New analysis of 2022 midterm elections: implications for Democrats

When you work on an election, pretty much everything you do is determined by the data. The data used to be called "the voter lists" despite living in a computer file, but perhaps became envisioned as the data when we moved away from paper and onto smart phones. The data is used to send campaigners to interact with a selection of voters. Which voters the campaign expends resources to interact with is the most fundamental choice made in designing a strategy. From the point of view of the canvasser or phoner, the reasons for any particular list can be opaque, though good campaigns teach their workers as much as is known about their target voters.

(Reuters published a nice visual about political data flow if you want a picture.)

The data is compiled from public sources and past campaigns by list brokers -- at the top end, TargetSmart for the Democrats and Data Trust for Republicans. Various organizations further massage the data, attaching additional information and speculation about individual voters. Think of this part of the process as marketing for politics; like all the businesses that create profiles of us to sell stuff to us, political actors use public information to decide who to pitch with what message and how to reach them.

On the Democratic side, the best of these enhanced data files come through a nonprofit outfit called Catalist. Here's how that entity describes itself:

Catalist compiles, enhances, stores, and dynamically updates data on over 256 million unique voting-age individuals across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. ... Our commitment is to strengthen the progressive community year after year by growing and maturing this community asset and related technology and services.

When an election cycle is over, Catalist refines its data, using it now, not for targeting, but to discern what trends and changes are happening among the voters. Every two years, Catalists publishes a What Happened. Findings about the midterm elections of 2022 are encouraging :

Gen Z and Millennials played a remarkable role in the 2022 election, voting heavily for Democratic candidates and exceeding their turnout from 2018. That makes this the second midterm cycle in a row where young voters have not only defied conventional wisdom about their willingness to turn out, but delivered decisive victories for Democrats....

From the late 1970s to the early 2000s, young Democratic support was routinely between 50% and 60% and even dropped below 50% in some cycles, according to exit polls. While support rose dramatically in the 2006 midterms amidst opposition to the Iraq War and in 2008 during President Obama’s first election, the midterm years of 2010 and 2014 saw a substantial drop in support among young voters, in part due to young Democrats sitting out those elections but also due to across-the-board declines in support for Democrats in a Republican wave year.

Support has remained incredibly strong since 2016, however, notably including the past two midterms: peaking at 68% in the wave year of 2018, and remaining high in 2022. This marks the first time that young people's Democratic support has been greater than 60% for two consecutive midterm elections, and now includes a midterm with a Democratic incumbent president.

Democratic support among young voters is partly due to the diversity of this group, as America becomes more diverse over time. But that is not the whole story. Democratic support was higher among young voters of color, both nationally (78%) and in highly contested races (also 78%). But support among young white voters rose between 2018 (53% national, 52% highly contested races) and 2022 (58% nationally, 57% highly contested races). This 5-6 point support change is notable, indicating a broad base of Democratic support among young voters across the country.

What Does This Mean for Turnout in 2024? For practitioners, high turnout cycles mean that more voters have registered, cast ballots and engaged with campaigns, meaning there is more opportunity to re-engage these voters over time because they are visible to voter files and campaigns. Voting itself is also habitual and people who vote once are more likely to vote again than people who have never voted at all. We may remain in a high turnout era, but voters’ perceptions of how competitive and salient an election is can change dramatically. Higher turnout does not automatically confer advantages to Democrats and parties have been able to fight to near-parity in the past several general elections.

Campaigns are about winning the immediate election -- and also about encouraging habits of participation among your target population. That's what we do out there. It's called citizenship and underlies functioning democracy.

Here's an historical artifact from the days when we used paper to teach about voter files. In Nevada, by the way.

Michigan goes blue; Ohio stays red; Nevada splits the difference

Here's an interesting discussion of why Michigan and Ohio, states which might seem similar, have diverged politically since 2016. In that year, both voted for Donald Trump. By 2022, Michigan elected Democrats to state offices across the board, while Ohio elected Republicans to the U.S. Senate and statewide. The latter is now considered a solid "red state," while Michigan looks solidly "blue."

These are apparently demographically similar places, with only small differences:

Michigan and Ohio have similar white populations, 78% and 80%, respectively; Black populations, 14% and 12%; bachelor’s degree recipients, both 18%; people over 65, both 17%; median household incomes, both $59,000 in 2020 dollars; and workers belonging to unions, 13% and 12%.

 

The study's authors go on to discuss whether perhaps different voting laws shape different electorates. Michigan has put in place automatic voter registration through the DMV and election day registration. Ohio makes potential voters sign up a month in advance. Michigan's easier voting laws may make for increased participation.

According to the Michigan secretary of state’s official election results, there were 4.5 million total votes in the gubernatorial election, the highest office contested in 2022. Meanwhile in Ohio, the secretary of state reported 4.2 million total official votes cast for governor. ... The total number of voters in Ohio dropped by 295,466 between 2018 and 2022.

Well - maybe. But I have reservations, based having worked the election in Nevada in 2022. Under a Democratic governor and legislature, both elected in 2018, that state put in place election laws that do everything possible to make voting easy. Every Nevadan got a ballot in the mail, could mail it in or vote it in person as much as two weeks before election day, or register on election day if somehow they'd missed out on the mailing or at the DMV. 

And Nevada remained its deeply divided self in 2022, replacing its Democratic governor with a Republican, and re-electing a Democratic U.S. Senator, both by razor thin margins.

So very easy voting in Nevada (easier than in Michigan I think) wasn't enough to shape the partisan outcome.

The authors of the Michigan/Ohio comparison note one considerable discrepancy between but don't discuss it much:

Ohio voters were less likely to reside in a union household – 21% to 27% – and were much more likely to identify as Republicans, 41% to 32%.

Did the labor movement in Michigan get out the vote?

From what I saw in Nevada, it was the massive commitment of the hospitality union -- Culinary/UniteHERE -- to electing the Democrat that saved Senator Catherine Cortez Masto. Union membership in Nevada is not so different than in the other two states, between 11 and 12%. But a determined, high functioning union sector can make a difference in outcomes. And, so far, union membership does keep a lot of Nevadans identifying as Democrats. 

Perhaps unions in Ohio, despite their nominal membership, are not doing the work of communicating the advantages of Democratic governance to their people. Or maybe, their members have irrevocably soured on messages from these unions. These study authors conclude that whatever is going on, it may not be irrevocable --"... writing off Ohio as a noncompetitive state may be premature." Democratic U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown will be testing this out in 2024.

A ground level view of what really happened in the 2022 Nevada Senate election

Matt Yglesias, an often intriguing, though grumpy, Democratic DC pundit, is a fan.

One of the 2022 results that surprised me was Catherine Cortez Masto’s successful re-election in Nevada.

He cites a Data for Progress study which claims that the most effective Democratic message in the past cycle was something like this, from her campaign:

I worked hand-in-hand with law enforcement to crack down on crimes and keep our communities safe. I led the fight to combat sex trafficking, helped protect victims of sexual assault, and passed legislation to combat law enforcement suicide. I’ve worked tirelessly to get law enforcement the support and resources they need to keep our communities safe.

And he maintains this sort of thing is what made her narrow victory possible. Well maybe. Her victory was close enough that every little bit helped. But having lived inside the UniteHERE/Culinary Union campaign that helped win the election for Cortez Masto, I feel a need to report there was so much more going on here.

• Crucially, Republican Senate candidate Adam Laxalt put himself at odds with a crucial majority of Nevada voters when in June, he "called the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision 'a joke' and said it’s 'sad' that Nevada is not anti-abortion." Cortez Masto's ad makers never let anyone forget this. Our canvassers would report they would be having conversations at the doors on other issues and then, almost as an afterthought, would be told the voter's decision would be based on "women's rights." Nevadans overwhelmingly support reproductive choice.

• Republicans everywhere wanted to run in these midterms against a purported wave of increasing crime. In much of the country that was just a means of scaring white suburbanites about all those dangerous dark people that live in big Democratic cities. Cortez Masto came by her answer to this attack honestly: she was a former state attorney general who had had good relations with law enforcement, advertised her endorsement by the respected retiring Reno police chief, and had brought a particular focus on the sex crimes perpetrated against women from her former job. 

• Sex trafficking and sexual assault have particular weight in Nevada. The state advertises itself to tourists as a transgressive playground where anything goes, where "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas."  The state boasts state-licensed brothels. This does not promote a safe or respectful environment for ordinary working women. Cortez Masto's particular record of concern for women's public safety is all the more attractive in the Nevada context.

• Many working people in Las Vegas really are experiencing a very scary crime wave. Our canvassers in Nevada's only big city complained their own neighborhoods had become frightening, violent places since the pandemic. One day when a large group of them was gathering in a public park before taking off to knock on doors, they had to scatter to safety when an unconnected gang fight led to a shoot out on the same turf. It seems likely that appropriate fear of crime worked quite well for Republicans in Clark County/Las Vegas. Historically, Democratic statewide wins have depended on running up huge margins there to cancel out the state's deep red Republican rural counties. Didn't happen in 2022; the Dem margin in Clark just about equaled the Republican margin in the rurals. This made Reno/Washoe County the arena where the Senate race was decided.

• Like everywhere in the country, inflation was on the minds of voters. Especially inflation as evidenced by gas prices. When we arrived in July, regular gas was running close to $6 a gallon. I watched hopefully as the price dropped under $5 during the summer -- and watched in horror as it climbed back up to nearly $6 again in the fall. Would the price of gas doom our efforts?

• UniteHERE/Culinary Union canvassers listened to the people we met at the doors -- and realized there was another issue that was as important to voters as gas and grocery inflation. This was the rising cost of housing. Canvassers would try to contact a voter and be met with an eviction notice. Tenants around Reno were experiencing 35 and 40 percent increases. So the union added a petition to the canvass, seeking signatures asking politicians to enhance "neighborhood stability." The petition was greeted eagerly in Washoe and in Las Vegas. People felt heard and were eager to talk about housing scarcity. We put the issue of rents on the state agenda. Our candidates, including Cortez Masto, promised to seek solutions. I think we can trust that this approach helped encourage otherwise disinterested voters to cast a ballot in November. 

• Finally -- national media didn't realize that Cortez Masto was extremely fortunate in her opponent. Perhaps because Adam Laxalt was another former state attorney general, much of the national media didn't take in that he was as much a crackpot Trumpist election denier as were so many other candidates endorsed by the 2020 sore loser. Laxalt had been Trump's 2020 Nevada campaign chairman; he led a series of baseless lawsuits challenging the presidential result and continued to tell audiences that the results were "rigged." And it's an open secret in Nevada that this "Laxalt" adopted the Laxalt name opportunistically to try to inherit some of the respect that attached to longtime Nevada U.S. Senator Paul Laxalt, despite having been born named Domenici (it's complicated). The Laxalt family is offended by this appropriation, complaining that he “leveraged and exploited the family name.” They endorsed Cortez Masto. Adam Laxalt doesn't look like "a normie Republican" to Nevadans.

I found it telling that Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark who led focus groups of potential swing voters in most all of this year's battleground states, came away from her Nevada group surprised: "they just hate Adam Laxalt." 

Her surprise reinforces my sense that national commentators never had much of a clue about the dynamics in this Nevada election. There was so much more going on than they saw.

When elections are very close -- Catherine Cortez Masto won by a margin of 8000 votes among nearly one million cast, almost all of that margin from Washoe County/Reno -- the local features of the contest mattered. By finding, persuading, and turning out people who most likely would not have voted otherwise, UniteHERE canvassers were vital to this Senate victory. 

I take a lesson from all this. I know an enormous amount about this Nevada campaign; I know enough to be unsatisfied by most reporting about it. Perhaps all the other campaigns I read about need as much more nuance as this one does in order to get a useful understanding of what happened. That feels worth remembering.

Abortion in the 2022 midterms

This is a broad summary of how abortion issues played out, worth absorbing if you care about the future of reproductive freedoms under our right-dominated Supreme Court.

The available evidence from this past year is that the black-robed militants are out of step with the public, even in Republican-controlled states.

Reining in a runaway court will be the anti-fascist project of the next generation. Never doubt that we can do it, though it will demand diligence and focus.

Meanwhile, the victims of the crusade against women's bodily autonomy need our support. My friend Spike provides of a useful list of advocates and providers who could use any cash we have to share.

A Georgia Senator

He not only won. He seems to embody very decent threads from among the country's traditions. A majority of us still seem to have a yen for decency when it is on offer. How to enlarge that strain in our national cacaphony?

Yet another piece of very good news from the 2022 election

Did you know that Arizona -- otherwise known as home to xenophobic politicians like Kari Lake and former Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio -- just voted for a ballot measure that will allow undocumented students to pay in-state tuition at their public universities? 

The best evidence of Arizona’s shift away from Republican policies was the passage of a ballot measure reinstating the right of undocumented Arizonans to pay in-state tuition at public colleges and universities.

At 2.48 percentage points, the margin of victory for “yes” on Proposition 308 was bigger than the margin that secured the governor’s seat for Democrat Katie Hobbs over Kari Lake and broke 13 years of Republican dominance in Arizona.

How did this victory come to be? As usual, the answer was organizing, combined with building the broadest coalition possible. Dreamers even lined up the Chamber of Commerce for this effort, convincing the business group and moderate Republicans that an educated Arizona Latinx population was in their interest.

A voter-approved in-state tuition ban had made college three times more expensive for the last decade, putting it out of reach for many undocumented students. But Arizona has demonstrated it can move on from a season of fear of the newcomer.

Let's celebrate the voters

Perry Bacon Jr.:

... in elections, the voters are the actors, the deciders. And this year, millions of Democratic-leaning voters turned out and stuck with the party, looking past sky-high inflation and a leadership team that spent much of its time courting people who would never vote for Democrats while ignoring key priorities of people who always vote for the Democrats.

These voters should be commended and celebrated.

And let's celebrate the union members and other citizen activists who listened to and talked with voters who might not have bothered to vote if they hadn't felt heard.

Washoe County won Nevada

Sparks Library, Nov. 8, 2022 - Reno Gazette Journal

Back when I was training non-profit organizations how to engage with electoral politics, one of the first admonitions I would offer was: "Remember, everyone is lying." 

I was not trying to reinforce the common suspicion among the folks I worked with that there was something polluting about the fight at the ballot box. Most of them were more comfortable denouncing the evil system and taking to the streets. That felt so much more pure than engaging with electoral politics. (There's not so much of this nowadays; we're all a lot less certain of our own virtue -- or maybe more desperate.) 

Rather, I wanted them to understand that the incentives in electoral work lead politicians, elections professionals, and campaigns to make exaggerated claims for their successes. Electoral victories are complex; multiple factors contribute to outcomes. Often it is hard to discern what mattered. Everyone involved wants to claim a piece. And, frequently, everyone can legitimately claim a piece of a victory. There's always the imperative to persuade essential donors that their money went to good use and they should pony up next time. And after working so hard, everyone wants to believe their particular piece of the effort was vital.

Truth is often a casualty of these pressures. 

So it is with delight that I pass on this from Erudite Partner in her role as data nerd. She makes a simple, convincing case that UniteHERE/Culinary Union work in Washoe County was the element of Senator Catherine Cortez Masto's run that put her back in office. 

Figures from the Nevada Secretary of State’s website show that it was Washoe County that brought the election home for Catherine Cortez Masto. Her 52,000-vote margin of victory in Clark County (home of Las Vegas) was entirely matched by Laxalt’s margin in the state’s 16 underpopulated rural counties. Cortez Masto won because of her 8,000-vote edge in Washoe. And that edge was created by the canvassers of UNITE-HERE.

We did that. And we can legitimately claim this victory would not have happened without us. It's an extraordinary feeling.

"Common sense is not exciting. ... what you just saw was a victory for decency."

This post is hard for me. I come from a generation that learned, early on, if we had a conscience about American power, to distrust anything any president and any governing party might do or claim. The Indochina war of our youth was monstrous. We saw young people our age beaten and killed in the Black Freedom Struggle; we knew that government only grudgingly and under pressure upheld rights for all. We watched the destruction of unionized worker power under Democrats and Republicans alike. We saw global corporate capital crow that we had no alternative but to bow to it.

We did not come up fans of "American democracy" or "the rule of law."

David Rothkopf is a bit younger than I am, and worked the inside track -- in the Clinton Department off Commerce and as a security/foreign policy pundit. I became aware of him as a fierce, sophisticated, conscientious critic of the United States' mid-eastern imperial adventures. Life within the Beltway has given him a fine bullshit detector.

So when Rothkopf can find his way to appreciating the current turn our government has taken, I don't expect to nod in easy agreement. But to my surprise, these days confronting our white nationalist fascists,  I do largely agree with him.

What follows is a David Rothkopf Twitter thread, captured whole:

In '20, @JoeBiden was second guessed by many (me included). He wasn't exciting. Too old school. Talked about healing. Talked about a clear agenda when the other side had little to offer but hate & good TV ratings. And he won decisively despite the skepticism of the "smart money."

For two years, he was derided for reaching out to the other side, for his compromises with the left or with the centrists in his own party, for not be exciting enough. He ignored the Beltway buzz. He did the dullest thing imaginable: he governed.

The American Rescue Plan lifted millions out of poverty and helped stimulate a job boom that now has produced 10 million jobs, a record, more than the last three GOP administrations added up. Record numbers of quality judges were appointed. Executive orders undid Trump's damage.

He made the bold decision to end America's longest war. He passed the largest piece of infrastructure legislation in half a century. He helped tame a pandemic. Critics, even within his own party said, "Don't do too much, don't spend too much, the bond markets won't like it."

But the jobs kept being created. When Putin challenged the decency and the West in Ukraine, Biden led and has been central to NATO and global support for Kyiv that has produced extraordinary results and made all safer. It was all part of restoring American standing worldwide.

He and a disciplined Democratic Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act that also was the biggest piece of environmental legislation in US history. He took steps to reduce healthcare costs for Americans even when zero Republicans supported it.

In fact, with few exceptions, the Democrats passed a rich agenda, that also included the important Chips and Science Act that will help the country compete and create more and better jobs in the future, in the face of constant GOP obstruction.

Still, the savants and pundits said, the Democrats would be crushed in the 2022 elections. The GOP had momentum. Inflation would do Dems in--even though it was a global phenomenon and the GOP was closely linked to its causes from Putin to corporate profiteering.

There would be a Red Wave. Biden was too busy focusing on democracy and protecting the fundamental rights of women and voters when, the GOP talking heads and the bogus polls said what was front and center was inflation and only that and the Dems were doomed.

But Biden stayed laser focused. He said his first act in the new Congress would be to guarantee a woman's reproductive freedom. He made moving, heartfelt speeches about why it is essential to reject the lies, the election deniers, the coup plotters.

The result was the best result for a new president in a midterm election in sixty years, maybe longer. The Democrats held the Senate. It is still unclear how many seats they will lose in the House. But it won't be what was predicted.

... Election deniers running for top posts were rejected. Legislatures were flipped. The Republican leadership is turning on itself.

And Biden's first comments after the election were about the work to come, the governing ahead. Joe's too old. Joe's too boring. Joe's too quick to compromise. Joe's too stubborn. Joe's out of touch. Joe's...just off to the best start of any POTUS in more than half a century.

Left in his wake, defeated by his experience and his wisdom and his determination and his truly exceptional world class team, are the media favorites, the highly rated pundits, the best-selling columnists, the know-it-alls, the fancy insiders.

I could write the same thing about @SpeakerPelosi or @SenSchumer, co-authors of this remarkable record. You could say it about so many members of the united, mobilized Democratic team that this time around weathered the GOP efforts at suppression, ignored their lies & showed up.

You could say it about the Gen Z voters and the women and people of color who saw the threat and made the effort to fight for democracy. You could say it about all of you who have participated in the wholesale rejection of the greatest threat to our system we've seen since WWII.

Common sense is not exciting. But what we just saw was a victory for common sense. Decency doesn't drive clicks. But what you just saw was a victory for decency. Governing is tedious, incremental, arcane. But what you have seen for two years are the benefits of governing.

The conventional wisdom has been wrong about @POTUS @VP @SpeakerPelosi @SenSchumer @WHCOS, the president's cabinet, @TheDemocrats and their team from day one. Maybe we will learn. Probably we won't. But we can be grateful that they will ignore all that.

We can be grateful that at a perilous moment in US history, they will focus on the work that needs to be done, on the threats we face at home and abroad, and on what matters. And if the past is any indication, they will continue to succeed...against the odds, on behalf of us all.

Oh sure -- there's plenty more to do to enact justice and enhance freedom. But a dose of common decency is to be celebrated.

Shards from the embattled republic: post-midterm election edition

Eventually I may have the strength to share my own, experiential, musings about the election past, but for the moment here are some tidbits I find interesting:

Joyce Vance, United States Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama from 2009 to 2017 and TV talking head:

We did this. We lived through all of it together, found ways to help, supported each other, and we voted. We ignored the polls that told us we would lose and voted anyhow. No matter how this turns out, we fought for this country. Apparently, a lot of us still think it’s worth fighting for. That’s a good thing, because we’ve still got a lot of work ahead of us! But we’ve seen proof tonight that we can get there if we all work on it. ...We’re in this together...

Walter Shapiro, seasoned political observer and reporter:

A major lesson from 2022: Fundamentals such as historical precedents and presidential approval ratings don’t turn out to be very fundamental after a pandemic, an insurrection, and a runaway Supreme Court overturns abortion rights. The election also reminds Democrats and those of us in the press that it is time to go back to trusting the American people. ... Maybe that isn’t enough to break out the champagne, especially if the Democrats lose the House ... . But it is certainly a powerful reason for liberals to climb down from the window ledge and realize that the future does not automatically belong to Trump and his MAGA minions.

Click to enlarge

Field Negro, blogger extraordinaire:

Maybe some of you really do care about democracy.  And maybe, just maybe, you realize that paying a little more for gas --and the food you buy-- is not quite as serious as having your  freedom taken away. 

Now comes the fun part. The right-wingnuts will start to turn on each other, as we all know that the malevolent narcissist living in South Florida had his ego seriously bruised. He has started already. He is now threatening to take his cult and their red hats and totally abandon the republican party.

I, for one, do not feel sorry for the republican establishment. This is what happens when you make a Faustian bargain; at some point you are sure to get burned.

Jamelle Bouie, the New York Times' resident explorer of the patterns of the American past:

I think we are in for another round — or two or three or four — of close, hard-fought elections cycles with no decisive victory or defeat for either party. But something will come; something — whether economic or environmental or constitutional — will shock the system and give one coalition or the other the chance to expand and attempt to win hegemony over the political system.

The question in my mind is which forces in this country are best organized, either for good or ill, to take advantage when that something eventually hits.

Robert P. Jones documents increasing support for legal abortion, even among Republicans:

PRRI’s pre-election American Values Survey and the national exit polls reveal that nearly seven in ten Americans and six in ten midterm voters say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. That is the mainstream view on abortion.

Only about 1 in 10 Americans and midterm voters believe that abortion should be illegal in ALL cases. Most notably, support for complete bans on abortion has fallen dramatically, even among Republicans and white evangelical Protestants...

Dan Pfeiffer, Democratic communications guy:

Going forward, we need to look at electoral outcomes through the prism of MAGA extremism as much as the economy. In the nation and in the key battleground states, there is a pro-democracy, anti-truth majority that will turn out when their freedoms are on the ballot. That is the coalition that won in 2017, 2018, 2020 and 2022.

The 2016 election changed things more than we thought. The repeal of Roe v. Wade, the Big Lie and the violence of January 6th engrained the dangers of MAGA extremism into the American political consciousness. ...

There will be so much more ... but for now I need sleep ...

The people of Nevada have spoken

The election of Catherine Cortez Masto ensures a Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate. Let's go President Joe -- appoint some more diverse, broad-minded federal judges who respect the evolving republic of freedom and equality.

It has been a privilege to work with UniteHERE/Culinary workers to help bring about this happy result.

The young ones will seize their time

Too tired to post today. Nevada results still too close to call. But nationally, this exhortation seems to have been born out.

To the astonishment of prognosticators, voters just did it. The 18-29 age group is coming into its own and it's not wired quite the same way as many of their elders. It's their turn.

Reno morning view ...

five days out from the election.

 

This will probably melt during the day, but we can expect day time temperatures in the 30s. 

This Nevada town is a land of extremes -- 105° to below freezing -- all in one campaign season. It's also a place of political extremes. Our crew labors on in the hope that decency and democracy can still prevail.

Midterm election punditry I found descriptive ...

... of what our Reno canvassers are encountering as they try to convince and turn out infrequent, mostly working class, voters for the Democrats.

There are plenty of homes like this in Reno -- but canvassers report the house next door displayed a Trump banner.

First from Nicholas Lemann, who bothered to come to visit Nevada (as well as New Hampshire):

The aggressive mundaneness of Democratic candidates around the country, at least in competitive races, shouldn’t be mistaken for simple centrist, difference-splitting caution. It comes from a reading of American politics right now as an open competition for the loyalties of voters who aren’t especially affluent and who don’t feel especially secure or in control of their circumstances. ...

... Nevada Democrats, whose constituents are mainly blue-collar nonwhite residents, and New Hampshire Democrats, whose constituents are mainly white residents with small-government leanings, have a few things in common. They relentlessly emphasize the everyday practical benefits that the Party provides for its constituents. They are obsessively concerned with organizing, and especially with door-to-door, in-person campaigning. They try their best to get extreme Republicans as opponents. And, at least when I was visiting, they hardly ever mentioned their support for the Biden Administration’s major legislation. That’s partly because Biden isn’t very popular, and partly because of their conviction that voters, particularly in closely contested states, don’t care about whatever great changes are afoot in American government.

But that doesn’t mean there is no connection between what the Biden Administration has been doing and the way Democrats in purple states run for office. Both are animated by a critique, implied rather than directly stated, of past Democratic Party policies and politics. As Biden himself put it in a speech last year, “We’re now forty years into the experiment of letting giant corporations accumulate more and more power. And what have we gotten from it? Less growth, weakened investment, fewer small businesses. Too many Americans who feel left behind. Too many people who are poorer than their parents.” Politicians on the ground and a rising generation of policymakers in Washington are trying to reposition the Democratic Party as more focussed on the daily lives of the working-class voters it has been losing. For the economic-policy branch of the Party, that amounts to a revolution, one that hasn’t been sufficiently noticed.

Realizing that this is what might be persuasive to an electorate skeptical about the Democrats is changing the Democratic Party without loud breaches with the past, Lemann argues. And that's what our candidates, Catherine Cortez-Masto for U.S. Senate and Steve Sisolak for Governor, are talking about. They might seem very conventional Democrats, but they know the direction they have to take to reach voters. They appeal to working people who know they are getting a raw deal and blame the bosses. Our Culinary Union canvassers, who work in the tourist industry, have no trouble believing they are being ripped off. And they've walked and knocked for several months in heat and smoke to try to convince people much like them to vote. 

In the Atlantic, Ronald Brownstein lays out a view of what he labels The Double Negative Election.

Most Americans consistently say in polls that they believe that President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats have mismanaged crime, the border, and, above all, the economy and inflation. But roughly as many Americans say that they view the modern Republican Party as a threat to their rights, their values, or to democracy itself.

Based on Biden’s first two years in office, surveys show that most Americans are reluctant to continue following the policy path he has laid out. But polls also show no enthusiasm for returning to the programs, priorities, and daily chaos of Donald Trump’s presidency...

... [a] factor allowing Democrats to remain competitive is that, for all the doubts Americans are expressing about their performance, there is no evidence of rising confidence in Republicans. ... although half of voters said they disagreed with most of what Biden and the Democrats are trying to do, even more said they mostly disagreed with the agenda of congressional Republicans (53 percent) and Trump (56 percent).

On the ground, what our canvassers are trying to overcome is a pervasive cynicism about what any politician will do for ordinary people. If we pull our candidates through in Nevada, it will be because we convince enough of the disillusioned that their votes matter.

Good advice from a political pro

Dan Pfeiffer worked political communications for President Obama. He offers a sound prescription for a very tough Get Out The Vote season: 

For everyone other than the ad-makers and decision-makers at the party committees and Super PACs, the polls serve no purpose. None. Zero. Zilch. They are mood-altering statistical drugs.

... We are in the final stretch. There is nothing left to do but persuade and mobilize.

... Always remember that there is a diverse, pro-democracy, pro-truth, anti-MAGA majority in the country. If we turn them out, we win. ...

In the many close contests this year, this is simply true.

Sidewalk decoration encountered by our Reno canvassers

No time to agonize -- let's organize.

There's a ghoul on the loose in Reno

I doubt that whoever put up this Halloween decoration understood how well it went with their choice of U.S. Senate candidate. Adam Laxalt is a Big Lie Trump sycophant, eager to ban abortions nationally. Even his family urges voters to just say "no" to his ambitions.

But he's in a dead heat race with work-horse Nevada U.S. Senator Catherine Cortez-Masto. We're turning out her voters here in Reno.

The limits of political ads

Walter Shapiro is a wise old political writer. He observes:

Politics is always a struggle for the future rather than a toast of gratitude for the past ...

Messaging by both parties is probably overrated in our saturated media environment. Political ad spending during the 2022 midterms is expected to approach $10 billion. Amid this cacophony of voice-of-doom attack ads, it will be hard for even the cleverest messaging to break through to swing voters and the politically under-motivated. ...

Mostly, political ads are boring. Every once in a while, someone makes a charming one that breaks through. I count this one of those, from Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Tim Ryan, running in Ohio.

Not my aesthetic or my politics, but sweet in its own terms. Ryan is a surprisingly telegenic figure for someone running on white-working class cred in a white working-class state. He's about as suitable a candidate as Dems could have found. Just maybe, he'll succeed against the odds in a state turning hard right. We can hope so.

Reno boomtown and battleground

The story we're meeting while canvassing the neighborhoods of Reno, Nevada, has turned into a national story. Here's the New York Times describing this fascinating place:

These are boom times in and around Reno. Warehousing and casinos have long been the city’s main businesses, and the surge in e-commerce since the start of the pandemic has companies snapping up facilities as fast as they can be built. 

Yet Reno and the surrounding area have also seen the cost of things like housing, gas and groceries rise, making daily existence in this growing metropolis increasingly difficult for many of the people who live here...  

“Now Hiring” billboards dot Reno’s interstate and back roads. A chocolate factory was willing to pay as much as $25 an hour. A sign outside a Petco warehouse says a starting salary could be as high as $22 an hour. Hidden Valley Ranch’s plant says its starting hourly wage is $21, with other benefits including a 401(k), paid time off, and health care with dental and vision. Many retailers like Walmart are also trying to attract seasonal workers.

And yet for all the nominally "high" wages, people in Reno find that this booming economy doesn't give them enough to live on and they balance on edge, stressed and precarious.

So in this environment, Democratic U.S. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto is trying to win re-election -- and the contest is attracting national focus as the result might decide which party will control the Senate. Her opponent, Adam Laxalt, is something of a Nevada perennial candidate and a Trumpish Big Lie proponent.

More than any Senate candidate, Cortez Masto has made the Big Lie and Jan. 6 central to her campaign, running harrowing footage of the violence in TV ads and touting the support of law enforcement officials who’ve endorsed her campaign, in part because of her opponent’s recklessness. 

“Laxalt could not bring himself to show an ounce of remorse for his actions,” Cortez Masto said at an appearance last week with peace officers in Las Vegas. “It is unforgivable, and Nevada will not forget his actions.” 

... “He should know better,” Cortez Masto said in an interview Wednesday, her eyes narrowing as she discussed her opponent after a campaign stop at a Mexican restaurant in eastern Las Vegas. “But he doesn’t. And he’s leaning into this for a political extreme agenda.”

Laxalt's own relatives repudiate him as a phony, an opportunist, and an extremist.

But Cortez Masto could lose to this guy. The polls point to a cliffhanger.

A CNN/SSRS poll conducted 9/26 to 10/2 in Nevada gave Catherine Cortez Masto a +3 advantage among registered voters and -2 among likely voters.

That's why members of the hospitality union, UniteHERE, and dozens of volunteers are working, day in and day out, knocking on doors, explaining the stakes for women and for all working people. Join us.

A danger to democracy in Nevada

The Republican MAGA man running for Secretary of State here is a fanatic extremist. Will voters put him in office without really knowing what he's about because he comes with an R after his name?

His Democratic opponent, Cisco Aguilar, just wants to run this usually obscure office which manages state elections professionally and fairly. He would be following in the path of the current Secretary of State who is an honest, competent Republican -- not a Big Lie-affirming crank like Marchant. 

Says Aguilar: 

Growing up, my parents not only taught me that life is most meaningful when in service of others, they lived it. My grandfather and father were lifelong members of labor unions and they instilled the honor of a good day’s work, the importance of protecting working families, and standing up for their right to have a voice in democracy. I have made it my mission to be in service to the community I call home by being a fierce advocate for educational opportunities for all of Nevada’s children and an advocate for innovative public private partnership programs in our most vulnerable neighborhoods.  I’m running to be Nevada’s next Secretary of State because we must recognize that our government must work for all Nevadans.

More than ever, we need to defend every eligible American’s right to vote, remove barriers to voter participation, and make our elections as transparent as possible to maintain the public trust. But, there are individuals and groups who are determined to take us backwards making it harder to vote, creating barriers to register, and subverting public confidence in our elections. I am committed to building on the work that many have started in a bi-partisan way, including modernizing, safeguarding and strengthening our democracy, our elections process and the voting rights of every Nevadan.

Nevada has fair election laws and hardworking, professional election administrators. Cisco Aguilar is trying to keep it that way.

Republicans - the party of "do as I say, not as I do"

Dan Pfeiffer, one of former President Obama's communications guys and now a political commentator, said something I find thought provoking in his Substack, The Message Box. 

Elections are fundamentally about issue salience — which topics are top of mind when people make their decisions. ... most voters — the voters who decide elections — already assume the worst about politicians. Hypocrisy and dishonesty are priced into the baseline. You are not giving them new or actionable information when you point out hypocrisy.

We're about to find out whether accusations of hypocrisy retain any salience in US politics. Can Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker really run as a "pro-life" Christian  -- who, after he was "born again," paid a woman, not his wife, to abort a child he fathered? And now wants to further criminalize all abortions? Can kindly Doctor Mehmet Oz escape the story of hundreds of dogs murdered in lab experiments?

I got to thinking about hypocrisy when reading the New York Time's exhaustive exploration of how Trump's Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen captured the allegiance of the entire Republican Party. Suffice to say, GOPers are sold on a crackpot legal theory that advantages their political party -- and which might even prevail at the corrupt Supreme Court.

But it was a small detail that grabbed my attention. These Republicans who work so urgently to restrict mail and early voting sure like it for themselves; here's how the same House Republicans who objected to certifying Biden's win on January 6, 2021 cast their own ballots.

Click to enlarge