Despite the recent return of Democratic optimism associated with the Harris-Walz ticket, there are a few stubborn fears that keep partisans awake at night. Here’s a review of four of them that I wrote at New York:

Democrats are in a vastly better state of mind today than they were a couple of months ago, when Joe Biden was their presidential candidate and his advocates were spending half their time trying to convince voters they were wrong about the economy and the other half reminding people about how bad life was under President Trump. While it’s possible this would have worked in the end when swing voters and disgruntled Democrats alike took a long look at Trump 2.0, confidence in Biden’s success in November was low.

Now that the Biden-Harris ticket has morphed into Harris-Walz, there’s all sorts of evidence from polls, donor accounts, and the ranks of volunteers that Democrats can indeed win the 2024 election. But at the same time, as Barack Obama and others warned during the Democratic National Convention, the idea that Kamala Harris can simply float on a wave of joy and memes to victory is misguided. She did not get much, if any, polling bounce from a successful convention, and there are abundant signs the Harris-Trump contest is settling into a genuine nail-biter.

While the September 10 debate and other campaign events could change the trajectory of the race, it’s more likely to remain a toss-up to the bitter end. And many fear, for various reasons, that in this scenario, Trump is likelier to prevail. Here’s a look at which of these concerns are legitimate, and which we can chalk up to superstition and the long tradition of Democratic defeatism.

Republicans’ perceived Electoral College advantage

One reason a lot of Democrats favor abolition of the Electoral College is their belief that the system inherently favors a GOP that has a lock on overrepresented rural states. That certainly seemed to be the case in the two 21st-century elections in which Republicans won the presidency while losing the national popular vote (George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016). And in 2020, Joe Biden won the popular vote by a robust 4.5 percent but barely scraped by in the Electoral College (a shift of just 44,000 votes in three states could have produced a tie in electoral votes).

However, any bias in the Electoral College is the product not of some national tilt, but of a landscape in which the very closest states are more Republican or Democratic than the country as a whole. In 2000, 2016, and 2020, that helped Republicans, but as recently as 2012 there was a distinct Electoral College bias favoring Democrats.

To make a very long story short, there will probably again be an Electoral College bias favoring Trump; one bit of evidence is that Harris is leading in the national polling averages, but is in a dead heat in the seven battleground states that will decide the election. However, it’s entirely unclear how large it will be. In any event, it helps explain why Democrats won’t feel the least bit comfortable with anything less than a solid national polling advantage for Harris going into the home stretch, and why staring at state polls may be a good idea.

Recent polling errors

For reasons that remain a subject of great controversy, pollsters underestimated Donald Trump’s support in both 2016 and in 2020. But the two elections should not be conflated. In 2016, national polls actually came reasonably close to reflecting Hillary Clinton’s national popular-vote advantage over Trump (in the final RealClearPolitics polling averages, Clinton led by 3.2 percent; she actually won by 2.1 percent). But far less abundant 2016 state polling missed Trump’s wafer-thin upset wins in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, largely due to an under-sampling of white non-college-educated voters. The legend of massive 2016 polling error is probably based on how many highly confident forecasts of a Clinton win were published, which is a different animal altogether.

There’s no question, however, that both national and state polling were off in 2020, which is why the narrow Biden win surprised so many people. Two very different explanations for the 2020 polling error have been batted around: One is that the COVID pandemic skewed polling significantly, with Democrats more likely to be self-isolated at home and responding to pollsters; the other is that the supposed anti-Trump bias of 2020 polls simply intensified. The fact that polls in the 2018 and 2022 midterm elections were quite accurate is consistent with either interpretation.

So we really don’t know if polling error is a given in 2024, or which candidate will do better than expected. A FiveThirtyEight analysis of polling error since 1998 shows a very small overestimation of the Democratic vote across 12 election cycles. It might be prudent, then, to expect that Trump might exceed his polling numbers by a bit, but not necessarily by a lot.

Fundamentals in election forecasts

A lot of election forecasts (or model-based projections) incorporate, to varying degrees, what are known as “fundamentals,” i.e., objective factors that are highly correlated historically with particular outcomes. There are models circulating in political-science circles that project presidential-election results based mostly or even entirely on macroeconomic indicators like GDP or unemployment rates. Others take into account presidential approval ratings, the positive or negative implications of incumbency, or historical patterns.

While forecasts vary in how to combine “fundamentals” with polling data, most include them to some extent, and for the most part in 2024 these factors have favored Trump. Obviously the substitution of Harris for Biden has called into question some of these dynamics — particularly those based on Biden’s status as an unpopular incumbent at a time of great unhappiness with the economy — but they still affect perceptions of how late-deciding voters will “break” in November.

The high chances of a chaotic overtime

A final source of wracked Democratic nerves is the very real possibility — even a likelihood — that if defeated, Trump will again reject and seek to overturn the results. Indeed, some MAGA folk seem determined to interfere with vote-counting on and beyond Election Night in a manner that may make it difficult to know who won in the first place. Having a plan B that extends into an election overtime is a unique advantage for Trump; for all his endless talk about Democrats “rigging” and “stealing” elections, you don’t hear Harris or her supporters talking about refusing to acknowledge state-certified results (or indeed, large batches of ballots) as illegitimate. It’s yet another reason Democrats won’t be satisfied with anything other than a very big Harris lead in national and battleground-state polls as November 5 grows nigh.

Do Democrats need an actual landslide to win at all? The question arises from two disturbing possibilities.

1. The Trump campaign, likely in league with Putin, will surely try to steal the election. We have already seen a massive influx of GOP laws to gain control of the count put in place in various states. They have all but announced it. In addition, new evidence of Russian meddling in our election machinery has resurfaced, which is not exactly a shocker, but it does merit more attention.
2.  Even if Dems narrowly win the presidency, they could fail to win both houses of congress, rendering them all but impotent with respect to enacting anything substantial on their agenda. The best antidote for this outcome is a Democratic landslide – to win so big that Trump and the cat-lady hater are washed away in a cleansing blue tsunami. Easier said than done, but it could happen

Although most pundits are saying it’s a toss-up, Harris-Walz are scoring well in polls, so far dodging major screw-ups. They are the fresh faces in this race, while the GOP ticket marinates in their increasingly bitter take on America.  Harris’s youthful persona, Walz’s authentic middle class narrative and their ticket’s exuberant spirit have flipped the script; Growing numbers of likely voters see the GOP ticket as stale, tired and angry. Many of Trump’s own appointees have turned against him. Careerists RFK, Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard add to the GOP ticket’s “It’s all about me” vibe. The Republican campaign now has an aging preppy’s bilious ‘get-off-my-lawn’ spirit. Not a good look.

Democrats should amp up messages like”Harris-Walz for a More Joyful America,” “Let’s Move On – Harris-Walz 2024,”  or “Trump Is So Yesterday.” Just underscore the glaring reality that only one party’s leaders are pointing the way forward to a more hopeful future for all Americans, while the other party’s leaders wallow in a whining personality cult. As a result, poll numbers show a trend away from Republicans, toward Democrats.  Democratic activist James Carville put it well in a recent NYT op-ed, “The most thunderous sound in politics is the boom of a single page as it turns from one chapter to the next.”

The current Republican Party is more concerned with stroking Trump’s fragile ego than representing conservative causes. The only fix leading to a healthier Republican Party is a Democratic landslide. Only then is there a chance that they will finally get the message they missed during almost two years of electoral defeats. A few Republican leaders, including former U.S. Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kitzinger have figured out that defeating Trump decisively is the only way they can save their party, and they have endorsed Harris-Walz.

Democratic campaigns should understand that policy voters have already chosen sides. From now on, it’s all about the image that each party communicates to swing voters. For now, at least, advantage Democrats. Above all, hold that edge.

From “Harris goes her own way on capital gains tax hike” by  Brian Faler at Politico: “In a break with President Joe Biden, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris called Wednesday for a smaller capital gains tax increase on the rich than he’s proposed….Harris would hike the top total rate on people making more than $1 million to 33 percent, including a special 5 percent surcharge, well below the nearly 45 percent levy Biden has pitched….“We will tax capital gains at a rate that rewards investments in America’s innovators, founders and small businesses,” she said at a campaign stop in New Hampshire….Her shift toward what her campaign considers a more “moderate” capital gains increase comes ahead of her first debate with former President Donald Trump, and as Republicans try to paint her as a creature of the extreme left….It’s also part of an effort to woo business owners, with Harris separately calling for start-up firms to be allowed to deduct more of their costs. She also proposed creating a type of standard deduction for businesses.” Faler notes that “Biden has proposed requiring people making more than $1 million to pay taxes on capital gains — which include things like appreciation in the value of stocks — at ordinary income tax rates, instead of a special preferential rate. He has also proposed raising the top marginal income tax rate to 39.6 percent from 37 percent and increasing an investment surcharge on high earners to 5 percent from 3.8 percent.” Harris’s new position on taxes may help get  more contributions from business leaders and win more support from conservatives. It may also encourage media reporters to think a bit longer before stereotyping Harris as a left-winger and undercut the Trump campaign’s efforts to ‘brand’ her as a crazed left winger who hates business.

So the new presidential debate rules are set, as M.J. Lee reports at CNN Politics: “Kamala Harris’ campaign has accepted the terms of next week’s presidential debate with former President Donald Trump, including the fact that the candidates’ microphones will be muted when it is not their turn to speak, according to a person familiar with the debate negotiations….However, in a letter to ABC News Wednesday afternoon agreeing to the rules, the Harris campaign again laid out their objections to the muted mics condition, insisting that they believe the vice president will be “disadvantaged” by the format….“Vice President Harris, a former prosecutor, will be fundamentally disadvantaged by this format, which will serve to shield Donald Trump from direct exchanges with the Vice President. We suspect this is the primary reason for his campaign’s insistence on muted microphones,” the letter from the Harris campaign to the network, shared in part with CNN, said.” However, “The network, according to the source familiar, has offered assurances to the Harris campaign that if there is significant cross talk between Harris and Trump, it may choose to turn on the mics so that the public can understand what is happening, the moderator would discourage either candidate from interrupting constantly and the moderator would also work to explain to viewers what is being said….“Notwithstanding our concerns, we understand that Donald Trump is a risk to skip the debate altogether, as he has threatened to do previously, if we do not accede to his preferred format,” the campaign said. “We do not want to jeopardize the debate. For this reason, we accept the full set of rules proposed by ABC, including muted microphones.”….The network’s rules also state that there will be no audience, the candidates will not be permitted to have written notes, no staff can visit them during the two commercial breaks and the candidates cannot ask questions of one another.”

NYT opinion essayist Thomas B. Edsall shares a boatload of new polling results, including: “Adam Carlson — a Democratic polling analyst whose work I previously cited — has recently compiled demographic voting trend data comparing the levels of support for Biden in multiple surveys taken from July 1 to July 20 with levels of Harris’s support in surveys taken from July 22 to Aug. 9. Nationwide, Carlson found a net gain of 3.4 points for Harris….Harris’s improvement over Biden’s margins among specific constituencies has been much larger: voters 18 to 34, up 12.5 points; independents, up 9.2 points; women, up 8.2; Hispanics, up 6.3. While Harris’s gains are larger than her losses, she lost ground compared with Biden among white college graduates, down 0.5 points; men, down 2.2; Republicans, down 3.9 and voters over 64 years old, down 3.9….The RealClearPolitics averaging of multiple polls in battleground states found Trump up by tiny margins in three states (by 0.5 percent in Arizona, 0.7 points in North Carolina and 0.2 points in Georgia) a tie in Nevada and Harris ahead in three states (by 1.4 points in Wisconsin, 1.1 in Michigan and 0.5 points in Pennsylvania). All these percentages are within the margins of error….For comparison, on July 21, the day Biden dropped out, Trump led nationally by 4.3 points and was ahead in all seven battleground states….VoteHub, an election tracking website, followed presidential polling from Aug. 5 through Sept. 3 and found Harris going from slight underdog status to steadily building a lead over Trump….On Aug. 5, Trump held a statistically insignificant lead of 46.4 to Harris’s 46.2. By Aug. 24 Harris had pulled ahead by 2.6 points, 48.4 to 45.8, and by Sept. 3, she led by 3.3 points, 48.8 to 45.5.”

Edsall notes further, “Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican polling firm, responded by email to my inquiry, noting that Harris has benefited from a closely divided electorate because it “was not difficult for a Democratic nominee without the concerns voters had about Biden’s age to consolidate the Democratic vote.”….McInturff provided The Times with an analysis of the state of the election based on his firm’s polling for NBC. Among McInturff’s findings:

• Harris has closed the gap on who is better on handling the issues. When voters were asked in July who would “make our economy work better, they chose Trump over Biden by 11 points; in August, they chose Trump over Harris by one percentage point. Similar, when asked which candidate was “competent and effective” in July, Trump led Biden by 10 points, but in August, Harris led Trump by four points. The biggest shift was on the question of which candidate “has the energy and stamina needed to serve.” In July, Trump led Biden by 27 points; in August, Harris led Trump by 11 points.

• Crucially, Harris has substantially reduced Trump’s polling advantage on key issues that are pillars of the former president’s campaign. Asked which candidate was better on immigration and border security, Trump’s 35-point edge over Biden in July fell to nine points over Harris in August; on inflation and cost of living, Trump’s advantage dropped from 22 to three points; on crime and safety, from 21 to two points.

• Harris’s net favorable rating has appreciably improved and now is better (46 favorable, 49 unfavorable) than Trump’s (40 favorable, 55 unfavorable).

Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia and the director of its Center for Politics, emailed me the center’s analysis of the 2024 presidential election:

We have the Electoral College at 226 safe/likely/leaning to Harris, 219 safe/likely/leaning to Trump, and 93 electoral votes’ worth of tossups (seven states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin).

Every other electoral vote beyond these seven states is rated as likely or safe for one party or the other — the only electoral vote in the leans category (as leans Democratic) is the single electoral vote in Nebraska’s Second Congressional District.

A number of poll-based forecasting models suggest that the race is basically 50-50 or maybe there’s a small edge to Harris.”

There is a lot going on in the presidential race, but one issue stands out, as I suggested at New York:

Kamala Harris’s effort to depict herself as a candidate of safe but forward-looking change (as opposed to the decidedly unsafe and reactionary change represented by Donald Trump) has unsurprisingly spurred a host of GOP attacks on a cherry-picked assortment of unpopular or at least questionable-sounding policy positions from her past, ranging from support for a single-payer health-care system and sympathy for undocumented immigrants to opposition to fracking and to aggressive policing tactics. There are two ideas about Harris this barrage is intended to reinforce: One is that she’s at heart a radical leftist, and the other is that she’s a dishonest shape-shifting politician whose word cannot be trusted.

So far, Harris is largely ignoring these attacks on her past record and her integrity, but she will eventually need to clarify her policy views, if only to buttress the impression that she indeed represents something other than Biden 2.0. And to the extent her “new way forward” contradicts or at least sounds different from her past positions, she’ll need a rationale for any “pivot to the center” that Republicans will describe as insincere or unprincipled.

In a New York Times op-ed, veteran political consultant James Carville offered an excellent formula for Harris to follow in this complicated situation:

“To be the certified fresh candidate, Ms. Harris must clearly and decisively break from Mr. Biden on a set of policy priorities she believes would define her presidency …

“At the same time she must break from Mr. Biden on some policy measures, she has one lingering liability she will not be able to outrun: the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination campaign, in which she and a gaggle of candidates favored more exotic positions within the Democratic Party. As last week’s CNN interview with Ms. Harris showed, this will be a consistent plotline deployed at her throughout this campaign. It’s vital that she give the same answer every time to these attacks. The retort can be simple: I learned from my time governing in the White House. These are my positions. Take it or leave it.”

Harris must repeat this over and over until the notion that she is vacillating or calculating or prevaricating dies of starvation. If she decisively lays out popular policies that distinguish her from Biden, and then sticks to her guns, her critics could soon be the ones who appear to be wandering all over creation in an effort to find some blows that land and sting. Indeed, just as Biden’s withdrawal drew attention to Trump’s age and questionable mental faculties, an opponent who “pivots to the center” and stays there could reverse the narrative and expose the former president to charges of incessant flip-flopping and political opportunism. But there’s no time to waste for Kamala Harris to plant her flag on solid ground and then defend it. It should happen during if not before she goes head-to-head with Trump at the September 10 debate.

John Sakellariadis flags a scary vulnerability in America’s vote counting systems. As he writes in “Hacking blind spot: States struggle to vet coders of election software” at Politico:

When election officials in New Hampshire decided to replace the state’s aging voter registration database before the 2024 election, they knew that the smallest glitch in Election Day technology could become fodder for conspiracy theorists.

So they turned to one of the best — and only — choices on the market: A small, Connecticut-based IT firm that was just getting into election software.

But last fall, as the new company, WSD Digital, raced to complete the project, New Hampshire officials made an unsettling discovery: The firm had offshored part of the work. That meant unknown coders outside the U.S. had access to the software that would determine which New Hampshirites would be welcome at the polls this November.

The revelation prompted the state to take a precaution that is rare among election officials: It hired a forensic firm to scour the technology for signs that hackers had hidden malware deep inside the coding supply chain.

The probe unearthed some unwelcome surprises: software misconfigured to connect to servers in Russia and the use of open-source code — which is freely available online — overseen by a Russian computer engineer convicted of manslaughter, according to a person familiar with the examination and granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about it.

The public has no way of knowing how extensive of a U.S. vote hacking project Putin has in place. We can only surmise that Russia’s hackers are focusing on the swing states, counties and maybe even larger precincts. Nor do we know how good our anti-hacking operation is in these localities and the nation at large.

Like Trump, Putin must realize that his legal status may ultimately depend on the outcome of the U.S. elections. Trump is his lapdog, and it would be folly to deny that Putin will do all that he can to help defeat Democrats. Americans have short political memories. But let’s not forget Trump’s “Russia, if you are listening….” remark, and let’s more safely assume that he has reached out to Putin in some way.  Sakellariadis also writes,

The supply-chain scare in New Hampshire — which has not been reported before — underscores a broader vulnerability in the U.S. election system, POLITICO found during a six-month-long investigation: There is little oversight of the supply chain that produces crucial election software, leaving financially strapped state and county offices to do the best they can with scant resources and expertise.

The technology vendors who build software used on Election Day face razor-thin profit margins in a market that is unforgiving commercially and toxic politically. That provides little room for needed investments in security, POLITICO found. It also leaves states with minimal leverage over underperforming vendors, who provide them with everything from software to check in Americans at their polling stations to voting machines and election night reporting systems.

Many states lack a uniform or rigorous system to verify what goes into software used on Election Day and whether it is secure. When both state and federal officials have tried to bring greater attention to these flaws, they’ve had to contend with critics who resist “federalization” of state election processes.

Further, Sakellariadis reminds readers, “Russian hackers probed election systems in all 50 U.S. states and breached voter registration databases in at least two, according to a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report. Four years later, Iranian hackers penetrated inside an unnamed state’s database, then used data stolen during the hack to mount a targeted voter intimidation campaign, the Justice Department found.”

Also, “In the worst-case scenario, hackers could manipulate a state’s voter list, adding fictitious people to the rolls, changing real voters’ information or directing voters to the wrong polling places on Election Day.” Sakellariadis has much more to say about the extent of the problem, and what is, and is not, being done to address it.

Democrats have enough to worry about in just getting out the vote. It would be indeed tragic, not only for Democrats, but for the world, if Dems lost the election as a result of vote theft, instead of a fair count.

Ezra Klein interviewed Ruy Teixeira for the New York Times on February 1, 2024, long before Kamala Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee. But the interview is more about the Democratic Party, than the presidential race, specifically some of the party’s blind spots as identified by Teixeira. The Times is featuring the interview, which serves as a reminder that even more is at stake than selecting our next president. The transcript follows below. You can also listen to the interview on “The Ezra Klein Show” at: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, How to Listen

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.

Ezra Klein

From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

So last week on the show we had Simon Rosenberg giving the very optimistic case on the Democratic Party, the view that the Democratic Party is doing great, they are winning at a rate we have not seen since F.D.R., and that all of this panic about the state of the party, about its prospects in 2024, is misguided.

Today is the other argument, the argument the Democratic Party is not doing great. That, in fact, it’s doing quite badly. That it is losing something core to who it is, core to its soul, and it’s losing it because it is making bad strategic and even, as you’ll hear in his views, substantive decisions. So Ruy Teixeira is very well known in Democratic policy circles, longtime pollster and political strategist. And he wrote in 2002, alongside John Judis, a famous book called “The Emerging Democratic Majority.”

When this book comes out, things are looking real bad for Democrats. It’s the 9/11 era, George W. Bush is super popular. And here come Teixeira and Judis to say, actually things look pretty good for Democrats, that if you look at how the country is changing, the growth of nonwhite voters, the growth of the professional class, if you look at how those and other groups vote for Democrats, that just based on demographics you should expect the Democratic slice of the electorate to really grow. And if it grows, Democrats are going to begin winning.

Now it’s a weird time for that book to come out. George W. Bush wins again in 2004. But in 2008, reality begins to look a lot like what they’ve been describing. And then in 2012, when Obama wins on the back of huge, huge turnout among nonwhite voters, he has a share of the white electorate that is about what Dukakis had when he loses in 1988.

When Obama wins with that coalition, it really looks like Teixeira and Judis were right. And even the Republican Party seems to think so. It begins to think it has to moderate on immigration and put forward a kinder face. And then, of course, comes Donald Trump and upends us once again, wins when people think he cannot. And that sets off a set of soul-searching. What was wrong in the emerging Democratic majority? What did Teixeira and Judis get wrong? What did Democrats get wrong?

And so now they have a new book out called “Where Have All The Democrats Gone?” And this book’s fundamental argument is that most of what they said came to pass. But one thing happened that they had worried about in that book, and people didn’t really pick up on, which is that in order for that Democratic majority to happen, Democrats needed to keep the working class. And they, in particular, needed to at least hold down the ground they were losing with the white working class. And that did not happen — Democrats getting stomped among the white working class. There is some evidence of them losing at least some working-class Black and Hispanic voters, particularly men.

So the question is, why? It’s a question that Judis and Teixeira are trying to answer in the new book. You will hear in here that the view is both political and, I would say, substantive. Right? There’s an argument about what is good policy and also an argument about why that policy, why a much more moderate Democratic Party would be a more politically-effective one.

And so I wanted to offer this as the second way of thinking about the Democrats right now. That they have lost a constituency that, at their very soul, they are built to represent, and that they should be treating that as a real emergency. And then there’s the question of, what do you do about it? It’s a place where I think Ruy and I have some different views, but I was grateful that he joined me here.

Ruy Teixeira

Hey. Thanks for having me, Ezra.

Ezra Klein

So I want to begin with the older book, “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” which gets published in 2002 and later takes on this status as a kind of artifact of a certain era of Democratic triumphalism. But it was helpful to me to remember that it was in 2002, which was a really bad time for the Democratic Party. So tell me what you were seeing then that made you write the book. What was the context for it? Because at that time it was counterintuitive.

Ruy Teixeira

The context in which John Judis and I wrote the book was looking at the way the United States had evolved away from the Reagan coalition through the Clinton years and the very early part of the 21st century. If you looked at how their political base was changing and how the country was changing, it was clear that Democrats were going to benefit from the sort of inevitable rise of the nonwhite population, which was heavily Democratic. We saw the realignment of professionals toward the Democrats. We saw dramatic shifts in the voting patterns of women, particularly single, highly-educated working women.

And we looked at the more sort of dynamic Metropolitan areas of the country that we called ideopolises, and it was clear they were realigning toward the Democrats. So you could put these sort of demographic, ideological, and economic changes together and say, well, it looks like the way the country’s changing overall is moving in a direction that’s consistent with what we called at the time Democrat’s “progressive centrism,” and if they played the cards right, could conceivably develop a dominant majority that might last for some time. Even though, of course, it didn’t mean they’d win every election or even the very next election after the book was published, which was 2002.

Roiling underneath the surface there, Ezra, was a caveat we had in the book about the white working class, because we were very careful to note that secular tendency of the white working class to move away from the Democratic Party was a problem, and the Democrats really needed to stop the bleeding there and keep a strong minority share of the white working class vote overall nationally, maybe around 40 in the key Rust Belt states that were heavily working-class, more like 45. And if they did that, they could build this coalition. But the political arithmetic would get vexed and difficult if the white working class continued to deteriorate in their support for Democrats.

Ezra Klein

You mentioned something there, which is the ideological trends of the time, like the professional class becoming more Democratic. That hadn’t always been true. So what did you see happening ideologically in the parties around that time that was shifting these coalitions?

Ruy Teixeira

Right. Well, the professionals part was really important in our analysis. And if you looked at professionals, not only were they becoming a much larger part of the US occupational structure and of the electorate and, of course, they vote way above their weight in terms of turnout, but they were moving in a direction in terms of their views on cultural issues which was quite liberal.

Then also professionals, by virtue to some extent of their position in society and their occupational structure, they tend to be more public-spirited. They tend to be more sympathetic to the role of government. And those views seemed to be strengthening as professionals became a larger part of the American electorate. And we thought that was really going to help the Democrats. And, in fact, that turned out to be true, in a strict quantitative sense. They did, in fact, realign heavily toward the Democrats. It really starts in the late ‘80s, kind of strengthens in the ‘90s, and goes forth in the 21st century to the point today where professionals, by and large, can almost be considered a base Democratic group.

Ezra Klein

So then tell me what happens on the way to the Democratic majority. So you have this new book called “Where Have All The Democrats Gone?” It just published in late 2023, and it’s a bit of an update. Why didn’t this durable Democratic coalition emerge?

Ruy Teixeira

Well, point number one is something that we foreshadowed in “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” which was that the Democrats had a potential Achilles’ heel in their coalition in terms of the white working class. If that group started moving away smartly from the Democrats again, that would throw the whole thing into question. And that did, in fact, happen after Obama’s victory in 2008.

If you look at 2010 election where the Democrats get crushed to lose 63 seats, it’s a lot because white working-class voters bail out from the Democratic Party in lots of areas of the country, particularly the upper Midwest. 2012, Obama manages to get re-elected, and that was viewed or characterized as the return of the Obama coalition. But the part of the Obama coalition they missed is, he ran a kind of populist campaign against the plutocrat Mitt Romney, running on the auto-bailout and other things like that, and he really managed to grab back a lot of those white working-class voters in the upper Midwest. And if he hadn’t done that, he would have lost that election.

But the coalition of the ascendant kind of analysis that Democrats had been playing with becomes ever stronger. In fact, after 2012, in an odd sort of way, the Republicans even embraced it with their post-election autopsy. The Democrats were riding this demographic wave, it was going to wash over the country, and the Democrats were going to potentially be dominant.

But I think Trump —

Trump had a different opinion. He thought that, in fact, there was a wellspring of resentment among the working class in the United States that a politician like him could tap, and that the Democrats were going to have a lot of difficulty defending against, and that turned out to be the case.

So that’s part of what happened to the Democratic coalition. Another part of the Democratic coalition that is — I mean, the change that’s really still unfolding today that’s very important is, if you look at 2020, even though Biden did manage to squeak through in that election, not nearly as big a victory as they thought they’d get, he managed to hold what white working-class support they had, in fact, increase it a little bit. But what was really astonishing is the way Democrats lost nonwhite working-class voters, particularly Hispanics. There was big, big declines in their margins among these voters, declines that we’re still seeing today in the polling data.

So one way to think about 2020 and where we are today, is that racial polarization is declining but class polarization, educational polarization, is increasing. And that’s a problem for a party like the Democrats which purports to be the party of the working class.

Read more…

In her Labor Day article, “Both Trump and Harris claim to support the working class: Where do they stand on labor?,” Kinsey Crowley writes at USA Today: “While Trump performed better than expected among Union workers in 2016, some of that support shifted back to President Joe Biden in 2020. Experts say that Biden’s popularity among union workers is likely to carry over to Harris. And unlike 2016, unions may be energized by the recent wins from several major strikes….”It suggests labor’s got some muscle and some fire in their tank,” Bob Bruno, director of the Labor Education Program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, told USA TODAY in an interview. “If you think you can win…you’re really gonna push a whole lot harder….The Harris campaign seems to tout Biden’s record as a pro-union president to justify the labor movement’s draw to Harris, and Celine McNicholas, policy director at nonpartisan research organization Economic Policy Institute Action, agrees….”There are parts of the Biden administration… (his) record on benefiting workers that I think Harris deserves unique credit on, because she was essentially the tie-breaking vote,” said McNicholas said….Harris also chaired the White House Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment aimed at reducing barriers to unionization….The Harris campaign memo on working with unions detailed her pro-worker record dating back to her time as California Attorney General, when she addressed wage theft. While in office as a U.S. Senator, she walked picket lines in two strikes….if elected, Harris would pass the Protecting the Right to Organize Act. Known as the PRO Act, the bill would give workers more power to organize, and has passed the House multiple times but has not been signed into law.”

From an e-blast, “New GQR poll shows Americans want Increased Oversight on Corporate Greed”: “A recent GQR survey for More Perfect Union Foundation of 1,700 likely voters in seven battleground states—multimode survey in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin (multimode survey taken August 9-15, 2024; margin of error +/- 2.38– demonstrates broad support for government action to break up corporate monopolies and stop the price gouging that has raised the cost of every from groceries to rent to prescription drugs.
Key findings include:

• Voters still struggle with costs and majorities struggle to afford groceries (56 percent) and health care costs like premiums, deductibles and copays (51 percent).
• However, they are more likely to blame corporate greed and price gouging (61 percent) than high costs (51 percent) for inflation and rising costs.
• An 81 percent majority are “concerned that big corporations and businesses are becoming too powerful.”
• Huge majorities of voters support Biden’s efforts to rein in corporations including “right to repair,” reducing costs of cancer drugs, investigating big oil and breaking up monopolies.  However, few voters know about these efforts.
• Voters respond better to an economic narrative that centers in controlling corporate concentration than a conservative nationalist argument.”

“The Latino vote has transformed over the last 15 years — and it’s now disproportionately younger than other groups, explains Mark Hugo Lopez from the Pew Research Center,” Adrian Carrasquillo writes at Politico. “Nationwide, 21 percent of young eligible voters in the U.S. are Latino. But in critical Southwest states, the numbers are even greater: Latinos comprise 39 percent of all 18 to 29 year old eligible voters in Arizona and 36 percent of those young voters in Nevada, according to Pew data from 2022….Today, of the roughly 4 million new Latino voters since 2020, about 3 million are U.S.-born Latinos who have come of age and are eligible to vote in 2024….Harris must now take a Hispanic voter engagement plan built for an 81-year-old white man and retrofit it on the fly for a lesser known, 59-year-old woman of color. Control of the White House could depend on that rebuild.” Carrasquillo cites “early data showing Harris far ahead of Biden with those [younger] voters. [Pollster] Barreto showed internal polling that had Harris’ net favorability advantage over Biden at 24 points with 18 to 24 year old Latinas, plus 17 with Latino men of the same age, plus 18 with Latinas aged 25 to 29, and plus 12 with Hispanic men 25 to 29….“This is extremely important,” Barreto later explained. “Younger Hispanic men looked problematic for Biden. They don’t look problematic for Harris. They start out pretty open-minded about her….In an expansive August 14 survey of 2,183 Hispanics, the polling firm found Harris leading Trump 56 percent to 37 percent across seven battleground states. Harris’ support among Latinos under 40 was especially robust — 17 points higher than Biden.”

One of the underlying issues in the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard endorsements of Donald Trump is the bizarre claim that he’s a man of peace. I addressed that idea at New York:

Donald Trump is famously hostile to U.S. aid to Ukraine and to national security alliances generally, even such time-honored institutions as NATO. He has also been outspoken for years about his opposition to “forever wars” like George W. Bush’s war in Iraq. At the same time, he is one of the most belligerent men ever to occupy the Oval Office. He loves military pomp and circumstance, he pushed regularly for increased Pentagon spending as president, and his basic formula for peace is to terrify potential adversaries with his remorseless willingness to inflict unimaginable casualties while ignoring or violating every traditional principle of limited war. He is also very interested in deploying the U.S. military against migrants from Mexico, domestic protesters, and even criminal suspects. He models himself on Andrew Jackson, who similarly stood for a policy of strict neutrality in overseas affairs matched with a clearly announced determination to kill anything that moves if malefactors cross him or his country. Some observers call this posture “isolationism,” but it is more accurately described as unilateralism, in which national interests unmodified by treaties, alliances, or moral considerations justify any conceivable military action (or inaction).

So it’s interesting to watch ex-Democrats famous for their opposition to “militarism” embracing Trump as an antiwar candidate. These include former Democrat then independent-presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, and 2020 Democratic-presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard. In his long and rambling speech endorsing Trump on August 23, Kennedy listed Trump’s willingness to end (presumably on Russia-friendly terms) the war in Ukraine as one of three “existential issues” on which the two men agree. Shanahan similarly called “antiwar” one of the key principles supporting a “unity movement” between MAGA and her own preoccupations.

In endorsing Trump on July 26, Gabbard, who left the Democratic Party in 2022 after calling it an “elitist cabal of warmongers,” said of the Republican that she was “confident that his first task will be to do the work to walk us back from the brink of war.”

The very idea of Donald Trump as a man of peace is problematic, but presumably if the only national-security issue you care about is ending U.S. support for Ukraine, he’s your guy. Yes, some “doves for Trump” credit him with a determination and willingness to reduce the risk of nuclear war, notwithstanding his opposition to the nuclear nonproliferation treaties that kept the Cold War from turning hot. But a more honest assessment of the 45th president’s posture is that he has perfected the so-called “madman theory” once embraced by his predecessor (in office and in spirit) Richard Nixon, which means keeping the peace through sheer terror at the president’s unpredictability and indifference to human life. You can argue that Trump might succeed in intimidating other leaders into accepting his policy dictates. You cannot genuinely believe he will make the world a less violent and more stable place.

There are, to be clear, other reasons for the conduct of these and other doves for Trump. Kennedy and Shanahan are clearly angry at Democratic efforts to keep them off the ballot and at establishment liberal mockery of their subscription to a vast range of conspiracy theories involving alleged corporate capture of government agencies (not that this is a concern of Trump’s). Gabbard has revived an old cultural conservative strain of her political career and is regularly blasting Democrats for “wokeness.” It seems unlikely that there is a reservoir of voters concerned principally with the power of the military-industrial complex and the resources devoted to national defense who look at Trump and see a comrade. If he stands up at one of his rallies and flashes a peace sign rather than the clenched fist of vengeance, maybe it would do him some good.

The following article, “Build, Baby, Build:  Kamala’s commitment to the care economy is great, but she needs to commit to the construction economy as well” by Harold Meyerson, is cross-posted from The American Prospect:

That hardy perennial of American politics, the gender gap, is not only alive and well but alive and huge among the young. The New York Times/Siena poll of battleground states from earlier this month revealed that among voters under 30, males put Trump ahead of Harris by 13 percentage points, while females favored Harris over Trump by 38 percentage points.

This doesn’t mean that young men without college degrees are all that conservative. A PRRI poll of Gen Zers shows that a majority supports abortion rights and same-sex marriage. What they don’t see is an economy in which they have a place, chiefly because, well, it doesn’t. As culture tends to follow (at a distance, to be sure) the economy, they also see a culture that doesn’t value working-class men’s work as it once professed to do (though it was only when unions were powerful that that work was appropriately valued economically).

In a sense, these young men are canaries in a coal mine—detecting, in advance of many others, the economy’s diminished need for certain kinds of manual labor (like coal mining). The jobs that Kamala Harris is highlighting—those in what she calls “the care economy”—involve forms of manual labor, too, but not those that historically or culturally have been deemed “masculine,” which encompasses jobs in construction, transportation, and manufacturing. With neither the job security nor the income to support a family, these young men also fall short of the criteria that would make then “marriageable males”—a term the great sociologist William Julius Wilson used to explain how the “crisis of the Black family” was rooted in Black men’s disproportionate relegation to the informal economy where pay was low and benefits nonexistent. That crisis has now broadened into a crisis of the working-class family, as marriage rates in working-class America have fallen well below those in more upper brackets.

What some of these young men see in Trump, then, is the rhetoric and posturing of hypermasculinity, even though it’s really pseudo and performative hypermasculinity (see, e.g., trotting out Hulk Hogan to attest to Trump’s alleged toughness). There’s hardly anything concrete on offer for them in Trump’s policies, but there’s symbolism galore.

Democrats in general and Kamala Harris in particular can counter this—not that there’s anything they can do to eliminate this yawning gender gap, but there are ways that they could knock a few points off it through the miracle of smart policy. I have in mind Harris’s plans to increase the housing stock by three million units, through federal subsidies to first-time homebuyers and tax breaks to housing developers. This obviously would be welcomed by workers already employed in the building trades, but she should expand her goals, and the number of housing units, so that it would more clearly address those young working-class voters—disproportionately male—who’d welcome work in those trades. That would entail committing more federal dollars not just for the housing itself, but also for apprenticeship programs, more specifically, those programs run by the building trades unions. That could entail actually partnering with those unions through a new agency that would in some way resemble the Civil Works Administration (CWA) of the New Deal.

The CWA is not as well known today as the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), which employed millions of Americans on basic construction and maintenance jobs like road paving. The CWA employed skilled construction workers on more ambitious construction jobs (dams, aircraft carriers, and the like), but like the WPA, it brought Depression-era Americans back into the workforce. What we need now is a program that addresses the shortage of housing, andaddresses it in part by reaching out to young working-class Americans, teaching them the skills required to build that housing, and funneling them into the kind of union-scale (ideally, unionized) jobs that would enable them to make a family wage.

Such a program would expand the diminishing need for manual labor, which is at the root of young working-class men’s frustration with—and despair about—the economy. Making it a federal program that provides entry into remunerative private employment is not only good policy; it can be good politics, too. Simply offering tax breaks for builders and subsidies for buyers, as the Harris-Walz ticket is doing, provides good talking points, but is far too indirect and muted a message to impact swing voters. Elevating this to the level of a distinct federal commitment, to a distinct program with a budget and a name, would have greater impact. Alongside the commitment to a care economy, a commitment to a build economy could provide a way to shrink that gender gap. And in an election where every percentage point will matter, a little shrinkage could go a long way.

In his article, “Kamala Harris Has Got a Game-Changing Plan for Labor in Her Hands. As vice president, she helped devise an ambitious blueprint to advance unions. Now she just needs to make it a bigger part of her campaign” Timothy Noah writes at The New Republic: “The biggest substantive change since candidate Joe Biden stepped aside in favor of candidate Kamala Harris, at least where domestic policy is concerned, is much less discussion of labor unions. As Labor Day approaches, Harris needs to shore up her bona fides. As it happens, Harris herself has already created a plausible blueprint for organized labor’s path forward. With the hard work done, all she needs to do now is talk about it….in her speechannouncing the plan Harris did allow that “you should be able to join a union if you choose”….Walz has a stunningly good labor record as governor, especially in passing last year of a sort of mini–PRO Act, S.F. 3035, which banned captive meetings by management during union drives; required a minimum of six paid sick days for full-time employees; and banned noncompete clauses in employment contracts….no Democrat has ever won the White House without a working-class majority, going back 100 years. There is one exception: Joe Biden in 2020. But that occurred under the unusual circumstance of his opponent visibly mismanaging a deadly epidemic (a fiasco that the voting public, sadly, no longer seems to remember). As I’ve further pointed out, unions are more popular today (with approval levels of 67 to 68 percent) than at any time since the 1960s. Even affluent suburban voters support a more leftist economic agendathan anything we’ve heard from Harris….Harris created a useful blueprint on labor issues. That was the February 2022 report of the White House Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment,….Harris should talk up the Federal Trade Commission’s ban on noncompete clauses in employment contracts, which a federal judge recently blocked. It’s a letter-perfect example of the Democrats’ new mantra that they, and not the GOP, are the party of freedom. Just as women should be free to decide whether to carry a pregnancy to term, men and women should be free to work wherever they choose….Madame Vice President: You’ve done a splendid job persuading Democrats not to be fearful of your opponent, but rather to embrace a more joyful (and less weird) vision of government. Please don’t let linger any fear of labor’s enemies among the donor class. You have a record on organized labor, and in large part the task force report is it. Don’t let that be a secret.” Read the whole article for more details.

As long as you are at The New Republic you might as well give a listen to Greg Sargent’s “the Daily Blast,” in which he interviews one of the sharpest Democratic strategists, James Carville, who shares his insights and hunches about the presidential election, which have a way of coming true. You can also listen to it on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

It never ends with you know who, the convicted felon presidential candidate. Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein report in “Trump indicted again in election subversion case brought by Jack Smith” at Politico that “A federal grand jury in Washington, D.C. has reindicted Donald Trump on four felony charges related to his effort to subvert the 2020 presidential election….The 36-page indictment, secured Tuesday by special counsel Jack Smith, is an attempt by prosecutors to streamline the case against Trump to address the Supreme Court’s ruling last month that concluded presidents enjoy sweeping immunity from prosecution for their official conduct….The new indictment removes some specific allegations against Trump but contains the same four criminal charges, including conspiracy to defraud the United States. It’s a signal that Smith believes the high court’s immunity decision doesn’t pose a major impediment to convicting the former president.” However, “The development is unlikely to alter the reality that a trial in the case before the November election looks impossible. In fact, the new indictment could drag the case out further — defense attorneys often seek delays after prosecutors revise criminal allegations.” Further, “The new indictment seeks to rely on a distinction the Supreme Court drew between a president’s private actions (which can be the subject of criminal charges) and actions that stem from a president’s official powers (which now carry a large degree of immunity)….In addition to the election subversion case, Smith has also charged Trump in Florida with hoarding classified documents and obstructing justice. Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, dismissed that case last month — a decision that Smith is appealing….Trump also faces criminal charges in Georgia for interfering with the 2020 election results in that state. And in May, he was convicted in New York of falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment to a porn star.” If you are thinking that increasing numbers of America’s swing voters would like to put his mess behind them, you are not alone.

The Daily Kos staff has sharable post, “Trump bores his supporters, while Harris racks up Republican endorsements,” which includes, “The list of pro-Harris Republicans just got over 200 new names.”On Monday, a group of over 200 former Republican officials endorsed Kamala Harris for president. These officials—who worked for the late Sen. John McCain, Sen. Mitt Romney, former Vice President Mike Pence, and Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush—represent the last three Republican administrations and the two Republican presidential candidates before Trump… They all share a single message: “[R]e-electing President Trump would be a disaster for our nation.”….Despite the way some Republicans want to spin this, those endorsing Harris aren’t all junior clerks from some obscure agency. They are chiefs of staff, press secretaries, legislative directors, campaign chairs, and top advisors. They are high-ranking agency officials, U.S. attorneys, and a former director of the National Security Council…. These are people who worked closely with former Republican presidents and past candidates, all lining up to say that Trump isn’t worthy of the office.” According to their statement, “We’re heartfully calling on these friends, colleagues, neighbors, and family members to take a brave stand once more, to vote for leaders that will strive for consensus, not chaos; that will work to unite, not divide; that will make our country and our children proud. Those leaders are Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz.”….In the meantime, Trump cannot muster the endorsement of his former vice president, defense secretary, chief of staff, White House national security adviser, Homeland Security adviser, or White House communications director. These are people who worked directly with Trump. They saw how he behaved in office and know how he treated the responsibility of being behind the Resolute desk. They are not supporting his attempt to return to that office.”