Republicans keep trying how to figure out how to help their midterm prospects from Washington. One strategem they’ve hatched may backfire, as I noted at New York this week:

[T]his apparent decision is a risky one.

“House Republican lawmakers introduced legislation Monday that would make the 2017 tax cuts for individuals permanent in a bid to highlight their signature economic policy achievement ahead of the November elections.

“The legislation – released as Republicans are at risk of losing their majority in the House – is seen as a last-ditch effort by GOP lawmakers to convince voters of the benefits of their new tax code. Polls consistently show less than half of Americans approve of the tax cut.”

The bill, to be clear, is not going to be enacted; without the protection of a budget reconciliation vehicle like the one used to pass the first big Trump tax cut last December, it has zero chance in the Senate. So this is an election year “messaging” bill designed to tell voters: Hey, here’s some more money we’ve wrenched from the swamp. Don’t forget to say thank you on November 6.

There’s a problem, though: the original tax bill was very unpopular among higher-income voters in high-income, high-tax states because of its provisions reducing the deductibility of state and local income and property taxes (SALT) — notably California, New Jersey, and New York. Indeed, some Republicans were undoubtedly proud at their success in screwing over these states as havens of godless immigrant-coddling tree-hugging baby-killing liberals. Reminding them of this screwing-over shortly before the midterms has its perils.

Using the Cook Political Report’s ratings, there are 13 highly competitive (Lean D, Lean R, or Tossup) races in Republican-controlled districts in those three states where the SALT provisions are generally hated. There are another six in the Likely Republican category that could become competitive between now and November 6. Democrats need just a net gain of 23 seats to take control of the House.

To be sure, 11 House Republicans from California, New Jersey, and New York voted against the tax bill, mostly because of the SALT provisions. But it’s not going to help them very much if their constituents are reminded their party screwed them over, and if their own protestations grow too loud, “base” voters who love the tax cuts could be annoyed, undermining GOP turnout. As David Dayen put it:

“Brilliant work by the House GOP, forcing suburban Republicans to once again vote to either defy their party or raise taxes on their constituents.”

This could partially be a matter of the many lobbyists for industries and interests benefiting from the original tax cuts wanting to get Republicans locked into making them permanent while the bill is still viewed as a net plus. But if it helps lose them the House, that will be a pyrrhic victory of the highest order.

There is lots of buzz recently about improving Democratic prospects for winning a majority of Senate seats in the midterm elections, and the consensus of the top political analysts is a lot brighter for Democrats than it was even a few months ago.

CNN editor at large Chris Cillizza sees the range of possibilities for Democrats between +/- 3 seats and Kyle Kondik of Sabato’s Crystal Ball has changed his election outcome estimate from “Likely Republican” to “Leans Republican.”

Of the 36 senate seats in play on November 6th, the Cook Political Report rates only 3 of the races as “Solid R,” 2 as “Likely R” and 1 as “Lean R.” The remainder range from “Solid D” (14); “Likely D” (5); “Lean D” (2); and “Toss-up” (8).

At The Princeton Election Consortium, Sam Wang writes,

Senate control is said to be a difficult challenge for Democrats. However, the eventual seat margin will be close, and the number of critical races is small. If we look at current polling margins, a swing of 3 points would be enough to put Democrats on the brink of having 51 seats. So in the Senate, Republicans have a handicap of 3 percentage points favoring them.

I should throw in here that close Senate races tend to break mostly in the same direction on Election Day. Which way they’ll break isn’t known; one way gets Democrats to 51-52 seats, and the other way gets them to 45-46 seats. It appears that Senate control could go either way.

Ruy Teixeira flags an encouraging survey reported in the conservative Weekly Standard, and notes:

Senate models are a bit thin on the ground but David Byler at the Weekly Standard has one that seems solid. Currently, he has Democratic chances of taking the Senate at 41.5 percent, quite an improvement over earlier runs of his model. This reflects continued good poll results for Democratic Senate candidates, including the many, many candidates who have to hold a seat in red states. Of course, a little better than 2 in 5 still means they’re more likely to fall short than not. But given the Senate map this year, an estimate this high is impressive.

Political analyst Stu Rothenberg sees “an almost impossible map” for Democrats.” However he believes that the GOP’s mounting problems indicate that “the Senate could be in play.” Vox’s senate analyst, Dylan Scott says “while Democrats will need a near-perfect November to win back control of the chamber, a fresh assessment of the Senate battlefield reveals that they should have several opportunities to pick up the seats they need.”

All in all, the odds still favor the Republicans to hold a senate majority, but Democrats have some good reasons to invest more resources in competitive senate races.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman answers an important question on the minds of many voters, “are Democrats really credible on health care?”

Almost five years after Obamacare went into full effect, the answer is a very clear yes. It hasn’t worked perfectly, and its successes haven’t come in quite the form its proponents expected. But it has delivered huge progress, especially in states run by politicians who are trying to make it work.

It’s worth remembering what Republicans said would happen before the A.C.A. went online: that it would fail to reduce the number of uninsured, that it would blow a giant hole in the budget, that it would lead to a “death spiral” of rising premiums and declining enrollment.

What actually happened was a dramatic fall in the uninsured, especially in those states that expanded Medicaid. The budget costs of expanding Medicaid and subsidizing other insurance have been significant, but estimates for 2019 suggest that these costs will be around $115 billion — much less than half the revenue lost due to the Trump tax cut.

Krugman concedes that premiums “rose sharply when the people signing up for those exchanges turned out to be fewer and sicker than insurers had hoped.” However, “the markets have now stabilized, with only modest premium increases for 2019 and insurers returning to the exchanges.”

In addition, “Medicaid is covering more than expected, so that overall gains in coverage have been surprisingly on target. In early 2014, the Congressional Budget Office projected that under the A.C.A., by 2018 there would be 29 million uninsured U.S. residents. The actual number is … 29 million.”

And, despite the assault on the Affordable Care Act by Trump and the Republicans, “Democrats built their system so well that it’s still standing despite everything thrown at it.” Further,

…Obamacare would be doing even better if it were run by people who weren’t trying to kill it. Look at what’s happening in New Jersey, where a Democratic governor and Legislature have used their powers to undo most of the Trumpian sabotage: 2019 premiums will actually drop 9.3 percent, even as they rise modestly in the nation as a whole.

…Republicans, on the other hand, aren’t just lying about their health plans — pretending, for example, to protect people with pre-existing conditions when they aren’t. They’ve also been utterly wrong about everything, and have learned nothing from their mistakes.

Even the conservative Democrat Joe Manchin is running strong in a state Trump won by 42 percent by attacking the Republican plan to eradicate protection for people with pre-existing conditions. As Krugman concludes, “Democrats have earned a lot of credibility on health care: They delivered what they promised, and they have showed that they can build systems that work” — in stark contrast to their GOP opponents, who can’t pass any health care measures, despite having control of the presidency and majorities of both houses of congress.

Very interesting data from a Monmouth University poll of 8 competitive CDs (CA48, PA01, PA17, NJ03, NJ11, OH12, VA10, WV03). The general take below but there is a ton of detailed data provided in the writeup. Note particularly how well Democrats are doing among white noncollege women, losing them by a mere 6 points, while totally killing it among white college women.

“These eight House districts are particularly competitive because Donald Trump’s vote share was less than Mitt Romney’s in election precincts that encompass just under half of the combined electorate. Republican House candidates are doing worse in precincts where Trump underperformed even after controlling for the partisan lean of those precincts. Furthermore, Republican House candidates are not doing as well overall in Republican precincts as Democratic candidates are doing in Democratic precincts. This performance gap currently offsets the natural GOP lean of these congressional districts.”

Perry Bacon, Jr. and Oliver Roeder explain “Why Democrats Were Willing To Break The Rules On Kavanaugh Day 3″ at FiveThirtyEight. Here’s one key point from Bacon: “…The Booker-Cornyn run-in, and the “confidential” documents fracas in general, is a good example of why so many scholars are worried about the state of American democracy. The Republicans, in this instance and others,¹seem to be prioritizing winning over following bipartisan procedures. In turn, this is driving Democrats to violate norms.”

Ed Kilgore’s “On Kavanaugh, It’s All About Collins and Murkowski, Not the Red-State Democrats” at New York Magazine takes a revealing look at Democratic strategy after the appointment of Republican Jon Kyle to fill McCain’s seat, and notes that “the scenario in which Democrats could go after Collins and Murkowski individually as the “deciding vote” has evaporated. They now must flip both Republicans before any of the red-state Democratic senators matter at all. And that means the moment eitherCollins or Murkowski announces for Kavanaugh, it’s game over…The odds of defeating this confirmation have gone down significantly, not only because Kavanaugh got through his interrogation in the Judiciary Committee without any big revelations, but because Republicans can now afford to lose a senator without losing the vote.” Kilgore writes that of the two Republican moderate conservative enators Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, Murkowski is more likely to vote against Kavanaugh’s confirmation. Therefore, “…At present the smart Democratic strategy is to focus with the light and heat of a thousand suns on Susan Collins, who will probably announce her decision on Kavanaugh earlier rather than later. Assuming she wants another term in the Senate in 2020, she may be most concerned about heading off a conservative primary challenge from Maine governor Paul LePage (who is term-limited this year) or someone of his abrasively conservative ilk. That’s why the initiative to crowdfund a Democratic opponent for Collins if she votes for Kavanaugh — which has already raised nearly $900,000 — is a smart move.”

From Dylan Scott’s “The 7 most important moments in Obama’s blistering critique of Trump and the GOP,” a couple of salient points from the Democratic Party’s best communicator, which can be tweaked and leveraged in House and Senate campaigns: “Demagogues promise simple fixes to complex problems” — maybe the best one-liner from Obama’s much-buzzed Montana speech. Thoughtful voters know this at the cellular level, and reminding them that today’s Republicans are utterly incapable of creating reforms that incorporate this wisdom can only help brand Dems as the reality-based party. Also, “What happened to the Republican Party?” is a great shorthand way of reminding voters that the current GOP has lost the credibility of its better leaders, like Eisenhower, who understood the good leadership is about bringing people together, not exploiting their differencees. Lastly, the most-quoted line of Obama’s speech, “How hard can that be? Saying that Nazis are bad?” brings home the shame of Trump and his party enablers giving right-wing terrorists a free ride.

In his op-ed, “The Anthem Is a Trap for Democrats: And some of them are walking right into it, to the glee of Republicans,” NYT columnist David Leonhardt makes a credible case that the ‘take a knee’ controversy has no real upside for Democratic candidates. Leonhardt argues, “As Tarini Parti and Henry Gomez of BuzzFeed News reported this week, Republicans have decided to make the protests a big part of their midterm campaign message. “Republican strategists and campaign staff,” Parti and Gomez write, “see opportunities for candidates to make the N.F.L. protests a political liability for Democrats defending seats in states President Donald Trump won in 2016.”…Republicans feel this way partly because they know public opinion cuts against them on a long list of issues: Trump’s performance, the Russia investigation, tax policy, health care, the minimum wage and more. On the national-anthem protests, by contrast, most Americans agree with Republicans…I don’t see a good argument, however, that the issue will help the Democrats in the midterms. On their own, the protests don’t seem big enough to inspire higher voter turnout among left-leaning people who rarely vote in midterms. Yet the issue does seem divisive enough to cause some swing voters to decide that Democrats are out of touch. It’s precisely the kind of issue that can lead white working-class voters to focus on the white part of their identity rather than the working-class part. When that happens, Republicans benefit. When those same voters are thinking about class — about taxes, health care and the like — Democrats benefit.”

Terence Burlij charts “the narrow path to a Democratic senate” at CNN Politics. His scenario: “Democrats still have a narrow path to the Senate majority despite a map that favors Republicans and includes 10 Democratic incumbents running in states President Donald Trump won, five of them by double-digit margins…The list of Democratic targets this cycle has doubled, with a pair of red states — Tennessee and Texas — looking increasingly competitive. With the Senate currently split 51-49 in favor of Republicans, if Democrats were able to win either of those contests — assuming they also flip Arizona and Nevada — it would mean the party could afford to see one of its incumbents defeated and still preserve a path to the majority.”

If you had to pick the most deserving Democratic House candidate outside of your residential district to support, the short list would surely include Lucy McBath, who is running in GA-6. At least one recent poll indicates a statistical tie with her Republican opponent, incumbent Karen Handel. McBath is the mother of Jordan Davis, who was brutally shot and killed while he was in a car that was playing music that was too loud for the shooter in another car. Mcbath, a survivor of breast cancer, is a strong supporter of gun safety measures, a minimum wage increase, reproductive rights for women and other progressive reforms. In April, 2017, Democrat John Ossoff received 48.1 percent of the vote in the GA-6 blanket primary, while Handel received just 19.8 percent. In the June runoff, Handel, supposedly received 51.8 percent of the vote, compared to Ossoff’s 48.2 percent. Contribute to McBath’s ActBlue page right here.

The keystone state may also provide the key to the midterm elections. As Reid J. Epstein reports at The Wall St. Journal, “Of the 63 GOP-held House seats that the Cook Political Report rates as lean Republican, a tossup or likely or lean Democratic, 31 come from six states. Democrats could run the table in battlefield districts in just four states—Pennsylvania, California, Florida and New Jersey—and capture the net 23 seats they need to seize the House majority without taking a single district anywhere else…Nine of Pennsylvania’s 18 House seats could change parties this year, a concentration of competitive races like nowhere else in the country due to the combination of court-ordered redistricting and a broader realignment of suburban voters away from the Republican Party…“The political winds are blowing six swing seats our way,” said Rep. Mike Doyle, a Pittsburgh Democrat who is the dean of the Pennsylvania House delegation. “It would not surprise me if our state flips more seats than any state in the country.”

Some encouraging words for Democrats from Albert R. Hunt at Bloomberg Opinion: “For all the fury over the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, he’s expected to be confirmed on a mostly party-line vote, perhaps by Oct. 1, when the Supreme Court convenes. Politically, the fight probably is a wash or a slight energizer for Democrats…“I’ve never seen a wave reverse or dissipate between midsummer and Election Day,” said Charlie Cook, editor and publisher of the Cook Political Report and a sage of U.S. elections. “They have just remained constant or gotten bigger, like 1994 and 2006.”

There’s a new wrinkle in the GOP attacks on single-payer health care proposals. I wrote about it this week at New York:

But what Trump and Scott are doing is asking seniors to selfishly (or resentfully) oppose giving younger people the same kind of health coverage they enjoy because it might somehow put their own “socialist” benefits at risk. And as with the attacks on Obamacare, there is more than a bit of a whiff of racism involved, as Cohen observes:

[T]aken literally, Trump was saying that Democrats want to raid socialism to pay for socialism, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

But Trump was probably making a clumsy version of the pitch that helped him get elected and that continues to keep his base loyal ― namely, that Democrats want to shift money and status away from the kind of people who voted for him and give those things to others.

His message to supporters, in other words, was that Democrats want to raid your socialism to pay for theirs.

It’s not crazy to hear a racist dog whistle in there, given Trump’s history. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that a Republican tried to rally white voters by telling them that Democrats were going to take their money and give it to nonwhite people.

You could argue that Republicans are simply appealing to the innate conservatism of old folks who fear change even if they would be helped very directly by that change. But the country could do without the lies told by those with bad intent towards Medicare posing as its champions.

While following Brett Kavanaugh’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee from gavel to gavel, I saw a strange unscripted moment that told us a lot. I wrote about it at New York:

Throughout the confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, Democratic senators have challenged his acceptance of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that established a constitutional right to an abortion. He’s become adept in reciting a sort of formula acknowledging (in language also used by Chief Justice John Roberts at his own confirmation hearing) Roe as “settled law” and an important SCOTUS precedent — and then refusing to answer questions about Roe’s original legitimacy (the key to a possible future reversal by SCOTUS itself, which is not bound to its own precedents the way lower courts are) because his answers might prejudge a future case.

But Republican Lindsey Graham threw Kavanaugh a curve today by asking him to criticize Roe on the standard grounds that conservatives like both of those men have heard (and almost certainly agreed with) thousands of times in their adult lives.

Graham went back to basics:

GRAHAM: Is there anything in the Constitution about the right to an abortion? Anything written in it …

KAVANAUGH: Senator, the Supreme Court recognized the right to an abortion in the 1973 Roe v. Wade case, and has reaffirmed it many times.

GRAHAM: Look, my question is, did they find a phrase in the Constitution that says the state cannot interfere with a woman’s right to choose, until medical viability occurs? Is that in the Constitution?

KAVANAUGH: The Supreme Court, applying the liberty —

GRAHAM: This is pretty simple: “No, it’s not, Senator Graham.”

KAVANAUGH (laughing): I want to be very careful …

Kavanaugh tried to talk about the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the constitutional “liberty cause,” but Graham wasn’t having any of it:

GRAHAM: What are the limits on the Court’s ability to find a penumbra of rights to apply in a particular situation? What are the checks and balances for people in your profession, if you can find five people who agree with you, to confer rights, whether the public likes it or not, based on this concept of a penumbra of rights? What are the limits to this.

Graham is alluding to the famous “penumbra” doctrine of unenumerated but implied rights contained in Justice Willam O. Douglas’s decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 SCOTUS case that struck down a state ban on contraception as violating a right to privacy the Court had never explicitly identified before. It was, more importantly, the chief precedent cited by the Court majority in Roe v. Wade. Every American who has ever taken a constitutional law class knows all about Douglas, “penumbras,” Griswold, privacy rights, and Roe, and has heard the standard conservative complaint, echoed by Graham, that the whole thing is the epitome of illegitimate “judicial activism.”

But instead of agreeing or disagreeing with Graham, Kavanaugh tried to go off on a tangent about later Supreme Court cases about privacy rights being rooted in the country’s history and traditions. After mocking that idea, Graham got back to his basic objection of “five people” (justices) using “one word” (privacy) to “tell everybody elected in the country you can’t go there” (in restricting abortion).

GRAHAM: The only real check and balance is a constitutional amendment, to change the ruling. Would you agree with that?

This was a treacherous question, since most of the conservatives backing Kavanaugh would begin rioting in the streets if he conceded the Court had no power to “fix” Roe v. Wade. After a brief pause, Kavanaugh objected that he did not want to “comment on potential constitutional amendments,” and then mostly fell silent as Graham continued to offer the standard conservative rant about “judicial activists” robbing legislative bodies of their power to determine public policies. At the end, recognizing that Kavanaugh wasn’t going to comment, Graham concluded: “All I ask is that you think about it,” as though the veteran conservative jurist never had.

This near-comical exchange was revealing in that the well-rehearsed Kavanaugh had the discipline to act as though Graham, in enunciating tenets of liberal judicial overreaching that are part of his own philosophical inheritance, was handing him a rattlesnake to cuddle. There is no way Kavanaugh would have passed the Federalist Society vetting process if he didn’t at the very least broadly share Graham’s point of view about Roe. And if he is confirmed to the Court and blandly follows Roe as unshakable precedent, there will be hell to pay in conservative circles — from white-shoe law offices to small Evangelical churches — that will burn all the Republicans who voted to confirm him, and will even scorch Donald Trump if he is still in office at that point.

Everyone on the Judiciary Committee understands the deceptive game that he and Republican senators are playing on this subject. And that’s probably why Lindsey Graham felt secure in just making a speech to the galleries.

It was a true “teaching moment.”

Ronald Brownstein’s article, “What Liberal Organizers Are Seeing on the Ground in 2018” at The Atlantic spotlights the impressive activism of Working America, and offers a number of insightful observations, including: “Michael Podhorzer, who supervises Working America as the AFL-CIO’s political director, says the evidence suggests that suburban college-educated voters, particularly those who most revile Trump, will likely vote in large numbers in November. By contrast, the blue-collar whites who surged to the polls for Trump in 2016 appear less motivated to come out for other Republicans—just as many of Obama’s younger and minority supporters didn’t show up during the GOP landslide in 2010, his first midterm election. “In a peculiar irony,” Podhorzer says, “Trump may have something of Obama’s problem in 2010: If he’s not on the ticket, the surge voters are not going to come out and vote for congressional Republicans.”…And while support for the president in white working-class communities remains formidable, the Working America organizers say they have succeeded in moving some blue-collar Trump supporters, especially women, away from GOP candidates. They’ve done so by highlighting Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, as well as the risk that huge deficits created by the GOP tax plan will eventually compel cuts in Medicare and Social Security.”

Brownstein continues, “But Podhorzer, Morrison, and Nussbaum all caution that recapturing the House this fall wouldn’t mean that Democrats have solved all of their problems for 2020. For starters, each says Working America’s experience indicates that, despite all of Trump’s racial provocations, Democrats still face a serious challenge improving on the lackluster minority turnout that hurt Clinton in 2016. In its canvasses, the group has found that working-class minority communities are no more, and may be even less, engaged than their white counterparts. All three say they see no sign this year of an uptick from the typical midterm-turnout decline among minorities—and no evidence that distaste for Trump alone will change the equation for 2020…The core of the Democrats’ problem, they believe, is that while many minority voters see Trump and the GOP as hostile, they are not convinced Democrats have ideas to meaningfully improve their economic condition. White blue-collar communities are even more skeptical. Among these working-class voters on both sides of the color bar, Morrison says flatly, “it is not credible to see the Democrats, broadly speaking, as a change agent.” The ominous result for Democrats? In all parts of the country, families that cite the economy as their top concern during Working America’s door-knocking visits prefer Republicans.”

NYT columnist Paul Krugman nails the GOP’s Kavanaugh confirmation strategy — and a good way for Dems to describe it: “At a fundamental level, the attempt to jam Brett Kavanaugh onto the Supreme Court closely resembles the way Republicans passed a tax cut last year. Once again we see a rushed, nakedly partisan process, with G.O.P. leaders withholding much of the information that’s supposed to go into congressional deliberations. Once again the outcome is all too likely to rest on pure tribalism: Unless some Republicans develop a very late case of conscience, they will vote along party lines with the full knowledge that they’re abdicating their constitutional duty to provide advice and consent.”

Democrats who want to see more passion from the party’s top leaders ought to be pleased with the  comments by Sens. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker at the Kavanaugh hearings. Booker’s “I am Spartacus” moment drew predictable ridicule from the GOP, but voters who like a little moxie in political leaders — a frequently-cited concern many voters have about Democrats — have to appreciate Booker’s gutsy dare to the GOP to “bring it,” regarding their threat to expel him. Harris also showed plenty of mettle in her bulldogging Kavanaugh, who looked quite shaken by focused interrogation. Not many Republican leaders would welcome the chance to debate her.

Ed Kilgore’s “Most Americans Can’t Name a Supreme Court Justice” at New York Magazine notes that “A new survey of likely voters by C-Span, moreover, shows that 91 percent of them agree that: “Decisions made by the U.S. Supreme Court have an impact on my everyday life as a citizen.” But asked if they could name any of the Court’s current members, 52 percent could not. This is not a new thing, to be sure: the same C-Span question back in 2009 showed 54 percent as unable to name a sitting justice.” Less depressing and more interesting, Kilgore notes that “82 percent of those who voted in the 2016 elections claim that Supreme Court appointments were important to their presidential vote. By nearly a three-to-one margin, respondents favored some sort of restriction on SCOTUS tenure (as opposed to the current lifetime appointments).”

In his New York Times op-ed, “Trump and the Koch Brothers Are Working in Concert: They disagree about trade, tariffs and immigration, but don’t be fooled. Neither side can get what it really wants without help from the other,” Thomas B. Edsall explains why Dems should not be suckered by talk that the Koch brothers have split with Trump: “In practice, the Trump-Koch alliance has been extraordinarily productive, and the alliance is the odds on favorite to win the battle to put Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, where he is likely to cement a conservative majority for the foreseeable future…Looking toward November, the Koch organizations are already committedto attacking incumbent Democratic Senators in Wisconsin, Indiana, Missouri and Florida while looking at their chance of influencing the outcome in as many as 14 other races. In addition, the network plans to support Republican candidates for governor in Nevada, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan and Florida, a list that is expected to grow longer as the midterms heat up.”

At FiveThirtyEight, Nathaniel Rakich and Nate Silver plug Silver’s concept of “elasticity” into the 2016 midterm elections. They note that “A state’s elasticity is simply how sensitive it is to changes in the national political environment. A very elastic state is prone to big shifts in voter preferences, while inelastic states don’t blow as much with the political winds…An elastic state isn’t necessarily a swing state, or vice versa. Think of the difference between a state that is decided by 1 percentage point every election (an inelastic swing state) and one that votes 10 points Democratic one year and 10 points Republican the next (an elastic swing state). In other words, elasticity helps us understand elections on a deeper level. Just knowing that both of those districts are competitive doesn’t tell you everything you need to know; for example, the two call for different campaign strategies (turnout in the former, persuasion in the latter).” Read the article for their take on particular midterm races.

Here’s how close the midterms are shaping up in Florida: “New Quinnipiac University polls of the gubernatorial and Senate races in Florida found that both are neck and neck, with voters almost evenly split between the Democratic and Republican candidates,” report Dhrumil Mehta and Janie Velencia, also at FiveThirtyEight. “That’s not all that surprising in a perpetual swing state like Florida. But here’s what did catch our eye: The vast majority of Florida voters are already committed to a candidate with about two months still left until Election Day. Only 3 percent of voters in the gubernatorial poll and 2 percent of voters in the Senate poll said they were undecided.”

Kyle Kondik writes at Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “In order for Democrats to win the Senate, they need to do two of three things: 1.) Win both Republican-held Toss-up seats in Arizona and Nevada; 2.) Hold all 26 seats they currently hold, several of which are in states that Trump won in landslides; or 3.) Win at least one Senate seat in a dark red state where Republicans are currently favored, be it Mississippi, Tennessee, or Texas. At this point, we might peg Democrats as slightly better than 50-50 to accomplish No. 1, but we’d put Republicans as a bit better than 50-50 to prevent Democrats from accomplishing No. 2 and even better to prevent them from accomplishing No. 3. So that’s why Republicans continue to be favored to hold the Senate, in our view. That said, the Democratic path to a Senate majority does not involve them doing something radically out of the ordinary to win: The presidential out party did not lose a single incumbent-held seat in any of the last three midterms in the Senate, for instance, and both Arizona and Nevada (if not the redder Republican-held states) certainly fit the profile of Senate battlegrounds the out party could win in a year like this one. In other words, if Democrats swept the closest races and captured a small majority, it would be surprising, but not shocking.”

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

There hasn’t been much polling specifically of Latinos in the 2018 election cycle and the subsamples in most polls are small enough not to be very trustworthy. So it’s nice to see Latino Decisions out of the gate with a tracking poll of Latinos that they will do every week until the elections.

Their first poll is now available. Topline for the Democrats for the House vote is good –a 70-22 advantage among likely voters. On the less positive side, mobilization leaves something to be desired–about three-fifths say they have not been contacted yet concerning their vote. This is not an election when you want to leave any votes on the table!

Could Trump’s “dumb southerner” comment hurt Republicans in the midterm elections. As Gabriel Pogrund sets the stage in “Southern senators bristle at Trump’s ‘dumb Southerner’ insult” in The Washington Post:

Southern Republican senators defended Jeff Sessions after an explosive new book by Bob Woodward recounted how President Donald Trump called his attorney general a “dumb Southerner” and mocked his accent.

In the forthcoming chronicle of Trump’s White House, “Fear,” Woodward writes that the president privately called Sessions a “traitor,” saying: “This guy is mentally retarded. He’s this dumb Southerner . . . He couldn’t even be a one-person country lawyer down in Alabama.”

The remarks are said to have come during a conversation between Trump and his former staff secretary Rob Porter about Sessions’ decision to recuse himself from the Russian investigation. They represent the most withering insults the president has directed at his attorney general in months of largely one-sided sniping.

Of course Trump denies ever having said any such thing. But Bob Woodward’s credibility is not so easily dismissed, and the follow-up diss about Alabama sounds a lot like Trump’s put-down style.

Trump is not literally on the ballot in November, although quite a few Senators and congressional Republicans have proudly accepted his support in GOP primaries. Let them now squirm a bit when asked by reporters about his “dumb southerner” remark.

Meanwhile some southern Republicans have responded, as quoted by Pogrund:

“I’m a Southerner, people can judge my intellect, my IQ, by my product and what I produce rather than what somebody else says,” said Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., in an interview…”We’re a pretty smart bunch. We lost the Civil War, but I think we’re winning the economic war since then . . . I’m not gonna get into name calling because I don’t think you should be allowed to call names – including the president,” he added.

Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., who served alongside Sessions during his 20 years as senator for Alabama, said: “Well, I’m sure I’ve got that accent, wouldn’t you think?”…He pointed out that Trump himself relied on Southern voters during the 2016 general election, warning: “I guess the president, he says what he thinks…

Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., added to the chorus of disapproval, joking that Sessions was not a “dumb Southerner” but a “smart Southerner.” “Oh come on,” he said. “I’m a Southerner too. I think it’s not at all appropriate. It’s totally inappropriate.”

…Said Bob Corker, R-Tenn., on Tuesday: “I think we all know it’s likely he is going to terminate him after the midterms. In the interim I think it would be good if he stopped raving about Sessions. It’s unbecoming. Either do something or don’t, but these comments just continue to degrade our nation.”

Even Lindsay Graham weighed in with a timid scold that “It’s probably not helpful to characterize the region that way…” Yet, the election is two months away, and such gaffes may not have all that much of a shelf life — especially if southern voters are not reminded in the two months ahead.

But the opinions that really matter are those of southern swing voters in hot races in state legislatures, congressional districts, and statewide offices, particularly the marquee governorship races in Georgia and Florida and Beto O’Rourke’s bid for senate in Texas. It’s not hard to envision some creative Democratic ads reminding southern swing voters how they are perceived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.