Perry Bacon, Jr. explains “What John McCain’s Death Means For The Senate” at FiveThirtyEight: “…his Arizona Senate seat probably won’t stay vacant for long. Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona will appoint McCain’s replacement, and the Republican can select someone as soon as he wants. I expect him to land on a replacement within the next two weeks, maybe even sooner…I expect Ducey to pick a caretaker because the Arizona GOP is dividedbetween a more establishment wing (Ducey) and a more tea party one (former sheriff Joe Arpaio). It would be smart politics for Ducey to avoid irritating one of those groups by choosing someone not seeking a long-term Senate career…there has been little evidence that any Republican senator is willing to oppose the Kavanaugh nomination, so he probably already has the 50 votes required.”

PowerPost’s David Weigel spotlights the primaries in Arizona and Florida today. With respect to the Democratic contenders for the Florida governorship, Weigel writes, “Democrats, who lost two close, bitter races to Scott, have their most crowded primary in decades. Two wealthy candidates, former Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine and investor Jeff Greene, have led the field in spending, with Greene promising Democrats that he could pour millions of dollars into down-ballot races…Polls, however, have shown a close three-way contest between Levine, former congresswoman Gwen Graham and Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum. Graham, who built a moderate record during one term in Washington, has been the focus of the most negative ads; Gillum, who is running to the left of the field and who rallied with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), has surged in the final days. But at least 1.6 million voters cast ballots before Election Day, which could help Graham.” Regrding House races, Weigel notes that “there are tight races in four districts where Republicans have retired or left to seek other offices…Democrats are cautiously optimistic about competing for the 6th and 15th, which Barack Obama lost narrowly in 2012 but which swung toward Trump in 2016. But Democrats are most bullish on their chances in three South Florida districts where Latino and suburban voters, once reliably Republican, abandoned the GOP in 2016. Their top target is the Miami-based 27th District, where Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen is retiring and where voters rejected Trump by 20 points.”

Arizona is more of a mess, dealing with the fallout of Sen. McCain’s death and President Trump’s diss of the late senator. Weigel observes that Rep. Kyrsten Sinema is likely to win the Democratic nomination for Senate. However, “The Democrats’ gubernatorial primary has been more fractious, with former state education official David Garcia favored after a campaign in which he has talked about creating statewide universal health care and “replacing ICE with an immigration system that reflects our American values.” As for the House contests, Weigel cites a bitterly fought Democratic primary for the 2nd district. In Oklahoma, most of the Democratic interest is in the 5th congressional District, “which overlaps some of the areas where they [Democrats] have made surprising special election gains since 2016 — and where Trump won just 53 percent of the vote.”

University of Southertn California professors Abby K. Wood and Christian R. Grose have a post  “How will the Michael Cohen and Duncan Hunter scandals affect the November election? Here’s what our research finds” at The Monkey Cage. Among their findings: “Do voters care about campaign finance violations? Yes. In new research, we argue that campaign finance violations inform voters’ views about the elected official’s character. Members of Congress who were randomly audited and found to have violated campaign finance law fared about 5 percentage points worse in their general elections than incumbents who were not. So it may be no surprise that once elected officials are tarred with campaign finance violations, they also attempt to win back voters’ trust…The FEC’s randomization is key to our study, as it creates an ideal natural experiment for empirical analysis. Randomization allows us to say that the campaign finance revelations violations caused the change in vote share.” The authors acknowledge that “since Watergate involved campaign finance shenanigans — may have been sensitive to those violations in particular.” However, “Our current political climate has enough parallels to the Watergate era that we suspect voters will react negatively to campaign finance violations again. We will find out Nov. 6.”

Some perceptive and very troubling insights from NYT columnist/Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, which ought to energize Democratic voter registration and turnout campaigns coast-to-coast: “The fact is that the Republican Party is ready, even eager, to become an American version of Law and Justice or Fidesz, exploiting its current political power to lock in permanent rule…the modern G.O.P. feels no allegiance to democratic ideals; it will do whatever it thinks it can get away with toentrench its power…if Republicans retain control of both houses of Congress in November — we will become another Poland or Hungary faster than you can imagine…Now it’s clear that there are no limits: They’ll do whatever it takes to defend Trump and consolidate power…We’re suffering from the same disease — white nationalism run wild — that has already effectively killed democracy in some other Western nations. And we’re very, very close to the point of no return.”

Jennifer Hansler has a cautionary note for Democrats in her post, “Influx of Puerto Ricans in Florida may not turn the tide for the midterms, experts say” at CNN Politics: “Hispanic voter registration has increased by more than 100,000 voters since the 2016 election, although it is unclear how many of those are Puerto Ricans. The Florida Division of Elections told CNN it does not have specific statistics on Puerto Rican voters…What is less clear is if and how Puerto Ricans who have resettled in Florida will vote in Florida’s primary election on Tuesday and then in the general election in November.” However, “We are nearly seeing presidential election year numbers of Latinos registered,” he told CNN. Of the 22,600 people Mi Familia Vota said it has registered this season, more than 11,500 are of Puerto Rican descent…We would not be able to hit these numbers in a midterm year without the influx of Puerto Ricans to Central Florida,” [Mi Familia Voa field director Esteban] Garces said.

Harry Enten explains why “Win or lose, Beto O’Rourke will help Texas Democrats,” also at CNN Politics: “If you look at the House map, there are arguably at least six Texas House races that are going to be competitive this fall. These include Texas 2nd, Texas 7th, Texas 21st, Texas 23rd, Texas 31st and Texas 32nd…It’s been shown in academic literature that states where there are competitive Senate races tend to have higher turnout in House races than states that don’t (once you control for other factors)…Texas could use the turnout boost. With the exception of Hawaii, no other state had a lower turnout rate of its voter eligible population in 2016 than Texas. Just 52% of all eligible voters cast a ballot two years ago.”

In his Washington Post article, “Democrats need to start taking voting rights seriously,” Noah Beriatsky makes a case for a national ‘big package’ voting rights reform bill which includes measures like lowering the voting age, automatic voter registration, standardizing early and mail voting, full voting rights and representation for Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico, prevent politically-motivated closing of polling places, ex-felon enfranchisement and other needed measures. “While such policies have been discussed here and there, Democrats could find new focus by grouping them under a single comprehensive umbrella. Policy proposals aren’t just concrete plans, they are statements of values and statements of purpose. The point isn’t just to pass any one law. It’s to set benchmarks and moral standards. Right now, the United States behaves as if it doesn’t believe that every person has the right to vote. We need ambitious policy proposals not just to change that but also to help convince people that it needs to change.” Eventually, when Democrats regain congressional majorities and the White House, the time may be ripe for passing a comprehensive voting rights reform package. The idea would be to better brand Democrats as the party that actually values democracy. Until then, Democrats should eagerly pass whatever piecemeal voting reforms are possible.

Kyle Kondik has a Sabato’s Crystal Ball update on races for the U.S. House, nationwide: “We are making 12 ratings changes; 10 in favor of Democrats, two in favor of Republicans… if one believes the Democrats are favored in the race for the House — and we do, although we don’t think the result is locked in concrete — then something in the political environment needs to change, in a positive way, for Republicans to regain the advantage. The Cohen/Manafort news was not that…After today’s changes, there are 205 seats rated Safe/Likely/Leans Democratic, 198 Safe/Likely/Leans Republican, and 32 Toss-ups, of which 30 are currently controlled by Republicans and two are currently controlled by Democrats…With 205 seats now at least leaning to the Democrats, that essentially means the floor for Democratic gains this year would be 11, and that’s assuming Republicans win every Toss-up, which we’re reasonably confident won’t happen.”

At Bloomberg, Margaret Newkirk has a post that outs the GOP’s phony “get tough” on undocumented workers policy. As Newkirk writes in “E-Verify Laws Across Southern Red States Are Barely Enforced“:

In 2011 states across the Southeast passed laws that threatened private employers with dire consequences—including losing their license to do business—if they didn’t enroll with a federal data service called E-Verify to check the legal status of new hires. Modeled after 2008 measures in Arizona and Mississippi and billed as a rebuke to a do-nothing Obama administration, the laws went further than those in the 13 states that required checks for new hires only by state agencies or their contractors.

Seven years later, those laws appear to have been more political bark than bite. None of the Southern states that extended E-Verify to the private sector have canceled a single business license, and only one, Tennessee, has assessed any fines. Most businesses caught violating the laws have gotten a pass.

In Georgia the department charged with auditing compliance with the E-Verify law has never been given money to do so. In Louisiana, where the law against hiring unverified employees can lead to cancellation of public contracts or loss of business licenses, no contract has been canceled, no licenses have been suspended, and the state reports zero “actionable” complaints since the mandate went into effect in 2012. In Mississippi no one seems to know who enforces the E-Verify law. The mandate appears to give that job to its Department of Employment Security, which knows nothing about it and referred questions to the attorney general’s office, which says it doesn’t know who’s responsible.

The same is true in Alabama, where the state labor department points to the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency, which neither enforces the law nor knows who does. District attorneys, who field complaints under the mandate, say enforcement falls to the state attorney general’s office, which hadn’t heard that. “What is it we’re supposed to be doing?” spokeswoman Joy Patterson asks. “I’m not aware of anything like that.”

No doubt many Republican voters in these states are unaware that they have been hustled by their state legislators and governors, especially from those who bellow the loudest about “getting tough” on undocumented workers. As the conservative Cato Institute’s analyst, Alex Nowrasteh puts it “These are states that very much want to enforce immigration laws, where the electorate is solidly behind it and the politics is behind it, and even there they don’t want to enforce it.”

Advocates of The Legal Workforce Act, a bill that would institute a national E-Verify system know this to be the case. Still, they hope to put on a big show about it, when the bill comes up for debate in September, and reap support from voters who have been deluded that undocumented workers are a threat to their jobs.

Federal contractors have been required to E-Verify since 2009. Newkirk points out that, while “knowingly” hiring undocumented workers has been against the law since 1986, employers have finagled their way around the law in various ways:

The “knowingly” language spawned a cottage industry of fake documents, layered hiring—subcontractors who hire subcontractors who hire subcontractors—and the use of temp agencies and independent contractors, all shielding employers from knowledge of a worker’s status. Critics say E-Verify encourages discrimination and is filled with loopholes. It failed to flag the illegal status of Cristhian Rivera, who was accused in the recent death of Iowa college student Mollie Tibbetts.

E-Verify enforcement is largely a missing issue in the midterm campaigns. Newkirk notes that:

…the E-Verify laws were absent from Georgia’s recent GOP gubernatorial primary. Despite campaigning on how tough they would be on immigrants, neither candidate referred to the laws. The winner, Brian Kemp, ran ads saying he’d haul illegals away in his pickup. “They talked about sanctuary cities and rounding up criminal aliens in a truck, all these distractions,” [president of the Dustin Inman Society D. A. ] King says. “The root cause of illegal immigration is illegal employment. And none of our candidates made a peep about that.”

Obviously, the Republicans want to have it both ways — strut around as tough on undocumented workers, while giving employers, who are the key to E-Verify, the old wink-wink free pass. Kemp is probably the poster-boy for the two-faced scam. His bet is that the media will let him get away with it. We’ll know if that has been the case on November 6th.

The questioning of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh by senators is uncovering some allegedly reassuring, but not terribly revealing, statements, as I observed at New York:

The battle to nail down every Senate Republican vote for Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation took a significant, albeit somewhat predictable, turn today, as the Washington Post reports:

“Sen. Susan Collins (Maine) told reporters on Tuesday that she asked President Trump’s pick about whether he considered Roe to be settled law. Collins said Kavanaugh told her he agreed with current Chief Justice John Roberts, who said during his 2005 confirmation hearing that Roe was “settled as a precedent of the court.” Collins and Kavanaugh met for more than two hours on Tuesday morning.”

This is likely the “cover” Collins sought and secured in order to square her own pro-choice position with the vote for Kavanaugh her party expects her to cast. But if she claims it means Kavanaugh won’t participate in an effort to overturn or significantly modify Roe, she’ll likely be cooperating with Kavanaugh — and with John Roberts — in more than a bit of a scam.

It’s actually a bit of a no-brainer to say that the constitutional right to choose, decided 45 years ago in Roe v. Wade and emphatically reconfirmed (not in every detail but in its constitutional fundamentals) by Planned Parenthood v. Casey 26 years ago, is “settled law.” That means lower courts must follow it as a binding precedent. But for SCOTUS itself it simply indicates a degree of deference unless some stronger constitutional consideration is found to override it. So it does not guarantee that the “settled law” will be respected by the justices that acknowledge it. And as Irin Carmon recently observed, that’s demonstrably true of Chief Justice John Roberts:

“Not necessarily. On favored causes such as money in politics and this term’s union-fees case, Roberts has helped leave precedents and principles in tatters. You don’t even have to look past abortion itself: In 2000’s Stenberg v. Carhart, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor cast the deciding vote to strike down a state ban on “partial birth abortion,” citing the court’s precedent in Casey. By the time the federal version of the same law reached the court, in 2007’s Gonzales v. Carhart, O’Connor had been replaced by Samuel A. Alito Jr., and with his help, the court’s conservatives, including Roberts, eagerly teamed up to overrule the precedent.”

And even if Roberts and Kavanaugh are reluctant to support the kind of frontal assault on abortion rights that, say, Clarence Thomas is eager to undertake, that hardly rules out an incremental gutting of Roe. As recently as 2016, Roberts was in the minority in a key decision protecting abortion rights from state laws aimed at driving abortion providers out of business. And as Carmon points out, Roberts patiently used two cases — one in 2009, another in 2013 — to wreck the “long-settled” enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The most important thing to keep in mind in parsing this carefully constructed assurance Kavanaugh offered to Collins is the broader context of Kavanaugh’s nomination (and before him, that of Roberts, Alito, and Gorsuch): the iron determination of Republicans since at least the George W. Bush administration to atone for the GOP-appointed justices — the longest-lasting being Anthony Kennedy — who supported abortion rights. Uncertainty on this score was a major factor in the conservative uprisingagainst Bush’s second Court nominee Harriet Miers. And the search for certainty on hostility to the “liberal judicial activism” epitomized by Roe led eventually to Donald Trump’s smart decision to let conservative legal beagles vet his own SCOTUS list. It would be shocking if this process and the politics behind it produced a justice who looked at SCOTUS precedents on abortion and pronounced them unassailable.

Yes, Kavanaugh, like Roberts, might be inclined to undertake the project of overturning abortion rights carefully and with an eye to avoiding any open contempt for the eventual victims of a counter-revolution on this subject, particularly given strong public support for Roe. But no one should believe the precedent is safe.

 

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

Yes, I know, many of these ideas poll well when asked in a standard “here’s an idea, what do you think of it?” format. But life, politics and people are not so simple. There are many reasons to be cautious that a given program is–or will be–very popular simply from the results of few poll questions. My old comrade-in-arms Andy Levison usefully reminds of this in his new essay for the Democratic Strategist site.

With all the drama going on in Washington and New York this week, it’s easy to miss some important developments in the states. A dual fight over education policy is brewing in Arizona, which I wrote about at New York.

Arizona was one of the states that experienced serious teacher unrest last spring, with a six-day teachers’ strike that forced the Republican governor and legislature to make major concessions on pay and education funding. But in part because these wins did not satisfy all the strikers’ demands, the fight over public education in Arizona is (as is the case in other states) spilling over into the midterm elections. It is the central issue in the governor’s race where incumbent Doug Ducey faces both primary and general election opposition, and will feature heavily in many legislative contests as well. But beyond that, Arizona voters will have two major education-related measures on the ballot in November.

The one gaining headlines right now (because of an unsuccessful effort by conservative groups to keep it off the ballot because of allegedly misleading language) is called the Invest in Education Act, as explained by the Arizona Capitol Times:

“The proposal, dubbed the Invest in Education Act, would increase the state’s 4.54-percent personal income tax rate to 8 percent for those who earn more than $250,000 or whose household income reaches more than $500,000, and would double the rate to 9 percent for individuals who earn more than $500,000 or whose household income is greater than $1 million …

“The measure would also designate 60 percent of the revenue from the tax hike for teacher salaries and the remaining 40 percent for operations, including full-day kindergarten and pay raises for student support employees as applicable uses for the funds.”

The idea of highly targeted taxes on the very wealthy to fund education is getting traction in a lot of places, among them Arizona. A June poll showed65 percent of likely voters — including 43 percent of Republicans —supporting Invest in Education, although Republican politicians — notably Ducey — and business groups are opposing it on the usual anti-tax grounds. But opponents haven’t come up with any alternative ways to fund the teacher pay raises and other educational improvements the governor and legislature did accept earlier this year, which makes the tax measure look fiscally prudent by comparison.

There will be another measure on the ballot in Arizona this year that could be even more significant as a national precedent: a referendum on Republican-sponsored legislation that made the state’s no-strings-attached “empowerment scholarship accounts” available (in theory, at least) to the entire student population, instead of just students with disabilities. Ballotpedia explains:

“In 2011, Arizona became the first state to establish an Empowerment Scholarship Accounts program. The original program allowed parents or guardians of students with disabilities to sign a contract to opt out of the public school system and instead receive an ESA from the Arizona Department of Education (DEP). An ESA is funded at 90 percent of what the state would have paid for the student in a district or charter school. Parents or guardians use a prepaid bank card to pay for education-related tuition and fees, textbooks, tutoring, educational therapies, and curriculum.

“This referendum was initiated to overturn Senate Bill 1431 (SB 1431), which was designed to make all K-12 students eligible to apply for an ESA.”

The new law caps the number of ESA beneficiaries, but firmly plants the idea that parents can and should directly receive education funding and make a largely unconditional decision about where to spend it, at the expense of public schools. It’s the most aggressive step any state has taken to extend the national GOP’s efforts (strongly supported by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos) to bypass schools with “backpack” funding that can follows kids wherever their parents choose to send them. The virtually complete lack of accountability for the educational results these private school (and homeschool) subsidies produce is another crucial feature of Arizona’s system.

The Republicans who have created and expanded the ESA program are defending it in this referendum fight, and there are rumors of a forthcoming Koch Network investment on their behalf. But so far the most visible activity has been by an anti-ESA-expansion group called Save Our Schools Arizona, which got the referendum on the ballot and protected it from efforts in the courts and the legislature to stop it.

Given Arizona’s status as an increasingly purple state, with a key Senate race this year and a potentially competitive presidential contest in 2020, the fight over these education initiatives could cast a long shadow over the state’s politics for some time to come.

And it could affect national politics as well.

So how should Democratic congressional candidates handle the Manafort convictions and Cohen guilty pleas? Jonathan Martin and Nicholas Fandos explore the options for both parties in their New York Times article, “Republicans Urge Embattled Incumbents to Speak Out on Trump.” Here’s some of what they write about the Democratic strategy: “Democrats face their own pressure to shed their cautious midterm strategy and hammer the opposition for fostering what Democratic leaders are labeling “a culture of corruption” that starts at Mr. Trump and cascades through two indicted House Republicans to a series of smaller scandals breaking out in the party’s backbenches…the summer eruption of apparent Republican malfeasance has some in the party arguing that Democrats should make corruption more central…“There’s no way this won’t matter in a whole bunch of races out there, and Democrats need to be talking about this everywhere,” said Senator Christopher S. Murphy of Connecticut, invoking the 2006 campaign, when “late-breaking corruption scandals, on top of an unpopular president, tipped the House and the Senate…Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, issued a fund-raising plea declaring, “Donald Trump himself was implicated yesterday in Cohen’s guilty plea. The rot of corruption runs deep in the Republican Party.”

However, “To date, Democrats have urged their candidates to conduct their own races, explain Martin and Fandos, “and avoid a national campaign against Mr. Trump or the Republican Congress, except on carefully targeted issues like health care costs. Mr. Trump’s scandals, they argued, will play like background music that they do not need to accentuate…Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, distributed a public letter to her colleagues arguing that the Trump-era capital had “become a cesspool of self-enrichment, secret money and ethical blindness” and that House Republicans were offering only a “blind eye to the corruption and criminality at the heart of President Trump’s inner circle…But in the same letter, Ms. Pelosi also said that Democrats “must also stay focused on delivering our strong economic message…Democrats also worry that employing a Trump-tinged message about corruption will only prompt more questions about whether they would use a new House majority to impeach Mr. Trump, a campaign that could rile an otherwise demoralized Republican base. Democratic leaders have studiously avoided the “I”-word for months amid liberal outcry, preferring to shift the burden onto Republicans who have all but ceased conducting oversight of the Trump administration.” Then there is the middle way, based on the understanding that yes, corruption is a leading concern of many persuadable voters, made even harder to ignore by scandals involving Repubican House members cited in the article. “As news of a Cohen plea deal was circulating Tuesday, House Democratic leaders urged members on a private call to stay on message, avoiding the topic of impeachment. Instead, Democrats will cast themselves as offering a check and balance on the president, a message that their polling indicates voters respond to favorably.” What is certain is that emphasis on Trump’s scandals must be tweaked for each district and state.

At The Washington Post, Michael Scherer reports that ” Even before the public calls for focus on voters’ needs, Democratic candidates in the most crucial midterm races had already committed to steering clear of the latest legal turmoil surrounding Trump — along with the ever-present question of whether a Democratic takeover of the House would lead to the president’s impeachment…Their fears are that an impeachment debate would distract from other goals, while at the same time alienating the very voters they need to win competitive districts. “I don’t want to see a two-year distraction,” said Susan Wild, a Democrat who is favored to win a key Republican-held House seat in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. “I think, honestly, impeachment proceedings would obviously derail getting other things done in Congress.” Also, ““You’re living it every day in Washington, D.C., but we’re not,” said Ann Kirkpatrick, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination for one of the nation’s most vulnerable Republican House seats, in Tucson. “I’m not hearing from people about these recent incidents.” Kirkpatrick said her supporters have been raising alarms about issues far closer to home…the future solvency of Medicare and Social Security, the burden of student loans, the possible threats to abortion rights, and the fate of young immigrants who could lose their legal status to remain in the country. “I have been going door to door. They are concerned,” Kirkpatrick said about the kitchen-table issues. “They are worried. They are fearful.”

However, adds Scherer, Republicans squirming in responding to questions about Trump’s scandals may not be such a bad thing for Dems: “Cohen’s decision to put Trump at the scene of the crime creates a huge challenge for Republican candidates, who now have to figure out how many more shoes are going to drop and whether they really want to continue to stay all-in on Trump,” said Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster working on the midterms…Democrats retook the House in 2006 in a campaign that focused heavily on the “culture of corruption” among Republicans, which included a major Indian casino lobbying scandal.” Also, “I would suggest that an unindicted co-conspirator to a crime should not be in the business of having the ability to appoint someone to a lifetime position on the highest court in our land,” Sen. Kamala D. Harris (Calif.) said Wednesday on MSNBC.

Michael Tomasky cites the GOP leadership’s equivocating responses to Trump’s expanding scandals, and sums it up: “But what the Republicans are doing is even worse than mere sycophancy. They are in agreement with Trump on priorities, policy, world view. They agree on the wall. They agree (with limited exceptions) on scapegoating undocumented immigrants. They agree on giving more money to rich people. They agree on doing everything they can to see to it that black people can’t vote…The idea that Trump will finally cross some line that will compel them to bring down some righteous fury on him is silly and naïve. With what moral authority? They have none. And believe me, Trump knows this. He may be a nincompoop, but the one thing he understands is alpha-male power relationships…They will turn on him only when their own careers are on the block—when that bridge is lined with their openly displayed necks, the electoral guillotine dangling ominously above them…Things still have to get a lot worse in Trumpland for the Republicans to act, but even then, it will be to save their necks, not to find their spines.”

E. J. Dionne, Jr. adds in his syndicated column: “The timidity of congressional Republicans in responding to the twin blows to Trump’s integrity will strengthen the Democrats’ case…The argument for impeaching Trump suddenly became very strong, but this does not mean that turning 2018 into an impeachment election is prudent. Most voters see impeachment as a last resort, and it is not a battle cry that will play well in every state or congressional district…The adage that one should not interfere with an enemy who is destroying himself certainly applies here. Insisting on accountability and letting the ongoing probes go forward unobstructed by a lawless president are, for now, enough.”

For those Dems who want to go there, at least with a passing zinger, “Dan Rather Has A Scathing New Nickname For Team Trump,” notes Ed Mazza at HuffPo, who shares Rather’s tweet:

Abraham Lincoln – Team of Rivals
Donald Trump – Flock of Felons

— Dan Rather (@DanRather) August 23, 2018

In their Politico post, “‘A new cherry put on top’: Trump scandal fallout hangs over midterms: ‘Payoffs and porn stars and affairs and indictments and all this stuff doesn’t Make America Great Again in the suburbs,’ said one Republican consultant,” Natash Korecki and James Arkin round up some pithy quotes about the Manafort verdict and Cohen guilty pleas: “There’s only so much of this shit-show a soccer mom wants to hear about and explain to her kids,” said one top Republican consultant representing House Republican candidates on both coasts.”…Navin Nayak, executive director of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, observes “I don’t know if that you’re in a House race and you’ve only got $1 million your smartest strategy is necessarily to focus on [Trump] because he is his own worst enemy, creating so much more negative news … than three ads in [Ohio’s 1st District] might generate.” Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson notes that “while it is powerful to say a Republican gutted coverage for people with preexisting conditions, it’s even more powerful to say they did it while raking in big money from insurance companies.” Korecki and Arkin add, “The advice Democratic strategists are giving their clients: use the conviction of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Cohen‘s guilty plea to tee up fundraising appeals and communications to drive voter turnout. But stay the course on paid ads that focus on taxes and health care.”

As for the credibility of special counsel Robert Mueller and the investigation, a Fox News poll released Wednesday notes that “59 percent of registered voters approve of Mueller’s investigation, marking an 11-point jump from respondents who said the same in a July Fox News poll. Thirty-seven percent of respondents said they disapprove of Mueller’s probe,” reports Tal Axelrod at The Hill. “It is unclear whether some people were polled after news broke Tuesday.”

With all of the bad rap Facebook and Twitter have received in recent months, should Dems use more social media to amplify their messaging? In that regard, Dems should read “Trump Knows Digital Ads Work. Why Don’t Democrats?: The party’s campaigns are ignoring obvious opportunities to engage with voters” a NYT op-ed by Kendall Collins, board member of Tech for Campaigns, which has 7,500 volunteers and played a key role in the 2017 Democratic victories in the Virginia election. Collins writes,

“President Trump may not be up for re-election until 2020, but since May 31, the Trump Make America Great Again Committee — his re-election campaign — has spent $629,500 on advertising on Google platforms alone, making it the top spender on political ads on Google platforms. That’s nearly $200,000 more than the No. 2 spender, One Nation, a right-wing organization focused on influencing Senate elections…The average nonpresidential Democratic campaign spends only 10 percent to 15 percent of its budget on digital channels while pouring 60 percent to 70 percent of its budget into television ads and direct mail. That is shocking, especially because people now spend an average of 5.9 hours online every single day, with 3.3 of those hours on mobile devices…Democrats should take a cue and double down on digital: It empowers them to reach more people with less money, engage in back-and-forth conversations with voters and test what messaging is resonating in real time. It should also prove critical in turning out a younger voting population, which often sits out midterm elections.”

Bottom line is that the influence of social media isn’t fading away, despite its many problems. For Dems, not using it more effectively would be political malpractice.

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

It’s Election Forecasting Time!

Election forecasting season is heating up with the release of 538’s spiffy new House forecasting model. For those who have not yet seen it, their standard model (they have two alternate versions) gives the Democrats a 3 in 4 chance (75.3 percent) of taking the House. The average Democratic gain is projected to be 35 seats. As a nice bonus you can look up the chances that Democrats will take any particular seat both through maps and lists.

While the 538 forecast is the new and shiny, there are several other credible models that get much the same results with less complicated methodologies. The Economist model, which has been running since late spring, gives the Democrats a 70 percent chance of taking the House. They project an average Democratic gain of 29 seats.

G. Elliott Morris’ Crosstab site has also been running a model for quite awhile. He gives Democrats a 76 percent chance of taking the House (no specific seat gain projected).

So everybody seems to singing from the same hymnal which is reassuring. It hardly needs emphasizing that these models generate probabilities not certainties and that the improbable sometimes does happen. But the agreement among models and the fairly high probabilities assigned to Democratic takeover simply reflect the fact that almost all of the data we have right now is telling a story favorable to the Democrats.

Just how favorable the story is was emphasized in some interesting remarks by Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman–as astute and careful an analyst of House elections as you can find–in an interview with Jonathan Swan of Axios:

“Dave Wasserman, the Cook Political Report’s House analyst, says the most under-covered aspect of 2018 is that “a blue wave is obscuring a red exodus.” Republican House members are retiring at a startling clip — a trend that senior White House adviser Kellyanne Conway told me earlier this year was worrying her more than any other trend affecting the midterms.

There are 43 Republican seats now without an incumbent on the ballot. That’s more than one out of every six Republicans in the House — a record in at least a century, Wasserman says.

Just in the past eight months, the number of vulnerable Republican seats has almost doubled, according to Wasserman. Democrats need to win 23 seats to claim control of the House. Today, the Cook Political Report rates 37 Republican-held seats as toss-ups or worse. At the beginning of the year, it was only 20.

Wasserman says the most important sign that 2018 will be a “wave” year — with Democrats winning control of the House — is the intensity gap between the two parties. In polls, Democrats consistently rate their interest in voting as significantly higher than Republicans. And Democrats have voted in extraordinary numbers in the special elections held the past year, despite Republicans holding on to win almost all of these races.

“There’s a bit of over-caution, perhaps, on the part of the punditocracy, after what happened in 2016,” Wasserman told Axios. “But if anything most media could be under-rating Democrats’ potential to gain a lot of seats. They could be caught being cautious in the wrong direction.”

So it looks pretty good. But it ain’t over ’til it’s over.

Ron Brownstein has a mastery of election and public opinion numbers second to none, and his latest column provided a key insight into the upcoming midterms, which I wrote about at New York.

[S]ometimes the breakdowns on this or that very large demographic group are so large and dramatic that paying attention to anything else may be a waste of time. And as Ron Brownstein explains in his latest number-crunching exercise, it’s not just the Year of the Democratic Woman in terms of candidates running for office: Women are the key to a Democratic win this year, and to its magnitude.

“Trump is exposing the GOP this fall to the danger of unusually high mobilization and margins among African American women. Trump also risks consolidating a historic realignment toward the Democrats among college-educated white women, many of whom have viscerally recoiled from his behavior and language — such as his tweet Monday about Manigault-Newman.

“[P]olling continues to send mixed signals on whether Democrats can expect substantial inroads among the third large group of female voters: white women without a college degree. Gains among those women could be the critical final piece to creating a secure path to a Democratic House majority — opening opportunities in districts beyond the urban and suburban areas where Republicans are most vulnerable.”

Yes, other differentiations between voters, such as education and race, remain important, but gender differences are pervasive:

“Over the past month in Gallup’s daily tracking poll, Trump drew much higher approval ratings from men than women. That was true among whites with a college degree, whites without a college degree, Hispanics, African Americans, and members of other racial groups, according to figures Gallup provided to The Atlantic. In this week’s national Quinnipiac University poll, college-educated and non–college-educated white men, as well as minority men, were considerably more likely than women in the same groups to say they like Trump’s policies.

“This isn’t just a “gender gap.” Men do not seem to be moving that much from their positions in 2016. But college-educated women are, and if white working-class women do as well, the Democratic “wave” would become much larger.”

Brownstein emphasizes the importance of non-college-educated white women because it was a pro-Trump demographic group in 2016 that seems finally to be souring on the president, but he documents the potentially seismic shift underway among their college-educated counterparts, too:

“[C]ollege-educated white women … typically lean Democratic, but usually by modest margins. Hillary Clinton carried 51 percent of them against Trump in 2016, and Democratic House candidates have not carried more than 52 percent of them in any election since 1992, according to exit polls; they only split them evenly with Republicans in 2016.

“But polling points to the possibility of unprecedented advantages for Democrats with those women this year. In Quinnipiac polling from March, about three-fourths of college-educated white women said Trump did not respect women as much as men, and in July, nearly three-fifths said he’s racist. In the NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll, exactly three-fourths said his behavior as president “embarrassed” them. Likewise, in this week’s Quinnipiac survey, two-thirds said they didn’t like Trump as a person, and more than three-fifths said they didn’t like his policies or approve of his job performance.

“Those attitudes suggest these women may tilt sharply toward Democrats in November; for months, many public polls have shown that about 60 percent — sometimes slightly more, sometimes slightly less — prefer Democrats for Congress. Such a movement could lastingly shift many white-collar suburban districts away from Republicans.”

White working-class women, on the other hand, could be the key to Democratic gains in those famous Rust Belt areas that won Trump the presidency in 2016. As Brownstein notes, as a group they seem torn between revulsion toward Trump’s style and behavior, and relative satisfaction with his policies and results. If, as we have every indication to believe, Trump plans to double down on his abrasive tendencies in hopes of energizing his base, he might pay a price with white working-class women, who could stay home even if they can’t bring themselves to vote for the Donkey Party.

It could matter a lot whether they turn out and also whether they are open to voting Democratic a bit more than in 2016:

“Working-class white women are so pivotal to shaping Democratic opportunities largely because blue-collar white men appear so immovably behind Trump and the GOP. To expand beyond purely urban/suburban districts, Democrats believe they must replicate the winning equation demonstrated by Conor Lamb in his March special-election victory for a House seat near Pittsburgh. His model was to max out his advantage in white-collar suburbs recoiling from Trump while narrowing his deficit in blue-collar and rural communities, almost entirely by improving among working-class white women.”

Depending on the district, a strong turnout among minority women — whose hostility to Trump is reaching record proportions — could make a big difference too.

“Exit polls showed Democrats carried 91 percent of black women in the Virginia governor’s race won by Ralph Northam, and an astounding 98 percent in the Alabama Senate race won by Doug Jones.”

The focus on health-care issues among so many Democratic candidates regardless of gender is a tribute to their salience among women voters generally. And in 2016 pro-Trump districts, reminders of the president’s many broken economic promises are well-designed to bring non-college-educated white women over the line or leave them so discouraged that they abstain.

In any event, the nomination of so many women as Democratic congressional candidates this year is exquisitely timed. Unless Republicans can find a way to regain ground among college-educated women, keep white working-class women engaged, and rev up MAGA men, their odds of hanging onto the House or increasing their margins in the Senate are limited. To put it another way, the final accounting for the grossly porcine qualities Trump displayed so graphically in the Access Hollywood videos, and that the GOP accepted so cravenly when those videos didn’t kill his candidacy, hasn’t occurred just yet. Trump and his party richly deserve a Year of the Woman that makes all their sexist slurs about Hillary Clinton (and Nancy Pelosi and Maxine Waters and Elizabeth Warren) turn bitter in their mouths. And they may well be steadily losing women one vote at a time.