Category: Voter Turnout

Should Biden Run Again?

The Daily Escape:

Mesquite Dunes, Death Valley NP – November 2021 photo by Ed Kendall

Paul Campos asks: “Should Biden run again in 2024?” While Martin Longman asks what explains Joe Biden’s steep decline in the polls in the latter half of 2021?

Jonathan Chait has an idea:

“Nobody can say with any confidence if this fall can be reversed. Indeed, given the US’s steady job growth, nobody can ascertain exactly why the public has turned so sour so fast. Biden is like a patient wasting away from some undiagnosable disease. What is clear is that if the presidential election were held this fall, Biden would enter the contest as the decided underdog against Trump.”

All of us have been on the wrong side of failing someone’s unstated expectations. We didn’t know we were taking a test; we didn’t know our actions were being scored, and naturally, we failed. That’s where Biden is today. Regardless of the analysis, it seems clear that Biden would lose an election to a Republican if it were held today, probably even to Trump.

But the reasons for Biden’s poor poll numbers are at least to Wrongo, unclear. At the 2020 presidential election, people were crying out for a return to normalcy. Back to Campos:

“It’s clear that a big underlying reason for Biden’s success in 2020 was a widespread…belief/hope among voters…that electing an anodyne middle of the road elderly white man — you know, a normal person, as opposed to a woman or a minority or a Jewish radical leftist [sic] — would calm things down after all the Trump craziness, and the Republican party would at least trend back toward being a center right party…”

We didn’t return to normal, and maybe, there isn’t a normal to return to. If that’s true, “Make America Great Again” will again have tons of appeal.

Wrongo detects among Democrats a perception that Biden and the Democratic Party are all in on tying their policies to racial justice. While that’s well-intended, and good strategy for energizing the base of People Of Color, it’s causing some dissatisfaction among Whites and certain Hispanic sub-segments.

That showed in this year’s Virginia and New Jersey elections. White suburban women moved away from the Dems in both states.

In Passaic, NJ, Hispanics make up about 70% of the population. Trump won 22% of their vote in 2016, and 36% in 2020. The 2021 Republican candidate for governor won a similar percentage. A Republican won a seat on the county board of commissioners for the first time in more than a decade.

These results should be a wakeup call for Democrats.

A recent Pew Research study divided the electorate into nine affinity groups, four Republican, four Democratic and a disaffected group that didn’t fit well into either Party’s coalition. Pew found that among: (brackets by Wrongo)

“….the four Republican-oriented typology groups…[fewer]…than…a quarter say a lot more needs to be done to ensure equal rights for all Americans regardless of their racial or ethnic background; by comparison, no fewer than about three-quarters of any Democratic group say a lot more needs to be done to achieve this goal.”

This gulf on one of the central questions facing our nation suggests that for now at least, Republicans have a powerful message to take to Independents and undecideds in the mid-terms and beyond. From Tom Sullivan:

“The MAGA squad on Capitol Hill sees waging culture war as the very point of holding political office: stoking anger, provoking fights, “owning the libs,” and advancing conspiracy theories.”

Everything isn’t about Dems being too pro-equality. Things like the withdrawal from Afghanistan, inflation, the supply chain disruptions, and the Delta variant of Covid have something to do with Biden’s poor numbers, along with no prospect of returning to normal.

Should Biden not run in 2024? Do the Democrats have a viable national candidate who could step into Biden’s shoes? Having a president candidate in their early to mid-80s, like Biden will be, isn’t optimal. That would seem to rule out both Sanders and Warren.

Kamala Harris looks to be doomed at least for now as a national candidate. She polls behind Biden. About the only thing low-information voters know about her are her gender and ethnicity. All else being equal, being nonwhite and female are probably national electoral handicaps this time around. She does appeal to many minority voters. But are there enough minority voters in swing states who would be willing to vote for her?

Given the ossification of the Democrats, the question of “Who should run?” feels like shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic.

We’re one election away from permanent Republican rule that will bring with them “show elections”. So far, no Democrat with the exception of a few dark horses, like Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg or Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, appear to have the smarts and charisma to be credible with the disaffected middle road of American voters.

Maybe the Dems have no realistic alternative to Biden in 2024.

Who do you think should run?

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Saturday Soother – November 20, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Floyd Lamb Park, Las Vegas NY- November 2021 photo by Marcia Steen

The biggest, baddest news of the week was that Kyle Rittenhouse was found innocent on all charges in the Kenosha murders.

As bad as that is, there’s some good news to start the weekend. First, the House succeeded on Friday in their months-long quest to pass Biden’s social spending bill. It still faces a serious challenge in the Senate before it can become law.

Second, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reported that the US is the only G7 country to surpass its pre-pandemic economic growth. Employment is up. Wages are up. Goldman Sachs predicts by the end of next year the US unemployment rate will drop to a 50-year low, thanks to continuing red-hot demand for workers. Retail sales surged 1.7% in the month of October. American consumers spent $638 billion in October, a 16% increase from last year.

Meanwhile, slowly but surely, the supply chain bottlenecks that have plagued our economy for over a year appear to be easing. Imports through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are up 16% from 2018, and in the first two weeks of November, those two ports cleared about a third of the containers sitting on their docks.

The Baltic Dry Index (BDI), a measure of global shipping rates and an inflation indicator, has plummeted 50% since peaking Oct. 7, another good sign for consumers. And the global chip shortage that was crippling the auto industry? GM said that the week of Nov. 1 was the first time since February that none of its North American assembly plants were offline due to a lack of chips.

All of this good news is going to waste because of the media’s hot takes on how bad Biden is doing. From Eric Boehlert:

“For weeks this fall, the Beltway press joined forces with the GOP to tell a hysterical tale about the state of the US economy. It was an alternate version of reality, where the stagnant, faltering economy was being driven to the precipice by runaway inflation, which stood poised to demolish middle-class savings across the board. All while an ineffective president stood by and watched cash-strapped households suffer.”

Boehlert says that recent press coverage suggests the economy is an albatross around Biden’s political neck, while in reality, it’s booming.

Biden got elected to bring a return to normalcy. Since there’s no normalcy in sight, his poll numbers (along with Democrats generally) have plummeted. David Brooks in the NYT addresses Joe Biden’s efforts at meeting the needs of people in “left behind” places of the country that did not vote for him: (parenthesis by Wrongo)

“If (noted economist) Larry Summers thinks lifting wages at the bottom will cause inflation…so be it. The trade-off is worth it to prevent a national rupture.”

Democrats have to get beyond the victory laps when they pass a bill, and let America know what the bills are for. Propaganda is a tool that shouldn’t be used to yammer on about defunding the police. Here’s Wrongo’s list of what Dems should say they’re for:

  • The Bill of Rights
  • One person, one vote
  • A world-class ideology-free education for all American kids
  • Jobs for more Americans
  • Universal health insurance
  • No more foreign interventions
  • More police funding and more police accountability
  • Reduce carbon emissions
  • Zero potholes

That last one is facetious, but it’s political gold in Wrongo’s town, and is funded in the recent infrastructure bill.

The Democrats’ gamble is whether their efforts and their successes will be rewarded politically less than a year from now, in November 2022. Remember that despite what the pundits say, passing the items on Biden’s platform shouldn’t be primarily to woo swing voters. They’re to shore up enthusiasm among your base, something that Dems didn’t have in the recent elections in Virginia and New Jersey.

Right now, things look grim. If you let your mind wander to what might happen if there’s a Republican House and Senate in January 2023, you should be happy not sad, that the Dems aren’t repealing the filibuster.

Let’s take a break and try for some normalcy in our weekend. Wrongo recommends that you start by not watching the Sunday pundit shows. Here on the fields of Wrong, we’re still engaging in our fall clean-up, trying to take advantage of the few warmer days to work outside. Also, there’s some menu planning for Thanksgiving underway.

So, settle into your Saturday Soother, where we leave the chaos behind for a few moments. Let’s start by grabbing a chair near a large window, and listening to the Prague Cello Quartet play an atmospheric version of the theme from “The Phantom of the Opera”:

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Expanding The Dem’s Voter Base

The Daily Escape:

Artist’s Point, Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park, AZ-UT – October photo by Alan Seltzer

Ruy Teixeira explains the political (and messaging) dilemma facing Democrats in 2021:

“A recent Gallup release confirmed that Democrats now have about as many liberals in the party as moderates or conservatives. That liberalism has been mostly driven by increasing liberalism among white Democrats which has spiked upward 20 points since the early 2000s. White Democrats are now a solidly liberal constituency. Not so black and Hispanic Democrats who are overwhelmingly moderate or conservative.”

The contrast is particularly striking among Whites who are college graduates and working class (non-college) nonwhites. The Gallup data show that two-thirds of White college grads are liberal while 70% of Black working class and two-thirds of Hispanic working class Democrats are moderate or conservative.

This takes on additional relevance because in 2020, 63% of voters did not have college degrees, and 74% of voters came from households making less than $100,000 a year. This should make it painfully obvious that, if issues and rhetoric that appeal mostly to college-educated White liberals are promoted, Democrats could see serious attrition among Democrat working class nonwhites who dislike those issues and rhetoric.

It’s hard to build a majority if you’re focused on a minority of the electorate. The internal conflict between Democrats, displayed by the Gallup poll mentioned above by Teixeira, pits the Party’s progressives against its moderates, its college-educated against its working class.

Like the modern Democrats, the Whigs cobbled together their party in the late 1830s out of an assortment of constituencies, many of whom had little in common. The Whig Party was formed to counter President Andrew Jackson and the Jacksonian Democrats. They were one of the two major political parties in the US from the late 1830s through the early 1850s and managed to elect two presidents: William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor.

By the mid-1850s, the Whigs were divided by the issue of slavery, particularly as the country had to decide whether new states would be admitted as slave or non-slave states. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 overturned the Missouri Compromise and allowed each territory to decide for itself whether it would be a slave or free state. Anti-slavery Whigs then spun off to found the Republican Party in 1854.

Is the modern Democratic Party on the precipice of becoming the new Whigs? The Whigs were a coalition of bankers, lawyers, and the Eastern mercantile class. In the South, Whigs worked to put a moral face on slavery. This allowed the Whigs to cultivate political distance from what was becoming a party of southern Democrats happy to extend slavery in new states, and a northern base of what we call “blue collar” (white) workers.

The Whigs couldn’t continue bridging the ideological distance between the Northern industrial states section of the party and the Southern agribusiness/slavery Whigs. Faced with this dilemma, the party broke apart.

If the Democrats are to remain one Party, a new poll by Jacobin, YouGov, and the Center for Working-Class Politics offers a perspective on how to win among working-class voters. They found that:

  • Candidates who prioritized bread-and-butter issues (jobs, health care, the economy), and presented them in plainspoken, universalist rhetoric, performed significantly better than those who had other priorities or used other language. That preference was even more pronounced in rural and small-town areas, where Democrats have struggled in recent years.
  • Candidates who named elites as a major cause of America’s problems, invoked anger at the status quo, and celebrated the working class were well received among working-class voters.
  • Potential Democratic working-class voters did not shy away from candidates who strongly opposed racism. But candidates who framed that opposition in identity-focused language fared significantly worse than candidates who embraced either populist or mainstream language.

The survey proposed multiple sound bites spoken by potential candidates to survey respondents to rank. The most popular sound bite was the “progressive populist” one:

“This country belongs to all of us, not just the super-rich. But for years, politicians in Washington have turned their backs on people who work for a living. We need tough leaders who won’t give in to the millionaires and the lobbyists, but will fight for good jobs, good wages, and guaranteed health care for every single American.”

This has implications for the 2022 mid-terms. Keep Trump off the table unless, by some miracle, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attempted coup refers charges to the DOJ and the DOJ acts on it. Another key finding was that those surveyed felt Democrats run too far left on certain priorities:

This is also key for building Democrats’ messaging in 2022. You can read the full report here.

Democrats need to think about what it will take to do two things simultaneously: How to stay together as a Party, and how to retain majorities in the House and Senate.

It won’t be simple, but everything depends on it.

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How Voting Shifted from 2016 to 2020

The Daily Escape:

The Palouse from Steptoe Butte, Whitman County, WA – 2019 photo by Kristen Wilkinson Photography

Pew Research Center just published a new analysis of validated 2020 voters that’s worth your time. Pew surveyed adults it could identify as definitely having voted last November, based on voting records, a methodology considered more accurate than exit polls.

Suburban voters were a major factor helping Biden win. While Trump won the suburbs by 2 points in 2016, Biden won them by 11 points in 2020, a 13-point swing. Considering that the suburbs accounted for just over half of all voters, that was a big win for Biden.

  • Biden improved on Clinton’s share of suburban voters: 45% supported Clinton in 2016 vs. 54% for Biden in 2020. Trump’s share of the rural vote grew: In 2016, he won 59% of rural voters, but tallied 65% in 2020.

Trump gained in both rural and urban areas. He won 65% of rural voters, a 6-point increase from 2016. And while cities remained majority-Democratic, Trump’s support there jumped by 9 points, to 33%.

According to Pew, Biden made larger gains among married men than with any other demographic group. That’s an even larger gain for Biden than Trump made among Latino voters.

  • Trump won married men only by a 54% to 44% margin, a 20-point decline from his 62% to 32% victory in 2016. He won veteran households by a 55% to 43% margin, down by 14 points from 2016.

Biden’s winning electoral coalition looked like Hillary Clinton’s losing one: Black, Hispanic, and Asian voters and those of other races cast about 40% of all Biden votes. Black voters remained overwhelmingly loyal to the Democratic Party, voting 92%-8% for Biden.

  • The gender gap in 2020 was narrower than in 2016, both because of gains that Biden made among men, and because of gains Trump made among women.
  • In 2020, men were almost evenly divided between Trump and Biden, unlike in 2016 when Trump won men by 11 points.
  • Trump won a significantly larger share of women’s votes in 2020 than in 2016 (44% vs. 39%), while Biden’s share among women was nearly identical to Clinton’s (55% vs. 54%).
  • Trump won a majority of White women: 53% of White women chose Trump, up by 6 points from 2016.

Biden improved among White non-college voters:

  • White voters without a college degree were critical to Trump’s victory in 2016, when he won the group by 64% to 28% over Clinton. In 2018, Democrats won 36% of the White, non-college vote, and in 2020, Biden maintained the Democrats’ 2018 share with the group, improving upon Clinton’s 2016 performance by 5 percentage points, to 33%.

Even though voter turnout rose by 7 percentage points over 2016, the turnout battle wasn’t decisive. Democrats thought they would overwhelm Trump with a surge in turnout among young and nonwhite voters, but Pew shows that neither candidate held a decisive advantage in the highest turnout election since 1900.

Instead, Trump turned out his base, while Biden lost ground among nearly every Democratic base constituency. The data show that Trump turned out 5% more of his base (73%)  than Biden turned out of his (68%).

This was an improvement for Trump, who had a 2% turnout margin over Clinton in 2016. Bottom line, there was a far deeper support and enthusiasm for Trump than Democrats had imagined: 13 million more people voted for Trump in 2020 than did in 2016.

It was Biden’s gains among more moderate voting groups that carried him over the goal line.

From a demographic perspective, for the first time, the silent and boomer generations were a minority of voters. Gen X, Millennials, and Generation Z accounted for a majority. Generation Z (18 to 23 in 2020) and the Millennial generation (24 to 39 in 2020) favored Biden over Trump by a margin of 20 percentage points, though Trump gained 8 points among Millennials compared with his 2016 performance.

This is the clearest view we’re gotten on how different groups voted in 2020, and crucially, how those votes had shifted since 2016. It shows that Biden failed to improve his margins among virtually every voting group that Clinton won in 2016, whether it was young voters, women, Black voters, unmarried voters or voters in urban areas.

What about 2022? Hispanic voters, along with suburban Whites, will remain major focuses for both Parties. Both will be trying to cement their gains while working to improve in the other areas. The 2018 mid-terms were a referendum on Trump. The GOP will be making the 2022 mid-terms a referendum on the Democratic Party.  As Wrongo said here, Democrats need to stop focusing solely on the issues, when the opponent is focusing on killing democracy.

The headline is that we should brace for more years of grueling trench warfare between the two Parties. And to top it off? The Parties seem to be evenly matched.

Turnout will be even more crucial in 2022.

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Democrat’s Messaging Needs a Rethink

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise, Motif #1, Rockport MA – 2020 photo by Kristen Wilkinson. Motif #1 is among the most painted fishing shacks in the world. It was originally constructed in 1840, and reconstructed in 1978.

Dr. Rachel Bitecofer is a political scientist who became famous 2018 and 2020 by predicting the midterm and presidential election results of those years nearly perfectly. By doing that, she was way ahead of most pollsters. Bitecofer has now declared her true colors by forming a Democratic PAC called StrikePAC, designed to show Democrats how to fight today’s Trumpy GOP.

Bitecofer is warning Democrats that they could face a wipe out in 2022 if they continue to focus on policy and “kitchen table issues” to the exclusion of the toxic effort by Republicans to brand them, because those issues will not resonate against the GOP’s messaging of cultural issues and the Big Lie.

In a sense, Republicans are branding experts. They fuel the grievances of their supporters every day by waving the cultural wedge issues (abortion, LBGTQ, Critical Race Theory, voter fraud and BLM) in the faces of their followers, while simultaneously demonizing Democrats as against freedom, and for socialism.

Paul Rosenberg at Salon interviewed Bitecofer, and her analysis seems intuitively correct to Wrongo. She argues that the 2018 midterms were more a referendum on Trump’s presidency than on individual candidates and individual races. She foresees that the Republicans will be similarly motivated in 2022: (brackets by Wrongo)

“Look, the GOP doesn’t really run anything except a marketing/branding op [operation] and it’s predominantly a branding offensive against the left.”

More:

“They don’t spend a lot of time on their own brand, but they do spend a lot of time in their messaging on discounting, discrediting, and debasing our brand…..so it’s always about showing us as unattractively to voters as possible. We’ve never answered that.”

Bitecofer says that the Dems have been told by their consultants that they shouldn’t push back on the “socialism” or “defund the police”, or “destroy democracy” messaging, but some of those stones are starting to land, just like they did in the 2020 down ballot elections in which the Democrats badly under-performed. More from Bitecofer:

“…you can’t just stand there and pretend it’s not hitting….The GOP is saying, ‘We’re going to have a debate about these topics,’ and when you enter…that field, you are basically on the defense the whole time because you’re having a conversation that’s been structured by the opposition party.”

Bitecofer thinks it’s time to flip the script on the GOP’s tactics by making the 2022 election a conversation about their anti-democratic power grab, including contesting the results of 2020, their Jan. 6 insurrection, that Trump tried to use the Justice Department to stage a coup, and the Republican Party’s embrace of all of the above.

Republicans have normalized anti-democratic behavior by going into state legislative sessions to try and restrict voter access, even trying to take the vote certification process away from nonpartisan actors and placing it into partisan hands.

So, her basic point is that Democrats need to make the electorate realize that American democracy is on the ballot in 2022. A final quote from Bitecofer:

“To me, ‘bringing a brand offensive’ pretty much describes how Republicans have run the vast majority of their national campaigns at least since Ronald Reagan….Democrats have virtually never done so—not even when Trump first ran in 2016…. we are not engaged in a campaign technique that matches the moment.”

The collective decision by Republicans to stay on the anti-democratic, racist trajectory that the GOP had been on, even before Trump, is perhaps the most important story in American politics right now. The modern GOP messaging tries to turn out their side using the wedge cultural issues, but they also try hard to nationalize politics by making local races be largely about the differences in the two Parties.

Bitecofer says that started with the 2010 midterms which they made a referendum on Obamacare and Nancy Pelosi. They tied every candidate to that as tightly as they could. So candidates didn’t stand for re-election on their own performance and voting record, things that people traditionally thought mattered most. Instead, it was all about whether they were Democrats. And it worked.

Democrats noticed the strategy, but never adjusted to it. In some ways, it seems like Democrats fail to recognize how distinctly different voter behavior is inside the two Parties, and how hyper-partisanship has changed branding and messaging.

The GOP is running a strategic, intentional branding campaign. And Democrats are still talking policies and whether the filibuster should be dumped. Are we making a huge mistake by focusing solely on the issues when the opponent is focusing on killing democracy?

You bet. We need to find and deliver messaging that creates both persuasion and mobilization for our 2022 midterm candidates.

Make it a referendum on Republicans.

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The Disconcerting Truth About the Big Lie

The Daily Escape:

Sunset at Race Point Light, Provincetown, Cape Cod, MA – May 2021 photo by Kristen Wilkinson Photography

There’s a new Ipsos poll that asked the question: “Who do you think the true President is right now? Choose one”. (The choices were Joe Biden and Donald Trump).

Among all respondents, 75% said Biden, while 25% said Trump. So far, so good. Those saying that Trump is president broke down as Democrats 3%, Independents 22%, with 53% of Republicans answering that Trump is the actual President, not Biden. And that wasn’t all:

(The new Ipsos Poll is a national sample of 2,007 adults and was conducted between May 17th and 19th. It has an overall margin of error of 2.5%. The margin of error for the groups is: Democrats 3.7, Republicans 4.1, and Independents 8.0).

The question about whether the election was legitimate, or the result of illegal voting or election rigging, showed that Republicans believe the Big Lie, with 56% saying the 2020 election was illegitimate.

It doesn’t matter what the motives of the 53% of Republicans who say they believe Trump is really the president are. Maybe they believe what they’re saying, or they say it because they feel group (cult?) pressure to say it. The effect is the same. They are poisoning our democratic system, and they’re proud to be doing it.

Republicans throughout the country are saying that they need to restrict the vote to restore faith in the electoral system for their voters. But let’s not kid ourselves. The only way their faith will be restored is if Republicans “win.”

Does anyone remember polls of Democrats saying that Gore was the real president after the 2000 election, not GW Bush? There was plenty of complaining that Bush won through a corrupt legal process, because that’s what happened. The idea that Bush wasn’t actually the president would have been considered delusional. From Paul Campos:

“But today…a majority of the people who identify as members of one of the nation’s two major political parties are saying something that’s actually quite a bit crazier — that Donald Trump, who unlike Al Gore doesn’t have any factual basis for believing the election was stolen from him, is the true president RIGHT NOW — and we just have to shrug because that’s just something a lot of Real Americans happen to believe, just like they believe their guns protect them from the Government…and that global warming is a liberal myth…”

Paul Krugman on our current political mess:

“What’s different this time is the acquiescence of Republican elites. The Big Lie about the election didn’t well up from the grass roots — it was promoted from above, initially by Trump himself, but what’s crucial is that almost no prominent Republican politicians have been willing to contradict his claims and many have rushed to back them up.”

America’s next election will require UN observers.

The GOP’s party leaders have largely sworn allegiance to Trump and his movement, and they continue to propound the Big Lie. At the state level, they are moving quickly to restrict voting rights in as many locations as possible. And to help tie their program together, they are blocking attempts to investigate the coup on Jan 6th.

It is obvious that the GOP’s leaders are playing to the Republican base – fifty-six percent of whom think the election was stolen, and a majority of whom support the idea that “force may be necessary to save the American way of life.”

All this leaves America walking a tightrope over the abyss of authoritarianism. Any misstep and we could lose our democracy.

This is made all the more dangerous, of course, by the false sense of security Democrats are feeling now that Biden is in power. The Greenberg Research poll in late April focused on voter intensity levels in the states and Congressional Districts that will likely decide who controls Congress after 2022. It found 68% of Republican voters report the highest level of interest in the midterms, compared to just 57% of Democrats.

So, the fear of a Republican return to power in the Congress in 2022 is real. And will the GOP’s enthusiasm be matched in 2022 by Democratic voters rushing to the polls to show their gratitude to the Party for bringing back the economy and getting the vaccines distributed? Maybe.

Democrats need to realize sooner rather than later that it’s going to be hand-to-hand political combat for the foreseeable future and plan accordingly. No matter how much money you gave in 2020, you will need to give more in 2022.

Otherwise, if the Republicans are successful at overthrowing American democracy, there won’t be a next time. That’s it, game over. For a very long time, possibly for good.

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Getting Younger is Key to Democrats’ Future

The Daily Escape:

Canyonlands NP, UT – photo by Xymic

Like Biden, Wrongo is a member of the Silent Generation, but he always confuses the names and age groupings of the generational cohorts. Here’s the breakdown by cohort, age and number of each:

  • Silent Generation: Born between 1928 and 1945. There are about 23.6 million in the US
  • Baby Boomers:  Born between 1946 and 1964. There are about 68.7 million in the US
  • Gen X: Born between 1965 and 1979/1980. There are 65.1 million of them
  • Gen Y, or Millennials: Born between 1981 and 1994-1996. There are 82.2 million of them
  • Gen Z:  Born between 1997 and 2012-2015. There are 86.4 million of them in the US

Gen Z is now the largest demographic cohort, with Millennials just behind them. Boomers now represent 21% of America’s population, and Silents are 7%.

But Boomers and Silents still control our political lives. While true for both Parties, leadership in the Democratic Party skews really old: Biden is 78, Sen. Dianne Feinstein is 87, and House Speaker Pelosi is 80. Majority Leader Steny Hoyer is 81, Majority Whip Jim Clyburn is 80, while Senate Majority Leader  Chuck Schumer is a relatively young 70.

NY Mag’s Eve Peyser:

“If you’re starting to get the feeling that the country is governed as a gerontocracy, you are correct. People over 50 make up 34% of the US population, but 52% of the electorate, according to Pew. And it’s not only political power that baby-boomers and the Silent Generation have a tight grip on: Americans over 55 own two-thirds of the wealth in this country.”

Here is a chart from Pew that shows the distribution of the new Congress by age:

There are 31 Millennials in the House, and only one in the Senate. According to another Pew survey, in 2018, the most common age for all Americans was 27, while the most common age for White Americans was 58! The over-representation of Boomers and Silents in Congress means that White interests are similarly over-represented in US politics.

This isn’t happening everywhere; it’s a distinctly American problem. More from Peyser:

“If you look at other countries, they’re not similarly controlled by older politicians. I think that the explanation here is the two-party system….[A multiparty system gets] young people involved in politics, voting, organizing, running things, organizational politics, [which] means that they are able to start accumulating institutional power.”

Democrats must let younger politicians have a crack at leadership. That was the point of Sen. Chris Murphy’s (D-CT) successful push in January for a change in the Senate’s rules to allow more junior Senators to chair better and more influential subcommittees.

It was also tried in the House. Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) pushed Pelosi and House Financial Services Committee Chair Maxine Waters (D-CA) to be more confrontational in some committee hearings. But Porter lost the argument and is no longer a member of that Committee. However, she remains on the House Oversight Committee, and like Murphy, she has a bright future.

The Democrats have a few other young stars that can become future national leaders. In 2016, Frank Bruni showcased a few in the NYT. Among others, he mentioned Stacy Abrams, Julian Castro, Pete Buttigieg, Hakeem Jefferies, and Gina Raimondo. Two (Buttigieg and Raimondo) are now in Biden’s cabinet, while Abrams and Jefferies are already powerful Party leaders.

Several House members, including Jamie Raskin, David Cicilline and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are emerging leaders who help skew the Party younger, but change will be slow. From Peyser:

“We have not yet reached the peak of Boomer culture. We’re going to see the highest number of people turning 65 in US history in 2023,”

By 2028, Millennials and Generation Z will make up almost exactly half of eligible voters. In other words, things will change, but only as the Boomer generation retires from politics, and when we actively help convert eligible voters into registered voters.

Increasing their number could pivot on the fate of HR-1 in the Senate. It would ease the way for more young people to participate in politics, since it requires every state to create systems for automatic, same-day and online voter registration. That could significantly reduce the biggest barrier to more young people voting in American elections: our complex registration system. So far, fewer younger voters have been willing, or able to navigate it.

Strategically, the Republicans will continue trying to suppress voting, while also trying to woo more Boomers to their side. Democrats will work to expand the voter rolls and also get them to turn out, particularly in swing states.

Younger voters are likely to be more progressive than the older Democrats. But even the oldsters in the Party will follow them, as Biden is doing today.

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Monday Wake Up Call – February 15, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Nauset Light, Cape Cod, MA  – February 2021 photo by Michael Blanchette photography

The impeachment trial is behind us, but the Big Lie of the 2020 election, that there was massive voting fraud, remains with us. That Lie is propelling Republicans in many states to try to minimize, or end entirely, mail-in voting.

Republicans have reason to worry. Mail-in voting alone constituted nearly half the votes cast in the 2020 election, a significant increase from previous years. This chart from 538 shows the remarkable decline in same-day voting in America:

Traditional same day, in-person voting has dropped from more than 90% of ballots cast in the 1990s to 60% in 2016, to just 28% in 2020. Early in-person and vote-by-mail now accounts for 71% of total voting.

Overall, despite the Big Lie, early and by mail voting was a remarkable success. It was less prone to errors than expected, and had almost zero documented fraud. As expected, 538 reports that absentee votes broke blue, Election Day votes, red. They only have data for 15 of the 50 states, but it is consistent:

“Biden won the absentee vote in 14 out of the 15 states (all but Texas), and Trump won the Election Day vote in 14 out of the 15 as well (all but Connecticut).”

Trump used this historic change in voting patterns to claim that Democrats used mail ballots to steal the election. Now, in a backlash to the historic trends in voter turnout, Republicans are again looking to make it more difficult to vote.

A new report by the Brennan Center for Justice shows that legislators in 33 states have introduced 165 bills to restrict voting rights. The proposals primarily seek to: a) limit mail voting access; b) impose stricter voter ID requirements; c) slash voter registration opportunities; and d) enable more aggressive voter roll purges.

Many of these bills parrot the same lies Trump used to claim the election was stolen. And they’re sponsored by the same state officials who backed Trump’s efforts to reverse the results of the election.

Remember how narrow the Biden win was: he won three states by a combined margin of 43,560 votes: Arizona (10,457 votes), Georgia (12,636 votes), and Wisconsin (20,467 votes). These three states have 37 electoral votes, and had Trump won all three, the Electoral College would have been tied, 269 to 269. Then the House would have determined the winner, with each state delegation getting one vote. Since the Republicans hold a majority of state delegations, Trump would have won a second term.

It was worse. The WaPo reports that

“Republicans came, at most, 43,000 votes from winning each of the three levers of power.”

Just 32,000 votes would have flipped control of the House to Republicans, while 14,000 votes would have kept control of the Senate in Republican hands. The Republicans have a built-in structural advantage in all three political levers of power: In the House it’s gerrymandering; in the Senate it’s the population imbalance favoring rural states; and in the White House, it’s the Electoral College.

So, beating back voting restrictions has to be a top priority.

Republicans have been restricting voting for years. We were lucky that state and local election officials acted in the best interests of the people and the country. That may not happen next time, so these anti-democratic pieces of legislation must be highlighted publicly and fought tooth-and-nail.

Think for a minute about last week’s impeachment trial: 34 GOP senators representing just 14.5% of the US population can block the conviction of an impeached president. Said another way, the 57 senators who voted to convict Trump represent 76.7 million more Americans than the 43 senators who voted to acquit him.

We should also remember that every state sets its own rules when it comes to voting and counting the votes. And we’ll soon see the impact of Republican gerrymandering, once the 2020 census is complete. The long-term solution is a Constitutional amendment that finally establishes that all citizens have the right to vote, and describes the approved methods of voting.

Time to wake up America! Voting reform must be a top priority just behind beating the Coronavirus and getting kids back in school. To help you wake up, listen to John Fogerty perform his newest, “Weeping In The Promised Land“, released this January:

Partial Lyrics:

Forked-tongued pharaoh, behold he comes to speak

Weeping in the Promised Land

Hissing and spewing, it’s power that he seeks

Weeping in the Promised Land

With dread in their eyes, all the nurses are crying

So much sorrow, so much dying

Pharaoh keep a-preaching but he never had a plan

Weeping in the Promised Land

Weeping in the Promised Land

This is another very powerful video, a must-watch.

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Monday Wake Up Call – MLK Jr. Day -January 18, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Third Selma March, 1965 – photo by Charles Fentress Jr  shows Frank Calhoun, 16, of Meridian, MS, his face smeared with white suntan lotion and the word “VOTE” written on his forehead.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. helped lead marchers on March 21 to March 25 from Selma, Alabama to the state capital in Montgomery. It was their third attempt after a brutal crackdown by police on their first try on March 7, that caused the injuries that resulted in calling the first march “Bloody Sunday.”

On Aug. 6, President Lyndon Johnson signed the national Voting Rights Act of 1965. In 2013, the Supreme Court gutted the VRA, with its decision in Shelby County vs. Holder.

Since Martin Luther King Jr delivered his iconic “I have a dream” speech in August 1963, the number of Black Americans elected to the US Congress has dramatically increased. But it took until 2019, more than 54 years later, for the share of Black members serving in the House of Representatives to equal the percentage of Black Americans in the US population (12%).

To date, only seven states have sent a Black representative to the US Senate, and many states have never elected a Black representative to either House of Congress.

Here’s a look at Black representation in every US Congress since 1963:

A few words on the Voting Rights Act of 1965: Since the Voting Rights Act was gutted in 2013, 1,688 polling places have been shuttered in states previously bound by the Act’s preclearance requirement. Texas officials closed 750 polling places. Arizona and Georgia were almost as bad. Unsurprisingly, these closures were mostly in communities of color.

In December 2019, the House passed HR 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act, now named the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act, to restore the safeguards of the original VRA. It’s been collecting dust on Mitch McConnell’s desk ever since. He and his GOP colleagues continue to sit idly by as Republican state officials suppress the vote with no accountability.

If your vote didn’t count, they wouldn’t be trying so hard to suppress it. There’s no telling what change we’ll be able to make once we win the battle for voting rights.

So, time to wake up America! Change has to come. The fight didn’t start with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr and it didn’t end with John Lewis. The fight continues. To help you wake up, listen again to Sam Cooke’s “A Change Gonna Come”. It was released as a single in December 1964.

Cooke was inspired by hearing Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind”, and was also moved by Dr. King’s August 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. But it was Cooke’s experience in October 1963, when he and his entourage were turned away from a whites-only Holiday Inn in Shreveport, Louisiana, despite having reservations – that directly triggered him to write “A Change is Gonna Come.”

“Change” was released as a single two weeks after Cooke’s murder at age 33 on Dec. 11, 1964. It was quickly embraced by civil rights activists.

Still relevant, in so many ways, it’s possible to see it as a comprehensive review of the Trump administration. The linked video is as powerful to watch as the lyrics to Cooke’s song are to hear:

 

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Georgia and the $2,000 Stimulus Check

The Daily Escape:

Mt Hood with lavender, from upper Hood River Valley, OR –  photo by Greg Boratyn

Readers of this blog are well aware of the importance of the US Senate run-off races in Georgia. Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff are facing off against GOP incumbents Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue.

Recent analysis by FiveThirtyEight places Warnock ahead of Loeffler by .1% and Perdue ahead of Ossoff by .8%, but who trusts polls anymore?

Early voting in Georgia has been heavy, with 2.3 million votes already cast. So far, the demographics show that these early voters are skewing younger and more diverse than in the November election. Possibly troubling for Republicans is that people aren’t voting early in traditionally Republican counties like they have in the past. And since the early voting period ends soon because of the New Year holiday, the pressure will be on to boost turnout on Election Day, January 5.

Also possibly helping Democrats is a ruling that two Georgia counties must reverse their decision to purge thousands from voter rolls in advance of the January 5 runoff election. Georgia federal judge Leslie Abrams Gardner said in an order filed late on Monday that these two counties appeared to have improperly relied on unverified change-of-address information to invalidate voter registrations:

“Defendants are enjoined from removing any challenged voters in Ben Hill and Muscogee Counties from the registration lists on the basis of National Change of Address data,”

The judge is the sister of Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams. Before breaking into a happy dance, it’s good to remember that this order applies to only about 4,000 registrations, the vast majority of which are in Muscogee County. Biden won the county in November.

The runoff has seen record-breaking fundraising. Ossoff and Warnock each have raised more than $100 million in two months, more than their conservative opponents. The Democrats were powered by small donations collected from across the country, with nearly half of the funds coming from people who donated less than $200.

For Perdue and Loeffler, smaller donations accounted for less than 30% of what they raised. However, we need to remember the hard lessons of Jaime Harrison (NC), Sara Gideon (ME), and Amy McGrath (KY). These Democratic candidates out-raised their Republican incumbent opponents, and all lost by double digits in their races.

Ossoff and Warnock are still “sounding the alarm” about their ability to keep pace with GOP spending. They’re calling for a “significant increase” in grassroots donations to prevent them running out of money, as GOP outside groups are outspending Democratic groups.

Both Parties want to shift from TV to direct get-out-the-vote contact in the last days before the election.

But there’s an additional outside force that may play into the results in Georgia. Given the overwhelming popularity of increasing relief checks from $600 to $2,000, Trump has placed Senate Republicans in a brutal position. The House has passed a $2000 relief package, and now it is up to the Senate whether to take it up, or not.

Bernie Sanders (I-VT), is playing this one beautifully:

“Sen. Bernie Sanders will filibuster an override of President Donald Trump’s defense bill veto unless the Senate holds a vote on providing $2,000 direct payments to Americans.”

This puts the ball in Mitch McConnell’s court, and it will be interesting to see where he goes. He seems to have three options:

  1. Call Sanders’s bluff by demanding that Democrats provide enough votes for cloture and the subsequent veto override. McConnell will say that if they fail to do so, he’ll let the Defense bill die while pinning the blame on the Democrats.
  2. Lump the extra stimulus with Trump’s demand for action against the big tech firms. This would push consideration of the measure into the next Congress.
  3. Alternatively, McConnell can hold a vote on the bigger stimulus checks.

On Tuesday McConnell single-handedly blocked consideration of the House $2000 bill, but that was just the first step in a series of Senate parliamentary moves that are likely to take the rest of the week.

Loeffler and Perdue decided to support the extra stimulus. That was an easy call, once they knew McConnell would block it initially. They were joined by Sens Hawley (R-MO), Sen Marco Rubio (R-FL), and Sen Deb Fischer (R-NE). If all Senate Dems support it, they would need seven more Republicans to move forward.

Whether the extra relief bill passes or fails, there’s a winning message for Ossoff and Warnock to hammer: I want $2k, you want $2k, the Democrats in the House want $2k, and the Dems in the Senate want $2k. Heck, even Trump wants $2k. The only people who don’t want you to have $2k are Republicans.

If you don’t vote for the Democrats, you’ll never see any more stimulus money.

That’s the way to turn a loss in the Senate into control of the Senate on January 5.

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