“Vice President Harris is taking a significantly different approach than fellow Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in the final stretch of the presidential campaign,” Amie Parnes writes in “Harris employs radically different approach than Hillary Clinton” at The Hill. “Harris hasn’t leaned into shattering the glass ceiling or making history the way Clinton did, even though she’d be the first woman elected to the nation’s highest office….She’s also hyperfocused on the Midwest, including Wisconsin, a state Clinton regretted not visiting in the final days of the campaign. Clinton ended up losing the Badger State as well as Michigan and Pennsylvania, stunning Democrats at the time.”

Regarding Harris’s messaging tone, Parnes explains “In another difference, Harris has used an advertising strategy centered around positive or contrast ads, instead of just negative ads attacking former President Trump, as Clinton employed in the last few weeks of her campaign. “Kamala saw what Hillary did, what Hillary went through, what slings and arrows came her way and she seems to be both ready for it and seemingly able to thread a needle in a way that has been very successful,” said Tracy Sefl, the veteran Democratic consultant who has served as an adviser to Clinton. “Is it fair to say that Hillary showed her the way? Yeah. Are there also a million differences? That is also true.”

Parnes notes, “Democrats point to Harris’s recent visit to the border as proof that they’re seeking to go on offense even on issues where Republicans may have an edge. While Biden had gotten pummeled on the issue in recent years, Harris “took a chance” on highlighting the issue when she traveled to the southern border in Arizona. ”

“I think one of the biggest changes is how risk-averse we were,” one Democratic operative said, referring to the Clinton campaign. “We didn’t do anything to shake the apple cart. But I think this campaign feels good about doing those things, and that’s a huge difference.”

In addition, “Since becoming the Democratic nominee following Biden’s withdrawal from the race, Harris has not highlighted her own identity, something Clinton doubled down on throughout her campaign, with signs that read ‘I’m with Her’ and talk of shattering the glass ceiling.”

Further, “Democratic strategist Steve Schale, the director of the super PAC Unite the Country, which is also running positive and contrast spots, said the contrast ads are a “smart place” for Harris to be with about a month remaining until Election Day….As long as they’re in a place where her favorables remain where they are, it’s a good spot to be,” Schale said. “And I suspect they’re going to stay in this lane that they’re in.”

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter and co-author with John B. Judis of “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?,” is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

Why are Democrats fumbling the issue of education, which they have dominated for many years? There are multiple reasons: they mishandled the Covid-related school closures, they are letting the culture wars distract from the core mission of schools, and they are downplaying the importance of merit and academic achievement. Before I discuss how the Dems could effect a turnaround, let’s dig deeper into these missteps and unfortunate trends.

The school closures went on way too long. Democrats, far more than Republicans, worked to keep public schools closed during the Covid pandemic—longer than in other advanced countries and far longer than was justified by emerging scientific understanding of the virus and its effects. Pushed by their allies in the teachers unions, Democrats ignored the justified warnings that extended school closures would severely harm student learning and social development, especially for poorer children. The returns are now in, and it is clear that the warnings Democrats ignored were, if anything, too mild.

This was no minor error made by Democratic officials in the fog of pandemic confusion but a profound tragedy for millions of children that could have been avoided or at least substantially mitigated. To add to the shameful episode, parents in many communities around the country who wanted the schools reopened faster were frequently demonized by progressives as heartless, anti-science right-wingers who didn’t care about public health. The wounds from this still fester today.

Privileging politics over pedagogy. The culture wars rage on in the schools. Democrats argue that it is all the fault of the Right, who they say wishes to “ban books,” prevent children from learning about slavery, and subject gay and transgender-identifying children to bullying and worse. Progressive educators and school systems, on the other hand, simply stand for a modern, inclusive education that no decent, unprejudiced person should oppose.

This is disingenuous in the extreme. Over the last decade, and especially after the George Floyd summer of 2020, there has been a concerted effort by many school systems and educators to promote “anti-racist” education that goes way beyond benign pedagogical practices such as teaching about slavery, Jim Crow, the Tulsa Race Massacre, redlining, and so on. Instead, pedagogy itself is to be infused, from top to bottom and in every subject, with concepts drawn from the anti-racist playbook. As noted by sociologist Ilana Redstone, these concepts include the assertion that “[a]n unwillingness to recognize the full force of systemic racism as determining disparities between groups is a denial of the reality of racism today (and evidence of ignorance at best and racism at worst).” An army of diversity, equity, and inclusion consultants have stood at the ready to assist school systems in training their staff and teachers to implement this creed and incorporate it into their curricula.

This is politics, not pedagogy as traditionally and properly understood. It has little to do with what most parents want schools to do: develop their children’s academic skills and knowledge base so they can succeed in the world. Democrats have been hurt by their increasing identification with this ideological project rather than the traditional goals of public education.

Downgrading merit and educational achievement. Consistent with this ongoing politicization of educational practices, there has been a concomitant downgrading of academic merit and standard measures of educational achievement, especially standardized tests. In the name of fairness and “equity,” school systems in Democratic-controlled states and counties have taken steps to de-emphasize such measures as a means of evaluating students and controlling admissions to advanced courses, programs, and elite schools.

It hasn’t quite reached the “all shall have prizes” stage, but the message to aspiring students and parents who see educational achievement as their route to upward mobility and success in life is clear: students can no longer rely on hard work and objectively good academic performance to attain their goals (see “Your Neighborhood School Is a National Security Risk,” features, Winter 2024). Other priorities of the school system may take precedence, reducing the payoff from their performance. This does not sit well with most parents, who see it as public schools’ responsibility to encourage and reward their children’s talent and hard work. Democrats have been hurt by their diminishing association with what parents care about the most.

Getting Their Groove Back

In light of all this, is it possible for Democrats to regain their mojo on education during the 2024 election cycle? I think it is, though it will require changing their approach considerably from current practices. And it’s worth doing so. Even if education is not a central issue in the presidential contest, it is sure to loom large in many congressional, gubernatorial, and state legislative races.

Here’s how Democrats can decisively change their current image on education and rebuild their advantage on the issue.

Get ideology, whether from the Left or Right, out of schools.Voters are sick of the culture wars around schools. Overwhelmingly, they just want children to get a good education based on standard academic competencies, not instruction in a politically inflected worldview. Democrats must assure voters that the former is their number-one priority. Just as they oppose attempts from the Right to inject their ideology into schools by restricting critical discussion of American history and society, so they must also oppose efforts by those on the Left to impose their views on curricula and analysis of social issues. Neither is appropriate. The job of schools is to give students the tools to make informed judgments, not tell them what those judgments should be.

Articulating this point would signal to voters that Democratic politicians understand what the real priorities of schools should be. But they shouldn’t leave it at that. They should advocate the addition of something positive to schools—that is, to “teach kids what it means to be an American,” in the words of Albert Shanker, the pathbreaking president of the American Federation of Teachers in the late 20th century.

By doing so, Democrats could dissociate themselves from the jaundiced and divisive attitudes of many progressive activists and embrace instead an approach emphasizing what students have in common as Americans. As education scholar Richard Kahlenbergwrites, civics instruction in public schools should embrace (or get back to) teaching

the core of the American Creed: the veneration of liberty and equality promised by the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution…The Declaration and Constitution provide, as the Fordham Institute notes, “a common framework for resolving our differences even as we respect them.”… In emphasizing America’s distinctive system of governance, students can appreciate a shared American identity focused on shared values that counters both right-wing white identity politics that sees only white Christians as “real Americans” and left-wing race essentialism that sees a person’s race, ethnicity, gender, and religion as far more important than what citizens have in common as Americans.

Maintain high achievement standards for all groups, even while seeking to close racial disparities. The Democrats have a merit problem, and that has infected their approach to schools and schooling. The traditional Democratic theory of the case ran like this: discrimination should be opposed and dismantled and resources provided to the disadvantaged so that everyone can fairly compete and achieve. Those who were meritorious would be rewarded; those who weren’t would not be.

Democrats have lost interest in the last part of their case, and that abandonment undermines their whole theory. Merit and objective measures of achievement are now viewed with suspicion as the outcomes of a hopelessly corrupt system, so rewards should instead be allocated on the basis of various criteria allegedly related to social justice. Instead of dismantling discrimination and providing assistance so that more people have the opportunity to acquire merit, the real solution is to worry less about merit and more about equal outcomes—“equity” in the parlance of our times.

But here’s what ordinary voters believe: “Racial achievement gaps are bad and we should seek to close them. However, they are not due just to racism, and standards of high achievement should be maintained for people of all races.” This statement was tested in a nationwide poll of more than 18,000 registered voters by RMG Research and elicited 74 percent agreement versus a mere 16 percent disagreement. In Wisconsin, the statement generated agreement by 91 percent of Republicans and 64 percent of Democrats.

Democratic politicians should fearlessly endorse this statement and assure voters that they are all about high standards, high achievement, and how they go together in successful schooling. Democrats should forthrightly oppose the watering down of academic standards in the name of equity and defend elite programs based on academic merit and rigorous tests. The latter is particularly important for reaching Asian voters and stopping the ongoing decline in their support for Democrats.

Provide more choice within the public school system. Public schools have been losing students lately to private schools and homeschooling, as misplaced priorities and academic failures in many public schools have some parents heading for the exits. That typically means they aren’t happy with the public school their child is assigned to. An obvious way to mitigate this problem is simply to give parents more choice of where they can send their child to school, through both more options within the local school system and a wider array of charter schools.

Read more…

Former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for President. The video:

Cheney, whose father, former Vice President Dick Cheney has also endorsed Harris, is the most recent Republican leader to endorse Harris for President. As Andrew Feinberg writes at The Independent:

Other former Republican elected officials who have endorsed Harris include former Illinois Representative Adam Kinzinger, who served with Liz Cheney on the House January 6 committee, and former Republican senators Jeff Flake of Arizona and Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas.

But the ranks of former GOP diehards who’ve thrown support behind Harris goes beyond former elected officials.

In September, more than 200 former staffers for Republican presidential candidates — including former presidents George HW Bush and George W Bush, Utah Senator Mitt Romney and the late Arizona Senator John McCain — issued an open letter calling on  “moderate Republicans and conservative independents” to join them in backing the Democratic candidate against Trump, calling the ex-president’s potential return to the White House “simply untenable.”

Numerous officials who served in the Trump administration have endorsed Harris or have declined to endorse Trump’s third bid for the presidency on the grounds that he is unfit to serve because of his disregard for the US constitution.

At the only debate between Trump and Harris in September, two top Trump White House officials — ex-communications director Anthony Scaramucci and former vice presidential homeland security adviser Olivia Troye served as surrogates for the vice president.

Four more ex-Trump White House staffers — Alyssa Farah Griffin, Cassidy Hutchinson and Sarah Matthews — have also endorsed Harris this year, and all three are scheduled to join Cheney in campaigning for the vice president at an event in Pennsylvania next week.

It was a good day for Harris, who also picked up the endorsement of one of America’s most prestigious magazines, The New Yorker. The NYer endorsement said in part:

….For nine years, Donald Trump has represented an ongoing assault on the stability, the nerves, and the nature of the United States. As President, he amplified some of the ugliest currents in our political culture: nativism, racism, misogyny, indifference to the disadvantaged, amoral isolationism. His narcissism and casual cruelty, his contempt for the truth, have contaminated public life. As Commander-in-Chief, he ridiculed the valor of fallen soldiers, he threatened to unravel the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and he emboldened autocrats everywhere, including Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Viktor Orbán. When Trump lost to Joe Biden, in 2020, he tried every means possible to deny the will of the electorate and helped incite a violent insurrection on Capitol Hill.

Trump is a menacing presence in American life, and most of his former associates know it. Of his forty-two former Cabinet secretaries, only half have endorsed him. More than two hundred staffers for four previous Republican Presidents and Presidential candidates have endorsed the Democratic ticket. High-ranking officials who once surrounded Trump—including former Vice-President Mike Pence, former Defense Secretaries Jim Mattis and Mark Esper, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the former chief of staff John Kelly, the former national-security advisers John Bolton and H. R. McMaster, and the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley—regard him as unfit, a threat to national security…..

….Harris deserves enormous credit for stepping fearlessly into the role that fate has dealt her. In the face of a malign opponent, she has behaved with poise, conviction, and intelligence. Of course, her ability to carry out her policy ambitions would improve immeasurably with the election of Democratic majorities in the House and the Senate. But, whatever the circumstances, her positions on the critical issues are rational, undergirded by a basic sense of decency, and often compelling.

More endorsements of Harris for President by Republicans are expected in the weeks ahead.

The following article,  “‘An indispensable weapon’: Harris mobilizes diverse labor force in the Sun Belt: Democrats are tapping into the organizational strength of unions with more women and people of color in key states such as Arizona and Nevada” by Natasha Korecki is cross-posted from nbcnews.com:

President Joe Biden has often proclaimed that he is the most pro-union president in history, a declaration that Democrats often tied to his appeal to white working-class voters in the Midwest.

Now serving as the party’s standard-bearer, Vice President Kamala Harris is building her own coalition by mobilizing a more diverse and expansive labor force in a different part of the country.

Harris is tapping into the organizational strength of a network of union groups that have a significant membership of women and people of color in the Sun Belt, a battleground region Democrats are aiming to keep out of former President Donald Trump’s column this fall.

“There’s no one that can organize quite like labor,” Harris campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said. “Having that powerhouse of an organizing machine in concert with our teams in all of our battleground states has been a really important effort that we’ve been building to date and will continue as we head into early vote and get-out-the-vote efforts.”

Workers with the Service Employees International Union, the Culinary Workers Union and the AFL-CIO are among the groups who labor leaders say have become especially energized since Harris ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket this summer. Hotel workers, health care workers, janitors, airport workers and security officers are among the employees these groups represent. The SEIU alone has around 2 million members nationally, and 60% of them are women and two-thirds are people of color, according to the group.

“It’s a special moment for our members, particularly when we think about women of color, who often feel unseen, who often feel undervalued, disrespected, demeaned,” SEIU President April Verrett said. “It really is a special moment where our members can see themselves reflected in a woman who has been their champion for a long time, being able to be the leader of this country.”

That appeal has the potential to give Harris a critical boost in the closing months of the campaign, providing her with a faithful army poised to connect with the kind of constituencies she is trying to reach, including low-propensity Latino and Black voters.

All together, labor leaders predict thousands of union members will deploy to swing states to knock on doors and work phone banks. Large groups are expected to travel from blue states such as California, Illinois and New York to crucial battlegrounds such as Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina.

Having workers vouch for Harris could help Democrats’ efforts to battle against Trump’s messaging on the economy, an issue on which most polls show him with an edge as he’s seized on inflation and high costs.

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

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. What American voters want is more fossil fuels. Shocking, no? But it’s true. In a little-noticed result from the latest New York Times/Siena poll, two-thirds of likely voters said they supported a policy of “increasing domestic production of fossil fuels such as oil and gas.” Two-thirds!

Support for increasing fossil fuel production is particularly strong among working-class (noncollege) voters: 72 percent of these voters back such a policy. Support is even higher among white working-class voters (77 percent). But remarkably, support is also strong among many demographics where one would think, based on conventional wisdom, one would likely see opposition. For example, 63 percent of voters under 30 said they wanted more oil and gas production, as did 58 percent of white college graduate voters and college voters overall. Indeed, across all demographics reported by the NYT survey—all racial groups, all education groups, all regions (midwest, northeast, south, west) and all neighborhood types (city, suburb, rural/small town)—net support (total support minus total oppose) was at least 15 points and usually much higher. Now that’s popularity.

No wonder Harris, in her recent debate with Trump, touted her administration’s record in achieving record domestic production of fossil fuels:

I will not ban fracking. I have not banned fracking as Vice President of the United States. And, in fact, I was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases for fracking. My position is that we have got to invest in diverse sources of energy…We have had the largest increase in domestic oil production in history…I am proud that as vice president over the last four years….we have…increased domestic gas production to historic levels.

This is a far cry from Joe Biden famously pledging on the campaign trail in 2019:

I want you to look at my eyes. I guarantee you. I guarantee you. We’re going to end fossil fuel.

Or Kamala Harris equally famously saying:

I’m committed to passing a Green New Deal, creating clean jobs and finally putting an end to fracking once and for all.

My, how things do change! But this reflects two fundamental facts that Harris and her party are belatedly facing up to. First, despite the strenuous Democratic rhetoric about the climate crisis, “net zero,” rapidly eliminating fossil fuels and ramping up renewables, energy realities have forced them to preside over record levels of oil production (both on federal lands and overall), record natural gas production, and record LNG exports. As Roger Pielke, Jr. documents, Joe Biden, fully supported by his vice president, really has been the “drill, baby, drill” president!

Second, as far as voters are concerned, this record fossil fuel production has been a feature, not a bug, of the Biden-Harris administration. The NYT poll result is just the latest in a series of findings that American voters, especially working-class voters, are not disturbed, but rather delighted, with this record production. Therefore, it makes all the political sense in the world for Harris to start owning up to this in an attempt to get credit for something voters view positively and reassure these voters that she is not seeking, as Biden put it, “to end fossil fuel.”

Of course, it’s one thing to finally admit to this record production and back off from banning fracking, but quite another to fully embrace energy abundance, rather than climate action, as the guiding star of energy policy. Findings from a recent CBS News poll of Pennsylvania voters, tied between Harris and Trump, underscore just how important an energy abundance approach could be for Harris. In this poll, climate change was rated one of the least salient issues motivating voter choice for president. Just 37 percent said climate would be a “major factor” in their vote for president. This was a massive 45 points below the salience rating for the economy, the most important issue, which 82 percent of voters said would be a major factor in their decision. The divergence in importance is even starker among white working-class voters, where Harris has been struggling: 85 percent of these voters said the economy will be a major factor in their vote, compared to 30 percent who said climate change will be.

In the same poll, white working-class voters were very dubious about their economic progress since before the Covid pandemic—a period of course when Trump was president. By an overwhelming 57 to 13 percent these voters said they are financially worse off, rather than better off, compared to that period. And in subsequent questions about their expectations “for economic opportunities for working-class people and those without college degrees” under both a Harris and Trump administration, white working-class voters decisively favored Trump on the provision of economic opportunities. They thought  Harris would actually make such opportunities worse rather than better by 49 to 27 percent, while Trump was viewed as making economic opportunities for the working class better rather than worse by 53 to 32 percent.

These data argue strongly for a robust embrace of energy abundance by Harris. As liberal economist Noah Smith has argued, Harris’s recent words are a good first step but she:

…needs to go much further. Instead of simply promising not to ban fracking, she should promise to expand it. And she should be loud and unambiguous about trumpeting what Biden has already accomplished in this regard.

Unlike climate action, energy abundance has an unambiguous relationship to economic advancement and prosperity for the working class, which of course is paramount for these voters. Maybe it is time to give these voters what they want instead of what Democrats think they should want.

More generally, it is becoming clearer and clearer that climate change policy, to be politically successful, must be embedded in and subordinate to, the goal of energy abundance and prosperity. In other words, as energy abundance is pursued, efforts to mitigate climate change should be undertaken within those constraints, rather than pursuing climate change as the paramount goal and trying for energy abundance within those limits. There’s a big difference and only the former approach offers a viable way forward for the left, both here and abroad.

Relatedly, it is high time for Democrats and the left to develop a more realistic understanding of what is feasible in terms of climate action. There is no point in setting goals and timelines that cannot be met. Discarding these will make it much easier to pursue an energy abundance path that also includes reasonable progress on reducing emissions over what will undoubtedly be a very lengthy time period.

As the polymath, Vaclav Smil, universally acknowledged to be one of the world’s premier energy experts, has observed:

[W]e are a fossil-fueled civilization whose technical and scientific advances, quality of life and prosperity rest on the combustion of huge quantities of fossil carbon, and we cannot simply walk away from this critical determinant of our fortunes in a few decades, never mind years. Complete decarbonization of the global economy by 2050 is now conceivable only at the cost of unthinkable global economic retreat…

And as he tartly observes re the 2050 deadline:

People toss out these deadlines without any reflection on the scale and the complexity of the problem…What’s the point of setting goals which cannot be achieved? People call it aspirational. I call it delusional.

Getting in touch with these realities should help Democrats get comfortable with the goal of energy abundance and understand how that goal does not represent the betrayal of a sacred moral cause to save the earth. However much Democrats may wish it not to be so, grand energy transitions take time—many, many decades. Absent drastically lowered living standards and/or radical social disruption, this transition will be no different. Fossil fuels, and the support they provide to the high living standards enjoyed by the advanced world and aspired to by everyone else, will be with us for a very long time.

That’s what voters want. And it’s what Democrats should want too. Let’s hope the Harris campaign is starting to walk down that road.

From “Pennsylvania, the crucial battleground in America’s election” at The Economist:

“On july 21st Matt Roan, chair of the Cumberland County Democratic Committee, hosted a meeting with volunteers. The event took a turn when Mr Roan stopped to read a statement from Joe Biden announcing his departure from the presidential race. “There was this sort of sense of sadness—and then immediate hope,” Mr Roan recalls in his office, which overlooks the Pennsylvania state capitol. The activist speaks highly of Mr Biden but acknowledged that “things were not looking good” at the time. The rise of Kamala Harris attracted a surge of volunteers to a county that favoured Donald Trump by around 18 points in 2016 but only 11 points in 2020. If such improvements hold there and in other areas like it, Ms Harris would probably win the state and the presidency.

Both campaigns see Pennsylvania as a fulcrum of the 2024 election, and for good reason. The Economist’s forecast model suggests that the state—with its 19 electoral-college votes, the most of any swing state—is the tipping-point in 27% of the model’s updated simulations, meaning it decides the election more often than any other state. Mr Trump wins only 7% of the time when he loses the Keystone State. Indeed, he narrowly won Pennsylvania in 2016, and then he lost by 80,000 votes out of nearly 7m cast in his unsuccessful re-election bid four years later.

….The messaging war is a study in contrasts. Ms Harris seeks to define herself in uplifting ads while warning in others about Mr Trump’s effect on the economy, reproductive rights and American democracy. As one of the most famous people in human history, Mr Trump doesn’t spend time introducing himself to voters. His ads and rhetoric relentlessly seek to paint Ms Harris as an out-of-touch leftist responsible for inflation and migrant crime. Such fear campaigns have found success before in presidential elections, but J.J. Abbott, a Pennsylvania Democratic strategist, argues that “there may be some limitations on how much these dark, brutal ads on those issues may work” this time, citing similar unsuccessful efforts mounted by Republicans in recent statewide races.

Mr Trump has also drawn attention to Ms Harris’s past opposition to natural-gas fracking, an important industry in western Pennsylvania, which she now supports. The issue may be top of mind in those energy-producing regions but elsewhere voters often express indifference. “It is not a slam dunk for any politician…to think that Pennsylvania is monolithically in support of further energy exploration,” says Stephen Bloom, vice-president of the Commonwealth Foundation, a centre-right think-tank. “No one has ever said the word fracking to me” while campaigning, says Stella Sexton, vice-chair of the Lancaster County Democratic Committee. She says she hears more about the cost of living and reproductive rights.

For many years a blue state that also elected moderate Republicans, Pennsylvania voted about three points to the right of the country in 2016 and 2020. Since 2008, the percentage of voters registered as Democrats has declined while the share of Republicans has grown. Republican registrations outpaced Democratic ones this year until Ms Harris entered the race (see charts). Democrats argue that some of the Republican gains have been offset by a rise in left-leaning independents.

Harris supporters are particularly proud of their ground game. The campaign has over 350 staffers across 50 offices in Pennsylvania, 16 of which are located in rural areas that Mr Trump won by double digits four years ago. The idea is to chip away at support in heavily Republican areas even when Ms Harris doesn’t have a chance to win outright. “They’re play-acting at trying to do better in the rural counties,” argues Mark Harris, a Republican strategist. “This will once again be an extraordinarily divided election between densely populated suburbs versus exurban and rural communities.”

Republican efforts appear more scattered, with a constellation of groups working on turnout efforts. Postal voting is a priority. In 2020 Mr Trump actively discouraged mail-in voting but has since shifted his rhetoric, albeit inconsistently, in the hope of cutting down the Democrats’ advantage.

If Mr Trump wins Pennsylvania, it will show that he put together a coalition of low-propensity white working-class voters and religious voters, says Ryan Shafik, a Republican strategist, and would probably also have attracted “a good amount of newer minority voters”. Ms Harris will have to reassemble Mr Biden’s coalition built on strength among urban and minority voters, as well as continuing to make inroads into the state’s suburbs. Her current lead in Pennsylvania, according to a polling average maintained by FiveThirtyEight, a data-journalism outfit, is less than two percentage points. For all the money pouring in, the race remains a virtual tie.”

The following article, “US Working Class ‘Overwhelmingly to the Left’ of the Rich on Economic Policy: Survey – The new research, said one union leader, provides Democrats with a “clear roadmap to winning back” working-class voters,” by Jake Johnson, is cross-posted from commondreams.org:

Polling results released Monday show that working-class voters in the United States are broadly more supportive of major progressive agenda items than those in the middle and upper classes, offering Democratic political candidates what one union leader called a “clear roadmap to winning back voters we’ve lost to a GOP that’s growing more extreme by the day.”

The survey of over 5,000 registered U.S. voters was conducted last August by HIT Strategies and Working Families Power (WFP), a sibling organization of the Working Families Party.

The poll found that a majority of working-class voters either somewhat or totally support a national jobs guarantee (69%), a “public healthcare program like Medicare for All” (64%), a crackdown on rent-gouging landlords (74%), and tuition-free public colleges and universities (63%), landing them “overwhelmingly to the left” of higher-income segments of the population.

Upper- and middle-class respondents were far less likely to support the above policy proposals. Just 39% of upper-class voters surveyed, for instance, said they completely or somewhat support “a nationwide jobs guarantee” that would provide “stable, good-paying work for everyone who needs it.”

WFP found that the “differences between classes are much smaller on social and cultural questions compared to economic fairness questions, and they do not uniformly point to a working class that is more socially and culturally conservative than the middle and upper classes.”

The poll results, said WFP, call into question the belief that “the greater social and cultural conservatism of the working class explains the working class’ drift away from the Democrats and towards the GOP.”

“The working class is not a monolithic group that wears a hard hat and hangs out in diners.”

Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, said the new survey results underscore that “the working class is not a monolithic group that wears a hard hat and hangs out in diners.”

“It’s a multiracial, multigenerational group that isn’t confined to a single geography, and it includes a tremendous diversity of views,” said Mitchell, suggesting that Democrats learn from the results to defeat former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, in November.

“We need our strategy and messaging to reflect that reality,” he said. “That’s how we defeat Trump’s MAGA movement and win back working-class voters.”

The new report identifies seven “clusters” within the U.S. working class that it labels as Next Gen Left, Mainstream Liberals, Tuned Out Persuadables, Anti-Woke Traditionalists, Secure Suburban Moderates, Diverse Disaffected Conservatives, and Core MAGA—and the survey data shows “large differences” between them that help explain disparate voting behaviors. For example, just 30% of the Next Gen Left cluster—which is disproportionately young and strongly progressive—are homeowners compared to 75% of the Core MAGA cluster, which has what WFP described as “down-the-line right-wing views.”

The survey results were released in the heat of an election campaign that has seen the GOP—spearheaded by Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio)—cast itself as “the party of working-class people.” Democrats, whose 2024 White House ticket is backed by major U.S. unions, have lost support from working-class voters in recent years while making gains among more affluent segments of the population.

WFP said that its findings “do not contradict the widespread belief that support for Democrats is stronger among middle- and upper-class voters than it is among working-class voters,” but they do “strongly call into question the explanation most commonly advanced for those political alignments, namely that the working class is simply more socially and culturally conservative than the middle and upper classes.”

“Our study shows that the most salient differences in worldview between classes revolve around questions of class, distribution, and economic fairness, where the working class is well to the left of the middle and upper classes, and regression analysis strongly suggests that the further left a voter is on these questions of class, distribution, and economic fairness, the less likely they were to have supported Donald Trump in 2020,” said WFP.

The new analysis was accompanied by what the Working Families Party described as a “practical handbook to winning the working class,” which makes up roughly 63% of the U.S. electorate.

Messaging that resonated most strongly across segments of the working class, according to the handbook, emphasized class conflict and the “need to elect Democrats who will fight for working people to keep the money they earn by cracking down on price-gouging at the grocery store, making wealthy tax cheats pay their fair share, and lowering the costs of prescription drugs.”

Derrick Osobase, vice president of Communications Workers of American District 6, said in a statement Monday that Democrats must embrace and act on the new findings if they hope to reverse their recent losses among the nation’s working class.

“During a time of record high corporate profits,” said Osobase, “Democrats need to show working-class voters that we have their backs and will fight for an economy that works for all of us.”

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter and co-author with John B. Judis of “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?,” is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

Democrats are enjoying the afterglow of a successful debate by their candidate against Trump. Harris’s game plan of goading Trump into irrelevant and defensive tangents worked as intended. She was the “winner” of the debate to the extent these designations still have any meaning.

But the race is still exceedingly tight….and seems likely to remain so. And there’s another part of her game plan—or what should be her game plan—that does not appear to be working out so well.

I refer to the need to boost support among the working class, which remains a serious weak spot for the Democrats and Harris. The latest New York Times/Siena poll has Harris trailing Trump among working-class (noncollege) voters by 17 points. That’s identical to Biden’s working-class deficit in the last NYT poll before he dropped out and way worse than Biden’s deficit among these voters in 2020—a mere 4 points.

More detailed NYT results reveal that Harris, relative to Biden in 2020, is doing 10 points worse among white working-class voters and 18 points worse among nonwhite working-class voters. The latter is despite considerable improvement for Harris among this demographic since Biden dropped out.

There’s no sugarcoating it—this is a serious problem for the Democrats. College-educated America may be delighted with candidate Harris but working-class America clearly is not. And there are a lot more working-class than college-educated Americans. Remember that 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 seven key swing states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, 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.

The NYT data demonstrate how far apart the viewpoints of working-class and college-educated America are today. Consider the following class gaps in perception:

1. Biden’s net job approval (approval minus disapproval) is -34 among working-class voters but +8 among college-educated voters (class gap = 42 points).

2. Trump’s net favorability among working-class voters is +10; among college voters it’s -29 (class gap = 39 points). Harris’ favorability is -16 among the working class but +16 among the college-educated (class gap = 32 points).

3. While both working-class and college-educated voters have negative views about the state of the economy (only fair or poor), working-class voters are far more negative. Their net rating (excellent or good minus only fair or poor) is -67 compared to –35 among the college-educated (class gap = 32 points).

4. When asked which candidate could do a better job handling the issue they care about the most, working-class voters prefer Trump over Harris by 20 points while college voters prefer Harris over Trump by 15 points (class gap = 35 points).

5. The same question was asked about handling the economy specifically. Working-class voters think Trump would do a better job by 27 points; college-educated voters prefer Harris by 9 points (class gap = 36 points).

6. On handling immigration, working-class voters prefer Trump by 24 points while college voters prefer Harris by 11 points (class gap = 35 points).

7. And on democracy, working-class voters think Trump would do a better job handling the issue by 9 points, while college-educated voters overwhelmingly prefer Harris by 28 points (class gap = 37 points).

8. The poll asked separately for Trump and Harris whether they would be a safe or risky choice for the country. Working-class voters’ net assessment (safe minus risky) for Trump is +5 while for college grads it is -33 (class gap = 38 points). For Harris, her net safe/risky among the working class is -21 compared to +16 among college graduates (class gap = 37 points).

9. Finally, voters were asked whether the next president should represent a major change or minor change (or no change at all) from Biden. Almost all voters wanted at least some change but working-class voters were far more likely to want major change. Working-class voters’ net change preference (major minus minor change) was +46 but among college voters it was just +1 (class gap = 45 points).

These are rather daunting figures but of course they don’t mean Harris can’t win. Her performance among college-educated voters is very strong and that is keeping her afloat right now in this exceedingly tight right race. Perhaps her debate performance will improve her standing among working-class voters, which could pull her out of her current danger zone.

But there are clearly reasons for concern. Besides the data noted above, polling right after the debate found that Harris did little to improve voter confidence in her ability to handle the all-important issue of the economy. A CNN flash poll among debate-watchers found that before the debate voters trusted Trump over Harris on the economy by 16 points and after the debate they favored Trump by….20  points. Furthermore, if you look at the cross-tabs, working-class voters before the debate favored Trump over Harris to handle the economy by 29 points, an advantage for Trump which increased slightly to 32 points after the debate. Not exactly what the Harris campaign had in mind.

So, as the Harris campaign basks in a post-debate wave of favorable coverage and perhaps even a bump in the polls, they would do well to remember that working-class Americans can contain their enthusiasm. The Democratic Achilles’ heel remains and could still deliver a second term for Trump.

The power of celebrity endorsements of presidential candidates is often overstated in our entertainment-crazed culture, and no one has invented a credible metric for gauging their impact. But Kamala Harris should nonetheless be very happy about racking up strong statements of support from two super-stars.

“The link Taylor Swift shared to vote.gov after announcing her support for Vice President Kamala Harris and encouraging others to register to vote had nearly 406,000 people click on it—emphasizing the impact the billionaire pop star’s endorsement could have on the election. In the 24-hour period Swift’s Instagram story linking to vote.gov was live, there were a total of 405,999 visitors referred to the site from her custom link, Rachel Davis, a spokesperson for the General Services Administration, told Forbes in a statement Thursday,” Molly Bohannon reports at Forbes. Further, “Swift endorsed Harris after Tuesday’s debate between the vice president and former President Donald Trump, telling her 284 million followers on Instagram that Harris “fights for the rights and causes I believe [in].”

No telling how many of those visitors to vote.gov actually registered to vote, or how many were already going to vote for Harris anyway. But there can be no doubt that Swift has wide influence, particularly with young women in rural America. The Trump campaign must be livid about it. There may be more bad news for them to come, since Swift will surely be asked for follow-up comments.

The second superstar endorsement just came from Linda Ronstadt, who is one of the most admired and respected Americans of Mexican heritage. According to Daniel Gonzales of azcentral.com, “About 2 million Latinos in Arizona are of Mexican origin…. What’s more, Latinos of Mexican origin make up more than 25% of the state’s total population.”

Walter Einenkel reports at Daily Kos: “Legendary musician Linda Ronstadt is not at all happy that Donald Trump is holding a rally at a venue that carries her name in Tucson, Arizona. The “You’re No Good” singer released a statement on Wednesday endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris, while wiping the floor with Trump.”

Einenkel adds, “The bad news for the MAGA movement is that the list of legendary artists who can’t stand even a tangential association with Trump is legion. The list of musicians who have demanded he cease from using their music reads like a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame docket.”