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.

It’s always a good idea to compare political rhetoric to facts, so it’s important to be aware of the latest official crime statistics, as I noted at New York:

Anyone whose major information source is conservative media or the rhetorical stylings of Republican politicians probably believes the United States is in the grip of an unprecedented crime wave. Indeed, one of the standard GOP talking points against the investigation and prosecution of Donald Trump is that prosecutors should be devoting their resources to fighting out-of-control crime rather than pursuing the former president. But beyond that, an alleged unwillingness to fight crime is a central element of GOP attacks on Joe Biden and the Democratic Party. And as has been the case for many decades, crime-wave rhetoric has provided a pretext for conservative politicians and pundits to engage in thinly veiled racist commentary on the dangerous nature of the Black and Latino citizenry in various urban areas.

The latest official crime statistics for 2022 (the most recent full year for which numbers are available), released this week by the FBI, poke a major hole in the premise of crime-wave talk:

“The FBI’s crime statistics estimates for 2022 show that national violent crime decreased an estimated 1.7% in 2022 compared to 2021 estimates:

“Murder and non-negligent manslaughter recorded a 2022 estimated nationwide decrease of 6.1% compared to the previous year.

“In 2022, the estimated number of offenses in the revised rape category saw an estimated 5.4% decrease.

“Aggravated assault in 2022 decreased an estimated 1.1% in 2022.”

Violent crime, and particularly the homicides that understandably get so much attention, are even lower if viewed in any sort of historical context, as Popular Information explains:

“Since 1991, the rate of murder has dropped 36%….

“The rate of violent crime is the lowest it has been since 2014, and is nearly half of what it was in 1991 and 1992.”

This downward trend, experts say, is expected to continue in 2023. According to crime data from the first half of the year, there is “strong evidence of a sharp and broad decline in the nation’s murder rate,” crime analyst Jeff Asher reports. Asher finds that preliminary data indicates that the nation is witnessing the “largest annual percent changes in murder ever recorded.”

Yes, property crime were up 7 percent in 2022, but as Popular Information also notes, it was mostly owing to what should be a temporary spike in certain auto thefts:

“The rise in auto thefts is likely due to a recent trend on social media platforms, including TikTok, that teaches viewers how to steal certain models of Kias and Hyundais.

“According to Axios, the videos show people how to “break windows and remove parts of the steering column cover, then start the vehicle with a screwdriver, or a plugin from a USB device.” The viral videos take advantage of Hyundai Motors’ decision “not to install a theft prevention mechanism called an immobilizer in certain makes and models” of Kias and Hyundais since model year 2011. The craze developed into a “Kia Challenge,” which involves creating social media content about successful car thefts.”

In its report on the phenomenon, Axios notes that “Kia and Hyundai both released new ‘theft deterrent software’ for more than 8 million vehicles in response to the trend.” So it may not last. And more to the point, crime analyst Jeff Asher observes, it’s not like we are in some historic property “crime wave” either: “The property crime rate in the US has fallen an astounding 61 percent since 1991.”

All in all, GOP fearmongering about crime parallels the party’s inflation alarms based on selective and outdated numbers. It can be effective, unfortunately; during 2022, Gallup found that 78 percent of Americans thought crime was higher nationally than in 2021. Turns out it just wasn’t true.

 

A very old hypothesis essentially attributing Republican extremism to southern influences popped up again this week, so I addressed it at New York:

Having grown up in the authoritarian police state of the Jim Crow South, I am acutely aware of the racism that dominated the politics of my home region while white supremacists had the former Confederacy in their grip, and that persisted in various ways even as they lost power. So I am sympathetic to the argument that the roots of today’s twisted Republican Party trace back to the peculiar white southern conservatism that migrated into the GOP during and after the civil-rights movement. New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie revives this “southern coup” hypothesis in a meditation on the death of Republican prophet (and later anti-Republican writer) Kevin Phillips and the rise of Louisiana’s Steve Scalise. But I think it’s a bit anachronistic. The MAGA movement that has now conquered the GOP is a thoroughly national phenomenon drawing on reactionary and “populist” impulses from every region of the country.

There’s no question that the rapid defection of the South from its ancient Democratic allegiances to the GOP that began with Barry Goldwater’s campaign in 1964 was a major factor in the narrow victory of Richard Nixon in 1968 (for which Phillips was the whiz-kid demographic analyst). But as Phillips pointed out in his seminal 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority, southern white conservatives angry about civil rights were just one component of the new coalition that just three years later gave Nixon a vast landslide win that captured nearly every former citadel of Democratic power. There were the Catholic working-class ethnic voters (soon to be known as “Reagan Democrats”) of the urban Northeast and Midwest, who had their own racial and economic grievances with LBJ’s Great Society; rural midwestern and western “populists” bridling against federal regulations; and, throughout the country, white suburbanites defending their quality of life from rising crime and creeping taxes. Yes, racism pervaded much of this newfangled conservatism, but it was native to much of white America, not just imported from the South.

It’s plausible to argue that there was a particular ferocity to southern white conservatism — perhaps based on Evangelical culture and/or a racialized approach to issues like labor relations and public education — that has come to characterize conservatism elsewhere. But just as country music is a national (and even global) cultural force whose southern heritage is increasingly incidental, there’s a point at which white conservative Republican politics became truly national as well, blending southern and non-southern traditions.

When Connecticut Yankee turned Texan George H.W. Bush became president in 1988 by catering to the Christian right in the primaries and running openly racist ads in the general election, was he representing “the South”? How about that much-discussed avatar of harsh partisanship Newt Gingrich, the Pennsylvania-born Army brat from a suburban Georgia district that could have been relocated to just about anywhere in the country without changing its character? Did the South slowly strangle the moderate Republican tradition in its ancestral northeastern stomping grounds, or did the GOP come to represent a coalition of homegrown cultural and economic conservatives in unlikely places such as New York? It’s often been noted that the harsh anti-labor and anti-government themes Scott Walker championed in Wisconsin made the 21st-century politics of that once-progressive state feel like 20th-century “southern” politics. But at a certain point, you have to stop treating a national political movement as some sort of interregional infection; it’s more like an ideological pandemic.

That point was surely reached when Donald Trump came along and conquered the Republican Party with a speed that showed how ripe it was for a sharp turn toward authoritarian populism in all its forms, from southern cultural and religious grievances to western anti-government paranoia to the midwestern protectionism and isolationism that gave Trump his “America First” motto.

It’s really no accident that Trump was a quintessential New Yorker who moved to the least “southern” spot south of the Mason-Dixon line, just as it’s no surprise that Ohioan Jim Jordan has outflanked Louisianan Steve Scalise on the right in the House GOP conference. Sure, there remain some distinctively southern MAGA folk such as the Alabaman Tommy Tuberville and arguably even Marjorie Taylor Greene, a wealthy Atlanta suburbanite who basically bought a rural-and-small-town congressional seat. But those battling to restore the “American greatness” of government of, by, and for conservative Christian white people hail from fever swamps located in all 50 states.

A noisy dog has stopped barking with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s decision to withdraw from the Democratic nominating contest and run as an independent. I took a look at this development at New York:

Much of the limited buzz about nuisance candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropping out of the Democratic presidential contest and launching an attempted general-election independent run has focused on the question of whom the conspiracy theorist might help or hurt in a general election between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. That’s understandable, in part because of the likelihood of another extremely close two-major-party race in November 2024 and in part because of Kennedy’s combination of high name ID and a potentially bipartisan well of support (or, as he likes to put it, a “horseshoe” coalition of left and right “populists” whose distrust of pretty much every institution makes them credulous customers for the cranky stuff he’s peddling). There’s also a rush of donations to RFK Jr. now that he’s rid himself of the light yoke of party loyalty.

The truth is we don’t have a good way of assessing a Kennedy independent candidacy until we see if he has the money and moxie to get on the ballot in competitive states. It won’t be easy, now that the adulatory treatment he has been getting from conservative media as a burr under Biden’s saddle may come to an abrupt end.

But we do know the absence of the Kennedy name on Democratic primary ballots next year is an unambiguous boon to the incumbent. With only the lightly regarded Marianne Williamson (polling at under 4 percent nationally in the RealClearPolitics averages) facing Biden (unless you take pundit Cenk Uygur’s newly announced candidacy seriously, which I don’t), he can run as the all but unanimous Democratic favorite who need not campaign for the nomination or even look or sound defensive about refusing to debate intraparty opponents. Even though his Democratic support has dropped since he was polling at around 20 percent in the spring and has been stagnant since the summer, he was still regularly hitting double digits in the polls and couldn’t be entirely ignored (he was, after all, doing about as well as the much-ballyhooed Republican Ron DeSantis). By contrast, Williamson is an asterisk, comparable less to the incumbent than to “Some Dude” perennial candidates.

Gone with RFK Jr.’s Democratic candidacy, moreover, is any fear of an embarrassingly poor showing in New Hampshire, whose rogue primary he could not enter and that media folk might find themselves unable to ignore (particularly with conservative media inflating every Kennedy vote into a repudiation of the incumbent). The Biden write-in effort that New Hampshire Democratic leaders have been quietly undertaking to overwhelm RFK Jr. in the Granite State should have even less trouble swamping Williamson.

Kennedy also takes with him, via his departure from his ancestral party, any lingering affection of Democrats for him in tribute to his famous relatives (I speak as someone who idolized his father and is pained to see his name profaned so vividly). What’s left is a veteran scandalmonger and misinformation peddler who belongs to no party because no party really wants him. Biden and Democrats are well rid of him.

The deal went down on this some time ago, but it’s still worth noting the official demise of the First-in-the-Nation Iowa Democratic Caucuses, as I did at New York:

The death rattle of the hallowed First-in-the-Nation Iowa Democratic Caucuses took a while to subside. But now it’s done. Yes, Iowa Democrats will still get together in precinct gatherings on January 15, the same day when Iowa Republicans caucus to formally launch the 2024 Republican nominating contest. But thanks to a national party mandate insisted upon by President Joe Biden, there will be no presidential preference balloting at the Democratic caucuses. A separate, mail-in ballot process will culminate in the announcement of the results on March 5, Super Tuesday, safely outside the “early state” window Iowa once dominated, and in the midst of a cascade of votes that will confirm Biden’s nomination.

Iowa’s defenestration from the early-state window was caused by three interrelated factors that came together to overcome the first-in-the-nation tradition. First, Democrats have moved decisively to outlaw caucuses as a method for awarding national-convention delegates, compared to more open and inclusive primaries. Second, Iowa was deemed far too unrepresentative of the country demographically to maintain such a highly influential position on the nominating calendar. And third, the last Democratic Caucuses in 2020 were a huge mess with the state party unable to report the results on Caucus Night (though arguably national party mandates helped make that happen). You could add as a fourth, decisive factor: Biden’s poor performance in Iowa en route to his nomination and election; certainly the White House owed the state no favors.

As Politico reports, Iowa Democrats hope their cooperation in what is after all an uncontested nomination contest in 2024 will give them a chance at reentering the early-state window in the future, albeit not likely in its old premier position. And as the Des Moines Register notes, the state party’s surrender eliminates a collateral threat to Iowa Republicans who might have faced a calendar challenge from New Hampshire if Iowa Democrats conducted something that looked like a primary before the Granite State’s event (which by state law must occur first).

Now the only apparent troublemakers left in the presidential nominating arena are New Hampshire’s Democrats, who have no choice but to follow state law and conduct a presidential primary on January 23; the DNC has demanded New Hampshire give way to the vastly more diverse South Carolina as the first primary state and vote instead on February 6, the same day as Nevada’s primary. The Republicans who control New Hampshire’s legislature have refused to play ball, leaving their Democratic counterparts to hold a rogue event that will cost New Hampshire at least half its delegation to the Democratic convention in Chicago next year, while creating the possibility of an embarrassing upset of President Biden, who won’t participate in a primary that defies his own calendar rules.

Most recently, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has significantly reduced the risk of that happening by indicating he plans to withdraw from an allegedly “rigged” Democratic nominating contest to run as an independent, leaving Marianne Williamson as Biden’s only foe with any significant support. To be safe, New Hampshire’s Democratic leaders are planning a Biden write-in effort.

No matter what happens in New Hampshire, the whole show will begin in Iowa on January 15 strictly on the GOP side of the partisan divide. Republicans, after all, aren’t that hung up on diversity and are still okay with caucuses and highly unrepresentative delegate award systems. Meanwhile, sad Iowa Democrats may well feel their caucus traditions on January 15 like a missing limb.