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…

At The Hill, Brent Budowsky writes: “While most commentators, myself included, believe there is an upper limit to what Biden and congressional Democrats can accomplish legislatively, it is wrong to suggest that nothing important can be accomplished, for two reasons….First, there are somewhere between 10 and 30 House Republicans who could be part of negotiating success on some important issues that they believe in and which are important to their districts. …Second, it is already increasingly apparent that the growing image of hard-core House Republican obstructionism, including the super-hostile attempts to humiliate Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), are beginning to brand House Republicans in the eyes of voters as the kind of anti-voter obstructionists that led the GOP to electoral disaster in 2018, 2020 and 2022….One can envision significant bipartisan agreements in the Senate that 10 or more GOP House members would accept, such as on a broad immigration bill that would strengthen border protection, improve border security, provide relief for the “Dreamers” and more. Remember when everyone believed bipartisan infrastructure was impossible to pass?….It could be similarly possible to reach agreement on lowering prescription drug costs for a far wider group of patients than could be achieved last year, or to pass some version of the widely popular child tax credit and other measures to support working women.”

Li Zhou explains why “McCarthy’s speaker chaos could make Democrats more powerful” at Vox: “Rep. Kevin McCarthy has become speaker of the House, but only did so by offering offered a series of concessions that effectively mean his speakership will consistently be under threat from his own caucus….McCarthy’s agreement to weaken the role of the speaker is likely to lead to extreme gridlock within the ranks of the GOP. But it could also present an opening for Democrats. If far-right lawmakers in the GOP follow through on their promises to hold up pivotal spending and debt ceiling legislation, Republicans may well have to rely on Democrats’ help to get any bills across the finish line — a dynamic Democrats could capitalize on….“The deal is, if they want to get stuff done, they’re going to have to work with us,” says Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA), the top Democrat on the House Rules Committee. “And we’re not going to be a cheap date.”….Ultimately, House Republicans will need to get a majority to pass bills including an increase to the debt ceiling, spending legislation, the farm bill — which authorizes many Agriculture Department programs — and a defense bill that lays out funding for the military. Were conservative members to withhold their support for such policies, the GOP wouldn’t be able to pass the bills on their own. If they aren’t able to, they risk scenarios like the country defaulting on the national debt and causing an economic crisis, as well as a potentially interminable government shutdown….The best case for Democrats is that they’re able to slip a few of their priorities into must-pass legislation. But, as Scanlon alluded to, there’s a worst-case scenario as well: utter gridlock.”

“Democrats’ political success comes down to a pretty simple equation,’ Amy Walter writes at The Cook Political Report. “When those millions of “new voters” show up, Democrats can win. When they don’t, Democrats fall short….Using Catalist modeling, Podhorzer calculated the percent of the vote Democrats could expect from “regular voters” and from the “new Midterm voters” in each battleground state. …In every state but Michigan, regular voters—those who voted in 2014—are more GOP leaning. For example, in Arizona, just 46 percent of “regular voters” would vote Democratic, while in Florida it’s 43 percent. But, in every state except Texas, new Midterm voters are majority Democratic. In Nevada, for example (where regular voters are just 45 percent Democratic voting), a whopping 57 percent of new voters are modeled Democratic voters…. In other words, if only those who voted in 2014 showed up to vote last year in Arizona, Georgia and Nevada, Democrats would likely have fallen short of winning in those states. But, with the addition of these new voters, Democrats were victorious….However, this also illustrates the challenge for Democrats to win once critical battleground states like Florida and Ohio, as well as the still-uphill fight to turn Texas blue. Florida, Ohio and Texas have the most GOP-leaning “regular voter” pool of the battleground states. Plus, in Ohio and Texas, the new Midterm voters are divided evenly between Democratic and Republican leaning. So, to win statewide in those two states, Democrats will need to not only drive up their new voters, but will have to hope that the GOP base voters stay home as well.”

The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuval writes, “Even while giving Republicans a narrow margin in the House of Representatives, voters elected a historic cohort of insurgent progressive newcomers, adding at least 11 new members to the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The CPC, which just reelected Washington Representative Pramila Jayapal as its leader, had numbered 101 members, making it the largest ideological caucus in the last Congress. It will grow in the new one, even after losing members to retirement (like Eddie Bernice Jackson of Texas), election to other offices (Karen Bass as Los Angeles mayor, Peter Welch as senator to Vermont), or election reversals (including, regrettably, one of the true champions of working people in Congress, Michigan’s Andy Levin, brought down by reapportionment and a multimillion-dollar dark money assault in the Democratic primary waged largely by AIPAC and Emily’s List)….What’s behind this new wave? Slowly, insurgents are turning blue districts progressive. That isn’t easy: 2022 saw an unprecedented flood of dark money mobilized by corporate and conservative interests intent on defeating progressives in primary battles….Fortunately, citizen movements and community organizing gave Democrats the base to counter corporate money. They also put forth bold ideas to address an economy that doesn’t work for working or poor people. All are staunch advocates of progressive reforms—from the Green New Deal and Medicare for All to police and gun reforms, abortion rights, and more. They are also bolstered by a growing progressive electoral infrastructure: Our Revolution, the Working Families Party, MoveOn, Indivisible, People’s Action, the Progressive Congress Campaign Committee, and the CPC PAC, among others….With Democrats losing control of the House, the newly emboldened progressives will be forced to take on an even greater role. They will need to consolidate their inside/outside strategies with grassroots groups across the country—and to push hard for an aggressive executive-order strategy from the Biden White House. They will sharpen the reform agenda and contrast it with the chaos and venom that will mark the Republican caucus. And they’ll continue to build—challenging a corrupted Democratic establishment. “You can win or lose elections,” Representative-elect Casar said, “but you don’t ever lose a movement. Our work is on a much greater horizon than one election.”

Listening as I did to the House Speaker’s election saga, I heard a lot of rhetoric that brought back very bad memories, and I wrote about them at New York:

One of the more interesting things about the weeklong right-wing revolt against Kevin McCarthy’s ascent to the Speakership that has paralyzed the U.S. House has been the rebels’ conceit that they, rather than the other 414 members of the chamber, exclusively represent the “will of the American people.” They have passionately and redundantly appealed to this self-designed mandate during their remarks on the floor. A good example was Thursday’s speech by Virginia congressman Bob Good in nominating his obscure Oklahoma colleague Kevin Hern for the Speakership:

“The greatest reflection of where the people of this country are is the House of Representatives. The people spoke back on November 8 and gave the majority by some 3 or 4 million votes to the Republican Party. It’s not the White House; it’s not the Senate. It’s the People’s House that reflects where the American people are, and they trusted us on this side of the aisle with the leadership of this House. And we have a window of opportunity to validate that trust, to do whatever we can to save this Republic.”

That salvation, Good continues at some length to assert, requires “transformational change” in the Republican Party and in the Congress, meaning above all no more cooperation with the White House, with House Democrats, or with either party’s leadership in the Senate, as they all represent the despised “swamp” in the MAGA imagination.

When you deconstruct this train of thought, its arrogance is pretty breathtaking. The notion that the House majority holds an exclusive popular mandate is not one that Good or any of the rebels would have embraced during the eight years that Nancy Pelosi was Speaker. As for 2022, the more than 54 million Americans who voted for House Democratic candidates are given no voice at all. And the idea that Republicans carried the House out of some frantic cry from the electorate for “transformational change” is less compelling than the entirely commonplace metronomic trend against the party controlling the White House — a trend that was, in fact, weaker than any we have seen since 2002 and among the weakest ever. And the anti-McCarthy rebels had little or nothing to do with preventing a completely catastrophic midterms outcome for Republicans. As FiveThirtyEight notes, most of them barely had to run in the 2022 general election:

“Unlike the Democrats who voted against former Speaker Nancy Pelosi in 2019 — who hailed exclusively from competitive districts — McCarthy’s foes tend to come from solidly red turf. Only three of the 20 were elected in districts with FiveThirtyEight partisan leans bluer than R+15 [districts 15 points more Republican than the country as a whole].”

Yes, arch-rebel Lauren Boebert won the closest House race in the country. But that’s because she very nearly lost reelection in an R+7 district, not because she was identified with “the swamp” or with Kevin McCarthy. Conversely, it’s hard to blame GOP underperformance on RINO squishes. Republicans lost the Senate thanks to unimpressive results posted by MAGA stalwarts like Blake Masters, Don Bolduc, Herschel Walker, and Adam Laxalt. If Mitch McConnell (the object of nearly as much rebel spleen as McCarthy this week) still stands athwart the Senate Republican conference like an ancient colossus, it’s because candidates who share the worldview of Bob Good and Matt Gaetz and Andy Biggs bombed at the ballot box. Closer to home, notable House flops included right-wing insurgents Joe Kent of Washington, J.R. Majewski of Ohio, and John Gibbs of Michigan.

Listening to the anti-McCarthy hardliners, you get the sense that they believe themselves to represent the popular will independently of mere elections. And that makes sense when you plumb the depths of their conspiracy-theory-laden points of view. Most of them are 2020 election deniers who are willing to discount a sizable number of votes as putatively fraudulent. Many believe leaders in both parties (along with the news media and social-media platforms) are complicit in preventing many millions of voters from making informed candidate choices. And at a time when they and other Republicans routinely accuse Democrats of socialist extremism, conservative hardliners counterintuitively continue to assert (as they have done during the Speakership fight) that there is too little difference between the two parties.

In this, the fringe characters of the political right resemble their counterparts on the left; both tend to assume there is a hidden majority for their points of view that somehow never breaks through in actual elections thanks to the perfidy of the Establishment. But let’s be clear: There’s zero equivalence in conduct. The fringe elements of the left, to the extent they exist in Congress, aren’t holding the chamber hostage; they have joined their Establishment colleagues in supporting Hakeem Jeffries for Speaker, though many consider him too “centrist.” And it’s not the left that spawned an assault on the Capitol just two years ago or whose votes to overturn the 2020 election results represented an endorsement of the rioters’ motives, if not their violent excesses. (All of the anti-McCarthy rebels then in Congress, along with McCarthy himself and a majority of House Republicans, voted against counting state-certified Biden electors.) In a very real sense, the men and women who have prevented the swearing in of the 118th Congress for so long represent not “the American people” but an anti-democratic faction that recognizes no authority but its own will to power.

Recent years have witnessed lots of hand-wringing about the Democratic “brand,” paired with anxieties about a lack of clarity regarding the Democrats’ mission, along with questions like “what do the Democrats stand for?” It’s a fair gripe – it hasn’t been easy for Dems to project a clear, concise message that gives them a positive image. But now that the Republicans are in glorious 3D ‘disarray,’ it’s time for Democrats to craft some new GOP branding irons, so Republicans will have to display a deeper imprint on their foreheads.

Branding is not a one-way strategy. It’s just as important to brand the adversary as oneself.

G.O.P. stands for “Gridlock, Obstruction and Paralysis” is a particularly good fit at the moment. That’s fine for bumper stickers and headlines. But it’s also time for Dems to sear the “do-nothing GOP” and “Chaos party” brands deeply into the Republican public image. Pair it with a reminder that the The GOP leaders are marinating in their own chaos to the point where they can’t even get newly-elected members, most of whom are Republicans, sworn-in, let alone do the peoples’ business.

As Stephen Collinson put it at CNN Politics, “McCarthy is becoming the latest example of a political leader consumed by a revolution the “Make America Great Again” radicals helped to stage. For the radical lawmakers now blocking his ascent to his dream job, he’s become the political establishment he once condemned….The Californian, who has lost a stunning 11 consecutive House roll call votes in his bid to become speaker, was the first major GOP leader to embrace ex-President Donald Trump after the January 6, 2021, insurrection.”

“The speakership stalemate is not just a fresh indication of the turmoil still racking the GOP after the far-right forced out two previous GOP speakers,” Collinson adds. “It suggests the new GOP House majority will be perennially dysfunctional and – given the capacity of a few lawmakers to grind the chamber to a halt at any moment – chaotic political crises are likely to dominate the next two years.”

What Dems must do is something more than sit on the couch enjoying the spectacle and noshing on popcorn. Every single Democratic elected official ought to be out there branding the Republicans as the incompetent do-nothing party. It’s long been true. But never before has there been a better political moment for making the brand stick. Some Democratic leaders are doing this. But all of them need to make it the ‘message du jour.’

Eventually, the Republicans will elect a speaker and they will be able to make Democratic reforms D.O.A. in the House, no matter what Dems are able to accomplish in the senate. They will launch investigations targeting Democrats, and they will dominate the media narrative when it comes to House coverage. For Dems not to take full advantage of this political moment, would be political malpractice. Attack, attack, attack.

The worst part about the McCarthy meltdown is that the Republican dissenters causing it are even worse than him. Many are wondering why the Democrats can’t hook up with a half-dozen or so Republican moderates to elect a more moderate Republican speaker. The answer is that it’s not so easy to find enough GOP moderates who have the gonads to to take such a stand. At The Week, Peter Weber notes, “Incoming House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), who won a plurality of votes in all three rounds, said Republicans have not yet reached out to his caucus. And he didn’t sound overly eager to make a deal. “We are looking for a willing partner to solve problems for the American people, not save the Republicans from their dysfunction,” Jeffries said. “We need a partner in governance” and haven’t found one in McCarthy’s Republicans….Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) seemed a little more amenable. “Democrats are here, we’re not going anywhere, and if they want to play ball, we’re open to that,” she told MSNBC Tuesday night….”I do not believe that Kevin McCarthy has the votes, I believe that a lot of the opposition to him is very personal,” and if no Republican can get 218 votes, “McCarthy’s team may have to come to the Democratic Party,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “And if that’s the case, then what would that even look like? It’s rather unprecedented. Could it result in a potential coalition government? Could we get Democratic chairs of committees as a result? We don’t know.” New York Times columnist Perry Bacon, Jr. argues that “Democrats should back a centrist Republican for speaker.” For most House Democrats, however, the prevailing attitude seems to be pass the popcorn and enjoy the demolition derby. No telling how it’s going to shake out.

Writing at The Hill, Mike Lillis also doubts that Democrats are going to get involved. “Democratic leaders said Wednesday that Republicans are on their own amid the conservative revolt that’s prevented Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) — or anyone else — from becoming the next Speaker in the new Congress….“This is on them,” Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.), the incoming chair of the House Democratic Caucus, said during a press briefing in the Capitol….Aguilar said he hasn’t been approached by any lawmakers about a search for a potential consensus candidate, nor have Democratic leaders presented that possibility to their rank-and-file members, who are united behind Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), the incoming minority leader who got all 212 Democratic votes on Tuesday’s three ballots….With Republicans flailing in their effort to seat a new Speaker, outside centrist groups are agitating for lawmakers in both parties to unite behind a moderate figure — perhaps one outside of Congress — to fill the void. This week, former Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), a centrist who is popular on both sides of the aisle, said the idea that he might be that figure is “an intriguing suggestion that I have not rejected.”….Yet even those Democrats who have supported the idea of a consensus candidate don’t appear ready to jump on board. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who has been open to that strategy, is also downplaying that idea this week amid the Republicans’ struggles to seat a new Speaker….Yet even those Democrats who have supported the idea of a consensus candidate don’t appear ready to jump on board. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who has been open to that strategy, is also downplaying that idea this week amid the Republicans’ struggles to seat a new Speaker….“At the end of the day, this is a Republican mess,” he told CNN Tuesday night. “This is a failure of them to govern. This is their problem to fix.”

In “4 Things That Were Changed (Forever) By 2022” at Campaigns & Elections, Sean J. Miller writes, “There was a time when digital consultants felt it was, well, just a matter of time before they took their rightful place at the head of the campaign strategy table. Remember Brad Parscale’s appointment as campaign manager for President Trump’s reelect? Digital was going to be in charge. Since 2020, that inevitability has appeared far less certain. Sure, digital spending is still increasing — as platform companies’ stock prices are plummeting — but look at how much money went to broadcast in 2022: Pre-election projections had it hitting just under $5 billion , the biggest advertising category by far. And the reason for that is clear: it still works….“Broadcast television builds the most reach, quickly, and there’s nothing that comes close to it,” said Hadassa Gerber, chief research officer at TVB, a trade association representing America’s local broadcast television industry….Gerber’s group recently released a study  that had 41 percent of voters saying broadcast TV was motivating them to get out and vote. Cable TV was second at 27 percent, followed by social media at 24 percent….“People just write off that television can’t reach young adults (18-34 year olds), but 78 percent [of those voters] saw an ad on TV for a candidate or ballot issue,” Gerber told C&E. “They also trust it.”….She added: “Are they [campaigns] using the other platforms? Yeah they are. But nothing has the reach of television.”

I know. I too hate to see Mitch McConnell get credit for anything good. After all, the senate minority leader served as Trump’s most important enabler for years. He could have checked Trump’s worst proclivities numerous times. He could have been a force for moderation, or at least sane conservatism. He could have raised some hell about January 6. He betrayed long-standing bipartisan consensus on procedural traditions to pack the Supreme Court into a reactionary majority. His list of coulda shouldas and crimes against human decency is too long to document here. But all of that was then, and this is now. So when Mitch and Biden do a joint appearance to claim credit for an infrastructure upgrade, it’s sigh and smh time. As MJ Lee, Kevin Liptak and Sam Fossum report in “Biden and McConnell show off their bipartisan bonafides in Kentucky“at CNN Politics: “A rare scene unfolded Wednesday in Covington, Kentucky: President Joe Biden stood alongside Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, as the two men promoted a major bipartisan legislative accomplishment they achieved together….The president’s visit to McConnell’s home state to herald the implementation of the massive $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that McConnell and 18 other Senate Republicans voted for, and that Biden signed into law in 2021, marked his first domestic trip of the new year. The trip was aimed at sending an unmistakable message as Biden kicks off the second half of his first term: Even in a newly divided Congress, the Biden White House still sees room for bipartisanship….Biden thanked McConnell for working across the aisle on the law….“It wouldn’t have happened without your hand. It just wouldn’t have gotten done and I want to thank you for that,” Biden said to McConnell during his remarks….He added that while he and McConnell don’t agree on a lot, the Kentucky Republican is someone you can trust….“He’s a man of his word. When he gives you his word, you can take it to the bank, you can count on it, and he’s willing to find common ground to get things done for the country. So thank you, Mitch. Thank you,” Biden said.” Wince. But Democrats have to be about the future, if they want to build an electoral coalition that actually gets things done. Sure, Biden could be playing Charlie Brown to Mitch’s Lucy holding the ball. But Democrats are stuck. If they want to be perceived as the grownups going forward, they have to give the leader of their party and the nation enough room to be viewed as a force for bipartisanship.

Just as America can not function well without at least two healthy political parties, both committed to democracy, rational debate and bipartisanship, the Democratic Party can’t grow and prosper without both progressive and moderate voices making their best arguments. TDS contributor Ruy Teixeira has done as much as anyone to make sure the moderate perspective gets a fair hearing.  No Democratic writer has worked harder to find the best data, analyze it and make a data-driven case for thoughtful policy choices, rooted in opinion polls, election returns and demographic analysis. As we await his next contribution, here’s a few excerpts from some of his recent articles:

“With all the Democratic back-patting going on, I’m not sure they’re really facing up to an emerging problem that severely undermines their electoral theory of the case. I speak of their declining margins with the nonwhite working class. That’s not to say they don’t still carry the nonwhite working class vote, it’s just they carry it by a lot less. That wasn’t in the “rising American electorate” battle plan….As I have previously noted, AP/NORC VoteCast estimates the decline in Democrats’ advantage among the nonwhite working class as 14 points between 2020 and 2022, 23 points between 2018 and 2022 and (splicing in some Catalist data, which are consistent with VoteCast data where they overlap) an astonishing 33 point drop between 2012 and 2022.” – from The Democrats’ Nonwhite Working Class Problem.

“Democrats lost the House popular vote overall by 3 points in this election. That’s bad enough but they also lost the statewide House vote in seven (7!) states with Democratic-held Senate seats up in 2024. That includes four Biden states (Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) and three Trump states (Montana, Ohio and West Virginia). But the Biden states were all carried by under 3 points (.3, 2.4, 1.2 and .6, respectively) while the Trump states were all crushing Democratic losses (16, 8 and 39 points, respectively). It defies logic to think Democrats can compete successfully across these House Republican-supporting states in 2024, especially if Republicans run halfway sane candidates, without burnishing their common sense, distanced-from-the-national-party credentials. More progressivism ain’t gonna do it. Moderation = Democratic votes.” – from Ten Reasons Why Democrats Should Become More Moderate.

“Democrats’ hold on the suburban vote—such as it is—is far more tenuous than might be implied by the popular image of socially liberal, college-educated suburban voters who can no longer countenance voting for the GOP under any circumstances. Democrats’ target suburban voters must necessarily include legions of moderate and/or working class voters who might not draw as much sustenance from a steady diet of anti-MAGAism as Democrats anticipate….And just how much hold do the Democrats have on suburban voters anyway? In the AP/NORC VoteCast survey, the most reliable election survey available, Democrats carried suburban voters nationwide by a single point in 2022. That’s a slippage of 9 points from the Democrats’ 10 point margin in 2020. Interestingly, the slippage in Democratic support from 2020 to 2022 was actually larger among nonwhite than white suburban voters….These data indicate strongly that Democrats might not be in quite the catbird seat they think they are with suburban voters and therefore with the 2024 election.” – from The Democrats’ Tenuous Hold on the Suburbs.

“Democrats lost the nationwide popular vote by 3 points (48-51), along with control of the House. Working class Democratic supportdeclined…..again (down 9 margin points). Hispanic support declined….again (down 11 points). Black support declined….again (down 14 points). Republicans got 40 percent of the Hispanic working class House vote and 45 percent among Hispanic men. They got 19 percent among black men, According to an AARP/Fabrizio Ward/Impact Research post-election survey, Democrats did not do any better among these demographics in competitive House districts. The did however clean up in these districts among white college graduate women, carrying them by 34 points….This does not sound like a ceiling being broken. It’s more like the sound of stalemate.” – from The Cultural Left (Still) Puts a Ceiling on Democratic Support.

“…It’s worth considering the possibility that Democrats did not, in fact, fix all their problems in 2022 and that some of these may be lurking beneath the surface to undermine their chances—perhaps fatally—in 2024. One such problem is the Democrats’ Hispanic voter problem. In 2020, Democrats’ advantage among Hispanic voters declined nationwide by 16 points relative to 2016. Democrats had hoped to stop the bleeding in 2022. Did they?….It does not appear so. Prior to the election, the AEI demographics tracker, which averages poll subgroup results, found the Democratic Congressional margin among Hispanic voters consistently 7-9 points below its 2020 level and 17-19 points below its 2018 level. Results from AP/NORC VoteCast indicate that the drop in the 2022 election was actually larger than that foreshadowed by the pre-election data. These data show Democrats carrying Hispanics nationwide by just 56-39 in 2022, a 12 point decline in margin relative to 2020 (18 points relative to 2018). For what it’s worth, the less-reliable network exit polls, show an identical decline in Hispanic support between 2020 and 2022….AP VoteCast estimates the decline in Democrats’ advantage among the nonwhite working class as 14 points between 2020 and 2022, 23 points between 2018 and 2022 and (splicing in some Catalist data, which are consistent with VoteCast data where they overlap) an astonishing 33 point drop between 2012 and 2022.,,,I’d say that qualifies as a problem—and one that’s very, very far from being fixed.” – from Democrats’ Hispanic Problem — The Sequel.

It’s not easy to find equally well-argued, data-driven cases for progressive Democratic policy choices. if you have any, send them our way.

At The Washington Monthly, Bill Scher weighs in on the importance of swing voters:

Swing Voters Exist: “Modern elections don’t turn on capturing a mythical ‘center,’ they turn on activating, expanding, and mobilizing your base and demoralizing the opposition,” wrote the progressive commentator Jamelle Bouie for Slate in 2018. Fresh from her first primary election win in that same year, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said, “Our swing voter is not red-to-blue. Our swing voter is the voter to the non-voter, the non-voter to the voter.”

The jolt of Donald Trump’s fluky 2016 Electoral College victory turbocharged such simplistic conclusions, though they initially sprang from more nuanced data-driven analyses, like Alan I. Abramowitz’s 2011 book The Disappearing Center and the 2012 academic paper from Andrew Gelman, David Rothschild, Sharad Goel, and Doug Rivers titled “The Mythical Swing Voter.”

The academic debate has ideological overtones. If elections are primarily won with base turnout, then Democrats should move farther to the left without fear of alienating moderates. If not, then Democrats need to be more careful about their mix of issue positions.

In 2022, we got a crystal-clear answer: Swing voters exist, and they swung.

As Nate Cohn reported, “Final turnout data shows that registered Republicans turned out at a higher rate—and in some places a much higher rate—than registered Democrats, including in many of the states where Republicans were dealt some of their most embarrassing losses,” particularly Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia. Cohn also notes that preliminary data suggests that the African American share of the electorate might have “sank to its lowest level since 2006.” Without swing voters, Democrats would have lost the Senate.

“Knowing that swing voters exist doesn’t mean that progressive ideas must be jettisoned to win them over,” Scher concludes. “But just because wooing swing voters is tricky doesn’t merit waving them away as mythical unicorns.”

Despite all of the legitimate gripes about social media’s influential conservative bias (see Musk, Elon and Zuckerberg, Mark, for example), TV still rules when it comes to political ads. A couple of quick takes from Amy Walter at the Cook Political Report underscore television dominance: “….Traditional advertising (TV and cable), made up 73% of all ad spending in 2022 – But, CTV, Connected TV, has become a bigger share of the political advertising market, representing 12% of all ad spending this cycle. CTV is defined as a device that plugs into your TV (or is part of your TV) that allows you to stream content (think Roku or Apple TV). (AdImpact)….2022 was the most expensive midterm on record for TV ad spending. According to the campaign ad tracking firm AdImpact, the 2022 political cycle was the most expensive midterm election on record, with over $8.9B spent, more than doubling the $3.9B spent during the 2018 midterms. In fact, this year’s midterm spending was just $119M shy of 2020, the most expensive political cycle of all time….However, according to Wesleyan Media Project, while spending on advertising in House and Senate contests was up 10 percent compared to 2018, the volume of TV ads (the number of ads run) “does not break historical records in all cases.” It was 2020, not 2018, that saw the highest volume of TV ads in races for the House and Senate. In House races this cycle, writes the Wesleyan Media Project analysis, ad volumes cycle-to-date were down 7 percent from 2020 and in Senate races the volume was down 35 percent from 2020. “In general, though, ad volumes in congressional races since (and including) 2018 are higher than in the three previous elections in 2012, 2014, and 2016.”

In their op-ed, “Latino voters are still in search of a working-class agenda” in The Los Angeles Times, Republican strategist Mike Madrid and Democratic analyst Lucas Holtz write: “The education divide that has defined American politics over the last three election cycles has begun to appear in the country’s largest blue state, California. Democrats have captured and retained greater shares of college-educated voters in metro areas, but it has come at the expense of losing rural and blue-collar voters to the Republican Party….For California, this trade-off has had the effect of Democrats flipping down-ballot House seats in suburban places like Orange County and northern Los Angeles County but losing races in the rural Central Valley. It could also exacerbate ethnic, class and geographic tensions within the Democratic Party….In California, as with other states with large Latino populations, the educational realignment has become intertwined with Latino voters’ political shift to the right. California’s 17 most heavily Latino congressional districts (where a Republican and Democrat both ran in 2022) have an average college education rate 20% lower than the rest of the state. Every one of these districts swung right from the 2020 presidential election to the 2022 midterms, with an 11.2% aggregated shift. All but one of these 17 districts swung right from the blue wave of 2018 to this year’s 2022 midterm election. There were three competitive, toss-up districts among these 17, each of which Biden won in 2020 and Republicans managed to win this year….Republicans won seven of California’s 10 most competitive congressional districts in 2022, and Latino voters had an outsize impact in the outcomes of almost every one of these 10 districts….The backlash to the Supreme Court overturning Roe vs. Wade, the recent memory of the Uvalde school shooting and the constant drumbeat of MAGA extremism may have been enough to keep swing Latino voters in the Democratic column, but these issues become less motivating as Latino voters are disproportionately affected by rising living costs, steep housing prices and the employment damage done by the pandemic.”

Associated Press reporters  Ayanna Alexander and Gary Fields make the case that “Black voters have been a steady foundation for Democratic candidates for decades, but that support appeared to show a few cracks in this year’s elections….Republican candidates were backed by 14% of Black voters, compared with 8% in the last midterm elections four years ago, according to AP VoteCast, an extensive national survey of the electorate….In Georgia, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp more than doubled his support among Black voters to 12% in 2022 compared with 5% four years ago, according to VoteCast. He defeated Democrat Stacey Abrams both times….If that boost can be sustained, Democrats could face headwinds in 2024 in Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, where presidential and Senate races are typically decided by narrow margins and turning out Black voters is a big part of Democrats’ political strategy….It’s too early to tell whether the 2022 survey data reflects the beginnings of a longer-term drift of Black voters toward the GOP or whether the modest Republican gains from an overwhelmingly Democratic group will hold during a presidential year.” There’s no denying that Republicans are making some small, but potentially-significant gains with Black and Latino voters. Sharon Lure notes at U.S. News that “According to [Univ. of California researcher Robert] Fairlie’s analysis of the census data, the number of Black small-business owners was 28% higher in the third quarter of 2021 than it was pre-pandemic, compared to 19% for Latino business owners and 5% for white and Asian business owners.” Would it help Democrats if they  reviewed and updated their policies to benefit and win support from more small business entrepreneurs?

Paul Glastris explains “How Democrats Won More Rural Votes in 2022” at The Washington Monthly: “Instead of relying on out-of-district volunteers to canvas with scripted messages, [Wisconsin State Senator Jeff] Smith and other successful rural Democrats deploy locals or knock on doors themselves and let voters lead the conversation. They also buy ads in and give interviews to small-town newspapers and radio stations, even if those outlets are arch-conservative.” Noting that The Washington Monthly has been advocating similar strategy for a long time, WaMo Editor-in-Chief Gastric adds, “The overall aim is not to win the majority of rural voters—that’s virtually impossible these days for a Democrat—but to minimize their losses in these areas while getting the maximum number of their core Democratic supporters to vote….other Democratic candidates listened to what Johnson and other party critics had to say about the need to fight for rural votes. The most famous is Pennsylvania’s Democratic Senator-elect John Fetterman, who performed better than Joe Biden in 2020 not only in the suburbs but also in small, rural towns, as well with a strategy he dubbed “Every County, Every Vote.” The state’s newly elected Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro also ran hard in rural counties and did even better there than Fetterman. In Colorado, U.S. Senator Michael Bennet won reelection in a 15-point blowout, thanks partly to the Democrat’s better-than-expected showing in rural areas. And in Michigan, robust results in rural districts plus a new legislative map helped Democrats take control of both houses of the legislature for the first time in 40 years.”

In “The First Thing Michigan Democrats Should Do With Their New Power” at The New Republic, Steven Greenhouse, senior fellow at the Century Foundation and author of Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor, writes:

Now that Democrats in Michigan have won control of the governor’s mansion and both houses of the state legislature for the first time in nearly four decades, they have an excellent opportunity to do what no state legislature in the U.S. has done in over a half-century: repeal a right-to-work law.

Such laws are deliberately anti-union and divisive. They let workers opt out of paying any dues or fees to their union while still enjoying the benefits their union provides them: winning better pay and benefits and fighting to protect them if they’re fired. Pushed by corporations and billionaire donors, Republican lawmakers have enacted these laws in state after state because they weaken labor unions by sapping their treasuries and undercutting their power—both in the workplace and in politics.

In an era when Republicans have repeatedly prevented Congress from enacting pro-union legislation like the Protecting the Right Organize Act, the Michigan legislature—as soon as Democrats take control in January—will be in position to take a momentous step to strengthen unions. Repealing right-to-work in Michigan would be a big symbolic and substantive shot in the arm for labor across the U.S. It would also be a powerful way for Governor Gretchen Whitmer to prove her labor bona fides if she runs for president one day.

Greenhouse notes that “One study found that the portion of workers in right-to-work states who opt out of paying union dues or fees ranged from 9 percent in Georgia to as high as 27 percent in Louisiana, 31 percent in Florida, and 39 percent in South Dakota. This translates into a sharp decline in dues payments, and that weakens union treasuries and hampers unions’ ability to do organizing and other work.”

As for the political consequences of unions, Greenhouse adds, “In a recent study, three scholars found that “when right-to-work laws are in place, Democrats up and down the ballot do worse.” They concluded that in “right-to-work counties,” Democrats perform about 3.5 percentage points worse in presidential elections, with “similar effects in Senate, House, and Gubernatorial races, as well as on state legislative control.” That study also found a 2 percent drop in voter turnout in “right-to-work counties.” Let’s not forget that in 2016, Hillary Clinton lost Wisconsin and Michigan by less than 1 percent of the vote. Further,

Conservative operatives know that once a state passes right-to-work and other anti-union measures, it’s easier for Republicans to enact other conservative legislation, like restricting voting rights, cutting Medicaid, and giving tax breaks to corporations and the rich. In his book State Capture: How Conservative Activists, Big Business, and Wealthy Donors Reshaped the American States—and the Nation, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez wrote, “State policy moves sharply to the right after the passage of anti-union right-to-work laws—with real consequences for ordinary Americans on issues like minimum wage and labor market standards.”

With 71 percent of all Americans, including 56 percent of Republicans, voicing approval of unions in an August Gallup poll, it is clear that red state legislatures—pushed by corporations and wealthy donors—are often far more anti-union than the public at large. In 2018, Missourians voted 67 to 33 percent to repeal a year-old right-to-work law enacted by the state legislature.

Unions are not only good for American workers; They are also essential for building working Democratic majorities in federal, state and local legislative bodies.