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**SEPTEMBER 2, 2022**
Kuttner on TAP
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**** Biden's Luck Continues
Will it last through Election Day?
Building on the surprising success of the Inflation Reduction Act, the
run of good news continues for Biden and the Democrats. Trump's
explanations for his document heist keep crumbling, and more Republican
legislative candidates are awkwardly trying to distance themselves from
him. The backlash against restrictions on reproductive health keeps
intensifying.
In the upset special-election win for Alaska's House seat, Democrat
Mary Peltola defeated Sarah Palin to flip the seat and become the first
indigenous Alaskan to represent her state in Congress. According to
FiveThirtyEight
,
"Alaska is 15 percentage points redder than the nation as a whole. That
means going by the results in the final round, Peltola's 3-point
victory was an
**18-point** overperformance for Democrats."
In the four special elections since June before Alaska there was an
average swing of more than five points
to the Democrats relative to 2020. Alaska increases that average to
seven or eight points. Translated nationally in November, that means a
lot of House seats saved.
My friend Mike Podhorzer, the longtime political director of the
AFL-CIO, likes to say that there are few swing voters but lots of swing
districts. How can that be? The key variable is turnout. If the
Democratic turnout in November is more like that of 2018, when Democrats
gained a net 41 seats, Democrats could actually beat the midterm
jinx-and hold the House.
What's increasingly clear is that the MAGA Republicans are losing
public support and can take power only by defying the will of the
citizenry. Biden's speech last night
displayed a confident
president, who deftly connected unpopular Republican assaults on rights
with their assault on democracy itself.
Republicans, he said, "are determined to take this country
backwards-backwards to an America where there is no right to choose,
no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who
you love. They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of
political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the
pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this
country."
Biden got more good news with today's release of the August jobs
report . The economy
added 315,000 jobs in August, down from 526,000 in July. The
unemployment rate rose slightly, to 3.7 percent. So the rate of job
creation is slowing, even without additional Fed efforts to engineer a
recession. At the same time, the rate of labor force participation
increased by 0.3 percent, meaning that more people are looking for work.
Nothing succeeds like success. The media lives by pack instincts and
clichés, and the new morning line is that maybe Biden and the Democrats
are not dead after all.
Last spring, I went out on a limb in my book Going Big
,
predicting that Democrats could hold Congress in 2022 and that we might
even save democracy. We are not out of the woods, but things are looking
a lot more hopeful.
~ ROBERT KUTTNER
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