The Bulwark’s Jonathan Last sells comforting fairy tales for Democrats.
The Bulwark’s Jonathan Last sells comforting fairy tales for Democrats.
E very sign we have says that political disaster looms for Democrats this fall. Joe Biden, at this writing, has a 41.3 percent approval rating and 53.8 disapproval in the RealClearPolitics poll average, and Republicans have a 3.6 point lead in the generic ballot. Henry Olsen warns that a 40-seat loss in the House could be on the table in spite of Democratic gerrymanders. In states holding elections in 2021, Olsen writes, “public opinion shifted 12.5 points in one year. Lo and behold, Democrats lost every state legislative seat in those states that Biden carried by 11.75 points or less and a couple of additional seats above that line . . . [Democrats] hold 42 House seats that fall below that mark, and a few more will be added to the list when New Hampshire and Florida draw their maps.” David Siders in Politico warns that an eleven-point enthusiasm gap between Republican and Democratic voters in the fall of 2021 has now swelled to 17 points: “The last time the enthusiasm gap was this wide, in 2010, Democrats lost more than 60 seats in the House.”
It doesn’t end here: Democratic analyst David Shor’s latest model shows that “unless we see big structural changes in the Democratic party’s coalition, then the modal outcome for 2024 is Donald Trump winning a filibuster-proof trifecta” — 60 Republican Senate seats. Ruy Teixeira warns that Nevada, a Democratic stronghold in recent years with Senate elections in 2022 and 2024, is “a state where the Democrats’ Hispanic voter and working class voter problems could combine for a disastrous outcome. . . . Among working class Hispanics in the state, Biden is actually underwater, with disapproval of his performance exceeding approval.”
Democrats assessing this situation could take one of two paths. One path, trodden by Shor and Teixeira (see here, here, and in Teixeira’s latest cover story in National Review) is to look hard at what Democrats are doing and why it is damaging their brand with ordinary voters. Teixeira calls the Democrats’ radical left-wing turn on race, gender, patriotism, policing, education, and equality their “common sense problem.”
The other path is presented by Jonathan Last of the Bulwark — namely, denial that any of this is the Democrats’ fault. Last writes, “Maybe this political moment isn’t actually about kitchen-table issues? Or about Democrats not being friendly to moderate, working-class voters? Maybe outcomes are being wildly overdetermined by environmental factors beyond the control of either party? . . . Maybe Democrats could do everything perfecto — could run the administration of Mitt Romney’s moderate, working-class dreams — and still lose both the House and Senate.”
(I will leave the reader a moment to ponder the phrase “Mitt Romney’s…working-class dreams.”)
Now, undoubtedly, Joe Biden and the Democrats have been unlucky in facing some problems not of their own making (not that this is unusual for new presidents) and are likely to face some of the midterm blues that commonly afflict the party in power. But here is how Last frames the two parties.
From where I sit, the two parties have spent the last 15 months doing the following: Republicans:
- Purging members who say that Biden is the legitimately elected POTUS.
- Protecting members who rub elbows with white nationalists.
- Re-litigating the 2020 election at all levels of government.
- Making culture war issues out of a series of topics progressing from Dr. Seuss, to CRT, to a trans college swimmer, to grooming/pedophilia.
Am I missing something? Do you recall any big Republican initiatives that aren’t on this list? Democrats:
- Passing the American Rescue Plan.
- Fixing the vaccine rollout.
- Passing a bi-partisan infrastructure bill.
- Pulling out of Afghanistan.
- Nominating an overwhelmingly popular and historically important judge to the SCOTUS.
- Managing the most successful American response to a foreign policy crisis in (at least) two generations.
Is there negative stuff that happened for Democrats during the last 15 months? Sure. The idea of pulling out of Afghanistan was very popular. The reality of it was deeply unpopular. They have made policy mistakes. The Democrats also spent a great deal of time negotiating an unpopular Build Back Better bill. But—and this point seems important — that unpopular bill did not pass.
You tell me: On balance, which of the two parties has been trying to make inroads with the political center and which has been all about that base for the last 15 months?
Now, the spin caked on here in Last’s account of Democratic “accomplishments” is so astounding that it would embarrass Paul Begala. But leave that aside. Leave aside as well the obvious asymmetry that always exists between a party holding all the levers in Washington and one that has, at the federal level, been focused on opposition because it is in the opposition.
The real chutzpah here is what Last leaves out. Just for starters, the very first item on his list of Republican offenses is purges. And he gives Democrats a pass for their colossal, budget-busting, interest-group-payoff Build Back Better bill because it didn’t pass thanks in large part to unified Republican opposition. He does not mention the procedural radicalism of trying to blow up the filibuster (which Biden used to defend) to pass this and other elements of their agenda — shredding long-standing norms in the process and permanently altering how the federal government works, to the detriment of future minority parties and future bipartisan centrism. Somehow, even in focusing on purges, Last manages to avoid mentioning the fury that Democrats have unleashed against Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema for preventing all of this. Both have been pursued by angry mobs of progressive activists. Sinema was censured by her own state party and called a “traitor” by a Democratic congressman, and now the Biden White House itself is signaling sympathy and potentially support for a primary challenge to her in 2024.
Last complains that many Republicans either question Biden’s legitimacy or face a backlash if they won’t. He omits the very long history of prominent Democrats questioning the legitimacy of the last two Republican presidents, the fact that their candidate for governor of Virginia last year continued to dig in his heels on the 2000 election being stolen, that their current candidate for governor of Georgia has spent years falsely claiming that her last race for the office was stolen, and the fact that, this year, Biden has said that the fall elections “would easily be illegitimate” if the Democrats’ voting and election bills did not pass (he knew, when he said this, that they would not), while Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer called American elections a “rigged game” as his grounds for opposing a standalone bill to reform the Electoral Count Act.
What does Last have to say for the Democrats’ bizarre, reality-denying “Jim Crow 2.0” rhetoric and comparing even their own party’s moderates to George Wallace, Bull Connor, and Jefferson Davis? About their colossal bills to radically transform American election law, suppress free speech, pay off incumbents and Democratic activist groups (such as “campus vote coordinators”), unconstitutionally hijack state government, and favor racial gerrymandering? Somehow, despite this being a core element of Democratic rhetoric and legislative priority, to which the White House devoted a full week of full-court press, it goes unmentioned.
What about immigration? Biden has reversed many successful Trump-era immigration policies and is about to end the Title 42 emergency measures without a plan in place to replace them. Immigration was the first area in which Biden (and Kamala Harris, after her disastrous trip south of the border) started taking on water in public polls, and it has consistently produced his highest levels of public disapproval, most visibly among Hispanic voters. Last also just ignores it.
What about trying to revive the Iran Deal, which entails massive, multibillion dollar boondoggles for Russia in the midst of the Russian invasion of Ukraine? Crickets.
What about Covid restrictions, particularly in schools? Here, the chief offender has been Democratic governors and mayors — Eric Adams, billed as a more moderate replacement for Bill de Blasio, is still fighting to keep masks on small children. Biden’s administration, however, has been far from innocent, letting the teachers’ unions dictate its school-reopening guidance, overruling scientific advisors on boosters, and following transparently political timelines for dropping mask mandates, while openly flouting the Supreme Court on the lawless CDC eviction moratorium. Crickets.
Most conspicuous of all, however, is that Last hand-waves away the central cultural fights of the day: education, abortion, race, law enforcement, and transgenderism. These are, he tells us, just made-up issues on which Republicans are the aggressors and Democrats are minding their own business and tacking with the center — never mind that the current administration spends a disproportionate amount of its time filing or threatening lawsuits against states that are trying to legislate in accordance with their voters interests.
Take the furious reaction in Virginia to Terry McAuliffe saying, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Does Last think that Republicans put him up to that? It was not Republicans who made Merrick Garland issue a misleading and alarmist alert likening protesting parents to domestic terrorists. It wasn’t Republicans who forced California Democrats to pass a statewide curriculum that unconstitutionally required children to chant to Aztec gods. Last may think that Democrats should continue to dig their heels in on the whole wild menagerie of left-wing pedagogy on race, but he should at least acknowledge that parents have a legitimate reason to be concerned about what their children are taught in schools and legitimate worries about the lengths to which the people running those schools are willing to go to exclude them.
Then there is the transgender madness. The Biden administration had a top-to-bottom public push across multiple agencies just last week. Two days ago, secretary of Health and Human Services secretary Xavier Becerra testified that he would “do everything [he] can” to provide federal funding for sex-change surgery for minors. Yesterday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki pledged full presidential support for “gender-affirming health care for transgender kids” to the point of fighting state laws. New Jersey just adopted state standards requiring gender-identity education for second-graders. The Democrats’ position is, yet again, an ideological hard line out of step with the American public. For all of the hysteria surrounding Florida’s bill prohibiting the instruction of sexual orientation and gender identity to young school children, polls regularly show that the bill is a massively popular 70–30 issue in Florida and nationally. It is even supported by the majority of Democratic primary voters in Florida.
As a onetime pro-lifer, Last is careful not to mention abortion. He calls Ohio senate candidate Tim Ryan “the most moderate Democrat on planet earth,” but in 2019, Ryan supported abortion all the way to the end of pregnancy, a radical and unpopular position out of step with the law on most of planet earth. (Ryan also backed decriminalizing illegal border-crossing.) Senate Democrats recently voted almost unanimously for a bill that would override popular state laws requiring parental consent for a minor seeking an abortion. Last fall, House Democrats passed a bill enshrining in federal law a virtually unlimited right to kill a baby through all nine months of pregnancy. Worse things are being advanced by state-level Democrats: Colorado’s “moderate” progressive governor, Jared Polis, just signed a law similar to the House Democrats’ bill. California Democrats have followed Maryland Democrats in proposing the decriminalization of letting a newborn baby die of neglect within the first month after birth.
National Democrats have, belatedly, awakened to the dangers of the anti-police, pro-criminal posture their party has been pushing in cities across the country. Last pretends that none of that happened. Not the bail-reform bill in New York that triggered a huge red wave on Long Island in 2021 and prompted the ousted Nassau County executive to warn of a coming “bloodbath” and compare the continuing propping up of Biden to “elder abuse.” Not the defund-the-police effort in Minneapolis that went down to disaster at the ballot box in 2021. Not red-diaper San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin, now facing a recall election, or district attorneys in Portland and elsewhere going easy on rioters, or Alvin Bragg’s abandonment of Manhattan to the criminals.
Even Nancy Pelosi, of all people, has reportedly complained in private that her fellow Democrats have “alienated Asian and Hispanic immigrants with loose talk of socialism” and extreme rhetoric on abortion.
I understand why Jonathan Last would write something claiming that Democrats are cautious centrists on cultural issues that bear no responsibility for the state of the economy, foreign policy, immigration, or crime. I understand why he would dismiss the extensive evidence that ordinary Americans, many of them longtime Democratic or swing voters, are freaked out by the Democrats’ cultural suicide machine. What is unclear is why or whether he expects anyone to believe it.