In “How Biden Might Recover” at The Atlantic,  Ronald Brownstein writes: “If the GOP renominates Trump, attitudes about the challenger might overshadow views about the incumbent to an unprecedented extent, the veteran GOP pollster Bill McInturff believes. McInturff told me that in his firm’s polling over the years, most voters usually say that when a president seeks reelection, their view about the incumbent is what most influences their decision about whom to support.

Brownstein notes further, “But in a recent national survey McInturff’s firm conducted with a Democratic partner for NBC, nearly three-fifths of voters said that their most important consideration in a Trump-Biden rematch would be their views of the former president….“I have never seen a number like this NBC result between an incumbent and ‘challenger,’” McInturff told me in an email. “If 2024 is a Biden versus Trump campaign, we are in uncharted waters.”

In addition, “Alan Abramowitz, an Emory University political scientist, said the principal reason presidents now appear more capable of surviving discontent about their performance is the rise of negative partisanship. That’s the phrase he and other political scientists use to describe a political environment in which many voters are motivated primarily by their belief that the other party represents an unacceptable threat to their values and vision of America. “Emphasizing the negative results of electing your opponent has become a way of unifying your party,” Abramowitz told me.”

However, “Jim Messina, the campaign manager for Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection, reflected the changing thinking when he told me he does not believe that Biden needs to reach majority approval to win another term. “I don’t think it’s a requirement,” Messina said. “It might be if we are dealing with an open race with two nonpresidents. People forget that they are both incumbents. Neither one of them is going to get to 50 percent in approval. What you are trying to drive is the choice.”….

Another consideration Browstein points out, “Trump has already laid out a much more militantly conservative and overtly authoritarian agenda than he ran on in 2016 or 2020. His proposals include the mass deportation of and internment camps for undocumented immigrants, gutting the civil service, invoking the Insurrection Act to quash public protests, and openly deploying the Justice Department against his political enemies. If Trump is the GOP nominee, Democratic advertising will ensure that voters in the decisive swing states are much more aware of his agenda and often-venomous rhetoric than they are today. (The Biden campaign has started issuing near-daily press releases calling out Trump’s most extreme proposals.).”

However, “In a recent national poll by Marquette University Law School, nearly twice as many voters said they trusted Trump rather than Biden to handle both the economy and immigration. The Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg released a survey last week of the nine most competitive presidential states, in which even the Democratic “base of Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, LGBTQ+ community, Gen Z, millennials, unmarried and college women give Trump higher approval ratings than Biden.” Among all voters in those crucial states, the share that said they thought Trump did a good job as president was nearly 10 percentage points higher than the group that gives Biden good grades now.

“The problem for Trump’s team,” Brownstein adds, “is that he constantly pushes the boundaries of what the public might accept. Holding his strong current level of support in polls among Hispanics, for instance, may become much more difficult for Trump after Democrats spend more advertising dollars highlighting his plans to establish internment camps for undocumented immigrants, his refusal to rule out reprising his policy of separating migrant children from their parents, and his threats to use military force inside Mexico. Trump’s coming trials on 91 separate criminal charges will test the public’s tolerance in other ways: Even a recent New York Times/Siena College poll showing Trump leading Biden in most of the key swing states found that the results could flip if the former president is convicted.”

Brownstein concludes, “rump presents opponents with an almost endless list of vulnerabilities. But Biden’s own vulnerabilities have lifted Trump to a stronger position in recent polls than he achieved at any point in the 2020 race. These polls aren’t prophecies of how voters will make their decisions next November if they are forced to choose again between Biden and Trump. But they are a measure of how much difficult work Biden has ahead to win either a referendum or a choice against the man he ousted four years ago.”

The following article by John Halpin, president and executive editor of The Liberal Patriot. is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot: 

People often finger social media as the primary culprit in America’s increasingly bitter and divided politics. As the argument goes, corporate tech algorithms and consumer choices are forcing people into closed-looped information circuits full of misinformation, political self-righteousness, and acrimony toward others.

If you happen to spend any time on these social media platforms, you might agree with this assessment. However, the empirical question remains: Are the users of social media any more partisan or ideological than consumers of other types of media?

Looking at data from the recent TLP/YouGov polling of 3098 registered voters conducted in September 2023, the answer is not as simple as conventional wisdom dictates. It turns out, consumers of traditional media—mainly cable news, network television, radio, and national newspapers—exhibit far greater partisan imbalances than do consumers of the biggest social media platforms.

For context, the survey asked respondents, “In the past week, did you get any news from any of the following sources?” and allowed people to make multiple selections.

As the chart below shows, local television remains the most used media source for news information chosen by 41 percent of voters overall. News websites and apps come in second at 33 percent followed by a cluster of different sources including Fox News (28 percent), Facebook (28 percent), CNN (27 percent), and YouTube (26 percent). Notably, national print newspapers were selected by only 9 percent of voters—almost equal to those Americans getting news from the social media video platform, TikTok, at 10 percent. Seven percent of voters overall report not getting news from any of these sources.

Looking at the crosstabs on media usage, the overlap in news consumption is interesting. For example, 54 percent of those who tune into CNN also get news from local television, and 40 percent get news from Facebook. Likewise, 53 percent of those who tune into Fox get news from local television, and 37 percent get news from Facebook. On the social media side, 52 percent of TikTok news consumers also turn to CNN for news, 54 percent watch YouTube, and 59 percent get news on Facebook.

To gauge the partisan leanings of different consumers, I examined the breakdown of media consumers on President Biden’s job approval, which stood at 45 percent approve and 53 percent disapprove among all voters in September. (Job approval and disapproval seems like a more representative measure of political beliefs than the national horserace at this stage, but the patterns are broadly matched in terms of Biden or Trump support.)

As the table below highlights, legacy media users emerge as the most skewed American consumers of media in terms of their approval or disapproval of President Biden—particularly cable news viewers.

In contrast, users of an array of social media platforms—including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and other social media (including LinkedIn and Instagram) appear more evenly split in their evaluations of the president. Among voters who get news from either Facebook or YouTube, an equal 49 percent approve and disapprove of Biden. And although both Twitter and TikTok users overall emerge slightly more pro-Biden than the national average, their approval or disapproval is much less pronounced than that among cable news viewers.

If analysts are looking for the information roots of America’s most intense political polarization, they might want to examine the consumer bases and news content of legacy media sources as much as they scrutinize social media platforms.

The viewers of different cable news channels, and readers of national newspapers or listeners of radio, constitute vastly different (and more one-sided) partisan worlds than most people on social media platforms with a cacophony of voices and partisan inclinations.

Social media often gets dinged for partisan self-selection and ideological reinforcement, which certainly goes on to some extent, but these data show that the sharpest partisans splits are more prominently found among consumers of traditional cable, print, network news, and radio sources.

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

The Democrats had a good election on November 7. While there were not a lot of big races this year, Democrats did hold the governorship in the deep red state of Kentucky, flipped the House of Delegates in Virginia, and easily passed a referendum in Ohio enshrining abortion rights in the state constitution. Moreover, this year Democrats have been cleaning up in special elections, consistently doing better than expected given the partisan lean of the areas contested. In the more consequential 2022 elections, Democrats defied expectations keeping down their losses in the House, gaining a seat in the Senate, netting two governorships and making progress in state legislatures. And of course, Democrats did win the biggest election of them all, the presidency, the last time it was held in 2020.

This has led to a certain amount of self-congratulatory behavior among Democratic partisans. The basic take is that in the wake of the Dobbs decisions Democrats have the political equivalent of a nuclear weapon on their side, abortion rights. That adds to a deep arsenal of potential attacks based around voter distaste for Trump/MAGA/election denial/threats to democracy and for a shambolic Republican Party that appears incapable of governing. With these weapons at Democrats’ disposal, they feel they have a decisive advantage moving into the 2024 election. It is simply a matter of pressing that advantage and hitting the Republicans as hard as they can.

In short, as the catechism goes, they’ve got the formula down for defeating the GOP. There is no need to tinker with the formula; stout hearts and merciless execution will win the day. The future for the Democrats and their brand is bright.

And yet…there are so many signs of underlying weakness that undercut this happy story. It was not so long ago after all that Bad Orange Man actually won the presidency in 2016. Have the Democrats really discovered the secret to withstanding further populist surges from the right? Here are three reasons to doubt that and question the Democrats’ current stand-pat complacency.

1. Despite recent results, the actual governing situation is a stalemate. Democrats had their trifecta (presidency, House, Senate) for exactly one term, losing the House in 2022. The last time they had a trifecta was with Obama’s election in 2008. That too vanished after one term, with the 2010 wipeout in the House. But an important difference between then and now is that Obama briefly had a cloture-proof majority in the Senate that included Senators from many states where Democrats have become uncompetitive: Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota.

Despite some gains elsewhere, so many states are now out of competition for the Democrats that their path to 60 seats appears completely closed off. In addition, next election the Senate map is so unfavorable that Democrats are very likely to lose their current razor-thin majority. They are already essentially down one seat, with the retirement of West Virginia’s Joe Manchin.

Elsewhere, notwithstanding good Democratic election results since 2020, Republicans still have more governors, control more state legislatures, and have more state government trifectas (governor, state house, state senate) than the Democrats. Not exactly Democratic dominance.

This raises an important question: if the Trump-ified Republican Party is so awful, so beyond the pale, such a danger to democracy and all that is right and decent—why can’t the Democrats beat this mess of a party decisively? Why are they still playing at the 50-yard line of American politics against this version of the GOP with all its many vulnerabilities and the millstone of Donald Trump around its neck? The simplest explanation is that the Democrats themselves are so unattractive to so many voters in so many places that they cannot break the stalemate. This simple truth is the most difficult thing for Democrats to accept since it implies the need for change rather than more aggressive messaging.

2. The polls are bad—really bad. With the cheerful results from November 7, Democrats are reviving the hoary admonition “the only poll that counts is the one on election day”. True as far as it goes but there’s no gainsaying how poor these polls are for Democratic prospects. They tell us that voters, right now, are uninclined to re-elect Biden. He not only is losing to Trump on the national level but, critically, in the swing states that will determine the next presidential winner he is running behind in enough of them to lose the Electoral College.

• In the New York Times/Siena poll, Trump is ahead in five states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Pennsylvania—of the six covered by the survey.
• In the Morning Consult/Bloomberg poll, Trump is ahead in six states—Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—of the seven covered.
• In the Stack Data Strategy study, which combines survey data with statistical analysis, Trump leads in four states—Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—carried by Biden in 2020 and trails in none of the states he carried in that election.

Not good! The Times/Siena poll releases detailed crosstabs that allow for an examination of just where Biden is falling short. One key area is Biden’s continuing weakness among nonwhite working-class (noncollege) voters. Confirming a pattern I have previously noted, Biden leads Trump by a mere 16 points among this demographic in the six swing states covered by the poll. This compares to his (national) lead over Trump of 48 points in 2020. And even that lead was a big drop-off from Obama’s 67-point advantage in 2012.

Read more…

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter and John B. Judis, a former editor of The New Republic and author of major works about contemporary politics, is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot. It is adapted from their recently published book, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?: The Soul of the Party in an Age of Extremes:

The Democratic Party has had its greatest success when it sought to represent the common man and woman against the rich and powerful, the people against the elite, and the plebeians against the patricians. Over the last thirty years, the Democrats have continued to claim to represent the average citizen. In his 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton championed “the forgotten middle class” and promised to “put people first.” Barack Obama pledged that the “voices of ordinary citizens” would “speak louder” than “multimillion-dollar donations.” Hillary Clinton in her 2016 campaign promised to “make the economy work for everyday Americans.” And Joe Biden promised in 2020 to represent “the people” and framed the election as being between “Park Avenue and Scranton.”

For all this, over the last decades, Democrats have steadily lost the allegiance of “everyday Americans”—the working- and middle-class voters that were at the core of the older New Deal coalition. Initially, most of these lost voters were white, but in the last elections, Democrats have also begun to lose support among Latino and Asian working-class voters.

How did this happen? There is an original reason, for which the Democrats were hardly to blame. Democrats were the principal supporters of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—measures that went a long way toward ending racial segregation and Jim Crow, but that angered many southern whites and, to a lesser extent, some whites in the North.

With the exception of a few far-right groups, however, Americans have reconciled themselves to those bills. Democrats regularly win elections in Virginia, the seat of the southern Confederacy, and many of the northern and southern suburbs formed by white flight now vote for Democratic candidates. And Americans elected an African American president in 2008 and reelected him in 2012.

Today, there are a multitude of factors that have driven working-class voters out of the Democratic Party. They include:

• Democrats’ support for trade deals that led to factory closings in many small towns and midsize cities in states that were once Democratic strongholds.
• Democrats’ support for spending bills that the working and middle classes paid for but that were primarily of benefit to poor Americans, many of whom were minorities.
• Democrats’ enthusiasm for immigration of unskilled workers and the party’s opposition to measures that might reduce illegal immigration.
• Democrats’ support for strict gun control.
• Democrats’ insistence on eliminating fossil fuels.
• Democrats’ use of the courts and regulations to enforce their moral and cultural agenda, whether on the sale of wedding cakes or the use of public men’s and women’s bathrooms.

Not all Democrats are in line with these actions or beliefs. But overall, they came to characterize the party. Some of these stances have to do directly with economics; others with culture. The differences over them are often taken to distinguish the college-educated professional from those who do not have college degrees, but they equally, if not more accurately, arise from the differences in economic geography—what we call the “Great Divide” in American politics.

On one side of the divide are the great postindustrial metro centers like the Bay Area, Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, New York, and Seattle. These are areas that benefited from the boom in computer technology and high finance. These areas are heavily populated by college-educated professionals, but also by low-skilled immigrants who clean the buildings, mow the lawns, and take care of the children and the aged. The professionals, who set the political agenda for these areas, welcome legal and illegal immigrants; they want guns off the street; they see trade not as a threat to jobs but as a source of less expensive goods; they worry that climate change will destroy the planet; and, among the young, they are engaged in a quest for new identities and sexual lifestyles. A majority of them are Democrats.

On the other side of the divide are the small towns and midsize cities that have depended on manufacturing, mining, and farming. Some of these places have prospered from newly discovered oil and gas deposits, but many are towns and cities like Muncie, Indiana; Mansfield, Ohio; and Dundalk, Maryland that have lost jobs when firms moved abroad or closed up shop in the face of foreign competition. The workers and small businesspeople in these towns and cities want the border closed to illegal immigrants, whom they see as a burden to their taxes and a threat to their jobs; they want to keep their guns as a way to protect their homes and family; they fly the American flag in front of their house; they go to or went to church; they oppose abortion; some may be leery of gay marriage, although that is changing; many of them or members of their family served in the military; they have no idea what most of the initials in LGBTQIA+ stand for. A majority of them are now Republicans and many are former working-class Democrats.

Read more…

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

Large segments of the progressive left disgraced themselves by indulging in demonstrations and statements that, directly or indirectly, excused Hamas’s terrorist massacre. For that, they were rightly condemned across the political spectrum, including by many Democrats. But the progressive left has not given up on pushing their “decolonialist” perspective within the Democratic Party, demanding that Biden soften his support for Israel and calling for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire in the conflict. This policy recommendation is backed up what is essentially a threat: if Democrats don’t move in the direction recommended by the progressive left, “their” voters, especially young voters, will fail to be “energized” in 2024, endangering Biden’s re-election and Democratic electoral prospects generally.

But is that really true? Leaving aside the question of whether that would be a responsible use of their power (I don’t think so), do they even have that kind of power? I doubt it. In fact, I think the progressive left is more of a paper tiger, claiming power and influence way above what they actually have.

Start with the fundamental fact that the progressive or intersectional left, for whom issues from ending fossil fuels to open borders to decriminalizing and decolonizing everything (free Palestine!) are inseparably linked moral commitments, is actually a pretty small slice of voters—six percent in the Pew typology, eight percent in the More in Common typology. So we should ask whether and to what extent their commitments are reflected in the views of the voter groups in whose name they claim to speak.

Probably the most important of these is young voters, lately lionized as Democrats’ best hope—but also perhaps their downfall, if not appropriately catered to. And it is true that young voters generally lean more left than older voters, including in expressing more sympathy for the Palestinians and more opposition to sending weapons to Israel. But that does not mean young voters’ views are therefore in sync with those of the intersectional left and likely to take their cues from activists’ fury at the Biden administration. Consider these results from a very recent poll by Slingshot Strategies on the Israel-Gaza conflict.

1. Respondents were asked who they blame for the current violence in Israel and Gaza. Among the 18-44 year old age group, which covers the entire Millennial generation and eligible members of Gen Z, just 19 percent blame Israel for oppressing the Palestinians, less than half the 44 percent who blame Hamas for committing acts of terrorism against Israel (36 percent had no opinion).
2. Respondents were also asked what they think about the level of support Biden is showing for Israel. Less than one third (31 percent) of 18-44 year olds think Biden has been showing too much support for Israel, compared to 69 percent who believe he is either showing the right amount (42 percent) or not enough (27 percent) support for Israel.
3. Similarly, only a third of this age group prefers that the U.S. work to broker a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, less than the 36 percent who would prefer that the U.S. support Israel’s attempt to eliminate Hamas’s military capabilities.

The disjuncture between these views and those of progressive activists is striking. Far from speaking for the younger generations, it would appear the intersectional left is, as usual, speaking for itself.

This disjuncture can be seen on many other issues. One such is how to tackle the problem of climate change. The progressive left is in a state of perpetual outrage that the country is not moving faster to get rid of fossil fuels and transition to renewable (e.g., wind and solar) energy, the alleged solution to the problem. This too is supposed to be an issue where the Biden administration is out of sync with younger voters, who therefore will fail to be energized by his re-election bid.

But, again, is this true? In a recent 6,000 person survey by the American Enterprise Institute’s Survey Center on American Life (SCAL) respondents were asked about their preferences for the country’s energy supply. By 64 percent to 36 percent, Millennial/Gen Z (18-44 year old) voters favored “Use a mix of energy sources including oil, coal and natural gas along with renewable energy sources” over “Phase out the use of oil, coal and natural gas completely, relying instead on renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power only.” This does not seem consistent with the mantra of progressive left activists.

Similarly, in a recent 3,000 voter survey conducted by YouGov for The Liberal Patriot, the following choices were offered to voters about energy strategy:

• We need a rapid green transition to end the use of fossil fuels and replace them with fully renewable energy sources;
• We need an “all-of-the above” strategy that provides abundant and cheap energy from multiple sources including oil and gas to renewables to advanced nuclear power; or
• We need to stop the push to replace domestic oil and gas production with unproven green energy projects that raise costs and undercut jobs.

Among the same Millennial/Gen Z (18-44 year old) voters, the progressive left-preferred first position, emphasizing ending the use of fossil fuels and rapidly adopting renewables, is a distinctly minoritarian one, embraced by just 36 percent of these voters. The most popular position is the second, all-of-the above approach that emphasizes energy abundance and the use of fossil fuels and renewables and nuclear, favored by 48 percent of Millennial/Gen Z voters. Another 16 percent flat-out support production of fossil fuels and oppose green energy projects. Together that’s 64 percent of these voters who are not singing from the progressive left hymnbook.

So the progressive left’s claim that failing to embrace their positions is the death-knell for Democrats among younger generation voters is highly suspect. Of course it’s entirely in their interest to claim that only a bracing tonic of progressive left positions can jolt these voters out of their torpor. But there isn’t much behind this claim; in reality, the intersectional left and the groups and politicians in +25D Democratic districts that support it are paper tigers. Their power derives more from their ability to scare the rest of the party than from their power over actual voters.

Democrats would be well-advised to worry less about the progressive left’s complaints and more about the uncomfortable possibility that the voters who surge into the voting pool in 2024—those who sat out 2022 but may return in 2024—will present a serious persuasion challenge to their party. Gone are the days when higher turnout necessarily bodes well for Democratic fortunes. As Nate Cohn noted in a recent article:

Mr. Biden’s pronounced weakness among less engaged voters is, at least momentarily, disrupting the usual patterns. It has at least temporarily weakened or even reversed the typical Democratic advantage from higher turnout. It has hurt Mr. Biden in national polling of registered voters and all adults, as low-turnout young and nonwhite voters make up a far larger share of eligible voters than the actual electorate.

Even more sobering, consider some findings specifically about Hispanics, the group driving the growth of the nonwhite population and much of Democrats’ hopes for the future. It turns out that Hispanic voters who did not show up in 2022 but did vote in 2020 are much more Republican leaning than 2022 Hispanic voters. According to a study by Equis Research of the Hispanic electorate, Hispanics who were drawn into the 2020 Presidential election but have been skipping congressional elections favor a generic Republican Presidential candidate over Biden by 20 points. Hispanic men under 40 in this group are even more pro-GOP, favoring a generic Republican by well over 30 points.

Now that’s a challenge. Instead of worrying about placating the progressive left, Democrats should be scheming about how they can persuade these peripheral voters that the Democrats are better for them than the Republicans. Otherwise, they may “energize” themselves right into a 2024 election loss.

From “An Ohio amendment serves as a testing ground for statewide abortion fights expected in 2024″ by A. P.’s Julie Carr Smyth and Christine Fernando at The Hill:

Abortion access is expected to play a central role in the 2024 elections. The preview comes next week, when Ohio voters decide whether to enshrine reproductive rights in their state Constitution.

The amendment is the only abortion question on any state’s ballot this year, a spotlight that has generated intense attention from national groups and made Ohio a testing ground for fresh campaign messaging — some of it misleading. The amendment has drawn more than $60 million in combined spending so far.

Mini Timmaraju, president and CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All, said Ohio offers a vital proving ground heading into next year’s presidential election, when Democrats hope the abortion issue can energize supporters in contests up and down the ballot. Initiatives seeking to protect access could be on the ballot across the country, including in the presidential swing states of Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

“When we’re able to see how our messaging impacts independents and Republicans and persuades them that this fundamental freedom is important to protect in Ohio, that’s going to be something that we can implement looking at 2024,” she said.

The battleground on abortion shifted to the states last summer, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned its Roe v. Wade decision, erasing federal abortion protections that had been in place for half a century. Since then, voters in six states — California, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana and Vermont — have either supported measures protecting abortion rights or rejected efforts aimed at eroding access.

Smyth and Fernando note that “The Ohio amendment would guarantee an individual’s right “to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions.” It expressly permits the state to regulate abortions after fetal viability, as determined by an attending physician, as long as any laws regulating the procedure after that point provide exceptions for the life and health of the woman.”

Further, “Its supporters include Democrats in the state, the ACLU, Planned Parenthood and a bipartisan coalition of labor, faith and community groups. They portray the measure — one of the most broadly worded so far — as a way to enshrine Roe-era abortion rights in a one-time bellwether state that has turned increasingly Republican and has passed some of the nation’s toughest restrictions on the procedure….AP VoteCast polling last year found that 59% of Ohio voters say abortion should generally be legal.”

“Turnout in the election that concludes Tuesday is expected to be robust,” Smyth and Fernando write, “building on the enthusiasm from the summer, organizers say. Local election officials anticipate 40% to 50% of registered voters will participate, according to the Ohio Association of Election Officials. That’s higher than a typical off-year November election and up from the 39% turnout in August.”

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

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

As I have documented, there are many current examples of this fallacy including in such hot-button areas as immigration and crime. In the latest ABC/Ipsos poll, Biden’s job approval rating on handling “immigration and the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border” is 26 percent, with 70 percent disapproval (net: minus 44) and 33 percent on handling crime, with 64 percent disapproval (net: minus 31). That hurts the Democrats not just on these particular issues but also by bolstering their image as a party that tolerates, if not facilitates, social disorder.

But from a political standpoint, the worst example of the Fox News Fallacy by far is around voters’ number one issue: the economy. Consider these recent data on voters’ views of the economy.

1. In the new CNBC survey, Biden’s approval rating on the economy is an abysmal 32 percent with 63 percent disapproval. This includes some very low ratings among some groups Democrats plan to rely upon in 2024: Just 35 percent among young (18 to 34 year old) voters and among Latinos. And then there’s the working-class problem: 31 percent approval among high school graduates (or less), 34 percent among those with some college and only 32 percent among those who identify as either low income or working class. The latter figure includes a 27 percent rating among low income/working-class whites and, more surprisingly, an anemic 39 percent rating among low income/working-class nonwhites. That’s not exactly what the Biden administration had in mind when they started their Bidenomics offensive.

Perhaps most alarming of all, among voters who currently say they are undecided between Biden and Trump for 2024, Biden approval rating on the economy is just 13 percent. 13 percent! That doesn’t bode well for moving these undecideds into Biden’s column.

2. In a survey of 5,000 voters across seven swing states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin), Morning Consult found that about three-quarters of voters believe the nation’s economy is headed down the wrong track and that, on net, voters were likely to think their personal financial situation was better under Trump than Biden.

And in a direct hit to the Bidenomics campaign, about half (49 percent) of swing state voters say Bidenomics—the economic policy of the Biden administration—has been bad for the economy, compared to just 26 percent who say it has been good for the economy and ten percent who say it has had no impact. Among those currently undecided between Biden and Trump for 2024, views are even more negative: only two percent (!) say Bidenomics has been good for the economy.

Even more damaging to the Bidenomics cause, swing state voters say they trust Trump more than Biden to handle a wide range of economic issues. That includes the economy generally (Trump +14), the stock market (Trump +16), everyday costs (Trump +12), interest rates (Trump +13) and taxes (Trump +10). Even issues like the job market, unemployment, pay raises, housing and personal debts generate Trump advantages of six to seven points.

Of course, conservative media outlets—Fox News and the like—are quick to point to results like these and argue that the Biden economy, especially associated inflation, is to blame. On cue, Democrats are quick to argue that this can’t be right—the economy has been going great guns! Unemployment is super-low, job creation has been strong, inflation has been moderating, real wages have started to rise and (so far) no recession. Therefore, if voters say they’re unhappy with the economy that can’t possibly reflect their “lived experience” as it were but rather how they are being manipulated and misinformed by the media, especially Fox News, etc.

This is a huge mistake—a textbook and very damaging example of the Fox News Fallacy. It’s still the case that real hourly wages and weekly earnings are lower now than when Biden took office (though they’re comparable with pre-pandemic levels). The latest income data from the Census Bureau also show continued decline in real median household income in the first two years of the Biden administration, leaving it 4.7 percent lower than its pre-pandemic peak. In contrast, the pre-pandemic years of the Trump administration saw an increase of 10 percent in household income.

And, critically, as Bill Galston notes in a new article, “$8.99 Cereal Could Rock the Globe:”

In the current election cycle, the central economic issue isn’t growth and jobs, but inflation. The most recent Economist/YouGov poll asked a random sample of Americans, “Which of the following do you consider the best measure of how the national economy is doing?” Four percent selected the stock market; 11 percent picked their personal finances; 15 percent chose unemployment and jobs reports. But 56 percent said the best measure was the prices of the goods and services they buy.

When economists talk about “inflation,” they are referring to the rate at which prices are increasing. They have naturally been puzzled by the continued intensity of public concern about inflation, given that the rate of inflation has declined significantly. But surveys show that average Americans are at least as concerned about price levels as they are about the rate of price increases.

That brings us to the price of breakfast cereal. “I almost had a heart attack the other day when I saw a box of cereal for $8.99,” said an Illinois house cleaner. “I was like, ‘Does that come with a gallon of milk too?’” I’m sure she’s speaking for many Americans; I know she’s speaking for me. My sense of what things should cost at the grocery store is anchored at pre-pandemic levels, and I find it hard to accept that so many items have risen in price by 30 percent or more. My wife and I can afford the higher prices, though we sometimes choose not to pay them and do without items we regard as outrageously expensive. What about families with children who are trying to get by on $75,000 a year?

Galston goes on to talk about the prices of cars and homes but you get the idea. This is voters’ lived experience. No amount of banging on about Bidenomics and new green jobs is going to make much of a dent in these feelings. The only thing that might is focusing intensely on voters’ chief economic concern and stop trying to talk them into believing the economy and Bidenomics are actually great when they clearly don’t think so. They are not just being manipulated by the evil conservative media—that’s the Fox News Fallacy. They’re trying to tell you what they really think. It might not be a bad idea to start listening.

And if not? I’ll give the last word here to Dave Wasserman from a Twitter thread:

How is it Dems are cleaning up in special elections/referendums if their national poll numbers are so bad? Because in the Trump era, Dems are excelling w/ the most civic-minded, highly-engaged voters.

Their biggest weakness? Peripheral voters who only show up in presidentials.

A big reason Dems beat pundit/historical expectations in the midterms? Only 112M people voted, including a disproportionate turnout among voters angry at Dobbs/abortion bans (many of them young/female).

But there will be ~160M voters in 2024. So who are those extra 48M voters?

They skew young, unaffiliated, nonwhite and non-college. They’re also more likely to base their choice on a simplistic evaluation of whether the economy was better under Trump or Biden.

On this question—and on immigration/age concerns—Biden is routinely getting clobbered.

Keep in mind: in 2020, when Biden’s favorability was above water and Trump was at 41 percent job approval (and Biden was ~7 pts ahead in the final polling averages), Trump still came within 42,915 votes in AZ, GA & WI out of ~160M cast nationally of winning a second term.

Now fast forward to 2024 with tied national polls, 40 percent Biden approval, equally dismal Biden/Trump favorability, more economic pessimism, growing migrant/intl crises and the potential for RFK/West to double Jill Stein’s pull on campuses, etc.

Biden is in absolutely dire shape.

Gulp.

Kyle Kondik explains “The Third Party Wild Card: Recent non-major party vote strongest out west — and not in the states likeliest to decide 2024” at Sabato’s Crystal Ball:

In addition to RFK Jr., left-wing intellectual Cornel West is also running, most recently deciding to run as a true independent instead of seeking the Green Party nomination. No Labels, the third party group that Democrats see as a front for Republicans trying to hurt Joe Biden through the party’s potential candidacy, is also floating out there. And that doesn’t even mention the Green and Libertarian parties, the two most reliable sources of third party candidates in recent years, or anyone else who might run.

None of these candidates, individually, would have a prayer of winning barring some truly incredible change in American politics, nor are they even guaranteed to be on the ballot everywhere. Collectively, though, the level of support they get will be interesting to monitor, and it may be that the third party vote ends up disproportionately hurting one of the major party nominees over the other, although that is not certain. At least two recent polls, from USA Today/Suffolk and NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist, showed Donald Trump doing better on the two-way ballot against Biden than if Kennedy was included (although the effect is more pronounced in the Marist survey). But after using Kennedy as a weapon against Biden in the Democratic primary, Republicans are switching gears as he now appears to threaten Trump more.

In terms of Electoral College votes in key swing states, however, the third party vote could be less consequential. Kondik argues that ” Of greatest interest to us is whether we should expect the third party vote to be meaningfully higher or lower in the most important states in the Electoral College. Seven states were decided by 3 points or less in 2020: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — these states form the core of what we expect to be the competitive map in 2024. Their recent third party history is shown in Table 3.

Kondik notes further that “Pennsylvania and Michigan are also on the lower end of the average — the Keystone State was just a couple hundredths of a point from being listed in the bottom 10 of average third party voting in Table 2. Wisconsin is basically right at the average, and Arizona is a little above average, with the big third party year of 2016 standing out as its strongest outlier year (and even then, the third party share was only a little over a point higher than the nation as a whole). Of these core swing states, Nevada has had the highest average third party vote in recent elections. Nevada offers voters an explicit “None of These Candidates” option, which likely contributes to the higher average: This option has gotten at least 0.4% of the vote in every election this century, and that’s about how much higher Nevada’s average third party voting is compared to the rest of the country. Arizona and Nevada being a little higher than average also just fits in with them being western states, given the heightened support that recent third party candidates have gotten in that region.”

Kondik concludes, “So, while there are a number of states that have a recent track record of clearly higher-than-average third party performances, the states most likely to decide the election are not really among them. That doesn’t mean third party votes in these states are necessarily unimportant: It just means that we shouldn’t expect the third party candidates to do better in them than they do nationally. It may also be that a common argument against voting third party — “go ahead, throw your vote away,” to quote a favorite Simpsons episode — is perhaps most persuasive in the top battlegrounds.”

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

The appalling terrorist attack by the appalling terrorist group Hamas, which slaughtered more than 1300 Israelis, 87 percent of whom were civilians, is the largest single day killing of Jews since the Holocaust. The response of America’s intersectional left has also been appalling. As Sohrab Ahmari accurately noted in a Compact magazine article titled “Woke Is Dying”:

Many of those who spent the last few years promoting #Defund, “intersectionality,” and similar concepts refused to condemn Hamas’s butchery—that is, when they didn’t celebrate it. The Chicago chapter of Black Lives Matter tweeted, “I Stand With Palestine,” along with a picture of a paraglider, an allusion to how Hamas terrorists descended upon an outdoor party, murdering some 260 ravers. Yale American Studies professor Zareena Grewal declared: “Settlers are not civilians. This is not hard.” The New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America promoted a Times Square rally at which murderers were hailed as liberators.

What is wrong with these people?

In my opinion, the rot goes very deep. This is not a one-off. Over the last number of years, huge swathes of the American left have become infected with an ideology that judges actions or arguments not by their content but rather by the identity of those involved in said actions or arguments. Those identities in turn are defined by an intersectional web of oppressed and oppressors, of the powerful and powerless, of the dominant and marginalized. With this approach, one judges an action not by whether it’s effective or an argument by whether it’s true but rather by whether the people involved in the action or argument are in the oppressed/powerless/marginalized bucket or not. If they are, the actions or arguments should be supported; if not, they should be opposed.

This approach was always a terrible idea, in obvious contradiction to logic and common sense. But it has led much of the left and large sectors of the Democratic Party to take positions that have little purchase in social or political reality and are offensive to the basic values most people hold. The failure to unequivocally condemn the Hamas massacre as a crime against humanity is just the latest example of this intellectual and moral malignancy.

Take the vogue for “anti-racist” posturing. This dates back to the mid-teens and gathered overwhelming force in 2020 with the George Floyd police killing and subsequent nationwide protests. It became de rigueur in left and liberal Democratic circles to solemnly pronounce American society structurally racist and shot through with white supremacy from top to bottom. No argument along these lines was too outrageous if it came from or on behalf of “people of color”, who must be deferred to given their place in the intersectional hierarchy.

Nothing exemplifies this better than the lionization of Ibram X. Kendi, whose thoroughly ridiculous claims were treated as revealed truth by tens of millions of good liberals and leftists:

There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy. Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity between racial groups…The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination….The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.

Only those who have checked their capacity for critical thinking at the door could possibly take this “analysis” seriously. But they did because of the intersectional positioning of Kendi and those he claimed to advocate for.

How else to explain why liberals didn’t run screaming in the opposite direction when Kendi called for the passage of an “anti-racist Constitutional amendment” that would:

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

It is difficult to imagine anything more illiberal than proposing an unelected Soviet-style bureaucracy of “experts” that would vet the actions, ideas, and perhaps even the thoughts of all public officials in the country for their anti-racist content and punish those who deviate from the correct path. Madness! And yet he has been showered with honors, money, and coveted academic positions (though recent revelations of epic mismanagement at his Boston University Center for Antiracist Research may curb some of that enthusiasm).

Bad ideas and arguments are bad ideas and arguments. It shouldn’t matter who makes them. Just like it shouldn’t matter who in the intersectional hierarchy massacres Jews. It’s still an atrocity.

It’s high time for Democrats to decisively reject this kind of thinking across the board. Embrace instead the universalistic principles the overwhelming majority of Americans believe in. They believe, unlike Kendi, that racial preferences in rewards and decision-making are not fair and fairness is a fundamental part of their world outlook. They actually believe, with Martin Luther King Jr., that people should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” In a recent University of Southern California Dornsife survey, this classic statement of colorblind equality was posed to respondents: “Our goal as a society should be to treat all people the same without regard to the color of their skin.” This MLK-style statement elicited sky-high (92 percent) agreement from the public, despite the assaults on this idea from Critical Race Theory (CRT), Kendi, and large sectors of the Democratic left. In a fascinating related finding, the researchers found that most people who claim to have heard about CRT believe CRT includes this colorblind perspective, rather than directly contradicting it. Perhaps they just can’t believe any theory that has anything to do with race would reject this fundamental principle.

Similarly a recent Public Agenda Hidden Common Ground survey found 91 percent agreement with the statement: “All people deserve an equal opportunity to succeed, no matter their race or ethnicity.” This is what people deeply believe in: equal opportunity not, unlike the intersectional left, equal outcomes.

Equally, Americans believe crime is crime no matter who commits it and that criminals should be punished. They do not believe that open drug use, street camping, shoplifting and countless other symptoms of social disorder should be tolerated because the populations involved are “marginalized” or because enforcement outcomes might not be equally distributed across races. Nor do they believe that the borders of the United States are merely suggestions that can be ignored by those appropriately placed in the intersectional hierarchy.

Reactions to the Hamas massacre have exposed the moral cul-de-sac occupied by the intersectional left. Democrats and liberals should seize this opportunity to dissociate themselves not just from these disgraceful reactions but also from the entire world view that has produced bad policy and worse politics in area after area.

Of course the usual suspects will inevitably say that returning to a universalist, mainstream approach is tantamount to throwing loyal Democratic constituencies in need of help “under the bus”. But who is throwing whom under the bus? Perhaps it is those whose intersectional dogma stands in the way of a Democratic approach that could plausibly generate the widest possible support that are throwing those who need help the most under the bus.

Andrew Prokop mulls over “5 ways the House speaker drama could end: Will the “Never Jordan” bloc cave? Will there be a bipartisan deal? Or … what?” at Vox and writes:

“Republicans’ staring contest of a speaker’s race, then, is continuing, with no resolution in sight. Here’s the GOP’s math problem:

• 217 out of 221 Republicans need to vote for the GOP’s speaker candidate on the House floor to elect him (if all Democrats oppose him).
• Roughly 180 Republicans appear to be team players who will happily back any nominee preferred by most of the conference.
• But there are about 20 holdouts on the right who have embraced hardball tactics to try and force a more right-wing speaker to be elected. Think of them as an “Only Jordan” bloc.
• And now there’s a newly emerged roughly 20-person “Never Jordan” bloc, composed of mostly mainstream or swing-district members who are fighting back against the right-wingers.

So what are the ways this could end?

1) The “Never Jordan” bloc caves: Jordan is currently the GOP’s speaker nominee, and he’s still trying to win over enough support among the 22 Republicans who opposed him on the most recent House floor vote.

Some of these members are powerful Appropriations Committee Republicans who could be given promises over how Jordan will handle spending fights. Others represent swing districts and fear support for an extremist candidate like Jordan could hurt their reelection, but they’ll need support and fundraising from the party establishment to keep their seats. And other holdouts appear to be motivated by personal gripes over how Jordan treated the previous speaker nominee, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) — maybe their feelings could be assuaged?

2) The “Only Jordan” bloc settles for someone else: If Jordan can’t win over enough holdouts and quits the contest as Scalise did, the GOP will go back to the drawing board and try to select another speaker nominee.

The question then will be whether that person can win over the hardcore Jordan supporters on the right. These recalcitrant right-wingers made it difficult for Kevin McCarthy to be elected speaker in the first place in January — but he did eventually win enough of them over. Perhaps another candidate, not yet in the race, could do the same. (Or maybe McCarthy could do it again.)

3) Some Republicans cut a deal with Democrats: If neither bloc of GOP holdouts is in the mood to cave, one other option is to rely on Democrats to get a Republican speaker candidate elected. In theory, such a deal could take place with a small group of Democratic moderates, or through a deal cut with Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) that has the Democratic Party’s official approval.

Any such deal would draw fury from conservative media, and GOP leaders have already tried to denounce any idea for a “coalition government.” This is why the recent proposal to empower McHenry via some Democratic votes got dropped like a hot potato. But if the far right truly seems impossible to win over, a bipartisan deal may seem to mainstream Republicans like the only option to keep the government open.

4) McHenry just takes the reins without an official vote: Up to this point, speaker pro tempore McHenry has interpreted his duties as limited to facilitating the election of a new speaker. He has said he doesn’t want to do any more than this, and the belief within the GOP conference was that for him to be able to do more, the House would have to vote to empower him.

Outside experts, though, have argued that such a vote might not be necessary. Brendan Buck, a former aide to speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan, wrote a New York Times op-ed arguing that McHenry “may simply need to act on his own.” That is, he should start calling up resolutions or bills, and if any member of Congress objects, just put it to a vote and see if a majority of the House backs him. “All of this is unstable and unsustainable, but so too is our current course,” Buck wrote.

5) It doesn’t end: Finally, for the sake of completion, one more possibility (albeit right now an extremely remote one) is that the House simply remains speaker-less until 2025. This would mean an unprecedented, devastating 13-month government shutdown with unforeseen consequences — something enough Republicans would likely want to cut short so they won’t be blamed for it. It would also mean an end to legislation for the next year, including perceived “must-pass” measures like aid to Israel. So it seems unlikely things would go this far. But there’s a first time for everything.

None of the scenarios outside of option 3 bode well for the Republic. Meanwhile, Jordan is doing a great job of dividing his party, with plenty of support from eager accomplices.

Can Democrats leverage the “GOP can’t govern” meme next year?  Jordan’s remarkable record of zero legislative accomplishments in his entire career will invite continuing scrutiny, if he gets elected. But it may be a bit stale a year from now. For Democrats, the short term-strategy is to publicize GOP paralysis, keep chipping away at their prospects in swing districts and work on a legislative agenda that can interest political moderates, while holding liberal support steady..