Some polling data from “Just How Far Apart Are The Two Parties On Gun Control?” by Ryan Best, Mary Radcliffe and Kaleigh Rogers at FivdeThirtyEight: “What percentage of Republican and Democratic respondents do you think said they “strongly” or “somewhat” support requiring background checks for all gun purchasers? 77% of Republican and 91% of Democratic respondents said they “strongly” or “somewhat” support universal background checks, a difference of 14 percentage points. (Source: Morning Consult/Politico, March 6-8, 2021, among 1,990 registered voters)….What percentage of Republican and Democratic respondents do you think said they “strongly” or “somewhat” support allowing a family member to seek a court order to temporarily take away guns if they feel a gun owner may harm themselves or others? 70% of Republican and 85% of Democratic respondents said they “strongly” or “somewhat” support red-flag laws, a difference of 15 percentage points. (Source: APM Research Lab, July 16-21, 2019, among 1,009 U.S. adult residents) ….What percentage of Republican and Democratic respondents do you think said they “strongly” or “somewhat” favor banning assault-style weapons? 37% of Republican and 83% of Democratic respondents said they “strongly” or “somewhat” favor banning assault weapons, a difference of 46 percentage points. (Source: Pew Research Center, April 5-11, 2021, among 5,109 adults). What percentage of Republican and Democratic respondents do you think said they believe the right of people to own guns is more important than protecting people from gun violence? 9% of Democratic and 39% of Republican respondents said they believe the right to own guns is more important, a difference of 30 percentage points. (Source: YouGov/The Economist, April 16-19, 2022, 1,500 U.S. adult citizens). And anyone concerned about improving gun safety in America should read Nicholas Kristof’s “A Smarter Way to Reduce Gun Deaths” in the New York Times.

And at The Hill Olafimihan Oshin reports that “Americans’ dissatisfaction with gun laws at new high: Gallup poll,” and writes: “A majority of Americans surveyed expressed dissatisfaction with current gun laws in the U.S. amid a recent string of mass shootings affecting the country, according to a new Gallup poll….The poll, published Wednesday, found that 63 percent of respondents said they are dissatisfied with the nation’s laws and policies on firearms, while 34 percent of those surveyed said the opposite….The results marked the highest percentage of Americans that are dissatisfied with current gun laws in the last seven years, with a seven-point increase from last year, when 56 percent of respondents claimed they were unhappy….Satisfaction with gun policies in the country has also fallen since last year’s poll, tying the lowest on record, according to Gallup….Among political party lines, 54 percent of Republican or Republican-leaning Independent respondents said they are satisfied with the nation’s laws and policies on handguns, while 44 percent of those surveyed expressed their dissatisfaction with current law….On the other side, 84 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning Independents expressed their dissatisfaction with the nation’s laws and policies, while 14 percent of those surveyed said they are satisfied with the nation’s current policies…Around 60 percent of Independent respondents express their dissatisfaction with the nation’s laws and firearm policies, while 36 percent of those surveyed said they are satisfied.”

Jason Linkins argues “The Case Against a Biden Run Is Obvious—and Weak” at The New Republic, and observes: “The political media are chaos junkies who treat conflict as catnip and would relish the crisis caused by Biden’s departure. Meanwhile, the lesson of the midterms is that voters are turned off by disarray. Biden’s own polling struggles reflect this: Nothing damaged his approval ratings more than the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. He is still struggling to recover from that one moment when it did not appear that the adults were in charge….But Afghanistan is instructive in a different way as well. The withdrawal may have hurt Biden’s numbers, but the fact that he was unwilling to keep paying the sunk costs of the Afghanistan scam was a real break from the status quo. Biden’s State of the Union address suggested that the president still has that yen for fresh thinking. As HuffPost’s Kevin Robillard noted: Clinton used his address “to declare the era of big government over, Obama used them to sell a grand bargain and a free trade deal.” Biden, by contrast, “used it to attack big pharma, rule out social security cuts, talk about antitrust policy, and declare the tax code unfair.”….This is a phenomenon that we’ve noted before: Many of Biden’s throwback instincts about the way America could be are incredibly well suited to the moment, and seem fresher than his predecessors’ ideas. Would-be Biden successors should take heed, because at the moment it’s Biden who sounds most like a bona fide party standard-bearer and a better tribune of the middle class than any of the GOP’s weird culture warriors, and more prepared to battle the larger universe of chiselers and cheats who have gotten away with nickel-and-diming ordinary Americans.”

So many of the internal arguments among Democrats boil down to how to spend money. At Campaigns & Elections, Swati Mylavarapu makes the case that “Democrats Need a Better Investment Strategy‘ and writes: “Currently, Democrats over-invest at the top of the ticket and prioritize federal races at the expense of state races. We fall in love with candidates and over-invest in individual campaigns at the expense of organizing infrastructure and pipeline building. And we invest late in an election cycle when resources can have limited impact….In practice, this means that for every campaign that’s raising millions in a given cycle, including long shots, we’re neglecting winnable state races and infrastructure investments that can help Democrats build lasting power for generations….First, we must invest early in the election cycle—and by early, I mean now. As Election Day approaches, campaigns become increasingly limited in how they can leverage resources, resulting in the majority of late money going to advertising….Reallocating a portion of that late money towards early investments would give Democrats the flexibility to prioritize tactics like voter registration and deep canvassing to message policy wins—efforts that can reduce election-year spend and build our base….Second, donors must distribute resources up and down the ballot. Last year’s historic state legislative gains came from a long-overdue recognition that state legislatures govern issues that have a profound impact on our lives. Prioritizing down-ballot investments can help us lock in those gains and flip other chambers — all while helping Democrats build a bench of talent and drive up vote tallies on top of the ticket races….Third, in addition to supporting candidates, we must invest in groups that strengthen Democratic infrastructure and help us build long-term power. We need permanent, year-round efforts to register voters, mobilize communities of color, expand the Democratic talent pipeline, and train campaign staff and volunteers. Investment in groups that do this work–like Arena, Run for Something, SwingLeft, and Sister District–pays both short and long-term dividends….Finally, rather than ceding ground, we should buy in the bear market with investments in states that are or are trending red, like Florida. Georgia is a perfect example of what Democrats can accomplish when we play the long game. Winning back power is a marathon, not a sprint — we can’t be short sighted and only focus on races that can be won immediately….Together, these shifts in tactics and strategy can help Democrats secure sustainable power for generations.”

The odds of Joe Biden running for reelection are now very high, but since we keep hearing of polls where Democratic voters are restive, it’s worth pondering the road that probably won’t be taken, so I did that at New York:

The estimable New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg recent came out and said what a good number of Democrats occasionally think: They like Joe Biden and think he’s done a good job as president, but they’d rather see the 80-year-old step aside and let someone else run in 2024. Goldberg was very direct about it:

“It’s been widely reported that Biden plans to use the State of the Union to set up his case for re-election. There’s a rift in the Democratic Party about whether this is wise for an 80-year-old to do. Democratic officials are largely on board, at least publicly, but the majority of Democratic voters are not. ‘Democrats say he’s done a good job but he’s too old,’ said Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump Republican strategist who conducts regular voter focus groups. ‘He’ll be closer to 90 than 80 by the end of his second term.’ Perhaps reflecting this dynamic, a Washington Post/ABC News poll showed that while 78 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents approved of the job Biden has done as president, 58 percent of them wanted a different candidate next year.”

Regardless of what Democrats may want, the odds of Biden stepping aside are very low. The last sitting president to retire on his own terms after just one full term was Calvin Coolidge nearly a century ago. There are zero signs of any serious challengers stepping up to challenge Biden’s renomination, and restive Democratic voters will almost certainly come around once the 46th president becomes the party’s standard-bearer again.

But it’s worth considering what might happen if Biden does step aside. Goldberg’s view of this scenario is fairly sunny:

“Plenty of Democrats worry that if Biden steps aside, the nomination will go to Vice President Kamala Harris, who polls poorly. But Democrats have a deep bench, including politicians who’ve won in important purple states, like Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia. Biden said he wanted to be a bridge to the next generation of Democrats. There are quite a few promising people qualified to cross it. A primary will give Democrats the chance to find the one who is suited for this moment.”

Unfortunately, a contested 2024 Democratic primary probably wouldn’t be a calm, deliberative process. It would more likely be a nasty and complicated slugfest leading to a shaky general-election campaign. The GOP presidential field is coming together pretty late compared with previous cycles, and even if Biden made a call soon, Democratic candidates would find themselves scrambling to put together a national campaign. Here are some likely consequences of a sudden Biden retirement.

Kamala Harris would run, but she wouldn’t clear the field.

The vice-president is Biden’s heir apparent, though most observers figured she would have until 2028 to polish her image and (assuming she and Biden were reelected) chalk up some distinctive accomplishments. Harris’s candidacy could get a big boost if Biden promoted her candidacy, but he might decide it’s more appropriate to stay out of the nominating process, much as Barack Obama did in the early stages of the 2016 primaries. Even with Biden’s active support, though, it’s unlikely Harris has the sort of political clout to preempt a challenge.

Furthermore, Harris might have to prove her appeal to Black voters. In 2020, Black voters strongly preferred Biden to Harris, ruining her efforts to pursue a strategy modeled on Obama’s in 2008. Would she do better with this crucial segment of the primary electorate in a second presidential campaign? It’s unclear, particularly if the “electability” concerns that helped boost Biden among Black and white voters alike turn out to be a millstone for Harris.

2020 candidates would flood the race.

In 2020, the Democratic primary field was the largest since the start of the modern primary system, and the many candidates who performed better than Harris would certainly be tempted to challenge her again.

Two progressive heavyweights, 81-year-old Bernie Sanders and 73-year-old Elizabeth Warren, probably retired their own presidential ambitions on the assumption that Biden would be the party’s candidate in 2024. But if he’s not in, they might consider running. In particular, the huge following Sanders built over two presidential campaigns might convince him to run again; he has pointedly not ruled out a bid if Biden isn’t in the field.

There are also younger 2020 candidates who envision themselves in the White House and may accelerate their plans given the surprising appearance of an “open” nomination contest and the uncertainty as to when the next “opening” might occur. For some reason, Pete Buttigieg is often the sole object of speculation on this possibility, but Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker, Julian Castro, and even Michael Bennet might go for the gold again.

The primary would attract plenty of fresh candidates, too.

The 2024 primary field could be even more crowded than it was four years earlier. There are several major Democratic officeholders thought to be waiting for the right moment to run for president. If Biden doesn’t run, that moment might arrive early for three governors: California’s Gavin Newsom, Illinois’s J.B. Pritzker, and Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer. The first two governors have vast resources at their disposal, while the third checks an awful lot of boxes for Democrats valuing electability above all else.

The fight over the Democratic primary calendar would become red hot.

Right now, the Democratic National Committee’s Biden-driven bid to shake up the presidential primary calendar is a bit of an abstract proposition; it doesn’t really matter if Biden runs unopposed. If Biden isn’t the nominee, it will suddenly matter a great deal whether the primaries begin with South Carolina rather than New Hampshire, whether Iowa is excluded from the early states altogether, and whether Georgia or Michigan go third or fourth or fifth. In a late-developing open nomination contest, candidates may rise or fall based on how well they navigate the new calendar. So the DNC’s tentative decision to move ahead with a new order of states could suddenly become controversial and even disputed.

Democrats would fall right back into “disarray.”

Democrats are rightly proud of the unity they have been displaying in Congress lately in sharp contrast to the chaos and factionalism of the GOP.

But the relative ideological unity of the Democratic Party would by no means guarantee a peaceful nomination process if Biden retires. In primaries in which everyone is mostly aligned on the issues, candidates tend to differentiate themselves on personal matters, often leading to especially nasty battles. Warren’s demolition of billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s 2020 candidacy candidacy in just one debate could provide the template for 2024. And, ideology aside, a competitive contest could revive disagreements over race and gender at a time when the Democratic coalition couldn’t afford any self-inflicted wounds.

Costs could be high for Democrats.

A Biden retirement might air out some dirty Democratic laundry and help identify future talent, but it would come at a high price. The money and energy that would be siphoned off into what would almost certainly be a big fight involving a large field of candidates could be more usefully deployed on behalf of a Biden-Harris reelection campaign. Yes, there’s a risk in moving forward with an 80-year-old nominee who doesn’t excite Democratic voters. But it’s not as big a risk as distracting Democratic voters with the carnage of a primary fight while Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis waits to pick up the pieces and blast all Democrats to perdition.

 

From E. J. Dionne, Jr.’s “Biden and Democratic governors embrace the new (old) class politics” at The Washington Post:

Leading figures in both parties have decided that the future of American politics rests in the hands of working-class voters. With the most affluent voters now largely sorted by ideology, the “working middle class” in the poll-tested phrase popular among politicians, will be getting a lot of love.

Biden’s bet — and it’s a wager many successful Democratic governors made last year — is that Democrats can win back blue-collar voters. This means not just gaining ground among Whites without college degrees but also winning back Hispanic voters who have drifted toward the GOP, and boosting turnout among the Black working class.

The president reiterated one of his favorite formulations on Tuesday, describing his agenda as “a blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America.” His first stop the day after his big speech was at a laborers’ union training center in Wisconsin. “For decades, the backbone of America — the middle class — has been hollowed out,” Biden said, adding: “Once-thriving cities and towns became shadows of what they used to be. … Now we’re going to turn that around.”

But Biden isn’t the only Democrat  zeroing in on class conflict, as Dionne explains:

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

Joe Biden in his generally well-received State of the Union address made a clear attempt to reach out to working class voters. As he recounted his administration’s achievements, he said:

Jobs are coming back, pride is coming back, because choices we made in the last several years. You know, this is, in my view, a blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America and make a real difference in your lives at home.

Much of the first part of his speech was devoted to laying out the receipts for his pro-working class claims and the promise of much more bounty to come. This may reflect Biden’s genuine desire to turn the Democratic party back into a forthrightly working class party and, not unrelated, his recognition that a Democratic coalition with steadily declining working class support is electorally very fragile.

That may be what Biden wants. But will his party cooperate? This is a party whose image and priorities are increasingly determined by white liberals not working class voters. The party’s claim to be a working class party these days rests primarily on its undeniable—though diminishing—strength among nonwhite working class (noncollege) voters. These voters made up about 28 percent of Democratic supporters in 2020 according to States of Change data and probably about the same in 2022. But a substantially larger 37 percent of Democratic voters are white liberals (Gallup datacross-walked with States of Change data). This size mismatch is heavily exacerbated by the high educational levels of white liberals which translates into much higher levelsof political attention, interest, knowledge, donations and activism among these voters than among working class nonwhites. Add to that the dominance of educated white liberals in the Democratic party infrastructure and in sympathetic media, nonprofits, advocacy groups, foundations and educational sectors and you have a group that punches way, way above its already considerable weight in the party.

It would be strange indeed, given these facts, if the values and priorities of white liberals weren’t over-weighted in the Democrats’ values and priorities, particularly as perceived by working class voters. That suggests it will take quite some time and a determined, if not single-minded, focus to make the Democratic party once again the party of the working class rather than the party of white liberals. Here are some data that suggest the immensity of the task.

1. Pew just released data about the public’s top policy priorities. They found that of the 21 priorities tested, protecting the environment and dealing with global climate change ranked 14th and 17^th, respectively, on the public’s priority list. But among liberal Democrats, these issues ranked first and third, respectively. The story was basically the same among white college-educated Democrats, who are heavily dominated by liberals.
2. A new CBS News poll confirms the low priority of dealing with climate change. Among the ten priorities tested, addressing climate change ranked ninth (interestingly, protecting abortion access ranked dead last).
3. The same poll indicates a poor evaluation of the Biden administration’s actions in areas that rank much higher in working class concerns. On the US economy 53 percent said Biden’s policies have made it worse, compared to 27 percent who say his policies have made it better. The analogous figures on “your own family’s finances” are 49 percent vs. 18 percent; on illegal immigration, 51 percent vs. 21 percent; on inflation, 57 percent vs. 22 percent; and on gas prices, 55 percent vs. 21 percent.
4. Recent Gallup data show half in the country saying they are financially worse off today than they were a year ago, the highest level since 2009 in the midst of the Great Recession. Among the working class, the level saying they are worse off is even higher.
5. New Washington Post/ABC News data further document the depth of working class discontent. In the poll, 41 percent of the public say they are worse off today than they were when Biden took office, the highest level the poll has recorded on analogous questions dating back 37 years. But the negative judgement is even higher among working class respondents at 44 percent to a mere 14 percent who say they are better off. This undoubtedly has a lot to do with the fact that, despite the low unemployment rate, real wages are still lower today than they were when Biden took office.
6. In the same poll, working class respondents were not sanguine about the Biden administration’s accomplishments. By 68 percent to 30 percent the working class view was that Biden had accomplished not much/little or nothing as opposed to a great deal/a good amount. But Democratic liberals—who are overwhelmingly white—had a diametrically opposed view; 85 percent credited Biden with a accomplishing a great deal or a good amount and just 15 percent thought not much/little or nothing had been accomplished.
7. Moreover by 2 or 3:1 the working class thought Biden had not made progress in four specific areas. Only 21 percent thought he had made progress of making electric vehicles more affordable compared to 60 percent who saw no progress; just 27 percent saw progress on lowering prescription drug costs; and a mere 31 percent, respectively, thought he had made progress on improving roads and bridges and creating good jobs in their communities. Liberal Democrats, however, were happy campers. By 2:1 they thought Biden had made progress on the first three items and by a ringing 3:1 they endorsed Biden’s progress on creating good jobs in their communities.

Biden clearly has his work cut out for him if he truly seeks to make the Democrats the undisputed party of the working class rather than the chosen vehicle for white liberals. Zach Goldberg puts it well in his recent detailed report on the demographic evolution of the Democratic party.

[I]ndividuals of higher socioeconomic status are more socially progressive and are more likely to prioritize post-material or moral-value-related issues (e.g., abortion, climate change, LGBT rights) over kitchen-table issues… The result of this phenomenon is the selection of candidates who are—or who are pressured and incentivized to be—far more socially progressive than would be the case with proportional constituent input, as well as legislative time and energy being expended on niche progressive causes, programs, and amendments that are likely to polarize the chambers and produce congressional gridlock. There are also opportunity costs: the more time invested in debating and attempting to pass progressive legislative agendas, the less time that can be spent on “normal” economic and quality-of-life issues that are far more relevant to the lives of many working class nonwhite Democrats.

There are indeed opportunity costs! Biden and his party will continue to pay those costs, which put a ceiling on their coalition, unless and until they are prepared to break the hegemony of white liberals and concentrate unreservedly on working class concerns.

“A flash poll conducted by CNN immediately after Biden finished his address found that nearly three-quarters of respondents had a favorable impression. So far, so normal,” Sasha Abramsky writes at The Nation. “Most presidents, from both political parties, end up with positive public reactions to their big February speeches. But buried in the polling was a far more interesting number: Among those who had told pollsters before the speech that they disapproved of the direction of Biden’s presidency, only 7 percent went into the speech thinking that the president’s specific policy proposals would move the country in the right direction; after the speech, that number increased to 45 percent. Among independents, the number rose from 40 percent pre-speech to 66 percent afterwards….These are huge perception shifts, of a magnitude that could serve as a launch vehicle for the president’s reelection campaign, and that could reverse his currently underwater approval numbers. Biden has, consistently, been underestimated by pollsters and by pundits. He was written off in the 2020 primaries. He was declared dead on arrival in the run-up to the 2022 midterms. But it turns out he’s got a pretty good bead on where the American people are at and what policies they believe will improve their daily lives. He was right, back in the autumn, when he banged the “democracy is in danger” drum before the elections. And it looks like he was right on Tuesday night when he devoted most of his State of the Union address to fashioning an unapologetically progressive economic agenda: raise taxes on the rich, make prescription drugs more affordable, make it easier for workers to organize into unions, make it harder for corporate scofflaws to avoid both taxes and also economic competition, increase access to child care and preschool facilities, invest more in American manufacturing and in big infrastructure projects, and protect Social Security and Medicare….These are popular ideas—even among the white working class that, in recent years, has fled the Democratic Party largely because of wedge “cultural issues.” More than three-quarters of Americans support limiting annual drug price increases. A majority of Americans support increasing taxes on the super-wealthy. Seven in 10 tell pollsters that they support trade unions. If the Democrats can really focus in on these themes over the coming years, using major infrastructure projects as a launch pad to reinvent the economy for those lower down the economic ladder, Biden’s bet is that he can win back many of those voters who shifted rightward over the last couple decades.”

Here’s some of Abramsky’s take on class politics in the west: “This has already been done, with much success, by progressive governors and state legislators in the racially diverse Pacific West, and increasingly in Nevada, New Mexico, and Arizona, where non-white working-class movements provide critical levels of support for left-leaning leaders. In California, large majorities of the state’s non-white population are registered as Democrats, while far fewer than 20 percent are registered as Republicans. In 2021, when Governor Gavin Newsom faced a recall election, more than four of every five voters in densely populated Latino-majority neighborhoods of LA County cast ballots against recalling him. In Oregon, according to Pew Research data, 38 percent of Democratic voters have a family income of less than $30,000 per year, a far higher percentage than the number of low-income voters within the Republican fold. In Nevada, multiracial trade unions in Las Vegas have long been instrumental to Democrats’ victories; in 2022 Catherine Cortez Masto was reelected to the Senate with a 9,000 vote majority, a majority that would not have been possible without high levels of union organizing and turnout. Similarly, Katie Hobbs won the Arizona governor’s race in part because of ongoing organizing efforts by immigrants’ rights groups and trade unions that brought large numbers of working-class Latino voters to the polls. Meanwhile, in New Mexico, Governor Lujan Grisham won reelection with high levels of supportfrom the state’s Hispanic population. For all the ink that has been spilled nationally in recent years exploring how and why the working class abandoned the Democratic Party—an angst-fest that is really only reacting to white working-class voting patterns—in the West that abandonment simply hasn’t occurred….True, Washington State seems to buck this trend slightly, with working-class voters of all colors shifting somewhat toward the Republican Party during the 2022 midterms. But taken as a whole, the West and Southwest have, over the past decade or two, crafted a strong counternarrative to the idea that working-class voters are shying away from the Democrats, showing that the party thrives in states with large non-white working-class populations….Biden’s instincts seem to be to take that Western model and expand it, to put forward a series of unapologetically progressive economic ideas and policies that have the capacity to bind more working-class voters, both white and non-white, to the Democratic Party in all regions of the country….For too many years, the Democrats at a national level have tried to triangulate their way to power. Now, in the unlikely guise of an 80-year-old longtime centrist, those advocating a programmatic effort to reshape and rebalance the American economy in a social democratic direction may have finally found their White House messenger.

Just to pile on re the SOTU, here’s an excerpt from “GOP boos fool no one: Everyone knows Republicans want to slash Social Security and Medicare” by Amanda Marcotte at salon.com: “McCarthy allowed Biden the space during his State of the Union address to show the public that Republicans are gunning for these popular programs by provoking a defensive denial of yelling and heckling from Republicans that is so over-the-top that it ended up confirming the accusation. Now McCarthy is having to deal with the very thing he was trying to avoid: A news cycle dominated by talk about how Republicans want to steal away the money in accounts workers spend their lives paying into as security when they retire….Just how badly did McCarthy’s gambit backfire? So badly that even Republican-friendly outlets like Axios and Politico ran with stories about the GOP’s secret yearnings to end Social Security and Medicare. Axios described Biden as “baiting Republicans to agree with his push to protect Medicare and Social Security….Despite his flailing denials, it’s been clear from the moment that Scott first released his 11-point plan that the main purpose of the “sunset” provision was so that Social Security and Medicare would expire, and a GOP-controlled Congress would just never get around to voting to keep it around. It’s once again proof that Republicans think voters are extremely stupid. Scott really does seem to think that if Republicans just kill these programs passively instead of taking a vote against them, people wouldn’t notice or blame the GOP. In reality, of course, people tend to notice when their checks stop showing up or their doctor won’t see them anymore….Republicans thought they could smuggle Social Security destruction past voters by calling it “privatization.” They soon learned that voters, who tend to be skeptical of politicians already, saw directly through that ruse. Democrats won the 2006 midterms by healthy margins. But the Republican dream that they can fool the public with flimsy code words never dies. Former Vice President Mike Pence, also never mistaken for the sharpest tool, has been out there putting the final nail in his presidential aspirations by talking up Social Security “privatization.””

Then Marcotte goes there, to the place most commentators dare not tread: “Being generous to Republicans for a moment, there is one reason for them to think a majority of Americans are stupid: They do keep voting for Republicans. Republicans, in fact, won more voters in 2022 than Democrats. That’s hard evidence right there that a majority of Americans are easily snowed into voting against their own interests….Those numbers are disappointing reminders that voters could definitely be smarter, of course, but it’s not the slam dunk evidence of American imbecility that Republican politicians seem to think it is. The likelier explanation is that voters understand that Democrats will protect them from Republican efforts to decimate Medicare and Social Security. Perversely, that understanding freed some people up to vote GOP as a means to exercise their racist and sexist resentments, secure in the knowledge that Biden is in the White House to shield them from the worst consequences of electing a bunch of right-wing radicals….We’ve seen this time and again: Swing voters will reward Republicans for their culture war nonsense up until the point where Republicans cause massive damage. Then they’ll run back to Democrats, to fish the country out of the gutter. We saw this in 2008 when voters elected Barack Obama to bail them out of the disastrous Bush presidency. We saw it again in 2020 when Biden was brought in to clean up for Trump. Voters are irrational at times and prone to complacency — but they aren’t as dumb as Republicans assume.” While pundits wince at the white working-class “voting against their own interests” grumble of liberals, Marcotte’s take on swing voters’ course correction approach provides one explanation for the motivation of those fickle swingers. who bash Dems for their worst culture war rants, but will quickly turn on Republicans who dare to mess with retirement benefits. If only SOTUs had better shelf life….

As someone who has closely followed the law and politics of the abortion issue literally for decades, I am fascinated by what’s been happening to public opinion since the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade, and did an update on that subject at New York: 

During the near half-century in which the Supreme Court precedent of Roe v. Wade protected the right to choose abortion, public-opinion research on the topic tended to be of questionable value. Respondents were asked to categorize themselves as “pro-life” or “pro-choice,” depending on their subjective self-definitions. Polls asked people to engage in hair-splitting on the degree to which they wanted abortion to be legal or illegal. And the whole subject was overshadowed by the fundamental reality that political maneuvering on abortion policy had limited consequences for a majority of voters (though not for those who couldn’t access or afford abortion services).

With Roe gone, the basic laws governing reproductive decisions depend to an enormous extent on where one lives, and abortion policy is a central and urgent political decision (at least outside those few states that have re-enshrined abortion rights in state constitutions). So it’s getting easier for pollsters to weigh how the public feels about what should happen on abortion policy.

There’s already clear evidence that the abortion backlash had a tangible effect on the 2022 midterm elections and the underperformance of Republicans compared to historical precedents. But the effect on political preferences is ongoing.

The pro-choice majority that has always existed is now clearly being mobilized by what the Supreme Court and Republican state legislators and governors have wrought, as Gallup recently found:

“Americans are more dissatisfied with U.S. abortion policies now than they have been at any point in Gallup’s 23-year trend, and those who are dissatisfied are three times as likely to prefer less strict rather than more strict abortion laws.

“The record-high 69% of U.S. adults dissatisfied with abortion laws includes 46% who prefer that these laws be made less strict, marking a 16-percentage-point jump in this sentiment since January 2022. In addition, 15% of Americans are dissatisfied and favor stricter laws, and 8% are dissatisfied but want them to stay the same.”

The number of unhappy pro-choice respondents is striking for several subgroups:

“The percentage of women who are dissatisfied with U.S. abortion policies and support less strict laws has risen 18 points this year to 50%, compared with a 13-point increase among men to 41% over the past year. Both readings are the highest on record for those groups …

“For the first time in Gallup’s trend, pluralities of Catholic (38%) and Protestant (37%) Americans and a majority of those with no religious identity (69%) express dissatisfaction with abortion policies and a preference for less strict laws …

“Before 2022, dissatisfied Catholics and Protestants were typically more likely to favor stricter rather than less strict abortion laws.”

What do dissatisfied pro-choice Americans want to do about it? According to an NPR-Ipsos poll last month, they want to decide abortion policy themselves:

“Without a federal law in place, state abortion policies are shaped by lawsuits, state laws and constitutional amendments.

“A majority of Americans say they would like the decision to be in their hands, not elected officials. Nearly 7 in 10 of those surveyed say they would strongly or somewhat support their state using a ballot measure or voter referendum to decide abortion rights, if they had the option, rather than leaving the decision to state lawmakers.”

After pro-choice voters won all seven ballot tests in 2022, there’s a grim battle underway elsewhere to provide or deny voters a chance to weigh in on abortion in 2024. As NBC News reported late last year, the potential landscape for abortion ballot initiatives is quite broad:

“Activists are already planning citizen-led ballot initiatives that would enshrine abortion rights in the constitutions of 10 states: Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma and South Dakota.

“Those states all ban or restrict abortion, and it is also legal for citizens to initiate ballot proposals that amend the states’ constitutions.”

Given these realities, it’s unsurprising that the anti-abortion activists whose battle cry for decades was to let the people decide are now beginning to rely on right-wing judicial activists determined to ban abortion from the bench, or a bit down the road, a Republican trifecta in Washington willing to override the states and ban abortion nationally. The stakes for 2024 are rising steadily.

Before we let go of the GOP’s SOTU meltdown, have a gander at “What Republicans have actually said about cuts to Social Security and Medicare” by Julia Shapero, who writes at The Hill:

Biden and Democratic lawmakers have repeatedly accused Republicans of attempting to target Medicare and Social Security in potential spending cuts that they hope to tie to a debt ceiling increase. However, Republicans have denied that the entitlement programs are at risk.

But some prominent Republicans have previously suggested cuts to the programs. Here’s what they actually said about cuts and changes to Social Security and Medicare.

At the center of the current debate over the federal entitlement programs is an 11-point plan released by Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) last February, which called for all federal legislation to sunset after five years as part of an effort to curb government spending.

“All federal legislation sunsets in 5 years. If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again,” the document said.

This would require Congress to renew Social Security and Medicare every five years. Scott’s proposal also called for a yearly report from Congress “telling the public what they plan to do when Social Security and Medicare go bankrupt.”….

Former Vice President Mike Pence, who has indicated that he is considering a bid for the presidency in 2024, said last week that a conversation needs to be had about reforming Social Security….Pence suggested that the U.S. government allow young Americans to put part of their Social Security withholdings into a private savings account overseen by the government, which could potentially generate more than current Social Security accounts.

When Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) initially ran for Senate in 2010, he called for the complete elimination of Social Security.

“It will be my objective to phase out Social Security, to pull it up by the roots and get rid of it,” Lee said at a campaign event in 2010, adding, “There’s going to be growing pains associated with doing this. We can’t do it all at once.”….However, the Utah Republican appears to have since tempered his views on entitlement programs…..“I don’t recall ever having advocated for dismantling those — that’s sensitive stuff,” he said in an October interview with the Daily Herald…..“I think, we oughta look to, after we get it solvent, look to the idea of allowing people, if they want to, to at least identify some portion of their social security payments to go into a private account,” he added, appearing to promote a similar idea to Pence.

Similar to Scott, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) has suggested that Congress regularly renew the entitlement programs. However, Johnson has proposed that it be done on an annual basis.

“I’ve been saying for as long as I’ve been here that we should transfer everything, put everything on budget so we have to consider it if every year. I’ve said that consistently, it’s nothing new,” Johnson told “The Regular Joe Show” podcast last August….

The Republican Study Committee, the largest conservative caucus in the House, has called for increasing the threshold for Medicare to 67 years of age and Social Security to 70 years of age in an effort to avoid the programs’ trust funds from becoming insolvent, per its fiscal 2023 budget. The group includes more than 150 Republican members of the House, the majority of the GOP caucus.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) suggested in a debate in June that a bipartisan compromise on the issue will likely mean that “people like me are going to have to take a little less and pay a little more in.”….Like the Republican Study Committee, he also suggested adjusting the qualifying age for Social Security and Medicare upward….

In reality, however, Republicans opposed both Social Security and Medicare from the get-go, blasting the two programs as “socialism.” Go back to 1952, when Democratic President Harry Truman flagged their campaign to smear Social Security and noted that “socialism is what they called Social Security….socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people.”

Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson spearheaded the Medicare struggle and signed it into law. And Democrats overwhelmingly supported Medicare in both the House (237-48 among Democrats) and Senate (57-7 among Democrats) votes in 1965. For Republicans, however, the breakdown of the Medicare vote was 13 Senators in favor of Medicare, and 17 against. In the House, 70 Republicans voted for creating Medicare, with 68 against it.

Despite the aforementioned examples, most of today’s Republicans in congress don’t openly advocate cuts in Social Security and Medicare. But there is not much reason to doubt that many of them would support carefully camouflaged cuts in the two programs.

Shapero’s account doesn’t name any of the GOP House members who today want to slash or eliminate Social Security and Medicare. Is there a chance that Biden’s calling out Republicans at the SOTU will force them to abandon their schemes to gut the two programs, which are hugely popular, especially with high turnout senior voters? Maybe in the short run. More likely they will modify their rhetoric with language that will give them some “deniability.”

But the bottom line is that Republicans can not be trusted to leave Social Security and Medicare intact, no matter what they say. Mitch McConnell has pretty much nuked the credibility of the G.O.P.’s promises of bipartisan comity and trust. What Biden showed at the SOTU on Tuesday is that there is only one party that is genuinely committed to preserving Social Security and Medicare for coming generations — and that party is clearly not the Republicans.

In bis article, “Americans Usually Blame Republicans After Showdowns Over Federal Spending,” Nathaniel Rakich writes at FiveThirtyEight, “….Since 2010, there have been no fewer than five major fiscal standoffs between Republicans and Democrats akin to the one(s) we’ll probably brave later this year. These crises had tangible economic consequences, including the furloughing of 800,000 federal workers and the downgrading of the U.S.’s credit rating. But they also had political repercussions for the elected officials who caused them. And that track record could give us an idea of whom Americans would blame if brinksmanship in Washington, D.C., again upsets the economic apple cart….So I looked at what caused each of the five prior crises and what the polls said after they were resolved. The results bode poorly for Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his fellow Republicans: Since 2010 at least, the public has always blamed and soured on the GOP more than Democrats in the wake of these standoffs.’ Rakich reviews the previous stand-offs and notes the polling responses following each one. He concludes: “Here in 2023, House Republicans have already made it clear that they will demand spending cuts, as they did in 2011, before raising the debt ceiling. And if history is any indication, Americans will see that as a reason to blame them for any ensuing chaos….But Americans may not penalize the GOP at the ballot box for it. That’s because the political effects of these crises are short-lived; there’s always another news cycle that replaces it….events, dear reader, events will probably put the memory of 2023’s fiscal turbulence in the rearview mirror by the time of the 2024 election. But that doesn’t make public opinion surrounding the debate irrelevant — far from it. Impasses like 2013’s and 2019’s were likely broken because Republicans felt intense public pressure to give in. So while Republicans probably don’t need to worry about losing an election due to their hard line on spending, they still ought to fret about losing public support: It will make it harder for them to stand firm in the showdown to come.”

At Vox, Nicole Narea writes: “Democrats have just notched yet another win at the state level after a strong showing in the 2022 midterm, claiming control of the Pennsylvania House….Democrats followed statehouse takeovers in Minnesota and Michigan by winning all three special elections in the Pennsylvania state House Tuesday. Those victories gave them a one-seat majority and brought a close to the conflict for control of the chamber that has persisted since November. It was an upset: Redistricting had made the electoral map more competitive for Democrats, and the Pennsylvania House was rated “leans Republican” ahead of the November election by Sabato’s Crystal Ball. Democrats haven’t controlled the chamber since 2010….And it’s another moment of reckoning for Republicans in a critical swing state, which also sent two Democrats to the US Senate for the first time in more than 70 years and saw Democrat Josh Shapiro win the governorship by nearly 15 points over his Republican opponent, election denier Doug Mastriano….The result builds on Democrats’ success in state capitols in the midterms. The party previously struggled to compete with more than a decade of Republican dominance at the state level. It was the first time since 1934 that the party of the incumbent president didn’t lose a single state legislative chamber. In fact, they gained five. Democratic state legislatures now govern more people than those controlled by Republicans, even though the GOP still won marginally more seats in 2022 overall….Even so, Pennsylvania will have a divided government: Shapiro won the governor’s race, and Republicans maintained control of the state Senate. That could limit the realm of what’s possible from a policy standpoint, especially since even a single defection from party ranks in the House could doom any given Democratic agenda item….Pennsylvania Democrats are already managing expectations in that regard. They’re projecting that they won’t be able to codify Roe v. Wade after the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn it last year, but hope that on labor and the economy, they have a real opportunity to achieve reforms because those are areas of wide agreement in the caucus and where they might even be able to attract some Republican votes….“We’ll be able to dodge so many bullets just by going from defense to offense,” Lee told WESA, Pittsburgh’s NPR News station. “We’ll get to move forward a workers’ rights agenda.”

The Nation’s Jeet Heer has some cogent observations about “The GOP’s Phony Class War,” including “the GOP shows little interest in economic populism. In the debt ceiling fight, the GOP has shown that austerity rather than economic populism still guides the party’s approach to social spending. Only six Republican senators, including Hawley and Rubio, voted to force railway companies to give union workers paid sick leave. In a recent committee assignment for chair of the House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee, Speaker Kevin McCarthy picked Thomas Massie, a standard pro-corporate Republican, over Ken Buck (described by Emily Birnbaum of Bloomberg as “one of the most fervent tech critics in the House”). As Branko Marcetic of Jacobin notes, in 2022 only seven Republican senators voted “to cap the extortionate price of insulin for Americans on private insurance to $35, a potentially transformative policy at a time when four out of five Americans are going into debt to pay for the medicine.” Marcetic further observed that in 2021 not a single Republican senator supported a motion to raise the minimum wage (Hawley said he’d support such a measure if it had a carve-out for small business that would have left nearly half the work force uncovered)….the working class is divided on partisan lines, with a majority of white working-class voters supporting the GOP on racial and cultural grounds, while a majority of working-class people of color vote for the Democrats. Princeton political scientist Frances Lee told The New York Times that “the party system in the U.S. simply does not represent that ‘haves’ against the ‘have-nots.’ Both parties represent a mix of haves and have-nots in economic terms.”….Because both parties are broad cross-class alliances, economic populism is likely to be muted for the foreseeable future. For the Republicans, stoking the culture wars remains the easiest way to keep white working-class support without alienating the wealthy. It’s hardly a surprise that the two front-runners for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination are Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis: both masters of pouring fuel into the fire of transphobia, xenophobia, and racism….they represent the future of the GOP.”

Jarod Facundo shares interesting election and polling data in “Will the Education Culture War Backfire on Republicans?” at The American Prospect: “In last November’s midterm elections, conservative candidates for school board elections performed worse than they had hoped in most places across the country. The most visible issues in these matchups were culture war panics about so-called “woke” schools infected with critical race theory curricula, sports teams with transgender athletes, and lingering COVID-19 restrictions. The legitimate discontent parents had with wanting their children inside schools was tapped into by right-wing groups such as the 1776 Project PAC and Moms for Liberty, which supported candidates who would purge “cultural Marxism” and promise to bring a “culture of Liberty.”….Instead of overwhelming success that would prove the lasting power of a grassroots constituency of fed-up parents all across the country, those conservative groups overcalculated the saliency of the issues they ran on. Before the midterms, the 1776 Project posted a 70 percent success rate in elections it worked on. In November, the group won 20 races of the 50 endorsed, good for 40 percent. Moms for Liberty fared a bit better. They won 50 percent of endorsed races nationwide….The new culture war over the future of education is a stalking horse for the same old battle over school choice. The not-too-hidden goal of denigrating public schools is to weaken support for teachers and their unions, and to redirect funds into school vouchers and other programs that pummel public education even further….Polling conducted by the American Federation of Teachers in mid-December found that the culture-war framing was unpopular. Instead, voters and parents saw strong academic, critical reasoning, and practical life skills as most important, when compared to anti-wokeness. Furthermore, among the sample group, when given the option between improving public education and giving parents more school choices, 80 percent preferred improving public schools. Most revealing was that two-thirds of voters said that culture-war battles distracted public schools from their foremost role: educating students.”

As a big fan of boring process issues, I have been watching the DNC engineer a major change in the presidential primary calendar, and explained it at New York:

Amid wails of distress from Iowa and New Hampshire, the Democratic National Committee has formally ratified a change in the party’s 2024 presidential primary calendar. Since 1976, Iowa’s caucuses and New Hampshire’s primary were the opening events of the Democratic nominating process; in 2008 they were joined by Nevada’s caucuses in the third position and South Carolina’s primary in the fourth. Under the new calendar, Iowa is out of the early going; South Carolina will move ahead of New Hampshire; and Georgia and Michigan will be added to the early “window” of states allowed to hold primaries before March. The new order of states was recommended by the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee in December after a push from the White House. The DNC will give Georgia and New Hampshire until June to come up with a plan for their primaries that complies with the new calendar; in both cases, the state Democratic Party needs cooperation from Republican lawmakers to execute the changes and may or may not succeed.

It’s important to understand that Republicans plan to stick with their old calendar, as they can.  Indeed, back in April 2022, the Republican National Committee voted to lock in the traditional early-state order (Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada) for 2024. And whatever the national parties decide, it’s state legislatures and parties that determine when primaries happen.

Odds are high that Democrats from Iowa and New Hampshire will hold unsanctioned 2024 contests. This will generate a lot of drama, but it probably won’t matter in this presidential cycle, assuming President Biden runs for renomination without significant opposition. The DNC has said it will revisit the calendar before the 2028 races, but it may signal an intention to preserve this year’s changes by placing heavy sanctions on states that go rogue (e.g., barring them from having delegations at the convention or sanctioning candidates that participate in unauthorized caucuses or primaries).

If, instead, national Democrats conclude that the 2024 reshuffling was just Biden’s way of rewarding the state that saved his bacon in the 2020 primaries (South Carolina) while punishing the states in which he finished fourth (Iowa) and fifth (New Hampshire), and making it even harder for anyone to challenge him, then all bets could be off for 2028. But displacing South Carolina from its new perch at the top of the calendar won’t be easy even with Biden having retired: As those who fought for so many years to displace Iowa can tell you, people will fight to stay No. 1.

Some choice excerpts from the media regarding Biden’s State of the Union Speech:

In “Joe Biden Reveals His Superpower: Acting Like a Pretty Normal Person,” Ben Mathis-Lilley writes at Slate: “He worked the crowd; he injected the word “folks” everywhere he could; he got mad and fired up. In what was largely a departure from the norm, he also played to the Republicans in attendance, goading them into peeved responses that he could then meet with a confident camaraderie…It made for a better speech. The presence of actual human energy in its early moments gave weight to the softer tone Biden took when he turned, in the second half of the night, to address matters of life and death—police brutality, foreign proxy war, and assault rifle massacres among them; you know, the modern-America subjects. This, in turn, contrasted with the patriotic verve of the evening’s quintessentially Bidenian conclusion, the Last True Idealist material that he takes such visible pleasure in delivering….An arc, a shape, a structure—a real speech, by a real-seeming human! It might even be the kind of thing you remember, years from now. Biden is surely hoping it can carry him, at least, through 2024″

“Feisty, combative and energetic, Biden seemed to relish in drawing a contrast with a Republican Party he treated at times with gentle but needling condescension, Alexander Nazaryan writes in “Energetic and pugnacious, Biden makes his case to the nation” at Yahoo News: “Lots of luck in your senior year,” he told GOP membersseeking to repeal last year’s Inflation Reduction Act….Pointing to the gain of 12 million jobs and record-low 3.4% unemployment, Biden argued that the United States had prevailed at a time when many other countries continued to flounder….“And to my Republican friends who voted against it but still ask to fund projects in their districts, don’t worry,” Biden said with evident delight. “I promised to be the president for all Americans. We’ll fund your projects. And I’ll see you at the ground-breaking.”

From “A populist Biden gave perhaps the best speech of his presidency” by Nicholas Kristoff at The New York Times: “A populist Biden gave perhaps the best speech of his presidency.Biden is most eloquent when he doesn’t try to be, when he’s the guy from a working-class family in Scranton, Pa., with a dad who bounced among jobs and struggled for paychecks but even more to retain his tattered dignity….That’s the populist Biden who delivered the State of the Union address, giving perhaps the best speech of his presidency….When Biden talks about giant companies failing to pay taxes or ripping off consumers with invisible fees or charging unconscionable sums for insulin, those are talking points that resonate everywhere….Biden’s populism won’t win Republican votes in the House, but they frame the partisan divide in an authentic way that advantages Democrats, and they remind us that America can’t succeed when so many Americans are falling behind.”

At The Atlantic, David Frum writes “How Biden Successfully Baited Congressional Republicans: The old man has learned some new tricks.” that “Partisanship, populism, and patriotism were his themes. The speech was strewn with traps carefully constructed to ensnare opponents. He opened with a tribute to bipartisanship, but the mechanics of his address were based on shrewd and unapologetic hyper-partisanship. He anticipated negative reactions in the chamber—and used them to reinforce his message….Obama came to national attention in 2004 with a speech about the essential political and cultural unity of the American people. Biden made a few nods to that notion, but he’s plainly not betting on it. Instead, he pushed Republicans on pain point after pain point. He mocked Republicans who voted against his infrastructure but still show up at the groundbreakings….Like a boxer trying to goad his antagonist into leaving open a vulnerable spot for a counterpunch, Biden’s plan was to invite Republicans to make dangerous mistakes. This was a speech not of lofty phrases but of cunning ploys; one not for the ages, but one that will reverberate long enough to make a difference in November 2024.”

Tal Axelrod reports at ABC News that Biden cited an “Unemployment rate at 3.4%, a 50-year low. Near record unemployment for Black and Hispanic workers,” he said. “We’ve already created, with your help, 800,000 good-paying manufacturing jobs, the fastest growth in 40 years.”….Biden went on to boast of 300 bipartisan laws that he signed, maintaining that more could be on the way — if the House, under new GOP management, would work with him….”To my Republican friends, if we could work together in the last Congress, there is no reason we can’t work together and find consensus on important things in this new Congress,” he said. “The people sent us a clear message: Fighting for the sake of fighting, power for the sake of power, conflict for the sake of conflict, gets us nowhere.”….”The idea that in 2020, 55 of the largest companies in America, the Fortune 500, made $40 billion in profits and paid zero in federal income taxes? Folks, simply not fair. But now, because of the law I signed, billion-dollar companies have to pay a minimum of 15%. God love them,” he said….”Under my plan, nobody earning less than $400,000 a year will pay an additional penny in taxes. Nobody. Not one penny. But let’s finish the job, there’s more to do,” he said. “No billionaire should pay a lower tax rate than a school teacher or a firefighter.”