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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Nothing but a number? [1]

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Date: 2023-07-30  

We begin today with Lisa Lerer and Reid J. Epstein of The New York Times writing about “aging with dignity in public office.”

Two closely scrutinized episodes this week thrust questions about aging with dignity in public office out of the halls of Congress and into the national conversation. On Wednesday, video of Senator Mitch McConnell, 81, freezing for 20 seconds in front of television cameras reverberated across the internet and newscasts. Less than 24 hours later, another clip surfaced of Senator Dianne Feinstein, 90, appearing confused when asked to vote in committee. A political discussion on the issue of age has been building for months, as the country faces the possibility of a presidential contest between the oldest candidates in American history. President Biden, 80, already the oldest president to sit in the White House, is vying for a second term, and Donald J. Trump, 77, is leading the Republican primary race. [...] While other industries have mandatory retirement ages, including some publicly traded companies and airlines, members of Congress have shown little desire for policies that would amount to voting themselves out of a job. Even voters can’t seem to agree on when enough is enough, remaining divided when asked to back a specific age limit.

John Cassidy of The New Yorker attempts to explain why many economic forecasters erroneously predicted a recession.

It almost goes without saying that making economic forecasts is a difficult, and often thankless, task. Modern economies are extremely complex organisms. The aggregate outcomes they generate reflect many factors, including some external ones that are innately unpredictable, such as the coronavirus pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Since last October, though, there haven’t been any colossal surprises. Global supply chains have continued to recover from the pandemic, the war in Ukraine has continued, and the Fed has followed through on its pledge to keep raising rates until inflation is brought under control. Why, then, has the economy outperformed the forecasters’ predictions? The proximate answer is that consumer spending and capital investments by businesses have held up stronger than expected. In the three months from April to June, personal consumption expenditures, which make up more than two-thirds of G.D.P., rose at an annual rate of 1.6 per cent, and gross private domestic investment rose at a rate of 5.7 per cent. Together, these increases accounted for nearly all of the quarterly rise in G.D.P. (The rest was largely due to higher spending by state and local governments.) But merely reciting these figures raises a deeper question: How have households and businesses been able to shrug off higher prices and higher interest rates, at least so far?

Batten down the hatches, y’all, because novelist, essayist, and social commentator Ishmael Reed is on the loose in the pages El País in English stating that millions of white Americans prefer a dictatorship to living in a multiracial democracy and that far too many American institutions along with far too much American money is assisting in the effort to make that so.

Rather than exist in a society where members of all ethnic groups have an opportunity for success, millions of American whites would approve of a dictatorship. Ten million would restore Donald Trump to the presidency by force. Recent polls show that Biden and Trump are tied in the presidential race even though Trump said he would suspend parts of the Constitution and construct an all-powerful executive branch with him as the head. [...] Whites and Black pundits, who are limited in what they can say, cast those who sought to overthrow the government as left behind economically. Studies show that January 6 was a middle-class insurrection. It involved those with pensions, vacation time, IRAs, and stocks. Police and firefighters participated. One of those who sponsored the riot was a food heiress, which brings up another excuse for insurrection offered by east coast columnists, especially the privileged white men who monopolize the editorial pages of The New York Times, even though the person in charge of opinion is a woman. These columnists argue that the white working class is distant from the Democratic Party because the party represents the elites when the right has all the money. Moreover, a recent poll shows that Trump is gaining among college-educated whites, men and women.

Geoffrey Skelley of FiveThirtyEight looks at what the news regarding retirements from the House of Representatives portend for the 2024 elections (Hint: it’s too early in the 2024 electoral cycle to call it.)

Given how thin the margin is, we’re closely watching which House seats might become open due to the officeholder’s retirement or decision to seek another office. Despite a weaker incumbency advantage in recent elections, parties still tend to be more vulnerable to losing control of competitive seats if they aren’t fielding incumbents to defend them. Additionally, a disproportionate number of retirements by one party — especially “pure retirements,” when politicians decide to leave office without seeking another one — can sometimes signal a belief among that party’s officeholders that the coming election will go poorly for them. If you’ve made it this far in the hopes of seeing which way the political winds are blowing, well, sorry. So far this cycle, House departures haven’t revealed much of anything about how things might go next November. Just two representatives have announced they won’t run for reelection or another office — one from each party — while 10 House members are running for the Senate instead of seeking reelection. With 12 overall exits as we reach the end of July, the 2024 cycle ranks in the lower half of election cycles over the past two decades when it comes to the number of announced House departures at this point in time.

Cameron Joseph of Bolts magazine reports that the majority Republican state legislature continues to target Wisconsin’s nonpartisan elections commissioner.

As the administrator of the Wisconsin Election Commission, Meagan Wolfe is the nonpartisan manager of the office that advises and aids Wisconsin’s 72 county clerks and nearly 2,000 local election officials. Wolfe is widely respected by local clerks and election experts from both parties. But she has become a target for right-wing conspiracy theorists touting false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump, and Republican lawmakers who want to appease their base have turned her into a convenient scapegoat. After state senate Republicans made clear earlier this summer that they were unlikely to confirm her for another four-year term, the commission’s Democrats moved to block a procedural step to allow that vote to happen at all. Now, to keep Wolfe in office past her term expiration on July 1, Democrats are banking on the courts to uphold the precedent of a controversial ruling that they had decried and Republicans cheered just a year ago. This unprecedented and unpredictable situation is the result of Republicans’ yearslong attacks on the state’s election governance—and could undermine Wisconsin’s ability to run a smooth election in 2024, when it could well be the state to determine the next presidential election.

All elections matter.

Emma Janssen and Ana Claudia Chacin of the Miami Herald report on the continuing loss of registered Democrats in Miami-Dade County.

Just in the last four years, the number of registered Democrats in the county decreased by over 6,000 voters, and their advantage over registered Republicans was almost cut in half, dropping from a 15-point lead in August 2019 to eight in July 2023, according to a Miami Herald analysis of state voter registration data. Democrats had around 138,000 more registered voters than Republicans in Miami-Dade. The shift has Democrats concerned about the party’s ability to stay relevant in 2024, when voters will cast ballots in the presidential election and local races. Party leaders are scrambling to make changes. “There’s no way for Democrats to win statewide in Florida by having a voter registration meltdown in Miami-Dade County,” said Fernand Amandi, managing partner of the Miami-based political strategy and polling firm Bendixen & Amandi. “Democrats are now registering as Republicans and Republicans are out-hustling Democrats in the most important county in the state for Democrats.” [...] While Miami-Dade arguably represents one of the party’s biggest problems, as 10% of registered voters live in the county, Democrats are losing statewide. The percentage of total voters registered as Democrats has decreased in every single county in Florida since 2019.

Steven Waldman of Editor and Publisher reports on a little-known bill with some bipartisan support designed to keep local newsrooms in business.

The Community News and Small Business Support Act (HR 4756) attempts to address a horrifying phenomenon: local news is disappearing from thousands of communities across the country. Two newspapers are closing each week, on average. There’s been a 57% drop in newsroom employees since 2004. Thousands of towns have no local news source or “ghost newspapers” barely covering the area. The substance of the bill is smart. Tenney and her co-sponsor (Rep. Suzane DelBene of Washington) basically honed in on two excellent parts of an earlier piece of legislation, the Local Journalism Sustainability Act (LJSA). The LJSA included a tax credit for small businesses that advertise in local news and a payroll tax credit for hiring and retaining local journalists. This one-two punch would dramatically help local news. But while Democrats in the past have stressed the payroll tax credit (which we love), Tenney has inverted the emphasis. She rewrote some of the bill’s language and changed its name to underline that the first tax credit goes to restaurants, grocers and other small businesses supporting their local newsrooms.

Finally today, Mark Joseph Stern of Slate writes about Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s use of two methodologies prized by conservatives.

During her confirmation hearing, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson associated herself with two methodologies, originalism and textualism, that are prized by the conservative legal movement. It was not a feint. With her first term wrapped up, it’s safe to say that Jackson really does have zero interest in the “living Constitution” sometimes associated with liberal judging. In place of lofty odes to the majestic generalities of the Constitution, the justice has consistently favored its original meaning and a statute’s plain text over other considerations. It’s a stark departure from her predecessor, Justice Stephen Breyer, who could not write in the originalist style to save his life. But was it effective? [...] Jackson’s originalism has received the most attention in the context of race, and for good reason: Like most progressive originalists, she views the Constitution through the lens of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, passed in the wake of the Civil War. These amendments fundamentally altered the entire Constitution, expanding federal power over the states while extending civil rights and equal citizenship to all Americans. (In theory, at least.) This Second Founding informs many liberals’ vision of the law today, including Jackson. Contemporary scholars on the left, for instance, point out that Congress enacted explicitly race-conscious measures after the Civil War to address past discrimination against Black Americans. Jackson laid out this evidence during arguments over the Voting Rights Act, when Alabama’s solicitor general claimed the law’s consideration of race was unconstitutional. The framers of 14th Amendment, Jackson explained, used “race-conscious” remedies to safeguard the rights of Black Americans. How could it be unconstitutional for the Voting Rights Act to do the same? It was, as the New York Times’ Adam Liptak has observed, “a kind of mission statement” from the brand new justice.

Have the best possible day, everyone!

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