In his column, “Biden made a very tough decision to save the soul of America — again. Democrats need to get to a Harris nomination through a process the whole party will see as fair,” E. J. Dionne, Jr. writes: “Choosing someone other than Harris, who has already been well vetted, would invite turmoil the party can’t afford. Dumping your entire ticket three months before an election is not a good look. But Democrats need to get to a Harris nomination through a process the whole party will see as fair….Doing so would only strengthen Harris’s candidacy. So would a strong running mate. Govs. Roy Cooper of North Carolina and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan are among the many good options Harris would have….Biden’s decision will bring new energy to a party that had already gained confidence in its capacity to win, courtesy of Trump’s 92-minute disquisition on Thursday that drove even ardent loyalists to weariness and exhaustion. Trump’s lack of discipline and his vaudevillian affection for his old act led him away from the recommendations of his advisers. They understood that natural sympathy had rushed Trump’s way after a failed assassination attempt. They promised he would tell his moving personal story and call for national unity….Although the choice was excruciating, the president should be — and deserves to be — at peace with this outcome. None of what happened reflects badly on his record as president. He didn’t fail in that debate. His age failed him….All along, Biden cast himself as the person who could best preserve democracy by stopping Trump a second time. Paradoxically, perhaps, he stayed true to that mission by removing himself from the contest. He did the hardest thing a politician can do: relinquish power. His decision saved his legacy.”

“What we can say from head-to-head polling of Harris is that the general trend has gotten a lot better for her,” Christian Paz writes in “Does Kamala Harris give Democrats a better chance to win?” at Vox. “A year ago she was underperforming Biden in head-to-head polling against Trump in a variety of surveys. Closer to the debate and right after, she began to perform about evenly. And more recently, in July, a few polls comparing Biden and Harris against Trump in battleground states and nationally have shown Harris even with Biden or slightly ahead of him….The first sign of this change came from CNN’s first post-debate poll, finding the vice president trailing Trump by 2 percentage points (within the margin of error) while Biden trailed by 6 points. And in FiveThirtyEight’s polls-only post-debate comparison of Harris and Biden vs. Trump, Harris performs slightly better than the president in battleground states — though not in all of them….Recent polling from Pennsylvania and Virginia also shows more positive signs for the vice president: New York Times/Siena College polls this month show that while Harris still trails Trump by 1 point in Pennsylvania, that’s a smaller gap than the 3 points that put Trump ahead of Biden there. Both of these results are within the polling’s margin of error, making the race in the state essentially tied. In Virginia, meanwhile, Harris’s lead over Trump is 2 points larger than the lead Biden has over the former president….And a post-assassination attempt national poll from Reuters/Ipsos shows a statistically tied presidential contest for either Biden or Harris against Trump….Under the hood, however, Harris backers can find an additional data point in their column: 69 percent of respondents think Biden is too old; Harris doesn’t face that concern. And Biden is more unpopular than Harris, something that is consistently true: As of July 18, Biden has a net -17.7 approval rating in the FiveThirtyEight aggregate. Harris’s disapproval is at 11.8. And in RealClearPolitics’ average of favorability ratings, Biden (-16.3) is also more unpopular than Harris (-14.9).”

In all the talk about whether Joe Biden should “step aside,” there hasn’t been enough discussion of the rationale he should present if he does so. So I offered one at New York:

The Democratic Party’s semi-public bickering over what to do with Joe Biden needs to come to an end very soon, lest it turn into a horrific party-rending conflict or a de facto surrender to Donald Trump. While he can technically be pushed out of the nomination, it would be nightmarishly difficult to do so given his virtually unopposed performance in the primaries and the lack of precedent for anything like a forced defenestration of a sitting president. It would also express disloyalty to a brave and dedicated leader. But Biden has already lost the united, confident party he needed to make a comeback. He’s trailing in the polls right now. And even more importantly, his own conduct and fitness for office will command center stage for the rest of the general-election campaign, which is precisely what he cannot afford given his poor job-approval ratings and the sour mood of the electorate.

So Joe needs to go of his own accord, and it needs to happen quickly before Republican and Biden-loyalist claims of a “coup” become all too credible. But it’s obviously a humiliating exercise. So if Biden comes to realize the futility of going forward, what can this proud and stubborn man say that will make him something other than an object of derision or pity?

I have a simple answer: He can tell the truth.

The truth is that Biden’s firm commitment to the pursuit of a second term, despite his advanced age and increased frailty, hardened into inflexible determination when Trump made his own decision to launch an initially unlikely comeback. When Biden took office, Trump was a disgraced insurrectionist whose very defenders in his second impeachment trial mostly denounced his conduct, even as they urged acquittal on technical grounds. The 46th president was in a position to serve one distinguished “transitional” term and retire with a wary eye on his fellow retiree festering in anger and self-righteousness in Mar-a-Lago. But as Trump slowly recovered and eventually reemerged as a more dominant figure than ever in a MAGA-fied Republican Party, Biden became convinced that as the only politician ever to defeat Donald Trump, he had the responsibility to do it again and the ability to remind voters why they rejected the 45th president in 2020.

As this strange election year ripened, Biden had a perfectly plausible strategy for victory based on keeping a steady public focus on Trump’s lawless conduct (including actual crimes), his erratic record, and extremist intentions for a perilous second term. The polls were close and Biden wasn’t very popular, but these surveys also showed a durable majority of the electorate that really didn’t want to return Trump to power, particularly as economic conditions improved and the consequences of Trump’s Supreme Court appointments grew more shockingly apparent each day.

Then came the June 27 debate, and suddenly Biden lost the ability to make the election about Trump. He needs to look into a camera and say just that, and conclude that just as the threat posed by Trump motivated him to run for a second term, the threat posed by Trump now requires that he withdraw so that a successor can make the case he can’t make as he’s become the object of endless speculation about his age and cognitive abilities. Biden does not need to resign the presidency, since his grounds for withdrawing his candidacy are about perceptions and politics rather than any underlying incapacity. Biden would be withdrawing as a weakened candidate, not as a failed president.

For this withdrawal to represent a stabilizing event for his administration and his party, it’s critical that Biden not equivocate or complain, and that he show his mastery of the situation by clearly passing the torch to the vice-president he chose four years ago. For all the talk of an “open convention” being exciting (for pundits) and energizing (for the winner), the last thing Democrats need right now is uncertainty. No matter what the polls show and how badly his old friends want him to succeed, it’s the prospect of 100 days of terror every time Biden makes unscripted remarks that is feeding both elite and rank-and-file sentiment that a change at the top of the ticket is necessary. The fear and confusion needs to end now, and Biden effectively made his choice of a successor when he made Kamala Harris his governing partner. The president needs to reassert his agency now, not look like he is abandoning his party and his country to the winds of fate.

A straightforward and honest admission of why Biden 2024 is coming to an end could go a very long way toward enabling Harris and other Democrats to shift the nation’s gaze back to the ranting old man whose acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention showed that he has not mellowed or moderated at all. Of course Biden wants to solidify and extend his legacy over the next four years. But right now, the clear and present danger is that it will be extinguished altogether. He alone can address that threat, not as a candidate, but as a president and a patriot who recognizes his duty.

Plenty of good and bad ideas are popping up in this summer of Democratic anxiety, but it’s one of the latter I tried to knock down at New York:

Coming out of the agonizing intra-Democratic debate about Joe Biden’s fitness to beat Donald Trump is a sort of plan B scheme. Donors, we are told, are considering shifting resources to an effort to flip control of the House (just four seats away) in order to block a Trump-led Republican trifecta and a bacchanalia of authoritarian extremism next year. The reigning assumption is that absent a presidential win (which provides the tie-breaking vote in the Senate), maintaining Democratic control of the upper chamber will be almost impossible, since Republicans are sure to flip West Virginia, and all the other competitive races are on Democratic turf. So making Hakeem Jeffries House Speaker offers the best return on investment and perhaps relief from the agony of watching Biden like a hawk every time he’s on-camera.

It’s an interesting strategy but not terribly promising from a historical point of view. The last time House control flipped in a presidential-election year was in 1952, when Republicans benefited from a presidential landslide. The last six times House control has flipped (in 1954, 1994, 2006, 2010, 2018, and 2022), it’s happened in midterm elections featuring a very common backlash against the president’s party. You know how often a party has lost the White House and flipped the U.S. House in the same election? Zero times. There were times when Senate races (with their highly eccentric landscapes thanks to only one-third of seats being up in any one election) moved in a very different direction from the presidential election. But the House has always been harnessed to White House results in fundamental and even predictable ways, as political scientist David Faris points out:

“Political scientist Robert Erikson found in 2016 that for ‘every percentage point that a presidential candidate gains in the two-party vote, their party’s down-ballot candidates gain almost half a point themselves.’ A 1990 study by James E. Campbell and Joe A. Sumners found that for every 10 points that a presidential candidate gains in a state, it boosts that party’s Senate contender by 2 points, and its House hopefuls by 4. This basic logic is a large part of why the past five presidents brought congressional majorities into office with them when they were elected to their first term.”

And most of this historical record, mind you, was forged in the bygone era of relatively nonideological major parties that made ticket-splitting immensely more common. House Democrats entered the 2024 cycle optimistic about making gains since 16 Republicans are in districts carried by Biden in 2020 while only five Democrats are in Trump ’20 districts. But as J. Miles Coleman of Sabato’s Crystal Ball observes, an even Biden-Trump race in the national popular vote would turn six Democratic-held House districts red. A 3.3 percent Trump advantage in the national popular vote (his margin in the polling averages Coleman was using) would turn 19 Democratic-held House districts red.

Flipping the House if Biden loses decisively is hard to imagine. Even now, with polls showing a close presidential race, all of the major House prognosticators give Republicans a slight advantage (Cook Political Report, for example, shows the GOP favored in 210 races and Democrats favored in 203, with 22 toss-ups, half of them currently controlled by each party). The congressional generic ballot, polling that estimates the House national popular vote, is dead even (on average, Democrats lead by 0.5 percent in FiveThirtyEight, Republicans by 0.3 percent in RealClearPolitics). This will be an uphill fight for Democrats in the best of circumstances. And it should be remembered that Biden’s party lost 13 net House seats in 2020 even as he won the White House.

History, current analysis, and common sense indicate that abandoning the presidential ticket to focus on House races as though they are isolated contests is a fool’s errand for Democrats. Whether it’s Biden, Kamala Harris, or some improbable fantasy candidate heading the ticket, the presidential race needs to stay highly competitive if Democrats want to make House gains. If Trump rides back into the White House with a solid win, his toady Mike Johnson will almost certainly be there to help him turn his scary plans into legislation.

There is no telling how long the Republicans’ post-convention bump will last. Nor is there any way to peg the shelf-life of their re-branding as a ‘populist,’ pro-working-class party, which the Vance veep pick is supposed to symbolize.

Republicans appear unified, but only if we choose to ignore the reality that a large group of anti-Trump Republicans still hope to reclaim their party as a legitimate conservative force, instead of a personality cult. One anti-Trump Republican, George Conway, has produced a hard-hitting video. featuring Trump’s own appointees warning about his mental health issues. Here it is:

If you thought Sen. Ted Cruz, Lindsay Graham, Nikki Haley and Marco Rubio set the lowest standard for selling out previously stated views for political advantage, take a look at “JD Vance, Trump’s VP pick, once called him a ‘moral disaster,’ and possibly ‘America’s Hitler’” by Andrew Kaczynski and Ern Steck at CNN Politics. As the authors write: “Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick Ohio Sen. JD Vance was once a fervent critic of the former president. In private messages, he wondered ahead of Trump’s election whether he was “America’s Hitler” and in 2017 said the then-president was a “moral disaster.” In public, he agreed Trump was a “total fraud” who didn’t care about regular people and called him “reprehensible.”….“I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler,” Vance wrote in a message to a friend in 2016. “How’s that for discouraging?”….In 2016 and 2017, Vance, then best-known for penning the best-selling book “Hillbilly Elegy” said Trump was “cultural heroin” and “just another opioid” for Middle America. He told CNN ahead of the 2016 election that he was “definitely not” voting for Trump and he also contemplated voting for Hillary Clinton (he ultimately said he planned to vote for independent candidate Evan McMullin.)….,“Fellow Christians, everyone is watching us when we apologize for this man. Lord help us,” he tweeted after the “Access Hollywood” tape was published in 2016….Vance also liked tweets that said Trump committed “serial sexual assault,” called him “one of USA’s most hated, villainous, douchey celebs,” and harshly criticized Trump’s response to the deadly 2017 White nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia….“There is no moral equivalence between the anti-racist protestors in Charlottesville and the killer (and his ilk),” Vance wrote in a deleted-tweet….“I’m definitely not gonna vote for Trump because I think that he’s projecting very complex problems onto simple villains,” Vance told CNN’s Jake Tapper ahead of the 2016 election….“Trump makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us,” he wrote in October 2016.”

Michael Tomasky, editor of The New Republic, interviews Stuart Stevens, a Lincoln Project consultant and writes,”Regular cable news viewers will know that Lincoln Project consultant Stuart Stevens has been steadfast in arguing that the Democrats should stick with the president. Regular TNR readers will know that most of our columns have argued otherwise. Here, Michael Tomasky asks Stevens to make the case. “I’m just hard-wired that in a campaign, you’re going to have incredibly difficult moments,” Stevens said. “The instinct shouldn’t be to run for the lifeboats. You fix it.” Watch to see what Stevens thinks the Democrats need to emphasize to win, and what he and the Lincoln Project are doing between now and November.” The interview:

An excerpt from “How Blue-Collar Candidates Could Change Politics” by Barry Yeoman at The Assembly: “About half the U.S. labor force qualifies as working class: people with manual, service-sector, and clerical jobs. They rarely see themselves reflected in their elected bodies….People with current or recent working-class jobs make up 1 percent of all state legislators, and 0 percent in North Carolina, according to data compiled by political scientists Nicholas Carnes at Duke University and Eric Hansen at Loyola University Chicago. If you add leaders of unions that represent working-class people, the national figure rises to 1.6 percent. The number is higher for city councils in the United States, but still hovers around 10 percent. A notable outlier is Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, a former factory worker and now the Republican candidate for governor….Nor do working-class voters have a clear champion in either political party. Democrats carried that mantle for much of the 20th century—and, to some degree, still do—in part because of their alliance with organized labor. But that alliance was eroding by 1993, when President Bill Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement into law. North Carolina’s manufacturing sector cratered after NAFTA, as factories closed and jobs moved to Mexico….“That was a demarcation point,” said Gwen Frisbie-Fulton, Down Home’s senior narrative strategist. “The Democrats started to feel more elite, feel very metropolitan, and [weren’t] talking about bread-and-butter issues.”….Carnes and Noam Lupu, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, examined survey data from 1,000 Americans who, in 2015, were asked to compare hypothetical political candidates. Factory workers fared about 2 percentage points better than business owners in these matchups, though the difference was not statistically significant. “[Voters] tend to perceive politicians from working-class jobs as maybe having a little less competence, but a little more warmth or concern for their problems,” Carnes said. “The two things kind of wash out in the end.”

In “Republicans Just Handed Down a Death Sentence to the Nation’s Coal Miners,” Kim Kelley writes at In These Times: “It is shameful that some in Congress would play politics with the lives of the coal miners who too often sacrifice their health to power our country,” commented Chelsea Barnes, director of government affairs and strategy for the clean-energy advocacy group Appalachian Voices, in a statement. ​“Make no mistake: blocking the silica dust standard will cost lives. It is imperative that Congress strike this reckless provision as the legislative process moves forward.”….This rule, for which so many workers fought for so long, is a part of what these Republican committee goons call a ​“destructive and anti-worker regulatory agenda.” The final vote was 31 to 25, which likely means that every single Republican voted for this — and a Democrat joined them (and I for one am awfully curious about who that is). The irony is painful, particularly when one considers the Republicans’ cringeworthy push to position themselves as a ​“blue-collar party” that fights for ​“American workers” against out-of-touch liberal elites. Even Donald Trump, who used to yammer constantly about how much he ​“loved” coal miners and how he was going to bring back the coal industry, has largely abandoned both during his current campaign of destruction….When a coal miner is stricken with black lung and left unable to work, the absolute highest monthly payment that they can receive from the federal black lung benefits fund is $1,545.00, provided they have three or more dependents; if they’re all alone, it’s capped at $772. Meanwhile, members of Congress have access to the best medical care in the nation, thanks to their low-cost, gold-plated healthcare plans and six-figure salaries, both of which are paid for with workers’ tax dollars. Each one of the Representatives who voted to defund the silica rule brings home at least $174,000 per year. Aderholt himself is worth about $9 million, and took home $3.8 million in federal farm subsidies in 2023 for his spouse and businesses. All that filthy lucre could probably buy a lot of oxygen tanks for the coal miners that he and his colleagues just doomed….“It’s very disheartening to see a handful of Washington politicians try and undo all this hard work on a whim,” said Robinson of the National Black Lung Association, in a statement. ​“If this policy becomes law, it will put the lives of countless miners at risk. Mining families deserve better, and we urge Congress to throw out this dangerous policy and get to work helping miners, not making their lives much harder.”

In “Get a Grip, Democrats. You Can Still Win This: Biden’s not far behind, the economic conditions remain excellent, and a vile assassination attempt in July doesn’t determine November’s outcome,” Bill; Scher writes at Washington Monthly:

It is trite but true to note that a lot can happen over the next three months. We can’t be clairvoyant, but optimism is warranted. Israel and Hamas may soon agree to a ceasefire. Biden’s border crackdown may continue to drive down the number of illegal crossings and relieve pressure on municipalities. Perhaps most importantly, the Federal Reserve may cut interest rates and buoy public perception of the growing economy.

Many Democrats are understandably nervous about how Biden will perform in the campaign’s final weeks, but let’s not forget that Trump may do plenty to rankle swing voters, as he has throughout his political career. It’s not true that Trump always “gets away with it.” If he did, Republicans would have had better electoral performances in 2018, 2020, and 2022.

The brazen attempt by Republicans to deify Trump and claim God intervened to save him from the assassination attempt could well be viewed by swing voters as crass opportunism, especially if the Trump campaign tries to milk the tragedy for months.

Scher is not a ‘Biden only’ supporter, as he explains:

I’ve already made my case that Biden should not only withdraw from the 2024 presidential race but also resign and give President Kamala Harris the best chance to win in November. I stand by it, and I worry that Biden will have more episodes raising questions about his neurological health. There is still time for Biden to withdraw, and any Democrat concerned about his ability to campaign and govern effectively should continue to press the case.

But Scher sees a significant edge for Democrats in terms of campaign muscle:

If the contours of the race remained fixed, its outcome may hinge upon the quality of their two parties’ get-out-the-vote operations. And on this front, Democrats should retain their optimism. As I recently wrote, the Trump campaign has made a reckless bet on the far-right Turning Point network to shoulder much of its GOTV effort despite its nonexistent track record of successful electioneering and its reputation for financial mismanagement.

Biden and the Democrats have a good record to run on, Scher writes:

The fundamentals of the 2024 election remain favorable to Democrats. Gross Domestic Product is growing. Unemployment is low. Wages have been beating inflation for more than a year. American soldiers aren’t fighting and dying in an unpopular ground war. For over a century, incumbent parties in power have won American elections under these conditions.

Scher concludes:

Yes, we are facing an unusual set of X-factors that could render the lessons of history inoperative. But defeatism guarantees defeat. The Democrats may need to fight more of an uphill battle than necessary, but uphill battles can still be won.

Anything can happen in this crazy political year. There is still time to persuade a critical mass of swing voters in battleground states to honestly compare Biden’s record to that of his opponent. If that happens, all of the bad news of the last month could look like old news in November.

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:

Since the latter part of the 20^th century, the left has had a plan. Well, not really a plan, it just kind of….happened. Call it, to use Thomas Piketty’s term, the Brahmin Left. That is his characterization of Western left parties increasingly bereft of working-class voters and increasingly dominated by highly educated voters and elites. The Brahmin Left has evolved over many decades and certainly includes today’s Democratic Party, Britain’s Labour Party, and the French left. The chart below illustrates this trend.

For Brahmin Left parties, the temptation is great to lean into their emerging strengths and just hope they can retain enough of their working-class base to make the political arithmetic work. That is the natural inclination of the elites and activists who now dominate the parties. But these parties have been increasingly battered by right populist competitors who are bleeding off more and more of the left’s working-class support. That calls the viability of the Brahmin Left model into question. There is a point beyond which the loss of working-class voters cannot be plausibly balanced by increased support among college-educated and professional voters and the model is fatally undermined.

We’re certainly not there yet but we may not be very far away. We have two recent elections in France and the UK to look at and an upcoming one in the United States that provide a real-time update on where we are in this process. Is it a last hurrah for the Brahmin Left or a new stage in the model’s success? Let’s take a look.

France. After a stunning showing for Marine Le Pen’s right populist National Rally (RN) party in the EU parliamentary elections, where her party garnered far and away the most votes, President Macron decided to dissolve the national parliament and call new elections. (His motivations for doing so were complicated and perhaps not completely knowable.)

The result in the first round of France’s two round elections was another triumph for RN. Their alliance took 33 percent of the vote, compared to 28 percent for the New Popular Front (NFP)—a left coalition of Jean-Luc Melenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI), the Socialists, the Communists, and the Greens—and 21 percent for the centrist Ensemble coalition, which includes Macron’s party. In the second round, the RN alliance actually increased its vote share but did not gain the most seats because NFP and Ensemble made a deal to pool their support against National Rally in districts where their candidates were trailing RN. The leftist NFP wound up with 180 seats, the most of any group, despite getting only 26 percent of the popular vote. Macron’s Ensemble got 159 seats with 25 percent of the vote and, bringing up the rear, the RN alliance got a mere 142 seats, despite their 37 percent of the vote. The seat result was a big disappointment for RN even though it represented big gains for them over the previous election.

The demographics of the vote for left and right in the election are instructive. NFP had a classic Brahmin Left profile: they did by far the best of the different political groupings among managers/professionals and those with the highest levels of education. The RN in contrast did by far the best among blue collar and low-level white collar workers and those with the lowest levels of education. Indeed, the RN got an absolute majority (57 percent) of blue collar workers despite the many ways in which the vote was split. In the view of Emile Chabal, an academic specialist in French political history, “the RN can fairly lay claim to being the party of the French working classes.”

So are the French results a big victory for the Brahmin Left? Through the vagaries of the French electoral system and shifting alliances, one could say yes but it does have the air of a last hurrah. The right populists have barely been kept out of power and have considerably increased their overall strength and hold over the French working class. And the prospects for effective governance in France seem very poor. The program of the NFP, the group with the most seats, is ludicrously left-wing and seems on a collision course with the preferences of Macron’s Ensemble coalition, their presumed partners in forming a government. The NFP program includes:

…overturning Macron’s pension, unemployment, education, immigration, police, guaranteed minimum income, and universal national service reforms, as well as his cuts to funding for low-income housing and his merger of French nuclear safety organisations; lowering the retirement age to 60 in the longer-term; implementing price freezes on essential food, energy, and gas; raising the minimum wage to €1,600 per month (representing a 14 percent increase) and personalised housing assistance by 10 percent; moving towards a 32-hour work week for arduous or night shift jobs; conditioning government support for businesses on adherence to environmental, social, and anti-discriminatory regulations; reserving workers one-third of seats on boards of directors; increasing financial transaction taxes; banning bank financing for fossil fuels; nationalising control over water; reforming the generalised social contribution and inheritance taxes (capping the latter), as well as nearly tripling the number of income tax brackets from 5 to 14, to make them more progressive; re-instituting a solidarity tax on wealth “with a climate component”; enacting an exit tax on funds withdrawn from the country; charging a vehicle miles traveled tax on imports; guaranteeing a price floor for agricultural products; cancelling the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement and any future free trade treaties; and forbidding the imports of agricultural products which do not meet domestic social and environmental standards.

Other key NFP proposals included raising the image and salaries of public healthcare, education, justice, and government jobs; strengthening the industrial sector in key strategic areas; establishing the right to menstrual leave; prohibiting new major highway projects; outlawing intensive animal farming and the usage of all PFASs, neonicotinoids, and glyphosate; re-examining the Common Agricultural Policy; providing partial or full government financing for home insulation; creating free public water fountains, showers, and toilets; constructing 200,000 new public housing units per year; requiring mandatory rent control in high-rent areas; introducing proportional representation; removing article 49.3 from the constitution; outlawing the usage of blast balls by riot police; continuing to supply weapons to defend Ukraine; recognising the state of Palestine along with Israel; and demanding compliance with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) order against Israel and ceasing support for Benjamin Netanyahu‘s government.

OK then! It seems a bit much I’d have to say—though I do like the idea of free public water fountains. I mean, who doesn’t like a water fountain? Overall however the common ground between this program and that of the Macronist Ensemble seems close to non-existent. That suggests that it’ll be rocky days ahead for France with these mismatched partners and Macron still reigning as president. That further suggests that the RN, by being in opposition, will be well-positioned to benefit from dissatisfaction with chaotic government and ongoing economic and social problems, growing their working class support even further. The 2027 presidential election looms; the Brahmin Left and Macron’s center may have a hard time pulling off their trick again.

UK. The British election presents us with a different picture. Keir Starmer’s Labour gained a mighty majority, dethroning the massively unpopular Tories after 14 years of Conservative rule. Labour took 412 seats out of a possible 650, their second biggest victory since World War II, while the Tories crashed to their worst performance ever. However, Labour’s popular vote share was only 35 percent, the lowest-ever winning share and actually less than the 40 percent Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour got in 2017. The radical disjuncture between vote share (35 percent) and seat share (63 percent) is possible due to the UK’s multi-party, first past the post electoral system.

Despite Labour’s relatively low vote share, the demographics of Labour support represented a U-turn of sorts from the Brahmin Left playbook. Labour did better than the previous election among non-degree holders while actually losing some ground among degree-holders. This narrowed the education differential of the Labour vote from 42 percent degree/28 percent non-degree to 38 percent degree/33 percent non-degree. That’s quite a shift.

Read more…

Democratic politics was plenty complicated even before Trump was wounded in an assassination attempt. Democrats still have a daunting challenge to meet in mobilizing for the 2024 elections, and they can’t back away from the task because of the tragic shooting that took two lives, injured others and almost killed the Republican nominee. But let all Democrats be united in deploring and condemning the shooting and political violence. Social media is full of unworthy comments about the shooting from people who should know better. No Democrat should respond to them in any way that encourages or tolerates such comments. Democrats must be the adult party, the one which condemns all forms of violence, especially when directed at political adversaries. Not only is violence morally wrong; to tolerate it in any way is to invite certain defeat in the elections. “Toning down” the rhetoric is not enough. Democrats should openly and consistently espouse nonviolence in all of our political strategies and tactics, and, to paraphrase the message of Martin Luther King, Jr., urge everyone to refrain from violence of “fist, tongue and heart.” It is impossible to gauge the political effects of the assassination attempt on the November elections until all ballots have been counted and subjected to a rigorous analysis. But there is no quicker way for Democrats to blow it than to allow cynical comments about the shooting. Pennsylvania’s Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro has provided a good  template for responding to this tragedy: “Violence targeted at any political party or political leader is absolutely unacceptable. It has no place in Pennsylvania or the United States.” In expressing his sympathy for the victims of the shooting he added “We lost a fellow Pennsylvanian last night: Corey Comperatore….Corey dove on his family to protect them last night at this rally….Corey was the very best of us. May his memory be a blessing.”

Some other Democratic leaders’ responses to the shooting noted by Associated Press, via Daily Kos include: “As one whose family has been the victim of political violence, I know firsthand that political violence of any kind has no place in our society. I thank God that former President Trump is safe,” former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a statement. “As we learn more details about this horrifying incident, let us pray that all those in attendance at the former President’s rally today are unharmed.”….Obama, Trump’s immediate predecessor in the White House, shared the views of others who have held the presidency, writing on social media: “There is absolutely no place for political violence in our democracy. Although we don’t yet know exactly what happened, we should all be relieved that former President Trump wasn’t seriously hurt, and use this moment to recommit ourselves to civility and respect in our politics. Michelle and I are wishing him a quick recovery.”….President Joe Biden said in his Oval Office address last night: ““We cannot, we must not, go down this road in America,” he said, speaking in a prime time speech to the nation. “There is no place in America for this kind of violence, for any violence ever. Period. No exceptions. We can’t allow this violence to be normalized.”….Sen. John Fetterman, a Pennsylvania Democrat, blasted the violence in his home state. “I am appalled and condemn in the strongest terms this violence in Butler,” he wrote on X. “I extend my condolences to those injured and wish a speedy and full recovery for Mr. Trump.” Also at X, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez added “There is no place for political violence, including the horrific incident we just witnessed in Pennsylvania. It is absolutely unacceptable and must be denounced in the strongest terms. My heart goes out to all the victims and I wish the former President a speedy recovery.”

At The Guardian, Katrina vanden Heuval, editor and publisher of The Nation, writes, “Being the victim of a shooting is terrifying. Donald Trump and those wounded and killed deserve our sympathy and concern. We should not forget the risks that political leaders take in a society as polarized and as gunned up as this one….What should we take from this horror? We should begin by decrying all political violence as unacceptable. President Biden has condemned the shooting ardently and unequivocally. So, too, did prominent Democrats who fundamentally disagree with the former president. Hopefully, leaders from across the political and ideological spectrum will join in these condemnations. Just as, one hopes, they will condemn the growing threats of violence that public officials from the president to poll volunteers to judges and jurors now receive….But this is about more than politics and public life. This country has too much gun violence – and too many guns. Most of the victims are not famous, or powerful. With children in grade schools now forced to take part in active shooter drills, it is long past time for all of us to get serious about curbing gun violence….Trump should be assessed – as anyone who would lead this country – on his behavior, his character, and his agenda. That responsibility does not disappear because someone took a shot at him. The prospect of a Trump presidency was as deeply unsettling before Saturday’s shooting incident – and it remains so after it….No one should be fooled. Donald Trump deserves sympathy for the attack he experienced. That does not, however, make him an acceptable candidate for the presidency.”

“Ahead of the November presidential election, just 19% of Americans say democracy in the United States is a good example for other countries to follow, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in April,” Janell Fetterolf and Sofia Hernandez Ramones report at the Pew Research Center on July 10th. “The most common view – held by 72% of Americans – is that democracy in the U.S. used to be a good example, but has not been in recent years. Another 8% of Americans say U.S. democracy has never beena good example for other countries to follow….Americans are much more likely than people in other countries to say U.S. democracy used to be a good example. A median of 40% of adults across 34 other countries surveyed in 2024 take this view….Relatively few Americans overall see the nation’s democracy as a good example for other countries to follow. But adults ages 50 and older are more likely than those under 50 to hold this view. Younger adults, on the other hand, are more likely than older adults to say American democracy has never been a good example (11% vs. 4%)….Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are somewhat more likely than Republicans and Republican leaners to see U.S. democracy as a good example (22% vs. 17%). This is nearly the reverse of where things stood in February 2021, when 24% of Republicans and 16% of Democrats saw democracy in the U.S. as a good example….Opinions also differ by voter status. Among Americans who are registered to vote, 21% see U.S. democracy as a good example, compared with 13% of those who are not registered to vote. Registered voters are also somewhat more likely to answer this question.” A critical part of the challenge facing Democrats in the 2024 elections must be to improve these numbers.

At New York I discussed and tried to resolve one source of anxiety about a potential alternative ticket:

One very central dynamic in the recent saga of Democratic anxiety over Joe Biden’s chances against Donald Trump, given the weaknesses he displayed in his first 2024 debate, has been the role of his understudy, Vice-President Kamala Harris. My colleague Gabriel Debenedetti explained the problem nearly two years ago as the “Kamala Harris conundrum”:

“Top party donors have privately worried to close Obama allies that they’re skeptical of Harris’s prospects as a presidential candidate, citing the implosion of her 2020 campaign and her struggles as VP. Jockeying from other potential competitors, like frenemy Gavin Newsom, suggests that few would defer to her if Biden retired. Yet Harris’s strength among the party’s most influential voters nonetheless puts her in clear pole position.”

The perception that Harris is too unpopular to pick up the party banner if Biden dropped it, but too well-positioned to be pushed aside without huge collateral damage, was a major part of the mindset of political observers when evaluating Democratic options after the debate. But now fresher evidence of Harris’s public standing shows she’s just as viable as many of the candidates floated in fantasy scenarios about an “open convention,” “mini-primary,” or smoke-filled room that would sweep away both parts of the Biden-Harris ticket.

For a good while now, Harris’s job-approval numbers have been converging with Biden’s after trailing them initially. These indicate dismal popularity among voters generally, but not in a way that makes her an unacceptable replacement candidate should she be pressed into service in an emergency. As of now, her job-approval ratio in the FiveThirtyEight averages is 37.1 percent approve to 51.2 percent disapprove. Biden’s is 37.4 percent approve to 56.8 percent disapprove. In the favorability ratios tracked by RealClearPolitics, Harris is at 38.3 favorable to 54.6 percent unfavorable, while Biden is at 39.4 percent favorable to 56.9 percent unfavorable. There’s just not a great deal of difference other than slightly lower disapproval/unfavorable numbers for the veep.

On the crucial measurement of viability as a general-election candidate against Trump, there wasn’t much credible polling prior to the post-debate crisis. An Emerson survey in February 2024 showed Harris trailing Trump by 3 percent (43 percent to 46 percent), which was a better showing than Gavin Newsom (down ten points, 36 percent to 46 percent) or Gretchen Whitmer (down 12 points, 33 percent to 45 percent).

After the debate, though, there was a sudden cascade of polling matching Democratic alternatives against Trump, and while Harris’s strength varied, she consistently did as well as or better than the fantasy alternatives. The first cookie on the plate was a one-day June 28 survey from Data for Progress, which showed virtually indistinguishable polling against Trump by Biden, Harris, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Gavin Newsom, J.B. Pritzker, Josh Shapiro, and Gretchen Whitmer. All of them trailed Trump by 2 to 3 percent among likely voters.

Then two national polls released on July 2 showed Harris doing better than other feasible Biden alternatives. Reuters/Ipsos (which showed Biden and Trump tied) had Harris within a point of Trump, while Newsom trailed by three points, Andy Beshear by four, Whitmer by five, and Pritzker by six points. Similarly, CNN showed Harris trailing Trump by just two points; Pete Buttigieg trailing by four points; and Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer trailing him by five points.

Emerson came back with a new poll on July 9 that wasn’t as sunny as some for Democrats generally (every tested name trailed Trump, with Biden down by three points). But again, Harris (down by six points) did better than Newsom (down eight points); Buttigieg and Whitmer (down ten points); and Shapiro (down 12 points).

There’s been some talk that Harris might help Democrats with base constituencies that are sour about Biden. There’s not much publicly available evidence testing that hypothesis, though the crosstabs in the latest CNN poll do show Harris doing modestly better than Biden among people of color, voters under the age of 35, and women.

The bottom line is that one element of the “Kamala Harris conundrum” needs to be reconsidered. There should be no real drop-off in support if Biden (against current expectations) steps aside in favor of his vice-president (the only really feasible “replacement” scenario at this point). She probably has a higher ceiling of support than Biden as well, but in any event, she would have a fresh opportunity to make a strong first or second impression on many Americans who otherwise know little about her.