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:

David Leonhardt made a bit of a stir recently with an article arguing that a “new centrism” is rising in Washington. He cites numerous examples of bipartisan cooperation in the last several years:

During the Covid pandemic, Democrats and Republicans in Congress came together to pass emergency responses. Under President Biden, bipartisan majorities have passed major laws on infrastructure and semiconductor chips, as well as laws on veterans’ health, gun violence, the Postal Service, the aviation system, same-sex marriage, anti-Asian hate crimes and the electoral process. On trade, the Biden administration has kept some of the Trump administration’s signature policies and even expanded them.

That does seem impressive. Much of Leonhardt’s essay is devoted to an explanation of how this new centrism has, counterintuitively, arisen in a time of intense polarization. There is much to his explanation but the most fundamental point is this: a relatively laissez-faire economic model, typically shorthanded as “neoliberalism,” which was supported in different ways for decades by both parties, ultimately failed to deliver the steadily rising prosperity most Americans desire. This has led to widespread voter dissatisfaction and an openness to alternatives across the electorate.

Both parties, Leonhardt argues, have been forced to respond to this shifting public mood, albeit in different ways reflecting their differing philosophies and political bases. But the potential for overlap has emerged as both parties chase the median voter. Hence the counterintuitive level of bipartisan cooperation and commonality of goals.

That commonality of goals builds on a shared sense that the shortfall in living standards must be addressed and that America now faces a dangerous new world where the emergence of rivals like China threatens the country on multiple levels. Should Democrats lean into that and seek to, in a sense, “own” this new centrism?

I’d say yes. The new centrism, as it has developed so far, provides clear indicators of the current policy sweet spot among American voters: they want to live better and feel safer and are pragmatically open to policies that could directly address these needs. They do not have an ideological litmus test for these policies, nor a definite view of how large or small government should be. Given the dysfunction and incoherence of today’s Trumpified Republican Party would this not be an opportunity to steal a march on their rivals and (dare I say it?) give the people what they actually want?

Of course, pursuing such a course would not be without its obstacles. As Leonhardt notes:

Americans lean left on economic policy. Polls show that they support restrictions on trade, higher taxes on the wealthy and a strong safety net. Most Americans are not socialists, but they do favor policies to hold down the cost of living and create good-paying jobs….The story is different on social and cultural issues. Americans lean right on many of those issues, polls show (albeit not as far right as the Republican Party has moved on abortion).

If you aim to promote and dominate a new centrism, it makes sense to target that fat center of American public opinion. But progressive Democrats would balk at this second part and would chafe at the limited nature of the first part; support for government action in the areas enumerated does not equate to support for restructuring American capitalism around a rapid clean energy transition. The new center of American politics is oriented instead toward concrete improvements in living standards and the safeguarding of America’s place in the world.

The importance of the latter is should not be underestimated. From the Leonhardt article:

“China is a unifying force, absolutely,” Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, told me. Senator John Fetterman, a Pennsylvania Democrat, compared the rise of artificial intelligence to the Soviet Union’s launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957, which led to bipartisan legislation on education and scientific research. Anxiety about A.I., Fetterman added, made possible the passage of the semiconductor-chips bill. “We are most able to come together when we acknowledge the risks we have to the American way of life,” Fetterman said. “Whose side are you on—democracy or Putin, Hamas and China?”

That muscular, “whose side are you on?” approach resonates well with the new center but less so with the progressive left in the Democratic Party. They are far more interested in a quixotic quest to rapidly replace fossil fuels with renewables and get everyone to drive an electric car, whether they are interested or not. That’s nuts, both as policy and politics.

More broadly, it seems clear that building out the new center of American politics from the Democratic side depends on weighting down progressive left priorities and weighting up moderate priorities consistent with the views of most voters. It’s frustrating that when the Biden administration takes actions consistent with this approach, they are bizarrely reluctant to talk about them, presumably because they’re afraid to annoy the activist-industrial complex. Here’s a pertinent example from a recent Wall Street Journal article, “While Biden Worries About the Left, the Voters He Needs Are in the Center”:

Under Biden, American energy production has reached historic highs—a popular accomplishment that voters overwhelmingly support. But you would never know it from listening to him. The achievement went unmentioned in the president’s recent State of the Union address and his recent campaign speeches, where he has preferred to talk about climate investments and “environmental justice.” Perhaps as a result, most Americans disapprove of his handling of energy, and many blame him for high gas prices.

The president’s failure to tout this aspect of his record has frustrated moderate allies. Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) recently wrote a Washington Post op-ed sarcastically “congratulating” Biden for his energy record and urging him to tout it more vigorously. “This is the all-of-the-above strategy in action, showing results. But it seems some of the president’s radical advisers in the White House are so worried about angering climate activists that they refuse to speak up about these accomplishments,” Manchin wrote.

This seems like political malpractice, which has only been compounded by the administration’s decision to cave to pressure from climate activists and halt permitting on liquified natural gas (LNG) exports—a decision that makes no policy sense and is guaranteed to alienate working-class voters.

John Fetterman and Bob Casey, Pennsylvania’s two Democratic Senators had some stern words for administration’s peculiar decision:

Pennsylvania is an energy state. As the second largest natural gas-producing state, this industry has created good-paying energy jobs in towns and communities across the Commonwealth and has played a critical role in promoting U.S. energy independence…

While the immediate impacts on Pennsylvania remain to be seen, we have concerns about the long-term impacts that this pause will have on the thousands of jobs in Pennsylvania’s natural gas industry. If this decision puts Pennsylvania energy jobs at risk, we will push the Biden Administration to reverse this decision.

Fetterman, in particular, has made no attempt to hide his lack of interest in doing the progressive left’s bidding. He has said, “I’m not a progressive,” and “I don’t feel like I’ve left the label; it’s just more that it’s left me.” An amusing anecdote in a recent New York Times article makes it abundantly clear where he’s coming from:

Senator John Fetterman was hard to miss, lumbering down an empty hallway in a Senate office building dressed in his signature baggy gym shorts and a black hoodie. So when Stevie O’Hanlon, an environmentalist and organizer from Chester County, Pa., spotted him recently, she took the opportunity to question her home-state senator about a pipeline in her community.

Mr. Fetterman’s reaction was surprisingly hostile. Raising his phone to capture the confrontation on video, the senator began ridiculing her.

“I didn’t expect this!” Mr. Fetterman said, feigning excitement. “Oh my gosh!”

As Ms. O’Hanlon politely pressed him on what she called his “change of heart” on the issue of the local pipeline, which he had previously opposed, Mr. Fetterman pulled faces of faux concern until he stepped onto an elevator and let the closing door end the interaction.

Ms. O’Hanlon, a co-founder of the progressive Sunrise Movement, was stunned.

A Democratic Party that wants to build out the new center needs a lot more stunning of Sunrise Movement activists and a lot less genuflecting to their concerns. I’ve called this The Way of the Fetterman; it models how Democrats should declare independence from an activist-driven agenda at variance with the emerging center of American politics.

The dividends from embracing that new center could be not just desirable but critical for the Democrats moving forward. The Split Ticket November-April average of cross-tabular results from public polls finds Biden with an average 4 point deficit to Trump among independents, compared to Biden’s 10 point advantage in 2020 (a 14 point pro-Trump swing). And among moderates, Biden is leading Trump by an average of 14 points, way down from his 27 point advantage in the 2020 election (a 13 point pro-Trump swing).

That should make the idea of embracing the new center of American politics pretty darn attractive. In truth, it’s a golden opportunity for a Democratic Party that, right now, needs all the help it can get.

For what it’s worth, “One in 10 Republicans less likely to vote for Trump after guilty verdict, Reuters/Ipsos poll finds,” Jason Lange writes at Reuters. Lange explains, “Ten percent of Republican registered voters say they are less likely to vote for Donald Trump following his felony conviction for falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment to a porn star, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll that closed on Friday….The two-day poll, conducted in the hours after the Republican presidential candidate’s conviction by a Manhattan jury on Thursday, also found that 56% of Republican registered voters said the case would have no effect on their vote and 35% said they were more likely to support Trump, who has claimed the charges against him are politically motivated and has vowed to appeal….The potential loss of a tenth of his party’s voters is more significant for Trump than the stronger backing of more than a third of Republicans, since many of the latter would be likely to vote for him regardless of the conviction….Among independent registered voters, 25% said Trump’s conviction made them less likely to support him in November, compared to 18% who said they were more likely and 56% who said the conviction would have no impact on their decision….The verdict could shake up the race between Trump, who was U.S. president from 2017-2021, and Democratic President Joe Biden ahead of the Nov. 5 election. U.S. presidential elections are typically decided by thin margins in a handful of competitive swing states, meaning that even small numbers of voters defecting from their candidates can have a big impact….Biden and Trump remain locked in a tight race, with 41% of voters saying they would vote for Biden if the election were held today and 39% saying they would pick Trump, according to the poll, which surveyed 2,556 U.S. adults nationwide.” Plug in all of the usual caveats, especially the one about swing state polls being more meaningful in 2024 than national polls, and we still have a bunch of “what if?” scenarios and no safe bets. At The Hill, Nick Robertson writes, “Trump leads Biden by about 1 percentage point in The Hill/Decision Desk HQ average of polls, though Biden has gained on Trump since the conviction, leading Trump in most polls since Thursday.”

In “Donald Trump Gets More Bad News From Fourth Post-Verdict Poll” at Newsweek, Mandy Taheri adds, “Meanwhile, three separate polls conducted since Trump’s guilty verdict also show similar findings with the ABC News/Ipsos poll….A YouGov snap poll of 3,040 Americans conducted just hours after the verdict was announced revealed that 50 percent believe Trump was guilty, while 30 percent thought he was not. Another 19 percent were unsure. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.3 percentage points….Broken down into party lines, 15 percent of Republicans think Trump is guilty while 64 percent do not, 48 percent of independents think Trump is guilty while 25 percent do not, and 86 percent of Democratsbelieve he is guilty while 5 percent do not. A total of 831 Republicans, 1,114 independents, and 1,113 Democrats were surveyed. The margin of error of the subgroups are unclear….Morning Consult’s poll of 2,220 registered voters found 54 percent approve of the jury’s verdict while 39 percent disapprove. Across party lines, 18 percent of Republicans approve of the verdict while 74 percent disapprove, 52 percent of independents approve while 33 disapprove and 88 percent of Democrats approve while 8 percent disapprove. The poll, which was conducted on Friday, had a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.” Nonetheless, “Steven Cheung, Trump’s campaign communications director, told Newsweek via email on Saturday, “President Trump has seen an outpouring support, which has led to polling increases and record-shattering fundraising numbers that include close to $53 million in just 24 hours, 30% of those who are new donors.”….He also mentioned a snap Daily Mail/J.L. Partners poll taken after Thursday’s verdict, which found that Trump’s approval rating was up by 6 percentage points compared to those who disapproved….A total of 22 percent of likely voters had a more positive view of Trump after his guilty verdict while 16 percent had a more negative view. Meanwhile, 32 percent of likely voters who already had a negative view of Trump had no change of opinion while 27 percent of likely voters who already had a positive view of Trump had no change. The poll surveyed 403 likely voters from Thursday to Friday and had a margin of error of plus or minus 4.9 percent.” Perhaps all of the polls taken thus far can be likened to knee-jerk reactions so soon after the verdict.

“A Bit of Trump Trial Campaign Advice” by Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo: “Trump’s play is always dominance. The weapon of choice against that puffed-up pro-wrestling-like dominance spectacle that is at the heart of Trumpism is mockery. And this provides such a wonderful opening….Trump was convicted of a felony. So the trial was rigged. Just like when Donald Trump lost a whole presidential election. Remember that? And he said that was rigged. He couldn’t just take it like a man (or woman) like the other … what, 44 guys who lost, and just admit he lost? And remember back in 2016 when it looked like he was going to lose, well … that election was rigged too. And then he won so it wasn’t rigged anymore. And the lawsuit that dissolved his company for decades of serial fraud. Also rigged, surprisingly!….Don’t we all know that guy? From our own lives? It’s not his fault? Someone always set him up? It was rigged!….And why stop there? Remember the convictions of Bannon and Flynn and Manafort and Stone and good lord almost every one who’s ever worked for him? All rigged. And what about the time he pulled up a U-Haul on the White House lawn and made off with a few hundred boxes of classified records and kept them in random rooms at his beach resort. Also rigged? Yes, would you believe that prosecution was also rigged! We know this guy….The way to constantly inject Trump’s felony conviction into the campaign, other than remembering that “convicted felon” is now his first name, is to simply make his pathetic whining, excuses and demands for never-ending life mulligans the center of the campaign against him. He’s a disgrace but more than that an embarrassment. It won’t be hard because he’ll be making this claim non-stop through November, just a constant cue up for the same lethal mockery. It is the heart of his politics to always be jacking the conversation up to higher and higher levels of drama, even when the drama is his own menace, indeed especially when the drama is his own menace. That’s his power. What cuts him down is to zero in on the pathetic excuse-making and whining, a trait all of us associate with the most odious and pitiful people we’ve ever known. And let that pull the disgrace of his many crimes and prosecutions along with it.”

Sofia Benavides explains “Why Mexico’s election is more important than ever for the United States” at CNN Politics: “With more than 98 million eligible voters, some 70,000 candidates and over 20,000 public offices being contested, Mexico’s general election on June 2 will be the largest in the country’s history….But it’s not just the massive scale of the event that makes it so important in the eyes of observers across the border in the United States….For the first time in history, the country looks set to elect its first female president. The two front-runners are both women – Claudia Sheinbaum, of the Morena party, who is backed by the governing coalition Sigamos Haciendo Historia, and Xóchitl Gálvez, who is backed by an coalition of opposition parties….The vote is also important because it falls in the same year as the US presidential election – something that happens only once every 12 years – and comes at a time of transition in the relationship between the two countries….Mexico became the United States’ top trading partner last year, surpassing China and Canada….Experts say this is largely because geopolitical issues such as the pandemic, the legacy of Trump’s trade war against China, and the war in Ukraine all encouraged near-shoring – the relocation of supply chains nearer to home – which boosted US imports from Mexico and its investment in the country….Key to facilitating this shift was the creation of the USMCA trade agreement, which came into effect in 2020 between Mexico, the United States and Canada….Many analysts believe the US is currently playing down disputes over the USMCA in the hope that this can ease differences in other areas, both in domestic Mexican issues – such as alleged human rights violations, the government’s treatment of journalists, and the increase in political assassinations – and bilateral concerns such as immigration and the drug trade….“It’s very transactional. Mexico agreed to partially manage the immigration crisis in the US, keeping immigrants in Mexican territory and taking care of their deportation, in exchange for the United States not activating these lawsuits,” said Raquel López Portillo Maltos, executive secretary of the youth group of the Mexican Council on Foreign Relations (Comexi) think tank….While migration across the countries’ 1,933 miles long border is a shared concern, the issue is much lower on Mexican politicians’ agenda than in the US — where it could be a decisive factor in the November vote, according to Carin Zissis, editor-in-chief of the Americas Society/Council of the Americas website….The rub for US politicians is that they need buy-in from their Mexican counterparts if their own immigration policies are to succeed.”

Now that Trump has been convicted of multiple crimes, the 2024 presidential campaign could change. I thought about how the former president would handle things, and wrote about it at New York:

Donald Trump’s most important consolation after a Manhattan jury found him guilty of 34 criminal counts is that he has anticipated this moment for a long time. He was indicted 14 months ago with subsequent criminal indictments following in Florida, in Atlanta, and in Washington. Ever since, he has been running for president as a man under criminal indictment, and coping with that fact has been central to his strategy and message. Indeed, it became clear a long time ago that Trump’s endless preoccupation with his failed 2020 stolen-election fables, a backward-facing stance that initially baffled political observers, was actually a way of conditioning voters to view his future treatment by the justice system skeptically, if not with great hostility.

During this year’s Republican nominating contest, this strategy worked brilliantly, not only insulating Trump from criticism from his rivals about his misconduct in the cases that led to his serial indictments but actually making his alleged criminality a badge of honor. His increasingly shrill attacks on the prosecutors he faced helped boost him to an easy win in the primaries as the hero of conservatives angry at the Democrats and liberal elites seeking to hold him accountable. Now that he has been found guilty in a case brought by a Democratic prosecutor in a dark-blue constituency, to the delight of those liberal elites, Trump can be expected to keep on with the same chest-thumping professions of innocence and victimization (and promises of vengeance) with the Republican Party that has already nominated him dragooned willingly into joining his crusade for vindication.

There’s no particular reason to doubt that Trump’s ongoing call for loyalty will continue to work with a Republican base that very badly wants to respond to it favorably. Pre-verdict polls have consistently shown that a significant share of Republicans would “reconsider” their support for Trump if he were convicted of any crime. But “reconsidering” isn’t the same as “abandoning.” As a May 5 AP-Ipsos poll showed, most of these voters will likely wind up right back in his camp with any encouragement at all (only 4 percent of Trump supporters said they’d drop their allegiance to him after a conviction, and that may be overstating the reaction given past experience with moments when Republicans seemed to be jettisoning the 45th president — but didn’t).

But even if Trump can confidently count on his base of supporters to stay loyal — indeed, perhaps even cling to him more fiercely than ever as the victim of a “witch hunt” — he must still deal with possible fallout among the small but potentially decisive sliver of swing voters that is open to voting for him but might seriously reconsider voting for a felon. He will need something different from tribal loyalty fed by conspiracy theories to seal the deal in November. For these voters, the key may be to double down on every line of attack on Joe Biden as a feckless incompetent and an active danger to the peace and prosperity of America. Conservative Christian activist Rod Dreher may have identified precisely the right precedent for what the Trump campaign will try to do to assuage concerns over his conviction, in tweeting a copy of an old Louisiana bumper sticker that read, “Vote for the Crook: It’s Important,” and commenting: “I had this bumper sticker on my Louisiana car in 1991, urging my fellow voters to vote for sleazy Edwin Edwards over ex-KKK leader David Duke. After Trump’s felony convictions, I say it’s time to bring it back for the fall election.”

Yes, supporters of the ethically challenged Edwin Edwards frontally attacked concerns he was corrupt by minimizing the significance of his corner-cutting as compared to the dire consequences of letting David Duke become chief executive of Louisiana, and what had been a close “race from hell” turned into an Edwards landslide. Nobody will ever mistake Joe Biden for David Duke, but the basic idea of suggesting that a little criminality is better than bad leadership could be fruitfully adapted by the Trump campaign. Trump’s sentencing (scheduled for mid-July) by Judge Merchan could create some serious logistical problems for him, restricting his movements while reminding voters he’s on the wrong side of the law. But he is just lucky that the clock has probably run out for any further criminal convictions prior to Election Day that might make the verdict in Manhattan harder to overlook.

Even if this strategy does not work for Trump and he loses in November, the consequences of the guilty verdict will continue, and not just for the convict. If there was any doubt that Trump will deny and reject an election loss even more vociferously than he did in 2020, it should vanish now. Not only is he deeply invested in the claim that his legal peril represents “election interference” by Democrats, but he also needs the kind of get-out-of-jail card a return to the White House might offer.

No. There is no way to fully prepare for such an unprecedented political event. Never before has a Democratic presidential campaign had to run against a convicted felon.

“Americans reacted Thursday to the historic conviction of former President Donald Trump on 34 felony charges with a mixture of surprise, joy, anger, indifference and expletives,” a team of reporters note in “‘Speechless’: Swing state voters react to Donald Trump’s guilty verdict“ at USA Today. Politico has five “takeaways” from the verdict. NPR has four. But nobody really knows how it will play out.

Can Democrats safely assume that Trump will still be the Republican nominee? Probably, although the prospects for chaos in the Republican Party have just increased significantly, and the chaos factor was already a big problem for them. Nearly all Republican “leaders,” notably including Nikki Haley, have signed up for the Trump grovelfest. Watch them now squirm as they try to justify their continued support for a convicted felon, while still trying to project an image of conservative public servants who are tough on crime. That sell just got a lot harder.

Some worry that the verdict will somehow help Trump. But I suspect he has already maxxed out with the “evil Democrats are out to destroy Trump” voters. There are only so many of them, and they would have to believe that Democrats somehow politicized the jury, which is quite a stretch.

Some Republicans will say that the trial was conducted in a kangaroo court, even though Trump’s attorneys had plenty of opportunities to ditch jurors they deemed to be prejudiced against him. More than 500 potential jurors were scrutinized for this trial. The Trump grovelers will argue that it ain’t over until the appeal process is completed. That looks a bit weak in light of the speed of the jury’s verdict, which is a slam dunk of a message.

If Trump starts to tank badly in poll averages, the GOP grovelfest could quickly come to an end, and they will dump him at their convention. In that event, expect amusingly dodgy comments, something like “my support was always contingent on Mr. Trump being found innocent.” Not a great look.

Republicans now have an even shorter list of credible replacement presidential candidates. Edge to Democrats in that possibility.

But that doesn’t mean that Biden will have a lock on re-election. Americans have short memories. And there is also the possibility that voters will shrug off the conviction, believing that it’s just more of the crazy polarization of our times. After all the “if-then” scenarios are parsed, nobody knows what is going to happen. Democrats should have measured responses, don’t gloat so much and play it cool.

Ronald Brownstein shares some insights in his article “The unusual turnout dynamic that could decide the 2024 election” at CNN Politics: “For decades, Democrats have built their electoral strategies on a common assumption: the higher the turnout, the better their chances of winning. But that familiar equation may no longer apply for President Joe Biden in 2024….A wide array of polls this year shows Biden running best among Americans with the most consistent history of voting, while former President Donald Trump often displays the most strength among people who have been the least likely to vote….These new patterns are creating challenges for each party. Trump’s potential appeal to more irregular voters, particularly younger Black and Latino men, is compelling Democrats to rethink longstanding strategies that focused on mobilizing as many younger and non-White voters as possible without worrying about their partisan allegiance….“What all this means is this election has volatility,” says Daniel Hopkins, a University of Pennsylvania political scientist who has studied the widening partisan divergence between voters with and without a consistent history of turning out. “We used to expect that the marginal non-voter, the next voter who turned out if an election was very engaging, didn’t look different from people who did vote. In this case, the crowd that hasn’t gotten engaged looks very, very different.”

Brownstein explains further, “Merged results from the three most recent national NBC polls, conducted by a bipartisan team of prominent Democratic and Republican pollsters, for instance, found that Biden leads Trump by 4 percentage points among people who voted in both 2020 and 2022. But among those who voted in 2020 but not 2022, Trump led Biden by 12 percentage points. Trump’s lead swelled to 20 percentage points among those who did not vote in either 2020 or 2022. Fully 65% of those who did not vote in either of the past two elections said they disapproved of Biden’s performance in office….Combined results from recent national New York Times/Siena College polls likewise have found Biden narrowly leading among potential 2024 voters who turned out in 2020 while trailing Trump by double digits among those who did not vote in their previous contest….Hopkins has conducted perhaps the most ambitious attempt to quantify the divergence between Americans with and without a history of voting. Earlier this year, he and a colleague worked with NORC at the University of Chicago to survey over 2,400 adults about their preferences in the 2024 race. The poll only surveyed people who were old enough to vote in each of the past three elections — the midterms of 2018 and 2022 and the 2020 presidential race….The results were striking. Among adults who had voted in each of the past three federal elections, Biden led Trump by 11 points, and Biden eked out a narrow advantage among voters who participated in two of the past three races. But, the poll found, Trump led Biden by 12 percentage points among those who voted in just one of the past three elections and by a crushing margin of 18 percentage points among those who came out for none of them….As important, the pattern held across racial lines. In the poll, Trump ran even with Biden among Latinos who voted in two, one or none of the past three elections, while Biden held a nearly 20-point advantage among those who voted in all three. With Black voters, Biden’s lead was just 10 points among those who did not show up for any of the past three elections, but over 80 points among those who participated in all three.”

Brownstein adds, “Using data from Catalist, a leading Democratic voter targeting firm, Michael Podhorzer, the former political director of the AFL-CIO, reached similar conclusions. He found that in 2020 Biden’s margins over Trump were higher among people who voted in the three previous elections of 2018, 2016 and 2014 than those who voted in some or none of them — and that the relationship held across racial lines….Hopkins said the gap between habitual and irregular voters in his latest survey was far greater than the difference he found when he conducted a similar poll early in the 2016 race between Trump and Hillary Clinton. Key to this widening chasm, he believes, may be another dynamic: Adults who are less likely to vote are also less likely to follow political news….“For more infrequent voters, these are often people who pay less attention to politics and whose political barometer is more the question of how is my family doing economically, how does the country seem to be doing,” Hopkins said. “For those voters, Donald Trump…is not especially unusual.” By contrast, Hopkins said, a “sizable sliver” of habitual voters “have a sense that Trump may be qualitatively different than other political candidates with respect to norm violations and January 6.” For less frequent voters, he added, the equation may be as simple as “they don’t love what they see with Joe Biden, and if Donald Trump is the person running against Joe Biden, they want change.”….The NBC polling results buttress that conclusion: It found that among the roughly one-sixth of voters who say they do not follow political news, Trump led Biden by fully 2-to-1….Several analysts caution that while this divergence between high- and low-frequency voters is appearing consistently in polls now, it’s too early to say for certain whether it will persist through Election Day.”

Further, notes Brownstein, “Through the 21st century, as first Millennials and now Generation Z have entered the electorate in large numbers, Democrats have unwaveringly operated on the belief that turning out as many young voters as possible would benefit the party….But that’s a much more uncertain proposition in 2024, as demonstrated by the latest youth poll from the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, probably the most in-depth look at attitudes among young people. In the IOP poll this spring, Biden led Trump by nearly 20 points among young adults (aged 18-29) who said they definitely plan to vote in November; that lead was comparable to Biden’s advantage among all young adults in 2020….But Republicans point out that even if Trump doesn’t win as many of these irregularly voting non-White men as polls show today, he will still benefit if they drift toward third-party candidates or simply choose not to vote. Looking at the Black community, “even if you don’t buy the potential for Trump to flip lots of votes there, it seems there’s considerable risk of a turnout drop-off that will hit Biden’s raw margins out of big cities in the battlegrounds that Democrats usually depend on,” said GOP pollster Patrick Ruffini…. But Trump’s position steadily improved as the likelihood of voting diminished, with the former president leading Biden by 2-to-1 among those who said they probably would not vote….Those who indicated they were less likely to vote tended to be young people without a college degree, non-Whites and the very youngest cohort aged 18-24. John Della Volpe, the Institute of Politics’ polling director, pointed out that those youngest adults probably don’t remember much about Trump’s presidency.” Brownstein concludes, “Democrats can feel confident that at least as many habitual voters are hostile to Trump as committed to him, particularly in most of the battleground states that will decide the election. The decisive variable for 2024 may be how many people beyond that inner core of the most reliable voters show up and whether they break for the former president as decisively as most polls now suggest.”

Sometimes objective reality really does matter in politics, so at New York I raised a question about its impact on perceptions of Biden and Democrats on immigration issues:

There are two big 2024 campaign issues relating to Joe Biden’s job performance that are really hurting his prospects for reelection: the economy, and more specifically inflation; and the surge in migrants crossing the border during his presidency. Polls consistently show Biden getting low marks on handling inflation (34.8 percent approval according to the RealClearPolitics polling averages) and immigration (33.5 percent per RCP). Unfortunately for the president, these two concerns seem to be especially salient in 2024.

Gallup routinely asks Americans what they consider the “most important problem facing the country.” In its most recent report at the end of April, 30 percent said either “Economy in general” or “High Cost of Living/Inflation” were the single biggest problem, and another 27 percent named “Immigration.” This latter number has more than doubled since last fall. That’s not surprising given the drumbeat of news about high levels of border crossings by migrants since Biden took office, and incessant Republican complaints on the subject, particularly from Donald Trump, for whom immigration has long been his signature issue.

So the most recent statistics on border crossings, as reported by CBS News, represent some really good news for the 46th president:

“Illegal crossings along the U.S.-Mexico border in May are down by more than 50% compared to the record highs reported in December, giving the Biden administration an unexpected reprieve during a time when migration has historically surged, according to internal government data obtained by CBS News. … May is also on track to see the third consecutive month-over-month drop in unlawful border crossings, the preliminary U.S. Department of Homeland Security statistics show. In March and April, illegal crossings along the southern border dropped to 137,000 and 129,000, respectively, according to public government data. If the trend continues, Border Patrol is on pace to record between 110,000 and 120,000 apprehensions in May.”

Biden administration officials concede that a lot of this improvement is attributable to much tougher enforcement efforts by the Mexican government. But the drop in crossings is happening at the same time — coincidentally or not — that the administration is toughening its own rhetoric on illegal immigration, a trend that really began in February after congressional Republicans (reportedly at Trump’s insistence) rejected bipartisan border control legislation.

The major political question is whether this is happening too late to change perceptions of Biden’s job performance on immigration and migration, which Republicans tend to combine with complaints about (largely imaginary) spikes in crime into a law-and-order pitch that treats Democrats as weak and feckless, or perhaps even consciously lawless (that’s the heart of the “Great Replacement Theory” which no less a personage than House Speaker Mike Johnson has echoed, arguing that Biden plans to undocumented immigrants into illegal voters). After all, inflation has significantly abated in 2024, but voters don’t seem inclined to give Biden much credit for it, or even to tamp down their unhappiness with him over the high prices of food, housing and gasoline. It’s also possible that immigration has simply become an issue (much like abortion for Republicans) where Democrats have lost public trust and may not regain it for a good while. It hasn’t been that long since immigration policy divided Republicans and benefited Democrats, but those days seem to be gone for the immediate future.

Team Biden may not be able to hope for a big improvement in job performance assessments on immigration. But a reduction in its salience is feasible, making it an issue that decides voting preferences for a far smaller segment of the electorate. If border crossings continue to drop until election day, hyperbolic Republican claims that Biden has “opened the border” will begin to ring hollow, and Trump’s second-term plans to undertake a massive armed deportation drive will begin to sound as cruel as the former president himself.

In “Senate Democrats are polling well. That could help Biden,” Nathaniel Rakich writes at 538:

As Democrats wring their hands over their poor polling numbers in the presidential race, there is one spot of good news for them: U.S. Senate races. Democratic candidates have led in most recent polls of key Senate races like Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin* even as President Joe Biden trails former President Donald Trump in the very same polls.

I went back and looked at every state-level poll that has asked about both the presidential race and a U.S. Senate race over the past six weeks. The table below shows a simple average of these polls by state; as you can see, Senate Democrats are outrunning Biden’s margin by an average of 5 percentage points:

Senate Democrats are outpolling Biden

Average margin in each state’s presidential race versus Senate race in polls that have asked about both since April 12

Table with 5 columns and 11 rows.

		AVERAGE MARGIN FOR…
STATE	NO. OF POLLS	PRESIDENT	SENATE	DIFF.
Arizona	5	R+4	D+6	+10
Pennsylvania	5	R+3	D+4	+7
Wisconsin	4	R+2	D+7	+10
Florida	3	R+10	R+13	−3
Nevada	3	R+8	D+6	+15
Maryland	2	D+23	D+10	−13
Michigan	1	R+1	D+2	+3
Minnesota	1	D+2	D+14	+12
Texas	1	R+9	R+13	−4
Virginia	1	D+1	D+12	+11
Average		R+1	D+4	+5

When a poll released multiple versions of the same question, we used the version among likely voters over the version among registered voters; the version that asked about third-party candidates over the version that asked a head-to-head; and the version that included the most likely Senate nominees in states that have not yet held their primaries.

It isn’t hard to figure out why this is the case. Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but Biden is unpopular; meanwhile, most Democratic candidates for Senate are popular incumbents, like Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey and Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, and/or have a track record of outperforming the top of the ticket, like Michigan Rep. Elissa Slotkin and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar. Lo and behold, the only three states where Republican Senate candidates are polling better than Trump are the two states where they are incumbents (Florida and Texas) and Maryland, where the GOP’s candidate is popular former Gov. Larry Hogan, who had an astounding 81 percent approval rating among Democrats at the time he left office.

So it’s not exactly a mystery why there’s a presidential-downballot gap. The more interesting question is what, if anything, that gap means for November. There are basically three theories to answer that:

1. Biden’s support right now is artificially low; there are plenty of traditionally Democratic voters who are telling pollsters they support Senate Democrats but, for whatever reason, aren’t ready to get behind Biden yet. So Biden’s support will rise as we get closer to the election and those voters get on board, leaving both Biden and Senate Democrats in good shape.

2. Senate Republicans’ support right now is artificially low. Since most of them aren’t incumbents, they aren’t as well known as their opponents, but their support will rise as Trump voters learn that they are on the “right team” in these Senate races. Therefore, both Trump and Senate Republicans will do well in November.

3. Senate Democrats are just more popular than Biden, and this gap will persist through the election: Many states will vote for both Trump and a Democratic Senate candidate.

Right off the bat, I’m skeptical of No. 3. If the current polls end up being exactly correct, Democrats would win at least five Senate races in states Trump carries. That wouldn’t have been unusual 20 years ago — in 2004, seven states voted for different parties for president and for Senate. But today, split-ticket voting is quite rare. In 2016, every state voted for the same party for Senate that it did for president, and in 2020, every state but one (Maine) did.

The median difference between the presidential and Senate margins in a state has also shrunk drastically over that time — from 20 points in 2004 to just 3 points in 2020.

Read the rest of Rakich’s article here.

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:

It’s a strange political world we live in now. Back in 2010, there was a raging controversy controversy around “epistemic closure” on the right, where many on the left and some dissenting conservatives characterized fierce advocacy in GOP ranks for even the most dubious right-wing takes on the perfidy of the Obama administration as the product of an intellectual ecosystem that was sealed off from the real world—existing in a bubble through which reasonable criticisms could not penetrate. Indeed, such criticisms were summarily dismissed by the faithful as left-wing disinformation and prevarications whose acceptance in any form would undermine the GOP and its righteous drive to save the country.

That was then. This is now. The Trumpified sectors of the GOP still have plenty of epistemic closure going on—but now the left itself and even the White House has joined the party as Nate Silver recently pointed out.

This directly connects to a concept I have popularized called the “Fox News Fallacy.” As I originally described it in the summer of 2021:

This is the idea that if Fox News (substitute here the conservative bête noire of your choice if you prefer) criticizes the Democrats for X then there must be absolutely nothing to X and the job of Democrats is to assert that loudly and often. The problem is that an issue is not necessarily completely invalid just because Fox News mentions it. That depends on the issue. If there is something to the issue and persuadable voters have real concerns, you will not allay those concerns by embracing the Fox News Fallacy. In fact, you’ll probably intensify them by giving such voters the impression that Democrats simply don’t care about their concerns and will do nothing to address them. That will undermine the Democrats’ ability to respond to predictable attacks against their candidates….

We might think of epistemic closure as the logical result of a cascading series of Fox News Fallacies that render Democrats’ theory of the case bulletproof to criticism—and therefore incapable of real change. It becomes more an ideology that a guide to successful electoral action and effective policy-making.

Nowhere is this epistemic closure stronger than on the progressive left which has had extraordinary success making its views “That Which Cannot Be Questioned” within the Democratic Party mainstream. The progressive left thoroughly dominates what John Judis and I call the Democrats’ “shadow party”—the activist groups, think tanks, foundations, publications and websites, and big donors and prestigious intellectuals who are not official parts of the Democratic Party, but who influence and are identified with it.

And they do not like criticism. There is no better exemplar of their determination to enforce epistemic closure within Democratic ranks than the new book, Solidarity, by Astra Taylor and that noted Fighter for the People, Leah Hunt-Hendrix, an heir to the Hunt oil fortune. Jonathan Chait observes:

…[A]s the left has gotten stronger, it has become less socially acceptable to critique it. That people disagree with my [Chait’s] opinions is to be expected. What is notable is that disagreement per se has become controversial. There is a growing, if not yet universal, norm of movement discipline often summarized as “Don’t punch left.”

“Don’t punch left” is the core tenet of Solidarity, a new book by Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix. In a laudatory interview with the Washington Post, Hunt-Hendrix said the book was aimed not only at progressives in general but also specifically at liberals who criticize the left, naming me [Chait] and newsletter author Matthew Yglesias as “falling into the right’s divide-and-conquer strategy.”….

The progressive movement emerged over the past two decades out of a series of component groups representing causes like civil rights, environmentalism, abortion rights, and labor. Over the past two decades, these groups, sometimes called “The Groups,” have evolved from a patchwork of atomized single-issue organizations into a relatively unified movement. Each component part now habitually supports the projects of the others: Abortion-rights groups endorse defunding the police….

Since their goals are both to move the Democratic Party leftward and to hold together the progressive coalition, it follows that criticism from liberals poses a significant strategic threat. “Too often, liberals seek to legitimize their positions by punching left, distancing themselves from social movements to make themselves appear reasonable by comparison, which only strengthens the hands of conservatives and pulls the political center to the right,” they write, urging liberals to instead accept “the necessity of working in coalition with progressive social movements.”

Which presumably means accepting whatever these self-appointed tribunes of the people in The Groups have to say about any given issue, no matter how absurd. Can’t punch left after all!

Madness. Underneath this power play to silence critics is a noxious ideology that fits epistemic closure like a glove. This ideology—call it “intersectionalism”—judges actions or arguments not by their content but rather by the identity of those involved in said actions or arguments. Those identities in turn are defined by an intersectional web of oppressed and oppressors, of the powerful and powerless, of the dominant and marginalized. With this approach, one judges an action not by whether it’s effective or an argument by whether it’s true but rather by whether the people involved in the action or argument are in the oppressed/powerless/marginalized bucket or not. If they are, the actions or arguments should be supported; if not, they should be opposed.

This approach was always a terrible idea, in obvious contradiction to logic and common sense. It has not improved with age. It has led much of the left and large sectors of the Democratic Party to take positions that have little purchase in social or political reality and are offensive to the basic values most people hold—and to be impervious to criticism about them. Hence, epistemic closure.

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That helps explain, but does not excuse, the vogue for “anti-racist” posturing. This dates back to the mid-teens and gathered overwhelming force in 2020 with the George Floyd police killing and subsequent nationwide protests. It became de rigueur on the left and in most of the Democratic Party to solemnly pronounce American society structurally racist and shot through with white supremacy from top to bottom. No argument along these lines was too outrageous if it came from or on behalf of “people of color,” who must be deferred to given their place in the intersectional hierarchy.

Nothing exemplifies this better than the lionization of Ibram X. Kendi, whose thoroughly ridiculous claims were treated as revealed truth by tens of millions of good Democrats. This was a man who called for the passage of an “anti-racist Constitutional amendment” that would:

…establish and permanently fund the Department of Anti-racism (DOA) comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees. The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.

It is truly shocking that this kind of totalitarian thinking was tolerated for even a micro-second in respectable Democratic circles. But it was. Intersectionalism begat epistemic closure. Only racists would criticize “anti-racist” ideas, no matter how ridiculous. So the train rolled on. And it rolls on to this day, preventing Democrats from confronting the many ways they are alienating ordinary working-class voters whose complicated views of the world cannot be contained within the progressive bubble.

It is time for Democrats to bust out of the epistemic closure that imprisons so much of their thinking. A good beginning would be to discard the fundamental belief that conservatives are always wrong about everything and can never be right. In reality, the right is not always wrong and the left is not always correct. The blanket condemnation of conservatives is a tribal belief that always bothered me in my years at the Center for American Progress, leading as it did to disregarding all criticisms, no matter how reasonable, that came from the right and treating allconservatives as little better than tools of Satan. This did not make sense to me and seemed dubious empirically. Some of the criticisms from the right werecorrect and many conservatives were good and interesting people whose views simply differed from my own.

Indeed, some conservatives, by virtue of being conservatives, make good points and provide useful analysis that the left, reflecting its traditional commitments and current epistemic closure, has difficulty producing on its own. Matt Yglesias makes this case in an excellent recent essay, “What the right gets right.” Some excerpts from the article:

[O]ne thing the right gets right is a patriotic attitude toward The United States of America…[M]ost people on the contemporary American left are skeptical of, if not outright hostile to, the idea of patriotism. If you picture someone with an American flag bumper sticker on their vehicle, you’re probably picturing a conservative guy and his truck. Personally, I’m glad that Joe Biden tries to avoid ceding patriotism to the right, but I do think the reality of the situation is closer to “Joe Biden agrees with conservatives about patriotism” than “the left is into patriotism, too.”… I don’t really want to do a whole “patriotism is good” take here (try Noah Smith or read One Billion Americans), but I think American conservatives come out better on this score in part because I think conservatives have a generally clearer sense of history….

Progressives typically characterize their stance on this as being that it’s important to tell people about the darker aspects of history. And they’re right—it is a good idea for people to learn about those things. But I think the standard progressive read of this gets the figure and the ground backwards. The implication of a lot of these takes on episodes of violence, bigotry, displacement, and cruelty in American history is that these episodes are what’s distinctive about the United States of America.

But if you read the history of anywhere, you’ll see that it’s not like there’s some other country where you wouldn’t say “it’s important for people to learn about the darker aspects of our history.” History is dark!…

Conservatives have their own flawed tendency to lapse into nostalgia for the recent past, but I do think they typically have a more clear-eyed view of the reality that the whole of human history is littered with atrocity and cruelty. It’s naive to view our sociocultural antecedents here in the United States as flawless, shining heroes, but it’s also naive to think the violence and brutality of American history is what’s unique about it, rather than the fact that we’ve settled into a prosperous and liberal status quo…

The related thing that conservatives get right is a sense that good things are vulnerable and it’s worth worrying about wrecking everything.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s mantra, paraphrasing Theodore Parker, that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice” is a nice bit of motivational speaking. But this often leads progressives to the view that there is a strong and inherent directionality to history, and thus that any noisy movement for reform with adequate progressive branding must be good. You hear a lot with regard to the Gaza protests that the people complaining are just the same as the people who complained about every good and virtuous social movement of the past. Implicit is the sense that there is no such thing as a social movement that was bad….

The view here is that the important thing is to position yourself on the side of reform, rather than to ask too many questions about the precise contents of the reform.

But while I do think it’s true that you shouldn’t miss the forest for the trees, it’s actually very important for a reform plan to be based on true facts and workable ideas. The fact that Black lives do matter makes it more, rather than less important, to propose criminal justice reforms that save rather than cost lives. The fact that burning fossil fuels has harmful externalities makes it more, rather than less important, to accurately understand energy economics. Conservatives often err by being excessively skeptical of reform efforts, but they are correct to say that one should be somewhat skeptical, and I think correct that center-left circles sometimes get too squeamish about saying no.

In the present-day American context, I think this relates to both patriotism and history—conservatives are right to think that, in the context of history, we have things pretty good and that we should be cautious about overturning the apple cart without being quite rigorous in our thinking….

All kinds of people, both liberal and conservative, have incorrect anti-market intuitions that lead not only to bad policy choices, but to bad anti-pricing norms.

One important virtue of conservative politics, though, is that official doctrine on the right is that markets are good. So when some right-wing suburban NIMBYs are pounding the table about how they hate apartment buildings, you can come at them with some points about property rights and economic growth….There’s much more to building a prosperous economy than saying nice things about successful business people, but if you are in the business of saying nice things about successful business people—as conservatives generally are—then “these successful businesses help power economic growth” is a pretty obvious argument….

[A]t a certain point, people [on the left] started suggesting that degrowth could be a virtue…Or that the real solution to our ecological problems is for everyone to be poor.

This is dumb, and plenty of people on the left (even the far left) know that degrowth is dumb, but the fact is, it’s a live controversy on the left in a way that it is not on the right. There is, of course, more to life than the monolithic pursuit of economic growth, but it’s a genuinely massive conceptual error to see growth as undesirable or to be indifferent toward it….[A] growing and vibrant economy is genuinely very important. Conservatives have this right, while progressives are mired in disagreement about it. And the correct progressive faction is the one that can appreciate these conservative insights.

You get the idea. Conservatives, by virtue of their world outlook, are inclined to consider some important factors and see some critical problems that people on the left are not. This means that for the left to succeed at scale, both in electoral and governance terms, it needs, paradoxically, some of the right stuff. And that means ditching intersectional politics and epistemic closure once and for all.

At Deseret News, Hanna Seariac probes for answers to a question of much political interest: “Is either political party the home of working-class voters?” As Seariac writes, “according to a new poll from Gallup. Forty-six percent of Republicans consider themselves working or lower class and 35% of Democrats do. Sixty-two percent of Democrats identify themselves as upper-middle or middle class and 53% of Republicans say the same.” Class identification does not necessarily tell you how people are going to vote in a crazy political year like 2024. But, in this case, it does shed some light on political leanings. As Seariac explains, “The survey data comes from self-identification, not factors like education level or profession or income. Economic experts differ on the specifics of what qualifies as working class, but generally, it refers to people who do not have college educations (around 62% of the country) and/or those who receive an hourly wage rather than a salary….Gallup survey data started showing this shift in 2022. When the same survey was done in 2019, 46% of Democrats identified as working or lower class while only 34% of Republicans did. In contrast, 65% of Republicans called themselves upper-middle or middle class and 54% of Republicans did. Self-identification has fluctuated along those lines, but from 2002 to 2019, Republicans generally identified more as upper-middle and middle class more than Democrats did — the reverse was true for Democrats calling themselves working and lower class at a higher rate than Republicans.” Nor does class self i.d. tell us why working-class voters feel an affinity for one party of. the other. Seariac notes further, “Left-of-center think tank Progressive Policy Institute did a survey with YouGov about the politics of the working-class voters (defined in the report as those without four-year college degrees). The report found that the working class trusts Republicans more on the economy, natural security, immigration and crime while they trust Democrats more on climate change, clean energy, abortion access and respecting elections.”

Seariac adds, “Forty-seven percent of the working class said they want a federal government involved in the economy mostly via protecting free markets while 34% said they want a small federal government with less taxation and spending. Nineteen percent responded in favor of a large federal government involved in wealth distribution….As far as which party the working class trusts to put the interests of the working class people first, respondents were almost evenly divided — 38% said Democrats and 37% said Republicans. Twenty-two percent of respondents said neither….A plurality of respondents to the survey also said they would prefer if the Democratic Party would spend tax dollars more efficiently rather than grow government programs. As for what they want the Republican Party to do, they said they’d like if the GOP would cut spending and increase taxes on the wealthy….Among those surveyed, 50% said their household income was less than $50,000 annually and 27% said it was between $50,000 and $100,000 with the remainder either not marking prefer not to say or reporting a household income above $100,000….“In the short term, the political preferences of working-class voters are likely to be shaped by urgent issues such as high prices and illegal immigration,” wrote William A. Galston for Brookings Institute about the survey. “In the longer term, however, a party that combines moderation on cultural issues with support for government programs that would improve the prospects of upward mobility for the working class would likely improve its performance in this key part of the electorate.”….Galston also pointed toward specific policies that some members of the working class have taken issues with such as student loan forgiveness. Fifty-six percent of working-class voters said they oppose student loan debt relief because they think it’s unfair to those who don’t get a college degree….“I think the claim that says the Republican Party is the party of the working class is at best, insincere, and more likely, political misdirection and rebranding exercises,” John Russo, visiting scholar at the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University, told NPR in 2021. He pointed toward Biden winning the majority of voters earning less than $50,000 a year in 2020 and Trump winning the majority of voters who made more than $100,000 annually….Others point toward areas where the working class may poll differently than what the messaging from Democratic politicians sounds like. Ruy Teixeira, fellow at American Enterprise Institute, wrote for The Liberal Patriot that working-class voters are less ideological, have economic struggles and in his words are “more focused on material concerns.”

Some useful talking points for Dems regarding “Here’s What Trump and the GOP Really Think About the Working Class: Trump polls very well with voters without college degrees. But organized labor polls well with even more voters. Make a move, Democrats” by Timothy Noah at The New Republic: “….Democrats need to get word out that the GOP is bent on destroying unions, which today enjoy more popular support (67 percent approval) than they have for six decades. Even more than one-third of Republicans agree that labor unions are a net positive for the country.” Trump “appointed anti-union members to the National Labor Relations Board who made it easier for employers to manipulate the size of a bargaining unit to defeat a union bid; lengthened and complicated union elections to make it harder for unions to win; made it easier for corporations to avoid responsibility for their subcontractors’ labor violations; and allowed employers to prevent labor unions, which already are barred from electioneering on company premises, from contacting workers via company email….Trump also changed overtime rules to exclude eligibility for eight million workers; failed to raise the $7.25 hourly minimum wage (after promising to do so during the 2016 election, though only in reaction to a backlash after he proposed eliminating it entirely); killed a regulation barring employers from requiring employees to agree never to sue the company as a condition of employment; reduced the number of manufacturing jobs by 75,000 (losing 43,000 the year before the Covid epidemic); and cut federal workplace safety inspections to their lowest level in history. This is very much a partial list. There’s more here and here….More representative of what “Trump’s economic circles” think is Trump’s own think tank. The America First Policy Institute is chaired by Linda McMahon, who ran the Small Business Administration under Trump and then a pro-Trump super PAC. She posted an op-ed last June at The Daily Caller that attacked Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer for signing into law a repeal of the state’s right-to-work law. This law had barred unions from collecting “fair share” fees from union nonmembers….The nonprofit group In Union and the political strategist Mike Lux this week released a reportnoting that among working-class voters, a “considerable” number are “double haters” (that is, they hate both Biden and Trump), third-party curious, or undecided. “Most of them voted Democratic in the recent past,” Lux wrote. “These are prime and winnable Democratic targets, and we should focus a great deal of firepower on winning them over.”

Some observations from “Will Trump Leaners Come Home to Biden? The weirdness of this year’s polling gives the President’s team hope.” by James Joyner at outsidethebeltwaay.com: “President Joe Biden trails Donald Trump by approximately one point in national polls, according to FiveThirtyEight. The gap is larger in most of the so-called swing states, including Pennsylvania (2.1 per cent), Arizona (4.3 per cent), Georgia (6.1 per cent), and Nevada (seven per cent). Moreover, in both 2016 and 2020, most polls ended up understating Trump’s support. This year, the head-to-head polls and Biden’s unpopularity have made many Democrats anxious about the coming election, but that feeling does not appear to have pervaded the White House. Axios reported last week that, “in public and private, Biden has been telling anyone who will listen that he’s gaining ground—and is probably up—on Donald Trump in their rematch from 2020.” (The Axios story says this sense of optimism is also shared by his “team.”)….even aside from the possibility of cataclysmic events shaking up the landscape, it’s almost impossible to project a race where both candidates are so universally unpopular. There are more truly enthusiastic Trump voters than truly enthusiastic Biden voters. But there are also more people who intensely dislike Trump than intensely dislike Biden….Think about those with little if any partisan or ideological predisposition. They may have real doubts and concerns about Trump’s character, behavior, values, and perhaps whether he has much respect for institutions and the rule of law. Substantively, only the abortion issue really rises to the surface for many of these people….Conversely, doubts and concerns about Biden are more about his abilities and his judgment, his priorities and objectives. Most don’t doubt Biden’s morals, values, and intentions, but do wonder whether this has been the cruise they signed up for. Just as abortion is the substantive chink in the armor for Trump, it is age and health for Biden, who looks and acts even older than he is….We have a group of voters who are not enthusiastic about either candidate, and many may well end up deciding not to decide. In some minds, not casting a ballot is becoming a very real and deliberate option, a way to show their displeasure with their choices and the nominees that the two parties have offered up. They look at the field of independent or third-party candidates and do not see a political knight in shining armor worthy of their support.”

The following article, “Senate Democrats are finally looking to fix their biggest mistake” by Hayes Brown, is cross-posted from msnbc.com:

If Democrats retain control of the Senate after this fall’s elections — and as of today that’s still a big “if” — the filibuster as we know it may finally be toast next year. Despite the 60-vote threshold’s being antidemocratic, extraconstitutional and antithetical to the founders’ vision, it has taken years of hemming and hawing for Democrats to reach this point. With its potential demise, the country can finally start to get back on track — or at the very least force our lawmakers to be honest about their vision for the future.

In the last Congress, two Democratic senators stood in the way of filibuster reform: Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, the latter of whom later switched to be an independent. They argued that the filibuster is a method of forcing bipartisanshipon issues and that it encourages more debate between senators, neither of which holds water when you look at the history of the filibuster. Thanks to Sinema and Manchin, Democrats had to leave many wins on the table, including subsidized child care for struggling parents, codifying Roe v. Wade and much-needed protections for voting rights. Those big-ticket items wouldn’t have just made millions of Americans’ lives better, but they also might have helped Democrats this November.

Any Democratic plan for reform would require majority support: either 51 senators or, should Vice President Kamala Harris be re-elected this fall, 50 votes plus the vice president’s tiebreaking vote. As things stand, the Democrats’ chances of holding the Senate aren’t ideal; the party is defending nearly twice as many seats as Republicans are, including three in states Donald Trump has won twice. But both Manchin and Sinema are retiring this term, and, as NBC News has reported, Democratic candidates looking to join the Senate’s ranks are all in on reform: