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AUGUSTA, Maine A national Republican group was quick to put out a statement hammering Gov. Janet Mills after former Gov. Paul LePage officially filed to face her in 2022last week.

But the sharpest criticism directed at Mills in the past few weeks has been from fellow Democrats as she came into conflict with progressives, ultimately vetoing more than a dozen progressive bills including several on criminal justice, tribal gaming and prescription drug prices.

It is the sort of division LePage and his Republican allies could benefit from in 2022, especially if a third-party candidatejoins a race that will not use ranked-choice voting. But despite objections from fellow Democrats on policy in recent weeks, there is little sign that liberals would abandon Mills in big numbers, with lawmakers who have criticized the governor still likely to support her.

Progressives were disappointed by her vetoes, viewing them as a wasted opportunity to pass ambitious legislation with a trifecta in Augusta, said Betsy Sweet, a progressive lobbyist who finished in third place behind Mills in the 2018 Democratic gubernatorial primary. But she also noted Mills COVID-19 response and proposals to increase child carefunding as positives.

There have been some really good things done, she said. This is not all about vetoes.

The open divisions are somewhat new for Mills, who was quick to reverse controversial LePage policies after riding into the Blaine House with full Democratic control of the Legislature in 2018. She signed an order to expand Medicaid on her first day in office.

Last years legislative session was cut short with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, which abruptly flipped the tenorof Mills first termfrom good times to crisis. But Maine weathered the pandemic relatively well and federal funding helped avert what could have been a state budget crisis, allowing for a new, bipartisan state budget that met Maines K-12 education funding goalfor the first time. While Mills has sharply raised state spending, she has held the line on taxes.

Behind that approach, Mills has weathered limited backlash given increasing polarization. She maintained a 57 percent approval ratingin a Digital Research Inc. poll released last month, which is 10 points higher than LePages highest markduring his tenure as governor.

Mills careful path so far made recent criticism from Democrats stand out. Maine Conservation Voters, which endorsed Mills during the 2018 general election campaign, said it was disappointed in Mills after she vetoed a bill to ban the use of aerial herbicides. Maine Youth Justice, a group that advocates for criminal justice reform, called Mills veto of a bill to close Maines only youth prisona grave misstep.

Senate President Troy Jackson, D-Allagash, said Mills did not have the courage to stand up to pharmaceutical companies after she vetoed bills he championed targeting prescription drug prices. (Mills, in her veto message, argued the bills would be unlikely to withstand constitutional scrutiny and may not accomplish Jacksons intended goals.)

That was a sharp remark, but the Mills squabbles look quaint next to the wars between LePage and Senate Republicans. The latter group largely allied with Democrats on budget issues in the run-up to a 2017 government shutdown. LePage vetoed a record 642 bills during his tenure in a mostly divided government; Mills has vetoed 16 as of Friday after 10 in her first two years in office. Two Democratic-led Legislatures have sustained all vetoes so far.

Mills recent decisions have also kept her in good graces with groups that might be more likely to oppose her. Ben Lucas, executive director of the Maine Jobs Council, a conservative-leaning business advocacy group, pointed to a bill aimed at reforming the unemployment system as the only recent major one the governor backedthat was opposed by the business community.

Mills vetoed several other bills that business interests had spoken against, including a graduated real estate tax and a bill limiting referendum spending by companies owned by foreign governments.

We certainly appreciate the governor holding the line on a lot of these very anti-jobs proposals, Lucas said.

Sen. Bill Diamond, D-Windham, a moderate who praised Mills recent vetoes, said there would be a clear philosophical difference between the governor and LePage. Sweet said progressives would not defect, but that their enthusiasm to help Mills could wane due to recent actions.

Theyre not going to vote for LePage, she said. But I think its really the difference between voting, and then enthusiastically working, canvassing and helping.

Mills has not formally launched her reelection campaign, though she resumed fundraising in late March. The campaign against her has already begun, with the Republican Governors Association, in a statement after LePage filed, saying she had driven Maine into a ditch with her extreme liberal pet projects.

Advocates have still begun to step up on her behalf. Recent bills, such as the bipartisan budget, showed Mills is willing to work with conservatives and progressives to achieve shared goals, said Emily Cain, a former Maine lawmaker who now is executive director of EMILYs List, a group that helps elect Democratic women and aided Mills in the 2018 primary.

When you consider the combination of the pandemic, along with heightened partisanship in our country, Janet has remained true to her Maine values with every decision that she has made, Cain said.

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Janet Mills stalls progressive priorities as race with Paul LePage kicks off - Bangor Daily News

Can progressives win broad numbers of the Black and brown voters they say their policies will benefit most?

That provocative question is one that a lot of Democrats find themselves asking after seeing the early results from New York Citys mayoral primary this past week.

In a contest that centered on crime and public safety, Eric Adams, who emerged as the leading Democrat, focused much of his message on denouncing progressive slogans and policies that he said threatened the lives of Black and brown babies and were being pushed by a lot of young, white, affluent people. A retired police captain and Brooklyns borough president, he rejected calls to defund the Police Department and pledged to expand its reach in the city.

Black and brown voters in Brooklyn and the Bronx flocked to his candidacy, awarding Mr. Adams with sizable leading margins in neighborhoods from Eastchester to East New York. Though the official winner may not be known for weeks because of the citys new ranked-choice voting system, Mr. Adams holds a commanding edge in the race that will be difficult for his rivals to overcome.

His appeal adds evidence to an emerging trend in Democratic politics: a disconnect between progressive activists and the rank-and-file Black and Latino voters who they say have the most to gain from their agenda. As liberal activists orient their policies to combat white supremacy and call for racial justice, progressives are finding that many voters of color seem to think about the issues quite a bit differently.

Black people talk about politics in more practical and everyday terms, said Hakeem Jefferson, an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University who studies the political views of Black people. What makes more sense for people who are often distrustful of broad political claims is something thats more in the middle.

He added: The median Black voter is not A.O.C. and is actually closer to Eric Adams.

In the 2016 Democratic presidential primary race, Senator Bernie Sanders struggled to win over voters of color. Four years later, Black voters helped lift President Biden to victory in the Democratic primary, forming the backbone of the coalition that helped him defeat liberal rivals including Mr. Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren.

In the general election, Donald J. Trump made gains with nonwhite voters, particularly Latinos, as Democrats saw a drop-off in support that cost the party key congressional seats, according to a postelection autopsy by Democratic interest groups. In the 2020 election, Mr. Trump made larger gains among all Black and Latino voters than he did among white voters without a college degree, according to the Democratic data firm Catalist.

On issues beyond criminal justice, data indicates that Black and Latino voters are less likely to identify as liberal than white voters. An analysis by Gallup found that the share of white Democrats who identify as liberal had risen by 20 percentage points since the early 2000s. Over the same period, the polling firm found a nine-point rise in liberal identification among Latino Democrats and an eight-point increase among Black Democrats.

As votes were being tabulated in New York, Mr. Adams tried to capitalize on that tension between progressives and more moderate voters of color, casting himself as the future of Democratic politics and his campaign as a template for the party.

I am the face of the new Democratic Party, he said at his first news conference after primary night. If the Democratic Party fails to recognize what we did here in New York, theyre going to have a problem in the midterm elections and theyre going to have a problem in the presidential elections.

Extrapolating national trends from the idiosyncratic politics of New York is a bit like ordering a bagel with a schmear in Des Moines. Youll probably get a piece of bread, but the similarities may end there.

Liberal activists argue that theyve made important breakthroughs among nonwhite voters in recent years, pointing to Mr. Sanderss gains among Latinos and younger voters of color over the course of his two presidential bids. Progressive congressional candidates, like the members of the so-called Squad, have won several heavily Democratic House districts with meaningful support from nonwhite voters.

And of course, Black and Latino voters, like any demographic group, are hardly a monolith. Younger voters and those with college degrees are more likely to trend left than their older parents.

Still, the traction some more conservative Democratic candidates like Mr. Adams have gained in Black and Latino communities threatens to undercut a central tenet of the partys political thinking for decades: demographics as destiny.

For years, Democrats have argued that as the country grew more diverse and more urban, their party would be able to marshal a near-permanent majority with a rising coalition of voters of color. By turning out that base, Democrats could win without needing to appeal to affluent suburbanites, who are traditionally more moderate on fiscal issues, or white working-class voters, who tend to hold more conservative views on race and immigration.

But a growing body of evidence indicates that large numbers of Black and Latino voters may simply take a more centrist view on the very issues race and criminal justice that progressives assumed would rally voters of color to their side.

The New York mayoral primary provided a particularly interesting test case of that kind of thinking. As crime and gun violence rise in New York, polls showed that crime and public safety were the most important issues to voters in the mayoral race.

The limited public polling available showed nuanced opinions among voters of color on policing. A poll conducted for the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, found that just 17 percent of Black voters and 18 percent of Latinos wanted to decrease the number of police officers in their neighborhoods. But 62 percent of Black voters and 49 percent of Latino voters said they supported defunding the New York Police Department and spending the money on social workers instead, the poll found.

Other surveys found that Black and Latino voters were more likely than white voters to say that the number of uniformed police officers should be increased in the subways and that they felt unsafe from crime in their neighborhoods. Fears of violent crime led some leaders in predominantly Black neighborhoods to reject efforts to defund the police.

Progressive activists who backed Maya Wiley, one of the more liberal candidates in the race, accused Mr. Adams of fear-mongering over rising crime rates in the city.

Voters were offered a false dichotomy between justice and public safety by the Adams rhetoric, said Sochie Nnaemeka, the New York state director of the Working Families Party. We worked hard to dismantle that framework, but that dog-whistling does strike the real fear that people have when our streets are increasingly unsafe. Its a very human experience.

Yet Mr. Adamss personal history may offer particular appeal to voters with complicated views on criminal justice. A former police officer, he built his political brand on criticizing the police, speaking out against police brutality, and, later, the departments stop-and-frisk tactics. After years in New York politics, hes a member of the party establishment, enjoying the advantages of name recognition and decades-old relationships with community leaders.

Its the kind of biographical narrative likely to appeal to voters more likely to have intimate personal experiences with policing, who tend to live in neighborhoods that may have more crime but where people are also are more likely to face violence or abuse from officers.

Some scholars and strategists argue that Black and Latino voters are more likely to center their political beliefs on those kinds of experiences in their own lives, taking a pragmatic approach to politics thats rooted less in ideology and more in a historical distrust of government and the ability of politicians to deliver on sweeping promises.

These standard ways of thinking about ideology fall apart for Black Americans, Dr. Jefferson said. The idea of liberalism and conservatism just falls to the wayside.

He added, Its just not the language Black folks are using to organize their politics.

Nate Cohn contributed reporting.

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Progressives Urgent Question: How to Win Over Voters of Color - The New York Times

The American left has a romantic self-conception as a movement of the masses. But its actual strength is concentrated in the minority of the population that is highly educated. This tension has led to an odd dynamic: To put it bluntly, the fewer people paying attention, the better the left does.

Consider last weeks election in New York City, which saw the largest turnout for a primary since at least 1989. A long-planned progressive breakthrough fizzled as left-wing candidates Maya Wiley, Scott Stringer and Diane Morales combined for a disappointing 30% of first-choice ballots in a field dominated by tough-on-crime ex-cop Eric Adams. Wiley is still technically still in the hunt under the citys ranked-choice voting system, but a victory is unlikely.

In contrast, progressives did well in a number of down-ballot races in New York City, including for Brooklyn borough president and Manhattan district attorney. And in the less-covered and lower-turnout race happening upstate in Buffalo, socialist India Walton scored a stunning upset against the longtime incumbent mayor.

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This speaks to the lefts current source of strength in American politics: Its adherents are highly educated and engaged, and can deploy their social and cultural capital to great effect in low-turnout or low-salience races.

Social media does not pick a candidate, Adams quipped at his quasi-victory party last week. People on Social Security pick a candidate. Thats true only if the people on Social Security know a lot about a race already.

But with both the quantity of local news coverage and the audience for it in decline, social media is in fact a key vector for political information in many races. A Pew study last fall found that 10% of Twitter users are responsible for 92% of its content. Of that 10%, 69% are Democrats. And heavy-tweeting Democrats are younger, better educatedand further left than Democrats as a whole.

Candidates such as Adams (or Joe Biden) can crush tweeting leftists when voters are highly engaged, as they were last week. The benefits of the lefts online engagement are evident down ballot.

Its conceivable that this dichotomy can work to the benefit of the party as a whole. In the 2020 cycle, for example, Democrats running in special elections for state legislatures beat Hillary Clintons margin in 2016 by 4.7%. This year so far, the pattern of Democratic overperformance is holding up. And sometimes engagement works even in a highly publicized race with large turnout, such as the two U.S. Senate elections in Georgia at the beginning of the year.

Conventional wisdom long held that high turnout benefits Democrats. But the pattern seems to have changed as Democrats have added college graduates to their coalition while Republicans have picked up non-college voters. These new Trump Republicans appear to be disproportionately low in social trust, socially isolated, and disengaged from civic life. In short, they seem to be more interested in conspiracy theories than in voting in obscure races.

This helps to explain the Republican strategy of ensuring that there is no such thing as an obscure race. And it may lead to a perverse conclusion for Democrats: The key to success in 2022 may be to keep races obscure enough that they have a chance, yet not so obscure that not enough Democrats vote.

The real impact of the Social Capital Gap, however, is evident outside of elections. Essentially any white-collar setting will, in practice, exclude the big conservative-leaning cohorts of senior citizens, rural residents and people who didnt attend college. That means corporate HR policies, redesigned curriculums or new public-health initiatives are likely to skew left. Conservatives can win by dragging things into the arena of electoral politics, where their constituents have a voice.

The left may relish its self-image as the force that mobilizes the masses to exert more democratic control over elite-led institutions. But the right is in fact acting as that force. And while the lefts tactics may strain Democratic Party politics, the rights pose a fundamental challenge to the core ideological tenets of conservatism. Whither free markets, decentralization, localism and limited government if the rights game plan is to fight wokeinstitutions by extending government control into as many spheres of life as possible?

(Corrects ninth paragraph to say that high turnout has generally benefitted Democrats.)

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:Matthew Yglesias at Matt@slowboring.com

To contact the editor responsible for this story:Michael Newman at mnewman43@bloomberg.net

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Progressives Can Win Only One Kind of Election - Bloomberg

New York progressives cheered last week after an insurgent socialist defied the odds and defeated a longtime incumbent to decisively win a Democratic primary for mayorof Buffalo.

First-time candidate India Walton upset four-term Mayor Byron Brown on Tuesday in a victory supported by the left-leaning Working Families Party and the Democratic Socialists of America, of which Ms. Walton is a member.

Leaders of the groups say the victory in New Yorks second-largest city is proof that their movement is gaining strength and can succeed beyond the parts of Brooklyn and Queens where DSA members already hold office.

But other observers say it was a mixed night for the movement in New York after Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adamsfinished with a nine-point lead over Maya Wiley, his nearest progressive challenger, in the primary for New York City mayor.

Look at me and youre seeing the future of the Democratic Party, Mr. Adams said Thursday. America is saying, we want to have justice and safety and end inequalities, and we dont want fancy candidates.

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India Waltons Win in Buffalo Mayoral Primary Buoys Progressives - The Wall Street Journal

More than 60 percent of adults in the U.S. have gotten at least one vaccine dose, but when you look at the demographic breakdown, things dont look too good.

You see Donald Trump and BIll O'Reilly just announced a set of tours, what do you think they're going to be doing there? said Rahna Epting, executive director of MoveOn. They're going to be spewing lies and spewing this false narrative about the Democrats rigging everything. And we need Biden to not just go toe-to-toe. We need him to go on offense here, and we need him to be the champion that people voted for on this issue. And we just have not seen that level of prioritization.

Epting said progressives know Biden inherited numerous crises. But she said that Republican-authored election law changes at the state level, along with continued attempts to discredit Bidens win, required that Biden give voting rights campaign-style prioritization.

We have not seen him fully use the full power of his office, specifically the power of narrative, she added.

The White House has taken notice of the mounting, more direct frustrations on the left. Officials reached out to civil rights and progressive organizations to join Vice President Kamala Harris for a call on Thursday to discuss threats to democracy. In the past week, the White House has also been in close touch with national civil rights and social justice groups from the NAACP to the Native American Rights Fund about voting rights.

Since taking office, Biden has fostered open lines of communication with progressive lawmakers and activist groups. Part of that includes a bi-weekly progressive leaders meeting with more than 60 groups, which different White House staff attend, and a weekly campaign meeting on Bidens infrastructure and care economy spending proposals, where White House staff strategize with progressives.

A White House official described the president as being revolted by the GOP attempts to pass voter restrictions in statehouses across the country. The official stressed that Biden is constantly using the bully pulpit to communicate the seriousness of the situations, from his remarks commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa massacre to those he offered on Juneteenth, the date marking the end of slavery in the country, a now a federally-recognized holiday.

But progressives want more. Indivisible, a progressive group which mobilizes Democratic voters, chastised the president in a tweet for having no public events scheduled to talk about the urgent deadline for democracy on the day that the Senate prepared a vote on Democrats sweeping elections bill.

[Biden] says that democracy is in crisis, right now he is phoning it in, Ezra Levin, co-founder of the group, said in an interview.

Other outside groups launched demonstrations in Washington D.C. Rev. William J. Barber II and the Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, who co-chair The Poor Peoples Campaign, led what they called a Moral March on Hart Senate Office Building Wednesday afternoon, targeting both Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Manchin. And progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Jayapal are set to hold a rally Thursday on the National Mall to demand bold action from Congress.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Wednesday said that progressive critics, in accusing Biden of not doing enough, were picking a fight against the wrong opponent.

And not all Democrats, or even all progressives, expect or want Biden to be more vocal, calculating that the partys slim control of the House and Senate and the still-intact legislative filibuster requires compromises that might not always benefit from greater White House engagement.

Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.), a progressive who is also House Democrats lead negotiator on police reform, said she did not believe the Biden administration should be more active in their negotiations at all. The White House has been extremely helpful, she said. But acknowledging the reality of the 50-50 Senate, she said, I think its important to let the Senate work its will.

Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), a former chair of the Progressive Caucus, said Biden isnt the issue.

Let's face it, the problem is going to be like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema and a couple other folks, Pocan said. I am sure he's having all sorts of conversations, and I have found so far that I don't have to second guess what Joe Biden's doing behind the scenes because he's doing the right thing.

Marianne LeVine and Sarah Ferris contributed reporting.

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Progressives are no longer so pleasantly thrilled with the Biden era - POLITICO