The Center Is a Beautiful Place To Be!

But the Democrats can't seem to find it. In my latest for The Liberal Patriot I explain how they might go about this. Will they? I'm not holding my breath.

"All the political signals are screaming: Democrats must move to the center, both to mitigate their losses in 2022 and to keep alive their hopes of retaining the Presidency in 2024 and building political power thereafter. Let’s review some of the background.

Biden’s approval rating is in the low 40’s, only a little above where Trump’s was at the same point in his Presidential term which of course was the precursor to the GOP’s drubbing in the 2018 election. Biden has been doing especially poorly among working class and Hispanic voters.

Biden’s approval ratings on specific issues tend to be lower, in the high 30’s on the economy and in the low 30’s on hot button issues like immigration and crime. Voters say they prefer the Republicans over the Democrats by wide margins on economic issues including inflation, crime and securing the border. Off year and special elections since 2020 have indicated a strongly pro-Republican electoral environment and Democrats currently trail Republicans in the generic Congressional ballot for 2022. It now seems likely that Democrats will, at minimum, lose control of the House this November and quite possibly suffer a wave election up and down the ballot.

In short it’s damage minimization time…and time to rebrand for future advances. The logical course of action is to move to the center on cultural issues, where more and more voters see the Democrats as abandoning common sense, and emphasize issues that are really, really popular. The latest NBC news poll provides a useful template for this"

Read the whole thing at The Liberal Patriot.

THELIBERALPATRIOT.SUBSTACK.COM

Democrats: Go Directly to the Center

Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200

How to Fix the Democratic Brand

National Review (yes, National Review) just published a lengthy essay of mine on how the Democrats could fix their woefully bad party image, if they had a mind to do so.

And if you're wondering why this essay isn't in some left-leaning magazine, the answer is pretty simple: they wouldn't dream of publishing it.

"As a lifelong man of the Left who very much wants the Democratic Party to succeed, I regret to report this: The Democrats and the Democratic brand are in deep trouble. That should have been obvious when Democrats underperformed in the 2020 election, turning what they and most observers expected to be a blue wave into more of a ripple. They lost House seats and performed poorly in state legislative elections. And their support among non-white voters, especially Hispanics, declined substan­tially.

Still, they did win the presidency, which led many to miss the clear market signals this underperformance was sending. That tendency was strengthened by the Democrats’ improbable victories in the two Senate runoffs in Georgia, which gave them full control of the federal government, albeit by the very narrowest of margins.

At the same time, Trump’s refusal to concede the election — his bizarre behavior in that regard probably contributed to the GOP defeats in the Georgia runoffs — and his encouragement of rioters who stormed the Capitol on January 6 led many Democrats to assume that the Republican brand would be so damaged by association that the Democratic brand would shine by comparison. And yet, two years later, the Democrats are in brutal shape.

Biden’s approval rating is in the low 40s, only a little above where Trump’s was at the same point in his presidential term, which of course was the precursor to the GOP’s drubbing in the 2018 election. Biden has been doing especially poorly among working-class and Hispanic voters. His approval ratings on specific issues tend to be lower, in the high 30s on the economy and in the low 30s on hot-button issues such as immigration and crime. Off-year and special elections since 2020 have indicated a strongly pro-Republican electoral environment, and Democrats currently trail Republicans in the generic congressional ballot for 2022. It now seems likely that Democrats will, at minimum, lose control of the House this November and quite possibly suffer a wave election up and down the ballot.

Most Democrats would prefer to believe that the current dismal situation merely reflects some bad luck. The Delta and Omicron variants of the coronavirus did undercut Biden’s plans for returning the country to normal, interacting with supply-chain difficulties to produce an inflation spike that angered consumers, but that is not the whole picture. Democrats have failed to develop a party brand capable of unifying a dominant majority of Americans behind their political project. Indeed, the current Democratic brand suffers from several deficiencies that make it somewhere between uncompelling and toxic to many American voters who might otherwise be the party’s allies. I locate these deficiencies in three key areas: culture, economics, and patriotism."

Read the whole thing at NR. I think you'll find it thought-provoking even if you don't agree with it.

NATIONALREVIEW.COM

Eyes Wide Shut | National Review

A Democrat looks at what his party can’t see.

Never Underestimate the Value of Common Sense!

In my opinion, the Democrats do. My latest at The Liberal Patriot:

"The Democrats are bleeding voters, particularly working class voters of all races. There are lots of reasons for this and I’ve written about some of them. One important throughline here is what we might call the common sense problem. As in, Democrats seem to have abandoned it in many areas. This helps explain why there hasn’t been a ”Trump disenchantment dividend” for the Democrats as the former President’s popularity has fallen and for that matter a “nutty GOP politicians” dividend as various Republican pols do and say fairly crazy things. Voters just aren’t sure the Democrats are that well-grounded either.

Awhile ago, I tried to codify some of voters’ common sense views and values into ten short statements to illustrate how Democrats are losing the plot relative to the median voter. I’ll go through some of them here with the aid of some new data demonstrating how widely this common sense is embraced by ordinary Americans in contrast to their rejection by woke liberal activists and some politicians associated with the Democratic party."

Read the whole thing at The Liberal Patriot....and subscribe!

THELIBERALPATRIOT.SUBSTACK.COM

The Democrats’ Common Sense Problem

Voters Think They’ve Abandoned It

Stan Greenberg Critiques Galston and Kamarck

Interesting article. I particularly liked this bit:

"Democratic base voters hate “defunding the police.” Choose your group, but they each respond negatively to the words, in a ratio of 2-to-3 to 4-to-1. About half of Hispanics, AAPI, millennials/Gen Z voters, and unmarried women give the highest possible negative (over 75 on a 100-degree scale). If you are defunding the police, you are not concerned with crime and not using the only instrument people know to achieve public safety.

That is why a public safety message that prioritizes addressing crime, while funding the police with accountability and reform—precisely the message Joe Biden used in the State of the Union—has a big impact, doubling the Democratic margin among those who hear it. Working-class voters, whether they supported Biden or Trump, are surprised by it because they think defunding the police is a “woke” Democratic position.

My surveys had also shown that “Black Lives Matter” and “defund the police” were particularly unpopular among Hispanic voters. We didn’t ask what explained it, and we should. Hispanics may have thought Black Americans and their issues were higher on the priority list for Biden and the Democrats. They didn’t see Joe Biden campaign for their vote, the way Hillary Clinton did.

Let me posit an additional explanation that will need a lot of further discussion. Democrats putting addressing America’s very real “systematic racism” at the top of their campaign agenda doesn’t align with the priorities of those communities, as we saw above.

But it also doesn’t align with the vision of America as an immigrant country where all ultimately make progress. You may have faced extreme poverty, all forms of unfree labor and political repression, but you are blessed to live in a country where hard work allows each generation to do better than the last. That Democrats are losing to Republicans now on who can help you realize the “American dream” is prima facie support for my concerns.

In the Hispanic community, pollster Carlos Odio found that the new Hispanic migrants feel blessed to be in America and away from their home countries where life was unbearable and unfree. Republicans more than Democrats have been speaking to that strong immigrant consciousness.

Black voters in my focus groups have an astute sense of history and worry that past work to secure their family and their parents’ battle for civil rights will be reversed. They think the Black community will be the first to pay the price if progressive forces lose out to conservatives. Despite the fraught history, they want to be part of an American story where their community continues to make progress.

In my survey conducted for Biden’s State of the Union, I found a pretty stunning 69 percent of the respondents reacted warmly to the assertion “America is still the country with the best history of advancing civil rights.” Do you realize 63 percent of Blacks said that? So did 62 percent of Hispanics and 67 percent of Asian Americans. Less than a third of voters across our diverse base rejected that."

Hmm. Now where have I heard stuff like this before?

PROSPECT.ORG

The Real Lesson for All Factions of the Democratic Party

Offer a hopeful vision where all Americans make progress.

On the Reliability of Black Support for Democrats

I am not so sure that support is as reliable as most Democrats assume. I see signs of erosion, particularly among black working class voters. I discuss and analyze the relevant data in my new post at The Liberal Patriot.

"It has been widely noted that the Hispanic vote was relatively poor for the Democrats in 2020. But that wasn’t the Democrats’ only disappointment among nonwhite voters. Democratic margins among black voters also declined by 7 points, though not by nearly as much as among Hispanics (16 points, Catalist two party vote). Moreover, while absolute turnout for black voters was up, as it was for almost all groups in a very high turnout election, turnout did not go up as much for black voters as for other groups, so relative turnout fell.....

This is a bit of a puzzle. Trump was widely and correctly viewed as a racist, a perception that was turbocharged by the Black Lives Matter protests over the summer. And the Democratic party and Biden were certainly all in on BLM, so you could hardly ask for an election where the profile of the racial justice issue was any higher. And yet….the expected surge in black support and turnout for Democrats failed to appear.

One possibility is that Democrats overestimated the salience of the racial justice issue, perhaps especially as it unfolded around the BLM movement. Black voters, particularly working class voters, do after all have other concerns rooted in material, kitchen-table concerns....

[B]lack voters are not a monolith and cannot be assumed to belong to the Democrats simply on the basis of racial justice advocacy and rhetoric. In the end, the loyalty of black voters depends crucially on the ability of the Democrats to provide material improvements in their lives, particularly for those in working class and poor communities.

This helps explain why the black shift toward Trump in 2020 wound up being heavily concentrated among black working class (noncollege) voters. A forthcoming States of Change detailed re-analysis of 2020 election data not only shows this pattern nationally but also indicates that black margin shifts toward Trump in key states from Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to Florida, Georgia and Nevada were driven entirely or overwhelmingly by black working class voters.

Read the whole thing at The Liberal Patriot!

THELIBERALPATRIOT.SUBSTACK.COM

Just How Solid Is the Black Vote for the Democrats?

Perhaps Much Less Than People Think

The Democratic Brand Is in Very Serious Trouble

John Halpin runs down some recent data and discusses their implications for the Democrats at The Liberal Patriot:

"Politics is not a complicated game to win. Either your party fields compelling candidates that voters mostly like or your party offers a compelling and relevant enough agenda that voters mostly support. The one thing a party can’t do and expect to win is suffer double-digit deficits to the other party on the issues that matter most to voters.

Yet this is exactly where Democrats find themselves today according to fresh new polling from Impact Research and Fabrizio Lee for The Wall St. Journal....

A grimmer picture emerges when examining the big economic and social issues facing the country. Although many voters give Biden credit for “trying to do the right thing”, nearly 6 in 10 voters say President Biden is not focused on the issues that are most important to them. What are those issues? Topping the presented list of four major priorities for Congress and the President is “inflation and the economy”—scoring well above others at 50 percent—followed by “the conflict between Russia and Ukraine” at 25 percent, “immigration and border security” at 15 percent, and “the coronavirus pandemic” at a distant 5 percent."

THELIBERALPATRIOT.SUBSTACK.COM

Code Red on the Democratic Brand

A party can’t hold or grow political power with double-digit deficits on 

When Will the Climate Left Ever Learn, When Will They.....Ever Learn?

Catchy eh? Try singing it. Anyway take a gander at today's chart from Pew. And think about it, really think about it. This is what the actually-existing American public actually thinks. Then read this good article from David Weigel on the current travails of the climate left.

Note especially this accurate observation from a Data for Progress analyst:

“There's no political appetite for that [ending exploration for domestic energy], much to the chagrin of people in the climate movement,” said Danielle Deiseroth, the lead climate strategist at the left-wing polling and advocacy group Data for Progress. “We couldn't just shut it all off tomorrow, and we're realizing that more than ever.” Polling for climate groups, said Deiseroth, was revealing that “the language of ‘moratoriums' and ‘stop drilling'” alienated voters, while “transition away from fossil fuels over a longer period of time” did not. The policy was the same, but the apocalyptic language wasn't helpful."

For more on the essential uselessness of apocalyptic language, see my recent piece criticizing climate catastrophism.

https://www.pewresearch.org/.../americans-largely.../...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/.../trailer-democrats.../

https://theliberalpatriot.substack.com/.../climate...