There is a sector of working class voters who can be persuaded to vote for Democrats in 2024 – but only if candidates understand how to win their support.
Saying that Dems need to “show up” in solidly GOP districts is a slogan, not a strategy. What Dems actually need to do is seriously evaluate their main strategic alternatives.
Democratic Political Strategy is Developed by College Educated Political Analysts Sitting in Front of Computers on College Campuses or Think Tank Offices. That’s Why the Strategies Don’t Work.
The American Establishment’s Betrayal of Democracy
The American Establishment’s Betrayal of Democracy The Fundamental but Generally Unacknowledged Cause of the Current Threat to America’s Democratic Institutions.
The Democratic Strategist is proud to present an extremely important new Strategy Memo–one that is simultaneously appearing as a lead article in The Washington Monthly.
The memo’s basic thesis is simple:
In many white working class and red state districts, Democratic policies and proposals, regardless of whether they are “progressive” or “moderate,” never get seriously debated or even considered. As a result, in these districts neither strategy can be relied on to elect Democrats.
Instead, the success of Democratic candidates in these white working class communities will most critically depend on their ability to convincingly demonstrate to voters that Democrats will once again be their most sincere, effective and genuine advocates and representatives.
This challenge cuts across the conventional centrist-progressive divide that now dominates the debate within the Democratic coalition–and will fundamentally determine the outcome in November.
For a printer-friendly document, you may download the memo below:
Republicans spent millions of dollars on scorching television ads, pried a reluctant endorsement from Ohio’s moderate governor, used the Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi as a foil and enlisted President Trump in a last-minute turnaround effort in a special election for Congress in Ohio.
And after all that, in a conservative-leaning district outside Columbus, the Republican candidate clung to the narrowest of leads on Tuesday night…The district that Mr. Balderson may have barely won voted for Mr. Trump by 11 points less than two years ago, and routinely elected Republicans to Congress by landslide margins before that…Even as Mr. O’Connor appeared to fall short, however, he significantly improved upon Hillary Clinton’s performance in the district’s suburban precincts, and he overwhelmed Mr. Balderson in the sort of high-income enclaves Republicans must perform better in to hold their 23-seat majority in the House.
The Republican, Troy Balderson, a state senator who ran a plodding campaign, led his Democratic challenger, Danny O’Connor, by less than 1 percentage point with all precincts reporting. But an unknown number of provisional ballots are yet to be counted, and Ohio law provides for an automatic recount if the two candidates are ultimately separated by less than half a percentage point.
National Republicans declared victory before midnight, but it could be days or weeks before there is a conclusive result in the race. And regardless of the outcome, Mr. Balderson and Mr. O’Connor will face each other again in three months, in the regularly scheduled November election.
O’Connor has not conceded as of this writing, and Republicans are still nervous about the final tally, as well as the November rematch.
As for its bearing on the midterms, though, this race has already told us pretty much everything it can. Donald Trump won the district by 11 points two years ago, and Democrats haven’t represented it in Congress in three-plus decades. That the contest turned out to be as close as it did is shocking, regardless of who wins—or it would have been shocking, anyway, if it weren’t for the surprises of the previous 10 federal elections since Trump took office. Democrats have performed better, often way better, than the makeup of their respective electorates would predict. That was true in Pennsylvania, where Conor Lamb beat the partisan lean of his district (as measured by FiveThirtyEight) by 22 points to win his congressional race by a few tenths of a point. It was true in South Carolina, where Archie Parnell beat the lean by 16 points, to come up only 3 points short. And it’s true in Ohio, where O’Connor is on pace to beat expectations by about 13 points.
If Balderson can hold on, Republicans will avoid a national embarrassment like the one they suffered in Alabama this past December and in western Pennsylvania this spring. But even then, Balderson’s razor-thin margin of victory would be more worrisome for the GOP than his win would be reassuring. Republicans pulled out all the stops in this one. National GOP groups spent millions in the race, Donald Trump held one of his MAGA rallies in the district over the weekend, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich—one of the few #NeverTrump Republicans still in office, and someone who held this seat for nearly two decades—supported Balderson.
That kind of GOP unity is hardly guaranteed in the fall, and Republicans won’t have the luxury of devoting so much time and money to each battleground district between now and November. The GOP currently holds roughly 60 congressional districts that are lessRepublican than this one, according to the Cook Political Report’s partisan index. Democrats, then, could lose half of those districts this fall and still win the 23 seats they need to retake the House next year.
“I think Republicans are running out of excuses for why these seats are more competitive than they have been in the past,” said Nathan Gonzales, who handicaps elections at Inside Politics. “The common thread here is Donald Trump is energizing Democrats,” quoted in Michael Scherer’s Washington Post report on the vote count. Also, “This district should have been a slam dunk for the GOP,” said Rep. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), the leader of the Democratic midterm effort in the House, in a statement. “The fact that we are still counting ballots is an ominous sign for their prospects in November.”
“Since O’Connor outraised Balderson on the strength of small donations, the national party swooped in to make up the difference,” notes Daniel Marans at HuffPo. “GOP groups outspent their Democratic counterparts in the race by a ratio of nearly 5 to 1.”
At the Netroots Nation conference in New Orleans, there was an ostentatious lack of interest in anything remotely resembling an actual swing voter. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: “Our swing voter is not red to blue; it’s nonvoter to voter”. In other words, it’s all mobilization not persuasion, according to her and others at the conference.
That may be unwise. Henry Olsen offers some hard data from the Voter Study Group surveys (full disclosure: I was involved in the collection of these data and sit on the editorial board of the group) on the potential salience of good old-fashioned swing voters in the coming election. Olsen may overstate his case a bit but attention must be paid to the data he presents.
“Most strategists and analysts say this November’s midterms will be determined by turnout. According to this view, whichever party more fully energizes its partisans will come out on top. New data, though, shows this common wisdom has it exactly backward. It’s the voters who sit between the two parties, not the party bases, who will choose which party wins…
“Romney-Clinton” voters are generally the sort of highly educated, affluent, more moderate voters who disapprove of Donald Trump. The most recent Voter Survey shows Mr. Trump had less than a 20 percent job approval rating among them; nearly 70 percent of these formerly Republican voters disapprove of his job performance. And they are taking this dislike with them to the voting booth. Forty-three percent say they will vote for Democrats this fall; only about 20 percent intend to back Republicans.
These voters are very important for the battle for the House. Democrats need to pick up 24 House seats to get a majority, and Republicans hold 25 seats in areas that Hillary Clinton carried. Mitt Romney won the districts of 13 of those seats in 2012, and his margin of defeat was smaller than Mr. Trump’s in another nine. Democrats simply cannot retake the House unless they get a lot of these voters to stick with them when Mr. Trump isn’t personally on the ballot.
“Obama-Trump” voters are the people you’ve heard a lot about recently: largely white, less educated and middle or working class. By and large the latest Voter Survey shows that they still like Trump: 76 percent approve of his performance. But like Romney-Clinton voters, they aren’t yet completely sold on their new party’s congressional candidates. While 41 percent say they will vote Republican in the fall, 44 percent say they are either unsure whom they will back or plan to vote for a third-party candidate. That’s a lot of Trump backers who haven’t yet made the leap to the G.O.P.”
This suggests that airy dismissals of the importance of swing voters border on political malpractice.The objective is to win and win big and for that swing voters are essential. The Democrats’ motto should be: No voter left behind!
In his Poltico post, “Democrats surging on eve of pivotal special election: Republicans have deployed the full machinery of the party to avoid defeat in the final special election before the midterms.” Alex Isenstadt writes that the Republicans are extremely worried about losing OH-12 to the young Democratic candidate Danny O’Connor. In addition to Trump and Kemp campaigning in the district for the lackluster GOP candidate Troy Balderson, “The Republican National Committee has opened two offices in the district, launched a $500,000-plus get-out-the-vote effort, and dispatched one of its top officials, Bob Paduchik, who ran Trump’s 2016 Ohio campaign. And outside conservative groups, led by a super PAC aligned with House Speaker Paul Ryan, have dumped more than $3.5 million onto the TV airwaves, far outpacing Democrats…The all-out push underscores the GOP’s trepidation about the final special election before the midterms. A loss, following startling Republican defeats in Pennsylvania and Alabama, would offer more evidence that a blue wave is on the horizon…Those worries intensified on Saturday morning when, just hours before the rally, Trump took to Twitter to attack NBA legend LeBron James, an Ohio favorite son who recently opened a public school in Akron for at-risk youth.” The latest Monmouth University poll indicates a statistical tie between the candidates, and Trump’s aproval rating in the district is 46 percent, down from 52 percent in 2016.
At The New York Times, Alexander Burns writes, “Most polling for both parties has shown a slim advantage for Mr. Balderson, 56, an auto dealer-turned-state legislator with a wooden public demeanor. But Republicans see his position as precarious in a season when Democrats are voting with passionate enthusiasm. And Democratic attacks on Mr. Balderson — for telling the Columbus Dispatch newspaper that he might support raising the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare — have wounded him…That there is uncertainty about Tuesday’s election to begin with is a source of grave anxiety for Republicans, and even victory might not allay it. The district has elected Republicans to Congress for decades and favored Mr. Trump in 2016 by 11 percentage points, surpassing his powerful margin statewide…And Mr. O’Connor, the Democrat, has attempted to channel a nonthreatening kind of indignation, trumpeting broadly appealing themes like protecting government-backed retirement benefits, rejecting corporate donations and promoting “new leadership” in Washington.”
“Most strategists and analysts say this November’s midterms will be determined by turnout. According to this view, whichever party more fully energizes its partisans will come out on top. New data, though, shows this common wisdom has it exactly backward. It’s the voters who sit between the two parties, not the party bases, who will choose which party wins…That’s a surprising finding from the most recent Democracy Fund Voter Study Group poll. This biannual poll, which asks thousands of Americans their views on issues, personalities and voting intentions, has been querying the same people their views going back to 2011 (in the polling world, this is known as a longitudinal survey). That means it is large enough and has the right sort of questions to do what most polls can’t: report accurately on small groups within the overall electorate…These dynamics will be on clear display in Tuesday’s special election in Ohio’s 12th Congressional District. The seat is split between an affluent, educated core that has loads of Romney-Clinton voters (Delaware and Franklin Counties) and five small-town and rural counties that have lots of Obama-Trump voters…The Democrat Danny O’Connor’s campaign has skillfully played to this divide. His ads emphasize working across the aisle to find common ground and note that “we need new leadership in both parties.” Winning control of the House and Senate means Democrats have to fight on Republican turf, and that means talking to Romney-Clinton and Obama-Trump voters. How well they can talk to both at the same time — and how well Republicans do among the same groups — will determine whether we see a blue wave or another case of Democratic despair.” — From “The Voters Who Will Decide the Midterms,” a New York Times op-ed by Henry Olsen, editor of the “Flyover Country” section at UnHerd.com, is the director and a co-founder of the Voter Study Group.
Vox’s Dylan Scott explores O’Connor’s growing support, and notes, “Even if he’s skeptical of single-payer, O’Connor talks a lot about expanding access to health care. In his campaign office, almost every sign adorning the walls is about stopping the GOP war on Medicaid or protecting the Affordable Care Act. His mom is a cancer survivor, and he is focused on protecting preexisting conditions. Balderson, the Republican in the race, opposed Ohio’s Medicaid expansion and is running on repealing Obamacare…“I haven’t seen a [single-payer] proposal that’s gonna move the needle, whether it’s budgetarily or coverage-wise,” he said. “I think voters here are more focused on protecting their access now, not the political jargon and all these catchphrases that have been poll-tested and are proposed by people in Washington, DC..But where O’Connor differs from moderate Democrats of the past — and from Republican now — is he refuses to entertain cuts to Social Security and Medicare; his campaign ads hit Balderson over GOP proposals to do so. He’s proud of his F-rating from the National Rifle Association.”
“Politics is regularly described in terms of “left” vs. “right,” observes E. J. Dionne, Jr. in his syndicated column, “Forget left and right. This is what will determine the midterms” at The Washington Post. “But other binaries can be more relevant. “Forward” vs. “backward” often define a choice facing an electorate better than the standard ideological categories. And the most powerful faceoff of all may be “reform” vs. “corruption.”…Much commentary on the 2018 midterm campaign has focused on a drift or a lurch left in the Democratic Party, the measurement of the port-side tilt varying from analyst to analyst. In fact, more moderate progressives have done very well in the primaries so far, but Democrats are certainly less enamored of centrism than they were during the 1990s…What is missed in this sort of analysis is that many, maybe most, of us don’t think in simple left/right terms, and countless issues are not cleanly identified this way. The same is true of elections. When the returns are tallied in November, the results may be better explained by the reform/corruption dynamic than any other.”
Further, adds Dionne, “The advantages of the corruption issue are (1) “corrupt” really is the right word to describe the Trump administration; (2) a concern over corruption transcends philosophical dispositions; and (3) the failure to “drain the swamp” is one of President Trump’s most obvious broken promises. Instead, Trump has turned the swamp into an immense toxic-waste dump. The stench emanates from Cabinet officialsdriven from office by egregious behavior and from Trump’s own violations of long-standing norms limiting business dealings by presidents and their families…But the corruption issue goes beyond meat-and-potatoes sleaze. Our democracy itself is in danger from the overpowering influence of money on our politics, unchecked foreign intervention in our elections and an increasing willingness of Republicans to bias the system in their favor through gerrymandering and restrictions on access to the ballot.”
“The single-payer Democrats are on the ballot in red and blue states and from California, where Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom is the heavy favorite to win in November, to Massachusetts, where Democrat Jay Gonzalez believes the issue will give him an opening against a popular Republican governor,” writes David Weigel at PowerPost…“There are going to be bills about this in dozens of states,” said Sam Munger, a spokesman for the liberal State Innovation Exchange who added that there has been a surge of single-payer legislation since the start of 2017. “Ninety percent of those bills won’t go anywhere, but people are pushing the spectrum of debate. Expanding health care, however they want to do it, is one of the top-testing messages we see in polls…While Democrats running for the House and Senate talk about Medicare for all in aspirational terms, as a post-Trump national goal, liberal candidates for governor suggest that their states could quickly become laboratories for universal coverage.”
Sher Watts Spooner explains why “2018 is the year of Democratic women—but not only candidates” at Daily Kos: “The elections in 2018 are turning out to be the Year of the Woman, but it’s not just women candidates running as Democrats. It’s women voting in big numbers. It’s women donating money to candidates—lots of money. More than anything else, it’s about women having their voices heard…No longer are women candidates afraid to speak out on all issues. They’re proud of touting their military service. And they’re also not afraid to talk about a double standard for women candidates…Suddenly the media are full of stories about the number of Democratic women running and winning primaries. About how the midterms could feature a record gender gap between men and women voters. About how women are establishing “giving circles” to make sure candidates are funded and to give more interested women a way to get involved.” Spoonoer quyotes a CNN story: “In the average poll since June, Democrats are leading among women by an average 20-percentage point margin compared to trailing among men by 6 points. If this holds, this would be the largest margin that Democrats would win women by in a midterm election since at least 1958…One clear advantage of doing better among women voters though is that they almost always represent a larger percentage of the electorate than men do.”
Looking at some historical data from Cook Political Report‘s Amy Walter, I noticed some trends that may be germane to this election cycle and wrote about them for New York:
The Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter points out that in two recent “wave” midterm elections, in 2006 and 2010 — both of which flipped control of the House — the late trends were very strongly against the party controlling the presidency:
“In July of 2006, The Cook Political Report rated just 14 GOP-held seats as highly vulnerable. By November, the number of GOP-held seats in danger had tripled to 43. We saw a similar pattern in 2010. In August of that year, we listed 36 Democratic-held seats as highly vulnerable. By November, the number of vulnerable Democratic-held seats had more than doubled to 78. On Election Day of 2006, Republicans lost 30 seats; Democrats lost 63 seats in 2010.”
A lot of seats that wound up falling weren’t even on the radar a few months earlier:
“[O]f the 30 seats that Democrats won in 2006, 21 of them (or 70 percent), weren’t classified as the most vulnerable GOP-held seats in July. Almost half of the Democratic seats Republicans won in 2010 were classified as Lean or Likely Democrat in August.”
Right now, Cook has 34 Republican-held House seats looking very vulnerable (3 are likely Democratic, 7 lean Democratic, and 24 are toss-ups). But the landscape could get much bluer in a hurry:
“This year, Republicans already have more seats in the highly vulnerable category than they had at this point in 2006 or than Democrats had in August 2010. If 2018 follows a similar pattern to 2006 and 2010 — where less vulnerable seats move into more vulnerable territory in the fall — the GOP is almost certain to lose its majority. There are currently another 53 GOP-held seats in lean/likely Republican.”
What would account for this kind of late trend? In 2006 and 2010 it was not, interestingly enough, any deterioration of the president’s own approval ratings:
“There wasn’t a point where the bottom just dropped out for one party. The approval rating for President George W. Bush was 40 percent in mid-July 2006 and 38 percent in early November. President Obama was sitting at 44 percent in mid-August 2010 and 45 percent in early November.”
So Donald Trump’s exceptionally stable approval ratings won’t necessarily serve to limit his party’s losses in the House. Late trends could also reflect intensifying excitement over an approaching win for the “out” party. But most likely what we are seeing is simply a public recognition of trends that were developing all along. Forecasters like those at Cook are naturally conservative about predicting change of party control for any given House district, given the power of incumbency and the generally strong grip of partisan inclinations in this century.
There have, of course, been some nasty surprises for the “out” party in late midterm trends, and they’ve been relatively recent. In 1998 when Democrats actually gained House seats in Bill Clinton’s second midterm (Newt Gingrich made his painful concession-of-failure speech in front of a backdrop covered with the legend “America’s Victory”), and in 2002 when Republicans repeated that amazing feat. But then Clinton in 1998 had a approval rating just before the midterms of 66 percent, and George W. Bush enjoyed a 63 percent approval rating going into the 2002 midterms. Add in the reaction to the pending GOP impeachment effort in 1998 and the effects of 9/11 on 2002, and you have sets of circumstances that are extremely unlikely to recur between now and this November.
We could even realize in retrospect that the best 2018 signals to watch may have been the strongly pro-Democratic special-election results in 2017 and 2018, rather than November projections or even the generic ballot, as portending a wave that has been obscured in those less-tangible indicators. Since the pace of special elections has slowed this year, a lot of attention will be focused on next week’s special election in Ohio over yet another GOP-held U.S. House seat (one that Republicans have held for 36 years).
In any event, it will all get very real in the fall, and if both parties seem to be achieving new levels of furious intensity, it could be because the electoral tremors beneath the surface are getting stronger every day.
With all the endless talk of disagreements among Democrats about the right message for the midterm elections, I though it was worth noting that Republicans aren’t exactly all on the same page either, and I wrote it up at New York.
With less than 100 days to go until the midterm elections, there’s an increasingly sharp division of opinion between the White House (aligned with hard-core House Freedom Caucus types) and more conventional congressional Republicans about strategy and messaging. It has been dramatized by Trump’s renewed threats to shut down the government at the end of the fiscal year if he doesn’t get what he wants in the way of immigration policy, which is about as welcome to Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan as syphilis, as The Hill reports:
“Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) want Republicans seeking reelection to focus on the booming economy and the GOP’s tax-cut package passed last December. House GOP leaders are also touting a new campaign slogan for the midterms, asking Americans if they are ‘Better Off Now.’
“They believe that’s a message that will propel them to victory in competitive swing districts and states around the country, helping them stave off a Democratic wave this fall.”
Even among Republicans who don’t mind a little immigration demagoguery, there’s no big desire for presidential antics, as Byron York notes after discussions with GOP election wizards:
“What Republicans would like now is the absence of noise and distraction coming from the White House.
“‘We just need a decent level of calmness so we can message,’ said [one] strategist. ‘If we could just have calmness, we could talk about the economy and ICE. And if we could talk about the economy and ICE, we’d be fine.'”
But Trump and the HFC think otherwise, and it’s not just a matter of temperament or sheer hatefulness (though those do play a part). Some key voters love noise and distraction:
“Trump’s shutdown threat … [is] appealing to loyalists whose support he needs right now as he battles special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation and approval ratings in the low to mid 40s.
“‘His base is reacting positively to it,’ one conservative House lawmaker told The Hill …
“Trump’s message is consistent with the one being made by Jordan, the former Freedom Caucus chairman running for Speaker who said Monday that ‘heck yes’ conservatives would fight tooth and nail to stop GOP leaders from punting a fight over funding the border wall and other Trump priorities until after Election Day.”
This represents a pretty classic division of opinion between pols focused on swing-v0ter persuasion and those devoted to base mobilization. And in turn it reflects the two quite different types of Republican House seats in peril in November.
The New York Times’ Nate Cohn took a long look at the 60 most vulnerable GOP-controlled House seats and while some conform to the stereotype of highly educated suburban districts (many of which were carried by Hillary Clinton in 2016) expected to stray from the GOP banner, others are white working-class-dominated districts where Trump did well in 2016.
A ferocious runup to the midterms dominated by Trump and culture-war issues may help Republicans turn out their vote in places like the First District of Iowa or the Second District of Maine or the Eighth District of Minnesota. But it might also help mobilize Democrats, and might not help the GOP at all in highly educated suburban districts like Virginia’s Tenth or Georgia’s Sixth. And there are many competitive districts with both kinds of voters where the choice of targeting one or the other category can be excruciatingly difficult.
Truth is, it is a bit late in the game for either party to be arguing over electoral messaging, which increases the pressure on individual candidates (and their ad-buying “independent” friends) to tailor an appeal to individual districts that makes the most sense. When all else fails, of course, candidates can just go negative and hope to win by damaging opponents as much as by attracting support. Republicans do have the advantage of very low expectations, along with structural advantages that mean they can lose the national House popular vote and still control a majority of seats (as they did in 2012), just as Trump won the Electoral College while losing the presidential popular vote by 2.1 percent. But if they approach November dissenting from their own president’s message, a bad result will inevitably mean all sorts of blame games and finger-pointing at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.
The Republican Party has become so extreme that Democrats can win midterm support from voters as a result of GOP positions on any of a long list of issues. But if Democrats had to pick one issue to focus on, in most cases it would be health care in general, and the Republicans gutting coverage for pre-existing conditions in particular.
The Trump administration issued a final rule on Wednesday that clears the way for the sale of many more health insurance policies that do not comply with the Affordable Care Act and do not have to cover prescription drugs, maternity care or people with pre-existing medical conditions…Democrats derided the new policies as “junk insurance” that will lure healthy people away from the broader insurance market, raising premiums for sicker people and putting purchasers at risk.
…People who buy the new policies and develop cancer could “face astronomical costs” and “may be forced to forgo treatment entirely because of costs,” said Chris Hansen, the president of the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network.
…In the past year, the Trump administration has also cut funds for groups that help people sign up for coverage; ended cost-sharing subsidies paid to insurers on behalf of low-income people; and asked a federal court to throw out parts of the Affordable Care Act, including the popular protections for people with pre-existing conditions.
We are not talking about a small number of people who are affected by the GOP’s assault on coverage of pre-existing conditions. As Margaret Sanger Katz notes at The Upshot:
More than a quarter of working-age adults have a pre-existing health condition, like asthma, diabetes or cancer, that might have locked them out of the insurance market in the years before Obamacare, according to research from the Kaiser Family Foundation. Surveys show that far more have a friend or family member with a serious medical problem. Because health problems tend to pile up as people age, the older voters who tend to turn out most reliably in midterm elections experience such worry disproportionately.
Amy Goldstein elaborates at The Washington Post, “In the months since the idea surfaced, it has elicited a wall of opposition from the health insurance industry, hospitals, doctors and patient advocacy groups. All have warned that consumers with bare-bones plans would be stranded when they need care — and that the defection of healthy customers from ACA marketplaces would drive up prices for those who remain…Topher Spiro, vice president for health policy at the liberal Center for American Progress, derided the health plans as “junk insurance” and “the Trump University equivalent of health insurance.” Further,
Both types of insurance can sidestep the ACA’s requirement that health plans sold to individuals and small businesses must include 10 categories of benefits, including maternity care and mental-health services. Both can have bigger price differences between older customers and younger ones. But only the short-term plans also can charge higher prices to customers with medical conditions that require care, refuse to sell them a policy, or exclude coverage of health problems that a customer had before buying the insurance. The ACA bans such practices.
Democratic candidates are doing their best to hold the Republicans accountable in the midterm elections. Sanger-Katz writes that,
After nearly a decade of playing defense on the issue, Democratic congressional candidates around the country are putting a health care message at the center of their campaigns. After the Republicans’ failed effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Democrats have detected a newfound concern that the consumer protections established under the law might go away. And that fear has turned into a potent campaign theme.
…“I completely can see why they’re excited to be able to talk about this issue again,” said Mollyann Brodie, a senior vice president at Kaiser, who runs the group’s public opinion polling. The foundation’s most recent survey, released last week, found that pre-existing conditions had become the most important health care concern among voters, ranked the most important campaign issue for many of them over all. “I agree with the strategy, based on our polling and everyone else’s polling. It’s a time when it is going to work.”
It’s not just red-state Democratic senators who are focusing on pre-existing conditions. The issue is coming up in House races across the country. Tyler Law, a spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, ticked off districts — in Arkansas, Washington, New Jersey — where it’s a major campaign theme. In markets with close races, the committee is running its own advertisements on health care…“We’re seeing candidates in every single district talking about health care,” he said. “There is nowhere this does not play.”
Pre-existing condition protections have always been much more popular than the law over all…The Trump administration’s position is that most of the [ACA} law should remain on the books, but that its protections for people with pre-existing illnesses should be stripped away.
At New York Magazine, Jonathan Chait provides the most accurate description thus far of the Republican ‘alternative’ to Obamacare:
But whenever Democrats have attempted to expand access to health care, Republican leaders have generally declined to present themselves as principled opponents of universal health care. Instead, they have promised they could accomplish the same goal in a better, cheaper fashion, without any of the painful trade-offs in the existing Democratic-authored proposals. No such plan ever emerged, in part because Obamacare was the most market-friendly way to accomplish the bare minimum objectives of any humanitarian health-care reform. The only space to Obamacare’s right involved punishing the poor and sick with medical and financial deprivation.
…What is striking about the Trump-era Republican health agenda is the lack of policy ambition. Having spent years insisting they had an army of wonks who could design a better alternative to the Obamacare “train wreck,” the Republican plan of attack has dissolved into a rearguard sabotage campaign with no pretense of doing anything to help the poor and sick afford medical care. Health care remains a policy ground with which conservative-movement dogma cannot grapple.
The utter failure of Republicans to come up with a rudimentary alternative health care plan, even with the presidency and majorities of both houses of congress and the Supreme Court, is really quite pathetic. Chait’s description of their “plan” as “a rearguard sabotage campaign with no pretense of doing anything to help the poor and sick afford medical care” is exactly right. On November 6th, the bill comes due.
George Packer has the sobering read of the day in his New Yorker article, “All That’s Left Is the Vote: The midterm elections are the last obstacle to Trump’s consolidation of power—and the greatest obstacle to voting is the feeling that it doesn’t matter.” Among Packer’s observations: “The institutional clout that ended the Presidency of Richard Nixon no longer exists. The honest press, for all its success in exposing daily scandals, won’t persuade the unpersuadable or shame the shameless, while the dishonest press is Trump’s personal amplifier. The federal courts, including the Supreme Court, are rapidly becoming instruments of partisan advocacy, as reliably conservative as elected legislatures. It’s impossible to imagine the Roberts Court voting unanimously against the President, as the Burger Court, including five Republican appointees, did in forcing Nixon to turn over his tapes. (Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s nominee to succeed Anthony Kennedy, has even suggested that the decision was wrong.) Congress has readily submitted to the President’s will, as if legislation and oversight were burdens to be relinquished. And, when the independent counsel finally releases his report, it will have only the potency that the guardians of the law and the Constitution give it.” While Democrats can draw some cautious optimism from the polls, the questions that beg for an answer include what more can be done to mobilize low-turnout, but pro-Democratic voters in the 98 days until the midterms and how can Dems win or neutralize Trump’s wobbly 2016 voters?
At vox.com, Tara Golshan notes, “A new poll from Quinnipiac University released Wednesday put O’Rourke just 6 points behind Cruz. Cruz drew the support of 49 percent of registered Texas voters; 43 percent of registered voters backed O’Rourke. The poll, which has a 3.5-point margin of error, shows the Texas Senate race tightening since an earlier poll in May when O’Rourke was 11 points behind Cruz…Another poll from Texas Lyceum, with a slightly smaller sample size, had Cruz up by just 2 points — a statistical dead heat. Cruz had the support of 36 percent of registered voters, and O’Rourke had the support of 34 percent…Put simply: It’s becoming a very real possibility that Cruz could lose reelection to a Democrat — an upset that would seriously imperil Republicans’ hold on the Senate majority. Texas has not had a Democratic senator in more than 20 years.”
Sabato’s Crystal Ball associate editor Geoffrey Skelley provides an update on the likeliest outcomes for the contest for a U.S. Senate majority: “Historical midterm results suggest that we are in for a bounce-back year for split-ticket outcomes in Senate elections as they relate to the previous presidential election. This is good news for Democrats because they are defending one of the largest number of seats on record for any party in a midterm. Conversely, the GOP has few vulnerable seats to defend but may find itself limited by the electoral environment as the presidential party. Looking back at the historical success or failure in midterm contests based on incumbency and partisan lean, we have good reason to expect only a small change to the partisan makeup of the Senate, but those shifts could slightly favor the Republicans at the end. The GOP remains favored to retain the Senate, but the fact that Democrats have any chance at all at capturing a majority speaks to the benefit of being the non-presidential party, having so many incumbents seeking reelection, and of having a relatively friendly electoral environment.”
Burgess Everett and Elana Schor take apeak “Inside Democrats’ strategy to defeat Kavanaugh” and report at Politico, “While his red-state members stall in the face of attacks from their GOP challengers, Schumer hopes to place massive pressure on moderate Republicans by raising damaging questions about Kavanaugh’sviews on abortion, health care and presidential power. His top GOP targets are Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska…Schumer’s strategy starts like this: Hold his caucus in line and force Republicans to cough up 50 votes on their own…he’s counting on Manchin and a half-dozen other vulnerable Democrats to keep any hint that they might support the high court nominee to themselves.”
At New York Magazine, Ed Kilgore shares a hopeful comment in his post, “The GOP Sets Up Narrow Window for Kavanaugh Confirmation” about the problematic clock management Senate Republicans face: “As we learned with the Clarence Thomas saga, strange, unexpected developments have been known to come up during SCOTUS confirmations. Republicans have not given themselves any margin for error in the timing of their drive to place Kavanaugh on the Court, and if the process drags on until just before — or even after — the midterm elections, the political dynamics could change. Assuming Senate Republicans continue to fall into line on this critical appointment, an October Surprise may be the best hope Democrats have for derailing Kavanaugh’s nomination.”
In addition to the encourging polls of recent weeks, Nate Silver makes a couple of good points in the chatfest on “Who Are The Most Important Swing Voters In This Year’s Midterms?” at FiveThirtyEight: “So far, Democrats have gotten very good results in special elections — which consist of, you know, actual voters. And they also look pretty good, as Nathaniel said, in district-by-district polls, which are mostly conducted among likely voters rather than registered voters. Those could be signs of a turnout advantage…it’s noteworthy that Trump’s lowest approval ratings came while Republicans were trying to pass major policy initiatives such as the tax cut (successful) and their Obamacare repeal (not successful)…So I think a message framed around maintaining a check on Trump and the excesses of the Republican Congress would make sense. That’s classic midterm strategy, since midterms are all about balancing.”
New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall offers this observation about the damage horse-race reporting can do: “In a paper published in February, “Projecting Confidence: How the Probabilistic Horse Race Confuses and Demobilizes the Public,” Sean Westwood, Solomon Messing and Yphtach Lelkes of Dartmouth, Pew and the University of Pennsylvania, write: “Horse race coverage in American elections has shifted focus from late-breaking poll numbers to sophisticated meta-analytic forecasts that often emphasize candidates’ probability of victory…These improvements, in turn, “lower uncertainty about an election’s outcome, which lowers turnout under the model.” The effect, then, is that, “when one candidate is ahead, win probabilities convey substantially more confidence that she will win compared to vote share estimates. Even more importantly, we show that these impressions of probabilistic forecasts cause people not to vote in a behavioral game that simulates elections. In the context of the existing literature, the magnitude of these findings suggests that probabilistic horse race coverage can confuse and demobilize the public.”
“Two years after Russia interfered in the American presidential campaign, the nation has done little to protect itself against a renewed effort to influence voters in the coming congressional midterm elections, according to lawmakers and independent analysts…They say that voting systems are more secure against hackers, thanks to action at the federal and state levels — and that the Russians have not targeted those systems to the degree they did in 2016. But Russian efforts to manipulate U.S. voters through misleading social media postings are likely to have grown more sophisticated and harder to detect, and there is not a sufficiently strong government strategy to combat information warfare against the United States, outside experts said.” — From “As midterm elections approach, a growing concern that the nation is not protected from Russian interference” by Ellen nakashima and Craig Timberg.
But really, it’s even worse than that. As E. J. Dionne, Jr. writes in his column, “Trump is working with the trolls” at The Washington Post: “In the face of active measures by our adversaries to widen our nation’s social gulfs, one might imagine a more responsible leader trying to bring us together, to ease our anxieties about each other and to stand against endless cycles of recrimination….Instead, Trump is working in tandem with these outside trolls to aggravate resentment, stoke backlash and incite his opponents…It’s an established fact that the Kremlin and Trump were on the same side in the 2016 election. And so far, the online activity in connection with the 2018 elections — some of which has been linked to the Kremlin’s Internet Research Agency — rather consistently plays into right-wing propaganda and targets Democrats such as Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri…The online meddling has a broader objective as well: to divide our country even more sharply than it already is and to weaponize racial and ethnic divisions.”
Can we really expect a blue-wave election in November, with Democrats taking back the House and even possibly the Senate?
On the one hand, there are some encouraging portents. Since the 1840s, the president’s party has lost seats in 41 of 44 midterm elections. The pattern has been for the out party to pick up something like 25 seats in the first off-year election after a new president takes office. Trump is of course far less popular than most of his predecessors. And Democratic activism is at a fever pitch.
On the other hand, we have a level of voter suppression unprecedented since the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 ― purges of the rolls; needlessly stringent ID requirements; games played with polling places and their hours; extreme gerrymandering; and questions about whether systems will be hacked — either by the Russians or by Trumpian locals.
According to the Brennan Center, which carefully tracks this mischief, 13 states have added restrictive voter ID requirements since 2010, 11 have new laws making it harder to register, and six cut back on early voting or voting hours. Many of these are the same states.
In addition, according to David Daley’s indispensable Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count, seven Republican-controlled states resorted to extreme gerrymandering for House districts (and also state legislative seats) after the 2010 census, including key swing states such as North Carolina, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa and Arizona.
As a consequence, Republicans won just 52 percent of the Ohio popular vote for Congress in 2012, but garnered 12 of that state’s 16 congressional seats. In closely divided Michigan, they took nine of the state’s 14 seats.
So will the combination of voter suppression and gerrymandering abort the supposed blue wave? I think not. Here are the counterforces:
First, there are plenty of vulnerable House seats in states that were not subject to recent voter suppression or gerrymandering efforts. By my count, there are at least 40 such seats, and Democrats need to flip only 23 to take back the House.
There are dozens of Republican seats in play in states such as California, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Oregon, Minnesota and more, where voting systems are basically honest, and there have even been measures to make it easier to vote.
Second, extreme gerrymandering, as I’ve previously noted, can backfire ― because it seeks to pack Democrats into a few seats and spread the presumed Republican voters widely to capture the maximum possible number of seats. But in a wave year, there aren’t enough Republican voters to go around, and designer seats are suddenly at risk.
In Michigan, for example, the average Republican member of Congress won their House seat with 57.7 percent of the vote, according to Daley. In a wave year, that’s a flippable margin. Indeed, two Republican-held Michigan seats, the 8th and 11th congressional districts, are considered seriously in play, and three others are potentially vulnerable.
In heavily gerrymandered Ohio, two Republican House seats, the 1st district and the 12th, are in play. We will get a preview of just how vulnerable these gerrymandered seats are and how effective voter suppression is, on Aug. 7. There will be a special election for a vacant seat in Ohio’s 12th, which takes in the suburbs and working class towns north of Columbus. Trump carried the district in 2016 by 11 points, but polls show the Republican candidate only barely ahead.
Further, voter mobilization can offset voter suppression, and all signs point to a banner year for voter activism on the Democratic side.
Polls on the relative enthusiasm and interest in the election point to a wide gap that favors Democrats. Even better for Democrats is that voters say they are increasingly inclined to vote Democratic for Congress as a way of containing Trump. A Wall Street Journal/NBC poll in June found that voters, by a 25-point margin, said they’d be more likely to support an anti-Trump congressional candidate.
If you look at special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and Trump’s deepening woes on multiple fronts, this will all come to a head, in a harmonic convergence, on the eve of the November election.
Interestingly, political scientists who study election trends conclude, almost unanimously, that turnout is a somewhat overrated factor in off-year elections, especially the premise that turning out “the base” is a key factor.
Statistically, off-year turnout falls off dramatically from turnout in presidential years, when interest in the presidential race provides focus and drama, but is historically stable within a fairly narrow range from the high 30s to low 40s.
Could this year be different? If you look at the loathing of Trump among Democrats and the heightened interest among all voters, especially those in the Democratic base, notably blacks, Latinos, women and the young, then quite possibly.
Even if the political scientists are right, and base turnout doesn’t rise that much, swing voters are also highly likely to break for the Democrats. Each time I read the projections of the respected Cook Report, a few more seats have slipped from leaning Republican to toss-up, or from toss-up to leaning Democrat.
Now, the best news of all for Democrats is that Trump has promised to go on the road, “six or seven days a week,” to campaign for endangered Republican candidates. In all but hardcore conservative districts, this is likely to backfire as voters look to Democratic candidates to rein in Trump.
Even the Senate looks like it could be in play. In the most recent polls, Democrats are now leading in two Republican-held seats ― Jacky Rosen over Dean Heller in Nevada, and Kyrsten Sinema over Martha McSally in Arizona. Phil Bredesen leads Marsha Blackburn in Tennessee in some polls as well, although he is still well behind in others.
There are four Democrat-held seats at risk, in Florida, Indiana, North Dakota and Montana. (Joe Manchin in West Virginia, sometimes considered at risk, is now well ahead.) If Democrats can hold the at-risk seats, and pick up two GOP seats, they take the senate 51-49. Picking up three would allow them to lose one Democratic incumbent.
As Donald Trump comes into swing districts where Republican incumbents are vulnerable, Democrats should greet him with flowers.
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Having spent much of the week watching the runup to a crucial Senate vote on appropriations, I had to express at New York some serious misgivings about Chuck Schumer’s strategy and what it did to his party’s messaging:
For the record, I’m usually disinclined to promote the hoary “Democrats in Disarray” narrative whereby the Democratic Party is to blame for whatever nightmarish actions Republicans generally, or Donald Trump specifically, choose to pursue. That’s particularly true right now when Democrats have so little actual power and Republicans have so little interest in following laws and the Constitution, much less precedents for fair play and bipartisanship. So it really makes no sense to accuse the powerless minority party of “allowing” the assault on the federal government and the separation of powers being undertaken by the president, his OMB director Russ Vought, and his tech-bro sidekick Elon Musk. If congressional Republicans had even a shred of integrity or courage, Senate Democrats would not have been placed in the position this week of deciding whether it’s better to let the government shut down than to let it be gutted by Trump, Vought, and Musk.
Having said all that, Senate Democrats did have a strategic choice to make this week, and based on Chuck Schumer’s op-ed in the New York Times explaining his decision to get out of the way and let the House-passed spending bill come to the floor, he made it some time ago. Nothing in his series of rationalizations was new. If, indeed, “a shutdown would be the best distraction Donald Trump could ask for from his awful agenda,” while enabling the administration to exert even more unbridled power over federal programs and personnel, that was true a week ago or a month ago as well. So Schumer’s big mistake was leading Senate Democrats right up to the brink of a collision with the administration and the GOP, and then surrendering after drawing enormous attention to his party’s fecklessness.
This doesn’t just look bad and feel bad for Democrats demanding that their leaders do something to stop the Trump locomotive: It also gives the supreme bully in the White House incentive to keep bullying them, as Josh Marshall points out in his postmortem on the debacle:
“[P]eople who get hit and abused and take it tend to get hit and abused again and again. That’s all the more true with Donald Trump, a man who can only see the world through the prism of the dominating and the dominated. It is a great folly to imagine that such an abject acquiescence won’t drive him to up the ante.”
The reality is that this spending measure was the only leverage point congressional Democrats had this year (unless Republicans are stupid enough not to wrap the debt-limit increase the government must soon have in a budget reconciliation bill that cannot be filibustered). Everyone has known that since the new administration and the new Congress took office in January. If a government shutdown was intolerable, then Democrats should have taken it off the table long before the House voted on a CR. Punchbowl News got it right:
“Let’s be blunt here: Democrats picked a fight they couldn’t win and caved without getting anything in return. …
“Here’s the lessonfrom this episode: When you have no cards, fold them early.”
Instead, Democrats have taken a defeat and turned it into a debacle. House and Senate Democrats are divided from each other, and a majority of Senate Democrats are all but shaking their fists at their own leader, who did in fact lead them down a blind alley. While perhaps the federal courts will rein in the reign of terror presently underway in Washington (or perhaps they won’t), congressional Democrats must now become resigned to laying the groundwork for a midterm election that seems a long time away and hoping something is left of the edifice of a beneficent federal government built by their predecessors from the New Deal to the Great Society to Obamacare. There’s a good chance a decisive majority of the general public will eventually recoil from the misrule of the Trump administration and its supine allies in Congress and across the country. But at this point, elected Democrats are going to have to prove they should be trusted to lead the opposition.
