Sen. Roy Blount (R-MO) becomes the fifth GOP Senator to announce he will not run for reelection next year.* This is not what we would expect to see from a party that thinks it has a shot of regaining the majority next year. There may be more retirements coming as well. Many expect that Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) to be one of them. He will be 89 on election day in 2022, but recently filed a “statement of candidacy” with the Federal Election Commission. That is just a formality, not a commitment to run. Grassley says he’s going to make a decision later this year. I have a suspicion he is waiting until the last minute to announce his retirement to give his grandson an advantage in the Republican primary. Pat Grassley is the Speaker of the Iowa House of Representatives and continues to claim that his grandfather is going to run. That hasn’t stopped Sioux City state senator Jim Carlin (R) from announcing he’s running for the seat. Carlin kicked off his campaign by criticizing the certification of the electoral vote for President Biden.
Another retirement candidate is Wisconsin’s awful Senator Ron Johnson (R). He has made a fool out of himself screaming no like a petulant toddler when it came time to vote on the American Rescue Plan. He was one of the Republicans who spent July 4th a few years ago in Moscow secretly meeting with Putin and has never come clean about what they discussed. He returned to the US a loud and angry Trump defender, as well as one of the Republican officials who continues to promote the Big Lie about the election and show support for the insurrectionists. He has been non-committal about reelection, but he has suggested recently that he is leaning towards retirement. Even if he does not, that race will be competitive.
The Intercept reports that Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) may be working on an exit strategy from the Senate, in which his protégé state Attorney General Daniel Cameron and two other supporters would be offered up as successors. This might be an over-analysis or overreaction to McConnell’s behind the scenes work to change Kentucky law to prevent Gov. Andrew Bevin (D) from appointing a Democrat to fill a potential Senate vacancy. Every Senate vacancy requires a special election, normally held at the next regular statewide election, but governors can fill vacancies in the interim subject to state law. Currently, Bevin has the legal right to appoint anyone constitutionally eligible to fill a vacancy. In a normal time that might seem like a minor inconvenience since a Republican is likely to win a special election even against a Democratic incumbent. However, the Senate is currently tied at 50-50. The loss of one Senator from either party will make a big difference in who controls the chamber.
Kentucky legislators are proposing to change the law so that Bevin will have to pick someone who is a member of the same political party as the former Senator who created the vacancy. That appointee must come from a list of three candidates proposed by the outgoing Senator’s state party. This is an odd proposal. Some states do require the governor to appoint someone of the same party as the outgoing Senator when filling a vacancy, but this law would give unelected Republican Party leaders the power to essentially choose the appointee for the elected governor. McConnell is circulating a list of three successors, including Cameron, former UN Ambassador Kelly Craft, and Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams.
For some, this suggests McConnell is planning to resign and wants to control who succeeds him. My guess - and it's just a guess - is that a combination of age, poor health, watching his wife barely escape justice for corruption as Trump’s Secretary of Transportation, and a belief that he will never be majority leader again are coming together to form a perfect political storm that has him considering resigning. It may also have something to do with the right-wing blowback to his criticism of Trump; McConnell is facing calls to be censured by the state GOP for criticizing Trump even though he voted to acquit him in the recent impeachment trial. I doubt McConnell takes that too seriously since he just won another six-year term, which will likely be his last whether or not he resigns.This could just be prudent politics. With a tied Senate, it is important to be prepared for the possibility of an unexpected vacancy.
The number of retirements and the machinations going on in Kentucky suggest that the Republicans do not believe they can regain the majority in 2022. The conventional wisdom is that the incumbent president’s party loses votes during the first midterm, so why would so many Republicans retire (and more might – like Grassley)? They only need to net one seat to win back the majority. Doesn’t the closeness of party representation in both houses suggest they have a shot of winning back one or both next year? Perhaps the closeness of the houses does not suggest the relative strength Democrats have over Republicans right now, conventional wisdom notwithstanding.
It may be due to what Julian Zelizer calls asymmetric polarization. Last March every Senate Democrat voted for the covid relief bill. Just a few months ago, in December, almost every Senate Democrat did the same for the second relief bill. In both cases, Republicans controlled the Senate and the presidency. However, last week not a single Republican (in both chambers) supported the Biden relief bill. Democrats are working to solve problems; Republicans are polarizing the country hoping voters will blame both parties and ignore the role the GOP plays in creating the polarization and obstructing all attempts to help regular Americans. The lack of support for tangible benefits going to ordinary Americans may be starting fracture the base the GOP has spent 60 years building through nativist appeals.
The populist streak in the GOP which has focused on appeals to racism and nativism has an ideological dimension that is threatening the interests of the business wing of the party. A coalition is developing for a minimum wage increase that includes Bernie Sanders and Josh Hawley, who occupy opposite sides of the Left/Right political spectrum in the Senate. The problem for the business wing of the GOP (which I sometimes call the establishos) is that the economic issues have not improved for the parts of their base they have moved from supporting Democrats to supporting Republicans.
It was inevitable over time that it would become apparent that Republican policies of tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations coupled with austerity for low- and middle-income folks would provoke a reaction from their base. Trump was able to channel that reaction through appealing to their racial and nativist fears and exploiting it. Anger can be power, according to Joe Strummer and Mick Jones, and the GOP has spent years tuning up anger among white voters, hoping to direct it towards Democrats. The problem with Trump’s strategy is that the party has left its base jobless, in poverty, and suffering from addiction. Republican governance gave no tangible benefits for their base. That may be the reason that counties with higher unemployment voted for Biden.
One aspect of Naziism was improving the economic outcome for German workers. Of course, those benefits were reserved only to those meeting the Nazis’ racial definitions placing them in the German social and political community - and even then it was accomplished by increasing work hours and through debt-financed military spending. Proving more income to workers was an important source of social control that the Nazis recognized, but other fascists often did not. Sooner or later, your base needs to receive – not just imagine that they receive – tangible economic benefits for supporting a party that tells them that the Other is responsible for their economic insecurity (which informs and reinforces their notions of racial and gender fragility).
That Hawley supports raising the minimum wage suggests that we might actually get such a bill enacted. But we need to be careful. Hawley is an insurrectionist who, if not fascist himself (a charitable deference, admittedly), cultivates support from fascists. He is under attack from establishment conservatives for his role in the January 6th coup attempt, with major news outlets in his home state of Missouri calling for his resignation and his mentor, former Sen. John Danforth (R-MO), saying on the record that supporting Hawley was the biggest mistake he ever made.
Hawley seems to understand the need to provide tangible benefits – not just whipping up anger – to his base. He supports a much lower minimum wage increase, but he is not opposing one altogether. This seems like a way to point the blame for the base’s economic problems onto the establishos in his own party, now that the Democrats have passed the American Rescue Plan. That act will put thousands of dollars into the pockets of many of the folks the GOP has been counting on to win elections. There is a reason that some in the GOP are trying to rebrand their party as a “working class party.” However, voters eventually see through that. They turned from the Democrats in the ‘90s when the party embraced Clintonism and Wall Street. Clintonites insisted that Democrats were losing presidential elections because they were not conservative enough. How did voters respond? Bill Clinton was indeed elected twice (both times by only a plurality) but Democrats lost hundreds of down-ballot elections – including their majority in the House of Representatives. The ripple effect to state legislatures allowed Republicans to gerrymander themselves into more power through redistricting.
While the establishos in the GOP seem to be opposed to a minimum wage increase, corporations see the problem for them more clearly. Amazon and other large corporations support a $15 minimum wage. Sure they can afford it and for those paying higher wages already this is a way to prevent competitors from undercutting their labor costs, but losing Republican voters will also jeopardize all the tax and other benefits Republicans have provided for Corporate America. Additionally, they are probably aware of Henry Ford’s position that you want to pay your workers enough to afford your products. The decades-long Walmart strategy of driving down prices rather than raising wages appears to have backfired. The significant cost to public services from having so many workers not making enough money to get out of poverty is well-known by now. Sure, Walmart workers could buy some kitchen utensil cheaply, but they could not afford rent or health care. Driving down prices and wages does not work. And with Biden issuing the most pro-union statement a president has ever issued, corporations probably now see the wisdom in raising wages to stave off an organized workforce.
It is not hyperbole to say that the Republican Party has done little in recent years to help out ordinary Americans. Both covid relief packages last year were enacted because of increased pressure and support from Democrats. While zero Republicans in either house supported the American Rescue Plan, Democrats voted for much weaker versions last year when Republicans controlled the Senate and the presidency. McConnell and other Republicans are counting on Americans to not notice the difference. It seems like more voters are starting to notice, despite all the scare tactics thrown up by the GOP about the dangers of unified Democratic control of the government during the election. The real danger of Democratic government is to the GOP’s continued viability as a party that makes racialist appeals to the “white working class” yet never comes through on the tangible benefits those folks need.
The defection of the Democratic Party’s Gang of 8** on keeping the minimum wage increase in the American Rescue Plan, while infuriating, distracts from the significance of the act. This law, which was the cornerstone of the Biden/Harris campaign, will put $1,400 in the pocket of every low-income person in the country. It also cures the “premium cliff” in the Affordable Care Act, which will limit health insurance premiums to 8% of income – and provide no premiums to people with very low incomes. It provides an increase in the unemployment insurance benefit through September, by which time we may not need it as vaccinations increase and folks get back to work. According to The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin, a quarter of the benefits of this act will go to the bottom 20% of incomes compared to just one percent of the GOP’s 2017 tax cut bill. The top 20% will receive just 11% of the benefits of the Biden bill compared to 65% of the tax cut benefits from the GOP’s bill. As the current president said once to President Obama about the ACA, “This is a big fucking deal.” The American Rescue Plan does not just help out Americans, it addresses inequality in a way no other federal law has in years, maybe decades.
Public opinion appears to be on the side of Democratic proposals, even among Republicans. Recent polling found strong support for the American Rescue Plan across all sorts of demographic and political categories. Morning Consult found that only 17% of Americans opposed the $1.9 trillion plan. And it is not just the relief package that Americans support. Recent polls likewise found strong support for HR 1 (voting rights) and strong opposition to employment and health care discrimination against the LBGTQ community.
However, FiveThirtyEight warns that this level of public support for Democratic proposals will not change the GOP’s opposition to them. This is because (1) Republicans have a huge structural advantage in the way in which our government over-represents (politically) minority interests, (2) politics and policymaking is disconnected (the heightened polarization argument), (3) historical midterm backlash against presidential incumbents (the conventional wisdom argument), (4) a belief that voters will punish even a popular president if his agenda is not enacted with bipartisan support (the McConnell strategy, which is rooted in asymmetrical polarization), and (5) the impact of the median voter (i.e., swing voters move to the perceived centrist position).
Aside from the first point, which is admittedly a structural problem – and one that could be partially cured by enacting HR 1 and HR 4 – these concerns are rooted in what has happened previously under different administrations and Congresses during different times. If Democrats learn lessons from the past, they can avoid repeating them. In fact, it appears Biden has learned from the mistakes made during the Obama years in pushing through the popular Rescue Plan regardless of whether any Republicans support it or not. Bipartisanship is not something that Americans really care about, it’s a weapon used by Republicans to discredit Democrats.
What all this demonstrates is that on economic issues, Americans – even Trump supporters – are receptive to progressive solutions and Republicans are acting like they know this and are not sure how to respond.*** This should be an opening for the Democratic Party, even though some voters continue to show knee-jerk opposition solely based on partisan labels.**** It also shows the danger of centrist Democrats reneging on the economic promises most voters heard the party make during the last two election cycles. Progressive solutions to economic problems are popular in America, but voters want results not excuses.
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* The other Republican Senators who have announced retirements are: Rob Portman (OH); Richard Burr (NC); Pat Toomey (PA); Richard Shelby (AL).
** The Gang of 8 includes seven Senate Democrats and one Senate Independent who caucuses with the Democrats: Angus King (I-ME); Maggie Hassan (D-NH); Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH); Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ); Joe Manchin (D-WV); Tom Carper (D-DE); Chris Coons (D-DE); Jon Tester (D-MT).
***Outside of voter suppression and other efforts to limit the ability and desire of Americans to vote.
****Support for the American Rescue Plan dropped from 77% to 71% when respondents were told it was a Democratic proposal in a recent Morning Consult poll.