political malpractice.

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

It’s Election Forecasting Time!

Election forecasting season is heating up with the release of 538’s spiffy new House forecasting model. For those who have not yet seen it, their standard model (they have two alternate versions) gives the Democrats a 3 in 4 chance (75.3 percent) of taking the House. The average Democratic gain is projected to be 35 seats. As a nice bonus you can look up the chances that Democrats will take any particular seat both through maps and lists.

While the 538 forecast is the new and shiny, there are several other credible models that get much the same results with less complicated methodologies. The Economist model, which has been running since late spring, gives the Democrats a 70 percent chance of taking the House. They project an average Democratic gain of 29 seats.

G. Elliott Morris’ Crosstab site has also been running a model for quite awhile. He gives Democrats a 76 percent chance of taking the House (no specific seat gain projected).

So everybody seems to singing from the same hymnal which is reassuring. It hardly needs emphasizing that these models generate probabilities not certainties and that the improbable sometimes does happen. But the agreement among models and the fairly high probabilities assigned to Democratic takeover simply reflect the fact that almost all of the data we have right now is telling a story favorable to the Democrats.

Just how favorable the story is was emphasized in some interesting remarks by Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman–as astute and careful an analyst of House elections as you can find–in an interview with Jonathan Swan of Axios:

“Dave Wasserman, the Cook Political Report’s House analyst, says the most under-covered aspect of 2018 is that “a blue wave is obscuring a red exodus.” Republican House members are retiring at a startling clip — a trend that senior White House adviser Kellyanne Conway told me earlier this year was worrying her more than any other trend affecting the midterms.

There are 43 Republican seats now without an incumbent on the ballot. That’s more than one out of every six Republicans in the House — a record in at least a century, Wasserman says.

Just in the past eight months, the number of vulnerable Republican seats has almost doubled, according to Wasserman. Democrats need to win 23 seats to claim control of the House. Today, the Cook Political Report rates 37 Republican-held seats as toss-ups or worse. At the beginning of the year, it was only 20.

Wasserman says the most important sign that 2018 will be a “wave” year — with Democrats winning control of the House — is the intensity gap between the two parties. In polls, Democrats consistently rate their interest in voting as significantly higher than Republicans. And Democrats have voted in extraordinary numbers in the special elections held the past year, despite Republicans holding on to win almost all of these races.

“There’s a bit of over-caution, perhaps, on the part of the punditocracy, after what happened in 2016,” Wasserman told Axios. “But if anything most media could be under-rating Democrats’ potential to gain a lot of seats. They could be caught being cautious in the wrong direction.”

So it looks pretty good. But it ain’t over ’til it’s over.

Timothy Egan has a New York Times column on “The Coming Green Wave,” which offers an optimistic outlook for rising environmental awareness, which is good news, particularly for Democrats. As Egan writes,

Egan notes, further, that “if just one unorganized voting segment, the 60 million bird-watchers of America, sent a unified political message this fall, you’d have a political block with more than 10 times the membership of the National Rifle Association.” Egan faults Trump for “drafting rules to make it easier for major polluters to drive up the earth’s temperature,” weakne rules protecting endangered species and “while lovers of the outdoors break visitation records at national parks and forests, Trump is removing land from protection.”

Egan believes that “144 million Americans who participated in an outdoor activity last year” and the 344 million visitors to national parks are getting ready to “flex some muscle in the upcoming midterm elections.” He notes also that,

Only one in 10 voters think Americans should use more coal. And more than 80 percent of millennials, soon to be the largest cohort of voters (if they ever turn out), believe there’s solid evidence behind these freakish manifestations of an overheated earth…hese people are now ready to “put aside our differences and stand together for the places we love,” as Tawney and Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, wrote in The Denver Post.

You will see it in Minnesota, where the 140,000 people who work in outdoor recreation are furious at Trump’s attempt to open a sulfide-ore copper mine near Boundary Waters Wilderness. You will see it in a half-dozen tossup congressional races in California, where the administration is mounting the biggest assault yet on public health, with its attack on emission rules.

Whether or not Egan’s predictions materialize in the midterm elections, there is surely a lot of room for improvement in Democratic outreach to voters who are alarmed about the environment. It may be that, with a little more effort, Democrats could win some new voters who are concerned about quickening environmental deterioration, a broad-based constituency that is bound to grow in the months and years ahead.

Egan concludes with a hopeful observation that “the silent green majority has had enough.” If there isn’t yet a “silent green majority,” Democrats should be be about the business of organizing one.

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

I often hear laments that, despite all the other things going wrong for the GOP, Trump himself has an unshakable base of support that will ultimately save him and his party.

This is a myth. Yes, Trump has a strong base of support, but it is not extraordinary and is subject to attrition among voters who have questions about him, his behavior and/or his policies. Trump has not invented a new form of politics where he is invulnerable to voter defection.

First point, his approval rating among Republicans. This is high but hardly unprecedented by historical standards. According to Politifact:

“The most recent publicly available data from Gallup’s weekly tracking poll at the time of Trump’s tweet showed him with 85 percent approval from Republicans.

So how does that 85 percent rating compare with his Republican predecessors? We looked at Gallup historical data for Republican presidents going back to Eisenhower. We looked for the closest polling data for July 29 of their second year in office (the day of Trump’s claim). We used the equivalent period after the inauguration of Gerald Ford, who unlike the others was not sworn in on Jan. 20.

So…not only did George W. Bush have a higher approval rating among Republicans, but so did Dwight Eisenhower and, arguably, George H.W. Bush.

Two other points of comparison make Trump’s achievement less impressive.

One is to compare Trump’s highest approval rating of his tenure so far — 90 percent as recently as mid-July — to the record-high rating for his predecessors through July 29 of their second year in office.

By this measure, Trump actually ties for the second-worst of any post-World War II Republican president, surpassing only Ford.

Another approach is to compare each president on the highest approval rating of their tenure. (Trump has only been in office for a year and a half, but he opened the door to this analysis by claiming the “highest poll numbers in the history of the Republican Party.”)

Once again, by this measure, Trump fares the second worst of any post-war Republican president, only surpassing Ford.

By historical standards, Trump has had “solid, but not extraordinary in-party approval,” said Kathleen Joyce Weldon, director of data operations and communications at the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University.”

Second point: Support for Trump is relatively weak among large and important groups of Republicans. According to a study by political scientists Peter K. Enns, Jonathon P. Schuldt and Adrienne Scott:

“During the first two weeks of July, we fielded a nationally representative survey of 1,379 likely voters. Conducted online and on the phone by the National Opinion Research Center, we included only respondents who reported a high likelihood of voting in this year’s midterms. The survey was funded by Cornell’s Center for the Study of Inequality.

In our survey, Trump’s approval rating was 85 percent among Republicans. That’s consistent with other polls. On the surface, the president’s support among his fellow Republicans is overwhelming.

But the key to our analysis was to divide Republicans into three groups: those who say they identify strongly with the Republican Party; those who identify as Republicans but not strongly; and those who call themselves independents but say they lean toward the Republican Party. These distinctions, often obscured in media coverage, are important because research shows that the strength of a voter’s partisan identity has an important effect on their political attitudes.

Among strong Republicans, Trump’s overall approval rating is 93 percent, with 78 percent “strongly” approving of the president. The problem for Trump, however, is that these voters make up less than half of the Republican electorate — and 18 percent of likely voters.

Among the larger number of Republicans who identify less strongly with their party, Trump is much less popular. For example, Trump’s overall approval rating among not-so-strong Republicans is 72 percent, with 38 percent saying they strongly approve. Thirty-four percent say they only “somewhat” approve of Trump. Those numbers are similar among independent-leaning Republicans.”

Third point: Not everyone who voted for Trump is very happy with him. That matters. Nate Cohn on newly-released Pew data:

“There has been little change in President Trump’s approval rating in the last 18 months, and so it’s often assumed that nothing can erode his base of support. The Pew data suggests it’s not so simple.

Yes, nearly half of Mr. Trump’s voters have exceptionally warm views toward him: 45 percent rated their feeling toward him as a 90 or higher out of 100, a figure that is virtually unchanged since his election. But a meaningful number of his voters had reservations about him in November 2016, and even more Trump voters held a neutral or negative view of him in March.

Over all, 18 percent of Mr. Trump’s voters gave him a rating of 50 or less, on a scale of 0 (coldest) to 100 (warmest), up from 13 percent in November 2016.

It is worth noting that the November 2016 Pew survey was taken after Mr. Trump won the presidency, at the height of his post-election honeymoon. But even when you consider the slightly lower ratings voters gave him in the months before the election, the big picture is the same: A modest number of Mr. Trump’s voters didn’t like him that much then, and don’t like him much now.

Women, and especially college-educated women, are the likeliest Trump voters to have serious reservations about him in 2018: A striking 14 percent of the college-educated women who voted for him hold a very cold impression of him, up from just 1 percent in November 2016.”

So don’t believe the hype. Trump’s support is plenty shakable. And it’s being shaken.

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

Buried in the latest Pew report was an extraordinary finding from their study of validated voters in the 2016 election. As you may recall, the exit polls had Trump carrying college-educated whites by 3 points. This was puzzling to many of us since polls prior to the election had been regularly showing Clinton carrying this group by 15-20 points.

Subsequent analysis from the States of Change project strongly indicated that Clinton carried white college voters in the 2016 election, not Trump. Our estimate was that Clinton won this group by around 7 points. Now we have this Pew study based on verified voters that puts Clinton’s margin over Trump among this group at 17 points. 17 points! That’s impressive and indicates that the pre-election polls were in the right ballpark on the white college grad vote and that this group may have crossed over from being a swing group to a solid Democratic one. I might add that this is entirely consistent with the polling and other data we are seeing in the run-up to the 2018 election.

Greg Sargent’s “Will the ‘Trump economy’ save the GOP? Here’s the Democratic strategy to prevent that” at The Plum Line offers some insights Democratic campaigns should consider. He cites two major challenges Dems face:

The first is the difficulty of puncturing their message about the economy through the din of press coverage of other matters, especially child separations and the Russia probe and Trump’s reaction to it. This isn’t to say that Democrats are at a disadvantage on those issues — the opposite is very likely the case — but rather that in addition to winning the argument about those things, it is also a crucial ingredient that their message about the economy get heard. “Unlike Russia and immigration, voters won’t hear about this as much in the press,” the memo concludes, “meaning Democrats must continue to carry the message in paid media and on the campaign trail.”

The second big challenge Democrats face is that it isn’t clear voters will necessarily base their choices on personal perceptions of the economy, rather than on general perceptions of it. A recent Post-Schar School poll found that 57 percent of voters rate the economy as good or excellent, including 58 percent in battleground districts.

Thus, the imperative for Democrats is to get voters to base their choice instead on their personal experience of the economy, as well as on specific Republican policies that would slash the safety net, particularly on health care (an area where Democrats are stronger). Of course, many Democrats are already trying to do this. As Margot Sanger-Katz reports, Democratic candidates around the country are stressing health care, crucially by asking audiences how many of them suffer from preexisting conditions, thus personalizing the issue, which is essential.

So when you see Democratic candidates trying to stress voters’ personal experience of the economy and the health-care system, and highlighting specific Trump/GOP policies on both fronts, this memo helps shed light on the thinking behind it.

Sargent makes an excellent point that health security is a central economic concern of millions of voters, who are understandably very nervous about the GOP’s lack of a coherent alternative, as well as Republican opposition to coverage for preexisting conditions. Democrats have been given a potent gift in the GOP’s total failure to improve the ACA, despite their House and Senate majorities and the presidency, and they should work it to brand the Republicans as incompetent, as well as elitist. Do read the rest of Sargent’s article for a thoughtful perspective on Democratic strategy in the months ahead.

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

At the Netroots Nation conference in New Orleans, there was an ostentatious lack of interest in anything remotely resembling an actual swing voter. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: “Our swing voter is not red to blue; it’s nonvoter to voter”. In other words, it’s all mobilization not persuasion, according to her and others at the conference.

That may be unwise. Henry Olsen offers some hard data from the Voter Study Group surveys (full disclosure: I was involved in the collection of these data and sit on the editorial board of the group) on the potential salience of good old-fashioned swing voters in the coming election. Olsen may overstate his case a bit but attention must be paid to the data he presents.

George Packer has the sobering read of the day in his New Yorker article, “All That’s Left Is the Vote: The midterm elections are the last obstacle to Trump’s consolidation of power—and the greatest obstacle to voting is the feeling that it doesn’t matter.” Among Packer’s observations: “The institutional clout that ended the Presidency of Richard Nixon no longer exists. The honest press, for all its success in exposing daily scandals, won’t persuade the unpersuadable or shame the shameless, while the dishonest press is Trump’s personal amplifier. The federal courts, including the Supreme Court, are rapidly becoming instruments of partisan advocacy, as reliably conservative as elected legislatures. It’s impossible to imagine the Roberts Court voting unanimously against the President, as the Burger Court, including five Republican appointees, did in forcing Nixon to turn over his tapes. (Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s nominee to succeed Anthony Kennedy, has even suggested that the decision was wrong.) Congress has readily submitted to the President’s will, as if legislation and oversight were burdens to be relinquished. And, when the independent counsel finally releases his report, it will have only the potency that the guardians of the law and the Constitution give it.” While Democrats can draw some cautious optimism from the polls, the  questions that beg for an answer include what more can be done to mobilize low-turnout, but pro-Democratic voters in the 98 days until the midterms and how can Dems win or neutralize Trump’s wobbly 2016 voters?

At vox.com, Tara Golshan notes, “A new poll from Quinnipiac University released Wednesday put O’Rourke just 6 points behind Cruz. Cruz drew the support of 49 percent of registered Texas voters; 43 percent of registered voters backed O’Rourke. The poll, which has a 3.5-point margin of error, shows the Texas Senate race tightening since an earlier poll in May when O’Rourke was 11 points behind Cruz…Another poll from Texas Lyceum, with a slightly smaller sample size, had Cruz up by just 2 points — a statistical dead heat. Cruz had the support of 36 percent of registered voters, and O’Rourke had the support of 34 percent…Put simply: It’s becoming a very real possibility that Cruz could lose reelection to a Democrat — an upset that would seriously imperil Republicans’ hold on the Senate majority. Texas has not had a Democratic senator in more than 20 years.”

Sabato’s Crystal Ball associate editor Geoffrey Skelley provides an update on the likeliest outcomes for the contest for a U.S. Senate majority: “Historical midterm results suggest that we are in for a bounce-back year for split-ticket outcomes in Senate elections as they relate to the previous presidential election. This is good news for Democrats because they are defending one of the largest number of seats on record for any party in a midterm. Conversely, the GOP has few vulnerable seats to defend but may find itself limited by the electoral environment as the presidential party. Looking back at the historical success or failure in midterm contests based on incumbency and partisan lean, we have good reason to expect only a small change to the partisan makeup of the Senate, but those shifts could slightly favor the Republicans at the end. The GOP remains favored to retain the Senate, but the fact that Democrats have any chance at all at capturing a majority speaks to the benefit of being the non-presidential party, having so many incumbents seeking reelection, and of having a relatively friendly electoral environment.”

Burgess Everett and Elana Schor take apeak “Inside Democrats’ strategy to defeat Kavanaugh” and report at Politico, “While his red-state members stall in the face of attacks from their GOP challengers, Schumer hopes to place massive pressure on moderate Republicans by raising damaging questions about Kavanaugh’s views on abortion, health care and presidential power. His top GOP targets are Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska…Schumer’s strategy starts like this: Hold his caucus in line and force Republicans to cough up 50 votes on their own…he’s counting on Manchin and a half-dozen other vulnerable Democrats to keep any hint that they might support the high court nominee to themselves.”

At New York Magazine, Ed Kilgore shares a hopeful comment in his post, “The GOP Sets Up Narrow Window for Kavanaugh Confirmation” about the problematic clock management Senate Republicans face: “As we learned with the Clarence Thomas saga, strange, unexpected developments have been known to come up during SCOTUS confirmations. Republicans have not given themselves any margin for error in the timing of their drive to place Kavanaugh on the Court, and if the process drags on until just before — or even after — the midterm elections, the political dynamics could change. Assuming Senate Republicans continue to fall into line on this critical appointment, an October Surprise may be the best hope Democrats have for derailing Kavanaugh’s nomination.”

In addition to the encourging polls of recent weeks, Nate Silver makes a couple of good points in the chatfest on “Who Are The Most Important Swing Voters In This Year’s Midterms?” at FiveThirtyEight: “So far, Democrats have gotten very good results in special elections — which consist of, you know, actual voters. And they also look pretty good, as Nathaniel said, in district-by-district polls, which are mostly conducted among likely voters rather than registered voters. Those could be signs of a turnout advantage…it’s noteworthy that Trump’s lowest approval ratings came while Republicans were trying to pass major policy initiatives such as the tax cut (successful) and their Obamacare repeal (not successful)…So I think a message framed around maintaining a check on Trump and the excesses of the Republican Congress would make sense. That’s classic midterm strategy, since midterms are all about balancing.”

New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall offers this observation about the damage horse-race reporting can do: “In a paper published in February, “Projecting Confidence: How the Probabilistic Horse Race Confuses and Demobilizes the Public,” Sean Westwood, Solomon Messing and Yphtach Lelkes of Dartmouth, Pew and the University of Pennsylvania, write: “Horse race coverage in American elections has shifted focus from late-breaking poll numbers to sophisticated meta-analytic forecasts that often emphasize candidates’ probability of victory…These improvements, in turn, “lower uncertainty about an election’s outcome, which lowers turnout under the model.” The effect, then, is that, “when one candidate is ahead, win probabilities convey substantially more confidence that she will win compared to vote share estimates. Even more importantly, we show that these impressions of probabilistic forecasts cause people not to vote in a behavioral game that simulates elections. In the context of the existing literature, the magnitude of these findings suggests that probabilistic horse race coverage can confuse and demobilize the public.”

“Two years after Russia interfered in the American presidential campaign, the nation has done little to protect itself against a renewed effort to influence voters in the coming congressional midterm elections, according to lawmakers and independent analysts…They say that voting systems are more secure against hackers, thanks to action at the federal and state levels — and that the Russians have not targeted those systems to the degree they did in 2016. But Russian efforts to manipulate U.S. voters through misleading social media postings are likely to have grown more sophisticated and harder to detect, and there is not a sufficiently strong government strategy to combat information warfare against the United States, outside experts said.” — From “As midterm elections approach, a growing concern that the nation is not protected from Russian interference” by Ellen nakashima and Craig Timberg.

But really, it’s even worse than that. As E. J. Dionne, Jr. writes in his column, “Trump is working with the trolls” at The Washington Post: “In the face of active measures by our adversaries to widen our nation’s social gulfs, one might imagine a more responsible leader trying to bring us together, to ease our anxieties about each other and to stand against endless cycles of recrimination….Instead, Trump is working in tandem with these outside trolls to aggravate resentment, stoke backlash and incite his opponents…It’s an established fact that the Kremlin and Trump were on the same side in the 2016 election. And so far, the online activity in connection with the 2018 elections — some of which has been linked to the Kremlin’s Internet Research Agency — rather consistently plays into right-wing propaganda and targets Democrats such as Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri…The online meddling has a broader objective as well: to divide our country even more sharply than it already is and to weaponize racial and ethnic divisions.”