“Can Democrats knock Republicans off their two-faced midterm strategy?,” E. J. Dionne, Jr. asks in his Washington Post column. Dionne’s take: “Polls for congressional contests are closer than the conventional wisdom suggests about impending Democratic catastrophe. Some even give Democrats a slight lead in generic surveys for House races. A Washington Post/ABC News poll released Sunday found Democrats with 46 percent among registered voters, Republicans with 45. But the Republicans’ two-step, and enthusiasm in their base, give the GOP confidence about the fall….Democrats, being Democrats, are wringing their hands with apprehension. They often blame each other for the party’s troubles — the left goes after the center, the center assails the left, and the congressional and White House wings sometimes seem to be speaking different languages….But there are signs that Democrats, collectively, have begun to identify the first task in front of them: to call out the stark contradiction inherent in the GOP’s strategy and to force the Republican Party as a whole to own the meanness of its loudest voices….Even if they salvage some of the president’s climate and social spending this spring, Democrats realize they can’t prevail on accomplishments alone. They need to force voters to confront what a vote for Republicans could lead to….“I think we make a mistake if we don’t go straight at Republicans on their obsession with these very narrowcast, broadly unpopular cultural fights,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) told me during an interview. “It’s just not true that it’s popular to pick on gay kids. That riles up a subsection of the Republican base.”….Murphy has been at the forefront in pushing Democrats toward a more aggressive strategy. His approach was on display in a widely shared tweet last weekend: “Republicans fight Disney to force them to discriminate against gay kids. Democrats fight drug companies to force them to lower insulin prices for sick kids. Run on that.”….The point, he told me, is to “call out their bigotry and their obsession with these wedge social issues and contrast it … with our decision to spend our time working on issues that matter to a much broader cross-section of Americans.”….Yes, 2022 will be a challenging year for Democrats. But playing offense is a better political bet than playing defense. And wagering that the basic decency of moderate voters will inspire a recoil from intolerance and culture-war obsessions is a fine place to start.”

Charlie Cook addresses the question, “Could Roe Change the Subject This November?” at The Cook Political Report, then responds:”Democrats need the subject of this election to change, to shift away from them and toward Republicans—a tall order indeed when the GOP is out of power and not held responsible for much that does or does not happen. Keeping in mind that election years are notoriously unproductive in terms of legislation, if something happens to shift the focus of this election, it is more likely to come from the opposite side of First Street than where the Senate and House chambers are situated: that is, the Supreme Court….A reversal of Roe would basically punt the entire abortion issue to the states to fight over, just as they did on partisan (though not racial) gerrymandering. But given how many states are already safely ensconced in the back pockets of one party or the other, a substantial share of the electorate lives in states where little change in state abortion law is likely. States that preponderantly favor abortion rights are unlikely to enact antiabortion legislation, and vice versa. Potential change is more likely in states on the bubble, where the partisan and state legislative balance is either evenly balanced or in transition….The states worth watching are pretty much the swing states that we see on the presidential, senatorial, and gubernatorial levels. One could do a lot worse than focus on the six states that political sage Doug Sosnik identifies as critical for 2022 and, arguably, 2024 as well: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Nevada….In terms of individual minds being changed, it is unlikely that a reversal or near reversal of Roe would have much more than a ripple. Those most likely to be outraged by a reversal are mostly either already in the Democratic camp or find themselves cross-pressured on many issues, thus hardly likely to be single-issue voters. Those who would greet such a decision in a jubilant fashion are already on the GOP side, making motivation the only game in town, not persuasion….If any issue or event on the radar screen could shift the focus of this election, it would be Roe, but the prospect of it changing which way the river is flowing is pretty unlikely.”

From Harry Enten’s “The 3 things that need to happen for Democrats to keep the Senate” at CNN Politics: “For Senate Democrats to have a good election night in November, some combination of at least three things needs to happen….1. Republicans nominate weak candidates. The 2022 Senate map is not that great for the GOP, with all Democrats up for reelection running in states Biden won in 2020 and Republicans defending two seats in Biden states. Most neutral observers have noted that the leading Republican candidates in high-profile Senate races in Arizona, Georgia and New Hampshire are not the strongest candidates. That accounts for 21% of all GOP Senate challengers this year. (While three weak challengers in the 435-member House is unlikely to make a difference to the final outcome, it can make a huge difference in the 100-member Senate.)….2. The economy improves. Inflation is sky-high, disposable income has dropped and even the nation’s GDP has declined. When the economy is the top concern, it’s hard to win as the incumbent party.The good news for Democrats is that the election is still six months away. Although none of these metrics are likely to improve dramatically, all are forecast to get at least a little better by November…..3. Everyone who approves of Biden votes Democratic. Biden’s job approval rating is going to be key this fall, at a time when straight-ticket voting is very high….Historically, the magic mark for a president in midterm elections has been 60% approval. But that may not be the case anymore with more Americans voting for the party in the White House when they approve of the president and voting against it when they disapprove….So Biden’s approval rating may only need to be around 50% — if not a little lower should Democrats have an advantage in candidate quality.”

Monica Potts and Jean Yi explain why “Why Twitter Is Unlikely To Become The ‘Digital Town Square’ Elon Musk Envisions” at FiveThirtyEight: “Overall, though, Twitter might be more accurately described as a scrolling newspaper than a public square. Other social media sites, like Facebook, stretch farther into the information ecosystem and are likelier to reveal what most Americans are currently reading, sharing and saying….The Pew Research Center conducts regular surveys on social media use in the United States, and the most popular networks across demographics and political affiliation remain, by far, YouTube and Facebook. As of early 2021, 81 percent and 69 percent of American adults, respectively, reported using these two sites, and the majority of each site’s users visited frequently. This is particularly true of Facebook: 71 percent of users said they visited the site daily, and nearly half of all users visited multiple times a day….By comparison, just under a quarter of American adults reported being on Twitter. And according to a Pew study released in April 2019, only a tiny portion (10 percent) of its adult users in America made up 80 percent of all tweets from that same group. And according to another Pew survey from 2021, only a very small share of tweets from American adults (14 percent) were original content. In other words, these users are mostly retweeting, quote-tweeting or replying….Overall, though, 66 percent of Americans said that social media does more to hurt than help free speech and democracy. That reasoning, however, broke starkly along partisan lines: Republicans were likelier to say speaking freely online was important, while Democrats were likelier to think it was more important that people felt safe and welcome online.”

Thinking about recent history, it occurred to me that Republicans had blown some easy Senate wins. and might do so again. I wrote about it at New York:

The dynamics of this year’s battle for control of the U.S. Senate were nicely captured recently by Kyle Kondik and J. Miles Coleman of Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “There is a push and pull in the race for control of the U.S. Senate between the big-picture electoral environment, which clearly benefits Republicans, and the day-to-day developments on the campaign trail, which do not always clearly benefit Republicans.”

In other words, the overriding factor in competitive Senate races is the size of the likely pro-Republican midterms “wave,” which should lift all red-painted boats. But an undertow is entirely possible in individual races, as Mitch McConnell remembers.

“From an atmospheric point of view, it’s a perfect storm of problems for the Democrats,” the Republican leader said last month. “How could you screw this up? It’s actually possible. And we’ve had some experience with that in the past.”

Indeed they have. As a bit of a tonic for Democrats who are sinking into a slough of despond about the midterms, and the possibility of a Republican Senate that can thwart Joe Biden’s appointments and legislation, here’s a reminder of the three ways recent Republican Senate candidates have managed to blow races they should have won.

Being too wacky

While Republicans generally performed extremely well in the 2010 midterms, they fumbled two Senate races they were initially expected to win, in Delaware and in Nevada.

In Delaware, Republicans had a star Senate candidate in five-term congressman, three-term governor, and one-term lieutenant governor Mike Castle, a moderate who had been in statewide office for an incredible 30 straight years. He was heavily favored to flip the Senate seat held by Democratic place-holder Ted Kaufman, appointed to the seat when its long-time occupant Joe Biden became vice-president. But then in a huge shocker, Castle lost the GOP primary to veteran right-wing crank and Tea Party celebrity Christine O’Donnell, who had lost to Biden in a landslide two years earlier. After a disastrous general election campaign best remembered for the efforts she had to undertake to deny that she was a witch (a possibility she had herself raised in a 1999 appearance on Bill Maher’s show Politically Incorrect), she lost badly to underdog local elected official Chris Coons, who holds the seat to this day.

That same year Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid was in deep trouble in Nevada. His job approval ratings were terrible, he was losing in polling matchups against every named Republican opponent. But when the most formidable of those opponents had a campaign meltdown (see below), he drew a general election fight with far-right former legislator Sharron Angle. The Republican nominee proceeded to alienate voters with out-there statements opposing the regulation of health insurers even as Reid used his lavish campaign treasure to remind voters of her past remarks favoring the privatization or even the abolition of Social Security — a deadly position in senior-heavy Nevada. Reid came back from near-political death to beat Angle by five points.

The ultimate example of a Republican Senate candidate being too nutty even for deep-red-state voters came in Alabama in 2017, in a special election to fill the vacancy created when veteran senator Jeff Sessions resigned to (briefly) become Donald Trump’s attorney general.

The eventual Republican Senate nominee, Judge Roy Moore, was a perennial candidate and a globally notorious theocrat (at one point he drove around Alabama hauling a huge stone edifice of the Ten Commandments he had tried to place in the state Supreme Court chambers). Roy had been removed twice from a state judicial post for defiance of federal courts. That he managed to snag a Senate nomination was a testament to the weakness of his rivals. The appointed incumbent and beneficiary of a Donald Trump endorsement, Luther Strange, was fatally tainted by association with the man who put him in the Senate, disgraced Governor Robert Bentley (who was forced to resign shortly after he filled the Sessions seat). Another Moore opponent was congressman Mo Brooks, whose habit of running bad campaigns was reinforced when he lost a Trump Senate endorsement in 2022. By the time Moore won the GOP nomination to face underdog Democrat Doug Jones, the judge’s extremist record and platform was being overshadowed by a drumbeat of allegations that he had engaged in creepy and even illegal misconduct toward underaged women.

It took a whole lot of crazy and creepy for a Republican to lose a Senate race in Alabama, but Roy Moore got it done; he lost to Jones in December of 2017.

Committing fatal gaffes

Even in this era of straight-ticket voting and partisan polarization, candidates can occasionally make mistakes so large that they cancel out any prior advantages. In the aforementioned 2010 Nevada Senate contest, Republicans wound up nominating Sharron Angle because front-runner Sue Lowden blew up her own campaign in one terrible moment when she endorsed the idea of patients bartering for health care services.

“You know, before we all started having health care, in the olden days, our grandparents, they would bring a chicken to the doctor,” she said on a local TV show. “They would say I’ll paint your house … In the old days that’s what people would do to get health care with their doctors. Doctors are very sympathetic people. I’m not backing down from that system.”

Soon “chickens for checkups” became Lowden’s unfortunate signature, and her candidacy sank like a stone.

Even more unfortunately for Republicans, in 2012 not one but two Senate nominees who seemed to be cruising towards a general election victory were felled by variations on the same exceptionally stupid gaffe: remarks defending abortions bans even in cases of a pregnancy caused by rape.

In Missouri, Congressman Todd Akin was favored to defeat incumbent Democratic senator Claire McCaskill before he answered a question about rape exceptions for abortion in this manner:

“First of all, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something. I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child.”

The ignorant scientific assertion made immeasurably worse by the suggestion that victims are lying about rape was disastrous for Akin, leading to calls by both members of the Republican presidential ticket (Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan) for Akin to quit the Senate race and let the party choose someone less offensively bone-headed. Back-peddling and whining all the way, Akin stayed in the race and cost Republicans a Senate seat they expected to win easily.

A while after Akin’s fatal gaffe, Indiana treasurer and Senate nominee Richard Mourdock got caught in his own rape-abortion snare when he said:

“The only exception I have to have an abortion is in that case of the life of the mother. I just struggled with it myself for a long time but I came to realize: Life is that gift from God that I think even if life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.”

Tea Party favorite Mourdock was already in a tight race against Democrat Joe Donnelly after upsetting veteran Republican Senator Dick Lugar in a primary. His suggestion that God wanted women to be raped offended people across the political spectrum, and had a lot to do with his eventual loss to Donnelly.

The twin defeats in Indiana and Missouri produced a whole cottage industry of Republican consultants hired to train conservative men on how to talk about women.

Running bad campaigns and having bad luck

Almost by definition losing Senate campaigns are not ideally competent. And good candidates are often the victims of bad landscapes for their party in a given election cycle. But sometimes campaigns that should succeed are met with a perfect storm of candidate fecklessness and external crosswinds.

That arguably happened to Republicans in the two most fateful recent Senate contests: the twin general election runoffs defeats in Georgia in January of 2021 that gave Democrats control of the Senate and a governing trifecta in Washington.

Now that Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock are in the Senate representing a state carried by Joe Biden, it may not be fully appreciated how heavily David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler were favored when the runoff campaign began. But they were the betting favorites until late in the race, as Fortune reported:

“According to the bets placed on the race — which often predict outcomes more accurately than polls — Republican candidates David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler were both cruising to relatively easy wins. ‘Until just before the election, people betting their own money reckoned that Republicans had this in the bag,’ says Thomas Miller, a Northwestern University data scientist who calculated the chances of victory in each race based on prices from the PredictIt.org political betting site.”

How did Republicans blow it? It was a team effort.

Appointed senator Kelly Loeffler, who was running in an all-party special election for the right to finish Johnny Isakson’s term after the veteran senator resigned for health reasons, spent much of the cycle frantically trying to head off a challenge from conservative Trump ally Doug Collins. Indeed, a big part of her strategy for making the runoff against Democrat Raphael Warnock was to keep Trump from endorsing Collins by becoming more MAGA than any Senate candidate in the country. She pursued and received an endorsement from the already-notorious Marjorie Taylor Greene. And she ran ads calling herself “more conservative than Attila the Hun.”

Loeffler beat Collins for a runoff spot, all right, but only after alienating the swing voters she was originally appointed to attract, while giving Warnock a free ride until after November.

Meanwhile, incumbent David Perdue was running a reelection campaign that paled in self-discipline, aggressiveness, and grassroots organization compared to Democrat Jon Ossoff’s. At a crucial moment in late October, when Perdue was trying to reach 50 percent and avoid a runoff, Ossoff called him a “crook” in a debate, leaving the incumbent spluttering and then refusing to participate in further debates through the runoff. This enabled the Democrat to debate an empty podium in December.

Perdue also got unlucky, contracting COVID-19 and having to go into quarantine five crucial days before the runoff.

But both Georgia Republicans got unlucky (albeit justly) down the stretch when their professed political lord and savior Donald Trump undermined their campaigns by coming into the state to campaign for them and then spending much of his time complaining about the state’s “rigged” election machinery. By near-universal assent, Trump’s rhetoric dampened GOP base turnout and in combination with the smart, tough and well-organized Democratic campaigns, cost Perdue and Loeffler their seats and Republicans their Senate control.

None of these examples, of course, mean that Republicans will misplay enough 2022 Senate races to cost them a victory they might otherwise win. But you cannot blame Mitch McConnell for wondering if history might repeat itself in an unfortunate way.

Andrew Prokop explains “Why Republicans are favored to win the Senate — and how Democrats could stop them” at Vox:

In the past decade, there have been 20 individual Senate elections where a seat ended up flipping to the other party. The vast majority of those races (16 of 20) had the same partisan outcome as either the presidential race that year or, in midterm years without a presidential contest, the most recent one. Senate races have been falling in line with the state’s presidential party preference. “Mismatched” senators, who represent a state their party’s presidential nominee lost, are becoming rarer.

From that perspective, Democrats have a pretty okay map in 2022. In the two most recent midterm cycles, they were badly exposed, with several incumbents in states the Republican presidential candidate just won. This year, they have none at all. (They do have three such seats coming up in 2024, which will be a major challenge, but that’s a problem for another time.) Meanwhile, there are two GOP-held seats in states Biden narrowly won, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, on the ballot.

But that’s likely too optimistic for Democrats. Another way to think about the map is that there are six true swing states with races this cycle. At least once in either 2016 or 2020, Trump either won or came quite close to winning Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, and New Hampshire. Nevada, meanwhile, trended right relative to the country between 2016 and 2020, though Biden still won it….Senate seats in these states are in great danger of slipping out of Democrats’ grasp.

But while Senate race outcomes have become more correlated with national partisanship, individual candidates do frequently overperform or underperform the overall trend. Democrats’ Senate chances likely hinge on whether enough of their candidates can escape this partisan gravity, arguing either that they’re not just another Democrat, or that their opponent is a uniquely unfit Republican.

Prokop shares some indepth analysis of races in the six states, and provides this chart to illustrate Democratic hopes for picking up Senate seats:

History, as well as current polls, indicate that Democrats are facing an unusually tough combination of Biden’s lagging approvals numbers and a deteriorating party image. As Prokop writes, Democratic hopes require that “unique dynamics among candidates in individual races break in their favor.”

At Politico, Burgess Everett spotlights Senator Elizabeth Warren’s ideas for Democratic midterm election strategy in the next few months: ““We’ve got nearly 200 days. If we don’t deliver, if we don’t get up off our rear ends and make it happen, we’re in real trouble,” the Massachusetts Democrat said in an interview in her office on Tuesday. “But if we do deliver, if we can get some tangible results that touch people’s lives, then we can go to the polls in November with our heads held high.”….She wrote a New York Times op-ed last week claiming Democrats are “headed toward big losses in the midterms” without delivering on their goals, sat for a lengthy Crooked Media podcast interview to push the party to make deals on issues it ran on in 2020, then did a rare three-network sweep on the Sunday shows….Warren is offering a prescription that’s in keeping with her policy-wonk identity during the 2020 primary. She wants anti-price gouging legislation and a ban on lawmaker stock trades on the Senate floor ASAP and quick work on a drug pricing and tax reform bill to wash away the bad taste of Build Back Better’s failure….she also wants President Joe Biden to cancel student loan debt, raise overtime pay and use executive actions to bring down drug prices. With the evenly divided Senate struggling to pass even a $10 billion coronavirus bill, it’s a tall order; still, Warren is pitching her revitalized agenda as a vital antidote to conservative framing of the election….She wants Democrats to put a bill allowing the Federal Trade Commission to investigate price gouging responsible for costly consumer goods and “dare the Republicans to vote against it. A clean, simple bill….Let’s put it to the Republicans. Do they care about price gouging from the perspective of helping the consumers?”

“As we assess the Senate map right now, we do currently see the Republicans as favorites to take the majority,” Kyle Kondik and J. Miles Coleman write at Sabato’s Crystal Ball. “This is because, of the most competitive seats — the ones we call Toss-ups — Republicans are defending just 1 (Pennsylvania) and Democrats are defending 3 (Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada). And while we’re holding at a Toss-up rating in all of these races, there are some indications that the Republicans are better-positioned in several if not all of them.” Kondik and Coleman provide a map reflecting the latest trends in public opinion:

Map 1: Crystal Ball Senate race ratings

Robert Kuttner takes a more optimistic view of Democratic midterm prospects for the Senate at The American Prospect: “Conversely, several Democratic pickups seem possible, notably the open seat in Pennsylvania, which Biden carried in 2020, as well as in Wisconsin, another Biden state, and where far-right incumbent Ron Johnson is a lightning rod for Democratic turnout. Elsewhere, Republicans face a divisive primary in Ohio, where Democrats have a strong candidate in Tim Ryan. In the open seat in North Carolina, a competitive state with a Democratic governor, Democratic chances depend on the degree of voter suppression. In Missouri, Republican incumbent Roy Blunt barely won the seat in 2016. Blunt is retiring, and the leading contender for the Republican nomination is Eric Greitens, who resigned as governor after accusations of abuse by a woman with whom he had an extramarital affair….The most serious at-risk incumbent is Raphael Warnock of Georgia, because of the degree of that state’s voter suppression. In New Hampshire, however, Sen. Maggie Hassan got lucky when her strongest potential opponent, Gov. Chris Sununu, decided not to make the race. In Arizona and Nevada, both blue-trending states, vulnerable incumbents Mark Kelly and Catherine Cortez Masto could well hold their seats given decent mobilization.”

From “Our commitment to Ukraine will be tested. Americans must stay strong” by Washington Post columnist Dionne, Jr.: “While the widespread solidarity with a people under siege is a refreshing break from cynicism and division, it’s easy to fly a flag and swoon over a fluent and courageous leader. It’s harder to stick with a commitment that will entail spending billions of dollars on behalf of a faraway people….Inevitably, some share of Americans will express sentiments that always arise about engagements abroad, even when no U.S. troops are involved: Why are we sending money to Kyiv and Odessa instead of Kansas City and Omaha?….The question should be taken seriously, and leaders of both parties will have to join in answering it convincingly. Remember how bipartisan support for the Marshall Plan after World War II was critical to its success. We and our allies must keep faith with Ukraine, even if the cost is high. The price of Russian success in subjugating Ukraine would be even higher, not only to Ukrainians but also to democratic countries everywhere. Aggression cannot be rewarded….Progressives are wary of throwing money at the Pentagon. They rightly argue that advocates of high levels of military spending typically turn around and insist on stringency when it comes to domestic needs, especially those of the least advantaged. Conservatives are often wary of foreign aid. And when they back big defense budgets, they never seem willing to increase taxes to pay for what they say we need….But in this moment of emergency for democracy, we must put aside our disharmony….The truth is that the United States is wealthy enough to do right by both Kyiv and Kansas City — and standing up for Ukraine now is an investment in a more secure future. The cost of bolstering Ukraine today pales in comparison to the price of allowing Putin’s treacherous adventure to succeed.”

Ed Burmilla shares some creative ideas for “How Biden Can Save Democracy From the GOP” at The Nation.

Experience indicates that, with few exceptions, midterm election outcomes are reliably linked to the incumbent President’s approval rate. Noting that “Biden’s approval rating has plummeted among younger voters more than among any other group. Sanctimonious lectures about the obligation to Vote Blue No Matter Who seem unlikely to motivate young people to the polls,” Burmilla advises:

“Federally reschedule marijuana and expunge federal marijuana-related convictions. Pitch it to timid moderates as boosting tax revenue and freeing up police resources to deal with serious crimes, if you must. The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service conservatively concluded that “the President cannot directly remove marijuana from control under federal controlled substances law, [but] he might order executive agencies to consider either altering the scheduling of marijuana or changing their enforcement approach.” Surely all the Ivy League brainpower that makes up modern Democratic administrations can construct a plausible case for doing even more than the CRS is willing to advise. This is low-hanging fruit; the House has passed a bill along these lines. Yet Biden remains coy. Younger voters and communities most directly affected by the woefully unequal ways “justice” is doled out in this country are overwhelmingly opposed to our antiquated federal drug laws. Democrats have no path to victory without those votes. This doesn’t even rise to the standard of a tough choice; it’s an easy call, and long overdue.”

Also, strengthening worker leverage in collective bargaining could help Biden’s image and the Democratic brand with all workers, including the young. As Burmilla writes,

“Keep pushing with the National Labor Relations Board. The recent organizing success in the service industry signals the direction of the wind among the younger, mostly non-college-educated voters we’ve heard so very much about Democrats’ struggling to woo. The NLRB just recently called for an end to employer-mandated anti-union sessions. Keep going. Do more than give Amazon warehouse workers a pat on the back for their organizing efforts. Redefine the Reagan-era Meyers Industries standard of “concerted activities” that gives workers the right under the National Labor Relations Act to “engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection.” Interpretations of this vague phrase were narrowed to employers’ advantage in 2019; the current administration has the same powers today that the Trump NLRB had then. Close the numerous and embarrassingly obvious loopholes in Duty to Bargain, the fundamental concept that gives workers input into decisions made on their behalf by an employer. Currently, management can shutter a workplace and relocate it by fiat simply by claiming that work at the new location “varies significantly from the work performed at the former plant.” Upsetting the Chamber of Commerce by revising employer wish-list fodder like that is a risk worth taking today. Anti-labor sentiment exists in the electorate, but how many voters for whom that is a deal-breaker are not already voting Republican?”

In addition,

“Act on student debt. You’re tired of hearing it. You’ve heard all the arguments. A president staring down a 34 percent youth approval rating needs to suck it up and do it already. We are creeping toward de facto loan forgiveness anyway with the repeatedly extended deadlines for restarting federal student loan repayment. Even the person Trump put in charge of the issue calls for loan forgiveness, admitting that the overwhelming majority of student debt is never, ever being repaid and serves only to burden and discipline borrowers. And even the noted Marxist-Leninists at… Forbes note that Biden not only has the power to do this unilaterally but there are multiple ways he could do it. A choice between standing before young voters cajoling “C’mon, vote, man!” and “Look at what I just did for you, like I promised… Now it’s on you,” is no choice at all.”

Burmilla writes in his conclusion, “This isn’t guaranteed to work. But the strategy in which the threat is enormous and the response is timid is—historically, even logically—bound to fail. If the stakes are as high as we are regularly told, leaving bold options on the table makes no sense.”

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

Are Democrats Fiddling While Rome Burns?

That’s been more or less my point of view and that of a few others like David Shor. It’s a positive step though that more and more left-leaning analysts are coming to share that viewpoint. The latest is G. Elliott Morris, as expressed in a recent commentary on his substack newsletter.

“[M]any Democrats do not seem to be taking the prospect of being locked out of power for the short- to medium-term seriously enough. If Republicans win back the House in 2022, take back the White House in 2024, and defend a very favorable map in 2026, Democrats may not regain full control of the federal government until 2028 or 2030. To quote [Ross] Douthat: “The political landscape after 2024, however, might look more like liberalism’s depictions of its Trump-era plight.”…

I have to say [that progressives’ current strategy]…. sounds like more of the same strategy that got Democrats where they are today. That is not to say [their policies are] not the normatively or morally right thing to do. If I had my way, Democrats (including Joe Manchin) would immediately expand universal child care, pass a public option for government-subsidized health care, and dramatically radicalize their approach to climate policy. As a bonus, most of those things in isolation are popular with a majority of voters.

Instead, my argument is that this unified progressive agenda does nothing to bring back into the fold the conservative working-class voters — mainly white, but growing significantly more Latino recently — who have abandoned the Democrats and caused the structural disadvantages that are dragging them down today. The party needs a renewed identity as a pro-worker party, not one where coastal elites control the party line on policy and messaging. And it needs to be substantially more diverse in its approach to talking to voters in different areas of the country; messages that work in young, diverse urban cores do not work in educated white suburbs or shrinking exurbs.”

Ah but how to do that? That is what every Democrat should be thinking hard about instead of acting like they live in a different country than they do.

I ran across an important distinction between two meanings of a term we hear a lot, and wrote about it at New York:

In an examination of the many, many statements Republican politicians are making these days about allegedly improper election procedures or voter conduct, the Washington Post’s Philip Bump made a crucial distinction that often gets lost in all the rhetoric:

“Maybe there was rampant fraud, maybe there wasn’t. But everyone could agree that the election was rigged against Trump by the very elites he was trying to disempower.

“One of the earliest articulations of this approach came from Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.). He argued that the law expanding voting access in Pennsylvania was unconstitutional, implying that this gave Biden an unfair advantage. The law, passed by Republicans, had gotten to the state’s Supreme Court, with the chief justice saying that even if the law was invalid, the votes weren’t — a preview of how many similar allegations about ‘rigging’ would play out.”

In other words, you didn’t have to believe illegal conduct had occurred to claim that an election was “rigged.” Some Trump backers were using the term pretty much the same way Bernie Sanders supporters deployed it against Hillary Clinton and the Establishment Democrats behind her during the 2016 primaries: an unfair advantage baked into election laws and procedures, not a violation of them. A big difference, of course, is that Sanders supporters were alleging the system discouraged maximum voter participation, while MAGA folks allege the opposite: that pro-Democratic “elites” made it too easy for people to vote legally.

Trump’s inner circle, of course, has used “rigged” in an ambiguous way. Sometimes he and his 2020 campaign staff alleged (but never substantiated) actual lawbreaking, as in the wild November 19, 2020, presser when Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell promoted all sorts of sinister, even global, conspiracy theories. But other times Team Trump simply complained about the rules themselves rather than their violation. That was the idea behind all the litigation over extended deadlines for casting ballots by mail. There was too much legal voting by the wrong people.

As Bump notes, a lot of Republicans nestle their rhetoric into that sweet spot between complaints about illegal voting and complaints about politically inconvenient (and thus unfair!) voting. A recent reelection ad from Alabama Governor Kay Ivy is a classic. “The fake news, Big Tech, and blue-state liberals” stole the election from Trump by sending “absentee ballots to everyone and their brother” and allowing “corrupt curbside voting,” says Ivey. Does that mean she is claiming that those ballots were cast illegally? Or is it just that these practices make it too easy for Democrats to vote, which is unfair to Republicans? She doesn’t tell us, and Bump thinks that’s deliberate:

“Curbside voting is ‘corrupt’ because … why? Because of fraud? Or because it’s an expansion of access in more Democratic areas? That it could be perceived as either, of course, is the point. If expanding the vote in general is treated as dishonest or illegal, as above, then you can simply wave your hand at any tool for making voting easier as something to be avoided at all costs.”

A trio of nuggets mined from Charlie Cook’s “The Concrete Theory of Politics” at The Cook Political Report:

Cook writes that “like freshly poured concrete, the perceptions, impressions, and convictions of voters in a given election cycle are soft and somewhat malleable at first but gradually get harder and harder over time. With seven months until the general elections, Democrats will soon need a chisel to chip away at them.”

Put another way, Democratic campaigns should never count on voters being forgetful or forgiving. Positive accomplishments often have a short shelf-life in politics. But negative attitudes harden over time. I used to sometimes think, “Don’t worry about this or that particular screw-up – It’s along way until November.” Wrong. Voters do sometimes forgive and move on. But counting on it is a losing strategy.

Cook also writes, “This column has repeatedly argued that the political impact of inflation is far greater than of unemployment, or for that matter, interest rates or any other economic indicator. Since 1948, U.S. unemployment has averaged just under 6 percent, so let’s define a low unemployment rate as under 4 percent and a high rate as over 8 percent—a difference of about 4 percentage points. Yet when it comes to inflation, basically 100 percent of Americans are affected. One could say that inflation is 25 times more powerful than unemployment. While high interest rates hurt a lot of people—anyone with a credit card or who is borrowing money to buy a house or car—inflation still affects more people, and by a greater amount. That is why politicians ignore the threat of inflation at their own peril, particularly if they are perceived as having ignored, denied, or exacerbated it.”

Don’t even fantasize that the low unemployment rate or Biden’s adept handling of the Ukraine crisis is going to win any new votes in November. Voters are being hammered every day at the gas pump, supermarket and loan office. They need to blame someone. The party that occupies the white house and holds the House speakership and Senate majority leader’s office provides an awfully-convenient scapegoat.

In his third nugget, Cook notes, “Voters tell pollsters that they are mad at Democrats for not delivering on their promises. The reality was that the promises were never realistic and were never deliverable.”

To paraphrase a Cook nugget from another column, “You don’t bet the ranch on a pair of threes,” as Biden and Shumer did with their multi-tentacled social infrastructure delusions of grandeur. Pelosi actually had the votes. But 48 dependable Democratic Senators is not a working majority. True, this is a lot easier to say with hindsight. But Dems need to learn the lesson to avoid this booby trap in the future.

Instead, Dems would do well to emulate the post-it note a consultant friend used to put on her computer: “Underpromise, overdeliver.”

A frequently-heard Democratic lament goes something like “Jeez, how come Democrats get blamed for everything, while Republicans get away with murder?” Perhaps it’s because Republicans have a very limited vision – tax cuts and deregulation for the rich, deliverable promises made in closed-door meetings with lobbyists. They throw in a paltry tax cut for workers sometimes. But that’s the essence of their agenda, coupled with a disciplined echo chamber that effectively slimes Democrats as inflation-prone socialist spendthrifts who diss white working-class voters.

There is just not enough time between now and November for Dems to correct this toxic branding. That’s a multi-year project. But it’s not like a majority of voters are in love with Republicans. Dems may be able to reduce the damage in November with concerted, unrelenting attacks on specific Republicans for their financial ‘improprieties.’ Corruption is their genetic malady – it’s always there. And not just individual candidates. A fierce ad campaign should expressly target their party as well. It would have the virtue of being truthful.

As is often the case, I noticed a public opinion data point and riffed on it at New York:

In the midst of a meditation on “Bidenism,” Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon Jr. offered this provocative thought: “Ultimately, I wonder whether we have simply entered an era in which presidents are always going to be unpopular.”

It really is worth thinking about. Joe Biden had a brief period of relative popularity for the first few months of his presidency, but his job-approval rating went underwater last summer and seems to have stabilized in the low 40s. Donald Trump never reached 46 percent in his job-approval ratings, according to the FiveThirtyEight averages, and for the most part stayed about where Biden is today. Barack Obama struggled to stay popular even though he took office in 2008 with what looked like a strong popular mandate. According to Gallup (the best source for comparing presidential approval ratings over time), from March 2010 until March 2016, Obama’s approval rating was regularly below 50 percent, except for a brief season of relative popularity felicitously centered on the 2012 elections. His average Gallup approval rating was 47.9 percent, the lowest since Jimmy Carter’s presidency. George W. Bush’s average rating was just a bit higher at 49.7 percent, though that’s misleading; the insane spike in approval he got immediately after 9/11 (reaching 90 percent) skewed his numbers.

 In the 21st century, then, presidents have indeed not been very popular compared with their late-20th-century predecessors. Gallup averages show Bill Clinton at 55.1 percent, George H.W. Bush at 60.9 percent, and Ronald Reagan at 52.8 percent.

Why are presidents becoming more unpopular? Polarization is one obvious factor; partisans increasingly dislike opposing-party presidents regardless of who they are or what they actually do in office. But as Bacon points out, presidents like Biden (and Trump and, arguably, Obama and George W. Bush) also suffered from intraparty rifts:

“The parties are increasingly divided internally. So the wing of the party that lost the primary — for the Democrats today, that’s younger and more progressive voters — might never be fully satisfied with a president from the same party but opposite wing.”

There is a silver lining to that particular problem. Partisans who aren’t happy with their party’s president may still vote for their team in a midterm:

“Biden’s support has plunged among all demographic groups, including Democrats, Black voters and voters under 40. But those three groups in particular don’t include a lot of conservatives. It is possible that many voters who are lukewarm about Biden will ultimately still vote Democratic.”

And, for that matter, they may vote for Biden in 2024 if he runs again, especially if his opponent is Trump or some other MAGA demagogue like Ron DeSantis. Trump punched above his favorability numbers against the marginally less unpopular Hillary Clinton in 2016 and modestly overperformed his approval ratings in 2020.

But there’s another anchor dragging down presidential popularity: Self-identified independents have regularly disliked both Trump and Biden more than the public at large has. As long as they are (relatively speaking) disengaged from politics and mistrustful toward politicians, independents may rarely if ever find a president they can wholeheartedly favor, even if conditions in the country are sunny.

And if conditions are perceived as cloudy to stormy, as they are right now (despite low unemployment, high economic growth, and a world in which American troops are not — thus far — deeply entangled in a foreign war), no president is going to be surfing a wave of high approval. There may be, as Bacon notes, specific things about Biden that have disappointed some Democrats and a lot of independents while enraging Republicans. But in general, being unpopular could now just be a part of the job.