Steven Greenhouse, who covered the labor beat for the New York Times for more than three decades, has a new article, “Broken’ US labor laws could hamper union wins for workers, experts warn: Strikes by autoworkers, actors and writers brought wins in 2023, but analysts worry labor laws could undo progress” at The Guardian. It is a must-read for Dems who want to understand is going on in the labor movement. Greenhouse writes: “Strikes by autoworkers, writers, actors and nurses and a threatened strike by UPS workers all led to significant wins in 2023. “The big challenge for labor in 2024 will be to take that momentum and turn it into new organizing and getting first contracts where workers have organized,” said Ken Jacobs, the co-director of the UC Berkeley Labor Center. “That’s going to be a real challenge because labor law in the US is broken.”….Among the big tests that labor faces is whether the United Auto Workers (UAW) will succeed in using the impressive contracts it won with Detroit’s automakers to organize Toyota, Tesla and other non-union auto plants, especially in the anti-union south. Another challenge is whether the Starbucks, Amazon, Trader Joe’s, Apple, Chipotle and REI workers who have unionized over the past two years will finally get first contracts that deliver improved wages and benefits….During 2023, there were several major contract disputes, including ones involving 340,000 Teamsters at UPS, 150,000 screen and television actors, 140,000 autoworkers and 85,000 Kaiser Permanente workers. In each of those negotiations, unions came away boasting of record contracts, although only after the actors, autoworkers and Kaiser workers went on strike. “2023 has been huge for labor, both the extraordinary increase in large strikes beyond and the success of workers through those strikes,” Jacobs said. “That’s a really a turnaround from where we had been.”….“Strike activity might not reach the same level next year but it’s still an opportune time to go on strike,” said Johnnie Kallas, director of the ILR Labor Action Tracker, which keeps a tally of strikes across the US. Many labor experts say it’s a favorable time to go on strike because the labor market is tight, public approval for unions is at its highest level in decades, and there’s a vigorously pro-union president in the White House….The UAW hopes its record contracts with Detroit’s automakers will set up organizing victories at auto and battery plants across the south. It has announced plans to seek to unionize Toyota, Tesla, Mercedes and BMW, and its effort to unionize the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, is racing ahead of the others, with more than 1,000 VW workers signing pro-union cards. But some auto executives, most notably Tesla’s Elon Musk, have served notice that the UAW is unwelcome. “I disagree with the idea of unions,” Musk said recently. ”

Greenhouse continues, “The UAW hopes its record contracts with Detroit’s automakers will set up organizing victories at auto and battery plants across the south. It has announced plans to seek to unionize Toyota, Tesla, Mercedes and BMW, and its effort to unionize the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, is racing ahead of the others, with more than 1,000 VW workers signing pro-union cards. But some auto executives, most notably Tesla’s Elon Musk, have served notice that the UAW is unwelcome. “I disagree with the idea of unions,” Musk said recently….Joseph McCartin, a labor historian at Georgetown University, voiced relative optimism for the UAW. “They’re in a better position to make a move on these companies than they have ever been,” he said. “They not only have a great contract to show what they’ve accomplished, but they have the will to wage the campaign in a way that the union has not for a long time. It’s bound to be a really important campaign. There’s going to be a furious struggle.”….Many labor leaders see another important challenge for 2024: to help ensure that Joe Biden defeats Donald Trump, the likely Republican nominee for president. McCartin said the 2024 election is reminiscent of 1948. “If you think about Harry Truman – he was not doing well in the polls, he was struggling, his party was divided,” with rival candidates Strom Thurmond and Henry Wallace, McCartin said. “When Truman won, he said that labor did it.”….McCartin said Biden is also facing a “situation of how to hold together: Biden has a youth problem. People under 35 are not enthused about him. In my view, labor is well-positioned to be an engine for the re-election of Biden. But it’s hard to prognosticate.”….Jones of the University of Minnesota said: “Labor has to play a big role. I think it’s going to be a make or break. Biden has talked a lot about turning out working-class voters, particularly white men. He’s been fairly successful at that. There’s a lot of talk of him losing support among Black and Latino voters. So the degree that Biden can turn out white, working-class voters is really critical. That’s something the UAW and other unions can really help with.” Jones said unions could make a pivotal difference in industrial states such as Michigan and Ohio….Arguably the biggest challenge labor faces is whether unions can finally begin to reverse the decline in union membership and in the percentage of workers in unions. Just 10% of workers are in unions, down from more than 20% during the 1980s ….Reversing the decline in union membership “is the big test”, Jacobs said, adding: “The UAW demonstrated what a union can do when its members are fully engaged and taking on the boss. Can unions turn that into new organizing and expanding and increasing union density? In the context of our very broken labor law, none of this is easy. But I’m the most optimistic I’ve been since I began doing this work.”

In “What issues will matter most to Hispanic voters in 2024?,” Monica Potts and Holly Fuong write at 538 that their  “analysis of data from the Cooperative Election Study, a Harvard University survey of at least 60,000 Americans taken before the 2020 elections and the 2022 midterms, shows that Hispanic voters remain to the left of the general electorate on key issues like immigration and environmental policy. In other areas, Hispanic voters are largely similar to the general electorate….”Most [Hispanic voters] are not single-issue voters,” said Melissa Morales, the president and founder of Somos Votantes and Somos PAC, an independent outreach group that has endorsed Democratic candidates. “There’s a bunch of things that are going to come in to affect how they vote.”….Overall, Hispanic voters* made up about 11 percent of the electorate in 2020. That’s relatively low compared to an estimated 19 percent of the total U.S. population. But they’re also the fastest-growing demographic group in the country. And while the share of this group that’s eligible to vote and turning out to vote is low compared to other groups, it’s growing every year….CES data shows that Hispanic voters are more likely to be young, with more than 30 percent of those voters under 30, compared with 21 percent of the general electorate. That means many of them are squarely in a generation that’s already more diverse and further to the left on many issues than the general electorate. And only 13 percent are 65 or older, compared to 22 percent of the general electorate….Hispanic Americans are less educated on average than the electorate as a whole: Based on 2020 CES data, about half have only a high school education, while 19 percent are college graduates, compared with 37 percent and 31 percent of the general electorate, respectively. What will happen within the huge group of Hispanic voters without college degrees, and why, is one of the big unanswered questions both parties are facing as we head into the 2024 presidential election….In the 2020 CES, Hispanic voters were 14 points more likely than the general electorate to support giving legal status to immigrants who have held jobs and not been convicted of a crime. They were also less likely to support increasing border security measures like hiring more border patrol officers and building a wall than the general electorate, and less supportive of measures to curb legal immigration. Their stances on immigration questions differed from the general electorate by 9 to 13 points, showing that the group was significantly more liberal. The differences were similar in 2022.”

Potts and Fuong note further, “In 2016, when Trump ran a campaign focused on anti-immigration policies, he lost Hispanic voters to the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, two to one….But his anti-immigration rhetoric didn’t turn out a record wave of Hispanic voters to vote against him and become solidly loyal Democrats, as some had predicted. Instead, his base of support among the group was on par with or even better than that shown for previous nominees Sen. Mitt Romney and Sen. John McCain. That led observers to conclude that a significant and steady minority of Hispanic voters, around a third, were probably conservative and unlikely to abandon Republicans….In 2020, Trump made gains among Hispanic voters. Immigration was a less important issue that year, when voters were much more focused on COVID-19 and the economic wreckage surrounding the pandemic. Biden won the group overall, 59 percent to 38 percent, but Trump made gains among a specific group: those without college degrees….Immigration has been rising in salience among voters and continues to be a losing issue for Biden. Whether it’s a winning issue for either party among Hispanic voters remains to be seen, however. Republican front-runner Trump has made overtly racist and fascist remarks about immigration, while Biden has signaled he’s willing to deal with Republicans on immigration policy in order to pass aid for Ukraine in its war against Russia — a stance that could turn off some Hispanic voters. “The Democratic Party needs to make sure that they’re not bargaining away the rights of immigrants in this country, because it is still a very, very important issue to the Latino community,” Tzintzún Ramirez said….On issues of policing, like decreasing the number of police officers on the street or eliminating mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders, Hispanics were not consistently further to the left or right of the overall electorate, and the differences were small. On a wide range of other issues included in the CES, ranging from banning assault rifles to allowing abortions as a matter of choice, Hispanics also did not vary significantly or predictably from the general electorate….One area that did stand out was policies related to health care access. Hispanics in 2020 were more likely to support expanding Medicare to cover all Americans than the general electorate was by 14 points, and they were more likely to support lowering the age for Medicare eligibility from 65 to 50 by the same margin….Analysis from Equis Research showed that, in 2022, Hispanic voters, like most voters, were concerned about the economy and cost of living, and that those who rated that as their top concern were more likely to support Republican candidates.”

There are plenty of potentially-pivotal wild cards still looming in the 2024 election deck: Trump’s indictments; Biden’s age; RFK, Jr.; other 3rd party candidates; abortion; Gaza; Ukraine; inflation; etc. etc. Ed Pilkington notes another in his article, “‘Did you just hear John Roberts scream?’: US supreme court to have outsized influence in 2024 election” in The Guardian. Among his observations:

The US supreme court, stacked with rightwing justices appointed by Donald Trump and facing a crisis of public confidence in its impartiality, has been thrust into the thick of the 2024 presidential election through a number of highly charged and critical cases.

Last week’s dynamite ruling from the Colorado supreme court disqualifying Trump from the state’s presidential primary ballot on grounds that he engaged in insurrection on 6 January 2021 is almost certain to end up before the country’s highest court. Trump’s legal team has indicated it will appeal, and the nine supreme court justices will be under pressure to take the case or risk legal confusion spreading as the election year unfolds.

In addition to the Colorado ruling, the top court was also asked to step into the legal battle between Trump and the department of justice’s special counsel Jack Smith in the criminal prosecution of the former president over his attempt to subvert the 2020 election. At issue was whether Trump could claim presidential immunity even though he is no longer in the White House.

Earlier this month Smith asked the supreme court to expedite a decision to avoid delaying a criminal trial in Washington DC scheduled to begin on 4 March. On Friday the court issued a one-sentence denial, which returns the case back to a Washington DC-based federal appeals court, though it is likely to be only a matter of time before such a fundamental question wends its way back to the highest court for final adjudication.

All of which “comes at an awkward time for the court, which is already reeling from its own internal ethical scandals and plummeting public approval ratings,” according to Pilkington., who adds,

To be shoved into the heart of the election battle is likely to be a deeply uncomfortable experience for all the justices, three of whom – Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – were appointed by Trump. The prospect is especially fraught for the chief justice, John Roberts, who is known to be sensitive about public opinion and keen to keep the court above the political ruckus.

As the Colorado ruling was announced Mike Sacks, a writer on law and politics, quipped on social media: “Did you all just hear John Roberts scream too because I def did”.

Legal pundits agree that the supreme court is almost duty bound to take the Colorado case and hear it expeditiously. David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said “it’s crucial for all Americans that the issue of Trump’s eligibility be resolved as soon as possible. The Republican party needs to know if it has a qualified nominee, election officials need to know who to name on the ballot, and the voters need to know who they can vote for.”

Colorado’s primary is slated for Super Tuesday, March 5th – one of 17 states that will count presidential primary ballots that day. And there will be loud weeping and gnashing of teeth, no matter what the Supremes, who have a 41 percent approval rate, decide to do. The implications for Democratic strategy are iffy too, depending on the decision.

It may be that the Biden campaign would rather run against Trump than several other GOP presidential candidates. So there are undoubtedly Democratic strategists who are hoping Trump prevails in the Supreme Court ruling. No doubt many other Democrats would prefer not to gamble on allowing Trump to win the GOP nomination and risk empowering him to further degrade American democracy.

The 14th amendment, section 3 is not one of the more well-written parts of the Constitution. But for any interpretation to say that it is OK for the President of the U.S. to not only advocate, but also take part in a plot to shred a fair presidential election is a pretty ugly stretch, even for a court with three Trump appointees. Don’t bet on Justice Thomas recusing himself. But if he does, a 4-4 tie becomes possible, in which case the Colorado decision stands.

Regardless, however, the  upcoming Supreme Court decision underscores the enormous importance of restoring integrity in the composition of the High Court, as well as reforms in its rules. As soon as Democrats win the necessary seats in the Senate and House, they should increase the size of the Supreme Court, which was last set at 9 seats back in 1869, when the U.S. had less than 40 million people, compared to about 332 millions now. In all, the number of seats on the Supreme Court has been changed six times by congress, so let’s have no whining about upholding the founders’ intentions.

And no bellyaching, please, about ‘packing the court.’ The Republicans have already done that. Dems must WTFU and play their best hole card at the first opportunity, if they want to play on a level table in the coming years.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter and co-author with John B. Judis of the new Book “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?,” is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

In a recent outstanding piece for The Liberal Patriot, sociologist Musa al-Gharbi noted:

The key schism that lies at the heart of dysfunction within the Democratic Party and the U.S. political system more broadly is between professionals associated with ‘knowledge economy’ industries and those who feel themselves to be the ‘losers’ in the knowledge economy—including growing numbers of working-class and non-white voters.

I believe this is correct. And it leads me to make a suggestion to all those knowledge economy professionals out there who can’t bring themselves to deviate from current Democratic Party orthodoxy because it would supposedly undermine the cause of “social justice”: become a class traitor!

Ask yourself who the social justice you prize so highly is really for. Is it really for the poor and working class who have the short end of the stick in our society or is it to make your feel righteous and onside with Team Progressive? Are your social justice commitments and priorities what the poor and working class actually want? Does the language you speak on these issues even make sense to them?

If not, you should consider that a politics that is appealing to you but not the working class is intrinsically limited and cannot achieve the objectives for a better society that you presumably harbor. You should, in short, consider becoming a class traitor.

At the top of the list for aspiring class traitors is decisively rejecting the intersectional left, the ideological vanguard of today’s knowledge economy professionals. According to this vanguard, actions or arguments should be judged not by their content but rather by the identity of those involved in said actions or arguments. Those identities in turn are defined by an intersectional web of oppressed and oppressors, of the powerful and powerless, of the dominant and marginalized. With this approach, one judges an action not by whether it’s effective, or an argument by whether it’s true, but rather by whether the people involved in the action or argument are in the oppressed/powerless/marginalized bucket or not. If they are, the actions or arguments should be supported; if not, they should be opposed. Finally, all the political stands that follow from this “analysis” are linked together and constitute a social justice catechism that must be uncritically embraced by the knowledge economy faithful.

This whole approach is completely bonkers, defying reasonable standards of logic, evidence, and common sense. Yet it has remarkable influence within the Democratic Party and has associated the party with many positions that are both substantively wrong and politically toxic. Consider the following:

• It is not the working class that sees the police as an unnecessary evil and opposes rigorous enforcement of the law for public safety and public order.
• It is not the working class that believes public consumption of hard drugs should be tolerated, with intervention limited to reviving addicts when they overdose.
• It is not the working class that believes many crimes like shoplifting should be decriminalized because punishing the perpetrators would have “disparate impact”.
• It is not the working class that believes you should never refer to illegal immigrants as “illegal” and that border security is somehow a racist idea.
• It is not the working class that believes an overwhelming surge of migrants at the southern border should be accommodated with asylum claims, parole arrangements, and release into urban areas around the country.
• It is not the working class that believes competitive admissions and job placements should be allocated on the basis of race (“equity”) not merit.
• It is not the working class that views objective tests as fundamentally flawed if they show racial disparities in achievement.
• It is not the working class that believes America is a structurally racist, white supremacist society.
• It is not the working class that sees patriotism as a dirty word and the history of the United States as a bleak landscape of racism and oppression.
• It is not the working class that thinks sex is “assigned at birth” and can be changed by self-conception, rather than being an objective, biological reality.
• It is not the working class that thinks it’s a great idea to police the language people use for hidden “microaggressions” and bias against the “marginalized”.
• And it is definitely not the working class that believes in “decolonize everything” and manages to see murderous thugs like Hamas as righteous liberators of a subaltern people.

No, my fellow knowledge economy professionals, it is not the working class that saddles Democrats and American politics with this nonsense, it is the intersectional left that insists on these absurdities and demands your acquiescence. But you don’t have to give it!

Read more…

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 Whitmer, Gavin Newsom, J.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.

For a fresh take on the U.S. politics and where it appears to be heading, read “High suburban turnout may be the new norm: We took a detailed look at who turned out to vote in five states in 2023” by 538’s Tia Yang, Mary Radcliffe, and Holly Fuong at abcnews.go.com. As the authors write:

538 analyzed turnout patterns in five states with high-profile elections in 2023, looking at both trends over time and differences between counties with different demographic compositions to see where turnout was highest. (You can download the data we used in this analysis on our GitHub page.) Overall, off-year turnout in these states was at or near its highest level in more than a decade, suggesting that we are still in the high-turnout environment that has characterized U.S. elections since 2016. We also found that turnout rates tended to be higher in suburban counties than in urban and rural ones, and that the pre-2016 conventional wisdom about off- versus on-year turnout has changed — which could pose both an opportunity and a danger to Democrats in 2024.

Since former President Donald Trump took office in 2017, turnout in U.S. elections has been off the charts. According to U.S. Census data, 53 percent of the citizen voting-age population voted in 2018, the highest midterm turnout since at least 1978. The 2020 election broke another record with 67 percent turnout, the highest since 1992. And midterm turnout in 2022 was almost as high as in 2018, at 52 percent.

Turnout rates in off-year elections during the same span have also been elevated. And if the 2023 elections are any indication, turnout in the 2024 presidential election will probably be very high as well. Compared to previous off-year elections with the same types of races on the ballot, Ohio, New Jersey and Pennsylvania all had their highest turnout since at least 2011, and Kentucky and Virginia came very close to matching their turnout acmes from 2019.

The state with the highest 2023 turnout was Ohio; its statewide turnout rate of 43 percent almost matched its 47 percent turnout rate in the 2022 midterms, when the ballot included a competitive open Senate race between Republican J.D. Vance and Democrat Tim Ryan (as well as a less competitive gubernatorial race). This was likely due to high voter engagement on Issue 1, a (successful) ballot measure to codify the right to abortion in the state constitution.

Contentious ballot questions have motivated similar off-year turnout levels in Ohio before: Turnout hit 42 percent in 2011 as voters chose to repeal an unpopular GOP-backed collective bargaining restriction. But Ohio’s high turnout this year seems to be a strong argument in favor of the theory that abortion is still driving voters (especially liberal voters) to the polls, even more than a year removed from the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Ballot questions addressing abortion access will likely be on the ballot again in several states in 2024, and while their effects on turnout may be less pronounced in a presidential year, they could still make a difference — especially when it comes to turning out young voters.

It’s kind of pathetic that we think of stats like 42 percent and even slightly better figures hovering around 50 percent as high turnout numbers. Never mind the percentage of voters who are actually well-informed. It gets worse in selected states as you read the rest of the article. But the article’s most important point is that “one consistent theme across states was that suburban counties saw significantly higher turnout than adjacent cities.”

For example, in Ohio, turnout ranged from 36 to 46 percent in the four counties housing the state’s largest city centers. But turnout was particularly high in populous exurbs, like Delaware County north of Columbus and Geauga County east of Cleveland, which saw turnout rates of 62 and 55 percent, respectively. The results suggest that Democratic mobilization around abortion was one factor driving turnout here: For example, Issue 1 was approved with 57 percent of the vote statewide, while President Joe Biden got just 45 percent in 2020 — a 12-percentage-point difference. But in Geauga County, Issue 1 got 55 percent of the vote, and Biden got 38 percent — a 17-point improvement.

Yang, Radcliffe and Fuong take a deeper dive and provide graphics to underscore the relatively high turnouts in the burbs of the selected states. The suburban strongholds appear to be where Democrats can expect more victories in the years ahead. They conclude:

What these new trends mean for turnout next year isn’t immediately clear. In contrast to the Obama years, odd- and even-year turnout patterns haven’t been totally predictable since 2016, so it’s hard to say whether turnout in urban areas in 2024 will be as high as Democrats hope. But regardless of whether the new voting patterns in cities and rural areas are here to stay, it looks like suburban and mostly urban counties now reliably have the highest turnout — no matter what the calendar says.

Over the past several years, turnout slumps in major cities have been a cause for concern for Democrats. But at the same time, surging turnout in the suburbs — which have become bluer as they’ve grown more racially diverse and as college graduates have moved toward Democrats — seems to have helped offset this. Though suburbs are certainly not monolithic in their party preferences, even small leftward shifts in these areas have benefited Democrats— particularly as they’ve been accompanied by, or perhaps helped drive, high turnout. With this trend continuing in 2023, it seems safe to say suburbs will remain a major political battleground for years to come.

None of this is inevitable and recent years have brought wild cards to the election game which can confound the most astute political analysts. But Dems have to bet on the best available data, which clearly points to cultivating suburban voters as an increasingly pivotal element of Democratic electoral coalitions.

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

A 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.

 

An excerpt from “Landmark Trump ruling gives Supreme Court an unexpected New Year’s agenda” by Noah Bressner and Justin Green at Axios: “A little over two decades after the landmark Bush v. Gore ruling decided one messy presidential election, the Supreme Court will have a chance to rescue former President Trump’s political ambitions — or leave him out in the cold….Why it matters: A decision from Colorado on Tuesday will likely force the court to decide — very quickly by SCOTUS standards — if states can ban Trump from the ballot using the U.S. Constitution’s insurrection clause….Driving the news: The Colorado Supreme Court, in a 4-3 ruling, removed Trump from the state’s primary ballot, concluding that he “incited and encouraged the use of violence and lawless action to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.”….It stayed the ruling until Jan. 4, with the option to keep the stay in place if the Supreme Court takes up the case before then….The state’s primary is set for Super Tuesday in early March….The Colorado decision marks the first time a court has found that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — which bans insurrectionists who once swore to uphold the Constitution from holding office — applies to Trump….Between the lines: There’s already a budding campaign to pressure Justice Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from any ruling because of his wife’s connections to the Trump White House before Jan. 6….Ginni Thomas was involved in Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election….State of play: Trump likely wouldn’t lose much by staying off the ballot: He lost the state by a double-digit margin in 2020. No Republican has won it since 2004….Courts have so far rejected similar lawsuits in other states. Minnesota’s top court rejected an attempt to push Trump off the ballot last month. A judge ruled against another effort in Michigan that’s now being appealed….What to watch: The Supreme Court has an extremely narrow window to take up the case and issue a ruling….Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold said the court would need to decide within weeks for her office to meet a Jan. 5 deadline to certify and print ballots….If the Supreme Court doesn’t decide in time, Trump’s name could remain on the ballot.”

It’s a BFD, alright. Trump supporters and some of the GOP’s hidebound traditionalists are tripping over each other, arguing that the text of the relevant section of the 14th amendment to the Constitution does not precisely specify that it applies to the President. Here’s the relevant text, so you can decide: “Section 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.” The Republicans, including candidates running against Trump, are reduced to arguing in essence that it’s OK for the President to participate in “insurrection and rebellion” and only the smaller fry have to pay a penalty for doing so. Check out Republican renegade George Conway III’s Atlantic article, “The Colorado Ruling Changed My Mind: The strongest argument for throwing Trump off the ballot is the weakness of the counterarguments” for other equivocations. The Supreme Court may indulge such nitpicking, and it will certainly be an outrage, if Clarence Thomas doesn’t recuse himself, since his wife, Ginni Thomas, was was involved in Trump’s project to overturn the 2020 election. Yes, Trump will use the controversy to do some fund-raising and it may energize some of his more unhinged supporters for a while. But I doubt he will gain many new supporters because of it, regardless of what the Supreme Court will do.

“We’ll see what the U.S. Supreme Court thinks. But in the meantime, one question that is dancing around in my mind right now is this: Why stop with Trump?,” Editor Michael Tomasky writes in The New Republic. “There are other officeholders, in Congress and at the state level, who are alleged or known to have participated in the planning of January 6. Should they not receive the same scrutiny as Trump?….Back in October 2021, Rolling Stone published a blockbuster reportalleging direct involvement in the planning of the insurrection by six Republican members of Congress: Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Paul Gosar, Mo Brooks, Louie Gohmert, and Madison Cawthorn (Gohmert and Cawthorn are no longer serving, if you can describe what the other four are perpetrating as “service”)….Reporter Hunter Walker spoke extensively with two sources who alleged to him that these members “were intimately involved in planning both Trump’s efforts to overturn his election loss and the Jan. 6 events that turned violent.”….Beyond this report, we know of many other allegations of conniving with the White House in the run-up to the riot by other House members—Scott Perry, Jim Jordan, and even Mike Johnson, the man who is now the speaker and second in line to the presidency. All we know about Johnson right now is that he organized an amicus brief, signed by many GOP members of Congress, to some bogus election fraud lawsuit. But what else might he have done?….The word “conspiracy” has been used many times—but I don’t think promiscuously—with respect to what happened on January 6, 2021. A conspiracy by definition involves a lot of people. If these or other Republican House members conspired just to have Congress vote against the certification of Joe Biden as president, would that rise to the level of engaging in “insurrection or rebellion,” to use the amendment’s language? Maybe, maybe not. But if they encouraged violence as a means of pressuring members to vote that way? It would seem pretty hard to deny that that would count as insurrection or rebellion.”

“Red states are dominating migration trends among U.S. states, according to new population estimates released by the U.S. Census Bureau,” according to Timothy H. J. Nerozzi at, gulp, foxnews.com. ” The Census Bureau released a report Tuesday outlining population trends in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico….”The increasing number of states with population growth reflects both the broad national trends of deaths and net international migration returning to pre-COVID levels as well as reduced net domestic outmigration for some of the states,” the report reads….Texas experienced the largest numeric population growth of all 50 states and the District of Columbia, according to the data….The Texas population grew from 30,029,848 on July 1, 2022, to 30,503,301 on the same day in 2023….Florida was directly behind Texas in second place, experiencing a growth from 22,245,521 in 2022 to 22,610,726 in 2023….In descending rank, the rest of the top 10 states for population growth between 2022 and 2023 are: North Carolina, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Arizona, Virginia, Colorado and Utah….South Carolina and Florida led the way as the two fastest-growing states by percentage last year, growing by 1.7% and 1.6%, respectively, the report found….Eight states experienced a fall in population between 2022 and 2023: California, Hawaii, Illinois, Louisiana, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania and West Virginia….California experienced the highest gross population decrease by far, losing 75,423 residents.” Of course, Fox sees the migration stats as an indication  of dislike for “blue state” politics. But it is entirely possible that it could be driven more by a desire to live in warmer climates, since the top 8 in-migration states are all in the southeast — which may eventually become less conservative as a result.

At Current Affairs, Nathan Robinson has an interview with Thom Hartmann, who reaches more Americans via radio every day than any other liberal political commentator. Some of Hartmann’s observations about the potential of radio for helping to build a pro-Democratic majority include:

….The number one talk radio show in America, in fact, prior to Limbaugh, was Alan Berg out of Denver. And he was doing a show that you could hear in 27 states. It was on a giant station, it was blowing a huge signal across the western states. And he was assassinated by a couple of skinheads in the parking lot of the radio station. And they made a movie out of it: Talk Radio….The number one show in America before he was assassinated was left-wing. And with the Alan Berg assassination, there was just this collective, oh my God, across America, where for several years nobody wanted to do talk radio. And then Limbaugh rolled out his show in, whenever it was—‘86, I think—and then there was this herd mentality that kicked in across broadcasting.

….when Air America [progressive talk radio network from 2004-2010] rolled out, I wrote the original business plan for Air America and when Air America rolled out, we leased stations, we leased time on—I think—54 Clear Channel stations around the country. And as I recall, when Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital took over Clear Channel, suddenly we started losing stations until basically it just bankrupted Air America.

On another occasion, there’s a another very large radio network with over 900 stations, and I met with the one of the two billionaires who owned that network in the offices of a United States Senator, and said “Why don’t you put”—and he had hundreds of right wing stations—and I said “Why don’t you put some left-wingers on?” I would offer myself, but just generically. And he simply said straight up, he said, “I’m never gonna put somebody on the air who’s gonna argue for raising my taxes.” This is a guy who owned 900 radio stations.

….we were on 54 Clear Channel stations. Clear Channel also had probably at that time 400 or 500 right-wing stations…..Every single one of the stations that we were on was part of a pod of stations owned by Clear Channel that also had a right-wing show. The right-wing shows had been on for years and years. So their sales guys had developed networks that were right-wing show friendly. They had gotten to know the movers and shakers in the local Republican Party. They had gotten in tight with the Chamber of Commerce. They’d gotten to know the car dealers who were big Republican donors. They even hired people out of that universe. So we were suddenly on 50 radio stations across the country. And every single one of those radio stations had a sales team that was almost entirely either made up of right-wingers or had a customer base that was largely right-wing friendly.”

Hartmann adds that “Half of America is Democrat, half are Republicans. It’s not like we’re wired differently in really major substantial ways. I realize there are arguments about authoritarianism and all that kind of stuff, but still, left-wing talk radio works. It worked before Limbaugh; it’s worked since Limbaugh.” Further

….what really made Limbaugh and what really made right-wing talk radio was the Bill Clinton presidency, when Bill Clinton got elected in 1992….They’re preaching a message of tax cuts and deregulation. And so, of course, the very, very wealthy and very powerful are going to be pouring money down their throats. And I’m preaching a message of “raise taxes on rich people.” And I don’t know how many rich people are therefore going to go out and buy a radio station to put me on.

That’s when they really took off. That’s when it became a multi, multi, you know, $100 million business rather than just a million dollar business. And left-wing talk radio never successfully went through that curve. It got halfway down the road. But when Air America started out, the guy who started it said that he had millions of dollars in funding and he had lied. The very first, you know, he was a con man. I did not know him. But it was a mess. And nobody has ever properly funded a progressive network in the United States.

….There are, at any given moment in the United States, hundreds of radio stations for sale, and they don’t sell for huge amounts of money, hundreds of 1000s to low millions at the very most. There’s also low-power FM, and there are increasing numbers of folks who are starting low-power FM stations. I’m on probably a dozen of them around the country right now….you can put together a low-power FM station for $25,000 and run it out of your basement for that matter, if somebody can get a decent antenna and tower location. So there is the possibility of growing a progressive network. It’s actually happening. We’ve been adding a couple of stations, four or five, six, or eight stations a year, every year steadily for four years.

Back around what must have been 2006 or thereabouts, Randi Rhodes and me and a bunch of other people from Air America went to DC to talk with a bunch of Senators, Democratic Senators, about talk radio, and we tried to convince them that that, you know, they’re raising billions of dollars every four years for elections, and with a fraction of that money, they could buy 400 or 500 radio stations or even 50 radio stations around the country. And it’s much more politically effective to have somebody 24/7 singing your praises on the radio in a way that has high credibility because people feel like they’ve built a relationship with you, than it is to buy ads every advertising cycle. And outside of Bernie Sanders, who totally understood what I was talking about, because for 11 years he had been on my show every Friday for an hour taking calls from listeners—outside of Bernie, we just got blown off, including by somebody who later became a candidate for president of the United States and lost. And I think they lost because right-wing talk radio just destroyed that candidacy.

….The Democratic Party constantly underestimated talk radio. And what’s happening right now is even more alarming. And I don’t recall if I got into that in the Nation article or not. But this is a phenomenon that has just been going on in the last four or five years. At any given moment there are a couple hundred radio stations around the country for sale, but there are also, at any given moment, probably 1,000 radio stations available for lease, where you just go in and say, I’ll rent your station for a year. This is how Air America did it with all the stations we leased from Clear Channel. And typically, on the lease stations, what you’ll hear is religious content or polka music or music that serves niche communities with niche advertisers just kind of hanging on. And what’s happening is that a group of deep-pocketed Hispanic right-wingers, mostly Cuban exiles, have been renting radio stations around the country, the best estimate is there might be 200 or 300 of them now, where they’re running some syndicated and some local Spanish language, right-wing talk radio, and in some cases, they’re playing music, but they’re hiring DJs who are delivering right-wing political messages, you know, snarky comments and things between songs. I saw an article like two weeks ago saying Democrats can’t figure out why the Hispanic vote has moved 7% towards the Republican Party in the last two years. And I’m yelling at the web page going, It’s the freakin’ radio, you know?

….You know, guys working on construction sites, listening to the music with the DJ coming on and going, “Oh my god, do you see what Joe Biden just did?” Well, here’s a new song in Spanish. The people listening are Spanish speakers. I’m telling you, you’re going to see by the 2024 election, you’re going to see Spanish language radio stations in every community in America with a significant Spanish-speaking population, pushing right-wing politics, and they’re already halfway there.

As regards the reach of conservative talk radio, Hartmann notes that there are “1,500 right-wing radio stations in this country, and probably fewer than 100 left-wing stations” and “what political radio there is, is entirely right-wing. It’s not healthy.”

Hartmann adds, “if you live in Wyoming, I mean, you might drive an hour to work, what are you gonna do, you’re gonna listen to the radio. And podcasts are great, and they’re growing rapidly, but they’re also growing rapidly in the 40 and under demographic. If you look at the 50 and over demographic, they still very, very heavily use radio. And those folks are more likely to be voting.”

It’s only one poll, but your jaw-dropper of the day is the headline “McConnell’s approval rating sinks to 6 percent: Monmouth poll” reported by Filip Timotija at The Hill. It doesn’t matter much for 2024, in that Mitch’s seat will not be contested next year. But dare we hope that he will retire soon and Democratic Governor Beshear will appoint his successor? Not bloody likely. Dare we hope, even more extravagantly, that his tanking approvals  presage a growing discontent with his party’s leadership, even in red states? Naahh. Most likely, voters are  concerned about his recent “freezes,” which, let’s face it, does not bode well for leaders of a certain age (including Trump?). Timotija explains “McConnell garnered a 60 percent disapproval rating among American adults in the poll, with an approval rating of 6 percent. He is the only member within congressional leadership to have a negative score among fellow Republicans, accumulating a 10 percent approval and a 41 percent disapproval rating….McConnell, 81, who is up for reelection in 2026, has not stated if he will run again. The Kentucky lawmaker, who won his seventh term in 2020, has frozen up twice this year while taking questions from reporters.” Timotija notes low approval rates (21 percent) for both Senate Majority Leader Schumer (D-NY) and House Minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY). So Dems should probably save the high-fives for later. But don’t chalk it all off to a longing for ‘fresh faces,’ either, since “The new House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) kicks off his tenure with 17 percent approval and 31 percent disapproval rating among all American adults in the poll.”

Still, it would not be a huge stretch to infer from that poll that many voters, despite their doubts about Democrats, are not all that much enamored with Republican leadership. For yet another reminder of what the Republicans have done for America, check out “Clarence Thomas Faces Backlash for Complaining About Supreme Court Pay” by Andrew Stanton at Newsweek. Get out your hankies when reading “Thomas is again facing criticism after ProPublica’s latest report. The article published Monday alleged Thomas hinted in discussions with Republican lawmakers in 2000 he may resign unless Congress authorized a raise….The Supreme Court has faced myriad ethics concerns in recent months after ProPublica reported that Thomas and other justices accepted vacations and luxury gifts from GOP megadonors for decades without disclosure to the court. Thomas had allegedly accepted gifts ranging from private jet flights and private school payments from donor Harlan Crow, prompting calls for his resignation. The court last month adopted an ethics code amid outrage over these scandals….Thomas at the time received a salary of $173,600. However, he was among the least wealthy members of the Supreme Court, allegedly owing “hundreds of thousands of dollars” in debt and had “grown frustrated with his financial situation,” according to the report.” No word yet on whether his high-roller buddies will ante up an Xmas bonus to supplement his paltry income. And don’t hold your breath waiting for Thomas to actually quit during a Democratic Administration.

Take heart, Dems, because there are “5 ways New York Democrats could reshape the race for the House,” according to Bill Mahoney, writing at Politico. As Mahoney observes, “Democrats won the court fight. Now they’ll look to win the redistricting war….New York’s top court Tuesday handed Democrats a victory in a lawsuit over the state’s congressional lines, ordering the restart of a redistricting process that will eventually put the maps in the hands of the Democratic-dominated state Legislature….There’s a chance the lines might not be as ambitious as some Democrats are hoping: While the Legislature can now redraw the maps, lawmakers also need to guard against an inevitable Republican lawsuit alleging an illegal gerrymander….Since both sides want to avoid two years of legal battles, any change might be relatively minor — perhaps just tweaking a couple of neighborhoods in the five districts Democrats lost by narrow margins in 2022 and hoping the party fares better in a high-turnout presidential year….But there will be plenty of pressure from Democrats, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, to make sweeping changes to help the party.” Mahoney digs into the minutae of redistricting relevant New York communities and neighborhoods, and comes up with the five alternatives. He concludes, “Mapmakers will need to decide whether they want to swing for the fences again, drawing three districts that appear friendly to Democrats, but none of which is a lock. Or they could try to squeeze as many Democrats as possible into one or two districts to hopefully ensure at least some success in the region….One major factor that might influence their thinking is the result of the special election to replace Rep. George Santos on Feb. 13….If the map-making process drags on long enough, state legislators could know if Democrat Tom Suozzi has won the special election. That would ensure that boosting Suozzi’s reelection efforts in November would be a centerpiece of their strategy on the entire island.”

In “How can Democrats persuade the voters they need?,” Errin Haines writes at 19thnews.org “Among the challenges the campaign faces is not just whether Black voters will turn out for them, but whether some of them will turn out at all….The Biden-Harris administration has had mixed results on key priorities for Black voters, coming up short on passing federal legislation on voting rights, gun reform and criminal justice, but securing record funding for historically Black colleges, record low unemployment and the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court….Presidential and other campaigns have to do this work, but it’s an organizing model that is getting a new member. The new Renegade Collective is focused on the South — where most Black Americans live and vote — both for 2024 and for the longer term. It’s made up of a group of political strategists who helped Stacey Abrams build the winning coalition that flipped Georgia from red to blue in 2020 and 2022….Organizers with the Abrams team were among those who bucked the traditional turnout-focused campaign strategy of chasing more reliable voters who could be counted on to show up on Election Day. Instead, they looked to expand the electorate by focusing on “low-propensity” voters, people who didn’t participate regularly in the electoral process and who were mostly seen by campaigns as not worth the effort or outreach….This included Black voters who were previously unregistered or otherwise less engaged, but it was also about putting together a coalition that was multiracial, intergenerational, both rural and urban, and largely disaffected. An approach that centered their priorities — and not the candidates — was the persuasion argument that helped deliver seismic political victories for Democrats in Georgia in 2020 and 2022….“I’m of two minds: On the one hand, the Abrams coalition did put together, twice, something that was really remarkable in terms of registration, grassroots organizing and education,” said Fordham University political scientist Christina Greer. “They also had a candidate that was once-in-a-generation, in a state that already had a lot of organizing infrastructure, a number of HBCUs, a civil rights legacy and demographic shifts in a state that helped Democrats.”

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter and co-author with John B. Judis of the new Book “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?,” is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

“I’ve got those mean old swing-state, working-class blues!” I wouldn’t exactly recommend this as the Democrats’ campaign theme song, but it would encapsulate a lot of what appears to be happening to them these days.

A run of national polls have had Biden losing to Trump but, even worse, so have a number of swing-state polls. The latest are of Michigan and Georgia by CNN. In the former, Biden is behind by 10 points; in the latter, he is trailing by 5 points. Peering into the crosstabs, it is clear that Biden’s woes in these states have a lot to do with declining support among working-class voters. Let’s review some of the relevant data, starting with Michigan.

Michigan. In CNN’s Michigan poll, Trump is ahead by 21 points among working-class (noncollege) voters, while Biden is ahead by 10 points among college-educated voters. But Michigan is an overwhelmingly working-class state—according to States of Change projections, Michigan should be around 71 percent working-class eligible voters in 2024—so this a very unfavorable pattern for the Democrats.

Compared to Biden’s successful effort in 2020, the fall off in working-class support suggested here is precipitous. According to States of Change data, Biden lost these voters by a mere 2 points in 2020, so the current deficit of 21 points represents a massive 19-point swing against him. In contrast, the college-educated swing against him in the CNN poll looks quite small: a 12-point advantage among these voters in 2020, compared to a 10-point advantage now.

Other findings from the poll underscore the hole Biden is in among the state’s working-class voters. On whether Biden’s policies have improved or worsened economic conditions in the country, 60 percent of Michigan working-class voters think his policies have worsened conditions, three times more than the 20 percent who believe his policies have improved them.

The poll asked voters about several characteristics and whether Biden and Trump had exactly the characteristics they would like to see in a president, close enough or not what you want in a president. On Biden, 61 percent of Michigan working-class voters say his policy positions on major issues are not what they would like to see in a president. Worse, 65 percent of these voters believe Biden’s ability to understand the problems of people like them is not what they want in a president. And worse yet, 72 percent say Biden’s “sharpness and stamina” isn’t what they’d like to see in a president. In contrast, strong majorities of Michigan’s working-class voters see Trump’s major policy positions, his ability to understand the problems of people like them, and his sharpness and stamina as exactly what they’d like to see in a president, or close enough.

Biden is wont to wave away his troubles by saying: “Don’t compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative.” When it comes to working-class voters in Michigan, that is not a comparison at present that does much to mitigate his problems.

Georgia. In CNN’s Georgia poll, Trump is ahead by 14 points among working-class voters, while Biden is ahead by 7 points among college-educated voters. Georgia too is an overwhelmingly working-class state, likely around 67 percent working-class eligible voters in the next election, putting the Democrats in a very poor position.

In 2020, Biden lost Georgia working-class voters by just 6 points, so his current 14-point deficit is an 8-point swing against him. But his current 7-point lead among the college-educated is only 3 points less than his lead among these voters in 2020. As in Michigan, working-class defections are driving the move away from Biden to Trump.

It’s worth noting that, while CNN does not supply breaks for nonwhite working class voters, inspections of the internals of these polls indicates that in both states the swing away from Biden among nonwhite working-class voters is likely greater than the overall working-class swing.

The Georgia CNN poll has the same questions as the Michigan poll so it is possible to look at the same Biden evaluations. Georgia working-class voters are far more likely to think Biden’s policies have worsened economic conditions (58 percent) than improved them (22 percent). As for desired characteristics in a president, strong majorities of Georgia working-class voters see Biden as nothaving what they would like to see in a president on major policy positions, his ability to understand people like them and, especially, having the sharpness and stamina to do the job. With Trump, it’s exactly the reverse: on all three of these characteristics, strong majorities of Georgia’s working class see him as having exactly what they want in a president or close enough.

National. CNN also recently released an extensive national poll that sheds more light on Biden’s general working-class woes. Some key findings:

1. Biden’s working-class approval rating on handling the economy is just 26 percent. Among the college-educated, in contrast, it’s a more respectable 43 percent.
2. His approval rating on helping the middle class is a mere 28 percent among working-class voters. On handling crime, his rating, at 31 percent among these voters, is scarcely better.
3. On which party is closer to voters’ views on issues, working-class voters favor Republicans over Democrats by 16 points on the economy. Intriguingly, the parties are essentially tied among Hispanics on this issue.
4. On immigration, working-class voters prefer the GOP by 22 points. Even more intriguingly, Hispanics favor Republicans over Democrats by 6 points on the issue.
5. Working-class voters also favor Republicans by 18 points on crime and policing, 12 points on America’s role in the world, 6 points on helping the middle class (!), and 4 points on education. The strongest area for the Democrats among these voters is abortion and even here they only have a single digit (8-point) lead, far less than their lead among the college-educated.
6. Almost half (47 percent) of working-class voters are very worried that the cost of living will be too high for them to continue living in their current community. Another 32 percent are somewhat worried for a total of 79 percent.

Biden’s path to victory in 2024 of course goes through the key swing states everybody talks about. But people should realize that the path to victory in those swing states goes through the working-class voters in those states, voters among whom he has been losing critical support. He and his campaign will either fix this problem or they will lose. And then they—and the country—will really have those swing-state, working-class blues.