I’m certainly old enough to remember lots of these pre-election “agenda” documents, and couldn’t help but mock the latest one at New York:

In Thomas Pynchon’s 1965 cult novel The Crying of Lot 49, a character who has taken too much LSD decides that if everyone on earth repeats the marketing phrase “rich, chocolatey goodness,” it will represent the voice of God. With or without drugs, a lot of people in politics have a similar delusion that getting candidates to make the same noises like chirping cicadas will produce electoral victories. It’s a particularly strong belief among congressional Republicans, who share the dubious conviction that Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America” is what flipped control of Congress in 1994.

With the assistance of Gingrich and former Donald Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, the House Republican Conference has released a new “agenda” document, entitled “Commitment to America.” The document, clearly designed for online consumption, has lots of bells and whistles and factoids about the hellish reign of Joe Biden and his “Democrat” Party. What it doesn’t have is a whole lot of specificity, unlike the unfortunate “agenda” that Republican Senate Campaign Committee chairman Rick Scott released earlier this year to the near-universal horror of his colleagues, who don’t want to be identified with the proposed sunsetting of Social Security and Medicare.

The relatively anodyne character of Kevin McCarthy’s pet project doesn’t mean it is entirely useless. Candidates mouthing the approved pieties will presumably not be expressing their pithy views on Jewish space lasers or repeating QAnon slogans.

Still, it’s hard to take seriously an agenda for the nation that does not mention climate change, Russia, or extremist threats to democracy — or one that suggests the sole cure for inflation is to cut “wasteful government spending” without explaining what that means (in the indictment of Democrats that accompanies the agenda, there is much criticism of direct stimulus payments, which Donald Trump preferred to virtually every other form of government spending).

Most interesting was how House Republicans handled a red-hot issue they dare not ignore completely, given the obsession it commands among a very big chunk of the GOP party base: abortion. You have to look pretty hard to find it, nestled as it is under the unlikely heading of “A Government That’s Accountable,” and the downright misleading subheading of “a plan to defend America’s rights under the Constitution.” And it simply says Republicans will “protect the lives of unborn children and their mothers.” So they checked off a box for anti-abortion activists in the manner least likely to draw curious or unfriendly attention to the extreme abortion views so many of them have expressed, which don’t poll well. Perhaps voters will be too mesmerized by the overall party message to notice. Repeat after me: rich, chocolatey goodness.

 

It’s just a hunch, but I think FL Gov. Ron DeSantis probably screwed himself and hopefully his party’s brand, with what Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. calls DeSantis’s “cruel stunt of flying Venezuelan migrants to Martha’s Vineyard — now under investigation by a sheriff in Texas and the subject of a lawsuit filed on Tuesday in Boston.”

I doubt that there are a lot of swing voters thinking, “Hot damn, just what I wanted to see – a Republican governor defrauding impoverished immigrants and making their lives harder.” People who like that ‘owning the libs’ sort of thing are already on board with the GOP’s worst policies. There’s no value added with swing voters who are looking for constructive solutions and more bipartisanship.

DeSantis’s stunt does nothing to solve immigration problems and it calls attention to the GOP’s inability to come up with any credible immigration reforms. Makes you wonder if DeSantis has the same advisor who persuaded Sen Lyndsey Graham that now would be a good time to call for a national ban on abortions.

E. J. Dionne, Jr. sees it this way: “So DeSantis’s cynical move was, as much as anything, an effort to push aside abortion rights, an issue central to the underdog campaign Democrat Charlie Crist is waging against him….” Dionne adds,

New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall takes a deeper dive into the “Why Aren’t You Voting Your Financial Interests?” thing and comes up with some perceptive comments, including: “Partisan prioritization of cultural and racial issues has, to a notable extent, superseded the economic conflicts that once characterized the nation’s politics, leading to what scholars call a “dematerialization” of American electoral competition….On the right, millions of working- and middle-class whites have shifted their focus away from the goal of income redistribution — an objective Democrats have customarily promoted — to support the Republican preference for traditional, even reactionary, sociocultural values. At the same time, college-educated white voters have come to support tax and spending initiatives that subordinate their own financial self-interest in favor of redistribution and liberal social values….In “Identity, beliefs, and political conflict,” Giampaolo Bonomi, a doctoral candidate in economics at the University of California, San Diego, and Nicola Gennaioli and Guido Tabellini, professors of economics at Bocconi University in Milan, make a similar argument:

I knew there was something familiar about the way Democratic and Republican strategists were talking about the 2022 issue landscape, and it finally hit me, as I noted at New York:

In the gospel according to the Church of Bipartisanship, the way politics should work is that each side should devise distinctive solutions to commonly identified problems and then compromise where necessary to get things done. If that doesn’t happen, the blame is typically assigned to self-serving politicians and fanatical activists who prefer gridlock to any accommodation of divergent views.

Reality is more complicated. In part, that’s because the real engines of gridlock are the institutional obstacles (especially the Senate filibuster and judicial review) available to minority parties to obstruct anything they don’t want to happen. Beyond that fundamental problem, moreover, is a flawed premise at the heart of the bipartisan proposition: The parties often don’t agree on any “commonly identified problems.” Indeed, as Ron Brownstein explains, that’s why Democrats and Republicans appear to be “talking past each other” in this year’s midterm-election chatter:

“As the Democratic pollster Molly Murphy told me, 2022 is not an election year when most Americans ‘agree on what the top priorities [for the country] are’ and debate ‘different solutions’ from the two major parties. Instead, surveys show that Republican voters stress inflation, the overall condition of the economy, crime, and immigration. For Democratic voters, the top priorities are abortion rights, the threats to democracy created by former President Donald Trump and his movement, gun control, climate change, and health care.”

Now this is not, of course, an entirely unprecedented phenomenon. Ever since polling and focus groups were invented, politicians have understood there are certain issues that favor or disfavor their own parties. For ages, Republicans have struggled to maintain credibility on fundamental fairness, maintenance of an adequate social safety net, and sensitivity to the needs of minorities, while Democrats aren’t really trusted to keep government efficient, attend to national security needs, or protect traditional moral values. Ceding whole areas to the opposition unfortunately tends to reinforce such stereotypes, which in turn makes loud shouting the way to elevate the issues one “owns.”

In living memory, some of the more innovative politicians in both parties have refused to play this game of ownership and instead sought to “capture,” or at least neutralize, the other party’s issues with distinctive policies of their own. Most famously, Bill Clinton, to the great dismay of Republicans and quite a few people in his own party, insisted on offering proposals aimed at reducing crime (e.g., community policing and deploying more officers on the streets), reforming welfare (originally a work-based proposal that maintained a personal entitlement to assistance), and “reinventing government.” Yes, Clinton, whose party did not control either chamber of Congress for six of his eight years in office, ultimately went too far in accommodating Republican policies on both crime and welfare reform (thus exposing him to the charge of “triangulating” against his own party). But the basic idea of offering Democratic proposals on public concerns outside the party’s comfort zone was smart, and it drove Republicans, who constantly complained that Clinton was “stealing our issues,” absolutely crazy.

Similarly, George W. Bush, on the advice of strategist Karl Rove, spent much of his first term offering modest but significant proposals on health care (a Medicare prescription-drug benefit), education (the No Child Left Behind Act), and immigration (a comprehensive reform measure) — all issues Democrats were generally thought to “own.” Like Clinton, he paid a price among party activists for “RINO” efforts to address “Democrat issues.” Arguably, the conservative backlash to his perceived heresies, especially on immigration, fed both the tea-party movement and its descendent, the MAGA movement, though Bush himself was clearly undone by the Iraq War and his inept reaction to a financial crisis. But the impulse to build credibility on salient public concerns where none existed was wise, and it was even in some minor respects emulated by Donald J. Trump (e.g., in his effort to co-opt criminal-justice reform via the Jared Kushner–brokered First Step Act).

Is anything like this kind of mold-breaking occurring at present? To some extent, Democrats have tried to address “Republican issues” involving the economy. Certainly, Joe Biden and congressional Democrats have spent much of 2021 and 2022 touting their budget proposals as essential to the task of building a strong economy. And while Joe Manchin might have been principally responsible for branding the fiscal year 2022 budget-reconciliation bill as an “Inflation Reduction Act,” by the time Biden signed the legislation, it had come to seem like a very good idea to most Democrats. The party has been less resolute in dealing with the crime issue, other than by constantly trying to rebut made-up claims that it wants to “defund the police” as part of an orgy of “wokeness.”

Republicans, perhaps because they thought they had a surefire winning message in 2022 and are loath to depart from it, have been less adept in adjusting to shifting public concerns that undermine their position. They justifiably think of abortion as a “Democrat issue” right now — one that threatens to boost Democratic turnout while flipping many suburban swing voters — and when Lindsey Graham tried to offer a proposal to reposition them on stronger ground, the reaction among Republicans was overwhelmingly negative, as the Washington Post reported:

“In a memo to GOP campaigns released this week, the Republican National Committee laid out what it called a winning message on abortion: Press Democrats on where they stand on the procedure later in pregnancy, seek ‘common ground’ on exceptions to bans and keep the focus on crime and the economy. Then, Senator Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) introduced legislation to ban abortions nationwide after 15 weeks of pregnancy — overshadowing new inflation numbers and undermining what many GOP strategists see as their best message for the fall: ‘Leave it to the states.’

“’It’s an absolute disaster,’ GOP strategist John Thomas said, as Republican Senate nominees already targeted for their comments on abortion were asked to weigh in. ‘Oy vey,’ he said when informed that Blake Masters in battleground state Arizona had just expressed his support.”

Even if Republicans succeed in making inflation or crime or border control more salient than abortion among 2022 voters, they will pay a price down the road — among voters generally and in their powerfully anti-abortion base — by running for the hills when an issue is raised that’s not going to go away in the foreseeable future. Maybe someday the two parties can get onto the same page when it comes to the menu of national problems they intend to address. But don’t hold your breath.

From “How to Turn Out Young Voters in November” by Harold Meyerson at The American Prospect:

By the evidence of every known survey, today’s young Americans are the leftmost generation in many decades, perhaps in our entire history. But will they vote in sufficient numbers this fall to block a Republican takeover of the Senate and the House?

….A new poll by Hart Research of nine states with closely competitive Senate contests, which oversampled voters under 40 (it polled more than 800 of them), shows, however, that the Democrats can still campaign profitably on the economy, inflation notwithstanding.

Even though Republicans outnumbered Democrats in the poll’s overall sample, young voters in those states favored the Democratic Senate candidates by a 57 percent to 29 percent margin. The top three most important issues to those voters were “prices and inflation,” with 55 percent highlighting that concern; “wages and salaries that keep up with the cost of living,” with 47 percent; and “abortion,” with 43 percent.

The poll then teased out themes from that “wages and salaries” issue. Asked whether companies or workers had too much power today over the other, or whether their power was roughly balanced, 79 percent of young voters said it was the companies that had too much power, versus the 7 percent who said it was workers and the 14 percent who said the relationship was balanced. Seventy-seven percent of young voters said they’d prefer a pro-union candidate, while 23 percent preferred an anti-union candidate. After hearing a description of the PRO Act, which is the latest iteration of congressional legislation making it easier to join or form unions, 64 percent of young voters said they’d back a Democrat who supports the act, while just 22 percent said they’d back a Republican PRO Act opponent.

Singling out swing voters among the young, the way to their hearts, and to get them to the polls, Hart Research concludes, is to emphasize such messages as raising wages and salaries (which 63 percent of those young swing voters say is an “extremely strong reason to support a Democratic candidate”), and making sure that workers are not “punished or even fired” for speaking out about problems on the job (68 percent).

“In other words,” Meyerson concludes, “abortion is still a crucial issue for Democrats to stress, but there’s also some economic messaging, despite inflation, that will help turn out the young.”

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

“Democrats are congratulating themselves that they are now the “normie voter” party. The logic runs like this.

They have recovered from a deficit in the generic Congressional ballot and no longer appear to be headed for a complete drubbing in the November election. They could plausibly hold the Senate and keep their losses in the House relatively modest (though are still highly likely to lose control of that body).

The Democrats can point to several issues on which Republicans are out of step with the country and have contributed to their recovery. Chief among them is abortion, where the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision reversing Roe v. Wade has allowed them to cast the Republicans as intransigent advocates of abortion bans. The public on the other hand is clearly on the side of moderate abortion rights.

Another helpful development is the increased prominence of Donald Trump in the political dialogue and in various specific races. Republicans have a great deal of trouble dissociating themselves from Trump and his endless relitigation of the 2020 election. Some are true disciples of Trump and some just find it too politically difficult, whatever their personal opinions, to put real distance between themselves and the former President. But the end result is being out of step with the public which sees the 2020 election as settled and generally disapproves of Trump’s role in the January 6th events, his inflammatory rhetoric and his disregard of democratic norms.

Finally, Democrats have succeeded in passing stripped down versions of key leglislative priorities, the CHIPS and Science Act and the cheekily name Inflation Reduction Act, both of which are fairly popular with the public and strengthen the Democrats’ argument that they are delivering on their promises. (Of course, the recent decline in gas prices has little to do with Democrats’ priorities and actions and that decline certainly does more for Democrats’ immediate prospects that these pieces of legislation.)

So Democrats are on the right side of public opinion on these issues and are seeing their fortunes improve as a result. Does that make them the normie voter party now?

Not so fast. It may be fair to say that Republicans, by virtue of being associated with abortion bans and with Trump and Trumpism, are not the normie voter party. But that does not mean that Democrats, by virtue of not being those things, are now the normie voter party. Normie voters want more than that—a lot more than that.

Start with the very issue that is currently doing the Democrats the most good: abortion. Democrats are taking advantage of the Dobbs decision and the intent of many pro-life Republican forces to leverage that decision into draconian state abortion laws. This is not what normie voters want (see: Kansas). But on the other hand, neither do normie voters want completely unrestricted access to abortion throughout all nine months of pregnancy, the default position of much of the Democratic party.

By about 2:1 the public favors at least some restrictions on abortion. Looked at by trimesters, the framework used in Roe v. Wade, Gallup found that 60 percent think abortion should be generally legal in the first three months of pregnancy. But that falls to 28 percent for the second three months and just 13 percent for the final trimester.

This and other data strongly indicate that the median voter position is that abortion should be available without restrictions for the first trimester and then available only with restrictions, such as for rape, incest and the health of the mother, thereafter. This approximates the legal situation in most Western countries and would cover close to 90 percent of the abortions that currently take place.

(MORE HERE)

In Georgia, the emerging Democratic strategy to win the governorship is all about in-person, early voting. As the Associated Press explains, “Stacey Abrams, Georgia Democrats’ nominee for governor, is launching an intensive effort to get out the vote by urging potential supporters to cast in-person ballots the first week of early voting as she tries to navigate the state’s new election laws….The strategy, outlined to The Associated Press by Abrams’ top aides, is a shift from 2018, when she spent generously in her first gubernatorial bid to encourage voters to use mail ballots. It also moves away from Democrats’ pandemic-era emphasis on mail voting, a push that delivered Georgia’s electoral votes to President Joe Biden and helped Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff win concurrent U.S. Senate runoffs to give Democrats control of Capitol Hill….Republicans, including Abrams’ opponent, Gov. Brian Kemp, answered in 2021 with sweeping election changes that, among other provisions, dramatically curtailed drop boxes for mail ballots, added wrinkles to mail ballot applications and ballot return forms, and made it easier to challenge an individual voter’s eligibility. But it also expanded in-person voting….“It’s self-evident we have to have a big early vote in-person,” said Abrams campaign manager Lauren Groh-Wargo, arguing the new mail ballot procedures make it risky for Democrats to rely too heavily on that option. “What’s not self-evident,” Groh-Wargo continued, “is how the hell you do that….Beginning Sunday, the Democrat’s campaign will ask supporters to commit to vote at in-person polling sites during the first week of early voting, which opens Oct. 17. The campaign will send digital commitment cards to targeted supporters via email and texts, with direct mail to follow. Field workers will ask voters to fill out commitment cards, with 2 million households slated for in-person visits. And the Abrams campaign will make pledge cards a standard part of its campaign events….“A lot of our constituencies are ‘persuasion voters,’” Groh-Wargo said. That doesn’t mean swing voters, she said, because they’re not choosing between Abrams and Kemp — they’re deciding whether to back Abrams or not vote at all.”

In. “Will The Polls Overestimate Democrats Again?” Nate Silver writes at FiveThirtyEight: “As Democrats’ prospects for the midterms have improved — they’re now up to a 71 percent chance of keeping the Senate and a 29 percent chance of retaining the House, according to the 2022 FiveThirtyEight midterm election forecast¹ — I’ve observed a corresponding increase in concern among liberals that the polls might overestimate Democrats’ position again, as they did in 2016 and 2020. Even among commenters who are analyzing the race from an arm’s-length distance, there sometimes seems to be a presumption that the polls will be biased toward Democrats….The best version of this argument comes from Other Nate (Nate Cohn, of The New York Times). He pointed out in a piece on Monday that states such as Wisconsin and Ohio where Democratic Senate candidates are outperforming FiveThirtyEight’s fundamentals index — like how the state has voted in other recent elections — were also prone to significant polling errors in 2020. Cohn’s analysis is worth reading in full….As I mentioned, the Deluxe version of our forecast gives Democrats a 71 percent and 29 percent chance of keeping the Senate and House, respectively. But the Deluxe forecast isn’t just based on polls: It incorporates the fundamentals I mentioned earlier, along with expert ratings about these races. Furthermore, it accounts for the historical tendency of the president’s party to perform poorly at the midterms, President Biden’s mediocre (although improving) approval rating and the fact that Democrats may not perform as well in polls of likely voters as among registered voters….By contrast, the Lite version of our forecast, which is more or less a “polls-only” view of the race, gives Democrats an 81 percent chance of keeping the Senate and a 41 percent chance of keeping the House.” Silver goes on to issue a 7-point rebuttal to the argument that recent polls have a pro-Democratic bias. It’s a smidge wonky, but a good read for all political junkies.

A couple of House seat ratings change in favor of Democrats, both in New Hampshire. At Sabato’s Crystal Ball, J. Miles Coleman reports, “Pappas, who now starts the general election campaign with $3 million in the bank, is still in for what could be a challenging race, but we feel comfortable calling him a modest favorite. So NH-1 moves to Leans Democratic.” Coleman adds that for NH-2, “we are holding our rating for it as Leans Democratic….While the map retains 2 competitive districts, we now have both in the Leans Democratic category. Aside from the results of last night’s primaries, where Republicans didn’t seem to put their collective best foot forward, this is also because of the improving national environment for Democrats. On the latter point, it may be worth noting that, with abortion becoming an increasingly salient issue this cycle, New Hampshire is, by some measures, among the states most supportive of abortion rights.” In. his article, “Rating Change: Kuster’s NH-02 Moves from Toss Up to Lean Democrat,” David Wasserman writes at The Cook Political Report, “Sometimes meddling in the other side’s primaries works; other times it backfires. In the case of New Hampshire’s 2nd CD, Democrats’ gambit worked. In a gift to Democratic Rep. Annie Kuster (NH-02), underfunded pro-Trump Republican Bob Burns toppled GOP leaders’ star recruit, moderate Keene Mayor George Hansel, 33%-30% — a result that wouldn’t have been possible if not for $569,000 spent by a liberal Super PAC propping up Burns.”

“How Hopeful Should Democrats Be About the Midterms?” Benjamin Wallace-Wells addresses the question at The New Yorker: “The Trump-era realignment poses a different challenge for Democrats. Their voting base and candidates mostly share political aims; the problem is that there simply may not be enough working-class Democratic voters to form a majority in key districts and battleground states. In response, Biden-era Democrats have mostly trusted that the threat of Trump will keep their educated base intact, while focussing on targeted material support for working-class voters: generous pandemic-relief checks and cheaper prescription drugs. This was, essentially, why Biden was picked as the nominee in the first place—he had support among voters without college degrees that the other candidates simply could not match….But the Democrats have also got a bit lucky. In the most competitive Senate races, their candidates are especially adept. The list includes Mark Kelly, the former astronaut, in Arizona; Mandela Barnes, the first Black lieutenant governor in state history, in Wisconsin; and Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, who has won three statewide races in Nevada. But Democratic prospects hinge especially on their candidates in the two Senate seats most likely to flip: Senator Raphael Warnock, the pastor of Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s church, in Georgia, and Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman, the cargo-shorts-wearing former mayor of the blue-collar city of Braddock, in Pennsylvania. Both Warnock’s and Fetterman’s biographies insulate them somewhat from the Republican line that Democrats are out-of-touch élitists….Much like the Republicans, the Democrats have responded to education polarization by following a path of least resistance, theorizing that they do not need to change their commitments on abortion, climate policy, student-debt relief, and L.G.B.T.Q. rights in order to maintain a majority. This strategy has put enormous pressure on their swing-state candidates, who, in order to win in November, will likely need to secure the support of many voters who disapprove of Biden’s performance as President—without being able to distinguish themselves from the White House ideologically. A recurring question in American politics, given the electoral map’s bias toward rural areas, is how Democrats will seek to win in moderate and conservative places. Liberals might be heartened by the approach of Warnock, Fetterman, and the class of 2022, who are more forthrightly progressive on both economic and social issues and rely on their personas and the extremism of the Trump-era Republicans to make a broader appeal. But, for their politics to stick, those politicians, running in states that are not especially progressive, need to win.”

As a former long-time resident of Georgia, I still follow politics there closely, and filed this update on the governor’s race at New York:

In 2020, Georgia became the ultimate battleground state with a very close presidential contest and two Senate races that went into overtime and ultimately decided control of the chamber. The tradition continues this year with another close and crucial Senate race featuring incumbent Democrat Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker.

But for aficionados of high principle and hardball tactics, the race to watch is the rematch of Republican governor Brian Kemp and Democratic challenger Stacey Abrams. Kemp is a hard-core conservative and veteran vote suppressor who survived a purge attempt by Donald Trump earlier this year, while Abrams is a nationally renowned voting-rights champion who came very close to winning four years ago in the most successful Georgia Democratic gubernatorial campaign of this century. The two pols represent polarized and evenly matched parties in a state that has turned from red to purple thanks to demographic change. Abrams has helped build a powerful coalition of Black voters aligned with white moderates in the rapidly growing Atlanta suburbs, and Kemp, the product of an older Georgia in the iron grip of exurban and rural conservatives, has fought her every step of the way. It’s likely Georgia is in the process of turning blue, but the peculiar forces in play in this midterm election could give the GOP a reprieve. It will probably come down to which party best mobilizes its base in November.

Without question, the Abrams-Kemp contest is a grudge match between candidates with a lot of history together. During and prior to their 2018 race, Kemp exploited his position as secretary of State to purge voter rolls and close polling stations aggressively, while running a savagely ideological campaign as a “politically incorrect conservative” backed by Trump. After his very narrow win, Abrams was so angry at his abuse of office that she refused to officially concede (though she did not contest his right to serve as governor).

The desire to eject Kemp from the governor’s office and a career-long goal of gaining either the governorship or the presidency impelled Abrams to pass up some tantalizing opportunities. She could easily have won a Senate nomination in 2020 to face David Perdue (Jon Ossoff ran instead and won), and no one batted an eye when she was spoken of early in the cycle as a possible presidential or vice-presidential candidate. After deservedly getting significant credit for building the voter-registration and vote-turnout machine that allowed Democrats to make such impressive gains in 2020, she was the uncontested choice for a second gubernatorial nomination.

Going into 2022, Democrats were looking forward to popping popcorn and enjoying a Republican civil war as Trump (infuriated by Kemp’s co-certification of Biden electors and his refusal to buy into MAGA election conspiracies) talked former senator Perdue into a primary challenge to the sitting governor. At first, Perdue looked formidable, but in the end, Kemp absolutely demolished him by nearly a three-to-one margin, carrying all of Georgia’s 159 counties. Indeed, Georgia Republicans under Kemp’s leadership administered Trump’s worst setbacks of the entire primary season, as Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (hated even more than Kemp by MAGA folk) and two other statewide Trump targets won their races. The very size of the beatdown minimized any intraparty grudges as Perdue quickly endorsed Kemp, Trump kept his mouth shut, and Republicans united by respectful fear of Abrams closed ranks.

While the usual smears of Abrams as a hustler (a charge levied at all Black pols in the Deep South with no evidence deemed necessary) and an extremist (belied by her very mainstream platform) are a regular feature of the GOP campaign in Georgia, Kemp has drawn on assets beyond thinly veiled appeals to racism and sexism and a surprisingly united party. The state’s booming economy and burgeoning revenues have allowed Kemp and the legislature his party controls to enact voter-pleasing measures like tax cuts and a gasoline-tax suspension. He has also tried to blunt one of Abrams’s signature issues, Medicaid expansion, by obtaining a waiver from the Trump administration (and successfully defending it in court against efforts by the Biden administration to revoke it) in a small expansion of health-care services tied to work requirements. Kemp’s job-approval ratings have generally been above water, though not by much.

Abrams has supplemented her generally moderate 2018 platform by calling for legalized sports betting to help fund public-education improvements, building on the successful legacy of the late Zell Miller’s lottery-for-education initiative back in the 1990s. And she is definitely trying to capitalize on the backlash to the Dobbs decision by emphasizing her commitment to abortion rights and attacking the “heartbeat” law Kemp signed in 2019 and quickly began to enforce, banning abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy and giving fetuses certain legal rights.

But while both candidates are pitching swing voters on their specific policy proposals, the contest is essentially a battle of base mobilization in a deeply polarized state. A recent poll of the contest by Quinnipiac made that clear:

“Republicans (98 – 1 percent) back Kemp, while Democrats (97 – 2 percent) back Abrams. Independents are split, with 50 percent backing Abrams and 48 percent backing Kemp.

“Nearly all likely voters (94 percent) who support a candidate in the race for governor say their minds are made up about how they will cast their vote, while 5 percent say they might change their minds before the election.”

That’s a narrow band of persuadable voters in a race Qunnipiac called nearly even (with Kemp leading by two points) among likely voters generally.

Abrams is building on her renowned voter-registration and turnout efforts, along with those deployed (especially by Ossoff) in the 2020 Senate races to break a long Georgia Democratic losing streak in general-election runoffs that place a premium on turning out voters. Kemp’s backers believe they would have won those runoffs had Trump not discouraged Republican base voters by calling the state’s Republican-run election machinery “rigged.” They hope to match or surpass Democrats in getting out the vote in November.

Early in the cycle, it looked as if Kemp would benefit, like all Republicans, from a stiff midterm breeze favoring the GOP. That has, for the moment, all but dissipated, leaving these two very effective pols to slug it out in a relatively even landscape tilted just a bit by Kemp’s powers of incumbency. Unlike Kemp’s ticket mate the GOP Senate nominee Walker, who has been dodging debates with primary opponents and general-election rival Warnock all year (though he has finally agreed to one), Kemp and Abrams agreed early on to two televised debates in October. They certainly know each other’s strong and weak spots extremely well.

Kemp enters the home stretch as a very narrow betting favorite, but don’t count out Abrams, already the most successful Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate of this century, whose candidacy will likely generate the kind of enthusiasm that only people whose rights are endangered can show to their champion.

A few tips from, “Is This When Democrats Finally Learn How to Message? Republicans have been running circles around Democrats for decades. But finally the right has handed them a potent weapon. Will they recognize it and use it?” by Michael Sokolove at The New Republic:

“Sell the brownie, not the recipe,” is the top-line advice that [progressive candidate strategist Anat] Shenker-Osorio gives to her clients. She has consulted for various candidates and organizations, both overseas and in the United States, including the Senate Democratic Caucus. She tries to coax progressives out of their long-windedness—their instinct to aim messages at the head rather than the heart—and their tragic inability to get to the point.

“I want them to say fewer things and say them more often,” she said. “But Democrats get bored with that. They’re not good at it. I say this with so much sadness, but Elizabeth Warren spent an entire campaign selling the recipe rather than the brownie. I tell people: Don’t take your policy out in public. It’s not seemly. Your policy is not your message. The message is the outcome of your policy. For example, ‘We’re going to give you family leave so you’re going to be there the first time your baby smiles. We’ll raise the minimum wage so you can put food on your table, and you’ll be home to eat dinner with your family.’”

Drawing a contrast between the messaging style of the two major parties, Sokolove notes,

….The two major parties “do not operate as simple mirror images,” the political scientists Matt Grossman and David Hopkins observe in their 2016 book, Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats. They write that even as Democrats have moved to the left on certain social issues, the party’s governing style can be described as “technocratic incrementalism over one guided by a comprehensive value system.” Democratic voters largely expect their elected officials to compromise—both among themselves, and, where possible, with the opposing party.

Is there an important distinction to be made between messaging by Democratic candidates on the one hand and progressive groups on the other?

….Steven Greene is a professor of political science at North Carolina State University with an expertise in public opinion and elections. When I told him the questions I was exploring, he responded by highlighting the divisions in the Dem tribe: “Are Democrats horrible at messaging? No. Liberal advocacy groups, who are not trying to win elections, are horrible at it. They’re the ones talking about ‘chest feeding,’ the ones arguing for Lia Thomas and other trans athletes to compete against women.” Establishment Democrats, he continued, “did not argue for defunding the police or use that phrase. But the left and its organized groups do. These are deeply unpopular opinions.” The party, he said, is currently engaged in “generational warfare. They’re eating themselves from the inside.”

Regarding the allegation that people who vote for Republicans do so against their self-interest,

There’s a raft of political science research that voters, and maybe especially Republican voters, are led by emotion as much as rationality. They go with the team they feel is pulling for them. Is it really voting against their self-interest when they cast ballots to put people in office who speak their language and make them feel better?….“When it’s said that people are voting against their self-interest, it’s a mistake to define self-interest in purely economic terms,” said Laurel Elder, a political science professor at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York, and the co-author, with Steven Greene, of The Politics of Parenthood. “They vote on emotion, on what gives meaning to their lives.”

Sokolove also taps the insights of a top Republican wordsmith, and writes:

Freedom is one of the big words that Republicans have owned. “Democrats don’t want to talk about religion, faith, and freedom,” [Republican strategist Frank] Luntz told me. “That comes off the Republican tongue like butter. Democrats choke on it.”….Freedom, though, is the winning word for Democrats. It is the beacon that brought immigrants pouring into this country. In its fullest form, it is what the descendants of enslaved Africans have fought for over the whole of the nation’s 246-year history. It’s the through line for the nation’s proudest accomplishments and purest ambitions.

Freedom for women to have control over their own choices and bodies. Freedom to vote. Freedom to love who you want. Freedom to read what you want. Freedom to earn a living wage. Freedom to send your children off to school without fear they’ll be riddled with bullets from an AR-15. Freedom for your kids and grandkids to dwell on a livable planet.

As Sokolove concludes, “Sell the brownie, not the recipe—and see how that works.”

An old subject has arisen unusually often in this midterm election year, and I addressed it at New York:

The received wisdom from political scientists on candidate debates is that, outside the presidential arena where everything gets attention, they rarely have a significant effect. This is mostly because viewership of anything other than a presidential debate is typically limited to the kinds of political junkies who have already made up their minds. The exception comes when a candidate makes a serious gaffe in a debate (e.g., former Arizona governor Jan Brewer’s inexplicable brain freeze during her opening remarks in a 2010 encounter she nonetheless survived); the news media will cover it, and the opposing campaign will heavily publicize it. This is why front-runners tend to avoid or minimize debates, while candidates who are in danger of losing will relentlessly call for as many as possible to maximize the opportunities for lightning to strike.

But it’s clear that the debates over debates are assuming a bigger role than usual in the 2022 midterms. There are two key reasons: a breakdown in bipartisan understanding about when and where general-election debates occur, and a couple of high-profile contests in which it’s entirely possible that debates could be decisive.

As a CNN rundown of debates on debates shows, there are an unusual number of contests this year in which, for various reasons, candidates cannot agree on the timing, frequency, or format of a debate. Some states have such a strong tradition of revisiting a particular debate venue or host that the event just happens regardless of either candidate’s strategic needs. This is the case in the Florida Senate race, as CNN notes:

“In Florida, a statewide coordinator for the long-running “Before You Vote” debates, Ron Sachs, told the Orlando Sentinel on Tuesday that Republican Sen. Marco Rubio and his opponent, Democrat Rep. Val Demings, had committed to an October 18 debate to be broadcast in the state’s 10 major media markets. It is the only debate both candidates have reportedly agreed to so far, though neither has explicitly acknowledged that publicly.”

In these cases, noncompliant candidates risk the event’s taking place with just one participant. This leads to one of the hoariest traditions of them all: the compliant candidate “debating” an empty chair or a podium. It’s a bad look for the absent candidate and gives the attending candidate an extended free ad, assuming it’s televised. It may even matter in a very close race (as it appears to have done in Georgia’s 2020 Senate runoff between Jon Ossoff and David Perdue).

But there seem to be fewer and fewer of these must-have bipartisan debates these days. The trend accelerated at the presidential level earlier this year when the Republican National Committee flat-out banned participation in events organized by the Commission on Presidential Debates. The group had been jointly founded by the two major parties, but in this MAGA era of Republican politics, it has been deemed “biased.” Henceforth, presidential debates will be negotiated between campaigns that are busily hurling demands and insults at each other (if they happen at all).

This trend appears to be spreading to the sub-presidential level as well. The situation in Nevada’s very close Senate race, as reported by CNN, is typical:

“After Republican Adam Laxalt won the Republican Senate primary in June, Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto agreed to three debates.

“Ignoring that trio of debates, Laxalt wrote on Twitter in August that he had instead agreed to two statewide televised debates hosted by local television stations and was continuing ‘to consider other debate invites.’ Laxalt spokeswoman Courtney Holland pointed to the Republican candidate’s previous comments, noting that Cortez Masto has not agreed to the two debates Laxalt proposed and accusing the Democratic incumbent of ‘hiding from her constituents.’

“’It’s clear Laxalt can’t defend his record and wants to avoid being held accountable on the debate stage,’ said Josh Marcus-Blank, a Cortez Masto campaign spokesman.”

There are two crucial Senate races this fall in which proposed debates have assumed an outsize importance thanks to concerns about a candidate’s ability to function in that environment — or, for that matter, in the Senate itself. After almost comically misfiring on a number of fronts, Pennsylvania Republican nominee Dr. Mehmet Oz seems to have settled on drawing attention to the stroke that his opponent, John Fetterman, had earlier this year, using multiple debate challenges as a means of questioning the Democrat’s fitness for office. At first, like most front-runners, Fetterman ignored the Oz campaign’s constant taunting. But amid signs that Oz may have reversed his candidacy’s downward trajectory, Fetterman has now agreed to participate in at least one debate on October 25.

An even more unusual debate over debates developed in Georgia, where Republican nominee Herschel Walker had seemed reluctant to debate, even though, unlike Fetterman, he is at best locked in a tight race. After refusing to commit to three separate debate invitations, Walker said this week that he will meet Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock on October 14. Walker is a novice candidate with multiple issues (including mental-health troubles, shady business dealings, and previously unacknowledged children) that he would just as soon not discuss in an uncontrolled environment. He successfully avoided debates and even interviews during his primary campaign and has made strange, incoherent comments on the campaign trail when not tightly scripted. Warnock, by contrast, is an experienced candidate and a minister who has been preparing and delivering Sunday sermons for most of his adult life. You can see why Walker wouldn’t want to take him on.

It’s possible that debate-shy candidates like Walker and Fetterman always intended to debate but wanted to lower expectations so that even a weak performance would seem like a vindication. Candidates who have the most to lose from a poor debate performance will work diligently to make sure they don’t matter much at all.