In “Democrats seek campaign opportunity with ObamaCare court ruling,” Nathaniel Weixel writes at The Hill, “Democrats are seizing on a federal judge’s ruling against ObamaCare’s prevention coverage as an opportunity to campaign on preserving health care just two months before the midterm elections….The ruling on Wednesday by Judge Reed O’Connor in Texas escalates another battle over ObamaCare, and could jeopardize access to preventive care for millions of Americans, including screenings for colorectal and other cancer, depression and hypertension, among many other services….Running on saving the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has proven effective for Democrats in the past: The party used the GOP’s attempt to repeal the law in 2017 to mount a successful campaign in 2018 to take control of the House. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court’s June decision to overturn Roe v. Wade gave Democrats another health issue with which to galvanize their base — and now it appears they’re looking to build on that strategy with O’Connor’s ruling….“With the GOP’s utter disdain for our health, safety and freedom, it is only a matter of time that another drug, treatment, vaccine or health service becomes the next target of their extremism,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in a statement shortly after the ruling….Pelosi also indicated that Democrats will look to tie the ruling directly to the GOP’s “extreme MAGA” agenda and the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade…..“As a thirty-five-year ovarian cancer survivor, I am outraged that this judge would take us back to the days before the ACA when individuals suffered pain and even death because coverage for routine cancer screenings were not guaranteed without cost-sharing,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) said…..O’Connor has a history of ruling against ObamaCare, as well as other Democratic policies. In 2018, O’Connor sided with a coalition of GOP state attorneys general and struck down the entire health law as unconstitutional, a decision that was eventually overturned at the Supreme Court in 2020…..Health care has not been a winning campaign topic for Republicans in recent cycles. Since failing to repeal the health law in 2017, the GOP has been largely silent on the topic of ObamaCare…..Vulnerable GOP candidates have also lately softened their language on abortion and even tried to scrub references to past comments on the issue from their campaign websites.”

“Forecasters now predict Democrats have the edge in the fight for Senate control,” Chris Cillizza writes at CNN Politics: “Two prominent election forecasting models now give Democrats a 70% or better chance of retaining their Senate majority in November, a major shift that suggests the fight for control may no longer be the toss-up that it has long been considered….The FiveThirtyEight election model finds that in 70 out of 100 election simulations, Democrats emerge from 2022 in the majority. The Economist’s model is even more optimistic for the party, finding that in 78 out of 100 simulations, Democrats retain their majority in November….Both models take into account polling, demographic, fundraising and historical data to produce a prediction of what will happen in two months’ time. It’s worth noting that these forecasts are built on probable outcomes and their predictive power depends on how good the underlying data are. So, in 30-ish percent of the scenarios each models runs, Republicans win the Senate majority. In interpreting those numbers, FiveThirtyEight characterizes that probability as Democrats being slightly favored to win the Senate. In short, be wary of taking these models as fact….In explaining why Democrats’ chances have improved of late, both FiveThirtyEight and The Economist note the disparity in candidate quality between the Democrats and Republicans as playing a significant role in the broader fight for the majority.” Cillizza discusses key Senate races in four states, and concludes, “But what’s clear as of today is this: Democrats are on the front foot in the race for the Senate majority, a major shift and surprise from even three months ago.”

Amelia Thomson-Deveaux and Zoha Qamar explain why “The Supreme Court Is More Unpopular Than Ever. That Could Help Democrats” at FiveThirtEight: “The Supreme Court’s conservative justices aren’t on the ballot this November. But for Democratic voters, the upcoming midterms are looking more and more like a referendum on the country’s high court….In late June, when the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in a contentious and divided ruling, Republicans had a solid 2-percentage-point lead over Democrats in generic-ballot polling, which asks Americans whether they plan to support Republicans or Democrats in the upcoming congressional election. A little over two months later, though, and abortion is mostly or completely illegal in 14 states — and those generic-ballot polls look very different. According to FiveThirtyEight’s average, Democrats now have more than a 1-point lead over Republicans….A Pew Research Center poll conducted Aug. 1-14 found that more Americans have an unfavorable view of the Supreme Court than at any other point since Pew began asking the question just over 35 years ago. Only 28 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents have a favorable view of the Supreme Court, down 18 points since January and nearly 40 points since August 2020. Republicans’ views of the court, meanwhile, have gotten a bit more positive since the beginning of the year, which has created a gaping 45-point partisan gap in the Supreme Court’s favorability rating….

Thomson-Deveaux and Qamar note, further that “the share of Democrats who say abortion is a very important issue for the midterm elections rose from 46 percent in March to 71 percent in August. Meanwhile, in a Gallup poll conducted July 5-26, 13 percent of Democrats said that abortion issues were the most important problem facing the country — driving record-high levels of concern among Americans overall. An additional 9 percent of Democrats said that the judicial system and the courts were the most important problem….According to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll conducted July 7-17, for instance, nearly three-quarters (72 percent) of Democratic voters and 56 percent of independent voters say the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs has made them more motivated to consider a candidate’s position on abortion. However, 62 percent of Republicans said the decision hadn’t made a difference to them….A solid majority (64 percent) of Democrats say the Supreme Court has too much power, up from only 23 percent in August 2020. Increasingly, Democrats also say that the justices are not making politically neutral decisions. Just over half (51 percent) of Democrats say the justices are doing a poor job of keeping their own politics out of their decision-making, up from 26 percent in January.” If the Democrats pick up a couple of seats in the Senate in November and hold a house majority, Supreme Court expansion becomes a  possibility. Supreme Court membership has changed 7 times in U.S. history. The last time it was set at 9 members (1869), the population was about 38 million. Today it is 330+ million. That’s a good demographic argument that Supreme Court justices do indeed “have too much power,” as the Kaiser poll put it, and for increasing the size of the court by an act of congress.

Some observations from “Lessons from the 2022 Primaries – what do they tell us about America’s political parties and the midterm elections?” by Elaine Kamarck at Brookings:

The leftward movement on the Democratic side is far less dramatic than the movement to the right on the Republican side, a trend our colleagues Tom Mann and Norm Ornstein have been writing about for much of the 21^stcentury….there are still a large number of Mainstream Democrats running in the Democratic primaries, and they do fairly well. In addition, there are a large number of candidates who call themselves progressives and they too do fairly well. In a finding sure to make Republican ad makers unhappy, there are very few Democratic Socialists running in Democratic primaries and they lose more than half their races. Of the 13 candidates using that label only five won, and all of those races were in very Democratic districts where the Cook Political Report rates them above D+20. The revolution appears to be losing steam.

….Conclusion. In the past decade each major political party has found itself embroiled in factional wars. But the impact on the parties has been very different. On the Republican side candidates have embraced Trump – even when he has not embraced them – and done very well in the primaries because of it.  On the Democratic side, the impact of Bernie Sanders’ revolution has been smaller, more muted, and less successful in primaries. These facts are often overlooked for two reasons. First, the Republican Party works hard to paint all Democrats as socialists who would wreck our economy, defund the police, and open our borders to everyone. Second is the inclination in the press towards what our colleague and distinguished journalist Marvin Kalb has called the “journalistic curse called bothsideism.”[4] The way this has worked in recent years is to assume symmetry – if the Republican Party is being jerked to the far right; the Democratic Party must be being jerked to the far left. As we’ve seen, there’s not much evidence to support that trend among the Democrats but plenty of evidence to support it among the Republicans.”

Some years ago, political scientists Norm Ornstein and Tom Mann popularized the notion of “asymmetric polarization” and argued that it was worse among elites such as lawmakers on the Republican side than it was among lawmakers on the Democratic side.[5] The ongoing work in the Primaries Project offers evidence that polarization is worse on the Republican side than on the Democratic side, and that moving far right is received more enthusiastically among Republican voters than moving far left is among Democratic voters.

The question this poses for the elections of 2022 and beyond is whether the Republican Party’s enthusiastic embrace of Trumpism will, at some point, go so far as to backfire and create a large and sustainable Democratic majority. Early indications are that abortion politics may be the cutting edge of this kind of overreach.

There is reason to hope we are seeing the first stirrings of such a stable congressional Democratic majority, moving into the home stretch of the 2022 midterm campaigns. Experience teaches that personality cults and extremism don’t have a long shelf life. It’s more a matter of when, than “if.”

At FiveThirtyEight, Geoffrey Skelley takes a look at the two marquee races in Georgia, and writes: “After a history-making 2020 and 2021, Georgia is once again on our minds with two high-profile statewide races on the ballot this November: the U.S. Senate race, a highly competitive contest between Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker, as well as the gubernatorial contest, a high-octane rematch between Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and Democrat Stacey Abrams….But interestingly, these races have pretty different outlooks in FiveThirtyEight’s 2022 midterm forecast. The Senate race is currently rated as a toss-up, while in the governor’s race Kemp is a clear favorite to win….For starters, the gap between the two races varies depending on pollster, but on average, polls have found a 7-point difference between the margins in the Senate and gubernatorial contests. This pretty much matches what our more rigorous polling averages found, too, with Warnock up around 2 points and Kemp leading by about 5 points¹ — or a 7-point gap….The forecast currently³ has Kemp with a 6-point lead and Warnock with about a 1-point lead, which would amount to a 7-point gap between the two races….Finally, there’s one other wrinkle with Georgia: If no candidate wins an outright majority of the vote, a runoff between the top-two finishers will take place on Dec. 6, 2022.⁴ And considering each contest has a Libertarian candidate, which is notable because Libertarians have averaged a little over 2 percent in statewide races dating back to 2002, it’s entirely possible that if the Senate race is especially tight, a Libertarian candidate who gains 1 or 2 percent of the vote could trigger a Warnock-Walker runoff in December. Currently,⁵ the FiveThirtyEight forecast gives the Senate race about a 1-in-5 chance of going to a runoff, while the governor’s race has about a 1-in-10 chance.” If Georgia’s swing voters focus more on candidate quality, Warnock’s lead will likely widen. Abrams’s chances may depend on her campaign’s ability to mobilize Black voters, which was impressive in her 2018 run for the governorship, and/or the uprising of women voters against Republicans in response to the Dobbs decision. Georgia Republicans are nervous and are already flooding the state with hard-hitting attack ads.

In “Democrats Winning Over the “Meh” Voter,” Amy Walter writes at The Cook Political Report: “This year, however, Democratic Senate candidates have been consistently outpolling Biden’s job approval ratings in their states. And, when it comes to the House, the share of voters who say they would vote for a Democrat for Congress is anywhere from 1 to 8 points higher than the percentage of voters who say they approve of the job Biden is doing. For example, the most recent Quinnipiac survey showed Biden’s job approval rating at 40 percent, yet 47 percent of voters said they were supporting a Democrat for Congress in November….In other words, many voters who are unhappy with Biden are nonetheless committed to supporting a Democratic candidate in November….In the Pew survey, 37 percent of voters said they either strongly or somewhat approved of the job Biden was doing in office. Not surprisingly 93 percent of those who strongly approve and 86 percent who somewhat approve say they are voting Democratic this fall. Among the 43 percent of voters who give Biden “very unfavorable” marks, 82 percent of those voters say they are supporting a Republican for Congress….But, among the 17 percent of voters who say they “somewhat disapprove” of Biden, 43 percent say they are planning to vote Democratic this fall, compared to 29 percent who say they’ll vote Republican….In other words, those who are “meh” about Biden are voting for Democrats. This is not something that we’ve seen before….Keeping those voters on their side for the next two months is a bigger – an unprecedented – challenge.”

Nathaniel Frank and Evan Wolfson write at The Daily Beast that “the Republican Party is currently so extreme that not only is it incapable of advocating for a vision of what government should do (the GOP didn’t even adopt a platform in 2020), it has abandoned a commitment to American democracy itself. Indeed, elected Republicans now pose the clearest and most present danger to democracy in our lifetime….Thus, preserving, let alone reinvigorating, our nation’s liberal democracy now entirely hinges on the Democrats’ ability to eke out a governing majority in the approaching election. That, in turn, requires delivering on—and touting—effective government action that improves people’s lives, just as President Biden said….More than ever, bold government action and the fate of democratic governance itself now depend on one another….The first bite at the apple, then, is that heading into November, Democrats can campaign with a message of what they have done in the face of Republican obstruction, and, even more important, what they will do if Americans keep them in power or expand their thin majorities….“Give us two more seats in the Senate and a stronger margin in the House,” the Democrats can pledge, “and then hold us accountable if we do not pass what we’ve promised.”…Selling the Democratic brand this way has not always been straightforward because while majorities of Americans agree with Democratic policy goals significant groups of voters, often for cultural reasons, lack trust in the party. Campaigning on recent accomplishments (particularly in contrast to Republicans’ dangerous enabling of Trumpian nihilism and sedition) could go far toward showing Americans that the Democratic Party truly is focused on making government work for them, and has begun to deliver on that promise.” Democrats must also “convince more Americans, of any or no party, that for now and the foreseeable future, Democrats are the only ones who will try to salvage democratic governance from the jaws of rising domestic authoritarianism and oligarchic greed.”

Joan McCarter reports that “Biden’s approval ratings keep ticking up. Getting stuff done turns out to be popular at Daily Kos, and observes, “The recent run of getting stuff done is working for Democrats with the American public, if you can believe public polling. That means unticking approvals for President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party. The latest message polling from Navigator Research shows that majorities believe Biden’s accomplishments will “result in positive outcomes for the country.” That includes passing the PACT Act to provide benefits for veterans harmed by burn pits, job growth, infrastructure investment, declining gas prices—it’s all combining to hold his approval rating steady as the midterm elections loom….The big surprise from this survey, though, is how popular his student debt plan is with pretty much everyone. That includes 86% approval from people with student debt, but also 56% of people who’ve paid off their loans, and 52% who never had student loan debt. That gives it an overall 60% approval….Biden’s approval is holding at 42% in the Navigator survey, but he gets 50% approval for handling the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s the stuff that he and Democrats have accomplished, though, that’s popular when messaged correctly. “After messaging about Biden and Democrats’ accomplishments, the share of independents who say the Democratic Party is focused on the right things increases by net 28 points (from -35 to -7) and the share of Black Americans increases by net 23 points (from +53 to +76),” Navigator finds….The Inflation Reduction Act is popular, too, with 67% support, including 64% support from Independents who are particularly supportive of the drug price caps and health care costs in the legislation. That’s the part that is most persuasive to voters, and that has given Democrats the edge on handling health care and lowering health care costs….It’s also not just Navigator. Civiqs has been tracking a steep uptick in Biden’s approval rating since an all-time low in early July. Since July 8, he’s gained 9 points in approval with registered voters….That’s all very good stuff for Democrats, the best you could hope for in the post-Labor Day push to the election. It also doesn’t hurt that Republicans own the hugely unpopular abortion bans sweeping red America after the U.S. Supreme Court ended federal protections. In fact, in the Navigator survey, “abortion” and “Trump” dominate, and 59% associate them negatively with congressional Republicans.”

Drew Westen explains “How Democrats can persuade voters to turn out at the polls” in an August 15th column at CNN Opinion:

Democrats can use their accomplishments to blunt voters’ economic anxiety and begin to restore hope — two of the most important emotions that drive voting. Aside from its popular provisions, the Inflation Reduction Act — if Democrats can restrain themselves from calling it “the reconciliation bill,” or a resorting to a “catchy” acronym like “IRA22” — is an emotionally evocative name that connects the dots to voters’ primary source of anxiety.

It also allows Democrats to put their opponents on the defensive by simply asking, “So why are you against reducing inflation? Most of the people we represent are pretty concerned about it.”

Westen argues that Democrats must “retain the emotional intensity” that energized the Kansas vote on abortion rights and turn up the heat on election deniers and Trump worshippers, because voters’ “polarized feelings about Trump will undoubtedly enter voters’ unconscious calculus as well.”

Westen concludes that “Voters can’t consciously report what they are unconsciously thinking and feeling. But if Democrats want to break the historical curse of first-term presidents in the midterms and the equally powerful curse of inflation, they will need to go for the gut.”

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

Links of the Day

Here are two very solid empirically-based assessments of where we are politically as we move into the homestretch of this electoral cycle. Democrats are looking good but there are still considerable grounds for caution….

Can Democrats defy midterm gravity? Making sense of recent shifts in the national political terrain by Michael Baharaeen at substack.com

Roe fell two months ago. Here’s how much it’s hurting the GOP by David Tyler at The Washington Post.

“Okay, it’s not like labor’s high tide in the 1940s or 1950s yet,” E. J. Dionne, Jr. writes in his Labor Day column, “Unions are on a roll. And they unite a divided nation” at The Washington Post. “But unions are staging a remarkable comeback in the United States that few anticipated even a decade ago….Government policies are shifting in the direction of workers. Unions are winning workplace elections at a rapid clip. And just last week, Gallup reported that approval of unions hit its highest level in 57 years….Gallup found that approval of unions hit low points of 48 percent in 2009 and 52 percent in 2010. They have risen ever since — to 61 percent in 2017, 68 percent last year and 71 percent last week, a peak not reached since 1965….At a time when so many attitudes divide along racial lines, Gallup found that Whites and non-Whites were equally pro-labor. Approval spanned generations — at 72 percent for those under 54, and 70 percent among those 55 and over. Support for organized labor, close to unanimous among Democrats, is in fact bipartisan: 89 percent of Democrats approved of unions, as did 68 percent of independents and 56 percent of Republicans….A spurt of new organizing will not undo years of union decline. Efforts to change labor laws to make unionization easier have failed even in Congresses controlled by Democrats. The new shape of the economy — with fewer of the sorts of manufacturing jobs on which labor built its power between the 1930s and the 1960s — creates challenges that the movement still needs to master….But the new labor story, based on an embrace of the promise of triumph through shared struggle, runs crosswise to many of the trends in our politics, and usefully so. Unions have the capacity to bring Americans together across some very deep divides. Republicans have yet to alter their largely antilabor policy stances to accommodate a new constituency that includes large numbers of working-class voters. You’d never know from the party’s hostility to unions how sympathetic the GOP rank and file is to what they do.”

Gregory Krieg flags “Key Governors Races to watch This Fall” at CNN Politics and writes: “In November, 36 states will hold gubernatorial elections that, while often less expensive than Senate races, are likely to yield more immediate impacts on the political landscape and could provide a launching pad for candidates with even higher aspirations — like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis….Heading into the general election season, Republicans control 20 of the contested governor’s seats to Democrats’ 16. But many of the key battleground contests feature Democratic incumbents, elected during the 2018 “blue wave,” trying to win a second term. In Michigan and Wisconsin, Govs. Gretchen Whitmer and Tony Evers are likely Republicans’ only obstacle to governing trifectas. The same goes in Pennsylvania — another state President Joe Biden flipped in 2020 — where Democratic state Attorney General Josh Shapiro would likely face a GOP-controlled legislature if he defeats Republican nominee Doug Mastriano, a Trump-allied election denier….The added attention and, to some extent, increasing attractiveness of governors’ races to big donors and outside spenders, could benefit Democrats if only because the party has in the past tended to look past state elections and zero in on federal and presidential ones….While Democrats try to fashion a broad argument that ties economic concerns to growing extremism in the Trump-dominated Republican ranks, the GOP has been keen to narrow the conversation to dissatisfaction with the economy — especially in states, such as Nevada, which was hit especially hard by Covid-19 and has been slow to recover.” Krieg has lots more to say about particular races.

From Nicole Narea’s “Is post-Roe voter registration benefitting Democrats? Preliminary data suggests that enthusiasm is up among women and young voters in the midterms” at Vox: “Democrats appeared to be heading into the 2022 midterms with a perceived voter enthusiasm deficit brought on by inflation and an unpopular incumbent president. But over the last few months, the party’s outlook for the midterms has significantly improved, and many political strategists attribute the shift at least in part to voters’ outrage over the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade….Many of these strategists — like Simon Rosenberg and James Carville — believe the threat of further restrictions on abortion access should the GOP take control of Congress, governor’s mansions, and statehouses will energize Democratic turnout in the fall. Several recent elections — including in New York’s 19th, where the Democratic winner centered his campaign on abortion access and the resounding rejection of a constitutional amendment that would have allowed state lawmakers to further restrict abortion access in Kansas — have been taken as early signs that Democrats are likely to fare better than expected in the fall. Narea interviews Tom Bonier, CEO of data firm Targetsmart, who adds, “In every state that I’ve looked at so far, when you look at the under-25 voters who have registered since Dobbs, and then compare them to the under-25 voters who registered this year prior to Dobbs, they’re even more Democratic. You see the same pattern with women who are registering post-Dobbs versus those who registered prior to Dobbs. They’re more likely to be registered as Democrats by a pretty wide margin….What’s interesting to me is, when you see surges in enthusiasm reflected in registration historically, it almost always is then mirrored in surges in enthusiasm and turnout among those groups overall. So it stands to reason that what we’re seeing isn’t just relevant because it means more women are eligible to vote, but it indicates that women in general are far more attuned to this election and therefore far more likely to vote.”

Some observations from Alex Shephard’s “The Media Is Not Ready to Defend Democracy” at The New Republic: “On Thursday, President Biden delivered a searing speech about the threat to democracy posed by Donald Trump—whose name he mentioned only twice—and the growing ranks of “MAGA Republicans.”….He characterized the upcoming midterm elections as nothing less than a “battle for the soul of the nation.”….With the midterm elections less than three months away, the Democratic message is—rather  unsurprisingly—equally uncomplicated and understandable: It’s focused on protecting democracy from a party that keeps promising political violence. Biden’s speech, delivered just before Labor Day, served as a kind of grace note to the midterm season. It was an existential speech in that the fate of American democracy does actually seem to be on the ballot. And, yes, it was a political speech in that the Democrats are pledging to preserve democracy while Republicans plot to overthrow the Founders’ ideals in favor of something in Viktor Orbán’s image….That Biden’s speech was political served as an excuse for lazy both-sides journalism, as reporters scrambled after the nearest bottle of weak sauce to draw equivalence between Biden’s commentary and a movement that’s currently calling in bomb threats to children’s hospitals. Biden was quoted laying out an argument—with evidence—that Republicans were bent on subverting democracy….The Beltway press has struggled to cope with the rise of a political party that is pursuing an existential threat to democracy. They hate the idea that they actually bear some responsibility for preventing autocracy; indeed that their own profession relies on this defense of our institutions. This neurosis drives them, endlessly, back into a blind spot they’ve built for themselves, in which everything is strictly politics as usual, and the question of whether America’s multiracial democracy should actually survive the decade is just an interesting debate that can be bemusedly enjoyed. There are plenty of normal political issues at stake in the midterms—inflation, crime, the war in Ukraine—to which they can apply their preferred rubric. The GOP’s threat to the republic isn’t one of them.”

From “Cook Political Report moves five House races toward Democrats” by Emily Brooks at The Hill:

The nonpartisan election handicapper Cook Political Report on Thursday shifted its forecasts for five competitive House races in favor of Democrats.

The changes follow a spike in Democratic voter enthusiasm following the Supreme Court’s decision in June that overturned the landmark federal abortion rights protections in Roe v. Wade, Cook Political Report senior editor Dave Wasserman wrote. Democrats have outperformed expectations in every special election since the ruling.

They also also come as Republicans, some of whom predicted a potentially record “red wave” election year, have tempered expectations about the midterm elections this year.

Last week, a separate Cook Political Report analysis said Republicans still look like the favorites to win control of the House in the midterm elections. But the publication revised its forecast down from Republicans winning 15 to 30 seats to winning 10 to 20 seats.

The Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman said the five ratings changes favoring Democrats include: AK-1( from “likely Republican to tossup”); AZ-4 (to “likely Democratic”); MD-6 (to “likely Democratic”); NY-4 (to “Lean Democratic”) and VA-7 (to “Lean Democratic”).

Here’s my take from New York on the very special House election in Alaska that concluded with a ranked-choice vote tabulation on August 31:

Alaska voters spurned a comeback bid by former governor and vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin and instead sent Democrat Mary Peltola to Washington to fill a vacancy in the U.S. House until January. Peltola will be the first woman and the first Alaska Native to hold the state’s one U.S. House seat, albeit temporarily. She’s the first Democrat in that position since 1973, when Republican Don Young, whose death in March necessitated this special election, first won the seat.

Peltola’s victory was made possible by Nick Begich III voters’ unwillingness to make fellow Republican Palin their second choice under the state’s new ranked-choice system. In the top-four primary on June 11, Palin finished first, Begich was second, independent Al Gross was third, and Peltola — who had a mere 10 percent of the vote — was fourth. But Gross soon dropped out, creating a top-three general election with Peltola drawing a lot of Gross’s supporters.

The general election took place on August 16, but the final results were only announced on August 31. Peltola won 40 percent, Palin 31 percent, and Begich 29 percent — eliminating him from the contest and reallocating his voters’ second preferences. In a special ranked-choice tabulation live-streamed by state election officials, it was revealed that only 50.3 percent of Begich voters backed Palin, while 28.7 percent supported Peltola and another 20.9 percent left the ballot line for a second preference blank. This gave Peltola the victory by a margin of 51.5 percent to Palin’s 48.5 percent.

Some observers will attribute the upset to the ranked-choice voting system itself, which Palin bitterly denounced as “crazy, convoluted, confusing” after her defeat was made clear. But while Gross’s withdrawal definitely ensured Peltola would make the final round, it’s not entirely clear things would have turned out differently with the traditional system had Palin won a Republican primary, then faced Peltola. A July poll from Alaska Survey Research showed Palin with a 37-60 favorable/unfavorable rating while relatively little-known former legislator Peltola rang in at 37-16. Peltola hit some progressive themes as a general-election candidate including support for abortion rights, ocean productivity, and food security. But as the Associated Press noted, she was able to rise above the fray as Palin and Begich pounded each other.

The winner has a uniquely Alaskan background, as CNN observed:

‘Peltola, who turned 49 on Wednesday, is the daughter of a Yup’ik mother and a Nebraskan father who had moved north to teach school and later became a bush pilot.

“She had spent a decade in Alaska’s House of Representatives, from 1999 to 2009, where she chaired the bipartisan “bush” caucus of rural lawmakers and overlapped with Palin, her leading opponent in the special congressional race, who was governor from late 2006 through mid-2009. Peltola later became a Bethel City Council member, a lobbyist and a salmon advocate as the executive director of the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission.”

Peltola’s authenticity may have subtly fed on resentment of Palin’s perceived abandonment of the state after Palin’s abrupt resignation as governor in 2009 following her failed national campaign, followed by a peripatetic political and pop-culture career mostly taking place in the Lower 48. Palin jumped into the House special-election race late (Begich had already been running against Young) and only gained steam when Donald Trump endorsed her.

For the moment, Pelota is a surprise addition to the Democrats’ fragile House majority from a very red state (Trump defeated Biden in Alaska by 10 points in 2020). It’s possible that Peltola’s service and the much higher name ID she will soon gain will make her a formidable candidate in November. In the regular primary for a full term in Congress (which took place the same day as the special general election), Peltola again finished first with Palin second and Begich third. A fourth candidate, Republican Tara Sweeney, was far behind, and, like Gross in the special election, she has indicated that she plans to withdraw. After losing the special election, Palin immediately vowed to fight on to November. “Though we’re disappointed in this outcome, Alaskans know I’m the last one who’ll ever retreat,” she said.

But you have to figure that Republicans unhappy with Palin losing a House seat that the party controlled for 49 years, and looking at her unfavorability numbers, may be tempted to consolidate their support behind Begich to give Peltola a stronger challenger. How the two Republicans behave toward each other and what national Republicans frantic to win the seat do to boost the odds of victory may do a lot to determine the outcome. But at the moment, Mary Peltola’s political future looks a lot brighter than Sarah Barracuda’s.

Ronald Brownstein’s “From a Republican ‘tsunami’ to a ‘puddle’: Why the forecast for November is changing” at CNN Politics sheds some fresh light on Democratic midterm prospects. As Brownstein writes, “It was a referendum. Now it’s a choice….For political professionals in both parties, that’s the capsule explanation for why the Democratic position in the midterm elections appears to have improved so much since summer began….with evidence suggesting more voters are treating the election as a comparative choice between the two parties, operatives on both sides are bracing for a closely contested outcome that could include an unusual divergence in results for the House and those in Senate and governor races….”It feels to me to be more like a shallow red puddle that we’re walking through, rather than a tsunami of sorts,” says Republican strategist John Thomas….Earlier this year, the debate between the parties centered on inflation, the economy, crime, immigration and President Joe Biden‘s stalled legislative agenda in Congress — all issues that motivated the Republican base and alienated many swing voters from Democrats. But a series of dramatic events over the past few months have elevated an entirely different set of issues: gun violence, threats to democracy, climate change and, above all, abortion rights….”The conversation in the nation has changed,” says Michael Podhorzer, former chief political adviser to the AFL-CIO and chair of the Analyst Institute, a collaborative of progressive groups that conducts extensive public polling….That shift in the conversation, he argues, is “reminding the 81 million people who voted against Trump in 2020″ about why they turned out to oppose him and increasing the odds that more of them will show up again in 2022….”We have even heard people in focus groups say, ‘prices go up and down, but I can’t prevent myself from being raped and not being able to have an abortion,'” she [Fernandez Ancona] said. “The idea that something everyone had is now being taken away is so strong it’s overriding” other concerns.”….Particularly noteworthy is that a recent Pew Research Center surveyfound congressional Democrats leading among voters who somewhat disapproved of Biden’s performance, while the NBC survey found them essentially breaking even with those voters. That’s a remarkable divergence from recent experience: the opposition party won about two-thirds of voters who somewhat disapproved of Trump in 2018 and former President Barack Obama in 2010, according to exit poll results provided by the CNN polling unit.”

In more downers for wingnuts news, Jeff Singer reports that “Sarah Palin loses Alaska’s lone House seat to a Democrat in a special election upset” at Daily Kos. As Singer writes, “Alaska election officials carried out the instant-runoff process Wednesday for the Aug. 16 special election for the state’s only House seat, and former Democratic state Rep. Mary Peltola has scored a dramatic pickup for her party by defeating Republican Sarah Palin 51-49….Peltola, who will replace the late GOP Rep. Don Young, will be the first Democrat to represent the Last Frontier in the lower chamber since Young won his own special election all the way back in 1973. The new congresswoman, who is of Yup’ik ancestry, is also set to become the first Alaska Native to ever serve in Congress….Peltola’s victory on such red turf, though, looked improbable before the polls closed two weeks ago. Indeed, national Democrats didn’t even commit serious resources to the contest, a decision the former state representative called “bizarre” just before Election Day. Peltola, however, benefited from voters’ lingering apathy toward Palin, whom the Anchorage Daily News last year described as “nearly invisible within the state” and “almost entirely absent from Alaska politics” since she resigned the governorship in 2009….Republicans, though, will have the chance to regain this seat in a few months. Peltola, Palin, and Begich, as well as Libertarian Chris Bye, will be on the ballot again in November for another instant-runoff election, and the dynamics could be very different for this second round.”

From “Male Politicians Haven’t Noticed How Angry Women Voters Are” by Dahlia Lithwick at slate.com: “One analysis of the Kansas’ voter registration list showed that in the week after Dobbs, more than 70 percent of newly registered voters in that state were women. Those numbers, according to an Upshot analysis of 10 states with available voter registration data, show consistently higher registration for women after the Dobbs leak in May. As Jennifer Rubin recently noted, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that, “62 percent of women registering since Dobbs registered as Democrats, 15 percent as Republicans and that 54 percent were younger than 25.” And a Pew Research Center poll indicates that “a majority of registered voters (56 percent) say the issue of abortion will be very important in their midterm vote, up from 43 percent in March.” Tom Bonier, CEO Of TargetSmart recently posted on Twitter: “We are seeing early signs of what could lead to a huge increase in women voting in November. …This surge is young and female.” Both Mitch McConnell and RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel are panicking about the GOP’s odds in Congress, directly connected to fundraising around abortion….I have a lot of theories about why nobody should be surprised that women are friggin’ furious right now, which include, as Mark Joseph Stern has been arguing all summer, the increasingly horrifying tales of women, disproportionately on teenagers and victims of violence, left to suffer from sepsis, refused prescriptions and denied treatment for ectopic pregnancies, and ever more horrors. And yet, the forced birth Republicans continue to insist that none of this is happening, or that journalists and physicians are making it all up….And as President Biden warned this week, Democrats losing Congress will mean that abortion is in peril everywhere.”

Kyle Kondik and J. Miles Coleman share “Senate Rating Changes: Arizona, Pennsylvania to Leans Democratic” at Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “Are we being too friendly to Democrats by moving Arizona and Pennsylvania off Toss-up? Quite possibly. On the other hand, you could argue we’re being too friendly to Republicans in at least one state: Wisconsin, where Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes (D) has posted surprising leads in several independent polls — even in the typically GOP-friendly Trafalgar, which found Barnes up 2 points a couple of days ago (although such a small lead might as well be a tie). Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) continues to struggle with favorability. As Marquette University Law School pollster Charles Franklin points out, Johnson entered the 2016 cycle more anonymous than he is now — he scored an upset victory that year by winning over ambivalent voters. Now, as more voters have firm opinions of him, Johnson’s favorables are not impressive. But we still ultimately favor Johnson in a state where Republicans do not appear likely to be at a spending disadvantage and where they appear to have ample opportunity to paint Barnes as left-wing. Wisconsin’s Senate race remains Leans Republican, to us….So we only have 2 Toss-ups right now, the seats that Sens. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) and Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) are defending. We don’t have much of a handicap in either at the moment. But we think both are legitimately close enough that we wouldn’t be surprised if the GOP sweeps both. This is why we still see the Senate as an overall Toss-up even though, based on our current ratings, Democrats only need to win one of these Toss-ups for a majority and Republicans need to win both (because Democrats only need 50 seats for a majority thanks to Vice President Kamala Harris’s tiebreaking vote, whereas Republicans need an outright majority of 51).”

In “Will ‘Dobbs’ Drive Young People to the Polls?,” Madeline Rosenberg writes at The American Prospect:

Vote.org, a nonpartisan voting registration site, reported a roughly 1,000 percent increase in Kansas voter registrations on its site immediately following the Dobbs decision in June, as well as registration spikes of 500 percent or more in ten other states. About 81 percent of people who register on the site, where a large percentage of users are women under age 35, also turn out to vote, according to Vote.org’s Andrea Hailey.

“To see almost twice as much voter turnout compared to the prediction, I have to believe young people played a role in that,” said Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, director of Tufts University’s CIRCLE, which tracks youth civic education and engagement.

Though voters ages 18 to 35 comprise one of the largest voting blocs in the country, they have historically turned out in lower numbers compared to older Americans. But in a post-Roe era of abortion bans and threats to other forms of reproductive health care, including birth control and IVF, Kansas may be an indicator of what’s to come, as young people are mobilizing their peers and registering to vote in higher numbers because this issue affects them personally…A July Voters of Tomorrow poll surveying young adults ages 18 to 29 found that “the data is clear: young people fear for their future,” listing gun violence and abortion as top concerns.

It makes perfect sense that women of child-bearing age would be disproportionately energized to vote in midterms as a result of the Dobbs decision, and that their partners would agree with them. Looking towards the near future, Rosenberg outlines some of the challenges facing Democrats:

Polling that predicts young people are energized to vote ahead of the midterms comes after 2018 already saw historic youth voter turnout. Democratic pollster Celinda Lake explained that voters who cast their ballots in a midterm for the first time in 2018 are among those planning to vote again this cycle. “We just need to get all of the young people who turned out in 2018 and had no previous midterm history to vote again, and we will win,” Lake said.

There’s also time before November for campaigns and candidates to reach young people who didn’t vote in 2018. In half of the states, youth voter registration was lower in June than it was at the same point in 2018, particularly for newly eligible 18- and 19-year-olds, according to polling from Tufts CIRCLE.

….But getting people registered remains a major barrier to voting—and the subject of voter suppression efforts in some states. Since the uptick in youth voter turnout in 2018, at least 18 states have passed 30 laws that make it harder to vote, and introduced more than 400 bills that restrict voting access.

Democratic ad strategy and outreach should more energetically target this age demographic, which has now become a pivotal concern for the midterm elections. It’s important also to tailor messaging to resonate with moderate and even conservative young voters (“Republican candidates are meddling in your most personal decisions”), as well as more liberal young voters (‘choice in family planning is a central human right’).

With the Dobbs decision, Republican judicial appointees have given the Democrats a cutting edge issue that will swing some young women voters and their partners towards voting Democratic and make others stay home instead of voting Republican. Republicans will try to drown out abortion protests by hammering inflation fears — that is already underway. But Democrats must remind the public — moderates as well as liberals — that it was exclusively Republican-appointed justices, supported by Republican elected officials, who took away their family planning options and created this mess.