George Packer has the sobering read of the day in his New Yorker article, “All That’s Left Is the Vote: The midterm elections are the last obstacle to Trump’s consolidation of power—and the greatest obstacle to voting is the feeling that it doesn’t matter.” Among Packer’s observations: “The institutional clout that ended the Presidency of Richard Nixon no longer exists. The honest press, for all its success in exposing daily scandals, won’t persuade the unpersuadable or shame the shameless, while the dishonest press is Trump’s personal amplifier. The federal courts, including the Supreme Court, are rapidly becoming instruments of partisan advocacy, as reliably conservative as elected legislatures. It’s impossible to imagine the Roberts Court voting unanimously against the President, as the Burger Court, including five Republican appointees, did in forcing Nixon to turn over his tapes. (Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s nominee to succeed Anthony Kennedy, has even suggested that the decision was wrong.) Congress has readily submitted to the President’s will, as if legislation and oversight were burdens to be relinquished. And, when the independent counsel finally releases his report, it will have only the potency that the guardians of the law and the Constitution give it.” While Democrats can draw some cautious optimism from the polls, the  questions that beg for an answer include what more can be done to mobilize low-turnout, but pro-Democratic voters in the 98 days until the midterms and how can Dems win or neutralize Trump’s wobbly 2016 voters?

At vox.com, Tara Golshan notes, “A new poll from Quinnipiac University released Wednesday put O’Rourke just 6 points behind Cruz. Cruz drew the support of 49 percent of registered Texas voters; 43 percent of registered voters backed O’Rourke. The poll, which has a 3.5-point margin of error, shows the Texas Senate race tightening since an earlier poll in May when O’Rourke was 11 points behind Cruz…Another poll from Texas Lyceum, with a slightly smaller sample size, had Cruz up by just 2 points — a statistical dead heat. Cruz had the support of 36 percent of registered voters, and O’Rourke had the support of 34 percent…Put simply: It’s becoming a very real possibility that Cruz could lose reelection to a Democrat — an upset that would seriously imperil Republicans’ hold on the Senate majority. Texas has not had a Democratic senator in more than 20 years.”

Sabato’s Crystal Ball associate editor Geoffrey Skelley provides an update on the likeliest outcomes for the contest for a U.S. Senate majority: “Historical midterm results suggest that we are in for a bounce-back year for split-ticket outcomes in Senate elections as they relate to the previous presidential election. This is good news for Democrats because they are defending one of the largest number of seats on record for any party in a midterm. Conversely, the GOP has few vulnerable seats to defend but may find itself limited by the electoral environment as the presidential party. Looking back at the historical success or failure in midterm contests based on incumbency and partisan lean, we have good reason to expect only a small change to the partisan makeup of the Senate, but those shifts could slightly favor the Republicans at the end. The GOP remains favored to retain the Senate, but the fact that Democrats have any chance at all at capturing a majority speaks to the benefit of being the non-presidential party, having so many incumbents seeking reelection, and of having a relatively friendly electoral environment.”

Burgess Everett and Elana Schor take apeak “Inside Democrats’ strategy to defeat Kavanaugh” and report at Politico, “While his red-state members stall in the face of attacks from their GOP challengers, Schumer hopes to place massive pressure on moderate Republicans by raising damaging questions about Kavanaugh’s views on abortion, health care and presidential power. His top GOP targets are Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska…Schumer’s strategy starts like this: Hold his caucus in line and force Republicans to cough up 50 votes on their own…he’s counting on Manchin and a half-dozen other vulnerable Democrats to keep any hint that they might support the high court nominee to themselves.”

At New York Magazine, Ed Kilgore shares a hopeful comment in his post, “The GOP Sets Up Narrow Window for Kavanaugh Confirmation” about the problematic clock management Senate Republicans face: “As we learned with the Clarence Thomas saga, strange, unexpected developments have been known to come up during SCOTUS confirmations. Republicans have not given themselves any margin for error in the timing of their drive to place Kavanaugh on the Court, and if the process drags on until just before — or even after — the midterm elections, the political dynamics could change. Assuming Senate Republicans continue to fall into line on this critical appointment, an October Surprise may be the best hope Democrats have for derailing Kavanaugh’s nomination.”

In addition to the encourging polls of recent weeks, Nate Silver makes a couple of good points in the chatfest on “Who Are The Most Important Swing Voters In This Year’s Midterms?” at FiveThirtyEight: “So far, Democrats have gotten very good results in special elections — which consist of, you know, actual voters. And they also look pretty good, as Nathaniel said, in district-by-district polls, which are mostly conducted among likely voters rather than registered voters. Those could be signs of a turnout advantage…it’s noteworthy that Trump’s lowest approval ratings came while Republicans were trying to pass major policy initiatives such as the tax cut (successful) and their Obamacare repeal (not successful)…So I think a message framed around maintaining a check on Trump and the excesses of the Republican Congress would make sense. That’s classic midterm strategy, since midterms are all about balancing.”

New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall offers this observation about the damage horse-race reporting can do: “In a paper published in February, “Projecting Confidence: How the Probabilistic Horse Race Confuses and Demobilizes the Public,” Sean Westwood, Solomon Messing and Yphtach Lelkes of Dartmouth, Pew and the University of Pennsylvania, write: “Horse race coverage in American elections has shifted focus from late-breaking poll numbers to sophisticated meta-analytic forecasts that often emphasize candidates’ probability of victory…These improvements, in turn, “lower uncertainty about an election’s outcome, which lowers turnout under the model.” The effect, then, is that, “when one candidate is ahead, win probabilities convey substantially more confidence that she will win compared to vote share estimates. Even more importantly, we show that these impressions of probabilistic forecasts cause people not to vote in a behavioral game that simulates elections. In the context of the existing literature, the magnitude of these findings suggests that probabilistic horse race coverage can confuse and demobilize the public.”

“Two years after Russia interfered in the American presidential campaign, the nation has done little to protect itself against a renewed effort to influence voters in the coming congressional midterm elections, according to lawmakers and independent analysts…They say that voting systems are more secure against hackers, thanks to action at the federal and state levels — and that the Russians have not targeted those systems to the degree they did in 2016. But Russian efforts to manipulate U.S. voters through misleading social media postings are likely to have grown more sophisticated and harder to detect, and there is not a sufficiently strong government strategy to combat information warfare against the United States, outside experts said.” — From “As midterm elections approach, a growing concern that the nation is not protected from Russian interference” by Ellen nakashima and Craig Timberg.

But really, it’s even worse than that. As E. J. Dionne, Jr. writes in his column, “Trump is working with the trolls” at The Washington Post: “In the face of active measures by our adversaries to widen our nation’s social gulfs, one might imagine a more responsible leader trying to bring us together, to ease our anxieties about each other and to stand against endless cycles of recrimination….Instead, Trump is working in tandem with these outside trolls to aggravate resentment, stoke backlash and incite his opponents…It’s an established fact that the Kremlin and Trump were on the same side in the 2016 election. And so far, the online activity in connection with the 2018 elections — some of which has been linked to the Kremlin’s Internet Research Agency — rather consistently plays into right-wing propaganda and targets Democrats such as Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri…The online meddling has a broader objective as well: to divide our country even more sharply than it already is and to weaponize racial and ethnic divisions.”

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

Our spam filter treats posts which include embedded links as likely to be commercial spam messages rather than genuine comments and does not publish them. If your post does not appear, this is usually the reason.

In his New York Magazine post, “Battle for the House: 100 Days Out, Democrats Are on the Brink,” Ed Kilgore notes, “All along, the conventional wisdom has been that Democrats need a lead of seven or eight points in the generic congressional ballot, an approximation of the House national popular vote, to feel reasonably confident of their chances. Their lead on the generic ballot is currently at 7.3 percent in the RealClearPolitics polling averages (it was as high as 13 percent last December and as low as 3 percent in the late spring), and 7.7 percentin the FiveThirtyEight averages (which weight polls according to their assessed quality and make adjustments for partisan bias). Typically the party that does not control the White House is likely to get a late breeze in its favor unless the president’s favorability markedly improves. At this point in 2014, Democrats led in most generic congressional polls, but then lost the national House popular vote by nearly 6 percent.”

“Donald Trump is “the worst politician ever” but he’s on a path to re-election because the Democratic party refuses to counter his courtship of working class disaffection, says the American political analyst and historian Thomas Frank…Frank said Trump was “uniquely dangerous” as a political figure, and that required the left to reconnect with working people to counter “the long turn of the American right towards populism…I am absolutely certain the way for a left party to beat that stuff is not to join it and bid for the bigot vote, but to counter fake populism with the real deal,” Frank said.” — From Katherine Murphy’s “Donald Trump, ‘worst politician ever’, on path to re-election, Thomas Frank says” at The Guardian.

fdrom ABC News The Powerhouse Roundtable:

Kyle Kondik’s “The House Tilts Toward the Democrats: Big-picture factors help minority party, but battle far from over; 17 ratings changes in favor of Democrats” at Sabato’s Crystal Ball notes some recent gains for Democras in the midterm camapign, including: “Democrats are now a little better than 50-50 to win the House. This is the first time this cycle we’ve gone beyond 50-50 odds on a House turnover…We’re making 17 House ratings changes this week, all in favor of the Democrats…One of those comes in OH-12, where the last nationally-watched special House election is taking place in a couple of weeks…Put it all together, and the Democrats now look like soft favorites to win a House majority with a little more than 100 days to go. The usual caveats apply: There is time for things to change, and the Democrats capturing the majority is not a slam dunk. We recently were discussing the House map with a source who recited reams of positive indicators and data for Democrats. After hearing those, we suggested that, based on what this person was saying, the Democrats should win the House with seats to spare. The source then said it will come down to just a few seats either way. By the way, such a close outcome — a House where the majority party has 220-225 seats or even less (218 is the number required for a bare majority) — remains a distinct possibility, and the presence of so many competitive House seats in California, where the vote count takes weeks to finalize, could delay the final House outcome.”

In his New York Times column, “The Rules for Beating Donald Trump: Don’t argue with 4.1 percent growth,” Bret Stephens argues “if you’re serious about wanting to defeat Trump, you might want to start with Rule No. 1: Don’t argue with sunshine. Don’t acknowledge good news through gritted teeth, or chortle at the president’s boastful delivery, or content yourself with the thought that Barack Obama also had some strong quarters and deserves all the credit…If working-class resentment was a factor in handing the White House to Trump, pooh-poohing of good economic news only feeds it.” Also, “Ignore Trump’s tweets. Yes, it’s unrealistic. But we would all be better off if the media reported them more rarely, reacted to them less strongly, and treated them with less alarm and more bemusement. Tweets are the means by which the president wrests control of the political narrative from the news media (and even his own administration), whether by inspiring his followers, goading his opponents, changing the subject, or merely causing a ruckus. There’s no way to stop him, but there’s no reason to amplify him.”

Matt Ford explains “How a Democratic House Could Really Give Trump Hell: And it has nothing to do with impeachment” at The New Republic: “On Thursday morning, [New Mexico U.S. Senator Tom] Udall was back at it, appearing on MSNBC’s Morning Joesaying he would support legislation to force presidential candidates to publicly release their tax returns. “I think it’s very important that people know if there are conflicts of interest that the president might have, that we clear that up,” he replied. “The easiest thing to do here is just disclose all the tax returns.”…What Udall didn’t mention is that Congress doesn’t need legislation to release the president’s tax returns. If Democrats retake either the House or the Senate this fall members of the tax committees can obtain Trump’s tax returns directly from the IRS by using a provision in federal law that grants those committees special access to help craft legislation…By all accounts, Trump’s tax returns are being treated like something akin to a state secret. John Koskinan, who retired as IRS commissioner last year, told Politico even he didn’t have access to them. Under federal law, however, Congress’ tax committees can request a copy of any taxpayers’ returns directly from the IRS, ostensibly to aide in the development of a better tax code. An intrepid legislator could then publicize what they find in Trump’s tax returns by reading them aloud on the floor of Congress, just as Alaska Senator Mike Gravel did with the Pentagon Papers.”

At CNN Politics John King takes a look at “Why Democrats Are Optimistic About the Midterms“:

Trump is probably bluffing about the shutdown if he doesn’t get funding for his wall. For one thing it would jeopardize his Kavanaugh appointment, and for another it would call unwanted attention to his ridiculous bragg that he was going to make Mexico pay for the wall. Still, logic and common sense have rarely limited Trump’s statements, and Republicans are somewhat nervous about his shutdown talk. “We’re going to have a challenging midterm anyway, and I don’t see how putting the attention on shutting down the government when you control the government is going to help you,” Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma, said in an interview,” reports Sheryl Gay Stohlberg at The New York Times.

James Hohman sounds a cautionary note in his PowerPost article, “The Daily 202: Puerto Ricans who fled to Florida after Hurricane Maria are not registering to vote.” As Hohman writes, “Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico last September and prompted a mass exodus of more than 100,000 residents to the mainland United States…The exact number is still not known, but tens of thousands of people permanently resettled in Florida…Because they’re already U.S. citizens, Puerto Ricans are eligible to vote as soon as they move to the mainland. The thinking last fall was that they’d be so angry at Trump that they’d be champing at the bit to vote against Republicans in the midterms. Operatives from both parties said that this could prove decisive in a perennial battleground like Florida where elections are always close…Once again, the conventional wisdom turns out to have been wrong. Trump appears to be defying the old rules of politics. In this case, it’s because most of the Puerto Ricans who have come to Florida are not registering to vote or otherwise getting involved in politics. At least for now…During the nine months after the hurricane — from last October through the end of June — there were 326,000 new registered voters. Just 21 percent were Hispanic. That’s a pretty small uptick — and not necessarily explained by Puerto Rican registration at all…in the two Orlando-area counties with the highest concentration of Puerto Ricans, there has not been any meaningful increase in Democratic registration.” It’s time for the Florida Democrats ‘A Team’ to take charge, launch a voter registration drive targeting recent Puerto Rican immigrants and get it done.

After reading repeatedly about Democratic prospects in 2018 and 2020 being spoiled by “Democratic extremism” or
“Democrats moving too far to the left,” I smelled a rat, and wrote up my findings at New York:

There is a convention going back into the mists of time whereby the Democratic Party is thought of as a disorganized and divided mess. The early 20th-century humorist Will Rogers, himself a Democrat, once said:

“The difference between a Republican and a Democrat is the Democrat is a cannibal. They have to live off each other, while the Republicans, why, they live off the Democrats.”

He wasn’t trying to be funny on that occasion, and it made a fair amount sense to think of the Donkey Party as an unwieldy paradox back when it was the preferred political vehicle of rural populists, southern segregationists, urban machines, and ethnic minorities doing battle with a Grand Old Party that mostly revolved around defending economic privilege and deploring anything that wasn’t WASPy.

But the “Democrats in Disarray” meme has lived on, and for a brief moment in the late autumn of 2016, it was pretty accurate, as Democrats reeled from a shocking defeat against a presidential candidate who looked more like a cartoon villain than a serious aspirant to high office.

As New York’s Eric Levitz explained last November, however, any talk of Democrats being fatally divided or in despair during 2017 was visibly rebutted by the steady drumbeat of Democratic victories in special and off-year elections.

Democrats don’t have nearly as many special elections to show they’re feeling their oats this year, and they’ve lost some of the huge, double-digit lead in the generic congressional ballot that was regularly appearing when Levitz wrote his upbeat assessment of Democratic prospects. And for those (both conservatives and conflict-seeking mainstream-media folk) who deeply cherish the Democrats in Disarray meme, those special elections are helpfully being replaced by party primaries in which Democrats are running against Democrats! Imagine that! Worse yet, in some of these primaries the winners are self-proclaimed progressives! And as we all know, the American people have a deep craving for sensible centrists who want to cross the party aisles and get things done. If Republicans don’t have any of those anymore, then by God, it’s critical that the loyal opposition keep the faith and avoid extremism.

Veteran political writer Walter Shapiro has written a useful skewering of this all-too-common narrative, which has been sent into overdrive by the June primary victory in New York of Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over House Democratic Caucus chairman Joe Crowley:

“[A]n emblematic story led Sunday’s New York Times under the print headline, “Democrats Brace as Storm Brews Far to Their Left.”

“The themes of the Times story and dozens like it are familiar. They all highlight young activists such as 28-year-old giant slayer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who upended potential Nancy Pelosi successor Joe Crowley in the New York primary. Risky issues are highlighted as main stream Democrats recoil from demands for single-payer health insurance and the abolition of ICE (the acronym for Immigration and Customs Enforcement)….

“Yet by the historical standards of Democratic internecine warfare, today’s disputes are like 6-year-olds battling with foam swords.”

Spoken like a man that remembers the fraught intraparty ideological battles over the Iraq War, Clinton’s “New Democrat” movement, Cold War defense spending and national security strategy, and civil rights. Democrats are more unified on a host of issues — including hot buttons like abortion policy, criminal justice, and the social safety net — than they have been for years. And Democratic Socialists represent but one influence bubbling up from the grassroots. As Shapiro notes, for a party allegedly in the grips of an existential crisis, they’re in pretty good shape:

“It’s hard to identify a Senate or House seat that is being lost because of excessive Democratic activism. Even if a Democratic incumbent like North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp is troubled by calls to ax ICE, there is scant evidence that this makes her more vulnerable than before in a state that Donald Trump carried by better than a two-to-one margin.

“No incumbent — not even Heitkamp or Joe Manchin in West Virginia — is being denounced as a DINO. According to a new Monmouth University Poll, moderate Democrat Rep. Conor Lamb, who won a high-profile special election in western Pennsylvania earlier this year, holds a hefty lead in his bid for a full term. Lamb is a prime example of a Democrat who has prospered by defying litmus-test politics in his opposition to Nancy Pelosi as House speaker.”

There’s really not much excuse for the hyperventilation so evident about the Democratic Party falling apart or “going off the deep end.” So why is this narrative so ever-ready?

Some of it is simply the result of a lazy habit of “balancing” the chaos coming out of the White House every day with the “disarray” allegedly found within the opposition party. But a deeper motive, particularly in conservative media, is the need to distract attention from the ideological revolution going on in the GOP by suggesting that something equally if not more alarming is going on across the partisan barricades. The idea is very simple: If you can’t expand your support beyond the ranks of the party “base” by “moving to the center,” then a good fallback position is to deny your opponent “the center” by alleging it’s being taken over by extremists. Aside from blurring the natural public and media focus on the strange people running the country and almost daily destroying old GOP positions on issues ranging from trade and deficits to the environment and NATO, the “here come the socialists!” cry appeals viscerally to the false-equivalence needs of MSM reporters and pundits who are constantly seeking protection against claims of liberal bias.

And so Ocasio-Cortez becomes, somehow, a vastly more significant figure than her most obvious recent conservative counterpart Dave Brat of Virginia, who similarly upset a congressional leader of his party in 2014. That’s true even though Brat almost certainly was emblematic of a strong rightward trend in the GOP, while the jury is definitely still out on whether Ocasio-Cortez is a harbinger of a world to come or simply an adept local pol who upset a complacent incumbent in an incredibly low-turnout primary in an incredibly atypical district.

It’s possible we are about to witness an extremist polarization of both parties to an extent unknown since the Spanish Civil War. But that’s not at all clear at this point, and as for Democratic divisions, none seem to matter nearly as much as a common revulsion toward Donald Trump and his enablers. As Shapiro observes, parties are ultimately defined by presidents. We see what that has meant for the GOP since 2016. Let’s give Democrats a chance to display their own proposed new leadership in 2020 before deciding they are equally feckless or reckless.

Morning Consult’s latest batch of quarterly approval rating data has a very important comparison of senatorial and presidential numbers that I shared at New York:

[T]en Democratic senators are running for reelection in states that Donald Trump carried in 2016 — some by large margins. Amid partisan polarization and the growing trend toward straight-ticket voting, it seems impossible that all (or even most) of these anomalies could survive in 2018.

But there are two mitigating factors we sometimes forget: (1) presidential elections are comparative, while midterms tend to be (usually sour) referenda on the party that controls the White House, which means you cannot assume the partisan balance in any given state will remain the same, and (2) it’s not 2016 anymore, and Trump’s popularity can’t be assumed to have remained static all this time in every state.

You can see the difference a more dynamic view of the “Trump Ten” senators makes in the latest quarterly state-by-state numbers showing Senate approval and disapproval ratings from Morning Consult. They did something interesting: They directly compared the average net approval ratings for senators from April through June with those of the president over the same period of time in the same states. Turns out eight of the Trump Ten are doing better than Trump himself in their states.

Perhaps the most interesting numbers are from North Dakota, which Trump carried by 33 points against Hillary Clinton in 2016. In the second quarter of 2018, however, Trump’s net approval rating in North Dakota was minus-10 points. Now as it happens, Heitkamp isn’t in great shape; her own net approval rating is zero, and she faces a formidable GOP opponent in U.S. Representative Kevin Cramer. But it looks like Cramer, not Trump, is her problem, which gives her some freedom to be more critical of the president than she might otherwise be in a state he had carried so overwhelmingly.

Another good example is Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin. Yes, Trump narrowly carried her state in 2016. But in Q2 2018 his average approval rating there was minus-16 points. By comparison Baldwin’s net approval rating over that period was plus-5, which is immensely better. Similarly, Trump carried Ohio in 2016 by eight points, which was impressive given the state’s recent voting history. But his Q2 2018 average approval rating in the Buckeye State was minus-6, while Senator Sherrod Brown’s is plus-16. No wonder Brown is presently a solid favorite for reelection.

The two Trump Ten Democratic senators who do trail Trump in Q2 2018 approval ratio averages are Joe Manchin and Claire McCaskill. West Virginia was Trump’s second-best state in 2016 (after Wyoming); he won it by an astonishing 42 points. He’s still pretty popular there, with a plus-23 net approval rating in the second quarter of this year, as compared to Senator Joe Manchin’s plus-3. Manchin’s divided GOP opposition and his long familiarity with the state are helping him keep a lead in the polls. Missouri’s Claire McCaskill’s tepid minus-4 approval ratio trails Trump’s (plus-2), but not as much as you’d normally expect in a state he carried by 21 points.

Meanwhile, Trump’s net approval rating in Montana, which he carried by 20 points, has sunk to plus-3, while Senator Jon Tester’s looking pretty good at plus-14. The gap between presidential and senatorial net approval is smaller in Indiana (Trump is at plus-5, Joe Donnelly at plus-8). Florida’s Bill Nelson is at plus-10 (Trump is at plus-2 in Florida), but his problem is not so much Trump as his opponent Rick Scott, who has endless money and a net gubernatorial approval rating (again, in the second quarter of this year) of plus-19.

None of this means Democrats will win control of the Senate; aside from the fact that several of the Democratic senators we’ve been talking about aren’t out of the woods just yet, Democrats need to find a way to beat at least one and preferably more than one Republican incumbent (or win an open seat like those in Arizona and Tennessee). But it’s important to remember that whatever his standing compared to where he was in 2017 or earlier this year, Trump remains generally weaker than he was when facing an equally unpopular Democratic opponent in a year when Democrats weren’t remotely as energized as they are right now.

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

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

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

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

The race for Georgia governor is set with Democrat Stacy Abrams running against Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who won the GOP nomination on Tuesday. Sue Halpern’s article, “Trump, Election Hacking, and the Georgia Governor’s Race” at The New Yorker raises very disturbing questions about Kemp’s integrity as Georgia’s chief vote counter, as well as what his ‘shotgun ad’ indicates about his mental health: “Georgia is one of only five states that uses voting machines that create no paper record, and thus cannot be audited, and the Center for American Progress has given it a D grade for election security. But, when D.H.S. offered cybersecurity assistance, Kemp refused it… a group called the Coalition for Good Governance sued Kemp and other state officials for failing to insure a fair election, free from interference. They asked, among other things, that the court invalidate the special election. (Handel took her seat in Congress the week after the election.) The suit was filed on July 3rd [2017]. Four days later, the servers at the Center for Election Systems were wiped clean…On August 9th, less than twenty-four hours after the case was moved to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, all the data on the Center’s backup servers were destroyed as well.” Abrams’s impressive margin in her Democratic primary victory indicates that she knows how to run an effective campaign. For those who want to help her level the playing field against Kemp’s corporate domors, here’s her ActBlue page.

Georgia has another contest of potential national importance, Democrat Lucy McBath’s campaign to unseat Karen Handel in GA-6. McBath has a decent chance here as a strong progressive and gun safety advocate in a year when it is a high-profile issue — she is the mother of a 17-year old son, Jordan Davis, who was killed in a horrific shooting by a white man. McBath’s Republican opponent, Handel, is another former Secretary of State (2007-09), who ran a suspicious project to purge “non-citizens” from the voter rolls, which provoked lawsuits by the Georgia ACLU and the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund. In addition to the incidents noted above questioning the conduct of Handel and Kemp in the office of the Georgia Secretary of State, it should be noted that the low-key Democrat Jon Ossoff received 48.1 percent of the vote in the first round election in his 2017 campaign to win the district — Handel got 19.8 percent in the first round and won the run-off by a margin of 51.7 to 48.2 percent. One Ossoff campaign worker noted that “We registered over 86,419 voter registration forms…and 40,000 of them are missing. And you know what they told us? “We don’t know what you’re talking about. What forms?” It seems that Georgia Democrats have a unique ‘Drain the swamp’ messaging opportunity in support of both the McBath and Abrams campaigns. Here’s Lucy Mcbath’s ActBlue page.

Michael Wear, author of author of “Reclaiming Hope: Lessons Learned in the Obama White House About the Future of Faith in America,” argues that “Democrats are entirely too focused on abortion” at The Monitor. “…Conservatives are primarily responsible for making “Supreme Court” another term for abortion politics. Now, Democrats are approaching the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh with the same singular focus. As MoveOn’s Washington director told the Associated Press, when it comes to Trump’s nominee, “the essential message is Roe.”…And yet voters and Democrats’ constituents have a broader set of constitutional concerns. Voting rights, immigration, workplace protections, environmental law and affirmative action are going to be at the mercy of the justices. …Does it help the party to make abortion rights such a predominant subject? Does it even help the pro-choice cause?…Kavanaugh’s confirmation battle may only make matters worse for Democrats. If the message the party delivers during the Senate hearings is single-mindedly focused on Roe and abortion rights, it may discourage support and turnout in many competitive districts crucial to switching the House and Senate from red to blue. (I’m thinking about states in the Southeast, the Rust Belt and Midwest, and even the Mountain West.)…Senate Democrats should forcefully test Kavanaugh’s fitness for the bench. But to the extent the Kavanaugh hearings are going to be a policy referendum, let’s be sure the nation hears from a party that is interested in more than just the fate of Roe v. Wade.”I think Wear is overstaing the case. Very few Democratic candidates are single-issue campaigners; it’s more that major media provides weak coverage of the other issues because they are too busy chasing Trump’s distractions du jour.

Regarding the current epidemic of hand-ringing about whether the Democrats are moving left too fast or holding on to the centrist policies too tightly, Ositu Newanevu shares some insights at slate.com, including “What do we actually know, nonanecdotally, about what kind of economic policies American voters want? For many years, Third Way has made a habit of waving around poll data showing very few Americans identify as liberals. “At the national level,” William Galston and Elaine Kamarck wrote in a report for the group called “The Still-Vital Center,” “self-identified liberals constitute barely one-fifth of the electorate; in most states, they are nowhere near a plurality—let alone a majority.” This has long been true. It has also long been true that when asked about specific proposals and political values, American voters are far more economically liberal than the numbers on ideological self-identification suggest.” Nwanevu comes down on the side of the Dem left critique. Looking at the bigger picture, a vigorous debate about whether policies are too far left or too centrist serves the cause of a healthy party, unlike the Republicans, most of whom cower in the shadows at every inane tweet by their unhinged leader.

In that same spirit, Sarah Larson’s “The Wilderness,” Reviewed: Can a Partisan Podcast Save the Democratic Party?,” also at The New Yorker, plugs Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau’s current project. Larson writes, “So much oxygen is consumed by Trump that it can be hard, for Democrats, to focus on that other problem: the Democratic Party. Democrats lost not only the 2016 Presidential election but, in the past six to eight years, some nine hundred seats nationwide. “The Wilderness,” Favreau’s ambitious new podcast about the Democratic Party, seeks to address that problem. It’s a fifteen-part series, narrative and documentary in form (it’s co-produced by Two-Up, of “36 Questions” and “Limetown”), that provides context about the Party and soul-searching about what Democrats should do next. It will conclude a few weeks before the midterms, giving newly motivated door-knockers and phone-bankers ample time to absorb its lessons. “It’s a show about us, about being honest with ourselves as Democrats,” Favreau says in an episode. “We have a lot to learn and a shitload of work to do.”

In her post, “Obama may be the only one who can heal the Democratic Party. But his presence could cost it votes” at nbcnews.com, Ashley Pratte mulls over the pros and cons of using the former president in midterm campaigns,” and comes up with this: “…Although Trump’s victory could be seen as a complete repudiation of Obama’s policies and his time in office, it’s possible that only the return of the still-popular former president could heal the party’s rifts from 2016 and help it return to power.” On the other hand, “There is one problem with keeping Obama at the helm of the Democratic Party — even if it is only behind the scenes — and that’s the fact that nothing energizes Republicans more than their distaste for Obama and his policies. If Republicans run on the idea that Obama is the puppet master (whether it be through his direct counsel or through his political committee, Organizing For Action), it will be enough to mobilize their own base and turn out the vote.” But Obama-haters were going to vote Republican anyway, and very few are going to think “I wasn’t going to vote, but since Obama out there again, I think I will.” Also, most Democratic candidates are smart enough to use the president when and where he can help. And lastly, Obama’s “Miss me yet?” star is rising every day, even among some who voted against him.

The Upshot staff has a fun, interactive map, “Political Bubbles and Hidden Diversity: Highlights From a Very Detailed Map of the 2016 Election” that provides a “A 90-second tour of 14 big cities.” The map “lets you explore the 2016 presidential election at the highest level of detail available: by voting precinct” and, “On the neighborhood level, many of us really do live in an electoral bubble, this map shows: More than one in five voters lived in a precinct where 80 percent of the two-party vote went to Mr. Trump or Mrs. Clinton. But the map also reveals surprising diversity…The election results most readers are familiar with are county maps like the ones we produce at The Times on election night. But votes are cast at a much finer unit of geography — in precincts, which may contain thousands of voters but in some cases contain only a handful. Our previous election maps contained results for about 3,100 counties; here we show results for more than 168,000 voting precincts.” It’s not hard to see how campaigns can improve their broadcast media ads using the map. Explore and learn.

Chris Cillizza argues that “Every sign is pointing to a Democratic wave in November” at CNN’s The Point: “While many of the more than four dozen Democratic challengers who outraised their GOP incumbent opponents are already in targeted races, others remain on the periphery of the landscape of what are commonly accepted as competitive districts. But if the horizon continues to slide toward Democrats, some Republican House members who may not think they are in trouble right now could find themselves suddenly vulnerable. And if their Democratic opponent already has enough money in the bank to run ads and ensure voters know they have a choice, it could be curtains for people who no one is even thinking about possibly losing right now…Add it all up — and throw in the weight of history that suggests the President’s party loses, on average, 33 seats in midterm elections — and you have a devil’s brew for Republicans….”Think it’s safe to say the odds of a D House takeover have never been higher this cycle,” tweeted National Journal politics editor Josh Kraushaar. “Time is running out for Rs to turn things around.”

If you know any younguns who are interested in getting into political campaign work, suggest they read “2018 Rising Stars” at Campaigns & Elections. The article features 22 one-paragraph profiles of young political activists (ten of them Democrats). The article notes that “Rising Star recipients have climbed to the heights of politics, launching dozens of successful consulting firms and serving at the highest levels of state and federal campaigns.” Here’s a sample entry: “Tara McGowan, Democrat, Founder and CEO, ACRONYM and Lockwood Strategy.With her new ventures, ACRONYM and Lockwood Strategy, Tara McGowan is helping progressive campaigns and organizations on the left to run more nimble and innovative digital programs. In just over a year, Lockwood has doubled in size and played a leading role in helping Democrats to major 2017 wins up and down the ballot in Virginia. Among the innovation already emerging from McGowan’s new venture: a first-of-its-kind online voter registration program with a custom built, end-to-end registration and relational organizing platform, a digital organizing tools assessment designed to help campaigns and organizations break through vendor marketing speak to more effectively utilize the digital resources available in the Democratic tech space, and a multi-million dollar digital-only effort to flip over 100 state legislative seats blue in the midterm elections this fall.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more…