It seems strange to even write this since, not so long ago, that seemed pretty far-fetched. But now we have had much more public polling and the contours of a 2020 election where Trump is on the ballot and every Republican candidate is tied to him have become clearer. As things stand, that’s not a good look for endangered Republican candidates.
“Public polls have shown a huge overlap between voter attitudes in the presidential race between Trump and presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden and their preferences in the Senate contest between Kelly and McSally, who lost her Senate bid in 2018 but was then appointed to fill the term of the late GOP Sen. John McCain. Every recent public survey in Arizona has found both Trump and McSally trailing Biden and Kelly, with the Democrat usually leading by even slightly more in the Senate contest than in the presidential race.
“McSally’s and Trump’s numbers are almost identical,” said Mike Noble, a former Republican consultant who now polls for nonpartisan clients in Arizona. “They are so tied together.”
These patterns in Arizona are just one measure of a larger trend: Senate elections are becoming more about the party and less about the individual candidates….All signals indicate that “this will be another election in which what people think about Trump determines almost everybody’s vote” in Senate contests, says Gary Jacobson, a University of California at San Diego political scientist who specializes in congressional races. “Elections are much more nationalized and partisan.”
One high-ranking GOP strategist, who asked for anonymity to discuss changes in the strategic landscape, agreed that very few Senate candidates may be strong enough to swim against the tide of a presidential defeat for their party in their state.”
The Democratic Party is a constantly evolving coalition, so I looked at a potential new element for New York:
[T]here’s nothing that annoys politically informed people more than overestimating the impact of the Never Trump Republicans (or ex-Republicans) who are already overrepresented in the punditocracy, including such key precincts as cable TV and the op-ed pages of the New York Times. But four years after Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party, it is probably a good time to get some perspective on Never Trumpers and their significance. Perry Bacon Jr. gives us a good start at FiveThirtyEight:
“Even by the slightly broader standard of influencing Republican politics, #NeverTrump has been largely unsuccessful …
“But ‘Never Trumpers’ are increasingly involved in the Democratic Party and have gradually shifted their tactics in that direction — effectively becoming a ‘Never Trump’ and ‘Never Bernie Sanders’ coalition. And they appear to be having more success shaping their new party than the one that many of them had been associated with for much of their lives.”
So Bacon does not treat this high-profile tribe (whose membership includes media figures Joe Scarborough, Bill Kristol, Max Boot, Jennifer Rubin, David Brooks, George Will, and many others) as they were once widely regarded, as representatives of a sort of permanent conservative aristocracy that would outlive Trumpism and rise again in some future — perhaps near future — GOP. Recognizing that the Republican Party’s heart, soul, and membership now belong to POTUS, Bacon regards Never Trumpers as having largely made the transition from one party to the other. And in that respect, they represent not the small number of GOP holdouts quietly resisting Trump, but the voters who have defected as Trump replaced George W. Bush and Mitt Romney as the definer of Republican (and conservative movement) orthodoxy. And whether or not their numbers justify the heavy presence of Never Trumpers in the commentariat, these defectors are a real phenomenon:
“[I]t is possible that 5 to 10 percent of the people who will vote for Biden in November backed either Romney in 2012 or Trump in 2016 and at some point identified as conservative or Republican. So while “Never Trump” conservatives are a smaller and less formal constituency in the Democratic Party than black voters, for example, some of them feel exiled from a Republican Party dominated by Trump, backed Democrats in the 2018 midterms and participated in the 2020 Democratic primaries. Michael Halle, a strategist on Buttigieg’s campaign, said about 50 of the campaign’s county precinct captains in Iowa were former Republicans who changed their party registration to become Democrats so they could participate in the caucuses and back the former mayor.”
At the elite level, Bacon’s right in observing the active role Never Trumpers played in warning Democrats to eschew Bernie Sanders. It’s less clear that they spoke for a sizable body of swing voters who were prepared to vote for anybody but Bernie against Trump. There is some evidence that a lot of the upscale suburban voters who gave Democrats some of their most notable 2018 gains joined African-Americans in the coalition Joe Biden put together to beat Sanders on Super Tuesday and subsequent primaries. So perhaps Never Trumpers do represent, as Bacon suggests, a new Democratic Party faction serving as a not-so-heavy counterweight to the better known progressive tendency. More likely they are simply merging into the Donkey Party’s preexisting moderate wing.
By and large, these people, at both the elite and grassroots level, resemble the neoconservatives of the 1970s and 1980s. Before “neoconservatism” became associated with a specific GOP foreign-policy school of the early-21st century (mostly identified with the failed military enterprise in Iraq), it referred to a group of disgruntled Democratic thinkers and movers who gradually abandoned their party over an assortment of cultural and foreign-policy grievances. The classic definition was offered by Bill Kristol’s father, Irving, a former leftist who quipped that a neoconservative was “a liberal mugged by reality.” The classic neoconservative leader was Jean Kirkpatrick, an adviser to old-school liberal Democratic presidential candidates Hubert Humphrey and Scoop Jackson, who gradually left the Democratic Party during the Carter administration and eventually became a key figure (as ambassador to the United Nations, and as 1984 Republican Convention keynote speaker) in the Reagan administration.
As Anthony Elghossain explained recently, the original neocons weren’t just hawkish conservatives:
“Remaining relatively liberal on social and economic issues and rejecting conservatives’ isolationist impulses, these neocons — and some younger, internationalist hawks such as Richard Perle — spent the 1970s in a space occupied by Senator Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson. They wanted to engage the world, not ‘come home.’ They wanted to confront, not contain or compromise with, communists. And they wanted to apply American power to pursue interests and ideals abroad.”
Like the Never Trumpers, the neocons represented an actual body of voters — particularly strongly anti-communist Catholics and white Southerners — drifting from the Democratic to the Republican Party. Like the Never Trumpers, they had some associates (notably Daniel Patrick Moynihan) who could not bring themselves to abandon the Old Faith. And there’s some tangible links between the older band of heretics and the new (e.g., Max Boot and the Kristol family).
Perhaps Never Trumpers will, like the neocons did, melt into their new party and eventually lose their identity, if not their history. Even in the short term, a narrative of 2020 that emphasizes such discrete developments as migrations between parties is likely to be swept away in the tide of pandemic and depression. But at the moment, Never Trumpers do offer some fresh impetus to the nonprogressive Democrats who are, for the moment, in charge of the urgent task of ridding the nation of Donald Trump. If they succeed, there will be many new questions about the future direction of both parties.
From Alex Daugherty’s “‘A huge missed opportunity.’ Democrats fail to challenge Miami’s only House Republican” at mcclatchydc.com: “When South Florida Democrats couldn’t find a candidate to challenge Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, a nine-term Cuban-American congressman from a prominent political family, they ensured that Miami’s only Republican will remain in Congress until 2023 — even though his district only went for President Donald Trump by a slim two-point margin…That could prove to be a costly mistake, Democrats and others now say. If Trump’s support continues to sag in swing states including Florida, Democrats would have been in a position to capitalize on a potential blue wave in November that could carry even little-known, down-ballot candidates — the kind they might have fielded against Diaz-Balart — to unexpected wins…“There’s a huge missed opportunity now because of what you’re seeing at the national level … depending on how this presidential election turns out,” said David Perez, a Democrat who unsuccessfully sought a state Senate seat in 2018 that overlaps with Diaz-Balart’s district.” After all the excuses have been made, a two-point margin ought to insure a well-funded Democratic challenger anywhere in the U.S.
Ruy Teixeira shares some good news from the mountain west, riffing on a poll cited in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle: “Montana is a Great State Even With One Democratic Senator; Imagine If They Had Two!..It could happen! I thought when Steve Bullock entered the race, he had a terrific shot at the Senate seat. The new Montana Statue University poll has him up 7 on incumbent Steve Daines (R). And as governor, he has a 70 percent approval rating on handling the coronavirus…Polling of course is thin in the state but this is a good sign. The more seats that are in play in November, the better for Democratic odds of picking up control of the Senate. Not a bad pick to send money to if you’re inclined to contribute to a reach Senate seat beyond the big four or AZ, CO, ME and NC.”
For a piercing critique of the major media’s coverage of coronavirus politics, read Eric Alterman’s “The Press Is Amplifying a Dangerous Know-Nothing Ideology: The anti-lockdown protests aren’t the first time the media has been swindled into cheerleading an extremist faux libertarianism” at The Nation. As Alterman obseerves, “Encouraged by near-saturation media coverage, the right-wing protests against commonsense social-distancing measures are getting out of hand. While the absolute numbers involved in the protests are tiny, their effect—when amplified by the credulous, cheerleading tone of the coverage—is massive and dangerous. On April 30 in Michigan, rifle-touting, Confederate-flag-waving, Trump-supporting militia types attempted to intimidate the legislature (to predictably sympathetic tweets from the president). These anti-lockdown rallies are popping up everywhere, often with nearly as many reporters covering them as there are protesters in attendancThe right to not only infect oneself with a potentially life-threatening disease but also to infect others and worsen the crisis that threatens the world’s public health and economy has become a symbol of the extremist libertarian right wing, whose members make up a significant segment of Trump’s political base. Governors—such as those in Georgia and Florida—who identify with Trump’s brand of faux libertarianism are embracing the right to infect, no matter the cost to their constituents, their country, and the world at large.”
Alterman cites several big media, including examples from The Times, Post, Politico and CNN. He concludes, “Chris Cillizza, a reporter at The Washington Post (later recruited by CNN), explained it thus: “My job is to assess not the rightness of each argument but to deal in the real world of campaign politics in which perception often (if not always) trumps reality. I deal in the world as voters believe it is, not as I (or anyone else) thinks it should be.”…One could hardly ask for a better an example of what New York University professor Jay Rosen’s diagnosed in 2011 as the “cult of the savvy,” which he defined as the quality “of being shrewd, practical, hyper-informed, perceptive, ironic, ‘with it,’ and unsentimental in all things political.” Rosen wrote, “Nothing is more characteristic of the savvy style than statements like ‘in politics, perception is reality.’” Of course, as Rosen notes, perception is not reality: “Reality is reality!”…So it’s no surprise that the miscreants demanding the right to infect themselves and others have no trouble receiving the loving attention of the uncritical mainstream media. It’s as if we’ve been in training for this death march for decades.”
Check out Greg Bluestein’s article, “Georgia’s Democratic U.S. Senate hopefuls make virus response top issue” at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution for a peek at some of the messaging Democratic U.S. Senate candidates are using to wrestle away not one, but two Republican-held seats in the state. Of course, GA’s two do-nothing Senators are catching hell for the GOP’s dangerous coronavirus strategy. But the issue of corruption is now front and center, since both GA Republican Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler have been accused on profiteering from the crisis. As Bluestein notes, “Each of the Democrats is also pressing to link Perdue with Loeffler, who is trying to tamp down an uproar over her stock transactions during the pandemic. At another recent virtual forum, the trio repeatedly mentioned Perdue and Loeffler in the same breath as they accused both of profiting from the disease…Loeffler has attracted most of the national attention for trades dating from Jan. 24, the day she and other senators attended a private briefing on the illness. She said financial advisers made those decisions without her input, and she announced she’ll no longer invest in individual stocks…Perdue’s opponents have highlighted a spate of trading from the month of March and purchases of stock from DuPont and other firms that are involved in the coronavirus response. Echoing her rivals, Amico accused Perdue of “blatantly profiting off of a pandemic.”
Brad Adgate discusses “The Impact COVID-19 Is Having On Political Ad Spending And Messaging” at Forbes and notes, “Expect political ads mentioning the pandemic to continue for the time being. Advertising Analytics says while it’s difficult to project messaging trends out too far, given how quickly the political landscape shifts, it seems that COVID-19 will be the largest topic of ads in 2020. Not all of the ads will be on this topic, however. We’re already seeing the curve of ads mentioning COVID-19 smooth out at around 40-45% of political ads. However, this could easily increase or decrease depending on if there is a second wave or a vaccine or some other drastic event. For the week of March 10, in local broadcast, candidates spent $467,000 on ads that mentioned COVID-19. In the most recent available data (week of April 28), it had risen to $3.2 million.”
Adgate continues, “Looking ahead, Mark Lieberman, the President and CEO of Viamedia, believes the 2020 campaign with no rallies will be similar to the 19th century, when Presidential candidates relied on supporters acting as surrogates to reach voters. In 2020, these surrogates will be the media, especially television and digital. As Lieberman states, “Television with its sight, sound and motion remains the best medium to build awareness while digital media allows candidates to shake the virtual hands of voters. Bloomberg’s cross-platform media strategy of spending heavy on television combined with digital media with their superior targeting capabilities and memes, could be copied by Biden.”
Lest anyone get carried away with fantasies about a bipartisan response to the coronavirus pandemic, Charles P. Pierce writes that “Ohio Governor Mike DeWine Reminds Us That Without Fail, Republicans Gonna Republican” at Esquire: “Governor Mike DeWine, Republican of Ohio, was the recipient of a great deal of praise for leading his state’s response to the pandemic. He was the latest Republican cited as one of The Good Ones. But, as we all have come to realize, if you wait long enough, Republicans gonna Republican and, as the Great Reopening has begun, and as the national government has surrendered to the virus, DeWine is reverting to the mean…and we do mean mean…First, here’s the form with which Ohioans can nark on their friends who choose not to risk their lives by heading back to the widget plant in the middle of a pandemic when the governor and their bosses tell them to come in. If you don’t go back to your cubicle-shaped petri dish, and the guy from HR finks on you to the state, you lose your unemployment benefits. I was just saying the other day that what the American response to the pandemic was missing was just a little dab of East Germany…Second, DeWine announced on Tuesday that, in response to the economic impact of the pandemic, it’s time for another round of Austerity Follies in which Medicaid and public education get whacked and Ohio’s “rainy day” fund is left untouched, presumably for a rainier day than the one we’re soaking in now…”
Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich chimes in with a similar warning regarding the Sunshine state’s Repubican rulers:
Perry Bacon, Jr. has a post up at FiveThirtyEight, discussing “How ‘Never Trumpers’ Crashed The Democratic Party.” Bacon covers a lot of ground about the segment of Republicans who have become disillusioned with the head of their party, as well as the ones who were against him from the outset of his 2016 campaign. One of the more interesting questions about the ‘Never Trumpers” is, will most of them vote for Democratic candidates down-ballot – expecially for the U.S. Senate – in November?
Some Never Trumpers have pointed out that Republicans can oppose Trump and still vote for Republicans down-ballot. They want the Republicans to hold a Senate majority, so they can continue to shape the Supreme, federal, state and local courts in a conservative direction. For that goal, they are willing to endure another term for Mitch McConnell as Majority Leader.
Others, including Steve Schmidt, have argued that the GOP needs a thorough ass-whupping in November, in order to regain its senses and rebuild into a semblance of its more dignified and genuinely conservative identity of the not too distant past. It’s not hard to understand why many genuine conservative are embarrassed by Trump’s failed leadership and crass behavior. For good reason, they see McConnell as Trump’s enabler in chief, who should be defeated, even if Trump is re-elected. Without McConnell’s support, they believe Trump could be contained by the saner leaders of his party.
The 2020 general election, by every indication, will be about persuasion, with turnout expected to be at record highs. Our efforts are aimed at persuading enough disaffected conservatives, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents in swing states and districts to help ensure a victory in the Electoral College, and congressional majorities that don’t enable or abet Mr. Trump’s violations of the Constitution, even if that means Democratic control of the Senate and an expanded Democratic majority in the House.
Bacon mines some data and notes.
“Trump won around 90 percentof self-identified Republican voters in 2016, similar to past GOPpresidential nominees. About 90 percent of Republicans have approved of Trump throughout his first term, similar to George W. Bush’s standing in his first four years in office. And with Trump as the face of the party, Republican congressional candidates won around 90 percent of the GOP vote in the 2018 midterms, just as in recent midtermelections. There is really only one anti-Trump figure among the 249 Republicans on Capitol Hill: Sen. Mitt Romney…Polls also suggest most Republicans will be strongly behind Trump this November too — he is getting about 90 percent of the Republican vote in head-to-head match-ups with the presumptive Democratic nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden.
…Conservatives who really hate Trump probably no longer identify as Republicans — 11 percent of Republicans switched their party affiliation between December 2015 and March 2017, according to Pew. But surveys suggest that the share of Democrats switching affiliation in that same period is about the same. It’s hard to be precise about this: Data suggests at most 10 percent of American voters overall are anti-Trump but generally lean Republican.1 That’s not nothing, but between 40 and 50 percent of Americans are likely to votefor Trump in November.
Never Trumpers played a role in Democratic victories in the 2018 midterms, although the extent of their contribution is unclear. as Bacon notes:
It’s hard to quantify exactly how many anti-Trump conservatives backed Democrats in 2018 and how big a role they played in Democrats taking the House and winning many key governor’s races. But that temporary alliance between “Never Trump” Republicans and Democrats was strengthened in 2019 for two reasons. First, “Never Trump” Republicans found there was little appetite in the GOP for a primary challenge to Trump — another illustration of their declining influence within the party. And second, in a final blow for some of them, Republicans largely stood by Trump even as details emerged about his efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate the Bidens.
The third possibility is that Never Trumpers will vote for the most genuinely moderate candidates down-ballot, or not vote, or vote for a third party candidate when the choice is between an unnaceptable liberal or a Trump enabler. In every race, Democratic senate candidates in competitive races would be wise to pay close attention to the down-ballot views of Never Trumpers in their districts.
The Economist has published some very interesting numbers on Biden’s performance relative to Clinton among various demographic groups (presumably, the number-crunching was done by G. Elliott Morris, who is their US politics data guy), The standout difference here is among white noncollege voters. As the chart below shows, the more white nonocollege the state is, the more Biden’s performance is superior Clinton’s in 2016.
That is a very beneficial pattern for Biden in terms of electoral college results. The article notes:
“Currently our model estimates that 41% of whites who cast ballots would vote for Mr Biden if the election were held today, whereas 51% say they will cast their lot for Mr Trump—a ten-percentage-point margin. In 2016 Mrs Clinton lost this group by 15 points. Mr Biden has improved his standing both among whites who have college degrees and the ever-watched group of those who do not. He polls four and six percentage points better than Mrs Clinton did among each group, respectively. Mr Biden is currently polling 11 points better than Mrs Clinton in states where working-class white voters make up the largest share of the electorate, and he is performing roughly six points worse in those states where they are the lowest share (see chart).
That improvement has a disproportionate effect on Mr Biden’s chances of victory. Whereas Mrs Clinton lost the election by small margins in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, we find Mr Biden with a slight lead in all three. He is also likely to beat Mrs Clinton’s margin in Arizona, which is likelier than any of the midwestern battlegrounds to tip the election.”
The article also notes some underperformance by Biden among nonwhites and young voters relative to Clinton but this pattern appears to be less salient to electoral college results in their analysis. In the Nationscape data (80,000 cases since the beginning of the year), I find less of underperformance among these groups, but confirm the general pattern of Biden overperformance among noncollege whites with similar positive effects on Biden’s electoral college results.
If this pattern continues, Biden is in very good shape.
Perry Bacon, Jr. reports at FiveThirtyEight that “Several polling firms released surveys of Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in April. Former President Barack Obama carried all four states in 2012. Trump flipped all four in 2016 (as well as Ohio and Iowa, neither of which has much recent polling.) And Biden appears to lead in all four now. (North Carolina, which has gone Republican in both of the last two cycles, was also polled pretty often in April, with Trump and Biden looking basically tied there.)…at the moment, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are very close to the national tipping point — so they’re likely to be among the more determinative states this November.” However, noes Bacon, “Trump is likely to look stronger when pollsters start limiting their results to “likely voters.” Most of the April surveys in these four states were conducted among registered voters or all adults, two groups that include some people who may not vote in November…Fox News, Ipsos and Public Policy Polling all recently polled several swing states. All three found Biden had a larger lead in Michigan and Pennsylvania than in other swing states they surveyed (Florida for Fox, North Carolina and Wisconsin for PPP, Wisconsin for Ipsos.)”
Ruy Teixeira notes on his Facebook page, “Texas? Georgia?…Well, I wouldn’t get too frisky here. But there are two new polls out of TX and GA; the former shows Biden ahead of Trump by 1, while the latter has Biden only behind Trump by a point. No internals on the GA poll, so not much to comment on there, other than I’d have to see a lot more similar polling before I’d see GA as truly being on the edge between Trump and Biden. The TX poll has some internals available and encouragingly they show Biden with a much larger margin among Hispanics than Hillary had in the state in 2016 (47 vs. 26 points). However, Biden’s deficit among whites is basically the same as Clinton’s, about 40 points. I find it hard to believe that Biden can take the state or even make it very close without compressing that deficit…That said, it’s certainly worth keeping an eye on both these states as we move forward.”
Harry Enten explains why “Democrats are slight favorites for Senate control” at CNN Politics: “To gain Senate control from Republicans in November’s elections, Democrats will need a net gain of three seats (if former Vice President Joe Biden holds onto his lead over President Donald Trump and claims victory) or four seats (if Trump wins)…An early look at the data finds that Democrats are the slightest of favorites to take back the Senate. The chance Democrats net gain at least 3 seats is about 3-in-5 (60%), while the chance they net gain at least 4 seats is about 1-in-2 (50%)…The Democrats are doing fairly well not because they’re overwhelming favorites in any one or a select number of seats. Rather, it’s that they have a non-negligible to good chance in a lot of seats. Although Democrats only hold 12 of the 35 seats up, they have at least a 1-in-20 (5%) shot in 25 seats…They hold about an 8-point lead on the generic ballot. That’s about the same as it was in 2018, when it was 7 points, and about double what it was in 2016. Based on past trends, this large advantage suggests that races that may look like tossups right now are forecasted to move toward the Democrats over the course of the year.”
Enten continues: “Right now, Democrats are clear favorites in three seats Republicans currently hold: Arizona (Sen. Martha McSally), Colorado (Sen. Cory Gardner) and Maine (Sen. Susan Collins). They’re favored to defeat incumbents between about 2-in-3 times (65%) to three in four times (75%) in these states. All three are in states that were decided by 5 points or less in the 2016 presidential election, and where the national environment is helping the Democrats. The limited polling in Arizona and Maine also point to Democrats being ahead by a small margin.” However, ” Republicans are heavily favored in Alabama. Democratic Sen. Doug Jones won a shocking victory in a 2017 special Senate election. The polling and strong Republican tilt of the state indicate that Republicans should win this race about 6-in-7 in seven times (85%)…If Democrats are going to net gain three seats while losing in Alabama, their best shot to get that additional pickup is in North Carolina. This is another state that was determined by less than 5 points in the 2016 presidential election, and where Republican Sen. Thom Tillis has actually been running slightly behind Democratic challenger Cal Cunningham in an average of polling. Cunningham wins a little bit north of half the time (55%), though it’s best to regard this one as a tossup…The lack of Republican pickup opportunities again point why Democrats have a real shot of wrestling control: Democrats simply have a wider playing field.”
As former Vice President Biden ponders his choices for a running mate, a new group called The Committee to Draft Michelle Obama is making a case for the former First Lady, who was the “most admired woman in the world” in a YouGov poll taken less than a year ago. Supporters hope that there may be some wiggle-room in her statement, “I’ll say it here directly: I have no intention of running for office, ever,” as she wrote in her best-selling memoir, “Becoming.” The group believes it would be hard for her decline if asked to join the ticket by Biden, who is a close friend of the Obamas. Biden has stated that his running mate will be a woman, and he is also being urged to select an African American woman. Only two Democratic women have 8 years of experience living in the White House and Mrs. Obama would also bring a younger, energetic feel to the ticket, as well as some bipartisan credibility. In addition, she has been thoroughly vetted. Asked if he thought Mrs. Obama would be a good running mate, Biden said, “I’d do that in a heartbeat if I thought there was any chance.”
“What should bring moderates and progressives together is an idea put forward long ago by the late social thinker Michael Harrington: “visionary gradualism,” E. J. Dionne, Jr. writes in his opinion essay, “Progressives and moderates: Don’t destroy each other” in the Washington Post. “The phrase captures an insight from each side of their debate: Progressives are right that reforms unhinged from larger purposes are typically ephemeral. But a vision disconnected from first steps and early successes can shrivel up and die. Vision and incremental change are not opposites. In our nation’s history, the two have reinforced each other — for example, in protecting the environment, achieving social security for the elderly and assistance to the unemployed, protecting civil rights, and expanding health insurance coverage. This lesson will apply for any new Democratic president, no matter which wing of the party she or he represents.”
Dionne continues, “A vibrant left has always been a central component of any successful era of social reform. By offering plans and proposals on what Harrington called “the left wing of the possible,” socialists, social democrats and left-liberals have redefined the political playing field…Moderates who think of themselves as problem solvers should welcome the left’s initiatives as part of a process of legitimizing the very act of public problem solving. Only when this happens can a real contest begin over how fast and how far we can move at any given moment.”
“The main reason crises don’t produce lasting change in social policy seems to be that people quickly forget or turn their attention elsewhere, so their beliefs and preferences snap back to where they were before the emergency.,” Lane Kenworthy argues in Foreign Affairs. Kenworthy, author of Social Democratic Capitalism, writes “Examining public opinion data going back to the early 1970s, the sociologist Lindsay Owens and I have found that recessions tend to have only temporary effects on Americans’ attitudes on a wide range of economic, social, and political issues. In addition, economic downturns cause some people to worry about their own financial well-being rather than the welfare of others, as the political scientist Ronald Inglehart has documented. And welfare state opponents and deficit hawks invariably warn against new public spending, arguing that the country can’t afford to take on additional debt.” Is Kenworthy underestimating the shelf-life of the fear factor in the current economic crisis as a force for lasting health care reform, or the relationship between public opinion and the actions of congress?
Kenworthy continues, “Temporary expansions of the safety net thus rarely become permanent. Time and again during downturns, the federal government has intervened to help people who lose their jobs and to rejuvenate the economy—by extending access to unemployment benefits, making stimulus payments, and declaring payroll tax holidays, loan payment delays, and more. But these temporary measures nearly always end once the economy recovers…When public social programs have been enlarged for good, it has tended to happen via the ballot box: progressive parties in government, not crises, make lasting social policy…Unless a new Democratic majority in the Senate is willing to do away with the filibuster, new social spending likely would have to be passed via the reconciliation procedure, which per Senate rules can be used only once a year…If the pandemic pushes us closer to social democracy, it will be because it boosts the electoral fortunes of the political party currently out of power, which happens to be one that’s already inclined to expand the social safety net.”
Trump revived one of his more ridiculous routines this week, and I wrote about it at New York:
Nothing illustrates the self-interested moral relativism characterizing our president’s worldview quite like his purely instrumental view of public-opinion research. If it redounds to his power and glory, it’s wonderful and worth proclaiming to the whole world like some sort of heathen gospel. If it doesn’t, then it’s “fake” and the mendacious work of his anti-American enemies.
Since Trump hasn’t had that much to brag about in the way of polling results as president, it’s sometimes hard to remember that polls were about all he talked about in the early days of his 2016 campaign. Here’s a reminder from Politico in December 2015:
“Poll numbers are, unlike perhaps any candidate in history, central to Trump’s pitch to voters. In his telephone and in-person morning talk show interviews and his evening rallies, not to mention on his hyperactive Twitter account, he rarely lets an opportunity escape without mentioning his titanic standing. “Wow, my poll numbers have just been announced and have gone through the roof!” Trump tweeted Thursday morning …
“One Trump insider likens Trump’s obsession with his poll numbers to a TV executive’s hunger for ratings: ‘It’s a barometer of success.'”
He was fairly promiscuous in praise of pollsters, so long as they made him look good:
“After a favorable poll release from CNN last week, for instance, he tweeted his thanks to the network and political team for ‘very professional reporting.'”
After he won the Republican presidential nomination, however, the support he had been getting from a surprisingly large plurality of Republican primary voters didn’t project so well onto the much bigger landscape of a general-election audience. In the RealClearPolitics national polling averages of the general election, Trump led Hillary Clinton for two brief moments, in May and then in July. But for the most part, he trailed HRC, which led, of course, to the Myth of Bad 2016 Polls, which Trump is still repeating today, tweeting: “FAKE POLLING, just like 2016 (but worse)!”
The reality is that 2016 polling was reasonably accurate, as Nate Silver, who thought more highly of Trump’s chances than most observers, pointed out in his exhaustive postmortem about erroneous expectations of a Clinton win:
“Trump outperformed his national polls by only 1 to 2 percentage points in losing the popular vote to Clinton, making them slightly closer to the mark than they were in 2012. Meanwhile, he beat his polls by only 2 to 3 percentage points in the average swing state. Certainly, there were individual pollsters that had some explaining to do, especially in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where Trump beat his polls by a larger amount. But the result was not some sort of massive outlier; on the contrary, the polls were pretty much as accurate as they’d been, on average, since 1968.”
Yes, many pundits relying on polls overinterpreted them and did not anticipate Trump’s success in threading the needle and winning the electoral vote even as he lost the national popular vote by a pretty decisive margin. There’s a fair amount of evidence that the results surprised Team Trump, too. But the polls weren’t “fake.” And even if they were grievously in error in 2016, many polling outlets have made adjustments to their methodologies to increase accuracy, most notably by weighting samples for education levels to avoid the undersampling of non-college-educated white voters that may have artificially depressed support for Trump in some 2016 surveys.
None of this seems to matter to the president, for whom polling results are nothing more than agitprop to be praised or attacked, depending on how well they show him faring. Since recent head-to-head polls matching Trump against Joe Biden have been pretty generally negative for him (he trails the Democrat by 6.3 percent in the RCP polling averages), he’s on the warpath again. According to multiple accounts, his campaign’s internal polls show pretty much the same thing, and he’s sufficiently upset about it to lash out at the people around him, which is par for the course. Here’s how Vanity Fair reported a recent blowup with campaign manager Brad Parscale:
“[A]fter Trump’s disinfectant comments set off a new political firestorm — the president reportedly took his anger over his dimming electoral prospects out on Parscale, whom he shouted at over the phone. ‘[Trump is] pissed because he knows he messed up in those briefings,’ one Republican close to the White House told CNN about the president’s attack. CNN, which first reported the news of Trump’s call with Parscale, notes that Trump ‘berated’ the campaign manager for the president’s poor polling numbers, and even threatened to sue Parscale, though the Post reports the comment was intended as a joke.”
It’s clear Trump wants to undermine the credibility of adverse polls as part of a broader project of undermining the credibility of unfriendly media. The erroneous but pervasive myth that polls got 2016 terribly wrong will help him in this endeavor, and if his polling performance improves, he will have no inhibitions about boasting that “even” the fake-news media’s fake polls acknowledge his towering popularity among a grateful populace. The scarier prospect is that he’s preparing to declare adverse election returns “fake” unless they confirm he’s won.
Tom Edsall has an excellent review of recent research on trends in racial liberalism/conservatism. Among several studies, he highlights one by Daniel Hopkins and Samantha Hopkins that avoids the huge methodological problem of using the standard “racial resentment” battery, which despite its name measures nothing of the sort. (I have posted previously about the problems with the racial resentment battery, if you are interested in searching my archives. And see the Riley Carney and Ryan Enos paper, “Conservatism , Just World Belief , and Racism : An Experimental Investigation of the Attitudes Measured by Modern Racism Scales”)
“Daniel Hopkins, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, and Samantha Washington, a former research assistant there, challenge the argument that racial polarization in the United States is increasing. They contend that on matters of race, the views of both groups — white Democrats and white Republicans — are liberalizing.
In their paper — “The Rise of Trump, the Fall of Prejudice? Tracking White Americans’ Racial Attitudes 2008-2018 via a Panel Survey” — Hopkins and Washington use a measure of prejudice that is significantly different from the [racial resentment battery] used by [Andrew] Engelhardt.
Hopkins explained in an email why he and Engelhardt differ in their assessment of white Republicans. In his study, Engelhardt uses responses to the battery of what are known as “racial resentment” questions. Hopkins argued that these questions tend to push Republicans in a conservative direction because some directly relate to a separate issue, the role of government, including questions asking whether the government should intervene to help minorities.
According to Hopkins, some Republicans will oppose intervention on the basis of ideological “small government” principle, not racism, nonetheless raising their racial resentment score.
Hopkins and Washington write that they used a separate measure designed to capture white respondents’ beliefs in stereotypes. Specifically, our panelists were repeatedly asked to rate Blacks, Hispanics/Latinos, and Whites on two stereotype scales, work ethic and trustworthiness.
The advantage in this approach, they argue, is that the use of in-group stereotypes helps address concerns about social desirability biases, as people can rate an out-group positively while also rating their own group more positively.
As the accompanying graphic shows, Hopkins and Washington found bipartisan declines in anti-black and anti-Hispanic prejudice.”
Now, none of this means Trump can’t win….but it does indicate that continued support for Trump cannot be explained simply on the basis of racism. It is (and was originally) a far more complex political impulse than that reductionist view suggests. That should be kept in mind as Democrats seek to undercut Trump and build the broadest possible coalition for 2020.
It is even possible, as Hopkins put it in an email to Edsall:
“Overall, I do think these results indicate that the share of white Americans who would rally to a general election campaign because of its explicit appeals to racial prejudice is smaller than many political strategists suppose.”
New York Times colmnist Thomas B. Edsall probes recent scholarship on racial attitudes of white Democrats and Republicans and notes: “In his 2019 paper, “White People’s Racial Attitudes are Changing to Match Partisanship,” Andrew Engelhardt, a political scientist at Brown, shows a dramatic increase in partisan racial polarization from 2016 to 2018…The accompanying charts show the percentage of white Democrats in the most racially liberal category growing from 10 percent in 2016 to 15 percent in 2018, the leading edge of a general turn to the left among party members. The percentage of white Republicans in the most racially conservative cohort, in contrast, grew from 14 percent to 21 percent, a tilt to the right with a potentially substantial impact…On a scale from zero to 100, ranking levels of racial resentment, the mean for white Democrats fell from 43 to 34. For white Republicans, the mean rose from 71 to 76…n a more recent paper, “Observational Equivalence in Explaining Attitude Change: Have White Racial Attitudes Genuinely Changed?” Engelhardt answers in the affirmative the question posed in his title….Poll data, he writes, supports “seeing changes in white racial attitudes as genuine. The decline in Democrats’ racial resentment levels between 2012 and 2016 appears sincere, not cheap talk.” And, Engelhardt contends, there will be significant political and policymaking consequences…
Edsall adds, “In their paper — “The Rise of Trump, the Fall of Prejudice? Tracking White Americans’ Racial Attitudes 2008-2018 via a Panel Survey” — [Daniel} Hopkins and [Samantha] Washington use a measure of prejudice that is significantly different from the one used by Engelhardt…Hopkins explained in an email why he and Engelhardt differ in their assessment of white Republicans. In his study, Engelhardt uses responses to the battery of what are known as “racial resentment” questions. Hopkins argued that these questions tend to push Republicans in a conservative direction because some directly relate to a separate issue, the role of government, including questions asking whether the government should intervene to help minorities…According to Hopkins, some Republicans will oppose intervention on the basis of ideological “small government” principle, not racism, nonetheless raising their racial resentment score…Hopkins and Washington found bipartisan declines in anti-black and anti-Hispanic prejudice.”
Edsall notes, further: “There is a third analysis that stands apart from those of both Engelhardt and Hopkins and Washington: that the growing racial liberalism of white Democrats is more about claiming a moral posture than deeply felt conviction…Hakeem Jefferson, a political scientist at Stanford, challenged the sincerity of white Democrats’ growing racial liberalism in an April 21 Twitter thread: “The white left” can sometimes look more “progressive” than black folks because the white left has the luxury of approaching questions that bear on marginalized people’s lives with a kind of reckless abandon that many others don’t have…I remain rather skeptical that we are in a period where black people can trust that white liberals have embraced a liberatory politics.” Edsll cites another study: “[Tufts political scientist Deborah J.] Schildkraut conducted a series of surveys to gauge liberal and conservative racial identity among whites. She found that just over 40 percent of conservatives said that their white identity was “very” or “extremely” important to them. A smaller percentage (23 percent) of white liberals saw their racial identity as similarly important…There were also vastly different perceptions of the level of discrimination against blacks and whites between white liberals and conservatives: “44 percent of white liberals said there is no discrimination against whites and 28 percent said there is a great deal of discrimination against blacks, while only 2 percent of conservatives said there is no discrimination against whites and only 8 percent said there is a great deal of discrimination against blacks.”
Edsall concludes, “If, as Hopkins and Washington find, whites are abandoning the relatively high levels of prejudice of 2016 in meaningful numbers, and if this decline contributed to Democratic victories in 2018, Trump will face a steeper climb in capitalizing on racial resentment than he did four years ago…The drop since Trump took office in what had been a fairly consistent sense of white racial superiority, according to Hopkins and Washington, would suggest that Trump’s ongoing racial appeals may have crossed a line, potentially endangering his re-election…Has the exploitation of racial anxiety reached the end of its politically useful life? No. Nor will it fade from American history anytime soon, if it ever does. But the very fact that more and more people now question whether Trump’s re-election is assured provides a ray of hope.”
Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. reports that “President Trump, who has largely declined to use his power under the Defense Production Act for needed medical and protective equipment, used that same power on Tuesday night to force meat processors to remain open. Never mind that food-processing and meatpacking plants are hot spots for covid-19 — at least 79 have reported outbreaks. Never mind that at least 20 workers in the industry have died from the disease or that the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) reports that at least 6,500 workers in the industry have been diagnosed or exposed. Dionne quotes Debbie Berkowitz, director of the worker health and safety program at the National Employment Law Project: “Trump has created a false choice between worker safety and feeding America,” Berkowitz, who has spent decades working on safety issues in meat processing, said in an interview. “We can do both. Other parts of the economy are doing both.” Dionne adds, “When social solidarity is essential, it’s common to hear pious sermons against class warfare. Unfortunately, there is a class war. And its victims, so many of them front-line workers, didn’t start it.”
At The Cook Political Report, Charlie Cook writes, “Simply put, a referendum on his performance is going to be a tough sell for Trump. He’s the first president in history to never have a majority job approval rating. Plus, as Bill Scher noted in Politico Magazine, third-party candidates are unlikely to make the ballot in many states this year because the coronavirus shutdown has made gathering petition signatures all but impossible. This makes Trump’s climb tougher in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. In 2016, Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s vote share in each of those states was greater than Trump’s margin of victory. Thus, he will need to get closer to 50 percent in that all-important trio of states this time around than the 46 percent he got last time.” Cook warns, “The only way Trump wins is to make Joe Biden absolutely unelectable, to make him an unacceptable risk. That only happens one way, and it’s not by playing by the Marquess of Queensberry Rules for fair fighting…The Willie Horton, Bain Capital, and Swift Boat attacks that Michael Dukakis, Mitt Romney, and John Kerry faced, respectively, were child’s play compared to what is going to be thrown at Biden, his son, Hunter, and anyone else in the former vice president’s orbit. When this is over, Hillary Clinton will think she got off light from the 2016 Trump campaign. That’s the only way he can win, because a referendum isn’t going to go his way. Expect this to get ugly.”
Zack Stanton sketches “The Nightmare Scenario’: How Coronavirus Could Make the 2020 Vote a Disaster: Trump can’t cancel the presidential election. Here’s what you should really be worrying about” at Politico:=, and writes “the prospect that terrifies election experts isn’t the idea that Trump moves the election (something he lacks the power to do); it’s something altogether more plausible: Despite an ongoing pandemic, the 2020 election takes place as planned, and America is totally unprepared…The nightmare scenario goes something like this: Large numbers of voters become disenfranchised because they’re worried it’s not safe to vote and that participating makes it more likely they catch the coronavirus. Voter-registration efforts, almost always geared toward in-person sign-ups, bring in very few new voters. A surge of demand for absentee ballots overwhelms election administrators, who haven’t printed enough ballots. In some states, like Texas, where fear of coronavirus isn’t a valid reason to request an absentee ballot, turnout drops as Americans are forced to choose between voting in person (and risking contact with the coronavirus) or not voting at all…At the same time, confidence in the cash-strapped U.S. Postal Service — whose coronavirus funding President Donald Trump has already threatened to block — teeters, and its involvement in handling so many absentee votes causes concern.”
Stanton interviews Rick Hasen, author of Election Meltdown, who says, “I’ve always been concerned that [Trump] would claim that fraud was the reason he might lose an election. And I still think that might happen, should he lose — which brings up the Election Administrators’ Prayer: “Lord, let this not be close.” If you have a real blowout, it’s hard to claim that fraud is the result…How do we ensure that elections are not only conducted fairly, but that people have confidence in them, when recent public opinion polling shows up to 40 percent of the public is not convinced that elections are conducted fairly? I think there’s a role to play for elected leaders, social media companies, traditional media companies, lawyers, members of Congress, state and local election officials — there are steps that all can take to try to minimize the chances of a meltdown. And that’s really where we have to focus our efforts, especially now in this Covid-19 era.”
At Sabato’s Crystal Ball, Kyle Kondik and J. Miles Coleman have an update on Democraic prospects for winning a U.S. Senate majority in November. Calling the battle for majority control a “toss-up,” Kondik and Coleman write, “The focus on the evenly-matched battle for the Senate has in some ways narrowed to four GOP-held seats: Arizona, Colorado, Maine, and North Carolina…Practically speaking, Democrats probably have to win all four, and the White House, to win the Senate…However, the map may be expanding. Democrats’ best bet among the other targets probably is Montana, but we still see a small Republican edge there…We are making two rating changes this week on the periphery of the Senate map: Alaska and South Carolina move from Safe Republican to Likely Republican.”
I’ve been following the battles in Congress over the idea of a federal mandate to allow expanded voting by mail this November. But whoever’s winning at any given moment, time’s running out, as I noted at New York:
The question of how to conduct elections during and immediately after a pandemic has been a red-hot topic during the relatively brief span of the U.S. coronavirus crisis. It blew up big time during the latter stages of the stalled Democratic presidential primaries (particularly in the last state that attempted to hold a live-voting primary, Wisconsin), and became a highly partisan issue in congressional negotiations over the $2.2 trillion coronavirus stimulus legislation enacted last month.
Generally speaking, Democrats want voting by mail to be made available as broadly as possible going forward — preferably by mailing all registered voters ballots they can cast if they choose — and want the federal government to push states in that direction via carrots (major new federal funding) and sticks (a mandate). Most Republicans oppose major changes in voting practices to one degree or another. Some Republicans, notably the president, have claimed, without any actual evidence, that voting by mail is inherently vulnerable to massive fraud. And they are more or less united in opposing the kind of federal push toward voting by mail that Democrats have demanded. They did go along with a modest amount of federal funding for election assistance in the coronavirus stimulus bill, but kept it free of any mandates for voting by mail.
Congressional Democrats have renewed calls for conditional election assistance in negotiations over the next coronavirus stimulus legislation, as the Hill reports:
“Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) declined to say on Friday how much money Democrats would try to include, saying she wouldn’t negotiate through the media. But Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) said during a conference call with progressives groups on Friday that he would push to include $1.8 billion for mail-in voting and other ‘alternatives.’
“’I don’t think this president wants to have an election at all. I think he’s going to do everything he can to circumvent people going to the polls in November,’ Clyburn said during the call.”
But simply by waging a battle against expanded voting by mail, Republicans may be winning the war, because the clock is running down on major election rules and infrastructure changes in cash-strapped states that may not have the wherewithal to adopt near-universal voting by mail, even if they want to move in that direction, as Dominic Holden reports:
“’I would call it an emergency situation,’ said Carl Amacker, whose company, BlueCrest, makes Relia-Vote, a system that handles outbound mail ballots and processes them once they’re returned.
“BlueCrest currently supplies vote-by-mail systems to counties around the United States, yet like other leaders in the industry, it can’t expand those systems overnight. ‘Counties need to act very, very quickly,’ Amacker told BuzzFeed News, explaining that it can take months to build and install mail-in election systems. ‘The problem is we are going to run out of time.’
“Despite many inquiries in recent weeks, there are ‘not a lot of orders yet,’ added Jeff Ellington, president of Runbeck Election Services, which makes envelope sorters, prints mail-in ballots, and develops software to manage mail-in elections.”
The dirty little secret of American democracy is the ramshackle nature of our ridiculously decentralized system of elections. Starved of funds, staffed by elderly volunteers, often supervised by Republican state and local officials determined to hold down turnout for partisan reasons, that system didn’t get fixed after the Florida debacle in 2000 and now faces a supreme challenge. And in states with limited experience with voting by mail, it will soon be too late to change by November:
“The emerging consensus among industry leaders and election experts is that expanding voting by mail for November — particularly in large jurisdictions that haven’t processed a huge number of absentee ballots in the past — could require making commitments in the next few weeks …
“Getting ready for a big spike in mail-in ballots can involve months of preparation: In addition to building new machinery, the mere act of printing ballots is complex, as neighbors can be in different legislative districts, so ballots have numerous variations. Mail-in elections also entail constructing multilayer security envelopes, assigning each envelope a barcode for tracking, and installing computer systems to help verify voter signatures upon return.”
That’s in addition to the legal changes necessary in states that currently discourage voting by mail. Sixteen of them require an excuse for utilizing absentee ballots, though Democratic governors in Kentucky and New York have waived these requirements by executive order, and New Hampshire’s Republican election officials have announced that coronavirus fears represent a “disability,” which qualifies voters rationally convinced they are at risk to vote by mail there as well.
At some point, Democrats in Congress may need to decide whether fighting for weeks over conditions for federal-election assistance, or simply getting as much money into the pipeline as quickly as possible and hoping for the best, makes the most strategic sense. Any Democratic tack that delays election preparations, and thus elevates the odds of chaos, plays into the hands of the King of Chaos in the White House.
Plenty of good and bad ideas are popping up in this summer of Democratic anxiety, but it’s one of the latter I tried to knock down at New York:
Coming out of the agonizing intra-Democratic debate about Joe Biden’s fitness to beat Donald Trump is a sort of plan B scheme. Donors, we are told, are considering shifting resources to an effort to flip control of the House (just four seats away) in order to block a Trump-led Republican trifecta and a bacchanalia of authoritarian extremism next year. The reigning assumption is that absent a presidential win (which provides the tie-breaking vote in the Senate), maintaining Democratic control of the upper chamber will be almost impossible, since Republicans are sure to flip West Virginia, and all the other competitive races are on Democratic turf. So making Hakeem Jeffries House Speaker offers the best return on investment and perhaps relief from the agony of watching Biden like a hawk every time he’s on-camera.
It’s an interesting strategy but not terribly promising from a historical point of view. The last time House control flipped in a presidential-election year was in 1952, when Republicans benefited from a presidential landslide. The last six times House control has flipped (in 1954, 1994, 2006, 2010, 2018, and 2022), it’s happened in midterm elections featuring a very common backlash against the president’s party. You know how often a party has lost the White House and flipped the U.S. House in the same election? Zero times. There were times when Senate races (with their highly eccentric landscapes thanks to only one-third of seats being up in any one election) moved in a very different direction from the presidential election. But the House has always been harnessed to White House results in fundamental and even predictable ways, as political scientist David Faris points out:
“Political scientist Robert Erikson found in 2016 that for ‘every percentage point that a presidential candidate gains in the two-party vote, their party’s down-ballot candidates gain almost half a point themselves.’ A 1990 study by James E. Campbell and Joe A. Sumners found that for every 10 points that a presidential candidate gains in a state, it boosts that party’s Senate contender by 2 points, and its House hopefuls by 4. This basic logic is a large part of why the past five presidents brought congressional majorities into office with them when they were elected to their first term.”
And most of this historical record, mind you, was forged in the bygone era of relatively nonideological major parties that made ticket-splitting immensely more common. House Democrats entered the 2024 cycle optimistic about making gains since 16 Republicans are in districts carried by Biden in 2020 while only five Democrats are in Trump ’20 districts. But as J. Miles Coleman of Sabato’s Crystal Ball observes, an even Biden-Trump race in the national popular vote would turn six Democratic-held House districts red. A 3.3 percent Trump advantage in the national popular vote (his margin in the polling averages Coleman was using) would turn 19 Democratic-held House districts red.
Flipping the House if Biden loses decisively is hard to imagine. Even now, with polls showing a close presidential race, all of the major House prognosticators give Republicans a slight advantage (Cook Political Report, for example, shows the GOP favored in 210 races and Democrats favored in 203, with 22 toss-ups, half of them currently controlled by each party). The congressional generic ballot, polling that estimates the House national popular vote, is dead even (on average, Democrats lead by 0.5 percent in FiveThirtyEight, Republicans by 0.3 percent in RealClearPolitics). This will be an uphill fight for Democrats in the best of circumstances. And it should be remembered that Biden’s party lost 13 net House seats in 2020 even as he won the White House.
History, current analysis, and common sense indicate that abandoning the presidential ticket to focus on House races as though they are isolated contests is a fool’s errand for Democrats. Whether it’s Biden, Kamala Harris, or some improbable fantasy candidate heading the ticket, the presidential race needs to stay highly competitive if Democrats want to make House gains. If Trump rides back into the White House with a solid win, his toady Mike Johnson will almost certainly be there to help him turn his scary plans into legislation.
