The more we look at Joe Biden’s job approval ratings, the more it looks like the continuation of a pattern, as I explained at New York:

One of the regular themes of poll watchers during the Trump presidency was the remarkable stability of this very unstable man’s job-approval ratings compared with every available precedent. Two days after he left office, an NBC News analysis put it all into perspective:

“Former President Donald Trump’s time in office is over. He’s been impeached twice and banned from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. But if his presidency was a roller coaster, his approval ratings were not.

“Trump left office with steadier approval ratings than his most recent predecessors, an analysis of NBC News/Wall Street Journal polling data from January 1993 to this January shows. Trump’s approval rating remained within the same 9-point range for his entire presidency: 47 percent at its highest in October 2018, and 38 percent at its lowest in October 2017.”

Barack Obama, by contrast, had a 21-point “band” of approval ratings, which in turn was vastly less volatile than George W. Bush’s 62-point variation between highest and lowest ratings. Trump’s numbers were so uncannily consistent that every time we all wondered if they were finally about to change for better or for worse, instead they lapsed back into moderately underwater territory. It adds to the weirdness that this politician — who was elected president in 2016 despite a terrible favorability ratio (significantly exceeding in disfavor his unpopular opponent) — came very close to winning a second term despite never posting a net-positive job-approval rating in the polling averages.

Now we are five months into the Biden presidency, and guess what? The new president’s job approval ratings, while higher than Trump’s, are also very — in fact, historically — stable, as Harry Enten observes:

“A lot has happened since Biden took office: We’ve seen a failed impeachment trial, a major economic and coronavirus relief package signed into law and the continuation of a mass vaccination campaign leading to more than 60% of adults with at least one a Covid-19 shot nationwide.

“All of this has happened — and the national political environment has remained stagnant. It’s almost as if no event seems to really change public opinion.”

Biden’s approval rating today is pretty much the same as it was a month ago (54%). It’s the exact same as it was at the beginning of his presidency (53%). Any movements can be ascribed to statistical noise.

Some of us (myself included) have wondered if the contrast between the fairly dramatic real-world developments that occurred early in Biden’s presidency and his virtually unchanging approval ratings reflected his deliberately low-profile approach to governing. But it was pretty hard to ignore the fact that partisan polarization best explained the actual numbers, as I noted last month:

“The most striking thing about Biden’s approval ratings is the degree of partisan polarization. It’s off the charts, according to Gallup data. When I wrote about this a couple of months ago, the partisan gap in Biden job approval was a record 87 percent (98 percent approval among Democrats, 11 percent among Republicans). The March Gallup numbers put the gap at 86 percent (94 percent approval among Democrats, and 8 percent among Republicans). These are more extreme splits than we saw under the exceptionally polarizing Trump, and they make the partisan atmosphere under George W. Bush and Barack Obama look like Edens of consensus.”

At some point, you wind up wondering with Enten if no event seems to really change public opinion. That would suggest that Americans have become so tribal in their partisan preferences that neither the turbulent Trump nor the placid Biden — nor anything either of them is doing or undoing — can shake people out of their allegiances. Indeed, I expressed a similar suspicion back in 2019 that wound up predicting the outcome of the 2020 race more than any of my election forecasting:

“My guess is that the narrow band of favorability and job approval numbers for Trump is just another testament to the partisan polarization that made it possible for him to win in 2016, despite his unpopularity. He cannot fall too far, even when he’s behaving in his signature beastly manner, because Republicans will sustain him …

“There are circumstances under which he can transcend his many handicaps by demonizing his opponent, revving up the MAGA people, and taking advantage of an Electoral College system which does not weigh popular votes equally.”

The events of January 6 finally created a bit of a drop in Trump’s popularity among Republicans, but he seems to have quickly recovered that ground and reestablished himself as the boss of his party at both the rank-and-file and elite levels. What matters most, in the long run, is not whether Republicans remain loyal to Trump personally, but whether the partisanship and extremism he represents remain politically cost-free to those emulating his example. There’s abundant evidence it is.

So the temptation for today’s and tomorrow’s Republicans is to let no demagogic opportunity to “energize the base” go unexploited in order to goose partisan turnout the way Trump clearly did. The natural anti–White House trend in midterm elections, reinforced by the Republican advantage in redistricting, is extremely likely to award the GOP with control of the U.S. House in 2022, and with more than its share of battleground state victories in gubernatorial, secretary of state, and legislative contests, leaving the party in good shape for a 2024 comeback with or without Trump as the vengeful candidate of a militant and happily extremist MAGA base.

There are still some swing voters out there to be captured. But as both the 2016 and 2020 Trump campaigns illustrated, a strategy of demonizing the opposition can simultaneously energize the base and sway the undecided with a lesser-of-two-evils appeal.

There are obviously reciprocal lessens for Democrats in this tale. Any fears that pursuit of a too-ambitious agenda by Biden and congressional Democrats will hurt the party in 2022 are probably misplaced; Democrats are likely to lose some ground in the midterms with either a timid or an audacious governing strategy, so they might as well get as much done as possible. And, ironically, the fact that Joe Biden the Fighting Liberal has the same exact level of popularity as Joe Biden the determined bipartisan centrist may show that a more progressive successor would do just fine, or perhaps better, if she or he could mobilize the Democratic base more effectively.

It appears more and more likely that America is in a perilous moment at which the zeal of our two warring tribes matters more in determining the nation’s fate than the identity of its leaders or even the consequences of their policies. That’s not the “new normal” of the Biden presidency most observers had in mind, but it explains a lot.

At FiveThirtyEight, Geoffrey Skelley writes, “Despite the importance of COVID-19 to voters, Biden’s overall job approval rating has never come close to his approval rating for dealing with the pandemic, which suggests that some segments of the public approve of his work on the coronavirus but not of his job performance in the aggregate….Biden’s topline rating sits at about 55 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight’s approval tracker,² about 8 percentage points lower than his approval on handling the coronavirus. And that gap has mostly widened since February….Biden is getting some credit for his response to the coronavirus pandemic, and if those good marks last, that could help Democrats in the 2022 midterms. Partisanship notwithstanding, handling a big issue well in the eyes of most voters still helps. It helps in terms of overall popularity and electorally. But the effect is greatly muted — by partisanship and by other issues.” There we have it, Democrats. The message for the last month leading up to the 2022 midterm elections should be that Democrats under Biden’s leadership did a remarkable job of cleaning up the Republican Covid-19 mess. Hit it every day, and hit it hard. Put as a question to the electorate,” Do you really want to return leadership control of congress to the party that has proved its ineptitude by mismanaging the worst public health crisis in a hundred years, and gotten hundreds of thousands of Americans killed?” It wouldn’t be a bad idea for Democrats to commission a 1/2 hour film that drives home the point: It’s less about the individual candidates, than which party is best for your family in light of America’s experience with the pandemic tragedy.

That’s not to say all of the other issues should be ignored. For example, Democrats should also remind the voting public that Republicans showed their cowardice, lack of respect for law and police, and indeed, Democracy itself, in supporting the January 6th riot in the U.S. capitol. Work the hell out of  video footage of violent thugs in the red hats, Confederate and Nazi regalia. Make Sens. Hawley, Groveling Graham and Cancun Cruz poster boys for the G.O.P., even though none of them are up for re-election in 2022. Show video of Republican candidates who are running in swing districts squirming when asked about their views of the 2006 riot. Gladys Sicknick, mother of officer Brian Sicknick, who died because of the riot, recently put it in terms Dems should emulate. As Melanie Zanona and Nicholas Wu report at Politico,  “Not having a January 6 Commission to look into exactly what occurred is a slap in the faces of all the officers who did their jobs that day,” Gladys Sicknick said in a statement provided to POLITICO. “I suggest that all Congressmen and Senators who are against this Bill visit my son’s grave in Arlington National Cemetery and, while there, think about what their hurtful decisions will do to those officers who will be there for them going forward….Putting politics aside, wouldn’t they want to know the truth of what happened on January 6? If not, they do not deserve to have the jobs they were elected to do,” she added.”

NYT columnist Thomas B. Edsall probes the political ramifications of “wokeness” and shares a couple of salient observations, including this from TDS editor Ed Kilgore: “In a piece in New York magazine, “Is ‘Anti-Wokeness’ the New Ideology of the Republican Party?” Ed Kilgore makes the case that for Republicans Casting a really wide range of ideas and policies as too woke and anyone who is critical of them as being canceled by out-of-control liberals is becoming an important strategy and tool on the right — in fact, this cancel culture/woke discourse could become the organizing idea of the post-Trump-presidency Republican Party. This approach is particularly attractive to conservative politicians and strategists, Kilgore continued, because It allows them and their supporters to pose as innocent victims of persecution rather than as aggressive culture warriors seeking to defend their privileges and reverse social change.” Edsall also quotes NYU social psychologist Jonathan Haidt: “Wokeness is kryptonite for the Democrats. Most people hate it, other than the progressive activists. If you just look at Americans’ policy preferences, Dems should be winning big majorities. But we have strong negative partisanship, and when people are faced with a party that seems to want to defund the police and rename schools, rather than open them, all while crime is rising and kids’ welfare is falling, the left flank of the party is just so easy for Republicans to run against.”

Amid all of the hand-wringing about the tough political landscape Dems will face in the 2022 mideterms, Kyle Kondik and J. Miles Coleman limn “a silver lining for Democrats” at Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “Last week’s Crystal Ball, which featured hypothetical ratings of the House that did not take looming redistricting into account, painted a relatively bleak picture for Democrats. We rated 19 Democratic seats as Toss-ups if no district lines changed, and just two Republican ones. Republicans need to net just five additional seats to win the House next year….However, there is at least one reason to think Democrats could be able to limit their losses next year or even hold on to the majority: The Democrats are not that overextended into hostile, Republican territory….Part of the reason why Democrats are not very overextended is that they only won 222 House seats in 2020. Democrats won 257 in 2008, and Republicans won 241 in 2016. The bigger your majority, the likelier it is that you are cutting into unfavorable turf. As such, Democrats don’t hold a lot of Trump-won territory, which could insulate them from significant losses if the political environment cooperates to at least some degree.” However, Kondik continues, “There’s one major caveat here: These numbers will change because of redistricting. Some current Democrats in Biden-won seats may find themselves in Trump-won seats, or vice versa, next year. It may also be that some current crossover district members might find themselves no longer in crossover seats, as friendly map-drawers alter their districts in ways that help them win reelection.”

At The Atlantic, Ronald Brownstein explains why the Asian American vote could be pivotal for Democratic victories in the 2022 midterms and 2024 presidential elections:

Even amid soaring participation from all major racial groups, Asian Americans increased their turnout by more than any other cohort, according to recently released studies by the Census Bureau and Catalist, a Democratic voter-targeting firm. In fact, no major demographic group in recent decades has increased its turnout from one election to the next as much as Asian Americans did from 2016 to 2020, the census found; not even Black voters grew that much from 2004 through to Barack Obama’s first election four years later.

Why the surge? It reflected both long-term investments from grassroots groups in organizing and the immediate threat that many Asian Americans felt from former President Donald Trump—including his policies to slash legal immigration and his racist labeling of the coronavirus as the “China virus” and even “kung flu.” Although Republicans retain pockets of strength in Asian communities, the party now faces the prospect that Trump’s words—and the link many experts see between them and the rising wave of anti-Asian hate crimes—could lastingly alienate many of the thousands of Asian Americans who voted for the first time last year.

“It’s become a defining moment for the Asian American community,” says Karthick Ramakrishnan, a political scientist at UC Riverside who studies Asian American political influence. “What you saw in 2020 was a forging of political consciousness among the younger generation that could carry [Democrats] through for years, if not decades, to come.”

Brownstein notes that “Asian Americans still represent a small sliver of the population in all but a few states. But census figures show that from 2010 to 2019, the group grew rapidly, increasing its population nationwide by nearly 30 percent, or just over 5 million people. In percentage terms, that was by far the biggest increase over the past decade for any major racial group. Among adult citizens eligible to vote, Asian Americans have doubled their share, from 2.5 percent in 2000 to 5 percent in 2020, according to calculations by William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program.”

And Asian American voters are showing some clout in unexpected places:

The states with the largest populations of eligible Asian American and Pacific Islander voters, Hawaii and California, are safely blue. But the groups’ numbers have also increased in Sun Belt states that are becoming tipping points in American elections. “Think about where we are growing the fastest: It’s Texas, it’s Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, Nevada,”  AAPI Victory Alliance Executive Director Varun Nikore told me.

The Asian American population isn’t nearly large enough to decide those states on its own. Although Asian Americans represent almost 9 percent of eligible voters in Nevada, they represent only about 3 percent in Georgia, Arizona, and North Carolina, Frey shared with me. Yet the rise in voter participation has proved crucial for Democrats in several closely balanced states. A growing number of Asian American voters—mostly in the Washington, D.C., suburbs—were central to tilting Virginia blue over roughly the past 15 years. They played a comparable tipping-point role in Democrats’ victories in Georgia last year, at both the presidential and senatorial level. TargetSmart, a Democratic voter-targeting firm, calculates that some 60,000 more Asian Americans voted in the state in November than had in 2016—an increase that far exceeded Joe Biden’s narrow margin of victory there… “

And the turnout trendlines are in the right direction for Democrats. As Brownstein notes, “Nationwide, Asian Americans increased their turnout at an astounding pace last year—soaring from about 49 percent in 2016 to just over 59 percent, the census found…. In its recently released analysis of voter files nationwide, Catalist calculated that the total number of votes cast by Asian Americans grew from 2016 to 2020 by almost 40 percent, reaching about 7 million. TargetSmart, in its analysis, put the increase even higher, at about 47 percent.”

In a close race – national or local – any smaller demographic group can be decisive. It appears that Republicans have blown whatever hopes they had for gaining traction with Asian American voters, and that’s a good thing for Democrats, who now have even reasons for insuring that GOTV programs for them are well-funded.

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

Right Now, You Should Be Asking Yourself: What Can I Do to Help Insulate Democrats in Competitive Districts from Blowback?

No, not even an economic revival, covid containment and some good legislation can guarantee, or even make it likely, that Democratic control of the House can survive the next election. Far from it. Democrats need not just a good record to run on but all the help they can get defusing the now predictable lines of attack that the GOP will wield. Sure, Republicans will make these attacks anyway. But the less real world referents for these attacks they have, the better off the Democrats will be.

Message discipline comrades, message discipline. All elections are now national! Kyle Kondik at Sabato’s Crystal Ball runs down just how dicey the situation is for the Democrats in the House.

“Every state with more than one U.S. House district will be redrawing their district lines this cycle to account for population changes, and that process is on hold because of delays in the U.S. Census. The Census Bureau won’t be releasing the granular data states need to draw new maps until later this year. While some states are trying to get a head start — Oklahoma, for instance, drew new state legislative districts using older data — we likely will not get a good handle on what new maps will look like until the fall. Among those delayed by the stalled census is us: We have not released House ratings yet as we await the new districts.

On balance, we expect the reapportionment of House seats — which we analyzed late last month — to benefit Republicans to a small extent. Redistricting seems likely to also help Republicans. Given that the Democrats only won a 222-213 edge in the House last year, Republicans only need to net five seats to win the House. That kind of small gain could come from reapportionment and redistricting alone.

This doesn’t even take into account the usual advantages that the party that does not control the White House typically has in midterm House elections: Since the end of World War II, the average seat loss by the presidential party in midterms is 27 seats. In those 19 midterm elections, the presidential party has lost seats 17 times. The exceptions were 1998 and 2002, when the president’s party made small gains.

House Democrats are facing twin challenges next year: The overall consequences of reapportionment and redistricting, as well as midterm history. The combination of the two will be difficult for Democrats to overcome. But what if they only had to overcome one of these challenges? What if no district lines were changing? Could Democrats hold the House under the current map?….

The larger point of this exercise is that we would start many more Democratic-held seats as Toss-ups than Republican-held ones even if no district lines were changing.

Overall, these ratings show 211 districts at least leaning to the Republicans, 203 at least leaning to the Democrats, and 21 Toss-ups (19 held by Democrats, two held by Republicans). Splitting the Toss-ups roughly down the middle — let’s say 11-10 Republican — would result in a 222-213 Republican majority, good for a nine-seat Republican net gain and a narrow majority the same size as the one Democrats elected in November.

In other words, Republicans already appear set up to significantly threaten the Democratic House majority, and the net impact of reapportionment and redistricting may make their task easier. Republicans are not guaranteed to win the House next year, but the majority is clearly there for the taking.”

This may not be what people want to hear. But it is the reality we live in. Act accordingly.

Charlie Cook notes at The Cook Political Report: “This column last week analyzed an April NBC News national poll conducted by Hart Research and Public Opinion Strategies—top Democratic and Republican survey firms, respectively. The data showed that, since an October poll that the two firms conducted for NBC and The Wall Street Journal, the share of Republicans who identify themselves as more loyal to Trump than to the party had declined from 54 percent to 44 percent; meanwhile, the share of those professing more loyalty to the party than to the personality had increased from 38 percent to 50 percent. Equally importantly, among those who continue to be more loyal to Trump than to the party, the share who rated their feelings for him as “very positive” declined from 91 to 75 percent, reflecting a shift toward somewhat positive or neutral feelings rather than negative. The share among those more loyal to the party than to Trump who still saw him very positively declined from 50 percent to just 31 percent, again shifting more to neutral and, to a lesser extent, to somewhat negative….Sifting through a mountain of recent data measuring the intensity of Republicans’ feelings toward Trump drew me to Economist/YouGov polling (not one of my favorite surveys, but they do ask the question I was looking for more regularly than any other). Among all Republicans and GOP-leaning independents, the share rating him “very favorable” through dozens of polls last year normally landed in the mid-60s to mid-70s, reaching as high as 78 percent. Since late February, however, that number landed in the 50s in seven out of eight polls—with the lowest at 55 percent and the highest at 61 percent. The share of Republicans viewing him negatively increased only a little; the shift was primarily from very favorable to somewhat favorable….The decline of GOP enthusiasm and intensity for Trump, even while Republicans have not totally turned against him, suggests that he is increasingly seen as a quirky personality—a flawed vehicle for a powerful message that is showing no signs of abatement—and that a post-Trump Trumpism is on the horizon….I suspect you will see a party that embraced much of what Trump said but will be looking for a less-flawed candidate to push that agenda, something that Democrats might not want to see. Most Republicans, and even many of Trump’s backers, acknowledge that he was often his own worst enemy….That does not mean that the GOP is going back to what it was. It’s more likely to just go with someone new.”

The Guardian has a reader’s forum on “what do the terms ‘working class’ and ‘middle class’ actually mean?” Some of the responses reference the U.K.’s unique class consciousness; others are more brqodly applicable: “The best description I heard: the middle class shower before work, the working class shower after work. SeedAgnew“….When I see the labels working and middle class in articles, I know it means that we are usually being misled. We are too complicated, too nuanced to be pigeonholed so conveniently. That there is a ruling elite is undeniable, the rest of us are just arguing over the crumbs. WeallneedThneads….Many years ago now, it was notes and queries that provided my favourite definitions of these terms: upper class: your name on the building; middle class: your name on your desk; working class: your name on your uniform. NonDairyCanary….My (working class) husband says whether you have white pepper at home (working class) or black pepper (other) is the dividing line. This was news to me! areyoutheremoriarty….The working class worry about paying for dinner, the middle class worry about paying for the kitchen. HaveYouFedTheFish….Since you asked about coffee: working class pour the coffee; middle class drink the coffee; upper class own the plantation. Teemytooks….Jobs, wealth etc are no longer relevant to the distinction. The closest I can come is that middle class means coming from a background/family home where getting a higher education is the default expectation. HairApparent.”

The Guardian continues, “You’re working class if you get paid weekly, typically in cash. You’re middle class if you get paid monthly, as a salaried employee with benefits and a pension. This simple definition holds true over the decades as people overall, including the working class, get wealthier. You’re working poor if you’re working class but can’t ever seem to save any money for a rainy day or a holiday. MaxineMQ….I was told that working-class people keep their ketchup in the fridge, the middle classes in the larder and the upper classes don’t even know what ketchup is. beckiboo….The defining characteristic of being middle class is the presence of a safety net. You can be a middle-class bin man or van driver if you have friends or family who can help you out when things go wrong or you can be a working-class doctor or lawyer if you have no one behind you to catch you when you fall. The upper class live above a permanent safety net. Losing a job or a failed business makes no difference to your life outcome. The trust fund sees to that. Emma Rhodes….Educational status, job, where you live … all these things matter, but I think what matters most in the 21st century is a group in society defined by Paul Mason and others as the “precariat”. The key question is: if you lose your main source of earned income, are you three months or less away from destitution? If the answer is yes, you are a member of the 21st-century working class. If the answer is no, because you have savings, assets or other resources to fall back upon, you are middle class. James Atkinson.”

At FiveThirtyEight, Dhrumil Mehta shares this guide for assessing the quality of political opinion polls:

Press reports of an official 2020 post-mortem by Georgia Republicans show how subscription to Trump’s lies enables a full whitewashing of what happened, and I wrote about it at New York.

Want a succinct illustration of the delusional nature of the Republican Party’s Trumpian reaction to the 2020 election cycle that lost them control of the White House and both houses of Congress? Check out the Georgia GOP’s official “2020-2021 After Action Report,” released recently by David Shafer, the state party chairman. Here’s the key claim:

“We completely retooled the Georgia Republican Party in 2020. We raised record amounts of money, recruited record numbers of volunteers and knocked on record numbers of doors. We turned out 372,733 more Republican votes in 2020 than in 2016 when Donald Trump won Georgia and 483,429 more votes than in 2018 when Brian Kemp was elected governor.”

So where’s the snake in this Garden of Eden? That’s easy:

“[I]n the top races, even this massive increase in Republican turnout was unable to overcome an electoral system rendered defenseless by foolish legal settlements and feckless ’emergency’ rules. The Georgia Republican Party, on three separate occasions, sued the Secretary of State to force him to obey the law and do his job [emphasis in the original].”

That would be the elected Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who spurned the Trump campaign’s incoherent blustering about “foolish legal settlements” (a consent decree that simply confirmed existing signature-authentication procedures for mail ballots) and “feckless emergency rules” (the mailing of absentee-ballot applications to registered voters), and also declined to obey Trump’s personal instruction to “find” enough missing or erroneous ballots to overturn Biden’s certified victory in Georgia.

The attribution of every defeat to Raffensperger usefully (if “fecklessly”) allowed Shafer to take a victory lap over an election cycle in which the Georgia GOP (a) lost the presidential race for the first time in 28 years); (b) lost not one but two U.S. Senate seats — the first Senate losses in Georgia for Republicans since sorta-Democrat Zell Miller’s win in 2000 — thereby giving Democrats control of the Senate and a governing trifecta, a development with enormous consequences; and (c) the loss of a long-Republican U.S. House seat for the second consecutive election year. Even if you buy half of the ludicrous “fraud” allegations that every judge in the state contemptuously rejected, this was a bad election cycle for the Georgia Republican Party, leading to a panic-stricken effort to restrict voting opportunities in hopes of bringing back the Peach State electorate of yore. So it’s not very smart to paper over the setbacks and pretend that once Raffensperger is purged (a task Georgia Republicans with Trump’s encouragement are well on their way to executing) everything will be hunky-dory for the GOP, as Greg Bluestein suggested in his analysis of the After Action Report:

“Typically, political parties use setbacks as a chance to learn from their mistakes, try out new messaging and offer advice for a future generation of candidates on how to wage a winning campaign in the next election cycle. But there was no introspection or soul-searching in the Georgia GOP’s high-gloss ‘After Action Report,’ even in a year following Joe Biden’s narrow victory in the state in November’s presidential election and the Democratic sweep of U.S. Senate runoffs in January. The publication distributed by the state party at district meetings across the state over the weekend, and obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, read as a manifesto about what the party did right.”

On the other hand, a political party that is willing to treat every defeat as a purloined victory has no particular incentive to fix anything. If, say, Republicans lose the governorship to a likely Stacey Abrams candidacy in 2022, it will be the easiest thing in the world to blame it on the imaginary “voter fraud” they are already inclined to accuse Abrams in particular and Democrats in general of fomenting. After all, it won’t be their fault, and in 2024, Donald Trump will come to the rescue of the GOP and of the America he once made great. It’s a closed feedback loop of unassailable strength and shocking mendacity.

At Daily Kos, Aldous J. Pennyfarthing notes a new poll Democrats will find concerning, and comments:

Millions of people just live their lives, blissfully ignorant of the minutiae that go into spending bills meant to benefit them directly. They got their Biden Bucks, but they don’t necessarily know whom to credit.

To wit: $300 monthly child tax credits will start landing in people’s bank accounts in July, and most people have already gotten their $1,400 stimulus payments. While this much-needed relief is the work of Joe Biden and congressional Democrats (exclusively Democrats, in fact), not everyone in rural America has grokked what the Democratic Party has done for them.

Pennyfarthing quotes from a Washington Post report on the poll:

The poll, which was conducted by YouGov for Rural Objective PAC, finds that only 50 percent of those rural voters associate “providing stimulus checks directly to families and workers” with the Democratic Party.

Meanwhile, 32 percent of those rural voters associate this with the GOP, and another 11 percent associate it with neither party. That’s a total of 43 percent who don’t associate it with Democrats.

“We’re not connecting with these voters, even if we have great policy,” J.D. Scholten, executive director of Rural Objective PAC, told the Post.

After the U.S. Supreme Court finally decided to deal with Mississippi’s sharply restrictive new abortion law, I wrote about the possible implications at New York:

After months of mysterious uncertainty, the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to review a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade presented by a ban on abortions prior to 15 weeks of pregnancy, as enacted by the State of Mississippi. And the Court left no ambiguity about its willingness to get back to the basics of the constitutional law governing abortion by limiting its review to the question of “whether all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional.” That’s the question that was answered affirmatively in 1973 in Roe and again in 1992 in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the two Supreme Court precedents that have restrained eager Republican-controlled state legislatures and an increasingly conservative federal judiciary from eroding or abolishing reproductive rights.

Oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization will occur in the next Court term this fall, which means a decision is likely in the spring or early summer of 2022. The early betting is that the six justices placed on the Court by the strongly anti-abortion presidents George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump will finally take the leap to seriously revise, if not reverse, a woman’s right to choose abortion prior to fetal viability. The chronically pessimistic progressive legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern may be right this time around:

“This action suggests that the conservative majority is no longer interested in gradually eroding abortion rights until they are, in reality, nonexistent. This strategy has guided the anti-abortion movement for decades. It has resulted in laws that shutter abortion clinics under a bogus pretext, compel doctors to read anti-abortion propaganda, force women to undergo ultrasounds and waiting periods, and forbid abortions for specific reasons, like fetal disability. After the confirmations of Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, the conventional wisdom dictated that the Supreme Court would begin to uphold these laws, chipping away at Roe until it became a hollow promise. But the new conservative majority is not waiting for these half-measures to reach the court; with Dobbs, it has gone for the jugular. Roe itself is on the table.”

Under this reading, the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett flipped a Court that, as recently as 2020, was willing to invalidate a Louisiana law restricting access to abortion clinics on the grounds that it violated Casey’s standard prohibiting laws that placed an “undue burden” on women choosing pre-viability abortions. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch are almost certain votes to abandon Roe and Casey, while Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh have appeared to be more cautious about defying so long-standing a set of precedents.

But with only three justices (Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan) being firmly committed to reproductive rights, and with virtually the entire Republican Party (not to mention its Federalist Society legal wing) opposing them, the time for a showdown may have now arrived. Indeed, among conservatives, the main difference of opinion is between those who favor a return to the pre-1973 status quo ante, in which the states (or, in theory, Congress) will determine abortion law, and those embracing the more radical doctrine of fetal “personhood” (which would have the effect of requiring a constitutional amendment to legalize abortion anywhere).

But before conceding defeat on the Court, reproductive-rights advocates should recall that we’ve been here before. In 1992, when SCOTUS accepted the Pennsylvania case that became Casey, it was widely expected that Roe was about to fall, in no small part because Thomas had just joined the Court. Indeed, we now know then–Chief Justice William Rehnquist circulated a draft opinion overturning Roe that was tentatively supported by five justices. But Justice Anthony Kennedy changed his mind and joined fellow Republican appointees Sandra Day O’Connor and David Souter in affirming Roe’s viability standard, while replacing its trimester scheme with the “undue burden” test for pre-viability restrictions that is still in place.

Could that (i.e., a reframing rather than a reversal of the right to choose) happen again? It seems unlikely, but there is one straw in the wind that suggests it’s not necessarily a done deal. Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan did not choose to publish dissents to the order to hear Dobbs, which one might have expected if a conservative majority to reverse Roe is in place, given the unquestioned unconstitutionality of the Mississippi law under the existing precedents. It remains possible that Roberts and Kavanaugh, fearing an anti-Court outcry among women everywhere, could be persuaded to reaffirm the viability standard yet again, perhaps alongside some new leeway for less fundamental state restrictions. In other words, the 1992 saga could be replayed with a similar result. Short of a change of Court membership during the next year, that may be the abiding hope of reproductive-rights advocates. But they’d best focus most of their efforts on formulating a strategy for restoring the right to choose via intense political warfare in the states.

You don’t have to look far to find articles about the pros and cons of adding states to the U.S., such as proposals for statehood for Washington, D.C.  Ditto for increasing the size of the U.S. Supreme Court. More rare, however, are thoughtful discussions about increasing the size of the U.S. House of Representatives.

But Dennis Negron has done exactly that in his article, “The Different Ways of Expanding the House: The number of House representatives has remained largely static for almost a century” at Sabato’s Crystal Ball. As Negron explains:

With the 2020 census results out, we now know where the balance of power will be once the 118th Congress assembles in January 2023. Southern and western states generally gain power at the expense of Rust Belt and northeastern states. Because the House is arbitrarily capped at 435 members, it means that every time the census is taken, there’s a game of musical chairs that determines which states gain more representation in Congress and which lose, depending on how their populations grew relative to the nation in the previous decade. Texas, for example, has seen explosive growth and has been the top seat gainer since 2000, earning two seats in 2000, four seats in 2010, and two seats in 2020. But that growth has been at the expense of states like New York, which in the same Census years lost two seats in both 2000 and 2010, and one seat in 2020.

This means that states end up with more residents per representative than other states. Using the 2020 census results, Montana’s two House members will each represent about 543,000 people apiece; on the other side of the spectrum, Delaware’s single member will represent all 991,000 people. So how can the House truly represent the state populations?

First, it’s important to bear in mind that current House membership stands at 435 because of a law passed in 1929 (the Reapportionment Act of 1929), which caps the number at 435. There is no constitutional provision that dictates the maximum number of representatives that the House can hold. The other thing to remember is that states are meant to be equally represented in the Senate with each one sending two senators; in the House, however, the argument was to have the chamber represent the population in general. As states were admitted, new seats were gradually added to account for the population growth. The last time seats were added were for Alaska and Hawaii when they attained statehood and each had a single seat, increasing the House to 437. However, the House reverted to 435 after the 1960 census and has remained static ever since.

What is so good about fixing the number of House members at 435? Arguments that it facilitates political stability fall flat, when considering the founders’ intentions. They clearly meant for the number to increase as the population grew.

The way it is now, Democrats get screwed by “musical chairs” gerrymandering, not just in the House, but also in the Electoral College which reflects the 435 limit. Of course, Republicans like it a lot, since it feeds their ability to dominate

It wouldn’t be easy to change the number. As Negron notes, “The obvious solution is the simplest one, though in today’s polarized environment, it may not fly so well because it will require the Senate to pass it too: increase the size of the House by repealing the 1929 law and passing a different one that either sets a higher number or lets the total float.” But, as soon as Democrats win a real working majority — say 53 or more U.S. Senate seats — they should seriously consider such a reform.

Negron discusses other possible measures to rectify the 435 rip-off, some of them interesting, but likely more difficult than the repeal and replace reform noted above. Yes, correcting the injustice of the 435 limitation would serve Democrats in the short run. Over the longer range, however, it might serve Republicans as well. But it would certainly serve the cause of fairness, as well as representative democracy.