We may wish that he would long be gone, but he’s hard to erase. The damage he has done to our national psyche is enormous. We elected a common real estate broker with a limited belief in democracy to be the leader of our land, and nothing will ever be the same again. He has impacted our institutions of governance in a way that should never be forgotten. If we are lucky, or at least peripherally vigilant, we won’t make the mistake of electing such a personage to be our President ever again.

Already, I digress.

He is not in this story at all, except for the long shadow that he has been able to cast over our previous concept of democracy, a notion that goes back to the Colonies in New England in the early 1600’s. We’ve had centuries of practice in democracy. We honed to, discussed it, fought over it, legislated it; the overwhelming majority of us based our lives on its tenets. We thought we were good. We came to love the hypothesis that we were all created equal, and we utterly believed that our vote, once we were all awarded it, counted. We learned that nobody was above the law.

The property-owning huckster begged to differ.

God knows what image of himself he fell in love with in front of his mirrorball; however he did it, he fell for a self-inflated ego the likes of which has rarely been seen across the land. He thought omnipotence, he thought all-powerful, he thought Ayatollah; he cosied up to Kim Jong Un. Things got out of hand. He ended up questioning the operation of democracy in multiple states, and pushed in Georgia for imaginary votes to materialize.

This man has, as far as I can tell, never encountered humility.

Confucious once said Humility is the solid foundation of all virtues. Without a solid foundation in life, where are you? Well, possibly in a Barbiland place called MAR-A-LAGO, about as far away from reality as you can get and still be in the United States.

Do we care?

Yes, and no. We don’t want him back in the White House, so we have to constantly keep an eye out and an ear cocked for erratic and half-baked truths that might again threaten our foundations of self-government. Let him busy himself on his apparently multitudinous golf courses; we don’t really have to give a second thought to his golf escapades unless, of course, he’s hiding highly sensitive and classified documents on nuclear programs in his golf course bathrooms. Then, we might need to be concerned.

We elected Biden. We were ready to move on, but our loser-in-chief resident of Inflated Ego Tower in New York, doesn’t want to let us go. He keeps dragging us, desperately, back, repeating his false claims and hurt feelings ad nauseum. His desire for headlines swamps us, even now, daily. Many of those headlines date back to his time in office, and many involve prosecutions and lawsuits that appear to be reproducing like rabbits. A date in 2024 has been set for a trial involving the man’s fetish for hoarding official government documents at his residences; the Justice Department has brought 37 counts against him for his handling of classified documents after leaving the White House. It doesn’t end there. New York is charging him with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. A jury found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation of writer E. Jean Carroll and awarded her $5 million. This is only a partial list of accusations. Bubbling just under the surface is Georgia’s 2020 election meddling case; the Grand Jury has already submitted their report there.

Perhaps most serious of all is the January 6 insurrection case in Washington. Did the con man actually direct an assault on our Capitol? This past week, he received a letter of concern from Justice Department prosecutor, Jack Smith, informing him that he is a target in Smith’s investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The potential charges against our former loony-in-chief are obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the government, incitement of an insurrection and conspiracy to violate civil rights.

None of it looks good.

Where is Trump? Out on the campaign trail for 2024, where else, disinforming and continuing with his usual bragger and swagger, and now being threatening too. To understand that more, just take a gander at Robert Reich’s instinctive column today, Trump is gearing up for his ‘final battle’. So should we:

A Trump indictment for attempting the overthrow of the constitutional order and the verdict of the electorate will guarantee that 2024 will be more of a referendum on Trump than a referendum on Biden, as was the 2020 election.

It will make it harder for Republican candidates across the nation to focus on their fake nemeses – “woke” teachers and corporations, trans youth, LGBTQ+ people, immigrants and “socialism” – and force them instead to defend Trump’s side in the final battle.

Trump and the Republicans will lose this battle. Even if they win Republican primaries, they will lose the general election.

Let’s just hope. As Reich reminds us:

We want to live in a nation where no one is above the law. We want to be able to sleep at night without worrying that a president might unleash armed lackeys to drag us out of our homes because he considers us to be his enemy.

Here I was thinking that I was going to write a piece on the nascent concept of Bidenomics, much in the news these past few weeks.

What do you know? The elephant in the room trumpeted (ah ha, that’s what elephants do!), growled, squeaked, and snorted. The churning of the legal battles of the man who held the most prestigious office in the land not even 4 years ago, got in the way. The most damning legal struggles of our President from 2017 to 2021 seem to be getting underway at a moment when Biden’s economic initiatives are clicking into place.

As someone once said. That’s politics.

There was never going to be a Trump in this headline. There never should be. There never should have been.

But there you go.

Life is full of surprises. It will continue to stymie us until we can never be stymied again, or until justice is served.

Fingers crossed.

The post The Elephant in the Room (or There Is No Trump in this headline) appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The title of this article is a recent quote from Steven Crowder, an immensely popular conservative YouTuber with almost six million subscribers. “He’s not wrong about everything,” Crowder quipped about Kanye West’s recent and obviously anti-Semitic remarks. “Is there a conversation to be had about secular humanists with Jewish last names exploiting people in Hollywood?”

Crowder went on to articulate that these “secular humanists with Jewish last names” aren’t evil “because they’re Jewish”. His distinction serves two purposes here. First, it allows a modicum of plausible deniability for anti-Semites and people foolish enough to believe “I hate Jews, but not because they are Jewish” is a legitimate opinion. Second, it allows the divorcing of Jews with non-reactionary views from the Jewish populace as a whole. It separates Jews that Crowder finds worthy–religious conservatives like Ben Shapiro, the late Sheldon Adelson, the Israeli far-right–with those he finds unworthy. The fact that Crowder was referring to wealthy Hollywood executives is irrelevant here, as he does not make a distinction between powerful Jews who aren’t religious and Jews who hold left-wing views. For Crowder, there is no water between Noam Chomsky and Harvey Weinstein. They’re both part of the same cabal.

The comment section of Crowder’s video rips the mask off this farce. It’s full of open anti-Semites. So too with “journalist” Tim Pool’s Kanye West interview, in which Pool tried to make a distinction between “the corporate press” treating Kanye unfairly vs. Jews as a monolithic bloc doing so. A large chunk of these comments consisted of Pool’s fans criticizing him for not identifying the “real problem”, i.e., Jews.

Crowder is noteworthy here because he straddles the gap between American conservatism–people like Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson–and overt fascists like Milo Yiannopolis and Nick Fuentes. That gap shrinks by the day. We may soon see mainstream Republicans running on a rhetorical platform similar to Crowder’s. Donald Trump’s admonishment of American Jews for “not caring about Israel” is probably a portent of an ever-more noxious Republican Party, one an inch from Nazi talking points on Jewish issues. The predominance of conservative discourse on “cultural Marxism” (The Nazis said “cultural Bolshevism”) means we’re already pretty close.

Where does this thinly-veiled prejudice come from? Consider Slavoj Zizek’s commentary on anti-Semitism in The Sublime Object of Ideology. In response to the overt anti-Semitism of Nazis and their ilk, Zizek writes, many will say that

‘The Nazis are condemning the Jews too hastily, without proper argument, so let us take a cool, sober look and see if they are really guilty or not; let us see if there is some truth in the accusations against them.’ Is it really necessary to add that such an approach would merely confirm our so-called ‘unconscious prejudices’ with additional rationalizations? The proper answer to anti-Semitism is therefore not ‘Jews are really not like that’ but ‘the anti-Semitic idea of Jew has nothing to do with Jews; the ideological figure of a Jew is a way to stitch up the inconsistency of our own ideological system.’

Zizek is a difficult and provocative thinker, but my interpretation of this passage is that people like Crowder will find “the Jew” a convenient ideological fantasy to justify already-held beliefs. For Crowder, whose politics revolve around disgust at those he finds displeasing–black people and LGBT people in particular–”The Jew” serves as the source of the revulsion. This is to say, Crowder and company cannot admit that queer people have a legitimate right to their gender and sexual expression, or that black people have legitimate grievances with contemporary America. There must therefore be a nefarious source spreading these ideas among the populace. The source of the “repulsive ideology” is, conveniently, “secular humanists with Jewish last names”. By situating Jews as the master manipulators, Crowder legitimizes the prejudices he previously held and espoused.

We must remember that conservatives have set the bar impossibly high for what constitutes prejudice. Donald Trump, for instance, in justifying his dinner with Kanye West, denied Kanye’s anti-Semitism by saying that Kanye did not, in that particular dinner, say anything anti-Semitic. Similarly, Steven Crowder denied Kanye’s anti-Semitism by saying that Kanye was “using a Howitzer”, but “doesn’t hate Jews.” For the modern conservative, to be prejudiced is to hold hatred for a group in one’s heart of hearts. As humanity has not yet developed telepathy, this is a standard that cannot be met. The potentially virtuous inner life of a Nazi does not prevent him from doing the things that Nazis do.

History does not look kindly on these conservative fence-sitters, those who refuse to oppose fascism. Paul Von Hindenburg is not viewed as an anti-fascist but rather as the man who invited the Nazis into government. Erwin Romell, who was perhaps not a Nazi in his political inner life, still served as the general of a fascist army. Aside from Claus Von Stauffenberg, the conservatives and monarchists who fought alongside the Nazis are remembered correctly as Nazis. Ditto with Steven Crowder.

To quote the novelist A.R. Moxon: “Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed.

That word is ‘Nazi.’ Nobody cares about their motives anymore.”

The post “Secular Humanists with Jewish Last Names” appeared first on Occasional Planet.

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.

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.

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.

We are now at the end of Women’s History Month after recognizing Black History Month in February. The United States Senate, appropriately, is now on the precipice of confirming the first Black woman to serve as an associate justice on the Supreme Court of the United States. When Senator Booker told Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson that he couldn’t help but look at her and see his own mother, I knew exactly what he meant. I saw my own mother, a Black woman, and I thought about her and what it might’ve meant to her as a little girl to have seen this moment.

Booker said “I’m not gonna let my joy be stolen, because I know – you and I – we appreciate something that we get that a lot of my colleagues don’t. I know Tim Scott does…And I want to tell you, when I look at you, this is why I get emotional. I’m sorry, you’re a person that is so much more than your race and gender. You’re a Christian, you’re a mom, you’re an intellect, you love books. But for me, I’m sorry, it’s hard for me not to look at you and not see my mom, not to see my cousins, one of them who had to come here and sit behind you. She had to have your back. I see my ancestors and yours. Nobody’s going to steal the joy of that woman in the street, or the calls that I’m getting, or the texts. Nobody’s going to steal that joy. You have earned this spot. You are worthy. You are a great American.”

Senator Booker cried, Judge Brown Jackson cried, I cried, and I imagine millions of Black people in America cried as well. This should be a moment of national solidarity and great celebration, as a Black twitter user said “If Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson gets confirmed she’ll be the first Black Supreme Court justice since Thurgood Marshall to serve. And before you try to correct me with your thinky thoughts, I know what I tweeted. Thanks for understanding in advance.”

So why doesn’t any of this feel celebratory? Why does it feel like some of my joy has been stolen?

Black History month is something like a dark joke (no pun intended) among many Black Americans. We’d gladly tell you that February is an opportunity for White people to learn about what we already know (and then promptly forget in time for next February). It’s become as commercialized and hollowed out as every other holiday in America and so we’ve even developed our own traditions, like the collective gritting of teeth when coworkers inevitably say something along the lines of “at least you get a whole month!” and of course the corporate apology for the ill-thought racist product. The curriculum offered to children in school (more on that later) is so reductive that it usually consists of a listing of inventors, a poem from Langston Hughes, watching the “I Have a Dream Speech”, and some discussion of the civil war but generally not it’s cause (slavery). There’s a Frederick Douglass speech titled “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” where he calls out the contradictions of a freedom centered holiday in a nation which at the time had over 3 million enslaved people. I’m reminded of that every year in February, and I’m reminded of it now with the President’s well-meaning gesture of nominating Judge Brown Jackson by the end of February.

I can’t say I’m as familiar with the dynamics surrounding Women’s History month, but I’m sure similar ironies and contradictions present themselves. What do I mean by contradictions? Consider the last several years which nonetheless has very public acknowledgements of Black History.

In 2005, many residents of almost entirely black neighborhoods in New Orleans were left scrambling after the worst Hurricane the region had seen in living memory. Many died without assistance during the flooding, and many of those who didn’t were met with silence from the federal government.

In 2012, Trayvon Martin was murdered in Florida and Barack Obama was pilloried for displaying a semblance of sympathy for an unarmed teenager who was killed by a racist.

In 2014, Ferguson Missouri was consumed by protests and police aggression after the shooting death of Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer. A no-fly zone was instituted by the governor, to keep the cameras from showing the despair of the people on the ground. Eric Garner, another Black man, was strangled to death by police in New York City for allegedly selling individual cigarettes. Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old, was shot for holding a plastic toy rifle. Meanwhile in Nevada, a white rancher named Bundy claimed to “know a lot about the negroes” including how “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”  All while pointing dozens of actual loaded rifles at federal law enforcement.

In 2015, a white supremacist domestic terrorist killed 9 Black parishioners in South Carolina. He did it to start a “race war”. When he was captured, the police delivered him to burger king for a hot meal before delivering him to prison. A 5-year-old survived by laying in the blood on the floor pretending to be dead.

In 2016, the man who had popularized the racist myth that the first Black President was illegitimate because he wasn’t an American citizen was elected President himself and his party won a majority of the popular vote in Congress the same year, many of them not condemning the myth and others having trafficked in it themselves with no consequence from the voting public.

Then there’s everything that’s happened since. These past two years especially have made the contradictions clearer than they’ve ever been, beginning with the international outpouring of righteous indignation at the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. But as time went on, the government’s resolve weakened and the patience of the white public which has since soured on the idea that Black Lives Matter with the media glad to write stories making imaginary links between a nonexistent defunding of police and crime. Now just 2 years shy of the anniversary of the murder and the outrage, we’re confronted nationally with a wave of white parents successfully lobbying government at all levels to erase Black people from history. To quote Senator Booker, God Bless America.

So, we arrive in February once again, the Judge is nominated, the kabuki begins and the insincere niceties are written everywhere that they can be read. Then we entered March, and that was forgotten. If you watched the confirmation, you know what I’m talking about. There’s only so many times you can see someone accused of being soft on child pornography and pedophiles. There’s only so many times you can see someone’s intelligence and credentials questioned. There’s only so many times you can watch someone be talked over, shouted down, disrespected, and condescended to. There is only so much one can withstand and still maintain their joy.

Judge Brown Jackson will become Justice Brown Jackson, and the swelling pride I feel because of her success is shared by many other Black Americans. But the joy that Sen. Booker feels I reckon still escapes most of us, it certainly has escaped me. Sen. Booker is known for being this generation’s happy warrior, it is in his nature to see our better angels first. There is a liberal tendency to cope with these moments by imagining the “end of history” and the moral arc of the universe bending towards justice or the increasing diversity or the passion of the next generation. It should be said this is a step forward and it speaks of the progress that might be possible, though not inevitable.

As Booker and Brown-Jackson and myself and the 40 million Black people living in America must know, this nomination changes the racial composition of the Supreme Court, but it does not change the soul of America.

The post Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Confirmation Should’ve Been a Celebration 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.

Oh boy, were we ready for a change.

Biden and Harris came in with stratospherically high expectations. Lady Gaga sang the national anthem at the inauguration, and a new day was about to begin. Our newly elected White House Democrats were going to replace night for day, chaos for reason, and restructure dystopia with a clear path leading us forward toward order. And they were going to do all of that within their first year in office, if possible (that’s what we dreamed, hoped, thought – okay, what I dreamed, hoped, imagined!) Oh, foolish me. Oh, foolish us. After DT, were we ever ready for change! We were on pins and needles, waiting for our new day to begin. Kamala was dispatched to the Mexican border, and Joe would take care of the rest.

Of course, we were still in the middle of a pandemic, and caught up in pandemic-related worldwide distribution issues that ultimately contributed to an inflation rate not seen in 40 years. Higher gas prices do not happy campers make! Biden didn’t create the pandemic or inflation. Biden didn’t set up Chinese dominance of production and its tumbling dice of ocean misuse to get us our iPhones when we want them. For that, we have to go back through years of policy making and bipartisan culpability in Washington. And yes, we might even have to reassess our love affair with Apple. Perish the thought! But yeah, we just might. Suffice it to say, there is enough inflation blame to go a long way round – and a long way back. Biden just happens to be the President in place right now, so he’s our fall guy.

Biden didn’t create gun violence either. Gun violence came with the job. Gun violence comes with the country that we are. We are consistently deaf to our nation-defining lessons on death by guns and automatic weapons. We are unwilling to leave the curse of our bloody need to kill one another behind us for once and for all. We are, seemingly, just incapable of doing that. We prefer the guns for everybody Don’t Worry Be Happy approach. As Bobby McFerrin once sang:

“In every life we have some trouble
But when you worry you make it double
Don’t worry, be happy.”

And incapable of bringing about real change, we need someone to blame for our morass. That’s why we elect a new President every four years, right?

This time round, we elected Joe Biden.

And surprise, surprise, in an ABC News-Ipsos poll released in December, even though a majority of Americans (53%) still approve of Biden (not a big majority by any means), Biden’s favorability has slipped far from the 72% support that he had just in March. Scapegoat, maybe? And guess what, in recent polls, gun violence, inflation and Covid-response are the major barometers in Biden’s declining poll numbers. Gun violence and inflation, as already mentioned, are beyond any President’s control.

Covid came out of the clear blue sky. Biden’s Covid response is like night and day compared to Trump’s. But a virus is a virus, not controlled by any president anywhere in the world. The delta variant morphed to an omicron variant whether we like it or not. And Biden, despite his power, has no say in that. But yeah, if we’re going to blame someone for the fast-increasing number of Covid infections across the country, let’s blame the guy in office right now. That would be Biden.

Can we fall back on Harris? Not really.

Harris, not often seen or reported on in our media, has percentages that line up pretty much 53% for, and 40% against, not dissimilar to Biden’s. She is not resonating broadly. She faux-pas’s big time recently by saying the delta and omicron variants had caught the current administration off-guard. Fauci, never failing, came to the rescue. Her comments were taken ‘out of context,’  he reassured us.

And so and just because, I thought we might look at how the previous power brokers in the kingdom are doing. They may yet come back to haunt us. A note to Microsoft’s Word’s spellcheck programming people; even now, Word doesn’t recognize Melania as a legitimate name. Come on Microsoft – you’re the most valuable internet-focused company on the planet, get it together and catch up! Melania was here and gone!

Is Melania’s step-daughter, Ivanka, doing so much better than the current occupants of the White House?

I am sad to report that no, she is not.

I found on YouGovAmerica that Ivanka is not doing well at all. The site tells us that Ivanka’s popularity is now at an all-time low of 34%. Welcome to the club, Ivanka! We’re here for you.

How about Melania herself?

It turns out that there is enough disconnect to go round. Melania – unrecognized by Microsoft – left office with the worst final popularity rating for a First Lady ever. But empathy begins from those abandoned en masse by society, so all is not lost. However, after she left the White House, nobody much seemed to care about how our former First Lady was doing. There are no recent poll statistics that I have been able to find on Melania at all.

Melania news was sparse until FoxBusiness recently reported that you can now own a digital watercolor painting of our former First Lady’s eyes in exchange for 1 Solana, a cryptocurrency token. This is not some nutcase hacker trying to make a buck off of Melania. I am not making this up. This is Melania herself selling an NFT. The SOL token involved is, as of this writing, valued at somewhere around $175. Well, you sell a thousand, that’s small change. You sell 50 thousand, you’re looking at almost 9 million dollars! Melania is cashing in. And apparently she is planning to dedicate more of her energy to her new business going forward. According to AlJazeera … Melania Trump will release NFTs “in regular intervals” on her website … with a portion of the proceeds going to foster children. It’s unclear what percentage of the proceeds will be donated, or whether the donations will be given to specific foster child-related charities.

Melania has moved on.

So, there you go!

Oops, not so fast.

Our 45th President, DT, the man himself, seems to think that Melania still has pending, how to put it, responsibilities, duties, (advantages for DT himself?) going forward. He believes that she, despite her current NFT endeavors (she just posted a new one today and is now called crypto queen by London’s Guardian) – , can win the rest of America over for another flyby at the presidency. Well, dreams have to start somewhere.

How is DT, the man himself, doing in the polls these days? As of Dec 15th, FiveThirtyEight tells us that, unfortunately for him and fortunately for us, not so great either. DT had a 52% disapproval rating as of mid-December. The scales seem to have tipped to his detriment. The man lives, still fuming like a discarded cigarette butt, in a luxurious club-like situation in Palm Beach, Florida. He is slow-burning his final years forward, in exile, like some once-upon-a-time Russian oligarch in erstwhile Paris.

So, who wants to be America most? Who loves us the most right now?

Honestly, I don’t know.

Somewhat facetiously, I thought of nominating Lana Del Rey.

Lana Del Rey is a self-made enthusiast for American symbolism and a lover of America’s past. Del Rey, sometimes, knows us better than we know ourselves. She knows our ins and outs, our cultural highs and lows, perhaps more than anybody. She knows our doubts, our inadequacies, our blemishes and our flaws. She knows out inherent attractions, and she understands why we are the country that we are.

Lana knows us like the back of our hand.

Alas, Lana Del Rey is not our answer. She is a singer who has no interest in politics.

So, hurtling on toward November 5, 2024, we are left with the same coterie of names as before, the Kennedys, the Bushes, the Obamas, the Reagans, the Clintons, the Trumps, and now the Bidens.

The Obamas were the breakthrough family on that list. But they have come and gone, just like Melania. The list is getting thinner by the day. There are no new Regans going forward, no new Bushes (that I know of), no Clintons, no new Kennedys and no new Obamas.

But are there still future Trumps out there, lesser or greater Trumps, in our future?

Hell yeah, there are many new future Trumps – sharing his surname or not – just waiting in line, ready to sabotage our democracy all over again. The grand lesson of DT for his acolytes worldwide is that you can lie, bluff, confuse and bluster … and you can get away with it. You can build a fake persona, just like you can build fake news. QED.

Lesson learned.

Get yourself a bullhorn, align yourself with our most base instincts that negate difference, diversity, multiculturalism, human decency and democracy. And then start to prattle, jabber and vent – the more outrageous and farfetched your positions the better.

Then – and just then – some segments of America may start to believe that you have legitimacy. And just then, some segments of America may begin to believe that you love them most.

Oops! Sorry.

That you love America most.

The post Who loves America most? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Being a Republican in Congress is a lot easier than being a Democrat. That’s because there are very few things that Republicans have or want to do. Most Democrats have full plates in front of them as they want to reform our society so that government provides a strong and secure safety net for all of us, particularly those most at risk. If we reach a point of gridlock, of stalemate, it is the right that wins, because if nothing happens, that is exactly what they want.

In the wake of the January 6, 2021 insurrection and other rebellious acts from the right, there is increasing talk of a new American civil war. What shape it might take is open to all kinds of interpretation. It certainly would not be like America’s first civil war, or even a feared possible upcoming war between Russia and Ukraine.

That does not mean there would not be violence. The January 6 insurrection resulted in the deaths of five individuals and the injuring of hundreds. The Right certainly does not hesitate to use threats of violence against those with whom they merely disagree.

For example, Fox News anchor Jesse Watters recently told a group of conservatives to “ambush” Dr. Anthony Fauci with questions and “go in for kill shot.” Fox News has not reprimanded Watters; in fact, they have not said a word about his using their platform to threaten to kill someone. Fox did the same things with correspondent Lara Logan who compared Fauci to the Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele (also included in the clip below).

As we approach the end of 2021, the Washington Post reports “Inside the nonstop pressure campaign by Trump allies to get election officials to revisit the 2020 vote.” The Big Lie continues more than thirteen months after the 2020 safe, secure and democratic elections.

The fallout has spread from the six states where Trump sought to overturn the outcome in 2020 to deep-red places such as Idaho, where officials recently hand-recounted ballots in three counties to refute claims of vote-flipping, and Oklahoma, where state officials commissioned an investigation to counter allegations that voting machines were hacked.

The important point in the article is that the Trumpsters are continuing their efforts to intimidate Republican-controlled state legislatures to undo the past and change the future so that free and fair elections become something of the past.

A “civil war” could include numerous other acts of aggression by the right including the intimidation of teachers, vigilante forces, Congressional action to not raise the debt limit and not fund necessary programs that are the framework of our social and economic safety net.

COVID has already played a key role in dividing the nation and threatens to do so for some time to come. Samuel Goldman in The Week suggests:

I’m not the first to compare the way of thinking about the pandemic still dominant in official statements to the military disasters of the last two decades. My colleague Noah Millman and the journalist Daniel McCarthy have both noted parallels between the interminable conflicts that followed 9/11 and the “war” on COVID. “Like the old Afghan government,” Millman wrote, “those in charge of public health have little practical ability to shape events. But they speak as if they are sovereign and in control.”

It is hard to imagine what aggressive actions those on the Left may take. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, extremists far to the left of the Democratic Party engaged in bombing attacks on both public and private buildings. But there was very little coordinated about that and as it became apparent that the bombings were counter-productive, the bombings essentially ended.

Regrettably, there is very little that the Right needs to do now to win a “civil war.” The current stalemate allows those on the Right to generally get their way.

Progressive legislation will not pass. The right to safe and legal abortions will be ended in most states when Roe v. Wade is overturned, elections will be rigged to favor far-right Republicans, COVID and other infectious diseases will continue to run rampant, gun-control measures will not be passed, climate change legislation will stall and those who do not agree with those on the Right will live in fear of violence.

The only real way that progressives and others can prevent an escalated “civil war” is by winning big in elections and having protections against Republican electoral manipulation. This means that the U.S. Senate is going to have to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act in order to maximize the chances of free and fair elections. Additionally, Democrats are going to have to figure out a way to elevate the popularity of Joe Biden and improve their chances of winning 2022 Congressional races. Perhaps a backlash to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade would help, but that seems unlikely.

The stakes are truly high for progressives; we need to do all that we legally and non-violently can do.

The post Why A “Civil War” Would Be So Hard for Progressives to “Win” 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.