We are now three Tuesday’s away from the first (perhaps only) midterm of the Biden Presidency, and things have certainly changed from last Fall when Republicans hailed their conquering hero in Virginia, now Governor Glenn Youngkin, as a harbinger of things to come; a Red Wave. However, a confluence of events has drastically altered the playing field for the two parties and Democrats now find themselves within striking distance of maintaining control of Congress. Last year I previewed the midterms here, and an update is necessary. Let’s start off checking in on a few predictions:

“Another Glenn Youngkin is Hard to Find. 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.”

Possibly more than the Dobbs decision, Democratic prospects have been saved by abysmal candidate quality on the part of the Republicans. Earlier this month the nominee for the United States Senate in Pennsylvania, Dr. Mehmet Oz, was forced to play defense against a story that he managed experiments at Columbia which killed over 300 dogs including an entire litter of puppies. That same week, we found out that Herschel Walker in Georgia who has said he believes abortion should be illegal even in cases of rape paid for at least one abortion. That’s on top of scandals from earlier in the cycle where we learned that Walker had several secret children or that Walker had held a gun to his ex-wife’s head or more recently that he lied about Native American ancestry.

In Arizona, US Senate nominee Blake Masters has been all but abandoned by Mitch McConnell and his massive fundraising apparatus. Partially because of his history of extreme or heterodox views on every domestic issue (and unsuccessfully has tried to scrub them from his website), but more likely because he has consistently polled behind Senator Mark Kelly. In New Hampshire, Republicans opted to nominate Don Bolduc to challenge Sen. Maggie Hassan. The problem? Bolduc is an election denier in a state that leans Democratic and doesn’t appear to have any of the moderate inclinations that usually propel Republicans to victory in New England.

Then finally there’s the potential sleeper scare for Republicans in Ohio, a state that shouldn’t even be considered competitive. J.D. Vance has proven to be a much weaker candidate than the partisanship of the state would suggest. Even acknowledging the problems of modern election polling, in multiple polls that show President Biden significantly underwater and Governor Mike Dewine cruising to re-election by double digits, Vance either trails his Democratic opponent Rep. Tim Ryan or leads within the margin of error.

Let’s not bury the lead here, Republicans have seriously fucked this one up. The self-destructive tendencies of GOP primary voters as well as Donald Trump’s need to have himself surrounding by sycophants have produced a field so weak that the US Senate is not a toss-up but leans substantially in Democrats favor. Of course it is not a sure thing that Democrats will keep control of the Senate, a polling error as significant as 2020 would at the very least flip as many as two or three seats where Democrats are currently favored. However it seems likely that the polls will not have the same error as 2020, because as we saw in 2018 polling was actually quite good without Trump on the ballot who has twice produced millions of low propensity voters who were not reachable by conventional polling methodology.

“Split Ticket Voting is a thing of the past. 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. 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.”

This appears less true than a year ago as some issues, namely abortion, have risen in salience. In Kansas, a state which has not given Democratic candidates for President more than 41% of the vote since 1988 (and that year Dukakis only mustered 42%), voters enshrined Abortion in the state constitution with nearly 60% in favor. This could not have been possible without substantial support from the white non-college educated voters who Republicans have had great success with since the turn of this century. In recent years there has been much greater partisan sorting on the issue, with fewer Democratic politicians identifying as anti-abortion and even fewer Republicans politicians identifying as pro-choice. But the voters themselves have been much more varied, in 2020 24% of voters who thought abortion should be legal in most cases voted for Donald Trump and 23% of voters who thought abortion should be mostly illegal voted for Joe Biden. This year has the potential (more on those italics later) to deliver a not insignificant number of those pro-choice but otherwise conservative voters to Democratic candidates.

The greater split in voters however is related to perceptions of President Biden who despite being up from his nadir over the summer, is still significantly underwater in most of America and especially so in the states that will decide control of Congress. In an poll of Georgia from Emerson College just last week, President Biden managed a dismal 41% approval rating among likely voters with 52% disapproving. At the same time, Sen. Raphael Warnock leads Herschel Walker by 2-points, 48% to 46% (many other polls put Warnock further ahead). In a poll of Pennsylvania from Suffolk University, once again Biden receives a much lower approval (42%) than the share of support for the Democratic nominee for US Senate (John Fetterman leads Mehmet Oz 46% to 40%). That story repeats itself in North Carolina, in Wisconsin, in Arizona, and very notably in Ohio. There are many reasons for this split, but a lot of it can be attributed to voters who supported the President in 2020 and are generally left of center but disapprove of his performance now. This group, many of whom are under 35, non-white, and/or do not identify with either political party would traditionally be low-propensity voters as they were in 2014 and 2010. In 2022 however, their turnout is predicted to be closer to 2018 than 2010 or 2014 and they support down ballot Democrats over President Biden by upwards of 10%  in many polls.

“The Fundamentals favor the Republicans. 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.”

It looked likely at the time that things could get worse, and things certainly have with the invasion of Ukraine by Russia has certainly accelerated negative trends. Americans are not optimistic about the economy or the Direction of the Country and that appears unlikely to change as the Federal Reserve has indicated that they will continue to raise interest rates while OPEC has reduced the global oil supply. In YouGov polling from this week, perceptions have either gone from bad to worse or have simply stagnated at bad.

Direction of the Country

Generally headed in the right direction: 28%

Off on the wrong track: 60%

Trend of the Economy

Getting Better: 12%

Getting Worse: 52%

With less than a month before Election Day, it’s unlikely that American optimism will suddenly rebound to anywhere near where it was at the beginning of the Biden term. The cake is probably baked on this one, Americans think inflation and the economy are serious issues and they can’t be convinced otherwise when their bank statements confirm this truth every month. The fact that Democrats have been able to hold their own in such dire straits is noteworthy, but if they end up faltering on election day the answer will be obvious as to why.

“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….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.”

What a difference a year can make. Democrats have found themselves united, perhaps more so than anytime in 10 years, and that is in large part thanks to the United States Supreme Court’s extreme term which saw many right-wing decisions with the most far-reaching being the overturn of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey which ended the constitutional right to an abortion and effectively made abortion illegal in 13 states and virtually inaccessible in several more. It appears, at least for now, that Democratic voters and politicians have agreed to point their fire outside their circle as opposed to at each other.

President Biden has also encouraged this development over the last several months with wins on the Inflation Reduction Act (a diminutive spiritual successor to Build Back Better), the Supreme Court nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson, a limited but still expansive student loan forgiveness, the PACT Act for veterans, and the CHIPS and Science Act. The President with no time to spare seems to have caught his stride, and a party desperate for policy wins started getting them at a pretty rapid clip while the price of gasoline declined all summer long. It’s easy to cheer for your team when you’re winning.

So that leaves a question of, how does this midterm resolve itself?

My Prediction: A Divided Congress is Likely, but both Parties have Room for Error to Change That

Before we get into predictions, just briefly let’s talk about terms.

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 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 2022 updated PVI of your state or congressional district here. For example, Rep. Cori Bush (MO-1) represents the 27th most Democratic seat in the nation with a PVI of D+27. 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 with about 77% 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 one of the most Republican leaning districts 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 underperformance 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+22 and Republican Sen. Susan Collins in Maine which has a score of D+2. 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+9. 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. So, while you’d expect Republicans to lurch further into Democratic leaning territory and Democrats to lose some of their Republican leaning seats, partisanship will blunt some of that momentum. That said, the party favored usually wins most of the toss up races and I expect that to be the case in 2022.

THE HOUSE

While there will be a margin of error, perhaps as many as +/- 10 seats, this is how the House of Representatives could look in January. I think Republicans are still very clearly favored in the House for the simple fact that Democrats have such a narrow majority, it doesn’t take much for them to win. Democrats have 220 seats to Republicans 212, that means just 6 flips and it’s hard to imagine a scenario where Republicans can’t find 6 seats. The question I believe is can they find a governable majority and that is very much an open question. Kevin McCarthy will be greeted by no fewer than a dozen members of Congress who have espoused some belief in the QAnon conspiracy, if Republicans maintain a majority on the backs of these members then McCarthy may very well find himself in a situation like former Speaker John Boehner who was ousted in 2015 by a revolt in the right flank of his party conference. That’s a battle for 2023, the question before us is where might those GOP gains come from? There’s been some movement among Latino voters in the Rio Grande valley that should work in Republicans favor, you might also expect some reversion in the suburbs which could make the northeast and the southwest more competitive than it might otherwise be. However, the most beneficial factor for Republicans will be redistricting as states like Texas, Florida, Georgia, and Alabama have drawn maps that have been largely regarded as racial gerrymanders by independent observers. Democrats have some upside to be sure, Rep. Mary Peltola (D-AK) seems well positioned against either Former Governor Sarah Palin or Nick Begich. There are also Democratic pickup opportunities in California, Illinois, and New York thanks in part to Democratic gerrymanders but also thanks to long term demographic trends. Still, you’d rather be the Republicans even if you wouldn’t necessarily want to be Kevin McCarthy.

THE SENATE

The Democrats are probably more likely to pick up a Senate seat than Republicans are to win the majority, although I think the most likely outcome is the status quo with a seat traded in Nevada for one in Pennsylvania. If Democrats hold a narrow margin in the House, they are living on a razor’s edge in the Senate with a 0-seat majority. Last year I thought it was likely that candidate quality would matter and it has in ways that I couldn’t have imagined at the time. The Democratic field is strong, and the Republican field with a notable exception in Nevada is fairly weak.

The “party crackup” in Pennsylvania never materialized as Lt. Governor John Fetterman won his primary in a landslide and despite health issues has maintained a lead the entire campaign. That’s in part because of Fetterman’s appeal, but the most relevant factor is the unpopularity of Republican nominee Dr. Mehmet Oz who rose to prominence as a television doctor who was investigated by the US Senate for advertising pseudo scientific health products. While Fetterman has a net +1 approval rating among Pennsylvania voters, Oz gets a net -17 rating with a majority of voters (51%) saying they have an unfavorable opinion of Oz. It wouldn’t be impossible to overcome those perceptions, but Oz would need a lot of things to break his way to even break even.

In Arizona, largely on the power of Donald Trump’s endorsement, Blake Masters defeated Attorney General Mark Brnovich and businessman Jim Lamon in the GOP Primary. Masters so far has had to mostly rely on the generosity of crypto bros and billionaires like Peter Thiel to raise money as Mitch McConnell and the NSRC have begun to triage this race. Senator Mark Kelly could’ve had a much tighter race had he faced any of Master’s opponents, then again Kelly amassed a war chest of over $73 million which probably always made the incumbent favored.

A lot has already been written about the Senate race in Georgia, and that’s because of Herschel Walker has been a lightning rod for controversy. The danger for Senator Warnock is not Mr. Walker, but it is Governor Kemp who will also be on the ballot and is heavily favored for re-election. Although there will be some split ticket voting to be sure, southern states like Georgia have incredibly racially polarized electorates with very few swing voters. It is possible for Gov. Kemp and Sen. Warnock to both win re-election, but the larger Kemp’s margin gets the closer Warnock will be to a runoff in which it’s harder to predict what the result might be. It’s less likely that Walker could win outright without a run-off due to the presence of a libertarian candidate who is likely to draw more votes from the Republican.

The closest race will likely be in Nevada where the wild card is not third-party voters but a ballot option that gives voters the chance to select “none of these candidates” which has received anywhere from 15,000 to over 50,000 votes over the last decade. Sen. Cortez-Masto despite serving in the US Senate for the last 6 years hasn’t built her own brand in the state once dominated by the Reid machine and it wasn’t until recently that most voters could form an opinion about her performance. Nevada is also a state that in theory could be ripe for a realignment as it has a significant Latino population, many voters are non-college educated, and even more voters are working class. The Republican, former Attorney General Adam Laxalt for his part has been a top-tier recruit. Nevada has historically been a difficult state to poll because it is so rural and a not insignificant population only speaks Spanish, yet that’s still the best predictive tool we have. Laxalt and Cortez-Masto have traded leads in polling throughout the election with Laxalt currently having a one-point edge in the fivethirtyeight polling average. Of course, Nevada is still a Democrat leaning state and every statewide office except secretary of state is held by a Democrat so there is institutional strength working in Sen. Cortes-Masto’s favor. Still, Las Vegas has been especially affected by inflation and without Clark County Democrats can’t win Nevada. Again, it’ll be close, but I’d give the advantage to Laxalt.

Now for some discussion on Ohio, Wisconsin, and North Carolina where Democrats are tied but facing significant electoral obstacles. Donald Trump won Ohio twice and both times by about 8%, which is better than he got in Texas. North Carolina has elected and re-elected it’s Democratic Governor, but it has not elected a Democratic senator since 2008 and has given Republicans it’s electoral votes in every election except one from 1980 until present. Wisconsin was won by President Biden and Democratic nominees from Obama to Dukakis, but Sen. Ron Johnson is an incumbent who despite being pugilistic and divisive has managed to win two statewide elections with at least 50% of the vote when the expectation was that he would not be favored. Democrats nominated very strong candidates in each race, and Republicans are frankly not sending their best. Despite that, you’d expect partisanship to still carry the day and give Republicans wins in each contest. That said, if Democrats win any of these races, then they have almost certainly won the Senate. If you had to ask me who I’d consider most favored in these races, I’d say Cheri Beasley in North Carolina, then Tim Ryan in Ohio, and then Mandela Barnes in Wisconsin.

It’s not worth discussing Florida, Iowa, Missouri, or South Carolina. Republicans will win these races, and in the case of Missouri and South Carolina it will be a landslide. If there is any mystery, it is in Alaska where Senator Lisa Murkowski and Trump endorsed Kelly Tshibaka are locked in an epic battle for that seat. In a split Senate, there is a world of difference between a Sen. Murkowski and a Sen. Tshibaka. Ranked choice voting has already helped Sen. Murkowski because it’s almost certain that she would’ve been defeated in a Republican primary as she was in 2010 when she had to launch a write-in campaign to win her election. Still, it’s not a sure thing that in a Republican leaning state that a Republican Senator can get away with voting to impeach a Republican President as Murkowski did after Trump’s role in inciting the January 6th insurrection. I have Murkowski favored, but there could be a surprise.

THE GOVERNORS RACES

Despite a surprisingly strong effort by Rep. Beto O’Rourke, Texas will re-elect Gov. Greg Abbott. The fact is, Beto’s run for President did him no favors and his comments on the trail have become a recurring campaign theme. Gov. Abbott has had a controversial term with many failures included the power grid collapse that left millions freezing, a mass shooting in Uvalde, and many more unforced controversies. Still, he is favored because Texas is still Texas, and Abbott is still popular among conservatives who remain the largest voting bloc in the state.

In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis looks like a presidential candidate in waiting and looks likely to announce for 2024 whether or not Donald Trump does the same. His culture war has been popular in Florida, and the state has only gotten more red between 2018 and today. Charlie Crist has been a Republican, an Independent, and a Democrat and has been painted as a political chameleon because of that. This race probably wasn’t ever going to be close; the question now is whether DeSantis will win left leaning Miami-Dade in his re-election.

Georgia is shaping up to be another disappointment for Democrats, and the nominee Stacey Abrams will likely lose by a larger margin than she did in 2018. Why? Gov. Brian Kemp by doing the bare minimum of not breaking the law to support Donald Trump’s false claims of election fraud, has earned a reputation as a conservative willing to stand up to the former President which has endeared him to the suburbanites he lost in his first campaign. Abrams also did herself no favors by refusing to concede her race in 2018 which has been used against her by Republicans claiming Democratic hypocrisy. Finally, Kemp is the incumbent and he isn’t unpopular.

Republicans are in for barn burners in Nevada, Arizona, and Oregon (yes Oregon!) but they are favored in each race albeit slightly. In Arizona, Kari Lake is a Trump acolyte and true believer in his political vision which ordinarily wouldn’t be a strength in Arizona. However, Lake is a household name with decades of television experience and is frankly very very good on camera and has been able to out-message and out-perform her Democratic opponent Secretary of State Katie Hobbs who refused to debate Lake. Polling shows a close race, but more polls recently have given Lake an edge. In Nevada, Governor Sisolak is in a similar situation to Sen. Cortez-Masto which is a state where tens of thousands are employed in hospitality and tourism are facing hard times because of inflation. There seem to be plenty of undecided voters, but Sheriff Lombardo leads in most polls. Finally Oregon has gotten itself a competitive race because of a strong independent candidate, Betsey Johnson, running as liberal leaning centrist who is siphoning votes from the Democrat, Tina Kotek, which has left an opening for Christine Drazan to win with perhaps as little as 40% of the vote. As election day gets closer independent candidates usually fade as voters come home to one of the major parties, but Johnson has not faded as much as would’ve been expected and her candidacy will matter a lot in the final outcome

In Kansas, New Mexico, and Wisconsin Democratic Incumbents are in very different races but may very well win by similar margins. Kansas is a red state, but as we saw earlier this year Abortion is clearly on the mind of voters in more pronounced way than perhaps any other state. That works to Governor Kelly’s advantage who has led in the few polls of this race and has run an active campaign across the state. Still, her opponent Attorney General Derek Schmidt is no slouch and will gather more support from Republicans than Kris Kobach did 4 years ago. In New Mexico, Gov. Grisham is experiencing the same trends among Latino voters that are happening all over the southwest but New Mexico is much bluer than Nevada and for that reason alone she should win re-election. To be clear, New Mexico is not a done deal and has elected Republicans to statewide office as recently as 2014 and Mark Ronchetti, the Republican nominee, outperformed expectations in 2020 when he was a candidate for US Senate and lost by only 6%. That said, Ronchetti did lose in New Mexico and Gov. Grisham has won in New Mexico, and that’s worth something. Wisconsin will be the closest of these races, and that’s just the nature of Wisconsin. Gov. Evers and Tim Michaels have been in a two-point race since the summer as Wisconsin, more than any other Midwestern state, has the pedal to the floor on partisanship. Anything that happens between now and election day will affect things on the margins, and luckily for Evers there seems to be some evidence of falling gas prices in the Great Lakes states which is exactly the boost he’d need but the race may still be close enough for a recount.

In New England, voters will almost certainly continue their tradition of electing unorthodox Republicans to their Governor’s mansions in Vermont and New Hampshire but not Massachusetts or Maine. In Pennsylvania, Doug Mastriano has struggled to fundraise, attract volunteers, and any positive media attention and for that reason Attorney General Josh Shapiro should be heavily favored. In Michigan, Republicans had hoped for a closer race against Gov. Whitmer who has been a target on Fox for her response to Covid but an abortion referendum being held in the state seems to have foreclosed that possibility. Finally, Illinois and Ohio, states which were competitive in recent midterm cycles will re-elect their incumbents, Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Gov. Mike Dewine, if polling is to be believed, have gathered the weakest opponents possible and are headed to large victories in November. If there are any surprises they might come from South Dakota or Oklahoma where recent polling has shown Democratic candidates tied or leading Republican incumbents, but I’d take those polls with a grain of salt and expect a closer race but not a flip. Although stranger things have certainly happened.

Going Forward

What happens this November will directly shape what happens in the 2024 Presidential campaign and we might see some potential candidates, especially President Biden and former President Trump, recalculate their chances and opt not to run or decide definitively to throw their hat in the ring. If Republicans get their wave, and some Trump endorsed long-shots defy the odds then the former President would rightly feel vindicated and other candidates might back off. Alternatively, if Democrats maintain control of Congress, it would be difficult to imagine anyone challenging Biden although Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) and others seem to be ready to jump on any sign of weakness. Ultimately though, 2024 is an eternity away and there are Secretary of State, Attorneys General, and Supreme Court Justices who might have more of an impact on our politics than anything else.

We are not dealing with politics as usual, and if I have learned anything about the Trump era it has been to forget what you know and expect the unexpected.

The post An (Updated) Honest Preview of the 2022 Midterms appeared first on Occasional Planet.

We all have blind spots; some of ours are greater than others. If you happen to be someone in the public eye, it’s more likely that other people will happen to see yours.

Each of us needs one or several people who can help us identify our blind spots and warn us when they seem to be leading us into a danger zone.

There may be no one in the world of politics who consistently gets duped more often than Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins. She seems to be about as well-intentioned as any Republican can be. She hopes for the best, so much so, that there are many times when she thinks that the better angels will visit upon the shoulders of someone who clearly has no intention of taking a compassionate or reasonable path. While often being naïve in judging the intentions of judicial nominees, she can be a savvy politician when dealing with the likes of Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia on possible bi-partisan agreements (this plays into his blind spot on bi-partisanship). She also knows well the playing field of her home state of Maine and consistently wins reelection by substantial margins in a fairly progressive state.

But nowhere has her blind spot been more apparent than in her assessment of Supreme Court nominees. A backdrop to this is that Collins is clearly pro-choice on the abortion issue, and she has wanted Supreme Court nominees to be committed to preserving the Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling.

She was completely duped by Trump nominees Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. Collins is quoted in Rolling Stone as saying the following about the leak of the Roberts Courts decision in the Dobbs case that overturned Roe, “If this leaked draft opinion is the final decision and this reporting is accurate, it would be completely inconsistent with what Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh said in their hearings and in our meetings in my office.” Perhaps it would be, but clearly the two of them would not be the first individuals to walk into the office of a senator and fudge the truth. Like most others who come to visit Collins and other legislators, visitors generally say what they think will give them the greatest advantage.

Gorsuch told Collins that Roe was “the law of the land.”  Regarding Kavanaugh, Collins asserted that he “said under oath many times, as well as to me personally many times, that he considers Roe to be ‘precedent upon precedent’ because it had been reaffirmed in the Casey v. Planned Parenthood case.”

According to Rolling Stone magazine, “Collins expressed shock and deep concern when a draft of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Services decision indicated the justice would likely vote to overturn Roe was leaked to the public.” She felt that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh had misled her.

One of the most important assets that a politician can have is a strong BS detector. Not telling the truth, embellishing the truth, misleading others are all essentially components of the currency of politics. Why should nominees for the Supreme Court be any different? They want to both advance their own careers as well as the beliefs they have on issues that are likely to come before the Court.

This summer our non-profit worked with an outstanding group of high school interns. One of them, Corvin Haake, suggested that a president withdraw a judicial nominee if that nominee refuses to directly and honestly answer questions when testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Clearly, a nominee must be told in advance by the president that they must answer questions directly or their nomination will be yanked. It would thoroughly change the way in which Supreme Court justices are selected and could be a major first step in elevating the level of honesty in politics.

Maybe Susan Collins could lead the movement, by acknowledging that she has a blind spot when it comes to assessing nominees. She needs ones who would be honest, and so do the American people. She can make lemonade out of a personal lemon she has.

The nomination process is a bullshit-a-rama. We need to find a way to changed it. Senator Collins, please lead the charge!

The post Rescuing Susan Collins – Make Judicial Nominees Speak the Truth appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Can one person change the course of life for millions of others?

Radically.

We have Putin as our most conspicuous contemporary example.

Just a few moments ago in our elastic present-day concept of time here at home, we had the hotel magnate, Trump, as our elected leader, influencing our daily lives like a twin Putin autocrat.

Thanks to that very same hotelier, we now have Brett M. Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett firmly ensconced on our Highest Court, pretending to be impartial, damaging lives left, right and center.

So let me reframe the question.

Can one person change the course of life for the good of millions of others?

Right away, all of the above are disqualified.

Putin, apparently whimsically – and just because as a simple Russian bureaucrat elevated to the highest post of his land well beyond his abilities – misunderstood the zeitgeist and ordered Russian troops to invade and decimate neighboring Ukraine. Unwittingly, he relegated Russia to minor player status on the world stage going forward.

His US counterpart, Trump, tried to upend the real world here at home and declare his opponent’s election invalid. Unlike in Nicaragua, where a Trump think-alike, Ortega, has been able to maintain and enhance his power through manipulating elections since 1979, Trump failed to falsify Biden’s Presidential triumph. At least for now. Fingers crossed.

There are now six Catholic justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, 6 out of 9. That might be par for the course in Italy or France; not here in the United States. Immigration from largely Catholic Latin America has given us a Catholic population in our 50 states of about 20%. Yet according to the Pew Research Center, we identify ourselves as a country predominently Protestant, 43%, unaffiliated, 26% and Jewish, 2%. Six Catholics on the highest Court of the land is way out of proportion to our religous identity as a nation.

Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, the most recent Catholic arrivals to the Supreme Court, gave us ample reason to doubt their true personas in their Congressional hearings. A psychology professor, Christine Blasey Ford, accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault years before. Our elected Republican senators shut their ears. They voted him in anyway. OK, they seemed to say, Boys will be boys. They were fast to overlook the implications of his traditional conservative Catholicism, or perhaps eager to espouse it.

In 2020, the Washington Post reported that, while in law school, Coney Barrett

lived at the South Bend home of People of Praise’s influential co-founder Kevin Ranaghan and his wife, Dorothy, who together helped establish the group’s male-dominated hierarchy and view of gender roles.

In June of this year, London’s Guardian had this to say on the very same People of Praise co-founder:

… the People of Praise, a secretive charismatic Christian group that counts the supreme court justice Amy Coney Barrett as a member, was described in a sworn affidavit filed in the 1990s as exerting almost total control over one of the group’s female members, including making all decisions about her finances and dating relationships.

Were our elected Republican senators interested in any of this? Did they care? Not at all. Coney Barret was confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice on Oct 26, 2020 with 52 of 53 Republicans voting in favor. Maine’s Susan Collins was the sole dissenting Republican.

Could we now, just possibly, be seeing People of Praise influencing a Supreme Court decision on abortion? Yes, we could.

You are totally within your rights to shout out loud about that right now. As Marcellus once said in in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”

Back to the original question.

Can one person change the course of life for the good of millions of others?

Lest we forget, the answer is yes, yes and yes again.

There are still some Americans who might fit the bill. Franklin D. Roosevelt comes to mind. How about our 16th President, Abraham Lincoln? Or our 44th, Barack Obama?

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, our 32nd President, was elected to the office four times, something no longer possible. He led us through the Great Depression and World War 2. He launched the New Deal, a transformation of American society that included the creation of the Social Security Administration, which today continues to provide essential daily benefits for more than 70 million Americans.

Abraham Lincoln was our President during our first and only – up to now – Civil War. Not only did he preserve our Union – an achievement that continues to reverberate for all 330 million + of us living in the United States today, but he also just happens to be the President who abolished slavery. At the time, the ending of slavery immediately affected the lives of four million African-Americans living in servitude. Since then, the abolition of slavery has daily touched the lives of millions and millions of others, as a constant reminder of our need, and necessity, to acknowledge and embrace each other, and to celebrate our similarities and differences.

So how many lives did Abraham Lincoln impact for the good? The number in incalculable and uncountable.

Oh and by the way, Abraham Lincoln was something called a moderate Republican, a species now apparently extinct.

Barack Obama served as our President from 2009 to 2017. In our lifetime, we have been witness to Obama’s supreme gift to our nation, the establishment of Obamacare. Thanks to Barack Obama, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services reports that we have:

35 Million People enrolled in Coverage Related to the Affordable Care Act, with a historic number of 21 Million people enrolled in Medicaid Expansion Coverage.

In terms of doing good for the greater benefit of society, that counts.

It would seem that we are in a constant back-and-forth between those who want to do good to the benefit of all of us alive on earth, and those who are equipped with an aberrant gene that is programmed to do us harm.

Unfortunately for those of us living in the United States today, we are confronted with, and confounded by, a hotelier equipped with the aberrant gene, a hotelier who would seem to be planning further assaults on our democracy.

See fingers crossed above.

Our DT, our Wizard of Doom to democracy, is still with us.

At any moment, he could rise from the ashes.  At any moment, he could still consume us, devour us, and swallow our collective notion of peaceful coexistence in one night-sweat gulp.

The post Doing the world a world of good appeared first on Occasional Planet.

You probably did not think that a key reason why the current Supreme Court is so out of whack with much of America is because of gerrymandering. This is so because the makeup of every Court is determined by the two other gerrymandered branches of government, the executive and legislative.

Twelve of the last fifteen justices have been appointed by Republican presidents, and that is not an accident. With our Constitution, it is virtually impossible not to have partisan Supreme Courts when we choose our presidents and legislators in ways that are mired in a deep gerrymandering pie, or cesspool.

Here’s how it works:

The U.S. Senate is perhaps the most insidious form of gerrymandering that we have. A good working definition of gerrymandering from Merriam-Webster is “the practice of dividing or arranging a territorial unit into election districts in a way that gives one political party an unfair advantage in elections.” At the time that the American constitution was created, there were no political parties. But there were political interests. The most significant of these interests was what powers would individual states have as opposed to the federal government.

For example, who would be responsible for determining whether a road should be built, or whether it would be legal for a sixteen-year-old to drink whiskey? Who would be able to levy taxes, or even tariffs? At the time that the constitution was being written, there were two key interests within the states that created the groundwork for gerrymandering:

1. The smaller states such as Rhode Island or Delaware did not want to be overpowered at the federal level by larger ones such as New York or Virginia.
2. The states where slavery was legal and was commonly used wanted to have equal power to the states that did not have slavery.

Many of the founding fathers were leery of direct democracy, meaning direct votes by the people. In order to prevent runaway “popular democracy,” the founders created a Senate to go along with the House of Representatives in the Congress. The Senate was undemocratic in two ways, both of which impacted the Supreme Court.

1. Initially, Senators were chosen by state legislatures, not the people. This would be a way of better ensuring that the interests of the states, as opposed to the people, were represented in the Senate. This was clearly undemocratic, and in 1917, the 17^th Amendment was passed, allowing the people to vote for their Senators. But at that time, “the people” were essentially only white males.
2. Each state has two senators. That ensures that there is equal representation among all the states in the Senate. At the same time, it ensures that at least one house of Congress does not include equal representation of the people. For example, California has a population of nearly 40 million people while Wyoming has less than 600 thousand. For each person in Wyoming, there are over 60 in California. What that means in the Senate is that each person in Wyoming has as much power as 60 people in California. That is terribly unfair, and it means that states like Wyoming, the Dakotas, Montana, Nebraska, etc. have far more power in the Senate than states like California, Texas and New York. The same is true for southern states such as Mississippi, Alabama and South Carolina which are relatively small by population. Additionally, these states are no longer politically competitive. Conservative Republicans win virtually all state-wide elections including for the Senators.

Right now, the U.S. Senate is evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. But Democratic Senators represent nearly 57% of the population, whereas Republican Senators represent around 43%. If the Senate was democratic, the Democrats would have a large majority. But in today’s real world the Democrats will probably lose seats in the 2022 mid-term election and once again be a minority.

We should also point out that the House of Representatives is gerrymandered in a different way. Take Missouri for example. It has eight Congressional seats. Recently, the state has voted between 50% – 60% Republican. Even at 60%, Republicans should get only five of the seats. However, they get six and some tried to get them seven. Why does it come out this way?

It is because in Missouri the districts are drawn by the state legislature. The Missouri General Assembly is currently veto-proof Republican. What the legislature has done is to draw two “minority majority” districts. This means districts in which some minority constitutes a majority of the voters. In Missouri, it is African-Americans. One district is in the eastern part of the state, St. Louis, and the other in the western part, Kansas City. None of the other districts is competitive.

Similar to the legislative branch, the executive (presidency) is deeply influenced by gerrymandering. The way in which the founding fathers took care of that was by creating the Electoral College. The E.C. is not really a college. It is a barely known organization that only exists every four years, when there is a presidential election. The number of representatives that each state has in the E.C. is somewhat based on population, but not entirely. What is important to know is that when the Electoral College works properly, the electors from each state vote for the candidate who won the popular vote in that state. In other words, the electors in Alabama vote for whomever carried the state and the electors in California vote for whomever won that state.

Where it gets undemocratic is let’s suppose that Candidate A carries Alabama by one million votes and loses California by a 400,000 votes. You might think that Candidate A would be ahead at that point, because she has 600,000 more votes than Candidate ‘B.’ But with the Electoral College, Candidate ‘B’ is ahead with 55 Electoral Votes from California as opposed to Candidate ‘B’ who has the 9 Electoral Votes from Alabama.

The fact that a candidate can lose the popular vote and still be elected president through the E.C. is not just hypothetical. It has happened five times in our history. The two most recent are the two most consequential. In 2000, Democrat Al Gore won the popular vote from George Bush by over a half million votes. However, Bush won the Electoral vote when the Supreme Court made a decision that gave Bush Florida’s electoral votes. That would not have mattered if the decision had been made by the popular vote.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton defeated Donald Trump by more than three million votes. However, Trump narrowly won “battleground states” such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin and that propelled him to an Electoral victory.

It’s possible that two of our worst presidents ever were elected by the Electoral College than the popular vote. These two presidents are also responsible for five of the current six conservatives on the Supreme Court. Bush nominated John Roberts and Samuel Alito; Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

This is how the Supreme Court became impacted by gerrymandering. Without a gerrymandered presidency and a gerrymandered Senate, the Supreme Court would have been more balanced and reflective of the values of the American people.

To make matters worse, the Supreme Court itself has recently refused to overturn the creation of gerrymandered districts by the states.

The political ramifications of the gerrymandering dynamics is that Republicans are helped in all three branches. Theoretically, the three branches of government are supposed to restrain one another through a system of checks and balances. But that does not work when all three branches are dominated by one party, and that particular party is intent on thoroughly dominating government and extending very few levers of power to minority parties.

How can this change? At the moment, it’s difficult to conceive. Trump Republicans have a number of plans to further a radical right agenda in America. For our government to become more balanced it will require challenging victories by non-Republicans in congressional and presidential races. Stay tuned to see if that happens.

The post The Gerrymandering Virus – It’s Everywhere! appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The history of the Republican Party over the past seventy years includes battles between the moderates within the party against the extremists to the right. During most of the second half of the 20^th Century and some of the 21^st Century, the moderates were able to seize the presidential nomination. But the far-right Donald Trump steamroller movement seems to have almost crushed the remaining elements of the moderates.

In 1952, the Republican Party was divided between the moderates favoring General Dwight Eisenhower and the deeply conservative (though barely extremist) element favoring Senator Robert Taft of Ohio. Eisenhower won the nomination in 1952 as well as the presidential election. The same thing happened four years later in 1956.

The GOP nomination in 1960 went to Eisenhower’s vice-president, Richard Nixon. At that time in his life, he was actually quite moderate, in part because he was constantly currying the favor of Eisenhower. It was not a certainty that Eisenhower would endorse Nixon until a day before the convention. Nixon was opposed by progressive New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, but the former vice-president won the nomination, carrying all eleven states with primaries as well as every other state that did not have a “favorite son” running. Nixon’s ease with winning the nomination did not carry over to the election as he was edged by Democrat John F. Kennedy.

1964 was the first year in which a true right-wing extremist won the Republican nomination. The nominee was Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, as he defeated Rockefeller on the strength of his appeal to many voters who were angry about the progressive turns in the Kennedy-Johnson years. Goldwater became famous for uttering in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

Goldwater wanted to undo much of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society as well as Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. But he carried very few moderate Republicans and was soundly defeated in November. That election, 1964, was the last time that Democrats won in a landslide.

1968 was one of the strangest and most disconcerting years in American history. Lyndon Johnson announced on March 31 that he would not seek renomination. Two other individual seemed to be likely candidates, Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota and Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York. Kennedy was assassinated right after the California primary in early June. Johnson’s vice-president Hubert Humphrey ran as the “proxy Johnson” candidate. He did not enter any primaries, but with the help of Johnson in garnering support from the “party regulars,” Humphrey was able to win the nomination at the disjointed convention in Chicago where on-going violence was taking place in downtown.

On the Republican side, Richard Nixon was able to make a comeback, in large part because of the support that he had given Republican candidates across the country over the previous six years. He was opposed by newly elected governor of California Ronald Reagan and New York’s long-time governor Nelson Rockefeller. Nixon won ten of the twelve primaries and 61 % of the delegate votes. His politics fell somewhere between the progressive Rockefeller and the conservative Reagan. He won the election against Humphrey and third-party candidate Governor George Wallace of Alabama. Nixon governed moderately for his first several years, but as his anger rose, he became more and more conservative.

Even though the Watergate break-in occurred in 1972, it did not impact Richard Nixon’s reelection that year. He carried every state other than Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. He had no opposition in the Republican primary that year, and his election race against Senator George McGovern of South Dakota was a breeze for him. But he was initially worried that he would have to run against popular Maine Senator Edmund Muskie. The fact that McGovern bested Muskie for the Democratic nomination was due in part to the Nixon “plumbers” who created false and misleading information about Muskie, and they eventually trapped him into appearing very unpresidential in a press conference.

Once Nixon won reelection, his primary focus was on the Watergate cover-up. This brought out a great deal of anger and meanness on his part. It also was consistent with his notion of an “enemies list” and crafting domestic policies to undermine Johnson’s Great Society. By the time that Nixon resigned in August of 1974, his governance was quite conservative.

In 1973, after disgraced Vice-President Spiro Agnew resigned, Rep. Gerald Ford of Michigan became vice-president. He assumed the presidency upon Nixon’s resignation. He was faced with problems of inflation, recession, and an extended energy crisis. He was considered a moderate, in large part because he did not fervently support the right-wing Republican social agenda on abortion, gay rights, etc. Leading to the 1976 election, Ford was seen as vulnerable. He was challenged by the aforementioned former Governor Ronald Reagan of California. The contest was extremely tight as Ford carried 26 states and Reagan 24. Ford won 1,121 delegates and Reagan 1,078. Ford won the nomination, as a moderate, but Reagan had established himself as a national leader and was poised for 1980.

In the 1976 general election, Ford carried a great deal of Nixon’s baggage, including the fact that Ford pardoned Nixon for “all crimes committed or might have been committed.” Ford lost to energetic Democrat, former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter.

Carter had a somewhat sluggish presidency as he faced many of the economic and energy problems that Ford did and he was further burdened by the fact that 51 Americans had been taken hostage by Iran during a califate revolution. The 1980 Republican nomination was going to be a prime plumb and Reagan was poised to secure in on behalf of the conservative wing of the party. He carried 44 states to the six carried by moderate George H.W. Bush, who Reagan accepted as his vice-president. Reagan defeated Carter in a landslide. Four years later, Reagan faced nominal opposition for the nomination and then prevailed in another landslide election, this time against former vice-president Walter Mondale of Minnesota.

The race for the 1988 Republican nomination was largely between two party regulars who fell somewhere between moderation and extremism. Vice-President George H.W. Bush battled Kansas Senator Bob Dole. Extremists to the right were represented by Rev. Pat Robertson of Virginia, but he carried only four states. Dole became quite upset with some of the accusations by Bush, whose campaign was managed by one of the greatest masters of dirty tricks, Lee Atwater. The Bush campaign dispensed of Dole rather early in the primary sweepstakes and went on to carry 42 states.

The Democrats continued a habit of choosing weak presidential nominees, this time former Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. Atwater was incredibly skilled in embarrassing Dukakis, portraying Dukakis as being both soft on crime and weak as a military leader. Bush won in the third straight Republican landslide.

When Bush ran for reelection in 1992, he a tougher race. First, Atwater had died the year before from a virulent form of brain cancer, and his Democratic opponent was a strong one, former Arkansas governor Bill Clinton. Bush was also challenged from the right within his own party by former journalist and Nixon speech-writer Pat Buchanan. Bush carried all 50 states and the District of Columbia and easily dispensed of Buchanan to win the Republican nomination.

In 1988, Bush had campaigned on a very conservative plank, “read my lips, no new taxes.” He had been able to fulfill that promise until 1992, reelection year. The federal government was running short on money and new taxes were in order. He walked back his pledge, albeit with sound reasoning. But it hurt him politically. Clinton was a breath of fresh air, particularly in the debates where he came across as much more human and compassionate than Bush. Clinton won the election in a three-way race in which eccentric businessman Ross Perot ran as an independent.

While Clinton had a difficult time getting legislation through Congress, he was still popular among voters. Two veterans of previous presidential races were the top contenders for the GOP nomination in 1996, Kansas Senator Bob Dole and Virginia journalist Pat Buchanan. In this case, the moderate, Dole, achieved an overwhelming victory, carrying delegates from 46 states, this, despite losing New Hampshire to Buchanan early in the cycle. Dole was a legitimate moderate who knew as well as anyone how Congress operated, something that was tough for Clinton to do. But Clinton started his campaign well before Dole won the Republican nomination and he carried 31 states plus DC for a 379 – 159 electoral victory. Clinton won the popular vote by a margin of over eight million votes.

The fight for the 2000 Republican nomination featured moderate Senator John McCain against conservative former Texas Governor George W. Bush. While Bush seemed to many to be too naïve and inexperienced for the job, he had an extremely skilled campaign staff, and he was able to capitalize on the growing conservative movement in the country. In the primaries, he won nearly twice as many votes as McCain and carried 45 states.

In the November general election, Democrat Al Gore of Tennessee, the sitting vice-president won the popular vote by over 500,000 votes. The electoral victor depended on the vote from Florida where there was considerable confusion and malfeasance, particularly with the use of “butterfly ballots” in Palm Beach County. At first it appeared that Gore would carry Florida; then Bush, whereupon Gore conceded. But as the Florida vote tightened up again, Gore rescinded his concession. Virtually all components of the Florida race were thrown into the courts which resulted in numerous precinct recounts. Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court rendered a decision that resulted in Bush winning the election. It was a 5-4 decision, and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor later said that she thought that she made a mistake in her vote. But Bush won and what happened in the country was quite different from what would have happened with an Al Gore presidency.

Gore graciously accepted the Supreme Court’s decision, and Bush was inaugurated as president. It remains an open question as to what Bush and the Republicans would have done had the Court ruled in Gore’s favor.

It was on Bush’s watch that nine-eleven occurred. Many scholars believe that had Gore been president, he may well have paid more attention to the CIA’s warning about Al Qaeda during the first eight months of his administration and perhaps would have been able to prevent the attack from happening. Had nine eleven occurred on his watch, it is unlikely that he would have invaded Iraq for specious reasons as Bush did.

In 2004, Bush had the most nominal of opponents in the Republican primary. In the general election, he won the popular vote by over three million votes and the determinative electoral count, 285 – 251.

Most people remember the 2008 election because of Barack Obama’s nomination win over Hillary Clinton, and then his win of the presidency. But Republicans had a very competitive race for their nomination. Eventually Senator John McCain of Arizona won the contest, winning the races in thirty-seven states. But former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney won eleven contests and nearly five million popular votes to McClain’s ten million. Both McCain and Romney were seen as moderates.

Two other candidates in the race were former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee who was on the far-right of the evangelical wing of the Republican party, and Texas congressman Ron Paul who was more of a libertarian than a Republican. In 2008, the moderates in the GOP clearly carried the day.

2012 was another year in which the moderate wing of the Republican Party prevailed. Romney won going away with 42 states and over 52% of the popular vote. His nearest competitor was former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum who was an extreme right-wing religious candidate. Also on the race were Ron Paul again as well as former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who in many ways was the father of the modern right-wing Republican Party.

Romney won the nomination but lost the general election to Obama. Even though Obama won reelection, he was being stymied with his legislative agenda, particularly with the obstinance of Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell.

Charles Darwin would have liked the 2016 Republican race, as it was clearly an exercise of survival of the fittest. The fittest won the nomination and eventually the election, but as was clear to many when he first announced his candidacy in June of 2015, Donald Trump was not the fittest to govern.

He won the nomination against fifteen other candidates who took the stage on at least one of the televised Republican debates in the 2016 cycle. Most Republicans thought that Trump’s candidacy was a “joke,” but as more and more of the other candidates dropped out of the race, Trump became more of a concern, and then a favorite. The other candidates learned rather quickly that it was not wise for them to cross swords with Trump. He had ways of humiliating others while responding to attacks on him with more vicious rebuttals on his opponents. He dispatched in quick order with some of the previously favored candidates such as Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Carly Fiorina, Santorum, Paul and Huckabee. Even before the primaries began, well-known Republicans such as former New York governor George Pataki, South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, former Texas governor Rick Perry, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker and Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal. Some of those who dropped out were moderate (Kasich and Bush) but most were extreme right-wingers. The last person standing before Trump clinched the nomination was extreme right-winger Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. Trump attacked Cruz by insinuating that his father had been part of a conspiracy to kill President John Kennedy, and that his wife was unattractive. When the Republican delegates assembled in Cleveland, Trump had nearly three times as many delegates as Cruz. Trump organized the convention to in many ways be a “hate-fest” as he and his supporters lambasted Republicans who did not agree with him as well as anyone with a ‘D’ (Democrat) after their name.

If the Trump – Clinton race has occurred in virtually any other democracy, Clinton would have won solidly, with nearly three million more popular votes than Trump. But this is the United States, and it has the anachronistic Electoral College. In that arena, Trump prevailed 306 – 225, and thus was declared the next president of the United States.

By 2020, Trump was so popular within the Republican Party that his only opposition was the not-well-known former governor of Massachusetts, William Weld, a genuine moderate. In the primaries. Weld won only 2.35 % of the vote while Trump essentially won the rest. Trump won the nomination and then went on to lose the general election to former vice-president and senator Joe Biden of Delaware by seven million popular votes, and in the Electoral College, 306-225, the same margin by which he had won four years previously. However, now, twenty months after the election, Trump still does not understand that he lost, nor do many of his supporters. That in itself exemplifies how far to the radical right the Republican Party currently sits.

The main difference in the 2022 Republican Party is that it’s virtually impossible to find a moderate Republican. Where are the Dwight Eisenhowers, Nelson Rockefellers, Gerald Fords, George H.W. Bushs, Bob Doles, John McCains and Mitt Romneys of the Republican Party? It seems that somewhere between the time that Donald Trump declared his candidacy for the 2016 Republican nomination in June of 2015 and the time that he won the nomination in July, 2016, it became virtually impossible to be a moderate in the GOP without getting verbally demolished by Trump.

Following the testimony of White House Chief-of-Staff aide Cassidy Hutchinson before the January 6 committee on June 28 of this year, it seems that Trump is not a shoo-in to win the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. But the mostly likely opponents are current “Trumpsters” such as Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, former vice-president Mike Pence of Indiana, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley. If there is a well-known moderate in the party, it would be Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney. In reality, her views on most issues are strongly conservative. Where she differs from the others is in her integrity, as show so vividly in her role as vice-chair of the Jan. 6 committee.

As we see from the chart above, Republicans have won eleven of the eighteen races since 1952. Had the winner been based on the popular vote, the split would be nine each. The Republicans have won the popular vote only once in the last eight elections (W. Bush in 2004). Theoretically the Democrats should be on a roll.

But Republican extremists seem to have captured the party, though it was only ten years ago when the party nominated a moderate (Romney in 2012). Under fair and equal rules, the Democrats may have a bright future. However, the conservative Supreme Court is actively undermining democracy, and at the present time, all bets are off.

The post Are moderate Republicans dying with a whimper; or will there be a resurgence? 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.

Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has taken a lot of flak for the slow sales of his book, Republican Rescue. During its first week in stores, it sold only 2,289 copies.

Even though Christie has been a long-time friend of Donald Trump and assisted him considerably during his campaigns and presidency, Christie generously criticizes Trump and his supporters for their penchant for falsehoods and conspiratorial thinking. He is well aware of the fact that Trump’s assertion that he won the 2020 presidential election, but it was stolen from him is clearly a Big Lie.

Christie believes that the Republican Party needs to separate itself from its right-wing extremists and revert to a conventional conservative platform based on ideas rather than myths, or simple opposition to whatever Democrats advocate.

He says,

“As Republicans, we need to free ourselves from the quicksand of endless grievances. We need to turn our attention to the future and quit wallowing in the past. We need to face the realities of the 2020 election and learn—not hide—from them. We need to discredit the extremists in our midst the way William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan once did. We need to renounce the conspiracy theorists and truth deniers, the ones who know better and the ones who are just plain nuts. We need to give our supporters facts that will help them put all those fantasies to rest so everyone can focus with clear minds on the issues that really matter. We need to quit wasting our time.”

Clearly not the word of a loyal Trumpster. Christie is not alone in asking Republicans to abandon Trump, the “Freedom Caucus” or Tucker Carlson and return to its core values of a generation ago. Georgia Lieutenant-Governor Geoff Duncan strongly critiqued his party in his book GOP 2.0. He was at Ground Zero for much of Trump’s efforts to unconstitutionally change the Georgia vote. Duncan is a solid conservative, but he believes that the party has been infected by extremism based on falsehoods tinged with absurd conspiracy theories. He stood by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and others who firmly opposed Trump’s efforts to “find nearly 12,000 votes for him” so that he could be declared the winner in Georgia.

In the wake of the poor opening sales of his book, many have said that while Christie’s ideas may be of value, he is seeking an audience that is far smaller than he anticipated. Democrats are not interested in rescuing the Republican Party and Trump supporters am not inclined to support traditional Republicans.

I would recommend Christie’s book for several reasons:

1. It provides further insight into one of the greatest mysteries for people who are not Republicans, and even some who are. I’m talking about the makeup of “the Republican Brain.” This is a phrase that became the title of Washington Post writer Chris Mooney’s 2012 book by the same name, The Republican Brain. The book is quite detailed and nuanced, but among the key points is that Republicans do not have the same level of empathy as others, nor do they engage in critical thinking the same way.
2. It is becoming more apparent that the number one challenge for Americans is preserving our democracy. This means that we should do all that we legally can do to restrain the extreme right. Progressives and other Democrats need to preserve and strengthen the traditional Republican Party, no matter how weak it might be now. Rather than mocking Christie, I think that it would be wise to support him in his party-building efforts, though not with most of his conservative social and economic policies.

Christie is interesting, because while he shows no mercy towards the Biden Administration, he supports numerous progressive ideas on community policing, eliminating debtors’ prisons, making school curricula more relevant, and providing improved and more accessible health care.

If we are going to preserve democracy, we need to be prepared to talk with the Chris Christies of the world.

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Since August of this year, President Joe Biden’s popularity has been plummeting. The rule of thumb is that a president needs to have an approval rate that is at least ten points higher than his or her disapproval rating in order to stand a good chance of being reelected.

According to 538, in early August Biden was up 52 – 42%. It was that month that the president announced that the United States was initiating a thorough and complete withdrawal from Afghanistan, where American troops had been since shortly after Nine-Eleven in 2001.

At the time of Biden’s announcement, MSNBC anchors Nicolle Wallace and Brian Williams jointly said that they speculated that 95% of the American people would support the withdrawal while 95% of the media would oppose it. If it was true that the preponderance of the American people supported the departure, it did not take long for the media to exercise overwhelming influence over the populace. By early September, Biden was underwater (higher disapproval than approval rating), 46%-47%. It wasn’t just Afghanistan; it was the lack of organization and progress with key domestic legislation such as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Build Back Better Act (expanding the social safety net).

Biden had formidable members of Congress who preferred gridlock to giving him victory when he really needed it. The so-called “corporate Democratic twins” in the Senate, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, did and continue to block passage of the Build Back Better Act. If the bill passes at all, it will probably be at a tab that is $1 trillion less than what forty-eight other Democratic senators want.

In the House, the Progressive Caucus fashioned a strategy whereby the infrastructure bill would not be voted upon without a commitment to vote for the Build Back Better bill. They withheld their votes on the infrastructure bill, but fortunately thirteen Republicans voted for it to allow it to pass (nineteen Republicans in the Senate also voted for it earlier in the year). But the lack of unity among the Democrats made Biden look weak to some and contributed significantly to his drop in the polls.

To many, the fact that Joe Biden is such a nice guy and doesn’t seem to have a mean bone in his body would be reason enough for his popularity to stay well above water. Yes, he has made tactical mistakes with both foreign and domestic policy, but we all make mistakes, don’t we?

The fact that he has been burned for the kind of miscues that anyone might makes causes me to think that maybe the so-called independent voters are more like Republicans than Democrats. Republicans are much less tolerant at giving Democrats a break than Dems are of Republicans. Biden’s good intentions and humane governance is not playing well enough with independents to keep his job approval rating intact.

Is there anything that Biden can do to improve his job approval rating, and encourage citizens to be more positively inclined towards Democrats in general? Molly Jong-Fast of the Atlantic Magazine writes that “Biden Needs an Enemy.” She asserts that demonizing his enemies is what has allowed Donald Trump to stay so popular among his base. Biden needs to play hardball and forego giving Republicans the benefit of the doubt. The reluctance of Republicans to support virtually any proposal from Democrats shows that while the GOP can talk the bi-partisan game, it rarely plays it. One of the most telling incidents was in 2009-2010 when President Barack Obama was bending over backwards to get Republicans to support the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare). He had exclusive meetings with Republicans in which he encouraged them to share their thoughts and let his administration know what they wanted in the bill. Of course, this was all premised on the assumption that they cared about improving affordable and effective health care for American citizens. That proved to not be the case.

Iowa Senator Charles Grassley seemed interested in engaging in the dialogue, and Obama repeatedly tried to incorporate some of his suggestions into the bill. But whenever it became time to count noses and see who would approve a compromise version of the bill, no Republicans would indicate support. At the time when the bill was passed exclusively with Democratic votes, Grassley admitted that he never had any intention of supporting the bill. He seemed to simply enjoy jacking around Obama and other Democrats.

Joe Biden has tried to forge bi-partisan alliances for his domestic policies. To a certain extent, it worked for the infrastructure bill. But for the most part, Republicans have shown little interest in collaboration. Those who worked and voted with him on infrastructure are now facing repercussions from party leadership. The bottom line is that there is little point in Biden using valuable time to try to get Republicans to try to change their ways.

But what if Biden adopted a different strategy; one in which he is played hardball and essentially attacked Republicans whenever they engaged in behavior that was outside the bounds of the rational and empathetic thinking that characterizes most Democrats, both in and out of Congress and the White House? Even if it would be a good idea for Biden to do this (and there are ample opportunities for his team to poll the American people on how they would react to this), it really would be an impossibility for one simple fact.

Being nasty and aggressive is not who Joe Biden is. What’s more, he doesn’t seem to have a sarcastic sense of humor, the type that Barack Obama utilized at the White House Correspondents Dinner against Donald Trump in 2011. He himself would likely become a target of mockery if he tried to vitriolically lash out at his opponents.

However, he could be firmer in his deadlines with Republicans. It hurt him that votes on much of his domestic agenda extended beyond the time that he decided to pull the United States out of Afghanistan. Since Republicans have a consistent and proven record of jacking around Democratic presidents, it would serve him well to give them ‘x’ amount of time to contribute to a solution, and if they don’t, then move ahead as best he can without their input. It may be that this will irritate Joe Manchin, but Manchin too is going to have to show that he does not want to make the Democratic Party look tentative and even feeble at time.

Those who criticize Biden for being either too patient or too rash are being unfair to him because neither option is without its negative consequences. What is important to keep in mind is how he is a quantum leap over Donald Trump in how to function as president of the United States. It is not Biden’s fault that Republicans are as strong as they are in the Congress. He has been dealt a difficult hand. Let’s work with him and encourage others to show compassion towards him. We have already gotten half a loaf of what we want from him; hopefully we can up that considerably with passage of a credible form of the Build Back Better Act and then focus on maintaining control of one or both houses of Congress in 2022.

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Here’s a tough philosophical question for you. What is more important to you – the well-being of those of us presently living on Earth, or the well-being of succeeding generations?

Over the past fifty years, the Republican Party has taken a definite stance of minimizing its commitment to the well-being of those of us who currently inhabit Planet Earth. The GOP has become more callous in how it regards, or disregards, the well-being of those of us who currently on Earth.

In recent years, when America has been in crisis such as the Great Recession of 2008-09, or the recent and current COVID pandemic, Republicans become extremely miserly. They resist providing necessary financial aid to those who are suffering the most. This is odd, because many people believe that it is natural for currently alive human beings to look out for their own well-being first and worry less about those who come later.

Some believe that an inherent element of evolution is for each generation to want to make the world better for those that come next. But the history of our world has been replete with wars; ones in which billions of children have had their parents taken from them. Left behind are children with limited resources and bitter memories. If the Republican philosophy of prioritizing the future over the present held true, each generation would have become more peace-loving and prosperous. While there is some evidence of that, for the most part the economic and human rights status of today’s children is falling behind that of their parents, most particularly those in the United States.

There are clear political explanations to these conundrums. Democrats, particularly the progressives among them, are consistently seeking to improve the quality of life for those of us who are currently inhabiting Planet Earth. It may seem odd to speak of the New Deal or the Great Society in the context of cosmic issues such as planetary or universal evolution, but what is essential to know about Democratic policies is that they have a key common denominator. They are always working to make the quality of life better for those of us who at any point in time happen to be alive on earth. The New Deal was essential in moving millions of Americans out of poverty and misery. The Great Society provided enhanced civil liberties, health care, job training, educational opportunities and more for those who were alive in the 1960s. Republicans were largely opposed to these programs, just as they have recently been to the stimulus and social welfare programs of Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

In Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s book Peril, about the end of the Trump Administration and beginning of the Biden one, we see how Republicans are very parsimonious when it comes to providing needed aid to those Americans who are suffering through the COVID pandemic as well as growing economic inequality.

Upon becoming president, Joe Biden sought $1.9 trillion for Americans to recover from the COVID pandemic and the damage it was doing to the economy. Republicans wanted far less. Maine’s GOP senator Susan Collins cobbled together a group of ten Republicans with the express purpose of forging a reasonable compromise with the new administration. The figure that the Republicans offer is $618 billion, less than a third of Democratic $1.9 trillion amount from President Joe Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

There have been times in American history when the political parties would have a disagreement like this. Each side recognized that its figure was a starting point. Representatives would meet in small groups. In this case of relief from the COVID pandemic, the Democrats would figure out how low they could go; the Republicans, how high they could go.

But in this case, the Republicans felt that the fact that their figure was greater than zero demonstrated that they were negotiating in good faith. They felt that it was good enough to let the American people, including the Democrats, know that they cared enough about the COVID problem that they were willing to do something, no matter how little.

The problem is that the Republicans expressed no awareness of the suffering that so many Americans, and individuals outside the United States, were experiencing at a time of severe illness, double-digit unemployment, and psychological isolation.

Simply put, the Republicans showed virtually no empathy for hundreds of millions of Americans who were suffering through the pandemic and related maladies. An illustrative component of the Republicans’ lack of concern and commitment about the suffering of the American people was that it did not seem to matter that millions of Republicans were among those hardest hit. This became particularly clear in early 2021 when COVID vaccinations hit the market and many Republicans chose to forgo them.

A second contemporary issues that clearly demonstrates how Republicans have minimal regard to for the currently living is abortion. Republicans have gone to all lengths to make legal abortion difficult, even impossible, in the United States. The bizarre Texas law with bounty hunters is only the latest in their efforts to suppress of women’s reproductive rights.

Republicans seem comfortable abrogating the rights of their wives, girlfriends, sisters, daughters for the vague commitment to protecting the lives of fetuses. While protecting the lives of fetuses is sound policy when examined in isolation, it pales in comparison to protecting the well-being of currently-living woman who is experiencing an unwanted pregnancy. The result is that we have more women, and men, who reluctantly become parents and often do not provide the necessary love and attention to their unwanted children.

Why is it that many Republicans place so little value on women and men and even children who are living now, and place greater importance on yet to be born generations? It is difficult to fathom. The impact of this public policy is huge. It reduces our collective chances of improving the quality of life for those among us who are currently living.

What is essential to keep in mind is that when we diminish the quality of life for those among us currently on Earth, we sacrifice opportunities for each current generation to improve life for itself, and equally important, for those who will follow. By addressing current needs on earth, we allow for subsequent generations to live more complete lives because the generations before them will have enjoyed greater human and economic rights.

Building from one generation to the next is not that difficult a concept, but regrettably, most Republicans have a difficult time grasping it. We see the results of their myopic view. Republicans give us the likes Donald Trump for a president and manipulate our political system so that even when Democrats such as Barack Obama or Joe Biden to win elections, it is difficult for them to govern effectively.

Democracy is at risk. A big step towards saving it is for Republicans to refocus their main concern to the well-being of those currently alive. This will help both the present and the future. It may be in the category of wishful thinking, but at this point, wishing is our best hope.

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