Li Zhou writes at Vox “This past weekend, more than 30 Democratic senators had a message for President Joe Biden: They want him to do more to protect abortion rights, and they want him to do it now. “There is no time to waste,” they said in the letter, which was led by Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) and sent one day after the Supreme Court announced its decision to officially roll back Roe v. Wade. “You have the power to fight back and lead a national response to this devastating decision.”….This letter is the latest indication of growing pressure on the White House to take additional executive actions in response to the fall of Roe. While Biden is not able to reinstate the protections offered by Roe without Congress, lawmakers and activists have clamored for the president to take other steps, such as finding ways for the federal government to defend abortion access in every state…..Many of these proposals would likely be challenged in court, but proponents emphasize that they’d like to see the administration give them a try before forgoing them completely. For months, some abortion rights advocates have felt that the White House hasn’t been doing enough to address the urgency of the situation, whether that’s weighing more ambitious policies or simply speaking out more forcefully on the subject. Many were disappointed, for instance, to find that Biden hadn’t used the word “abortion” in any presidential speech until recently….Additional ideas that have been suggested include a proposal championed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) that would establish abortion clinics on federal lands in states where there are existing bans. Because federal lands aren’t subject to states’ civil laws and there’s room to interpret criminal laws, clinics could theoretically establish themselves on places like military bases without having to deal with a state’s bans….Other ideas that have been floated include using federal money to provide vouchers to people traveling across state lines for abortions and enforcing the use of federal Medicaid dollars to provide coverage in the narrow instances in which they can be used. These schemes also face implementation questions, with the first possibly running afoul of the Hyde Amendment and the second facing uncertainty about enforcement.”

Some observations from “Politics in the Post-Roe World” by Kyle Kondik at Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “It is not surprising that, in the immediate aftermath of the ruling, Democrats appear to be enjoying something of a bounce. The NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist College poll, out Monday morning, hadDemocrats up 48%-41% on the House generic ballot. Most other recent generic ballot surveys have shown Republicans leading. The generic ballot did not really change when the Dobbs opinion was leaked back in early May, although that was a hypothetical decision, whereas this is a real one. We’ll have to see whether this is the start of a new trend, or just a blip….abortion is such a huge issue, and Republicans (through the court) have changed the status quo so dramatically, that one cannot just assume the issue won’t matter….it seems obvious to us that many key state legislators don’t possess the kind of expertise and nuance, particularly on abortion, to legislate in nuanced ways. The likelihood of Republicans overplaying their hand is high….there are opportunities for both parties to accuse the other of being extreme on the issue. It just may be that in the immediate aftermath of Dobbs, Republican extremism on abortion will be easier to pinpoint because of the coming flood of anti-abortion activity in the states and because the status quo has changed in the direction of their position….To be crystal clear: We still favor Republicans to flip the House, as they only need to win 5 more seats than they did in 2020 to win the majority. And we think we would still rather be Republicans in the race for the Senate, although we continue to have questions about the strength of GOP candidates in key states. The abortion issue could exacerbate those problems. For instance, former football star and Georgia Senate nominee Herschel Walker (R) opposes abortion even in the case of rape or incest (and he’s far from alone among Republicans in that regard). Perhaps that stance becomes difficult to defend as the salience of the abortion issue now increases….Elections are rarely ever just about one thing. Abortion is going to be a bigger deal in 2022 than it otherwise would have been, but it may not alter the basic trajectory of the election….The 2022 election will get the nation started down a future path on abortion, but the ultimate destination is very much unclear.”

Let the finger-pointing begin. Those who are looking for something more substantial than ‘it’s the Democrats fault’ should read Scott Neuman’s “The abortion ruling has forced progressives to confront past missteps in strategy” at npr.com. As Neuman writes, “With abortion already banned in at least seven states and more than a dozen others expected to either prohibit or severely restrict the practice in the coming weeks, progressives are being forced to confront their missteps in the defense of Roe as they assess how to move forward on abortion rights and other issues in the wake of the court’s landmark decision last week in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization….What occurred was “a failure to fight on a lot of different fronts,” [NYU Professor Melissa] Murray says….The overturning of Roe was, in large measure, the pinnacle of a methodical and highly effective conservative strategy patiently carried out over the past half-century. Murray points to the gradual stacking of the Supreme Court in favor of conservatives and state laws severely restricting abortion….But equally important was “an inattentiveness to the lower federal courts” on the part of progressives — as these courts were routinely upholding state-level anti-abortion legislation, Murray says….To that list, Murray adds an erosion of voting rights that made it more difficult for women of color — likely the group most affected by the reversal of Roe — to have a say at the ballot box….Samuel Lau, a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood Federation of America, concurs. “Disenfranchising people, gerrymandering voters out of meaningful representation, confirming federal judges with records hostile to civil and reproductive rights, and instituting undemocratic voting restrictions is in large part how we arrived here — especially when you look at the erosion of abortion rights on the state levels,” he says….Many Black women see a connection between voting rights and efforts to end abortion, Murray says. But instead of fighting on both fronts, abortion-rights activists remained focused solely on abortion….Carol Sanger, a professor at Columbia Law School, says it is also important not to discount the anti-abortion movement’s deep pockets. Thanks to donors such as the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, there was no lack of funding, she says….”That’s a failure of the progressives not to have had [their] own Koch brothers,” Sanger says. “[But] I don’t know how you get [your] own Koch brothers.”….Andrea Miller, president of the National Institute for Reproductive Health (NIRH), agrees. “This really was about the degree of funding and diligence and focus,” she says. The anti-abortion rights campaign “had multiple layers and was exceedingly well funded and well executed,” Miller says. “That’s really where the blame should lie. [Abortion opponents] were very clear about their goals. They were incredibly determined and refused to ever give any ground,” she says.”….Meanwhile, a majority of Americans have consistently supported abortion rights and, according to an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist National Poll that came out on Monday, that still holds….Progressives “have some advantages,” [Florid State University professor Mary] Ziegler says. “Namely that this is not a decision that’s in line with popular opinion, including in some red states.” The states are likely to be the prime battleground for abortion-rights advocates moving forward, Miller says….”The path forward really is through the states,” she says. “I believe that that is really the place where if greater attention had been paid, perhaps we wouldn’t have seen quite the tsunami in 2018 or the number of bills restricting access to abortion and now banning abortion.”

Will Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony before the January 6th insurrection committee affect the midterm election results? Also at Vox, Ben Jacobs notes, “In conversations with a half-dozen Republican strategists who represent a spectrum of opinion within the party and were granted anonymity to speak frankly, there was a broad consensus that, yes, this might have an impact on Trump — but probably not on Republicans in the midterms. There was a sense that this would inflict real damage on Trump’s long-term ambitions, even if it did nothing to shift the needle for now…..”What more do you need to believe crimes were committed?” one Republican strategist asked, before also conceding that “There have been a million times when people say Trump is finished, but this could be the millionth and one, but I don’t see a way for him to come back from this testimony.”….As to where that breaking point was, the Republican operative noted the silence from most national Republicans. “It’s fascinating how little you’re hearing from people like Ron DeSantis,” they said, and marveled at “how few members of Congress have stepped in” to defend Trump since Hutchinson’s testimony….Whatever the impact on Trump, none of the Republicans I spoke to thought the testimony would damage Republicans in the midterms. As one veteran operative pointed out, “people right now are really focused on $5 to $6 a gallon gas and I think that’s where people’s heads are at. By and large people have tuned this out. … Maybe this would be different if the economy was better but people are focused on their own welfare right now.”….That was echoed by another Republican working on 2022 races, who said, “No one is going to vote based on something that is happening within Washington regarding something that occurred a year and a half ago.”

From “Does the Roe Ruling Have a Silver Lining for Democrats” by Chris Cillizza at CNN Politics:

“Seventy-two hours removed from the landmark overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court, there are signs that the judgment may have woken up the long-dormant Democratic base in advance of this year’s midterm elections.

A new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll had two striking findings:

1) More than 3 in 4 Democrats (78%) said the court’s decision made it more likely that they would vote in the fall. A slim majority of Republicans (54%) said the same.

2) Democrats now lead on the generic ballot question (“If the election were today, would you vote for the Democrat or the Republican for House”) 48% to 41% over Republicans, a remarkable 10-point swing since an NPR poll in April.

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

Democrats have a lot of problems and their supposed allies in progressive organizations are one of the biggest ones. I explain in my latest at The Liberal Patriot:

“The secret is out. Progressive organizations—nonprofits and advocacy groups—which form a vital part of the Democrats’ supportive ecosystem have become massively dysfunctional due to internal meltdowns, mission creep and maximalist goal-setting. For those close to this world, this has been apparent for some time though there has been reluctance to call it out for fear of helping the right (the Fox News Fallacy) and/or being ostracized by their own side. But with the publication of Ryan Grim’s exposé on The Intercept and Zack Colman’s Politico piece focusing on green organizations, the rot is out there for all to see.

There are three key aspects to this rot:

1. Internal Dysfunction. The new generation of activists coming into these organizations tends to see internal hierarchies as reflecting their radical critique of society as a whole as a system that oppresses all “marginalized” groups: black, Hispanic, anybody nonwhite, female, gay, trans, indigenous, colonized, etc. Therefore, these internal hierarchies are by definition unjust and must be struggled against with little regard to what function these hierarchies might actually serve.

Needless to say, this plays havoc with an organization’s ability to run a merit- and efficiency-based internal system, since so many “diversity” boxes have to be checked to do practically anything. And the need to placate staff demands and smooth over the endless conflicts this produces leads to a stunning misallocation of time and internal resources. The resulting inefficiencies can virtually paralyze an organization. Said one former executive director of a progressive organization quoted by Grim: “My last nine months, I was spending 90 to 95 percent of my time on internal strife”. Said another current executive director: “I’m now at a point where the first thing I wonder about a job applicant is, ‘How likely is this person to blow up my organization from the inside?”

Read the whole thing at The Liberal Patriot!

One of the top progressive organizers, Heather Booth, rallies activists in the wake of the SCOTUS decision in her article, “Fighting for Abortion Rights All Over Again: This Supreme Court decision is a call to action. And the key message is—ALWAYS—if we organize, we can change this world, and we need to” at The American Prospect: “The Supreme Court decision is outrageous, but not surprising. The Court has taken away the ability of people to control their own bodies and lives and turned that power over to politicians. It is outrageous because it is against the popular will, against morality, against precedent, against the expansion of freedom….This is an undermining of the most basic freedom and most intimate decision of a person’s life: when or whether or with whom to have a child. It is against the popular will. Eighty percent of people in this country believe that no politician should come between a woman and her doctor in this most intimate decision. Seventy-five percent of people do not think Roe should be overturned….One in five people who can have a child will have an abortion in their lifetime. One in five. This means it could be your friend, your sister, your mother (and the majority of people who have abortions already have one child—and so know what it means to bring a child into this world). It could be you.” Booth shares some moving personal memories of her involvement in the movement for reproductive rights, and adds “Now we are on a knife’s edge in this country—not only about reproductive freedom, but about freedom to vote, freedom to marry who we love, freedom itself. But we do have the majority of the country on our side. We do have morality on our side. And now we need to organize to have the power to make these decisions to reflect the popular will….But just imagine what two more senators and holding the House could do. We could overturn the filibuster and codify Roe—and have sensible gun laws, and expand voting access, and address climate, and more. And the same is true at every level—including in the states and local areas….We need to use every tool at our disposal….We need to tell our stories, educate, activate, agitate, elect, and organize….We need the 4 M’s: Members, Message, Money, Movement.” Booth goes into more detail about the 4Ms and “When we organize, we have changed this world—won voting rights, expanded participation in the society, and elected a Senate and president who made Roe the law of the land. And we can do that again … but for that we need to organize. And if we organize, we can change the world.”

In “Dems hope to harness outrage, sadness after abortion ruling,” AP’s Steve Peoples and Mike Catalini report on the immediate political fallout of the Supreme Court decision and note, “Pregnant women considering abortions already had been dealing with a near-complete ban in Oklahoma and a prohibition after roughly six weeks in Texas. Clinics in at least eight other states — Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, South Dakota, Wisconsin and West Virginia — stopped performing abortions after Friday’s decision….In Pennsylvania, the future of the procedure could hinge on November’s elections. For now, women here will continue to have access to abortion up to 24 weeks. Republicans are poised to change state law, however, should they maintain control of the legislature and seize the governorship in November. Doug Mastriano, the GOP nominee for governor, opposes abortion with no exceptions for rape, incest or the life of the mother. Democrats in Pennsylvania and beyond initially appeared to unite behind their collective outrage, fear and sadness. They planned widespread protests. From the White House on Friday, President Joe Biden urged protesters to keep the peace, even as he described the court ruling as “wrong, extreme and out of touch.”….The Democratic president also called on voters to make their voices heard this fall: “Roe is on the ballot.”…At the same time, members of the Democratic National Committee raised the prospect of a silver lining within the high court’s historic gut punch….“Democrats have a real opportunity right now to harness this anger, to harness the sadness,” Democratic strategist Mo Elleithee said during a meeting of a DNC subcommittee. “We are setting the foundation to ensure that Democrats stay in the White House, so that the next time, there’s an opening on the bench, on the federal bench anywhere, that we’ve got a Democratic president making that appointment.”

It’s a non-starter until Democrats win an actual, not just a nominal, working majority of the U.S. Senate. But on ABC News ‘This Week,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren made a case for increasing the size of the Supreme Court, as reported by Julia Cheney at abcnews.com: “In a Friday decision, the high court overturned the landmark holding in Roe, instead ruling that there was no constitutional guarantee to abortion access. Justices voted five to four to reject Roe and six to three in favor of Mississippi’s ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, in the underlying case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization…The Supreme Court has “burned whatever legitimacy they may still have had” with their ruling last week overturning Roe v. Wade, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren said on Sunday….”They just took the last of it and set a torch to it,” Warren, a Democrat, told ABC “This Week” co-anchor Martha Raddatz in an exclusive interview. “I believe we need to get some confidence back in our court and that means we need more justices on the United States Supreme Court. We’ve done it before, we need to do it again.” (Warren has previously called for expanding the number of justices, including in an op-ed in The Boston Globe in December.)….[ABC’s Martha] Raddatz asked Warren on “This Week” why abortion should not just be decided by individual states and their elected officials, rather than ensured as a constitutional right….”‘Go to the polls,’ you say. President [Joe] Biden says, ‘Go to the polls.’ But look at the states outlawing abortion,” Raddatz pressed. “Those are largely conservative states, Gov. [Kristi] Noem had a point there — people go to the polls. They went to the polls just like your constituents in Massachusetts where abortion is legal, so why not leave it to the states?”….”We have never left individual rights to the states. The whole idea is that women are not second-class citizens and the government is not the one that will decide about the continuation of a pregnancy,” Warren responded. “Access to abortion, like other medical procedures, should be available across the board to all people in this country….”We [need to] get two more senators on the Democratic side, two senators who are willing to protect access to abortion and get rid of the filibuster so that we can pass it,” Warren said. “John Fetterman, I’m looking at you in Pennsylvania. Mandela Barnes, I’m looking at you in Wisconsin. We bring them in, then we’ve got the votes, and we can protect every woman no matter where she lives….the Republicans have been very overt about trying to get people through the court who didn’t have a published record on Roe but who they knew, wink, wink, nod, nod, were going to be extremist on the issue of Roe v. Wade and that is exactly what we have ended up with.”

Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. comments on the irony of the Supreme Court decisions on abortion rights and New York’s “open carry” law just as congress, led by Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) passed the most significant gun safety reform in decades, signed in to law by President Biden on Saturday:  “The Supreme Court’s right-wing majority is so pro-life that it is willing to risk more killing by making it easier for people to carry concealed firearms. It extolled states’ rights in overturning Roe v. Wade but showed no such solicitude a day earlier for state gun regulations….The court’s precedent-shattering decision on Roe will dominate our public debate, but its irresponsibility on guns cannot be forgotten. Supporters of smarter, tougher weapons statutes should be very afraid that the Supreme Court’s radical conservatives will abuse their power to impose the gun lobby’s jurisprudence. But they should also take heart that a decade of organizing and public pressure has culminated in congressional passage of the first meaningful gun reform in 26 years….The upshot: Proponents of stronger gun control need to keep pushing — to restore the ban on assault weapons, to enact universal background checks, to raise the age for gun purchases, to establish gun buyback programs and much more. And friends of democracy need to challenge the justices’ arrogant overreach by strengthening support for enlarging the court and, where possible, containing its jurisdiction….Which brings us to the irony of the court issuing its gun ruling on the same day the Senate passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. House passage followed on Friday, and President Biden signed it into law on Saturday, declaring that “lives will be saved.” Do not underestimate the significance of this victory. The bill is certainly not all we need, but it takes major steps in the right direction….It strengthens background checks, imposes tougher regulations against illegal “straw” purchases of guns, tightens rules on access to guns by those accused of domestic abuse and promotes state red-flag laws that allow authorities to confiscate guns temporarily from people deemed dangerous. It also provides for reviews of juvenile and mental health records of gun purchasers younger than 21….In a democracy, public opinion matters. Organizing matters. Persistence matters. They finally paid off this week in modest but landmark gun reform. All three must be brought to bear in battling a partisan Supreme Court majority unwilling to acknowledge any limits to its power.”

In looking at Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization from many angles at New York, one I noted was the lonely position of Chief Justice John Roberts, who failed to hold back his conservative colleagues from anti-abortion radicalism:

While the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization will go down in history as a 6-3 decision with only the three Democrat-appointed justices dissenting, Chief Justice John Roberts actually did not support a full reversal of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. His concurring opinion, which argued that the Court should uphold Mississippi’s ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy without entirely abolishing a constitutional right to abortion, represented a path not taken by the other five conservative members of the Court.

When the Court held oral arguments on the Mississippi law last December, the conservative majority’s determination to redeem Donald Trump’s promise to reverse Roe v. Wade was quite clear. The only ray of hope was the clear discomfort of Chief Justice John Roberts, as New York’s Irin Carmon noted at the time:

“It seemed obvious that only Roberts, who vainly tried to focus on the 15-week line even when everyone else made clear it was all or nothing, cares for such appearances. There had been some pre-argument rumblings that Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh might defect, perhaps forming a bloc with Roberts to find some middle ground as happened the last time the Court considered overturning Roe in 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey. On Wednesday, neither Barrett nor Kavanaugh seemed inclined to disappoint the movement that put them on the Court.”

Still, the Casey precedent offered a shred of hope, since in that 1992 case some hard and imaginative work by Republican-appointed justices determined not to overturn Roe eventually flipped Justice Anthony Kennedy and dealt a devastating blow to the anti-abortion movement. Just prior to the May leak of Justice Samuel Alito’s draft majority opinion (which was very similar in every important respect to the final product), the Wall Street Journal nervously speculated that Roberts might be undermining conservative resolve on the Court, or change sides as he famously did in the Obamacare case.

In the wake of the leak there was some reporting that Roberts was indeed determined not to go whole hog in Dobbs; one theory about the leak was that it had been engineered to freeze the other conservatives (especially Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who during his confirmation hearings had said many things incompatible with a decision to reverse Roe entirely) before the chief justice could lure them to his side.

Now it appears Roberts tried and failed. His concurrence was a not terribly compelling plea for “judicial restraint” that left him alone on the polarized Court he allegedly leads:

“I would take a more measured course. I agree with the Court that the viability line established by Roe and Casey should be discarded under a straightforward stare decisis analysis. That line never made any sense. Our abortion precedents describe the right at issue as a woman’s right to choose to terminate her pregnancy. That right should therefore extend far enough to ensure a reasonable opportunity to choose, but need not extend any further certainly not all the way to viability.”

Roberts’s proposed “reasonable opportunity” standard is apparently of his own invention, and is obviously vague enough to allow him to green-light any abortion ban short of one that outlaws abortion from the moment of fertilization, though he does seem to think arbitrarily drawing a new line at the beginning of the second trimester of pregnancy might work. Roberts’s real motivation appears to be upholding the Court’s reputation for judiciousness, which is indeed about to take a beating:

“The Court’s decision to overrule Roe and Casey is a serious jolt to the legal system — regardless of how you view those cases. A narrower decision rejecting the misguided viability line would be markedly less unsettling, and nothing more is needed to decide this case.”

In his majority opinion (joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett, along with Kavanaugh) Alito seems to relish in mocking the unprincipled nature of the chief justice’s temporizing position:

“There are serious problems with this approach, and it is revealing that nothing like it was recommended by either party …

“The concurrence would do exactly what it criticizes Roe for doing: pulling “out of thin air” a test that “[n]o party or amicus asked the Court to adopt …

“The concurrence asserts that the viability line is separable from the constitutional right they recognized, and can therefore be “discarded” without disturbing any past precedent … That is simply incorrect.”

One has to wonder that if Merrick Garland had been allowed to join the Court in 2016, or if Amy Coney Barrett had not been rushed onto the Court in 2020, Robert’s split-the-differences approach eroding but not entirely abolishing the constitutional right to abortion might have carried the day in Dobbs. But that’s like speculating about where we would be had Donald Trump not become president in 2017 after promising conservatives the moon — and an end to Roe.

Some excerpts from “The Democrats Have a Winning Message: “Stop Dangerous Extremists”: Forty reasons the GOP is “a clear and present danger to American democracy” by Mark Green at The Nation:

“Trump and his allies are a clear and present danger to American democracy.”—the Honorable J. Michael Luttig….Speaking slowly but powerfully, Judge Michael Luttig last week may have handed Democrats what has so far eluded them: a winning message for the midterm elections. Given all the revelations to date from the January 6 hearings—as well as five-plus years of Republican malevolence—Democrats can campaign this fall against a GOP full of “dangerous extremists” and run by “dangerous extremists.”

….The best response to persistent misdirection, however, is to repeat a memorable message sustained by a mass of evidence that brands today’s Republican Party as the most extreme in our modern history…..To get there, voters need to visualize and understand what happens when violence-prone reactionary authoritarians replace democracy with despotism. An America run by Senator Ted Cruz and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene means no Obamacare, shrunken and corporatized Social Security, lower real income for average workers, even more school shootings, rising attacks on LGBTQ and Asian Americans, appeasement of Putin, plus emboldened armed militias like the Proud Boys threatening—or actually killing—local election officials….

So while the Biden White House will presumably be pushing its positive accomplishments, Democrats need to simultaneously begin assailing the “clear and present danger” of the Republican Party as the only negative message that can work—especially as likely indictments of the Trump cabal and more instances of right-wing violence occur….Running against “dangerous extremists” can tie together the news about January 6, the likely reversal of Roe, Republicans calling homosexuality an “unacceptable lifestyle choice” while suggesting secession at the Texas GOP convention, and the MAGA mob assaults on Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss….It can become in 2022 what the “Do-Nothing-Congress” was in 1948—a political hammer that galvanized voters and turned Harry Truman from a sure loser into a surprise winner.”

For some well-stated message points, comb Green’s 40 reasons to illustrate the GOP’s “clear and present danger to American democracy.”

As a California voter, I am acutely aware of the state’s very deliberate process for counting votes, and wrote about the latest lesson from June 7 at New York:

Anyone engaged in politics in a state with heavy voting by mail knows that making pronouncements based on early returns is perilous. The danger of rushes to judgment is especially dire in California, which allows mail ballots postmarked by Election Day but received in the next week to count, permits Election Day registration, and goes the extra mile to help voters cure minor errors on their mail ballot. As CalMatters put it in 2020, “the state opts to make it very easy for Californians to vote” and prioritizes voter convenience over the speed or efficiency of vote-counting. There have been many recent elections in the Golden State where the winners on Election Night have turned into losers before very long.

This was all well known prior to the 2022 California top-two primary on June 7. Yet early returns fed a narrative of a conservative law-and-order revolt against the Golden State’s dominant progressives. Newsweek’s take was typical:

“Democratic voters in California took their frustrations to the ballot box on Tuesday, boosting a former Republican in Los Angeles’ mayoral race and removing one of the nation’s most progressive district attorneys from office in an urban revolt …

“What’s happening in the L.A. mayor’s race and in the San Fransisco district attorney race is ‘consistent with the trend we are seeing nationally: that voters feel that the Democratic Party has moved too far left and want elected officials to shift back towards the center,’ Democratic pollster Carly Cooperman told Newsweek.”

Rick Caruso’s early lead in the L.A. mayoral race and what appeared initially to be a three-to-two victory for the effort to recall San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin were wildly overinterpreted, as I pointed out at the time:

“The idea that the primary showed a state convulsed with reactionary tough-on-crime sentiment is an overreaction to what actually happened on June 7. Boudin was happily tossed over the side by much of San Francisco’s Democratic political establishment — who regarded him as an embarrassing and not terribly competent outlier, not a national symbol of criminal-justice reform (as some have treated him). And while Caruso’s emergence as a freshly minted Democrat running a viable race for mayor of L.A. was startling, it took a ten-to-one spending advantage over Karen Bass to make the general election. His best shot at winning may have passed in this low-turnout primary; Bass should be favored to win in November.”

Now, late-arriving results in the primary have made the law-and-order takes not just premature but possibly wrong, as the Los Angeles Times explained:

“[I]n the two weeks since California’s primary, some key races across the state have reshuffled or tightened — turning upside-down some of the early punditry about the message Golden State voters are sending this cycle …

“In L.A.’s mayoral race, Caruso, a billionaire developer who ran on a platform of expanding the city’s police force and clearing homeless encampments, celebrated with confetti on election night as he held a five-percentage-point lead over U.S. Rep. Karen Bass (D-Los Angeles), whom he will face in the November runoff.

“But two weeks later, he finds himself trailing Bass by seven points.”

I’d say Caruso is a distinct underdog for November.

Boudin was indeed recalled, but the margin of yea-over-nay votes has dropped from 20 percent to 10 percent, and may drop further. And meanwhile, other contests already contradicted the swing-to-the-right narrative on Election Night, as I noted:

“Appointed incumbent attorney general Rob Bonta should have been a prime target for tough-on-crime agitation. As The Appeal noted: ‘Bonta’s record on criminal justice reform, and his ties to groups doing the frontline work to transform prisons and policing, are stronger than either [Xavier] Becerra or [Kamala] Harris,’ his two predecessors. (The former is Joe Biden’s Health and Human Services secretary; the latter is his vice-president.) As a novice statewide candidate, Bonta could have been especially vulnerable, but in a primary against four opponents, he has received almost 55 percent of counted votes — a higher percentage than U.S. senator Alex Padilla and a bit below that of Governor Gavin Newsom.”

Bonta’s lead is exactly where it was on the evening of June 7.

The moral of the story is to resist the temptation to make broad generalizations about California election results until enough of them are in to justify such conclusions. Let’s hope the lesson sinks in by November.

There is a pretty good counter-argument to the belief that the January 6th investigation will not help Democrats in the midterms. In his article, “Truth about Trump “starting to sink in” for Republicans, says Morning Joe” at Salon’s Raw Story, Travis Gettys flags some comments by former Republican congressman and now MSNBC commentator Joe Scarborough regarding the political fallout of the January 6th investigation. As Gettys writes, “Scarborough was shocked by the results of a new [ABC/Ipsos] poll showing a majority of Americans — including one in five Republicans — think Donald Trump should be prosecuted….The survey conducted after the first week of public hearings by the House select committee found 58 percent of Americans believe the former president should be charged with a crime for his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection, and the “Morning Joe” host found the results astonishing….”You look at the number — only 19 percent of Republicans, let’s stop for a second and think about this,” Scarborough said. “In this world of small margins that we play by every election, whether it was 2016 or 2020, let’s just stop for a second and go, oh, wow. Only 19 percent of Republicans think he should be charged with a crime and go to jail. That’s one in five Republicans.”….”Now, I must say, I ran four times and won easily four times,” he added. “But if one in five of my base thought I should have been charged with a crime and gone to jail, I mean, I would have gone and practiced law a lot earlier. Again, this is starting to resonate, this is starting to sink in. I just — we love to knock around Washington institutions. I’m not saying you, but all of us, we love to talk about how ineffective people in Congress or committees are. This committee has gotten the truth out to the American people, and even at the beginning of the summer, they’re listening….”

Dylan Scott reports that “A new study claims Medicare-for-all could have saved more than 200,000 lives during the pandemic” at Vox, and notes: “….a new study from a group of scholars at Yale and UMass-Amherst says the US had more deaths per capita than most economic peers due to something more specific: the lack of universal health care….According to that paper, published this month in PNAS, at least 212,000 fewer Americans would have died of Covid-19 in 2020 alone if the US had a single-payer health care system similar to the Medicare-for-all plan proposed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). The country would have also saved $105 billion in pandemic-related health care costs….The researchers ticked through different factors that would have reduced the number of Covid-19 fatalities under a system in which the government insures everyone and pays almost all of their health care costs:

• Nobody would have lost health insurance as a result of job loss from the pandemic’s shock to the economy. (The study estimates about 14.5 million Americans lost employer-based coverage in March and April of 2020, though some of those people would end up being covered by Medicaid.) Research has repeatedly shown being uninsured leads to patients delaying health care and worse health outcomes. More insured people would have meant more cases being diagnosed and getting treated sooner, reducing the likelihood of severe disease or death.
• Vaccination rates would likely have been higher — and therefore there would have been fewer severe cases and deaths — if more Americans had a relationship with a primary care doctor, which one in four people in the US don’t.
• And by reducing the number of Covid-19 hospitalizations through more vaccinations and earlier diagnoses, US hospitals would have come under less strain. That would have made it easier for them to manage all of their patients, rather than the situation last summer — after vaccines were widely available — when people showed up at hospitals with no room or staff to treat them. Some of those people died.

….And if you take a look at countries that have universal health care systems — the UK, Taiwan, Australia, and the Netherlands, countries we covered in our Everybody Covered series on universal health care, plus France and Germany — they have experienced fewer deaths per capita than the US has.”….Countries with universal health care did outperform the US during the pandemic — that part of the paper’s conclusion appears beyond dispute. But they have deployed different programs to achieve that goal. It’s not clear to me that Medicare-for-all would necessarily lead to better outcomes than, say, a system modeled on the Australian or Dutch approach.” It won’t be much of an issue for the midterm elections, but leaning toward some form of M4A may get some traction for Dems in 2024.

Democratic strategists would be wise to enhance their dossiers on Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. As Chris Ciliizza reports at CNN Politics: “A new poll conducted by the University of New Hampshire has some startling news for Donald Trump: He’s no longer the big dog on the block (at least in the Granite State)….Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis takes 39% in a poll of the Republican presidential primary in New Hampshire, while Trump is at 37%. No other potential GOP contender manages double-digit support, with former Vice President Mike Pence in third place at 9%….That’s a MAJOR change from where the race was last fall. A UNH poll in October 2021 showed Trump with 43% to DeSantis’ 18%….Another interesting nugget from the poll: Just 6 in 10 self-identified Republicans (62%) want the former President to run again in 2024. Which is, well, sort of low?…Now, this is just one poll in a state expected to be one of the first to vote in the 2024 primary season. If you look at all the polling done in the broader Republican White House race, Trump still leads in the preponderance of it. And he would start a third bid for president as the favorite for the GOP nomination….(Check out my rankings of the 10 Republicans most likely to win the 2024 nomination.)…And DeSantis just got the New Yorker profile treatment. (The headline: “Can Ron DeSantis Displace Donald Trump as the G.O.P.’s Combatant-in-Chief?“) That story includes this telling line: “Articulate and fast on his feet, he has been described as Trump with a brain.” Expect a hard-fought, maybe a vicious Republican presidential primary season in 2024, but don’t assume that they won’t unify at the end of it.

In “Yes, Democratic Messaging Sucks. But It’s Harder to Fix Than You Think.It’s a lot easier to be the party that wants to break government than it is to be the one that wants to use it,” Editor Michael Tomasky observes at The New Republic: “Democrats simply give the impression of being afraid of a fight. They want to be the party of comity. Even Biden is still trying to give Republicans a path to redemption in this regard….Democrats and their consultants need to think outside the box in which they’re trapped. Show elected Democrats doing things and going places you wouldn’t normally expect to see a Democrat, things that reinforce that they’re on the side of working people of all kinds, even those who don’t vote for them. And name names. Take on enemies. Every time you name an enemy you also name the people you’re trying to defend. People have a much better sense of what you stand for when you tell them what, and who, you’re against. They’ll trust you more if they think you’re on their team….I submit that this kind of approach will help address the structural problems I laid out above. Democrats across the ideological spectrum—from the conservatives to the very liberal—will respond favorably to a politics that emphasizes the idea, “We’re against the powerful interests that are scheming against you.” If people see liberal politicians taking creative and brave stands, we might even bump that liberal number up above 25 percent, since liberalism will stand for something positive again to your average person. This kind of politics can also slice through the media chatter: Republicans understand that the media loves conflict, so they serve up some new ones every week. The public always knows who the GOP is mad at, and they don’t pay a price for being the “angry” party….We don’t know if Biden will run in 2024. He often looks tired. But I’ll say this for him. He is more unambiguously on the side of working people than any Democratic president in a very long time. He’s an old-school, Truman-type Democrat. He and his team need to do more to show it.”

So, “Why Do Democrats Suck at messaging?” Dan Pfeiffer, former communications director for President Obama and author of “Battling the Big Lie,” shares some thoughts on the topic at Vanity Fair, including:

“Pundits and the political press are constantly haranguing Democrats for their messaging mistakes. One liberal writer of several well-reviewed presidential histories called me often during Obama’s first term to lecture me on why Obama didn’t yet have a version of FDR’s New Deal or LBJ’s Great Society. The subtext of these conversations was that great slogans make great presidents. Much of Progressive Twitter is filled with lamentations about some failure or missed messaging opportunity. There was a running joke in the Obama White House that you needed a master’s in economics to discuss economic policy and a doctorate in public health to offer health care ideas, but everyone believed that reading the newspaper made them qualified to opine on messaging strategy.

….A series of focus groups conducted in the first few months of the Biden presidency found that voters were unable to identify what the Democratic Party stood for. Two electoral landslide victories for Obama, a huge popular-vote win for President Biden, and four years of resistance to  Trump—and the Democrats still have a brand problem. This is more than a failure by party leaders and activists to settle on a narrative.

…How does one compose a pithy slogan or a tweet-length narrative to accurately and appealingly describe a coalition so broad that it extends from Joe Manchin to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? It’s the difference between being asked to come up with a brand for one television network like HBO or ESPN and being asked to brand “television” more broadly. What compelling slogan would be inclusive of every channel, from Bravo to CNBC?

Frankly, the messaging and branding task is more challenging for Democrats than it is for Republicans. The geographic disparities in the Senate and the Electoral College mean that Democrats must turn out liberal-base voters and appeal to voters much more conservative than the median Democratic voter. Democrats have to sell a wider array of products to a wider array of people.

The Republican coalition is narrower. It’s more ideologically homogenous and as white as a field of lilies. The Electoral College is biased toward Republican states, and the Senate gives small rural states like Wyoming the same number of votes as California and New York. To succeed, Republicans need only appeal to their base and little else, which allows for a simpler message.

However, Pfeiffer notes, “For all the party’s messaging mishaps, there are some facts running counter to the prevailing narrative that Republicans are messaging maestros. First, Democrats have won the popular vote in all but one presidential election since 1988. Second, the Democratic Party’s approval rating, while nothing to write home about, has been consistently higher than the Republican Party’s for many years. Finally, the Democratic position on immigration, taxes, reproductive freedom, minimum wage, civil rights, voting rights, and climate change is more popular than the Republican position.” Further,

These facts help explain why Republicans and their billionaire supporters invest so much time and energy in building a disinformation apparatus that can overcome the opinions of the majority of Americans. Hence, the megaphone problem…..Democratic messaging is not perfect; far from it. It’s often too wonky and wordy, an Ezra Klein column distilled into a paragraph of focus-grouped verbal applesauce. Our party leaders are all over 70, and none of them rose to the pinnacle of party leadership based on their communication chops. They are generationally disconnected from the party’s base, but the problem isn’t their age. It’s that each has spent more than half their years serving in Congress, where authentic human speaking goes to die.

Noting that “Democrats spend 99% of their time worrying about what they should say and only 1% figuring out how to get people to hear what they are sayin,” Pfeiffer adds,

The Republicans have a cable television network whose sole raison d’être is to attack Democrats and promote pro-GOP talking points. The conservative media dwarfs the progressive media in size and scope. And even then, it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison. The bulk of the media on the right is an adjunct of the party apparatus; during the Trump presidency it was state-adjacent propaganda—Pravda, but with plausible deniability…..Facebook, the biggest, most important media outlet in the world, aggressively promotes conservative content. Democrats are out-gunned. We have fewer outlets with less reach. What we say is being drowned out. Sure, we need a better message, but first we need to get a bigger megaphone….Democrats have a much smaller megaphone, and our message is getting drowned out.

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

Will Higher Turnout Fix the Democrats’ Problems?

Nope, not this election. And not future ones either. I explain in my latest at The Liberal Patriot:

“Turnout myths die hard. In fact they don’t seem to die at all.

That is particularly the case in Democratic circles. You don’t have to talk to a typical Democrat for any length of time before they evince their touching faith in the wonder-working powers of high voter turnout. Interrogate them a little further and it turns out what they really mean is that the stark choices presented to the electorate by Democrats’ progressive policies and Republicans’ reactionary ones will, if presented forcefully enough, produce massive turnout by Democratic-leaning constituencies (nonwhites, young voters, etc) that will neutralize Republican advantages.

We can see the latest example of this in how many Democrats are approaching the 2022 elections. The giant hole the Democrats are now in is hard to deny. Biden’s approval rating, a key indicator of midterm outcomes, is now below 40 percent in the 538 rolling average and below where Trump’s was at this point in the 2018 cycle. Republicans are comfortably ahead on the generic Congressional ballot, which typically underestimates their chances and augurs a big election for them. Gallup just released a comprehensive historical review of midterm indicators (Presidential and Congressional approval, satisfaction with the direction of the country, views on economic conditions) which shows the Democrats’ current situation to be exceptionally grim.

Democrats’ approach to digging out of this hole relies heavily on turnout. Either implicitly or explicitly, Democrats think of issues like abortion, guns, “MAGA Republicans” and, of course, January 6th mostly as ways of motivating their base to turn out at higher levels in the current dismal political environment….

There are, however, a number of reasons why this turnout fix is highly unlikely to work and, in fact, borders on the delusional.

1. Some Simple Math. Start with this: when Democrats persuade a voter to switch sides, that nets two votes for the Democrats (one less for the Republicans, one more for the Democrats). When Democrats turn out one more voter to vote Democratic that is, of course, a net of only one vote for them.

But it’s really worse than that. Typically, Democrats think of increased base turnout in terms of turning out more voters from various pro-Democratic demographic groups—young voters, black voters, Hispanic voters, college-educated whites, whatever. But not all the voters in these groups favor the Democrats so mobilization of more voters from a given group may well net less than one vote per additional voter. For example, looking at current Congressional ballot preferences, Democrats might net only a third of a vote for every additional Hispanic or young voter, six-tenths of a vote from every additional black voter and just a sixth of a vote from every additional college-educated white voter.”

Read the whole thing at The Liberal Patriot!