debatable

Subterms

    Latest story

    113 Shares159 Views

    How Can Democrats Use Their Final Weeks in Power?

    by

    This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Wednesdays.The Democratic Party’s success in securing a 51st Senate seat in the Georgia runoff Tuesday is certainly consequential, but it did nothing to avert an imminent shift in the national political environment: On Jan. 3, Republicans will take control of the House of Representatives, and it will be two years at least — if not much longer, given historical trends — before Democrats again have the power to enact major legislation.This period between an election and the transition of power is known as a lame-duck session, and in recent years, it’s often when Congress has been most productive. How will Democrats make use of this one? Here are just some of the most pressing legislative priorities on the party’s agenda that could be accomplished without fear of a Republican filibuster in the Senate, or with the possibility of enough Republican votes to block such a move.Keeping the government — and the global financial system — runningCongress is staring down a Dec. 16 deadline to pass a budget for the 2023 fiscal year. If it doesn’t, the government could be forced to shut down, as it did in 2013 and twice in 2018, depriving hundreds of thousands of government workers of pay and disrupting public services.But an even more urgent threat, German Lopez of The Times recently wrote, is that Republicans will refuse to raise the limit on how much money the government can borrow, which Congress frequently must do to fund the budget it has approved. If the government hits the debt ceiling, which could happen early next year, it could eventually lose the ability to make debt payments and be forced, for the first time, to default, with potentially calamitous effects for the global economy.Once a pro forma administrative task, raising the debt ceiling became a matter of high-stakes brinkmanship during the Obama administration, as Republicans repeatedly leveraged the threat of default to push for spending cuts and regulatory rollbacks. In October, Representative Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader hoping to become speaker, suggested that his party would deploy this strategy again to force “structural changes” to programs like Social Security and Medicare.Democrats have two options to avert financial crisis, Peter Orszag, a former director of the Office of Management and Budget and the Congressional Budget Office, explains: Win over enough Senate Republicans to form a filibuster-proof majority to raise the debt ceiling, or raise it unilaterally through the reconciliation process, which would require only 50 votes.“Any Democrats averse to taking such a painful vote now should consider how much leverage their party will lose once Republicans control the House — and how much higher the risk of default will be then,” he writes in The Washington Post.The trade-off, however, is that raising the debt ceiling with only Democratic votes would take much longer — about two weeks — than if Republicans were on board. “This might crowd out Democrats’ ability to pass almost any other legislative priority while they still control both chambers,” notes Catherine Rampell in The Washington Post.Preventing a repeat of Jan. 6Given concerns about the integrity of the 2024 presidential election, another major Democratic priority is modernizing the Electoral Count Act, a 1887 law governing the Electoral College counting procedure. The law’s ambiguous language became the legal basis for Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, culminating in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.Reforming the law to prevent such schemes has bipartisan support: Nearly 40 senators, including 16 Republicans, have signed on to a bill introduced in the Senate over the summer, and the House passed its own bill in September.“Both the Senate and House bills are far better than what we have right now, and either one would go a long way to ensuring that the electoral-count law cannot be used as a tool for subverting the election in 2024 or beyond,” the Times editorial board wrote last month. “Congress needs to pass the overhaul now, when it has willing majorities in both houses and well before anyone casts a ballot in 2024.”Reforming the immigration systemNearly two years after President Biden proposed the most comprehensive immigration reform since the Reagan administration, Democrats have made very little headway on the issue. But this week, there were signs of a potential breakthrough when a bipartisan pair of senators reportedly drafted a framework for legislation that would create a pathway to citizenship for two million DACA recipients and improve the asylum system. In exchange, it also contains provisions for expediting the deportation of migrants who fail to qualify for asylum and continuing the use of Title 42, a Trump-era emergency public health order that restricts the right to claim asylum.Some immigration advocates have called on congressional Democrats to seize the opportunity. “House Republicans are not likely to allow any measures to improve immigration matters to reach a vote, preferring to have the political issue for the next elections rather than solutions,” said Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of America’s Voice. “This year and the remaining weeks in this Congress present the best opportunity to enact legislation.”But obstacles to a bipartisan immigration deal are formidable. Republican senators “might decide that the G.O.P. won’t get any credit even if the effort succeeds — that credit might go to President Biden — and that it’s better to retain the permanent ‘border crisis’ as an issue,” writes Greg Sargeant of The Washington Post. On the Democratic side, he adds, “the continuation of Title 42, which has been a human rights disaster, and the beefed up removal process might make it a nonstarter among progressives in both chambers.”De-escalating the war on drugsAs overdoses soar and public opinion turns against the war on drugs, proponents of drug law reform say there may be an opening for Congress to save lives by passing bipartisan measures like the Mainstreaming Addiction Treatment Act, which would increase access to medication used to treat opioid addiction, and the Medicaid Re-Entry Act, which would reduce disruptions in medical care for people who have just been released from jail or prison.Another bill called the EQUAL Act, which would end the federal sentencing disparity between crack cocaine and powder cocaine offenses, already has more than 10 Republican co-sponsors, “so it can withstand a filibuster and seems ripe for some action this lame-duck session,” Udi Ofer, a professor at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs, said last month.Staying ahead of the coronavirusThe Biden administration last month asked Congress for an additional $9 billion to fund its response to the coronavirus pandemic, which is still killing more than 280 Americans per day and remains a leading cause of death in the United States.Some of the $9 billion would go toward researching long Covid and ensuring continued access to vaccines and treatments, which have fallen out of reach for more and more uninsured Americans as federal money has dried up.About $5 billion would go toward creating a program in the mold of Operation Warp Speed, to develop next-generation therapeutics and vaccines, like nasal sprays that could block more infections and universal, variant-proof coronavirus shots.Many scientists believe that nasal vaccines could be crucial to reducing Covid’s disease burden, but the United States has lagged other countries in developing one because of underinvestment. Congressional Republicans have rebuffed requests for more pandemic funding, having accused the administration of mishandling previous allocations. They have also questioned the necessity of more aid, pointing to Biden’s declaration in September that “the pandemic is over.”Democrats now find themselves in the awkward position of trying to make the case for more funding without admitting error: “While COVID-19 is no longer the disruptive force it was when the president took office,” the White House wrote in a November letter to Congress, “we face the emergence of new subvariants in the United States and around the world that have the potential to cause a surge of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths, particularly as we head into the winter months.”Protecting marriage equalityOne major legislative effort that is likely to advance is the Respect for Marriage Act, which would enshrine federal protections for same-sex and interracial marriage. The issue took on newfound importance this summer after Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the court “should reconsider” the 2015 precedent establishing the right of gay couples to marry.Some conservatives have dismissed the bill as a response to an imaginary threat and one that endangers religious liberties; many liberals argue the bill doesn’t go far enough, since it wouldn’t prevent states from refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Nonetheless, the measure attracted enough Republican support to pass in the Senate last week and is expected to win final approval in the House.To some, the success of a bill that was considered just a few months ago to be dead on arrival suggests there might be opportunities for more congressional breakthroughs, albeit within a very limited window. “As with the same-sex marriage bill, bipartisan legislation revising the 19th century Electoral Count Act wasn’t politically possible before the midterm elections and wouldn’t be once Trumpian Republicans are in charge of the House schedule in four weeks,” writes Jackie Calmes, a columnist for The Los Angeles Times. “Enjoy these few weeks of what passes for bipartisanship as Congress waddles to its end. You won’t be seeing much of that over the next two years.”Do you have a point of view we missed? Email us at debatable@nytimes.com. Please note your name, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter.READ MORE“Can Republicans and Democrats Find a Way Forward on Immigration?” [The New York Times]“What should Democrats do in the lame-duck Congress?” [The Economist]“Same-Sex Marriage Bill Passes Senate After Bipartisan Breakthrough” [The New York Times]“Here’s how Congress can make the lame-duck session a mighty one”[The Washington Post] More

    More stories

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Democrats Are Starting to Feel Hopeful About the Midterms. Should They?

      by

      Illustration by The New York Times; images by Olivier Douliery, Anna Moneymaker and Andrii Shyp, via Getty ImagesThis article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Wednesdays.Just a couple of months ago, Democrats’ prospects heading into the November elections looked, if not quite doomed, then decidedly dour: Not only do Americans tend to swing against the president’s party in the midterms, but President Biden was also presiding over the worst spate of inflation in four decades and his approval ratings over the summer had plunged to the lowest of any elected president at that point in his term since the end of World War II, according to FiveThirtyEight.But the national political environment has changed: Since July, Biden’s approval rating has risen by five percentage points and Democrats have gained around a net three percentage points in the generic ballot, which asks whether voters would prefer Democrats or Republicans to control Congress, overtaking the Republican Party’s lead.What are some of the issues that voters care most about, and how might the parties’ recent rhetorical and legislative handling of them be driving the race? Here’s what people are saying.AbortionWhen the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, there was a great deal of speculation among poll watchers and pundits about whether the abrogation of the constitutional right to abortion would redound to the Democratic Party’s benefit, potentially boosting turnout and swinging independents who might otherwise vote for Republicans.Shortly before the decision was handed down, but weeks after a draft of it had been leaked, the Times columnist Michelle Goldberg didn’t find much evidence to support this theory: “I don’t know that I’ve seen a new influx of energy,” Samhita Mukhopadhyay, the co-editor of “Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance and Revolution in Trump’s America” and the former executive editor of Teen Vogue, told her. “It’s surprising. There were marches, but it wasn’t the level of activism that we saw a couple of years ago with Black Lives Matter or even the Women’s March.”In the months since, though, there have been signs that the curtailment of abortion rights has moved the needle: In an August poll, Gallup found that abortion had climbed on Americans’ list of “most important problems” facing the country, ranking behind only economic concerns and more general issues of government and leadership. What’s more, according to a Times analysis, Roe’s overturning was followed by a surge in voter registration among women in 10 states with available data, including Kansas, where strong turnout in an August primary helped defeat a referendum that would have effectively ended abortion rights in the state.Because most Americans favor at least some abortion rights, many Republicans have tried to avoid making abortion a central campaign issue, emphasizing instead that the matter has been returned to the states. But that rhetorical posture became much harder to maintain last week, when Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, proposed a federal ban on the procedure after 15 weeks of pregnancy — “to cringes from many of his Republican colleagues,” The Times’s Carl Hulse reported.In the view of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, renationalizing the question of abortion regulation could be a risky political gamble for Republicans: “By Mr. Graham’s political logic, if voters in Colorado, Pennsylvania or Arizona think 15 weeks is too restrictive, they now have a reason to vote against those G.O.P. Senate candidates. Every Republican candidate will be asked to take a stance, and a Senate majority is made by swing states.”InflationPoll after poll after poll has found that inflation remains voters’ top concern heading into November. And while July’s Consumer Price Index report suggested that inflation had peaked, the August report suggested that it was not cooling as quickly as the White House and many economists had forecast. The price of rent and some food items actually increased between July and August, and workers lost buying power over the last year as prices increased faster than wages.These would be problems for any party in power during an election year, much less one whose leader has boasted of delivering wage gains. “Citizens of countries suffering from inflation have routinely sought to assign blame — to the government, to greedy companies or to politicians,” The Times’s Jonathan Weisman wrote last week of the Republican campaign strategy to blame Democrats for inflation. “Inflationary periods often yield labor strife, as workers and unions press for wage increases to keep up with rising prices, point fingers at ‘price-gouging’ companies and, more than anything, rage at those in power.”At the same time, some Republican officials have become concerned that inflation may no longer be the electoral clincher they had hoped for: Gasoline prices have fallen 26 percent from the record above $5 a gallon set in June, and consumer sentiment has improved as a result. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported this month that consumer inflation expectations were also falling, with households now expecting gas prices to be roughly unchanged a year from now.If inflation is indeed sinking in salience, some conservatives believe that Republicans will regret not elevating other issues like school curriculums, crime and immigration, Gabby Orr reported for CNN. “Our closing pitch must be compelling enough to make Republicans want to vote,” a Senate campaign aide told her. “‘It’s the economy, stupid’ no longer fits into that category.”Student debt reliefWhen Biden made the decision in August after months of lobbying to wipe out up to $20,000 of student loan debt for tens of millions of low- and middle-income Americans, it was in part because his chief of staff, among others, had argued that the relief could endear the administration to younger voters — an age group that, while more Democratic-leaning than any other, had broadly soured on the president.“It certainly energizes young people and people with student loan debt, which also includes many Republicans,” Andre Perry, a senior fellow at Brookings, told NPR. “Overall, it’s a political win for Biden because he’s delivering on his promises, he has a chance to pick up on some moderate Republicans who have debt.”This read of Biden’s debt jubilee is shared even by some of his political enemies:But Philip Bump wrote for The Washington Post that, so far, there are no obvious signs that young people will reward Biden for the relief plan, which hasn’t yet taken effect. In approval rating polls since August, “when we look at Americans under 30 — the group with the most debt — there’s been little to no movement at all,” he noted.Nor, as Vox’s Christian Paz pointed out, does the relief plan seem to be making much of an impression with independent voters, who polls have suggested are divided on the issue. “Ultimately, the policy might have had the effect of stopping the bleeding of support that Biden and Democrats were experiencing among their base,” he wrote. But, he added, “What is apparent is that Biden’s action is not as popular with the kind of voter that tends to matter in midterm elections in swing states: older white Americans and independents.”The polling wild cardThe polling profession entered something of a legitimacy crisis after the 2016 presidential election that only deepened in 2020, as this newsletter has explored, and there’s good reason to be wary of the polling data we’ve seen so far in 2022: As Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, noted last week, Democratic Senate candidates are outrunning expectations in the same places where the polls overestimated Biden in 2020 and Hillary Clinton in 2016, raising the possibility that the party’s supposedly favorable odds of retaining Senate control are an illusion.Polling mistakes matter not just because they can give pundits and readers a false impression of how an election might turn out; as Dan Pfeiffer, a senior adviser to Barack Obama, wrote in his newsletter last weekend, they can also change the outcome of the election itself, because campaigns, national party committees and super PACs rely on polling to make decisions about where to direct their efforts and funds.But Pfeiffer (and Cohn, too) sees evidence that the polls might actually be right this time around: Polls were more accurate in the 2018 midterms than they were in the 2020 presidential race, and recent special elections — including one that resulted in the pickup of a House seat in Alaska — have been encouraging for Democrats.Their predictive function (or dysfunction) aside, polls can also be useful for revealing trends in public opinion and voter behavior. In 2016, for example, pre-election polls accurately showed that Donald Trump was making huge gains among white voters without college degrees, and in 2020 they showed that he was also making gains among Hispanic voters. Even when polls miss on the horse race, Cohn noted this week, “these trends uncovered by polls continue to have import.”Do you have a point of view we missed? Email us at debatable@nytimes.com. Please note your name, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter.READ MORE“Are the Polls Wrong Again?” [The New York Times]“Will Abortion Affect the Midterm Vote for Candidates? Lessons From the Ban Gay Marriage Ballot Initiatives” [The Brookings Institution]“Two Months That Turned the 2022 Midterms on Their Head” [The Cook Political Report]“America’s Dueling Realities on a Key Question: Is the Economy Good or Bad?” [The New York Times]“Four Types of Voters We’re Watching in the Midterms” [The New York Times]What’s at stake for you on Election Day?In the final weeks before the midterm elections, Times Opinion is asking for your help to better understand what motivates each generation to vote. We’ve created a list of some of the biggest problems facing voters right now. Choose the one that matters most to you and tell us why. We plan to publish a selection of responses shortly before Election Day. More

    • 75 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Can Democrats Avoid a Midterm Wipeout?

      by

      This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Wednesdays.It is one of the most enduring trends in American politics that the president’s party tends to fare poorly during midterm elections. And in 2022, that trend was supposed to reassert itself with a vengeance: As inflation climbs at its fastest pace in four decades, Joe Biden’s approval rating has plunged to the lowest of any elected president at this point in his presidency since the end of World War II, according to FiveThirtyEight.But despite those grim conditions, the midterms could be surprisingly competitive: In a July poll conducted by The New York Times and Siena College, 41 percent of registered voters said they preferred Democrats to control Congress, compared with 40 percent who preferred Republicans.Here’s what people are saying about the state of the races, whether Democrats stand a chance of keeping one or both of their majorities in Congress, and what could change the forecast between now and November.Why the races look closer than expectedIf the Times/Siena polling made one thing clear, it’s that voters are not pleased with the way the country is being run. Even as the unemployment rate hovers around a 50-year low, Americans are deeply anxious about the economy: Just 10 percent of registered voters rated it as “good” or “excellent.” More broadly, political malaise seems the order of the day: A majority of respondents said the nation was too divided to solve its challenges, and just 13 percent said the country was heading in the right direction.But there are a few factors insulating Democrats from all this negative sentiment.As The Times’s chief political analyst, Nate Cohn, explains, recent news is actually helping Democrats in some ways: This summer, the Supreme Court has handed the right significant victories on abortion, climate policy, religious rights and gun laws, galvanizing voters who lean Democratic on those issues and shifting the national political discourse away from the Republican Party’s preferred turf of immigration, crime and school curriculums. Recent mass shootings have also played a role in this shift.In the past several years, the Republican Party has made inroads with less affluent, less educated voters while shedding support among higher-income, higher-educated voters. As a result, the electoral playing field has become less tilted toward Republicans, according to Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at Harvard who focuses on redistricting and demographic trends. While “the conventional wisdom has it that Democrats are disadvantaged in redistricting because of their inefficient over-concentration in cities,” he told Thomas B. Edsall, a contributing writer for Times Opinion, “the Trump era seems to have changed the country’s political geography in ways that are beneficial to Democrats.”Republicans are also reconfiguring their relationship with Donald Trump, whose grip on the party isn’t as strong as it once was, particularly as the fallout from the House Jan. 6 investigation compounds. According to the Times/Siena College poll, nearly half of Republican primary voters would prefer someone other than Trump for president in 2024. As Jake Lahut reports for Insider, that fault line has created potential pitfalls for Trump-backed Senate candidates, like Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania and Herschel Walker in Georgia, who have won their primaries but have struggled to break away in general election matchups against their Democratic opponents.The odds: According to Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, Republicans have roughly the same chance of reclaiming a Senate majority as Democrats do of retaining theirs. In the House, though, Republicans are still heavily favored. Why? House candidates are both more numerous and more anonymous than Senate candidates, Silver explains, so voters’ feelings about the national political environment tend to be determinative.As The Times’s David Leonhardt wrote this month, “If Democrats keep the Senate without the House, they still would not be able to pass legislation without Republican support.” But, he added: “Senate control nonetheless matters. It would allow President Biden to appoint judges, Cabinet secretaries and other top officials without any Republican support, because only the Senate needs to confirm nominees.”The abortion factorBecause the Supreme Court returned the power to regulate abortions to the states last month, abortion will be a live issue this midterm season in a way it hasn’t been for many decades. Five states will have ballot measures asking voters whether to amend their constitutions to either enshrine or proscribe the right to abortion. And in other states, the issue has raised the stakes in competitive races for the legislature and the governor’s mansion.There are two ways abortion’s centrality could help Democrats in November, Ed Kilgore argues in New York magazine. “The first and most obvious is that it could keep in the Democratic ranks a significant number of suburban swing voters who voted for the Donkey Party in 2018 and 2020 but who might swing back to the G.O.P. without Trump totally dominating the landscape and with economic issues in the forefront,” he writes. “The second possible effect is to boost the turnout rates of certain pro-Democratic groups of voters who often skip non-presidential elections.”Mainstream Democrats have historically treated abortion as a divisive issue best left on the periphery of their campaign strategy. (Biden himself did not utter the word “abortion” until more than a year into his presidency.) But this election season, some Democrats are actively campaigning on the issue, wagering that the Supreme Court’s abrogation of the constitutional right to abortion could prompt a backlash from voters. In Georgia, for example, Stacey Abrams, the state’s Democratic nominee for governor, has started making direct appeals to swing voters and portraying her opponent, the incumbent governor, Brian Kemp, as the mind behind one of the nation’s most extreme abortion laws, which bans abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy.Similarly, Senator Maggie Hassan, a Democrat who is up for re-election in “notoriously swingy” New Hampshire, has leaned into the issue. “I will fight and never back down,” she said in a June television ad raising the possibility of a national abortion ban. “Protecting our personal freedoms isn’t just what’s right for New Hampshire. It’s what makes us New Hampshire.”Whether this strategy will end up redounding to the Democrats’ benefit remains an open question. Since the court overruled Roe v. Wade, most polls have shown approximately a three-point shift in the Democrats’ direction on the generic ballot, which asks whether voters would prefer Democrats or Republicans to control Congress, compared with surveys by the same pollsters before the decision came down.But some are skeptical that the shift will endure through November or prove significant enough to turn the electoral tide. “Does it have an effect? Absolutely,” Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist, told The Times. “Does it fundamentally change the landscape? No. Not in an off-year election, when your president’s approval rating is below 40 percent and gas is $5 a gallon.”What to watchInflation: According to the Times/Siena College poll, 78 percent of voters say inflation will be “extremely important” when they head to the polls. “It’s a very negative thing politically for the Democrats,” said Jason Furman, an economist at Harvard University and a former economic adviser for the Obama administration. “My guess is that the negative views about inflation are so deeply baked in that nothing can change in the next few months to change them.”Unless, of course, they get worse: Republicans are seizing on fears of rising prices in campaign ads, which economists warn could push prices even higher by entrenching inflationary expectations.A surprise announcement from Trump: “Should former President Trump decide, against the advice of nearly every Republican strategist alive, to announce his candidacy before the midterm elections in November, he might energize Democratic voters enough to minimize their losses at the margins,” Charlie Cook of the Cook Political Report writes. “I am not sure it would save one or both majorities, but it certainly has the potential to have a greater impact than abortion, guns, and Jan. 6 combined.”Another polling failure: As this newsletter has explored, the polling profession has been in something of a state of crisis since the 2016 election. Pollsters are having a harder and harder time reaching working-class voters, who have been trending Republican, and so polls have routinely overestimated Democratic support. As Cohn writes, “It’s hard not to wonder whether the good news for Democrats might simply be a harbinger of yet another high-profile misfire.”Do you have a point of view we missed? Email us at debatable@nytimes.com. Please note your name, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter.READ MORE“This election could answer the biggest midterm question: Abortion or the economy?” [Politico]“Where the Midterms Could Most Affect Abortion Access” [FiveThirtyEight]“Could the Midterms Be Tighter Than Expected?” [The New York Times]“Democrats’ Risky Bet: Aid G.O.P. Extremists in Spring, Hoping to Beat Them in Fall” [The New York Times]“Sorry, Democrats. Don’t get your hopes up for the midterms.” [The Washington Post] More

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Is a Red Wave Coming for Biden’s Presidency?

      by

      This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays.The Republican Party, you may have heard by now, has a lot of news to celebrate after last week’s elections. In Virginia, a state that President Biden won by 10 points last year, it took back the governor’s mansion, a feat it hadn’t managed in over a decade. Republicans also came within striking distance of doing the same in New Jersey, a more deeply blue state that Biden won by about 16 points. And in New York, Democrats lost ground in local races too.Needless to say, tonight’s results are consistent w/ a political environment in which Republicans would comfortably take back both the House and Senate in 2022.— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) November 3, 2021
      What does the G.O.P.’s rebound tell us about how the electorate is changing, and what does it portend for the country’s political future in 2022 and beyond?The thermostat strikes backIn 1995, the political scientist Christopher Wlezien developed a theory known as the thermostatic model of American politics: The idea, as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp explains, is “to think of the electorate as a person adjusting their thermostat: When the political environment gets ‘too hot’ for their liking, they turn the thermostat down. When it gets ‘too cold,’ they turn it back up.”In practice, the thermostatic nature of public opinion means that the president’s party tends to struggle in off-year elections. Such swings have been observed for decades:The effect occurs for two reasons, The Washington Post’s Perry Bacon Jr. explains. “First, there is often a turnout gap that favors the party that doesn’t control the White House,” he writes. “Off-year elections have much lower turnout than presidential ones, but typically more people from the party that doesn’t control the presidency are motivated to vote in opposition to whatever the incumbent president is doing.” A turnout gap was certainly in evidence last week.The second reason for thermostatic backlash is that some voters switch from the president’s party, which also appears to have happened last week: Exit polls suggested that 5 percent of 2020 Biden voters backed Glenn Youngkin, the Republican candidate, while just 2 percent of those who voted for Donald Trump in 2020 supported Terry McAuliffe, the Democrat. “That only accounts for a few points,” Bacon notes, but given that Youngkin won by less than two percentage points, “those small shifts matter.”[“How shocking were New Jersey and Virginia, really?”]So why are voters cooling toward the Democrats?As Democrats make sense of their losses, “one fact stands out as one of the easiest explanations,” The Times’s Nate Cohn wrote. “Joe Biden has lower approval ratings at this stage of his presidency than nearly any president in the era of modern polling.”Why?Some argue that Biden is performing poorly because he has tacked too far left on policy. Representative Abigail Spanberger, a Virginia Democrat, told The Times: “Nobody elected him to be F.D.R., they elected him to be normal and stop the chaos.”Others blame a more general political-cultural gestalt: “wokeness.” “Wokeness Derailed the Democrats,” the Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote last weekend. This line of argumentation has drawn criticism for being deliberately, even insidiously vague. But when it comes to last week’s elections, much of the “wokeness” debate, on both sides of the aisle, has revolved around the so-called critical race theory controversy in K-12 schools, which this newsletter explored at length in July.There are strong counterarguments to both of these explanations. As Beauchamp writes, while Youngkin did at one point vow to ban what has disingenuously been called critical race theory in public schools, his campaign wasn’t nearly as focused on the issue as some pundits made it out to be. Nor does the “critical race theory” controversy explain the election results in New Jersey, where there was a similar backlash against Democrats despite the race’s not being “particularly culture-war focused.”The Times columnist Michelle Goldberg argues that the real reason education was such an incendiary issue this election cycle “likely had less to do with critical race theory than with parent fury over the drawn-out nightmare of online school.” Zachary D. Carter agrees: “A lot of suburban parents lost faith in Virginia’s public schools over the past year, and as a result, they’re more open to conservative narratives about problems in public schools.”As for the idea that the Democrats’ underperformance owes to Biden’s leftward shift on policy, one could just as easily — if not more easily — take the opposite reading of events: During his campaign, Biden openly aspired to a presidency that would rival or even eclipse that of F.D.R.; in office, however, his legislative agenda, which remains broadly popular, has been stripped down and delayed by his own party. Couldn’t disappointment, not backlash, be to blame for his party’s low turnout?Some say that last week’s electoral shifts have even more general causes. Put simply, Americans are in a gloomy mood. A chief reason appears to be the pandemic, which has disrupted everyday life and the economy for longer than many expected.In the words of The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson, Democrats are losing the “vibe wars”: “Despite many positive economic trends, Americans are feeling rotten about the state of things — and, understandably, they’re blaming the party in power.”3 trends worth watchingRepublicans can succeed — and are perhaps even stronger — without Trump. As the G.O.P. pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson notes, Youngkin was able to enjoy the advantages of Trump — who over the past five years turned many formerly disengaged voters into habitual Republican voters — without incurring any of his liabilities. He did so mainly by neither embracing nor disavowing the former president.“In the current political environment, the Trump coalition seems primed to turn out and stick it to the Democrats even if Trump isn’t on the ballot himself,” she writes. And that means that “trying to use the fear of Trump to hold on to swing voters doesn’t seem as viable a strategy for Democrats.”Democrats’ problem with white non-college-educated voters is getting worse. For decades now, left-wing parties around the world have been losing support among their traditional working-class base. The Democratic Party has also suffered from this phenomenon, as the white electorate has become less polarized by income and more polarized by educational attainment.That trend appeared to assert itself in Virginia’s election last week, according to FiveThirtyEight, as the divide between white voters with and without a college degree grew.It’s not just white voters. In recent years, Democrats have also lost ground among Latino voters and, to a smaller extent, Black and Asian American voters, with the sharpest drops among those who did not attend college.The writer and researcher Matthew Thomas argues that there are signs that the racial depolarization of the electorate may be accelerating: In New York’s mayoral election last week, he notes, Queens precincts that are more than 75 percent Asian swung 14 points toward Republicans from four years ago, while Queens precincts that are over 75 percent Hispanic swung 30 points toward Republicans.“There’s no easy solution to the decades-long demobilization of working-class voters,” he writes. “But the left can’t afford to chalk up all of our defeats to whitelash alone. This country is in the midst of a profound realignment along axes of culture and education that are about to make race and class seem like yesterday’s news.”[“Why Americans Don’t Vote Their Class Anymore”]So are Democrats — and free and fair elections — doomed?As Bacon notes, the results from last week suggest that the Republican Party will suffer few electoral consequences in 2022 for its recent anti-democratic turn. “In normal circumstances, I’d see that as a bad thing, since my policy views are closer to the Democrats,” he writes. “But in our current abnormal circumstance, with U.S. democracy on the precipice because of the extremism of the current G.O.P., everyone needs to understand that normal could well be catastrophic.”How should Democrats respond?Some argue that they should tack to the center: “Congress should focus on what is possible, not what would be possible if Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema and — frankly — a host of lesser-known Democratic moderates who haven’t had to vote on policies they might oppose were not in office,” the Times editorial board writes.Samuel Moyn, a professor of history and law at Yale, thinks that’s precisely the wrong approach given the popularity of progressive economic policies: “Even if progressives were to secure a welfare package and retain influence in their party, Trump — or an even more popular Republican — could still win the presidency. But this outcome is a near certainty if the Democrats return to centrist form — as seems the likeliest outcome now.”In the end, as Moyn suggests, policy may not have the power to save Democrats from defeat. As The Times’s David Leonhardt noted last week, some political scientists believe that Democrats overweight the electoral importance of policy and don’t talk enough about values.And the values Biden ran on were, in effect, a liberal answer to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” creed, a promise to restore “the soul of America” to its former self. “Joe Biden promised normality, Americans got abnormality, and Democrats got punished at the polls for it,” Thompson writes in The Atlantic. “The path toward a more successful midterm election for Democrats in 2022 flows through the converse of this strategy. First, make things feel better. Then talk about it.”Do you have a point of view we missed? Email us at debatable@nytimes.com. Please note your name, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter.READ MORE“What Moves Swing Voters” [The New York Times]“Why Virginia’s And New Jersey’s Elections Could Suggest A Red Wave In 2022” [FiveThirtyEight]“The Powerful G.O.P. Strategy Democrats Must Counter if They Want to Win” [The New York Times]“Bill Clinton Saved His Presidency. Here’s How Biden Can, Too.” [The New York Times]“How to Rebuild the Democratic Party” [The New Republic] More

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Will 2024 Be the Year American Democracy Dies?

      by

      This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays.Nearly nine months after rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election, a question still lingers over how to place it in history: Were the events of Jan. 6 the doomed conclusion of an unusually anti-democratic moment in American political life, or a preview of where the country is still heading?Richard L. Hasen, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law and an expert in election law, believes the second possibility shouldn’t be ruled out. In a paper published this month, he wrote that “The United States faces a serious risk that the 2024 presidential election, and other future U.S. elections, will not be conducted fairly, and that the candidates taking office will not reflect the free choices made by eligible voters under previously announced election rules.”It could be a bloodless coup, he warns, executed not by rioters with nooses but “lawyers in fine suits”: Between January and June, Republican-controlled legislatures passed 24 laws across 14 states to increase their control over how elections are run, stripping secretaries of state of their power and making it easier to overturn results.How much danger is American democracy really in, and what can be done to safeguard it? Here’s what people are saying.How democracy could collapse in 2024In Hasen’s view, there are three mechanisms by which the 2024 election could be overturned:State legislatures, purporting to exercise the authority of either the Constitution or an 1887 federal law called the Electoral Count Act, swapping in their own slate of electors for president, potentially with the blessing of a conservative Supreme Court and a Republican-controlled Congress.Fraudulent or suppressive election administration or vote counting by norm- or law-breaking officials.Vigilante action that prevents voting, interferes with ballot counting or interrupts the legitimate transfer of power.These mechanisms are not outside the realm of possibility:Recent reporting from Robert Costa and Bob Woodward revealed that the previous administration had a plan, hatched by the prominent conservative lawyer John Eastman, for former Vice President Pence to throw out the electoral votes of key swing states on the basis that they had competing slates of electors. Next time around, “with the right pieces in place, Trump could succeed,” the Times columnist Jamelle Bouie writes. “All he needs is a rival slate of electoral votes from contested states, state officials and state legislatures willing to intervene on his behalf, a supportive Republican majority in either house of Congress, and a sufficiently pliant Supreme Court majority.”On top of passing voting administration laws, Republicans have also recruited candidates who espouse election conspiracy theories to run for positions like secretary of state and county clerk. According to Reuters, 10 of the 15 declared Republican candidates for secretary of state in five swing states have either declared the 2020 election stolen or demanded its invalidation or investigation.Skepticism of or hostility toward election administration is widespread among Republican voters as well, 78 percent of whom still say that President Biden did not win in November. That conviction, Reuters reported in June, has sparked a nationwide intimidation campaign against election officials and their families, who continue to face threats of hanging, firing squads, torture and bomb blasts with vanishingly little help from law enforcement. One in three election officials feel unsafe because of their job and nearly one in five listed threats to their lives as a job-related concern, according to an April survey from the Brennan Center.“The stage is thus being set for chaos,” Robert Kagan argues in The Washington Post. Given a more strategically contested election, “Biden would find himself where other presidents have been — where Andrew Jackson was during the nullification crisis, or where Abraham Lincoln was after the South seceded — navigating without rules or precedents, making his own judgments about what constitutional powers he does and doesn’t have.”Some experts worry about democratic backsliding even in the event of a legitimate Republican victory in 2024, Ashley Parker reports for The Washington Post. In such a scenario, Trump or a similarly anti-democratic figure might set about remaking the political and electoral system to consolidate power.“We often think that what we should be waiting for is fascists and communists marching in the streets, but nowadays, the ways democracies often die is through legal things at the ballot box — so things that can be both legal and antidemocratic at the same time,” said Daniel Ziblatt, a Harvard political scientist. “Politicians use the letter of the law to subvert the spirit of the law.”Experts told Parker that perhaps the most proximate example is Hungary under Viktor Orban, who returned to power in 2010 after being ousted in 2002 and over the past decade has transformed the country into a soft autocracy. Admirers of the country’s government include Tucker Carlson, who in August extolled it as a model for the United States, and the high-profile Conservative Political Action Committee, which will host its next gathering in Budapest.Brian Klaas, a political scientist at University College London, believes there are many reasons — the threat of primary challenges against Republicans who defy “Stop the Steal” orthodoxy, gerrymandering, the influence of social media — that the Republican Party’s anti-democratic turn might not just continue but accelerate: “There are no countervailing forces. There’s nothing that rewards being a sober moderate who believes in democracy and tries to govern by consensus.”‘The quicksand we’re already in’Could a plan of the kind Eastman devised to manipulate the Electoral College count really have succeeded? Teri Kanefield, a lawyer, doesn’t think so. The plan was “alarming,” to be sure, but “It was never within the realm of possibility that Americans would passively tolerate” a de facto dictatorship, she writes in The Washington Post, “and at any rate, U.S. military leaders had no interest in using force to keep Trump in power, either.”The same argument could apply to the other methods of subversion Hasen outlines. After all, if Republicans feel they must change election rules to win, might they not be said to be operating from a place of weakness rather than strength? “The only person or party that attempts a coup d’état is the one that cannot win by other means,” Jack Shafer writes in Politico. “It would only inspire a counter-coup by the majority, and maybe a counter-counter coup, and a counter-counter-counter coup.”But some analysts worry that U.S. elections are already so undemocratic that an anti-democratic movement doesn’t need to subvert them. Consider, for example, that the Senate now heavily favors, more than it has before, a minority of voters controlling a majority of the seats, while the Electoral College has become more likely to deny victory to the winner of the popular vote. Conceivably, an Orban-like candidate without a popular mandate could win legitimately in 2024, without violence or fraud, and feel little need to transform these institutions much further.“As things already stand today, the Republican Party can return to power in Washington without the support of the majority of the American electorate,” Osita Nwanevu writes in The New Republic. “Democrats, by contrast, had to win more than simple majorities or pluralities to gain the power they tenuously hold now — if Joe Biden had defeated Donald Trump by any less than 3.2 points in the popular vote, he would have lost outright in November. None of this is privileged information; these and other related facts have been widely disseminated in recent years by academics, analysts, and journalists who also tend to imply, nevertheless, that an undemocratic America is merely a hypothetical looming ahead of us. It isn’t. It is the quicksand we’re already in.”What happens next? It’s up to the DemocratsThe partisan biases of the Electoral College and the Senate are not easily altered, and whether they should be is a debate all its own. But at the very least, members of Congress could act to prevent the kind of explicit subversion of existing election rules that Hasen warns of: In the House of Representatives, Democrats have passed a new voting rights act aimed at stemming the tide of restrictive new election laws from Republican state legislatures. It would reverse two Supreme Court rulings that gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, reviving the Justice Department’s power to bar some discriminatory election changes and easing the path to challenge others in court.In the Senate, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota has introduced a bill that promises to “expand protections for election administrators by extending existing prohibitions on intimidating or threatening voters to include election officials engaged in the counting of ballots, canvassing, and certifying election results.”To guard against an Eastman-style plan to overturn the Electoral College vote, Congress could modernize the ambiguous Electoral Count Act that governs the counting procedure — far too ambiguously, Meredith McGehee and Elise Wirkus argue in The Hill.All of these measures would require changing the Senate filibuster, but doing so is completely within Democrats’ power, as the Times columnist Ezra Klein has noted. “In that way,” he argues, “Republicans perceive the threat correctly: A country that is far closer to being truly democratic, where the unpopularity of their ideas would expose them to punishing electoral consequences.” More

    • 88 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      Where Does American Democracy Go From Here?

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyWhere Does American Democracy Go From Here?Six weeks after the election, Republican leaders are finally acknowledging Biden’s victory. Is that a relief, or an omen?Mr. Bokat-Lindell is a staff editor.Dec. 15, 2020, 6:15 p.m. ETCredit…Illustration by The New York Times; photographs by Erin Schaff/The New York Times and Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesThis article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays.On Tuesday, Senator Mitch McConnell, the most powerful Republican in Congress, finally recognized Joe Biden as the president-elect after the Electoral College certified his victory on Monday. “The integrity of our elections remains intact,” Mr. Biden said in a speech after the Electoral College vote. “And so now it is time to turn the page, as we’ve done throughout our history. To unite. To heal.”It’s a fine thought. But first many Americans will want to inspect the wound: For more than a month now, the Republican Party has helped Mr. Trump wage a campaign to overturn the results of the presidential election. How serious are these schemes — which, if the president’s Twitter feed is any indication, are still ongoing — and how much damage might they do to the integrity of American democracy? Here’s what people are saying.‘It’s not a coup. It’s not even a bad coup.’Mr. Trump and his Republican allies have tried to subvert the will of the American people in so many ways that it can be difficult to keep track:Since well before November, they have sought to cast doubt on the integrity of American elections and disenfranchise voters by weaponizing a false narrative of voter fraud.They have filed nearly five dozen challenges to the handling, casting and counting of votes in every level of the judiciary in at least eight different states. Perhaps the most high-profile concerned a Supreme Court petition from Texas to overturn election results in four battleground states, which gained formal support from 18 state attorneys general and nearly two-thirds of House Republicans, including the minority leader.They have tried to throw out hundreds of thousands of votes cast in majority-Black precincts.They have organized slates of shadow electors in Georgia and Michigan as a means of creating an “alternate” Electoral College tally.And finally, they have planned to dispute the election on the House floor on Jan. 6, when Congress will meet to formalize the Electoral College results.Yet all of these efforts have so far failed. As The Times editorial board writes, the electoral system itself has proved remarkably resilient despite the stresses placed on it, including a pandemic and the largest turnout ever recorded. “The votes were counted, sometimes more than once,” the board notes. “The results were certified. In the states that have attracted the particular ire of Mr. Trump and his allies, most officials, including most Republican officials, defended the integrity of the results.”That includes judicial officials, too, as Daniel Drezner points out in The Washington Post. “For all the fears about the Federalist Society and conservative court-packing,” he writes, “Politico’s Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein reported last week that ‘several of the most devastating opinions, both Friday and in recent weeks, have come from conservative judges and, in some federal cases, Trump appointees.’” Perhaps the most decisive defeat for Mr. Trump came from the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Texas lawsuit, which all three of Mr. Trump’s appointees voted to shut down last week.That decision effectively ended any prospect Mr. Trump had of reversing Mr. Biden’s victory through the courts, and constitutional scholars say the remaining efforts to do so through Congress are also all but certain to fail. “What is happening is not a coup, or even an attempt at a coup,” Dr. Drezner writes. “It is a ham-handed effort to besmirch the election outcome by any easily available means necessary.”‘Act like this is your first coup, if you want to be sure that it’s also your last’The incompetence of Mr. Trump’s attempt to subvert the election is not a reason to discount its seriousness, Zeynep Tufekci argues in The Atlantic. The end he seeks may be out of reach, but the means — a mobilization of executive, judicial and legislative power to contest election results, implicitly and explicitly endorsed by one of the country’s two major parties — will now be available to more competent successors.Consider that of the 249 Republicans in the House and Senate, 220, or 88 percent, refused in a recent survey to acknowledge that Mr. Biden had won the presidency. (Two said that Mr. Trump had won.) And when the Supreme Court handed down its ruling on the Texas lawsuit, the head of the state’s Republican Party suggested that “law-abiding states” secede from the union.“The next attempt to steal an election may involve a closer election and smarter lawsuits,” she writes. “Imagine the same playbook executed with better decorum, a president exerting pressure that is less crass and issuing tweets that are more polite. If most Republican officials are failing to police this ham-handed attempt at a power grab, how many would resist a smoother, less grossly embarrassing effort?”“There is an anti-democratic virus that has spread in mainstream Republicanism, among mainstream Republican elected officials,” Dale Ho, director of the Voting Rights Project at the A.C.L.U., told The Times. “And that loss of faith in the machinery of democracy is a much bigger problem than any individual lawsuit.”It’s also not clear that the damage Mr. Trump did to that faith is reversible, Michelle Goldberg writes in The Times. Other presidents have deceived the country, as anyone who lived through the Iraq War remembers, but Ms. Goldberg argues that Mr. Trump’s insistent and unapologetic fabrication of alternate realities stands unparalleled. “Trump has eviscerated in America any common conception of reality,” she writes. “He leaves behind a nation deranged.”Several polls have found that a large majority of Republican voters do not believe Mr. Biden’s victory to be legitimate, which raises questions about even the possibility of shared understanding that reconciliation requires. In The Times, Bret Stephens predicts that it could take decades for Americans to understand the damage done to social trust and how to repair it.“If enough people believe that a government is not elected legitimately, that’s a huge problem for democracy,” Keith A. Darden, a political science professor at American University in Washington, told The Times. “Once reality gets degraded, it’s really hard to get it back.”Before and beyond ‘Trumpism’Perhaps asking what damage Mr. Trump has done to American democracy risks putting the question backward. According to the V-Dem institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, the Republican Party has indeed grown more illiberal and anti-democratic, having come to more closely resemble authoritarian parties around the world than it does typical center-right ones. But while its retreat from democratic norms may have accelerated under Mr. Trump, researchers say that it began under the Obama administration and coincided with the rise of the Tea Party.And experts were warning even a decade before that American democracy was showing signs of trouble, as Amanda Taub and Max Fisher have written for The Times. “Constitutional scholars said that the bill was coming due for horse trading compromises the framers had made among one another 200 years earlier,” they explain. “Political scientists said those founders’ had built cracks into the system that had been slowly widening ever since.”Two such cracks are the Senate and the Electoral College: They have always made American democracy unusually undemocratic, but in recent years they have made it even more so, and in ways that advantage Republicans: The Senate now heavily favors, more than it has before, a minority of voters controlling a majority of the seats, while the Electoral College has become more likely to deny victory to the winner of the popular vote.The increasingly minoritarian character of these institutions is what made contesting this election possible, as my colleague Jesse Wegman points out. “We came within a hairbreadth of re-electing a man who finished more than seven million votes behind his opponent — and we nearly repeated the shock of 2016, when Donald Trump took office after coming in a distant second in the balloting,” he writes.The absence of majority rule naturally opens the door to corruption, neglect and abuse of power, Mr. Wegman argues, because a government that doesn’t have to earn the support of a majority or a plurality of its citizens has no incentive to represent their interests or provide for their needs. He notes, for example, how millions of Californians were ignored by Mr. Trump during wildfire season. But the dynamic is also visible in the Senate’s ability to stand athwart popular opinion on all manner of policy issues, from a $15 minimum wage to marijuana legalization to another stimulus check.Barring a double victory in the Georgia Senate runoffs, at the very least, the Democrats probably won’t be able to make the government more accountable to the popular will. But the result could look less like despotism than further stagnation, a paralyzed politics that produces little beyond an occasional defense bill, tax cut or executive order on immigration here and there.“It seems so strange to me that people spoke so much of authoritarianism under Trump when what we’ve been seeing for years now, including the Trump years, is political impotence, the absence of political will,” the political theorist Corey Robin told Jewish Currents. “And without the left getting its act together, I don’t see that changing any time soon.”Do you have a point of view we missed? Email us at debatable@nytimes.com. Please note your name, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter.MORE ON TRUMP’S LONG DEFEAT“The Texas Lawsuit and the Age of Dreampolitik” [The New York Times]“How Trump Won” [The New York Review of Books]“Three ways the outgoing president’s post-election fight changed the political landscape” [The Atlantic]“How Trump’s Judges Got in the Way of Trump” [Politico]“1918 Germany Has a Warning for America” [The New York Times]WHAT YOU’RE SAYINGHere’s what readers had to say about the last debate: The battle over Biden’s defense secretary.Flora: “Biden should select Pete Buttigieg. He served in war. He has administrative experience. He is brilliant with impressive performance in presidential primary debates. The military-industrial complex needs to be dismantled! Austin’s association with Raytheon disqualifies him.”Stephen: “I recall that Donald Rumsfeld was not a career military man and still did not ask the hard questions about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He seemed more bent on starting and winning a war there. A civilian secretary of defense is no guarantee of getting to the heart of why we should involve ourselves in war.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More