The state of the democratic party

related

 

sticking to the topic

 

"Dems Can’t Run Against the Big Lie in 2022":

https://thebulwark.com/dems-cant-run-against-the-big-lie-in-2022/

Dems Can’t Run Against the Big Lie in 2022
Trump-Biden voters don't really care about how Republicans keep lying about the 2020 election.
by RICH THAU

JUNE 21, 2021 5:24 AM

Here’s a scenario to ponder: It’s October 2022 and a Democratic congressional candidate is running ads showing the Republican candidate questioning whether Joe Biden actually won the 2020 election. The Republican candidate, meanwhile, is running ads talking about the problems happening on Biden’s and the Democrats’ watch: inflation, unemployment, crime, the southern border, etc.

In that context, would Trump-to-Biden swing voters choose the Democrat or the Republican candidate?

I asked this question of 13 such swing voters on June 8 in two online focus groups. Two were Democrats; six were Republicans; five were independents. All were from among the most competitive 2020 swing states.

Ten of the 13 basically said they’d vote for the Republican candidate in that scenario.

“I tend to vote based on the issues, and if the information this Republican is presenting is factually accurate, and the economy is tanking, and we have all these other issues, then the Democrats aren’t working out. Let’s vote differently,” said Holly, 52, a Democrat from Norcross, Georgia.

David, 55, an independent from Dallas, agreed: “If that’s the only thing the Democratic candidate is running on, I’m going to vote against him. . . . He’s got to have some type of substance to be running, rather than just what the other guy said.”

Farah, a 44-year-old Republican from Atlanta, said, “That’s the only thing you have going was that [the election] was stolen? Come up with some other reasons why I should vote for you.” She added, “Republicans have more solid ground to stand on if that’s the case.”

I pressured respondents on this issue by explicitly asking, “You’re willing to vote for a Republican who said the 2020 election was stolen?” Many affirmed their positions and downplayed the relevance of the “Big Lie” as an important factor in their choice of candidate.

Diane, 50, an Independent from Scottsdale, Arizona, acknowledged, “I know that statement is false [about the election being stolen], but coming from a Republican candidate, that’s also not a surprise. So I’m not ready to use that as something I would base my vote on.”

Sean, a 26-year-old Democrat from nearby Tempe, said, “I don’t think it’s relevant because [the 2020 election by that point] is two years past now, it’s already done. . . . This is what it is, we’re going to move forward.”

Chris, a Republican from Gilbert, Arizona, was the only participant in his group who emphatically said he would vote for the hypothetical Democrat in 2022. In a very animated fashion, he asked the other respondents in the group directly, “Would you guys vote for a person that said that this last election was a fraud? Would you vote for that person in 2022?” The rest of the group’s answer was yes.

Some Democrats think it’s important to endlessly highlight Republicans’ Trump-animated doubts about the 2020 election results—to make them toxic to voters in the way that Republicans hung AOC and “defund the police” around Democratic candidates in previous elections. But it seems possible that this strategy won’t work in this direction, in this coming election.

One strategy the Democrats may have more success with is a focus on the creation of a January 6 commission. Ten of the 13 participants said they generally support the creation of a formal commission to investigate the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

Chris said, “I want public hearings against public officials that were actually complicit in not preparing the defenses appropriately.” He worried that without the commission, “the DOJ is only going to prosecute the civilians that breached the gate, they are not going to prosecute one member in the public space [who was] responsible.”

Kelli, 41, a Republican from Maitland, Florida, said, “I want to know who, why, how, what. And then anyone responsible needs to be held accountable, because how are we supposed to stop these things from happening again in the future if we don’t have more information?”

The majority of the 10 supporters of the commission shared Kelli’s sentiment, hoping to prevent any future attacks that threaten our country.

“If you got somebody attacking your country,” said William, 27, an independent from Grand Rapids, Michigan, “you definitely want to figure out where these attacks are coming from, and really get to the bottom of it . . . so that we can be safe without attacks.”

Jessyca, a 35-year-old from Apopka, Florida, agreed: “If we don’t address it and it happens again, we’re allowing the bad behavior to continue. . . . It should be used as an example so it discourages anyone from trying to do something that stupid again in the future because they’ll see the severity of the consequences now.”

Participants who did not support the creation of the commission questioned how effective it would actually be.

David, the Dallas independent, said, “What have their formal commissions done? The one on the Russian commission, that did nothing. . . . Just prosecute these people, put them in jail, and end it.”

Tanya, 45, a Republican from Naples, Florida, echoed David’s feelings when she said, “I just think it’s a waste of time and money.”

In short, the marching orders from Trump-Biden voters sound like this: Congress, please create a January 6 commission so nothing like this happens again. But if you Congressional Republicans remain squarely focused on present day concerns—no matter what you said about 2020—we’ll consider voting for you in 2022 if Democrats appear obsessed with the past.

Aaron Witkin contributed to this piece.


​

 

"How Democrats are ‘unilaterally disarming’ in the redistricting wars":

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/06/21/democrats-redistricting-wars-495303

excerpt:

Oregon Democrats had finally secured total control of redistricting for the first time in decades.

Then, just months before they were set to draw new maps, they gave it away.

In a surprise that left Democrats from Salem to Washington baffled and angry, the state House speaker handed the GOP an effective veto over the districts in exchange for a pledge to stop stymieing her legislative agenda with delay tactics. The reaction from some of Oregon's Democratic House delegation was unsparing: “That was like shooting yourself in the head,” Rep. Kurt Schrader told POLITICO. Rep. Peter DeFazio seethed: “It was just an abysmally stupid move on her part.”

Yet what happened this spring in Oregon is just one example, though perhaps the most extreme one, of a larger trend vexing Democratic strategists and lawmakers focused on maximizing the party’s gains in redistricting. In key states over the past decade, Democrats have gained control of state legislatures and governorships that have long been in charge of drawing new maps — only to cede that authority, often to independent commissions tasked with drawing political boundaries free of partisan interference.

Supporters of these initiatives say it's good governance to bar politicians from drawing districts for themselves and their party. But exasperated Democrats counter that it has left them hamstrung in the battle to hold the House, by diluting or negating their ability to gerrymander in the way Republicans plan to do in many red states. And with the House so closely divided, Democrats will need every last advantage to cling to their majority in 2022.

“We Democrats are cursed with this blindness about good government,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia, a Democratic state that will nonetheless see its congressional map drawn by a newly created independent commission.

“In rabid partisan states that are controlled by Republicans, they're carving up left and right. And we're kind of unilaterally disarming,” Connelly conceded, before adding: “But having said that, I still come down on the side of reforming this process because it's got to start somewhere.”

Only a handful of states had redistricting commissions a decade ago, but the number has grown since then thanks in large part to a campaign from national Democrats, including former Attorney General Eric Holder, to increase voter awareness of gerrymandering — casting it mostly as a Republican abomination, despite the practice's bipartisan history.
​

more at the link

​

 

"Democrats Increasingly Frustrated with Congress":

https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/democrats-increasingly-frustrated-with-congress/

excerpt:

A new Gallup poll shows President Biden remains quite popular, at least given the polarized political climate, while Congress is down even from a pitiful starting point. Looking inside the numbers, it’s mostly Democrats who have become disillusioned by the inability of a Congress nominally controlled by Democrats to get anything done.
​

more at the link

 

meanwhile, back in Buffalo

 

latest Harvard Harris poll : https://mcusercontent.com/ca678077b...3130-1b4eb065a3da/HHP_June_21_Preso_FINAL.pdf

Democrats are holding steady:


whereas Republicans are on the upswing. Not exactly sure how that works, but that's what the poll suggests:

 

"Surrogates for Mr. Adams have suggested without evidence that an apparent ranked-choice alliance between Ms. Garcia and another rival, Andrew Yang, could amount to an attempt to suppress the votes of Black and Latino New Yorkers."

https://althouse.blogspot.com/2021/06/surrogates-for-mr-adams-have-suggested.html

"Mr. Adams himself claimed that the alliance was aimed at preventing a Black or Latino candidate from winning the race.... To advocates of ranked-choice voting, the round-by-round shuffling of outcomes is part of the process of electing a candidate with broad appeal. But if Ms. Garcia or Ms. Wiley were to prevail, the process — which was approved by voters in a 2019 ballot measure — would likely attract fresh scrutiny, with some of Mr. Adams’s backers and others already urging a new referendum on it.... According to the now-withdrawn tabulation released Tuesday, Ms. Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, nearly made it to the final round. She finished closely behind Ms. Garcia, the former sanitation commissioner, before being eliminated in the penultimate round of the preliminary exercise. After the count of in-person ballots last week, Ms. Garcia had trailed Ms. Wiley by about 2.8 percentage points...."

From "New York Mayor’s Race in Chaos After Elections Board Counts 135,000 Test Ballots/The extraordinary sequence of events threw the closely watched Democratic primary contest into a new period of uncertainty and seeded further confusion about the outcome" (NYT).

Wiley and Adams are the 2 black candidates. If they are shut out after multi-round computer shuffling and Garcia gets the nomination, I don't see how people are going to believe what happened was legit. And the Democrats will have themselves to blame, since they've been leaning into characterizing everything that happens within the structure of voting as racist.

The top-rated comment in the NYT is:

Please oh please do not make it sound like ranked choice is somehow rigged! The old way meant people who the majority did *not* want could win elections because of multiple candidates dividing the vote. Ranked choice makes it so that a majority is in favor of the winner, even if that person wasn’t their first choice. Voters voted for this process. Eric Adams and fans, do not follow Trump into the moral void and start undermining results just because you don’t like them.

Too late for that sort of wishful thinking. This is a bed Democrats made for themselves.


Posted by Ann Althouse at 8:41 AM ​

 

"Republicans have more friends across the political divide than Democrats, study finds":

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/07/03/how-politics-divides-friends/

excerpt

Republicans like Huzzard’s former pal tend to have more bipartisan friendships than Democrats do: Just over half, 53 percent of Republicans said they have at least some friends who are Democrats, AEI found, while about a third of Democrats (32 percent) said they have at least some Republican friends.

***
Cox adds that race plays a role, too. Black Democrats, for example, have very few Republican friends, so they don’t often have the opportunity to engage across the political aisle. “People who are strong partisans tend to be more segregated socially,” Cox adds.​