America’s two major parties are hunting for arguments to win over voters in the 2022 midterm elections after a 2020 presidential race defined by feelings about former president Donald Trump, who’s in no rush to stamp his approval on a GOP policy blueprint.
“There’s no imminent policy platform that will have President Trump’s name on it,” senior Trump adviser Jason Miller told The Daily 202 by email.
Miller’s comment came as Republicans are eagerly wooing the former president’s support for such a blueprint, perhaps modeled on the “Contract with America” the GOP used to win over voters in the party’s historic 1994 mid-term romp.
They’ve clung to Trump because of the commanding hold he has on their base, even after the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riot in which his supporters tried to overturn his electoral defeat.
Democrats, meanwhile, are in danger of underperforming yet again in the 2022 midterms if they don’t hone a winning economic message with minority voters, especially, according to a new report in the New York Times.
“The former president is set to meet this week with the chairman of the Republican Study Committee, Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana, to begin discussing the party’s policy prescriptions should the GOP retake the House majority next year.
Trump has met privately with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), in recent weeks to discuss the creation of policy document in line with Gingrich’s famous ‘Contract With America,’ which outlined a clear and concise Republican agenda before the GOP’s 1994 midterm success.
[Miller] said it’s ‘a bit of an overreach’ to suggest Trump is actively working with Gingrich to create the document.”
The Banks-Trump meeting will take place at the latter’s club in Bedminster, N.J., a Trump aide said, and will be the latest diplomatic mission from GOP leadership to one of the former president’s properties in an effort to secure his support for the GOP effort to retake the House majority.
In some ways, Trump’s biggest achievements in office reflect orthodox GOP policies: Appointing conservative judges and cutting taxes on wealthy Americans and corporations.
But on issue after issue, Trump broke with more traditional Republican principles.
In 2016, Trump repudiated long-standing GOP beliefs like support for free trade and for reining in entitlement spending. But he won over some skeptical conservatives by publicly providing a slate of potential judicial-branch nominees if he won.
In 2020, Trump ran for reelection with the GOP so far under his control — and identified with him, personally — that the party didn’t even generate the traditional party platform.
“Trump’s appearance Saturday illustrates a continued conundrum for the Republican Party: While he remains overwhelmingly popular among the party’s faithful, he potentially poses a problem for the GOP as it looks to win over voters ahead of the 2022 midterms who are wary of his divisive style.
Some Republicans argue that the party needs to move past Trump to woo disaffected suburban voters and women with a return to a focus on policy. As evidence, they maintain that Trump contributed to Georgia Republicans losing both the state’s Senate seats in a January runoff because he would not budge from his false claims that the election was rigged rather than push the Republican candidates as a needed counter to President Biden’s agenda.”
One question for elected Republican leaders is whether to spend time and energy putting together a policy platform — something geared to winning over suburban voters who helped hand President Biden the White House — knowing that Trump could easily repudiate it.
Democrats, meanwhile, will rally behind Biden’s record — they don’t really have a choice — but that doesn’t mean the party isn’t struggling with how to win over 2022 voters after a 2020 election in which Democrats did not do nearly as well as it hoped in congressional elections.
When the smoke cleared, Democrats largely underperformed Biden, ending up with far-narrower House and Senate majorities than they’d hoped and losing battleground states in which pollsters had given them strong odds of prevailing.
“A review of the 2020 election, conducted by several prominent Democratic advocacy groups, has concluded that the party is at risk of losing ground with Black, Hispanic and Asian American voters unless it does a better job presenting an economic agenda and countering Republican efforts to spread misinformation and tie all Democratic candidates to the far left.
The 73-page report, obtained by the New York Times, was assembled at the behest of three major Democratic interest groups: Third Way, a centrist think tank, and the Collective PAC and the Latino Victory Fund, which promote Black and Hispanic candidates. It appears to be the most thorough act of self-criticism carried out by Democrats or Republicans after the last campaign.”
Alex reported the study found Democratic House and Senate hopefuls did not do as well with voters of color “who loathed Mr. Trump but distrusted the Democratic Party as a whole. Those constituencies included Hispanic voters in Florida and Texas, Vietnamese American and Filipino American voters in California, and Black voters in North Carolina.
Overall, the report warns, Democrats in 2020 lacked a core argument about the economy and recovering from the coronavirus pandemic — one that might have helped candidates repel Republican claims that they wanted to ‘keep the economy shut down,’ or worse. The party ‘leaned too heavily on ‘anti-Trump’ rhetoric,’ the report concludes.”
One important difference exists between 2020 and 2022, though: Biden’s policy pronouncements were merely aspirational last year. Come 2022, his approach to the pandemic, the economy, and myriad other issues will have been road-tested.
The FDA approved the first drug to slow the decline of Alzheimer’s disease. “[The move is] likely to be hailed by patients and advocates but sharply criticized by others who argued there was not sufficient evidence the drug works,” Laurie McGinley reports. “The medication, called aducanumab, is for people with mild cognitive impairment or early-stage dementia both caused by Alzheimer’s. It is the first drug cleared that is designed to alter the course of the disease by slowing the deterioration of brain function — not just to ease symptoms.”
Despite the pandemic, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hit historic levels. “Fossil fuel burning is really at the heart of this. If we don’t tackle fossil fuel burning, the problem is not going to go away,” Ralph Keeling, a geochemist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, told Brady Dennis and Steven Mufson, adding that the world ultimately will have to make emissions cuts that are “much larger and sustained” than anything that happened during the pandemic.
Lunchtime reads from The Post
- “Bob Dole’s forgotten fight to get Washington to recognize the Armenian genocide,” by Manuel Roig-Franzia, who interviewed the 97-year-old former senator: “During Dole’s frequent stays at [surgeon Hampar] Kelikian’s home in Chicago, the doctor shared his tragic family history amid the horrors that began in 1915 when the Turkish Ottoman Empire undertook a years-long campaign of ethnic cleansing that left more than 1 million Armenians dead. Dole learned that three of Kelikian’s sisters had been burned to death during the genocidal rampage, and Kelikian had been forced to leave his homeland. Those recollections were prominent in Dole’s mind as he set on a quest years later, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, to force the United States government to officially acknowledge what so many historians consider indisputable: that a genocide had taken place.”
- “Jeff Bezos announces he’ll be on first crewed spaceflight of Blue Origin rocket,” by Taylor Telford and Christian Davenport: “The plan is that Bezos, his brother, Mark, and the winner of an online auction for Blue Origin’s nonprofit foundation will be aboard the New Shepard on July 20 — which is also the anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. … This flight would be a giant step forward for Bezos, who would become the first billionaire to go to space, as Elon Musk and Richard Branson have yet to set forth on rockets from their companies. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)”
- “He spent years at war in Afghanistan. Now he commands the U.S. withdrawal,” by Dan Lamothe: “After 2,400 U.S. military deaths, more than $2 trillion spent and about a dozen generals under four presidents, [Army Gen. Austin ‘Scott’] Miller expects to be the last U.S. commander in the war. He won’t be able to rewrite history. But he’ll command the departure. Miller, 60, said U.S. troops can do what is needed to ‘go out with our heads held high.’ “
- “Anthony Weiner’s not coming back. But he has nowhere to go,” by the New York Times’s Ben Smith: “Weiner, now 56, isn’t in politics any more. The barista at the third-floor cafe didn’t even recognize him. ‘I’d be really good as a campaign manager,’ he said, but of course no politician would be caught dead even speaking to him. He said he had given some informal advice to mayoral campaigns, though, ‘I don’t talk about which ones, because it would hurt them.’ They won’t even take his money. … Lately, the news that Mr. Weiner said he has been following ‘with some interest’ is the story of Representative Matt Gaetz.”
In an attempt to continue infrastructure negotiations, Biden will speak again by phone to Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) today.
- “The two spoke by phone Friday but did not make much apparent progress toward reaching a compromise on legislation that could pass the Senate with Republican votes,” John Wagner reports.
- The clock is ticking for Republicans on infrastructure, as Democrats plan to start preparing the bill for a vote in the House on Wednesday, with or without GOP support, according to Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm.
- “The president still has hope, Joe Manchin still has hope” for crafting a bipartisan infrastructure bill, Granholm told CNN yesterday. “But I will tell you the House will start their markup on Wednesday.”
Biden is hosting NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg today.
- The in-person meeting comes ahead of a June 14 summit of the 30-member military alliance in Brussels, Wagner reports.
- According to the White House, the two plan to discuss “many issues on the NATO agenda, including reinforcing transatlantic security in the face of challenges from Russia and China.”
Vaccination rates are falling off, imperiling Biden’s Fourth of July goal.
- “The United States is averaging fewer than 1 million shots per day, a decline of more than two-thirds from the peak of 3.4 million in April, according to The Washington Post’s seven-day analysis, even though all adults and children over age 12 are now eligible,” Dan Diamond, Dan Keating and Chris Moody report. “Small armies of health workers and volunteers often outnumber the people showing up to get shots at clinics around the country, from a drive-through site in Chattanooga, Tenn., to a gymnasium in Provo, Utah, or a park in Raleigh, N.C.”
- “The slowdown is national — with every state down at least two-thirds from its peak — and particularly felt across the South and Midwest. … But the picture varies considerably across the country: Thirteen mostly East and West Coast states have already vaccinated 70 percent of adult residents, and another 15 states, plus the District of Columbia, are over 60 percent and will likely reach Biden’s goal.”
- “The rest are lagging behind. Tennessee and five other states are at 50 percent or below and vaccinating at such low rates that meeting the president’s threshold is very unlikely.”
The administration deployed an app for asylum seekers, and privacy experts are worried.
- “In recent weeks, U.S. border officials have taken an unprecedented step, quietly deploying a new app, CBP One, which relies on controversial facial recognition, geolocation and cloud technology to collect, process and store sensitive information on asylum seekers before they enter the United States,” the Los Angeles Times’s Molly O’Toole reports. “The DHS assessments describe the app as necessary because border officials cannot ‘process all individuals at once’ who are seeking protection in the United States but have been forced back into Mexico under Trump-era policies that Biden has largely kept. Officials maintain it offers a safe and efficient technical solution.”
“When you listen to Donald Trump talk now, when you hear the language he’s using now, it is essentially the same things that the Chinese Communist Party, for example, says about the United States and our democracy,” Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) told host David Axelrod on “The Axe Files” podcast.
The Arizona review of the 2020 election highlights risks for Republicans — and democracy.
- “The Republican State Senate’s autopsy of the 2020 vote, broadly seen as a shambolic, partisan effort to nurse grievances about [Trump’s] loss here in November, risks driving away some of the very people the party needs to win statewide elections in 2022,” the Times’s Michael Wines reports. “That Arizona Republicans are ignoring that message — and that Republicans in other states are now trying to mount their own Arizona-style audits — raises worrisome questions not just about their strategy, but about its impact on an American democracy facing fundamental threats.”
- “The returns to date are not encouraging for the party. A late-May poll of 400 Arizonans by the respected consulting firm HighGround Inc. found that more than 55 percent of respondents opposed the vote review, most of them strongly.”
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) might still want to be president one day. He’s willing to wait out Trump.
- “You can be the world’s greatest surfer and you can show up to the beach with the best surfboard you can imagine,” he said in a recent interview with NBC News’s Allan Smith when asked about his ambitions for 2024. “But if there’s no waves that day, there’s nothing you can do about it.”
- “He hasn’t stopped thinking about the White House for himself — or of himself as the Republican with the transformative vision for a party that has centered some of the cultural, economic and foreign policy issues he seeks to champion… Allies say Rubio’s approach was affirmed by Florida’s decisively red shift. Trump won the state handily last year.”
- “Democrats see in Rubio someone who abandoned principles to become one of the Senate’s most MAGA members. But they know he’ll be tough to beat next year. … ‘He wants to be all things to all people,’ said Fernand Amandi, a Florida Democratic consultant. ‘The challenge for those that are not supporters of Rubio is that he’s yet to really pay a political price in any real context.’ ”
Fox News refused to air an ad about the Jan. 6 insurrection.
- The ad, by MeidasTouch, a liberal PAC, touches on the violence law-enforcement members faced as they tried to stop the riot, the Los Angeles Times’s Seema Mehta reports.
- “We couldn’t have fathomed in our wildest imaginations that even a Fox News would reject an ad that simply condemns the insurrection, and condemns people who support the insurrection,” said Ben Meiselas, one of the co-founders of MeidasTouch. “Meiselas and his two brothers, Brett and Jordan, said they placed the ad buy as they have in the past, but were informed over the phone on Friday that the cable network would not air the ad and were not given a reason. Fox News has never before refused to air one of their ads without offering suggestions for edits, they said.”
Wealthy G-7 nations should pay to vaccinate lower-income nations, former world leaders say.
- “It’s going to cost $66 billion to vaccinate lower-income countries and the exclusive club of top economies should pay the lion’s share of it, concluded a letter signed by more than 200 prominent figures, including 100 former government leaders,” Paul Schemm reports. “The letter is directed at the leaders of the Group of Seven nations, the world’s top economies, ahead of their in-person summit in Britain on Friday.”
- China says it has exported nearly one-third of the vaccines it has produced. “NHC Deputy Director Zeng Yixin said in the broadcast that China’s production capacity has increased ‘faster than expected.’ China’s coronavirus vaccine exports have been closely watched, due to the prospect that Beijing is strengthening its geopolitical standing through ‘vaccine diplomacy,’” Eva Dou reports.
The U.N.’s nuclear watchdog sees indications of plutonium work in North Korea that could be used in nuclear weapons.
- “The International Atomic Energy Agency has not had access to the secretive state since Pyongyang expelled its inspectors in 2009,” Reuters reports. “The Vienna-based IAEA now monitors North Korean activities at sites including the main nuclear complex at Yongbyon from afar, mainly using satellite imagery.”
Presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori has a narrow lead as ballots are counted in Peru’s presidential election.
- Fujimori, who’s making a third presidential bid, “opened a narrow lead over first-time candidate Pedro Castillo as ballots were being counted Monday morning,” Simon Tegel reports. “The choice between Fujimori, the right-wing daughter of a former strongman president, and Castillo, a left-wing teachers union leader, offered voters no middle ground. Critics warned that no matter the outcome, the country’s fragile democracy is under threat.”
Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador lost his “Teflon” in midterm elections.
- “López Obrador’s coalition hung on to its control of congress in midterm elections on Sunday but lost its supermajority in the lower house,” Mary Beth Sheridan reports. “Analysts said the results were relatively positive for López Obrador’s nationalist, anti-establishment movement, given a host of political problems including a devastating coronavirus pandemic, an economic crash and a staggering homicide rate.”
Sen. Joe Manchin lll (D-W.Va.) reiterated his aversion to gutting the filibuster to push Biden’s agenda in an op-ed for the Charleston Gazette-Mail. Manchin wrote he believes “partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy.” In the op-ed, Manchin revealed he will be voting against the Democrats’ voting rights bill. Democratic colleagues responded promptly:
As our colleague Amy B Wang reports, Republicans used Manchin’s argument to point out that regardless of a filibuster, the voting rights legislation doesn’t have enough Democratic votes to pass the Senate:
D.C. statehood cost, visualized
Congress appropriates approximately $730 million for D.C. each year, the vast majority goes toward funding the court system. If D.C. becomes a state it could also lose more than $90 million in education funds from the federal government.
Vice President Harris is participating in a meeting with Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei today at the Palacio Nacional de la Cultura in Guatemala City to discuss what the administration calls the “root causes” of migration from Central America. At 1:45, she will meet with Guatemalan community and civil society leaders, and at 3:25 p.m. she will participate in an event meant to promote entrepreneurship in the region. Harris and Giammattei will hold a joint news conference before Harris leaves Guatemala for Mexico City at 7:50 p.m.
Biden will meet with Stoltenberg today at 4:30 p.m.
Simone Biles won her seventh national all-around title at the U.S. Gymnastics Championships yesterday, reminding us all why she might very much be the greatest gymnast of all time:
And John Oliver explained why our conversations on Asian Americans and the myth of the “Model Minority” need to be better-informed:
