The Coffee Klatch with Robert Reich

Friends,

Veterans Day is a time to honor those who have fought to protect American democracy, especially those who gave their lives so that our democracy can endure.

We have just emerged from midterm elections that have tested that democracy as it has not been tested since the Civil War. In large part, our democracy passed that test. We are indebted to all candidates who peacefully and responsibly conceded defeat, and to all election workers who worked so diligently (and in several states are still working) to ensure the legitimacy of the elections.

The aspect of the midterm elections that gives me most hope for the future is the growing ranks of the young — as well as people of color and women — among American voters and in American politics.

By 2028, Millennials & Gen Z’rs will dominate U.S. elections.

This is why the GOP is pulling out all the stops to entrench Republican power. They know they don't stand a chance against a multi-racial, progressive generation of young people that will make the GOP’s backwards ideas irrelevant.

They are the Republican Party’s worst nightmare.

The latest data prove the point. In this weeks’ midterm elections, 27 percent of young people (ages 18 to 29) turned out — the second-highest youth voter turnout in almost three decades.

These young people helped decide critical races.

In a group of nine electorally competitive states for which exit poll data is available (Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin), the aggregate youth voter turnout was 31%.

In Michigan, the early youth vote was up 207 percent from 2018. In Pennsylvania, up 318 percent. In Wisconsin, up 360 percent.

Young people were a critical force in holding back a “red wave.” They supported Democratic House candidates by 62 percent to 35 percent.

According to AP VoteCast, an in-depth survey of more than 94,000 voters nationwide, 61 percent of voters younger than 45 backed Democrat John Fetterman in his  Pennsylvania Senate race.

What accounts for these astounding numbers?

Start with Trump, who continues to be deeply and justifiably despised by most young people. He wasn’t on any ballot, but he made his presence as conspicuous as he always does. Trump insisted on campaigning loudly and belligerently. Most Republican candidates joined in his big lie that he won the 2020 election.

Next is the stark political reality that young people -- the first generation in America to be subject in school to active shooter drills – want action on gun violence.

They also want progress on the climate crisis, presumably because they’ll be living longer with its consequences than anyone else.

And they’re passionate about preserving reproductive rights.

Don’t get me wrong. The growing numbers and political power of young people, as well as people of color and women, is not an argument for complacency.

To the contrary, it means Republicans will now be even more determined to suppress their votes. Fighting voter suppression in all its forms -- making it easier rather than harder to vote – should continue to be among our highest priorities.

We can also expect more cruel divisiveness from the Trumpian Republicans, especially if, as seems most likely, they take back control of the House. How to fight this? Not with more belligerence, which only kindles more of the same. No, we fight it with openness and civility.  

Third, we must continue to do everything possible to relieve the economic burdens borne by young people, women, and people of color – especially the escalating costs of housing, childcare, and higher education, and the scarcity of good jobs paying a living wage.

The encouraging reality is the inevitability of these long-term demographic trends: a nation that’s younger, more female, and with more people of color -- and, largely as a result, more progressive.

“History was made tonight,” tweeted Maxwell Alejandro Frost, the first Gen Z’r to be elected to Congress Tuesday night, at the ripe age of 25. “We made history for Floridians, for Gen Z, and for everyone who believes we deserve a better future.”

Indeed.

Anyone worried about the direction this nation is heading still has much to be worried about. But we should find some solace in the young people who are committed to redirecting it toward social justice and democracy.

Wishing you a good Veterans Day

***

Please consider giving your favorite young people a gift subscription to this letter

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Friends,

Apart from specific issues and candidates that motivated voters on Tuesday, two contrasting parties continue to emerge in America – one, pro-democracy; the other, anti-democracy or neofascist.

The hallmarks of the neofascist party are its cruel nastiness and unwillingness to abide by election results. In other words: Trumpism.

Both were on full display election night as Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake assailed the “cheaters and crooks” whom she claimed were running elections, “BS and garbage,” “incompetent people,” “propagandists,” and “fake media.”

And as Rep. Andy Biggs joked that Nancy Pelosi was “losing the gavel but finding the hammer,” a crude reference to the attack on Pelosi’s husband that left him with a fractured skull.

Other GOP candidates and flaks hurled similar insults -- “Merrick Garland needs some new pantyhose,” “Beto [O’Rourke] is a furry,” Sen. Mark Kelly is a “little man” whose “ears don’t match,” President Biden is a “lost child” with a “very dirty diaper,” Democrats are “lunatics.”

Contrast this feculence with Tim Ryan’s graceful concession speech in the Ohio senate race (I’ve pasted the live version below).

We have too much hate, we have too much anger, there’s way too much fear, there’s way too much division, and we need more love, we need more compassion, we need more concern for each other. These are the important things. We need forgiveness, we need grace, we need reconciliation. … I have the privilege to concede this race to J.D. Vance because the way this country operates is that when you lose an election you concede and you respect the will of the people. We can’t have a system where if you win it’s a legitimate election and if you lose, someone stole it. … We need good people who are going to honor the institutions of this country…. The highest title in this land is citizen, and we have an obligation to be good citizens.

Or with John Fetterman’s humble remarks after the senate race in Pennsylvania was called for him — when, wiping away tears, he told cheering supporters “I'm not really sure what to say right now, my goodness. I am so humbled, thank you so much …. This campaign has always been about fighting for anyone that ever got knocked down that got back up.”

Fetterman had been knocked down last May with a near-fatal stroke — which invited ridicule from Trumpists such as Trump Jr., who told a Sunday-night crowd at a rally in Miami that “if you're going to be in the United States senator, you should have basic cognitive function. It doesn't seem that unreasonable to have a working brain … We're up against a Democrat party today that doesn't believe that a United States senator should not have mush for brain."

Gratuitous cruelty, derision, nastiness — they are one of a piece with authoritarianism because they feed off the same anger and fear. They also fuel the hate and paranoia that are causing Americans to distrust our electoral system and one another. And they can fuel violence.

When I was a kid I was bullied by other kids because I was so short. I remember the ridicule and the cruelty. The worst of the bullying, I later learned, came from kids who were bullied at home, often by abusive parents.

So many Americans feel bullied by the system today — bullied by employers, landlords, hospitals, insurance companies, debt collectors, government bureaucracies, and the like — that they’re easy prey for Trumpism.

This isn’t to excuse these people, but only to explain the likely source of their rage, and how the Trumpists are channeling it.

And why it’s so important to stop all forms of bullying in modern America — not only because such bullying is morally wrong but because its poison spreads throughout our society.

The results of the midterm elections could have been far worse. The extreme grotesqueries of the Trumpist right were soundly defeated — Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, Maine gubernatorial candidate Paul LePage, New Hampshire Senate candidate Don Bolduc, and Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Tim Michels (who promised if elected that no Democrat could ever win Wisconsin again). Most election-denying candidates for secretary of state were defeated.

As of Wednesday evening, Kari Lake was trailing her Democratic rival for Arizona governor, Katie Hobbs, by a hair. Congresswoman Lauren Boebert (the freshman MAGA Republican from Colorado) was fighting to keep her seat,

But Marjorie Taylor Greene was reelected, as was Andy Biggs, and many other election-deniers. And Trump himself seems intent on launching another run on the White House (and on American democracy) within the week.

Not as bad as it could have been, but deeply concerning nonetheless.

We are still on the brink.

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Hello friends,

Welcome back to my Saturday coffee klatch with my colleague Heather Lofthouse (Executive Director of Inequality Media Civic Action — and my former student), where we talk about the highs and lows of the past week over morning coffee.

I’m delighted to be back. And many thanks to Michael Lahanas-Calderón for filling in for me.

Today we cover:

— What gives us the most hope and what worries us most about the upcoming midterm elections.

— Elon Musk’s wild takeover of Twitter.

— Jerome Powell’s wild takeover of the U.S. economy.

And more. Please join us.

And thank you to Joseph Lawson and Guy Brenner for this week’s theme songs.

And take this week’s poll:

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I really don’t want to write about him any more. I’d rather not even think about him. Honestly, I’d rather forget he existed.

But he looms over the 2022 elections like a sword of Damocles. Trump continues to dominate all political coverage. In many respects, he is still the center of American politics — if anything, bigger and more dangerous than he was when he left the White House.

First, consider all the action in federal and state courts.

Just within the last two weeks, Trump has been subpoenaed to appear before the January 6 committee, his appeal to the Supreme Court challenging the FBI’s seizure at Mar-a-Lago of secret documents he stole from the White House was rejected, his former aide Steve Bannon was sentenced to four months in prison for contempt of Congress, a federal appeals court denied a request by Sen. Lindsey Graham to be shielded from testifying in an investigation into Trump’s interference in the 2020 election in Georgia, other aides were observed after testifying before a grand jury in the criminal investigation of Jan. 6, his name was featured in text messages read aloud at the Oath Keepers trial, and his decision to form a new company (Trump Organization II) was criticized by the New York attorney general, who is suing him.

Never before in history has a former president, his aides, and supporters in Congress been as entangled in legal proceedings stretching years beyond his administration. Never have the legal maneuvers attracted more media attention.

Second is the continuing speculation about whether Merrick Garland will indict him.

The Jan 6 committee has done an outstanding job, but it has also helped Trump become a more historically significant. As Politico’s John Harris noted,  

“The usual journalistic crutch when assessing political legacies is ‘for better or worse,’ but in this case it is only for worse. Trump’s historic significance flows from how effectively he has made people doubt what was previously beyond doubt — that American democracy is on the level — and how brilliantly he has illuminated just how much this generation of Americans looks at one another with mutual contempt and mutual incomprehension.”

While the Jan. 6 committee has dismantled Trump’s deceptions and denialism surrounding the 2020 election, it has also helped build Trump into something larger than he appeared two years ago — a political force too serious to forget. That’s not a bad thing; we must not allow ourselves to forget what he has done to America. But it does cast his shadow over our future in ways few former presidents have ever managed.

Third is the groundwork for an undemocratic coup that Trump and his henchmen continue to lay.

That groundwork is being prepared step by step. A majority of Republican candidates for office in the 2020 midterms are election deniers, including several candidates for the crucial election jobs of secretaries of state and governors.  

The tactics they and their supporters used in primary elections force us to brace for a range of new challenges in the upcoming midterms and in 2024, including disruptive poll watchers and workers, aggressive litigation strategies, voter and ballot challenges and vigilante searches for fraud.

He will almost certainly declare his candidacy for president in 2024 within the next few months.

Just as menacingly for 2024 and beyond, the Supreme Court has taken up the “independent state legislature” doctrine. If upheld, this doctrine would allow state legislatures to do exactly what Trump tried to do in December 2020 — appoint their own slates of electors, regardless of the popular vote.

Finally, Twitter and Facebook are poised to allow Trump back on — to continue to spread his lies on the largest megaphones in the world.

Trump is not only a sociopath. He is also a masterful conman. Social media will soon allow him to continue to spread his lies and hate. (Elon Musk has virtually guaranteed it for Twitter if, as expected, Musk takes over that platform. Facebook has signaled it will do the same.)

A sociopathic conman on social media is terrifying.

It is our terrible misfortune that Trump came to power and continues to infect America and the world just as the tangled weave of other crises — near-record inequality, bigotry (racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia), the climate, the pandemic — have made many Americans vulnerable to his demagoguery.

I didn’t want to write about him today or even think about him. But none of us dares turn our eyes away in revulsion.

Rather than ignore him, we must demand that Trump be prosecuted. Instead of pretending the poison he released into the American system is behind us, we must acknowledge that it is spreading.

As opposed to dismissing him, we must deal with him and the lawmakers who are enabling him head-on — and stop him, and them, through every non-violent means possible.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

Hello friends,

Welcome back to my Saturday coffee klatch with my colleague Heather Lofthouse (Executive Director of Inequality Media Civic Action — and my former student), where we talk about the highs and lows of the week over morning coffee.

I’m off this week but have invited Heather and Michael Lahanas-Calderón (Director of Digital Strategy at Inequality Media Civic Action) to chat in my absence. Michael, a member of Gen Z, leads our work on TikTok. He and the team at IMCA have been using video across social media to break down complex issues and change the frames through which people understand the system, so viewers can see what’s at stake and mobilize towards an inclusive democracy and an economy where the gains are widely shared, including in advance of the midterms.

Today they cover:

* How young people process information (hint: it involves the internet).

* How to fill the knowledge gaps around economics and inequality left by the mass media.

* The dirty secret of social media video (most people watch with the sound off!).

* What makes a video break through on crowded platforms like Instagram and TikTok.

Here are a couple recent videos:

* A 10-second TikTok video which uses several “trends” to depict how trickle-down economics is a hoax (the speed of which I find dizzying and Heather says makes her motion sick. Do you agree?!).

* A video of CEOs crowing about raising prices on consumers to boost their profit margin; they speak for themselves on the relationship between corporate profiteering and inflation. (The Groundwork Collaborative has built a very useful website for these publicly-available quarterly corporate earnings calls.)

Thank you to Deirdre Broderick / Corey Kaup and Joseph Lawson for today’s theme songs, and to all of you for listening.

P.S. For those of you who have been asking about written transcripts of these coffee klatches, we will have them for you in the coming weeks. Thank you for your patience.

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The culture wars now ripping through American politics — especially noticeable in these last few weeks before the midterm elections, when Trump is trying to lay the groundwork for an authoritarian takeover — arguably began on May 8, 1970 in New York City.

That day happened to be the 25th anniversary of the Allied victory over Germany in World War II. It was also weeks after Richard Nixon expanded the Vietnam War into Cambodia. And it was just four days after Ohio National Guardsmen shot dead four students during antiwar protests at Kent State University.

I recall it vividly.

On May 8, 1970, a riot broke out in New York City.

Around noon, near the intersection of Wall Street and Broad Street in Lower Manhattan, more than 400 construction workers — steamfitters, ironworkers, plumbers, and other laborers from nearby construction sites like the emerging World Trade Center — attacked around 1,000 student demonstrators (including two of my friends) protesting the Vietnam War and the May 4 Kent State shootings.

The workers carried U.S. flags and chanted “USA, All the way” and “America, love it or leave it.” They chased the students through the streets — attacking those who looked like hippies with hard hats and weapons, including tools and steel-toe boots.

I heard about it when several friends from New York who were active in the anti-Vietnam War movement phoned me later that day. To characterize them as upset understates their emotions.

As David Paul Kuhn reports in The Hardhat Riot, the police did little to stop the mayhem. Some even egged on the thuggery. When a group of hardhats moved menacingly toward a Wall Street plaza, a patrolman shouted: “Give ’em hell, boys. Give ’em one for me!”

The workers then stormed a barely-protected City Hall where the mayor’s staff, to the hardhats’ rage, had lowered the flag in honor of the Kent State dead. They pushed their way to the top of the steps and attempted to gain entrance, chanting “Hey, hey, whatcha say? We support the USA!”

Fearing the mob would break in, a person from the mayor’s staff raised the flag.

It was a small precursor to the attack on the U.S. Capitol more than a half-century later.

The workers ripped down the Red Cross flag that was hanging at nearby Trinity Church because they associated the flag with the anti-war protests. They stormed the newly built main Pace University building, smashing lobby windows and beating students and professors with their tools.

More than 100 people were wounded. The typical victim was a 22-year-old white male college student, though one in four was female. Seven police officers were also hurt. Most of the injured required hospital treatment. Six people were arrested, but only one construction worker.

My friends escaped injury but they were traumatized. I remember them describing the rioting construction workers as a “pack of animals.”

The hardhat riot had immediate political consequences. Richard Nixon exploited it for political advantage. It was the first salvo in America’s culture wars.

Nixon’s chief of staff H.R. Haldeman wrote in his diary: “The college demonstrators have overplayed their hands, evidence is the blue-collar group rising up against them, and [the] president can mobilize them.”

Patrick Buchanan, then a Nixon aide, wrote in a memo to his boss, saying “blue-collar Americans” are “our people now.” 

Peter Brennan, then president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York, claimed “the unions had nothing to do with” it — although just before the riot, Brennan had held a rally of construction workers to show support for Nixon’s Vietnam policies.

Brennan explained that workers were “fed up” with violence and flag desecration by anti-war demonstrators.

At Nixon’s invitation, Brennan then led a delegation of 22 union leaders, representing more than 300,000 tradesmen, to the White House. They presented Nixon with several hard hats and a flag pin, after which Nixon praised the “labor leaders and people from Middle America who still have character and guts and a bit of patriotism”.

After the 1972 election, Nixon appointed Brennan labor secretary. Brennan did not distinguish himself in that position. He strongly opposed affirmative action. He also prevented Labor Department officials from investigating allegations of corruption in the Teamsters Union and of its president, Frank Fitzsimmons, who had helped secure labor support for Nixon’s election.

The hardhat riot revealed a deep split in America’s left — in the coalition of workers and progressives that Franklin D. Roosevelt had knitted together in the 1930s, and the wished-for alliance of Blacks, liberals and blue-collar whites in the aftermath of Lyndon Johnson’s landslide 1964 re-election.

The riot’s class-based and race-based tensions would worsen over the next half century, as America’s upper-middle class and wealthy began pulling away from white Americans without college degrees.

The construction workers who attacked the demonstrators on May 8, 1970, and the police who egged them on, were more likely to have family and friends in Vietnam than the college students who demonstrated. Many were veterans of World War II and Korea. They also lived in the same working-class neighborhoods.

They despised the protesters as a bunch of pampered, longhaired, draft-dodging, flag-desecrating snots.

They felt abandoned by the middle class and the college-educated, stiffed by the clever kids with draft deferments, forced to bus their kids to Black neighborhoods they didn’t trust and accept Black kids into their schools, and burdened by an economy no longer delivering the possibility of upward mobility.

As the journalist Pete Hamill observed at the time, the workingman “feels trapped and, even worse, in a society that purports to be democratic, ignored.”

The former Nixon aide Pat Buchanan, writing in 1988 about the future of the GOP, argued that it should have embraced these growing working-class resentments.

The Republican moment slipped by, I believe, when the GOP refused to take up the challenge from the left on its chosen battleground: the politics of class, culture, religion, and race.”

Three years later, Buchanan openly questioned whether democracy was the best form of government. “The American press is infatuated to the point of intoxication with democracy,” he wrote, comparing the Marine Corps and corporations like IBM to the federal government. “Only the last is run on democratic, not autocratic principles. Yet who would choose the last as the superior institution?”

Buchanan sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1992, 1996, and 2000. He lost, of course. But over the course of the 1990s, his ideas began taking root in the GOP.

When I was secretary of labor, I spent much of my time in the Midwest and elsewhere around the country where workers felt abandoned in an economy taken over by Wall Street. I witnessed their anger and resentment. I heard their frustrations.

The nation could have responded, but did not.

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Sincere question: How are you doing these days?

I ask because almost everyone I talk with is feeling overwhelmed. Putin’s war in Ukraine and his threats to use nuclear weapons, Trump and his henchmen’s (and henchwomen’s) ongoing threats to democracy, the upcoming midterm elections, the bizarre economy, the climate crisis and the natural disasters it’s spawning. 

And much more. 

It’s impossible to block all this out because we’re inevitably affected by it every day –from the prices we’re paying for gas and food, to neighbors and family members who repeat bonkers things they hear on Fox News, to weather that’s out of whack and sometimes menacing, to getting that new booster shot and making sure your loved ones do, too.  

We also feel all this indirectly, through the anxieties and stresses experienced by those we love. They’re not immune to the chaos, either. 

I like to think that you find my near daily messages helpful. Yes, they’re sometimes alarming or grim, but they’re written from a set of values that I think we share. I hope you receive them as if from a friend who gives you a tad more courage, assurance, and arguments about why those values are so important. 

In times like these we also need to take care of each other, and of ourselves. It’s about sustenance — feeding our need to laugh and play, savoring the joy of connecting with those we love, dancing to music that literally moves us. 

A year before my father died, shortly before his 102nd birthday, we took him to the local mall and parked him in his wheelchair just outside a drugstore for just a moment while we bought a few things. When we returned, he was out of his wheelchair, moving his body with perfect rhythm to the sound of Jimmy Dorsey’s 1930s big band, over the mall’s speakers. My father couldn’t speak and could barely see, but he had a broad grin across his face.  

I hadn’t even noticed the music. 

Today, amid all the anxiety and despair, I want to inspire you to hear the music. I guarantee it’s there. 

Please take some time out to be moved.

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It’s not just the Big Lie. Republicans are telling three other lies they hope will swing the midterms.

They involve crime, inflation, and taxes. 

Here are the GOP’s claims, followed by the facts.

1. They claim crime is rising because Democrats have been “soft” on crime.

Rubbish. Rising crime rates are due to the proliferation of guns, which Republicans refuse to control.

While violent crime rose 28 percent from 2019 to 2020, gun homicides rose 35 percent. States that have weakened gun laws have seen gun crime surge. Clearly, a major driver of the national increase in violence is the easy availability of guns.

The violence can’t be explained by any of the Republican talking points about “soft on crime” Democrats.

Lack of police funding? No. On average, all cities — whether run by Democrats or Republicans — saw an increase in police funding in 2022.

Criminal justice reforms? No. Wherever bail reforms have been implemented, re-arrest rates remain stable. Data shows no connection between the policies of progressive prosecutors and changes in crime rates.

In fact, crime is rising faster in Republican, Trump-supporting states. In 2020, per capita murder rates were 40 percent higher in states won by Trump than in those won by Joe Biden.

Republican policies have made it easier for people to get and carry guns. Republicans are lying about the real cause of rising crime to protect some of their biggest supporters, big gun manufacturers and the NRA.

2. Republicans claim that inflation is due to Biden’s spending, and wage increases.

Baloney. Biden’s spending can’t be causing our current inflation because inflation has broken out everywhere around the world, often at much higher rates than in the US. 

Besides, heavy spending by the US government began in 2020, before the Biden administration, in order to protect Americans and the economy from the ravages of COVID-19 — and it was necessary.

Wages can’t be pushing inflation because wages have been increasing at a slower pace than prices — leaving most workers worse off.  

The major cause of the current inflation is the global post-pandemic shortage of all sorts of things, coupled with Putin’s war in Ukraine and China’s lockdowns.

The biggest domestic culprit for America’s current inflation is big corporations that are using inflation as an excuse for raising prices above their own cost increases, resulting in the highest profit margins since 1950 — while consumers are paying through the nose.

The biggest domestic cause of inflation is corporate power. Republicans are lying about this to protect their big corporate patrons.

3. Republicans say Democrats voted to hire an army of IRS agents who will audit and harass the middle class.

Wrong. The IRS won’t be going after the middle class. It will be going after ultra-wealthy tax cheats.

The Inflation Reduction Act, passed in July, provides funding to begin to get IRS staffing back to what it was before 2010, after which Republicans cut staff by roughly 30 percent, despite increases since then in the number of Americans filing tax returns.

The extra staff are needed to prevent high-end tax evasion, which is more difficult to root out (the ultra-wealthy hire squads of accountants and tax attorneys to hide their taxable incomes). It’s estimated that the richest 1 percent are hiding more than 20 percent of their earnings from the IRS.

The Treasury Department and the IRS have made it clear that audit rates for households earning $400,000 or under will remain same.

Republicans are lying about what the IRS will do with the new funding to protect their ultra-wealthy patrons.

None of these three lies is as brazen and damaging as Trump’s Big Lie. But they’re all being used by Republican candidates in these last weeks before the midterms. 

Know the truth and share it. 

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Hello friends,

Welcome back to my Saturday coffee klatch with my colleague Heather Lofthouse (Executive Director of Inequality Media Civic Action — and my former student), where we talk about the highs and lows of the week over morning coffee. Pull up a chair.

Today we cover:

— The (potentially last) January 6 committee hearing, and where do things go from here?

— The new bad inflation number, and why the Fed’s rate hikes don’t seem to be working (and what Democrats should be saying about inflation).

— Alex Jones has to pay almost $1 billion to the families of the victims of Sandy Hook, and what’s the likely effect?

— Should we be talking about this time as “post-pandemic?” (Thank god for boosters.)

Plus this week’s poll.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

Want some good news? With 27 days until Election Day, polling averages suggest Democrats could retain control of the Senate and even gain a few seats there, and are within sight of keeping the House.

Last week, the Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan election forecaster, shifted its forecast in 10 House races, seven of them in favor of Democrats. A day later, analysts at Sabato’s Crystal Ball, an election handicapper based at the University of Virginia, shifted six House seats, four favoring Democrats. 

"Democratic optimism grows in battle for House," read The Hill’s Mike Lillis' headline Tuesday morning. Lillis goes on to say: “With a month remaining before the midterm elections, House Democrats are in a position where few expected them to be even just a few months ago: competitive.”

Meanwhile, the forecasters at FiveThirtyEight, tallying up the available evidence, put the chances that Democrats hold the Senate at seventy-one per cent.

But wait. There’s reason to doubt these optimistic numbers.

The debacle of 2016 election polls showing Hillary Clinton with a healthy lead, and the 2020 election polls overstating Biden’s lead over Trump, reveal a dirty little secret: Election polls overstate Democratic strength and understate Republican.

There are three reasons for this bias:

1. Republicans are less likely to respond to election polls. The pandemic understated Republican strength in 2020 because safety-conscious liberals were more likely to be home during lockdowns (and answer telephone calls) while conservatives went out and lived their lives. With lockdowns over, this bias may be over too.

But Trump Republicans are less likely to participate in election polls in the first place. Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, found that in 2020, white Democrats were 20 percent likelier to respond to Times/Siena polls than white Republicans. Trump voters tend to be less educated, more anti-establishment, and therefore less likely to respond to polls. (In the poll Cohn is undertaking right now, only 0.4 percent of dials have yielded a completed interview.)

2. Election polls over-estimate the number of people who will be voting, and non-voters are much more likely to be or lean Democrat than are regular voters. People who rarely or never vote don’t like to admit this to pollsters (they don’t want to be thought of, and don’t want to think of themselves, as non-voters). But because non-voters are far more likely to lean Democrat and tell pollsters they favor a Democratic candidate, poll results exaggerate Democratic strength at the ballot box.

3. People who respond to election pollsters don’t want to admit their preferences for Trump. The vast majority of Trump voters lack a college degree. They believe that pollsters (as educated professionals) will disapprove of their support for Trump, so they don’t admit it. This happened in 2016 and again in 2020.

Trump isn’t on the midterm ballot, of course, but many Republican candidates who support him and his Big Lie are on the ballot (in fact, a majority of Republican candidates are election-deniers), so the effect is likely to be the same: understating Republican strength at the ballot box. (According to the Cato Institute’s own polling, 62 percent of Americans say they have political views they’re afraid to share. Many of them, presumably, support Trump and Trump election-deniers.)

I don’t mean to discourage you. Quite the opposite. With 27 days to go, many races could go either way. My point is you shouldn’t pay attention to the polls, and not become so confident that you stop phone banking, canvassing, contributing, and doing whatever else you can. Turnout is the critical variable. We must do everything humanly possible to get out the vote.

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