Based on this @RonBrownstein piece, it seems the Biden admin's lack of emphasis on HR1/HR4 reflects their evaluation--and in my view, an accurate evaluation--of the relative threats democracy and Democrats. theatlantic.com/politics/archi…
According to the article, Biden administration appears to believe that the GOP voter suppression laws, however odious, don't really pose a meaningful threat to democracy or Democrats.
It does appear to take the threat of election subversion--like refusal to certify--seriously
One missed connection here is that HR1/HR4 doesn't do much to address to election subversion. These are reform bills; they just weren't conceived to secure the fundamentals of democracy, and the politics around these bills might be quite a bit different if they were.
Another thing missing is gerrymandering. Unlike, say, limiting mail voting, gerrymandering more fundamentally threatens to lower-case 'd' democratic values while hurting Ds quite a bit.
Yet, the word appears once in the article, as it's been overshadowed by the access debate
I've seen nothing that's really deliberately focused on this stuff (though there are a few provisions in HR1 that incidentally address a few subversion issues, fwiw)
One theme in my replies yesterday is an assumption that plausible reforms under consideration--ending gerrymandering, DC/PR, HR1, etc.--would so fundamentally change the electoral incentives that the GOP would have no choice but to moderate
I don't think that's clear at all
That's not to say that they wouldn't make things tougher on the GOP, but in terms of the magnitude of the effect consider this: the GOP would probably still win all three branches of government in 2016, a fairly close election, if all of those changes were enacted
It's useful to go by chamber. Adding up to four Senate seats would certainly help Democrats, but it wouldn't be enough to flip control in any election this decade.
It would move the Senate bias from R+5 to R+4. Hardly a huge incentive to remake the GOP.
Republican candidates for House won the most votes in 29 states worth 290 electoral votes, accounting for uncontested races, even as Democrats won the House and carried the national House vote by about 2 points by the same measure
And if the conventional wisdom is right about how redistricting will go for Democrats, and I believe it is, then even that national margin of victory in the House vote probably wouldn't be enough to hold the chamber in 2022
I think this winds up as an important twist on the 'why won't the GOP rebrand/autopsy/ditch Trump?' question.
Many have noted the GOP nearly won in 2020, but if the non-Trump GOP did enough to win a trifecta, at least on a 2022 map, why would it think it needs to do anything?
Can Biden bounce back among Latinos? I think there are a lot of reasons for Ds to hope so
Merely holding 2016 support among Latino voters would have meant a Biden+2 victory in Florida and Trump+1 in Texas.
Is there any GOP dead-cat bounce in affluent, well-educated, conservative suburbs?
They're not going back to pre-Trump levels, of course. But what about merely Trump 2016? Here's there's a lot more GOP upside in Texas than Florida
I'm a little late to the Catalist report on the demographic makeup of the electorate from earlier this week, but I wanted to note a few quick things catalist.us/wh-national/
One observation: in the fight between AP/Votecast and the exit poll, the Catalist estimates are a fairly clear vote in favor of Votecast.
And when you put all the various sources together (adding CCES, CPS, live phone), the exit polls are an outlier on several indicators
I'm not going to be comprehensive, but the exit polls continue to show--as they have for more than a decade--an erroneously diverse and well educated electorate, with countervailing (and erroneous) Dem weakness among white voters (esp with a degree)
Why rising diversity isn't quite helping Democrats as much as progressives hope or conservatives fear nytimes.com/2021/05/04/us/…
--Most growth is among non-Black groups of nonwhite voters, who back Ds more modestly
--Rs do fairly well among those groups in the red states that Ds need to flip
--Ds made big, overlooked gains among white voters in many states where diversity might have otherwise been key
That second point--the R strength among nonwhite voters in red states like TX/FL--has a blue state corollary: D strength among nonwhite voters in blue states, which adds to the Dem E.C. challenge by padding Dem margins in IL/CA/NY/CT/NJ etc. without adding electoral votes
New census data on 2020 turnout is out:
White, non-Hispanic share of the electorate drops to 71 percent from 73.3 in 2016
Black share of the electorate drops slightly, from 12.4 to 12.3 percent
Hispanic share increases to 10.6 from 9.2 percent
Demographic change was the main driver of the shift.
The turnout rate among non-Hispanic white voters increased by 5.6 points, slightly above the 5.4 point national average
Black turnout rate increased by just 3.2 points
Hispanic turnout rate increased by 6.1 points
Here's the change in the white share of the electorate, by state.
State data is pretty noisy, don't interpret the details!
One preemptive example: it's likely the white share of the electorate declined slightly in both PA/MI, rather than big drop in one and increase in the other