by Cliston Brown | Nov 6, 2024 | Political Commentary
In 2006, when I was working in Washington, D.C. for a national trade organization, I was deeply consumed with that year’s midterm elections. I began obsessively tracking all the House and Senate races and, toward the end of the cycle, I made some predictions, which, as it turns out, were almost completely spot on. I only missed the House total by three seats and was nearly perfect in the Senate.
I began regularly making predictions, and in almost every election, I was very close, coming within a handful of seats. In 2012, I called every state correctly but one in the presidential race, and missed the House and the Senate by one seat each.
With the advent of the Trump era, I began to lose my touch. And I have never gotten it completely back. After Tuesday’s election, I had to make a very hard reckoning with myself, and I have come to realize something important. For as much as I have always prided myself on my objectivity, I realized I have been unable to be objective when it mattered, and my personal preferences have been clouding my judgment for years.
In the last week before the election, I wrote a column on this website in which I said that I thought both Kamala Harris and Senator Bob Casey were in trouble in Pennsylvania, and that Senator Sherrod Brown was likelier than not to lose his seat in Ohio. I was right. But I switched course just a few days later as soon as I found information that mirrored my biases. I have written for years about how polls were broken and should be disregarded, but as soon as I saw a polling result that showed what I hoped to see, I disregarded what I was clearly seeing—and everything I thought I had learned in the previous eight years.
On Tuesday night, a follower of mine on X.com, distraught by the results, lashed out angrily at me and my incorrect predictions. It made me think. And it made me realize that my inability to separate my wishes from my analysis, once again, was providing false hope to people who I never wished to mislead.
Over the last 15 years, I have earned a following of more than 13,000 people on X.com (formerly Twitter), who have come to trust my judgments. I have been featured in numerous publications and on several television and radio programs around the world. And I have done all of them—all of you—a disservice. I’m sorry.
So I have decided that I am getting out of the election prediction business. Not only do I no longer believe I can do it well or objectively, but I am actively letting down thousands of people who trust what I say. I will not do that anymore.
Going forward on this website and on social media, I will confine my observations to my own views on politics and analyzing election results. In particular, I will write about what I believe politicians will do and what my party, the Democratic Party, should do if it hopes to reverse the obvious disconnect between itself and the median voter in this country.
I fear that our country faces hard times now, and that much of the progress that has been won over the last hundred years will be undone by aggressive conservative populists in the next two years. I worry that the Social Security and Medicare I was hoping to have at some point in the next 15 years will no longer be there for myself or others. I fear the decisions that the conservative-dominated Supreme Court will make for the rest of my lifetime. There is nothing that can be done about any of that now, sadly.
I will likely be much less active on this site and on social media going forward, though I hope to maintain the friendships that I have made over the years. All that any of us can do now is get on with our lives and make the best of it. I have a terrific wife, a great home, an amazing job, good friends, and a master’s degree to pursue, and I am going to turn a much greater focus to all of those things going forward. I wish you all the best of luck in everything you want to do. Thank you for believing in me, and I sincerely apologize to everyone I have let down.
With a tip of the hat to the originator of the phrase, Edward R. Murrow: Good night, and good luck.
by Cliston Brown | Oct 1, 2024 | Political Commentary
Today, Jimmy Carter, who served a single term as the nation’s 39th president from 1977-81, turned 100 years old.
It has been said of President Carter that he was the best ex-president in U.S. history, and that is probably quite true. He is the first president of whom I have any memories, and I am sad to say that my impressions of him as a young child were the negative impressions that were passed on to me by my mother and stepfather and many of the people in our neighborhood.
By the time I was in first and second grade, Carter had become an object of national derision and ridicule, such that schoolkids were singing mocking jingles about him on the playground. (They sang, to the tune of the “Oscar Mayer” wiener song: “‘Cause Jimmy Carter has a way of screwing up the U.S.A.”) It should be noted that I grew up in a solidly Democratic, labor-union dominated corner of Indiana bordering on Chicago, and that Carter narrowly missed losing Lake County, Indiana in his 1980 reelection campaign. Only two Democrats–Adlai Stevenson in 1956 and George McGovern in 1972–have lost Lake County since 1928.
It would be fair to say that Carter’s presidency was largely unsuccessful, although it would also be fair to note that he had some key successes. The Camp David Accords, resulting in peace between Egypt and Israel, represented one of the finest diplomatic accomplishments of any president in U.S. history–right up there with Richard Nixon’s opening to China in 1972 and Theodore Roosevelt’s mediation of the Portsmouth, N.H. peace settlement between Japan and Russia in 1905. He also successfully negotiated the second round of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks with the Soviet Union and made the courageous, and morally correct, move of pardoning all Vietnam War draft evaders on his second day in office.
Sadly, Carter’s successes were few, and he fell victim to a number of events which he either mishandled or could not control. The Iran Hostage Crisis, in which 53 American citizens were held in captivity for more than 14 months, and the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan, both coming in 1979, reinforced the popular impression that Carter was weak. His tireless work to solve the crisis was undermined by the Ronald Reagan campaign’s secret promises to Iran that if the Iranians kept the crisis going through the 1980 election, ensuring Carter’s defeat, the Iranian theocratic regime would get a better deal from Reagan than it would from Carter. Although Carter ultimately secured the hostages’ freedom on his last day in office, he never really got the credit for it from the public. I remember Reagan supporters claiming that Iran freed the hostages on the day Reagan was inaugurated because they were afraid Reagan would “get tough” with them.
Carter was also beset by an energy crisis that he did not cause but was unable to solve. His appearance on television wearing a sweater and urging Americans to conserve energy was at odds with the national mood; he was seen as weak and pessimistic, and the country went through a period of psychological “malaise.” The sunny, optimistic pronouncements of Reagan captured the nation’s imagination, and Carter lost all but six states when he failed to win a second term.
The night he conceded the 1980 election, Carter reminded Americans that he had promised, in his successful 1976 campaign, that he would never lie to them. In that spirit, he admitted he could not say that his landslide defeat that day didn’t hurt.
But Carter bounced back from the agony of his defeat and took on the rest of his life with gusto, earning well-deserved plaudits and praise from even his biggest political detractors for the work he did after leaving the White House. He established the Carter Center to fight for human rights around the globe and worked tirelessly around the world, conducting peace negotiations, monitoring elections, helping to fight devastating diseases. He also worked nonstop with Habitat For Humanity, helping build countless homes for the needy with his own hands. He refused to lay down and die after losing the presidency and spent more than 40 years simply doing good for his fellow human beings–all while living humbly in his tiny hometown of Plains, Georgia, where he taught Sunday School at his church until his health made it impossible for him to continue.
Perhaps Carter was not the most effective president, but we would be so much better off if all of our leaders cared about people as much as he does. And even if his message on energy conservation was not one that Americans wanted to hear, it was the truth. He was right.
Carter’s grandson said a few weeks ago that the former president said he is trying to hold on and live long enough to cast an absentee ballot for Kamala Harris for president. It is typical of Jimmy Carter that even as the end of his life draws near, he continues to live for his country and his fellow human beings.
We may have better presidents in the years to come, but we will never have a better human being as our president than Jimmy Carter.
Happy birthday, Mr. President.
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.
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