Alan I. Abramowitz explains “Why Voter Suppression Probably Won’t Work” at Sabato’s Crystal Ball:

“Former President Trump and his political allies continue to push baseless allegations of widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election more than a year after Joe Biden’s inauguration. Largely in response to those allegations, Republican state legislatures around the country have enacted dozens of laws intended to tighten identification requirements, limit access to absentee voting, reduce the time period for early in-person voting, and limit the use of drop boxes for absentee voting. Democrats have responded to these new laws by proposing legislation in Congress to override these laws but have failed to pass new voting rights laws due to unified Republican opposition and the unwillingness of 2 Democratic senators to modify the filibuster rule in that chamber.

An important question raised by both these new laws and Democratic efforts to override them is just how effective such voter suppression laws would be in reducing voter turnout among Democratic-leaning voter groups. In an earlier article in the Crystal Ball, I examined the impact of expanded absentee voting on the 2020 election. I concluded that increased use of absentee voting had only a small impact on turnout and no effect at all on the Democratic margin in the 2020 presidential election. In this article, I expand my focus to look at the effects of other voting procedures that Republicans have targeted, including increased availability of early in-person voting, use of drop boxes for absentee voting, and stricter identification requirements for absentee and in-person.[1]

The results reinforce the findings of my previous research. These voting rules had only minor effects on turnout and no effect at all on the Democratic margin in the presidential election.”

Analysing data from the 2016 and 2020 elections, Abramowitz notes further,

Turnout of eligible voters increased in every state and the District of Columbia between 2016 and 2020, with an average increase of just over 7 percentage points. The turnout of roughly 2/3rds of eligible voters in 2020 was the highest in any presidential election in over a century. The percentage of voters casting their ballots before Election Day also increased dramatically as many states adopted policies to encourage both early in-person voting and mail or absentee voting in response to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. However, there was considerable variability in the policies adopted by the states regarding both early in-person and absentee voting as well as the use of drop boxes and voter ID requirements.

Abramowitz highlights two voting reforms that did have a beneficial effect on voter turnout:

“However, after controlling for 2016 turnout, the data show that states that mailed absentee ballots directly to voters had a significantly higher turnout in 2020 than other states. Similarly, states that allowed the use of drop boxes for absentee voting had significantly higher turnout than those that required voters to put their absentee ballots in the mail. Finally, early in-person voting had a small negative impact on turnout but this effect was not statistically significant….It should be emphasized that although some of these effects on turnout are statistically significant, all of them are quite small — no greater than 2 or 3 percentage points.”

Who turns out to vote in state and congressional districts will shape the outcome of the midterm elections, and the incumbent President’s party usually loses seats. Here and there, however, Democrats can take advantage of divisions in state and local Republican groups. In the 2020-21 U.S. Senate elections in Georgia, for example, the GOP was damaged by internecine bickering amplified by Trump in combination with run-off rules that helped Democrats. In the runoff elections of January 5th, 2021, “Both elections saw significant turnout by Black voters, who overwhelmingly support Democrats. Just 8% fewer Black voters turned out for the runoffs, compared with an 11% decline among white voters,” according to according to an analysis by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock were elected to the U.S. Senate by margins of 1.2 percent and 2.0 percent respectively.

In his conclusion, Abramowitz writes that “efforts by Republican-controlled state legislatures to suppress turnout by Democratic-leaning voter groups by imposing restrictions on absentee voting, early in-person voting, and use of drop boxes or by requiring that voters present photo identification in order to vote are unlikely to bear fruit. Such efforts could even backfire by angering voters who are the targets of these efforts and by causing left-leaning voting rights groups to increase their voter registration and GOTV efforts.”

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

Well, I see a bit of improvement (link below), but I don’t think he’s there yet. My latest at The Liberal Patriot:

“It’s been widely noted that Democrats’ biggest problem is voters’ thirst for a return to normalcy which they don’t believe that Democrats have delivered. The biggest problems here are the economy and the covid pandemic neither of which have returned to normal in voters’ eyes.

That is certainly what Democrats should be concentrating on most.

But there are other important aspects of American society where normality still seems far away and provide additional headwinds for Democrats as they approach the 2022 elections. One such area is rising violent crime where voters are quite dissatisfied with Democrats’ performance. According to a recent NBC poll, Republicans are favored over Democrats on the crime issue by 22 points. In a December Ipsos/ABC poll, Biden’s approval rating on crime was a dismal 36 percent with 61 percent disapproving. And just 11 percent in a January Pew poll said they were very confident that Biden can “effectively handle law enforcement and criminal justice issues”.

Joe Biden is visiting New York City and Eric Adams this Thursday. He could learn a few things from Adams. To begin with, Biden could stop paying attention to the voices within his party that urge him not to talk tough and be tough on crime. Adams knows that those voices do not represent “normie voters”, especially working class normie voters, especially black, Hispanic and other nonwhite working class normie voters. So Adams has not been afraid to put public safety front and center in his political appeals and call out affluent professionals who think nonwhite and working class communities can do with less policing. He believes that this is what his constituencies want.”

Read the rest at TLP!

Politico Playbook covered the current terrain well:

“President JOE BIDEN travels to New York City today for a pair of events on crime policy with Mayor ERIC ADAMS. Two years ago, if Democrats knew their next president would be meeting with an ex-cop mayor of New York at the NYPD’s Manhattan headquarters to discuss “historic levels of funding for cities and states to put more cops on the beat,” it would have been a big surprise…..

[O]outrage over white police officers abusing and killing unarmed Black Americans sparked a fierce backlash against cops, especially among progressives, and birthed the “defund the police” movement, which was embraced by a surprisingly wide spectrum of Democrats.

You don’t hear that slogan much anymore. So what happened to make it safe for Biden to reorient the Democratic Party’s positioning on crime?

Top Dems argue it was several big things:

— Reality: Crime, especially homicide, has spiked in cities across the country. Black mayors in big progressive-dominated cities like San Francisco (LONDON BREED) and Chicago (LORI LIGHTFOOT ) have been more vocal about the problem than well-known Washington Dems who are now playing catch-up. The Adams race was catalytic.

“Adams becoming mayor of one of the most liberal cities in America shifted the politics,” said one high-ranking Democrat. “He captured it the right way: It’s a false choice to pit civil rights against public safety.”

— Justice: High-profile prosecutions of white cops charged with abuse or murder, such as Minneapolis police officer DEREK CHAUVIN, showed the legal system could work. Still, the tension between advocates of criminal justice reform, which crashed in Congress, and advocates of cracking down on violent crime remains.

“Democrats don’t want to be robbed while pumping their gas or to live in fear,” a former Biden administration official told Playbook. “The White House just needs to make sure the violent crime conversation does not over take the police reform conversation because they are two different things. I believe they are sensitive to that dynamic.”

— Personnel: Biden is surrounded at the top levels of the White House by an older generation of advisers who have long been wary of the leftward shift on crime and policing. BRUCE REED, for example, has been working on the politics of crime since the 1990s. They are often pushing on an open door when it comes to Biden.

— The Dem strategist rebellion: A cottage industry of Democratic polling experts has emerged over the last two years to warn the party of the dangers of mishandling the issue of crime. RUY TEIXEIRA, one of the main anti-defund voices, pointed us to something he wrote last summer:

“Initially dismissed as simply an artifact of the Covid shutdown that was being vastly exaggerated by Fox News and the like for their nefarious purposes, it is now apparent that the spike in violent crime is quite real and that voters are very, very concerned about it. According to recent data from the Democratic-oriented Navigator Research, more Americans overall, including among independents and Hispanics, now believe violent crime is a ‘major crisis’ than believe that about the coronavirus pandemic or any other area of concern. … Moreover, majorities of even Democrats now believe violent crime is a major crisis and concerns are sky-high among black voters (70 percent say it’s a major crisis).

“The public response leans heavily in the direction of more policing, not less, countering the defund the police approach that was promulgated by many on the Democratic left and still holds considerable sway in those quarters.”

Back then, Teixeira’s view was seen as heretical among his party’s leaders. Today it’s close to conventional wisdom.”

Of course, there are dissenters from this take on the left of the party. One of the more thoughtful ones is from the Post’s Greg Sargent.

But perhaps we an all agree this is a real problem, not just the fevered fantasy of Fox News!

Stef W. Knight and Andrew Solender report that “Democrats snag redistricting” at Axios, and note that “Proposed maps released for New York last Sunday would knock out half of the state’s House Republicans, while giving Democrats as many as three more seats.’ In addition, “The newly enacted Illinois maps create two more blue seats, eliminating two Republican-leaning districts. Both states will lose one seat this decade because of their relatively slow population growth” and “Democrats also managed to draw favorable lines in New Mexico and Oregon, giving themselves a chance to pick up two additional seats from those states.” Further, “Democratic governors are also flexing their veto muscles in key states, with the potential to ward off Republican gerrymandering efforts in states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Kansas.” Also, “North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper used his own veto powers to block efforts by Republican state lawmakers to delay primary elections while the state Supreme Court considers the new GOP-enacted maps,”…. In Louisiana, the official redistricting process is just getting started, but Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards could block any Republican plan that fails to add a second Black majority district. Knight and Solender also report that Democrats won favorable court rulings in four states AL, NC, OH and PA. The arrticle quotes, Kelly Ward Burton, president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, who said “We’ve been, for years, running this comprehensive plan and really pushing to think about redistricting in this holistic way. And what you are seeing are the receipts of that strategy.”

At FiveThirtyEight, Alex Samuels and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux chew on some possible strategies for Democrats to address Republican framing of ‘culture war’ issues, and write: “So what can Democrats do in response?”….They could unravel some of the misinformation out there, reframing conversations in ways that are both truthful and potentially beneficial to them electorally. With abortion, that could mean talking about it as an issue that’s fundamentally about women’s power and autonomy. And on critical race theory,….that might look like them providing evidence on what these bans in schools really mean for public school curricula. For example, over the next several years, executive orders like the one Youngkin issued are likely to lead to teachers getting reprimanded for doing their jobs. (Youngkin, for his part, already implemented a tip line for parents to report “inherently divisive practices,” like teaching critical race theory, in schools.) So if Democrats can condemn those offenses while also reframing public discourse on those issues, public opinion — and the terms of how these debates are framed — may later be on their side….Alternatively, Democrats could coalesce around a completely different message that energizes their own base “rather than getting stuck talking about critical race theory — which is something that animates the right, and just isn’t really an issue on the left,” Arora said. Because of increasing partisan polarization, he said, it’s unlikely Republican voters’ opinion on this issue will change unless elites in their own circles say otherwise, so it may be prudent for Democrats to focus on where they can unify their own base instead….Regardless of the choice Democrats make, though, experts said that telling voters their fears and concerns about these issues aren’t real is the worst of both worlds. After all, insisting that the focus on critical race theory is just fake news will only alienate the people who believe it’s not — and it won’t do much to convince Democratic voters that they should care about the underlying issues either.” Whatever else Democratic candidates say, they should keep repeating that  Republicans use the politics of distraction to try and hide their failure to initiate any laws that actually help working families.

Adam Woillner’s “Biden is (finally) stringing together some political wins. Can it last?” at CNN Politics provides an impressive checklist Democrats can share with potential swing voters, including:

“(1) The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Friday that the US economy had added 467,000 jobs in January, well above what had been forecast.

2) Covid-19 cases nationally are down 38% from last week, according to Johns Hopkins University, while hospitalizations are down 16%. (Deaths were 7% higher, but there are signs that number is plateauing.)

3) A successful US counterterrorism raid in Syria that was months in the making resulted in the death of a top ISIS leader.

4) And on top of all that, Biden kick-started the process of filling the upcoming vacancy on the Supreme Court.

Plus, the week was marked by infighting for the President’s opposition, with the Republican National Committee voting to censure two of the party’s most outspoken critics of former President Donald Trump: Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. The RNC also received swift blowback for referring to the events of January 6, 2021, as “legitimate political discourse.” OK, it’s just a week. But it’s a damn good week, and if Democrats don’t toot their own horn, who will?

It didn’t get much national attention, but a dog that did not bark in California was significant, as I explained at New York:

The relatively disappointing legislative results the Democratic trifecta in Washington has produced is attributable in no small part to the obstructive power of the Senate filibuster in a chamber split 50-50 between the two parties. But sometimes a lack of partisan power cannot explain progressive policy failures. Few states are more reliably Democratic than California. Democrats hold solid vetoproof supermajorities in both Houses of the California legislature, and the latest decennial redistricting process (conducted by an independent commission) shouldn’t change that any time soon. And vetoes are rarely necessary, since the governor has been a Democrat since Arnold Schwarzenegger left office in 2011. Any thought that a post-2020 backlash against Democratic rule might upset the Golden State party status quo died with the decisive September 2021 defeat of a ballot initiative aimed at removing Governor Gavin Newsom from office.

Yet California lawmakers have chronically failed to fulfill pledges to achieve the most cherished policy goal of the state’s progressive activists: creating a state-financed universal health-care system. It’s happened again this year with the demise of a single-payer bill without so much as a vote in the lower chamber of the legislature, the California Assembly.

Single-payer health care is part of the California Democratic State Platform, and the state party’s Progressive Caucus has threatened to withhold endorsements from legislators who didn’t support it. It was backed by Newsom when he was elected in 2018, and by Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon this year. Like the measure that passed the California Senate in 2017 but died in the Assembly, the current bill, AB 1400, is all dessert and no green beans: it prospectively bans private health insurance and sets up a public single-payer system but puts off enactment the tax revenues (somewhere between $314 billion and $390 billion annually, according to legislative analysts) to pay for the new benefits.

Yet AB 1400’s principal sponsor, San Jose legislator Ash Kalra, yanked the bill earlier this week, arguing that he was far short of the votes needed to enact it and didn’t want to put his colleagues on the spot with a recorded vote.

Newsom didn’t comment on the situation. Rendon pushed the blame onto Kalra. Progressives organizations — most notably the California Nurses Association, which has made enactment of single-payer health care its major priority — were very unhappy with the outcome, the latest in a number of major disappointments on this subject in California and elsewhere. The CNA blasted Kalra by name in a statement, saying, “Nurses are especially outraged that Kalra chose to just give up on patients across the state.”

So why does this keep happening? Progressives who consider single-payer a no-brainer substantively point to the enormous corporate lobbying apparatus opposing this or similar universal-health-care legislation, as CalMatters notes:

“The influential California Chamber of Commerce, which represents business interests in the state, labeled AB 1400 a ‘job killer’ shortly after it was reintroduced in January, indicating it would be a top priority to defeat. Its lobbying campaign — joined by dozens of insurers, industry groups and the associations representing doctors and hospitals — included social media advertisements and a letter to members denouncing the “crippling tax increases” that would be needed to pay for the system.”

But it’s this last issue — taxes — that probably best explains the reluctance of Democratic legislators to put their money where their mouths are on single-payer. Some argue passing a bill like AB 1400 without including the taxes necessary to implement it is simply irresponsible. Others fear a tax revolt that could revive the moribund California Republican Party. That is particularly true on the brink of a midterm election in which the GOP may have the wind at its back across the nation, possibly extending all the way to the West Coast.

In any event, Democratic legislators who did not publicly express support for the legislation will brace themselves for possible primary challenges, while Newsom, who is up for reelection next year, will need to make clearer what he will and won’t support and how hard he’ll fight for health-care reform when it comes back up, as it most definitely will. While remaining mostly silent about AB 1400, Newsom has given a lot of attention to his own proposals to expand the state’s Medicaid program to include undocumented immigrants and others excluded from the current health-care system.

The whole brouhaha helps explain why single-payer health care is not seriously being discussed in Washington, and why progressives with a clear and fixed vision of the kind of society Democrats ought to support are so often disappointed.

“Although Donald Trump has hovered over American politics since leaving office, most voters saw him as yesterday’s news,” E. J. Dionne, Jr. writes in his Washington Post column. “Now, he’s very much today’s news, and — thanks to the accelerating pace of the House’s Jan. 6 inquiry — tomorrow’s. This should change the trajectory of this year’s midterm election politics.”

Dionne adds, “Democrats did well in 2018 and 2020, when a significant share of the electorate thought the survival of our democracy was on the ballot. Democrats need to put democracy on the ballot again this year.” Further, Dionne notes,

At Vox Sean Illing interviews Dan Pfeiffer, President Obama’s White House communications director and co-host of the podcast Pod Save America. Illing notes that “Pfeiffer’s a sharp political observer, but he’s also spent a lot of time thinking about something he calls the “Democratic messaging deficit.” Some  excerpts from Pfeiffer’s responses pertaining to how Democrats use media: “Our party tends to think the press will do our job for us. We think they’re going to communicate our message. But it’s our responsibility to get the message, or the news, from Joe Biden’s lips or Nancy Pelosi’s lips to the voters’ ears. And that’s not going to happen organically. It has to happen through paid advertising, through social content we generate, through progressive media, and there has been very little effort to adjust our communication strategy. We didn’t have to do this in the Trump years because Trump dominated the conversation and he made the case against himself all the time, and that was sufficient to win elections….The Republicans have spent decades building up a massive, ideologically based media apparatus. We think about it as Fox News, but it’s not just Fox News. It is Breitbart, Gateway Pundit, and Daily Caller. And then there’s talk radio, which has been around for a long time and is still incredibly powerful in a lot of places. And then there’s an entire Facebook-centric digital army led by the likes of Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino that dictates the four corners of the political conversation and drowns out Democratic messaging. They have a giant army and we have just a couple people shooting spitballs to try to keep up, and we’re getting clobbered on it….Democrats can still win elections in that environment. I know that because we just did it in 2020, and in 2018. But we are competing with one hand tied behind our back when we do it….The other thing is, I think we’ve spent too much time demonizing Fox News for its propaganda. There’s this visceral reaction from a lot of people in our donor community. They don’t want to be labeled propagandists in that way. Which is why you see Democratic billionaires buying the Atlantic and Time magazine and not trying to build a non-racist, more honest, better version of Breitbart, or a Democratic Fox News, or whatever that would look like….Some of that is because Democratic progressive talk radio in the early part of the century, with Air America, didn’t really work. For a certain set of donors, that was a formative experience. The key difference is that Republican donors view their media operations more as political investments than as profit engines. Pick a digital right-wing outlet that started in the last 10 years and there’s a Republican billionaire behind it.”

On Monday, I noted the solid worker rights record of Judge J. Michelle Childs, who is reportedly on President Biden’s short list of potential nominees for the U.S. Supreme Court. Another potential nominee on the short list, Ketanji Brown Jackson, also merits a mention as a strong supporter of worker rights, as Mark Joseph Stern reports at Slate: “Ketanji Brown Jackson may sit at the top of President Joe Biden’s Supreme Court short list, but until she gets the nod, she’ll keep plugging away at her current gig: a judge on the nation’s “second highest court,” the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. This court has long served as a springboard to SCOTUS, which may be one reason Biden elevated Jackson to it in June. While Jackson authored myriad opinions during her eight years as a trial court judge, she had not written a single opinion for the D.C. Circuit—until Tuesday, when she made her debut in AFL-CIO v. Federal Labor Relations Authority. The case emerged from a sharp dispute between the Trump administration and organized labor over the rights of federal unions to negotiate their working conditions. And in her lucid, concise opinion, Jackson delivered an unqualified win to union rights….On the district court, Jackson exhibited a deep understanding of labor law, as well as a refreshing lack of antipathy toward unions (all too common among her Trump-appointed colleagues). At this inflection point for labor, as millions of Americans demand better working conditions and fight the decline of unions, she brings important expertise to the bench. Biden vowed to be the most pro-union president ever, and placing Jackson on the Supreme Court would certainly help to cement that legacy.”

Jeff Hauser and Max Moran explain “What Biden’s Message Should Be” at Democracy: A Journal o Ideas: “Our organization, the Revolving Door Project, has spent the last several months collaborating with polling firm Data For Progress to poll-testing a potential message for the White House to pursue, and researching the policy tools it would need to carry out a corresponding agenda. (Data For Progress has provided research and polling assistance, but the views in this article reflect only the authors’ opinions. The Revolving Door Project is a watchdog group focused on corporate influence over the federal executive branch.)….Put simply, our analysis show that Biden is in desperate need of a villain, and what that should translate into is a corporate crackdown. Biden needs to take the fight to the elite villains who are screwing the American people. He needs to tell the public who the villains are, and he needs to fight them on the people’s behalf. And the best villains available today, on both policy and politics, are predatory megafirms whose abuses harm the public….As President, Biden has unique powers that could let him generate conflict on his terms—federal investigation, prosecution, regulation, and more. These policy tools are also powerful messaging opportunities….Here, then, is the challenge for Biden: He needs villains whom he can credibly identify to the public as his adversaries and then pursue under longstanding law. He, and frontline Democrats down-ballot, need to know and believe they will be well-liked for pursuing these villains. Corporate and ultrarich lawbreakers fill that need….Our polling finds voters agree with the following statements: “Wealthy people and corporations are regularly not punished for breaking the law” and “The criminal justice system unfairly targets poor people over rich people,” by margins of +67 and +48 percentage points respectively. Majorities of Democrats, Independents, and Republicans all agreed with both sentiments. Voters supported providing more funding to federal agencies which investigate corporate lawbreaking by a margin of +49 percentage points, again with strong net support even from Republicans. These results square with other polling showing support for policies like higher taxes on the wealthy and forcing fossil fuel companies to pay for the costs of climate change adaptation.”

Hauser and Moran continue: “Democrats don’t like to hear this, but to many voters, this is a genuinely open question. We Democrats sometimes like to flatter ourselves by saying we’re “the party of labor” in America. But most of the party’s actions haven’t supported that claim for at least three decades—longer than most Millennials have been alive. Since the 1980s, Democrats and Republicans have both willingly enabled laissez-faire deregulation, corporate concentration, tax cuts for the wealthy, race-to-the-bottom trade pacts, and other hallmarks of our neoliberal age. There’s a reason many people feel that Democratic and Republican politicians are the same kind of people in different-colored ties: On far too many economic issues, they have been….This means that neither party is necessarily set up to capitalize on this populist fervor. However, only one party has been trying to in recent years—and it’s not the Democrats. Every high-profile Republican right now wants to attack the “elite.” Insurrectionist Senator Josh Hawley wrote a book railing against Big Tech, onetime establishment robot Senator Marco Rubio supported unionizing Amazon’s warehouse employees (although only to punish the firm’s alleged “wokeness”), and Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance has gone from hedge fund investor to decrying global trade pacts. Donald Trump attacked free trade agreements and wealthy “globalists” in 2016, and voters both considered him the most liberal Republican candidate in recent history, and preferred his message on the economy two months out from the election….Unfortunately, phony populism still trumps no populism at all. Any politician invoking populism with any success then gets to define who is and isn’t part of “the people,” and describe what does and doesn’t make the elite “elite.” To trump Republicans at their own game, Democrats can instead name the actual elite as their villains: CEOs, wealthy heirs, and everyone else at the top of the socioeconomic ladder who’ve pulled it up behind them. But doing so will require some hard looks in the mirror….Biden’s milquetoast messaging also lacks any narrative propulsion. If the White House does not provide political reporters with conflict, reporters will naturally look for conflict elsewhere. For example, zeroing in, as they have, on Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema  as they (particularly the former) continue to hold the President’s legislative agenda hostage to their corporatist whims….People like to see their President fighting for them, and the media want to cover such fights. When the deadly virus is no longer Biden’s go-to villain, abusive mega-corporations and the ultra-wealthy will still be around. The post-New Deal executive branch was built for cracking down on economic abuses of power—abuses that include pharmaceutical companies hoarding vaccine know-how developed through government funding….Biden’s rhetoric should instead be about fighting against big corporate malefactors on behalf of the average American. Our own polling indicates enormous support for the public policy departments Biden can use to make enemies of corporate America, and strong support for a President willing to wield them. The Department of Labor polled with a net favorability of +28 percent.”

Anyone who has been around for a while probably understands how and why Supreme Court confirmations have become partisan, like everything else. But I provided a quick history lesson at New York:

Beneath the hilariously insincere conservative criticism of President Biden for “politicizing” the Supreme Court selection process by pledging to name the Court’s first Black woman is a very different reality: Both political parties fear a “rogue” justice who will align herself against the “team” responsible for her nomination. This concern is much stronger among Republicans, who feel a number of GOP-appointed jurists betrayed them in the past. These grievances were a principal reason for conservatives’ appreciation of Donald Trump’s tightly controlled, highly transactional system for choosing Supreme Court members.

The biggest betrayal of all came on June 29, 1992, when a Republican Party that had already come under the control of the anti-abortion movement was shocked at the decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Expected to deliver the long-awaited overturning of Roe v. Wade, the Court instead gave the central holding of Roe a lease on another three decades of life, with all five justices who upheld abortion rights having been appointed by Republican presidents. One of those five, Reagan appointee Anthony Kennedy, frustrated Republicans off and on for another quarter-century and earned the eternal enmity of cultural conservatives with authorship of the majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, creating a federally established right to same-sex marriage. The biggest favor Kennedy did for his party was to retire when it controlled the White House, allowing Trump to nominate former Kennedy clerk Brett Kavanaugh, a safely ideological successor.

It’s telling that of the five Judases who handed down Casey, two (Justices Kennedy and Sandra Day O’Connor) were appointed by Mr. Conservative himself, Ronald Reagan, while another (David Souter) was appointed by Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush. A fourth apostate (John Paul Stevens) was appointed by Gerald Ford, and a fifth (Harry Blackmun) was appointed by Richard Nixon.

Blackmun wrote the main opinion in Roe v. Wade, but that’s not even the most striking example of a Republican-appointed justice who went rogue. That would be Chief Justice Earl Warren, who presided over the Court as it handed down multiple famous decisions promoting civil rights and civil liberties. Conservatives despised and denounced Warren’s jurisprudence for decades. Yet this appointee of Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower had been a highly partisan Republican politician before becoming chief justice. He was Thomas Dewey’s running mate in 1948, and before being elected governor of California in 1942, he was chairman of the state GOP and a member of the anti-Asian nativist group Native Sons of the Golden West. Most famously, as governor during World War II, Warren championed the internment of around 100,000 Japanese Americans, the majority of them U.S. citizens. He was not a very likely prospect to become the most famously progressive chief justice in the Court’s history. That’s how it goes with lifetime appointments to the federal bench: Teamwork cannot be taken for granted. Another of Ike’s appointees to the Court, William Brennan, built a reputation even more liberal than Warren’s.

Thanks to the Republican control of the presidency for 44 of the 77 years since World War II and some vagaries of luck (Democrat Jimmy Carter had no Supreme Court openings to fill, whereas Donald Trump had three), Democrats have had fewer opportunities to be “betrayed” by Court appointees. Truman appointee Sherman Minton, another former politician (he had been a Democratic senator from Indiana) became a leading advocate of judicial restraint. JFK’s sole appointee, Byron “Whizzer” White, was one of the original dissenters in Roe v. Wade (and was still around to dissent in Casey). In 2008, Democratic presidential aspirant Bill Richardson cited White as his favorite justice, and it damaged Richardson’s campaign significantly.

In any event, the partisan anger spurred by all these apostates is pretty good evidence that the idea of a “politicized” process for selecting Supreme Court justices is neither new nor newly unpopular. The long-term trend is in favor of more careful vetting to ensure “betrayals” don’t happen, with Republicans insisting on conformity as much as Democrats. No “team” likes a player who runs the wrong way.

From “What Message Should Biden Use in the Midterms? Blaming Republicans can only get you so far. The president needs to embrace his bipartisan successes and lay out a plan for more” by Bill Scher at The Washington Monthly:

In the 2020 presidential primaries, progressives scoffed at Biden’s repeated odes to bipartisanship. After he won the nomination and general election, some of those critics grudgingly acknowledged that his positioning was smart politics, at least for 2020. Following Biden’s January presser, The New Republic’s Alex Shephard argued that while “there was a political argument for indulging in this kind of fanciful talk” in 2020 when voters craved “a return to normalcy,” believing that Republicans would wake from “their fever-dreams and suddenly Congress would start working again” was “a theory that had no basis in reality.” Shephard praised Biden for slamming Republican obstructionism because “acknowledging the failure of bipartisanship is crucial to righting an administration that has, in recent months, gone badly off the rails.”

One problem with Shephard’s argument is that voters still want a return to normalcy. They want the pandemic to lift. They want prices to drop. And they want politicians to compromise.

In December, a poll from The Economist/YouGov found that 55 percent of voters want a congressperson who “compromises to get things done,” while 45 percent want one who “sticks to their principles, no matter what.” Well, you might say that’s just a slim majority, and appealing to the mushy middle by selling compromise won’t help energize the Democratic base. However, that majority is fueled by Democrats and liberals, as 76 percent of each camp takes the pro-compromise view. They are mostly joined by moderates (63 percent) and suburbanites (58 percent). The opponents of compromise are largely Republicans (35 percent) and conservatives (32 percent).

This is not a fluke result. Various forms of the “compromise” question have been polled in the past 12 years, and almost every time—regardless of which party holds the most power in Washington—a majority of Democrats supports compromisers and a majority of Republicans does not.

Granted, as the political scientist John Sides explained in The Washington Post back in 2019, just because people support compromise “in the abstract” does not mean they will all readily “agree to any specific compromise.” In turn, upon taking control of the Senate and the White House in January 2020, Democrats understandably proceeded on the notion that the quality of policies they delivered mattered more than parliamentary procedures and roll call vote tallies. The Democratic push to roll back the filibuster this winter did not, in and of itself, put the party at odds with its compromise-friendly base; a January Economist/YouGov poll found 76 percent of Democrats (and 54 percent of all voters) believe that the filibuster does not “promote compromise” but instead “impede[s] passing the legislation.”

But now that filibuster reform has fizzled, Democrats must run on what they achieved. As Biden noted, that largely rests on the “two real big ones”: the partisan American Rescue Plan Act and the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. In selling that record, Biden can either treat the infrastructure bill as a mere exception to the Republican obstructionist rule, which means Democrats must be kept in power if anything else is to come from Congress. Or he can tout the infrastructure package—a compromise measure that is also popular—as the strongest evidence that he got Washington to work again. With that, Biden can argue that if Congress is going to keep compromising and enact more popular bills, the current balance of power in Washington should be kept.

At a time when Biden’s job approval numbers are in the low 40s and Republicans beat Democrats in generic congressional ballot polls—on top of the fact that midterms typically go horribly for the president’s party—for Democrats to run on a strictly partisan message at odds with Biden’s declared goals of bipartisanship and compromise is a hell of a bet.

Biden can make a better choice. When he declared victory in November 2020, he said, “The refusal of Democrats and Republicans to cooperate with one another is not due to some mysterious force beyond our control. It’s a decision. It’s a choice we make … And I believe that this is part of the mandate from the American people. They want us to cooperate. That’s the choice I’ll make.” Biden can now say he delivered on that mandate, not just by working with Republicans to pass the infrastructure bill, but also to avoid defaulting on America’s debt, to aid military veterans, and to ban imported Chinese goods made with forced Uyghur labor. All are bipartisan achievements that have often been ignored, not just by the media but also by Democrats reluctant to share the spotlight with their opposition. Yet the 117th Congress may not be done with bipartisanship: Talks between the two parties are currently under way to address election integrity and help America better compete with China.

Of course, Presidents Biden and Obama were both right to always stand for more bipartisanship. To do otherwise is to court disaster. Leadership is about bringing people together – building bridges, not walls. it’s unfair that Democrats are more frequently held accountable for failed bipartisanship. It’s as if no one expects Republicans to take any bipartisan initiatives, and so they don’t. But that’s the way it is.

On the whole, Democrats have been more open to bipartisanship than have Republicans. There are still “Blue Dogs,” but no “Red Dogs” in congress. If you had to pick only two words to explain the failure of bipartisanship in current American politics, you couldn’t do much better than “Mitch McConnell.” And yes, it would be good if Sens. Manchin and Sinema would once in a while criticize Republicans for their extremely weak track record of bipartisanship outreach. Regarding the need for getting more attention for Biden’s bipartisan successes, built-in media bias still gives conflict more coverage than cooperation.

Looking toward the midterm elections, Scher provides a good soundbite Democratic candidates ought to consider: “The strongest Democratic message is one grounded in reality: If you give Democrats control of Congress again, we will continue to work with Republicans to the greatest extent possible and will try to deliver for the American public on our own when necessary. But if you give Republicans control of Congress, you will empower Donald Trump, who will use his bullying tactics to prevent the Republican leadership from cooperating with us, and grind government to a halt.”

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

My attempt to create a meme to lead the Dems down the right path–my latest at The Liberal Patriot. We’ll see if it works.

“All across the Western world the working class is deserting the Left. Thomas Piketty and his colleagues among others have copiously documented this trend. The United States is no exception to this trend.

In the 2020 Presidential election, despite a slight improvement over 2016, Democrats still lost white working class (noncollege) voters in 2020 by 26 points (Catalist two party vote). Since 2012, nonwhite working class voters have shifted away from the Democrats by 18 margin points, with a particularly sharp shift in the last election and particularly among Hispanics. This latter development is particularly important since Democrats have hitherto comforted themselves that losses among the working class were just among whites, who they presume to be motivated by retrograde racial and cultural attitudes. That is no longer a tenable view.

Since the 2020 election, the situation has only worsened. Signs of continued slippage among working class voters were unmistakable in the 2021 elections, most notably among Hispanic and Asian working class voters. In the latest Monmouth poll, Biden’s approval rating among the multiracial working class was an abysmal 32 percent vs. 59 percent disapproval, compared to 52 percent approval among the college-educated.

therefore plausibly claim to represent its interests? And in raw electoral terms, worsening performance among working class voters makes the Democrats’ quest for political dominance essentially impossible, since the share of working class voters in the country is 70 percent larger than the share of college-educated voters.

To help remedy this situation, I suggest a simple test Democrats should be continually making on both their policies and rhetoric: What Would the Working Class Say? (WWWCS). This test is not so hard to do but it does entail getting outside of the liberal college-educated bubble so many Democrats live within, particularly as experienced on social media, in activist circles and within advocacy, nonprofit, media and academic institutions. Look at actual public opinion data—not as summarized by someone you know or something you read. Look at focus group reports. Talk to actual working class people—there are lots of them! Listen to your intuitions about how working class people would likely react to policies and rhetoric currently associated with the Democrats —not how you think they should react. Think of family members or people you grew up with who are working class. Try to get inside their heads. They are less ideological, more focused on material concerns, more likely to be struggling economically, less interested in cutting edge social issues, more patriotic and generally more culturally conservative. All this makes a difference.”

Read the whole thing at The Liberal Patriot…and subscribe!

When it comes time to fill a U. S. Supreme Court seat, there is always a lot of discussion about the implications for decisions that address racial and gender justice. That’s good. Those are always leading concerns for society. But rarely is there much discussion about the implications of potential nominees regarding worker rights, which affects employees of all races. It could be different this time. President Biden has said that he will nominate an African American woman to fill the high court seat being vacated by Justice Breyer, which is good news for Americans concerned about racial injustice and reproductive rights. This year, however, at least one of the potential ‘short list’ nominees also has a strong track record in support of worker rights. Judge J. Michelle Childs, who President Biden recently nominated to the Washington, D.C. Circuit Court, has also served as a commissioner on the South Carolina Workers’ Compensation Commission and a deputy director at the state Department of Labor. “Childs is a favorite of top Black Caucus members including Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) and G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.), according to two senior Democratic aides,” Nick Niedzwiadek reports at Politico.  It’s likely that all of the potential ‘short list’ nominees would be good on defending worker rights. And yes, Childs, at 56, is older than a couple other short-listers, including California Supreme Court Justice Leondra Kruger, 45 and D.C. Appeal Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, 51. But, if confirmed, Childs would probably serve for at least two decades. Childs, who has been called an “expert on employment law,” may be the potential nominee most feared by anti-labor conservatives, which is a plus, considering the steady erosion of unions since the Reagan Administration.

“A new justice will not dent the court’s majority of Republican-appointed justices,” as E. J. Dionne, Jr. observes in his Washington Post column. “But the coming weeks will provide an exceptional opportunity to underscore the imperative of fighting back against ideologues in robes. They are ready to do further damage to voting rights and to eviscerate the government’s ability to protect Americans through economic, labor, environmental and health regulations….It’s certainly true that the battle for a new justice provides short-term political advantages for Biden. His party has been broadly united on his picks for the judiciary up to now, so he has a good chance of a major victory after setbacks on voting rights and his social program….And in keeping his promise to name a Black woman to the court, Biden will rally core supporters even as Republicans embarrass themselves by criticizing Biden for identifying the race and gender of his future pick….It’s not a good look for the GOP, especially because the jurists on Biden’s shortlist have enormously impressive records. Don’t the Republicans have enough problems around race already?”

Amy Walter has some suggestions for “How to Survive a Wave Election” at The Cook Political Report, including: “2. Define your opponent early and often….Midterm elections are a referendum on the party in power. When things are going well, you ride that momentum. When things aren’t going well, you have to find a way to change the topic. You can’t suddenly make people care less about inflation or COVID. But, you can try to undercut the image of your opponent. Or to force them into a fight on policy/ideological turf that is more comfortable for you than them. “You are in a constant battle to keep the campaign off of the major narrative of the election,” another strategist told me. “Obviously, the easiest way to do this is to make it a character campaign, if your opponents background allows for that.” Even then, however, voters may be willing take a risk with a flawed challenger rather than sticking with an incumbent party they feel has lost its way. I remember talking to GOP campaigns back in 2006 who were flummoxed at how challenging it was to make any of their attacks on their Democratic opponents stick. Things that would have sunk their opponent in a previous cycle didn’t move the needle.” To chuck a related idea into the mix, Democrats should organize a special task force of their top oppo experts to focus on creative ways to deepen and exploit Republican divisions, which are already doing the GOP  damage in several states and congressional districts, thanks to Trump’s blundering.

At Mother Jones, Ryan Little and Ari Berman note, “During municipal elections in November, Georgia voters were 45 times more likely to have their mail ballot applications rejected—and ultimately not vote as a result—than in 2020. If that same rejection rate were extrapolated to the 2020 race, more than 38,000 votes would not have been cast in a presidential contest decided by just over 11,000 votes….In November 2021, Georgians who successfully obtained mail ballots were also twice as likely to have those ballots rejected once they were submitted compared to the previous year. If that were the case in 2020, about 31,000 fewer votes would have been cast in the presidential election….More than half of mail ballot applications were rejected because they arrived after the state’s newly imposed deadline to request them. In 2020, Georgia voters could request a mail ballot up until the Friday before Election Day; under the new law signed by Gov. Brian Kemp in March 2021, voters must place their requests no later than 11 days before the election, which voting rights advocates say is too early and burdensome for many voters….These rejections are having a disproportionate impact on Democratic-leaning constituencies. Black voters, who make up about a third of the electorate in Georgia, accounted for half of all late ballot application rejections, according to the voting rights group Fair Fight Action. Voters 18 to 29 made up just 2.76 percent of mail voters in 2021, but they constituted 15 percent of late ballot application rejections. Overall, four times as many Democratic voters requested mail ballots compared to Republicans, so an increase in rejections will particularly harm their party….An analysis by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in November 2021 found that rejected mail ballot applications had quadrupled compared to 2020.”