We begin today with Dan Balz, Emily Guskin, and Scott Clement of The Washington Post, analyzing the latest numbers from a WaPo-ABC news poll about the midterm elections.
With control of the House and Senate possibly shifting from Democrats to Republicans in November and the country deeply divided, 2 in 3 registered voters see this election as more important than past midterm campaigns. That’s the same percentage that said this in 2018 when turnout surged to the highest in a century.
At this point, both sides are highly motivated to turn out in November. Among registered Democratic voters, 3 in 4 say they are almost certain to vote compared with about 8 in 10 Republicans. Independents are less motivated. Four years ago, Democrats were about as mobilized as Republicans and had a clear lead in overall support. Eight years ago, when Democrats suffered losses, Republicans were more motivated.
Historical trends have favored Republicans throughout this election year, and political forecasters still rate the GOP as likely to win the House. Earlier predictions of big GOP gains have been clouded by the Supreme Court’s decision in June to overturn Roe v. Wade, spurring on abortion rights supporters, especially younger women. Legislative victories by Democrats and the defeat of a Kansas antiabortion referendum over the summer also appeared to boost morale among some Democrats.
Since FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver is doing here what he does best— that is, the number crunching and analysis of political data—I’ll allow this analysis of the latest data on the upcoming midterm elections that show that in spite of the usual trends for midterm elections, the midterm prospects for Republicans are not improving.
As Democrats’ position has continually improved, I’ve tended to focus on optimistic scenarios for Democrats. Frankly, I’ve been looking for an opportunity to reiterate why Republicans could still have a pretty good midterm. They are, after all, reasonably clear favorites to flip the House, and a 30 percent chance to flip the Senate is nothing to sneeze at, either. That 30 percent chance is pretty much the same one our model gave to Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton on Election Day in 2016.
But that Republicans could win doesn’t mean that their situation is improving. I’ve seen several recent claims about Republican momentum in the polls that I don’t think are yet justified in the evidence.
Let’s leave our probabilistic forecast aside for now and just look at the polls themselves. Specifically, we’ll look at what our polling averages say as I write this on Sept. 22 and how that compares to one month ago, on Aug. 22. A fair amount has happened since then: The White House announced its student loan forgiveness program on Aug. 24; there’s been some fairly negative inflation news and other economic data; Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis sent around 50 migrants to Martha’s Vineyard; Russia is facing significant setbacks in its war with Ukraine; and campaigns are kicking into higher gear in many states after Labor Day.
First up, the generic Congressional ballot. Democrats currently lead by 1.9 percentage points in our average. That reflects continued improvement from Aug. 22, when they led by 0.4 percentage points.
Matthew Choi of the Texas Tribune reports from the last night of the Texas Tribune Festival about Liz Cheney’s comments that she will no longer “be a Republican” if Donald Trump is the Republican nominee for president in 2024.
Cheney, who lost to a Republican primary challenger in August but will continue as vice chair of the House Jan. 6 Committee until she leaves office in January, said she continues to identify as a Republican, celebrating the legacy of the likes of Ronald Reagan and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
But she said she would no longer be a Republican if Trump gets the party’s nomination in 2024.
“I'm going to make sure Donald Trump, make sure he's not the nominee,” Cheney said. “And if he is the nominee, I won't be a Republican.”
Cheney maintained that she is an ardent conservative on policy issues, voting in near lockstep with Trump’s legislative agenda when he was in office. But she warned a House Republican majority would give outsized power to members who have been staunch allies of the former president and his efforts to keep the White House, including U.S. Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert and Jim Jordan.
Masha Gessen of The New Yorker compares the actions of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott with regard to migrants to the actions of Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenka.
Hannah Arendt—who fled Nazi Germany in 1933, lived in France as a displaced person, and came to the United States in 1941—observed that a refugee, a stateless person, who exists outside the framework of national laws, is by definition stripped of all rights. While we may claim, and believe, that people have rights by virtue of being human—that these rights are inalienable—in actuality, to exercise rights, a person has to be a member of a political community. Arendt called stateless people “rightless.” Their calamity, she wrote, “is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law and freedom of opinion—formulas which were designed to solve problems within given communities—but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever. Their plight is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them; not that they are oppressed but that nobody wants even to oppress them.”
None of this means that asylum seekers should be put on buses or planes and sent to places they never meant to go—only that the preconditions for such treatment have existed for decades. The relative novelty is the weaponization of asylum seekers. “We take what’s happening at the southern border very seriously, unlike some—unlike the President of the United States, who has refused to lift a finger to secure that border,” DeSantis said, after taking credit for chartering the planes to Martha’s Vineyard. “We are not a sanctuary state. It’s better to be able to go to a sanctuary jurisdiction.” In other words, if Democrats like asylum seekers so much, they should take the responsibility for housing them. Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, was more direct. After buses dropped dozens of asylum seekers in front of Vice-President Kamala Harris’s house, Abbott told a Texas radio station, “She’s the border czar, and we felt that if she won’t come down to see the border, if President Biden will not come down and see the border, we will make sure they see it firsthand. . . . And listen, there’s more where that came from.”
Abbott and DeSantis did not invent the tactic. In 2021, the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenka arranged for thousands of people from Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia and other countries, who were in need of international protection, to fly to Minsk, from where they were escorted to borders with European Union members Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland. Years earlier, Vladimir Putin’s Russia appeared to facilitate the passage of people fleeing Syria—where Russian troops were waging war on the side of Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship—to Finland and Norway, apparently as part of a larger plan to destabilize European democracies.
The ultimate track of Tropical Storm Ian has shifted a bit to the west prior to its projected landfall in Florida later this week, but not before producing heavy rainfall, flash flooding, and possible mudslides in Jamaica and western Cuba, with major hurricane-force winds.
Roya Hakakian writes for The Atlantic that now, in light of the death of Masha Amini in Iran, the fight for women’s freedom has, for the moment, unified Iranian society in a way that nothing else has—since the Iranian Revolution of 1979.
Each time I see the images of her lying in a coma in a hospital bed, I cannot help thinking that I could have been Mahsa Amini. I was a girl in Iran in 1981, when a law making the hijab a mandatory dress code for women first came into force, two years after the Islamic Revolution. And I was a teenager when the morality police began making the rounds, stopping and arresting people on a whim, sometimes on no more pretext than a few strands of hair peeking out from under one’s scarf.
One August day in 1984, thickly wrapped under my Islamic uniform and headscarf when the temperature was intolerably high and the water fountains in Tehran had been shut off in observance of Ramadan, I began thinking that I would not mind dying if those who had made our lives so miserable were to die along with me. I left Iran later that year, but today I feel what so many Iranian women feel: We are all Mahsa Amini.
Since her death, thousands have taken to the streets in a show of rage and solidarity that is rare even for a country that has known many such tumultuous moments. More than some past uprisings against the regime, this one has been remarkably broad-based and inclusive. The affluent residents of north Tehran have come out alongside the poor ones from the city’s south side. The youth are there—and so are their parents, even their grandparents. The metropolitan people are out, and so are the small-town folk.
A 10-reporter team for Der Spiegel explains why Russian President Vladimir Putin has chosen to escalate his unprovoked war in Ukraine.
Putin, Russia’s head of state and warlord-in-chief, heralded a new phase in his war against Ukraine this week, and triggered a flood of young men leaving his country in the process. He did so with two announcements: First, Russia is apparently preparing the annexation of additional Ukrainian territory and is planning to orchestrate referendums in the two self-proclaimed "people’s republics" in the Donbas and in the southern Ukrainian regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia to make it seem as though people in those areas are in favor of becoming part of Russia. Second, he is introducing mobilization.
Putin is essentially going all-in. He has deprived his people of the illusion that the invasion of Ukraine could be pursued at little cost. And he has also deprived himself of the possibility of pulling back from his destructive adventure. The same man who otherwise tries to give himself as much room for maneuver as possible has committed himself to a single strategy – like a luckless gambler who doubles his bet because he is unable to walk away from the gambling table. He is risking everything. For Putin, as for Dmitry, the refugee from St. Petersburg, there is no going back.
Why, though, did he take this step? And what does it mean for his country?
Despite the mobilization only having been announced on Wednesday, the conscription campaign, as chaotic as it may be, has already begun. Reservists are receiving phone calls, getting emails from the state service portal Gosuslugi or being approached in person. In one town in the far eastern region of Primorye, police used loudspeakers to call on young men to report to their local draft office. Lines formed in front of military offices in places like Khabarovsk in the east and Belgorod in the southwest.
Happymom Jacob writes for Foreign Affairs about the complexity of India’s current relationship with Russia, in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
India’s decision to ramp up its purchases of Russian oil since the invasion of Ukraine has piqued many Western commentators. In February, just before the war began, India’s purchases of Russian oil were negligible; by April, they had risen to 389,000 barrels a day, and in June the figure reached the one-million mark. But the boost in oil imports is largely opportunistic. Russia has offered India deep discounts, much as it has other willing buyers. In May, for instance, buying Russian oil saved India $16 per barrel over the average oil import price for that month. The injection of Russian oil has helped alleviate economic distress resulting from the lingering aftermath of the pandemic and the rise in retail prices driven by the war in Ukraine. Indian officials bristle at criticism about these purchases, especially considering that most European countries have continued to buy at least some Russian gas—and have been reluctant to stop doing so.
In other important areas, however, great change is afoot. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Russia was India’s largest supplier of arms in the last decade. But from 2012 to 2021, the share of Russian weapons in India’s arsenal shrunk by nearly half. Over the years, India has been attempting to diversify its defense procurement, turning to alternate suppliers, including France and the United States. In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, New Delhi deferred its plans for more military purchases from Moscow, including a deal for 21 new MiG-29 fighter jets for the Indian Air Force. Indian officials claimed to have made the move to support domestic production, but the country is clearly slowing its rate of arms purchases from Russia. The protracted nature of the Russia-Ukraine conflict has also raised concerns in New Delhi about Russia’s military production capabilities. In particular, India worries that Russia won’t be able to follow through on scheduled deliveries of new hardware and spare parts for older equipment, especially in emergency situations.
At the level of public diplomacy, India is also sending important signals. The contrast between New Delhi’s official statements during the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the invasion of Ukraine earlier this year further demonstrates India’s tilt away from Russia. In 2014, there was little condemnation of Russia’s attack. In fact, Shivshankar Menon, then national security adviser, insisted that “there are, after all, legitimate Russian and other interests involved.” However, the phrase “legitimate Russian interests” is notably absent from recent Indian statements. Although Indian officials have not named or condemned Russia, their statements from March onward have been indirectly yet undeniably critical of Russian actions. Their continuous references to respect for international law, the UN Charter, and the principles of territorial integrity and the sovereignty of states suggest that India does not in fact consider Russia’s invasion legitimate.
Finally today, ahead of today’s Italian snap elections, Roberto Saviano writes for The Guardian about the dangers that the far-right Brothers of Italy party, led by Giorgia Meloni, poses to the rest of Europe.
The danger arises for Europe because Italy has always been a laboratory: it has foreshadowed the crises of other countries. Italy had Mussolini before Hitler and the leftwing extremist Red Brigades before Action Directe appeared in France and the Red Army Faction followed suit in Germany. Italy had Berlusconi before the US got Trump. And after years of Berlusconi misrule, Italy produced the Five Star Movement, the first populist party led by a comedian, before the rest of Europe caught up. Five Star’s agenda was political disruption, often without any thought to the consequences.
Meloni’s moral and economic inspiration is Viktor Orbán, the man who in recent years has destroyed the opposition in Hungary and achieved legitimacy by weaponising popular consensus. He has provided an ephemeral sense of security but Hungarians have paid for it dearly in the form of economic instability and, above all, the loss of their rights.
The European parliament declared earlier this month that Hungary could no longer be considered a full democracyElections take place, but European norms and democratic standards are systematically ignored to the point that Hungary is now an “electoral autocracy”. MEPs from Italy’s populist League and the far-right Brothers of Italy voted against the resolution, and how could they do otherwise? Meloni has never made any secret of collaborating closely with Orbán and his allies in pursuing the common goal of strengthening the European hard right in the name of respect for national sovereignty, defence of the natural family, Christian identity and the social market economy.
Have a good day, everyone!