by Cliston Brown | May 23, 2022 | Political Commentary
Today I saw a tweet from a self-identified Millennial who lamented that her generation had spent their adolescence doing all the things they were supposed to do to prepare for a world that was not waiting for them when they graduated.
I had to restrain myself from responding unsympathetically. In fact, I didn’t respond at all. But I thought about responding, and what immediately came to mind was that the kids who turned 18 years old in 1861, 1929, 1941 and 1965 got thrown some unexpected curveballs too.
I grew up in Northwest Indiana, an industrialized collection of suburban communities near Chicago. “The Region,” as the locals call it, relied heavily for several generations upon the steel mills established in the early 20th century along the south shore of Lake Michigan. Up until the 1980s, it was commonplace for “Region” kids to get their high school diploma one day and get a job at one of the mills the next day. The mill jobs were plentiful and paid well, and the hard-won benefits secured by the United Steelworkers union made it possible to retire with a good pension by age 50. But by the 1980s, the domestic steel industry had gone into decline, and the kids who came up with me had to make other plans. Many of them have not done as well as their parents’ and grandparents’ generations, but they’ve adapted and done what they had to do. This is nothing new.
I guess that’s the thing that irritates me the most about today’s younger generations. They seem to think nobody else has ever faced the need to adapt to an unexpected situation. In the preceding paragraphs, I named five groups of people who also faced unexpected challenges when they came of age. I’ve left out many more. Millions upon millions of people throughout human history have made careful plans, played by the rules, did all they were supposed to do, and then saw all of their efforts go up in smoke. It’s not a new or unprecedented phenomenon.
What previous generations seemed to understand that the current younger generations seem not to get is that there are no guarantees in life, and when things don’t go the way you expected, you have to adapt. You can’t just complain and ask older people to bail you out (as we are seeing with the incessant push for forgiveness of all student loan debt).
“But Boomers left us this mess!” Yes, and the adults of the 1920s left their kids a Great Depression, and adults in the 1930s left their kids a world at war for the second time in 25 years. Millions of them did everything they were supposed to do, too, and they got smacked in the face by a world that wasn’t the one they had prepared for.
What seems to separate today’s young people from the ones back then is that their parents didn’t prepare them for the eventuality that things might not go according to plan. They weren’t raised to adapt, or to roll with the punches that life brings, in one form or another, to every generation and every person.
So it’s hard for me to be sympathetic to the complaints of younger people today. I oppose blanket student loan forgiveness, for example. I think it’s a bad idea, and a political loser as well, since most Americans don’t have student debt and will see forgiveness as a giveaway to a privileged minority. I do think we should revisit the law prohibiting bankruptcy relief for student loans, and also make provision for people who truly can’t pay. I would even support a reduction in interest rates on federally backed loans.
But I don’t like the idea that if you can’t buy all the things you want, or take all the vacations you’d like to take, you should just get to walk away from your obligations. I also don’t like the idea that people who don’t make the wisest choices (majoring in a field with poor job prospects, for example) should be absolved or saved from the consequences. And if you want loan relief, a number of forgiveness programs already exist. You might have to do something you don’t especially want to do–say, spend a few years teaching school in an impoverished area, for example–but people have always had to do things they don’t especially want to do in order to get the things they want in life. This, also, is nothing new.
I’m a Gen-Xer. We and previous generations were all taught something that succeeding generations seem not to have been told: Life isn’t fair. Sorry, but it just isn’t. If you’re a young person and you were sheltered from that reality by your parents, I’m sorry, but now, it’s time for you to learn that eternal truth and adapt. And maybe you’ll be able to tell your kids what your parents never told you.
by Cliston Brown | Apr 1, 2022 | Political Commentary
Twelve years ago, when all the leading pundits were telling us how the Democrats were going to lose badly in the 2010 midterms, I was initially skeptical. In fact, I posted on a blog I was writing at the time that I thought a leading DC prognosticator was off-base and that Democrats were actually going to make gains that year.
I was much younger then and not as well-versed in the ebb and flow of U.S. politics as I should have been, and fortunately, I realized that my statement was foolish even before the elections took place. (I still underestimated the GOP House pickups by 10 seats that year, having predicted they would net 53 House seats; they netted 63. Until 2020, that was the only election in which I missed the final House margin by double digits.)
At the time, I was saying many of the things that naive Democrats on Twitter are saying on a daily basis today–that these midterms were different, that the pundits were all wrong, that voters would see through the Republican rhetoric, etc. It was wishful thinking then, and it’s wishful thinking now.
In fact, predicting that the sitting president’s party will lose seats in a midterm election is the safest bet in U.S. politics. There have been 39 midterm elections since the Civil War ended, and in 36 of those midterms, the sitting president’s party has suffered a net loss of seats in Congress. In short, in 92.3% of midterm elections held since 1865, the president’s party has lost seats.
The three exceptions are notable because they didn’t just happen randomly. Since 1865, the president’s party has only gained seats in midterm elections when the president has been extraordinarily popular. In 1934, Franklin Roosevelt was flying high after unemployment fell from 25% at the start of his term to 14% by the midterms. In 1998, Bill Clinton was polling around 65% approval ratings as Republicans prepared to impeach him for what most of the public considered an unimpeachable offense. And in 2002, George W. Bush was over 65% approval in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
That’s it. Those are the only three midterms in the last 157 years in which the president’s party gained seats. And those only happened when the president was extremely popular.
Now let’s fast forward to today. Joe Biden is hovering around 40% approval ratings despite a level of job creation in his first 14 months that has put several generations of prior presidents to shame. High inflation and gas prices have turned the public sour on the new president and his party.
Even if Biden were over 50% approval right now, his party would still be expected to lose seats. But with a president hovering around 40%, the likelihood of very big losses is high. Since World War II, when midterms took place with the president’s approval ratings slumping, the president’s party has averaged U.S. House losses of nearly 44 seats. In the Senate, when the president has been underwater, his party has lost an average of just under 6 seats.
Democrats currently have a margin of five seats in the House and are dead even with Republicans in the Senate. If Democrats this year only lose their post-Civil War average of seats, Republicans could be expected to gain 34-35 House seats and 3-4 Senate seats. (Senate losses are only calculated since 1914, because U.S. Senators were appointed by state legislatures prior to that year.) This would mean Republicans would easily take control of both houses of Congress in 2023–even if they don’t win at the levels that could be expected with a president well under 50% approval.
But wait, says the Twitterverse–this year is going to be different!
How, exactly? As we have seen, the only circumstances under which the president’s party has netted seats in Congress since the Civil War have been when the president’s popularity is stratospheric. Those conditions do not exist this year.
And none of those three presidents became stratospherically popular in a vacuum–there were special circumstances in all three cases that led to their high popularity: the start of a recovery from the worst economic depression in the country’s history; the overreach of Republicans against a popular president because of his personal peccadilloes; and the worst terrorist attack in the country’s history. None of those conditions exist this year, either.
Now, there are those who say that the Republican Party’s complicity in the January 6, 2021 insurrection created special circumstances, but at this point, who is even talking about the insurrection except Democrats? Right now, the public is obsessed with inflation and gas prices, not an episode that most people decried and then promptly forgot.
Another point that is getting too much credence is the fact that Democrats appear to have done better in redistricting than expected. But redistricting successes do not protect an incumbent president’s party against the normal midterm losses they suffer 12 times out of every 13 midterms, on average.
In short, there is no reason to expect that Democrats will gain seats in the November midterms, or even suffer small losses. All signs point to very large Republican gains in November, and anybody who says otherwise should not be taken seriously. They’re substituting wishful thinking for a pattern that has prevailed for more than a century and a half and is all but certain to hold true this November as well.
by Cliston Brown | Sep 27, 2021 | Election Analysis, Political Commentary
One of my occasional criticisms of Democrats who are active on Twitter is that they don’t know how to count. This is, of course, a figurative criticism, not a literal one. The point of my observation is that they often don’t grasp some of the basic nuances of electoral and legislative arithmetic.
For example: it doesn’t make sense to send money to a Democratic candidate challenging GOP Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, because Democrats are so badly outnumbered in her northwest Georgia district that no amount of campaign contributions will flip it from blue to red. As such, any money spent there is wasted. It’s gone and can’t be spent in districts where Democrats actually have a chance to win.
The latest example of Twitter Democrats not being able to count is the ongoing stream of tweets expressing that COVID-19 will kill enough unvaccinated Republicans to impact the coming midterm elections.
There are a few things wrong with this line of thinking, not the least of which is the ghoulish glee at the prospect of mass deaths among vaccine holdouts helping Democrats to defeat Republicans in an election. I don’t like these stubborn, petulant and childish vaccine-deniers any more than anyone else, and as far as I’m concerned, if they get sick or die, it’s their own fault. However, actively applauding the prospect of their deaths because of the perceived electoral boost it would supposedly provide to Democrats is pretty sick and not a good look. You might keep that in mind.
Beyond that, there’s the fact that the numbers just don’t add up. One Twitter poster I follow recently re-posted a graphic from a New York Times article indicating that on average, the death rate from COVID is three times higher in heavily Trump-voting counties than it is in heavily Biden-voting counties. The person who re-posted the graphic expressed the thought that perhaps Democrats might win the midterm elections after all.
So let’s dig into the numbers a bit. The graphic indicated a widening gap between the deaths-per-100,000 residents in Trump counties and Biden counties that really began to grow in August and September of this year. As of September 23, approximately 1.25 people per 100,000 residents in Trump counties were dying per day, as compared to approximately 0.4 people per 100,000 residents in Biden counties.
After the 2021-22 redistricting cycle, the average number of residents per Congressional district, taking the current Census population of 331.4 million residents and dividing it by 435, will be about 762,000 residents in each district. There will be some variance, but that’s the average.
If 1.25 people per 100,000 are dying in Trump counties per day, and 0.4 people per 100,000 in Biden counties, and we extrapolate that to the average Congressional district, that means, roughly, 7.6 people in Trump counties and 3 people in Biden counties per day per district. With 411 days left between Sept. 23, 2001 and the Nov. 8, 2022 midterms, the average Congressional district could see (roughly) 3,124 people in red areas and 1,233 people in blue areas die of COVID prior to the vote.
Not all of these people are voters. If we assume that COVID deaths are largely among adults (which so far has been the case), only about half of them (at best) would be voters in a midterm election. That would mean Republicans in an average Congressional district might lose about 1,600 votes (at most) to COVID deaths, and Democrats would lose about 600 votes (at most) between now and the midterms. (But that’s only if we have midterm turnout close to the unusually high midterm voting rate in 2018. The numbers would be lower in an average midterm.)
In short, in an average Congressional district, Democrats might expect to gain, at most, a net of 1,000 votes due to COVID deaths. In the 2018 midterms, a Democratic net of 1,000 votes per district would have flipped exactly two U.S. House districts from red to blue: the 7th Congressional District of Georgia, which the Republicans held by 433 votes, and the 23rd Congressional District of Texas, which the Republicans held by 926 votes. Two districts. That’s it.
As to Senate races, a net gain of 1,000 votes per Congressional district in 2018 would have kept Democratic Senator Bill Nelson in office in Florida. Nelson lost by a little over 10,000 votes, and a net gain of 27,000 votes (1,000 in each of Florida’s 27 U.S. House districts) would have saved him from defeat.
In short, deaths among unvaccinated Republicans are not likely to make any substantial difference in the upcoming midterm elections, particularly in the House, where the average midterm loss for the president’s party since 1934 has been a little over 29 seats. In the Senate, the average loss for the president’s party during that timespan has been a little over four seats. Assuming average losses for the Democrats in 2022, minus the additional couple of House seats and perhaps a single Senate seat that might be affected by COVID deaths, Democrats would still lose both chambers handily. Republicans could expect, under these circumstances, to emerge from the 2022 midterms with a 240-195 majority in the House and a 53-47 edge in the Senate.
Bottom line: If you’re expecting COVID deaths among unvaccinated Republicans to crush their electoral prospects, you’re going to be in for a big surprise in November 2022.
by Cliston Brown | Jan 31, 2021 | Political Commentary
I became a Democrat as a college student in the 1990s, largely for three reasons, one practical, the other two ideological.
1) At that time, I harbored ambitions of running for office, and my home county and Congressional district were solidly Democratic. That was the practical reason.
2) I was appalled by the childish, petulant Republican reaction to the election of President Bill Clinton, of whom I was a staunch supporter. Their constant grumbling and whining about losing an election, to me, indicated an unwillingness to accept the verdict of the voters.
3) The Republicans opposed what was known as the Motor-Voter Bill, which allowed drivers’ licensing branches across the country to register people to vote. The point of the bill, which Clinton signed into law in 1993, was to get more eligible citizens registered to vote. I remember asking myself at the time “Why don’t Republicans want more people to vote?” I quickly concluded that the answer was evident in the question itself.
Many years later, I would write an article for the New York Observer on how polling showed non-voters tended to break heavily Democratic. The implication was clear: the more people who vote, the likelier that Democrats will win.
Therefore, it is clearly in Republicans’ interest to stifle the democratic process. If voting is easy, more people will do it, and Republicans will win fewer elections. The rash of restrictive voter-identification laws in Republican-controlled states, surgically precise gerrymandering that ensures Republicans win Congressional and legislative seats even if they win fewer votes statewide, targeted voter-roll purging, and chicanery such as shutting down or moving polling stations in heavily Democratic areas, are all intended to reduce the voting pool and help Republicans win.
In short, democracy itself works against Republicans, because Republican ideology and policy is unpopular with most of the public. Republicans have faced this conundrum for almost a hundred years, and for most of that time, they lost a lot more elections than they won.
By the 1960s, it was clear to Republicans that they were never going to win elections on the issues, so they needed to find other ways to win. This was the genesis of Richard Nixon’s infamous “Southern Strategy,” in which Republicans began getting around their unpopular positions on economic issues by appealing to the cultural grievances of disaffected white racists. As it turned out, these voters existed outside the South as well. They began leaving the Democratic Party after President Lyndon Johnson pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and Republicans rode them to victory in five of the next six presidential elections, control of Congress for most of the years after 1994, and control of most key swing states since the turn of the century. That enabled Republicans to begin redrawing the Congressional and legislative maps to cement their continued advantage and to pass laws making it far more difficult for eligible Americans to vote.
This drift toward full-throated opposition to democracy has played out for over 50 years. The inevitable turn from subverting democracy to attempting to overturn it outright it played out in the wake of the 2020 election, in which President Donald Trump and his supporters actively pushed for Republican officials in closely contested swing states to overturn the will of the voters. Ultimately, an angry mob invaded the Capitol on January 6, 2021, seeking to forcibly block Congress’s certification of the presidential election.
The fanciful notion that a post-Trump GOP will back away from its enmity toward democracy ignores that this phenomenon has been ongoing for nearly 60 years. The Republican Party’s positions on economic issues remain unpopular, so Republicans know they cannot win a fair fight. If their choice is to change their views or circumvent democracy, they will circumvent democracy. They’ve been doing it for decades.
The Republican Party is the enemy of democracy in America because democracy in America is the enemy of the Republican Party. The GOP’s war on democracy is the inevitable result of its inability to sell its ideas to the public, and as long as the public isn’t buying what Republicans are selling, the Republican Party will continue trying to overrule the public. They failed in 2020, but they’ll double down going forward.
by Cliston Brown | Jan 29, 2021 | Election Analysis, Political Commentary
A prominent sportswriter in the early 20th century, Hugh Keough, has been credited with a quote that is also quite relevant to political prognostication:
“The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that’s the way to bet.”
My Twitter feed these days is abuzz with the notion that Democrats are going to buck the longstanding trend in which the “out” party–which is to say, the party that does not control the presidency–picks up seats in Congress during midterm elections.
Is it possible? Sure. Democrats made net gains in Congress in the 1998 midterms, and Republicans did so in 2002. Prior to that, the last time the “in” party netted seats in Congress was 1934. On a handful of rare occasions, notably the midterms of 1962, 1970 and 2018, the “in” party has picked up seats in one chamber of Congress, while losing a larger number of seats in the other chamber.
However, to say that it is unlikely would be a tremendous understatement. The near-constant of midterm elections cutting against the party holding the presidency is one of the most consistent, and time-tested, patterns in American politics. The likelihood of Democrats keeping the House of Representatives or taking an outright majority in the Senate after 2022 is so low that I would consider it foolhardy for anybody to bet any amount of money on that outcome.
It isn’t just 150-plus years of post-Civil War history that leads me to this conclusion. There are several factors coming into play that point to significant Republican wins in the 2022 midterm elections.
First, the “exception” midterms of 1934, 1998 and 2002 all occurred when the president at the time was exceedingly popular. In 1998 and 2002, Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, respectively, were both polling above 65% approval. While there was no public polling on approval ratings in 1934, Franklin D. Roosevelt was exceedingly popular at the time due to his leadership in combating the Great Depression.
With today’s partisan polarization, it is hard to imagine President Joe Biden being at 65% or higher in November 2022. Polarization alone would seem to render that all but impossible. But there’s also the fact of continued Republican obstruction, which means that President Biden will likely fail to pass very much substantive legislation. The public, not always especially discerning as to where to place the blame, usually blames the president and his party, not the opposition party in Congress, when things don’t go well.
Two Democratic Senators, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have ensured Republicans will continue to have the ability to obstruct the Democrats through 2022. By refusing to budge on ending the filibuster, the arcane rule requiring 60 votes out of 100 to end debate and bring a bill up for a vote, Manchin and Sinema have given the Republicans a veto over any Democratic legislation that might benefit the public. Republicans will use this veto to deny Biden any substantive victories, and Biden will get the blame for it from a largely uninformed public.
On the House side, it is a near-certainty that Republicans, who need to net only five seats for control, will gain those seats on the strength of redistricting alone. Because of Democratic failures to flip any state legislatures in the 2020 elections, Republicans remain in firm control of redistricting in most of the key swing states.
On the Senate side, most of the Republican-held seats that are up in 2022 are not promising targets for the Democrats. Their best shot at a pickup is in Pennsylvania, where Republican Senator Pat Toomey is not seeking reelection. There will also be vacancies in North Carolina and Ohio, but North Carolina still leans Republican, and Ohio has been trending heavily Republican for years. Democrats also may have a shot at flipping Wisconsin, where incumbent GOP Senator Ron Johnson is considering retiring, and Florida, though it appears very unlikely that any top Democrats will step up for a tough race against Republican Senator Marco Rubio. Of these five seats, Democrats would probably do really well to flip two, and one is much more likely.
But there are several vulnerable Democratic senators up in 2022, two of whom won special elections in 2020 by extremely close margins. With an electorate that is likelier than not to skew more Republican in 2022, Democratic Senators Mark Kelly of Arizona and Raphael Warnock of Georgia will face difficult challenges. Catherine Cortez Masto is up for reelection in closely divided Nevada, and Maggie Hassan may have to face off against popular Republican Governor John Sununu in New Hampshire. It would be no surprise if two or three of these Democrats lost, maybe even all four if 2022 is a bad year for Democrats.
The likeliest scenario in the Senate is a wash, which would mean continued 50-50 gridlock, or a modest GOP gain, which would deliver control of the chamber to the Republicans. Starting in 2023, President Biden is likely to face a Congress where at least one chamber is Republican-controlled, sharing the fate of the last two Democratic presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. It is true that midterm losses for Clinton and Obama in 1994 and 2010 set the stage for resurgences by both presidents and their ultimate reelections two years later. However, it is also true that neither of those Democratic presidents ever had a governing majority in Congress again, and that they were succeeded by Republican presidents who inherited those Republican majorities in Congress.
The bottom line is that whatever little Democrats get done in Washington in the next two years is likely to be all they are going to get between now and 2033, at the earliest.
by Cliston Brown | Jan 1, 2021 | Election Analysis, Political Commentary
I have held off making any predictions about the Georgia Senate runoffs because I frankly have no idea what’s going to happen. The only thing I can say with any confidence is that I expect there will not be a split: either Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock will both win, or incumbent Republicans Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue will retain their seats.
We hear that there is a lot on the line, and superficially, this is true. If the Democrats win both seats, they will take control of a 50-50 Senate on the tie-breaking vote of Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris. If not, Republicans will continue to control the chamber and the agenda.
In reality, the outcome is not going to make a great deal of difference. As long as the filibuster remains in place, 60 votes will be required to advance any legislation. We already know that the votes will not be there to end the filibuster, as Senator Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) has already stated flat-out that he will not vote to do so. Congressional Republicans have shown for more than a decade that they will give a Democratic president no cooperation, and there is no reason to expect that their stance will change. Frankly, obstructionism has worked very well for them, and because the overwhelming majority of them are in safe Republican constituencies, most of them will face no negative consequences for obstructing President-Elect Joe Biden.
In short, regardless of what happens next Tuesday, Democrats aren’t going to be able to pass very much of anything through the Senate. If they do get to a 50-50 tie, they might be able to pass some items through the budget reconciliation process, but this option is much more limited than a lot of people seem to think it is. The new president is going to have to rely heavily on executive orders to get any significant part of his agenda through, and that approach also has its limitations.
In short, President-Elect Biden will achieve very little of substance between his inauguration and the 2022 midterms, and given the longstanding patterns of American politics, this will play to the benefit of the obstructing party, the Republicans. Expect the GOP to block almost everything Biden tries to do, knowing that a poorly educated and highly polarized public will blame the president, not them. The end result is likely to be big Republican wins–and control of both chambers of Congress–in the 2022 midterms. Barring some major, unanticipated event–such as a terrorist attack that boosts Biden’s popularity into the stratosphere, as happened with George W. Bush heading into the 2002 midterms–substantial Republican victories in the 2022 midterms are as predictable as the sun rising in the east.
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