From Merriam-Webster:

One of the hazards of complaining about the qualities of the opposing party’s candidates is that it increases the stakes for having qualified candidates yourself.

Paraphrasing one of my favorite political figures from the last century, we’re defining competency down.

Revisions to the projections for the midterm elections are coming in, both from Cook’s Political Report and Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball. At the Crystal Ball Kyle Kondik updates their projections to predict a coming House Republican majority:

Way back in January, and even as redistricting was still being completed, we suggested that the biggest question about the race for the House was not whether Republicans would win the majority, but rather how big the eventual Republican majority would be. Though there have been twists and turns along the way, that still appears to be the key question with a couple of weeks to go until the election.

While we have always described the Republicans as favorites to win the House majority this cycle, today’s rating changes represent the first time we’ve had at least 218 districts rated as Safe, Likely, or Leans Republican — the minimum number required to win a majority.

Overall, the House playing field remains large and is mostly made up of districts that Joe Biden carried and that Democrats hold. Several weeks ago, we wrote about the districts that have seen at least some outside spending by party groups. There were 57 back then, and the number is up to 61 now. Our sense is that many Democratic incumbents are holding their own but are south of 50%, making them vulnerable to the whims of a GOP-leaning overall national political environment (we’ll address some of these members in one of the bullet points about polling below).

and here’s his conclusion:

After today’s rating changes, we now show 218 districts rated Safe, Likely, or Leans Republican and 195 at least Leans Democratic, with 22 Toss-ups remaining.

Per Crystal Ball tradition, we will push all the Toss-ups to a Leans rating before the election — and we reserve the right to move some of the leaners from one lean column straight to the other, bypassing the Toss-up column (do not pass Go and do not collect $200, to quote Monopoly).

Splitting the Toss-ups down the middle, 11-11, would give the GOP a 229-206 House edge, or a net gain of 16. However, at this point we’d probably pick the Republicans in two-thirds of the Toss-ups, and they may very well end up flipping some of our current Leans Democratic seats as well. Overall, we’re thinking the likeliest House outcome is a GOP gain of somewhere in the high teens or low 20s.

Let’s underscore that. Barring some dramatic new development and, indeed, regardless of dramatic new developments since so many votes have already been cast at this point, Republicans are extremely likely to hold a majority in the House of Representatives in 2023 with as few as 218 seats and as many as 240.

I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry about the many complaints about misinformation and disinformation in politics. Has there been more of it in period leading up to the 2022 midterms or are they about the same as usual? Misinformation and disinformation are intrinsic to American politics—they go all the way back to the acrimonious campaign between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in 1800, the very first real presidential election. There are still some claims made in that election that people believe.

Ending misinformation and disinformation would mean the end of American politics as it’s been for 200 years. Ending the disinformation and misinformation of the “other guys” while leaving that of “your guys” alone would be even worse.

From Our World in Data via a piece in Bloomberg by Niall Ferguson comes the graph above. The spike in 2014 almost undoubtedly represents the combination of the war in Syria/Iraq and the war in Ukraine.

I thought of titling this post “Pax Americana” but it seems to me that’s too self-aggrandizing. I don’t know how to characterize it.

I settled on “you will miss it when it’s gone” and gone it all but certainly is. The deaths in the war in Ukraine alone exceed any year since the 1980s.

I find the lack of balance and proportion in journalism these days very wearing and I’m searching for alternatives. Here are two I’ve found so far:

Ground News

This aggregator site is distinctive not only in that it lists left, center, and right coverage of the news but in that it attempts to assess the bias of each source.

Tangle

This site appears to aspire to be something along the lines of Vox.com without the bias.

Please propose other alternatives, I’ll evaluate them, including them to the list as necessary.

At Politico Caitlin Emma provides a preview of what the agenda of an incoming Republican Congress is likely to be:

Roy is also a member of the Republican Study Committee, the largest caucus of House GOP lawmakers. It released a budget plan in June that proposes making Trump-era individual tax cuts permanent and gradually raising the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare, among other major changes.

As should be needless to say I have severely mixed feelings about that. I suspect that when push comes to shove the only thing that Republicans will be able to agree on will be that taxes should be cut.

IMO the “Trump-era individual tax cuts” were fiscally irresponsible and our economic situation is worse now if anything.

Additionally, I am waiting with bated breath for the Social Security Trustees’ 2023 report. I can’t help but imagine that the nearly 10% increase in Social Security Retirement Income payments will result in moving the exhaustion of the trust fund forward. Labor force participation rates are significant in that, too. The only real question will be whether exhaustion is one year or two years closer.

And this must play a role as well:

Find more statistics at Statista
When Social Security was put in place in 1935 full SSRA was 65 and life expectancy was 60. Now they are 70 and 79, respectively. Obviously, the program is no longer serving the purpose for which it was intended but has expanded in scope substantially. On the one hand pushing the full Social Security retirement age back to 84 would be inhumane but leaving it at 70 doesn’t look workable, either. I think what we really need is multiple different public retirement programs but that’s probably politically impossible.

The Medicare trust fund is in even worse shape. The insolvency date is 2028. There should be little doubt that it, too, is in need of reform but that will be even harder politically.

In the end I’m guessing that the Republican leadership will chicken out on entitlement reform but push making the Trump tax cuts permanent.

Noting the record number of “encounters” at our southern border, the editors of the Wall Street Journal finally address a point I have been making here for years, namely that the failure to secure our borders undermines the case for legal immigration:

The U.S. needs to tighten its rules on asylum to send the message that not everyone in the Western hemisphere can come to the U.S., but the Biden Administration and Democratic leaders in Congress won’t act.

By the way, these are the migrants you read about who are bused or flown from the border to cities across the country. Most of those flights and buses aren’t sent by GOP Governors. They’re sent by the Biden Administration, which wants to ease the pressure on border regions. But that’s why mayors such as Eric Adams in New York are declaring emergencies as they cope with the new arrivals.

All of this represents an American political failure, of which there are many these days. It is also doing great harm to the cause of legal immigration. The perception of an essentially open border is building a political backlash in favor of more restrictionist immigration policies. The bitter truth, which the left won’t admit, is that Mr. Biden’s border failure has done more damage to the immigration cause than Donald Trump’s policies ever did.

The percentage of immigrants in the United States at present is the highest it’s been in a century, when it was at the highest level in our history. At that time the United States essentially slammed the door on new immigrants.

I believe that countries have carrying capacities for immigrants, that ours is higher than most, but that we have reached that carrying capacity. I think we need a guest worker program with a specific focus on Mexican workers. I think we should be accepting more refugees and legal immigrants. Together I think those things mean that we need to reduce the number of people here illegally. I don’t think a wall would be effective because I think that walls are only as effective as the most corruptible border agent. My preferred solution is very tight employer-based restrictions on the employment of workers here illegally, similar to those in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, with substantial penalties for violations That’s what I want.

What does the Biden Administration want?.

For all of the pontificating about how undemocratic our political system is and how much better a strictly majoritarian system would be, I’m not seeing any calls for direct democracy. Has anyone wondered why? I would think that if you believe in a strictly majoritarian system (1/2 + 1 votes rules) that direct democracy would be the ideal.

After cataloguing how the polls have shifted in favor of Republicans over the last month, in his most recent New York Times column David Brooks summarizes his take:

To understand how the parties think the campaign is going, look at where they are spending their money. As Henry Olsen noted in The Washington Post last week, Democrats are pouring money into House districts that should be safe — places that Joe Biden won by double digits in 2020. Politico’s election forecast, for example, now rates the races in California’s 13th District and Oregon’s Sixth District as tossups. Two years ago, according to Politico, he won those areas by 11 and 14 points.

If Republicans are competitive in places like that, we’re probably looking at a red wave election that will enable them to easily take back the House and maybe the Senate.

So how should Democrats interpret these trends? There’s a minimalist interpretation: Midterms are usually hard for the president’s party, and this one was bound to be doubly hard because of global inflation.

I take a more medium to maximalist view. I’d say recent events have exposed some serious weaknesses in the party’s political approach&#133l

Here are the bullet points he goes on to point out:

• It’s hard to win consistently if voters don’t trust you on the top issue.
• Democrats have a crime problem.
• Democrats have not won back Hispanics.
• The Jan. 6 committee and the warnings about MAGA fascism didn’t change minds.
• The Republicans may just have a clearer narrative.

Some of the poll results I’ve seen lately have been startling. More than 30% of Hispanic voters favoring Republicans. 15% of black voters favoring Republicans. It seems to me that’s a real problem for Democrats. For the last 20 years they’ve benefited from demographics; if that is reversing it’s not clear to me how they’ll reverse it. Appealing to young voters isn’t enough—there aren’t enough of them. And young voters don’t remain young voters forever. If Gen X is shifting towards Republicans, impelled by issues like the economy, crime, and the schools, it seems to me that the Democrats’ trouble is even greater.

In case anyone wonders I think the tail has been wagging the dog for a long time. Progressives aren’t even a majority of Democrats let alone of likely voters and yet the progressive ideology has become the guiding star of the party.