Month: July 2022

“Season finale” Jan. 6 hearing seen by millions

The Hollywood Reporter has numbers:

According to Nielsen, 17.67 million people watched the primetime hearing across 10 broadcast and cable outlets. That’s down from the 20 million who watched the first televised hearing (across 11 channels) on June 9, but significantly more people than watched any of the six daytime hearings in between the two primetime sessions.

Fox News ran its regular nightime programming and shunted the hearing to its “ lesser-watched channel Fox Business.”

The hearings are taking a toll on Donald Trump’s support even if Ross Douthat thinks “the stench of failure … from his well-worn grievances, his whine of disappointment and complaint” are more to blame. Even if Maryland’s Republican Gov. Larry Hogan believes most Republicans “are not watching and not paying attention, and it’s not going to impact them.”

Polls show no major shifts among voters in the share of Republicans who view the Jan. 6 riot as protected speech, although independents have moved nine points since December in seeing of the Jan. 6 riot as an insurrection.

Nonetheless, Republicans are beginning to view Trump less favorably as a 2024 candidate capable of winning. Perhaps it is that stench of failure (Washington Post):

Two Florida lobbyists who have fundraised for DeSantis, a potential contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, said the hearings could intensify “Trump fatigue,” as one put it. “I think a lot of people want normalcy. Policies without the craziness.” The other said the committee lacks credibility among Republicans but could still create discomfort about “Trump’s drama.”

Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former Pence aide and White House communications director who has spoken out against Trump, said attitudes are more malleable “for those who are on the margins and are not ultra MAGA.”

“I think it’s weakened him in a massive way,” she said. “It reminds people of the drama and the four years of having to explain why they supported him.”

A looming GOP primary, Griffin said, means “it’s not a binary moment. It’s not him versus Biden. Do they really want to go back through that whole fiasco? They’re also reminded of the noise and the drama and the division. We can support someone else. There are other good candidates.”

Even if Trump fades, Trumpism is still going strong.

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Democracy to die by a thousand shortcuts

Of course, the case comes from North Carolina. Since regaining control of the state legislature with the 2010 election, Republicans have repeatedly probed for soft spots where democracy might prove vulnerable to attack. The phrase “with almost surgical precision” arose from a case here.

Now, a crank legal theory of “recent vintage” so half-Baked Alaska that only QAnon and supposed originalists on the U.S. Supreme Court could buy it is due for testing in Moore v. Harper, a case from North Carolina, writes Adam Sewer.

Under the “independent-state-legislature theory,” North Carolina Republicans argue that in our famed system of checks and balances, the Constitution empowers only state legislatures to set voting rules, unchecked by even the state’s supreme court (The Atlantic):

The justification for this theory is that the U.S. Constitution’s text about state legislatures setting election rules refers not simply to passing laws or adopting state-constitutional provisions regarding voting, but to an authority to decide such matters unilaterally. State legislatures themselves pass laws and participate in the process of adopting constitutional amendments; it makes no sense to argue, as the independent-state-legislature theory does, that such bodies are not bound by rules they themselves have set. Nevertheless, this idea is the kind of obtuse, context-free pedantry that malicious lawyers adore. As the election-law expert Rick Hasen writes, in its most extreme interpretation, this theory would mean that a state legislature could simply overturn federal election results it did not like based on its perception, no matter how unfounded, that the rules were violated. Hypothetically, the Supreme Court could check such abuse of power; its capture by the Republican Party means that, in practice, it might not.

That the country has never in its history operated like this is no barrier to the Roberts court’s entertaining the theory now. But the Republican Party wears democracy like decorative chiffon these days. Anywhere popular sovereignty might be, um, adjusted to ensure Republicans never lose is fair game.

The independent-state-legislature theory, as Republicans imagine it, would allow a state legislature “to throw out its state’s presidential-election results” should a GOP presidential candidate inconveniently earn fewer votes than the Democrat. Donald Trump attempted and failed at that for months following his 2020 loss to Joe Biden. Should the Supremes buy into the theory, Republican-controlled legislatures could do it without needing arm-twisting from a dime-store mafioso.

The implications of Moore v. Harper succeeding are staggering, Serwer explains:

The sheer number of catch-22s involved here can be confusing. Federal courts cannot review partisan gerrymandering, so the people should turn to state courts, which also can’t. If you want to protect voting rights, you must do it by federal legislation, except the Supreme Court will decide that that legislation is unconstitutional, because it violates imaginary principles unmentioned in the Constitution. Political questions must be decided by the people, except if those in power conclude that they don’t like how the people might decide them.

So this is how democracy dies, to paraphrase a legislator from a galaxy far, far away. By a thousand shortcuts.

This can all be reconciled given the Republican Party’s de facto position that elections are by definition illegitimate if the GOP does not win them, and that the Democratic Party’s constituencies are less American and therefore their votes should count for less. Counter-majoritarian mechanisms such as the Senate and the Electoral College have already allowed the GOP to win presidential elections and gain control of the Supreme Court without a majority of voters. The adoption of the independent-state-legislature theory would strengthen the party’s ambition to lock itself in power indefinitely regardless of how the electorate votes.

Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban smile quietly to themselves.

Perhaps a national organization of non-white, non-straight, non-Christian former Republicans could make enough noise about such treachery to give domestic autocrats pause for reflection. But even as Donald Trump’s slowly star dims, the arc of the Trumpist universe does not bend toward self-examination. It bends toward Ron DeSantis.

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Maybe, maybe not

One of the constant discussions about the future of our democracy concerns the fact that Latinos are drifting to the right and voting Republican despite the party’s racism and xenophobia. Ron Brownstein took a deep dive into the subject:

Once the backbone of the Democratic base, working-class white voters have been migrating toward the Republican Party since the 1960s, largely out of alienation from the Democrats’ liberal stands on cultural and racial issues. Half a century later, those working-class white voters—usually defined as having less than a four-year college education—have become the indisputable foundation of the Republican coalition, especially in the era of Donald Trump.

Now a chorus of centrist and right-leaning political analysts are claiming that the same shift has begun among working-class nonwhite voters, especially Latinos.

“We’re seeing a political realignment in real time,” Axios insisted in a recent analysis. “Democrats are becoming the party of upscale voters concerned more about issues like gun control and abortion rights. Republicans are quietly building a multiracial coalition of working-class voters, with inflation as an accelerant.”

If correct, these claims would offset, or even eliminate, the advantage Democrats expect from the demographic change that has steadily increased the share of the vote cast by people of color by about two percentage points every four years. Growth among working-class Latino voters, in particular, would offer the Republicans an escape from the demographic cul-de-sac in which their core constituencies of non-college-educated and white Christian voters have each fallen to only about two-fifths of the total population.

There’s no disagreement that Trump, despite all the controversies surrounding his hard-line immigration policies and his often harsh rhetoric about immigrants, ran better among Latinos in 2020 than he did in 2016. And there’s no dispute that President Joe Biden’s approval rating among Latinos has sagged, just as it has in most polls among other groups.

But whether these results amount to a lasting realignment among working-class Latino voters is much more disputed—as is the assertion that rejection of liberal cultural values is the principal cause of the recent Democratic difficulties with them. “I would say there’s a difference between a dominant narrative and dominant data,” Fernand Amandi, a Democratic pollster who specializes in Latino voters, told me.

The best evidence in polling and election results suggests that claims of a fundamental shift among non-college-educated Latino voters (who comprise about 85 percent of all U.S. Latinos) is, at best, wildly premature. But that doesn’t mean that the ground isn’t shaking in the Latino community.

“The only honest answer is that nobody actually knows, and it’s maddening, the extent to which we are not acknowledging the uncertainty here,” Carlos Odio, the senior vice president of Equis Research, a Democratic firm that focuses on Latino voters, told me. He believes that those who claim Democrats face “an irreversible death spiral” with Latinos are “exaggerating this moment.” But even so, “the degree of uncertainty and variability right now should be nerve-racking for Democrats,” he said.

The major data sources about the election results differ on exactly how much stronger Trump performed last election, but broadly they suggest that Biden won Latino voters in 2020 by roughly 30 percentage points, after Hillary Clinton had carried them in 2016 by about 40 percentage points.

The shift was most visible in South Florida (with its large population of Cuban Americans and immigrants from Central and South America) and South Texas (with a large culturally conservative population of rural and small-town Mexican Americans). But gains for Trump were evident in every key state. Demographically, he found support across a wide range of groups as well, but the most important change may have been that, in 2020, a considerably higher share of Latinos who identify as conservative voted Republican than in 2016 or 2012, according to the exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations. Taken together, all of these factors pushed Trump’s Latino support to about 35 percent—well above his 2016 showing but in range of what Republicans have carried in many other presidential races since 1980.

In other words what really happened was that Latinos shifted to Democrats in recent years but shifted back in 2020.

Meanwhile, Latinos are down on Biden and Democrats. Like everybody else:

Biden’s standing among Latinos has fallen sharply; multiple recent polls place his approval rating among them at less than 50 percent and sometimes at as little as 40 percent. Biden’s fall has exerted a downward pull on Latino support for other Democrats, with multiple surveys showing the party holding a much narrower advantage among them than usual in the so-called generic ballot for the House of Representatives.

These two dynamics are propelling claims that Latinos are undergoing a structural realignment, in which more of them are recoiling from “woke” cultural liberalism and concluding that the GOP better reflects their values.

“While there certainly was a white vs. black dimension to the working class realignment of the 1960s, today it’s mostly just white progressives against everyone else,” Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster, insisted in a recent tweet. “Hispanic voters will find a religious connection with many, many white Republicans, and that religious connection can prove far more culturally and politically consequential than any effort to create a politics based on ethnic or racial identity,” David French, a conservative writer critical of Trump (and an Atlantic contributor), recently declared. Almost daily, a different New York Times writer offers some version of the claim that, as David Leonhardt wrote last week, “the social liberalism of Democrats—on immigration, marijuana, L.G.B.T. rights, affirmative action, abortion and more—has simultaneously attracted progressive college graduates and repelled more culturally conservative working-class voters.”

In making these claims, the realignment camp is using something of a double standard. It argues that Republicans have become a multiracial working-class coalition even though the major data sources—including the exit polls; the analysis done by Catalist, a Democratic targeting firm; and the Pew Research Center’s “Validated Voters” study—all show that Trump carried only about one-fourth of nonwhite voters without a college degree in 2020. Each of those sources showed that Biden actually carried a notably higher share of white voters without a college degree (about one-third or more). Yet that performance purportedly leaves Democrats as a party solely of “upscale voters,” while the weaker showing among nonwhite non-college-educated voters earns Republicans credit as a “multiracial coalition of working-class voters.”

But the question is still why Trump did better than Romney:

In a recent article, the longtime Democratic demographic and electoral analyst Ruy Teixeira, a leading proponent of the realignment theory, cited polling from Ruffini’s firm to bolster his argument that “Democrats’ emphasis on social and democracy issues, while catnip to some socially liberal, educated voters, leaves many working class and Hispanic voters cold.” Teixeira pointed to results in Ruffini’s poll that showed Latinos leaning toward Republican positions on specific issues, particularly in their support for increasing funding for police and for requiring transgender kids to play in sports that match their assigned sex at birth. But mostly he highlighted the divergence in the poll between the attitudes of Latinos and self-defined progressives on broad statements of values, such as whether “America is the greatest country in the world,” racism is structurally built into American society, or that hard work guarantees success. In each case, Latinos took positions much less critical of American society.

It’s far from clear that most Democratic officeholders, as opposed to liberal activists and organizers, would really answer those basic values questions very differently than most Latinos did. But even leaving that aside, that list omits many of the most important choices that government officials at all levels actually face on cultural issues. And on those issues, preponderant majorities of Latinos—including those without a college degree—express views that place them in the Democratic mainstream and in direct opposition to the dominant position in the Republican Party.

Take abortion. In recent polling by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute, two-thirds of Latinos said abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances. The survey also found that big majorities of Latinos opposed the recent Supreme Court decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion, measures Republican-controlled states are discussing to prohibit women from traveling across state lines to seek an abortion, and prohibiting women from receiving abortion medication through the mail.

On gun control, the split was similar: A majority of Latinos took positions that align with Democrats and directly collide with the dominant view among Republicans. In 2021 polling by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, about two-thirds of Latinos—including more than three-fifths of those without a college degree—said they believed gun laws should be made more strict and supported a ban on both assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines. About four-fifths of Latinos opposed the proliferating red-state policy of allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons without a permit.

“There is data right now that says Latinos are angry about the overstepping of Republicans” on abortion, Tory Gavito, the president of Way to Win, a group that mobilizes support for causes and candidates that focus on communities of color, told me. Simultaneously, she said, the tragedy in Uvalde, Texas, was “a massive flashpoint for Latino communities across the country” around gun reform.

Huh. Maybe “wokeism” isn’t really the problem? And anyway, they aren’t on the same page as the Republicans on some really important stuff:

Likewise, a huge gulf separates Latino voters from Republicans on the biggest issues surrounding immigration. Polling (like the Ruffini survey cited by Teixeira) has found that many Latinos, like other voters, do not embrace radical calls for an open border or unconstrained illegal immigration. But nearly nine in 10 Latinos in Pew’s poll supported legal status for Dreamers, an idea blocked by the Republican Senate coalition. In PRRI polling, more than two-thirds of Latinos opposed Trump’s efforts to build a border wall and large majorities of Latinos think undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. should be eligible for citizenship, another idea opposed by almost all House and Senate Republicans.

Most broadly, about three-fifths of all Latinos, including roughly that many Latinos without a college education, agreed in the PRRI polling that “the Republican Party has been taken over by racists.” By contrast, only about one-third of Latinos—roughly the GOP’s typical level of support in most presidential elections—agreed with the statement that socialists have taken over the Democratic Party.

Charles Coughlin, a longtime GOP consultant in Arizona, told me he believes conservative inclinations on some cultural and economic issues should allow his party to improve its performance with Latino voters. But he says he remains uncertain that Republicans can exploit that opportunity because of how the party is presenting itself in the Trump era. “You don’t hear Republicans talking about values anymore that bring people together,” he said. “It’s always that government is this existential threat and they are out to get you. I don’t find that to be a narrative that’s popular … with a lot of bread-and-butter Hispanic voters. [Republicans] talk themselves out of the room.”

But according to pollsters and analysts, they don’t like “defund the police” and “Latinx” and they don’t think Democrats are prioritizing economic issues. Apparently those who voted for Trump did so because they thought he delivered a good economy. (Actually it was Obama’s good economy but Trump gets the credit…)

Now, though, in polling by Navigator Research, a consortium of Democratic pollsters, three-fifths of non-college-educated Latino voters said they were uneasy about their current financial situation. “Everybody is looking for all the reasons” for Biden’s decline “with Latinos, and it’s like the suspect is there holding the smoking gun and it’s always the frickin’ economy,” Odio said.

To some Democrats, the economy shifts the arrow of blame. While centrists point fingers at the left for advancing cultural positions and language unpopular with Latinos, liberals say the real culprit is the party’s moderate wing—particularly Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema—who have derailed the economic assistance embodied in Biden’s Build Back Better legislation, which enjoyed strong Latino support in Navigator polling.

Gavito, the Way to Win president, told me that the critics of cultural liberals are aiming at the wrong target. “I wish they would bring some of that ire to Joe Manchin to ask why he kicked out the legs from our stool on a really solid economic argument behind Build Back Better,” she said. Is the real problem, she added, that “Democrats are losing touch with working-class voters because a group of movement leaders responding to the George Floyd uprising made a bold request of our policing system, or is it more likely that the powers that be who can actually vote on big economic packages just aren’t moving?”

The usual anti-woke voices insist that Democrats must jettison their base and stop talking about anything but kitchen table issues but that’s nothing new. Brownstein does see the possibility of Latino voter’s “de-coupling” which means they might vote for Democrats in this midterm even though they don’t like Biden at the moment. Still:

But even with greater than usual “decoupling,” the level of Latino discontent over the economy and Biden’s performance is so great that few would be surprised if many Democratic candidates in November lag their usual support in that community.

Such a result would undoubtedly fuel another round of debate over whether a lasting realignment among Latinos is really under way. And that talk will undoubtedly grow louder if Biden’s Latino support remains depressed moving closer to 2024. Whether the Democrats’ recent struggles among Latinos are structural and mostly values-based, or personal to Biden and mostly economic-based, probably won’t matter as much to the party as whether it can reverse that erosion, if not in November then certainly before voters pick the next president.

If you read the whole article you will see that many of the analysts and pollsters he quotes are on their hobby horses — “it’s the economy stupid” or “everybody hates wokeness” or whatever. Mine is that I think a lot of it is personal to Trump. Working class people of all stripes just really like that jackass, whether it’s because of all his bluster or his bling and I won’t be surprised if that doesn’t carry over to other Republicans. For some reason people are really reluctant to admit that more than anything, it’s Trump’s style that appeals to the people who like him. They may be getting tired of his act — there is a sense of Trump fatigue for sure. But many of the people who voted for him didn’t do it because they care about policy or hate liberals. They affirmatively liked the guy. And I wouldn’t bet on them not voting for him again.

It’s too much

I just can’t …

What a great idea…

These people are determined to have more kids killed:

The Mississippi Board of Education voted today to remove a policy that barred individuals with enhanced concealed carry permits from carrying guns in the state’s elementary and secondary public schools, revising a 1990 policy that previously prohibited anyone other than “duly authorized law enforcement officials” from doing so. The board made the change as part of an ongoing review of its policies to bring them into compliance with state law.

The board said the 1990 policy prohibiting “the possession of pistols, firearms, or weapons in any form by any person other than duly authorized law enforcement officials on school premises or at school functions” is at odds with the state’s 2011 enhanced-carry law.

“We simply complied with the state law that’s been in effect for the last 11 years,” Mississippi Department of Education Office of Safe and Orderly Schools Director Brian McGarity told the Mississippi Free Press today.

Mississippi had a famous school shooting in 1997. I don’t know if there have been any since then. But apparently, the BoE wants to get in on the current action. It’s sick.

This is what he has wrought:

Failed far-right Nevada Republican gubernatorial candidate Joey Gilbert filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn his primary defeat, citing an “analysis” that found his loss to be a “mathematical impossibility” even after a recount he requested confirmed the results.

Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo last month defeated Gilbert, who attended former President Donald Trump’s Jan. 6 rally ahead of the Capitol riot, by double-digits, 38-27. But Gilbert, a voter fraud conspiracy theorist, refused to concede the race.

Gilbert on Friday filed a lawsuit on Friday in Carson City seeking to overturn his loss. The suit claims that Lombardo’s win is a “mathematical impossibility.” Once the results are “statistically corrected,” said a copy of the complaint obtained by The Nevada Independent, will show “with irrefutable geometric finality” that Gilbert won by more than 55,000 votes.

Nevada counties already completed a recount sought by Gilbert, which confirmed that he lost to Lombardo by more than 20,000 votes.

The suit raises questions about Gilbert’s differing vote shares among early, mail-in and Election Day ballots, which the suit argues is a “geometric impossibility” derived through an “illegal formula.”

The lawsuit cites an analysis by an “expert mathematician” to claim that thousands of Gilbert votes were “drawn illegally” into Gov. Steve Sisolak’s pool of voters in the Democratic primary and, once “corrected,” would show that Gilbert defeated Lombardo by more than 50,000 votes.

The “expert mathematician” cited by Gilbert is infamous election conspiracy theorist Edward Solomon, who falsely claimed to have found evidence that the 2020 presidential election was rigged using an algorithm — a claim repeatedly debunked by expert fact-checkers, who noted that Solomon’s claims show a “basic misunderstanding of how vote counts work.”

I don’t know if these people are so dumb that they actually believe this stuff or if, like Trump, they are just sore losers who can’t admit they lost. Whatever it is, it’s indicative of something more disturbing than just some cranks and crackpots running for office which has always happened. These people are modeling themselves after the once and future president and it has great currency on the right, contributing to the notion that elections are rigged and that Republicans can’t lose. It’s bad.

Coming soon to a country near you

This piece called “How Orban Wins”by Princeton’s Kim Lane Scheppele, an expert on Hungary, is a must read if you want to know what the future may very well hold if the Republicans have their way. Trump and some of his minions may be clownish and inefficient, but there are plenty of Republicans (DeSantis for instance) who aren’t:

On 3 April 2022, Viktor Orbán won his fourth straight election with his fourth straight supermajority in parliament that allows him to amend the constitution at will. This essay traces how he managed to do that. Orbán’s skillful use of the war in Ukraine and his major expansion of social benefits right before the election were important in that victory. But even more crucial were the rules of the game that Orbán established after his election victory in 2010, rules that have been constantly modified as the opposition has tried to work around the barriers that those rules erected.  Hungary has already been demoted from democracy to autocracy by all democracy raters. This essay shows precisely why those rankings are right. As long as Orbán retains complete control over the rules that govern elections, he can remain in power indefinitely.

In the run-up to Hungary’s 3 April 2022 parliamentary election, the race looked too close to call. But insiders knew that the structural bias in the electoral system meant that the six-party opposition coalition, United for Hungary, was fighting an uphill battle. The opposition had done everything it could to unpick the lock on power that Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of the Fidesz party had installed with his revision of Hungary’s electoral system ten years earlier. By giving up their individual party ambitions to run a single coalition candidate against Fidesz’s candidate in each district, the opposition maximized its chances of winning.

Days before the election, even the most Fidesz-favorable poll predicted that Orbán would lose his two-thirds grip on the 199-member unicameral parliament even if he managed to scrape out a majority.¹ It takes just a single two-thirds vote of parliament to amend Hungary’s constitution. Thus having a supermajority, as Orbán’s Fidesz has had for all but a short time since coming to power in 2010, means that a party can put itself above the law by changing the constitution at will. So even if the opposition failed to win, taking away Orbán’s two-thirds majority would have been a victory.

In 2022, victory seemed not only possible but probable. In the 2014 and 2018 elections, Fidesz had won parliamentary supermajorities with less than half the vote. Orbán’s victories could be chalked up partly to social-benefits giveaways before each election and partly to campaigns of fear against migrants and cosmopolitans. But much of Orbán’s electoral success results from an election system crafted to ensure that any division in the opposition automatically generates supermajorities for the ruling party. In 2022, with the opposition united across the political spectrum and running neck and neck with Fidesz in the polls for more than a year, it finally seemed that Orbán could actually lose.

Against all predictions, however, Orbán had his biggest election triumph yet. On the eve of the election, polls had put Fidesz at about 5 percentage points ahead of the opposition, within the margin of error. Yet Orbán came out 20 points ahead on election day, winning 83 percent of the single-member districts and 54 percent of the party-list vote. Orbán did not just retain his two-thirds majority in parliament—he now has a comfortable cushion with 68 percent of the seats. With the worst opposition showing since the fall of the Berlin Wall, United for Hungary members are trying to figure out what path might lie ahead given that four more years of autocracy are in store.

How did the contest go from being too close to call to a blowout? Elections can be organized to turn a plurality party into a supermajority winner. While the Hungarian case has distinctive features, it demonstrates more generally how autocrats can rig elections legally, using their parliamentary majorities to change the law to neutralize whatever strategy the opposition adopts. Understanding how Orbán won his latest supermajority shows defenders of democracy what they are up against when autocrats lock in their power by law.

I highly recommend you read the whole thing if you have the time. She lays out in details exactly how he rigged the electoral system in his favor. And it is very familiar.

When you look at the likes of Ron DeSantis don’t look at Trump as the model. He is just the demagogue who pulled the coalition together. The system they are building to ensure it’s longevity is all Orban. And they know it.

Let us tread on thee

A snappy comeback from a former Republican:

Oh, there’s more. Much more.

Raw Story:

On Friday, the far-right House Freedom Caucus came out against the Respect for Marriage Act, which seeks to codify in law the Supreme Court decisions that legalized gay and interracial marriage.

“The radical left has launched an all-out campaign on America’s traditional values and sacred institutions,” the House Freedom Caucus claimed in a statement.

“It has weakened the nuclear family, attacked the norms of masculinity and femininity, and now it wants to further erode the sacred institutions of marriage,” the statement said, even though gay and interracial marriages have long been allowed.

Like G.W. Bush’s “Clear Skies” and “Healthy Forest” initiatives, Freedom Caucus means the opposite of what its name implies.

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Or, sinking while the music plays

Getting Democrats to think outside the box is one helluva challenge. Unless you are selling some silver-bullet campaign tech. The wise ones on the Hill are still convinced kitchen table issues are what motivate voters. What you regularly see on the ground is Democrats’ attachment for doing what they’ve always done no matter how many times they lose doing it. Among the elite, there is a fixed way of thinking about politics that has not kept up with reality.

Brian Beutler addressed that problem this week as a difference between how Dempcrats and Republicans conceive of their roles, writing, “At bottom, I think the explanation is that the right has imagined itself as an insurgent force in American politics and the center-left has accepted its incumbency, or the inevitability of progress on a long-enough time scale.” It’s why Democrats sometimes seem so slow to respond to crisis:

Since the New Deal, through eras of ascendency and retreat, Democrats have sought political power almost exclusively as a means of modifying and expanding the terms of a social contract for Americans. They are driven by the pursuit of ideological goals and interest group demands, nearly all of which entail passing significant pieces of legislation. Their presidents view their own legacies as synonymous with how much they can get done on that front, and how well it stacks up to what FDR managed to achieve. If not FDR, then LBJ; if not LBJ, then Barack Obama. Be like them, and not only will history remember you fondly, but your party will thrive as the public rallies to the side of solidary leaders.

They have also, rightly and wrongly, projected mirror-image ambitions on to their opponents, imagining the great pendulum swings of politics as a tit-for-tat between common-good liberals and libertarian-minded conservatives; a world where the Republican ideal of political greatness runs through the Reaganesque devolution of the welfare state and other institutions of collective power. 

It’s a pleasingly symmetrical model, and there have been times when it resembled reality, but I think it’s mostly wrong, and completely outmoded today. FDR was a rare leader, but it’s reductionist in the extreme to attribute the durability of Democratic power after he died entirely to the way he governed, rather than, say, to the fact that the Democratic coalition included segregationists who rigged elections for themselves. Reagan really did preside over a hollowing-out of the New Deal, but the New-Deal coalition was already in tatters by the 1980s, and it’s incorrect to think of Reagan’s “success” in purely fiscal terms. Even then, Republicans viewed fleeting control over the federal government as an opportunity to undermine Democratic power centers, to structurally weaken their opponents. 

If anything’s changed it’s the level of GOP zest for frontal attacks on the welfare state. Through the 2010s, Republicans used power principally to sever the connection between popular Democratic majorities and their ability to claim and wield power for themselves. They still cut taxes for the rich and sabotaged social programs when the opportunity arose. But the first thing they did after the 2010 midterms was gerrymander Democrats into semi-permanent minority status anywhere they could. Then they came for labor rights and public-sector unions and campaign-finance regulations and voting rights and the Census. When they’ve lost, they’ve used their expiring trifectas to strip incoming Democrats of the authorities they had wielded gleefully. They use power not just to remake the social contract, but as a means of power accretion in itself. In the Trump and post-Trump era, the core Republican aspiration is to torment and persecute liberals and their purported allies; to wield power from the minority through nullification and judicial fiat; to own the libs.

The Democratic Party’s ambitions haven’t changed to counter this rogue turn. 

Democrats’ conviction that their adversaries hold symmetrical but opposing policy stances is failing the country. Anyone needing further confirmation of that analysis should read Jonathan Swan’s chilling account of Republican plans to reclassify a large swath of mid-level public servants as Schedule F employees the next time they hold the White House. Then eliminate them. Perhaps as early as Jan. 20, 2025, they could begin replacing people who’ve dedicated themselves to public service with reactionary, misogynistic “Christians” like this guy:

Right-wing groups have already drawn up lists of candidates for positions to be re-filled (those they don’t plan to eliminate). Think Trump 1.0 was chaos? Just wait. Even if Trump 2.0 is not named Trump, Trumpism will live on. As Digby noted Friday:

If you don’t think this could literally destroy the country you are unaware of how much our nation relies on the federal government to make everything we take for granted on a daily basis function. These people are nihilists and they do not care about that.

Democrats do. But they won’t counter it any better than they did the overturn of Roe if they don’t reconceptualize how they think about politics. Policy and program design is fun and all that, but for Republicans more than for Democrats, personnel is policy.

Beutler again:

The broad left has effectively redoubled its conviction that the best way to deal with the right’s politics of rule or ruin is to pull the policy lever ever harder. Different Democrats have different intuitions about how the policy lever is supposed to work. Progressives imagine transformational, redistributive policies will generate working-class solidarity and an unbeatable rainbow coalition. Moderates believe competent management, along with popular but incremental new reforms will capture the political center, without which Republicans can’t win.

But both believe that good policy, and good execution, are destiny, and that consensus is visible in the party’s vast technocratic class, the army of Mr. Fix-its who ride to the rescue after Republicans leave everything in a smoldering heap.

They two parties are not even playing the same game. Democrats are playing one their opponents have long abandoned, and by rules Republicans think are for suckers.

Anymore, when I see more-progressive-than-thou wonks debating the weakneeses of policy proposals that won’t pass anyway, I’m out. They are playing Risk in a bomb shelter while shells explode around them.

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