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The Democrats' chances of winning both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives in November's midterm elections are improving, based on an analysis by national poll tracker FiveThirtyEight.

President Joe Biden's party is currently favored to win the Senate, while Republicans are favored to win the House, but the Democrats appear to be picking up momentum.

FiveThirtyEight said the GOP's chances of taking the House were 72 percent as of Thursday compared to the Democrats' 28 percent. However, those figures represent a movement toward the Democrats.

On September 2, the same analysis gave Republicans 75 percent chance of taking the House, while Democrats had 25 percent, a move of three points in two weeks.

Republicans are facing a bleaker picture in the Senate, where FiveThirtyEight's analysis shows Democrats with a 71 percent chance of taking the chamber compared to the GOP's 29 percent.

On September 2, the same analysis showed Democrats with just 68 chances in 100 of taking the Senate and Republicans with 32 chances in 100. FiveThirtyEight's model now rates Democrats as "favored" to win the Senate but they were previously only "slightly favored" to do so.

The poll tracker includes data from a wide variety of pollsters and assigns each one a rating using its own system to arrive at its final figures.

The Democrats' position in the upcoming midterms has been steadily improving despite the fact the incumbent president's party generally performs poorly in midterm election years and Biden's approval ratings have been low.

The president's approval rating has been rising in recent weeks, however, with Biden's approval standing at 42.3 percent as of Thursday based on FiveThirtyEight's tracker. His disapproval rating was 53.1 percent.

With less than two months until the midterms, it remains to be seen if Democrats can pick up enough momentum to keep control of the House and the Senate. If they can do so, it would be a significant victory.

The last time neither chamber of Congress changed hands was in the 1998 midterms when Republicans retained the House and Senate despite modest Democratic gains in the House. The composition of the Senate also changed slightly.

It's worth noting that the 1998 midterms were considered a disappointment for Republicans at the time as the party had hoped to make gains following major victories in 1994.

It's difficult to speculate about why Democrats' chances are improving and the current polls may not be borne out in November but recent legislative victories such as the Inflation Reduction Act and concerns about abortion rights could be part of the apparent shift.

The Inflation Reduction Act, which Biden signed into law on August 16, is seen as reviving his Build Back Better agenda, which had stalled earlier his presidency, while the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to overturn the landmark 1973 abortion ruling Roe v. Wade may be cause for concern for Republican candidates if voters prove to be motivated by the ruling.

More here:
Democrats' Chances of Keeping Both House and Senate Are Improving: Polls - Newsweek

The two parties arent on the same page about what they should even be debating. Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty Images

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 doesnt 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, thats 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 dont want to happen. Beyond that fundamental problem, moreover, is a flawed premise at the heart of the bipartisan proposition: The parties often dont agree on any commonly identified problems. Indeed, as Ron Brownstein explains, thats why Democrats and Republicans appear to be talking past each other in this years 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 arent 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 partys 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 partys 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 Kushnerbrokered 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.)introducedlegislation 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.

Its 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 thats 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 dont hold your breath.

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Democrats and Republicans Aren't Even Talking About the Same Issues This Year - New York Magazine

[The media is] reacting the way they think theyre supposed to react to maintain [their] neutral bona fidesby policing norms and obsessing over how itll affect the horserace; by neither validating [nor] invalidating the critique. Thats not to say their reaction is unimportant, if it persists unanswered or successfully drives Democrats into retreat, the idea that Democrats overplayed some ill-defined hand will crystalize into public opinion. As we learned during the Trump presidency, the best way to normalize the critique, to get journalists to accept that it is just part of our discourse now, is to just plow ahead with it, over their sniffing, until it no longer seems extraordinary even to them.

As Beutler went on to point out, all Democrats should want GOP extremism and criminality to remain the thematic center of politics at least between now and the election. That Mitch McConnelldesperately wants to change the subjectis a clear indication that Democrats shouldnt just allow fascism or semi-fascism to happen.

Chances are, the Democrats wont retain majorities in both houses of Congress. But they cant do much about the countrys historical tendency to reward the party out of power in the midterms, nor can they alter the reality of electoral math or partisan gerrymandering, or the rude mechanics of a systemthats tilted toward the Republican Partyin multiple ways.

The good news is that should Democrats come up short, it will be due to these realities and not because they ran on a bunch of bad policy ideas or bankrupt ideological beliefs. The partys popular positions will survive a defeat in 2022, as will its case against the GOPs authoritarian turnwhich, lets face it, will onlyget worse. There is an equally important election in 2024. Democrats have good ideas and better enemies. Thats why they should all possess the confidence of Lindsey Graham.

The rest is here:
Democrats: Steal This Move From Lindsey Graham - The New Republic

David Brooks can't figure out why the Democrats haven't figured out how to stop Donald Trump. Excerpts:

You would think that those of us in the anti-Trump camp would have at one point stepped back and asked some elemental questions: What are we trying to achieve? Who is the core audience here? Which strategies have worked, and which have not?

If those questions were asked, the straightforward conclusion would be that most of what we are doing is not working. The next conclusion might be that theres a lot of self-indulgence here. Were doing things that help those of us in the anti-Trump world bond with one another and that help people in the Trump world bond with one another. Were locking in the political structures that benefit Trump.

My core conclusion is that attacking Trump personally doesnt work. You have to rearrange the underlying situation. We are in the middle of a cultural/economic/partisan/identity war between more progressive people in the metro areas and more conservative people everywhere else. To lead the right in this war, Trump doesnt have to be honest, moral or competent; he just has to be seen taking the fight to the elites.

The proper strategy in this situation is to scramble the identity war narrative. Thats what Biden did in 2020. He ran as a middle-class moderate from Scranton. He dodged the culture war issues. Thats what the Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman is trying to do in Pennsylvania.

A Democratic candidate who steps outside the culture/identity war narrative is going to have access to the voters who need to be moved. Public voices who dont seem locked in the insular educated elite worldview are going to be able to reach the people who need to be reached.

Trumpists tell themselves that America is being threatened by a radical left putsch that is out to take over the government and undermine the culture. The core challenge now is to show by word and deed that this is a gross exaggeration.

But the thing is -- it's not a gross exaggeration. This is what the elites keep telling themselves. Just today, I was driving, and heard NPR interview Juan Perez Jr., an education reporter from Politico, about Republican strategies in this fall's education races. Here's an excerpt from that interview:

PEREZ: I think that's true. For starters, I think we should note - education and schooling have always been political, right? Yet the pandemic, our nation's ongoing reckoning with race, gender identity, have made it clear that the environment was ripe for a shift, a pendulum swing. Recent polling from one Democratic education advocacy group from this summer concluded that parents and voters of color in dozens of congressional battlegrounds, they were more likely to trust Republicans on education policy than Democrats.

SUMMERS: OK. So we've talked a lot about the attention that conservative Republicans across the country are paying to these offices. Have Democratic candidates offered any sort of counter narrative or funding to match that intensity on the right?

PEREZ: I think they're working on it. The challenge is whether it's actually breaking through, particularly in red states, where, again, this stuff is so potent, such a potent issue for base voters. There's emerging polling and messaging, guidance and strategy coming out of Democrats right now that are trying to get candidates focused on, I guess, what I would describe as bread-and-butter issues, back on academics, back on the classroom, back on teacher pay, back on what we need to do to make sure children catch up after years of disrupted schooling amid the coronavirus pandemic. And I think that's partly because they want to appeal not only to voters who are very concerned about these issues, but also, again, moderates and independents who may be turned off by some of the far-right culture war messaging that's been animating primary campaigns.

Classic, just classic. The way Perez Jr frames it is that the Republicans are fooling people with "far-right culture war messaging," instead of focusing on real issues, like teacher pay and Covid catch-up. Funny, though, that black and Latino parents trust Republicans more on education issues than Democrats. Gosh, I wonder why. Do you think that black and Latino parents don't want their kids to be jacked up with propaganda encouraging them to think of themselves as transgender, and to learn a hundred pronouns? Yeah, I think that might be it. That, and the fact that over and over, we are seeing school boards defend policies that instruct teachers and staff to hide from parents their child's transness. Not to mention all the CRT crap that riled up northern Virginia voters, including immigrants and people of color.

You can tell by reading or listening to the interview with the Politico reporter that this entire media class sees their own cultural preferences as normative and uncontroversial. To object to it is to either be on the far right, or a dupe of the far right. Why is this such a mystery to my friend David? Maybe if you live in the Boston-NYC-DC corridor, you can't easily see how radical all this is to people outside it. Today the Biden White House held a summit to fight "white supremacy" -- this, while the country is suffering a crime wave that is not being led by white people any more than religious terrorism is being led by Swedish Lutherans. You can be sure that Joe Biden is not interested in this hate crime at a Beaumont school; it doesn't fit the Narrative:

This is why the anti-Trump people don't have a strategy to stop Trump. It would require them abandoning their cultural narrative. People are less afraid of what Trump might do to the country than they are about what Biden and the elite Left that runs American institutions, including Big Business, are doing to the country right now. I spoke to a recently retired military officer the other day when I was traveling. He left the service early because woke politics had infested the brass. He told me it's truly affecting American readiness -- but no one higher up the Pentagon ladder cares. It's all about woke politics now.

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I hope Ron DeSantis is the 2024 Republican nominee, because I think he is right on the issues, competent, and blessedly free of Trump's narcissism and drama. But you want to know why a lot of us would vote for Trump, despite having no particular regard for him? Watch Tucker Carlson's monologue tonight. This is but one reason why. This stuff is no great mystery. I remember the summer of 2016, when candidate Donald Trump flew to mosquito-bound, rain-soaked Baton Rouge to visit with victims of the catastrophic flooding. That same weekend, candidate Hillary Clinton was at a $50,000 a plate fundraiser on, yes, Martha's Vineyard, at the home of her friend Lady Rothschild. You can't make it up!

Excerpt from:
Why Can't The Democrats Beat Trump? - The American Conservative

The draft text of permitting reform expands the scope of categorical exclusions that are regularly applied to oil and gas projectsincluding BPs Deepwater Horizon rigin a way that could include more clean energy projects and level the playing field.

Many advocates are leery of categorical exclusions writ large. A more careful analysis also isnt necessarily a slower one. Analyzing 41,000 NEPA decisions completed by the U.S. Forest Service between 2004 and 2020, legal scholars John C. Ruple, Jamie Pleune, and Erik Heiny found that delays associated with the law are owed to inadequate staffing, insufficient funding, and time spent on interagency coordination, not a delay in permitting. Contrary to widely held assumptions, they write, we found that a less rigorous level of analysis often fails to deliver faster decisions. As Aaron Gordon reported recently for Vice, the agencies that handle such decisions are chronically understaffed, with many now adding a growing number of climate disasters to already full plates. According to the most recent draft on offer, this version of permitting reform wouldnt give regulators more resources to do their jobs; it would require them to do them more quickly. Forty years of bludgeoning state capacity has not made it more efficient. The gamble proposed by proponents of the side deal is that now it will.

Neither is the bill a panacea for local opposition; locals seeking to block a project can lean on any number of local, state, and federal provisions to keep stuff from getting built. Theres no way around getting the backing of politically powerful players where you want to get a project through, Earthjustice director Abigail Dillan told me. Decarbonizing the U.S. economy, that isan awe-inspiring taskwill require a certain amount of democratic consent.

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Why Resolving Democrats' Internal War on Climate Policy Will Be Hard - The New Republic