Ezra Klein interviewed Ruy Teixeira for the New York Times on February 1, 2024, long before Kamala Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee. But the interview is more about the Democratic Party, than the presidential race, specifically some of the party’s blind spots as identified by Teixeira. The Times is featuring the interview, which serves as a reminder that even more is at stake than selecting our next president. The transcript follows below. You can also listen to the interview on “The Ezra Klein Show” at: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, How to Listen

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.

Ezra Klein

From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

So last week on the show we had Simon Rosenberg giving the very optimistic case on the Democratic Party, the view that the Democratic Party is doing great, they are winning at a rate we have not seen since F.D.R., and that all of this panic about the state of the party, about its prospects in 2024, is misguided.

Today is the other argument, the argument the Democratic Party is not doing great. That, in fact, it’s doing quite badly. That it is losing something core to who it is, core to its soul, and it’s losing it because it is making bad strategic and even, as you’ll hear in his views, substantive decisions. So Ruy Teixeira is very well known in Democratic policy circles, longtime pollster and political strategist. And he wrote in 2002, alongside John Judis, a famous book called “The Emerging Democratic Majority.”

When this book comes out, things are looking real bad for Democrats. It’s the 9/11 era, George W. Bush is super popular. And here come Teixeira and Judis to say, actually things look pretty good for Democrats, that if you look at how the country is changing, the growth of nonwhite voters, the growth of the professional class, if you look at how those and other groups vote for Democrats, that just based on demographics you should expect the Democratic slice of the electorate to really grow. And if it grows, Democrats are going to begin winning.

Now it’s a weird time for that book to come out. George W. Bush wins again in 2004. But in 2008, reality begins to look a lot like what they’ve been describing. And then in 2012, when Obama wins on the back of huge, huge turnout among nonwhite voters, he has a share of the white electorate that is about what Dukakis had when he loses in 1988.

When Obama wins with that coalition, it really looks like Teixeira and Judis were right. And even the Republican Party seems to think so. It begins to think it has to moderate on immigration and put forward a kinder face. And then, of course, comes Donald Trump and upends us once again, wins when people think he cannot. And that sets off a set of soul-searching. What was wrong in the emerging Democratic majority? What did Teixeira and Judis get wrong? What did Democrats get wrong?

And so now they have a new book out called “Where Have All The Democrats Gone?” And this book’s fundamental argument is that most of what they said came to pass. But one thing happened that they had worried about in that book, and people didn’t really pick up on, which is that in order for that Democratic majority to happen, Democrats needed to keep the working class. And they, in particular, needed to at least hold down the ground they were losing with the white working class. And that did not happen — Democrats getting stomped among the white working class. There is some evidence of them losing at least some working-class Black and Hispanic voters, particularly men.

So the question is, why? It’s a question that Judis and Teixeira are trying to answer in the new book. You will hear in here that the view is both political and, I would say, substantive. Right? There’s an argument about what is good policy and also an argument about why that policy, why a much more moderate Democratic Party would be a more politically-effective one.

And so I wanted to offer this as the second way of thinking about the Democrats right now. That they have lost a constituency that, at their very soul, they are built to represent, and that they should be treating that as a real emergency. And then there’s the question of, what do you do about it? It’s a place where I think Ruy and I have some different views, but I was grateful that he joined me here.

Ruy Teixeira

Hey. Thanks for having me, Ezra.

Ezra Klein

So I want to begin with the older book, “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” which gets published in 2002 and later takes on this status as a kind of artifact of a certain era of Democratic triumphalism. But it was helpful to me to remember that it was in 2002, which was a really bad time for the Democratic Party. So tell me what you were seeing then that made you write the book. What was the context for it? Because at that time it was counterintuitive.

Ruy Teixeira

The context in which John Judis and I wrote the book was looking at the way the United States had evolved away from the Reagan coalition through the Clinton years and the very early part of the 21st century. If you looked at how their political base was changing and how the country was changing, it was clear that Democrats were going to benefit from the sort of inevitable rise of the nonwhite population, which was heavily Democratic. We saw the realignment of professionals toward the Democrats. We saw dramatic shifts in the voting patterns of women, particularly single, highly-educated working women.

And we looked at the more sort of dynamic Metropolitan areas of the country that we called ideopolises, and it was clear they were realigning toward the Democrats. So you could put these sort of demographic, ideological, and economic changes together and say, well, it looks like the way the country’s changing overall is moving in a direction that’s consistent with what we called at the time Democrat’s “progressive centrism,” and if they played the cards right, could conceivably develop a dominant majority that might last for some time. Even though, of course, it didn’t mean they’d win every election or even the very next election after the book was published, which was 2002.

Roiling underneath the surface there, Ezra, was a caveat we had in the book about the white working class, because we were very careful to note that secular tendency of the white working class to move away from the Democratic Party was a problem, and the Democrats really needed to stop the bleeding there and keep a strong minority share of the white working class vote overall nationally, maybe around 40 in the key Rust Belt states that were heavily working-class, more like 45. And if they did that, they could build this coalition. But the political arithmetic would get vexed and difficult if the white working class continued to deteriorate in their support for Democrats.

Ezra Klein

You mentioned something there, which is the ideological trends of the time, like the professional class becoming more Democratic. That hadn’t always been true. So what did you see happening ideologically in the parties around that time that was shifting these coalitions?

Ruy Teixeira

Right. Well, the professionals part was really important in our analysis. And if you looked at professionals, not only were they becoming a much larger part of the US occupational structure and of the electorate and, of course, they vote way above their weight in terms of turnout, but they were moving in a direction in terms of their views on cultural issues which was quite liberal.

Then also professionals, by virtue to some extent of their position in society and their occupational structure, they tend to be more public-spirited. They tend to be more sympathetic to the role of government. And those views seemed to be strengthening as professionals became a larger part of the American electorate. And we thought that was really going to help the Democrats. And, in fact, that turned out to be true, in a strict quantitative sense. They did, in fact, realign heavily toward the Democrats. It really starts in the late ‘80s, kind of strengthens in the ‘90s, and goes forth in the 21st century to the point today where professionals, by and large, can almost be considered a base Democratic group.

Ezra Klein

So then tell me what happens on the way to the Democratic majority. So you have this new book called “Where Have All The Democrats Gone?” It just published in late 2023, and it’s a bit of an update. Why didn’t this durable Democratic coalition emerge?

Ruy Teixeira

Well, point number one is something that we foreshadowed in “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” which was that the Democrats had a potential Achilles’ heel in their coalition in terms of the white working class. If that group started moving away smartly from the Democrats again, that would throw the whole thing into question. And that did, in fact, happen after Obama’s victory in 2008.

If you look at 2010 election where the Democrats get crushed to lose 63 seats, it’s a lot because white working-class voters bail out from the Democratic Party in lots of areas of the country, particularly the upper Midwest. 2012, Obama manages to get re-elected, and that was viewed or characterized as the return of the Obama coalition. But the part of the Obama coalition they missed is, he ran a kind of populist campaign against the plutocrat Mitt Romney, running on the auto-bailout and other things like that, and he really managed to grab back a lot of those white working-class voters in the upper Midwest. And if he hadn’t done that, he would have lost that election.

But the coalition of the ascendant kind of analysis that Democrats had been playing with becomes ever stronger. In fact, after 2012, in an odd sort of way, the Republicans even embraced it with their post-election autopsy. The Democrats were riding this demographic wave, it was going to wash over the country, and the Democrats were going to potentially be dominant.

But I think Trump —

Trump had a different opinion. He thought that, in fact, there was a wellspring of resentment among the working class in the United States that a politician like him could tap, and that the Democrats were going to have a lot of difficulty defending against, and that turned out to be the case.

So that’s part of what happened to the Democratic coalition. Another part of the Democratic coalition that is — I mean, the change that’s really still unfolding today that’s very important is, if you look at 2020, even though Biden did manage to squeak through in that election, not nearly as big a victory as they thought they’d get, he managed to hold what white working-class support they had, in fact, increase it a little bit. But what was really astonishing is the way Democrats lost nonwhite working-class voters, particularly Hispanics. There was big, big declines in their margins among these voters, declines that we’re still seeing today in the polling data.

So one way to think about 2020 and where we are today, is that racial polarization is declining but class polarization, educational polarization, is increasing. And that’s a problem for a party like the Democrats which purports to be the party of the working class.

Read more…

The following article, “Build, Baby, Build:  Kamala’s commitment to the care economy is great, but she needs to commit to the construction economy as well” by Harold Meyerson, is cross-posted from The American Prospect:

That hardy perennial of American politics, the gender gap, is not only alive and well but alive and huge among the young. The New York Times/Siena poll of battleground states from earlier this month revealed that among voters under 30, males put Trump ahead of Harris by 13 percentage points, while females favored Harris over Trump by 38 percentage points.

This doesn’t mean that young men without college degrees are all that conservative. A PRRI poll of Gen Zers shows that a majority supports abortion rights and same-sex marriage. What they don’t see is an economy in which they have a place, chiefly because, well, it doesn’t. As culture tends to follow (at a distance, to be sure) the economy, they also see a culture that doesn’t value working-class men’s work as it once professed to do (though it was only when unions were powerful that that work was appropriately valued economically).

In a sense, these young men are canaries in a coal mine—detecting, in advance of many others, the economy’s diminished need for certain kinds of manual labor (like coal mining). The jobs that Kamala Harris is highlighting—those in what she calls “the care economy”—involve forms of manual labor, too, but not those that historically or culturally have been deemed “masculine,” which encompasses jobs in construction, transportation, and manufacturing. With neither the job security nor the income to support a family, these young men also fall short of the criteria that would make then “marriageable males”—a term the great sociologist William Julius Wilson used to explain how the “crisis of the Black family” was rooted in Black men’s disproportionate relegation to the informal economy where pay was low and benefits nonexistent. That crisis has now broadened into a crisis of the working-class family, as marriage rates in working-class America have fallen well below those in more upper brackets.

What some of these young men see in Trump, then, is the rhetoric and posturing of hypermasculinity, even though it’s really pseudo and performative hypermasculinity (see, e.g., trotting out Hulk Hogan to attest to Trump’s alleged toughness). There’s hardly anything concrete on offer for them in Trump’s policies, but there’s symbolism galore.

Democrats in general and Kamala Harris in particular can counter this—not that there’s anything they can do to eliminate this yawning gender gap, but there are ways that they could knock a few points off it through the miracle of smart policy. I have in mind Harris’s plans to increase the housing stock by three million units, through federal subsidies to first-time homebuyers and tax breaks to housing developers. This obviously would be welcomed by workers already employed in the building trades, but she should expand her goals, and the number of housing units, so that it would more clearly address those young working-class voters—disproportionately male—who’d welcome work in those trades. That would entail committing more federal dollars not just for the housing itself, but also for apprenticeship programs, more specifically, those programs run by the building trades unions. That could entail actually partnering with those unions through a new agency that would in some way resemble the Civil Works Administration (CWA) of the New Deal.

The CWA is not as well known today as the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), which employed millions of Americans on basic construction and maintenance jobs like road paving. The CWA employed skilled construction workers on more ambitious construction jobs (dams, aircraft carriers, and the like), but like the WPA, it brought Depression-era Americans back into the workforce. What we need now is a program that addresses the shortage of housing, andaddresses it in part by reaching out to young working-class Americans, teaching them the skills required to build that housing, and funneling them into the kind of union-scale (ideally, unionized) jobs that would enable them to make a family wage.

Such a program would expand the diminishing need for manual labor, which is at the root of young working-class men’s frustration with—and despair about—the economy. Making it a federal program that provides entry into remunerative private employment is not only good policy; it can be good politics, too. Simply offering tax breaks for builders and subsidies for buyers, as the Harris-Walz ticket is doing, provides good talking points, but is far too indirect and muted a message to impact swing voters. Elevating this to the level of a distinct federal commitment, to a distinct program with a budget and a name, would have greater impact. Alongside the commitment to a care economy, a commitment to a build economy could provide a way to shrink that gender gap. And in an election where every percentage point will matter, a little shrinkage could go a long way.

Some insights from “Time for Change Model Predicts Close Election with Slight Edge for Kamala Harris” by Alan I. Abramowitz, author of The Great Alignment: Race, Party Transformation, and the Rise of Donald Trump, at Sabato’s Crystal Ball:

The assumption underlying the Time for Change model, which has an excellent track record in predicting the outcomes of presidential elections since 1992, is that the results of these contests are largely determined by three factors: the popularity of the incumbent president, the state of the economy, and the number of terms that the president’s party has controlled the White House.

Not surprisingly, the more popular the incumbent president and the stronger the economy, the better the candidate of the president’s party tends to do. Less obviously, the incumbent president’s party does better when it has held the White House for a single term than when it has been in power for two terms or longer. That is the “Time for Change” factor, and it has a surprisingly strong relationship with the results of presidential elections. Since World War II, the candidate of the president’s party has won 7 of 9 elections after a single term in office but only 2 of 10 elections after two or more terms in office. The public appears to be more reluctant to vote for a change in direction in Washington after only four years than after eight or more years and in 2024, Democrats will be defending the White House after only four years in office. So even though Harris is not a first-term incumbent running for reelection, she does benefit from something of an incumbency bonus in the model because she is seeking just a second straight term for her party in the White House.

Abramowitz notes, further:

Plugging in President Biden’s net approval rating of -18% in late June and the estimated second quarter growth rate of 2.8% in real GDP along with the fact that Kamala Harris will be defending the White House after a single Democratic term in office, the Time for Change model predicts narrow Democratic victories in both the popular vote and the Electoral College. The predictions are a Democratic margin of 2.6 percentage points in the national popular vote and 281 electoral votes, only 11 more than the minimum of 270 needed to win an Electoral College majority.

Based on these results, clearly the safest prediction that we can make about the 2024 presidential election is that it is likely to be very close. Both the predicted popular vote margin of 2.6 percentage points and the predicted electoral vote margin of 24 votes are much smaller than the standard errors of the two regression equations. Adding to the uncertainty of the predictions are the highly unusual circumstances of the 2024 election, especially the replacement of the incumbent president at the top of the Democratic ticket by the incumbent vice president. These results are based on the assumption that Kamala Harris will enjoy the normal advantage that goes to the candidate seeking just a second-straight party term in the White House (typically this person is an incumbent who was elected to the party’s first term in the previous election, but Harris is not).

It certainly would not be shocking if Donald Trump were to win either the popular vote or the electoral vote in the 2024 presidential election. It would also not be shocking if the outcome turns out to be an Electoral College misfire, a split between the popular vote winner and the electoral vote winner. That has happened twice since 2000 and it almost happened again in 2020. Nevertheless, both the popular vote and the electoral vote models give a small advantage in the 2024 presidential election to the Democratic ticket of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz over the Republican ticket of Donald Trump and JD Vance.

Harris has thus far waged a remarkably effective campaign, leading up to Labor Day. If she can hold the current trend line for ten  more weeks, Abramowitz’s ‘Time for Change’ model will look even stronger.

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 not just happy, they are ecstatic. Harris has surged into a modest lead over Trump in national polls and is doing well enough in swing states for her to be a slight favorite (53-47) to win the Electoral College and therefore the election. The Democratic National Convention seems to be a smashing success with delegate enthusiasm at a fever pitch.

The enthusiasm is understandable. They thought they were going to lose, now they think they’re going to win. Everything is going great!

But that’s them—partisan, liberal-leaning Democrats who are no doubt fully reflective and then some of the increasingly college-educated character of their party. Working-class voters however can restrain their enthusiasm.

Let’s take a look at some data. First up, the new Washington Post/ABC News/Ipsos poll.

1. In this poll, Harris is ahead of Trump by 3 or 4 points, depending on whether other candidates are included on the ballot test. But among working-class (noncollege) voters, Harris trails Trump by 7 points while leading among college-educated voters by 20 points. This is both somewhat worse than Biden did among working-class voters in 2020 (deficit of 4 points) and somewhat better than Biden did among college-educated voters (advantage of 18 points).

2. The same pattern applies to white voters; Harris is doing somewhat better than Biden 2020 among white college voters but somewhat worse among white working-class voters. And among nonwhiteworking-class voters she is still underperforming. Biden carried these voters by 48 points in 2020; Harris is ahead by only 29 points.

3. Among the working class, Trump gets a 47 percent retrospective job approval rating while Harris gets just a 34 percent rating. Among the college-educated, it’s just the reverse: Harris gets 47 percent job approval and Trump gets only 38 percent.

4. Working-class adults are still significantly more pessimistic about the state of the nation’s economy than the college-educated: 78 percent say the economy is not so good or poor compared to “only” 62 percent among the college-educated.

5. On the all-important issue of the economy, working-class respondents trust Trump over Harris by 15 points. But the college-educated trust Harris over Trump, albeit by a small margin (3 points). The pattern is exactly the same on inflation/rising prices, which was asked separately.

6. Despite Harris’s recent tough talk (well, commercials) on the border, working-class adults trust Trump over Harris to handle the border situation by 16 points while the college-educated deem them equally trustworthy. Interestingly, Hispanics actually trust Trump over Biden by 3 points to handle the border.

7. On crime and public safety, working-class adults trust Trump over Harris by 9 points, while the college-educated are the reverse, trusting Harris over Trump by 9 points.

8. Finally, Trump is slightly favored by the working class (one point) over Harris on “protecting American democracy” while the college-educated trust Harris over Trump by a wide margin (20 points).

The Democrats—still the college-educated party after all these years! Next up: The new CBS News poll. Several questions here highlight the different—and more jaundiced—attitudes of working-class voters compared to college voters. (Note: CBS does not report an overall education split but only whites by education.)

1. In terms of their personal/household situation, 60 percent of white working-class voters say, “I have just enough to meet my basic expenses” or “I don’t have enough to meet my basic expenses.” By comparison, just 35 percent of white college voters make such a gloomy assessment. And 72 percent of white working-class voters describe the national economy as fairly or very bad.

2. The poll asked voters what they thought would happen with the price of food and groceries if Harris or Trump is elected. White working-class voters believe by 43 points that these prices will go uprather than down if Harris is elected but believe by 26 points that these prices will go down not up under a Trump presidency. White college grads are less negative on Harris by 11 points and less positive on Trump by 21 points.

3. The poll also asked voters about what might happen at the border with migrant crossings under Harris or Trump. White working-class voters by 45 points think migrant crossings under Harris would increase rather than decrease, while under a Trump presidency they believe by an overwhelming 75 points that such crossings would decrease not increase. Again, white college voters are much less likely to see a Harris presidency as increasing border crossings or a Trump presidency as decreasing these crossings.

And finally, the latest Fox News poll.

1. In terms of favorability, working class voters give Harris a 44 percent favorability rating and Trump a 52 percent favorable rating. College-educated voters are basically the reverse: they give Harris a 54 percent favorability rating and Trump just a 38 percent rating.

2. Consistent with the Post ratings on which candidate voters trust on key issues, working-class voters prefer Trump over Harris on the economy by 13 points, on crime also by 13 points, on foreign policy by 17 points, and on border security by 27 points (on the latter, even Hispanics trust Trump over Harris by 17 points). In contrast, college voters favor Harris over Trump on the economy by 6 points, on crime by 7 points and on foreign policy by 10 points. And they “only” favor Trump over Harris on border security by 5 points.

Now, none of this is to say that Harris doesn’t have better issues with working-class voters that are important, particularly abortion but also health care. And it is also true that Harris has made up significant ground with these voters since Biden cratered in the polls shortly before he dropped out. But the yawning gap between the views of working-class and college-educated voters remains, as does the gap between their voting intentions (the latter confirmed by sources of running crosstab averages—see here and here).

When Democrats are feeling frisky, they would do well to remember this. Most of their activists live and work in environments where they are surrounded by other college-educated voters as do most of those who cover and write about politics. Their universe is different from that of working-class voters; what plays so well in their college-educated bubble does not typically play nearly as well in the universe inhabited by working class voters.

But, Democrats might say, we are working on this! Harris is taking backall of her unpopular stuff. We’re now tough(er) on the border—at least in commercials and in our platform (love the land acknowledgement!). We’re going to bring prices down with our anti-price-gouging plan! We’re trying on our patriotism hat again! And how about what Barack Obama said!

On the latter, it is true that Obama has not forgotten the ancient wisdom of the Obama era. But hey, he’s Obama so I’m not sure how many points the Democrats get for that.

In truth, most of what Democrats are doing and saying today amounts to, as befits their status as a Brahmin left party, a kind of Brahmin populism. It combines a mild-mannered and scattershot populism—a far cry from Bernie Sanders’ class-oriented populism of 2016—with an underlying commitment to a very wide array of social justice and “equity” issues that the working class detests.

The more-or-less plausible goal is to reconstitute the Biden coalition of 2020. They may or may not make it. But they shouldn’t kid themselves on the underlying weakness of their coalition. They are notreconstituting the Obama coalition or anything close to it, as I showedin a recent analysis. As Michael Cuenco tartly points out:

Consider that when Obama last ran, the Midwest was still known as an impenetrable Blue Wall, while Florida and Ohio were still purple states. When Bill Clinton gave his acceptance speech in 1996, the Democrats were competitive throughout large swathes of the South. During that period, they had gone on to win not just Clinton’s Arkansas and Al Gore’s Tennessee, but states such as Kentucky and Louisiana too.

The story of the last three decades has been one of political success for Democrats, who have won the popular vote in seven out of the last eight elections. Yet it is also one of narrowing political constituencies and pyrrhic victories, as the party attracted college-educated professionals at the expense of the non-college-educated majority. In particular, non-college-educated whites were lost, but in recent years they have increasingly been joined by significant numbers of non-college-educated minorities. As recently as 2007, “56 percent of voters without a degree were Democrats or leaned Democratic, while 42 percent were Republicans or GOP leaners”; today, Republicans hold “a six-percentage-point advantage over the Democratic Party,” according to Pew Research.

Of course, the selection of Tim Walz as Harris’s running mate is supposed to help the Democrats claw back some of that lost working-class support. Besides the obvious point that vice-presential picks typically don’t matter much, this seems doubtful given his own electoral record in Minnesota, where his support as governor has skewed toward highly-educated metro areas.

Indeed, even granting Walz the sincerity of his advocacy on economic issues, he fits quite comfortably into the Democrats’ current Brahmin populism. As Gregory Conti points out in an excellent Compact article on the vice-presidential picks:

Tim Walz’s ascension looks…to be fully in keeping with the [Democrats’ shifting coalition]. For if woke has peaked, Harris seems not to have known it when she selected him. Given that Harris appears now to want to backtrack from and minimize her distinctly far-left messaging in 2019-20—which ranged from the sublime (working to bail out rioters and affirming the righteousness of the disorder of summer 2020, calling to decriminalize illegal border crossings, endorsing a ban on fracking) to the ridiculous (getting sucked in by the Jussie Smollett hoax)—it is curious that she made Walz her running mate. For there is nary an enthusiasm of contemporary cultural progressivism that he has not indulged to the hilt. Reflecting the left’s recent hostility on the subject, he has no affection for—or understanding of—the American tradition of free speech. He was a Covid-maximalist, both in his personal conduct and far more importantly in public policy, having set up a snitch line for reporting transgressions of the state’s innumerable and ineffective NPIs and vigorously defending school closures. In contrast to the trend of European social democracies toward greater caution on the issue, Walz has made Minnesota a spearhead for gender-affirming care for children….This is not the record of Joe Biden in ’08, or Tim Kaine in ’16, but something close to a replay—and perhaps a magnification—of the Harris persona in ’20.

In sum, it’s a long road back to the working class for the Democrats. As they leave their convention, with visions of electoral sugar plums dancing in their heads, they should remember that they still have far to go.

There are lots of good “takeaway” articles about the Democratic convention (See here, here, here and here, for example)  Nearly all of the wrap-up articles note how well-produced it was and cite it as likely to produce a nice ‘bump’ of indeterminate length for Harris-Walz. Here are some excerpts from “Democrats rejoice as ‘joyful’ Kamala Harris puts them back in the game,” Ed Pilkington’s analysis at The Guardian:

On Tuesday, the Obamas added their own ideas on how to tackle Trump. Focus by all means on fears of a possible second Trump presidency – “the deep pit in my stomach”, as Michelle put it – but also bring him down to size, make him look as small as he is.

A good point, and somebody needed to say it. Pilkington notes, further:

It was fitting that the most forceful put down of Trump during the week came from Harris herself. “In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man,” she said. “But the consequences of putting him back in the White House are extremely serious.”

She invited her audience to contemplate what Trump would do if he were returned to power, fortified by the recent US supreme court ruling that makes him largely immune from criminal prosecution.

“Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails,” Harris said, “and how he would use the immense powers of the presidency.”

A party leader unleashed. A new mood of positivity and optimism. Fresh ways to hit Trump. The Democratic party emerges from the convention in much more robust health than it entered it.

Also,

Messages were pumped out designed to soothe the doubts of wavering voters. A Harris presidency would be tough on crime, good for your family’s budget, lower your middle-class taxes, secure the border – and do all this with compassion and kindness, not the other side’s disparagement and hate.

The convention repeatedly bashed Trump for overturning abortion rights, driving the point home with heart-wrenching accounts from women denied health care in states with abortion bans, including a woman raped by her stepfather aged 12 and a second woman who miscarried in her bathroom having been turned away from hospital.

“This is what’s happening in our country because of Donald Trump, and he is not done,” Harris said.

In addition,

Latest polls put Harris just a few points up over Trump in battleground states like Wisconsin without which Harris will have difficulty prevailing. That’s a dramatic improvement on Biden, but it is still well within the margin of error.

Meanwhile, Trump is not letting up on his pursuit of darkness. As Harris was preparing to address delegates on Thursday, he was down at the US border with Mexico scaremongering about “hardened criminals pouring into our country”.

Will it work? Nobody knows.

What Democratic strategists do know is this. If they let their party faithful leave Chicago, turn off the TV, sit back and relax as they bask in the glow of so much talk of joy and freedom and a new beginning, then they lose.

As conventions go, this one had many more ups than downs. On the whole, was it was much better than any other in recent memory. Democratic leaders and rank and file should now prepare for the Republican’s all-out assault and mobilize an unrelenting counter-attack, one which will show that 2024 Democrats are ready to win.

Some perceptive observations from “At the Convention in Chicago, Kamala Harris Can Seal the Deal” b y Jeet Heer at The Nation:

Writing in The Atlantic, the veteran political analyst Ronald Brownstein makes a powerful argument that this week’s Democratic National Convention could be one of the history-making ones, thanks to the fact that Kamala Harris, like Clinton before her, remains for much of the public an unknown quantity—a blank slate ready to be filled in. Brownstein contends that “no presidential nominee in decades has approached their convention with a greater opportunity to reshape their public image than Vice President Kamala Harris.”

Aside from the comparison with Bill Clinton, Brownstein also notes, “Harris is the first nonincumbent since Hubert Humphrey in 1968 to claim either party’s presidential nomination without first enduring months of grueling primary contests. Because Harris did not experience the setbacks and triumphs that come from waging such a fight, public impressions of her are uncommonly shallow for a nominee on the convention’s eve, strategists in both parties agree.”

While acknowledging that the current era of partisan polarization means candidates have only a narrow room to rise (or, conversely, to sink), Brownstein makes a convincing case for 2024 offering Harris the chance to solidify her standing in a way that is essential to her presidential bid.

Harris heads into the convention already riding a wave of enthusiasm. But if Brownstein is accurate in gauging the opportunity the convention presents, Harris has a chance to catch an even bigger wave—one that would ensure a solid electoral victory.

Heer notes further, “It seems America is hungry for a fresh face—a fact that has already allowed Harris to take a lead in polls and election models (notably that of Nate Silver, who was bullish on Trump but now sees Harris as the favorite). Political analyst Joshua A. Cohen estimates that more than 100 Electoral College votes that were previously leaning toward Trump have shifted toward Harris—an astonishing reversal that puts the Democrats in a far more favorable position.” Also,

Harris has the wind at her back precisely because many Americans who hate Trump had also been dispirited by Biden. So far, they seem willing to give Harris a chance. Harris’s challenge is to turn these feel-good vibes into a fully mobilized electorate ready to flood the polls on Election Day.

Harris will be helped by the fact that she is not just a fresh face in the campaign. She also has a gripping biographical story that speaks to the emerging America. Harris’s late mother was an immigrant from India, and her father is an immigrant from Jamaica. Donald Trump has tried to use Harris’s multiethnic family history as a wedge to divide Black voters by absurdly claiming that Harris is not really Black. But the meeting of Harris’s parents is a very American story, one that speaks to an optimistic vision of the country as a haven for all. It is also a story that serves as an eloquent rebuke to Trump’s xenophobia and racism.

So far, Harris has been chary of defining herself as anything more than a generic Democrat, a profile reinforced by her pick of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. Harris has made a few policy pitches that are gratifyingly progressive, notably her promise to fight corporate price gouging on food and to provide financial support to low-income first-time homeowners. With the eyes of the nation watching the DNC, Harris would be well-advised to offer many more such policies to help economically struggling Americans. That would turn a feel-good event into durable political support.

Heer adds, “Barack Obama, the most skilled living orator in American politics, will take the stage on Tuesday. Former first lady Michelle Obama will speak the same evening, as will Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff. Emhoff’s prominent role at the event stands in contrast to Melania Trump’s silent, sullen presence at the GOP convention. The following evening’s highlights include speeches from Bill Clinton and Tim Walz, Harris’s running mate. Harris herself will be the primary speaker on the final night of the convention on Thursday.”

Heer concludes, “The danger of a divided—and divisive—convention is real. Harris’s ability to navigate the Israel/Palestine divide is the first big test of her political acumen. Harris has a difficult task ahead of her, but if she can manage to secure the votes of wavering parts of the Democratic coalition, this convention will truly be historic.”

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:

There’s been a lot of good news lately for the Harris campaign. Every national polling average has her ahead of Trump with margins ranging from 1 point in the New York Times average to 3.1 points in Nate Silver’s average (average lead = 2.1 points).

Silver’s state-level polling averages, which are relatively aggressive in incorporating new information, have Harris enjoying big improvements relative to Biden every swing state and now has her ahead in all these states except for Georgia and North Carolina. Moreover, his forecasting model makes her the favorite in Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin and tips her as a 57 percent overall favorite to take the Electoral College.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that Harris is still running significantly behind where Biden and Hillary Clinton were at this point in the 2020 and 2016 cycles. Using the RCP averages (538 does not provide 2016 averages but their 2020 average closely tracked the 2020 RCP averages), at this point Biden was ahead of Trump by 7.7 points and Clinton was ahead by 6.8 points. That compares to the current RCP average of 1.1 points.

Moreover, looking at the “Rustbelt three”—Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—which loom so large in this election, here are the RCP averages for this point in the cycle for 2024 Harris-Trump, 2020 Biden-Trump, and 2016 Clinton-Trump in that order and for each state:

Michigan: +2.4/+6.7/+6.8

Pennsylvania: -.2/+6.4/+9.2

Wisconsin: +1.2/+6.5/+9.4

Given that Clinton lost all three of these states in 2016 and Biden carried them by an average of only 1.6 points in 2020, this pattern does not inspire confidence. In general, and particularly with these data in mind, the race is still way too close for comfort.

Of course, just because the polls tended to underestimate Trump support in 2020 and 2016 both nationally and in key states doesn’t mean they are today. But that remains a possibility. As Sean Trende notes:

[T]here is a sound social science concept of which we should be aware. In fact, it is particularly dangerous right now. It is known as partisan non-response bias. The idea is this: When events favor one political side or the other, partisans become more (or less) likely to take a poll.

The intuition is this: After Biden’s disastrous June debate, Democrats really didn’t want to talk about the election. Republicans on the other hand, wanted to talk about nothing else. It was probably the best time to be a Republican in a presidential election since, well, Mitt Romney beat Barack Obama in the first presidential debate. Some of Trump’s poll lead in July probably was due to a newfound Republican eagerness to respond to polls.

At the same time, Democrats are overwhelmingly engaged right now. They have reason to believe they just avoided a near-death scenario and potential wipeout. They have a new presidential nominee, about whom they are overwhelmingly excited, and they like the vice presidential selection. They would love nothing more than to talk to you, or a pollster, about the 2024 election.

Unfortunately, there is no way to know for sure whether this is happening or not. But it could be in which the case the race, already close, may be closer than it looks. If you’re the Harris campaign you want to keep this in mind and take appropriate evasive action. “Kamalamania” may be more fragile than it appears.

A relevant cautionary tale is provided by an earlier example of a politician suddenly ascending to be their party’s standard-bearer and rocketing into the lead. This is the example of “Jacindamania” where Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand in 2017 replaced Labour leader Andrew Little who appeared to be headed to a landslide defeat (sound familiar?). Her candidacy caught fire and very soon her party was in the lead. But the conservative party, the National Party, counter-attacked, aiming withering fire at Ardern’s considerable vulnerabilities. By the time the election arrived the National Party actually out-polled Labour and Ardern by 7 points. (She was still able to form a government, but only by forming a coalition with New Zealand’s right-populist and green parties.)

This suggests a missing part of the current Trump campaign that is no doubt helping Harris—disciplined, withering fire directed at Harris’s vulnerabilities, of which there are many, has been lacking. Trump, by general consensus, has done a poor job on this politics 101 part of his campaign, indulging his proclivities for dwelling on various pet beefs, rather than concentrating attacks where they would most hurt his opponent (see this brutally effective ad from the McCormick Senate campaign in Pennsylvania for how this could be done). If he continues on the former course, the Harris campaign may continue to dominate; if he and his campaign take the latter path, Kamalamania may go the way of Jacindamania.

The question for the Harris campaign therefore should be how to armor themselves against such a turn in the campaign. This is where recovering the ancient wisdom of the Obama era could come in handy. Harris is perfectly willing to disavow previous unpopular positions on controversial issues and allude in very general terms to a current position that is closer to the center of public opinion. But what’s she’s not willing to do is piss off the left. And unless you’re willing to piss off the left, you can’t convincingly and durably occupy the center of American politics. That’s the real insurance against a counterattack by the GOP.

Obama understood this. He was willing to piss of the left in pursuit of a broader coalition. Here are a couple of examples but there are many more.

On immigration:

“We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked, and circumventing the line of people who are waiting patiently, diligently, and lawfully to become immigrants to this country.”

He added that those who employ people living in this country illegally “disrespect the rule of law.”

On energy/climate change:

“We need an energy strategy for the future—an all-of-the-above strategy for the 21st century that develops every source of American-made energy.”

He added that his administration had “quadrupled the number of operating oilrigs to a record high” and “opened up millions of new acres for oil and gas exploration.”

Different times, different politician for sure. And of course the progressive left within the Democratic Party is much stronger now than it was then. But the principle remains valid. If you want to define yourself as being in the center of American politics you have to be willing to piss off those who are constantly trying to push you out of the center.

This is particularly important for the Harris campaign among difficult demographics like white working-class voters, where recent improvement—particularly in the Rustbelt—has been key to the campaign’s improved fortunes. These voters could stick or they may be just visiting; much will depend on whether the Harris campaign can convince them she is truly a different kind of Democrat than what she used to be.

It seems like a long time ago but it really wasn’t when Democrats generally understood the need to aggressively capture the center and, if the left stood in the way, the need to push them aside. Clinton and Obama understood this and they prospered accordingly. What seems to have happened is that intense criticisms within the party of various policy actions of these leaders—some justified, some not—have induced a collective amnesia about that era’s political wisdom. As a result, today’s Democratic leaders are now absolutely terrified of pissing off the left even where it would be greatly to the party’s benefit to do so.

It’s time to recover that ancient wisdom. The stakes are high and the time is short. Democrats can’t afford to rely on Trump’s incompetence to cede them the center of American politics. They must seize it.

Political junkies talk a lot about various constituencies based on race, class, age, sex etc., and who they do and don’t support and why. But we tend to overlook one of the largest groups of American voters who share some unique concerns — people running and employed in small businesses, which had less than 12 employees on average in 2023. Many of them are working-class contractors, while some of them have managerial or professional training. But they are all engaged in private enterprise, often competing against huge corporations and sometimes working on government contracts. For starters, consider that 61.7 million people were employed in more than 33 million small businesses in 2023, according to the small Business Administration. 

So, please check out “How Kamala Harris can win over small businesses” by Gene Marks, founder of The Marks Group, a small-business consulting firm, which is cross-posted from The Hill:

Pew Research reports that two-thirds of the nation’s 33 million small-business owners have fewer than four employees. Also, 85 percent of them are white and 76 percent are men. More than half are over age 50.

Today, these small-business owners are not a happy bunch. Despite a surge in startups, lower inflation, a softening labor market, fewer supply chain issues and a growing economy, their sentiment and confidence levels are still at historic lows.

Not surprisingly, more than half of small-business owners in one recent survey say they believe another Donald Trump administration would have the best impact on their businesses, compared with only 14 percent for Joe Biden. In another recent survey, 33 percent of small-business owners believe that Trump winning the election will positively impact their business, versus 16 percent for Biden.

Today, Kamala Harris has taken over for Biden as the Democratic nominee. So now this is her challenge. Can she win over small-business owners this election year? I believe there is a way.

When government is friendly toward business, businesses feel more comfortable investing, hiring and taking risks. Taxing “the rich,” going after “the wealthy” to “pay their fair share” and vilifying “big corporations,” on the other hand, makes businesses seem evil. This may be a great plot line for a Hollywood movie or for populist fringe groups, but it’s not a terrific strategy for a government that needs to win over a large swathe of voters.

Remember that there are many small-business owners who, with their spouses, do make more than $400,000 per year (the “wealthy”) but use a substantial amount funds to reinvest in their companies. Also remember that countless small businesses — from pizza shops to landscapers — rely on big corporations and their employees for their livelihoods. And while it’s important to help business owners of color or in historically disadvantaged neighborhoods, it’s also important to recognize that 85 percent of us would not be included in that group. We need support and a little love too.

As I’ve previously written, the Republicans will work hard to make permanent the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which includes many provisions that benefit small-business owners. Without that, my tax bill personally will increase between 20 and 30 percent.

Harris has so far been mostly silent on this issue, so most of my clients are assuming she’ll continue with Biden’s policies, letting the tax cuts expire. My advice for her is to compromise and champion a few of the TCJA’s provisions that specifically benefit small businesses — most importantly the Qualified Business Income Tax. She should also support making permanent first-year deductions for capital equipment and research and development expenditures. That would make me, and many of my clients, much less concerned about a tax increase if she were elected.

Over the last few years, we’ve seen many new regulations emerge from various government agencies working under Biden’s direction that require all businesses to reclassify certain independent contractors, pay more overtime wages, eliminate non-compete contracts and be subject to new and more rules (and fines) for safety, harassment and discrimination violations. These are important. But they come with significant costs.

Big corporations can absorb these costs, which is why an overwhelming number of both Republican and Democratic small-business owners say business policies today favor large companies over small businesses. Small businesses struggle to keep up with and pay for these regulations. A blanket exemption on many of these rules for employers with less than 10 employees or so would win over many voters.

Isabella Guzman is perhaps one of the best Small Business Administration leaders I’ve ever seen. She’s worked hard and travelled extensively. She deserves a promotion to the Department of Commerce or Department of Defense, where she can do the same thing for the many small-business programs there that need attention. And she should be significantly involved in choosing her successor at the SBA to ensure that her work continues.

Harris also needs to set forth a plan on immigration, which needs to be a priority. Congress must compromise and pass a bill already. No one wants to see families physically deported, but everyone knows that illegal immigrants are breaking the law and creating a burden. Sort this out with Congress, secure the border and create a better legal path for citizenship. Small businesses need workers. The economy needs more entrepreneurs. Law-abiding business owners need help competing with those that flout the law and hire illegal workers. The country needs a strong president who will work with Congress to fix this major problem.

Finally, consider a new funding program for succession. As mentioned above, the majority of small-business owners are over the age of 50 (the average age is about 55). Many of my clients are thinking hard about exiting their businesses over the next few years, and many others have already gotten started. Sales of business are up more than 20 percent from a year ago. But tax, financing and other obstacles remain.

Harris would do well to support and expand the tax benefits for Employee Stock Ownership Plans, so that more workers can have equity in their workplaces and business owners can get help cashing out. Direct the SBA to create special financing programs for those looking to buy businesses. This is not only an enormous opportunity to provide for retirement but also a chance for younger generations — and even employees — to own businesses.

I’m a moderate Republican business owner. My vote is still up for grabs. Taking the above actions would go a long way toward winning my support — and the support of many other business owners — for Kamala Harris.

Kyle Kondik shares his insights about the effect of 2024 third party/independent presidential candidates at Sabato’s Crystal Ball:

A smaller number of “double-haters” naturally will have the effect of reducing the number of voters open to third party candidates. Back in 2016, the national exit poll indicated that third party voters generally had unfavorable views of both major party nominees. Trump and Clinton each won 98% of the voters who were favorable only toward them, with just 1% voting for the other candidate and another 1% voting third party and/or not answering the question. But 23% of the nearly one-fifth of voters who had negative views of each said they voted third party (or did not answer). So those kinds of voters provided the lion’s share of the total third party votes in 2016, which made up 6% of the electorate that year (Clinton and Trump won, combined, 94% of the total votes cast).

With a smaller number of double-haters likely this time, the total third party vote probably will be lower than 6% nationally. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the most prominent third party candidate, has already seen his share of the vote dip into just the mid-single digits lately. In the final FiveThirtyEight polling average of the Biden vs. Trump matchup, Kennedy was getting about 9% of the vote. He’s now at about 5%.

Libertarian Gary Johnson—the former New Mexico governor and Republican presidential aspirant who was the 2016 cycle’s most prominent third party option—was polling at 8%-9% for much of the late summer. He ended up getting just 3.3% of the vote in November. With Kennedy now polling clearly worse than Johnson was at this point in the race, Kennedy may end up performing even worse than Johnson ultimately did (and ballot access remains a question for RFK Jr. and the other third party options—RFK Jr. was dealt a setback in New York on Monday, for instance).

Since Harris entered the race, it appears that she has pulled some Democrats back from the Kennedy column, and most polls now suggest Kennedy is hurting Trump more than Harris. This could actually represent a small but still hidden source of Trump growth—if one believes that RFK Jr. is still polling higher than what he’ll ultimately get in November, perhaps Trump will benefit from further Kennedy erosion just as Harris has benefited recently. The other noteworthy third party candidates—likely Green Party nominee Jill Stein, progressive academic Cornel West, and Libertarian nominee Chase Oliver—all appear likelier to see their level of national support measured in tenths of a percentage point as opposed to 1% or more come November.

It is likely that all of the these third party candidates know they aren’t going to be elected and that they are well-aware of their ‘spoiler’ potential. Some soul-searching about the point of their campaigns might serve them well.

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:

The Democrats have had a good two weeks, nosing ahead of Trump in the national polling averages and even in some key swing states. Nate Silver’s prediction model shows the race now as basically a toss-up, with Harris actually on the good end of a 53-47 probability-of-victory split. That’s a dramatic improvement from where the Democrats were in the fading days of Biden’s campaign.

But it’s still a campaign on a knife’s edge that could go either way. Recognizing this, the Harris campaign has sought to remedy Harris’s vulnerabilities on a host of issues where her status as a liberal California Democrat and her publicly-stated past positions put her far away from the median American voter. They know the more voters view her as a moderate and close to the center of American politics, the better her chances of winning the election.

So far, this move to the center has revolved around several strategies. None of them seem very likely to remedy the problem to which they are addressed. They include:

(1) The “I take it back” strategy. Harris has a long record of taking unpopular, even toxic, stances on various policies that played well, at various times, with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party but are not remotely centrist. These include, but are hardly limited to, banning fracking, banning offshore drilling, backing a Green New Deal, mandatory gun buybacks, defunding the police and casting doubt on whether police really improve public safety, abolishing ICE, decriminalizing illegal border crossings, and abolishing private health insurance.

Do you, the median voter, see something there you don’t like? The Harris campaign says: no problem. Harris now takes it back! Whatever she said in the past that seems bonkers, she now enthusiastically disavows.

Of course, these position reversals raise many questions. Why did she have these positions in the first place? Why did she change those positions—what accounts for her conversion? And what is her position now on those contentious policy issues—besides not being for dumb position X? That leads to a second strategy in the moving-to-the-center campaign.

(2) The “No questions please—we’re Democrats!” strategy. The Harris campaign’s current approach to the logical and potentially embarrassing questions raised by these policy reversals has the beauty of simplicity: don’t answer them! In fact, avoid questions entirely by confining Harris’s activities to scripted rallies. After all, you can’t get in trouble for your answers if nobody gets to ask you questions.

The downside of course is it makes the disavowals less convincing, leaving voters wondering whether Harris’s views really have changed and, critically, whether and to what extent Harris’s positions are really centrist and close to their own.

The media has been remarkably tolerant of this strategy which has contributed to the almost 100 percent positive coverage of her campaign so far. While it doesn’t seem like that can last, the Harris campaign certainly hopes it will; they much prefer a “vibes” campaign with only vague policy commitments (the campaign website does not even have an issues section), super-broad themes like “freedom” and social media memes around policy-independent things like “brat,” “coconut tree,” and “weird.”

But perhaps not all the voters they need to reach will be susceptible to a vibes campaign, especially non-online, working-class voters in key states. That brings us to a third moving-to-the-center strategy, designed especially to reach recalcitrant working-class voters.

(3) The “Hey, we’re working class too!” strategy. This appears to be part of the thinking behind the selection of Minnesota governor Tim Walz as Harris’s running mate, instead of Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro. Shapiro, of course, was not beloved of the progressive left and their campaign against him and for Walz apparently had an effect. But Shapiro also, in terms of background and personal affect, does not code as working class in a way Walz does. The Harris campaign hopes that his persona will help them reach the working class, particularly white working-class voters, whose support they so desperately need in key Midwestern/Rustbelt states.

There are some problems with this. Walz, while he was a relatively conservative Democrat when he was representing a rural district in the House of Representatives, as governor of Minnesota he has been pretty much a down-the-line progressive. Indeed, in his current incarnation he is more a coastal liberal Democrat’s idea of what white working-class guys from the Midwest should be like rather than what they really are like.

Nor does his electoral record suggest unusual blue collar appeal. Shapiro in 2022 won his governor’s race in Pennsylvania by 15 points in a state with a +3 Republican partisan lean. He outran Biden’s 2020 performance in the state by 14 points. In contrast, Walz won his governor’s race in 2022 by 8 points in a state with a +2 Democratic partisan lean. And he ran ahead of Biden’s 2020 performance in the state but just a single percentage point. Walz also lost white working-class voters in his state by 8 points, 6 points worse than Shapiro did in his race.

An interesting analysis by Steve Kornacki underscores this point. He explains:

Forty-nine of Minnesota’s 87 counties might be considered “Trump surge” counties; that is, Republicans ran at least 20 points better there under Trump in 2016 and 2020 than they had in the 2012 election, when Mitt Romney was the GOP nominee. Those counties are all part of Greater Minnesota, many are rural, and virtually all are overwhelmingly white. The share of white adults without four-year degrees in those counties 72 percent to 85 percent.

Demographically, those counties almost perfectly fit the mold of the swaths of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania where Democrats have lost the most ground in the Trump era. They were also, before Trump, politically competitive, and some even voted for Barack Obama in 2012. In other words, these are the first counties you’d look at to assess whether Walz has unique appeal where his party has experienced its most dramatic Trump-era slide.

As it turns out, Walz had no special appeal in these counties; his performance was similar to Biden’s but vastly inferior to how Obama did in 2012. Kornacki adds:

“What’s striking…is how different the Walz and Biden numbers are from Obama’s. When Obama won his two elections, he joined strong metro-area support with respectable showings (and sometimes better) among small-town and blue-collar voters. A primary feature of American politics since Obama has been the virtual disappearance of that kind of demographic and geographic balance from the Democratic coalition.

In his ’22 campaign, Walz didn’t restore that old balance. His coalition, instead, looked just like what has become the standard post-Obama coalition for Democrats. He rolled up massive margins in metro areas and took a beating practically everywhere else.

This is consistent of course with my analysis from last week, “The Harris Coalition Is *Not* the Second Coming of the Obama Coalition.” It’s also consistent with a fascinating new piece by the New York Times’s Jess Bidgood on Walz campaigning in Wisconsin, which suggests what the Harris-Walz campaign in the Midwest may really be about:

Eau Claire is a deep blue college town, and it’s far from clear that the appeal of the governor from the other side of the St. Croix will translate beyond liberal bastions like this one and expand his ticket’s competitive terrain. But as I wound my way through the crowd today, it occurred to me that the Eau Claires of the world might be the main point.

In recent years, Wisconsin Democrats have notched major victories by running up their numbers in strongholds like Madison, La Crosse and Milwaukee. That means Walz was here not simply to sound folksy, talk about hunting and reach out to rural voters. His purpose, electorally speaking, is to fire up Wisconsin progressives who wish their state was just a little more like his….

The Harris campaign is betting that leaning into Walz’s unabashed progressivism might work—and, given Wisconsin’s famous swinginess, that comes with some risk. But Dane County, the Democratic stronghold that contains Madison, is growing rapidly….

Tim McCarthy, 60, a teacher from the college town of Ripon, said he was thrilled both to see Walz and to be at a rally with “like-minded people.”

“There’s a lot of conservatism in northern Wisconsin that you’re not going to shake loose,” McCarthy said. “They’ll support Trump no matter what.”

But he thought that Walz would catch on in his town—and suggested that the campaign might not even need to bother with more conservative parts of the state.

Hmm. Very interesting, if questionable as a political strategy. In the end, an attempt to move to the center that does not involve actively embracing centrist, moderate positions—as appears to be the current Harris campaign strategy—may fall short of its political goals. Jonathan Chait makes the case well:

Rather than move to the center on policy, they [the left] hope nominating candidates with a reassuring personal affect and personal biography can reassure moderate voters.

Walz generates so much enthusiasm on the left in part because he represents the apotheosis of this strategy….

But at the end of the day, issue positioning matters a lot. There is a reason Walz is less popular in a light-blue state than Josh Shapiro is in a purple state—indeed, when Walz shared a ballot in his own state with the moderate Amy Klobuchar [2018], her victory margin (24 points) was more than double his (11.4 points). It’s not because Walz is less likable than Shapiro or Klobuchar. It’s because he’s less moderate.

Walz had a fairly conservative voting record in Congress, where he represented a red district. He used that record to win the governorship, and then moved sharply left. The lesson he seems to have taken from this experience is that there is no cost in adopting progressive positions across the board. “Don’t ever shy away from our progressive values,” Walz said on a recent call. “One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.”

I can’t emphasize enough what a bad idea this is. On issues where progressive values are unpopular, and there are several, Democrats should definitely shy away from progressive values. For example, their stance on socialism, which is an extremely unpopular concept, should not be to liken it to neighborliness, but to say it’s bad and promise not to do it….

What the selection does…is forfeit her best opportunity to send a message that she is a moderate. She needs to take every possible opportunity between now and November to make up for that. Harris needs to adopt positions that will upset progressive activists. She needs to specifically understand that the likelihood a given action or statement will create complaints on the left is a reason to do something, rather than a reason not to.

That is an approach to moving to the center the Harris campaign has apparently ruled out. If that is the case, Donald Trump, with all his unattractive qualities and unforced political errors, is likely to remain competitive through November and, let’s face it, could easily win. As Chait puts it, somewhat wistfully, “I don’t want to bet the future of this country on a coin toss. I want to build a political coalition with a clear majority.” Unfortunately, it looks far more likely he’ll get the former than the latter.