Among the many charms of the new Speaker of the House, Rep. Mike Johnson, is his eagerness, make that determination, to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits for millions of Americans. As Michael Hiltzik explains in his column, “America’s retirement system is mediocre. The new House speaker wants to make it downright awful” at The Los Angeles Times, “Johnson is a long-term advocate of cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits through changes such as raising the retirement and eligibility ages for the programs….He also has advocated scrutinizing the cost of those programs through a “bipartisan debt commission” that inevitably would place them in the deficit-reduction cauldron along with other spending. After his rise to the speaker’s chair Wednesday, Johnson immediately promised to create this panel….“When Social Security was created in the ‘60s, the average life span was somewhere in the mid-70s,” he said. “Now people live to be 100 routinely. So people are on the program for decades, when it was never structured to be able to do that.”….A few things about this. First and foremost, Social Security was created in 1935, not the ‘60s. Even then, the average American life expectancy for anyone reaching the age of 45 or older was more than 70. For 65-year-olds — that is, those who were eligible to begin collecting benefits — the average life expectancy was nearly 78….Today, the average life expectancy for a 65-year-old is about 85….As for Americans living “routinely” to age 100, one wonders from where Johnson could have excavated that fantastical assertion. In 2021, there were 89,739 centenarians in the U.S., out of a total population of 336 million. That works out to about 2.5 hundredths of a percent of the population. You may debate whether that’s a lot or a little, but by any standard, “routine” it ain’t….In measuring Johnson’s record on 10 legislative measures important to retirees, the Alliance for Retired Americans gave him a 0% score for 2022, and 5% for his entire career. He was the lowest-scoring senator or representative from his state.”

John Ward interviews Ruy Teixeira one week out from the release of his and John Judis’s new book, “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?: The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes., and asks Teixeira three good questions. Here’s an excerpt with one of Ward’s questions and Teixeira’s answer: “You say that the radical side of the GOP has propensities for violence and contempt for democracy that far outweigh the foibles of the Democrats’ cultural radicals. Basically, you’re saying that your hopes for democracy and American prosperity and vibrancy rests with the Democrats and with the working class?  [Teixeira responds] Yes, absolutely. That’s the correct way of understanding it. We don’t rule out that the Republicans could right the ship, and there are very interesting intellectual currents in and around the Republican Party. That could bear fruit over the medium to long term. But right now, realistically, looking at our political landscape, we still see the Democrats as being the best bet — if they sort of return to the roots as a party of the people — as a party of the common man and woman, if they shuck off some of this cultural radicalism for more of a centrist approach….At the tail end of another question, Teixeira adds, “We’re trying to make people understand how even though the Democrats are plausibly the best alternative at this point — the sort of the Trumpist Republicans are not a great look — here’s why they can’t seem to beat the other side more decisively. And here’s what they might need to be, to be the party we need to have in America.”

Credit Democrat Brandon Presley for making a gutsy run for the governorship of Mississippi, even though many political observers pronounced the state Democratic Party a near-hopeless cause. As AP’s Emily Wagster Pettus elaborates at The Mississippi Link: “They’re sitting up in that governor’s mansion tonight, I bet you money, tinkling their little glasses, smoking their cigars,” Presley said, imitating someone holding a tumbler of whiskey. “And they’re talking about how, ‘Well, nobody’s going to come vote.’ And particularly black Mississippians. They don’t think you’re going to commit.”….Presley, the 46-year-old second cousin of rock ‘n’ roll legend Elvis Presley, will need a bipartisan, multiracial coalition to vote in unprecedented numbers to accomplish his goal of unseating Reeves….Presley is endorsed by the state’s most powerful black politician, U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson. One of the most famous black Mississippi residents, Oscar-winning actor Morgan Freeman, recently joined him at a campaign event….Presley has raised more campaign cash than Reeves this year, and he’s attracting larger and more diverse crowds than any Democrat running for Mississippi governor in a generation….Presley is pushing for robust turnout among black voters, who comprise nearly 40% of the state’s population and are the base of the state Democratic Party. He also needs crossover votes from people who usually support Republicans but are disenchanted with conditions in one of the poorest states in the U.S….Others are making independent efforts to increase turnout….In speeches and TV ads, Presley talks about being in third grade when his father was murdered and then being raised by a single mom who worked in a garment factory and struggled to pay bills….Presley says rural hospitals are hurting because of Reeves’ refusal to expand Medicaid to people working jobs with no health insurance – roofing houses or waiting tables at the Waffle House. Reeves calls Medicaid “welfare” and says he does not want more people on government-funded health insurance….There’s evidence Presley is connecting with white working-class voters.”

If Presley can pull off an upset, future statewide victories for Democrats will become more of a possibility and perhaps lure needed funding and activism for the party’s candidates. Pettus notes one major change in election law which could help Presley: “One source of optimism in the Presley camp is a change in how Mississippi elects its governor. Until this year, winning a governor’s race required overcoming a unique legal challenge that was written into the state constitution during the Jim Crow era and repealed by Mississippi voters in 2020….Under the old method, a gubernatorial candidate had to win a majority of the statewide popular vote and and prevail in a majority of the 122 state House districts. Without both, the race would be decided by the Mississippi House….That process was written in 1890….The separate House vote allowed the white ruling class to have the final say in who holds office, and it fueled lingering cynicism among black Mississippians about whether their votes would ever matter….Mississippi was the only state in the U.S. with this process for electing statewide officials, and the vote to repeal the provision came only after former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder sued the state on behalf of some Black residents….Winning a governor’s race now requires a majority of the popular vote. If nobody receives that Nov. 7, the race goes to a Nov. 28 runoff. Although an independent candidate, Gwendolyn Gray, recently announced she is dropping out and endorsing Presley, she did so after the ballot had been set….Presley says the new method of electing a governor gives him a better chance than the old one. He doesn’t have to strategize to win a majority of House districts mostly drawn to favor Republicans….“For the first time, candidates of all political parties can truthfully emphasize voter turnout, where before it had to be such a scattered approach,” Presley said last week at Tougaloo College, an historically black school in Jackson. “This will be the first time particularly that black voters’ votes will count to an extent of 100%, where before, an argument could be made that they were very much diluted.” Here’s a fridge magnet Gandhi quote for Presley and other Democratic underdog candidates: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Biden is in absolutely dire shape.

Gulp.

Some nuggets from “The races to watch next week and why 2024 is already here” by Daily Kos Staff:

It’s not a midterm or a presidential year, but voters in Kentucky, Mississippi, New Jersey, Ohio, Virginia, and other states all face important state or local elections, and everyone should watch closely to see what the results presage for 2024.

In blood-red Kentucky, Republicans are struggling to gain traction in the governor’s race, where popular Democratic incumbent Andy Beshear remains the favorite. Indeed, after months of trying to make “the radical transgender agenda” a thing, the Republican candidate is now claiming that “Andy Beshear is a nice enough guy.” Attacking transgender people remains an electoral loser for Republicans, even in one of the most evangelical states in the country.

In Ohio, a ballot initiative to guarantee a right to abortion is headed toward a landslide victory, with a Public Policy Polling survey finding support at 55-38. Republican Gov. Mike DeWine must be looking at similar polling: He’s now trying to convince people to vote against the measure by saying he’ll loosen Ohio’s oppressive abortion restrictions. Are there any abortion-rights supporters brainless enough to fall for that trap? Hopefully not. After all, DeWine signed the state’s six-week ban, which lacks exceptions for rape and incest. Why would anyone trust him to do better? This election will demonstrate the continued potency of reproductive rights heading into next year.

In Virginia, Democrats can retake control of the state House of Delegates by picking up just a handful of seats. You can still make a difference in these races by supporting these five great Democratic candidates. And by doing so, you can help quell the insufferable Beltway narratives that somehow it is Democrats who are currently in trouble.

You know who is in trouble? Republicans. And not just because they picked a radical weirdo as their new House leader. There are few states more conservative than Mississippi, where its racialized politics means that roughly 90% of white voters vote for Republicans no matter what. Yet infighting among Magnolia State Republicans could offer Democrat Brandon Presley an opening for a surprise victory. And like the GOP civil war happening inside the U.S. House of Representatives, a divided Republican Party could pay big electoral dividends for Democrats next year.

The post didn’t really address New Jersey’s election, in which Republicans hope fallout from Sen. Menendez’s indictment will help them. As Matt Friedman notes at Politico,

New Jersey Republicans are practically giddy at a prospect that had been virtually unthinkable until now: Could they retake control of one or both houses of the state Legislature?….It’s a longshot scenario in a state where Democrats have a nearly one million voter registration advantage and have controlled the Statehouse for two decades….buoyed by Republicans’ surprising gains in the 2021 election — and the sudden fallout of Sen. Bob Menendez‘s indictment — GOP leaders see a narrow path to scoring key upsets that could put them on top in Trenton….“We are looking at a razor-thin proposition of holding the majorities in both houses this year. It’s going to come down to a few districts,” Kevin McCabe, the Middlesex County Democratic chair and one of the leading power brokers in the state, said at a party meeting in June….Democrats hold a 25-15 majority in the Senate and a 46-34 majority in the Assembly. Flipping either chamber would take an extraordinary run in swing districts and at least some upsets.

It’t undoubtedly too much to hope for that Dems will pull the inside straight and win all five elections. But three or four out of five would be something to crow about.

How is the war in Gaza affecting public opinion of President Biden’s policy toward the conflict? The most recent polling data indicates a significant decline in young voter support, although it is unclear how these attitudes will play out a year from now. Alexander Sammon notes in “Biden Has a Youth-Vote Problem. His Israel Policy Is Making It Worse” at Slate that “A recent Quinnipiac poll underscores Biden’s disastrous standing with the youth vote. The president’s favorability rating has cratered out at an almost-unbelievable 25 percent among registered voters under 35 years old. A few weeks prior, a Washington Post–ABC poll had Trump winning voters under 35 by 20 points. (The Post’s story notes that the poll differs from others taken recently, and that it may be an outlier. It’s not the only recent presidential poll that’s made publishers raise an eyebrow.)….In 2020, 60 percent of 18-to-29-year-old voters, by far the most Democratic-voting group by age, threw in for Joe Biden….That same Quinnipiac poll found that 51 percent of voters under 35 say they disapprove of the United States’ sending weapons and military support to Israel—a much higher figure than the 28 percent of Americans who oppose such a policy. Only 21 percent of voters under 35 say they approve of Biden’s Israel policy; 42 percent of voters across all age brackets approve….A CBS News poll conducted last week came to an even starker conclusion. When asked if the U.S. should send weapons and supplies to Israel, 59 percent of respondents under 30 said it should not. An even more resounding 64 percent of those between age 30 and 44—a bracket more likely to vote that carries the whole millennial generation and part of Gen X—said the U.S. should not….Earlier this year, Gallup polling found that among Democrats, net sympathy for Palestinians outweighs net sympathy for Israelis, a change that has occurred during Biden’s time in office. The aforementioned CBS News poll shows that a slim majority of both Democrats and independents feel that the U.S. should not send weapons and supplies to Israel. Data for Progress found that 80 percent of Democrats currently believe that the “US should call for a ceasefire and a de-escalation of violence in Gaza.”

Sammon continues, “Although the data seems overwhelming on this point, the anecdotal evidence in Washington appears to mirror it. An open letter, signed by 411 congressional staffers, took the rare move of calling publicly for a cease-fire. Meanwhile, HuffPost has reported that the State Department is in turmoil over Biden’s unequivocal support for Israel. “There’s basically a mutiny brewing within State at all levels,” one department official told the outlet….those 400-odd staffers are overwhelmingly not senior-level or senior age. They’re young people expressing a widespread conviction of their generation….Look, too, at the slowly growing list of representatives sponsoring the House’s cease-fire resolution. They’re not all young, but the list includes the House’s most prominent left-wing millennial in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the chamber’s only Gen Z member, Maxwell Frost….If Biden hopes to win reelection, he desperately needs to run up the score with the youth vote as he did in 2020; we can comfortably say, even 13 months from Election Day, that there are only narrow, unlikely paths back to the White House for any Democrat without that….Meanwhile, joining the congressional calls for cease-fire is hardly a safe bet. Certainly, significant percentages of the electorate would welcome that, but the same polling indicates that nontrivial percentages would also be enraged. It’s a divisive issue, and domestically, there’s no “safe” option for a U.S. president.” At The Guardian, Lauren Gambino reports that “A Gallup poll released on Thursday found that Biden’s approval rating among Democrats plummeted 11 percentage points in one month, to a record low of 75%. According to the survey, the drop was fueled by dismay among Democratic voters over Biden’s support for Israel….Meanwhile, a poll released last week by the progressive firm Data for Progress found that 66% of likely US voters strongly or somewhat agree that the US should call for a ceasefire.” Gambino adds that “So far no senator has backed a ceasefire. Warren, Sanders and several other Democratic senators have urged a “humanitarian pause” to allow aid, food and medical supplies to flow into Gaza after Israel ordered a “complete siege” of the territory.”

“Today’s polls aren’t predictive of an election that’s more than a year out,” Will Marshall writes in his article, “For victory in 2024, Democrats must win back the working class” at The Hill. “But they are indicative of how little headway the president and his party have made since 2020 on their central political challenge: enlarging their party by winning back working class voters.” Marshal, founder and CEO of the Progressive Policy Institute, adds “…it’s not unreasonable for Democrats to believe that, despite his abysmal approval ratings, Biden could yet parlay public anger at the Republicans’ anti-abortion crusade and Trump’s accumulating legal wounds into a second presidential term next November….Yet even if he manages to eke out a win, a Biden-Trump rematch would likely leave the parties at rough parity. Until that changes, Democrats’ path to victory will be exceedingly narrow….  To break this political deadlock, Democrats need to start reaching across the “diploma divide.” They’re doing fine with college graduates; Biden won 61 percent of them in 2020…. But Trump won white non-college voters by a massive, 25 point margin. The New York Times reports that “In nearly 20 Western and Southern states, Democrats are virtually shut out of statewide offices largely because of their weakness among the white working class.”….What Democrats really need is more voters. The only way to break today’s partisan stalemate and build a solid center-left majority is to target non-college voters, who are expected to be nearly two-thirds of eligible voters in 2024. Democrats must whittle away at Trump’s huge margin with white voters and stop hemorrhaging support among Black and especially Hispanic non-college voters….The push for loan forgiveness also highlights a glaring disparity between Democrats’ solicitude for college students, who are already on track toward higher lifetime earnings, and their comparatively modest investments in the majority of young Americans who don’t have college degrees….  Educational polarization also manifests itself in cultural politics. As the liberal political demographer Ruy Teixeira has documented, the progressive left has saddled Democrats with “genuinely unpopular positions” on crime, immigration, race, gender and schooling….it’s not too late for Democrats to start reorienting their cultural and economic policies around what working families actually want rather than what progressive elites think they should want. Their ability to keep Trump or a Trump clone out of the White House just may depend on it.”

In “The group Biden and Trump both want, because it might win them the presidency,” Los Angeles Times syndicated columnist Doyle McManus writes, “The battle for working-class voters is on, and it could well decide the outcome of the 2024 election….The battle for autoworkers’ hearts is a microcosm of a larger struggle for working-class voters, a category typically defined by pollsters as voters without a college degree. They make up about 60% of the electorate….Working-class voters, especially union members and their families, were once the cornerstone of the Democratic Party. But over the past half-century, as Democrats became more liberal, millions of white, non-college-educated voters moved toward the GOP and its conservative social policies — a phenomenon political scientists call a “class inversion.”….In 2016, Trump won the presidency partly by winning almost two-thirds of white non-college voters, a major reason he prevailed in former Democratic strongholds such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton won only 28% of those voters….In 2020, Trump won 65% of white working-class votes, but Biden improved on Clinton’s dismal performance by winning 33%, according to a study by the Pew Research Center. That was enough to move Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania into the Democratic column….So Biden doesn’t need to win a majority of non-college-educated voters to keep his job in 2024, he just needs to do about as well as he did in 2020….He especially needs to maintain his support among union members and their families, most of whom still vote Democratic. In 2020, Biden carried union households in Michigan by a whopping 25-percentage-point margin, 62% to 37%….Census Bureau estimates suggest that real household income, which began falling in 2020, hasn’t yet returned to its pre-pandemic high….Biden’s answer has been an array of economic stimulus, investments in infrastructure and clean energy, and policies to promote higher wages — a package he has dubbed “Bidenomics.”….”The term ‘Bidenomics’ seems perfectly designed to annoy voters rather than win them over,” said Ruy Teixeira, a centrist Democratic political scientist….Better, he suggested, for Biden to focus his pitch on the ways he’s nudging businesses to raise wages, including federal regulations requiring overtime pay for more workers.”

There are few topics more complicated and fraught with emotion than abortion politics and policy in the post-Roe era. At New York I addressed a Republican effort to turn the tables on this subject.

When a close and potentially historic election is on the horizon, political analysts invariably try to read entrails from off-year and special elections. This November, Beltway pundits are especially focused on elections in nearby Virginia, where Republican governor Glenn Youngkin is trying to gain control of the state legislature. The GOP currently controls the House while Democrats control the Senate, and thus have a veto on Youngkin’s agenda. Beyond the alleged significance of who wins and loses in Virginia, Youngkin is being widely credited with attempting a new party position on abortion that will get Republicans out of the defensive crouch they have assumed amid a widespread public backlash against the abortion restrictions made possible by U.S. Supreme Court striking down Roe v. Wade.

As the New York Times explains, Youngkin believes he’s come up with a silver bullet for his party on this issue: a ban on abortions after 15 weeks:

“Legislative races across the state will offer a decisive test of a strategy led by Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who has united Republicans behind a high-profile campaign in support of a ban on abortion after 15 weeks with exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother. The party calls it a ‘common sense’ position, in contrast to Democrats, who it says ‘support no limits.’

“The strategy is meant to defuse Republicans’ image as abortion extremists, which led to losses in last year’s midterms and threatens further defeats next month in an Ohio referendum and the Kentucky governor’s race.”

This 15-week “compromise” idea should be understood from several perspectives. First of all, existing Virginia law, based on Roe v. Wade, allows abortions without restrictions up until fetal viability, or about 26 weeks of pregnancy. The Roe standard is pretty popular in Virginia and nationally, so the Youngkin strategy is to chip away at it incrementally, for now at least, and look for a more strategic time to go much further. It just so happens, moreover, that a 15-week national ban is the litmus-test demand of the most hard-core anti-abortion groups. To be clear, that doesn’t mean a national standard of allowing abortions prior to 15 weeks, but a 15-week floor that enables red states to ban abortions entirely or at a much earlier stage of pregnancy, as most of them have already done (at least where voters haven’t overruled them, as they have in Kansas and Kentucky).

Yet another dimension of the Youngkin gambit is to draw a new line between the parties in which Republicans favor “reasonable” abortion restrictions (at least in those states where they cannot secure unreasonable abortion restrictions) while Democrats favor “abortion on demand” up until the moment of live birth. There’s no question that the plan is to seize on the growing sentiment among many reproductive-rights advocates in favor of abandoning the old gestational framework of Roe (originally based on “trimesters” and now on different rules for pre- and post-viability abortions) and replacing it with more straightforward defense of abortion rights, as my colleague Irin Carmon recently explained:

“[Abortion rights advocate Erika] Christensen believes this moment of outrage provides an opportunity to stop debating about gestational age and instead focus on enshrining abortion as an absolute right. Using the old frameworks, she says, ‘accepts the premise that there’s a reasonable point in pregnancy in which the state should be given authority to compel breeding.'”

Much as the debate among Democrats over police reform following the murder of George Floyd was caricatured by Republicans as representing a demand to “defund the police,” Youngkin and the entire GOP are clearly disregarding the Roe framework that most Democratic policymakers still support in order to depict the opposition as especially devoted to complete legalization of late-term abortions. The full “abortion on demand” position, rightly or wrongly, remains unpopular, especially among swing voters, but more to the point, it’s not the position of Democrats fighting red-state pre-viability abortion bans.

If Virginia Republicans do win in November, you can expect the 15-week “compromise” position to become wildly popular within the GOP, particularly since a fake compromise on abortion is what Donald Trump has been calling for, while lying about where Democrats stand, as he made clear on Meet the Press last month:

“‘Let me just tell you what I’d do. I’m going to come together with all groups, and we’re going to have something that’s acceptable,’ Trump said when asked about a 15-week ban Sunday.

“’I would sit down with both sides and I’d negotiate something, and we’ll end up with peace on that issue for the first time in 52 years. I’m not going to say I would or I wouldn’t,’ he added.

“Trump also called Democrats ‘radicals’ on abortion, claiming that some Democrat-led states like New York allow for abortions after birth.”

Republicans will continue to press for total or near-total abortion bans whenever and wherever they can get away with it while labeling Democrats as extremists, even though most Democrats are simply asking for the legal standard that was in place nationally for 49 years before the Supreme Court struck.

If Youngkin fails, then the forced-birth lobby may have to go back to the drawing board.

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

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

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

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

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

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

New York Times opinion essayist Thomas B. Edsall provides some insightful commentary that should be of interest to Democrats who are doing ‘oppo’ analysis to better formulate their own strategy. Edsall’s latest essay reads like it was written just before the Republicans confirmed Mike Johnson as the new Speaker, but his take on the Republicans’ floundering is still instructive. For example, “There are 18 Republicans who represent districts President Biden carried in 2020. These members, more than others, were forced to choose between voting for Jordan and facing sharp criticism in their districts or voting against him and facing a potential primary challenger. This group voted 12 to 6 for Jordan, deciding, in effect, that the threat of a primary challenge was more dangerous to their political futures than the fallout in their Democratic-leaning districts from voting for Jordan….Or take the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, which describes its members as “tired of the obstructionism in Washington where partisan politics is too often prioritized over governing and what is best for the country.” Jordan’s approach to legislation and policymaking embodies what those members are tired of….Despite that, the Republican members of the caucus voted decisively for Jordan, 21 to 8, including a co-chairman of the caucus — Brian Fitzpatrick, Republican of Pennsylvania — and Tom Kean, the son and namesake of a distinctly moderate former governor of New Jersey….Each time the Republican Party has had an opportunity to distance itself from Trump, Brownstein continued, “it has roared past the exit ramp and reaffirmed its commitment. At each moment of crisis for him, the handful of Republicans who condemned his behavior were swamped by his fervid supporters until resistance in the party crumbled.”

Further along, Edsall writes “There is little doubt that the three-week struggle, still unresolved, to pick a new speaker is quite likely to inflict some costs on Republicans….First and foremost, if, as appears possible, the government is forced to shut down because of a failure to reach agreement on federal spending, Republicans have set themselves up to take the fall when the public decides which party is at fault….Previous government shutdowns, especially those in 1995 and 1996, backfired on Republicans, reviving Bill Clinton’s re-election prospects to the point that he won easily in November…I asked Kevin Arceneaux, a political scientist at Sciences Po Paris and the lead author of the 2021 paper “Some People Just Want to Watch the World Burn: The Prevalence, Psychology and Politics of the ‘Need for Chaos,’” about the role of Gaetz and his seven allies. Arceneaux emailed back that he has no way of knowing, without conducting tests and interviews, how the eight “would answer the need for chaos survey items.”….But, Arceneaux added, “their behavior is certainly consistent with the burn-it-all-down mentality that we found associated with the need for chaos.”….He continued: “We also found that a drive to obtain status along with a sense that one’s group has lost social status increases one’s need for chaos. It would be interesting to study whether Freedom Caucus members are more preoccupied with concerns about status loss relative to other Republicans. If so, that would offer some circumstantial evidence that a need for chaos could at least partly explain their willingness to damage their own party.”

If you have friends or associates who like to get on the high horse about liberals smothering free speech on college campuses and elsewhere, give a read to Edsall’s previous column, in which he points out: “These civil libertarian claims of unconstitutional suppression of speech come from the same Republican Party that is leading the charge to censor the teaching of what it calls divisive concepts about race, the same party that expelled two Democratic members of the Tennessee state legislature who loudly called for more gun control after a school shooting, the same party that threatens to impeach a liberal judge in North Carolina for speaking out about racial bias, the same party that has aided and abetted book banning in red states across the country….In other words, it is Republicans who have become the driving force in deploying censorship to silence the opposition, simultaneously claiming that their own First Amendment rights are threatened by Democrats….One of the most egregious examples of Republican censorship is taking place in North Carolina, where a state judicial commission has initiated an investigation of Anita Earls, a Black State Supreme Court justice, because she publicly called for increased diversity in the court system….At the center of Republican efforts to censor ideological adversaries is an extensive drive to regulate what is taught in public schools and colleges….In an Education Week article published last year, “Here’s the Long List of Topics Republicans Want Banned From the Classroom,” Sarah Schwartz and Eesha Pendharkar provided a laundry list of Republican state laws regulating education: “Since January 2021, 14 states have passed into law what’s popularly referred to as “anti-critical race theory” legislation. These laws and orders, combined with local actions to restrict certain types of instruction, now impact more than one out of every three children in the country, according to a recent study from U.C.L.A.”

“In a February 2022 article, “New Critical Race Theory Laws Have Teachers Scared, Confused and Self-Censoring,” Edsall continues, “The Washington Post reported that “in 13 states, new laws or directives govern how race can be taught in schools, in some cases creating reporting systems for complaints. The result, teachers and principals say, is a climate of fear around how to comply with rules they often do not understand.”….From a different vantage point, Robert C. Post, a law professor at Yale, argued in an email that the censorship/free speech debate has run amok: “It certainly has gone haywire. The way I understand it is that freedom of speech has not been a principled commitment but has been used instrumentally to attain other political ends. The very folks who were so active in demanding freedom of speech in universities have turned around and imposed unconscionable censorship on schools and libraries. The very folks who have demanded a freedom of speech for minority groups have sought to suppress offensive and racist speech.”….“Post makes the case that there is “a widespread tendency to conceptualize the problem as one of free speech. We imagine that the crisis would be resolved if only we could speak more freely.” In fact, he writes, “the difficulty we face is not one of free speech, but of politics. Our capacity to speak has been disrupted because our politics has become diseased.”….We cannot now speak to each other because something has already gone violently wrong with our political community,” Post writes. “The underlying issue is not our speech, but our politics. So long as we insist on allegiance to a mythical free speech principle that exists immaculately distinct from the concrete social practices, we shall look for solutions in all the wrong places.”

This week’s political news brought back some distant memories from 1968, and I wrote about that at New York:

Ever since Joe Biden convinced the Democratic National Committee to remove the first-in-the-nation status from the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary last December (in favor of a calendar placing South Carolina first), New Hampshire Democrats have been in a jam. They don’t control the date of their presidential primary; the Republican secretary of State does, and he’s under a state-law mandate to keep the Granite State’s primary first no matter what. So for a while now it’s been clear New Hampshire will hold a “rogue” Democratic primary on January 23, 2024. This election will not be recognized as legitimate by the DNC, exposing the state (and any participating candidates) to the loss of convention delegates and other sanctions.

Joe Biden’s campaign has now made it official: He will not file to be on the New Hampshire primary ballot. But sensing an opportunity to embarrass the incumbent early in what is not expected to be a competitive nominating contest, Biden’s two main challengers, Marianne Williamson and Dean Phillips, are going for broke in the rogue primary. Phillips, the Minnesota congressman who tried to talk Democrats into dumping Biden before entering the primaries himself, is about to make his candidacy official on October 27 in New Hampshire.

Williamson, an eccentric progressive who ran for president in 2020 but dropped out shortly before voters began voting, is very much a known quantity. She has received single-digit support in New Hampshire polls and at best low double-digit support in national polls; she could inherit some of the modest but significant anti-Establishment backing previously held by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who switched to an independent general election candidacy earlier this month. Phillips is more of a wild card, with more mainstream respectability than Williamson or Kennedy, but also with virtually no name ID outside Minnesota.

To head off an embarrassing upset in New Hampshire, that state’s Democratic Establishment is organizing a write-in campaign for Biden, who is the overwhelming favorite of Granite State Democrats (polling at 70 percent there in the RealClearPolitics averages), despite their disappointment in his removal of their primary’s premier status. This step will inevitably bring back distant memories of the last time an incumbent Democratic president ran a write-in campaign in New Hampshire against significant opposition: in 1968 when Lyndon B. Johnson underestimated the anti–Vietnam War candidacy of Eugene McCarthy. LBJ won, but by an unimpressive margin that contributed greatly to his subsequent decision to fold his campaign.

Could history repeat itself? Almost certainly not. Whatever misgivings Democrats have about Biden, they pale in comparison to the impassioned anti-war sentiment that fed opposition to LBJ in 1968. Marianne Williamson isn’t going to win in New Hampshire, and at this point, all Dean Phillips shares with the well-known Gene McCarthy is a home state.

Still, Team Biden needs to be careful in associating the president too closely with the New Hampshire write-in effort. He won’t be campaigning there at all, and it’s not exactly Biden Country; he finished a poor fifth in the 2020 New Hampshire primary. More importantly, any semi-decent showing by his opponents will be inflated and massively publicized by conservative media and perhaps by some Democrats nervous about Biden’s electability.

It’s tough to ask voters for their support in a primary that you have delegitimized. So the president’s campaign may need to loudly write off New Hampshire as meaningless in advance while privately hoping state party leaders can give him a solid win.

Could this be the year Democrats score a big win in Mississippi, the state with the highest percentage of Black residents? Taylor Vance explores the possibilities in his article, “Inside the Democratic Party’s coordinated effort to turn out Black voters for the Nov. 7 election” at Mississippi Today. Some excerpts from Vance’s article:

The get-out-the-vote efforts from Democratic Party officials have continued into late October and have been focused across the state, not just in the Jackson metro.

This past weekend, state party leaders attended multiple events on the Gulf Coast, including a get-out-the-vote rally Sunday night at First Missionary Baptist Church Handsboro in Gulfport. The event, which organizers titled “Wake the Sleeping Giant,” was keynoted by Bishop William James Barber II, co-chair of the national organization Poor People’s Campaign.

The party will host a virtual organizing event called “Souls to the Polls” on Oct. 28, which is the first day of in-person absentee voting. The party has also hosted several town hall-style events in multiple Mississippi towns over the past few weeks focused on the state’s hospital crisis before mostly-Black audiences, culminating with a final stop on the tour in Jackson on Oct. 25.

And while party leaders organize their own events, Democratic candidates are benefitting from the independent electoral work of numerous third-party progressive organizations that are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to knock doors and target hyper-local Black communities. These groups, many of which have long organizing histories in Mississippi, are pumping money this cycle into door-knocking, phone banking, direct mailing, and digital and radio advertising.

Vance adds that “the party’s work of the past few weeks marks a noticeable shift in strategy to energize its base ahead of the 2023 election. Lackluster efforts with Black voters during the 2019 statewide election cycle from former state party leaders notoriously left candidates frustrated and Democratic voters feeling left behind..” Vance notes that “Black Mississippi voters make up the overwhelming foundation of the Democratic Party — about two-thirds of the party’s voting base.”

Vance explains further,

The bulk of media attention and national party resources during the election cycle has focused on [Brandon] Presley, the Democratic nominee for governor who has mounted a formidable campaign against Republican Gov. Tate Reeves and recently outraised the incumbent governor in campaign donations.

But most of the recent Black voter outreach events have not been framed exclusively around Presley’s race or any specific candidate. Rather, they have served as a repudiation of conservative policies over the last four years that, in the Democratic leaders’ view, harm Black communities. The events have served as a call to action to elect all Democrats on the ballot.

However, there have been instances when Presley’s work as north Mississippi’s public service commissioner was lauded, and his attendance at predominantly Black churches, HBCU football games and other places over the past few weeks was clearly noticed.

Presley has a powerful ally in Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC), who President Biden has credited with providing pivotal support for his election to the presidency. Clyburn is campaigning for Presley in Mississippi and advising him on strategy and tactics to win a pivotal share of the Black vote.

While the contest for governor is Mississippi’s marquee race, Vance writes, “The governor’s race aside, several progressive officials proclaimed the slate of Democratic statewide candidates was strong, and they were building a better foundation for the party that can continue to be stronger in future years.”

As a moderate Democrat, Presley has a good chance to take away some votes from the Republican incumbent. In addition, Clyburn notes that Presley was instrumental in securing substantial funding for the inclusion of broadband for rural communities in the bipartisan infrastructure bill congress passed in 2021.

Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. explains why “The GOP’s speaker chaos is a blessing in disguise,” and writes: “The chaotic Republican-led House of Representatives has a rather poor sense of timing. The United States is in the midst of two international emergencies and faces the threat of a government shutdown next month. President Biden’s prime-time speech on Thursday pressing for aid to Ukraine and Israel underscored the exorbitant costs of the GOP meltdown….But the embarrassing exercise could prove to be a blessing because it’s exposing a crisis in our politics that must be confronted. The endless battle for the speakership is already encouraging new thinking and might yet lead to institutional arrangements to allow bipartisan majorities to work their will….The House impasse was precipitated by both radicalization and division within the Republican Party. Narrow majorities in the House have enabled right-wing radicals to disable the governing system. Normal progressives and normal conservatives, in alliance with politicians closer to the center, are discovering a shared interest in keeping the nihilist right far from the levers of power….The GOP doesn’t want to recognize that McCarthy gave Democrats no reason to save him — he flatly refused to negotiate with them in his hour of need — and many reasons to believe he’d continue to kowtow to party extremists….The last straw came after Democrats gave more votes than Republicans did to pass McCarthy’s bill to avoid a government shutdown last month. The next day, McCarthy turned around and bizarrely claimed that Democrats “did not want the bill” and “were willing to let government shut down.” That dishonest nonsense sealed his fate.”

“Democrats are going out of their way,” Dionne adds, “to say they are ready to deal. “We are willing to find a bipartisan path forward so we can reopen the House,” Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said at a news conference on Friday, after Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) went down in his third and decisive defeat in the speakership vote. Republicans, Jeffries said, had a choice: to “embrace bipartisanship and abandon extremism.”….The Democratic rank and file has quietly been working in this direction. Rep. Annie Kuster (N.H.), chair of the New Democrat Coalition, told me that moderate Democrats “were talking to any reasonable Republican we had a relationship with” in an effort to empower Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick T. McHenry (R-N.C.) to bring up bills that have broad support in both parties….She noted that the Democrats’ conditions were minimal and hardly left-wing: to agree to avoid a government shutdown; to pass spending bills along the lines of the fiscal accord McCarthy and McHenry themselves made with Biden in May to avert a debt default; and to provide military aid to Ukraine and Israel and humanitarian aid for Palestinians….All friends of democratic rule should be grateful. With a regiment of nine lesser-known Republicans pondering a now wide-open speaker’s race, a new version of the McHenry option might gain appeal….Bipartisanship is no magic elixir, but bipartisanship in pursuit of majority rule is a worthy cause. Pushing Republicans to confront extremism in their ranks is both good politics and essential for governing. The Democrats’ offer to help Republicans through their intraparty struggle will either hasten the day of reckoning or expose the GOP’s refusal to stand up to its nihilists.”

“Former President Obama issued a new statement Monday on the ongoing violence taking place in Israel and Gaza as the death toll continues to tick up,” Lauren Sforza writes in “Obama issues new statement on Israel and Gaza” at The Hill. “In a lengthy statement, Obama again condemned the deadly attacks launched by the militant group Hamas on Oct. 7 in what he called an “unspeakable brutality.” While he maintained Israel had a right to defend itself against the attacks, he reiterated the need to abide by “international law.”….“But even as we support Israel, we should also be clear that how Israel prosecutes this fight against Hamas matters. In particular, it matters — as President Biden has repeatedly emphasized — that Israel’s military strategy abides by international law, including those laws that seek to avoid, to every extent possible, the death or suffering of civilian populations,” Obama wrote….He said upholding international law is “vital for building alliances and shaping international opinion.”….The attacks on Israel have resulted in the deaths of thousands of civilians across the region. More than 1,400 Israelis have been killed, mostly in the initial attack launched by Hamas on Oct. 7. The U.S. and other countries have designated Hamas as a terrorist organization….More than 5,000 Palestinians have been killed so far in the conflict in Gaza, including an estimated 2,055 children and 1,119 women, with more than 15,000 injured, the Gaza Health Ministry reported Monday….“The Israeli government’s decision to cut off food, water and electricity to a captive civilian population threatens not only to worsen a growing humanitarian crisis; it could further harden Palestinian attitudes for generations, erode global support for Israel, play into the hands of Israel’s enemies, and undermine long term efforts to achieve peace and stability in the region,” he wrote….He also recognized Israel has “every right to exist,” but Palestinians have “also lived in disputed territories for generations.”….“But if we care about keeping open the possibility of peace, security and dignity for future generations of Israeli and Palestinian children — as well as for our own children — then it falls upon all of us to at least make the effort to model, in our own words and actions, the kind of world we want them to inherit,” he concluded.”

You may not be shocked to learn that “Voters under 30 are trending left of the general electorate,” as Monica Potts and Holly Fuong report at FiveThirtyEight, via ABC News. “Voters under the age of 30 have largely been part of the Democratic camp since former President Barack Obama won two-thirds of them in 2008. That same age group may have helped put President Joe Biden over the top in 2020, and assisted Democrats in broadly overperforming expectations in the 2022 midterms. And there’s some evidence that these young voters are staying liberal even as they age, defying the trend of previous generations. That’s especially true of millennials, the now-27 to 42 year-olds who were so taken with Obama’s first campaign. (Throughout this analysis, we use the Pew Research Center’s definitions of millennials and Generation Z.)….Young voters are consistently more liberal than the general electorate is on a range of issues, according to a 538 analysis. We took a look at data from the Cooperative Election Study, a Harvard University survey of at least 60,000 Americans taken before the 2020 elections and the 2022 midterms, and found notable differences between younger voters and the general electorate on key issues like the environment, abortion and immigration. That could make a big difference in the general election — that is, if young voters actually show up to vote….In 2020 and 2022, voters under 30 made up 21 percent of the electorate, according to our analysis of the CES data. In both of those elections, the cohort of 18 to 29 year-olds was composed of a mix of millennials and Gen Z, those born after 1996. More of Gen Z will be eligible to vote next year than ever before, and so far, they seem to be voting like the millennials that came before them. If history holds, they are likely to become more politically active as they age, and if they keep the political preferences they exhibit now, then like millennials, they’ll have a bigger and bigger impact on elections to come. That impact may begin as soon as 2024….Turnout among millennials and Gen Z, many of whom will be voting in their first presidential election, will be key in 2024. The youngest voters in any given election year have historically been the least likely to vote, with around 46 percent in that age group voting in 2016, more than 15 percentage points lower than the general electorate. Turnout rose in 2020, as it did for all groups, when an estimated 50 percent of young voters and 66 percent of the general electorate voted, but declined some in 2022 compared to the previous midterm in 2018.”