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.”

The following article, by Robert Kuttner, co-editor of the American Prospect and author of Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism?, is cross-posted from HuffPo:

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

Sure Democrats Are Ahead Nationally, But How Are Democrats Doing in Competitive House Districts?

A good question; there is a veritable fire hose of national polls that test the generic Congressional ballot (where the Democrats are doing very well). But what about in the competitive districts that really count, where the race to control the House will actually be won or lost? Such polls are harder to find but Latino Decisions has just released a poll of the 61 most competitive House districts as defined by the Cook Political Report, CNN and Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball site.

As a bonus they did oversamples of individual minority groups so they could report reliable findings for those groups. The overall +13 in these districts for the Democrats looks excellent, the minority Democratic margins are solid and the anemic +7 for the Republicans among whites (roughly two-thirds of registered voters across these districts) is quite poor by contemporary GOP standards.

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

A common view these days, particularly on the left, is that swing voters have disappeared. This is comforting for those who see slogans like “Abolish ICE!” as having no real downside, since there are no persuadable swing voters out there to alienate. Just need to get those juices flowing among the Democratic base!

That would make life easier, wouldn’t it? Unfortunately, in the real world of politics, this is not remotely true. Matt Yglesias does a good job of demonstrating this in a lengthy article just published on Vox.. Some of his main points:

“Swing voters have gotten rarer over time, but there are definitely swing voters, and their decision to swing one way or the other makes a difference in politics…..The 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study conducted a large sample poll and found that 6.7 million Trump voters said they voted for Barack Obama in 2012 and 2.7 million Clinton voters said they voted for Mitt Romney in 2016. In other words, about 11 percent of Trump voters say they were Obama voters four years earlier and about 4 percent of Clinton voters say they were Romney voters four years earlier….The switchers are also important because they are not evenly distributed around the country. Obama lost whites with no college degree by a very large margin in 2012, but Clinton did even worse — especially losing the support of the kind of Northern, relatively secular noncollege whites who had not already defected from the GOP. This kind of vote is disproportionately common in the three crucial swing states that delivered Trump his Electoral College victory….

Swing voters themselves are very real, concern about alienating them with unpopular positions is valid, and nothing about Trump’s election win should be seen as debunking the basic conventional wisdom about all of this. Even more importantly, there’s relatively little reason to believe that chasing swing voters requires sharp trade-offs with other electoral strategies.

Probably the biggest fallacy in the dialogue about swing voters is the widely stated — but rarely examined — notion that a political party could try to focus on “mobilizing the base” instead of persuading swing voters.

This is, however, both a conceptual and empirical confusion. For starters, the actual base of a political party is almost by definition the people you don’t need to work on mobilizing — the party regulars who are habituated to voting and loyal to the party as an institution. The people you would want to mobilize are people you have reason to believe would vote for you if forced to vote, but who for one reason or other are disinclined to actually show up…..

There’s nothing wrong with taking a stand on something you think is important, even if it’s unpopular — though a wise candidate might prefer to emphasize her popular views and reduce the salience of her less popular ones. But whatever it is that causes people to vote, the important point is that swing voters really do exist. A small but incredibly important group of Americans regularly switch their partisan allegiances, and many people are willing to vote differently down-ballot from how they vote in presidential races.

Appealing to these swing voters isn’t the only way to win elections, but it’s a pretty good strategy, and there’s no reason to believe that using it involves a hard trade-off with trying to mobilize marginal voters or anything else.”

Read more…

The following article by Michel Tomasky, editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, is cross-posted from The Daily Beast:

New developments on the #demsindisarray front as The New York Times ran a long story over the weekend under the dramatic headline “Democrats Brace as Storm Brews Far to Their Left… Fiercely Liberal Voices… Young Voters Urge Party to ‘Wake Up and Pay Attention.’”

“Storm”? “Far” to their left? I’d like to interview that headline writer. Also, “brace,” for that matter, because the article itself doesn’t really quote anybody doing any bracing, in the sense of preparing themselves for arduous battle. It quotes a couple people—Martin O’Malley, oddly, and the state party chairman in Michigan—reminding Times readers that the party still has moderate voices, and voters, too. But it doesn’t have anyone screaming to the heavens that this is suicide.

And it doesn’t have anyone screaming that because I don’t think many people really think that. Democrats disagree, and in some cases strongly, on how far left they believe the party ought to go, but the ones I talk to accept that this is happening and understand why it’s happening.

The Times article refers mostly to young people, and it’s mostly young people who are pulling the party left. And it’s easy to see why. If you’re 27 and not right wing or rich or both, you’ve grown up in a country that in most fundamental ways has gotten worse and worse since you were of an age to start paying attention to things. Inequality is worse. Opportunity is worse. Wage growth is worse. Benefit structures are worse. Job stability is far worse. If you live in a small town, your town is probably dying, and half the people you know are on drugs.

If you’re around that age and you call yourself a socialist, well, who can blame you? The capitalism that we’ve been practicing in this country for certainly the last 18 years has failed everyone except the top 10 or so percent. Barack Obama softened some of this around the edges, and with Obamacare, he did more than that. But for most people—for eight or nine out of 10 Americans—our right-wing version of capitalism has narrowed their opportunities instead of expanding them. It’s been a criminal failure (in some cases literally, even though Obama chose not to prosecute anybody).

So I think everybody understands why this is happening. And I don’t think I know a single Democrat who believes ’90s-style centrism is the answer. It’s not. Even the centrists are moving left.

Read more…

The following article by Stan Greenberg, Greenberg Research, Page Gardner, Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund and Nancy Zdunkewicz, Democracy Corps, is cross-posted from democracycorps.com

Pundits built a new conventional wisdom that included higher job approval ratings for President Donald Trump due to the tax cuts and strong economy that could shrink the enthusiasm ad- vantage and midterm vote for Democrats. But they are wrong about the political trends, the econ- omy, and what motivates Democrats. They miss how the GOP strategy branded Trump and the GOP as only out for themselves and the rich.

This is according to the second of three waves of WVWVAF’s battleground research program conducted by Democracy Corps. This program consists of phone polling among registered voters and an on-going web-panel of 1,813 target voters – the Rising American Electorate of minorities, millennials, and unmarried women, plus white working class women – in 12 states with competi- tive races for governor, Senate, and Congress, including 42 Cook competitive seats.1 The same web-panel respondents were interviewed in April and late June, so these reported trends we know to be true.

Here are the key findings:

• The off-year trends that favor Democrats have solidified and grown. In fact, Trump’s base strategy is pushing up Democrats and anti-Trump voters’ intention to vote in this off-year and is widening the enthusiasm gap.
• Over the past three months, a nationalized Democratic advantage has emerged across the Senate, congressional and governors’ battlegrounds as Democrats have made gains in the Cook battleground districts and in the governors’ races.1
• Despite perceptions of a strong macro-economy, Donald Trump’s poor job approval rat- ings barely budged from April; nor did the intense disapproval of his presidency dimin- ish, thereby fueling and sustaining the enthusiasm gap between Democrats and Republi- cans.
• Trump and the GOP have a strategy, but it is not working: they did not make gains on handling taxes, the economy or immigration.
• Pundits are missing how frustrated ordinary citizens are with politicians who put govern- ment to work for their big donors and corporations, and don’t get how much ordinary people are struggling with wages that don’t keep up with higher costs, health care above all.
• The passage of the Republicans’ tax scam for the rich has created a shared brand for Trump and the GOP as out for themselves and the rich.
• Yes, voters know there are more jobs and they are feeling more financially secure, but that has nothing to do with their wages and the cost of living. Two-thirds of the base say the growing economy is not helping them and a big majority says wages aren’t keeping up with rising costs. Dominating their economic pain are health care costs.
• When asked what issues are impacting their vote, Democrats and the Rising American Electorate point first to the cost of health care, followed by guns.
• Democrats have powerful messages that drive higher turnout. Each begins with attacks on corrupt work for wealthy donors and corporations, highlights the corrupt tax deal for corporations and accuses Trump and the GOP of governing for the rich and themselves while voters struggle. The voters know which politicians are in charge and who they are working for, and they reward Democrats who embrace these messages.
• The strongest Democratic message platform: politicians in Washington divide the country so they can cut corrupt deals for big donors, corporations, and themselves which hurt working people and the middle class. The reckless increase in the deficit means less in- vestment, less help with health care, and puts Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid at risk.
• A millennial-directed message on this platform has real power and drives up turnout among Democratic voters.

(On behalf of Women’s Voices. Women Vote Action Fund, Democracy Corps conducted the second in a series of three phone surveys with accompanying web-surveys among an on-going panel of minorities, millennials, unmarried women and white non-college educated women (the RAE+) in 12 states with Governor races (10 Senate race states): Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Wisconsin. The phone survey of 1,000 registered voters with 66 percent cell-rate was conducted June 11-14, 2018. The voter-file matched web-panel of 1,813 “RAE+” registered voters was conducted June 13-28, 2018.)

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