Despite Democratic improvement in support from rural voters in congressional disticts in the midterm elections over 2016, Nathaniel Rakich writes at FiveThirtyEight that “One theme of the 2018 election was that Democratic senators from rural, red states became an endangered breed. Three Democratic senators on deep-red turf — Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota — lost their seats. Two others managed to squeak out wins — Jon Tester of Montana and Joe Manchin of West Virginia — but they saw their support shrivel up in many parts of their states…In the six years since these senators last appeared on the ballot (in 2012), Democratic support has become increasingly confined to America’s metro areas…These five Democratic incumbents didn’t all manage that; as it has for Democrats nationally, their support deteriorated significantly relative to 2012 in areas outside of cities and suburbs, according to a county-by-county analysis of U.S. Senate results.”

Ella Koeze’s graphic comparison accompanying Rakich’s FiveThirtyEight article, illustrating the difference between county results in the five states in 2012 and 2018:

Yes, they are older guys. But “Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are both way more popular than Donald Trump,” as Matthew Yglesias reports at Vox. “Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are the best-known members of the Democratic Party’s very crowded 2020 primary field, and they are both more popular than Donald Trump, according to a new Quinnipiac University national poll…The two other moderately well-known Democrats — Elizabeth Warren and Michael Bloomberg — both fare less well with underwater favorable ratings. Everyone else, including Beto O’Rourke, Sherrod Brown, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Kirsten Gillibrand, is fairly obscure, with a majority of the public offering no opinion so far…In contrast to Trump, Joe Biden’s numbers look fantastic with a 53/33 favorable/unfavorable split. Democrats love Biden, with 84 percent approving, and he’s above water with essentially all demographic subcategories.” Yglesias breaks down the demographic components of support for the two Democrats, and notes that Biden is substantially more popular with African Americans, white males and seniors than Sanders, but Sanders has an edge over Biden with younger voters and Latinos. Biden also does a litle better with working-class whites than does Sanders, though both are under 50 percent approval with this large constituency.

In her CNN Politics article, “3 Kansas legislators switch from Republican to Democrat,” Sophie Tatum reports the good news for Democrats. “Two state lawmakers in Kansas announced on Wednesday that they would be switching their political party — from Republican to Democrat…In separate Facebook posts, state Rep. Stephanie Clayton and state Sen. Dinah Sykes said they would now be serving as Democrats in the state Legislature…Last Wednesday, Kansas state Sen. Barbara Bollier also had announced she would be leaving the Republican Party and would come back in 2019 as a Democrat.” Clayton cited the Republicans killing a “bipartisan education plan” in her statement, while Sykes noted “the Republican party focusing on issues and approaches that divide our country. I do not agree with that approach.”

“Americans are scattered and divided over which source they most trust for news,” reports Emily Guskin at The Fix. Among the findings of Guskin’s report on television news preferences: “A Washington Post Fact Checker poll used an open-ended format to ask what source of information viewers trust most for political news, which could include a person, company or organization. Cable news networks overall topped the list of responses, with 22 percent mentioning CNN (11 percent), Fox (9 percent) or MSNBC (2 percent), compared with a total of 5 percent who mentioned either ABC News, CBS News or NBC (together, 5 percent mention NBC or MSNBC)…Partisans split in trust for Fox News and CNN, with Fox volunteered as the most trusted by 22 percent of Republicans but just 1 percent of Democrats, while CNN is most trusted by 19 percent of Democrats but only 3 percent of Republicans. MSNBC is mentioned by 3 percent of Democrats as most trustworthy, while no Republican respondents mention the network.” Guskin also reports on data from a Pew Research Center and a 2018 Poynter Media Trust Survey on viewer preferences for television news. (There was no data on how TV compared to use of other internet sources).

For a good update on Democratic prospects in the Lone Star state, read “Is Texas finally turning blue? We looked at the electorate to find out” by Juan Carlos Huerta and Beatriz Cuartas at The Monkey Cage. As Huerta and Cuartas explain, “Although O’Rourke fell short, Democrats picked up 12 seats in the Texas House, two seats in the Texas Senate and two seats in the U.S. House, and came close in several statewide races. Nor were these anomalies. In the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton lost the state by only nine points, much less than Barack Obama’s 16-point loss in 2012…The state’s diversifying electorate and young people’s leftward shift appear to be weakening the GOP’s grip on the Lone Star State…By 2017, demographers estimate that Texas’s population was 58 percent people of color and 42 percent whites. As demographics have continued to change, the Texas legislature has passed laws such as strict voter-photo-identification requirements that are likely to make it harder to mobilize people of color in the state…According to data obtained from the States of Change: Demographics and Democracyproject, people of color were 44 percent of the voting eligible population in 2008 in Texas, and the project estimates that that population is 50 percent in 2018. From 2012 to 2016, Hispanic turnout increased by 30 percent while the percent of Hispanic population grew 15 percent, meaning the increase in turnout outpaced the increase in population.”

Ed Kilgore notes an historic milestone in his article, “Nevada Becomes First State With Women-Majority Legislature” at New York Magazine: “A couple of postelection appointments to vacant positions in the Nevada State Assembly included one in which criminal defense lawyer Rochelle Thuy Nguyen succeeded Chris Brooks as a Democrat representing Clark County. That officially gave the state a historic landmark, as the New York Times noted: “[W]omen will hold 32 of 63 seats in the Nevada Legislature when the next session begins in February, about 51 percent. No state house in history had ever crossed the 50 percent mark….New Hampshire previously had majority women representation in the state Senate, but women were not the overall majority in the Capitol.” Kilgore also notes that, according to National Conference of State Legislatures, women’s share of state legislators will increase by about 3 percent in 2019. Further, “Democrats outnumber Republicans by a more than two-to-one margin (1,431 to 660) among the women who will be serving in state legislatures in 2019.”

At PowerPost, Joe Davidson reports on a sophisticated Russian effort to sway African American voters away from opposing Trump: “Documents released by the Senate Intelligence Committee, first reported by my colleagues Craig Timberg and Tony Romm, show in previously unknown detail a complex, high-tech, surreptitious strike on American democracy, targeting African Americans. Unlike the Republican sledgehammers used to suppress votes and thwart electorates’ decisions in various states, the Russians are sneaky, using social media come-ons that ostensibly had little to do with the 2016 vote…“Messaging to African Americans sought to divert their political energy away from established political institutions by preying on anger with structural inequalities faced by African Americans, including police violence, poverty, and disproportionate levels of incarceration,” said the report by the Computational Propaganda Research Project. “These campaigns pushed a message that the best way to advance the cause of the African American community was to boycott the election and focus on other issues instead. This often happened through the use of repetitive slogans.”

Congratulations to Sabato’s Crystal Ball and their election forecasters on the accuracy of their Midterm election predictions. As the editors note, not only did they come very close on the net number of pick-ups for U.S. Senate and House seats and Governorships; they also nailed specific races with impressive accuracy. They picked the winners in: 34 of 35 U.S. Senate races, 423 of 434 House races and 32 of 35 Governors races.

Katha Pollitt argues in The Nation that “You Can’t Get Conservative White Women To Change Their Minds: The great electoral opportunity of 2020 is not in converting Trump voters. It’s motivating the large numbers of Americans who don’t vote at all.” As Pollitt explains, “Mostly, what changes people’s minds about important convictions is experience: something new and unusual that shakes their settled views…Of course, people do change their minds, but probably not after being proselytized by someone they barely know (or, in the case of family, know all too well). You won’t get far inviting your Trumpie co-worker out for coffee so you can politely suggest she’s a racist, or giving your Trumpie cousin a hard time about her Facebook posts at a baby shower…So why is it so hard to believe that white women who voted for Trump are mostly as fixed in their views as you are? They voted for him for dozens of reasons: to fit in with their family and community, to preserve or gain status, to piss off the libtards, to ally with their menfolk, to keep MS-13 from killing their children, to bring back jobs stolen by Mexico and China, to keep taxes low and black children out of their schools, or because it’s what Jesus wants…Rather than devoting yourself to chipping away at Trump’s base, it makes more sense to forget about them and outvote them…The great electoral opportunity of 2020 is not in the marginal number of repentant Trump voters you might be able to convert. It’s in the nearly 40 percent of eligible voters—many of them younger voters, rural residents, and people of color—who in 2016 did not vote at all.”

Politico headline: “GOP leader concedes ‘we have room for improvement” on House diversity.” Ya think?

In her New York Times op-ed, “Ohio Isn’t a Red State Yet: But it will be if Democrats do not fight for working people in every corner of the state,” Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley argues that “the results of this year’s election don’t support the argument that Ohio is firmly in the Republican Party’s column. Instead, they suggest how Democrats can still win statewide with a reorientation of our resources and our message…Those who see 2018 as a blood bath for Ohio Democrats are forgetting that Senator Sherrod Brown won by 6.4 percentage points. This was a larger margin of victory than he had in 2012 — when he shared the top of the ticket with President Barack Obama, who also carried the state…In Senator Brown, we see a model for success across the industrial Midwest: He maintains a laserlike focus on economic issues without compromising on civil rights and other core progressive values. He laid it out in his victory speech: “As we celebrate the dignity of work, we unify. We do not divide. Populists are not racists. Populists are not anti-Semitic. We do not appeal to some by pushing down others.”…If we’re serious about being the party of working people, we must meet them where they are — including engaging deeply in places like Chillicothe, Canton and Steubenville.”

Speaking of Senator Brown, Esquire’s Charles Pierce commends his candor in refusing to walk back his comments questioning the integrity of the ballot-count in the Georgia governor’s race. When MSNBC’s Chuck Todd questioned whether Brown’s description might undermine public trust in elections, Brown responded, “I was the secretary of state in Ohio 30 years ago. I know what you do, as secretary of state. You encourage people to vote. You don’t purge millions of voters. You don’t close down polling places in rural areas where voters have difficulty getting to the polls, which were mostly low-income areas. You don’t do what Republicans are doing all over the country…the secretary of state of Georgia should have recused himself from running that election, as Jimmy — as former — Georgia resident, former-President Jimmy Carter said he should.” Brown added that Republican Secretary of State Kemp “did everything he could to put his thumb on the scale and…quote, unquote “won” that election by only about a point…So don’t play this false equivalency. Because a former secretary of state, like me, said that about this election, which clearly is an effort to suppress the vote, not of people that look like you and me…” Todd was respectful and fair in giving Brown his say, but, with the notable exception of MSNBC, major broadcast media have generally glossed over voter supression, at best.

Danielle Root and Aadam Barclay have a post up at the Center for American Progress, a comprehensive survey entitled “Voter Suppression During the 2018 Midterm Elections.” The authors note that “This year—perhaps uncoincidentally—severe voter suppression occurred in states with highly competitive political races, including Georgia, Texas, Florida, and North Dakota.” The authors share details regarding: Voter registration problems; voter purges; voter ID and ballot requirements; voter confusion; voter intimidation and harrassment; poll closures and long lines; malfunctioning voter equippment; Disenfranchisement of justice-involved individuals; and gerrymendering. In one excerpt they note, “more than 10 percent of voter registrants in the “heavily African-American neighborhoods near downtown” Cincinnati were purged for failing to vote since 2012, compared with only 4 percent of registered voters living in the surrounding suburb of Indian Hill.” in another, they note, “In October 2018, Kansas officials moved the last remaining polling location in Dodge City—a majority-Hispanic community—outside the city limits and far away from public transportation. Compounding the problem, officials sent mailers to newly registered voters, incorrectly informing them that they were allowed to vote at the old location.” Also, “In Georgia, more than 1,800 voting machines sat unused in a warehouse on Election Day in three of Georgia’s largest and most heavily Democratic counties.”

“Voting reforms also ought to be top priority in the 14 “trifecta” states where Democrats now control the state house, state senate and governorship,” urges Jill Lawrence in her article, “Democrats need to be ruthless on fixing voting. They’re paying a steep price for neglect” in USA Today. “And whether through the party or other organizations, by whatever means are legal, rich Democrats ought to direct money to equipment upgrades, professionalizing voter administration (including ballot design) and candidates who are committed to reforms…The soonest Democrats could run the table nationally from Washington would be 2021. In the meantime, the House Democrats should pass all reforms they can and force Republicans to show what side they’re on. And state activists should aim to put reforms directly before voters in 2020 ballot measures wherever possible. This year, while a few states added voting restrictions, more states made it easier to vote and changed how districts are drawn to prevent gerrymandering situations like North Carolina.”

Alex Rogers and Clare Foran write at CNN Politics: “Massive fundraising in Maine. A countdown clock in Alabama. Calls and texts encouraging potential challengers in Colorado. Just a few weeks after 2018’s Election Day, the signs are clear: the 2020 Senate campaigns are already underway….Democrats start 2020 in a solid position, though they remain in the minority in the upper chamber of Congress. Of the 12 Democratic seats up for re-election, only two are from states President Donald Trump won in 2016 — Alabama’s Doug Jones and Michigan’s Gary Peters. Republicans have more seats to defend, with 22 GOP seats on the line…”The map looks good for the Democrats — I’ll tell you that,” Sen. Catherine Cortez, the new chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, told CNN.”

At The New Republic, Alex Shephard outlines Democrat Mike Espy’s campaign strategy for tommorrow’s run-off in his race for the U.S. Senate: “Espy has an uphill climb. According to Vox, Democratic strategists have a clear goal for turnout: “Thirty-five percent of Mississippi’s population is black, and Democrats need them to make up at least that much of the electorate—preferably more, of course—to have a chance.” The centrist Espy is also hoping to pick off moderate Republicans. In Tuesday’s debate, he distanced himself from his party and made the case that he would be a forceful advocate for his state’s interests, touting a “Mississippi First” approach. “That means Mississippi over party. Mississippi over person,” he said. “I don’t care how powerful that person might be. It means Mississippi each and every time.”…During the debate, he also underscored his strong positions on gun rights and promised to push for a “strong immigration policy.” Meanwhile, concerns about health care, one of the defining issues in the midterms, may help Espy, who has returned to the subject again and again on the campaign trail. Hyde-Smith claims that she supports coverage of pre-existing conditions while also demanding that the Affordable Care Act be repealed. (This common Republican position is, of course, nonsensical, and voters punished the GOP for it in other states.)” David Weigel notes at The Washington Post, “Hyde-Smith’s party has the numbers, if it can tune them in to a post-Thanksgiving election. Espy’s campaign is working to convert a small pool of moderate voters, while it and multiple third-party groups try to fire up black voters. To win, Espy would need to combine historic turnout among African Americans with perhaps 30 percent of the white vote — easier to achieve if some white conservatives sit the election out.”

In his  WaPo wrap-up of the midterm elections, Dan Balz notes that “the Trump-centric strategy backfired spectacularly in the race for control of the House, as suburban voters revolted against the president, delivering a rebuke to his party’s candidates in district after district…If the enthusiasm for Trump in rural and small-town America constituted the story after 2016, the revolt against him in the suburbs, led by female voters, has become the story of the 2018 elections. The more you analyze the House results, the more the GOP’s suburban problem stands out…There were 30 districts categorized as suburban-sparse. Heading into the election, Republicans held every one of them. As a result of the election, Democrats will have 16 to the GOP’s 14. In the 15 districts described as suburban-dense, something similar happened. Republicans held all 15 before the election. In January, they will have control of just three. In the nine districts categorized as urban-suburban, Republicans will go from holding seven to holding just one.”

A key Democratic messaging point is well-expressed in Margot Sanger-Katz’s “Republicans Say They Will Protect Pre-existing Conditions. Their Records Say Something Else” at The Upshot. As Sanger-Katz explains, “It is Democrats, by passing the Affordable Care Act in 2010, who introduced meaningful protections for Americans with prior illnesses…And Republican officeholders have taken numerous actions that would tend to weaken those protections — in Congress, in states and in courts. The Trump administration introduced a sweeping new policy just last week that would allow states to sidestep Obamacare’s requirement to cover pre-existing conditions…Pre-existing conditions have been a central theme in Democratic campaigns around the country.” The rest of the article rolls out the shameful GOP record of trying to gut previous illness protection. Not a bad message to amplify in the last full day of the 2018 miderm campaign. 

From “What Americans care about ahead of the 2018 elections, mapped” by Andrew Van Dam at Wonkblog:

If Democrats needed a late energizer for their midterm campaigns, in addition to the horrific Trump-stoked violence of last week, Ari Berman’s op-ed “How Voter Suppression Could Swing the Midterms” in The New York Times should help. As Berman writes, “In Georgia and other states, the question in this election is not just about which candidates voters will support, but whether they’ll be able to cast a ballot in the first place. The fight over voting rights in the midterms is a reminder that elections are not solely about who is running, what their commercials say or how many people are registered to vote. They are about who is allowed to vote and which officials are placing obstacles in the way of would-be voters…Since the 2010 election, 24 states overwhelmingly controlled by Republicans have put in place new voting restrictions, such as tougher voter ID laws, cutbacks to early voting and barriers to registration. Republicans say these measures are necessary to combat the threat of widespread voter fraud, even though study after study shows that such fraud is exceedingly rare. Many of these states have hotly contested races in 2018, and a drop in turnout among Democratic constituencies, such as young people and voters of color, could keep Republicans in power.”

Berman spotlights voter supression initiatives in Georgia, Texas, Florida, North Dakota, Wisconsin and Kansas, and concludes, “If Democrats turn out in large numbers on Nov. 6, as the early-voting data suggests is happening in some key states, it will be in spite of these barriers, not because they didn’t exist or didn’t matter…Despite rampant suppression efforts, there is some hope. In seven states, ballot initiatives would restore voting rights to ex-felons, make it easier to register to vote and crack down on gerrymandering. If these pass, we could see 2018 as a turning point for expanding voting rights, instead of an election tainted by voter suppression. But first people need to have the right to cast a ballot.”

If a frog had a glass ass, he could only jump once. But Emily Badger’s “What If Everyone Voted?” at The Upshot does include an instructive observation, which sharply underscores the importance of better Democratic GOTV in key states: “It’s impossible to know what would have happened had the people sitting out elections voted. But Bernard Fraga, an Indiana University political scientist, has tried to gauge that alternative reality using data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, which annually surveys thousands of Americans…The survey asks which candidates people preferred even if they did not vote. And if we add their preferences to the voting population in the last several elections, we get different election results…“If everybody voted, Clinton wins. If minority turnout was equal to white turnout, Clinton wins,” said Mr. Fraga, who describes these patterns in a new book, “The Turnout Gap.” Many white voters who preferred Mr. Trump sat out 2016 as well. So in this full-turnout counterfactual, Mrs. Clinton doesn’t overcome Mr. Trump’s narrow victories in Wisconsin, Michigan or Pennsylvania. Rather, she flips Florida, North Carolina and Texas.” And what if, more realistically, not everyone voted, but local activists mobilized a 10 percent improvement in turnout among African American, Latino and young voters in those 3 states?

At The National Journal, John Kraushaur notes, quoted by Ruy Teixeira, that ““Privately, Republican leaders expect to lose around 30 seats—and the House majority—but acknowledge that there could be a number of unexpected outcomes pushing those numbers higher on Election Night. That’s an all-too-realistic scenario given the supercharged liberal engagement in districts across the country, lackluster re-election efforts from unprepared GOP members of Congress, and impressive fundraising figures from even long-shot Democratic challengers…But there are many other districts where Trump won less than 55 percent of the vote that feature Democratic challengers who have gone under-the-radar…All told, that means Republicans are likely to lose around 30-35 House seats—but the potential for a larger total is higher than the likelihood they can salvage their majority.”

And if you wanna get wonky, Teixeira also flags a “Forecastapalooza!,” and notes, “The good folks at PS, one of the American Political Science Association’s journals, have made the articles from their special forecasting issue available online. These are all academic models, of course, which use a handful of variables to predict the outcome of the 2018 election. They are not continuously updated with polling information, etc, in the manner of 538 and other models on various websites….But they’re interesting and, if you can take the poli sci jargon, well worth strolling through.”

In additon to 538’s model, “Are Republicans Losing The Health Care Debate?” by Janie Velencia and Dhrumil Mehta, notes that “unfortunately for Trump and the Republican party, Democrats seem to be winning the health care public opinion battle: 53 percent of Americans said they trust Democrats to do a better job with health care than Republicans in a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll. Just 35 percent of respondents said they trusted Republicans over Democrats. Similarly, a recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that Americans were more likely to trust Democrats over Republicans on specific health care issues like continuing protections for pre-existing medical conditions and reducing health care costs. Even independents have gotten behind Democrats: 60 percent placed their faith in Democrats to protect pre-existing conditions (compared to 19 percent who trusted Republicans) in the Kaiser poll.”

Anthony Adragna’s Politico headline says it well “The powerful weapon House Republicans handed Democrats: A GOP rule change handed unilateral subpoena authority to many House committee chairmen. Democrats cried foul, but now they hope to use it against Trump.” As Adragna elaborates, “House Republicans changed the rules in 2015 to allow many of their committee chairmen to issue subpoenas without consulting the minority party, overriding Democrats objections that likened the tactic to something out of the McCarthy era…Now the weapon that the GOP wielded dozens of times against President Barack Obama’s agencies could allow Democrats to bombard President Donald Trump’s most controversial appointees with demands for information. And many Democrats are itching to use it…“The Republicans have set the standard and, by God, we’re going to emulate that standard,” Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) told POLITICO.” Adragna notes that some Democrats are relectant to use the power, but “Many Democrats argue that Republicans have only themselves to blame for weaponizing the subpoena process, and that their own party should not unilaterally disarm now that the power has been unleashed.”

Democrat Beto O’Rourke is fighting an uphill battle in Texas to take Ted Cruz’s senate seat. But, in his article, “Here’s One Way Beto O’Rourke And Democrats Nationwide Could Win. It Won’t Be Easy: Demographics isn’t destiny in Texas. But 2018 could mark a turning point for Latino turnout” at HuffPo, Roque Planas notes this ray of hope: “…Most polls measure the preferences of likely voters, an inconsistently defined classification that ranges from people who say they’re likely to cast a ballot to people whom pollsters can confirm voted in recent elections. That makes this Texas election harder to predict. In recent years, Texas has averaged an annual increase of 100,000 new voters. But between the last presidential election and last week, when the Texas Secretary of State’s Office released its final tally, the number of new voters skyrocketed by nearly 700,000…Some of that growth benefits Cruz. Suburban counties, many of which lean Republican, saw some of the highest growth in registration rates. But the top four counties to gain voters — Harris, Bexar, Travis and Dallas — all went blue in 2016 and amassed more than a quarter-million extra voters between them. The border’s largest counties saw voter growth outpacing the state’s average as a whole. Registration in Hidalgo County, where Cambio Texas works, jumped by 7 percent.”

“The share of 18- to 29-year-old voters who say they will definitely vote has jumped from 26 percent in the run-up to the last midterm election in 2014 to 40 percent this fall, according to a new poll obtained from the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government,” Amy Garner writes in “Pushing for a ‘youth wave’: Can Democrats channel dissent into action at the ballot box?” at The Washington Post. “One driving factor: widespread support for government intervention to curb gun violence and reduce college debt and health-care costs…A national analysis by the Democratic data firm TargetSmart shows voter registration — and voting in primaries — has risen slightly nationally among young voters since the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., last February…In Pennsylvania, youth voters have made up nearly 60 percent of all new registrants, Target­Smart reported in September. The share of the electorate that is under age 30 has grown since 2017 in several key states, including Nevada, North Carolina and Florida, according to state voter registration data tracked by the firm L2. In Virginia, requests for student absentee ballots, at about 30,000, are about 50 percent higher than in last year’s gubernatorial election.”

Something popped up in the political news this week that brought back some personal memories, so I wrote about it at New York:

On a rainy Monday morning in June of 1992, I happened to have a meeting in the Georgia State Capitol (I was communications director for U.S. senator Sam Nunn at the time). Upon arriving, I learned a demonstration against the Confederate flag insignia that segregationists added to the state flag in 1956 would soon begin on the steps outside. But it looked like a war was imminent: Just inside the doors at the Capitol, there was a phalanx of State Building Authority police officers in full riot gear. Walking behind their ranks, peering over them to see what was happening at the protest site, was none other than former governor Lester Maddox, the last of the state’s segregationist governors. Turns out he was, like me, just there for a meeting, but for all the world it looked like those mostly black cops were there protecting ol’ Lester from civil-rights protesters.

I went about my business, and I suppose Maddox did, too; meanwhile a brief protest took place just outside the building. The general feeling at the time was that the state had massively overreacted to a small, peaceful demonstration. The reason was obvious: Just over a month earlier violent protests had erupted in Atlanta (as in other cities) after the Rodney King verdict in Los Angeles. At one point, a car parked just outside the Capitol (belonging, ironically, to then–Governor Zell Miller’s top African-American staffer) was overturned. There were no deaths, fortunately, but there were many injuries.

And so in June the flag protesters were outnumbered not just by nearby riot police, but by Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents taking snapshots and trying to intimidate the young college students carrying out the protest. They briefly set fire to the 1956 flag. The rain probably extinguished the fire pretty quickly.

Another piece of context is crucial to this story: Just two weeks earlier, Governor Miller, a Democrat who had once been Maddox’s chief of staff (and who would be a supporter of many conservative candidates later in his career), had called for getting rid of the Confederate emblems on the Georgia flag — a stance that quickly gained the support of soon-to-be U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a conservative Republican from Georgia. So the position, if not the incendiary behavior, of the June protesters was very much in the political mainstream (though it would take another near-decade for the flag to change, under Governor Roy Barnes in 2001).

All this would be a forgotten footnote to the long story of social change in the Deep South had not one of those protesters at the Georgia Capitol been Stacey Abrams, who is running to become the first Democratic governor since Barnes won 20 years ago. Someone dug up a 1992 article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that showed Abrams among the flag-burners, and posted it on Facebook. The New York Times wrote it all up, omitting most of the context I outlined above.

It’s unclear whether this will become an issue in the red-hot, very close contest between Abrams and her conservative Republican opponent, Brian Kemp. Abrams’s underlying position on the flag is now, of course, accepted by everyone other than hard-core neo-Confederates. She has taken far more controversial positions on other divisive relics, such as the giant marble billboard of Confederate leaders chiseled onto the face of state-owned Stone Mountain. But in a racially as well as ideologically polarized gubernatorial election in which Kemp has worked hard to depict Abrams as some sort of lawless radical (particularly in the context of Abrams’s long-standing effortsto register poor and minority voters), the symbolism of flag-burning is easy to exploit, and the larger Lost Cause will also rouse not-so-quiet racists.

The protests in which Abrams participated were righteous then and now, and posed no threat to public safety or order.

“Trump ‘s provocations alone show few signs of improving the subpar turnout patterns among Latinos and millennials, two core Democratic constituencies,” notes Ronald Brownstein in “Here’s what should excite and depress Democrats so far in 2018“at CNN Politics: However, “Democrats received encouraging news from Sunday’s ABC/Washington Post poll, which found much higher levels of youth engagement than almost any other recent survey. But that result looks like an outlier compared to most other polls. And even if young people participate in somewhat higher numbers, their share of the vote could fall if they don’t keep pace with the greater-than-usual midterm interest evident among other voter groups. By 2020, millennials will significantly exceed baby boomers as a share of eligible voters, but based on their turnout trajectory they will continue to lag them among actual voters. That would be a huge opportunity cost for Democrats given Trump’s consistently low marks with the generation (apart from younger non-college whites).”

Geoffrey Skelley presents the case that “Young Voters Might Actually Show Up At The Polls This Year: At least, more of them than usual might” at FiveThirtyEight: “Looking at the historical trends, there’s no question that youth voter turnout is consistently low in midterms, but exit poll data from competitive statewide elections in 2017 suggests that 2018 could set a record high for young voter participation….Polling from the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics also gives us reason to believe we may see high turnout from young voters. The institute conducts a long-running, large-sample poll of young Americans…[I]n the IOP’s spring 2018 poll, 37 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds answered they would “definitely” vote, which was a new record high.”

From Jennifer Rubin’s column, “Democrats should thank McConnell for the last-minute assist” in the Washington Post: “Minority Leader Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) pounced. “Senator Mitch McConnell, President Trump, and their fellow Republicans blew a 2 trillion dollar hole in the federal deficit to fund a tax cut for the rich, he said in a written statement. “To now suggest cutting earned middle-class programs like Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid as the only fiscally responsible solution to solve the debt problem is nothing short of gaslighting.” He added with relish, “As November approaches, it’s clear Democrats stand for expanding affordable health care and growing the middle class, while Republicans are for stripping away protections for people with pre-existing conditions and cutting Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid to fund their giveaways to corporate executives and the wealthiest few.” He might have sent flowers as well in thanks for delivering a closing message to Democrats who have already been focusing on health care.”

Rubin adds, “The main GOP policy goals — cutting entitlements, cutting taxes for the rich and repealing protection for preexisting conditions — are extremely unpopular. (Republicans’ positions on climate change, “dreamers,” the wall and plenty else are also out of sync with voters.) In the final stretch before Election Day, Democrats are likely to remind voters of the GOP’s ambitions should they retain control of both houses. With many voters already saying they want a check on Trump, McConnell reiterated the policy stances that voters fear most. Schumer and his party couldn’t have asked for a better “October surprise.”

in “People are searching for voter registration info at presidential-year levels,” Philip Bump writes at The Washington Post, “Searching for “register to vote”…is probably a good measure of how much interest new voters have in the election…People are searching “register to vote” at near-presidential-election levels — suggesting a surge in interest among less frequent voters…Averaging the data across all states, the pattern is obvious. 2018 does not look like 2010 or 2014 in terms of searches for voter registration information…As with most other election-related metrics, it’s not clear how much significance this has. But the prospect of a wave election powered by newly motivated voters seems as though it would look much more like this than like the search pattern from, say, 2010.”

“Over just two weeks in September a limited-liability company calling itself News for Democracy spent almost $400,000 on more than 16 million impressions for a network of 14 Facebook pages that hadn’t existed until August,” reports Alexis C.Madrigal in his post “The Secretive Organization Quietly Spending Millions on Facebook Political Ads: Meet the liberal group that’s running a new breed of digital campaign” at The Atlantic. “From May 7 to October 16—the period that Facebook’s newly created archive of political advertising covers—News for Democracy paid from $1.2 million $4.6 million to create, at a minimum, 45 million impressions through more than 2,600 ads. (Facebook’s data offer ranges, rather than precise amounts, of dollars spent or impressions generated…the number of people who saw these ads is certainly higher, and possibly much higher.)…The biggest of News for Democracy’s ad buys went to pages with names like Women for Civility (8 million impressions), Better With Age (7.2 million), Our Flag Our Country (5.7 million), Living Free (5.4 million), and The Holy Tribune (4.2 million). Most of the ads consisted of one-minute videos, done in that Facebook style with text sliding around over footage making a single point. The ads were shown to two very specific groups of people: women ages 55 to 64 in Arkansas and mostly male Kansans under the age of 44…Despite the God-and-country nature of the page names, the actual content was left-leaning…Their message is the same: Republicans want to take away protections for people with preexisting medical conditions, and that would hurt the nice, relatable people in the videos.”

“In terms of our ratings, this week’s changes leave 212 seats at least leaning to the Democrats, 201 at least leaning to the Republicans, and 22 Toss-ups. Democrats need to win six of the Toss-ups to win the House, and all the other seats that currently lean to them (some of which are still very much in play), to win the House.” — From Kyle Kondik’s post “The Drive for 25: An updated seat-by-seat analysis of the House: Democrats closing in on majority but it’s not a sure thing” at Sabato’s Crystal Ball.

Some of the Democratic women veterans running for congress, from a video by Serve America PAC:

A great video, although one commenter, ‘pixxer1’ notes a couple of flaws that could be corrected easily enough: “You could be helpful to these women by writing their names and district numbers below the video. My only complaint about this otherwise excellent video is that they go by so fast at the end that someone in their district who was unaware of them would not have time to notice the information.” Maybe also emphasize that these are Democratic women.

The next time you hear/read a Trump supporter arguing that “at least he keeps his promises,” you can refer him to Matthew Yglesias’s article, “The biggest lie Trump tells is that he’s kept his promises: A raft of populist pledges have been left on the cutting room floor” at vox.com. In addition to ditching his promises about Obamacare, releasing his taxes and no big tax breaks for the rich, Yglesias adds “Trump promised to break up America’s largest banks by reinstated old Glass-Steagall regulations that prevented financial conglomerates from operating in multiple lines of business…Trump promised price controls on prescription drugs…Trump promised to “take the oil” from Iraq to reduce the financial burden of US military policy…Trump promised many times that he would release his tax returns and promised to put his wealth into a blind trust…Trump vowed rollback of climate change regulations but said he was committed to upholding clean air and clean water goals…Trump promised a $1 trillion infrastructure package.”

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

How Far Left Is the Democratic Party Moving?

I address this question in a new article for the British site, Unherd. I argue that the Democratic party is indeed moving left but not in the fashion envisioned by self-conscious radicals like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

“The Left in America is on the rise…But how far Left is this surge? And what does it stand for? Can it really be compared with the hard Left radicalism seen elsewhere across the globe?

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

The Washington Post is out with a large poll of the House battleground–the 69 most competitive House districts. The poll covered the period when the Kavanaugh controversy was coming to a head so should capture political movement from those events pretty well.

The topline is quite favorable for the Democrats:

“The survey of 2,672 likely voters by The Post and the Schar School at George Mason University shows that likely voters in these districts favor Democrats by a slight margin: 50 percent prefer the Democratic nominee and 46 percent prefer the Republican. By way of comparison, in 2016 these same districts favored Republican candidates over Democratic ones by 15 percentage points, 56 percent to 41 percent.”

If accurate, that’s quite a sea change in sentiment in these districts.

But I want to draw special attention to a couple of graphics in the story. The first shows some basic demographics of the likely voters in those districts. Note that despite all the talk about educated suburbanites, there are still far more white noncollege than white college voters in these districts (47 percent to 31 percent).

The second shows vote intention by some key demographics. Unsurprisingly, the Democratic advantage among white college women is large (62-37). But also of great significance is that white noncollege women–a more numerous demographic than white college women–are close to even between the parties (a mere 4 point Democratic deficit). If white noncollege women were polling more like their white noncollege male counterparts (a 20 point Democratic deficit), the Democrats’ chances of taking the House would be poor.

Understanding these facts about the House battleground is key to understanding what is going on in 2018 and lessons Democrats should learn for 2020.