GOP Conundrum

Being tied to Trump has upsides and downsides.

Trump may be out of office, and not yet an official candidate for president in 2024, but he still represents a conundrum for his party. The former president retains an unchallenged grip over the base of the party. In most states, separation from Trump’s desires and policies is a sure path to defeat in a Republican primary and risks lower GOP turnout in a general election.

But Trump’s continued effort to downplay the events of Jan. 6 while stoking agitation for future violence risks alienating the independent and moderate voters Republicans desperately need and think they are set to gain in November.

Smartphone COVID Test kit

This kit is as good as lab kits but much faster and more portable.

Rapid antigen tests are quick and easy but can often miss positive cases. The test requires a certain amount of viral material to be captured by a nasal swab or saliva samples.

PCR, or polymerase chain reaction, technology is the most accurate way to test for SARS-CoV-2. It involves taking a swab sample from a subject and amplifying the viral genetic material in a lab.

the novelty of LAMP technology is that it can amplify viral material without the complex temperature cycling required by PCR testing. The main problem with LAMP diagnostics has been over-sensitivity. It is so effective at enhancing viral replication that it often results in high volumes of false-positives.

Alongside solving this false-positive problem the researchers designed a novel smartphone-based system that can be produced for less than US$100. The system has been dubbed smaRT-LAMP (smartphone-based real-time loop-mediated isothermal amplification).

Using just a smartphone, LED lights and a hotplate, the researchers claim saliva samples can deliver accurate results in 25 minutes. The cost of each individual test has been estimated at around $7, significantly less than a lab-based PCR test.

The system can also be easily adapted to detect other viruses. In its current iteration, the researchers have demonstrated that simply changing the primers used to interact with a saliva sample can shift the kit from detecting SARS-CoV-2 to the influenza virus.

ERA ratified, almost

By its own terms the ERA has been ratified, but it can't be formerly added to the Constitution but the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel disagrees.

“The Constitution is clear: You need to do two things. We did it,” Representative Carolyn Maloney of New York, a longtime E.R.A. proponent, told me. Indeed, no amendment that has cleared Article V’s two high bars has ever been excluded from the Constitution — until now.

The technical reason for this is that the archivist of the United States, David Ferriero, has declined to certify the Equal Rights Amendment, despite a federal law requiring him to do so whenever an amendment has satisfied “the provisions of the Constitution.”

His refusal is based on a 2020 memo by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which provides legal advice to the executive branch. The memo contended that the E.R.A. is no longer valid because it failed to meet the seven-year deadline that Congress initially set and then, when the ratification effort fell three states short, extended until 1982. (The last three states — Nevada, Illinois and Virginia — all ratified after 2016, spurred by the election of Donald Trump.) The O.L.C. memo also noted that five states that approved the amendment later tried to back out by rescinding their ratifications. As a result of the missed deadline, the memo said, the E.R.A. “has expired and is no longer pending before the states.” If its supporters want it ratified, they need to start over.

The supporters’ retort: The Constitution says not a word about either deadlines or rescissions. It says two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of the states, nothing more. In a 2012 letter to Ms. Maloney, Mr. Ferriero appeared to agree with this interpretation. As soon as at least 38 states have ratified an amendment, he wrote, the National Archives publishes the amendment along with his certification “and it becomes part of the Constitution without further action by the Congress.” He also said he did not consider any of the rescissions to be valid.

Stuck With the Kooks

The Republican Party, in making their deal with the devil, find themselves unable to purge the crazies. 

When an ideological extreme faction with unpopular views emerges, it becomes a threat to the party that hosts it. At first, the party’s incentive is to banish the extremists, lest their toxic ideas taint the party’s brand with the broader electorate. But if the radical faction’s growth is not arrested, the calculus changes, and barring the doors can no longer work. It forms a large enough part of the base that the party can’t afford to alienate its members. The crank wing becomes too big to fail.

The most telling gauge of the anti-vaxx movement’s progress is the waning resistance from the party mainstream. Republicans have tried to channel anti-vaccine activism into narrower resistance to government mandates of the vaccine. This has the advantage of appealing to a broader share of the public (depending on the exact framing, between one-third and one-half of Americans oppose mandates, much larger than the one-fifth that opposes vaccines themselves.) It also comfortably locates the issue within the traditional bounds of individual liberty and restricted government power, without requiring any uncomfortable defense of pseudoscientific gibberish.

Insisting DeSantis is pro-vaccine because he endorsed it last year? Check. Pretending his opposition to vaccines is limited to mandates, while ignoring his open embrace of anti-vaccine nuts? Check. Leaning heavily on the bad data about Florida’s supposedly high vaccination rate? Check.

If the goal is to elect a Republican at any cost, it may work. The flaw is that it surrenders any leverage the party elite has against the anti-vaxxers. Their only tool is increasingly comic levels of denial, like western communists in the 1930s who didn’t want to hear about purges or prison camps in their socialist paradise.

Conservatives have a founding myth centered on William F. Buckley supposedly purging the John Birch society from the movement. (In fact his main goal was to keep the Birchers in the tent while nudging aside the group’s embarrassing president.) As the conservative movement gained full control over the Republican Party, the party lost whatever ability it had to sift crackpots from its ranks.

Coup Opportunity

It could happen in 2024.

Understanding these weaknesses has concrete utility right now. It will help shape Congress’s efforts to shore them up via reform of the Electoral Count Act of 1887, or ECA, which governs how Congress counts presidential electors.

Here’s the unsettling reality: If the ECA isn’t revised, under certain scenarios, all it would take for a future effort to succeed is a single corrupt GOP governor and a GOP-controlled House of Representatives.

Imagine that former senator David Perdue becomes Georgia governor, after winning a GOP primary against Gov. Brian Kemp, who is under fire from Trump supporters precisely because he refused to overturn the 2020 results. Imagine Speaker Kevin McCarthy controlling the House on Jan. 6, 2025.

If a Democrat won the state by a slim margin, and the election came down to it, Perdue could send a rogue slate of electors based on a fake pretext of election fraud, and the GOP-controlled House could simply count those electors. A Democratic Senate might object, but under the ECA, both chambers must object to a slate of electors to invalidate it, so it would stand.

Here’s the conclusion that emerges: Reform must thwart corruption at both the state and congressional ends. At the state end, one emerging solution in the Senate would trigger heightened judicial review when a state government fails to follow preexisting procedures in appointing electors.

But as noted, a GOP governor could ignore this, and a GOP House could play along. So Seligman suggests a second backstop: In an ECA reform bill, Congress could explicitly direct the Supreme Court to review Congress’ count after the fact, making it less likely to decline to intervene.

Meanwhile, at the congressional end, reform must address the other possible scenario floated above: a corrupt House and Senate refusing to count the correct electors sent by a non-corrupt governor and legislature.

Guarding against that requires raising the threshold for Congress to object to and invalidate electors, and making it ironclad that Congress must count electors that were legitimately certified.

Ultimately, getting ECA reform right will require balancing efforts to address all these threats. This is an extremely difficult problem. Some pundits are having a grand old time mocking those who are thinking through such scenarios. Their time would be more productively devoted to figuring out how to fix the system to avert such a meltdown, however unlikely it seems.

Republicans Bring On The Thought Police

Paul Krugman talks about Republicans and curriculums. 

Republicans have made considerable political hay by denouncing the teaching of critical race theory; this strategy has succeeded even though most voters have no idea what that theory is and it isn’t actually being taught in public schools. But the facts in this case don’t matter, because denunciations of C.R.T. are basically a cover for a much bigger agenda: an attempt to stop schools from teaching anything that makes right-wingers uncomfortable.

There’s a bill advancing in the Florida Senate declaring that an individual “should not be made to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.” That is, the criterion for what can be taught isn’t “Is it true? Is it supported by the scholarly consensus?” but rather “Does it make certain constituencies uncomfortable?”

Anyone tempted to place an innocuous interpretation on this provision — maybe it’s just about not assigning collective guilt? — should read the text of the bill. Among other things, it cites as its two prime examples of things that must not happen in schools “denial or minimization of the Holocaust, and the teaching of critical race theory” — because suggesting that “racism is embedded in American society” (the bill’s definition of the theory) is just the same as denying that Hitler killed six million Jews.

racism is far from being the only disturbing topic in American history. I’m sure that some students will find that the story of how we came to invade Iraq — or for that matter how we got involved in Vietnam — makes them uncomfortable. Ban those topics from the curriculum!

Then there’s the teaching of science. Most high schools do teach the theory of evolution, but leading Republican politicians are either evasive or actively deny the scientific consensus, presumably reflecting the G.O.P. base’s discomfort with the concept. Once the Florida standard takes hold, how long will teaching of evolution survive?

And who will enforce the rules? State-sponsored vigilantes! Last month Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, proposed a “Stop Woke Act” that would empower parents to sue school districts they claim teach critical race theory — and collect lawyer fees, a setup modeled on the bounties under Texas’ new anti-abortion law. Even the prospect of such lawsuits would have a chilling effect on teaching.

Omicron-specific Vaccine

Pfizer begins trials for an omicron-specific booster.

The Three C's

Japan has successfully dealt with COVID by observing the dangers of the three C's. Avoid closed spaces, crowded places, and close-contact settings.

People should avoid the three C’s, which are closed spaces, crowded places and close-contact settings. The Japanese government shared this advice with the public in early March, and it became omnipresent. The message to avoid the three C’s was on the news, variety shows, social media and posters. “Three C’s” was even declared the buzzword of the year in Japan in 2020.

The three C’s taught people what to avoid. How they do that may be different, depending on individual circumstances and risk tolerance. Some people may be able to stay home. Others may remain silent on crowded trains as they commute to work to avoid spread. Some people may dine out but avoid sitting immediately across from one another. Most people are likely to continue to mask.

Even though over 70 percent of Japanese citizens are fully vaccinated, vaccination alone won’t be sufficient for the world to live with Covid-19. The Japanese people will need to embrace the three C’s whenever there’s a surge. This is most likely how we will continue to adapt to life with the virus.

It would require a much deeper analysis to understand how anthropological, cultural and historical contexts have played into the various response measures around the world and their effectiveness. But for now, we know that an effective, science-based message has helped Japan keep deaths lower compared to the numbers in peer countries and could be an example of how to move forward in a world where Covid-19 will always be with us.

SCOTUS Corruption

Is it right for the wife of a Supreme Court judge to be active in groups that are involved in cases which are before her husband? Clarence Thomas must recuse.

SCOTUS is not required to abide by the same ethics code as other courts. This situation starkly demonstrates how much a problem this is. Currently, Ginni Thomas could clandestinely receive all kinds of payments from entities that have cases before her husband with no consequences.

Talking Points

In just one year, Democrats have:

• Got Shots in Arms & Saved Lives: The President set up a historic vaccination program that resulted in more than 200 million Americans getting fully vaccinated this year – almost 75% of all adults. Millions of teenagers and children are now vaccinated, and tens of millions of Americans are getting booster shots. The President closed the racial equity gap in COVID vaccinations among adults. And, about 96% of schools have re-opened their buildings and welcomed students back to learn in their classrooms. All these steps have and continue to save countless lives. 

• Got People Back to Work: President Biden has spurred the fastest economic growth in decades and added 6.4 million jobs - the most ever recorded in one year. Weekly unemployment claims are at their lowest level since 1969. Economic growth is the strongest it’s been in two generations – and for the first time in 20 years, the U.S. economy has grown faster than China’s.

• Passed Laws to Create Jobs & Rebuild Crumbling Infrastructure: President Biden got the American Rescue Plan and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed -- the most impactful legislative agenda ever for a first-year president. The American Rescue Plan led to what experts estimate will be the lowest child poverty rate on record. The unemployment rate is down to 3.9% – two years faster than projected. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law will create jobs, provide clean drinking water, upgrade our roads, airports, and rail, and is a critical, first step towards a clean energy future.

Some facts on the record firsts of Biden’s Presidency so far:

• Jobs: President Biden’s first year was the greatest year of job creation in American history, with more than 6 million jobs created.

• Unemployment Rate: The unemployment rate dropped from 6.2% when Biden took office to 3.9% – the biggest single year drop in American history.

• Unemployment Claims: The average number of Americans filing for unemployment every week has been at its lowest level since 1969. When the President took office, over 18 million were receiving unemployment benefits; today only 2 million are — also the biggest single year drop in history.

• Economic Legislation Passed: Most significant economic impact of any first-year president.

• Child Poverty: Experts estimate the US reached its lowest child poverty rate ever in 2021.

• Expanded Access to Health Care: Nearly five million Americans have newly gained health insurance coverage.

• Reduced Hunger: The number of households reporting that they sometimes or often did not have enough to eat dropped by 32%.

• Judges Confirmed: More judges confirmed to lower federal courts than any president since President Kennedy.

• Judges That Reflect Our Nation: More Black women appointed to the US Court of Appeals than any president -- even over 8 years -- in history.

• Cabinet: First majority non-white Cabinet in history, with most women in the Cabinet, including first female Treasury Secretary, first LGBTQ+ and Native American Cabinet officials, and first female Director of National Intelligence.

• Climate Investments: Largest investments ever in climate resilience, the power grid, and electric vehicle chargers.

• Clean Water: Largest investment and national, bipartisan plan to get safe and clean drinking water to all Americans.

• Cleaner Cars: Strongest vehicle emissions standards ever, saving drivers money at the pump and reducing pollution.

• Wind: First-ever approvals of large-scale, offshore wind projects.

• Personnel: Most diverse Administration in history – most women, people of color, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+, first-generation American, and first-generation college graduates.

Read Your Constitution

Even "Constitutional Conservatives" don't read the part where Congress has the complete power to overrule states on rules about federal elections. So don't give me crap about a federal takeover of elections. It was in the Constitution from the beginning. Article I, Section 4.

Deep Doodoo

Neil Katyal  analyzes the consequences of the recent 8-1 ruling of SCOTUS on Trump's January 6 documents with Lawrence O'Donnell

COVID vaccines and placebo effect

Most COVID vaccine side effects due to placebo effect, metastudy finds.

A meta-analysis looking at data from 12 vaccine trials has concluded up to three-quarters of adverse events reported following COVID-19 vaccination can be attributed to the placebo effect. The researchers call for improved public health communication to inform people that many vaccine side effects can be attributed to what is known as the "nocebo effect."

The new research looked at data from 12 COVID-19 vaccine trials encompassing over 45,000 people. Over 35 percent of those in the trials receiving a placebo reported systemic side effects after the first dose, including fever, headache and fatigue. This compared to around 46 percent of those in active vaccine groups reporting similar side effects.

Possible life on Mars

Curiosity detects carbon signature on Mars that, on Earth, indicates life

NASA’s Curiosity rover has detected high amounts of an unexpected form of carbon on Mars. That might not sound too exciting, but the kicker is that here on Earth, this chemical signature is usually associated with life.

Crucially, carbon-12 is usually considered a signature of biological chemistry. Earthly organisms use carbon-12 to metabolize their food, while plants use it to perform photosynthesis. That seems to suggest that the rover has detected evidence of ancient life on Mars, however, the team says we just don’t know enough about the Red Planet’s carbon cycle to be sure.

As for those other explanations, the team gives two non-biological hypotheses about the source of this carbon-12. The first says that ultraviolet light from the Sun could have interacted with carbon dioxide in Mars’ atmosphere, which would have produced carbon-rich molecules that then settle on the surface. And the second story suggests that the solar system may have passed through a huge molecular cloud hundreds of millions of years ago, which could have caused more carbon-12 to rain down to the surface.

And then there’s the third hypothesis – that ancient bacteria living on and just below the surface of Mars would have released methane into the atmosphere. This would then have interacted with UV light and been converted into more complex molecules, creating the carbon signature detected by Curiosity billions of years later.

As tempting as it is to want to believe the third story, the team cautions that non-biological origins are probably the more likely culprit. What works on Earth doesn’t necessarily apply to Mars.

“The hardest thing is letting go of Earth and letting go of that bias that we have and really trying to get into the fundamentals of the chemistry, physics and environmental processes on Mars,” said Jennifer L. Eigenbrode, an author of the study.

 

Pandemic religion

Losing my religion: The pandemic is causing many to lose faith in God

New research published in the Journal of Religion and Health has found faith in God and trust in a higher power declined across the course of the pandemic. The German survey found the longer the pandemic went on, the more people seemed to lose their faith in God.

It is generally thought that belief in God and reliance on religious institutions increase during times of trauma and crisis. Prior studies have indicated faith-based beliefs can help people make sense of traumatic events that can initially seem meaningless or random.

A Pew Research poll conducted in the summer of 2020 found, in the United States at least, the pandemic was strengthening many people’s religious faith.

“Analyses revealed that with the 2nd wave of the infection and its 2nd lockdown, trust in a Higher Source, along with praying and meditation decreased,” the researchers wrote in the new study. “Also, the sharp increase in corona-related stressors was associated with a decline of wellbeing and a continuing loss of faith. These developments were observed in both Catholics and Protestants, and in both younger and older persons.”

the researchers hypothesize this general loss of faith trend during the pandemic is most likely due to a severing of the social bonds many religious communities rely upon.

“It seems that, due to the long course of social distancing and related restrictions, more or less vital social and religious bonds between people and local religious communities were affected and even disrupted,” the researchers hypothesized. “… when sacred spaces (i.e., the churches) are not easily accessible, people may lose access to the center of their public religious life, and thus they may either develop new forms of spiritual practices in privacy or simply get used to the loss.”

While the pandemic has unsurprisingly led to decreases in US church attendance over the past 18 months, it is believed this should pick up as the coronavirus subsides. And many religious organizations are indicating a need to modernize their accessibility to make better contact with younger demographics.

Catalyst to convert CO2 to solid carbon

Liquid metal catalyst quickly coverts carbon dioxide into solid carbon

Researchers at RMIT have developed a new method for quickly converting carbon dioxide into solid carbon, which can be stored indefinitely or turned into useful materials. The technology works by bubbling CO₂ up through a tube of liquid metal, and it’s designed to be easy to integrate into the source of emissions.

The RMIT team’s new system uses liquid metal, specifically an alloy called Eutectic Gallium-Indium (EGaIn), which is heated to between 100 and 120 °C (212 and 248 °F). Then, carbon dioxide is injected into the mix, and as the bubbles rise, the CO₂ molecules split into flakes of solid carbon. These float to the top, making it easy to collect the material.

Solid carbon, on the other hand, is stable, and could be stored more or less indefinitely without risk of leakage. The team says this could be buried again, or, more promisingly, used for other industrial applications, such as making concrete.

Principles for Better AI

A former Google scientist has some ideas.

Translation: The goal for algorithms should not be to keep us constantly clicking and buying but to make us better people and our society more just. 

Cowen said he even envisions social media companies using Hume’s platform to gauge a user’s mood — then algorithmically adjusting served posts to improve it.

“Is it increasing people’s sadness when they see a post? Is it making them sad a day or two later even when the post is gone?” Cowen said. “Companies have been lacking objective measures of emotions, multifaceted and nuanced measures of people’s negative and positive experiences. And now they can’t say that anymore.”

(In the guidelines, Cowen says Hume’s goal is that AI be used to “strengthen humanity’s greatest qualities of belonging, compassion, and well-being” while also reducing “the risks of misuse.” The guidelines ask signees to take such pledges as “Empathic AI should never be used to develop more cruel forms of psychological warfare by optimizing for negative emotional responses.”)

“The right technology can help a lot. But if you’re just looking at technology to create a safety culture, it’s not going to work,” he said. He cited government regulation and hard standards set by the likes of insurance companies and auditors as essential.

Hume’s adoption head winds could be fierce. A Pew Research Center study published in June found that more than two-thirds of AI experts did not believe that artificial intelligence would be used mostly for social good by 2030.

“If we continue to improve these algorithms to optimize for engagement without projects like empathic AI, then soon kids will be spending 10 hours a day on social media,” he said. “And I don’t think that’s good for anyone.”

Giving Up Too Soon

Experts fear that we will swing too far into the "living with the virus" camp, too soon.

Crushing the virus is no longer the strategy. Many countries are just hoping for a draw.

It’s a strategic retreat, signaled in overt and subtle ways from Washington to Madrid to Pretoria, South Africa, to Canberra, Australia. Notably, few countries today outside of China — which is still locking down cities — cling to a “zero-covid” strategy.

the virus has killed more than 5.5 million people, and the pandemic is ongoing. But the global health emergency has evolved — reshaped by the tools deployed to combat it, including vaccines. The virus itself and the disease it causes are now so familiar, they have lost some of their early spookiness.

Even officials in Australia, long a fortress nation that sought to suppress the virus at all costs, have chosen to ease some mandates in recent weeks.

“The decision to remove restrictions just as Omicron surged has cost us dearly,” declared a report from an independent group of experts called OzSAGE. “The ‘let it rip’ strategy and defeatist narrative that ‘we are all going to get it’ ignores the stark lived reality of the vulnerable of our society.”

In South Africa, where officials first sounded the alarm about omicron, the government in December eased protocols, betting that previous encounters with the virus have given the population enough immunity to prevent significant levels of severe illness. The omicron wave there subsided quickly with modest hospitalizations, and scientists think one reason is that so many people — close to 80 percent — had previously been infected by earlier variants.

Omicron also appears to be less virulent — less likely to cause disease. This heavily mutated coronavirus variant stiff-arms the front-line defense of antibodies generated by vaccines and previous infection but does not seem to be adept at invading the lungs or escaping the deeper defenses of the immune system.

In the ideal scenario, omicron’s alarming wave of infections will spike quickly, leaving behind a residue of immunity that will keep a broad swath of the population less vulnerable to future infections. 

Slippery variants packing a more powerful punch could yet emerge, and virologists say that, contrary to what has sometimes been conjectured, viruses do not inexorably evolve toward milder strains.

French President Emmanuel Macron is blunt about his desire to make life uncomfortable for the unvaccinated by limiting their ability to go into public places. In a newspaper interview, he used graphic language that has been translated into English as “I really want to piss them off.”

The vaccines do lower the risk of severe illness. What they do not do as well is stop transmission and mild infection. The speed of omicron’s spread is the key factor in the equation that determines how much pressure it will put on hospitals — which are currently seeing record numbers of covid patients in the United States.

“People think that means we just give up,” she said. “They think ‘endemic’ means that we’re all going to get covid eventually. I’m hearing people say, ‘Why not just get it over with now, and I’ll be bulletproof?’ None of this is what endemicity means.”

Genomics moves to the cloud

Until now, researchers shared genomic data by transferring large files back and forth. With AnVIL, Johns Hopkins is sharing the data is a cloud is ways that researchers can use it remotely.

France does better than US

 Paul Krugman explains the success in France.

When the pandemic forced economies into a temporary lockdown, Europe, France included, and the United States took divergent routes toward supporting workers’ incomes. We offered enhanced unemployment benefits; France offered subsidies to employers to keep furloughed workers on the payroll. At this point it seems clear that the European solution was better, because it kept workers connected to their employers and made it easier to bring them back once vaccines were available.

France also has universal child care, which reopened relatively early in the pandemic, as did schools — freeing parents, largely mothers, to return to work.

at a time when Republicans denounce as destructive “socialism” any effort to make America less unequal, it’s worth knowing that the economy of France — which isn’t socialist but comes far closer to socialism than anything Democrats might propose — is doing pretty well.

Economic Policy Success

 Paul Krugman counters the doom and gloom.

Sponsor Circles for Afghan Refugees

 link

Political Hobbyism

 The Last Word transcript 1/12/22

See post "Winning in the Trenches"

Getting Free Trade to really work

 Peter Coy explains.

Hubbard makes the standard Econ 101 argument for free trade, which can be tailored for defenses of all kinds of markets. First, assert that trade increases prosperity by allowing each country to specialize in what it’s best at. (Generally true.) Second, acknowledge that not everyone wins from free trade; for example, some jobs are displaced by cheap imports. (Certainly true.) Third, state that this problem can be easily solved: Everyone in society can be made better off if the winners share some of their gains with the losers.

The flaw in this sequence is the third part: In reality, the winners from trade rarely share much of their gains with the losers. The losers remain losers, and they often vote for candidates who put up tariff walls.

But when it comes to proposed solutions, Hubbard’s are bound to strike skeptics of free trade as lukewarm. They include block grants for community colleges, personal re-employment accounts to help displaced workers acquire marketable skills, wage insurance, an expanded earned-income tax credit, “place-based” aid that creates jobs where people live so they don’t have to move and changed tax subsidies for health insurance that make it easier for people to change jobs without losing coverage. He proposes a task force on economic engagement that would issue scorecards on bills and regulations based on whether they promote economic engagement. (Surprisingly for a Republican economist, he also suggests a “modest” increase in the corporate income tax and is open to getting rid of a provision in the estate tax that allows heirs to avoid taxation on capital gains made before their inheritance.)

Running the numbers and they don't look good

David Shor Is Telling Democrats What They Don’t Want to Hear

In addition to winning in the trenches, we need to know who our voters really are. The short story is that party leaders need to pay attention to the less-educated and the less affluent and the issues which affect them. 

President Biden’s agenda is in peril. Democrats hold a bare 50 seats in the Senate, which gives any member of their caucus the power to block anything he or she chooses, at least in the absence of Republican support. And Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are wielding that leverage ruthlessly.

But here’s the truly frightening thought for frustrated Democrats: This might be the high-water mark of power they’ll have for the next decade.

Democrats are on the precipice of an era without any hope of a governing majority. The coming year, while they still control the House, the Senate and the White House, is their last, best chance to alter course. To pass a package of democracy reforms that makes voting fairer and easier. To offer statehood to Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. To overhaul how the party talks and acts and thinks to win back the working-class voters — white and nonwhite — who have left them behind the electoral eight ball. If they fail, they will not get another chance. Not anytime soon.

Senate Democrats could win 51 percent of the two-party vote in the next two elections and end up with only 43 seats in the Senate.

Either way, the sorting that educational polarization is picking up, inexact as the term may be, puts Democrats at a particular disadvantage in the Senate, as college-educated voters cluster in and around cities while non-college voters are heavily rural. This is why Shor believes Trump was good for the Republican Party, despite its losing the popular vote in 2016, the House in 2018 and the Senate and the presidency in 2020. “Sure, maybe he underperforms the generic Republican by whatever,” Shor said. “But he’s engineered a real and perhaps persistent bias in the Electoral College, and then when you get to the Senate, it’s so much worse.” As he put it, “Donald Trump enabled Republicans to win with a minority of the vote.”

The second problem Democrats face is the sharp decline in ticket splitting — a byproduct of the nationalization of politics. As recently as 2008, the correlation between how a state voted for president and how it voted in Senate elections was about 71 percent. Close, but plenty of room for candidates to outperform their party. In 2020, it was 95.6 percent.

The days when, say, North Dakota’s Republicans would cheerfully vote for a Democrat for the Senate are long past. Just ask Heidi Heitkamp, the defeated North Dakota Democrat who’s now lobbying her former colleagues to protect the rich from paying higher taxes on inheritances. There remain exceptions to this rule — Joe Manchin being the most prominent — but they loom so large in politics because they are now so rare. From 1960 to 1990, about half of senators represented a state that voted for the other party’s nominee for president, the political scientist Lee Drutman noted. Today, there are six.

Put it all together, and the problem Democrats face is this: Educational polarization has made the Senate even more biased against Democrats than it was, and the decline in ticket splitting has made it harder for individual Democratic candidates to run ahead of their party.

Democrats are on the edge of an electoral abyss. To avoid it, they need to win states that lean Republican. To do that, they need to internalize that they are not like and do not understand the voters they need to win over. Swing voters in these states are not liberals, are not woke and do not see the world in the way that the people who staff and donate to Democratic campaigns do.

All this comes down to a simple prescription: Democrats should do a lot of polling to figure out which of their views are popular and which are not popular, and then they should talk about the popular stuff and shut up about the unpopular stuff. “Traditional diversity and inclusion is super important, but polling is one of the only tools we have to step outside of ourselves and see what the median voter actually thinks,” Shor said. This theory is often short-handed as “popularism.” It doesn’t sound as if it would be particularly controversial.

Shor believes the party has become too unrepresentative at its elite levels to continue being representative at the mass level. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the people we’ve lost are likely to be low-socioeconomic-status people,” he said. “If you look inside the Democratic Party, there are three times more moderate or conservative nonwhite people than very liberal white people, but very liberal white people are infinitely more represented. That’s morally bad, but it also means eventually they’ll leave.” The only way out of this, he said, is to “care more and cater to the preference of our low-socioeconomic-status supporters.”

Winning in the trenches

 Ezra Klein  and the wisdom of Steve Bannon

“A third of Americans say they spend two hours or more each day on politics,” he writes. “Of these people, four out of five say that not one minute of that time is spent on any kind of real political work. It’s all TV news and podcasts and radio shows and social media and cheering and booing and complaining to friends and family.”

 this isn't the way

Real political work, for Hersh, is the intentional, strategic accumulation of power in service of a defined end. It is action in service of change, not information in service of outrage.

for Democrats to be in a position to protect democracy, they need bigger majorities.

There are people working on a Plan B. This week, I half-jokingly asked Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, what it felt like to be on the front lines of protecting American democracy. He replied, dead serious, by telling me what it was like. He spends his days obsessing over mayoral races in 20,000-person towns, because those mayors appoint the city clerks who decide whether to pull the drop boxes for mail-in ballots and small changes to electoral administration could be the difference between winning Senator Ron Johnson’s seat in 2022 (and having a chance at democracy reform) and losing the race and the Senate. Wikler is organizing volunteers to staff phone banks to recruit people who believe in democracy to serve as municipal poll workers, because Steve Bannon has made it his mission to recruit people who don’t believe in democracy to serve as municipal poll workers.

I’ll say this for the right: They pay attention to where the power lies in the American system, in ways the left sometimes doesn’t. Bannon calls this “the precinct strategy,” and it’s working.

While Congress can write, in some ways, rules or boundaries for how elections are administered, state legislatures are making decisions about who can and can’t vote. Counties and towns are making decisions about how much money they’re spending, what technology they’re using, the rules around which candidates can participate.”

Protecting democracy by supporting county supervisors or small-town mayors — particularly ones who fit the politics of more conservative communities — can feel like being diagnosed with heart failure and being told the best thing to do is to double-check your tax returns and those of all your neighbors.

“If you want to fight for the future of American democracy, you shouldn’t spend all day talking about the future of American democracy,” Wikler said. “These local races that determine the mechanics of American democracy are the ventilation shaft in the Republican death star. These races get zero national attention. They hardly get local attention. Turnout is often lower than 20 percent. That means people who actually engage have a superpower. You, as a single dedicated volunteer, might be able to call and knock on the doors of enough voters to win a local election.”

“One thing I was really struck by when I first started getting involved in politics is how much power there is in just showing up to things,” she said. “If you love libraries, libraries have board meetings. Go to the public meeting. See where they’re spending their money. We’re supposed to be participating. If you want to get involved, there’s always a way.”