If you are feeling a sense of deja vu about where the current budget debate in Congress is headed, you aren’t alone, and I offered an explanation at New York:

In the partisan messaging battle over the federal budget, Joe Biden seems to have Republicans right where he wants them. Beginning with his State of the Union Address in early February, the president has hammered away at GOP lawmakers for plotting to gut wildly popular Social Security and Medicare benefits. This has driven Republicans into a defensive crouch; they can either pretend their proposed cuts aren’t really cuts or forswear them altogether. It’s a message that Democrats would love to highlight every day until the next election, or at least until Republicans figure out a better response than lies, evasions, and blustery denials.

But as Ron Brownstein points out in The Atlantic, there is a logical path Republicans could take to counter Democrats’ claims that GOP policies threaten popular retirement programs. It’s based on pitting every other form of federal domestic spending against Social Security and Medicare, and on making Democratic support for Big Government and its beneficiaries a political problem among seniors:

“Republicans hope that exempting Social Security and Medicare [from cutbacks they are demanding for raising the federal debt limit] will dampen any backlash to their deficit-reduction plans in economically vulnerable districts. But protecting those programs, as well as defense, from cuts—while also precluding tax increases—will force the House Republicans to propose severe reductions in other domestic programs … potentially including Medicaid, the ACA, and food and housing assistance.

“Will a Republican push for severe reductions in those programs provide Democrats with an opening in such places? Robert J. Blendon, a professor emeritus at the Harvard School of Public Health, is dubious. Although these areas have extensive needs, he told me, the residents voting Republican in them are generally skeptical of social-welfare spending apart from Social Security and Medicare. ‘We are dealing with a set of values here, which has a distrust of government and a sense that anyone should have to work to get any sort of low-income benefit,’ Blendon said. ‘The people voting Republican in those districts don’t see it as important [that] government provides those benefits.’”

And so Republicans will very likely return to the messaging they embraced during the Obama administration. Back then, self-identified Tea Party conservatives constantly tried to convince elderly voters that the real threat to their retirement programs stemmed not from GOP budget cutting, but from Democratic-backed Big Government spending on younger people and minorities, with whom many conservative voters did not identify. Then as now, a partisan budget fight — and the threat of a debt default of government shutdown — let Republicans frame funding decisions as a competition between groups of beneficiaries, rather than a debate over abstract levels of taxing or spending.

The big opening shot in the anti-Obama campaign was Sarah Palin’s wildly mendacious but highly effective September 2009 Facebook post claiming that the Affordable Care Act would create “death panels” that would eliminate Medicare coverage for seniors or disabled children deemed socially superfluous (the barely legitimate basis for the attack was an Affordable Care Act provision to allow Medicare payments to physicians discussing end-of-life treatments with patients).

Soon Republicans would come up with slightly more substantive claims that Obamacare threatened Medicare. In 2011, House GOP budget maven Paul Ryan, whom Democrats hammered for his proposals to partially privatize both Social Security and Medicare, claimed that Obama administration projections of health cost savings in Medicare represented a shift of resources from Medicare to Obamacare. By 2012, when Ryan became Mitt Romney’s running mate, Ryan was campaigning with his mother in tow, claiming that Republicans wanted to protect her from raids on her retirement benefits by the redistributionist Democrats.

Romney and Ryan didn’t win, of course, but they did win the over-65 vote by a robust 56-44 margin, a better performance in that demographic than Trump registered in 2016 or 2020. As Thomas Edsall explained in The New Republic in 2010, the Tea Party–era Republicans understood they had to mobilize their federal spending constituents against alleged competitors:

“Republicans understand that one axis of the resource war will be generational. All of their vows to defend Medicare are coupled with attacks on Obama’s health care reform. They implicitly portray Democrats as waging an age war—creating a massive new government program that transfers dollars to the young at the expense of the elderly. Republicans have cleverly stoked the fear that Obama is rewarding all his exuberant, youthful, idealistic supporters by redistributing resources that are badly needed by the old.”

In a 2024 campaign in which Democrats are going for the jugular with seniors, a reprise of the GOP’s 2012 Medicare counterattack, dishonest as it was, might make sense.

During this year’s budget skirmish in Congress, House Republicans are expected to take a claw hammer to domestic spending outside Social Security and Medicare, as the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities reports:

“This spring, House Republicans are expected to release an annual budget resolution that calls for large health care cuts, and Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) marketplace coverage are likely to be prime targets. House Republican leaders are calling for cutting the deficit and making the Trump tax cuts permanent, while saying they will shield certain areas of the budget (Medicare, Social Security, and military spending) from cuts. To do all these things at once, it is highly likely they will propose cuts in health programs that provide coverage to millions of people.”

The House GOP has also already called for deep cuts in nondefense discretionary spending, including food stamp and nutrition programs. It’s likely the GOP’s state-based crusade against “woke” public education will lead to a renewal of ancient conservative demands to deeply cut or kill the U.S. Department of Education. Maybe those representing energy-producing areas will go hard after EPA or the Department of the Interior’s programs. Almost certainly, the GOP as a whole will embrace across-the-board cuts in federal employment or federal employee benefits under the guise of “draining the swamp.” Any and all such cuts can also be rationalized as necessary to avoid reductions in spending for Social Security, Medicare, and national defense, not to mention tax increases.

Whatever formula they adopt, there’s little doubt Republicans will find ways to present themselves the true defenders of Social Security and Medicare, just as many of them will always keep scheming for ways to damage or destroy these vestiges of the New Deal and Great Society. Biden seems committed to his effort to make seniors fear the GOP, and this is the only way Republicans can counter-punch.

From “Republicans don’t really care about crime — and the Nashville shooting proves it” by Charles F. Coleman, Jr. at MSNBC Opinion:

Just 6 months ago, high-profile midterm election races pushed the conversation about America’s crime problem into the national spotlight stage. GOP challengers were parroting talking points around a sensationalized narrative that painted Democrats as anti-police and ultimately responsible for rising crime rates. This, despite the fact that many of the areas where violent crime is highest across the United States are in red states and, more specifically, GOP-led districts. But there was another missing piece in the conversation: mass shootings….Republicans are very protective of their guns — more than they are of the children and educators forced to leave in fear of these weapons.

….Finally, of course, is how easy it is to access weapons in this country and, specifically, how easy it is to access and abuse assault weapons. GOP House members proudly wore AR-15 lapel pins to espouse their commitment to protecting Second Amendment rights during the State of the Union. Do they remain proud today? Probably. Worse, some conservatives have already gone on the offense, stoking fear and attempting to score political points by characterizing President Joe Biden and others who advocate for sensible gun legislation as “gun grabbers.”  This despite a majority of American voters being in favor of some type of assault weapons ban.

Coleman, a former New York prosecutor, notes further, “The bravado and self-righteous rage is designed to deflect the conversation away from real solutions. American lawmakers appear incapable of loosening the chokehold that the gun lobby maintains on the GOP, preferring to pacify loyalists and gun nuts.” Further,

We have known ever since Sandy Hook that the double-speak around school shootings in America is engagingly duplicitous. No amount of bloodshed appears capable of moving the needle — at least in the Republican Party, which now controls the House and almost half of the Senate (to say nothing of the legislative bodies in states like Tennessee). These men and women refuse to take meaningful steps to protect our youth.

And importantly, we now understand even more clearly that the feigned concern about crime that overtook the nation’s airwaves in the summer of 2022 was just a passing moment for the right. Crime stats are only worth mobilizing around when they fit a specific narrative, namely that Democrats are soft on criminals.

Because mass murder against children is an inevitable cost of doing business….Because Republicans don’t really care about crime, or about keeping our kids safe.

Coleman concludes, “And that’s why this keeps happening.”

In 2022 Congress did pass the “Bipartisan Safer Communities Act,” which expands background checks for individuals under the age of 21 purchasing firearms and prevents individuals who have been convicted of a domestic violence misdemeanor or felony in dating relationships from purchasing firearms for five years. But a large majority of  Republicans opposed this ‘bipartisan’ legislation. Meanwhile President Biden has taken some bold initiatives on his own, including a March 14th executive order increasing background checks and expanding  “red flag” laws.

President Biden and other Democrats have proposed legislation “banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, requiring background checks for all gun sales, requiring safe storage of firearms, closing the dating violence restraining order loophole, and repealing gun manufacturers’ immunity from liability.” Thus far Republicans have blocked all such proposals.

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

It’s not a secret that Democrats have been doing ever better with white college graduate voters, even as they have been slipping with nonwhite and working-class voters. Between the 2012 and 2020 elections—two elections with essentially identical popular vote margins—Democrats’ performance among white college graduates improved by 16 points, while declining by 18 points among nonwhite working-class voters.

Less well-appreciated is how polarized white college graduates have become in their political views as these trends have unfolded. Patrick Ruffini’s analysis of data from the 2020 Cooperative Election Study (CES), an academic survey with over 60,000 respondents, demonstrates this vividly. Across 50 policy items, white college Democrats are highly likely to give consistently liberal responses, while white college Republicans give consistently conservative responses.

Ruffini explains:

[G]iving the conservative or liberal answer more than 75 percent of the time places you in [ideological] camps. Otherwise, you’re in a non-ideological middle ground. The 75 percent cutoff is an important one. Above we find Assad-like margins for Donald Trump or Joe Biden in 2020 of more than 98 percent. If you’re above this threshold, you’re not persuadable in the slightest. In the middle, your vote is basically up-for-grabs, progressing from one candidate to other in sliding scale fashion according to your policy views.

This approach leaves relatively few white college voters—38 percent—in an ideological middle ground where their responses are significantly mixed across the 50 items. In contrast, black, Hispanic and Asian voters are much less polarized, including within education groups, and have far more voters of mixed orientation in their ranks. This middle ground includes 83 percent of black voters, 77 percent of Hispanic voters, 69 percent of Asian voters, and even 58 percent of white non-college voters, despite the fact that they skew conservative.

Putting this together with the trend data, this means that, as the Democrats have picked up more white college voters, they are adding many more ideologically consistent liberals, while shedding less ideological nonwhites with mixed policy preferences. Strikingly, among the most liberal voters—those who agree with liberal positions more than 90 percent of the time—there are 20 times more white college than black voters.

These developments can only push the party toward being uncompromisingly and uniformly liberal in its policy orientation and that is indeed what we’ve seen. Moreover, the cultural outlook of highly liberal white college graduates, given the heavy weight of this group in the Democratic party infrastructure and in sympathetic media, nonprofits, advocacy groups, foundations, and educational institutions, has inevitably come to define the culture associated with the party.

Here are some other findings that underscore the salience of Ruffini’s analysis:

1. Among white Democrats, there has been an astonishing 37-point increase in professed liberalism between 1994 and today according to Gallup. White Democrats are now far more liberal than their black and Hispanic counterparts, who are overwhelmingly moderate to conservative.
2. White liberals are now more liberal on many racial issues than black and Hispanic voters.
3. White liberals now outnumber the nonwhite working class among Democratic voters.
4. Recent Pew data found that of the 21 policy priorities tested, protecting the environment and dealing with global climate change ranked 14th and 17th, respectively, on the public’s priority list. But among liberal Democrats, these issues ranked first and third, respectively. The story was basically the same among white college-educated Democrats who, as noted, are heavily dominated by liberals.
5. Gallup data indicate that two-thirds of white college Democrats are liberal while 70 percent of black working-class and two-thirds of Hispanic working-class Democrats are moderate or conservative.
6. By 13 percentage points, white college liberals disagree that there are just two genders, male and female. But moderates and conservatives from the nonwhite working class agree by 31 points that there are in fact just two genders.
7. White college graduate liberals support providing government financed health insurance to immigrants who enter the country illegally by 22 points while this is opposed by 16 points among the moderate and conservative nonwhite working class.
8. On granting reparations to the descendants of slaves and reducing the size of the US military, white college liberals are solidly in favor, while nonwhite working-class moderates and conservatives are not.

While the Democratic party is a complex entity, it really is true that it has increasingly become a party whose positions and image are defined by the burgeoning ranks of white college-educated liberals who have made the party their political home. In the process, it has become much harder for many working-class voters, white and nonwhite, to feel comfortable in the party, given their more mixed policy views.

This is a problem. As Ruffini remarks:

[White college graduates are] less than 30 percent of the American electorate. If everything seems polarized these days, it’s probably because of the circles you run in. Not everyone is like this. And the people that aren’t—the multiracial working class—are wildly underrepresented in political media.

True that. Democrats would be well-advised to look past the political media they typically consume and set the controls for the heart of the multiracial working class. That’s the way—the only way—out of the current political stalemate.

At Vox, Nicole Narea gathers comments from four political strategists/pollsters in response to a question of current speculation: “Would Trump’s indictment help or hurt his 2024 campaign?” Some excerpts: GOP pollster Whit Ayers – “I am skeptical that a charge about a years-old event that everybody has already known about for years is likely to have much impact on anything, other than it will probably rally Republicans and supporters of Trump around him, at least in the short term. This would be a very easy case to frame as a partisan political indictment. Much easier to frame that way than, say, the Georgia voting case or the classified documents or January 6.” Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg – “I think it will help [Trump] in the Republican primary, but will continue to degrade him with the broader electorate. MAGA has underperformed in three consecutive elections, and we know it doesn’t work in the battlegrounds. And if the Republicans present themselves as the party all for MAGA in 2024, they’re gonna have a very, very hard time winning the presidency….Trump coming in as the nominee, having been indicted potentially two or three times — there’s no scenario where that’s helpful to him in a national election. It perhaps will help him crowd out DeSantis and other challengers in the primary. But of course, that would be a disaster for the Republican Party. I’d much rather be us than them heading into this next election.” Matt Dole, Ohio Republican strategist: “Trump faced an uphill battle before this for the nomination. I think [his indictment] probably just adds to that. A lot of folks in the Republican coalition want an option that espouses [Trump’s] policies without bringing the antics. Ron DeSantis, obviously, is the model for that….Over the long term, I think this probably helps Trump’s opponents in the Republican primary. There’s certainly a lot to be said for political attacks on President Trump. But I think throughout the entire Republican coalition, this probably hurts him more than it would help….There is a subset of Republicans who are going to support Donald Trump to the very end. And they are loud. And they are well-covered by the media. There will certainly be blowback. But again, all of this is feeding into the fatigue about Donald Trump.”

Pranab Bardhan shares some perceptive insights in “What Will It Take to Save Democracy?,” his review of Martin Wolf’s The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism at The Boston Review. Bardhan, author of  “A World of Insecurity: Democratic Disenchantment in Rich and Poor Countries,” notes that “the cultural narratives used by the right have been more effective in influencing public opinion than the economic narratives of class politics used by left-liberals. Survey results have shown that people tend to vastly overestimatethe size of immigrant and minority populations but dramatically underestimate the extent of wealth inequality and the racial wealth gap. The narrative of a besieged cultural majority and the spell of white nationalist conspiracy theories like the Great Replacement are difficult to break, fueling a victimization complex and toxic cultural forms of status anxiety. The whole situation is exacerbated by social media, where the right seems to have an advantage in spreading falsehoods; the more outrageous they are, the more viral they are likely to go (and the more profits the social media companies make). There is evidence that in the three months before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, false stories on Facebook favoring Trump were shared about 30 million times, whereas false stories favoring Hillary Clinton were shared about 8 million times….The decline of unions has hollowed out a shared sense of meaning and identity among workers. Into this cultural void the demagogues have stepped with their racist, xenophobic culture war agenda. In a world of virulent disinformation and fake news and with social media amplifying anger and resentments and creating echo chambers of extremism, labor unions—in collaboration with other community organizations—can try to be active in providing links to public information services and news provided by demonstrably independent agencies.”

“Biden kicks off ‘Invest in America’ tour next week,” Jeremy Diamond reports at CNN Politics: “As he gears up for a likely reelection campaign, President Joe Biden on Tuesday will kick off a three-week tour to highlight the impact of his signature legislative accomplishments as the impacts of those laws begin to be felt around the country, according to a White House official….The “Invest in America” tour will see Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, first lady Jill Biden and nearly a dozen Cabinet members hit more than 20 states – including key battleground states like Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania – over the next three weeks….The tour is the White House’s most coordinated, concerted push to date to accomplish what White House officials see as their central task this year: implementing legislation and making sure Americans know what Biden has accomplished. Polling published last month indicated the White House has its work cut out: 62% of Americans said they believe Biden has accomplished “not very much” or “little or nothing,” according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll….Biden will make his first of multiple stops on Tuesday with a visit to a semiconductor manufacturer in Durham, North Carolina, which has announced plans to build a $5 billion chips manufacturing facility that will create 1,800 new jobs, spurred on by passage of the CHIPS and Science Act, which incentivizes domestic semiconductor manufacturing….Biden will head to North Carolina a day after convening a meeting of his “Invest in America” Cabinet, which is comprised of key Cabinet officials working to implement the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, the Inflation Reduction Act and the American Rescue Plan….Biden and his Cabinet will highlight the direct and indirect impacts of those laws – including private sector investments spurred on by pieces of legislation – and the impact on state and local economies at each stop.” Sounds like a good plan. But I hope these Democrats will also share some soundbites showing that Republicans are more committed to supporting investments in other countries.

Sherrilyn Ifill reports at slate.com on “The Republican Plan to Make Voting Irrelevant,” and writes, “The ability of the governor to appoint a nominee to fill the unexpired term of a senator without restrictions is the law in 35 states….This effort—to remove powers from elected representatives who are Democrats—has become the new method of disenfranchising voters and maintaining perpetual Republican political power. And it is being undertaken with alarming frequency and speed across the country,” Ifill warns. Further, “This may be the most dangerous and efficient structural attack on our democracy. Its threat, and pernicious ingenuity, lies in its ability to make voting itself irrelevant. Voters may turn out in high numbers and elect their candidates of choice, but if the official is not one whose views align with those of the Republican Party, they may find that their powers of office are removed by antagonistic GOP-controlled legislatures.” Ifill notes “Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, not widely regarded as a reform prosecutor, made the presumably unpardonable decision to convene a grand jury to investigate the effort of Donald Trump to compel Georgia officials to fraudulently award him votes he did not win in the 2020 election. In the wake of what were reported to be “imminent” indictments resulting from Willis’ investigations, the Georgia Legislature passed a legally dubious bill that would create commissions empowered to remove elected prosecutors from office….It was [Sen. Mitch] McConnell who, in essence, removed the power of a sitting president to fill an open seat on the United States Supreme Court when he refused to allow hearings and consideration of President Obama’s nominee, then-Judge Merrick Garland. In essence, the Republicans declared that a Democratic president would be denied the constitutional power to appoint justices to the Supreme Court as long as the GOP controlled the Senate….This is an efficiently sinister effort to solidify one-party rule. Its geographic breadth and reach to offices both high and low requires a national legislative response….this should be powerful motivation for congressional Democrats—and, indeed, for all Americans who wish to live in a democracy—to turn out and vote this year and next, in essence to save the framework of democracy while there’s still time. It should be clear now that for the foreseeable future, democracy remains on the ballot.”

There’s another turn in a story we’ve all been following for over a decade, so I wrote it up at New York:

The Affordable Care Act was signed into law 13 years ago, and the Medicaid expansion that was central to the law still hasn’t been implemented in all 50 states. But we are seeing steady, if extremely slow, progress in the effort to give people who can’t afford private insurance but don’t qualify for traditional Medicaid access to crucial health services. The U.S. Supreme Court case that upheld the ACA also made Medicaid expansion optional for states. Twenty-four states accepted the expansion when it became fully available at the beginning of 2014, and that number has steadily expanded, with the most recent burst of forward momentum coming from ballot initiatives in red states like Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Utah. Now a 40th state is in the process of climbing on board: North Carolina. As the Associated Press reports, legislation is finally headed toward the desk of Governor Roy Cooper:

“A Medicaid expansion deal in North Carolina received final legislative approval on Thursday, capping a decade of debate over whether the closely politically divided state should accept the federal government’s coverage for hundreds of thousands of low-income adults. …

“When Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, a longtime expansion advocate, signs the bill, it should leave 10 states in the U.S. that haven’t adopted expansion. North Carolina has 2.9 million enrollees in traditional Medicaid coverage. Advocates have estimated that expansion could help 600,000 adults.”

So what changed? Basically, over time the fiscal arguments North Carolina Republicans used to oppose the expansion began sounding increasingly ridiculous, AP suggests:

“GOP legislators passed a law in 2013 specifically preventing a governor’s administration from seeking expansion without express approval by the General Assembly. But interest in expansion grew over the past year as lawmakers concluded that Congress was neither likely to repeal the law nor raise the low 10% state match that coverage requires.

“A financial sweetener contained in a COVID-19 recovery law means North Carolina also would get an estimated extra $1.75 billion in cash over two years if it expands Medicaid. Legislators hope to use much of that money on mental health services.”

In other words, the GOP Cassandras warning that the wily Democrats would cut funding for the expansion in Congress once states were hooked turned out to be absolutely wrong. Indeed, the very sweet deal offered in the original legislation got even sweeter thanks to the above-mentioned COVID legislation. States like North Carolina appeared to be leaving very good money on the table for no apparent reason other than partisanship, seasoned with some conservative hostility toward potential beneficiaries. In this case, GOP legislators finally reversed course without much excuse-making. The AP reports:

“A turning point came last May when Senate leader Phil Berger, a longtime expansion opponent, publicly explained his reversal, which was based largely on fiscal terms.

“In a news conference, Berger also described the situation faced by a single mother who didn’t make enough money to cover insurance for both her and her children, which he said meant that she would either end up in the emergency room or not get care. Expansion covers people who make too much money for conventional Medicaid but not enough to benefit from heavily subsidized private insurance.

“’We need coverage in North Carolina for the working poor,’ Berger said at the time.”

That, of course, has been true all along. Final legislative approval of the expansion was delayed for a while due to an unrelated dispute over health-facility regulations. And the expansion cannot proceed until a state budget is passed. But it’s finally looking good for Medicaid expansion in a place where Democrats and Republicans are bitterly at odds on a wide range of issues.

There remain ten states that have not yet expanded Medicaid; eight are Republican “trifecta” states (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming) and two others have Republican-controlled legislatures (Kansas and Wisconsin). Perhaps the peculiar mix of stupidity and malice that keeps state lawmakers from using the money made available to them by Washington to help their own people will abate elsewhere soon.

In his NYT column, “The Unsettling Truth About Trump’s First Great Victory,” Thomas B. Edsall discusses books and studies showing the role of racial attitudes in the current Republican front-runner’s 2016 upset victory in the presidential election. Edsall quotes several high-quality surveys addressing aspects of white Americans’ attitudes toward African Americans and white identity/victimhood and how they affected voting behavior in that year, compared to other years.

Edsall leans into a study by Stanford researchers Justin Grimmer and Cole Tanigawa-Lau and William Marble of the University of Pennsylvania, which found that much of Trump’s support came form voters who harbor only ‘moderate’ racial resentments. That is significant because of the widespread, but apparently mistaken assumption that most of his support comes from those who harbor more virulent racial animosities. The underlying idea is that ‘moderate’ racial resentments can be changed through interracial contact and education.

All of the studies Edsall references look pretty solid. But the quote Edsall provides which makes the most sense to me came from Daniel Hopkins, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, who wrote in an email:

The 2016 presidential election included ballots cast by more than 128 million Americans, and so any one narrative used to explain that election will be partial and incomplete. So I think it’s critical to avoid the idea that there is a single skeleton key that can explain all the varied undercurrents that led to Trump’s 2016 victory, or that any one paper will provide a definitive explanation….

My guess is that the percentage of voters who cast ballots for Trump solely, or even mostly, because of their racial resentments was likely pretty small. I would like to see a survey that ranks 2016 voting reasons, which also includes such variables as dislike for white liberals or Hillary Clinton, peer and family leanings and preference for an ‘outsider’ candidate. There are very few ‘single issue voters,’ and there is not much that can be done to sway them in a different direction anyway.

The reason 2016 is not old news is that Trump is still around, mining many of the same themes. But no matter what happens in the 2024 presidential election, it will be impossible to isolate the role of racial attitudes in the popular vote in light of Trump’s complex legal problems, his bizarre presidency and his role in the January 6 riot, as well as the usual complex of issues.

In his conclusion, Edsall writes,

In fact, the new analysis suggests that Trumpism has found fertile ground across a broad swath of the electorate, including many firmly in the mainstream. That Trump could capture the hearts and minds of these voters suggests that whatever he represents beyond racial resentment — anger, chaos, nihilism, hostility — is more powerful than many recognize or acknowledge. Restoring American politics to an even keel will be far tougher than many of us realize.

Of course it is always worth noting that in 2016 Hillary Clinton got about 2 million, 868 thousand more popular votes than Trump nationwide, although her popular vote margin in California alone was about 4 million, 270 thousand. Most analyses that address Trump’s 2016 upset are mostly about his non-California vote totals. But California stubbornly remains part of the U.S.

As an old guy with a particularly long interest in the career of Georgia’s Democratic President Jimmy Carter, I noted with interest some new revelations about the end-game of the 1980 elections, and wrote about it at New York:

Jimmy Carter’s slow drift toward life’s end after the longest and most impressive post-presidency in U.S. history has spawned a lot of retrospective assessments of the 39th president and his legacy. But the New York Times has brought us a look back that’s also news: Longtime Texas lieutenant governor Ben Barnes, now 85, decided to let it be known that he was part of a scheme in 1980 to make sure Carter’s reelection campaign wouldn’t benefit from an early release of the U.S. hostages in Tehran whose captivity had tormented the White House since November 1979.

Barnes’s story is indeed stunning. For decades, it was generally assumed that Iran’s revolutionary regime countenanced the hostage taking by allied students and activists and refused to negotiate a release with the Carter administration because of entrenched hostility toward Carter over his friendship with the deposed shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and/or because they had reason to expect a better deal from Carter’s general-election opponent, Ronald Reagan. (Iran released the hostages, after 444 days, on Reagan’s Inauguration Day.) But no one has really offered concrete evidence of a dirty Republican deal with Tehran until now. And the prime mover in the reported drama happens to be one of the shadier figures of the modern era, former Texas governor John Connally, a powerful career-long political fixer who was suspected of personal corruption.

Best known for being wounded in the same car that John F. Kennedy was assassinated in, Connally, a protégé of Lyndon B. Johnson, played a large role in the defection of southern Democrats to the Republican Party during Richard Nixon’s administration, during which he served as Treasury secretary. His influence was best reflected by his success in convincing Nixon to impose the heretical step of wage and price controls to (temporarily) rein in inflation. Connally was reportedly Nixon’s preferred pick to replace disgraced vice-president Spiro T. Agnew, but the hostility of Democrats toward the turncoat and his less-than-ideal reputation led the Republican president to instead choose Gerald Ford, whom Carter defeated in 1976.

Four years later, Connally launched his own presidential campaign, but despite lavish funding and enthusiastic backing from corporate leaders, he floundered in Iowa and New Hampshire, losing to Reagan. According to Barnes, a longtime political associate and business partner of his fellow Texan, Connally was determined to land a high-level Cabinet appointment in a Reagan administration, so, with Barnes in tow, he put on his globe-trotting shoes to prove his worth. Per the Times account:

“What happened next Mr. Barnes has largely kept secret for nearly 43 years. Mr. Connally, he said, took him to one Middle Eastern capital after another that summer, meeting with a host of regional leaders to deliver a blunt message to be passed to Iran: Don’t release the hostages before the election. Mr. Reagan will win and give you a better deal.”

The Iranians appear to have gotten the message, as a happy Connally later reported to Reagan’s campaign chairman and future CIA director William Casey.

So should we conclude that if Connally’s mission hadn’t take place, Carter might well have won a second presidential term, relegating Reagan (and quite possibly his running mate, George H.W. Bush. and his running mate’s son George W. Bush) to the political dustbin? Tempting as the hypothesis is, it is not terribly plausible.

First of all, the Islamic regime in Tehran didn’t trust any American politician enough to depend on indirect promises of a “better deal,” and its hatred of and desire to humiliate Carter ran deep, independent of any comparison with Reagan.

Second of all, if Connally played such a dramatic role in postponing a potential hostage release, Team Reagan was notably under-appreciative. Hoping to become Secretary of State or Defense once Reagan took office, he was instead offered the Department of Energy (which the new administration intended to abolish); Connally contemptuously rejected the gig.

More important, the Iran-hostage crisis was just one of the problems weighing down Carter’s reelection campaign heading into 1980. Far more damaging than the hostage situation or any international issue was the economy, which had produced the election-year disaster of “stagflation.” In 1980, the average unemployment rate was 7.1 percent, the average inflation rate was 12.67 percent, and average home-mortgage rates were 13.74 percent. This was a political-economic catastrophe for Carter.

And that wasn’t all. Carter had to deal with a deeply divided Democratic Party and one of the strongest primary challenges any modern incumbent president has faced from liberal legend Ted Kennedy. (Ironically, a rally-round-the-flag effect stemming from the hostage crisis undoubtedly helped Carter hold off Kennedy’s challenge.) And Carter’s reelection campaign had a big strategic problem to overcome. He had narrowly won the 1976 general election thanks to the excitement of southern and southern-inflected voters (many of them former Nixon and future Reagan voters) who were thrilled to have credible presidential candidate emerge from their region of the country. But it was extremely difficult for Carter to maintain that unique coalition, particularly against an ideological candidate like Reagan. He also lost a lot of liberal voters to third-party candidate John Anderson, who ran to Carter’s left. Under these circumstances, it was actually impressive that Carter lost to Reagan by only 9.8 percent of the popular vote (though he lost the Electoral College by a 489-to-49 margin). Well before Connally and Barnes’s Middle East tour, Carter’s job-approval rating (per Gallup) had already slipped well below 40 percent, never to recover.

As much as it might give Carter and his friends some grim sense of vindication to know that skullduggery was deployed to keep the hostages locked up as his presidency slipped away, it ultimately mattered only at the margins. But the tale does provide a bit more posthumous damage to the already spotty image of Connally.

In “More Americans think Trump should face charges in hush money scandal: poll,” Olafimihan Oshin writes at The Hill: “More Americans than not believe that former President Trump should face charges in the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation into a hush money payment he made before the 2016 election, according to a new The Economist/YouGov poll….Forty-six percent of respondents to the survey said that Trump, who over the weekend had said he expected to be arrested on Tuesday in the probe, should be indicted for his actions, compared to 34 percent who said he shouldn’t. The remaining 20 percent were unsure….Only 14 percent of registered Republicans who responded said that Trump should face criminal charges over the payment to adult film performer Stormy Daniels, while 63 percent said he should not. By comparison, 77 percent of Democrat respondents said the former president should be charged, with 11 percent saying he shouldn’t….Charges also have the support of 44 percent of Independents, compared to 30 percent who said Trump should not charged….The Economist/YouGov poll was conducted from March 19 to 21 with a total of 1,500 respondents participating in the survey. The poll’s margin of error was 3.3 percentage points.”

From “Trump’s chief 2024 worry isn’t DeSantis; it’s his stunning success in dismantling abortion rights” by Kerry Eleveld at Daily Kos: “From the moment he stepped off the plane in Iowa, Trump continually dodged questions about whether he would implement a federal national abortion ban. AP reporter Steve Peoples pressed him twice on the matter, but the most he could squeeze from Trump was a decidedly generic, “We’re looking at a lot of different things.”….despite his stellar record on upending a half-century of precedent on reproductive rights, Trump ducking the issue at every turn isn’t going to fly with the forced-birther fundies….“No one gets a pass,” said Majorie Dannenfelser, head of the right-wing anti-abortion organization Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. “With Trump, this is his legacy. It’s something that I believe he will get right, but he’s clearly doing some soul searching right now.”….As 2024 gets underway, Dannenfelser’s group plans to ask all Republican candidates to sign a national 15-week abortion ban pledge…..“If any GOP primary candidate fails to summon the moral courage to endorse a 15-week gestational minimum standard, then they don’t deserve to be the president of the United States,” said Dannenfelser….the dogged push by forced birthers will continue throughout the cycle to the detriment of a Republican Party that is mounting simultaneous attacks on Black voting rights, transgender freedoms, parental rights, freedom of speech, and more….Eventually, a GOP nominee will emerge who will either be at odds with the fundies (causing serious internal GOP strife) or at odds with the broader electorate (sacrificing any chance of winning over suburban women)….Either eventuality will be a welcome development for Democrats.”

Andrew Roman o reports that “Signature DeSantis policies unpopular with Americans ahead of likely presidential run” at Yahoo News: “If Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis defeats former President Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, he may have a harder time winning the general election than his supporters expect, according to the latest Yahoo News/YouGov poll….The new survey shows that more Americans oppose than favor seven out of eight signature policies put forward by DeSantis in Florida, with support ranging from 36% (for requiring public school books to be reviewed for content “the government deems inappropriate”) to a low of 21% (for “granting political appointees the power to fire tenured faculty members at public colleges and universities at any time and for any reason”)….On foreign policy, meanwhile, DeSantis doesn’t fare much better….“While the U.S. has many vital national interests,” the Florida governor said in a statement last week, “becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them.” Yet by a nearly 2-1 margin, Americans consider the conflict an “invasion of Ukraine by Russia” (56%) rather than a “territorial dispute” (30%) — and less than a third (32%) think “the conflict is none of America’s business….The poll of 1,582 U.S. adults, which was conducted from March 16 to 20, suggests a bumpy road ahead for DeSantis after he launches his widely expected presidential campaign later this spring. For now, he trails Trump 39% to 47% in a one-on-one primary matchup among registered voters who are Republicans or Republican-leaning independents, down from his 45% to 41% lead in early February. DeSantis (32%) lags even further behind Trump (47%) in a field that includes former Vice President Mike Pence (5%) and former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley (6%).”

At Sabato’s Crystal Ball, Alan I. Abramowitz explores “The Transformation of the American Electorate,” and
writes that “the electorate that voted for Joe Biden in 2020 was very different from the electorate that voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980. Over these 40 years, the electorate has become both more racially diverse and more educated. The white share of the electorate has fallen from 84% in 1980 to 66% in 2020. At the same time, the share of the electorate without a college degree has fallen from 84% in 1980 to 63% in 2020….The combined impact of growing racial diversity and rising levels of education is that the share of the electorate made up of whites without a college degree has fallen drastically, from 69% in 1980 to 39% in 2020. In 40 years, non-college whites have gone from an overwhelming majority to a minority of the American electorate….At this rate of decline, the proportion of the electorate made up of non-college whites will fall to approximately 30% by 2032….the Democratic advantage in party identification has declined steadily since 2008, falling from 13.9 percentage points to only 4.1 percentage points over these 12 years. The 4.1 percentage point Democratic advantage in party identification in 2020 was the smallest recorded in ANES surveys in the past 40 years….the proportion of eligible voters with a college degree more than doubled between 1980 and 2020, going from 16% to 37%. The proportion of college graduates rose from 17% to 40% among whites and from 11% to 30% among nonwhites….To test the racial and cultural resentment hypothesis, I examined the relationship between the standard 4-item racial resentment scale and party identification among whites with and without college degrees….There is a very strong relationship between racial resentment and party identification among those with and without college degrees. Whites who scored low in racial resentment identified overwhelmingly with the Democratic Party while those who scored high in racial resentment identified overwhelmingly with the Republican Party. Moreover, once we control for racial resentment, the educational divide in partisanship disappears completely. In fact, at moderate to high levels of racial resentment, whites with college degrees were slightly more likely to identify as Republican than whites without college degrees….racial and cultural resentment rather than economic distress and insecurity has been driving non-college whites toward the Republican Party in recent years….Among white Democrats without a college degree, the proportion scoring either low or very low on the racial resentment scale increased from 26% in 2012 to 44% in 2016 to 63% in 2020. Among white Democrats with college degrees, the proportion scoring either low or very low on the racial resentment scale increased from 56% in 2012 to 75% in 2016 to 86% in 2020….In 2020, according to the ANES data, 96% of white Democrats reported voting for the Democratic nominee, Joe Biden. This was the highest level of loyalty among white Democrats in any presidential election in the entire ANES series, going back to 1952. As recently as 1988, only 80% of white Democrats reported voting for the Democratic nominee, Michael Dukakis….The sharp increase in party loyalty among white Democrats has largely offset the impact of declining Democratic identification among whites since the 1980s. The Democratic base today is somewhat smaller than it was 40 years ago but it is much more loyal in its voting behavior, as shown in Figure 7. That is a major reason why Democratic candidates have won the popular vote in 7 of the last 8 presidential elections.”

In the last two decades, the Republican ranks in Colorado have shrunk drastically, to just a quarter of registered voters, as the once reliably red state has turned a distinct shade of blue.

In the last two decades, the Republican ranks in Colorado have shrunk drastically, to just a quarter of registered voters, as the once reliably red state has turned a distinct shade of blue.

The transformation is part of a larger political shift across the West: along the Pacific Coast, through the deserts of Nevada and Arizona, into the Rocky Mountain states of Colorado and New Mexico. Once a Republican bulwark, the region has become Democratic bedrock. That, in turn, has reshaped presidential politics nationwide.

With a big chunk of the West — California, Colorado, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington — seemingly locked up, Democrats are free to focus more heavily on the perennial battlegrounds of the Midwest and venture into once-solidly Republican states such as Georgia.

Barabak plans to visit western states for a series “to explore the forces that remade the political map.” Further,

The changes didn’t just happen, like the snow embroidering the Rockies in winter, or the runoff that swells Colorado’s icy rivers in the spring. It took money, strategy, demographic changes and, not least, a sharp rightward turn by Republicans.

The series, called “The New West,” begins in Colorado, as no state in the region has changed its partisan coloration as emphatically over the last two decades. “From a western swing state, it has become a Democratic stronghold,” said pollster Floyd Ciruli, who’s sampled public opinion in Colorado for more than 40 years.

In 2004, Democrats essentially gave up and wrote the place off; they’ve carried Colorado in every presidential contest since. In 2020, Joe Biden romped to a 13-point win over President Trump, the largest Democratic victory here in more than half a century.

Barabak explains that “Colorado has long been a magnet for twenty- and thirty-somethings, drawn by the state’s mouthwatering scenery, outdoorsy lifestyle and, more recently, its thriving tech and service industries.” Also,

What has changed are those who’ve found their home in the Democratic Party: They are younger, more affluent, better educated, and more liberal on issues such as abortion and gay rights….In short, Democrats are now much more in tune with Colorado, one of the best-educated and socially liberal states in the country, as the Republican base has gotten older, less educated, more evangelical and more Trumpy.

However, “The state is “not a playground for the fringe left,” said Chris Hughes, a former Colorado Democratic Party chairman. “It’s not a state like Maryland, where whoever the Democrat is they’ll win.”….“Coloradans tend to be very moderate,” said Democratic strategist Craig Hughes. “Anyone who puts personal ideology over solutions is going to run afoul of the Colorado electorate.”

In terms of party preference, “Unaffiliated voters are the majority at 45%, followed by Democrats at 28% and Republicans at 25%; for decades the parties were at rough parity, with about a third of the electorate each.)….Republicans were in decline in Colorado well before Trump bulled his way into the White House. The former president’s deceit and the mayhem he spawned hastened the free fall.”

Despite the grotesque underrepresentation of California in the U.S. Senate, the west may soon lead the way to a stable Democratic majority in both houses of congress and a more secure Democratic hold of the presidency. But it won’t happen automatically, and it will require that Democrats successfully ‘brand’ their party as the rational alternative to the G.O.P.’s extremist drift.