When an underwhelming primary rival to Brian Kemp announced his candidacy I took a look at the Georgia governor’s comeback strategy and wrote it up at New York.

Until March 25, Georgia governor Brian Kemp was looking pretty finished politically. Very publicly and vociferously blamed by Donald Trump for ratifying Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s certification of Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia on November 20, Kemp was persona non grata in MAGA country. He had already been periodically in Trump’s doghouse over his handling of the pandemic in his state, and before that, over his rejection of the Boss’s instruction that he appoint Representative Doug Collins to an open U.S. Senate seat. But getting in the way of the 45th president’s attempted election coup was the final straw: Trump has been publicly and privately vowing to take down Kemp in next year’s Republican gubernatorial primary, as recently as the RNC donor retreat in Florida last weekend. During his brief campaign appearance in Georgia before the January Senate runoffs that ended in defeat for his party, Trump even called on Collins to challenge Kemp in 2022, which wasn’t exactly a Georgia GOP talking point. Nor was Trump’s later suggestion that Kemp should resign.

Kemp managed to keep his mouth shut in the face of all these provocations, grimly promising to support Trump in 2024 and generally taking his medicine. But his comeback strategy became apparent when he made a big show of signing Georgia’s highly controversial new election law on March 25. It’s unclear whether he deliberately courted the appearance of racist impropriety, though he did sign the bill under a painting of a plantation and barred a Black Democratic legislator from his office during his remarks on the bill. (State Representative Park Cannon was subsequently manhandled by state troopers who wrestled her out of the Georgia Capitol to be arrested on multiple felony counts.)

As anger over the legislation mounted (echoing the anger over Kemp’s own voter-suppression measures as Georgia’s secretary of State, the job he insisted on keeping during his narrowly successful 2018 gubernatorial campaign) and major corporations joined the criticism of the law, Kemp was able to adopt a pose that is legal tender for a GOP pol at present: victim of “race card” politics backed by “woke” corporations. As the Associated Press reported, it was very clear to Georgia Republicans what the man who had labeled himself a “politically incorrect conservative” in 2018 was up to:

“[T]he sweeping election law could be one of Kemp’s last hopes to rekindle a bond with Republicans who remain fiercely loyal to Trump and will be a critical force in next year’s GOP primary. The legislation, which Kemp signed into law, could give him an opening to persuade Republicans that he is an outsider, willing to stand up to Democrats, corporate leaders, and sports leagues who have derided the measure as an affront to democracy that is based on false claims and needs to be rewritten.

“’This is an absolute godsend for Brian Kemp,’ said Brian Robinson, a Republican consultant and former top aide to Kemp’s predecessor, Nathan Deal.”

Kemp has eagerly been making the rounds of conservative media outlets to defend the new law, struggling, no doubt, to hide his glee at the liberal criticism it has attracted. The furor is helping him back home where it matters as well, as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Greg Bluestein observes:

“In recent weeks, Kemp has been a mainstay on conservative cable TV shows and enjoyed raucous receptions at grassroots meetings across the state, seemingly dissuading better-known Republican rivals such as former U.S. Rep. Doug Collins, whom Trump once recruited to run.”

Morning Consult reports that Kemp’s job-approval rating among Georgia Republicans rose from 59 percent in mid-March to 74 percent in early April. Nonetheless, a well-known Georgia pol close to Trump has now announced a 2022 primary bid against the governor. But his identity could be a blessing in disguise to the incumbent.

Vernon Jones is a Black former state legislator and county CEO who endorsed Trump’s reelection last year and has more recently switched parties. He got a lot of MAGA attention, particularly after his featured role at the GOP National Convention. He has really taken to his new career in Republican politics, speaking at the notorious January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington and basking in the affection of the Big Man (“When are you announcing? When are you announcing?” Trump said to Jones at Mar-a-Lago last week).

Jones’s announcement made it clear that he’s the former president’s surrogate.

Jones, however, is a risky proposition as Trump’s instrument of vengeance against Kemp. Aside from the fact that he’s a career Democratic politician from a jurisdiction (the Atlanta inner suburb of Dekalb County) that your average rural Republican wouldn’t visit on a bet, he has always had some issues, as Bluestein explains, calling him “a uniquely polarizing figure in state politics”:

“Jones launched his political career in the early 1990s in the Georgia House before winning the first of two terms as DeKalb County’s chief executive officer in 2000. His stint was marked by controversy …

“[H]is angry outbursts and clashes with other local officials dominated headlines, as did more serious allegations …

“[A] wide-ranging special grand jury report released in 2013, after Jones left office, recommended an investigation against Jones and other DeKalb officials into possible bid-rigging and theft when he was chief executive, painting a picture of a culture of corruption that spanned from his office to workers and contractors in the watershed department.”

Worse yet, Jones was accused of rape in 2005. His successful defense was that the intercourse in question was part of a consensual three-way sexual encounter. This is still not a great look for candidates in the Christian-right- dominated Georgia GOP. And speaking of the Christian right, Jones had a problem with a vote in the legislature against a “fetal heartbeat” abortion ban Kemp had championed in 2019. On the eve of his candidacy, Jones executed a straight-out flip-flop on abortion, stating he now believed zygotes should be protected “from the moment of conception.”

You get the sense that Jones will serve as an irritant to Kemp but not a serious threat unless Trump himself forcefully intervenes in the race (and/or if a more formidable Trump-backed candidate, like Collins, who is reportedly mulling a Senate race, jumps in). And even then, Georgia Republicans will remember that Trump had strongly endorsed Kemp during the last gubernatorial primary. MAGA bravos looking for a pound of flesh may instead focus on Raffensperger, who has drawn an actual member of Congress as his 2022 primary opponent, along with the rival he barely defeated in 2018.

If Kemp does escape, he will likely face a rematch with his nemesis, voting-rights activist Stacey Abrams. And in that contest, all the treasure he has stored up in Republican circles by boasting of his commitment to “election integrity” may earn him a backlash from the voters he and his party have sought to bedevil.

In “Republicans are in a messy divorce with big business. Democrats could benefit: As corporations flee the Republican Party, liberals should welcome them into the Democratic coalition – with conditions,” Andrew Gawthorpe writes at The Guardian:

It is premature to predict a wholesale collapse of the Republican party’s alliance with big business. But the events of recent years present an enormous opportunity for Democrats to make political inroads. In 2020, the counties won by Joe Biden produced a whopping 71% of US GDP, compared with only 29% in the counties which voted for Donald Trump – a gap which is 14 points higher than in 2016. Democrats also increasingly represent the more educated voters who corporate America covets as consumers and employees, and who have fled the Trumpified Republican party.

Democrats also represent the values and competence which American businesses – and the workers who depend on them – need to thrive. Trump’s plutocratic tax cuts and shamelessness in gutting the regulatory state might have provided a sugar rush to many businesses, but his woeful handling of the pandemic and impulsive trade wars harmed them. The paranoid, reality-denying, cultish Republican party of today cannot be trusted to elevate competent figures into key political and policymaking positions. As Trump demonstrated, the costs of having a clown in charge can generally be tolerated while the economy is thundering along in normal times – but they become catastrophic when a serious challenge arises.

Democrats, on the other hand, don’t just represent a steady hand in a crisis. They are also advancing plans for infrastructure, increased R&D spending and a green energy transition which are all necessary to the future competitiveness of the American economy. Such plans involve winners and losers, but overall they represent an enormous investment in the economy which can solidify the party’s appeal to corporations, employees and voters.

Republicans are in a race with the clock. They have plased a big bet that white working-class anger  towards Democrats alone will give them the edge they need to take back majorities in the House and Senate in 2022. Meanwhile, however, Biden is making all of the right moves that can actually benefit working-class voters, win corporate support and improve the Democrats’ image as the “recovery party.”

It won’t be a cakewalk for Dems, as Thomas B. Edsall writes in his New York Times column:

Finally, for Democrats, the leftward shift of business is a mixed blessing.

On the plus side, Democrats gain an ally in pressing a liberal agenda on social and racial issues.

On the downside, the perception of the party as allied with corporate interests may take root and Democratic officials are very likely to face pressure to make concessions to their new allies on fundamental economic policies — bad for the party, in my view, and bad for the country.

But Gawthorpe sees a more optimistic outcome, if Democrats seize the opportunity:

Progressive Democrats are right to be wary of calls for the party to identify itself as pro-business. And it’s absolutely right that Democrats seek to reform capitalism at the same time that they embrace it. But Republican tensions with big business give Democrats exactly what they need to accomplish that – leverage. Faced with the alternative, groups like the Chamber of Commerce have proven more open to Democratic proposals like raising the minimum wage than under previous administrations. Their support makes such policies easier to pass and more likely to be enduring.

Something even more important is at stake. For decades, corporate America has been a key pillar in the Republican coalition. That pillar is starting to crack, providing an opportunity for Democrats to weaken a dangerously extremist party which poses an existential threat to American democracy. As big business flees the wreckage of the Republican party, the best thing to do for the future of the country is welcome it into the Democratic coalition – with conditions.

If Biden keeps his current trajectory in the polls and the economy keeps improving, it will be hard for swing voters to deny that only one party offers a credible vision and policies for steady progress, while the other continues to marinate in anger and resentment.

From “Democrats to introduce bill to expand Supreme Court from 9 to 13 justices: President Joe Biden announced the formation of a commission last week to study the court’s structure, including the number of justices and their length of service.” by Sahil Kapur at nbcnews.com:  “Congressional Democrats will introduce legislation Thursday to expand the Supreme Court from nine to 13 justices, joining progressive activists pushing to transform the court. The move intensifies a high-stakes ideological fight over the future of the court after President Donald Trump and Republicans appointed three conservative justices in four years, including one who was confirmed days before the 2020 election….The Democratic bill is led by Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee. It is co-sponsored by Reps. Hank Johnson of Georgia and Mondaire Jones of New York….The Supreme Court can be expanded by an act of Congress, but the legislation is highly unlikely to become law in the near future given Democrats’ slim majorities, which include scores of lawmakers who are not on board with the idea. President Joe Biden has said he is “not a fan” of packing the court….”This bill marks a new era where Democrats finally stop conceding the Supreme Court to Republicans,” said Brian Fallon, a former Senate Democratic leadership aide and a co-founder of Demand Justice, who described the court as “broken and in need of reform.”….”Our task now is to build a grassroots movement that puts pressure on every Democrat in Congress to support this legislation because it is the only way to restore balance to the court and protect our democracy,” he said.”

The next time you hear an argument about the wisdom of President Biden’s decision to withdraw the remaining U.S. ground forces from Afghanistan, calmly ask those criticizing his decision, “How many troops are we talking about?,” and see how close they get to the actual number, 2,500 — down from over 100,000 during the Obama Administration. A good follow-up question might be, “Can 2,500 troops really accomplish our primary strategic objectives?” That will spark a wide-ranging discussion of our strategic objectives, prompting critics of Biden’s decision to call for an increase in U.S. ground troops in Afghanistan, a pricey option for a nation that is assuming a couple trillion dollars in expenses we didn’t forsee a year ago. “The simplest explanation of the US goal in Afghanistan is to keep it from again becoming a hotbed for terror groups like al Qaeda. When the US left Iraq, for instance, the power vaccum helped lead to the rise of ISIS there,” Zachary B. Wolf writes at CNN Politics. “But what the US has been trying to accomplish in Afghanistan, and the strategy to do it, has changed with each president.” There are some strong arguments for a continued and increased military forces in Afghanistan, most of them rooted in human rights, particularly for women. But, Biden, a former chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has carefully weighed the cost/benefit ratio, after consulting with the top military and economic analysts. The U.S. D.O.D. estimates that the U.S. has spent $778 billion in Afghanistan from Oct. 2001 to Septmeber 2019. The New York Times reported that “the cost of nearly 18 years of war in Afghanistan will amount to more than $2 trillion.” The human toll includes, 2,300 American soldiers killed, and many more wounded. That’s a lot of heartbreak, with few measurable accomplishments. When it comes to military budget cuts, Afghanistan looks like low-hanging fruit.

In his article, “Few Americans Who Identify As Independent Are Actually Independent. That’s Really Bad For Politics,” Geoffrey Skeeley writes at FiveThirtyEight: “The share of Americans who say they’re independent has climbed considerably, according to Gallup’s quarterly party affiliation data. In the late 1980s, roughly one-third of Americans identified as Democratic, Republican or independent. Now, 40 percent or more identify as independent, while the share who identify as Democrats or Republicans has fallen to around 30 percent or lower, as the chart below shows….The problem is that few independents are actually independent. Roughly 3 in 4 independents still lean toward one of the two major political parties, and studies show that these voters aren’t all that different from the voters in the party they lean toward. Independents who lean toward a party also tend to back that party at almost the same rate as openly partisan voters….The abandonment of voters openly identifying with one of the two parties has led to less political engagement, which means Americans are exerting less influence on what the parties look and sound like. That’s a real problem since the parties are still the fundamental building blocks that organize our politics. But with party building left to more stringent partisans, the parties’ bases have largely cultivated candidates who tend to be more ideologically extreme than the voters they seek to represent.” We know that Republicans are stuck in an inflexible commitment to Trumpism. Democrats also have room to strengthen their party’s image and brand, far more flexibility than the GOP — and much to gain by doing so.

“Without a dramatic change in the rules governing the filibuster,” Walter Shapiro writes in “The Case for the Talking Filibuster” at The New Republic. “Democrats have no chance of passing the ambitious voting rights bill known as the “For the People Act” that has already won approval in the House. The same is true for legislation that would enact gun control and raise the minimum wage….The C-SPAN cameras are the biggest X-factor in assessing the strategic merits of a talking filibuster. The first few days of a talking filibuster—especially if you add the drama of an all-night session or two—could attract a sizable audience. And if the Republicans were opposing a voting rights bill, it would be instructive to hear their arguments as fatigue stripped away their masquerade that they are defenders of election integrity….Let’s be honest—there are no guarantees that McConnell can be defeated as long as it takes 60 votes to shut off Senate debate. But the other options open to the Democrats are bleak in a 50–50 Senate. That is true whether the legislation is to protect voting rights, promote gun safety, or provide a $15-an-hour minimum wage. A talking filibuster may not be a panacea. But at least it would require Republicans to put their mouths where their money is.”

I stumbled on a piece at the Never-Trump site The Bulwark, and it stunned me enough to write it up at New York.

You may have heard about the 45th president’s reported rant at a Republican donor conference near his Florida home over the weekend. Trump is apparently still furious at Brian Kemp for impeding his election coup, and Mike Pence for failing to steal a second term for him anyway, and at Mitch McConnell for refusing to back his electoral vote challenge and then criticizing him for inciting a riot.

To Republicans who aren’t deep in the fever swamps of MAGA-land, this is just Trump continuing his narcissistic and destructive post-election behavior. Just as he blew up those crucial Georgia Senate runoffs in January because he couldn’t let go of his own lies about the presidential election, he’s blowing up the party at a time when the GOP needs to stay unified in the fight against Biden.

And to those of us without a betting interest in Republican success, Trump’s intra-party vendetta and purge threats are bizarre and laughable, and only understandable as a way for him to keep his thumb on the party he conquered in 2016 with no concern for its future.

But what if Trump’s attacks on those who “betrayed” him in 2020 aren’t just narcissistic or backward-looking? What if it’s part of a forward-looking plan to rerun 2020 and get it right this time?

That’s the question Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark appears to have asked himself, and he’s answered it with a hair-raising hypothesis that is as plausible as the assumption that Trump is just throwing temper tantrums. He presents his theory as the likely product of an implicit Republican 2020 “autopsy” that has turned defeat into a near-victory:

“It is likely Republicans will have majorities in the congressional delegations of at least 26 states for the foreseeable future. They have a >50 percent chance of winning the House in 2022 and a pretty good shot at flipping the Senate.

“So the first two preconditions for winning the presidency while losing the election are very much on the table.

“Which leaves just one project: Mustering the political will to move past both the popular vote and the Electoral College.”

If you begin not with the assumption that Trump’s entire effort to steal the election was absurd, but regard it as an audacious plan that wasn’t executed with the necessary precision, then reverse engineering it to fix the broken parts makes sense:

“[T]he key parts of the Republican autopsy have been (1) building the political will to use raw power next time and (2) removing the Republican officials who were not willing to comply last time.

“That’s why Republican state parties have censured nearly every Republican who did not participate in Trump’s attempted coup.”

And the really heady thing for Trump is knowing how easy it was to convince the GOP rank-and-file base that his lies were the gospel truth:

“The Big Lie is actually the biggest insight to come from the Republican autopsy. Republicans and their enablers discovered that if they make false, evidence-free claims often and loudly enough, then the vast majority of their voters will believe them.

“And then, once Republican voters were onboard, they found that the rest of the party elites would either join them or stay silent. Only a handful of Republicans dared to object. And those figures are in the process of being either defeated or coopted.”

So why not play it again with a prepared and united party that won’t hesitate to seize on bogus “voter fraud” claims and either steal electoral votes before they can be certified by the states, or refuse to certify a Democratic victory and throw the election into Congress?

“[E]ven though the success of such a gambit is a longshot given all of the various failure points, since political power is derived from their voters, many Republicans politicians will be incentivized to embrace the challenge anyway, since they will gain power within the party from the voters who have been primed to demand such a fight.”

But it’s not any more implausible than the election coup hypothesis sounded when some of us began predicting it in the spring of 2020. And in retrospect, it was spot-on except for a few crucial mistakes Team Trump made after Election Night.

From Last’s perspective, in ranting about disloyal Republicans Trump isn’t engaged in hindsight or vengeance, but is following an ambitious schedule for success in 2024 by getting rid of potential troublemakers within his party. And here’s the thing: it’s a strategy that doesn’t necessarily depend on Trump running for president again. It’s available to anyone determined to do whatever it takes to reconquer Washington at a time when Republicans look to be a minority of the electorate for the foreseeable future. Trump has prepared the way with a dress rehearsal.

It’s a chilling thought, and one to revisit if Trump’s Republican enemies go down to primary challenges next year.

It’s not exactly a hot flash that the GOP hopes to secure a permanent majority of white working-class voters, who are about 45 percent of America’s electorate, and that they have done well with this key constituency since 2016. But for Democratic oppo researchers who like details, Susan Davis has them in her article, “Top Republicans Work To Rebrand GOP As Party Of Working Class” at npr.org. As Davis writes,

A growing number of working-class voters were drawn to Donald Trump’s Republican Party, and now top Republicans are searching for ways to keep those voters in the fold without Trump on the ballot.

“All of the statistics and polling coming out of the 2020 election show that Donald Trump did better with those voters across the board than any Republican has in my lifetime since Ronald Reagan,” Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., told NPR. “And if Republicans want to be successful as a party, win the majority in 2022, win back the White House in 2024, I think we have to learn lessons that Donald Trump taught us and how to appeal to these voters.”

Since 2010, the most significant growth in the Republican coalition has been white voters without a college degree — an imperfect but widely used metric to quantify the working-class voting bloc — along with some marginal growth among similarly educated Black and Hispanic voters. Banks believes the only winning path forward for the GOP is to reimagine itself permanently as the party of working-class America.

Banks is the chairman of the Republican Study Committee, a conservative faction in the House long rooted in small government, low taxes and social conservatism, and he recently sent a six-page memo to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., making his case. For Banks, it means tougher immigration laws and cracking down on China, Big Tech and, perhaps most provocatively for the GOP, corporate America.

“For too long, the Republican Party fed into the narrative and the perception that the Republican Party was the party of big business or the party of Wall Street,” Banks said.

Davis shares the entire, 6-page GOP memo from Jim Banks, chairman of the Republican Study Comittee to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. In the memo, entitled “Cementing the GOP as the Working-Class Party.” Davis quotes John Russo, who has contributed to The Democratic Strategist:

“I think the claim that says the Republican Party is the party of the working class is at best, insincere, and more likely, political misdirection and rebranding exercises,” said John Russo, a visiting scholar at the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University and a co-editor of the publication Working-Class Perspectives.

The working-class vote is complicated and too often confused with whiteness when about 40% of the working-class vote is people of color, Russo said. Their support also didn’t cut overwhelmingly toward Republicans in 2020. Biden still won a majority of voters who earn less than $50,000 year, while Trump won a majority of voters who earn over $100,000 a year.

Russo said about one-third of working-class voters are considered persuadable in elections, and it’s never reliable whether cultural or economic forces will drive their vote. “The working class, like all of us, carry multiple identities, race, class, gender, religious, geographic, and people may vote different parts of their identity as situations and moments change in their lives.”

Davis concludes, “The battle for the working class is even more urgent for the two parties because it’s a growing bloc of voters. Since the 2008 financial crisis, Russo said, more middle-class people have slid economically backward and are experiencing what he calls “the fragility of working-class life.”

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

Andy Levison at The Democratic Strategist takes a look at the latest Democracy Corps memo on “What Will Trump Loyalists’ Sensed Powerlessness Mean For Politics?“and considers how moderate Democrats can leverage the situation to improve Democratic prospects. Important stuff. As I have frequently noted, the ostentatiously progressive Democrats get the ink but the Democrats’ near-term fate depends much more on how moderate Democrats fare in coming elections.

“While it is almost impossible for many Democrats to seriously imagine that any white Americans could be genuinely afraid of this result, there is no question that it is felt by many white Republicans with complete sincerity. While Democrats envision a progressive future America as being an exciting, culturally and ethnically diverse, multiracial country in which there is general tolerance for diversity, white working class and small town people imagine an elitist society in which they have no place. To understand how this vision can seem entirely plausible, one has only to consider how rarely small town life or manual labor are portrayed positively in TV commercials and other media as part of the golden future that lies ahead. In slick advertisements and magazine spreads “the future” always looks like a world of gleaming office towers, bright young people in bustling urban centers and “country” as a place that people drive to in late model SUVs in order to go rock climbing or mountain biking.

The political implication of this is that moderate Democrats in Red State districts must very sincerely reassure Republicans that they genuinely value and respect the America of small towns, manual labor and the cultural traditions of that world and do not think it all an obsolete relic that should disappear. Moderate Democrats must make clear that the Democratic vision is for mutual tolerance and respect for different kinds of communities and not the ascendency of one group or community over another.

A related fact that emerges from the research is that many Republicans are seriously and deeply disturbed by what seems to them a Democratic indifference and even tolerance for social chaos. This extends across a wide range of social problems – from crime to urban decay to homeless vagabonds, illegal immigrants and failing schools. For Republicans, the common thread in all these problems is a Democratic failure to insist that rules should be followed and law and order firmly upheld.

The most powerful issue in 2020 was the specter of urban riots whose importance the GOP vastly exaggerated until many Republicans were sincerely convinced that it was totally out of control….Democrats must draw a clear line regarding what they view as genuinely unacceptable violations of social order. Among progressives there is tendency to resist endorsing slogans like “law and order” because they can sound like coded appeals to racial prejudice. But carried to an extreme this is profoundly counterproductive. Democratic voters do not actually support rioting of the type in which the Antifa protesters engaged in last year or passively accept street crime and other urban lawlessness. Democrats can be tough on riots and crime and actually win support from African-Americans and Latinos who drifted notably toward the Republicans in significant measure because in 2020 they also fear and reject chaos as much as whites….
Moderate Democrats will also have the opportunity to make inroads into the 30% who are somewhat or strongly opposed to him.

The Democracy Corps report says the following about this group: About 30 percent of Republicans are [either] non-Trump conservatives [or] the ideologically and religiously moderate —with the latter forming half of this bloc that vocally opposes Trump. …they are now much clearer where they differ with Trump and much more willing to express it, even in a room full of Trump loyalists. Trump’s CPAC speech — “that’s what I hate” says one. They called out the “nut jobs” and conspiracy theorists. They don’t understand their fellow Republican’s opposition to masks and health measures. They don’t think the 2nd Amendment is sacred, oppose the display of weapons in Michigan, and want to regulate guns. When others said they appreciated what the Proud Boys did, they called them out as “not patriots.” They seemed open to a much more expansive role for government.

This is encouraging but it should not lead to misperceiving them as fully in agreement with moderates or liberals:

They do share with other Republicans an aversion to BLM and cancel culture; they too are looking for more law and order and seem uncomfortable with whites being on the defensive. They agreed that the elite media ignored the violence in the cities.

What this clearly indicates is that the same tactics that can reassure or partially neutralize the opposition of the Trump loyalists can also present an attractive alternative for these voters….

[M]oderate Democrats must recognize that they have to pre-empt the inevitable Republican distortions of their views by very clearly drawing certain “lines in the sand” about their firm opposition to rioting, crime, and allowing demands for “political correctness” to essentially require that average Americans completely adopt the language and culture of the university or face censure, contempt and condemnation.

A position of this kind will not only resonate with the 30% of non-Trumpist Republicans but will also “lower the temperature” of the Trumpist Republicans themselves and convince them that the elections of 2022 and 2024 are not apocalyptic battles against evil in which the future itself is literally at stake. To the extent that this can be achieved, it will reduce the turnout of low frequency GOP voters and enhance the likelihood of Democratic victories.”

Read all of Levison’s analysis and the original DCorps memo.

In “Economist: ‘Voter restriction bills will cost Texas billions‘,” at kvue.com, Ashely Goudeau reports “Two Republican-backed bills to make sweeping elections changes could cost Texas billions of dollars and thousands of jobs, according to local economists….Central Texas Economist Ray Perryman, Ph.D., analyzed data, studies and research of state economies correlation to voting access. His team found when voter access is restricted, business and the economy suffer due to the loss of business, jobs and major events and deals….Among other things, Senate Bill 7 and House Bill 6 ban drive-thru voting, limit voting hours and stop elections clerks from proactively sending out mail-in ballot applications to registered voters. Republicans say the bills will enhance voter integrity, but democrats and critics say the bills aim to suppress voters, particularly minority voters….”As of 2025, if a bill like this would come into effect and be in effect for about five years, we’ve found Texas could lose about $14.7 billion in GDP and roughly around 73,000 jobs,” Dr. Perryman said….Dr. Perryman also estimates Texas’ tourism and economic development would take a $16.7 billion hit in the first five years if one of the bills becomes law. And those figures only increase the longer the laws are in effect.”

Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. writes, “The Supreme Court faces a legitimacy crisis not because progressives are complaining but because of what they are complaining about: a reckless, right-wing, anti-democratic court majority, and a conservative court-packing campaign marked by the disgraceful Republican blockade against President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland in 2016 and the unseemly rush to confirm Justice Amy Coney Barrett just before President Donald Trump’s defeat last November….Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Trump were the court-packers. There would be far less talk of court enlargement if McConnell and Trump had not abused their power. Nor would enlargement be on the table if conservative justices had not substituted their own political preferences for Congress’s decisions, notably on voting rights and campaign finance reform, 5-to-4 rulings on which Breyer, rightly, joined the dissenters.”

Adie Tomer explains why “Biden’s infrastructure plan replaces federal cynicism with a sweeping vision” at Brookings: “Put it all together and the Biden proposal offers the most powerful ingredient when it comes to infrastructure reform: It sells a vision. The plan unapologetically calls out our next destination, whether that’s safer streets or cleaner power. It offers sweeping investments to make such a vision real, from replacing aging pipes to delivering rural broadband. And it brings people—especially our workforce—along for the ride….Biden has used the stump the way a forward-looking president should. The administration has delivered a vision to the American people—a promise of a new kind of country. And the country itself is responding, with polling that shows bipartisan support for the plan’s ideas….America was built for these kinds of grand visions. It is starting to feel like another one may soon come to life….Biden’s plan is an enormous bet on America—a bet that trillions of dollars of targeted investment can improve people’s lives, make our industries more globally competitive, and repair our fragile natural world. It’s also a major bet on the power of federal investment. Rather than asking states and cities to do more, as the Trump administration’s plan sought, the proposal recognizes the economic moment and essentially says that it’s time for the federal government to lead.”

Ronald Brownstein writes in The Atlantic: “One asset Democrats have in this struggle is time. However successful Republicans are at tarnishing Biden’s programs at the outset among core GOP voters, Biden has an opportunity to change those perceptions through the actual implementation of his plans. Even during the putative honeymoon period at his presidency’s start, Biden’s approval rating among rural and non-college-educated white voters has remained stuck at only a little over one-third. But the stimulus package has drawn substantial support in polls even from Republican voters, and those numbers could rise even more as families feel the effects of the aid. Likewise, if Democrats can pass Biden’s infrastructure program this summer, that will leave plenty of time before the next two elections to start repairing bridges and roads, and to break ground on new water systems, new wind and solar installations, and new broadband facilities. Even small gains in nonurban areas from such initiatives would fortify Democrats’ position in states near the tipping point of American elections, including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Georgia, Hildreth told me. “I think we are maybe a decade from having a majority in critical rural counties, but we just need to cut margins right now,” he said. “Literally the motto is ‘Lose less.’”

Some of the contradictions in Republican talking points on election law and voting rights are becoming clear to me, so I wrote about it at New York:

During the intense controversy raised by Georgia’s new election law, which included a negative reaction from Major League Baseball and a number of corporations, many defenders of the law have played a game of whataboutism. What about voting laws in Colorado, the state to which the MLB’s all-star game has been shifted? What about liberal New York? A lot of these comparisons have been factually challenged, or have zeroed in on one benign feature of the Georgia law while ignoring others. But it does raise a pretty important question: What is the posture nationally of the GOP or the conservative movement on the right to vote and its limits?

Not long ago you might have said that Republicans and conservatives were firmly committed to the view that rules governing voting and elections —even federal elections — were purely within the purview of state and local policy-makers. But that was before Donald Trump spent four years disparaging the decisions made by liberal and conservative jurisdictions on voting procedures whenever they contradicted his often-erratic but always forcefully expressed views. If, for example, voting by mail was as inherently pernicious as Trump said it was, almost daily from the spring through the autumn of 2020, allowing states to permit it was a Bad Thing, right? That simply added to the complaints made by Trump after the 2016 elections that California’s alleged openness to voting by noncitizens cost him a popular vote win over Hillary Clinton, and the widespread Republican whining after 2018 that the same jurisdiction had counted out Republican congressional candidates (whining that somehow subsided when Republicans did better in the exact same districts following the exact same rules in 2020).

And that was before Team Trump and his many Republican enablers spent the weeks and months after November 3, 2020, shrieking about state and local election procedures around the country, culminating in efforts to get the U.S. Supreme Court to overrule state court interpretations of state election laws. Indeed, since Trump, his congressional Republican backers, and the Capitol riot mob were trying to block the certification of state election results by Congress on January 6, you could say that a major segment of the GOP wanted the federal government to impose its will on the states with respect to voting and elections.

And if the prevailing conservative idea is that decision-makers closest to the people should determine voting and election rules, then it’s hard to explain the provisions in the Georgia law (and in pending legislation in Texas) that preempt local government prerogatives decisively.

So what doctrine of voting rights does the GOP favor, other than whatever is necessary to produce Republican election victories? That’s hard to say.

Yes, at the Heritage Foundation you will find experts who more or less think everything other than in-person voting on Election Day should be banned everywhere. And now and then you will get someone like Kevin Williamson who will articulate the provocative old-school conservative case for restricting the franchise to “better” voters, which was pretty much the ostensible case for the poll taxes and literacy tests of the Jim Crow South. Unfortunately, snooty contrarianism isn’t a particularly helpful guide to the development of voting laws, and most Republicans (other than those caught in a gaffe) are unlikely to agree out loud with the Williamson proposition.

Until quite recently, most Republicans agreed that the jurisdictions that had for so many years discriminated against the voting rights of minorities deserved extra federal scrutiny and some additional hoops to jump through before changing their rules. In 2006, George W. Bush signed a 25-year extension of the Voting Rights Act that did just that, after it passed the Senate unanimously and the House with scattered opposition. Then a conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a key feature of the VRA, and now it’s almost exclusively Democrats (via the John Lewis Voting Rights Act) who want to restore it. Where are Republicans on that idea? With the states and localities, or just with the states and localities where federal intervention in voting and election practices doesn’t inconvenience Republicans?

Whatever you think of Democratic attitudes toward voting and elections, at least they can answer such questions coherently. They have united to an amazing extent around highly detailed legislation (the House and Senate versions of the For the People Act and the aforementioned John Lewis Act) that generally expands voting rights and sets clear federal standards for procedures in and surrounding federal elections. The Republican response to these proposals has been almost universally negative. But it’s unclear what, if anything, they would propose of their own accord.

If the implicit GOP position on voting and elections is simply that such rules are part of the give and take of partisan politics and that both sides are free to play fast and loose with the facts and get what advantages they can, then I can understand why they are loathe to make it explicit. But in that case, people who care about voting rights one way or the other should simply choose sides and have it out.

The following article by Peter Juul and Brian Katulis is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

As we’ve written before here at The Liberal Patriot, the center-left needs a new intellectual infrastructure to better disseminate its core principles and resist illiberal politics from all quarters. An important part of that effort involves building new sources of support that can yoke practical policies to broader principles. In other words, liberals need a new set of institutions, programs, and individuals that can tell a compelling story about their principles, politics, and policies.

Right now, however, this narrative infrastructure doesn’t exist – and it shows. The Biden administration has gotten off to a strong start on a number of fronts, from pandemic relief and economic rebuilding to pragmatic foreign policy decisions. But it’s struggled to tie its actions together in a coherent story that it can tell the American people and the world.

“Build back better” and “a foreign policy for the middle class” are slogans for a very ambitious and possibly historic policy agenda – one that could transform the country for the better. But don’t be mistaken: these headlines and the policy components don’t yet constitute a narrative, a story that connects with ordinary Americans and instills a sense of national purpose. As things stand, they remain skeletal notions, and the Biden domestic and foreign policy teams have yet to flesh them out in many ways.

Take two recent speeches by Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen and Secretary of State Antony Blinken – both lay out a number of good policy ideas but don’t go the extra mile and connect them to a persuasive political narrative. In her remarks on international economic policy, for instance, Yellen made important points about the need to help low-income nations vaccinate themselves and enact a global minimum corporate tax rate. But much of her speech remained standard technocratic boilerplate that could have been delivered at any point over the past thirty years without much alteration. That’s a missed opportunity on the narrative front given the historic, transformative times we’re living in right now.

Similarly, Secretary of State Blinken’s remarks on appointing former USAID director Gayle Smith as international COVID response czar put forward a number of compelling arguments. In language reminiscent of airline pre-flight safety notices to secure one’s own oxygen mask before helping others, Blinken noted that the United States rightly focused on beating COVID-19 at home before helping others do the same. But he also made the case that Americans wouldn’t be safe from COVID-19 or recover economically until the pandemic was beaten worldwide.

Blinken’s speech was cogent and competent, which in and of itself a marked improvement from most of what America saw on the foreign policy front during the previous administration. But like Yellin’s speech, it was not connected to a persuasive political narrative – one that helps move to the coming post-COVID recovery phase. The main challenge is that the story told is incomplete – it’s like a baseball pitcher on the mound who winds up and throws but doesn’t follow through completely. The ball is less likely to hit the glove in the strike zone.

This lack of a convincing center-left story results from a variety of causes, but it’s fundamentally rooted in the much broader collapse of liberal intellectual infrastructure in recent decades.

This collapse has 4 components:

1. Outsourcing narrative-building to academics, activists, and political journalists.

After the tumult of the 1960s, liberals in and around the Democratic Party outsourced the vital task of narrative-building to a random assortment of activists, academics, and political journalists. Anti-war activists, for instance, issue empty calls to “end endless wars,” while unpopular and unwise proposals to defund the police originated with small, unrepresentative far-left activist groups. When these parties are interested in constructing narratives, they’re likely to tell bleak and pessimistic stories about America itself – such as the factually-challenged 1619 Project published and heavily promoted by the New York Times. For their part, many politically-minded academics have spent the past many decades conjuring up what the late philosopher Richard Rorty called “dreams not of political reforms but of inexplicable, magical transformations” of a fundamentally corrupt society in thrall to mystical “preternatural forces.” To be clear, voices from a diverse range of experts and activists should be part of the mix when it comes to building an inclusive nationalism. But to succeed in building a narrative, the North Star should be about painting a hopeful vision of the future, rather than getting stuck in the current moment or wallowing in the past.

2. Positioning through polling rather than staking out clear positions based on ideas and values linked to a story.

Starting in the 1970s, moreover, politicians themselves turned to political consultants and pollsters rather than intellectuals and wordsmiths to shape and guide their policies. Since its advent, modern polling has always been an important factor in politics and policy. But the ever-increasing contemporary reliance on consultants have left liberals with plenty of messaging but not a whole lot of actual message. As a result, the narrative infrastructure on the left is more about positioning – reacting to the political winds that blow – rather than generating a new breeze in a narrative that stakes out principled positions based on values and advancing those positions.

3. The rise of the technocratic and bureaucratic wonks.

In the 1990s, a new class of technocratic policy experts rose to dominate political and policy discussions on the center-left. Ensconced in universities and think tanks interspersed with a couple of years of government service, these policy wonks tend to focus narrowly on their areas of expertise and specialization. It’s assumed that technical proficiency of the sort possessed by economists and foreign country specialists scales up and allows a mastery of generalist subjects, but it’s not at all clear that that’s the case either in theory or in reality. Liberals have a cadre of highly-educated experts to manage government bureaucracies and execute complicated programs, but few have the skills to tell a compelling story about liberal politics and policies. Some of the most agonizing meetings that take place in Washington are the ones involving foreign policy or economics specialists struggling to cobble together a convincing political narrative. It’s like a cello player in an orchestra trying to tell the conductor how the overall piece of music should be put together: sometimes it works, but most times it is off-key.

4. The quest for echo chambers.

On top of these developments, transformations in the media landscape over the past fifty years – and especially over the past decade – have made it more difficult to inject a coherent narrative into the national political bloodstream. It’s not impossible, but the days when FDR or JFK could set the terms of the national debate with fireside chats or televised press conferences have been long gone for a while now. In their place, liberals belatedly and without much success attempted to replicate the echo chambers like Fox News that conservatives have deployed to great political effect. More recently, left and right have built echo chambers on social media platforms like Twitter that encourage the most extreme and Extremely Online voices. In recent years, some elements of the so-called “progressive” left have used these platforms more to beat others up on the left and fragment coalitions and relationships, rather than use them to build coalitions and relationship capital to achieve shared, common goals.

As a result, the broad center-left is not structured to tell a coherent story about its politics and policies. Their programs and messages amount to less than the sum of their parts. Administration communications gurus and activist networks organize pop-up echo chambers to push particular policies, but they don’t invest in the making of big-picture narratives that put these policies into perspective in ways that ordinary people can easily understand. Smart and dedicated people waste their time and energy on what remain fundamentally tactical issues – leaving wider strategic questions unattended and unanswered in the process.

To its credit, the Biden administration has avoided many of the worst mistakes made by present-day progressives. Biden and many of his key aides are terminally Offline, and his administration has wisely focused on bread-and-butter issues like the pandemic and economic recovery more than the culture war issues beloved by both the progressive left and conservative right. “Build back better” and “a foreign policy for the middle class” may not pop as slogans and remain ideas that need further development, but they’re a decent starting point. What the Biden administration needs moving forward aren’t echo chambers that repeat its talking points on, say, its infrastructure package or its Iran policy – it needs generalists that build on and expand the themes it’s sketched out in very rough terms and helps carry those narratives to the broader American public in a way that seeks to advance a more inclusive nationalism.

That’s easier said than done, as President Obama learned when his “New Foundation” formula failed to gain traction during his time in office. While his administration found its attention repeatedly diverted by crises and emerging challenges, it also lacked the sort of external intellectual support to reinforce and elaborate on the themes it tried to surface. Obama’s eight years resulted in many important accomplishments such as an effective response to the 2008 Great Recession, health care reform, and steps forward on climate change. But towards the end of two terms in office, the sum total of the foreign policy narrative was “don’t do stupid shit” and this left many Americans asking: what’s the big idea?

Think tanks once might have served this function, but too often they have become either waystations for mid-level technocrats going into and coming out of government or activist operations fueled by funding from elite foundations – and increasingly they’re both at the same time.

Instead, liberals need to invest in big-picture, meaning-making institutions and outlets outside government, academia, existing think tanks, and major media outlets. They cannot outsource their narratives to academics, activists, and political journalists, or rely on think tanks that exist to shelter technocrats and increasingly see unrepresentative activists chart their courses to do the job. Looking forward, a new breed of institution that can see and describe the whole picture from an outside perspective will be necessary to build new liberal political narratives that connect particular policies and programs with underlying principles in a compelling and easily comprehensible way.

These narratives can’t be reduced to mere messaging or communications, either. As the scholar Lawrence Freedman noted in the conclusion of his history of the subject, strategy is as much about stories as anything else. Accordingly, these new narrative-building institutions will have much to say about political strategy and big-picture policy questions. They’ll help tell liberals where they’ve been, where they are, and where they’re going – and, crucially, why. Moreover, they’ll provide a sanctuary for liberals who don’t see mid-tier government positions as their primary way to advance good ideas as well as academics who wish to constructively contribute to the common good.

It’s as good a place as any for liberals to start rebuilding their once-formidable intellectual infrastructure.

In his New York Times column, “The Fear That is Shaping American Politics,” Thomas B. Edsall notes, “Robert Griffin, research director of the nonpartisan Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, wrote by email that he expects “the national environment to be worse for Democrats in 2022 than it was in 2020.” The shift, he continued, will almost certainly include a loss of support among white voters who — if history is any guide — will represent a larger share of the electorate in 2022 because of midterm turnout dynamics….Griffin wrote that “it’s not obvious to me that this shift will be dependent on Biden’s ability or failure to overcome white racial resentment,” because “these midterm dynamics are pretty baked in and it would be shocking to see them defied.”….On the plus side for Democrats, Griffin noted: The growing educational divide among white Americans does present an interesting opportunity for the Democratic Party. One of the things most people don’t appreciate is that white overrepresentation among voters is driven almost entirely by white college voters. This overrepresentation of white college voters is even greater in midterm elections. The growing educational divide among white voters — with Biden viewed much more favorably by white college voters — potentially blunts some of those midterm dynamics I described….I asked Griffin what the prospects are for Biden to build a stronger and more durable Democratic coalition. He is doubtful: If you had to pick one group that would do the most to solidify the democratic coalition electorally, it would be white non-college voters. They make up more than 40 percent of voters and are exceptionally well represented in the Electoral College, the House and the Senate….Biden, Griffin continued, improved slightly on Hillary Clinton’s margin among these voters, but it wasn’t anything massive. Given the long-term trends away from the Democratic Party among these voters, even holding onto his 2020 margins would likely represent an achievement.”

At Slow Boring, Matthew Yglesias makes a pretty convincing case that, contrary to popular beliefs, America’s transportation infrastructure, particularly roads and bridges, is not all that bad. Yglesias writes that “the existing surface transportation funding levels in the United States are inadequate. We have some of the best commute times in the world in an international context; our road quality is improving under current funding levels; and the biggest practical problem we have — endemic congestion in a few key metro areas — is not really amenable to being addressed with a big surge of funding.” Yglesias acknowledges that there is room for imrovement in mass rail transit in cities like New York, and notes, “What America’s bad traffic cities really need is congestion pricing, zoning that allows more people to live in convenient locations, and selective investments in improving mass transit capacity.” Yglesias would like to see more infrastructure investment on other more urgently-needed priorities, and notes “the same low population density that generally makes our commutes good has left us with subpar levels of mass broadband adoption. The challenge of moving electricity around is very real. Lead in water pipes is really bad. These infrastructure challenges are huge and much more important than roads and bridges. If the bill gets changed, it’s important to keep that stuff.”

In ‘keep doing what you’re doing, Mr. President’ news,  Chelsea Cox reports at USA Today, “More Americans identify as Democrats than Republicans by a margin that hasn’t been seen in a decade, according to a report released by Gallup on Wednesday…An average of 49% of adults age 18 and older reported Democratic Party affiliation or said they are independent with Democratic leanings throughout the first quarter of 2021, the pollster reported. The survey was conducted by phone from January-March.  In comparison, 40% of adults identified as Republican or Republican-leaning. The 9% difference is the Democrats’ largest advantage since the fourth quarter of 2012, according to the report. The remaining 11% of respondents were political independents with no partisan leanings….Democrats have typically held a 4 to 6 point advantage over Republicans.  Shortly before the first quarter of the year, the gap in affiliation was virtually nonexistent before Democrats’ advantage widened by 9%….The report also noted a 6% increase in independents; from 38% in the fourth quarter of 2020 to 44% in the first quarter of 2021. It’s the highest percentage since 2013, when 46% of survey respondents identified as independents. The rise correlates with the decline in Republican Party identification, just as in 2013, when the GOP saw a drop in the popularity during the government shutdown over the Affordable Care Act.”

Democrats pondering a response to Mitch McConnell’s sanctimonious comments urging corporations to “stay out of politics” should check out former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich’s zinger: “Mitch McConnell continued his tirade against businesses who have spoken out against Georgia’s egregious voter suppression bill today, telling reporters that corporations should “stay out of politics.” Yes, you read that right….That’s rich, coming from one of the most outspoken supporters of the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision, which allowed corporate cash and big money to flood unabated into our democracy. I suppose McConnell has no problem with “corporate free speech” when it’s benefiting him personally — he was, after all, the top recipient of corporate cash in the 2020 election cycle. And he even took a case all the way to the Supreme Court in 2003 because he was so determined to bring more corporate money into our political process. Republicans love corporations in politics when it means they’re bankrolling Republican campaigns — but as soon as corporations stand up against Republican hatred and bigotry, it’s time for them to be silent. The hypocrisy is staggering.”