Congressman Ted Lieu of California’s 36th District represents a place that looms large in the American imagination, the Western Los Angeles area that’s home to Santa Monica, Muscle Beach, UCLA and other iconic American locales.
It’s famously sunny in LA, but at Rep. Lieu’s day job in Washington, the weather is always stormy, with thunderclaps of censure and lightning bolts of impeachment.
Lieu, a Democrat, works in a House of Representatives dominated by hard right Republican figures like Kevin McCarthy, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus. The House is currently a legislative body so partisan that after his GOP congressional colleagues voted to censure Lieu’s fellow Californian Rep. Adam Schiff last month, Democrats in the chamber erupted in a chant of “shame, shame, shame.”
Yet despite the divisive machinations of the House and the reportedly tepid support among the electorate for Democratic incumbent Joe Biden, Lieu makes a bold prediction about his party’s political future and about Biden’s shot at re-election. It’s a virtual certainty, asserts Lieu. A landslide in the making.
In April, a liberal crushed a conservative in a state wide election in WI. It was about 1 issue: abortion.@JoeBiden will be re-elected, and the election will not be close.
— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) July 9, 2023
The overwhelming majority of Americans are angry at GOP efforts to restrict a woman’s freedom to choose. https://t.co/Q0KUvNbkD1
Lieu forwarded some research shared by Brent Peabody at Harvard’s Kennedy School and added his belief.
“In April, a liberal crushed a conservative in a state wide election in WI. It was about 1 issue: abortion,” Lieu writes. “Joe Biden will be re-elected, and the election will not be close. The overwhelming majority of Americans are angry at GOP efforts to restrict a woman’s freedom to choose.”
Lieu studied computer science and political science at Stanford and is a Georgetown trained lawyer, so he presumably knows how to interpret the data. But he’s also — it’s part of the job — a California-style optimist.
2024 will show whether Lieu’s certitude is that of a technocrat who sees the writing on the wall, or whether he’s just another California dreamer.
