| From | NDN <[email protected]> |
| Subject | NDN News: The 2022 US Election Begins Today |
| Date | May 3, 2022 2:29 PM |
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NDN News: The 2022 US Election Begins Today
The 2022 Election Begins Today – If you’ve been part of the NDN community, you know it’s our view that current global and domestic trends will make GOP success this year far less likely than conventional wisdom holds right now.
Simply, since the rise of Trump/MAGA and its allies in Europe, Western countries including the US have been steadily putting center-left governments in power and defeating far right parties. The threat of this new politics has been widely understood by the voters of the West, and today the far right is much further from power than it has been in years. In the US for example the Democratic margin in the three elections since Trump took over the GOP has averaged 5 points. In the last two elections the Dem margin averaged 6 points in historically high turnout elections. More people have voted against MAGA in the US than any other political movement in our history.
For Republicans to take control of either chamber in Congress this fall it would mean that an awful lot of people who voted against a radicalized right would have to stay home or switch over to the Republican side. We think either of those scenarios is far less likely now, as overturning Roe may be the single most unpopular and out of the mainstream position this modern right holds today. The polling on this issue is eyepopping. Overturning Roe is opposed 69%-30% in a new CNN poll. In a new Navigator poll 72% of pro-choice voters (almost 60% of the electorate) say they will be more likely to vote if Roe is overturned.
The problem for Republicans is that confirmation of their extremism on any single issue opens the door for Democrats to expand the conversation with voters about the out of the main stream positions the GOP holds on many other issues – climate, health care, book banning, denigration of our democracy, support of Putin and authoritarianism, attacks on Disney, raising taxes on working people while cutting taxes on the wealthy, etc – and remind voters that this is the kind of politics rejected by record numbers in the last 2 elections. It can wake up the clear anti-MAGA majority, once again get them off their couches and get them go out there and fight, and vote.
2022 is now a “choice” election, between a party which has repeatedly made things better for the country and one that wants to tear it all down. As we’ve been saying it is why when it comes to the 2022 elections we would rather be us than them. For more on the 2022 elections, see these two items below.
The Center-Left Rises in the West - Since the infamous Trump-Putin Helsinki summit in the summer of 2018, the far right extremist politics new this alliance represented has steadily lost ground in the West. Democrats took the Presidency, the Senate and House in very high turnout elections in 2018 and 2020. In the 2019 European elections Greens and Liberals were the big winners. A new emerging coalition of Center/Liberals, Social Democrats/Progressives and Greens now run the governments of Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the US. Even in the UK, recent polling now has now Labour ahead of the Tories 40% to 34%, and Labour/Lib Dems/Greens lead the Tories/UKIP/Reform 56%-39%, a margin similar to Macron’s huge rout of Le Pen. The center right and Putin aligned, anti-Europe far right are now more out of power in the West than in any time in recent memory. The EU and NATO are expanding. A new center/center-left is clearly ascendent.
Russia’s aggression and barbarism in Ukraine has also become serious political problem for the Western right, including the GOP here in the US. The Republican Party’s leading politician, Donald Trump, has deep ties to Putin and continues to praise him. A leading institution of the American right, CPAC, heads to Hungary in a few weeks to create common cause with Putin’s last remaining major European ally, Victor Orban. A record number of Americans voted against Trump’s illiberalism in 2018 and 2020 (Dem’s won these two elections by an average of 6.5 pts), and as we have argued, the GOP’s doubling down on MAGA/insurrection/illiberalism is going to create a very low ceiling for the Republican Party this fall, perhaps low enough to deny them a victory. Voters in the West, including America, have been embracing a far more liberal and green politics in recent years, and it is hard for us to imagine all those voters who viewed MAGA as a big threat putting illiberal insurrectionists back in control of the House, particularly when all can see what savagery Putinism brings. The political space for this kind of extremist politics is disappearing in the West, for good reason, and the GOP’s doubling down on it in recent months looks increasingly like a huge miscalculation.
If American voters come to believe that a vote for the GOP helps Putin and weakens the West this could be a far more challenging environment for Republicans this fall than the current landscape suggests. As a new Ron Brownstein CNN essay quotes Simon: “It is critical that Democrats take this radicalization we are witnessing and make it into a kitchen table issue. That has to be part of the discourse with the American people this year in order to make this into a competitive election.”
Dems Need to Get Loud Now, Turn On Their Campaigns - In a new podcast with Joe Trippi, and in a recent Greg Sargent Washington Post article, Simon returns to a big challenge we’ve been talking about for years – the need for Democrats to get louder in an "always on" information landscape. In these media appearances, and in these three essays (here, here, here), he lays out four ways Dems can get louder and hopefully begin to change the current political information landscape, particularly on the economy:
· DNC can make it their central job this year to educate the public about how much better things are, using all the tools the national party infrastructure has at its disposal – paid and organic media, in depth issue/language training of party leaders/groups across the country etc. Brings the Party together, creates a single national goal for all Democrats.
· Dem campaigns turn on, start spending money now. The risk of holding until the fall outweighs the risk of starting to engage now. Can be low levels of media, but starting campaigns now will excite our supporters, start to draw out the opposition. Think we just need to put our heads down and start engaging/fighting. Change the dynamic. Idea of starting volunteer GOTV phone banks now should be explored, tested. Democrats across the country need to be given something to do, now.
· DNC/DSCC/DCCC can start holding a weekly Zoom based national fundraisers for battleground candidates. Make it festive, celebratory, shoot to raise $1m each week. Bring in celebrities, make it like a weekly Dem tv show showcasing a single candidate/patriot fighting to save our democracy. Again, we need to engage our supporters, wake them up, give them something to do.
· Finally, we should reimagine the War Room. The new War Room should be millions of people wired together perhaps to the DNC, amplifying core messages/narratives, making our family louder. Right is highly networked and amplified. We can do it in a single core place like the DNC but also campaigns need to start better organizing their supporters to be partners in the daily info war not just donors to the cause. We have to put our people to work for the good of the country.
Behind all these ideas is an understanding that the daily information battle is a national one. Our networks and information flow are not geographically based. Far more emphasis should go into winning the daily national conversation, and not believing that localized content – ads, surrogate visits, local media – can overcome underperforming in the daily national back and forth. Just as Dem volunteers can give money to a campaign and make calls for campaigns outside of where they live, they can also share information across their networks and reach voters outside of where we live. We need everyone rowing in the boat, together.
- Simon, Georgia, and the rest of the NDN team
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Contributions or gifts to NDN are not deductible for federal tax purposes. Contributions or gifts to The New Policy Institute are tax-deductible. |
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Washington, DC 20024
www.ndn.org @NDN_NPI
If you believe you received this message in error or wish to no longer receive email from us, please [link removed].
NDN News: The 2022 US Election Begins Today
The 2022 Election Begins Today – If you’ve been part of the NDN community, you know it’s our view that current global and domestic trends will make GOP success this year far less likely than conventional wisdom holds right now.
Simply, since the rise of Trump/MAGA and its allies in Europe, Western countries including the US have been steadily putting center-left governments in power and defeating far right parties. The threat of this new politics has been widely understood by the voters of the West, and today the far right is much further from power than it has been in years. In the US for example the Democratic margin in the three elections since Trump took over the GOP has averaged 5 points. In the last two elections the Dem margin averaged 6 points in historically high turnout elections. More people have voted against MAGA in the US than any other political movement in our history.
For Republicans to take control of either chamber in Congress this fall it would mean that an awful lot of people who voted against a radicalized right would have to stay home or switch over to the Republican side. We think either of those scenarios is far less likely now, as overturning Roe may be the single most unpopular and out of the mainstream position this modern right holds today. The polling on this issue is eyepopping. Overturning Roe is opposed 69%-30% in a new CNN poll. In a new Navigator poll 72% of pro-choice voters (almost 60% of the electorate) say they will be more likely to vote if Roe is overturned.
The problem for Republicans is that confirmation of their extremism on any single issue opens the door for Democrats to expand the conversation with voters about the out of the main stream positions the GOP holds on many other issues – climate, health care, book banning, denigration of our democracy, support of Putin and authoritarianism, attacks on Disney, raising taxes on working people while cutting taxes on the wealthy, etc – and remind voters that this is the kind of politics rejected by record numbers in the last 2 elections. It can wake up the clear anti-MAGA majority, once again get them off their couches and get them go out there and fight, and vote.
2022 is now a “choice” election, between a party which has repeatedly made things better for the country and one that wants to tear it all down. As we’ve been saying it is why when it comes to the 2022 elections we would rather be us than them. For more on the 2022 elections, see these two items below.
The Center-Left Rises in the West - Since the infamous Trump-Putin Helsinki summit in the summer of 2018, the far right extremist politics new this alliance represented has steadily lost ground in the West. Democrats took the Presidency, the Senate and House in very high turnout elections in 2018 and 2020. In the 2019 European elections Greens and Liberals were the big winners. A new emerging coalition of Center/Liberals, Social Democrats/Progressives and Greens now run the governments of Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the US. Even in the UK, recent polling now has now Labour ahead of the Tories 40% to 34%, and Labour/Lib Dems/Greens lead the Tories/UKIP/Reform 56%-39%, a margin similar to Macron’s huge rout of Le Pen. The center right and Putin aligned, anti-Europe far right are now more out of power in the West than in any time in recent memory. The EU and NATO are expanding. A new center/center-left is clearly ascendent.
Russia’s aggression and barbarism in Ukraine has also become serious political problem for the Western right, including the GOP here in the US. The Republican Party’s leading politician, Donald Trump, has deep ties to Putin and continues to praise him. A leading institution of the American right, CPAC, heads to Hungary in a few weeks to create common cause with Putin’s last remaining major European ally, Victor Orban. A record number of Americans voted against Trump’s illiberalism in 2018 and 2020 (Dem’s won these two elections by an average of 6.5 pts), and as we have argued, the GOP’s doubling down on MAGA/insurrection/illiberalism is going to create a very low ceiling for the Republican Party this fall, perhaps low enough to deny them a victory. Voters in the West, including America, have been embracing a far more liberal and green politics in recent years, and it is hard for us to imagine all those voters who viewed MAGA as a big threat putting illiberal insurrectionists back in control of the House, particularly when all can see what savagery Putinism brings. The political space for this kind of extremist politics is disappearing in the West, for good reason, and the GOP’s doubling down on it in recent months looks increasingly like a huge miscalculation.
If American voters come to believe that a vote for the GOP helps Putin and weakens the West this could be a far more challenging environment for Republicans this fall than the current landscape suggests. As a new Ron Brownstein CNN essay quotes Simon: “It is critical that Democrats take this radicalization we are witnessing and make it into a kitchen table issue. That has to be part of the discourse with the American people this year in order to make this into a competitive election.”
Dems Need to Get Loud Now, Turn On Their Campaigns - In a new podcast with Joe Trippi, and in a recent Greg Sargent Washington Post article, Simon returns to a big challenge we’ve been talking about for years – the need for Democrats to get louder in an "always on" information landscape. In these media appearances, and in these three essays (here, here, here), he lays out four ways Dems can get louder and hopefully begin to change the current political information landscape, particularly on the economy:
· DNC can make it their central job this year to educate the public about how much better things are, using all the tools the national party infrastructure has at its disposal – paid and organic media, in depth issue/language training of party leaders/groups across the country etc. Brings the Party together, creates a single national goal for all Democrats.
· Dem campaigns turn on, start spending money now. The risk of holding until the fall outweighs the risk of starting to engage now. Can be low levels of media, but starting campaigns now will excite our supporters, start to draw out the opposition. Think we just need to put our heads down and start engaging/fighting. Change the dynamic. Idea of starting volunteer GOTV phone banks now should be explored, tested. Democrats across the country need to be given something to do, now.
· DNC/DSCC/DCCC can start holding a weekly Zoom based national fundraisers for battleground candidates. Make it festive, celebratory, shoot to raise $1m each week. Bring in celebrities, make it like a weekly Dem tv show showcasing a single candidate/patriot fighting to save our democracy. Again, we need to engage our supporters, wake them up, give them something to do.
· Finally, we should reimagine the War Room. The new War Room should be millions of people wired together perhaps to the DNC, amplifying core messages/narratives, making our family louder. Right is highly networked and amplified. We can do it in a single core place like the DNC but also campaigns need to start better organizing their supporters to be partners in the daily info war not just donors to the cause. We have to put our people to work for the good of the country.
Behind all these ideas is an understanding that the daily information battle is a national one. Our networks and information flow are not geographically based. Far more emphasis should go into winning the daily national conversation, and not believing that localized content – ads, surrogate visits, local media – can overcome underperforming in the daily national back and forth. Just as Dem volunteers can give money to a campaign and make calls for campaigns outside of where they live, they can also share information across their networks and reach voters outside of where we live. We need everyone rowing in the boat, together.
- Simon, Georgia, and the rest of the NDN team
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Contributions or gifts to NDN are not deductible for federal tax purposes. Contributions or gifts to The New Policy Institute are tax-deductible. |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
800 Maine Avenue SW, Suite 200
Washington, DC 20024
www.ndn.org @NDN_NPI
If you believe you received this message in error or wish to no longer receive email from us, please [link removed].
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