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Tag: Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina

  • ‘She’s Going to Be Famous for a Long Time’

    ‘She’s Going to Be Famous for a Long Time’

    For many judicial nominees, a Senate confirmation hearing is one of life’s most grueling experiences—an hours-long job interview led by lawmakers who are trying to get them to face-plant on national television.

    Not for Aileen Cannon. When the federal judge who will oversee former President Donald Trump’s criminal trial testified in 2020, the Senate Judiciary Committee didn’t go easy on her so much as they ignored her.

    Cannon, then a 39-year-old prosecutor, appeared on Zoom alongside four other nominees, her face framed by a wall of diplomas on one side and an American flag on the other. Her opening statement lasted all of three minutes and sounded like an Oscar winner’s speech—lots of thank-yous and little else. She didn’t say a word about her legal philosophy or how she would approach the job of a judge. The senators didn’t seem to mind: None of them addressed a question specifically to Cannon for the rest of the hearing. The committee’s chair at the time, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, skipped the proceeding entirely, as did each of the five most senior Republicans on the panel. The hearing was over after barely an hour. Three months later, while Trump was beginning his effort to overturn his defeat in the presidential election, a bipartisan Senate majority (including a dozen Democrats) voted to confirm Cannon’s nomination as a federal judge in the Southern District of Florida.

    For low-profile nominations like Cannon’s, perfunctory hearings aren’t unusual. But the scrutiny she was spared in the Senate is coming her way now. After just two and a half years as a judge, Cannon will soon preside over a trial with no precedent in American history. The defendant is the former president who appointed her, and her rulings during the investigation that led to Trump’s indictment have already prompted many legal experts to fear that she will tilt the trial in his favor.

    But some of the Democratic lawyers who have appeared in Cannon’s courtroom don’t share those worries. They say that she is a smarter, more deliberate, and more even-handed judge than the early criticism of her would suggest. “I think the government should be very happy that they have Judge Cannon,” says Richard Klugh, a longtime defense attorney in Miami who has dealt with Cannon both as a judge and when she served as a federal prosecutor there. Klugh, a lifelong Democrat, told me that aside from her “narrow” rulings on Trump’s case last summer, he had heard no complaints about Cannon from either prosecutors or defense attorneys. “She’s very confident, very honest … and very thorough,” he told me. “She’s confident enough to go through things independently.”

    Read: Will Trump get a speedy trial?

    That may be, but she’s extremely inexperienced. Since taking her seat on the bench, Cannon has worked mostly out of a courthouse in Fort Pierce, a two-hour drive from Miami and a town that one local lawyer described to me as “a backwater.” She has presided over just four trials as a judge, none of which covered crimes remotely similar to the willful retention of classified documents that the government has accused Trump of committing. (She is set to oversee a far more complex trial involving alleged Medicare fraud in the coming months.)

    Cannon was born in Colombia and is the daughter of Cuban refugees. In her brief statement to the Judiciary Committee, she described how her mother, at the age of 7, “had to flee the repressive Castro regime in search of freedom and security.” Cannon graduated from Duke University, and by the time she earned her law degree from the University of Michigan, she had already joined the conservative Federalist Society. After law school, she embarked on a fairly conventional legal career: She clerked for an appellate judge, spent several years at a large law firm, and then became an assistant U.S. attorney in Miami. In written responses to the Judiciary Committee, Cannon wrote that she considered herself both an “originalist” and a “textualist”—two approaches long identified with conservative judges—but that she would follow all precedents set by the Supreme Court and other appellate rulings.

    Two South Florida lawyers told me that they were struck by Cannon’s overt religiosity, which has seeped into her pronouncements in court. She routinely tells defendants “God bless you” after they enter guilty pleas, said Valentin Rodriguez, a lawyer who has appeared before Cannon. “In my entire 30-year career I’ve never had a judge mention God to a client ever,” Rodriguez told me. “She does that as a matter of course.”

    Although presidents formally nominate all federal judges, they frequently appoint district-court judges at the recommendation of home-state senators. Cannon told the Judiciary Committee that she was first approached about filling a judicial vacancy by the office of Senator Marco Rubio in 2019, nearly a year before Trump sent her nomination to the Senate. Her appointment came at a moment when Trump and then–Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell were trying to reshape the federal courts by filling as many open judgeships as possible with young conservatives in their 30s and 40s. Three previous nominations for judgeships in Florida’s Southern District had gone to men in their 40s. “It made sense that Trump would select a woman with good credentials who also happens to be Hispanic,” a South Florida defense lawyer who knows Cannon told me. (The lawyer requested anonymity to speak candidly about a judge in their jurisdiction.)

    At the time of her nomination, Cannon had virtually no public profile outside of the courtroom. On her Senate questionnaire, she said she had never given a speech, served on a panel discussion, or testified before a legislative body. She had never held public office and told the Senate she had never participated in a political campaign, although she and her husband each contributed $100 to Ron DeSantis’s bid for governor in 2018. The only interview Cannon said she had ever given for publication was for a photo feature on TheKnot.com about her wedding. Her relative anonymity has caused headaches for publications that have searched in vain for a public photo of Cannon that hasn’t already been used repeatedly; almost every story features the same Zoom screenshot from her Senate testimony in 2020.

    Like most Republican-appointed judges in Florida’s Southern District, Cannon is known as a tough sentencer. But there have been notable exceptions when she has handed down a shorter prison term than she could have, Rodriguez told me. He mentioned a case in which a 21-year-old defendant, Artavis Spivey, who had been incarcerated on and off since he was 11, pleaded guilty to armed carjacking. He and another defendant committed the crime just 18 days after Spivey had been released from prison. Cannon sentenced Spivey to 15 years, but Rodriguez said she could have added many more years to his term. “She could have thrown the book at him, and I think she saw redeeming qualities in the young man,” Rodriguez said. Spivey had grown up in a troubled home without a father, “kind of given up by his parents,” Rodriguez added. “That experience tended to make me appreciate the fact that she could look beyond just the retribution and vengeance of a sentence and look at the person.”

    Andrew Weissmann: A ruling untethered to the law

    Cannon also handed down a lighter-than-expected sentence to a 34-year-old man, Christopher Wilkins, who threw a chair at and threatened to kill a federal prosecutor after receiving a 17.5-year sentence on gun and witness-tampering charges. Cannon added six and a half years to his prison term, which was less than the sentencing guidelines called for. “I’ve heard stuff about tough sentencing. I can’t report that. I can report fair sentencing,” Wilkins’s lawyer, Jeffrey Garland, a Republican, told me.

    Yet none of the decisions that Cannon has made in her young judicial career have stirred as much controversy as her rulings in the lawsuit that Trump filed after the FBI searched his Mar-a-Lago estate for unreturned classified documents last summer. Cannon initially appointed a special master to review the documents that federal investigators had collected, and barred the government from accessing some of them. The rulings were a gift to Trump at the time and delayed the FBI’s investigation. But in a sharp rebuke of Cannon, the conservative Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals overruled her decisions and said she should not have even heard the case.

    Some legal experts have cited those rulings and the fact that Trump appointed Cannon as reasons for her to recuse herself or be taken off the case. A few of the Florida defense lawyers I interviewed—who, it should be noted, routinely argue against the government’s position—characterized Cannon’s orders as understandable considering how unprecedented the case was. The defense lawyer who spoke on the condition of anonymity, however, was more critical. “That ruling was totally out of bounds,” the lawyer told me.

    One of the most significant decisions Cannon now faces is whether to attempt to hold the trial in advance of the 2024 presidential election. Should Trump win the White House, he could quash the government’s prosecution of him. South Florida lawyers were dubious that Cannon could try the case before the election, noting the complexities surrounding classified documents that frequently slow down prosecutions at the federal level. Howard Srebnick, a Democratic defense lawyer on the Medicare-fraud case before Cannon, also praised her early performance on the bench. But he said that it still took 18 months for the Medicare case to get to trial even though it does not involve government secrets. “The notion that this case could go quickly? That’s absurd,” Klugh told me.

    Still, Cannon has already issued her first order—one that could indicate she wants to move swiftly. On Thursday, she instructed lawyers who want to take part in the case to get security clearances by next week. That was the first of many decisions Cannon will make that, in ways big and small, will shape the first-ever federal criminal prosecution of a former president. They will change Cannon’s life, creating a reputation for favoritism or fairness where none existed. A young judge whose photograph had never appeared in a newspaper until last year is set to become a household name. As Rodriguez observed with a slightly nervous laugh: “She’s going to be famous for a long time.”

    Russell Berman

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  • How a GOP Congress Could Roll Back Nationwide Freedoms

    How a GOP Congress Could Roll Back Nationwide Freedoms

    If Republicans win control of one or both congressional chambers this week, they will likely begin a project that could reshape the nation’s political and legal landscape: imposing on blue states the rollback of civil rights and liberties that has rapidly advanced through red states since 2021.

    Over the past two years, the 23 states where Republicans hold unified control of the governorship and state legislature have approved the most aggressive wave of socially conservative legislation in modern times. In highly polarizing battles across the country, GOP-controlled states have passed laws imposing new restrictions on voting, banning or limiting access to abortion, retrenching LGBTQ rights, removing licensing and training requirements for concealed carry of firearms, and censoring how public-school teachers (and in some cases university professors and even private employers) can talk about race, gender, and sexual orientation.

    With much less attention, Republicans in the U.S. House and Senate have introduced legislation to write each of these red-state initiatives into federal law. The practical effect of these proposals would be to require blue states to live under the restrictive social policies that have burned through red states since President Joe Biden’s victory in 2020. “I think the days of fealty [to states’ rights] are nearing an end, and we are going to see the national Republicans in Congress adopting maximalist policy approaches,” Peter Ambler, the executive director of Giffords, a group that advocates for stricter gun control, told me.

    Read: The double-negative election

    None of the proposals to nationalize the red-state social agenda could become law any time soon. Even if Republicans were to win both congressional chambers, they would not have the votes to overcome the inevitable Biden vetoes. Nor would Republicans, even if they controlled both chambers, have any incentive to consider repealing the Senate filibuster to pass this agenda until they know they have a president who would sign the resulting bills into law—something they can’t achieve before the 2024 election.

    But if Republicans triumph this week, the next two years could nonetheless become a crucial period in formulating a strategy to nationalize the red-state social-policy revolution. Particularly if Republicans win the House, they seem certain to explore which of these ideas can attract enough support in their caucus to clear the chamber. And the 2024 Republican presidential candidates are also likely to test GOP primary voters’ appetite for writing conservative social priorities into national law. Embracing such initiatives “may prove irresistible for a lot of folks trying to capture” the party’s socially conservative wing, Patrick Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, told me.

    It starts with abortion. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina in September introduced a bill that would ban the procedure nationwide after 15 weeks of pregnancy. In the House, 167 Republicans have co-sponsored the “Life Begins at Conception Act,” which many legal analysts say would effectively ban all abortions nationwide.

    In elections, Senator Rick Scott of Florida has proposed legislation that would impose for federal elections nationwide many of the voting restrictions that have rapidly diffused across red states, including tougher voter-identification requirements, a ban on both unmonitored drop boxes and the counting of any mail ballots received after Election Day, and a prohibition on same-day and automatic voter registration.

    In education, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas has proposed to federalize restrictions on how teachers can talk about race by barring any K–12 school that receives federal money from using “critical race theory” in instruction. Several Republicans (including Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri) have introduced a “Parents’ Bill of Rights,” which would mandate parental access to school curriculum and library materials nationwide—a step toward building pressure for the kind of book bans spreading through conservative states and school districts. Nadine Farid Johnson, the Washington director for PEN America, a free-speech advocacy group, predicts that these GOP proposals “chipping away” at free speech are likely to expand beyond school settings into other areas affecting the general population, such as public libraries or private companies’ training policies. “This is not something that is likely to stop at the current arena, but to go much more broadly,” she told me.

    Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana, along with several dozen co-sponsors, recently introduced a federal version of the “Don’t Say Gay” legislation that Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida pushed into law. Johnson’s bill is especially sweeping in its scope. It bars discussion of “sexually-oriented material,” including sexual orientation, with children 10 and younger, not only in educational settings, but in any program funded by the federal government, including through public libraries, hospitals, and national parks. The language is so comprehensive that it might even prevent “any federal law enforcement talking to a kid about a sexual assault or sexual abuse,” David Stacy, the government-affairs director at the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ advocacy group, told me.

    Read: Want to understand the red-state onslaught? Look at Florida.

    Johnson’s bill is only one of several Republican proposals to nationalize red-state actions on LGBTQ issues. During budget debates in both 2021 and 2022, Republican senators offered  amendments to establish a nationwide ban on transgender girls participating in school sports. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia has introduced a bill (the “Protect Children’s Innocence Act”) that would set felony penalties for doctors who provide gender-affirming care to minors. Cotton, in a variation on the theme, has proposed to allow any minor who receives gender-affirming surgery to sue the doctor for physical or emotional damages for the next 30 years.

    Meanwhile, Senator Steve Daines and Representative Richard Hudson of North Carolina have introduced legislation requiring every state to accept a concealed-carry gun permit issued in any state—a mechanism for overriding blue-state limits on these permits. When Republicans controlled the House, they passed such a bill in 2017, but the implications of this idea have grown even more stark since then because so many red states have passed laws allowing residents to obtain concealed-carry permits without any background checks or training requirements.

    Ambler told me he expects that the NRA and congressional Republicans will eventually seek not only to preempt blue states and city limits on who can carry guns, but also to invalidate their restrictions on where they can do so, such as the New York State law, now facing legal challenge, barring guns from the subway.

    Brown, of the conservative EPPC, said it’s difficult to predict which of these proposals will gather the most momentum if Republicans win back one or both chambers. Some congressional Republicans, he said, may still be constrained by traditional GOP arguments favoring federalism. The strongest case for contravening that principle, he said, is in those instances that involve protecting what he calls “fundamental rights.” Graham’s national 15-week abortion ban can be justified on those grounds because “we are talking about, from my perspective, the life of an unborn baby, so having a federal ceiling on when states can’t encroach on protecting that fetus in the womb in the later stage of pregnancy makes a lot of sense to me.”

    In practice, though, Brown thinks that congressional Republicans may hesitate about passing a nationwide abortion ban, particularly with no hope of Biden signing it into law. He believes they are more likely to coalesce first around proposals to bar transgender girls from participating in sports and to prohibit gender-affirming surgery for minors, in part because those issues have proved “so galvanizing” for cultural conservatives in red states.

    Conor Friedersdorf: The constitutional case against a federal abortion ban

    Stacy, from the Human Rights Campaign, said that although Senate Republicans may be less enthusiastic about pursuing legislation restricting transgender rights, he hasn’t ruled out the possibility of a GOP-controlled Congress advancing those ideas. “It’s hard to know how far a Republican majority in either chamber would go on these issues,” he told me. “But what we’ve seen again and again in the states is that when they can, they have moved in these directions. Even when you take a look at more moderate states, when they have the power to do these things, they move these things forward.” That precedent eventually may apply not just to LGBTQ issues, but to all the red-state initiatives some Republicans want to inscribe into national law.

    These approaching federal debates reframe the battle raging across the red states during the past few years as just the first act of what’s likely to become an extended struggle.

    This first act has played out largely within the framework of restoring states’ rights and local prerogatives. As I’ve written, the red-state moves on social issues amount to a systematic effort to reverse the “rights revolution” of the past six decades. Over that long period, the Supreme Court, Congress, and a succession of presidents nationalized more rights and reduced states’ leeway to abridge those rights, on issues including civil rights, contraception, abortion, and same-sex marriage.

    Now the red states have moved to reverse that long trajectory toward a stronger national floor of rights by setting their own rules on abortion, voting, LGBTQ issues, classroom censorship, and book bans, among other issues. In that cause, they have been crucially abetted by the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority, which has struck down or weakened previously nationally guaranteed rights (including abortion and voting access).

    But the proliferation of these congressional-Republican proposals to write the red-state rules into federal law suggests that this reassertion of states’ rights was just a way station toward restoring common national standards of civil rights and liberties—only in a much more restrictive and conservative direction. “All of these things have been building for years,” Alvin Tillery, the director of the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy at Northwestern University, told me. “It’s just that Mr. Trump gave them the idea they can succeed being more [aggressive] in the advocacy of these policies.”

    Like many students of the red-state social-policy eruption, Tillery believes that Republicans and social conservatives feel enormous urgency to write their cultural priorities into law before liberal-leaning Millennials and Generation Z become the electorate’s dominant force later this decade. “The future ain’t bright for them looking at young people, so they are acting in a much more muscular and authoritarian way now,” he said.

    With Republicans likely to win control of the House, and possibly the Senate, the next two years may become the off-Broadway stage of testing different strategies for imposing the red-state social regime on blue America. The curtain on the main event will rise the next time Republicans hold unified control of the White House and Congress—a day that may seem less a distant possibility if the GOP makes gains as big as those that now seem possible this week.

    Ronald Brownstein

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  • Why This Election Is So Weird

    Why This Election Is So Weird

    The two major factors shaping the 2022 midterm elections collided in tumultuous fashion on Tuesday morning.

    First came the government report that inflation last month had increased faster than economists had expected or President Joe Biden had hoped. The announcement triggered a sharp fall in the stock market, the worst day on Wall Street in two years.

    That same afternoon, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina introduced legislation that would impose a nationwide ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

    The inflation report captured this year’s most powerful tailwind for Republicans: widespread dissatisfaction with Biden’s management of the economy. Graham’s announcement captured this year’s strongest Democratic tailwind: widespread unease about abortion rights.

    Molly Jong-Fast: Of course voters care about abortion

    The shift in the campaign debate away from Biden’s management of the economy and toward the GOP’s priorities on abortion and other issues has been the principal factor improving Democratic prospects since earlier this summer. But the unexpectedly pessimistic inflation report—which showed soaring grocery and housing bills overshadowing a steady decline in gasoline prices—was a pointed reminder that the economy remains a formidable threat to Democrats in November.

    These two events also underscored how, to an extremely unusual degree, the parties are talking past each other. 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.

    Few questions may shape the November results as much as whether the issues Democrats are stressing continue to motivate roughly as many voters as Republicans’ preferred issues. Gene Ulm, a Republican pollster, told me he believes that pocketbook strains will ultimately prove decisive for most voters, particularly those without a college degree. Those voters, he added, are basically saying, “‘I am worried about putting food on the table, and you are talking to me about all this other crap.’”

    Yet there is no question that Democratic candidates are performing far above the consistently bleak public assessments of the economy, and especially Biden’s management of it. In one sense, that’s not shocking: Over the past few decades, voters’ economic assessments have become less predictive of election results, in large part because those judgments are themselves so heavily shaped by partisanship. But even in light of that trend, the disconnect between voters’ views on Biden’s economic management and their willingness to support Democratic candidates for the House and Senate remains striking.

    Read: How the Democrats rallied

    Biden has positive trends in the economy to celebrate, particularly robust job growth. He’s been cutting ribbons at a steady procession of infrastructure projects and manufacturing-plant openings (like last week’s groundbreaking for an Intel semiconductor facility in Ohio) tied to the tax incentives and direct spending from the infrastructure, climate, and semiconductor bills that he’s signed. Those economic milestones—yesterday, for instance, the White House touted $85 billion in new private investments for electric-vehicle production since Biden took office—will likely be a political asset for him in 2024, especially in the pivotal states across the industrial Midwest. But those accomplishments won’t necessarily sway voters this November, and in any case, all of these favorable trends for now are being overshadowed in most households by the persistent pain of higher prices on consumer goods.

    Even before this week’s inflation report, voters gave Biden an extremely negative grade for his economic performance. In an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Institute poll released last week, just 34 percent of those surveyed said that his actions have helped the economy, while 57 percent said they have hurt it. Not surprisingly, that discontent was most intense among Republicans and also among white voters without a college degree (a stunning 76 percent of whom said Biden’s actions had hurt the economy.) But that belief was also shared by 63 percent of independents, 55 percent of Generation Z and Millennial voters, 47 percent of nonwhite voters, and even 16 percent of people who voted for him in 2020.

    However, the share in each of these groups that gave Biden an overall positive mark on his job performance was consistently five to nine percentage points higher than those who believed his actions had helped the economy. And the share in each group that said they intend to support House Democrats in the November election was higher still—enough to give Democrats a narrow lead on that crucial question. Independents, for example, were split evenly on which party they intend to support in November, even though they were negative on Biden’s economic performance by more than two to one.

    This stark pattern points to another consequential anomaly in the 2022 polling so far. One of the most powerful modern trends in congressional races is a correlation between voters’ attitudes toward the president and their willingness to vote for candidates from his party. Virtually all voters who “strongly disapprove” of a president have voted against his party’s candidates in recent House and Senate elections. In 2018, two-thirds of voters who even “somewhat disapproved” of Trump voted for Democratic House candidates, according to exit polls. In 2010, two-thirds of voters who “somewhat disapproved” of Barack Obama likewise voted for Republican candidates.

    By contrast, in the Marist survey, and another recent national poll by the Pew Research Center, Democrats led slightly among those who “somewhat disapproved” of Biden—a stunning result.

    Murphy told me this disconnect has been evident since the outset of Biden’s presidency: Even when his approval numbers were high during his first months, she said of her polling, that didn’t lift other Democratic candidates, so she’s not entirely surprised that his decline hasn’t tugged them down. But Murphy, like others in the party, believes that concerns about Republicans—centered on their abortion-restriction efforts, their nomination of extremist and election-denying candidates, and their unflagging defense of Trump—also explain why Democratic candidates are consistently running ahead of Biden’s approval rating.

    “It should have been pretty easy for [Republicans] to put these races away, given how concerned voters are about the economy and inflation,” Murphy told me. Now, she said, “I do think they are having to go back to the drawing board.”

    Graham’s abortion legislation is certain to benefit Democratic efforts to shift voter focus from what Biden has done to what Republicans might do if returned to power. In a press conference, Graham flatly declared, “If we take back the House and Senate, I’ll assure you we’ll have a vote on our bill.” Although many Republican senators and candidates quickly distanced themselves from his proposal, his pledge meant that every Democratic Senate candidate can plausibly argue that creating a GOP majority in the chamber will ensure a congressional vote on a national abortion ban.

    Dan Sena, the former executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, who now consults for many party House candidates, told me that the abortion fight’s biggest impact will be to inspire higher turnout from liberal-leaning and young voters. Abortion, he said, “has energized a group of people that we saw in 2018 and we saw in 2020 that traditionally don’t participate in midterm elections and are much more motivated by the cultural fight.”

    Read: Abortion could define California’s elections

    Yet few Democrats believe that the political threat from inflation and general unease about the economy is behind them in this election cycle. In focus groups, Ulm, the GOP pollster, told me, “We hear more gripes about groceries than anything.” Sena largely agrees: “Jobs and paychecks still matter, pal,” he said.

    One Democratic pollster, who asked not to be identified while discussing private campaign research, told me that inflation and crime—the principal issues Republicans are stressing on the campaign trail—remain tangible and immediate concerns in swing districts. In House district polling, the pollster said, the firm often asks voters whether they worry more that Democratic policies are fueling inflation and crime or that Republicans are too extreme on abortion and too soft on the January 6 insurrection. On balance, the pollster told me, most respondents in swing districts say they worry more about Democratic policies.

    Yes, the pollster said, the Supreme Court abortion decision, the revelations about Trump from the House January 6 committee hearings, and the Justice Department’s investigation into his stockpiling of classified documents have energized and awakened Democratic voters. But, the pollster added, it’s not as if everyone has decided that abortion and January 6 are more important than crime and inflation.

    Strategists and pollsters on both sides believe that these diverging agendas could intensify one of the most powerful trends in modern American politics: the class inversion in which Democrats are running stronger among white voters with college degrees and Republicans are gaining ground among white voters without them, as well as among blue-collar Latino voters.

    In white-collar America, inflation may be more of an inconvenience than an existential threat, which provides space for voters to prioritize their values on issues such as abortion or Trump’s threat to democracy. In blue-collar America, where inflation often presents more difficult daily choices and sacrifices, abortion and the fate of democracy may be less salient, even among those who agree with Democrats on those issues. In the Marist poll, twice as many white voters without a college degree picked inflation over abortion as their top concern in November, while slightly more college-educated white voters picked abortion than inflation.

    Even with inflation at its highest level in 40 years, Republicans appear unlikely to significantly cut into such key Democratic constituencies as college-educated white voters, young people, and residents of large metropolitan areas. And even such a seismic shock as the Supreme Court abortion decision may not significantly loosen the Republican hold on white women without a college education. Although there may be some movement around the edges (inflation, for instance, could help Republicans gain among Latino voters), the biggest story of 2022 may be how closely it follows the lines of geographic and demographic polarization that the 2016, 2018, and 2020 elections have engraved.

    As in those contests, a handful of competitive swing states (Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania) will tip the precarious national balance of power between red and blue areas that now behave more like separate nations than different sections. The November elections seem likely to demonstrate again that the U.S. remains locked in a struggle between two coalitions that hold utterly antithetical visions of America’s future—yet remain almost equal in size.

    Ronald Brownstein

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