Monday evening an unknown individual inside the United States Supreme Court leaked a draft decision written by Justice Samuel Alito which would explicitly overturn the landmark decisions Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. This would mean the end to a guaranteed federal constitutional protection of abortion rights and at least 22 states, including Missouri, would almost immediately ban abortion entirely. This has been the animating force behind the conservative legal movement for the last two generations and this is their grand triumph which will only embolden the court to go even further. The language of Alito leaves the door open for reconsiderations of Obergefell v. Hodges which legalized same-sex marriage and Lawrence v. Texas which invalidated state laws criminalizing homosexual intercourse, and if you compare his dissent in Obergefell to his draft majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization it’s not hard to imagine the Court deciding to also “Send the issue back to the states”. The Constitution of the United States of America is in the hands of 6 members of the federalist society, we are entering a new era of American politics.

President Biden has made clear that his administration has no plans to protect abortion access. In a statement the morning after the leak, the President said, “If the Court does overturn Roe, it will fall on our nation’s elected officials at all levels of government to protect a woman’s right to choose. And it will fall on voters to elect pro-choice officials this November.  At the federal level, we will need more pro-choice senators and a pro-choice majority in the House to adopt legislation that codifies Roe, which I will work to pass and sign into law.” It’s important to be clear about two points. The first, is the most important and it is that the president’s party almost always has a bad midterm. Data from fivethirtyeight.com shows a familiar pattern (that I also wrote about in 2021 here) “Overall, in the post-World War II era, the president’s party has performed an average of 7.4 points worse in the House popular vote in midterm elections than it did two years prior. Therefore, since Democrats won the House popular vote by 3.0 points in 2020, Republicans can roughly expect to win it by 4.4 points in 2022 if history is any guide…Indeed, in the 19 midterm elections between 1946 and 2018, the president’s party has improved upon its share of the House popular vote just once. And since 1994, when (we would argue) the modern political alignment took hold, the president’s party has lost the national House popular vote in six out of seven midterm elections — usually by similar margins (6 to 9 percentage points) to boot.”

It took 9/11 for George W. Bush and Impeachment for Bill Clinton, as well as voter coalitions that no longer exist, for them to break history. It is extremely unlikely that President Biden, given his approval ratings, economic conditions, and redistricting will outrun history. The second point is, when Democrats had 60 Senators there were not enough votes to codify Roe into law. In 2022 there are not realistic opportunities to win 60 Senate seats, meaning the only avenue to codifying Roe or expanding the Court or any potential remedy would be through abolishing the filibuster which cannot find 50 votes in the US Senate. Currently in the House of Representatives, Speaker Nancy Pelosi is campaigning for the lone anti-choice Democrat in the House while he has a viable progressive challenger in Jessica Cisneros. This is the state of our opposition party, these individuals are the last line of defense.

There are some who have used this dark moment which represents the greatest contraction of civil rights since the end of Reconstruction to deliver an “I told you so”. These people would like to do historical revisionism about the 2016 election and have taken to blaming the left-wing in this country for the state of the Supreme Court. Generally, it’s not worth engaging in this discourse, but I’ve decided to do so today if not for the sole reason that these narratives are actively hindering the success of any centrist let alone any liberal project in this country. Candidly, we are rapidly approaching different entirely preventable disasters and we shouldn’t waste any more time promulgating useless ideas. So, I’m willing to address the skyscraper sized elephant lurking around this discourse, What if Hillary Clinton had won. It’s probably the most frequent hypothetical among liberals, and my read of the alternative is blessed by hindsight but is not informed by omniscience. This is what I believe would’ve happened, it is not exhaustive of everything that could’ve happened.

It’s important to note that Clinton didn’t lose because of insufficient support from the left. In 2008, Clinton did 13 public campaign events for then-candidate Sen. Barack Obama. In 2016, Sen. Bernie Sanders did 41 public campaign events for Clinton during the general election. In 2008, 25% of Clinton primary voters supported Sen. John McCain. In 2016, only 12% of Sanders supporters voted for Trump, meanwhile 13% of Obama’s 2012 voters supported Trump. Clinton lost because she was the most unpopular Democrat to run for President in the history of modern polling and would’ve been the most unpopular candidate period if not for Donald Trump. In terms of ideology, it’s hard to remember now but a critical number of voters wrongly perceived Trump to be more moderate than Clinton. To imagine a world in which Clinton wins the election is not difficult because in spite of her weak electoral performance and rock bottom approval ratings, she very nearly did win. Let’s imagine that James Comey does not release his October letter which hurt Clinton among late deciders and Clinton narrowly wins Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Florida bringing her to 307 electoral votes. Let’s assume, for Clinton’s sake, that her improved margin extends down ballot which would mean victories in the Pennsylvania and Missouri Senate races and probably an additional 2-3 house seats. This would give her the exact same evenly divided Senate the Biden has but a GOP controlled House. So, what would have happened to Antonin Scalia’s vacant seat?

President Hillary Clinton would submit her nominee to the Senate Judiciary Committee, likely Sri Srinivasan of the D.C. Circuit or Jane Kelly of the 8^th Circuit. The nomination would advance deadlocked from the committee, NeverTrump Republicans like former Sen. Jeff Flake would not adopt their current faux moderate posture without Trump as a foil but would return to the vapid anti-Clinton rhetoric that dominated the 90s. It is likely that Republicans would filibuster this Supreme Court nomination, led perhaps by Sen. Ted Cruz who would now likely be heir-apparent for the 2020 nomination or Sen. Jeff Sessions who instead of being disgraced former Attorney General would be an ideological leader in the GOP Conference. Even without the filibuster, the nomination is in jeopardy as Sen. Manchin is non-committal about supporting the nominee and no GOP Senator wants to cast the deciding vote in favor. Senate Majority Leader Schumer undertakes an effort to abolish the Senate filibuster for Supreme Court nominees, it fails 47-53 with Senators Joe Donnelly, Heidi Heitkamp, and Joe Manchin voting with all Republicans. President Clinton is forced to withdraw her nomination and through a compromise with Mitch McConnell and Chuck Grassley nominates then Gov. Brian Sandoval of Nevada, a “moderate” Republican. He is confirmed with all 50 Democrats and 16 Republicans voting in favor. Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Republican appointed by Reagan, opts not to retire while Democrats control the Senate and Presidency. Justice Ginsburg again postpones retirement, fearing that she too will be replaced by a conservative compromise candidate.

In 2018, Democrats suffer sweeping loses in the midterm elections. Republicans elect Josh Hawley in Missouri, Rick Scott in Florida, Joe Donnelly in Indiana, and Kevin Cramer in North Dakota just like in our reality. However, Republicans also pick up West Virginia and Montana while holding Nevada as Democrats narrowly squeak by in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. There is no special election in Minnesota, Democrats don’t force Al Franken to resign and launch at attempt to discredit the MeToo movement as liberal figures like Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey find themselves accused of sexual misconduct. This is done partially to protect the tenuous Democratic majority, but also to discredit renewed criticism of former President Bill Clinton as his connections to child sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein become public knowledge during a special counsel investigation lead by Robert Mueller was launched by the House early in the administration. On January 3^rd, Mitch McConnell becomes Senate Majority leader once again with 55 seats. Democrats make gains in the House, although still in the minority they make gains in the suburbs bringing their numbers just above 200.

In 2019, Several Republicans announce their candidacies for President including Sen. Ted Cruz fresh off his double-digit re-election, Governor Nikki Haley, and Sen. Tom Cotton while Speaker Paul Ryan forms an exploratory committee before ultimately deciding against a run. Donald Trump is speculated to be a potential candidate, but instead successfully pivots his failed run for President into a New York Times best-selling novel with accompanying docuseries chronicling his rise to the GOP nomination self-describing as a “populist revolutionary”. Clinton herself faces a spirited primary challenge from Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley (the lone member of the Senate to endorse Sanders in 2016), and he wins the New Hampshire primary as well as a few caucuses, but he is never seriously close to overtaking Clinton and she wraps up the nomination before mid-March. The pandemic still rages across the globe in 2020, in the United States the pandemic is made worse by a severe economic recession. President Clinton and the GOP Congress deadlock on several fronts and settle on a relief package that mirrors the 2009 recovery, however it is not passed until May leaving millions scrambling to compete for resources from overwhelmed nonprofits. Infections are lower than our current reality because Clinton never disempowers the CDC and is prepared for a pandemic level event, but anti-lockdown activity begins earlier and is more violent as people are animated not just by anti-science conspiracy but also anti-Clinton sentiment. In September, Ruth Bader Ginsburg dies, and Republicans hold open her seat for the duration of the 2020 Election. President Clinton is likely defeated, not since the election of 1820 have there been 2 successive 2 term presidents of the same political party. If Clinton did win re-election, it’s hard to imagine Democrats having better midterm prospects in 2022 than what they face today. When she does lose, Republicans appoint Attorney General Pam Bondi of Florida or perhaps law professor Amy Coney Barrett. Justice Anthony Kennedy retires shortly thereafter, and Judge Brett Kavanaugh is elevated to his seat. Roe and Casey are functionally though not explicitly overruled in a 5-4 decision, with Sandoval joining the liberal minority in dissent.

Seeing as a Clinton victory might not have been enough to avoid our current reality, what would’ve needed to happen to avoid this nightmare? You don’t have to get into butterfly effect level science fiction or have had psychic super power to be able to imagine how things could’ve gone differently. If:

1. At any point between 2009 and 2015, if Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had opted to retire, abortion rights, voting rights, labor rights, and many civil liberties would not be facing near certain annihilation. In 2013, Ginsburg had battled cancer twice by the age of 80 and the political environment in Washington was increasingly polarized. It was clear to contemporary writers that should Republicans capture the Senate, something they were heavily favored to do given the history of midterm elections, because of rising partisanship it would be unlikely that a liberal successor could be confirmed. At the time, the balance of the court was 3 hard right conservatives, 2 center-right conservatives, and 4 liberals. The few liberal victories of the 21^st century were generally 5-4 decisions, and the disappearance of any justice would have a dramatic impact on constitutional law. Furthermore, the disappearance of a liberal justice would of course mean a hard right turn in the court at least until a conservative vacancy appeared. Ginsburg, understanding the stakes of her decision opted not to retire. When she died, as an attempt to shield her legacy perhaps realizing the disastrous effect of her decision to not retire, sheepishly relayed a message that she knew would not be honored. Ginsburg had no reason to believe her replacement would not be a woman, as President Obama had nominated both Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. Ginsburg had no reason to believe that her replacement would be less liberal, as Sotomayor actually disagreed more with Kavanaugh, Thomas, Alito, and Roberts than Ginsburg did in the 2019 term. There was no reason for Ginsburg to do what she did, and that decision more than anything else is responsible for this moment.
2. In 2014 and 2010, Democrats lost several close Senate races and spent tens of millions of dollars on blowout losing races. If the party had decided to abandon clear losers and directed that spending elsewhere, Democrats might’ve had a Senate majority in 2016 when Scalia died. Which would’ve meant a liberal Supreme Court, not just a not as far right one, but a genuine liberal majority which hasn’t existed in generations. Let’s look at the 2010 races, Sen. Blanche Lincoln (AR-D) spent $12 million for 37% of the vote, Gov. Charlie Crist (FL-I) and Rep. Kendrick Meek (FL-D) spent a collective $23 million to receive 29.7% and 20.2% of the vote respectively, and Robin Carnahan (MO-D) spent $10 million to receive 40.6% of the vote. Meanwhile Democratic Senate candidates in Illinois and Pennsylvania failed by less than 2% of the vote. What might an extra $45 million split between the two of them have meant? So, what about 2014? Mark Pryor (AR-D) spent $14 million to receive 39% of the vote and Alison Lundergan Grimes spent $18 million to receive 41% of the vote. Meanwhile, Democrats lost Alaska, Colorado, and North Carolina by less the 2.3%. If those races had broken Democrats way, they would’ve certainly had enough votes to Supreme Court Justice. Unfortunately, this pattern has only intensified as Democrats burned a whopping $250 million dollars to be beaten by double digits in Kentucky, South Carolina, and Alabama while losing several close House races.
3. In 2009, Democrats could’ve attempted to codify Roe. For 3 months, Democrats had a filibuster proof majority and then just shy of it the rest of that congressional term. There were likely enough Pro-Choice Republicans to overcome the objections of Anti-Choice Democrats, and even if compromise legislation had to be crafted it is a near certainty that it would’ve been better than our current system which has allowed states like Texas and Mississippi to ban abortion without outright doing so. It certainly would’ve been better than allowing a conservative court to decide the fate of abortion. But the fault on this one doesn’t lay solely with Harry Reid, but with President Barack Obama. In 2007, he said at a speech to Planned Parenthood that the first thing he’d do as President was sign the “Freedom of Choice Act” which would’ve codified Roe. Before he’d been President 100 days, it had been completely dropped from his agenda and he said of the bill that it was “not my highest legislative priority” and apparently not a priority at all.

That leaves just one burning question, what can we do now? Some of you will be tempted to say “vote!” or some variation of “elect more Democrats”. I’d like you to just consider this, for a moment. In 2018, more than half of Americans could not name a single Supreme Court Justice. Although most Americans (71%) blame Vladimir Putin and Oil companies (68%) for the rising cost of oil, however a majority also blame President Biden (51%) and Democratic Party policies (52%). Most voters don’t perceive politics through the lens of obsessive partisan observers, and often are more likely to see correlations and be unaware of longer-term trends. This is all to say that there is a critical mass of voters who will say “Why should I be convinced that my support has mattered or will matter? I’ve always voted for Democrats, and they just beat Trump so why is this happening.” If Abortion rights disappear while Democrats control congress and the Presidency, the fine details will be lost and I don’t think it’s logical to assume that the response among voters will be a Democratic surge. Although, you should support candidates who support abortion rights when given the opportunity. It’s important to keep protesting, donate to abortion funds to support people who are going to have trouble finding access, and testify against state efforts to criminalize abortion.  But beyond that, what else is there? Not much that isn’t 10 years too late. What’s really important is for the left to develop a sense of our place of history and work towards a long-term vision for society. The right knows who they are and where they are going and have been working for it since the New Deal. We must have that same determination and will or there will come a day when we wake up in a country that we do not recognize as our own. We may already be there.

The post Would President Hillary Clinton have saved Roe? Probably Not appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Barack Obama was clearly one of the most cerebral and well-spoken presidents that the United States has ever had. But as odd as it may seem, two slips of his tongue may have led to the rise of the two worst dictators so far in the 21^st Century.

In 2011, Obama spoke at the White House Correspondents Dinner. One of the guests was Donald Trump. Obama showed little mercy when while looking at Trump, he said, “No one is happier, no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald. And that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter, like: Did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?” Obama also included a fake video of his birth and an artist’s rendition of what the White House would look like if Trump was president, further embarrassing Trump.

You can see the five-minute video here:

As you might expect, Trump was not pleased by being the butt of the jokes. Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said Trump was “pissed off like I’d never seen him before.”

Trump had played around with the idea of running fore president before the 2011 Correspondents Dinner. But the events that evening truly crystallized his hate towards Obama as well as any Democrat who held him in low regard. In June of 2015, Trump announced that he was running for president in 2016. He decimated the rest of the Republican field of candidates and then lost to Hillary Clinton by nearly three million popular votes, but won the outdated and undemocratic Electoral College.

The second faux pas by Obama came in 2014. In March of that year, shortly after Vladimir Putin and Russia had invaded Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine, Obama called Russia a “regional power.” Specifically, he said, “Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors, not out of strength but out of weakness.” Obama describes in in more detail in the following 50-second video:

Knowing what we know now about Putin, it is no surprise that he would be humiliated and outraged at the thought of Russia being called a regional power. After all, his dream as president of Russia was to re-establish the old Soviet Union, with all seventeen republics. He felt that Russia and the Soviet Union had a long and proud history of being a global power and he want to reassert what had been lost at the end of the twentieth century when Mikhail Gorbachev orchestrated to collapse of the Soviet Union in order to give more autonomy to each of the republics.

We cannot say that Obama’s demeaning remarks about Russia caused Putin to bully and ultimately further invade Ukraine in 2022, but it certainly did not help. Putin was also irritated by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who repeatedly criticized Putin and Russia for the lack of fair and democratic elections.

Generally, Barack Obama measures his words as well as anyone. You can see it, particularly in his press conferences, when he often pauses between phrases to make sure that the next thing that he says is precisely what he is thinking and not something that he will later regret.

Life is full of ironies, and the fact that Barack Obama may well have significantly contributed to the rise of dictators Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin can be considered unexpected and certainly unfortunate. It is further evidence that we all make mistakes, even when we try our best to avoid them.

The post How Loose Lips from Obama Hurt America and the World appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Our political system is structurally stacked against Democrats. The U.S. Senate gives overweighted power to small states, helping Republicans. The Electoral College is equally advantageous to Republicans.

Republicans have held the White House for sixteen of the 34 years since 1988, yet in only one of those eight elections since then have they won the popular vote (George W. Bush in 2004). There is little that can be done about either of these discriminatory sets of rules, short of constitutional amendments.

There is one area in which Democrats can act alone, and that is how they operate and schedule their presidential primaries. Right now, the Democratic primary / caucus schedule is heavily weighted towards small and predominantly white states. First on the list of contests in Iowa, then usually followed eight days later with the New Hampshire Primary. Both of these contests favor candidates who can attract a lot of early volunteers, because door-to-door canvassing is feasible and effective in such small states with months, even years, of lead time in advance.

For candidates whose predominant appeal is to metropolitan voters in blue states, it is an excruciating wait until primaries occur in such states. By that time, they are often out of the race because (a) they did poorly in Iowa and/or New Hampshire, (b) the media minimizes their chances, and (c) they run out of money.

Democrats could fix this by establishing their own schedule for primaries. One idea that has been suggested is setting up a series of four regional primary days, (a) Northeast, (b) Southeast, (c) Northwest, and (d) Southwest. Or, the regions could be completely different, though it helps to have clearly define geographic areas. Also, the order of the regional primaries could change in each quadrennial election year.

By changing how their party selects its presidential nominees, Democrats would demonstrate to the American people that they truly support democratic processes. It might eventually help in changing the Electoral College and bringing needed reform to the Senate.

Regrettably, when it comes to doing the heavy lifting to modify the Electoral College and the Senate rules, the Democratic Party is the equal to the Republican Party in perpetuating the status quo.

This and other systemic obstacles to Democrats is eloquently stated in Jedediah Britton-Purdy’s recent guest essay in the New York Times.

At a more basic level, today’s Republican Party succeeds only because the Electoral College, the Senate and the Supreme Court all tilt in its favor. That system has handed conservatives a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court, despite the fact that only one Republican has won the presidential popular vote after 1988.

The Electoral College is like the Senate; it favors small states and is tone deaf to the margins by which candidates win individual states. Wyoming, a Republican state, has equal representation in the Senate to California, a Democratic state. Equal representation, but California has fully fifty-seven times as many people. That means that each person in Wyoming has fifty-seven times as much power in the Senate as individuals in California.

Democrats are nearly as responsible as Republicans for the perpetuation of the antiquated Electoral College. While many rank-and-file Democrats would like to see it abolished, party leaders are radio silent about it. They need to take the lead in either abolishing the Electoral College or passing the National Popular Vote Act in states totaling more than 270 Electoral votes. That act, which has passed 16 states with 195 electoral votes, instructs electors to vote for whomever wins the national popular vote. But that might be dicey now with how Republicans are trying to take power away from the electors and give them to state legislatures in Red States.

So, if Democrats wish to advance democracy without opposition from the Republicans, they may well want to focus on how they plan their primaries. Time is actually short, as plans for the 2024 primaries are already being made.

The post What Dems can actually do without Republicans appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The thermostatic public opinion of the American voter is not a well understood phenomenon, but it is something that has been well observed for the last century. The President’s party almost always suffers a midterm penalty and Joe Biden is historically unpopular, only just missing out on the bottom spot except Donald Trump was more unpopular. This is all to say that the political environment is bad, and conceivably very bad. These are not really debatable points, what is debatable is how much we can read into the future from what happened in Virginia and New Jersey. There is a lot of spin and misguided optimism in politics, there is also an equal amount of apocalypse type meltdowns. This preview attempts to be neither, but rather a 10,000 foot view of the state of things.

The good news first:

Another Glen Youngkin is Hard to Find

How exactly did a Carlyle employed, fleece vest wearing, multi-millionaire who has never held elected office defeat a former Governor? The strengths of the Republican were only amplified by the many weaknesses of the Democrat.

In a normal campaign, you’d probably see the Democrat take a more populist tone and attack Youngkin for his ties to the financial industry. Terry McAuliffe was unable and unwilling to “go there” perhaps because as many pundits have noted, McAuliffe himself is an investor in Carlyle.

Youngkin made extraordinary use of education as a campaign wedge issue, drawing a lot of attention to an apparent gaffe made by McAuliffe during a debate in which he said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach”. There are a couple pieces to this, the first being the frustration many Virginia parents have had because their schools have been closed for in-person learning longer than most other states because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The second more obvious motivating force was race, specifically a considerable amount of white opposition to anything deemed “Critical Race Theory”. Normally a dog whistle this loud would be easy to counteract except the Democrats had very little credibility on racial issues in this election. The incumbent Governor, Ralph Northam, admitted to wearing black face as did the incumbent Attorney General, Mark Herring, who was unsuccessful in his bid for re-election. The Republicans also managed to nominate Winsome Sears, a Jamaican-American who will be the first woman and person of color to be Lieutenant Governor. Republicans essentially were able to neutralize whatever natural advantage Democrats typically have on issues of race and racism, which allowed at least several thousand more conservative Biden voters to pull the lever for Youngkin.

Finally, the way in which Youngkin talked about race sounded rhetorically much more like a liberal critique than a conservative one, despite the more straightforward right-wing animus we saw at school board meetings across America. Ironically, he very successfully used the Obama era “post-racial America” that worked so well for the former President in diffusing tensions with the rural and working-class whites who have abandoned Democrats in droves.

I’ll include a portion of his final stump speech, and I think you’ll notice that this threading of the needle will be hard to replicate:

“We will teach all history, the good and the bad.  America is the greatest country on the planet. We know it. We have an amazing history, but we also have some dark and abhorrent chapters. We must teach them all. We can’t know where we’re going unless we know where we come from. But let me be clear, what we don’t do – what we don’t do — is teach our children to view everything through a lens of race, where we divide them into buckets; one group’s an oppressor and another group’s a victim; and we pit them against each other, and we steal their dreams. We will not be a commonwealth of dream-stealers. We will be a commonwealth of dream-enablers and builders. We know it’s not right. We’re all created equal, and we’re trying so hard to live up to those immortal words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who implored us to be better than we are; to judge one another based on the content of our character and not the color of our skin. And so let me be clear, on day one, we will not have political agendas in the classroom, and I will ban critical race theory.”

That’s not how former President Trump talks about race nor is it how many GOP primary voters talk about race. Therein lies the greatest hope for Democrats, Youngkin of course was not the choice of a primary electorate. The Virginia Republican party opted to hold a convention to select its nominees for statewide row offices as opposed to a regular primary. This was because the party establishment correctly understood that State Sen. Amanda Chase, who self-described as “Trump in heels”, would run away with the nomination if left up to primary voters. A convention however would limit the influence of party outsiders and the folks who might be motivated enough to vote but not spend several hours at a convention. Most states will have primaries and as we saw in 2010 when Republicans lost easy pickup opportunities in Senate races in Nevada, Delaware, and Colorado; sometimes a bad candidate is just bad enough to break a wave.

Other Good News:

1. Midterm and off-year elections are not predictive of Presidential elections. Consider 2018, 2010, 2002, 1994, and 1990. In 2018 and 1990 Presidents Trump and Bush saw their party, the Republicans, suffer loses in the midterm election and they in-turn went on to lose re-election. In 2010 and 1994 Presidents Obama and Clinton saw their party, the Democrats, suffer historic defeats only to be re-elected themselves 2 years later. Finally in 2002, President Bush saw his party make gains and was re-elected President. What’s the theme? Context matters. The results of the next Presidential election were about the next battle, not the last one. Even if Democrats do poorly in 2022, they have until 2024 to recover if they can.
2. A year is an eternity in politics. In 2018, it seemed probable if not likely that Republicans would lose their Senate majority until as late as September. However, the confirmation battle of Brett Kavanagh made possible an opening for Republicans to galvanize voters in states like Missouri and Indiana. What would that look like for Democrats? It’s unclear, but it may defend against potential loses in Georgia and Arizona by providing openings in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. However, it should be said, Republicans won Missouri and Indiana by 19% in 2016 while Democrats won Georgia and Arizona by less than 0.2% in 2020.
3. Starting in 2024 but continuing through 2026, 2028, and 2030 many of the seats drawn to favor Republicans will likely continue to trend Democratic. Population growth is exploding across American suburbs while rural areas are seeing mass depopulation. Take Cobb County in suburban Atlanta for example which mirrors the trends being seen elsewhere. In 2020, Donald Trump received 25,000 more votes than George Bush had in 2000 when he carried the county with nearly 60% of the vote. Joe Biden however received 135,000 more votes and won the county with 56.3%. You can find similar numbers in the suburbs of Houston, Dallas, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, New York, and nearly every major American city with the obvious exception of Miami (although Jacksonville and Tampa show greater upside). The 2012 maps had been gerrymandered heavily in some places, but by 2018 more than 40 seats had flipped to the Democrats. This is short-term good news for the House, but the Senate might be a longer-term view.
4. Should Donald Trump announce his candidacy for President in 2024 he will be the Republican nominee. The potential of a defeated President returning to lead his party in another general election campaign if frankly something that exists well outside the bounds of living memory. The closest examples we have are Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 who ended up running under a third party or Grover Cleveland in 1892 who successfully returned to office after being ousted in 1888. There’s not a lot of precedent for that and there is no precedent for Donald Trump. He is the unknown unknown and he could completely scramble expectations for November should he begin actively campaigning.

Now that Bad News:

Split Ticket Voting is a thing of the past

In 2013, the last time McAuliffe was on the ballot, over 113,000 votes separated the highest performing Democrat (Ralph Northam, then the candidate for Lieutenant Governor) from the lowest performing Democrat (Mark Herring, then the candidate for Attorney General). All three Democrats ended up being elected in that election. In 2021, only 13,000 votes separated the highest performing Republican (Glenn Youngkin, Governor-elect) and the lowest performing Republican (Jason Miyares, Attorney General-elect).

In some environments, that is good news. If there was less split ticket voting, Susan Collins would’ve been defeated in 2020 and the Democratic majority in the House would not have shrunk to single digits. In some environments, this is bad news. If there were more split ticket voting in 2020, it’s very easy to imagine Republicans keeping Senate seats in Arizona and Georgia and perhaps picking up a seat in Michigan, bringing us to 54-46 as opposed to 50-50. Democrats unfortunately find themselves much closer to the latter than the former. This is a bad environment for more split ticket voting for a couple reasons.

The seats Democrats see as most vulnerable, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, and New Hampshire are not necessarily full of voters that are trending towards Democrats currently. According to exit polling, here’s the percentage of white voters without college degrees in the aforementioned states:

Nevada: 42%

Arizona: 41%

Georgia: 35%

New Hampshire: 53%

In Virginia according to exit polls, these white voters without college education went from voting Republican 62% to 38% in 2020 to 74% to 24% in 2021. There are of course problems with using only exit polling data, but looking at county level swings in conservative southwestern Virginia tell this story too. Every county swung more Republican, some as little as Buchanan County which became only 2.1% more Republican but some as large as Radford County which swung right 18%. If you apply that kind of shift to Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, and New Hampshire what you find is that every state flips Republican. The challenge becomes clearer when you look at the states Democrats want to flip; Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Ohio, and Florida which at least have 40% of their voters being non-college educated white people. What is dire however is 2024, which as David Shor has observed that if education and race are still as predictive as they are now for voter choice and voters split ballots like they do now and Democrats manage 52% of the popular vote as they did in 2020; Democrats likely will only capture 45 seats (not including any potential loses in 2022). If they win the Presidency in 2024, the 2026 midterm could be equally challenging when Democratic seats such as Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, and New Hampshire will be contested.

The Senate has a bias that currently benefits Republicans (It was not so long ago that Democrats had 60 Senate seats and could expect modest support from non-college educated white voters). There are simply many more states with large populations of non-college educated white voters, and many of those states are relatively small while receiving the same number of senators. Democrats need some voters concentrated in red trending states to vote for them, it’s becoming clear that not many will.

The Fundamentals favor the Republicans

Analysts like Dave Wasserman and Nate Silver said in 2018 that Democrats would probably need to win the popular vote by around 7% in 2018 to win a majority of seats outright in the US House. The latest polling averages suggest Republicans have a lead in the generic congressional ballot in the low single digits although some polls show a dead heat. With gerrymandering, there will likely be a slight bias in favor of Republicans given that many “Blue” and “purple” states opted for independent redistricting processes while “Red” states are utilizing the more familiar partisan redistricting process. However even without gerrymandering, something that is not an issue in statewide races, Democrats are still at a disadvantage if they are losing the popular vote. Remember in 2012 when Democrats led Republicans by 1.1% in the House popular vote, they still found themselves in a minority position weaker than the Republicans find themselves in now.

On key questions where Democrats had previously enjoyed relatively good numbers in our hyper-partisan political environment but polling from YouGov/The Economist shows a pretty clear story of declining fortunes over the last several months.

Direction of the Country:

Generally headed in the right direction: 27% Nov., 31% Sept., 35% Jul., 42% May

Off on the wrong track: 61% Nov., 55% Sept., 51% Jul., 46% May

Trend of the Economy

Getting Better: 16% Nov., 17% Sept., 23% Jul., 28% May

Getting Worse: 54% Nov., 45% Sept., 38% Jul., 34% May

The bit of good news is the final question that most analysts look at when trying to handicap the political environment shows some hope for Democrats. The only thing people dislike worse than Democrats are Republicans! 53% of voters dislike the Democratic Party including 39% who strongly dislike Democrats, but 59% dislike the Republican Party including 40% who strongly dislike Republicans. However, the light at the end of the tunnel on this one is still somewhat dim. In 2016, Hillary Clinton was the most disliked Presidential nominee in the history of polling….second to Donald Trump who ended up defeating her. Americans are familiar with negative partisanship and there is a critical mass, certainly millions of people including this author, who have a negative opinion of both parties. This is in my opinion the true swing group of voters because some not only are weighing whether to vote for the Republican or the Democrat, but many more are conflicted whether to vote at all. Donald Trump won this group of voters by 17 points in both 2020 and 2016, but in 2016 they accounted for 18% of voters while in 2020 they made up less than 5%. So it’s unlikely that it will be enough to be less hated but rather Democrats need to become more popular. Which brings me to my final point.

The Democrats Actually Are in Disarray

Despite what you might hear from party loyalists, self-proclaimed resistance members, never-Trumpers, and MSNBC viewers there is actually a lot of internal discontent in the Democratic Party. The left is likely more distrustful of moderates than ever after several betrayals over the last several months. Years of “Vote Blue No Matter Who” rhetoric to encourage disaffected progressives to support the party fell apart when the incumbent mayor of Buffalo was defeated by India Walton, a democratic socialist, in their democratic primary. Instead of conceding, the defeated mayor launched an independent bid for mayor which went unchallenged by Gov. Kathy Hochul (who had made endorsements in other races) and was actively supported by establishment figures in the state (except for Majority Leader Schumer). Brown was successful in his re-election, showing progressives that the relationship they have with the party is entirely one-sided as they were left flailing looking for support when just a year earlier, they we were decisive in defeating Donald Trump. There’s also the Build Back Better/Infrastructure chicanery which has produced a lot of bad will not just among rank-and-file voters but clearly amongst members. The original agreement reached by Moderates in the Senate, Progressives in the House, and President Biden was two bills that would move simultaneously. One bill would be bipartisan and contain Senate priorities on physical infrastructure like roads, bridges, broadband, and environmental upgrades. The other bill would pass through reconciliation with only Democrat votes but would have the vast majority of Biden’s domestic policy goals including a public option, paid family leave, tuition free community college, dental coverage for seniors, the PRO Act, and other liberal priorities of the last quarter century. The end result so far has been the passage of the Senate bill without support from the left with Reps. Ocasio-Cortez, Bush, Tlaib, Omar, Pressley, and Bowman voting no. Meanwhile, the House bill has been neutered by moderate figures like Sens. Manchin, Sinema, and unnamed others who don’t have the temerity to put their opposition on record. This doesn’t begin to touch on the palpable disappointment with the failure to raise the federal minimum wage or cancellation of student debt. This well sums up the left-wing frustration with the party, but it’d be dishonest not to acknowledge the drift within the right flank of the party.

James Carville and his neoliberal allies have made clear that they blame Democratic misfortunes on leftist activists and progressives lending support to causes they think are electorally toxic. Namely “Defund the Police”, “Critical Race Theory”, “Wokeness”, “Cancel Culture” and “Socialism” generally. Admittedly these issues clearly have some cultural resonance among at least some voters although this has likely been helped by a media that seems insistent on promoting narratives as opposed to nuance. However much of the blame does lay with Democrats who have not effectively found a way to explain exactly what it is that they do believe in this new culture war. The answers they’ve given on these issues is some variation of “This isn’t real, it’s more of an academic thing that most people don’t engage with and it’s missing context, but we do agree with the sentiment and will attack anyone who attacks these ideas by name although we aren’t running on these things but opposing these things puts you closer to Donald Trump.” To be clear, it is not the job of activists to support popular policies, lunch sit-ins and Martin Luther King Jr. were widely disapproved of by white Americans. Their job is to shift the window of what is politically possible and bring issues to the attention of the actors who can address them. The job of politicians is to build public support for policies and then to enact them. If something associated with the Democratic Party is “Toxic” that is the fault of the party for not figuring out how to explain themselves to the voters. There is a lot that Republicans campaign on that is not just offensive but unpopular and they are connected to activists and ideologues who are equally unpopular. Nevertheless, they have at least managed a coherent (although often inflammatory not to mention dishonest) message that appeals to a growing number of voters.

Not everyone blames the culture war, in fact some moderates like Rep. Spanberger blame the political environment on the national economy and blame the condition of the national economy on progressives. She’s quoted in the New York Times saying:

“We were so willing to take seriously a global pandemic, but we’re not willing to say, ‘Yeah, inflation is a problem, and supply chain is a problem, and we don’t have enough workers in our work force, we gloss over that and only like to admit to problems in spaces we dominate. Nobody elected him to be F.D.R., they elected him to be normal and stop the chaos”

Spanberger is now being challenged for her seat by State Sen. Amanda Chase, the aforementioned Trump in heels. Virginia aside, many so-called fiscal hawks have pointed to President Biden’s American Rescue Plan as the cause of the spike in inflation we’re currently experiencing. Which of course is not just a critique of government spending but government priorities.

My Prediction: Republicans are going to Win, Democrats can decide by How Much

I’ll let Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter describe exactly how bad for Democrats it would be if Republicans continue the swing they achieved earlier this month.

“To put yesterday in context: in NJ, GOP legislative candidates outperformed the ’20 Biden/Trump margin in their districts by a median of 10.8 pts. If that swing were superimposed nationally, Rs would pick up 44 House seats in 2022 (before even factoring in redistricting). Before unpacking what this could mean we need to discuss “PVI” or “Partisan Voting Index” to ground us.

From www.ballotpedia.com:

“The Cook Political Report published its first Partisan Voter Index (PVI) in August 1997. The PVI was developed by Charles Cook, editor and publisher of Cook, and scores each congressional district based on how strongly it leans toward one political party. The PVI is determined by comparing each congressional district’s presidential vote to the national presidential election results. According to Cook, the PVI “is an attempt to find an objective measurement of each congressional district that allows comparisons between states and districts, thereby making it relevant in both mid-term and presidential election years”

You can find the PVI of your state or congressional district (according to 2020 lines) here. For example, Rep. Cori Bush (MO-1) represents the 22^nd most Democratic seat in the nation with a PVI of D+29. Therefore, in an election where nationally Republicans and Democrats tied in the popular vote (a D+0 or R+0 environment), you’d expect Bush to win her election about 79% of the vote. In 2020, Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by about 4.5 points nationally (meaning a D+4.5 national environment) and Bush won her election with about 78% of the vote, a slight underperformance. Meanwhile Rep. Jared Golden (ME-2) represents the most Republican leaning district held by a Democrat at R+6. In 2020, Golden won with 53% of the vote, running ahead of his district’s partisanship by an impressive 8 points. What accounts for over performance or under performance varies from race but political science says generally a few things matter: incumbency, fundraising, voter contact, and candidate favorability (not necessarily in that order). In the Senate we see a bit more of candidates defying state partisanship like Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin in West Virginia which has a score of R+23 and Republican Sen. Susan Collins in Maine which has a score of D+1. The House is increasingly becoming more partisan with no Democrat representing a district redder than R+6 and no Republican representing a district bluer than D+5. This isn’t usually true in the aftermath of a wave election, 2006 and 2008 saw many Democrats representing Republican leaning districts while 2010 and 2014 brought a lot more Republicans from D districts. 2022 will probably see Republicans take many of those Democrat leaning districts back.

What could it look like? Well assuming some Democrats will outperform their districts partisanship (although most won’t), some states/districts are weighted too heavily towards 2016 as opposed to 2020, and that Joe Biden’s approval doesn’t recover to majority support but doesn’t fall below Trump’s in 2018…it’s a good picture for Republicans.

In the House, Republicans might expect to end up with a majority somewhere between those that they had in 2014 and 2010, which themselves were extraordinary wave elections. However, partisanship might be so strong that even with new lines, some D leaning seats are just too far out of reach (this could be a particular problem California and New York). Therefore, you might see Democrats land somewhere around 200 seats, about the size of their caucus after the 1994 elections. Conversely, if partisanship has weakened then it’s possible that some Democrats who have been outperforming expectations in their district since flipping them in 2008 or 2006 or earlier may finally find themselves out of office and Democrats could reach their nadir of the century. A lot of this will depend on how new lines are drawn, as of the writing of this article Republicans have created 5 new winnable seats for themselves and Democrats have created 5 new winnable seats for themselves, additionally 5 competitive seats have been erased. Which brings up another natural dynamic of wave elections which is the swing districts fall first and most people representing those districts are moderates. That was true in 2018 when Democrats inadvertently created a much more Trumpian Republican caucus by defeating most of the party moderates. In 2022 the Democratic caucus is likely to lurch a bit to the left but it’s unlikely that the left flank of the party will be empowered in the minority, but this election will provide an opportunity to lose the more obstructionist members of the caucus like Rep. Gottheimer in New Jersey’s 5^th Congressional District (D+0). However, some seats will be harder to flip back than others, as some Latino and Asian voters continue to drift to the right it will make incumbent Republicans who are members of those communities more formidable. In southern California Reps. Young Kim and Michelle Steel are the first Korean-American republican women in Congress and they represent districts with growing Korean populations, they will probably be able to represent California as long as they want to. Overall, the house looks fairly grim for Democrats if things persist as they are.

The Senate is probably bad news but there are a couple of ways Democrats can thread the needle here assuming nothing else changes. As was mentioned earlier, candidate quality really does matter although it isn’t everything. In the 2017 Alabama Special Senate election (where I correctly anticipated the surprise result) for example it might not have actually been enough for the Republican candidate to be a credibly accused sexual predator who was “more than off color” about matters ranging from slavery to 9/11 being divine retribution from God. After all, the Republicans did still manage 48.3% of the popular vote in Alabama. What was also required was a near-perfect candidate in Doug Jones the Democrat who had prosecuted the Ku Klux Klan, had no voting record, and could raise $22 million. Democrats have well positioned candidates in Sen. Raphael Warnock and Sen. Mark Kelly and potentially very poor candidates in Herschel Walker and Mark Brnovich in Georgia (R+3) and Arizona (R+3) respectively. Yet we should probably expect Republicans to have an edge, however they may be able to save themselves. In Nevada (D+0) and New Hampshire (D+0), Sens. Catherine Cortez-Masto and Maggie Hassan were both elected with less than 48% of the popular vote in 2016 and represent states with large populations that are trending Republican. Their incumbency, fundraising ability, and raw political talent will keep these races competitive but only Cortez-Masto faces a potentially strong challenger in Nevada’s former Attorney General Adam Laxalt who comes from a political dynasty in the silver state but who is not without baggage. Hassan avoided almost certain defeat when Gov. Chris Sununu announced that he has no interest in being part of the United States Senate (and why would you when you can be God-King of New Hampshire) and will run for re-election after winning the popular vote by 32 points just last year (New Hampshire elects its governor every 2 years, with no term limits). However she may face the President of the New Hampshire Senate, Chuck Morse, who is well connected around the state.

That said, Democrats will probably lose one of the four aforementioned seats if not all of them. To counteract that, Democrats need to pick up Republican seats and there are theoretically opportunities in Pennsylvania (R+2), Wisconsin (R+2), North Carolina (R+3), Florida (R+3), Ohio (R+6), and Missouri (R+11) but many of these are simply illusions of opportunity. Although the potential of an explosively toxic Eric Greitens, the disgraced former governor who resigned after allegations of stealing a donor list from a veterans charity and less than clearly consensual series of sexual encounters with his hairdresser, candidacy may seem like the best opportunity for Democrats to capture Missouri’s US Senate seat. However, there are zero reasons to believe based on any publicly available data or easily observable trends that Missouri will elect anyone but a Republican to the US Senate next November. In an environment where Democrats won the popular vote nationally by 8 points, Sen. Claire McCaskill was defeated for re-election by a larger than expected 6 points (McCaskill underperformed her state partisanship at the time by a little over 5 points).

In Florida, Sen. Marco Rubio is popular enough in South Florida with Latino voters that he could conceivably win Miami-Dade County as he did during the 2016 Republican primaries. If you’re not familiar with Florida politics, Democrats won Miami-Dade by 29 points in 2016 and still lost Florida. In Ohio, Republicans seem set to nominate the Trumpian former state Treasurer whose campaign staff walked out on him last year, Josh Mandel or the Peter Theil financed Hillbilly Elegy author that the liberal media constantly platformed  J.D. Vance. Rep. Tim Ryan is no slouch as a potential Democratic Senate candidate, but he’ll likely be forced to account for statements made on the campaign trial during his quixotic quest for the presidency in 2020. Furthermore, Ohio has seen perhaps the most accelerated rightward shift of any state in the Midwest and in 2020 Donald Trump received 300,000 more votes than 4 years prior while achieving virtually the same margin of 8 points.

North Carolina has two very strong Republican options to choose from in the former Gov. Pat McCrory and Trump endorsed Congressman Rep. Ted Budd. 2020 saw over performance down ballot in North Carolina as the Governor, Attorney General, Secretary of State, and Auditors Office all were won by Democrats as Joe Biden lost the state to President Trump. The character of North Carolina is changing from a traditionally inelastic southern state with nearly all white voters supporting Republicans while Black voters support Democrats at similar levels, which bodes well for Democrats future prospects in the state. However, North Carolina is more red than purple, and Democrats will need to do better than they have in better years where they also lost which is a tall order.

Finally, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania which do represent the best opportunities Democrats have to flip any senate seats. These states are both trending Republican and were won by President Biden last year, but Wisconsin has a polarizing candidate in incumbent Sen. Ron Johnson and an open-seat in Pennsylvania where the Trump endorsed Republican is credibly accused of domestic violence. In Pennsylvania however, Democrats are threatened with a party crackup as the front-runners for the nomination are conservative Rep. Connor Lamb, moderate state. Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, and progressive Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman. After the betrayal in Buffalo, it seems unclear if any of these candidates if nominated can unify the Democratic voting base. Wisconsin although it has an incumbent, and incumbents are typically harder to defeat, benefits from the character of Mr. Johnson which has been remarkably conservative given the lean of his state. Wisconsin is trending Republican, but it isn’t that Republican yet and it’s likely that Johnson’s likely challenger, Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes, will be able to raise enormous sums of campaign dollars.

As far as Alaska goes, it’s complicated. The state has recently adopted a new voting system described here by the Anchorage Daily News:

“Under the new Ballot Measure 2 system, all candidates for a particular office, regardless of party, will run against one another in the August primary. (Candidates for governor and lieutenant governor are paired together on a single ticket as running mates.)

Voters pick one candidate or ticket for each office, and the top four vote-getters advance to the general election in November. In that election, voters will be asked to rank the candidates in order of preference, Nos. 1 through 4. A write-in spot offers a fifth choice.

If one candidate gets more than half of the first-choice ballots, that person wins the election. If none of the candidates reach that mark, the candidate with the fewest first-choice ballots is eliminated. Voters who picked that candidate first will instead have their ballots go to their second choices, and the total is recounted.

If a candidate then has more than half of the votes, that person wins. If not, the process continues until there are only two candidates left, and the person with the most votes wins.”

President Trump has already endorsed an opponent to Sen. Lisa Murkowski in the former commissioner of Alaska’s Department of Administration Kelly Tshibaka. Meanwhile Murkowski has been endorsed by Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin and Republicans like Sens. Mitch McConnell, Rick Scott, Susan Collins, and John Thune to name a few. It’s unclear what the voters will do or if Murkowski will make the top-two in November. If she does, it’s likely that she’ll win with coalition support as she did in 2016 and 2010. If she doesn’t, Tshibaka will almost certainly win. Given that Murkowski voted to impeach the Donald Trump who last year won Alaska by 10 points and voted against the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, you might want to be Tshibaka.

All said, the Republicans have a lot more paths to 51 seats than Democrats have to 50.

Without beating a dead donkey, Democratic incumbents in Kansas, Michigan, Wisconsin, New Mexico, Maine and Nevada find themselves in tough races for the reasons listed above. These states either have large populations that are trending Republican, or they are traditionally red states. Democrats have the best odds likely in New Mexico and Nevada where the strength of incumbency may carry Gov. Steve Sisolak and Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham over increasingly conservative working-class Latino voters in their states. However, all these governors were swept in on a blue wave in 2018, it’s not impossible to think that they could be as easily swept out. In fact, in 2010 that’s exactly what happened in Kansas, Michigan, Wisconsin, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Maine (Nevada already had a Republican governor) after the 2006 blue wave. The fact is that while it helps to be an incumbent, these are still not favorable environments.

In New England, liberals love electing Republican governors and we shouldn’t expect that to change in the near future. Gov. Phil Scott of Vermont (D+15) was re-elected last year by a staggering 41 point margin capturing every municipality in the state except for 3. Scott voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and called for President Trump’s resignation after January 6^th. Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire (D+0) also won re-election by a very impressive 32 points in 2020, but Sununu unlike Scott has described himself as a “Trump guy through and through”. The only Republican in any danger is Gov. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts (D+14) and it’s not from the Democrats but rather a Republican primary challenger. President Trump has endorsed Geoff Diehl, a former state rep who challenged Sen. Warren in 2018, over Gov. Baker who despite being overwhelmingly popular in the state is actually not very popular among Republicans who view him as too liberal. If Baker should decide not to run or be defeated in his primary, Massachusetts would be ripe for Democrats to flip. However, should Baker survive his primary, he will surely sail to re-election like Scott and Sununu.

In the South, Democrats are hoping failed Presidential and US Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke will make the race for Governor in Texas (R+5) competitive. That likely won’t be the case for several reasons starting with the heavy GOP swing in the Rio Grand Valley in 2020 which is home to many Latino voters. Just looking at Zapata County, which is 94% Hispanic, you can see just how uphill Beto would need to fight to be competitive.

Beto of course ran for President and made a number of statements on the campaign trial that were calibrated to appeal to a national primary electorate that in theory is much more culturally liberal than general election voters in Texas, although of course voters opted for chronically “un-woke” Joe Biden so it’s not clear if Democrats were that “woke” to begin with. Yet Beto will likely be easy work for the Republican propaganda machine with statements like “hell, yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47” and “In necessary some cases, completely dismantling those police forces”. However, Beto is perhaps the strongest candidate Democrats could hope for, but having unnecessarily tarnished himself in a Presidential campaign it’s unlikely that we should expect Gov. Gregg Abbot to be in any serious danger.

Georgia like Massachusetts will see its Republican Governor challenged seriously in the primary which will have implications for the general election. Gov. Brian Kemp has fallen very far from the graces of Donald Trump after he refused to intervene on behalf of Trump in the certification of Georgia’s election last year. Enough Georgia Republicans sat out the Senate run-offs that Democrats were able to narrowly win and secure the majority in the US Senate, in large part due to Trump continuing to spread conspiracies about unproven mass voter fraud. If Kemp is the nominee, Trump may well decide to ask Republicans to stay home. That’s if Kemp makes it that far as he’s being challenged by Vernon Jones, a once promising Black former Democrat legislator turned Republican who has been dogged by allegations of anti-white racial prejudice. There are rumblings that former Sen. David Purdue might challenge Kemp and if he did it’s an open question whether Kemp could win. Now it’s time to address the name Democrats have been hearing for the last 4 years, Stacey Abrams who narrowly lost her campaign for Governor in 2018. Abrams would be a formidable candidate given the chaos that is consuming the Georgia GOP, but it’s not clear if she will jump into the race given the difficult political environment. Abrams, who has never been shy about wanting to be President (or Vice President), understands where to look for political opportunities. In 2018 she ran for Governor in her purple state when polls showed a national wave environment for Democrats. In 2020 she did not enter the race for President after seeing over 2 dozen candidates including the runner-up from 2016 and the former Vice President enter because she (unlike Beto) correctly recognized that she didn’t have a lane to win. Later in 2020, when polls showed Biden with an exaggerated lead over President Trump, she auditioned heavily to be Vice President on what would eventually be a winning ticket. Now we are less than a year from the next election, and this time in 2017 Abrams had already been a candidate for 5 months. This could’ve been because she had a primary then and doesn’t expect much competition now. It could also be because she doesn’t want to run just to lose.

If one state is likely to flip to the Democrats, it is Maryland (D+14) where Gov. Larry Hogan is term-limited. He was elected in a close upset in 2014 but since then had achieved high marks from Democrats and Independents with more mediocre numbers among Republicans. Like Scott in Vermont, Hogan did not vote for President Trump in 2016 or 2020.

The white whale for Democrats is Florida, a state that has not elected a Democratic Governor in over 25 years. Gov. Ron DeSantis and his administration have mirrored their style in many ways after the former President and that has created many detractors. Yet it’s also produced many supporters as DeSantis polls in the top-tier of potential Presidential candidates, and those are polls with and without former President Trump. In Florida Gov. DeSantis is on the positive side of polarizing — notching a 52% approval rating among registered voters ahead of his upcoming re-election bid. The Florida Democratic Party however has a penchant for botching elections in the state and that doesn’t seem to be changing as for the first time in history as registered Republicans outnumber registered Democrats in the Sunshine state. Challenging DeSantis are the former Republican turned Independent Governor who already lost an election as a Democrat in 2014 now Congressman Charlie Crist, Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried who is Florida’s only statewide elected Democrat, or state Sen. Annette Taddeo who previously ran with Crist as his Lieutenant Governor candidate in 2014. None seem prepared so far to deal with the precipitous slide in Miami-Dade or the continued collapse in the panhandle which will be the party’s undoing.

Republicans should be able to hold on easily in Ohio, Iowa, and Arizona and they should be able to hold on very easily everywhere else. Iowa is approaching the status of red state and is currently more Republican leaning than Texas, there are no indications that rural white voters (of which Iowa has many) will be shifting back towards the Democrats anytime soon. In 2012, President Obama won all white voters in Iowa by 4 points. In 2020, Joe Biden lost white voters in Iowa by 12 points. Gov. Kim Reynolds was elected for the first time in 2018 in a much more hostile political environment, she should be fine in 2022 against any Democrat. The same is true of Gov. Mike DeWine in Ohio who is a known quantity in Ohio having previously been elected statewide as its Attorney General, Lieutenant Governor, and US Senator. In Arizona, Gov. Doug Ducey is term-limited (although he would’ve been unlikely to earn a Trump endorsement after he acknowledged Biden won his state last year) and so that race is the most competitive. Trump has endorsed former TV news anchor Kari Lake although it’s not clear if she will be the party’s nominee given her history of association with QAnon conspiracy theories, white supremacist congressman Paul Gosar, and alleged Nazi sympathizers. Should she be nominated however, it’s likely that she’ll face Secretary of State Katie Hobbs who does not have the same history of bizarre connections. Nobody should be surprised if Hobbs pulls an upset because again, candidate quality can and often does matter on the margins.

Finally, Illinois, California, New York, and Oregon will almost certainly elect Democratic governors (although in New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul faces a very strong primary challenge from Attorney General Tish James). The state level Republican parties in these states for the most part lack a serious moderate element which means that they will likely be unable to mount serious challenges in 2022. These for all intents and purposes are blue states, and they’ve only gotten bluer since the last GOP wave in 2014.

So, what’s a Democrat to do then?

The Democrats are on borrowed time, it’s not clear if all of them know that but some do. It might be easy to despair as we look down the road at the horror of possibilities. Instead, though, we should remember that we are living through a turbulent period of great transitions and there are forces outside of our control. It is up to the President and his Congress to understand the stakes of the next year and do whatever it takes to pass their policy agenda. It may not be enough to save themselves from ignominy but doing nothing will surely doom them to it. And so, what if they do everything they promised last year and more and still the American people still reject them at the polls? What good is government that is so afraid to govern lest they be thrown out and forced to not govern some more but this time from the minority? I’ve written about the need to radically change the Supreme Court, but beyond that Democrats should probably try to do what voters want and dare them not to like them.

Polling suggests sweeping majorities in favor of legalizing marijuana, increasing the minimum wage, forgiving student debt, codifying Roe v. Wade, and letting the government negotiate prescription drug prices. These are things Democrats could do if they were willing to really question the rules of what is possible. The only thing that will save the party from likely electoral disaster is if they can get out of their own way and realize that the rules of the road have changed forever. Perhaps they still will, but the clock is ticking.

As for us, the ball is in their court. Knock on doors if you want, make phone calls if you have time, donate if you’ve got the disposable income, talk to your neighbors if you like them enough and vote if you’ve got the Tuesday available. Ultimately though, it’s up to the people in power to decide how long they think America can survive Republican control of the federal government. In a nation where 700,000 have died of an infectious disease over the last 20 months, it’s not an unreasonable question.

The post An Honest Preview of the 2022 Midterm Elections appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Donald Trump uttered the word and visited the place. We’re talking about Iowa. And off we go, the 2024 presidential election is under way.

There is virtually nothing democratic about the Iowa caucuses. But that has not kept Democrats from worshiping at the altar of Des Moines, Bettendorf and Dyersville where there is a Field of Dreams.

At a time when virtually all Democrats in the House and forty-eight in the Senate are strongly advocating strengthening our democracy with The For the People Act (H.R. 1) and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act (H.R. 4), the party is hamstrung by Republicans and a few of their own, most notably Joe Manchin (WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (AZ).

The Democratic Party also has a structural disadvantage in the U.S. Senate. While far more Americans vote for the 50 Democrats in the Senate than the 50 Republicans, any gain that Democrats would accrue is negated by the gerrymandered nature of the Upper Chamber. Wyoming has as many senators as California even though California has 57 residents for every individual in Wyoming.

But there is one part of our political process where Democrats can effect meaningful change without constitutional changes. This is the manner in which the party of progressives selects its nominees for president. The method for choosing nominees for president is as archaic and undemocratic as any part of our political process, and Democrats do not seem particularly concerned about it.

The quadrennial nomination process begins in Iowa. With a population of 3.1 million people, it represents less that one percent of the United States. The U.S. is 13.4% African-American; Iowa is 4.1%. The U.S. is 18.5% Hispanic; Iowa is 6.3%. In the U.S. as a whole, 13.6% of the population is foreign-born; in Iowa the number is 5.3%. Oh, and Iowa does not have a presidential primary; it has caucuses in which less than 10% of eligible voters participate.

Just across the Mississippi River from eastern Iowa is Illinois. Like Iowa, Illinois is rich in farmland and rural development. But it also is home to America’s third largest city, Chicago. It is a state that consistently votes Democrat, thus making it an excellent state in which candidates seeking the Democratic presidential nomination can compete. It has minority representation reflective of the country as a whole. It has strong components of virtually every crucial constituency of the Democratic Party.

It clearly makes sense for the Democrats to open their primary season in a state like Illinois. However, we all know that relegating Iowa to a lower ranking would not play well in Iowa. In the past six presidential elections, Democrats carried Iowa in 2000 (Al Gore) as well as 2008 and 2012 (Barack Obama), so there may well be a price for Dems to pay if they relegated Iowa in the nomination process.

If the Democrats choose to engage in meaningful electoral reform, it will require creating a level playing field across the country. The process of leveling will mean that some states like Iowa will have less clout in the nomination process and other states like California will have far more.

It is quite possible that in the short run, the Democratic Party will lose support in smaller states. But that is already happening, and trends indicate that Democrats will be paying less attention to New Hampshire and more to Texas.

But once the Democratic Party has a clear policy of promoting democracy across the board, it will be easier for it to argue for statehood for the District of Columbia as well as Puerto Rico. Both such developments would help Democrats bring more democracy to the U.S. Senate. Once that happens, our country will be much closer to operating as a true democracy.

It’s a small window of opportunity to talk about Iowa without getting thrown out of the room. Now is the time for Democrats to initiate that conversation. Promoting true democracy should be a consistent goal for the Democratic Party.

The post How Democrats Can Promote Democracy starting with Iowa appeared first on Occasional Planet.

There are no permanent friends and there are no permanent enemies in politics. There are just temporary alliances that serve as a means to an end. That is how leftists should view the candidacy of Joe Biden when deciding whether to vote for him in November. I have decided that I will vote for Biden, it was not easy.

Joe Biden will be a bad President if he gets his way. He has a policy record nearly a mile long full of war authorizations, working class attacks, and mass incarceration. He is not going to meaningfully compromise with the left, there has been nothing in his long political history to suggest that he will. The party platform doesn’t matter, and his campaign concessions don’t matter, they will disappear after he wins. We’re not going to end up with the kind of society we were fighting for, not this time. The left lost this one, there isn’t a real positive way to spin that. There were insurmountable odds in regard to uniformly negative media treatment, outside party pressure to coalesce around anyone but the left front runner, and an electorate that ultimately cared only about electability and thought the left was a risk despite polling better than every liberal alternative save for Joe Biden. However, losing is still losing and there are now millions of voters who are unsure how to move forward, which will be of enormous consequence in the 7 states which will decide the presidency.

Here’s a question for my fellow friends on the left, “do we want to start winning?” If the answer is yes, the choice must be Joe Biden. That’s not going to be a popular answer, but I’m going to do my best to explain myself.

Joe Biden represents a rapidly decaying, unpopular, irrelevant ideological framing that is clearly in its death throws considering the left defeated 23 candidates representing it and would have defeated 24 if not for the party stepping in to save Biden. Meanwhile Donald Trump represents the beginning of an ideological revolution already seen in US Senators like Josh Hawley. The New Right is adopting the language of working class movements and has allowed its rhetoric to become increasingly anti-elite while pushing a policy that is aggressively conservative on immigration and civil rights. Which will be easier to defeat when the time comes and will do less immediate damage? It’s Joe Biden and neoliberalism. The danger of the New Right is so profound and under examined that we cannot risk it’s further legitimization with a Trump re-election.

As Cornel West said, we have to form an anti-fascist electoral coalition. It will not be a happy task because of the genuine disagreements many of us have with Biden on nearly every policy issue. In some cases, I truly believe his solutions will make our world worse, not better. However, I don’t subscribe to the acceleration mindset that is present in some leftist circles. I don’t believe that it’s in the best interest of anyone to allow the system to become as dysfunctional as possible in the hope that the working class will achieve the class consciousness to finally stand up to industry and party elites. I understand the logic, but there’s several reasons I find it dangerous and irresponsible.

First, the revolution just might not happen that way. Things may get bad or just downright terrible and the working class may simply just learn to live with less as we always have, and a more unimaginable cruelty will become the new standard of living. We may be resigning ourselves to a generation or a century of unrealized opportunities because we mistakenly believed that the powers that be which have actively suppressed the working class would suddenly become allies because the Right won.

Second, and this a more philosophical question, but just how much guaranteed suffering are we comfortable inflicting to prevent hypothetical suffering? We know to a great extent what happens if the right wins. There will be an even more enormous transfer of wealth to the rich from the poor. Civil rights will be rolled back for ethnic minorities, religious minorities, the LGBTQ+ community and women. Climate change will be ignored and there will be hostility towards socialist governments. So, it’s a pretty enormous gamble to suggest that by strengthening the right by giving it access to power that the locked-out left will win. I don’t know that we’re organized enough to win against an animal that is admittedly much smarter and much more politically savvy than the liberals in the Democratic Party who we still lost to.

Finally, if there was any real chance that the New Right was sincere, would act on their populist rhetoric, and actually unite with the left on the few things we agree then that’d be one thing. Josh Hawley for example talks a pretty good game about cracking down on Google and increasing worker wages. However, Donald Trump has been President nearly 4 years now and the time for compromise has come and gone and come and gone again and each time the New Right became more extreme and further removed from anything resembling populism. They are not serious about supporting the working class, they are enemies of working people and only play lip service to our economic anxieties. They are co-opting ideas and language to create a coalition broad enough to enact their actual agenda. Joe Biden is also not a consistent ally, but at the very least he isn’t duplicitous in his true intentions. We know what we’re dealing with and that matters.

I know some of you are thinking “Well what about the Green Party?” and I understand the question. Clearly the Democratic establishment has a deep antipathy towards the left and resents us for questioning why we shouldn’t expect better. There’s obviously an urge to thumb our collective noses at the party and refuse to support a nominee we feel was foisted upon us. Believe me, I get it. Here’s what I don’t get; is the Green Party serious about doing anything except making it easier for Republicans to become President? Because if they were serious about providing an actual left-wing alternative for voters, that would be a noble and respectable goal. However, there does not seem to be an effort to build any actual left-wing political party that can compete in municipal, state, or federal races. There are 0 greens in the US House, 0 greens in the US Senate, 0 greens in Governors mansions, 0 greens in state houses, 0 greens in state senates, just 1 mayor and a smattering of assembly people or trustees to a fire protection district. The Green Party is not serious about politics; they’re serious about publicity stunts including running for President with no intention of winning or even organizing in a serious way. The Green Party isn’t worth anyone’s time.

You might also be thinking, as I did, why not just leave your presidential ballot blank and only vote down ballot. In 2016 despite organizing hard for Hillary Clinton, despite Bernie Sanders holding over 37 events for Hillary Clinton, and despite more Bernie voters supporting Hillary than Hillary voters supported Obama 8 years earlier…she still lost and the left received all the blame. If Biden loses we will get all the blame and if he wins we’ll receive none of the credit. However as with Mrs. Clinton, a Biden loss would not cause the party to become introspective. It would lead the party to double down on an ineffective ideology while simultaneously attempting to strangle the left. The party again will be obsessed with beating the other guys by any craven means necessary as opposed to creating positive policies that will make people’s lives better. Yes if Biden wins, truly awful people will once again have direct access to power. However, those same people have that access now and will retain it win or lose, but hopefully what changes for us is a fever break in the fear that grips Democratic voters that will allow us to be bold on policy next time.

I understand believing there is not an affirmative policy case for Joe Biden. He opposes Medicare-for-All. He opposes marijuana legalization. He opposes the Green New Deal. He is conservative in his outlook and without imagination. I don’t dispute that; I agree with that analysis without objection. However, the few places that he is not bad, not good by any means but devoid of Trump level cruelty, are important.

A bipartisan consensus exists on DACA and would likely succeed with the narrowest possible senate majority. Biden would sign DACA, Trump would not. That makes the difference for 700,000 Dreamers. It’s not nearly enough for them, but it is life changing.

Joe Biden paved the way for Clarence Thomas, something he regrets but we should nonetheless resent him for. Donald Trump appointed Brett Kavanaugh and will appoint other conservative activists. The Supreme Court is at stake, it shouldn’t be, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg unnecessarily put this country at risk by not retiring in 2014 while Democrats had a Senate majority; but here we are. There are also federal courts and US Attorneys and decades of precedent that could be upheld, rewritten, or tossed out. The ACA, which is a dysfunctional and inadequate attempt at moderate healthcare reform, only exists because of a single swing vote. Medicare-for-All will never come to pass with a Trump judiciary. Biden’s picks will not inspire us, but they will support an eventual leftist agenda when the time comes.

Finally, it’s important to acknowledge the credible allegations of sexual assault against Joe Biden. I believe Tara Reade and I believe Joe Biden should be investigated. This is no different than the Kavanaugh allegation right down to the reporter. I believe Joe Biden should be disqualified from the presidency; I believed that about Donald Trump too yet nonetheless he became President. As a country we are going to have to grapple with what it means to have two accused sexual assaulters competing for the Presidency. It’s disgusting and survivors of sexual abuse certainly deserve better than Trump or Biden. There’s nothing to add beyond that, there is no “defense” or “vote for the rapist with better politics”. If the allegations against the candidates are a bridge too far for you, that is perfectly reasonable and let nobody convince you otherwise.

What the left is fighting for is not about one Joe Biden or even Donald Trump. It’s about defeating the forces that created Joe Biden and Donald Trump. It’s about long term goals for this society and moving the ball forward anyway that we can, understanding that this struggle came before us and will continue once we’re gone.

I’m voting for Joe Biden. Not because I support him or what he believes in. Voting for President in states like Missouri has become a purely symbolic act, it just won’t matter in the end. But symbolism does matter and eventually Donald Trump won’t be President and we’ll be able to take a long distance view of the damage he’s done to our country. I want to be able to say I opposed him in every way possible. I protested, I organized for unions, I organized for criminal justice reform, I donated to organizations doing good work in places I can’t go…and I voted in opposition. We should still demand things of Biden and his eventual administration should he win. We should get even more serious about persuasion and political organizing. We should rethink electoralism and find new ways to achieve our policy goals. Those are all necessary things for the future, what is necessary now is defeating the New Right by voting for Joe Biden. In an election with no good options, we have to fight to prevent the worst possible outcome.

The post The Left Case for Joe Biden appeared first on Occasional Planet.

After Super Tuesday it seems clear that the Democratic Establishment learned a valuable lesson from the Republicans after 2016. You can’t beat an insurgent candidate with a divided field, which necessarily means some candidates are gonna have to take one for the team. That’s what happened in the hours leading up to the grand event when moderates like Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg ended their campaigns to rally around their fellow moderate Joe Biden. The result was what you might expect, Biden picked up the lion’s share of those votes which equaled narrow plurality wins in Texas, Minnesota, and Maine. This was a result that we should’ve been more prepared for and if we think about the Democratic Party as an institution it makes sense.

Democrats are the party of government; they respect its legitimacy to have authority and believe that it can be used as a tool to improve people’s lives. Republicans are the anti-government party; they believe that the private sector is often more effective than government and in fact government limits liberty not increases it. The media watched the Trump phenomenon in awe and believed they recognized something universal in the American voter, an abiding anger at the system as well as a desire to disempower it. This was only reinforced when Donald Trump exceeded all expectations to become President of the United States defeating a candidate who was well financed and well credentialed but nevertheless the human manifestation of Washington. So, the logic went, populism overtook an established political party once so therefore it can happen again.

But what that fails to understand is that Democrats are not Republicans. Democrats have not been primed in the same way for a generation through media and mainstream politicians to have the same distrust of the status quo and our institutions in the way that Republicans have. Some Democrats have, those on the left have been skeptical of our institutions since before Vietnam but they are a minority. Therefore, a candidate running against the systems, systems that most Democrats still fundamentally believe in, was going to have very limited upside. That is unless a disproportionate amount of independents with the same skepticism were drawn into the process. It remains to be seen if that will happen, but so far Democrats are showing that they believe the problem is the Republicans and not any kind of institutional failure. That’s what Biden is running on, that the government isn’t functioning because of Republican obstructionism but it used to work before, and it can work again if Republicans do the right thing. Of course, that erases the experiences of several different communities including but not limited to Blacks, Latinos, indigenous people, and of course most people not identifying as straight or male. Nevertheless, so far it appears to be a winning message because it is consistent with a century of ideology.

But while we’re speaking about ideology, it seems to be more complicated than policy. It also seems to be wrapped up in culture, and if were being completely honest Sanders is the counterculture and Biden is the mainstream. Often the counterculture wins in the long term, but it is still the counterculture and does not win in the immediate term. This is fine if we’re talking about political movements, but it is not ideal for presidential campaigns who need to win elections as they happen. You may be familiar with the “beer track“ and “wine track” analogy used in politics, where beer candidates are authentic outgrowths of the working class while wine candidates appeal to a more suburban educated voter. In most parts of the country, save for areas with more Whole Foods and Nordstrom’s than low income housing, the beer candidate wins. This dynamic plays out fairly regularly in general elections, on occasion two wine track candidates face off and the incumbent tends to fare better. But rarely do two beer track candidates face off which is what is happening with Biden and Sanders. Twenty years ago, perhaps Biden and Sanders would fight to a draw or Sanders would be narrowly favored. However, the Democratic Party is witnessing a rapid change in its coalition to include scores more of traditional wine voters, many former Republicans, and they are wielding their influence. The choice is Sanders who is openly contemptuous of the kind of inequality that wine voters have been able to take advantage of and don’t see as inequality versus Biden who has wine voter sympathies while speaking the language of the beer voter. Wine voters and many beer voters seem to have decided on Biden, the results of that decision will have enormous consequences.

There are a lot of voters with Biden in spite of his policies not because of them. Voters aren’t necessarily with what Biden is saying, but how he says it. Sanders is attempting to combat a problem not totally related to policy with a policy argument. That’s probably not going to work because it hasn’t already, Biden has a very long and very problematic policy history hat is public record. As a Sanders supporter it’s difficult for me to say this, but if you can’t defeat Joe Biden with his many failures of policy and presentation, then it’s hard to imagine you defeating Donald Trump who is a much more capable competitor. Of course, the party and the media and donor class have put up countless roadblocks, but that was always going to happen and Sanders experienced it first-hand 4 years ago so he should’ve been prepared. If Sanders wants to win, if he can win, he will need to stop expecting the party to come to their senses. Sanders is going to need to attempt to talk in ways outside his comfort zone. Sanders has clearly won the party on policy, but ironically not on himself. It is going to be necessary to thread the needle on exposing more voters to what is wrong with the system while proposing a more positive, perhaps less caustic, way forward.

There’s a long way to go until July and many votes to be counted, anything could happen. But there’s a lot of history working against Sanders that he should attempt to understand because that will be pivotal not just for his prospects as a candidate but the overall success of his movement.

The post Why Bernie was always a longshot appeared first on Occasional Planet.

I have run for Congress twice as a Democrat, but I might as well have run as an introvert. You may have heard of me had I won, but it’s important to note that the real reason that an introvert like me got the Democratic nomination was because nobody else wanted to run in a strongly Republican district (which fortunately is changing now and may turn blue this November).

I am passionate about politics. I find it very troubling that in the United States we leave millions of people behind. For many, it is economically. For others it is socially; still others, educationally. You know the drill: There are a myriad of ways to be left behind in any society.

I became more aware of this around the time that I was seven years old. Many Sundays I would go to St. Louis Cardinals games with my father in what was the first of three iterations of Busch Stadium. I knew that something was wrong by what I saw as we walked the five blocks to the stadium from where we parked. North St. Louis was different from the suburb where I had grown up. Virtually everyone was African-American, most of the homes were in disrepair, and the looks on many faces were ones of despair. Why was this so? I wasn’t sure, but I knew that somehow, some way, when I “grew up,” I would try to do something to in some small way remedy the unfairness in our society that I was experiencing for the first time.

I first visited Washington, DC when John F. Kennedy was president and then became even more committed to wanting to be a positive agent of change. My career choice was teaching, because (a) it was an opportunity to try to provide empathy and support to young people, and (b) by teaching in inner-city St. Louis, I was exempt from the draft, and this was during the Vietnam War.

I have teaching almost all of the time. However, by 2010, I wanted a larger platform from which I could address national and global issues. But I was scared to run for office. I did not think that I belonged. There were things that were absolutely abhorrent to me, fund-raising for example. As a person who largely sees himself as an introvert, I could hardly think of anything worse than asking another for money. Let me count the ways: (a) I don’t want to be beholden to anyone else, (b) the person I am asking may well need the money far more than I do, and (c) what gives me the right to argue that giving money to me or my campaign is a worthy endeavor?

Public speaking was something in which I had experience. It’s hard to teach without doing it. But there was never  a day of teaching when I wasn’t anxious about getting in front of the students.  Even more unnerving was my time as director of an independent school, when I had large audiences of, can you believe this, adults.

So in 2010, when I first ran for Congress in MO-02 (against the infamous Todd Akin), I wanted to reach voters, but I didn’t want to have to do it by reaching voters. Does that sound familiar to any introverts? Fortunately for me, the expectations were low. As far as party Democrats were concerned, the only thing worse than me running would have been for there have been no name on the Democratic side of the ballot. I limited myself to three or four campaign appearances a week.

Nobody endorsed me, but that was fine because it would have meant standing on a stage and saying disingenuous things about the endorser as he/she did likewise about me. There were no rallies to attend, because the Dems were very weak in the ‘burbs of St. Louis (as I said, fortunately that is changing now). There were “meet-and greets” and gatherings at voters’ homes. While those were never easy, they were small and contained. I had chances to recharge my batteries both before and after.

I like to say that I ran a campaign with integrity. I say this with reservations, because it strikes me that integrity is like honesty and courage, where there is no clear sense of what it is and what it is not. But let’s use the term integrity as a handle to describe what I was trying to do.

Attempting to run with integrity meant that I did not force myself to do “stupid human tricks,” the sorts of things that so many politicians are forced to do. I’m talking about mindlessly waving at everyone at a parade, kissing babies who might most of all want distance from a stranger, and dressing up in team colors, regardless of where one’s loyalties might lie.

I had the freedom to run this way, with a certain reckless abandon. Had I been in a competitive district, that would not have been the case. The Democratic Party would have cast me aside and gone with the traditional candidate, the one who is an extrovert and does not mind, perhaps even enjoys, the silly things that politicians have to do, including asking others for money and turning that cash around to run misleading or excessively self-promoting commercials.

Those of us who see ourselves as introverts often think that we have a special wisdom. I feel trepidatioud about saying that I would prefer that introverts have different kinds of insights from people who live more of their lives as extroverts. But introverts’ preferences for quiet, for space, for thought and small group conversations strike me as entryways for those who run for public office to communicate clearly with voters. They can resonate with voters in a way in which substance takes precedence over image. There is room for give-and-take about the issues that our society faces and to explore ways to try to solve them.

The more candidates running for office let their inner introvert out, the more politics will be acceptable, perhaps welcoming, to the 25 to 50 percent of people who fall on the introverts end of the intro-extro scale. I contend that this would be a very good thing, not only for introverts, but for the country at large.

I have just published a book, Political Introverts: How Empathetic Voters Can Help Save American Politics. A basic premise is that our electorate does not seem to be up to the task of providing the country with the quality of leaders  we need. It fascinates me that, in 1968, the country elected Richard Nixon, and forty-eight years later Donald Trump won a majority of the vote in the Electoral College. During those intervening forty-eight years, we have reformed our educational system to presumably give us a wiser electorate. But no matter how much standardized testing we do, how many AP courses students take, how credentialed teachers become, we did no better in 2016 than 1968. So, my book advocates three types of change:

1. Make politics more welcoming to introverts. What do we have to lose? Introverts are frequently more thoughtful, deliberative and empathetic (not always, but enough to make a difference). How do we make politics more introvert-friendly? Partly by making it easier for introverts to run for office, but also to downplay “silly politics” like rallies, and give greater importance to thoughtful conversation. Another big step would be to drastically shorten the length of campaigns, because two-year campaigns make it virtually impossible for introverts to recharge their batteries. In England, campaigns are generally six weeks long.
2. Acknowledge that changing schools is the gateway to changing politics. We need to make it easier for “natural teachers” to get into the classroom. Forget the credentials; look for individuals who are primarily concerned about the well-being of each student, individuals who communicate well, who have a sense of humor, particularly the self-deprecating kind, and who most of all are empathetic.
3. Promote structural change in American politics, such as eliminating the Electoral College. Get rid of gerrymandering and voter suppression. The houses of Congress should not be fiefdoms in which a Mitch McConnell can stifle not only the will of the minority, but also of the majority. Distribute the power equally among all members of Congress. The electorate will be more interested in government if they sense that it operates fairly and logically.

Change has to be thoughtful and deliberate. That’s how introverted people operate. So, everyone like me who spends much of their time on the introverted side of the continuum, consider trying to find ways to engage in politics and still be in your comfort zone. It’s not easy, but I think that that the county would be better off by letting introverts in to the political process. Let’s try to work our way in and concurrently maintain our dignity. It’s not easy, but well worth trying.

The post Running for Congress as an Introvert appeared first on Occasional Planet.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. I’ve been trying to figure out why our current political moment feels so familiar and the answer has been there the whole time. We never stopped fighting the 2016 campaign, the names of the characters have changed but the dynamics haven’t, nor have the issues. The Democratic candidates have their Republican parallels, I’ve done my best to figure out who they are. I’ve found that the description for each candidate fits fairly well whether you’re thinking about 2016 or 2020.

Cory Booker is George Pataki

He’s running a campaign on ideas that the party doesn’t really want. As an elected person representing a populous north eastern state you’d think he’d be more formidable because to be frank he knows where the money is. He is the happy warrior and he wants to talk about American renewal and love. But here’s the thing, voters are angry and have been this entire decade and if you didn’t know that then you were destined to lose. Overall he’s running a “goober” campaign that despite the resume, lacks gravitas.

Tulsi Gabbard is Chris Christie

They once had a promising future in the party, but made a political decision that upset the elites and torpedoed that future. Now they only exist to get bad press coverage and attack weak candidates who haven’t faced real scrutiny. They probably would’ve been better off not running but they don’t have a stellar track record for good decision making. They have theoretical bipartisan appeal, or so we hear from political analysts who seem to have never met a person without a Master’s or makes under $165,000 a year.

Beto O’Rourke is Jeb

We know he’s not running anymore but we can’t believe it all fell apart so quickly. He began his campaign with so much promise and institutional support. After losing the last election the party got together and tried to understand why the last nominee failed and thought they optimized the winning formula with him. But he never had a natural constituency or performed well in debates, so he started to fade. Originally he was loved by the media and then they turned on him. Now he’s universally disliked by the opposition and not especially loved by his own party so now he kind of just wanders aimlessly.

Amy Klobuchar is Carly Fiorina

The media keeps waiting for her to surge but it doesn’t seem to be happening. She’s had some decent moments during debates, but never has broken out of the single digits. She’s still running but it doesn’t seem like it’s for President anymore, yet she’s maintaining that she has a special electability argument. She also has a reputation for “complicated” relationships with staff.

Andrew Yang is Rand Paul

He’s libertarian who is running for the nomination of one of the major parties. He’s saying some things that make a lot of sense and there’s real enthusiasm there. It doesn’t seem like any of his competitors are taking him seriously which is rude considering he polls even or better than many of them.

Kamala Harris is Marco Rubio

They made sense on paper and was promoted as the future of the party. They performed great during debates by challenging the front runner, they had a natural case for electability in possessing several qualities the last nominee didn’t have, and they’re well known in the party. However, they haven’t lived up to expectations and have only seen their polling decline recently. They now seem unlikely to win any primaries, and almost certainly will lose their home state where they were just popularly elected to a different office. This campaign badly damaged their brand and they might be stuck in the Senate forever. To add insult to injury they don’t even poll well with the voters that they campaigned on being able to attract.

Pete Buttigieg is John Kasich

We didn’t really know him at first but now it seems like there’s two profiles about him a week in major magazines. He won’t stop talking about the Midwest and winning elections despite winning fewer votes in his re-election campaign than both his immediate predecessor and successor did in their first campaigns. He isn’t popular with a core constituency in the party which almost certainly makes his campaign a non-starter, but he’s going to unconvincingly pitch to them anyway because he has fundraised enough money from the worst people you don’t know to last until June. Right now, he’s hoping for a brokered convention to win on a fourth ballot or at the very least something to get him the hell out of Indiana.

Elizabeth Warren is Ben Carson

For a little while there it really seemed like they were running away with it! They become the leader in national polls and state polls and had the highest favorable ratings in the party! But increased scrutiny hasn’t been their friend and some voters are questioning their sincerity on some major issues, others don’t think they’re electable anymore. Yet they still represent a large chunk of the party and do reasonably well in polls. Not that long ago, it would have been hard to imagine someone like them leading a major party but there was a politician who looked like them before who shattered the glass ceiling. It’s hard not to find them endearing even if how they deliver speeches is often lacking in energy. People are also whispering about controversial things they did in their youth that would come up in a general election campaign but they built their mythology around it, so they pretty much brought it on themselves.

Bernie Sanders is Ted Cruz

He is supported by the activist base and not well liked by elected officials in his own party. His candidacy represents the natural evolution of the party, many of his positions have been adopted by the field, and he has led national discourse the last few years. He and the front runner clearly don’t like each other, but somehow they like everyone else running even less. He’s ideologically rigid which endears him to many voters, but it angers his colleagues. His plan for the nation is less about policy, although the policy is there, and more about a revolution of kinds to remake America. He makes the most sense as a nominee but it likely won’t happen because of institutional barriers but in spite of that, he’s more motivated in stopping the opposition than stewing over what might’ve been. People never doubt his authenticity because he’s been consistently for the same things forever and so he’s become the standard bearer for his wing of the party.

Joe Biden is Donald Trump

Ever since he announced he’s been the front runner. He’s objectively out of step with the direction the party has been attempting to go and he’s unpopular online. The media doesn’t get it and they desperately want him to fail if the coverage is to be believed. You might think there’d be stronger candidates considering his gaffes, old school ideas, and scandals but it seems like voters are kinda into it. They’ve known of him for the last 40 years, but they really got to know him the last 10 because of his relationship to Barack Obama. We keep waiting for him to falter but about one third of the party seems to be sticking with him. Sure, other candidates rise and fall but typically only ever to second place because nothing has been more consistent this campaign than his dominance in the polls. He’s the favorite to be the nominee and yet we’ll still be surprised when it happens because “I don’t know anyone who voted for him”. Also, what’s going on with his son? Is he alright?

Honorable Mentions:

Steve Bullock is Mike Huckabee

If it were 1988 he’d be President. But his political career didn’t line up with our current political moment and so he’s languishing at the bottom of the pack. He’s the Governor of a state that had ancestral roots in his party but has been long gone in this century. Why didn’t he run for Senate?

John Delaney is Bobby Jindal

Is he seriously running for President or is this a mix of mid-life crisis, boredom, and trying to find work as a talking head on CNN? Regardless he’s shockingly easy to meme and you’re not even sure if he’s still running.

Michael Bloomberg is Michael Bloomberg

He’s a Republican running in the wrong primary.

Deval Patrick is Jim Gilmore

Who? He’s running for What?

Julián Castro is Rick Santorum

He missed his chance to be President in the last cycle. It turns out that being out of Government for four years renders you essentially irrelevant to the voters unless you’re a Clinton.

The post The 2020 Democrats as Their 2016 GOP Counterparts appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Elizabeth Warren has proposed a student loan forgiveness program that would cancel up to $50K in student loan debt. Warren says that her plan would totally eliminate student loan debt for 75% of Americans who have that debt and would at least reach 95% of Americans with some debt (there’s even a nifty calculator). Kamala Harris has a student loan forgiveness proposal that would forgive up to $20K in student debt if you received a Pell Grant and start as well as operate a business successfully for 3 years. The business would have to be in an income-disadvantaged neighborhood. Bernie Sanders also has a student loan forgiveness proposal; he wants to forgive all of it. That’s it. There are no formulas, no missives full of technocratic language, and no barrier to entry other than having accumulated student loan debt. To quote democratic strategist James Carville “the less you say, the more you heard”. Simplicity matters, and the broadest policies with the easiest to understand messages typically beat out complexity no matter how much wonkish nerds at think-tanks spend on market testing for whatever candidate they’re writing policy for.

“Build the Wall” was and continues to be more effective at energizing voters than “comprehensive immigration reform.” In 2008, “Universal Coverage” had a much better ring to it than “replacing the tax exemption with a tax credit to be applied to a health savings account.” There’s a separate argument that can be made about messaging and how that can matter when campaigning. As we’ve seen, voters don’t always care too much what actual legislation looks like as long as they can identify it with the campaign message. This would in part explain why Trump voters are satisfied with current policy on immigration despite there being no new wall construction.

However, there are relevant considerations that are obviously more important than messaging such as whether something is good policy. Unequivocally, universal programs are better than means tested programs and that’s why Democrats need to run on them and then fight for them once in government. Whether it’s Medicare-for-All vs. “Medicare-for-All-Who-Want-It” or forgiving all student debt as opposed to forgiving most of it, there are at least 3 reasons why (especially in this campaign) universal programs are better.

1. Universal Programs are More Resistant to Attack from Opposing Interests
   1. Nine states have approved work requirements for Medicaid, and each would have implemented those requirements if not for federal judges blocking implementation. [The Trump Administration is appealing those decisions]. As of 2017, fifteen states have passed legislation to drug test recipients of SNAP or other public assistance programs. Obamacare has been undermined by the failure of 14 states, including 2 of the 3 largest states in the union, have refused to expand Medicaid and have denied millions of people access to healthcare coverage. Meanwhile Medicare benefits have only expanded since its creation in 1965 and has continued to enjoy broad support from voters from both parties. The difference is obvious, Medicare eventually covers everyone while the other programs have formulas for determining coverage and harsh cut-offs. It is easier to oppose a program when it will never benefit you and it’s harder for monied corporate interests to fund opposition to programs that help everyone. That is why privatization of Social Security and Medicare will never become a mainstream right-wing talking point and also serves an effective scare tactic from democratic politicians.
2. Universal Programs Always Help Who They’re Meant To
   1. Hillary Clinton, Pete Buttigieg, and other liberals have made the argument that “we shouldn’t be paying for billionaires’ kids to go to college.” The implication being that public money would be used on the super wealthy to pay for things that they themselves can already afford. That falls apart rather quickly when you go policy by policy. Students take out loans because they can’t afford the cost of school, children of wealthy families are not taking out student loans because they are from wealthy families who can afford tuition and therefore universal student debt forgiveness wouldn’t apply to them in the first place because they have no student debt. The same is true of universal free-public college, most wealthy families send their children to elite private universities and would still pay tuition. When it comes to Medicare-for-All, an argument has been made that we would create a dual-system where the rich are able to afford a higher standard of care under private insurance while the masses must use a public system. That analysis misses two things; we already have the dual-system where wealthy people receive better healthcare and at least in our new paradigm, everyone has healthcare where currently that is not the case. What is most important is that in a universal system, there is no chance that those who need help won’t receive it. Even the best means-tested programs still create incentives for people to work less or stay unmarried or be generally unproductive because without public subsidies they would not be able to afford to live.
3. Politics is About Negotiating, If You Don’t Start High Then You’ve Lost
   1. As anyone who has ever bought a car or home or any product where there isn’t a fixed price knows, you don’t offer the price you’re willing to settle for. If you start with where you’re willing to settle, then you’ll either end up paying more or not buying anything at all because you have to convince the seller that they also received a fair deal. The same is true in politics, we have a bicameral legislature and it will be necessary to deal with conservatives elements in both parties (especially in the Senate) in order to pass any legislation. For Medicare-for-All to be accomplished in the next 4 years a number of extraordinary events would need to happen. Democrats would need to win the Presidency, hold the House, win the Senate, whip every Democratic vote, abolish the filibuster, and appoint a Supreme Court justice to ensure that the law can survive court challenges. That all probably won’t happen, but we can still make sure that we get the best healthcare legislation possible. We may very well end up with Beto’s “Medicare-for-America” or Buttigieg’s “Medicare-for-All-Who-Want-It” or Biden’s “ACA 2.0”. These plans would cover millions more people and make our healthcare system better, but these are plans that we should settle for. We will all be better off if we end up in the middle of Medicare-for-All and our current ineffective system. I don’t know that the same will be true if we’re in the middle of ACA 2.0 and the ACA. By promoting universal programs, we are shifting the Overton window and what is possible in regard to policy which will make it easier to eventually achieve those big progressive ideas.

This country needs big structural change and piecemeal reforms or tinkering around the edges will not make life meaningfully better for most people. Government ought to be viewed as a tool to make people’s lives better and we should not be afraid of unleashing its power to combat the inherent problems present in our political economic system.

It’s time for Democrats to put down the calculators, delete the Brookings Institute from their Rolodex, and embrace big ideas.

The post Embrace Universality, Reject Means Testing appeared first on Occasional Planet.