An opportunity for both parties, judicial politics, Manchin's ambitions, and other notes
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Data provided by Rep. Marcy Kaptur’s (D-Ohio) office to Axios reveals Republicans now represent 64 percent “of congressional districts with median incomes below the national median.” That presents real opportunities for both parties — but also major warning signs.
For the GOP, it means a chance to paint Democrats as the out-of-touch elitist party, while fully assuming the mantle of the working class. But to do that, Republicans need to move beyond the economic remnants of Reaganism. All of their rhetoric about out of control federal spending, and unwillingness to even consider tax increases for the wealthy will make it hard to be the party of the American worker.
Their current posture of advocating against social welfare programs, while backing away from free trade, pushing immigration restrictions, and now disclaiming any desire to cut Social Security and Medicare, has proved potent with the White working class. Those voters have long been predisposed to see social welfare programs — beyond the two big entitlements funded by payroll taxes — as taking from them to give to undeserving people (implicitly poor people of color or sometimes slacking young people).
Yet, to be a truly populist party — which would allow for inroads with working class people of color, which is crucial in a country becoming less White — the GOP needs to develop a new set of economic programs to make life easier for working class Americans. The party also needs to be open to new taxes on the wealthy to pay for government services and ensure that the economy works for their voters.
Instead, the GOP hasn’t developed a populist economic agenda, outside of beginning to turn on free trade. On countless issues, from medical costs, to infrastructure, to paid leave, to domestic manufacturing, Republicans haven’t moved on from the agenda they developed in the late 1970s and 1980s, which has become ossified and rigid.
But being the party of tax cuts for the wealthy, doing nothing to address medical costs, and proposing little to make life easier for working Americans makes it hard to fully capitalize on Democrats’ awkward coalition of culturally liberal, well educated White professionals and people of color. Republicans can’t really say what they’d do if elected to make working class lives better — outside of fighting the culture wars. And that limits their ceiling.
For Democrats, this map also presents opportunity, because theoretically, they are the party that has long pushed an economic agenda geared toward making life better for working class Americans. From advocating for things like paid family leave, to trying to cut prescription drug prices, to trying to reinvigorate domestic manufacturing, Democrats have a case to make with the working class voters represented by Republicans. But doing that requires building political infrastructure in those communities and showing that they care. That means investing in grass roots organizing, and blessing candidates who represent their communities — even if they depart from Democratic orthodoxy on social, cultural, and environmental issues.
Which brings us to the risk for Democrats. Making gains in these communities is contingent upon not going so far left on cultural policy (or to the extent they already have, edging back toward the center) that voting Democratic would be a non-starter.
In many ways, the GOP’s increasing success in working class districts over the last 20-40 years has been a byproduct of being able to reframe populism as less of an economic thing, and more of a cultural one. The villains in the story aren’t the wealthiest Americans or big corporations that take advantage of workers and consumers alike. Instead, it’s scornful cultural elite on the coasts who have no respect for traditional American values and who have adopted radical positions on everything from gender and sexuality, to race, to crime, to patriotism.
Democrats need to work to combat that image. They also need to be mindful of pushes by activists for linguistic changes (pregnant people, Latinx, etc), and of radical slogans like “Defund the Police.” They can be the socially liberal party — one that fights for a more tolerant, more inclusive society that acknowledges past wrongs — but do it with common sense and without coming off as embracing fringe positions.
They can wrap their positions in patriotism and aspirational thinking, and avoid the optics of making it look like Democrats care more about activists’ demands (or in the case of crime policy, criminals) than average Americans who are somewhere in the middle on lots of cultural issues. This is essential not only to broadening the party’s appeal, but also to preventing an erosion among working class people of color, many of whom are more economically liberal and socially conservative.
That is going to require finesse, a big tent party, and some common sense — don’t attack people worried about crime, teach about our long sordid history of racism without forgetting about the great things America has done, push for equal rights without rewriting the language unless it does some real concrete good, think carefully about how to frame programs, etc.
Democrats can’t win just as the party of the well educated (which is the risk if Republicans can start poaching working class voters of color), and Republicans can’t win without appealing beyond the White working class. This data shows that both have opportunities to broaden their coalitions, and the party which moves to take advantage of this opportunity sooner will probably be the one that becomes a majority party...
Even as Republican appointed judges make increasing bold and right wing rulings, Democratic elected officials still don’t seem to really, truly understand how to match the hardball tactics Republicans apply to judicial politics. On April 7, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk handed down a Medicaid abortion decision that has been eviscerated by everyone from conservative legal experts to historians to medical experts. Then on Wednesday night, two Trump appointed judges on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals granted only a partial stay of the ruling, once again drawing deep scorn for their legal reasoning even from conservative legal experts.
Yet, I haven’t seen a single Democrat propose some sort of law to ban venue shopping — the practice which landed the case in front of Kacsmaryk because conservative advocacy groups knew that he’s the only federal judge hearing cases in Amarillo. Nor have they called for an end to nationwide injunctions of the sort that Kacsmaryk proposed. There have been no proposals to enlarge the 5th Circuit (the most right wing court in America), even though expanding appeals courts is a relatively regular practice as the population grows, or even calls to repeal the 1873 Comstock Law, which most people assumed was dead letter before Kacsmaryk tried to resurrect it.
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