The following article by Digby is cross-posted from Digby’s Hullabaloo:

In the NY Times post-verdict survey of 2,000 people they’d surveyed before there was a perceptible shift toward Biden. It was only a couple of points but what’s meaningful about it is who shifted. Nate Cohn wrote:

Perhaps not surprisingly, the swings were relatively pronounced among young, nonwhite, less engaged and low-turnout voters. In fact, 20 percent of Mr. Trump’s previous supporters who are Black now say they back Mr. Biden.

Only 2% of non-Black swing voters shifted to Biden. Apparently, Trump’s racist belief that Black voters would like him more because he’s a convicted criminal may not be such a great idea after all.

Dan Pfeiffer writes:

This comports with my most optimistic take on this election. Trump’s lead is very fragile because it depends on people who disagree with him on most issues, don’t particularly like him, and have a history of voting for Democrats, including Joe Biden.

The defining characteristic of the persuadable voter universe is their disdain for politics and their abstention from political news. While the conviction was the biggest news event in the 2024 campaign, large swathes of the electorate saw little to no coverage of the verdict. In this era, you have to actively seek out the news. It is no longer fed to you via social media IV. In fact, Meta is actively suppressing political news as they try to pivot away from politics.

According to Data for Progress:

Notably, as of the time this poll was fielded between May 31 and June 1, only 37% of swing voters said they had heard, seen, or read “a lot” about Trump being convicted, compared with 61% of likely voters overall.

Democrats have an imperative to keep Trump’s verdict in the headlines and relate it to the larger story we are telling about why Trump is the wrong choice. We absolutely cannot let the felony conviction of the potential next President get memory-holed like so many of Trump’s previous transgressions.

I agree with this. In order to penetrate the minds of swing voters who are tuned out, apathetic and pessimistic you have to repeat things over and over again. Convicted felon Donald Trump understands this and it works.

Gabe Gutierrez and Monica Alba report at nbcnews.com:

“Facing mounting political pressure over the migrant influx at the southern border, President Joe Biden on Tuesday signed an executive order that will temporarily shut down asylum requests once the average number of daily encounters tops 2,500 between official ports of entry, according to a senior administration official….“The border is not a political issue to be weaponized,” Biden said in a White House speech announcing the order.

The shutdown would go into effect immediately since that threshold has already been met, a senior administration official said. The border would reopen only once that number falls to 1,500. The president’s order would come under the Immigration and Nationality Act sections 212(f) and 215(a) suspending entry of noncitizens who cross the southern border into the United States unlawfully.

Senior administration officials said Tuesday in a call with reporters that “individuals who cross the southern border unlawfully or without authorization will generally be ineligible for asylum, absent exceptionally compelling circumstances, unless they are accepted by the proclamation.”

The officials said that migrants who don’t meet the requirement of having a “credible fear” when they apply for asylum will be immediately removable, and they “anticipate that we will be removing those individuals in a matter of days, if not hours,”

Gutierrez and Alba note further that “the White House has repeatedly argued that it was congressional Republicans who have failed to act on immigration. Earlier this year, Trump urged House GOP members to kill a bipartisan border funding bill that had been negotiated in the Senate. At the time, House Speaker Mike Johnson and other Republicans said that the Senate bill didn’t go far enough and they argued that a more hard-line immigration bill in the House was preferable.”

At Politico Jennifer Haberkorn and Myah Ward add, “It also is designed to give Biden’s campaign, as well as Democratic candidates in key House and Senate races, the ammo they believe they need to push back on relentless Republican attacks. Shortly after the president made his announcement, the Democratic National Committee sent surrogates talking points pointing to the February defeat of a bipartisan border bill by congressional Republicans and laying out its preferred framing for the debate: “President Biden took action after Donald Trump and his MAGA friends said ‘no’ to border security.” Further,

Polling shows immigration has risen among the main concerns for voters in both parties, and is the top concern of Republicans. A February NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist poll found that 41 percent of Americans believe the GOP will do a better job of handling the issue.

Hoping to turn around those numbers, the White House on Tuesday booked interviews for administration officials and allied lawmakers on national broadcast, Spanish language media and regional press across the country, according to an White House official. That effort is expected to go through the week.

Also,

Biden’s new executive action carries some risk within his own party. Progressives and immigration advocates are deeply frustrated at what they see as a return to Trump-era policies and worry about the long-term implications of Democrats embracing the new measures. The American Civil Liberties Union quickly said it would sue the administration over the action, threatening to stall it right at the point of implementation.

Immigration advocates and progressives are still holding out hope that the administration would follow Tuesday’s tough action with relief for long-term, undocumented residents like caregivers, farmworkers and spouses of U.S. citizens later this year. White House officials have not taken these policy moves off the table, according to three people familiar with the administration’s thinking, who were granted anonymity to discuss private conversations. But a final decision could ultimately depend on how much political pressure is facing the president in the months ahead.

….The Biden campaign, for now, appears comfortable with its positioning. The president on Tuesday stood next to mayors from border cities and fellow Democratic lawmakers supportive of his new approach. In attendance was Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.) — whose February special election race was seen among Biden campaign officials as proof that going aggressive on border security could appeal to a swath of independent voters; and, perhaps as importantly, defang Republican attacks on the issue.

Democratic Senate candidates have already posted ads on Republican opposition to the Senate border bill — particularly in the face of Democrats’ support for anti-fentanyl policies — and have talked about the local effect in non-border states like Ohio. Many of the Democratic candidates in battleground states are expected to maintain that drumbeat following Tuesday’s announcement.

Haberkorn and Ward conclude, “on Tuesday, there were also indications that Biden saw a need to ensure that progressives didn’t feel like he was giving away too much in search of a modest political gain….“I will never demonize immigrants. I will never refer to immigrants as poisoning the blood of a country. And further, I will never separate children from their families at the border,” Biden said, making a clear contrast with his predecessor and current opponent.”

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:

David Leonhardt made a bit of a stir recently with an article arguing that a “new centrism” is rising in Washington. He cites numerous examples of bipartisan cooperation in the last several years:

During the Covid pandemic, Democrats and Republicans in Congress came together to pass emergency responses. Under President Biden, bipartisan majorities have passed major laws on infrastructure and semiconductor chips, as well as laws on veterans’ health, gun violence, the Postal Service, the aviation system, same-sex marriage, anti-Asian hate crimes and the electoral process. On trade, the Biden administration has kept some of the Trump administration’s signature policies and even expanded them.

That does seem impressive. Much of Leonhardt’s essay is devoted to an explanation of how this new centrism has, counterintuitively, arisen in a time of intense polarization. There is much to his explanation but the most fundamental point is this: a relatively laissez-faire economic model, typically shorthanded as “neoliberalism,” which was supported in different ways for decades by both parties, ultimately failed to deliver the steadily rising prosperity most Americans desire. This has led to widespread voter dissatisfaction and an openness to alternatives across the electorate.

Both parties, Leonhardt argues, have been forced to respond to this shifting public mood, albeit in different ways reflecting their differing philosophies and political bases. But the potential for overlap has emerged as both parties chase the median voter. Hence the counterintuitive level of bipartisan cooperation and commonality of goals.

That commonality of goals builds on a shared sense that the shortfall in living standards must be addressed and that America now faces a dangerous new world where the emergence of rivals like China threatens the country on multiple levels. Should Democrats lean into that and seek to, in a sense, “own” this new centrism?

I’d say yes. The new centrism, as it has developed so far, provides clear indicators of the current policy sweet spot among American voters: they want to live better and feel safer and are pragmatically open to policies that could directly address these needs. They do not have an ideological litmus test for these policies, nor a definite view of how large or small government should be. Given the dysfunction and incoherence of today’s Trumpified Republican Party would this not be an opportunity to steal a march on their rivals and (dare I say it?) give the people what they actually want?

Of course, pursuing such a course would not be without its obstacles. As Leonhardt notes:

Americans lean left on economic policy. Polls show that they support restrictions on trade, higher taxes on the wealthy and a strong safety net. Most Americans are not socialists, but they do favor policies to hold down the cost of living and create good-paying jobs….The story is different on social and cultural issues. Americans lean right on many of those issues, polls show (albeit not as far right as the Republican Party has moved on abortion).

If you aim to promote and dominate a new centrism, it makes sense to target that fat center of American public opinion. But progressive Democrats would balk at this second part and would chafe at the limited nature of the first part; support for government action in the areas enumerated does not equate to support for restructuring American capitalism around a rapid clean energy transition. The new center of American politics is oriented instead toward concrete improvements in living standards and the safeguarding of America’s place in the world.

The importance of the latter is should not be underestimated. From the Leonhardt article:

“China is a unifying force, absolutely,” Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, told me. Senator John Fetterman, a Pennsylvania Democrat, compared the rise of artificial intelligence to the Soviet Union’s launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957, which led to bipartisan legislation on education and scientific research. Anxiety about A.I., Fetterman added, made possible the passage of the semiconductor-chips bill. “We are most able to come together when we acknowledge the risks we have to the American way of life,” Fetterman said. “Whose side are you on—democracy or Putin, Hamas and China?”

That muscular, “whose side are you on?” approach resonates well with the new center but less so with the progressive left in the Democratic Party. They are far more interested in a quixotic quest to rapidly replace fossil fuels with renewables and get everyone to drive an electric car, whether they are interested or not. That’s nuts, both as policy and politics.

More broadly, it seems clear that building out the new center of American politics from the Democratic side depends on weighting down progressive left priorities and weighting up moderate priorities consistent with the views of most voters. It’s frustrating that when the Biden administration takes actions consistent with this approach, they are bizarrely reluctant to talk about them, presumably because they’re afraid to annoy the activist-industrial complex. Here’s a pertinent example from a recent Wall Street Journal article, “While Biden Worries About the Left, the Voters He Needs Are in the Center”:

Under Biden, American energy production has reached historic highs—a popular accomplishment that voters overwhelmingly support. But you would never know it from listening to him. The achievement went unmentioned in the president’s recent State of the Union address and his recent campaign speeches, where he has preferred to talk about climate investments and “environmental justice.” Perhaps as a result, most Americans disapprove of his handling of energy, and many blame him for high gas prices.

The president’s failure to tout this aspect of his record has frustrated moderate allies. Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) recently wrote a Washington Post op-ed sarcastically “congratulating” Biden for his energy record and urging him to tout it more vigorously. “This is the all-of-the-above strategy in action, showing results. But it seems some of the president’s radical advisers in the White House are so worried about angering climate activists that they refuse to speak up about these accomplishments,” Manchin wrote.

This seems like political malpractice, which has only been compounded by the administration’s decision to cave to pressure from climate activists and halt permitting on liquified natural gas (LNG) exports—a decision that makes no policy sense and is guaranteed to alienate working-class voters.

John Fetterman and Bob Casey, Pennsylvania’s two Democratic Senators had some stern words for administration’s peculiar decision:

Pennsylvania is an energy state. As the second largest natural gas-producing state, this industry has created good-paying energy jobs in towns and communities across the Commonwealth and has played a critical role in promoting U.S. energy independence…

While the immediate impacts on Pennsylvania remain to be seen, we have concerns about the long-term impacts that this pause will have on the thousands of jobs in Pennsylvania’s natural gas industry. If this decision puts Pennsylvania energy jobs at risk, we will push the Biden Administration to reverse this decision.

Fetterman, in particular, has made no attempt to hide his lack of interest in doing the progressive left’s bidding. He has said, “I’m not a progressive,” and “I don’t feel like I’ve left the label; it’s just more that it’s left me.” An amusing anecdote in a recent New York Times article makes it abundantly clear where he’s coming from:

Senator John Fetterman was hard to miss, lumbering down an empty hallway in a Senate office building dressed in his signature baggy gym shorts and a black hoodie. So when Stevie O’Hanlon, an environmentalist and organizer from Chester County, Pa., spotted him recently, she took the opportunity to question her home-state senator about a pipeline in her community.

Mr. Fetterman’s reaction was surprisingly hostile. Raising his phone to capture the confrontation on video, the senator began ridiculing her.

“I didn’t expect this!” Mr. Fetterman said, feigning excitement. “Oh my gosh!”

As Ms. O’Hanlon politely pressed him on what she called his “change of heart” on the issue of the local pipeline, which he had previously opposed, Mr. Fetterman pulled faces of faux concern until he stepped onto an elevator and let the closing door end the interaction.

Ms. O’Hanlon, a co-founder of the progressive Sunrise Movement, was stunned.

A Democratic Party that wants to build out the new center needs a lot more stunning of Sunrise Movement activists and a lot less genuflecting to their concerns. I’ve called this The Way of the Fetterman; it models how Democrats should declare independence from an activist-driven agenda at variance with the emerging center of American politics.

The dividends from embracing that new center could be not just desirable but critical for the Democrats moving forward. The Split Ticket November-April average of cross-tabular results from public polls finds Biden with an average 4 point deficit to Trump among independents, compared to Biden’s 10 point advantage in 2020 (a 14 point pro-Trump swing). And among moderates, Biden is leading Trump by an average of 14 points, way down from his 27 point advantage in the 2020 election (a 13 point pro-Trump swing).

That should make the idea of embracing the new center of American politics pretty darn attractive. In truth, it’s a golden opportunity for a Democratic Party that, right now, needs all the help it can get.

In “Senate Democrats are polling well. That could help Biden,” Nathaniel Rakich writes at 538:

As Democrats wring their hands over their poor polling numbers in the presidential race, there is one spot of good news for them: U.S. Senate races. Democratic candidates have led in most recent polls of key Senate races like Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin* even as President Joe Biden trails former President Donald Trump in the very same polls.

I went back and looked at every state-level poll that has asked about both the presidential race and a U.S. Senate race over the past six weeks. The table below shows a simple average of these polls by state; as you can see, Senate Democrats are outrunning Biden’s margin by an average of 5 percentage points:

Senate Democrats are outpolling Biden

Average margin in each state’s presidential race versus Senate race in polls that have asked about both since April 12

Table with 5 columns and 11 rows.

		AVERAGE MARGIN FOR…
STATE	NO. OF POLLS	PRESIDENT	SENATE	DIFF.
Arizona	5	R+4	D+6	+10
Pennsylvania	5	R+3	D+4	+7
Wisconsin	4	R+2	D+7	+10
Florida	3	R+10	R+13	−3
Nevada	3	R+8	D+6	+15
Maryland	2	D+23	D+10	−13
Michigan	1	R+1	D+2	+3
Minnesota	1	D+2	D+14	+12
Texas	1	R+9	R+13	−4
Virginia	1	D+1	D+12	+11
Average		R+1	D+4	+5

When a poll released multiple versions of the same question, we used the version among likely voters over the version among registered voters; the version that asked about third-party candidates over the version that asked a head-to-head; and the version that included the most likely Senate nominees in states that have not yet held their primaries.

It isn’t hard to figure out why this is the case. Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but Biden is unpopular; meanwhile, most Democratic candidates for Senate are popular incumbents, like Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey and Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, and/or have a track record of outperforming the top of the ticket, like Michigan Rep. Elissa Slotkin and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar. Lo and behold, the only three states where Republican Senate candidates are polling better than Trump are the two states where they are incumbents (Florida and Texas) and Maryland, where the GOP’s candidate is popular former Gov. Larry Hogan, who had an astounding 81 percent approval rating among Democrats at the time he left office.

So it’s not exactly a mystery why there’s a presidential-downballot gap. The more interesting question is what, if anything, that gap means for November. There are basically three theories to answer that:

1. Biden’s support right now is artificially low; there are plenty of traditionally Democratic voters who are telling pollsters they support Senate Democrats but, for whatever reason, aren’t ready to get behind Biden yet. So Biden’s support will rise as we get closer to the election and those voters get on board, leaving both Biden and Senate Democrats in good shape.

2. Senate Republicans’ support right now is artificially low. Since most of them aren’t incumbents, they aren’t as well known as their opponents, but their support will rise as Trump voters learn that they are on the “right team” in these Senate races. Therefore, both Trump and Senate Republicans will do well in November.

3. Senate Democrats are just more popular than Biden, and this gap will persist through the election: Many states will vote for both Trump and a Democratic Senate candidate.

Right off the bat, I’m skeptical of No. 3. If the current polls end up being exactly correct, Democrats would win at least five Senate races in states Trump carries. That wouldn’t have been unusual 20 years ago — in 2004, seven states voted for different parties for president and for Senate. But today, split-ticket voting is quite rare. In 2016, every state voted for the same party for Senate that it did for president, and in 2020, every state but one (Maine) did.

The median difference between the presidential and Senate margins in a state has also shrunk drastically over that time — from 20 points in 2004 to just 3 points in 2020.

Read the rest of Rakich’s article here.

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:

It’s a strange political world we live in now. Back in 2010, there was a raging controversy controversy around “epistemic closure” on the right, where many on the left and some dissenting conservatives characterized fierce advocacy in GOP ranks for even the most dubious right-wing takes on the perfidy of the Obama administration as the product of an intellectual ecosystem that was sealed off from the real world—existing in a bubble through which reasonable criticisms could not penetrate. Indeed, such criticisms were summarily dismissed by the faithful as left-wing disinformation and prevarications whose acceptance in any form would undermine the GOP and its righteous drive to save the country.

That was then. This is now. The Trumpified sectors of the GOP still have plenty of epistemic closure going on—but now the left itself and even the White House has joined the party as Nate Silver recently pointed out.

This directly connects to a concept I have popularized called the “Fox News Fallacy.” As I originally described it in the summer of 2021:

This is the idea that if Fox News (substitute here the conservative bête noire of your choice if you prefer) criticizes the Democrats for X then there must be absolutely nothing to X and the job of Democrats is to assert that loudly and often. The problem is that an issue is not necessarily completely invalid just because Fox News mentions it. That depends on the issue. If there is something to the issue and persuadable voters have real concerns, you will not allay those concerns by embracing the Fox News Fallacy. In fact, you’ll probably intensify them by giving such voters the impression that Democrats simply don’t care about their concerns and will do nothing to address them. That will undermine the Democrats’ ability to respond to predictable attacks against their candidates….

We might think of epistemic closure as the logical result of a cascading series of Fox News Fallacies that render Democrats’ theory of the case bulletproof to criticism—and therefore incapable of real change. It becomes more an ideology that a guide to successful electoral action and effective policy-making.

Nowhere is this epistemic closure stronger than on the progressive left which has had extraordinary success making its views “That Which Cannot Be Questioned” within the Democratic Party mainstream. The progressive left thoroughly dominates what John Judis and I call the Democrats’ “shadow party”—the activist groups, think tanks, foundations, publications and websites, and big donors and prestigious intellectuals who are not official parts of the Democratic Party, but who influence and are identified with it.

And they do not like criticism. There is no better exemplar of their determination to enforce epistemic closure within Democratic ranks than the new book, Solidarity, by Astra Taylor and that noted Fighter for the People, Leah Hunt-Hendrix, an heir to the Hunt oil fortune. Jonathan Chait observes:

…[A]s the left has gotten stronger, it has become less socially acceptable to critique it. That people disagree with my [Chait’s] opinions is to be expected. What is notable is that disagreement per se has become controversial. There is a growing, if not yet universal, norm of movement discipline often summarized as “Don’t punch left.”

“Don’t punch left” is the core tenet of Solidarity, a new book by Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix. In a laudatory interview with the Washington Post, Hunt-Hendrix said the book was aimed not only at progressives in general but also specifically at liberals who criticize the left, naming me [Chait] and newsletter author Matthew Yglesias as “falling into the right’s divide-and-conquer strategy.”….

The progressive movement emerged over the past two decades out of a series of component groups representing causes like civil rights, environmentalism, abortion rights, and labor. Over the past two decades, these groups, sometimes called “The Groups,” have evolved from a patchwork of atomized single-issue organizations into a relatively unified movement. Each component part now habitually supports the projects of the others: Abortion-rights groups endorse defunding the police….

Since their goals are both to move the Democratic Party leftward and to hold together the progressive coalition, it follows that criticism from liberals poses a significant strategic threat. “Too often, liberals seek to legitimize their positions by punching left, distancing themselves from social movements to make themselves appear reasonable by comparison, which only strengthens the hands of conservatives and pulls the political center to the right,” they write, urging liberals to instead accept “the necessity of working in coalition with progressive social movements.”

Which presumably means accepting whatever these self-appointed tribunes of the people in The Groups have to say about any given issue, no matter how absurd. Can’t punch left after all!

Madness. Underneath this power play to silence critics is a noxious ideology that fits epistemic closure like a glove. This ideology—call it “intersectionalism”—judges actions or arguments not by their content but rather by the identity of those involved in said actions or arguments. Those identities in turn are defined by an intersectional web of oppressed and oppressors, of the powerful and powerless, of the dominant and marginalized. With this approach, one judges an action not by whether it’s effective or an argument by whether it’s true but rather by whether the people involved in the action or argument are in the oppressed/powerless/marginalized bucket or not. If they are, the actions or arguments should be supported; if not, they should be opposed.

This approach was always a terrible idea, in obvious contradiction to logic and common sense. It has not improved with age. It has led much of the left and large sectors of the Democratic Party to take positions that have little purchase in social or political reality and are offensive to the basic values most people hold—and to be impervious to criticism about them. Hence, epistemic closure.

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That helps explain, but does not excuse, the vogue for “anti-racist” posturing. This dates back to the mid-teens and gathered overwhelming force in 2020 with the George Floyd police killing and subsequent nationwide protests. It became de rigueur on the left and in most of the Democratic Party to solemnly pronounce American society structurally racist and shot through with white supremacy from top to bottom. No argument along these lines was too outrageous if it came from or on behalf of “people of color,” who must be deferred to given their place in the intersectional hierarchy.

Nothing exemplifies this better than the lionization of Ibram X. Kendi, whose thoroughly ridiculous claims were treated as revealed truth by tens of millions of good Democrats. This was a man who called for the passage of an “anti-racist Constitutional amendment” that would:

…establish and permanently fund the Department of Anti-racism (DOA) comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees. The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.

It is truly shocking that this kind of totalitarian thinking was tolerated for even a micro-second in respectable Democratic circles. But it was. Intersectionalism begat epistemic closure. Only racists would criticize “anti-racist” ideas, no matter how ridiculous. So the train rolled on. And it rolls on to this day, preventing Democrats from confronting the many ways they are alienating ordinary working-class voters whose complicated views of the world cannot be contained within the progressive bubble.

It is time for Democrats to bust out of the epistemic closure that imprisons so much of their thinking. A good beginning would be to discard the fundamental belief that conservatives are always wrong about everything and can never be right. In reality, the right is not always wrong and the left is not always correct. The blanket condemnation of conservatives is a tribal belief that always bothered me in my years at the Center for American Progress, leading as it did to disregarding all criticisms, no matter how reasonable, that came from the right and treating allconservatives as little better than tools of Satan. This did not make sense to me and seemed dubious empirically. Some of the criticisms from the right werecorrect and many conservatives were good and interesting people whose views simply differed from my own.

Indeed, some conservatives, by virtue of being conservatives, make good points and provide useful analysis that the left, reflecting its traditional commitments and current epistemic closure, has difficulty producing on its own. Matt Yglesias makes this case in an excellent recent essay, “What the right gets right.” Some excerpts from the article:

[O]ne thing the right gets right is a patriotic attitude toward The United States of America…[M]ost people on the contemporary American left are skeptical of, if not outright hostile to, the idea of patriotism. If you picture someone with an American flag bumper sticker on their vehicle, you’re probably picturing a conservative guy and his truck. Personally, I’m glad that Joe Biden tries to avoid ceding patriotism to the right, but I do think the reality of the situation is closer to “Joe Biden agrees with conservatives about patriotism” than “the left is into patriotism, too.”… I don’t really want to do a whole “patriotism is good” take here (try Noah Smith or read One Billion Americans), but I think American conservatives come out better on this score in part because I think conservatives have a generally clearer sense of history….

Progressives typically characterize their stance on this as being that it’s important to tell people about the darker aspects of history. And they’re right—it is a good idea for people to learn about those things. But I think the standard progressive read of this gets the figure and the ground backwards. The implication of a lot of these takes on episodes of violence, bigotry, displacement, and cruelty in American history is that these episodes are what’s distinctive about the United States of America.

But if you read the history of anywhere, you’ll see that it’s not like there’s some other country where you wouldn’t say “it’s important for people to learn about the darker aspects of our history.” History is dark!…

Conservatives have their own flawed tendency to lapse into nostalgia for the recent past, but I do think they typically have a more clear-eyed view of the reality that the whole of human history is littered with atrocity and cruelty. It’s naive to view our sociocultural antecedents here in the United States as flawless, shining heroes, but it’s also naive to think the violence and brutality of American history is what’s unique about it, rather than the fact that we’ve settled into a prosperous and liberal status quo…

The related thing that conservatives get right is a sense that good things are vulnerable and it’s worth worrying about wrecking everything.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s mantra, paraphrasing Theodore Parker, that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice” is a nice bit of motivational speaking. But this often leads progressives to the view that there is a strong and inherent directionality to history, and thus that any noisy movement for reform with adequate progressive branding must be good. You hear a lot with regard to the Gaza protests that the people complaining are just the same as the people who complained about every good and virtuous social movement of the past. Implicit is the sense that there is no such thing as a social movement that was bad….

The view here is that the important thing is to position yourself on the side of reform, rather than to ask too many questions about the precise contents of the reform.

But while I do think it’s true that you shouldn’t miss the forest for the trees, it’s actually very important for a reform plan to be based on true facts and workable ideas. The fact that Black lives do matter makes it more, rather than less important, to propose criminal justice reforms that save rather than cost lives. The fact that burning fossil fuels has harmful externalities makes it more, rather than less important, to accurately understand energy economics. Conservatives often err by being excessively skeptical of reform efforts, but they are correct to say that one should be somewhat skeptical, and I think correct that center-left circles sometimes get too squeamish about saying no.

In the present-day American context, I think this relates to both patriotism and history—conservatives are right to think that, in the context of history, we have things pretty good and that we should be cautious about overturning the apple cart without being quite rigorous in our thinking….

All kinds of people, both liberal and conservative, have incorrect anti-market intuitions that lead not only to bad policy choices, but to bad anti-pricing norms.

One important virtue of conservative politics, though, is that official doctrine on the right is that markets are good. So when some right-wing suburban NIMBYs are pounding the table about how they hate apartment buildings, you can come at them with some points about property rights and economic growth….There’s much more to building a prosperous economy than saying nice things about successful business people, but if you are in the business of saying nice things about successful business people—as conservatives generally are—then “these successful businesses help power economic growth” is a pretty obvious argument….

[A]t a certain point, people [on the left] started suggesting that degrowth could be a virtue…Or that the real solution to our ecological problems is for everyone to be poor.

This is dumb, and plenty of people on the left (even the far left) know that degrowth is dumb, but the fact is, it’s a live controversy on the left in a way that it is not on the right. There is, of course, more to life than the monolithic pursuit of economic growth, but it’s a genuinely massive conceptual error to see growth as undesirable or to be indifferent toward it….[A] growing and vibrant economy is genuinely very important. Conservatives have this right, while progressives are mired in disagreement about it. And the correct progressive faction is the one that can appreciate these conservative insights.

You get the idea. Conservatives, by virtue of their world outlook, are inclined to consider some important factors and see some critical problems that people on the left are not. This means that for the left to succeed at scale, both in electoral and governance terms, it needs, paradoxically, some of the right stuff. And that means ditching intersectional politics and epistemic closure once and for all.

The following article, “Senate Democrats are finally looking to fix their biggest mistake” by Hayes Brown, is cross-posted from msnbc.com:

If Democrats retain control of the Senate after this fall’s elections — and as of today that’s still a big “if” — the filibuster as we know it may finally be toast next year. Despite the 60-vote threshold’s being antidemocratic, extraconstitutional and antithetical to the founders’ vision, it has taken years of hemming and hawing for Democrats to reach this point. With its potential demise, the country can finally start to get back on track — or at the very least force our lawmakers to be honest about their vision for the future.

In the last Congress, two Democratic senators stood in the way of filibuster reform: Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, the latter of whom later switched to be an independent. They argued that the filibuster is a method of forcing bipartisanshipon issues and that it encourages more debate between senators, neither of which holds water when you look at the history of the filibuster. Thanks to Sinema and Manchin, Democrats had to leave many wins on the table, including subsidized child care for struggling parents, codifying Roe v. Wade and much-needed protections for voting rights. Those big-ticket items wouldn’t have just made millions of Americans’ lives better, but they also might have helped Democrats this November.

Any Democratic plan for reform would require majority support: either 51 senators or, should Vice President Kamala Harris be re-elected this fall, 50 votes plus the vice president’s tiebreaking vote. As things stand, the Democrats’ chances of holding the Senate aren’t ideal; the party is defending nearly twice as many seats as Republicans are, including three in states Donald Trump has won twice. But both Manchin and Sinema are retiring this term, and, as NBC News has reported, Democratic candidates looking to join the Senate’s ranks are all in on reform:

From “Is Reversing Biden’s Working-Class Slump Even Possible? A new survey of key swing states shows how it could be done, but—granting its necessity—it sure sounds difficult” by Harold Meyerson at The American Prospect:

A New York Times/Siena national poll from last month shows Biden’s level of support among non-college voters of all races is down to 39 percent, which is nine percentage points beneath his level of support from those voters in the 2020 election. If he can’t make up that gap or get close to it between now and November, his goose, not to mention civilization’s, is cooked.

One reason why that decline looms so large is that working-class voters constitute a disproportionately large share of the electorate in three must-win swing states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. This week, two groups that have long been surveying the Midwest working class—In Union, and the Factory Towns Project of American Family Voices—are releasing a study of those voters, focusing on the issues that can move them back into the Democrats’ column, and even more on the means by which Democrats can and must make their case.

Donald Trump carried Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin over Hillary Clinton in 2016, but lost those states to Biden in 2020. By itself, the shift in union household voting between 2016 and 2020 more than accounted for Biden’s narrow margins of victory in those three states. As the study documents, the swing among working-class voters in Michigan came to approximately 104,000; in Pennsylvania, 137,000; and in Wisconsin, 28,000. Recent polling in those states, however, shows that Biden’s levels of support among working-class voters have subsided to Clinton’s insufficient levels of 2016.

The polls undertaken by the study’s two sponsors make clear that the issues that could bring Biden’s totals up among these voters, not surprisingly, involve progressive populism. Both polling and focus groups made clear that these voters “are very inclined to believe Democrats who tell a story about price gouging and outrageous corporate profits. They are angry that wealthy corporate CEOs and billionaires aren’t paying what they should in taxes and that the top 1 percent (yes, they still use that phrase) are gaming the system.”

The other issue to which these voters responded most positively is the hardy perennial of retirement security and access to affordable health care. They give greater credence to the Democratic record on Social Security and Medicare, and the party’s pledges to defend them, than they do to the Republican position. The study also shows that Democratic support for abortion rights, affordable child care, and even forgiving student loans is widely popular among these working-class voters, and that Democrats should not skimp on defending those positions. But the primary message must center on attacking corporate greed and defending the right to a secure retirement.

Meyerson explains further, “One of the key strategic elements to moving these voters,” the study claims, “is tapping into trusted sources to communicate with them. Simply airing a bunch of TV ads and knocking on doors late in the campaign is not going to break through with these voters—they are too convinced that most people like them are voting Republican and too cynical about politics as it is commonly practiced to be moved much by traditional ads and campaign tactics right before Election Day.” Also,

This assessment echoes that in perhaps the best book that’s come out on the political shift in much of the working class: Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol’s Rust Belt Union Blues, which was published last year. The book, which I reviewed for the Prospect in January, takes a granular look at the onetime mine and mill towns of Western Pennsylvania. In 1960, those towns (also including the cities of Pittsburgh and Erie) were home to 143 locals of the United Steelworkers; today, only 16 of those locals still exist. In 1960, those locals were not just venues for union meetings. They were also union social halls, where members and their families came to unwind after work, and hold weddings and other family celebrations. The unions were a social center of those towns’ collective life (something the movie The Deer Hunter depicted quite well), creating peer groups and communities enmeshed in the union’s values and, more often than not, its politics.

Today, not only are those union locals long gone, but the only real remaining social centers in most of those towns are gun clubs, most of them affiliated with the National Rifle Association as a way to get discounted guns for their members. Today, the peer groups and communities for most working-class residents of the once-industrial Midwest have become Republican, a transition that the In Union/Factory Towns survey completely corroborates.

So who are “the trusted sources,” as the survey puts it, the neighbors and friends who still retain credibility, who can convey the Democrats’ populist messaging to working-class voters? The study calls on unions to activate their members to be the precinct walkers who can actually talk to working-class voters, but acknowledges that due to unions’ declining numbers, they must be joined by Democratic and other movement activists. In Union has identified 3.3 million voters in those three swing states who have pro-union attitudes; 14 percent of them say they’re undecided in the upcoming presidential and senatorial elections.

But building a community where progressive populist politics is the norm rather than the exception is the work of years, and the study acknowledges that Democrats are flat out of years to do that work. “We aren’t going to transform the landscape and reverse all the problematic trends in six months in terms of working-class voters,” it says, adding, “right now this is a game of inches. But given how close battleground elections are going to be, inches are the difference between winning and losing.”

It was not in the purview of this study to review how the Democrats got themselves into this fix with the American working class. But it’s clear that the Democrats’ decades of indifference to unions’ decline was a primary reason, and in many parts of the country, the disappearance of unions was perhaps the primary reason. Unions have rebounded in the popularity polls and have recently won some important organizing victories (though not at the Mercedes plant in Alabama), but that doesn’t mean they have enough activists in working-class communities to prod their politically undecided neighbors to cast their votes for Joe Biden this fall.

Meyerson concludes, “For that reason, the study chiefly reads as a plea to the rest of us: Do what you can to help our guys out!”

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:

Toward the beginning of this year, I remarked in a post on “The Coming Working-Class Election”:

Here is a simple truth: how working-class (noncollege) voters move will likely determine the outcome of the 2024 election. They will be the overwhelming majority of eligible voters (around two-thirds) and, even allowing for turnout patterns, only slightly less dominant among actual voters (around three-fifths). Moreover, in all six key swing states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—the working-class share of the electorate, both as eligible voters and as projected 2024 voters, will be higher than the national average.

It follows that significant deterioration in working-class support could put Biden in a very deep hole nationally and key states. Conversely, a burgeoning advantage among working-class voters would likely put Trump in a dominant position.

So, how’s that going now that we’re almost midway through the election year? From the standpoint of the Democrats, not good, not good at all. The just-released New York Times/Philadelphia Inquirer/Siena College poll provides an opportunity to check in on the working class vote in considerable detail. The Times poll provides data across the six key Presidential battleground states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—as well as data for each of these individual states. Here is what I found:

1. Across the battleground, Biden is losing to Trump among working-class voters by 16 points. That compares to Biden’s national working-class deficit of just 4 points in 2020. It’s also slightly worse than Biden’s performance in last October’s Times poll which covered the same states, when he was behind among these voters by 15 points.

2. The October-to-May deterioration among working-class voters is actually a bit worse among likely voters. Biden was behind Trump by 14 points among these voters last October; the gap today is now 18 points. However, in what follows I will confine my analysis to registered voters, since the Times does not provide demographic breakdowns for likely voters within states.

3. The October-to-May deterioration is also worse among nonwhite working-class voters. Biden was ahead among these voters in the battleground states by 16 points last October (note that this compares to the 48 point advantage Biden had nationally in 2020). But his advantage among nonwhite working class voters has fallen to single digits—9 points—in the new data.

4. In Arizona, Biden trails Trump by 9 points among working-class voters. In 2020, when Biden barely won the state by three-tenths of a percentage point, his deficit among these voters was only 4 points.

5. In Georgia, Biden is losing to Trump by a daunting 21 points among working-class voters. That compares to Biden’s modest 6 point gap in 2020 (here I use States of Change data, since Catalist data are not available for the state). Biden won Georgia in 2020 by a slender two-tenths of percentage point.

6. In Michigan, Biden’s working-class deficit against Trump is 24 points. In 2020, that deficit was just 6 points.

7. In Nevada, Biden trails Trump by 21 points among working-class voters. But in 2020, Biden and Trump were tied among these voters! That’s quite a drop. As noted in a followup Times article on their Nevada survey, Nevada is a state where Biden’s stewardship of the economy is viewed especially negatively. Among working class Nevada voters, Trump is deemed better than Biden for handling the economy by 40 points (66 to 26 percent). Interestingly, white and nonwhite working-class voters are basically united in their view of Trump vs. Biden on the economy: white working-class voters prefer Trump by 67-24, while nonwhite working class voters prefer Trump by 63-29.

8. In Pennsylvania, it’s Trump over Biden by 19 points among working-class voters. That’s a sharp drop from Biden’s 9 point deficit among these voters in 2020 (States of Change data). This is a state that Biden won by only a single point last election.

9. In Wisconsin, Biden is behind Trump by 6 points among working-class voters. That doesn’t sound so great but is actually 6 points better than Biden did in 2020, when he lost these voters by 12 points. This is the only state of the six surveyed by the Times where Biden is running better among these voters today than in 2020. And, not coincidentally, it is the only state of the six where Biden is currently leading Trump among registered voters.

This is all pretty baleful for the Democrats. As Timothy Noah has remarked:

For the past 100 years, no Democrat—with one exception—has ever entered the White House without winning a majority of the working-class vote, defined conventionally as those voters who possess a high school degree but no college degree. The exception was Joe Biden in 2020, under highly unusual circumstances (a badly-mismanaged Covid pandemic, an economy going haywire). It’s unlikely in the extreme that Biden can manage that trick a second time. He must win the working-class vote in 2024.

As the Times data (and much other data) show, that objective seems quite far away for Biden at this point. And that’s a problem: you can’t hit the target unless you’re aiming at it. That’s why I think that the Biden campaign’s notorious “polling denialism” might well be viewed as “working class denialism.” The Biden campaign would rather think about this election as “the democracy election” and/or “the abortion rights election”; advocates tell the campaign it should be “the climate election” or “the student loans election” or “the Palestinian rights election” or the “racial justice election.” But in the end, the outcome will be determined by how the working class assesses the choice between Trump and Biden and casts their vote. That fact should not be denied—and the fact should be faced that none of the above issues provides the key for turning the election in Democrats’ favor.

What would? The answer may be quite mundane if challenging to implement, not least because it goes against the grain of the Democrats’ shadow party and their amen corner in the media and academia. A recent memo from the Blueprint strategy notes:

We tested messages that Biden could use to expose Trump’s vulnerabilities, and the ones that voters found most compelling focused on economic fairness and how that should be reflected in public policy—not on Biden and Trump’s respective characters, biographies, and backgrounds….

Blueprint’s latest survey, conducted in partnership with The Liberal Patriot, showed that many of the policies that are most popular with voters can be used to make the case that Biden is the candidate for average Americans while Trump is the candidate who advocates for the interests of the very rich. Among the 40 policies we tested, the most popular ones are those that crack down on corporations, lower the prices of health care and other things, and protect Medicare and Social Security.

Just as the most effective tax and economic policy messages in the poll centered on those topics, none of these stances are particularly sexy or novel; instead, they are positions that are easy to imagine any Democrat supporting over the last decade. Trump has many qualities and vulnerabilities that make him distinct from run-of-the-mill Republicans of the past and present, which are tempting to focus on in paid and earned media. But our polling shows that ahead of November, Biden would be wise to highlight boring-but-popular policy distinctions that he supports in order to drive home the overall contrast between himself and Trump on tax policy and economic fairness.

Would this work? There is no guarantee; Democratic vulnerabilities on issues like immigration, crime, and social disorder would remain. But it does seem better suited to the realities of the coming working-class election than the Biden campaign’s current approach. That approach may resonate better with the Democrats’ shadow party and activist supporters, but not where it counts the most: with the working class.

The following article, “It’s Not Too Late for Democrats to Win Back Rural Voters” by Erica Etelson and Anthony Flaccavento, is cross-posted from The Nation:

After three decades of increasingly steep losses in rural America, Democrats are finally beginning to grapple with an inconvenient truth: An enduring Democratic majority requires winning back some portion of persuadable rural working-class voters.

Both Republicans’ and Democrats’ neoliberal economic policies have been harmful—in some instances ruinous—to rural communities. The GOP, on the whole, has caused more economic pain—but it has also been the party that has acknowledged rural struggles and put the people who’ve been harmed at the center of their rhetoric. None more so than Donald Trump, who said, in 2016, “Every time you see a closed factory or a wiped out community in Ohio, it was essentially caused by the Clintons.”

Too many Democrats, meanwhile, have sounded either dismissive of or exasperated by rural people. In 2016, Chuck Schumer’s catastrophically cavalier strategy willfully sacrificed blue-collar rural voters in exchange (or so he’d hoped) for high-income suburbanites. As far as the Democratic establishment was concerned, non-college-educated rural voters should quit complaining and simply get a degree—ideally in coding—and join the knowledge economy. Such contempt for a large swath of America has resulted in the ongoing erosion of Democratic supportamong working-class white and non-white voters.

Joe Biden, more than any president in decades, has prioritized rural people with a remarkable set of pro-worker policies and major investments in rural economies and infrastructure. We believe that this record offers a foundation for Democrats at all levels to begin to win back working-class rural voters—while holding on to the party’s multiracial urban and suburban base.

In 2022, the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative (which we cofounded) interviewed 50 Democratic candidates, from 25 states, who ran in rural districts between 2016 and 2020. Though they didn’t all win office, they all significantly overperformed the partisan lean of their district or state.

Our questions to them boiled down to, “What was your secret sauce?” From their answers, we identified several key ingredients: First and foremost, successful candidates were highly attuned to the concerns of their would-be constituents. Instead of running on a cookie-cutter national Democratic platform, they focused on the things voters in their district cared about most—kitchen-table matters like jobs and the economy, alongside ultra-local problems such as lousy roads, underfunded hospitals, and spotty Internet access.

Overperforming candidates also eschewed Beltway political consultants in favor of campaign staffers rooted in the community. This made for authentic campaigns with local flavor. Former Maine state senator Chloe Maxmin, for example, deployed homemade yard signs that were a folksy departure from the typically soulless campaign placards that litter the landscape.

Rural overperformers did something else that’s unpopular within the progressive left but widely appreciated by rural swing voters: They didn’t demonize Trump, no matter how richly he deserved it. And they didn’t try to scare or pressure persuadable voters into seeing the GOP or MAGA as an existential threat to democracy. Such rhetoric is music to the base’s ears but falls flat with key constituencies, most worryingly youth and Latinos.

Guillermo Lopez, a board member of the Hispanic Center Lehigh Valley in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, had this to say about Democrats’ hyping the MAGA threat to democracy: “I actually think that harms the vote.… [The average person who] just puts their nose to the grindstone and goes to work, I don’t think that motivates them. I think it scares them and freezes them.”

We’re with Lopez. Time spent enumerating and labeling Trump’s voluminous misconduct is time that could have been spent connecting with voters on what they care about most. We reserve judgment as to whether sounding the alarm about MAGA fascism appeals to disaffected or undecided urban and suburban voters, but we’re reasonably confident that this message does little to help rural candidates.

The superiority of depolarizing rhetoric is corroborated by a wide body of academic and poll-tested research documented in our full report. At the end of the day, the rural Democrats able to chip away at Republican strongholds were the ones who knew how to meet voters where they already were—not where they wished they were at. This sounds like Politics 101, but it’s a principle all too often cast aside by candidates and campaign consultants who spend too much time tuned in to MSNBC pundits and not enough listening to their own voters.

Democrats running in this cycle should study the 2022 campaigns of Representatives Mary Peltola, who won in solidly red Alaska, and Marie Glusenkamp Perez, who won Washington State’s Third Congressional District, which had been in Republican hands for six terms. Peltola ran on “Fish, Family, Freedom” and in her current reelection campaign calls on Alaskans to say “to hell with politics” and “work together to protect our Alaska way of life.”

Glusenkamp Perez won her 2022 race in large part because of her credibility as co-owner of an auto repair shop and her laser-sharp focus on issues her constituents prioritized, like the “right to repair” farming and other equipment. While some on the left are angry that she doesn’t toe the Democratic party line on every issue, her record shows her to be the kind of left-leaning populist who can win in rural districts. The Democratic Party would be wise to embrace socially moderate, economically and stylistically populist candidates like Glusenkamp Perez and Peltola as part of its coalition.

In the spirit of cross-racial populist solidarity, top-performing rural candidates put work and workers at the center of their policy and rhetoric, proposing a “hand up” rather than a “handout.” For the great majority of rural people, self-reliance—the wherewithal to solve our own problems and meet our own needs—is central to our identity. We don’t know a single farmer, conservative or liberal, who doesn’t feel this way. As Colby College rural political scholars Nick Jacobs and Dan Shea put it, “What rural residents want to hear is this: ‘Make it possible for us to improve our communities ourselves.’”

Rural residents might be disproportionately dependent on some form of government transfer payment, but they don’t like it. Farah Stockman, author of American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears, wrote, “Too often, those who champion the working class speak only of social safety nets, not the jobs that anchor a working person’s identity.” The key is in the delivery, ensuring that local communities can adapt and drive these investments rather than trying to implement ill-suited, top-down mandates.

The Biden administration’s aggressive anti-trust actions combined with rule changes favoring workers and organized labor are critical steps in giving non-college-educated working people agency. Its investments in rural infrastructure and manufacturing are essential as well.

Likewise, the Biden campaign’s decision to hire a rural coordinator bodes well. But that coordinator’s efficacy will be orders of magnitude greater if they hire a small army of locally rooted staff who know how to make a national campaign relevant and resonant for rural voters.

While Democrats will not “win” rural America in 2024, they can and must run up the margins with rural voters—a third of whom are considered persuadable—if they are to keep the presidency and control Congress and statehouses. Because it turns out the secret sauce isn’t that complicated: Find out what’s most important to persuadable rural people, and focus on that. That’s the only recipe worth cooking.

In “Biden’s surprise proposal to debate Trump early, explained,” Andrew Prokop explains at Vox: “Biden’s proposal for a June debate is surprising, since every presidential debate has been in September or October. We don’t know exactly what the campaign is thinking, but there are a few likely considerations.

1. Biden is trailing in the polls right now, and usually, the trailing candidate wants to shake up the status quo somehow.
2. Biden’s team wants to frame the election as a choice between him and Trump, rather than just a referendum on his job performance. A debate would clearly do that, putting them side by side and making clear that it really is either him or Trump.
3. His team may hope that if Biden performs well, he could quiet voters’ concerns about his age and mental fitness.
4. If a June debate does go poorly for Biden, there will still be ample time for him to recover. And even if Biden flops in September, too, the campaign would continue throughout October, giving time for voters’ attention to shift to other things.

RFK Jr. likely won’t be invited to the first debate: Another big question hanging over this year’s potential debates is whether third-party or independent candidates would be included — most notably, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who neither Biden nor Trump want onstage….CNN announced qualification rules for the June debate that would make it extremely difficult for RFK Jr. to qualify by then….The network said candidates must hit 15 percent in at least four national polls from approved outlets by June 20. That’s the traditional standard used for general election presidential debates. RFK Jr. has been polling at about 10 percent nationally, which is below the threshold but not too far below it….The catch, though, is that CNN also said the candidate must qualify for the ballot in states that added up to 270 electoral votes. According to Politico, RFK Jr. is currently on the ballot in only four states, and though his team’s effort to qualify in others has been going better than expected, it likely wouldn’t happen soon enough for the late June debate.”

Bill Scher writes that “Trump Promised 100% Tariffs on Chinese EVs. Biden Did It. Will It Work?” at The Washington Monthly. He explains further, “The big political news today, as was the case yesterday, is Michael Cohen’s testimony in the Donald Trump hush money trial….The big policy news today is Joe Biden slapping stiff tariffs on a wide range of Chinese imports, including a striking 100 percent tariff on electric vehicles (EVs), up from 27.5 percent. You can read the White House announcement here….Is this policy a good idea? Is it crude protectionism in the mold of Trump? Is it honorably standing up for American workers? Will it help or hurt the transition to a clean energy economy? President Biden said, “”American workers can out-work and out-compete anyone as long as the competition is fair, but for too long it hasn’t been fair,” Biden said during a speech in the White House Rose Garden before unions and companies. “We’re not going to let China flood our market,” Trevor Hunnicutt and Steve Holland report at Reuters. They add that “Biden will keep tariffs put in place by his Republican predecessor Donald Trump while ratcheting up others, including a quadrupling of EV duties to over 100% and doubling the duties on semiconductor tariffs to 50%….The new measures affect $18 billion in imported Chinese goods including steel and aluminum, semiconductors, electric vehicles, critical minerals, solar cells and cranes, the White House said. The EV figure, while headline-grabbing, may have more political than practical impact in the U.S., which imports very few Chinese EVs….The United States imported $427 billion in goods from China in 2023 and exported $148 billion to the world’s No. 2 economy, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, a trade gap that has persisted for decades and become an ever more sensitive subject in Washington….Biden has struggled to convince voters of the efficacy of his economic policies despite a backdrop of low unemployment and above-trend economic growth. A Reuters/Ipsos poll last month showed Trump had a 7 percentage-point edge over Biden on the economy.” Jonathan Yerushalmy notes at The Guardian that “experts say that the new tariffs are likely a preventive measure to stop China flooding the US market with its surplus product – and by that measure they’re likely to be effective.”

In related economic news, Chris Marquette writes at Politico that “President Joe Biden’s surrogates will crisscross the country this week talking up the hundreds of billions he’s pumping into projects such as roads, clean energy, drinking water and broadband — an effort designed to draw a sharp contrast with his predecessor’s series of ineffectual “infrastructure weeks.” However, “recent polls — including one published last week by POLITICO and Morning Consult — show the message has been slow to sink in with voters. And a POLITICO analysis of the implementation of Biden’s four landmark infrastructure, climate, technology and pandemic-relief laws found that only 17 percent of the $1.1 trillion in funding that Congress provided has been spent to date, thanks in part to the time it takes to vet, approve and move so much money through myriad federal agencies, state governments and private recipients….Infrastructure Week, which begins Monday, was already an annual industry gathering and Washington lobbying fly-in before Trump’s administration borrowed the name for its unsuccessful attempts to pitch a $1.5 trillion infrastructure plan that would have offered little new federal funding. Now, Biden’s White House is embracing the real event — and dispatching stand-ins such as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, senior White House adviser Tom Perez and acting Labor Secretary Julie Su to appearances around the country….According to the new POLITICO-Morning Consult poll, many voters aren’t that familiar with the laws and don’t see the benefits in their lives yet. And, perhaps most ominously for the White House before an election, respondents gave Biden only a 3 percentage-point advantage over Trump when asked who was more responsible for improving America’s infrastructure and creating jobs.”

Political commentators who still argue that Democrats should basically ‘skip the south’ have some ‘splainin’ to do in light of newly released demographic data. At Axios, Alex Fitzpatrick observes “Atlanta, Fort Worth and Raleigh are America’s fastest-growing cities with more than 250,000 residents as of 2023, according to new U.S. Census Bureau data out today….Why it matters: Late-pandemic shifts in where Americans live are still shaking out — with big implications for cities seeing massive growth or rapid decline….By the numbers: Atlanta grew by 2.42% between 2022 and 2023, and now has 510,823 residents….Fort Worth grew by 2.23% with 978,468 residents in 2023, and Raleigh grew by 1.87%, with 482,295 residents….Losers: New Orleans (shrank -1.56%, to 364,136 residents), St. Louis (-1.55%, to 281,754 residents) and Philadelphia (-1.04%, to 1,550,542 residents)….The big picture: Southern cities dominate the list of the fastest-growing big metros, with Florida and Texas alone accounting for eight of the top 20….Between the lines: Some of America’s fastest-growing places are not cities themselves, but their outer suburbs, or “exurbs.”….”Fewer of the fastest-growing places between 2022 and 2023 were inner suburbs than in 2019 … and more were on the far outskirts of metro areas — 30, 40 and even more than 60 miles away from the largest city’s downtown,” according to a Census Bureau analysis….That’s a particularly pronounced phenomenon in the Phoenix metro area, where four exurbs made up a third of the broader area’s population growth in 2023, the Bureau says.” For 2024, Pennsylvania remains the largest swing state in terms of electoral votes – unless Biden pulls off a Florida miracle. But given these numbers, Democrats clearly have to look southward for longer-term strategy in presidential elections.