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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Editor’s Corner

January 17: What the Iowa Caucuses Mean for November

Now that the results are in from the Iowa Caucuses, it’s worth pausing for a moment to consider what if anything they mean for the general election, so I assessed that issue at New York:

Donald Trump’s landslide victory in the Iowa Caucuses sealed his position as the overwhelming favorite to win a third straight Republican presidential nomination. For the millions of Americans who either hope or fear that our most-impeached and most-indicted president will consummate his comeback in November, the big question is what the Iowa results can tell us about the general election, beyond the high odds that Trump will be on the ballot.

The clearest answer is that Trump will be the nominee of a relatively well-united Republican Party that is familiar with his act in all its outrageous permutations and is fine with it. That’s quite the contrast with where he was the last time he participated in contested Iowa Caucuses, in 2016. Then he was an insurgent candidate who lost to the more conventional (if hard-core) conservative Ted Cruz, and eventually won the nomination by wearing down the opposition and taking a number of steps (including the choice of the hyper-conventional Mike Pence as his running mate) to win over skeptics. But even as the nominee he had a lot of intraparty problems; 33 percent of Republicans gave him an unfavorable rating in mid-October of 2016, according to Gallup.

The latest such poll this year, from YouGov, showed just 16 percent of Republicans giving him an unfavorable rating, despite eight intervening years of relentless mendacity, shout-outs to authoritarians, erratic (at best) management of a pandemic, and then the 2020 election denial followed by an attempted coup d’état via thugs invading the Capitol. And that’s just the high spots of a record that you’d think (and think wrong) might give a lot of Republicans pause about going to war with this particular general in the lead tank.

Yet as Iowa showed, they are plunging straight ahead. He won there by a record 30 points, with 51 percent, despite being heavily outspent by opponents on campaign advertising. Yes, caucuses like Iowa’s draw a very small percentage of voters, even within the limited universe of the GOP. But here’s the thing: Trump is actually doing a lot better in national polls of Republicans, registering the support of 61.4 percent of them in the RealClearPolitics averages. And the entrance polls in Iowa do indicate that Trump is winning broad support within the GOP, across ideological and geographical lines. Nothing happened there that should make you doubt the general election polling that shows him leading Joe Biden.

There are some shadows in the Iowa numbers for Trump, however, as the ever-insightful Ron Brownstein points out at The Atlantic after looking at the entrance polls:

“[N]oteworthy was voters’ response to an entrance-poll question about whether they would still consider Trump fit for the presidency if he was convicted of a crime. Nearly two-thirds said yes, which speaks to his strength within the Republican Party. But about three in ten said no, which speaks to possible problems in a general election. That result was consistent with the findings in a wide array of polls that somewhere between one-fifth and one-third of GOP partisans believe that Trump’s actions after the 2020 election were a threat to democracy or illegal. How many of those Republican-leaning voters would ultimately support him will be crucial to his viability if he wins the nomination.”

This confirms that Trump’s conduct on January 6, along with the criminal charges he faces, could have a crucial effect on the general election, even though these same factors may have actually helped him win the nomination (in part by forcing his most formidable rivals to defend him!). But it is very, very difficult to assess at this early point where exactly the various court procedures involving Trump will be just before and on Election Day, much less what exactly they will reveal and how the revelations (or the unprecedented spectacle of a presidential nominee in the dock) will affect the campaign and the outcome. You cannot just assume the people (in Iowa or elsewhere) who now say a criminally convicted Trump isn’t fit to serve as president will vote for Joe Biden or some other non-Republican candidate. How many of them said in October of 2018 that the swinish man revealed by the Access Hollywood tape would never get their vote for president … and then voted for him anyway just weeks later? Yes, Trump’s conduct and efforts to hold him accountable will become part of a powerfully presented comparative case by the Biden campaign to make voting for the Republican difficult if not impossible even for voters who aren’t happy with the incumbent’s performance. But it’s one of many variables that will determine how many swing voters there are in November and which way they will swing.

Trump’s hold on a majority of his partisans is fierce, though like Biden he is going to have some defectors, and it’s likely to be a close general election unless conditions in the country improve enough to lift Biden’s job-approval ratings significantly. Anyone hoping that Trump would stumble early on the road back to the White House is likely going to be disappointed.


January 12: Like Mr. Magoo, Mike Johnson May Blunder Into Keeping the Government Open

Watching the now-customary chaos among House Republicans, I predicted at New York that this time all the dysfunction may prevent rather than trigger a government shutdown:

Since Republicans won narrow control of the U.S. House a year ago, the most important dynamic affecting the 118th Congress has been utter disarray within the GOP ranks. The only real leverage the House GOP has over big national policy issues is its ability by inaction to shut down the federal government, since affirmative legislation in both congressional chambers is required to enact the annual spending measures necessary to keep Washington humming. Because Republicans only have a tiny majority (down temporarily to just one seat thanks to recent resignations), it only takes a few rebels to keep their conference from any particular course of action. Within the hard-core conservative House Freedom Caucus there are enough members willing to risk a government shutdown to make very basic decisions on federal spending levels impossible. They’re also happy to wreak vengeance on any Speaker who cooperates with the hated Democratic enemy to avoid disaster, as Kevin McCarthy did last fall.

So Congress lurches from stopgap spending bill to stopgap spending bill, and now Speaker Mike Johnson is in very much the same position that led to McCarthy’s defenestration by a maneuver to take away his gavel. He’s agreed with Senate Democrats on general spending levels for defense and nondefense programs (known in beltway jargon as a “top-line spending deal”) and wants now to translate the agreement into individual appropriations bills before the last stopgap spending measures expire on January 19 (for part of the federal government) and February 2 (for the rest of it, including the Pentagon). Predictably, Freedom Caucus hardliners don’t think the deal cuts spending nearly enough, and they also want to pass some right-wing “policy riders” on issues like abortion and the alleged persecution of conservatives by federal law enforcement officials. But Johnson’s their guy, unlike McCarthy, and they really don’t want to go through another “motion to vacate the chair” and then another impossible search for a Speaker who can somehow meet their demands without the power to force Democrats to go along with them.

Ironically, the continuing disarray in the House GOP conference may produce enough paralysis to keep the federal government operating. At the moment Johnson wants another stopgap spending measure (known as a “continuing resolution” or CR) to buy enough time to implement the top-line spending agreement. After issuing some threats to blow everything up, the Freedom Caucus rebels now seem inclined to favor a CR so they can buy time to unravel that agreement and unite Republicans around something more to their liking. Conveniently, Senate Democrats are moving a CR that would kick the can down the road until March. It’s looking more and more like a House GOP (and more generally, a Congress) that can’t agree on anything else might be able to agree to disagree at least a bit longer without dire consequences for the federal government. It’s even possible that the closer they get to November elections, the more Republicans will become inclined to just let voters decide how to resolve their differences with each other and with Democrats.

If Johnson is indeed rescued from a fatal revolt by the irresolution of the very rebels who took down McCarthy, there will be some observers who credit the novice congressional leader with Machiavellian talents not possessed by his wily predecessor. It’s more likely Johnson is Mr. Magoo, blundering through potential disasters by sheer luck. It remains to be seen if his luck runs out before this exhausting session of Congress ends.

 


January 11: Trump’s True “Evangelical” Base: Hateful People Who Don’t Go to Church

As a long-time student of the intersection of religion and politics, I don’t often learn something that really surprises me, but reported at New York on an exception:

Barring a big surprise that defies all the polls, Ron DeSantis is going to fall far short of his original expectations in the Iowa Caucuses on January 15.

Where did DeSantis go wrong in Iowa? His strategy, to be clear, was to closely emulate that of the last three winners of contested GOP caucuses, Mike Huckabee (in 2008), Rick Santorum (in 2012), and Ted Cruz (in 2016), by building a formidable field organization and appealing to Iowa’s powerful conservative evangelical voting bloc via hard-core right-wing positions on cultural issues. He committed early on to appearances in all 99 counties in the state; turned most of his campaign over to veterans of Cruz’s 2016 effort; signed a “heartbeat” law banning abortions after six weeks that was virtually identical to the one signed by Iowa governor Kim Reynolds, an evangelical heroine; and succeeded in winning endorsements from both Reynolds and from evangelical kingmaker Bob Vander Plaats (who had supplied crucially timed endorsements to Huckabee, Santorum, and Cruz). He also (at least initially) added the kind of money politicians like Huckabee and Santorum could never have raised.

None of it has worked beyond keeping the Florida governor in the game in Iowa even as he sank like a stone in the other early states, which he neglected. There have been three common explanations for DeSantis’s Iowa struggles: (1) organizational problems stemming from overdelegation of campaign chores to the Never Back Down super-PAC, leading to late-campaign chaos; (2) DeSantis’s meh personality, which only grew more evident thanks to his retail-heavy Iowa effort; and (3) DeSantis’s bid to out-Trump Trump, regularly running to his right, which was doomed to fail against the founder of the MAGA movement and the beloved daddy of its most right-wing elements.

There’s undoubtedly a significant element of truth to all these reasons DeSantis is falling short of high early expectations in Iowa. But there is another that helps explain why the Floridian’s intense cultivation of conservative evangelicals isn’t bearing the kind of fruit he surely anticipated: Evangelicals themselves are evolving in a way that strengthens their loyalty to Trump no matter what self-professed “kingmakers” want. The New York Times’ Ruth Graham and Charles Homans have reported on this phenomenon:

“Being evangelical once suggested regular church attendance, a focus on salvation and conversion and strongly held views on specific issues such as abortion. Today, it is as often used to describe a cultural and political identity: one in which Christians are considered a persecuted minority, traditional institutions are viewed skeptically and Mr. Trump looms large.

“’Politics has become the master identity,’ said Ryan Burge, an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University and a Baptist pastor. ‘Everything else lines up behind partisanship.’”

More and more white evangelicals are engaging in a sort of roll-your-own form of religious practice, and this appears to be a particularly advanced development in Iowa, according to Graham and Homans. These believers are detached from collective worship services as much as from formal denominations and feed on social media “prophets” and others who share Trump’s treatment of conservative Christians as an aggrieved constituency group longing for the good old days and paranoid about persecution by Big Government and secular progressives. From their perspective, Trump’s heathenish personal behavior and theological illiteracy aren’t nearly so alienating as it is for churchgoing folk who acknowledge strict codes of conduct and doctrinal teachings. Indeed, in some respects they are more like Trump than some of his churchier political rivals, as Burge tells the Times writers:

“An increasing number of people in many of the most zealously Trump-supporting parts of Iowa fit a religious profile similar to the former president’s. “’Iowa is culturally conservative, non-practicing Christians at this point,’ Mr. Burge said. ‘That’s exactly Trump’s base.’”

This trend is doubly deadly for politicians like DeSantis. Un- or de-churched evangelicals are not going to take orders from Bob Vander Plaats or Kim Reynolds. And they are more focused on MAGA issues rather than on the “social issues” as traditionally defined by the old-school Christian right:

“The evolving evangelical identity is already scrambling how politicians appeal to these voters. Mr. Burge’s research has found that ‘cultural Christians’ care relatively little about bedrock religious-right causes like abortion and pornography.

“In interviews across Iowa, non-churchgoing Christians who supported Republican candidates, even those who said they believed in governing the country by Christian principles, cited immigration and the economy most often as their top issues in this year’s election.”

That’s not to say these people have lost the sense of certainty — and sometimes self-righteousness — often associated with conservative Christians, whether it’s “traditionalist” Catholics or The-Bible-Tells-Me-So Protestants, Graham and Homans observe:

“At Mr. Trump’s rally in Coralville, it was Joel Tenney, a 27-year-old local evangelist who does not lead a church, who delivered the opening prayer.

The crowd responded tepidly to his impassioned recitation of several Bible verses. But the rallygoers roared to life when he set aside the Scripture and told them what they had come to hear.

“’This election is part of a spiritual battle,’ Mr. Tenney said. ‘When Donald Trump becomes the 47th president of the United States, there will be retribution against all those who have promoted evil in this country.’”

Among these Iowans, Ron DeSantis, for all his contrived battles with Disney and Anthony Fauci and LGBTQ+ activists and the education establishment, can’t compete with Trump. Uninhibited by laws or the Constitution, and devoid of Christian charity, Trump will smite Satan and all his infernal minions on Day One.


January 4: Biden ’24 Is a Better Bet Than Truman ’48

I love historical analogies for campaigns and elections, and looked at a familiar precedent at New York:

It’s probably a by-product of our unstable and fractious political environment that observers constantly reach for historical precedents to anchor today’s dizzying developments in patterns we can recognize. So I am highly sympathetic to Nate Cohn’s effort in a New York Times column to suggest that Joe Biden’s reelection bid might resemble Harry Truman’s in 1948.

Truman is an eternal role model for embattled presidents whose reelection prospects seemed doomed; his upset win over Thomas Dewey is the perpetual consolation of struggling incumbents. It’s no accident that when Donald Trump was badly trailing Biden in the polls during the summer of 2020, his fans began predicting a Truman-style comeback.

Cohn, however, is focused on a particular analogy between 1948 and 2024: the fact that, like Biden, Truman struggled to overcome intense unhappiness over rapidly rising prices at a time when other economic indicators were quite positive:

“In the era of modern economic data, Harry Truman was the only president besides Joe Biden to oversee an economy with inflation over 7 percent while unemployment stayed under 4 percent and G.D.P. growth kept climbing. Voters weren’t overjoyed then, either. Instead, they saw Mr. Truman as incompetent, feared another depression and doubted their economic future, even though they were at the dawn of postwar economic prosperity.”

What Cohn wants us to understand is that Truman’s remarkable comeback was accompanied by an intense presidential focus on fighting inflation:

“You might well remember from your U.S. history classes that he blamed the famous ‘Do Nothing Congress’ for not enacting his agenda.

“What you might not have learned in history class is that Mr. Truman attacked the ‘Do Nothing Congress’ first and foremost for failing to do anything about prices. The text of his speech at the Democratic convention does not quite do justice to his impassioned attack on Republicans for failing to extend price controls in 1946, and for their platform on prices.”

Cohn notes that Biden cannot emulate certain assets Truman had in his efforts to bring down inflation while blaming his Republican opponents for its persistence: a mechanism, government price controls, that was popular then but entirely disreputable now and a Congress totally controlled by the GOP, making it as culpable as the president for hard times.

But while Biden may not have some of the raw materials Truman used to build his remarkable comeback, he also doesn’t share some of the distinct problems the 33rd president faced.

Yes, Biden is coping with dissension in his party’s ranks but not the sort of formal crack-up that led to not one but two competing ex-Democratic presidential tickets in 1948: the States’ Rights Democratic (a.k.a. Dixiecrat) ticket led by Strom Thurmond, which attracted southern segregationists, and ex-Vice-President Henry Wallace’s left-bent Progressives. Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is indeed an ex-Democrat from a famous Democratic family, but it appears he is taking away at least as many votes from the Republican column as from his former party.

Biden also suffers from a dyspeptic post-pandemic public mood that is similar in some respects to the angst afflicting Americans after the euphoric unity of World War II. That’s bad for any incumbent president. But Truman had the additional handicap of his party having controlled the White House for 16 years, the longest stretch since the post–Civil War era of Republican dominance. Today, the United States is in an extended period of exceptional balance between the two major parties, which have each held the presidency for exactly half of the 21st century and shared control of Congress as often as not.

But the most important difference between 1948 and 2024 is the identity of the likely Republican nominee. Yes, Dewey was a repeat nominee as Trump will be, having run a respectable if losing campaign against FDR in 1944. But Dewey, who was the governor of New York, was as remote from Trump in his temperament and ideological inclinations as is possible to imagine. The living embodiment of the Republican Establishment of his day, Dewey was relatively progressive on domestic-policy issues (he famously debated his most formidable primary opponent, Harold Stassen, on the single topic of Stassen’s proposal that the Communist Party should be outlawed, strongly opposing the idea) and resolutely internationalist in foreign policy. In sharp contrast to the perpetually turbulent MAGA movement founder, Dewey ran a quiet, even complacent general-election campaign that heavily relied on the poll-driven belief that he would win easily. And while Truman did indeed run a strongly partisan campaign attacking the opposing party, most of his fire was trained on congressional Republicans rather than Dewey himself.

There is zero question that Biden is staking his reelection prospects on making 2024 a referendum on Trump as much as on his own performance as president. And while the kind of sharp improvement in perceptions of the economy that helped rescue Truman would also enormously benefit Biden, he may not have to become all that popular to win.

In his essay on 1948 and 2024, Cohn hints at one factor that was crucial in 1948 and could be equally important this year: a national craving for “normalcy.” He doesn’t go into this issue in detail, but it’s clear in retrospect that Republicans had high expectations of victory in 1948 in no small part because they assumed voters wanted calm and stable governance after the excitement of the Great Depression and World War II (much as British voters rejected Winston Churchill’s long-governing Tories at the very end of that war). One reason Truman won is that he successfully warned swing voters that a Republican administration would junk Democratic policies (not just wartime price controls but, crucially, farm price supports) they had come to rely on as a normal part of economic life.

One of the big intangibles about 2024 is whether swing voters ultimately perceive a Trump comeback as auguring a return to the pre-pandemic status quo ante (especially in terms of prices and interest rates) as less fearful than another term for an octogenarian incumbent thought to be less than fully in control — or instead make the same calculations many did in 2020 when Biden offered a safe alternative to the perpetually alarming 45th president. I’d say the odds of the latter contingency are pretty high so long as the economy continues to improve even modestly. It’s far too early to predict happy days will be here again for Democrats, but it’s no time for excessive pessimism either.


January 3: Get Ready For a L-O-N-G General Election Campaign

You think a lot of voters are tired of politics this year? Just wait until a few more months have gone by, as I explained at New York:

Back in the days when presidential nominees were chosen by elites at national conventions rather than in mass-participation caucuses and primaries, general elections were pretty brisk affairs. Traditionally, the campaigns kicked things off around Labor Day and conducted a real sprint to early November. Candidate debates didn’t happen before 1960, and then they were generally held in late September or October.

Even in recent years, at least one of the major-party nominees often wasn’t known until well into the election-year calendar. In 2016, for example, Donald Trump clinched the Republican nomination on May 26, and Hillary Clinton didn’t nail down the Democratic nomination until June 7. And while Trump’s renomination in 2020 was a given, Joe Biden wasn’t an absolute certainty as his opponent until June 5.

At this point it appears the 2024 match-up will be known much, much earlier. Barring some health crisis, President Biden will again be the Democratic nominee. And barring a huge upset in an early state, Trump will again be the Republican nominee. Trump could have the delegates he needs by early March. He may even be the last candidate standing on February 24, when he is favored to win the South Carolina primary, which is crucial for both Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley.

In all likelihood, then, we’ll soon be dealing with an eight-month general election, the longest since John Kerry ran against George W. Bush in 2004 (Bush was an unchallenged incumbent; Kerry clinched his nomination in March).

The race is going to feel a lot longer than the 2004 election because it’s a rematch. For months, polls have been showing that Americans don’t particularly want to see these two men on their ballots again. They are universally known, and at present, quite unpopular. According to the RealClearPolitics polling averages, Biden’s ratio of favorability to unfavorability is 39.2 percent favorable to 55.3 percent unfavorable, while Trump’s is 39.9 percent favorable to 55.4 percent unfavorable. Biden and Trump are a matched pair of ugly socks in the national leadership drawer. How will another eight months of their omnipresence wear on voters, after their domination of news for the last eight years (or longer in Biden’s case, given his eight years as Barack Obama’s sidekick)?

Yes, it’s possible the condition of the country and the world will make Biden more or less popular as an incumbent, and tempestuous legal dramas are likely to affect perceptions of Trump. But will voters simply get more fatigued with them as presenting a choice they don’t particularly want to make?

If so, that could have a dampening effect on 2024 general-election turnout. And it could also stimulate already-high interest in minor-party or independent candidacies. These typically lose altitude late in a general-election cycle as voters realize they aren’t going to be successful. But that might not be the case in this seemingly eternal battle between two very old men who have been lobbing grenades at each other for such a very long time.

Perhaps something will spice up and refresh the general-election contest. It probably won’t be the conventions, themselves a tired ritual lacking all real drama for decades now. It probably won’t be political ads, which are more relentlessly, predictably negative than they’ve ever been. And it probably won’t be debates, assuming they even occur; any debate involving Trump will be a mud fight. It would be nice if new issues emerged in the course of 2024 that could elicit something we’ve haven’t heard again and again.

More likely than not, however, both campaigns will need to devote even more resources than usual to voter mobilization, as voters are tired of a contest that few can barely remember beginning. One truly useful thing the two major parties could do is to convince Americans their vote will be truly consequential, which won’t at all be a lie or an exaggeration: The 2024 contest will likely be very close, and the stakes — particularly if the resolute anti-constitutionalist Trump wins or again refuses to accept a defeat — could be epochal. Indeed, eight months probably isn’t long enough to cure the electorate of the cynical tendency to believe elections don’t really matter. But it’s one goal Biden and Trump and their supporters ought to be able to share each and every day.


December 22: It’s Biden or Bust in 2024!

After reading endless scenarios for some sort of late withdrawal by Joe Biden from the 2024 presidential race, I decided to state some plain facts at New York:

There is a misconception about how the 2024 presidential election is likely to unfold that just won’t die: that President Joe Biden will suddenly rethink his 2024 election bid and drop out. Independent candidate Cornel West was the latest to float this idea.

“I’m not even sure whether I’ll be running against Biden,” West told Politico. “Biden — I think he’s going to have an LBJ moment [and] pull back.”

This is an allusion to Johnson’s famous announcement on March 31, 1968, in conjunction with a Vietnam bombing halt, that he was ending his campaign for reelection. The idea is that, like LBJ, Biden will come to a realization, even after the 2024 primaries have begun, that it would be good for his party and country if he hung up his spurs and let Democrats choose someone who polls better against Donald Trump (or in LBJ’s case, against Richard Nixon).

In an earlier column I challenged the LBJ Redux scenario from the point of view of the two presidents’ political standing. In 1968, Johnson was leading a Democratic party deeply divided by the Vietnam War, which he had prosecuted relentlessly. He had already stumbled in a New Hampshire primary (not losing, but underperforming expectations badly) against Senator Gene McCarthy, and the more formidable Senator Robert F. Kennedy had just announced his own candidacy.

Biden is facing only feeble opposition from woo-woo author and failed 2020 candidate Marianne Williamson and obscure Minnesota congressman Dean Phillips; Biden currently leads the second-place Williamson by 60 points in the RealClearPolitics polling averages. His rivals are betting everything on making a splash in a rogue New Hampshire primary where Biden won’t even be on the ballot (though a write-in effort will be waged on his behalf). But Biden is almost certain to crush them there and in the official first primary of South Carolina on February 3. (South Carolina was Biden’s big breakthrough state in 2020.)

But beyond Biden’s stronger intra-party position, there are growing obstacles to the selection of a different nominee that Democrats simply did not face in 1968. Back then, only 13 states held primaries, and some of those were either nonbinding on delegates or were won by “favorite sons.” The ultimate nominee, Johnson’s veep Hubert Humphrey, did not enter a single primary.

In 2024, every delegate who will vote on the first ballot of the Democratic convention in Chicago will be pledged to a candidate according to the primary results. (So-called superdelegates who have seats at the convention through the elected or party offices they occupy won’t have any role unless there’s a first-ballot deadlock, which hasn’t happened since 1952.) There won’t be any large reserve of uncommitted votes a late-emerging candidate can comandeer (as Humphrey did in 1968). And thanks to generations of “front-loading” the primaries, the deal will go down much earlier on the calendar than in 1968. An estimated 48 percent of pledged Democratic delegates will have been chosen by March 12 (the week after Super Tuesday, when 15 states hold primaries). Filing deadlines have already passed or are fast approaching for these crucial primaries (Florida’s was on November 30, Michigan’s was on December 8, and the largest state’s, California’s, was on December 15).

So if the idea is for Biden to have a dark night of the soul and withdraw after the first few contests, it’s unclear how Democrats will settle on the ultimate nominee. Will there be enough primaries left for an open competition among the various would-be candidates we keep hearing about (e.g. Governors Gretchen WhitmerGavin NewsomJ.B. Pritzker, and Josh Shapiro, not to mention Vice-President Kamala Harris)? Or if people are expecting some sort of mind-meld among Democratic elites that produces an ideal Democratic ticket, how, mechanically, is that supposed to happen in a nomination system designed to make that choice via delegates pledged in primaries?

It’s not impossible for Biden to step aside and let someone else to win the nomination in an emergency; far-fetched scenarios for doing just that should be in the back of the mind for wire-pullers in both parties in case a health crisis or something else dramatic afflicts the current front-runners. But the breezy assumption that Democrats are stupidly blundering ahead when an alternative course is still available to them is just significantly out of date. The time for Joe Biden to take a pass and let his party go elsewhere for a 2024 nominee was months — arguably many months — ago. Second thoughts now would just create chaos.


December 21: Do Biden’s Critics on the Israel-Hamas War Think Trump Would Do Better?

At New York I asked an obvious question that wasn’t being asked elsewhere.

new national poll from the New York Times–Siena College reinforces a development that’s getting clearer every day: Joe Biden’s strength among Democrats and other past supporters is being steadily sapped by deep unhappiness with his staunch support of Israel in its war with Hamas. The phenomenon is particularly evident among young (under-30) voters, a left-leaning group that astonishingly favors Donald Trump over Biden by a 49 percent to 43 percent margin in the Times–Siena poll. While there are a variety of contributing factors to Biden’s poor standing with young voters — including his age, cost-of-living concerns, and unfulfilled promises on student loans and climate change — Times data wizard Nate Cohn sees a lot of evidence that the war is pivotal:

“Usually, it’s not worth dwelling too much on a subsample from a single poll, but this basic story about young voters is present in nearly every major survey at this point. Our own battleground-state surveys in the fall showed something similar, with Mr. Biden ahead by a single point among those 18 to 29. Either figure is a big shift from Mr. Biden’s 21-point lead in our final poll before the midterms or his 10-point lead in our last national poll in July.

“And there’s a plausible explanation for the shift in recent months: Israel …

“[Young] voters in the survey took an extraordinarily negative view of Israel’s recent conduct: They overwhelming say Israel isn’t doing enough to prevent civilian casualties in Gaza, believe Israel isn’t interested in peace, and think Israel should stop its military campaign, even if it means Hamas isn’t eliminated.”

If it’s true that Biden is losing voters to Trump because he’s tilting too far toward Israel in this war, then the question has to be asked: Do these voters know Trump’s position on this war? Do they imagine Trump would be more benevolent toward the suffering people of Gaza?

Anyone familiar with the 45th president’s Middle Eastern policies — and, for that matter, his Islamophobic immigration policies — while he was in office would mock the idea of his being more sympathetic to Palestinians than Biden is. His own January 2020 “peace plan” for the region, unveiled with his longtime ally Bibi Netanyahu at his side, would have “give[n] Israel most of what it has sought over decades of conflict while offering the Palestinians the possibility of a state with limited sovereignty,” as the New York Times described it:

“Mr. Trump’s plan would guarantee that Israel would control a unified Jerusalem as its capital and not require it to uproot any of the settlements in the West Bank that have provoked Palestinian outrage and alienated much of the world …

“President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority immediately denounced the plan as a ‘conspiracy deal’ unworthy of serious consideration, making the decades-long pursuit of a so-called two-state solution appear more distant than ever. ‘We say a thousand times over: no, no, no,’ Mr. Abbas said on Tuesday in Ramallah, in the West Bank.”

While the “Trump peace plan” is DOA, the former president can (and often does) boast that he gave Netanyahu the gift of a U.S. embassy in Jerusalem and recognition of that divided and contested city as Israel’s capital, itself a blow to Palestinian aspirations. He also frequently cited the belief of Republican (and Likud) mega-donor Sheldon Adelson that a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians was “impossible” because of a mutual legacy of hatred.

But what’s interesting is how little — quantitatively or substantively — Trump has had to say about the war currently underway between Israel and Hamas.

He got attention right after it broke out for calling Hamas’s allies the Lebanon-based terrorist group Hezbollah (which many feared would join in the war against Israel) “very smart,” while criticizing Netanyahu on petty grounds that had nothing to do with the conflict.

Yet even as his Republican rivals for the 2024 presidential nomination competed with one another to show who could be more vicious in encouraging uninhibited Israeli military action in Gaza, Trump’s comments have mostly revolved around his narcissistic claims that this war — like the Russia-Ukraine War — would never have happened if he were still in office. Apparently, he believes his fearsome presence in Washington would have deterred Hamas from its original plan of attack, though there’s very little evidence that the U.S., assumed to be a close ally of Israel with Biden in office, was much of a factor in the decision to go to war.

Trump has also used the Israel-Hamas War to reinforce his positions on other issues remote from the conflict itself, particularly his hostility to Muslim refugees, making it clear that Gazans (and, likely, Muslims generally) would be stopped from entering the U.S. if he is reelected.

Nothing in Trump’s self-centered utterances about the war suggests he could change Israel’s conduct or bring about a cease-fire, much less a lasting peace. You have to wonder if, by refusing to address the situation in any concrete detail, the GOP front-runner for the 2024 nomination is deliberately sowing ambiguity about his position or even making himself acceptable to voters who would normally flee in horror from the idea of this advocate of violence, chaos, and prejudice being placed in charge of U.S. foreign policy. Perhaps he’s just trying to lie in the weeds and, for once, keep himself out of the center of a political news story. If young voters indeed are inclined to punish Biden for inadequate sympathy for the Palestinian people, then voting for an independent or third-party candidate or not voting at all would benefit Trump’s campaign even if they cannot bring themselves to vote for the former president himself. His silence or incoherence on the war could well be strategic.

 


December 15: How Large Will the Nonmajor Party Vote Be in 2024?

There’s been a lot of talk about one of the big variables in 2024, but not a lot of precision. I tried to provide a bit more at New York:

Between 2016 and 2020, the nonmajor party share of the presidential vote dropped from 5.7 percent to 1.9 percent. It’s impossible to determine whether that factor had a decisive impact on the fact that Donald Trump won the former race and lost the latter; after all, he lost the popular vote in both elections. But if you accept the proposition that his conduct and character have placed something of a cap on his popularity, the availability of robust minor-party or independent candidacies to divert anti-Trump votes seems significant. Beyond that, nonmajor-party votes that might have gone to a major-party candidate always matter to some degree. Indeed, critics of Joe Biden may believe there’s a cap on his popularity as much as on Trump’s, thanks to his age or stubborn negative perceptions of his presidency.

Early 2024 polls have shown a massive uptick in possible willingness to vote for a nonmajor-party candidate, along with low-approval and favorability numbers for the likely major-party candidates, Biden and Trump.

The RealClearPolitics average of polls testing Biden and Trump against announced independent candidates Robert F. Kennedy and Cornel West and likely Green Party candidate Jill Stein shows 18.2 percent of voters willing to go rogue. This is obviously a lot higher than the nonparty vote in 2016 and 2020, and about double the maximum I could find in 2016 polls when minor/independent candidates were last the rage. That’s without a Libertarian (the largest-standing minor party) in the mix, by the way; there are so many candidates running for that party’s nomination that most pollsters are waiting for a name.

There are definitely reasons to assume the number of people willing to vote independent/minor party will decline before November 2024. The first is history, as Jacob Indursky explains in an article on the difficulty of third-party polling:

“Third-party candidates routinely fade in the stretch. A June 2000 Gallup survey found Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate and Green Party nominee, and Reform Party nominee Pat Buchanan combining for roughly 8 percent. Still, on Election Day, they only won 3 percent of the national vote, albeit enough to tip Florida, and thus the presidency, to George W. Bush. In 1980, Republican congressman turned independent presidential candidate John Anderson scored around 20 percent in Gallup polling for most of the spring and summer but wound up with under 7 percent of the popular vote.”

A major reason for this nonmajor-party fade is one that is high relevant to today’s grumpy electorate:

“When voters are underwhelmed by the major party nominees and want to express their frustration to a pollster, they may claim to back a third option. With the average favorability of Trump and Biden well underwater, according to FiveThirtyEight, the double-digit polling numbers for RFK Jr. are essentially a ‘cry for help’ from the voting public.”

Indursky also mentions the fall in support that often accompanies minorparty candidates becoming better known. RFK Jr., a man with a famous name and some superficially attractive populist poses, is likely to lose altitude with some of his more erratic conspiracy-theory leanings and a largely incoherent worldview become manifest to voters, as the major-party campaigns are guaranteed to ensure. As the New York Times observed last month, Kennedy was briefly popular among Democratic primary voters before he switched to an independent bid in part because his numbers were crashing:

“The durability of Mr. Kennedy’s appeal to voters remains an open question. Shortly after he entered the Democratic primary race in April, polls found him drawing support from up to 20 percent of the party’s primary voters.

“But as he gained more attention from the news media and articulated more positions that are out of step with the Democratic base, his numbers dropped to the low single digits.”

He’s not as big a factor in the polls as RFK Jr., but Cornel West is already drawing some very hostile press about his personal life and financial probity. Jill Stein’s candidacy, moreover, will bring back bad memories of her alleged role in tipping key states to Trump in 2016.

Still another reason nonmajor-party candidates sometimes poll better than they actually perform in elections involves the difficulty of accurately measuring their supporters’ likelihood to vote. The voters most disgruntled with the choice of Biden and Trump — the “double haters” as they are sometimes called — are disproportionately marginal, and often young, voters, who are less engaged with politics and most likely to just stay home.

And even with the major-party primaries beginning next month, it’s possible additional general election candidates could join the fray and confuse everything. The centrist group No Labels will decide in April whether to field a candidate and claims it will only do so if said candidate could actually win (which seems an extremely dubious proposition). Until its ruled out this option, it must be considered a factor and as deadly a threat to the other nonmajor-party candidates as to Biden and Trump.

And finally, there is the crucial question of how many voters in the states that will decide the Electoral College winner in 2024 will even have the opportunity of voting for these candidates. According to veteran political observer Doug Sosnik, the nonmajor-party candidates have had variable success in obtaining the ballot access necessary to affect the presidential election:

“Jill Stein announced that she is running again as the Green Party candidate and thus far she has qualified to be on the ballot in three battleground states — Michigan, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. Stein will likely attack Biden from the left on a variety of issues, including his support for Israel. This could have a significant impact in Michigan, with a population of over 300,000 Arab Americans. No Labels will be holding a convention on April 14 in Dallas to determine if it will field a candidate. So far it has achieved ballot access in the swing states of Arizona, Nevada, and North Carolina. Robert Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West are running, but neither has qualified to be on the ballot in any state.”

However large the minor party/independent vote looks at any given point, we will hear arguments that either Biden or Trump would have had an additional advantage if the other candidates weren’t around. So far the 2024 polling shows the minor party vote helping the 45th president though not massively; the RealClearPolitics head-to-head polling averages show Trump leading Biden by 3.2 percent; while the more limited five-way polling that includes Kennedy, West, and Stein shows Trump leading Biden by 5.7 percent. That could change a bit once a Libertarian candidate is in the field. But for all we know the non-major-party vote could split so evenly that it will still be a Biden-Trump race to the finish. Most experts now believe the most successful independent candidate of recent decades, 1992 and 1996 presidential aspirant Ross Perot, didn’t really affect the outcome of either election, other than marginally influencing the mix of issues the major candidates addressed. So while a smaller non-major party vote is good for the major parties, the outliers in the field could just add to the noise.


December 14: Low Approval Ratings Happen to Nearly Every President, Not Just Biden and Jimmy Carter

Reading about President Biden’s approval ratings lately, it’s struck me that some of the panic among Democrats is based on a lack of accurate historical perspective. I sought to address that at New York?

Joe Biden’s presidential job-approval numbers have been sinking recently, and are now under 40 percent in both the RealClearPolitics and FiveThirtyEight polling averages. This data point is understandably being linked in a lot of commentary to Biden’s relatively poor showing of late in general-election polls matching him against Donald Trump and/or a larger field that includes a passel of minor candidates.

To place this in the proper context, it’s helpful to note that a sub–40 percent job-approval rating is not terribly unusual for U.S. presidents. As Gallup explains, 11 of the 13 post–World War II presidents — all but Eisenhower and JFK — had approval ratings below 40 at some point. One of those presidents, of course, was Trump, who managed to hit 34 percent just as he was noisily and reluctantly leaving office.

No president has been reelected with a sub–40 percent job-approval rating on Election Day, but per Gallup, three had ratings below 50 percent in June of their successful reelection years (Harry Truman: 40 percent; George W. Bush: 49 percent; Barack Obama: 46 percent), and Gerald Ford missed reelection by an eyelash after posting a 45 precent approval rating in June 1976.

The idea that Biden is toast 11 months before Election Day 2024 is ridiculous. But what makes it especially ridiculous is the double-incumbency factor. Trump is not some fresh, promising alternative to an unpopular incumbent. He’s a recent incumbent himself who is very well known and steadily unpopular. Every struggling incumbent wants to make reelection a comparative rather than a referendum election. The 45th president is the ideal foil for the 46th.

Biden’s poor job-approval ratings should be compared to Trump’s very similar recent favorability ratings. At RCP Trump’s favorability averages are currently at 40.4 percent, a half-percent above Biden’s job-approval averages. Trump’s record as president is in the can, and he has clearly doubled down on the issue-positioning and personal conduct that have put a cap on his popularity. Biden’s popularity has room for improvement as his presidential record evolves. Trump’s? Not so much.

Without much question, the impending Biden-Trump rematch is an “unpopularity contest.” As veteran political observer Bill Schneider suggests, these two men are precisely the kind of presidential candidates who play into partisan stereotypes that cut both ways:

“Democrats win when they nominate a ‘tough liberal.’ They used to do that in the old days, with standard bearers like Harry Truman (who fired General MacArthur), John F. Kennedy (the Cuban Missile Crisis) and Lyndon Johnson …

“Many Republicans have a reputation for being mean and nasty (Newt Gingrich, Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and certainly Donald Trump). Republicans need a ‘nice conservative’ …

“That was Ronald Reagan, who, voters quickly found out, was not going to start a war or throw old people out in the snow. Donald Trump denounces “niceness” as a sign of weakness. He has advised the police, ‘Please don’t be too nice’ in handling criminal suspects.”

So in 2024, we are likely to have an unpopularity contest between a Democrat who is not very tough and a Republican who is not very nice. That’s why it’s so close, and so hard to predict.

Biden is more likely to get tough than Trump is to get nice. But the key point is that this will be a comparative election no matter how far Biden’s job-approval rating lags at this point. As the president often says: “Don’t compare me to the Almighty but to the alternative.”

Yes, Biden needs, and is perfectly capable of achieving, a higher job-approval rating between now and next November. But his opponent’s popularity is crucial and is probably capped. Team Biden needs not only to energize its currently passive electoral base but to have the kind of swing-voter appeal that was crucial in beating Trump in 2020. Indeed, Biden may have to win voters who don’t like either candidate, which will require a focus on Trump’s terrifying second-term agenda.

There is no particular level of popularity, however, that the incumbent president needs to achieve in order to prevail in a contest with his unpopular predecessor. This really could be a race to the near-bottom.


December 8: Trump’s “Drain the Swamp” Plan Worse Than a Return to the Spoils System

It’s hard to keep up with the growing evidence of the horrors Trump plans to implement in a second term, but I wrote about one item that really struck me at New York:

There have been many credible reports that a second Trump administration would feature an assault on the federal civil-service system in order to reduce “deep state” resistance to his authoritarian ambitions — or, to use his terms for it, to “drain the swamp” — while stuffing the higher levels of the federal bureaucracy with political appointees. Those of us who are history-minded have immediately thought of this as threatening a return to the “spoils system” of the 19th century, which was more or less ended by enactment of the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 (signed into law by Republican president and reformed spoilsman Chester Alan Arthur).

But the more we know about Team Trump’s plans, this understanding of what they want to do in staffing the federal government looks increasingly inadequate and anachronistic. The spoils-system beneficiaries of the distant past were by and large party foot soldiers rewarded for attending dreary local meetings, talking up the the party’s candidates in newspapers and forums, and, most of all, getting out the vote on Election Day. No one much cared what they believed in their heart of hearts about issues of the day or how they came to their convictions. It was enough that they put on the party yoke and helped pull the bandwagon to victory.

As Axios reports, one questionnaire used late in the first Trump administration to vet job applicants and another distributed by the Heritage Foundation to build up an army of second-term appointment prospects show a far more discriminating approach:

“The 2020 ‘Research Questionnaire,’ which we obtained from a Trump administration alumnus, was used in the administration’s final days — when most moderates and establishment figures had been fired or quit, and loyalists were flexing their muscles. Questions include:

“’What part of Candidate Trump’s campaign message most appealed to you and why?’

“’Briefly describe your political evolution. What thinkers, authors, books, or political leaders influenced you and led you to your current beliefs? What political commentator, thinker or politician best reflects your views?’

“’Have you ever appeared in the media to comment on Candidate Trump, President Trump or other personnel or policies of the Trump Administration?”

Similar questions are being asked for the Talent Database being assembled by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 — the most sophisticated, expensive pre-transition planning ever undertaken for either party.

The Heritage questionnaire makes it especially clear that being just any old kind of Republican isn’t going to be enough. It asks if applicants agree with a number of distinctively MAGA issue positions, including:

“The U.S. should impose tariffs with the goal of bringing back manufacturing jobs, even if these tariffs result in higher consumer prices. …

“The permanent institutions of family and religion are foundational to American freedom and the common good. …

“The President should be able to advance his/her agenda through the bureaucracy without hinderance from unelected federal officials.”

One insider told Axios that both the 2020 Trump and 2024 Heritage questionnaires have a common and very particular purpose:

“An alumnus of the Trump White House told us both documents are designed to test the sincerity of someone’s MAGA credentials and determine ‘when you got red-pilled,’ or became a true believer. ‘They want to see that you’re listening to Tucker, and not pointing to the Reagan revolution or any George W. Bush stuff,’ this person said”.

This represents a really unprecedented effort to place the executive branch under the direction of people chosen not on the basis of merit or experience or expertise, and not on party credentials, but on membership in an ideological faction that is also a presidential candidate’s cult of personality. As such, it’s more dangerous than a return to the partisan habits of a bygone era.