Stafford Democratic Committee

Opinion by Ed Kilgore – Friday

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/democrats-and-republicans-aren-t-even-talking-about-the-same-issues-this-year/ar-AA11UdE8?ocid=EMMX&cvid=45429e5fbb994e738a47a8ee0697889c

In the gospel according to the Church of Bipartisanship, the way politics should work is that each side should devise distinctive solutions to commonly identified problems and then compromise where necessary to get things done. If that doesn’t happen, the blame is typically assigned to self-serving politicians and fanatical activists who prefer gridlock to any accommodation of divergent views. And that is bad!

Reality is more complicated. In part, that’s because the real engines of gridlock are the institutional obstacles (especially the Senate filibuster and judicial review) available to minority parties to obstruct anything they don’t want to happen. Beyond that fundamental problem, moreover, is a flawed premise at the heart of the bipartisan proposition: The parties often don’t agree on any “commonly identified problems.” Indeed, as Ron Brownstein explains, that’s why Democrats and Republicans appear to be “talking past each other” in this year’s midterm-election chatter:

As the Democratic pollster Molly Murphy told me, 2022 is not an election year when most Americans “agree on what the top priorities [for the country] are” and debate “different solutions” from the two major parties. Instead, surveys show that Republican voters stress inflation, the overall condition of the economy, crime, and immigration. For Democratic voters, the top priorities are abortion rights, the threats to democracy created by former President Donald Trump and his movement, gun control, climate change, and health care.

Now this is not, of course, an entirely unprecedented phenomenon. Ever since polling and focus groups were invented, politicians have understood there are certain issues that favor or disfavor their own parties. For ages, Republicans have struggled to maintain credibility on fundamental fairness, maintenance of an adequate social safety net, and sensitivity to the needs of minorities, while Democrats aren’t really trusted to keep government efficient, attend to national security needs, or protect traditional moral values. Ceding whole areas to the opposition unfortunately tends to reinforce such stereotypes, which in turn makes loud shouting the way to elevate the issues one “owns.”

In living memory, some of the more innovative politicians in both parties have refused to play this game of ownership and instead sought to “capture,” or at least neutralize, the other party’s issues with distinctive policies of their own. Most famously, Bill Clinton, to the great dismay of Republicans and quite a few people in his own party, insisted on offering proposals aimed at reducing crime (e.g., community policing and deploying more officers on the streets), reforming welfare (originally a work-based proposal that maintained a personal entitlement to assistance), and “reinventing government.” Yes, Clinton, whose party did not control either chamber of Congress for six of his eight years in office, ultimately went too far in accommodating Republican policies on both crime and welfare reform (thus exposing him to the charge of “triangulating” against his own party). But the basic idea of offering Democratic proposals on public concerns outside the party’s comfort zone was smart, and it drove Republicans, who constantly complained that Clinton was “stealing our issues,” absolutely crazy.

Similarly, George W. Bush, on the advice of strategist Karl Rove, spent much of his first term offering modest but significant proposals on health care (a Medicare prescription-drug benefit), education (the No Child Left Behind Act), and immigration (a comprehensive reform measure) — all issues Democrats were generally thought to “own.” Like Clinton, he paid a price among party activists for “RINO” efforts to address “Democrat issues.” Arguably, the conservative backlash to his perceived heresies, especially on immigration, fed both the tea-party movement and its descendent, the MAGA movement, though Bush himself was clearly undone by the Iraq War and his inept reaction to a financial crisis. But the impulse to build credibility on salient public concerns where none existed was wise, and it was even in some minor respects emulated by Donald J. Trump (e.g., in his effort to co-opt criminal-justice reform via the Jared Kushner–brokered First Step Act).

Is anything like this kind of mold-breaking occurring at present? To some extent, Democrats have tried to address “Republican issues” involving the economy. Certainly, Joe Biden and congressional Democrats have spent much of 2021 and 2022 touting their budget proposals as essential to the task of building a strong economy. And while Joe Manchin might have been principally responsible for branding the fiscal year 2022 budget-reconciliation bill as an “Inflation Reduction Act,” by the time Biden signed the legislation, it had come to seem like a very good idea to most Democrats. The party has been less resolute in dealing with the crime issue, other than by constantly trying to rebut made-up claims that it wants to “defund the police” as part of an orgy of “wokeness.”

Republicans, perhaps because they thought they had a surefire winning message in 2022 and are loath to depart from it, have been less adept in adjusting to shifting public concerns that undermine their position. They justifiably think of abortion as a “Democrat issue” right now — one that threatens to boost Democratic turnout while flipping many suburban swing voters — and when Lindsey Graham tried to offer a proposal to reposition them on stronger ground, the reaction among Republicans was overwhelmingly negative, as the Washington Post reported:

In a memo to GOP campaigns released this week, the Republican National Committee laid out what it called a winning message on abortion: Press Democrats on where they stand on the procedure later in pregnancy, seek “common ground” on exceptions to bans and keep the focus on crime and the economy. Then, Senator Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) introduced legislation to ban abortions nationwide after 15 weeks of pregnancy — overshadowing new inflation numbers and undermining what many GOP strategists see as their best message for the fall: “Leave it to the states.”

“It’s an absolute disaster,” GOP strategist John Thomas said, as Republican Senate nominees already targeted for their comments on abortion were asked to weigh in. “Oy vey,” he said when informed that Blake Masters in battleground state Arizona had just expressed his support.

Even if Republicans succeed in making inflation or crime or border control more salient than abortion among 2022 voters, they will pay a price down the road — among voters generally and in their powerfully anti-abortion base — by running for the hills when an issue is raised that’s not going to go away in the foreseeable future. Maybe someday the two parties can get onto the same page when it comes to the menu of national problems they intend to address. But don’t hold your breath.

Preliminary data suggests that enthusiasm is up among women and young voters in the midterms.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2022/9/4/23333329/roe-voter-registration-dobbs-midterms-democrats

Democrats appeared to be heading into the 2022 midterms with a perceived voter enthusiasm deficit brought on by inflation and an unpopular incumbent president. But over the last few months, the party’s outlook for the midterms has significantly improved, and many political strategists attribute the shift at least in part to voters’ outrage over the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Many of these strategists — like Simon Rosenberg and James Carville — believe the threat of further restrictions on abortion access should the GOP take control of Congress, governor’s mansions, and statehouses will energize Democratic turnout in the fall. Several recent elections — including in New York’s 19th, where the Democratic winner centered his campaign on abortion access and the resounding rejection of a constitutional amendment that would have allowed state lawmakers to further restrict abortion access in Kansas — have been taken as early signs that Democrats are likely to fare better than expected in the fall.

Voter registration is another factor to consider when making midterm predictions. Tom Bonier, the CEO of the political data firm TargetSmart, has been analyzing publicly available voter files for every state. And he says that the data shows that young people (particularly young women) are registering to vote at a significantly higher rate in states where abortion rights are under threat since the Supreme Court’s June decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. That includes Kansas, where women registered to vote at more than twice the rate men did in the weeks between the ruling and the August 2 referendum on the constitutional amendment.

I spoke with Bonier about his findings and what they mean for Democrats’ midterm prospects. Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Nicole Narea:

I know it’s still only been a few months, but I was hoping that you might be able to step back and give us a sense of what we do know, and we don’t know yet about how Dobbs is affecting voter registration.

Tom Bonier:

Kansas was the first state I looked at to see what had been going on leading up to the ballot initiative there. Voter registration data lags by a little bit, just depending on how and when the state reports it. But we were able to get enough data from Kansas, basically looking at registered voters before Dobbs and after Dobbs, and saw that women were 69 percent of the new registrants post-Dobbs and up to the ballot initiative election, which was crazy. I’ve just never seen anything like it.

Generally, voter registration is split pretty close to 50-50. It varies a little bit by state, but not much. To see a period of time over several weeks where women accounted for almost 70 percent of registered voters — I’ve never seen anything like that.

Then, we started looking at other states. There’s no state that comes close to Kansas in terms of that size of the gender gap, which makes sense. I mean, Kansas seems almost impossible. But in Kansas, they also had an immediate constitutional amendment ballot initiative as a referendum on the future of choice in the state. So it would make sense that women were more energized there than they might be in other states because the pattern that seems to be holding up is that the surges in registration among women seem to be more closely connected to states where choice is more at risk or it’s more relevant to specific elections this year.

To me, that’s interesting because I think people might assume it’s mostly going to be a blue state, big city phenomenon. And it’s just not the case. Kansas is the number one state [in terms of the gender gap], Idaho is number two, Louisiana is in the top five. But then you also have states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, and Michigan and Wisconsin, that all have significant gender gaps, as well. We’re talking more like 12 points, not 40 points, like you had in Kansas. But still, that’s substantial.

Nicole Narea:

Do we have a sense of who these women are who are registering? And what about men?

Tom Bonier:

It’s mostly younger women. In Kansas, over half of the women who registered to vote after Dobbs were under the age of 25 — 52 percent. You do see increases in the states among younger men, too. It’s just not keeping up. It certainly is an issue that seems to be energizing younger voters in general, just more so younger women than men.

Texas was an interesting one, because I thought that you would see a similar gender gap just given the political dynamics there. And what was interesting is women and men are registering at almost even rates in Texas. But what we have seen is much higher registration rates among younger voters in general. To me, that doesn’t suggest that women aren’t energized — it just suggests that younger women and younger men in Texas seem to be energized around Dobbs and are registering at high rates.

Nicole Narea:

Do Democrats have more to gain here from these new registrations? The fact that women are registering at a higher rate would suggest that it’s a high salience issue, but not necessarily what their position is.

Tom Bonier:

In every state that I’ve looked at so far, when you look at the under-25 voters who have registered since Dobbs, and then compare them to the under-25 voters who registered this year prior to Dobbs, they’re even more Democratic. You see the same pattern with women who are registering post-Dobbs versus those who registered prior to Dobbs. They’re more likely to be registered as Democrats by a pretty wide margin.

If you want to look at it through the partisan lens, all the data we’re seeing at this point suggests that the registration surge since Dobbs is very much to the benefit of Democrats.

Nicole Narea:

You’ve been talking about this in terms of younger voters and women making up a larger share of newly registered voters. I’m also wondering to what extent we are seeing a surge in the number of registrations generally, or whether that’s hard to measure.

Tom Bonier:

For our analysis, we’re looking at what percent of the new registrants are men and women, [Democrat] versus Republican or unaffiliated or independent. Generally, as we get closer to the election and until we hit registration deadlines in both states, what we’ll see is more people registering in general. So just seeing more women register to vote by itself isn’t meaningful — but seeing women occupy a larger share of the registers is.

It’s not necessarily just relevant in that we’re going to have more new registrants, and therefore, there’ll be this surge of new voters voting in November who can impact the outcome of the election. Certainly, there’s the potential for that to some degree. But even in high turnout presidential elections, first-time voters generally only account for a relatively small share of the electorate, maybe 7 to 15 percent of voters. In a midterm election, it’s generally going to be a smaller share.

What’s interesting to me is, when you see surges in enthusiasm reflected in registration historically, it almost always is then mirrored in surges in enthusiasm and turnout among those groups overall. So it stands to reason that what we’re seeing isn’t just relevant because it means more women are eligible to vote, but it indicates that women in general are far more attuned to this election and therefore far more likely to vote.

We saw it in 2018, when younger voters were registering at a much higher rate than they had in the previous two midterms. And sure enough, younger voters almost doubled their vote share between 2014 and 2018. So the data we’re seeing here is similar.

https://fredericksburg.com/opinion/editorial/editorial-virginia-dss-cant-get-funds-to-those-in-need/article_31608d6c-fabb-549f-ad42-7127b487396e.html

There is little more disabling to a resident than coming home to find the water shut off. Unfortunately, many poor Virginians are facing that prospect as protections put in place to prevent shut-offs during COVID are now expiring.

To assist high-poverty families struggling with water and sewer bills post-COVID, the federal government in 2021 approved more than $1.1 billion for a program known as LIHWAP (low income household water assistance program). Each state received a share of these funds to help the poor bring their water and sewer bills up to date and avoid shut-off.

That money is being put to good use in most states. Here in Virginia, however, not a single cent has been distributed.

According to a fact sheet from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, as of March 30, 2022, 41 states and over 56 tribes had implemented their programs and started fund distribution. In Virginia, however, the program still hasn’t gotten off the ground.

The commonwealth received nearly $22.5 million in 2021 to get LIHWAP up and going, with $10 million of that money coming from the American Rescue Plan Act.

The state’s initial estimate was that the program would be operational by April 2022. As we enter the month of September, people still can’t apply to access these funds.

The number of those affected by the state’s failure to get the program moving is not inconsequential.

In Stafford County, as of June 9, there were 5,123 accounts listed as 30-or-more days delinquent; 2,378 listed at 60+ days, and 1,585 at 90+ days. Accounts that are 90 days delinquent or more are most at risk of having their service disconnected.

The total amount due in Stafford County for accounts 90 or more days overdue? More than $627,000.

In Spotsylvania County, 3,585 accounts are 30-or-more days delinquent as of Aug. 30; 1,341 are listed at 60+ days, and 456 are at 90+ days.

The Free Lance–Star reached out to Denise Surber, energy assistance program manager with the Virginia Department of Social Services, to ask why the state has been so slow in launching this program.

She acknowledged via email through a spokesperson that things were off to a slow start, but she offered no explanation beyond “contractual delays have resulted in the planned launch to be moved to September 2022.”

Were the delays the fault of the state? The company the state is contracting with?

And why have 41 other states managed to get their programs up and running, including the programs in North Carolina, Maryland, and Pennsylvania?

Benjamin Litchfield wants to know why, too.

“When I assumed the role of Aquia District Utilities Commissioner” on June 7, he told The Free Lance–Star, “it appeared that Virginia DSS was still negotiating vendor agreements and had yet to decide how to implement the program. … I’ve been pestering county staff about the status of this program ever since.”

On June 9, Litchfield asked Christopher Edwards of the Stafford County Department of Public Works what he knew about progress on the program.

Edwards forwarded Litchfield a summary from Deidre Jett, budget manager for the department. Citing Surber, Jett wrote: “the vendor agreement should be sent out by the end of the week.”

As for when the state would implement the program? Jett noted that “In regards to timing and how the program will work (manual versus electronic), not much progress since the last meeting [with the state DSS office].”

It is clear from Litchfield’s efforts that from April to June, the state DSS office had been dragging its feet. Has it done better since?

Apparently not, as Surber is still talking about a “planned launch” in September.

Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger is equally frustrated. “It is unacceptable that it has taken this long … and I am closely following for updates on the expected implementation timeline.”

In our region, the difference between having water tomorrow and not having water for many of our poorer residents lies in getting this program off the ground.

Surber’s suggestion to those waiting for that to happen? A laundry list of other groups to track down. People, she said, should seek “additional assistance from community partners, community action agencies, and non-profit organizations.”

Those in need shouldn’t have to do this. Not when the money is in place to ensure that water is flowing through the pipes in their homes tomorrow.