As regular readers know, one of the missions of TDS is to promote civil, empirically based discussion of intra-Democratic Party issues, with the aim of fostering principled party unity.
With all the recent, FISA-fueled talk of holding congressional Dems more accountable for their votes and views, Salon published an exchange today between Glenn Greenwald and yours truly about the advisability of threatening or carrying out primary challenges to selected Dems, particularly the Blue Dogs.
Glenn’s piece is here; my response is here. For the record, the thrust of my hold-your-fire argument was that (1) it’s not that easy to divine the views of the “Democratic base” in order to construct the limits of acceptable Democratic opinion; and (2) if Obama wins, we’ll be dealing with an entirely new, post-Bush environment in which today’s intraparty discontents may need to be reviewed, and may be moot.
Much of the reaction on the Salon site followed the Kabuki Theater of “center” versus “left” tendencies on the subject; Glenn and I both got trash-talked an awful lot. For a more nuanced reaction, check out Big Tent Democrat’s take at TalkLeft.
TDS Strategy Memos
Latest Research from:
Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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April 26: Kennedy Now Taking As Many Votes From Trump As From Biden
Polls are showing a subtle but potentially important shift that I discussed at New York:
For a while there, the independent ticket of ex-Democrats Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Nicole Shanahan seemed to be taking crucial votes away from Democrat Joe Biden, at least as indicated by comparing three-way and five-way (with Cornel West and Jill Stein) polls to head-to-head matchups of the incumbent and Donald Trump. Now, even as Biden has all but erased his polling deficit against Trump, he’s getting some more good news in surveys that include other candidates.
Two recent major national polls show Biden running better in a five-way than a two-way race. According to NBC News, Biden moves from two points down to two points up when the non-major-party candidates are included. In the latest Marist poll, Biden leads Trump by three points head-to-head and by five points in a five-way race. Since left-bent candidates West and Stein are pulling 5 percent in the former poll and 4 percent in the latter (presumably taking very few votes from Trump), you have to figure Kennedy is beginning to cut into the MAGA vote to an extent that should get Team Trump’s attention. And it has, NBC News reports:
“Former President Donald Trump has repeatedly said he’s confident that independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will pull more votes away from President Joe Biden than from him — a net win for the Republican’s candidacy.
“’He is Crooked Joe Biden’s Political Opponent, not mine,’Trump wrote on Truth Social late last month. ‘I love that he is running!’
“Behind closed doors, however, Trump is less sure. A Republican who was in the room with Trump this year as he reviewed polling said Trump was unsure how Kennedy would affect the race, asking the other people on hand whether or not Kennedy was actually good for his candidacy.”
Politico notes that Kennedy is drawing higher favorability numbers from Republican voters than from Democratic ones, which could indicate a higher ceiling for RFJ Jr. among Trump defectors. And it’s generally assumed from his past performances that there is a lower ceiling on Trump’s support than on Biden’s; he needs to be able to win with significantly less than a majority of the popular vote, as one Republican told Politico:
“’If the Trump campaign doesn’t see this as a concern, then they’re delusional,’ Republican consultant Alice Stewart said. ‘They should be looking at this from the standpoint that they can’t afford to lose any voters — and certainly not to a third-party candidate that shares some of [Trump’s] policy ideas.’”
One likely reason that Kennedy could be appealing to Republicans is the residual effect from the positive attention he received from conservative media when he was running against Biden in the Democratic primaries; his identification with anti-vaccine conspiracy theories also resonates more positively on the right side of the political spectrum than the left. So it’s in the interest of Team Trump to begin telling the former president’s sympathizers that RFK Jr. is actually a lefty, and that started happening recently, as the New York Times reported: “Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, pointed in particular to Mr. Kennedy’s views on climate change and the environment, writing on his social media site that Mr. Kennedy was more ‘radical Left’ than Mr. Biden.”
The idea, of course, is not only to discourage potential Trump voters from drifting toward the independent candidate, but to encourage potential Biden voters to consider a Kennedy vote.
If Kennedy continues to draw votes from both Biden and Trump, each of their campaigns will need to make a strategic decision about how to deal with him: Do you ignore him and count on the usual fade in support afflicting non-major-party presidential candidates as Election Day nears, or do you attack him as too far left (if you’re Trump) or too far right (if you’re Biden) and try to make him a handicap to your major-party opponent? The more aggressive approach has become common among Democrats seeking to intervene in Republican primaries (or in the recent case of the California Senate race, a nonpartisan top-two primary) by loudly attacking candidates they’d prefer to face in the general election, encouraging Republicans to flock to the supposed menace to progressivism. This kind of tactic — if deployed with some serious dollars — could have an effect on Kennedy’s base of support.
Certainly Trump seems to be considering it. With his usual practice of saying the quiet part out loud, Trump opined: “If I were a Democrat, I’d vote for RFK Jr. every single time over Biden, because he’s frankly more in line with Democrats.”
Trying to minimize losses to Kennedy and maximize opposite-party votes for Kennedy could become a routine practice down the stretch. Where and by whom this strategy is pursued will depend in part on where RFK Jr. is ultimately on the ballot. Right now he has nailed down ballot access in just two states, Utah and Michigan. CBS News reports the Kennedy-Shanahan ticket is close to securing a spot on the November ballot in a number of other states:
“Kennedy’s campaign says it has completed signature gathering in seven other states in addition to Utah and Michigan — Nevada, Idaho, Hawaii, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Nebraska and Iowa.
“The super PAC supporting Kennedy, American Values 2024, says it has collected enough signatures in Arizona, Georgia and South Carolina.”
Coping with Kennedy could become a game of three-dimensional chess between the Biden and Trump campaigns. But if it begins to look like RFK Jr. has become an existential threat to Democrats or to Republicans, you can bet they’ll go medieval on him without even a moment’s hesitation.
After reading both articles a couple of points:
1. DURING elections is no time to discipline politicians. That time is either BEFORE or AFTER elections.
2. During THIS election Democratic voters are looking to get rid of the dominant Republican mis-rulers. They are not keen on calls to exact revenge on Democrats.
In 2009 it’s going to be a different ball-game if Obama wins. At that point progressives are immediately going to start developing a rather LARGE list of policy differences with Obama.
There’s going to be problems with his desire to ramp up the Afghanistan war, that’s not going to go well and U.S. casualty rates are likely to soar. The more Afghanis feel that someone is trying to establish the rule of Kabul over them the more they will fight. They fought the Soviet installed regime, they fought the Taliban, they are fighting Karzai and the northern tribes that replaced the Taliban now. It’s only going to get worse the more we try to exert control.
This has the potential to be like JFK and Vietnam.
Then Iraq is still going to be a severe problem. Just because McCain and the media are trumpeting that “we’ve won! The surge worked!” doesn’t make it true as pointed out on this site.
There’s going to be the problem of “residual troops.” What Obama wants and what progressives want (total evacuation of Iraq and leaving the country to the Iraqis without intereference) are night and day. Obama is talking about keeping hundreds of thousands of Americans (military advisers, economists, security personnel, experts of all stripes, spooks and CIA operatives, etc.) and lots of bases, including our Fortress Embassy and probably the Green Zone as well — all under U.S. control, even if there is some fig-leaf “transfer” of autonomy over to the Iraqis.
The Iraqis don’t want any of this. It’s a replay of Vietnam, with a dash of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians as also mentioned on this site.
There will be plenty of domestic problems as well.
The 70 vote defection on FISA ought to make something clear. The real lack is a progressive lobbying effort in Washington that controls money and clout. Many of these people aren’t “Bush Dogs” at all, they are run of the mill Democrats who just aren’t feeling any pressure from the left so they don’t vote for liberal causes.
Its a nice effort to develop this, but we’d be much better off targeting Democrats in blue districts who don’t vote with us, than Bush Dogs in Rep +5 districts.
It took conservatives 15 years before they got Ronald Reagan elected. In the mean time how many “betrayals” by Rockyfeller Republicans did they have to endure?
Noam Chomsky has called Nixon the “last liberal president” for his creation of EPA and various environmental laws, his espousal of “treatment first” drug policy, etc. He was in a liberal era and couldn’t tilt nearly as far to the right as Bush can now, after Neo-con crusaders have been planting seeds for 20-30 years.
Obama might, if we are successful, be the “last conservative president.”
This is going to take a long time.