Just returned very early this morning from the DLC’s annual meeting in Denver, exhausted but happy at how the event turned out. As I noted in yesterday’s brief post, the National Conversation had a record turnout of state and local elected officials, which should help, among anybody paying attention, rebut the “DC Establishment” stereotype about the DLC. As always, it was refreshing to spend some time among electeds who are actually trying to solve problems; congressional Dems, for all their virtues, have no power to do that. And Monday’s public event, including the rollout of Hillary Clinton’s American Dream Initiative, was quite coherent and upbeat. Lord knows there were plenty of reporters in Denver who would have loved to ignore what was actually going on at the DLC meeting and instead written about intra-party fights, and plenty of bloggers and other DLC-detractors who would have loved to pile on. But they weren’t given a hook for it, and I’m relieved and grateful for that.Tom Vilsack’s and Hillary Clinton’s speeches in Denver are already available on the DLC web site, and they are well worth reading. Vilsack offered a good quick summary of what the DLC is about these days. And Clinton combined an effective critique of Bush domestic policies with a very focused and specific set of counter-policies that would get the country back to what it was accomplishing when her husband was in office: expanding the middle class and dealing with supposedly intractable social and economic problems. Vilsack mentioned, as he always does, his efforts to build bridges between the DLC and the labor movement, which will begin to bear fruit in a visible way in a few weeks (stay tuned). And Clinton’s economic/social agenda managed to attract praise from none other than Bob Borosage of Campaign for America’s Future, who pioneered DLC-bashing long before it was cool.Last time I checked, the DLC event had not attracted much attention in the progressive blogosphere. Sure, Markos of DKos dismissed the whole deal as irrelevant in a throwaway line in a broader post on Bill Clinton’s Lieberman appearance in Connecticut yesterday; but he would have done so even if we had revealed the cure for the common cold. That’s his story and he’s going to stick to it.Chris Bowers of MyDD, with whom I sometimes have a friendly sparring-partner relationship, did a long post cherry-picking press reports on the Denver event in order to argue that the DLC was focused on poll-driven political arguments for doing this or that.I would agree with Chris if that was what had really happened. But here’s the thing: this was the most wonkified DLC gathering I can remember. The whole event was organized around a collection of 22 essays on national security; a book on state and local policies to deal with globalization; and a big and specific agenda (the aforementioned American Dream Initiative) on middle-class opportunity. I was there the whole time, and didn’t hear any polling data. Yes, there was one session focused on a DLC paper about electoral and demographic trends. But that’s the kind of stuff Chris normally loves; it’s pure data and political analysis. He singles out for particular opprobrium the discussion of faith and politics he read about; presumably this refers to the workshop on this subject I moderated in Denver. But having been there and all, I can assure him that the main thrust of the discussion was “authenticity” in connecting progressive principles with faith traditions. And my own remarks focused on the misreading of public opinion research that leads some Democrats to say damaging things about religion and politics.I can understand the lefty impulse to describe any DLC event as revolving around poll-driven injunctions to Democrats to abandon their principles and drift to the center and right. But it’s still a little odd to get bashed within the poll-and-elections-obsessed blogosphere for simply acknowledging a political dimension to the question of how progressives should pursue their values and policy goals. You can’t take the politics out of politics, no matter how you want to prettify it. But anybody who was actually in Denver will agree that the big message was that Democrats need principled big ideas to take full advantage of the ongoing disaster of Republican misgovernment.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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July 11: If Biden “Steps Aside” and Harris Steps Up, There Should Be No Falloff in Support
At New York I discussed and tried to resolve one source of anxiety about a potential alternative ticket:
One very central dynamic in the recent saga of Democratic anxiety over Joe Biden’s chances against Donald Trump, given the weaknesses he displayed in his first 2024 debate, has been the role of his understudy, Vice-President Kamala Harris. My colleague Gabriel Debenedetti explained the problem nearly two years ago as the “Kamala Harris conundrum”:
“Top party donors have privately worried to close Obama allies that they’re skeptical of Harris’s prospects as a presidential candidate, citing the implosion of her 2020 campaign and her struggles as VP. Jockeying from other potential competitors, like frenemy Gavin Newsom, suggests that few would defer to her if Biden retired. Yet Harris’s strength among the party’s most influential voters nonetheless puts her in clear pole position.”
The perception that Harris is too unpopular to pick up the party banner if Biden dropped it, but too well-positioned to be pushed aside without huge collateral damage, was a major part of the mindset of political observers when evaluating Democratic options after the debate. But now fresher evidence of Harris’s public standing shows she’s just as viable as many of the candidates floated in fantasy scenarios about an “open convention,” “mini-primary,” or smoke-filled room that would sweep away both parts of the Biden-Harris ticket.
For a good while now, Harris’s job-approval numbers have been converging with Biden’s after trailing them initially. These indicate dismal popularity among voters generally, but not in a way that makes her an unacceptable replacement candidate should she be pressed into service in an emergency. As of now, her job-approval ratio in the FiveThirtyEight averages is 37.1 percent approve to 51.2 percent disapprove. Biden’s is 37.4 percent approve to 56.8 percent disapprove. In the favorability ratios tracked by RealClearPolitics, Harris is at 38.3 favorable to 54.6 percent unfavorable, while Biden is at 39.4 percent favorable to 56.9 percent unfavorable. There’s just not a great deal of difference other than slightly lower disapproval/unfavorable numbers for the veep.
On the crucial measurement of viability as a general-election candidate against Trump, there wasn’t much credible polling prior to the post-debate crisis. An Emerson survey in February 2024 showed Harris trailing Trump by 3 percent (43 percent to 46 percent), which was a better showing than Gavin Newsom (down ten points, 36 percent to 46 percent) or Gretchen Whitmer (down 12 points, 33 percent to 45 percent).
After the debate, though, there was a sudden cascade of polling matching Democratic alternatives against Trump, and while Harris’s strength varied, she consistently did as well as or better than the fantasy alternatives. The first cookie on the plate was a one-day June 28 survey from Data for Progress, which showed virtually indistinguishable polling against Trump by Biden, Harris, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Gavin Newsom, J.B. Pritzker, Josh Shapiro, and Gretchen Whitmer. All of them trailed Trump by 2 to 3 percent among likely voters.
Then two national polls released on July 2 showed Harris doing better than other feasible Biden alternatives. Reuters/Ipsos (which showed Biden and Trump tied) had Harris within a point of Trump, while Newsom trailed by three points, Andy Beshear by four, Whitmer by five, and Pritzker by six points. Similarly, CNN showed Harris trailing Trump by just two points; Pete Buttigieg trailing by four points; and Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer trailing him by five points.
Emerson came back with a new poll on July 9 that wasn’t as sunny as some for Democrats generally (every tested name trailed Trump, with Biden down by three points). But again, Harris (down by six points) did better than Newsom (down eight points); Buttigieg and Whitmer (down ten points); and Shapiro (down 12 points).
There’s been some talk that Harris might help Democrats with base constituencies that are sour about Biden. There’s not much publicly available evidence testing that hypothesis, though the crosstabs in the latest CNN poll do show Harris doing modestly better than Biden among people of color, voters under the age of 35, and women.
The bottom line is that one element of the “Kamala Harris conundrum” needs to be reconsidered. There should be no real drop-off in support if Biden (against current expectations) steps aside in favor of his vice-president (the only really feasible “replacement” scenario at this point). She probably has a higher ceiling of support than Biden as well, but in any event, she would have a fresh opportunity to make a strong first or second impression on many Americans who otherwise know little about her.