Greg Sargent’s “Will the ‘Trump economy’ save the GOP? Here’s the Democratic strategy to prevent that” at The Plum Line offers some insights Democratic campaigns should consider. He cites two major challenges Dems face:

The first is the difficulty of puncturing their message about the economy through the din of press coverage of other matters, especially child separations and the Russia probe and Trump’s reaction to it. This isn’t to say that Democrats are at a disadvantage on those issues — the opposite is very likely the case — but rather that in addition to winning the argument about those things, it is also a crucial ingredient that their message about the economy get heard. “Unlike Russia and immigration, voters won’t hear about this as much in the press,” the memo concludes, “meaning Democrats must continue to carry the message in paid media and on the campaign trail.”

The second big challenge Democrats face is that it isn’t clear voters will necessarily base their choices on personal perceptions of the economy, rather than on general perceptions of it. A recent Post-Schar School poll found that 57 percent of voters rate the economy as good or excellent, including 58 percent in battleground districts.

Thus, the imperative for Democrats is to get voters to base their choice instead on their personal experience of the economy, as well as on specific Republican policies that would slash the safety net, particularly on health care (an area where Democrats are stronger). Of course, many Democrats are already trying to do this. As Margot Sanger-Katz reports, Democratic candidates around the country are stressing health care, crucially by asking audiences how many of them suffer from preexisting conditions, thus personalizing the issue, which is essential.

So when you see Democratic candidates trying to stress voters’ personal experience of the economy and the health-care system, and highlighting specific Trump/GOP policies on both fronts, this memo helps shed light on the thinking behind it.

Sargent makes an excellent point that health security is a central economic concern of millions of voters, who are understandably very nervous about the GOP’s lack of a coherent alternative, as well as Republican opposition to coverage for preexisting conditions. Democrats have been given a potent gift in the GOP’s total failure to improve the ACA, despite their House and Senate majorities and the presidency, and they should work it to brand the Republicans as incompetent, as well as elitist. Do read the rest of Sargent’s article for a thoughtful perspective on Democratic strategy in the months ahead.

It didn’t get as much attention as it deserved before August 7 (though I did write about it), and the same is true of the remarkable results from Missouri, where the labor movement pulled off a shocker, as I noted at New York:

[Members of] America’s beleaguered labor movement really, really needed this one, and after an impressive investment of time, energy, and money, they got it. In conservative Missouri, a right-to-work law enacted last year by a Republican-controlled legislature and former Republican Governor Eric Greitens was overturned by voters who rejected the anti-labor measure by a comfortable margin. In early returns, rural counties were joining urban labor strongholds in opposing right-to-work.

Republicans had sought to make Missouri the 28th state to adopt right-to-work, which prohibits “union shop” arrangements whereby workers who benefit from collective bargaining agreements can be required to help defray union costs. When unions and their allies succeeded in putting the law on hold pending the ballot measure, the legislature countered by moving the vote from the relatively-high-turnout general election to the primary, hoping to kill it with voter indifference. But it didn’t work.

A reported 5-1 financial advantage for the No on Prop A campaign obviously helped produce this result. But you have to figure there was an intensity factor, too. The Supreme Court’s June decision imposing the equivalent of right-to-work rules on all public-sector workplaces was not just a blow to unions, but a huge setback in the sector of the workforce where labor had made most of its recent membership gains. Labor needed to mount a comeback, and as fate would have it, the opportunity arose first in Missouri, a state with a proud labor tradition but an increasingly pro-corporate state government.

Today’s verdict by voters should give pause to anti-union pols and organizations who assume they can roll back collective bargaining rights at will in any state where Republicans have control.

I wrote this well before the final results, which exceeded all expectations: the right-to-work law went down by more than a two-to-one margin–in Missouri. That is truly good news for embattled union folk everywhere–and for Democrats who very much need a vibrant labor movement.

More bad news for the GOP, from Kyle Kondik’s update “The House: Ratings Changes in the Aftermath of Another Nail-Biter Special Election: GOP likely holds on in OH-12, but narrow result and other developments Tuesday reinforce positive Democratic trends” at The Crystal Ball: “The Democrats now have 203 seats at least leaning to them, the Republicans have 198 at least leaning to them, and there are 34 Toss-ups. Based on our current ratings, the Democrats no longer have to win a majority of the Toss-ups to win the House — 15 of 34 would now do the trick — although Republicans hope that some of our Leans Democratic seats are rated too bearishly for their side. There is always a chance that something could happen to change the current dynamic, but nothing that happened Tuesday night suggested that the pro-Democratic trend we’ve seen throughout the cycle is eroding. The election is less than three months away now.”

At The Princeton  Election Consortium, Sam Wang’s “OH-12 is ominous for GOP in House…and the Senate” notes, “In 46 special elections in 2018, the overall swing from 2016 has averaged 12 points toward Democrats. Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote by a little over 2 percentage points. If this swing were to hold up in November 2018, it would mean a 14-point win in the national House popular vote. I estimate that a 6-point win would be just enough to flip control. A 14-point win is massive, enough for a gain of over 50 seats.”

Frank Bruni urges “Democrats, Do Not Give Up on the Senate: The party’s odds aren’t great, but they look better all the time” in his New York Times column, and argues, “But I wouldn’t give up on it, because a Democratic majority in the Senate means more than one in the House (Supreme Court, anyone?), and there really is a rationale for hope…It starts with the general political climate and Trump’s approval rating, which never crests 45 percent. Sad! Recent polls have shown that in congressional races, voters prefer a generic Democrat to a generic Republican by six to 10 points. That’s wave territory, and Democrats are favored by the historical patterns of midterms…The party needs to pick up two seats. It has more than two states to turn to. For a while now, Jacky Rosen in ever-bluer Nevada has been scaring the bejesus out of the Republican incumbent, Dean Heller. More recently, Kyrsten Sinema in reddish Arizona and Phil Bredesen in redder Tennesseehave emerged as fearsome contenders for seats being vacated by Trump-averse Republicans (Jeff Flake and Bob Corker, respectively).”

Ruy Teixeira writes on his Facebook page, “Why did Democratic support spike in Franklin county in OH-12 last Tuesday? I have a feeling it has a lot to do with the data on the far right hand side of this chart[below]. No wonder smart Republicans like Sean Trende are getting nervous.”

“The biggest strategic challenge [Democrats] have will come in September and October when they’ve got to make a decision whether some races are now in the safe column and they can divert resources to lean-Republican races,” said former Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), quoted in “Dems eyeing smaller magic number for House majority” by Scott Wong nd Mike Lillis at The Hill. “It’s way too early to make those decisions,” added Israel, who led the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) from 2011 to 2014…“Without the redistricting firewall that they built, Republicans would probably lose 60 seats in this kind of cycle,” Israel said. “As a result of the redistricting firewall that they built, they could lose about half of that.”

Some statistics to consider about the contest for Georgia governorship, from Thomas B. Edsall’s column, “The Democratic Party Has Two Futures: Candidates in different states are testing out the electoral power of the left and the center” at The New York Times: “The black share of the Georgia electorate has been growing rapidly. The Atlanta Journal Constitution reported that the number of African-Americans voting in the May primary grew by 43 percent between 2010 and 2018, while white voters declined 9 percent. In 2017, the state population was 52.8 percent white — on the cusp of turning majority minority.”

Edsall also notes, however, that “In an analysis of Democratic primaries through July 12, Brookings found that establishment candidates had won 88 and progressive candidates had won 64. The results from Tuesday now increase the share won by establishment candidates.”

“Nearly half — 46 percent — of registered voters younger than 30 said they are “absolutely certain to vote,” according to Post-ABC polls averaging across polls in January and April. And more than 6 in 10 millennials ages 22 to 38 said they are “looking forward” to midterm elections in a recent Pew Research Center survey. That number was 46 percent in 2014 and 39 percent in 2010…Relying on young voters — particularly those enrolled in college — may not be the best strategy,” argues Eugene Scott in “There’s optimism college students could deliver in Ohio in the fall. Is that realistic?” at The Fix. “Washington Post polling analyst Emily Guskin did a deep dive on the uptick in voter registration for 18- to 29-year-olds. It has not been as significant as some expected after the politically charged Parkland, Fla., school shooting earlier this year. Many people who register to vote do not show up on Election Day, and young people are by far the least likely age group to cast ballots, especially in midterm elections. The United States Elections Project analyzed U.S. Census Bureau data tracking turnout in midterm elections since 1986 and found that 16 percent of eligible voters ages 18 to 29 turned out to vote in the 2014 midterms. It was the lowest for any election since 1986, though turnout among this age group was never higher than 21 percent in midterms over this period.”

There’s no substitute for in-person engagement for both base mobilization and winning over swing voters. But Democratic campaigns should also take a look at “How RumbleUp is Powering the Republican Texting Revolution: When it comes to campaign technology, Democrats invent, Republicans perfect.” by Thomas Peters at Campaigns & Elections. His article provides a clear picture of how the opposition is planning to reach younger voters in particular, and it shows what some of their text messages look like.

The Democratic Strategist is proud to present an extremely important new Strategy Memo–one that is simultaneously appearing as a lead article in The Washington Monthly.

The memo’s basic thesis is simple:

In many white working class and red state districts, Democratic policies and proposals, regardless of whether they are “progressive” or “moderate,” never get seriously debated or even considered. As a result, in these districts neither strategy can be relied on to elect Democrats.

Instead, the success of Democratic candidates in these white working class communities will most critically depend on their ability to convincingly demonstrate to voters that Democrats will once again be their most sincere, effective and genuine advocates and representatives.

This challenge cuts across the conventional centrist-progressive divide that now dominates the debate within the Democratic coalition–and will fundamentally determine the outcome in November.

For a printer-friendly document, you may download the memo below:

Democrat Danny O’Connor trails by less than 1 percent in the vote count for the special election in OH-12. As Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns explain in “Republican Holds Slim Lead in Ohio Special Election for House Seat” at The New York Times,

O’Connor has not conceded as of this writing, and Republicans are still nervous about the final tally, as well as the November rematch.

In his slate.com post, “The Results in Ohio Bode Poorly for Republicans, Regardless of Who Wins, Josh Vorhees notes:

As for its bearing on the midterms, though, this race has already told us pretty much everything it can. Donald Trump won the district by 11 points two years ago, and Democrats haven’t represented it in Congress in three-plus decades. That the contest turned out to be as close as it did is shocking, regardless of who wins—or it would have been shocking, anyway, if it weren’t for the surprises of the previous 10 federal elections since Trump took office. Democrats have performed better, often way better, than the makeup of their respective electorates would predict. That was true in Pennsylvania, where Conor Lamb beat the partisan lean of his district (as measured by FiveThirtyEight) by 22 points to win his congressional race by a few tenths of a point. It was true in South Carolina, where Archie Parnell beat the lean by 16 points, to come up only 3 points short. And it’s true in Ohio, where O’Connor is on pace to beat expectations by about 13 points.

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

At the Netroots Nation conference in New Orleans, there was an ostentatious lack of interest in anything remotely resembling an actual swing voter. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: “Our swing voter is not red to blue; it’s nonvoter to voter”. In other words, it’s all mobilization not persuasion, according to her and others at the conference.

That may be unwise. Henry Olsen offers some hard data from the Voter Study Group surveys (full disclosure: I was involved in the collection of these data and sit on the editorial board of the group) on the potential salience of good old-fashioned swing voters in the coming election. Olsen may overstate his case a bit but attention must be paid to the data he presents.

In his Poltico post, “Democrats surging on eve of pivotal special election: Republicans have deployed the full machinery of the party to avoid defeat in the final special election before the midterms.” Alex Isenstadt writes that the Republicans are extremely worried about losing OH-12 to the young Democratic candidate Danny O’Connor. In addition to Trump and Kemp campaigning in the district for the lackluster GOP candidate Troy Balderson, “The Republican National Committee has opened two offices in the district, launched a $500,000-plus get-out-the-vote effort, and dispatched one of its top officials, Bob Paduchik, who ran Trump’s 2016 Ohio campaign. And outside conservative groups, led by a super PAC aligned with House Speaker Paul Ryan, have dumped more than $3.5 million onto the TV airwaves, far outpacing Democrats…The all-out push underscores the GOP’s trepidation about the final special election before the midterms. A loss, following startling Republican defeats in Pennsylvania and Alabama, would offer more evidence that a blue wave is on the horizon…Those worries intensified on Saturday morning when, just hours before the rally, Trump took to Twitter to attack NBA legend LeBron James, an Ohio favorite son who recently opened a public school in Akron for at-risk youth.” The latest Monmouth University poll indicates a statistical tie between the candidates, and Trump’s aproval rating in the district is 46 percent, down from 52 percent in 2016.

At The New York Times, Alexander Burns writes, “Most polling for both parties has shown a slim advantage for Mr. Balderson, 56, an auto dealer-turned-state legislator with a wooden public demeanor. But Republicans see his position as precarious in a season when Democrats are voting with passionate enthusiasm. And Democratic attacks on Mr. Balderson — for telling the Columbus Dispatch newspaper that he might support raising the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare — have wounded him…That there is uncertainty about Tuesday’s election to begin with is a source of grave anxiety for Republicans, and even victory might not allay it. The district has elected Republicans to Congress for decades and favored Mr. Trump in 2016 by 11 percentage points, surpassing his powerful margin statewide…And Mr. O’Connor, the Democrat, has attempted to channel a nonthreatening kind of indignation, trumpeting broadly appealing themes like protecting government-backed retirement benefits, rejecting corporate donations and promoting “new leadership” in Washington.”

A Danny O’Connor Ad:

“Most strategists and analysts say this November’s midterms will be determined by turnout. According to this view, whichever party more fully energizes its partisans will come out on top. New data, though, shows this common wisdom has it exactly backward. It’s the voters who sit between the two parties, not the party bases, who will choose which party wins…That’s a surprising finding from the most recent Democracy Fund Voter Study Group poll. This biannual poll, which asks thousands of Americans their views on issues, personalities and voting intentions, has been querying the same people their views going back to 2011 (in the polling world, this is known as a longitudinal survey). That means it is large enough and has the right sort of questions to do what most polls can’t: report accurately on small groups within the overall electorate…These dynamics will be on clear display in Tuesday’s special election in Ohio’s 12th Congressional District. The seat is split between an affluent, educated core that has loads of Romney-Clinton voters (Delaware and Franklin Counties) and five small-town and rural counties that have lots of Obama-Trump voters…The Democrat Danny O’Connor’s campaign has skillfully played to this divide. His ads emphasize working across the aisle to find common ground and note that “we need new leadership in both parties.” Winning control of the House and Senate means Democrats have to fight on Republican turf, and that means talking to Romney-Clinton and Obama-Trump voters. How well they can talk to both at the same time — and how well Republicans do among the same groups — will determine whether we see a blue wave or another case of Democratic despair.” — From “The Voters Who Will Decide the Midterms,” a New York Times op-ed by Henry Olsen, editor of the “Flyover Country” section at UnHerd.com, is the director and a co-founder of the Voter Study Group.

Vox’s Dylan Scott explores O’Connor’s growing support, and notes, “Even if he’s skeptical of single-payer, O’Connor talks a lot about expanding access to health care. In his campaign office, almost every sign adorning the walls is about stopping the GOP war on Medicaid or protecting the Affordable Care Act. His mom is a cancer survivor, and he is focused on protecting preexisting conditions. Balderson, the Republican in the race, opposed Ohio’s Medicaid expansion and is running on repealing Obamacare…“I haven’t seen a [single-payer] proposal that’s gonna move the needle, whether it’s budgetarily or coverage-wise,” he said. “I think voters here are more focused on protecting their access now, not the political jargon and all these catchphrases that have been poll-tested and are proposed by people in Washington, DC..But where O’Connor differs from moderate Democrats of the past — and from Republican now — is he refuses to entertain cuts to Social Security and Medicare; his campaign ads hit Balderson over GOP proposals to do so. He’s proud of his F-rating from the National Rifle Association.”

“Politics is regularly described in terms of “left” vs. “right,” observes E. J. Dionne, Jr. in his syndicated column, “Forget left and right. This is what will determine the midterms” at The Washington Post. “But other binaries can be more relevant. “Forward” vs. “backward” often define a choice facing an electorate better than the standard ideological categories. And the most powerful faceoff of all may be “reform” vs. “corruption.”…Much commentary on the 2018 midterm campaign has focused on a drift or a lurch left in the Democratic Party, the measurement of the port-side tilt varying from analyst to analyst. In fact, more moderate progressives have done very well in the primaries so far, but Democrats are certainly less enamored of centrism than they were during the 1990s…What is missed in this sort of analysis is that many, maybe most, of us don’t think in simple left/right terms, and countless issues are not cleanly identified this way. The same is true of elections. When the returns are tallied in November, the results may be better explained by the reform/corruption dynamic than any other.”

Further, adds Dionne, “The advantages of the corruption issue are (1) “corrupt” really is the right word to describe the Trump administration; (2) a concern over corruption transcends philosophical dispositions; and (3) the failure to “drain the swamp” is one of President Trump’s most obvious broken promises. Instead, Trump has turned the swamp into an immense toxic-waste dump. The stench emanates from Cabinet officials driven from office by egregious behavior and from Trump’s own violations of long-standing norms limiting business dealings by presidents and their families…But the corruption issue goes beyond meat-and-potatoes sleaze. Our democracy itself is in danger from the overpowering influence of money on our politics, unchecked foreign intervention in our elections and an increasing willingness of Republicans to bias the system in their favor through gerrymandering and restrictions on access to the ballot.”

“The single-payer Democrats are on the ballot in red and blue states and from California, where Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom is the heavy favorite to win in November, to Massachusetts, where Democrat Jay Gonzalez believes the issue will give him an opening against a popular Republican governor,” writes David Weigel at PowerPost…“There are going to be bills about this in dozens of states,” said Sam Munger, a spokesman for the liberal State Innovation Exchange who added that there has been a surge of single-payer legislation since the start of 2017. “Ninety percent of those bills won’t go anywhere, but people are pushing the spectrum of debate. Expanding health care, however they want to do it, is one of the top-testing messages we see in polls…While Democrats running for the House and Senate talk about Medicare for all in aspirational terms, as a post-Trump national goal, liberal candidates for governor suggest that their states could quickly become laboratories for universal coverage.”

Sher Watts Spooner explains why “2018 is the year of Democratic women—but not only candidates” at Daily Kos: “The elections in 2018 are turning out to be the Year of the Woman, but it’s not just women candidates running as Democrats. It’s women voting in big numbers. It’s women donating money to candidates—lots of money. More than anything else, it’s about women having their voices heard…No longer are women candidates afraid to speak out on all issues. They’re proud of touting their military service. And they’re also not afraid to talk about a double standard for women candidates…Suddenly the media are full of stories about the number of Democratic women running and winning primaries. About how the midterms could feature a record gender gap between men and women voters. About how women are establishing “giving circles” to make sure candidates are funded and to give more interested women a way to get involved.” Spoonoer quyotes a CNN story: “In the average poll since June, Democrats are leading among women by an average 20-percentage point margin compared to trailing among men by 6 points. If this holds, this would be the largest margin that Democrats would win women by in a midterm election since at least 1958…One clear advantage of doing better among women voters though is that they almost always represent a larger percentage of the electorate than men do.”

Looking at some historical data from Cook Political Report‘s Amy Walter, I noticed some trends that may be germane to this election cycle and wrote about them for New York:

The Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter points out that in two recent “wave” midterm elections, in 2006 and 2010 — both of which flipped control of the House — the late trends were very strongly against the party controlling the presidency:

“In July of 2006, The Cook Political Report rated just 14 GOP-held seats as highly vulnerable. By November, the number of GOP-held seats in danger had tripled to 43. We saw a similar pattern in 2010. In August of that year, we listed 36 Democratic-held seats as highly vulnerable. By November, the number of vulnerable Democratic-held seats had more than doubled to 78. On Election Day of 2006, Republicans lost 30 seats; Democrats lost 63 seats in 2010.”

A lot of seats that wound up falling weren’t even on the radar a few months earlier:

“[O]f the 30 seats that Democrats won in 2006, 21 of them (or 70 percent), weren’t classified as the most vulnerable GOP-held seats in July. Almost half of the Democratic seats Republicans won in 2010 were classified as Lean or Likely Democrat in August.”

Right now, Cook has 34 Republican-held House seats looking very vulnerable (3 are likely Democratic, 7 lean Democratic, and 24 are toss-ups). But the landscape could get much bluer in a hurry:

“This year, Republicans already have more seats in the highly vulnerable category than they had at this point in 2006 or than Democrats had in August 2010. If 2018 follows a similar pattern to 2006 and 2010 — where less vulnerable seats move into more vulnerable territory in the fall — the GOP is almost certain to lose its majority. There are currently another 53 GOP-held seats in lean/likely Republican.”

What would account for this kind of late trend? In 2006 and 2010 it was not, interestingly enough, any deterioration of the president’s own approval ratings:

“There wasn’t a point where the bottom just dropped out for one party. The approval rating for President George W. Bush was 40 percent in mid-July 2006 and 38 percent in early November. President Obama was sitting at 44 percent in mid-August 2010 and 45 percent in early November.”

So Donald Trump’s exceptionally stable approval ratings won’t necessarily serve to limit his party’s losses in the House. Late trends could also reflect intensifying excitement over an approaching win for the “out” party. But most likely what we are seeing is simply a public recognition of trends that were developing all along. Forecasters like those at Cook are naturally conservative about predicting change of party control for any given House district, given the power of incumbency and the generally strong grip of partisan inclinations in this century.

There have, of course, been some nasty surprises for the “out” party in late midterm trends, and they’ve been relatively recent. In 1998 when Democrats actually gained House seats in Bill Clinton’s second midterm (Newt Gingrich made his painful concession-of-failure speech in front of a backdrop covered with the legend “America’s Victory”), and in 2002 when Republicans repeated that amazing feat. But then Clinton in 1998 had a approval rating just before the midterms of 66 percent, and George W. Bush enjoyed a 63 percent approval rating going into the 2002 midterms. Add in the reaction to the pending GOP impeachment effort in 1998 and the effects of 9/11 on 2002, and you have sets of circumstances that are extremely unlikely to recur between now and this November.

We could even realize in retrospect that the best 2018 signals to watch may have been the strongly pro-Democratic special-election results in 2017 and 2018, rather than November projections or even the generic ballot, as portending a wave that has been obscured in those less-tangible indicators. Since the pace of special elections has slowed this year, a lot of attention will be focused on next week’s special election in Ohio over yet another GOP-held U.S. House seat (one that Republicans have held for 36 years).

In any event, it will all get very real in the fall, and if both parties seem to be achieving new levels of furious intensity, it could be because the electoral tremors beneath the surface are getting stronger every day.

With all the endless talk of disagreements among Democrats about the right message for the midterm elections, I though it was worth noting that Republicans aren’t exactly all on the same page either, and I wrote it up at New York.

With less than 100 days to go until the midterm elections, there’s an increasingly sharp division of opinion between the White House (aligned with hard-core House Freedom Caucus types) and more conventional congressional Republicans about strategy and messaging. It has been dramatized by Trump’s renewed threats to shut down the government at the end of the fiscal year if he doesn’t get what he wants in the way of immigration policy, which is about as welcome to Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan as syphilis, as The Hill reports:

“Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) want Republicans seeking reelection to focus on the booming economy and the GOP’s tax-cut package passed last December. House GOP leaders are also touting a new campaign slogan for the midterms, asking Americans if they are ‘Better Off Now.’

“They believe that’s a message that will propel them to victory in competitive swing districts and states around the country, helping them stave off a Democratic wave this fall.”

Even among Republicans who don’t mind a little immigration demagoguery, there’s no big desire for presidential antics, as Byron York notes after discussions with GOP election wizards:

“What Republicans would like now is the absence of noise and distraction coming from the White House.

“‘We just need a decent level of calmness so we can message,’ said [one] strategist. ‘If we could just have calmness, we could talk about the economy and ICE. And if we could talk about the economy and ICE, we’d be fine.'”

But Trump and the HFC think otherwise, and it’s not just a matter of temperament or sheer hatefulness (though those do play a part). Some key voters love noise and distraction:

“Trump’s shutdown threat … [is] appealing to loyalists whose support he needs right now as he battles special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation and approval ratings in the low to mid 40s.

“‘His base is reacting positively to it,’ one conservative House lawmaker told The Hill …

“Trump’s message is consistent with the one being made by Jordan, the former Freedom Caucus chairman running for Speaker who said Monday that ‘heck yes’ conservatives would fight tooth and nail to stop GOP leaders from punting a fight over funding the border wall and other Trump priorities until after Election Day.”

This represents a pretty classic division of opinion between pols focused on swing-v0ter persuasion and those devoted to base mobilization. And in turn it reflects the two quite different types of Republican House seats in peril in November.

The New York Times’ Nate Cohn took a long look at the 60 most vulnerable GOP-controlled House seats and while some conform to the stereotype of highly educated suburban districts (many of which were carried by Hillary Clinton in 2016) expected to stray from the GOP banner, others are white working-class-dominated districts where Trump did well in 2016.

A ferocious runup to the midterms dominated by Trump and culture-war issues may help Republicans turn out their vote in places like the First District of Iowa or the Second District of Maine or the Eighth District of Minnesota. But it might also help mobilize Democrats, and might not help the GOP at all in highly educated suburban districts like Virginia’s Tenth or Georgia’s Sixth. And there are many competitive districts with both kinds of voters where the choice of targeting one or the other category can be excruciatingly difficult.

Truth is, it is a bit late in the game for either party to be arguing over electoral messaging, which increases the pressure on individual candidates (and their ad-buying “independent” friends) to tailor an appeal to individual districts that makes the most sense. When all else fails, of course, candidates can just go negative and hope to win by damaging opponents as much as by attracting support. Republicans do have the advantage of very low expectations, along with structural advantages that mean they can lose the national House popular vote and still control a majority of seats (as they did in 2012), just as Trump won the Electoral College while losing the presidential popular vote by 2.1 percent. But if they approach November dissenting from their own president’s message, a bad result will inevitably mean all sorts of blame games and finger-pointing at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

The Republican Party has become so extreme that Democrats can win midterm support from voters as a result of GOP positions on any of a long list of issues. But if Democrats had to pick one issue to focus on, in most cases it would be health care in general, and the Republicans gutting coverage for pre-existing conditions in particular.

As Robert Pear explains at The New York Times:

The Trump administration issued a final rule on Wednesday that clears the way for the sale of many more health insurance policies that do not comply with the Affordable Care Act and do not have to cover prescription drugs, maternity care or people with pre-existing medical conditions…Democrats derided the new policies as “junk insurance” that will lure healthy people away from the broader insurance market, raising premiums for sicker people and putting purchasers at risk.

…People who buy the new policies and develop cancer could “face astronomical costs” and “may be forced to forgo treatment entirely because of costs,” said Chris Hansen, the president of the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network.

…In the past year, the Trump administration has also cut funds for groups that help people sign up for coverage; ended cost-sharing subsidies paid to insurers on behalf of low-income people; and asked a federal court to throw out parts of the Affordable Care Act, including the popular protections for people with pre-existing conditions.

More than a quarter of working-age adults have a pre-existing health condition, like asthma, diabetes or cancer, that might have locked them out of the insurance market in the years before Obamacare, according to research from the Kaiser Family Foundation. Surveys show that far more have a friend or family member with a serious medical problem. Because health problems tend to pile up as people age, the older voters who tend to turn out most reliably in midterm elections experience such worry disproportionately.

Both types of insurance can sidestep the ACA’s requirement that health plans sold to individuals and small businesses must include 10 categories of benefits, including maternity care and mental-health services. Both can have bigger price differences between older customers and younger ones. But only the short-term plans also can charge higher prices to customers with medical conditions that require care, refuse to sell them a policy, or exclude coverage of health problems that a customer had before buying the insurance. The ACA bans such practices.

After nearly a decade of playing defense on the issue, Democratic congressional candidates around the country are putting a health care message at the center of their campaigns. After the Republicans’ failed effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Democrats have detected a newfound concern that the consumer protections established under the law might go away. And that fear has turned into a potent campaign theme.