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

This is the second part of a three part series. The first part is here.

Despite the astounding early successes of modern environmentalism, the apocalyptic strain of the movement was simply lying dormant. Given the fundamental contradiction between man and nature, between human economic activity and ecological balance that is assumed by environmentalism and its intellectual origins, it was only a matter of time before an issue or issues arose that rekindled that strain.

The first such issue was nuclear power. From the beginning, opposition to nuclear power was closely linked to opposition to nuclear weapons.  The same things that led people to demonstrate against nuclear  bombs—deadly radiation and catastrophic explosions—drove people to oppose nuclear power. Surely those plants, since they relied on the same technology that produced nuclear explosions, could easily pollute the environment with radiation and potentially destroy surrounding communities.

The issue was a natural fit to the burgeoning environmentalist consciousness. The first activist group dedicated to the issue was the Citizens Energy Council, founded in 1966, which argued that nuclear power plants were intrinsically unsafe and a health hazard. As the sixties moved into the seventies and nuclear power plants were being rapidly rolled out, opposition grew and was seamlessly blended into the general environmentalist portfolio. If you considered yourself an environmentalist, you also likely opposed nuclear power.

An additional spark for the movement was provided by the early 1970’s energy crisis. This brought home to Americans the need to ramp up the domestic energy supply. This development helped popularize the thinking of environmentalists like anti-nuclear, anti-fossil fuel economist EF Schumacher (Small Is Beautiful) and, particularly, Amory Lovins, whose influential Foreign Affairs article, “The Road Not Taken”, built directly on the chaos of the energy crisis to argue that America faced a choice between two paths, the “hard” path, relying on nuclear and fossil fuels (the policy at the time) and the “soft” path that would twin the “benign” energy sources of wind and solar with energy conservation and efficiency. That would both solve the energy crisis, he claimed, and lead to a much better eco-conscious society.

Lovins’ arguments had wide purchase within the environmental movement and the allied and frequently coterminous anti-nuclear power movement (environmentalist organizations like the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and others had already declared their opposition to nuclear power). His analysis brought together environmentalism, anti-nuclear power and reverence for wind and solar in one big package that quickly became conventional wisdom in activist circles and the wider public they were preaching to.

The apocalyptic strain already visible in the anti-nuclear power movement was turbo-charged by the Three Mile Island incident in 1979. No one died in the incident and the safety systems held, but it is fair to say the event scared the hell out of many people and, of course, the anti-nuclear power movement had a field day. The movie, The China Syndrome, had been released right before the incident and the eerie coincidence further amplified the effect of Three Mile Island on the popular imagination. Nuclear power was cast as a matter of life and death, with the Big Explosion and radiation poisoning always, and inevitably, right around the corner.

Then, of course, there was Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011. From 1978 to 2012, no new nuclear power plants were authorized in the United States. The build-out of nuclear power in the country essentially stopped. The anti-nuclear power movement could not eliminate nuclear power entirely (though they’re still trying) but they did largely succeed in the goal of preventing the expansion of nuclear power (already plagued by cost overrun problems) through political obstacles and a super-stringent regulatory process.

The Rise of the Climate Change Issue

That was one apocalypse averted. But there was another one incoming: climate change. Unlike the nuclear power problem, which was dubious scientifically (it is easy to show that nuclear as a power source has an outstanding safety record over time) and owed its place in the public imagination to its association with nuclear weapons and a technology that people were terrified of, the climate change problem had a sound scientific basis. The earth really was warming and that really did have a lot to do with the activities of humankind, specifically the release of greenhouse gases (primarily CO2).

The understanding that human activity could affect the climate goes back a long way, including the potential effects of CO2. Work of Charles Keeling, Roger Revelle and Hans Suess had established by the late 1950’s that CO2 emissions could and were affecting the climate, making it warmer over time. But at the time, this was not regarded as particularly alarming. The New York Times reported on p. 112 of a Sunday edition in 1959: “The world is getting slightly warmer” but most scientists believe the “warming trend” is not “alarming or steep”.

Confusingly, however, the CO2 emissions-warming relationship was put forward in the context of research looking at other emissions (aerosols) whose atmospheric effects raised the possibility not of warming, but of sudden cooling that would overwhelm any warming trend. That was actually the original climate apocalypse—a new Ice Age, not today’s image of a burning globe. Newsweek published “A Cooling World” in 1975 and columnist George Will warned that “There will be megadeaths” due to a global drop of “two or three degrees by the end of the century”. As late as 2004, a popular movie, The Day After Tomorrow, portrayed a sudden, disastrous cooling of the earth producing a frozen globe.

But the science eventually converged on the gradual warming assessment and the central role of CO2. The real impact though didn’t come until 1988 when NASA’s James Hansen testified before the Senate on June 23rd, during a US heat wave and a worldwide pattern of extreme weather, “Earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements…With 99 percent confidence we can state that the warming during this time period is a real warming trend….Carbon dioxide is changing our climate now.”

Extensive coverage of Hansen’s testimony began the process of cementing the association in the public mind between climate change and the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events and, eventually, the possibility of a dystopian future. Fortuitously, the World Conference on the Changing Atmosphere in Toronto was held just four days after Hansen’s testimony and attracted reporters primed by Hansen’s testimony and on the hunt for newsworthy predictions. They were duly provided. The conference called for immediate action to reduce CO2 emissions by 20 percent by 2005. It was averred that climate change could be nearly as serious as nuclear war.

Also in 1988, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established by the United Nations providing a mechanism for synthesizing the exploding scientific research on the issue and establishing it as a area of worldwide concern. In tandem with this outpouring of scientific research was the beginnings of what has become a tsunami of popular treatments of the issue. This key work here is Bill McKibben’s 1989 book, The End of Nature.

The core concept that was being established by these testimonies, conferences, research syntheses and books was that the “greenhouse effect” was real, was caused by emissions of human origin and was, in fact, changing the climate of the planet. Specifically, it was making the planet warmer over time. If the greenhouse effect was allowed to go unchecked, it therefore followed that the climate could get warm enough to have very serious adverse effects on human societies, from rising sea levels to extreme temperatures and weather. Thus, a real problem with a real scientific basis presented itself and called for action.

As the late 1980’s moved into the 1990’s, action on climate change did make its way onto the agenda. It is interesting to note that at the very beginning, concern about climate change was not totally Democratic-coded. George H.W. Bush made a point of calling for action on the problem in his 1988 Presidential campaign. Bush in office did, in fact, take some action including helping establish the United Nations Framework Convention of Climate Change. But in short order the issue became heavily partisanized as fossil fuel companies mounted PR campaigns around the issue designed to cast doubt on the reality of global warming and hence for any need cut down on fossil fuels. Republicans fell into line.

Over the course of the 1990’s, the issue increasingly became the central issue of the environmental movement and ever more strongly associated with the Democrats. Democrats sought to advance both cooperative international action and a domestic plan to move away from greenhouse gases. The idea was that America and the world could continue to grow but that, over time, it was necessary to replace fossil fuels with clean energy to keep global temperatures under control and avoid disastrous outcomes. Given political will, that could be achieved by gradual reform.

In 1993, the Clinton administration commissioned a Climate Change Action Plan, though it had little muscle behind it and was mostly a set of voluntary recommendations for businesses. In 1997, the international Kyoto Protocol, which had countries commit to set targets for emissions reduction, was promulgated. This was an extension of the United Nations Framework Convention of Climate Change, which President George HW Bush had helped develop. However, while President Clinton signed the Protocol, it did not have enough support to be ratified by the Senate.

When Al Gore, who was a staunch environmentalist, advocate of the Kyoto Protocol and strong proponent of reducing greenhouse gases ran for President in 2000 against George W. Bush, he leaned into these issues. Environmental protection, he declared, should be “the central organizing principle of civilization”. Bush disagreed on all counts. The increased salience of the issue hurt Gore in some states linked to fossil fuels with, notably, formerly deep blue West Virginia (Clinton carried it by 15 points) flipping to the GOP (Bush carried it by 5 points).

In office, President Bush withdrew from the Protocol entirely. However, the Bush administration did set a goal of an 18 percent reduction in emissions over then next ten years. That was not particularly satisfying for the burgeoning climate movement, who spent the Bush years getting more and more frustrated about lack of action on climate and vowing that once the Democrats got back into office they would press for massive efforts to combat global warming.

The Temperature Rises within the Climate Change Movement

In the interregnum, the climate movement, reflecting that perception and their view of the scale of the problem, became increasingly apocalyptic in their pronouncements. In a sense, they were getting back to the environmental movement’s Vogtian roots. Action to stop global warming must be very large-scale and very fast; otherwise, that could be it for Planet Earth and even humanity itself. Along those lines, Al Gore’s 2006 movie, An Inconvenient Truth, and his famous slide show, which did not hold back in its assessment of the direness of the situation and the lateness of the hour, had a huge influence on the public discussion.

In 2008, 350.org was founded by Bill McKibben and some college graduates who had been working with him. Its tone was explicitly Vogtian. The goal was address the climate “crisis” by creating an international movement that could end the use of fossil fuels and hasten the transition to renewables (essentially, wind and solar). As the group states in the history on its website:

When we started organizing in 2008, we saw climate change as the most important issue facing humanity — but climate action was mired in politics and all but stalled. We didn’t know how to fix things, but we knew that one missing ingredient was a climate movement that reflected the scale of the crisis.

Naturally, expectations were high among climate activists when the Obama administration took office in 2009. Initially, some hope was vested in the American Clean Energy and Security Act (aka the Waxman-Markey bill), which would have set up an emissions trading system. However, while the bill passed the House it predictably died in the Senate. More promising was the very substantial amount of money devoted to clean energy in the Obama administration stimulus bill (the ARRA, American Recovery and Reinvestment Act).

This bill’s commitment to clean energy was a notable advance in magnitude over prior Democratic commitments. In 1999, President Clinton proposed a $6.3 billion clean energy bill that died a very quick legislative death. The stimulus bill poured $90 billion into clean energy, more than 14 times what Clinton proposed.

As summarized by one booster of the bill, the bill provided:

…unprecedented government investments in a smarter grid, cleaner coal, energy efficiency in every imaginable form, “green-collar” job training, electric vehicles and the infrastructure to support them, advanced biofuels and the refineries to brew them, renewable power from the sun, the wind, and the heat below the earth, and factories to manufacture all that green stuff in the United States.

One of the chief purposes of the bill was to jolt the flagging US clean energy industry to life. The provision of loans and cash grants to renewable energy and related firms did have considerable success along these lines. One goal was to double renewable power generation within Obama’s first term, which it did achieve.

Nevertheless, climate advocates were still quite unsatisfied with what the Obama administration initially accomplished. Many felt that the administration had not spent sufficient political capital on Waxman-Markey, focusing instead on the health care issue. Given advocates’ rising millenarian commitment to rapid social transformation through a clean energy transition, the failure to give fighting climate change a higher priority was viewed as a sellout to fossil fuel interests.

Even the Obama administration’s further actions on climate change, including the 2013 Climate Action Plan and the followup Clean Power Plan, which aimed to cut 32 percent of emissions from electrical power plants, and adhering to the 2015 international Paris Agreement, failed to satisfy advocates who wanted more action and faster. After all, went the thinking, the earth was burning and this was all Obama was doing?

Climate advocates had been dismayed by Obama’s embrace in March 2012, in the run-up to the 2012 election, of an “all-of-the-above” approach to energy policy and the clean energy transition. He said, “We need an energy strategy for the future—an all-of-the-above strategy for the 21st century that develops every source of American-made energy.” He boasted that his administration had “quadrupled the number of operating oilrigs to a record high” and “opened up millions of new acres for oil and gas exploration.”

They were even more dismayed by the further development of Obama’s strategy in 2014. In July of that year a 43-page White House report formally outlined “The All-Of-The-Above Energy Strategy as a Path to Sustainable Economic Growth”. The report began:

The U.S. energy sector is undergoing a profound transformation. The United States is producing more oil and natural gas, is generating more electricity from renewables such as wind and solar, and is consuming less petroleum while holding electricity consumption constant. These developments have had substantial economic and energy security benefits, and they are helping to reduce carbon emissions in the energy sector and thereby tackle the challenge posed by climate change…. The All-of-the-Above energy strategy has three key elements: to support economic growth and job creation, to enhance energy security, and to deploy low-carbon energy technologies and lay the foundation for a clean energy future.

The report and the strategy it outlined recognized, implicitly or explicitly, several key realities of a clean energy transition: (1) fossil fuels would continue to play a big role in the American energy mix for a long time to come; (2) energy policy has to be considered in the context of energy security; (3) energy policy has to be about economic growth and jobs not just clean energy; and (4) wind and solar, while important, are just one part of an all-of-the-above strategy.

The climate movement was appalled. A letter was sent to Obama by 18 environmental organizations, including Earthjustice, Sierra Club, Environmental Defense Fund, League of Conservation Voters, and the Natural Resources Defense Council. They characterized the policy as “a compromise that future generations can’t afford. It…locks in the extraction of fossil fuels that will inevitably lead to a catastrophic climate future.”

Bill McKibben and 350.org duly upped the ante with a “A Call to Arms” for a massive climate march, which wound up getting 1500 organizational cosponsors. On September 21, 2014, 400,000 people marched in New York for the People’s Climate March, easily the biggest climate demonstration yet. By 2015, fossil fuel divestment had become the fastest growing divestment movement in history. The table was set for the next stage of the movement.

Next: The Triumph of Climate Catastrophism and the Challenge for Today’s Left

Daniel McGraw ponders “What Even Are the Suburbs Nowadays, Anyway? If you want to understand American politics, you need to understand how suburbia has changed in the last half-century” at The Bulwark. As McGraw writes,

The suburban voters in the 2024 election are thought to be key to who will be voted in as the next president, and some analysts are treating this large segment of the population as comparable to the national voter mix (40 R / 40 D / 20 independent), and not much differentiating between suburbs in different states and around different urban areas.

“Time for a reality check,” writes Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and well-respected political demographer and commentator. “Start with the demographic contours of the suburban vote. The idea seems to be that the suburbs are full of liberal, highly-educated voters who are likely to be permanent recruits to the anti-MAGA army. There are certainly some, but actually-existing suburban voters are quite different—and more complex—than this caricature.”

So what is suburbia really in 2023, how has it changed, and how should we think about it politically?

First, the old suburbs in the Northeast and Midwest (both of which regions are losing population) are nothing like the newer ones in the West and South.

Second, the hub-and-spoke model of central cities and suburbs that surround them has been blown apart in recent decades, especially in places like Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Atlanta.

And third, though the suburban demographics are very different nowadays, the issues that matter are still, as they always have been, at the top of the lists of what suburban voters care about: education, public safety, affordable housing, transportation, fair pay. What’s not up there, at least based on the polls: the Big Lie, climate change, gentrification, and voting changes. Which suggests that in the 2024 cycle, “What have you done for me lately?” political thinking will likely predominate over matters of ideological identity.

As for the political ramifications of the transformation of the ‘burbs, McGraw explains:

Moreover, the suburban population has changed quite a bit, becoming more racially diverse and educationally inclusive. According to William H. Frey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who keeps an eye on the ever-changing suburbs, the suburban population is “more racially diverse than the rest of the country as a whole,” with suburbs in the South and the West being more racially diverse than those of the Midwest and Northeast suburbs. “Black flight” has overtaken white flight in these growth areas.

Frey’s data breakdown of the metro areas shows how this diversity of the suburban population might have a big influence on the 2024 election. The suburbanites in the old swing states’ metro areas are majority white: Philadelphia (68 percent white), Detroit (73 percent), and Milwaukee (83 percent). By contrast, the metro areas that will be the presidential kingmakers this time around are not so much: Atlanta (44 percent white), Las Vegas (34 percent), and Phoenix (60 percent). These are three of the fastest growing metro areas in the country.

If you want to win the Electoral College votes of Georgia, Nevada, and Arizona in 2024, you’ll have to win those three suburbs—after all, the Atlanta area has 56 percent of the entire Georgia population, Las Vegas is 72 percent of Nevada, and Phoenix is 67 percent of Arizona, and those metro areas tend to be about two-thirds suburban.

Phoenix is a good example. Maricopa County voted for Mitt Romney over Barack Obama by 54-44 in 2012, went for Donald Trump narrowly (46-44) in 2016, and gave Biden the win (50-48) in 2020. In the recent runoff Senate election in Georgia, Sen. Raphael Warnock won the eleven-county (mostly suburban) Atlanta metro area by about 500,000 votes. Republican candidate Herschel Walker won the rest of the state by 410,000. The voting math of suburban Atlanta is front and center.

McGraw adds, “The ability to tweak political messaging is hugely important, and in 2024, calibrating the message for the suburbs will be huge….So which party is better positioning itself for success in the suburbs in 2024?” Further,

Republicans are playing the “We won’t fund anything and we’ll investigate everyone” game. That never plays well in the long term.

As for the Democrats, going into 2024, the Atlanta, Phoenix, and Las Vegas metro areas will all be getting their share of the trillion-dollar infrastructure investment, pandemic relief, and economic stimulus cash cow that the Biden administration dropped. Those areas’ suburban voters are going to see shovel-ready projects begun, electric vehicle battery plants open, and chip and semiconductor manufacturing plants opening as well, as well as clean-energy job creation taking place. Already, the Biden administration is targeting such job creation in Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. Because in the end, the American people like to eat and buy clothes and drive their cars.

Democrats certainly hope that will help. Traditionally, however, Democrats have put more energy into publicizing what they say they are are going to do, rather than getting credit for the things they actually accomplish.  Much depends on how persuasively the Democrats ‘brand’ the shovel-ready, clean-energy and other job-creation projects after they are up and running.

For a perceptive look at Democratic possibilities in NC, check out “To win statewide in NC, there’s one thing Democrats should change” by Ned Barnett at The (Raleigh) News & Observer. As Barnett writes:

There’s a reason Democrats struggle to win statewide elections in North Carolina and there’s a way they can do better. That’s the upshot of an analysis of voter turnout in North Carolina’s 2022 Senate race by Michael Bitzer, a Catawba College political scientist. It should be required reading for Democrats as they approach the 2024 race for governor. In the Senate race, Democrats nominated former state Supreme Court Chief Justice Cheri Beasley and Republicans chose U.S. Rep. Ted Budd, a backer of gun rights and opponent of abortion and LGBTQ rights who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The contest looked promising for the Democrats: a respected jurist against a reactionary congressman, yet Budd won with 50.5 percent of the vote to Beasley’s 47.2 percent.

Democrats blamed their defeat on a lack of national Democratic funding that resulted in Beasley being heavily outspent by outside groups supporting Budd. That was part of it, but Bitzer’s analysis shows the main reason: Poor turnout among core Democratic groups. “For Black/African Americans, their turnout rate was nearly 10 points below the state’s turnout rate, while white turnout was 7 points ahead,” Bitzer said in his analysis. He added that participation by voters under 40 – a key to Democrats’ successes in other states – was “abysmally below the state’s turnout rate.”

This raises strategic questions for what may be the Democrats best shot at a swing state: Should NC Democrats invest more in mobilizing Black turnout, or focus more on appealing to rural voters? Or is that a false choice because winning Democratic campaigns have to do both?

Barnett continues, explaining “Bitzer notes that Democratic turnout has not matched Republican turnout in any midterm or presidential election since 2008. That trend matters as Democrats look ahead to 2024. The early favorites to face off for governor are Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein and Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson. If that’s the case, it’s something of a replay of the Senate race: A prominent and politically cautious legal veteran vs. a very conservative firebrand. The result could be the same, too, unless Democrats address the voting intensity gap they have with Republicans. Democrats who water-down their progressive positions in hopes of cutting their rural and suburban losses also diminish their support among core Democratic groups.”

Of course many Democratic strategists argue that the opposite is true: Don’t waste resources on Black midterm turnout when the party needs to peel off  just a small share of the rural vote. Dems may have a  better chance of taking away about 2 percent of those who voted for Ted Budd against Beasley in NC’s midterm senate race and persuading them to vote Democratic than they do of enhancing Black midterm turnout.

It should be easier to reach Black voters, most of whom are concentrated in NC’s large cities. And it is always  tough for Dems to reach rural voters. Democratic candidates have to put in more time to reach rural voters who are more scattered. However, NC’s ‘Research Triangle‘ does include a large concentration of educated and more liberal white voters.

The lessons of the Georgia flip of 2020 may not be applicable in NC because (a.) NC has a smaller percentage of Black residents (about 1 out of 5 compared to GA’s 1 out of 3), and (b.) NC doesn’t have GA’s election activists and (c.) Donald Trump didn’t fubar NC’s GOP.

In addition, Beasley was a really good candidate with impressive credentials, and may have done as well as any Democrat could have in NC’s cities. Barnett adds,

Pope “Mac” McCorkle, a professor at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy and a veteran North Carolina political consultant, thinks Stein should stay the middle course. While Democrats haven’t won a statewide federal race since 2008, he said, they have won seven of the last eight gubernatorial elections. And Stein has won two statewide elections for attorney general. “That’s nothing to sneeze at,” McCorkle said. “He didn’t win big, but he still won.”….A Democratic strategy of trying to reduce losses in Republican areas is also questioned by Chris Cooper, a Western Carolina University political scientist. He said Stein “won’t be able to pull the Roy Cooper magic trick” of drawing votes from rural counties. “Stein’s path,” he said, “will be to double down on urban counties.”

Barnett nonetheless concludes, “A key message for Democratic candidates is that trying to reach unreachable rural and conservative-leaning voters invites failing to inspire core Democratic voters. In short, to win as a Democrat, run as one.”

But the question remains, for state-wide races, is it really all that impossible to do both a first-rate job of turning out Black voters and also persuading 2 percent of rural GOP voters to flip towards the Democrats? Or maybe just do a little bit better at meeting both challenges.

Jared Gans reports at The Hill: “The public’s party preferences were almost evenly split in 2022 after years of Democrats having a slight advantage among U.S. adults….A Gallup poll released on Thursday found that 45 percent of adults consider themselves Republicans or Republican-leaning independents, while 44 percent consider themselves Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents….The Democratic Party has led the GOP in the poll by at least three points since 2011, when the two parties were tied. Gallup found a plurality of adults, 41 percent, identify as independents. Only 28 percent identify as Democrats and 28 percent identify as Republicans….Gallup said in its analysis that the increase in independent identification seems to have been driven by members of Generation X and millennials identifying as such. About half of the millennials surveyed and more than 40 percent of Generation X said they identify as independents, while less than a third of older generations said the same….The results were based on 10,736 U.S. adults from 11 separate polls from January to December 2022. The margin of error was plus or minus 1 percentage point.”

What’s the matter with Florida (Democrats)? Some insights from “Florida Democratic Party chair quits after disastrous midterms” by Gary Fineout and Matt Dixon at Politico: “Diaz’s departure came after Florida Democrats suffering some of their worst losses ever, including the re-election of Gov. Ron DeSantis by 19 points over Charlie Crist, the election of a supermajority in the Florida Legislature and the flipping of several counties including once-reliable blue Miami-Dade County….“During my tenure, I hoped to address these issues, and build a united party without silos, focused exclusively on our purpose- to elect Democrats,” Diaz wrote in his statement, first reported by the Florida Phoenix. “Instead, I found obstacles to securing the resources and a long-standing, systemic and deeply entrenched culture resistant to change; one where individual agendas are more important than team; where self-interest dominates and bureaucracies focus on self-preservation.”….There were also signs of dissatisfaction heading into the crucial 2022 elections, with many Democrats privately whispering that Diaz appeared “missing in action” as the Republicans caught — and then zoomed past Democrats in voter registration numbers….State Rep. Anna Eskamani (D-Orlando) said “there is close to no Democratic Party in Florida,” which is what led her to launch her own voter registration and organizing group, People Power for Florida. “I wasn’t going to wait for the party to step up and I’m glad I didn’t. We — as individual Democrats — are the party, and we have to get back to basics and think long term if we’re going to win this state for everyday people.”….Diaz’s lengthy missive announcing his resignation savaged national Democratic organizations that raised millions from Florida donors but did not spend that money in the state.”

Fineout and Dixon continue, “He also took aim at legislative campaign organizations, including the one run by Senate Democratic Leader Lauren Book for focusing “exclusively” on their candidates and not helping the party….It is impossible to build or ‘rebuild’ an organization without resources,” Diaz wrote. “Huge sums of money continue to be outside the control of the FDP. When reflecting on our disappointments during the past 20 years, one must follow the money. Who received the investments? What was the return on these investments?” ….During the 2018 midterms, for example, national Democratic groups spent nearly $60 million in Florida, a number that dropped to under $2 million in 2022….Diaz also contended that the party did not have an effective message to voters and had difficulty finding volunteers to help the party: “We have plenty of social media activists, not roll-up-your-sleeves volunteers. We communicate virtually, not personally.”….On messaging he wrote: “Campaigns are about winning and winning requires hard work and resources. No amount of hard work or resources can overcome a bad message, a message that fails to connect with people where they are. The point of messaging is to win votes. You do that by not prompting ideological polarization.”….“While the Florida Democrats seem to be in perpetual rebuilding mode, after a tough series of election cycles, it was time for a change in chair,” Book said. ”But to regain what has been lost, the changes cannot being or end there — and Manny Diaz cannot be used as a scapegoat for what has transpired….One person didn’t get us into this mess and one person can’t get us out,” she said.”

From “Biden’s sudden centrist push on immigration‘ by Stef W. Knight at Axios: “Zoom in: The administration deployed a White House address and a visit to El Paso, all while House Republicans readied for investigations into the administration’s handling of the border.

• “I think on this issue, he is shifting to where a lot of us have been wanting him to go. He has shifted to the center,” Rep. Henry Cuellar, a moderate border Democrat from Texas, told Axios following his trip to the El Paso border with Biden.
• Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas), who also accompanied the president to the border in her district, agreed last week signaled a shift in strategy.
• Escobar told Axios she thinks it is the right approach and that some of her more concerned colleagues are coming around.

Between the lines: Immigration has long been a political minefield — and the administrationhas struggled to politically address the record numbers of border crossings.

• The right accuses Biden of having “open border” policies and rhetoric.
• Left-wing immigration activists decry the administration’s use of Title 42, expedited dockets for asylum seekers, for-profit detention spaces and restricted access to asylum.

….The big picture: Biden embraced many of the priorities of progressive immigration advocates during the 2020 presidential election.

This week at New York I wrote about an important trend that is becoming more apparent every day:

When Russia first launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, most Americans and their political representatives immediately identified with and sought to assist the beleaguered victims of Vladimir Putin’s aggression, while condemning the crude neo-tsarist imperialism it represented.

But from the get-go in the dark heart of MAGA-land, there was dissent and considerable grumbling. Some of if took the form of America First whataboutism, best expressed by Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance; on the brink of the invasion he said, “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine” because he was too absorbed with fentanyl coming across the U.S.-Mexico border. But others were really struggling to abandon their affection for Putin, who had, with Donald Trump, Victor Orbán, and Jair Bolsonaro, represented a sort of right-wing authoritarian network. Then-Congressman Madison Cawthorn parroted Russian propaganda by saying “the Ukrainian government is incredibly corrupt and is incredibly evil and has been pushing woke ideologies,” and his colleague Marjorie Taylor Greene called the Ukrainians “neo-Nazis.” Fox News’ Tucker Carlson was a constant font of bitter hostility toward U.S. aid for Ukraine.

Now, nearly a year later, it’s harder to find Republicans expressing a crush on Putin, but neo-isolationist disdain for any U.S. role in aiding Ukraine has been steadily rising in the GOP and may have reached a tipping point where it has real-life consequences. When putative House Speaker Kevin McCarthy reached a handshake agreement with his right-wing critics to roll back appropriations for the current fiscal year, defense hawks in his party were appalled. It quickly became apparent that the “defense cuts” many House Republicans had in mind involved the new tranche of military aid to Ukraine that had been included in the omnibus spending bill Congress approved in December. It’s no accident that a majority of House Republicans skipped Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s address to Congress on December 21, even as opinion leaders on the right were attacking him (e.g., Donald Trump Jr.’s dismissal of Zelenskyy as an “ungrateful international welfare queen”).

This sort of attitude isn’t as common among Senate Republicans (whose leader, Mitch McConnell, said in support of the omnibus bill, “providing assistance for Ukrainians to defeat the Russians is the No. 1 priority for the United States right now”). But the idea of abandoning Ukraine is now an acceptable point of view among GOP elected officials. And it’s spreading to rank-and-file Republicans. FiveThirtyEight’s latest polling overview found “a growing partisan divide on the issue:”

“In [a] YouGov/CBS News poll, a narrow majority of Republicans (52 percent) wanted their representative in Congress to oppose aid [to Ukraine], whereas 81 percent of Democrats wanted theirs to support it. A mid-December poll from CivicScience also showed a wide partisan gap, with 83 percent of Democrats supporting military aid to Ukraine versus 53 percent of Republicans. At the beginning of the war, though, support among Republicans was almost as high as it was among Democrats: In March, another YouGov/CBS News poll showed that 75 percent of Republicans and 80 percent of Democrats supported sending weapons and supplies to Ukraine.”

There’s nothing terribly novel about voters (and politicians) from one political party growing cool toward a U.S. military engagement or alliance associated with a president from the opposing party. Many once-staunch Vietnam war hawks in the Democratic Party changed their minds once it became “Nixon’s War.” And many hyperhawkish Republicans began sounding like cooing doves when Bill Clinton pushed NATO into military action against Serbia. That may be what’s going on now with respect to Ukraine.

The darker possibility of an underlying MAGA longing for solidarity with authoritarians near and far shouldn’t be entirely ruled out. Maybe Putin — once the object of particular idolatry on the U.S. Christian right for his homophobia and Islamophobia — is beyond the pale for the time being. But people who see the world as characterized by a global battle to the death between conservative patriarchal Christianity and a global conspiracy of “woke” elitists aren’t going to abandon that vision just because of some Russian war atrocities.

Some observations from “If Democrats Want to Win 2024, They Need to Punch Back Hard” by Mark Green at The Nation:

While it’s obviously hard to predict what issues will dominate the next cycle, lessons from the midterms should inspire Democrats to get back on the offense as soon as early 2023, which the fractious speakership fight can only encourage.

For starters, that means tattooing a very unpopular Trump (plunging to only 31 percent favorability rating in the most recent Quinnipiac poll) on nearly all Republican nominees. He’s the product of their party. And whether he ends up running seriously or not, Trump has the potential to destroy the brand of the GOP for a generation—especially after the six currently sitting criminal grand juries conclude their work.

Failing to do so would be like ignoring the disgraced Nixon in 1974 because he was no longer “on the ballot.” Republican candidates who have been either complicit or silent during Trump’s carnage need to be held politically accountable for shredding the truth and the law. Herbert Hoover was a Democratic piñata for some 50 years; the Republicans ran against Jimmy Carter for 20. Trump should be radioactive at least as long.

Green notes further, “An effective response would not mean merely piling even more Trump scandals onto the existing mountain of them, which largely worsens scandal fatigue among weary voters and a cynical media. More urgent are memorable messages and vivid metaphors that tie together the thousands of separate lies and scandals that already add up to the singular truth that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts when it comes to both Don and Ron.”

Will “pocketbook populism” combined with tougher attacks against the Republican’s contempt for democracy and economic policies favoring billionaires be enough to help Democrats gain ground in 2024? Green argues:

As lower inflation, more jobs, cleaner air, and lower drug prices take effect by the next election, some swing voters may take notice.

Can Democrats then run on both this pocketbook populism and an assault on GOP revanchism to create a “blue backlash”?  There’s a new cadre of congressional talent in place to make that case—such as the eloquent House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, constitutional lawyer Jamie Raskin, wunderkind AOC, and cable-guys Ted Lieu and Eric Swalwell—and keep Republicans on the ropes.

In this crucial interregnum before the transition of the 117th Congress to the 2024 general election, the test is who controls the narrative. Will it be the McCarthy-Greene regime asserting that “87,000 more IRS agents” is Big Brother? That cutting Social Security is essential even if it risks tanking the economy? That the Ethics Committee must be weakened? Or will it be the Jeffries-Raskin bloc responding that the 87,000 number is a Trump-level lie and a euphemism for what is in reality a “Billionaire’s Protection Act,” that failing to increase the debt limit will lead to a “Republican recession,” and that weakening the Ethics Committee is really just a Get-George-Santos-out-of-jail-free card?

Because if above-the-fray Democrats let them, Greene and Musk will be more than happy to flood the zone with their QAnon conspiracies and stochastic terrorism—after all, they are better at threatening violence than winning votes.

The genteel ‘above the fray’ strategy, combined though it was with some highly effective meddling in the adversary’s primaries, may have helped some Democrats in 2022. But 2024 is shaping up to be a brutal year for Democrats — if they don’t sharpen their attacks against Republicans.

Sometimes polling numbers change so slowly that it takes a while to notice an important trend, but Joe Biden’s job approval ratings are still gradually creeping upward, as I noted at New York:

Democrats managed to break pretty close to even in the 2022 midterms despite Joe Biden’s chronically underwater job-approval ratings. But now there’s even better news for Democrats and for Biden’s prospects of winning a second term: His job-approval numbers have been gradually improving since Election Day. And if you look at his approval ratio (the gap between those approving and disapproving of his performance as president), the trends are even better.

According to the RealClearPolitics polling averages, Biden’s current job-approval ratio is minus 7.6 percent (44.1 percent approval, 51.7 percent disapproval). The gap was 12.4 percent on November 8, 2022, and 20.7 percent last July 20 (36.8 percent approval, 57.5 percent disapproval). In the FiveThirtyEight averages, Biden is even closer to being above water in terms of popularity. His ratio is now minus 6.8 percent (44.1 percent approval, 50.9 percent disapproval). Last time he was in positive territory was on August 29, 2021, at FiveThirtyEight and on August 21, 2021, at RCP. There are some outlier polls already showing Biden above water (e.g., a new Economist/YouGov poll that gives him 50 percent approval and 47 percent disapproval among registered voters). More may soon follow.

What does Biden need in the way of popularity to become a good bet for reelection in 2024? Using Gallup data (our best source for comparing presidents over time), recent presidents who won reelection had job-approval ratings between 48 percent (George W. Bush in 2004) and 58 percent (Ronald Reagan in 1984). Obama was at 52 percent, and Bill Clinton was at 54 percent. Losers included Jimmy Carter at a terrible 37 percent and Donald Trump at a meh 45 percent (Trump, of course, came pretty close to pulling off the electoral-vote upset despite losing the popular vote by 4.5 percent).

Biden might note that Obama (whose party did not do remotely as well in the 2010 midterms as it did in 2022) gained six points in job-approval ratings between June and November of 2012. That kind of progress for Biden from now through Election Day 2024 would put him in relatively good standing. And that’s aside from the fact that he could win reelection even with unimpressive job-approval numbers if his opponent has popularity issues of his or her own. Presumably, these are matters that Biden will mull before he makes his 2024 intentions definitively known.

 

From Thomas B. Edsall’s latest New York Times opinion column: “Stan Greenberg, a Democratic pollster, suggested in an email that the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning Roe v. Wade was a crucial factor in the escalation of conflict within Republican ranks. This split became evident within weeks of the decision in the abortion rights vote cast by a majority of the electorate in Kansas, a red state, in an August referendum. In the Kansas governor’s contest, “moderate Republicans rebelled against an extreme pro-life, anti-tax, antigovernment conservative, allowing Democrats to win the governorship,” Greenberg wrote….Polling conducted by Democracy Corps, Greenberg said, shows that “moderates are Republicans because of race and immigration, but they are more pro-choice and pro-A.C.A. (the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare), and they are providing a base of voters and support for Republican leaders who are starting to shake up the party.”….During the current session of Congress, Greenberg wrote, “I bet that there will be 10 to 20 Republicans who will work with Democrats to pass important legislation. And they will be empowered by the state examples and the perception that McCarthy is just in the pocket of the Tea Party and Trump Republicans.”

Edsall also notes some trends toward GOP moderation at the state level, including: “At the start of this year, Derek Merrin — a hard-edged anti-abortion conservative supportive of so-called right-to-work laws — was assured victory in his bid to become speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives….Merrin had won majority support from the 67-member Republican caucus in the 99-member Ohio House. His ascent would have marked a significant shift to the right in a state Republican Party known traditionally for its centrism….On Jan. 3, however, when the full Ohio House met to pick a speaker, Merrin was defeated by a bipartisan coalition of 32 Democrats and 22 Republicans, a rarity in this polarized era. The coalition supported a less conservative, less confrontational Republican, Jason Stevens, who told the House after his victory, “I pledge to respect and to work with each and every one of us to address the many concerns of our state.”….Let’s look at a third state, Pennsylvania — where the determination of control in the state House of Representatives awaits the results of special elections for three vacancies. Here, enough Republicans joined with Democrats in a bipartisan vote on Jan. 3 to make Mark Rozzi, a centrist Democrat, speaker of the House….“The commonwealth that is home to Independence Hall will now be home to this commonwealth’s first independent speaker of the House,” Rozzi told his colleagues after the vote. “I pledge my allegiance and my loyalty to no interest in this building, to no interest in our politics. I pledge my loyalty to the people of the commonwealth.”…In Ohio and Pennsylvania, the House speaker can, with some restrictions, set the legislative agenda.”

At FiveThirtyEight, Alex Samuels ponders “What Will New Leadership In Congress Mean For Democrats?,” and writes: “House Democrats officially elected New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries to be their leader this past weekend, coalescing around a fresher face as the new Republican majority took control. The new top three leaders will consist of Jeffries, Massachusetts Rep. Katherine Clark, who will serve as the new minority whip, and California Rep. Pete Aguilar, who will chair the Democratic caucus….While all of these changes are noteworthy, Jeffries, in particular, makes history as the first Black politician to lead any major party in Congress. At 52, he also marks a stark generational shift for House Democratic leadership following two decades under Nancy Pelosi, who is leaving the position at 82 years old….Jeffries still has a choice to make: Will he use his new mantle to advocate for more progressive policies or continue the unspoken tradition of past rising Black political leaders and move more toward the middle?…And while he’s more liberal than most fellow House members, according to DW-NOMINATE, a political-science metric that uses roll-call votes to measure the ideology of members of Congress, Jeffries has tried to assert his independence from the party’s left wing, saying in 2021, “There will never be a moment where I bend the knee to hard-left democratic socialism.” Jeffries is clearly not a guy who is going to die on any ideological hill. But his bell-ringer speech debut as leader of the House Democrats made it clear he is also not a guy who is going to take any guff from the Republican majority. It’s a pretty good look for House Dems.

Looking ahead to the 2023 governor’s races,  J. Miles Coleman observes at Sabato’s Crystal Ball “While it’s easy to begin looking towards the 2024 election cycle, 3 states will have gubernatorial contests this year…. In Kentucky, Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear remains personally popular, but he will be running in a red state with a large GOP bench….Louisiana and Mississippi should be easier contests for Republicans. Term-limited Gov. John Bel Edwards (D-LA) will be hard for Democrats to replace, while Mississippi, where Democrats have not won a gubernatorial contest this century, will also be an uphill fight for them….The initial ratings for these 3 races are Leans Democratic for Kentucky, Safe Republican for Mississippi, and Likely Republican for Louisiana….Of the 3 states seeing governors races this year, Kentucky will likely see the most vigorous 2-party competition. Four years ago, Kentucky voters ousted an unpopular governor from a popular party. This year, the Bluegrass State will weigh whether to keep a popular governor from an unpopular party….Though the status of abortion in Kentucky is being settled in the courts, from a purely electoral perspective, the anti-Amendment 2 vote may provide something of a template for a Beshear win this year. The state’s 2 largest counties, Louisville’s Jefferson and Lexington’s Fayette, both voted over 70% against the amendment — in 2019, Beshear himself received about two-thirds of the vote in each of those large counties. (Those are the pockets of dark blue on the map.) The 3 northernmost counties, which are in Cincinnati’s orbit, also voted, in aggregate, against Amendment 2. Beshear’s overperformance in northern Kentucky was key to his 2 previous statewide wins. It is hard to transfer every element of a referendum to an actual partisan contest, but a similar vote in Kansas last summer presaged Gov. Laura Kelly’s (D-KS) victory in another red state….Considering the governor’s personal popularity and the potential for uncertainty in the Republican primary, we are starting Beshear off as a slight favorite and calling the Kentucky contest Leans Democratic.” Coleman also provides a detailed analysis of the Guv races in MS and LA.

From “White House turns talk of Medicare, Social Security cuts against GOP” by Alex Gangitano and Brett Samuels at The Hill:

The White House is turning the tables on House Republican lawmakers when it comes to conservative-led spending proposals that Democrats warn could mean cuts to crucial programs like Medicare and Social Security….The Biden administration is already building on a strategy it deployed during the midterm election season in which it highlighted talk from multiple GOP congressional lawmakers about how they plan to use their new House majority to consider cuts to entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare.

It’s also putting a spotlight on the possibility of military spending cuts by Republicans in an effort to balance federal spending and reduce the national debt….The Biden administration has made clear it won’t go along with such proposals, framing Republicans as the party that wants to defund the military and threaten social welfare programs.

“They are going to try to cut Social Security and Medicare. It could not be clearer,” White House chief of staff Ron Klain tweeted Monday, sharing a clip of Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.) saying on Fox Business Network that major spending cuts would likely require changes to entitlement programs.

As Gangitano and Samuels note, “The Republican Study Committee’s fiscal 2023 model federal budget included increasing the Social Security eligibility age to reflect longevity. The committee argued that the adjustment would continue the gradual increase of the retirement age, noting that full retirement was raised to 67 in 2022.”

This is a really bad look for McCarthy and other Republican House leaders. “I can’t imagine a less persuasive case to the American people than, ‘Let me hollow out Medicare or I’ll set off an economic bomb that kills millions of jobs overnight,’” one Democratic strategist said.”

But the Republicans won’t be committing political suicide unless Democrats and the media insist they own it. It shouldn’t be hard. It’s up to Democrats – elected officials, party leaders and rank and file – to make sure young voters all across America understand that it is their health care and retirement that is on the GOP chopping block, and only one party is working to stop them.

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

This is the first part of a three part series

The beginnings of the environment as an issue can be traced to the conservation movement of the late 19th and early 20th century associated with figures like Gifford Pinchot, head of the Forest Service under Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club. They were Republicans but many Democrats also embraced the movement; Woodrow Wilson created the National Park Service in 1916. And the New Deal in the 1930’s had a prominent place for conservation activities, most famously in the creation of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) where young men were employed to improve forests and national parks. Trail systems and lodges from that era are still widely used today.

With varying degrees of strictness the conservation movement’s guiding principle was to insulate unspoiled parts of nature from development by market forces, thereby preserving them for healthy leisure and recreation. The movement, like all future iterations of the environmental movement, assumed an unending conflict between man and nature that required good people to take the side of nature.

As development proceeded over the course of the 20th century, the stresses on nature became ever larger and more obvious, leading to the emergence after World War II of an apocalyptic strain in the conservation movement. The argument gained traction that economic and population growth would, if unchecked, destroy the environment and lead to civilizational collapse. Accompanying that strain was a milder version of the idea that directly challenged the old conservation ethos: simply conserving what was left of nature was not enough. The reality of the interdependent natural world meant that man’s activities were having dire effects everywhere on the planet—where people lived and where they didn’t. These activities were upsetting a finely balanced system, resulting in the degradation of both nature, as conventionally understood, and people’s lives. Restoring and preserving that balance was what it meant to be an environmentalist.

This reformist environmentalism gained purchase during the 1950’s, associated with figures like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and John Kenneth Galbraith who were trying to expand the remit of contemporary liberalism. Galbraith’s best-selling book, The Affluent Society, dwelt on the ways the mass consumer capitalism was good at meeting basic needs but very poor at producing a healthy society for its citizens. One of the symptoms of the latter failure was the increasing degradation of the environment through pollution of the air and water.

Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring, picked up on Galbraith’s concern and vastly amplified it, posing the environmental problem in dire, life-threatening terms. It caught the popular imagination and created a national debate about the environment almost overnight. This was the birth of the modern environmental movement and its instantiation as a movement of the educated middle class, leaving behind the conservation movement’s upper class base.

The movement proved enormously effective as a reform movement. Carson’s book veered toward the apocalyptic, but the movement she inspired was laser-focused on practical reforms that would immediately reduce pollution and safeguard the environment. A raft of legislation in the Johnson administration followed like the Clean Air and Water Quality Acts and, in the Nixon administration, the creation of the Environmental Protection Act and the promulgation of the NEPA (National Environmental Protection Act) standards. This legislation and subsequent action was directly responsible for a radical reduction in pollution of all kinds in the next decades.

But the apocalyptic strain of environmentalism, which saw industrial society as an imminent threat to human life and to the planet, was not eliminated by these reforming successes. Instead a closer relationship evolved between mainstream environmentalism and a radical view of the fundamental dangers of industrial society. The first manifestation of this was the anti-nuclear power movement which arose in the 1970’s and was turbo-charged by the 1979 Three Mile Island incident, Building on public fears of  nuclear meltdowns and radiation poisoning, the movement was successful in stopping the build-out of nuclear power in the United States.

In the 1990’s, as a scientific consensus emerged that greenhouse gases were steadily warming the earth, this movement was superseded by the climate movement. Here was clear proof that industrial society and human civilization were counterposed. Initially meliorist in orientation, the movement has become more radical as it has gathered strength. The quest to eliminate the possibility of dire scenarios has met the reality that industrial societies built on fossil fuels are likely to change only slowly, for both political and technical reasons.

This has promoted a sense that radical action to transform industrial society must be taken as fast as possible. That view has gained hegemony within the Democratic party infrastructure, supporting activist groups and associated cultural elites. Practical objections about the speed with which a “clean energy transition” can be pursued and concerns about effects on jobs and prices are now outweighed for most Democrats by the perceived urgency of the mission. That has set the Democrats apart from the working class voters they aspire to represent for whom these practical objections and concerns loom large. It has become a significant factor in the Great Divide that has opened between postindustrial metros and the rural areas, towns and small cities of middle America.

Read more…