I read this piece on Insider this morning about the Democrats loss of rural support and how they need to “show up”, which is no doubt true — margins matter. But it also says that Democrats have to concentrate on “kitchen table issues” that will materially help these rural voters in their real lives instead of all the supposedly abstract stuff they don’t care about.
I won’t go into all the studies which show that this is not the reason those voters have rejected the Democratic Party. They reject the Democrats is because they are hostile to the people who make up the Democratic coalition: people of color, feminists, LGBT folks, immigrants, city people in general. That is a very difficult problem since these rural voters require that politicians crudely insult the Democratic base in order to win their favor and that is a zero sum game.
And about those kitchen table issues? Yeah … every Republican in the congress and one Democrat from one of the most rural states in America reject the Build Back Better plan which will bring more material benefit to rural voters than any legislation since the New Deal. They believe their voters will punish them for voting for it. (Not to say they won’t take credit for the projects it brings. They are already touting the infrastructure projects they didn’t vote for.)
If you’ve been reading Hullabaloo for a while, you know that we’ve spilled oceans of digital ink on that subject and have featured the ideas and critiques of dozens, if not hundreds, of scholars, experts, analysts and gadflies (like me…) It’s been one of the most important and confounding topics of our political era and I don’t think anyone’s figured out the answer. But we’ll keep asking the questions.
Anyway, everyone is expecting a blow out in 2022. That would follow historical midterm trends and the polling a year out says that nothing is different this time. The pandemic is making everyone sour and that often leads to a “throw the bums out” mentality. The media isn’t helping.
However, I’m not so sure it’s going to go that way. Our era is defined by negative partisanship much, much more than “kitchen table issues” and Republicans know that. Mitch McConnell even announced the other day that they would offer no agenda for the 2022 election. They believe they don’t need one. But he has a problem and it may end up costing him the big landslide he thinks is on its way.
Here’s conservative writer Matthew Continetti in the New York Times:
Republicans have experienced hopeful times before — only to have the moment pass. They believed that disapproval of President Bill Clinton’s conduct would expand their majorities in 1998. They ended up losing five House seats. They believed that Mr. Trump would rally the base to support two incumbent senators during runoffs in Georgia last January. They lost both seats and control of the Senate.
Time and again, the biggest obstacle to a red wave hasn’t been the Democratic Party. It’s been the Republican Party.
Republican victories in the midterms next year are far from preordained. Glenn Youngkin’s win in Virginia may be much harder to replicate elsewhere than it looked on election night. Republican leaders continue to fear Mr. Trump and his supporters, and they are divided over candidate selection, message and agenda. The result is a unique combination of external strength and internal rot: An enthusiastic and combative Republican Party that despite its best efforts may soon acquire power it has done nothing to deserve…
Republicans lost winnable Senate seats in 2010 and 2012 because of flawed nominees like Sharron Angle in Nevada, Christine O’Donnell in Delaware, Todd Akin in Missouri and Richard Mourdock in Indiana. Past may be prologue if Republicans nominate Trump allies whose record or rhetoric are questionable and extreme.
Mr. Trump remains the central figure in the G.O.P. Party elites try to ignore him as he spends many days fighting Republicans rather than Democrats and plotting his revenge against the 10 Republican House members who voted for his second impeachment, the seven Republican senators who voted to convict him and the 13 House Republicans who voted for the bipartisan infrastructure bill. Mr. Trump targets his enemies with primary challenges, calls for “audits” and “decertification” of the 2020 presidential results and howls at Mitch McConnell for not being “tough.” His imitators within the party are a font of endless infighting and controversy, and they undermine the authority of the House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy. Mr. Trump would have it no other way.
A more visible and vocal Trump has the potential to help Republicans in solid red states but doom them in purple or blue ones. Yet control of the Senate hinges on the results in Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire — states Mr. Trump lost in 2020.
Republicans have an orange chaos agent in their midst and he is likely going to define the election far more than rural broadband or child tax credits as sad as that might be. Democrats should be prepared to exploit that situation and I hope they are.
We’ll be following all this very closely here at Hullabaloo. My great morning man Tom Sullivan has his eye on the states and I’ll be watching the right wing. We’ll all keep our eye on the media. So stay tuned!
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