Republicans have been threatening to undermine Social Security for Decades. Thus far, they haven”t been able to do much because the program is extraordinarily popular. Yet their threats have had an effect. Today, many younger voters are skeptical about the program’s solvency, and what it means for their future economic security.

In “Nearly half of Gen Zers think they won’t ‘get a dime’ in Social Security,” Aris Folley writes at The Hill that “Almost half of Generation Z adults said they don’t expect to get any of the Social Security benefits they’ve earned, according to a survey.” Further,

In a survey released Tuesday by the Nationwide Retirement Institute, 45 percent of Gen Z adults between the ages of 18 to 26 said they expect to not “get a dime” of the benefits they have earned.

Additionally, 39 percent of millennials said the same, compared to 25 percent of Gen X adults and 10 percent of baby boomers who agreed.

More older Americans also expressed concern that Social Security could run out of funding in their lifetimes, with 75 percent of respondents aged 50 and older sharing that concern in the survey, up 9 percent from roughly a decade ago.

Regarding the future financing of Social Security, Folley adds, “In the new survey, less than a fourth of respondents backed increasing funding through payroll taxes. Instead, 49 percent of respondents pushed for tax increases on higher earners to pay for the program….Forty-one percent also said they supported increasing funding through taxes paid by employers, compared to 40 percent who also pushed for less taxation and 24 percent who wanted to see the age of eligibility lowered.” Also,

The survey found less support among respondents when it came to some changes tightening eligibility, with only 19 percent saying they support raising the full retirement age, while just 9 percent backed a gradual reduction of benefits that would most affect younger generations.

Only 6 percent of respondents support reducing benefits across the board.

….Gen Z, millennial, and Gen X respondents were more likely than boomers and older respondents in the survey to say they have or “will have retirement accounts and savings as additional sources of retirement income beyond Social Security benefits.”

The implications for Democratic strategy are pretty clear; Democrats must repeatedly assure younger voters that Democrats will fight to secure Social Security benefits at every opportunity. Dems must also remind voters that Republicans have been threatening to weaken the program for decades, but their threats will become a reality only if the GOP wins a 2/3 majority of both houses of congress, or a majority of both houses of congress plus the presidency.

The Democratic Party should remind all voters that it was Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt’s leadership, which made Social Security a reality in the first place. Democrats have protected it ever since then, and every expansion of Social Security benefits has been achieved through the leadership of Democrats, who will lead the fight for all future improvements in the program.

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

Democrats lately have been basking in good news. The fourth Trump indictment! Continued success for abortion rights (the defeat of the Ohio referendum)! Good news on “Bidenomics”  (slowing inflation and strong job creation)!

The sentiment seems to be: we got this! How could we lose to a candidate (assuming it’s Trump) who’s under a blizzard of legal scrutiny for undermining democracy and represents a party that wants to take away women’s right to choose—especially when we, the good guys, are doing such a great job with the economy?

This “how can we lose?” attitude is uncomfortably reminiscent of Democrats’ attitude in 2016. Then too they thought they couldn’t lose. And yet they did.

Perhaps it’s time to take out an insurance policy. It may be the case that a multiply-indicted Trump is now toxic to enough voters and abortion rights such a strong motivator that even a candidate with Biden’s weaknesses will beat him easily. But it might not and that’s where the insurance policy comes in.

Consider that right now the race looks very, very close. The RealClearPolitics poll average has Biden ahead of Trump by a slender four-tenths of a percentage point. If that was Biden’s national lead on election day, he’d probably lose the presidency due to electoral college bias that favors Republicans.

In the latest Quinnipiac poll, Biden has a one-point lead over Trump consistent with the running average. Among white working-class (noncollege) voters, he’s behind by 34 points, considerably worse than he did in 2020. If Trump (or another Republican) does manage to prevail in 2024, we can be fairly sure that a pro-GOP surge among these voters will have something to do with it.

States of Change simulations show that, all else equal, a strong white working class surge in 2024 would deliver the election to the GOP. Even a small one could potentially do the trick. In an all-else-equal context, I estimate just a one-point increase in Republican support among the white working class and a concomitant one-point decrease in Democratic support (for a 2-point margin swing) would deliver Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin (and the election) to the Republicans. Make it a 2-point increase in GOP support and you can throw in Pennsylvania too.

So an insurance policy to prevent such a swing is in order.

The problem: these are very unhappy voters. In the Quinnipiac poll, white working-class voters give Biden an overall 25 percent approval rating versus 70 percent disapproval and 72 percent have an unfavorable opinion of him. On handling the economy, Biden’s rating is even worse—24 percent approval and 73 percent disapproval. Just 20 percent say the economy is excellent or good, compared to 79 percent who say it is not so good or poor. By 63 to 16 percent, these voters believe the economy is getting worse not better. Evidently they haven’t yet heard the good news about Bidenomics.

The temptation among Democrats is to ascribe the stubborn resistance of these voters to Democratic appeals and openness to those of Trump and right populists to misinformation from Fox News and the like and, worse, to the fundamentally racist, reactionary nature of this voter group. The roots of this view go back to the aftermath of the 2016 election.

As analysts sifted through the wreckage of Democratic performance in 2016 trying to understand where all the Trump voting had come from, some themes began to emerge. One was geographical. Across county-level studies, it was clear that low educational levels among whites was a very robust predictor of shifts toward Trump. These studies also indicated that counties that swung toward Trump tended to be dependent on low-skill jobs, relatively poor performers on a range of economic measures and had local economies particularly vulnerable to automation and offshoring. Finally, there was strong evidence that Trump-swinging counties tended to be literally “sick” in the sense that their inhabitants had relatively poor physical health and high mortality due to alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide.

The picture was more complicated when it came to individual level characteristics related to Trump voting, especially Obama-Trump voting. There were a number of correlates with Trump voting. They included some aspects of economic populism—opposition to cutting Social Security and Medicare, suspicion of free trade and trade agreements, taxing the rich—as well as traditional populist attitudes like anti-elitism and mistrust of experts. But the star of the show, so to speak, was a variable labelled “racial resentment” by political scientists, which many studies showed bore a strengthened relationship to Republican presidential voting in 2016.

This variable is a scale created from questions like: “Irish, Italian, Jewish, and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors.” The variable is widely and uncritically employed by political scientists to indicate racial animus despite the obvious problem that statements such as these correspond closely to a generic conservative view of avenues to social mobility. And indeed political scientists Riley Carney and Ryan Enos have shown that responses to questions like these change very little if you substitute “Nepalese” or “Lithuanians” for blacks. That implies the questions that make up the scale tap views that are not at all specific to blacks. Carney and Enos term these views “just world belief” which sounds quite a bit different from racial resentment.

But in the aftermath of the Trump election, researchers continued to use the same scale with the same name and the same interpretation with no caveats. The strong relationship of the scale to Trump voting was proof, they argued, that Trump support, including vote-switching from Obama to Trump, was simply a matter of activating underlying racism and xenophobia. Imagine though how these studies might have landed like if they had tied Trump support to activating just world belief, which is an eminently reasonable interpretation of their star variable, instead of racial resentment. The lack of even a hint of interest in exploring this alternative interpretation strongly suggests that the researchers’ own political beliefs were playing a strong role in how they chose to pursue and present their studies.

In short, they went looking for racism—and they found it.

Other studies played variations on this theme, adding variables around immigration and even trade to the mix, where negative views were presumed to show “status threat” or some other euphemism for racism and xenophobia. As sociologist Stephen Morgan has noted in a series of papers, this amounts to a labeling exercise where issues that have a clear economic component are stripped of that component and reduced to simple indicators of unenlightened social attitudes. Again, it seems clear that researchers’ priors and political beliefs were heavily influencing both their analytical approach and their interpretation of results.

And there is an even deeper problem with the conventional view. Start with a fact that was glossed over or ignored by most studies: trends in so-called racial resentment went in the “wrong” direction between the 2012 and 2016 election. That is, fewer whites had high levels of racial resentment in 2016 than 2012. This make racial resentment an odd candidate to explain the shift of white voters toward Donald Trump in the 2016 election.

Political scientists Justin Grimmer and William Marble investigated this conundrum intensively by looking directly at whether an indicator like racial resentment really could explain, or account for, the shift of millions of white votes toward Trump. The studies that gave pride of place to racial resentment as an explanation for Trump’s victory did no such accounting; they simply showed a stronger relationship between this variable and Republican voting in 2016 and thought they’d provided a complete explanation.

They had not. When you look at the actual population of voters and how racial resentment was distributed in 2016, as Grimmer and Marble did, it turns out that the racial resentment explanation simply does not fit what really happened in terms of voter shifts. A rigorous accounting of vote shifts toward Trump shows instead that they were primarily among whites, especially low education whites, with moderate views on race and immigration, not whites with high levels of racial resentment. In fact, Trump actually netted fewer votes among whites with high levels of racial resentment than Mitt Romney did in 2012.

Grimmer and Marble did a followup study with Cole Tanigawa-Lau that included data from the 2020 election. The study was covered in a New York Times article by Thomas Edsall. In the article, Grimmer described the significance of their findings:

Our findings provide an important correction to a popular narrative about how Trump won office. Hillary Clinton argued that Trump supporters could be placed in a “basket of deplorables.” And election-night pundits and even some academics have claimed that Trump’s victory was the result of appealing to white Americans’ racist and xenophobic attitudes. We show this conventional wisdom is (at best) incomplete. Trump’s supporters were less xenophobic than prior Republican candidates’ [supporters], less sexist, had lower animus to minority groups, and lower levels of racial resentment. Far from deplorables, Trump voters were, on average, more tolerant and understanding than voters for prior Republican candidates…

[The data] point to two important and undeniable facts. First, analyses focused on vote choice alone cannot tell us where candidates receive support. We must know the size of groups and who turns out to vote. And we cannot confuse candidates’ rhetoric with the voters who support them, because voters might support the candidate despite the rhetoric, not because of it.

So much for the racial resentment explanation of Trump’s victory. Not only is racial resentment a misnamed variable that does not mean what people think it means, it literally cannot account for the actual shifts that occurred in the 2016 election. Clearly a much more complex explanation for Trump’s victory was—or should have been—in order, integrating negative views on immigration, trade and liberal elites with a sense of unfairness rooted in just world belief. That would have helped Democrats understand why voters in Trump-shifting counties, whose ways of life were being torn asunder by economic and social change, were so attracted to Trump’s appeals.

Such understanding was nowhere to be found, however, in Democratic ranks. The racism-and-xenophobia interpretation quickly became dominant, partly because it was in many ways simply a continuation of the approach Clinton had taken during her campaign and that most Democrats accepted. Indeed, it became so dominant that simply to question the interpretation reliably opened the questioner to accusations that he or she did not take the problem of racism seriously enough.

We are still living in that world. Scratch a Democrat today and you will find lurking not far beneath the surface—if beneath the surface at all—a view of white working-class voters and their populist, pro-Trump leanings as reflecting these voters’ unyielding racism and xenophobia.

This is neither substantively justified nor politically productive. Democrats desperately need that insurance policy for 2024 and getting rid of these attitudes toward 40 percent of the electorate (much more in key states!) should be part of it. Think of it as a down payment on the “de-Brahminization” of the Democratic Party. This attitude adjustment might irritate some of their activist supporters, but considering the stakes, that seems like a small price to pay for a potentially vital insurance policy.

By now it is obvious to most swing voters that there is only one political party that is doing anything to improve health care for America’s working people, and the other political party has provided zero leadership for needed health care reforms. That realization is paying off in a big way in a key swing state. In her article, “With prescription drug costs, Nevada Democrats believe they’ve found a winning issue,” Gabby Birenbaum writes in The Nevada Independent: “As Democrats have fanned out across the country this summer to sell voters on the president’s agenda a year out from the election, Cabinet members and elected officials have honed in on a specific theme in appearances in Las Vegas — the cost of prescription drugs…..The bulk of the IRA, passed just over a year ago, focused on kickstarting clean energy production across the country, providing incentives for companies and consumers alike to go green. But it also included health care policies from Biden’s broader domestic agenda, referred to as Build Back Better. The IRA capped the price of insulin at $35 per month for Medicare beneficiaries, which went into effect in January. Eli Lilly, the largest manufacturer of insulin in the U.S., announced it too would cap the cost of insulin for private insurance users in March….Additionally, out-of-pocket prescription drug costs for seniors will be capped at $2,000 annually beginning in 2025. And the law will allow Medicare to negotiate lower prices of 10 drugs with pharmaceutical companies, with negotiated prices to be implemented by 2026; further drugs will be subject to negotiation each successive year. (Medicare’s list, which is due September 1, is expected to include the most widely prescribed drugs for common conditions including blood disorders, arthritis  and heart disease.)….Democrats say the messaging is part of a concentrated effort to highlight what has proven to be one of the most popular elements of the party’s signature policy achievement, hoping to bring the campaign to the comfortable turf of health care while also signaling engagement on the issue of rising costs.”

Birenbaum continues, “And in a legislative landscape in which the infrastructure, clean energy and manufacturing efforts spurred by Democrat-passed laws will take years to implement, the focus on prescription drug pricing provides what party members say is a simple, effective electoral message….“Historic legislation is fantastic, but it’s conceptual,” White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients said to a group of regional reporters last week. “That’s why we need to be on the ground, and be comfortable being repetitive about telling the story … $35 insulin is resonating so quickly with people. It’s immediate savings.”….By retroactively applying the IRA’s $2,000 out-of-pocket cap to 2020 costs paid by Nevadans, HHS estimates that 143,000 Nevada seniors will save $434 per year on the cost of their prescription drugs in 2025. On the cost of insulin, nearly 11,000 Nevadans qualify for the $35 cap, saving an average of $439 annually per person….“It’s incredible,” Becerra said at an event in Las Vegas. “This is going to be a game-changing law.”….In a press conference, Horsford said he’s unsurprised by these provisions’ popularitybecause he hears from constituents and family members about how beneficial the insulin caps have already proven. He said he had family members who saw their monthly payment go from over $300 to $35….“They were explaining it to me at the dinner table, and I said ‘Yeah, I voted for that!’” Horsford said. “That’s real money that people can use to pay the cost of rent, of putting food on the table, of spending time with their kids and doing other activities with their grandkids.”….With Nevada’s population of seniors 65 and older growing — having seen an increase of 40 percent between 2011 and 2018 — the political calculus of the law’s appeal is straightforward. The IRA passed without a single Republican vote in either chamber, meaning Democrats will own the law next November, for better or worse.”

Birenbaum adds, “A July poll of registered voters from Navigator Research and Democrat-aligned Global Strategy Group found that the insulin cap was the most popular provision in the bill, with 82 percent support. Allowing Medicare to negotiate drugs was similarly well-received, with 81 percent approval, and the $2,000 out-of-pocket cap earned 77 percent support….Most of the voters polled were also able to identify the prescription drug provisions as being part of the Inflation Reduction Act — 81 percent of respondents agreed the IRA allowed Medicare to negotiate the price of drugs, compared to only 51 percent of voters who think the IRA provides tax incentives for manufacturing job creation….As the biggest health care law since the ACA, strategists said that Medicare negotiating the price of drugs and prescription drug cost caps have the benefit of being easily understood, as opposed to the ACA, and thus far, have had a smooth rollout, the lack of which plagued the Obama administration….The Biden campaign is banking on the popularity of a prescription drugs-based message….“Simple policies can go very far,” White House National Economic Council Deputy Director Joelle Gamble said to reporters. “And I think this is a policy that people understand. They know how much they pay; they know the president and Democrats in Congress are lowering [those costs.]”….With the insulin cost caps already in place, that message should be easy to promote. But Democrats will have to be proactive in advertising the negotiation and out-of-pocket cost caps, given that they will not kick in until after the election….Peter Koltak, a Democratic strategist who’s worked on several Nevada campaigns, said the cost of prescription drugs should be a winning issue for Democrats….“This is already popular — this starts way more popular than the ACA was,” he said. “It’s only going to get more popular … it’s all upside, really.”….Koltak added that several key swing demographics — Latinos, seniors and suburban voters among them — shift toward voting for a generic Democrat who supports capping the cost of prescription drugs when juxtaposed with a standard Republican who does not, citing state data from Democratic pollsters Global Strategy Group.”

Birenbaum notes further, “Strategists said the issue marries health care and rising costs, the latter of which typically benefits Republicans more. Combining the two allows Democrats to address a potential weakness while campaigning on an area that voters trust them on….“[Health care] is kind of a bread-and-butter Democratic issue,” UNLV political science professor Dan Lee said….The fact that it targets seniors — a group with high voter turnout — is another political appeal….Though AARP Nevada is nonpartisan, it plans to engage all elected officials during the campaign season and beyond on the prescription drug provisions of the IRA, which Jessica Padrón, the organization’s associate state director of advocacy and outreach, said has resonated with members….“Older Americans are tired of promises to tackle these issues,” she said. “And they’re thrilled that Congress finally took action. We’re getting a lot of positive feedback.”….An analysis of per capita prescription drug spending between 2004 and 2019 from the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Peter G. Petersen Foundation found that Americans, on average, spend $1,126 annually on prescription drugs, double the average of peer nations. Democrats argue these high prices are because, up until next year, the government can not negotiate drug prices the way it can in Canada, the United Kingdom, France and Germany, for example….The next step for Democrats is to expand the program to institute maximum prices for those not on Medicare. That can only be done with majorities in both chambers and Biden re-elected to the White House — making it an explicit part of their campaign appeal….And it’s not just Congress that can bring the benefits to Nevadans younger than 65. Democrats in the Legislature passed a bill to apply the Medicare-negotiated price caps statewide in 2026, allowing private insurance beneficiaries to take advantage of the new lower costs as well, though Gov. Joe Lombardo (R) vetoed the bill.” Birenbaum’s article focuses on Nevada, but the very substantial economic and health benefits she cites apply nation-wide.

Since the latest Trump indictment dropped in my home state of Georgia, I offered some thoughts at New York about the Peach State being his nightmare jurisdiction:

There’s an old saying among southerners that “you can’t go to hell without going through Atlanta,” which is a reference to the many, many air passengers who have to transfer from plane to plane at Atlanta’s Jackson-Hartsfield Airport to reach their destinations. Donald Trump’s journey through criminal courtrooms near and far is taking him through Atlanta, too, we learned on August 14, as a Fulton County grand jury indicted the former president on a variety of charges stemming from the Georgia edition of his plot to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. And unless he gets very lucky, Trump’s legal experience in Atlanta will be as hellish as a layover headed nowhere, as the charges force him to relive some of his least favorite moments of the last three years.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, and likely the jurors called forth to judge Trump, can and will be demonized by Team Trump and his MAGA supporters as Democrats “weaponizing” the legal system to take down the 45th president before he can return triumphantly to the White House. But many of the key witnesses testifying to Trump’s criminality will be his fellow Republicans in a state that has defied his wishes again and again. Trump’s losing streak in the state began in 2020, when he lost the state narrowly to Joe Biden in an election result certified by Republican secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, who administered the election, and recertified by Republican governor Brian Kemp.

All Trump’s efforts to change that result represented challenges to his own party’s power structure in the state, which refused to back down on the conviction that it was an honest election honestly counted and duly confirmed before God and the federal government. Trump and his allies had to lie like madmen to keep Georgia’s electoral votes contested, and from the president on down, they ensnared themselves serially in fraudulent charges and felonious pressure campaigns, most notably in Trump’s own plea to Raffensperger to manufacture some votes for him. And while their high jinks from fake-elector schemes to made-up fraud incidents echoed what they were doing in other battleground states, it’s the solid phalanx of Republican statewide elected officials fighting the election coup that made Georgia special.

Trump’s humiliation in Georgia didn’t end with Raffensperger’s refusal to “find” him some votes or with the refusal of Georgia’s Republican legislature to certify fake electors. His obsession with his attempted election coup was widely blamed for the defeat of two Republican U.S. senators in a January 2021 general-election runoff that cost the GOP control of the upper chamber. But worse yet, Trump sought to purge Raffensperger, Kemp, and several other GOP officeholders who didn’t bend the knee during the 2022 Republican primaries, and he and his surrogates had their asses handed to them. In the midterm election, Kemp, Raffensperger, and other Republicans romped to victory. The conspicuous loser was Trump’s hand-picked Senate candidate Herschel Walker, again robbing the GOP of a shot at Senate control.

Suffice it to say that as Trump faces a potentially devastating criminal proceeding in Georgia, there are very few of his fellow partisans willing to defend him, and some of the biggest names in the state GOP have already testified against him before the grand jury and are likely to incriminate him in open court (a very open court since the proceedings may be televised). Such sympathy as Trump demands as the putative 2024 Republican presidential nominee may be eroded by racketeering charges, which will surely make potential co-conspirators keep their distance. And if Trump is found guilty by a Fulton County jury at trial, he not only cannot pardon himself as he might do with a federal conviction but cannot even throw himself on Brian Kemp’s mercy. In Georgia, pardons are administered not by the governor but by an appointed state board that in the past has limited pardons to offenders who have already done their time.

All in all, Georgia is the last place in America where Donald Trump wants to face the music for his misdeeds. He should have skipped committing election-related crimes in his nightmare state even as wealthy travelers find ways to fly around Atlanta.

 

Some excerpts from “For Biden, Republican Anti-Government Attacks Can Be a Campaign Strategy: While Trump believes the government exists to serve him, Biden has a strong case for a government for the people in 2024” by Chris Edelson at The Progressive:

Ironically, one of the most fervent Trump supporters—Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia—may have given Biden a ready-made campaign plank. In July, Greene warned that Biden is following in the footsteps of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson; that he is a “Democratic Socialist” committed to “big government programs to address education, medical care, urban problems, rural poverty, transportation, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and welfare.”

Greene—known for promoting a “Jewish space laser” conspiracy by breathlessly (and incoherently) suggesting that California wildfires in 2018 might have had something to do with a “laser beam” somehow connected to “Rothschild, Inc”—doesn’t stand out as a deep, strategic thinker. So it’s no surprise that her effort to tar Biden with the frequently misused scare label of “socialist” could easily backfire. As one observer said of Greene’s “socialism” rant, “it strikes me as a curious political strategy to compare the legislation of a President [Biden] you despise and want to impeach with some of the most broadly popular legislation in American history.”

Biden seems to agree with this analysis: his campaign quickly responded with an ad that welcomed Greene’s comparison to FDR and LBJ as an indication that the Biden Administration is committed to helping middle class and working class people.

It was refreshing—but certainly not inevitable—to see Biden proudly embrace the idea that government can be a force for good in Americans’ lives.  In the past, other Democrats went into a defensive crouch when Republicans like Ronald Reagan described government as “the problem.” After Republicans hammered home their “big government attack” for more than a decade, Bill Clinton finally conceded in 1996 that “the era of big government is over,” seeming to accept the Republicans’ premise that government is the enemy, or, at best, “a necessary evil.”

Edelson adds, “The Biden ad suggests an alternative approach: seizing on overwrought Republican anti-government rhetoric as an opening for presenting an effective case for Biden and the Democrats in 2024 that contrasts their approach with Republicans’ cynical view of government….” Further, writes Edelson,

….Republicans see government as a force that serves them—that advances their specific world views at the expense of their perceived enemies. This view is represented in its purest form by the party’s leader, Donald Trump. For Trump, everything is about him, and the government exists only to serve his personal interests by lining his pockets (or his family members’ pockets), protecting his henchmen, punishing his perceived enemies, and consolidating personal power. This is a man so self-absorbed that he falsely insisted classified government documents were “my documents.”….If he is given a second term, Trump has made it brazenly clear that he will do all he can to make government officials personally loyal to him. At its heart, Trump’s vision of government is profoundly authoritarian: he sees government as a tool he can use to advance his interests and a weapon he can deploy to destroy his critics.

In contrast, Biden and the Democrats can argue that government exists to serve everyone. The point of government is to make life better—the preamble to our Constitution says as much. Where Trump’s view of government is deeply authoritarian and personal, Biden can embrace government as thoroughly democratic and aimed at public service. He could claim his presidency has been focused not on personal gain but rather on helping Americans burdened by student loans, inflation, worries about the pandemic, and economic uncertainty. On all of these fronts, Biden has standing to contend that peoples’ lives have been improved by government intervention, and that he can continue this approach in a second term.

Edelson concludes that “emphasizing a contrast between Biden’s and Trump’s approaches to government can give progressives an edge in an election that may be extremely competitive.” These opposing views of government provide an important distinction.

But it’s not just that Democrats have a genuine faith in government’s responsibility to serve the people, while Trump and his Republican lapdogs see government as a tool for their personal enrichment. Democrats should also not hesitate to ‘wave the flag’ and say clearly that Trump’s view of government, shared by his followers in his party, is deeply unamerican and unpatriotic. They have betrayed America’s — and Democracy’s — best ideals about freedom and fairness. That’s what voters who love America should take to the polls in 2024.

At The Hill, Tara Suter reports that a “Majority of voters think Trump ‘did something illegal,” and writes: “In a recent Fox News poll, a majority of registered voters said they think Trump “did something illegal” related to “efforts to overturn the 2020 election.”….The poll, released Wednesday, also found that 20 percent of registered voters think Trump “did something wrong” but “not illegal.” Another 24 percent said the former president “did nothing seriously wrong.”….The same poll revealed a drop in the number of voters who think the Department of Justice’s “treatment” of the former president “is politically motivated,” from 55 percent in June to 51 percent this month. Parallel to those findings, there was a rise in those who said the DOJ’s actions against the former president are not “politically motivated.”….The poll was conducted between August 11 and 13, with a margin of error of 3 percent and a sample size of 1,002 registered voters.” Suter did not report any numbers indicating what percentage of survey respondents would vote for him anyway.

In similar vein, G. Elliot Morris, editorial director of data analytics at ABC News, writes at FiveThirtyEight that “two weeks after Trump was indicted by a federal grand jury for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, polling data suggests he has been unable to convince voters that his latest boogeyman — the United States Department of Justice — is really out to get him. Instead, polls show that while it may not be putting a serious dent in his lead in the Republican primary, voters overall view his latest indictment as serious and believe that Trump’s actions related to the events of Jan. 6, 2021, merit criminal charges. And among both adults and Republicans, Trump’s favorability rating fell after he was indicted in June for illegally retaining classified documents and refusing to return them to the U.S. officials when asked….In the two weeks after federal prosecutors unsealed the classified-documents indictment, Trump’s net favorability rating among Republicans fell from +57.1 to +55.3, a drop of 1.8 percentage points….Over that same time period, Trump’s net favorability rating among all adults fell from -11.9 percentage points — the high point for him in 2023 — back down to -14.8, a slightly larger dip than among Republicans….Two studies of election results in the 2022 midterms found that the Republican candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives who received endorsements from Trump or voiced support for his election denialism performed worse than Republican House candidates who did not. In a CBS/YouGov poll conducted Aug. 2-4,  a majority of adults said the indictments against Trump were “upholding the rule of law” (57 percent) and an effort to “defend democracy” (52 percent), although more than half also said the indictments and investigations were trying to stop the Trump campaign (59 percent).”

Voters who are concerned about big corporations picking their pocket will probably find the efforts of President Biden and Democrats of significant interest. At least that’s one of the big bets Democratic Party leaders are placing in the 2024 campaign. As Madison Hall reports at The Insider, “House Democrats are increasingly embracing what could be a winning strategy as the 2024 election approaches by joining in on the Biden Administration’s crusade against “junk fees.”….In October 2022, the White House announced its plans to go after junk fees — “fees designed either to confuse or deceive consumers or to take advantage of lock-in or other forms of situational market power” — which it said could save consumers more than $1 billion each year….According to a recent report from the Associated Press, with assistance from the Progressive Change Institute, some House Democrats have already held events addressing junk fees and there are at least a dozen or more planned across the country….Then, five months later, Biden addressed the issue again during his 2023 State of the Union speech, where he made a point to note how he personally understands “how unfair it feels when a company overcharges you and gets away with it.”….And after the Biden Administration’s push in part led to some airlines changing policies to allow family seating without additional fees and Live Nation Entertainment to introduce a more “transparent” pricing model, House Democrats have entered the fight as well….According to a recent report from the Associated Press, with assistance from the Progressive Change Institute, some House Democrats have already held events addressing junk fees and there are at least a dozen or more planned across the country.”

In “Will Biden Have Enough Chips in 2024? Today on TAP: His industrial-policy programs are great. How much of an election year difference can they make?,” Robert Kuttner writes at The American Prospect: “Biden’s big public programs, including the CHIPS and Science Act, Inflation Reduction Act, and the bipartisan infrastructure law together spend about $2 trillion over ten years—about 1 percent of GDP. If you compare the relative scale, as well as the longer lead time of Biden’s public investments, you can appreciate why Biden does not get the credit he deserves….The White House fact sheet on CHIPS, released August 8, tells us: “In the one year since CHIPS was signed into law, companies have announced over $166 billion in manufacturing in semiconductors and electronics, and at least 50 community colleges in 19 states have announced new or expanded programming to help American workers access good-paying jobs in the semiconductor industry.”….as Ronnie Chatterji, who recently stepped down as White House coordinator for the CHIPS and Science program, points out, these new publicly subsidized investments do make a concentrated difference, with high local media visibility, in some states and regions….These include Ohio, where Intel has broken ground for a massive new campus and several thousand new jobs, and upstate New York, where Micron will invest billions. Other key places with large new semiconductor investments are Arizona and Indiana….The challenge, beyond election year visibility, is that the administration has only so much leverage. These are global companies that can produce anywhere in the world; they have never had union production workforces….That said, the Biden semiconductor program is a genuine achievement that will revive a key domestic industry and relieve supply chain pressures, as well as a monumental ideological reversal. The political question is whether it’s sufficient, even with the best messaging in the word, to overcome the long-term sense of government having failed to deliver for working-class voters who face worsening terms of engagement with the economy.”

It can be oddly fascinating to watch a presidential campaign implode, particularly if you don’t like the candidate. That’s where I am with Ron DeSantis, as I explained at New York:

Ron DeSantis remains, for the moment, the most formidable rival to Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. But it’s been a long, long time since he’s gotten any particularly good news in the polls. A new Emerson College survey shows him dropping into single digits and third place in New Hampshire, behind Chris Christie. In the RealClearPolitics averages of national GOP polls, he’s dropped from 30.1 percent at the end of March to 14.8 percent now. He looks relatively strong in Iowa, where it appears he is making a desperate all-or-nothing stand, but mostly just by comparison. Trump only leads him by 27 points in the first-in-the-nation caucus state, though sparse Iowa polling may disguise a less positive environment for DeSantis.

Polling aside, recent news emanating from the DeSantis campaign has been generally quite bad. He’s had three campaign leadership shakeups, a big round of staff layoffs, and at least one major “reboot” of his message and strategy. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign is still building steam, and its main problem is that too much of his vast financial resources are going into legal costs in connection with indictments that aren’t hurting him at all among Republican voters. Another bad development for DeSantis is that a large field of rivals has remained in the race, spoiling his hopes for a one-on-one battle with the front-runner.

Once an almost obscenely well-funded campaign, the DeSantis effort appears to have a high burn rate and some serious donor defections. And more generally, he’s no longer the darling of Republican and conservative elites, most particularly Rupert Murdoch.

The trajectory of DeSantis 2024 should remind political observers of another recent Republican presidential bid that at this point in 2015 was about to enter a dramatic plunge into premature defeat well before voters voted: Scott Walker.

Read my colleague Jonathan Chait’s description of Walker as he appeared at the beginning of that race and see if it doesn’t sound exactly like the image DeSantis had built until his recent troubles:

“Scott Walker won three statewide elections in Wisconsin, which has supported the Democrat in every presidential election since 1984. He led national Republican polling as recently as March. He led in Iowa by enormous margins as recently as August. The Koch brothers loved him. Walker had spent his entire adult life developing an almost superhuman fealty to the principles of the modern Republican Party, its Reaganolotry, and, above all, a ruthless commitment to crushing its enemies beneath his boot heel. If there was anything that gave Walker joy … it was the goal of wiping organized labor off the map. As Grover Norquist enthused in May, ‘when you meet him, it’s like seeing somebody who sits on a throne on the skulls of his enemies.’”

Like DeSantis, Walker was relatively young, in his 40s, and thus was able to generate a sense of generational change in his party (the two previous GOP nominees were 72 and 65 years old, respectively). Like the Floridian, the Wisconsin governor had found the absolute sweet spot of the GOP zeitgeist: the strident ideologue who somehow still appeals to swing voters, and who strikes fear into the hearts of liberals everywhere as he destroys their counterparts in his state. Walker’s very colorlessness (like DeSantis’s) enhanced his reputation as a methodical Death Star come to remake America in his own repulsive image.

The question now is whether DeSantis will also emulate Walker in the ultimate futility of his campaign. There are as many parallels in the decline of their candidacies as in their rise to national political celebrity. Margaret Hartmann’s timeline for Walker’s brief campaign shows some of the same weaknesses as DeSantis’s, and also how quickly his problems snowballed:

“According to Real Clear Politics’ polling averages, during most of the first half of 2015, Walker was among the top three GOP presidential candidates in national polls, and led in Iowa by a wide margin …

“Some outlets ran stories such as “How Scott Walker Will Win” and “Six Reasons Why Scott Walker Will Be Elected President,” but the Times raised the possibility that Walker’s shift to the right on issues like same-sex marriage, immigration, and ethanol subsidies to maintain his lead in Iowa was making him appear inauthentic and costing him elsewhere in the nation.”

Coincidentally or not, DeSantis’s Iowa-driven decision to run to the right of Trump also had less than ideal consequences for his candidacy. Also like Walker, DeSantis seems to have also underestimated Trump. Walker pretty clearly didn’t know what hit him, Hartmann suggested:

“With Trump dominating the political conversation and a crowded field of 16 other Republican candidates, Walker’s campaign began imploding in earnest. After months on top, a CNN/ORC poll found Walker had dropped to third place in Iowa behind Trump and Ben Carson.”

At this point, Walker’s lack of charisma started becoming a problem for him in the retail political environment of Iowa, just as it’s a problem for DeSantis, especially after he made the dubious decision to promise to appear in all the state’s 99 counties. But what actually did in Walker after his campaign lost its magic were mediocre debate performances, beginning in August:

“Walker’s appearance in the first GOP debate was unmemorable. Just before the debate, he had more than 11 percent in an average of the last nine national polls, but afterward he dropped below 5 percent.”

In the second debate, in September, Walker was all but invisible, struggling to draw questions and attention. And then he was done, with his support dropping to below one percent in national polls even as Trump soared and Ted Cruz replaced Walker as the “true conservative” in the race.

It’s entirely possible that Ron DeSantis is one poor debate performance away from the sad fate of Scott Walker. He’s supposedly been deep into preparations for the first candidate debate on August 23 for a while now, though he’s handicapped by not knowing if Trump is going to show. But his margin for error has disappeared. He’s hardly the political behemoth he appeared to be earlier this year, and if he can’t turn things around soon, impatient Republicans will either resign themselves to another Trump nomination or quickly find a new alternative.

By now, you’ve probably heard several versions of the argument that President Biden can only beat Trump, and if any other Republican gets the GOP presidential nomination Democrats are screwed. Not so fast. At The Hill, Alexander Bolton chews on that assumption and argues,

Republican strategists are worried that if former President Trump doesn’t secure the GOP’s presidential nomination next year, or if he is kept off the ballot because of his mounting legal problems, it could spell a voter turnout disaster for their party in 2024.

GOP strategists say there’s growing concern that if Trump is not the nominee, many of his core supporters, who are estimated to make up 25 percent to 35 percent of the party base, “will take their ball and go home.”

“The conventional wisdom is there’s concern that if Trump’s not the nominee, his coalition will take their ball and go home,” said Matt Dole, a Republican strategist based in Ohio, where Republicans are targeting vulnerable Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown.

Bolton notes further, “A Pew Research Center analysis of the 2022 midterm election published last month found that higher turnout among Trump voters last year was a key factor behind Republicans winning control of the House….The analysis found that 71 percent of voters who backed Trump participated in the midterm election, compared to 67 percent of voters who supported Biden.”

Also, Bolton adds,

Given the shift of college-educated women and suburban voters to Democrats since the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, Republicans are counting on big turnout in rural areas and from the so-called “Trump coalition” to win the presidential and congressional races next year.

“With controversial issues like abortion in the suburbs, Republicans have to make up for it in rural parts of the state, and without Trump on the ballot, rural parts of the state just didn’t turn out at the same rate,” the [unnamed] strategist said of the election result in Ohio.”

Yes, Biden’s polling numbers could be better. But 14 and a half months before Election Day is a bit early for doomsaying or high fives. Trump, or no Trump, however, there are persuasive arguments that Biden can win, regardless of the GOP nominee.

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

The basic contours of the 2024 election are coming into view. The two sides might be loosely described as “Brahmin Left” and “Populist Right.”

“Brahmin Left” is a term coined by economist Thomas Piketty and colleagues to characterize Western left parties increasingly bereft of working-class voters and increasingly dominated by highly educated voters and elites. The Brahmin left has evolved over many decades and certainly includes today’s Democratic Party.

Consider the class split in the latest New York Times/Siena poll. Among college-educated voters, Biden is favored by 22 points. Among working-class (noncollege) voters, Trump is favored by 13 points. That’s a 35-point gap. Compare to the 2020 election, where the gap was “only” 22 points (plus 18 points for Democrats among college voters and plus four for Republicans among noncollege voters). And in that election, modeled estimates by the States of Change project indicate that Trump carried the working-class vote in 35 out of 50 states, including in critical states for the Democrats like Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, as well as in states that are slipping away from the party like Florida, Iowa, Ohio, and Texas. The results from the NYT/Siena and other polls suggest Democrats are unlikely to do better among working-class voters in these states in 2024.

Another indicator of the Brahminization of the Democratic Party is the current distribution of congressional seats. Democrats now dominate the more affluent districts while Republicans are cleaning up in the poorer districts. Marcy Kaptur, who represents Ohio’s working-class 9th district and is the longest-serving female member of the House in American history, has said of this pattern:

You could question yourself and say, well, the blue districts are the wealthiest districts, so it shows that the Democrats are doing better to lift people’s incomes. The other way you could look at it is: how is it possible that Republicans are representing the majority of people who struggle? How is that possible?

How indeed. Kaptur has a two-page chart that arrays Congressional districts from highest median income to lowest with partisan control color-coded. The first page is heavily dominated by blue but the second, poorer page is a sea of red. You can access the chart here. It’s really quite striking. Overall, Republicans represent 152 of the 237 Congressional seats where the district median income trails the national figure.

In light of all this, consider how Democrats are proposing to run in 2024. First, they are not going to back down an inch on the party’s commitment to cultural leftism, a key marker of the party’s Brahmin turn. Indeed, they believe the abortion issue currently gives them cover in this area due to the Dobbs decision, where the party has been able to occupy center ground in opposition to significant parts of the GOP who wish to ban the procedure. But crime isn’t the abortion issue. Immigration isn’t the abortion issue. Race essentialism and gender ideology aren’t the abortion issue. Even the abortion issue isn’t the abortion issue once you get past opposing bans and start having to deal with the nitty-gritty of setting some limits on abortion access (as the public wants).

The fact is that the cultural left in and around the Democratic Party has managed to associate the party with a series of views on crime, immigration, policing, free speech, and of course race and gender that are quite far from those of the median working class voter (including the median nonwhite working-class voter). These unpopular views are further amplified by the Democrats’ “shadow party” (as John Judis and I put it in our forthcoming book, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?), the activist groups, think tanks, foundations, publications and websites, and big donors, and prestigious intellectuals who are not part of official party organizations, as well as within the Democratic Party infrastructure itself, all of which are thoroughly dominated by the cultural left.

As a direct result of these associations, the party’s—or, at least, Biden’s—attempt to rebrand Democrats as a unifying party speaking for Americans across divisions of race and class appears to have failed. Voters are not sure Democrats can look beyond identity politics to ensure public safety, secure borders, high quality, non-ideological education, and economic progress for all Americans.

Instead, Democrats continue to be weighed down by those whose tendency is to oppose firm action to control crime or the southern border as concessions to racism, interpret concerns about ideological school curricula and lowering educational standards as manifestations of white supremacy, and generally emphasize the identity politics angle of virtually every issue. With this baggage, rebranding the party—making it more working class oriented and less Brahmin—is very difficult, since decisive action that might lead to such a rebranding is immediately undercut by a torrent of criticism. Judging from Biden’s actions so far, I don’t see him taking that decisive action and being willing to buck that kind of criticism. No “Sister Souljah moment” seems likely this cycle.

The Democrats’ refusal to back down on any of their cultural left commitments is twinned to aggressive attacks on GOP excesses, real and imagined, on culture war issues and linking those excesses to a “MAGA” Republican Party (and Trump of course) they characterize as anti-democratic and perhaps even fascist. This plays well with Democrats’ college-educated supporters, but less well with working-class voters who simply look at Democrats’ commitments and rhetoric differently.

As David Brooks noted in a recent piece that has earned him the wrath of the online left:

Members of our [highly-educated] class…segregate ourselves into a few booming metro areas: San Francisco, D.C., Austin and so on. In 2020, Biden won only 500 or so counties, but together they are responsible for 71 percent of the American economy. Trump won over 2,500 counties, responsible for only 29 percent…. Armed with all kinds of economic, cultural and political power, we support policies that help ourselves. Free trade makes the products we buy cheaper, and our jobs are unlikely to be moved to China. Open immigration makes our service staff cheaper, but new, less-educated immigrants aren’t likely to put downward pressure on our wages.

Like all elites, we use language and mores as tools to recognize one another and exclude others. Using words like “problematic,” “cisgender,” “Latinx” and “intersectional” is a sure sign that you’ve got cultural capital coming out of your ears. Meanwhile, members of the less-educated classes have to walk on eggshells because they never know when we’ve changed the usage rules so that something that was sayable five years ago now gets you fired.

We also change the moral norms in ways that suit ourselves, never mind the cost to others. For example, there used to be a norm that discouraged people from having children outside marriage, but that got washed away during our period of cultural dominance, as we eroded norms that seemed judgmental or that might inhibit individual freedom.

After this social norm was eroded, a funny thing happened. Members of our class still overwhelmingly married and had children within wedlock. People without our resources, unsupported by social norms, were less able to do that.

This is the raw material a populist right campaign—whether Trump’s or, I believe, any other Republican candidate’s—will make good use of. The Democrats, as an unrepentant Brahmin Left party, will be highly vulnerable among working-class voters to such attacks.

They do believe, however, that they have an ace in the hole that can overcome these liabilities with working class voters: “Bidenomics.” The idea is that the improving economic outlook, especially lowered inflation, plus the jobs generated by the Democrats’ various spending bills, will endear these voters to the Democrats and allow them to overlook the other things they don’t like about the party and the Biden administration.

So far, this approach has decidedly not worked. As many outlets have reported, voters remain deeply unhappy about the economy and unconvinced by the Bidenomics pitch. In the most recent CNN poll, working-class voters give Biden just a 32 percent approval rating on the economy and a 24 percent rating on handling inflation; about four-fifths characterize the current economy as poor. And in the most recent CBS poll, most hadn’t heard much about Bidenomics and of those who had the term was mostly associated with higher inflation.

None of this should be surprising. Liberal journalist David Dayen points out, in a notably sober take on the situation:

The dominant economic story in the country during the Biden presidency is the spike in inflation. While the jobs numbers are prodigious, changes in employment by definition affect a smaller number of people than the price of everything, which affects everyone.

When inflation “goes away,” that doesn’t mean that every price reverts back to its previous level. For the most part, the rate of price increases just levels off. Anyone pissed off about prices at the grocery store is still going to be pissed off, because they’re still high relative to where they were in 2021….

The main prices that have fallen already are on gas and energy, but that has ended, in part because of the ongoing heat wave, which prevents refineries from running at full capacity and increases demand for air-conditioning. The positive trends on consumer sentiment are if anything going to go down in the near term, as the most publicly visible posted prices in the country rise….

What’s left of Bidenomics has long time lags: Manufacturing plants aren’t built overnight, bridges aren’t repaired instantly. Of course it won’t trigger an immediate reaction among the public.

Another problem with Bidenomics is that so much of it is bound up with Democrats’ commitment to a rapid clean energy transition based on renewables. This approach is simply not very popular with working-class voters (though it is wildly popular with Democrats’ liberal college-educated supporters) and, on current evidence, that situation seems unlikely to change anytime soon. Indeed, the populist right attack on Bidenomics is likely to target both the association with inflation and with the Democrats’ maximalist green agenda.

So Brahmin Left vs. Populist Right does indeed seem to be our lineup for the 2024 election. Either side could win. But no matter which side does, the contradictions at the heart of this clash are unlikely to be easily resolved without substantial changes in orientation by at least one of the parties. Brahmin Left and Populist Right can both win elections. But neither seems capable, without considerable change, of building the kind of broad, durable coalition capable of unlocking the country’s potential for a new era of dynamic growth and universal uplift.

In his Washington Post column, “Immigration can be fixed. So why aren’t we doing it?,” Fareed Zakaria unveils a common-sense approach to solving a problem that has bedeviled Democrats for too long. As Zakaria writes,

In May, it seemed obvious that the United States was going to face an unmanageable border crisis. In the previous fiscal year, there were about 2.4 millionapprehensions of people trying to enter the United States at the southern border. And the authorities were about to lose the provision of Title 42 implemented in March 2020 that allowed them to swiftly expel migrants at the border as a pandemic-prevention measure. But the end of the pandemic meant that temporary power also had to come to a close.

In fact, as it turned out, there was no crisis. The number of encounters with migrants at the southern border actually dropped by a third, from about 7,100 per day in April to about 4,800 per day in June, according to the latest available data. Why did this happen?