The following article by Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter and Yuval Levin, director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and founder and editor of National Affairs, is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

This election couldn’t get any tighter. The New York Times polling average has every swing state within a point, with the exception of Arizona where Trump is ahead by a mighty two points. Nate Silver’s election forecasting model has the election at dead-even, 50-50, between the two candidates.

What can we conclude from this? We can certainly be sure someonewill win—we just don’t know who. And we can be reasonably sure that the election will not resolve the fundamental stalemate between the parties, leaving the country still bitterly polarized and torn apart by political rancor. We can also be fairly sure that [insert winning party here] will claim that a New Era in politics has arrived with a mandate for [winning party] and their plans for the country, no matter how narrow the victory.

Enough! This is madness that voters should not accept. The fact of the matter is that neither party seems truly interested in building the broad majority that might break the stalemate and lead to a healthier, more productive politics. But that is not because such a broad majority can’t be built but rather because neither party is consciously and purposively attempting to build such a coalition.

That is the thesis of our report, “Politics Without Winners: Can Either Party Build a Majority Coalition?,” which has just been published by the American Enterprise Institute. Please do read the whole thing, but here is our basic argument.

In the American political system, the parties’ purpose is to form enduring national coalitions. Look at almost any point in American history, and you will find a majority party working to sustain a complex coalition and a minority party hoping to recapture the majority. Today, however, American politics features two minority parties, and neither seems interested in building a national coalition. Close elections and narrow majorities dominate electoral politics more than at any other point in American history. Our report explores the evolution of the party coalitions, considers their contemporary strengths and weaknesses using fresh data from AEI’s Survey Center on American Life, and assesses which issues Democrats and Republicans can use to build a durable majority.

Once the American constitutional system began, political parties materialized nearly immediately. Yet not until the chaos of the 1824 presidential election were the parties truly formalized and institutionalized. Martin Van Buren and others argued for developing two broad, durable parties to subsume personal ambition and moderate divisions. This party system formed around the intense battles of 19th-century politics and gradually fell into a pattern of shifting majority coalitions.

The realigning election of 1896, which expanded the Republican coalition among diverse groups including urban workers, began a period of Republican dominance that lasted until the Great Depression. Between 1896 and 1913, the economy more than doubled in size, and real per capita income rose by 2.5 percent per year.

In the wake of the 1929 stock market crash, a new governing coalition emerged under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s leadership. The New Deal coalition owed its electoral success to the perception that Democrats were the party of the people—unionized workers, cross-class white Southerners, and ethnic minorities who united against a Republican Party that they perceived as too friendly to business and the wealthy. Even as Dwight Eisenhower captured the presidency, this coalition returned massive Democratic majorities to the House and Senate.

Not until the late 1960s did the New Deal coalition fracture. Democratic leaders embraced a bevy of new social movements, especially the civil rights movement, and white working-class voters began to abandon the party. Combined with the widely perceived failure of Democratic economic management in the 1970s, this led to a new era of Republican dominance.

After resurgences during the Clinton and Obama years, Democrats once again found themselves on a rocky road in 2016. By a massive margin, Donald Trump won support from white working-class voters—including many who had voted for Barack Obama four years prior. In 2020, though Joe Biden narrowly defeated Trump, Democrats up and down the ballot started to slip with black and Hispanic voters, particularly those without a college degree.

Today, the Republican coalition relies heavily on white working-class voters and is increasingly weak among white college-educated voters. The GOP generally does poorly among non-white voters, especially blacks, but is starting to do better among non-white working-class voters. Geographically, Republicans dominate rural and small-town America and perform much better in outer suburbs and exurbs than in more educated, affluent inner suburbs. They get walloped in dense urban areas.

The Democratic coalition, on the other hand, has become increasingly dependent on the votes of college graduates, particularly white college graduates. Its long-standing and worsening weakness is among white working-class voters, still a vast constituency despite their steadily declining weight in the electorate. The burgeoning non-white population continues to vote heavily Democratic, but the Democratic margins here are starting to decline, especially among Hispanic and working-class voters.

Geographically, the Democrats’ support base is highly polarized. They dominate urban areas and run up ever-bigger margins in inner suburbs, but their strength diminishes away from the urban core. And in much of rural and small-town America, their brand is simply toxic.

What the Republican and Democratic coalitions have in common is enough strength to stalemate the other party but not enough to dominate.

As a result, a noxious back-and-forth has defined American politics for a generation. Can the deadlock be broken?

Our analysis, based on a proprietary survey and publicly available data, reveals which issues each party can use to create a majority coalition. Republicans could capitalize on Democratic cultural radicalism—including on immigration, crime, and identity politics—energy realism, and patriotism. Democrats, meanwhile, hold clear advantages with their positions on abortion, health care, and adherence to political norms. But the key issues of economic prosperity and America’s place in the world lack a defining advantage for either party.

Stalemate is not the American party system’s natural equilibrium. Both parties have avenues to build a durable majority, but they must first recognize where they have gone wrong. Only then can each consciously build a dominant coalition.

We conclude:

Our overview of the history of American party politics, today’s two major party coalitions, and each party’s opportunities and challenges has put in stark relief the party system’s broader failure. For a generation, Americans have been in a state of deadlock, with neither party able to attract a durable majority of voters or construct a coherent winning coalition.

This deadlock has not happened because either party lacks opportunities. Nor has it resulted because the party coalitions have been static and unchanging. Today’s Democratic and Republican voters are not yesterday’s. Both party coalitions have churned a great deal, yet neither has broken through to clear majority status.

Surveying the parties’ decisions in one election cycle after another, it is hard to avoid concluding that they are stuck at 50–50 because they choose to be. Both have prioritized the wishes of their most intensely devoted voters—who would never vote for the other party—over the priorities of winnable voters who could go either way. They have done this even as the nature of their most devoted voters has changed. They have not operated as institutions geared to construct broad coalitions and win broad general-election victories. Instead, they have focused on fan service—satisfying their most partisan and loyal constituencies.

Ironically, the fact of America’s 50–50 politics has made it difficult for either party to break out of this pattern. You might think that two minority parties would each feel pressure to expand its coalition and become a majority, but actually, both have behaved as if they were the rightful majorities already. Each finds ways to dismiss the other’s wins as narrow flukes and treat its own as massive triumphs. Indeed, each has responded to close election losses with various forms of denial.

This is sustainable only because elections are so close. Politicians learn big lessons from big losses or big wins, so neither party has learned much in a long time, and neither can grasp that it isn’t popular and could easily lose the next election.

Breaking this pattern must start by acknowledging a truism: Bigger majorities are possible if the parties seek broader support. That sounds obvious, yet it has eluded America’s leaders for a generation, because it requires seeing beyond our age of deadlock. But it remains true.

Deadlock is not the American party system’s natural equilibrium. Durable majority coalitions are not only possible; they are the norm. And we will see them again.

But the next durable majority must result from self-conscious coalition building, which in turn must result from realizing that what both parties are now doing is not working and will not work.

Whichever party first grasps that it has been losing for a generation will have a chance to make itself the next big winner in American politics.

As Election Day draws closer, I’m joined by my AEI colleague Sean Trende to break down all things 2024. We discuss swing state polling before moving into who we think might be favored to win the White House. Did Democrats make the wrong VP pick? What’s behind Harris’s stubborn leads in the Midwestern battlegrounds? Why are some pollsters suddenly weighting on recalled vote? Who’s favored to win the House and Senate? [If the forward arrow on the red button doesn’t work, click on the YouTube logo.]

En route to his conclusions in “Media organizations are blowing their endorsements, Matthew Yglesias flags a study, “Political practitioners poorly predict which messages persuade the public,” by David E. Brookman, Joshua L. Calla, Christian Caballero and Matthew Easton at OSF Reprints. From the Abstract:

Recent research finds that political persuasion efforts often have limited effects. We explore a potential explanation for this finding: that political practitioners have poor intuitions about how to persuade. This would be surprising in light of longstanding theories that political elites can easily manipulate public opinion (Lasswell 1938) and the large sums spent to secure their expertise (Sheingate 2016)—but resonate with findings regarding the surprising limits of expert forecasts (Milkman et al. 2022; Tetlock 2005). In this paper, we evaluate how well political practitioners can predict which messages are most persuasive. We measured the effects of N = 172 messages about 21 political issues using a large-sample survey experiment (N = 67, 215 respondent-message observations). We then asked both political practitioners who work to persuade the public (N = 1, 524 practitioners, N = 22, 763 predictions) and laypeople (N = 21, 247 respondents, N = 63, 442 predictions) to predict the efficacy of these messages. We find that: (1) political practitioners and laypeople both perform barely better than chance at predicting persuasive effects; (2) once accounting for laypeople’s inflated expectations about the average size of effects, practitioners do not predict meaningfully better than laypeople; (3) these results hold even for self-identified issue experts and highly experienced practitioners; and (4) practitioners’ experience, expertise, information environment, and demographics do not meaningfully explain variation in their accuracy. Our findings have theoretical implications for understanding the conditions likely to produce meaningful elite influence on public opinion as well as practical implications for practitioners.

None of which bolsters confidence in the messaging skills of campaign strategists. That doesn’t mean campaigns should not bother seeking experienced political message crafters and strategists. But it does suggest that their messages should be subjected to rigorous review and more skepticism.

Many a campaign has run aground by emphasizing the wrong messages or poorly presenting the right ones. There’s no foolproof way for a campaign to hire the best messaging talent. Although likable candidates with lackluster messages have sometimes won elections, winning political campaigns would rather have message-crafters and strategists who have a good track record.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getting Their Groove Back

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or Kamala Harris equally famously saying:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And as he tartly observes re the 2050 deadline:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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