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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vance explains further,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The appalling terrorist attack by the appalling terrorist group Hamas, which slaughtered more than 1300 Israelis, 87 percent of whom were civilians, is the largest single day killing of Jews since the Holocaust. The response of America’s intersectional left has also been appalling. As Sohrab Ahmari accurately noted in a Compact magazine article titled “Woke Is Dying”:

Many of those who spent the last few years promoting #Defund, “intersectionality,” and similar concepts refused to condemn Hamas’s butchery—that is, when they didn’t celebrate it. The Chicago chapter of Black Lives Matter tweeted, “I Stand With Palestine,” along with a picture of a paraglider, an allusion to how Hamas terrorists descended upon an outdoor party, murdering some 260 ravers. Yale American Studies professor Zareena Grewal declared: “Settlers are not civilians. This is not hard.” The New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America promoted a Times Square rally at which murderers were hailed as liberators.

What is wrong with these people?

In my opinion, the rot goes very deep. This is not a one-off. Over the last number of years, huge swathes of the American left have become infected with an ideology that judges actions or arguments 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.

This approach was always a terrible idea, in obvious contradiction to logic and common sense. But it has led much of the left and large sectors of the Democratic Party to take positions that have little purchase in social or political reality and are offensive to the basic values most people hold. The failure to unequivocally condemn the Hamas massacre as a crime against humanity is just the latest example of this intellectual and moral malignancy.

Take the vogue for “anti-racist” posturing. This dates back to the mid-teens and gathered overwhelming force in 2020 with the George Floyd police killing and subsequent nationwide protests. It became de rigueur in left and liberal Democratic circles to solemnly pronounce American society structurally racist and shot through with white supremacy from top to bottom. No argument along these lines was too outrageous if it came from or on behalf of “people of color”, who must be deferred to given their place in the intersectional hierarchy.

Nothing exemplifies this better than the lionization of Ibram X. Kendi, whose thoroughly ridiculous claims were treated as revealed truth by tens of millions of good liberals and leftists:

There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy. Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity between racial groups…The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination….The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.

Only those who have checked their capacity for critical thinking at the door could possibly take this “analysis” seriously. But they did because of the intersectional positioning of Kendi and those he claimed to advocate for.

How else to explain why liberals didn’t run screaming in the opposite direction when Kendi called for the passage of an “anti-racist Constitutional amendment” that would:

…establish and permanently fund the Department of Anti-racism (DOA) comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees. The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.

It is difficult to imagine anything more illiberal than proposing an unelected Soviet-style bureaucracy of “experts” that would vet the actions, ideas, and perhaps even the thoughts of all public officials in the country for their anti-racist content and punish those who deviate from the correct path. Madness! And yet he has been showered with honors, money, and coveted academic positions (though recent revelations of epic mismanagement at his Boston University Center for Antiracist Research may curb some of that enthusiasm).

Bad ideas and arguments are bad ideas and arguments. It shouldn’t matter who makes them. Just like it shouldn’t matter who in the intersectional hierarchy massacres Jews. It’s still an atrocity.

It’s high time for Democrats to decisively reject this kind of thinking across the board. Embrace instead the universalistic principles the overwhelming majority of Americans believe in. They believe, unlike Kendi, that racial preferences in rewards and decision-making are not fair and fairness is a fundamental part of their world outlook. They actually believe, with Martin Luther King Jr., that people should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” In a recent University of Southern California Dornsife survey, this classic statement of colorblind equality was posed to respondents: “Our goal as a society should be to treat all people the same without regard to the color of their skin.” This MLK-style statement elicited sky-high (92 percent) agreement from the public, despite the assaults on this idea from Critical Race Theory (CRT), Kendi, and large sectors of the Democratic left. In a fascinating related finding, the researchers found that most people who claim to have heard about CRT believe CRT includes this colorblind perspective, rather than directly contradicting it. Perhaps they just can’t believe any theory that has anything to do with race would reject this fundamental principle.

Similarly a recent Public Agenda Hidden Common Ground survey found 91 percent agreement with the statement: “All people deserve an equal opportunity to succeed, no matter their race or ethnicity.” This is what people deeply believe in: equal opportunity not, unlike the intersectional left, equal outcomes.

Equally, Americans believe crime is crime no matter who commits it and that criminals should be punished. They do not believe that open drug use, street camping, shoplifting and countless other symptoms of social disorder should be tolerated because the populations involved are “marginalized” or because enforcement outcomes might not be equally distributed across races. Nor do they believe that the borders of the United States are merely suggestions that can be ignored by those appropriately placed in the intersectional hierarchy.

Reactions to the Hamas massacre have exposed the moral cul-de-sac occupied by the intersectional left. Democrats and liberals should seize this opportunity to dissociate themselves not just from these disgraceful reactions but also from the entire world view that has produced bad policy and worse politics in area after area.

Of course the usual suspects will inevitably say that returning to a universalist, mainstream approach is tantamount to throwing loyal Democratic constituencies in need of help “under the bus”. But who is throwing whom under the bus? Perhaps it is those whose intersectional dogma stands in the way of a Democratic approach that could plausibly generate the widest possible support that are throwing those who need help the most under the bus.

Early as it is in the 2024 presidential election cycle, it’s good to pay attention to general election trial heats, which I did at New York:

Despite some Republicans’ concerns about Donald Trump’s 91 felony indictment counts, and Democrats’ worries about Joe Biden’s age and job approval ratings, these two men are steadily heading towards a 2024 rematch. Fairly regular polling of a prospective Biden-Trump general election has consistently shown a close race: At the moment, the two are actually tied in the RealClearPolitics polling averages.

But as we should be constantly reminded, presidential elections are determined by the Electoral College, not the national popular vote (if they were, neither George W. Bush nor Donald Trump would have been president). So as the two parties begin to formally nominate their 2024 candidates, attention will shift to how well they might fare in the “battleground states” where the fight for 270 electoral votes will be waged.

We’ve now gotten a taste of that landscape via two big batches of state general-election trial heats from Emerson and Bloomberg/Morning Consult. Emerson seems to have focused much of its polling on states with down-ballot races, so the firm is mostly confirming that Trump is predictably far ahead of Biden in red states like Montana (by 21 points), Tennessee (by 33 points), and Wyoming (53 points). But Emerson also has polls of Wisconsin (Trump 42 percent, Biden 40 percent), Michigan (Biden 44 percent, Trump 43 percent), and a Pennsylvania shocker (Trump 45 percent, Biden 36 percent).

The new Bloomberg/Morning Consult polls are squarely centered on the seven states that were closest in 2020 (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin). The results show Trump leading among registered voters in Arizona (47 percent to 43 percent), Georgia (48 percent to 43 percent), North Carolina (47 percent to 43 percent), Pennsylvania (46 percent to 45 percent), and Wisconsin (46 percent to 44 percent). Biden leads in Nevada (46 percent to 43 percent), and the two candidates are tied in Michigan (at 44 percent). Taking the margins of error into account, Trump has small leads in Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina, and the candidates are statistically tied in Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Aside from the rather important fact that the 2024 general election is more than a year away, there are a lot of variables to keep in mind when looking at such early data. For one thing, both Emerson and Bloomberg/Morning Consult are measuring sentiment among registered voters; you can make arguments for either candidate having an advantage when a set of likely voters emerge (Trump because Republicans are historically the most likely to vote and Biden because he’s unusually strong among the college-educated voters most likely to vote). For another, in both 2016 and 2020, Trump over-performed his national numbers in battleground states, which is why he was able to win in 2016 while losing the national popular vote by 2.1 percent and come close in 2020 despite losing the national popular vote by 4.5 percent.

It’s pretty likely that neither candidate is going to be wildly popular by November 2024, so the ultimate deciding factors could be (a) how many voters who dislike both Trump and Biden decide to turn out and (b) which candidate they prefer. Trump actually won the “hate ‘em both” vote by similar margins in 2016 and 2020, but lost in part because this segment of the electorate was a lot smaller in the latter year.

The even bigger variables, of course, could be turnout levels within each party’s base, and the possible impact of nonmajor-party candidates such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Cornel West, and someone sponsored by No Labels. On this latter front, it will be important to see exactly where minor-party-indie candidates gain ballot access; nobody’s really going to care if they rack up significant percentages of the vote in states either Biden or Trump is carrying easily.

It’s not too soon to begin paying attention to the places where the presidency will actually be determined next year. In the end, a national popular vote win may be a nice bonus for the next president or another bitter reminder that our system isn’t fully democratic.

Andrew Prokop mulls over “5 ways the House speaker drama could end: Will the “Never Jordan” bloc cave? Will there be a bipartisan deal? Or … what?” at Vox and writes:

“Republicans’ staring contest of a speaker’s race, then, is continuing, with no resolution in sight. Here’s the GOP’s math problem:

• 217 out of 221 Republicans need to vote for the GOP’s speaker candidate on the House floor to elect him (if all Democrats oppose him).
• Roughly 180 Republicans appear to be team players who will happily back any nominee preferred by most of the conference.
• But there are about 20 holdouts on the right who have embraced hardball tactics to try and force a more right-wing speaker to be elected. Think of them as an “Only Jordan” bloc.
• And now there’s a newly emerged roughly 20-person “Never Jordan” bloc, composed of mostly mainstream or swing-district members who are fighting back against the right-wingers.

So what are the ways this could end?

1) The “Never Jordan” bloc caves: Jordan is currently the GOP’s speaker nominee, and he’s still trying to win over enough support among the 22 Republicans who opposed him on the most recent House floor vote.

Some of these members are powerful Appropriations Committee Republicans who could be given promises over how Jordan will handle spending fights. Others represent swing districts and fear support for an extremist candidate like Jordan could hurt their reelection, but they’ll need support and fundraising from the party establishment to keep their seats. And other holdouts appear to be motivated by personal gripes over how Jordan treated the previous speaker nominee, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) — maybe their feelings could be assuaged?

2) The “Only Jordan” bloc settles for someone else: If Jordan can’t win over enough holdouts and quits the contest as Scalise did, the GOP will go back to the drawing board and try to select another speaker nominee.

The question then will be whether that person can win over the hardcore Jordan supporters on the right. These recalcitrant right-wingers made it difficult for Kevin McCarthy to be elected speaker in the first place in January — but he did eventually win enough of them over. Perhaps another candidate, not yet in the race, could do the same. (Or maybe McCarthy could do it again.)

3) Some Republicans cut a deal with Democrats: If neither bloc of GOP holdouts is in the mood to cave, one other option is to rely on Democrats to get a Republican speaker candidate elected. In theory, such a deal could take place with a small group of Democratic moderates, or through a deal cut with Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) that has the Democratic Party’s official approval.

Any such deal would draw fury from conservative media, and GOP leaders have already tried to denounce any idea for a “coalition government.” This is why the recent proposal to empower McHenry via some Democratic votes got dropped like a hot potato. But if the far right truly seems impossible to win over, a bipartisan deal may seem to mainstream Republicans like the only option to keep the government open.

4) McHenry just takes the reins without an official vote: Up to this point, speaker pro tempore McHenry has interpreted his duties as limited to facilitating the election of a new speaker. He has said he doesn’t want to do any more than this, and the belief within the GOP conference was that for him to be able to do more, the House would have to vote to empower him.

Outside experts, though, have argued that such a vote might not be necessary. Brendan Buck, a former aide to speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan, wrote a New York Times op-ed arguing that McHenry “may simply need to act on his own.” That is, he should start calling up resolutions or bills, and if any member of Congress objects, just put it to a vote and see if a majority of the House backs him. “All of this is unstable and unsustainable, but so too is our current course,” Buck wrote.

5) It doesn’t end: Finally, for the sake of completion, one more possibility (albeit right now an extremely remote one) is that the House simply remains speaker-less until 2025. This would mean an unprecedented, devastating 13-month government shutdown with unforeseen consequences — something enough Republicans would likely want to cut short so they won’t be blamed for it. It would also mean an end to legislation for the next year, including perceived “must-pass” measures like aid to Israel. So it seems unlikely things would go this far. But there’s a first time for everything.

None of the scenarios outside of option 3 bode well for the Republic. Meanwhile, Jordan is doing a great job of dividing his party, with plenty of support from eager accomplices.

Can Democrats leverage the “GOP can’t govern” meme next year?  Jordan’s remarkable record of zero legislative accomplishments in his entire career will invite continuing scrutiny, if he gets elected. But it may be a bit stale a year from now. For Democrats, the short term-strategy is to publicize GOP paralysis, keep chipping away at their prospects in swing districts and work on a legislative agenda that can interest political moderates, while holding liberal support steady..