There is a sector of working class voters who can be persuaded to vote for Democrats in 2024 – but only if candidates understand how to win their support.
Saying that Dems need to “show up” in solidly GOP districts is a slogan, not a strategy. What Dems actually need to do is seriously evaluate their main strategic alternatives.
Democratic Political Strategy is Developed by College Educated Political Analysts Sitting in Front of Computers on College Campuses or Think Tank Offices. That’s Why the Strategies Don’t Work.
The American Establishment’s Betrayal of Democracy
The American Establishment’s Betrayal of Democracy The Fundamental but Generally Unacknowledged Cause of the Current Threat to America’s Democratic Institutions.
On one hand, 56 percent of those polled described Biden’s response as “not been tough enough” compared with 36 percent “about right” and 6 percent “too tough.” There were sharp partisan divisions on this question: 68 percent of Republicans said Biden’s response to the invasion was not tough enough, and 20 percent said it was about right. Fifty-three percent of Democrats said it was about right, and 43 percent said not tough enough. Independents were closer to Republicans than to Democrats: 64 percent not tough enough, 25 percent just right.
Conversely, the AP/NORC survey found that 45 percent of respondents said they were very or extremely “concerned about Russia using nuclnd Dems)ear weapons that target the United States,” 30 percent said they were “somewhat concerned,” and 25 percent said they were “not very or not at all concerned.”
The potential pitfalls in the American response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine range from provoking Vladimir Putin to further escalation to diminishing the United States in the eyes of Russia and the rest of the world. The specific dangers confronting policymakers stem from serious decisions taken in a crisis climate, but the pressures on those making the decisions are tied to the competing psychological dispositions of Republicans and Democrats described above, and they are tied as well to discrepancies between men and women in toleration of the use of force.
is to compare how men and women weigh the choice between backing down and conflict. Women are nearly indifferent between an unsuccessful use of force in which nothing is gained, and their country’s leader backs down after threatening force. Men, by contrast, would much rather see force used unsuccessfully than see the country’s reputation endangered through backing down. Approval among men is fully 36 percent higher for a use of force that achieves nothing and in which over 4,000 U.S. soldiers die than when the U.S. president backs down and the same objective outcome is achieved without loss of life.
The gender gap on the use of force has deep roots. A 2012 study, “Men and Women’s Support for War: Accounting for the gender gap in public opinion,” found consistently higher support among men than women for military intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, concluding that the evidence shows a “consistent ‘gender gap’ over time and across countries.” According to the study, “it would be rare to find scholarship in which gender differences on the question of using military force are not present.”
The author, Ben Clements, cites “psychological differences between women and men, with the former laying greater value on group relationships and the use of cooperation and compromise, rather than aggressive means, to resolve disputes.”
It should be self-evident that the last thing this country needs at a time when the world has drawn closer to the possibility of nuclear war than it has for decades is a leader like Donald Trump, the apotheosis of aggressive, intemperate white manhood, who at the same time unreservedly seeks the admiration of Vladimir Putin and other authoritarians.
The difficult task facing Biden is finding the correct balance between restraint and authority, between harm avoidance and belligerent opposition. The situation in Ukraine has the potential to damage Biden’s already weakened political stature or to provide him with an opportunity to regain some of the support he had when first elected.
As Edsall concluse, “American wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan have been costly for incumbent American presidents, and Biden faces an uphill struggle reversing that trend, even as the United States faces the most dangerous set of circumstances in its recent history.”
In “Democrats take aim at Big Oil in lead up to midterms,” Zack Budryk reports at The Hill that “Democrats are looking to pin the blame on oil companies for high gas prices, potentially signaling an election-year goal of refocusing scrutiny on an issue that has dogged President Biden’s approval ratings….Two different House committee chairs have called for oil CEOs to testify on disparities between falling oil prices and consumer gas prices. While three companies rebuffed House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), several others are set to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday….“While American families struggle to shoulder the burden of rising gas prices from Putin’s war on Ukraine, fossil fuel companies are not doing enough to relieve pain at the pump, instead lining their pockets with one hand while sitting on the other,” Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.) and investigations subcommittee Chairwoman Dianna DeGette (D-Colo.) said in a statement Tuesday….A bicameral bill sponsored by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Rep.Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) would tax major oil companies on windfall profits and provide rebates to Americans from the proceeds….“What we’ve seen as a result of the Russian invasion is a lot of speculation and cartel behavior that has dramatically raised oil and gas prices,” Whitehouse said at a press conference Wednesday afternoon. “Note that the costs did not change, there has not been a similar spike in cost to match the spike in price. … This is a price increase of choice on the part of the big oil companies.”
In other oil and midterm politics news, Kevin Liptak reports “Biden considering releasing 1 million barrels of oil per day from strategic reserves” at CNN Politics. As Liptak writes, “President Joe Biden is weighing releasing a record amount of oil from US reserves as high gas prices persist. A plan being considered involves releasing around 1 million barrels per day from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for the coming months, a person familiar with the deliberations says….The announcement could come as soon as Thursday, when Biden is scheduled to deliver remarks from the White House on gas prices….Biden earlier in the month announced a coordinated release of oil from the reserves in conjunction with other nations. He also released around 60 million barrels in November, which he said at the time was the largest release from the reserve in US history.” However, “Tapping the reserve — the stockpile of 600 million barrels of crude oil stored in underground salt caverns in Louisiana and Texas — generally has only a limited effect on gas prices because of how much oil can be released at a time, but would act as a political sign that Biden is continuing to confront the problem.” Liptak also reports that the governors of CA, GA and ME are pushing economic relief packages for gas consumers.
“Could Trump blow the midterms for the GOP?” Ryan Lizza, Rachel Bade and Eugene Daniels mull over the possibilities at Politico Playbook. Among their comments: “One of the few ways Republicans could potentially blow this electoral equivalent of a layup is if former President DONALD TRUMP suddenly returns to center court….Trump is not toxic for his party everywhere. Republicans did better than expected in House races in 2020 because of the high MAGA turnout Trump generated. But he’s deadly for the GOP in the decisive suburbs at the heart of 2022 politics. Recall how Virginia’s GLENN YOUNGKIN treated Trump like Voldemort, concerned that even uttering his name would repel potential supporters in NoVa….There is a debate among Democrats about whether there is any strategic value in making Trump the center of the election. The moderate Dems barely clinging to their seats insist they have no interest in talking about him. The make-2022-about-Trump faction insists that the only way to recreate the Dem surges of 2018 and 2020 is to recreate the Trump-saturated political environment of those years when right-leaning suburbanites flocked to the Dems….But that debate may be moot….This week’s convergence of 2020 election subversion news and wild Trump comments is a harbinger of things to come. The Jan. 6 committee’s major reports, when released this year, will force every candidate to discuss Trump and 2020. And as the midterms approach, Trump, who has big bets placed on dozens of candidates up and down ballots across America, will be a central player in campaigns everywhere, whether either party likes it or not.”
Some cogent observations from “The Media Is Not Ready for the Midterms” by Molly Jong-Fast at The Atlantic: “The Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan, who has written extensively on this topic, has recommended the “truth sandwich”—the tactic by which a reporter properly quotes a lie by surrounding it with truth. Her advice for the media as the midterms approach? “The mainstream press (the reality-based press, to distinguish them from the right-wing press) should focus on what’s good for citizens and not the horse race aspect of the midterms, and they should call out lies clearly.” She added that she’d also like to see “more focus on voting rights and gerrymandering.”….When I reached out to Jon Allsop, the author of Columbia Journalism Review’s newsletter, his response was focused on the press not two-siding midterms stories: “Mainstream media should cover the midterms like they should cover any political story at the moment—by avoiding treating the two parties as equal and opposite ‘sides’ when they aren’t, especially when it comes to the preservation of U.S. democracy. I think that many reporters and editors have woken up to the Republican assault on democracy in recent years—and others didn’t need waking up in the first place—but good, urgent coverage of the threat still tends to get siloed away from the horse-race punditry, which still often seems to start from the premise that the track is even. We need to see more joined-up thinking here and that will require focus, which will be a particular challenge amid a news cycle dominated by war and with so many other important stories to cover.”….Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at NYU, told me that the media should “redraw the baseline for election-year conflict. Instead of just assuming it’s Democrats vs. Republicans in a familiar battle for control of government, start with a more urgent contest: those from both parties who still abide by the norms of American democracy vs. those who have demonstrated they do not—the Trump loyalists in the GOP, the Stop the Steal movement, the crazed conspiracy mongers, the Christian nationalists. Redirect the bulk of your reporting resources to this newer conflict, while keeping a careful eye on the ‘state of the race’ between the two parties.”….The idea that media should have a prodemocracy bias is a good one. It would help us focus on politicians straying from democratic norms, and highlight antidemocratic plays like disenfranchising voters.”
I was totally persuaded by William Galston and Elaine Kamarck’s 1989 study, The Politics of Evasion, when they wrote, “Too many Americans have come to see the party as inattentive to their economic interests, indifferent if not hostile to their moral sentiments, and inattentive in defense of their national security.” At the time, I too was tired of winning only one presidential election over two decades, and averaging 42 percent of the vote.
In their new report, The New Politics of Evasion, I share their analysis on many of the same problems that keep the Democratic Party “in the grip of myths that block progress toward victory.” Count me in as an ally when they write now that Democrats have taken “stances on fraught social issues … that repel a majority of Americans,” and have failed to defuse the oft-repeated contention that they want to “defund the police.” Count me in when they write that “social, cultural, and religious issues” are at least as real as “economic considerations” in determining how people vote. And they are right that imposing a “politics of identity” on Blacks, Hispanics, and Asian Americans put Democrats out of touch with the priorities of these populations: ending the COVID crisis, providing affordable health care, and reopening schools, getting higher pay, and checking big corporate power.
I thank Galston and Kamarck for raising these issues. But unfortunately, you don’t get any further help from them on removing the blinders that keep you from seeing America.
“The Democrats are bleeding voters, particularly working class voters of all races. There are lots of reasons for this and I’ve written about some of them. One important throughline here is what we might call the common sense problem. As in, Democrats seem to have abandoned it in many areas.
This helps explain why there hasn’t been a ”Trump disenchantment dividend” for the Democrats as the former President’s popularity has fallen and for that matter a “nutty GOP politicians” dividend as various Republican pols do and say fairly crazy things. Voters just aren’t sure the Democrats are that well-grounded either.
Awhile ago, I tried to codify some of voters’ common sense views and values into ten short statements to illustrate how Democrats are losing the plot relative to the median voter. I’ll go through some of them here with the aid of some new data demonstrating how widely this common sense is embraced by ordinary Americans in contrast to their rejection by woke liberal activists and some politicians associated with the Democratic party.”
1. Equality of opportunity is a fundamental American principle; equality of outcome is not.Americans love equal opportunity! But lately more and more Democrats have embraced, implicitly or explicitly, the idea that we must equalize outcomes as well by emphasizing policies that promote “equity” as opposed to simple equality.
But Americans’ common sense is that opportunities should be made equal if they are not and then let people achieve as they will. There is no guarantee, nor should there be, that everyone will wind up in the same place.
The statement above was tested in the very liberal state of Massachusetts by pollster Louis DiNatale who was interested in my ten statements and added them to some of his polls. (I should note that my statements were simply tested as is, rather than reworded for survey purposes, but the results are still quite interesting I think). On this statement, DiNatale found that Massachusetts voters overall agreed with the statement by 61 percent to 16 percent. Republican voters agreed with the statement by 72-12, but so did independent voters by 65-13 and even Democrats by 56-17. White voters endorsed the statement by 63-12 but so did black voters by 56-17.
There just isn’t much of a constituency for equality of outcomes.
2. America is not perfect but it is good to be patriotic and proud of the country. Americans know their country isn’t perfect but they are proud of it anyway. And they don’t view it as fundamentally flawed and tarnished in the way so many progressive activists do. Rather they would echo Bill Clinton’s assertion that “there is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America”
In the Massachusetts poll, the statement above drew lopsided 66-25 support, including 60 percent or more of all racial groups. This is consistent with data collected by the More in Common group. Their data separated out a group they termed “progressive activists” who were 8 percent of the population (but punch far above their weight in the Democratic party) and are described as “deeply concerned with issues concerning equity, fairness, and America’s direction today. They tend to be more secular, cosmopolitan, and highly engaged with social media”.
These progressive activists’ attitude toward their own country departs greatly from not just that of average Americans but from pretty much any other group you might care to name, including average nonwhite Americans. Black, Hispanic and Asian Americans, in fact, are highly likely to be proud to be Americans and highly likely to say they would still choose to live in America if they could choose to live anywhere in the world. In contrast, progressive activists are loathe to express these sentiments For example, just 34 percent of progressive activists say they are “proud to be American” compared to 62 percent of Asians, 70 percent of blacks, and 76 percent of Hispanics.
Patriotism is a fundamental American value that some parts of the Democratic party now seem reluctant to embrace. That’s a problem.
3. Discrimination and racism are bad but they are not the cause of all disparities in American society. It’s truly amazing the extent to which Democrats have become associated with the view that disparities in American society can only be attributed to oppression and discrimination, particularly when it comes to race. No other explanation need apply.
But this defies common sense and is not the way normal voters see it, including normal nonwhite voters. In the Massachusetts poll, the statement above generates overwhelming 72 to 20 percent agreement, with 63 percent of blacks, 70 percent of Asians and 65 percent of Hispanics concurring.
It may be easy to convince left-leaning academics and progressive activists that the mere existence of disparities is proof of discrimination and racism. But the American people are a harder sell.
4. No one is completely without bias but calling all white people racists who benefit from white privilege and American society a white supremacist society is not right or fair. The blanket characterization of all whites as racists because of “systemic racism” from which they benefit, regardless of their individual conduct, is a commonplace in Democratic activist circles, as is the idea that white supremacy is a fair characterization of contemporary American society. These dubious assertions, however, fail the common sense test among actual voters.
In the Massachusetts poll, the statement above, that these assertions are not right or fair, received 59-21 agreement overall, with even black voters and Democrats more than 2:1 in agreement. This is likely another case where the common understanding in Democratic activist circles is not the common sense of ordinary Americans or even of the groups these activists claim they are representing.
5, Racial achievement gaps are bad and we should seek to close them. However, they are not due just to racism and standards of high achievement should be maintained for people of all races. Democrats are becoming increasingly associated with an approach to schooling that seems anti-meritocratic, oriented away from standardized tests, gifted and talented programs and test-in elite schools, generally in the name of achieving racial equity. This has led them to a de-emphasis on high and universal academic achievement standards, an approach popular in progressive education circles but not among ordinary voters, including nonwhites.
In the Massachusetts poll, the above statement received 73-19 support, including 3:1 support among black voters. Progressive educators may think differently, but the common sense of voters is that the road to high academic achievement is through high standards and hard work, not the lowering of bars.
6. Police misconduct and brutality against people of any race is wrong and we need to reform police conduct and recruitment. More and better policing is needed for public safety and that cannot be provided by “defunding the police”. Nowhere is the departure of Democrats from the common sense of ordinary voters more evident than on the issue of crime and policing. Democrats are associated with a wave of progressive public prosecutors who seem quite hesitant about keeping criminals off the street, even as a spike in violent crimes like murders and carjacking sweeps the nation. This is twinned to a climate of tolerance and non-prosecution for lesser crimes that is degrading the quality of life in many cities under Democratic control.
The fact is that ordinary voters hate crime and want something done about it. They’re not particularly impressed by disembodied talk about the availability of guns that does not include enforcing the law against the criminals who actually use these guns. Nor do they respond well to assurances that progressive approaches to law enforcement that include less law enforcement will—eventually—work even as crime surges and the quality of life deteriorates.
Reflecting these views, voters in the Massachusetts poll endorsed the statement above by 63-26. This included 64-24 support among whites, but also 2:1 support among blacks, Hispanics and Asians. Ordinary voters don’t want the crime issue racialized, they simply want it stopped and they know you need cops to do it.
Like with the other statements discussed above, it could be argued that this statement is too easy to agree with and is just common sense. But if it’s just common sense, why do so many Democrats have trouble saying these things? The fact that they do explains a great deal about the Democrats’ current woes.
At The Washington Post, columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. provides some useful Democratic messaging points, and writes, “By offering Jackson at least a respectful hearing, Republican senators could have taken a step toward easing the legitimacy crisis the Supreme Court confronts because of the GOP’s relentless packing of the nation’s highest judicial body. Rejecting extreme partisanship might have lowered the political temperature around the court, to the benefit of its 6-to-3 conservative majority….To turn the nomination of the first Black woman to the court into an occasion for raising racial themes Republicans plan to use in the 2022 and 2024 election campaigns was to kick away the chance the party had to show that it means what it says in declaring its faithfulness to “colorblindness.”….What conservatives don’t want to acknowledge is how much damage they have already done by taking control of the court through the raw exercise of political power. Beginning with the blockade of Merrick Garland’s nomination in 2016 and culminating in the rushed confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett just days before the 2020 election, Republicans have sent the message that not the law, not deliberation, but partisan manipulation is at the heart of the court’s decision-making….The court’s conservative justices have reinforced this view with rulings on voting rights, gerrymanders and campaign finance that are tilted to the benefit of Republicans, moneyed interests and voter suppression.”
Adam Woolner flags “The issue that could be the sleeping giant of the 2022 elections” at CNN Politics: “The political world’s attention in recent days has largely been centered on the Russia-Ukraine crisis and Ketanji Brown Jackson’s historic Supreme Court nomination, the outcomes of which will have major implications for the future of Joe Biden’s presidency. But there’s another issue simmering below the surface at the moment that could also go a long way in shaping the political environment heading into this year’s midterm elections: abortion….After the US Supreme Court allowed a restrictive abortion law in Texas to remain in place, saying that abortion providers could still challenge the law in federal court, and took up a case on another in Mississippi — which is a direct challenge to the 1973 landmark Roe v. Wade ruling — Republican-controlled states have felt emboldened to pursue their own limitations on the procedure.’ Woolner notes that four states recently acted on this “hot button issue,” and adds, “In each of these cases, partisans took action to appease their bases. But the politics of abortion — which hasn’t been a major issue in recent elections — would become much more nationalized and complicated if the US Supreme Court scales back or overturns Roe v. Wade later this year….If Roe v. Wade is overturned and abortion laws are left to the states, the issue would quickly shoot up on voters’ priority list. In an otherwise treacherous political environment, Democrats see an opening on the issue: A recent CNN poll found that 69% of Americans said they do not want to see the Supreme Court completely overturn Roe v. Wade.”
Aida Chavez reports that “Progressives Want to Put Medicare for All Back on the Table” at The Nation, and observes that “after dominating the 2020 presidential primary, the idea of establishing a national, single-payer health insurance program has all but disappeared from mainstream political discourse….Congressional progressives are trying to revitalize the conversation. The House Oversight Committee is holding a hearing next week on Medicare for All, the first to examine paths to universal health care since 2019—and House Democrats’ third-ever on the issue. The hearing is being led by Chair Carolyn Maloney and Representative Cori Bush, and will be stacked with members of the Squad, including Representatives Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Jamaal Bowman….“I have fought tirelessly for policies to expand access to health coverage since I was first elected to Congress, including as a proud supporter of Medicare for All since its introduction,” Maloney told The Nation. Maloney is facing a crowded primary field this election season, including from Justice Democrats-backed candidate Rana Abdelhamid, and she has long touted her support for Medicare for All as a campaign plank….“As chairwoman of the Oversight Committee,” Maloney added, “I am holding this hearing to examine how the gaps in our current system threaten the health of the most vulnerable among us and how Congress can ensure that every person in this country has access to high-quality health care—no matter who they are. I am thankful to Congresswoman Cori Bush for her partnership in convening this hearing and for her leadership on behalf of patients across the country……..On the Senate side, Bernie Sanders is planning to reintroduce Medicare for All legislation in the coming days.” Opinion polling on health care reform issues is all over the place, depending on how questions are phrased.
In “Are Latinos Deserting the Democratic Party? Evidence from the Exit Polls” at Sabato’s Crystal Ball, Alan I. Abramowitz adds some clarity to understanding recent trends: “Recent election results have led some political strategists and pundits to suggest that the partisan allegiances of Latino voters in the U.S. may be shifting in the direction of the Republican Party. Exit poll results from the 2020 presidential election showed Donald Trump modestly increasing his share of the Latino vote even as his share of the national popular vote declined between 2016 and 2020. At the same time, results from some heavily Latino areas in South Florida and along the Texas-Mexico border showed a dramatic swing toward the GOP. More recently, one exit poll showed the Republican candidate winning a majority of the Latino vote in the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election, although a second exit poll showed the Democratic candidate winning a clear majority of the Latino vote….Solid support among Latino voters has long been seen as crucial to Democratic chances of winning elections in states like Florida, Texas, and Arizona and important in many other states in which the Latino share of the electorate is growing rapidly….Evidence from national and state exit polls shows that Latino support for Democratic presidential candidates has been quite variable in recent elections. Democratic margins have generally been much larger in elections with Democratic incumbents than in elections with Republican incumbents like 2020. This pattern of support among Latino voters also helps to explain variability in Democratic margins in Miami-Dade County in recent elections. From this perspective, the falloff in Democratic support in the 2020 presidential election may reflect the greater responsiveness of Latino voters than other types of voters to the effect of presidential incumbency rather than any long-term shift in the underlying partisan loyalties of these voters. It is not clear why Latino voters seem to be more responsive to the effects of presidential incumbency, but if this pattern holds again in 2024 and Joe Biden is running for a second term, we could see a rebound in Democratic support among Latino voters, although Biden’s approval rating in recent months has been fairly weak with Latinos….Going forward, Democrats may or may not have longer-term problems with Latino voters; however, it’s worth noting that the overall pattern of Latino presidential voting is more variable over time than the most recent couple of elections might indicate.”
The escalating use of the term “Republicans In Name Only” epithet and its evolving meaning has struck me for a while, so I wrote about it at New York.
Political party members accusing each other of insufficient fidelity to party goals or creeds is a very old tradition. But amid the ideological sorting out of the two major U.S. parties during the 20th century, the accusations of party heresy sharpened considerably.
This has been true for both parties. During the debates over the Iraq War and President George W. Bush’s policies, you often heard progressive Democrats complain about “DINOs” (Democrats in Name Only), “Vichy Democrats,” or “ConservaDems.” While ideological tensions remain in the Donkey Party, it’s now rare to see the kind of desire for excommunication that “DINO” implies. Yet it’s strong as ever in the Republican Party, where “RINO” has become an extraordinarily common epithet on conservative media and in GOP primaries.
But something very different seems to be happening right now: Instead of being a slur aimed at ideologically heterodox Republicans (who have already been hunted to near extinction), RINO increasingly means “disloyal to Donald Trump,” as Politico notes.
“While the RINO term has been employed in some form for more than 100 years, its meaning has shifted over time. In previous decades, a Republican risked getting tagged as a RINO for supporting tax increases, gun control or abortion rights. Today, in a reflection of the GOP’s murkier ideological grounding in the Trump era, it’s a term reserved almost exclusively for lack of fealty to Trump.”
The ideology of the GOP has quickly migrated from traditional Goldwater-Reagan-Bush conservatism to the peculiar right-wing populism of the MAGA cause, in which Trump’s cult of personality is a crucial ingredient. And Trump himself is perhaps the most promiscuous purveyor of the RINO smear: He generally deploys it toward Republicans who have rejected or even failed to adopt his 2020 “stolen election” mythology. Sometimes the term is deployed against people with stronger conservative credentials than the 45th president himself.
Consider Georgia governor Brian Kemp, whom Trump referred to just last week as “a horrendous RINO who has betrayed the people of Georgia, and betrayed Republican voters [while] repeatedly [surrendering] to Stacey Abrams and the Radical Left.” In fact, the only substantive issue on which Kemp has differed from Trump was on the preferred speed of his state’s emergence from COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, when Kemp wanted to move faster than the federal government. As for election laws, Kemp was once known as a master vote suppressor, so his RINO-dom is solely a matter of refusing to follow Trump’s orders to purloin the 2020 election in Georgia.
Many members of Congress who have been labeled RINOs by Trump and his surrogates have also supported him on non-election-heist matters. According to FiveThirtyEight’s analysis of congressional support for Trump, the alleged queen of RINOs herself, Liz Cheney, voted with her tormentor 92.9 percent of the time during his presidency. Tom Rice of South Carolina, whom Trump called an “atrocious RINO” at a rally on March 12, voted with Trump 94.1 percent of the time. That hardly makes them latter-day Nelson Rockefellers. What Cheney and Rice have in common, of course, is a vote for Trump’s second impeachment after the January 6 insurrection.
Even Trump’s friends and close advisers haven’t been able to avoid the label. Last month, the former president called Senator Lindsey Graham, his on-again, off-again golfing buddy, a RINO for mildly criticizing Trump’s expressed willingness to pardon the January 6 insurrectionists if he regains the White House in 2024. Trump has even dismissed his former attorney general Bill Barr — one of the most thoroughgoing reactionaries around — as a RINO. Again, it’s due to Barr’s refusal to credit his 2020 conspiracy theories.
A new batch of suspected RINOs is identified every time a Republican primary candidate secures Trump’s endorsement against an intraparty opponent. What this really means is that being a “true Republican” now means being a Trump Republican, particularly on tough issues like the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s election as president. And “conservative” increasingly just means conserving Trump’s control over the GOP and restoring him to power. It’s been a startling change in perspective that I can’t imagine the movement conservatives of the not-so-distant past would accept.
Soaring turnout and big margins among young voters were central to the Democratic victories in the 2018 congressional and 2020 presidential elections. But with many young people expressing disenchantment with President Joe Biden‘s performance, preserving those advantages looms as one of the biggest challenges facing Democrats in the 2022 midterms.
There’s widespread concern among Democrats that turnout for young people this November could fall back from its gains in 2018 toward the meager levels that contributed to the party’s crushing losses in the 2014 and 2010 midterm elections….”If you accept the status quo with young people, it’s not going to go great,” says Democratic pollster Ben Tulchin. “Turnout is not going to be good.”……..”My stern warning to the Biden administration and Democrats is you have to take this seriously, because if we do go back to a 2010 or 2014 model where they really fall off it’s going to make it very difficult for us in November,” says Tulchin, who served as the pollster for Bernie Sanders during the 2020 primary campaign, when the senator from Vermont dominated Biden among younger voters.
….Inexorably, the balance of electoral power is shifting toward these younger generations. William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, told me that he projects about 17 million young people will turn 18 between the 2020 and 2024 elections, and that fully 49% of them will be kids of color. Simultaneously, more of the predominantly White baby boomers and members of the Silent Generation are aging out of the electorate.
….In the 2020 presidential election, exactly half of eligible voters younger than 30 cast ballots, according to a detailed study by CIRCLE (the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement), an institute at Tufts University that studies younger voters. That was still less than the number for older generations, but it constituted a huge jump from their 39% turnout rate in 2016. Youth turnout, the group found, did not decline in any state from 2016 through 2020 and multiple states saw double-digit increases — including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Nevada, states that keyed Biden’s victory.
It might be a good idea for Democrats to take a closer look at the Georgia elections of 2020 and the 2021 run-off for some clues. As Brownstein reports,
In no state was youth turnout more critical to recent Democratic gains than Georgia, where strong turnout by young people helped key both Biden’s narrow win in 2020 and the stunning twin Senate runoff victories in early 2021 that provided Democrats control of the chamber. This year, the state is facing closely contested races for both governor and Senate, with Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock seeking a full term and Abrams making her second bid for governor.
“The elevated youth turnout and the elevated youth registration and participation that we saw from ’16 to ’18 to ’20 is not magic,” says Nsé Ufot, chief executive officer of the New Georgia Project, a non-profit voter registration and mobilization group founded by Stacey Abrams. “It is absolutely a direct result of our investment and our labor and targeting that particular group.”
Ufot says a majority of the targets for the New Georgia Project’s turnout efforts in those contests will be voters younger than 35. Though many of those younger adults have been disappointed by the failure of Biden and congressional Democrats to deliver on many of their promises during those campaigns, she says, the group is confident it can mobilize a robust youth turnout anyway.
“We are not relying on enthusiasm (for Biden) at all,” she says. “We are relying on organizing, connecting the power of the vote to the things that young Georgians told us they are willing to fight for, that they are willing to take to the streets for.”
But not all states have Georgia’s tradition of Black activism, anchored in the experience of MLK’s voting rights movement. Many of today’s voting rights organizers based in Georgia were trained by King’s S.C.L.C. lieutenants and staff members, including James Orange, whose “blue crew” was instrumental in electing all of Atlanta’s Black mayors and members of congress, and Ella Mae Brayboy, whose mastery of voter registration rolls, regulations and turnout mechanics continue to influence Georgia’s GOTV. Sen. Warnock himself, who is up for re-election in November, is pastor at King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, which is likely the most politically-engaged congregation in the state.
Brownstein adds that “Some structural dynamics may help to sustain youth turnout this fall. Many experts note that the large youth turnout of 2018 and 2020 creates momentum for continued participation, because people who register and vote in one election are more likely to vote in the next. Over the past two elections, Democrats and nonpartisan groups have built a significant organizational infrastructure to engage more young voters, and those efforts are continuing through 2022.”
However, “Public opinion polls show that Biden’s troubles with young voters have persisted into his presidency. In the latest CNN national survey, just 40% of those aged 18-34 said they approved of his job performance, and fewer than 3 in 10 described him as a strong leader. Other polls, like last week’s Monmouth University survey, have registered similar weakness.”
Biden is surely aware of the oft-voiced suggestion that he and Democrats do something more substantial to reduce burdensome student debt, which Brownstein notes is a frequently-voiced concern of young voters. But that is a tricky issue. An Obama to Trump voter I know in one of Georgia’s conservative counties complains that he and his wife each worked multiple jobs to put their kids through college, and now Democrats are talking about free tuition for the current generation, which feels like a rip-off to his family. I didn’t have a good response at the time. But maybe it’s “at least your grandkids wouldn’t be putting a huge tuition loan burden on your kids.”
Brownstein concludes, “Young people turned out in huge numbers, basically they won the election” for Democrats, says Brandon. “And what have they seen delivered? That’s the issue. Unfortunately, like the public at large, all the stuff that has been delivered just doesn’t feel like it….Unless that changes for more young adults before November, Democrats may be left lamenting a lost opportunity — and facing the sort of depressed youth turnout that battered them so badly in 2014 and 2010.”
Alex Samuels explains why “Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Nomination May Not Be Enough To Turn Out Black Voters For Democrats” at FiveThirtyEight. An excerpt: “In February, political scientists Jaclyn Kaslovsky of Rice University and Andrew R. Stone of Washington University in St. Louis published a piece in The Washington Post about their research showing that Black Americans place a high value on what’s called “descriptive representation.” In other words, having someone who looks like them in a position of power — particularly in the judiciary — is very important to Black Americans….Kaslovsky told me one reason why Black Americans may want more Black people in positions of power is that they’ve been historically underrepresented in politics. “There’s research arguing that group consciousness matters for how people evaluate political institutions,” she said. “So, as Black Americans become more represented in the judiciary, they may feel like their voices are legitimated by that institution.”….What’s working in Biden’s favor is that polls suggest that Black voters really want Jackson to make it through the nomination process and that her appointment is motivating them ahead of what’s expected to be a grueling midterm cycle for Democrats. While surveys on midterm enthusiasm among Black Americans are generally sparse, at least one survey from Morning Consult/Politico shows that Black voters became more enthusiastic for the midterm elections in late February — right around the time Biden made Jackson’s nomination public. Other polls similarly show Black Americans’ eagerness to get Jackson through the nomination process. According to Navigator Research, 89 percent of Democratic voters and 88 percent of Black voters said they trusted Biden’s judgment on who should be the next Supreme Court justice. In fact, among all races and ethnic groups, Black voters were the most likely to say they would support the Senate’s confirmation of Jackson, at 71 percent; only 11 percent of Black voters said they would oppose the confirmation, for a net support of 60 percentage points. Asian American and Pacific Islander voters had the second-highest level of support for Jackson’s confirmation: 58 percent would support her confirmation, for a net support of 51 points.”….To be sure, Jackson’s nomination is pretty far away from the midterms, and there’s still plenty of time for voters to either forget Biden took this step orwarm up to him before November. As the Morning Consult/Politico poll shows, along with tracking polls from YouGov, Biden’s standing among Black Americans has the potential to rebound. But, as Reece told me, “Biden will have to rely on something else to motivate Black people come November. I’m not sure if Jackson’s nomination will be the thing that gets people out of their seats for a midterm election.”
Nick Hannauer’s “Democrats Need to Fix Rural Economies—and Get the Credit for It” at The American Prospect poses a pretty tough challenge. But what’s a great political party for, if not to meet great challenges? As Hannauer writes, “the political rupture that threatens to tear our nation apart is largely occurring along the urban/rural divide….Throughout rural America, once-vibrant factory towns have been impoverished and dismantled through the offshoring of manufacturing jobs. Local businesses have been struggling to compete against the concentrated buying power of national chains, while local workers have been forced to struggle to make ends meet as monopsony employers have relentlessly pushed down wages. Small and midsize farmers have been at the mercy of a handful of agribusiness giants with the power to dictate the crops to be sown, the livestock to be raised, and the price to be paid for them. Local tax bases have eroded, and with them the services, schools, infrastructure, and other public investments necessary to secure a prosperous future….At the median, rural workers now earn only 82 cents on every dollar earned by their urban counterparts, and as rural jobs grow more scarce and less diverse, rural workers have fewer opportunities to close the gap. Nationally, the U.S. workforce grew by 68 percent since 1975 while rural employment actually shrank by nearly a third. Between 2007 and 2018, just 11 percent of counties captured 9 out of every 10 new jobs, a massive concentration of employment and wage growth in a handful of deep-blue metros. In second-tier cities, small towns, and rural counties, the health and well-being of residents are being left behind.”
Hannauer continues, “If rural voters are angry, they have every right to be—and if they look at the relative wealth and good fortune of “urban elites” and blame their woes on Democratic policies, it’s not hard to understand why. Yes, there is massive and growing inequality within big blue cities too, but in the aggregate these booming cities are receiving nearly all the benefits of the information economy while rural America reliably gets none. Rural voters are angry, and lacking a more obvious villain they routinely punish Democrats, the party of the cities, at the polls. As the violent rhetoric surrounding the January 6th insurrection indicates, there’s a not insignificant number of Republicans who passionately believe that electoral defeat isn’t nearly punishment enough….In nearly every recent election cycle, Democratic candidates routinely receive millions more votes than Republican candidates for the House, the Senate, and the White House, and yet the Republican Party could plausibly establish a regime of minority rule (not to mention a stranglehold on the federal courts) for at least a generation to come. Beholden, both ideologically and financially, to corporate interests, Republican elected officials do little if anything to actually help their rural constituents. Instead, they nurture a politics of grievance. But given the failure of Democrats to offer a compelling alternative, grievance alone appears more than enough for Republicans to continue to secure the rural vote….President Biden and congressional Democrats have a frighteningly narrow window to persuade a small but electorally significant percentage of rural voters that only Democrats can and will serve their communities’ needs. To do this, Democrats need to aggressively run on rural revitalization as a centerpiece of their economic agenda in 2022, 2024, and beyond, while immediately using every policy tool at their disposal to begin the difficult work of reversing the extreme geographic inequality that the past 40 years of neoliberalism has wrought….Democrats don’t need to persuade a majority of rural voters, or even a lot of them. Just a few percentage points in a handful of swing states would be enough to block the Trumpist forces from seizing hegemonic minority rule. And that would also give Democrats the breathing space they need to do the hard work necessary to assure that the state of the union between urban and rural America is once again strong.”
In their post, “Notes on the State of Politics: March 24, 2022,” Kyle Kondik and J. Miles Coleman sketch one key aspect of the daunting challenge facing Democrats at state-level politics: “The Democrats do not control a single chamber in a state that Donald Trump won with the debatable exception of Alaska’s state House, where Republicans have a majority of members, but a coalition of Democrats, independents, and Republicans elected the chamber’s speaker. Meanwhile, Republicans hold both chambers in 6 Biden-won states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) and a single chamber in 2 others, Minnesota and Virginia, for a total of 14 Biden-state chambers. Overall, Republicans hold 61 chambers — 62 if one includes Nebraska’s technically nonpartisan but functionally Republican unicameral state legislature — while Democrats hold 36, with Alaska’s House not counted in either side’s tally.” They share this map:
Ruy Teixeira, co-editor of the Liberal Patriot, argues in an email that “the cultural left has managed to associate the Democratic Party with a series of views on crime, immigration, policing, free speech and of course race and gender that are quite far from those of the median voter. That’s a success for the cultural left but the hard reality is that it’s an electoral liability for the Democratic Party.”
Teixeira went on: “The current Democratic brand suffers from multiple deficiencies that make it somewhere between uncompelling and toxic to wide swathes of American voters who might potentially be their allies.”
In Teixeira’s view, many Democrats have fallen victim to what he calls the “Fox News Fallacy.”
“This is the idea,” Teixeira explained, “that if Fox News criticizes the Democrats for X, then there must be absolutely nothing to X and the job of Democrats is to assert that loudly and often.” For example, he wrote, “Take the issue of crime. 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.”
Edsall quotes a number of political scientists, who affirm Teixeira’s argument, including John Halpin, a co-editor of The Liberal Patriot, who adds,
The biggest problem ahead of 2022 midterms is that voters don’t think Biden and the Democrats are focused on the issues that matter most to them. If you look at the most recent Wall St. Journal poll, Democrats are currently suffering double-digit deficits compared to Republicans on perceptions about which party is best able to handle nearly all of the issues that matter most to voters: for example, rebuilding the economy (-13), getting inflation under control (-17), reducing crime (-20), and securing the border (-26). Democratic advantages on issues like education are also down considerably from just a few years ago.
Edsall also quotes Third Way Vice President Matt Bennett, who notes, “Of the 12 House Democratic freshmen who lost last cycle — on a ticket with a winning presidential candidate — all were seriously hurt by culture war attacks.”
Edsall shares the perspecive of one of the critics of this view, Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch, who observes,
party messaging largely remains dominated by reaction and fear rather than boldness. Those fears seem rooted in a panic that progressive values will be seen as less American — when the reality is that ideas like academic freedom, preventing censorship, and a belief in inquiry, including science, are the core beliefs of this nation. It’s past time for President Biden and other leaders of the Democratic Party to approve this message….The white working class is a much more diverse group than commentators from all sides tend to credit….I think the greatest cause of resentment is lack of educational and related career opportunities that have shut out the working class of all races. The Democrats are philosophically wired to expand these opportunities — through free community college and trade school, for example — yet have failed to make these a priority, ensuring a continued sense that Dems are now the party of self-enlightened degree holders looking down on them. That cycle can and must be broken.
Then there’s media critic Dan Froomkin, who calls ‘critical race theory’ a “phony issue….that serves as a stalking horse for inciting white grievance.” Froomkin adds, “I have been horrified at how credulously many political reporters have written about Republican lies — and how impressed they were at their alleged (but entirely unproven) effectiveness. They wrote about it as if it were a real problem, rather than an obvious, bad-faith attempt to manufacture white panic.”
A bright young Democratic left activist I know agrees, and argues that “the ‘culture wars are a distraction from the more important economic wars,” which is true. But that doesn’t make the problem go away.
As Edsall concludes, “What we can be sure of is that the Democrats can’t go on forever with this much of a gulf between what the majority of progressive party activists think the party should stand for and what the majority of Americans think it should.”
I am not so sure that support is as reliable as most Democrats assume. I see signs of erosion, particularly among black working class voters. I discuss and analyze the relevant data in my new post at The Liberal Patriot.
“It has been widely noted that the Hispanic vote was relatively poor for the Democrats in 2020. But that wasn’t the Democrats’ only disappointment among nonwhite voters. Democratic margins among black voters also declined by 7 points, though not by nearly as much as among Hispanics (16 points, Catalist two party vote). Moreover, while absolute turnout for black voters was up, as it was for almost all groups in a very high turnout election, turnout did not go up as much for black voters as for other groups, so relative turnout fell…..
This is a bit of a puzzle. Trump was widely and correctly viewed as a racist, a perception that was turbocharged by the Black Lives Matter protests over the summer. And the Democratic party and Biden were certainly all in on BLM, so you could hardly ask for an election where the profile of the racial justice issue was any higher. And yet….the expected surge in black support and turnout for Democrats failed to appear.
One possibility is that Democrats overestimated the salience of the racial justice issue, perhaps especially as it unfolded around the BLM movement. Black voters, particularly working class voters, do after all have other concerns rooted in material, kitchen-table concerns….
[B]lack voters are not a monolith and cannot be assumed to belong to the Democrats simply on the basis of racial justice advocacy and rhetoric. In the end, the loyalty of black voters depends crucially on the ability of the Democrats to provide material improvements in their lives, particularly for those in working class and poor communities.
This helps explain why the black shift toward Trump in 2020 wound up being heavily concentrated among black working class (noncollege) voters. A forthcoming States of Change detailed re-analysis of 2020 election data not only shows this pattern nationally but also indicates that black margin shifts toward Trump in key states from Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to Florida, Georgia and Nevada were driven entirely or overwhelmingly by black working class voters.
Having spent much of the week watching the runup to a crucial Senate vote on appropriations, I had to express at New York some serious misgivings about Chuck Schumer’s strategy and what it did to his party’s messaging:
For the record, I’m usually disinclined to promote the hoary “Democrats in Disarray” narrative whereby the Democratic Party is to blame for whatever nightmarish actions Republicans generally, or Donald Trump specifically, choose to pursue. That’s particularly true right now when Democrats have so little actual power and Republicans have so little interest in following laws and the Constitution, much less precedents for fair play and bipartisanship. So it really makes no sense to accuse the powerless minority party of “allowing” the assault on the federal government and the separation of powers being undertaken by the president, his OMB director Russ Vought, and his tech-bro sidekick Elon Musk. If congressional Republicans had even a shred of integrity or courage, Senate Democrats would not have been placed in the position this week of deciding whether it’s better to let the government shut down than to let it be gutted by Trump, Vought, and Musk.
Having said all that, Senate Democrats did have a strategic choice to make this week, and based on Chuck Schumer’s op-ed in the New York Times explaining his decision to get out of the way and let the House-passed spending bill come to the floor, he made it some time ago. Nothing in his series of rationalizations was new. If, indeed, “a shutdown would be the best distraction Donald Trump could ask for from his awful agenda,” while enabling the administration to exert even more unbridled power over federal programs and personnel, that was true a week ago or a month ago as well. So Schumer’s big mistake was leading Senate Democrats right up to the brink of a collision with the administration and the GOP, and then surrendering after drawing enormous attention to his party’s fecklessness.
This doesn’t just look bad and feel bad for Democrats demanding that their leaders do something to stop the Trump locomotive: It also gives the supreme bully in the White House incentive to keep bullying them, as Josh Marshall points out in his postmortem on the debacle:
“[P]eople who get hit and abused and take it tend to get hit and abused again and again. That’s all the more true with Donald Trump, a man who can only see the world through the prism of the dominating and the dominated. It is a great folly to imagine that such an abject acquiescence won’t drive him to up the ante.”
The reality is that this spending measure was the only leverage point congressional Democrats had this year (unless Republicans are stupid enough not to wrap the debt-limit increase the government must soon have in a budget reconciliation bill that cannot be filibustered). Everyone has known that since the new administration and the new Congress took office in January. If a government shutdown was intolerable, then Democrats should have taken it off the table long before the House voted on a CR. Punchbowl News got it right:
“Let’s be blunt here: Democrats picked a fight they couldn’t win and caved without getting anything in return. …
“Here’s the lessonfrom this episode: When you have no cards, fold them early.”
Instead, Democrats have taken a defeat and turned it into a debacle. House and Senate Democrats are divided from each other, and a majority of Senate Democrats are all but shaking their fists at their own leader, who did in fact lead them down a blind alley. While perhaps the federal courts will rein in the reign of terror presently underway in Washington (or perhaps they won’t), congressional Democrats must now become resigned to laying the groundwork for a midterm election that seems a long time away and hoping something is left of the edifice of a beneficent federal government built by their predecessors from the New Deal to the Great Society to Obamacare. There’s a good chance a decisive majority of the general public will eventually recoil from the misrule of the Trump administration and its supine allies in Congress and across the country. But at this point, elected Democrats are going to have to prove they should be trusted to lead the opposition.
