Some of the contradictions in Republican talking points on election law and voting rights are becoming clear to me, so I wrote about it at New York:

During the intense controversy raised by Georgia’s new election law, which included a negative reaction from Major League Baseball and a number of corporations, many defenders of the law have played a game of whataboutism. What about voting laws in Colorado, the state to which the MLB’s all-star game has been shifted? What about liberal New York? A lot of these comparisons have been factually challenged, or have zeroed in on one benign feature of the Georgia law while ignoring others. But it does raise a pretty important question: What is the posture nationally of the GOP or the conservative movement on the right to vote and its limits?

Not long ago you might have said that Republicans and conservatives were firmly committed to the view that rules governing voting and elections —even federal elections — were purely within the purview of state and local policy-makers. But that was before Donald Trump spent four years disparaging the decisions made by liberal and conservative jurisdictions on voting procedures whenever they contradicted his often-erratic but always forcefully expressed views. If, for example, voting by mail was as inherently pernicious as Trump said it was, almost daily from the spring through the autumn of 2020, allowing states to permit it was a Bad Thing, right? That simply added to the complaints made by Trump after the 2016 elections that California’s alleged openness to voting by noncitizens cost him a popular vote win over Hillary Clinton, and the widespread Republican whining after 2018 that the same jurisdiction had counted out Republican congressional candidates (whining that somehow subsided when Republicans did better in the exact same districts following the exact same rules in 2020).

And that was before Team Trump and his many Republican enablers spent the weeks and months after November 3, 2020, shrieking about state and local election procedures around the country, culminating in efforts to get the U.S. Supreme Court to overrule state court interpretations of state election laws. Indeed, since Trump, his congressional Republican backers, and the Capitol riot mob were trying to block the certification of state election results by Congress on January 6, you could say that a major segment of the GOP wanted the federal government to impose its will on the states with respect to voting and elections.

And if the prevailing conservative idea is that decision-makers closest to the people should determine voting and election rules, then it’s hard to explain the provisions in the Georgia law (and in pending legislation in Texas) that preempt local government prerogatives decisively.

So what doctrine of voting rights does the GOP favor, other than whatever is necessary to produce Republican election victories? That’s hard to say.

Yes, at the Heritage Foundation you will find experts who more or less think everything other than in-person voting on Election Day should be banned everywhere. And now and then you will get someone like Kevin Williamson who will articulate the provocative old-school conservative case for restricting the franchise to “better” voters, which was pretty much the ostensible case for the poll taxes and literacy tests of the Jim Crow South. Unfortunately, snooty contrarianism isn’t a particularly helpful guide to the development of voting laws, and most Republicans (other than those caught in a gaffe) are unlikely to agree out loud with the Williamson proposition.

Until quite recently, most Republicans agreed that the jurisdictions that had for so many years discriminated against the voting rights of minorities deserved extra federal scrutiny and some additional hoops to jump through before changing their rules. In 2006, George W. Bush signed a 25-year extension of the Voting Rights Act that did just that, after it passed the Senate unanimously and the House with scattered opposition. Then a conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a key feature of the VRA, and now it’s almost exclusively Democrats (via the John Lewis Voting Rights Act) who want to restore it. Where are Republicans on that idea? With the states and localities, or just with the states and localities where federal intervention in voting and election practices doesn’t inconvenience Republicans?

Whatever you think of Democratic attitudes toward voting and elections, at least they can answer such questions coherently. They have united to an amazing extent around highly detailed legislation (the House and Senate versions of the For the People Act and the aforementioned John Lewis Act) that generally expands voting rights and sets clear federal standards for procedures in and surrounding federal elections. The Republican response to these proposals has been almost universally negative. But it’s unclear what, if anything, they would propose of their own accord.

If the implicit GOP position on voting and elections is simply that such rules are part of the give and take of partisan politics and that both sides are free to play fast and loose with the facts and get what advantages they can, then I can understand why they are loathe to make it explicit. But in that case, people who care about voting rights one way or the other should simply choose sides and have it out.

I tried to put myself in Republican shoes for a moment, and explored at New York why so many of these elephants think their current path is a winner.

At FiveThirtyEight this week, Perry Bacon Jr. explores a very important political mystery: why a Republican Party that lost control of the White House and Congress over the last four years — and that is at the north end of a south-bound brontosaurus when it comes to demographic trends — seems so completely happy with standing pat on its ideology and leadership.

Bacon goes through multiple theories for this resistance to introspection, including activist and media love for Trump and Trumpism; rank-and-file complacency with the current direction of the GOP; Trump’s own refusal to go away; and perhaps most important, the realization that this is an old story by now, that we are looking at a “[c]ollective decision of conservative activists and Republican elected officials to stay on the anti-democratic, racist trajectory that the GOP had been on before Trump — but that he accelerated.”

Since we are talking about people operating in what is largely a winner-take-all political system, who are following a leader who professes to be all about “winning,” perhaps the most interesting reason for the manifest Republican complacency is the belief that an immediate comeback is not simply possible but likely. Some of this is a matter of degree, says Bacon:

“Historically, parties have done more self-reflection and been more likely to change course when they’ve hit electoral low points….

“In contrast, Trump would have won reelection had he done only about 1 percentage point better in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and about 3 points better in Michigan. Republicans would still control the Senate had Republican David Perdue won about 60,000 more votes (out of nearly 4.5 million cast) against Democrat Jon Ossoff in Georgia’s Senate runoff. A slew of court rulings that forced the redrawing of House district lines in less favorable ways to the GOP helped the Democrats win several seats — otherwise, Republicans might have won back the House. Add all that up, and 2020 wasn’t that far from resulting in a Republican trifecta.”

But close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. Republicans have now lost three of the last four presidential elections, and have won the national popular vote just once in the last eight presidential elections. They are still getting clobbered among the younger voters (61 percent of under-30 voters preferred Biden to Trump, according to a Tufts study) who will increasingly dominate elections. Trends among the youngest voters, from increased diversity to decreased church attendance, are not friendly to the GOP.

So where does the Republican optimism come from? There are several factors, as I explore below:

The 2022 midterms look sunny

The over-performance by Republicans in 2020 House races gives them what is historically a very good chance to retake that chamber in 2022, as Kyle Kondik recently noted:

“Since the Civil War, there have been 40 midterm elections. The party that held the White House lost ground in the House in 37 of those elections, with an average seat loss of 33. Since the end of World War II, the average seat loss is a little smaller — 27 — but still significant.”

Based on the House as it was shaped after November 2020, Republicans would only need to flip five net seats to regain the majority. The Senate is iffier thanks to a landscape dotted with GOP retirements. But busting up the Democratic trifecta would have a massive effect on the Biden administration’s ability to enact legislation.

Redistricting will beef up Republican gains

The decennial process of reapportioning and redistricting congressional and state legislative seats will soon be underway. And thanks to what one analyst called “an abysmal showing by Democrats in state legislative races” in 2020, Republicans are in a good position to reinforce their advantage over the next decade.

At the congressional level, reapportionment of seats between the states will give GOP-controlled state legislatures new seats to play with (especially in Florida, which will gain two seats, and in Texas, which will gain three). Redistricting is harder to predict, but as Geoffrey Skelley noted in November, it will likely favor Republicans:

“The GOP is set to fully control redistricting for about two-fifths of all House seats, while Democrats will only hold sway over one-tenth of them, with the remaining seats are in states with divided governments or where redistricting is done by a commission system. The Republican line-drawing advantage should help the party draw favorable maps that could help the GOP win more seats than we might otherwise expect.”

Republicans will do more with less popular support

The redistricting factor is one of several examples of the GOP’s willingness and ability to counter Democratic popular support with institutional arrangements that magnify minority power, from gerrymandering to the Electoral College to the Senate filibuster to voter suppression efforts. Perhaps Republicans didn’t get close enough in 2020 to convert such bonus points into trifecta control, but they understand that actual popular majorities are not the point.

They think Trumpism is a strategy for party expansion

While most Democrats tend to think of Trumpism as the last-gasp effort of a reactionary party to hold onto power by polarizing the country and eking out narrow electoral victories by mobilizing culturally threatened voters with hate and rage, Republicans naturally don’t see it that way. As Representative Jim Banks illustrated in his recent memo to Kevin McCarthy about GOP messaging in 2021 and beyond, they think Trumpism is about making a country-club party the “party of the [white] working class,” which can appeal to a growing segment of minority voters as well. This notion is mostly based on the theory that cultural conservatism is more powerful among white working-class voters and Black and Latino men than the more tangible economic offerings of Democrats.

It’s an approach which Republicans have been pursuing since the days of Richard Nixon, when the white working-class portion of the population was vastly larger, but it’s still exciting to those who think Trump invented it.

Many of them think they really won in 2020

While those of us in the reality-based community scoff at the claims of the MAGA wing of the Republican Party that Democrats stole the 2020 election (and presumably control of Congress along with it), the fact remains that it’s an article of faith among many of the rank-and-file Republicans (55 percent of them, according to a recent Reuters-Ipsos survey) who are the most important consumers for GOP messaging going forward. Accordingly, the current crusade in Republican-controlled state governments in key battleground states to restrict voting rights isn’t viewed by them as a matter of vengeance or of panic-striken authoritarianism, but as a blow to fraudsters that is likely to produce or expand Republican victories in the near future.

This factually-challenged but emotionally powerful perspective, which has been reinforced constantly by Trump-aligned media, a big share of Republican elected officials, and state and local party leaders, also explains the strong interest in a Trump comeback in 2024.

In the bloody-shirt campaign so many Republicans think they are now waging, the alleged “victim” of the “rigged election” is an indispensable figure, even though no defeated incumbent president has successfully staged a comeback since 1892. And that is why even if Trump decides against running again in 2024, Trumpism in all its particulars will very likely remain dominant until the stain of 2020 is erased.

And if you are a follower of the man who said over and over again that “we can’t lose unless it’s rigged,” victory is always just over the horizon.

Maybe winning isn’t everything after all

Perry Bacon offers one more angle on Republican optimism that’s worth pondering: there’s an ““own the libs’ bloc exemplified by many Fox News personalities and elected officials such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene:”

“For the ‘own the libs’ bloc, winning elections isn’t that important anyway — they aren’t really invested in policy or governing and will be fine if Republicans remain out of the White House and in the minority on Capitol Hill.”

Maybe Democrats and these happy losers can both get their way.

After observing the spectacle of the Georgia General Assembly enacting anti-voter legislation, it hit me that the Georgia GOP has been committing a long series of unforced errors that will continue to halt them, so I wrote about it at New York.

Having taken a preliminary look at the 2022 midterm landscape, I had some good news that I wrote up at New York:

The announcement of Joe Biden’s first group of federal judicial nominees helps dramatize the value to Democrats of holding the White House and the Senate at the same time, aside from the ability to enact legislative priorities. So even if Democrats lose control of the House in the 2022 midterms, as history (buttressed by redistricting) suggests they might, it’s important to Biden’s legacy to hang onto the Senate at least through his current term in the White House. And if you take a look at the midterm Senate landscape, it’s not that much of a reach.

But first let’s look at history. The very high number of midterms in which the president’s party loses House seats (17 out of the 19 since World War II) isn’t quite matched in Senate races (11 out of 19 over the same period). The most obvious reason is that only one-third of the Senate is up in any one cycle, which means the playing field can sometimes be skewed in the direction of the president’s party even if it’s having a bad year overall.

For example, in 1970, the first midterm after Richard Nixon’s election as president, 24 of the 34 Senate seats up were held by Democrats. Even though Democrats flipped Republican seats in high-profile contests in California and Illinois, and Republicans lost an additional seat in New York as third-party Conservative James Buckley beat both major parties, the GOP had a net gain of one seat in a very target-rich environment even as Democrats gained 12 net seats in the House. More recently, and even more strikingly, Republicans gained two net Senate seats in 2018 even as Democrats netted 41 House seats. It wasn’t that hard since 24 of the 33 Senate seats on the ballot were held by Democrats, including incumbents in the very red states of Indiana, Missouri, and North Dakota.

The 2022 landscape isn’t as favorable to Democrats as those two were for Republicans, but it is still reasonably sunny, with Republicans holding 20 of the 34 seats at risk. It certainly helps Democrats that five Republicans are retiring in 2022, with additional retirements still possible, while so far all the Democratic incumbents are running again.

According to the Cook Political Report’s initial analysis of 2022 Senate races, six look competitive (either tossups or leaning in one direction or the other). Of those, four (including the two tossups, which involve open seats in North Carolina and Pennsylvania) are currently held by Republicans. Conditions could obviously change (possible GOP retirements in Iowa and Wisconsin could make those two seats more competitive, and if popular New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu decides to run against Democratic incumbent Maggie Hassan, that race could heat up). But all things considered, Democrats don’t need a national advantage to keep the Senate.

In the meantime, of course, Democrats should pray for the health of their current senators. If a Democratic senator in the wrong state (i.e., one of the six where a Republican governor would have the power to appoint a Republican to a vacant seat) resigns or dies, Kamala Harris’s tie-breaking vote could become meaningless, and Mitch McConnell might regain the gavel. At that point 2022 would  represent a fight to regain lost ground.

I’ve been following this development in my home state, and wrote about it at New York as it reached an inflection point:

Republican Governor Brian Kemp on Thursday signed into law a measure passed by Georgia’s Republican-controlled legislature to restrict voting rights in reaction to Democratic gains there last year. While it’s not the “Jim Crow 2.0” critics feared — and that earlier versions threatened — the new law shows a determined effort by Republicans to restrict voting in order to claw back power

The bill imposed a new ID requirement on those wishing to vote by mail and tightened deadlines on mail ballots. It also restricted mail ballot drop boxes, banned provisional ballots for votes cast in the wrong precinct, and perhaps most ominously, allowed for state takeover of election administration from county election boards if it deems such interventions necessary.

The legislation also overhauled rules governing Georgia’s unique general election runoffs, which produced two Democratic wins in January that gave Democrats control of the U.S. Senate. Going forward runoffs will occur four weeks after the general election, with very limited time provided for the early voting on which Democrats generally, and minority voters specifically, tend to rely.

Though Democrats in Atlanta and in Washington are attacking the legislation with varying degrees of heat, it could have been much worse from a voting rights perspective. At varying points in the process, some Republican legislators were promoting the abolition of no-excuse voting by mail (which Republicans themselves introduced in 2005) and elimination of Sunday in-person early voting (in a transparent effort to stop the tradition of “souls to the polls” events traditionally held by Black churches after Sunday worship). The final version of the bill left no-excuse voting by mail in place, and actually mandated two weekend early voting days that by local option could be switched to Sundays. This provision is feeding Republican spin that the entire bill is somehow pro-voter.

The bill is probably best understood as a compromise worked out between the two wings of the Georgia GOP: Trump loyalists who claim to believe loose voting rules “stole” Georgia for Biden and two Senate seats for Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock; and those including Kemp and secretary of state Brad Raffensperger who don’t buy the stolen election rap but still favor voter suppression as a way to improve their party’s odds in a closely contested state.

Aside from the ripe-for-abuse state takeover provision, the most troublesome part of the bill from a voting rights point of view is the switch from verification of mail ballots by signature authentication against voter registration files, to the new requirement for ID that must be submitted with applications to vote by mail and with the ballots themselves. This requirement adds two additional steps to the process for all voters, and a potential bar to participation for others, as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported: “About 3% of registered voters don’t have a license or state ID number on file, and they would need to submit additional documentation.” It’s a provision almost sure to attract a lawsuit and judicial review.

While this legislative activity ends the GOP effort to roll back voting opportunities for now, the state will continue to be ground zero for fights over the franchise at least through the 2022 elections, which are expected to be very competitive, and where Kemp and Raffensperger may be fighting primary challenges from Trump-backed pols who will argue they are soft on “voter fraud” and too sympathetic to minorities. It’s worth noting that above and beyond the current bill’s provisions, there’s a tradition of Republican secretaries of state (most notably Kemp) using aggressive purges of voting rolls to target young and minority voters. That could be very much in play as Republicans deal with a likely gubernatorial race by 2018 Democratic nominee and national voting rights champion Stacey Abrams.

Let’s not forget, by the way, that the new Georgia election law is precisely the sort of legislation that would have been put on hold pending Justice Department review of its impact on minority voting rights had the U.S. Supreme Court not gutted the preclearance requirements of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That’s another reason congressional Democrats should find a way to enact the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, restoring the VRA’s effectiveness and ensuring Lewis’s home state does not mock his memory and wreck his legacy.

 

After two horrendous gun massacres in less than a week — one in and around Atlanta, the other in Boulder, Colorado — I wrote at New York about the tedious and unproductive debate that is likely to ensue.

The reason nothing ever happens on gun violence ultimately boils down to two interrelated things: The Republican Party has become wedded to Second Amendment absolutism, and that produces a veto of any federal gun-safety measures thanks to the Senate filibuster and the de facto 60-vote supermajority required to pass any and all legislation.

But aside from the mechanics of raw power that doom the reactions to gun massacres to tears of impotent sorrow and rage, some well-rehearsed rationalizations for doing nothing are reflexively, continually trotted out to defuse the spontaneous public impulse to just stop the madness. Their narcotic effect on debate is a testament to their real, if wafer-thin, plausibility.

1. “New laws wouldn’t have prevented this.”

This rationalization comes in two forms — first in the impossible-to-rebut argument that when there’s a will to mass murder, there will be a way to commit it, which means that any particular gun regulation will produce a Whac-A-Mole displacement whereby the putative killer can always find an alternative weapon or a means of acquiring one.

A bit more compelling are the precise arguments that this gun regulation would not have prevented that atrocity. Right after the Boulder killings, Ted Cruz offered it up. “Every time there’s a shooting, we play this ridiculous theater where this committee gets together and proposes a bunch of laws that would do nothing to stop these murders,” he said.

What makes such arguments disingenuous is that Congress remains stuck on narrow legislative ideas, like closing the gun-show “loophole” to background checks, because the gun lobby opposes doing anything more comprehensive. By definition, these kinds of incremental steps to reduce the incidence of and the toll from gun violence will have a similarly incremental effect. But those who oppose broader measures have no standing to complain about the inadequacy of minimal improvements to the law.

2. “Guns don’t kill, people kill.”

The oldest and hoariest of arguments is that what causes gun massacres isn’t the weapon but the criminal who wields it — as though all blame must be assigned to one or the other. The whole purpose of gun regulation, of course, is the effort, which will never be perfectly executed, of separating evil humans from death-dealing machines.

No, gun-safety measures will not abolish original sin or prevent bad people from having very bad intentions toward their fellow citizens. But keeping lethal weapons out of the hands of lethal individuals as much as possible will reduce the number of times the wages of sin are someone else’s death. Presumably, all the other countries with vastly fewer incidents of gun violence still have evildoers; they just don’t kill as often.

3. “The real problem isn’t guns. The real problem is ______.”

A variation on the “Guns don’t kill” howler was illustrated by then-President Donald Trump after a 2019 multiple-gun-massacre week in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. “Mental illness and hatred pulls the trigger,” Trump said, “not the gun.” Put aside for a moment the fact that the mentally ill are far, far more likely to be victims rather than perpetrators of any and all acts of violence. Mental illness — and, for that matter, “hatred” — is a deep, vast problem that cannot be “solved” overnight or ever. Postponing gun regulation until the human frailties that make weapon use illegitimately deadly essentially means postponing it forever, which is clearly the idea.

Anyone who cites other genuine problems (whether mental illness, ethnic/racial hostility, poverty, or family turmoil) as reasons to ignore the problem posed by poorly regulated weapons is, strictly speaking, trying to change the subject.

4. “It takes a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy with a gun.”

For many years, the National Rifle Association has argued that gun control gives criminals and other bad actors an effective monopoly on weapons (“If you criminalize guns, only criminals will have guns”). Now, the truth is nobody with any power in this country is arguing for general bans on private gun ownership, so the underlying argument is really that private citizens should wage and win an arms race with evildoers. The logical end of this way of thinking is mandatory gun ownership by law-abiding citizens to make the United States an armed camp where the kinds of people who commit gun massacres are literally outgunned. It’s particularly sad when police officers like Eric Talley in Boulder die in the crossfire.

The possibility that the cure may be worse than the disease accompanies all such schemes. The U.S. is the global leader in gun ownership and towards the top of countries in gun homicides. It is improbable that there is no connection between the two.

5. “This is a slippery slope to gun confiscation.”

Like all “slippery slope” arguments, the claim that limited gun regulation will inevitably lead to the extinction of private gun ownership is both illogical and ahistorical. The fact is we have less gun regulation than we had in 2004 when the military assault weapons so prevalent now were at least partially banned. That ban hardly led to other weapons bans; the pendulum in fact swung in the opposite direction.

There is nothing irreversible about gun-safety measures, which should be judged on their own terms and not on the belief that their proponents secretly want to do something else. Even if the United States were on the brink of enacting that great gun-lobby bugaboo of national gun registration (or gun-owner licensing), it would not lead to gun confiscation without a vast expansion of government power and an extremely unlikely passivity among federal judges.

6. “Guns protect our freedom.”

This last rationalization, which essentially holds that the Second Amendment should be absolute and interpreted as unlimited, requires some thinking through. The idea (as I put it some time ago) is that “no restrictions on firearms possession are ever constitutional. And that particularly applies to military weaponry because the whole idea of the Second Amendment is the right to undertake a violent revolution against the United States government when ‘patriots’ deem it necessary or convenient.”

Gun absolutists are usually coy about what that means and allude vaguely to an armed citizenry as a deterrent to tyranny or just cite the American revolutionary precedent. Some have gone so far as to suggest that when politics fails to achieve some right-wing goal, “Second Amendment solutions” may prove essential. But make no mistake: The argument is to deliberately break the monopoly on deadly force that the military and law-enforcement agencies typically have in civilized societies, in case “patriots” need to start shooting soldiers and cops to defend their supposed liberties. It is precisely the mindset of the insurrectionary mobs of January 6, who believed they were exercising — to quote congressman and would-be senator Mo Brooks — their “1776 moment.”

The scariest thing about Second Amendment absolutists is that they often believe the sign for stockpiling the shooting irons in preparation for a possible armed rebellion is any threat to gun rights as they understand them. And so you have the circular reasoning that absolute gun rights are necessary to protect absolute gun rights. As with other rationalizations for refusing to deal with gun violence, there’s really no effort to reason with the other side of the argument at all.

There’s an alarming trend — not new, but suddenly very intense — among our Republican friends that I wrote about at New York:

When former White House press secretary and longtime political operative Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced her much-expected bid for the Arkansas governorship her father held for 11 years, what do you suppose she talked about doing in her fine corner of the heartland? Maybe improving the schools? Promoting economic development? Modernizing state agencies? Building some roads? These are all kinds of messaging Republicans have traditionally found acceptable in state government, as opposed to Democratic agenda items like expanding health-care coverage and fighting poverty and protecting the environment and so forth.

But no.

As some of you may know, I have a substantial professional background in federal-state and also state-local relations. So my heart leapt up at a new analysis of how Joe Biden might upset the intergovernmental apple cart, and I wrote about it at New York:

In the wake of the enactment of Joe Biden’s COVID-19 relief and stimulus legislation — which distributed $1.9 trillion to a wide range of individuals, businesses, and state and local governments — it has not gone unnoticed that some beneficiaries are more grateful than others. In particular, some Republican state leaders are resisting the Biden administration and all its works in the bitter aftermath of the 2020 elections and the January 6 insurrection in Washington, D.C.

As Ron Brownstein observes, the situation may tempt the Biden administration to bypass recalcitrant state governments and work directly with urban and suburban local governments that are Democratic-run or at least more amenable to the active role the federal government will clearly take on economic, social, and environmental challenges if the new administration has anything to say about it:

“Cities and their inner suburbs need an immediate lifeline from Washington to stabilize their finances after the devastation of the pandemic. But once those communities regain their balance, they could become crucial allies for Biden. By working with big metros, the president would be aligning federal policy with powerful economic, social, and electoral trends — and empowering local officials overwhelmingly sympathetic to his core objectives. If Biden can forge such partnerships, he could both ignite a new wave of local innovation and solidify the Democratic Party’s advantage in the fast-growing, diverse, and well-educated metro areas that have become the bedrock of its electoral coalition.”

Metropolitan local governments need Washington as much as Washington needs them, as Brownstein indicates. And if Biden does try to forge direct fiscal and programmatic links to cities and counties, he will be reviving a strategy deployed most prominently by Lyndon Johnson during his Great Society and War on Poverty initiatives, which worked directly with local governments — and in some cases with community organizations it had created for that purpose — in lieu of often-reactionary state governors, particularly in the white racist South.

Although LBJ was the pioneer in establishing a direct federal-local relationship, the practice reached its apex under his successor, Richard Nixon, who embraced what he called a New Federalism to distribute money and power from Washington to state and local governments. The centerpiece of Nixon’s initiative was General Revenue Sharing, which distributed what was then a very high level of no-strings-attached aid, with about two-thirds going to cities and counties and one-third to states. This period led to the establishment of the Community Development Block Grant Program, which is today the largest surviving federal program with a component channeling dollars directly to local governments.

By the time Ronald Reagan took office, conservative thinking about Federalism focused on devolving government responsibilities to the states, rather than sharing revenues with states and localities. GRS was a frequent target of Reagan-era budget cuts. Even before Reagan took office, Congress had knocked out the state share of the program; it was finally killed altogether in 1986. A bit later, another vestige of the era of direct federal-local assistance, the Urban Development Action Grants, bit the dust.

Perhaps these setbacks for a federal-local relationship weren’t as definitive as they looked at the time. As Brownstein observes, Biden’s first elected office was on the New Castle County Council in Delaware, and he often worked with mayors on Obama-administration economic initiatives. More important, in key areas like climate-change policy, urban and suburban governments eager to take action to promote energy efficiency and reduce reliance on automobiles may provide the only partners available to his administration. The growing political alignment of large cities and their inner suburbs makes regional policy solutions more feasible than ever with some help from Washington:

“’What I see is a coalition of business, civic, and philanthropic leaders around the country committing to a set of national goals through local action,’ [Brookings Institution’s Amy] Liu told me. ‘I could imagine CEO circles with mayors in different parts of the country committing to drive those goals in those regions, and the federal government could easily align their resources to help regions meet their goals.'”

If Biden does move in this direction, it will cut against a lot of political traditions and even constitutional arrangements. States clearly have a central role in the Founders’ conception of Federalism, and, technically speaking, cities and counties are creatures of state constitutions and laws. They also play a large role in the domestic governance of a country in which the central government provides few direct services outside of national defense (e.g., in the huge federal-state Medicaid program, wherein the Supreme Court famously decided states could not be forced to carry out the expansion contemplated in the Affordable Care Act).

But the political logic Brownstein writes about for reviving a direct federal-local relationship is compelling, particularly when large states like Florida and Texas are governed by Republicans who would rather resign than do anything to help make the Biden presidency a success.

There’s always something unusual cooking in California politics, and I reported on the latest zaniness from the Golden State at New York:

Like other governors, California’s Gavin Newsom is surely pleased at the favorable trajectory of COVID-19 cases and prospects for a return to something like normalcy. But happier times may not arrive quite quickly enough for Newsom: He is on the very brink of the ultimate nightmare for California officeholders, a recall election. With 11 days left before the deadline, organizers of the drive to recall Newsom now claim they’ve collected nearly 2 million signatures on their petition. At the current rate of signature verification, that could be just enough to reach the goal of 1.5 million, trigging an election this summer or fall (though Republicans are hedging their bets via unsupported claims that Democrats will find a way to void recall petitions illegitimately).

Newsom is not (at this point) even close to being as unpopular as the last California governor to be recalled: Gray Davis, who was replaced in a 2003 recall election by none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger. But while there is almost always low-level recall activity by some opposing party for any given governor of California, this time it’s been fed by various types of discontent with the state’s handling of the pandemic (particularly school closings and restrictions on churches and certain businesses). And for Newsom, specifically, the coup de grâce may have been his much-publicized attendance at an indoor dinner for a lobbyist friend last November at the ultraexclusive French Laundry restaurant in Napa Valley — which violated Newsom’s own pandemic guidelines. Since then, the slow start to California’s vaccine rollout has only added more fuel to the fire.

But even if recall proponents collect enough signatures by March 17, California’s recall law provides for multiple delays before an actual election, as the Sacramento Bee explains:

“County elections officials must determine how many signatures are valid and report their signature counts by April 29, after which the Secretary of State’s office will have ten calendar days to determine if the effort met the nearly 1.5 million signature threshold. Then, people who signed the petition would have 30 business days to remove their signatures. Counties have 10 business days after that to report any signature removals to the Secretary of State. At that point, the California Department of Finance would have 30 business days to develop a cost estimate for the recall election, which the Legislature would have 30 days to review.”

And then Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis would have to schedule the recall election within 60 to 80 days. She, like every other statewide official and most of the county elected officials involved in the recall process, is a Democrat. So, too, are the legislative leaders who could amend the recall process to delay the election even further (Democrats have supermajorities in both state legislative chambers.) Assuming California rebounds from the pandemic doldrums, every delay could allow a boost for Newsom’s popularity. But more importantly the state’s heavily Democratic character makes Newsom a better bet to survive a recall than Davis was at a time when California Republicans were significantly stronger.

The way recall elections work complicates the dynamics. Voters will have two questions to resolve. First, they must decide whether to recall Newsom, (which is an up-or-down vote). Second, if they do decide to eject him from office, they must decide who will replace him. The incumbent in a recall cannot run to succeed himself. So the big strategic decision for Democrats is whether they successfully discourage any Democratic “replacement” candidates and just gamble on Newsom defeating the recall. If he fails, of course, California will have a Republican or possibly an independent governor. That’s assuming anyone can control the replacement field; thanks to very low qualifying requirements, you could have a vast number of contestants (there were 135 candidates on the ballot in 2003).

Let’s say for the sake of argument that no major Democrats run. There are currently three major Republicans mulling a replacement candidacy: 2018 gubernatorial nominee John Cox; former San Diego mayor Kevin Faulconer; and former Trump administration acting Director of National Intelligence Ric Grenell. Perhaps the GOP can cull their own field, but in theory, a Republican could become governor with a plurality that represents far fewer votes than Newsom would win against the recall. That possibility reinforces an anomaly in the recall process: Since California adopted a “top two” primary system in 2011, every victorious general election candidate has won a majority. That may not be the case this year if Newsom is recalled.

At present, the best bet is that a recall election will happen, and will amount to an off-year amusement at best and an enormous waste of time and campaign dollars at worst. In three polls taken in early February, Newsom’s job-approval rating ranged from a high of 52 percent to a low of 46 percent. If the pandemic does abate, Democrats don’t split, and Newsom doesn’t badly stumble going forward, he should win the recall vote, and then nobody will much care which Republican finishes first in a replacement vote that no longer means anything. Indeed, California Republicans may wind up deciding they would have been wiser to lay off Newsom for the moment and save their powder (and money) for 2022 elections when they could stand to benefit from a midterm wave.

Trying to follow the action in various Republican efforts to restrict the franchise, I offered an observation at New York that differs a bit from the conventional wisdom:

The Republican-controlled Georgia state senate voted on March 8 to kill the no-excuse voting by mail that a previous Republican-controlled legislature put on the books way back in 2005. But something interesting happened along the way: This change has been opposed by several top Republicans in the state, and Governor Brian Kemp is not onboard either. Maybe these hard-boiled Georgia Republicans understand that the bipartisan belief that liberalized voting by mail cost Trump their state and ultimately the White House is far from clearly supported by the evidence.

Recently that Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz conducted a regression analysis that convinced him Joe Biden would have won without significantly higher levels of voting by mail. Last week, a new Stanford University study reached the same conclusion:

“The results of our paper do not offer a clear recommendation for the policy debate around vote-by-mail, but they do suggest that both sides of the debate are relying on flawed logic. Vote-by-mail is an important policy that voters seem to like using, and it may be a particularly important tool during the pandemic. Despite all that, and despite the extraordinary circumstances of the 2020 election, vote-by-mail’s effect on turnout and on partisan outcomes is very muted, just as research prior to the pandemic would have suggested.”

The participants in the Stanford study agreed that expanded voting by mail might boost turnout by one or 2 percent in midterm elections, but probably little or not at all in presidential elections, when a higher percentage of marginal voters are likely to vote in any event. Increased voter interest and engagement drove the turnout spikes of 2018 and 2020, not changes in voting procedures, they argue. As pre-2020 elections clearly showed, Republican voters are as likely as Democratic voters to take advantage of “convenience voting” (so long as their lord and master at Mar-a-Lago doesn’t tell them they shouldn’t).

So what’s the point of a GOP crackdown on liberalized mail ballots? And for that matter, should defending liberalized voting by mail be the main focus of Democrats at a time when Republicans are assaulting voting rights generally?

It’s a pertinent question in GOP-controlled places like Georgia, where, in addition to an end to no-excuse absentee voting, cutbacks in weekend in-person early voting, new voter-ID requirements, elimination of automatic voter registration, and mandatory voter purges are all in play, with less Republican opposition. In Iowa, Republican governor Kim Reynolds just signed partisan legislation that reduces early in-person voting days and even cuts Election Day voting hours.

Yes, the principle that all kinds of voting should be encouraged as a matter of basic democratic rights — as reflected in H.R. 1, the For the People Act, which recently passed the U.S. House — is worth defending. But when push comes to shove, perhaps the overemphasis on voting by mail on both sides of the voting wars doesn’t make a lot of sense. Being denied any path to the ballot box is surely the most urgently objectionable development to stop. People can adjust to changing incentives and disincentives to one form of voting or another, as so many did at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. But being excluded from the franchise altogether is not something that can be overcome easily.