2022 Midterm Elections: NO RED WAVE! - GOP Takes U.S. House; Dems Keep U.S. Senate
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Why Democrats See 3 Governor’s Races as a Sea Wall for Fair Elections
Reid J. Epstein, Nick Corasaniti
10-13 minutes
Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania all have Democratic governors and G.O.P.-led legislatures. And in all three battlegrounds, Republicans are pushing hard to rewrite election laws.
Credit...Lianne Milton for The New York Times
Oct. 6, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET
MADISON, Wis. — In three critical battleground states, Democratic governors have blocked efforts by Republican-controlled legislatures to restrict voting rights and undermine the 2020 election.
Now, the 2022 races for governor in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — states that have long been vital to Democratic presidential victories, including Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s — are taking on major new significance.
At stake are how easy it is to vote, who controls the electoral system and, some Democrats worry, whether the results of federal, state and local elections will be accepted no matter which party wins.
That has left Govs. Tony Evers of Wisconsin, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania standing alone, in what is already expected to be a difficult year for their party, as what Democrats view as a sea wall against a rising Republican tide of voting restrictions and far-reaching election laws.
The question of who wins their seats in 2022 — Mr. Evers and Ms. Whitmer are running for re-election, while Mr. Wolf is term-limited — has become newly urgent in recent weeks as Republicans in all three states, spurred on by former President Donald J. Trump, make clearer than ever their intent to reshape elections should they take unified control.
Republicans have aggressively pursued partisan reviews of the 2020 election in each state. In Pennsylvania, G.O.P. lawmakers sought the personal information of every voter in the state last month. In Wisconsin, a conservative former State Supreme Court justice, who is investigating the 2020 election results on behalf of the State Assembly, issued subpoenas on Friday for voting-related documents from election officials. And in Michigan on Sunday night, Ms. Whitmer vetoed four election bills that she said “would have perpetuated the ‘big lie’ or made it harder for Michiganders to vote.”
Republican candidates for governor in the three states have proposed additional cutbacks to voting access and measures that would give G.O.P. officials more power over how elections are run. And the party is pushing such efforts wherever it has the power to do so. This year, 19 Republican-controlled states have passed 33 laws restricting voting, one of the greatest contractions of access to the ballot since the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. Democrats in Congress have tried without success to pass federal voting laws to counteract the Republican push.
The prospect that Mr. Trump may run again in 2024 only compounds what Democrats fear: that Republicans could gain full control over the three key Northern states in 2022 and, two years later, interfere with or overturn the outcome of a narrow Democratic presidential victory in 2024.
“I would’ve never guessed that my job as governor when I ran a couple years ago was going to be mainly about making sure that our democracy is still intact in this state,” said Mr. Evers, a former Wisconsin schools superintendent. He was elected governor in the Democratic wave of 2018 on a platform of increasing education spending and expanding Medicaid.
He and Ms. Whitmer are seeking re-election while vying to preserve the voting system, which was not built to withstand a sustained partisan assault, in the face of intensifying Republican challenges to the routine administration of elections. Mr. Wolf cannot seek a third term, but his Democratic heir apparent, Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania attorney general, has been on the forefront of legal efforts to defend the 2020 election results for nearly a year.
The shift from focusing on traditional Democratic issues like health care and education to assuring fair elections is starkest for Mr. Evers, a man so aggressively staid that he’s partial to vanilla ice cream.
Image
Credit...Lianne Milton for The New York Times
Last week, as he walked through a row of black-and-white Holstein cows at the World Dairy Expo, he predicted that if he were defeated next year, Republican legislators would have a direct path to reverse the results of the 2024 election.
“The stakes are damn high,” Mr. Evers said above the din of mooing and milking at Madison’s annual dairy trade show. “This is about our democracy. It’s frightening.”
The message that democracy itself is on the line is a potentially powerful campaign pitch for Mr. Evers and his fellow Democrats, one he has used in fund-raising appeals.
Republicans dismiss the idea that they are undermining democracy and say that their various election reviews will increase, not decrease, voters’ trust in the system.
“It’s full of hyperbole and exaggeration, which is what the Democrats do best on this election stuff,” Robin Vos, the speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly, said in an interview last week at the State Capitol. “All we’re trying to do is make sure that people who were elected were elected legitimately.”
Mr. Vos said he was still not sure if President Biden had legitimately won the state. (Mr. Biden carried it by more than 20,000 votes.)
It would not take much to swing statewide elections in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Four of the last six presidential contests in Wisconsin have been decided by fewer than 23,000 votes. Other than Barack Obama, no presidential nominee has won more than 51 percent of the vote in any of the three states since 1996.
And as Mr. Trump and his allies chisel away at confidence in American elections by making baseless allegations of voter fraud, it is no longer a stretch to imagine governors loyal to the former president taking previously unthinkable steps to alter future results.
Governors are required to submit to Congress a certificate of ascertainment of presidential electors. But what if a governor refused?
Another scenario could also give a governor outsize power over the presidential election: A state could send competing slates of electors to Congress, and the House might accept one slate and the Senate the other. Then, the Electoral Count Act of 1887 — the guidelines for tallying Electoral College votes, which remained obscure until the violence of Jan. 6 — appears to give the state’s governor the tiebreaking vote.
The National Task Force on Election Crises, a nonpartisan group of experts in various fields, warned about such a possibility in a September 2020 memo.
“It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that any one of those states falling to a Trump-aligned candidate would pose an existential threat to the survival of American democracy come the 2024 election,” said Ian Bassin, the executive director of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan group dedicated to resisting authoritarianism, who convened the election crises task force before the 2020 election.
Republicans have not been shy about their ambitions to change election laws in the three states.
In Pennsylvania, Lou Barletta, a former congressman who recently announced a bid for governor, said that as he crossed the state last week, the top issue for voters was “election integrity.”
“People talk to me about mandates, about vaccines, but they always bring up election integrity as well,” Mr. Barletta said in an interview.
He said that he was waiting for the Republicans’ election review before committing to a full slate of election changes, but that he already had a few in mind, including stricter voter identification laws.
Image
Credit...Susan Walsh/Associated Press
James Craig, the leading Republican candidate for governor in Michigan, has backed bills that would forbid the mass mailing of absentee ballot applications to voters who do not request them and that would enact a strict voter ID requirement. He declined to comment.
Those proposed laws are being pushed by Ed McBroom, a Republican state senator, even though he released a report in June debunking Trump-inspired claims of election fraud.
“Somebody could pretty easily try to impersonate somebody they don’t know,” said Mr. McBroom, who leads the Michigan Senate’s elections committee.
And in Wisconsin, Rebecca Kleefisch, a Republican who served as lieutenant governor under Gov. Scott Walker until 2019, is challenging Mr. Evers with a campaign platform that calls for shifting responsibility for the state’s elections from the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission, which her and Mr. Walker’s administration created in 2016, to the G.O.P.-controlled Legislature. Ms. Kleefisch declined to comment.
Perhaps no 2022 Democratic candidate for governor is as familiar with Republican attempts to dispute the 2020 outcome as Mr. Shapiro. As Pennsylvania’s attorney general, he defended the state in 43 lawsuits brought by Mr. Trump and his allies that challenged voting methods and the results.
“There are new threats every single day on the right to vote, new efforts to disenfranchise voters, and I expect that this will be another huge test in 2022,” said Mr. Shapiro, who is planning to announce a campaign for governor as soon as this month.
Last month, Mr. Shapiro filed a lawsuit to block Republicans in the Pennsylvania Senate after they sought the personal information of all seven million voters in the state as part of their election review, including driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers.
Image
Credit...Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Times
“The only thing that is preventing the rollback of voting rights in Michigan right now is the threat of my veto,” she said in an interview.
Michigan was also home to one of the most forceful and arcane attempts at reversing the outcome in 2020, when Republican election officials, at Mr. Trump’s behest, tried to refuse to certify the results in Wayne County and stall the certification of the state’s overall results. That memory, combined with new voting bills and Republican attempts to review the state’s election results, makes Michigan’s election next year all the more important, Ms. Whitmer said.
“If they make it harder or impossible for droves of people not to be able to participate in the election,” she said, “that doesn’t just impact Michigan elections, but elections for federal offices as well, like the U.S. Senate and certainly the White House.”
Mr. Vos said he had not thought about the degree to which Wisconsin Republicans could change voting laws if the state had a Republican governor. But this year, the State Legislature passed a package of six bills that would have enacted a range of new voting restrictions.
Mr. Evers vetoed them all.
“I’ve learned to play goalie in this job,” he said. “And I’ll continue to do that.”
Why Democrats See 3 Governor’s Races as a Sea Wall for Fair Elections
Reid J. Epstein, Nick Corasaniti
10-13 minutes
Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania all have Democratic governors and G.O.P.-led legislatures. And in all three battlegrounds, Republicans are pushing hard to rewrite election laws.
Credit...Lianne Milton for The New York Times
Oct. 6, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET
MADISON, Wis. — In three critical battleground states, Democratic governors have blocked efforts by Republican-controlled legislatures to restrict voting rights and undermine the 2020 election.
Now, the 2022 races for governor in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — states that have long been vital to Democratic presidential victories, including Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s — are taking on major new significance.
At stake are how easy it is to vote, who controls the electoral system and, some Democrats worry, whether the results of federal, state and local elections will be accepted no matter which party wins.
That has left Govs. Tony Evers of Wisconsin, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania standing alone, in what is already expected to be a difficult year for their party, as what Democrats view as a sea wall against a rising Republican tide of voting restrictions and far-reaching election laws.
The question of who wins their seats in 2022 — Mr. Evers and Ms. Whitmer are running for re-election, while Mr. Wolf is term-limited — has become newly urgent in recent weeks as Republicans in all three states, spurred on by former President Donald J. Trump, make clearer than ever their intent to reshape elections should they take unified control.
Republicans have aggressively pursued partisan reviews of the 2020 election in each state. In Pennsylvania, G.O.P. lawmakers sought the personal information of every voter in the state last month. In Wisconsin, a conservative former State Supreme Court justice, who is investigating the 2020 election results on behalf of the State Assembly, issued subpoenas on Friday for voting-related documents from election officials. And in Michigan on Sunday night, Ms. Whitmer vetoed four election bills that she said “would have perpetuated the ‘big lie’ or made it harder for Michiganders to vote.”
Republican candidates for governor in the three states have proposed additional cutbacks to voting access and measures that would give G.O.P. officials more power over how elections are run. And the party is pushing such efforts wherever it has the power to do so. This year, 19 Republican-controlled states have passed 33 laws restricting voting, one of the greatest contractions of access to the ballot since the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. Democrats in Congress have tried without success to pass federal voting laws to counteract the Republican push.
The prospect that Mr. Trump may run again in 2024 only compounds what Democrats fear: that Republicans could gain full control over the three key Northern states in 2022 and, two years later, interfere with or overturn the outcome of a narrow Democratic presidential victory in 2024.
“I would’ve never guessed that my job as governor when I ran a couple years ago was going to be mainly about making sure that our democracy is still intact in this state,” said Mr. Evers, a former Wisconsin schools superintendent. He was elected governor in the Democratic wave of 2018 on a platform of increasing education spending and expanding Medicaid.
He and Ms. Whitmer are seeking re-election while vying to preserve the voting system, which was not built to withstand a sustained partisan assault, in the face of intensifying Republican challenges to the routine administration of elections. Mr. Wolf cannot seek a third term, but his Democratic heir apparent, Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania attorney general, has been on the forefront of legal efforts to defend the 2020 election results for nearly a year.
The shift from focusing on traditional Democratic issues like health care and education to assuring fair elections is starkest for Mr. Evers, a man so aggressively staid that he’s partial to vanilla ice cream.
Image
Credit...Lianne Milton for The New York Times
Last week, as he walked through a row of black-and-white Holstein cows at the World Dairy Expo, he predicted that if he were defeated next year, Republican legislators would have a direct path to reverse the results of the 2024 election.
“The stakes are damn high,” Mr. Evers said above the din of mooing and milking at Madison’s annual dairy trade show. “This is about our democracy. It’s frightening.”
The message that democracy itself is on the line is a potentially powerful campaign pitch for Mr. Evers and his fellow Democrats, one he has used in fund-raising appeals.
Republicans dismiss the idea that they are undermining democracy and say that their various election reviews will increase, not decrease, voters’ trust in the system.
“It’s full of hyperbole and exaggeration, which is what the Democrats do best on this election stuff,” Robin Vos, the speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly, said in an interview last week at the State Capitol. “All we’re trying to do is make sure that people who were elected were elected legitimately.”
Mr. Vos said he was still not sure if President Biden had legitimately won the state. (Mr. Biden carried it by more than 20,000 votes.)
It would not take much to swing statewide elections in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Four of the last six presidential contests in Wisconsin have been decided by fewer than 23,000 votes. Other than Barack Obama, no presidential nominee has won more than 51 percent of the vote in any of the three states since 1996.
And as Mr. Trump and his allies chisel away at confidence in American elections by making baseless allegations of voter fraud, it is no longer a stretch to imagine governors loyal to the former president taking previously unthinkable steps to alter future results.
Governors are required to submit to Congress a certificate of ascertainment of presidential electors. But what if a governor refused?
Another scenario could also give a governor outsize power over the presidential election: A state could send competing slates of electors to Congress, and the House might accept one slate and the Senate the other. Then, the Electoral Count Act of 1887 — the guidelines for tallying Electoral College votes, which remained obscure until the violence of Jan. 6 — appears to give the state’s governor the tiebreaking vote.
The National Task Force on Election Crises, a nonpartisan group of experts in various fields, warned about such a possibility in a September 2020 memo.
“It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that any one of those states falling to a Trump-aligned candidate would pose an existential threat to the survival of American democracy come the 2024 election,” said Ian Bassin, the executive director of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan group dedicated to resisting authoritarianism, who convened the election crises task force before the 2020 election.
Republicans have not been shy about their ambitions to change election laws in the three states.
In Pennsylvania, Lou Barletta, a former congressman who recently announced a bid for governor, said that as he crossed the state last week, the top issue for voters was “election integrity.”
“People talk to me about mandates, about vaccines, but they always bring up election integrity as well,” Mr. Barletta said in an interview.
He said that he was waiting for the Republicans’ election review before committing to a full slate of election changes, but that he already had a few in mind, including stricter voter identification laws.
Image
Credit...Susan Walsh/Associated Press
James Craig, the leading Republican candidate for governor in Michigan, has backed bills that would forbid the mass mailing of absentee ballot applications to voters who do not request them and that would enact a strict voter ID requirement. He declined to comment.
Those proposed laws are being pushed by Ed McBroom, a Republican state senator, even though he released a report in June debunking Trump-inspired claims of election fraud.
“Somebody could pretty easily try to impersonate somebody they don’t know,” said Mr. McBroom, who leads the Michigan Senate’s elections committee.
And in Wisconsin, Rebecca Kleefisch, a Republican who served as lieutenant governor under Gov. Scott Walker until 2019, is challenging Mr. Evers with a campaign platform that calls for shifting responsibility for the state’s elections from the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission, which her and Mr. Walker’s administration created in 2016, to the G.O.P.-controlled Legislature. Ms. Kleefisch declined to comment.
Perhaps no 2022 Democratic candidate for governor is as familiar with Republican attempts to dispute the 2020 outcome as Mr. Shapiro. As Pennsylvania’s attorney general, he defended the state in 43 lawsuits brought by Mr. Trump and his allies that challenged voting methods and the results.
“There are new threats every single day on the right to vote, new efforts to disenfranchise voters, and I expect that this will be another huge test in 2022,” said Mr. Shapiro, who is planning to announce a campaign for governor as soon as this month.
Last month, Mr. Shapiro filed a lawsuit to block Republicans in the Pennsylvania Senate after they sought the personal information of all seven million voters in the state as part of their election review, including driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers.
Image
Credit...Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Times
“The only thing that is preventing the rollback of voting rights in Michigan right now is the threat of my veto,” she said in an interview.
Michigan was also home to one of the most forceful and arcane attempts at reversing the outcome in 2020, when Republican election officials, at Mr. Trump’s behest, tried to refuse to certify the results in Wayne County and stall the certification of the state’s overall results. That memory, combined with new voting bills and Republican attempts to review the state’s election results, makes Michigan’s election next year all the more important, Ms. Whitmer said.
“If they make it harder or impossible for droves of people not to be able to participate in the election,” she said, “that doesn’t just impact Michigan elections, but elections for federal offices as well, like the U.S. Senate and certainly the White House.”
Mr. Vos said he had not thought about the degree to which Wisconsin Republicans could change voting laws if the state had a Republican governor. But this year, the State Legislature passed a package of six bills that would have enacted a range of new voting restrictions.
Mr. Evers vetoed them all.
“I’ve learned to play goalie in this job,” he said. “And I’ll continue to do that.”
nytimes.com
Democrats Lost the Most in Midwestern ‘Factory Towns’, Report Says
Jonathan Martin
6-8 minutes
The party’s struggles in communities that saw declines in manufacturing and union jobs, and health care, could more than offset its gains in metropolitan areas.
Credit...Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Oct. 5, 2021
WASHINGTON — The share of the Democratic presidential vote in the Midwest declined most precipitously between 2012 and 2020 in counties that experienced the steepest losses in manufacturing and union jobs and saw declines in health care, according to a new report to be released this month.
The party’s worsening performance in the region’s midsize communities — often overlooked places like Chippewa Falls, Wis., and Bay City, Mich. — poses a dire threat to Democrats, the report warns.
Nationally and in the Midwest, Democratic gains in large metropolitan areas have offset their losses in rural areas. And while the party’s struggles in the industrial Midwest have been well-chronicled, the 82-page report explicitly links Democratic decline in the region that elected Donald J. Trump in 2016 to the sort of deindustrialization that has weakened liberal parties around the world.
“We cannot elect Democrats up and down the ballot, let alone protect our governing majorities, if we don’t address those losses,” wrote Richard J. Martin, an Iowa-based market researcher and Democratic campaign veteran, in the report titled “Factory Towns.”
Mr. Martin wrote the report in conjunction with Mike Lux and David Wilhelm, fellow Democratic strategists who, like him, also have roots in the region and worked together on President Biden’s 1988 presidential campaign.
For all the arresting data, vivid graphs and deepening red maps presented, Mr. Martin offers little guidance on how to reverse the trends. He does, however, offer a warning, one that Midwestern Democrats have been issuing since Mr. Trump’s victory five years ago.
“If things continue to get worse for us in small and midsize, working-class counties, we can give up any hope of winning the battleground states of the industrial heartland,” writes Mr. Martin.
Surveying ten states — the Great Lakes region as well as Missouri and Iowa — Mr. Martin laid out a set of stark figures.
Comparing Barack Obama’s re-election to President Biden’s election last year, he notes that Democrats gained about 1.55 million votes in the big cities and suburbs of the region surveyed. In the same period, they lost about 557,000 votes in heavily rural counties.
But in midsize and small counties, Democrats lost over 2.63 million votes between the two elections. Dubbing these communities “factory towns,” Mr. Martin separates them by midsize counties anchored around cities with a population of 35,000 or more and smaller counties that lean on manufacturing but do not have such sizable cities.
Taken together, the changes illustrate the degree to which Mr. Obama relied upon the votes of working-class white voters to propel his re-election — and how much Mr. Biden leaned on suburbanites to offset his losses in working-class communities that had once been a pillar of the Democratic coalition.
Sign Up for On Politics A guide to the political news cycle, cutting through the spin and delivering clarity from the chaos.
What alarms Mr. Martin, and many Democratic officials, is whether the party can sustain those gains in metropolitan areas. It’s uncertain, as he puts it, “if moderate suburban Republicans will continue to vote for Democrats when Trump is not on the ballot.”
Democratic gains up and down the ballot in fast-growing Sun Belt states like Arizona and Georgia garnered significant attention last year. Yet Mr. Biden wouldn’t have won the presidency and Democrats couldn’t have flipped the Senate without victories in 2020 across the Great Lakes region.
However, those wins proved more difficult than many pre-election polls concluded because of the G.O.P.’s continued strength in manufacturing communities. And, the report noted, these communities made up a significant portion of the region’s vote share. In Wisconsin, midsize and small manufacturing counties make up 58 percent of the statewide vote. In Michigan, half of the voting population is in these communities.
This is where the decline in manufacturing has been most damaging to Democrats. The ten states included in the survey have lost 1.3 million manufacturing jobs since the beginning of this century.
In the small to midsize “factory town” counties in those states, where support for the Republican presidential nominee grew between 2012 and 2020, the losses were acute: More than 70 percent suffered declines in manufacturing jobs.
The elimination of those jobs also led to declines in health care, according to data from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute.
In the counties that suffered manufacturing losses and health care declines, Republicans surged between 2012 and 2020. Nearly half of the party’s gains in these states came in communities where there were both manufacturing cuts and worsening health care.
Republicans also prospered in communities hit hard by the decline in manufacturing that were predominantly white. With fewer well-paying industry jobs, the power of local unions declined as well, silencing what was always the beating heart of Democratic political organizing in these areas. In 154 such counties, Democrats suffered a net loss of over 613,000 votes between the elections in 2016 and 2020.
Perhaps most striking was the decline in union membership across the region.
Nine of the 10 states included in the survey have accounted for 93 percent of the loss of union members nationwide in the last two decades. And just in the last 10 years, these states have lost 10 percent of their union membership — an average that is three times greater than nationally.
Jonathan Martin is a national political correspondent. He has reported on a range of topics, including the 2016 presidential election and several state and congressional races, while also writing for Sports, Food and the Book Review. He is also a CNN political analyst. @jmartnyt
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 6, 2021, Section A, Page 16 of the New York edition with the headline: Report Paints A Dire Picture For Democrats In the Midwest. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
Democrats Lost the Most in Midwestern ‘Factory Towns’, Report Says
Jonathan Martin
6-8 minutes
The party’s struggles in communities that saw declines in manufacturing and union jobs, and health care, could more than offset its gains in metropolitan areas.
Credit...Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Oct. 5, 2021
WASHINGTON — The share of the Democratic presidential vote in the Midwest declined most precipitously between 2012 and 2020 in counties that experienced the steepest losses in manufacturing and union jobs and saw declines in health care, according to a new report to be released this month.
The party’s worsening performance in the region’s midsize communities — often overlooked places like Chippewa Falls, Wis., and Bay City, Mich. — poses a dire threat to Democrats, the report warns.
Nationally and in the Midwest, Democratic gains in large metropolitan areas have offset their losses in rural areas. And while the party’s struggles in the industrial Midwest have been well-chronicled, the 82-page report explicitly links Democratic decline in the region that elected Donald J. Trump in 2016 to the sort of deindustrialization that has weakened liberal parties around the world.
“We cannot elect Democrats up and down the ballot, let alone protect our governing majorities, if we don’t address those losses,” wrote Richard J. Martin, an Iowa-based market researcher and Democratic campaign veteran, in the report titled “Factory Towns.”
Mr. Martin wrote the report in conjunction with Mike Lux and David Wilhelm, fellow Democratic strategists who, like him, also have roots in the region and worked together on President Biden’s 1988 presidential campaign.
For all the arresting data, vivid graphs and deepening red maps presented, Mr. Martin offers little guidance on how to reverse the trends. He does, however, offer a warning, one that Midwestern Democrats have been issuing since Mr. Trump’s victory five years ago.
“If things continue to get worse for us in small and midsize, working-class counties, we can give up any hope of winning the battleground states of the industrial heartland,” writes Mr. Martin.
Surveying ten states — the Great Lakes region as well as Missouri and Iowa — Mr. Martin laid out a set of stark figures.
Comparing Barack Obama’s re-election to President Biden’s election last year, he notes that Democrats gained about 1.55 million votes in the big cities and suburbs of the region surveyed. In the same period, they lost about 557,000 votes in heavily rural counties.
But in midsize and small counties, Democrats lost over 2.63 million votes between the two elections. Dubbing these communities “factory towns,” Mr. Martin separates them by midsize counties anchored around cities with a population of 35,000 or more and smaller counties that lean on manufacturing but do not have such sizable cities.
Taken together, the changes illustrate the degree to which Mr. Obama relied upon the votes of working-class white voters to propel his re-election — and how much Mr. Biden leaned on suburbanites to offset his losses in working-class communities that had once been a pillar of the Democratic coalition.
Sign Up for On Politics A guide to the political news cycle, cutting through the spin and delivering clarity from the chaos.
What alarms Mr. Martin, and many Democratic officials, is whether the party can sustain those gains in metropolitan areas. It’s uncertain, as he puts it, “if moderate suburban Republicans will continue to vote for Democrats when Trump is not on the ballot.”
Democratic gains up and down the ballot in fast-growing Sun Belt states like Arizona and Georgia garnered significant attention last year. Yet Mr. Biden wouldn’t have won the presidency and Democrats couldn’t have flipped the Senate without victories in 2020 across the Great Lakes region.
However, those wins proved more difficult than many pre-election polls concluded because of the G.O.P.’s continued strength in manufacturing communities. And, the report noted, these communities made up a significant portion of the region’s vote share. In Wisconsin, midsize and small manufacturing counties make up 58 percent of the statewide vote. In Michigan, half of the voting population is in these communities.
This is where the decline in manufacturing has been most damaging to Democrats. The ten states included in the survey have lost 1.3 million manufacturing jobs since the beginning of this century.
In the small to midsize “factory town” counties in those states, where support for the Republican presidential nominee grew between 2012 and 2020, the losses were acute: More than 70 percent suffered declines in manufacturing jobs.
The elimination of those jobs also led to declines in health care, according to data from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute.
In the counties that suffered manufacturing losses and health care declines, Republicans surged between 2012 and 2020. Nearly half of the party’s gains in these states came in communities where there were both manufacturing cuts and worsening health care.
Republicans also prospered in communities hit hard by the decline in manufacturing that were predominantly white. With fewer well-paying industry jobs, the power of local unions declined as well, silencing what was always the beating heart of Democratic political organizing in these areas. In 154 such counties, Democrats suffered a net loss of over 613,000 votes between the elections in 2016 and 2020.
Perhaps most striking was the decline in union membership across the region.
Nine of the 10 states included in the survey have accounted for 93 percent of the loss of union members nationwide in the last two decades. And just in the last 10 years, these states have lost 10 percent of their union membership — an average that is three times greater than nationally.
Jonathan Martin is a national political correspondent. He has reported on a range of topics, including the 2016 presidential election and several state and congressional races, while also writing for Sports, Food and the Book Review. He is also a CNN political analyst. @jmartnyt
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 6, 2021, Section A, Page 16 of the New York edition with the headline: Report Paints A Dire Picture For Democrats In the Midwest. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
Rell Lauren
Banned
This is from a poll that heavily oversamples Ds. They're on track to get slaughtered in the House and Senate.
theatlantic.com
What Democrats Need to Understand About the Changing Electorate
Ronald Brownstein
11-14 minutes
How the president’s party can avoid a midterm blowout
Cassidy Araiza / The New York Times / Redux
Follow the sun. That’s the advice to Democrats from a leading party fundraising organization in an exhaustive analysis of the electoral landscape released today.
The study, from the group Way to Win, provided exclusively to The Atlantic, argues that to solidify their position in Congress and the Electoral College, Democrats must increase their investment and focus on Sun Belt states that have become more politically competitive over recent years as they have grown more urbanized and racially diverse. “The majority of new, likely Democratic voters live in the South and Southwest, places the Democratic establishment have long ignored or are just waking up to now,” the group argues in the report.
Read: What does the Democratic Party stand for?
The study, focusing on 11 battleground states, is as much a warning as an exhortation. It contends that although the key to contesting Sun Belt states such as North Carolina, Georgia, Texas, and Arizona is to sustain engagement among the largely nonwhite infrequent voters who turned out in huge numbers in 2018 and 2020, it also warns that Republicans could consolidate Donald Trump’s gains last year among some minority voters, particularly Latino men. “These trends across our multiracial coalition demonstrate the urgent need for campaigns and independent groups to stop assuming voters of color will vote Democrat,” the report asserts.
The study echoes the findings of other Democratic strategists such as Mike Podhorzer, the longtime political director of the AFL-CIO, in arguing that the Democrats’ best chance to avoid the usual midterm losses is to turn out large numbers of those surge voters next year.
“If all the consultants in the Democratic Party do is follow their same playbook, which is talking only to the most likely voters, or really focusing on white voters or white non-college voters, Democrats will likely lose,” says Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, Way to Win’s vice president and chief strategy officer. “The big message for us is that the core strategy of the 2022 midterm [should be] about engineering and expanding enthusiasm among this high-potential multiracial, multigenerational base that is really a critical part of the electorate across the Sun Belt states.”
Recommended Reading
Way to Win was founded by Fernandez Acona and the Democratic operatives Tory Gavito and Leah Hunt-Hendrix after the 2016 election to channel more funding from Democratic donors into organizations and campaigns that focus on voters of color. Their work, which they say has raised $165 million so far, has centered on Sun Belt states, but has also included investments in diversifying urban and suburban areas in other regions, says Gavito, who now serves as Way to Win’s president and CEO. Among the groups Way to Win has funded are grassroots organizations in Georgia and Arizona that are widely credited for the robust minority turnout that helped President Joe Biden flip both of those states last November.
The key analytical insight in the new report is its attempt to quantify the stakes for Democrats in continuing to engage the infrequent voters who flocked to the polls in 2020.
Using an analysis of voter files by the firm TargetSmart, the report studied the 64.8 million voters who cast ballots last year in the 11 states where Way to Win focused its efforts: a Sun Belt–heavy list that includes Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina, and Florida in the Southeast; Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, and Texas in the Southwest; and Minnesota, Michigan, and Pennsylvania in the Rust Belt.
TargetSmart projects that nearly 41 million of the voters in those states turned out in all three of the most recent elections—2016, 2018, and 2020—and that those dependable voters split almost exactly in half between Biden and Trump. The firm sees little opportunity for moving those voters through persuasion efforts, writing that they “are polarized, deeply entrenched, partisan base voters.” Only about one in seven of these habitual voters, TargetSmart concludes, might be genuinely persuadable from election to election.
Instead, the report argues that the Democratic Party has greater opportunity among less reliable voters. Despite Trump’s own success at energizing infrequent voters, the study found that in these crucial states, Biden actually generated more support from voters who turn out only occasionally.
Across the 11 states, TargetSmart calculated, nearly 13 million 2020 voters participated in just two of the past three elections, and they preferred Biden 52 percent to 48 percent. Another 11.1 million 2020 voters did not vote in either 2018 or 2016, and they gave Biden an estimated advantage of 54 percent to 46 percent. Looking beyond these infrequent voters, the study found that another nearly 25 million registered adults did not vote in any of the three most recent elections, and they model as more Democratic- than Republican-leaning in all 11 states.
These concentric circles of irregular voters—especially those who have now turned out to oppose Trump or his party in either 2018 or 2020, or both—represent the Democrats’ best chance of expanding their support, and contesting new states, in the years ahead, the report argues. “To expand the Democratic base with a durable coalition,” the report maintains, all of these infrequent voters “must be invited to become more habitual voters who consistently break for Democrats. Democrats cannot afford a scarcity mindset where we only talk to high-frequency ‘persuadable’ voters in 2022.”
David A. Graham: The Democrats’ greatest delusion
Even as it flags that opportunity, the Way to Win study echoes other Democratic analysts who have seen signs through Biden’s first months that Republicans may be preserving the unexpected gains Trump recorded among Latino voters, particularly men, and even (though fewer) Black voters. “In some ways this is a clarion call and a warning sign because it means that we need more investment and more work to figure out what is happening in these communities,” Gavito says. One lesson that’s clear already regarding Latinos, she says, is that emphasizing “a traditional Democratic message that’s centered on racial justice” without delivering improvement in material day-to-day conditions is “falling on deaf ears.”
The Way to Win report arrives amid another spasm in the perennial Democratic argument over whether the party’s future revolves more around the emerging electoral opportunities in the Sun Belt or restoring its strength in Rust Belt states such as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, and Iowa that have moved toward the GOP in the Trump era. That geographic argument also functions as a proxy for the party’s central demographic debate: whether Democrats should place more priority on recapturing non-college-educated white voters drawn to Trump or on maximizing support and turnout among their more recent coalition of young people, racial minorities, and college-educated white voters, particularly women.
On a national basis, white voters without a college degree for years have been supplying a shrinking share of Democrats’ total votes, both because those voters are declining as a percentage of the overall electorate (down about two percentage points every four years to roughly 40 percent now) and also because Democrats are winning fewer of them, especially in the Trump years.
But that national trend still leaves room for plenty of regional divergence that, in practice, commits Democrats to relying on both strategies, rather than choosing between them.
In the Rust Belt, party candidates have understandably devoted enormous effort to maintaining support among white voters without a college degree. That’s partly because in these states, minority populations are not growing nearly as quickly as in the Sun Belt, and those blue-collar white voters remain about half the electorate or more. But it’s also because a history of class consciousness and union activism has allowed Democrats to historically perform slightly better with working-class white voters in these states than elsewhere, even if that ceiling has lowered amid Trump’s overt appeals to racial resentment.
In the Sun Belt, non-college-educated white voters are both a smaller share of the electorate and more resistant to Democrats, in part because more of them than in the Rust Belt are evangelical Christians. (Although exit polls showed Biden winning about two in five non-college-educated white voters in Michigan, Wisconsin, and even Iowa, he carried only about one in five of them in North Carolina and Georgia and only about one in four in Texas.) Conversely, the opportunity for mobilization is greater in the Sun Belt—where people of color constitute a majority of the population turning 18 each year in many of the states—than in the Rust Belt. Given those political and demographic realities, most Democratic campaigns and candidates across the Sun Belt believe their future depends primarily on engaging younger and nonwhite voters—and the registration and turnout efforts led by Stacey Abrams in Georgia is the model they hope to emulate.
Fernandez Ancona says Way to Win isn’t calling for Democrats to abandon the Rust Belt, or to concede more working-class white voters to the GOP. Rather, she says, the group believes that party donors and campaigns must increase the resources devoted to “expansion” of the minority electorate so that it more closely matches the greater sums already devoted to the “persuasion” of mostly white swing voters.
“I don’t think it’s expansion versus persuasion: It’s that we have to prioritize expansion just as we have historically prioritized persuasion,” she says. “We saw that in 2020. It’s very clear: We needed it all.”
Read: Democrats’ 2024 problem is already clear
In fact, both Fernandez Ancona and Gavito argue, the entire debate over whether to stress recapturing more white voters or mobilizing more nonwhite voters obscures the party’s actual challenge: finding ways to unify a coalition that is inherently more multiracial and multigenerational than the Republicans’. Even with Trump’s gains among some minority voters, white voters still supplied almost 92 percent of his votes across these 11 states, the analysis found. Biden’s contrasting coalition was much more diverse: just under 60 percent white and more than 40 percent nonwhite.
“Sometimes we are missing the whole and we are not grasping that the multiracial coalition includes white people and people of color, and we have to hold that coalition together,” Fernandez Ancona says. “Thinking about the whole coalition [means] we have to find messages that unite around a shared vision that includes cross-racial solidarity.”
One of those messages, Gavito says, is boosting economically strained families of all races with the kind of kitchen-table programs embedded in the Democrats’ big budget-reconciliation bill, such as tax credits for children, lower prescription-drug prices, and increased subsidies for health- and child-care expenses. Those “programs are very important at this stage,” she says, to give Democrats any chance of avoiding the usual midterm losses for the president’s party, “that’s for damn sure.”
On that point, Biden and almost every Democrat in both the House and the Senate agree. But unless they can also persuade Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona to pass the bill, debates about the Sun Belt versus the Rust Belt, or white versus nonwhite voters, may be washed away by a tide of disapproval from all of those directions.
What Democrats Need to Understand About the Changing Electorate
Ronald Brownstein
11-14 minutes
How the president’s party can avoid a midterm blowout
Cassidy Araiza / The New York Times / Redux
Follow the sun. That’s the advice to Democrats from a leading party fundraising organization in an exhaustive analysis of the electoral landscape released today.
The study, from the group Way to Win, provided exclusively to The Atlantic, argues that to solidify their position in Congress and the Electoral College, Democrats must increase their investment and focus on Sun Belt states that have become more politically competitive over recent years as they have grown more urbanized and racially diverse. “The majority of new, likely Democratic voters live in the South and Southwest, places the Democratic establishment have long ignored or are just waking up to now,” the group argues in the report.
Read: What does the Democratic Party stand for?
The study, focusing on 11 battleground states, is as much a warning as an exhortation. It contends that although the key to contesting Sun Belt states such as North Carolina, Georgia, Texas, and Arizona is to sustain engagement among the largely nonwhite infrequent voters who turned out in huge numbers in 2018 and 2020, it also warns that Republicans could consolidate Donald Trump’s gains last year among some minority voters, particularly Latino men. “These trends across our multiracial coalition demonstrate the urgent need for campaigns and independent groups to stop assuming voters of color will vote Democrat,” the report asserts.
The study echoes the findings of other Democratic strategists such as Mike Podhorzer, the longtime political director of the AFL-CIO, in arguing that the Democrats’ best chance to avoid the usual midterm losses is to turn out large numbers of those surge voters next year.
“If all the consultants in the Democratic Party do is follow their same playbook, which is talking only to the most likely voters, or really focusing on white voters or white non-college voters, Democrats will likely lose,” says Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, Way to Win’s vice president and chief strategy officer. “The big message for us is that the core strategy of the 2022 midterm [should be] about engineering and expanding enthusiasm among this high-potential multiracial, multigenerational base that is really a critical part of the electorate across the Sun Belt states.”
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Way to Win was founded by Fernandez Acona and the Democratic operatives Tory Gavito and Leah Hunt-Hendrix after the 2016 election to channel more funding from Democratic donors into organizations and campaigns that focus on voters of color. Their work, which they say has raised $165 million so far, has centered on Sun Belt states, but has also included investments in diversifying urban and suburban areas in other regions, says Gavito, who now serves as Way to Win’s president and CEO. Among the groups Way to Win has funded are grassroots organizations in Georgia and Arizona that are widely credited for the robust minority turnout that helped President Joe Biden flip both of those states last November.
The key analytical insight in the new report is its attempt to quantify the stakes for Democrats in continuing to engage the infrequent voters who flocked to the polls in 2020.
Using an analysis of voter files by the firm TargetSmart, the report studied the 64.8 million voters who cast ballots last year in the 11 states where Way to Win focused its efforts: a Sun Belt–heavy list that includes Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina, and Florida in the Southeast; Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, and Texas in the Southwest; and Minnesota, Michigan, and Pennsylvania in the Rust Belt.
TargetSmart projects that nearly 41 million of the voters in those states turned out in all three of the most recent elections—2016, 2018, and 2020—and that those dependable voters split almost exactly in half between Biden and Trump. The firm sees little opportunity for moving those voters through persuasion efforts, writing that they “are polarized, deeply entrenched, partisan base voters.” Only about one in seven of these habitual voters, TargetSmart concludes, might be genuinely persuadable from election to election.
Instead, the report argues that the Democratic Party has greater opportunity among less reliable voters. Despite Trump’s own success at energizing infrequent voters, the study found that in these crucial states, Biden actually generated more support from voters who turn out only occasionally.
Across the 11 states, TargetSmart calculated, nearly 13 million 2020 voters participated in just two of the past three elections, and they preferred Biden 52 percent to 48 percent. Another 11.1 million 2020 voters did not vote in either 2018 or 2016, and they gave Biden an estimated advantage of 54 percent to 46 percent. Looking beyond these infrequent voters, the study found that another nearly 25 million registered adults did not vote in any of the three most recent elections, and they model as more Democratic- than Republican-leaning in all 11 states.
These concentric circles of irregular voters—especially those who have now turned out to oppose Trump or his party in either 2018 or 2020, or both—represent the Democrats’ best chance of expanding their support, and contesting new states, in the years ahead, the report argues. “To expand the Democratic base with a durable coalition,” the report maintains, all of these infrequent voters “must be invited to become more habitual voters who consistently break for Democrats. Democrats cannot afford a scarcity mindset where we only talk to high-frequency ‘persuadable’ voters in 2022.”
David A. Graham: The Democrats’ greatest delusion
Even as it flags that opportunity, the Way to Win study echoes other Democratic analysts who have seen signs through Biden’s first months that Republicans may be preserving the unexpected gains Trump recorded among Latino voters, particularly men, and even (though fewer) Black voters. “In some ways this is a clarion call and a warning sign because it means that we need more investment and more work to figure out what is happening in these communities,” Gavito says. One lesson that’s clear already regarding Latinos, she says, is that emphasizing “a traditional Democratic message that’s centered on racial justice” without delivering improvement in material day-to-day conditions is “falling on deaf ears.”
The Way to Win report arrives amid another spasm in the perennial Democratic argument over whether the party’s future revolves more around the emerging electoral opportunities in the Sun Belt or restoring its strength in Rust Belt states such as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, and Iowa that have moved toward the GOP in the Trump era. That geographic argument also functions as a proxy for the party’s central demographic debate: whether Democrats should place more priority on recapturing non-college-educated white voters drawn to Trump or on maximizing support and turnout among their more recent coalition of young people, racial minorities, and college-educated white voters, particularly women.
On a national basis, white voters without a college degree for years have been supplying a shrinking share of Democrats’ total votes, both because those voters are declining as a percentage of the overall electorate (down about two percentage points every four years to roughly 40 percent now) and also because Democrats are winning fewer of them, especially in the Trump years.
But that national trend still leaves room for plenty of regional divergence that, in practice, commits Democrats to relying on both strategies, rather than choosing between them.
In the Rust Belt, party candidates have understandably devoted enormous effort to maintaining support among white voters without a college degree. That’s partly because in these states, minority populations are not growing nearly as quickly as in the Sun Belt, and those blue-collar white voters remain about half the electorate or more. But it’s also because a history of class consciousness and union activism has allowed Democrats to historically perform slightly better with working-class white voters in these states than elsewhere, even if that ceiling has lowered amid Trump’s overt appeals to racial resentment.
In the Sun Belt, non-college-educated white voters are both a smaller share of the electorate and more resistant to Democrats, in part because more of them than in the Rust Belt are evangelical Christians. (Although exit polls showed Biden winning about two in five non-college-educated white voters in Michigan, Wisconsin, and even Iowa, he carried only about one in five of them in North Carolina and Georgia and only about one in four in Texas.) Conversely, the opportunity for mobilization is greater in the Sun Belt—where people of color constitute a majority of the population turning 18 each year in many of the states—than in the Rust Belt. Given those political and demographic realities, most Democratic campaigns and candidates across the Sun Belt believe their future depends primarily on engaging younger and nonwhite voters—and the registration and turnout efforts led by Stacey Abrams in Georgia is the model they hope to emulate.
Fernandez Ancona says Way to Win isn’t calling for Democrats to abandon the Rust Belt, or to concede more working-class white voters to the GOP. Rather, she says, the group believes that party donors and campaigns must increase the resources devoted to “expansion” of the minority electorate so that it more closely matches the greater sums already devoted to the “persuasion” of mostly white swing voters.
“I don’t think it’s expansion versus persuasion: It’s that we have to prioritize expansion just as we have historically prioritized persuasion,” she says. “We saw that in 2020. It’s very clear: We needed it all.”
Read: Democrats’ 2024 problem is already clear
In fact, both Fernandez Ancona and Gavito argue, the entire debate over whether to stress recapturing more white voters or mobilizing more nonwhite voters obscures the party’s actual challenge: finding ways to unify a coalition that is inherently more multiracial and multigenerational than the Republicans’. Even with Trump’s gains among some minority voters, white voters still supplied almost 92 percent of his votes across these 11 states, the analysis found. Biden’s contrasting coalition was much more diverse: just under 60 percent white and more than 40 percent nonwhite.
“Sometimes we are missing the whole and we are not grasping that the multiracial coalition includes white people and people of color, and we have to hold that coalition together,” Fernandez Ancona says. “Thinking about the whole coalition [means] we have to find messages that unite around a shared vision that includes cross-racial solidarity.”
One of those messages, Gavito says, is boosting economically strained families of all races with the kind of kitchen-table programs embedded in the Democrats’ big budget-reconciliation bill, such as tax credits for children, lower prescription-drug prices, and increased subsidies for health- and child-care expenses. Those “programs are very important at this stage,” she says, to give Democrats any chance of avoiding the usual midterm losses for the president’s party, “that’s for damn sure.”
On that point, Biden and almost every Democrat in both the House and the Senate agree. But unless they can also persuade Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona to pass the bill, debates about the Sun Belt versus the Rust Belt, or white versus nonwhite voters, may be washed away by a tide of disapproval from all of those directions.
Thread:
Thread by @grapesmoker on Thread Reader App
since we're doing race and elections discourse again i want to say, predictably, that the shor-yglesias consensus on this is stupid and unworkable even by their own standards. it's wrong because it's fundamentally unresponsive to the conditions under which politics happens today
the basic idea of shor-yglesias thought is that democrats should "lower the salience" of race in elections. they both say this outright, shor explicitly says he wants to go back to the halcyon days of obama 2012. that won't, *can't* work
(this isn't my gloss, this is their own words)
the most basic problem that this runs into is that race is just this huge axis around which just about everything in american history turns. if you want to know why X is the way it is for almost any value of X, a likely reason is racism
because it's such a huge gravitational attractor in the political space, so to speak, everything orbits it. things that (ostensibly) have nothing to do with race become racialized in short order
housing, transit, medical care, finance, climate. you name it, there's a racial cleavage around it. who gets the benefits and who eats the shyt is determined in large part by race and, of course, class, which is itself racialized in various ways
this plays very well into the conservative electioneering logic, which is to constantly tell white people that they're being robbed to give free stuff undeserving black people. we're in god knows what decade of this shyt now and it just ratchets up every year
the idea that somehow democrats can just unilaterally reverse this trends or affect this strategy is, to put it in the kindest possible terms, wishful thinking. it's completely disconnected from reality
this is not, of course, to say that broadly speaking democrats should not try to enact universal programs that benefit everyone. it's just to say that those programs will themselves become racialized as long as racism wins enough elections
"but but obama 2012"
the context in which barack obama ran against romney in the 2012 election is wildly different than the context in which the politics of the present day is happening. like, I don't think i need to elaborate more on this, it should be obvious
joe biden is about as close to an obama 2012 as you can get! he was there! and peep what the right wing reaction is. this machine only runs in one direction and it's not responsive to input from the left
furthermore while it's nice to think about obama 2012 there was also obama 2010 and 2014 and that... did not work out, to say the least! like, why are we pretending that we didn't all live this experiment in real time
on top of all of this, you cannot ask for the votes of the affected groups and then tell them to fukk off after. well, you *could* but we have now seen where that gets you. so if your black constituents ask you what you've done for them either you lie and lose them or...
you answer honestly and provide further grist for the right-wing mill. except if you do the first part the mill will just find some other thing to grind into white grievance. you can't win by pandering to it
SY thought would be objectionable even if one could count on it to work, but it's a failure even on its own terms. it's a dead end as a political project. nobody is listening to any of this, the events are too far ahead of them
there are no magic incantations or "strategies" that are going to allow you to navigate past the part where you have to actually *do politics* by exercising whatever power you have. SY imagine that words can substitute for action, but they can't
i mean, dems *have* the trifecta and they're allowing it to be wrecked by shytheels like machin and sinema and gottheimer instead of imposing party discipline. they can't even herd their own cats and they're going to somehow "muzzle" (that word!) activists?! come the fukk on
i don't know what to say, i don't have any magical answers either, my hot take is do the best you can with what you got but we're not even doing that. solving tertiary problems like "some activist is saying defund the police and i don't like it" is just fantasy
i guess my last point is that it doesn't matter what we say on the bird app or what white papers get written at brookings, none of that is going to get ahead of the actual change that's happening before our eyes
we're riding a complicated secular process & we don't really understand all the ways in which it evolves. i get the feeling of disorientation and the need to form some sort of theory to make sense of it, but thinking you're going to get a grip on this tiger is delusional
Thread by @grapesmoker on Thread Reader App
since we're doing race and elections discourse again i want to say, predictably, that the shor-yglesias consensus on this is stupid and unworkable even by their own standards. it's wrong because it's fundamentally unresponsive to the conditions under which politics happens today
the basic idea of shor-yglesias thought is that democrats should "lower the salience" of race in elections. they both say this outright, shor explicitly says he wants to go back to the halcyon days of obama 2012. that won't, *can't* work
(this isn't my gloss, this is their own words)
the most basic problem that this runs into is that race is just this huge axis around which just about everything in american history turns. if you want to know why X is the way it is for almost any value of X, a likely reason is racism
because it's such a huge gravitational attractor in the political space, so to speak, everything orbits it. things that (ostensibly) have nothing to do with race become racialized in short order
housing, transit, medical care, finance, climate. you name it, there's a racial cleavage around it. who gets the benefits and who eats the shyt is determined in large part by race and, of course, class, which is itself racialized in various ways
this plays very well into the conservative electioneering logic, which is to constantly tell white people that they're being robbed to give free stuff undeserving black people. we're in god knows what decade of this shyt now and it just ratchets up every year
the idea that somehow democrats can just unilaterally reverse this trends or affect this strategy is, to put it in the kindest possible terms, wishful thinking. it's completely disconnected from reality
this is not, of course, to say that broadly speaking democrats should not try to enact universal programs that benefit everyone. it's just to say that those programs will themselves become racialized as long as racism wins enough elections
"but but obama 2012"
the context in which barack obama ran against romney in the 2012 election is wildly different than the context in which the politics of the present day is happening. like, I don't think i need to elaborate more on this, it should be obvious
joe biden is about as close to an obama 2012 as you can get! he was there! and peep what the right wing reaction is. this machine only runs in one direction and it's not responsive to input from the left
furthermore while it's nice to think about obama 2012 there was also obama 2010 and 2014 and that... did not work out, to say the least! like, why are we pretending that we didn't all live this experiment in real time
on top of all of this, you cannot ask for the votes of the affected groups and then tell them to fukk off after. well, you *could* but we have now seen where that gets you. so if your black constituents ask you what you've done for them either you lie and lose them or...
you answer honestly and provide further grist for the right-wing mill. except if you do the first part the mill will just find some other thing to grind into white grievance. you can't win by pandering to it
SY thought would be objectionable even if one could count on it to work, but it's a failure even on its own terms. it's a dead end as a political project. nobody is listening to any of this, the events are too far ahead of them
there are no magic incantations or "strategies" that are going to allow you to navigate past the part where you have to actually *do politics* by exercising whatever power you have. SY imagine that words can substitute for action, but they can't
i mean, dems *have* the trifecta and they're allowing it to be wrecked by shytheels like machin and sinema and gottheimer instead of imposing party discipline. they can't even herd their own cats and they're going to somehow "muzzle" (that word!) activists?! come the fukk on
i don't know what to say, i don't have any magical answers either, my hot take is do the best you can with what you got but we're not even doing that. solving tertiary problems like "some activist is saying defund the police and i don't like it" is just fantasy
i guess my last point is that it doesn't matter what we say on the bird app or what white papers get written at brookings, none of that is going to get ahead of the actual change that's happening before our eyes
we're riding a complicated secular process & we don't really understand all the ways in which it evolves. i get the feeling of disorientation and the need to form some sort of theory to make sense of it, but thinking you're going to get a grip on this tiger is delusional
At this point I've just accepted that the Dems are screwed and the GOP will be in power for decades after 2022. I just don't see any way around it 
Hopefully they at least get something done on climate change, since it's an existential threat to humanity and all, but I'm not optimistic on that. It is what it is, I'm checking out.
Hopefully they at least get something done on climate change, since it's an existential threat to humanity and all, but I'm not optimistic on that. It is what it is, I'm checking out.