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 “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?,” is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:
Democrats are nothing short of giddy. Biden, who looked like a sure loser, bowed out of the presidential race and was seamlessly replaced by Kamala Harris through deft and lightning-fast intraparty maneuvering. The race is reset! All is possible!
Who can blame Democrats for being a bit slap happy? They were staring into the abyss and now have a reprieve. They have a younger candidate and a more enthusiastic, unified party. Those are important and positive differences. But there are also similarities to their previous situation that are highly negative and can’t be wished away. Here’s one that I wrote about back in January:
Here is a simple truth: how working-class (noncollege) voters move will likely determine the outcome of the 2024 election. They will be the overwhelming majority of eligible voters (around two-thirds) and, even allowing for turnout patterns, only slightly less dominant among actual voters (around three-fifths). Moreover, in all six key swing states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—the working-class share of the electorate, both as eligible voters and as projected 2024 voters, will be higher than the national average.
It follows that significant deterioration in working-class support could put Biden [now Harris] in a very deep hole nationally and key states. Conversely, a burgeoning advantage among working-class voters would likely put Trump in a dominant position.
This is very important to keep in mind as we are swamped by a tsunami of favorable Harris coverage in legacy and other center-left media. Where once her retail political skills were disparaged, we are told that she is now (or always has been) a consummately effective, charismatic retail politician.
Polls of course will be scrutinized for signs that the race is shifting in the Democrats’ favor and even small changes will be interpreted as signs that Trump is on the run. But in truth it will take a few weeks for the race to settle out and one should be cautious about interpreting initial results.
That said, what we have seen so far does not suggest a fundamentally altered race. Trump was ahead and is still ahead. Democrats still badly trail among working-class voters and have compressed margins among nonwhite and young voters relative to 2020. Of course, that may change in coming weeks but that is what we see now.
Looking at the running poll averages, we have the following for Trump-Harris matchups: RCP has Trump over Harris by 1.7 points (2.8 pointswith the full ballot including Kennedy/West/Stein). New York Times has Trump over Harris by 2 points and DDHQ/The Hill has Trump by 2 points. Pretty consistent.
Another approach is to compare averages of Biden vs. Trump and Harris vs. Trump. Naturally, these only overlap when Biden was the actual candidate and Harris was a notional candidate. But the data are still of interest.
Split Ticket has the most recent data on this, covering the month of July, and they do not show much difference between the candidates. Harris does slightly worse overall, with a margin against Trump .4 points worse than Biden. She does worse among men, a bit better among women; worse among seniors, better among those under 30; worse among whites and Hispanics and better among blacks and, significantly, worse among working-class voters and better among the college-educated. But the differences are generally quite small.
If you confine one’s sample of polls to those that were entirely in the field after Biden dropped out (i.e., after July 20), rather than just partially—a tiny group–there are some signs of a tightening race. But Trump is still ahead.
CNN is one of those polls and it does indeed show Harris doing better against Trump than Biden did prior to dropping out. But Trump is still ahead and, interestingly, Harris is doing no better against Trump than she did before Biden dropped out—in fact, a bit worse (3 point deficit now vs. a 2 point deficit in late June). And the internal demographics are quite similar to the earlier reading and all run far behind how Biden did in the 2020 election. Notably, her working-class deficit to Trump is 15 points, compared to Biden’s 4 point deficit in 2020.
These double digit Democratic deficits among the working class have been a regular feature of this election cycle. These deficits have been driven by worsening performance among the white working class (recall that Biden in 2020 actually did a bit better among these voters relative to Clinton in 2016) and much lower margins among nonwhiteworking-class voters. It is difficult to see how Harris prevails without strong progress on this front.
Can she do it? Sure, anything’s possible. But Democrats would be well-advised to be clear-eyed about the challenge. What Harris has to overcome is illustrated by an early July Pew poll that had a large enough sample size (N=over 9,400) to allow blacks and Hispanics to be broken down by working-class vs. college-educated. Both racial groups show strong educational polarization that is much larger than what was observed in 2020. Hispanic working-class voters in this poll preferred Trump by 3 points over Biden, compared to a 22 point margin for Biden over Trump in 2020. Among black working-class voters, Biden was leading by 47 points over Trump, compared to an 82 point lead for Biden in 2020.
A working class-oriented campaign would appear to be in order. But so far there is little indication that is what the Harris campaign has in mind. A widely-circulated memo from the campaign sees Harris’ candidacy as building on the “Biden-Harris coalition of voters” and mentions black voters, Latino voters, AANHPI voters, women voters and young voters. Working-class voters are conspicuous by their absence. The memo proposes to expand this coalition among, for example, white college-educated voters by taking advantage of the fact that:
…[Harris] has been at the forefront on the very issues that are most important to these voters—restoring women’s reproductive rights and upholding the rule of law following January 6, Donald Trump’s criminal convictions, and the Supreme Court’s immunity decision.
There is little mention of any other issues. This is despite the fact that Harris is rated far below Trump on handling issues like crime, inflation, and immigration. The latter two issues typically top voters’ list of concerns.
To the extent Harris has talked about issues other than abortion, “democracy is on the ballot,” and Trump’s character it has been to emphasize, according to Axios, that:
…she’ll pursue big—and expensive—parts of Joe Biden’s domestic agenda that never made it across the finish line…Harris is signaling that even as Democrats play defense on Biden’s mixed economic record, she’s eager to go on offense for the next four years…Her plans include pushing for nearly $2 trillion to establish universal pre-K education and improve elderly care and child care…
This seems…unwise in light of working-class voters’ inflation fears and how poorly they view Biden administration economic management. Pushing for massively increased spending is highly unlikely to win them over to your side, even if they approve of some of the end goals.
As some of the saner voices on the left have noted, Harris needs to make a serious effort to assure skeptical voters, particularly working-class voters, that she will in fact do things differently from the Biden administration on key issues where Democrats are vulnerable. David Leonhardt mentions crime, immigration, inflation, gender issues, and free speech. As Leonhardt points out:
Democrats often describe Donald Trump and other Republicans as radical….But many voters also see the Democratic Party as radical. In fact, the average American considers the Democratic Party to be further from the political mainstream than the Republican Party…
…[S]uccessful presidential candidates reassure voters that they are more moderate than their party. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Biden all did in their own ways. Even Trump did in 2016, by supporting Social Security, opposing trade deals, and endorsing same-sex marriage. The strategy works because most voters see themselves as less conservative than the Republican Party and less liberal than the Democratic Party….
[These politicians] were sending a larger message. It was the same one Clinton sent when he called himself “a new Democrat” and George W. Bush did with his talk of “compassionate conservatism.” It was also the one Trump recently tried to send by saying he opposed a national abortion ban.All these politicians were asserting their independence from their own parties. It’s hard to get elected president without doing so.
So far there is little indication that Harris will do anything of the kind. As Politico Playbook noted: “Three sources in Harris’ orbit we spoke to said people expecting Harris to take drastically different positions [to distinguish herself from Biden] are going to end up disappointed.”
Thus, instead of a “different kind of Democrat” what voters will likely get is a younger, nonwhite, female version of the same kind of Democrat. Put another way, the Democrats seem content to remain a Brahmin Left party and see how things work out. Gulp.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/28/harris-campaign-trump-fracking-ban-00171537
Good first step regarding fracking. Now wholly embrace it. No natural gas dominance without fracking. No third world energy transition from coal without natural gas.
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/democrats-think-their-candidate-is?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=295937&post_id=147068119&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=ecbqk&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
“Everything is very stupid right now.
The liberal media (that is, all media that is not explicitly branded as conservative) is really, really feeling themselves, seemingly convinced that Kamala Harris’s near-tie performance in recent polls reflects permanent strength on her part.
I don’t know; it seems like this closing of the gap could largely be the result of an unprecedented one-time boost, given the strange situation we’re in.
It would certainly be an exaggeration to say that most Democrats appear certain of victory in November, but many are displaying a level of exuberance that’s very hard for me to justify with evidence.
This is especially true given two facts – one, we’ve seen successive presidential elections in which Donald Trump has meaningfully outperformed both pundit prognostication and polling, and two, our horrible electoral system unduly empowers a lot of voters who are not at all Harris’s core constituencies.
And many seem intent on remaking a core 2016 mistake: acting as though the Democratic candidate’s job is to become the President of Online rather than the President of the United States, begging Harris to devote her campaign to memes and social media, playing to people like them instead of the middle class white retirees in Wisconsin and Arizona who will actually determine this election.
The weird way that a given party’s most loyal voters are often rendered the least important is another dumb element of democracy, and another fact of life.
If Harris is going to win, the absolute last thing she should do is to run a meme candidacy like that presided over by Robbie Mook in 2016, where Hillary’s agenda took a back seat to a never-ending procession of glamorous celebrity photo ops and a wince-inducing attempt to make the candidate into America’s cool grandma.
These strategic mistakes were not the reason that Hillary lost, but they played directly into her biggest weakness, which was how her underlying unpopularity fit squarely into the perception that Democrats came from a different strata of life than swing voters.
You can’t fix that by disappearing further up the ass of popular culture. (If you’re over the age of 25 and you catch yourself earnestly discussing whether something is “brat,” please find Jesus. Or heroin. Or Dianetics. Whatever it takes to change your life.)
For one thing, the abstract concept of freedom doesn’t strike me as particularly novel or unceded territory in an American election.
For another, isn’t that precisely what Harris has demonstrated she’s incapable of consistently doing – delivering clear, simple messages?
Memes that the voters Democrats need won’t ever see because they don’t have bullshit email jobs where they can watch Instagram reels for six and a half hours a day.
And then there’s the serial overestimation of the power of the Black vote.
And yet certain repetitive claims about the Black vote that have become holy writ among Democrats simply aren’t true.
In 2016, a lot of white liberals on social media took to performatively thanking Black women for how they would save us in November. “I thank these brilliant Black queens for saving this nation from itself!” This was like-farming at its most shameless, and it’s inherently dehumanizing to talk about people like this.
More to the point, it wasn’t true. Black women could not rescue the Democrats, quantitatively. Black women are a little more than 6% of the population, and Black voters have significantly lower consistent turnout rates than white.
For all the talk of Black women or Black voters saving the country in 2020, the reality is that Biden sufficiently reduced Trump’s lead with white suburban voters and white voters without a college degree to win the election.
I find it all so bizarre, just more of this senseless liberal habit of acting like hype men for the concept of Black people, as if that’s what fighting racism entails.
While the Black vote will be very important in Michigan and Georgia, it’s much less important in Arizona and Nevada. That’s just demographics.
Pennsylvania is the single most important state in this election. It’s 80% white and 11% Black.
“Black voters are the key for the Democratic party” is just one of those things that patronizing white liberals say in lieu of securing actual progress for Black people. It’s obviously untrue.
Stop mistaking the responsibility Democrats have to Black citizens for the electoral impact of Black voters. They’re not the same.
Most swing voters appear to hold a hodgepodge of political views that are hard to reconcile given our usual definitions; this can be frustrating, but it’s important to remember.
I suspect that what matters more than moderation on government policy, which most voters don’t understand, is making voters feel that you are culturally similar to them and responsive to their needs.
Retreating to internet politics is the absolute last thing we want to do if that’s the case.
It does, however, mean that you have to nominate people who can win the vibes race, and it remains to be seen a) if the country has progressed enough to bless a woman for her vibes and b) if Harris in particular can overcome her bizarre digressions and exploitable San Francisco baggage to win white suburban voters in swing states.
The answer may very well be yes; Hillary Clinton came very close, and her vibes could hardly have been worse.
But it amazes me how confident many Democrats seem. I just don’t get it.
And the intelligentsia, for lack of a better term, seem committed to pushing the campaign into precisely the wrong direction. Hess writes, “A meme alliance has emerged between the Democratic Party’s irony-pilled leftists and its #resistance-core centrists.” Ah! Both kinds of voters!”
Where do you get these numbers? 36% of the population has a college degree. So at most non-college individuals represent 63%. If you adjust for turnout, I don’t see how you get to 60% for working class. I also want to point the percent of those with college degrees is not constant across generations. About 40% of millennials have college degrees. And as they age, they are voting in higher and higher numbers. I also want to point out the non college white voters have lower life expectancy than their college educated counterparts. So their numbers are shrinking over time. And finally, not all working class voters are white. There are a lot of minority voters in this group. And while the GOP appears to have made some gains, it’s still not the majority. i think we need a multi variate approach to this issue. The analysis presented is way too simplistic.