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.”

The pending retirement of Justice Stephen Breyer will give President Biden the rare opportunity for a Supreme Court nomination, and at New York I examined the lopsided record of recent opportunities to shape the Court.

Assuming President Joe Biden’s nominee to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer is confirmed, it will be only the fifth time that a Democratic president has added a member to the Court since the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson. That’s right — the roster of Democratic-nominated Supreme Court justices during the last ten presidencies is short: Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, by Bill Clinton; and Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, by Barack Obama. To date, these Democratic-nominated justices have served a total of 67 years on the Court. During the same time frame, there have been 15 Supreme Court justices nominated by Republican presidents, serving a total (to date) of 292 years.

This lopsided record is partially, of course, attributable to Republican success in presidential elections since 1968. And Obama nominee Merrick Garland’s non-confirmation was a matter of partisan malice; Mitch McConnell, who controlled the Senate at the time, denied him even a confirmation hearing. Other whiffs involved bad luck. In his one term as president, Donald Trump had the opportunity to name three justices (Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett). In his one term, George H.W. Bush named two justices. One of them, David Souter, served for 19 years. The other, Clarence Thomas, is still on the Court 13 years after Bush’s son left the White House. Yet Democrat Jimmy Carter had not a single Supreme Court appointment. Barring something unforeseen, Joe Biden should at least avoid that fate.

Opportunities to put new members on the Court are becoming rarer. One bipartisan trend in recent decades has been the nomination of younger jurists whose lifetime terms will presumably be longer. During the last ten presidencies, four justices ascended to the Court before reaching the age of 50. All of them (William Rehnquist, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett) were nominated by Republican presidents. Rehnquist was on the Court for 33 years. The other three are on the Court right now.

So Democrats have some catching up to do, and Biden knows he’d better get it right, not only by redeeming his pledge to place the first Black woman on the Court, but by choosing someone fully vetted and prepared to serve for a long, long time.

From “America Has Split, and It’s Now in ‘Very Dangerous Territory’” by New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall:

In “The Ideological Nationalization of Partisan Subconstituencies in the American States,” Devin Caughey, James Dunham and Christopher Warshaw challenge “the reigning consensus that polarization in Congress has proceeded much more rapidly and extensively than polarization in the mass public.”

Instead, Caughey and his co-authors show

a surprisingly close correspondence between mass and elite trends. Specifically, we find that: (1) ideological divergence between Democrats and Republicans has widened dramatically within each domain, just as it has in Congress; (2) ideological variation across senators’ partisan subconstituencies is now explained almost completely by party rather than state, closely tracking trends in the Senate; and (3) economic, racial and social liberalism have become highly correlated across partisan subconstituencies, just as they have across members of Congress.

Caughey, Dunham and Warshaw describe the growing partisan salience of racial and social issues since the 1950s:

The explanatory power of party on racial issues increased hugely over this period and that of state correspondingly declined. We refer to this process as the “ideological nationalization” of partisan subconstituencies.

In the late 1950s, they continue,

party explained almost no variance in racial conservatism in either arena. Over the next half century, the Senate and public time series rise in tandem.” Contrary to the claim that racial realignment had run its course by 1980, they add, “our data indicate that differences between the parties continued to widen through the end of the 20th century, in the Senate as well as in the mass public. By the 2000s, party explained about 80 percent of the variance in senators’ racial conservatism and nearly 100 percent of the variance in the mass public.

The three authors argue that there are a number of consequences of “the ideological nationalization of the United States party system.” For one, “it has limited the two parties’ abilities to tailor their positions to local conditions. Moreover, it has led to greater geographic concentration of the parties’ respective support coalitions.”

The result, they note,

is the growing percentage of states with two senators from the same party, which increased from 50 percent in 1980 to over 70 percent in 2018. Today, across all offices, conservative states are largely dominated by Republicans, whereas the opposite is true of liberal states. The ideological nationalization of the party system thus seems to have undermined party competition at the state level.

As a result of these trends, Warshaw wrote me in an email,

It’s going to be very difficult to reverse the growing partisan polarization between Democrats and Republicans in the mass public. I think this will continue to give ideological extremists an advantage in both parties’ primaries. It also means that the pool of people that run for office is increasingly extreme.

In the long term, Warshaw continued,

there are a host of worrying possible consequences of growing partisan polarization among both elites and the public. It will probably reduce partisans’ willingness to vote for the out-party. This could dampen voters’ willingness to hold candidates accountable for poor performance and to vote across party lines to select higher-quality candidates. This will probably further increase the importance of primaries as a mechanism for candidate selection.

Looking over the contemporary political landscape, there appear to be no major or effective movements to counter polarization. As the McCoy-Press report shows, only 16 of the 52 countries that reached levels of pernicious polarization succeeded in achieving depolarization and in “a significant number of instances later repolarized to pernicious levels. The progress toward depolarization in seven of 16 episodes was later undone.”

As Edsall concludes, “That does not suggest a favorable prognosis for the United States.”

As polarization hardens, so does party self-identification. Yet recent elections indicate that there is a substantial number of persuadable and swing voters the Democrats can win under favorable conditions, such as the ‘Trump fatigue’ we saw in the 2020 election and the 2021 run-off election in Georgia. But Trump fatigue won’t help much in the midterm elections this year. The challenge for Dems now is to identify and focus on persuadable and swing voters and connect Democratic candidates with them in a positive way. It won’t be easy. But it’s not like Republicans have anything substantial to offer these voters.

There is not enough time to repair the Democratic ‘brand’ for the midterms. But, with more message discipline focusing on GOP obstruction and gridlock, it should be possible to take the Republican brand down a notch or two – and minimize midterm damage for Democrats.

In “Biden said he’d put a Black woman on the Supreme Court. Here’s who he may pick to replace Breyer,” Ariane de Vogue notes some of the political considerations involved in replacing Justice Breyer at CNN Politics: “With Democrats holding the narrowest of majorities in the upper chamber, Biden will have to choose someone who can safely get 50 votes in the Senate (Vice President Kamala Harris could provide the tie-breaking vote if the Senate is split on the nomination). In addition to the vote count, Biden also has to keep an eye on the calendar. Senate Republicans are likely to retake the chamber in this year’s midterms and have already signaled they would block a Biden nominee to the Supreme Court. It typically takes two to three months for a President to see his nominee confirmed by the Senate once he or she is named. The most recent justice, however, was confirmed in just a month and a half, as Senate Republicans rushed to get Justice Amy Coney Barrett approved before the 2020 election….Given the disappointments that have been recently dealt to the progressives under the Biden administration — between the congressional demise of the President’s Build Back Better proposal and his failure to find a way forward on voting rights legislation — Biden’s choice for the Supreme Court gives him the opportunity to reinvigorate the democratic base. If she is confirmed, Biden will secure a much-needed victory for his administration. De Vogue provides capsule bios of some of the ‘short list’ contenders, and there is an accompanying video. For a longer list of potential nominees, check here.

At The Wall St. Journal, Sabrina Siddiqui adds, “Although Justice Breyer’s replacement won’t change the conservative majority of the high court, the looming confirmation process follows a series of high-profile clashes between Republicans and Democrats over recent Supreme Court nominees that underscored the importance of the judiciary in determining the direction of major issues such as abortion, voting rights and immigration….Democrats hold a 50-50 majority in the Senate, with Vice President Kamala Harris serving as a tiebreaking vote, and they only need a simple majority to fill the vacancy. Some progressives and Democratic lawmakers had publicly urged Justice Breyer to step aside and ensure his seat is filled while the party has control….House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D., S.C.), a close Biden ally, said nominating a Black woman could motivate base voters and draw more attention to what the president has done to diversify the judiciary, including nominating eight Black women to serve on circuit courts, more than all of his predecessors….“If I could get the folks on my side of the aisle to stop talking about what has not been done and start talking about what has been done, his approval rating would go up,” Mr. Clyburn said.” Also at the WSJ, Ken Thomas, Eliza Collins and Natalie Andrews add, “While the White House hasn’t yet commented on any potential successors, the list of possible nominees would likely encompass several prominent Black jurists, including Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, 51 years old, a judge on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit; Leondra Kruger, age 45, a justice on the California Supreme Court; and Julianna Michelle Childs, 55, a federal judge in South Carolina who has been nominated by Mr. Biden to the D.C. Circuit appeals court.”

Nathaniel Rakich explains why “Why Joe Manchin And Kyrsten Sinema Will Probably Vote For Biden’s Supreme Court Pick” at FiveThirtyEight: “The next time a Democratic senator votes no on one of Biden’s judicial picks, it will be the first time. That means that even Manchin and Sinema have 100 percent track records of supporting Biden’s judicial nominees….Democratic senators have occasionally skipped confirmation votes, which could be a convenient way to avoid casting a “no” vote. (And both Manchin and Sinema have skipped an above-average number of votes: seven for Manchin, 12 for Sinema.) We also don’t know if there are any confirmation votes Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer declined to hold because he knew the nominee didn’t have the votes….But at the very least, Manchin, Sinema and every other Senate Democrat have been reticent to publicly express opposition to one of Biden’s nominees — and with a position as important as the Supreme Court, the pressure to toe the party line will likely be even greater….If anything, the data shows it’s more likely that a Republican might break ranks to vote for Biden’s Supreme Court nominee than that a Democrat would vote against her….”

Jonathan Bernstein writes in his article, “The Good News About Biden’s Poor Approval Ratings: Public opinion was unusually static across the last two presidencies. It’s a good thing if that’s starting to change,” at Bloomberg Opinion “Although it’s hard to say exactly why Biden has become unpopular, and there are a lot of theories out there, his numbers over time are certainly consistent with the rise and fall of the coronavirus. His approval rating began declining soon after the delta wave began, flattened out or perhaps recovered a bit when that wave ebbed, and then dropped again when omicron took hold. That’s consistent with a comparative perspective, which might note that Biden is one of several world leaders who isn’t very popular right now. It also wouldn’t be surprising if the effects of the pandemic recession and recovery, including high inflation, contributed to Biden’s slump….I continue to take the correlation between the strength of the pandemic and Biden’s approval rating as good news after two presidencies in which approval ratings were unusually static. Biden’s 13 percentage-point approval range is already larger than Trump’s was over his entire four years. It’s not yet as large as Obama’s overall, but it is larger than Obama’s range from the beginning of his second year through well into his eighth year. I suspect Obama’s narrow range during most of his presidency was caused by the unusual condition of a slow but steady recovery from the recession he inherited: Events just never seemed to drive his approval strongly in either direction. As for Trump, my guess is that he really was an unusual case of a president who permanently alienated over half the nation in his initial campaign and never really attempted to win them back. That put a cap on his popularity even during what people perceived as good times. In other words, all those things he did and said — the things that pundits often said would’ve destroyed other politicians — really did have significant negative effects.”

With all the attention being placed on the battle for the House in 2022, realistic analysis of the battle for the Senate has been lacking, so I tried to provide some at New York:

Political handicappers looking to the 2022 midterms have focused on House races because the very predictable pattern of midterm House losses by the president’s party makes continuation of a Democratic House a real long shot (and probably a prohibitive long shot unless Joe Biden’s job-approval rating shows significant improvement soon). The loss of either chamber, of course, means the governing trifecta that has made enactment of part of Biden’s legislative agenda possible will be gone, probably for a good while (at least until 2026, by my reckoning). But there is some independent value in continued Democratic control of the Senate thanks to that chamber’s role in confirming Biden’s executive branch and judicial nominees along with the ability to control committee and floor action in a way that gives Democrats significant leverage and opportunities for conveying their message.

Because only one-third of the Senate is up for reelection every two years, there is not the sort of predictable relationship between Senate outcomes and the general political climate. In other words, a bad year for either party in presidential, House, or gubernatorial contests doesn’t mean a bad year in Senate races if the landscape is positive. We saw that most recently in 2018, when Republicans lost 41 net House seats and seven net governorships yet picked up two net Senate seats because the landscape (with 26 Democratic Senate seats and only nine Republican Senate seats at stake) was very positive for the GOP.

The Senate landscape is modestly positive in 2022 for Democrats, who have to defend only 14 seats as compared with 20 seats for Republicans. Moreover, as Amy Walter points out, none of the 14 Democratic seats are in a state carried by Donald Trump in 2020. Meanwhile, Republicans are defending two seats in states carried by Biden in 2020, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

But at the same time, Democrats are defending three Senate seats (in Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada) in states Biden carried very narrowly (he won by 0.30 percent in Arizona, 0.24 percent in Georgia, and a relatively luxurious 2.39 percent in Nevada). Republicans in the two nominally blue states whose Senate seats they control don’t have much ground to make up, either (Biden won Pennsylvania by 1.17 percent and Wisconsin by 0.63 percent). They also control an open seat in North Carolina, a state Trump won by only 1.3 percent.

To give you an idea of how much “swing” Republicans might rationally expect in a midterm, consider that Republicans won the national House popular vote by 1.1 percent in 2016 and Democrats won it by 8.6 percent in 2018. That’s a lot of movement against the party controlling the White House. Anything remotely like that in 2022 — again, controlling for state aberrations despite the trend toward straight-ticket voting in recent years — and Republicans could pretty easily sweep the six contests mentioned above, all rated as toss-ups by the Cook Political Report, and take control of the Senate by a 53-to-47 margin, assuming neither party breaks serve by winning in a less competitive state.

What may give Democrats better Senate odds is the current nature of Republican intrastate and intraparty dynamics. There are potentially fractious GOP Senate primaries in Arizona, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania that could produce nominees with real weaknesses. Moreover, in these states and others (notably Ohio, a “red” state that recently reelected a progressive Democratic senator), Trump’s insistence on turning GOP primaries into referenda on loyalty to his ludicrous 2020 election claims could interfere with the expected pro-Republican midterm trend.

Potential Trump-generated problems affecting Senate races aren’t limited to his involvement in just those races. Georgia is a classic example. Freshman Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock, who along with Jon Ossoff won by an eyelash in 2021’s unique dual general-election Senate runoff in what has become the ultimate battleground state, ought to be a sitting duck in 2022 with even a minimal midterm swing. But Trump enormously complicated Georgia politics by pushing the man Ossoff beat a year ago, David Perdue, into a primary challenge to the incumbent governor, Brian Kemp, as part of a purge effort aimed at those who didn’t support the 45th president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. The Perdue-Kemp primary is sure to be an extremely expensive and divisive affair. It could weaken the ultimate winner in a general election against Stacey Abrams and might spill over into the Senate race, where Republican front-runner and Trump favorite Herschel Walker hasn’t shaken questions about his background and temperament (or rid himself of primary opposition).

Divisive Republican gubernatorial primaries seem likely in Arizona and Pennsylvania, as well, and could extend to Wisconsin, where incumbent GOP Senator Ron Johnson is struggling with low favorability numbers.

Republicans should be considered the slight favorites to flip the Senate (and much stronger favorites to flip the House) in 2022, assuming Biden’s popularity doesn’t seriously improve by November. But Mitch McConnell should not be making big plans for 2023. His party’s lord and master, Trump, could screw things up yet, and you never know entirely what will happen in a wide array of competitive Senate races.

At The New Yorker, Isaac Chotiner interviews Wendy Weiser, vice-president of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice on the topic, “Is There a Future for Voting-Rights Reform?” Some excerpts:

What went wrong in terms of Democratic strategy?

I think that this was a significant failure in the Senate, but I think that it has also advanced the ball for protecting voting rights, and it is not the end of the battle. I do think that pushing for this vote and this legislative agenda was absolutely the right thing to do. Congress could not stand by while our voting rights and our democratic institutions were under such brazen assault. There is a moral obligation to act, and Congress also has an obligation to voters—especially voters of color—to stand up for these rights. It has an obligation to try to check these abuses that have been tearing across the country at a very rapid pace, and in very large numbers. And I do think that, the more that these abuses of our voting rights and our democratic institutions go unanswered, the worse and more brazen the attacks become.

Do you think Democrats have overemphasized the threat of voter suppression and underemphasized the threat of election subversion?

I think the threat is multifaceted, and I think there is both a tremendous threat of voter suppression and a tremendous threat of election subversion. We are tracking legislation on both. The voter-suppression threats have materialized already; the election-subversion attempts are still nascent.

You’ve seen some Republicans talk about reforming the Electoral Count Act in the past couple of weeks. Is there a chance for legislation around that?

The Electoral Count Act absolutely has ambiguities that need to be fixed, and, if they are addressed, that would help reduce the risk of a certain form of sabotage at the very end of Presidential elections. But what we are seeing in terms of election subversion across the country is a much broader attack on impartial election administration—one that opens the door to partisan manipulation of election outcomes and sabotage of election results in a much broader array of races, not just the Presidential race, and at many more points in the election process, not just at the finish line.

My view is that the Freedom to Vote Act is actually the strongest response that has been proposed to election subversion. It doesn’t deal with the Electoral Count Act, but for all the other forms of election subversion the strongest protection is, in fact, establishing baseline national standards for election administration and vote-counting rules and for the ways in which voters can use the court system to enforce those rules. One of the principle ways that those who are attacking our institutions from within are trying to enable election subversion is by putting partisan loyalists—who aren’t necessarily committed to the rule of law or to insuring that everyone’s votes are counted properly—in election-administration positions where they can make decisions that would subvert outcomes. And, if those positions don’t have the discretion to take actions that would suppress votes or throw out votes or refuse to certify votes, then that entire strategy can’t succeed, and is no longer worth pursuing.

Is it worth trying a bill that only focusses on election subversion?

The election-subversion bill will not look dramatically different from the Freedom to Vote Act, because to actually protect against election subversion you need to have some baseline rules for vote counting that the Freedom to Vote Act has. I think those who say that you can attack election subversion without enforcing the right to have your vote counted and having some basic level of access that every American can rely on are going to be disappointed.

An election-subversion bill also leaves another huge problem unaddressed: the gerrymandering that’s going on. In Congress, there may not currently be bipartisan support for fixing that. But there is bipartisan support in the country for addressing it. And a narrowly focussed election-subversion bill will not do so.

I think the most optimistic reading of this effort would be that there’s now more momentum, as you said, to do things like fix the Electoral Count Act. But I wonder about the message to Democratic voters and progressives that the failure of this legislation will lead to the complete erosion of American democracy.

The United States’ democracy ranking has already been downgraded by international organizations. We are in a very precarious, perilous place, and there’s a lot of risk. These are the reforms that would protect our system and turn it around and, frankly, put us in a place where the system would be stronger than it was before. The legislation to roll back voting rights or to sabotage elections has become more brazen, more aggressive, and far more numerous. I think that, if there are no brakes, this is going to continue to get worse.

Democrats are going to have to fight to get the best possible reforms of the Electoral Count Act. But hopes for voting rights reform beyond that now depend on Dems getting focused on midterm elections upsets that can win a real working majority.

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

As it becomes ever clearer that the Biden presidency never had the transformational potential assigned to it by many Democrats in and out of the administration, it is perhaps time to cast comforting illusions aside and look clear-eyed at political reality.

Two articles today are helpful. Nate Cohn looks at the non-FDRness of Biden’s time and Biden’s actions:

“Joseph R. Biden Jr. was supposed to be another Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democratic president who enacted transformative liberal legislation and in doing so built a lasting political coalition….

Rather than following Mr. Roosevelt’s playbook and focusing relentlessly on the crises facing the nation and voters, Mr. Biden’s efforts have shifted from the pandemic and the economy to also pursue longstanding Democratic policy goals — universal prekindergarten, climate change, voting rights, a child tax credit.

Even if those proposals are needed or important, they do not rank high on the list of the public’s demands at the heart of a pandemic and with rising inflation. Only 33 percent of voters say the president is focused on the issues they “care a lot about,” according to a recent CBS/YouGov poll.

The decision to prioritize the goals of his party’s activist base over the issues prioritized by voters is more reminiscent of the last half-century of politically unsuccessful Democratic presidents than of Mr. Roosevelt himself….

It is a presidency aimed at matching Mr. Roosevelt’s transformative legacy while forgetting the most basic, high school history class lesson about the root of the New Deal’s political appeal: It was designed to meet the challenges of the moment.

While liberals cherish the New Deal for expanding the role of government, the core of its political success was its focus on addressing an immediate crisis facing the nation — the shuttered banks, failing farms and mass unemployment of the Great Depression.”

Matt Yglesias has some ideas about what a more realistic approach might be at this point for the Democrats:

“For Mr. Biden and his team to give Democrats a fighting chance and turn his numbers around before electoral disaster strikes, they need to keep two slightly paradoxical thoughts in mind. First, Mr. Biden is governing in extraordinary times, but his presidency is still governed by the normal rules of American politics. Second, generating a feeling of normalcy around American politics and daily life — as he promised to do during the campaign — would itself be a transformative change….

Yet even when it turned out that the [pre-election] polls were off and his victory was much narrower than expected, Mr. Biden never really let go of the dream of a transformative 1930s-style presidency, though he clearly lacked the large legislative majorities to deliver on a New Deal or Great Society….

When all is said and done, the frustrations of the Biden supporters who want a return to normal are more politically significant than those of the more progressive crowd who yearn for transformation.

That means more focus on the short-term economic situation. The good news on inflation is that the gasoline price spike of 2021 is unlikely to occur a second time, and the Federal Reserve is likely to pivot into inflation-fighting mode as well. But there are risks, too, from economic disruptions in China, and monetary policy efforts to curb inflation could do too much to curb real growth as well.

The fate of Mr. Biden’s presidency — and if you believe the dire warnings of many Democrats and academics, of the republic itself — hinges less on the fate of legacy items like Build Back Better or a renewed voting rights act than it does on the normal procession of macroeconomic events. Unfortunately for Mr. Biden, no president has control over them entirely — but pushing for a final version of the bipartisan U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, which contains provisions to strengthen the semiconductor supply chain, could be helpful.

It means more attention to classic Biden themes of patriotism, bipartisanship and normalcy, and fewer headlines dominated by high-profile squeeze plays against moderate senators.

Most of what has happened to Mr. Biden has been very normal. But if Democrats take their own fears about the opposition party seriously, they should be very worried about the consequences of the normal cycle of overreach and backlash, and try harder to surprise the country by doubling down on normalcy.”

It all reminds me of something I wrote at the beginning of the year in one of my first contributions to The Liberal Patriot:

“Biden got 51 percent of the vote in 2020, enough to win the election, but hardly a dominant majority. And Democrats’ downballot performance was distinctly inferior, leading to disappointing performance in Senate, House and state legislative races. The Biden administration now confronts a divided country racked by twin pandemic and economic crises. In the not so far distance looms the 2022 midterm elections where an incoming Presidential administration traditionally loses ground. The last time Democrats faced this situation in 2010 they suffered massive losses….

[Democratic success] can only run through a successful attack on the pandemic and economic crises. Really for the next period of time nothing else is important. Not immigration reform. Not criminal justice reform. Not climate change. Not child poverty. Not executive orders. Not Trump’s trial. Either solve the twin crises or prepare yourself for the wrath of voters who will, not unreasonably, think you have failed them. The Biden coalition will shrink, not expand and all the great ideas progressives have for improving the country will come to naught.”

In retrospect, it appears I might have been on to something.

Some key findings of the new NBC News poll, conducted January 14-18, as reported by Mark Murray of nbcnews.com: “Overwhelming majorities of Americans believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, that their household income is falling behind the cost of living, that political polarizationwill only continue and that there’s a real threat to the nation’s democracy and majority rule….What’s more, the nation’s top politicians and political parties are more unpopular than popular, and interest in the upcoming November midterms is down — not up….“Downhill, divided, doubting democracy, falling behind, and tuning out — this is how Americans are feeling as they’re heading into 2022,” said Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt of Hart Research Associates, who conducted this survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies….While the poll shows Democrats enjoying a narrow 1 point advantage over Republicans as the party that should control Congress, it also shows President Joe Biden’s job approval rating remaining in the low 40s, Republicans holding a double-digit edge in enthusiasm and key Democratic groups losing interest in the upcoming election….On the economy, while job creation is up and the unemployment rate is down, 61 percent of respondents in the poll say their family’s income is falling behind the cost of living. That’s compared with 30 percent who say they’re staying about even and 7 percent who say their income is going up faster than the cost of living….And on the state of democracy, a whopping 76 percent of Americans — including 7 in 10 Democrats, Republicans and independents — believe there is a threat to democracy and majority rule in this country….”

Murray notes, further, “With fewer than 300 days until the November midterm elections, the NBC News poll finds 47 percent of registered voters saying they prefer a Democratic-controlled Congress, while 46 percent want Republicans in charge. But Republicans enjoy a double-digit advance on enthusiasm ahead of November’s elections, with 61 percent of Republicans saying they are very interested in the upcoming midterms — registering their interest either as a 9 or 10 on a 10-point scale — compared with 47 percent of Democrats who say the same….In previous midterm cycles — whether 2006, 2010, 2014 or 2018 — the party that held a double-digit advantage in enthusiasm ended up making substantial gains….And some of the biggest drops have come from key segments of the Democratic base, including Black voters, young voters and urban voters….Asked their two most important issues facing the country, the top responses from Americans were jobs and the economy (a combined 42 percent), the coronavirus (29 percent), voting rights and election integrity (25 percent), the cost of living (23 percent) and border security and immigration (22 percent)….Among Democrats, the top issues were the coronavirus, voting rights and election integrity, social and racial justice, jobs/economy and climate change….Among Republicans, the top issues were jobs/economy, border security/immigration, taxes and spending and the cost of living….Finally, the NBC News poll finds every politician and political party it tested to be more unpopular than popular with the American public…”

Nathaniel Rakich has an update on congressional redistricting at FiveThirtyEight: “Since we last took stock of redistricting in early December, eight more states — including some of the biggest and swingiest states in the country — have finalized their congressional maps for the next 10 years. In all, 26 states have now completed the congressional redistricting process (not including the six states with only one congressional district). Of the 268 congressional districts drawn so far, 128 have a FiveThirtyEight partisan lean¹ of D+5 or bluer, while 119 have a FiveThirtyEight partisan lean of R+5 or redder. Only 21 are in the “highly competitive” category between D+5 and R+5….That’s a net gain of seven Democratic-leaning seats over the old maps in those 26 states, while the number of Republican-leaning seats has increased by only one. Since the old House map had 208 Republican-leaning seats and 181 Democratic-leaning seats overall, that means redistricting has chipped away at — though certainly not erased — Republicans’ structural advantage in House elections….the number of light-blue seats has actually increased by eight as the number of dark-blue seats has decreased by one. But that’s not because Democrats have been redistricting saints. While Republicans, who went into redistricting with a better starting position, have adopted a defensive redistricting strategy (i.e., shoring up already-red seats), Democrats have adopted an offensive strategy of maximizing the number of seats that are any shade of blue….These are the takeaways of redistricting so far — but we must emphasize the “so far.” Eighteen states have yet to finalize their new maps, and some could genuinely scramble the math above. For instance, how aggressive will Democratic cartographers be in New York? Republicans in Florida?…And then there’s the fact that even those 26 states may not be done with redistricting. Lawsuits over the new maps loom in at least eight of those states, and one other state’s map (Ohio’s) has already been overturned. Just under two-thirds of the districts whose lines are being challenged (73 out of 110) were drawn by Republicans, too, so there could be substantial upside for Democrats here — enough that some analysts believe the House’s Republican bias will disappear completely.”

Despite the downer polls, Tom Hanks rolls out a more optimistic and share-worthy view of the Biden Administration’s accomplishments: