Consumer Sentiment Darkens

 Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections. Despite gerrymandering wins, things look bad for the GOP in part because the Iran War has gone badly.

Jeff Cox at CNBC:

Surging gas prices due to the Iran war sent consumer sentiment to a new low in the early part of May, according to a University of Michigan survey Friday.

The school’s closely watched Survey of Consumers posted a 48.2 preliminary reading, down 3.2% from April’s prior record swoon and off 7.7% from a year ago. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been looking for 49.7.

Inflation fears were the primary driver of the continued trend lower in consumer attitudes.

The trend, which also saw the current conditions index tumble 9%, is “owing to a surge in concerns about high prices both for personal finances as well as buying conditions for major purchases,” the survey’s director, Joanne Hsu, said.

One-third of respondents mentioned gas prices as the biggest cause of concern. However, another one-third also cited tariffs — both connected to President Donald Trump, who launched an attack on Iran in late February and announced an aggressive slate of tariffs in April 2025.

“Taken together, consumers continue to feel buffeted by cost pressures, led by soaring prices at the pump,” Hsu said. “Middle East developments are unlikely to meaningfully boost sentiment until supply disruptions have been fully resolved and energy prices fall.

World War G: Republicans Score Wins in VA and TN

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

Sabrina Moreno at Axios:

The Virginia Supreme Court overturned the results of the state's redistricting referendum, which voters narrowly approved last month.

Why it matters: The ruling upends one of the most closely watched redistricting fights in the country.It follows months of legal challenges over whether the referendum was unconstitutional.

The big picture: The decision effectively blocks Democrats from redrawing congressional maps mid-decade.That's after the state spent $5.2 million to pay for the special election, and outside groups raised nearly $100 million to sway voters.

The new map would have been in effect for the November midterms and was expected to shift the state's congressional split from 6-5 favoring Democrats to 10-1.

 Katherine Chui and Emily Cochrane at NYT:

When the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act of 1965 last week, Republicans saw new political opportunities across the South. Congressional districts that were considered strongholds for Democrats, often with majority Black populations, could be redrawn for the first time in decades.

Among Southern states, Tennessee was the first to redo its map, which Gov. Bill Lee signed into law on Thursday. The new map breaks the Ninth Congressional District — a longtime Democratic base encompassing Memphis — into three Republican-leaning districts.

The new map divides areas of Memphis where most of the population is Black among three districts with overwhelmingly white populations, eliminating the state’s sole majority Black district in the process.

The Thumpin' Redux? 2006 and 2026 Parallels

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

Theodoric Meyer at WP:

“A year ago, no one thought we had a chance to take back the Senate,” Schumer said. “I was one of the very few. And I laid out a plan which is now working.”

For months, Democrats have been far more bullish about retaking the House, which requires flipping only a few seats. But Trump’s unpopularity has made Republicans in both chambers appear more vulnerable.

Thirty-seven percent of Americans approve of Trump’s job performance, according to a recent Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll. Sixty-two percent disapprove, the highest level of either of Trump’s terms. Trump’s approval rating was even lower for his handling of the economy and inflation, which both parties view as crucial to the midterms.

A recent Pew Research Center survey found Trump faring even worse: 34 percent of Americans approved of his performance, and 64 percent disapproved.

Schumer said the political environment feels similar to 2006, when Democrats capitalized on discontent with the Iraq War in President George W. Bush’s second term to pick up six Senate seats and flipped the chamber against the odds.

“There’s a very unpopular president, there’s a war on, and it’s a really hard Senate map,” J.B. Poersch, who runs Senate Majority PAC, the flagship Democratic super PAC in Senate races, said in an interview. “Those are all similarities to ’06. We won in a scenario where we weren’t supposed to win [in 2006] because the map was so challenging — and this one’s challenging, too.”

Trump Clout in IN Primrary, Bad Sign for GOP in Michigan

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

Susan Page at USA TODAY:

He's still the boss.

President Donald Trump is beset by rising gas prices, falling approval ratings and an unpopular war in Iran. But in the Indiana primary May 5 he demonstrated his continued grip on the Republican Party by delivering a thumping to a half-dozen state senators who defied his demands to redraw congressional lines.

Of seven GOP senators who earned his ire, five lost their party's nominations to challengers the president had endorsed, with one race still too close to call.

It was an unlikely test, and an expensive one, in contests that typically attract little attention.

"Trump is perhaps not as popular in my district as he once was," Spencer Deery, one of the incumbent senators, told CNN while the votes were being counted, "but he is still overwhelmingly popular."

Patrick Svitek at CNN:

Michigan Democrats on Tuesday won a special election for a state Senate seat in another party over-performance after the district was almost evenly divided in the last presidential election.

Democratic firefighter Chedrick Greene defeated GOP lawyer Jason Tunney for a seat to determine whether Democrats would retain control of the state Senate. With an estimated 93% of votes in, Greene led Tunney by 19 points.

 

Stealing the 2026 Election?

 Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is has been full of ominous developments.  Just as an authoritarian leader would, he is abusing the legal process to punish his opponents.  If Democrats win the midterms, he might bring the hammer down.

Thomas B Edsall at NYT:

Not one to keep a secret, Trump made what he would like to do very clear during a Feb. 3 bill signing ceremony at the White House:

Look at the facts that are coming out. Rigged, crooked elections. Take a look at Detroit. Take a look at Pennsylvania. Take a look at Philadelphia. You go take a look at Atlanta. Look at some of the places that … horrible corruption on elections, and the federal government should not allow that.

The federal government should get involved.

The states, Trump claimed, “are agents of the federal government to count the votes. If they can’t count the votes legally and honestly, then somebody else should take over.”

...

The threat posed by Trump has rattled experts at the Brennan Center and Keep Our Republic, along with scholars who study Trump’s real and claimed powers.

Two of the foremost students of these powers are Joel McCleary, a founder of Keep Our Republic, and Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the liberty and national security program at the Brennan Center. Some, but not all, of their attention has been focused on the secretive creation of presidential emergency action documents, which have come to be known as “PEADs.”

McCleary described his findings and his concerns in a series of emails, many including reports he has written. In an April 23 report, “Continuity of Government, Presidential Emergency Action Documents and the Evolution of Executive Emergency Powers,” McCleary wrote that the president “possesses emergency powers that are virtually unknown to the public, to most members of Congress and to much of the federal judiciary. These powers — codified in classified presidential emergency action documents” — allow

a single individual to suspend fundamental constitutional rights, detain civilians, seize property, impose martial law and censor communications.

They require only a presidential signature. No prior congressional approval is needed. No court reviews them before activation. No statutory mechanism exists for Congress to restrict or terminate these powers once invoked.

Dems' Poor Standing -- and Why It Might Not Matter

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

Dan Merica and Matthew Choi at WP quote Scott Clement, the Post’s  polling director, on the perception that Democrats are “too liberal.” 

A Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll released Sunday found Trump’s approval rating is 25 percentage-points underwater among Americans overall, including a 21-point disapproval margin among registered voters. The same poll found Democrats’ advantage in overall support for Congress grew from two points in February to five points in the latest poll.

While Trump’s popularity is clearly flagging, the large gap between Trump’s disapproval ratings and Democrats’ smaller advantage in support for Congress has raised questions about whether the Democratic Party’s unpopularity will hamper its chances in this fall’s midterm election. In the last week, Lakshya Jain at the Argument posited that Democrats’ trust deficit on crime is keeping them from winning voters who don’t like Trump, while G. Elliot Morris argued most of the gap is due to “closeted Republicans” who Democrats shouldn’t expect to persuade anyway.

The Post-ABC-Ipsos poll sheds some new light on these issues. It confirms the overall pattern: 93 percent of registered voters who approve of Trump support Republicans for Congress, compared with 79 percent of voters who disapprove of Trump supporting Democrats. But the poll also asked whether each party’s views are “too liberal,” “too conservative,” or “about right,” finding 53 percent of Americans said the Democratic Party is too liberal, up from 46 percent who said this in 2013 (A slightly smaller 49 percent said the Republican Party is too conservative, up from 43 percent in 2013)

Focusing on Trump disapprovers, 61 percent of voters who think the Democratic Party is “too liberal” support Democrats for Congress, compared with 90 percent among voters who don’t think the party is too liberal. When filtering out Republicans, 73 percent of Trump disapprovers who say Democrats are too liberal support Democrats for Congress, compared with 91 percent of those who don’t think the party is too liberal.

How much does that matter? Not much. A simple statistical model controlling for partisanship and 2024 vote finds that viewing the Democratic Party as too liberal is associated with a 5-to-7 point shift in which party voters support in the midterms. But that is on a 0-to-100 scale. If the share of voters saying Democrats are too liberal dropped by 10 points, Democrats would only expect to gain a half a percentage point in support.

The early stage of the campaign is likely a bigger reason for Democrats’ underperformance on the generic ballot. A 2010 political science paper describes a “balance” theory “where the midterm campaign motivates some to vote against the party of the president in order to achieve policy moderation.” As the campaign progresses, vote preferences almost always move toward the out party.”

California Redboxing

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

Seema Mehta at LAT:

Intriguing updates emerged on Democratic gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra’s campaign website on Tuesday.

Highlighted in bright red text, and boxed by a red outline, was a game plan for attacking one of Becerra’s top rivals in the California governor’s race, billionaire hedge fund founder turned environmental activist Tom Steyer.

But was that message meant for California voters or, perhaps, a more specific audience — the operatives running the newly formed big-money independent committees that are backing his campaign?

Becerra’s website may be using a practice known as “red boxing,” a nod to how campaigns signal what they want outside groups supporting them to focus on in their ads and other tactics. That strategy is used to avoid running afoul of laws prohibiting campaigns from directly coordinating with “independent” expenditure committees.

“What we’re looking at with the Becerra web page is a textbook example” of efforts to circumvent rules that disallow such coordination, said Aaron McKean, senior legal counsel for campaign finance at the Campaign Legal Center, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit focused on fair elections. “It’s specifically calling out particular messaging and particular ways of communicating with voters ... as a way to get Super PACs, nominally independent spenders, to do the bidding of the campaign.”

...

Such practices are growing increasingly common — and increasingly lucrative. According to a 2024 article titled “Coordination in Plain Sight: The Breadth and Uses of ‘Redboxing’ in Congressional Elections” published in the Election Law Journal, more than 200 candidates for federal office used the tactic during the 2022 midterm election, and often received greater financial support from independent expenditure committees than candidates who did not embrace the strategy.