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.”

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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.”

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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.

 

Gasoline, Iranamok, and the Midterms

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

Adie Tomer and Ben Swedberg at Brookings:

• The Iran conflict has raised U.S. gas prices by $1 per gallon, meaning the country’s median-earning, two-driver households will spend $70 more per month on gasoline—equal to about 1% of their post-tax income.
• Over 18 million U.S. households in the lowest-earning income quintile will be even more impacted, spending an extra 5% of their post-tax income on gasoline.
• Elevated gasoline prices will likely impact the midterm elections: The average constituent of a current Republican House member drives 26% more miles than the average constituent of a Democratic member.

Michael Birnbaum and Scott Clement at WP:

President Donald Trump’s war in Iran is as unpopular among Americans as the Iraq War during the year of peak violence in 2006 and the Vietnam War in the early 1970s, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll, amid growing economic pain and fears of terrorism as a result of the military campaign.

Sixty-one percent of Americans say that using military force against Iran was a mistake, with fewer than 2 in 10 Americans believing that the U.S. actions in Iran have been successful. About 4 in 10 say it has been unsuccessful, while another 4 in 10 say it is “too soon to tell.” The polling numbers indicate a broadly unpopular war effort and growing economic fallout at a time when the White House has been trying to convince Americans that they are better off under Trump than under Democrats.

...

The historical comparison to the wars in Iraq and Vietnam — conflicts that polarized Americans in the moment and ultimately came to be seen as failures — is especially notable. It took years for the Iraq War, which was launched in March 2003, to reach the level of disapproval that Trump’s war has in just two months. Fifty-nine percent of Americans in mid-2006 said the war in Iraq was a mistake, while similar numbers felt the same about the war in Vietnam in the early 1970s, according to Gallup polls.

Americans were dying and getting wounded in far higher numbers in those eras, making the current opinions all the more striking. More than 50,000 Americans had died in Vietnam by 1971, when Gallup found that 61 percent of Americans said sending troops to fight there was a mistake. And by April 2006, the month before a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 59 percent of Americans said the Iraq War was a mistake, 2,402 U.S. troops had died there, and the U.S. military was embroiled in some of the bloodiest fighting of the conflict. The Pentagon has announced the deaths of 13 American service members so far in the war against Iran.

Maine Senate Race and the Big Picture

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

In Maine, Gov. Janet Mills withdrew from the D Senate primary, leaving Graham Platner as the presumptive nominee to face Susan Collins in the fall.

Dan Merica and Matthew Choi at WP:

Mills’s decision — and the trajectory of her campaign — tells us a lot about this moment in politics. On paper, Mills was the undisputed favorite for the Democratic nominee. All Mainers knew her, many had voted for her multiple times, and she had the kind of track record that someone like Schumer, who was desperate to get her to run against Collins, thought would make her successful.

The opposite is true for Platner. He is a first-time candidate whose baggage is so significant that it would need to be checked, not carried on, when flying out of Bangor International Airport, including deleted Reddit comments that were dismissive of sexual assault and the Nazi symbol he had tattooed on his chest and later altered. Even some of his backers were skeptical of his staying power when he launched his campaign.

...

This race has taught political watchers a few things: Voters, especially Democrats who watched their party lose the 2024 presidential race against Trump, are angry with the politics of this moment and the status quo that got the nation to this point. That anger is so deep that candidates who look good on paper but hark back to the politics of yore are easily expendable for someone who, warts and all, makes them feel something.

Platner’s entire image embodies a slice of Maine that most people outside the state don’t understand. With his baggy sweatshirts, his ties to the water as the owner of an oyster farming business and even his gravelly voice, Platner clearly connected with Democrats on a deeper level. In a state that is known for judging people who are “from away,” Platner is notably not.

 Adam Wren with Dasha Burns at POLITICO quote Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM):

“I think there’s just a mood right now in the country where there’s so much economic pressure on hard-working regular folks, and you can either connect with that or not, and that’s how I’ve made decisions in these races: based on whether I think that person is going to do the best job of connecting with that frustration that regular people have right now.”

The deep unsettledness Heinrich describes is upsetting traditional Washington norms around electability, he told Playbook. “I just think who is electable is evolving, and our analysis of these races, and who’s going to be the strongest in a general, which is really what’s most important here, from a majority standpoint, needs to evolve with where the electorate is today.”

After all, that electorate is one that sided with a trail of controversial online comments from Platner regarding political violence, the military, police and more that drew months of attention and headlines.

“We’ve gotten over-analytical as a party, and sanitized and thinking about resumes,” Heinrich said. “None of these candidates are perfect, but I think there’s an expectation by voters today that if you seem perfect, you’re probably hiding something.”

 

Voting Rights And World War G

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

Amy Howe at SCOTUSblog::

The Supreme Court on Wednesday, in the case of Louisiana v. Callais, struck down a Louisiana congressional map that a group of voters who describe themselves as “non-African American” had challenged as the product of unconstitutional racial gerrymandering. By a vote of 6-3, the justices left in place a ruling by a federal court that barred the state from using the map, which had created a second majority-Black district, in future elections. Although Wednesday’s ruling did not strike down a key provision of the federal Voting Rights Act, as Louisiana and the challengers had asked the court to do, Justice Elena Kagan suggested in her dissent (which was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson) that the majority opinion by Justice Samuel Alito had rendered the provision “all but a dead letter.”

Jack Blanchard and Dasha Burns at POLITICO:

Excitable Republicans hailing the Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act as the start of a golden age of neverending House majorities may need to pause and take breath.
...

How far can they go this year? With the ruling less than 24 hours old — and with the midterms just six months away — there’s uncertainty about what’s possible. But even in a maximalist scenario for Republicans, none of the experts Playbook spoke to believed this ruling will net the GOP more than a handful of House seats in November.

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ABOUT THAT UNCERTAINTY: Four big factors will ultimately decide the extent of further Republican redistricting this year.

1. TIME PRESSURE: This was an extraordinary moment for the Supreme Court to drop this ruling. (In Louisiana, absentee ballots for next month’s primaries have already been sent out.) Those Southern states keen to redistrict before November are in for an almighty scramble. What’s possible will vary state to state.

2. GOP APPETITE: Not every state-level Republican will want to redraw maps on short notice. Some may see 2028 as a more realistic target. Others may be reluctant to move mid-decade at all. Don’t forget that state legislatures in Republican-run Indiana and Democratic-run Maryland already resisted pressure to accept redrawn maps this cycle.

3. TRUMP: The president remains the decisive factor. How hard the White House pushes for new maps this cycle remains an unknown factor, but may prove critical in how many states move immediately. Trump sounded keen yesterday —- “I would think that they would want to do it,” he told reporters — but had only just learned about the ruling.

4. LEGALITY: This wasn’t the “clean kill” Republicans hoped for, watering down rather than completely gutting Section 2 of the VRA. Experts believe there are legal uncertainties still to be ironed out. Pro-VRA litigation — even if ultimately fruitless — could slow the process down.

Democrats will likely retaliate.  (And after the midterms, they might control more legislative chambers.)

Reid J. Epstein at NYT:

Some Democrats who backed new redistricting commissions in the 2010s now look back on those efforts as tying one hand behind their back for the future.

“It seemed like a pitchfork moment. It did seem good,” said Michael Li, a senior counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “The lesson is that there are some states that are never going to be able to do this. If you’re not going to do it nationally, you’re going to have an unlevel playing field.”

The California and Virginia referendums to let Democrats seize redistricting power represented mea culpas about political idealism that could spread to other blue states.

One of the nation’s oldest redistricting commissions is in Washington State, where voters in 1983 adopted a provision to shift map-drawing power from elected officials. Now Shasti Conrad, the state’s Democratic Party chairwoman, said that it could be undone if Democrats were to flip a handful of seats in the State Legislature and seize supermajority control next year.

If they do, Ms. Conrad said, Washington voters are likely to be asked in 2027 to allow lawmakers to enact a new congressional map. Now, Democrats hold eight of 10 House seats in the state.

“People have been asking, ‘What can Washington do with redistricting?’” Ms. Conrad said. “They’re seeing other states like Virginia do it, so why can’t we?”

Democratic regrets over their redistricting hurdles tend to quickly morph into the party’s most reliable political stance over the last decade: blaming Mr. Trump.