In his New York Magazine post, “Battle for the House: 100 Days Out, Democrats Are on the Brink,” Ed Kilgore notes, “All along, the conventional wisdom has been that Democrats need a lead of seven or eight points in the generic congressional ballot, an approximation of the House national popular vote, to feel reasonably confident of their chances. Their lead on the generic ballot is currently at 7.3 percent in the RealClearPolitics polling averages (it was as high as 13 percent last December and as low as 3 percent in the late spring), and 7.7 percentin the FiveThirtyEight averages (which weight polls according to their assessed quality and make adjustments for partisan bias). Typically the party that does not control the White House is likely to get a late breeze in its favor unless the president’s favorability markedly improves. At this point in 2014, Democrats led in most generic congressional polls, but then lost the national House popular vote by nearly 6 percent.”

“Donald Trump is “the worst politician ever” but he’s on a path to re-election because the Democratic party refuses to counter his courtship of working class disaffection, says the American political analyst and historian Thomas Frank…Frank said Trump was “uniquely dangerous” as a political figure, and that required the left to reconnect with working people to counter “the long turn of the American right towards populism…I am absolutely certain the way for a left party to beat that stuff is not to join it and bid for the bigot vote, but to counter fake populism with the real deal,” Frank said.” — From Katherine Murphy’s “Donald Trump, ‘worst politician ever’, on path to re-election, Thomas Frank says” at The Guardian.

fdrom ABC News The Powerhouse Roundtable:

Kyle Kondik’s “The House Tilts Toward the Democrats: Big-picture factors help minority party, but battle far from over; 17 ratings changes in favor of Democrats” at Sabato’s Crystal Ball notes some recent gains for Democras in the midterm camapign, including: “Democrats are now a little better than 50-50 to win the House. This is the first time this cycle we’ve gone beyond 50-50 odds on a House turnover…We’re making 17 House ratings changes this week, all in favor of the Democrats…One of those comes in OH-12, where the last nationally-watched special House election is taking place in a couple of weeks…Put it all together, and the Democrats now look like soft favorites to win a House majority with a little more than 100 days to go. The usual caveats apply: There is time for things to change, and the Democrats capturing the majority is not a slam dunk. We recently were discussing the House map with a source who recited reams of positive indicators and data for Democrats. After hearing those, we suggested that, based on what this person was saying, the Democrats should win the House with seats to spare. The source then said it will come down to just a few seats either way. By the way, such a close outcome — a House where the majority party has 220-225 seats or even less (218 is the number required for a bare majority) — remains a distinct possibility, and the presence of so many competitive House seats in California, where the vote count takes weeks to finalize, could delay the final House outcome.”

In his New York Times column, “The Rules for Beating Donald Trump: Don’t argue with 4.1 percent growth,” Bret Stephens argues “if you’re serious about wanting to defeat Trump, you might want to start with Rule No. 1: Don’t argue with sunshine. Don’t acknowledge good news through gritted teeth, or chortle at the president’s boastful delivery, or content yourself with the thought that Barack Obama also had some strong quarters and deserves all the credit…If working-class resentment was a factor in handing the White House to Trump, pooh-poohing of good economic news only feeds it.” Also, “Ignore Trump’s tweets. Yes, it’s unrealistic. But we would all be better off if the media reported them more rarely, reacted to them less strongly, and treated them with less alarm and more bemusement. Tweets are the means by which the president wrests control of the political narrative from the news media (and even his own administration), whether by inspiring his followers, goading his opponents, changing the subject, or merely causing a ruckus. There’s no way to stop him, but there’s no reason to amplify him.”

Matt Ford explains “How a Democratic House Could Really Give Trump Hell: And it has nothing to do with impeachment” at The New Republic: “On Thursday morning, [New Mexico U.S. Senator Tom] Udall was back at it, appearing on MSNBC’s Morning Joesaying he would support legislation to force presidential candidates to publicly release their tax returns. “I think it’s very important that people know if there are conflicts of interest that the president might have, that we clear that up,” he replied. “The easiest thing to do here is just disclose all the tax returns.”…What Udall didn’t mention is that Congress doesn’t need legislation to release the president’s tax returns. If Democrats retake either the House or the Senate this fall members of the tax committees can obtain Trump’s tax returns directly from the IRS by using a provision in federal law that grants those committees special access to help craft legislation…By all accounts, Trump’s tax returns are being treated like something akin to a state secret. John Koskinan, who retired as IRS commissioner last year, told Politico even he didn’t have access to them. Under federal law, however, Congress’ tax committees can request a copy of any taxpayers’ returns directly from the IRS, ostensibly to aide in the development of a better tax code. An intrepid legislator could then publicize what they find in Trump’s tax returns by reading them aloud on the floor of Congress, just as Alaska Senator Mike Gravel did with the Pentagon Papers.”

At CNN Politics John King takes a look at “Why Democrats Are Optimistic About the Midterms“:

Trump is probably bluffing about the shutdown if he doesn’t get funding for his wall. For one thing it would jeopardize his Kavanaugh appointment, and for another it would call unwanted attention to his ridiculous bragg that he was going to make Mexico pay for the wall. Still, logic and common sense have rarely limited Trump’s statements, and Republicans are somewhat nervous about his shutdown talk. “We’re going to have a challenging midterm anyway, and I don’t see how putting the attention on shutting down the government when you control the government is going to help you,” Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma, said in an interview,” reports Sheryl Gay Stohlberg at The New York Times.

James Hohman sounds a cautionary note in his PowerPost article, “The Daily 202: Puerto Ricans who fled to Florida after Hurricane Maria are not registering to vote.” As Hohman writes, “Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico last September and prompted a mass exodus of more than 100,000 residents to the mainland United States…The exact number is still not known, but tens of thousands of people permanently resettled in Florida…Because they’re already U.S. citizens, Puerto Ricans are eligible to vote as soon as they move to the mainland. The thinking last fall was that they’d be so angry at Trump that they’d be champing at the bit to vote against Republicans in the midterms. Operatives from both parties said that this could prove decisive in a perennial battleground like Florida where elections are always close…Once again, the conventional wisdom turns out to have been wrong. Trump appears to be defying the old rules of politics. In this case, it’s because most of the Puerto Ricans who have come to Florida are not registering to vote or otherwise getting involved in politics. At least for now…During the nine months after the hurricane — from last October through the end of June — there were 326,000 new registered voters. Just 21 percent were Hispanic. That’s a pretty small uptick — and not necessarily explained by Puerto Rican registration at all…in the two Orlando-area counties with the highest concentration of Puerto Ricans, there has not been any meaningful increase in Democratic registration.” It’s time for the Florida Democrats ‘A Team’ to take charge, launch a voter registration drive targeting recent Puerto Rican immigrants and get it done.

After reading repeatedly about Democratic prospects in 2018 and 2020 being spoiled by “Democratic extremism” or
“Democrats moving too far to the left,” I smelled a rat, and wrote up my findings at New York:

There is a convention going back into the mists of time whereby the Democratic Party is thought of as a disorganized and divided mess. The early 20th-century humorist Will Rogers, himself a Democrat, once said:

“The difference between a Republican and a Democrat is the Democrat is a cannibal. They have to live off each other, while the Republicans, why, they live off the Democrats.”

He wasn’t trying to be funny on that occasion, and it made a fair amount sense to think of the Donkey Party as an unwieldy paradox back when it was the preferred political vehicle of rural populists, southern segregationists, urban machines, and ethnic minorities doing battle with a Grand Old Party that mostly revolved around defending economic privilege and deploring anything that wasn’t WASPy.

But the “Democrats in Disarray” meme has lived on, and for a brief moment in the late autumn of 2016, it was pretty accurate, as Democrats reeled from a shocking defeat against a presidential candidate who looked more like a cartoon villain than a serious aspirant to high office.

As New York’s Eric Levitz explained last November, however, any talk of Democrats being fatally divided or in despair during 2017 was visibly rebutted by the steady drumbeat of Democratic victories in special and off-year elections.

Democrats don’t have nearly as many special elections to show they’re feeling their oats this year, and they’ve lost some of the huge, double-digit lead in the generic congressional ballot that was regularly appearing when Levitz wrote his upbeat assessment of Democratic prospects. And for those (both conservatives and conflict-seeking mainstream-media folk) who deeply cherish the Democrats in Disarray meme, those special elections are helpfully being replaced by party primaries in which Democrats are running against Democrats! Imagine that! Worse yet, in some of these primaries the winners are self-proclaimed progressives! And as we all know, the American people have a deep craving for sensible centrists who want to cross the party aisles and get things done. If Republicans don’t have any of those anymore, then by God, it’s critical that the loyal opposition keep the faith and avoid extremism.

Veteran political writer Walter Shapiro has written a useful skewering of this all-too-common narrative, which has been sent into overdrive by the June primary victory in New York of Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over House Democratic Caucus chairman Joe Crowley:

“[A]n emblematic story led Sunday’s New York Times under the print headline, “Democrats Brace as Storm Brews Far to Their Left.”

“The themes of the Times story and dozens like it are familiar. They all highlight young activists such as 28-year-old giant slayer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who upended potential Nancy Pelosi successor Joe Crowley in the New York primary. Risky issues are highlighted as main stream Democrats recoil from demands for single-payer health insurance and the abolition of ICE (the acronym for Immigration and Customs Enforcement)….

“Yet by the historical standards of Democratic internecine warfare, today’s disputes are like 6-year-olds battling with foam swords.”

Spoken like a man that remembers the fraught intraparty ideological battles over the Iraq War, Clinton’s “New Democrat” movement, Cold War defense spending and national security strategy, and civil rights. Democrats are more unified on a host of issues — including hot buttons like abortion policy, criminal justice, and the social safety net — than they have been for years. And Democratic Socialists represent but one influence bubbling up from the grassroots. As Shapiro notes, for a party allegedly in the grips of an existential crisis, they’re in pretty good shape:

“It’s hard to identify a Senate or House seat that is being lost because of excessive Democratic activism. Even if a Democratic incumbent like North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp is troubled by calls to ax ICE, there is scant evidence that this makes her more vulnerable than before in a state that Donald Trump carried by better than a two-to-one margin.

“No incumbent — not even Heitkamp or Joe Manchin in West Virginia — is being denounced as a DINO. According to a new Monmouth University Poll, moderate Democrat Rep. Conor Lamb, who won a high-profile special election in western Pennsylvania earlier this year, holds a hefty lead in his bid for a full term. Lamb is a prime example of a Democrat who has prospered by defying litmus-test politics in his opposition to Nancy Pelosi as House speaker.”

There’s really not much excuse for the hyperventilation so evident about the Democratic Party falling apart or “going off the deep end.” So why is this narrative so ever-ready?

Some of it is simply the result of a lazy habit of “balancing” the chaos coming out of the White House every day with the “disarray” allegedly found within the opposition party. But a deeper motive, particularly in conservative media, is the need to distract attention from the ideological revolution going on in the GOP by suggesting that something equally if not more alarming is going on across the partisan barricades. The idea is very simple: If you can’t expand your support beyond the ranks of the party “base” by “moving to the center,” then a good fallback position is to deny your opponent “the center” by alleging it’s being taken over by extremists. Aside from blurring the natural public and media focus on the strange people running the country and almost daily destroying old GOP positions on issues ranging from trade and deficits to the environment and NATO, the “here come the socialists!” cry appeals viscerally to the false-equivalence needs of MSM reporters and pundits who are constantly seeking protection against claims of liberal bias.

And so Ocasio-Cortez becomes, somehow, a vastly more significant figure than her most obvious recent conservative counterpart Dave Brat of Virginia, who similarly upset a congressional leader of his party in 2014. That’s true even though Brat almost certainly was emblematic of a strong rightward trend in the GOP, while the jury is definitely still out on whether Ocasio-Cortez is a harbinger of a world to come or simply an adept local pol who upset a complacent incumbent in an incredibly low-turnout primary in an incredibly atypical district.

It’s possible we are about to witness an extremist polarization of both parties to an extent unknown since the Spanish Civil War. But that’s not at all clear at this point, and as for Democratic divisions, none seem to matter nearly as much as a common revulsion toward Donald Trump and his enablers. As Shapiro observes, parties are ultimately defined by presidents. We see what that has meant for the GOP since 2016. Let’s give Democrats a chance to display their own proposed new leadership in 2020 before deciding they are equally feckless or reckless.

Morning Consult’s latest batch of quarterly approval rating data has a very important comparison of senatorial and presidential numbers that I shared at New York:

[T]en Democratic senators are running for reelection in states that Donald Trump carried in 2016 — some by large margins. Amid partisan polarization and the growing trend toward straight-ticket voting, it seems impossible that all (or even most) of these anomalies could survive in 2018.

But there are two mitigating factors we sometimes forget: (1) presidential elections are comparative, while midterms tend to be (usually sour) referenda on the party that controls the White House, which means you cannot assume the partisan balance in any given state will remain the same, and (2) it’s not 2016 anymore, and Trump’s popularity can’t be assumed to have remained static all this time in every state.

You can see the difference a more dynamic view of the “Trump Ten” senators makes in the latest quarterly state-by-state numbers showing Senate approval and disapproval ratings from Morning Consult. They did something interesting: They directly compared the average net approval ratings for senators from April through June with those of the president over the same period of time in the same states. Turns out eight of the Trump Ten are doing better than Trump himself in their states.

Perhaps the most interesting numbers are from North Dakota, which Trump carried by 33 points against Hillary Clinton in 2016. In the second quarter of 2018, however, Trump’s net approval rating in North Dakota was minus-10 points. Now as it happens, Heitkamp isn’t in great shape; her own net approval rating is zero, and she faces a formidable GOP opponent in U.S. Representative Kevin Cramer. But it looks like Cramer, not Trump, is her problem, which gives her some freedom to be more critical of the president than she might otherwise be in a state he had carried so overwhelmingly.

Another good example is Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin. Yes, Trump narrowly carried her state in 2016. But in Q2 2018 his average approval rating there was minus-16 points. By comparison Baldwin’s net approval rating over that period was plus-5, which is immensely better. Similarly, Trump carried Ohio in 2016 by eight points, which was impressive given the state’s recent voting history. But his Q2 2018 average approval rating in the Buckeye State was minus-6, while Senator Sherrod Brown’s is plus-16. No wonder Brown is presently a solid favorite for reelection.

The two Trump Ten Democratic senators who do trail Trump in Q2 2018 approval ratio averages are Joe Manchin and Claire McCaskill. West Virginia was Trump’s second-best state in 2016 (after Wyoming); he won it by an astonishing 42 points. He’s still pretty popular there, with a plus-23 net approval rating in the second quarter of this year, as compared to Senator Joe Manchin’s plus-3. Manchin’s divided GOP opposition and his long familiarity with the state are helping him keep a lead in the polls. Missouri’s Claire McCaskill’s tepid minus-4 approval ratio trails Trump’s (plus-2), but not as much as you’d normally expect in a state he carried by 21 points.

Meanwhile, Trump’s net approval rating in Montana, which he carried by 20 points, has sunk to plus-3, while Senator Jon Tester’s looking pretty good at plus-14. The gap between presidential and senatorial net approval is smaller in Indiana (Trump is at plus-5, Joe Donnelly at plus-8). Florida’s Bill Nelson is at plus-10 (Trump is at plus-2 in Florida), but his problem is not so much Trump as his opponent Rick Scott, who has endless money and a net gubernatorial approval rating (again, in the second quarter of this year) of plus-19.

None of this means Democrats will win control of the Senate; aside from the fact that several of the Democratic senators we’ve been talking about aren’t out of the woods just yet, Democrats need to find a way to beat at least one and preferably more than one Republican incumbent (or win an open seat like those in Arizona and Tennessee). But it’s important to remember that whatever his standing compared to where he was in 2017 or earlier this year, Trump remains generally weaker than he was when facing an equally unpopular Democratic opponent in a year when Democrats weren’t remotely as energized as they are right now.

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

Sure Democrats Are Ahead Nationally, But How Are Democrats Doing in Competitive House Districts?

A good question; there is a veritable fire hose of national polls that test the generic Congressional ballot (where the Democrats are doing very well). But what about in the competitive districts that really count, where the race to control the House will actually be won or lost? Such polls are harder to find but Latino Decisions has just released a poll of the 61 most competitive House districts as defined by the Cook Political Report, CNN and Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball site.

As a bonus they did oversamples of individual minority groups so they could report reliable findings for those groups. The overall +13 in these districts for the Democrats looks excellent, the minority Democratic margins are solid and the anemic +7 for the Republicans among whites (roughly two-thirds of registered voters across these districts) is quite poor by contemporary GOP standards.

The race for Georgia governor is set with Democrat Stacy Abrams running against Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who won the GOP nomination on Tuesday. Sue Halpern’s article, “Trump, Election Hacking, and the Georgia Governor’s Race” at The New Yorker raises very disturbing questions about Kemp’s integrity as Georgia’s chief vote counter, as well as what his ‘shotgun ad’ indicates about his mental health: “Georgia is one of only five states that uses voting machines that create no paper record, and thus cannot be audited, and the Center for American Progress has given it a D grade for election security. But, when D.H.S. offered cybersecurity assistance, Kemp refused it… a group called the Coalition for Good Governance sued Kemp and other state officials for failing to insure a fair election, free from interference. They asked, among other things, that the court invalidate the special election. (Handel took her seat in Congress the week after the election.) The suit was filed on July 3rd [2017]. Four days later, the servers at the Center for Election Systems were wiped clean…On August 9th, less than twenty-four hours after the case was moved to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, all the data on the Center’s backup servers were destroyed as well.” Abrams’s impressive margin in her Democratic primary victory indicates that she knows how to run an effective campaign. For those who want to help her level the playing field against Kemp’s corporate domors, here’s her ActBlue page.

Georgia has another contest of potential national importance, Democrat Lucy McBath’s campaign to unseat Karen Handel in GA-6. McBath has a decent chance here as a strong progressive and gun safety advocate in a year when it is a high-profile issue — she is the mother of a 17-year old son, Jordan Davis, who was killed in a horrific shooting by a white man. McBath’s Republican opponent, Handel, is another former Secretary of State (2007-09), who ran a suspicious project to purge “non-citizens” from the voter rolls, which provoked lawsuits by the Georgia ACLU and the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund. In addition to the incidents noted above questioning the conduct of Handel and Kemp in the office of the Georgia Secretary of State, it should be noted that the low-key Democrat Jon Ossoff received 48.1 percent of the vote in the first round election in his 2017 campaign to win the district — Handel got 19.8 percent in the first round and won the run-off by a margin of 51.7 to 48.2 percent. One Ossoff campaign worker noted that “We registered over 86,419 voter registration forms…and 40,000 of them are missing. And you know what they told us? “We don’t know what you’re talking about. What forms?” It seems that Georgia Democrats have a unique ‘Drain the swamp’ messaging opportunity in support of both the McBath and Abrams campaigns. Here’s Lucy Mcbath’s ActBlue page.

Michael Wear, author of author of “Reclaiming Hope: Lessons Learned in the Obama White House About the Future of Faith in America,” argues that “Democrats are entirely too focused on abortion” at The Monitor. “…Conservatives are primarily responsible for making “Supreme Court” another term for abortion politics. Now, Democrats are approaching the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh with the same singular focus. As MoveOn’s Washington director told the Associated Press, when it comes to Trump’s nominee, “the essential message is Roe.”…And yet voters and Democrats’ constituents have a broader set of constitutional concerns. Voting rights, immigration, workplace protections, environmental law and affirmative action are going to be at the mercy of the justices. …Does it help the party to make abortion rights such a predominant subject? Does it even help the pro-choice cause?…Kavanaugh’s confirmation battle may only make matters worse for Democrats. If the message the party delivers during the Senate hearings is single-mindedly focused on Roe and abortion rights, it may discourage support and turnout in many competitive districts crucial to switching the House and Senate from red to blue. (I’m thinking about states in the Southeast, the Rust Belt and Midwest, and even the Mountain West.)…Senate Democrats should forcefully test Kavanaugh’s fitness for the bench. But to the extent the Kavanaugh hearings are going to be a policy referendum, let’s be sure the nation hears from a party that is interested in more than just the fate of Roe v. Wade.”I think Wear is overstaing the case. Very few Democratic candidates are single-issue campaigners; it’s more that major media provides weak coverage of the other issues because they are too busy chasing Trump’s distractions du jour.

Regarding the current epidemic of hand-ringing about whether the Democrats are moving left too fast or holding on to the centrist policies too tightly, Ositu Newanevu shares some insights at slate.com, including “What do we actually know, nonanecdotally, about what kind of economic policies American voters want? For many years, Third Way has made a habit of waving around poll data showing very few Americans identify as liberals. “At the national level,” William Galston and Elaine Kamarck wrote in a report for the group called “The Still-Vital Center,” “self-identified liberals constitute barely one-fifth of the electorate; in most states, they are nowhere near a plurality—let alone a majority.” This has long been true. It has also long been true that when asked about specific proposals and political values, American voters are far more economically liberal than the numbers on ideological self-identification suggest.” Nwanevu comes down on the side of the Dem left critique. Looking at the bigger picture, a vigorous debate about whether policies are too far left or too centrist serves the cause of a healthy party, unlike the Republicans, most of whom cower in the shadows at every inane tweet by their unhinged leader.

In that same spirit, Sarah Larson’s “The Wilderness,” Reviewed: Can a Partisan Podcast Save the Democratic Party?,” also at The New Yorker, plugs Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau’s current project. Larson writes, “So much oxygen is consumed by Trump that it can be hard, for Democrats, to focus on that other problem: the Democratic Party. Democrats lost not only the 2016 Presidential election but, in the past six to eight years, some nine hundred seats nationwide. “The Wilderness,” Favreau’s ambitious new podcast about the Democratic Party, seeks to address that problem. It’s a fifteen-part series, narrative and documentary in form (it’s co-produced by Two-Up, of “36 Questions” and “Limetown”), that provides context about the Party and soul-searching about what Democrats should do next. It will conclude a few weeks before the midterms, giving newly motivated door-knockers and phone-bankers ample time to absorb its lessons. “It’s a show about us, about being honest with ourselves as Democrats,” Favreau says in an episode. “We have a lot to learn and a shitload of work to do.”

In her post, “Obama may be the only one who can heal the Democratic Party. But his presence could cost it votes” at nbcnews.com, Ashley Pratte mulls over the pros and cons of using the former president in midterm campaigns,” and comes up with this: “…Although Trump’s victory could be seen as a complete repudiation of Obama’s policies and his time in office, it’s possible that only the return of the still-popular former president could heal the party’s rifts from 2016 and help it return to power.” On the other hand, “There is one problem with keeping Obama at the helm of the Democratic Party — even if it is only behind the scenes — and that’s the fact that nothing energizes Republicans more than their distaste for Obama and his policies. If Republicans run on the idea that Obama is the puppet master (whether it be through his direct counsel or through his political committee, Organizing For Action), it will be enough to mobilize their own base and turn out the vote.” But Obama-haters were going to vote Republican anyway, and very few are going to think “I wasn’t going to vote, but since Obama out there again, I think I will.” Also, most Democratic candidates are smart enough to use the president when and where he can help. And lastly, Obama’s “Miss me yet?” star is rising every day, even among some who voted against him.

The Upshot staff has a fun, interactive map, “Political Bubbles and Hidden Diversity: Highlights From a Very Detailed Map of the 2016 Election” that provides a “A 90-second tour of 14 big cities.” The map “lets you explore the 2016 presidential election at the highest level of detail available: by voting precinct” and, “On the neighborhood level, many of us really do live in an electoral bubble, this map shows: More than one in five voters lived in a precinct where 80 percent of the two-party vote went to Mr. Trump or Mrs. Clinton. But the map also reveals surprising diversity…The election results most readers are familiar with are county maps like the ones we produce at The Times on election night. But votes are cast at a much finer unit of geography — in precincts, which may contain thousands of voters but in some cases contain only a handful. Our previous election maps contained results for about 3,100 counties; here we show results for more than 168,000 voting precincts.” It’s not hard to see how campaigns can improve their broadcast media ads using the map. Explore and learn.

Chris Cillizza argues that “Every sign is pointing to a Democratic wave in November” at CNN’s The Point: “While many of the more than four dozen Democratic challengers who outraised their GOP incumbent opponents are already in targeted races, others remain on the periphery of the landscape of what are commonly accepted as competitive districts. But if the horizon continues to slide toward Democrats, some Republican House members who may not think they are in trouble right now could find themselves suddenly vulnerable. And if their Democratic opponent already has enough money in the bank to run ads and ensure voters know they have a choice, it could be curtains for people who no one is even thinking about possibly losing right now…Add it all up — and throw in the weight of history that suggests the President’s party loses, on average, 33 seats in midterm elections — and you have a devil’s brew for Republicans….”Think it’s safe to say the odds of a D House takeover have never been higher this cycle,” tweeted National Journal politics editor Josh Kraushaar. “Time is running out for Rs to turn things around.”

If you know any younguns who are interested in getting into political campaign work, suggest they read “2018 Rising Stars” at Campaigns & Elections. The article features 22 one-paragraph profiles of young political activists (ten of them Democrats). The article notes that “Rising Star recipients have climbed to the heights of politics, launching dozens of successful consulting firms and serving at the highest levels of state and federal campaigns.” Here’s a sample entry: “Tara McGowan, Democrat, Founder and CEO, ACRONYM and Lockwood Strategy.With her new ventures, ACRONYM and Lockwood Strategy, Tara McGowan is helping progressive campaigns and organizations on the left to run more nimble and innovative digital programs. In just over a year, Lockwood has doubled in size and played a leading role in helping Democrats to major 2017 wins up and down the ballot in Virginia. Among the innovation already emerging from McGowan’s new venture: a first-of-its-kind online voter registration program with a custom built, end-to-end registration and relational organizing platform, a digital organizing tools assessment designed to help campaigns and organizations break through vendor marketing speak to more effectively utilize the digital resources available in the Democratic tech space, and a multi-million dollar digital-only effort to flip over 100 state legislative seats blue in the midterm elections this fall.”

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

A common view these days, particularly on the left, is that swing voters have disappeared. This is comforting for those who see slogans like “Abolish ICE!” as having no real downside, since there are no persuadable swing voters out there to alienate. Just need to get those juices flowing among the Democratic base!

That would make life easier, wouldn’t it? Unfortunately, in the real world of politics, this is not remotely true. Matt Yglesias does a good job of demonstrating this in a lengthy article just published on Vox.. Some of his main points:

“Swing voters have gotten rarer over time, but there are definitely swing voters, and their decision to swing one way or the other makes a difference in politics…..The 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study conducted a large sample poll and found that 6.7 million Trump voters said they voted for Barack Obama in 2012 and 2.7 million Clinton voters said they voted for Mitt Romney in 2016. In other words, about 11 percent of Trump voters say they were Obama voters four years earlier and about 4 percent of Clinton voters say they were Romney voters four years earlier….The switchers are also important because they are not evenly distributed around the country. Obama lost whites with no college degree by a very large margin in 2012, but Clinton did even worse — especially losing the support of the kind of Northern, relatively secular noncollege whites who had not already defected from the GOP. This kind of vote is disproportionately common in the three crucial swing states that delivered Trump his Electoral College victory….

Swing voters themselves are very real, concern about alienating them with unpopular positions is valid, and nothing about Trump’s election win should be seen as debunking the basic conventional wisdom about all of this. Even more importantly, there’s relatively little reason to believe that chasing swing voters requires sharp trade-offs with other electoral strategies.

Probably the biggest fallacy in the dialogue about swing voters is the widely stated — but rarely examined — notion that a political party could try to focus on “mobilizing the base” instead of persuading swing voters.

This is, however, both a conceptual and empirical confusion. For starters, the actual base of a political party is almost by definition the people you don’t need to work on mobilizing — the party regulars who are habituated to voting and loyal to the party as an institution. The people you would want to mobilize are people you have reason to believe would vote for you if forced to vote, but who for one reason or other are disinclined to actually show up…..

There’s nothing wrong with taking a stand on something you think is important, even if it’s unpopular — though a wise candidate might prefer to emphasize her popular views and reduce the salience of her less popular ones. But whatever it is that causes people to vote, the important point is that swing voters really do exist. A small but incredibly important group of Americans regularly switch their partisan allegiances, and many people are willing to vote differently down-ballot from how they vote in presidential races.

Appealing to these swing voters isn’t the only way to win elections, but it’s a pretty good strategy, and there’s no reason to believe that using it involves a hard trade-off with trying to mobilize marginal voters or anything else.”

Read more…

The following article by Michel Tomasky, editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, is cross-posted from The Daily Beast:

New developments on the #demsindisarray front as The New York Times ran a long story over the weekend under the dramatic headline “Democrats Brace as Storm Brews Far to Their Left… Fiercely Liberal Voices… Young Voters Urge Party to ‘Wake Up and Pay Attention.’”

“Storm”? “Far” to their left? I’d like to interview that headline writer. Also, “brace,” for that matter, because the article itself doesn’t really quote anybody doing any bracing, in the sense of preparing themselves for arduous battle. It quotes a couple people—Martin O’Malley, oddly, and the state party chairman in Michigan—reminding Times readers that the party still has moderate voices, and voters, too. But it doesn’t have anyone screaming to the heavens that this is suicide.

And it doesn’t have anyone screaming that because I don’t think many people really think that. Democrats disagree, and in some cases strongly, on how far left they believe the party ought to go, but the ones I talk to accept that this is happening and understand why it’s happening.

The Times article refers mostly to young people, and it’s mostly young people who are pulling the party left. And it’s easy to see why. If you’re 27 and not right wing or rich or both, you’ve grown up in a country that in most fundamental ways has gotten worse and worse since you were of an age to start paying attention to things. Inequality is worse. Opportunity is worse. Wage growth is worse. Benefit structures are worse. Job stability is far worse. If you live in a small town, your town is probably dying, and half the people you know are on drugs.

If you’re around that age and you call yourself a socialist, well, who can blame you? The capitalism that we’ve been practicing in this country for certainly the last 18 years has failed everyone except the top 10 or so percent. Barack Obama softened some of this around the edges, and with Obamacare, he did more than that. But for most people—for eight or nine out of 10 Americans—our right-wing version of capitalism has narrowed their opportunities instead of expanding them. It’s been a criminal failure (in some cases literally, even though Obama chose not to prosecute anybody).

So I think everybody understands why this is happening. And I don’t think I know a single Democrat who believes ’90s-style centrism is the answer. It’s not. Even the centrists are moving left.

Read more…

Zawn Villines’s post, “Authoritarianism Thrives on Demoralization: How to Fight Trump and Stay Psychologically Healthy” at Daily Kos (via the San Diego Free Press) suggests 15 ways to avoid activist burnout, including: “It’s time to stop pointing fingers at those who didn’t vote. Unless, of course, you want them to get even angrier and not vote again. It’s time to sway them, court them, welcome them into the party, give them a seat at the table, and when they’re ready, encourage them to run. We need everyone, and we especially need those who see what’s wrong with party business as usual.” Also, “Don’t waste your energy arguing with Nazis on Facebook. Don’t let your conservative family “devil’s advocate” you into a state of rage and panic. Don’t allow people to burn through energy you could spend on something useful” and “Stop Wasting Time Talking About How Bad Things Are or Will Be… spinning our wheels in panic about a future we can’t control only wastes energy. Do what you can to protect yourself, yes. But after you’ve done that, stop reading about how bad things are, stop trying to convince people how hopeless it all is, and get back to work.” To this last I would add, ‘Let go of political instant gratification – real social change can take years, even generations. Fight for the kids, their kids and coming generations. Be a happy, long-haul warrior.’

Here’s another great ad for Democratic congressional campaigns to learn from:

Eric Bradner has an update on “Democratic governors set to take on the bigger names in 2020 race” at CNN Politics. Bradner writes, “A handful of Democratic governors are wading into the early stages of the 2020 presidential contest…Three governors — Montana’s Steve Bullock, Colorado’s John Hickenlooper and Washington state’s Jay Inslee — each said in interviews at the National Governors Association summer meeting in New Mexico this week that they are considering 2020 runs.” Noting that all three governors have visited Iowa already, Bradner adds, “Two Democratic former governors — Massachusetts’ Deval Patrick and Virginia’s Terry McAuliffe — are also considering 2020 runs…the governors think they have a compelling case to make: While other Democratic leaders were in Washington criticizing President Donald Trump, they’ve enacted agendas designed to forcefully counter him on issues like climate change and health care.” All five governors have impressive track records and solid approval ratings in their respective states. Given the plummeting approval rates for congress, it seems increasingly possible that one of them, or another governor to come, will win the Democratic nomination.

According to judoka Masao Takahashi, Jiu-jitsu is “manipulating the opponent’s force against themselves rather than confronting it with one’s own force.” Perhaps Dems can deploy some political jiu-jitsu with an ad message that Republican domination of America’s major political institutions has produced only one legislative “accomplishment” — a multibillion dollar tax break for the wealthy. There could also be a Democratic meme/ad reminding voters that “The GOP has control of the White House, the Congress and the Supreme Court, and the only health care “reform” they are proposing is taking away coverage for prior conditions. Pathetic.”

At The Plum Line, Paul Waldman works a version of this angle: “As much attention as we all give to the latest outrage from President Trump, polls have repeatedly shownhealth care to be at or near the top of the public’s agenda when it comes to the midterm elections. Republicans are clearly nervous: They are planning symbolic votes in the House on the same old GOP health-care ideas (health savings accounts!) as a way of dealing with Democratic attacks on the issue…Unlike many issues, with health care, Democrats can make a persuasive argument no matter to whom they are talking. To their own base, they can say, “Republicans tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act and take away Medicaid from millions, and now they want to do even more to take away health security.” And to swing voters, they can say, “Look what Republicans have done to you. Your premiums keep going up, your out-of pocket costs keep going up, and now the Trump administration even wants to take away protections for people with preexisting conditions. They said they’d fix everything, and they failed.” For Democrats, Waldman argues, “as a piece of marketing, “Medicare for all” is dynamite. Everyone loves Medicare, and the idea of just giving it to everybody is incredibly appealing. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation pollfound that 59 percent of respondents favored “Medicare-for-all, in which all Americans would get their insurance from a single government plan,” while 75 percent favored a Medicare for all plan that would be open to anyone but not required.”

When we talk about “checks and balances,” it’s usually in the context of our political institutions. This includes the three branches of government being designed to limit one another or other provisions of the constitution, such as ratification of amendments by the states. Could the GOP’s majorities also provide Democrats with a ‘checks and balances’ messaging opportunity? To restore healthy balance to our government, voting Democratic is the most effective thing a citizen can do in 2018. As Lee Drutman observed at vox.com, “There is no separation of powers without divided government.” It may seem a self-evident point, but it can’t hurt to encourage voters to think about it a little more. Dems could have a jiu-jitsu ad about one-party rule, and the responsibility of citizens who value balance and bipartisanship to vote accordingly: “The ulitimate force for ‘checks and balances’ is the voter” is a message that may resonate in the fall.

Despite gridlock in congress, Democrats have reason for hope in the state legislatures: “Since the Parkland, Fla., high school massacre in February,” writes Amber Phillips in her article “After Parkland, gun-control advocates see a turning point for new state laws” at The Fix, “gun-control advocates have said there is something different about the debate this year, an energy on the issue that is driving gun safety to the top of minds of suburban moms and younger, traditionally less engaged voters. How, or if, that affects the November midterm elections is to be determined. But there is an early manifestation of this newfound political energy: Gun-control advocates had their best year in state legislatures in recent history…Since the Florida shooting, the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence counts 55 new gun-control laws passing in 26 states. That is far more success than they normally see, any way you measure it: in the number of laws, the variety of the laws passed and the bipartisan support a number of them had. Republican governors in 15 states signed bills gun-control advocates supported…It is hard to overstate what a shift this is from last year, where gun-control groups were focused on trying to stop states from allowing guns in universities in churches. But after Americans lived through three of the deadliest mass shootings in its history, it was the pro-gun rights side that was on the defense in state legislatures in a way it has not been before.”

Democrats had better be on high alert for voter “caging” projects by Republicans, particularly in swing districts. Li Zhou reports that “Voter purges are on the rise in states with a history of racial discrimination” at Vox. Zhou notes that “States are kicking a growing number of voters off their rolls in the wake of a 2013 Supreme Court decision that invalidated a key part of the Voting Rights Act…The spike is notable. Between 2006 and 2008, 12 million voters were purged from voter rolls. Between 2014 and 2016, that number rose to 16 million — a roughly 33 percent increase…Voter purge rates in preclearance jurisdictions between 2012 to 2016 far outpaced those in jurisdictions that were not previously subject to federal preclearance. The report — which analyzed 6,600 jurisdictions and calculated purge rates for 49 states — concludes that as many as 2 million more voters were removed from voter rolls due to the higher purge rates in the preclearance states.”

James Downie explains “What really disturbs voters about Russia’s election interference” at Post Partisan.” Citing the new Washington Post-ABC News poll, Downie writes, “the poll also suggests that, in talking about the “Russia scandal,” Trump opponents should focus less on Russia and more on the election interference itself…Partisans support or oppose Trump depending on their political party, and independents are less concerned about the president’s performance than furor in Washington and the media would suggest. Clear majorities of Republicans approved of how Trump handled the summit and believe American leadership has “gotten stronger.” Democrats said the opposite. And for independents, only 38 percent thought the president went “too far” in supporting Putin, compared with 52 percent who answered “not far enough” or “about right.”…Trump opponents can be slightly relieved that independents didn’t side with Republicans. Overall, though, as The Post’s Scott Clement and Dan Balz note, “The findings indicate that while Trump was judged critically for his summit performance, the event has not at this time proved to be a significant turning point in his presidency.” If you wondered why even after Helsinki most Republicans avoided criticizing the president, this poll is your answer…But on one question — whether voters approve of Trump expressing doubt about whether Russia tried to influence the 2016 election — the numbers look different. On that query, 60 percent of independents disapprove — a clear majority. Furthermore, only 51 percent of Republicans approve of Trump impugning the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusions and 31 percent disapprove. Yes, that’s still a majority in favor, but by Republican standards, 51 percent support for the president is astonishingly low. Remember, at the 500-day mark of his presidency, Trump’s approval rating among Republicans was nearly 90 percent. Other than George W. Bush post-Sept. 11, that’s the highest support for a president within his own party since World War II. Any issue where only half of Republicans support the president and nearly a third oppose is an opportunity to erode enthusiasm among his base…for everyone who understands that protecting special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe is vital, this poll is a reminder to keep election interference itself front and center when making that case.”

The following article by Stan Greenberg, Greenberg Research, Page Gardner, Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund and Nancy Zdunkewicz, Democracy Corps, is cross-posted from democracycorps.com

Pundits built a new conventional wisdom that included higher job approval ratings for President Donald Trump due to the tax cuts and strong economy that could shrink the enthusiasm ad- vantage and midterm vote for Democrats. But they are wrong about the political trends, the econ- omy, and what motivates Democrats. They miss how the GOP strategy branded Trump and the GOP as only out for themselves and the rich.

This is according to the second of three waves of WVWVAF’s battleground research program conducted by Democracy Corps. This program consists of phone polling among registered voters and an on-going web-panel of 1,813 target voters – the Rising American Electorate of minorities, millennials, and unmarried women, plus white working class women – in 12 states with competi- tive races for governor, Senate, and Congress, including 42 Cook competitive seats.1 The same web-panel respondents were interviewed in April and late June, so these reported trends we know to be true.

Here are the key findings:

• The off-year trends that favor Democrats have solidified and grown. In fact, Trump’s base strategy is pushing up Democrats and anti-Trump voters’ intention to vote in this off-year and is widening the enthusiasm gap.
• Over the past three months, a nationalized Democratic advantage has emerged across the Senate, congressional and governors’ battlegrounds as Democrats have made gains in the Cook battleground districts and in the governors’ races.1
• Despite perceptions of a strong macro-economy, Donald Trump’s poor job approval rat- ings barely budged from April; nor did the intense disapproval of his presidency dimin- ish, thereby fueling and sustaining the enthusiasm gap between Democrats and Republi- cans.
• Trump and the GOP have a strategy, but it is not working: they did not make gains on handling taxes, the economy or immigration.
• Pundits are missing how frustrated ordinary citizens are with politicians who put govern- ment to work for their big donors and corporations, and don’t get how much ordinary people are struggling with wages that don’t keep up with higher costs, health care above all.
• The passage of the Republicans’ tax scam for the rich has created a shared brand for Trump and the GOP as out for themselves and the rich.
• Yes, voters know there are more jobs and they are feeling more financially secure, but that has nothing to do with their wages and the cost of living. Two-thirds of the base say the growing economy is not helping them and a big majority says wages aren’t keeping up with rising costs. Dominating their economic pain are health care costs.
• When asked what issues are impacting their vote, Democrats and the Rising American Electorate point first to the cost of health care, followed by guns.
• Democrats have powerful messages that drive higher turnout. Each begins with attacks on corrupt work for wealthy donors and corporations, highlights the corrupt tax deal for corporations and accuses Trump and the GOP of governing for the rich and themselves while voters struggle. The voters know which politicians are in charge and who they are working for, and they reward Democrats who embrace these messages.
• The strongest Democratic message platform: politicians in Washington divide the country so they can cut corrupt deals for big donors, corporations, and themselves which hurt working people and the middle class. The reckless increase in the deficit means less in- vestment, less help with health care, and puts Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid at risk.
• A millennial-directed message on this platform has real power and drives up turnout among Democratic voters.

(On behalf of Women’s Voices. Women Vote Action Fund, Democracy Corps conducted the second in a series of three phone surveys with accompanying web-surveys among an on-going panel of minorities, millennials, unmarried women and white non-college educated women (the RAE+) in 12 states with Governor races (10 Senate race states): Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Wisconsin. The phone survey of 1,000 registered voters with 66 percent cell-rate was conducted June 11-14, 2018. The voter-file matched web-panel of 1,813 “RAE+” registered voters was conducted June 13-28, 2018.)

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