There’s an interesting post at Larry Satabo’s Crystal Ball by Alan I. Abramowitz, forecasting the outcome of the 2022 mid-terms. Here’s the meat of it:

Despite their extremely narrow majorities, the forecasts in Table 3 show that Democrats have a reasonable chance of keeping control of both chambers in the midterm elections if they maintain at least a narrow lead on the generic ballot. A recent Quinnipiac poll gave Democrats a nine-point lead on the generic ballot. A lead of that magnitude would predict a Republican gain of one seat in the House and a Democratic gain of two seats in the Senate giving Democrats a 221-214 seat majority in the House and a 52-48 seat majority in the Senate. Given the standard error of about 10 seats for the House forecast and three seats for the Senate model, however, the safest conclusion would be that the balance of power in both chambers would probably be very close. A smaller Democratic lead in the generic ballot, or a Republican lead, would predict a Republican edge in the House, and possibly also in the Senate.

One additional factor that is not included in the House forecast is the impact of redistricting, which will take place this cycle based on the results of the 2020 census. Republicans are widely expected to gain at least a few additional House seats in 2022 by virtue of controlling states with far more House districts during the redistricting process. A similar situation occurred in the 2012 election, in which Republicans managed to hold onto their majority despite losing the national popular vote for the House. If we assume that redistricting will be worth an additional 10 House seats to the GOP, Democrats would likely need a lead of at least 10 points on the generic ballot in order to maintain control of the lower chamber.

The emphasis is mine. The analysis the precedes that explicitly ignores redistricting. It reminds me of one of my college profs who said that he ignored any undergraduate paper until the first “however”.

There’s more than one headwind opposing the Democrats, even considering the “generic ballot”, i.e. ignoring individual candidates. Among those challenges are that presidents’ parties have tended to lose House seats going back more than 200 years, redistricting, and the internecine warfare highlighted in the previous post.

Where to begin, where to begin? How about we start with this piece in the Washington Post by Michael Scherer, Gregory S. Schneider, and David Weigel. Apparently, more progressive candidates aren’t faring that well in primary elections:

Democratic primary voters have been turning away this year from the anti-elite furies that continue to roil Republican politics, repeatedly choosing more moderate candidates promising steady leadership over disrupters from the party’s left wing.

Tuesday’s elections in Virginia, which brought the renomination of former governor Terry McAuliffe and primary losses by three of the Democrats’ most outspoken liberal delegates, only underscored a pattern that was previously apparent in special House elections in Louisiana and New Mexico. New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, a moderate Democrat, won his party’s nomination without a challenge from the left after two protest candidates failed to collect the 1,000 signatures needed for ballot access.

In the crowded Democratic primary in New York City, a similar crop of contenders, including Eric Adams and Andrew Yang, have emerged as front-runners by pushing platforms that include an embrace of police as an essential component of public safety, a far cry from the “defund the police” mantra that some liberal activists embraced in 2020.

I wish they wouldn’t equate “liberal” and “progressive”. I don’t think it’s correct to say this is different from the “anti-elite furies that continue to roil Republican politics” but rather it’s pretty much the Democratic version of the same phenomenon. Is there actually such a thing as a “political establishment” in either party these days? If so I think the rank-and-file of both parties are reacting against their respective establishments. The Democratic leadership is more progressive than the rank-and-file Democrats and Americans, generally, tend to be pragmatic rather than ideological. Here’s another telling snippet:

“There is nothing wrong with being one of those trailblazers who shakes up the status quo, but you can do it in a way that brings people along with you,” said Michelle Maldonado, a small-business owner from Bristow, Va., who defeated the state House of Delegates’ only self-described democratic socialist in Tuesday’s Democratic primary. “Prac-tactical — you’ve got to be practical and tactical at the same time.”

Such rhetoric has left some liberal politicians fuming, as they see the dream of remaking the Democratic Party slipping away like it did during the 2020 presidential campaign, when perceived electability became the most valued commodity and voters coalesced around Joe Biden.

“People like myself who are grass-roots-funded, who don’t take corporate money, are not able to compete effectively,” said Del. Ibraheem S. Samirah (Fairfax), another disruptive liberal who lost in the primary Tuesday after his opponent was endorsed by centrist leaders. “The party is not progressive.”

That’s right. Try as they might to convince themselves otherwise only about 25% to 50% of Democrats are progressives.

Note that Terry McAuliffe, who is handily cruising to re-election is

1. a known quantity and
2. a Clintonista rather than a Bernie Bro

It does raise an interesting question: why is the Biden Administration’s stated agenda so progressive but progressives just aren’t doing that well at the polls? More on this question after a few posts.

In his WSJ column James Freeman mentions the Tax Foundation’s recent assessment of the Biden Administration’s American Jobs Plan:

The White House doesn’t seem to understand that most productivity-enhancing infrastructure is built by business, and when corporate taxes rise, businesses have an incentive to build less of it. The Tax Foundation explains that government spending giveth less investment than the new taxes would taketh away:

We estimate the infrastructure spending would increase long-run GDP by 0.3 percent, but this positive economic effect is entirely offset by the increase in corporate taxation, resulting in less corporate investment which reduces GDP by 0.5 percent in the long run, reduces wages by 0.5 percent, and eliminates 101,000 full-time equivalent jobs.

That’s an example of the deadweight loss I keep harping on.

And they don’t even mention that in order to stimulate the U. S. economy using a Keynesian strategy rather than those of Germany, China, or Japan (or Canada or Mexico) we’d need to produce a lot more of what we consume here. That would make the BANANAs whose support President Biden needs to pass his agenda’s heads explode.

I agree with the observation that Jason L. Riley makes in his Wall Street Journal column. It’s probably a perspective you haven’t heard if you get most of your information from the NYT, WaPo, CNN, or the Huffington Press:

Mr. Manchin isn’t being obstructionist so much as practical, and he’s forcing Democrats to confront tensions within their ranks that they can’t ignore forever. As more college-educated whites have joined the Democratic Party, it has lurched further left, causing discomfort among the more moderate black, Hispanic, Asian and working-class white Democrats who outnumber them. Unlike these progressive white elites, polling shows that minorities in the main tend to support things like voter-ID laws, school choice, race-blind college admissions and the presence of more police officers in high-crime neighborhoods.

David Shor, a data scientist and Democratic strategist, first voiced these concerns in an interview earlier this year with New York magazine. Democrats have tended to treat racial and ethnic minorities as more progressive by nature, but Mr. Shor said that view was a mistake. “Roughly the same proportion of African-American, Hispanic, and white voters identify as conservative,” he said. “What happened in 2020 is that nonwhite conservatives voted for conservatives at higher rates; they started voting more like white conservatives.” Mr. Shor cited the left’s attacks on law enforcement after the death of George Floyd as an example. “In the summer, following the emergence of ‘defund the police,’ as a nationally salient issue, support for [Joe] Biden among Hispanic voters declined,” he said. “We raised the salience of an ideologically charged issue that millions of nonwhite voters disagreed with us on.”

That’s one of the I believe unappreciated risks of increased immigration. Most of today’s immigrants aren’t progressives. They’re more socially and religiously conservative than the progressive who form the Democratic Congressional leadership. Defunding the police is a lot less interesting to them than reducing the crime in their neighborhoods.

Maybe they’ll become more progressive the longer they’re here. Maybe their children will be more progressive. I wouldn’t bet on it.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal are piling on Illinois Gov. J. B. Pritzker and you’ve got to admit there’s a lot to pile on there:

J.B. Pritzker didn’t say “read my lips” in 2018 when he promised the people of Illinois he wouldn’t sign onto a partisan redistricting if elected Governor. Specifically, he promised to veto any redistricting map “drafted or created by legislators, political party leaders and/or their staffs or allies.” But on Friday he broke that promise, and it will now take its rightful place in the annals of political whoppers beside George H.W. Bush’s famous pledge not to raise taxes.

The new map diminishes the already diminished Republican presence in Springfield. Fourteen Republican-held seats in the state house will be squeezed into seven, for example, guaranteeing a loss of at least seven GOP incumbents. No Democratic incumbents will lose seats as a result of a combined new district. It also redraws the boundaries for the state’s Supreme Court for the first time since 1964—an effort to maintain the 4-3 Democratic majority on what is an elected court.

Adding to the wholly politicized nature of the effort is that redistricting is supposed to be done based on the latest Census results. But because of Covid-19, the results won’t come in time to meet the state constitutional deadline of June 30. The state provides for this—a bipartisan, eight-member commission would then take charge—but Democrats went ahead with less reliable and detailed data.

I didn’t expect him to keep that pledge and I honestly don’t see how anyone could have. There’s nothing like getting elected to change your perspective on electoral reform.

Meanwhile Gov. Pritzker has been musing out loud about spending more time with his family and I don’t know whether that’s a euphemism or not. Were I he I would get out while the getting is good. The Madigan case is just getting into its stride and if he thinks he’ll escape that scot free he’s even dumber than I think he is.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal are upset over the leak of tax return information to ProPublica that I posted on the other day:

Leaking such information is a crime, since under federal law tax returns are confidential. ProPublica says it received the files from “an anonymous source” and doesn’t know who provided them, how they were obtained, or what the source’s motives are.

Allow us to fill in that last blank. The story arrives amid the Biden Administration’s effort to pass the largest tax increase as a share of the economy since 1968. The main Democratic argument for a tax hike is that the rich should pay their “fair share.” The ProPublica story is a long argument that somehow the rich don’t pay enough. The timing here is no coincidence, comrade.

If I didn’t make it clear in my post I agree with this assessment:

There is no evidence of illegality in the ProPublica story. As these columns keep pointing out, the rich can afford to hire lawyers and accountants to exploit every part of the tax code to pay the minimum amount of income tax the law allows.

ProPublica knows this, so its story tries to invent a scandal by calculating what it calls the “true tax rate” these fellows are paying. This is a phony construct that exists nowhere in the law and compares how much the “wealth” of these individuals increased from 2014 to 2018 compared to how much income tax they paid. ProPublica says that Mr. Buffett’s “true tax rate” over that period was only 0.10%.

But wealth and income are different, and what Americans pay is a tax on income, not wealth. ProPublica makes much of the fact that these billionaires pay a lower rate on capital gains and dividends than they do on income. The story suggests this is unfair, but it isn’t.

The preferential rate for capital gains and dividends has been a central part of the tax code for decades, and for good reasons. Congress has wanted to encourage capital investment; assets are often held for decades and gains are only realized upon their sale; gains can’t be adjusted for inflation over the years they are held; and investors can’t deduct net capital losses from income beyond $3,000 a year. Bipartisan majorities have long supported this part of the tax code.

The real scandal, as I have pointed out time after time, is not the marginal rates that the richest Americans pay or how small their taxes are relative to their wealth. It’s what’s legal under the tax code (not to mention the code’s complexity). Don’t expect that to change. A good part of the Congress’s power derives from granting exemptions to their friends and donors and punishing their enemies and their enemies’ donor via the tax code. It would not be difficult at all to fix but were the Congress to do so they would relinquish that power so it won’t change. Only those who benefit change.

In a sense this is my “feel good” story of the day it all turned out well. On a state highway in Idaho a border collie mix was “ejected” from the back of a pickup truck in an automobile crash. Here’s a report from KHQ NBC Spokane:

RATHDRUM, Idaho – The Idaho State Police (ISP) is investigation after a crash blocked SH-41 and Hayden Avenue on Sunday afternoon.

ISP said they are looking for people who witnessed the incident.

The crash happened when a GMC Yukon towing a white horse trailer attempted to turn south onto SH-41 when a Buick struck the GMC.

The driver of the Buick, a man from Spirit Lake, was transported to a nearby hospital and was treated and released. No one else was injured.

During the crash, a dog was ejected from the rear of the GMC and is still missing.

That’s exactly why many states prohibit letting dogs ride loose in the backs of pickup trucks. But wait! There’s a happy ending:

Tilly, the 2-year-old Border Collie who was ejected from a car Sunday during a crash, has been found.

He was found on a sheep farm, where he had apparently taken up the role of sheep herder.

According to Tilly’s owner, he has lost some weight since Sunday’s crash and is now drinking lots of water but is otherwise healthy.

And what would you expect him to be doing in sheep country? A border collie, even a mix, has a combination of pack and prey instincts that lead them herd even when no one has asked them to. It’s not just something they like to do, it’s something they need to do. It’s the work for which they were bred.

I think it was one of my favorite humorists, Robert Benchley, who said that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide people into two kinds and those who don’t. In a recent piece in The Atlantic George Packer divides Americans into four different camps:

• Free America
• Smart America
• Real America
• Just America

Here’s his conclusion:

all four of the narratives I’ve described emerged from America’s failure to sustain and enlarge the middle-class democracy of the postwar years. They all respond to real problems. Each offers a value that the others need and lacks ones that the others have. Free America celebrates the energy of the unencumbered individual. Smart America respects intelligence and welcomes change. Real America commits itself to a place and has a sense of limits. Just America demands a confrontation with what the others want to avoid. They rise from a single society, and even in one as polarized as ours they continually shape, absorb, and morph into one another. But their tendency is also to divide us, pitting tribe against tribe. These divisions impoverish each narrative into a cramped and ever more extreme version of itself.

All four narratives are also driven by a competition for status that generates fierce anxiety and resentment. They all anoint winners and losers. In Free America, the winners are the makers, and the losers are the takers who want to drag the rest down in perpetual dependency on a smothering government. In Smart America, the winners are the credentialed meritocrats, and the losers are the poorly educated who want to resist inevitable progress. In Real America, the winners are the hardworking folk of the white Christian heartland, and the losers are treacherous elites and contaminating others who want to destroy the country. In Just America, the winners are the marginalized groups, and the losers are the dominant groups that want to go on dominating.

I don’t much want to live in the republic of any of them.

It’s common these days to hear people talk about sick America, dying America, the end of America. The same kinds of things were said in 1861, in 1893, in 1933, and in 1968. The sickness, the death, is always a moral condition. Maybe this comes from our Puritan heritage. If we are dying, it can’t be from natural causes. It must be a prolonged act of suicide, which is a form of murder.

I don’t think we are dying. We have no choice but to live together—we’re quarantined as fellow citizens. Knowing who we are lets us see what kinds of change are possible. Countries are not social-science experiments. They have organic qualities, some positive, some destructive, that can’t be wished away. Our passion for equality, the individualism it produces, the hustle for money, the love of novelty, the attachment to democracy, the distrust of authority and intellect—these won’t disappear. A way forward that tries to evade or crush them on the road to some free, smart, real, or just utopia will never arrive and instead will run into a strong reaction. But a way forward that tries to make us Equal Americans, all with the same rights and opportunities—the only basis for shared citizenship and self-government—is a road that connects our past and our future.

Meanwhile, we remain trapped in two countries. Each one is split by two narratives—Smart and Just on one side, Free and Real on the other. Neither separation nor conquest is a tenable future. The tensions within each country will persist even as the cold civil war between them rages on.

I found his taxonomy more brittle, more solipsistic, and less factually based than a previous deconstruction of the United States into four groups, Walter Russell Mead’s Jeffersonians, Jacksonians, Wilsonians, and Hamiltonians, on which I’ve written extensively. There’s at least some empirical and historical basis for Mead’s groups. I found Mead’s views more insightful. For example:

Oddly, the most influential libertarians were Europeans, especially the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, whose polemic against collectivism, The Road to Serfdom, was a publishing sensation in America in 1944, during the most dramatic mobilization of economic resources by state power in history.

There’s a reason that was the case. The thinker with the most influence on “Free America” wasn’t Hayek but (Russian) Ayn Rand cf. Paul Ryan, Alan Greenspan, Ron and Rand Paul. There’s more of objectivism to it than Reaganism. I suspect the numbers of people who subscribe to “Free America” or “Just America” are actually quite small.

What confuses things is that there’s bit of resonance between Mr. Packer’s taxonomy and Mead’s: “Free America” and Jeffersonians, “Smart America” and Wilsonians, “Real America” and Jacksonians, but not “Just America”. It’s actually rather new and I believe it’s just another term for Marxism substituting race or gender for class. There can be black, white, or Hispanic Jacksonians but there can only be white “Real Americans”. As someone who presumably considers himself part of “Smart America” his description of “Real America” is a lampoon while he cuts “Smart America” altogether too much slack. Note, too, that Mr. Packer is uncomfortable with his “Just America” appellation:

But Just America has a dissonant sound, for in its narrative, justice and America never rhyme. A more accurate name would be Unjust America, in a spirit of attack rather than aspiration.

which makes Mr. Packer’s analysis more comprehensive than it is. And I think his conclusion is entirely too rosy:

We have no choice but to live together—we’re quarantined as fellow citizens. Knowing who we are lets us see what kinds of change are possible. Countries are not social-science experiments. They have organic qualities, some positive, some destructive, that can’t be wished away.

That is factually untrue. The list of countries that no longer exist is enormous. Austro-Hungary, Prussia, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia. Multi-ethnic, multi-confessional states must maintain a fragile balance. Most nation-states are united by ties of blood. The United States was nearly unique in being, as Chesterton put it a century ago, “a country founded on a creed”. One of Mr. Packer’s factions, “Just America”, rejects that creed as a cruel hoax. Without it I don’t believe there’s anything to keep the United States united.

One word of advice: don’t arouse the Jacksonians. I say this as someone who is not one of them but has lived among them all his life. They are fearsome enemies, merciless, and play by no rules other than victory.

NPR reports on Vice President Kamala Harris’s visit to Guatemala:

Vice President Kamala Harris told Guatemala’s president today that the two need to work together to bring hope to his fellow citizens so that they don’t leave and migrate to the U.S. Harris is in Guatemala City on her first foreign trip as vice president. President Biden put her in charge of one of the toughest jobs facing his administration – that is curbing the surge of migrants at the U.S. border. The two leaders held a press conference this afternoon. And we’re joined now by NPR’s Carrie Kahn, who is in Mexico City, where Harris arrives tonight.

I was favorably impressed by this:

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: Do not come. Do not come. The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our border.

I’ll be even more impressed if the Biden Administration follows through with this pledge.