Democrats in Congress and the White House really need to understand how to negotiate with new House Speaker Mike Johnson. I offered some pessimistic thoughts at New York on what he might demand:

On November 17, barring action by Congress and President Joe Biden, nonessential functions of the federal government will shut down, as they nearly did last month. The bullet Washington narrowly avoided in October at the price of Kevin McCarthy’s Speakership will be fired again. And there’s no indication just yet that McCarthy’s successor, Mike Johnson, has a feasible plan to keep the government functioning, or that he even wants to develop one.

Up until now, Washington politicians probably took solace at the news that Johnson wanted to enact another short-term stopgap funding measure that would extend spending authority until January or even later. His right-wing backers seem okay with that — in theory, at least — though it’s not necessarily a solution since the Democrats who control the White House and the Senate would vastly prefer a measure taking care of appropriations until the end of the fiscal year next September and ruling out any additional shutdown threats in the interim.

But it’s important to understand that Johnson has not committed to the kind of “clean CR” — continuing resolution, as stopgap spending bills are known in congressional parlance — that was McCarthy’s fatal concession. He’s talking about demanding an across-the-board spending cut as a condition for keeping the federal government open. And he’s already shown in his ultraconfrontational gambit tying aid to Israel to a demagogic cut in IRS funding that he is even more prone than McCarthy was to placating the hard-right faction in the House GOP (of which he is a charter member).

The latest wrinkle the new Speaker has added to the stopgap spending-bill discussions is a bizarre idea that would immensely complicate matters, as Government Executive explains:

“Federal agencies could face an ongoing series of independent shutdown threats under a proposal put forward by House Republican leadership on Thursday, who pitched the idea with just more than two weeks until current funding expires.

“While details on the plan were not yet made clear, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said he was considering rolling out a ‘laddered CR,’ or continuing resolution, that would create multiple stopgap bills that fund different parts of the government and have different end dates. Rather than the normal tact of keeping all agencies afloat under one short-term spending bill, the measures would be more narrowly focused and set up unique deadlines for each bill.”

This approach most definitely does reflect the House Freedom Caucus’s mania for avoiding the comprehensive spending measures it associates with runaway “big government” in favor of passing the 12 individual appropriations bills covering the landscape of federal agencies. Trouble is, in a time of divided government and partisan appropriations, multiplying the number of bills on which highly divisive time-sensitive negotiations must take place from one to 12 is a recipe for gridlock and chaos. A “laddered CR” is most definitely a nonstarter for Democrats and probably many Senate Republicans. It’s alarming to hear Johnson talking about it just a couple of weeks before all hell breaks loose, and it makes you wonder if he even wants to prevent a government shutdown.

Amidst the sound and fury surrounding the war between Israel and Hamas, there’s been some loose talk about Biden imperiling his reelection by standing so firmly with Israel. I looked at the numbers, and wrote a cautionary note at New York:

In the furor over Joe Biden’s response to the Israel-Hamas war, one of the more interesting reactions is the supposition that Democrats are in dire danger of losing large numbers of votes from Arab Americans and/or Muslim Americans, risking their defeat in a number of critical states in November 2024.

The Arab American Institute released a new poll suggesting a serious backlash against Biden in 2024, as The Hill reported:

“President Biden’s support among Arab American voters has sharply decreased since the Israel-Hamas war, plummeting to dismal and unprecedented numbers.

“Support for his upcoming reelection bid from Arab Americans dropped by 42 percentage points, from 59 percent in 2020 to 17 percent, according to a new poll conducted by the Arab American Institute …

“The poll found that if the election were held today, 40 percent said they would vote for former President Trump, the GOP front-runner …

“The institute said the poll marks the first time in the 26 years it has polled Arab Americans that the majority did not claim to prefer the Democratic Party.”

Both support for third-party options (17 percent) and an undecided vote (25 percent) spiked in this poll. And, of course, the sponsors pointed out that “Arab Americans account for hundreds of thousands of voters in several key election states, like Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, where the 2024 election battleground will play out.” (At the same time, a group calling itself the National Muslim Democratic Counsel gave Biden and Democrats an “ultimatum” to support an “immediate cease-fire” in Gaza or potentially forfeit Muslim votes in “Michigan, Ohio, Iowa, Florida, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee, where many of our voters reside.”)

So is this backlash as alarming as it sounds? It’s certainly significant, but there are some important qualifiers to address before weighing the effect on Biden’s and his party’s 2024 prospects.

First of all, there’s a tendency among Americans who aren’t closely in touch with Arab and Islamic communities to conflate the two. That’s a major mistake. Roughly one-fourth of Arab Americans are Muslim (a significant majority are Christian). And roughly one-fourth of American Muslims (or less by some estimates) are of Arab ethnicity. Michigan with its heavy concentration of Arab Muslims is probably an outlier.

Measuring Muslim or Arab political leanings isn’t easy, either, since neither category is deployed regularly by Census takers or exit-pollsters.

Since neither the U.S. Census or exit pollsters break out Arab or Islamic Americans systematically, any analysis of voting preferences for either group is less than completely authoritative, though it is clear both Arab Americans and Islamic Americans trended Democratic following September 11. The Arab American Institute’s portrayal of massive losses of support for Biden ’24 should be taken with a grain of salt since it was conducted by pollster John Zogby, whose methodologies have long drawn criticism from experts in the field.

That is not to say that Democrats shouldn’t worry about evidence of voter estrangement over Biden’s war policies (which will likely extend beyond Arab Americans and Muslims to include self-identified progressives and younger voters). In a close election like 2024 is expected to be, relatively small numbers of voters in battleground states can be crucial.

Without question, Democrats should make it clear that the GOP under Donald Trump is far from representing a safe haven for voters unhappy with U.S. policies toward Israel and Palestinians. Aside from Trump’s abundant history of Islamophobia and encouragement of Israel’s most extreme right-wing elements, he and his party are going to be seriously constrained from any “even-handedness” by their conservative Evangelical electoral base, in which disempowerment of Palestinian Arabs (along with general hostility to Muslims) is theologically blessed and even mandated. Trump as the Republican nominee could make a crucial difference between a mere lack of enthusiasm for Biden and a decision to vote for a third-party candidate or for no one at all.

 

There are few topics more complicated and fraught with emotion than abortion politics and policy in the post-Roe era. At New York I addressed a Republican effort to turn the tables on this subject.

When a close and potentially historic election is on the horizon, political analysts invariably try to read entrails from off-year and special elections. This November, Beltway pundits are especially focused on elections in nearby Virginia, where Republican governor Glenn Youngkin is trying to gain control of the state legislature. The GOP currently controls the House while Democrats control the Senate, and thus have a veto on Youngkin’s agenda. Beyond the alleged significance of who wins and loses in Virginia, Youngkin is being widely credited with attempting a new party position on abortion that will get Republicans out of the defensive crouch they have assumed amid a widespread public backlash against the abortion restrictions made possible by U.S. Supreme Court striking down Roe v. Wade.

As the New York Times explains, Youngkin believes he’s come up with a silver bullet for his party on this issue: a ban on abortions after 15 weeks:

“Legislative races across the state will offer a decisive test of a strategy led by Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who has united Republicans behind a high-profile campaign in support of a ban on abortion after 15 weeks with exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother. The party calls it a ‘common sense’ position, in contrast to Democrats, who it says ‘support no limits.’

“The strategy is meant to defuse Republicans’ image as abortion extremists, which led to losses in last year’s midterms and threatens further defeats next month in an Ohio referendum and the Kentucky governor’s race.”

This 15-week “compromise” idea should be understood from several perspectives. First of all, existing Virginia law, based on Roe v. Wade, allows abortions without restrictions up until fetal viability, or about 26 weeks of pregnancy. The Roe standard is pretty popular in Virginia and nationally, so the Youngkin strategy is to chip away at it incrementally, for now at least, and look for a more strategic time to go much further. It just so happens, moreover, that a 15-week national ban is the litmus-test demand of the most hard-core anti-abortion groups. To be clear, that doesn’t mean a national standard of allowing abortions prior to 15 weeks, but a 15-week floor that enables red states to ban abortions entirely or at a much earlier stage of pregnancy, as most of them have already done (at least where voters haven’t overruled them, as they have in Kansas and Kentucky).

Yet another dimension of the Youngkin gambit is to draw a new line between the parties in which Republicans favor “reasonable” abortion restrictions (at least in those states where they cannot secure unreasonable abortion restrictions) while Democrats favor “abortion on demand” up until the moment of live birth. There’s no question that the plan is to seize on the growing sentiment among many reproductive-rights advocates in favor of abandoning the old gestational framework of Roe (originally based on “trimesters” and now on different rules for pre- and post-viability abortions) and replacing it with more straightforward defense of abortion rights, as my colleague Irin Carmon recently explained:

“[Abortion rights advocate Erika] Christensen believes this moment of outrage provides an opportunity to stop debating about gestational age and instead focus on enshrining abortion as an absolute right. Using the old frameworks, she says, ‘accepts the premise that there’s a reasonable point in pregnancy in which the state should be given authority to compel breeding.'”

Much as the debate among Democrats over police reform following the murder of George Floyd was caricatured by Republicans as representing a demand to “defund the police,” Youngkin and the entire GOP are clearly disregarding the Roe framework that most Democratic policymakers still support in order to depict the opposition as especially devoted to complete legalization of late-term abortions. The full “abortion on demand” position, rightly or wrongly, remains unpopular, especially among swing voters, but more to the point, it’s not the position of Democrats fighting red-state pre-viability abortion bans.

If Virginia Republicans do win in November, you can expect the 15-week “compromise” position to become wildly popular within the GOP, particularly since a fake compromise on abortion is what Donald Trump has been calling for, while lying about where Democrats stand, as he made clear on Meet the Press last month:

“‘Let me just tell you what I’d do. I’m going to come together with all groups, and we’re going to have something that’s acceptable,’ Trump said when asked about a 15-week ban Sunday.

“’I would sit down with both sides and I’d negotiate something, and we’ll end up with peace on that issue for the first time in 52 years. I’m not going to say I would or I wouldn’t,’ he added.

“Trump also called Democrats ‘radicals’ on abortion, claiming that some Democrat-led states like New York allow for abortions after birth.”

Republicans will continue to press for total or near-total abortion bans whenever and wherever they can get away with it while labeling Democrats as extremists, even though most Democrats are simply asking for the legal standard that was in place nationally for 49 years before the Supreme Court struck.

If Youngkin fails, then the forced-birth lobby may have to go back to the drawing board.

This week’s political news brought back some distant memories from 1968, and I wrote about that at New York:

Ever since Joe Biden convinced the Democratic National Committee to remove the first-in-the-nation status from the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary last December (in favor of a calendar placing South Carolina first), New Hampshire Democrats have been in a jam. They don’t control the date of their presidential primary; the Republican secretary of State does, and he’s under a state-law mandate to keep the Granite State’s primary first no matter what. So for a while now it’s been clear New Hampshire will hold a “rogue” Democratic primary on January 23, 2024. This election will not be recognized as legitimate by the DNC, exposing the state (and any participating candidates) to the loss of convention delegates and other sanctions.

Joe Biden’s campaign has now made it official: He will not file to be on the New Hampshire primary ballot. But sensing an opportunity to embarrass the incumbent early in what is not expected to be a competitive nominating contest, Biden’s two main challengers, Marianne Williamson and Dean Phillips, are going for broke in the rogue primary. Phillips, the Minnesota congressman who tried to talk Democrats into dumping Biden before entering the primaries himself, is about to make his candidacy official on October 27 in New Hampshire.

Williamson, an eccentric progressive who ran for president in 2020 but dropped out shortly before voters began voting, is very much a known quantity. She has received single-digit support in New Hampshire polls and at best low double-digit support in national polls; she could inherit some of the modest but significant anti-Establishment backing previously held by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who switched to an independent general election candidacy earlier this month. Phillips is more of a wild card, with more mainstream respectability than Williamson or Kennedy, but also with virtually no name ID outside Minnesota.

To head off an embarrassing upset in New Hampshire, that state’s Democratic Establishment is organizing a write-in campaign for Biden, who is the overwhelming favorite of Granite State Democrats (polling at 70 percent there in the RealClearPolitics averages), despite their disappointment in his removal of their primary’s premier status. This step will inevitably bring back distant memories of the last time an incumbent Democratic president ran a write-in campaign in New Hampshire against significant opposition: in 1968 when Lyndon B. Johnson underestimated the anti–Vietnam War candidacy of Eugene McCarthy. LBJ won, but by an unimpressive margin that contributed greatly to his subsequent decision to fold his campaign.

Could history repeat itself? Almost certainly not. Whatever misgivings Democrats have about Biden, they pale in comparison to the impassioned anti-war sentiment that fed opposition to LBJ in 1968. Marianne Williamson isn’t going to win in New Hampshire, and at this point, all Dean Phillips shares with the well-known Gene McCarthy is a home state.

Still, Team Biden needs to be careful in associating the president too closely with the New Hampshire write-in effort. He won’t be campaigning there at all, and it’s not exactly Biden Country; he finished a poor fifth in the 2020 New Hampshire primary. More importantly, any semi-decent showing by his opponents will be inflated and massively publicized by conservative media and perhaps by some Democrats nervous about Biden’s electability.

It’s tough to ask voters for their support in a primary that you have delegitimized. So the president’s campaign may need to loudly write off New Hampshire as meaningless in advance while privately hoping state party leaders can give him a solid win.

Early as it is in the 2024 presidential election cycle, it’s good to pay attention to general election trial heats, which I did at New York:

Despite some Republicans’ concerns about Donald Trump’s 91 felony indictment counts, and Democrats’ worries about Joe Biden’s age and job approval ratings, these two men are steadily heading towards a 2024 rematch. Fairly regular polling of a prospective Biden-Trump general election has consistently shown a close race: At the moment, the two are actually tied in the RealClearPolitics polling averages.

But as we should be constantly reminded, presidential elections are determined by the Electoral College, not the national popular vote (if they were, neither George W. Bush nor Donald Trump would have been president). So as the two parties begin to formally nominate their 2024 candidates, attention will shift to how well they might fare in the “battleground states” where the fight for 270 electoral votes will be waged.

We’ve now gotten a taste of that landscape via two big batches of state general-election trial heats from Emerson and Bloomberg/Morning Consult. Emerson seems to have focused much of its polling on states with down-ballot races, so the firm is mostly confirming that Trump is predictably far ahead of Biden in red states like Montana (by 21 points), Tennessee (by 33 points), and Wyoming (53 points). But Emerson also has polls of Wisconsin (Trump 42 percent, Biden 40 percent), Michigan (Biden 44 percent, Trump 43 percent), and a Pennsylvania shocker (Trump 45 percent, Biden 36 percent).

The new Bloomberg/Morning Consult polls are squarely centered on the seven states that were closest in 2020 (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin). The results show Trump leading among registered voters in Arizona (47 percent to 43 percent), Georgia (48 percent to 43 percent), North Carolina (47 percent to 43 percent), Pennsylvania (46 percent to 45 percent), and Wisconsin (46 percent to 44 percent). Biden leads in Nevada (46 percent to 43 percent), and the two candidates are tied in Michigan (at 44 percent). Taking the margins of error into account, Trump has small leads in Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina, and the candidates are statistically tied in Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Aside from the rather important fact that the 2024 general election is more than a year away, there are a lot of variables to keep in mind when looking at such early data. For one thing, both Emerson and Bloomberg/Morning Consult are measuring sentiment among registered voters; you can make arguments for either candidate having an advantage when a set of likely voters emerge (Trump because Republicans are historically the most likely to vote and Biden because he’s unusually strong among the college-educated voters most likely to vote). For another, in both 2016 and 2020, Trump over-performed his national numbers in battleground states, which is why he was able to win in 2016 while losing the national popular vote by 2.1 percent and come close in 2020 despite losing the national popular vote by 4.5 percent.

It’s pretty likely that neither candidate is going to be wildly popular by November 2024, so the ultimate deciding factors could be (a) how many voters who dislike both Trump and Biden decide to turn out and (b) which candidate they prefer. Trump actually won the “hate ‘em both” vote by similar margins in 2016 and 2020, but lost in part because this segment of the electorate was a lot smaller in the latter year.

The even bigger variables, of course, could be turnout levels within each party’s base, and the possible impact of nonmajor-party candidates such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Cornel West, and someone sponsored by No Labels. On this latter front, it will be important to see exactly where minor-party-indie candidates gain ballot access; nobody’s really going to care if they rack up significant percentages of the vote in states either Biden or Trump is carrying easily.

It’s not too soon to begin paying attention to the places where the presidency will actually be determined next year. In the end, a national popular vote win may be a nice bonus for the next president or another bitter reminder that our system isn’t fully democratic.