In “With Build Back Better, Dems aim to correct messaging missteps,” Scott Wong and Mike Lillis write at The Hill,  “While President Biden‘s Build Back Better Act still has a tough road in the Senate, House Democrats have already begun holding a series of roundtable discussions, site visits, in-person and virtual town halls and news conferences across the country highlighting individual pieces of the roughly $2 trillion package….The idea is to break it up into smaller bite-size chunks — things like child care, climate change, education, health care and help for seniors — that will make the 2,135-page bill easier for voters and constituents to digest and understand how it directly impacts their lives….”There are some challenges. I think we never messaged effectively the American Rescue Plan. I think we have to do it bit by bit,” said Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas), a senior member of the Ways and Means and Budget committees who is planning separate events focused specifically on child care and students….“So given the size and scope of the bill, the messaging of it cannot be done in a day or a week,” he said. “It’ll have to be spread out, and do it with people whose lives really will be affected by what we do.”….Vulnerable Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.), a mother of three, has done local TV interviews focused on her top priorities in the bill: universal preschool and the one-year extension of the expanded child tax credit….And at a Phoenix pharmacy this week, Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) joined patient advocates at a health care-themed news conference, highlighting how Build Back Better empowers Medicare to negotiate lower prices for some prescription drugs, expands Medicaid coverage and allocates $150 billion for home care for seniors and people with disabilities…..[Rep. Sean Patrick] Maloney recently gave a pep talk to colleagues at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, where he unveiled internal polling numbers showing that Democrats are only 2 percentage points behind Republicans in a generic ballot across battleground districts — suggesting his party has plenty of time to make up the difference if they message Build Back Better effectively.”

Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne explains why “The hypocrisy argument on the filibuster is itself phony,” and notes, “Because every Republican senator voted against the Freedom to Vote Act last month — and all but one opposed even debating the John Lewis voting rights bill this month — no bill that would do anything worthwhile can reach the 60-vote threshold required to overcome the filibuster….Reforming the filibuster is the only way Democrats can pass the voting guarantees favored by civil rights groups and democracy advocates. It’s the only way they can undo the voter suppression and election subversion laws that have been passed in more than a dozen GOP-controlled states since 2020. It’s the only way to dismantle wildly partisan gerrymanders…..No Democrat or progressive whohas flipped on the filibuster is pretending they didn’t. They are quite clear in saying versions of what the Senate arch-traditionalist Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) said in 1979: Rules that seemed appropriate in the past “must be changed to reflect changed circumstances.”….The loudest critic of changing filibuster rules now, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), was happy to junk the filibuster in 2017 in his quest to pack the Supreme Court with conservatives. Seems pretty hypocritical to me.”

Dionne continues, “There are two big reasons why senators should vote to reform the filibuster, no matter their past views. The first is institutional: What started out as an unusual practice to extend debate has become a routine method for blocking the will of the majority. To put it starkly: Abuse of the filibuster is wrecking the Senate….A 2020 report from the Brennan Center for Justice nicely summarized just how radical the shift has been on the use and abuse of the filibuster. “There have been as many cloture motions in the last 10 years (959),” wrote senior fellow Caroline Fredrickson, “as there were during the 60-year period from 1947 to 2006 (960).”….But the core reason the filibuster must be reformed is the moral imperative of passing bills to defend democracy. It confronts multiple challenges: to the right to vote; the right to have votes counted without political interference; and the right of voters to select their representatives — and not have politicians do it by drawing wildly partisan district boundaries….Should Democrats, including President Biden, allow these things to happen by claiming that the filibuster renders them powerless, they will be guilty of a more profound hypocrisy. If it fails to act, the party that won power in 2020 as the bulwark of democracy and civil rights will be saying that these commitments matter less than fealty to an outdated, dysfunctional practice that has been altered repeatedly in pursuit of far less noble goals.”

Some comments from David Pepper, former Ohio Democratic Party Chairman and author of “Laboratories of Autocracy,” during his interview by David Neiwert at Daily Kos: “…There were a lot of people who rigged these districts in 2011 after Karl Rove was very sadly adept at targeting statehouses to flip….Ohio is this glaring case study of what happens when you’ve had that for a generation, but sadly, Missouri or Tennessee or Florida, they’re all seeing the same thing as Ohio is….It was on the third time of trying they succeeded in getting rid of the week where people both vote and register at the same time. It took them three tries. But if there’s never accountability, they just keep pushing and pushing….We often have one bad cycle, we quit, we fire everybody, we start over. Stacey Abrams told us, even when she lost her governor’s race for a lot of reasons that she explained were really illegitimate, she gained progress in that loss. She registered people. She fired up people, and that progress carried over to ’20 in a way that we turned Georgia blue, just like running in every single statehouse district in every state. You’re going to lose most of those races. We know that, but we should celebrate the fact that we’re running in every district because every one of those candidates will register voters….They will have higher turnout, and maybe in two or four years, if they do it again, and we’ve seen this in states like Virginia, they win the next race….So we’ve got to define it as a long game, and that means you see progress even in tough years if you’re doing it right, and we’ve seen that in Ohio. We’ve seen that in other states, and the other thing we got to do—back to the broader politics—there are multiple elections that impact democracy.”

I got a bit annoyed at one of the recent topics of Beltway scuttlebutt, and wrote about it at New York.

I like Pete Buttigieg. I met and interviewed him at a mayors’ conference in 2017 and found him to be smart, engaging, and open-minded. I didn’t even mind that he failed to respond to my hint that I’d sure like help getting tickets to the upcoming Georgia–Notre Dame football game in his fair city (maybe he didn’t have any; he did, after all, go to Harvard, not Notre Dame). It did not occur to me that he might run for president in the very next cycle, but he was clearly a young pol to watch.

Once he did take the plunge, Mayor Pete’s ability to transcend his slim résumé to become a top-tier candidate was impressive indeed. As an observant liberal mainline Protestant, I couldn’t help but cheer the challenge he posed to the religious right, which could not grasp the idea of a gay, married, churchgoing military veteran who knew scriptures and theology better than its own champions. But Buttigieg also showed some conventional political chops, particularly in Iowa, where his largely amateur grassroots organization basically fought Bernie Sanders to a tie. Even when he faded, he managed not to burn too many bridges with occasionally sharp-elbowed debate performances, and got out of the race at the right time while endorsing the ultimate nominee. His reward, the visible but distinctly second-tier Cabinet post of secretary of Transportation, seemed appropriate to his contributions to Biden’s victory and his status in the party. He had, after all, just turned 39 the day before the new administration took office.

But now he faces the most daunting challenge yet of his brief career on the national political stage: presidential buzz. It emanates regularly from Beltway journalists and their sources like a sort of sonic nerve gas. Today’s entry from Politico reads:

“While Buttigieg says he’s not contemplating the race to be Biden’s successor, inside the West Wing, others are imagining it for him. His name is sometimes discussed by aides as a natural Democratic presidential nominee in 2028 — or 2024 if the president opts not to run.

“’Nobody in the West Wing shuts that down,’ said one person with direct knowledge of the conversations. ‘It’s very open.'”

This sort of thing is deadly for Buttigieg’s potentially very long future in Democratic politics. It is bound to annoy his boss, President Biden, who is tamping down any speculation that he might take a pass on a reelection fight in 2024 and obviously wants to keep talk of a successor on a low boil at best. More pointedly, any Buttigieg buzz will undoubtedly be perceived as hostile and even disrespectful to the interests of heir-apparent Kamala Harris. The biggest political liability Mayor Pete took out of his presidential campaign was a reputation for being the ultimate wine-track candidate, with a particular difficulty (fed by events in South Bend) in attracting any sort of support from Black voters. He may have made some subtle progress in this respect by proposing a well-received “Douglass Plan” for Black empowerment, though it wasn’t enough to help him electorally. But clearly the last thing he needs if he ever does want to serve as president is to become a cat’s paw for those who want to sideline the first Black woman to have a clear shot at the presidency.

Beyond that, presidential buzz puts Buttigieg in a no-win position vis-à-vis doing the job assigned to him in the Biden administration. Politico notes that the kind of barnstorming any secretary of Transportation should be doing to promote the bipartisan infrastructure legislation that is Biden’s biggest accomplishment to date sure looks a lot like proto-campaign activity:

“While there is no election directly in sight, Buttigieg’s initial on-the-ground efforts to promote the infrastructure deal had some familiar elements of his past campaigns. There were lots of news interviews, meet-and-greets with local electeds, die-hard fans in ‘Pete’ shirts carrying copies of his book, a protester with a homophobic sign (‘Booty Gay Go Away’), and people having trouble pronouncing his name (‘Butt-Edge-Edge’ instead of ‘Boot-Edge-Edge,’ as the emcee of one event kept pronouncing it).

“There were also attempts at that folksy Midwestern humor that were part of his candidacy roughly two years ago. On the benefits of the infrastructure package, he told POLITICO ‘this is literally as concrete as it gets.’ He noted how cold it was at the bill signing but said that the bipartisan package ‘warmed my heart.’”

If everything he does in public or private becomes interpreted as little more than a calculated step toward the presidency, that goal may grow further and further away.

Buttigieg hasn’t even turned 40 yet. If Biden has set a new standard for the lifespan of presidential ambitions, Buttigieg can keep hope alive for close to four more decades. What he doesn’t need is to burn out and become yesterday’s news long before he makes another big move in 2036 or 2040 or 2050. If it turns out he is quietly promoting the buzz as we speak, he deserves the danger he would be courting. Otherwise, for Pete’s sake, cut it out and let him do his job.

At The New Republic’s ‘the Soapbox,’ Editor Michael Tomasky argues that “Democrats Shouldn’t Be Afraid to Tell Voters What the Build Back Better Act Is All About: The Biden agenda will make everyone’s lives a little bit easier and a little bit better. There’s no need to hide from a good deal.” As Tomasky writes,

Assuming the Democratic Party–controlled Senate passes some version of the Build Back Better Act this year, as Chuck Schumer has vowed it will, the new year will dawn with Democrats fanning out across the country to sell the Biden agenda (which House Democrats have already started doing with the version of the president’s social provision bill they passed last week, along with the bipartisan infrastructure bill).

Among the people I talk to, there seems to be a consensus forming that Democrats are going to have a hard time convincing voters about the generous array of wonderful benefits these bills will unleash before the midterm elections. People are in a sour mood, they say. Besides, inflation and the pandemic dictate everything, Donald Trump’s America is more fired up to vote, swing voters are going Republican, and too few of these programs are going to be up and running by next November.

On top of that, political science tells us that voters don’t often reward a party that passes transformative legislation. Voters are a cranky bunch. People are far more likely to use their votes to punish what they don’t like than to reward what they do like.

I suppose there’s truth to a lot of these observations. But I look through the reports on what happened to be in the bill, and I feel like I’m seeing a lot of stuff that Democrats can campaign on. Say you’re a Democrat trying to hold onto your seat in a purple district and you’re not Maine’s Jared Golden (in other words—you voted for these bills). You’re being challenged by some right-wing loon who’s carrying on about socialism and handouts and taxing and spending. Can’t that person say something that sounds a little something like this?

“I’d really like to know what particular things in the bill my opponent has such trouble with. Let’s start with Medicare. This bill adds hearing aids to Medicare coverage. The average cost of a prescription hearing aid in this country is $4,700. That’s a lot of money—for most seniors, a prohibitive amount of money. Now it’s covered. Is that a handout? In my opinion, it’s something that’s going to improve a lot of people’s quality of life. The bill also caps prescription drug outlays at $2,000 a year. Right now, there’s no hard cap, and there’s that infamous donut hole, which you know all about if you’ve bothered to talk to seniors. Maybe my opponent hasn’t. But it strikes me that saving seniors some money is a pretty good thing. Maybe my opponent doesn’t. And of course, insulin is going to cost $35, as opposed to the current $100. Is that what my opponent means by socialism?

“Let’s see, what else.… There’s a lot of money in there for the states—not the federal government, the states—to build and stand up pre-kindergarten programs and childcare centers. The bill ensures that a family of four with income up to $300,000, which is about 98 percent of the population, will pay no more than 7 percent of their income on childcare. Is this going to create a society of layabouts? I think the opposite. I think affordable day care will give a lot of parents, mothers in particular, the chance to work or go back to school and better themselves so they can move up the ladder at work. I’m not seeing how this is bad.

“And how about the climate? There are a lot of tax incentives for companies and people to produce and purchase more renewables and to move away from coal. All kinds of things to encourage individuals and communities to invest in green energy. I guess if you think climate change is a hoax, you think all this is a waste of money. But most people don’t think it’s a hoax. Most people think it’s real. So, I think these are good ideas.”

Tomasky also has a “don’t”: “The one thing that was in the bill that I’d advise this candidate to skip is the lifting of the cap on the state and local tax deduction, which is, no doubt about it, a gift to higher-income taxpayers. But it was political reality that some moderates from high-tax states might have voted no if this wasn’t included—and another political reality that if it hadn’t been included and isn’t in whatever ends up passing in some way, shape, or form, some Democrats from swing districts in New Jersey, New York, and elsewhere would be much more likely to lose.”

Tomasky shares some more good messaging tips:

But there’s a lot more good news than bad. Democrats ought to welcome a debate about what they’ve done for the American people with their GOP opponents. Incumbents should defend their vote in terms like I’ve laid out above. And Democratic challengers to Republicans in winnable swing districts should clearly be able to say: Look at all these good things this person voted against.

In fact, Democrats should go even further. This is an old pet peeve of mine about how Democrats debate policy. Republicans talk about this stuff solely on the abstract level—it’s socialism and profligacy and so on. They do this because they know the programs are individually popular but the idea of big government is not. By the same token, Democrats do the opposite. They read the same polls, so they tend to emphasize the specifics and steer clear of the abstract.

I get it. But it leaves Democrats sounding like they’re just for individual policy programs here and there instead of a big-picture vision for the kind of society they want to build. This bill, whatever its shortcomings, contains a vision of society: a more humane place where wealth is being shifted back from the rich to the middle so that more people can fulfill their potential.

Democrats don’t really need to mention government at all. In the end, what these bills are seeking to do has nothing to do with the government anyway. The public sector is the means to an end. That end is creating the means by which people can lead more fulfilling lives and do so with greater ease at that. Democrats need to be willing to say as much, and they need to demonstrate a willingness to fight for it.

So much recent political analysis explains what many Democrats have been doing wrong, and that’s useful information. But now Dems have to regroup and attack. Tomasky’s article provides a promising battle plan.

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

Jon Chait, in an important article in New York magazine, analyzes the profoundly ineffective anti-politics of the Democratic party left, aided and abetted by donors and foundations who finance this nonsense. (Note: he also has some stern words for centrist Democrats who oppose very popular Democratic measures in the name of moderation.)

Here is perhaps the most important part of his argument:

“When confronted with the reality that the Democratic Party is losing Black and Latino moderates, the response on the left is often to treat their views as morally beyond the pale. “Yes, it turns out that a number of people of color, especially those without a college education, can see the allure of the jackboot authoritarian thuggery offered by modern Republicans,” wrote The Nation’s Elie Mystal. “A certain percentage of non-college-educated people are hostile to immigration. Sure. Does that mean Democrats should embrace beating migrants? A certain percentage of non-college-educated people are resistant to science. Sure. Does that mean Democrats should embrace horse dewormer?”

Obviously, nobody is proposing Democrats run on authoritarian thuggery. The question is whether any compromise with the center is acceptable. Obama competed for moderate views by promising that people could keep their private insurance even as he covered those who couldn’t get any coverage, that he would secure the border even as he gave amnesty to Dreamers. Reducing all these spectra of belief to a simple binary, then declaring the opposing position so horrific it cannot be accommodated, is not a political strategy. It is a kind of anti-politics.

This anti-politics did not materialize out of thin air. It is the working assumption of a vast array of progressive nonprofit organizations and the millionaires who fund them. Over the past half-dozen years, several people who work in and around the nonprofit world have told me, the internal political culture at progressive foundations has undergone the same changes that have torn through elite universities, mainstream-media newsrooms, and private schools. An uncompromising version of left-wing political rhetoric has put the leadership of these organizations on the defensive and often prodded them to fund more radical organizations and ideas than before.

These groups have churned out studies and deployed activists to bring left-wing ideas into the political debate. At this they have enjoyed overwhelming success. In recent years, a host of new slogans and plans — the Green New Deal, “Defund the police,” “Abolish ICE,” and so on — have leaped from the world of nonprofit activism onto the chyrons of MSNBC and Fox News. Obviously, the conservative media have played an important role in publicizing (and often distorting) the most radical ideas from the activist left. But the right didn’t invent these edgy slogans; the left did, injecting them into the national bloodstream.

Twitter is often blamed for (or, alternately, credited with) facilitating the rise of the Democratic Party’s left wing. But an important and generally unexamined source of the left’s growth is the left-wing millionaires who finance it. A little more than a decade ago, David Callahan wrote a book, Fortunes of Change, describing a social and political evolution among the American rich. The rise of a knowledge economy had produced a growing class of liberal millionaires and billionaires, and this elite cohort had begun to work its will on the system by forming “a new progressive donor class.”

Read more…

We’re not going to put lipstick on a pig named Pollyanna here, But Laura Barron-Lopez writes in “Team Biden gets some pep in its step after months of taking it on the chin” at Politico: “Don’t call it a comeback. Seriously, don’t. But for the White House, the breakthroughs they had last week represent major progress. And after the few months they’ve had, they’ll take it….In the span of four days, the president signed his bipartisan infrastructure bill into law and saw the second piece of his landmark economic package pass through the House. The Food and Drug Administration authorized Covid-19 booster shots for all adults, and the administration announced a new purchase of 10 million treatment courses of the Pfizer antiviral Covid-19 pill. All this, while government reports show strong gains in the number of jobs across the labor market….But there is a desire among Democrats for the White House to move even more aggressively should the social spending bill ultimately pass through Congress. In particular, they want the administration to target Republican governors and lawmakers who try to take credit for new projects in their state made possible by funding approved in either Biden’s Covid-relief plan from earlier this year or the recently signed infrastructure bill. They also want to see the president explain to voters that some of the benefits will take time to dole out….“I’ve made this point to the administration … a lot of it’s going to depend on managing expectations” said Rep. John Yarmuth (D-Ky.), the retiring chair of the House Budget Committee, noting the lag-time in implementation of many of the programs that will be funded in the bill. “We have to get much more ruthless” with Republicans.”

Despite all of the hard cheese Dems have been served in recent months, it appears that they have a decent chance to win the governorship of Texas, as Geoffrey Skelley explains at FiveThirtyEight:  “[Republican Governor Greg] Abbott’s approval slide has a few causes. First, his handling of the pandemic has received a lot of criticism from all corners in the state, and a late September poll from Quinnipiac University found more Texas voters (50 percent) disapproved of his handling of the pandemic than approved (46 percent). Second, Texas voters seem to still be disappointed by his administration’s response to the winter storms this past February and the failure of the state’s power grid. Earlier this month, a survey conducted by YouGov on behalf of the University of Texas-Austin and The Texas Tribune found that 60 percent of Texas voters disapproved of how state leaders and the legislature had dealt with the reliability of the grid, which was the highest disapproval mark for any issue asked about in the poll. Finally, Abbott’s numbers may have also suffered in the aftermath of the Texas GOP’s push to essentially ban abortions and to allow the concealed carry of handguns without a permit — both being pieces of legislation that Abbott signed into law. A Dallas Morning News/University of Texas-Tyler poll from early September found that 50 percent of registered voters opposed permit-less concealed carry, while the Quinnipiac survey found 53 percent disapproved of Abbott’s handling of abortion.” Skelley points out that most horse-race polls give Abbot a slight edge over Democrat Beto O’Rourke at this early juncture. But Democrats ought to be able to win some swing voters who are disgusted with Abbot’s incompetent Covid response and his disastrous handling of the winter storms Texas experienced. A Democratic win of the governorship of the nation’s 2nd largest state would take a lot of the sting out of the Virginia loss.

In “What Beto O’Rourke has to overcome in Texas,” Nicole Narea writes at Vox: “he governor’s race isn’t going to be about convincing partisans already entrenched in their views to switch sides. It’ll be about turning out each party’s base while wooing moderates and independents, said James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin….O’Rourke hasn’t had trouble inspiring voters to show up for him; he helped fuel an 18 percent increase in turnout in 2018. This time, he has the opportunity to mobilize an estimated 7 million Texans who didn’t vote in 2020….Registering and turning out new voters may be more difficult than in the past; Texas now has one of the most restrictive voting laws in the country passed by state Republicans earlier this year. The bill imposes a slew of new restrictions on 24-hour polling locations, drive-thru voting, voting by mail, and sending voters mail-in ballot applications. Opponents of the law have argued that it will disproportionately impact voters of color, who helped fuel O’Rourke’s 2018 campaign and who he’d again need to win the governor’s race….One issue that has emerged as an early flashpoint is O’Rourke’s comments on guns during a Democratic presidential debate in 2019. “Hell, yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47,” he said when asked about his position on mandatory buybacks of assault-style weapons in the wake of a deadly mass shooting in El Paso….O’Rourke told the Texas Tribune that he isn’t backing down from his position, arguing that responsible gun owners can “vigorously protect that Second Amendment right and also protect the lives of those around us.”….That seems to be in line with public opinion: A 2019 UT Tyler poll found that more Texans — about 49 percent — supported mandatory buybacks of military-style assault weapons than the roughly 29 percent who opposed it. But troubling for O’Rourke is the fact that independents were less favorable toward buybacks, with just 39 percent supporting them and roughly a third opposing them.”

Narea adds, “Abbott set off on a misleading quest to construct a border wall on his own (the taxpayer funds he’ll use for the effort are enough for only a few miles of wall, at most) and has falsely claimed that migrants are behind Covid-19 surges. On Monday, he went to court to challenge the Biden administration’s requirement that all companies with at least 100 employees ensure their workers are vaccinated or undergo weekly testing….Those kinds of policies have built loyalty among Republicans, but there are also cracks starting to show in Abbott’s candidacy. A September 28 Quinnipiac poll found that his job approval rating had fallen to 44 percent, its lowest since 2018, and 51 percent said he did not deserve reelection, up from 48 percent in June. That’s largely due to overwhelmingly negative perceptions among Democrats and divisions among independents, with 43 percent approving and 47 percent disapproving. Still, Abbott remains more popular than Cruz was during his race against O’Rourke — in 2018, the senator had a 39 percent approval rating….Those numbers, however, may mean Abbott will have a tougher primary than O’Rourke. He’s already facing challenges from high-profile candidates, including former Texas Republican Party chair Allen West, with his most important challengers coming from his right. If he wins the Republican nomination — as he is expected to — he would be a formidable but not unassailable opponent.” O’Rourke’s campaign may be one of the few statewide races next year, in which Democrats can hope to mobilize a substantial young voter turnout. If O’Rourke can generate some enthusiasm with Black voters and reverse the Latino trend toward Republicans, he has a chance. And if Democratic ads do a good job of spotlighting Abbot’s gross mismanagement of the Texas power outages, they may be able to flip enough white working-class voters to help defeat Abbott.”

Some political observers seem baffled by the behavior of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. I’m not, and wrote about it at New York, just before McCarthy’s demagogic eight-hour speech opposing Joe Biden’s Build Back Better legislation.

In every respect, the House GOP fight against the censure of Paul Gosar for posting a tweet with an anime video depicting him murdering Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was embarrassing. Republicans were defending a clearly dangerous and contemptible act while identifying themselves with a chronically dangerous and contemptible extremist politician. Beyond that, though, rallying around Gosar interrupted their efforts to make this week’s Beltway coverage revolve around the follies of the opposition Democrats. As Politico Playbook observed: “This was supposed to be a ‘Dems in Disarray’ week, but thanks to Rep. PAUL GOSAR (R-Ariz.), it turned into a ‘McCarthy Defends …’ week.

So why didn’t House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy toss Gosar onto the dustbin of political history where he belongs, or at least keep his troops from treating him like a martyr? I can’t see into McCarthy’s mind or soul, of course, but it’s reasonably clear he has adopted a policy of pas d’ennemis a droit (“no enemies to the right,” an inversion of the old Popular Front slogan “no enemies to the left,” deployed to prevent criticism of communists). And he did so because he does not want to go the way of his distinguished former colleagues in the House Republican leadership, Eric Cantor and John Boehner.

Cantor, you may recall, was the brilliant young Virginia congressman who was in top leadership spots (first as House Minority Whip then as House Majority Leader) from 2009 until 2014. That last year, he came crashing to earth in a primary loss to an obscure economics professor named Dave Brat, who demonized Cantor’s friendly attitude toward a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. More generally, Cantor painted a big bull’s-eye on his back by identifying himself with the famous “Growth and Opportunity Project” — better known as the “2012 GOP autopsy report” — that argued the Republican Party was doomed if it did not expand its base by attracting minority voters, with comprehensive immigration reform being a sine qua non. Brat’s nativist-tinged campaign found its most avid cheerleader in Ann Coulter, and got an assist from a former Michele Bachmann staffer named Stephen Miller. It was, arguably, the first MAGA campaign ever. And it sent shock waves through Washington that have yet to subside completely.

Who succeeded Cantor as House Majority Leader? Kevin McCarthy, of course. You think he remembers Cantor’s demise pretty well? I do. But there’s more.

Soon thereafter, the only House Republican who outranked the prelapsarian Cantor, Speaker John Boehner, crashed and burned as well, not in a primary, but by losing an internal party struggle with the House Freedom Caucus, which viewed the convivial wine-and-cigarettes Ohioan as insufficiently combative toward the hated Democrats and their especially hated president Barack Obama. When Kevin McCarthy sought to succeed Boehner, he was blocked by the HFC, which did not consider him ideologically reliable and preferred (and secured) Paul Ryan for the gig. In 2019, McCarthy finally did gain the top leadership spot and has been very solicitous toward the right wing of his conference ever since.

With the Speaker’s gavel in sight — he probably goes to sleep at night envisioning the moment he takes it away from his least-favorite colleague, fellow-Californian Nancy Pelosi — McCarthy isn’t going to blow it now by upsetting Gosar and his Freedom Caucus friends Andy Biggs, Lauren Boebert, Andrew Clyde, Matt Gaetz, Louie Gohmert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and … the list keeps growing. Periodic bad publicity about his tolerance of scary people saying and doing scary things is a small price to pay for ensuring there is no GOP leadership coup in 2023 if history repeats itself and the president’s party loses quite a few House seats. After all, if McCarthy isn’t careful, he could be brushed aside by a fresh new face aspiring to the Speakership: Donald J. Trump.

At The Guardian, former Secretary of Labor and political commentator Robert Reich addresses a question of current interest, “Why Are Americans So Unhappy With Joe Biden?” As Reich explains,

How can the economic and pandemic news be so good, and so much of Biden’s agenda already enacted – yet the public be so sour on Biden and the Democrats?

Some blame Biden’s and the Democrat’s poor messaging. Yes, it’s awful. Even now most Americans have no idea what the “Build Back Better” package is. It sounds like infrastructure, but that bill has been enacted. “Human infrastructure” makes no sense to most people.

Yet this can’t be the major reason for the paradox because the Democrats’ failure at messaging goes back at least a half century. I remember in 1968 after Nixon beat Humphrey hearing that the Democrats’ problem is they talk policy while Americans want to hear values – the same criticism we’re hearing today.

Some blame the media – not just despicable Fox News but also the corporate mainstream. But here, too, the problem predates the current paradox. Before Fox News, Rush Limbaugh was poisoning countless minds. And for at least four decades, the mainstream media has focused on conflict, controversy and scandal. Good news doesn’t attract eyeballs.

Some suggest Democrats represent the college-educated suburban middle class that doesn’t really want major social change anyway. Yet this isn’t new, either. Clinton and Obama abandoned the working class by embracing trade, rejecting unions, subsidizing Wall Street and big business and embracing deregulation and privatization.

So what explains the wide gap now between how well the country is doing and how badly Biden and the Democrats are doing politically?

In two words: dashed hopes. After four years of Trump and a year and a half of deathly pandemic, most of the country was eager to put all the horror behind – to start over, wipe the slate clean, heal the wounds, reboot America. Biden in his own calm way seemed just the person to do it. And when Democrats retook the Senate, expectations of Democrats and independents soared.

But those expectations couldn’t possibly be met when all the underlying structural problems were still with us – a nation deeply split, Trumpers still threatening democracy, racism rampant, corporate money still dominating much of politics, inequality still widening, inflation undermining wage gains, and the Delta variant of Covid still claiming lives.

Dashed hopes make people angry. Mass disappointment is politically poisonous. Social psychologists have long understood that losing something of value generates more anguish than obtaining it generated happiness in the first place.

Reich may be overstating the ‘good news’ about the economy, in light of concerns about inflation, however unmerited. Also, the frustrations of 31 million small businesses as they struggle to get enough employees and supplies in the wake of Covid-related disruptions may be increasing discontent. This could get worse in the year ahead. But it could also get better.

For those looking for an optimistic scenario in the 2022 midterms, Reich adds, “Biden and Democrats can take solace from this. Hopefully, a year from now the fruits of Biden’s initiatives will be felt, Covid will be behind us, bottlenecks behind the current inflation will be overcome, and the horrors of the Trump years will become more visible through Congress’s investigations and the midterm campaigns of Trumpers.”

I was in a contrarian mood, and wrote this piece for New York expressing an unpopular but empirically accurate point of view:

There is a vocal group of politically minded people who absolutely hate horse-race polling (i.e., polling about who is leading in election contests). They have varying reasons. Some think polls systemically underrepresent the viability of their favorite party or politicians. Others just dislike the hype surrounding poll findings and the phony conflicts over various numbers. And particularly among progressives, there are some who object to such polling because they feel the coverage it generates blots out the sky at the expense of the policy discussions that ought to be the focus of political media.

To all these poll-o-phobes, the recent emergence of self-doubt in the public-opinion industry based on polling errors in certain elections is a tiding of great comfort and joy. A particularly big moment came on November 4, after the gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia, when Monmouth University Polling Institute director Patrick Murray, deploring his own big “miss” in the New Jersey race, made this statement in an op-ed:

“Public trust in political institutions and our fundamental democratic processes is abysmal. Honest missteps get conflated with ‘fake news’ — a charge that has hit election polls in recent years …

“Most public pollsters are committed to making sure our profession counters rather than deepens the pervasive cynicism in our society. We try to hold up a mirror that accurately shows us who we are. If election polling only serves to feed that cynicism, then it may be time to rethink the value of issuing horse race poll numbers as the electorate prepares to vote.”

As Murray pointed out, two of the big guns in public opinion, Gallup and Pew Research Center, have already stopped polling candidate preferences, though they still poll on issues, presidential job approval, ideological views, partisan affiliation, and other horse-race-adjacent matters. And Murray’s freak-out over polling error in New Jersey reflected broader anxieties expressed within and beyond the polling industry over high-profile “misses” in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.

Now it’s important to note that polls were quite accurate in the 2018 midterms, and were also spot-on in the Virginia gubernatorial race that occurred the same day as New Jersey’s (in the final RealClearPolitics polling averages for Virginia, Glenn Youngkin led Terry McAuliffe by 1.7 percent. He won by 1.9 percent). And it’s easy to exaggerate the 2016 and 2020 errors. In the former election, the final RCP average projected a 3.3 percent Clinton lead over Trump. Her actual popular vote plurality was 2.1 percent. The margin of error was larger in 2020, but was a less-than-astronomical 2.7 percent (RCP averages showed Biden up 7.2 percent, and he won the popular vote by 4.5 percent).

The more crucial errors in both cases were in state polling, which (a) is generally less accurate than national polling, and (b) is less frequent. Yes, the chatter about Clinton and Biden’s big national leads based on national polling may have misled people who forgot there was this thing called the Electoral College that actually determines the presidency. But this goes to my fundamental problem with horse-race-polling abolitionism: Bad media coverage of political races won’t necessarily go away, or even improve, if you get rid of candidate-preference polls. Indeed, getting rid of the polls will likely create a vacuum which will be filled with partisan spin, leaked campaign poll results (believe me, the candidates aren’t going to deny themselves polling data), and “reporting” that harvests predictable, self-confirming “data” from tiny samples, conspiracy theories, and other misinformation.

FiveThirtyEight’s Galen Druke raised a lot of these and other concerns with Murray in a podcast interview this week. The more you listen to the back-and-forth, the more it becomes clear that Murray’s big fear is that the perception of pollster bias, fed by polling errors, is contributing to the loss of “public trust in political institutions and our fundamental democratic processes,” which he cited in his op-ed. This is a pretty clear allusion to the anti-democratic (and anti-Democratic) fallout reflected in heavy Republican subscription to the Big Lie about the 2020 elections. And it helps explain why Murray is upset about New Jersey but not Virginia, and about 2020 polling but not 2018 polling. The crisis, it seems, is that misleading (or more accurately, misinterpreted) polls are among the factors turning Republicans into authoritarians who won’t believe anyone other than Donald Trump.

It’s an understandable fear, and one that may particularly grip pollsters, who suspect a disproportionate refusal to participate in polls by Republicans is at the root of the 2020 polling “miss,” and perhaps others. Maybe not doing horse-race polls at all will keep the problem from getting worse.

There are, fortunately, remedies short of abolitionism that could help ameliorate the legitimate issues Murray and others have raised, without unnecessarily obscuring elections for political office in a data-free fog. Pollsters can more cautiously establish and publicize margins of error and what they mean. They can also simply refuse to conduct likely voter calculations — which Murray rightly suggests is the source of a lot of, or maybe most, polling error — relying on predefined samples like registered voters, or even the “all adults” samples typical of the job-approval and issues polls no one seems to find objectionable. Then pollsters could make it clear that they are not estimating turnout patterns, which might significantly reduce perceptions of bias.

Because misuse of polling data is probably the biggest problem of all, media outlets should be strongly encouraged to balance polling data with other kinds of political coverage, whether it’s on-the-ground campaign reporting, issues polling, or simply a focus on events remote from the campaign trail (e.g., actual governing activity in the three branches of government, and at the federal, state, and local level). And even in reporting polls, consumers of this data (including media) should absolutely look at averages, and warn that sparse polling of particular contests (which, ironically, voluntary decisions to stop horse-race polling by individual pollsters will exacerbate) is a danger sign in making predictions. It’s no accident that the New Jersey governor’s race featured less public polling than its counterpart in Virginia; similarly, the state polls that were off in 2016 and 2020 were, in most cases, conducted less frequently than national polling. Should there be any surprise that more polling means greater overall accuracy?

But make no mistake, there’s no silver bullet. As the deep skepticism over exit polls (sort of a combination of candidate-preference and issues polling) shows, non-horse-race polling has its own problems. There is a lot of “pure” issues polling out there that’s unreliable and downright biased, thanks to tricks of wording and question order (and a lot of it is commissioned by special interests promoting a particular point of view).

Some high-minded folks might ask a more fundamental question: What would we lose if we got rid of horse-race polling and instead did a lot more issues polling? My answer to that may infuriate such people, but it’s the truth: In our system, and especially with today’s extreme partisan polarization, who wins elections has much greater influence on policy outcomes than all the policy “debates” and public-opinion surveys you can devise. Politicians in both parties — and particularly Republicans, I would argue — routinely ignore issues polling in what they decide to do; ideology and pressure from donors and activists typically matters more, which is why Republicans won’t support even the most modest gun-safety measures, and Democrats won’t give government the prescription-drug-price negotiation powers the public has demanded for years. To put it another way, you can’t take the politics out of politics.

Polling of all sorts can and should be improved, and without question, we must do a better job of reporting and interpreting survey findings. But it’s folly to think that a reduction or an abolition of one type of polling is going to keep Republicans from believing Big Lies, or give politicians in both parties overpowering incentives to focus on policies rather than politics. In the end, the answer to flawed data is more, not less, data, with the kind of transparency and accountability we can’t get from private polls done for private purposes and then leaked and spun selectively.

“The rise of inflation, supply chain shortages, a surge in illegal border crossings, the persistence of Covid, mayhem in Afghanistan and the uproar over “critical race theory” — all of these developments, individually and collectively, have taken their toll on President Biden and Democratic candidates, so much so that Democrats are now the underdogs going into 2022 and possibly 2024,” Thomas B. Edsall writes in his New York Times column, “Democrats Shouldn’t Panic. They Should Go Into Shock.” Edsall goes on to add the fumbling of the infrastructure and social spending bills, GOP edge in redistricting, historical patterns and high crime rates to the list. He cites polls and quotes pundits to make his case, including Duke political scientist Herbert Kitschelt, who, “quoting James Carville, noted in his email: “It’s the economy, stupid. And that means inflation, the supply chain troubles and the inability of the Democrats to extend the social safety net in an incremental fashion.” Edsall doesn’t see a lot of silver lining for Dems. But he does note that Trump’s divisive “vengeance tour” could help Biden’s re-election and he cites the possibility that midterm losses for Dems would put the spotlight on the GOP’s failure to deliver any reforms. But the hope of booming, covid-free economy a year from now appears to be the Dems best hope for holding their congressional majorities.

From “GOP recruitment struggles give Democrats hope in 2022 Senate fight” by Sahil Kapur, Alex Seitz-Wald and Henry J. Gomez at NBC News: “They lost the governor’s race in Virginia. They had a bad scare in New Jersey. They’re the clear underdogs in the battle for the U.S. House. But Democrats saw glimmers of hope in the fight for the Senate on Tuesday when a top Republican prospect decided not to run….In New Hampshire, popular Republican Gov. Chris Sununu shocked party leaders when he announced that he wouldn’t launch a bid for a Democratic-held seat, preferring instead to seek re-election for a fourth term as governor….With one-third of the Senate up for grabs next year and a handful of competitive states likely to decide control, Democrats are looking for any advantage as they try to defend their majority. They’ve been getting some help recently from Republicans….From New England to Arizona, Republicans are struggling to land top-tier recruits even as the deteriorating political climate for Democrats puts them in a strong position to win back the chamber. Party operatives find themselves having to keep a close eye on several Senate hopefuls they see as unelectable, a familiar problem for the GOP….Brian Walsh, a former Senate GOP campaign operative, said he sees “echoes of 2010″ in the pro-Republican political environment and the potential for subpar candidates to cost Republicans the majority….”Arguably, Republicans lost five seats between 2010 and 2012 because of bad general election candidates,” he said. “I’m not saying that’s necessarily going to happen here. We don’t know that yet. But broadly, candidates matter.”

Russell Berman has a different kind of warning for Democrats at The Atlantic. It goes like this: “The people who fear the most for the future of American democracy weren’t watching the election returns in Virginia and New Jersey earlier this month for clues about next year’s midterms. These voting-rights advocates didn’t pay much attention to who won mayoral or school-board races. Instead, they’ve spent the past two weeks trying to discern how many Donald Trump loyalists captured control of elections in a pivotal 2024 swing state: Pennsylvania….Voters across the Keystone State decided who will run their polling places in the next two elections, but you could forgive them if they didn’t realize it. Buried near the bottom of their ballots on November 2 were a pair of posts: judge of elections and inspector of elections, bureaucratic titles that most people have never heard of. In many counties, the contests didn’t even make the first page of local races, falling far beneath those for supreme-court justice, county executive, and the school board—even tax collector and constable merited higher placement….Yet the people who hold these election positions will play an important—if often overlooked—role in determining whether elections in Pennsylvania go off smoothly. Grassroots Republican supporters of Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 defeat targeted these posts throughout the state, and many of them won their race last week. “There hasn’t been a sophisticated, concerted effort to sabotage elections like the one we’re facing now,” Scott Seeborg, the Pennsylvania state director for the nonpartisan group All Voting Is Local, told me.”

Some good pro-Democratic message points from Simon Rosenberg at ndn.org: “Biden’s 5.6m jobs is already three times as many than were created in the 16 years of the last 3 Republican Presidencies, combined.  It is also millions more than were created in the entirety of any of their three individual Presidencies.  Many millions more.  Since 1989 and the end of the Cold War, the US has seen 42 million new jobs created.  Remarkably 40 million of those 42 million were created under Democratic Presidents….since this new age of globalization began in 1989, a modern and forward looking Democratic Party has repeatedly seen strong economic growth on its watch.  Republican Presidents, on the other hand, have overseen three consecutive recessions – the last two, severe. The contrast in performance here is very stark, it is not a stretch to state that the GOP’s economic track record over the past 30 years has been among the worst in the history of the United States….And look at the jobs created per month over these Presidencies – Rs at just 10k per month over 16 years.  Biden is running more than 60 times times that so far in 2021.  Yes 60x….The rigid ideological approach of the modern GOP has left it unable to govern in a time of rapid change; and those repeated failures have left many Republicans angry, reactionary and willing to do the unthinkable to stay in or regain power.  The modern GOP has no answers for many of the most important challenges America faces today, and rather than modernizing, adapting, as all institutions must in a time of change, the GOP has decided to fight the future by rigging the system to remain in power while the country and its people drift from their narrow grasp.”

We focus a lot at TDS on exploring ways the Democrats can get a bigger bite of the white working-class vote to insure a stable working majority in both houses of congress. It wouldn’t take all that much, as Andrew Levision has argued in his recent strategy memo. Of course Dems must do it in such a way that the gains are not offset by a reduceded share of African American votes or diminished Black voter turnout.

Toward that end, Juana Summers reports that “House Democrats have a new strategy to engage voters of color in the midterm elections” at npr.org, and writes:

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is launching a new, multimillion-dollar effort to engage and mobilize voters of color ahead of the midterm elections, including investments in local organizing and a seven-figure research and polling effort.

The plan, the details of which were shared first with NPR, includes an initial $30 million investment to hire local community organizers, launch targeted advertising campaigns aimed at nonwhite communities, as well as building voter protection and education programs. The committee is also working to combat disinformation efforts that are specifically focused on voters of color.

The announcement comes as Democrats are preparing to defend their slim congressional majorities in 2022, and as many in the party are still assessing their unexpected losses in significant elections this month. It is an early signal of how national Democrats plan to work to ensure that the racially diverse coalition that elected President Biden and delivered victories in key states across the country that gave Democrats a bare Senate majority shows up again.

Summers quotes Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chair Sean Patrick Maloney, who said, “as part of the Building our Base Project, he wants “boots on the ground much earlier, not just showing up at election time, and putting the resources behind it with a culturally competent, diverse team that knows what it’s doing.”