Geoffrey Skelley shares the findings of a new Morning Consult poll, at FiveThirtyeight: “When given three interpretations of the word “bipartisan,” only 10 percent of voters said it involved getting broad support from voters across the political spectrum; 32 percent said it had to involve wide support among lawmakers from both parties, while 43 percent said it was best defined as including support from both lawmakers and voters across partisan divides (14 percent didn’t know or had no opinion). The poll didn’t ask voters their views on each of the three definitions separately, so we don’t know whether they would find all of them at least somewhat credible; nevertheless, they were least likely to back the White House’s characterization of bipartisanship….Yet despite not agreeing with the Biden administration’s definition of bipartisanship, voters in the Morning Consult survey did think that among the major figures in Washington mentioned, Biden was the most interested in achieving bipartisanship: 53 percent agreed that he cared about getting bipartisan support for major legislation while only 34 percent disagreed. Democrats overwhelmingly agreed with this view, of course, but so did about 1 in 5 Republicans. By comparison, less than 40 percent of voters said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer cared about achieving bipartisanship, and less than 30 percent said the same of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.”

However, Skelley adds, “But how much does bipartisanship actually matter to voters? Americans have long said they prefer that the parties work together, and respondents in Morning Consult’s poll were no different. For instance, 85 percent of voters said it was very or somewhat important for legislation to have bipartisan support, 69 percent agreed that policies with bipartisan backing were the best policies, and 62 percent disagreed with the idea that it was a waste of time for politicians to seek bipartisan support. What’s more, there were no meaningful differences between how Democrats and Republicans answered these questions….However, polls also show that many Americans are willing to scrap bipartisanship if it means passing legislation that their party prefers. For instance, a 2019 poll from the Pew Research Center found that despite majorities of Democrats (69 percent) and Republicans (61 percent) saying it was very important that elected officials be willing to compromise, members of both parties thought it was more important for officials from the other party to compromise than it was for officials from their own party to do so. Seventy-nine percent of Democrats thought it was very important for Republican lawmakers to compromise compared with just 41 percent of Republicans. Likewise, 78 percent of Republicans thought it was very important for Democratic lawmakers to compromise compared with 48 percent of Democrats.”

Further, Skelley notes, “According to a 2014 study by political scientists Laurel Harbridge, Neil Malhotra and Brian F. Harrison, respondents preferred legislation when their party got more of what it wanted and when it dominated the coalition that passed the bill versus the outcomes that were more bipartisan-oriented. In fact, respondents sometimes viewed bipartisan tradeoffs as the equivalent of a legislative defeat for their party. Notably, the researchers found this effect even though they tested respondents’ attitudes on fairly noncontroversial policies — funding for NASA or legislation to make it easier for small businesses to obtain loans. That means it’s possible that these effects could be even more pronounced on more divisive legislation….In other words, voters like bipartisanship more in theory than in practice. But that doesn’t mean bipartisan support isn’t still important politically. Voters may prefer more partisan policy results, but their stated desire for bipartisanship means that politicians can still benefit by at least trying to work together. Notably, Morning Consult’s poll found that 75 percent of voters respected politicians more when they made efforts to get bipartisan support, with essentially no difference between how Democrats and Republicans answered.” Looking towards the midterm elections, “Making bipartisan appeals could also help politicians appear more moderate to the electorate, which in turn could make them more attractive to a broader slice of the public and boost their electoral chances. In 2020, for instance, the strongest-performing candidates in U.S. House elections tended to be more ideologically moderate.”

It’s important for Democrats to better understand public attitudes toward bipartisanship and what they believe it is. In “What Joe Manchin’s constituents think of his bipartisanship,” Dan Merica interviews politcal activists and operatives in West Virginia for CNN Politics. Merica notes, “As much as I appreciate Joe’s ideal — maybe that is where his heart is at and maybe that is because of his roots — there has to come a time when you have to realize (Republicans) are not going to sit down and hold hands and sing kumbaya,” said Donna Costello, the former mayor of Manchin’s hometown and a longtime friend of the Manchin family. “And you have to do what is in the best interest of what put you there.” Merica adds, “Manchin’s political positioning — often voting with Democrats but refusing to go along with the party on key issues — has rankled countless national Democrats, many of whom accuse the senator of standing in the way of needed legislation all to preserve his own political power. At best, in the eyes of these Democrats, Manchin is solely representing the views of his politically changing state. At worse, they believe, he is a politician bent on being the most important man in the Senate….But Manchin is as savvy a political operator as he is a political unicorn. Where the West Virginia Democrat’s one-time colleagues from states like Nebraska, Arkansas and South Dakota have long ago lost their seats, Manchin has held on.”

Despite Democratic consternation about Sens. Manchin and Sinema refusing to modify the filibuster so their party can actually enact popular reforms, the situation may not be as hopeless as appears.

With respect to Sen. Manchin, here are some very up-to-date voter registration figures (“as of May 21, 2021”) from the Secretary of State’s office regarding political party strength in West Virginia: Democrats 35.54%; Republicans 37.83%; No Party 22.42%; Other 3.24%; Libertarian 0.77; Mountain 0.19%.

In light of these numbers, isn’t it a bit of a stretch to stereotype WV as a hopelessly “red” state?

Regarding Arizona, the AZ S.O.S. reports that the state’s registered voter stats for April 2021 are: Democrats 32.01%; Republicans 34.87%; Other 32.23%; Libertarian 0.88.

Yes, lots of self-identified Democrats in these states are relatively conservative. But why do they still call themselves Democrats, and do they really want to surrender America’s future to the party that supported the Jan. 6th coup attempt and sports “leaders” with the character flaws of Trump, McConnell, Cruz, Graham and Hawley?

Before curling up in the fetal position in unconditional surrender, Democrats might want to consider Stacy Abrams/GA-style education and mobilization campaigns in AZ and WV to persuade Sens. Manchin and Sinema that some reasonable modifications of the filibuster might be a politically-wise career move.

Much as we all want to see congressional action on voting rights while Democrats control the White House and Congress, it’s time to consider a Plan B, as I noted at New York:

In all the projections of what Congress might accomplish this year, there’s no subject on which Republican obstruction is more powerful and fateful than voting rights. And amid widespread angst over state-level voter-suppression measures enacted at the behest of both threatened Establishment Republicans and delusional MAGA folk alleging massive if never-documented fraud, partisan gridlock may actually be hardening.

The two pieces of voting-rights legislation currently moving through Congress are certainly long overdue. The For the People Act (HR1 and S1), which has passed the House twice, would establish national standards for voting, elections, and representation across a wide range of issues, from rules for absentee ballots to gerrymandering to the financing of congressional campaigns. On a parallel track, the narrower John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act aims to reverse the Supreme Court’s demolition of the pre-clearance provisions that prior to 2013 would have subjected voting and election-laws changes (like the ones Republican-controlled states are racing to enact) to advanced review and possible cancellation by the U.S. Department of Justice.

The For the People Act is pending in the Senate, where it has 49 co-sponsors (every Democrat other than Joe Manchin). The John Lewis bill is still under development in both Houses, as Democratic lawmakers work on a formula for pre-clearance to replace the one the Supreme Court struck down as “outdated.” But all 50 Senate Democrats, plus Republican Lisa Murkowski, favor it (perhaps with modifications; Manchin wants to require pre-clearance in all 50 states).

Unfortunately, it will take every Democrat plus ten Republicans to get either bill through the Senate, and that seems 100 percent impossible for S.1 and maybe 95 percent impossible for the John Lewis Act. Many Republicans plausibly argue that S. 1 goes far beyond voting rights into areas like campaign-finance law that are wildly controversial. There’s no legitimate reason for GOP hostility to the most basic version of the John Lewis Act, which restores the VRA to what it was when it was unanimously extended by the Senate (with support from President George W. Bush) in 2006. But at a time when Donald Trump and his allies are lashing Republican legislators everywhere to restrict voting opportunities, few Senate Republicans are going to risk a primary challenge for valuing voting rights over “election integrity.”

Ron Brownstein has forcefully argued that defeating attacks on the franchise is a life-or-death matter for Democrats, meriting the extraordinary remedy of taking the filibuster off the table for voting-rights legislation (if not for everything):

“With the congressional calendar dominated by President Joe Biden’s multitrillion-dollar spending proposals … activists are expressing concern that neither the administration nor Democratic congressional leaders are raising sufficient alarms about the threats to voting rights proliferating in red states, or developing a strategy to pass the national election standards that these groups consider the party’s best chance to counter those threats.”

In a closely divided country where Democrats are clinging to power in Washington, new voter-suppression laws (in tandem with present and future GOP control of state-election systems) could help Republicans gain a decisive advantage in the next couple of election cycles. But Joe Manchin’s outspoken opposition to any sort of filibuster reform — explicitly including a carve-out for voting rights — makes the urgency of this fight a little beside the point. No threats or blandishments aimed at Manchin can likely overcome the simple fact that he represents a state that gave Donald Trump 69 percent of its vote in both 2016 and 2020. And opposing filibuster reform is an easy and mandatory vote for Republican senators, even those who are open to heresy on other subjects.

So what are voting-rights advocates, including the president and most other Democrats in Congress, to do? Sure, they can scale back S. 1 to make it less obviously objectionable to Republicans, but at the risk of alienating Democratic constituencies, and without necessarily winning a single GOP Senate vote. Or they could (and probably should) launch a very noisy effort to shame Republicans for blocking the John Lewis bill — but even alleged GOP voting-rights supporters can always find some whataboutism excuse (ballot harvesting! Unsupervised drop-boxes!) for demanding a different kind of legislation.

In The Atlantic, David Frum looks down the likely road to defeat for voting-rights legislation in this Congress and finds a “Plan B” that is unsatisfying but perhaps all that’s left:

“Taking decisive action to fill the 80-odd federal judicial vacancies with pro-voting judges followed by turbocharging enforcement efforts at the Department of Justice may seem only second-best compared with new legislation. But if new legislation cannot be enacted, then second-best will have to do.”

Frum is alluding to the power of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department to launch its own litigation against voter-suppression measures under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which is still intact. Under the leadership of the distinguished and newly confirmed Civil Rights Division chief Kristen Clarke, such litigation could indeed be “supercharged.” But while the Biden administration can strengthen pro-voting-rights elements of the federal judiciary to give its Justice Department some wins, Clarke and other voting-rights advocates will still being dealing with conservative-leaning courts, led by a Supreme Court that is more conservative than it was when it weakened the VRA eight years ago.

Indeed, the author of that Shelby County v. Holder decision, Chief Justice John Roberts, is now in many respects to the left of the Court’s center of gravity. And the Supreme Court will soon rule on a fresh challenge to Section 2 of the VRA that could make it harder for Clarke or any other litigant to successfully show the discriminatory effect of voting- or election-law changes.

If all else fails, of course, and state-level Republicans continue to violate voting rights, Democrats could use outrage over these developments to energize their own voters and simply overwhelm the barricades erected by legislators. Brownstein thinks that may be Team Biden’s Plan B already:

“Looking ahead to 2022 and 2024, ‘I think our feeling is, show us what the rules are and we will figure out a way to educate our voters and make sure they understand how they can vote and we will get them out to vote,’ the official told me. Through on-the-ground organizing, ‘there are work-arounds to some of these provisions,’ said a senior Democrat familiar with White House thinking, who also spoke with me on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.”

It is entirely true that no one knows what the impact of voter-suppression laws will be on the ground, particularly with respect to provisions that make voting much more inconvenient without blocking it altogether. Some analysts are convinced that Republican legislators don’t know what they are doing, or are simply reacting to Trump’s demands for assaults on voting by mail (a voting method that Republicans utilized in the past at least as much as Democrats). But Democrats hoping to out-motivate Republicans in the 2022 elections are betting against the decided evidence of history, in which the White House party almost always loses ground in midterms. And it won’t take much in the way of losses for Republicans to regain control of the House if not the Senate, and shut down prospects for voting-rights legislation for the foreseeable future.

Steve Kornacki, MSNBC political correspondent, reports on the outcome of the special congressional election in New Mexico to replace now-Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, with Democrat Melanie Stansbury projected to defeat Republican Mark Moores by a similar margin to Biden’s 2020 win in that district, dispelling notions of a Republican swing.

“Is a Democratic Landslide in New Mexico’s Congressional Special Election a Sign?,” Elliot Hannon asks at slate.com. Hannon explains, “The 25-point walloping appears to show that Democratic support for Biden is holding, as the party tries to hold onto its slim advantage in the House while simultaneously fighting against the American electorate’s habit of returning the opposition party to power in the House in the cycle after a newly elected president takes office. Stansbury’s opponent ran almost entirely on the rise in crime in the Albuquerque-based district in an effort to make the race a referendum on crime, a line of attack that is surely going to be front and center of the Republican election effort in 2022 amid elevated national crime rates on the tail of the pandemic.” Hannon shares Cook Political Report House editor Dave Wasserman’s tweet on the race: “Here’s my line on the #NM01 special tonight (district was Biden +23, Haaland +16 in ’20). Melanie Stansbury (D) by… >15: Dems should be very happy 10-15: about what we might expect <10: sign of a Dem turnout problem post-Trump.” However, Hannon notes, “Democrats took far more interest and invested far more resources in the race as national Republicans largely stayed on the sidelines. Stansbury raised three times more money, allowing her to blanket the local airwaves, while receiving a wave of visits from high-profile Democrats to maintain enthusiasm.”

One lesson of Stansbury’s victory over Republican Mark Moores is that a brutal GOP campaign to brand the Democrat as a “soft on crime,” defund the police liberal didn’t work at all. As Paul Waldman observed in the Washington Post, “The pulsing heart of Moores’s campaign was an absolutely horrific TV ad warning of the danger Stansbury posed, showing video of a woman being assaulted in a dark alley while the sound of children screaming played in the background. It could have come right from the early 1990s….But here’s the surprise: It didn’t work. The vote in the New Mexico election turned out to be exactly in line with the district’s recent history. In 2018, Haaland got 59 percent of the vote, in 2020 she got 58 percent of the vote, and Stansbury got 60 percent of the vote….Might it be that voters won’t respond to fear-based, “tough on crime” rhetoric in the same way they used to?…Stansbury didn’t counter the “soft on crime” attacks as Democrats have in the past, by trying to prove that they’re even tougher than Republicans. She stressed issues such as hunger, climate change and economic development that are important to her constituents. She had her own ads touting support from law enforcement — but they weren’t about supporting punitive measures to lock up more people….So this is the challenge Democrats face: They can fall back into the defensive crouch with which they are so familiar, convinced that every Republican attack must be turning voters against them. Or they can believe the evidence we’ve seen that those attacks don’t necessarily work, and keep talking about the approach they believe will produce a safer and more just society.” As Waldman notes, that’s not to say that “soft on crime” attacks won’t work in other districts.

Here’s one of Stansbury’s ads:

At Mother Jones, Ari Berman and Nick Surgey report on the growing influence of Heritage Action for America in spearheading voter suppression laws in state legislatures across America. As Berman and Surgey note,

“In a private meeting last month with big-money donors, the head of a top conservative group boasted that her outfit had crafted the new voter suppression law in Georgia and was doing the same with similar bills for Republican state legislators across the country. “In some cases, we actually draft them for them,” she said, “or we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe.”

The Georgia law had “eight key provisions that Heritage recommended,” Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action for America, a sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, told the foundation’s donors at an April 22 gathering in Tucson, in a recording obtained by the watchdog group Documented and shared with Mother Jones. Those included policies severely restricting mail ballot drop boxes, preventing election officials from sending absentee ballot request forms to voters, making it easier for partisan workers to monitor the polls, preventing the collection of mail ballots, and restricting the ability of counties to accept donations from nonprofit groups seeking to aid in election administration.

All of these recommendations came straight from Heritage’s list of “best practices” drafted in February. With Heritage’s help, Anderson said, Georgia became “the example for the rest of the country.”

The leaked video reveals the extent to which Heritage is leading a massive campaign to draft and pass model legislation restricting voting access, which has been swiftly adopted this year in the battleground states of Georgia, Florida, Arizona, and Iowa. It’s no coincidence that so many GOP-controlled states are rushing to pass similar pieces of legislation in such a short period of time.”

Berman and Surgey have a lot more to say – read on here.

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

Perhaps It Takes a European Observer To See the Democrats’ Fundamental Political-Economic Problem Clearly

Jean Pisani-Ferry is at the Brussels-based think tank Bruegel. In an article on Project Syndicate he observes:

“The Biden administration’s promises to “think big” and rebuild the country seem like a major historical departure from decades of policy orthodoxy. And yet, insofar as its agenda will merely help the United States catch up to other advanced economies, its main components amount to necessary but insufficient reforms.”

He focuses particularly on the Democrats’ fundamental political problem and links it to the difficulties of the left in other advanced countries:

“[S]uch reforms are unlikely to suffice to address the Democrats’ political problem. Their challenge is that white voters without a college degree – who formed the backbone of Trump’s support – still make up 41% of the electorate. Even assuming that new voting laws in many Republican-led states do not overly suppress black turnout, the Democratic coalition of black voters and educated elites remains at the mercy of a shift in public sentiment, leaving the party without a strong enough majority in the right places to guarantee victory in the Electoral College in 2024.

The Democrats’ imperative is to recapture the white working-class voters who backed Trump in 2016 and 2020. But since Bill Clinton’s presidency in the 1990s, the party has offered left-behind workers only two solutions: education and social benefits. As The Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein recounts, Clinton’s mantra was that, “What you learn is what you earn.” He and Barack Obama strongly believed that more and better education was the best way to deal with the labor-market upheavals brought about by digitalization and globalization. (Europeans mostly shared this philosophy, though they placed a greater emphasis on social transfers.)

But workers do not agree. They do not want to live on welfare, but nor do they want to be sent back to school. Rather, they want to keep the good jobs that have long provided them with incomes and a sense of pride. Trump won in 2016 because he understood this sentiment and exploited it to win the working-class vote in key swing states.

And it’s not just America. Everywhere one looks, the left has lost the working-class vote. In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has conquered Labour’s “Red Wall”; in France, far-right leader Marine Le Pen has emerged as the candidate of choice for a growing share of workers; and in Germany, the Social Democrats seem likely to be crushed in the September elections. As Amory Gethin, Clara Martínez-Toledano, and Thomas Piketty show in a fascinating comparative paper, the traditional cleavages that structured postwar politics have collapsed across Western democracies.

Biden clearly understands this political shift. Last month, in his first address to a joint session of Congress, he made a point of noting that nearly 90% of the jobs created by his infrastructure plan will not require a college degree. But how can his administration actually deliver good jobs?”

That’s the question. And it’s not at all clear the Biden administration has a good answer to this and, therefore, to its fundamental political problem.

“After hopes for a bipartisan January 6 commission went down in flames on Friday, Democrats may have a new plan to investigate the attack on the Capitol: A select House committee, which would not require Republican support to establish….Such a committee would differ from the proposed bipartisan commission in several key ways, but it could still take steps to ensure accountability for those involved in the insurrection. Notably, a select committee would be composed of members of Congress rather than outside experts, and the subpoena power would function differently — but, crucially, it could also be created with only a simple majority vote in the House.” Rep. Ted Lieu tweeted, “Mitch McConnell thinks he can stop the full truth from coming out. He cannot. The House can empower a bipartisan select congressional committee to investigate the insurrection. The select committee would also have stronger subpoena power because GOP Members can’t block subpoenas.” Peters adds, “there could be fewer prospects for GOP obstruction in a select committee. In contrast to the defeated plan for an independent investigative commission, where use of the subpoena power would have required either majority support or agreement between the chair and vice chair — in other words, bipartisan agreement — Democrats on a select committee would be perfectly able to wield unilateral subpoena power.” — from “A bipartisan January 6 commission is probably dead. Democrats have a backup plan” by Cameron Peters at Vox.

Ronald Brownstein writes at The Atlantic that a “wide range of activists…have become more and more uncertain that Democratic leaders have a strategy to overcome Manchin’s hesitance, not to mention his (and other Democrats’) refusal to pare back the filibuster, which Republicans are certain to employ against any voting-rights legislation. What’s more, these activists fear that by focusing relatively little attention on red states’ actions, Democrats aren’t doing enough to create a climate of public opinion in which Manchin and others could feel pressure to act on the issue of voting rights if and when Senate Republicans filibuster against it.” However, notes Brownstein, “Celinda Lake, a longtime Democratic strategist who served as one of Biden’s chief pollsters in the 2020 campaign, seconds the argument that Biden should prioritize producing results, particularly on the economy, over raising alarms. “Right now, that’s not his job,” Lake told me. “His job is to provide the Democratic alternative and to show what we can get done,” so that voters will “say to themselves, ‘I don’t want to lose this; I don’t want to go back’” to Republican control of Congress.” Yet, “In their private conversations, activists fear that Biden, by constantly stressing his determination to work across party lines, is normalizing Republicans’ behavior even as many in the party are radicalizing. And they worry that he is so focused on producing kitchen-table results—through his big infrastructure and education and families packages—that the voting-rights agenda will slip on the Senate priority list….“We are dealing with one senator here, and the question is what do you do to persuade Senator Manchin that it is his role to protect, if not save, the democratic process?” [president of the reform group Democracy 21Fred] Wertheimer told me.”

Kerry Eleveld explains why “Biden’s clean-energy initiatives are total winners with the public and central to his jobs plan” at Daily Kos: “Fresh polling released Thursday from Navigator Research shows that fricking 78% of registered voters agree with the statement, “America should make significant investments in clean energy as part of our efforts to rebuild the economy.” That even gets majority support from GOP voters. Here’s the breakdown:

• Democrats: 98% agree
• Independents: 87% agree
• Republicans: 55% agree

Even as the questioning grows more specific and Biden’s name is attached to several clean-energy initiatives within his jobs plan, nearly 70% still express support for the climate proposals….The exact question asks, “As you may know, President Biden has proposed including a number of climate-related initiatives in the ‘American Jobs Plan,’ such as investing in clean energy, like wind energy and solar power, modernizing our electric grid, increasing electric vehicle production, and ensuring everyone has access to clean air and water. Do you support or oppose including these policies in the ‘American Jobs Plan’?”….Overall, 69% of registered voters said they supported the policies, including 95% of Democrats, 76% of independents, and 39% of Republicans….This is what’s known as overwhelming public support. The drop among Republicans was predictable as soon as Biden’s name was inserted into the mix. Nonetheless, nearly 40% of GOP voters still support the initiatives.”

“Bipartisanship” still gets a lot of good press from commentators who long for a return to the “I’d like like to buy the world a Coke” days of the 1960s and ’70s when there were Republican senators who were every bit as ardent in their support of civil rights, environmental protection, and robust social investment as most of their Democratic colleagues,” John Nichols writes in ‘Bipartisan’ Is How Republicans Say ‘Sucker!’ at The Nation. “But those days, and those Republicans, are long gone….The idea that there could be positive cross-party collaboration on so definitional a measure as Biden’s American Jobs Plan is a ridiculously outdated and dangerous fantasy. It may still be true that Congress can pull together in an emergency, as it did on some measures during the worst stages of the pandemic. But when it comes to forging the future, Republicans have taken cooperation for the common good off the table….If the president and Senate Democrats think they can cut deals with Senate Republicans on the existential issues of the 2020s, they are no wiser than Charlie Brown as he prepares to make one more attempt to kick the football Lucy is about to pull out from under him….For Senate Republicans, negotiating with a Democratic president is no longer an exercise in governing. It is a political strategy designed to distract, delay, and ultimately defeat Democrats….Noting that “Biden has a once in a generation opportunity to make change in this country, which is why he was elected on a bold climate mandate and began his administration with a sweeping Covid relief bill,” Sunrise’s Ellen Sciales said Thursda….“Not a single Republican senator voted for the popular and vital Covid relief package and Democrats passed it anyway,” she explains. “That’s what Democrats must do now—they must use the power vested in them by voters to do what’s needed with or without the GOP. Do not cower to Republicans. Ceding to Republicans and accepting any GOP proposal will only lead to the death of more people from extreme weather, continue the persistent under and unemployment Americans are facing, and will put in jeopardy the Democratic majority in 2022 and 2024.”

This news I discussed at New York was mostly of interest to those of us who were politically active in the 1990s, though then again, some gimmicks never die.

We all understand that Donald Trump wants to maintain control over the Republican Party for the foreseeable future, which means he has to find some way to keep himself in the spotlight during the 2022 midterm elections.  For assistance with this effort, he is consulting the all-time reigning huckster of such symbolic endeavors, former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, whose 1994 “Contract With America” earned all sorts of undeserved credit for the GOP conquest of the House that year. Politico has the eye-rolling story:

“With an eye toward winning back the House and Senate in the 2022 midterm elections, former President Donald Trump has begun crafting a policy agenda outlining a MAGA doctrine for the party. His template is the 1994 ‘Contract with America,’ a legislative agenda released ahead of the midterm elections in the middle of President Bill Clinton’s first term. And, as a cherry on top, he’s teaming up with its main architect — Gingrich — to do it.”

Apparently, two other veteran hucksters, Lindsey Graham and Mark Meadows, are in on the project. But for the moment, words like “agenda,” “policy,” and even “document” should be put in quotes, and anything suggesting that Trump is working on actionable ideas should be rigorously fact-checked. After all, the 45th president knows as much about policy thinking as a three-toed sloth knows about the Critique of Pure Reason. And I suspect he’s reaching out to Gingrich not because of the former speaker’s thin reputation for intellectualism but precisely because Newt won that reputation by skillful packaging and marketing of poll-tested slogans that were policy adjacent.

Yes, the Contract With America included some specifics like Congress applying its laws to its own operations, a balanced-budget constitutional amendment, and congressional term limits. But it excluded plenty of top-tier Republican legislative proposals that weren’t terribly popular, and it batched loosely connected policy bites under catchy headlines like “The Take Back the Streets Act” (random provisions conveying a get-tough-on-crime attitude) and “The Senior Citizens Fairness Act” (really just eliminating taxes on Social Security benefits).

As the involvement in the effort by word-meister Frank Luntz suggests, the meta-message of the contract was the idea of a contract and hence “accountability.” Beyond that, the details were largely disposable. It reflected Gingrich’s own identification with the idea of ideas more than with actual ideas. And the attribution of the 1994 victory to the contract is undercut by (a) the fact that the contract wasn’t unveiled until late in the cycle, (b) the Republican victories in Senate and state elections that had nothing to do with it, and (c) the many other factors contributing to the “Republican Revolution,” including redistricting, Democratic retirements, and a long-overdue reckoning for the party that had controlled the House since 1954.

The alleged genius of the contract (and of Gingrich) was also refuted more than a bit by the travails of the GOP in power. Newt’s great nemesis Bill Clinton was easily reelected two years later, and four years later Republicans became the first non–White House party since 1934 to lose House seats in a midterm election, leading to Gingrich’s forced resignation as speaker (and as a House member).

But at this stage of their careers, neither Gingrich nor Trump is likely thinking long-term. Both men went off the rails into extremism during the past decade: Gingrich in preparation for a failed 2012 presidential bid and Trump more successfully in 2016 and 2020. You do wonder how savage and culture-war-centric the new contract, which will supposedly have America First thematics, could wind up being. Gingrich offered some thoughts:

“’It should be positive,’ Gingrich said. ‘School choice, teaching American history for real, abolishing the 1619 Project, eliminating critical race theory and what the Texas legislature is doing. We should say, ‘Bring it on.’”

“Gingrich said it shouldn’t be expected until closer to the midterm elections because ‘the world keeps changing and evolving.'”

Yeah, and so do polls. But hey, there’s nothing more substantive, is there, than “abolishing the 1619 project”? Unless it’s combating “voter fraud,” which I am sure Trump will insist upon.

Expect the worst when these two frauds get together.

At Gallup, Jeffrey M. Jones reports, “In Gallup polling throughout the first quarter of 2021, an average of 49% of U.S. adults identified with the Democratic Party or said they are independents who lean toward the Democratic Party. That compares with 40% who identified as Republicans or Republican leaners. The nine-percentage-point Democratic advantage is the largest Gallup has measured since the fourth quarter of 2012. In recent years, Democratic advantages have typically been between four and six percentage points.” Further,

Gallup routinely measures U.S. adults’ party identification and the political leanings of independents. In the first quarter, 30% of Americans identified as Democrats and 19% were Democratic-leaning independents, while 25% were Republican identifiers and 15% Republican-leaning independents. The vast majority of the remaining 11% were independents with no partisan leanings.

The latest figures were measured as President Joe Biden was inaugurated despite rioters’ attempts on Jan. 6 to disrupt the certification of his victory in the 2020 election. The first quarter also saw a steady decline in U.S. coronavirus deaths and infections from its early January peak, a great expansion of COVID-19 vaccinations, and the passage of a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package.

Jones notes that Democrats have enjoyed an even larger advantage during the Bush II and Clinton presidencies. Jones adds that “The 44% of Americans who identify as political independents, whether they subsequently express a party leaning or not, is up from 38% in the fourth quarter of 2020 and is above 40% for the first time since 2019.”

In light of the Democratic edge in party identification, Republicans did very well in U.S. House elections, as well as state legislatures. A new study “Way to Win” found that “Republicans spent a lot more money on casting Democrats as extremists than Democrats did in making the case against Republican extremism, as Greg Sargent reports. “Republicans spent more than 10 times more on ads with the words “extremist” and “radical” than Democrats did. Republicans spent $51 million on such ads, while Democrats spent $3.4 million….Overall, Republicans spent more than $87 million on ads with one or more of the following words in it: “AOC,” “Ocasio,” “Pelosi,” “socialism,” “socialist,” “defund,” “radical,” “extremist,” “extreme.”….GOP ads were more likely to use words with “emotional punch,” such as “taxes,” “radical” and “jobs,” while Democratic ads featured words like “insurance,” “voted” and “work.”

Talking up bipartisanship may have served Democrats well in electing Biden, and possibly Biden’s coattails helped Democratic senate candidates Ossoff and Warnock in GA. But the softer tone may be a liability for Dems in 2022 House and Senate races.

In his article “GOP Image Slides Giving Democrats Strong Advantage” back in February, Jones reported on an earlier Gallup poll and observed that “The tumultuous end to the Trump presidency appears to have harmed the image of the Republican Party. The GOP now faces a double-digit deficit in favorable ratings compared with the Democratic Party.”

Clearly, Democrats are on the right track in pressing the case for a thorough investigation of the January 6th riot, which Trump encouraged and all but a few Republican leaders refuse to condemn. Democrats have a wealth of video showing Trump supporters committing violence, destroying taxpayer-owned property, and leveraging it to remind midterm voters about the GOP’s grotesque hypocrisy regarding law, the Constitution and democracy should give Dems a big edge in branding their adversries.

The more we look at Joe Biden’s job approval ratings, the more it looks like the continuation of a pattern, as I explained at New York:

One of the regular themes of poll watchers during the Trump presidency was the remarkable stability of this very unstable man’s job-approval ratings compared with every available precedent. Two days after he left office, an NBC News analysis put it all into perspective:

“Former President Donald Trump’s time in office is over. He’s been impeached twice and banned from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. But if his presidency was a roller coaster, his approval ratings were not.

“Trump left office with steadier approval ratings than his most recent predecessors, an analysis of NBC News/Wall Street Journal polling data from January 1993 to this January shows. Trump’s approval rating remained within the same 9-point range for his entire presidency: 47 percent at its highest in October 2018, and 38 percent at its lowest in October 2017.”

Barack Obama, by contrast, had a 21-point “band” of approval ratings, which in turn was vastly less volatile than George W. Bush’s 62-point variation between highest and lowest ratings. Trump’s numbers were so uncannily consistent that every time we all wondered if they were finally about to change for better or for worse, instead they lapsed back into moderately underwater territory. It adds to the weirdness that this politician — who was elected president in 2016 despite a terrible favorability ratio (significantly exceeding in disfavor his unpopular opponent) — came very close to winning a second term despite never posting a net-positive job-approval rating in the polling averages.

Now we are five months into the Biden presidency, and guess what? The new president’s job approval ratings, while higher than Trump’s, are also very — in fact, historically — stable, as Harry Enten observes:

“A lot has happened since Biden took office: We’ve seen a failed impeachment trial, a major economic and coronavirus relief package signed into law and the continuation of a mass vaccination campaign leading to more than 60% of adults with at least one a Covid-19 shot nationwide.

“All of this has happened — and the national political environment has remained stagnant. It’s almost as if no event seems to really change public opinion.”

Biden’s approval rating today is pretty much the same as it was a month ago (54%). It’s the exact same as it was at the beginning of his presidency (53%). Any movements can be ascribed to statistical noise.

Some of us (myself included) have wondered if the contrast between the fairly dramatic real-world developments that occurred early in Biden’s presidency and his virtually unchanging approval ratings reflected his deliberately low-profile approach to governing. But it was pretty hard to ignore the fact that partisan polarization best explained the actual numbers, as I noted last month:

“The most striking thing about Biden’s approval ratings is the degree of partisan polarization. It’s off the charts, according to Gallup data. When I wrote about this a couple of months ago, the partisan gap in Biden job approval was a record 87 percent (98 percent approval among Democrats, 11 percent among Republicans). The March Gallup numbers put the gap at 86 percent (94 percent approval among Democrats, and 8 percent among Republicans). These are more extreme splits than we saw under the exceptionally polarizing Trump, and they make the partisan atmosphere under George W. Bush and Barack Obama look like Edens of consensus.”

At some point, you wind up wondering with Enten if no event seems to really change public opinion. That would suggest that Americans have become so tribal in their partisan preferences that neither the turbulent Trump nor the placid Biden — nor anything either of them is doing or undoing — can shake people out of their allegiances. Indeed, I expressed a similar suspicion back in 2019 that wound up predicting the outcome of the 2020 race more than any of my election forecasting:

“My guess is that the narrow band of favorability and job approval numbers for Trump is just another testament to the partisan polarization that made it possible for him to win in 2016, despite his unpopularity. He cannot fall too far, even when he’s behaving in his signature beastly manner, because Republicans will sustain him …

“There are circumstances under which he can transcend his many handicaps by demonizing his opponent, revving up the MAGA people, and taking advantage of an Electoral College system which does not weigh popular votes equally.”

The events of January 6 finally created a bit of a drop in Trump’s popularity among Republicans, but he seems to have quickly recovered that ground and reestablished himself as the boss of his party at both the rank-and-file and elite levels. What matters most, in the long run, is not whether Republicans remain loyal to Trump personally, but whether the partisanship and extremism he represents remain politically cost-free to those emulating his example. There’s abundant evidence it is.

So the temptation for today’s and tomorrow’s Republicans is to let no demagogic opportunity to “energize the base” go unexploited in order to goose partisan turnout the way Trump clearly did. The natural anti–White House trend in midterm elections, reinforced by the Republican advantage in redistricting, is extremely likely to award the GOP with control of the U.S. House in 2022, and with more than its share of battleground state victories in gubernatorial, secretary of state, and legislative contests, leaving the party in good shape for a 2024 comeback with or without Trump as the vengeful candidate of a militant and happily extremist MAGA base.

There are still some swing voters out there to be captured. But as both the 2016 and 2020 Trump campaigns illustrated, a strategy of demonizing the opposition can simultaneously energize the base and sway the undecided with a lesser-of-two-evils appeal.

There are obviously reciprocal lessens for Democrats in this tale. Any fears that pursuit of a too-ambitious agenda by Biden and congressional Democrats will hurt the party in 2022 are probably misplaced; Democrats are likely to lose some ground in the midterms with either a timid or an audacious governing strategy, so they might as well get as much done as possible. And, ironically, the fact that Joe Biden the Fighting Liberal has the same exact level of popularity as Joe Biden the determined bipartisan centrist may show that a more progressive successor would do just fine, or perhaps better, if she or he could mobilize the Democratic base more effectively.

It appears more and more likely that America is in a perilous moment at which the zeal of our two warring tribes matters more in determining the nation’s fate than the identity of its leaders or even the consequences of their policies. That’s not the “new normal” of the Biden presidency most observers had in mind, but it explains a lot.