Not to rain on the big parade, but if Kamala Harris is to have even a shred of a chance to win in November, she needs some tough criticism as soon as possible to help prepare her campaign for  attacks. Michael Baharaeen steps up to meet this challenge in his post, “The Kamala Gamble” at The Liberal Patriot. As Baharaeen writes:

Joe Biden rocked American politics over the weekend with the news that he will be the first incumbent president since Lyndon Johnson in 1968 not to seek a second term. The obstacles against him—stubbornly weak polling numbers, a hostile media, defections from his own party, dried-up fundraising—ultimately proved to be too much to overcome. In his announcement, he endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, to be his successor.

Harris is not expected to face much serious competition for the nomination from other prominent Democrats, meaning she will likely lead the party’s ticket heading into November. But while shaking things up may offer Democrats a new lease on life, it’s far from clear that Harris is the strongest candidate to take on Trump. Democrats should consider her many vulnerabilities carefully before coronating her at their convention next month.

First, Harris has popularity issues of her own. Part of the argument for Democrats moving on from Biden was his dreary poll numbers—his approval rating had been underwater for nearly three years with no sign that it would ever bounce back. He has also consistently trailed Trump in head-to-head match-ups, which signifies a severe change from 2020, when he never trailed at all.

But Harris hasn’t fared any better than Biden. Not only has her own approval tracked very closely with Biden’s, sinking into negative territory in mid-2021, but she has also never cracked 50 percent (while Biden at least sat in the mid-50s for the first several months of his presidency). This is a good indication that Harris has been less popular than Biden from the start. And, at least in initial surveys, Harris doesn’t appear to do much better against Trump than Biden did, though there is still time for that to change. Suffice it to say, she will have to work to endear herself more to a skeptical public if she becomes the Democratic nominee.

Second, Harris has a concerning electoral track record. Her first election to a major office came in 2010. That cycle, she won a close race for California’s open attorney general seat, defeating her Republican opponent by less than one point, 46.1–45.3. Though some might be tempted to attribute this to running in a difficult midterm election, except every other California Democrat in a statewide contest significantly outperformed Harris, earning at least 50 percent of the vote and winning their races by double digits.

However, her presidential campaign was perhaps an even bigger disappointment. Despite being a media darling for much of the primary race, her campaign flamed out before the first voters had the chance to cast their ballots in the Iowa caucuses. Some observers attributed this to the lack of a coherent message or reason for her candidacy—and the fact that her campaign became beset by infighting.

Another likely reason was her desire to placate her party’s activist base. For example, rather than touting her accomplishments as a prosecutor and explaining her pragmatic vision for criminal justice, Harris ran from her record, which some on the left viewed as too punitive. She also endorsed some deeply unpopular proposals, including the decriminalization of border crossings and the Green New Deal. All this may have stemmed from the fact that Harris surrounded herself with campaign staffers who seemed to embrace the idea that “Twitter is real life,” and that what progressive voices on the platform espoused was representative of the broader public’s views.¹

If Harris wants to shed any part of her past as she looks for ways to appeal to median voters in swing states, she might consider rebuking these lefty fads in favor of a message that highlights her track record of prosecuting criminals—something that could set up a favorable contrast against Trump.

Third, although Biden will no longer be on the ticket, Harris will be forced to defend his administration, including its less popular facets. In 2021, Biden tasked Harris with the thankless job of trying to help resolve the crisis at the southern border. But far from successfully addressing the “root causes” of the problems there, they grew exponentially worse in the following years, with migrant encounters hitting a record high by the end of 2023. Recent polling has shown that voters trusted Trump over Biden to handle issues related to immigration and inflation, which are top-of-mind for many of them. Switching to that president’s second-in-command isn’t likely to immediately assuage voters’ concerns about Democrats’ ability to handle either one.

Fourth, while the latest polls have shown Harris mirroring Biden’s statistical tie against Trump nationally, this alone doesn’t leave Democrats in a particularly strong position. Consider: in 2020, when Biden defeated Trump, his national polling heading into the election was 8.4 points. Ultimately, Biden won by a more modest 4.5 points. As we know, though, presidential elections are decided not by national popular vote but the Electoral College, and Biden’s win at that level was actually extremely narrow. So simply tying Trump in the national polls still reflects a massive shift relative to 2020 and puts an Electoral College win very much within reach for him. To overcome that, Harris would need to move the needle back in the other direction and probably build a lead of at least a couple points to have a chance of winning.

Finally, in addition to issues related to herself and the Biden administration, Harris will be contending with broader problems that the Democratic Party has not fully reckoned with. For instance, survey data indicates that they have experienced substantial attrition among black and Hispanic voters, which may at least partially explain why important swing states like Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada have shifted in Trump’s favor this time around. Trump has also made more overt overtures to union voters, a longtime Democratic constituency that has shown cracks in recent years—and that could put other battlegrounds like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in play.

Democrats have also lost ground with rural voters, working-class voters, and even some young voters, a group that hasn’t been competitive in a generation. While Biden appeared to be attracting higher levels of support among seniors, a higher-turnout bloc that has historically leaned Republican, it’s not clear that those voters would stick with another Democratic nominee.

Some of these are longer-term issues that the party has been contending with since at least the start of the Trump era. Some may be specific to this cycle: third-party candidates like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., for example, are disproportionately attracting younger and non-white voters. There is also early evidence that Harris may perform better than Biden with some of these groups and have more success pulling them back into the fold. Still, she’ll be confronting these bigger coalitional issues with less than four months to go in the campaign.

Democrats’ best case for Harris is that she is a wild card: neither they nor Trump’s campaign know how her candidacy would shake up the race. If voters’ views of her aren’t as entrenched as they are for Biden, she might have a slightly higher ceiling. Given the opportunity to prosecute the case against Trump, she is also likely to be far stronger and more effective than Biden, which could level the playing field more in Democrats’ favor. And polls show that many Americans want someone, anyone, who isn’t Biden or Trump. Maybe all that is enough for someone like Harris to succeed.

Even so, a simple swap of candidates isn’t guaranteed to immediately put Democrats in a stronger position than they’re in today. Harris will need to distance herself from the perceived setbacks of the Biden administration, come into her own as a candidate, and develop a campaign pitch that will appeal to the handful of voters in swing states who will decide this election—all in the next three months (or less). It will still be an uphill fight, but if she can achieve these things, she might yet be able to pull out the win.

From “What do the polls say about a Harris vs. Trump matchup?” by Geoffrey Skelley and G. Elliot Morris at 538, via abcnews.com:

“While Harris consistently polled worse than Biden did against Trump before the debate, since then she’s sometimes polled ahead of Biden. In fact, Harris fared the same as or better than Biden in close to half of the post-debate polls: A near-bell curvedistribution in the differences between their margins in these polls is centered close to 0, suggesting little to no meaningful difference between how Harris and Biden performed.”

“And it seems that Harris’s stronger showing in these later polls is more about her having made up distance on Trump than Biden losing ground. Across nine national surveys before the debate, Harris did about 3 points worse than Biden on average, but in 25 post-debate polls, she’s only performed about 1 point worse than Biden on average — even as Biden’s margin in the same set of post-debate surveys also got slightly better.* Harris also improved her showing across the swing states, based on a very limited sampling of polls.

“To be clear, this doesn’t mean that Harris will run notably stronger than Biden, only that she could. Her post-debate polls against Trump relative to Biden have a great deal of variance, ranging from around 8 points worse to 4 points better than how Biden performed. Based on an average of 26 national polls conducted over the past month, Harris trailed Trump by 4.5 points nationally compared with a smaller 3-point deficit for Biden.

“Polling at the state level is limited at this point, with no more than four polls conducted in the past month in any battleground state. But based on the state-level polls we do have, things don’t look any more rosy for Harris there, as she lags behind Biden’s margin against Trump in the key battleground states for which we have data. In our aggregate of this limited set of polls, Harris trailed Trump by around 3 points in Wisconsin (Biden trailed by about 2 points), by almost 5 in Pennsylvania (Biden was down around 4) and by 5 in Michigan (Biden was behind by about 2). This raises the possibility that she could have a harder time than Biden winning the Electoral College and thus the election.

“Still, if Harris does end up as her party’s nominee, Democrats will hope that her polling improves as she mounts an active campaign against Trump. For one thing, Harris could experience something of a quasi-convention bounce in the wake of the coverage of Biden’s departure and her now-active candidacy. Moreover, until Sunday, any poll that tested Harris (or any other possible Democratic candidate) had been hypothetical for survey respondents. That is not the case anymore, which could at least partially reset the race and shift how some voters are thinking about it moving forward. For Democrats, Harris could represent an escape hatch from the doom spiral of negative media coverage that had hounded Biden following the June debate, as well as the heightened concerns about his capacity to serve at 81 years old and fears that he could not recover the momentum against Trump.

Skelley and Morris conclude: “If nominated, Harris could absolutely end up losing to Trump — after all, the same post-debate polling that suggested she could do better than Biden also pointed to a potentially lower floor of support. But for Democrats who felt like they were slouching toward defeat in November behind a candidate whom voters were increasingly unenthused by, a Biden alternative could shake up the race, excite the party and give Democrats a chance of rebuilding an anti-Trump coalition that could win.”

There is no telling how long the Republicans’ post-convention bump will last. Nor is there any way to peg the shelf-life of their re-branding as a ‘populist,’ pro-working-class party, which the Vance veep pick is supposed to symbolize.

Republicans appear unified, but only if we choose to ignore the reality that a large group of anti-Trump Republicans still hope to reclaim their party as a legitimate conservative force, instead of a personality cult. One anti-Trump Republican, George Conway, has produced a hard-hitting video. featuring Trump’s own appointees warning about his mental health issues. Here it is:

In “Get a Grip, Democrats. You Can Still Win This: Biden’s not far behind, the economic conditions remain excellent, and a vile assassination attempt in July doesn’t determine November’s outcome,” Bill; Scher writes at Washington Monthly:

It is trite but true to note that a lot can happen over the next three months. We can’t be clairvoyant, but optimism is warranted. Israel and Hamas may soon agree to a ceasefire. Biden’s border crackdown may continue to drive down the number of illegal crossings and relieve pressure on municipalities. Perhaps most importantly, the Federal Reserve may cut interest rates and buoy public perception of the growing economy.

Many Democrats are understandably nervous about how Biden will perform in the campaign’s final weeks, but let’s not forget that Trump may do plenty to rankle swing voters, as he has throughout his political career. It’s not true that Trump always “gets away with it.” If he did, Republicans would have had better electoral performances in 2018, 2020, and 2022.

The brazen attempt by Republicans to deify Trump and claim God intervened to save him from the assassination attempt could well be viewed by swing voters as crass opportunism, especially if the Trump campaign tries to milk the tragedy for months.

Scher is not a ‘Biden only’ supporter, as he explains:

I’ve already made my case that Biden should not only withdraw from the 2024 presidential race but also resign and give President Kamala Harris the best chance to win in November. I stand by it, and I worry that Biden will have more episodes raising questions about his neurological health. There is still time for Biden to withdraw, and any Democrat concerned about his ability to campaign and govern effectively should continue to press the case.

But Scher sees a significant edge for Democrats in terms of campaign muscle:

If the contours of the race remained fixed, its outcome may hinge upon the quality of their two parties’ get-out-the-vote operations. And on this front, Democrats should retain their optimism. As I recently wrote, the Trump campaign has made a reckless bet on the far-right Turning Point network to shoulder much of its GOTV effort despite its nonexistent track record of successful electioneering and its reputation for financial mismanagement.

Biden and the Democrats have a good record to run on, Scher writes:

The fundamentals of the 2024 election remain favorable to Democrats. Gross Domestic Product is growing. Unemployment is low. Wages have been beating inflation for more than a year. American soldiers aren’t fighting and dying in an unpopular ground war. For over a century, incumbent parties in power have won American elections under these conditions.

Scher concludes:

Yes, we are facing an unusual set of X-factors that could render the lessons of history inoperative. But defeatism guarantees defeat. The Democrats may need to fight more of an uphill battle than necessary, but uphill battles can still be won.

Anything can happen in this crazy political year. There is still time to persuade a critical mass of swing voters in battleground states to honestly compare Biden’s record to that of his opponent. If that happens, all of the bad news of the last month could look like old news in November.

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:

Since the latter part of the 20^th century, the left has had a plan. Well, not really a plan, it just kind of….happened. Call it, to use Thomas Piketty’s term, the Brahmin Left. That is his characterization of Western left parties increasingly bereft of working-class voters and increasingly dominated by highly educated voters and elites. The Brahmin Left has evolved over many decades and certainly includes today’s Democratic Party, Britain’s Labour Party, and the French left. The chart below illustrates this trend.

For Brahmin Left parties, the temptation is great to lean into their emerging strengths and just hope they can retain enough of their working-class base to make the political arithmetic work. That is the natural inclination of the elites and activists who now dominate the parties. But these parties have been increasingly battered by right populist competitors who are bleeding off more and more of the left’s working-class support. That calls the viability of the Brahmin Left model into question. There is a point beyond which the loss of working-class voters cannot be plausibly balanced by increased support among college-educated and professional voters and the model is fatally undermined.

We’re certainly not there yet but we may not be very far away. We have two recent elections in France and the UK to look at and an upcoming one in the United States that provide a real-time update on where we are in this process. Is it a last hurrah for the Brahmin Left or a new stage in the model’s success? Let’s take a look.

France. After a stunning showing for Marine Le Pen’s right populist National Rally (RN) party in the EU parliamentary elections, where her party garnered far and away the most votes, President Macron decided to dissolve the national parliament and call new elections. (His motivations for doing so were complicated and perhaps not completely knowable.)

The result in the first round of France’s two round elections was another triumph for RN. Their alliance took 33 percent of the vote, compared to 28 percent for the New Popular Front (NFP)—a left coalition of Jean-Luc Melenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI), the Socialists, the Communists, and the Greens—and 21 percent for the centrist Ensemble coalition, which includes Macron’s party. In the second round, the RN alliance actually increased its vote share but did not gain the most seats because NFP and Ensemble made a deal to pool their support against National Rally in districts where their candidates were trailing RN. The leftist NFP wound up with 180 seats, the most of any group, despite getting only 26 percent of the popular vote. Macron’s Ensemble got 159 seats with 25 percent of the vote and, bringing up the rear, the RN alliance got a mere 142 seats, despite their 37 percent of the vote. The seat result was a big disappointment for RN even though it represented big gains for them over the previous election.

The demographics of the vote for left and right in the election are instructive. NFP had a classic Brahmin Left profile: they did by far the best of the different political groupings among managers/professionals and those with the highest levels of education. The RN in contrast did by far the best among blue collar and low-level white collar workers and those with the lowest levels of education. Indeed, the RN got an absolute majority (57 percent) of blue collar workers despite the many ways in which the vote was split. In the view of Emile Chabal, an academic specialist in French political history, “the RN can fairly lay claim to being the party of the French working classes.”

So are the French results a big victory for the Brahmin Left? Through the vagaries of the French electoral system and shifting alliances, one could say yes but it does have the air of a last hurrah. The right populists have barely been kept out of power and have considerably increased their overall strength and hold over the French working class. And the prospects for effective governance in France seem very poor. The program of the NFP, the group with the most seats, is ludicrously left-wing and seems on a collision course with the preferences of Macron’s Ensemble coalition, their presumed partners in forming a government. The NFP program includes:

…overturning Macron’s pension, unemployment, education, immigration, police, guaranteed minimum income, and universal national service reforms, as well as his cuts to funding for low-income housing and his merger of French nuclear safety organisations; lowering the retirement age to 60 in the longer-term; implementing price freezes on essential food, energy, and gas; raising the minimum wage to €1,600 per month (representing a 14 percent increase) and personalised housing assistance by 10 percent; moving towards a 32-hour work week for arduous or night shift jobs; conditioning government support for businesses on adherence to environmental, social, and anti-discriminatory regulations; reserving workers one-third of seats on boards of directors; increasing financial transaction taxes; banning bank financing for fossil fuels; nationalising control over water; reforming the generalised social contribution and inheritance taxes (capping the latter), as well as nearly tripling the number of income tax brackets from 5 to 14, to make them more progressive; re-instituting a solidarity tax on wealth “with a climate component”; enacting an exit tax on funds withdrawn from the country; charging a vehicle miles traveled tax on imports; guaranteeing a price floor for agricultural products; cancelling the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement and any future free trade treaties; and forbidding the imports of agricultural products which do not meet domestic social and environmental standards.

Other key NFP proposals included raising the image and salaries of public healthcare, education, justice, and government jobs; strengthening the industrial sector in key strategic areas; establishing the right to menstrual leave; prohibiting new major highway projects; outlawing intensive animal farming and the usage of all PFASs, neonicotinoids, and glyphosate; re-examining the Common Agricultural Policy; providing partial or full government financing for home insulation; creating free public water fountains, showers, and toilets; constructing 200,000 new public housing units per year; requiring mandatory rent control in high-rent areas; introducing proportional representation; removing article 49.3 from the constitution; outlawing the usage of blast balls by riot police; continuing to supply weapons to defend Ukraine; recognising the state of Palestine along with Israel; and demanding compliance with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) order against Israel and ceasing support for Benjamin Netanyahu‘s government.

OK then! It seems a bit much I’d have to say—though I do like the idea of free public water fountains. I mean, who doesn’t like a water fountain? Overall however the common ground between this program and that of the Macronist Ensemble seems close to non-existent. That suggests that it’ll be rocky days ahead for France with these mismatched partners and Macron still reigning as president. That further suggests that the RN, by being in opposition, will be well-positioned to benefit from dissatisfaction with chaotic government and ongoing economic and social problems, growing their working class support even further. The 2027 presidential election looms; the Brahmin Left and Macron’s center may have a hard time pulling off their trick again.

UK. The British election presents us with a different picture. Keir Starmer’s Labour gained a mighty majority, dethroning the massively unpopular Tories after 14 years of Conservative rule. Labour took 412 seats out of a possible 650, their second biggest victory since World War II, while the Tories crashed to their worst performance ever. However, Labour’s popular vote share was only 35 percent, the lowest-ever winning share and actually less than the 40 percent Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour got in 2017. The radical disjuncture between vote share (35 percent) and seat share (63 percent) is possible due to the UK’s multi-party, first past the post electoral system.

Despite Labour’s relatively low vote share, the demographics of Labour support represented a U-turn of sorts from the Brahmin Left playbook. Labour did better than the previous election among non-degree holders while actually losing some ground among degree-holders. This narrowed the education differential of the Labour vote from 42 percent degree/28 percent non-degree to 38 percent degree/33 percent non-degree. That’s quite a shift.

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:

What is the Biden campaign’s theory of the case? They have persistently been running behind Trump for months and most forecasting models currently tip Trump to win the election. A just-released New York Times/Siena poll has Biden behind by 6 points among registered voters and 3 points among likely voters. How are they planning on turning the election in their favor in the coming months?

Naturally, the Biden campaign will seek to put a number of messages into play where they feel they have an advantage. But numerous reports indicate that, above all, they believe emphasizing threats to democracy will the key to victory. Mike Donilon, probably Biden’s closest and most influential advisor, has said that by election day this year:

…the focus will become overwhelming on democracy. I think the biggest images in people’s minds are going to be of January 6th.

Axios quotes Biden advisors as saying:

This is Joe Biden’s strategy — and Mike Donilon and his top advisers are in agreement with the president. The polling shows that democracy ended up a top issue of concern for voters in 2022, and it will be in 2024.

Izzat so? There are grounds for, to put it gently, considerable skepticism here. Let’s take a look at the data.

1. To begin with, preserving/defending/whatever democracy persistently trails the economy/inflation as the issue voters think is most important, even when the democracy issue is specifically mentioned as part of a list.

2. And when respondents’ most important issue is solicited in an open-ended format, where respondents give an unprompted, top-of-mind answer, democracy simply does not rate very high. In the most recent Gallup poll, only 4 percent fall into a bucket they term “elections/election reform/democracy.” This vastly trails key economic problems, immigration, etc.

3. Even more recently, the new New York Times/Siena poll finds just 5 percent of voters (3 percent of working-class voters) saying “the state of democracy/corruption” will be the most important issue in deciding on their November vote, again substantially trailing the same set of issues. In an interesting followup, the poll asked voters who they thought could do a better job of handling whatever issue they designated as most important. By 14 points (24 points among the working class), voters thought Trump could do a better job than Biden of handling that issue.

4. Further undercutting the Biden campaign theory, an earlier New York Times poll asked voters what was the one thing they remembered most from Trump’s presidency; that most definitely was not January 6^th. Just 5 percent mentioned it, again dwarfed by other events and trends.

5. And, as John Sides has pointed out, Biden’s victory over Trump in 2020 was not attributable to running on democracy or anything like that. Campaign messages and advertisements focused instead on the economy, the pandemic, health care and other less abstract issues. If there was a broader theme, it was a return to normalcy not saving democracy.

6. So, democracy does not appear to be the mega-salient issue the Biden campaign is envisioning. What makes the apparent drive to center the issue in the Biden campaign even less understandable is that the issue, as an issue, does not even cut very much in Biden’s direction unlike, say, abortion rights or health care. This is because preserving/defending democracy means different things to different voters; many voters don’t see the choice between Biden and Trump on the issue as blindingly obvious. They don’t, as the Democratic faithful would have it, believe Biden = democracy and Trump = fascism. Many see Trump as their paladin and view Biden and the Democrats as privileging the interests and preferences of their supporters, especially educated elites, in a distinctly non-democratic way.

7. That explains why Biden is not typically preferred by much over Trump on democracy and related issues. One of the most favorable results is in the latest Fox News poll where Biden is preferred over Trump by a modest 6 points on “the future of American democracy.” Even here, Trump gets the nod over Biden by 4 points among working class voters.

8. And there are many results that aren’t nearly so favorable. A March Wall Street Journal poll of battleground states had Biden ahead by just a point on “protecting democracy.” Similarly, over two waves of Democracy Corps’ battleground surveys, Biden and the Democrats were favored over Trump and the Republicans by an average of only 3.5 points on “presidents not being able to act as autocrats,” by 2.5 points on “democracy being secure,” and by 2 points on “protecting democracy” (first wave only). And Trump and the Republicans were favored over Biden and the Democrats by 1.5 points on “opposing extremism” (!) and by 5 points on “protecting the US constitution” (!!). All this hardly makes the democracy issue seem like a slam-dunk for the Biden campaign.

9. Even more devastating, a massive (3,500 registered voters) Washington Post/George Mason Schar School April-May survey of the battleground states found Trump favored over Biden by 11 points on who could do a better job handling “threats to democracy in the US.” And among a group of voters the survey dubbed “the Deciders,” more peripheral voters who will surge into the voting pool in 2024 and likely decide the election, Trump is favored by 9 points over Biden to safeguard democracy.

10. Looking over these data, one must conclude that the Biden campaign plan is to somehow dramatically raise the salience of democracy and January 6^th among ordinary voters in coming months and simultaneously generate a robust advantage on the issue among these same voters. This is not impossible but it does not really seem advisable; a little like drawing to an inside straight in poker. You might make it but you probably won’t.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Biden and his campaign are unduly influenced by what they believe should be true rather than what is true. They see Trump as an unspeakably evil man who is an existential threat to democracy and can’t imagine why that view wouldn’t be everybody’s and drive their vote inexorably toward Biden. But it isn’t and the sooner they realize that, the better their chances of actually beating the Bad Orange Man.

That means dropping the absurd Hitler/end of the Weimar Republic analogies and developing a more realistic model of the situation they’re in. David Leonhardt provides some helpful observations along these lines:

I’m reminded of the arguments of Luigi Zingales, an economist at the University of Chicago. Zingales grew up in Italy, where a bombastic right-wing populist—Silvio Berlusconi—presaged Trump by becoming prime minister in 1994 and holding the job on and off for years…Shortly after Trump’s 2016 victory, Zingales wrote an Opinion essay in The Times outlining the political strategies that tend to fail when opposing a figure like Trump.

Berlusconi’s least-effective opponents focused on his personality and argued that he was beyond the pale of acceptable politics. This criticism made many Italian voters like him even more. They reasoned that if the elites who had done such a poor job running the country hated Berlusconi, maybe he was the solution after all.

Berlusconi’s most effective opponents, by contrast, treated him like an ordinary politician who would not improve their lives. “They focused on the issues, not on his character,” Zingales wrote.

Biden’s campaign sometimes makes arguments along these lines….So far, though, these messages tend to be less prominent than the arguments about democracy and the soul of America.

Just so. The Biden campaign desperately needs a new theory of the case. Otherwise, they really will be drawing to an inside straight and we could all suffer the consequences.

Some excerpts from “Biden Is Pouring Millions Into a State Democrats Haven’t Won Since 2008” by Tarini Parti at The Wall Street Journal:

President Biden’s re-election campaign is making a larger investment in North Carolina than recent Democratic presidential efforts, laying the groundwork for an alternative path to retaining the White House and potentially forcing Donald Trump to play defense in a Republican-dominated state.

The Biden campaign has 16 offices and hired more than 60 staff members, a campaign official and county officials said, marking a larger footprint—at an earlier point in the race—than Biden’s 2020 effort or Hillary Clinton’s in 2016. Biden and his allies have spent $5.2 million in the state through June 19 on broadcast and cable advertising, as well as radio and online, data from AdImpact shows. Trump’s campaign has spent nothing on advertising in the state so far for the general election, a sign his campaign sees the state as safely Republican.

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

The results from the recent European parliament elections were quite something. Right populists did very well indeed while the European Greens took big losses. They lost 18 of their 72 seats in the European parliament and their performance was particularly bad in the E.U.’s two largest states, Germany and France. In Germany, the core country of the European green movement, support for the Greens plunged from 20.5 percent in 2019 to 12 percent. Shockingly, among voters under 25, the German Greens actually did worse than the hard right Alternative for Germany (AfD). That contrasts with the 2019 elections, when the Greens did seven times better than the AfD among these young voters.

And in France, Green support crashed from 13.5 percent to 5.5 percent. The latter figure is barely above the required threshold for party representation in the French delegation.

The Greens’ overall poor performance means they are now behind not only the traditionally largest party groupings—the center-right European People’s Party (EPP), the social-democratic Socialists and Democrats group and the liberal Renew Europe group, but also both right-populist groupings—the European Conservatives and Reformists (which includes Georgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy) and the Identity and Democracy group (which includes Marine LePen’s National Rally group)—and even the non-affiliated group (which includes Alternative for Germany (AfD) and Hungary’s Fidesz party).

There’s a reason for this. While there’s no doubt that concerns about immigration were key to the right populist surge in these elections, the role of backlash against green policies (call it “greenlash”) should not be underestimated. And the fattest target for this greenlash was naturally the Greens, the most fervent proponents of the European “Green Deal” and associated policies. The implications of this are huge. As Adam Tooze, himself a strong supporter of green policies, admits:

The elections have tilted the European political balance against the green agenda which has served as an important reference point for politics in Brussels for the last five years….Even if Ursula von der Leyen succeeds in her bid for a second term as Commission President, she will not be pursuing the full-throated green-forward policy that launched the Green Deal in 2019 and Next Gen EU in 2020….There is a groundswell of opinion in Europe that is preoccupied with the cost of living, wants to keep its internal combustion-engined cars and sympathizes with farmers in their opposition to green regulation.

Speaking of von der Leyen, Manfred Weber, the leader of her EPP party—still the largest grouping in the new parliament—has declared that the 2035 ban on the sale of combustion engine cars was a “mistake.” Peter Liese, lead climate policymaker of the EPP, said the election results indicated support for a less restrictive Green Deal and that, “The ban on combustion engines—that needs to go”.

Greenlash, in short, is for real. A summary article in The New York Times puts the situation well:

There is no sugarcoating it: losing one-third of their seats in the European Parliament elections last week, the Greens tanked.

The European Union has in recent years emerged as the world’s most ambitious frontier in fighting climate change. It did so through major policy shifts like setting high targets to cut emissions, preparing to ditch combustion engines, pushing for nature restoration and curbing the effect of farming on the environment. Green parties across the 27 E.U. member states have successfully driven that agenda.

But over the past few years, something has clearly snapped in much of the European electorate…A backlash against climate change policies as part of broader culture wars has gained momentum.

In many places, the nationalist agendas of far-right parties have been augmented by populist appeals to economically strained citizens. The right surged among voters by targeting the Greens specifically, painting them as unfit to protect poorer working people in rapidly changing societies.

For many voters, Green parties failed to show that their proposals were not just expensive, anti-growth policies that would hurt the poorest the most. And some view them as elitist urbanites who brush aside the costs of the transition to a less climate-harming way of life.

Some may look at these results and say, “Well, that’s Europe—couldn’t happen here”. But not only could it happen here it is happening here. Trump is running aggressively against Biden on exactly the same climate/energy issues and in exactly the same way as the right populists in Europe. And he’s getting traction. Voters really don’t want to be forced, directly or indirectly, to get an electric vehicle when they’re perfectly happy with their internal combustion car. Voters really do care, above all, about cheap energy prices, not the provenance of that energy. And fundamentally most voters simply do not care that much about climate change as an issue relative to other issues like the cost-of-living.

Recent polling by Impact Research for Third Way vividly demonstrates these realities. Just 4 percent of voters attach enough priority to climate change issues to be described as “climate-first” voters, dwarfed by the ranks of voters most concerned about lowering costs and reducing inflation. This mighty 4 percent of voters supports Biden by 96 points (!), a margin that would have made a Soviet Politburo candidate happy back in the day. Doesn’t seem like these voters, unlike the economy-first voters, are really in play.

Moreover, nonwhite and young voters—among whom Democrats have been bleeding support—are disproportionately economy-first voters. And who are the climate-first voters? According to the Third Way report they:

…tend to hold a college degree or higher…They are also far more likely than Economy-First voters to be financially comfortable and to believe the economy is in good shape, by a margin of 35 and 47 points, respectively….

It’s simple: if you’re prioritizing climate change this election, you’re financially comfortable. For everyone else, it remains a fringe issue, and cost-of-living concerns take center stage.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs anyone?

No wonder Trump thinks he can effectively slam Biden and the Democrats on their climate change approach. They are leaning into an issue and devoting considerable resources to a cause that is fundamentally boutique in nature. Sentiment about electric vehicles has been trending negative and most in the working class now say they would not even consider buying one. Voters are strongly opposed to measures and regulations that would limit the future availability of gasoline-powered cars. And somewhat cluelessly the Biden administration has recently doubled down on doing just that.

Voters of course hate being told what car they must drive, how they must heat their homes, cook their food, etc. And they really, really hate high prices. Rather than fighting climate change, their strong preference is for cheap, reliable, abundant energy. No wonder that, when asked whether they would support paying something extra on their monthly utility bill to combat climate change, working-class voters opposed even paying an extra one dollar. And if the toll was raised to $10, these voters were opposed by a massive 38 points.

This makes it a problem, to say the least, that voters trust Trump more than Biden to address these issues. In an earlier Third Way poll, voters preferred Trump to Biden by 15 points on increasing domestic energy production and by 17 points on reducing the cost of energy and gas. Clearly a different approach is called for in this area other than emphasizing the importance of climate change, as dear to the hearts of liberal activists as this issue may be.

Above all, Democrats should keep in mind the “iron law of climate policy” as originally articulated by Roger Pielke Jr: When policies focused on economic growth and the cost-of-living confront policies focused on emissions reductions, it is economic growth and the cost-of-living that will win out every time.

The funny thing is that the experience of the Biden administration has been quite consistent with the iron law even though they’re loath to admit it. When Biden swept into office, cancelling the Keystone XL pipeline, blocking oil and gas exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and stopping oil and gas leasing on public lands, it seemed like his administration was going to fulfill the dreams of climate activists and dramatically ratchet down fossil fuel production. But economic imperatives soon put paid to those dreams and the Biden administration has presided instead over historic highs in oil and gas production.

The U.S. is an all-of-the-above energy superpower! But Biden and the Democrats never talk about that. Maybe they should. Greenlash is here and coming for them, unless they change course and unapologetically connect to the concerns of ordinary voters, rather than to the tiny group of climate-first voters. Carrying those voters by 96 points will be cold comfort if Trump rides the massive group of economy-first voters into the White House. And right now that looks very possible.

Check out the new Biden-Harris ad, followed by some of the commentary of Julianne McShane at Mother Jones:

President Joe Biden is highlighting the fact that his GOP opponent for the presidency is now a convicted felon—a first in American history.

The ad begins with somber, black-and-white pictures of former President Donald Trump in court flashing across the screen. “In the courtroom, we see Donald Trump for who he is,” a narrator explains. “He’s been convicted of 34 felonies, found liable for sexual assault, and he committed financial fraud.” (Fact-check: All true.)

After a brief detour into some of Biden’s accomplishments—”lowering healthcare costs and making corporations pay their fair share”—the narrator reminds viewers of the high stakes in November’s election: “This election is between a convicted criminal who’s only out for himself and a president who’s fighting for your family.”

McShane adds that “The new ad is reportedly part of a $50 million ad blitz the Biden campaign is launching through the end of this month, timed to kick off before the first presidential debate between Biden and Trump, hosted by CNN and set for June 27. It also reflects the Biden campaign’s increasing focus on turning Trump’s conviction into a critical part of its messaging. New polling shows this could matter to certain key voters. A POLITICO Magazine/Ipsos poll found that more than a fifth of independent voters—21 percent—said the conviction made them less likely to support Trump. On the other hand, 44 percent of independents said they somewhat or strongly believed the false narrative that the hush-money case was brought to support Biden’s re-election. In 2020, Biden led Trump among independent voters by 52 to 43 percent.”

McShane concludes:

As Democrats attempt to highlight the contrast between Biden’s and Trump’s records on abortion rights, NBC News reports that the Biden campaign plans to hold more than 30 events in battleground states this Saturday to mark the two- year anniversary of Dobbs, the ruling that struck down Roe. The Democratic Party arm focused on state legislative races also announced a $10 million campaign today in swing states emphasizing the importance of electing Democrats at the state level and putting Biden back in the Oval Office for another term.

It looks like the Democrats’ gloves are finally off—just in time for next week’s battle on the debate stage.

And not a minute too soon.