Jonathan V. Last had a thoughtful essay that asked the question, “What if Democrats do everything right and still lose?” He’s speaking about the Dems’ poor mid-term polling. Last describes polls showing that people who benefited from the Child Tax Credit passed by Democrats nonetheless favor Republicans going into 2022:
“Inside the Democrats’ American Rescue Plan was the most substantively pro-family agenda item in a generation: A child tax credit that put real money into the pocket of just about every family….The child tax credit was the ultimate kitchen-table issue. Then Republicans killed it. They own…the act of taking this money away from working families.”
Last feels that the current political moment isn’t actually about kitchen-table issues. He points to the Ohio Senate race between Democrat Tim Ryan and Republican Josh Mandel:
“The Ohio Democrat is running on jobs, healthcare, infrastructure, and national security. The Ohio Republican is running on Trump, abortion, Christian nationalist identity, guns, RINOS, the Bible, and bitcoin.”
If Tim Ryan loses this race, it won’t be because Dems are blowing off working-class voters by refusing to focus on the real, kitchen-table issues that affect their lives. It’s looking like the electorate has become entirely untethered to policy concerns and have reached a point of nihilism.
Despite this environment, let’s not impose arbitrary timelines on achieving success. Just ask newly minted Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. On to cartoons.
Same as it ever was:
Palin runs again:
Ukraine gives Putin a few new stories:
The definition of Red State has changed:
Will the Russian Army really fit in the smaller dolls?
Tiger returns:
The Democrats can’t really get their word in, partly because they don’t have a few easy catch phrase, rather they are really about policies and policies are complicated. So are solutions to problems. Thus inflation with its complex causes is a terrible problem for campaigner. In fact – it may be that some portion was caused by the money the US Govt doled out. But had we not doled out money at all, we’d have crashed for sure. And decades in business assures me that no one really knew just where to draw the line. But regardless of the stimulus packages we also have issues specific to real things. So oil and gas are up because of their issues, housing for different reasons and so forth. Even the cutting off of immigration legal and otherwise had its impact. So Dems have no easy counter to Republicans who just have to blame Biden.
But more problematical is the right wing press which has a narrative vs the MSM which does not. So Fox tells us that Biden has failed America and the MSM whines about inflation.