In her article, “The Challenge of Going It Alone” at The Cook Political Report, Amy Walter argues that “the problem with pushing through major legislation on a party-line vote is that it alienates not just those in the other party, but it may fail to attract independent voters. If only one side is willing to defend it — and the other side is busy trashing it — well, that law can become pretty unpopular, very quickly.” However, Walter adds, “If the economy recovers, vaccine production and distribution improve, and families can plan for summer vacations and schools back in session, process arguments about a lack of bipartisan outreach aren’t going to get much traction.” But, “if the next six months are messy, those attacks will likely carry more of a sting. Republicans will have an easier time making the case that Democrats, in their zeal to promote their own limited agenda, failed to fix the nations more serious problems.” On the other hand, “If things go well over the next six months, both sides can take credit. If things don’t go well — say the vaccine distribution is still not fixed or the economy is still sputtering or schools are still shuttered — it won’t matter that Biden was able to get a bipartisan bill to tackle these issues. The blame will fall squarely on him and his party.”

In Robert Kuttner’s “Student Debt Cancellation and the Working Class” at The American Prospect, he writes that “the optics of student debt relief raise issues of social class. Almost by definition, people who attend four-year colleges are better off than those who don’t…And the Democrats have a political problem with the non-college-educated, who voted disproportionately for Donald Trump. College student debt relief at government expense is not exactly popular with those who never got to attend college….For working-class kids, the most plausible ladder within near reach is community college. But even community college costs several thousand dollars a year, plus lost income if you attend full-time….So how about balancing the perceived class favoritism of student debt relief with a big aid package for community college? It could include having the federal government cover all tuition costs, plus a stipend, as the original GI Bill did….How about if we balance that with $20 billion for free tuition plus stipends for public community college students?”

At The L. A. Times, Laura W. Brill and Vicki C. Shapiro of The Civics Center offer some suggestions for increasing voter turnout among younger voters in California, and some of their ideas could be applied in other states. For example, Brill and Shapiro write, “Georgia showed the nation that it’s possible to do much more to encourage young people to support democracy. Through the work of community activists and groups, the share of voters under 25 more than doubled in the Georgia electorate between 2016 and 2020….California could learn from Georgia, a state where a strict voter ID law creates obstacles for young voters and does not allow people to preregister to vote until they turn 17½….In California, we have most of the technical apparatus that voting rights advocates champion. We have online voter registration and automatic voter registration at the Department of Motor Vehicles, as well as preregistration beginning at age 16. What we don’t have are the social systems we need to make these laws work….What is missing in California and most of its school districts is a requirement that high schools help their students register, provide a strong civics curriculum, train teachers in every high school, provide necessary funds and measure results, school by school….The state could streamline the online system (as Pennsylvania has) to allow people to upload a signature in the online registration process and confirm their citizenship by a sworn statement and the last four digits of their Social Security number. Paper voter registration forms in California do not require submission of a state ID, and the online system should not be more burdensome.”

Rob Stein’s article, “Biden’s Key to Success: Majorities of Expediency” at Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, makes a case for “the conscious, purposeful will by leaders inside and outside government to do all in their power to build the alliances, issue by issue, that are necessary to govern effectively on behalf of the American people.” Stein rolls out the particulars of this strategy for Dems and concludes, “Two months before the shameful siege of the Capitol by MAGA followers, incited by the President himself and his congressional allies, 81 million Americans voted for Biden/Harris. These generally are Americans committed more to country than to party and who champion democratic institutions and norms. They span the ideological spectrum from some on the progressive left to some on the conservative right, and of course everyone in between….What makes the next months and years so exceptional and the potential for forging majorities of expediency so possible is the elegant alignment of the man, the moment, and this remarkably broad electoral majority. We are not in another FDR or LBJ moment, and Biden is neither of those men. Rather, he has come to power just as our nation has been awakened to the profound dangers of our fragility. We understand, perhaps as never before, that failure to govern is not an option. It is an incitement to chaos…A Biden Administration that is fortified by the broadest, deepest, and largest coalition of voters in recent times, led by one of this era’s most skilled relationship builders, and a nation in desperate need of problem solving is perhaps our last, best chance for governing our republic in order to create a more just society and erect a bulwark against the ravages of authoritarian populism.”

Looking through some political history, I saw some bad news and some potentially good news about 2022, and wrote it up at New York:

If it seems Joe Biden is in a big hurry to get things done, there’s a very clear reason, aside from the poor shape in which his predecessor left the country. His party has a five-seat majority in the House and only controls the Senate by the tie-breaking vote of Vice-President Kamala Harris. The odds of Democrats maintaining a trifecta after November 8, 2022, are not good. In the last century, there have been 25 midterm elections. The president’s party lost House seats in 22 of them (the exceptions were in 1934, the very beginning of the New Deal; in 1998, when Republicans were trying to impeach Bill Clinton; and in 2002, the first election after 9/11). The Senate is a bit iffier, thanks to the variability of the landscape in any given election. But even there, the president’s party has lost seats in 20 of 25 elections.

The reason for these midterm blues for the president’s party are obvious enough. There’s a natural cooling-off period of affection for the party lifted to executive power, with all the afflictions and disappointments over the direction of the country becoming attached to the people controlling the White House.

Midterms when the president’s party holds a governing trifecta (controlling the White House and both Houses of Congress) have been especially difficult; in the last century, no party in that circumstance has gained House seats, and only two gained Senate seats (under JFK in 1962, and believe it or not, Trump in 2018). There’s a strong consensus among political scientists that midterms typically serve as a referendum on the incumbent president and his record. Since World War II, presidents with a Gallup job-approval rating under 50 percent going into the midterms (Truman in 1946, Truman in 1950, Johnson in 1966, Carter in 1978, Reagan in 1982, Clinton in 1994, Obama in 2010, Obama in 2014, and Trump in 2018) have lost an average of 37 House seats. Biden’s job-approval-rating average at FiveThirtyEight right now is 53.2 percent, which is pretty low for a newly elected president (albeit better than Trump’s at any point in his presidency).

Adding to the obstacles facing Democrats in hanging on to the House in 2022 is the decennial redistricting just ahead, in which Republicans have a clear advantage. As David Wasserman put it recently: “[Republicans] could gain all six seats they need for House control from reapportionment and redistricting alone.”

It’s possible, of course, that the COVID-19 pandemic is an event like the Great Depression or 9/11, one that scrambles all normal political expectations. If the Biden administration confidently leads the country to a public-health and economic recovery, a referendum on the first two years of the presidency could turn out well. But there’s another possibility, too, that Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter describes:

“Donald Trump isn’t going anywhere. Unlike previous presidents — especially those who lost re-election, he isn’t interested in retreating from public view. He — and those who support his brand of politics — are going to play a much more significant role than we’ve seen in modern times …

“Democrats [may] want to make Trump the centerpiece of their midterm strategy. Do they want to keep up the pressure on Republicans to answer for the events on January 6th or for its most controversial members like freshman firebrand Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene? Or, once the impeachment trial is finished, will they try to put Trump — and those attacks — in the rearview mirror?”

In other words, Trump’s unique character and his continued domination of the GOP could make 2022 at least in part a referendum on him rather than (or as well as) Biden, particularly if the 45th president tries to make the midterms a vindication of his thwarted 2020 campaign. Indeed, this could be the silver lining for Democrats of an impeachment trial expected to acquit Trump and leave him eligible to run for president again. If the Senate doesn’t kill a 2024 Trump comeback, some voters might feel compelled to do so in 2022. And that could provide Biden’s party with a crucial margin of victory.

In his New York Times column posted today, Thomas B. Edsall explores the psychological roots of QAnon conspiracy believers who energized the riot at the U.S. capitol, and notes:

A Dec 30 NPR/Ipsos poll found that “recent misinformation, including false claims related to Covid-19 and QAnon, are gaining a foothold among some Americans.”…According to the survey, nearly a fifth of American adults, 17 percent, believe that “a group of Satan-worshiping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics.” Almost a third “believe that voter fraud helped Joe Biden win the 2020 election.” Even more, 39 percent, agree that “there is a deep state working to undermine President Trump.”

Think about it for a moment – 17 percent, more than one out of six Americans believe this stuff. That’s not a tiny fringe of paranoid citizens. Double that, and you have the percentage of those who think Biden and the Democrats stole the election, despite the fact that Trump-appointed judges say it’s nonsense. Edall goes on to quote from interviews and academic studies. Among them this:

According to Joseph E. Uscinski and Joseph M. Parent, professors of political science at the University of Miami and Notre Dame, conspiracy theorists do not “hold coherent, constrained policy positions.” In a forthcoming paper, “Who Supports QAnon? A Case Study in Political Extremism,” Uscinski explores what he identifies as some of the characteristics of the QAnon movement: “Support for QAnon is born more of antisocial personality traits and a predisposition toward conspiracy thinking than traditional political identities and motivations,” he writes, before going on to argue that

While QAnon supporters are “extreme,” they are not so in the ideological sense. Rather, QAnon support is best explained by conspiratorial worldviews and a predisposition toward other nonnormative behavior.

Uscinski found a substantial 0.413 correlation between those who support or sympathize with QAnon and “dark” personality traits, leading him to conclude that “the type of extremity that undergirds such support has less to do with traditional, left/right political concerns and more to do with extreme, antisocial psychological orientations and behavioral patterns.

Edsall notes that researchers have found similar pattters among some left-leaning Americans, particularly when their party is out of power. Edsall continues,

In their 2014 book “American Conspiracy Theories,” Uscinski and Parent argue that “Conspiracy Theories Are For Losers.” They write:

Conspiracy theories are essentially alarm systems and coping mechanisms to help deal with foreign threat and domestic power centers. Thus, they tend to resonate when groups are suffering from loss, weakness or disunity.

To illustrate how the out-of-power are drawn to conspiracy theories, the authors tracked patterns during periods of Republican and Democratic control of the presidency:

During Republican administrations, conspiracy theories targeting the right and capitalists averaged 34 percent of the conspiratorial allegations per year, while conspiracy theories targeting the left and communists averaged only 11 percent. During Democratic administrations, mutatis mutandis, conspiracy theories aimed at the right and capitalists dropped 25 points to 9 percent while conspiracy theories aimed at the left and communists more than doubled to 27 percent.

Edsall’s column is focused on diagnosis, not remedies. That’s a big topic for another column. For Democrats interested in building an enduring coalition, reducing the widespread sense of loss is a critical concern which they must address with credible policies and creative initiatives to promote more critical thinking in education and mass media.

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

Bernie Sanders and his movement had quite an impact on American politics in 2016 and 2020 but it is almost inconceivable that he will run again in 2024. At the dawn of the Biden administration, what should we make of his campaigns and the potential of his brand of politics going forward?

It is a mixed record. On the positive side, it seems entirely fair to credit him with moving the Democratic party and the entire political conversation to the left. He has been a veritable Overton window-moving machine, constantly pushing for bigger and bolder policies to attack America’s problems and railing against the influence of the rich and the staidness of the political establishment. His arguments tapped into a latent public hunger, particularly among younger voters, for a decisive break with business as usual that merely tinkered at the margins of the American political economic model. They were ready to move left and Bernie showed them the way.

Reflecting his efforts and those of like-minded politicians and activists, Medicare for All and a massive Green New Deal entered the political conversation, as did aggressive action on workers’ wages, taxing the rich and free provision of higher education. As they did, this shifting of the Overton window made policies that were more moderate, but considerably to the left of prior Democratic commitments, a much easier sell both within and outside of the party. One need only look at Biden’s policies on health care, climate change, wages, higher education and, more generally, on levels of taxes and spending to see the concrete results of this shifting window to which Sanders contributed so much.

But there was failure as well, most critically in the coalition-building and political power area. Sanders did much worse in 2020 than in 2016 in the Democratic primary vote (26 percent vs. 43 percent) and was soundly defeated by the considerably more moderate Biden. His supporters have various stories attempting to explain away this poor performance but the fact remains that Sanders could not successfully sell his approach even within a political party that was moving to the left and in the midst of a national crisis.

Read more…

“In his first week in office, Biden announced at least 33 new policies that he will implement through the executive branch, according to a count from CNN. Polls conducted by Morning Consult and Ipsos since Biden’s first day in office have assessed public opinion on 14 of these policies. In all cases, more of those polled favor the policies than oppose them, and a majoritysupport nearly every policy,” Perry Bacon Jr. reports at FiveThirtyEight. “The popularity of these policies is notable for a few reasons. First, Biden’s emphasis on trying to unify the country in his inaugural address has created a debate in political circles about exactly what constitutes “unity.” These early executive orders meet one definition — adopting policies that a clear majority of Americans support, which necessitates that at least some Republicans back them. In fact, a few of these policies, such as requiring people to wear masks on federal property, have plurality support among Republicans. (On the other hand, many of Biden’s policies, such as trying to make sure noncitizens are counted in the U.S. Census, are extremely unpopular with Republicans.)….You might be skeptical of polling that seems favorable to Democrats after many polls in 2016 and 2020 underestimated GOP strength. But there are a number of recent examples of liberal policies being supported by voters who also back Republican candidates. This happened last fall in Florida, where a proposal to raise the state’s minimum wage to $15 per hour got 61 percent support, but the presidential candidate in favor of that idea, Biden, received only 48 percent. So I tend to think these numbers are reliable and that a bloc of Trump voters agrees with many of Biden’s new policies.”

Was the Georgia flip in the 2020-21 elections a rare clusterfuck for Republicans, or is it an indication of a more durable trend?  At The Hill, Tal Axelrod notes (via MSN News), “Democrats are significantly outpacing Republicans in their approval ratings in Georgia in a sign of the party’s burgeoning strength in the Deep South state, according to a new poll from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The poll, conducted by the University of Georgia and released Saturday, shows the state’s two newly elected Democratic senators and President Biden with net positive approval ratings, while Gov. Brian Kemp (R) and former President Trump have approval ratings that are underwater and sinking….Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff, who just unseated former Sen. David Perdue (R) in Georgia, had an approval rating of about 50 percent, while just 40 percent of voters had an unfavorable view of him. Sen. Raphael Warnock (D), who flipped Georgia’s other Senate seat in a special election and will have to run for a full term in 2022, has a net positive approval rating at 54-37….Another 52 percent of voters had a favorable view of Biden, compared with just 41 percent who had an unfavorable view. Stacey Abrams, the 2018 Democratic gubernatorial nominee who is expected to run for that post again in 2022, has a similarly positive 51-41 approval rating….Fifty-seven percent disapprove of the job Trump did in office. By comparison, 48 percent of voters approved of the job Trump was doing last year….Fifty-seven percent of voters also said Trump is responsible for a “great deal” or a “good amount” of blame for egging on the deadly mob on Jan. 6, and 51 percent of voters said the House was right to impeach him over it.”

Is it time for political analysts to ditch the “bellwether” term? Ryan Matsumoto makes a good case for it with respect to counties, in his post “Where Did All The Bellwether Counties Go?,” also at FiveThirtyEight. As Matsumoto notes, “From 1980 to 2016, 19 counties voted for the winner of the presidential election every single time. The most impressive of those was Valencia County, New Mexico, which voted for the victor in every presidential election from 1952 to 2016….But in 2020, 18 of these 19 “bellwether counties” voted for former President Donald Trump. Just one — Clallam County, Washington — voted for President Joe Biden….like so many electoral trends, demographics play a major role in explaining why these once-bellwether counties finally missed the mark in 2020.” However, a ‘bellwether’ county is different from a ‘swing’ county, which has a habit of close popular vote margins in presidential elections. There are still plenty of those, depending how you define a close margin. But they have also been declining, as Matsumoto notes: “…according to David Wasserman of The Cook Political Report, just 303 counties were decided by single-digit margins in 2016, compared to 1,096 counties that fit that description in 1992.” There are states which have picked presidential winners in recent elections, but Trump’s disruptive politics, the pandemic and accelerating demographic changes complicate any attempt to peg a ‘bellwether’ state in 2024.

Democrats have different opinions about exactly what they should to do about the filibuster. But doing nothing about it is clearly the road to ruin, as Washington Post columnist E, J. Dionne, Jr. writes in his current syndicated column: “The Democrats can use their House and Senate majorities to reform our politics, guarantee voting rights and enhance our democracy. Or they can surrender to an anti-majoritarian, money-dominated system, and allow the more accessible approach to voting created during the coronaviruspandemic to be destroyed….This means that the party must recognize that the Senate filibuster, contrary to happy myth, does not promote bipartisanship or constructive compromise by requiring most bills to get 60 votes. No, in the face of a radicalized Republican Party, maintaining the current filibuster rules means abandoning any aspirations to a legacy of genuine achievement….Sorry, there is no third way here. Yes, Democrats could avoid a complete repeal of the filibuster by getting rid of it only for certain categories of bills — for example, those related to voting rights and democratic reforms. But living with the status quo means capitulating to obstruction. Democrats have only 50 votes plus Vice President Harris’s tie-breaker. They will never get 10 votes from a GOP that can’t even find a way to exile white-supremacist extremists from its ranks.”

Looking back at the most recent presidential beginnings, I made some comparisons at New York  to what Biden is trying to accomplish:

For those closely following the initial steps of the Biden administration, it’s obvious the new president’s team is placing a premium on creating the impression that it’s successfully following a carefully planned rollout. Each day has a topical theme, and Joe Biden’s time is ruthlessly rationed. One purpose, of course, is to create a vivid contrast with the previous occupant of the White House, and from this Washington Post report, it seems a success:

“Almost every day of his young tenure, President Biden has entered the State Dining Room, a portrait of Abraham Lincoln looking down and wood burning in the fireplace. He speaks on the planned topic of the day. He sits at an undersized desk and searches for a pen to sign his latest stack of executive orders. Within 30 minutes of entering the camera’s frame, he has left it.

“It is all plotted and planned. Little room is left for the unscripted or the unusual.

“Biden’s first full week in office has showcased an almost jarring departure from his predecessor’s chaotic style, providing the first window into a tenure whose mission is not only to remake the White House in Biden’s image but also to return the presidency itself to what he sees as its rightful path”.

But there’s more to this disciplined approach than adding a redundant reason to wish Donald Trump good riddance. Biden and his people are undoubtedly aware that they need a sense of momentum to encourage Democratic unity and just enough Republican cooperation to get his agenda passed. Getting things done is the key to avoiding a midterm setback that will make it truly impossible to get more things done. Recent presidents provide plenty of object lessons in the dangers of a slow or clumsy start.

Bill Clinton stumbled early

Clinton was the first Democrat to occupy the White House since Jimmy Carter, which meant limited experience for his eager and relatively young team and a disorganized transition that got the new administration off to a bad start, as Vox’s Richard Skinner later explained: “An atmosphere of chaos and disorganization permeated this transition. Clinton’s policy advisers were divided between centrists and liberals. The president-elect stumbled into a controversy over allowing open military service by gay individuals that soon set him against the Joint Chiefs of Staff and members of his own party.”

Clinton also had some conspicuous personnel problems, including trouble finding an attorney general who had not violated laws on reimbursement of domestic servants (the so-called Nannygate scandal that ended two AG nominations and complicated the top Pentagon nomination) and some disorganization in the White House itself. His first major legislative initiative was an economic-stimulus plan that Senate Republicans gutted. After successfully (albeit narrowly) getting a budget approved, the Clinton administration got bogged down in a complex and ultimately unsuccessful health-care-reform effort. And it failed to pursue the sort of political reforms that might have kept 1992’s Ross Perot voters from returning to the GOP voting habits many of them had abandoned.

In 1994, all these setbacks and lost opportunities contributed to a disastrous midterm election in which Democrats lost both houses of Congress for the first time since the early days of the Eisenhower administration. Democrats didn’t regain both houses until 2006.

Obama lost control

Some Biden advisers served in one capacity or another in the Clinton administration. Far more worked for Obama and Biden when they took office in 2009.

Unlike Clinton, Obama had the benefit of a solid popular-vote majority and coattails that gave his party a big margin of control in the House and 58 Democratic senators. By July, Democrats had a supermajority of 60 senators after Pennsylvania’s Arlen Specter switched parties and Minnesota’s Al Franken was seated upon the resolution of a disputed election.

But before gaining complete control of the Senate, the new administration lost early momentum when it had to pare back and reconfigure its own economic-stimulus package to secure Republican votes, a step widely thought to have reduced its effectiveness.

Meanwhile, the fruitless pursuit of Republican senators in the design of Obamacare slowed down its progress and complicated its provisions, nearly producing a catastrophe when Ted Kennedy’s illness and death, and then a shocking Republican victory in the special election to replace him, robbed Democrats of their supermajority.

If disorganization was the biggest avoidable problem besetting Clinton in his early days, for Obama it was probably the failure to keep his powerful campaign infrastructure in place to mobilize support for his agenda and keep pressure on a Republican Party that saw no real risk in obstructing him.

Like Clinton, Obama suffered a calamity in his first midterm election, with congressional and downballot losses that emboldened Republicans further and made a mockery of the talk after 2008 that Democrats were building a durable majority. Democrats lost the House and any measure of real control in the Senate.

George W. Bush’s accidental success

If Clinton and Obama showed how much promise could be squandered through poor planning and strategy or just bad luck, the administration between theirs got out of the early doldrums via a bolt from the blue.

Bush got off to a reasonably good start despite the shady nature of his elevation to the White House in 2000, easily enacting one of his campaign’s top priorities, a big tax-cut bill (made possible, ironically, by Clinton’s achievement of budget surpluses). But his party lost control of the Senate in May 2001 when Vermont’s Jim Jeffords changed sides to become a Democrat, and by the end of the summer, Bush’s job-approval ratings had slumped to a meh 51 percent. He was likely en route to the usual midterm setback and a further loss of power.

All that changed, of course, on September 11, 2001. W. was transformed overnight into the wildly popular commander-in-chief of a unified nation, and his party managed the very unusual feat of gaining ground in 2002 and consolidated its control of Congress. It took Bush a longer time to squander his wartime popularity than his father did after the Gulf War, but he did so thoroughly by 2008.

Presidents can overcome a bad start

Clinton and Obama both had comebacks after a slow start and a disastrous first midterm election, winning second terms and posting some impressive accomplishments (including, in Clinton’s case, becoming more popular than ever even as Republicans impeached him). And in his own way, Trump also showed there’s life after failure or, in his case, failures every day. Despite his party controlling Congress and bending the knee to his every whim, it took him nearly a year to post a significant legislative accomplishment: the 2017 tax-cut measure. Republicans lost a string of special elections the first two years of the Trump presidency and then, in 2018, lost the House and some key governorships that ultimately played a role in thwarting his attempted 2020 election coup.

Trump had his own good luck in inheriting a strong economic recovery and in harvesting an epochal trend in conservative-media infrastructure that gave him a way to convince his supporters to reject the exposure of his many lies and missteps as nothing more than enemy misinformation. But in the end he came within a distressingly small margin of winning a second term on the scorched ground of his divisive and violence-inducing rhetoric.

So Biden’s current effort to get off to a fast start isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition, and there will be positive and negative influences on his power that he can neither anticipate nor control. But I can think of no precedent in which early success hurt a new president. So he and his people might as well get a few steps down the road before the winds of fortune buffet them.

Yes, it’s way early. But here’s some thoughts from “2022 Senate Races: Initial Ratings” by J. Miles Coleman at Sabato’s Crystal Ball:

“Republicans will be defending more Senate seats than Democrats in 2022, but both sides have some potential pickup opportunities — though a large gain for either party seems unlikely….Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) would have been an overwhelming favorite to win a third term, but even with his retirement, Ohio’s rightward lean makes it an uphill climb for Democrats….Democrats’ clearest path to gaining seats runs primarily though the Rust Belt, as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin seem to be their top offensive races, though they may finally get lucky in North Carolina….We rate four states — Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and New Hampshire — as Leans Democratic, and these seem to be the most obvious GOP targets….There will likely be more retirements this cycle, but they probably won’t change the fundamental picture.”

Here’s Crystal Ball’s first 2022 Senate race ratings map:

The wild card in fleshing out strategy for Democrats has to be the applicability of the lessons of Georgia’s double Senate flip for Democratic Senate campaigns in other states? It’s a question that should be thoroughly investigated by the DSCC and every Democratic Senate campaign for 2022.

“More than 30,000 voters who had been registered members of the Republican Party have changed their voter registration in the weeks after a mob of pro-Trump supporters attacked the Capitol — an issue that led the House to impeach the former president for inciting the violence,” Reid Wilson reports at The Hill. “The massive wave of defections is a virtually unprecedented exodus that could spell trouble for a party that is trying to find its way after losing the presidential race and the Senate majority….It could also represent the tip of a much larger iceberg: The 30,000 who have left the Republican Party reside in just a few states that report voter registration data, and information about voters switching between parties, on a weekly basis….Nearly 10,000 Pennsylvania voters dropped out of the Republican Party in the first 25 days of the year, according to the secretary of state’s office. About a third of them, 3,476, have registered as Democrats; the remaining two-thirds opted to register with another party or without any party affiliation….Almost 6,000 North Carolina voters have dropped their affiliation with the GOP. Nearly 5,000 Arizona voters are no longer registered Republicans. The number of defectors in Colorado stands north of 4,500 in the last few weeks. And 2,300 Maryland Republicans are now either unaffiliated or registered with the Democratic Party….In all of those areas, the number of Democrats who left their party is a fraction of the number of Republican defectors….Only a small handful of states report voter registration data on a weekly basis. Others report monthly activity, and many states do not report granular details about those who leave one party or the other. Once more states report party registration data, the true number of Republicans who have re-registered in recent weeks may prove to be much higher.”

However, Chris Cillizza notes at CNN’s The Point that, “before you start writing the political obituary for the Republican Party in Washington, you need to consider this oft-ignored but critically important card that the GOP still has in hand: The Republican Party will control the bulk of the redistricting processes in the country….Wrote David Wasserman, The Cook Political Report’s House editor, in his big look at the state of redistricting on Tuesday: “Republicans may not be as dominant as they were in 2011 when they redrew nearly five times as many congressional seats as Democrats. But they still hold far more raw power. They fared well in 2020’s state legislative elections and maintained control of several huge prizes: Texas, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina, which are collectively poised to gain six seats from the Census.” (Remember that following the census every decade, all state legislative and congressional lines are redrawn based on population gains and losses.)…Wasserman added that, based on his initial calculations, Republicans could gain as many as 10 seats solely from the number of map-drawing processes in key states they will control over the next 18 months. (Republicans need a net gain of only six seats to retake control of the House in November 2022.)”

Amy Walter shares this note on the fragility of the Democratic Party’s senate  ‘majority’ at The Cook Political Report: “The last time we had a 50-50 Senate, it ended five months later with Vermont’s Republican Sen. Jim Jeffords’ defection….in the event of a tragedy, the death or sudden resignation of a Senator, control of the body (and with it prospects for a Biden agenda), could be altered immediately….There are currently 15 Democratic senators who sit in states with a Republican Governor: Sens. Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema (Arizona), Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff (Georgia), Ben Cardin and Chris Van Hollen (Maryland), Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren (Massachusetts), Jon Tester (Montana), Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan (New Hampshire), Sherrod Brown (Ohio), Patrick Leahy and Bernie Sanders (Vermont), and Joe Manchin (West Virginia). Five Republican senators sit in states with a Democratic Governor: Sens. Susan Collins (Maine), Richard Burr and Thom Tillis (North Carolina), Pat Toomey (Pennsylvania), and Wisconsin (Ron Johnson). …However, while most states allow a governor to fill the vacancy immediately with a candidate of their choosing, other states have more specific rules about when and how a vacancy is filled. For example, in Arizona, North Carolina and Maryland, the governor must appoint a senator from the same party as the senator he/she is replacing. In Wisconsin, the senate seat remains vacant until a special election is held to fill the seat. The National Conference of State Legislatures provides a list of rules for each state here.”

It looks like filibuster foes just don’t have the votes to end it. But there some potential reforms that could make it less of an obstruction. As Alex Pereene explains one of the ideas at The New Republic: “Norm Ornstein has proposed simply placing the onus on the minority to make a filibuster rather than on the majority to break one. “Instead of 60 votes required to end debate,” he suggested last year, “the procedure should require 40 votes to continue it. If at any time the minority cannot muster 40 votes, debate ends, cloture is invoked, and the bill can be passed by the votes of a simple majority….This is far from ideal, which is precisely why hidebound senators ought to approve of it. It could be paired with other tweaks (former Senator Tom Harkin has proposed lowering the vote threshold each day a piece of legislation is debated, which may be a bridge too far for the filibuster enthusiasts), but it would be a good start on its own. It would allow senators like Manchin to brag that they saved the filibuster, assuming that their stubborn devotion to the rule stems from some belief that their constituents approve of it.” Also, why not just lower the filibuster threshold from 60 votes to 55?

Some revealing strategic observations from Nathaniel Rakich and Geoffrey Skeeley from their article, “What All Those GOP Retirements Mean for the 2022 Senate Map” at FiveThirtyEight:

These retirements could be a helpful development for Democrats, too, as they provide the party with potential openings on what was already a decently favorable Senate map for them. Although the Senate’s rural biasstill makes the chamber advantageous to Republicans overall, the 2022 Senate map doesn’t force Democrats to compete on red turf nearly as much as the 2020 map or killer 2018 map did. In fact, no Democratic senators are running for reelection in states won by former President Donald Trump in 2020, while Republicans are defending two seats in states won by President Biden: the open seat in Pennsylvania and Sen. Ron Johnson’s seat in Wisconsin. (To make matters worse for Republicans, Johnson is considering retirement as well.)

However, the GOP may have one big advantage in 2022: a Republican-leaning national environment. As we saw in 2018 (and 2014, and 2010, and 2006, and…), midterm elections are usually bad for the president’s party. If that pattern holds true in 2022, the 2020 presidential results are probably not the best barometer of the partisanship of these states. Indeed, 2020 was actually a Democratic-leaning year, with Biden winning the national popular vote by 4.5 percentage points. So there’s a good chance that states will be at least a bit redder in 2022 than they were in 2020.

Skelley and Rakich conclude, noting that “the 2022 Senate map doesn’t force Democrats to compete on red turf nearly as much as the 2020 map or killer 2018 map did. In fact, no Democratic senators are running for reelection in states won by former President Donald Trump in 2020, while Republicans are defending two seats in states won by President Biden: the open seat in Pennsylvania and Sen. Ron Johnson’s seat in Wisconsin.”

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

Biden got 51 percent of the vote in 2020, enough to win the election, but hardly a dominant majority. And Democrats’ downballot performance was distinctly inferior, leading to disappointing performance in Senate, House and state legislative races. The Biden administration now confronts a divided country racked by twin pandemic and economic crises. In the not so far distance looms the 2022 midterm elections where an incoming Presidential administration traditionally loses ground. The last time Democrats faced this situation in 2010 they suffered massive losses.

The imperative here is expand the Biden coalition. Concretely, that means Biden’s approval rating has to be as high as possible going into 2022. That is by far the most straightforward way of insulating the Democrats from big losses and creating at least the possibility for some gains.

So, how to do this? I offer a simple formula: convert Trump disapproval into Biden approval/Democratic votes. Consider these data comparing recent Trump disapproval, as measured by Pew, with Biden 2020 support figures from AP/VoteCast.

Black voters: Trump January disapproval – Biden 2020 support = 91-91 = 0

Hispanic voters: Trump January disapproval – Biden 2020 support = 82-63 = 19

White college voters: Trump January disapproval – Biden 2020 support = 73-52= 21

White noncollege voters: Trump January disapproval – Biden 2020 support = 52-37= 15

I smell opportunity! Besides an opening to expand white college support, there are serious possibilities here for attacking the two most serious weak spots in Biden’s 2020 coalition, Hispanic voters and white noncollege voters.

The conversion process for turning these Trump disapprovers into Biden approvers and then hopefully Democratic voters can only run through a successful attack on the pandemic and economic crises. Really for the next period of time nothing else is important. Not immigration reform. Not criminal justice reform. Not climate change. Not child poverty. Not executive orders. Not Trump’s trial. Either solve the twin crises or prepare yourself for the wrath of voters who will, not unreasonably, think you have failed them. The Biden coalition will shrink, not expand and all the great ideas progressives have for improving the country will come to naught.

Thus, the mantra here should be move fast, spend big and make it obvious. Derek Thomson in the Atlantic puts it well:

Biden…faces concentric crises, which move outward toward the future as you unpeel them: the biological threat of the pandemic, the economic recession, and, beyond that, the entrenched problem of child poverty. He also has to contend with the problem casting a shadow over the whole century, the existential crisis of climate change.

Biden’s first 100 days should address the first two crises with Rooseveltian focus. Quench the conflagration of the moment—then fight the fire of the future….

One lesson from the Obama years is that smart policy making isn’t just about doing brainy stuff; it’s about doing good and popular stuff in a way that keeps you in power so you can do more good stuff. The Democrats’ failure to properly stimulate the economy in 2010—or get credit for their very real contributions—led to catastrophic midterm losses in the House that made it impossible for them to accomplish much of anything in Obama’s last six years in office.

Let’s not let that happen again! The fate of the country and of the Democrats really does depend on it.