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by racists,” in a recent national survey by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute, according to previously unpublished results provided to CNN….The stakes in this struggle are enormous.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.”

In his CNN Politics article, “Polling shows a huge age gap divides the Democratic Party on Israel,” Harry Enten writes: ”

Take a look at a recent Quinnipiac University poll on the topic. Biden’s approval rating for his handling of the Israel-Hamas War among Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters is just 56%. Compare that to his 76% approval rating among Democratic voters for his overall job performance.

A significant minority of Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters (36%) disapprove of his handling of the war. Those voters tend to be young….The lion’s share (69%) of Democrats and Democratic-leaning younger than 35 disapprove of how Biden is responding to the war. Just 24% approve. It’s the inverse among older Democrats. Most Democrats 65 and older (77%) approve of Biden on this issue. Few (16%) disapprove.

….When asked which side they sympathize with, Israelis or Palestinians, more, Democrats younger than 35 are far more likely to sympathize with Palestinians (74%) than Israelis (16%). Democrats 65 and older are somewhat more likely to side with Israelis (45%) than Palestinians (25%).

Enten notes further, “The large divide by age causes Democrats and Democratic leaning voters overall to split basically evenly, with 39% sympathizing with Palestinians and 35% with Israelis….This is a massive shift from the beginning of the Israel-Hamas War, when Democrats were more likely to sympathize with Israel by a 48% to 22% margin. That poll was taken in the immediate aftermath of a surprise terrorist attack by Hamas on October 7 that killed about 1,200 people. Since that time, Israel has mounted an offensive in Gaza, and the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health says more than 10,000 Palestinians have died.”

Enten adds,

Most Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters (70%) believe that supporting Israel is in the national interest. This includes 87% of those 65 and older….Democrats younger than 35 see things entirely differently. Just 40% think backing Israel is in the national interest of this country. The majority (52%) disagree.

Perhaps not surprisingly, these younger Democrats don’t think we should be supplying military aid to Israel in its war with Hamas. A mere 21% agree that we should, while 77% are against it. Older Democrats are for it by a 53% to 32% margin….In total, Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters were 49% in opposition to 44% in support….Voters overall, on the other hand, are 53% in support to 39% opposed for more military aid for Israel.

Also,

All voters by a 54% to 24% margin sympathized more with Israelis than Palestinians. Voters, including Democrats, Republicans and independents, by a 73% to 19% margin said backing Israel was in the national interest of America.

Biden’s problem is that he likely needs more support from younger voters heading into the 2024 election. He won voters younger than 35 by more than 20 points in 2020. Today, his lead over former President Donald Trump is in the low single digits in an average of recent polling ahead of a potential rematch.

It’s not clear that Biden’s handling of the war is causing his decreased backing from younger voters, but it can’t be helping him.

And there is no way of knowing how important this issue will be to American voters a year from now. In our highly-polarized electorate, the biggest issue in November 2024 could be inflation or democracy or Trump’s legal disasters or his mental health, or gun control. As large as the issue looms now, it may be a fading memory late next year.

Check out “The Fight for Working-Classs Voters,” featuring Ruy Teixeira, Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and co-founder and politics editor of the Substack newsletter, The Liberal Patriot and Patrick Ruffini, Republican pollster and founding partner of Echelon Insights, being interviewed by Galen Druke, at 538:

Also at 538, Nathaniel Rakich explains “What the 2023 elections can — and can’t — tell us about 2024” at abcnews.go.com: “In the end, the most predictive of 2023’s elections may be some of the lowest-profile. Nov. 7 saw special elections take place in Rhode Island’s 1st Congressional District as well as seven state-legislative districts (although one of those was uncontested). And as we’ve written many times, a party’s overperformance in special elections (using the same methodology as I used for New Jersey and Virginia) has historically been pretty predictive of the House popular vote in the subsequent general election….And those special election results were mixed, though overall they were better for Democrats than for Republicans. Democrats did better than base partisanship in four of the seven races, and the average overperformance on Nov. 7 was D+3….it is special elections all cycle long that have historically proved predictive, not just special elections on odd-year Election Days, and with Nov. 7’s special elections factored in, Democrats are still overperforming base partisanship by an average of 9 points on the year….Instead, take the 2023 elections for what they were: a series of Democratic and liberal victories that were important in their own right. More than 25 million people live in Kentucky, Mississippi, New Jersey and Virginia and will be directly impacted by the results there. Ohio guaranteed abortion rights to 2.6 million reproductive-age women and legalized marijuana for 8.7 million adults. In Pennsylvania, Democrats notched key wins in judicial and county-level races that will matter for the 2024 presidential race not because of what they portend, but because they will affect how that election is administered logistically and how ballots are counted. These things are the true legacies of the 2023 election.”

You should read “Can Biden and the Democrats Survive Their Divisions on Israel-Palestine? Herewith, some suggestions” by Harold Meyerson at The American Prospect. A Teaser: “Absent the Vietnam War, Hubert Humphrey would probably not have lost the 1968 presidential election to Richard Nixon. In a Biden-Trump contest next year, Israel-Palestine could be one more nail in the Democrats’ coffin. And for all of his depredations and paranoia, Richard Nixon posed a petty threat to American democracy, while Trump poses a massive one….What, then, are Democrats to do? As Michelle Goldberg has outlined in The New York Times, the efforts by Democratic Majority for Israel to recruit candidates to run in primary elections against members of the Squad, and to fund their campaigns with many millions of dollars (a good deal of which comes from Republicans and corporate interests seeking to squash economic progressives) would only widen those rifts and guarantee that many young voters and voters of color—key elements in the Democratic base—would either stay home or vote for protest candidates in next November’s elections….Is there anything that the Biden administration and the Democrats—two groups that, of necessity, we need to consider separately—can do to narrow this yawning chasm?….As to the administration, it needs to get much more serious about prompting a two-state solution than any previous administration has ever been. It needs to condition all aid to Israel on that nation’s agreement to permit the establishment of a viable Palestinian state within a brief period of time. That begins with having the Palestinian Authority govern Gaza and continues with the withdrawal of most, if not all, Israeli settlements from the West Bank. Keep in mind that the current Netanyahu government is in place only because it’s propped up by settler extremists and the ultra-Orthodox, against whose rule most Israelis have been passionately demonstrating throughout much of this year.”

In “The Real Reason Why Biden Shouldn’t Drop Out: A contested Democratic primary with less than a year before the 2024 election would be a mess” Walter Shapiro writes at The New Republic: “….Even if Biden were to accept the truth embedded in the polls, as Harry Truman did when he bowed out in 1952, the subsequent multicandidate scramble for the Democratic nomination would create as many (if not more) political problems as it would solve….It is easy to get caught up in questions of logistics since the filing deadlines have already passed for the Democratic Party’s first two authorized primaries: South Carolina (February 3) and Nevada (February 6). By the end of November, California (March 5) will have closed the books on its primary, and the deadline for Michigan (February 27) is in early December. But barring a divisive contested Democratic convention in Chicago, any Biden delegates chosen in these early states would presumably rally behind the leading candidate in the name of party unity….What about money, which a deep-pocketed presidential candidate once described as “the most reliable friend you can have in American politics”?….a truncated primary season would make it impossible for an out-of-nowhere candidate to have enough time to catch fire in the early states like Pete Buttigieg in 2020 or a former Georgia governor named Jimmy Carter in 1976….If Biden announced on the Monday after Thanksgiving that he would be retiring, it would give 2024 presidential contenders fewer than 100 days to declare their candidacies and define their image before 14 states pick delegates on Super Tuesday, March 5. And 11 other states will be holding Democratic primaries later in March….By my reckoning, Biden made a heedless mistake by not bowing out of the 2024 presidential race last spring, knowing that his age would be a political liability. Such a springtime 2023 decision would have given his Democratic successor ample time to run a winning and hopefully inspiring primary campaign….Instead, Biden chose to defy Father Time. And at this point, Biden—despite his obvious flaws as a candidate—is probably the Democrats’ best option for president against Trump. For in politics, it gets late early. And it is, sadly, too late for a compelling Biden replacement.”

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:

The Democrats had a good election on November 7. While there were not a lot of big races this year, Democrats did hold the governorship in the deep red state of Kentucky, flipped the House of Delegates in Virginia, and easily passed a referendum in Ohio enshrining abortion rights in the state constitution. Moreover, this year Democrats have been cleaning up in special elections, consistently doing better than expected given the partisan lean of the areas contested. In the more consequential 2022 elections, Democrats defied expectations keeping down their losses in the House, gaining a seat in the Senate, netting two governorships and making progress in state legislatures. And of course, Democrats did win the biggest election of them all, the presidency, the last time it was held in 2020.

This has led to a certain amount of self-congratulatory behavior among Democratic partisans. The basic take is that in the wake of the Dobbs decisions Democrats have the political equivalent of a nuclear weapon on their side, abortion rights. That adds to a deep arsenal of potential attacks based around voter distaste for Trump/MAGA/election denial/threats to democracy and for a shambolic Republican Party that appears incapable of governing. With these weapons at Democrats’ disposal, they feel they have a decisive advantage moving into the 2024 election. It is simply a matter of pressing that advantage and hitting the Republicans as hard as they can.

In short, as the catechism goes, they’ve got the formula down for defeating the GOP. There is no need to tinker with the formula; stout hearts and merciless execution will win the day. The future for the Democrats and their brand is bright.

And yet…there are so many signs of underlying weakness that undercut this happy story. It was not so long ago after all that Bad Orange Man actually won the presidency in 2016. Have the Democrats really discovered the secret to withstanding further populist surges from the right? Here are three reasons to doubt that and question the Democrats’ current stand-pat complacency.

1. Despite recent results, the actual governing situation is a stalemate. Democrats had their trifecta (presidency, House, Senate) for exactly one term, losing the House in 2022. The last time they had a trifecta was with Obama’s election in 2008. That too vanished after one term, with the 2010 wipeout in the House. But an important difference between then and now is that Obama briefly had a cloture-proof majority in the Senate that included Senators from many states where Democrats have become uncompetitive: Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota.

Despite some gains elsewhere, so many states are now out of competition for the Democrats that their path to 60 seats appears completely closed off. In addition, next election the Senate map is so unfavorable that Democrats are very likely to lose their current razor-thin majority. They are already essentially down one seat, with the retirement of West Virginia’s Joe Manchin.

Elsewhere, notwithstanding good Democratic election results since 2020, Republicans still have more governors, control more state legislatures, and have more state government trifectas (governor, state house, state senate) than the Democrats. Not exactly Democratic dominance.

This raises an important question: if the Trump-ified Republican Party is so awful, so beyond the pale, such a danger to democracy and all that is right and decent—why can’t the Democrats beat this mess of a party decisively? Why are they still playing at the 50-yard line of American politics against this version of the GOP with all its many vulnerabilities and the millstone of Donald Trump around its neck? The simplest explanation is that the Democrats themselves are so unattractive to so many voters in so many places that they cannot break the stalemate. This simple truth is the most difficult thing for Democrats to accept since it implies the need for change rather than more aggressive messaging.

2. The polls are bad—really bad. With the cheerful results from November 7, Democrats are reviving the hoary admonition “the only poll that counts is the one on election day”. True as far as it goes but there’s no gainsaying how poor these polls are for Democratic prospects. They tell us that voters, right now, are uninclined to re-elect Biden. He not only is losing to Trump on the national level but, critically, in the swing states that will determine the next presidential winner he is running behind in enough of them to lose the Electoral College.

• In the New York Times/Siena poll, Trump is ahead in five states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Pennsylvania—of the six covered by the survey.
• In the Morning Consult/Bloomberg poll, Trump is ahead in six states—Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—of the seven covered.
• In the Stack Data Strategy study, which combines survey data with statistical analysis, Trump leads in four states—Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—carried by Biden in 2020 and trails in none of the states he carried in that election.

Not good! The Times/Siena poll releases detailed crosstabs that allow for an examination of just where Biden is falling short. One key area is Biden’s continuing weakness among nonwhite working-class (noncollege) voters. Confirming a pattern I have previously noted, Biden leads Trump by a mere 16 points among this demographic in the six swing states covered by the poll. This compares to his (national) lead over Trump of 48 points in 2020. And even that lead was a big drop-off from Obama’s 67-point advantage in 2012.

Read more…

Fortunately, the federal government will stay open through the holidays, but Democrats must stay vigilant, since the nihilist forces that keep bringing Congress to the brink have not gone away, as I explained at New York:

After his success in passing a two-tiered stopgap spending bill with a ton of Democratic votes and quiet concurrence from the Democratic-controlled Senate and the White House, freshly minted House Speaker Mike Johnson hastily retreated into a Thanksgiving recess with angry shouts from his erstwhile hard-core MAGA allies echoing in his ears, as Punchbowl News reports:

“Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), policy chair for the House Freedom Caucus, went to the House floor and angrily bashed the GOP leadership after members had bolted town on Wednesday, a bitter ending to a grueling 10-week marathon for the chamber.

“’I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing — one — that I can go campaign on and say we did. One!’ Roy yelled during a speech in an otherwise empty House chamber.

“’Anybody sitting in the complex, you want to come down to the floor and come explain to me one material, meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done besides, well, I guess it’s not as bad as the Democrats.’”

Among the “material, significant things” Roy and others among the 93 House Republicans who voted against Johnson’s plan wanted were deep spending cuts in disfavored areas of the federal government and perhaps some symbolic policy shibboleths smiting abortion providers or transgender athletes or tax collectors. Such items would have been treated by Democrats and even some Republicans as poison pills, which is why Johnson’s “clean” stopgap bill didn’t include them. The new Speaker’s support for a “clean” bill and his reliance on Democratic voters are precisely the actions that got old Speaker Kevin McCarthy tossed out on his ear. Thanks to Johnson’s past record of rigorous right-wing orthodoxy (and perhaps exhaustion following the long fight over McCarthy’s successor), his rebellious friends appear to have given him a mulligan. But it probably won’t last.

A new government shutdown threat will likely appear once the first “tier” of the stopgap bill expires on January 19. Indeed, the hard-liners are already firing shots across Johnson’s bow, as Politico reports:

“Hardliners sunk any chances of passage for two additional funding bills this week — marking a major setback for Speaker Mike Johnson less than 24 hours after working with Democrats to pass a bill that would thwart a shutdown deadline Saturday …

“GOP leadership then canceled the rest of the votes for the week, with Republicans predicting that Johnson’s spending headache won’t get any easier once they return at the end of the month.

“Instead, members of the Freedom Caucus vowed to continue blocking House Republicans’ remaining five funding bills. They urged Johnson to come up with a plan that would cut spending for the fiscal year that began on Oct. 1, without any accounting tricks.”

What makes this revolt even more significant is that Freedom Caucus types are really obsessed with the need to enact individual appropriations bills instead of the catchall measures they believe endemic to out-of-control federal spending. A big part of the rationale for Johnson’s two-tiered stopgap was to provide enough time — and no more — for passage of these individual bills. But now HFC leaders are sabotaging that very possibility out of a fit of pique, in an exceptional example of what it means to cut off your nose to spite your face.

The thing is, Senate Democrats and the White House aren’t going to bend to Chip Roy’s definition of what the American people want or need between now and the time the next shutdown crisis arrives (indeed, a collision over aid to Ukraine and border policy contained in the president’s supplemental spending proposal will likely come to a head before Christmas). So the shutdown threat may have simply been deferred for a bit even as House GOP hard-liners flagellate themselves for letting Johnson off the hook for the exact sins that damned McCarthy. Enjoy the holidays, federal employees. But stash away some provisions for what could be a stormy winter.

 

In his latest opinion essay, New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall chews on a couple of issues and frames his probe like this: “What do the strikingly different public responses to two recent Supreme Court rulings — one on abortion, the other on affirmative action — suggest about the prospects for the liberal agenda?”

You have no doubt read a lot about the political power of abortion rights this year, and it will most certainly be a front and center issue in next year’s elections. Republicans would like affirmative action to crowd out the abortion debate in the months ahead. But I doubt there is enough of a news hook to make that happen on a scale that will have a significant political impact on the presidential contest.

However, it may be more of a factor in a few, though not many, state and local elections, particularly with respect to admission to public colleges and universities. How should Democrats navigate this difficult issue ? Edsall shares some observations about concerns revealed in referenda:

There have been no referendums on affirmative action since the June decision, Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College. Six states held referendums on affirmative action before that ruling was issued, and five voted to prohibit it, including Michigan, Washington and California (twice). Colorado, the lone exception, voted in favor of affirmative action in 2008.

Do the dissimilar responses to the court decisions ending two key components of the liberal agenda, as it was conceived in the 1960s and 1970s, suggest that one of them — the granting of preferences to minorities in order to level differences in admissions outcomes — has run its course?

On the surface, the answer to that question is straightforward: A majority of American voters support racial equality as a goal, but they oppose targets or quotas that grant preferential treatment to any specific group.

Pretty hard and fast, that call. Of course referenda questions, which are focused on up or down votes, are never framed in a way that reflect overall context. “Should race-based affirmative action be eliminated from college admission policies, even if it means that nearly all enrolled students will come from upper income families?” Such a frame would be rare, even in opinion polls. But it does reflect the reality at many higher educational institutions before affirmative action became a widespread remedy.

Today more students from racial minorities can qualify for admission to elite colleges and universities on the merits of their grades and achievements than was the case 40 or 50 years ago. But that doesn’t mean that genuine economic opportunity has been achieved nationwide. Ditto for educational opportunity. For example, only 6.6 percent of students enrolled in the University of Georgia (Athens flagship) are black, according to the UGA factbook, even though African Americans are about one-third of the state population.  And the trend for Black enrollment at the institution is down over the last five years. Which Democratic politicians want to argue that is fair?

Conservatives would argue that the problem here is the low quality of public schools that feed the state university, and that’s a county/city problem. But they don’t want to invest in local education either and often flee to the ‘burbs when taxes are raised for education.

Opponents of affirmative action routinely trot out the MLK quote about ‘content of their character’ being more important than ‘the color of their skin” and twist it into an argument against preferences to help those who have experienced racial discrimination. But, in his book, “Why We Can’t Wait,” King supported the concept of preferential treatment as a remedy for discrimination, and expressed admiration for India’s special programs to help “untouchables.”

Edsall is surely right that the central issue underlying all questions of preferential treatment is fairness. And it is no easy task for a political candidate to appear fair to all of her/his prospective constituents. Edsall adds further:

In an email, Neil Malhotra, a political economist at Stanford — one of the scholars who, on an ongoing basis, oversees polling on Supreme Court decisions for The New York Times — pointed out that “race-based affirmative action is extremely unpopular. Sixty-nine percent of the public agreed with the court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, including 58 percent of Democrats.”….An Economist/YouGov poll conducted in early July posed questions that go directly to the question of affirmative action in higher education.

“Do you think colleges should or should not be allowed to consider an applicant’s race, among other factors, when making decisions on admissions?”

The answer: 25 percent said they should allow racial preferences; 64 percent said they should not.

“Do you approve or disapprove of the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action, which ruled that colleges are not allowed to consider an applicant’s race when making decisions on admissions?”

Fifty-nine percent approved of the decision, including 46 percent who strongly approved. Twenty-seven percent disapproved, including 18 percent who strongly disapproved.

I asked William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, about the significance of the differing reactions to the abortion and affirmative action decisions, and he referred me to his July 2023 essay, “A Surprisingly Muted Reaction to the Supreme Court’s Decision on Affirmative Action”….“To the surprise of many observers,” Galston wrote, citing poll data, Black Americans “supported the court by 44 percent to 36 percent.”

Key groups of swing voters also backed the court’s decision by wide margins, Galston went on to say: “Moderates by 56 percent to 23 percent, independents by 57 percent to 24 percent and suburban voters, a key battleground in contemporary elections, by 59 percent to 30 percent.”

Edsall quotes a number of people who are involved in the debate over the merits of affirmative action, who say that it is not going to be an issue that Democrats will focus on in the year ahead. But that doesn’t mean that political candidates who loudly oppose it won’t pay a price in lost votes.

In his conclusion, Edsall writes, “Where does that leave the nation? Galston, in his Brookings essay, provided an answer:”

In sum, the country’s half-century experiment with affirmative action failed to persuade a majority of Americans — or even a majority of those whom the policy was intended to benefit — that it was effective and appropriate. University employers — indeed, the entire country — must now decide what to do next to advance the cause of equal opportunity for all, one of the nation’s most honored but never achieved principles.

America has a long, often brutal history of preferential treatment for white people, which is too often answered  with variations of the “that was then, this is now” response, and somehow we can’t afford a relatively small investment to help reduce inequality. But fairness and equal opportunity need not be oppositional values in a democratic society – if policy-makers steer a wiser middle course that rejects throwing anyone under the bus.

I know there’s a lot of scary stuff in the air about Donald Trump’s second-term plans. But there is one agenda item that is unusually well-defined and a real electoral challenge and opportunity for Democrats, as I explained at New York:

Donald Trump’s recent reference to his political enemies as “vermin” is a reminder that while we should be cautious about comparisons between the 45th president and the most notorious fascists of the 20th century, there are times when nothing else suffices. That’s certainly true of Trump using such dehumanizing rhetoric for his fellow Americans. And it’s also true of Trump’s appalling immigration-policy proposals for his second term, which truly sounds like something you’d expect to see in an authoritarian dictatorship rather than in the modern-day United States.

The New York Times recently reported that if reelected, Trump plans to round up, incarcerate and then deport millions of undocumented immigrants. In recent decades there has been plenty of talk among Republicans about sealing off the southern border, reducing both legal and illegal immigration, and deporting selected groups of immigrants deemed a threat to national security. But aside from those living in the fever swamps of racist xenophobia, nobody has proposed mass deportations of people who have been living and working peacefully in America for years.

That will clearly change if Trump wins a second term and returns former Breitbart News rabble-rouser Stephen Miller to the helm of the government’s immigration policies, per the Times:

“Former President Donald J. Trump is planning an extreme expansion of his first-term crackdown on immigration if he returns to power in 2025 — including preparing to round up undocumented people already in the United States on a vast scale and detain them in sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled …

“He plans to scour the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport people by the millions per year.

“To help speed mass deportations, Mr. Trump is preparing an enormous expansion of a form of removal that does not require due process hearings. To help Immigration and Customs Enforcement carry out sweeping raids, he plans to reassign other federal agents and deputize local police officers and National Guard soldiers voluntarily contributed by Republican-run states.”

This isn’t some surreptitious plan that reporters have dug out from obscure sources. Miller is publicly chortling about the audacity of what he intends to do, as the Times notes:

“Stephen Miller, a former senior Trump administration official who led Trump’s immigration policy, told The Times, ‘Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown.’

“Miller told The Times that Trump’s immigration plans are being designed to avoid having to create new substantial legislation. During Trump’s first term, he relied heavily on executive orders to implement immigration policy. Many of those moves were challenged in the courts, something Miller acknowledged would be likely to happen again in a second Trump term.”

We’ll get to see, in other words, whether Trump’s judicial appointments and more competent lawyering can help him achieve a different result in his new term than he did with his less aggressive first-term agenda.

There’s no doubt the political climate on immigration policy has changed since Trump was first elected president in 2016. For one thing, the salience of immigration as a voting issue dropped significantly between 2016 and 2020. And it was clearly a topic that hurt Trump’s second campaign even though he wasn’t raging about it constantly, as a 2020 Election Night survey from Public Opinion Strategies found:

“The Public Opinion Strategies poll makes clear that President Trump’s immigration policy was a political loser by a double-digit margin and cost him a substantial vote share. Voters across the political spectrum want to reform our nation’s immigration system, centered on a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.”

Now, thanks to massive publicity (particularly in conservative media) about migrants at the southern border, immigration policy matters more than it did in 2020. According to recent battleground-state polling from New York Times/Siena, voters trust Trump more than Biden on immigration policy. It’s simply a better environment for Trump to propose an immigration crackdown. However, it’s unclear whether voters have any idea of how far Trump wants to go in inaugurating Gestapo-style policies to track down, arrest, transport, and deport millions of people from communities all over the country. But it’s not ambiguous at all. Once they know about Trump’s plans, the Latino voters who have been trending Republican in recent elections will likely bridle at the racial and ethnic profiling by federal, state, and local law-enforcement officials that will inevitably accompany any effort to “scour the country for unauthorized immigrants,” as the Times puts it.

Team Biden may be tempted to ignore immigration policy as a “loser” for the incumbent president. But if they do, they will be missing an opportunity to let voters know how scary Trump’s plans are. He’s using concerns about migrants to justify the most massive reversal of U.S. immigration practices at least since Dwight D. Eisenhower’s openly racist “Operation Wetback” deportation drive in the 1950s (which Trump has often praised). Biden and Democrats need to stop thinking of immigration as a Republican issue and explain to voters just how radical Trump is on the subject. It’s encouraging that the Biden campaign has already come out with an attack on Trump’s plan, calling it an “extreme and rapid expansion of his first-term clampdown on immigration if he takes back the White House,” as Politico put it. But they need to keep it up. It’s a really big deal not just for people directly affected by immigration policy but for anyone who wants to block a lurch into authoritarianism.

In “Exclusive: Memo Reveals Democratic Plan to Flip More State Houses in 2024,” Mini Racker reports at Time: “After their big wins in Virginia last week, Democrats are signaling they will use the strategy adopted there as a model for down-ballot races in 2024….In a memo to top donors shared first with TIME, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which focuses on state legislative races, credits its early focus on abortion rights in Virginia as a critical factor in helping the party retain control of the State Senate and flip the State House, thwarting a high-profile effort by Gov. Glenn Youngkin to ban abortion in most cases after 15 weeks in the state. The memo signals that the committee plans to position state-level races next year as part of a national fight to preserve Americans’ freedoms….“Throughout the year, the DLCC sounded the alarm on the national stage about the stakes of the election and what a Republican trifecta would mean for Virginia,” Heather Williams, the DLCC’s interim president, writes in the memo. “Republican control of the General Assembly and an unchecked GOP trifecta would have led to an abortion ban and cut off the last point of access for the entire South.”….As the presidential race, and the unpopularity of each party’s frontrunner, sucks up much of the air in politics, the memo emphasizes the importance of state legislative seats. Wins at that level could provide a key bulwark for Democrats against right-wing legislation, especially if President Joe Biden fails to win reelection in what is expected to be a close race….“Regardless of what happens at the top of the ticket, 2024 will be the year of the states,” Williams writes….The DLCC also plans to invest in Georgia, Kansas, North Carolina, and Wisconsin next year. The status of abortion rights in several of those states is currently murky pending action from the courts…. “Democrats are recognizing that alongside important federal races, we must also compete and win power in the states,” Williams writes. “Republicans built an advantage in the last decade but now Democrats are fighting back and shifting the balance of power.”

Some insights from “Biden’s ‘Up-Ticket’ Ballot Strategy: Can Democrats reverse the typical dynamic in which the presidential nominee boosts candidates in down-ticket races and instead rely on them to help raise their leader to victory?” by Susan Milligan and Lauren Camera at US News: “President Joe Biden is having an awful time in the polls, with surveys showing even core Democratic supporters are unhappy with his job performance and – at best – less than excited about casting a vote for the incumbent president next fall….At the same time, Democrats are having a great year at the polls themselves, with Tuesday night’s near sweep of key elections capping a year when the party’s candidates have well overperformed in state and local races and won every state referendum on abortion rights….The political contradiction has the Democrats and Republicans in a quandary: Do the Democratic wins mean Biden is better-positioned than he appears for next year’s presidential election? Is the 80-year-old Biden (who turns 81 on Nov. 20) uniquely vulnerable because of his age and other issues? And can down-ticket Democrats reverse the typical dynamic – where the presidential nominee either boosts or deflates candidates in his party – and help raise their leader to victory next year?….Biden on Thursday dismissed questions about polling – actually, a sobering New York Times/Siena College poll released Sunday that showed the president trailing GOP front-runner Donald Trump in five of six battleground states. “Because you don’t read the polls. Ten polls: Eight of them, I’m beating him in those states – eight of them. You guys only do two, CNN and New York Times. Check it out. Check it out. We’ll get you copies of all those other polls,” Biden said as he prepared to leave for a speech before United Auto Workers in Illinois….”We told people to pay attention to what was happening in states like Virginia and Kentucky and ballot measures in Ohio because Republicans were using those as test cases for what they might be able to accomplish in 2024,” said A’shanti Gholar, president of Emerge, a political organization that recruits and trains Democratic women to run for office.”….”Democrats, meanwhile, believe they can benefit not just from the abortion issue but discontent toward Trump, whose favorability numbers with the general electorate are on par with Biden’s. Trump’s legal woes – along with Republicans’ failure to “right the course” of their party after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, puts the threat of future extremism in the minds of voters as they head into the 2024 election season, Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, told reporters in a conference call.”

Monica Potts of 538 reports at ABC News Pollapalooza that “Recent polling suggests that Americans are very worried about gun violence. A Quinnipiac University poll taken from Oct. 26 to 30, right after the Maine shooting, found that 46 percent of registered voters worried about becoming a victim of a mass shooting themselves. That matches a high set in July 2022 in the wake of the Uvalde, Texas, shooting at Robb Elementary School, and is 9 points higher than a low of 37 percent in December 2017, the year the survey began asking the question….Americans also feel pessimistic that anything will change. Indeed, 68 percent don’t believe the federal government will do anything to reduce gun violence within the next year, per the Quinnipiac poll…A solid majority of Americans have supported stricter gun control laws during most of the years that Gallup has been tracking the issue, since 1990, with a dip in support during former President Barack Obama’s tenure. More than half have supported stricter gun control laws since 2015, and recent polls have shown public support hovering between 50 and 60 percent….In September, a Verasight poll that found 58 percent favored stronger gun laws. And in late October, Gallup found that 56 percent of Americans supported stricter gun control laws, an amount virtually unchanged from a year before….Support for tighter gun control measures tends to spike after a mass shooting event and then fall back down to the prior level after the event has faded from the news, a pattern that began after the Sandy Hook shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012. (Though it’s worth noting that the correlation is most direct for school shootings, as opposed to high-profile shootings at other locations.)….There’s not enough evidence yet to say whether public opinion following the Lewiston event will follow that pattern, but early surveys seem to show public opinion holding stable. The Quinnipiac poll found results in line with previous polls, with 57 percent of respondents supporting stricter gun laws. A YouGov/Economist survey has asked adults whether they think laws governing the sale of handguns should be more strict periodically over the past year.

Potts continues, “Support has varied between a low of 53 percent last November and a high of 58 percent in January. The latest survey, which ran from Oct. 28 to the 31, right after the Lewiston shooting, showed support for stricter laws at 55 percent, still within that range and 2 points lower than the most recent survey in May….Drilling down, even more registered voters show support for specific measures. The Quinnipiac poll found that 52 percent supported a nationwide ban on assault-style rifles, the kind of legislation Golden had previously voted against, compared with 44 percent who opposed it. An overwhelming majority, 92 percent, supported background checks on all gun buyers, 56 percent opposed the sale of high-capacity magazines, and 53 percent thought the United States would be less safe if more people carried guns. These numbers are consistent with other polls, and with Quinnipiac polling that on some questions goes back at least a decade; American voters have wanted stricter gun control laws for a long time….About 70 percent of Americans also favor red flag laws that allow law enforcement to temporarily remove guns from people deemed a risk to themselves or others, according to an Associated Press/NORC poll from Aug. 10-14. There’s a lot of evidence that, particularly in the case of mass shootings, many shooters talk about their plans or raise alarms with family and friends, and interventions in those cases can be successful….In a September NPR/Ipsos poll on active shooter drills, 40 percent of respondents named gun violence as one of their top concerns for K-12 schools….The 68 percent of Americans who didn’t think the federal government will do anything about curbing gun violence within the next year is up from the 56 percent who said the same in June 2022, right before Biden signed the gun control law. Biden has said that law didn’t go far enough, but the partisan splitin support for some gun control measures may keep many Republican lawmakers from working on more serious reform. The AP/NORC poll found that Republican support dropped after Biden signed the law, from 49 percent last summer to 32 percent this summer.”

From “Biden’s economic messaging should ‘hit Trump’ and highlight his mistakes, data reveals: Biden can revive ailing poll numbers by reminding voters Trump was a threat to social security and cut taxes for the wealthy” by David Smith at The Guardian:

Joe Biden should sharpen his economic message by acknowledging voters’ pain and drawing a more direct contrast with Donald Trump to revive his ailing poll numbers, according to research presented to the White House and seen by the Guardian.

Surveys by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC), a grassroots organisation aligned with Senator Elizabeth Warren, found that voters trust Republicans over Democrats to handle the economy – but there are ways to close the gap by highlighting Trump’s past mistakes and threat to social security.

“We cannot just repeat over and over again that the economy is doing great and expect repetition to win us the trust of the public,” said Adam Green, cofounder of the PCCC, who has held meetings with top officials in the White House, House of Representatives and Senate Democratic leadership and senior political operatives around Washington.

Smith shares some well-crafted talking points, including:

America’s economy is performing well by most measures. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) rose at a 4.9% annual rate during the July to September quarter, defying predictions of a recession. Unemployment is at its lowest level for half a century and inflation has fallen to the lowest rate in any G7 country.

Commenting on recent polling, Smith adds,

National polling conducted by the PCCC and the Data for Progress thinktank from September to November rings further alarm bells going into Biden’s re-election campaign. Asked which party they trust more to handle the economy, 42% of likely voters say Republicans, 35% say Democrats and 20% say neither. But the research also found that message framing is crucial.

Just 24% of likely voters agree with the statement that “the economy is getting better for people like me”. But that share climbs to 43% when extra context is given such as: “We should not return to the chaos created by Trump. Our economy is beginning to turn a corner after a few tough years felt across the world. I trust Biden more than Trump to crack down on corporations that inflate the price of gas and food – and to fight for people like me.”

The survey found that a message that blames Trump for gutting funding for pandemic preparedness, which left America unprepared for Covid-19, still leaves Democrats with a deficit of 14 percentage points. But asserting that Trump mismanaged the economy by cutting taxes for billionaires and failing to fight back against corporate price gouging on gas and groceries cuts the gap to just four points.

The PCCC’s research shows that Democrats can drive a contrast over taxing the wealthy to boost social security. The statement “Billionaires and other wealthy Americans should have to pay social security taxes at the same rate as other Americans” has support from 79% of independent voters.

Furthermore, the assertion that “Democrats support increasing taxes on billionaires and support increasing funding for programs like social security” gives the party an 11-percentage point lead. While adding a second sentence – “Republicans are pushing to cut taxes on billionaires and are pushing to cut funding for programs like social security” – doubles the advantage to 22 percentage points.

Smith notes in his concluding paragraph that much of the public doesn’t seem to know abut the divergent policies of both parties on Social Security, and Democrats can benefit tremendously by exposing the difference.

Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch advises “‘Give ‘em hell, Joe!’ How Harry Truman showed Biden a way to win in 2024,” and observes that ” President Biden can benefit from taking a page Harry Truman’s reelection strategy: “Like Truman, Biden’s challenge in going into 2024 is not to reinvent the wheel — Democrats have won the popular presidential vote in seven of the last eight elections — but to boost enthusiasm and turnout among the coalition that produced those million-vote margins. Today, that includes white voters in cities and suburbs with college degrees, Black and brown voters, and young people of all stripes, among others. Truman outsmarted Dewey by designing campaign trips that intensely targeted the places he needed to win, and Biden must do the same….“We’re going to give ‘em hell,” Truman declared in boarding his whistle-stop express in mid-September. A campaign slogan — and a winning vibe — was born. The growing shouts of “Give ‘em hell, Harry!” from the swelling crowds meant more than any public-opinion poll….Biden — despite his lifelong struggles with stuttering, and now his advancing age — can be Truman-esque when he is truly unleashed on the campaign trail. “Is there ever anything America set its mind to as a nation that we’ve done together and we haven’t succeeded?” Biden asked union autoworkers celebrating a new contract in Illinois last week, before, uncharacteristically, lashing out at Trump by name. His energized audience booed and someone shouted “send him to jail!” Biden was giving ‘em hell, and his crowd was eating it up….Times change, but commonalities abound. Voters fret about the economy, but what brings them to the polls is a threat to their fundamental rights….Last Tuesday’s election shows that in the 2020s, nothing has motivated voters more than the threat to women’s reproductive rights since the GOP’s handpicked U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Roe v. Wade ruling in 2022, as well as the freedom of speech assaults by conservative groups like Moms for Liberty….Until now, Democrats haven’t fully figured out how to translate that anger into energy into Biden’s reelection, but it can be done. Plans to put abortion rights referenda on the ballot in key states like Nevada or Florida will help. Team Biden needs to spotlight Trump’s frequent boasts that he’s personally responsible for ending Roe v. Wade through his radical Supreme Court picks….Abortion rights can be a winning issue. So can voter revulsion at the poisonous GOP brand and growing legitimate fears of dictatorship, which should trump any qualms over Biden’s age. The history of how Biden wins in 2024 was written in 1948. Give ‘em hell, Joe!”

Harry Enten explains “How RFK Jr. could change the outcome of the 2024 election” at CNN Politics”: As Enten writes, “…It would be foolish to dismiss what the current polls are telling us: Independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is polling higher than any independent or third-party candidate in a generation. He, along with other non-major-party candidates, has a real chance to affect the outcome of the 2024 election….,Take a look at a recent Quinnipiac University poll: Kennedy hit 22% among registered voters. That struck me as very high, so I went into the polling vault…The last independent presidential candidate to earn over 20% support in a poll within a year of the election was Ross Perot in 1992. He ended up getting 19% of the popular vote….Perot is a bit of an exception in that independent or third-party candidates usually fade as an election nears. John Anderson was polling above 20% during the 1980 campaign, before pulling in just 7% in November. In 1968, former Alabama Gov. George Wallace topped out at 21% in pre-election polling as a third-party candidate before picking up 14% when the votes were cast….Moreover, those three prior candidates ended up getting above 5% (if not 10%) in the final outcome….his numbers in the swing states should be turning heads. According to New York Times/Siena College surveys, Kennedy was in the high teens to upward of 25% in the six closest states that Biden won in 2020 over Trump: Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Michigan….If the final results matched those polls, Trump would win the election….Also on Thursday, West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin said he would not run for reelection next year. He was entertaining the idea of running as a third-party candidate earlier this year. Manchin took 10% as a No Labels candidate in an PRRI poll during the summer….Now, none of these non-major-party candidates are likely to win. That, though, really isn’t the point when talking about them….The ultimate winner could come in with well less than a majority.”

However, “if former President Donald Trump is the GOP nominee, his return to the spotlight and potential felony convictions will ensure that Biden is compared to the alternative, not the almighty, as the president likes to say,” Jonathan Martin writes in “Here’s How Biden Can Turn It Around” at Politico. Further, “For Biden to win reelection, however, he must make changes. I spoke with dozens of Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans about what the president can do on personnel, presentation and strategy to improve his prospects. Their suggestions (pleadings?) are below….Biden is indeed in peril. The New York Times battleground survey was no outlier, as made clear by a new poll from Bloomberg-Morning Consult that reflected the same cold fact: the president begins his re-election as the underdog….With the increasingly likely possibility that this will be a multi-candidate election, and Biden at risk of being denied the nose-holding votes he needs from independents and pre-Trump Republicans, the president’s margin for error is nil….Last week’s entry of Jill Stein as a Green Party candidate and Sen. Joe Manchin’s new presidential tease should focus the mind. Biden can do little about Stein, but he must smother Manchin with kindness and keep him in the Democratic tent. While he’s at it, the president and his top aides should also woo Manchin’s Republican friend (and third-party temptress) Mitt Romney….Neither senator wants their legacy to be abetting Trump’s return. But that’s not enough: Biden must bring them into his corner. They must actively make the case that voting for Biden is the only way to block Trump….And on this score, why is Biden not doing more to secure the support of Liz Cheney? She has made clear she’s determined to stop Trump’s return to the Oval Office. Yet Cheney is still publicly keeping open a presidential bid of her own. Biden can let her publish her book next month, but then she should be brought into the fold. Whether it’s called Republicans Against Trump or Republicans for Biden, Cheney must be deployed and do all she can do to bring other prominent figures with her, including her father and former President George W. Bush.”

Martin continues, “No ambassador has seemed to remake the role as Biden’s envoy to Japan, Rahm Emanuel. Yet the best service Rahm-san can offer Biden isn’t using his post in Asia to forge Pacific alliances and taunt the Russians and Chinese. The president should call Emanuel back stateside and have him chair the reelection….Doing so would demonstrate a willingness by Biden to broaden his inner circle, create a manic urgency in the campaign that is Emanuel’s trademark and, by elevating one of the most ferocious operatives of our times, signal that when Trump goes low the Democrats will go fucking lower….The last president to lose reelection before Trump, George H.W. Bush, was tagged as a foreign policy-focused leader who waited too long to summon his old hand, James A. Baker III, back from diplomatic service to the campaign. Biden should not make that mistake….The White House must move to the political equivalent of a war footing. Biden should lure back former Chief of Staff Ron Klain in some capacity. Few modern chiefs could do as much simultaneously as Klain, and he could be particularly useful as the left grows restive over Biden’s Israel tilt….The governors, the senators, the cabinet secretaries and the infrastructure czar should be the faces of Biden’s campaign, along with the president and vice-president. The message: with Democrats remaining in power, it’s not just an 82-year-old at the helm but also this group — Team Normal when compared to Trump and his Star Wars bar term two….the president must enlist younger figures like Senators Raphael Warnock and Cory Booker, and Representatives Marc Veasey, Lauren Underwood and Joe Neguse in the way he did Maxwell Frost on guns….Which raises one of the most vital imperatives: Go on the offensive against the GOP. Where are the frontal attacks on Republicans? Especially with Biden at risk of defeat because of slippage among working-class voters of all races, it’s confounding that he doesn’t lash the opposition for siding with the wealthy….And when it comes to the best issue Democrats have on their side, Trump is single-handedly responsible for the end of legal abortion in America. It was his three Supreme Court justices who delivered the crucial votes to overturn Roe vs Wade. And now, recognizing the issue as a political loser and never being fully committed in the first place, Trump is running like a scalded dog away from his signature achievement. Yet he’s on tape boasting how he’s the architect of Roe’s demise….As one canny Democratic strategist all but begged: Talk about abortion every day….Lastly, to paraphrase a future Middle East envoy, voters care more about their future than your past. Tell them what you will do in a second term. Be forward-looking. And contrast your vision for the next four years with that of the candidate who’s, literally folks, running on retribution.”