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New York Suburbs May Return Democrats To Power In Congress

New York Suburbs May Return Democrats To Power In Congress

Those days are obviously gone. The recent election of Democrat Tom Suozzi to replace George Santos in Long Island's 3rd district suggests that Democrats and independents in these swing districts now recognize that they must choose sides. And that may end up reversing more of the Republicans' recent advances in these near-in suburbs.

Those gains reflected the social chaos unleashed by COVID and shrieking headlines about crime in the big city. As a result, Republicans in 2022 took five of the six congressional House districts on Long Island and in the lower Hudson Valley. Four had gone for Joe Biden two years earlier.

The New York suburbs, of all places, helped the GOP obtain its thin House majority.

The problem for these voters, however, is that the House is not run by their kind of nice-guy Republicans but the right-wing Speaker Mike Johnson, Donald Trump and a coterie of fringe extremists with near zero interest in these suburbanites' concerns. On the contrary, they're hostile to reproductive rights, national security and health care.

The Republicans' successful pitch to these suburbs centered on crime, immigration and taxes. Crime in New York, never as rampant as the scary reports suggested, is now down. New York was still one of the safest cities in America, but with COVID keeping a lot of suburbanites working at home, many had little in the way of a reality check. In any case, the city is back to gridlock.

On immigration, the Republican House just smothered a bipartisan Senate deal that would have actually curbed the chaos at the border. Trump ordered that the problem not be solved, so he could campaign on it.

As for tax relief, the impotence of the suburban Republicans recently went on full display in their failure to restore any of the deduction for state and local taxes (SALT). In 2017, then-President Trump and a Republican Congress slashed the deduction to $10,000.

One intention was to shake down taxpayers in blue states, where incomes, local levies and the cost of living are high. They were thus forced to pay taxes on taxes they'd already paid.

Limiting the deduction to $10,000 not only affected rich people. A cop married to a nurse on Long Island could easily have a combined income of $200,000 — and state, local and property tax bills well north of $30,000.

Mike Lawler, a Republican representing the lower Hudson Valley, had campaigned on the promise to address this thorn in his constituents' side. He called for doubling the cap on SALT deductions to $20,000 and only for married couples. But Republican House leaders swatted down even that modest proposal.

Other changes since 2022 may blow wind in Democrats' sails. Democrats are unlikely to again forget to campaign, which contributed to the loss of at least two seats. One of the overly confident Democrats neglected to do any background check on his opponent, the wildly fraudulent George Santos.

Come November, Trump is sure to be on the ballot, and you don't have to be a Democrat in these affluent suburbs to detest him. Recent redistricting in New York State also slightly enhances Democrats' prospects. Finally, with inflation down and stock prices up, moods are improving across middle class America. Then there's the abortion issue.

And so exactly what are Lawler and other suburban Republicans doing for their constituents other than helping keep in power the very people who hold their interests in contempt? Little that we can identify.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Poll Shows Even Republicans Don't Trust GOP To Protect Social Security

Poll Shows Even Republicans Don't Trust GOP To Protect Social Security

A new survey from Navigator Research doesn’t just show how strongly voters feel about protecting Social Security and Medicare, but it also shows how much voters don’t trust Republican lawmakers to do it. And that’s including a solid majority — 61 percent —of Republicans.

The survey finds that 75 percent of registered voters are either somewhat or very concerned that congressional Republicans “passed a tax plan that gave record-breaking tax breaks to the wealthiest individuals and biggest corporations, but would result in cuts to programs that people count on like Social Security and Medicare.” Supporting tax breaks for the wealthy at the cost of Social Security and Medicare are the most concerning positions of Republicans in Congress on the issue of taxes.

Voters have good reason not to trust the GOP. Right now, House Republicans are plotting yet another fiscal commission that could fast track Social Security and Medicare cuts, in the name of deficit reduction, and they want to include that commission in the 2024 funding package. We’ve seen this ploy from Republicans before, with the Bowles-Simpson commission in 2010 and a congressional “super committee” in 2011. These committees are how Republicans have tried to cut Social Security and Medicare without dirtying their own hands. In this ploy, a committee would be responsible for coming up with the plan, and then Congress would have to pass it in order to save the country from the deficit.

This time around, however, the majority of Democrats aren’t going to play the deficit-peacock game, and they’re calling this plan what it is: “They should probably call this commission the Commission to Slash Benefits,” Rep. John Larson of Connecticut said at a recent press conference. “It’s tantamount to passing a death panel, because that will be the impact on so many Americans.”

Social Security doesn’t have to be cut to be saved. Democrats have legislation to shore up the Social Security trust fund by raising payroll taxes on those making more than $400,000 a year. The cutoff for payroll taxes this year is $168,600. Earnings beyond that aren’t subject to the payroll taxes that fund Social Security's Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance program.

This new commission is “undemocratic” Larson said, because it would all be in the hands of the committee, leaving lawmakers out of the process—just as Republicans want it. “We need hearings out in the open on specific proposals so the public can see what’s going on,” he said.

Judging by the Navigator survey results, the public knows exactly what Republicans have planned, and they don’t like it.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Behind That Iowa Primary 'Landslide' Lurked Very Bad News For Trump

Behind That Iowa Primary 'Landslide' Lurked Very Bad News For Trump

No question that a 30-point victory for Trump was not the ideal outcome of the Iowa caucuses. Voters have only two opportunities to prevent the return to power of a Putin-besotted, antisemite-praising, Constitution-terminating, multiple felony indictee — the primaries and the general.

It would have been better if Trump had been rebuked early and hard by Republican voters. But that was not to be. Once the first indictment was handed down in New York in the hush money for porn star case, the die was cast. The party faithful — partly because the Bragg indictment was legally shaky and pretty easily dismissed as politically motivated — rallied round their prosecuted, persecuted hero. I said partly because it wasn't just that the indictment was a stretch; it was also that MAGA Republicans so dearly want the accusations to be false. To admit otherwise opens the door to considering that he may really have obstructed justice and blithely endangered national security in the classified documents case, lied about and attempted to steal an election, and looked on with depraved satisfaction as his minions searched for Mike Pence — to commit murder. (Even now, despite everything we've witnessed, I still cannot believe I must write those words.)

We'll never know if things would have been different absent the Bragg indictment. Would the rally-round-the-mob-boss effect have been as pronounced if the classified documents in the bathroom case had gone first? Or if Ron DeSantis hadn't proved such a doofus candidate? Or if all of the GOP candidates in the race had run as Chris Christie did? We cannot know.

And while one can always hope for a miracle like Nikki Haley defeating Trump in New Hampshire, prompting South Carolina voters to rediscover their affection for their former governor, which would in turn upend the entire race — the chances of that are about as good as winning the lottery, which in South Carolina are about one in 293 million.

So one cannot bank on most Republicans to save us from a second Trump term. Still, lurking in the pre-caucus polling is some reassuring news. We cannot count on most Republicans, but what about the skeptics? What about a few Republicans like Kenan Judge, a lifelong Republican who left the party over Trump? Or Loring Miller, who voted for Trump twice but explained that "January 6 did it for me. A true leader would've put an end to that." Though 48 percent of likely Republican caucus-goers in the final Des Moines Register/NBC poll listed Trump as their first choice, 11 percent said that if Trump were the nominee, they would vote for Biden. Among the 20 percent who said Haley was their first choice, fully 43 percent said they would vote for Biden in the general if Trump is nominated.

According to The Washington Post ,"94 of Iowa's 99 counties moved toward Republicans between 2012 and 2020." Most voters don't show up for primaries and even fewer for caucuses. In 2016, 187,000 turned out, just 15.7 percent of voters. Last night, only about 110,000 made it. We are evaluating results from one of the whitest, most Evangelical, most rural states in the nation.

The Des Moines Register pre-caucus poll also found that among these gung-ho Republicans, six percent would support Robert F. Kennedy Jr. rather than Trump, and eight percent would seek another third party choice. Bottom line: At least 25 percent of Iowa Republican caucus-goers say they will not vote for Trump in the general.

That's significant. Our elections are decided by a few thousand votes in five swing states. Admittedly, Iowa is not one of those swing states, but if large numbers of Republicans in ruby-red Iowa are saying they will not vote for Trump in the general election, what does that suggest about Republicans in places like Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia?

Eleven percent of Republicans in Iowa tell a pollster that they will vote for Biden. Biden, the guy everyone says even Democrats are having trouble working up enthusiasm for. Whatever those misgivings may be, I very much doubt that 25% of Democratic primary voters would say they're thinking of voting for Trump or a third party.

The interest in third parties remains a serious challenge, but if we're indulging in hope, we can see the work ahead. Independents are even more determined to prevent Trump from gaining another term than the minority of Republicans who have drawn a line against him. Some, perhaps many, independents have not yet processed that we really will be facing another Trump/Biden choice in November. Once Trump is in front of their faces again, they will remember why he's unacceptable — just as the January 6 hearings in the summer of 2022 drove down Trump's approval.

The undimmed Trump support among the most ensorcelled bloc of Republicans shouldn't blind us to the other news from Iowa — there's a saving remnant out there, and we need to buttress them before November.

Mona Charen is policy editor of The Bulwark and host of the "Beg to Differ" podcast. Her new book, Hard Right: The GOP's Drift Toward Extremism, is available now.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Poll: Vast Majority Of Voters Support Select Committee Probe

Poll: Vast Majority Of Voters Support Select Committee Probe

Anyone who was paying attention to the polling for the past year around the January 6 insurrection generally concluded two things: 1) Very few Americans held the people who stormed the Capitol in high regard; and 2) Many Americans, though not a majority, wanted to leave the violent event in the past.

A Quinnipiac poll in January, for instance, found that 50 percent of Americans thought the storming of the Capitol should never be forgotten, while 44 percent believed too much was being made of the attack and it was time to move on.

In addition, support for arresting the insurrectionists last year dropped considerably among Republicans and independent voters in the months following the event. From January to July 2021, a Daily Kos/Civiqs survey found GOP support for arrests dropped 35 points to 55 percent, while independent voters' favoring arrests dropped 22 points, from 91 percent to 69 percent (still high, but not nearly as high). Not surprisingly, Democrats remained pretty stable, with 97 percent still backing arrests in July.

But new polling taken in the days following the House Select Committee's first hearing suggests the panel's inquiry has grabbed the attention of nearly two-thirds of Americans—including Democrats, independents, and even a sizable slice of Republicans alike.

The survey by the progressive consortium Navigator Research found that nearly two-thirds of Americans (63 percent) are hearing either "a lot" or "some" about the public hearings, including 70 percent of Democrats, 52 percent of independents, and 59 percent of Republicans. The quality and veracity of that information surely varies, but people across partisan lines are paying attention.

Additionally, by 36 points, Americans overwhelmingly support the work of the House select committee investigating Jan. 6. Once again, nearly two-thirds (64 percent) support the panel's investigation into "what happened on January 6th at the Capitol and the events leading up to it." That support includes 88 percent of Democrats and 56 percent of independents and even 40 percent of Republicans. Just 28 percent of Americans oppose the inquiry.

Overall support for the panel has dropped slightly since Navigator’s April survey, mostly due to a seven-point drop in support among Republicans along with independents moving from "not sure" (22 percent in April) to opposing the panel. Independents now saying they are not sure has dropped to 16 percent while opposition to the inquiry among the group has increased by seven points since April.

Now that Americans have had a chance to see some of the panel's work, a net favorability of 36 points with almost no drop-off in support among Democrats and independents is a good start for the public phase of the investigation.

As I noted in April, Democratic base voters crave accountability for the January 6 attack, but it’s also essential to remind swingy Trump-Biden voters that Trump and his GOP apologists are an ongoing threat to democracy. The select committee seems poised to push both of those objectives forward.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.