The following article,  “‘An indispensable weapon’: Harris mobilizes diverse labor force in the Sun Belt: Democrats are tapping into the organizational strength of unions with more women and people of color in key states such as Arizona and Nevada” by Natasha Korecki is cross-posted from nbcnews.com:

President Joe Biden has often proclaimed that he is the most pro-union president in history, a declaration that Democrats often tied to his appeal to white working-class voters in the Midwest.

Now serving as the party’s standard-bearer, Vice President Kamala Harris is building her own coalition by mobilizing a more diverse and expansive labor force in a different part of the country.

Harris is tapping into the organizational strength of a network of union groups that have a significant membership of women and people of color in the Sun Belt, a battleground region Democrats are aiming to keep out of former President Donald Trump’s column this fall.

“There’s no one that can organize quite like labor,” Harris campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said. “Having that powerhouse of an organizing machine in concert with our teams in all of our battleground states has been a really important effort that we’ve been building to date and will continue as we head into early vote and get-out-the-vote efforts.”

Workers with the Service Employees International Union, the Culinary Workers Union and the AFL-CIO are among the groups who labor leaders say have become especially energized since Harris ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket this summer. Hotel workers, health care workers, janitors, airport workers and security officers are among the employees these groups represent. The SEIU alone has around 2 million members nationally, and 60% of them are women and two-thirds are people of color, according to the group.

“It’s a special moment for our members, particularly when we think about women of color, who often feel unseen, who often feel undervalued, disrespected, demeaned,” SEIU President April Verrett said. “It really is a special moment where our members can see themselves reflected in a woman who has been their champion for a long time, being able to be the leader of this country.”

That appeal has the potential to give Harris a critical boost in the closing months of the campaign, providing her with a faithful army poised to connect with the kind of constituencies she is trying to reach, including low-propensity Latino and Black voters.

All together, labor leaders predict thousands of union members will deploy to swing states to knock on doors and work phone banks. Large groups are expected to travel from blue states such as California, Illinois and New York to crucial battlegrounds such as Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina.

Having workers vouch for Harris could help Democrats’ efforts to battle against Trump’s messaging on the economy, an issue on which most polls show him with an edge as he’s seized on inflation and high costs.

Read more…

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

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. What American voters want is more fossil fuels. Shocking, no? But it’s true. In a little-noticed result from the latest New York Times/Siena poll, two-thirds of likely voters said they supported a policy of “increasing domestic production of fossil fuels such as oil and gas.” Two-thirds!

Support for increasing fossil fuel production is particularly strong among working-class (noncollege) voters: 72 percent of these voters back such a policy. Support is even higher among white working-class voters (77 percent). But remarkably, support is also strong among many demographics where one would think, based on conventional wisdom, one would likely see opposition. For example, 63 percent of voters under 30 said they wanted more oil and gas production, as did 58 percent of white college graduate voters and college voters overall. Indeed, across all demographics reported by the NYT survey—all racial groups, all education groups, all regions (midwest, northeast, south, west) and all neighborhood types (city, suburb, rural/small town)—net support (total support minus total oppose) was at least 15 points and usually much higher. Now that’s popularity.

No wonder Harris, in her recent debate with Trump, touted her administration’s record in achieving record domestic production of fossil fuels:

I will not ban fracking. I have not banned fracking as Vice President of the United States. And, in fact, I was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases for fracking. My position is that we have got to invest in diverse sources of energy…We have had the largest increase in domestic oil production in history…I am proud that as vice president over the last four years….we have…increased domestic gas production to historic levels.

This is a far cry from Joe Biden famously pledging on the campaign trail in 2019:

I want you to look at my eyes. I guarantee you. I guarantee you. We’re going to end fossil fuel.

Or Kamala Harris equally famously saying:

I’m committed to passing a Green New Deal, creating clean jobs and finally putting an end to fracking once and for all.

My, how things do change! But this reflects two fundamental facts that Harris and her party are belatedly facing up to. First, despite the strenuous Democratic rhetoric about the climate crisis, “net zero,” rapidly eliminating fossil fuels and ramping up renewables, energy realities have forced them to preside over record levels of oil production (both on federal lands and overall), record natural gas production, and record LNG exports. As Roger Pielke, Jr. documents, Joe Biden, fully supported by his vice president, really has been the “drill, baby, drill” president!

Second, as far as voters are concerned, this record fossil fuel production has been a feature, not a bug, of the Biden-Harris administration. The NYT poll result is just the latest in a series of findings that American voters, especially working-class voters, are not disturbed, but rather delighted, with this record production. Therefore, it makes all the political sense in the world for Harris to start owning up to this in an attempt to get credit for something voters view positively and reassure these voters that she is not seeking, as Biden put it, “to end fossil fuel.”

Of course, it’s one thing to finally admit to this record production and back off from banning fracking, but quite another to fully embrace energy abundance, rather than climate action, as the guiding star of energy policy. Findings from a recent CBS News poll of Pennsylvania voters, tied between Harris and Trump, underscore just how important an energy abundance approach could be for Harris. In this poll, climate change was rated one of the least salient issues motivating voter choice for president. Just 37 percent said climate would be a “major factor” in their vote for president. This was a massive 45 points below the salience rating for the economy, the most important issue, which 82 percent of voters said would be a major factor in their decision. The divergence in importance is even starker among white working-class voters, where Harris has been struggling: 85 percent of these voters said the economy will be a major factor in their vote, compared to 30 percent who said climate change will be.

In the same poll, white working-class voters were very dubious about their economic progress since before the Covid pandemic—a period of course when Trump was president. By an overwhelming 57 to 13 percent these voters said they are financially worse off, rather than better off, compared to that period. And in subsequent questions about their expectations “for economic opportunities for working-class people and those without college degrees” under both a Harris and Trump administration, white working-class voters decisively favored Trump on the provision of economic opportunities. They thought  Harris would actually make such opportunities worse rather than better by 49 to 27 percent, while Trump was viewed as making economic opportunities for the working class better rather than worse by 53 to 32 percent.

These data argue strongly for a robust embrace of energy abundance by Harris. As liberal economist Noah Smith has argued, Harris’s recent words are a good first step but she:

…needs to go much further. Instead of simply promising not to ban fracking, she should promise to expand it. And she should be loud and unambiguous about trumpeting what Biden has already accomplished in this regard.

Unlike climate action, energy abundance has an unambiguous relationship to economic advancement and prosperity for the working class, which of course is paramount for these voters. Maybe it is time to give these voters what they want instead of what Democrats think they should want.

More generally, it is becoming clearer and clearer that climate change policy, to be politically successful, must be embedded in and subordinate to, the goal of energy abundance and prosperity. In other words, as energy abundance is pursued, efforts to mitigate climate change should be undertaken within those constraints, rather than pursuing climate change as the paramount goal and trying for energy abundance within those limits. There’s a big difference and only the former approach offers a viable way forward for the left, both here and abroad.

Relatedly, it is high time for Democrats and the left to develop a more realistic understanding of what is feasible in terms of climate action. There is no point in setting goals and timelines that cannot be met. Discarding these will make it much easier to pursue an energy abundance path that also includes reasonable progress on reducing emissions over what will undoubtedly be a very lengthy time period.

As the polymath, Vaclav Smil, universally acknowledged to be one of the world’s premier energy experts, has observed:

[W]e are a fossil-fueled civilization whose technical and scientific advances, quality of life and prosperity rest on the combustion of huge quantities of fossil carbon, and we cannot simply walk away from this critical determinant of our fortunes in a few decades, never mind years. Complete decarbonization of the global economy by 2050 is now conceivable only at the cost of unthinkable global economic retreat…

And as he tartly observes re the 2050 deadline:

People toss out these deadlines without any reflection on the scale and the complexity of the problem…What’s the point of setting goals which cannot be achieved? People call it aspirational. I call it delusional.

Getting in touch with these realities should help Democrats get comfortable with the goal of energy abundance and understand how that goal does not represent the betrayal of a sacred moral cause to save the earth. However much Democrats may wish it not to be so, grand energy transitions take time—many, many decades. Absent drastically lowered living standards and/or radical social disruption, this transition will be no different. Fossil fuels, and the support they provide to the high living standards enjoyed by the advanced world and aspired to by everyone else, will be with us for a very long time.

That’s what voters want. And it’s what Democrats should want too. Let’s hope the Harris campaign is starting to walk down that road.

Would you be shocked to learn that voting in the 2024 presidential and down-ballot elections has already begun?  As Ana Faguy and Ione Wells report in “First in-person votes cast in US presidential election” at bbc.com: “The first in-person votes have been cast in the US presidential race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, a milestone moment that comes six weeks before election day on 5 November….Virginia became the first state in the country to allow in-person voting on Friday, and early polling sites will remain open there until 2 November. Some long queues were seen as voters cast ballots on national, state and local levels….The situation in two other states, Minnesota and South Dakota, is different as voters there can only hand in absentee ballots in person instead of mailing them….Some 69% of votes cast during the 2020 election were done through early in-person voting or through mail-in ballots, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s election data science lab found….Virginia has been a reliably Democratic state in the last few elections, but some Republicans have been bullish about trying to flip it in November. Voters there will also be casting votes for the state’s eleven members of congress and one of its two senators….Early and mail-in voting has been a hot-button issue since the 2020 election, with just 37% of Republicans saying people should have the option to vote early, according to polling from the Pew Research Center. That sharply contrasts with 82% support from Democrats.” Ponder the strategic implications for campaigns for a minute: Prep time is pretty much over or will soon be in the days and weeks ahead. Beginning with the “Mother of Presidents” (8 of them), Virginia, the swing states are in motion. It’s on.

From “Why these three states are the most consistent tipping point in American politics“. by Ronald Brownstein at CNN Politics: “Whether measured by campaign advertising, candidate visits, organizational effort or nervous obsessing over poll results, Michigan, Wisconsin and above all Pennsylvania have moved to the top of the priority list for both Vice President Kamala Harrisand former President Donald Trump – just as they have in seemingly every recent presidential election….,Trump won the presidency in 2016 by stunning Democrat Hillary Clinton to win all three states by a combined margin of about 80,000 votes. President Joe Biden won back the White House in 2020 by recapturing all three states by a combined margin of around 260,000 votes….Since Harris took over at the top of Democratic candidate in July, the candidates have spent more money in advertising in Pennsylvania than anywhere else, with Michigan ranking second and Wisconsin fourth, according to data provided to CNN by AdImpact, an advertising tracking service. Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin rank first, second and fourth as well in the amount of advertising the campaigns have reserved through November (with only Georgia intruding as number three on both lists.)….Bob Shrum, the long-time Democratic strategist who now serves as the director of the Center for the Political Future at the University of Southern California, said the three Rust Belt battlegrounds have remained pivotal in presidential elections for so long because they encapsulate so many of the entrenched divisions that now define American politics – between, for instance, urban and rural areas and white-collar and blue-collar voters. “They reflect the polarization,” Shrum said….In a clear statement of their priorities, the campaigns have spent nearly $120 million more on ads in the three big Rust Belt battlegrounds than they have in the four Sunbelt states they are contesting (Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada). After camping out in Pennsylvania for her debate preparation, Harris is appearing in all three of the big Rust Belt battlegrounds again this week. Trump is holding a town hall in Flint, Michigan, on Tuesday…..Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are not carbon copies. But they do share enough common characteristics that the long-time Democratic strategist Tad Devine argues they should be thought of effectively a single state – what he calls “Mi-Pa-Wi.” Each of them is less racially diverse than the nation overall, according to data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Whites account for about three-fourths of the population in Michigan and Pennsylvania and roughly four-fifths in Wisconsin. Although their Latino communities are growing, Blacks remain the largest minority group in each of them. The three states are also slightly older than the nation overall, with seniors accounting for about one-fifth of the population in each. None have many immigrants, with residents born abroad accounting for only about 7% of the population in Michigan and Pennsylvania and just 5% in Wisconsin. All three have seen minimal population growth in recent years.”

“At a time when education has become an increasingly powerful predictor of political allegiance,” Brownstein adds, ” the three converge, with about one-third of their adults holding at least a four-year college degree – just slightly below the share in the nation overall, the Census found. The median income just slightly lags the national average in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and trails by a larger margin (about 10%) in Michigan. All three are big manufacturing states that have seen substantial job loss in that sector since 2000, but have also seen employment in it increase by about 20,000-30,000 jobs since Biden took office, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data….In their religious orientation, they are very similar too: White Christians, who generally lean Republican, comprise about 55% of adults in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and just over half in Michigan, according to newly released findings from the Public Religion Research Institute. Meanwhile, voters with no religious affiliation, who have become a staunchly Democratic group, represent about one-fourth of the population in all three, PRRI found….While the big three Rust Belt states look similar on all these measures, in some other respects Wisconsin, on paper, should be the most difficult state of the three for Harris this year. Not only is the minority share of the population smaller in Wisconsin than the other two, but Whites without a college degree (the core of the modern GOP coalition, especially in the Trump era) cast about three-fifths of the votes there compared to about half in Michigan and Pennsylvania, according to calculations from Census data by William Frey, a demographer at the non-partisan Brookings Metro think tank….Heavily White and blue-collar small town and rural areas, which have moved toward the GOP almost everywhere, also constitute a much bigger share of the vote in Wisconsin than in the other two. In a six-category geographic measuring system, devised by the non-partisan Center for Rural Strategies, small metros and non-metros cast nearly 50% of Wisconsin’s votes in both 2016 and 2020, compared to about 30% in Michigan and 20% in Pennsylvania each time, according to results provided to CNN by Tim Marema, the center’s vice president and editor of its Daily Yonder website….Conversely, Democrats don’t have as strong an asset in Wisconsin’s largest metro area as in the other two states. The county centered on Milwaukee is only about half as big as the counties that encompass Philadelphia and Detroit, and doesn’t provide Democrats nearly as large a vote advantage, particularly with turnout there lagging in recent years; simultaneously, while Democrats have steadily gained ground in the suburban so-called WOW counties outside Milwaukee, Republicans still win those three big counties (Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington), by bigger margins than almost any other major suburbs north of the Mason-Dixon line….One last factor makes Wisconsin on paper less attractive to Democrats: unions only represent about half as much of the private sector workforce in Wisconsin as they do in the other two states, according to federal figures.”

Brownstein takes a deep dive into the demographics of Wisconsin and Michigan, then writes of Pennsylvania, “That leaves Pennsylvania as the consensus toughest of the three states for Harris. It’s also the state analysts generally consider the most likely to provide the 270th Electoral College vote for the winner in November. (Wisconsin played that role in both 2016 and 2020.) “To me, the tipping point is Pennsylvania,” said Giangreco. “If we win Pennsylvania, [Harris] is going to be president. It’s really, really hard to see where you win Pennsylvania and you lose Michigan or Wisconsin. It’s not going to happen.”….The same broad trends reshaping the political landscapes in Wisconsin and Michigan are evident in Pennsylvania. As in the other states, Democrats are gaining in white-collar suburbs, especially in the Trump era: Biden in 2020 won the four big suburban counties outside Philadelphia by nearly 300,000 votes – over 100,000 more than even Clinton did four years earlier….But, as in other states, Democrats have been concerned about the risk of depressed turnout and some gains for Trump among Black voters in Philadelphia. And Republicans have built an imposing and enduring advantage among the state’s large population of non-college educated White voters….“Pennsylvania has just become a much better state” for Republicans, said Ulm, noting how the Democrats’ lead in Pennsylvania voter registration has shrunk since 2020. “Places that used to be Democratic bastions aren’t anymore.”….Dante Chinni is founder and director of the American Communities Project, which has developed another well-respected classification system to sort the nation’s political geography. Chinni says that in Pennsylvania (as well as the other two states) many of the places where Trump runs best are what the project calls “Middle Suburbs” – middle-income places outside urban centers predominantly filled with White working-class voters, like the blue-collar counties around Pittsburgh….“These were union strongholds…and in the past that’s meant they were Democratic,” Chinni said. “But they’ve shifted. They’ve become Trump-y. Usually he runs up vote in tiny places. But these are Trump’s most reliable concentration of dense votes.”….Democrats, however, see the possibility of Harris amassing huge margins in the Philadelphia suburbs with voters who support abortion rights and reversing some of the turnout decline that Biden suffered among Black voters in the city itself.”

It’s a very close presidential election, so unsurprisingly Team Trump is looking for an illicit edge, as I explained at New York:

With the major-party presidential candidates in close battles in a sparse landscape of battleground states, every electoral vote matters. There are scenarios where either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump wins 269 or 270 electoral votes. Part of the underlying picture is that each of them has been expected to snag a single Electoral College vote from one of the two states (Maine and Nebraska) that allocate them by congressional district. Biden won the Omaha-based Second Congressional District of Nebraska in 2020, when Trump won the largely rural Second Congressional District of Maine. Polls are showing the same outcome is likely this year.

So the two campaigns have hungrily looked at a potential gain or loss of an electoral vote if either state adopted a winner-take-all system. But only Nebraska, pushed aggressively by Team Trump, has seriously moved toward taking that step in 2024. It hasn’t happened yet, in part because of internal Nebraska Republican dissension and in part because Maine Democrats have threatened to retaliate and make the whole exercise pointless. But now, at the very last minute, the heist may be back on, as the Nebraska Examiner reports:

“The national Republican push to help former President Donald Trump win all five of Nebraska’s Electoral College votes is ramping up again, and this time it might work.

“Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen on Wednesday hosted two dozen state senators at the Governor’s Mansion, along with Secretary of State Bob Evnen, the state’s chief election official.

“Several who attended the meeting said some senators who had wavered earlier showed more support now for changing Nebraska to the winner-take-all system of awarding electoral votes this year.”

Pillen has talked off and on in recent weeks about calling a special session of the legislature (the state’s second this year) to give Trump this very special gift if he could secure the votes to overcome a likely Democratic-led filibuster. Now he’s bringing in some outside help:

“State senators at Wednesday’s meeting at the Governor’s Mansion heard from Trump ally U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., about the national security and economic stakes if voters don’t return Trump to the White House.

“A national GOP spokeswoman said Graham’s visit shows how seriously Republicans are treating the need for Trump to win Nebraska’s 2nd District. Some have argued it could break a 269-269 Electoral College tie.”

One Republican legislator involved in this skullduggery dismissed complaints about such a last-minute change by citing the substitution of Harris for Biden on the Democratic side. Apparently, rules of fair play no longer matter, if they ever did, to Trump’s backers.

So why didn’t Pillen (and Lindsey Graham, and Trump’s other operatives) put on a full-court press earlier? This explanation from Politico Playbook is persuasive:

“Back in April, when the Nebraska idea was first gaining steam, Maine’s Democratic House Majority Leader Maureen Terry issued a statement indicating that if Nebraska made such a move, she would push for a like-for-like move in her state, which delivered one electoral vote to Trump in 2016 and 2020.

“[Democratic] Gov. Janet Mills would be required to call a special session of the legislature. But the stickier wicket is in the timing: A bill only becomes law in Maine 90 days after it’s passed, unless the bill receives a two-thirds vote in each chamber (Democrats currently have majorities, but not supermajorities). We’re 46 days away from Nov. 5, and 87 days from Dec. 16, when electoral votes are set to be cast.”

More than likely, the electoral-vote robbers chose to postpone their gambit until it was too late for Democrats to neutralize the theft in Maine.

It appears the effort to nail down the votes needed to pull off the Nebraska heist will come down to a very small handful of state senators. All sorts of horse-trading could ensue. But there are good odds Republicans will “rig” the Electoral College by one vote, and unless a creative lawsuit is in the offing, no one will be able to do anything about it.

 

From “Pennsylvania, the crucial battleground in America’s election” at The Economist:

“On july 21st Matt Roan, chair of the Cumberland County Democratic Committee, hosted a meeting with volunteers. The event took a turn when Mr Roan stopped to read a statement from Joe Biden announcing his departure from the presidential race. “There was this sort of sense of sadness—and then immediate hope,” Mr Roan recalls in his office, which overlooks the Pennsylvania state capitol. The activist speaks highly of Mr Biden but acknowledged that “things were not looking good” at the time. The rise of Kamala Harris attracted a surge of volunteers to a county that favoured Donald Trump by around 18 points in 2016 but only 11 points in 2020. If such improvements hold there and in other areas like it, Ms Harris would probably win the state and the presidency.

Both campaigns see Pennsylvania as a fulcrum of the 2024 election, and for good reason. The Economist’s forecast model suggests that the state—with its 19 electoral-college votes, the most of any swing state—is the tipping-point in 27% of the model’s updated simulations, meaning it decides the election more often than any other state. Mr Trump wins only 7% of the time when he loses the Keystone State. Indeed, he narrowly won Pennsylvania in 2016, and then he lost by 80,000 votes out of nearly 7m cast in his unsuccessful re-election bid four years later.

….The messaging war is a study in contrasts. Ms Harris seeks to define herself in uplifting ads while warning in others about Mr Trump’s effect on the economy, reproductive rights and American democracy. As one of the most famous people in human history, Mr Trump doesn’t spend time introducing himself to voters. His ads and rhetoric relentlessly seek to paint Ms Harris as an out-of-touch leftist responsible for inflation and migrant crime. Such fear campaigns have found success before in presidential elections, but J.J. Abbott, a Pennsylvania Democratic strategist, argues that “there may be some limitations on how much these dark, brutal ads on those issues may work” this time, citing similar unsuccessful efforts mounted by Republicans in recent statewide races.

Mr Trump has also drawn attention to Ms Harris’s past opposition to natural-gas fracking, an important industry in western Pennsylvania, which she now supports. The issue may be top of mind in those energy-producing regions but elsewhere voters often express indifference. “It is not a slam dunk for any politician…to think that Pennsylvania is monolithically in support of further energy exploration,” says Stephen Bloom, vice-president of the Commonwealth Foundation, a centre-right think-tank. “No one has ever said the word fracking to me” while campaigning, says Stella Sexton, vice-chair of the Lancaster County Democratic Committee. She says she hears more about the cost of living and reproductive rights.

For many years a blue state that also elected moderate Republicans, Pennsylvania voted about three points to the right of the country in 2016 and 2020. Since 2008, the percentage of voters registered as Democrats has declined while the share of Republicans has grown. Republican registrations outpaced Democratic ones this year until Ms Harris entered the race (see charts). Democrats argue that some of the Republican gains have been offset by a rise in left-leaning independents.

Harris supporters are particularly proud of their ground game. The campaign has over 350 staffers across 50 offices in Pennsylvania, 16 of which are located in rural areas that Mr Trump won by double digits four years ago. The idea is to chip away at support in heavily Republican areas even when Ms Harris doesn’t have a chance to win outright. “They’re play-acting at trying to do better in the rural counties,” argues Mark Harris, a Republican strategist. “This will once again be an extraordinarily divided election between densely populated suburbs versus exurban and rural communities.”

Republican efforts appear more scattered, with a constellation of groups working on turnout efforts. Postal voting is a priority. In 2020 Mr Trump actively discouraged mail-in voting but has since shifted his rhetoric, albeit inconsistently, in the hope of cutting down the Democrats’ advantage.

If Mr Trump wins Pennsylvania, it will show that he put together a coalition of low-propensity white working-class voters and religious voters, says Ryan Shafik, a Republican strategist, and would probably also have attracted “a good amount of newer minority voters”. Ms Harris will have to reassemble Mr Biden’s coalition built on strength among urban and minority voters, as well as continuing to make inroads into the state’s suburbs. Her current lead in Pennsylvania, according to a polling average maintained by FiveThirtyEight, a data-journalism outfit, is less than two percentage points. For all the money pouring in, the race remains a virtual tie.”

An excerpt from “Pride, shame and understanding why the white working class vote supports Trump,” an interview with Arlie Rothschild, author of “Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame and the Rise of the Right” at wbur.org: “In her new book, author and sociologist Arlie Hochschild goes to the heart of Appalachia in Eastern Kentucky to share stories of people facing poverty, the loss of jobs and the rise of the opioid epidemic….”Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame and the Rise of the Right” explores what led to their allegiance to former President Donald Trump. Hochschild says she wrote the book to help Democrats understand how Republicans see things….“Not because you agree with them — you never will — but because it’s really important. It’s nearly half of the country. It’s grown ever more consequential with the upcoming elections,” she says. “We haven’t been listening to what’s been happening to the white working class. It’s been sinking both absolutely and relatively, and it’s turned away from the Democratic Party and to the Republican Party. We need to know how to talk to these people.” Godchild adds “Deep story is what the world feels like to you. It’s not a matter of what you believe in, your moral precepts. It’s not cognitive. It’s just how it feels and it’s told by a story.”….“That a man is standing in a long line leading up to the American dream, which is on the other side of a mountain.  And he feels his feet are tired. He, one guy said, ‘I haven’t had a raise in a decade.’ And he’s been patient, feels about himself he’s a good person. But he’s kind of stalled. He’s stalled. And he’s looking at the guy ahead of him, not the people behind….“Suddenly, there are line cutters. Well, who are they? What right do they have? And who are the line cutters in this right wing team story? They are women. They are Blacks. They are immigrants. They are refugees They are overpaid, as they see it, public officials. Even the lame and oil-soaked Louisiana pelican, it kind of limps ahead. ‘Oh, these environmentalists.’” Read on here.

Insights from “Tim Ryan talks need for Democrats to appeal to working class, young male voters,” an interview conducted by Joe St. George at scrippsnews.com: “With debates and conventions now over in 2024, the fight for voters is intensifying….That is especially true in the Midwest….Tim Ryan, a past Democratic presidential candidate, represented Ohio in Congress for 20 years and joined “The Race: Weekend” to discuss the need of Democrats to appeal to working-class voters in the Midwest….“I think they started the process, but I think there is a lot more work to do,” Ryan told Scripps News….“The base is rallied, that’s the first step,” Ryan added….“The next step has got to be a direct appeal to working-class people, whether they are White or Black or Brown,” Ryan said….“It’s jobs, it’s jobs, it’s wages, it’s pensions, it’s all the bread-and-butter stuff,” Ryan said….“I think you have to have an energy plan, a moderate down-the-middle energy plan,” Ryan added….The next big political event is the vice presidential debate on Oct. 1….Ryan is one of only a handful of people who has debated JD Vance in the past. Vance defeated Ryan in the Ohio senate race in 2022….“I would hang Project 2025 right around his neck,” Ryan said….As far as Ohio’s Senate race, Ryan says Sen. Sherrod Brown is getting the national resources to get across the finish line that he believes he did not receive in his campaign in 2022….“Sherrod Brown has a brand and a record,” Ryan said of Brown’s campaign….“I think it’s a coin toss right now,” Ryan said….“I think the Democratic brand has been damaged in many places in this country,” Ryan said. “I think it’s right in line with what you are seeing with young boys and young men, there is a real desperation out there.”….“We have to speak to them directly and say we have their hopes and dreams in our agenda,” Ryan added….“It’s a national crisis with young boys and men,” Ryan said.”

In “The Democrats face one major hurdle: working-class voters,” Michel Sean Winters writes at The National Catholic Reporter, “Hurdles remain, actually one hurdle: working-class voters. Let’s start with Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. Back in 2008, when I was still writing for America magazine, I called attention to Luzerne County in a post on the morrow of President Barack Obama’s historic victory, noting that Obama had carried the northeastern Pennsylvania county with 54% of the vote, up from John Kerry’s 51% in 2004. Hazleton, a city in Luzerne County, had passed an anti-immigrant ordinance in 2006. The town’s mayor, Lou Barletta, would become one of the faces of the Tea Party movement when he won a seat in Congress in 2010, defeating longtime Democratic Rep. Paul Kanjorski….Luzerne has changed and Hazleton is now a majority minority city, with Latinos constituting more than 60% of the population. The growth of the Latino vote, however, has not translated into Democratic wins….According to Politico, former President Donald Trump improved his vote totals in 2020 significantly in both Allentown and Reading, towns that are heavily Latino but which also lean more Democratic….Democrats have a problem with working-class voters. Jason Willick wrote about the “diploma divide” in The Washington Post last year and Doug Sosnik analyzed it in The New York Times. “The confluence of rising globalization, technological developments and the offshoring of many working-class jobs led to a sorting of economic fortunes, a widening gap in the average real wealth between households led by college graduates compared with the rest of the population, whose levels are near all-time lows,” Sosnik wrote. He also noted that in the seven battleground states “education levels are near the national average — not proportionately highly educated nor toward the bottom of attainment.”….Democrats, especially Harris, need to show that they care about these working-class voters and have some policy ideas that will help them. During the DNC, a friend with a long background working with organized labor and the Catholic Church, sent me a note.

Winters continues, “Working-class voters remember when they were called “deplorables” by the Democratic nominee in 2016, just as they remember her husband signing NAFTA, which shipped many jobs overseas. It confirmed what they suspected: that cultural elites really do look down on them. It is difficult to overstate the sense of betrayal and hostility lifelong Democrats felt by the end of the Clinton family’s leadership of the party….Latest CNN polls show that a surprisingly large number of people report they could yet change their mind. That is Harris’ biggest opportunity: These voters know everything there is to know about Trump. They continue to report that they think he would do a better job on the economy than Harris would. Her entry to them is the question: Who do you think cares about people like you? But then she has to show that she actually cares, that she wants to listen to working-class voters, not only talk to them or about them. Hillary Clinton thought the election was about her breaking the glass ceiling, and look how that turned out. Harris needs to convince voters she wants to help them break whatever glass ceilings they face. That is how to rebuild the famous “blue wall” of Democratic states along the Great Lakes, a wall that came crashing down in 2016….In addition to the debate, where Harris can continue to define herself for voters, she should seek an opportunity for a “Sister Souljah” moment. In 1992, appearing at a meeting of the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, candidate Bill Clinton criticized a rap singer for expressing extremist views. The views were repugnant, but what Clinton was saying is that he was willing to challenge a part of his base, that he was not too beholden to any special interest, that he was capable of self-criticism. Harris needs to have such a moment. It could be about apologists for Hamas or extremist views on gender or climate activists who attack the artistic patrimony of humankind. The target doesn’t matter. What matters is Harris demonstrating she is unafraid to challenge those who are generally on her side of the partisan divide….The Democrats can win this election, keep the White House, retake the House of Representatives and possibly even hold on to the Senate. In the weeks ahead, we’ll look at those down ballot races too. But the feel-good vibes coming out of the Democratic convention are running into the strong headwinds of culturally conservative working-class voters. If Harris can make inroads with them, she’ll win handily. If she can’t, she may still win, but it will be by a whisker. And she could lose.”

One of the many variables affecting the 2024 election is the plethora of ballot measures to protect abortion rights on state ballots, which I wrote about at New York.

After many months of signature-gathering on petitions and lots of maneuvering in state courts, ballot measures to expand or protect abortion rights have been certified for general-election ballots in ten states: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, and South Dakota. Two (in Maryland and New York) were referred by legislators and confirm rights already protected by statutes, while eight were citizen referred. This is more impressive than you may think: Only 17 states allow citizen-referred constitutional amendments, and after this year, fully 14 states whose legislatures enacted abortion bans will have voted on abortion ballot measures seeking to overturn them. Pro-choice advocates have won all seven ballot fights (four in the deep-red states of Kansas, Kentucky, Montana, and Ohio and another in the battleground state of Michigan) since the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade; there is a significant chance the winning streak could expand to 17 in November, in an astonishing confirmation of the breadth and depth of support for abortion rights.

We don’t have significant public polling in some states, but everywhere (including in the deep-red states of Missouri and South Dakota), advocates for expanding or defending abortion rights seem to have an advantage. It’s telling that one of the few signs of hope for the anti-abortion cause is in Florida, and that’s only because the state has a 60 percent supermajority requirement for constitutional ballot initiatives. Meanwhile, an abortion-rights victory is all but assured in Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, and Nevada. In Montana, it’s worth noting that voters rejected a 2022 ballot measure to restrict abortions.

There are some complications to this generally bright picture for abortion rights. In Nebraska, anti-abortion voters succeeded in certifying for the ballot a competing initiative that would constitutionally ban abortion after the first trimester; the standard is technically less draconian than the state’s current 12-week ban but would set back abortion rights and is clearly designed to confuse voters. If that initiative and the primary measure restoring the Roe viability standard both pass, the one that gathers the most votes will be implemented. In South Dakota, a legal effort failed to keep the abortion-rights initiative off the ballot, but courts are allowing a trial over the anti-abortion movement’s complaints, which could in theory make an enacted amendment unenforceable.

In New York, the decision to nestle abortion-rights protections into a broader equal-rights constitutional amendment could be backfiring, as Politico explains:

“An issue that should have been as easy a win in New York as it has been for Democrats across the nation is now at risk of backfiring because of how they chose to craft the amendment.

“The pushback from the right has relied heavily on anti-trans rhetoric, a line of attack that internal polling shows has proven persuasive to voters in battleground House districts, three people who have reviewed the data told POLITICO. They were granted anonymity to discuss the inside information.

“Without a well-funded campaign to defend and bolster the equality amendment, deep blue New York could reject a referendum in support of abortion rights — with dire national political implications for Democrats.”

It’s still hard to imagine New York voting against an equal-rights amendment, but it may be more difficult than expected.

If all ten pro-choice ballot initiatives succeed, there will be 18 states in which constitutions (either by explicit provision or state supreme court interpretations) prevent legislatures from banning abortion and another seven blue states where passage of a ban is extremely unlikely. That’s half the states, which leaves a lot of work to be done to reverse the damage wrought by the U.S. Supreme Court but a lot of work accomplished as well.

The following article, “US Working Class ‘Overwhelmingly to the Left’ of the Rich on Economic Policy: Survey – The new research, said one union leader, provides Democrats with a “clear roadmap to winning back” working-class voters,” by Jake Johnson, is cross-posted from commondreams.org:

Polling results released Monday show that working-class voters in the United States are broadly more supportive of major progressive agenda items than those in the middle and upper classes, offering Democratic political candidates what one union leader called a “clear roadmap to winning back voters we’ve lost to a GOP that’s growing more extreme by the day.”

The survey of over 5,000 registered U.S. voters was conducted last August by HIT Strategies and Working Families Power (WFP), a sibling organization of the Working Families Party.

The poll found that a majority of working-class voters either somewhat or totally support a national jobs guarantee (69%), a “public healthcare program like Medicare for All” (64%), a crackdown on rent-gouging landlords (74%), and tuition-free public colleges and universities (63%), landing them “overwhelmingly to the left” of higher-income segments of the population.

Upper- and middle-class respondents were far less likely to support the above policy proposals. Just 39% of upper-class voters surveyed, for instance, said they completely or somewhat support “a nationwide jobs guarantee” that would provide “stable, good-paying work for everyone who needs it.”

WFP found that the “differences between classes are much smaller on social and cultural questions compared to economic fairness questions, and they do not uniformly point to a working class that is more socially and culturally conservative than the middle and upper classes.”

The poll results, said WFP, call into question the belief that “the greater social and cultural conservatism of the working class explains the working class’ drift away from the Democrats and towards the GOP.”

“The working class is not a monolithic group that wears a hard hat and hangs out in diners.”

Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, said the new survey results underscore that “the working class is not a monolithic group that wears a hard hat and hangs out in diners.”

“It’s a multiracial, multigenerational group that isn’t confined to a single geography, and it includes a tremendous diversity of views,” said Mitchell, suggesting that Democrats learn from the results to defeat former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, in November.

“We need our strategy and messaging to reflect that reality,” he said. “That’s how we defeat Trump’s MAGA movement and win back working-class voters.”

The new report identifies seven “clusters” within the U.S. working class that it labels as Next Gen Left, Mainstream Liberals, Tuned Out Persuadables, Anti-Woke Traditionalists, Secure Suburban Moderates, Diverse Disaffected Conservatives, and Core MAGA—and the survey data shows “large differences” between them that help explain disparate voting behaviors. For example, just 30% of the Next Gen Left cluster—which is disproportionately young and strongly progressive—are homeowners compared to 75% of the Core MAGA cluster, which has what WFP described as “down-the-line right-wing views.”

The survey results were released in the heat of an election campaign that has seen the GOP—spearheaded by Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio)—cast itself as “the party of working-class people.” Democrats, whose 2024 White House ticket is backed by major U.S. unions, have lost support from working-class voters in recent years while making gains among more affluent segments of the population.

WFP said that its findings “do not contradict the widespread belief that support for Democrats is stronger among middle- and upper-class voters than it is among working-class voters,” but they do “strongly call into question the explanation most commonly advanced for those political alignments, namely that the working class is simply more socially and culturally conservative than the middle and upper classes.”

“Our study shows that the most salient differences in worldview between classes revolve around questions of class, distribution, and economic fairness, where the working class is well to the left of the middle and upper classes, and regression analysis strongly suggests that the further left a voter is on these questions of class, distribution, and economic fairness, the less likely they were to have supported Donald Trump in 2020,” said WFP.

The new analysis was accompanied by what the Working Families Party described as a “practical handbook to winning the working class,” which makes up roughly 63% of the U.S. electorate.

Messaging that resonated most strongly across segments of the working class, according to the handbook, emphasized class conflict and the “need to elect Democrats who will fight for working people to keep the money they earn by cracking down on price-gouging at the grocery store, making wealthy tax cheats pay their fair share, and lowering the costs of prescription drugs.”

Derrick Osobase, vice president of Communications Workers of American District 6, said in a statement Monday that Democrats must embrace and act on the new findings if they hope to reverse their recent losses among the nation’s working class.

“During a time of record high corporate profits,” said Osobase, “Democrats need to show working-class voters that we have their backs and will fight for an economy that works for all of us.”

“A new report commissioned by a labor-backed group is examining a problem many Democrats might rather ignore: the exodus of working-class voters from the party they used to call home,” Alex Seitz-Wald explains in “Democrats have been losing working-class voters. Here’s one playbook to win them back” at nbcnews.com. “Republicans under former President Donald Trump have been making inroads in the working class, including among Black and Hispanic voters, while Democrats have been gaining suburban moderates and highly educated professionals that used to vote Republican,” Alex Seitz-Wald explains in “Democrats have been losing working-class voters. Here’s one playbook to win them back” ate nbcnews.com. “Some voices on the left have downplayed the significance or even denied the loss of working class voters, but the data is increasinglyclear and signs of realignment are everywhere….“I’ve watched as MAGA flags have encroached into my community, which used to be a solid deep-blue working-class suburb of New York made of ethnic whites and people of color,” said Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, a labor-backed group that aims to organize a multiracial working-class coalition. “Republicans are making inroads into the working class, and it’s not just white working class people.”….A nonprofit offshoot of Working Families embarked on an extensive research project last year to try to take an honest accounting of Democrats’ problems with working-class voters and find effective messages for the Democratic presidential campaign and others. The group shared its findings exclusively with NBC News….“We take the right wing and Republican Party seriously when they say they want to be the party of the working class,” Mitchell said. “And as much as Democrats are interested in organizing working-class people, and we don’t deny their sincerity, we wanted to start with a grounded place that provides the most accurate picture.”….The effort started with an attempt to better understand the working class of the 21st century by creating a more nuanced definition of the demographic and breaking it down into seven values-based typologies.

“Those categories,” Seitz-Wald continues, “were based on a battery of 40 questions put to more than 5,000 participants in surveys conducted with HIT Strategies, a Democratic research firm….The conclusions, laid out in a 60-page research report and accompanying 23-page political handbook, was shared for the first time this week in a virtual meeting with 160 representatives of left-leaning organizations and labor unions….The result is a novel approach to analyze the working class, which the report says represents about 63% of the electorate….“The working class represents a gigantic share of the electorate. Yet ideological differences within the working class are almost never explored in any systematic way,” the report states….The report sorted people into seven subtypes, each of roughly equal size, arranged on the ideological spectrum from “Next Gen Left” to “Core MAGA,” but the research is especially interested in the four groups in the middle that it says are “cross-pressured,” with values that are best represented in both parties….Those groups include “Tuned Out Persuadables,” “Anti Woke Traditionalists,” “Diverse Disaffected Conservatives” and “Secure Suburbans.”….The cohorts may look different demographically, but more importantly, they’re sorted by their feelings about economic, social and cultural issues. The key to reaching these cross-pressured sections of the working class, according to the report, is differentdepending on what messages resonate with each subgroup….For instance, the research found that populist economic messages about taking on corporations and “big money” in politics are generally popular across the working class, while less effective messages included focusing on the Biden-Harris administration’s work on climate and infrastructure or on Harris’ potential to make history as the first woman president….If nothing else, Mitchell hopes the research will push Democrats to take seriously the erosion with working class voters and to move beyond one-size-fits all stereotypes when thinking about how to talk to working-class voters.”

In “Harris can end the Trump-Vance culture wars. Here’s how,’ Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne Jr. writes: “Now that she has routed Donald Trump on the debate stage, Vice President Kamala Harris needs to take the next step and reinforce her campaign’s most powerful theme: That it’s time to end the cultural and ideological warfare — much of it phony, some of it rooted in prejudice — that keeps our nation from solving its most important problems….Despite her standing as the incumbent vice president, Harris has transformed herself into the candidate who represents change by speaking to a reality most Americans sense in their bones. Although Trump has been out of office for nearly four years, his angry and pessimistic spirit still dominates the country’s public life. As long as Trump lurks, every controversy will be turned into a culture war, elections will be defined around who hates whom, and actual problems will be left to fester….Fighting over gender, ideology, sexual identity or religion won’t change that. What would make a difference is uniting behind practical steps to achieve a better balance between work and family life, between the economy and community needs….The fight over abortion will not go away, but opponents of abortion ought to be sympathetic to more help for women who bring children into the world….What’s clear is that Americans across our divides agree we need to do more to help parents and kids. During the debate, Harris rightly but briefly mentioned the child tax credit and helping young families afford a home. I wish she had talked more about her agenda on leave, child care, elder care and adequate pay for those who work in the care economy….Doing so in the coming weeks will be a clear answer to critics who say she’s short on policy. She’s not (especially compared with Trump), but more detail on these and other ideas to strengthen the country’s families can only help her with the voters she needs.”

At The Washington Monthly, Robert J. Shapiro argues that “even though it’s already Labor Day, there’s still time for her campaign to pay attention to a major issue that concerns millions of voters and offer them a response that would underscore her pledge to chart a more prosperous future for middle-class Americans, what she calls “an opportunity economy…..The big issue is the fading prospect of upward mobility for Americans without college degrees. One way to help people raise their incomes is by offering free retraining for higher-paying jobs….The fading prospects for upward mobility have made millions of Americans feel aggrieved and resentful. Donald Trump has used his own sense of personal grievance and resentment to channel their disappointment—to his benefit….The Harris-Walz campaign can turn the tables on this vital issue by giving average Americans a reason to feel optimistic about their futures. The campaign has promised to mandate paid family leave and sick leave, limit price hikes by large corporations in certain circumstances, reduce medical debt and subsidize first-time home buyers….That’s fine as far as it goes. But people still have to live on what they earn. In this economy, the way most people increase their incomes is to become more productive….While few of them have time or money to go to college now, the government could easily afford to give them free access to evening and weekend retraining courses at public community colleges as a pathway to revive their prospects for upward mobility….Community colleges today charge about $450 per course, so retraining would cost about $4,050 for a would-be plumber, $3,150 for those aspiring to be entry-level computer programmers, and $3,600 for a student electricians program. Using these three examples, the average retraining program would cost about $3,600. A new nationwide retraining program could waive those costs since the point is to restore upward mobility for millions who couldn’t afford to lay out $3,600, regardless of the potential benefits….Those costs would be de minimis for taxpayers. If we assume that 500,000 low earners would sign on each year for two-year programs of evening and weekend classes, the government could cover annual tuition costs for 1 million people each year for $2 billion annually. That’s equivalent to two-tenths of 1 percent of all non-defense discretionary federal spending….That’s a very small price to create a new path to upward mobility for millions of aggrieved Americans and get millions of those voters to take a new look at Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.”

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

Democrats are enjoying the afterglow of a successful debate by their candidate against Trump. Harris’s game plan of goading Trump into irrelevant and defensive tangents worked as intended. She was the “winner” of the debate to the extent these designations still have any meaning.

But the race is still exceedingly tight….and seems likely to remain so. And there’s another part of her game plan—or what should be her game plan—that does not appear to be working out so well.

I refer to the need to boost support among the working class, which remains a serious weak spot for the Democrats and Harris. The latest New York Times/Siena poll has Harris trailing Trump among working-class (noncollege) voters by 17 points. That’s identical to Biden’s working-class deficit in the last NYT poll before he dropped out and way worse than Biden’s deficit among these voters in 2020—a mere 4 points.

More detailed NYT results reveal that Harris, relative to Biden in 2020, is doing 10 points worse among white working-class voters and 18 points worse among nonwhite working-class voters. The latter is despite considerable improvement for Harris among this demographic since Biden dropped out.

There’s no sugarcoating it—this is a serious problem for the Democrats. College-educated America may be delighted with candidate Harris but working-class America clearly is not. And there are a lot more working-class than college-educated Americans. Remember that they will be the overwhelming majority of eligible voters (around two-thirds) and, even allowing for turnout patterns, only slightly less dominant among actual voters (around three-fifths). Moreover, in all seven key swing states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—the working-class share of the electorate, both as eligible voters and as projected 2024 voters, will be higher than the national average.

The NYT data demonstrate how far apart the viewpoints of working-class and college-educated America are today. Consider the following class gaps in perception:

1. Biden’s net job approval (approval minus disapproval) is -34 among working-class voters but +8 among college-educated voters (class gap = 42 points).

2. Trump’s net favorability among working-class voters is +10; among college voters it’s -29 (class gap = 39 points). Harris’ favorability is -16 among the working class but +16 among the college-educated (class gap = 32 points).

3. While both working-class and college-educated voters have negative views about the state of the economy (only fair or poor), working-class voters are far more negative. Their net rating (excellent or good minus only fair or poor) is -67 compared to –35 among the college-educated (class gap = 32 points).

4. When asked which candidate could do a better job handling the issue they care about the most, working-class voters prefer Trump over Harris by 20 points while college voters prefer Harris over Trump by 15 points (class gap = 35 points).

5. The same question was asked about handling the economy specifically. Working-class voters think Trump would do a better job by 27 points; college-educated voters prefer Harris by 9 points (class gap = 36 points).

6. On handling immigration, working-class voters prefer Trump by 24 points while college voters prefer Harris by 11 points (class gap = 35 points).

7. And on democracy, working-class voters think Trump would do a better job handling the issue by 9 points, while college-educated voters overwhelmingly prefer Harris by 28 points (class gap = 37 points).

8. The poll asked separately for Trump and Harris whether they would be a safe or risky choice for the country. Working-class voters’ net assessment (safe minus risky) for Trump is +5 while for college grads it is -33 (class gap = 38 points). For Harris, her net safe/risky among the working class is -21 compared to +16 among college graduates (class gap = 37 points).

9. Finally, voters were asked whether the next president should represent a major change or minor change (or no change at all) from Biden. Almost all voters wanted at least some change but working-class voters were far more likely to want major change. Working-class voters’ net change preference (major minus minor change) was +46 but among college voters it was just +1 (class gap = 45 points).

These are rather daunting figures but of course they don’t mean Harris can’t win. Her performance among college-educated voters is very strong and that is keeping her afloat right now in this exceedingly tight right race. Perhaps her debate performance will improve her standing among working-class voters, which could pull her out of her current danger zone.

But there are clearly reasons for concern. Besides the data noted above, polling right after the debate found that Harris did little to improve voter confidence in her ability to handle the all-important issue of the economy. A CNN flash poll among debate-watchers found that before the debate voters trusted Trump over Harris on the economy by 16 points and after the debate they favored Trump by….20  points. Furthermore, if you look at the cross-tabs, working-class voters before the debate favored Trump over Harris to handle the economy by 29 points, an advantage for Trump which increased slightly to 32 points after the debate. Not exactly what the Harris campaign had in mind.

So, as the Harris campaign basks in a post-debate wave of favorable coverage and perhaps even a bump in the polls, they would do well to remember that working-class Americans can contain their enthusiasm. The Democratic Achilles’ heel remains and could still deliver a second term for Trump.