You should not be shocked to learn that “The advertising dollars spent on U.S. elections and advocacy issues will grow to roughly $16 billion next year, up 31.2% compared to the last presidential election in 2020, according to a new forecast” by  GroupM, one of the world’s largest paid advertising agencies, Sara Fischer reports at Axios.

OK, ad expenditures up nearly a third from the last presidential election is a pretty big hike, but not a huge shock, considering inflation and the persistence of political polarization.

Every American who looks at images on a screen, either on TV, the internet and even cell phones, should expect an historically-unprecedented deluge of political ads. Oh, and print is not quite dead yet, so there will be more political ads in your mailbox.

Fischer notes further that “A majority of political advertising spend in the U.S. goes to local broadcast TV, but an increasing amount is moving toward digital channels.”  Further, “One of the fastest-growing segments is Connected TV (CTV) advertising, or video ads that run on digital TV sets connected to the internet. They offer campaigns the ability to target their ads more narrowly to voters with certain interests, instead of just age and gender demographics.”

Democrats should hope that the party’s ad gurus are on top of the trend toward Connected TV advertising, so they can better target key constituencies with appropriate ads. And let’s hope that Dems are already busy placing their ads in the most important swing county markets, like Erie County, Pa, as I noted on January 1. And would it be too much to ask that Democrats at least try to reduce the tremendous advantage they have ceded to Republicans on the nation’s radio networks, which penetrate into rural areas?

Of course, it’s not just about ads. Democratic campaigns must improve their game in terms of getting more “earned” media coverage. It’s a tough challenge when the other side has all the bomb throwers. But, as infrastructure projects  enacted by Democrats kick in during the next year, let no Republican who voted against them escape unscathed, especially those who have the temerity to show up for the ribbon-cutting.

The thing to keep in mind about political ads is that they are important for both persuasion and boosting turnout. If we have learned anything about “low information” voters in recent years, it is that there is a lot of room for improved outreach to them. The stakes couldn’t be much higher for both Democrats, and for the future of democracy in the U.S.

The following transcription of Paul Gigot’s interview of Ruy Teixeira, co-author with John B. Judis of Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, is cross-posted from the Wall St. Journal:

Paul Gigot: With the 2024 Iowa caucuses less than a month away, the presidential campaign season is in high gear and Democrats are worried. Joe Biden has an approval rating that is downright dreadful, now close to 40% and in head-to-head polling, he loses to Donald Trump and loses by even more to Nikki Haley. Ruy Teixeira says this is explained at least in part by a deterioration of the Democratic party’s winning coalition from 2020. Mr. Teixeira is a political scientist affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute and author with John Judas of the new book Where Have All the Democrats Gone, the Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes. Welcome back to Potomac watch (inaudible) Ruy. Nice to have you here.

Ruy Teixeira: Hey, thanks for having me, Paul.

Paul Gigot: All right, so you and John Judas wrote a very different book a decade and a half or so ago called The Emerging Democratic Majority. That majority appeared to be daunting under Barack Obama with his victory in 2008 in particular and then 2012, but it has since gone away. What happened?

Ruy Teixeira: Well, the main thing that happened, I think, and this is something we highlighted in our original book from 2002 about That Emerging Democratic Majority is we noted that yeah, there were a lot of things that were changing in the Democrat’s favor in terms of the rise of non-white vote, the realignment of professionals to the Democrats. The movement of a lot of the more dynamic cosmopolitan metro areas of the country toward. The Democrats changes in the women’s vote, which favored them and so on and so forth. But we were remarked that, hey, let’s be realistic here. The white working class is still a massive share of the American electorate and particularly in a lot of key states. And while they’re declining, they’re going to be with us for a long time. Therefore, if the Democrats could not hold on to their minority share of the white working class vote, if that further deteriorated, that would put their coalition in question. And that’s exactly what happened in 2010, then 2014 and then 2016 to everyone in shock, Trump manages to win and any wins really on the back of white working class voters, especially in the Midwest. So that was the white working class. And then I think what’s really fascinating about the last seven or eight years is the way the non-white working class has started to move away from the Democrats. We saw that in the 2020 election where Hispanic working class voters support for Democrats probably declined by about 20 margin points. There was also deterioration in the black working class vote and now we’re seeing it in the polls going up to the 2024 election. So this is really kind of a remarkable development and really points out that the Democrats Coalition was never as stable as they thought. And even something like the non-white vote, Hispanic and black vote and so on is really not stable for them if the working class component of it starts going south. All to shows to go you that the working class is no longer as committed to the Democrats as they once was, and that’s blown a hole in their coalition, which seemed to be so promising at the beginning of the 21st century.

Paul Gigot: All right, the polling sure backs you up. What are the causes as you look at them for this breaking away by working class voters as a cultural liberalism? Is it the fact that the Ann Arbor and Madison and Santa Monica elites don’t have a lot in common with people in Toledo who work in auto plants? What are the main causes?

Ruy Teixeira: Well, it’s all of the above, I think. If you look at the late part of the 20th century, I think certainly the cultural factors are important, but also it’s the decline of the labor movement, removing the working class anchor from the Democrats and the sense Democrats are no longer on the side of working class people who are getting hit by some of the economic changes of the latter part of the 20th century of feeling like Democrats were practicing a sort of soft neoliberalism, they were more interested in trade deals and deregulation than they were interested in the economic situation of the working class. And then in fact, they’d sort of forgotten about the working class in a lot of left behind areas of the country. And we saw that in a sort of a standard Gallup polling question that’s been asked forever, which party is better able to ensure prosperity for the country in the next several years? And that used to be a big democratic advantage and starting in the 80s it really goes away. So a sense that Democrats were no longer on your side economically, even as they were becoming more liberal and especially more liberal in the 21st century. And that’s where I think the cultural issues really start to bite because the Democrats do become so much more left-leaning and if not radical, a lot of issues concerning race and gender, immigration and so on. Then you might even add to that a whole sense that Democrats concerns were less about the working class and more about the priorities of their solid voters in the urban metro areas where culturally liberal white college graduates were so influential. So all of that put together kind of alienates the working class writ large from the Democrats and has contributed to a sense Democrats are no longer the party of the working class, but rather more the party of educated elites who are perhaps less interested in the fate of working class voters than they should be. And then you add to that, but frankly the Trump years prior to the pandemic were actually relatively better for working class voters, including non-whites than the first three years that the Biden administration has. So I think that just underscored the problems a lot of working class voters now have with the Democrats.

Paul Gigot: The Democrats under Bill Clinton did quite well winning two presidential races in the 1990s when you had that so-called neoliberal economic views supporting trade deals, for example, relatively centrist economic views. But where it seems to me this changed most sharply against Democrats in the working class is when you had under the Obama presidency this sharp notable turn towards the left on cultural issues. And I’m thinking about identity politics in particular, which in the second Obama term really has emerged as a dominant issue on the left and has continued under the Biden presidency. So I wonder, I’m pushing back on you a little bit on this economic analysis and more on the cultural concerns and I just would throw onto it, as you mentioned earlier, climate, where in my view it’s become a kind of a cultural religion for an awful lot of young people, and yet that cuts against things like assembly lines for gas powered vehicles. We just had Stellantis, the Chrysler parent warn 3,600 workers in Toledo and Detroit that their jobs are at risk because of California’s electric vehicle mandate.

Ruy Teixeira: I would point out though on the issue of trade deals, and so NAFTA was extremely unpopular in the Midwest among working class voters. And really the China shock in the early 2000s has a big effect on a lot of these communities. And really there’s been some good work that’s shown a relationship between increased republican voting and the influence of the China shock on a lot of these areas of the country. But leaving that aside, I couldn’t agree more that these cultural issues really do start to loom large throughout Obama’s two terms in office, the Black Lives Matter, remember Sterly Starks in 2013 and you see the Democratic party over that decade of the teens really moving so significantly in the direction of identity politics and the climate stuff. I just think that’s huge. I think Democrats really underestimate the extent to which while the elites who dominate the party and some of the younger educated voters they price so highly may think climate’s an existential crisis and there’s no crisis too high to pay to deal with this problem. That’s not how working class voters feel about the economy and about the world and about their priorities. The ranks about number 17 according to some (inaudible) polling in terms of their priorities for what the country needs to pay attention to. So I’ve described it as a Green Achilles Heel at times in terms of the Democrats coalition, that they’re so dedicated, so committed to moving as fast as possible to replace fossil fuels with renewables, whereas I think most working class voters and electric vehicles don’t get me started on that. Most working class voters say, “What?” “You want to do what?” “Why should I sign up for this?” But I think for a lot of Democrats, it’s so important to them that they’re just disregarding these signals.

Paul Gigot: That is fascinating to me because it gets into the religious nature of the belief here in terms of climate. What about identity politics? The breaking down into groups has always been there for quite some time and in fact worked to the Democrats advantage in terms of mobilizing minority groups in their favor when they could portray Republicans as particularly anti minority. That has turned in some respects, and it gets to this point you made earlier about the degree to which the non-white working class is moving away from the Democrats.

Ruy Teixeira: Yeah. I think Hispanics are a really good example of this because I think that Hispanics did support the Democrats at very high levels and they still do to some extent, though that’s declined, because they saw Democrats as being the party that was sympathetic to immigrants and that was on their side economically, it was generally like they might be a little too liberal on some things, but basically fine. But what really changes is when the Democrats start thinking of and insisting that Hispanics think of themselves as people of color who are brown people who are oppressed in the United States, who live in this dystopian hell hole we call the US, and who basically are discriminated against and set upon. And that’s really the problem. That’s not the way Hispanics working class people particularly think about the world. They think about, “I’m here to get ahead in life. I’m here to make a good life for my family. I want communities with safe streets and plenty of opportunity. I’m an American and I want to make my way in America.” And I think when identity politics interferes with that sense, that patriotic, upwardly mobile sense that a lot of Hispanic working class voters have, I think that’s when a lot of them start to draw the line and say, “Well, maybe the Democrats aren’t my party quite in the way I thought.” And the more moderate to conservative these voters are, the more open they are to thinking about voting for the Republicans because I didn’t want to get on the identity politics train. I just wanted to get ahead in life. And I think when Democrats lost track of who these voters really were and started putting them into these boxes that corresponded to their faculty lounge politics view of the world, as James Cardwell once put it, I think they really started to lose some of these voters and will continue to lose them.

Paul Gigot: All right, we’re going to take a break and when we come back we’ll talk more with Ruy Teixeira about the state of the Democratic party.

Speaker 5: Don’t forget, you can reach the latest episode of Potomac Watch anytime. Just ask your smart speaker, play the Opinion Potomac Watch podcast. That is play the Opinion Potomac Watch podcast.

Speaker 1: From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch.

Paul Gigot: Welcome back. I’m Paul Gigot, here on Potomac Watch talking to Ruy Teixeira, author of the new book, Where Have All The Democrats Gone, the Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes. So you write that the Democrats to win back the white working class needs to have a focus on their economic concerns and address those economic anxieties concerns. But if you look at the Biden White House and his Democratic party right now, isn’t that what Biden is trying to do with all of his flogging of what they’re calling Bidenomics? And they rolled that out a few months ago along the way, taking a shot at us at the Wall Street Journal we’d first used the word Bidenomics and then they made it their own and said, “Yeah, it’s terrific,” but that doesn’t seem to be helping them in the polls. Why not?

Read more…

Stephen Collinson notes in “Risks of US electoral chaos deepen after Trump is barred from another state ballot” at CNN Politics:

Maine’s decision only deepened the unprecedented legal and political tangle surrounding the 2024 campaign – all of which stems from Trump’s refusal to accept defeat and his historic challenge to the fabled US transfer of power. After all, two states have now found that a former president engaged in an insurrection against the US government – an unheard of state of affairs at any other moment in history.

The controversy, however, also raises new questions over whether efforts to make Trump pay for January 6 are justified on the grounds of protecting America’s democracy from a uniquely pernicious challenge or could backfire politically against President Joe Biden and Democrats next fall. The multiple criminal charges Trump is facing have tended to hike his popularity among base voters even if his wild anti-democratic conduct in 2020 could be a major general election liability.

So the political risk is that cascading disqualifications of Trump from various state ballots will “energize” his supporters, making it more likely that they will turn out in greater numbers. But that value added for his campaign could be offset to some extent by energizing turnout of Americans who are disgusted by Trump’s glaring disrespect for free and fair elections.

The moral risk in giving Trump a free ride on state ballots, despite compelling evidence that he has in fact participated in attempting to invalidate free elections with force is further deterioration in American democracy. It is hard to understand how any reasonable and honest person can say that he is innocent of inciting insurrection. As Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows explained her decision,

“I do not reach this conclusion lightly,” Bellows said. “Democracy is sacred … I am mindful that no Secretary of State has ever deprived a presidential candidate of ballot access based on Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment. I am also mindful, however, that no presidential candidate has ever before engaged in insurrection.”

Colllinson adds that “Bellows wrote that the challengers presented compelling evidence that the January 6 insurrection “occurred at the behest of” Trump – and that the US Constitution “does not tolerate an assault on the foundations of our government.” The case would be stronger after Trump is found guilty. But time is running out as his legal team seizes every opportunity to stall adjudication of his 91 indictments, which is sadly a real possibility in our glacially-paced legal system. Trump’s campaign is a dumpster fire. But it is a slow-burning one, thanks to the legal stalling.

Meanwhile the Michigan Supreme Court has ruled that Trump gets to stay on the GOP primary ballot, despite new evidence of Trump trying to prevent certification of Biden’s Michigan victory.  As William Brangham reports at pbsnews.org:

A report from Michigan further peels back the curtain on Trump’s efforts to nullify the results of the 2020 election. The Detroit News listened to a partial recording of Trump and RNC chair Ronna McDaniel reportedly pressuring the Republican chair and another member of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers not to certify the results there despite no evidence of fraud. William Brangham reports.

Hey, when are Americans going to get to hear that recording?

Cody Williams and Nicholas Riccardi of A.P. report that “The Michigan and Colorado cases are among dozens hoping to keep Trump’s name off state ballots.” Yes, dozens. Consider for a moment the level of denial required among Trump supporters to believe that they are all wrong.

Even so, prospects for the disqualifications being upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court are not good, owing in no small part to Republicans having packed the High Court.

But Democrats at least have a potent talking point to raise during the next ten months in reminding swing voters that Democracy is very much on the 2024 ballot. They should use it again and again.

Steven Greenhouse, who covered the labor beat for the New York Times for more than three decades, has a new article, “Broken’ US labor laws could hamper union wins for workers, experts warn: Strikes by autoworkers, actors and writers brought wins in 2023, but analysts worry labor laws could undo progress” at The Guardian. It is a must-read for Dems who want to understand is going on in the labor movement. Greenhouse writes: “Strikes by autoworkers, writers, actors and nurses and a threatened strike by UPS workers all led to significant wins in 2023. “The big challenge for labor in 2024 will be to take that momentum and turn it into new organizing and getting first contracts where workers have organized,” said Ken Jacobs, the co-director of the UC Berkeley Labor Center. “That’s going to be a real challenge because labor law in the US is broken.”….Among the big tests that labor faces is whether the United Auto Workers (UAW) will succeed in using the impressive contracts it won with Detroit’s automakers to organize Toyota, Tesla and other non-union auto plants, especially in the anti-union south. Another challenge is whether the Starbucks, Amazon, Trader Joe’s, Apple, Chipotle and REI workers who have unionized over the past two years will finally get first contracts that deliver improved wages and benefits….During 2023, there were several major contract disputes, including ones involving 340,000 Teamsters at UPS, 150,000 screen and television actors, 140,000 autoworkers and 85,000 Kaiser Permanente workers. In each of those negotiations, unions came away boasting of record contracts, although only after the actors, autoworkers and Kaiser workers went on strike. “2023 has been huge for labor, both the extraordinary increase in large strikes beyond and the success of workers through those strikes,” Jacobs said. “That’s a really a turnaround from where we had been.”….“Strike activity might not reach the same level next year but it’s still an opportune time to go on strike,” said Johnnie Kallas, director of the ILR Labor Action Tracker, which keeps a tally of strikes across the US. Many labor experts say it’s a favorable time to go on strike because the labor market is tight, public approval for unions is at its highest level in decades, and there’s a vigorously pro-union president in the White House….The UAW hopes its record contracts with Detroit’s automakers will set up organizing victories at auto and battery plants across the south. It has announced plans to seek to unionize Toyota, Tesla, Mercedes and BMW, and its effort to unionize the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, is racing ahead of the others, with more than 1,000 VW workers signing pro-union cards. But some auto executives, most notably Tesla’s Elon Musk, have served notice that the UAW is unwelcome. “I disagree with the idea of unions,” Musk said recently. ”

Greenhouse continues, “The UAW hopes its record contracts with Detroit’s automakers will set up organizing victories at auto and battery plants across the south. It has announced plans to seek to unionize Toyota, Tesla, Mercedes and BMW, and its effort to unionize the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, is racing ahead of the others, with more than 1,000 VW workers signing pro-union cards. But some auto executives, most notably Tesla’s Elon Musk, have served notice that the UAW is unwelcome. “I disagree with the idea of unions,” Musk said recently….Joseph McCartin, a labor historian at Georgetown University, voiced relative optimism for the UAW. “They’re in a better position to make a move on these companies than they have ever been,” he said. “They not only have a great contract to show what they’ve accomplished, but they have the will to wage the campaign in a way that the union has not for a long time. It’s bound to be a really important campaign. There’s going to be a furious struggle.”….Many labor leaders see another important challenge for 2024: to help ensure that Joe Biden defeats Donald Trump, the likely Republican nominee for president. McCartin said the 2024 election is reminiscent of 1948. “If you think about Harry Truman – he was not doing well in the polls, he was struggling, his party was divided,” with rival candidates Strom Thurmond and Henry Wallace, McCartin said. “When Truman won, he said that labor did it.”….McCartin said Biden is also facing a “situation of how to hold together: Biden has a youth problem. People under 35 are not enthused about him. In my view, labor is well-positioned to be an engine for the re-election of Biden. But it’s hard to prognosticate.”….Jones of the University of Minnesota said: “Labor has to play a big role. I think it’s going to be a make or break. Biden has talked a lot about turning out working-class voters, particularly white men. He’s been fairly successful at that. There’s a lot of talk of him losing support among Black and Latino voters. So the degree that Biden can turn out white, working-class voters is really critical. That’s something the UAW and other unions can really help with.” Jones said unions could make a pivotal difference in industrial states such as Michigan and Ohio….Arguably the biggest challenge labor faces is whether unions can finally begin to reverse the decline in union membership and in the percentage of workers in unions. Just 10% of workers are in unions, down from more than 20% during the 1980s ….Reversing the decline in union membership “is the big test”, Jacobs said, adding: “The UAW demonstrated what a union can do when its members are fully engaged and taking on the boss. Can unions turn that into new organizing and expanding and increasing union density? In the context of our very broken labor law, none of this is easy. But I’m the most optimistic I’ve been since I began doing this work.”

In “What issues will matter most to Hispanic voters in 2024?,” Monica Potts and Holly Fuong write at 538 that their  “analysis of 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, shows that Hispanic voters remain to the left of the general electorate on key issues like immigration and environmental policy. In other areas, Hispanic voters are largely similar to the general electorate….”Most [Hispanic voters] are not single-issue voters,” said Melissa Morales, the president and founder of Somos Votantes and Somos PAC, an independent outreach group that has endorsed Democratic candidates. “There’s a bunch of things that are going to come in to affect how they vote.”….Overall, Hispanic voters* made up about 11 percent of the electorate in 2020. That’s relatively low compared to an estimated 19 percent of the total U.S. population. But they’re also the fastest-growing demographic group in the country. And while the share of this group that’s eligible to vote and turning out to vote is low compared to other groups, it’s growing every year….CES data shows that Hispanic voters are more likely to be young, with more than 30 percent of those voters under 30, compared with 21 percent of the general electorate. That means many of them are squarely in a generation that’s already more diverse and further to the left on many issues than the general electorate. And only 13 percent are 65 or older, compared to 22 percent of the general electorate….Hispanic Americans are less educated on average than the electorate as a whole: Based on 2020 CES data, about half have only a high school education, while 19 percent are college graduates, compared with 37 percent and 31 percent of the general electorate, respectively. What will happen within the huge group of Hispanic voters without college degrees, and why, is one of the big unanswered questions both parties are facing as we head into the 2024 presidential election….In the 2020 CES, Hispanic voters were 14 points more likely than the general electorate to support giving legal status to immigrants who have held jobs and not been convicted of a crime. They were also less likely to support increasing border security measures like hiring more border patrol officers and building a wall than the general electorate, and less supportive of measures to curb legal immigration. Their stances on immigration questions differed from the general electorate by 9 to 13 points, showing that the group was significantly more liberal. The differences were similar in 2022.”

Potts and Fuong note further, “In 2016, when Trump ran a campaign focused on anti-immigration policies, he lost Hispanic voters to the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, two to one….But his anti-immigration rhetoric didn’t turn out a record wave of Hispanic voters to vote against him and become solidly loyal Democrats, as some had predicted. Instead, his base of support among the group was on par with or even better than that shown for previous nominees Sen. Mitt Romney and Sen. John McCain. That led observers to conclude that a significant and steady minority of Hispanic voters, around a third, were probably conservative and unlikely to abandon Republicans….In 2020, Trump made gains among Hispanic voters. Immigration was a less important issue that year, when voters were much more focused on COVID-19 and the economic wreckage surrounding the pandemic. Biden won the group overall, 59 percent to 38 percent, but Trump made gains among a specific group: those without college degrees….Immigration has been rising in salience among voters and continues to be a losing issue for Biden. Whether it’s a winning issue for either party among Hispanic voters remains to be seen, however. Republican front-runner Trump has made overtly racist and fascist remarks about immigration, while Biden has signaled he’s willing to deal with Republicans on immigration policy in order to pass aid for Ukraine in its war against Russia — a stance that could turn off some Hispanic voters. “The Democratic Party needs to make sure that they’re not bargaining away the rights of immigrants in this country, because it is still a very, very important issue to the Latino community,” Tzintzún Ramirez said….On issues of policing, like decreasing the number of police officers on the street or eliminating mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders, Hispanics were not consistently further to the left or right of the overall electorate, and the differences were small. On a wide range of other issues included in the CES, ranging from banning assault rifles to allowing abortions as a matter of choice, Hispanics also did not vary significantly or predictably from the general electorate….One area that did stand out was policies related to health care access. Hispanics in 2020 were more likely to support expanding Medicare to cover all Americans than the general electorate was by 14 points, and they were more likely to support lowering the age for Medicare eligibility from 65 to 50 by the same margin….Analysis from Equis Research showed that, in 2022, Hispanic voters, like most voters, were concerned about the economy and cost of living, and that those who rated that as their top concern were more likely to support Republican candidates.”

There are plenty of potentially-pivotal wild cards still looming in the 2024 election deck: Trump’s indictments; Biden’s age; RFK, Jr.; other 3rd party candidates; abortion; Gaza; Ukraine; inflation; etc. etc. Ed Pilkington notes another in his article, “‘Did you just hear John Roberts scream?’: US supreme court to have outsized influence in 2024 election” in The Guardian. Among his observations:

The US supreme court, stacked with rightwing justices appointed by Donald Trump and facing a crisis of public confidence in its impartiality, has been thrust into the thick of the 2024 presidential election through a number of highly charged and critical cases.

Last week’s dynamite ruling from the Colorado supreme court disqualifying Trump from the state’s presidential primary ballot on grounds that he engaged in insurrection on 6 January 2021 is almost certain to end up before the country’s highest court. Trump’s legal team has indicated it will appeal, and the nine supreme court justices will be under pressure to take the case or risk legal confusion spreading as the election year unfolds.

In addition to the Colorado ruling, the top court was also asked to step into the legal battle between Trump and the department of justice’s special counsel Jack Smith in the criminal prosecution of the former president over his attempt to subvert the 2020 election. At issue was whether Trump could claim presidential immunity even though he is no longer in the White House.

Earlier this month Smith asked the supreme court to expedite a decision to avoid delaying a criminal trial in Washington DC scheduled to begin on 4 March. On Friday the court issued a one-sentence denial, which returns the case back to a Washington DC-based federal appeals court, though it is likely to be only a matter of time before such a fundamental question wends its way back to the highest court for final adjudication.

All of which “comes at an awkward time for the court, which is already reeling from its own internal ethical scandals and plummeting public approval ratings,” according to Pilkington., who adds,

To be shoved into the heart of the election battle is likely to be a deeply uncomfortable experience for all the justices, three of whom – Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – were appointed by Trump. The prospect is especially fraught for the chief justice, John Roberts, who is known to be sensitive about public opinion and keen to keep the court above the political ruckus.

As the Colorado ruling was announced Mike Sacks, a writer on law and politics, quipped on social media: “Did you all just hear John Roberts scream too because I def did”.

Legal pundits agree that the supreme court is almost duty bound to take the Colorado case and hear it expeditiously. David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said “it’s crucial for all Americans that the issue of Trump’s eligibility be resolved as soon as possible. The Republican party needs to know if it has a qualified nominee, election officials need to know who to name on the ballot, and the voters need to know who they can vote for.”

Colorado’s primary is slated for Super Tuesday, March 5th – one of 17 states that will count presidential primary ballots that day. And there will be loud weeping and gnashing of teeth, no matter what the Supremes, who have a 41 percent approval rate, decide to do. The implications for Democratic strategy are iffy too, depending on the decision.

It may be that the Biden campaign would rather run against Trump than several other GOP presidential candidates. So there are undoubtedly Democratic strategists who are hoping Trump prevails in the Supreme Court ruling. No doubt many other Democrats would prefer not to gamble on allowing Trump to win the GOP nomination and risk empowering him to further degrade American democracy.

The 14th amendment, section 3 is not one of the more well-written parts of the Constitution. But for any interpretation to say that it is OK for the President of the U.S. to not only advocate, but also take part in a plot to shred a fair presidential election is a pretty ugly stretch, even for a court with three Trump appointees. Don’t bet on Justice Thomas recusing himself. But if he does, a 4-4 tie becomes possible, in which case the Colorado decision stands.

Regardless, however, the  upcoming Supreme Court decision underscores the enormous importance of restoring integrity in the composition of the High Court, as well as reforms in its rules. As soon as Democrats win the necessary seats in the Senate and House, they should increase the size of the Supreme Court, which was last set at 9 seats back in 1869, when the U.S. had less than 40 million people, compared to about 332 millions now. In all, the number of seats on the Supreme Court has been changed six times by congress, so let’s have no whining about upholding the founders’ intentions.

And no bellyaching, please, about ‘packing the court.’ The Republicans have already done that. Dems must WTFU and play their best hole card at the first opportunity, if they want to play on a level table in the coming years.

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:

In a recent outstanding piece for The Liberal Patriot, sociologist Musa al-Gharbi noted:

The key schism that lies at the heart of dysfunction within the Democratic Party and the U.S. political system more broadly is between professionals associated with ‘knowledge economy’ industries and those who feel themselves to be the ‘losers’ in the knowledge economy—including growing numbers of working-class and non-white voters.

I believe this is correct. And it leads me to make a suggestion to all those knowledge economy professionals out there who can’t bring themselves to deviate from current Democratic Party orthodoxy because it would supposedly undermine the cause of “social justice”: become a class traitor!

Ask yourself who the social justice you prize so highly is really for. Is it really for the poor and working class who have the short end of the stick in our society or is it to make your feel righteous and onside with Team Progressive? Are your social justice commitments and priorities what the poor and working class actually want? Does the language you speak on these issues even make sense to them?

If not, you should consider that a politics that is appealing to you but not the working class is intrinsically limited and cannot achieve the objectives for a better society that you presumably harbor. You should, in short, consider becoming a class traitor.

At the top of the list for aspiring class traitors is decisively rejecting the intersectional left, the ideological vanguard of today’s knowledge economy professionals. According to this vanguard, actions or arguments should be judged not by their content but rather by the identity of those involved in said actions or arguments. Those identities in turn are defined by an intersectional web of oppressed and oppressors, of the powerful and powerless, of the dominant and marginalized. With this approach, one judges an action not by whether it’s effective, or an argument by whether it’s true, but rather by whether the people involved in the action or argument are in the oppressed/powerless/marginalized bucket or not. If they are, the actions or arguments should be supported; if not, they should be opposed. Finally, all the political stands that follow from this “analysis” are linked together and constitute a social justice catechism that must be uncritically embraced by the knowledge economy faithful.

This whole approach is completely bonkers, defying reasonable standards of logic, evidence, and common sense. Yet it has remarkable influence within the Democratic Party and has associated the party with many positions that are both substantively wrong and politically toxic. Consider the following:

• It is not the working class that sees the police as an unnecessary evil and opposes rigorous enforcement of the law for public safety and public order.
• It is not the working class that believes public consumption of hard drugs should be tolerated, with intervention limited to reviving addicts when they overdose.
• It is not the working class that believes many crimes like shoplifting should be decriminalized because punishing the perpetrators would have “disparate impact”.
• It is not the working class that believes you should never refer to illegal immigrants as “illegal” and that border security is somehow a racist idea.
• It is not the working class that believes an overwhelming surge of migrants at the southern border should be accommodated with asylum claims, parole arrangements, and release into urban areas around the country.
• It is not the working class that believes competitive admissions and job placements should be allocated on the basis of race (“equity”) not merit.
• It is not the working class that views objective tests as fundamentally flawed if they show racial disparities in achievement.
• It is not the working class that believes America is a structurally racist, white supremacist society.
• It is not the working class that sees patriotism as a dirty word and the history of the United States as a bleak landscape of racism and oppression.
• It is not the working class that thinks sex is “assigned at birth” and can be changed by self-conception, rather than being an objective, biological reality.
• It is not the working class that thinks it’s a great idea to police the language people use for hidden “microaggressions” and bias against the “marginalized”.
• And it is definitely not the working class that believes in “decolonize everything” and manages to see murderous thugs like Hamas as righteous liberators of a subaltern people.

No, my fellow knowledge economy professionals, it is not the working class that saddles Democrats and American politics with this nonsense, it is the intersectional left that insists on these absurdities and demands your acquiescence. But you don’t have to give it!

Read more…

After reading endless scenarios for some sort of late withdrawal by Joe Biden from the 2024 presidential race, I decided to state some plain facts at New York:

There is a misconception about how the 2024 presidential election is likely to unfold that just won’t die: that President Joe Biden will suddenly rethink his 2024 election bid and drop out. Independent candidate Cornel West was the latest to float this idea.

“I’m not even sure whether I’ll be running against Biden,” West told Politico. “Biden — I think he’s going to have an LBJ moment [and] pull back.”

This is an allusion to Johnson’s famous announcement on March 31, 1968, in conjunction with a Vietnam bombing halt, that he was ending his campaign for reelection. The idea is that, like LBJ, Biden will come to a realization, even after the 2024 primaries have begun, that it would be good for his party and country if he hung up his spurs and let Democrats choose someone who polls better against Donald Trump (or in LBJ’s case, against Richard Nixon).

In an earlier column I challenged the LBJ Redux scenario from the point of view of the two presidents’ political standing. In 1968, Johnson was leading a Democratic party deeply divided by the Vietnam War, which he had prosecuted relentlessly. He had already stumbled in a New Hampshire primary (not losing, but underperforming expectations badly) against Senator Gene McCarthy, and the more formidable Senator Robert F. Kennedy had just announced his own candidacy.

Biden is facing only feeble opposition from woo-woo author and failed 2020 candidate Marianne Williamson and obscure Minnesota congressman Dean Phillips; Biden currently leads the second-place Williamson by 60 points in the RealClearPolitics polling averages. His rivals are betting everything on making a splash in a rogue New Hampshire primary where Biden won’t even be on the ballot (though a write-in effort will be waged on his behalf). But Biden is almost certain to crush them there and in the official first primary of South Carolina on February 3. (South Carolina was Biden’s big breakthrough state in 2020.)

But beyond Biden’s stronger intra-party position, there are growing obstacles to the selection of a different nominee that Democrats simply did not face in 1968. Back then, only 13 states held primaries, and some of those were either nonbinding on delegates or were won by “favorite sons.” The ultimate nominee, Johnson’s veep Hubert Humphrey, did not enter a single primary.

In 2024, every delegate who will vote on the first ballot of the Democratic convention in Chicago will be pledged to a candidate according to the primary results. (So-called superdelegates who have seats at the convention through the elected or party offices they occupy won’t have any role unless there’s a first-ballot deadlock, which hasn’t happened since 1952.) There won’t be any large reserve of uncommitted votes a late-emerging candidate can comandeer (as Humphrey did in 1968). And thanks to generations of “front-loading” the primaries, the deal will go down much earlier on the calendar than in 1968. An estimated 48 percent of pledged Democratic delegates will have been chosen by March 12 (the week after Super Tuesday, when 15 states hold primaries). Filing deadlines have already passed or are fast approaching for these crucial primaries (Florida’s was on November 30, Michigan’s was on December 8, and the largest state’s, California’s, was on December 15).

So if the idea is for Biden to have a dark night of the soul and withdraw after the first few contests, it’s unclear how Democrats will settle on the ultimate nominee. Will there be enough primaries left for an open competition among the various would-be candidates we keep hearing about (e.g. Governors Gretchen Whitmer, Gavin Newsom, J.B. Pritzker, and Josh Shapiro, not to mention Vice-President Kamala Harris)? Or if people are expecting some sort of mind-meld among Democratic elites that produces an ideal Democratic ticket, how, mechanically, is that supposed to happen in a nomination system designed to make that choice via delegates pledged in primaries?

It’s not impossible for Biden to step aside and let someone else to win the nomination in an emergency; far-fetched scenarios for doing just that should be in the back of the mind for wire-pullers in both parties in case a health crisis or something else dramatic afflicts the current front-runners. But the breezy assumption that Democrats are stupidly blundering ahead when an alternative course is still available to them is just significantly out of date. The time for Joe Biden to take a pass and let his party go elsewhere for a 2024 nominee was months — arguably many months — ago. Second thoughts now would just create chaos.

For a fresh take on the U.S. politics and where it appears to be heading, read “High suburban turnout may be the new norm: We took a detailed look at who turned out to vote in five states in 2023” by 538’s Tia Yang, Mary Radcliffe, and Holly Fuong at abcnews.go.com. As the authors write:

538 analyzed turnout patterns in five states with high-profile elections in 2023, looking at both trends over time and differences between counties with different demographic compositions to see where turnout was highest. (You can download the data we used in this analysis on our GitHub page.) Overall, off-year turnout in these states was at or near its highest level in more than a decade, suggesting that we are still in the high-turnout environment that has characterized U.S. elections since 2016. We also found that turnout rates tended to be higher in suburban counties than in urban and rural ones, and that the pre-2016 conventional wisdom about off- versus on-year turnout has changed — which could pose both an opportunity and a danger to Democrats in 2024.

Since former President Donald Trump took office in 2017, turnout in U.S. elections has been off the charts. According to U.S. Census data, 53 percent of the citizen voting-age population voted in 2018, the highest midterm turnout since at least 1978. The 2020 election broke another record with 67 percent turnout, the highest since 1992. And midterm turnout in 2022 was almost as high as in 2018, at 52 percent.

Turnout rates in off-year elections during the same span have also been elevated. And if the 2023 elections are any indication, turnout in the 2024 presidential election will probably be very high as well. Compared to previous off-year elections with the same types of races on the ballot, Ohio, New Jersey and Pennsylvania all had their highest turnout since at least 2011, and Kentucky and Virginia came very close to matching their turnout acmes from 2019.

The state with the highest 2023 turnout was Ohio; its statewide turnout rate of 43 percent almost matched its 47 percent turnout rate in the 2022 midterms, when the ballot included a competitive open Senate race between Republican J.D. Vance and Democrat Tim Ryan (as well as a less competitive gubernatorial race). This was likely due to high voter engagement on Issue 1, a (successful) ballot measure to codify the right to abortion in the state constitution.

Contentious ballot questions have motivated similar off-year turnout levels in Ohio before: Turnout hit 42 percent in 2011 as voters chose to repeal an unpopular GOP-backed collective bargaining restriction. But Ohio’s high turnout this year seems to be a strong argument in favor of the theory that abortion is still driving voters (especially liberal voters) to the polls, even more than a year removed from the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Ballot questions addressing abortion access will likely be on the ballot again in several states in 2024, and while their effects on turnout may be less pronounced in a presidential year, they could still make a difference — especially when it comes to turning out young voters.

It’s kind of pathetic that we think of stats like 42 percent and even slightly better figures hovering around 50 percent as high turnout numbers. Never mind the percentage of voters who are actually well-informed. It gets worse in selected states as you read the rest of the article. But the article’s most important point is that “one consistent theme across states was that suburban counties saw significantly higher turnout than adjacent cities.”

For example, in Ohio, turnout ranged from 36 to 46 percent in the four counties housing the state’s largest city centers. But turnout was particularly high in populous exurbs, like Delaware County north of Columbus and Geauga County east of Cleveland, which saw turnout rates of 62 and 55 percent, respectively. The results suggest that Democratic mobilization around abortion was one factor driving turnout here: For example, Issue 1 was approved with 57 percent of the vote statewide, while President Joe Biden got just 45 percent in 2020 — a 12-percentage-point difference. But in Geauga County, Issue 1 got 55 percent of the vote, and Biden got 38 percent — a 17-point improvement.

Yang, Radcliffe and Fuong take a deeper dive and provide graphics to underscore the relatively high turnouts in the burbs of the selected states. The suburban strongholds appear to be where Democrats can expect more victories in the years ahead. They conclude:

What these new trends mean for turnout next year isn’t immediately clear. In contrast to the Obama years, odd- and even-year turnout patterns haven’t been totally predictable since 2016, so it’s hard to say whether turnout in urban areas in 2024 will be as high as Democrats hope. But regardless of whether the new voting patterns in cities and rural areas are here to stay, it looks like suburban and mostly urban counties now reliably have the highest turnout — no matter what the calendar says.

Over the past several years, turnout slumps in major cities have been a cause for concern for Democrats. But at the same time, surging turnout in the suburbs — which have become bluer as they’ve grown more racially diverse and as college graduates have moved toward Democrats — seems to have helped offset this. Though suburbs are certainly not monolithic in their party preferences, even small leftward shifts in these areas have benefited Democrats— particularly as they’ve been accompanied by, or perhaps helped drive, high turnout. With this trend continuing in 2023, it seems safe to say suburbs will remain a major political battleground for years to come.

None of this is inevitable and recent years have brought wild cards to the election game which can confound the most astute political analysts. But Dems have to bet on the best available data, which clearly points to cultivating suburban voters as an increasingly pivotal element of Democratic electoral coalitions.

At New York I asked an obvious question that wasn’t being asked elsewhere.

A new national poll from the New York Times–Siena College reinforces a development that’s getting clearer every day: Joe Biden’s strength among Democrats and other past supporters is being steadily sapped by deep unhappiness with his staunch support of Israel in its war with Hamas. The phenomenon is particularly evident among young (under-30) voters, a left-leaning group that astonishingly favors Donald Trump over Biden by a 49 percent to 43 percent margin in the Times–Siena poll. While there are a variety of contributing factors to Biden’s poor standing with young voters — including his age, cost-of-living concerns, and unfulfilled promises on student loans and climate change — Times data wizard Nate Cohn sees a lot of evidence that the war is pivotal:

“Usually, it’s not worth dwelling too much on a subsample from a single poll, but this basic story about young voters is present in nearly every major survey at this point. Our own battleground-state surveys in the fall showed something similar, with Mr. Biden ahead by a single point among those 18 to 29. Either figure is a big shift from Mr. Biden’s 21-point lead in our final poll before the midterms or his 10-point lead in our last national poll in July.

“And there’s a plausible explanation for the shift in recent months: Israel …

“[Young] voters in the survey took an extraordinarily negative view of Israel’s recent conduct: They overwhelming say Israel isn’t doing enough to prevent civilian casualties in Gaza, believe Israel isn’t interested in peace, and think Israel should stop its military campaign, even if it means Hamas isn’t eliminated.”

If it’s true that Biden is losing voters to Trump because he’s tilting too far toward Israel in this war, then the question has to be asked: Do these voters know Trump’s position on this war? Do they imagine Trump would be more benevolent toward the suffering people of Gaza?

Anyone familiar with the 45th president’s Middle Eastern policies — and, for that matter, his Islamophobic immigration policies — while he was in office would mock the idea of his being more sympathetic to Palestinians than Biden is. His own January 2020 “peace plan” for the region, unveiled with his longtime ally Bibi Netanyahu at his side, would have “give[n] Israel most of what it has sought over decades of conflict while offering the Palestinians the possibility of a state with limited sovereignty,” as the New York Times described it:

“Mr. Trump’s plan would guarantee that Israel would control a unified Jerusalem as its capital and not require it to uproot any of the settlements in the West Bank that have provoked Palestinian outrage and alienated much of the world …

“President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority immediately denounced the plan as a ‘conspiracy deal’ unworthy of serious consideration, making the decades-long pursuit of a so-called two-state solution appear more distant than ever. ‘We say a thousand times over: no, no, no,’ Mr. Abbas said on Tuesday in Ramallah, in the West Bank.”

While the “Trump peace plan” is DOA, the former president can (and often does) boast that he gave Netanyahu the gift of a U.S. embassy in Jerusalem and recognition of that divided and contested city as Israel’s capital, itself a blow to Palestinian aspirations. He also frequently cited the belief of Republican (and Likud) mega-donor Sheldon Adelson that a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians was “impossible” because of a mutual legacy of hatred.

But what’s interesting is how little — quantitatively or substantively — Trump has had to say about the war currently underway between Israel and Hamas.

He got attention right after it broke out for calling Hamas’s allies the Lebanon-based terrorist group Hezbollah (which many feared would join in the war against Israel) “very smart,” while criticizing Netanyahu on petty grounds that had nothing to do with the conflict.

Yet even as his Republican rivals for the 2024 presidential nomination competed with one another to show who could be more vicious in encouraging uninhibited Israeli military action in Gaza, Trump’s comments have mostly revolved around his narcissistic claims that this war — like the Russia-Ukraine War — would never have happened if he were still in office. Apparently, he believes his fearsome presence in Washington would have deterred Hamas from its original plan of attack, though there’s very little evidence that the U.S., assumed to be a close ally of Israel with Biden in office, was much of a factor in the decision to go to war.

Trump has also used the Israel-Hamas War to reinforce his positions on other issues remote from the conflict itself, particularly his hostility to Muslim refugees, making it clear that Gazans (and, likely, Muslims generally) would be stopped from entering the U.S. if he is reelected.

Nothing in Trump’s self-centered utterances about the war suggests he could change Israel’s conduct or bring about a cease-fire, much less a lasting peace. You have to wonder if, by refusing to address the situation in any concrete detail, the GOP front-runner for the 2024 nomination is deliberately sowing ambiguity about his position or even making himself acceptable to voters who would normally flee in horror from the idea of this advocate of violence, chaos, and prejudice being placed in charge of U.S. foreign policy. Perhaps he’s just trying to lie in the weeds and, for once, keep himself out of the center of a political news story. If young voters indeed are inclined to punish Biden for inadequate sympathy for the Palestinian people, then voting for an independent or third-party candidate or not voting at all would benefit Trump’s campaign even if they cannot bring themselves to vote for the former president himself. His silence or incoherence on the war could well be strategic.