Reading polling results of public opinion in the United States makes me want to put my head in an oven. I imagine it’s not dissimilar to sitting in a doctor’s office and learning that you have Stage 5 cancer. We all knew that we’d die eventually, but it’s tough to get a firm timetable on the continuation of American democracy. It ends in January 2023, and now it’s all about palliative care for those who still give a shit.
Here’s a gem from Quinnipiac that should stop your heart.
A slight majority of Americans (52 percent) say the Democratic Party has moved too far to the left, 6 percent say it has moved too far to the right, and 34 percent say it hasn’t moved too far in either direction.
A plurality (43 percent) say the Republican Party hasn’t moved too far in either direction, 35 percent say it has moved too far to the right, and 13 percent say it has moved too far to the left.
So, fifty-six percent of Americans disagree that the GOP has lurched out of the mainstream. Just yesterday, 207 House Republicans voted against censuring one of their members for posting a video on social media that depicted him killing a Democratic member and fighting President Biden with swords. Also this week, the Wyoming Republican Party formally ousted Liz Cheney, the daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney, for the sin of being truthful about who won the 2020 presidential election. Despite these clear signs of newfound radicalism, a majority of the public thinks it’s the Democrats who have moved too far from the center.
Maybe you’re thinking that we’re just at a low point. Things will look up soon, surely, especially if Biden gets to sign his Build Back Better agenda into law. After all, the public really likes Biden’s agenda.
A majority, 58 – 38 percent, supports the roughly $2 trillion spending bill on social programs such as child care, education, family tax breaks, and expanding Medicare for seniors. The result is largely unchanged since early October.
But I’ve got news for you. Biden just signed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, which is also popular. The problem is that it was more popular before he signed it. It’s less so now.
A majority, 57 – 37 percent, supports the roughly $1 trillion spending bill to improve the nation’s roads, bridges, broadband and other infrastructure projects. It’s a dip since early October, when 62 percent supported it and 34 percent opposed.
The ink is hardly dry and already the public is souring.
The sad fact is that the people are pretty emphatic right now that they’d like to see the Republican Party back in power. They give Biden terrible marks on everything from foreign policy to COVID-19 to handling inflation to basic honesty, and although they say congressional Democrats are slightly more inclined than their Republican colleagues to “care about the needs and problems of people like them,” they still intend to vote for the Republicans.
Independents say 41 – 31 percent they would want to see Republicans win control of the U.S. House of Representatives, while 28 percent did not offer an opinion.
Americans say 46 – 40 percent they would want to see the Republican Party win control of the U.S. Senate, while 15 percent did not offer an opinion. Independents say 44 – 34 percent that they would want to see the Republican Party win control of the U.S. Senate, and 22 percent did not offer an opinion.
If there’s any ray of light in these survey results, it’s that Trump remains a drag on the GOP.
If a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives or the U.S. Senate strongly embraces former President Trump and his ideas, roughly 4 in 10 Americans (42 percent), say they would be less likely to vote for that candidate, 29 percent say they would be more likely to vote for that candidate, and 27 percent say it would have no impact.
But I have to throw a wet blanket on any inclination for optimism here. The Republicans are absolutely dominating us despite the drag Trump creates. If he were removed from the picture, things could quite possibly get much worse.
A Marquette Law School poll finds that 60 percent of Republican voters want Trump to run for president again despite leading a failed coup attempt. Fortunately, only 28 percent of the overall public agrees, and he suffers from an upside-down 32-65 favorability number. The Democrats got a rude awakening in Virginia and New Jersey when they discovered that their suburban advantage, on which they heavily rely, wasn’t very robust without Trump in the Oval Office or on the ballot.
Could things improve from here? Yes, the objective conditions and mood of the country can definitely get better between now and next November, but it won’t matter much because after the redistricting process is complete, the Republicans will have a built-in House majority and there will be almost no competitive congressional seats left to win or lose.
When most voters go to the polls to elect members of Congress next year, the general election will essentially be meaningless. That’s because winners are being determined right now, by a small number of party officials who are surgically ensuring preordained victories in the majority of the nation’s congressional districts.
It’s almost impossible to conceive on any scenario where the Republicans don’t win back the House of Representatives, and their odds of winning control of the U.S. Senate are better than fifty-fifty. This is true no matter what the Democrats do or don’t do over the next year.
As presently comprised, the Republican Party is fascist and undemocratic, and they will not allow free and fair elections going forward. What this means is that we’ll be powerless to organize the inevitable backlash and ride it back to power. They won’t concede elections that they lose, and that assumes we can even win elections for these noncompetitive seats that are overseen by radical election officials and even more radical state legislatures.
As of now, there’s still a semblance of normalcy. Rogue and threatening lawmakers are still held accountable in Congress and lose their committee seats. That won’t last.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) suggested that Reps. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) should expect to be on committees if Republicans take the House majority, NBC News reports.
Said McCarthy: “They’ll have committees. They may have other committee assignments. They may have better committee assignments.”
I’m not ordinarily a pessimist, but I always try to shoot straight with you. Some of what we’re witnessing are things I’ve warned about for years. One way I endured the Trump years was my complete confidence that we’d win congressional power back in the midterms and then deny Trump a second term. There were plenty of data to back up my confidence although it was a closer call than I expected. The metrics tell me something different now.
More than anything, they tell me that however much the people may have voted for Biden in the hope for a return to normalcy, there is no normalcy on the horizon and efforts to provide it aren’t going to be politically rewarded. The only hope is to start fighting as hard as the Republicans are fighting. That means using the law (since it still exists for a little while longer) very aggressively. It means the effort to right the ship through reestablishing norms will fail spectacularly.
I’d say that we should do away with the legislative filibuster and pass voter reforms, and that we should develop an intelligent and politically savvy legislative plan for 2022, and that we should do more and better messaging. But most of that won’t happen and the rest won’t be sufficient. The coup-plotters are in the driver’s seat and if we don’t have a radical and preemptive response, they’ll do next November what they failed to do on January 6.
And we won’t come back from that.
5
5
Well, sh*t…
>>The only hope is to start fighting as hard as the Republicans are fighting.
In other words, there is no hope. We are in this position because of 25 years of inadequate, gutless, Democratic “leaders”, and the whole concept of “fighting” does not exist in their vocabulary.
Covid, Covid, Covid. Most people could give a shit about whatever bill passes in Washington. They’ve been so conditioned to believe that government doesn’t actually work that passing good legislation is about passing good legislation, it rarely brings electoral advantage.
The fundamentals of the country are bad, especially consumer confidence, which is divorced from economic fundamentals. If Covid “disappears” by this spring, really fading into the background, then people will like Biden and Democrats again.
Your first sentence captures it perfectly. Many (most?) people don’t give a shit about what the government does, period. It largely doesn’t have an observable impact on their lives. But COVID sure as hell does. A lot of people voted for Biden or at least tacitly supported him because they want this shit to be over. And it’s not.
If all this comes to pass, and its likely that it will, the worst will be the regret, that it would have been far more easier to do something about this when dems had control, then it will be once the GOP takes over congress. What the republicans are doing in these state legislatures hurts the very voters democrats have relied on, time and again, and passing the Voting Rights bill will alleviate if not stop most of what those state bills will do, in terms of suppressing their votes. This is an all hands on deck moment for the party, and Biden should be calling for abolishing the filibuster to pass voting rights now, instead of “next year” as he has intimated to some who are pushing him to act now. Instead, its as if Voting Rights is a “black issue” and therefore the sense of urgency, and political will in doing something about it is just not there, lest they somehow upset the precious suburban voters who will likely return to their GOP roots now that Trump is gone. Resulting in the loss of suburban voters and ceding suppression of the one voting bloc that could make up the difference.
With the GOP running headlong into fascism and with an authoritarian base, once they take control who knows how bad things will get. But once there, they’ll be awfully hard to stop without an opposition party willing to fight. Given where they are now, I don’t see the democrats becoming the fighters they’ll need to be to stand up to and stop the
I think the redistricting and the replacement of election officials are the scariest part and leading Democrats don’t seem to be panicking or even formulating a unified strategy. They seem to have given up on a voting bill because two senators refuse to open up their eyes.
It’s time to start putting Republicans on the defensive. STRIKE PAC – STRIKE PAC
https://www.salon.com/2021/11/12/guru-rachel-bitecofer-democrats-face-10-alarm-fire-after-virginia-debacle/?fbclid=IwAR3I2PzITQ-S55nmTey9eQDPIUZVi7Pe30fL0580lixyF3sv6Osgq9glWI8
Fox News and the rest of the right wing media are at the bottom of all this – without them the GOP in its current state would not exist and on the left we just don’t have the same machinery pumping out lies. Kind of a catch 22 – good people don’t like to lie. My only hope is demographics.
5
You should look under the hood of what’s pushing his numbers so low. He’s normal with older voters. He is getting absolutely smashed with younger voters. To me that signals that this is purely the result of an administration that to the public feels aloof and doing nothing while their enemies rally and plunder and take over election offices. There’s no urgency, they’re not passing what was promised, and younger voters actually care about you are delivering these days.
No, the problem is not weak leadership, it’s us, the people on the Left. When Republicans fight, it’s war. That’s their paradigm. Our paradigm? Academia. They want to win power, we want to win debates. We are incapable of prioritizing, we are incapable of message discipline, and we are apparently incapable of not being obnoxious know-it-alls lecturing and hectoring and insisting that we’ve made no progress and must all wear hair shirts 24/7/365, woe, woe and more woe, let’s figure out how to become Sweden.
I’ve been warning since 2015 that cancel culture would bite us in the ass. And spare me the ritual crapola about how cancel culture isn’t really a thing because: Mel Gibson. We are clearly on the defensive on that issue, right? We’re taking hits on that issue, right? So, yeah, it’s a thing.The fact is we’ve annoyed the living f–k out of people by acting like sophomores home on Christmas break showing off their brand-new, paper-thin wisdom about absolutely everything. Propaganda is a tool of war, or can be if you can manage not to start yammering about defunding the police.
This obsession with superficialities that don’t do a goddam thing for working families or people under overpasses, is why we don’t connect. We have lost contact with anyone shy of a bachelor’s degree. We speak incomprehensible gibberish to each other: you’re not a man, you’re a cis-man. Hear that, stressed, overworked, 50-something guy hanging on by his fingernails in a dying town? Now vote for us! Just as soon as you memorize this glossary. I’m a social democrat! WTF does that mean to the person who cuts your hair?
Our job as Democrats is the defense of the weak, the feeding of the hungry, the housing of the homeless, the lifting up of the downtrodden and the salvation of the damn planet, and that is not what we’re doing. You cannot pretend that we give a damn about homelessness when the most-afflicted city is freaking San Francisco. Rich, entirely progressive-controlled and in a hard blue state currently up to its ears in tax receipts, and we’ve accomplished nothing there.
Time to wake up. We’ve lost ground among Black, Brown and even white women voters, and still, still, still we waste our time wasting our time. Climate change is an existential crisis! And so is the fact that we have a school with an inappropriate name! How do so many smart people understand nothing about communication? Stop burying the ledes, FFS.
You don’t win wars by fighting every battle simultaneously. You focus on where the enemy is, what his capabilities are, what your objective is, and then you concentrate your forces. This is important. This is the United States Constitution on the line, this is our freedoms in danger. This is not a drill, this is the war.
4.5
3.5
I think the key is inflation. The return of inflation is terrifying to middle class people. It’s not so much the idea of it as the reality. They see the cost of food going up. The cost of a car, let alone a home. And good luck finding a lawyer or plumber or carpenter.
I know most will disagree but I’d like to see the Fed raise interest rates. Yes, it would shock the economy and might cause a recession but inflation would retreat to a healthier rate. It’s easy for analytical people to not appreciate the terror that goes with inflation. For younger voters, it looks like everything they want will soon be forever out of reach. Home ownership. Hell, even just being out of debt. They don’t realize that, as debtors, they actually have much to gain from inflation (as it reduces the value of their debt in real terms).
These polls are discouraging, but not exactly surprising. For one thing, a good percentage of Americans get pretty much all their news from fox- which is now such a blatant propaganda arm of the right that they make Leni Riefenstahl look like a rank amateur in comparison. Democrats just can’t deal with the fact that the Republican party has become more of subsidiary of the Murdoch’s successful hate & fear business model than an actual political party. It’s the whole “freedom of the press” concept that they can’t really acknowledge that probably is no longer completely appropriate to a regulated business that is now openly advocating overturning our democracy and also spewing vaccine dis-information that is killing thousands.
But also, you have to acknowledge that the two favorite Democrats of fox news: Joe Manchin and Kristin Senma have been, and will continue to be the Democrats biggest obstacle to actually turning things around. History isn’t going to kind to them… well unless the fascist win, in which case they will be the heroes.
Yes, this. If they don’t vote to save the country as Democrats, then kick them out of the party, take away their committee assignments, and let them caucus with or join the Republican Party, so at least the blame lies squarely, 100%, at the feet of the Republican Party.
It’s time for the Democrats to stop enabling the Republicans.
Lots of interesting and important points here. I will comment on just one.
I’m surprised that people talk about bills, especially BBB, as if their political purpose is to woo swing voters. It seems to me that the reason to pass your party’s platform is to shore up enthusiasm among your base. The Trump tax cuts were never generally popular, but when they were passed Trump’s approval stopped declining…presumably that was the point that Republicans decided that he was ok after all. Similarly, we need to pass BBB to make sure dems show up in the midterm. It’s unlikely to matter in the House given gerrymandering, but it could make the difference in close Senate and Gov races.
Thanks for your comment. Here’s a tangential point: an added cost of the Senate filibuster rules is that pretty much everything Democrats want to accomplish legislatively has to be squashed into one big bill. This means there’s only one bill-signing ceremony. There’s only one day for members of Congress to go back to their districts and hold press conferences with local dignitaries to talk about the bill.
In the “good old days”, everything that’s in the BBB bill would be spread out over 5 – 25 separate pieces of legislation: each with its own public hearings, each with its own committee markup, each with its own floor vote, each with its own signing ceremony. It allowed Democrats (or Republicans) not only to get things done, but to be seen to be getting things done. That too is an important part of politics.
5
The scary part is not that Joe Biden is at a nadir in popularity. Polls go up and down; you win some, you lose some. The scary part is that Republicans are radicalized, anti-democracy, anti-liberal, and have apparently discovered an electoral perpetual motion machine in the one-two punch of culture war propaganda + gerrymandering.
But perpetual motion machines aren’t real. The question then is how much fuel the rigging of the electoral system will give to Republicans. Years worth of undemocratic dominance? Decades?
It seems quite potent and the result may be that when they run out of gas, the end will look more like the fall of some Eastern European one-party state than typical US politics.
But no matter how effectively Republicans rig the system, they are still not actually that popular. That’s the whole point: to cover up their unpopularity with electoral rigging and bombastic propaganda. So maybe a more important question is this: once the perpetual motion machine is running at full effectiveness, and Republicans seem to be the unquestioned masters of US politics, how will that change electoral politics and will the perpetual motion machine be able to adapt to changing circumstances on the ground?
I think the entire end-goal here is to win another election or two and then control the government and military so that any additional elections aren’t necessary. I mean, why give the communist pedophile America-hating traitor Democrats a chance to get back power to murder all straight conservative Christians?
Elections will eventually just be Republican window dressing. I think when people assume that the pendelum will eventually swing back against the Republicans, they are making the assumption that the freeing mechanism of constitutional elections that we have enjoyed for the last couple of centuries will still be in place. It will not. The fact that the GOP is right now creating a lawful way for elections to simply be ignored or overturned in states should be the big tell. Sure, there will always be states that are bastions of Democrats. But the vast majority of states will be under the iron fist of Republican created and enforced election policies and processes. And with nothing left at the federal level to insure fair voting in states, the jig is up. Democracy, for all intents and purposes, is dead. We’ll still go through all the motions of elections. But they will essentially be synonomous with all those “free elections” we see in dictatorships. Hell, once they lock this thing down it wouldn’t surprise me if the they didn’t make voting mandatory, so they can tout some sort of fallacious mass support for their ideals.
I couldn’t agree more. We either fix voting rights or forget about democracy. That runs right up to Joe Manchin and Sinema. Both of them or just Joe could go down in history in a most unpleasant way, But we seem obsessed with passing the big bill and Joe isn’t even on board with that. But hey we also have a debt limit that has to be passed and will Joe help or stand on his principles of bi partisanship in the senate.
5
In the next month and a half we have a lot to do to stop this freight train to hell. We need to pass a debt limit bill and the voting rights bill. Both of those are essential to continue as a viable political party. Believe it or not I think those two are more important than the reconciliation bill. We either handle it or let democracy go down the drain forever.
Inflation is something we can not do much about short term. There are a hundred or more ships waiting to unload off the West Coast and not enough truck drivers to move it. Maybe we should have a short term bill to pay bonuses to hire them. And heaven help us, but what was Joe thinking when he woke one day and decided to be a hero and exit Afghanistan? And that kind of resolve is going to save Taiwan?
But how do we get the filibuster gone. Anyone know how to get to Manchin? The 60 vote margin is enough to kill democracy all by itself.
Leaving Afghanistan was heroic. It’s been obvious for a decade or more that we were spinning our wheels, and Biden did what Obama lacked the guts to do. The coverage of the supposed failures were overblown and historically ignorant.
Yes. Hold all the Senate seats we have now, and add two more. This will mean picking candidates based not on how closely they adhere to progressive positions, but rather picking solely on the basis of who can win. Apply one litmus test, and one litmus test only: Does the candidate support reforming the Senate? If a candidate has a D after their name, and supports reforming filibuster, I don’t care if they wore blackface in a high school play 30 years ago, and I don’t care if they reject the use of the singular they, hell they can be anti-choice, I just need them to win. In a 52/48 Senate, Manchin and Sinema will lose most of their power.
We are in power. You want to win? Just start doing the things you promised. Get it done. Make a difference in people’s (particularly poor people’s) lives. Screw Manchin & Sinema. Have Schumer grow a pair. Get things done now. All of it. Get it done. That will win elections.