From “Red wave hits breaker: GOP midterm worries rise” by Emily Brooks at The Hill: “Republican worries of a midterm flop are growing heading into the critical post-Labor Day campaign season, with analysts who had previously predicted massive GOP gains shifting their forecasts toward Democrats….Rick Tyler, a Republican strategist and analyst, said the environment looks “not even close” to a red wave election year….“The enthusiasm is just not there,” Tyler said. “Last time Republicans had a good year, they were 6 points ahead in the generic poll. Now we’re barely 2 points ahead. So it’s definitely not going to happen.”….RealClearPolitics averages of pollsmeasuring whether voters would prefer Republican or Democratic control of Congress show the GOP advantage slipping from 4.8 points in late April to less than a point as of Friday. At around this point in 2010, when Republicans saw historic gains in Congress, generic polls showed an advantage of 4 to 6 points for the GOP….Weaknesses for GOP candidates along with results from recent elections have led election analysts at Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics and The Cook Political Report to shift several forecasts for key congressional midterm races toward Democrats. Cook revised its expected GOP gain in the House from 15 to 30 seats to 10 to 20 seats, and its Senate outlook from Republicans having an edge to a toss-up….Kyle Kondik, managing editor at Sabato’s Crystal Ball, said that weaknesses in GOP Senate and gubernatorial candidates, as well as many Republicans’ position against abortion, has given Democrats the opportunity ”to make the election more of a choice than a referendum.” But he cautioned against fully reevaluating the midterm environment before Labor Day and said that Republicans could still flip both chambers even if they fall below expectations of a “red wave.”….“It is possible that the Democrats’ addition of more college-educated voters, at the expense of losing more non-college voters, has skewed some of these special elections, as the college cohort is a more reliable voting bloc,” Kondik said. “That said, if the GOP had some big enthusiasm edge over the Democrats — and if it was bringing a lot of lapsed GOP voters back into the fold — one would think they’d be doing better than they are.”

In “Ratings Update: Democrats Gain Big in House Races” at Elections Daily, Eric Cunningham writes: “The national climate has undeniably shifted, perhaps from a Republican wave to a so-called “ripple” or neutral environment. We regard Republicans as the unequivocal favorites to hold the House, still, but our ratings changes predominantly benefit Democrats. The vast majority of our changes here are shifting potential upset races or fringe races we considered to be on the table. Additionally, we’re moving a handful of urban or suburban-oriented Republican seats back onto the board….Currently, we favor Republicans in 218 seats (the absolute bare-minimum for a majority) and Democrats in 193. We have 24 seats rated in the Tossup column….”

Amy Walter observes at The Cook Political Report that “Democrats are getting help flipping the script thanks to the Supreme Court and Trump. For the first time in history, warnings by Democrats about a rollback of abortion rights aren’t theoretical. Poll after poll continues to show that the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade is widely unpopular. And, as my colleague David Wasserman has noted, Democratic engagement in the post-Dobbs era has jumped considerably. In the four special elections since the June 28th Supreme Court decision, Democrats have outperformed 2020 results by as many as 6 points….Then, there’s Trump. While Youngkin was able to keep the polarizing former president at arm’s length, most of the other high-profile Senate candidates are embracing him. For the last few weeks, Trump and his ungrounded claims of voter fraud have dominated the political and media discourse. July has been dominated by coverage of January 6th commission hearings, the primary defeat of the committee’s GOP chairwoman Liz Cheney, the FBI discovery of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, and Trump’s ongoing legal troubles in Fulton County, Georgia. The party out of power — rather than the in-party — is in the spotlight….The more Trump is in the news, the more dangerous the political climate for the GOP….While neither Biden nor Trump are popular, Trump is the more polarizing. New polling from NBC News finds Trump’s net favorable ratings (-18) to be twice as bad as Biden’s (-8). That same dynamic is showing up in swing states like Arizona, where a recent FOX News poll finds Trump’s net favorable at -20 to Biden’s -10, and Wisconsin, where the FOX poll showed Biden’s net favorable ratings at (-6) compared with Trump’s (-10)….Democrats, especially incumbent Senators in key swing states, have built up solid foundation for themselves. Polling in Senate races not only finds Democrats leading in the ballot test, but also holding strong favorable ratings, especially among independent voters….A big reason for that bump in popularity is that Democratic incumbents have had the airwaves to themselves for most of the last two years. Since the beginning of 2021, significantly more money has been spent on positive ads for Democratic Senators in Arizona, Georgia, New Hampshire and Nevada than on negative ads against them….According to information provided to the Cook Political Report by AdImpact, every one of those Senators has had at least a two-to-one advantage on the airwaves.”

Gabrielle Gurley’s “Democrats in Danger of Missing the Marijuana Moment” at The American Prospect spotlights a danger — and an opportunity — for Democrats. As Gurley writes, “The Supreme Court’s revocation of abortion rights and the rush of red states to ban it altogether have opened the eyes of young voters to the perils of sideline-sitting at election time. President Biden’s decision to forgive $10,000 of student loan debt may also energize more young people to vote in the midterm elections. But failure to deliver on a slam-dunk issue like the federal decriminalization of marijuana could convince other voters to skip the general election….Removing research restrictions is a monumental step, but what voters across the political spectrum, and especially people under 25, are waiting for is the end of prohibition. The Cannabis Administration and Opportunity Act (CAOA) offers that pathway. The mammoth federal regulatory proposal, introduced in July by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Ron Wyden of Oregon, would end the federal prohibition of marijuana and remove cannabis from the Controlled Substances Act….Currently, recreational marijuana is legal in 19 states and medical marijuana in 39. An astonishing majority of Americans agree that marijuana should be legal for medical or recreational purposes. A July Gallup poll found that more than 50 percent of people 18 to 34 regularly use some type of marijuana product. Legalization is popular with young people, but it depends on who you ask: Americans ages 25 to 29 support legal cannabis by a 50 percent to 28 percent margin, with 21 percent unsure. Among people 18 to 24, the figure drops to 38 percent, with 39 percent opposed and 22 percent unsure. (On abortion and student debt relief, young people are much more uniformly aligned: 78 percent of young people support legal abortion, while 85 percent support some type of student loan debt relief.)….Cannabis descheduling by Congress or by a presidential executive order might serve as a motivational lever for both young potential voters and other unmotivated ones, demonstrating what they can expect next year if Democrats remain in power—or what they can expect if the Republicans take one or both houses of Congress.”

With so much of the political landscape in a state of flux right now, it’s time to think very positively for a minute, as I did at New York this week:

Rarely in today’s political debates do Democrats throw such a well-targeted counterpunch as did the White House in response to Republican criticism of President Biden’s student loan forgiveness initiative. As Zoe Richards reports at nbcnews.com:

The White House hit back at Republicans in an uncharacteristic manner Thursday by using its Twitter account to go after GOP lawmakers who are bashing President Joe Biden’s move to cancel some student debt after they personally benefited from having Paycheck Protection Program loans forgiven during the Covid pandemic.

In a series of tweets, the White House highlighted several congressional Republicans — Reps. Vern Buchanan of Florida, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania, and Markwayne Mullin and Kevin Hern of Oklahoma — who it said had six- and seven-figure PPP loans forgiven as part of a federal program intended to help those harmed by the coronavirus.

They blundered right into that one. Richards shares some of the specifics:

Greene, who said on Newsmax that “it’s completely unfair” for student loans to be forgiven, had $183,504 in PPP loans forgiven, according to the White House….Kelly, who tweeted that Biden’s move was poised to benefit “Wall Street advisors” at the cost of “plumbers and carpenters,” had $987,237 forgiven, the White House said….Buchanan, who according to the White House had more than $2.3 million in PPP loans forgiven, tweeted that Biden’s move was “reckless” and a “unilateral student loan giveaway.”….The White House also highlighted criticism and PPP loan forgiveness amounts from Mullin (more than $1.4 million) and Hern (more than $1 million).

This provides an excellent and instructive lesson for all Democratic candidates in the art of the political counterpunch. Be prepared for attacks in advance, hit back soon and hard. And keep in mind that the permanent weakness of Republican politicians is that their fingers are never far from the cookie jar.

Veteran ex-Republican pol Charlie Crist was chosen by Florida Democrats to take on the very menacing Governor Ron DeSantis. I had some thoughts at New York about Crist’s apparent strategy.

Former and would-be future Florida governor Charlie Crist is famously one of the sunniest people in politics. In a classic profile of the perma-tanned ex-Republican and ex-independent candidate during his first gubernatorial run as a Democrat in 2014, Michael Kruse marveled at the authenticity with which Crist uttered cringeworthy pandering remarks:

“One of the guests [at a political event] asked, ‘Governor, do you ever have bad days?’ And he answered, ‘It hardly ever happens! How can you have bad days? We live in Florida!’”

Now that Crist is taking on the powerful and aggressively abrasive culture warrior Ron DeSantis, Kruse wondered earlier this year if such an upbeat politician was mismatched in a contest that seemed to call for maximum confrontation:

“[T]he way Crist is running is a bet. That people are exhausted of the nonstop politics of conflict. That what they want really is to dial down the volume and the vitriol. And that almost all Democrats will vote for Crist and almost all Republicans will vote for DeSantis but that enough of the people somewhere in whatever’s left of the middle will vote because of this for Crist.”

But the day after Crist easily won the Democratic gubernatorial primary over the more hard-edged Nikki Fried, he seemed to strike a new and somewhat startling tone:

That doesn’t sound very sunny, does it? But if you listen to his full remarks, he follows this dismissal of DeSantis supporters with an appeal to a broad coalition of voters:

“I want the vote of the people of Florida who care about our state: good Democrats, good independents, good Republicans.”

This echoes his primary-night attack on DeSantis: “Guys, this is simple. Governor DeSantis only cares about the White House, he doesn’t care about your house.” So Crist is indeed continuing the “bet” that he can contrast himself with DeSantis precisely over their stark differences in temperament, focus, and perhaps even authenticity.  At the same time, he’s drawing that contrast with a degree of passion that should satisfy Democrats who want to wage war on the man they fear as Trump 2.0, a coldly calculating authoritarian who knows exactly how to stimulate the fears and hatreds of his MAGA base while keeping the trains running on time. By calling out MAGA voters as snakes in the Garden of Eden that is his beloved Florida, Crist can perhaps have it both ways.

But it’s a gamble. Politicians hardly ever publicly write off voters. For a “legendary retail pol” (as my colleague Gabriel Debenedetti recently called Crist), it must be actually painful. Yes, there aren’t nearly as many swing voters today as there were as recently as the 1990s, and boosting base enthusiasm has become the touchstone of candidate messaging lately, particularly in low-turnout midterm elections. Still, condemning your opponent’s supporters as incorrigible while appealing to members of that opponent’s party is tricky (though perhaps Crist, a former Republican, can present himself as a role model). You can be sure that Team DeSantis will take full advantage of Crist’s “don’t want your hateful vote” comment to rile up MAGA voters and tell potential defectors from his coalition that Democrats are the ones who are being hateful and divisive.

Over the course of a general-election campaign, however, it will be hard for anyone paying attention to view Crist as a hater. He will likely convey the sense that he is sad more than angry at what DeSantis is doing to Florida and wants to do to America from sea to shining sea. It’s as likely to work as any other strategy, as this is a midterm where Democrats are at a disadvantage and Florida is trending Republican.

In “This one issue could save Democrats in November,” Zachary B. Wolf writes at CNN politics: “the larger lesson of 2022 so far is that a focus on protecting abortion rights from the US Supreme Court and Republican-controlled state governments could, maybe, stop a “red wave” in November….In upstate New York, an Iraq War veteran, Democrat Pat Ryan, passed his Republican opponent, Marc Molinaro, in a House special election Ryan framed almost entirely around abortion….Ryan did better in the district against Molinaro than President Joe Biden did versus former President Donald Trump in 2020….Ryan told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Wednesday that his decision to focus on abortion came from watching the effect of the Supreme Court’s decision on the ground in his district….While the Kansas election put abortion directly on the ballot, it was simply a campaign focus in the special election in New York. Now, with a win in that hotly contested seat where both parties spent money, Democrats see a path in places that seemed to be slipping out of their reach earlier this year.” Woldf quotes CNN’s Harry Enten, who said “All told, Democrats are averaging a 4-point overperformance in House specials since Roe was overturned. This is a 10-point shift from where they were on average before the ruling.” Read the full story.”

“Yes, Special Elections Really Are Signaling A Better-Than-Expected Midterm For Democrats,” Nathaniel Rakich writes at FiveThirtyEight, and observes, “We at FiveThirtyEight often track the results of special elections (i.e., elections that occur at unusual times because an office unexpectedly becomes vacant) because of the hints they provide to the national mood. When a party consistently does well in special elections — defined not by winning or losing, but by outperforming a state or district’s baseline partisanship — it’s often a sign that the national political environment favors that party, and is therefore a good omen for that party in the upcoming regular general election….There have been four first-past-the-post special House elections since that decision [Dobbs v. Jackson on abortion rights], and Democrats have outperformed their expected margins in those elections by an average of 9 points….special-election results are clearly indicating that the political winds are now at Democrats’ backs. And it’s not just special-election results. Democrats and their allies have also done well in other, non-special elections since Dobbs….On the day of the Dobbs decision, Republicans led polls of the generic congressional ballot, or polls that ask Americans which party they plan to support for Congress, by 2.3 points, according to FiveThirtyEight’s average. But since then, Democrats have gained 2.7 points, and on Wednesday,³ they hold a small lead in these polls….This is unusual, given that the polls usually get worse, not better, for the president’s party as a midterm election draws closer. That could be a sign that 2022 could be the rare midterm that bucks the usual trend of the president’s party getting a “shellacking.” And if so, Democrats may have the Supreme Court to thank.”

Kyle Kondik writes at Sabato’s Crystal Ball, “Democrats turned in another pair of congressional special election overperformances last night, giving them an at least somewhat surprising victory in the closely-watched NY-19 special and a decent showing in the much sleepier NY-23 special, which Republicans held by a smaller margin than the GOP presidential showing in the district in 2020….In NY-19, a classic swing district that Joe Biden won by about 1.5 points in 2020, Ulster County Executive Pat Ryan (D) beat Dutchess County Executive Marc Molinaro (R) by a small margin. Some sites were reporting 51%-49% on Wednesday morning, others 52%-48%, and there probably are some scattered votes left to count, such as late-arriving mail votes….This came despite Republican outside groups spending more in the race and polling that pointed to Molinaro….Ryan ran heavily on the abortion issue, an increasing focus for Democrats in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision that eliminated constitutional protections for abortion rights, while Molinaro ran more on other issues, like inflation….there is an accumulating amount of evidence that Democrats are holding up better than expected in this midterm environment, likely in no small part because of the Dobbs decision. We now have these decent Democratic special election performances to consider, as well as House generic ballot polling that, collectively, no longer shows a Republican edge. This comes despite President Joe Biden’s poor approval rating — his numbers have been better lately, although he’s still in just the low 40s (as opposed to the high 30s).” Regarding the Ohio Senate race, Kopndik writes, “We’re moving the race from Likely Republican to Leans Republican. Our confidence in Vance winning remains, but we do not feel as strongly about it as we previously did.”

Reports of Democrats’ midterm death may be greatly exaggerated.” Gabby Goldstein and Mallory Roman write at Salon in their article, “Democrats have seized the momentum — now that needs to flow down-ballot. Our analysis shows a narrow path for Democrats to win back state-level power. It’s crucial — but it won’t be easy.”  Goldstein and Roman continue, “In fact, Democrats have momentum. Public reaction to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision has demonstrated the deep unpopularity of Republican abortion restrictions, including Kansas voters’ recent and resounding rejection of a change to the state constitution that would have made an abortion ban possible. And a summer of explosive Jan. 6 hearings has shown the depths to which MAGA Republicans aim to go in dismantling democracy. Meanwhile, the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act has been a tremendous victory. FiveThirtyEight now has Democrats ahead on the generic ballot….Democrats have a path to retain control in Washington. But the fight must be for much more than that. From abortion access to fair elections, state legislatures are increasingly the venues that control ever-broader swaths of our social, economic, and personal lives. Building progressive power in state legislatures is a key to securing the very future of our civil rights and democracy. Remember: whoever we elect to legislatures this year will be in office during the critical post-2024 election period….The good news is that control of legislative chambers is not wildly out of reach. Our recent analysis shows that Democrats have been much closer to controlling chambers than has been commonly understood. Follow the data: Legislative majorities often hinge on the outcomes in a handful of competitive seats. With so much on the line, Democrats must use their newfound momentum to fight hard for control of critically important state legislative seats….to combat ballot drop-off, Democrats need to make sure that our voters understand the importance of state legislatures, policy and power. Unlike Republicans, Democrats do not have an embedded, emotional connection to state-level power. But we can build one. We can shift the narrative to embrace the value of state power as necessary for a free future, we can celebrate progressive federalism, and we can commit to building and maintaining progressive state power.”

I’m always encouraged when I see a really good Democratic political ad. But does it really matter, and if so, how much? Maybe it’s impossible to say for sure. What we can know is, what the best data says about it.

Writing in 2020, Mike Cummings takes the skeptical view in “Political ads have little persuasive power” at Yale News: ”

Every four years, U.S. presidential campaigns collectively spend billions of dollars flooding TV screens across the country with political ads. But a new study co-authored by Yale political scientist Alexander Coppock shows that, regardless of content, context, or audience, those pricey commercials do little to persuade voters.

The study, published Sept. 2 in the journal Science Advances, measured the persuasive effects of 49 high-profile advertisements from the 2016 presidential campaign on a nationally representative sample of 34,000 people through a series of 59 randomized experiments. Expanding on prior research suggesting that political ads have little impact on voters’ preferences, the study shows that those weak effects are consistent irrespective of a number of factors, including an ad’s tone, timing, and its audience’s partisanship.

“There’s an idea that a really good ad, or one delivered in just the right context to a targeted audience, can influence voters, but we found that political ads have consistently small persuasive effects across a range of characteristics,” said Coppock, an assistant professor of political science in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “Positive ads work no better than attack ads. Republicans, Democrats, and independents respond to ads similarly. Ads aired in battleground states aren’t substantially more effective than those broadcast in non-swing states.”

OK, 2016 was weird, and Cummings’s article was focused on TV ads. Regarding the study’s methods, Cummings writes:

Coppock and his co-authors — University of California-San Diego political scientist Seth J. Hill and UCLA political scientist Lynn Vavreck — conducted the study throughout the 2016 presidential primaries and general election.

Over 29 weeks, a representative sample of Americans was divided at random into groups and assigned to watch campaign advertisements or a placebo advertisement — a car-insurance commercial — before answering a short survey.

The researchers selected ads using real-time, ad-buy data and news coverage of each week’s most important ads. They tested ads attacking or promoting Republican candidate Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton as well as commercials concerning primary candidates, such as Republican Ted Cruz and Democrat Bernie Sanders. They analyzed the ads’ effects on survey respondents across several variables, including the candidate, party, or political action committee that sponsored them; whether they were positive or negative in tone; the partisanship of those viewing the ads; the time to Election Day when they aired; whether they were viewed in a battleground state or not; and whether they aired during the primary or general election.

Cummings summarizes their findings:

They found that, on average and across all variables, the ads moved a candidate’s favorability rating among respondents only .05 of a point on the survey’s five-point scale, which is small but statistically significant given the study’s large size, note the researchers. The ads’ effect on whom individuals intended to vote for was smaller still — a statistically insignificant 0.007 of a percentage point.

Campaigns should carefully consider efforts to tailor advertisements to specific audiences given that the evidence shows that ads’ persuasive effects vary little from person to person or from commercial to commercial, the researchers concluded.

Of course a candidate’s favorability rating is not the same thing as a vote for or against a candidate. As Cummings notes further,

The findings do not demonstrate that political advertising is always ineffective, Coppock said, noting that the study didn’t analyze the influence of an entire advertising campaign.

“TV ads help candidates increase their name recognition among the public, which is extremely important,” said Coppock, a resident fellow at Yale’s Institution for Social Policy Studies and the Center for the Study of American Politics. “Moreover, the effects we demonstrated were small but detectable and could make the difference between winning and losing a close election.”

Another study of TV ads in the 2020 election in 75 market areas and 1607 counties by Northwestern University scholars Brett Gordon, Mitchell J. Lovett, Bowen Lou and James Reeder found, as reported by Roberta Kwok :

….Gordon and his colleagues report that TV ads do influence voter turnout and choices—and that the tone of the ad makes a difference. Based on data from the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, the team found that positive ads encouraged more people to show up on Election Day, while negative ads slightly suppressed turnout. And while both types of commercials affected whom people supported, the negative ones were more effective at swaying voters’ decisions.

In hypothetical scenarios, the researchers found that ad tone was sometimes enough to tip a close election. For example, the team predicted that if only positive ads had been shown, Al Gore would have won in 2000.

Regarding the thorny problem of campaigns continuing to spend billions of dollars on TV ads in elections every year, highly-experienced campaign managers know about such studies, but they still think TV ads are very important. The cynical argument goes, “Well, the system is corrupted by massive amounts of money they have to spend somewhere.” No doubt, however, many campaign managers can point to evidence that specific ads helped their candidates.

So who do you trust more – academics defending their studies, or campaign managers and consultants defending their investments?  No shortage of self-interest on either side of that argument. Kind of a draw, isn’t it?

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

Chart of the Day

Hmmm….

From “GOP’s Senate outlook grows dimmer amid ‘candidate quality’ concerns” by Mychael Schnell at The Hill: “On Thursday, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report changed its rating for the Pennsylvania Senate race from “toss up” to “lean Democrat,” signaling headwinds for Republican Mehmet Oz in his race against Lt. Gov. John Fetterman (D)….The shift came amid the crudité controversy in the Keystone State. Oz came under fire after Fetterman’s campaign recirculated a video the TV doctor posted in April showcasing him grocery shopping for crudité in an effort to show the effects of inflation….The Democratic campaign seized on the video, with the candidate writing on Twitter “In PA we call this a… veggie tray,” the most recent move in his attempt to paint Oz as a carpetbagger from New Jersey….Fetterman’s team said it raised more than $500,000 in the 24 hours after the video went viral. The lieutenant governor remains comfortably ahead of Oz in FiveThirtyEight’s average average, 49.1 percent to 37.7 percent.” Actually, the ‘crudite’ dust-up is more about the Republican candidate’s elitist language, in stark contrast to Fetterman’s authentic working-class appeal. Fetterman’s campaign was smart to capitalize on Oz’s blunder, and it wouldn’t hurt to make some humorous ads portraying Oz as poster boy for the crudite crowd.

In his op-ed, “The barely hidden fascism of Ron DeSantis makes a Pa. pit stop on a race to ’24,” Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch explains why Americans should be very concerned about a potential presidential candidacy of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis: “The time for mincing words is over. This is the latest and most alarming manifestation of a now barely hidden fascism by the head of America’s third-largest state, and one of the handful of serious contenders for the White House. DeSantis’ push for voter suppression and the increasingly paramilitaristic vibe of his public appearances prove the Floridian is the one we’ve been warning about: A post-Trump Republican taking a war on democracy to an even more dangerous place, minus the buffoonish narcissism of the 45th president….DeSantis has embraced a politics that has absolutely nothing to do with traditional conservative blather about freedom and everything to do with raw power. This 43-year-old rising force has already surpassed the dark promise of Trump by going after corporations who’ve dared to criticize him, seeking to chill classroom discussions about race or gender, and even overriding the resultsof a democratic election for a large-county prosecutor whose offense was having a differing opinion….In this context, DeSantis’ national campaign swing — which came to Pennsylvania this weekend with his controversial embrace of our extremist and Christian nationalist GOP gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano — marks a major turning point as America looks warily toward a 2024 election that already has a kind of 1860 feel to it. Right now, DeSantis — the only serious Republican rival to Trump, according to the polls — is demolishing the myth that The Former Guy would be challenged by a moderate. Instead, DeSantis is taking the loose ideology of Trumpism to new extremes of demonizing The Other and positioning the GOP as an anti-democracy movement….Just the fact that DeSantis, the head of a state with a large Jewish population, thought it important to endorse Mastriano — despite the shocking revelationsabout the Pennsylvanian’s ties to the website Gab, a cesspool of anti-Semitism that inspired the 2018 mass murderer of 11 Jewish people at a synagogue just a few miles from where he spoke — was a powerful illustration of a political party’s downward spiral into madness….the two true leaders of today’s GOP are tripping over each other to embrace a homophobicanti-Semite bidding to run the state where the American Experiment began.”

WaPo columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. turns the spotlight on Senator Maggie Hassan’s re-election campaign, and writes, “The New Hampshire Democrat, who got elected six years ago by a margin of just 1,017 votes, uses an unmistakably New England locution to describe her state’s voters: “Wicked independent.” So it’s not surprising that one of her very favorite words is “bipartisan.”….Hassan adds a thought far more likely to be embroidered on a sampler than shouted out on Twitter: “You can’t care more about winning the argument than about solving the problem.”….The proudly purple reelection campaign Hassan is waging is a reminder that to win a majority in a U.S. Senate that structurally tilts toward conservatives — Wyoming and South Dakota have the same number of senators as California and New York — Democrats need to prevail in states that are by no means reliably progressive….This makes bipartisanship a good calling card for potentially vulnerable Senate incumbents, and it’s valuable in swing House districts, too. Hassan’s two Democratic House colleagues here, Reps. Chris Pappas and Ann Kuster, are also stressing the bipartisan victories in Congress….In this very swingy state, no one in this trio pretends that 2022 will be easy for any of them. But they all sense a mood swing in the Democrats’ favor…for Hassan, the fact that congressional Republicans unanimously opposed the [Inflation Reduction Act] bill — and that her leading GOP opponents vying in a Sept. 13 primary have criticized the bill — allows her to give her moderation a populist tilt. She assails “extreme” Republicans who are “regurgitating Big Pharma’s talking points and Big Oil’s talking points.” Count on “Big Pharma” and “Big Oil” to play starring bad-guy roles in Democratic campaigns all over the country….And if there is any state where the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade is likely to change the political winds, this is it. A poll this month by the Saint Anselm College Survey Center found that 71 percent of New Hampshire voters identified themselves as “pro-choice” while just 25 percent picked “pro-life.” Only 38 percent said they supported the Supreme Court’s ruling….The Democrats’ hope that abortion will be a wedge issue among libertarian-leaning conservatives — they loom large here — was underscored by the evocative tag line of a Hassan television ad against the court decision. “Protecting our personal freedoms isn’t just what’s right for New Hampshire,” she says. “It’s what makes us New Hampshire.”….Demonizing Hassan as an ideologue will be hard, not only because voters here know her well from her four years as a moderate governor, but also because she tried to immunize herself on prices by criticizing Biden for not doing more about inflation and by calling for a gas tax holiday. Dionne closes with a quote from rep. Kuster: ““For the first time, I’m running on freedom and safety, which used to be bedrock Republican issues,” she said. “The Republicans are running on chaos.” Wicked independents aren’t big on chaos.”

Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight is bearish on Ohio Democrat Tim Ryan’s chances of winning his race for the U.S. Senate, but The New Republic’s Timothy Noah is more optimistic. As Noah writes, “Trump won the working class (defined conventionally as voters who lack a college degree) by 3 percentage points in 2016 and 4 in 2020. Granted, he won it partly through appeals to white bigotry. But Trump also increased Republicans’ share of working-class voters of color (mostly Hispanic) from 16 percent in the 2012 presidential race to 18 percent in 2016 to an alarming 25 percent in 2020. This is a serious problem. As the sociologist Ruy Teixeira, a leading scholar of working-class voters, puts it: “They just don’t feel Democrats give a shit about them.”….One Democrat who’s trying to reverse this tide is Ohio Senate candidate Tim Ryan, a 10-term congressman whose district includes Youngstown, the former steelmaking hub…..This year, Ryan is running to replace retiring Republican Senator Rob Portman. The move requires him to give up his safe House seat and is therefore a significant risk, given the Republicans’ tightening grip on the state. But Ryan has a record of risk-taking; he tried unsuccessfully to unseat Nancy Pelosi as Democratic leader in 2016, and made a brief, quixotic bid for the 2020 presidential nomination, dropping out three months before the Iowa Caucus. When I asked Ryan what he considered his most important legislative accomplishment, he cited an obscure but important measure, included in last year’s Covid relief bill, that shored up Rust Belt multiemployer pension funds at serious risk of defaulting and bankrupting their insufficiently funded federal insurer, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. The beneficiaries, he told me, included “about 100,000 people” in Ohio….Ryan parts company with Trump Republicans most obviously in his vigorous support for labor. The AFL-CIO gives him a lifetime score of 98 percent, the same as Representative Bobby Scott, the Democratic chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee. The very first entry on the “issues” page of his campaign website is titled “Cutting Workers in on the Deal,” and in the first paragraph he voices support for the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which would eliminate many significant legal barriers to unionization, and for a $15 minimum wage. Unions build communities, Ryan told me….To win back the working class, Democrats need to lead with their economic pitch: stronger unions, higher minimum wage, higher taxes on the rich. Ryan is doing all that….the Democrats have grown sufficiently weak in Ohio that even an inauthentic Vance will be hard to beat. If Ryan succeeds, it will be his job, alongside senior Senator Sherrod Brown, to persuade Ohioans that the Democrats really are the party of the working class. If they can do that, then maybe the Democratic standard-bearer in 2024 (I don’t assume it will be Biden) can shore up the party’s working-class support and make the Buckeye State competitive again by November 2024. If they fail, don’t rule out four more years of Trump.”

Took me a while, but it finally hit me that the anti-democratic tone of contemporary Republican politics has deep and disturbing roots, so I wrote about it at New York:

One of the maddening things about Donald Trump’s insistence that the 2020 election was “stolen” is that no proof of election fraud seems required to sustain the lie. Among the former president’s supporters, election denial is practically an article of faith; it relies more on conspiracy theories and mistrust of Trump’s enemies than any demonstrable facts. That’s why Trump can blithely assert not only that he won the 2020 election but that it was a historic landslide. The underlying assumption is that elections in the United States are now illegitimate. So why bother engaging with democracy at all if it produces patently “wrong” results?

This question lurks behind the MAGA movement’s growing hostility to democracy, not just to Democrats. In his discussions with grassroots Republicans in the election-denial stronghold of Arizona, New York Times reporter Robert Draper found that the old John Birch Society battle cry that America is “a republic, not a democracy” is on many tongues:

“What is different now is the use of ‘democracy’ as a kind of shorthand and even a slur for Democrats themselves, for the left and all the positions espoused by the left, for hordes of would-be but surely unqualified or even illegal voters who are fundamentally anti-American and must be opposed and stopped at all costs. That anti-democracy and anti-‘democracy’ sentiment, repeatedly voiced over the course of my travels through Arizona, is distinct from anything I have encountered in over two decades of covering conservative politics.”

The identification of conservative political causes as synonymous with Americanism isn’t new, of course. But it’s turning from a rhetorical device to an actual creed whereby the enemies of right-wing political success are deemed enemies to the country itself. This line of reasoning lets MAGA politicians and activists justify any means of resistance, including the often-threatened “Second Amendment remedies.” Kari Lake, Arizona’s Republican gubernatorial candidate, minces no words in hurling anathemas at Democrats and those who collaborate with them, as Draper notes:

“They have cast the 2022 election as not just history-defining but potentially civilization-ending. As Lake told a large crowd in downtown Phoenix the night before the primary: ‘It is not just a battle between Republicans and Democrats. This is a battle between freedom and tyranny, between authoritarianism and liberty and between good and evil.’ A week later, in response to the F.B.I.’s executing a search warrant at Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, Lake posted a statement on Twitter: ‘These tyrants will stop at nothing to silence the Patriots who are working hard to save America.” She added, ‘America — dark days lie ahead for us.'”

With the very existence of America at stake in every election, does it really matter whether you can prove the “evil” people broke the rules in each individual case? Probably not. And that helps explain why election denial is still flourishing in Arizona. When the state’s bizarre 2020 election audit dragged on for many months and proved nothing that simply led to more assertions that Democrats and RINOs were suppressing the truth. Mark Finchem, the Republican nominee for secretary of State, has summed up the Arizona GOP’s illogic by arguing that the burden of proof should be borne by those who consider legitimate elections legitimate:

A former GOP operative told Draper the particular susceptibility of Arizona Republicans to this sort of madness (aside from a tradition of extremism dating back to Barry Goldwater) may be attributable to a huge retiree population prone to conspiracy theories:

“’These are all folks that have traded in their suit pants for sweatpants,’ he said. ‘They’re on the golf course, or they’re in hobby mode. They have more than enough time on their hands. They’re digesting six to 10 hours of Fox News a day. They’re reading on Facebook. They’re meeting with each other to talk about those headlines. And they’re outraged that, ‘Can you believe that the government is lying to us about this?’”

But there’s clearly something else going on in Arizona and the nation that is deeper than the spread of disinformation. Hostility not just to government but to our democratic system of elections has been growing on the right for quite some time. It was evident during the Supreme Court coup of Bush v. Gore and the contempt Republicans expressed for the 2000 Democratic popular-vote victory. It was more fully manifest in the nasty right-wing reaction to the election of Barack Obama, whose legitimacy as president was regularly challenged and whose social and economic policies were attacked for allegedly redistributing resources from “deserving” taxpayers to undeserving poor people. The feeling on the right that democracy had broken America was expressed perfectly by Obama’s 2012 challenger Mitt Romney in his infamous remarks deploring the ability of the “47 percent” of Americans who owe no net income tax to vote themselves government benefits.

The ideological vanguard of the anti-Obama tea-party movement were the politicians and opinion leaders who dubbed themselves “constitutional conservatives,” typified by Jim DeMint, Michele Bachmann, and Ted Cruz. They held that conservative policy prescriptions were embedded in the Founders’ design for America and were eternally binding, regardless of the contrary wishes of democratic majorities. And the absolutism of the constitutional conservative belief system was typically strengthened by Christian nationalist views. An increasing number of conservatives seemed to believe that small government, gun and property rights, and conservative cultural totems like homophobia and fetal rights were handed down by the Founders with the explicit blessing of Jesus Christ. In this scheme, democracy is a strictly circumscribed means for choosing stewards of these inflexible traditions, never to be traduced without dire consequences for the republic.

Donald Trump and his followers took constitutional conservatism to its next level: an aggressive creed mixing libertarian hostility to government with reactionary cultural views, all wrapped in the super-patriotic rhetoric of American greatness. Today’s MAGA-dominated GOP is a perfect playground for people like Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel and Blake Masters, the Arizona Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate whose campaign Thiel has bankrolled. Thiel proclaimed in 2009, as the tea-party movement began to rage against Obama’s election, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” A few years earlier, Masters said, “People who support what we euphemistically call ‘democracy’ or ‘representative government’ support stealing certain kinds of goods and redistributing them as they see fit.”

This authoritarianism in the name of liberty and godliness certainly seems counterintuitive, but it’s extremely useful as a political weapon. Anyone utilizing the democratic process to promote alternative policy visions is deemed un-American, and their successes are dismissed as illegitimate. Or as Trump put it in August 2020: “The only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.” That could mean fraudulent ballots, or it could mean allowing immigrants who should have never been admitted to America to vote, or it could mean an election controlled by the 47 percent who expect something for nothing. Any democratic process that fails to affirm the righteous views of Trump and his supporters must be “rigged.”