Well, there’s certainly once element of the Republican coalition that’s excited about a competitive 2024 presidential nominating contest. I wrote about it at New York:

For the anti-abortion movement, 2022 was an epochal year, with its longtime goals, the reversal of Roe v. Wade and the abolition of federal constitutional abortion rights, accomplished in one fell swoop in the Dobbs Supreme Court decision. And the rush of Republican-controlled state legislators to enact newly available abortion restrictions was very exciting to those who spent decades struggling to find small cracks in the legal edifice created by Roe and by Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

But the grassroots political backlash to these developments should have been alarming to anti-abortion activists as they watched their long-time vassals in the Republican Party dance away from the aggressive steps to ban abortions everywhere that they had implicitly and explicitly promised to pursue once Roe went down. When Lindsey Graham tried to force a vote on a national 15-week abortion ban in the Senate in September, midterm-conscious Republican politicians all but shouted him down. By November, abortion-rights advocates had won ballot tests over laws in six states (Kansas, Kentucky, Vermont, California, Michigan, and Montana). And without question, the abortion backlash was a significant — maybe the most significant — factor in the underperformance of Republicans in the midterms.

Now divided government in Washington will paralyze policy-making on abortion and nearly every other issue for the next two years. So all eyes are on 2024, and worried anti-abortion activists are making it clear they will use all the leverage they can to reimpose their views on the GOP via litmus tests on Republican presidential candidates. As Politico reports, demand No. 1 will likely be the kind of national abortion ban Graham proposed to the horror of most of his colleagues:

“Anti-abortion advocates are insisting on more in a post-Roe era — namely, a hard commitment to back a federal abortion ban — and they’re holding out until they get it.

“That means potential Republican presidential hopefuls — such as Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose state’s 15-week abortion ban would have been at the leading edge of the anti-abortion movement a year ago — enter the 2024 cycle under pressure to go farther. There’s already a range of policy positions across the potential GOP field, from former Vice President Mike Pence’s support for a national abortion ban to former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley’s recent remarks that abortion should remain a state issue, and most have not yet detailed the exact anti-abortion policies they would push if elected.”

That will change assuming there really is a big, brawling competition for the 2024 GOP nomination full of candidate forums and dominated in some key states by activists who eat, breathe, and sleep abortion politics above all (such as Iowa, which among Republicans will remain the first contest of 2024 no matter what Democrats do). And despite the deep appreciation the forced-birth crowd has for what Donald Trump did to help bring down Roe and the powerful head of steam Ron DeSantis has built up if he decides to challenge the 45th president, no candidate will get to skip a tough abortion litmus test, or ignore demands to talk about the subject early and often.

“’Look, I’m appreciative of everything [Trump] put in place,’ Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, told POLITICO. ‘Evangelical voters and conservative voters have great admiration and appreciation for him, but they still want a vision cast for the future and they don’t want to go through four years of relitigating 2020.’

“Trump didn’t once mention abortion or the fall of Roe in his grievance-laden speech announcing his 2024 campaign, sparking conservative concerns that he won’t prioritize the issue in a third White House bid.”

DeSantis has been a bit dodgy, pushing through his legislature a 15-week ban with no exceptions but (so far) resisting demands to go farther now that he stands athwart Florida like a political colossus. But he and other potential presidential candidates will definitely have to take a stand on a national ban, which is not a theoretical matter since a very good Republican year in 2024 could give the GOP trifecta control in Washington. Certainly the topic will come up in the early and pivotal 2024 primary in South Carolina, Lindsey Graham’s state, where a potential presidential candidate, former governor Nikki Haley, has taken the position that abortion is exclusively a state issue. Here’s what Graham told Politico about that:

“’Each person running for the White House will have to come up with an answer to the question, post-Dobbs: “Should we consider this a states rights issue or a human rights issue?”‘ Graham said in an interview. ‘The pro-life community is still a strong component of the Republican Party and if you’re running for president, I think in certain states, like South Carolina, the position that the unborn have no voice in our nation’s capital will be a tough sell for the pro-life community.’”

At present the only potential 2024 Republican presidential candidate who is golden with the anti-abortion lobby is former vice-president Mike Pence, the conservative evangelical stalwart who has long favored a very tight national ban on abortions. Assuming he runs (which he’s giving every indication of doing) Pence will significantly ramp up the pressure on his rivals to commit to a federal ban on the strictest possible terms.

Will any potential GOP president look at some general-election polls and dare to push back on these demands? It’s an interesting question. The pro-choice wing of the Republican Party has been moribund for decades. But 2022 votes in Kansas and elsewhere have shown there are Republican voters who haven’t bought into anti-abortion extremism once it actually matters in terms of the law of the land. In any event, the national GOP’s position on the fraught subject will be tested as never before in 2024.

In “Why Zelensky’s surprise US visit is so hugely significant” at CNN Politics, Stephen Collinson touches on Republican ambivalence about America’s support of the Ukrainian leader and the people of that brutalized country: “His visit to Congress will also play into an increasingly important debate on Capitol Hill over Ukraine aid with Republicans set to take over the House majority in the new year. Some pro-Donald Trump members, who will have significant leverage in the thin GOP majority, have warned that billions of dollars in US cash that have been sent to Ukraine should instead be shoring up the US southern border with a surge of new migrants expected within days….Conscious of pressure from his right flank, the possible next speaker, GOP Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, has warned that Ukraine should not expect a “blank check” from the new House. Even though Ukraine still has strong Republican support in the Senate, it’s this kind of shifting political dynamic that appears to inform Kremlin perceptions about how long US resolve will last in a conflict on which Putin’s political survival may well depend.” Biden’s well-managed orchestration of Zelensky’s visit is an impressive testament to our President’s ability to call attention to the moral decay in the GOP core congressional leadership — just before Republicans take over the House speakership. For the most part, however, Republicans let their media ideologues make the nastiest comments about Zelensky. For some appalling examples,  check out “Putin’s Useful Idiots: Right Wingers Lose It Over Zelensky Visit: The anti-Ukraine right can’t stand America standing as the arsenal of democracy” by Cathy Young at The Bulwark.

You are probably not shocked by revelations that “Trump paid no taxes in half of the last six years and his returns have dozens of potential issues, as Mark Sumner explains at Daily Kos. Bearing in mind that many Americans are tired of hearing about all things Trump, his tax avoidance is nonetheless a subject that should resonate with many swing voters – particularly if he somehow becomes a GOP presidential nominee. As Sumner notes, “In all, over the six years of returns, Trump reported making money only in 2018 and 2019. He used a combination of reported losses and questionable deductions to keep his tax bills to $750 in 2016, $750 in 2017, and $0 in 2020. Trump did pay $641,935 in 2015, but don’t worry. He still has a “claim for refund” filed for that year based on a claim that he was owed more for “historic restoration.” If that claim is successful, it will return that 2015 money to Trump….This gives Trump a reported $54 million loss over these six years. In those years when he did pay taxes, he paid effectively 4% of his reported income in 2018, and 3% in 2019. The 2015 numbers involved paying taxes that carried over from the previous year, but Trump is still asking the IRS to reduce that year to no more than $750….Trump also appears to have written off over $2 million in property taxes as an income deduction; the committee notes that New York law caps that deduction at $10,000.” Trump’s tax forms also cast further doubt on his ‘successful business leader’ persona in Sumner’s view. “What’s also striking is that in every single year, including 2018, Trump’s core businesses—his golf courses, hotels, and real estate—operated at a reported loss. If Donald Trump actually makes money at anything, it’s not any of the areas in which he brags about being a success. In his best year, Trump reported that he lost $11 million on real estate.”

From “Notes on the State of North Carolina” a superb update on the state’s politics by J. Miles Coleman at Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “While Democrats broadly overperformed expectations in last month’s midterms, some weak spots in their coalition have become evident as more detailed data has emerged. Generally, Democrats relied more on persuasion — convincing swing voters to stick with them, as opposed to going with the other guys — than turnout. In several of the historically Republican suburban counties across the country, this played well for Democrats. But as news organizations like the New York Times have found, the Black vote, a key part of the Democratic coalition, was not especially animated this year….As we noted last week, North Carolina was 1 of only 7 states to be decided by less than 3 points in the 2020 presidential race — and the only state among that group to vote for Donald Trump….Though its race wasn’t in the highest tier of battleground Senate contests — the Crystal Ball had it rated as Leans Republican the entire cycle — 2022 was another cycle where Democrats came up a few points short in North Carolina. Rep. Ted Budd (R, NC-13) — who was, in retrospect, one of the better Trump-endorsed candidates running in a marginal state — held the state’s open Senate seat for Republicans by just over 3 percentage points. He beat former state Supreme Court Chief Justice Cheri Beasley (D)….Beasley was not a weak candidate: In 2020, as Joe Biden lost North Carolina by almost 75,000 votes, she lost her seat by 400 that year. Part of what made her an attractive candidate to Democrats was that, as a Black woman with statewide stature, she seemed well-positioned to inspire minority turnout. In 2020, Cal Cunningham, a white man who was their Senate nominee, got fewer votes than Biden in most areas of the state that have high Black populations — this was something that, if rectified, could have helped Democrats close the gap….To be fair to Beasley and North Carolina Democrats, low Black turnout was, again, a national problem for Democrats this year. It was especially pronounced in the South, given the region’s large Black population. In Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, and South Carolina, several heavily-Black rural counties that easily went for Barack Obama 10 years ago gave the GOP nominees for governor clear margins last month. In the Georgia Senate race, Sen. Raphael Warnock’s (D-GA) numbers in non-urban Black areas were down from his 2021 showing — but, as Georgia has less of a rural component than North Carolina, Warnock won by expanding his margins in the Atlanta metro area.”

At The Cook Political Report, Amy Walter flags four political developments coming up in 2023, which “could give us more insights into what 2024 could bring (as well as what we really learned from the 2022 midterms),” including: 1. Who Showed Up and Who Didn’t in 2022? 2. Who Stays Put and Who Retires? 3. Can Washington Work? and 4. Can Biden Keep His Momentum Going? Regarding the last point, Walter writes, “The better-than-expected midterm outcome have put President Biden in a strong position for 2024. Gone is the hand-wringing and second-guessing from his allies that dominated much of the 2021-2022 chatter. But, anyone who follows politics knows that the winds can shift at any moment. As The Washington Post’s Dan Balz noted, “despite Biden’s good fortunes in 2022 and Trump’s failures, there’s nothing certain about how 2024 will play out. Biden’s age and capacity to handle the job remain issues to many voters.” There will be unexpected events and crises. For now, the spotlight is trained on the former president and his troubles. But it won’t stay there permanently.” President Biden’s age, approval ratings and shifting winds notwithstanding, he does seem to have the determination to make an energetic run of it. Until that changes, Democrats would do well to focus more on preparing for down-ballot and state legislative races, plenty off which are also at stake in 2024.

The more I stare at 2022 election results, the more it is becoming clear that they resist an easy explanation, and I wrote about that at New York:

After the dust has settled on any election cycle, there’s a natural interest in deriving future lessons for the two major political parties. Democrats are interested in bottling and then mass-producing whatever formula enabled them to avoid an apparent oncoming Republican freight train of a midterm and instead gain a U.S. Senate seat while holding the GOP to House gains that are almost (I said almost) more trouble than they are worth.

Data points are still being collected and assessed at this point, but a very strong effort by FiveThirtyEight’s Geoffrey Skelley to examine four big Senate races that Democrats won but were at various points in doubt (in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Pennsylvania) shows us that the search for some simple, overriding explanation may not be terribly fruitful.

Using county-level and in some cases precinct-level results, Skelley explains that the winning formula for Mark Kelly, Raphael Warnock, Catherine Cortez Masto, and John Fetterman varied significantly. To oversimplify it, Kelly beat Blake Masters mostly thanks to overperformance among Latino voters; Warnock beat Herschel Walker via impressive margins in Atlanta’s urban core and suburbs; Cortez Masto (the one Democrat in these states to run a bit behind Joe Biden’s 2020 performance) held on against Adam Laxalt by a slightly inflated vote among white college-educated voters; and Fetterman dispatched Mehmet Oz pretty clearly by cutting into the recent Republican margins among white working-class voters.

Now it’s also true that all four of these winners more or less held on to the vast majority of Biden 2020 voters as well. But in an apparent era of very close partisan balance, gains and losses beyond rigid partisan bases are probably what matter most. It’s also true that all four candidates, and the Democratic Party as a whole, benefitted from certain unique developments that helped make the usual midterm referendum on the president more of a “choice” election, namely the reversal of Roe v. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court and high-profile meddling in the election by Donald Trump. And, finally, Kelly, Warnock, and Fetterman — and arguably Cortez Masto as well — got lucky by drawing relatively weak Republican opponents.

So what does all this add up to as a lesson for Democrats going forward? Probably nothing in particular. They certainly cannot count on an epochal development in the judicial system at the very moment an election cycle is heating up to occur on schedule. And there’s only so much you can do to dial up bad opponents. It’s noteworthy that none of the four Senate races in question were among those in which Democrats played the dangerous but occasionally successful game of running ads attacking the most extremist Republican candidates to boost their prospects of winning GOP primaries. Two of the “bad” Republican Senate nominees in the states Skelley analyzed (Laxalt and Walker) were runaway favorites among GOP primary voters. The most prominent alternative to Masters in Arizona (Jim Lamont) was as out there ideologically as Masters himself. And the characteristics that made Oz a stone loser were not nearly as apparent in the primary season as they were when he suddenly started talking about the price of crudités.

It probably is noteworthy that three of the four Democratic Senate candidates in question (all incumbents) were unopposed in their own primaries, and the fourth, Fetterman, won his primary easily. And all of them raised money at a very good clip. But those are always positive candidate qualities in any election. That’s true as well of the successful microstrategies including Warnock’s early-voting blitz prior to the December 6 primary in Georgia, which we will likely learn more about as the story of 2022 becomes more fully available.

At this point, the closest you can come to a general lesson for Democrats in 2022 is that it’s a good idea to stay united, raise money feverishly, prepare for whatever opportunities the campaign offers, and choose candidates with the strength to endure the rolling nightmare that contemporary high-profile contests often produce. You cannot simply dial up candidates with the incredible stamina of Warnock or the amazing courage of Fetterman. But without question, in a period of electoral gridlock, 2022 did establish that, on the crucial margins, candidates and campaigns still matter. And in politics as in football, sometimes the key to victory is to set aside any predetermined grand strategy and simply take what each opponent gives you.

Stephen Amberg, author of A Democracy That Works: How Working-Class Power Defines Liberal Democracy in the United States, explains why “The 2022 midterm results show how the US party realignment is continuing” at the Long Read of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Among his observations:

“The 2022 midterm election is confirmation that the US turned the corner in 2020 from the neoliberal party system that has dominated since the 1980s. There is no guarantee the process will continue, and many forces are in play, but the Biden administration and Democratic Congress not only delivered policies that take a new post-neoliberal direction in economic strategy…..Democrats were liberal on cultural issues and favored equal economic opportunity, which, they argued, could be secured in the new economy by targeted social investments in education and health care, retraining, and entitlement reform. But, like other leftwing parties in Europe, the Democrats alienated the working-classes and played into the hands of rightwing critics who labeled them frauds and elitists….”

The Republican Party has moved its campaign messaging to the far right. What else could it do? The Republicans have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections. Their neoliberal governing strategy became very unpopular. Deregulation of finance and bailouts of banks, free trade and off-shoring jobs, tax cuts for the rich, deregulation of civil rights and voting rights, cutbacks in pensions, education, and health care, lagging the minimum wage behind inflation, privatization of the veterans’ health care system and Medicare — none of it is popular. In contrast, this year’s Democratic attacks on corporate profiteering, raising taxes on corporations, guaranteeing health care, increasing the minimum wage, and forgiving some student debt polled very well.”

Amberg notes further that “The Biden administration is the most pro-labor administration since John F. Kennedy’s. The historically outstanding 2022 results confirm the potential of the new Democratic strategy. If they stick to the strategy, they can establish dominance in the party system.” In addition,

….Of course, the Biden administration struggled for a year to corral Senate votes to pass the progressives’ plans; in the end, Congress passed only part of it. But the important points are, first, it did pass quite a lot and, second, the Biden Democrats are rejecting the Republicans’ definition of electoral space and they are expanding political possibilities. Just this year Democrats passed major bills for energy and climate action, infrastructure investment, a corporate minimum tax, the CHIPS and Science Act that asserts a new industry policy, including microchip manufacturing in the US, reduced ACA health insurance premiums for nine million people, expanded Medicare benefits and capped insulin prices, increased funding for veterans, the military, and local police, and passed the Safer Communities Act to address gun violence and mental health. Congressional Republicans almost all voted against every bill. Biden ordered up to $20,000 in student loan forgiveness with an income cap, rallied NATO to help Ukraine resist Russian aggression, and is keeping Trump’s trade pressure on China.

“The Democrats’ new definition of politics contrasts with the Republicans’ messaging about the “elites vs. the people,” Amberg writes. “Biden Democrats are organizing an “equitable economy vs. corporate power” cleavage. This has a distinct working-class dimension to it, but now understood as an “intersectional” working-class. This theme contributed to victories in Pennsylvania, Ohio Congressional races, and in Michigan, Minnesota and elsewhere. The Progressive Caucus in the Congress is adding members.”

Amberg concludes, “Can the Democrats stick to the equitable economy theme against Republican Congressional opposition and corporate hostility? In their favor, the laws already passed earlier this year are going to be implemented and people will receive the benefits. In 2023, the Democrats will still have control of the White House and the Senate, guaranteeing approval of Biden’s judges and executive appointments. They can do a lot to sustain the momentum in the next two years.”

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

To paraphrase Barry Goldwater, I sometimes think the slogan of the Democratic party’s left is: “Extremism in the defense of progressivism is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of votes is no virtue”. Here are ten reasons why that approach is dead wrong and why Democrats need to fully and finally reject it if they hope to break the current electoral stalemate in their favor.

1. In the 2022 election, the reason why Democrats did relatively well was support from independents and Republican leaning or supporting crossover voters—not base voters mobilized by progressivism. These independents and crossover voters were motivated to support Democrats where they did because many Democrats in key races were perceived as being more moderate than their extremist Republican opponents. Moderation = Democratic votes.

2. In fact, as the Democratic party has moved to the left over the last four years, they have actually done worse among their base voters. They’ve lost a good chunk of their support among nonwhite voters, especially Hispanics, and among young voters. Since 2018, Democratic support is down 18 margin points among young (18-29 year old) voters, 20 points among nonwhites and 23 points among nonwhite working class (noncollege) voters. These voters are overwhelmingly moderate to conservative in orientation and they’re just not buying what the Democrats are selling. Moderation = Democratic votes.

3. Nor are Democrats making up for this loss of support with a surge in turnout generated by mobilizing their base groups in  a great progressive anti-MAGA crusade. In fact, Latino and black turnout was rather poor in this election as it was among Democrats overall. It turns out that the progressive base mobilization strategy hss a fatal flaw for the Democrats: the concerns of many of “their” voters do not track with the issues that motivate progressives. These voters would be more likely to turn out for a Democratic party associated with safe streets, a healthy economy and a sensible, non-divisive approach to social issues. Moderation = Democratic votes.

4. Democrats lost the House popular vote overall by 3 points in this election. That’s bad enough but they also lost the statewide House vote in seven (7!) states with Democratic-held Senate seats up in 2024. That includes four Biden states (Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) and three Trump states (Montana, Ohio and West Virginia). But the Biden states were all carried by under 3 points (.3, 2.4, 1.2 and .6, respectively) while the Trump states were all crushing Democratic losses (16, 8 and 39 points, respectively). It defies logic to think Democrats can compete successfully across these House Republican-supporting states in 2024, especially if Republicans run halfway sane candidates, without burnishing their common sense, distanced-from-the-national-party credentials. More progressivism ain’t gonna do it. Moderation = Democratic votes.

5. Democrats did relatively well in 2022 by taking down extreme Republican candidates. But the fact remains that the party itself is still regarded as extreme, particularly in its tolerance of extremist groups. 53 percent of voters thought so in 2022. Granted, an identical 53 percent thought the same thing about the Republican party. But imagine how well the Democrats could do if they were viewed as much less extreme than the Republicans. Moderation = Democratic votes.

6. Moderate candidates generally do better than more ideological candidates and this election was no exception. That was certainly true for the Republican party, where Trumpy candidates paid a steep price relative to their saner counterparts. But Democrats who succeeded also ran moderate campaigns and sought to dissociate themselves from the generic progressive brand.

As Warnock’s campaign manager neatly put it:

There could have been other campaign operatives or another campaign that could have said, ‘OK, Herschel Walker has all this baggage, so we’re just going to run to the left and just try to turn out as many of our voters and just let Republicans eat their own. We didn’t do that.

To this day, strenuously progressive groups like Justice Democrats have yet to flip a single seat from the Republicans, despite an abundance of effort. You’d think they’d get the message. Moderation = Democratic votes.

7. Remember Trump-Biden voters—voters who supported Trump in 2016 but Biden in 2020? They and voters like them will loom large in 2024. According to polling this year by JL Partners, just 10 percent of Trump-Biden voters think we need to go farther on political correctness in society today, compared to 51 percent who think we’ve gone too far. The analogous numbers for teaching children about trans issues are 14 percent (go farther) and 36 percent (too far); for efforts to remove historical statues, 8 percent (go farther) and 62 percent (too far); for teaching children about critical race theory, 18 percent (go farther) and 34 percent (too far); for removal of people from jobs for past offensive comments, 12 percent (go farther) and 43 percent (too far); for Black Lives Matter protests, 10 percent (go farther) and 49 percent (too far); and for use of different gender pronouns, 10 percent (go farther) and 51 percent (too far). Since progressives want to press the accelerator on all these things, their approach doesn’t seem like a good fit for this important swing voter group—and really probably for any swing voter group. Moderation = Democratic votes.

8. In the 2022 election, Democrats’ national-facing strategy left some important things out, reflecting the priorities of the progressive groups and the social strata they represent. Stan Greenberg notes:

In the last two months of the midterm election, Blacks, Hispanics, and Asian Americans prioritized the cost of living and crime, despite Democrats not speaking about either. In the election survey, they prioritized cost of living, inflation, and economy and jobs—barely intersecting with the priorities of the national Democrats.

Common sense suggests you should pay attention to the issues voters are most concerned about, rather than just singing from the progressive hymnal. It would likely pay off at the ballot box. Moderation = Democratic votes.

9. Speaking of crime, here’s a way to break out of the stalemate and really establish your moderate bona fides (as a number of politicians like incoming Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro did). Greenberg again:

Democrats break through parity when they call out the handful of Democrats who decline to talk about violent crime and public safety and the need to get more police into our communities. A message that says Democrats will not “defund in any way” and support “first responders” gets 7 points more warm than cool responses, in a midterm electorate that Republicans won by 3 points. Tackling your own party on crime is a good way for Democrats to break through.

Say it loud: I’m moderate and I’m proud! The voters will reward you. Moderation = Democratic votes.

10. And one last point: Democrats shouldn’t be afraid to embrace patriotism and dissociate themselves from those who insist America is a benighted, racist nation and always has been. Large majorities of Americans, while they have no objection to looking at the both the bad and good of American history, reject such a one-sided, negative characterization. That includes many voters whose support Democrats desperately need but are now drifting away from them. Greenberg once again:

You can no longer ignore the finding that big majorities of Hispanics and Asian Americans are opposed to the teaching of critical race theory. It is seen as denying America as an exceptional nation.

Progressives may want to deny that but voters don’t want to hear it. It’s far too negative for them. That’s why: Moderation = Democratic votes.

So those are ten reasons Democrats should become more moderate. There really is no alternative. That is, if you want to win and win big.

In his latest column, “There’s a Reason There Aren’t Enough Teachers in America. Many Reasons, Actually,” New York Times opinion essayist Thomas B. Edsall shares a daunting litany of problems facing teachers, as well as school administrators and parents. These include: “a generalized decline in literacy; the faltering international performance of American students; an inability to recruit enough qualified college graduates into the teaching profession; a lack of trained and able substitutes to fill teacher shortages; unequal access to educational resources; inadequate funding for schools; stagnant compensation for teachers; heavier workloads; declining prestige; and deteriorating faculty morale….Nine-year-old students earlier this year revealed “the largest average score decline in reading since 1990, and the first ever score decline in mathematics,” according to the National Center for Education Statistics. In the latest comparison of fourth grade reading ability, the United States ranked below 15 countries, including Russia, Ireland, Poland and Bulgaria.” Edsall quotes from and August 2022 paper, “Is There a National Teacher Shortage?,” Tuan D. Nguyen and Chanh B. Lam, which notes that “We find there are at least 36,000 vacant positions along with at least 163,000 positions being held by underqualified teachers, both of which are conservative estimates of the extent of teacher shortages nationally.” Edsall also writes, “I asked Josh Bleiberg, a professor of education at the University of Pittsburgh, about trends in teacher certification. He emailed back: The number of qualified teachers is declining for the whole country and the vast majority of states. The number of certified teachers only increased in the District of Columbia, Massachusetts, North Dakota, and Washington. Those increases were relatively small and likely didn’t keep up with enrollment increases.” Edsall has more to say about inadequate compensation of teachers, international comparisons, the adverse effects of culture wars, burnout, training and workload. Democrats have long been the more “pro-teacher” party, at least in terms of supporting teacher unions. I hesitate to suggest anything that reduces the supply of qualified teachers even more. But might it be time for Democrats to recruit and help prepare more public school teachers to run for office? Most teachers are already good at speaking to small groups and interacting with parents, good base skills for candidates. Ironically enough, it may take more teachers in politics to get more teachers in schools.

For another view of the political implications of public education issues, check out “Randi Weingarten Explains Why Most People Are Pro Public Education,” Glenn Daigon’s interview of the American Federation of Teachers President at The Progressive. Daigon’s opening question: “Glenn Daigon: The political momentum seemed to be on the right after Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia governor’s race in 2021. Do you think the midterms saw any shift in the political winds? If so, how do you think the results of the midterm elections will impact education policy both at the local and national level?….Randi Weingarten: Based on data analytics from TargetPoint, Youngkin used the culture wars to win people in rural areas who were very fearful. The culture wars didn’t persuade parents to vote for Youngkin, but they persuaded the elderly to vote for Youngkin. He used it effectively as a divisive tactic. But part of the reason he was successful was that Terry [McAuliffe], made an election-deciding mistake [by] saying, wrongly, that parents don’t have a role in their kids’ education….Parents of course have a role in their kids’ education, and I think what you saw in 2022 was that public education did quite well. Not in all places, but by and large parents want [teachers] to help their kids recover [from the disruption of the pandemic] and thrive by focusing on things that both Republicans and Democrats talk about: reading and literacy; pathways to career and college; and helping kids have confidence again and feel better about themselves….There is an agenda—a true education agenda—that is bipartisan, with perhaps Florida being an exception. But even in Florida, pro-education budgets were passed even though Republican Governor Ron DeSantis won comfortably. In virtually every other state where these issues were hotly contested, the pro-public education governors and legislators won….If you look at Michigan, Wisconsin, Maine, and Arizona, where Republican candidates ran on denigrating, defamatory, and demeaning planks; the undermining of teachers and vulnerable students; defunding public education; and all of the culture wars, pro-public education governors won. Those wins were just in states where races were really hotly contested. In less contentious races—in Illinois, New York, Connecticut, and Minnesota—pro-public education governors also won.”

The Progressive’s Weingarted interview also includes this exchange:”Q: Is there a set of any races in the 2022 election cycle where you can point to  moderates and progressives successfully countering the anti-critical-race-theory and anti-LGBT messaging from rightwing education backers?….Weingarten: Take New Hampshire, where they easily reelected Republican Governor [Chris] Sununu, but over the course of several months, every school board member who was elected was a pro-public education school board member. [This was in a state] where Moms for Liberty put $500 bounties on the heads of teachers and where a state school superintendent tried to chill the efforts of teachers to teach honest history—school board races were won by pro-public-education school board candidates.”….In Berrien County, Michigan, which had been electing Republicans since the 1800s—so it is a very red area—twenty-one out of twenty-five extremist school candidates lost their elections. In West Virginia, the anti-public education forces lost two referendums, while at the same time, the state has turned ruby red. In New York State, we saw a lot of Congressional races go to Republicans, but 85 percent of the pro-public-education school board candidates won, and 99 percent of school budgets passed….Sure, in Florida, where DeSantis put hundreds of thousands of dollars into school board races, he won more than he lost because nobody has that kind of money to compete, and most of the time these races are basically locally run races. But by and large, in the marquee races around the country, what you saw was the pro-public-education forces win. And in places where they didn’t, like in South Carolina, I believe you’ll see a lot of resistance develop.”

From Amy Walter’s “What Can Losing ‘22 Dem Candidates Tell Us About ‘24 Priorities?” at The Cook Political Report: “In politics, losing isn’t always a career ender. Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush both lost U.S. House contests before winning statewide office. President Biden, of course, ran and lost his bid for the Democratic nomination for president twice before his 2020 win. For years, the saying went that in order to win statewide in Ohio you first had to lose. Former Ohio Senators John Glenn, Howard Metzenbaum and George Voinovich all lost at least one senate race in the state before ultimately succeeding….In recent years, however, thanks to the increasing nationalization of our politics, down-ballot candidates can quickly build a brand that goes far beyond the borders of their state.  In 2018, liberal Democrats across the country were wearing BETO for Senate t-shirts and sending contributions to a Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate named Stacey Abrams….Even as they lost their bids, Beto O’Rourke and Stacey Abrams proved that Democrats could turn fast-growing and diverse Sunbelt states blue….Today, however, Democrats’ most lauded loser is a white guy from Ohio who gave Democrats some hope of winning back their blue-collar followers. Democratic Senate nominee Tim Ryan ran just a couple points ahead of Biden’s showing in the Buckeye state, but his strong campaign operation helped down-ballot Democrats win in key House races in the state….What does Ryan do with his newfound fame? For now, the path to the White House is closed. And, there are no obvious opportunities back home either….In fact, the types of ‘losers’ that Democrats have become attached to in recent years tells us more about what the party is most hopeful or worried about for the upcoming election than it does about the future for these up-and-coming candidates. In 2018, Democrats saw in Abrams and O’Rourke a pathway to opening up the sunbelt. Two years later, Democrats hold both senate seats in Arizona and Georgia, and hold the Governor’s seat in Arizona. At the same time, hopes of turning Texas and Florida blue have been deflated. In 2022, as was the case in 2016, Democrats are more focused on keeping their midwestern bunkers intact. It may not be possible to win back Ohio, but Democrats now see midwestern governors like Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan and Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania as their best potential presidential contenders for the near future.”

The more you look at the 2022 midterm election returns, the most it looks like a good if flawed Democratic result instead of a good but flawed Republican result, as I explained at New York:

After Election Day 2022, the standard narrative was that a solid Republican win in the national House popular vote (which looked to be as much as six percent initially) somehow didn’t translate into the kind of robust House gains you might expect. Even as late mail ballots drifted in across big blue states like California, reducing the GOP margin in the national House popular vote to 2.8 percent, the sense that Republicans got very unlucky in the actual results persisted. Now, the New York Times’ Nate Cohn has devoted a long column to investigating this alleged underperformance, concluding that Democrats may have actually had better candidates in both the Senate and the House:

“The red wave, to the extent it existed, may have come ashore in a relatively uninhabited area, but the red tide was still high enough to turn the House vote red in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada, even while the Democrats won the crucial Senate seats.

“How did the Democrats survive? Perhaps the simplest explanation: On average, they had better candidates thanks partly, but not completely, to weak Republican nominees.”

But another veteran number cruncher, Jacob Rubashkin of Inside Elections, looked at the final House results and found something remarkable:

“Ultimately, not only did a Red Wave fail to materialize, but Republicans barely cleared the lowest of bars they had set for themselves at the beginning of the cycle: winning back the House of Representatives.

“The GOP needed a net gain of five seats to win back the majority. While the party did net nine seats, in the five closest GOP wins in the country, the victorious Republican candidates outpaced their Democratic opponents by a combined 6,670 votes….

“The five closest races won by Republicans were Colorado’s 3rd (554 votes), California’s 13th (584 votes), Michigan’s 10th (1,600 votes), New York’s 17th (1,787 votes), and Iowa’s 3rd (2,145 votes).”

The combined margins in the “majority-making” races, Rubashkin calculates, were about a fourth of those in 2020 when Democrats won the same number of House seats and were widely thought to have skirted a major disaster. So you could definitely argue that Republicans got lucky to the tune of 6,670 votes.

Had those votes not materialized in the right places at the right time then instead of congratulating Democrats for not doing as poorly as everyone expected, we might be trying to figure out if Nancy Pelosi should serve one more term as Speaker or give way to Hakeem Jeffries. And 2022 might have been viewed as a historical anomaly ranking right up there with 1962, 1998, and 2002 (years in which the White House party gained net seats in midterms).

Nate Cohn also acknowledges that the results were close enough to merit different interpretations of their partisan import:

“Should it be understood as an outright good Democratic year that was interrupted by a few isolated Republican waves (Florida, New York, Oregon) and obscured by low nonwhite turnout in solidly Democratic areas? Or was it a good but not great Republican year that the party didn’t translate into seats because of bad candidates and somewhat inefficiently distributed strength?”

More to the point, an interpretation of this midterm as a lost Democratic rather than Republican opportunity might influence what we can properly expect in 2024, as Rubashkin notes:

“Not only did a ‘red wave’ not materialize for House Republicans, but their new majority rests on the narrowest victory in over a decade, setting up the fight for the House as the marquee congressional battle of 2024.”

In a presidential cycle, moreover, some of the Democratic-leaning voter groups that don’t turn out proportionately in midterms, including Black and under-30 voters, could very well tip the balance. So aside from the other issues he has in hanging on to a Speakership that depends to an unhealthy degree on the sufferance of MAGA extremists, Kevin McCarthy should deal with the real possibility that he’ll be back in the minority two years from now.

In his article at The Nation, “Democrats Can Win Rural Seats if They Listen to Marie Gluesenkamp Perez,” Nick Bowlin interviews the Democrat who won her party’s most impressive midterm upset in U.S. House races:

NICK BOWLIN: It’s common to hear that Democrats need to run as centrists to win rural areas. And it seems to me that you did things differently. You took strong progressive positions, but really honed in on a few that really matter to people in southern Washington. Does that seem right?

MARIE GLUESENKAMP PEREZ: Yes, I would say that is an astute assessment. My campaign was a reflection of my district, that’s why I was successful. Because that’s what matters, not any party dogma or particular label.

NB: It’s my understanding that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee [the party’s arm for House races] didn’t spend on your behalf, is that right? How did you pull off the win with minimal party support?

MGP: The DCCC never put in any money. Near the very end, I believe the House Majority PAC did come in [The House Democratic caucus’s main Super PAC spent $300,000 on her behalf in the final week]. I listen to my friends at home. I found allies. I found neighbors. I built a coalition. And I really got to stay focused on what matters to my district.

It was very frustrating to never be taken seriously by many in the party establishment. But it’s also not surprising, because people like me who work in the trades are used to being treated like we’re dumb.

NB: Do you think that perception explains why it took so long for them to even consider you as a viable candidate?

MGP: Yes, I do. I don’t think they think that, but when I went to a meeting with the DCCC after I won, I asked, “How many of your candidates don’t have graduate degrees? How many didn’t go to college? How many work in the trades?” And they said, “I don’t know.” Well, maybe you should know. Maybe that should be important to you, because it’s important to many, many Americans.

They really need to reassess what they think makes a qualified candidate. I’m not special. There are a lot of people like me, who really can serve our districts who understand them deeply. We have got to do a better job of recruiting those folks to run if we want to be relevant in rural places.

NB: During the campaign, you talked a lot about the economic pressures that you and your family were under. Can you talk more about that?

MGP: Neither my husband nor I have health insurance, and, frankly, I went through most of my pregnancy without it. In my county, Skamania County, there’s only one health care service provider. There’s one plan for you, and it’s not a great one. Your options are pretty limited. Trying to find child care has been a nightmare. I’m on waitlists all over. There’s just a real shortage of the things that make life work.

NB: I’m glad you brought up health care monopolies in rural areas. When we talk about corporate consolidation and power in the US, these conversations can leave out the specific ways these issues impact rural economies. On the campaign trail, you talked a lot about right-to-repair and other monopoly issues. Can you say more about this?

MGP: Right-to-repair is honestly one of the biggest reasons that I ran for Congress. Democrats love to talk about how they support the trades or being pro-labor. I think this is this is a crisis for the middle class, and it’s a crisis for the trades. Supporting the trades means ensuring that there are things to fix. That’s also part of being an environmentalist, ensuring that we have things to fix, that things are made to last and we don’t dispose of them. And it’s about cars and tractors, but also electronic waste. This is about home medical equipment. It’s this creeping, metastasizing problem, and it’s taking away a fundamentally American part of our identity. DIY is in our DNA. And I really believe that we’re being turned into a permanent class of renters who don’t really own their stuff.

NB: What do you intend to do in Congress to address this?

MGP: I’m going to pass a right-to-repair bill. I’m talking to everybody I can about it. It’s about being able to fix and maintain your own stuff. It’s about making things last. For my business, I need there to be a used-car market. I need people to be able to fix their own cars, and meanwhile, BMW is taking the dipstick out a lot of their new cars. There are subscription services for your seat heaters to work! And it sounds silly—is that really a big problem? It’s going to be if we don’t get out ahead of this.

NB: Another thing you talked about on the campaign trail was public safety. I saw that Portland broke its annual murder record recently, but nationally, there’s no evidence that crime is up overall [Portland, Ore., is just outside of Gluensenkamp Perez’s district]. But there’s also the fact that national media mentions of crime skyrocketed during the midterms. So can you talk about public safety in a way that addresses the realities but doesn’t feed into fearmongering?

MGP: Even if a lot of the crime statistics haven’t gone up, it feels really bad to a lot of us. I think this is something Democrats can get wrong. We like to talk about the facts and the statistics—and not address the feelings. I had a car stolen the night before I flew out to DC. Luckily, we recovered it, but it just sucks. And so I think we need to meet people where they’re at and acknowledge that a lot of people don’t feel safe.

NB: Can you do that without kind of promoting some of the worst aspects of American policing?

MGP: Yeah, there’s a way to do it that brings back a sense of community. That’s the solution to the safety concerns, when you know your neighbors, when people have ownership in their communities, when small businesses are thriving, and there’s accountability.

NB: You campaigned hard on abortion access and child care costs, both issues that have a tendency to be framed as liberal. In your experience, did you find that leaning hard on these issues helped your cross-partisan appeal?

MGP: It’s so annoying that child care gets talked about as a woman’s issue. They only ever ask moms to talk to about it. But I believe it’s a big driver of our workforce shortage. One in 10 child care facilities has permanently shut down since 2019. That’s is a problem for our economy. And so I think framing it in that way—making it relevant to all of us, not just to people with kids under 5—makes sense to people, regardless of what party you’re affiliated. It makes sense to people that it should be a priority, for good governance and for an economy that works for everybody.

NB: What does the party not get about rural areas?

MGP: They’re always trying to explain stuff to us, and they don’t listen to us. They try and tell us what’s going to solve our problems, instead of hearing us when we tell them what our problems are. It feels patronizing a lot of the time. My mechanics know a lot. They know things that other people don’t know. Actually respect us and don’t use us like mascots. I think a lot of a lot of Democrats would like to have sort of a blue-collar pet. I see it, and it’s pretty obnoxious.

Matthew Yglesias opines at Slow Boring: “Now that all the races are resolved, the 2022 midterms were pretty clearly the most catastrophic defeat yet for mobilization theory. As Nate Cohn explained in detail in the New York Times last Thursday, Republicans decisively won the turnout battle in key states, even while losing the preponderance of important races. Most years require an in-the-weeds effort to parse whether mobilization or persuasion mattered more because they both point in the same direction (a subject we’ll return to), but this year there was no such dilemma. Differential turnout explains less than 0 percent of Mark Kelly, Raphael Warnock, or Catherine Cortez Masto’s wins — it was an R-leaning turnout year, but they all won….We don’t yet have the same level of visibility into exactly who voted in Pennsylvania, where Democrats had an even better performance in statewide races. But we do know that comparing 2020 to 2022, the PA county with the largest turnout decline was the city of Philadelphia. That’s what you would expect to see if PA had the same turnout dynamics as those other six states, and it would be very unusual for a trend to hit all six states that we have full data for and not represent a national trend….Democrats won key races by persuading a small but nonzero number of Republicans to vote for them….Democrats’ current majority rests on the backs of Sherrod Brown, John Tester, and Joe Manchin, all of whom represent Trump states and face very steep re-election battles in 2024. It’s also notable that there aren’t a lot of targets that are clearly better than Ohio. In 2022, North Carolina, Florida, and Texas were all closer than Ohio. But Florida’s politics seem to have moved further to the right since then, Democrats have come up decidedly short in the last two North Carolina Senate races, and Texas remains a pretty firmly red state….Once you give up on the magical idea of mobilizing the base instead of finding ways to make swing voters like you, it’s easier to see that there actually isn’t a tradeoff here anyway. In other words, you should absolutely try to maximize the turnout of sporadic voters who are likely to vote for you. But there’s no reason to believe there’s a tension between that goal and trying to appeal to swing voters, because the boring truth is that sporadic voters are less politically engaged and less ideological than non-voters….Democrats really did do badly in most Georgia races in November. That’s how we know so precisely that Warnock won thanks to crossover voters. Taken on the whole, Democrats flopped on both turnout and vote choice. Warnock himself just did really well.” Put a little differently, it’s a false choice between turnout mobilization and persuasion. Winning campaigns do both well enough.

In his article, “in “Georgia’s Election Laws Couldn’t Stop Raphael Warnock,” at The Washington Monthly, Bill Scher writes “African American turnout in yesterday’s runoff election appears to have been robust and decisive. While we don’t have final demographic numbers yet, we can compare early vote data from all four Georgia elections over the past two years. Black voters composed 31.9 percent of the runoff early vote, precisely one point more than the January 2021 special election runoff. (Warnock won his first runoff by two points, and according to The New York Times estimate, he will win this time by three.) The Black share of the December 2022 runoff early vote is also higher than their share in November 2022 (29.1 percent) and November 2020 (27.7 percent)….if the point of Republican restrictive voting laws in Georgia and elsewhere was to suppress the vote to such an extent that Democrats couldn’t win, the plan failed. In states with strict voter ID laws that don’t allow for alternatives such as signed affidavits, this year, Democrats won hard-fought governor’s races (Arizona, Wisconsin, and Kansas) and Senate races (Arizona and Georgia). Democrats also performed well in swing states with non-strict voter ID laws, such as Pennsylvania and Michigan, keeping both governorships and winning key congressional races. Perhaps most importantly, Democrats needed to succeed in voter ID states to maintain control of the Senate, and they did….In short, everything both parties have told themselves about election laws—at least in regards to which parties are helped by restrictive and expansive reforms—has been proved wrong repeatedly. Voter ID laws don’t suppress voters, regardless of the intent behind them; academic research has shown that they boomerang and galvanize the voters thought to be targeted for suppression….In fact, after absorbing the 2022 midterm results, Republicans appear to be increasingly aware that instead of disparaging early voting, they should be competing for early voters.” Another point that fits under Scher’s title is that Atlanta’s activist community poured it on again for Warnock. Nobody outworks them, and without them, Warnock would have lost. And they don’t focus only on Black GOTV; they worked in close coalitions with other demographic groups, including Latinos, Asian-Americans and persuadable whites, including suburban soccer moms and and young white women, who had a lot at stake.

At FiveThirtyEight, Geoffrey Skelley and Holly Fuong report on findings from an Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel  collaboration asking 2,000 respondents “how they felt about the election, what policies the next Congress should pursue and their early views of the potential 2024 presidential candidates.” Regarding non-voters,  Skelley and Fuong report that “Among Americans who did not vote this year, 34 percent stated that they never vote in elections⁴ — a reminder that while turnout was high in 2022 (for a midterm) and record-setting in 2020 (for a modern presidential race), a large swath of potential voters is consistently uninvolved. Meanwhile, about 1 in 4 nonvoters felt that “none of the candidates were good options,” and another 1 in 4 “did not have enough information about the candidates and/or ballot initiatives.” Excuses, excuses. At The Hill, demographer Joseph Chamie noted last year that “The U.S. level of not voting in elections is higher than those of many OECD countries. For example, low percentages of the eligible populations not voting in recent elections where voting is not compulsory include Sweden (13 percent), Denmark (17 percent), South Korea (20 percent), and the Netherlands (21 percent). However, some countries have substantially higher levels of non-voting in recent elections than the U.S., including Switzerland 61 percent, Mexico and Poland both 51 percent, and Japan 47 percent….The major reason why 77 million Americans didn’t cast ballots in the 2020 presidential election was that they were not registered to vote. Approximately 27 percent of all Americans aged 18 years or older, numbering 63 million men and women, had not registered to vote. Those 63 million unregistered U.S. citizens account for 82 percent of those who did not vote in the 2020 presidential election. The U.S. is one of the few countries that requires citizens to register for voting separately from the actual voting….Other reasons offered by those who did not vote or failed to register to vote in the election included not being interested due to voter apathy, alienation, skepticism and voter fatigue, purged voter rolls, strict ID laws, and is a hassle. Some non-voters also believed that their vote would not make a difference on the election’s outcome or the country’s policies, they did not like any of the candidates or were undecided on whom to vote.”

“A new report from Inside Elections details how, in the five closest GOP House wins, the Republicans won by a combined measly 6,652 votes,” Prem Thakker writes at The New Republic. “Republicans’ gain of any seats at all came from just 22,370 votes, the combined margin of their nine closest victories….The most razor-thin victory was Colorado Representative Lauren Boebert’s closing win over Democrat Adam Frisch. The far-right candidate, expected to win 97 times out of 100 in FiveThirtyEight’s election simulator, had won the district previously by six points. This November, she won by 546 votes—a 0.16 percent margin that triggered an automatic recount. (The Inside Elections report did not take into account Boebert’s even lower margin of victory after the recount, and we’ve updated the numbers in this piece accordingly.)….Elsewhere, in New York, the state Democrats allowed a disastrous string of losses, with two races being lost by less than one percent, including the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Sean Patrick Maloney….A combination of state party mismanagement, a lack of strong top-of-ticket campaigning from re-elected Governor Kathy Hochul, and a disadvantageous redistricting spurred by former Governor Andrew Cuomo’s appointed judges all contributed to New York Democrats’ disastrous results….In total, New York Democrats lost six races in redistricted sections that voted for Biden in 2020….Of course, Democrats won narrow races too. And these wins came not just from coasting off of attacking MAGA candidates as such, but actually doing the work of campaigning….As Slate’s Alex Sammon points out, one of Democrats’ major upsets—Marie Glusenkamp Perez’s House win in rural Washington—benefitted from a massive organic ground game. The operation came despite lackluster financial support from the DCCC (losing-candidate Maloney’s committee), which dismissed the race as a “reach.”

The following article by Stanley B. Greenberg, a founding partner of Greenberg Research, Democracy Corps, and Climate Policy & Strategy, and Prospect board member, a New York Times best-selling author and co-author of It’s the Middle Class, Stupid!, is cross-posted from The American Prospect:

The election results surprised many pundits and Republicans, but not those who were following the surveys conducted by Democracy Corps and the articles I wrote for the Prospect. They showed the Democrats with a small lead in the generic House vote in September. That slipped to a tie and 2-point deficit with October’s likely voters. With 107 million votes counted, Democrats are losing the House by a 3-point margin. The surveys showed the potential for African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians to disappoint those looking for an engaged base.

The very low turnout of African Americans and Hispanics was not surprising and likely cost us a greater Senate majority (one that might have been willing to get rid of the filibuster) and House control.

Many were relieved that Democrats defied history. I was angry.

We are at a moment where Democrats have a policy offer that makes lives appreciably better. Republicans just decry inflation and Democrats. They plant powerful cultural bombs that leave Democrats badly damaged on crime, the border, and love of country.

I was angry because in this campaign the White House was just cheerleading over a “strong economy,” and some leaders gave this message: Re-elect us because we accomplished so much. Instead, they could have shown sympathy on income and the cost of living, pushed back against corporate power, neutralized the crime issue, and grown their numbers.

More from Stanley B. Greenberg

Over 70 percent of eligible voters do not have a four-year degree, my measure of working-class. And in this midterm election, they were 61 percent of the voters. Over 80 percent of the Black and Hispanic voters were working-class, though that is usually closer to 70 percent in our campaign surveys.

And those voters were mad as hell about the economy. Two-thirds rated it “negatively” in my survey for Democracy Corps and PSG Consulting with 2,000 pre-election and Election Day voters. Two-thirds of voters said the country was on the wrong track. They were also mad as hell about the billions in campaign spending that corrupted politics. They are conscious that the biggest corporations, high-tech companies, and billionaires use their money and lobbyists to rig the game against working people.

They are mad as hell because they really haven’t seen a pay raise in two decades, which is even more true for African Americans and Hispanics. Their frustration was heightened by two decades of spiking growth in incomes and wealth for the top 1 percent and spiking spending on political campaigns.

The economy was the top issue for voters in 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022, of course. This year, maddening inflation stole away any marginal gain in wages. Everywhere in the world, working people are on a desperate edge, and the top issue is the cost of living and what governments are doing to help them.

(MORE HERE)