Charlie Cook takes a gander at the upcoming midterm elections and makes the case that “Idiosyncrasies of Senate Races Could Play to Dems’ Advantage.”  As Cook writes, “With only a third of the chamber’s seats up in any election, the Senate is a different ball game, its dynamics far more idiosyncratic than those in the House….Fewer races overall (and fewer still of the competitive variety) also means that unique circumstances and events in a single state can have a huge effect on which party is gaining or losing Senate seats, or for that matter, capturing, losing, or holding a majority. That is how Presidents Nixon and Reagan could win 49-state reelection victories while their party had a net loss of two Senate seats the same night, and how Democrats could score a net gain of 40 seats in the House in 2018 while suffering a net loss of one Senate seat that same night. A year ago, Democrats lost 11 seats in the House while gaining three Senate seats….With the likely matchups determined in only three of those nine states at the moment, neither side has a natural advantage. Who will face whom in those other six, which party will nominate strong candidates or more-problematic ones, matters a huge amount….So Democrats’ hopes in the Senate remain alive, but they could use some help from former President Trump and his party faithful. Trump could split the party badly in his efforts to purge the GOP of any elected officials who have not pledged and exhibited sufficient fealty to him. GOP primary voters could also nominate exotic candidates who can’t win swing districts and states, much as they did during the tea-party movement in 2010 and 2012.”

Although Democrats certainly need a project to rebuild their ‘brand,’ there is probably not enough time to do much of it for the midterm elections. That may be more of a two, or three-cycle project. It is a hell of a lot harder to ‘rebuild’ a brand than it is to trash one, and Republicans got the jump on Democrats in mining that insight. But that doesn’t mean the Democrats can’t return the favor with an all-out campaign to discredit the GOP, as well as their candidates. It’s not like the Republican brand is all that beloved among the white working-class (non-college) voters who are about 44 percent of the national electorate (and more in key swing states and districts); it’s that a great many of these voters see Democrats as condescending elitists who talk big, but rarely deliver. Part of that perception comes from the Democratic failure to persuasively claim very real legislative accomplishments. But a lot of it comes from snobbery by some Democrats who still think of their political adversaries as “deplorables,” and it shows. Nonetheles, many Republican office-holders have serious weaknesses, including corruption (insider trading, financial mismanagement, nepotism, cronyism etc.), extremely weak track records as sponsors of enacted legislation, and few Republican senators or House members are endowed with impressive personal appeal. Their party’s image is ripe for a well-executed takedown — regardless of the President’s approval ratings or public attitudes towards the Democrats.

But the data thus far suggests that Democrats may not get much traction from increased anger toward Trump and his supporters because of their involvement in the January 6th failed coup attempt. As Kyle Kondik esplains at Sabato’s Crystal Ball, “What the numbers suggest to us is that….the political effect appears to be fleeting….Trump’s overall standing with the public, though not strong, is roughly the same now as it was right before Jan. 6, 2021. Trump remains a force within the Republican Party, probably the favorite for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination if he decides to seek it, and the Republican members of Congress who backed his impeachment are vulnerable within their own party. Retaking the House and the Senate are very much on the table for Republicans later this year, and indicators such as 2021’s election results and voter registration trends are broadly positive for them….Now, it may be that the electoral environment for Republicans would be even better had Jan. 6 not happened — although it is also possible that the outrage over the 2020 election that Trump has manufactured is actually helping Republican motivation. We also do not know what new revelations about Trump, either through the House’s investigation of Jan. 6 or otherwise, may emerge, and whether those revelations will be the thing that fatally undermines Trump’s position in a way that previous revelations have not….But as of now, it does not appear as though there have been lasting, negative political consequences for Trump and Republicans because of Jan. 6.” By all means, Dems should leverage public anger about January 6th. But the other Republican failures may provide a better target for Democratic ads and messaging.

If anyone needs a fact-studded refresher briefing esplaining “How we know the 2020 election results were legitimate, not ‘rigged’ as Donald Trump claims” for your crazy uncle, Daniel Funke has a good one at USA Today. Some excerpts: “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history,” the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and its partners said in a November 2020 statement. “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised.”….Trump’s own attorney general, William Barr, said in early December 2020 that the Justice Department had “not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election.” Biden won the presidency with 306 electoral votes, which Congress certified in January 2021 after the Capitol riot….”Nothing before us proves illegality anywhere near the massive scale, the massive scale that would have tipped the entire election – nor can public doubt alone justify a radical break when the doubt itself was incited without any evidence,”  Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Senate’s top Republican said in his address to the chamberbefore it was evacuated during the Jan. 6 insurrection….Dozens of lawsuits by Trump and his allies aimed at overturning the election, some of which inspired misinformation about results in contested states like Nevada, failed. The Supreme Court refused to take up several cases challenging results in battleground states that played a key role in the outcome of the election….In those battleground states, numerous audits and recounts have affirmed Biden’s win:

• In Arizona, a six-month audit of election results in Maricopa County, home of Phoenix, confirmed the state’s election results. The audit was conducted by Cyber Ninjas, a firm hired by the Republican-dominated state Senate and whose founder had previously promoted unfounded claims of voter fraud. Multiple hand recounts, as well as a forensic audit of voting machines, have also confirmed Maricopa County’s results.
• In Georgia, three separate audits found no evidence of wrongdoing affecting the state’s election outcome. Georgia’s Republican secretary of state has repeatedly quashed claims of widespread voter fraud.
• In Michigan, an audit of ballots, voting machines and election procedures affirmed Biden’s win. The bipartisan effort was the most comprehensive post-election audit in the state’s history.
• In Pennsylvania, a statewide risk-limiting audit found “strong evidence of the accuracy of the count of votes cast in the November 2020 presidential election. ” The audit examined ballots in 63 out of 67 counties.
• In Wisconsin, a recount in the state’s two largest counties found no evidence of widespread voter fraud. An audit of voting machines by the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau, commissioned by Republican lawmakers, and an investigation by a conservative law firm also upheld the election results.

Funke provides detailed sources for all of the bebuttal points.

One of the more important expected developments of 2022 caught my eye, and I wrote about it at New York:

Assuming Nancy Pelosi keeps her earlier pledge to step down as Democratic House leader after the 2022 midterms, there will be a jockeying for party-leadership positions that already has aficionados of the “Democrats in Disarray” meme excited. The Washington Post is positively salivating:

“House Democrats are bracing for a turnover in leadership next year that would amount to a seismic event for the party — one that could empower a new, diverse generation of members while also exacerbating tensions over the direction of the caucus and the policies it should pursue.”

To be fair, it isn’t just the usual progressives-versus-moderates battle fueling this “seismic event”; there’s also generational change. Word is that Pelosi may be heading to the exits with company from her other octogenarian leadership colleagues, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and Majority Whip James Clyburn, and even if they don’t retire from the leadership or from Congress, they could be bypassed by a Democratic Caucus wanting some fresh blood. The front-runner to succeed Pelosi is the fourth-leading member of the leadership, Brooklyn’s Hakeem Jeffries, a mere lad, at the age of 51, who would represent both continuity and change.

As the change of command grows nigh, we will hear a lot from the chattering classes about Jeffries’s ties to House Democratic moderates and how he can mend fences with progressives, including his Gotham frenemy, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But the bigger issue for House Democrats in and out of leadership is the context in which they will serve after the midterms, when many of today’s much-discussed factional conflicts could change or even fade. Let’s look at a few likely upcoming scenarios:

Life in the minority

The enormous pressure Pelosi dealt with every day last year as she discharged the responsibility of shepherding Joe Biden’s agenda through the House may not be a problem for her 2023 successor. Odds are very high (per both history and such leading indicators as Biden’s job-approval ratings) that the party controlling the White House will lose House seats in the midterms. This will likely flip control of the House given Democrats’ very narrow margin of control along with other discouraging factors like retirements and redistricting. If so, then Jeffries (assuming he is the Pelosi successor) won’t have to worry about how to wield the Speaker’s gavel, and Democratic divisions will probably fade in significance (just as the House Freedom Caucus lost its leverage among Republicans when they lost the chamber in 2018, becoming simply a noisy auxiliary to the MAGA movement).

Given the gulf between the two parties and the lack of interest Republicans have in bipartisanship these days, it shouldn’t be too hard to keep moderates and progressives in harness in opposing Republican-sponsored legislation. They will lose the headaches associated with the need to coordinate and reconcile legislation with Senate Democrats. It really won’t matter much if Republicans enjoy a veto via control of the House (and the GOP could, of course, control the upper chamber as well if 2022 trends go south).

Life without a trifecta

Let’s say for the sake of argument that Democrats lose the House in 2022 but regain it in 2024 along with a Biden reelection victory, an entirely plausible scenario. Trouble is, the 2024 Senate landscape is bad for the Donkey Party, so even if Democrats reflip the House and maintain the presidency, they could easily fall short of what they’d need to reconstruct a trifecta. If so, House Democrats will be in the position of having to regularly advance the president’s legislative initiatives with little or no hope that they will actually become law.

This sort of legislating without consequences has its own challenges but shouldn’t strain party unity all that much and is certainly easier than preconferencing every bill with the other chamber.

Life without an iron hand

Pelosi is regarded as one of recent history’s most effective Speakers and congressional party leaders in part because of her exceptional legislative and vote-counting skills. But her effectiveness is also owed a lot to the respect and — yes — fear she was able to rely on in dealing with fractious members of her caucus. This is a form of political capital it takes time to build, and no Pelosi successor will have it from the get-go. Indeed, if Jeffries or any rival for the House leadership tries to play badass prematurely, it could backfire. There won’t be an iron hand at the controls for a good while.

Life with a broad party coalition

One thing that won’t soon change for House Democratic leaders is the simple fact that their party remains a broad coalition as compared to the more ideologically rigid GOP (reflecting a more ideologically rigid activist base in the electorate). In historic terms, of course, the House Democratic Caucus is far more united than it has been, well, maybe ever (certainly more than it was when a significant number of self-described conservatives were around). But there are still factions and individual members willing to take advantage of whatever leverage they can muster without much fear of primary challenges or grassroots fury.

Congressional Democrats in both chambers also typically experience more tensions over the influence of moneyed interests than do Republicans. At some point, Democrats may need to unilaterally implement long-stalled initiatives aimed at reducing the power of lobbyists and the shadowy forces they represent, who have all along constituted a faction as powerful as moderates or progressives.

But in any event, the distinctive problems and opportunities that House Democrats are experiencing in the final two years of the Pelosi era will simply not be extended beyond 2022. However new or old, and left or center, the party’s future leadership turns out to be, the outlook for House Democrats will change significantly from cycle to cycle. It would be nice if House-watchers also adjust accordingly.

An excerpt from “A year after the Capitol attack, democracy itself is on every ballot,” a Los Angeles Times article by U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff (CA-28), a member of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6^th Attack on the United States Capitol:

In the hours and days after the insurrection, it seemed like the GOP leadership might finally come to grips with what President Trump had wrought with his big lie about massive election fraud.

“The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters,” Republican House Leader Kevin McCarthy acknowledged. For his part, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told the Senate, “There’s no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.”

And for a brief moment, we had a chance to turn the corner on a disastrous period of our nation’s history. We had a chance to repudiate the immoral grifter who led our country for four years, and weaponized people’s worst fears and anxieties to the point of violence against our capitol. We had a chance to turn back from one party’s grim flirtation with authoritarianism. We had a chance to move forward, still fragmented, but together as a country and a democracy.

And then, just like that, the opportunity was gone. Fingers to the wind, McCarthy, McConnell and state and local GOP leaders decided that Donald Trump really could, if not shoot someone in the middle of the street with impunity, at least incite a violent attack on our democracy and retain the support of his base. Lacking the courage of their convictions, guided by nothing more than their ambition to regain power, the GOP leadership buckled again to the former president.

Doubling down on Trump’s big lie, GOP officials used it to usher in a new generation of Jim Crow laws around the country, bent on disenfranchising people of color. Equally insidious, they have used false claims of voter fraud to strip independent election officials of their duties and given those duties over to partisan legislatures; they’ve run technocratic local election officials out of town, often with death threats.

The lesson Trump and his enablers seemed to have learned from their failure to overturn President Biden’s election appears to be this: If they couldn’t get the Georgia secretary of state to “find” 11,780 votes that didn’t exist in 2020, they will make sure to have someone in that position and others in 2024 who will.

They will prevent people from voting if they can. If that does not succeed, they will prepare the ground to overturn the next election. Never, in our lifetimes, has the threat to our democracy been so grave. We thought democracy to be inexorable. We were wrong.

Democracies do not always die by violent overthrow. More often, they die through atrophy, through the slow degradation of institutions, through the use of democratic means to bring on authoritarian ends. This is the model that Hungarian Prime Minister — and wannabe dictator — Viktor Orban has used to march his country toward autocracy, and it is the model that Republican thought leaders, like Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, admire and promote.

It is not too late to save our founders’ cherished legacy — a government of, by and for the people. There is no simple legislative solution to our present predicament, and our best statutory protections are stymied by the slavish devotion of senators to an archaic Senate custom — the filibuster. If the last four years have shown us anything, not even the Constitution can protect our democracy if the men and women sworn to uphold it will not live up to their oaths.

What is required on the anniversary of Jan. 6 is nothing less than a national awakening, and a national movement to save our democracy. We must rally around our local officials — Republicans as well as Democrats — who put the sanctity of our elections first. We must resist, and if necessary, overcome, any new impediments to voting. In each and every election to come, we must act as if democracy itself were on the ballot, for surely, it is.

There is no single remedy that can prevent the theft of the next election. But three essential elements of “a national movement to save our democracy” include enactment of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act, combined with an unprecedented mobilization of pro-Democratic voters leading up to the midterm elections.

Today being the 1st anniversary of the failed coup by Trump and his thug minions, Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne puts it in perspective in his column, ‘How to get real accountability for Jan. 6“: As Dionne writes, “One of our two major political parties refuses to face up to what happened. Worse, the Republican Party has been using Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election as a pretext to restrict access to the ballot box in many GOP-controlled states and to undermine honest ballot counts by allowing partisan bodies to seize control of the electoral process….“It is important to understand Jan. 6 as a political event and not be misled by a desire to sweep our divisions under a rug woven of well-meaning wishful thinking. While condemnations of the bloody aggression initially crossed party lines, most Republican politicians either retreated into silence bred by fear of Trump or set out to minimize the assault on police officers and the vandalizing of public space as a “protest.”….The deaths of Capitol Police officers, the beating of others, the degradation of the Capitol, and the terrorizing of officials and staff were all rooted in one man’s selfish indifference to the obligations of democratic leadership. Trump provoked the attack on the counting of electoral votes because he hoped to rig an election….The tell as to how much Trump has corrupted his party is its embrace of a wholly new position on federal guarantees of voting rights….The fact that Republicans oppose federal voting guarantees is no reason to give them veto power over bills aimed at repairing abuses their fellow partisans are enacting at the state level….Accountability for the events of Jan. 6 must be legal but also political. At issue is whether we are the democratic republic we claim to be.”

Thomas B. Edsall gives big philanthropy a proper thrashing in his latest NYT column, and writes “Jonathan Chait, a columnist for New York magazine, wrote an essay in late November on the dilemmas of the Biden presidency, “Joe Biden’s Big Squeeze,” in which he argued that progressive foundations “have churned out studies and deployed activists to bring left-wing ideas into the political debate. At this they have enjoyed overwhelming success. In recent years, a host of new slogans and plans — the Green New Deal, “Defund the police,” “Abolish ICE,” and so on — have leaped from the world of nonprofit activism onto the chyrons of MSNBC and Fox News. Obviously, the conservative media have played an important role in publicizing (and often distorting) the most radical ideas from the activist left. But the right didn’t invent these edgy slogans; the left did, injecting them into the national bloodstream….The grim irony is that, in attempting to court nonwhite voters, Democrats ended up turning them off. It was not only that they got the data wrong — they were also courting these “marginalized communities” in ways that didn’t appeal to them. For the reality is that the Democratic Party’s most moderate voters are disproportionately Latino and Black.” Eddall adds, “Nonprofits on the left, Chait argued, “set out to build a new Democratic majority. When the underpinnings of its theory collapsed, the movement it built simply continued onward, having persuaded itself that its ideas constituted an absolute moral imperative.”

Inasmuch as “critical race theory” is a topic likely more discussed in foundation board rooms than worker lunchrooms, union halls or family gatherings, Edsall adds, “ALG Research, the major polling firm in the Joe Biden campaign, conducted, along with Third Way, a postelection study of the 2021 Virginia governor’s race, in which Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, defeated Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic nominee. The ALG study of swing voters, which I have reported on in past columns, found, for example, that Republican highlighting of critical race theory had a subtle effect on voters: “CRT in schools is not an issue in and of itself, but it taps into these voters’ frustrations. Voters were nearly unanimous in describing the country as divided and feeling that politics is unavoidably in their faces.” While the voters ALG studied knew that critical race theory had not been formally adopted as part of Virginia’s curriculum, the report continued, “they felt like racial and social justice issues were overtaking math, history, and other things. They absolutely want their kids to hear the good and the bad of American history, at the same time they are worried that racial and cultural issues are taking over the state’s curricula. We should expect this backlash to continue, especially as it plays into another way where parents and communities feel like they are losing control over their schools in addition to the basics of even being able to decide if they’re open or not.”

Edsall quotes fellow Times writer Jeremy Peters to good effect: Critics “have argued that Democrats are trying to explain major issues — such as inflation, crime and school curriculum — with answers that satisfy the party’s progressive base but are unpersuasive and off-putting to most other voters. The clearest example is in Virginia, where the Democratic candidate for governor, Terry McAuliffe, lost his election after spending weeks trying to minimize and discredit his opponent’s criticisms of public school education, particularly the way that racism is talked about. Mr. McAuliffe accused the Republican, Glenn Youngkin, of campaigning on a “made-up” issue and of blowing a “racist dog whistle.”….But, Peters continued: “about a quarter of Virginia voters said that the debate over teaching critical race theory, a graduate-level academic framework that has become a stand-in for a debate over what to teach about race and racism in schools, was the most important factor in their decision, and 72 percent of those voters cast ballots for Mr. Youngkin, according to a survey of more than 2,500 voters conducted for The Associated Press by NORC at the University of Chicago, a nonpartisan research organization.” Edsall adds, “For leaders of the Democratic Party, these developments pose a particularly frustrating problem because they pay an electoral price for policy proposals and rhetoric that are outside party control.”

When looking back over the last year, I noticed some familiar data points, and wrote about them at New York:

There was a year not very long ago when Democrats spent January not only feeling their oats but believing they had turned a corner in the direction of a sustainable and perhaps even transformative majority. But that year ended in doldrums, with the party’s situation rapidly growing worse. It was 2009, though the description certainly applies to 2021 as well. During Barack Obama’s first year in office, his party experienced a fall from grace that felt a lot like the year that just ended (minus the pandemic and the persistent presence of former president Donald Trump, of course).

What happens in the coming year will soon determine whether we’re really moving in a predictable political cycle, but for now, let’s consider some of the similarities between 2009 and 2021 and what they might portend:

The 2008 elections produced a huge Democratic win

The sense of deliverance that accompanied the 2020 election results for most Democrats was an echo of how they felt 12 years earlier. I was in Washington on Election Night and will never forget walking out of the restaurant where I had heard the Obama victory announced into what looked like a citywide street party. Part of that euphoria, of course, stemmed from the unlikely election of the first Black president. But it was a partisan Democratic event as well: 2008 produced the first governing trifecta (control of the White House and both congressional chambers) since the Republican landslide of 1994, with a particularly impressive Senate majority of 59, soon to become 60 (a supermajority that could in theory override any filibuster) when Republican Arlen Specter flipped.

The Obama-Biden win was by a comfortably large margin (of more than 7 percent in the popular vote and 192 in the electoral one) after photo finishes in 2000 and 2004. Obama, for all his later demonization by Republicans, won 20 percent of all self-identified conservatives and 60 percent of moderates. It felt, at the time, like an era of gridlock might have come to an end — not quite as dramatic as the ejection of Donald Trump from the White House in 2020 and the Democrats’ picking up two Senate seats in Georgia, but a big deal nonetheless. Or so it seemed initially.

Democrats entered 2009 with an ambitious agenda and hopes of bipartisan traction

While there was no pandemic-induced economic collapse in 2009, there was an even stronger sense of economic malaise in the wake of the financial collapse of 2008 and the intensification of what had already become known as the Great Recession (which, according to economic indicators, ended in June 2009). The new Obama administration came into office with an ambitious agenda that included both short-term economic relief and stimulus, and its much-discussed campaign platform planks including health-care reform and an attack on climate change. Obama had talked a lot about bipartisanship during his short career in the Senate and then his run for the presidency, so he made an effort to secure Republican input and buy-in for all of his legislative agenda but had very little success (thanks to a GOP strategy of total obstruction designed by Mitch McConnell, who is running the same plays today).

Like Biden’s Democrats in 2021, Obama’s in 2009 compiled a record of partial success combined with frustration and failure. A stimulus package wound up smaller and less effective than originally planned thanks to concessions needed to bring a few Republicans onboard. Senate Democratic moderates vetoed key provisions of the president’s signature health-care initiative, including a “public option” for insurance in areas when private insurance was unavailable or unaffordable and a Medicare “buy-in” program for near-seniors. The entire Affordable Care Act legislation nearly crashed and burned when Republicans won an upset special Senate election in Massachusetts at the beginning of 2010; Democrats resorted to the budget-reconciliation process to avoid a fatal filibuster. Greenhouse-gas-emissions legislation got through the House but never gained traction in the Senate.

Hostility to Obama rapidly mounted as the anti-government tea-party movement spread, launched by furious conservatives who claimed that Democrats were socialistically redistributing wealth to undeserving minorities — claims similar to the those lobbed at Biden’s Build Back Better agenda these days. There was no precise equivalent to “Let’s Go, Brandon,” in part because Obama haters saw little need for euphemism.

Democrats were facing a 2010 midterm fiasco

The first midterm elections after the Democratic triumph of 2008 were a disaster for the Donkey Party. Republicans made net gains of 63 House seats (winning control of the chamber), six Senate seats, six governorships, and 19 state legislative chambers. The enormousness of the state victories for Republicans was magnified by the timing, with decennial congressional and state legislative redistricting immediately on tap in 2011. While midterm House losses for the party controlling the White House are normal, the top-to-bottom wipeout of 2010 was not. A major factor in the results was a big drop-off in Democratic turnout, some of it probably reflecting the higher-than-normal youth-and-minority turnout when Obama was on the ballot in 2008.

Republicans are currently expected to make solid gains in 2022, including a reconquest of the House. However, the landscape is not really ripe for a 2010-style landslide. For one thing, polarization has limited wins and losses alike for both parties. For another, the disappointing 2020 performance by House Democrats has made them less exposed to losses in marginal districts. And for still another thing, the Senate landscape for Democrats in 2022 is significantly better than it was in 2010.

Big state legislative losses for Democrats in 2022 are also far less likely; their party controlled 27 state legislatures going into 2010 and shared power in eight others. Now Republicans control 30 legislatures and share power in another. Even if Democratic losses do occur, they will be less consequential, since redistricting will have been completed by the fall of 2022.

Obama’s future looked iffy (but he bounced back)

In a period when today’s partisan polarization was still under construction, Obama posted a 67 percent job approval rating (per Gallup) at the beginning of his presidency; his job approval had dropped into the 40s by the end of 2009, and remained there throughout 2010. After Democrats were trounced in the 2010 midterms, the odds of a second term for Obama looked pretty slim

But just like Bill Clinton after the previous Democratic midterm disaster of 1994, Obama executed a slow but steady comeback. His job-approval rating was even lower in 2011 than in the previous year, but it gradually rose, reaching 50 percent just before the 2012 elections. And even though Republican Mitt Romney improved on McCain’s performance, he ultimately lost the popular vote by 3.9 percent — a bit less than Donald Trump’s 4.4 percent popular-vote loss in 2020.

We are obviously a long way from the 2024 elections and have no way of knowing if Biden — whose approval rating has taken a dive — can reprise Obama’s comeback. One variable, of course, is whether Trump will again be his opponent. Only three major-party presidential losers have won their party’s nomination in the next election, and only one, Grover Cleveland, went on to retake the White House. But Cleveland’s party had won one of the biggest midterm landslides ever two years before his final presidential victory. So Republicans may have an uphill climb to recover the White House even if they do well in next year’s midterms, particularly if they insist on renominating the most divisive president ever.

 

In his article, “2022 House Overview: Still a GOP Advantage, but Redistricting Looks Like a Wash,” at The Cook Political Report, David Wasserman writes:

The surprising good news for Democrats: on the current trajectory, there will be a few more Biden-won districts after redistricting than there are now — producing a congressional map slightly less biased in the GOP’s favor than the last decade’s. The bad news for Democrats: if President Biden’s approval ratings are still mired in the low-to-mid 40s in November, that won’t be enough to save their razor-thin House majority (currently 221 to 212 seats).

The start of 2022 is an ideal time to take stock of the nation’s cartographic makeover. New district lines are either complete or are awaiting certification in 34 states totaling 293 seats — more than two-thirds of the House (this includes the six states with only one seat).

A Cook Political Report with Amy Walter analysis finds that in the completed states, Biden would have carried 161 of 293 districts over Donald Trump in 2020, an uptick from 157 of 292 districts in those states under the current lines (nationwide, Biden carried 224 of 435 seats). And if Democrats were to aggressively gerrymander New York or courts strike down GOP-drawn maps in North Carolina and/or Ohio, the outlook would get even better for Democrats.

However, the partisan distribution of seats before/after redistricting is only one way to gauge the process. Because Democrats currently possess the lion’s share of marginal seats, estimating the practical effect of new lines in 2022 still points towards a wash or a slight GOP gain.

Wasserman notes further that “so far Republicans have only gone on offense in Georgia, North Carolina and Ohio — all of which face court scrutiny.” Also,

Meanwhile, Democrats unabashedly gerrymandered Illinois, New Mexico and Oregon. They scored highly favorable maps from commissions in California and New Jersey, and to a lesser extent Michigan. Republicans’ only mild commission “wins?” Arizona and Montana. And five states where the GOP had exclusive authority back in 2011 — Louisiana, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin — are now under split or commission control.

Even though Biden carried 224 of 435 seats in 2020, the current House map has a slight pro-GOP bias: the median district, held by Democratic Rep. Lauren Underwood (IL-14), voted for Biden by 2.4 points, two points to the right of his 4.4 point national popular vote margin. Nationally, according to the PVI, there are 230 districts that lean more Republican than the nation as a whole, compared to 205 districts that lean more Democratic.

So far, completed states look surprisingly rosy for Democrats. There are 15 seats that have “flipped” from GOP-leaning to Democratic-leaning: CA-13, CA-45, GA-07, IL-13, IL-14, IL-17, MI-03, MI-11, NV-03, NJ-03, NJ-05, NJ-11, NM-02, OR-04 and VA-07. By contrast, there are only nine seats that have “flipped” the other way: AZ-06, CA-40, GA-06, MI-08, MI-10, NJ-07, NC-02, NC-07 and OH-09. That’s a net gain of six Democratic-leaning seats.

‘However,” Wasserman adds, ” the oldest rule in the book is that you can’t gain a seat you already hold. Looking under the hood, Democrats already hold 11 of the 15 “newly Democratic-leaning” seats, meaning only four are pickup opportunities. By contrast, Republicans only hold one of the nine “newly GOP-leaning” seats, giving them eight map-enhanced pickup opportunities – twice as many as Democrats. At least in 2022, that’s a GOP advantage.”

Wasserman notes, “It’s still too early to render a final verdict on redistricting. There are still 16 states that aren’t complete (or near-complete), not counting the handful of states with high-stakes litigation pending. Republicans could still target Democratic seats in Florida, Tennessee and New Hampshire, and far less likely in Kansas, Kentucky and Missouri. Democrats could offset all of that in New York.” He warns, “Some of the narrowly Biden-won new seats where Democrats are especially vulnerable are AZ-06, IL-17, MI-07, MI-08, NV-01, NV-03, NV-04, NJ-07, NC-02, VA-02, VA-07 and WA-08. And, this list is certain to expand as more states finish maps….Adding to Democrats’ challenge: retirements. At this writing, there are 24 Democrats not seeking reelection in 2022, including 11 from potentially vulnerable districts. The retirements of Reps. Stephanie Murphy (FL-07), Cheri Bustos (IL-17), G.K. Butterfield (NC-02) and Ron Kind (WI-03) are the most problematic. By contrast, there are only 11 Republicans heading for the exits, none of whom were truly vulnerable under their current lines.”

In his concluding paragraphs, Wasserman explains, “Democrats began the cycle with virtually no margin for error, and the drag from Biden’s disapproval – inextricably linked to retirements and GOP recruitment/fundraising — long ago overtook redistricting as the leading threat to Democrats’ majority. Their only hope of holding on involves not only key map battles in New York, North Carolina and Ohio breaking their way but the president’s approval rating rebounding much closer to 50 percent.”

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

Lauren Gambino at the Guardian has an article about Republican plans for 2022 and different Democratic party strategies for countering them. She quotes the following from one influential wing of the party:

“It’s the oldest trick in the book,” said Anat Shenker-Osorio, a messaging expert and host of Words To Win By. “It’s creating some sort of an ‘other’ so that we don’t notice that they’re actually the cause of our problems.”

In Virginia and elsewhere, she said Democrats were caught “flat-footed” by concerns over critical race theory, a concept that, until recently, few outside of academia had ever heard of. Instead of confronting it, she said Democrats’ instinct was to deny support and dismiss the charge as a right-wing talking point, neither of which satisfied voters.

Democrats need “an explanation for the rightwing’s origin story of ‘this is why you’re suffering white man in the post-industrial midwest’,” Shenker-Osorio said. “Unless we can talk about race, about gender, about gender identity, our economic promise isn’t going to land.”

This seems certifiable to me but I guess YMMV. On the other hand Gambino notes an alternative perspective.

“An increasingly vocal coterie of liberal critics believe ….that Democrats are staring into the political wilderness unless they are able to win back some of the non-college educated voters who abandoned the party.

Ruy Teixeira, a demographer and election analyst, believes Democrats have moved too far left on social issues like crime and immigration and is in need of a complete rebrand. He said Trump’s gains with non-college educated Hispanic voters was a “real wake-up call” that Democrats need to change course.

“We need a durable majority,” he said. “You can’t build a durable majority by ignoring socio-cultural concerns and the values of these huge swaths of the population.”
Where Democrats agree is that they must deliver on their promises while in power.

“We’re really just at the beginning of what needs to be a substantial change in the way the American economic model works,” Teixeira said. “And to do that, it’s not enough to just win one election and pass some stuff. We need to win a number of elections and pass even more stuff … It’s not much more complicated than that.”

Whoever this guy Teixeira is, I think he’s onto something. I also like what Freddie deBoer has to say about the need for a profound attitude adjustment on the part of the American center-left:

“Sometimes I get people asking me why I don’t write more criticism of Republicans and conservatives. I’ve made the basic point many times before: those with influence within the conservative movement are too craven or crazy for meaningful written engagement to be worth anything, and those who are interesting and honest have no influence within the conservative movement. You can engage with Ross Douthat, who’s sharp and fair but who the average conservative would call a RINO or you can engage with a roster of interchangeable lunatics who lie and dissemble in defense of a cruel revanchist movement. I tend to train my fire on the broad left of center because, as much as I would sometimes like to wash my hands of the whole damn lot of them, they are the half of American politics that could actually reform, that could improve. I see no positive outcome from going through Breitbart posts and pointing out the lies. But [Chris] Hayes, and other liberal Democrats who grumble and groan about left on liberal criticism, seem to think that if we just keep talking about how awful Josh Hawley and the Proud Boys are, somehow these problems will all sort themselves out.

They won’t. If you’re obsessed with defeating Trumpism, you should realize that you can only do that through securing a broad multicultural coalition, and you can’t do that when you’re alienating Hispanic voters or failing to challenge people in your political orbit when they insist that white children should be taught that they’re inherently and irreversibly racist. 70% of this country is white, Hispanic voters are not remotely as left-leaning as people assumed, immigrants are far from uniformly progressive, women were never actually a liberal stronghold, and you can’t win national elections by appealing only to the kinds of people who say “Black bodies” instead of “Black people.” This is the simple point David Shor has made for over a year, and for his trouble he gets a columnist in the Nation flat-out lying about him. Imagine a political tendency where popularism – literally, the idea that you should do things that appeal to voters – is immensely controversial. Liberalism is not healthy.”

DeBoer goes on to quote Democratic ex-Senator Harry Reid, who, when asked what message he wanted to leave with America, answered “I want everybody in America to understand that if Harry Reid can make it, anybody can.” In regard to this deBoer comments:

“Does that sound anything like the message American liberalism wants to deliver now? Absolutely not. Today, American liberalism wants to tell you not that America can be a place of justice and equality where we all work together for the good of all, even as we acknowledge how badly we’ve failed that ideal. In 2021 liberalism wants to tell you that the whole damn American project is toxic and ugly, that every element of the country is an excuse to perpetuate racism, that those groups of people Hayes lists at the bottom are not in any sense in it together but that instead some fall higher on an hierarchy of suffering, with those who are perceived to have it too good in that hierarchy deserving no help from liberalism or government or the Democratic party – and, oh by the way, you can be dirt poor and powerless and still be privileged, so we don’t want you, especially if you’re part of the single largest chunk of the American electorate. Anyone who tows the line [sic] Harry Reid takes here is either a bigot or a sap, and politics is a zero-sum game where marginalized groups can only get ahead if others suffer, and Democrats fight to control a filthy, ugly, fallen country that will forever be defined by its sins. That’s the liberalism of 2021, a movement of unrelenting pessimism, obscure vocabulary, elitist tastes, and cultural and social extremism totally divorced from a vision of shared prosperity and a working class movement that comes together across difference for the good of all. In fact, I think I learned in my sociology class at Dartmouth that a working class movement would inherently center white pain! Better to remain divided into perpetually warring fiefdoms of grievance that can accomplish nothing. Purer that way. Now here’s Chris with part 479 of his January 6th series, to show us the country’s biggest problems.

Conservatives run roughshod over the country, and liberals are powerless to stop them, because liberalism has been colonized by a bizarre set of fringe cultural ideas about race and gender which they express in abstruse and alienating vocabulary at every turn. If anyone complains, liberals call them racist or sexist or transphobic, even when those complaining are saying that we can fight racism and sexism and transphobia more effectively by stressing shared humanity and the common good. Republicans tell the American people batshit conspiracy theories about communists teaching Yakub theory in kindergarten; Democrats fight back by making PowerPoint slides about why resegregating public schools is intersectional. We have reactionary insanity that expresses itself in plain, brute language and an opposition that insists that most voters don’t actually have any real problems, using a vocabulary that should never have escaped the conference rooms of whatever nonprofit hell it crawled out of. I cannot imagine a more obvious mismatch, the gleeful conspiracist bloodletting of the right against the sneering disdain and incomprehensible jargon of the left. I wonder who’ll win politically, an army of racist car dealership owners who have already taken over vast swaths of America’s state and local governments, keening for blood and soil? Or the guy in your anthropology seminar who insisted they were the voice of social justice while simultaneously making every conversation all about them?”

So, Happy New Year y’all. Let’s see if we can make some progress toward a saner left in 2022.

Caroline Vakil shares “Five takeaways from polls marking Jan. 6 anniversary” at The Hill,  including: “In an ABC News-Ipsos survey published on Sunday, 72 percent of Americans polled said those who participated in the riot were mostly threatening democracy. But about a quarter of respondents said the opposite — that those engaging in the Jan. 6 attack were mostly protecting democracy…About 58 percent of those polled also said Trump bore a good amount or great deal of responsibility for the Jan. 6 riot, while 41 percent said he bore no responsibility or just some….The poll showed a partisan divide among how those involved in the Jan. 6 riot were viewed: 52 percent of Republicans believed that those involved in the attack on the Capitol were protecting democracy, while 45 percent said they were threatening democracy….Comparatively, 96 percent of Democrats felt those who participated in the riot were threatening democracy….A Washington Post-University of Maryland poll published on Saturday found that one-third of Americans believe citizens engaging in violence against the government could sometimes be justified…Split along partisan lines, 40 percent of Republicans said violent actions could be justified, compared to 23 percent of Democrats and 41 percent of independents….Those who said that violent actions could be merited cited reasons such as the government violating or taking away people’s rights or freedoms, a potential military takeover, or the collapse of democracy….That percentage was an increase from those who answered similarly in a poll from October 2015, when 23 percent of those polled said the same. In April 2010 and January 2011, 16 percent of respondents said the same.”

Vakil continues, “A University of Massachusetts Amherst poll published last week showed a partisan divide in how Americans describe the participants of the Jan. 6 attack….While more than two-thirds of Democrats called those who participated in the riot “insurrectionists,” “white nationalists” and “rioters,” 62 percent of Republicans called them “protesters.”….A CBS News poll published on Sunday found that while 85 percent of Democrats polled called the Jan. 6 attack an attempt to overthrow the government and an insurrection, only 21 percent of Republicans called it an insurrection….Sixty-eight percent of Americans polled believe the Jan. 6 riot was not an isolated event and believe it is pointing toward more political violence. However, a portion of Americans — 33 percent — believe the Jan. 6 riot is an isolated circumstance….Pollsters found that an overwhelming majority of Democrats — 81 percent — said they strongly disapprove of the events at the Capitol, with 34 percent of Republicans in agreement….A Politico-Morning Consult poll released on Sunday painted a divided picture of how Republicans view the House select committee tasked with investigating the insurrection at the Capitol….It found that 44 percent of Republicans oppose the committee to some degree, while 40 percent somewhat or strongly support it. Comparatively, 82 percent of Democrats support the committee, and 61 percent of all registered voters polled approve of the House panel….But the poll also found that support for the panel dropped once it was noted that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) nominated the committee’s members.”

“Democrats have been ineffective in selling their accomplishments, which include the soaring economy, their economic rescue plan and a historic infrastructure bill, partly because their achievements have been overshadowed by the protracted struggle over Build Back Better,” E. J. Dionne, Jr. writes in his latest Washington Post column. “The wrangling has made the whole party, including Biden, look ineffectual — and exhaustion with what seems like a forever pandemic hasn’t helped….Let’s stipulate: A media ecosystem divided between a mainstream that takes pride in nonpartisan toughness on incumbents and a powerful right-wing communications network makes life harder for Democrats. But there is little chance of changing the media narrative unless Democrats themselves shift the broader conversation….The upshot: Biden’s standing has eroded from a 56 percent Gallup approval rating in mid-June to 43 percent in December. This is problem enough, but what should worry Democrats more is that Biden’s opponents are filled with passionate intensity while his supporters are, well, meh….The Morning Consult/Politico survey conducted between Dec. 18 and Dec. 20, for example, found 43 percent of registered voters approving of Biden’s performance and 53 percent disapproving. But only 21 percent of those surveyed strongly approved of what Biden is doing, while 39 percent strongly disapproved….The disenchantment of their core supporters is the biggest problem Democrats have to deal with. Among 18- to 29-year-olds — who gave Biden a 24-point advantage over Donald Trump in 2020 — only 22 percent strongly approved of his performance in the Morning Consult survey. And while 47 percent of Democrats strongly approved of Biden’s performance, 74 percent of Republicans strongly disapproved.”

In addition, Dionne writes, “Attacking Trump is not enough. Biden and his party need to make democracy itself a central issue, starting now….This means, first, quick final passage of the democracy bills pending in the Senate. It also requires invoking the evidence from the House select committee’s Jan. 6 investigation to make clear that the threat to democracy comes not just from Trump but also from a Republican Party complicit in undermining democratic institutions, both overtly and through its silence….Biden can strengthen his own standing by championing democracy far more forcefully. This requires vigorous advocacy for the democracy bills, legal and executive action against the GOP assault on free elections, and proving democratic government’s day-to-day effectiveness….His allies in Congress should stop shilly-shallying and pass key elements of Build Back Better. With voting rights and achievements on behalf of the climate, heath care and the well-being of kids, Democrats might begin to break the fever of disillusionment….Democrats will face big losses unless they simultaneously win back middle-ground voters and mobilize their disheartened loyalists. Governing with urgency is a good place to start, but overcoming the midterm blues will require more. They must make the election about something that matters. If democracy isn’t worth fighting for, what is?”

Some excerpts from Eric Alterman’s ‘Altercation’ column on “The Sins of the Mainstream Media: The many reasons why the media is failing to reckon with the loss of our democracy” at The American Prospect:

As this benighted year comes to an end, you, dear reader, are no doubt wondering why our media has failed so miserably when tested by a political party that seeks to destroy our democracy and our planet with it. The answer, sadly, is “it’s complicated.”

The media critic Dan Froomkin wrote an excellent column recently which pointed to another aspect of the problem. Nina Bernstein, a reporter who covered homelessness for The New York Times, tells him that at the Paper of Record, “To write factually, up close, with what I like to call intelligent compassion about these people’s lives basically invited charges of partisanship … Many reporters across the traditional news media are struggling against institutional tics and timidities that make ‘balance’ a false idol.” The result: “The inadvertent normalization of existential threats to democracy and public health by one party and its right-wing media echo chamber.” Bernstein points the finger at Times mid-level editors. They are often the ones “who are more timid, more ready to water down or reject a story.” But, she notes, “They’re trying to do what they think the top editors want.”

This is how an allegedly liberal newspaper ends up whitewashing Republican corruption, cruelty, and purposeful (often, but not always) faux stupidity, because it’s really true that “reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

Alterman notes “numerous instances where a terribly misleading headline will appear above a reasonably OK story. Given the fact that the headline is all most people will ever read, people receive a completely false picture of reality.” He provides a couple of examples from New York Times headlines and cites nine ways that the media dithers when it comes to standing up for democracy, including these excerpts:

“When Democrats do not do what journalists think they should—which is quite frequently—journalists take it personally and attack them, regardless of how inconsequential the offense. Republicans, whom journalists tend to find weird and scary, might be attempting to overthrow our government, but this turns out to be less of a concern.”

“Journalists like to pretend to objectivity, but what they really mean is quoting from “both sides” and failing to distinguish between what they know to be lies and what they know to be true. In this lengthy article on the 2016 election, I went into a great deal of detail about how it works and where it comes from.”

“Yes, most journalists are liberal on social issues like abortion and gun control and even, God help them, evolution. But most also work, by and large, for multinational corporations whose top executives earn eight-figure salaries and hate taxes, unions, and anything that threatens their power and profits.”

A few major media outlets, including MSNBC, and to a lesser extent CNN, have done a decent job of prioritizing reports about the investigation of the complicity of the Trump Administration and Republican office-holders in the January 6th riot. But reports about Republican-driven voter suppression in the states have been spotty in general, given their serious threat to American democracy.

Some have suggested that restoring the Fairness Doctrine would promote balance in reporting. Others argue that it was never all that ‘fair’ in practice. Although there are no quick ‘fixes’ for media sins of omission or distortion, there is plenty of room for new ideas for reform.

Elaine Kamarck explains why “Biden can still salvage his Build Back Better bill if he settles for a piece by piece strategy” at Brookings: “is that he keeps getting bad marks for popular policies. Most Americans wanted out of Afghanistan and a majority supported the items in the Build Back Better bill, and yet, Biden is getting slammed. The way out is to change strategy. Stop putting everything into these enormous bills on the grounds that “reconciliation” is the only way to get past the Republicans in Congress, and start doing things the old-fashioned way, one bill at a time. There are two advantages to this approach. Some of the very popular provisions just might, if they were standalone bills, attract enough Republican votes to become law. And if not, Republicans would be forced to vote, on the record, against some very popular ideas and face Democratic criticism in the midterms….There are many ways to break down the massive bill into discrete and popular parts that would make it harder for the president’s opponents to message an attack. For instance, Biden could send a free-standing bill to Congress focused solely on making the increase in the child tax credit (passed in March as a part of the COVID relief bill) permanent. This is one of the most popular features of the bill, and research has shown that it has had a dramatic impact on child poverty rates. As a stand-alone bill, the messaging is clear and easy. There’s a slim chance that Democrats would win a few Republican senators but there’s a big chance that they could do some political damage to the Republicans who would vote against it. Either way, something is better than nothing.”

Kamarck continues, “Or, Biden could send Congress a free-standing bill providing four weeks of paid family and medical leave. With workers struggling to take care of family members as COVID and long COVID crash through the population, this proposal would be increasingly popular as the effects of the virus wear on. Once again, there’s a chance (albeit a slim one) that a standalone bill could muster enough Republican votes. And for the Republican senators who don’t vote for it? Well… the opposition ads write themselves….This is the case for other parts of the massive bill as well. Take the health care provisions. One of the most popular provisions, expanding Medicare to include hearing aids, has a broad base and is easy to understand. The baby boom generation isn’t dead yet but too many rock concerts have made it hard of hearing. It could be tough for a Republican senator to vote against this, but it won’t be tough for Democrats to slam them for denying grandpa hearing aids….there are plenty of popular items in this bill – but too many different policy proposals made it impossible to message. For months now we’ve watched Democrats take a very deep breath before spewing out the laundry list of items in the bill. Biden can still have a win – in fact, he can have a series of wins – if he moves away from massive bills that contain everything but the kitchen sink and toward bills that are clear and easy to understand.  Social Security, perhaps the most popular program ever created, was enacted by President Roosevelt and the Democratic Congress in a 32-page bill.”

“For a prime example of the incredible value the maligned moderate provides to their party, Democrats should look no further than Joe Biden’s 40 judicial appointments — all of whom Manchin has voted to confirm,” The Welcome Party notes at substack.com. “Thanks to Manchin, the Biden administration has already appointed more judges at this point in its tenure than any presidential administration in recent history. Not only are these appointments significantly more diverse in background than those of prior administrations, but they also provide a critical opportunity for the Democrats to shift the balance of power away from Donald Trump’s disproportionately white, male, and conservative judicial picks….Those in the party who remain ungrateful to Manchin should also revisit his:

• Dual impeachment votes for Donald Trump, despite his constituents voting for Trump at higher rates than the GOP Senators who voted similarly
• Enthusiastic vote for the President’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan
• Voted against Donald Trump’s sweeping 2017 tax cuts and the GOP’s attempted repeal of Obamacare

Oh and he gave Biden an offer to spend $1.75 Trillion on “pre-k, climate, and Obamacare”. That’s $1,750,000,000,000 for Democratic priorities….To put it mildly, the differences between Manchin and MAGA are stark. Mitch McConnell couldn’t be more off-base when he argues that Manchin would fit in betterwith the GOP than with the Democrats, but that has not stopped him from getting away with doing so. At a time when Democrats should be doing everything they can to convert the handful of remaining pro-democracy Republicans (such as those who voted for Trump’s impeachment), it is both striking and problematic that the obstructionist in chief and his ever-more-authoritarian cabal are leading the charge on cross-partisan recruitment….The Democrats desperately need a big-tent, pro-democracy faction capable of appealing to cross-partisan coalitions of voters in swing districts across the country — and there’s no better place to start than with those elected officials on the center-right who clearly feel alienated from today’s radicalized GOP.”