At Sabato’s Crystal Ball, Alan I. Abramowitz crunches data from major political polls and shares some observations regarding ‘negative partisanship,’ including: “What is perhaps even more surprising than Trump’s domination of the Republican nomination contest is his continued competitiveness in a potential general election matchup with President Biden. Despite all of the criminal charges filed against him, Trump remains locked in a near dead heat with Biden, receiving an average of 43.7% of the vote compared with 44.2% for Biden according to the most recent RealClearPolitics polling average…..the key to understanding both Donald Trump’s domination of the Republican nomination contest and his continued competitiveness in a general election matchup with Joe Biden is negative partisanship. Negative partisanship refers to the growing dislike of the opposing party and its leaders among voters who identify with or lean toward one of the two major parties in the U.S….One of the most important consequences of negative partisanship is that crossing party lines to support a candidate from the opposing party has become totally unacceptable to the large majority of partisans. As a result, defection rates by partisans have declined dramatically in all types of elections, and especially in presidential elections….There is one interesting difference between the ratings given by Democrats and Republicans to their own party’s leader: 16% of Republicans rated Donald Trump below 35 degrees while only 8% of Democrats rated Joe Biden below 35 degrees. These numbers suggest that a somewhat larger share of Republicans than Democrats had serious reservations about the frontrunner for their party’s 2024 presidential nomination….it appears likely that a rematch between Biden and Trump in 2024 will remain highly competitive with the outcome hinging on a small number of swing voters in a handful of closely contested states — an outcome that could lend itself to attacks on the integrity of the election by the former president and his allies.”

In his article, ““What’s the Matter With Florida? The GOP’s doomed war against higher ed,” James Fallows writes at The Washington Monthly: “Community colleges are an exception to the partisan divide over higher ed. According to the New America survey, some 85 percent of Americans, a majority in both parties, believe that community colleges are succeeding in their main role, which is to match people who need opportunities with the opportunities a continually changing economy can open up. As for research universities, their role in spinning off innovations and businesses has been evident from the time of the land grant universities onward. “Researchers estimate that for each new patent awarded to a college, 15 jobs are created in the local economy,” Fischer writes. If you want to boost your region’s economy, the best step would be to establish a research university there 100 years ago. The second-best step would be not to drive that university’s students and faculty away now….In the biggest sense, colleges and universities are increasingly the key to community and regional success. But, as Charlie Mahtesian recently pointed out in Politico, they’re also an electoral threat to a Republican Party seen as anti-knowledge….What’s the matter with Florida at the moment might boil down to Ron DeSantis, and his crass willingness to sacrifice his state’s future to his own culture war campaign. What’s the matter with the GOP’s larger anti-education campaign is that it can do a lot of damage before it ultimately fails….It will fail because it’s based on a losing bet—that a party can permanently ride the grievances of a shrinking minority—and because it’s at odds with the long-term sources of economic, cultural, and civic development. Someday historians will see the anti-college campaign as the death throes of a doomed movement, like the last stages of the Know-Nothing Party in the 1850s.”

Fallows also has some suggestions for “college community—leaders, teachers, neighbors, students,” also good advice for Democratic campaigns to: “Never pull up the ladders. Keep talking about a bigger tent. Yes, these are two different images, and clichés. But they embrace one crucial reality: Even people who “don’t like” colleges mostly dream that their children and grandchildren will go to one. I don’t have New America polling data to back this up. But I do have nearly a decade of traveling smaller-town America with my wife, Deb, talking mostly with people who themselves lacked college degrees. And this is the story the Monthly’s improved college rankings have told….Ask people what they don’t like about the weirdos and lefties who now run colleges and they’ll tell you—as their grandparents might have complained about the weirdo hippies at Berkeley in the 1960s, and their grandparents might have grumbled about the privileged, prissy “college boys” in the era of Stover at Yale. But ask them what they hope for their own grandchildren, and the doors opened by higher education are almost always high on the list….Colleges need to present themselves as holding the doors open, expanding the tent, making sure the ladders are available to people who couldn’t reach them before. Making college sustainably affordable is obviously number one on this list. Number two is making people aware that 99 percent of American colleges are not Darwinian struggles-for-survival in the admissions process but in fact have room for nearly all. Colleges have often portrayed themselves as citadels, and with reason. For now they should emphasize their nearness and accessibility, not their distance from normal life….The Republican war on colleges boils down to the idea that colleges are them—one more object of suspicion, resentment, riling-up, and punishment….America’s higher ed establishment should show day by day why the colleges view America, and the larger public should view America’s colleges, as crucial parts of us.” Of all the discontents felt by Trump’s working-class voters, the limited opportunities for affordable higher education for their kids has to be a leading concern. President Biden’s initiatives to make college and vocational education affordable for all young people are a good start. He and Democrats should push these initiatives louder and harder.

In “A New Poll Has Bad News for the Guy Who Keeps Getting Indicted,” Josh Marshall shares some thoughts at Talking Points Memo on recent polling showing how the public feels about Trump’s legal woes. As Marshall writes, “There’s a new poll out from Politico Magazine/Ipsos the results of which are straight out of Obviousville. But surprisingly few people ever go to Obviousville. So those results are worth discussing. The central finding is that the parade of criminal charges against Donald Trump are not in fact good news, politically or individually, for Donald Trump. More specifically, majorities (albeit bare ones) of Americans want his trials to be held before the election (61%), believe he’s guilty (51%) and believe he should go to prison if convicted (50%)….Critically, Politico notes that a substantial minority of the population (between a quarter and a third) says they’re not that familiar with the charges against Trump. Since the charges – especially those in the Mar-a-Lago case – are quite strong as an evidentiary matter that suggests there’s plenty of room for things to get worse for Trump….For all this, what struck me most in the poll is below the top lines. These 50% or 51% results suggest the same old split down the middle polarization we’re accustomed to. But that’s not quite it. 51% believe Trump is guilty. 26% believe he’s not. That’s pretty lopsided. 22% say they don’t know. 50% say Trump should go to prison if he’s convicted. 18% say he shouldn’t be penalized. The rest are split between probation and some financial penalty….If you step back and ask how many respondents buy what we might call the Republican public line – that Trump’s innocent and the prosecutions are an abuse of power – only a bit over 20% of the population seem to buy that….My hunch is that a substantial part of the ‘don’t know’ group is based on what we might call willed partisan uncertainty. In other words, people who really don’t want Trump to be guilty and are uncomfortable with what would seem to flow from that judgment. But they also can’t square the facts with any belief that he’s innocent. When push comes to shove partisanship has a way of shaping not only our opinions but also how we interpret the facts. I suspect partisanship will bring a significant proportion of those people around.”

The GOP presidential debate offered fresh evidence of that party’s total disarray on abortion, as I explained at New York:

One of the essential tasks of a political party chair is to spin like mad when your candidates say and do unfortunate things. That’s the only way I can interpret this upbeat comment from Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel after the first Republican debate in Milwaukee:

“Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel said the discussion about abortion during Wednesday’s Republican debate was part of an important path forward for the party.

“’I was very pleased to see them talk about abortion,’ McDaniel told Fox News on Thursday morning. ‘Democrats used that in 2022 … If our candidates aren’t able to fend a response and put out a response, we’re not going to win. They’re going to do it again in 2024. And I thought all of them did a really good job on that.’”

The idea that Democrats were able to “use” the abortion issue in 2022 because Republicans wouldn’t talk about it is ludicrous. The vast majority of GOP politicians greeted the Supreme Court decision reversing Roe v. Wade with emotions ranging from unbridled joy to paternalistic satisfaction. In any event, Democratic gains attributable to abortion-rights sentiment were triggered not by talk but by the actions of Republican legislators and governors in red states across the country who rushed to ban abortions to the maximum extent allowed by state courts.

The even bigger problem with McDaniel’s claim that Republican jibber-jabber on abortion will help its candidates is that they manifestly aren’t in agreement about what should be done in the post-Roe era, and in the areas where they can find common ground, their position is unpopular.

In Milwaukee, several candidates were asked if they support a national abortion ban. This is, in fact, the most relevant abortion-policy question for those running for federal office, particularly since most major anti-abortion organizations (a key constituency in the GOP since at least 1980) support — nay, absolutely insist upon — such a ban as an urgent priority.

Ron DeSantis has managed somehow to avoid answering this question for many months, even as he signed a near-total abortion ban in his own state that he brags about in conservative religious circles on the campaign trail. That didn’t change in the debate. Instead of addressing a national ban, he went off on a lurid tangent involving an alleged survivor of live-birth abortions — an exceedingly rare phenomenon that anti-abortion activists cite incessantly as the omega point of largely fictional Democratic “abortion on demand” policies.

A less hammer-headed evasion was executed by Nikki Haley, who has made a “realistic” rap on the political infeasibility of a national abortion ban something of a signature. Haley argues that while a national ban might be great policy (albeit hellish for the women whose interests she claims to value and and even represent), there’s no point talking about it because it would face a Senate filibuster even if Republicans controlled the White House and Congress. As the Cut’s Andrea González-Ramírez observes, a Senate majority could exempt abortion policy from the filibuster just as it has exempted key presidential appointments and budget matters. But the idea of an immutable pro-choice filibuster is a convenient dodge for Haley, a career-long anti-abortion extremist who now poses as peacemaker and compromiser.

Haley’s “realism” aroused the ire of Mike Pence, for whom supporting a national ban is a “moral” commitment on which compromise is impossible. Likewise, Tim Scott raised the specter of all those babies being murdered in Democratic states like California and Illinois. But then Doug Burgum pointed out that Republicans (and, indeed, anti-abortion activists) for nearly half a century had claimed abortion policy should be decided by the states, a position he still holds.

Maybe Ronna McDaniel can explain to us which candidate response to basic questions about abortion policy is going to do the trick in eliminating the Democratic advantage on the subject. Unfortunately, the one thing all the candidates on the Milwaukee stage had in common is that not one of them acknowledges abortion as a basic reproductive right. That was the bedrock tenet of Roe v. Wade, and it’s why polls consistently show sizable majorities of Americans expressing opposition to the reversal of Roe. For that matter, as state ballot initiatives constantly show, upwards of a third of rank-and-file Republicans believe in a right to choose abortion. So opposing that position while fighting over (or evading) the question of what happens when abortion is no longer a right is not a good look for the GOP. Perhaps if Donald Trump had shown up in Milwaukee, he could have repeated his earlier claim that the party’s unpopular views on abortion — not reticence in articulating them — had lost Republicans the 2022 midterms. His preferred approach of campaigning on other issues and then going after fundamental rights when he has the power to do so is safer politically.

The Republican presidential debate is old news already because of Trump’s mugshot and his latest legal mess. But if you have room for just one more take, try “‘Economic Populism’ Was Nowhere to Be Found at the GOP Debate” by Branko Marcetic, who observes at Jacobin:

Remember how the Republican Party is meant to be a “working-class party” that has rejected neoliberal economics? It’s a claim plastered all over the GOP’s branding since the 2020 elections. Well, apparently the Republican candidates themselves forgot, since the new working class–focused, economically populist mood we keep being told has taken over the GOP was nowhere to be found at last night’s Republican presidential debate in Milwaukee.

Republicans have defended the economic interests of wealthy elites over the working-class for well over a century. In Milwaukee, the eight Republican presidential candidates doubled down on their party’s tradition. As Marcetic notes,

America “cannot succeed when the Congress spends trillions and trillions of dollars,” Florida governor Ron DeSantis thundered. “We cannot sit by any longer and allow the kind of spending that’s going on in Washington,” said former New Jersey governor and Donald Trump whipping boy Chris Christie, shortly after boasting about cutting taxes and debt as governor. Tea Party darling and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley attacked Republicans and the Donald Trump administration in particular as wild spendthrifts that “added $8 trillion to our debt,” even at one point comparing Democrats favorably to the GOP in terms of keeping a lid on earmarks. “I think it’s time for an accountant in the White House,” she concluded.

“I was the first person in this race to say we’ve got to deal with the long-term national debt issues,” said Mike Pence as if such a promise were novel, pledging to “restore fiscal responsibility” and complaining that “you’ve got people on this stage who won’t even talk about issues like Social Security and Medicare,” a not-so-subtle nod to the former vice president’s pledge to cut those entitlement programs. This was in response to a question that started out mentioning the rising cost of groceries, by the way.

Marcetic adds, “Trump’s gargantuan 2017 tax cut for the rich featured prominently in the debate, but not as a focus of attack for letting the richest of the rich pay lower rates than working-class Americans and eventually hiking rates for lower- and middle-income earners. Instead, candidates fell over each other to attach themselves to that legislative love letter to plutocrats (whose December 22, 2017 signing, incidentally, coincided with maybe the worst period for Trump’s approval rating), as when South Carolina senator Tim Scott took credit for the law — and deservedly so — and Pence brought it up in response to, of all things, a question about crime in US cities.”

Also, notes Marcetic, “Haley complained that Trump had “left us with ninety million people on Medicaid” and “forty-two million people on food stamps” by signing the CARES Act in March 2020. Former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson bragged about slashing his state’s government employee rolls by 14 percent, before affirming that as president, “we need someone who can actually constrain the growth of federal government, that can actually reduce the size — and I’ve pledged to reduce by 10 percent our federal, nondefense workforce.”

Summing up, Marcetic writes, “So let’s go over what the Republican candidates were pledging to do as president in 2023: slash spending, gut entitlements, shrink government, bust unions, and cut taxes for the rich — all while maintaining current funding for the cartoonishly large US military.”

It is no surprise that the Republicans deployed their usual strategy of emphasizing culture war distractions to overshadow their reactionary economic policies. Yes, we know, Jacobin is a hard left rag. But Marcetic hits the most significant takeaway squarely.

There are all kinds of scenarios you can read about late challenges to Donald Trump’s very likely Republican presidential nomination. I decided to rain on one such parade at New York:

Among the Republicans who are scheming to prevent Donald Trump’s third straight presidential nomination, there seems to be a notion that if the GOP presidential field him can be winnowed in Iowa and New Hampshire, some savior of the party will emerge and beat him in a one-on-one fight. The argument seems to go back to a highly debatable (I’d actually call it wrong) proposition: The large field of rivals was the crucial factor in enabling Trump to win his first nomination in 2016. But even if it were true that a smaller field could have vanquished Trump in 2016, he’s arguably a much stronger candidate right now than he was eight years ago. For example: He’s currently at 55.8 percent among Republican voters nationally in the RealClearPolitics polling averages. In 2016, he did not hit 50 percent in any national poll prior to nailing down the nomination in May.

Still, some say we should ignore the national polls and just focus on the early state races that could produce a Trump-vanquishing champion. That’s exactly what New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu argued Monday in a New York Times op-ed:

“The best indicator of Mr. Trump’s strength is looking to where the voters are paying attention: in states where candidates are campaigning, television ads are running, and there is a wide range of media attention on every candidate.

“In Iowa and New Hampshire, the first two states that will vote in the 2024 Republican primaries, Mr. Trump is struggling. In both Iowa and New Hampshire, he is consistently polling in the low 40 percent range. The floor of his support may be high, but his ceiling is low.”

I wouldn’t call a candidate who has a 26-point lead in Iowa (again, per the RCP averages) and a 30-point lead in New Hampshire one who is “struggling” in those two states. Sununu appears to assume anyone who is not for Trump now will never support him, which wasn’t true in 2016 (when he gained strength every time a rival dropped out) and isn’t much supported by the evidence of Trump’s high favorability numbers among Republicans today.

At some early point, if Trump keeps winning big, he’s going to become unbeatable. No Republican candidate who has won both Iowa and New Hampshire has ever been denied the presidential nomination. Will Trump be the first? It sure sounds like another of those Establishment Republican fantasies whereby Trump is regularly underestimated.

Indeed, the bigger question about the early states in 2024 is whether Trump will have nailed down the nomination before the field is small enough to give anyone a clean shot at the heavy front-runner. Several candidates (notably Chris Christie and Vivek Ramaswamy) are focusing mostly on New Hampshire; they aren’t going to drop out after an underwhelming performance in Iowa. Tim Scott and Nikki Haley are likely to hang onto their candidacies fanatically until their home state of South Carolina — the fourth state to vote — holds its primary in late February.

Even without the post-Iowa winnowing Sununu is counting on, it’s true there is a history of New Hampshire voters interrupting the premature victory celebrations of Iowa winners in both parties. Is it possible an Iowa win by Trump would be Pyrrhic, dooming his candidacy?

That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense once you examine the recent Republican candidates who have won Iowa and then quickly succumbed in New Hampshire and beyond. In 2008, 2012, and 2016, Iowa was won by Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, and Ted Cruz, respectively. Huckabee barely had two nickels to rub together; Santorum and Cruz upset national front-runners (Mitt Romney and Donald Trump) who came back to crush them in New Hampshire and later primaries. None of these doomed Iowa winners are in anything like the position Trump is in right now.

Anything’s possible in politics, and Trump’s legal troubles could in theory extend the contest for the nomination even if he’s winning initially (though so far those legal troubles seem to be helping him among Republicans). Candidates should definitely plan beyond the earliest states even if they are unlikely to be around for, say, Florida (where Trump and DeSantis could wage a dual home-turf battle) or Georgia (where Trump’s rivals are angling for an endorsement by Trump’s nemesis Brian Kemp).

But the odds say Trump’s rivals better beat him or at least give him a scare in Iowa, where it’s possible to punch above your weight with a superior ground game. It’s also a state the 45th president lost in 2016. If he romps there, he’s probably all but a lock for the nomination, barring crazy developments. And all those pleas to candidates to get out of the way of a fictional Trump-slayer will represent a waste of time and energy.

I watched as much as I could stand of the GOP’s Fantasy Island debate. I did see Nikki Haley’s well-publicized rant, which, who knows, may have clinched her a veep slot. The others yammered on much as expected, though I was a tad surprised at Christie’s weak performance, other than his ChatGPT zinger. Nowhere in evidence were any inklings of a candidate with Liz Cheney’s principled commitment to democracy or Adam Kinzinger’s decency. As for the elephant in the room, there should have been a really big empty chair. If you want to read a fresh take on the Republican front-runner, check out Drew Westen’s TDS strategy white paper, “All the President’s Mental Disorders.” Otherwise, there are plenty of debate takeaway screeds out there, including “34 Things You Missed at the First Republican Debate,” “Who Won the First Debate, “The Fox GOP Debate Melted Down When the Word “Climate” Was Mentioned,” “Republican Debaters Agreed on One Thing: They Hate Vivek Ramaswamy,” and “Who won, who lost and who fizzled in the first Republican debate.” All in all, not an impressive night for the political party that was once rooted in conservative principles, instead of personality cult derangement.

However, there are many other political articles worth reading, such as NYT columnist Thomas B. Edsall’s “Trump Voters Can See Right Through DeSantis,” in which he writes: “DeSantis has turned out to be a stiff on the stump, a man without affect. He speaks in alphabet talk: C.R.T., D.E.I., E.S.G. His attempts to outflank Trump from the right — “We’re going to have all these deep state people, you know, we’re going to start slitting throats on day one” — seem to be more politically calculated than based on conviction….[Joan C.] Williams described DeSantis’s approach to campaigning as “a clumsy color-by-numbers culture-wars formula” accompanied by a speaking style “more Harvard than hard hat, as when he talked about ‘biomedical security restrictions’ in his speech to the Republican Party convention in North Carolina (whatever those are??).” Linda Skitka, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois-Chicago, wrote to Edsall by email that “DeSantis, “is very specific and consistent about policy, and he is too extreme for many on the right. To ice the cake, he appears to be really bad at retail politics — he just isn’t likable, and certainly isn’t charismatic. Together, I don’t think DeSantis can compete to overcome these obstacles, even if he were to start using Trump-like rhetoric.” Edsall quotes Cornell political scientist David Bateman, who observes that everything about DeSantis “seems calculated. He’s the Yale and Harvard guy now complaining about intellectuals and elites. He’s talking about wokism and critical race theory, when no one knows what those are (even Trump noted no one can define woke, though he yells against it himself). When he tries to be as visceral as Trump, he just comes off as weird. DeSantis saying he’s going to start “slitting throats” reminded me of Romney’s “severely conservative.” While DeSantis’s is a dangerous escalation of violent imagery, they both sound bizarre and unnatural.”

Edsall continues, “Bateman suggested that insofar as DeSantis is seen as “an establishment Trump, who I expect most voters will see as fully aligned with G.O.P. orthodoxy but even more focused on the priorities of racial and social conservatives (taking over universities, banning books, or attacking transpersons), he starts to look more like a general election loser.”….Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, argued in an email that DeSantis has adopted an approach to the nomination fight that was bound to fail: “DeSantis’s strategy, and that of any candidate not named Trump, should be to consolidate the Maybe Trump voters. But DeSantis has seemed like he was going after the Always Trump voters with his aggressive language (“slitting throats”), his comment that Ukraine was just a “territorial dispute,” his suggestion that vaccine conspiracy theorist RFK Jr. would be a good candidate to head the Centers for Disease Control, and his doubling down on whether slavery might have been beneficial to some enslaved people.”….Robert Y. Shapiro, a political scientist at Columbia, elaborated on the difficulties facing DeSantis’s bid to position himself to the right of Trump. “The DeSantis strategy is weak in that there are not enough Republican voters to be gained to the right of Trump,”….Dianne Pinderhughes, a political scientist at Notre Dame, wrote by email that an image of DeSantis at a campaign event captured for her the weakness of his campaign for the nomination.“He has no affect,” Pinderhughes wrote. “My favorite example is a photo of him. He’s surrounded by a group of people, campaign supporters, but every face in the photo is flat, unexcited, unsmiling (including of course the candidate).”

I’m still a bit surprised that there is not more grumbling about Trump chickening out of the first debate, not that he had much to fear from the 8 munchkins. Perhaps it is more understandable in light of his complicated legal problems, which merit more media coverage than the Milwaukee drivelfest. Stephen Collinson rolls it out well in “Trump’s looming surrender will kill the buzz of the first GOP debate” at CNN Politics: “The idea that the front-runner for a major party nomination would boycott the first televised clash between candidates, then the next day surrender to authorities over his fourth criminal indictment would have been unthinkable at any previous moment in history. But that’s the reality as an unprecedented presidential election unfolds under the shadow of Trump’s criminal peril – and his extraordinary strength in the GOP primary that, at least for now, allows him to ignore all the normal rules of campaigning….the melee in Milwaukee was like a prize fight that lacked the reigning champion, as Trump stayed home, reasoning that he is so far ahead in the GOP primary that he had nothing to gain by showing up. At best, the debate turned into an audition for second place in a race that, on the current trajectory, looks likely to catapult Trump to his third consecutive Republican nomination….the ex-president might have won by staying away – even if his unwillingness to submit to debating his policies before voters on live television smacks of the same contempt for democracy that has landed him with four criminal indictments….Trump, exploiting his unrelenting support among GOP primary voters, has pulled off the feat of wielding multiple indictments as a political shield….the spectacle of Trump’s big jet with his name on the side heading to Georgia for processing at the Fulton County jail will soon overshadow the rest of the race….”

Republicans have been threatening to undermine Social Security for Decades. Thus far, they haven”t been able to do much because the program is extraordinarily popular. Yet their threats have had an effect. Today, many younger voters are skeptical about the program’s solvency, and what it means for their future economic security.

In “Nearly half of Gen Zers think they won’t ‘get a dime’ in Social Security,” Aris Folley writes at The Hill that “Almost half of Generation Z adults said they don’t expect to get any of the Social Security benefits they’ve earned, according to a survey.” Further,

In a survey released Tuesday by the Nationwide Retirement Institute, 45 percent of Gen Z adults between the ages of 18 to 26 said they expect to not “get a dime” of the benefits they have earned.

Additionally, 39 percent of millennials said the same, compared to 25 percent of Gen X adults and 10 percent of baby boomers who agreed.

More older Americans also expressed concern that Social Security could run out of funding in their lifetimes, with 75 percent of respondents aged 50 and older sharing that concern in the survey, up 9 percent from roughly a decade ago.

Regarding the future financing of Social Security, Folley adds, “In the new survey, less than a fourth of respondents backed increasing funding through payroll taxes. Instead, 49 percent of respondents pushed for tax increases on higher earners to pay for the program….Forty-one percent also said they supported increasing funding through taxes paid by employers, compared to 40 percent who also pushed for less taxation and 24 percent who wanted to see the age of eligibility lowered.” Also,

The survey found less support among respondents when it came to some changes tightening eligibility, with only 19 percent saying they support raising the full retirement age, while just 9 percent backed a gradual reduction of benefits that would most affect younger generations.

Only 6 percent of respondents support reducing benefits across the board.

….Gen Z, millennial, and Gen X respondents were more likely than boomers and older respondents in the survey to say they have or “will have retirement accounts and savings as additional sources of retirement income beyond Social Security benefits.”

The implications for Democratic strategy are pretty clear; Democrats must repeatedly assure younger voters that Democrats will fight to secure Social Security benefits at every opportunity. Dems must also remind voters that Republicans have been threatening to weaken the program for decades, but their threats will become a reality only if the GOP wins a 2/3 majority of both houses of congress, or a majority of both houses of congress plus the presidency.

The Democratic Party should remind all voters that it was Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt’s leadership, which made Social Security a reality in the first place. Democrats have protected it ever since then, and every expansion of Social Security benefits has been achieved through the leadership of Democrats, who will lead the fight for all future improvements in the program.

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

Democrats lately have been basking in good news. The fourth Trump indictment! Continued success for abortion rights (the defeat of the Ohio referendum)! Good news on “Bidenomics”  (slowing inflation and strong job creation)!

The sentiment seems to be: we got this! How could we lose to a candidate (assuming it’s Trump) who’s under a blizzard of legal scrutiny for undermining democracy and represents a party that wants to take away women’s right to choose—especially when we, the good guys, are doing such a great job with the economy?

This “how can we lose?” attitude is uncomfortably reminiscent of Democrats’ attitude in 2016. Then too they thought they couldn’t lose. And yet they did.

Perhaps it’s time to take out an insurance policy. It may be the case that a multiply-indicted Trump is now toxic to enough voters and abortion rights such a strong motivator that even a candidate with Biden’s weaknesses will beat him easily. But it might not and that’s where the insurance policy comes in.

Consider that right now the race looks very, very close. The RealClearPolitics poll average has Biden ahead of Trump by a slender four-tenths of a percentage point. If that was Biden’s national lead on election day, he’d probably lose the presidency due to electoral college bias that favors Republicans.

In the latest Quinnipiac poll, Biden has a one-point lead over Trump consistent with the running average. Among white working-class (noncollege) voters, he’s behind by 34 points, considerably worse than he did in 2020. If Trump (or another Republican) does manage to prevail in 2024, we can be fairly sure that a pro-GOP surge among these voters will have something to do with it.

States of Change simulations show that, all else equal, a strong white working class surge in 2024 would deliver the election to the GOP. Even a small one could potentially do the trick. In an all-else-equal context, I estimate just a one-point increase in Republican support among the white working class and a concomitant one-point decrease in Democratic support (for a 2-point margin swing) would deliver Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin (and the election) to the Republicans. Make it a 2-point increase in GOP support and you can throw in Pennsylvania too.

So an insurance policy to prevent such a swing is in order.

The problem: these are very unhappy voters. In the Quinnipiac poll, white working-class voters give Biden an overall 25 percent approval rating versus 70 percent disapproval and 72 percent have an unfavorable opinion of him. On handling the economy, Biden’s rating is even worse—24 percent approval and 73 percent disapproval. Just 20 percent say the economy is excellent or good, compared to 79 percent who say it is not so good or poor. By 63 to 16 percent, these voters believe the economy is getting worse not better. Evidently they haven’t yet heard the good news about Bidenomics.

The temptation among Democrats is to ascribe the stubborn resistance of these voters to Democratic appeals and openness to those of Trump and right populists to misinformation from Fox News and the like and, worse, to the fundamentally racist, reactionary nature of this voter group. The roots of this view go back to the aftermath of the 2016 election.

As analysts sifted through the wreckage of Democratic performance in 2016 trying to understand where all the Trump voting had come from, some themes began to emerge. One was geographical. Across county-level studies, it was clear that low educational levels among whites was a very robust predictor of shifts toward Trump. These studies also indicated that counties that swung toward Trump tended to be dependent on low-skill jobs, relatively poor performers on a range of economic measures and had local economies particularly vulnerable to automation and offshoring. Finally, there was strong evidence that Trump-swinging counties tended to be literally “sick” in the sense that their inhabitants had relatively poor physical health and high mortality due to alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide.

The picture was more complicated when it came to individual level characteristics related to Trump voting, especially Obama-Trump voting. There were a number of correlates with Trump voting. They included some aspects of economic populism—opposition to cutting Social Security and Medicare, suspicion of free trade and trade agreements, taxing the rich—as well as traditional populist attitudes like anti-elitism and mistrust of experts. But the star of the show, so to speak, was a variable labelled “racial resentment” by political scientists, which many studies showed bore a strengthened relationship to Republican presidential voting in 2016.

This variable is a scale created from questions like: “Irish, Italian, Jewish, and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors.” The variable is widely and uncritically employed by political scientists to indicate racial animus despite the obvious problem that statements such as these correspond closely to a generic conservative view of avenues to social mobility. And indeed political scientists Riley Carney and Ryan Enos have shown that responses to questions like these change very little if you substitute “Nepalese” or “Lithuanians” for blacks. That implies the questions that make up the scale tap views that are not at all specific to blacks. Carney and Enos term these views “just world belief” which sounds quite a bit different from racial resentment.

But in the aftermath of the Trump election, researchers continued to use the same scale with the same name and the same interpretation with no caveats. The strong relationship of the scale to Trump voting was proof, they argued, that Trump support, including vote-switching from Obama to Trump, was simply a matter of activating underlying racism and xenophobia. Imagine though how these studies might have landed like if they had tied Trump support to activating just world belief, which is an eminently reasonable interpretation of their star variable, instead of racial resentment. The lack of even a hint of interest in exploring this alternative interpretation strongly suggests that the researchers’ own political beliefs were playing a strong role in how they chose to pursue and present their studies.

In short, they went looking for racism—and they found it.

Other studies played variations on this theme, adding variables around immigration and even trade to the mix, where negative views were presumed to show “status threat” or some other euphemism for racism and xenophobia. As sociologist Stephen Morgan has noted in a series of papers, this amounts to a labeling exercise where issues that have a clear economic component are stripped of that component and reduced to simple indicators of unenlightened social attitudes. Again, it seems clear that researchers’ priors and political beliefs were heavily influencing both their analytical approach and their interpretation of results.

And there is an even deeper problem with the conventional view. Start with a fact that was glossed over or ignored by most studies: trends in so-called racial resentment went in the “wrong” direction between the 2012 and 2016 election. That is, fewer whites had high levels of racial resentment in 2016 than 2012. This make racial resentment an odd candidate to explain the shift of white voters toward Donald Trump in the 2016 election.

Political scientists Justin Grimmer and William Marble investigated this conundrum intensively by looking directly at whether an indicator like racial resentment really could explain, or account for, the shift of millions of white votes toward Trump. The studies that gave pride of place to racial resentment as an explanation for Trump’s victory did no such accounting; they simply showed a stronger relationship between this variable and Republican voting in 2016 and thought they’d provided a complete explanation.

They had not. When you look at the actual population of voters and how racial resentment was distributed in 2016, as Grimmer and Marble did, it turns out that the racial resentment explanation simply does not fit what really happened in terms of voter shifts. A rigorous accounting of vote shifts toward Trump shows instead that they were primarily among whites, especially low education whites, with moderate views on race and immigration, not whites with high levels of racial resentment. In fact, Trump actually netted fewer votes among whites with high levels of racial resentment than Mitt Romney did in 2012.

Grimmer and Marble did a followup study with Cole Tanigawa-Lau that included data from the 2020 election. The study was covered in a New York Times article by Thomas Edsall. In the article, Grimmer described the significance of their findings:

Our findings provide an important correction to a popular narrative about how Trump won office. Hillary Clinton argued that Trump supporters could be placed in a “basket of deplorables.” And election-night pundits and even some academics have claimed that Trump’s victory was the result of appealing to white Americans’ racist and xenophobic attitudes. We show this conventional wisdom is (at best) incomplete. Trump’s supporters were less xenophobic than prior Republican candidates’ [supporters], less sexist, had lower animus to minority groups, and lower levels of racial resentment. Far from deplorables, Trump voters were, on average, more tolerant and understanding than voters for prior Republican candidates…

[The data] point to two important and undeniable facts. First, analyses focused on vote choice alone cannot tell us where candidates receive support. We must know the size of groups and who turns out to vote. And we cannot confuse candidates’ rhetoric with the voters who support them, because voters might support the candidate despite the rhetoric, not because of it.

So much for the racial resentment explanation of Trump’s victory. Not only is racial resentment a misnamed variable that does not mean what people think it means, it literally cannot account for the actual shifts that occurred in the 2016 election. Clearly a much more complex explanation for Trump’s victory was—or should have been—in order, integrating negative views on immigration, trade and liberal elites with a sense of unfairness rooted in just world belief. That would have helped Democrats understand why voters in Trump-shifting counties, whose ways of life were being torn asunder by economic and social change, were so attracted to Trump’s appeals.

Such understanding was nowhere to be found, however, in Democratic ranks. The racism-and-xenophobia interpretation quickly became dominant, partly because it was in many ways simply a continuation of the approach Clinton had taken during her campaign and that most Democrats accepted. Indeed, it became so dominant that simply to question the interpretation reliably opened the questioner to accusations that he or she did not take the problem of racism seriously enough.

We are still living in that world. Scratch a Democrat today and you will find lurking not far beneath the surface—if beneath the surface at all—a view of white working-class voters and their populist, pro-Trump leanings as reflecting these voters’ unyielding racism and xenophobia.

This is neither substantively justified nor politically productive. Democrats desperately need that insurance policy for 2024 and getting rid of these attitudes toward 40 percent of the electorate (much more in key states!) should be part of it. Think of it as a down payment on the “de-Brahminization” of the Democratic Party. This attitude adjustment might irritate some of their activist supporters, but considering the stakes, that seems like a small price to pay for a potentially vital insurance policy.

By now it is obvious to most swing voters that there is only one political party that is doing anything to improve health care for America’s working people, and the other political party has provided zero leadership for needed health care reforms. That realization is paying off in a big way in a key swing state. In her article, “With prescription drug costs, Nevada Democrats believe they’ve found a winning issue,” Gabby Birenbaum writes in The Nevada Independent: “As Democrats have fanned out across the country this summer to sell voters on the president’s agenda a year out from the election, Cabinet members and elected officials have honed in on a specific theme in appearances in Las Vegas — the cost of prescription drugs…..The bulk of the IRA, passed just over a year ago, focused on kickstarting clean energy production across the country, providing incentives for companies and consumers alike to go green. But it also included health care policies from Biden’s broader domestic agenda, referred to as Build Back Better. The IRA capped the price of insulin at $35 per month for Medicare beneficiaries, which went into effect in January. Eli Lilly, the largest manufacturer of insulin in the U.S., announced it too would cap the cost of insulin for private insurance users in March….Additionally, out-of-pocket prescription drug costs for seniors will be capped at $2,000 annually beginning in 2025. And the law will allow Medicare to negotiate lower prices of 10 drugs with pharmaceutical companies, with negotiated prices to be implemented by 2026; further drugs will be subject to negotiation each successive year. (Medicare’s list, which is due September 1, is expected to include the most widely prescribed drugs for common conditions including blood disorders, arthritis  and heart disease.)….Democrats say the messaging is part of a concentrated effort to highlight what has proven to be one of the most popular elements of the party’s signature policy achievement, hoping to bring the campaign to the comfortable turf of health care while also signaling engagement on the issue of rising costs.”

Birenbaum continues, “And in a legislative landscape in which the infrastructure, clean energy and manufacturing efforts spurred by Democrat-passed laws will take years to implement, the focus on prescription drug pricing provides what party members say is a simple, effective electoral message….“Historic legislation is fantastic, but it’s conceptual,” White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients said to a group of regional reporters last week. “That’s why we need to be on the ground, and be comfortable being repetitive about telling the story … $35 insulin is resonating so quickly with people. It’s immediate savings.”….By retroactively applying the IRA’s $2,000 out-of-pocket cap to 2020 costs paid by Nevadans, HHS estimates that 143,000 Nevada seniors will save $434 per year on the cost of their prescription drugs in 2025. On the cost of insulin, nearly 11,000 Nevadans qualify for the $35 cap, saving an average of $439 annually per person….“It’s incredible,” Becerra said at an event in Las Vegas. “This is going to be a game-changing law.”….In a press conference, Horsford said he’s unsurprised by these provisions’ popularitybecause he hears from constituents and family members about how beneficial the insulin caps have already proven. He said he had family members who saw their monthly payment go from over $300 to $35….“They were explaining it to me at the dinner table, and I said ‘Yeah, I voted for that!’” Horsford said. “That’s real money that people can use to pay the cost of rent, of putting food on the table, of spending time with their kids and doing other activities with their grandkids.”….With Nevada’s population of seniors 65 and older growing — having seen an increase of 40 percent between 2011 and 2018 — the political calculus of the law’s appeal is straightforward. The IRA passed without a single Republican vote in either chamber, meaning Democrats will own the law next November, for better or worse.”

Birenbaum adds, “A July poll of registered voters from Navigator Research and Democrat-aligned Global Strategy Group found that the insulin cap was the most popular provision in the bill, with 82 percent support. Allowing Medicare to negotiate drugs was similarly well-received, with 81 percent approval, and the $2,000 out-of-pocket cap earned 77 percent support….Most of the voters polled were also able to identify the prescription drug provisions as being part of the Inflation Reduction Act — 81 percent of respondents agreed the IRA allowed Medicare to negotiate the price of drugs, compared to only 51 percent of voters who think the IRA provides tax incentives for manufacturing job creation….As the biggest health care law since the ACA, strategists said that Medicare negotiating the price of drugs and prescription drug cost caps have the benefit of being easily understood, as opposed to the ACA, and thus far, have had a smooth rollout, the lack of which plagued the Obama administration….The Biden campaign is banking on the popularity of a prescription drugs-based message….“Simple policies can go very far,” White House National Economic Council Deputy Director Joelle Gamble said to reporters. “And I think this is a policy that people understand. They know how much they pay; they know the president and Democrats in Congress are lowering [those costs.]”….With the insulin cost caps already in place, that message should be easy to promote. But Democrats will have to be proactive in advertising the negotiation and out-of-pocket cost caps, given that they will not kick in until after the election….Peter Koltak, a Democratic strategist who’s worked on several Nevada campaigns, said the cost of prescription drugs should be a winning issue for Democrats….“This is already popular — this starts way more popular than the ACA was,” he said. “It’s only going to get more popular … it’s all upside, really.”….Koltak added that several key swing demographics — Latinos, seniors and suburban voters among them — shift toward voting for a generic Democrat who supports capping the cost of prescription drugs when juxtaposed with a standard Republican who does not, citing state data from Democratic pollsters Global Strategy Group.”

Birenbaum notes further, “Strategists said the issue marries health care and rising costs, the latter of which typically benefits Republicans more. Combining the two allows Democrats to address a potential weakness while campaigning on an area that voters trust them on….“[Health care] is kind of a bread-and-butter Democratic issue,” UNLV political science professor Dan Lee said….The fact that it targets seniors — a group with high voter turnout — is another political appeal….Though AARP Nevada is nonpartisan, it plans to engage all elected officials during the campaign season and beyond on the prescription drug provisions of the IRA, which Jessica Padrón, the organization’s associate state director of advocacy and outreach, said has resonated with members….“Older Americans are tired of promises to tackle these issues,” she said. “And they’re thrilled that Congress finally took action. We’re getting a lot of positive feedback.”….An analysis of per capita prescription drug spending between 2004 and 2019 from the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Peter G. Petersen Foundation found that Americans, on average, spend $1,126 annually on prescription drugs, double the average of peer nations. Democrats argue these high prices are because, up until next year, the government can not negotiate drug prices the way it can in Canada, the United Kingdom, France and Germany, for example….The next step for Democrats is to expand the program to institute maximum prices for those not on Medicare. That can only be done with majorities in both chambers and Biden re-elected to the White House — making it an explicit part of their campaign appeal….And it’s not just Congress that can bring the benefits to Nevadans younger than 65. Democrats in the Legislature passed a bill to apply the Medicare-negotiated price caps statewide in 2026, allowing private insurance beneficiaries to take advantage of the new lower costs as well, though Gov. Joe Lombardo (R) vetoed the bill.” Birenbaum’s article focuses on Nevada, but the very substantial economic and health benefits she cites apply nation-wide.

Since the latest Trump indictment dropped in my home state of Georgia, I offered some thoughts at New York about the Peach State being his nightmare jurisdiction:

There’s an old saying among southerners that “you can’t go to hell without going through Atlanta,” which is a reference to the many, many air passengers who have to transfer from plane to plane at Atlanta’s Jackson-Hartsfield Airport to reach their destinations. Donald Trump’s journey through criminal courtrooms near and far is taking him through Atlanta, too, we learned on August 14, as a Fulton County grand jury indicted the former president on a variety of charges stemming from the Georgia edition of his plot to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. And unless he gets very lucky, Trump’s legal experience in Atlanta will be as hellish as a layover headed nowhere, as the charges force him to relive some of his least favorite moments of the last three years.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, and likely the jurors called forth to judge Trump, can and will be demonized by Team Trump and his MAGA supporters as Democrats “weaponizing” the legal system to take down the 45th president before he can return triumphantly to the White House. But many of the key witnesses testifying to Trump’s criminality will be his fellow Republicans in a state that has defied his wishes again and again. Trump’s losing streak in the state began in 2020, when he lost the state narrowly to Joe Biden in an election result certified by Republican secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, who administered the election, and recertified by Republican governor Brian Kemp.

All Trump’s efforts to change that result represented challenges to his own party’s power structure in the state, which refused to back down on the conviction that it was an honest election honestly counted and duly confirmed before God and the federal government. Trump and his allies had to lie like madmen to keep Georgia’s electoral votes contested, and from the president on down, they ensnared themselves serially in fraudulent charges and felonious pressure campaigns, most notably in Trump’s own plea to Raffensperger to manufacture some votes for him. And while their high jinks from fake-elector schemes to made-up fraud incidents echoed what they were doing in other battleground states, it’s the solid phalanx of Republican statewide elected officials fighting the election coup that made Georgia special.

Trump’s humiliation in Georgia didn’t end with Raffensperger’s refusal to “find” him some votes or with the refusal of Georgia’s Republican legislature to certify fake electors. His obsession with his attempted election coup was widely blamed for the defeat of two Republican U.S. senators in a January 2021 general-election runoff that cost the GOP control of the upper chamber. But worse yet, Trump sought to purge Raffensperger, Kemp, and several other GOP officeholders who didn’t bend the knee during the 2022 Republican primaries, and he and his surrogates had their asses handed to them. In the midterm election, Kemp, Raffensperger, and other Republicans romped to victory. The conspicuous loser was Trump’s hand-picked Senate candidate Herschel Walker, again robbing the GOP of a shot at Senate control.

Suffice it to say that as Trump faces a potentially devastating criminal proceeding in Georgia, there are very few of his fellow partisans willing to defend him, and some of the biggest names in the state GOP have already testified against him before the grand jury and are likely to incriminate him in open court (a very open court since the proceedings may be televised). Such sympathy as Trump demands as the putative 2024 Republican presidential nominee may be eroded by racketeering charges, which will surely make potential co-conspirators keep their distance. And if Trump is found guilty by a Fulton County jury at trial, he not only cannot pardon himself as he might do with a federal conviction but cannot even throw himself on Brian Kemp’s mercy. In Georgia, pardons are administered not by the governor but by an appointed state board that in the past has limited pardons to offenders who have already done their time.

All in all, Georgia is the last place in America where Donald Trump wants to face the music for his misdeeds. He should have skipped committing election-related crimes in his nightmare state even as wealthy travelers find ways to fly around Atlanta.

 

Some excerpts from “For Biden, Republican Anti-Government Attacks Can Be a Campaign Strategy: While Trump believes the government exists to serve him, Biden has a strong case for a government for the people in 2024” by Chris Edelson at The Progressive:

Ironically, one of the most fervent Trump supporters—Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia—may have given Biden a ready-made campaign plank. In July, Greene warned that Biden is following in the footsteps of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson; that he is a “Democratic Socialist” committed to “big government programs to address education, medical care, urban problems, rural poverty, transportation, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and welfare.”

Greene—known for promoting a “Jewish space laser” conspiracy by breathlessly (and incoherently) suggesting that California wildfires in 2018 might have had something to do with a “laser beam” somehow connected to “Rothschild, Inc”—doesn’t stand out as a deep, strategic thinker. So it’s no surprise that her effort to tar Biden with the frequently misused scare label of “socialist” could easily backfire. As one observer said of Greene’s “socialism” rant, “it strikes me as a curious political strategy to compare the legislation of a President [Biden] you despise and want to impeach with some of the most broadly popular legislation in American history.”

Biden seems to agree with this analysis: his campaign quickly responded with an ad that welcomed Greene’s comparison to FDR and LBJ as an indication that the Biden Administration is committed to helping middle class and working class people.

It was refreshing—but certainly not inevitable—to see Biden proudly embrace the idea that government can be a force for good in Americans’ lives.  In the past, other Democrats went into a defensive crouch when Republicans like Ronald Reagan described government as “the problem.” After Republicans hammered home their “big government attack” for more than a decade, Bill Clinton finally conceded in 1996 that “the era of big government is over,” seeming to accept the Republicans’ premise that government is the enemy, or, at best, “a necessary evil.”

Edelson adds, “The Biden ad suggests an alternative approach: seizing on overwrought Republican anti-government rhetoric as an opening for presenting an effective case for Biden and the Democrats in 2024 that contrasts their approach with Republicans’ cynical view of government….” Further, writes Edelson,

….Republicans see government as a force that serves them—that advances their specific world views at the expense of their perceived enemies. This view is represented in its purest form by the party’s leader, Donald Trump. For Trump, everything is about him, and the government exists only to serve his personal interests by lining his pockets (or his family members’ pockets), protecting his henchmen, punishing his perceived enemies, and consolidating personal power. This is a man so self-absorbed that he falsely insisted classified government documents were “my documents.”….If he is given a second term, Trump has made it brazenly clear that he will do all he can to make government officials personally loyal to him. At its heart, Trump’s vision of government is profoundly authoritarian: he sees government as a tool he can use to advance his interests and a weapon he can deploy to destroy his critics.

In contrast, Biden and the Democrats can argue that government exists to serve everyone. The point of government is to make life better—the preamble to our Constitution says as much. Where Trump’s view of government is deeply authoritarian and personal, Biden can embrace government as thoroughly democratic and aimed at public service. He could claim his presidency has been focused not on personal gain but rather on helping Americans burdened by student loans, inflation, worries about the pandemic, and economic uncertainty. On all of these fronts, Biden has standing to contend that peoples’ lives have been improved by government intervention, and that he can continue this approach in a second term.

Edelson concludes that “emphasizing a contrast between Biden’s and Trump’s approaches to government can give progressives an edge in an election that may be extremely competitive.” These opposing views of government provide an important distinction.

But it’s not just that Democrats have a genuine faith in government’s responsibility to serve the people, while Trump and his Republican lapdogs see government as a tool for their personal enrichment. Democrats should also not hesitate to ‘wave the flag’ and say clearly that Trump’s view of government, shared by his followers in his party, is deeply unamerican and unpatriotic. They have betrayed America’s — and Democracy’s — best ideals about freedom and fairness. That’s what voters who love America should take to the polls in 2024.