The state of the democratic party

Countdown to the Democrats' doomsday
Can the GOP win a filibuster-proof trifecta in the next three years?

https://theweek.com/2022-election/1012223/countdown-to-the-democrats-doomsday

excerpt:

Earlier this month, young Democratic strategist David Shor issued an apocalyptic warning to his followers, arguing that the "modal outcome" of his modeling for the Senate showed Republicans picking up a filibuster-proof, 60-vote majority over the next two election cycles, even if Democrats win a slim majority of the two-party vote. While everything would have to bounce right for Republicans for this to happen, it is not an implausible scenario — and that should absolutely terrify Democrats.

The Senate is currently split 50-50, and to get to 60, Republicans would have to net 10 pickups in the upper chamber over the next two cycles. It sounds like a heavy lift until you remember that Republicans picked up nine seats in 2014 alone, and the increasing rural-urban divide between the parties gives the GOP an increasing advantage in the Senate. Here's how it could happen.

Start with this year. There are four vulnerable Democrats up for re-election, in Georgia (Raphael Warnock), Arizona (Mark Kelly), Nevada (Catherine Cortez-Masto) and New Hampshire (Maggie Hassan). If they run the table in these races, and hold their own toss-up seats in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Republicans could walk away with a 54-seat majority in November. These are mostly strong Democratic incumbents, but that might not matter much in a wave election year. All six of these states are either ranked even on the Cook Political Report's Partisan Voting Index (PVI) or lean Republican, meaning Democrats need a favorable environment to win or hold a race.

The scary thing is that this year's Senate map is pretty decent for Democrats, comparatively, and two years from now that will not be the case. When President Biden is up for re-election, Democrats will have to defend incumbents in deep-red Montana (Jon Tester), Ohio (Sherrod Brown) and West Virginia (Joe Manchin), a task that will be made more challenging during a presidential election year when partisan identity is more important than ever. If Manchin retires or switches parties in the interim, the West Virginia race in particular will be a layup for the GOP.

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All of this is to say that moving right on issues where the GOP already has established a clear advantage is unlikely to pay dividends. The Fox News propagandists who just turned "grooming" into a national buzzword don't care if national Democrats shovel more money at the police or overreact to a modest increase in some crimes with some draconian show of carceral force. They will hammer them as soft-on-crime police abolitionists either way. What Shor and his allies are really asking is for Democrats to tack to the center away from the tone and content of the 2020 primaries, which they have already done.

A cops-and-austerity agenda as the course corrective for what ails the party is especially puzzling since this presidency has been a bonanza for moderate centrists who want incremental or possibly even just hypothetical change. The swing-seat House Democrats who asked their colleagues to avoid alienating suburban voters have gotten almost everything they wanted — a big, bipartisan infrastructure bill and little else that wasn't painstakingly watered down for the sake of enlisting a handful of Republicans. If I'm a Democratic strategist, I might be wondering how exactly the dream presidency of the moderates has put the party on the verge of decisive repudiations in both chambers of Congress.

There are limits, to be clear, to any strategy in a world in which the GOP has the ability to win electoral majorities in American governing institutions without majority support. Remember that Shor's model sees Republicans with a governing trifecta and 55+ Senate seats even if Democrats win slim majorities of the two-party vote for Congress and the presidency in 2022 and 2024. To his credit, he is a proponent of the democracy and institutional reforms that would make a Republican Senate supermajority more or less impossible — statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico, and aggressive voting rights legislation, for starters.

But most of those ideas are dead on arrival as long as one or more Senate Democrats remains committed to the filibuster rule. Since there's no sign of that changing, the biggest, easiest boosts to the party's electoral fortunes are all off the table, leaving Democrats to fight these internecine strategy battles instead of delivering on their agenda. The fact that no amount of 'popularism' is going to fix that doesn't make Shor's ominous predictions any less plausible, and Democrats have no choice but to get to work and hope for the best.
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more at the link

 

it's gratifying to know that @deb4rockets unignored me long enough to comment in a thread I started. baby steps.

 

thanks!

 

The case for exiling Manchin and Sinema from the Democratic Party
Yes, even if it means forfeiting Senate control

https://theweek.com/politics/101269...-manchin-and-sinema-from-the-democratic-party

excerpt:

There is no legal mechanism to expel these miscreants from the party. But there are growing strategic reasons why Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and his allies should make life so unbearable for Manchin and Sinema (both of whom aren't up for re-election until 2024) that they leave the party sometime before the 2022 midterms if one last push for even a microscopic version of the Build Back Better social investment package fails because of them. Go on a judicial confirmation binge first, but don't be delusional about what can be achieved with Manchin playing impossible to get in what looks like a plan to run out the clock on behalf of his fossil fuel overlords.

First, Schumer could announce that the Democratic Party will not support re-election bids for Manchin and Sinema and will actively side with their primary challengers. Second, the pair could be stripped of their committee assignments, after which Biden could deliver a speech arguing that Democrats who deliberately sabotage their party over and over again are not welcome in the big tent. The DNC could formally censure both senators, as the RNC did with GOP Reps. Liz Cheney (Wy.) and Adam Kinzinger (Ill.) due to their support for the impeachment of former President Trump.

It is hard to imagine either Manchin or Sinema refraining from a party switch in the aftermath of such public and dramatic rebukes. After all, the fragile Manchin hardened his opposition to the president's signature legislative goal after his feelings were hurt by a December White House statement in which Jen Psaki accused him of "a sudden and inexplicable reversal in his position, and a breach of his commitments to the president." In early February, Manchin declared the framework "dead."

I know what you're thinking: That's deranged! Why would Schumer and the Democrats willingly give up their Senate majority? Wouldn't that be passing control of the Senate majority to Mitch McConnell and the Republicans without even putting up a fight?
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more at the link

 

Political Correctness Is Losing

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/04/political-correctness-is-losing.html

excerpt:

The Democrats’ middling performances in 2020 and the 2021 off-year elections, and the lessons they might contain for the upcoming midterms, have brought elected Democrats face-to-face with the consequences of allowing the most militant members of the progressive movement to bully their party into adopting maximalist stances on issues like school closings, immigration enforcement, and crime. It’s now much harder for progressives to depict, say, support for enforcing immigration law or opposition to defunding the police as inherently racist when it’s clear the communities supposedly offended by those positions support them. There is an old saying that politics is downstream from culture, but in this case, culture is downstream from politics. When Democratic elected officials openly blamed their troubles on purity tests imposed by social activists, it gave permission for liberals elsewhere to resist tactics to which they had previously submitted.
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more at the link

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haven't watched this, but the presentation with David Shor speaking is supposed to be pretty good, starts at around the 47:30 mark