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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or Kamala Harris equally famously saying:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And as he tartly observes re the 2050 deadline:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s no sugarcoating it—this is a serious problem for the Democrats. College-educated America may be delighted with candidate Harris but working-class America clearly is not. And there are a lot more working-class than college-educated Americans. Remember that they will be the overwhelming majority of eligible voters (around two-thirds) and, even allowing for turnout patterns, only slightly less dominant among actual voters (around three-fifths). Moreover, in all seven key swing states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—the working-class share of the electorate, both as eligible voters and as projected 2024 voters, will be higher than the national average.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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:

As legendary football coach Vince Lombardi famously said: “Winning isn’t everything—it’s the only thing.” That might well serve as the slogan of today’s Democrats as they enthusiastically line up behind the newly-minted presidential candidacy of Kamala Harris. Doubts about Harris’s political history and positions, what she really stands for, what she might actually do if she is elected—all have been completely submerged to the sacred goal of beating Donald Trump.

This is understandable. They thought they were toast. Now the race has been reset and winning looks within their grasp. They subbed out their aging leader for a much younger model who can hit her marks in scripted settings and excites Democratic voters. But she is much less good in unscripted settings, has not had to put her personal views before voters for five years, and has an extensive history of commitments to policy goals that would be crippling liabilities in the upcoming election. Solution: keep her in scripted settings, make her policy commitments vague and deny, without explanation, that she now holds the unpopular positions she formerly did. Democrats, including progressive Democrats, who at other times might have been ostentatiously displeased with some or all of this have cheerfully—joyfully?—accepted this approach as a cheap price to pay for defeating Trump.

Will it work? There are two big problems with Vince Lombardi Democrats as the new, improved version of the Democratic Party. The first is that, even in the limited, short-term sense of beating Trump this November, it might fall short. Consider that, while Harris has dramatically improved the Democrats’ position compared to Biden and now leads in all national polling averages and in some key swing states (how many depends on which poll average you look at), her position is still not all that great. Even after weeks of extremely favorable press coverage, rapturously-received rallies, and near-flawless execution of her campaign’s roll-out strategy, followed by a national convention that was judged a great success, she still lags far behind where Biden was at this point in 2020 cycle and, indeed, lags behind Biden’s final popular vote margin in 2020. Nate Silver’s influential election forecasting modelnow has Trump a slight favorite, at 58 percent to a 42 percent win likelihood for Harris.

As has been widely noted, Harris has recovered a considerable proportion of Biden’s 2024 underperformance among key demographics. But it is also the case that she is still considerably below Biden’s 2020 performance among many of these demographics. Aaron Zitner and Stephanie Stamm have an illuminating article in the Wall Street Journal making these comparisons. According to their analysis, comparing Harris’s current margins vs. Biden’s in 2020 shows the following:

• Harris’s margin among black voters is 15 points below Biden’s in 2020;
• Harris’s margin among Hispanics lags Biden’s by 9 points;
• Harris’s margin among young (18-29 year old) voters is 20 points below Biden 2020; and
• Harris lags Biden’s 2020 margin among men by 6 points and, surprisingly, among women by 2 points.

In addition, their analysis shows Harris doing slightly better than Biden among white college voters but slightly worse among white working-class voters. While available data are sparse, they tend to indicate that Harris is also running behind Biden 2020 among nonwhite working-class voters, a likely culprit for much of her underperformance among blacks and Hispanics.

It’s a bit ironic, no? As Zitner/Stamm remark:

If Harris can’t match her party’s 2020 showing among these groups, where might she make up the votes? Many analysts say she can look to white voters, especially among women responding to her promises to work to restore access to abortion. If they are right, the first Black female president could have a winning coalition that relies more on white voters, and less on those from minority groups, than did the white man elected just before her.

Put another way, as I noted in a recent piece on how the emerging Harris coalition differs from the Obama coalition overly-enthusiastic Democrats believe she is replicating:

[E]ven if successful, Harris’s coalition will [not] represent the second coming of the Obama coalition. Instead it is likely to be a more class-polarized version of the post-Obama Democratic coalition [such as in 2020] with even more reliance on the college-educated vote, particularly the white college-educated vote.

This is nicely illustrated by new CNN data from Pennsylvania. By general assent, Pennsylvania is the most important state in this election, with by far the highest chance of being the tipping point state in this election. If Trump wins it, and only carries Georgia in addition to the states he carried in 2020, he will be the next president. Looking at the CNN crosstabs and comparing these findings to States of Change data from 2020, we have the following:

• The CNN poll has Harris carrying Pennsylvania college-educated voters by 23 points; Biden carried them by 18 points in 2020.
• In the poll, Harris loses Pennsylvania working-class voters by 16 points; Biden lost them by just 9 points last election.
• Looking at Pennsylvania’s white college voters, Harris has a thumping 22 point advantage among them compared to Biden’s lead of only 10 points in 2020.
• Finally, the white working class in Pennsylvania prefers Trump over Harris by 32 points, more than his already-large 28 point advantage over Biden in 2020.

This pattern translates into a tie between Harris and Trump in the state (close to the running average of Pennsylvania polls). This is not terrible and she could certainly wind up winning the state. But it does suggest the precarity of her position; the rise of Vince Lombardi Democrats has not fundamentally altered—and probably can’t—the underlying nature of the Democratic coalition.

Which brings us to the second problem with the rise of Vince Lombardi Democrats: it is no solution to Democrats’ longer-term problems with building a coalition sufficiently broad in class and geographic terms to dominate American politics. Therefore, even if successful in the short-term goal of keeping Trump out of the Oval Office, we are likely to see a continuation of what Yuval Levin and I term “Politics Without Winners” in a forthcoming paper:

In the American political system, the purpose of parties is to form a national coalition that endures. Look in on almost any point in our history and you would find a majority party working to sustain a complex coalition and a minority party hoping to recapture the majority. Today, however, American politics is home to two minority parties and neither seems interested in building a national coalition. Close elections and narrow majorities dominate our electoral politics more than at any point in our history.

The rise of Vince Lombardi Democrats seems highly unlikely to change this situation. This seems obvious, but one of the surprising things about this change in Democratic approach is how many formerly critical Democrats seem convinced Democrats have solved their underlying problems through the new approach. They are happy Harris and her campaign have emphasized gauzy themes like “freedom” instead of the imminent end of democracy, backed off her former support for politically toxic positions like decriminalizing border crossings and ending fracking, and drenched the Democratic National Convention in patriotism instead of identity politics-coded rhetoric.

It’s the new centrism and the new “big tent” Democrats! But how plausible is it that Vince Lombardi Democrats have, in a few weeks, reinvented the Democratic Party and decisively jettisoned its cultural radicalism, climate maximalism, and other baggage that prevents the party from broadening its coalition? It seems far more plausible that Democrats are “maximizing within constraints”—moving to the center just enough that they might gain some electoral advantage but without really changing the underlying commitments and priorities of the party their liberal, educated base holds dear.

In short, it’s more a purpose-built, curated centrism than a full-bore move to the center. As such, it fits the rise of Vince Lombardi Democrats like a glove but is profoundly inadequate to the task of building a broad and durable political coalition that can do more than squeak through the next election.

From “Harris goes her own way on capital gains tax hike” by  Brian Faler at Politico: “In a break with President Joe Biden, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris called Wednesday for a smaller capital gains tax increase on the rich than he’s proposed….Harris would hike the top total rate on people making more than $1 million to 33 percent, including a special 5 percent surcharge, well below the nearly 45 percent levy Biden has pitched….“We will tax capital gains at a rate that rewards investments in America’s innovators, founders and small businesses,” she said at a campaign stop in New Hampshire….Her shift toward what her campaign considers a more “moderate” capital gains increase comes ahead of her first debate with former President Donald Trump, and as Republicans try to paint her as a creature of the extreme left….It’s also part of an effort to woo business owners, with Harris separately calling for start-up firms to be allowed to deduct more of their costs. She also proposed creating a type of standard deduction for businesses.” Faler notes that “Biden has proposed requiring people making more than $1 million to pay taxes on capital gains — which include things like appreciation in the value of stocks — at ordinary income tax rates, instead of a special preferential rate. He has also proposed raising the top marginal income tax rate to 39.6 percent from 37 percent and increasing an investment surcharge on high earners to 5 percent from 3.8 percent.” Harris’s new position on taxes may help get  more contributions from business leaders and win more support from conservatives. It may also encourage media reporters to think a bit longer before stereotyping Harris as a left-winger and undercut the Trump campaign’s efforts to ‘brand’ her as a crazed left winger who hates business.

So the new presidential debate rules are set, as M.J. Lee reports at CNN Politics: “Kamala Harris’ campaign has accepted the terms of next week’s presidential debate with former President Donald Trump, including the fact that the candidates’ microphones will be muted when it is not their turn to speak, according to a person familiar with the debate negotiations….However, in a letter to ABC News Wednesday afternoon agreeing to the rules, the Harris campaign again laid out their objections to the muted mics condition, insisting that they believe the vice president will be “disadvantaged” by the format….“Vice President Harris, a former prosecutor, will be fundamentally disadvantaged by this format, which will serve to shield Donald Trump from direct exchanges with the Vice President. We suspect this is the primary reason for his campaign’s insistence on muted microphones,” the letter from the Harris campaign to the network, shared in part with CNN, said.” However, “The network, according to the source familiar, has offered assurances to the Harris campaign that if there is significant cross talk between Harris and Trump, it may choose to turn on the mics so that the public can understand what is happening, the moderator would discourage either candidate from interrupting constantly and the moderator would also work to explain to viewers what is being said….“Notwithstanding our concerns, we understand that Donald Trump is a risk to skip the debate altogether, as he has threatened to do previously, if we do not accede to his preferred format,” the campaign said. “We do not want to jeopardize the debate. For this reason, we accept the full set of rules proposed by ABC, including muted microphones.”….The network’s rules also state that there will be no audience, the candidates will not be permitted to have written notes, no staff can visit them during the two commercial breaks and the candidates cannot ask questions of one another.”

NYT opinion essayist Thomas B. Edsall shares a boatload of new polling results, including: “Adam Carlson — a Democratic polling analyst whose work I previously cited — has recently compiled demographic voting trend data comparing the levels of support for Biden in multiple surveys taken from July 1 to July 20 with levels of Harris’s support in surveys taken from July 22 to Aug. 9. Nationwide, Carlson found a net gain of 3.4 points for Harris….Harris’s improvement over Biden’s margins among specific constituencies has been much larger: voters 18 to 34, up 12.5 points; independents, up 9.2 points; women, up 8.2; Hispanics, up 6.3. While Harris’s gains are larger than her losses, she lost ground compared with Biden among white college graduates, down 0.5 points; men, down 2.2; Republicans, down 3.9 and voters over 64 years old, down 3.9….The RealClearPolitics averaging of multiple polls in battleground states found Trump up by tiny margins in three states (by 0.5 percent in Arizona, 0.7 points in North Carolina and 0.2 points in Georgia) a tie in Nevada and Harris ahead in three states (by 1.4 points in Wisconsin, 1.1 in Michigan and 0.5 points in Pennsylvania). All these percentages are within the margins of error….For comparison, on July 21, the day Biden dropped out, Trump led nationally by 4.3 points and was ahead in all seven battleground states….VoteHub, an election tracking website, followed presidential polling from Aug. 5 through Sept. 3 and found Harris going from slight underdog status to steadily building a lead over Trump….On Aug. 5, Trump held a statistically insignificant lead of 46.4 to Harris’s 46.2. By Aug. 24 Harris had pulled ahead by 2.6 points, 48.4 to 45.8, and by Sept. 3, she led by 3.3 points, 48.8 to 45.5.”

Edsall notes further, “Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican polling firm, responded by email to my inquiry, noting that Harris has benefited from a closely divided electorate because it “was not difficult for a Democratic nominee without the concerns voters had about Biden’s age to consolidate the Democratic vote.”….McInturff provided The Times with an analysis of the state of the election based on his firm’s polling for NBC. Among McInturff’s findings:

• Harris has closed the gap on who is better on handling the issues. When voters were asked in July who would “make our economy work better, they chose Trump over Biden by 11 points; in August, they chose Trump over Harris by one percentage point. Similar, when asked which candidate was “competent and effective” in July, Trump led Biden by 10 points, but in August, Harris led Trump by four points. The biggest shift was on the question of which candidate “has the energy and stamina needed to serve.” In July, Trump led Biden by 27 points; in August, Harris led Trump by 11 points.

• Crucially, Harris has substantially reduced Trump’s polling advantage on key issues that are pillars of the former president’s campaign. Asked which candidate was better on immigration and border security, Trump’s 35-point edge over Biden in July fell to nine points over Harris in August; on inflation and cost of living, Trump’s advantage dropped from 22 to three points; on crime and safety, from 21 to two points.

• Harris’s net favorable rating has appreciably improved and now is better (46 favorable, 49 unfavorable) than Trump’s (40 favorable, 55 unfavorable).

Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia and the director of its Center for Politics, emailed me the center’s analysis of the 2024 presidential election:

We have the Electoral College at 226 safe/likely/leaning to Harris, 219 safe/likely/leaning to Trump, and 93 electoral votes’ worth of tossups (seven states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin).

Every other electoral vote beyond these seven states is rated as likely or safe for one party or the other — the only electoral vote in the leans category (as leans Democratic) is the single electoral vote in Nebraska’s Second Congressional District.

A number of poll-based forecasting models suggest that the race is basically 50-50 or maybe there’s a small edge to Harris.”

John Sakellariadis flags a scary vulnerability in America’s vote counting systems. As he writes in “Hacking blind spot: States struggle to vet coders of election software” at Politico:

When election officials in New Hampshire decided to replace the state’s aging voter registration database before the 2024 election, they knew that the smallest glitch in Election Day technology could become fodder for conspiracy theorists.

So they turned to one of the best — and only — choices on the market: A small, Connecticut-based IT firm that was just getting into election software.

But last fall, as the new company, WSD Digital, raced to complete the project, New Hampshire officials made an unsettling discovery: The firm had offshored part of the work. That meant unknown coders outside the U.S. had access to the software that would determine which New Hampshirites would be welcome at the polls this November.

The revelation prompted the state to take a precaution that is rare among election officials: It hired a forensic firm to scour the technology for signs that hackers had hidden malware deep inside the coding supply chain.

The probe unearthed some unwelcome surprises: software misconfigured to connect to servers in Russia and the use of open-source code — which is freely available online — overseen by a Russian computer engineer convicted of manslaughter, according to a person familiar with the examination and granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about it.

The public has no way of knowing how extensive of a U.S. vote hacking project Putin has in place. We can only surmise that Russia’s hackers are focusing on the swing states, counties and maybe even larger precincts. Nor do we know how good our anti-hacking operation is in these localities and the nation at large.

Like Trump, Putin must realize that his legal status may ultimately depend on the outcome of the U.S. elections. Trump is his lapdog, and it would be folly to deny that Putin will do all that he can to help defeat Democrats. Americans have short political memories. But let’s not forget Trump’s “Russia, if you are listening….” remark, and let’s more safely assume that he has reached out to Putin in some way.  Sakellariadis also writes,

The supply-chain scare in New Hampshire — which has not been reported before — underscores a broader vulnerability in the U.S. election system, POLITICO found during a six-month-long investigation: There is little oversight of the supply chain that produces crucial election software, leaving financially strapped state and county offices to do the best they can with scant resources and expertise.

The technology vendors who build software used on Election Day face razor-thin profit margins in a market that is unforgiving commercially and toxic politically. That provides little room for needed investments in security, POLITICO found. It also leaves states with minimal leverage over underperforming vendors, who provide them with everything from software to check in Americans at their polling stations to voting machines and election night reporting systems.

Many states lack a uniform or rigorous system to verify what goes into software used on Election Day and whether it is secure. When both state and federal officials have tried to bring greater attention to these flaws, they’ve had to contend with critics who resist “federalization” of state election processes.

Further, Sakellariadis reminds readers, “Russian hackers probed election systems in all 50 U.S. states and breached voter registration databases in at least two, according to a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report. Four years later, Iranian hackers penetrated inside an unnamed state’s database, then used data stolen during the hack to mount a targeted voter intimidation campaign, the Justice Department found.”

Also, “In the worst-case scenario, hackers could manipulate a state’s voter list, adding fictitious people to the rolls, changing real voters’ information or directing voters to the wrong polling places on Election Day.” Sakellariadis has much more to say about the extent of the problem, and what is, and is not, being done to address it.

Democrats have enough to worry about in just getting out the vote. It would be indeed tragic, not only for Democrats, but for the world, if Dems lost the election as a result of vote theft, instead of a fair count.