How will Joe Biden GOVERN? General Biden Administration F**kery Thread
- Thread starter FAH1223
- Start date
ADevilYouKhow
Rhyme Reason
Test it on himself
The axe murderer
For I am death and I ride on a pale horse
Manchin is a legit mole
ZoeGod
I’m from Brooklyn a place where stars are born.
At this point Manchin is nothing more than a Republican. People were saying after Biden won that he wouldn't be a problem and yet here we are. Manchin and Sinema are going to be the biggest reason why democracy is dead in this country.
The axe murderer
For I am death and I ride on a pale horse
He wants bipartisan support, on a bill people are trying to pass because republicans are making it harder to vote…
This does not compute
Corny Batman
Caped Crusader
Been saying this for ages.
Manchin is basically running interference for centrist dems across the board and he doesn't give a fukk.
The entire bipartisan schtick is a little off to be honest.He wants bipartisan support, on a bill people are trying to pass because republicans are making it harder to vote…
This does not compute
You can pass legislation that introduces initiatives that Republican voters like even if their representatives aren't acting in good faith.
Biden dropped the bag for black farmers.
Trump is trying to make sure black farmers DONT get that money.
#BothSides, tho right?
On behalf of white farmers, Trump allies wage legal war against equity
On behalf of white farmers, Trump allies wage legal war against equity
Black farmers say reverse discrimination has never been evident in their industry — but that may not stop the idea of it from being used to upend civil rights law.
Jonathan Allen is a senior national politics reporter for NBC News, based in Washington.
June 6, 2021, 12:31 PM EDT
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are engaged in an intensifying proxy war over race and farming that could have much broader implications for the federal government's ability to direct aid to people of color.
The fight is centered on which farmers get taxpayer help at a time when Biden has pledged to focus on equity and reversing systemic injustices across federal programs. Trump's allies argue that the same criteria long used to discriminate against farmers of color — race and ethnicity — can't be employed to make them exclusively eligible for federal programs.
Whites have civil rights, too, they say in a lawsuit filed in federal court in Texas.
For Black farmers and civil rights groups, that's a proposition that defies reality — and yet they are taking it very seriously, with generations of civil rights law potentially in the balance.
"How is it OK for the government to harm on one hand but not to remedy on the other hand?" Cornelius Blanding, executive director of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, said. Still, he said, Black farmers are worried that a federal court could block all programs that direct aid to farmers of color. If that happens, it only makes sense that federal programs aimed at assisting people of color outside of Agriculture law will be next on the target list.
"We're concerned...you never know how it's going to go," Blanding said, adding that if you're a Black farmer "you have seen that things didn't always work in your favor."
Under Trump, the vast and disproportionate majority of trade-war-related relief money went to non-Hispanic white farmers — about 99.4 percent, according to one study. Biden's $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan set aside about $5 billion to wipe away the debts of Black, Hispanic and Asian farmers while providing them with another $1 billion in technical assistance.
"The effort to assist Black farmers comes after decades of systemic discrimination and exclusion," said Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League, said in a statement to NBC News. "Throughout the 20th century, Black farmers were denied the loans and subsidies available to white farmers, and untold generational wealth has been lost as a result.”
Now, former Trump aides are suing to block the Biden administration from spending that money. They say that reserving aid for "socially disadvantaged" farmers — defined by federal law as members of groups that have faced racial or ethnic discrimination — amounts to unconstitutional reverse-discrimination against whites.
"This is a landmark civil rights case," Stephen Miller, head of America First Legal and Trump's White House senior policy adviser, said in a statement Thursday. "The stakes in this case could not be higher: the government must not be allowed to use its awesome authorities to punish, harm, exclude, prefer, reward or damage its citizens based upon their race or ethnicity."
America First Legal did not respond to a request for an interview with Miller or other leaders of the Trump-centric group. The term "socially disadvantaged farmer" appears dozens of times in the 2018 farm law that Trump signed, and it dates back at least as far as the 1990 version signed by President George H.W. Bush. For grant programs, Trump favored including other groups that included whites — such as veterans and beginning farmers — in eligibility criteria.
The suit asks a federal judge in Texas to overturn not only that program but all agriculture laws that define social disadvantage in the same way. "The Court should declare unconstitutional any statute limiting the benefits of federal programs to 'socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers,'" the plaintiffs write in their complaint.
The Agriculture Department is racing to implement the debt-relief policy, according to Dewayne Goldmon, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack's senior adviser for racial equity.
"We’re just holding the accelerator to the floor," said Goldmon, who was the executive director of the National Black Growers Council until March. That's less about the lawsuit and more about "the urgency that’s been described to us as we’ve been out talking to these borrowers," Goldmon said in an interview Friday.
That effort is complicated by a dearth of demographic data on farmers and on federal farm lending by race.
Often, the federal government has been a tool of discrimination rather than equity, from promoting slavery to the injustices that led to the 1999 Pigford settlement, which has made some farmers reluctant to self-identify by race or ethnicity.
Experts estimate that there are less than 50,000 Black farmers in the U.S., down from closer to 1 million a century ago.
In early May, USDA sent out forms to farmers to try to ascertain which borrowers qualify as members of a socially disadvantaged group.
Now, the department is moving into a phase in which a second set of letters go out to about 13,000 individual farmers explaining that they are eligible for the program and checking the details of the loans they received from the federal government. Most of those debts could be erased within a couple of months. In a second wave, USDA plans to dispose of a few thousand guaranteed loans, which tend to be larger and more complex.
But all of that could come to a halt even more quickly than it started. In addition to the underlying suit, America First Legal filed a motion asking the judge to issue a preliminary injunction against USDA awarding aid on the basis of race or ethnicity.
"A preliminary injunction will not compel the defendants to withhold loan forgiveness from minority farmers and ranchers; it will merely require them to award loan forgiveness to farmers and ranchers without any regard to race," America First's lawyers wrote in a brief. "The defendants will have a choice in whether to respond to the proposed injunction by extending loan forgiveness to all farmers and ranchers, or whether to respond by withholding loan forgiveness from everyone."
For Black farmers and their advocates, the difficulty in getting aid is nothing new.
"A lot of the improvements in equality that have been made over the years didn't come easily," Goldmon said, noting that his great-grandfather was born a slave and his grandfather was born on a plantation. He said he believes the administration will prevail in court.
"I have full confidence in the Department of Justice," he said.
Trump is trying to make sure black farmers DONT get that money.
#BothSides, tho right?
On behalf of white farmers, Trump allies wage legal war against equity
On behalf of white farmers, Trump allies wage legal war against equity
Black farmers say reverse discrimination has never been evident in their industry — but that may not stop the idea of it from being used to upend civil rights law.
Jonathan Allen is a senior national politics reporter for NBC News, based in Washington.
June 6, 2021, 12:31 PM EDT
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are engaged in an intensifying proxy war over race and farming that could have much broader implications for the federal government's ability to direct aid to people of color.
The fight is centered on which farmers get taxpayer help at a time when Biden has pledged to focus on equity and reversing systemic injustices across federal programs. Trump's allies argue that the same criteria long used to discriminate against farmers of color — race and ethnicity — can't be employed to make them exclusively eligible for federal programs.
Whites have civil rights, too, they say in a lawsuit filed in federal court in Texas.
For Black farmers and civil rights groups, that's a proposition that defies reality — and yet they are taking it very seriously, with generations of civil rights law potentially in the balance.
"How is it OK for the government to harm on one hand but not to remedy on the other hand?" Cornelius Blanding, executive director of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, said. Still, he said, Black farmers are worried that a federal court could block all programs that direct aid to farmers of color. If that happens, it only makes sense that federal programs aimed at assisting people of color outside of Agriculture law will be next on the target list.
"We're concerned...you never know how it's going to go," Blanding said, adding that if you're a Black farmer "you have seen that things didn't always work in your favor."
Under Trump, the vast and disproportionate majority of trade-war-related relief money went to non-Hispanic white farmers — about 99.4 percent, according to one study. Biden's $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan set aside about $5 billion to wipe away the debts of Black, Hispanic and Asian farmers while providing them with another $1 billion in technical assistance.
"The effort to assist Black farmers comes after decades of systemic discrimination and exclusion," said Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League, said in a statement to NBC News. "Throughout the 20th century, Black farmers were denied the loans and subsidies available to white farmers, and untold generational wealth has been lost as a result.”
Now, former Trump aides are suing to block the Biden administration from spending that money. They say that reserving aid for "socially disadvantaged" farmers — defined by federal law as members of groups that have faced racial or ethnic discrimination — amounts to unconstitutional reverse-discrimination against whites.
"This is a landmark civil rights case," Stephen Miller, head of America First Legal and Trump's White House senior policy adviser, said in a statement Thursday. "The stakes in this case could not be higher: the government must not be allowed to use its awesome authorities to punish, harm, exclude, prefer, reward or damage its citizens based upon their race or ethnicity."
America First Legal did not respond to a request for an interview with Miller or other leaders of the Trump-centric group. The term "socially disadvantaged farmer" appears dozens of times in the 2018 farm law that Trump signed, and it dates back at least as far as the 1990 version signed by President George H.W. Bush. For grant programs, Trump favored including other groups that included whites — such as veterans and beginning farmers — in eligibility criteria.
The suit asks a federal judge in Texas to overturn not only that program but all agriculture laws that define social disadvantage in the same way. "The Court should declare unconstitutional any statute limiting the benefits of federal programs to 'socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers,'" the plaintiffs write in their complaint.
The Agriculture Department is racing to implement the debt-relief policy, according to Dewayne Goldmon, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack's senior adviser for racial equity.
"We’re just holding the accelerator to the floor," said Goldmon, who was the executive director of the National Black Growers Council until March. That's less about the lawsuit and more about "the urgency that’s been described to us as we’ve been out talking to these borrowers," Goldmon said in an interview Friday.
That effort is complicated by a dearth of demographic data on farmers and on federal farm lending by race.
Often, the federal government has been a tool of discrimination rather than equity, from promoting slavery to the injustices that led to the 1999 Pigford settlement, which has made some farmers reluctant to self-identify by race or ethnicity.
Experts estimate that there are less than 50,000 Black farmers in the U.S., down from closer to 1 million a century ago.
In early May, USDA sent out forms to farmers to try to ascertain which borrowers qualify as members of a socially disadvantaged group.
Now, the department is moving into a phase in which a second set of letters go out to about 13,000 individual farmers explaining that they are eligible for the program and checking the details of the loans they received from the federal government. Most of those debts could be erased within a couple of months. In a second wave, USDA plans to dispose of a few thousand guaranteed loans, which tend to be larger and more complex.
But all of that could come to a halt even more quickly than it started. In addition to the underlying suit, America First Legal filed a motion asking the judge to issue a preliminary injunction against USDA awarding aid on the basis of race or ethnicity.
"A preliminary injunction will not compel the defendants to withhold loan forgiveness from minority farmers and ranchers; it will merely require them to award loan forgiveness to farmers and ranchers without any regard to race," America First's lawyers wrote in a brief. "The defendants will have a choice in whether to respond to the proposed injunction by extending loan forgiveness to all farmers and ranchers, or whether to respond by withholding loan forgiveness from everyone."
For Black farmers and their advocates, the difficulty in getting aid is nothing new.
"A lot of the improvements in equality that have been made over the years didn't come easily," Goldmon said, noting that his great-grandfather was born a slave and his grandfather was born on a plantation. He said he believes the administration will prevail in court.
"I have full confidence in the Department of Justice," he said.
ADevilYouKhow
Rhyme Reason
Democratic Report Raises 2022 Alarms on Messaging and Voter Outreach
Democratic Report Raises 2022 Alarms on Messaging and Voter Outreach
A new report, in perhaps the most thorough soul-searching done by either party this year, points to an urgent need for the party to present a positive economic agenda and rebut Republican misinformation.
June 6, 2021Updated 12:29 p.m. ET
President Biden and Jill Biden at the White House on Friday. Despite Mr. Biden’s success last year, Democrats had hoped to achieve far more robust control of both chambers of Congress.Erin Scott for The New York Times
Democrats defeated President Donald J. Trump and captured the Senate last year with a racially diverse coalition that delivered victories by tiny margins in key states like Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin.
In the next election, they cannot count on repeating that feat, a new report warns.
A review of the 2020 election, conducted by several prominent Democratic advocacy groups, has concluded that the party is at risk of losing ground with Black, Hispanic and Asian American voters unless it does a better job presenting an economic agenda and countering Republican efforts to spread misinformation and tie all Democratic candidates to the far left.
The 73-page report, obtained by The New York Times, was assembled at the behest of three major Democratic interest groups: Third Way, a centrist think tank, and the Collective PAC and the Latino Victory Fund, which promote Black and Hispanic candidates. It appears to be the most thorough act of self-criticism carried out by Democrats or Republicans after the last campaign.
The document is all the more striking because it is addressed to a victorious party: Despite their successes, Democrats had hoped to achieve more robust control of both chambers of Congress, rather than the ultra-precarious margins they enjoy.
In part, the study found, Democrats fell short of their aspirations because many House and Senate candidates failed to match Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s support with voters of color who loathed Mr. Trump but distrusted the Democratic Party as a whole. Those constituencies included Hispanic voters in Florida and Texas, Vietnamese American and Filipino American voters in California, and Black voters in North Carolina.
Overall, the report warns, Democrats in 2020 lacked a core argument about the economy and recovering from the coronavirus pandemic — one that might have helped candidates repel Republican claims that they wanted to “keep the economy shut down,” or worse. The party “leaned too heavily on ‘anti-Trump’ rhetoric,” the report concludes.
“Win or lose, self-described progressive or moderate, Democrats consistently raised a lack of strong Democratic Party brand as a significant concern in 2020,” the report states. “In the absence of strong party branding, the opposition latched on to G.O.P. talking points, suggesting our candidates would ‘burn down your house and take away the police.’”
Former Representative Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a Democrat who lost re-electionin South Florida in November, said in an interview that she had spoken with the authors of the report and raised concerns about Democratic outreach to Hispanic voters and the party’s failure to rebut misinformation in Spanish-language media.
“Unfortunately, the Democratic Party has in some ways lost touch with our electorate,” Ms. Mucarsel-Powell said. “There is this assumption that of course people of color, or the working class, are going to vote for Democrats. We can never assume anything.”
The report, chiefly written by a pair of veteran Democratic operatives, Marlon Marshall and Lynda Tran, is among the most significant salvos yet in the Democratic Party’s internal debate about how it should approach the 2022 elections. It may stir skepticism from some quarters because of the involvement of Third Way, which much of the left regards with hostility.
A fourth group that initially backed the study, the campaign finance reform group End Citizens United, backed away this spring. Tiffany Muller, the head of the group, said it had to abandon its involvement to focus instead on passing the For the People Act, a sweeping good-government bill that is stuck in the Senate.
Former Representative Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a Democrat, lost re-election in South Florida last year. She remains worried about her party’s outreach to Hispanic voters.Saul Martinez for The New York Times
Mr. Marshall and Ms. Tran, as well as the groups sponsoring the review, have begun to share its conclusions with Democratic lawmakers and party officials in recent days, including Jaime Harrison, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
The study spanned nearly six months of research and data analysis that scrutinized about three dozen races for the House and the Senate, and involved interviews with 143 people, including lawmakers, candidates and pollsters, people involved in assembling the report said. Among the campaigns reviewed were the Senate elections in Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina, as well as House races in the suburbs of Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Dallas, and in rural New Mexico and Maine.
The study follows an internal review conducted by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee that was unveiled last month. Both projects found that Democratic candidates had been hobbled by flawed polling and pandemic-imposed limitations on campaigning.
In the D.C.C.C. report, the committee attributed setbacks at the congressional level to a surge in turnout by Trump supporters and an inadequate Democratic response to attacks calling them police-hating socialists.
Some lawmakers on the left have complained that criticism of left-wing messaging amounts to scapegoating activists for the party’s failures.
Yet the review by Third Way, the Collective PAC and the Latino Victory Fund goes further in diagnosing the party’s messaging as deficient in ways that may have cost Democrats more than a dozen seats in the House. Its report offers a blunt assessment that in 2020, Republicans succeeded in misleading voters about the Democratic Party’s agenda and that Democrats had erred by speaking to voters of color as though they are a monolithic, left-leaning group.
Representative Tony Cárdenas of California, who last year helmed the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’s political action committee, embraced that critique of Democratic messaging and said the party should discard the assumption “that voters of color are inherently more progressive.”
“That’s been a ridiculous idea and that’s never been true,” Mr. Cárdenas said, lamenting that Republicans had succeeded in “trying to confuse Latino voters with the socialism message, things of that nature, ‘defund the police.’”
Quentin James, the president of the Collective PAC, said it was clear that “some of the rhetoric we see from coastal Democrats” had been problematic. Mr. James pointed to the activist demand to “defund” the police as especially harmful, even with supporters of policing overhauls.
“We did a poll that showed Black voters, by and large, vastly support reforming the police and reallocating their budgets,” Mr. James said. “That terminology — ‘defund’ — was not popular in the Black community.”
A report by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee attributed the party’s setbacks to a surge in turnout by Trump supporters and an inadequate Democratic response to Republican attacks.Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times
Kara Eastman, a progressive Democrat who lost her bid for a House seat based in Omaha, said Republicans had succeeded in delivering a “barrage of messages” that tarred her and her party as being outside the mainstream. Ms. Eastman said she had told the authors of the 2020 review that she believed those labels were particularly damaging to women.
Matt Bennett, a Third Way strategist, said the party needed to be far better prepared to mount a defense in the midterm campaign.
“We have got to take very seriously these attacks on Democrats as radicals and stipulate that they land,” Mr. Bennett said. “A lot of this just didn’t land on Joe Biden.”
Democrats maintained a large advantage with voters of color in the 2020 elections, but the report identified telling areas of weakness. Mr. Biden and other Democrats lost ground with Latino voters relative to the party’s performance in 2016, “especially among working-class and non-college voters in these communities,” the report found.
The report found that a surge in Asian American turnout appeared to have secured Mr. Biden’s victory in Georgia but that Democratic House candidates ran behind Mr. Biden with Asian American voters in contested California and Texas races. In some important states, Democrats did not mobilize Black voters at the same rate that Republicans did conservative white voters.
“A substantial boost in turnout netted Democrats more raw votes from Black voters than in 2016, but the explosive growth among white voters in most races outpaced these gains,” the report warns.
There has been no comparable self-review on the Republican side after the party’s severe setbacks last year, mainly because G.O.P. leaders have no appetite for a debate about Mr. Trump’s impact.
Republicans will continue to have structural advantages in Washington because of congressional gerrymandering and the disproportionate representation of rural white voters in the Senate and the Electoral College. Erin Scott for The New York Times
The Republican Party faces serious political obstacles, arising from Mr. Trump’s unpopularity, the growing liberalism of young voters and the country’s growing diversity. Many of the party’s policies are unpopular, including cutting social-welfare and retirement-security programs and keeping taxes low for the wealthy and big corporations.
Yet the structure of the American electoral system has tilted national campaigns toward the G.O.P., because of congressional gerrymandering and the disproportionate representation of rural white voters in the Senate and the Electoral College.
Democratic hopes for the midterm elections have so far hinged on the prospect of a strong recovery from the coronavirus pandemic and on voters’ regarding Republicans as a party unsuited to governing.
Representative Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, a moderate Democrat who was briefed on the findings of the report, called it proof that the party needed a strong central message about the economy in 2022.
“We need to continue to show the American people what we’ve done, and then talk incessantly across the country, in every town, about how Democrats are governing,” Ms. Sherrill said.
Largely unaddressed in the report is the immense deficit Democrats face among lower-income white voters. In its conclusion, however, Mr. Marshall and Ms. Tran write that Democrats need to deliver a message that includes working-class whites and matches the G.O.P.’s clear “collective gospel” about low taxes and military strength.
“Our gospel should be about championing all working people — including but not limited to white working people — and lifting up our values of opportunity, equity, inclusion,” they write.
Democratic Report Raises 2022 Alarms on Messaging and Voter Outreach
A new report, in perhaps the most thorough soul-searching done by either party this year, points to an urgent need for the party to present a positive economic agenda and rebut Republican misinformation.
June 6, 2021Updated 12:29 p.m. ET
President Biden and Jill Biden at the White House on Friday. Despite Mr. Biden’s success last year, Democrats had hoped to achieve far more robust control of both chambers of Congress.Erin Scott for The New York Times
Democrats defeated President Donald J. Trump and captured the Senate last year with a racially diverse coalition that delivered victories by tiny margins in key states like Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin.
In the next election, they cannot count on repeating that feat, a new report warns.
A review of the 2020 election, conducted by several prominent Democratic advocacy groups, has concluded that the party is at risk of losing ground with Black, Hispanic and Asian American voters unless it does a better job presenting an economic agenda and countering Republican efforts to spread misinformation and tie all Democratic candidates to the far left.
The 73-page report, obtained by The New York Times, was assembled at the behest of three major Democratic interest groups: Third Way, a centrist think tank, and the Collective PAC and the Latino Victory Fund, which promote Black and Hispanic candidates. It appears to be the most thorough act of self-criticism carried out by Democrats or Republicans after the last campaign.
The document is all the more striking because it is addressed to a victorious party: Despite their successes, Democrats had hoped to achieve more robust control of both chambers of Congress, rather than the ultra-precarious margins they enjoy.
In part, the study found, Democrats fell short of their aspirations because many House and Senate candidates failed to match Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s support with voters of color who loathed Mr. Trump but distrusted the Democratic Party as a whole. Those constituencies included Hispanic voters in Florida and Texas, Vietnamese American and Filipino American voters in California, and Black voters in North Carolina.
Overall, the report warns, Democrats in 2020 lacked a core argument about the economy and recovering from the coronavirus pandemic — one that might have helped candidates repel Republican claims that they wanted to “keep the economy shut down,” or worse. The party “leaned too heavily on ‘anti-Trump’ rhetoric,” the report concludes.
“Win or lose, self-described progressive or moderate, Democrats consistently raised a lack of strong Democratic Party brand as a significant concern in 2020,” the report states. “In the absence of strong party branding, the opposition latched on to G.O.P. talking points, suggesting our candidates would ‘burn down your house and take away the police.’”
Former Representative Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a Democrat who lost re-electionin South Florida in November, said in an interview that she had spoken with the authors of the report and raised concerns about Democratic outreach to Hispanic voters and the party’s failure to rebut misinformation in Spanish-language media.
“Unfortunately, the Democratic Party has in some ways lost touch with our electorate,” Ms. Mucarsel-Powell said. “There is this assumption that of course people of color, or the working class, are going to vote for Democrats. We can never assume anything.”
The report, chiefly written by a pair of veteran Democratic operatives, Marlon Marshall and Lynda Tran, is among the most significant salvos yet in the Democratic Party’s internal debate about how it should approach the 2022 elections. It may stir skepticism from some quarters because of the involvement of Third Way, which much of the left regards with hostility.
A fourth group that initially backed the study, the campaign finance reform group End Citizens United, backed away this spring. Tiffany Muller, the head of the group, said it had to abandon its involvement to focus instead on passing the For the People Act, a sweeping good-government bill that is stuck in the Senate.
Former Representative Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a Democrat, lost re-election in South Florida last year. She remains worried about her party’s outreach to Hispanic voters.Saul Martinez for The New York Times
Mr. Marshall and Ms. Tran, as well as the groups sponsoring the review, have begun to share its conclusions with Democratic lawmakers and party officials in recent days, including Jaime Harrison, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
The study spanned nearly six months of research and data analysis that scrutinized about three dozen races for the House and the Senate, and involved interviews with 143 people, including lawmakers, candidates and pollsters, people involved in assembling the report said. Among the campaigns reviewed were the Senate elections in Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina, as well as House races in the suburbs of Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Dallas, and in rural New Mexico and Maine.
The study follows an internal review conducted by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee that was unveiled last month. Both projects found that Democratic candidates had been hobbled by flawed polling and pandemic-imposed limitations on campaigning.
In the D.C.C.C. report, the committee attributed setbacks at the congressional level to a surge in turnout by Trump supporters and an inadequate Democratic response to attacks calling them police-hating socialists.
Some lawmakers on the left have complained that criticism of left-wing messaging amounts to scapegoating activists for the party’s failures.
Yet the review by Third Way, the Collective PAC and the Latino Victory Fund goes further in diagnosing the party’s messaging as deficient in ways that may have cost Democrats more than a dozen seats in the House. Its report offers a blunt assessment that in 2020, Republicans succeeded in misleading voters about the Democratic Party’s agenda and that Democrats had erred by speaking to voters of color as though they are a monolithic, left-leaning group.
Representative Tony Cárdenas of California, who last year helmed the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’s political action committee, embraced that critique of Democratic messaging and said the party should discard the assumption “that voters of color are inherently more progressive.”
“That’s been a ridiculous idea and that’s never been true,” Mr. Cárdenas said, lamenting that Republicans had succeeded in “trying to confuse Latino voters with the socialism message, things of that nature, ‘defund the police.’”
Quentin James, the president of the Collective PAC, said it was clear that “some of the rhetoric we see from coastal Democrats” had been problematic. Mr. James pointed to the activist demand to “defund” the police as especially harmful, even with supporters of policing overhauls.
“We did a poll that showed Black voters, by and large, vastly support reforming the police and reallocating their budgets,” Mr. James said. “That terminology — ‘defund’ — was not popular in the Black community.”
A report by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee attributed the party’s setbacks to a surge in turnout by Trump supporters and an inadequate Democratic response to Republican attacks.Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times
Kara Eastman, a progressive Democrat who lost her bid for a House seat based in Omaha, said Republicans had succeeded in delivering a “barrage of messages” that tarred her and her party as being outside the mainstream. Ms. Eastman said she had told the authors of the 2020 review that she believed those labels were particularly damaging to women.
Matt Bennett, a Third Way strategist, said the party needed to be far better prepared to mount a defense in the midterm campaign.
“We have got to take very seriously these attacks on Democrats as radicals and stipulate that they land,” Mr. Bennett said. “A lot of this just didn’t land on Joe Biden.”
Democrats maintained a large advantage with voters of color in the 2020 elections, but the report identified telling areas of weakness. Mr. Biden and other Democrats lost ground with Latino voters relative to the party’s performance in 2016, “especially among working-class and non-college voters in these communities,” the report found.
The report found that a surge in Asian American turnout appeared to have secured Mr. Biden’s victory in Georgia but that Democratic House candidates ran behind Mr. Biden with Asian American voters in contested California and Texas races. In some important states, Democrats did not mobilize Black voters at the same rate that Republicans did conservative white voters.
“A substantial boost in turnout netted Democrats more raw votes from Black voters than in 2016, but the explosive growth among white voters in most races outpaced these gains,” the report warns.
There has been no comparable self-review on the Republican side after the party’s severe setbacks last year, mainly because G.O.P. leaders have no appetite for a debate about Mr. Trump’s impact.
Republicans will continue to have structural advantages in Washington because of congressional gerrymandering and the disproportionate representation of rural white voters in the Senate and the Electoral College. Erin Scott for The New York Times
The Republican Party faces serious political obstacles, arising from Mr. Trump’s unpopularity, the growing liberalism of young voters and the country’s growing diversity. Many of the party’s policies are unpopular, including cutting social-welfare and retirement-security programs and keeping taxes low for the wealthy and big corporations.
Yet the structure of the American electoral system has tilted national campaigns toward the G.O.P., because of congressional gerrymandering and the disproportionate representation of rural white voters in the Senate and the Electoral College.
Democratic hopes for the midterm elections have so far hinged on the prospect of a strong recovery from the coronavirus pandemic and on voters’ regarding Republicans as a party unsuited to governing.
Representative Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, a moderate Democrat who was briefed on the findings of the report, called it proof that the party needed a strong central message about the economy in 2022.
“We need to continue to show the American people what we’ve done, and then talk incessantly across the country, in every town, about how Democrats are governing,” Ms. Sherrill said.
Largely unaddressed in the report is the immense deficit Democrats face among lower-income white voters. In its conclusion, however, Mr. Marshall and Ms. Tran write that Democrats need to deliver a message that includes working-class whites and matches the G.O.P.’s clear “collective gospel” about low taxes and military strength.
“Our gospel should be about championing all working people — including but not limited to white working people — and lifting up our values of opportunity, equity, inclusion,” they write.
