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

The Latest Messaging Brainstorm from Progressive Democrats.

Probably not gonna work either. I explain at The Liberal Patriot:

“There is a new entrant in the Democratic messaging sweepstakes: “inclusive populism”. The idea here is that Democrats may indeed be bleeding working class voters—points for at least recognizing the problem!—but the solution does not lie in any way with moving to the center on culturally-inflected issues like crime, immigration, race, gender and schooling. That would apparently not be “inclusive”.

Instead, as recounted in Blake Hounshell’s Times article on their initial gathering, the inclusive populists argue for turning it up to 11 on economic populism since “[Democrats] don’t fight hard enough for working-class people, and…aren’t tough enough on big, greedy corporations.” As Hounshell notes:

“The unmistakable tone of the event was a rebuke of the Democrats who have failed to squeeze more progressive policy wins out of their congressional majority over the last 18 months — and essentially, in the left’s telling, let their most conservative member, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, dictate the terms of their governing agenda.”

There are two big problems with this approach.”

Read the whole thing at The Liberal Patriot!

Nate Silver explains why “The Political Environment Might Be Improving For Democrats” at FiveThirtyEight: “As was the case when we launched the forecast a month ago, the Deluxe version of FiveThirtyEight’s midterm model still rates the battle for control of the Senate as a “toss-up.” But within that category there’s been modest, but consistent movement toward Democrats. Their chances of winning the Senate now stand at 55 percent. That’s up from 47 percent from forecast launch on June 30. It’s also up from 40 percent in a retroactive forecast dated back to June 1….This is matched by Democrats’ improved position on the generic congressional ballot, which asks voters which party they would support in a congressional election. Democrats are now essentially tied with Republicans in our generic ballot polling average, after having trailed by 2 to 3 percentage points over most of the late spring and early summer.

At The Cook Political Report, Amy Walter observes, “Over the last couple of weeks, there’s been a shift in opinion among many political professionals about Democrats’ chances in the midterm campaign. They point in particular to improvement for Democrats in the generic ballot poll question (which party would you like to see control Congress?), as well as recent Senate polls which show incumbent Democrats significantly outpacing Biden’s job approval ratings in their respective states….The explanation for this seeming disconnect between the president’s weak approval ratings and stronger showings for Democratic House and Senate candidates seem to be driven by a few factors: a post-Dobbs energizing of the Democratic base, weak and/or flawed GOP senate candidates, and the January 6th hearings. In other words, the media focus has increasingly been centered on issues that are harmful for the GOP. …Yet, there’s nothing new about a late summer ‘reassessment’ of midterm assumptions. In fact, like clockwork, the out-party right about now starts to fret that their advantage is slipping, while the in-party sees green shoots springing from a barren landscape….But, have things really improved for Democrats? The most recent polls measuring the generic preference for Congress have shown a Democratic advantage of anywhere between 4 to 6 points. Overall, the generic ballot average in RealClearPolitics is a narrow R+2.2. So, suppose you compare Biden’s net job approval rating of -17 (39 percent approve minus 56 percent disapprove) to Republicans’ one to two-point advantage on the generic ballot? In that case, it looks as if Democrats are outpacing the president by 15 to 16 points. But, what if you looked at Biden’s overall job approval number (39 percent) and compared it with the vote share a Democrat is getting in the generic ballot (43 percent). Looking at it that way, a Democrat is outpacing Biden by a much smaller 5 points. And historically, that’s about the average margin that candidates of the in-party have been able to over-perform the president….Democratic candidates will also need a certain percentage of independent voters to support them. And, those independent voters not only deeply disapprove of Biden, but they are also more focused on the economy and inflation.”

From “Do Senate Republicans have a candidate problem?” by Adam Wollner at CNN Politics: “More than half (55%) of registered voters in Pennsylvania view Oz, a celebrity doctor, unfavorably, while just 35% view him favorably, according to Fox’s polling. By comparison, Fetterman, currently the state’s lieutenant governor, is viewed favorably by 49% of voters and unfavorably by 34%. Perhaps the most alarming number for Oz: only 67% of Republicans hold a favorable view of him….Walker isn’t in quite as rough of shape, but his favorability rating is also under water: 43% of Georgia voters view him favorably, and 48% view him unfavorably. Warnock breaks about even at 48% favorable and 47% unfavorable. Broken down by party, 82% of Republicans hold a favorable view of Walker, while 93% of Democrats hold a favorable view of Warnock….In both states, the Democrats are managing to outpace their Republican opponents even as President Joe Biden’s favorability rating sits just north of 40%….These are far from the first warning signs that have come up for Oz and Walker. Oz has faced scrutiny about his residency from the start of his campaign. For Walker, there have been revelations he had three children with women he was not married to, questions over his past business ventures and repeated verbal gaffes. Plus, both are raising far less campaign cash than their Democratic counterparts….And these are far from the only Senate candidates Republicans are concerned about. In Ohio, a state Biden lost by 8 points in 2020, GOP nominee J.D. Vance was outraised by a 9-1 margin in the second quarter and has made a long string of controversial comments….The GOP’s Senate headache could get even worse after next Tuesday’s primaries. In Arizona, which will host one of the country’s marquee Senate races this fall, Blake Masters has embraced former President Donald Trump’s unfounded election fraud claims. Republicans also fear that scandal-plagued former Gov. Eric Greitens would put deep-red Missouri’s Senate seat in play if he emerges as the party’s nominee.”

In “The Democrats’ Rural Problem” Kaleidoscope Munis and Robert Saldin write at The Washington Monthly: “Over the past two decades, Democrats have hemorrhaged support in the countryside. As recently as 1996, President Bill Clinton carried more than 1,100 rural counties in his reelection bid—about half the nation’s total. In 2008, Barack Obama’s haul of rural counties plummeted to 455 while he cruised to an easy win nationally. By 2020, a Democratic pulse could barely be detected in rural America. Joe Biden only won 194 rural counties. The collapse continues. Last year, Glenn Youngkin carried Virginia’s 20 least populous counties by 27 points on average in his gubernatorial bid, a 12-point improvement for the GOP over 2017….A handful of Democratic strategists and politicians with roots in the heartland have been trying to ring the alarm. For instance, Senator Jon Tester’s memoir, Grounded: A Senator’s Lessons on Winning Back Rural America, details how he balances his day job in Washington with running a farm in rural Montana, and offers his party a series of “lessons on winning back rural America” that include showing up and actually campaigning hard in rural areas. Similarly, Illinois Representative Cheri Bustos and her political adviser, Robin Johnson, have written a series of reports concerning the “ground game” of Democrats who have been successful in rural and working-class districts that Trump carried….A handful of Democratic strategists and politicians with roots in the heartland have been trying to ring the alarm. For instance, Senator Jon Tester’s memoir, Grounded: A Senator’s Lessons on Winning Back Rural America, details how he balances his day job in Washington with running a farm in rural Montana, and offers his party a series of “lessons on winning back rural America” that include showing up and actually campaigning hard in rural areas. Similarly, Illinois Representative Cheri Bustos and her political adviser, Robin Johnson, have written a series of reports concerning the “ground game” of Democrats who have been successful in rural and working-class districts that Trump carried….The latest entry in this burgeoning genre comes from a Democratic state senator from Maine, Chloe Maxmin, and her campaign manager, Canyon Woodward. (Maxmin has decided not to run for a second term. She had previously served one term in the Maine House.)…In Dirt Road Revival, the authors offer what they consider a “tough-love letter” to their party. The book provides a good overview of how the Democratic abandonment of rural America has been bad for the party and the country. Maxmin and Woodward chronicle the decision by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, following the 2010 midterm disaster, to disband working groups dedicated to rural politics. They chart how Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign neglected rural voters and review Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer’s myopic attempt to rationalize the problem by proclaiming that “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

Sometimes small changes in a factor affecting elections can have big consequences. I wrote about one that has and might at New York:

Since 2016 that the state-by-state landscape of the Electoral College system has made winning presidential contests harder than it should be for Democrats. It’s not just a coincidence that Hillary Clinton won the 2016 national popular vote by 2.1 percent but lost the election by 77 electoral votes, or that Joe Biden won the 2020 national popular vote by 4.4 percent yet came within 42,918 votes of losing the Electoral College. Part of the problem is that the Electoral College system reinforces the small-state bias of the U.S. Senate by giving each state three electoral votes before population is considered. But more subtly, the distribution of voting strength around the country makes the states that decide presidential election more Republican than the country as a whole.

The presidential election map as of 2021. Graphic: The Cook Political Report

This disadvantage for Democrats is getting worse, says Amy Walter, after presenting the Cook Political Report’s revised PVI (Presidential Voting Index) ratings for states (an analysis of the partisan “lean” of all 50 states based on the last two presidential elections):

“[W]hen looking exclusively at the Electoral College map, Republicans are enjoying a stronger advantage than at any point in the 25-year history of the Cook PVI. In 1997, the median Electoral College vote (located in Iowa) had a PVI score of D+1; meaning that the median Electoral College vote was one point more Democratic than the nation as a whole. By 2005, the median Electoral College state (Florida) had a PVI of R+1. In 2021, Wisconsin, with a PVI score of R+2, is the median Electoral College vote. So, if, for example, a Republican presidential candidate were to get 49 percent of the national popular vote, we should expect that Republican to get 51 percent of the vote in Wisconsin.”

And that would be enough for the national W, assuming a uniform distribution of voting support. But since most political junkies have fixed notions of “battleground states” they carry around in their minds, it’s important to notice which states are now the most competitive. It’s not what you might expect if your view of the states hasn’t been regularly updated. Cook has a list of “hypercompetitive” states dating back to 1997 based on those with PVIs between D+3 and R+3; it’s updated after each presidential election. Iowa and Ohio were regularly on that list until both finally fell off n 2021. That same year, Arizona and Georgia appeared for the first time. The number of such states has declined from 19 in 1997 to 13 in 2021. And the states clustered around Wisconsin as potential tipping points that are just a bit more Republican than the national average include Pennsylvania (R+2), Arizona (R+2), Michigan (R+1), and Nevada (R+1). Wisconsin went Democratic in seven straight presidential elections prior to 2016; Pennsylvania and Michigan did the same for six straight elections. And Arizona went Republican in 16 of 17 presidential elections from 1952 through 2016. It’s a new landscape, all right, and a tougher one for Democrats. Sure would be nice for them if the presidential candidate favored by a plurality of voters simply won.

From “In victory for Democrats, Congress sends chip subsidy bill to Biden” by Gavin Bade at Politico:

The House approved a massive semiconductor subsidy and research bill known as the “Chips plus Science” Act, 243-187, with one lawmaker voting present, sending the legislation to President Joe Biden for his signature.

The bill, in the works for almost two years, is intended to decrease U.S. reliance on computer chips manufactured in China and other countries, as well as fund science and technology research to keep American industries competitive with foreign firms.

The vote represents a win for the White House and congressional Democrats, who in recent months stripped out a litany of provisions related to trade and competitiveness strategy toward China in an attempt to get the legislation over the finish line before the midterm elections. President Biden, who has hailed the legislation as “historic,” reiterated Thursday he will swiftly sign it into law.

“The CHIPS and Science Act is exactly what we need to be doing to grow our economy right now,” the president said in a statement after the House passed the bill. “By making more semiconductors in the United States, this bill will increase domestic manufacturing and lower costs for families. And, it will strengthen our national security by making us less dependent on foreign sources of semiconductors.”

Bade notes that “….24 GOP House members supported final passage of the legislation. That includes Foreign Affairs Committee ranking member Michael McCaul (R-Texas), who said the national security concerns that fueled the bill needed to be addressed….“I get the classified briefings, not all these members do,” McCaul told reporters ahead of the vote. “This is vitally important to our national security.”

Perhaps swing voters in the other 187 Republican-held House districts would like to know why their reps did not support the bill.

Just a reminder, “Republicans Shouldn’t Get a Pass on Climate,” Mark Hertsgaard argues at The Nation: “….Despite mountains of scientific findings and heartbreaking real-world evidence, GOP leaders, including (but certainly not limited to) Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, and Steve Scalise, have demonized the very idea that climate action is important. Above all, congressional Republicans have opposed every major piece of legislation intended to tackle the onrushing crisis….Which is why President Joe Biden found himself giving a speech on July 20 announcing executive actions to deal with what he called the “climate emergency”—even as he stopped short of declaring an official national emergency—including more wind power and helping low-income households pay for air-conditioning.” Hertsgaard heaps blame on Sen. Manchin, but adds, “it is bizarre that his Republican counterparts haven’t faced this intensity of criticism, even though they are at least as culpable. Search the news stories and public statements cited above, and countless others from the same time frame, and you’ll find that Republicans’ role in blocking Build Back Better is rarely even mentioned—and certainly not identified as the principal reason climate legislation routinely dies on Capitol Hill….today’s Republicans pay no political price for torching the planet. In a democracy, elected officials are free to vote for or against whatever they please, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be held accountable for their choices. But most political observers, journalists, and even political adversaries simply accept the GOP’s climate obstructionism as an immutable fact of life, not worth calling out or wasting energy on….Instead, Republicans get to please their climate-denying voter base as well as their fossil-fuel-industry donors—and never have to explain themselves to the broader electorate, which, as it happens, favors climate action. Manchin gets nearly all the blame….In the weeks ahead, Biden, Democratic candidates, and climate activists can help voters understand the stakes and learn which politicians do and don’t favor climate suicide.” Hertsgaard has a scold for the press as well as Republican leaders, concluding “But the days of giving any politician a pass on climate action versus climate suicide must be over, or suicide it will surely be.”

In Kyle Kondik’s latest post at Sabato’s Crystal Ball, he shares the bad news that “All told, we have 10 rating changes this week, all but 1 of which favors Republicans” and “We don’t see a huge impact, so far, from the Supreme Court’s landmark abortion opinion.” But Kondik also adds, “In a midterm environment such as this one, the opposition party has the clear advantage in terms of “nationalizing” races, running on national themes like dissatisfaction with President Biden (whose approval rating is languishing in the 30s) and issues such as inflation and gas prices. Republicans will in fact lean heavily on these themes, which are potent. But one wrinkle, thanks to Dobbs, is that Democrats have a nationalizing message of their own, on abortion rights. Hypothetically, the Dobbs decision could make it easier for Democrats to do what any party in power wants to do in a midterm but is often unable to do — make the election more of a choice than a referendum by focusing the electorate on the deficiencies of the out-of-power party and/or its candidates. Some combination of what Democrats argue is GOP extremism on abortion and other issues (perhaps related to the Jan. 6 insurrection investigation) could help Democrats in certain races make the election more of a “choice.” Democratic incumbents also have, in many instances, gigantic fundraising edges over their Republican challengers — the money spigot that Democrats turned on in 2018 remains on full blast. Money won’t shape the entire race for the House, and outside spending will be heavy on both sides, but if Republicans don’t end up doing quite as well in the House as they hope, perhaps money will be part of the reason (just as money helped explain why Democrats did so well in 2018).”

If you are looking for some good news, Manu Raju, Ella Nilsen and Tami Luhby report that “In a major boost to Democrats, Manchin and Schumer announce deal for energy and health care bill” at CNN Politics: “Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Joe Manchin on Wednesday announced a deal on an energy and health care bill, representing a breakthrough after more than a year of negotiations that have collapsed time and again.”….The deal is a major reversal for Manchin, and the health and climate bill stands a serious chance of becoming law as soon as August — assuming Democrats can pass the bill in the House and that it passes muster with the Senate parliamentarian to allow it to be approved along straight party lines in the budget process…..While Manchin scuttled President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better bill, the final deal includes a number of provisions the moderate from West Virginia had privately scoffed at, representing a significant reversal from earlier this month. That includes provisions addressing the climate crisis….The agreement contains a number of Democrats’ goals. While many details have not been disclosed, the measure would invest $369 billion into energy and climate change programs, with the goal of reducing carbon emissions by 40% by 2030, according to a one-page fact sheet. For the first time, Medicare would be empowered to negotiate the prices of certain medications, and it would cap out-of-pocket costs at $2,000 for those enrolled in Medicare drug plans. It would also extend expiring enhanced subsidies for Affordable Care Act coverage for three years.”

At The Hill, Jared Gans reports “Whitmer’s race moves from ‘toss-up’ to ‘lean Democrat.’” As Gans writes, “The nonpartisan election handicapper Cook Political Report moved the Michigan governor’s race from “toss-up” to “lean Democrat” almost a week before the GOP chooses its nominee to take on Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D)….The Republican primary has been chaotic, with five candidates, including two of the front-runners, being removed from the ballot after the state Bureau of Elections found their petitions to get on the ballot included false signatures….Ryan Kelley, who then emerged as the leading candidate remaining in the race, was arrested for allegedly being present on the grounds of the Capitol during the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021. Kelley pleaded not guilty to four misdemeanor charges earlier this month, but his poll numbers have since fallen…. Jessica Taylor, Cook’s Senate and governors editor, said in her analysis of the move that the Republican primary has been a “three-ring circus” while Whitmer has accumulated impressive fundraising numbers and a high approval rating despite President Biden’s unpopularity….A Detroit News poll from earlier this month showed Whitmer ahead of multiple potential GOP competitors by double digits. The RealClearPolitics polling average shows former news anchor Tudor Dixon as leading the Republican primary.”

Sometimes a basic political truth takes a while to gain traction, so I wrote about an important one at New York:

Not long ago there was a robust debate among Democrats over whether they should enter a dangerous midterm cycle emphasizing economic or cultural appeals. There were a lot of voices arguing for various reasons (ranging from the simple poll analysis of “popularists” who wanted Democrats to stress their most popular positions, to those fearful that progressive cultural positions would repel key swing-voter blocs) that the Democratic Party should campaign on the “kitchen-table issues” that were central to the Biden administration’s legislative agenda, from child tax credits and child-care subsidies to minimum-wage increases, pro-unionization efforts, and clean-energy subsidies. It all made good practical sense, particularly if Democrats managed to make progress on enacting some of their favorite economic-policy proposals. And it reflected a very old tradition in which economic issues provided the glue that kept a culturally heterodox (albeit increasingly anachronistic) New Deal coalition together.

Then inflation arrived as the only economic issue that mattered to most voters.

The advent of the first really major wave of price inflation since the late 1970s didn’t make any Biden-Democratic economic-policy proposals less popular, except insofar as together they were presumed to be contributing to an overheated economy or overstimulated consumer demand. When Joe Manchin began gradually decimating the Build Back Better budget reconciliation bill citing inflation fears, he was appealing less to sophisticated economic opinion than to a crude public belief that too much government spending and/or deficits was the only intelligible explanation for this curse (never mind that later versions of BBB were often designed to reduce budget deficits and hold down prices).

Worse yet, even though most Americans under the age of 50 could not remember inflation as a major national problem, it has historically been a problem that left-of-center parties have little credibility to challenge, much like right-of-center parties have little credibility on reducing unemployment or maintaining the social safety net. The perceived evasiveness of Democrats and their “experts” on the subject most recently — apparently denying and then rationalizing inflation as temporary, while dismissing the threat of a real deterioration of the purchasing power of wages, savings, or pensions — has increased that credibility gap.

Unless inflation significantly abates well before November (and there’s certainly no guarantee of that), Democrats will face midterm voters, who are already disposed to smite the party controlling the White House, in a poor position to argue they are the party that can be trusted to help middle-class families make ends meet. That doesn’t mean that if they can wrest some popular domestic proposal out of Congress such as negotiated prescription drug prices for Medicare, it won’t help; they should fight for that and do everything in their power to demonstrate Republican loyalty to Big Pharma via this issue. But it’s likely to be a small life raft against a large wave of distress about inflation, the one economic problem that afflicts nearly everyone.

Democrats thus have little choice but to shift their attention to those “divisive” cultural issues where they at least can get the attention of voters and command majority support. Thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court’s radical Dobbs decision, that now includes abortion rights, an issue where Republicans are in a weak position. Abortion rights are also an issue that can be used to illustrate the GOP’s more general hostility to majoritarian values and more general reliance on anti-democratic institutions like the courts, the Electoral College, the filibuster-controlled U.S. Senate, and reactionary state legislatures. On this front it’s the GOP, not Joe Biden or his party, that is clearly responsible for a clear and present danger to swing-voter interests. Add in a renewed threat of a return to power by Donald Trump or some MAGA successor, and you have the ingredients for a fighting chance for Democrats.

To be sure, emphasizing cultural rather than economic issues is an emotional reach for some Democrats. The Democratic left has an ancient materialist tendency to consider economic concerns the only legitimate issues, while the Democratic center has long feared the negative impact of progressive cultural positions on various swing voters. (Both, in their own way, echo the Marxists of the 1960s who told proto-revolutionary hippies to cut their hair so as not to “alienate the workers.”) But while Democrats can and should obviously hold onto a firm commitment to economic equality as the party’s long-term goal — while understanding that some cultural issues like abortion are economic issues in their own right — at present, too many voters just don’t hear or trust Democrats when they gather, to use the old cliché, round the kitchen table to discuss their daily concerns. Meanwhile those who depend on the rights that Republicans and their judicial hirelings are threatening have no one else to defend them.

Political opportunity and moral responsibility are converging. This time, at least, Democrats need to make their strongest appeal a matter of values and rights that go deeper than the wallet.

Nathaniel Rakich and Humera Lodho explain why “Why Democrats’ Midterm Chances Don’t Hinge On Biden’s Approval Rating” at FiveThirtyEight:

Earlier this month, FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver noted an interesting disconnect between two pieces of information most commonly used to predict the upcoming midterms: the president’s approval rating and polls of the generic congressional ballot (which ask Americans whether they plan to vote for the Republican or the Democratic candidate this fall).

On one hand, President Biden is historically unpopular: As of July 25 at 5 p.m. Eastern, he had an average approval rating of 38 percent and an average disapproval rating of 57 percent — a net approval rating of -19 percentage points. You have to go back to Harry Truman to find a president with a net approval rating that bad at this point in his term.

On the other, generic-congressional-ballot polls are pretty close. As of the same date and time, Republicans had an average lead of 1 point.

“Those two numbers feel difficult to reconcile. Biden’s approval rating suggests that the national mood is extremely poor for Democrats, while the generic-ballot polling suggests that the political environment is only slightly Republican-leaning. But in reality, these two types of polls aren’t in opposition as much as you might think. They’re separate metrics, and a look back at past midterm elections shows they don’t always line up. But history also shows that when they do diverge, one is more predictive than the other.

Rakich and Lodhi note further, that”plenty of Democrats tell pollsters that they disapprove of Biden’s performance, but almost all of them also say in the same breath that they will vote Democratic in the midterms (that is, if they turn out to vote — an important caveat).” Also, “it’s not unusual for presidential-approval polls and generic-ballot polls to disagree. Just take a look at where the polls stood on July 25 in the past four midterm election years: 2006, 2010, 2014 and 2018.^1“

They review the historical data in more depth and ask, “So that leaves us with one final question: Which of those two indicators should we be paying more attention to?” Their answer:

The answer is the generic ballot. Unsurprisingly, polls asking Americans which party they plan to vote for in the midterms have historically been more predictive of the midterm results than polls asking about presidential approval. As Silver concluded, the president’s popularity just doesn’t add all that much new information when you have polls that directly ask the question you want answered….In the past four midterm elections, the generic-ballot polling average has missed the national popular-vote margin for the House of Representatives by an average of only 2.5 points, while the presidential-approval polling average has “missed” (we’re using scare quotes because presidential-approval polls are not intended to be measuring this) the national popular vote margin by 5.5 points. In each of those cycles, regardless of whether the two numbers were in sync or not, the generic-ballot polling average came closer to the final vote margin — sometimes significantly closer.”

But don’t uncork the bubbly just yet, because Rakich and Lodi write, “The generic-ballot polling got worse for the president’s party in all four cycles….a trend that’s especially pronounced when a Democratic president is in office….by the fall they will be conducted among likely voters — a group that will probably be disproportionately Republican, both because Democrats tend to be more infrequent voters in general and because, currently, more Republicans than Democrats say they are enthusiastic to vote.”

They conclude: “So Republicans may lead in generic-ballot polls by only 1 point on average today. But by November, their lead will probably be a few points wider. And while that wouldn’t be as disastrous for Democrats as it would be if everyone’s midterm vote was dictated by how they rated Biden’s job performance, it would still be a great result for Republicans.”

Could this year be different because of Trump, Covid or weak GOP Senate candidates? Rakich and Lodi apparently doubt it, since they don’t address the possibility. It doesn’t seem too much to hope that one of theses factors could make a small difference for the better. But every recent midterm election in their study has had its unique twists and turns, and not many get rich betting against such voting patterns in politics.

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

From My latest at The Liberal Patriot:

“Democrats are betting on a small set of issues to mitigate their losses this November. Inflation may have just hit a 40 year high (9.1 percent) with concomitant recession risk but Democrats believe that campaigning against the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, arguing for more gun control in the wake of recent mass shootings and highlighting Trump’s anti-democratic malfeasance through the January 6th hearings can turn the tide in their favor.

It is true that recently the polls have tightened a bit in the Democrats’ favor (though some of this could be the eagerness of motivated Democrats to be polled). And there is general agreement that Democrats’ chances of holding the Senate are much better than their chances of holding the House.

Recent data indicate that success for the abortion-gun control-January 6th strategy, to the extent it is working (and might work in the future) is attributable to those voters for whom these issues loom large and are less likely to be influenced by current economic problems. Such voters are disproportionately likely to be college-educated whites and it is here that Democrats have been demonstrating unusual strength.

In the just-released New York Times-Sienna poll, Democrats have a 21 point lead in the generic Congressional ballot among these voters. Shockingly, white college Democratic support in this poll is actually higher than support among all nonwhite voters. This is remarkable and has much to do with anemic Hispanic support for Democrats, who favor Democrats over Republicans by a scant 3 points.

More broadly, the lack of Democratic support among working class (noncollege) voters is striking. Democrats lose among all working class voters by 11 points, but carry the college-educated by 23 points. This is less a class gap than a yawning chasm.”

Read the whole thing at The Liberal Patriot!

So how are Democrats doing when it comes to registering voters? Rhodes Cook takes a look at party registration trends at Sabato’s Crystal Ball and writes, “Party registration can be a lagging indicator of political change, but recent changes in some states are bringing registration more in line with actual voting….Republicans have taken the voter registration edge in states such as Florida and West Virginia somewhat recently, and Kentucky flipped to them just last week. Democrats have built bigger leads in several blue states….Democrats hold a substantial national lead in party registration, but a lot of that has to do with the fact that a number of states, many of which are Republican-leaning, do not register voters by party. A little less than two-thirds of the states register voters by party (31 states plus the District of Columbia)….Overall, Republicans have made gains over Democrats in 19 states since summer 2018, when we last looked at these trends, while Democrats have made gains over Republicans in 12 states and the District of Columbia. There are more registered Democrats than Republicans in 17 of these states plus DC, and more registered Republicans than Democrats in 14….Why does all this matter? For a long time, party registration totals have been viewed as a “lagging indicator” of a state’s political evolution, changing more slowly than dominance at the ballot box. As a consequence, registration data has sometimes not been very predictive of how a state would vote. Yet now, as states switch from Democratic to Republican across the South, the data is becoming more reflective of actual election outcomes.” It should also be noted that party registration is not the same thing as “party identification,” which can be revealed by opinion polls. I’m not sure if it is still the case, but for many years registration status was the most accurate predictor of voting.

Cook shares a couple of charts that reveal challenges Democrats face:

In “What Could Save Democrats From a Midterm Catastrophe?” at The Cook Political Report, Charlie Cook reads the donkey party the riot act, but lets in a sliver of hope: “Democrats fervently hope that the reversal of Roe v. Wade, gun legislation, and the findings of the Jan. 6 committee (or some combination thereof) might galvanize their voters enough to retain at least one chamber. But data suggests that even a combination of all three is unlikely to be the antidote for their problems….The public is exhibiting an incredibly high level of pessimism about the direction of the country thanks in part to a variety of economic indicators that are all flashing red. Inflation is running at its highest rate in more than 40 years, the National Association of Realtors reported in May that the ability of buyers to afford a home hit its lowest levels since 2006, and over half of Americans and a majority of economists are bracing for a recession in the next year or 18 months….With those factors, along with the inability of President Biden and congressional Democrats to even remotely deliver on all they promised, there is plenty to be pessimistic about for Democrats. Midterm elections are basically report cards halfway through a president’s term, an opportunity for voters to choose between “stay the course” or “time for a change.” History shows their proclivity is to opt for a midcourse correction, if not a total reversal of what happened two years earlier….Yet there might be one silver lining for Democrats on the distant horizon. Should former President Trump decide, against the advice of nearly every Republican strategist alive, to announce his candidacy before the midterm elections in November, he might energize Democratic voters enough to minimize their losses at the margins. I am not sure it would save one or both majorities, but it certainly has the potential to have a greater impact than abortion, guns, and Jan. 6 combined….As unpopular as Biden is currently, he still bests Trump in most head-to-head matchups. In fact, Trump is arguably the one Republican that Biden might have a decent chance of beating if he ultimately decides to run for reelection….under the Republican delegate-selection system of winner-takes-all rather than proportional representation, delegates allocated in rough proportion with vote share, the more rivals Trump has, the more ways the anti-Trump or non-Trump vote is split. If that’s the case, then it is more likely for Trump to prevail….But back to 2022. Clearly Democrats need to make this election about anything but Biden and the state and direction of the economy. Can Trump provide the change of venue that Democrats so desperately need?….He will need to for Democrats’ sake, because the stakes are far too high considering historic precedent when a party suffers an election wipeout like Democrats are looking at this year.”

In a FiveThirtyEight post that ought to be required reading for data-crazed political junkies, Nate Silver offers another mini-ray of hope for Dems: “We remain in something of a summer doldrums for polling, and the overall outlook for November remains about the same as in recent weeks. But polls on the race for Congress have continued to inch slightly toward Democrats in what may reflect the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade….In the Deluxe version of our midterm election forecast, Republicans have a 85 percent chance to win the House and a 51 percent chance to win the Senate, both largely unchanged from when we launched the model three weeks ago. Meanwhile, in the Classic version of the model, which sticks to purely quantitative factors and leaves out the expert race ratings published by the Cook Political Report and other such groups, Republicans are actually underdogs to win control of the Senate, with a 39 percent chance.” Silver’s column is really more about how “distinctive” New Hampshire is as a “swingy” state, what makes a state that way and which states fall into that category. But he does conclude, “My subjective experience is that New England is considerably weirder — excuse me, “more distinctive” — than our metric describes it, and that means New England tends to be quite loyal to its incumbents. Hassan will hope that pattern holds.” Hassan, who has recently been listed as one of the more vulnerable Democratic senators, surely knows that hope is good, but working like hell to win her ‘swingy’ constituencies in a tough midterm year is even better.

For a good round-up probe of the effectiveness of the ‘McCaskill strategy,’ in which Democratic campaigns give dough to the more extreme Republican primary candidates they hope to run against, check out “Democrats have been boosting ultra-right candidates. It could backfire” by Nicole Narea at Vox. Narea lists the campaigns in which the strategy has worked well for Dems, and it is an impressive list. The list of campaigns where it has backfired is shorter. But Trump’s victory over Clinton in 2016, which may or may not have been decided by the strategy, is the scariest backfire example. However, the stakes are not quite so high in the midterms, and Democratic campaigns can’t be fairly blamed for using it when it looks promising. It may have worked just last Tuesday, when a Dem-supported extremist got the GOP nomination to run for Governor of Maryland. The Democratic nominee, Wes Moore, now has a much better chance of winning the governorship, according to Maryland pundits. Moore would be Maryland’s first Black Governor if elected. Ovetta Wiggins and Erin Cox reported at The Washington Post, “Moore said in an interview that while he recognizes a victory in November would be historic, that isn’t his goal. “I’m not running to make history,” he said. “I’m running to make inequality history. I’m running to make child poverty history. I’m running to address the issues that Maryland families have been facing for generations, with an urgency that I think it deserves.” Great statement.

Every time Democrats give a helping hand to an extremist Republican candidate on grounds of non-electability, I get nervous, and so I pointed out at New York where this logic might lead:

There are three big realities facing Democrats right now that might lead them to look fondly on an old enemy. First, Democrats need a major distraction to mitigate the damage they’re likely to suffer in November’s midterm elections. Second, in this primary season, Democrats have been perfecting the art of promoting wack-a-doodle Republican extremists that they think will make weak general-election opponents. And third, Donald Trump is thought to be the one Republican 2024 presidential aspirant whom Joe Biden might be able to beat.

Nobody is more distracting or erratic than Donald Trump, who is also the man Biden defeated in 2020. So it’s logical to ask this: Will Democrats start promoting him as the putative Republican presidential nominee in 2024?

The idea is a bit shocking, as the fundamental premise of Biden’s 2020 campaign was to end the Trump nightmare and help the country regain something like its past equilibrium. And the months since Biden won have been littered abundantly with evidence that the 45th president has nothing but contempt for democracy, the rule of law, and basic arithmetic. His postelection antics could yet land him in the hoosegow. But he’s the devil Democrats know: a politician so polarizing that he has a low ceiling on support and galvanizes the opposition and its voters like no one else. Honest Republicans admit that a Trump-free landscape is ideal for midterm gains. In the somewhat longer term, Republicans hope to pocket the electoral advantages of Trumpian “populism” without its dangerously volatile source. Democrats naturally want to thwart this effort to sanitize the MAGA movement.

So as Gabriel Debenedetti put it: “A formal reentry by Trump into the political arena could be very good news electorally for both the party and the president — arguably even the best realistic chance of a political turnaround right now.” And if that’s true right now, it will probably remain true after the midterms have ended and we enter the next presidential cycle.

Philip Bump of the Washington Post puts two and two together and gets yikes!

“Let’s assume that Biden easily locks up the Democratic nomination (which is not a sure thing). Let’s assume, too, that this year’s elevation of right-wing candidates doesn’t backfire on Biden’s party. Would Democrats actively work to ensure Trump gets past Republican primary opponents? Would we see ads sponsored by deep-pocketed Democrats disparaging [Ron] DeSantis as insufficiently MAGA in New Hampshire?”

Now to be clear, it’s unwise to extrapolate Democrats’ elevate-the-kooks midterms strategy too strictly for 2024. In several midterm primaries, Democrats have given a crucial lift to little-known and underfunded candidates with fringe views, like Pennsylvania’s Doug Mastriano and Illinois’s Darren Bailey. Donald Trump isn’t going to be underfunded in 2024, and it’s not like he will need paid ads by Democrats to get attention. But National Review’s Jim Geraghty has already speculated that the all-powerful liberal media might put a thumb on the scales in the 2024 primaries:

“In 2024, which Republican will be perceived by the media as the easiest rival for Joe Biden, or Kamala Harris, or some other Democrat to defeat? I suspect it will be Trump, who just lost a presidential election, will be getting into his late 70s, who won’t stop obsessively ranting about how he was the real winner in the 2020 election, and whose actions and words led to the January 6 Capitol Hill riot …

“The typical Republican may hate the mainstream media, but that doesn’t mean the mainstream media don’t have considerable influence over who Republicans nominate for president.”

Whether or not Democrats or their media allies really do have that kind of power over Republican voters, there’s obviously a moral hazard in even attempting to put Trump a general election away from occupying the Oval Office for a second time. Even if the polls say Trump is the weakest Republican available, the polls were sure wrong in 2016 (and to a considerable extent in 2020). And it’s hard to imagine how liberated the ex-president might feel if he’s lifted to power again after eight straight years of entirely unprecedented misconduct. Could we possibly be lucky enough to survive a second Trump administration with the Constitution (minus some basic rights Trump’s Supreme Court nominees have now denied us) more or less intact?

It’s not an easy thing to figure out. As New York’s Jonathan Chait points out in comparing Trump and DeSantis, there just aren’t any non-authoritarian options for Republican presidential nominations at the moment. Democrats should probably tend to their own problems and let Republicans pick the poison they wish to administer to America in 2024.