Ezra Klein interviews Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter and co-author with John B. Judis of the new Book “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?,  for The Ezra Klein Show at The New York Times. An excerpt of the interview transcript is cross-posted here:

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.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Ruy Teixeira, welcome to the show.

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 — [LAUGHS]: 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.

EZRA KLEIN: Well let’s pick up on this question of the working class and how do we define it. At different times we’ve talked about the working class here, the white working class. What is your measure of the working class?

RUY TEIXEIRA: I use the standard definition at this point, which is those voters lacking a four-year college degree. There’s obviously different ways you could do it. If you’re going to use a more traditional definition, which is essentially impossible to operationalize in most polls, you would use blue-collar and low-level service workers as opposed to managerial and professional workers.

You could do it by income. There’s no right, scientific way to do this. But the way I typically do it is to look at the four-year degree and more, and less than a four-year degree. And that’s pretty standard at this point, and it’s certainly the easiest thing to operationalize in polls.

And it’s not like it’s without substantive value. I mean, we look at the economic and cultural trajectory of non-college as opposed to college folks, and they look very different. I mean, this has been a country, in the last 40 years, that has been much, much better to people with a four-year college degree than people who lack it. That’s very well-established in all the empirical data.

The new Quinnipiac Poll, which finds Biden leading Trump, is generating a lot of buzz, even though it could be an outlier and it’s only one poll. Sarah Fortinsky reports on it with a slightly different take at The Hill:

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley leads President Biden by 5 points in a hypothetical head-to-head 2024 match-up, according to a poll released Wednesday, but she trails him by 7 points in a five-person race including third-party candidates.

In the Quinnipiac University national poll, Haley’s popularity among independents would boost her numbers in a one-on-one match-up against Biden, but her weak support among Republicans would hurt her when factoring in independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

In a two-person race, Haley receives 47 percent support and Biden receives 42 percent support. Among independents, 53 percent support Haley and 37 percent support Biden. Among Republicans, 79 percent support Haley and 4 percent support Biden. Among Democrats, 89 percent support Biden and 10 percent support Haley.

In a five-person race, however, Haley loses independent and Republican voters, letting Biden pull ahead with a 7-point lead. Biden receives 36 percent support, Haley receives 29 percent, Kennedy gets 21 percent, Independent Cornel West gets 3 percent and Green Party candidate Jill Stein gets 2 percent.

With five people in the race, Haley sees her support among Republican drop from 79 percent to only 57 percent. Kennedy would get 24 percent GOP support, Biden would get 3 percent and West would get 1 percent.

Fortinsky adds that “Biden holds a 6-point lead over Trump one-on-one, 50 percent to 44 percent. A five-person race, however, narrows his lead, bringing Biden’s support to 39 percent, followed by Trump’s support at 37 percent. Kennedy then follows with 14 percent, West receives 3 percent and Stein receives 2 percent….In a head-to-head matchup against Biden, Haley outperforms Trump, thanks to independents. Add third party candidates to the mix and her numbers slip in part because of her weakness among Republicans,” Quinnipiac University Polling Analyst Tim Malloy said in the poll’s press release.”

As always, one poll doesn’t flag a credible trend, especially this early in the 2024 campaign. But if other polls going forward reveal similar results, the Kennedy factor may be significant in deciding the election outcomes in November – one way or the other.

From “GOP senators seethe as Trump blows up delicate immigration compromise” by Manu Raju, Melanie Zanona, Lauren Fox and Ted Barrett at CNN Politics:

Senior Senate Republicans are furious that Donald Trump may have killed an emerging bipartisan deal over the southern border, depriving them of a key legislative achievement on a pressing national priority and offering a preview of what’s to come with Trump as their likely presidential nominee.

In recent weeks, Trump has been lobbying Republicans both in private conversations and in public statements on social media to oppose the border compromise being delicately hashed out in the Senate, according to GOP sources familiar with the conversations – in part because he wants to campaign on the issue this November and doesn’t want President Joe Biden to score a victory in an area where he is politically vulnerable.

Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell acknowledged in a private meeting on Wednesday that Trump’s animosity toward the yet-to-be-released border deal puts Republicans in a serious bind as they try to move forward on the already complex issue. For weeks, Republicans have been warning that Trump’s opposition could blow up the bipartisan proposal, but the admission from McConnell was particularly striking, given he has been a chief advocate for a border-Ukraine package.

Now, Republicans on Capitol Hill are grappling with the reality that most in the GOP are loathe to do anything that is seen as potentially undermining the former president. And the prospects of a deal being scuttled before it has even been finalized has sparked tensions and confusion in the Senate GOP as they try to figure out if, and how, to proceed – even as McConnell made clear during party lunches Thursday that he remains firmly behind the effort to strike a deal, according to attendees.

“I think the border is a very important issue for Donald Trump. And the fact that he would communicate to Republican senators and congresspeople that he doesn’t want us to solve the border problem because he wants to blame Biden for it is … really appalling,” said GOP Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, who has been an outspoken critic of Trump.

He added, “But the reality is that, that we have a crisis at the border, the American people are suffering as a result of what’s happening at the border. And someone running for president not to try and get the problem solved. as opposed to saying, ‘hey, save that problem. Don’t solve it. Let me take credit for solving it later.’”

The CNN Politics writers note that, “Underscoring just how damaging Trump’s comments and campaign to kill the border deal have been in the Senate, one GOP senator on condition of background told CNN that without Trump, this deal would have had overwhelming support within the conference….“This proposal would have had almost unanimous Republican support if it weren’t for Donald Trump,” the Republican senator said.

One of the few Republican senators who favor the border security deal, “Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who has made no secret of her frustration with Trump over the years, said members need to remember how big this moment is for the border and for Ukraine and put their own politics aside.

“I’m not giving up. This is not about Trump and this is not about me. This is about our country. This is about democracy around the world. This is about security for our own country and so let’s keep pushing to get this border deal,” she said. “Let’s stand by the commitments that we have made for our friends and our allies so that our word actually means something.”

Some instructive excerpts from “These New Hampshire voters don’t love everything Trump says. But here’s why they’re planning to back him” by John King at CNN Politics:

“Portsmouth, New Hampshire CNN — Andrew Konchek has a long list of complaints about Donald Trump. But there’s one reason he is ready, again, to set all those worrisome things aside…..“I’m with Trump because he supports fishermen, you know, and obviously it’s my livelihood,” Konchek said in an interview at the Portsmouth pier….Konchek says politicians and regulators repeatedly ignore suggestions from those who work on the water about how to protect the climate and the fish stock in a way that also allows working class fishermen like him to make enough to get by….Trump opposes planned green energy wind farms off the coast that Konchek believes would destroy the historic fishery just off the jagged coastline where New Hampshire and Maine meet….While in Portsmouth last week, Trump also said he would on his first day back in office get rid of the government observers who are on board every trip to make sure fishermen honor quotas and other rules….“Trump does not support the Green New Deal or the wind farms and I know that he backs us fisherman,” Konchek said….Konchek sees a vote for Trump as a vote to save his job….“I don’t like the way that he speaks sometimes. He can be a little ignorant and rude.”….“He’s kind of a bully,” Konchek said….“But you think he fights for you?” we ask….“I do. Yep.”….So Trump gets his vote Tuesday.”

Ditto for Debbie Katsanos….”She is an accountant, voted for Bill Clinton twice, backed Trump beginning in 2016 and, like many voters we meet, is past her boiling point with Washington and politicians…..“At first I didn’t like him and thought he was a big blowhard,” she said. “But then I started listening. … He talked like, he talked like me. I felt I could carry on a conversation with him.”….Not that she agrees with everything Trump might say in that conversation….“I didn’t drink the Kool-Aid,” Katsanos said. “He could tell me the moon is made out of cheese. I’m not going to believe that, you know.”….So who won the 2020 election?….“Oh, Biden,” Katsanos said….Her bottom line on Trump: “Sometimes he just doesn’t know when to shut up.”….But he will get her vote Tuesday because of her bottom line on what she wants most from Washington….“Close the border and get this economy moving again” is her list. “He’s got faults,” she says of the former president. “He’s not a saint. He doesn’t walk on water. I think he relates to people. He’s relatable.”

“Deven McIver will cast his primary ballot in Thornton – population 2,809….“I’m going to for Trump,” he told us during a break from his work at a quarry preparing giant slabs of stone to be crushed into construction gravel….It is mostly Trump country up here, though McIver, 46, says he voted for Barack Obama in 2008….“I said, ‘Oh, we’re going to have all this change and stuff,’” McIver said….But he skipped the 2012 election because he was disappointed by Obama and didn’t like Republican Mitt Romney. Then in 2016, he was excited enough by Trump to vote in the primary….“Because he wasn’t a politician,” McIver said. “So I thought this will be interesting.”….“Pretty good,” is McIver’s grade for Trump’s term as president. He was especially troubled, though, by “a lot of people coming and going” in top White House and agency jobs….“I don’t pay attention to it,” is his answer when asked about the caustic Trump social media posts and attacks he dishes out at his rallies. “I’m more busy getting up, getting ready to go in the morning.”….McIver doesn’t see himself as qualified to assess whether all the legal cases against Trump are legitimate….But while Trump, who has pleaded not guilty in all those cases, rails against prosecutors and judges and anyone he sees as a threat, and his MAGA supporters blame anyone but Trump, McIver takes a calm wait-and-see approach….“He has to go through a process for that,” he said. “And how it turns out is how it turns out.”….“If he’s convicted on it, then he goes to jail,” McIver said. “I guess he won’t be president.”….“Sometimes he’s not his own best friend,” he said. “He’s different. … It’s a show.”….McIver makes $40,000 a year, enjoys the work and is grateful his commute is just a few miles so he has more time with his family….It is a paycheck-to-paycheck life and inflation is especially tough on those with little to no margin in the family budget….“With Trump, I was doing pretty good. I was able to save more,” McIver said. “Right now, it is harder. … Your groceries are expensive and the cost of everything you purchase is expensive.”….“I know what I’m going to get,” McIver said. “I know he will fix the border and work on the economy.”….But he makes clear he is “just a regular Republican.”….“I don’t stand on the side of the the road with a flag every Saturday.”

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 the new Book “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?,” is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

With the Iowa caucuses in the rear view mirror, it seems even more likely that Trump will be the GOP candidate facing off against Biden this November. That should concentrate the mind. Right now Biden is running behind Trump in national polls and in every swing state with the possible exception of Wisconsin. In some of these states Trump’s lead is quite substantial: 5 points in Arizona, Michigan, and Nevada and 7 points in Georgia.

Of course it’s still early days. But let’s just say none of this is a good sign for Team Biden.

Right now the number one issue for voters is the economy and inflation and, as has been widely noted, Biden’s economic performance is viewed very poorly by voters. The latest ABC News poll has Biden’s approval rating on the economy at 31 percent. Only 13 percent say they are better off financially since Biden took office, compared to 43 percent who say they are worse off. When given a choice between two statements, 71 percent say “the economy is in bad shape, given higher prices and interest rates” rather than “the economy is in good shape, given low unemployment and rising wages” (24 percent). Perhaps most worrisome, in the latest CBS News poll half of voters believe that if Biden wins in November, his policies in a second term would make them financially worse off, with just a fifth saying those policies would make them better off. In contrast, half of voters think Trump’s policies, if he wins, would make them financially better off, compared to 30 percent who think his policies would make them worse off.

Not good. Maybe economic perceptions will improve over the course of the year. Maybe the Biden campaign’s economic messaging will improve after the debacle of “Bidenomics” (the Blueprint public opinion research group has some good ideas about this). Maybe the Democrats’ relentless drumbeat about “MAGA Republicans” and how “Democracy is on the ballot” will neutralize Trump’s advantage on the economy (and on mental and physical fitness). Maybe.

But it’ll be an uphill climb. And lurking in the weeds is voters’ second most important issue: immigration and the border. The Democrats are in such terrible shape on this issue that it could tip the balance decisively in Trump’s favor.

Start with this: Biden’s approval rating on “handling the immigration situation at the U.S.-Mexico border” is now 18 percent. Eighteen percent! That’s really, really bad and the lowest presidential approval on the issue ABC News has measured since 2004.

In the latest Wall Street Journal poll, Trump is preferred over Biden by 30 points, his greatest lead on any issue. In the latest Fox News poll, voters favor a wide variety of measures to crack down on illegal immigration: increasing border agents (79 percent); deporting illegal immigrants (67 percent); penalizing hiring illegal immigrants (64 percent); using the US military at the border (58 percent); and even building a border wall (54 percent).

Illuminating detail comes from a December survey conducted by the Blueprint group. Between Trump and Biden, who are voters most likely to think is close to their views on immigration? It’s Trump by a country mile: 44 percent of voters say Trump is close to their position, compared to a mere 25 percent who say Biden is close to their position. Even Hispanic voters are more likely to say Trump is close to their views on immigration than to say Biden is! (To understand this last data point I recommend Politico reporter David Siders’ sobering article, “There Are a Lot of Mexican People Looking Forward to Trump,” based on a reporting trip to El Paso, Texas.)

Across all voters, 56 percent say Biden is more liberal than they are on the immigration issue. Given a binary choice, voters prefer an approach that would “increase border enforcement and make asylum and refugee policies stricter” (61 percent) to one that would “increase legal pathways to immigrate to the United States” (39 percent). And they are far more likely to say rules on refugee and asylum status should be made stricter (53 percent) rather than looser (14 percent), and to believe that the US should take in fewer (52 percent) rather than more (17 percent) refugees and asylum seekers.

What part of “We need to get a lot tougher on border security” don’t Democrats understand? Of course, they are starting to bend a little on the issue, as we are currently seeing with the negotiations over linking border security changes to supplemental funding for Ukraine and Israel. We shall see how much they are willing to bend and how much Republicans, especially House Republicans, are willing to play ball.

Frankly, it’s a bit late in the day to finally be moving on this issue and only under duress from the Republicans. The border debacle has been unfolding throughout Biden’s term and the political damage has been accumulating. A big part of the problem is that there are a lot of Democrats who didn’t—and don’t—really want to do much about border security.

As David Leonhardt noted in The Atlantic :

Once a country has established borders, it must confront the unavoidably thorny issue of which outsiders it should admit and which it should not…“For those who believe in a multicultural America, this question can be uncomfortable to confront, because any system short of open borders invariably requires drawing distinctions that declare some people worthy of entry and others unworthy,” Jia Lynn Yang, a journalist, wrote in her history of immigration law. Because of this discomfort, the modern Democratic Party has struggled to articulate an immigration policy beyond what might be summarized as: More is better, and less is racist. The party has cast aside the legacies of [Barbara] Jordan and other progressives who made finer distinctions.

Leonhardt summarizes in a recent column:

Today, many Democratic politicians are willing to accept high levels of undocumented immigration and oppose enforcement measures that the party once favored. Some Democrats, especially on the left, argue that the government doesn’t even have the power to reduce migration much.

“More is better and less is racist” isn’t much of an immigration policy but it is the default position of many Democrats. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, has said that her members wouldn’t get behind any immigration legislation endorsed by Republicans. The delusional Jayapal added that any GOP-endorsed immigration legislation would hurt, not help, the Democrats in swing states this November.

“Compromises? We don’ need no stinkin’ compromises!” For these Democrats moving toward actually-existing public opinion on immigration is a betrayal and, of course (that magical concept), would demobilize the all-important progressive base. With “allies” like this, Biden will likely have a hard time re-positioning himself and his party on this critical issue.

I have noted the tendency of Democrats to indulge in the Fox News Fallacy on a variety of issues. To wit: if Fox News is going after the Democrats on some issue, it is likely made up and nothing Democrats should worry about. There is no starker example of this than Democrats’ attitude toward the immigration surge at the southern border. Cast your mind back to the early days of the Biden administration when the party line was that the situation at the Mexican border should not be called a “crisis”—only the bad people at Fox News use that word!—and that an initial surge at the border would go away on its own as the hot weather season arrived.

Well, here we are three years later and this is where we’ve wound up, as summarized by John Judis at The Liberal Patriot:

[O]f the 3.1 million undocumented immigrants who entered the United States at the Southwest border in FY 2023, about 1.5 million entered the maze of the immigrant court system, 300,000 were paroled, and 600,000 got through undetected. That’s about 2.4 million undocumented migrants in addition to the 1.1 million authorized to receive permanent visas under current immigration law. That’s an influx of undocumented immigrants that matches the population of Chicago or Houston. Given that migrants who were expelled could try again, America’s borders have been de facto open during the first three years of the Biden administration.

Not good! Rather than being dismissive of concerns about illegal immigration, it now seems obvious Democrats should have taken them more seriously from the very beginning. Trump of course will be delighted to take advantage of the Democrats’ colossal blunder. Could it hand him victory this November? It is my sad duty to inform you that yes, this is quite possible.

For the Commerce Club, the oldest and largest public affairs forum in the United States, George Hammond interviews John B. Judis, Editor-at-Large, Talking Points Memo and co-author with Ruy Teixeira of Where Have All the Democrats Gone?: The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes :

“If there’s one state in the nation you can call MAGA country, it’s Iowa,” Heather Digby Parton writes at Salon. “It’s something like 95% white, older than most states, extremely rural and the Republican Party there is as conservative as it gets. And yet, 40% of the voters who came out voted for someone else. Yes, sure, a good many of them voted for Trump-plus and Trump- X (DeSantis and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy), but nearly 20% of them voted for the daughter of immigrants positioned as the “moderate ” in the race. Recall, Trump beat Joe Biden statewide by 53% in 2020. He won the Republicans by an even smaller majority on Monday. That is not a good sign….Only 110,000 people turned out, which comes out to about 15% of registered Republicans. This means that he only won 7% of GOP voters in the state of Iowa, a MAGA stronghold. Considering that this is the beginning of his supposed big comeback, that’s pretty underwhelming….The Des Moines Register poll which was released last weekend showed some other rather surprising numbers about the Republican electorate in Iowa. It found that if Trump is the nominee 11% said they would vote for Joe Biden while another 14% said they would vote for a third party candidate or someone else. That adds up to 25% of the party saying they will vote for someone else in the general election. That seems worth pondering. And we hear constantly about how all these criminal and civil proceedings just make his base love him more, but even more concerning for the Trump campaign should be the fact that according to the entrance polls, 32% of caucus participants believe that if Trump is convicted he will be unfit for the presidency.”

Parton continues, “All this does raise the question: Why are the national polls so close?….In the last few months, the polls have shown Trump and Biden neck and neck within the margin of error. You would think that if there was really a substantial faction of Republicans and GOP-leaning Independents who aren’t going to vote for Trump it would be showing up. But remember, the data we’ve been discussing was all from Iowa, a state that has been inundated with campaign ads and personal appearances by the Republican candidates for the past year. Unlike the rest of the country, they’ve been forced to pay attention to this race. They are the canaries in the coal mine….As evidence of how important this is, CNN reported that “the majority of undecided voters simply do not seem to believe – at least not yet – that Donald Trump is likely to be the Republican presidential nominee.” If you’re reading this you probably find that to be absurd. He’s the front-runner! But most of America has tuned out the Trump show since he left office. When they realize that he’s going to be the nominee and the show is unavoidable again, they are going to see what at least a quarter of Iowa Republicans and all of Iowa’s Democrats have been seeing these past few months and it’s not pretty. Let’s just say, that show has not aged well….Sure, Trump won Iowa and he’s highly likely to win New Hampshire and all the rest of the states as well. The Republican Party establishment will back him to the hilt and he’ll have plenty of money to wage his campaign. But there are some very big cracks in his coalition and they are becoming more and more pronounced. Remember, if the election is close, as it may very well be, it would only take a small number of GOP and Independent defections in the right states to put the country out of this misery at long last.”

Food and gas costs are frequently cited as pushing the public’s concerns about inflation. Could the increase in out-of-pocket spending for health care also be a leading cause of President Biden’s low approval ratings? According to Caitlin Owens at Axios, “Families with workplace health insurance may have missed out on $125,000 in earnings over the past three decades as a result of rising premiums eating into their pay, according to a new JAMA Network Open study….While employers, rather than workers, typically bear the brunt of rising health insurance costs, the study is further evidence that rising premiums are costing workers through wages they would have otherwise received….Premium growth has long outpaced wage growth, meaning that health insurance has become a larger and larger part of workers’ total compensation as employers pay out more in health benefits….a larger percentage of total compensation for low-income workers — who are disproportionately people of color — than those with higher incomes….Employer insurance has gotten more and more expensive as health care itself has gotten more expensive — the average workplace health plan last year cost $24,000 for family coverage, with employers covering about three-quarters of the cost, according to KFF….Although workers most directly feel the impact of their health care spending through out-of-pocket costs, economists have long argued that soaring premiums have suppressed wage growth….In 1988, health care premiums on average accounted for 7.9% of a worker’s total compensation, which includes wages and premiums. By 2019, that had increased to an average of 17.7%, the study found.”

The Biden campaign has handled its share of incoming flak during the last year for its sunny view of economic trends. Despite the common wisdom that their optimism is not justified, there is some new polling data which suggest otherwise.  In “Americans are actually pretty happy with their finances” by Felix Salmon at Axios Markets. writes, “Americans overall have a surprising degree of satisfaction with their economic situation, according to findings from the Axios Vibes survey by The Harris Poll….That’s in spite of dour views among certain subsets of the country — and in contrast to consumer sentiment polls that remain stubbornly weak, partly because of the lingering effects of 2022’s inflation….The Axios Vibes poll has found that when asked about their own financial condition, or that of their local community, Americans are characteristically optimistic….GDP growth is the highest in the developed world, inflation is headed back down to optimal levels, and consumer spending keeps on growing….63% of Americans rate their current financial situation as being “good,” including 19% of us who say it’s “very good.”….Americans’ outlooks for the future are also rosy. 66% think that 2024 will be better than 2023, and 85% of us feel we could change our personal financial situation for the better this year….That’s in line with Wall Street estimates, which have penciled in continued growth in both GDP and real wages for the rest of the year…. 77% of Americans are happy with where they’re living — including renters, who have seen their housing costs surge over the last few years and are far more likely than homeowners to describe their financial situation as poor….The survey’s findings were based on a nationally representative sample of 2,120 U.S. adults conducted online between Dec. 15-17, 2023.”

The following article by Clark Merrefield is cross-posted from The Journalist’s Resource  (January 12, 2024).

The U.S. economy is in good health, on the whole, according to national indicators watched closely by economists and business reporters. For example, unemployment is low and the most recent jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows stronger than expected hiring at the end of 2023.

Yet news reports and opinion polls show many Americans are pessimistic on the economy — including in swing states that will loom large in the 2024 presidential election. Some recent polls indicate the economy is by far the most important issue heading into the election.

Journalists covering the economy in the coming months, along with the 2024 political races, can use academic research to inform their interviews with sources and provide audiences with context.

The studies featured in the roundup below explore how people filter the national economy through their personal financial circumstances — and those circumstances vary widely in the U.S. The top tenth of households by wealth are worth $7 million on average, while the bottom half are worth $51,000 on average, according to the Institute for Economic Equity at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

We’ve also included several questions, based on the research, which you can use in interviews with policy makers and others commenting on the economy, or as a jumping off point for thinking about this topic.

The economic state of play

Similarly, 78% of people who responded to a December 2023 Gallup poll rated current economic conditions as fair or poor. Gallup pollsters have reported similar figures since COVID-19 shutdowns began in March 2020.

Explanations and insights

The tone of news coverage is one possible explanation for the disconnect between actual economic performance and how individuals perceive it, according to a recent Brookings Institution analysis. Since 2018 — including during and after the recession sparked by COVID-19 — economic reporting has taken on an increasingly negative tone, despite economic fundamentals strengthening in recent years, the analysis finds. The Brookings authors use data from the Daily News Sentiment Index, a measure of “positive” and “negative” economic news, produced by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

The six studies featured below offer further insights. All are based on surveys and polls, some of which the researchers conducted themselves. Several also explore economic perception in other countries.

The findings suggest:

• Economic inequality tends to lead people into thinking the economy is zero-sum, meaning one group’s economic success comes at the expense of others.
• In both wealthy and poorer countries, belief in conspiracy theories leads people to think the economy is declining — things were once OK, now they are not.
• In the U.S., political partisanship may be a more accurate predictor of economic perception than actual economic performance.
• Households at higher risk of experiencing poverty are less likely to offer a positive economic assessment, despite good macroeconomic news.

Research roundup

Economic Inequality Fosters the Belief That Success Is Zero-Sum
Shai Davidai. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, November 2023.

The study: How does economic inequality in the U.S. affect whether individuals think prosperity is zero-sum? A zero-sum outlook indicates that “the gains of the few come at the expense of the many,” writes Davidai, an assistant professor of business at Columbia University, who surveyed 3,628 U.S. residents across 10 studies to explore the relationship between inequality and zero-sum thinking.

In one study, participants answered questions about how they experience economic inequality in their personal lives. In another, participants read about the salaries of 20 employees at one of three randomly assigned hypothetical companies. The first company had a range of very low and very high salaries. The second had high salaries with little variation. The third had low salaries with little variation. Participants were then asked if they interpreted the distribution of wages as equal or unequal, as well as about their political ideology. Davidai uses several other designs across the 10 surveys.

The findings: Participants who read about the company with highly unequal salaries were more apt to report zero-sum economic beliefs. Overall, when controlling for factors including income, education and political ideology, the perception of the existence of economic inequality led to more zero-sum thinking. Davidai also suggests that while people with higher incomes may not perceive their own success as having resulted from others experiencing loss, the existence of inequality could lead them to think generally about economic gains in zero-sum terms.

Read more…

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 the new Book “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?,” is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

Just how progressive are today’s youth (or “youts” as My Cousin Vinny would have it)? It’s fair to say that compared to older generations they generally lean more left on most issues, are more likely to say they’re “liberal” and more likely to support Democrats. But that’s a relative assessment; it doesn’t follow logically that the entire generation is therefore “progressive,” especially as the term has come to be understood by Democrats.

This potential problem has been thrown into relief by recent poll findings that the show the youth vote lagging considerably for Democrats when Biden is matched against Trump in 2024 trial heats. Some polls even show Biden polling behindTrump among voters under 30 (a group dominated by members of Gen Z). But on average Biden is still polling ahead of Trump among these voters—the problem is that the margin in his favor is much less than it was in 2020.

Data from the Split Ticket analytics site, based on an average of December cross-tabular data, show Biden carrying 18-29 year olds by 11 points, a 12-point pro-Trump shift relative to Catalist estimates from 2020. Similarly, pollster John Della Volpe collected a number of mostly December 18-29 year old crosstabs on his site. These crosstabs average out to a 6-point advantage for Biden among voters under 30, a 17 point shift toward Trump relative to 2020.

What gives? A variety of explanations have been advanced from mode effects (how the survey was conducted) to measurement error to disaffected young votersgiving a “protest” response they don’t really mean. The flavor of these explanations is that the polls aren’t capturing the “true” sentiment among young voters, which is far more pro-Biden than they are capturing.

Well, maybe. But then again—maybe not! It’s at least possible that the steadfast progressivism of the younger generation has been overestimated and its moderation—or at least non-ideological nature—has been underestimated. That’s the view of Jonathan Chait in a recent article with which I concur:

For the past two decades, young people were widely assumed to have an ironclad loyalty to the Democratic Party. Democrats believed this, as did Republicans and journalists…The progressive movement made a giant bet on mobilizing young voters. That strategy, invested with buoyant hopes and vast sums of money, is now in ruins…

Liberal donors poured resources into an endless array of supposed grassroots organizations designed to turn out young, and especially nonwhite, voters. The theory was that these potential voters held left-wing views and would be roused to vote only if they could be convinced Democrats would take firm progressive positions. “Democrats desperately need a bold, progressive agenda and to build the kind of relationships in Florida that can’t be forged overnight,” argued one activist in 2019, echoing what activists were saying in other states.

Activists tended to import the language and concepts of the academic left into their work. “Young people have expressed that true engagement means investing in young people as leaders and amplifying work already being done in their communities, centering social justice and intersectionality, and meeting young people where they are,” wrote one.

Perhaps “centering social justice and intersectionality” is not really “meeting young people where they are!” Actually-existing young voters are in fact quite different from the young people that inhabit the fever dreams of progressive activists.

Read more…

At Talking Points Memo, Editor-in-Chief Josh Marshall shares his thoughts on President Biden’s character in context of the fuss surrounding Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s hospitalization and concluding with Marshall’s observations about how it relates to the President’s decision to pull out of Afghanistan. Marshall’s take is cross-posted from Talking Points Memo:

Axios sent out an email yesterday headlined “Biden’s Stubborn Loyalty.” I went back to it this afternoon and realized I’d remembered it having a more negative spin than it really did. That headline above is followed by “1 Big Thing: Biden’s Teflon Cabinet.” The gist is that Biden sticks by his people. Got a criticism of one of his people? Who cares? Biden doesn’t want to hear it. What spurred this write-up is the controversy about Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. Will Biden fire Austin? Will he resign? No, says the White House. Indeed, Biden won’t let him resign. Done and done.

Axios writes this: “Politico reports Biden would not accept a resignation from Austin even if he offered, and chatter from the pundit class is likely to reflexively harden the president’s view.”

I like this attitude.

What first made the headlines with Secretary Austin’s surgery and return to the hospital was that reporters weren’t notified for four days. The much bigger deal is that, if I’m understanding the timeline, the White House and top Pentagon officials weren’t notified for either two or three days.

Here’s the timeline as I understand it. On December 22nd, Austin was hospitalized to undergo surgery for what we now know was prostate cancer. That all went by the books in terms of the relevant people being notified. But on January 1st Austin had some kind of complications causing severe pain. He was taken to the ICU at Walter Reed. The next morning (January 2nd) the Chairman of the Joint Chief’s staff was notified and Austin’s powers were turned over to Deputy Secretary Kathleen Hicks. But it wasn’t until the 4th that President Biden and Hicks herself was notified. The following day, January 5th, the service secretaries, Congress and the public was notified.

This isn’t a trivial matter. The Secretary of Defense has a specific and important role in the military chain of command. Under the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 the line goes like this: The President issues orders to the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary issues orders directly to the Combatant Commanders. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is the President’s statutory military advisor. But the orders don’t go through him. The service secretaries — Secretary of the Army, Secretary of the Navy — aren’t in the line at all. They just run the departments.

The point is the Secretary of Defense isn’t just nice to have around. He’s central to the highest-level command structure of the U.S. military. You don’t want to have a serious military crisis and not know where he is. He’s not as important as the President, obviously, but it’s really important everyone knows where the Secretary is or who is acting in his place.

So big goof. But a firing offense? Not really. I’m sure it won’t happen again. And it’s the President’s call. It’s refreshing to see a President or any high level official say in so many words, this is okay and I really don’t care what the Post editorial board or any yahoo in Congress has to say about it.

I also think that the withdrawal from Afghanistan remains one of Biden’s shining moments even though I know absolutely no one agrees with me.

The United States remained in Afghanistan for ten years after anyone had any good explanation for why we were there. Obama wanted to leave. But he got rolled by the Pentagon. Biden knew that the only way to really leave was to leave. Someone had to bite the bullet. He bit that bullet and paid a big price and didn’t look back.

Undecided voters are invited to compare Biden’s character, and yes also his maturity, to that of the GOP presidential aspirants, all but one of whom have said with a straight face that Trump actually won the 2020 election.