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Democrats on Wednesday passed their $1.9 trillion spending and welfare bill that would have been unimaginable even in the Obama years, and the big news is how easily they did it. The party is united behind the most left-wing agenda in decades, while Republicans are divided and in intellectual disarray. This is only the beginning of the progressive steamroller, and its worth understanding why.

One lesson from the Covid non-fight is that there are no Democratic moderates in Congress. The party base has moved so sharply left that even swing-state Members are more liberal than many liberals in the Clinton years. Democrats lost not a single vote in the Senate and only one in the House. The fear of primary challenges from the left, which took out House war horses in 2018 and 2020, has concentrated incumbent minds.

A second lesson is that President Biden is no moderating political force. Democrats in the House and Senate are setting the agenda, and Mr. Biden is along for the ride. Hes the ideal political front-man for this agenda with his talk of unity and anti-Trump persona, but he isnt shaping legislation. He is signing on to whatever chief of staff Ron Klain tells him he needs to support.

For now at least, there also isnt much of an opposition. With a few exceptions, the media are marching in lockstep support of whatever Democrats want. The substance of the Covid bill was barely covered outside of these pages. Opposition to H.R.1, the federal takeover of state election law, is literally reported as a revival of Jim Crow racism.

The business community has also been co-opted, as it often is at the beginning of a Democratic Presidency. Industries are trying to protect their specific iron rice bowls, but one price is their accommodation with the larger progressive agenda. Small business opposes the $15 minimum wage, but bigger businesses dont mind saddling smaller competitors with higher costs. Big Oil doesnt mind selling out independent frackers on climate rules.

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Opinion: The Progressive Democratic Steamroller - The Wall Street Journal

The Lake Research survey produced an unexpected result: Latinos were more sympathetic than either white or Black voters to Republican dog whistle messages.

The dog whistle messages tested by Lake Research included:

Taking a second look at illegal immigration from places overrun with drugs and criminal gangs, is just common sense. And so is fully funding the police, so our communities are not threatened by people who refuse to follow our laws.

And

We need to make sure we take care of our own people first, especially the people who politicians have cast aside for too long to cater to whatever special interest groups yell the loudest or riot in the street.

The receptivity of Hispanics to such messages led Haney-Lpez to conclude that those Latinos most likely to vote Republican do so for racial reasons.

What matters most, Haney-Lpez continued, is susceptibility to Republican dog whistle racial frames that trumpet the threat from illegal aliens, rapists, rioters and terrorists.

Julie Wronski, a political scientist at the University of Mississippi, offered a distinct but similar explanation for the increased Hispanic support for Republicans.

What may be changing is how certain ethnic and nationality groups within Hispanics perceive themselves with regards to their racial and ideological identities, she wrote by email:

If Latinos perceive themselves more as white than as a person of color, then they will react to messages about racial injustice and defunding the police as whites do by using their ideological identity rather than racial identity to shape support.

Wronski reports that

there is also a burgeoning line of research on the role of skin tone among non-Whites. Nonwhites who perceive themselves as having lighter skin tone feel closer to whites and tend to be more conservative than their darker-skinned peers.

Wronski made the case that conservative Hispanics who voted Republican in 2020 are not permanently lost to the Democratic Party:

Identifying as a conservative and supporting conservative policy positions are not the same thing. This is especially true for economic issues, such as unemployment benefits and minimum wage. If you know that a group of Latinos tend to be symbolically conservative and economically liberal, then you can make appeals to them on the shared economic liberalism basis and avoid pointing out diverging views on social issues.

Marc Farinella, a former Democratic consultant who helped run many statewide campaigns in the Midwest and is now at the University of Chicagos Harris School of Public Policy, wrote in response to my inquiry that the fraying of Hispanic support is emblematic of a larger problem confronting Democrats:

American politics in recent decades has become increasingly democratized. Historically-marginalized groups have been brought into the political process, and this, of course, improves representation. But democratization has also, for better or for worse, been highly disruptive to our two-party system.

Traditionally, party leaders tend to support centrist polices and candidates; they are, after all, in the business of winning general elections, he continued:

However, the ability of party leaders to set the partys priorities and define its values has been eroded. They must now compete with activist factions that have been empowered by digital technologies that have greatly amplified their messaging.

As a result, Farinella wrote,

Its now less clear to general election voters precisely what are the Democratic Partys values and priorities. Last year, Republicans succeeded in exploiting this ambiguity by insisting that the messaging of certain leftist activist factions was an accurate reflection of the Partys policy positions and, by and large, the policy positions of most Democratic candidates. As far left activists compete with Democratic Party leaders to define party values and messaging, the centrist voters needed to achieve a durable majority will remain wary about Democratic desires for dominance.

On the other hand, according to Farinella, the lunacy currently underway within the Republican Party could prove to be the Democratic Partys ace in the hole:

A party that demands fealty to a single demagogic politician, condones or even embraces loopy conspiracy theories, recklessly undermines crucial democratic norms and institutions, and believes the best way to improve its electoral prospects is by making it more difficult to vote is not a party destined for long-term success. If the Republican Party continues on its current path, center-right voters might decide that their only real options are to vote Democratic or stay home.

Farinella acknowledged that this might just be wishful thinking.

Ryan Enos, a professor of government at Harvard, is concerned that liberal elites may threaten the vulnerable Democratic coalition:

The question for parties is whether members of their coalition are a liability because they repel other voters from the coalition. For Democrats, this may increasingly be the case with college-educated whites. They are increasingly concentrated into large cities, which mitigates their electoral impact, and they dominate certain institutions, such as universities and the media. The views emanating from these cities and institutions are out of step with a large portion of the electorate.

Many of these well-educated urban whites dont seem to appreciate the urgency of the struggles of middle and low-income Americans, Enos continued:

Most of them support, in theory, economically progressive agendas like minimum wage increases and affordable housing, but they dont approach these issues with any urgency even Covid relief and environmental protection take a back seat to a progressive agenda focused on social issues.

Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, whose firm, North Star Opinion Research, has studied Hispanic partisan allegiance, wrote in an email that Latinos are far more flexible in their voting than African-Americans:

As a general rule, about 50 percent of Hispanics vote fairly consistently for Democrats, 25 percent vote for Republicans and the remaining 25 percent are up for grabs.

In the Latino electorate, Ayres said, many are sensitive to charges of socialism because of their country of origin. Many are sensitive to law-and-order issues. And many are cultural conservatives, as Reagan argued years ago.

As a result, Ayres continued,

When white liberal Democrats start talking about defunding the police, the Green New Deal and promoting policies that can be described as socialistic, they repel a lot of Hispanic voters. In other words, most Hispanics, like most African-Americans, are not ideological liberals.

The current level of concern has been sharply elevated by a series of widely publicized interviews with David Shor, a 29-year-old Democratic data scientist whose analyses have captured the attention of Democratic elites.

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Opinion | Democrats Are Anxious About 2022 and 2024 - The New York Times

The former governor of Virginia, four years removed from the end of his first term, is vying for another shot at leading the commonwealth, running as the closest thing to an incumbent in a place that bars governors from serving successive terms. McAuliffe enters the race as the clear frontrunner, buoyed by a significant fundraising advantage, a who's who list of endorsements and near total name recognition.

But both Democratic politics and Virginia have changed since McAuliffe's successful 2013 run, a shift exemplified by the Democratic legislature -- which went blue in 2019 with McAuliffe's help -- moving to abolish the death penalty, tighten gun laws and reckon with the legacy of the Confederacy in a commonwealth closely tied to the Civil War South.

With less than three months until the Democratic gubernatorial primary, McAuliffe -- who faced no primary challenge eight years ago -- is now being pushed by younger, more liberal challengers to explain how a leader synonymous with the political establishment reflects the future of the commonwealth and not the politics of a bygone era.

The anti-McAuliffe charge ahead of the June 8 primary has been led by former Virginia delegate Jennifer Carroll Foy and Del. Lee Carter, two gubernatorial candidates who have been unabashedly critical of the former governor. Two other Democrats -- state Sen. Jennifer McClellan and Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax -- haven't been as pointed in their criticism of McAuliffe, but they have all echoed a similar message: McAuliffe's time has passed.

"He was the right candidate for that moment. He was the right governor for that moment," said McClellan, referring to McAuliffe's 2013 bid, which she supported. "Times have changed. Virginia has changed."

McAuliffe, a figure whose story in the Democratic Party is defined by millions of dollars raised, the Clintons and a tenure as chair of the Democratic National Committee, dismisses any suggestion he isn't the future of the party. He points out that even after his time as governor, Virginia Democrats called on him to lead the effort that eventually won control of the Virginia General Assembly, giving the party full control of the state's government for the first time in more than two decades.

"I don't pay any attention to them," he said of his opponents suggesting his time has come and gone. "I'm laying out my own plan on why I'm running."

McAuliffe has already flooded his Democratic opponents in three things: Money, policy and endorsements.

The prolific fundraiser fired a warning shot early in the campaign when he announced he had raised $6.1 million in 2020, a staggering number that dwarfed his opponents' own efforts. And when he announced in December, his candidacy came along with a long list of endorsements, including a number of high-profile Democrats who serve with some of his primary challengers.

Since then, McAuliffe has rolled out policy after policy, aiming to both burnish his progressive credentials and argue that because Virginia is now in Democratic control, something the governor did not enjoy during his tenure, he will be able to get more done.

"I leaned in (as governor), but I had a Republican legislature. Now, with a Democratic legislature, all the big things that need to be fixed, we can get done," he said. "Heck, I just warming up. You give me a Democratic legislature, there is no stopping me."

'The appetite for career politicians... is long gone'

McAuliffe's desire to run for a second term as governor has long been one of the worst kept secrets in the commonwealth. The former chair of the DNC and CNN political commentator relished the job, often joking about how his election -- after Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson served as Virginia's first and second governors -- was a sign of American exceptionalism.

If McAuliffe were to win in November, however, he would do something neither Henry nor Jefferson ever did: Serve two four-year terms as the commonwealth's chief executive. The Virginia constitution prohibits governors from serving two successive terms and very few Virginia politicians have done so. The last person to do it was Mills Godwin, a segregationist who won as a Democrat in 1966 and as a Republican in 1974.

McAuliffe argues that even though he feels like he accomplished everything he could as governor -- "I don't know if you could find (a regret). I mean, I worked like a dog," he said -- it just makes sense for him to reprise a role that is part Virginia's chief executive, part commonwealth cheerleader.

Virginians "know I can get things done," McAuliffe said. "I did it before and they all know with a Democratic legislature, boy, I feel bad for those other 49 states cause I'm telling you Virginia is going to lead the country."

But his third run at governor (he tried and failed to win the party's nomination in 2009) also means standing in the way of possible history: If either McClellan or Foy were to win, she would become both the first woman to lead Virginia and the first Black woman governor in US history.

The significance of making such history, especially in a state that once housed the Capitol of the South during the Civil War, is powerful to both women.

"I feel the weight of it because... to know what my family has gone through, the fights that my parents and my grandparents and my great grandparents had to fight, to know that I'm still fighting those fights and I need to keep my children from fighting those same fights, I feel the weight of that," said McClellan, growing emotional as she described the potential for history. "I feel the weight of knowing I am running for a position in a system that was never built for me."

To McAuliffe's opponents, the reasoning for his candidacy is deeply flawed. And no candidate is more eager to go after McAuliffe than Foy, who resigned her assembly seat in December to focus on her gubernatorial run.

"I can't allow Terry McAuliffe to run a status quo race, while he romanticizes his time as governor," said Foy, who has argued her experience as one of the first women to every graduate from Virginia Military Institute and a mother of two who still struggles with child care and student loan debt is more representative of the commonwealth.

Foy has attacked McAuliffe on everything from donations he has taken to deals he made as governor to the fact he did little to address Confederate monuments. But her overarching criticism is that she represents Virginia's most progressive future, while McAuliffe represents the past.

"The appetite for career politicians who have continued to maintain the status quo that has hurt so many Virginians is long gone," she said in an interview.

But Foy is not alone in trying to run on McAuliffe's left. Lee Carter, the self-proclaimed democratic socialist state delegate with deep ties to the Bernie Sanders network of supporters and liberal organizations, has begun to lambast the former governor as not progressive enough.

"I see him as the guy that got us here and that's in very, very real ways," Carter told CNN, hammering McAuliffe for his support of pipelines through the state and economic policies that focused more on the rich than the poor. "We've spent the last eight years fighting against some of the worst things from McAuliffe's time as governor."

Neither McClellan nor Fairfax has been as direct in their criticism of McAuliffe as Foy and Carter, but their differences are primarily in tone, not substance.

"The voters decide what they are looking for in their candidates and in their visions for the future. But I do think it is very clear that people want their leaders to be focused on a vision for the future," said Fairfax.

For Fairfax, opposing McAuliffe is personal. During a chaotic period in Virginia government, Fairfax was accused of sexual assault by two women in 2019. Both women still stand by their allegations.

It is apparent that it still bothers the lieutenant governor and people close to him that McAuliffe, by then the former governor, had quickly called for him to step down due to the allegations.

Voters are "totally against the politics of the past and the traditional tactics of personal destruction that we have seen govern for too long," Fairfax said, a not-so-subtle nod to McAuliffe.

'People are looking for tested leadership'

"People are looking for tested leadership," said Louise Lucas, the president pro tempore of the Virginia state Senate and a McAuliffe campaign co-chair. "They need people with experience who can hit the ground running day one, who doesn't have to try to cultivate all those relationships."

Referring to Biden winning in 2020: "That in and of itself tell me people are looking for tested leadership."

Virginia overwhelmingly backed Biden during the 2020 primary, selecting him over liberal leaders like Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. And the state, which was once considered a battleground but has moved towards Democrats in recent years, would later back Biden over Trump by 10 percentage points in November. And McAuliffe is very close, both politically and personally, with the President.

Comparisons to the 2020 presidential election, however, ignore the fact that Democrats were as motivated to vote against Trump as they were to vote for Biden.

"That's so simplistic, I don't even know what to say," said McClellan. "Biden won in large part because he was the candidate who had the most government experience and the most experience solving people's problems. ... I have more state government experience and public service experience addressing the needs of Virginia than all of my opponents combined, including Terry McAuliffe."

Foy was even more pointed, comparing McAuliffe's candidacy to Hillary Clinton's failed 2008 presidential run.

"The comparison I hear about is Barack Obama and Hillary," she said. "How you had people saying that there's a person who is inevitable, who is a money machine, who has been around politics for a very long time and therefore everyone needs to make way."

The issue that these anti-McAuliffe candidates run into is space. People close to McAuliffe cheered when Carter entered the race, believing he will further box out candidates like Foy. And the longer the four challengers stay in, the harder it will be for either candidate to make up for their lack of statewide name recognition or consolidate the anti-McAuliffe support.

"If you believed that was so important, wouldn't you gather together and consolidate your vote?" asked Larry Sabato, the director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

Sabato concluded that, along with Virginia Democrats' desire to win, will help McAuliffe.

"Because Democrats lost for so long in Virginia... Democrats still have a minority mentality even though they are in the majority and because of that, they do tend to make practical decision in primaries," he said. "That may be the best thing McAuliffe has, other than incumbency and money, on his behalf."

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story gave an incorrect first name for Glenn Youngkin.

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Terry McAuliffe wants to be Virginia's governor again. His opponents say it's time to move on. - CNN

WASHINGTONDemocrats are resorting to a well-worn tactic for their plan to expand the child tax credit: Push for a short-term policy, then highlight the consequences of letting it expire as scheduled.

The expansion of the credit would send money to households, increasing the benefit to $3,000 a child from $2,000 while adding a $600 bonus for children under age 6. It is a key piece of the $1.9 trillion pandemic-relief plan that the House passed on Saturday and that the Senate will consider this week.

Advocates say the bill would cut child poverty in half. But that larger credit is scheduled to last only through 2021, and its backers are already warning what will happen if it expires and urging a permanent extension.

Were really confident that Congress is not going to want to double the child poverty rate in this country, Sen. Michael Bennet (D., Colo.) told reporters last week.

Once the larger credit is in place, it wont go away, regardless of the Dec. 31 expiration date, predicted Brian Riedl, a former Senate GOP aide who is now a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.

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Democrats Seek Temporary Expansion of Child Tax Credit, but Making It Permanent Is Real Goal - The Wall Street Journal

Lyndon Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Photo: AP/Shutterstock

Until not very long ago, voting rights was a genuinely bipartisan cause. Yes, of course, mostly Democratic southern racists had opposed the original Voting Rights Act of 1965, and their conservative Republican ideological heirs periodically fought its renewal and extension over many years. But as recently as 2006, President George W. Bush signed a 25-year extension of the VRA without a lot of controversy. This report from NBC News on the occasion describes a different Republican Party from the one we have today:

The Republican-controlled Congress, eager to improve its standing with minorities ahead of the November elections, pushed the bill through even though key provisions were not set to expire until next year.

The right of ordinary men and women to determine their own political future lies at the heart of the American experiment, Bush said. He said the Voting Rights Act proposed and signed by then-President Lyndon Johnson in 1965 broke the segregationist lock on the voting box.

Unfortunately, one of the Supreme Court justices appointed by W., Chief Justice John Roberts, helped put the lock back on the voting box in a 2013 decision that neutered one major safeguard of the Voting Rights Act, Shelby County v. Holder. (The Court junked the preclearance requirement that forced jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to clear proposed voting changes in advance with the Justice Department.) Now another VRA principle, the doctrine that state and local voting practices that result in discrimination are illegal whether or not malicious intent is demonstrated, could fall to a 6-3 conservative majority on the Court this very term.

Meanwhile, the need for federal voting-rights protections has become urgent once again as Republican-controlled state legislatures in and beyond the South race to restrict the franchise, often in ways that harm minority voters who lean Democratic. While some of this reactionary legislation stems from Donald Trumps lies about the impact of voting by mail, pre-Trump efforts to dig multiple potholes on the path to the ballot box (voter-roll purges, voter-ID requirements, and cutbacks on in-person early voting opportunities) are evident as well.

So if the Democratic Party is now the sole party of voting rights, what can it do at the federal level to stop and reverse this tide of voter suppression? The maximum answer is in the legislation Democrats pushed through the House in 2019 and introduced again this year: the For the People Act, aimed for the first time at enshrining the opportunity to vote as a nationally recognized right for all citizens. As The Atlantics Ron Brownstein explained earlier this year, the legislation would systematically address all the roadblocks to full ballot access and fair representation:

For federal elections, it would require every state to do the following: provide online, automatic, and same-day registration; ensure at least 15 days of in-person early voting; provide all voters access to no-excuse, postage-free absentee ballots; and offer drop boxes where they can return those ballots. It would also end gerrymandering by requiring every state to create independent commissions to draw congressional districts; establish a system of public financing for congressional elections; institute new safeguards against foreign interference in elections; and require increased disclosure of the unlimited dark-money campaign spending that was unleashed by the Supreme Courts 2010Citizens Unitedruling, which, likeShelby County,was backed by the Courts conservative majority.

Critical as the For the People Act would be in ensuring that Republican state legislatures dont perpetually enthrone anti-democratic (and anti-Democratic) rule, the newly partisan nature of voting rights as an issue guarantees that it has no chance of surviving a Senate Republican filibuster. And as Democrat Joe Manchin made clear this week, there will not be a Senate Democratic majority for eliminating the filibuster in the immediate future. Yes, Democrats should continue to try to convince Manchin and his fellow reform skeptic, Senator Kyrsten Sinema, that exempting voting-rights legislation from the filibuster is not just a worthy task but one thats essential to their own political survival (not to mention their honor). But as a threshold consideration, perhaps theres a simpler vehicle for both shaming Republicans and urging Democrats to fight efforts to turn back the clock.

That vehicle may be another piece of legislation passed by the House in 2019 and reintroduced this year: the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Put simply, this legislation restores the original structure and scope of the VRA. It creates a new formula for determining jurisdictions that will be subject to the preclearance requirement gutted by Shelby (which basically said the old formula was outmoded) and clarifies that discriminatory results will be grounds for invalidating voting changes. Its a VRA fix in a very limited sense, which should accordingly be acceptable to at least some Republicans.

Without in any way retreating from the principles incorporated in the For the People Act, Democrats could focus initially on the legislation named for Lewis, whose heroic sacrifices in Selma spurred the enactment of the original Voting Rights Act, and simply demand a restoration of the status quo ante. Perhaps that modest goal could drag a few Senate Republicans across the aisle and put pressure on others (in a way Mitch McConnell avoided by refusing to allow the legislation to come to the floor when he was majority leader) or even convince Manchin and Sinema that Republican obstructionism on so basic a matter is intolerable.

But if all else fails, a new focus on merely restoring the VRA as we knew it the VRA as George W. Bush and other Republicans supported would expose how far the GOP has fallen toward the disreputable precedents set by racists in both parties. Todays Republicans shouldnt be allowed to hide behind opposition to this or that provision in the wide-ranging For the People Act to distract attention from their abandonment of the most minimal guarantees for voting rights.

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Will Democrats Act Like the Party of Voting Rights or Not? - New York Magazine