In “Putting Biden’s Troubles with Young Voters in Perspective: Youngest voters have been strongly Democratic in recent elections, but the president also has clear weaknesses with that group,” Kyle Kondik writes at Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “According to the available exit polls from the 2020 primary season, Biden generally won paltry shares of the 18-29 bloc, finishing well behind his top rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), even in states that he won handily, like South Carolina. There were 15 states with Democratic primary exit polls in 2020 that had results for the 18-29 group, as compiled by CNN; Biden won the 18-29 group only in Mississippi, a state where Biden won 81%-15% overall against Sanders (that primary was held a week after Super Tuesday, when Biden had grabbed the reins of the nominating contest following a slow start in the kickoff states). Biden won 61%-35% among the 18-29 group in Mississippi; he did not surpass 30% among that group in any other state that had an exit poll, and his support from the youngest voters was minuscule in many places, like in Super Tuesday megastates California (just 6%) and Texas (12%). Biden still won many of these states (including Texas), but it’s clear that the youngest voters would have preferred a different nominee. To the extent Biden shows weakness in his renomination bid, we would expect protest votes to disproportionately come from younger voters (this is something to monitor during the primary season). This primary weakness didn’t prevent Biden from doing well with young voters in the 2020 general election, but it is an indicator that Biden’s softness with young voters is not new….Biden’s approval with young Americans has also been weak. Back in the spring, one of the top sources of information on young voters — the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School — found Biden’s approval rating at only 36% with 18-29 year olds. A possible contributor to Biden’s weak standing with these voters may include the economy and inflation — the aforementioned New York Times polls of swing states found that among 18-29 year olds who supported Biden in 2020 in these states, just 11% thought the economy was “excellent” or “good,” compared to 89% who said the economy was “poor” or “only fair.” This was a more pessimistic economic view than older cohorts of 2020 Biden supporters. Other potential contributors could be Biden’s unsuccessful effort to forgive some student debt for tens of millions of Americans and, more recently, how Biden has handled the aftermath of the Hamas strike on Israel in early October (young people are likelier than the broader public to sympathize with the Palestinians instead of Israel)….Our own two cents is that we really doubt Trump would beat Biden with young voters, or even come that close to doing so, in an actual November 2024 election. But we also think Biden clearly has weaknesses with young voters — weaknesses that could be electorally fatal if they endure, given the highly competitive nature of modern presidential elections. Young voters could end up defecting to third party candidates at higher rates than older cohorts, and it’s also possible that some of these voters from what is already a lower-turnout group could just decide not to vote, which could have the effect of reducing whatever Biden’s margin with the group would be.”

Leah Askarinam, Holly Fuong, and Mary Radcliffe write in “Why is Biden losing support from people of color His numbers among Black, Hispanic and Asian Americans have reached a new low” at 538: “According to a basic polling average,* Biden’s approval rating is currently at one of the lowest points of his presidency. But he wasn’t always this unpopular. When he was sworn into office, Biden’s approval rating started in the high 50s, but it dropped below 50 percent in summer 2021. That overlapped with the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the delta variant of COVID-19, which seemed to put an end to Biden’s honeymoon period….Biden’s approval rating continued to decline for nearly a year, bottoming out near 40 percent in summer 2022 as inflation reached 40-year highs. But it rebounded that fall, not long after the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned federal abortion rights. Still, the president’s approval rating hovered in the low 40s through the rest of 2022 and through the first few months of 2023, and by this summer, it had started to sag again….But with which demographic groups is Biden losing the most support? We looked at the crosstabs of his approval polls to find out. Biden’s approval rating has consistently been highest among Black Americans and lowest among white Americans. But while white Americans have been lukewarm about Biden for a majority of his administration, the president is losing support at a faster clip among people of color. That’s consistent with what other sources have found: The latest New York Times/Siena College polling found signs that Biden was losing ground among Black voters. And Democrats have been warning about signs of Latino voters turning toward the GOP for years….Biden started his presidency with an 86 percent average approval rating among Black Americans, higher than any other racial group. But by July 2022, that number was down 23 percentage points, to 63 percent. That said, his approval rating among Black Americans — unlike the other three racial groups we looked at — did mildly increase ahead of the midterm elections. But since early 2023, it has dropped again to 60 percent, the lowest his approval rating has ever been among Black Americans during his presidency….Democrats need to make it clear that the 2024 election is a choice between two opposing visions, not a referendum on the Biden presidency.”

From “‘Time to Be Bold’: Advice for Democrats from a Quietly Powerful Governor: As the new chair of the Democratic Governors Association, Gov. Tim Walz has some tips for the party” by Elena Schneider at Politico: “Like many Democrats, Walz doesn’t think President Joe Biden is getting the credit he deserves on a relatively strong economy, but the campaign can still retool their message as needed….“They may — I think — rework, refine, this message, but it doesn’t change the fact that Joe Biden invested in the middle class, just like Democratic governors did, and made life more affordable,” Walz said Saturday on the sidelines of the DGA’s winter meeting in Phoenix….Regardless of what happens in 2024, the party boasts a deep bench going forward, and Walz believes the 2028 Democratic nominee could indeed be a sitting governor….“I’m biased towards governors,” he said. “But they’re proven.”….Schneider: What are the most important governors’ races next year? Walz: I think holding those races we have. I tried my hardest to get [Washington Gov.] Jay Inslee to stay again. He could be my governor forever. There, of course, and in North Carolina and Delaware, where we’re term limited with [North Carolina Gov.] Roy Cooper and [Delaware Gov.] John Carney. I think there’s a golden opportunity in New Hampshire [where GOP incumbent Chris Sununu is retiring]. I can tell you those four states are a priority, especially with our incumbent governors being term-limited….We’re not naive. This is going to be nationalized in some of these races. But governors have a much better way, and especially good ones, of bringing it back down. Andy Beshear did that and he won because of that. He stayed focused on disaster relief, about recovering, caring for people, delivering on that, so they’re going to have to explain why they’re supportive of President Trump, but I think our candidates will be out there saying, “This is the difference it makes. We’re functional, not dysfunctional. We get things done,” and I think that’ll be the message.”

Schneider continues, “Schneider: Governors like Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan and Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania have job approval ratings that are 10, 15, 20 points better than Joe Biden. Can you explain that gap?….Walz: I think it’s not surprising to see governors do that, because we’re delivering every day. I think the constant drumbeat of dysfunction in D.C. gets attached to the president. But we all run into this. When we’re running against the generic Republican, our races are always really close, but there’s no such thing [as a generic Republican]. These guys are weird. Once they start running, their weirdness shows up, and especially with the nominee on the other side. I don’t think it’s that surprising….This is going to be a binary choice. Democracy, or what we saw with the former president. Projects, like roads getting built, or dysfunction. Pre-existing conditions being covered by health care, or having that ripped out. Those binary choices will start to become clear. They saw us act, how we acted during Covid, they saw us act on the recovery. It’ll work itself out….It’s one of our jobs to get out there and talk about it. I’ve talked to [White House infrastructure czar] Mitch Landrieu and the White House on infrastructure. Look, this is a golden age of infrastructure because of the president. Governors are the ones that are managing that — broadband expansion, removal of lead pipes. Put the signs up. Say where it came from….I wouldn’t be so bullish on Joe Biden or be so excited about it, if I saw that he wasn’t delivering. I’ve watched him deliver. We, as governors, who lived through what President Trump did not do during Covid, I’m not going back there again. Tell the story. Put some signs up for building bridges. Let us know where the money came from.”

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

As we head into the 2024 election, Biden’s chief liability is clearly voter dissatisfaction with the economy, which triumphalist talk about “Bidenomics” has done little to allay. However, there are other serious weaknesses he will have to overcome. One obvious one is immigration and the border where voters’ assessment of his administration’s performance is particularly dire. But we shouldn’t forget about crime and public safety, where Democrats’ image is scarcely better.

Gallup has just released a tranche of data on the crime issue which highlight the potential salience of the issue in 2024. Key findings include the following:

1. Sixty-three percent of the public now say the crime problem in the nation is extremely or very serious. This is the highest reading on this question since Gallup starting tracking it in 2000.
2. Over three-quarters (77 percent) say there’s more crime in the country today than there was a year ago. Along with similar results from their 2022 and 2020 surveys, these views on rising crime are the highest since 1993 in the Gallup’s series.
3. In terms of crime in respondents’ local areas, 55 percent say there’s more crime today than a year ago. Along with a similar reading from last year, these are the highest levels every measured by Gallup on this question going back to the beginning of their time series in 1972.
4. Over a quarter (28 percent) say their household has been victimized by at least one of these crimes in the past year: having a home broken into, having property vandalized, having money or property stolen, having money or property stolen by force, having a car stolen, being physically assaulted or being sexually assaulted. Except for 2016, this is the highest level reported by the public since Gallup initiated this time series in 2000.
5. Forty percent now say within a mile of their home there is an area where they would be afraid to walk alone at night. This is the highest level Gallup has measured since the crime-ridden early 1990’s.
6. Along with levels measured last year, Americans are more worried about the crimes of having their car stolen or broken into, being attacked while driving your car, getting mugged, and getting murdered than they have been since 2000 when Gallup started measuring these fears.
7. As for illegal drugs, for the first time since 1972, when Gallup first asked about this question, more than half (52 percent) think the U.S. is losing ground on the illegal drug problem. Just 24 percent believe the U.S. is making progress, 28 points less than those who feel we’re losing ground—the largest gap ever measured.
8. In light of the trends above, it is not surprising that negative views of the criminal justice system have gone up. Views that the justice system is “not tough enough” have spiked, rising 17 points since 2020 to 58 percent of the public, the highest level since the early 2000’s.

Consistent with these pessimistic views, voters are not happy with the job the Democrats have been doing on crime. In a September NBC poll, voters favored Republican over Democrats by 26 points on dealing with crime. Biden is consistently way underwater on his job approval in the crime area, averaging 21 points more disapproval than approval on the issue.

Even more pertinent to the coming election, Democracy Corps has a new surveyout of 2500 voters in next year’s battleground states and congressional districts. In this survey, inflation and the cost of living is tabbed by voters as the most pressing issue for the country by a considerable margin. But the second most cited is “crime, homelessness, and violence”. This pattern holds for black, Hispanic, and Asian voters and for moderate Democrats and political independents.

In the same survey, battleground voters favor Trump and the Republicans over Biden and the Democrats by 12 points on “feeling safe” and by 17 points on “handling crime”. The survey also asked these voters what they would worry about the most if Biden wins the election. Topping the list was “the border being wide open to millions of impoverished immigrants, many are criminals and drug dealers who are overwhelming America’s cities.” But a very close second—just a point behind—was “crime and homelessness being out of control in cities and the violence killing small businesses and the police”. Among black, Hispanic and Asian voters as well as among white Millennials, moderate Democrats and political independents, crime and homelessness worries actually topped the list.

It is not hard to think of reasons voters feel this way. In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder and the nationwide movement sparked by it, the climate for police reform was highly favorable. But Democrats blew the opportunity by allowing the party to be associated with unpopular movement slogans like “defund the police” that did not appear to take public safety concerns very seriously.

At the same time, Democrats became associated with a wave of progressive public prosecutors who seemed quite hesitant about keeping criminals off the street, even as a spike in violent crimes like murders and carjacking swept the nation. This was twinned to a climate of tolerance and non-prosecution for lesser crimes that degraded the quality of life in many cities under Democratic control. San Francisco became practically a poster child for the latter problem under DA Chesa Boudin’s “leadership.”

So the voters kicked him out in a recall election. Based on the neighborhood pattern of voting and pre-election polling data, it seems clear that Asian voter support for the recall was particularly strong.

Nonwhite support for cashiering Boudin shouldn’t be surprising. The most enthusiastic supporters of a Boudin-style approach to policing tend to be white college-educated liberals. Nonwhite and working-class voters approach the issue of crime quite differently. Think of Eric Adams’ support in his successful run for the New York mayoralty, or of Cherelle Parker’s support in her recent successful run to be Philadelphia’s mayor.

Adams wasn’t afraid to put public safety front and center in his political appeals and called out affluent professionals who think nonwhite and working class communities can do with less policing. He believed that this was what his constituencies wanted.

Read more…

In “Democracy faces two threats. Trump is only one of them,” Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. writes:

Over the next year, the survival of democracy should be the central issue in American politics. To insist on this is to be a realist, not an alarmist. But making that case requires identifying two distinct threats.

The first is Donald Trump, who is already at the center of our national conversation. The second is the ongoing assault on voting rights, which rarely commands the airwaves.

Let’s start with the good news: It has become untenable to treat Trump as a normal presidential candidate, thanks to his own evermore radical rhetoric, starting with his pledges to use the Justice Department as a tool for revenge against political enemies. The result is a partial but welcome shift in journalistic coverage recognizing Trump’s journey into what the New York Times called “more fascist-sounding territory.” The Economist, no avatar of left-wing politics, received wide attention for declaring that Trump “poses the biggest danger to the world in 2024.”

This led to an explosion of state abuses, including discriminatory voter-identification laws, targeted purges of electoral rolls, gerrymanders that undercut minority representation and changes in early-voting rules that often advantaged some groups over others.

Because such moves fall short of the wholesale disenfranchisement of Black voters during the Jim Crow era — it ended with the Voting Rights Act’s passage in 1965 — defenders of today’s restrictions insist they are not discriminating against anyone. But making it harder for some people to vote — often in the name of preventing the falsely imagined “voter fraud” that is at the heart of Trump’s election denial — is no less an attack on democracy.

“Why do we let the state put barriers in front of people when they exercise their right to vote?” Hasen asked in an interview. The director of UCLA’s Safeguarding Democracy Project, Hasen details his proposed amendment and the case for it in a forthcoming book, “A Real Right to Vote.” A carefully framed amendment, he argues, could simultaneously protect voter access and assure election integrity. He’d link automatic voter registration with a nationwide, universal, nondiscriminatory form of voter identification.

Staring at the polls and recent precedents, I offered some blunt thoughts at New York on exactly how popular Biden needs to be in 2024:

There’s abundant evidence that if it were held today, a general election rematch of Joe Biden and Donald Trump would show the 46th president in serious trouble. He’s trailing Trump in national and most battleground-state polls, his job-approval rating is at or below 40 percent, his 2020 electoral base is very shaky, and the public mood, particularly on the economy, is decidedly sour.

The standard response of Biden loyalists to the bad recent polling news is to say “The election is a year away!,” as though public-opinion data this far out is useless. But it’s only useless if Biden turns things around, and while there’s plenty of time for that to happen, there has to be a clear sense of what he needs to secure victory and how to go about meeting those needs. Vox’s Andrew Prokop provides a good summary of possible explanations for Biden’s current position:

“One theory: Biden is blowing it — the polls are a clear warning sign that the president has unique flaws as a candidate, and another Democrat would likely be doing better.

“A second theory: Biden’s facing a tough environment — voters have decided they don’t like the economy or the state of the world, and, fairly or not, he’s taking the brunt of it.

“And a third theory: Biden’s bad numbers will get better — voters aren’t even paying much attention yet, and as the campaign gears up, the president will bounce back.”

The first theory, in my opinion, is irrelevant; Biden isn’t going to change his mind about running for reelection, and it’s simply too late for any other Democrat to push him aside. And the second and third theories really point to the same conclusion: The president is currently too unpopular to win in 2024 and needs to find a way to change the dynamics of a general-election contest with Trump.

There’s not much question that Biden needs to improve his popularity at least modestly. There is only one president in living memory with job-approval ratings anything like Biden’s going into his reelection year who actually won; that would be Harry Truman in 1948, and there’s a reason his successful reelection is regarded as one of the great upsets in American political history. There are others, including Barack Obama, who looked pretty toasty at this point in a first term and still won reelection but who managed to boost their popularity before Election Day (Obama boosted his job-approval rating, per Gallup, from 42 percent at the end of November 2011 to 52 percent when voters went to the polls 11 months later).

Given the current state of partisan polarization, it’s unlikely Biden can get majority job approval next year even with the most fortunate set of circumstances. But the good news for him is that he probably doesn’t have to. Job-approval ratings are crucial indicators in a normal presidential reelection cycle that is basically a referendum on the incumbent’s record. Assuming Trump is the Republican nominee, 2024 will not be a normal reelection cycle for three reasons.

First, this would be the exceedingly rare election matching two candidates with presidential records to defend, making it inherently a comparative election (it has happened only once, in 1888, when President Benjamin Harrison faced former president Grover Cleveland). In some respects (most crucially, perceptions of the economy), the comparison might favor Trump. In many others (e.g., Trump’s two impeachments and insurrectionary actions feeding his current legal peril), the comparison will likely favor Biden.

Second, Trump is universally known and remains one of the most controversial figures in American political history. It’s not as though he will have an opportunity to remold his persona or repudiate words and actions that make him simply unacceptable to very nearly half the electorate. Trump’s favorability ratio (40 percent to 55 percent, per RealClearPolitics polling averages) is identical to Biden’s.

And third, Trump seems determined to double down on the very traits that make him so controversial. His second-term plans are straightforwardly authoritarian, and his rhetoric of dehumanizing and threatening revenge against vast swaths of Americans is getting notably and regularly harsher.

So Biden won’t have to try very hard to make 2024 a comparative — rather than a self-referendum — election. And his strategic goal is simply to make himself more popular than his unpopular opponent while winning at least a draw among the significant number of voters who don’t particularly like either candidate.

This last part won’t be easy. Trump won solidly in both 2016 and 2020 among voters who said they didn’t like either major-party candidate (the saving grace for Biden was that there weren’t that many of them in 2020; there will probably be an awful lot of them next November). So inevitably, the campaign will need to ensure that every persuadable voter has a clear and vivid understanding of Trump’s astounding character flaws and extremist tendencies. What will make this process even trickier is the availability of robust independent and minor-party candidates who could win a lot of voters disgusted by a Biden-Trump rock fight.

So the formula for a Biden reelection is to do everything possible to boost his job-approval ratings up into the mid-40s or so and then go after Trump with all the abundant ammunition the 45th president has provided him. The more popular Biden becomes, the more he can go back to the “normalcy” messaging that worked (albeit narrowly) in 2020.

If the economy goes south or overseas wars spread or another pandemic appears, not even the specter of an unleashed and vengeful authoritarian in the White House will likely save Biden; the same could be true if Uncle Joe suffers a health crisis or public lapses in his powers of communication. But there’s no reason he cannot win reelection with some luck and skill — and with the extraordinary decision of the opposition party to insist on nominating Trump for a third time. Yes, the 45th president has some political strengths of his own, but he would uniquely help Biden overcome the difficulty of leading a profoundly unhappy nation.

At Maddowblog Steve Benen reports: “One need not be a political expert to know what issues Republicans see as their strengths. If it were up to GOP leaders, the public conversation would focus entirely on inflation, border security and crime — not because the party has solutions to any of these challenges, but because polls tend to show that voters favor Republicans more than Democrats on these issues….That said, there are plenty of issues that favor Democrats, most notably health care. A recent national survey from NBC News found the party with a 23-point advantage over the GOP on health care, which is one of the reasons Republicans generally avoid the subject….It was against that backdrop that Donald Trump apparently thought it’d be a good idea to publish this message to his social media platform on Saturday morning, telling Americans that he’s “seriously looking at alternatives” to “Obamacare.” The former president went on to complain about Republican senators who failed to “terminate” the Affordable Care Act in 2017, concluding, “[B]ut we should never give up!”….The public comments coincided with a written statement from the president’s re-election campaign. “Forty million people — more than 1 in 10 Americans — have health insurance today because of the Affordable Care Act and Donald Trump just said he would try to rip it away if he returns to power,” spokesperson Ammar Moussa said. “He was one vote away from getting it done when he was president — and we should take him at his word that he’ll try to do it again….“That means letting insurance companies deny coverage to people with preexisting conditions like diabetes, cancer, or asthma; kicking college kids off their parents’ coverage the moment they graduate; leaving a job once again resulting in a loss of coverage; premiums skyrocketing; and middle class families suffering. Donald Trump’s America is one where millions of people lose their health insurance and seniors and families across the country face exorbitant costs just to stay healthy. Those are the stakes next November….If Democrats were to have literally written a script for Trump to follow, they probably would’ve had the Republican pick a fight over the future of the ACA. It was awfully generous of him to play along for no apparent reason.”

“The problem for Biden is that Republicans have shown themselves over time to be brilliant at setting campaign narratives,” Colorado Sun columnist Mike Litton writes. “And the narratives that Biden is too old, that the economy sucks, that the border situation is in crisis make the job fairly easy….Trump may be slightly ahead in the polls, but no one is really running against him yet. The Republican pretenders, other than Chris Christie, have to be provoked to even mention him. It took Nikki Haley days — and only after she was asked — to note that Trump’s use of  “vermin” may not have been the best choice of words. I don’t think Ron DeSantis ever commented on it…. Even Biden has been trying to make the campaign about his own successes, which is the usual strategy for an incumbent. But there are two incumbents in this race. And what we know is that whenever Trump is on the ballot, voters inevitably choose between the candidate who is Trump and the candidate who’s not Trump….The candidate who is Trump is campaigning as a would-be strong man, as a democracy-defying defendant facing 91 charges in multiple courtrooms, as an immigrant basher who promises to round up undocumented immigrants by the millions, as the president who appointed the Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade….That should be enough, but we learned in 2016 how these things can go….The way to beat Trump is to remind voters that he is Trump, as Biden did four years ago. A younger, more vibrant Democrat could probably have done that better. But at this point the question is not whether it’s time for Democrats to panic, but what they do to make sure Biden can pull off that trick, and beat Trump, one more time.”

“Has No Labels Become a Stalking Horse for Trump?,’ NYT columnist Thomas B. Edsall asks, and writes, “After its founding in 2010, the group was praised by moderates in both parties as a force for cooperation and consensus. Now, however, No Labels is a target of criticism because of its plan to place presidential and vice-presidential nominees of its choosing on the 2024 ballot — a step that could tip the outcome in favor of Donald Trump if he once again wins the Republican nomination….No Labels officials contend that their polling suggests that their ticket could win….Numerous factors exacerbate the suspicion that whatever its intentions are (or were), the organization has functionally become an asset to the Trump campaign and a threat to the re-election of Joe Biden….Leaks to the media that prominent Republican donors, including Harlan Crow, Justice Clarence Thomas’s benefactor, are contributing to No Labels — which is well on its way to raising $70 million — suggest that some major donors to No Labels see the organization as a means to promote Republican goals….No Labels, in turn, has declined to disclose its donors, and the secrecy has served to intensify the concern that some of its contributors are using the organization’s plan to run a third-party ticket to weaken the Biden campaign….“No Labels,” Representative Abigail Spanberger, Democrat of Virginia, declared, “is wasting time, energy and money on a bizarre effort that confuses and divides voters and has one obvious outcome — re-electing Donald Trump as president.”….An NBC survey in September found that the presence of third-party candidates on the ballot would shift the outcome from a 46-to-46 tie to a 39-to-36 Trump advantage over Biden.”

“Equally important,’ Edsall adds,  “NBC also found that the strongest appeal of third-party candidates is among constituencies Biden must carry, including voters pollsters call persuadable; low-income, working-class and middle-class voters of color; and voters who said they “somewhat” disapproved of Biden….In the media, the potential No Labels candidates most commonly mentioned are Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, who is 76 and recently announced his retirement from the Senate, and Larry Hogan, who is 67 and a former Republican governor of Maryland. The organization could also pick someone outside politics, including a military or corporate leader….Many Democratic leaders and organizations — including Nancy Pelosi, a former House speaker; state Democratic chairs; Third Way, a Democratic think tank; and advisers to President Biden — contend that a No Labels candidate in the race would probably doom Biden’s chances of re-election….No Labels is gearing up to pick a third-party presidential ticket without the constraints and safeguards of primary elections and caucus contests….William Galston, a Brookings Institution senior fellow and one of the 2010 founders of No Labels, resigned from the group this year in protest over the group’s plan to run presidential candidates….Over Galston’s objections, No Labels began “in 2022 to explore the possibility of an independent bipartisan ticket,” he wrote in an email to me. He objected, he said, “not only because I thought this plan had no chance of succeeding but also because I believed that anything that could divide the anti-Trump coalition was too risky to undertake.”….Ultimately, Galston continued, he decided he “did not want to be associated with a venture that I believed (and continue to believe) will increase Donald Trump’s chances of re-entering the Oval Office.”….I asked Fred Wertheimer, the founder and president of Democracy 21, a campaign-finance-reform organization, for his assessment. “In my view,” he replied, “when No Labels started qualifying in various states to be on the ballot to run a presidential candidate, they were functioning as a political organization under I.R.S. law and should have registered as such under section 527 of the I.R.S. code and disclosed their donors.”

I decided to add my analytical two cents at New York to the political topic many Democrats are worried about right now: the direction of the youth vote.

Until recently, Democrats’ biggest concern about the 2024 youth vote was that millennial and Gen-Z voters were so disappointed with our octogenarian president that they might not turn out in great enough numbers to reelect Joe Biden. Young voters were, after all, the largest and most rapidly growing segment of the Democratic base in the last election. But now public-opinion surveys are beginning to unveil a far more terrifying possibility: Donald Trump could carry the youth vote next year. And even if that threat is exaggerated or reversible, it’s increasingly clear that “the kids” may be swing voters, not unenthusiastic Democratic base voters who can be frightened into turning out by the prospect of Trump’s return.

NBC News reports it’s a polling trend that cannot be ignored or dismissed:

“The latest national NBC News poll finds President Joe Biden trailing former President Donald Trump among young voters ages 18 to 34 — with Trump getting support from 46% of these young voters and Biden getting 42%. …

“CNN’s recent national poll had Trump ahead of Biden by 1 point among voters ages 18 to 34.

“Quinnipiac University had Biden ahead by 9 points in that subgroup.

“The national Fox News poll had Biden up 7 points among that age group.

“And the recent New York Times/Siena College battleground state polling had Biden ahead by just 1 point among voters ages 18 to 34.”

According to Pew’s validated voters analysis (which is a lot more precise than exit polls), Biden won under-30 voters by a 59 percent to 35 percent margin in 2020. Biden actually won the next age cohort, voters 30 to 49 years old, by a 55 percent to 43 percent margin. In 2016, Pew reports, Hillary Clinton won under-30 voters by a 58 percent to 28 percent margin, and voters 30 to 44 by 51 percent to 40 percent.

So one baby-boomer Democrat and one silent-generation Democrat kicked Trump’s butt among younger voters, despite the fact that both of them had their butts kicked among younger primary voters by Bernie Sanders. It’s these sort of numbers that led to a lot of optimistic talk about younger-generation voters finally building the durable Democratic majority that had eluded the party for so many years.

What’s gone wrong?

For one thing, it’s important to note that yesterday’s younger voters aren’t today’s, as Nate Silver reminds us:

“Fully a third of voters in the age 18-29 bracket in the 2020 election (everyone aged 26 or older) will have aged out of it by 2024, as will two-thirds of the age 18-to-29 voters from the 2016 election and all of them from 2012. So if you’re inclined to think something like “gee, did all those young voters who backed the Obama-Biden ticket in 2012 really turn on Biden now?”, stop doing that. Those voters are now in the 30-to-41 age bracket instead.”

But even within relatively recent groups of young voters, there are plenty of micro- and macro-level explanations available for changing allegiances. Young voters share the national unhappiness with the performance of the economy; many are particularly afflicted by high basic-living costs and higher interest rates that make buying a home or even a car unusually difficult. Some of them are angry at Biden for his inability (mostly thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court) to cancel student-loan debts. And most notoriously, young voters are least likely to share Biden’s strong identification with Israel in its ongoing war with Hamas (a new NBC poll shows 70 percent of 18-to-34-year-old voters disapprove of Biden’s handling of the war).

More generally, intergenerational trust issues are inevitably reflected in perceptions of the president who is turning 81 this week, as youth-vote expert John Della Volpe recently explained:

“Today many young people see wars, problems and mistakes originating from the older generations in top positions of power and trickling down to harm those most vulnerable and least equipped to protect themselves. This is the fabric that connects so many young people today, regardless of ideology. This new generation of empowered voters is therefore asking across a host of issues: If not now, then when is the time for a new approach?”

All of these factors help explain why younger voters have soured on Uncle Joe and might be open to independent or minor-party candidates (e.g., Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Cornel West, Jill Stein, or a possible No Labels candidate). But they don’t cast as much light on why these same voters might ultimately cast a ballot for Donald Trump.

Trump is less than four years younger than Biden and is about as un-hip an oldster as one can imagine. He’s responsible for the destruction of federal abortion rights, a deeply unpopular development among youth voters (post-election surveys in 2022 showed abortion was the No. 1 issue among under-30 voters; 72 percent of them favored keeping abortion legal in all or most cases). His reputation for racism, sexism, and xenophobia ought to make him anathema to voters for whom the slogan “Make America Great Again” doesn’t have much personal resonance. And indeed, young voters have some serious issues with the 45th president, even beyond the subject of abortion. In the recent New York Times–Siena battleground state poll that showed Trump and Biden about even among under-30 voters, fully 64 percent of these same voters opposed “making it harder for migrants at the southern border to seek asylum in the United States,” a signature Trump position if ever there was one.

At the same time, under-30 voters in the Times-Siena survey said they trusted Trump more on the Israel-Hamas conflict than Biden by a robust 49 percent to 39 percent margin. The 45th president, needless to say, has never shown any sympathy for the Palestinian plight. And despite the ups and downs in his personal relationship to Bibi Netanyahu, he was as close an ally to Israel’s Likud Party as you could imagine (among other things, Trump reversed a long-standing U.S. position treating Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank as a violation of international law and also moved the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a gesture of great contempt toward Palestinian statehood). His major policy response to the present war has been to propose a revival of the Muslim travel ban the courts prevented him from implementing during his first term.

But perceptions often differ sharply from reality. Sixty-two percent of 18-to-29-year-old and 61 percent of 40-to-44-year-old voters said they trusted Trump more than Biden on the economy in the Times-Siena survey. It’s unclear whether these voters have the sort of hazy positive memories of the economy under Trump that older cohorts seem to be experiencing or if they instead simply find the status quo intolerable.

In any event, the estrangement of young voters provides the most urgent evidence of all that Team Biden and its party need to remind voters aggressively about Trump’s full-spectrum unfitness for another term in the White House. Aside from his deeply reactionary position on abortion and other cultural issues, and his savage attitude toward immigrants, Trump’s economic-policy history shows him prioritizing tax cuts for higher earners and exhibiting hostility to student-loan-debt relief (which he has called “very unfair to the millions and millions of people who paid their debt through hard work and diligence”). Smoking out the 45th president on what “Trumponomics” might mean for young and nonwhite Americans should become at least as central to the Biden reelection strategy as improving the reputation of “Bidenomics.” And without question, Democrats who may be divided on the Israel-Hamas war should stop fighting each other long enough to make it clear that Republicans (including Trump) would lead cheers for the permanent Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank while agitating for war with Iran.

There’s no world in which Donald Trump should be the preferred presidential candidate of young voters. But it will require serious work by Team Biden not only to turn these voters against the embodiment of their worst nightmares but to get them involved in the effort to keep him away from power.

In “How Biden Might Recover” at The Atlantic,  Ronald Brownstein writes: “If the GOP renominates Trump, attitudes about the challenger might overshadow views about the incumbent to an unprecedented extent, the veteran GOP pollster Bill McInturff believes. McInturff told me that in his firm’s polling over the years, most voters usually say that when a president seeks reelection, their view about the incumbent is what most influences their decision about whom to support.

Brownstein notes further, “But in a recent national survey McInturff’s firm conducted with a Democratic partner for NBC, nearly three-fifths of voters said that their most important consideration in a Trump-Biden rematch would be their views of the former president….“I have never seen a number like this NBC result between an incumbent and ‘challenger,’” McInturff told me in an email. “If 2024 is a Biden versus Trump campaign, we are in uncharted waters.”

In addition, “Alan Abramowitz, an Emory University political scientist, said the principal reason presidents now appear more capable of surviving discontent about their performance is the rise of negative partisanship. That’s the phrase he and other political scientists use to describe a political environment in which many voters are motivated primarily by their belief that the other party represents an unacceptable threat to their values and vision of America. “Emphasizing the negative results of electing your opponent has become a way of unifying your party,” Abramowitz told me.”

However, “Jim Messina, the campaign manager for Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection, reflected the changing thinking when he told me he does not believe that Biden needs to reach majority approval to win another term. “I don’t think it’s a requirement,” Messina said. “It might be if we are dealing with an open race with two nonpresidents. People forget that they are both incumbents. Neither one of them is going to get to 50 percent in approval. What you are trying to drive is the choice.”….

Another consideration Browstein points out, “Trump has already laid out a much more militantly conservative and overtly authoritarian agenda than he ran on in 2016 or 2020. His proposals include the mass deportation of and internment camps for undocumented immigrants, gutting the civil service, invoking the Insurrection Act to quash public protests, and openly deploying the Justice Department against his political enemies. If Trump is the GOP nominee, Democratic advertising will ensure that voters in the decisive swing states are much more aware of his agenda and often-venomous rhetoric than they are today. (The Biden campaign has started issuing near-daily press releases calling out Trump’s most extreme proposals.).”

However, “In a recent national poll by Marquette University Law School, nearly twice as many voters said they trusted Trump rather than Biden to handle both the economy and immigration. The Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg released a survey last week of the nine most competitive presidential states, in which even the Democratic “base of Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, LGBTQ+ community, Gen Z, millennials, unmarried and college women give Trump higher approval ratings than Biden.” Among all voters in those crucial states, the share that said they thought Trump did a good job as president was nearly 10 percentage points higher than the group that gives Biden good grades now.

“The problem for Trump’s team,” Brownstein adds, “is that he constantly pushes the boundaries of what the public might accept. Holding his strong current level of support in polls among Hispanics, for instance, may become much more difficult for Trump after Democrats spend more advertising dollars highlighting his plans to establish internment camps for undocumented immigrants, his refusal to rule out reprising his policy of separating migrant children from their parents, and his threats to use military force inside Mexico. Trump’s coming trials on 91 separate criminal charges will test the public’s tolerance in other ways: Even a recent New York Times/Siena College poll showing Trump leading Biden in most of the key swing states found that the results could flip if the former president is convicted.”

Brownstein concludes, “rump presents opponents with an almost endless list of vulnerabilities. But Biden’s own vulnerabilities have lifted Trump to a stronger position in recent polls than he achieved at any point in the 2020 race. These polls aren’t prophecies of how voters will make their decisions next November if they are forced to choose again between Biden and Trump. But they are a measure of how much difficult work Biden has ahead to win either a referendum or a choice against the man he ousted four years ago.”

The following article by John Halpin, president and executive editor of The Liberal Patriot. is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot: 

People often finger social media as the primary culprit in America’s increasingly bitter and divided politics. As the argument goes, corporate tech algorithms and consumer choices are forcing people into closed-looped information circuits full of misinformation, political self-righteousness, and acrimony toward others.

If you happen to spend any time on these social media platforms, you might agree with this assessment. However, the empirical question remains: Are the users of social media any more partisan or ideological than consumers of other types of media?

Looking at data from the recent TLP/YouGov polling of 3098 registered voters conducted in September 2023, the answer is not as simple as conventional wisdom dictates. It turns out, consumers of traditional media—mainly cable news, network television, radio, and national newspapers—exhibit far greater partisan imbalances than do consumers of the biggest social media platforms.

For context, the survey asked respondents, “In the past week, did you get any news from any of the following sources?” and allowed people to make multiple selections.

As the chart below shows, local television remains the most used media source for news information chosen by 41 percent of voters overall. News websites and apps come in second at 33 percent followed by a cluster of different sources including Fox News (28 percent), Facebook (28 percent), CNN (27 percent), and YouTube (26 percent). Notably, national print newspapers were selected by only 9 percent of voters—almost equal to those Americans getting news from the social media video platform, TikTok, at 10 percent. Seven percent of voters overall report not getting news from any of these sources.

Looking at the crosstabs on media usage, the overlap in news consumption is interesting. For example, 54 percent of those who tune into CNN also get news from local television, and 40 percent get news from Facebook. Likewise, 53 percent of those who tune into Fox get news from local television, and 37 percent get news from Facebook. On the social media side, 52 percent of TikTok news consumers also turn to CNN for news, 54 percent watch YouTube, and 59 percent get news on Facebook.

To gauge the partisan leanings of different consumers, I examined the breakdown of media consumers on President Biden’s job approval, which stood at 45 percent approve and 53 percent disapprove among all voters in September. (Job approval and disapproval seems like a more representative measure of political beliefs than the national horserace at this stage, but the patterns are broadly matched in terms of Biden or Trump support.)

As the table below highlights, legacy media users emerge as the most skewed American consumers of media in terms of their approval or disapproval of President Biden—particularly cable news viewers.

In contrast, users of an array of social media platforms—including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and other social media (including LinkedIn and Instagram) appear more evenly split in their evaluations of the president. Among voters who get news from either Facebook or YouTube, an equal 49 percent approve and disapprove of Biden. And although both Twitter and TikTok users overall emerge slightly more pro-Biden than the national average, their approval or disapproval is much less pronounced than that among cable news viewers.

If analysts are looking for the information roots of America’s most intense political polarization, they might want to examine the consumer bases and news content of legacy media sources as much as they scrutinize social media platforms.

The viewers of different cable news channels, and readers of national newspapers or listeners of radio, constitute vastly different (and more one-sided) partisan worlds than most people on social media platforms with a cacophony of voices and partisan inclinations.

Social media often gets dinged for partisan self-selection and ideological reinforcement, which certainly goes on to some extent, but these data show that the sharpest partisans splits are more prominently found among consumers of traditional cable, print, network news, and radio sources.

William A. Galston explains “What Today’s Working Class Wants from Political Leaders” at Brookings: “A second PPI report, a public opinion survey conducted in partnership with YouGov, investigates working-class sentiments and beliefs.¹ While these voters harbor reservations about both political parties, they align more with Republicans than with Democrats on most of the matters that concern them….On the face of it, working-class voters would appear to be evenly divided in their view of the political parties. Thirty-eight percent trust the Democrats more to put the interests of working-class voters first, while 37% trust the Republicans more. Thirty-six percent see the Democratic Party is more committed to governing and problem-solving than in waging partisan warfare, while 34% see the Republican Party in this light….But this apparent even division is inconsistent with the voting behavior of America’s working class. In 2020, Joe Biden outpaced Donald Trump by 24 percentage points among voters with a college degree or more while losing to Trump by 8 points among those with less than a bachelor’s degree.  Among white voters with less than a bachelor’s, Trump prevailed by 32 points, and Trump also did 25 points better among Hispanic voters with less than a college degree than he did among college-educated Hispanics….The PPI poll helps us understand why this is so. Forty-five percent of working-class voters, it found, believe that the Democratic Party has moved “too far to the left,” and 40% see it as heavily influenced by “special interests like public sector unions, environmental activists, and academics.” They trust Republicans over Democrats to manage a growing economy, promote entrepreneurship and keep America ahead in new technologies, control public debt and deficits, handle immigration, reduce crime and protect public safety, and make public schools more responsive to parents. Democrats lead in only three areas: combatting climate change, managing America’s clean air transition, and respecting our democratic institutions and elections (the last by a narrow margin of 39% to 34%).”

Galston notes, “Moving from specific issues to broader themes, working-class voters think Republicans do better in protecting personal freedom, strengthening private enterprise, respecting hard work and individual initiative, and creating economic opportunities for working Americans. On what many Democrats believe is the center economic and social issue—making America fairer—their party only ties the Republicans in the eyes of these voters….To be sure, Republicans still have an affluence problem. By a margin of 41% to 31%, working-class voters believe that the Republican Party represents the interests of the wealthy more than the Democratic Party does, and 38% believe that the Republicans are too influenced by wealthy donors. But to judge from the results at polling booths, these reservations about Republicans are not as weighty for working-class voters as is their long litany of complaints about Democrats….Progressive Democrats may be surprised to learn that working-class voters do not share their understanding of the proper role of government in the economy. Although 65% of working-class voters believe that the economy is controlled by the rich for their own benefit, just 19% of them want a large federal government focused on issues such as inequality and the distribution of wealth, compared to 34% who want a smaller federal government that spends and taxes less. A plurality of these voters—47%—opt for a middle course: a federal government that actively steers the economy, but mainly by promoting and protecting free markets….Twenty-one percent strongly support what Biden has done on the economy, but 35% strongly oppose it. Overall, 46% support the president’s agenda with varying degrees of enthusiasm while 47% oppose it….Asked to name the most significant challenge facing the economy today, 36% said “the high cost of living” while an additional 33% said “inflation is outpacing the economy.” Asked to explain these negative developments, 55% said that “government went overboard with stimulus spending, overheating the economy,” compared to 29% who pointed to the aftereffects of the pandemic and 16% who blamed bottlenecks in the supply chain.”

Galston adds, “Although Democrats have scored solid gains among college-educated Americans in recent electoral cycles, policies to support them find little favor with the working class. Fifty-six percent of these voters oppose debt relief for college student borrowers on the grounds that such action is unfair to the majority of Americans who don’t get college degrees and will increase costs for both students and taxpayers over the long term. Asked about the policies most likely to help working people get ahead, 10% named student loan forgiveness and 15% backed a federal government push for stronger labor unions while 74% opted for public investment in apprenticeships and career pathways to help non-college workers upgrade their skills. When asked for their views about policies that would help them personally to get ahead, their responses formed a similar pattern. Six percent mentioned joining a union and nine percent, getting a four-year college degree. By contrast, 69% mentioned apprenticeships with companies or other forms of short-term training programs that combine learning with work….Overall, the PPI survey documents a pervasive sense of decline among working-class Americans. By a margin of 66% to 21%, they believe that people like them are worse off today than they were 40 years ago. Interestingly, they do not identify a single dominant cause for this decline: roughly equal numbers blame immigration, trade, automation, de-unionization, bad government programs, and cultural change. While they do not express great confidence in either political party to turn around this decline, they lean toward an “America First” stance on issues such as immigration and trade. But they do not accept Republicans’ hardline views on criminal justice and policing, and they are deeply concerned about social conservatives’ efforts to ban books from school libraries and restrict access to reproductive health services for women. Still, when asked which president in recent decades had done the most for average working families, 44% named Donald Trump, compared to just 12% for Joe Biden.”

From “Pollster sees hope for Biden: “Republicans are in far greater trouble than is generally understood: Trump needs 95% of Republicans to have a chance of winning. Simon Rosenberg explains “he’s very far away from that” by Chauncey Devega’s interview of Rosenberg at Salon: “Democratic Party strategist and commentator Simon Rosenberg rejects the consensus view that President Biden is already done for. Rosenberg’s insights merit very careful consideration: He was one of the few experts who predicted that the so-called Republican “red wave” was actually a chimera….In this conversation, Rosenberg explains why President Biden and the Democrats are in a much stronger position than Donald Trump and the Republicans heading into the 2024 election and why he thinks so many of the early 2024 election polls are incorrect….How are you feeling given Trump and the Republican fascists’ escalating threats to democracy?  I’m tired. But I’m also exhilarated by our continued strong electoral performances all across the country going back to 2017. In particular, the Democrats have been winning elections since the [Supreme Court’s] Dobbs decision in Spring 2022. We are winning across the country, in every kind of race — mayoral races, school board races, in governor’s races in red states, and on ballot initiatives. It leaves me deeply optimistic about 2024. In rte4sponse to other questions, Rosenberg notes, “As shown by how the Democrats have been winning in every type of race across the country now for a year and a half, that is a sign of institutional and organizational strength. The Democratic Party is very strong right now. By comparison, the Republican Party is very weak institutionally….there is no way to scrub Trump, to put lipstick on the Trump pig, or to dress him up and make him something other than the most dangerous candidate in the history of American politics. And it just gives me hope that people have been voting against MAGA and the Republicans repeatedly, especially, in the battleground states. If we have a normal election the Democrats should win next year — even with Joe Biden and all of his limitations. But at the end of the day, he’s been a good president. And he’s got a strong case for reelection….This idea that as the electorate gets bigger, it gets more Republican is false. The Democrats have won more votes in the last seven out of eight elections than the Republicans. No political party has done that in American history….Trump is only at 60%. 40% of Republican primary voters are not with him. That’s a huge problem. Trump can’t lose any Republicans. He’s the weak candidate. Trump is struggling to pull his coalition back together….I think the issues around abortion, as we’ve seen, are creating openings with Republican and independent women that are unprecedented. The Republicans have no way now to mitigate the political damage that abortion has done to them or will do to them again in 2024.”

In “This may be Biden’s best hope of reversing his slide with Black and brown voters,” Ronald Browntein writes at CNN Politics: “A wide array of recent polls shows Biden with an unusually small lead for a Democrat among both Black and Latino voters in a potential 2024 rematch with Trump. But many analysts say it’s less clear that Democrats are facing a lasting structural realignment among those voters – much less a change rooted in a long-term cultural alienation from the party – rather than immediate dissatisfaction with the economy under Biden….“I keep looking for it as well, but you are not seeing as much evidence for a culture war driving any kind of change at this moment,” said Carlos Odio, senior vice president for research at Equis Research, a Democratic polling firm that specializes in Latino voters. “What’s driving Trump and the Republicans is the economy. At the end of the day, ‘It’s the economy, stupid’ over and over again.”….If anything, rather than cultural alienation driving working-class non-White voters toward the GOP, continuing resistance in those communities to Republican priorities on many culturally and racially tinged issues may be Democrats’ best hope in 2024 of recapturing non-White voters disenchanted with Biden’s performance and the economy. Despite all the discontent over Biden, almost three-fifths of non-White voters without a college degree agreed that the “Republican Party has been taken over by racists,” in a recent national survey by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute, according to previously unpublished results provided to CNN….The stakes in this struggle are enormous. White voters without a college degree, now the electorate’s most Republican-leaning group, have been steadily shrinking as a share of the total vote at a rate of about 2 to 3 percentage points in each presidential election for decades. To offset that decline, Republicans need to find votes elsewhere. The party is facing resistance among college-educated White voters, many of whom have recoiled from the hard-edged cultural and racial views the party has embraced under Trump.”

Brownstein continues, “The exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations including CNN found that Trump’s vote among non-White voters without a college degree increased from just 20% in 2016 to 26% in 2020. Research by Catalist, a Democratic voter targeting firm whose analyses are respected in both parties, found that Trump’s vote among Latino voters without a college degree spiked from 61% in 2016 to 72% in 2020; Trump also enjoyed a modest 3 percentage point gain among Black voters without a college degree over that period, Catalist found….Exactly why Trump made those gains, though, remains a matter of dispute – with important implications for 2024 and beyond. Advocates of the realignment theory argue that Trump’s gains represented an ideological rejection of Democrats among centrist and right-leaning minority voters, prompted partly by their opposition to the calls to “defund the police” in the racial justice protests that erupted after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. They pointed to evidence in exit polls that a much higher percentage of minority voters who identified as conservative voted for Trump in 2020 than in 2016….Somewhat to the surprise of both parties, the movement of non-college-educated minority voters toward the GOP stalled in the 2022 midterm election, even though those voters expressed widespread disenchantment with the economy and Biden’s performance. In Catalist’s analysis, Democrats won a slightly higher percentage of Latinos without a college degree in the 2022 House races than they did in the 2020 presidential contest. Most important for Democrats, Senate incumbents Mark Kelly in Arizona and Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada – probably the two states where Latino voters are most important for the party – also ran slightly better among non-college-educated Latinos than Biden did in their states, according to previously unpublished Catalist results provided to CNN. (The exit polls, differing slightly, showed a small further national gain in 2022 for the GOP among non-White voters without a college degree.)”

Brownstein adds, “Daron Shaw, a Republican pollster and University of Texas political scientist who co-conducted a recent large national survey of Latino voters for Univision, says that those attitudes mean “there is absolutely an opening” for Trump or another GOP nominee to advance further with non-White voters in 2024. Just as many White working-class voters “felt like the financial crisis of ’08-‘09 left them rudderless [and] eroded their position in American society … both on economic grounds and on cultural grounds, there are voters within the Latino community as well, who feel no one is representing them,” Shaw said during a press call about the Univision poll….Sergio Garcia-Rios, a University of Texas political scientist who partnered with Shaw on the Univision poll, said the Latinos supporting Trump are drawn to him mostly on economic grounds. “To those who are voting for Trump, they remember that in 2016-’17-‘18 the economy worked better,” he said. “You and I can disagree with them on whether or not that is true. But that’s what they remember.”….Ruy Teixeira, a longtime Democratic electoral analyst who has become an unflinching critic of the party’s policies on social issues, has noted, for instance, that most Latinos agree with statements asserting the US is the greatest country in the world and reject the idea that racism is embedded in American institutions. “It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Democrats’ emphasis on social and democracy issues, while catnip to some socially liberal, educated voters, leaves many working-class and Hispanic voters cold,” writes Teixeira, co-author of the recent book, “Where Have All The Democrats Gone?,” which makes similar arguments as Ruffini.

“Yet as polling by the Public Religion Research Institute, Univision and other groups show,” Brownstein notes,  “on many of the actual cultural policies dominating political debate, most minority voters – including most of those without a college degree – align with Democrats, not Republicans. Among non-White voters without a college degree, 57% support legal abortion, 55% back same sex-marriage, and 64% oppose placing barriers at the US border to deter migrants, according to unpublished results from the PRRI’s latest national American Values Survey provided to CNN. (Support for Democratic positions is even greater among non-White voters with a college degree, PRRI found.) Other surveys have found preponderant support among minorities for banning assault weapons and lopsided opposition to ending birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants, as Trump and other GOP candidates have proposed….Maybe most significantly, in PRRI polling, about three-fifths of non-White voters without a college degree agree the GOP has been “taken over by racists,” as do nearly two-thirds of non-White voters with a degree. By contrast, three-fifths of White voters without a college degree reject that idea….Latinos in the key states may not yet be aware of Trump’s immigration plans. But Robert P. Jones, president and founder of PRRI, said the group’s polling convinces him that Trump’s agenda on immigration and other cultural issues will ultimately repel some Latino voters otherwise disenchanted with Biden on the economy. “I think we will not know the truth about how much they [Republicans] are overplaying their hand until next summer” if Trump becomes the GOP nominee, Jones said….Some expressions of cultural liberalism – such as the fleeting calls in 2020 to “defund the police” – have clearly rankled working-class minority voters. But Biden never endorsed that idea. And his clearest path to recovering with those voters may be to convince them that the Republican agenda on immigration and other cultural issues threatens their interests and values. Rather than driving further movement toward the GOP among minority voters, in other words, issues such as abortion or immigration may be Biden’s best hope of preventing slippage with those voters.”