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

In my latest at The Liberal Patriot, I look at Democratic prospects for the 2022 election, what, if anything, they can do to improve those prospects and what they need to learn from the likely election outcome.

“How bad will the 2022 election be for the Democrats? In all likelihood, quite bad. Biden’s approval rating is bad, his rating is worse on the most important issue, the economy, and it is truly terrible on high profile, contentious issues like crime and immigration. Democrats are behind on the generic Congressional ballot, despite the tendency of this measure to overestimate
Democratic strength. The results of special and off-cycle elections indicate a very pro-GOP electoral environment. And midterm elections are typically bad for the incumbent party anyway.

So there are not a lot of good signs here. In fact, hardly any. The prospect of a very serious wipeout does seem plausible. A case along these lines for the Senate was made by Simon Bazelon on Matt Yglesias’ substack newsletter. His approach was very simple. Estimate what the Democratic disadvantage on the Congressional ballot is likely to be at the election (-4.5) and compare that to Biden’s advantage in 2020 (+4.5). That suggests a 9 point pro-GOP shift in the national electoral environment which, applied across states would imply no Senate pickups for the Democrats from the Republicans and the loss of their on-cycle Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and New Hampshire Senate seats (and control of the Senate) to the GOP. The outlook for 2024 is even worse, implying that even good Democratic performance in the Presidential contest could still leave the Democrats with only about 42 Senate seats.

As for the House, variants of the same approach by Amy Walter and Henry Olsen suggest Democratic losses could reach 25-40 or so seats. That of course is much, much more than the Republicans need to flip control of the House.

What passes for optimism here can be gleaned from Alan Abramowitz’ 2022 election forecasting model, presented on Sabato’s Crystal Ball. Abramowitz uses a very simple model, predicting House and Senate seat swings from generic Congressional polling and seat exposure in each body for the incumbent party. Walking in Bazelon’s estimate for the future Congressional ballot margin, Abramowitz’ model predicts a loss of around 23 House seats and little, and perhaps no change, in the Senate.

What can the Democrats do to avoid their apparent upper bound of losses and wind up closer to Abramowitz’ prediction? One approach it to emphasize the “roaring” economy with strong growth and historically low joblessness. The problem here is that inflation has eaten up workers’ wage gains from the hot economy so that real wages have actually gone down in the last year by 2.7 percent. And people just generally hate inflation and encounter it constantly in their daily lives. That and continued supply chain difficulties account for voters’ sour outlook on the economy. It is unlikely that Democrats can talk people out of these views by emphasizing something they already know (the job market is good!)”

Read the rest at The Liberal Patriot!

At Marketwatch, Rex Nutting reports that “Inflation inequality is hitting the working class harder than at any other time on record:Families that rely on wage income from certain occupations, such as clerical work, sales and construction, are paying more as gas, food and vehicle prices surge,” and writes: “America’s working class is getting clobbered by inflation because wage earners spend a larger share of their income on the things that are going up in price the most, especially necessities such as food, gasoline, and cars and trucks….The CPI-W — an inflation gauge that corresponds with the consumption habits of working people — has risen 9.4% in the past 12 months, compared with an 8.5% increase in the CPI-U, an inflation measure that considers the habits of a broader swath of American households, including retirees, investors and working people who earn salaries….The difference between an inflation rate of 9.4% and one of 8.5% can be explained entirely by the fact that the working class spends relatively more on food, gas and used car and trucks. Spending on those three categories accounts for less than 25% of the working family budget, but 51% of the inflation they’ve experienced over the past year….The disparity between working-class inflation and average inflation is the highest on record — and it’s been getting wider in recent months. Over the past six months, inflation for the working class has risen at an 11.1% annual rate compared with 10.1% for the general consumer price index….There’s one mitigating factor that is benefiting working-class families: The strong labor market. Employment is up by 6.5 million in the past year. Working-class weekly paychecks have risen faster than others’ earnings have, but the higher inflation rate for workers has eaten away at those gains and then some. Real average weekly wages have fallen 3.3% for the working class in the past year, the biggest decline in more than 30 years.”

If you were wondering “Why Inflation Is Sparking Economic Pessimism,” FiveThirtyEight has a panel discussion adressing the question. The introductory remarks note these nuggets: “Americans aren’t happy with the economy and it’s perhaps no wonder why when you look at the latest inflation numbers out this week. Prices have risen 8.5 percent since last March, and wages haven’t kept pace, rising 6 percent in the past year. Economists are debating whether there are silver linings in March’s inflation numbers, but regardless 8.5 percent inflation is the highest rate in four decades….Americans have taken note. According to Gallup, 17 percent of Americans say the high cost of living is the most important issue facing the country – the most since 1985. In the University of Michigan Survey of Consumers, more households reported they expected worsening finances over the coming year than at any point in the history of the survey, which began in the 1940s. And only 30-35 percent of Americans approve of President Biden’s handling of the economy.”

Chris Cillizza warns that “Joe Biden’s numbers are collapsing among a group you really wouldn’t expect” at CNN Politics: “Young Americans have turned on Joe Biden. That’s the shocking finding of a Gallup analysis of its polling over the breadth of Biden’s term released this week…In the early days of Biden’s presidency (from January 2021 to June 2021), an average of 6 in 10 adult members of Generation Z — those born between 1997 and 2004 — approved of the job Biden was doing. During the period spanning September 2021 to March 2022, that number had plummeted to an average of just 39%….Among millennials — those born between 1981 and 1996 — the collapse is similarly stark. Biden’s approval rating among that group stood at 60% in aggregated Gallup numbers in the first half of 2021, compared with 41% more recently….That loss in confidence among young people was, interestingly, not as steep among older age groups. Over that same period, Biden’s approval ratings among baby boomers — those born between 1946 and 1964 — dipped by only 7 points. Among “traditionalists” — those born before 1946 — his approval rating was unchanged….Now, some of the discrepancy is because younger Americans were far more positive about Biden at the start of his presidency than older Americans. So there was just more room to fall….At the same time, it’s clear in other surveys that there has been a significant lessening of enthusiasm for Biden among younger Americans. A Quinnipiac poll released this week showed that just 21% of those aged 18 to 34 said they approved of the way the President was handling his job, while 58% disapproved….By comparison, 36% of Americans aged 35 to 49 and 35% of Americans aged 50 to 64 approved of Biden’s job performance. Among Americans 65 and over, 48% said the same….Regardless of the reason, the fade in youth support for Biden is a major problem for Democrats. Especially when you consider that he won 60% of the youth vote — those aged 18 to 34 — in the 2020 presidential election, according to exit polls. It was, by far, his best performance among any age cohort.”

At Daily Kos, Bethesda 1971 urges “Dems: Use the 2002 GOP Model to win the 2022 Midterms (but in a Good and Truthful way,” and writes, “2002 was a rare year when the party holding the Presidency took control of both houses of Congress. How did it happen?….Exploiting post-9/11 trauma, Republicans built a phony case for war against Iraq by falsely linking 9/11 to Saddam Hussein, falsely claiming Saddam had WMD and tarring war opponents (and all Democrats) as traitors….It worked: By the first anniversary of 9/11, a majority of Americans thought Saddam was responsible for the attacks. Democrats who voted against the Iraq War Resolution were branded as traitors or part of a “fifth column.” War heroes like Max Cleland were tied to bin Laden. And the President’s party gained seats in both houses, and control of Congress, for the first time since 1970.” This year, however, “Democrats do not have to lie to make the case this year that Republicans are anti-democracy and unpatriotic by acting and voting against American interests. Why?

• Republicans in Congress have repeatedly voted to cover up the worst insurrection in the country since the Civil War. They voted against a bipartisan January 6 commission, they voted repeatedly against holding in contempt those who blatantly defied subpoenas, they called the January 6 cop-killers “tourists,” they relentlessly attack the only two Republicans to support the Committee.

• Republicans are tied to Putin and the genocidal war against Ukraine by their votes and actions, including 31 Republican Senators who voted against aid to Ukraine even two weeks after the brutal Russian invasion. These include Marco Rubio and Ron Johnson — both challenged by Democrats this year. (Yes, some later voted for aid — Let them try their version of John Kerry’s doomed 2004 ploy: “I voted for it after I voted against it.”). Kerry Eleveld detailed the Trump Putin Axis in her story last Thursday based on a NY Times piece.  And D’Artagnan yesterday detailed how the New York Times finally realized that Fox News is an arm of the Kremlin.

In 2002, Republicans successfully convinced voters that Democrats were “Objectively pro-Saddam” for opposing what is now acknowledged by all as a horrible mistake….There is no reason why in 2022, Democrats can’t convince voters that Republicans are Pro-Insurrection, Pro-Putin and Anti-Democracy….”We have the advantage of having the truth on our side.”

In thinking about the wild thematics coming out of the Republican Party right now, I offered some thoughts at New York about possible explanations:

The conventional wisdom on how to run a midterm campaign if your opponent controls the White House is pretty simple: ride the wave, stay focused on your most popular talking points, and don’t do anything to give the opposing party the chance to turn the election into something other than a referendum on the president, especially if said president is unpopular. The textbook target in a midterm election is the so-called median voter, typically a centrist who isn’t necessarily that focused on politics and definitely doesn’t belong to either party’s base. If there is any issue of great concern to said median voter that won’t lead to conflicted reactions, then talk about it again and again, emphatically.

Translated into the context of the 2022 midterms, Republicans have all the ingredients for a simple midterm message: an unpopular president, a discouraged Democratic base, and a simple economic issue that gives Democrats a lot of problems they cannot solve (inflation). History suggests they are on their way to victory, at least in terms of winning back the U.S. House (a really big deal since it kills a rare Democratic governing trifecta in Washington) and making gains at the state level as well. It’s kind of a no-brainer.

But are Republicans campaigning that way? So far, by and large, no. Instead, to a remarkable extent, Republican candidates and elected officials are going whole hog into culture-war topics. They’re pushing near-total bans on abortion, making law-and-order demands for a crackdown on crime, and railing against the alleged “woke indoctrination” of public-school students on matters of gender, sexuality, and race. This is happening more at the state level than in Washington. But anyone who watched the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the Supreme Court nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson or pays attention to the antics of Marjorie Taylor Greene knows that congressional Republicans are as capable of wild culture-war gyrations as your average conservative occupying a safe state-legislative seat in the rural South.

What’s going on? Are Republicans incapable of message discipline or out of touch with an electorate that’s relatively progressive on cultural issues? Are they consumed with “base mobilization”? Or maybe they’re just mirroring Donald Trump’s self-destructive tendencies?

Here are some possible explanations for a midterm strategy gone wild.

The conservative Christian base is demanding culture war

The most obvious reason Republican politicians are serving up culture-war fare is that their party base is dominated by conservative Christians who are more concerned about the supposed deterioration of traditional values than just about any other political topic. Indeed, there is some evidence that such voters are in a counterrevolutionary state of mind, anxious to use a Republican resurgence to roll back recent progressive gains on a wide range of issues, and free of any inhibitions about displaying their religious motivations. As the New York Times recently reported, there’s a new mood firing up the Christian right’s marriage of convenience with the Republican Party thanks to the MAGA movement’s radicalism:

“The infusion of explicitly religious fervor — much of it rooted in the charismatic tradition, which emphasizes the power of the Holy Spirit — into the right-wing movement is changing the atmosphere of events and rallies, many of which feature Christian symbols and rituals, especially praise music.

“With spiritual mission driving political ideals, the stakes of any conflict, whether over masks or school curriculums, can feel that much larger, and compromise can be even more difficult to achieve. Political ambitions come to be about defending God, pointing to a desire to build a nation that actively promotes a particular set of Christian beliefs.”

These are not people willing to accept LGBTQ+ rights and same-sex marriage as just part of the contemporary landscape. Emboldened by a right-wing trend in judicial circles that may end or sharply curtail abortion rights in a matter of weeks, and finding new allies among parents and wage earners infuriated by COVID-19 restrictions, key elements of the GOP base are not inclined to hide their light under a bushel at present, even if conventional political thinkers in their party wish they’d keep a lower profile. And because of the importance of turnout in non-presidential elections, Republicans by and large don’t want to do anything to dampen base enthusiasm, even if it flows from theocratic yearnings that will be difficult to satisfy down the road.

New and more popular culture-war issues are emerging

Even if the central motivation of many conservative-base voters is still traditional Evangelical or Catholic religious views and a rejection of progressive cultural accomplishments, there are new wrinkles in the old fabric of right-wing cultural politics. The emergence of transgender rights as the new frontier of gender and sexual inclusiveness is discomfiting to a lot of people who typically consider themselves enlightened and accepting of others. And an ancient, religion-based hostility to public education (a.k.a. “government schools”) has found new energy in concerns about COVID-19 lockdowns and the power of teachers unions, which bleeds over into “parental rights” agendas long set by homeschoolers and others wanting public subsidies for private education.

For that matter, “wokeness” itself as a political curse word has given new impetus to old-school racist and sexist impulses, beyond the ranks of conservative ideologues. And recent crime trends — or, arguably, a crime panic based on the inevitable reversal of decades-long reductions in most crimes — have made quasi-authoritarian attitudes toward urban areas as dystopian sinkholes of disorder and social pathology more common, even among swing-voter elements of the electorate.

In other words, a variety of circumstances have made right-wing culture-war politics something of a flavor of the month beyond the fever swamps in which it typically festers.

Conservatives want to change the culture now

It’s important to understand that a lot of the current culture-war energy on the right is emanating from places where conservatives already enjoy power, notably state legislatures in both red and purple jurisdictions. For many of these people, the 2022 midterms are not an opportunity to deny Democrats power or even seize more power for themselves; they’re an opportunity to aggressively govern in a culturally conservative manner without much fear of voter backlash. With the wind at their backs, Republicans are doing what they and their voters want, which is to redirect a culture perceived as godless and disordered back into its customary channels. Perhaps Republicans would be more careful about cultural counterrevolution in a less favorable political environment. But for now the historic pattern of midterm losses for the White House party, intensified by the first serious inflation scare since the 1970s, and an unpopular presidency makes it possible for conservatives to let their non-freak flag fly.

Is this just an unusual, dangerous moment that will fade if Republicans fail to meet their sky-high expectations in November? Perhaps. But keep in mind that the enduring popularity of Donald Trump in today’s conservative politics owes a lot to the 45th president’s habit of always remaining on the offensive and using divisive polarization to build a coalition of the radically aggrieved and just enough swing voters to win elections. Trumpism means never having to moderate and never retreating. Worse yet for the country, when Republicans fail electorally, Trumpism tells them they should double down on base-exciting extremism. It won’t get better.

A sobering conclusion from “Are Democrats Headed for a Shellacking in the Midterm Election? What the generic ballot model predicts” by Alan Abramowitz at Sabato’s Crystal Ball:

Democrats are very likely to lose their majority in the House of Representatives in the 2022 midterm election and could lose their majority in the Senate, although that is less certain. In neither chamber, however, are they likely to experience a shellacking of the sort that both parties have experienced in some postwar midterm elections. That is simply because they won only 222 seats in the House in 2020 and are defending only 14 seats in the Senate. The fact that very few of those Democratic seats in the House and none of the Democratic seats in the Senate are in districts or states that were carried by Donald Trump in 2020 makes it even less likely that the party will experience a shellacking the size of which we’ve seen in some previous midterms or anything close to it — even as the Republicans could very well flip both chambers of Congress this fall.

Despite all of the defeatist nail-biting about Democratic prospectsin the House of Reps, there is a plausible optimistic scenario in which Democrats hold their senate majority and maybe pick up a seat or two. Sure, there are factors which could produce the feared ‘shellacking” in both houses of congress. But it’s good news when a political scientist of Abramowitz’s caliber believes that is unlikely.

New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall comments on research b y Milan W. Svolik, a political scientist at Yale and Matthew H. Graham, a postdoctoral researcher at George Washington University: “The authors have calculated that “only 3.5 percent of voters realistically punish violations of democratic principles in one of the world’s oldest democracies.”….We find the U.S. public’s viability as a democratic check to be strikingly limited: only a small fraction of Americans prioritize democratic principles in their electoral choices, and their tendency to do so is decreasing in several measures of polarization, including the strength of partisanship, policy extremism, and candidate platform divergence….only a small fraction of Americans prioritize democratic principles in their electoral choices when doing so goes against their partisan identification or favorite policies. We proposed that this is the consequence of two mechanisms: first, voters are willing to trade off democratic principles for partisan ends and second, voters employ a partisan ‘double standard’ when punishing candidates who violate democratic principles. These tendencies were exacerbated by several types of polarization, including intense partisanship, extreme policy preferences, and divergence in candidate platforms….Put bluntly, our estimates suggest that in the vast majority of U.S. House districts, a majority-party candidate could openly violate one of the democratic principles we examined and nonetheless get away with it.”

Further, Edsall adds, “Graham and Svolik tested adherence to democratic principles by asking respondents whether they would vote for a candidate who “supported a redistricting plan that gives own party 10 extra seats despite a decline in the polls”; whether a governor of one’s own party should “rule by executive order if legislators don’t cooperate”; whether a governor should “ignore unfavorable court rulings by opposite-party-appointed judges”; and whether a governor should “prosecute journalists who accuse him of misconduct without revealing sources.”….“Put simply,” Graham and Svolik write, “polarization undermines the public’s ability to serve as a democratic check.”….Graham and Svolik’s analysis challenges the canonical view of the role of the average voter as the enforcer of adherence to democratic principles. However, Edsall writes, “Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University — and the author of “Delegitimization, Deconstruction and Control: Undermining the Administrative State” in the current issue of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science — wrote by email that he is “more worried about declines in democracy driven by formal changes in the law than by events like January 6th.”

Edsall continues, “In his March 2022 article “Moderation, Realignment, or Transformation? Evaluating Three Approaches to America’s Crisis of Democracy,” Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at New America and the author of “Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop,” argues that neither moderation nor realignment is adequate to address current problems in American democracy: Only reforms that fundamentally shake up the political coalitions and electoral incentives can break the escalating two-party doom loop of hyperpartisanship that is destroying the foundations of American democracy…..Drutman makes the case that moderation is futile because “in today’s politics, with national identity, racial reckoning, and democracy itself front and center in partisan conflict, it is hard to understand moderation as a middle point when no clear compromise exists on what are increasingly zero-sum issues. This is where the moderation principle falls especially short. If one party or both parties have no interest in moderation or cross-partisan compromise, would-be “moderates” cannot straddle an unbridgeable chasm.” Looked at from a slightly different angle, when there are only two parties, it is much easier to villify/demonize the one with which a voter most disagrees. Has America arrived at the point where conversion to a multiparty system is the best hope for saving democracy?

Are Democrats getting on the losing side of the growing debate about how transgender individuals can participate in sports? Matt Levietes reports that “Kentucky Legislature overrides governor’s veto of transgender sports ban: The bill bars transgender girls and women from participating in school sports matching their gender identity from sixth grade through college” at abcnews.com: “Kentucky’s Legislature voted Wednesday to override Gov. Andy Beshear’s veto of a bill that would prohibit transgender girls and women from playing on female sports teams, making the state the sixth to enact such a law this year and the 15th to date….Beshear, a Democrat, vetoed the bill last week, saying it “most likely” violates the Constitution because it “discriminates against transgender children.” Proponents contended that the measure was necessary to protect the rights of cisgender girls and women in school sports….The override passed the Senate in a 29-8 vote and the House in a 72-23 vote. The law takes effect immediately.” The politics in this instance is made more interesting by Governor Beshear’s credibility as one of the few Democrats who can win statewide elections in a red state. But the most widely known transgender athlete, Caitlyn Jenner has argued that it is wrong for persons born male to compete as females because it cheats girls: “In a Fox News interview Wednesday,” Jonathan Edwards wrote in January at the Washingtpon Post, “Caitlyn Jenner said she respected Ivy League swimmer Lia Thomas for coming out as a transgender woman and for transitioning….“I respect her decision to live her life authentically — 100 percent,” the Olympic gold medalist told “America Reports” host Sandra Smith….But, Jenner added, that “also comes with responsibility and some integrity.”….Jenner said it’s unfair for transgender women such as Thomas to compete in women’s sports. Thomas, a 22-year-old University of Pennsylvania senior, has been setting records and crushing competitors this season for the women’s swim team, re-electrifying one of more recent battles in the culture wars — how transgender athletes participate in competitive sports….“We need to protect women’s sports,” said Jenner, who won a gold medal and set a world record in the decathlon at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal.” It’s a tougher call for public schools than for athletic associations, because nobody wants children to feel ostracized. But policies that cheat girls out of athletic accomplishments and scholarship opportunities are a really bad look for Democrats.

From “Is Larry Summers Really Right About Inflation and Biden? The Harvard economist is getting plaudits for the warnings he issued early last year, but some Administration officials and economists are questioning the basis of his arguments” by John Cassidy at The New Yorker:

The first imperative, in assessing Summers’s contribution, is to clarify what he predicted. Appearing on Bloomberg’s “Wall Street Week” show on March 19, 2021, he said, “I think there is about a one-third chance that inflation will significantly accelerate over the next several years, and we’ll be in a stagflationary situation like the one that materialized between 1966 and 1969.” Summers said that there was also a one-third chance “that we won’t see inflation, but the reason we won’t see it is that the Fed hits the brakes hard, markets get very unstable, the economy skids downwards close to recession.” Finally, he added, there was “a one-third chance that the Fed and the Treasury will get what they are hoping for, and we’ll get rapid growth, which will moderate in a non-inflationary way.” Discussing Summers’s predictions, Tim Duy, a longtime Federal Reserve watcher who is now chief U.S. economist at SGH Macro Advisors, recently commented, “He certainly had those inflationary concerns very early. The counter is that he also put out plenty of other scenarios—enough that he almost couldn’t be wrong.”

As 2021 went on, and the inflation rate picked up sharply, Summers amped up his inflation warnings. “Look, we are seeing exactly what you would have expected with a central bank behind the curve,” he said, on Bloomberg, after the inflation rate rose to 5.4 per cent in September. Now he is warning that the war in Ukraine, through its impact on the prices of energy and commodities, will add to inflationary pressures, and he is comparing the current situation to the nineteen-seventies, when gas lines and rising inflation took a brutal toll on the Carter Administration.

….At this stage, most economists agree with Summers that, during 2021, strong demand, boosted by the American Rescue Plan, played at least some role in the inflation surge. “You’ve seen a broadening of inflation pressures in the economy, and an acceleration of wage growth,” Tim Duy, the SGH economist, said. “That’s all consistent with demand-driven inflation.” Even Sahm conceded to me that some of the extra federal spending eventually showed up in higher prices, but she added that the main cause of higher inflation was “fundamental disruptions under the hood” of the economy caused by the pandemic.

Ultimately, what matters now is whether we really are on the verge of returning to the nineteen-seventies. “I said a year ago, Vietnam is the right analogy. Inflation goes from one per cent to six per cent in four years of super-expansionary fiscal policy,” Summers told me. “Brad DeLong and the President’s Council of Economic Advisers said [to] look at World War Two and the Korean War. Those parallels, where price controls were central, so far have not proved out.”

In his most recent column in the Washington Post, Summers reiterated his call for sharply higher interest rates. He told me: “Prompter action from the Fed in the nineteen-seventies would have obviated the need for the Volcker recession, so prompt action against the threat of inflation is essential now.” With the Labor Department set to release the Consumer Price Index for March next week, the inflation-policy debate will only intensify. In the end, though, a lot of the animus toward Summers in Democratic policy circles is political. Many Democrats think that he has been giving ammunition to the Republicans, who cite him regularly, and understating the broader benefits that Biden’s policies have delivered, which include record job growth in the first year of his Presidency.

Summers said, “The benefits from the American Rescue Plan depend on a strong economy, which is threatened as overheating leads to declining real wages and, quite possibly, recession.” He added, “The Rescue Plan has crowded out political space for desirable long-term investments in the Build Back Better plan. And Carter’s demise suggests that inflation is a grave threat to progressive politics.”

Cassidy concludes, “Actually, it was Republican opposition and Senator Joe Manchin that sank the Build Back Better plan, and it’s far from certain that Manchin would have supported the initiative if the American Rescue Plan had been smaller. It’s certainly true, however, that Biden and the Democrats have been damaged politically by the inflation surge. How it plays out from here, and who is blamed, will go far to determine ultimate attitudes toward Biden’s economic record, and to the Summers critique.”

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

National Review (yes, National Review) just published a lengthy essay of mine on how the Democrats could fix their woefully bad party image, if they had a mind to do so. And if you’re wondering why this essay isn’t in some left-leaning magazine, the answer is pretty simple: they wouldn’t dream of publishing it.

“As a lifelong man of the Left who very much wants the Democratic Party to succeed, I regret to report this: The Democrats and the Democratic brand are in deep trouble. That should have been obvious when Democrats underperformed in the 2020 election, turning what they and most observers expected to be a blue wave into more of a ripple. They lost House seats and performed poorly in state legislative elections. And their support among non-white voters, especially Hispanics, declined substan­tially.

Still, they did win the presidency, which led many to miss the clear market signals this underperformance was sending. That tendency was strengthened by the Democrats’ improbable victories in the two Senate runoffs in Georgia, which gave them full control of the federal government, albeit by the very narrowest of margins.

At the same time, Trump’s refusal to concede the election — his bizarre behavior in that regard probably contributed to the GOP defeats in the Georgia runoffs — and his encouragement of rioters who stormed the Capitol on January 6 led many Democrats to assume that the Republican brand would be so damaged by association that the Democratic brand would shine by comparison. And yet, two years later, the Democrats are in brutal shape.

Biden’s approval rating is in the low 40s, only a little above where Trump’s was at the same point in his presidential term, which of course was the precursor to the GOP’s drubbing in the 2018 election. Biden has been doing especially poorly among working-class and Hispanic voters. His approval ratings on specific issues tend to be lower, in the high 30s on the economy and in the low 30s on hot-button issues such as immigration and crime. Off-year and special elections since 2020 have indicated a strongly pro-Republican electoral environment, and Democrats currently trail Republicans in the generic congressional ballot for 2022. It now seems likely that Democrats will, at minimum, lose control of the House this November and quite possibly suffer a wave election up and down the ballot.

Most Democrats would prefer to believe that the current dismal situation merely reflects some bad luck. The Delta and Omicron variants of the coronavirus did undercut Biden’s plans for returning the country to normal, interacting with supply-chain difficulties to produce an inflation spike that angered consumers, but that is not the whole picture. Democrats have failed to develop a party brand capable of unifying a dominant majority of Americans behind their political project. Indeed, the current Democratic brand suffers from several deficiencies that make it somewhere between uncompelling and toxic to many American voters who might otherwise be the party’s allies. I locate these deficiencies in three key areas: culture, economics, and patriotism.”

Read the whole thing at NR. I think you’ll find it thought-provoking even if you don’t agree with it.

At The Hill, Niall Stanage explains how “Bad economic news haunts Democrats ahead of midterms.” As Stanage writes, “President Biden and other Democrats are confronting a stark truth — they’re getting blamed for what’s bad in the economy and getting no credit for what’s good….On Thursday, fresh data showed new unemployment claims at their lowest level since modern records began in 1968. The president responded with a statement in which he noted that almost 8 million jobs had been created since he took office — “more jobs created on average per month than under any other president in history,” he said. Later the same day, in a speech to construction unions, Biden noted the sharp decline in the unemployment rate during his tenure — from 6.4 percent in January 2021 to 3.6 percent now — as well as the big recovery in U.S. gross domestic product last year. None of it is making much of a dent in public opinion….An NBC News survey late last month found a huge 63 percent of the population disapproving of Biden’s handling of the economy and just 33 percent approving….An Economist-YouGov poll this week asked people how they viewed the state of the economy.  Just 1 in 4 said it was either “excellent” or “good.” Twenty-seven percent rated the economy as only “fair,” and 42 percent said it was “poor.”…The clear culprit is inflation….The inflation rate hit 7.9 percent in the latest figures, which cover February, the highest level seen since 1982….But inflation is affecting virtually everything, including the price of food. Then there are knock-on effects, such as mortgage rates that have risen sharply, making it harder for people to buy homes. The visceral way in which inflation is felt is blocking out the other, more positive economic news….y contrast, Carrick noted, a strong job market is not felt so universally, being relevant mainly to people who are seeking a job or to employers. He suggested that when people do find a job, they are more likely to credit their own endeavors than the government — a stark difference to how they view inflation or gas prices….“It’s a complex equation, job creation — certainly more so than the cost of a six-pack or a loaf of bread or a frozen pizza,” he said. When people get a new job “it tends to be highly personalized — they did it on their own initiative, their sister-in-law told them there was a job someplace or whatever. They don’t see it so much as a macroeconomic issue.”….Voices across the Democratic spectrum, from centrists to progressives, worry that their problems are compounded by two other factors….One is general public irritability after more than two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. The other is Democratic infighting that limited progress in other areas, most prominently the party’s prolonged, failed attempt to pass Biden’s expansive “Build Back Better” agenda….As if all that were not enough, the war in Ukraine is now commanding the lion’s share of public attention and exacerbating the very inflationary pressures that are causing Democrats such problems.”

Regarding Sunday’s election in France, Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. writes that “Macron’s relatively strong showing increased the likelihood that he will prevail when the two face off in the second round April 24.”…In a sign of the discontent Macron’s pro-business policies have unleashed in significant parts of the French electorate, the far-left candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, was running close to Le Pen with 21.6 percent….Mélenchon’s strength puts Macron in a position of having to implore leftist voters who don’t much like the president to support him rather than abstain in the second round or cast protest votes for Le Pen. Mélenchon gave Macron some help in his concession speech, saying, “You should not vote for Madame Le Pen.”….Sunday’s outcome was a relief for Macron, an eloquent defender of liberal democratic values. A critic of a narrow and authoritarian nationalism, he drifted to the right on immigration in the face of the right-wing challenge.” It’s highly problematic to draw any applicable lessons from the French multiparty election for the U.S. midterms. However, the improved percentage for Marine Le Pen 2.0 as a toned-down xenophobe (She increased her percentage of the vote from 21.3 percent  in 2017 to 23.4  percent on Sunday) may provide an indication that white working-class voters now want tougher immigration policies and are concerned about inflation.  Geoffrey Skelley and Jean Yi noted at FiveThirtyEight just before the election, “Le Pen and her party, the National Rally² (formerly the National Front), have traditionally run on an anti-immigrant and Euroskeptic platform, dating back to her father Jean-Marie Le Pen’s party leadership. But in this election, Le Pen has placed a greater emphasis on kitchen table issues, including calls to cut taxes on energy and raise base pensions, which may broaden her appeal considering that many in France are worried about inflation. To be sure, her party maintains a strong anti-immigrant platform that aims to weaken immigrants’ access to government benefits and shut out many asylum seekers, but Le Pen has welcomed Ukrainian refugees as she tries to distance herself from her past praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin.”

In “Other Polling Bites,” Skelley and Yi also report that “Most Americans agree with the sentiment that Russian President Vladimir Putin cannot remain in power — but that doesn’t mean they approve of President Biden having said it in a March 26 speech in Warsaw, according to a March 31-April 4 poll from Yahoo News/YouGov. When the quote about Putin — “This man cannot remain in power” — was unattributed, 63 percent agreed with it. But when the pollster asked whether Biden was right or wrong to have said it,” just 48 percent of Americans said he was right. Both Democrats and Republicans were less likely to agree with this statement when it was attributed to Biden: 57 percent of Republicans agreed with the unattributed statement, whereas only 37 percent said the same when told Biden said it; meanwhile, 83 percent of Democrats agreed with the unattributed statement, while 70 percent said the same when told Biden said it.” At npr.org, Joel Rose reports that a new NPR/Ipsos poll found that “More than 6 in 10 Americans want the U.S. to give Ukraine some of the support it wants, while still trying to avoid a larger military conflict with Russia. Fewer than 2 in 10 say the U.S. should give Ukraine everything it wants, even if it risks a wider war.Those responses were remarkably consistent across the political spectrum with strong majorities of Republicans, Democrats and independents all in agreement. But when Americans are asked to assess President Biden’s performance, that bipartisan consensus breaks down….”What he’s doing is fundamentally what the American people want,” Jackson said. “But even if Biden is doing everything that people want to do, he’s not going to get a lot of credit for it.”

Some salient observations from Amy Walter’s column, “January 6th, Roe v. Wade as the Known Unknowns for 2022” at The Cook Political Report: “The question isn’t just whether the nation’s highest court will overturn the 50-year old abortion rights law, or whether the commission will reveal new and explosive information about the events leading up to and culminating in the attack on the U.S. Capitol, but whether these events will have a notable impact on the 2022 midterms. More precisely, will those two events have the effect of engaging a Democratic base that is clearly less energized about this election than the GOP….polling suggests that Democrats aren’t as invested in finding out more about the attack on the U.S. Capitol as Republicans are invested in moving on. A February Pew poll found that 65 percent of Republicans thought that “too much attention” had been paid to “the riot at the U.S. Capitol and its impacts,” compared to just 45 percent of Democrats who said “too little” attention had been paid. Twice as many Democrats (41 percent) as Republicans (21 percent) thought that the “right amount of attention” had been paid to the events of January 6th. In other words, Democrats aren’t currently clamoring for more attention to be paid to the attack….We don’t know exactly how the Supreme Court decision and the January 6th commission will turn out. But, they also aren’t happening in a vacuum. Right now, pocketbook concerns are the overwhelming worry for voters, making it hard for much else to break through.”

The New Republic has a panel discussion, “What Can Biden Do Now to Protect the Ballot? We Asked Eric Holder and Six Other Voting Rights Experts.Here’s what the president can do, now that major reforms are dead in the water in Congress.” Some excerpts:

Former Attorney General Eric Holder: ….with or without new federal laws, the Department of Justice should use its power to vigorously enforce the Voting Rights Act and constitutional voting protections, especially in states that have restricted ballot access in recent years….and the Biden Administration must continue to use its bully pulpit to reinforce that message to lawmakers and the American public. The White House must continue to call for action, including congressional action on voting rights. The country needs a reinvigorated Department of Justice that is closely following, documenting, and challenging voter suppression and election subversion in laws recently passed by states.

Trevor Potter, President of Campaign Legal Center and a Republican former chairman of the Federal Election Commission: The Biden administration can take at least four important steps: first, mobilize agencies to provide registration materials to eligible voters; second, guarantee voting access for eligible voters in federal custody; third, direct the Department of Justice to deploy election monitors and enforce existing voter intimidation laws; and fourth, prioritize providing accurate information about our election system. This would help make voting safe and accessible for all.

Chris Anders, Federal policy director at the ACLU: the Executive Branch has existing power to continue to urge federal agencies to provide expanded voter registration opportunities alongside their regular services, which can help reduce race and income-based disparities in voter registration.

Wendy Weiser, Vice president of Democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law: The White House should insist that any compromise legislation meaningfully tackle race discrimination in voting and sabotage threats. It should encourage Congress to fund elections. And it should fully engage federal agencies in enforcing voting rights, protecting election officials and infrastructure, and ensuring access to registration and voting.

Ayo Atterberry, Chief strategy officer with the League of Women Voters: The White House should continue to work with civil society organizations like the League of Women Voters around electoral access and transparency and push Congress to find common ground on voting rights protections that restore the Voting Rights Act.

Fred McBride, Senior policy advisor with the Southern Poverty Law Center: ….we need the Biden administration to renew efforts to restore the Voting Rights Act and expand federal protections to increase access to the ballot box. Federal voting legislation remains the best way to protect voters and establish reasonable standards for access to polls.

As a long-time resident of Georgia, I still follow politics there closely, and was amused at some of what I was seeing in the Peach State this year; I wrote it up at New York:

When Donald Trump got former U.S. senator David Perdue to launch a primary challenge to Georgia governor Brian Kemp last December, it initially looked like a master-stroke for the ex-president’s campaign of vengeance against those who opposed his efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 victory.

Perdue, after all, had broad support in his party throughout his one-term Senate career. He would have probably beaten Jon Ossoff, winning a second term in a January 2021 general election runoff, had Trump himself not spoiled it all with wild claims of a rigged Georgia election system, convincing many of his core supporters to stay home. That Perdue might not only forgive Trump but serve as his cat’s-paw against Kemp was surprising, and it saved Team MAGA from having to rely on a damaged-goods challenger like former Democrat Vernon Jones to take on the incumbent governor.

A snap poll from Fox5–Insider Advantage right after Perdue’s announcement showed him running even with Kemp among likely primary voters. But it’s been a long, slow downhill ride for Perdue ever since. He’s now regularly trailing the incumbent in polls (most recently, a March Fox News survey showing Kemp up 50-39), and despite his own wealth and financial connections, he’s trailing Kemp badly in fundraising as well.

Having intervened so conspicuously in Georgia (he’s endorsed nine candidates so far), Trump decided to give his candidates, and particularly Perdue, a boost with one of his patented rallies last week. But it may have shown his fecklessness instead. Aside from reports of poor attendance (and you know how that bugs Trump!), the event made it painfully obvious that “his” ticket of candidates weren’t all on the same page. In particular, most of them are giving their supposed headliner, David Perdue, a wide berth, as CNN reports:

“None of Trump’s preferred candidates in three of the highest-profile statewide races in Georgia – Herschel Walker for US Senate, Burt Jones for lieutenant governor and Jody Hice for secretary of state – have endorsed Perdue. And in their remarks at a Trump rally in Georgia on Saturday, none of them mentioned the gubernatorial primary.”

Walker has said for a while that he will be neutral in the gubernatorial race, complaining that he’s “mad” at both candidates for spoiling party unity. Hice’s position is more curious: Like Perdue, he is Trump’s handpicked instrument of vengeance; he abandoned a safe congressional seat to purge Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in Trump’s eyes even more culpable than Kemp in frustrating his 2020 plans. The only Trump endorsee eager to support Perdue over Kemp appears to be Vernon Jones, who at the former president’s urging dropped out of the governor’s race and is running for Hice’s open House seat.

Originally Perdue was campaigning on a “unity” message, claiming an ability to bring together both Trump and Kemp loyalists in order to parry the existential threat posed by Stacey Abrams, who is running again with a united state and national Democratic Party behind her. Now it looks more like Republicans are regarding Perdue’s campaign as a distraction getting in the way of Kemp’s long-anticipated rematch with Abrams. That’s how Kemp is regarding it.

You have to figure there’s a bit of an anticipatory smell of death around Perdue’s campaign mixed with a scent of fear about displeasing Kemp. Incumbent governors in Georgia and elsewhere have a lot of power and a lot of favors to call in. Kemp certainly showed he was willing to play hardball back in 2018 when he aggressively used his powers as secretary of State to do everything possible to mess with Democratic opponent Stacey Abrams and her supporters’ ability to cast votes. In Greg Bluestein’s authoritative new account of the 2020 elections in Georgia, Kemp comes across as intensely self-disciplined, resisting every temptation to respond publicly to Trump’s constant insults, while Perdue was temperamental, thin-skinned, and sometimes checked out in his race against Ossoff. In retrospect, deploying Perdue to take down Kemp may have been like (to borrow a phrase from the late Hunter Thompson) “sending out a three-toed sloth to seize turf from a wolverine.” The former senator himself could be having second thoughts.

Perdue still has time to turn things around before the May 24 primary (there’s a minor candidate still in the field, so it’s theoretically possible Perdue and Kemp will face off again in a June 21 runoff if neither wins a majority). But the distance fellow MAGA candidates are keeping from him is not a good sign. At this point, Georgia is looking like a major stumbling block to the 45th president’s plans to show his clout in the primaries, demonstrate his continued grip on the GOP, and perhaps lay the foundation for a 2024 presidential comeback. He’s already abandoned “his” candidate for the U.S. Senate, Mo Brooks, in next-door Alabama. He probably can’t do that in Georgia. But he may be regretting his strategy.