Many strategic decisions by Democrats for 2024 are difficult. There’s one that shouldn’t be, as I argue at New York:

While the 2024 Republican presidential field continues to expand, it looks like the Democratic field will consist of President Joe Biden and two nuisance candidates. One of them, Marianne Williamson, is a 2020 retread who is having serious problems with the management of her campaign; she’s also polling consistently in the single digits. She can be left to exercise her First Amendment rights until the money runs out. But the second candidate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is another matter. His last name is extremely famous in Democratic politics, and he’s polling regularly in the double digits — sometimes above 20 percent of the vote. As The Hill reports, that has spurred a debate among Democrats about what to do with the man mostly known as an anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist:

“Party strategists cleave into two camps on the question of how Biden and his campaign should respond.

“One faction argues that Biden should ignore Kennedy. Engaging him would only legitimize and elevate his candidacy, they say.

“The other school of thought holds that Kennedy is too dangerous a figure to let campaign unimpeded. This second camp notes that, even if Kennedy never looks like a fully serious contender for the nomination, he could hurt Biden if he continues edging up in the polls.

“In a hypothetical scenario where Kennedy rose to 25 percent or 30 percent in the polls, questions about Biden’s age and political vulnerability would grow much sharper.”

The big problem with the “ignore him” approach to RFK Jr. is that he doesn’t depend on Biden or other Democrats for the publicity that will keep his candidacy running along like a low-grade fever. He’s getting all the attention he needs from his fellow anti-vaxx and conspiracy-theory buffs on social media. He’s also drawing plenty of conservative-media love for being a thorn in Biden’s side and for his willingness to consort with those types of personalities regularly (in part because they agree with much of his agenda). Kennedy has been featured on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, Joe Rogan’s podcast, and in Elon Musk’s Twitter Spaces discussions. These invitations came after the candidate sucked up to all three figures (he called Carlson “breathtakingly courageous” when Fox fired him, he played into Rogan’s stunt of trying to ambush a prominent vaccine scientist for an impromptu debate, and he gushed about Musk’s alleged contributions to free speech).

So ignoring RFK Jr. won’t starve his candidacy to death. But exposing him for what he is — not a real Democrat — could effectively cap his vote while forcing the mainstream media to stop treating him as a legitimate Democratic candidate. He should be regarded as a pest doing the bidding of the opposing party.

That means constantly calling out Kennedy for the abovementioned coziness with conservative-media figures and for his substantive points of agreement with the less savory elements of the American right. RFK Jr. is set to address Moms for Liberty, the extremist “parental rights” group, at an event next week along with Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and an assortment of hard-core right-wing conspiracy theorists. As The New Republic observes, Kennedy is very much at home in such company:

“In the last week alone, RFK Jr. has made news for comparing Covid-19 mask mandates to Nazi experiments, saying chemicals in our water are making frogs gay and kids transgender, and claiming Wi-Fi causes cancer. He appeared on the conservative network NewsMax and accused China of developing “ethnic bioweapons” designed to go after specific races of people. And he promised to, if elected, gut funding for federal health agencies that recommend vaccine schedules for children. That includes agencies like the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

The man’s views simply aren’t those of a Democrat’s circa 2024. Even Democratic primary voters unhappy with Biden do not want to help produce a Trump or DeSantis presidency in 2024. Democratic messaging should make it clear that every vote for Kennedy generates smiles in Tallahassee, the fever swamps of the right-wing internet, and at Mar-a-Lago.

Any campaign to expose and discredit RFK Jr. should focus on a particular risk: that he could win, or at least put up headline-grabbing numbers, in a rogue New Hampshire primary that won’t include Biden. New Hampshire law traps Democrats into a first-in-the-nation primary date that defies the national party’s plan to start the 2024 nomination process in South Carolina. Without question, the president and party leader who created the new calendar cannot appear on the New Hampshire ballot or campaign there. So the key thing for Democrats nationally is to relentlessly pound away at the assertion that the nominating contest begins in whatever state’s primary Biden first enters (probably South Carolina’s). Fox News may celebrate a Kennedy win or near win in the Granite State. That should be regarded as spin or the kind of conspiracy RFK Jr. often embraces.

A lot of political misperceptions flow for outdated stereotypes. One of these is that Hispanic voters are trending Republican due to the Democratic Party’s support for abortion rights, as I explained at New York.

In all the recent talk about Republican gains among the fast-growing Hispanic and Latino populations in 2020 and 2022, there’s been a prevailing assumption that conservative cultural and religious views among these voters and the alleged progressive radicalism of the Democratic Party on subjects like abortion have played a major part in driving them to the right. While it is perilous to make too many generalizations about people of highly diverse national origins, proximity to immigration, religions, socioeconomic status, regions of the country, and even racial identities, it is pretty clear overall that on this decade’s hottest-button culture-war issue of abortion, Hispanic Americans are fully part of the country’s solid pro-choice majority. If Hispanics are trending to the right, it’s largely for other reasons.

Indeed, the recent direction of Hispanic opinion has unquestionably been toward support for legalized abortion. A major Pew survey in 2007-2008 showed a narrow plurality of Hispanics — 49 percent — agreeing that abortion should be “illegal in all or most cases,” with 47 percent agreeing that it should be “legal in all or most cases,” at a time when, overall, 54 percent of Americans favored legal abortion. The most recent Pew survey on abortion in June of 2022 (just before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade) showed 60 percent of Hispanics favoring legal abortion in all or most cases, right around the overall 61 percent.

To some extent, this trend reflects a particularly strong shift toward pro-choice views among Hispanic Catholics. In 2013, the Public Religion Research Institute found that 54 percent of U.S. Hispanic Catholics opposed legalized abortion. In 2022, PRRI showed the anti-abortion percentage dropping to 37 percent, with 61 percent favoring legalized abortion. Another factor driving pro-choice opinion has been a youth-led rise in the percentage of religiously non-affiliated Hispanics, as Pew explained in 2022:

“As of 2022, 43% of Hispanic adults identify as Catholic, down from 67% in 2010. Even so, Latinos remain about twice as likely as U.S. adults overall to identify as Catholic, and considerably less likely to be Protestant. … The share of Latinos who are religiously unaffiliated is on par with U.S. adults overall.”

At the same time, a relatively high percentage of U.S. Hispanic Protestants — 21 percent of the Hispanic population — are Evangelicals, often Pentecostals (especially recent immigrants from Central America). They provide a hard kernel of anti-abortion opinion; in the 2022 PRRI survey, 54 percent of Hispanic Protestants were opposed to legal abortion. They are not, contrary to the prevailing buzz, increasing as a share of the Hispanic population; the religious “nones” are the high-growth category in this as in other demographic groups.

Overall, U.S. Hispanics are roughly in sync with national opinion on abortion. Growth in Republican Party voting or affiliation is more likely to be attributable to other factors, ranging from the strongly anti-socialist views of Cuban and Venezuelan immigrants in Florida to support for local fossil-fuel-based industries in Texas, to a general sense in some states that Democrats are taking Hispanic voters for granted. Abortion policy would appear to have little to do with it, and shouldn’t provide any particular opportunity for a GOP that is out of step with the pro-choice majority of Americans overall. Indeed, one analysis of the 2022 midterms showed intense pro-choice opinion definitely helped produce better-than-anticipated Democratic results among Hispanics/Latinos in the latest election: “Latinos who chose abortion as their top issue, wrote Equis, while a smaller group, voted in dominant fashion for Democrats, and they turned out beyond predicted rates.”

Don’t be surprised if that trend continues until Republicans change their tune on abortion policy. It’s a loser for the GOP across many categories of voters.

 

I try to limit my exposure to Donald Trump’s speeches to the minimum necessary to do my job. But his reaction to his second criminal indictment was important, as I explained at New York:

Amid all the speculation as to how multiple criminal indictments will affect Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, a crucial evolution in the former president’s rhetoric and strategy has occurred. As he made clear in a rage-soaked speech to adoring followers at his Bedminster golf club following his arraignment in Miami on Tuesday, his comeback bid has a new focus. It’s no longer “backward-looking” toward the imagined 2020 election theft. Now, it’s about Trump’s present (perceived) persecution by Joe Biden and various officials in the U.S. justice system and his plans to throw all of his persecutors into prison. Jim Newell got it right at Slate in predicting that the Bedminster rant was a preview of many campaign speeches to come:

“To turn his (second) indictment from a primary liability into an asset, he has to alter the contours of what the primary is fought on — what should be done about the corrupt FBI? The corrupt DOJ? On which charges should Joe Biden be prosecuted?

“He’s well on his way.”

The former president will probably continue talking about various policy proposals, and he’ll almost certainly keep insulting his Republican rivals for the White House. But the central argument his campaign will make from now on is that all other concerns flow from his challenge to the criminals running the country, who have made him their preeminent target. A Trump victory, and only a Trump victory, can keep “radical left” predators from feasting on the regular citizens the former president is bravely protecting with his very life and liberty. What else can such lines from his Bedminster speech mean?

“If the communists get away with this [Trump’s indictment], it won’t stop with me. They won’t hesitate to ramp up their persecution of Christians, pro-life activists, parents attending school board meetings, and even future Republican candidates … We must end it permanently and we must end it immediately.

“They want to take away my freedom because I will never let them take away your freedoms … They want to silence me because I will never let them silence you … I’m the only one who can save this nation because you know that they aren’t coming after me, they’re coming after you, and I just happen to be standing in their way, and I will never be moving.”

No wonder some of Trump’s most fervent supporters seem to confuse him with Jesus Christ, given his self-presentation as the suffering savior of his nation. But he’s a savior who brings not peace but the sword, as he made especially clear at Bedminster, echoing words he posted at Truth Social the previous day (per The Hill):

“Now that the ‘seal’ is broken, in addition to closing the border & removing all of the ‘criminal’ elements that have illegally invaded our country, making America energy independent & even dominant again, & immediately ending the war between Russia & Ukraine, I will appoint a real special ‘prosecutor’ to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the USA, Joe Biden, the entire Biden crime family, & all others involved with the destruction of our elections, borders, & country itself!

“I will totally obliterate the deep state … and I know exactly who they are.”

How does professed neo-MAGA tough guy Ron DeSantis compete with that? Maybe he won’t even try. Trump’s efforts to make the Republican primary all about himself got an immediate assist from rival Vivek Ramaswamy, who just prior to the Miami indictment challenged all of Trump’s opponents to match his pledge to pardon Trump immediately if any of them win the presidency. But wouldn’t a self-pardon by Trump — much like Napoleon crowning himself emperor in 1804 — be more satisfying to the vengeance-minded, particularly when combined with the promised retribution against Biden’s “Department of Injustice” and the shadowy “communists” and media liars behind them.

At Bedminster, Trump called the occasion of his second indictment “a day that will go down in infamy,” choosing the words FDR famously applied to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. More precisely, it can be called the day Trump’s second attempted insurrection formally began with an unsparing attack on the entire system of justice and all the laws making his supposed persecution possible. As on January 6, 2021, Trump is now regularly treating his grasp on the White House as a life-or-death proposition for democracy, freedom, and American greatness. His rhetoric is both self-pitying and savagely vengeful. And heavily armed “patriots” are undoubtedly hearing the call of destiny once again. In some respects, the threat of MAGA violence has actually grown worse, as Dahlia Lithwick observed after watching the reaction to Trump’s indictment:

“For those who maintain that Donald Trump is an innocent man, subject to an unjust witch hunt at the hands of deep state actors who covered up Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden’s criminal conduct, it’s go time. As Rep. Andy Biggs put it on Twitter the night Trump was indicted: ‘We have now reached a war phase. Eye for an eye.’

“The promise of violence shimmers in the air.”

The Republicans seeking to end Trump’s political career really are bringing knives to a gun fight; they are prepared to fight a campaign, not an ongoing, slow-motion insurrection, particularly when so many of them accept most of Trump’s claims about the deep and incorrigible “evil” of Biden and his party. They certainly can’t expect that Trump will fight them fairly; in the minds of his large band of core supporters, he is literally on a mission from God. Is there any reason to believe that Trump will concede defeat if he loses the upcoming primaries? Not really, especially when you remember that he revoked his concession in Iowa in 2016, deciding to accuse Ted Cruz of “stealing” the caucuses.

It goes without saying that if Trump does win the GOP presidential nomination, his general-election campaign will be unequaled in savagery. Nothing short of a historic Biden landslide (if even that) will dissuade him from another challenge to the results, ending more likely than not in more violence, perhaps this time not confined to Washington, D.C. Speaking to Georgia Republicans, MAGA election-denier Kari Lake was not ambiguous at all:

“I have a message tonight for [U.S. attorney general] Merrick Garland, and Jack Smith, and Joe Biden. And the guys back there in the fake news media, you should listen up as well, this one’s for you.

“If you want to get to President Trump, you’re going to have to go through me, and you’re going to have to go through 75 million Americans just like me.

“And I’m going to tell you, most of us are card-carrying members of the NRA. That’s not a threat — that’s a public service announcement.

“We will not let you lay a finger on President Trump. Frankly, now is the time to cling to our guns and our religion.”

We’ve been forewarned. It’s going to be a very long presidential election; And Democrats are being called on to stop another insurrection.

It’s been a while since the current Supreme Court has surprised us in a good way. So I was happy to write about it at New York:

In a welcome surprise to voting-rights advocates, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down an Alabama congressional map on Thursday. In a 5-4 decision, the Court ruled in Allen v. Milligan that the Republican-controlled legislature violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by failing to draw a second majority-Black district in the state, though the state’s Black population is large enough and compact enough to do so.

The majority opinion was written by Chief Justice John Roberts, who is notorious for his past work in eroding voting-rights protections; ten years ago, the Roberts-led Court gutted Section 5 of the VRA, which required federal “pre-clearance” of state voting and redistricting decisions in states with a history of racial discrimination. But the bigger surprise was a concurrence in the decision by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who joined four other conservative justices to set aside a lower-court decision that would have forced Alabama to create a new map before the 2022 midterms. Kavanaugh and Samuel Alito’s concurring opinion in this “shadow docket” decision emphasized the idea that the Court shouldn’t intervene in such cases close to elections. At the time it seemed that might have just been an excuse to disguise Kavanaugh’s malign attitude toward applying the VRA to redistricting cases. But now it appears he meant what he said, at least in this case.

Ultimately Roberts and Kavanaugh joined the three liberals on the Court in upholding a 1985 precedent (Thornburg v. Gingles) providing a test for determining Voting Rights Act violations in redistricting cases. In a bitter dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas accepted Alabama’s plea that the Court reverse Gingles and eliminate redistricting as an object of VRA enforcement. Thomas blasted the decision as “yet another installment in the ‘disastrous misadventure’ of this Court’s voting-rights jurisprudence” and argued for a “color-blind” approach to cases involving alleged discrimination.

The immediate effect of the decision in Allen v. Milligan will be to overturn an Alabama map that led to the election of six white Republicans and one Black Democrat to Congress. The state will be forced to create a second majority-Black (and very likely Democratic) district in the state’s Black Belt region in time for the 2024 elections. This is bad news for the Republican Party, which will be struggling to hold on to a narrow House majority. Even worse for the GOP, this decision may pave the way for fresh challenges to congressional maps in Georgia, Louisiana, and possibly other states. And there could be ripple effects in local politics and government, as the Brennan Center noted last year:

“[S]ince the Supreme Court laid out the Gingles test nearly four decades ago, Section 2 has played a far more transformative role in ensuring that voters of color have equal opportunities to participate in the political process and elect their candidates of choice at the local level than it has at the congressional or legislative levels. Just this past decade, for example, Section 2 litigation opened the door for the first time to Black representation on the city council and school board in sharply racially divided Ferguson, Missouri.”

More generally, by maintaining judicial scrutiny of racial gerrymandering, the fragile Court majority declined to give full rein to lawmakers determined to abuse their power in drawing maps for the U.S. House and for themselves. The Supreme Court has already taken the federal courts out of the business of policing partisan gerrymandering. So going forward, you can expect the Republicans who rely on marginalizing minority voters in order to hold on to power to work overtime to deny or hide racial calculations.

Another religion and politics topic came up in my reading, so I discussed it at New York:

Everyone covering Republican presidential politics knows how important a force conservative Evangelical Christians are in that party, particularly in the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses. So it has become routine to examine GOP politicians for their adherence to various issue positions of presumed significance to these voters, and to their pulpit-based leaders.

That’s still well worth doing at a time when the culture-war issues so closely associated with religious conservatives are red-hot topics in American politics, and of great importance to many of the most likely voters in the Republican presidential primaries. Clearly, Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, and Tim Scott are particularly focused on letting conservative Evangelicals know how committed they are to the battle against legalized abortion, LGBTQ rights, “woke” corporations, and government impingements on “religious liberty.” These candidates are intensely determined to prove they are more faithful to the agenda of the Christian right than their front-running rival Donald Trump.

But there are two major problems with any sort of by-the-numbers effort to flip conservative Evangelicals against Trump. First, these voters have an abiding sense of gratitude for what Trump has already done for them. Second, Trump himself is deeply tied to the religious views of a growing subset of Christian Evangelicals.

As the 45th president frequently reminds conservative Christian audiences, he was the first Republican president to redeem decades of promises to secure the reversal of Roe v. Wade and the abolition of federal constitutional abortion rights. And more generally, Trump discarded decades of embarrassed Republican efforts to downplay cultural issues in pursuit of upscale swing voters favoring moderation and compromise on topics that Evangelicals considered matters of eternal and immutable principle. He was firmly the enemy of the enemies of the people in the pews, and smote them hip and thigh unscrupulously. It will take more than a slightly higher rating on the latest set of litmus tests laid out by conservative religious leaders for mere politicians to match the founder of the MAGA movement in the esteem of voters who really do want to turn back the clock to a “greater” America.

The second element of Trump’s Evangelical primary firewall is the significant and rapidly growing subset of American Evangelicals whose view of politics and its relationship to religion cannot be captured by mere policy issues. Trump plays a larger-than-life role in a supernatural drama of good and evil that many of these believers embrace via the teachings of a new set of “prophetic” teachers and preachers, as religious scholar Matthew Taylor explains:

“Trump’s most ardent Christian advocates are nondenominational Charismatic evangelicals, a group sometimes referred to by academics as Independent Charismatics or Independent Network Charismatic Christians.

“Independent Charismatics emphasize a modern, supernaturally driven worldview where contemporary prophets speak directly for God; miracles are everyday experiences; menacing demonic forces must be pushed back through prayer; and immersive, ecstatic worship experiences bolster Christian believers’ confidence that they are at the center of God’s work in the world. These believers are country cousins to the more denominationally aligned Pentecostal evangelicals, though the lack of denominational oversight and the freewheeling nature of the independent Charismatic sector leaves them more vulnerable to radicalization.”

Many Independent Charismatics have been radicalized by the passions unleashed by Trump and the conflicts he has engendered. Cultural warfare is for them spiritual warfare in which Trump is literally an agent of the divine will. Independent Charismatics are notably active in Trump-adjacent groups like the ReAwaken America Tour, in which pardoned former Trump lieutenants Roger Stone and Michael Flynn have been conspicuous participants, and a newer group called Pastors for Trump. The 45th president is an irreplaceable and heroic figure in the apocalyptic cosmologies of such groups, who aren’t about to replace him with some other Republican politician, no matter what more orthodox Evangelicals say or think. Specific political “issues” are very small in their reckoning of God’s destiny for America.

So within the legions of conservative Evangelicals engaged in American politics, Trump has charismatic shock troops whom he can count on to stick with him as though their lives — indeed, their souls — depend on it. If you add in the Evangelicals who uniquely trust Trump for keeping his promises to them and are grateful for his reshaping of the U.S. Supreme Court to make it a powerful allied force, you can see why he’s not as vulnerable to raids on this base of support as you might imagine from the boasts of his rivals that they are nearer to God than he is.