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

With the Iowa caucuses in the rear view mirror, it seems even more likely that Trump will be the GOP candidate facing off against Biden this November. That should concentrate the mind. Right now Biden is running behind Trump in national polls and in every swing state with the possible exception of Wisconsin. In some of these states Trump’s lead is quite substantial: 5 points in Arizona, Michigan, and Nevada and 7 points in Georgia.

Of course it’s still early days. But let’s just say none of this is a good sign for Team Biden.

Right now the number one issue for voters is the economy and inflation and, as has been widely noted, Biden’s economic performance is viewed very poorly by voters. The latest ABC News poll has Biden’s approval rating on the economy at 31 percent. Only 13 percent say they are better off financially since Biden took office, compared to 43 percent who say they are worse off. When given a choice between two statements, 71 percent say “the economy is in bad shape, given higher prices and interest rates” rather than “the economy is in good shape, given low unemployment and rising wages” (24 percent). Perhaps most worrisome, in the latest CBS News poll half of voters believe that if Biden wins in November, his policies in a second term would make them financially worse off, with just a fifth saying those policies would make them better off. In contrast, half of voters think Trump’s policies, if he wins, would make them financially better off, compared to 30 percent who think his policies would make them worse off.

Not good. Maybe economic perceptions will improve over the course of the year. Maybe the Biden campaign’s economic messaging will improve after the debacle of “Bidenomics” (the Blueprint public opinion research group has some good ideas about this). Maybe the Democrats’ relentless drumbeat about “MAGA Republicans” and how “Democracy is on the ballot” will neutralize Trump’s advantage on the economy (and on mental and physical fitness). Maybe.

But it’ll be an uphill climb. And lurking in the weeds is voters’ second most important issue: immigration and the border. The Democrats are in such terrible shape on this issue that it could tip the balance decisively in Trump’s favor.

Start with this: Biden’s approval rating on “handling the immigration situation at the U.S.-Mexico border” is now 18 percent. Eighteen percent! That’s really, really bad and the lowest presidential approval on the issue ABC News has measured since 2004.

In the latest Wall Street Journal poll, Trump is preferred over Biden by 30 points, his greatest lead on any issue. In the latest Fox News poll, voters favor a wide variety of measures to crack down on illegal immigration: increasing border agents (79 percent); deporting illegal immigrants (67 percent); penalizing hiring illegal immigrants (64 percent); using the US military at the border (58 percent); and even building a border wall (54 percent).

Illuminating detail comes from a December survey conducted by the Blueprint group. Between Trump and Biden, who are voters most likely to think is close to their views on immigration? It’s Trump by a country mile: 44 percent of voters say Trump is close to their position, compared to a mere 25 percent who say Biden is close to their position. Even Hispanic voters are more likely to say Trump is close to their views on immigration than to say Biden is! (To understand this last data point I recommend Politico reporter David Siders’ sobering article, “There Are a Lot of Mexican People Looking Forward to Trump,” based on a reporting trip to El Paso, Texas.)

Across all voters, 56 percent say Biden is more liberal than they are on the immigration issue. Given a binary choice, voters prefer an approach that would “increase border enforcement and make asylum and refugee policies stricter” (61 percent) to one that would “increase legal pathways to immigrate to the United States” (39 percent). And they are far more likely to say rules on refugee and asylum status should be made stricter (53 percent) rather than looser (14 percent), and to believe that the US should take in fewer (52 percent) rather than more (17 percent) refugees and asylum seekers.

What part of “We need to get a lot tougher on border security” don’t Democrats understand? Of course, they are starting to bend a little on the issue, as we are currently seeing with the negotiations over linking border security changes to supplemental funding for Ukraine and Israel. We shall see how much they are willing to bend and how much Republicans, especially House Republicans, are willing to play ball.

Frankly, it’s a bit late in the day to finally be moving on this issue and only under duress from the Republicans. The border debacle has been unfolding throughout Biden’s term and the political damage has been accumulating. A big part of the problem is that there are a lot of Democrats who didn’t—and don’t—really want to do much about border security.

As David Leonhardt noted in The Atlantic :

Once a country has established borders, it must confront the unavoidably thorny issue of which outsiders it should admit and which it should not…“For those who believe in a multicultural America, this question can be uncomfortable to confront, because any system short of open borders invariably requires drawing distinctions that declare some people worthy of entry and others unworthy,” Jia Lynn Yang, a journalist, wrote in her history of immigration law. Because of this discomfort, the modern Democratic Party has struggled to articulate an immigration policy beyond what might be summarized as: More is better, and less is racist. The party has cast aside the legacies of [Barbara] Jordan and other progressives who made finer distinctions.

Leonhardt summarizes in a recent column:

Today, many Democratic politicians are willing to accept high levels of undocumented immigration and oppose enforcement measures that the party once favored. Some Democrats, especially on the left, argue that the government doesn’t even have the power to reduce migration much.

“More is better and less is racist” isn’t much of an immigration policy but it is the default position of many Democrats. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, has said that her members wouldn’t get behind any immigration legislation endorsed by Republicans. The delusional Jayapal added that any GOP-endorsed immigration legislation would hurt, not help, the Democrats in swing states this November.

“Compromises? We don’ need no stinkin’ compromises!” For these Democrats moving toward actually-existing public opinion on immigration is a betrayal and, of course (that magical concept), would demobilize the all-important progressive base. With “allies” like this, Biden will likely have a hard time re-positioning himself and his party on this critical issue.

I have noted the tendency of Democrats to indulge in the Fox News Fallacy on a variety of issues. To wit: if Fox News is going after the Democrats on some issue, it is likely made up and nothing Democrats should worry about. There is no starker example of this than Democrats’ attitude toward the immigration surge at the southern border. Cast your mind back to the early days of the Biden administration when the party line was that the situation at the Mexican border should not be called a “crisis”—only the bad people at Fox News use that word!—and that an initial surge at the border would go away on its own as the hot weather season arrived.

Well, here we are three years later and this is where we’ve wound up, as summarized by John Judis at The Liberal Patriot:

[O]f the 3.1 million undocumented immigrants who entered the United States at the Southwest border in FY 2023, about 1.5 million entered the maze of the immigrant court system, 300,000 were paroled, and 600,000 got through undetected. That’s about 2.4 million undocumented migrants in addition to the 1.1 million authorized to receive permanent visas under current immigration law. That’s an influx of undocumented immigrants that matches the population of Chicago or Houston. Given that migrants who were expelled could try again, America’s borders have been de facto open during the first three years of the Biden administration.

Not good! Rather than being dismissive of concerns about illegal immigration, it now seems obvious Democrats should have taken them more seriously from the very beginning. Trump of course will be delighted to take advantage of the Democrats’ colossal blunder. Could it hand him victory this November? It is my sad duty to inform you that yes, this is quite possible.

Regarding the new Biden-Harris campaign ad on reproductive rights, Edward Helmore writes at The Guardian: “The campaign ad, titled Forced, is designed to tie Donald Trump directly to the abortion issue almost 18 months after his nominees to the supreme court helped to overturn a constitutional right to abortion enshrined in Roe v Wade, which would have turned 51 this week….Dr Austin Dennard, a Texas OB-GYN and mother of three tells the camera her story about traveling out of her state to terminate her pregnancy after learning her fetus had a fatal condition, calling her situation “every woman’s worst nightmare”….In Texas, she said, her choice “was completely taken away and that’s because of Donald Trump overturning Roe v Wade”….“Donald Trump is the reason that more than 1 in 3 American women of reproductive age don’t have the freedom to make their own health care decisions. Now, he and MAGA Republicans are running to go even further if they retake the White House,” Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Biden-Harris 2024 campaign manager, said in a statement to The Hill.” Here’s the ad:

“Trump’s victory in the Iowa caucuses created the feel of a party falling in behind him, E. J. Dionne, Jr. writes in his Washington Post column, “Trump is not a colossus. And his party is a mess.”….But even if the punditry proves right, the GOP is in no way cohesive or coherent. Just look at the Republican majority in the House, which can’t govern without Democratic help. Meanwhile, Senate and House Republicans are at odds on the most important foreign policy question of the moment: whether the United States will continue to stand up against Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine….Even Trump’s big victory in Iowa belied the idea that Trump’s army would walk through fire for him. Many were plainly unwilling to ignore the bitter cold and icy roads on caucus night. Only about 110,000 of the roughly 750,000 registered Republicans in the state participated, down more than 40 percent from the 187,000 who joined the last competitive caucuses in 2016….The divisions among those hardy voters were deep, pointing to President Biden’s opportunities to drive wedges into the GOP electorate. The entrance poll found that Trump drew just 37 percent among college graduates, compared with 67 percent among non-graduates. Caucus-goers split down the middle as to whether they considered themselves part of the MAGA movement (46 percent) or not (50 percent.). Three-quarters of the non-MAGA voters opposed Trump….And 31 percent said they would not consider Trump fit to be president if he were convicted of a crime — a significant number, considering the loyalty to the GOP of the small minority willing to brave the elements….Sure, Democrats have their divisions, too. Party loyalists range from the center to the left, and some of their loud fights doomed parts of Biden’s program in the last Congress. But what’s remarkable is how much they did pass with narrow House and Senate margins — and, in the case of the infrastructure and technology investments, with bipartisan support….Failing to see the GOP as a party torn asunder allows Trump to seem stronger than he is. He uses this perceived supremacy to cow Republicans who hold the quaint view that governing in a reasonable and (small-d) democratic way is the point of getting elected. Is it just wish-casting to think New Hampshire might seize the opportunity to send them the message that it’s their duty to fight back?”

Jason Linkins makes the case that “It’s Time for Democrats to Make Some Enemies: With the presidential primary all but over, a yawning void in the news hole just opened up. Biden and his allies should pick some fights—and give the media some fresh material” at The New Republic. As Linkins observes: “President Joe Biden opened this particular book by going long on the threat that Trump poses to democracy. There’s nothing wrong with restating these terms, especially as it was a winning message in the midterms two years ago. But not every voter that Biden needs to reach is going to be fully convinced that such an existential threat is in the offing. So it pays to locate some less esoteric enemies, to whom everyone can relate. Here, a slew of corporate enemies abound: junk-fee crooks; private equity goons; the gangsters of the pharmaceutical industry; banks plucking high overdraft fees out of the pockets of people living paycheck to paycheck; a small universe of price gougers, wage thieves, and consumer predators….Democrats should be using their bully pulpit to actually bully these miscreants, drawing down on anyone who’s preventing ordinary Americans from claiming their fair share of a robust economy….Democrats have to earn these stripes through political combat—and they need to force Republicans to pick a side, as well. More often than not, the GOP can be put on the defensive. Trump’s plan to team up with the privateers of the health care industry to dismantle protections for patients with preexisting conditions is already giving his fellow Republicans headaches….Republicans can be counted on to speak with one voice, picking topics on a daily basis on which to do a Two Minutes Hate, keeping the right-wing media Wurlitzer filled with fresh sheet music to call the next dance. Democrats can’t match the GOP in terms of propaganda infrastructure, but they can marshal far more relevant and substantive topics of conflict than the Republican Party’s typical culture-war fare.”

Call this one “anatomy of an R to D flip, Florida style.” Here’s a report from Andrew Polino at wtsp.com: “ORLANDO, Fla. — Florida Democrats flipped a Republican-held seat by winning Tuesday night’s special election in Central Florida’s 35th State House District….Democrat Tom Keen, a Navy flight officer, defeated Republican candidate and Osceola School Board member Erika Booth with unofficial counts totaling Keen with 11,390 votes and Booth with 10,800….Keen’s narrow victory came despite Republicans significantly outspending Democrats on the campaign, with Booth raising just over $300,000 compared to Keen’s $115,000….The special election for District 35, which covers parts of eastern Orange and Osceola counties, was launched when former GOP state Rep. Fred Hawkins resigned in 2023 to become president of South Florida State College in Highlands County….Keen’s campaign ran largely on the issues of protecting abortion rights and lowering the cost of property insurance. Booth’s campaign embraced former President Donald Trump’s “America First” rhetoric with slogans that included “stop the woke mob,” “cancel the woke agenda” and “stop the brainwashing.” Looks like another indication that reproductive freedom for women still has messaging power for Dems. And perhaps it’s a sign that woke-bashing is now being greeted more with eye rolls more than cheers among moderate voters. “We are engaging with voters through targeted messaging about non-partisan issues like the economy, education, and healthcare,” Keen said. “We’re also using data-driven approaches to identify and connect with voters who may be open to our message, regardless of their usual political leanings.”….That targeted approach may have paid off, as Democratic elections analyst Matt Isabel told the Orlando Sentinel….”What actually clinched the win for Democrats was this massive margin with [nonpartisan] and perhaps some Republican moderates as well,” Isbell said. “If anything, this should be concerning for the GOP because it indicates a voter anger that maybe they have not understood.”

It’s not unusual for Donald Trump to just make up stuff that’s not true, but in this case I wanted to set the record straight at New York:

In her very long-shot effort to get in the way of Donald Trump’s third consecutive Republican presidential nomination, Nikki Haley really needs to overperform in the New Hampshire primary on January 23. Fortunately for her, it’s probably her best state in the entire country. For one thing, she’s spent a lot of time there and is benefiting from the strong support of popular lame-duck governor Chris Sununu. But more basically, the GOP primary electorate is relatively light on Evangelicals (a mere 25 percent in the 2016 presidential primary), and GOP moderates are a small but visible breed (27 percent in 2016). Plus, independents (42 percent of GOP primary voters in 2016) are allowed to participate in the Republican contest.

Trump has seized on this last data point in an effort to discredit Haley’s showing on the chance that she really does beat expectations, as the Washington Post reports:

“Trump argued during his rally here [in Portsmouth] that Haley is ‘counting on Democrats and liberals to infiltrate your Republican primary.’

“’A vote for Nikki Haley this Tuesday is a vote for Joe Biden and a Democratic Congress this November,’ Trump said. (He went so far as to suggest that Haley would abandon her party, stating at one point: ‘I actually think she might go to the Democrat Party.’”)

As is often the case with the 45th president, he didn’t exactly get his facts right. Registered Democrats cannot vote in the GOP primary in New Hampshire, and they couldn’t even switch party registration after the October 2023 deadline (reportedly 4,000 voters — or less than 2 percent of the anticipated primary vote — did so). Still, as Ben Jacobs noted at New York recently, there has been an organized effort to get Democratic-leaning independents to vote against Trump in the GOP primary, and according to the polls, they are contributing to Haley’s base of support.

A new St. Anselm College poll this week shows Haley leading Trump by 52 percent to 37 percent among registered independents, who represent 47 percent of likely Republican primary voters (Trump leads Haley 65 percent to 25 percent among registered Republicans). Ten percent of likely GOP primary voters, moreover, told the pollsters they self-identify as Democrats, and among them Haley wins 90 percent.

There’s nothing illegitimate, much less illegal, about independents voting in a partisan New Hampshire primary (six other states allow independents to vote in either party’s primaries, and another 16 states — including South Carolina, which is holding the next big primary on the calendar — don’t have registration by party, which means you just show up at the polls and pick a primary). And a significant majority (81 percent, according to a Pew study in 2019) of independents nationally lean strongly toward one party or another. So there’s no “infiltrating” going on in New Hampshire, and the vast majority of GOP primary participants will likely support the party nominee in November. Team Haley, of course, will argue that her popularity among non-party-affiliated and even some self-identified Democratic voters is a token of how well she would do in a general-election contest with Joe Biden.

Having said all that, Trump’s superior performance among self-identified Republicans could pay off for him down the road in states with closed primaries in which independents — no matter which way they lean — cannot vote. That’s assuming he hasn’t already clinched the nomination much earlier, which will certainly happen if he beats Haley in New Hampshire and then in South Carolina, as appears likely. That St. Anselm poll showing Haley doing so well among independents also gives Trump a 14-point lead overall. To invert the old Sinatra song, if she can’t make it there, she can’t make it anywhere.

For the Commerce Club, the oldest and largest public affairs forum in the United States, George Hammond interviews John B. Judis, Editor-at-Large, Talking Points Memo and co-author with Ruy Teixeira of Where Have All the Democrats Gone?: The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes :

“If there’s one state in the nation you can call MAGA country, it’s Iowa,” Heather Digby Parton writes at Salon. “It’s something like 95% white, older than most states, extremely rural and the Republican Party there is as conservative as it gets. And yet, 40% of the voters who came out voted for someone else. Yes, sure, a good many of them voted for Trump-plus and Trump- X (DeSantis and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy), but nearly 20% of them voted for the daughter of immigrants positioned as the “moderate ” in the race. Recall, Trump beat Joe Biden statewide by 53% in 2020. He won the Republicans by an even smaller majority on Monday. That is not a good sign….Only 110,000 people turned out, which comes out to about 15% of registered Republicans. This means that he only won 7% of GOP voters in the state of Iowa, a MAGA stronghold. Considering that this is the beginning of his supposed big comeback, that’s pretty underwhelming….The Des Moines Register poll which was released last weekend showed some other rather surprising numbers about the Republican electorate in Iowa. It found that if Trump is the nominee 11% said they would vote for Joe Biden while another 14% said they would vote for a third party candidate or someone else. That adds up to 25% of the party saying they will vote for someone else in the general election. That seems worth pondering. And we hear constantly about how all these criminal and civil proceedings just make his base love him more, but even more concerning for the Trump campaign should be the fact that according to the entrance polls, 32% of caucus participants believe that if Trump is convicted he will be unfit for the presidency.”

Parton continues, “All this does raise the question: Why are the national polls so close?….In the last few months, the polls have shown Trump and Biden neck and neck within the margin of error. You would think that if there was really a substantial faction of Republicans and GOP-leaning Independents who aren’t going to vote for Trump it would be showing up. But remember, the data we’ve been discussing was all from Iowa, a state that has been inundated with campaign ads and personal appearances by the Republican candidates for the past year. Unlike the rest of the country, they’ve been forced to pay attention to this race. They are the canaries in the coal mine….As evidence of how important this is, CNN reported that “the majority of undecided voters simply do not seem to believe – at least not yet – that Donald Trump is likely to be the Republican presidential nominee.” If you’re reading this you probably find that to be absurd. He’s the front-runner! But most of America has tuned out the Trump show since he left office. When they realize that he’s going to be the nominee and the show is unavoidable again, they are going to see what at least a quarter of Iowa Republicans and all of Iowa’s Democrats have been seeing these past few months and it’s not pretty. Let’s just say, that show has not aged well….Sure, Trump won Iowa and he’s highly likely to win New Hampshire and all the rest of the states as well. The Republican Party establishment will back him to the hilt and he’ll have plenty of money to wage his campaign. But there are some very big cracks in his coalition and they are becoming more and more pronounced. Remember, if the election is close, as it may very well be, it would only take a small number of GOP and Independent defections in the right states to put the country out of this misery at long last.”

Food and gas costs are frequently cited as pushing the public’s concerns about inflation. Could the increase in out-of-pocket spending for health care also be a leading cause of President Biden’s low approval ratings? According to Caitlin Owens at Axios, “Families with workplace health insurance may have missed out on $125,000 in earnings over the past three decades as a result of rising premiums eating into their pay, according to a new JAMA Network Open study….While employers, rather than workers, typically bear the brunt of rising health insurance costs, the study is further evidence that rising premiums are costing workers through wages they would have otherwise received….Premium growth has long outpaced wage growth, meaning that health insurance has become a larger and larger part of workers’ total compensation as employers pay out more in health benefits….a larger percentage of total compensation for low-income workers — who are disproportionately people of color — than those with higher incomes….Employer insurance has gotten more and more expensive as health care itself has gotten more expensive — the average workplace health plan last year cost $24,000 for family coverage, with employers covering about three-quarters of the cost, according to KFF….Although workers most directly feel the impact of their health care spending through out-of-pocket costs, economists have long argued that soaring premiums have suppressed wage growth….In 1988, health care premiums on average accounted for 7.9% of a worker’s total compensation, which includes wages and premiums. By 2019, that had increased to an average of 17.7%, the study found.”

The Biden campaign has handled its share of incoming flak during the last year for its sunny view of economic trends. Despite the common wisdom that their optimism is not justified, there is some new polling data which suggest otherwise.  In “Americans are actually pretty happy with their finances” by Felix Salmon at Axios Markets. writes, “Americans overall have a surprising degree of satisfaction with their economic situation, according to findings from the Axios Vibes survey by The Harris Poll….That’s in spite of dour views among certain subsets of the country — and in contrast to consumer sentiment polls that remain stubbornly weak, partly because of the lingering effects of 2022’s inflation….The Axios Vibes poll has found that when asked about their own financial condition, or that of their local community, Americans are characteristically optimistic….GDP growth is the highest in the developed world, inflation is headed back down to optimal levels, and consumer spending keeps on growing….63% of Americans rate their current financial situation as being “good,” including 19% of us who say it’s “very good.”….Americans’ outlooks for the future are also rosy. 66% think that 2024 will be better than 2023, and 85% of us feel we could change our personal financial situation for the better this year….That’s in line with Wall Street estimates, which have penciled in continued growth in both GDP and real wages for the rest of the year…. 77% of Americans are happy with where they’re living — including renters, who have seen their housing costs surge over the last few years and are far more likely than homeowners to describe their financial situation as poor….The survey’s findings were based on a nationally representative sample of 2,120 U.S. adults conducted online between Dec. 15-17, 2023.”

Now that the results are in from the Iowa Caucuses, it’s worth pausing for a moment to consider what if anything they mean for the general election, so I assessed that issue at New York:

Donald Trump’s landslide victory in the Iowa Caucuses sealed his position as the overwhelming favorite to win a third straight Republican presidential nomination. For the millions of Americans who either hope or fear that our most-impeached and most-indicted president will consummate his comeback in November, the big question is what the Iowa results can tell us about the general election, beyond the high odds that Trump will be on the ballot.

The clearest answer is that Trump will be the nominee of a relatively well-united Republican Party that is familiar with his act in all its outrageous permutations and is fine with it. That’s quite the contrast with where he was the last time he participated in contested Iowa Caucuses, in 2016. Then he was an insurgent candidate who lost to the more conventional (if hard-core) conservative Ted Cruz, and eventually won the nomination by wearing down the opposition and taking a number of steps (including the choice of the hyper-conventional Mike Pence as his running mate) to win over skeptics. But even as the nominee he had a lot of intraparty problems; 33 percent of Republicans gave him an unfavorable rating in mid-October of 2016, according to Gallup.

The latest such poll this year, from YouGov, showed just 16 percent of Republicans giving him an unfavorable rating, despite eight intervening years of relentless mendacity, shout-outs to authoritarians, erratic (at best) management of a pandemic, and then the 2020 election denial followed by an attempted coup d’état via thugs invading the Capitol. And that’s just the high spots of a record that you’d think (and think wrong) might give a lot of Republicans pause about going to war with this particular general in the lead tank.

Yet as Iowa showed, they are plunging straight ahead. He won there by a record 30 points, with 51 percent, despite being heavily outspent by opponents on campaign advertising. Yes, caucuses like Iowa’s draw a very small percentage of voters, even within the limited universe of the GOP. But here’s the thing: Trump is actually doing a lot better in national polls of Republicans, registering the support of 61.4 percent of them in the RealClearPolitics averages. And the entrance polls in Iowa do indicate that Trump is winning broad support within the GOP, across ideological and geographical lines. Nothing happened there that should make you doubt the general election polling that shows him leading Joe Biden.

There are some shadows in the Iowa numbers for Trump, however, as the ever-insightful Ron Brownstein points out at The Atlantic after looking at the entrance polls:

“[N]oteworthy was voters’ response to an entrance-poll question about whether they would still consider Trump fit for the presidency if he was convicted of a crime. Nearly two-thirds said yes, which speaks to his strength within the Republican Party. But about three in ten said no, which speaks to possible problems in a general election. That result was consistent with the findings in a wide array of polls that somewhere between one-fifth and one-third of GOP partisans believe that Trump’s actions after the 2020 election were a threat to democracy or illegal. How many of those Republican-leaning voters would ultimately support him will be crucial to his viability if he wins the nomination.”

This confirms that Trump’s conduct on January 6, along with the criminal charges he faces, could have a crucial effect on the general election, even though these same factors may have actually helped him win the nomination (in part by forcing his most formidable rivals to defend him!). But it is very, very difficult to assess at this early point where exactly the various court procedures involving Trump will be just before and on Election Day, much less what exactly they will reveal and how the revelations (or the unprecedented spectacle of a presidential nominee in the dock) will affect the campaign and the outcome. You cannot just assume the people (in Iowa or elsewhere) who now say a criminally convicted Trump isn’t fit to serve as president will vote for Joe Biden or some other non-Republican candidate. How many of them said in October of 2018 that the swinish man revealed by the Access Hollywood tape would never get their vote for president … and then voted for him anyway just weeks later? Yes, Trump’s conduct and efforts to hold him accountable will become part of a powerfully presented comparative case by the Biden campaign to make voting for the Republican difficult if not impossible even for voters who aren’t happy with the incumbent’s performance. But it’s one of many variables that will determine how many swing voters there are in November and which way they will swing.

Trump’s hold on a majority of his partisans is fierce, though like Biden he is going to have some defectors, and it’s likely to be a close general election unless conditions in the country improve enough to lift Biden’s job-approval ratings significantly. Anyone hoping that Trump would stumble early on the road back to the White House is likely going to be disappointed.

The following article by Clark Merrefield is cross-posted from The Journalist’s Resource  (January 12, 2024).

The U.S. economy is in good health, on the whole, according to national indicators watched closely by economists and business reporters. For example, unemployment is low and the most recent jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows stronger than expected hiring at the end of 2023.

Yet news reports and opinion polls show many Americans are pessimistic on the economy — including in swing states that will loom large in the 2024 presidential election. Some recent polls indicate the economy is by far the most important issue heading into the election.

Journalists covering the economy in the coming months, along with the 2024 political races, can use academic research to inform their interviews with sources and provide audiences with context.

The studies featured in the roundup below explore how people filter the national economy through their personal financial circumstances — and those circumstances vary widely in the U.S. The top tenth of households by wealth are worth $7 million on average, while the bottom half are worth $51,000 on average, according to the Institute for Economic Equity at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

We’ve also included several questions, based on the research, which you can use in interviews with policy makers and others commenting on the economy, or as a jumping off point for thinking about this topic.

The economic state of play

Similarly, 78% of people who responded to a December 2023 Gallup poll rated current economic conditions as fair or poor. Gallup pollsters have reported similar figures since COVID-19 shutdowns began in March 2020.

Explanations and insights

The tone of news coverage is one possible explanation for the disconnect between actual economic performance and how individuals perceive it, according to a recent Brookings Institution analysis. Since 2018 — including during and after the recession sparked by COVID-19 — economic reporting has taken on an increasingly negative tone, despite economic fundamentals strengthening in recent years, the analysis finds. The Brookings authors use data from the Daily News Sentiment Index, a measure of “positive” and “negative” economic news, produced by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

The six studies featured below offer further insights. All are based on surveys and polls, some of which the researchers conducted themselves. Several also explore economic perception in other countries.

The findings suggest:

• Economic inequality tends to lead people into thinking the economy is zero-sum, meaning one group’s economic success comes at the expense of others.
• In both wealthy and poorer countries, belief in conspiracy theories leads people to think the economy is declining — things were once OK, now they are not.
• In the U.S., political partisanship may be a more accurate predictor of economic perception than actual economic performance.
• Households at higher risk of experiencing poverty are less likely to offer a positive economic assessment, despite good macroeconomic news.

Research roundup

Economic Inequality Fosters the Belief That Success Is Zero-Sum
Shai Davidai. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, November 2023.

The study: How does economic inequality in the U.S. affect whether individuals think prosperity is zero-sum? A zero-sum outlook indicates that “the gains of the few come at the expense of the many,” writes Davidai, an assistant professor of business at Columbia University, who surveyed 3,628 U.S. residents across 10 studies to explore the relationship between inequality and zero-sum thinking.

In one study, participants answered questions about how they experience economic inequality in their personal lives. In another, participants read about the salaries of 20 employees at one of three randomly assigned hypothetical companies. The first company had a range of very low and very high salaries. The second had high salaries with little variation. The third had low salaries with little variation. Participants were then asked if they interpreted the distribution of wages as equal or unequal, as well as about their political ideology. Davidai uses several other designs across the 10 surveys.

The findings: Participants who read about the company with highly unequal salaries were more apt to report zero-sum economic beliefs. Overall, when controlling for factors including income, education and political ideology, the perception of the existence of economic inequality led to more zero-sum thinking. Davidai also suggests that while people with higher incomes may not perceive their own success as having resulted from others experiencing loss, the existence of inequality could lead them to think generally about economic gains in zero-sum terms.

Read more…

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

Just how progressive are today’s youth (or “youts” as My Cousin Vinny would have it)? It’s fair to say that compared to older generations they generally lean more left on most issues, are more likely to say they’re “liberal” and more likely to support Democrats. But that’s a relative assessment; it doesn’t follow logically that the entire generation is therefore “progressive,” especially as the term has come to be understood by Democrats.

This potential problem has been thrown into relief by recent poll findings that the show the youth vote lagging considerably for Democrats when Biden is matched against Trump in 2024 trial heats. Some polls even show Biden polling behindTrump among voters under 30 (a group dominated by members of Gen Z). But on average Biden is still polling ahead of Trump among these voters—the problem is that the margin in his favor is much less than it was in 2020.

Data from the Split Ticket analytics site, based on an average of December cross-tabular data, show Biden carrying 18-29 year olds by 11 points, a 12-point pro-Trump shift relative to Catalist estimates from 2020. Similarly, pollster John Della Volpe collected a number of mostly December 18-29 year old crosstabs on his site. These crosstabs average out to a 6-point advantage for Biden among voters under 30, a 17 point shift toward Trump relative to 2020.

What gives? A variety of explanations have been advanced from mode effects (how the survey was conducted) to measurement error to disaffected young votersgiving a “protest” response they don’t really mean. The flavor of these explanations is that the polls aren’t capturing the “true” sentiment among young voters, which is far more pro-Biden than they are capturing.

Well, maybe. But then again—maybe not! It’s at least possible that the steadfast progressivism of the younger generation has been overestimated and its moderation—or at least non-ideological nature—has been underestimated. That’s the view of Jonathan Chait in a recent article with which I concur:

For the past two decades, young people were widely assumed to have an ironclad loyalty to the Democratic Party. Democrats believed this, as did Republicans and journalists…The progressive movement made a giant bet on mobilizing young voters. That strategy, invested with buoyant hopes and vast sums of money, is now in ruins…

Liberal donors poured resources into an endless array of supposed grassroots organizations designed to turn out young, and especially nonwhite, voters. The theory was that these potential voters held left-wing views and would be roused to vote only if they could be convinced Democrats would take firm progressive positions. “Democrats desperately need a bold, progressive agenda and to build the kind of relationships in Florida that can’t be forged overnight,” argued one activist in 2019, echoing what activists were saying in other states.

Activists tended to import the language and concepts of the academic left into their work. “Young people have expressed that true engagement means investing in young people as leaders and amplifying work already being done in their communities, centering social justice and intersectionality, and meeting young people where they are,” wrote one.

Perhaps “centering social justice and intersectionality” is not really “meeting young people where they are!” Actually-existing young voters are in fact quite different from the young people that inhabit the fever dreams of progressive activists.

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As the nation celebrates the 2024 Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, Democrats would do well to emulate the broad, bipartisan coalition that Dr. King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, mobilized to pass the legislation. It may be that such bipartisan coalitions created by Democrats can help to enact future reforms now languishing on the party’s legislative agenda. After Dr. King was assassinated, some public figures called for establishing a national holiday in his honor. The legislation stalled for more than a decade, as right wing members of the House and Senate were able to block the legislation. In the late 1970s, however, a petition campaign launched with the support of Atlanta-based The King Center headed by Mrs. King began to pick up steam – and millions of signatures. Mrs. King and superstar Stevie Wonder, whose song “Happy Birthday” helped galvanize grass roots support for the holiday, personally delivered petitions bearing six million signatures in two truckloads to Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill, who was impressed enough to prioritize the holiday legislation. Drawing on lessons she learned from serving as Chair of the National Committee for Full Employment and the Full Employment Action Council in the 1970s, Mrs. King organized a large coalition to urge congress to pass the holiday bill. The King holiday bill began to clear committees and by 1983 made it to a floor vote. 1983 was also the 20th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, and Mrs. King mobilized a coalition of more than 800 diverse human rights organizations which gathered at the Lincoln Memorial to mark the occasion. The coalition adopted a legislative agenda with the MLK holiday at the top of the list, and the gathering exceeded the turnout for the original March on Washington. The 20th Anniversary March took place after the House approved the bill, but  before the Senate vote, and the event’s high turnout and group lobbying helped win the votes needed for approval. Indeed, the bipartisan coalition she led secured the votes of quite a few Republicans, including Rep. Jack Kemp (NY-31), who was instrumental in winning support from his fellow Republicans. Even Sen. Strom Thurmond, once an arch-segregationist, supported the bill and Republican President Reagan signed it into law. Although far fewer of today’s Republican members of congress support bipartisan initiatives, Democrats could benefit from the coalition-building strategy Mrs. King leveraged so effectively.

The consequences of today’s Iowa caucuses vote are not likely to have much impact on Democratic campaign strategy. Trump is expected to win big, and the only suspense is whether former SC Gov. Nikki Haley will finish ahead of FL Gov. Ron DeSantis and by how much. Then it’s on to New Hampshire for the GOP, and Iowa will become a fading memory. Democrats should probably expect that former Gov. Haley will be Trump’s running mate, because of GOP hopes that she will draw some added women votes. If Florida presidential polls get closer near the GOP convention in the summer, Trump may pick DeSantis instead. There are not a lot of strategic implications for Democrats in Trump’s choice of a running mate, since his outsize media persona and legal problems will likely render his veep choice of even less consequential than usual. Most women voters who are paying attention and care about their reproductive rights will likely vote Democratic, no matter who Trump choses. As for democratic chances to win Iowa’s electoral votes in November, it’s doubtful, but not impossible. Trump won the state’s electoral votes in 2020 by 53.1 to 44.9, a margin of 8.2 percent. That’s a bit better for Dems than 2016, when Trump’s margin of victory was 9.5 percent. Before that, President Obama won the state’s electoral votes in both 2008 and 2012. Barring a major upset, the Iowa vote tallies today won’t influence President Biden’s campaign strategy.

In “Did Trump or Biden deliver more for farmers? The answer may surprise you. The former president is using his ag record to appeal to Iowa voters. Farm income, however, rose under Biden,” Garrett Downs writes at Politico: “….Net farm income has actually gone up since the Democrat entered the White House. On average, net farm income has totaled $165 billion between 2021 and 2023, compared to $94 billion between 2017 and 2019. Farm income reached a record high of nearly $189 billion in 2022. And while it is projected to drop off in 2023 (USDA is still tallying receipts from December 2023), it remains above the 20-year average for receipts….The challenge for Biden is convincing farmers, who lean heavily Republican, that he’s been just as good if not better for their bottom lines than Trump, should the two face a rematch in 2024. For Democrats, chipping away at Republicans’ margins of victory in rural areas is critical to their 2024 hopes of maintaining the White House and Senate — and winning back the House….The administration has leaned heavily on Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and USDA to try and change voters’ minds in agriculture-heavy areas. In the past several months, the former Iowa governor has visited Minnesota, Maine, Washington and the early primary state of New Hampshire to tell farmers about the gravy train Biden has brought to town — and how his administration is working to distribute the recent surge in ag profits to farmers across the spectrum, not just the largest ag conglomerates….“Beyond providing over $56 billion in specific direct federal assistance programs to support American farmers who feed our country and the world, the President has taken unprecedented executive action to level the playing field so small and mid-sized farmers can get a fair price for their products, while making billions of dollars in transformative investments through the American Rescue Plan and Inflation Reduction Act,” White House spokesperson Jeremy Edwards said in a statement to POLITICO….”the Trump years were pretty low in terms of income,” said [Joe] Glauber, who now serves as a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute. “That would have taken it down to probably one of the lowest levels that we’ve had in several years.”….But the former president’s proposals on trade are rattling some in the agriculture industry, which is fearful of another prolonged trade war….Glauber, for one, warned that should Trump be reelected, the former president’s plan to aggressively expand tariffs risks triggering another trade war that would “really hurt U.S. agriculture.”…“If I were a presidential candidate, I certainly would be pounding on that point,” Glauber added.”

From “Why older voters have stuck with Biden more than younger generations” by Ronald Brownstein at CNN Politics: “Many of these same polls have found Biden running at least even with Trump among seniors, or slightly ahead, as a CNN survey in early November did; recent national polls by NBC and Quinnipiac University have even shown double-digit advantages for Biden among voters 65 and older. (A project that attempts to average the crosstabs of all major surveys, including some that CNN does not consider methodologically sound, found Biden slightly trailing Trump among seniors but improving on his 2020 showing with them.) In several of these surveys, seniors are now Biden’s best group against Trump; in others they are tied with young people as the most supportive. But the two generations are moving in opposite directions, with Biden gaining or holding steady with seniors in most polls compared with 2020, while his vote among young people is often around 15 points lower than his performance last time….Older Americans are hardly immune to all the crosswinds that have battered Biden’s standing. But they have proven somewhat more resistant than younger voters to those trends. In the latest CNN national survey, for instance, most seniors describe the economy as fair or poor, but the share that describe it in positive terms (43%) is at least 15 percentage points higher than among any other age group. LeaMond noted that while inflation obviously pinches seniors living on fixed incomes, they are benefiting from a significant Social Security cost-of-living increase and higher interest rates on savings. “The way we look at it is, seniors seem to feel, in general, more comfortable economically than other groups,” she said….Seniors also appear somewhat more resistant to the idea that Biden should step aside because of his age. In the New York Times/Siena poll, most swing-state seniors agreed that Biden is too old to serve effectively as president, but fewer of them said so than younger generations. In that same survey, seniors were far more likely than younger generations to say that Biden has the mental sharpness to serve effectively (though only about half of them agreed with that sentiment)….A bigger problem for Biden is that KFF polling in November found that only about one-fourth of Americans know about his major initiatives to constrain drug prices, with awareness among seniors only slightly better. (More seniors know about Medicare’s new authority to negotiate lower prices, but just 44% of them are aware even of that, KFF found.)….Whatever happens with seniors, Biden’s weakness with younger Americans remains a huge source of concern for Democrats. Younger voters born after 1980 (millennials and Generation Z) are growing a share of the electorate, while older voters born before 1964 (the baby boomers and Silent Generation) are shrinking: The nonpartisan States of Change Project forecasts that for the first time, the younger group will equal the older as a share of all voters in 2024.”

Watching the now-customary chaos among House Republicans, I predicted at New York that this time all the dysfunction may prevent rather than trigger a government shutdown:

Since Republicans won narrow control of the U.S. House a year ago, the most important dynamic affecting the 118th Congress has been utter disarray within the GOP ranks. The only real leverage the House GOP has over big national policy issues is its ability by inaction to shut down the federal government, since affirmative legislation in both congressional chambers is required to enact the annual spending measures necessary to keep Washington humming. Because Republicans only have a tiny majority (down temporarily to just one seat thanks to recent resignations), it only takes a few rebels to keep their conference from any particular course of action. Within the hard-core conservative House Freedom Caucus there are enough members willing to risk a government shutdown to make very basic decisions on federal spending levels impossible. They’re also happy to wreak vengeance on any Speaker who cooperates with the hated Democratic enemy to avoid disaster, as Kevin McCarthy did last fall.

So Congress lurches from stopgap spending bill to stopgap spending bill, and now Speaker Mike Johnson is in very much the same position that led to McCarthy’s defenestration by a maneuver to take away his gavel. He’s agreed with Senate Democrats on general spending levels for defense and nondefense programs (known in beltway jargon as a “top-line spending deal”) and wants now to translate the agreement into individual appropriations bills before the last stopgap spending measures expire on January 19 (for part of the federal government) and February 2 (for the rest of it, including the Pentagon). Predictably, Freedom Caucus hardliners don’t think the deal cuts spending nearly enough, and they also want to pass some right-wing “policy riders” on issues like abortion and the alleged persecution of conservatives by federal law enforcement officials. But Johnson’s their guy, unlike McCarthy, and they really don’t want to go through another “motion to vacate the chair” and then another impossible search for a Speaker who can somehow meet their demands without the power to force Democrats to go along with them.

Ironically, the continuing disarray in the House GOP conference may produce enough paralysis to keep the federal government operating. At the moment Johnson wants another stopgap spending measure (known as a “continuing resolution” or CR) to buy enough time to implement the top-line spending agreement. After issuing some threats to blow everything up, the Freedom Caucus rebels now seem inclined to favor a CR so they can buy time to unravel that agreement and unite Republicans around something more to their liking. Conveniently, Senate Democrats are moving a CR that would kick the can down the road until March. It’s looking more and more like a House GOP (and more generally, a Congress) that can’t agree on anything else might be able to agree to disagree at least a bit longer without dire consequences for the federal government. It’s even possible that the closer they get to November elections, the more Republicans will become inclined to just let voters decide how to resolve their differences with each other and with Democrats.

If Johnson is indeed rescued from a fatal revolt by the irresolution of the very rebels who took down McCarthy, there will be some observers who credit the novice congressional leader with Machiavellian talents not possessed by his wily predecessor. It’s more likely Johnson is Mr. Magoo, blundering through potential disasters by sheer luck. It remains to be seen if his luck runs out before this exhausting session of Congress ends.