In his article, “2022 House Overview: Still a GOP Advantage, but Redistricting Looks Like a Wash,” at The Cook Political Report, David Wasserman writes:

The surprising good news for Democrats: on the current trajectory, there will be a few more Biden-won districts after redistricting than there are now — producing a congressional map slightly less biased in the GOP’s favor than the last decade’s. The bad news for Democrats: if President Biden’s approval ratings are still mired in the low-to-mid 40s in November, that won’t be enough to save their razor-thin House majority (currently 221 to 212 seats).

The start of 2022 is an ideal time to take stock of the nation’s cartographic makeover. New district lines are either complete or are awaiting certification in 34 states totaling 293 seats — more than two-thirds of the House (this includes the six states with only one seat).

A Cook Political Report with Amy Walter analysis finds that in the completed states, Biden would have carried 161 of 293 districts over Donald Trump in 2020, an uptick from 157 of 292 districts in those states under the current lines (nationwide, Biden carried 224 of 435 seats). And if Democrats were to aggressively gerrymander New York or courts strike down GOP-drawn maps in North Carolina and/or Ohio, the outlook would get even better for Democrats.

However, the partisan distribution of seats before/after redistricting is only one way to gauge the process. Because Democrats currently possess the lion’s share of marginal seats, estimating the practical effect of new lines in 2022 still points towards a wash or a slight GOP gain.

Wasserman notes further that “so far Republicans have only gone on offense in Georgia, North Carolina and Ohio — all of which face court scrutiny.” Also,

Meanwhile, Democrats unabashedly gerrymandered Illinois, New Mexico and Oregon. They scored highly favorable maps from commissions in California and New Jersey, and to a lesser extent Michigan. Republicans’ only mild commission “wins?” Arizona and Montana. And five states where the GOP had exclusive authority back in 2011 — Louisiana, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin — are now under split or commission control.

Even though Biden carried 224 of 435 seats in 2020, the current House map has a slight pro-GOP bias: the median district, held by Democratic Rep. Lauren Underwood (IL-14), voted for Biden by 2.4 points, two points to the right of his 4.4 point national popular vote margin. Nationally, according to the PVI, there are 230 districts that lean more Republican than the nation as a whole, compared to 205 districts that lean more Democratic.

So far, completed states look surprisingly rosy for Democrats. There are 15 seats that have “flipped” from GOP-leaning to Democratic-leaning: CA-13, CA-45, GA-07, IL-13, IL-14, IL-17, MI-03, MI-11, NV-03, NJ-03, NJ-05, NJ-11, NM-02, OR-04 and VA-07. By contrast, there are only nine seats that have “flipped” the other way: AZ-06, CA-40, GA-06, MI-08, MI-10, NJ-07, NC-02, NC-07 and OH-09. That’s a net gain of six Democratic-leaning seats.

‘However,” Wasserman adds, ” the oldest rule in the book is that you can’t gain a seat you already hold. Looking under the hood, Democrats already hold 11 of the 15 “newly Democratic-leaning” seats, meaning only four are pickup opportunities. By contrast, Republicans only hold one of the nine “newly GOP-leaning” seats, giving them eight map-enhanced pickup opportunities – twice as many as Democrats. At least in 2022, that’s a GOP advantage.”

Wasserman notes, “It’s still too early to render a final verdict on redistricting. There are still 16 states that aren’t complete (or near-complete), not counting the handful of states with high-stakes litigation pending. Republicans could still target Democratic seats in Florida, Tennessee and New Hampshire, and far less likely in Kansas, Kentucky and Missouri. Democrats could offset all of that in New York.” He warns, “Some of the narrowly Biden-won new seats where Democrats are especially vulnerable are AZ-06, IL-17, MI-07, MI-08, NV-01, NV-03, NV-04, NJ-07, NC-02, VA-02, VA-07 and WA-08. And, this list is certain to expand as more states finish maps….Adding to Democrats’ challenge: retirements. At this writing, there are 24 Democrats not seeking reelection in 2022, including 11 from potentially vulnerable districts. The retirements of Reps. Stephanie Murphy (FL-07), Cheri Bustos (IL-17), G.K. Butterfield (NC-02) and Ron Kind (WI-03) are the most problematic. By contrast, there are only 11 Republicans heading for the exits, none of whom were truly vulnerable under their current lines.”

In his concluding paragraphs, Wasserman explains, “Democrats began the cycle with virtually no margin for error, and the drag from Biden’s disapproval – inextricably linked to retirements and GOP recruitment/fundraising — long ago overtook redistricting as the leading threat to Democrats’ majority. Their only hope of holding on involves not only key map battles in New York, North Carolina and Ohio breaking their way but the president’s approval rating rebounding much closer to 50 percent.”

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

Lauren Gambino at the Guardian has an article about Republican plans for 2022 and different Democratic party strategies for countering them. She quotes the following from one influential wing of the party:

“It’s the oldest trick in the book,” said Anat Shenker-Osorio, a messaging expert and host of Words To Win By. “It’s creating some sort of an ‘other’ so that we don’t notice that they’re actually the cause of our problems.”

In Virginia and elsewhere, she said Democrats were caught “flat-footed” by concerns over critical race theory, a concept that, until recently, few outside of academia had ever heard of. Instead of confronting it, she said Democrats’ instinct was to deny support and dismiss the charge as a right-wing talking point, neither of which satisfied voters.

Democrats need “an explanation for the rightwing’s origin story of ‘this is why you’re suffering white man in the post-industrial midwest’,” Shenker-Osorio said. “Unless we can talk about race, about gender, about gender identity, our economic promise isn’t going to land.”

This seems certifiable to me but I guess YMMV. On the other hand Gambino notes an alternative perspective.

“An increasingly vocal coterie of liberal critics believe ….that Democrats are staring into the political wilderness unless they are able to win back some of the non-college educated voters who abandoned the party.

Ruy Teixeira, a demographer and election analyst, believes Democrats have moved too far left on social issues like crime and immigration and is in need of a complete rebrand. He said Trump’s gains with non-college educated Hispanic voters was a “real wake-up call” that Democrats need to change course.

“We need a durable majority,” he said. “You can’t build a durable majority by ignoring socio-cultural concerns and the values of these huge swaths of the population.”
Where Democrats agree is that they must deliver on their promises while in power.

“We’re really just at the beginning of what needs to be a substantial change in the way the American economic model works,” Teixeira said. “And to do that, it’s not enough to just win one election and pass some stuff. We need to win a number of elections and pass even more stuff … It’s not much more complicated than that.”

Whoever this guy Teixeira is, I think he’s onto something. I also like what Freddie deBoer has to say about the need for a profound attitude adjustment on the part of the American center-left:

“Sometimes I get people asking me why I don’t write more criticism of Republicans and conservatives. I’ve made the basic point many times before: those with influence within the conservative movement are too craven or crazy for meaningful written engagement to be worth anything, and those who are interesting and honest have no influence within the conservative movement. You can engage with Ross Douthat, who’s sharp and fair but who the average conservative would call a RINO or you can engage with a roster of interchangeable lunatics who lie and dissemble in defense of a cruel revanchist movement. I tend to train my fire on the broad left of center because, as much as I would sometimes like to wash my hands of the whole damn lot of them, they are the half of American politics that could actually reform, that could improve. I see no positive outcome from going through Breitbart posts and pointing out the lies. But [Chris] Hayes, and other liberal Democrats who grumble and groan about left on liberal criticism, seem to think that if we just keep talking about how awful Josh Hawley and the Proud Boys are, somehow these problems will all sort themselves out.

They won’t. If you’re obsessed with defeating Trumpism, you should realize that you can only do that through securing a broad multicultural coalition, and you can’t do that when you’re alienating Hispanic voters or failing to challenge people in your political orbit when they insist that white children should be taught that they’re inherently and irreversibly racist. 70% of this country is white, Hispanic voters are not remotely as left-leaning as people assumed, immigrants are far from uniformly progressive, women were never actually a liberal stronghold, and you can’t win national elections by appealing only to the kinds of people who say “Black bodies” instead of “Black people.” This is the simple point David Shor has made for over a year, and for his trouble he gets a columnist in the Nation flat-out lying about him. Imagine a political tendency where popularism – literally, the idea that you should do things that appeal to voters – is immensely controversial. Liberalism is not healthy.”

DeBoer goes on to quote Democratic ex-Senator Harry Reid, who, when asked what message he wanted to leave with America, answered “I want everybody in America to understand that if Harry Reid can make it, anybody can.” In regard to this deBoer comments:

“Does that sound anything like the message American liberalism wants to deliver now? Absolutely not. Today, American liberalism wants to tell you not that America can be a place of justice and equality where we all work together for the good of all, even as we acknowledge how badly we’ve failed that ideal. In 2021 liberalism wants to tell you that the whole damn American project is toxic and ugly, that every element of the country is an excuse to perpetuate racism, that those groups of people Hayes lists at the bottom are not in any sense in it together but that instead some fall higher on an hierarchy of suffering, with those who are perceived to have it too good in that hierarchy deserving no help from liberalism or government or the Democratic party – and, oh by the way, you can be dirt poor and powerless and still be privileged, so we don’t want you, especially if you’re part of the single largest chunk of the American electorate. Anyone who tows the line [sic] Harry Reid takes here is either a bigot or a sap, and politics is a zero-sum game where marginalized groups can only get ahead if others suffer, and Democrats fight to control a filthy, ugly, fallen country that will forever be defined by its sins. That’s the liberalism of 2021, a movement of unrelenting pessimism, obscure vocabulary, elitist tastes, and cultural and social extremism totally divorced from a vision of shared prosperity and a working class movement that comes together across difference for the good of all. In fact, I think I learned in my sociology class at Dartmouth that a working class movement would inherently center white pain! Better to remain divided into perpetually warring fiefdoms of grievance that can accomplish nothing. Purer that way. Now here’s Chris with part 479 of his January 6th series, to show us the country’s biggest problems.

Conservatives run roughshod over the country, and liberals are powerless to stop them, because liberalism has been colonized by a bizarre set of fringe cultural ideas about race and gender which they express in abstruse and alienating vocabulary at every turn. If anyone complains, liberals call them racist or sexist or transphobic, even when those complaining are saying that we can fight racism and sexism and transphobia more effectively by stressing shared humanity and the common good. Republicans tell the American people batshit conspiracy theories about communists teaching Yakub theory in kindergarten; Democrats fight back by making PowerPoint slides about why resegregating public schools is intersectional. We have reactionary insanity that expresses itself in plain, brute language and an opposition that insists that most voters don’t actually have any real problems, using a vocabulary that should never have escaped the conference rooms of whatever nonprofit hell it crawled out of. I cannot imagine a more obvious mismatch, the gleeful conspiracist bloodletting of the right against the sneering disdain and incomprehensible jargon of the left. I wonder who’ll win politically, an army of racist car dealership owners who have already taken over vast swaths of America’s state and local governments, keening for blood and soil? Or the guy in your anthropology seminar who insisted they were the voice of social justice while simultaneously making every conversation all about them?”

So, Happy New Year y’all. Let’s see if we can make some progress toward a saner left in 2022.

Caroline Vakil shares “Five takeaways from polls marking Jan. 6 anniversary” at The Hill,  including: “In an ABC News-Ipsos survey published on Sunday, 72 percent of Americans polled said those who participated in the riot were mostly threatening democracy. But about a quarter of respondents said the opposite — that those engaging in the Jan. 6 attack were mostly protecting democracy…About 58 percent of those polled also said Trump bore a good amount or great deal of responsibility for the Jan. 6 riot, while 41 percent said he bore no responsibility or just some….The poll showed a partisan divide among how those involved in the Jan. 6 riot were viewed: 52 percent of Republicans believed that those involved in the attack on the Capitol were protecting democracy, while 45 percent said they were threatening democracy….Comparatively, 96 percent of Democrats felt those who participated in the riot were threatening democracy….A Washington Post-University of Maryland poll published on Saturday found that one-third of Americans believe citizens engaging in violence against the government could sometimes be justified…Split along partisan lines, 40 percent of Republicans said violent actions could be justified, compared to 23 percent of Democrats and 41 percent of independents….Those who said that violent actions could be merited cited reasons such as the government violating or taking away people’s rights or freedoms, a potential military takeover, or the collapse of democracy….That percentage was an increase from those who answered similarly in a poll from October 2015, when 23 percent of those polled said the same. In April 2010 and January 2011, 16 percent of respondents said the same.”

Vakil continues, “A University of Massachusetts Amherst poll published last week showed a partisan divide in how Americans describe the participants of the Jan. 6 attack….While more than two-thirds of Democrats called those who participated in the riot “insurrectionists,” “white nationalists” and “rioters,” 62 percent of Republicans called them “protesters.”….A CBS News poll published on Sunday found that while 85 percent of Democrats polled called the Jan. 6 attack an attempt to overthrow the government and an insurrection, only 21 percent of Republicans called it an insurrection….Sixty-eight percent of Americans polled believe the Jan. 6 riot was not an isolated event and believe it is pointing toward more political violence. However, a portion of Americans — 33 percent — believe the Jan. 6 riot is an isolated circumstance….Pollsters found that an overwhelming majority of Democrats — 81 percent — said they strongly disapprove of the events at the Capitol, with 34 percent of Republicans in agreement….A Politico-Morning Consult poll released on Sunday painted a divided picture of how Republicans view the House select committee tasked with investigating the insurrection at the Capitol….It found that 44 percent of Republicans oppose the committee to some degree, while 40 percent somewhat or strongly support it. Comparatively, 82 percent of Democrats support the committee, and 61 percent of all registered voters polled approve of the House panel….But the poll also found that support for the panel dropped once it was noted that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) nominated the committee’s members.”

“Democrats have been ineffective in selling their accomplishments, which include the soaring economy, their economic rescue plan and a historic infrastructure bill, partly because their achievements have been overshadowed by the protracted struggle over Build Back Better,” E. J. Dionne, Jr. writes in his latest Washington Post column. “The wrangling has made the whole party, including Biden, look ineffectual — and exhaustion with what seems like a forever pandemic hasn’t helped….Let’s stipulate: A media ecosystem divided between a mainstream that takes pride in nonpartisan toughness on incumbents and a powerful right-wing communications network makes life harder for Democrats. But there is little chance of changing the media narrative unless Democrats themselves shift the broader conversation….The upshot: Biden’s standing has eroded from a 56 percent Gallup approval rating in mid-June to 43 percent in December. This is problem enough, but what should worry Democrats more is that Biden’s opponents are filled with passionate intensity while his supporters are, well, meh….The Morning Consult/Politico survey conducted between Dec. 18 and Dec. 20, for example, found 43 percent of registered voters approving of Biden’s performance and 53 percent disapproving. But only 21 percent of those surveyed strongly approved of what Biden is doing, while 39 percent strongly disapproved….The disenchantment of their core supporters is the biggest problem Democrats have to deal with. Among 18- to 29-year-olds — who gave Biden a 24-point advantage over Donald Trump in 2020 — only 22 percent strongly approved of his performance in the Morning Consult survey. And while 47 percent of Democrats strongly approved of Biden’s performance, 74 percent of Republicans strongly disapproved.”

In addition, Dionne writes, “Attacking Trump is not enough. Biden and his party need to make democracy itself a central issue, starting now….This means, first, quick final passage of the democracy bills pending in the Senate. It also requires invoking the evidence from the House select committee’s Jan. 6 investigation to make clear that the threat to democracy comes not just from Trump but also from a Republican Party complicit in undermining democratic institutions, both overtly and through its silence….Biden can strengthen his own standing by championing democracy far more forcefully. This requires vigorous advocacy for the democracy bills, legal and executive action against the GOP assault on free elections, and proving democratic government’s day-to-day effectiveness….His allies in Congress should stop shilly-shallying and pass key elements of Build Back Better. With voting rights and achievements on behalf of the climate, heath care and the well-being of kids, Democrats might begin to break the fever of disillusionment….Democrats will face big losses unless they simultaneously win back middle-ground voters and mobilize their disheartened loyalists. Governing with urgency is a good place to start, but overcoming the midterm blues will require more. They must make the election about something that matters. If democracy isn’t worth fighting for, what is?”

Some excerpts from Eric Alterman’s ‘Altercation’ column on “The Sins of the Mainstream Media: The many reasons why the media is failing to reckon with the loss of our democracy” at The American Prospect:

As this benighted year comes to an end, you, dear reader, are no doubt wondering why our media has failed so miserably when tested by a political party that seeks to destroy our democracy and our planet with it. The answer, sadly, is “it’s complicated.”

The media critic Dan Froomkin wrote an excellent column recently which pointed to another aspect of the problem. Nina Bernstein, a reporter who covered homelessness for The New York Times, tells him that at the Paper of Record, “To write factually, up close, with what I like to call intelligent compassion about these people’s lives basically invited charges of partisanship … Many reporters across the traditional news media are struggling against institutional tics and timidities that make ‘balance’ a false idol.” The result: “The inadvertent normalization of existential threats to democracy and public health by one party and its right-wing media echo chamber.” Bernstein points the finger at Times mid-level editors. They are often the ones “who are more timid, more ready to water down or reject a story.” But, she notes, “They’re trying to do what they think the top editors want.”

This is how an allegedly liberal newspaper ends up whitewashing Republican corruption, cruelty, and purposeful (often, but not always) faux stupidity, because it’s really true that “reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

Alterman notes “numerous instances where a terribly misleading headline will appear above a reasonably OK story. Given the fact that the headline is all most people will ever read, people receive a completely false picture of reality.” He provides a couple of examples from New York Times headlines and cites nine ways that the media dithers when it comes to standing up for democracy, including these excerpts:

“When Democrats do not do what journalists think they should—which is quite frequently—journalists take it personally and attack them, regardless of how inconsequential the offense. Republicans, whom journalists tend to find weird and scary, might be attempting to overthrow our government, but this turns out to be less of a concern.”

“Journalists like to pretend to objectivity, but what they really mean is quoting from “both sides” and failing to distinguish between what they know to be lies and what they know to be true. In this lengthy article on the 2016 election, I went into a great deal of detail about how it works and where it comes from.”

“Yes, most journalists are liberal on social issues like abortion and gun control and even, God help them, evolution. But most also work, by and large, for multinational corporations whose top executives earn eight-figure salaries and hate taxes, unions, and anything that threatens their power and profits.”

A few major media outlets, including MSNBC, and to a lesser extent CNN, have done a decent job of prioritizing reports about the investigation of the complicity of the Trump Administration and Republican office-holders in the January 6th riot. But reports about Republican-driven voter suppression in the states have been spotty in general, given their serious threat to American democracy.

Some have suggested that restoring the Fairness Doctrine would promote balance in reporting. Others argue that it was never all that ‘fair’ in practice. Although there are no quick ‘fixes’ for media sins of omission or distortion, there is plenty of room for new ideas for reform.

Elaine Kamarck explains why “Biden can still salvage his Build Back Better bill if he settles for a piece by piece strategy” at Brookings: “is that he keeps getting bad marks for popular policies. Most Americans wanted out of Afghanistan and a majority supported the items in the Build Back Better bill, and yet, Biden is getting slammed. The way out is to change strategy. Stop putting everything into these enormous bills on the grounds that “reconciliation” is the only way to get past the Republicans in Congress, and start doing things the old-fashioned way, one bill at a time. There are two advantages to this approach. Some of the very popular provisions just might, if they were standalone bills, attract enough Republican votes to become law. And if not, Republicans would be forced to vote, on the record, against some very popular ideas and face Democratic criticism in the midterms….There are many ways to break down the massive bill into discrete and popular parts that would make it harder for the president’s opponents to message an attack. For instance, Biden could send a free-standing bill to Congress focused solely on making the increase in the child tax credit (passed in March as a part of the COVID relief bill) permanent. This is one of the most popular features of the bill, and research has shown that it has had a dramatic impact on child poverty rates. As a stand-alone bill, the messaging is clear and easy. There’s a slim chance that Democrats would win a few Republican senators but there’s a big chance that they could do some political damage to the Republicans who would vote against it. Either way, something is better than nothing.”

Kamarck continues, “Or, Biden could send Congress a free-standing bill providing four weeks of paid family and medical leave. With workers struggling to take care of family members as COVID and long COVID crash through the population, this proposal would be increasingly popular as the effects of the virus wear on. Once again, there’s a chance (albeit a slim one) that a standalone bill could muster enough Republican votes. And for the Republican senators who don’t vote for it? Well… the opposition ads write themselves….This is the case for other parts of the massive bill as well. Take the health care provisions. One of the most popular provisions, expanding Medicare to include hearing aids, has a broad base and is easy to understand. The baby boom generation isn’t dead yet but too many rock concerts have made it hard of hearing. It could be tough for a Republican senator to vote against this, but it won’t be tough for Democrats to slam them for denying grandpa hearing aids….there are plenty of popular items in this bill – but too many different policy proposals made it impossible to message. For months now we’ve watched Democrats take a very deep breath before spewing out the laundry list of items in the bill. Biden can still have a win – in fact, he can have a series of wins – if he moves away from massive bills that contain everything but the kitchen sink and toward bills that are clear and easy to understand.  Social Security, perhaps the most popular program ever created, was enacted by President Roosevelt and the Democratic Congress in a 32-page bill.”

“For a prime example of the incredible value the maligned moderate provides to their party, Democrats should look no further than Joe Biden’s 40 judicial appointments — all of whom Manchin has voted to confirm,” The Welcome Party notes at substack.com. “Thanks to Manchin, the Biden administration has already appointed more judges at this point in its tenure than any presidential administration in recent history. Not only are these appointments significantly more diverse in background than those of prior administrations, but they also provide a critical opportunity for the Democrats to shift the balance of power away from Donald Trump’s disproportionately white, male, and conservative judicial picks….Those in the party who remain ungrateful to Manchin should also revisit his:

• Dual impeachment votes for Donald Trump, despite his constituents voting for Trump at higher rates than the GOP Senators who voted similarly
• Enthusiastic vote for the President’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan
• Voted against Donald Trump’s sweeping 2017 tax cuts and the GOP’s attempted repeal of Obamacare

Oh and he gave Biden an offer to spend $1.75 Trillion on “pre-k, climate, and Obamacare”. That’s $1,750,000,000,000 for Democratic priorities….To put it mildly, the differences between Manchin and MAGA are stark. Mitch McConnell couldn’t be more off-base when he argues that Manchin would fit in betterwith the GOP than with the Democrats, but that has not stopped him from getting away with doing so. At a time when Democrats should be doing everything they can to convert the handful of remaining pro-democracy Republicans (such as those who voted for Trump’s impeachment), it is both striking and problematic that the obstructionist in chief and his ever-more-authoritarian cabal are leading the charge on cross-partisan recruitment….The Democrats desperately need a big-tent, pro-democracy faction capable of appealing to cross-partisan coalitions of voters in swing districts across the country — and there’s no better place to start than with those elected officials on the center-right who clearly feel alienated from today’s radicalized GOP.”

Harold Meyerson recently explained why “Why Democrats Need Unions More Than Ever” at The American Prospect:

A new study out today from the Center for American Progress Action Fund reveals that one of the constants of American electoral politics is still constant: Union voters still vote more Democratic than their non-union counterparts. Despite Democratic hand-wringing over the flight of working-class men to Republican ranks, an in-depth study of the 2020 presidential vote by Aurelia Glass, David Madland, and Ruy Teixeira reveals that unions were indeed an electoral bulwark against the much-feared drift toward Trump.

Some journalists have studied union members’ votes through many elections—in my case, since the mid-1980s—to produce quick morning-after snapshots, relying on exit polls that are more accurate than the proverbial blind men’s descriptions of elephants, but sometimes not by much. The CAP study, by contrast, is based on two complementary gold standards of voting measurement: the 2020 Cooperative Election Study, whose sample is so large it permits an accurate measure of voter subgroups, and the American National Election Studies academic survey, from 2008 through 2020. The authors were also able to exclude non-employees from their study, and were thereby able to measure the difference between union and non-union workers more precisely than exit polls customarily do.

Here’s some of what they found:

• Union women were 21 percentage points more likely than non-union women to vote for Biden, while union men were 13 points more likely than their non-union counterparts.

• White union voters were 18 percentage points more likely to vote for Biden than white non-union voters, while Hispanic unionists were 13 points more likely to go for Biden. Black voters preferred Biden by such overwhelming margins that there was no significant difference due to union status.

• College-educated unionists went for Biden at a rate 22 percent higher than their non-union counterparts, while working-class union members favored Biden by 6 percent more than working-class nonmembers. Among Hispanic working-class voters, the union margin over non-union voters was 16 points; among whites, just six points (though that six-point margin certainly helped Biden carry Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania).

Just a glance at these numbers makes clear the toll that 70 years of declining union strength has taken on the Democrats’ electoral prospects. If the unionized workforce constituted 20 percent of the overall U.S. workforce, as it did 40 years ago—let alone the 35 percent it did in the middle of the last century—Democrats would be winning elections by far larger margins.

Meyerson notes that “unions now have an approval rating of 68 percent (the highest it’s been since 1965), and though their eclipse is one significant reason why economic inequality has soared in recent decades,” and concludes:

As Democrats ponder how to win more support among white and Hispanic working-class voters in particular, the ability of unions to produce more Democratic voters in those groups shows that the appeals of white supremacy and the war on wokeness can be countered in part by the kind of clear economic messaging that unions deliver. Plainly, Democrats themselves can’t deliver such messages as credibly as unions do. When unions speak to members through shop stewards and through friends at the worksite, the message isn’t being delivered by a Democratic establishment that some see as culturally alien and disrespectful. It’s being delivered by one’s peers.

Such messengers are needed now more than ever. The exit polls that I wrote about in the 1980s showed a substantially wider gap between working-class white union members and nonmembers than the six-point margin that divided them in 2020. That, though, was before the decades of economic stagnation and abandonment that befell this group of voters, before they fell prey to deaths of despair and right-wing media (Limbaugh, Fox, social). Democrats can’t do much about that right-wing media, but, as the Biden administration is the first since Harry Truman’s to realize, they had better do their damnedest to bolster unions any way they can.

In addition, unions also provide a significant source of election worker manpower favoring Democrats. Restoring their strength will also energize Democratic GOTV, which can make a pivotal difference in close elections.

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

Calling All Big Tent Democrats!

The Welcome Party organization is doing some great work trying to build a big tent Democratic party. They have some stern words for those on the left of the party who seem more interested in fratricidal attacks on Joe Manchin than in building the big tent party actually capable of defeating an increasingly authoritarian GOP. From their newsletter (well worth subscribing to):

“In vitriolic response to Manchin’s “Fox News Sunday” appearance, the Twitterverse has been brimming with everything from preposterous assertions that the West Virginia Democrat is, in fact, a Republican to nonsensical insinuations that he has done more than Mitch McConnell to blow up Biden’s agenda. These extreme and dishonest characterizations come either from a place of ignorance, malevolence, or both….

To put it mildly, the differences between Manchin and MAGA are stark. Mitch McConnell couldn’t be more off-base when he argues that Manchin would fit in better with the GOP than with the Democrats, but that has not stopped him from getting away with doing so. At a time when Democrats should be doing everything they can to convert the handful of remaining pro-democracy Republicans (such as those who voted for Trump’s impeachment), it is both striking and problematic that the obstructionist in chief and his ever-more-authoritarian cabal are leading the charge on cross-partisan recruitment.

The Democrats desperately need a big-tent, pro-democracy faction capable of appealing to cross-partisan coalitions of voters in swing districts across the country — and there’s no better place to start than with those elected officials on the center-right who clearly feel alienated from today’s radicalized GOP. Fostering such a faction requires that the party and its leadership make it crystal clear that they welcome and encourage a diversity of voices and perspectives, and that begins with Manchin. While the West Virginia senator won’t support everything that his colleagues to the left propose, they should be receptive to and grateful for everything that he is willing to get behind. After all, they’re lucky to have him.

As we wrote earlier this fall in The Bulwark, Democrats should be responding with empathy and aggressive recruitment to the growing spectre of political intimidation on the right. When the far-right has chosen to engage in threats of physical intimidation against members of the GOP, the Trump wing has largely been rewarded with retracted critiques and retirements.

As The Spectator World observed back in October, this kind of intimidation — physical and psychological — doesn’t work on Joe Manchin. When the far-left tried to pressure Manchin (he told the White House his family had “been the target of abuse”), they simply tore at the seams of an already-fragile big tent….

The disproportionate one-sidedness of this week’s conversation seems to suggest that the kind of self-righteous, pie-in-the-sky thinking that animates the online left is increasingly seeping into and molding how a substantial segment of the Democratic mainstream thinks — across the party’s leadership, base, and media allies. In many ways, it’s a mirroring of the same kind of far-left groupthink that gripped the candidates during the 2020 party primary debates. Remember when Elizabeth Warren raked John Delaney over the coals (to thundering applause) for his suggestion that Democrats are best served by running on “real solutions, not impossible promises”?

Warren’s leftist nihilism — “I don’t understand why someone goes to all the trouble of running for President of the United States just to talk about what we can’t do” — eloquently forecast Democrats’ 2022 predicament, where the left can plainly state not only disinterest in reality, but disdain for it.

Democrats from deep-blue strongholds must remember that many of the policies and assumptions they take for granted are, in fact, controversial or downright unpopular with large and critical constituencies across the country.

That the party has lost its focus and allowed this moment to be construed as “Manchin vs. the Democrats” instead of “big-tent Democrats vs. the increasingly authoritarian GOP” is telling of its approach to this perilous moment. Instead of Mitch McConnell trying to recruit moderate Democrats to his team, it’s time for Democrats to roll up their sleeves and start working over moderate Republicans — and their constituents.”

In her article, “Quit Moping: Democrats Had a Great Record in 2021: Despite inflation, the Biden economic boom is on. Shots are getting in arms. We’re out of Afghanistan. Now, if Democrats can just get their swagger back,” at The Washington Monthly, Anne Kim writes that “when Biden entered office, the U.S. economy was in chaos, thanks to Trump’s mismanagement of the pandemic. Unemployment was 6.8 percent, the economy was contracting, and job growth was anemic. Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, passed in March, averted a financial crisis for millions of American households through emergency stimulus checks, rent relief, and other support. It also funded school districts’ reopening efforts, propped up state and local governments facing steep budgetary shortfalls, and helped keep thousands of businesses afloat with loans and grants through programs like the Paycheck Protection Plan. The Treasury Department reports that the economy created 3 million new jobs within six months of the package’s enactment, while the nation’s economic output recovered to pre-pandemic levels. Since last November, the economy has regained 5.8 million jobs, and wages are up 3.8 percent….The American Rescue Plan included a first-ever monthly tax credit for families with children, which reduced child poverty to historic lows. In October, according to Columbia University, the child tax credit reached 61.1 million children, slashing the child poverty rate by 4.9 percent and reducing hunger among low-income families with children by as much as 25 percent….After decades of inaction (and four years of empty promises from Trump), Biden signed a $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package to repair the nation’s roads and bridges, upgrade energy and water systems, and connect millions of rural Americans to broadband. The American Society of Civil Engineers, which has consistently awarded U.S. infrastructure C and D grades over the past 20 years, hailedthe new law as a “historic, once in a generation investment.” Already, the first infusions of cash are headed to states and cities; the federal government recently announced the award of $3 billion in upgrades for U.S. airports, with more to come….In his debate with President Jimmy Carter in 1980, Ronald Reagan famously asked the question that’s become the litmus test for voters ever since: “Are you better off than you were four years ago”?….In the case of Biden’s slow but steady stewardship over the past year, versus the chaos and corruption of Trump, the answer, unequivocally, is yes. Democrats should brag about their accomplishments rather than undercut their success, moping about what hasn’t yet happened. What’s important is that American families are overwhelmingly better off this year than last.”

Some insights from Charlie Cook’s latest article at The Cook Political Report: “President Biden and congressional Democrats could look back at this year with pride and accomplishment, given their passage of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan and the $1 trillion infrastructure package. But instead, the first session of the 117th Congress is now in the history books, and Democrats head into the holiday season deeply demoralized, badly damaged politically, and with real reason to fear that Biden could become the fifth consecutive president to lose both Senate and House majorities on his watch…While there is still a chance that Biden and maverick Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin can reach some agreement early next year for a scaled-down version of the Build Back Better Act, the budget reconciliation package with major social spending and climate-change funding, the reality is that Biden and Democratic congressional leaders badly miscalculated what was realistic given the circumstances of the 2020 election outcome….Quite simply, if you want to do big things, you have to win elections big. The ambition of a party’s legislative and policy agenda should be commensurate with the magnitude of their victory. A meager victory won with the smallest of majorities demands a more modest agenda. Notwithstanding many worthy elements in what Democrats sought this year, proportionality was not to be found when comparing how Democrats did in 2020 and what they tried to do in 2021….”

Cook continues, “Biden’s 5-point popular vote win masked the fact that the relationship between the popular and electoral vote has been severed. Democrats running up the score in California and a few other populous states distort the picture about what really matters: the swing states. By that standard, this was an extremely close election, decided by a combined total of fewer than 126,000 votes scattered across four states. That is a long haul from Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson’s 44-state sweeps, with popular-vote wins of 23 and 18 points, respectively….Looking at Congress, 59 of the Senate’s 96 seats were occupied by Democrats when FDR took office. LBJ had 68 out of 100. Democrats had 313 seats in the House for FDR, 295 for LBJ….For this Congress, Democrats won their 49th seat on Jan. 5 with Raphael Warnock’s win of just under 94,000 votes over Kelly Loeffler in one Georgia runoff. The 50th came days later, as Jon Ossoff was declared the winner, by just under 55,000 votes over David Perdue. This is about as underwhelming as Senate majorities come….The 221 seats that Democrats have in the House represents a 13-seat loss in the 2020 election. Their very majority was saved by fewer than 32,000 votes in five districts. Simply put, this was a very ambiguous election result and not one from which to claim a mandate….So where are Democrats now? This past Saturday morning on SiriusXM’s The Trendline with Kristen Soltis Anderson, my colleague David Wasserman told the host, a highly regarded Republican pollster, that a net Democratic loss in the House of between 20 and 40 seats was quite possible. The Senate is far too murky to even hazard a guess.”

“It’s time for Democrats and the media to stop bashing Joe Manchin and to start bashing the other 50 members of the U.S. Senate who are keeping the public’s business from getting done—the Republicans. Especially bash-worthy are three world-class phonies named Susan Collins, Mitt Romney, and Lisa Murkowski,” Robert Kuttner writes at The American Prospect. “These alleged moderates vote in lockstep with Mitch McConnell and the Trumpers. Once, Collins actually was sort of moderate. She is said to be worried that if she breaks with the MAGA gang, she would likely be defeated in a primary. But in independent Maine, Collins would win in a walk running as an independent….Murkowski might do better in Alaska as an independent in a three-way contest, as well. Romney, who was a centrist Republican when he was governor of Massachusetts, will have to look to his own conscience as an enabler of outright fascism….If even one of them broke ranks and worked across the aisle, Manchin would suddenly be a lot less powerful.” Collins and Romney probably lack the intestinal fortitude to challenge their party and become Independents. But Murkowski has occasionally shown some mettle and flashes of humanity. One of 7 Republican Senators who voted to convict Trump in his impeachment trial, she said, “if the Republican Party has become nothing more than the party of Trump, I sincerely question whether this is the party for me.” And, really, this isn’t her father’s Republican party any more. Murkowski has the smarts to see that, if she merely declared herself to be an Independent, she could suddenly become the most powerful U.S. Senator. It would put her in position to bring home some serious bacon for her constituents in Alaska, not just in BBB —  it would also give her unique leverage in future legislative battles.

In her article, “How Do Democrats Recover From This? Here are five ways in which they could salvage their election chances,” at The Atlantic, Elaine Godfrey shares the thoughts of five Democratic strategists, including:

2. President Biden should enforce strict message discipline—and send the right messengers around the country.

I am an inveterate student of the Iowa Caucuses, so news this week about the 2024 presidential nominating processes fascinated me, as I explained at New York:

On February 4, 2020, the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses suffered a meltdown when results could not be tabulated and reported on Caucus Night. This perfect storm of dysfunction fed a lot of preexisting discontent about the privileged position of the not-terribly-diverse states of Iowa and New Hampshire in the Democratic presidential-nominating process. It looked like a change in the process, or at least a toppling of Iowa, was inevitable.

As late as this past autumn, that was still the prevailing mood in the Democratic Party, as the Washington Post reported:

“President Biden is not a big fan. Former Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez is openly opposed. And elsewhere in the Democratic inner sanctum, disdain for Iowa’s first-in-the-nation presidential caucus has been rising for years.

“Now the day of reckoning for Iowa Democrats is fast approaching, as the national party starts to create a new calendar for the 2024 presidential nomination that could remove Iowa from its privileged position for the first time since 1972, when candidates started flocking to the state for an early jump on the race to the White House.”

But now, as a disappointing year for Democrats comes to an end, Politico explains that the impetus for changing the nominating process has ground to a near halt:

“Democrats, including in the White House, suddenly have more pressing problems. And as party leaders gathered in recent days for year-end meetings here, interest in what was once a red-hot effort to overhaul the order of the early nominating states had all but vanished.

“Interviews with more than two dozen Democratic National Committee members, state party chairs and strategists laid bare widespread desire to avoid a divisive, intraparty dispute in 2022 — and skepticism that any change enacted after the midterm elections could be done in time for the next presidential campaign.”

Even if DNC members were strongly in favor of changing the nominating process, there are a lot of obstacles to wholesale reforms. For one thing, the national parties do not control what individual states decide to do; there isn’t a “system” in place but rather an interlocking set of decisions by state parties and legislatures. The most common form of nominating contest is a state-funded primary, which typically requires bipartisan cooperation in state legislatures and usually involves a common date for both parties (anything else would be deemed an inefficient waste of tax dollars).

If Democratic Iowa critics had their way, the state would replace the caucuses with a primary that would be held later in the year. But the Republican-controlled Iowa legislature is perfectly happy with the status quo, and, in fact, there is no evident interest among Republicans anywhere (including the party’s 2024 front-runner, Donald Trump) in a “reformed” nominating process. This is evidenced by the fact that Iowa’s GOP chair has been designated to lead the national-party committee that sets the calendar. And if Iowa did try to stay first but shift to a primary, New Hampshire has a state law that empowers and requires the secretary of state to move the Granite State’s election date back perpetually to head off any rivals for the first primary. Nevada has already bid for first place (it is currently third) in the process by junking its caucuses for a primary and scheduling it ahead of Iowa and New Hampshire. But New Hampshire will fight for its primacy, and it’s unclear if the national party really wants to adjudicate fights between the states.

It’s possible that residual anger at Iowa among Democrats over its non-diversity or its 2020 meltdown could lead to a simple national-party veto on Iowa going first. Short of creating a state-funded primary, Iowa Republican legislators would have no leverage over that sort of decision. The national party could also try to force Iowa Democrats to abandon caucuses, though in the absence of legislative action, the only option would be a party-funded so-called firehouse primary, so named because financial considerations usually mean that polling places would be limited to inexpensive public facilities like firehouses.

Iowa Democrats could also take some of the heat off themselves by simplifying the caucus process to make a recurrence of the 2020 fiasco far less likely. Iowa Republicans, after all, just show up, hear a few announcements, eat some cookies, and vote for their favorite presidential candidate before going home. Moving to that sort of process instead of the complex system of candidate thresholds and affinity groups and “votes” measured in multiple ways might boost participation while making the results much easier to tabulate and report.

In the end, the decision to stand pat or try to change the system may come down to how interested Joe Biden is in changing the calendar or the procedures by which particular states elect national-convention delegates. Biden is famously not invested in the Iowa–New Hampshire duopoly; he finished fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire in 2020 and then began his comeback with second place in Nevada and a big landslide win in South Carolina. Some of his closest party allies are those who think more diverse states should weigh in first.

Biden, however, obviously has other fish to fry and doesn’t need any additional intraparty drama at present. If he runs again in 2024, he will almost certainly win the nomination no matter which state goes first, second, third, or 35th.