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

Will the Democratic Majority Be Able to Work Together?

Sure there’ll be conflicts. But the question is, will they be worse or better than normal for a caucus that controls the House? I say better.

Ron Brownstein’s new Atlantic article runs down the situation in detail and agrees with this assessment.

From Greg Sargent’s “Democrats must wage war against Trump’s lies. Here’s what they can do” at The Plum Line:

When they take over the House, they can use the oversight process not just to investigate Trumpian corruption and abuses, but also to try to restore facts, empiricism and good-faith information-gathering to a place in governing processes and debates…Even if a short-term deal is reached to keep the government open, Trump will continue demanding wall money, meaning that will remain a sticking point. So restoring facts and empiricism to the debate over immigration will be particularly pressing.

First and foremost, Democrats must use their majority to restore a reality-based conversation around the topic of how secure the southern border really is…Democrats have an opening. They should formally request that the Congressional Research Service do a comprehensive report on the current state of border security. This is exactly what the CRS is for.

…“This would be quite valuable, because it would come with the imprimatur of the U.S. government,” Josh Chafetz, a law professor at Cornell who wrote a good book on how Congress can use its powers in hidden ways, told me. “Part of the goal here is to give journalists something they can report,” Chafetz noted, and CRS reports are an underappreciated resource for the public as well, given that they are particularly “reader friendly.”

Sargent points out that “CRS would likely conclude that we’ve already dramatically beefed up border security, and that this has worked, with illegal border crossings now at historically relative lows.”

Sargent adds that “Democrats can also hold hearings at which Homeland Security officials are directly asked to testify to the state of border security. As it happens, a 2017 Homeland Security report found that the border is more secure than it has ever been, which also undercuts Trump’s wall rage-fantasies.”

“Well-staged, effectively presented truths can also go viral,” concludes Sargent. “Democrats should do all they can to make that happen wherever possible and get into the fight against Trump’s war on facts and empiricism wherever they can.”

It’s about Democrats getting more pro-active about shaping news coverage. Simply assuming the media will give appropriate coverage to the realities of border security doesn’t work. Bomb-thrower Trump may be the master of political distraction. But that doesn’t mean Democrats should make it easy for him.

As a group, nonvoters also tend to be generally disengaged from public affairs and cynical about the government and their own roles in civic life. Nearly half of nonvoters in the most recent election said their personal dislike of politics played at least a minor role in their decision not to vote, according to Pew, with 44 percent saying they didn’t think their vote would make a difference and 41 percent saying that voting was inconvenient. (Nonvoters could select multiple reasons they didn’t vote.)

Three in 10 nonvoters said they weren’t registered or eligible to vote, 35 percent said they didn’t care who won the congressional elections and 22 percent said they’d forgotten to vote.

The Pew online survey, which included 10,640 adults online Nov. 7-16, (1,767 nonvoters included), is likely to be the most insightful study of why people didn’t vote in the 2018 midterm elections.

Edwards-Levy’s article includes this chart, which illustrates some of the major reasons why adults don’t vote.

PEW RESEARCH

Looking at the six reasons provided in the chart, it’s instructive to consider which of those problems can be solved with cost-efective remedies. There’s may not be much that can be done to reduce the percentages of those who say they “don’t like politics” and those who believe their vote “doesn’t matter,” outside of improved educational outreach and more educational videos on civic responsibility and voter empowerment.

The same may be true for those who “don’t care” who wins congressional elections. However, Edwards-Levy notes that “A 61 percent majority of the nonvoters said they wished they had voted, with the remaining 38 percent saying they had no regrets.” That indicates that there is room for improvement

But Democratic activists must get more engaged in projects to address the complaints about inconvenience and registration issues. Every Democratic state and local party should have a task force  to help identify and correct all such access problems. As for the 22 percent who “forgot to vote,” wherever possible, the offices of the Secretary of State should send out text messages alerting voters about registration and early voting deadlines, times and places. Dems must also escalate the fight for automatic registration in every state.

Edwards-Levy also reports that “Half of white Americans who cast a ballot in-person said they didn’t have to wait in line at all to vote, compared to 43 percent of black voters and 39 percent of Hispanic voters.” The challenge here is to figure out exactly where and when the lines were longest, and press the case for better hours, locations, parking, and more early voting.

More information about the methodology of the Pew Survey is available here.

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

Let me recommend a memo my old friend Andy Levison has written for The Democratic Strategist site. He takes aim at three myths–dangerous myths–that have taken hold in conventional interpretations of the 2018 elections. I have pushed back against each of these myths in various posts I have written since the election, but Levison does a nice job of rounding up much of the relevant data undermining these myths and putting it all in one place. I heartily endorse his conclusions.

In is article, “Should Democrats be as ruthless as Republicans when they have the chance?” at The Washington Post’s Plum Line, Paul Waldman reports that New Jersey Democrats are engaged in “attempt to push through a nakedly partisan gerrymandering plan for state legislative seats…The question is, should Democrats be as ruthless as Republicans when they have the chance, and do the same thing they’ve decried so often? It turns out to be a complicated question.”

Waldman notes that “Right now we have a situation where Republicans have been far more aggressive in using partisan gerrymandering in drawing both congressional and state legislative districts where they’re in control than Democrats have.” It’s the reality in New Jersey, but also in many other states.

Yes, Democrats have engaged in gerrymandering over the years. But in recent years they have been badly beaten at the game, owing in large part to the GOP’s REDMAP strategy, described at by David Daley, author of “Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count,” a senior fellow at FairVote:

The visionaries at the Republican State Leadership Committee, who designed the aptly-named strategy dubbed REDMAP, short for Redistricting Majority Project, managed to look far beyond the short-term horizon. They designed an audacious and revolutionary plan to wield the gerrymander as a tool to lock in conservative governance of state legislatures and Congress. It proved more effective than any Republican dared dream. Republicans held the U.S. House in 2012, despite earning 1.4 million fewer votes than Democratic congressional candidates, and won large GOP majorities in the Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and North Carolina state legislatures even when more voters backed Democrats.

REDMAP and other Republican gerrymandering and disenfranchisement projects lavishly funded by the Koch Brothers and various GOP sugar-daddies have been extraordinarily effective. And no, it wouldn’t be all that much of a stretch to cite Democratic leaders and strategists for political negligence while REDMAP was going on, although it would have been hard for Dems to match the GOP’s financial investment in gerrymandering during the last decade.

Charles Pierce put it this way at Esquire:

The Democratic Party, at both the state and national levels, was completely wrong-footed on all of this. I’m telling you, people will be studying how the Republicans did this in political science classes for the next 100 years. It’s like the Republicans were the only ones that remembered everything they’d learned in civics class.

Waldman makes the case that Democrats have to respond in kind, because, “if Republicans aren’t going to fight fair, Democrats shouldn’t either.” Further,

Look at what just happened in Wisconsin: Republicans pushed through a series of measures limiting the power of the incoming Democratic governor, Democrats raised a big stink, and today outgoing Gov. Scott Walker signed the bills. Democrats retained the moral high ground, and what do they have to show for it? Pretty much nothing.” Also,

There’s another somewhat more sophisticated argument in favor of the New Jersey legislators, one suggested by Kevin Drum: “This is the only thing that will ever get the Supreme Court off its butt to do something about gerrymandering.” In other words, it’s a bit of strategic envelope-pushing that could produce a fairer system in the end. The court has never struck down a partisan gerrymander, though it recently heard a case involving the question and put off making a decision. As long as the five conservative justices see partisan gerrymandering as something that helps Republicans almost exclusively, they’ll never strike it down.

Waldman also acknowledges that “Being principled is important even if you don’t get a lot of political gain from everyone knowing you’re the principled ones.” But he notes that “Republicans have no principles at all when it comes to representation and democracy, and they’ve paid precisely zero price because of it.” However,

But that doesn’t mean Democrats’ principles will inevitably cause their defeat. Just this year they used voter initiatives to strike down felon disenfranchisement in Florida, create independent redistricting commissions in Colorado, Michigan and Utah, and pass automatic voter registration in Maryland, Michigan and Nevada. They’re making progress, even if it isn’t easy to do so while holding on to your belief in democracy.

Thus the “When they go low, we go high” principle has real-world limitations when it comes to hand-to-hand combat for control of state legislatures. For Democrats, gerrymandering is sometimes necessary for survival and to counter-balance the GOP’s current edge in the strategy.

Yet Democrats should support establishing independent redistricting commissions, especially when the cost of doing so is fairly-shared by both parties. It will be a great day when all states have independent redistricting, and Democrats should lead the way to it.

With 100 percent of precincts reporting, Democrat John Barrow has lost his bid for Georgia Secretary of State to Republican state Rep. Brad Raffenberger by a margin of 52-48 percent. With a total 1,454,786 votes counted out of about 7 million registered voters, it appears that less than 21 percent of registered voters cast ballots in the contest. That would be an even smaller percentage of “eligible” voters who showed up and voted in the run-off.

In recent years, elections for Secretary of State have gotten more attention, in the wake of rising awareness of voter suppression, based primarilly on race, but also against Latinos and young voters. In most states, the Secretary of State supervises voting and counts the ballotts. When the office gets heavilly-politicized, as has clearly happened in Georgia, voters lose faith in the integrity of their elections.

As Ari Berman writes in Mother Jones, “Democrats flipped secretary-of-state offices in Arizona, Colorado, and Michigan in 2018. These victories will help reshape voting laws in key swing states. But given the voter suppression we saw in Georgia in 2018—and with Kemp now governor—a victory for Barrow would be the most significant of the bunch.”

Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Greg Bluestein has an insightful report on the Georgia run-off, which notes:

The suburban wave that nearly swept Democrat Stacey Abrams to Georgia’s highest office last month all but evaporated in Tuesday’s runoff for secretary of state and Public Service Commission.

Democrats only narrowly held Gwinnett County after winning it by about 15 percentage points in November’s general election. And Cobb County, the long-time Republican stronghold that Democrats easily carried four weeks ago, appeared to have flipped back to the red column.

The struggles in the close-in suburbs contributed to stinging defeats for John Barrow, a former U.S. House member running for secretary of state, and Lindy Miller, the businesswoman seeking a PSC seat. So did tepid Democratic turnout on the heels of a record-shattering race for governor.

The result was an election as polarizing as the general election – with the same conclusion: A GOP sweep.

Republican Brad Raffensperger outdid Brian Kemp’s margins in a spate of counties, from Clinch to Coweta, on his way to a 52-48 victory over Barrow. And Barrow narrowly topped Abrams’ 84 percent margin in all-important DeKalb County.

But the big margins in DeKalb and next-door Fulton weren’t nearly enough for Democrats to break the GOP grip on every statewide office.

Bluestein adds that “Raffensperger waged a low-key campaign focusing on rural Georgia,” while “Barrow tried to drive out turnout in the east Georgia district he long represented in the U.S. House. He flipped two sparsely-populated counties that voted GOP in November – Burke and Washington – but it wasn’t enough.”

“Republicans have long dominated fall general election runoffs,” notes Bluestein.  Yet, “Democrats hoped that swirl of voting rights issues that dogged the November vote would energize liberal voters still seething from Kemp’s victory and eager to prevent another Republican from overseeing state elections.” Barrow just fell short.

Democrats did flip more than a dozen state legislative districts, but Republicans still control both houses of the state legislature, along with the governorship, a majority of the U.S. House delegation and both U.S. Senators.

At ABC News, Adam Kelsey said that the runoff was “widely viewed as a referendum on allegations of voter suppression and disenfranchisement that marred Georgia’s midterm races this year.” Kelsey notes, further,

On Election Day last month, Raffensperger received 49.09 percent to Barrow’s 48.67 percent, a difference of just over 16,000 votes. Voting that night, and early voting in the weeks prior, overseen by the secretary of state’s office, featured scores of complaints across Georgia about voter registration purging and difficulties in obtaining absentee ballots and confirming their receipt and legitimacy.

Kemp, who defeated Abrams with 50.22 percent of the vote, narrowly avoiding a runoff himself, served as secretary of state until Nov. 8, two days after Election Day, leading to accusations of a conflict of interest by Abrams and others who believe his office’s efforts affected his own race. Kemp stepped aside from the position before Abrams conceded the race, as her campaign fought for a runoff by arguing for the inclusion of some additional provisional and absentee ballots.

But it was the contentious gubernatorial election that brought the office to the national spotlight. Last week, a group affiliated with Abrams brought a federal lawsuit against the interim secretary of state, Robyn Crittenden, seeking reforms that included halting voter purging practices, requiring the use of voting machines that provide paper confirmations and taking steps to reduce lines at polling places.

Kelsey adds that “Abrams said Saturday that no matter the winner, the lawsuit will proceed.” No doubt the same level of voter suppression that likely cost Abrams the election also hurt Barrow’s campaign this year. But, when the percentage of eligible voters who actually cast ballots sinks below 20 percent, Dems can’t blame it all on voter suppression. In Georgia, and in nearly all other states, voter participation is lagging badly in non-presidential election years — and it’s not all that great, even in presidential years compared to other democracies. The state and local Democratic parties and allied groups in all of the states must do a better job of mobilizing voters, if they want to put an end to widespread gerrymandering and voter suppression. If anyone has some fresh ideas about how to go about it, now would be a good time to share them.

In terms of demographics, Georgia is a good bet to become the next blue state. Abrams showed how closely divided the Georgia electorate has become. In addition, African Americans are a about a third of Georgia voters, the third highest percentage among the states after Mississippi and Louisiana. Only New York and Florida have more African Americans in the population. Latinos are about 9 percent of Georgia, but the percentage who are eligible to vote is in the low single digits. Georgia has one of the highest rates of increase of undocumented workers of all the states. In terms of generational voting patterns, Georgia has one of the lowest percentages of citizens over age 65.

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

Two interesting recommendations here. In the UK Guardian, Paul Mason emphasizes the role of emotion, inspiration and economic hope.

“The first lesson…for liberal centrism, if it wishes to survive, is that it needs an emotional narrative with an inspirational core offer. And that core offer has to be economic hope: there is nothing that says the far left has to own policies of fiscal expansion, redistribution, state aid and high wages. It’s just that the neoliberal economic textbook says they can’t be done. The “fear of the future” reported in much qualitative research on supporters of the nationalist right is, for many of them, rational. People are reacting as if scared, depressed and angry because the world created by precarious employment, poor housing and rising inequality is scary, depressing and annoying.

If you can’t answer the question: “How does life get rapidly better for me and my family?”, no amount of communicative power will help. Secondly, the centre has to make a strategic choice: to side with the left against the right. All discussions of populism that avoid that conclusion are worthless.”

Amen. On a different tack, Joan Williams on the Atlantic site focuses on the various ways educated and affluent whites tend to look down on the white working class. She includes a tendency to pooh-pooh the whole idea of economic anxiety as a driver of reactionary populism (“it’s just racism”) and a tendency to see any and all opposition to open borders as yet more racism.

She concludes her piece with a challenge to white elites. I particularly like the last line.

“With each trump-fueled outrage, people on Twitter ask whether I’m finally ready to admit that the white working class is simply racist. What my Twitter friends don’t seem to recognize is their own privilege. If elites cling to the idea that working-class whites are perpetrators of inequality, rather than both perpetrators and victims, perhaps it’s because they want to believe that they are where they are because they’ve worked hard and they’re the smartest people around. Once you start a conversation about class, elite white people have to admit they have not only racial privilege but class privilege, too.

Acknowledging this also requires elites to cede yet another advantage: the extent to which they have controlled Democrats’ priorities. Political scientists have documented the party’s shift over the past 50 years from a coalition focused on blue-collar issues to one dominated by environmentalism and other issues elites cherish.

I’m one of those activists; environmentalism and concerns related to gender, race, and sexuality define my scholarship and my identity. But the working class has been asked to endure a lot of economic pain while Democrats focus on other problems. It’s time to listen up. The only effective antidote to a populism interlaced with racism is a populism that isn’t.”

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 very important for Trump that he carry Pennsylvania again in 2020. This could be quite difficult for him, judging from recent trends in the Keystone state. An article by Paul Kane in the Post collects a lot of the reasons why and in the process makes it pretty clear what the Democrats need to do in 2020 to win the state.

“President Trump’s biggest 2016 upset took a very sharp turn this year away from Republicans.

Look at Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr.’s more than 13-percentage-point victory last month, only to be topped by Gov. Tom Wolf’s 17-point reelection win. Those Democrats torched the four suburban counties surrounding Philadelphia and Allegheny County, home to Pittsburgh and its inner suburbs, by margins never before seen.

Take Chester County, the wealthiest in Pennsylvania, due west of Philadelphia. Hillary Clinton broke through the traditional GOP stronghold in 2016, winning by 9 percentage points over Trump. Casey won there by 20 percentage points.

“You can’t attribute that just to a verdict on me,” Casey said in an interview inside his Senate office, giving Trump’s unpopularity much of the credit.

Wolf won there by 24 percentage points, actually topping Clinton’s raw vote total in Chester County from the higher-turnout 2016 race….

The broader problem was spelled out by G. Terry Madonna, who runs the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin & Marshall College, and Michael L. Young in a memo laying bare the Republican struggles:

* Democrats have won four of the past five governor’s races, each by more than 9 percentage points;

* Republicans lost 11 seats in the state House and five in the state Senate, creating the chance for Democratic majorities after 2020;

* Republicans performed even worse in down-ballot statewide contests: They have lost six straight races for state auditor, four straight for state treasurer and two straight for attorney general….

Of eight statewide races in the past three elections, Republicans won just two — Trump and Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R), both in 2016.

Two Pennsylvania Democrats, state Attorney General Joshua Shapiro and Treasurer Joseph Torsella, actually received more votes than Trump two years ago…..

Casey believes a Democratic presidential nominee, man or woman, can keep Trump’s margin down in the rural towns if they follow the Wolf-Casey approach.

“Get there physically, listen to them, show up and give a damn,” he said.

His first ad, run heavily in the western part of the state, showed coal miners talking about Casey’s legislation to help with their health benefits. A second ad showed a mother talking about the opioid epidemic in that part of the state.

Clinton devoted outsized attention to Pennsylvania, including an epic election eve rally outside Philadelphia’s Independence Hall with Bruce Springsteen, Katy Perry and the Obamas.

But her campaign focused heavily on liberal cultural issues, running ads that questioned Trump’s fitness for office. She received just 26 percent of the vote in the rural areas and small towns, according to exit polls.

Last month, Casey received 44 percent of that same region’s vote.

That came despite an ideological transformation in which he abandoned the culturally conservative views of his late father, former governor Robert Casey Sr.: The son now supports most gun-control proposals and in 2013 backed same-sex marriage.

His message for 2020 contenders is to follow that same path. The nominee will not abandon Pennsylvania’s urban or suburban voters, the new Democratic base. He or she does not need to win a majority in small rural towns, but must do better than Clinton.”

That shouldn’t be too tough.

Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith beat Democrat Mike Espy in Mississippi’s U.S. Senate run-off by a margin of 54 to 46 percent.

“Her win secures Senate Republicans a 53-seat majority for the next two years,” explains Dylan Scott at Vox. “If history is any guide, the next two years could see extreme gridlock on Capitol Hill, with even routine spending bills becoming a vicious fight between the two chambers. Senate Republicans, by holding on to the majority, will focus on what they’ve been doing for the past few months: confirming as many federal judges as possible…Now they’ll have an extra vote’s worth of wiggle room if they need to push through judicial nominees — or a Supreme Court justice — on a party-line vote.”

But, “Hyde-Smith will finish out the final two years of former Sen. Thad Cochran’s term, who retired earlier this year due to health concerns. Hyde-Smith will have to run again in 2020 to serve a full six-year term,” reports Eric Bradner at CNN Politics.

Espy did run “the state’s most competitive Democratic campaign for U.S. Senate in decades but fell short in his efforts to bring historic numbers of black voters to the polls,” note Matt Viser and David Weigel at The Washington Post. But Hyde-Smith was helped by a late injection of funds from conservative groups. Further, add Weigel and Viser,

Espy’s campaign executed its turnout strategy, running ahead of its Nov. 6 vote in nearly every county. He was on track to carry all 25 of the state’s majority-black counties, most by bigger margins than he’d won in the first round. He also cut into traditional Republican margins in some suburban counties. In DeSoto County, on the outskirts of Memphis, he improved from 34 percent in the first round to 41 percent Tuesday.

Some observations from “What Went Down In The Mississippi Senate Runoff Election,” a panel at FiveThirtyEight:

Sarah Frostenson – “…Ultimately, Espy did outperform his Nov. 6 marks, but not by enough to overcome the political landscape of a state as red as Mississippi (at least in statewide elections)…Mississippi leans about 15 points more Republicans than the country overall, according to our partisan lean metric. And Hyde-Smith is likely to end up winning by a margin in the high single digits — a sign that her campaign, which was pretty poorly run and dogged by controversies, cost her some votes. A less controversial GOP candidate likely would have won by more.”

Perry Bacon, Jr. – “The other big takeaway is the various racial controversies around Hyde-Smith probably did hurt her. A strong GOP candidate likely would have won by more. But they did not hurt her that much.”

Nathaniel Rakich – “…the Democratic overperformance might bode well for the party in next week’s runoff for Georgia secretary of state. (Laugh if you want at the obscurity of my election obsession, but it’s an important office with the power to administer elections — remember all the liberal complaints about Brian Kemp this fall?)…This should still be a single-digit race — and a solid Democratic overperformance — when all is said and done.”

Geoffrey Skelley – “Based on the turnout change in the counties that are 100 percent in, turnout as a share of the voting-eligible population might drop from 43 percent three weeks ago to about 40 percent today. That may reflect some staying power for the high-turnout midterm environment we just experienced, the ostensible competitiveness of the race and the heavy focus on the race in the media…Hyde-Smith wins, though she underperformed the GOP’s initial vote on Nov. 6, substantially in some places.”

The New York Times has list of vote totals by county, plus a county by county hover-map, which shows that the run-off’s blue counties are overwhelmingly concentrated in the western part of Mississippi.

“Mr. Espy needed a substantial turnout among black Mississippians, who made up more than a third of the voting-age population and historically sided with Democratic candidates,” notes Alan Blinder in his NYT report. “But Democrats also recognized that Mr. Espy needed to win about a quarter of the white vote.”

As Ed Kilgore concludes at New York Magazine, “Southern Democrats will continue to feel some frustration at their three strong but ultimately unsuccessful performances behind the historic statewide candidacies of African-Americans Espy, Stacey Abrams (Georgia gubernatorial nominee) and Andrew Gillum (Florida gubernatorial nominee). Political experts will intensely examine the turnout patterns in all these states to determine whether a coalition of minority and white suburban voters might revolutionize southern elections in the very near future. In the meantime, Mike Espy, who didn’t have the progressive street cred or media buzz enjoyed by Abrams and Gillum, did an admirable job of challenging the ancient race-driven status quo of Mississippi.”