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      There Is Another Democrat A.O.C. Should Be Mad At

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      Progressive Democrats in the House of Representatives can be forgiven their anxiety about whether Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona will support the more than $1.8 trillion Build Back Better plan. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, for example, rues the two senators’ outsize influence, while her colleague Rashida Tlaib of Michigan worries that Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema are “corporate Dems” led astray by special interests.But if disappointed progressives are looking for a Democrat to blame, they should consider directing their ire toward one of their party’s founders: James Madison. Madison’s Constitution was built to thwart exactly what Democrats have been attempting: a race against time to impose vast policies with narrow majorities. Madison believed that one important function of the Constitution was to ensure sustained consensus before popular majorities could prevail.Democrats do represent a popular majority now. But for Madison, that “now” is the problem: He was less interested in a snapshot of a moment in constitutional time than in a time-lapse photograph showing that a majority had cohered. The more significant its desires, Madison thought, the longer that interval of coherence should be. The monumental scale of the Build Back Better plan consequently raises a difficult Madisonian question: Is a fleeting and narrow majority enough for making history?In this Madisonian sense, Democrats are tripping over their own boasts. Even in announcing that the spending plan had been scaled back, President Biden repeatedly called the measure “historic.” No fewer than four times in a single statement, his White House described elements of the Build Back Better framework as the most important policy innovations in “generations.” Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, called the bill the House passed last week “historic, transformative and larger than anything we have done before.”Before the plan was trimmed from its original $3.5 trillion price tag, Democratic descriptions of it were even more grandiose. Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic majority leader, called the party’s initial proposal “the most significant legislation to expand support for American families since the era of the New Deal and the Great Society. If not quite Rooseveltian in scope, it is certainly near-Rooseveltian.” Ms. Pelosi said the legislation would “stand for generations alongside the New Deal and the Great Society as pillars of economic security for working families.”Madison might ask why legislation that will stand for generations should be enacted in months. The pragmatic answer, of course, is that Democrats may lose their majorities in the House and Senate next November. But that is part of the problem. Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson passed the New Deal and Great Society with enormous, broad-based legislative majorities. The policies were so popular that they commanded at least some bipartisan support.There is a reason Madison thought it should be that way. In evaluating public opinion, he saw two distinctions as essential. The first was whether the public’s views were based on reason or passion. The second was whether the views were settled or fluctuating.According to Madison’s political psychology, passions were inherently short-lived. That was why he could say in Federalist 10 that factions would not overtake a geographically large republic: In the time it took for them to spread, passions would cool and dissipate. By contrast, opinions based on reason could withstand the test of time.Madison encapsulated his theory of democracy in Federalist 63, which pertained to the unique role of the Senate in pumping the brakes on speeding majorities. He assumed that “the cool and deliberate sense of the community ought, in all governments, and actually will, in all free governments, ultimately prevail over the views of its rulers,” just as there would be unusual moments when the people would get swept up in passionate measures “which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn.”The most significant Madisonian fact is that majority rule is both a good idea and an inevitable one: public opinion both “ought” to and “will” win out in a republic. But, crucially, it will do so “ultimately,” not immediately. One original purpose of the Senate’s six-year terms was to give its members time between elections to resist public opinion. The different electoral clocks for representatives, presidents and senators require that public opinion cohere to prevail.In 1791, with the young Constitution in operation and nascent partisan alliances appearing, Madison wrote in a newspaper essay that the government owed deference to public opinion only when that opinion was “fixed” rather than fluctuating: “This distinction, if kept in view, would prevent or decide many debates on the respect due from the government to the sentiments of the people.”It is difficult to identify a case in American history of sustained, broad public opinion that did not ultimately manifest itself in public policy. Americans have been thwarted or delayed with respect to vague ideas like expanding access to health care. But they have also disagreed profoundly and deeply about what form those ideas should concretely take. When Americans have settled into an enduring consensus on particulars, they have almost always prevailed.One way proponents of particular policies encourage consensus is by appealing to public opinion. But according to Madison, the constitutional system judges majorities on their durability. A nearly $2 trillion bill that fundamentally alters relations between the government and the governed — even if in constructive and needed ways — should demonstrate broad and enduring support. A tied Senate and nearly tied House, acting in a space of months, cannot demonstrate that support on Madisonian terms.Democrats should not be overly faulted for failing to attract Republican support. At least since Democrats took the House in 2018, and arguably for longer, Republicans have been dogmatically uncooperative and uninterested in legislating.But the overuse of omnibus bills that throw every possible priority into a single measure make bipartisan support nearly impossible. Madison may have predicted the future of factions poorly. But his assumption was that coalitions would shift from issue to issue. A stand-alone bill on any one Democratic priority might well receive votes from across the aisle, as the recent $1 trillion infrastructure bill did. One reason for that bipartisan support is that isolating issues raises the cost of opposing them.In addition, the fact that one of the country’s two major political parties refuses to budge and — the decisive fact — feels no pressure from its constituents to do so is evidence that the Madisonian tests of durability and fixity have not been met. If majorities of the American people truly support the Democratic approach to social policy, the party’s candidates should be able to make that case on the campaign trail. The fact that they are trying to beat the clock instead suggests they know their support is fragile. Fragility is a poor foundation for major legislation.Polarization, especially when it falls along geographic lines, does not help. Madison, who foresaw that the enslavement from which he benefited might split the nation, warned against geographic fault lines. But to write off Republican politicians is also to write off broad swaths of voters who support them.Similarly, to blame Mr. Manchin for obstructing Democrats, as Representative Cori Bush of Missouri did in denying his authority “to dictate the future of our country,” is to ignore the fact that a 50-50 Senate gives every member of the body that power. A broader majority would deprive Mr. Manchin or Ms. Sinema of it. But because they serve as a moderating force that ensures wider support for legislation, disempowering them also risks increasing polarization.Devices like gerrymandering have the effect of exaggerating Republican support in the House. So does the geographic polarization reflected in the narrowly divided Senate. Consequently, Democrats’ slender margins in Congress may understate the degree of public support for their policies. But there is no constitutional means of registering public opinion other than elections. And it is equally unquestionable that the tragic flaw of many successful candidates for public office is exaggerating their mandates. The narrow majorities Democrats possess in Congress counsel caution instead. Mr. Biden’s mandate was largely for normalcy after four years of mania. It’s hard to make a case for being F.D.R. without a Great Depression.If progressive Democrats want to do more, they should demonstrate what Lincoln called “a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people.” If the people stand with them, Democrats will eventually — just not immediately — prevail.Greg Weiner (@GregWeiner1) is a political scientist at Assumption University, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of “Madison’s Metronome: The Constitution, Majority Rule, and the Tempo of American Politics.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      What We Give Thanks for and What We Say No Thanks To

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      Gail Collins: Happy Thanksgiving week, Bret. Anything you’re thankful for in particular — besides your lovely family of course.Bret Stephens: The E.M.T.s, cardiac surgeons and nurses who saved my mother’s life earlier this year will be the first people we’ll toast this Thursday, Gail.Gail: To the lifesavers!Bret: And I think we’ll also raise a glass to our regular readers, who seem drawn to a style of conversation that isn’t about compulsive loathing, bottomless contempt, frenzied recrimination, petty score-keeping, histrionic eye-rolling, suppurating disdain and Tucker Carlson-style smirking just because we sometimes have different political views.How about you?Gail: Well, gee, not gonna argue against toasting the readers. In a time when trashing folks on the web is so in, they’re so … out in a very, very fine way.Bret: Our readers: Gluttons for emollient.Gail: If I get to add one, I’d add teachers, especially the early childhood education community. They not only do essential work, they do it for very little applause — or money.Bret: Absolutely. But maybe I’m detecting a subtle hint that you really want to switch the subject to the House of Representatives passing the Build Back Bigger bill?Gail: Bret, I am now giving thanks that you remember at least part of the name of the Build Back Better bill. Which I will always think of as Not the Infrastructure Bill Even Though It Sounds Like It.Anyhow, we are talking about the social-safety-net-stop-climate-change bill. Known to many conservatives as That Two Trillion Dollar Thing.Bret: I gather you’re delighted with it.Gail: I’m happy. Never bought into the idea that President Biden was elected just to not be Donald Trump. He promised during his campaign to expand government help for non-wealthy families, battle the cost of prescription drugs, increase the scope of Medicare and achieve universal prekindergarten for 3- and 4-year-olds.Got elected, now it’s happening. Good news.Bret: Sorry to be the perpetual Grinch, Gail, but I’ll bet you my considerable store of Zabar’s leftovers that it isn’t happening. Certainly not in anything like the size of the House bill and very possibly not at all. And I have two numbers to support my argument: 60 and 32. The first is Joe Manchin’s approval rating in West Virginia. The second is Joe Biden’s approval rating in West Virginia. If Manchin votes for the bill, about which he’s already expressed big doubts, it’s going to mean the likely end of his political career when he’s up for re-election in 2024.Gail: This gives me another chance to point out that West Virginia gets around twice as much in federal aid as its residents pay in federal taxes.Gee, do you think Manchin’s magical ability to hang onto that seat is connected to the federal largess he brings home?Bret: The other pair of numbers I’m looking at is minus 12.1 and minus 11.6 percentage points. The first is the spread between Biden’s approval and disapproval ratings, the second is Kamala Harris’s. Why do you think it makes sense for the administration to double down on its policies instead of a nice Clintonian U-turn?Gail: The negativity is mainly all about Biden’s inability to get things done. Which won’t look better if he fails to get this bill passed.Bret: Despite what you said earlier, I don’t think Biden was elected to be a transformative president the way Reagan or Obama were, both of whom had clear electoral mandates to change America. He was elected to be a steadying presence. Biden’s failed totally so far, partly for reasons that were not under his control, like the persistence of the pandemic, and partly for reasons that were, like the bungled exit from Afghanistan.Either way, he is misreading his mandate, and the new legislation won’t help. It’s deeply unwise to try to change the entire shape of government based on a tiebreaking vote in the Senate. It’s even more unwise to do so when prices for groceries and gas seem to be rising by the minute.Biden is overseeing a combustible mixture of sweeping progressive social change and working-class economic distress — a formula that gave us Trump in 2016 and may give us Trump again in 2024. And all this is on top of the already hyperpolarized culture we have in this country.Gail: Well, let’s move onto something even more depressing. I sorta hate to bring this up on a holiday week, Bret. But I have to ask you about the Rittenhouse verdict. Your thoughts?Bret: David French had a lovely line on the case in a recent essay in The Atlantic: “The law allows even a foolish man to defend himself, even if his own foolishness put him in harm’s way.” Obviously Kyle Rittenhouse should not have been out that night, much less waltzing around with a rifle. But it also seems clear from the trial that much of what the world thought it knew about him — that he was some kind of out-of-town white supremacist who had crossed state lines with a gun and was looking for trouble — was false.What’s your view?Gail: I can understand the way it went, given the absolute mess that Wisconsin’s gun laws seem to be. But I wish I believed it would be a call to state legislatures — and Congress — to fix the system so that toting guns around in public is flat-out illegal. For anybody.Bret: Something like 43 states allow people to carry around guns in most places. And depending on how it goes with a case being decided this term by the Supreme Court, that number may soon be 50. Personally, I’d argue that if you’re too young to buy a beer you’re surely too young to parade around with a gun, unless you’re in the military or the National Guard.Gail: The two things that totally depress me are realizing that our politicians aren’t going to stop fawning over the gun-rights lobby and knowing that Rittenhouse is going to become even more of a right-wing hero who’ll probably be given a medal at the next Republican convention.Bret: He’s no hero. But I also think this case is a good reminder of why America needs responsible and effective policing, particularly during violent urban protests or riots: When law enforcement fails to protect lives and property, vigilantes spring up.Gail: Back for a minute to the House vote on Biden’s non-infrastructure bill: I presume that you listened to every word of Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s more than eight-hour speech against it, right? What were your takeaways?Bret: Yeah, sure, right after I performed a root canal on myself while watching “Ishtar” dubbed in Finnish.OK, I didn’t actually see the speech, but I did read The Times’s priceless account of it. My favorite detail: “Representative Madison Cawthorn, a hard-line Republican from North Carolina, sat behind him, stuffing his lip with chewing tobacco and spitting in a cup. Mr. McCarthy, for his part, sustained himself with peppermint candies, unwrapped one by one by aides.”Gail: Do you think that was in their original job descriptions?Bret: How much do you look forward to having him as Speaker, Gail?Gail: Aaauuughh. I’m not the most pessimistic Democrat when it comes to future expectations, but I have to admit the chances of the party hanging onto the House and Senate are not … super.My greatest source of optimism is what seems like a flood of terrible Republican candidates, many of them already endorsed by Trump despite minor defects like allegations of spousal assault.I know you have some extremely responsible, forward-looking Republican contenders you can point to, but it seems like there are only about six of them. Do you disagree?Bret: Unfortunately, you’re pretty much right. John Stuart Mill once described the Tories of his day as “the stupider party,” and the er in “stupider” seems to describe today’s G.O.P. pretty nicely. It isn’t out of the question that Republicans could trip themselves up on the way to a Congressional majority because all of the most Trumpy candidates win the primaries and then lose in the general election.On the other hand, Republicans will benefit mightily from the latest round of gerrymanders. Also, Glenn Youngkin in Virginia showed how a Republican candidate can distance himself just enough from Trump to win back more moderate voters, while not so much as to alienate the Trump die-hards. Which is another way of saying that I think you’ll be dealing with Speaker McCarthy and Leader McConnell in the next Congress.Gail: And both of them are the opposite of bipartisan, unless there’s a chunk of money for back-home roadbuilding up for grabs.OK, gonna block all this out until after the holidays.Bret: So, remind me again, what else will you be giving thanks for this Thanksgiving?Gail: Don’t know if I ever told you, but we have a tradition of having a group of old friends over every year for the holiday dinner. This is something we started in college — one of this year’s guests, who is 32, was born into it. So it’s partly an annual reunion and a chance to be grateful for longtime pals.As well, of course, for the relative newcomers. So when it comes to thanks, I’ll be including another year of conversing with you, Bret. And looking forward to carrying on into 2022 and beyond.Bret: As am I. And here’s to you.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      A.O.C. on Why Democrats’ ‘Talking Points Are Not Enough’

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      The House progressive spoke about “demoralizing” congressional negotiations, how she was told to stay away from Virginia’s elections, and what it means to excite the Democratic base.Last year, after Joseph R. Biden Jr. won the Democratic presidential nomination, a group of progressive lawmakers rallied around him to project party unity at a critical time.More than a year later, as the president seeks to pass a robust spending package of social policies that represent the bulk of his domestic agenda, many of the same leaders are looking for a return on their political investment.In an interview with The New York Times, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, one of the country’s most prominent progressives, questioned whether Democratic leaders and the White House understood the scope of the demands coming from the party’s base. The interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.Why do you feel this social policy bill has to pass as soon as possible, at the biggest scale possible?I think the stakes are really, really high.The entire reason that the Progressive Caucus gave their votes [for the infrastructure bill] was based on direct promises from the president, as well as direct promises from more conservative Democratic holdouts. And from House leadership as well. So if those promises don’t follow through, it’s going to be very, very difficult for them to get votes on anything moving forward, because the trust that was already so delicate will have been broken.Do you think these extended negotiations and the stuff that was cut will have an electoral effect? Obviously the Senate will have its say, but if the spending bill largely looks like what the House passed this week, will Democrats say it fulfills the promise of Election Day?I think that if we pass the Build Back Better Act as the House passed it, that we have a shot to go back to our communities and say we delivered. But that’s not to say that this process has not been demoralizing for a lot of folks, because there were enormous promises made. Not just at the beginning, and not just during the election, but that continued to be made.And this is where I have sounded the alarm, because what really dampens turnout is when Democrats make promises that they don’t keep.With the bipartisan infrastructure plan, there’s all of these headlines going around. And I understand the political importance of making a victory lap. But I think that the worst and most vulnerable position we could be in is to over-promise and under-deliver.So let’s not go around and say, “We’re going to replace every lead pipe in this country,” because according to the bipartisan infrastructure plan, that is not going to happen. That has not been funded. And if the Build Back Better Act gets cut even further, then that’s definitely not going to happen. You and other progressives backed Biden during the general election. Do you feel that this White House has continued to be open to the left? And that created trust, because trust requires vulnerability from all parties.There was some good faith with the American Rescue Plan [Democrats’ $1.9 trillion economic stimulus package, signed in March]. But after that, which was quite early, it’s been a bit of a slog.I actually don’t direct this critique directly at the White House. I think, in general, the party doesn’t quite fully grasp what is happening in deep-blue communities.What is it that you say they’re missing?The talking points are not enough.Yes, is child care great? Absolutely. Universal pre-K, this is something I’m deeply, deeply supportive of. But we also have too much of a top-down strategy when it comes to our base. We’re always giving them the medicine and telling them what they need to accept, as opposed to really monitoring where the energy is, and being responsive to it. And allowing that to shape our strategy.And even with the infrastructure plan, this kind of investment is deeply needed in underserved communities like the Bronx. However, if we as a party are asking every single person in this party to take a victory lap, and do a news conference in front of a bridge or pothole, and we aren’t funding and actually fixing that pothole, I’m very concerned about how people are going to interpret that a year from now.But doesn’t the White House agree — didn’t it propose a more robust package? The obvious response here is that the administration faces the reality of a 50-50 Senate.There is an enormous amount of executive action that they’re sitting on that I think is underutilized. On student loans. We’ve got executive action on the table with respect to climate. There are certainly things that we can do with immigration.So why are we taking this as a legislative compromise, when the opportunity is so much greater, or when Biden could do this stuff with a stroke of a pen, and is just reminding us that he’s choosing not to?We always try to tell people why they need to settle for less, instead of being able to harness the energy of our grass roots and take political risks in service of them, the same way that we take political risks in service of swing voters. We can do both. The Infrastructure Bill at a GlanceCard 1 of 5The bill receives final approval. More

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      Scams and Slippery Slopes

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      I’ve always believed that part of education — especially higher education — is learning to ask better questions about complex topics, knowing you might not have the right answers. In my graduate seminars, one of my favorite ways of prompting students to pursue deeper lines of inquiry is by asking this question: If we take off the table that something is racist, sexist or classist, what else can we say about it?Society is embedded with power imbalances and inequalities. Of course there are gender disparities and discrimination, of course there is a racial hierarchy and a racial order. But if we set that aside, what more can we say about a text, about a person, about a moment?I was thinking about this when reading a “rare interview” with Politico this week, in which Kyrsten Sinema weighed in on writing about her clothes, including our three-part discussion of her sartorial presentation as a form of political speech:“It’s very inappropriate. I wear what I want because I like it. It’s not a news story, and it’s no one’s business,” Sinema said. “It’s not helpful to have [coverage] be positive or negative. It also implies that somehow women are dressing for someone else.”The idea that women dress only for themselves is a truism in modern feminism, one that we could dispute or qualify. But let’s set that aside, for now, and stipulate that she’s right, generally speaking.It still remains that she is a politician. And part of the job of politicians is to court attention and manage their image. As I have argued, since presentation and style are part of the politician’s tool kit, the question for us is whether we are willing to allow this kind of political communication to go unexamined and without critique.Here, it’s important to consider the context when setting the bounds of appropriate discourse. The details of the Democrats’ social spending bill, Build Back Better, are in flux. But it has funds for Pell Grant increases, affordable child care, paid family leave and expanded health care coverage. It contains policy to slow climate change and mitigate its effects. It is not an exaggeration to say that lives hang in the balance with the fate of the bill.And Sinema has placed herself at the center of this political drama. So it matters how she marshals her power. It also matters how she manages attention.Sinema largely allows her performance to speak for her. She avoids interviews, and has been quite guarded about what she wants out of these negotiations. As Politico writes, “On policy, the first-term senator has remained almost completely quiet during breakneck negotiations to finish Biden’s agenda.”That silence puts a curtain between a powerful political actor and the public, who have a lot on the line. It also means it is more than fair to discuss and critique the political rhetoric coded in her performance, and that includes what she is wearing. Politicians should not be allowed to have a one-way dialogue with the American public. One-way political communication is a very slippery slope to a closed political process — one that trades real accountability for a process that appears transparent only because we can see the moving images on our screens.We get to talk back. And we should.Speaking of talking back, many of you wrote in and said we should be keeping our eye on what matters. A pair of reports, both from this month, got my attention. I think they point to an important trend.First, Politico reported that Sinema has received donations from the multilevel marketing industry:The political action committee associated with Alticor, the parent entity of the health, home and beauty company Amway, gave $2,500 to the Arizona Democrat in late June, as did the PAC for Isagenix, an Arizona-based business that sells nutrition, wellness and personal care products. Nu Skin Enterprises, another personal care and beauty company, gave $2,500 that month, as did USANA Health Sciences, which sells similar products. In April, Richard Raymond Rogers, the executive chair of Mary Kay, a Texas-based cosmetics company, gave $2,500 to Sinema. Herbalife, which also sells nutritional supplements, gave $2,500 in July. All are affiliated with the Direct Selling Association, a trade group that promotes multilevel marketing.These are not enormous sums of money, but it is notable for a few reasons. As Politico notes, it’s relatively uncommon for some of these companies to get involved in national politics at all. And Sinema has had a friendly relationship with the Direct Sellers Association, which represents 130 multilevel marketing companies, including Amway and Herbalife.This alliance is unusual for a Democratic senator given her party’s longtime alliance with unions and labor more generally. In multilevel marketing structures, the independent contractors who sell the product are paid commissions from their own sales of the product, but they also can receive income based on the sales or purchases of the sellers they have recruited. Sinema is the one of only three Democratic senators who do not co-sponsor the PRO Act, which would allow the “independent contractors” to unionize, as well as making it harder for companies to classify workers as independent contractors at all.Second, Dr. Mehmet Oz is reported to be considering running for Senate in Pennsylvania, to fill the seat being vacated by Pat Toomey. Through a very convoluted process of media culture that is possible only in the celebrity-obsessed American culture, Dr. Oz has become one of the most visible and wealthy endorsers of a host of scientifically questionable vitamins, herbal remedies and miracle cures.These news items brought to mind the way these kinds of businesses — on the border of illegality and not quite respectable — have gone mainstream in America. Donald Trump is perhaps the best example of this phenomenon. Among other things, he happened to be the founder and namesake of one of the most blatantly fraudulent for-profit school apparatuses that I have ever seen: Trump University, which National Review called a “de jure” scam.Donald Trump’s election seems to have opened the door to us not even pretending anymore that these kinds of scams aren’t legitimate parts of our political and economic system, and even pathways to power.Whenever I talk about multilevel marketing, people often make two suggestions of things to check out. One is a podcast called “The Dream” by Jane Marie. The other is a recent documentary about LuLaRoe, which sells leggings. Both of these tell stories about the mechanisms of multilevel marketers, how they work and why they work.With the holiday coming up, I’m going to spend some time on your behalf listening to the “The Dream” as I travel around by car. And I’m going to watch the LuLaRoe documentary. I have questions about why scamming has become mainstreamed as a legitimate part of national politics, and what it says about culture. We’ll be talking about that soon. I’ll be off next week to celebrate Thanksgiving, and I’ll see you the week after that.Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science, the author of “Thick: And Other Essays” and a 2020 MacArthur fellow. More

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      SALT Deduction That Benefits the Rich Divides Democrats

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      House Democrats are poised to lift a cap on the state and local tax deduction, a gift to wealthy homeowners in some blue states.WASHINGTON — A plan by House Democrats to reduce taxes for high earners in states like New Jersey, New York and California in their $1.85 trillion social policy spending package is becoming an early political albatross for the party, with Republicans already mobilizing to accuse Democrats of defying their populist principles in favor of cutting taxes for the rich.The criticism offers a preview of the emerging battle lines ahead of next year’s midterm elections and underscores the challenge that Democrats face when local politics collide with the party’s national ambitions to promote economic equity. For Republicans who have defended their 2017 tax cuts, which overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy, the proposal by Democrats to raise the limit on the state and local tax deduction is an opportunity to flip the script and cast Democrats as the party of plutocrats.“I think they’re struggling to maintain their professed support for taxing the wealthy, yet they are providing a huge tax windfall under the SALT cap,” said Representative Kevin Brady of Texas, the top Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee, referring to the acronym for state and local taxes. “If your priorities are working families, make that the priority, not the wealthy.”Republicans, looking for ways to finance their own tax cuts in 2017, capped the amount of state and local taxes that households could deduct from their federal tax bills at $10,000. Democrats from high-tax states like New York, New Jersey and California have spent years promising to repeal the cap and are poised to lift it to $80,000 through 2030, before reducing it back to $10,000 in 2031. The cap, which is currently set to disappear in 2025, would then expire permanently in 2032.The bill would cut taxes sharply for the next five years by increasing the value of the deduction, but it would mean higher taxes in the following five years than if the cap were allowed to expire. The Congressional Budget Office said on Thursday that over the course of a decade, the changes to the deduction would amount to a tax increase that would raise about $14.8 billion in revenue.The House proposal is likely to change in the Senate, where it has its own champions and detractors. Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, has embraced a more generous deduction while Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who is the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, has sharply criticized the House proposal. He joined Senator Bob Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, in negotiating an income cap — as high as $550,000, though that number is in flux — on who can receive the deduction.This week, the National Republican Congressional Committee released survey data that it said suggested most voters in battleground states would be less likely to vote for Democrats who supported a policy that gave tax cuts to rich homeowners in New Jersey, New York and California. It said that the Democratic Party would have “to defend its politically toxic policies which penalize hard working families to reward liberal elites.”Prominent tax and budget analysts have argued that expanding the deduction amounted to an unnecessary giveaway to the rich.According to the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a family of four in Washington making $1 million per year would receive 10 times as much tax relief next year from expanding the state and local tax deduction as a middle-class family would receive from another provision in the social policy package, an expansion of the child tax credit. Citing calculations from the nonpartisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, the group said that two thirds of households making more than $1 million a year would get a tax cut under the legislation because of the increase to the state and local property tax deduction.The proposal has put some Democrats on the defensive.Rep. Jared Golden, Democrat of Maine, said this week that tax giveaways to millionaires sounded like something that Republicans would have come up with.“Proponents have been saying that the BBB taxes the rich,” Mr. Golden said on Twitter, referring to the bill known as the Build Back Better Act. “But the more we learn about the SALT provisions, the more it looks like another giant tax break for millionaires.”The issue is further complicating passage of the bill, which Democrats are trying to get through both the House and Senate without Republican support. Given their thin majorities in both chambers, Democrats can afford to lose no more than three votes in the House and none in the Senate.Some Democrats in Congress from states with high taxes have made the inclusion of the more generous deduction as a prerequisite for their backing the bill.“There’s a series of competing views on SALT, but I mean, it’s pretty obvious something has to be in there, that’s for sure,” said Representative Richard E. Neal of Massachusetts, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.The unexpectedly tight race for governor of New Jersey was a clear reminder that the state’s high property taxes — and the limit on their deductibility — are high on voters’ lists of worries, strategists and other political observers said.“As Covid kind of recedes, taxes are taking its place as the top issue in New Jersey,” said Michael DuHaime, a Republican political strategist with Mercury Public Affairs.The SALT cap “essentially resulted in a pretty large tax increase for a lot of families” in the suburbs of New York City, Mr. DuHaime said. With Democrats in power, those homeowners are counting on some relief, he said.Now that former President Donald J. Trump is out of office, New Jersey has “reverted to its mean” of being deeply concerned about the state’s affordability, said Julie Roginsky, a strategist who advised Gov. Philip D. Murphy, a Democrat, during his first campaign in 2017. The average homeowner in the state pays about $10,000 in property taxes, she said, with the cap hitting about one-third of New Jersey residents.“I think it’s absolutely a line in the sand that some of these vulnerable members of Congress need to draw,” Ms. Roginsky said.Several Democrats who represent affluent suburban areas where most homeowners pay much more than $10,000 a year in property taxes will face stiff challenges in the midterm election next year, strategists said. Their short list of vulnerable House members include Josh Gottheimer, Mikie Sherrill and Tom Malinowski from North Jersey, and Andy Kim, who represents part of the Jersey Shore, all of whom support raising the SALT cap.If the Democrats can engineer a change to the SALT deduction that is retroactive to cover 2021 taxes, those incumbents can campaign on having provided a tax cut, Ms. Roginsky said. But if they fail, their Republican opponents — like Thomas Kean Jr., a state senator who is challenging Mr. Malinowksi — will be able to use that against them, she said.Several House Democrats who represent affluent suburbs, including Mikie Sherrill, whose district includes part of Montclair, N.J., are expected to face stiff challenges in next year’s elections.Todd Heisler/The New York Times“It may not play well in Vermont or in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s district, but if you’re Nancy Pelosi, you understand that the road to your majority runs through places like suburban New Jersey and suburban California and suburban New York,” Ms. Roginsky said.Ben Dworkin, the director of the Rowan Institute for Public Policy and Citizenship at Rowan University in Glassboro, N.J., cited the unexpectedly close race for New Jersey governor this year. He noted how effective Mr. Murphy’s challenger, Jack Ciattarelli, was in playing to voters’ feelings about the state’s high taxes.“He hammered home that issue,” Mr. Dworkin said.Public polling leading up to that election showed that affordability in general was the “top issue” in the state, he said.Biden’s ​​Social Policy Bill at a GlanceCard 1 of 6A proposal in flux. More

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      Just How Bad Is It Out There for Democrats?

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      Democratic support has plunged nationally in recent months. Exactly how far it has fallen is hotly debated in both parties.Sign up here to get On Politics in your inbox on Tuesdays and Thursdays.In the heady aftermath of Republicans winning the Virginia governorship this month, Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader who hopes to become speaker after the 2022 midterm elections, made a bold claim at the Capitol.“If you’re a Democrat and President Biden won your seat by 16 points, you’re in a competitive race next year,” McCarthy declared. “You are no longer safe.”It was, by most measures, more bullish hyperbole than sincere prognostication. There are 276 House seats that Biden won by less than that — far more than Republicans have held in nearly a century. (As of now, Democrats hold a narrow 221-213 majority.)But there was also an undisputed truth undergirding McCarthy’s braggadocio: Democratic support has plunged nationally in recent months. The party’s loss in Virginia was just the most consequential example.Exactly how far and fast Democratic popularity has fallen is hotly debated in both parties.Virginia was one key data point: The election showed a Republican improvement of 12 percentage points, from Biden’s win in the state a year ago by 10 points to Democrats’ loss of the governorship this month by two points. The governor’s race in New Jersey swung toward Republicans by a similar margin.Still, few strategists, Democrat or Republican, believe the Democratic brand’s collapse nationally has been quite that complete and widespread.Among campaign insiders, one popular measurement that is closely tracked to gauge the mood of the electorate is the “generic ballot test.” That is when pollsters ask voters whom they would prefer to serve in Congress — a Democrat or a Republican, with no names attached.For years, Democrats continuously have held an edge in this metric.Until now.For the first time since January 2016, Republicans are now preferred, according to the FiveThirtyEight public polling average. FiveThirtyEight’s average has swung 4.6 points in the last six months toward the G.O.P.Just how bad is it out there for the Democrats? A Washington Post/ABC News poll last weekend showed Republicans in the strongest position on this measure in the poll’s four-decade history. On Thursday, a poll from Quinnipiac University of registered voters said 46 percent wanted G.O.P. control of the House, compared with 41 percent for Democrats.The same trend is showing up in private surveys. The National Republican Congressional Committee’s internal polling this month showed that Republicans in battleground districts had improved by seven percentage points since the beginning of the year. So-called generic Republicans began the year three points behind Democrats; now they are ahead by four points.The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s generic ballot testing this month also shows Democrats trailing — albeit by two points. Party officials said that actually was an improvement from some other recent months. The D.C.C.C. declined to say what its polling showed at the start of the year.Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, who is chairman of the House Republican campaign arm, said in an interview that the N.R.C.C.’s private polling at the start of the year measured Biden’s approval rating as 10 percentage points higher than his disapproval rating. Now, Emmer said, it’s the reverse: Biden’s disapproval is 10 points higher.Emmer offered a less hyperbolic version of McCarthy’s prediction of exactly how many Democrats are at risk in 2022. “The experts are telling me that any Democrat who sits in a seat Joe Biden won by 10 points or less a year ago is vulnerable,” Emmer said.That is still roughly 250 seats. “We will win the majority,” Emmer said flatly, “but we’re going to let the voters tell us how big that’s going to be.”The indicators for Democrats are not quite as sour everywhere.My colleague Nate Cohn wrote earlier this week in the newsletter about two House special elections in Ohio, where Democrats finished only about three percentage points behind Biden’s performance.That is erosion, but it’s not as politically catastrophic.And in Pennsylvania, a Supreme Court vacancy was contested with millions of dollars in spending. In some ways, the contest functionally pitted a generic Democrat against a generic Republican, because even the most engaged voters know little to nothing about candidates for the judiciary.The Republican candidate won by 2.6 percentage points — in a state Biden carried by 1.2 points in 2020. That represented a nearly four-point improvement for Republicans.To summarize, various data points show a range of possibility for Democratic decline: somewhere between three to 12 percentage points. None of the possible outcomes bode well for holding the House in 2022 or maintaining control of a Senate now equally divided between 50 Democratic-aligned senators and 50 Republicans.Perhaps what is giving Democrats the most solace is the calendar. It is 2021 still and not 2022.Democrats also hope they will have more to sell in the coming year — Biden signed a $1 trillion infrastructure package on the South Lawn of the White House on Monday, and a $1.85 trillion social policy and climate change bill is winding its way through Congress — and more time to sell it.Representative Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, the chairman of the D.C.C.C., has pushed for both the president and Democratic members of Congress to more forcefully pitch what they have already passed this year. As he told my colleague Trip Gabriel this month: “My message is ‘free Joe Biden.’ That campaign needs to start now before the next crisis takes over the news cycle.”Maloney said it was understandable that voters hadn’t given Democrats credit for the large economic recovery measure that passed earlier in the year or for the new infrastructure spending.“We don’t expect them to know if we don’t tell them,” he said this week on Capitol Hill. “So we’re going to tell them.”Were you forwarded this newsletter? Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Democrats Shouldn’t Panic. They Should Go Into Shock.

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      The rise of inflation, supply chain shortages, a surge in illegal border crossings, the persistence of Covid, mayhem in Afghanistan and the uproar over “critical race theory” — all of these developments, individually and collectively, have taken their toll on President Biden and Democratic candidates, so much so that Democrats are now the underdogs going into 2022 and possibly 2024.Gary Langer, director of polling at ABC News, put it this way in an essay published on the network’s website:As things stand, if the midterm elections were today, 51 percent of registered voters say they’d support the Republican candidate in their congressional district, 41 percent say the Democrat. That’s the biggest lead for Republicans in the 110 ABC/Post polls that have asked this question since November 1981.These and other trends have provoked a deepening pessimism about Democratic prospects in 2022 and anxiety about the 2024 presidential election.Robert Y. Shapiro, a political scientist at Columbia, holds similar views, but suggests that the flood tide of political trouble may be beyond Democratic control:Biden and the Democrats have had almost all bad news: the pandemic is still going; the economy has not picked up in terms of perceptions of the expected increases in employment and economic growth not on fire; perceptions of what happened in Afghanistan; what has happened on the southern border; high crime rates, all amplified in news reports. It is all perception, and the latest is the increase in inflation and gas prices that people see/feel. The critical race theory controversy and perceptions of Democrats being too woke and extreme. The bad news is overwhelming.Bill McInturff, a founding partner of Public Opinion Strategies, provided me with data from the October WSJ/NBC poll asking voters which party can better manage a wide range of issues. On three key issues — controlling inflation (45R-21D), dealing with crime (43R-21D) and dealing with the economy (45R-27D) — the Republican advantage was the highest in surveys dating back to the 1990s.“Washington Democrats are spending months fighting over legislation,” McInturff wrote by email,but, during this time, voters tell us prices are soaring, the cost of living is tied for the top issue in the country, and there is a sharp increase in economic pessimism. It is these economic factors that are driving negative impressions about the direction of the country to unusually high levels, and this is hurting Democrats everywhere. No administration is going to thrive in that economic environment.In his analysis of the Nov. 6-10 Washington Post/ABC News Poll, Langer made the case thatWhile a year is a lifetime in politics, the Democratic Party’s difficulties are deep; they include soaring economic discontent, a president who’s fallen 12 percentage points underwater in job approval and a broad sense that the party is out of touch with the concerns of most Americans — 62 percent say so.The numbers are even worse for Democrats in the eight states expected to have the closest Senate elections, according to Langer — Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Not only is Biden’s overall job approval rating in those states 33 percent, 10 points lower than it is in the rest of the country, but registered voters in those eight states say they are more likely to vote for Republican House candidates than for Democrats by 23 points (at 58 percent to 35 percent).On Nov. 3, Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball updated the ratings for three incumbent Democratic senators — Mark Kelly of Arizona, Raphael Warnock of Georgia and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada — from “lean Democratic” to “tossup.”An examination of Gallup survey results on the question “As of today, do you lean more to the Democratic Party or the Republican Party?” reflects the damage suffered by the Democrats. From January through August, Democrats held a substantial 7.9 point advantage (48.2 percent to 41.3 percent). In September, however, Gallup reported a 2-point (47-45) Republican edge that grew to a 5-point (47-42) edge by October.In terms of election outcomes, Republican are once again capitalizing on their domination of the congressional redistricting process to disenfranchise Democratic voters despite strong public support for reforms designed to eliminate or constrain partisan gerrymandering. On Monday, The Times reported that the Republican Party “has added enough safe House districts to capture control of the chamber based on its redistricting edge alone.” The current partisan split in the House is 221 Democratic seats and 213 Republican seats, with one vacancy.There is perhaps one potential political opportunity for Democrats — should the Supreme Court overturn or undermine Roe v. Wade, mobilizing supporters of reproductive rights across the country.In the meantime, uneasiness prevails. Stephen Ansolabehere, a professor of government at Harvard, noted in an email thatBiden had two drops in approval ratings, one from June to August of about 6 points, and another from September to October of another 6 points. The first was a response to Afghanistan. The second was a response to Covid and weak employment growth over the summer.Passing the infrastructure bill should help “with the sense that the administration wasn’t doing enough for the economy,” Ansolabehere continued, but “the hit from Afghanistan is going to be harder to reverse, as it was a judgment about the administration’s handling of foreign affairs.”Micah English, a graduate student in political science at Yale who studies race, class and gender dynamics, argued in an email that Democratic leaders have, at least until now, mismanaged the task of effectively communicating their agenda and goals.“The Democratic Party has a messaging problem that they don’t seem to have any plans to rectify,” she wrote:The Republicans message right now is essentially “Democrats and Biden are only concerned about teaching your children critical race theory instead of focusing on the economy!” The Democrats have no unified countermessage, and until they do, they are likely to continue to suffer major losses in the midterms and beyond.This failure, English continued, has resulted in an inability to capitalize on what should have been good news:The Democrats have proposed legislation that contains incredibly popular policies, but if they continue to fail to communicate the benefits of this legislation to the wider public, it won’t do them any good in the midterms. Additionally, as the 2020 election demonstrated, the Democrats cannot continue to rely on the prospect of changing demographics to deliver them electoral victories.One theme that appeared repeatedly in the comments I received in response to my questions is that even as Biden has succeeded in winning passage of the $1.2 trillion bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, he has struggled to maintain an aura of mastery.Brian Schaffner, a political scientist at Tufts, argued in an email thatwhat a lot of swing voters expected from Biden was competent leadership during a time of crisis. And many perhaps expected that a return to normal leadership would immediately solve the unprecedented problems facing the country. Of course, that was never a realistic expectation.The crucial factors underlying Biden’s declining favorability rating, Schaffner continued, are “several things calling into question Biden’s effectiveness — the Afghanistan withdrawal, the continued impact of Covid, the struggling economy and the difficult time Democrats have had in passing their major legislative initiatives.”I asked a range of political scientists for their projections on how the 2022 elections for control of the House are likely to turn out. Their views were preponderantly negative for Democratic prospects.Matt Grossmann of Michigan State wrote: “Based on simple midterm loss averages, the Democrats are expected to lose 4 points of vote share and be down to ~45 percent of seats on ~48 percent of votes in 2022.” Those numbers translate into roughly a 24-seat loss, reducing Democrats to 197 seats. “There is not much under Democrats’ control that is likely to make a big difference in the extent of their losses,” Grossmann added. “They can try to avoid retirements and primary challenges in swing districts and avoid salient unpopular policies.”Robert M. Stein of Rice University is even less optimistic:In South Texas, Florida and parts of Arizona immigration policy is hurting Democrats with traditional-base voters. This is especially true with Hispanics in Texas border counties, where Trump did well in 2020 and Abbott (incumbent Republican governor) is making significant gains by appealing to the concerns of Hispanics over jobs and immigration.Stein adds:My guess is that Republicans are poised to take the House back in 2022 with gains above the average for midterm elections. Since 1946, the average seat gain for the party not in the White House is 27 seats. The best the Democrats can do is hold at the average, but given the Republican’s advantage with redistricting, my guess is that the Republicans gain 40+ seats.Martin Wattenberg of the University of California-Irvine wrote that “it would take a major event like 9/11 to keep the Democrats from losing the House.” He was more cautious about control of the Senate, which “really depends on the quality of the candidates. Republicans have had the misfortune of nominating candidates like Christine (“I am not a witch”) O’Donnell who have lost eminently winnable races due to their own foibles. It remains to be seen if they will nominate such candidates in 2022.”Wattenberg cited data from the General Social Survey showing a sharp rise in the percentage of Democrats describing themselves as liberal or slightly liberal, up from 47 percent in 2016 to 62 percent this year: “The left-wing movement of the Democrats is probably going to hurt with the 2022 electorate that will likely be skewed toward older, more conservative voters.”At the same time, Bruce Cain of Stanford suggested that a Democratic defeat in 2022 could be a potentially favorable development for the party’s long term prospects:It is quite possible that losing in the 2022 midterm is the best path to winning the presidency in 2024. It will put the Republicans in a “put up or shut up” spot vis a vis problems facing the country, and Biden meanwhile can work the middle without looking over his left shoulder.Cain took this logic a step further to argue thatIn retrospect the worst thing that happened to Biden was the Democrats winning the two seats in Georgia. It raised expectations among some in his party that they could go left legislatively while the political sun was shining when in reality the political math was not there for that kind of policy ambition.Cain added:The best hope for the Democrats is that Trump will undermine some Republicans during his vengeance tour and that the weakness of the people who want to run under his banner will create some unexpected wins for the Democrats.Howard Rosenthal, a political scientist at N.Y.U., added this observation:Pundits, who have to earn a living, always want to impute causality to election losses. However, the midterm cycle is just normal. Voters tend to balance the president. Over time, they also create divided government at the state level.A surprising number of those I contacted made the case that the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan did more lasting damage to Biden than might have been expected.“The extended wall-to-wall media coverage of the hurried exit from Afghanistan probably served as a catalyst for some folks to ‘update’ their views on Biden’s performance and take into consideration both the foreign and domestic concerns,” Ted Brader, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, wrote in an email:I’m skeptical that those events themselves drove the lower assessments; Americans weigh domestic events much heavier than foreign affairs. But the heightened attention and criticism can serve as an attention-getting call to re-evaluate the president: “Wait, how well is he doing his job?” As political science research has convincingly demonstrated, bipartisan criticism, as we saw with the Afghan withdrawal, in particular, opens the door to weaker support among independents and members of the president’s own party.Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, wrote me that “things touching on competence (Afghanistan, border, congressional inaction) are probably the most important” in driving down Biden’s ratings, but “for the future, it is inflation and the general economy that will matter most, I think.”Herbert Kitschelt, a political scientist at Duke, contended in an email that the problems facing Biden and his Democratic colleagues run deeper than any single issue:Biden was elected as a moderate to put back some sanity into government through a steady hand and incremental reforms. Instead, a wing of the Democratic Party took the 2020 election in which the Democratic Party lost a surprising number of House seats as a voter mandate to implement a pretty fundamental program of social reform and sociocultural change. While I personally might like a lot of these policy initiatives myself, I also realize that this programmatic ambition is consistent with the wishes of only a minority of core Democratic voters, and certainly not that of the centrist voters who prevented Trump from being re-elected.The history of midterm elections suggests that substantial House losses for the party of the incumbent president are inevitable, barring such unusual circumstances as public hostility to the Republican-led impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998 and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks raising Republican support in 2002 — the only two times since that the incumbent party gained seats since World War II.In 2010, Joseph Bafumi, Robert Erikson and Christopher Wlezien, political scientists at Dartmouth, Columbia and the University of Texas at Austin, published “Balancing, Generic Polls and Midterm Congressional Elections,” in which they argued that “between February and Election Day, the presidential party’s vote strength almost always declines.” But, they continued,the degree of decline is unrelated to the public’s evaluation of the president. Clearly, during the midterm election year, the electorate shifts away from the presidential party in its vote choice for reasons that have nothing to do with the electorate’s attitudes toward the president. By default, this is balancing: The electorate votes against the presidential party to give more power to the other party.In a 1988 paper, “The Puzzle of Midterm Loss,” Erikson examined every midterm contest since 1902 and explicitly rejected the theory that such contests are a “negative referendum on presidential performance.” Instead, Erikson wrote,A “presidential penalty” explanation fits the data nicely. By this explanation, the midterm electorate penalized the president’s party for being the party in power: Holding constant the presidential year House vote, the president’s party does much worse at midterm than it would if it did not control the presidency.While substantial midterm losses for the incumbent president’s party are inevitable under most circumstances, that does not mean external developments have no influence on the scope of the outcome.Kitschelt, quoting James Carville, noted in his email: “It’s the economy, stupid. And that means inflation, the supply chain troubles and the inability of the Democrats to extend the social safety net in an incremental fashion.”The inflation rate, Dritan Nesho, the director of civic technology and engagement at Microsoft and a co-director of the Harvard-Harris Poll, wrote in an email,is now outpacing wage growth. As a consequence close to 4 in 10 voters are saying that their personal financial situation is getting worse. This figure is up from the low 20s in May and importantly, majorities of voters are not confident in either the Biden administration keeping inflation at bay (56 percent not confident/44 percent confident) and also of the Federal Reserve (53 percent not confident/47 percent confident).In addition, Nesho said,over two-third of voters (68 percent) believe illegal monthly border crossings have increased since Biden took office, 65 percent blame Biden’s executive orders for encouraging illegal immigration, and 68 percent want stricter policies to reduce the flow of people across the border.In January 2021, the month Biden took office, the University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment index stood at 79. By Nov. 1, the index had fallen to 66.8, the lowest it has been since November 2011. Richard Curtin, director of the consumer sentiment survey, wrote in a commentary accompanying the report: “Consumer sentiment fell in early November to its lowest level in a decade due to an escalating inflation rate and the growing belief among consumers that no effective policies have yet been developed to reduce the damage from surging inflation.”Similarly, when Biden took office in January, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the inflation rate was 1.4 percent; as of October this year, the rate had risen to 6.2 percent.Perhaps nothing better encapsulates the problems Democrats face than the price of gas at the pump, which has risen, in the nearly 10 months Biden has been in the White House, to as high as $4.21 a gallon in California, $3.94 in Nevada and upward of $3.60 across the Mountain West.And no one foreshadows the dangers ahead more succinctly than Larry Summers. In his Nov. 15 Washington Post column, Summers, a former secretary of the Treasury, warned: “Excessive inflation and a sense that it was not being controlled helped elect Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and risks bringing Donald Trump back to power.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      For a Clue About the 2022 Midterm Elections, Look at 2 Ohio Races

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      Neither race received much national attention, but there’s a long history of special election results foreshadowing the next general election.Sign up here to get On Politics in your inbox on Tuesdays and Thursdays.A lot seems to be going poorly for Democrats right now, including President Biden’s sinking approval ratings and the results of this month’s elections in Virginia and New Jersey.But two obscure special elections in Ohio’s 11th and 15th congressional districts, where Democrats and Republicans each retained long-held seats, revealed a possible bright spot for Democrats and faintly signaled that political conditions may not be as dire for Democrats as they seem.Neither race received much national attention. Neither race was especially competitive. And neither had a high turnout. But unlike in the flashier races for Virginia and New Jersey governor, the two Democratic candidates in the Ohio congressional races ran about as well as Democrats usually do. They ran far closer to the party’s recent benchmarks, including Mr. Biden’s showing in the last presidential election, than Democrats did in Virginia, where Terry McAuliffe lost to the Republican, Glenn Youngkin, and in New Jersey, where Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, won by a slim margin.While it would be a mistake to read too much into these two low-profile affairs, it would also be a mistake to ignore them. The two House races didn’t receive much attention for a simple reason: Neither party had any reason to contest them. Ohio’s 11th District is overwhelmingly Democratic, and the 15th is firmly Republican.Yet in both races, the Democratic House candidates ran only three percentage points behind Biden’s showing against former President Donald Trump in last year’s election. The margin is nothing for Democrats to brag about, but it’s simply not the same as what they experienced in Virginia and New Jersey, where the Republican candidates ran 12 and 13 points ahead of Mr. Trump.Of the two districts, Ohio’s 15th is more competitive — and the most representative of next year’s battlegrounds. It stretches from the suburbs around Columbus to the conservative working-class countryside of south-central Ohio. Unlike the House battlegrounds, this is not a district where Democrats have a chance to prevail, even under favorable circumstances: Mr. Trump won the district by 14 points while the incumbent Republican, Steve Stivers, won it by 27 points last November.But despite a more favorable national political environment, Mike Carey, a Trump-endorsed Republican and coal lobbyist, defeated Allison Russo, a Democratic state representative, by a fairly typical 17-point margin — a bit better than Trump, and quite a bit worse than Mr. Stivers.While the results of the Virginia election spurred talk that the Democratic Party’s leftward lurch on race and cultural issues might be hurting the Democrats in the suburbs, Ms. Russo won 55 percent of the vote in the Franklin County portion of the district, home to the Columbus suburbs, nearly matching the 56 percent won by Mr. Biden.Ohio’s 11th District is even less competitive. The majority-Black district, which snakes from Cleveland to Akron, favored Mr. Biden by a whopping 61 points last November. The previous Democratic representative, Marcia Fudge, who is now the secretary of housing and urban development, won by 60 points. The result was similar this time: Shontel Brown, the establishment-backed Democrat who narrowly defeated the progressive favorite Nina Turner in an August primary, won by 58 points.It might seem odd to draw attention to the results of uncompetitive races, but special congressional election results often do a decent job of foreshadowing the outcome of the next midterm elections. Four years ago, special elections were one of the first signs of Democratic strength after Mr. Trump was elected president. So far this cycle, other special election results have tended to resemble the modest Republican gains in Ohio more than the significant G.O.P. swings in Virginia and New Jersey.Another reason to pay attention is that the special congressional elections are contests for federal office, not state or local government.While politics has become increasingly nationalized in recent years, it remains quite common for voters to split their tickets and back the other party in down-ballot races for governor or other local offices. Maryland and Massachusetts elected Republican governors in 2018, despite the so-called blue wave that year. Local issues, like education or property taxes, naturally play a much bigger role than they do in federal contests. And it is much easier for a relatively moderate candidate for local office to shed the baggage of the national party. After all, a vote for Youngkin as governor of Virginia is not a vote to make Kevin McCarthy the House speaker or Mitch McConnell the Senate majority leader.Democrats and Republicans were deadlocked on the generic congressional ballot, a poll question asking whether voters would back a Democrat or Republican for Congress. Historically, the measure tracks well with the eventual House national vote. On average, Republicans lead by less than a percentage point, according to FiveThirtyEight — they took the lead while I wrote this newsletter.A roughly tied House national vote would most likely mean clear Republican control of the chamber, thanks to partisan gerrymandering and the tendency for Democrats to win lopsided margins in reliably Democratic areas. But it would be a much closer race than one might guess based on Virginia and New Jersey.And it would be roughly in line with the results in Ohio: a four-point shift to the Republicans, compared to Biden’s four-point win in the national vote.On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More