Some observations from Washington Post syndicated columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. about the “Ohio GOP’s Scam Referendum”:

When you do everything you can to rig an election and still lose, you have a problem. Voters in Ohio told the state’s Republican Party on Tuesday that it has a big problem, and they sent that message to the GOP nationwide.

In addition to the damage the Ohio abortion referendum would have done if it passed to women’s rights and future referenda in the state, it also pissed away an estimated $20 million taxpayer dollars, according to Republican state senate president, Matt Huffman, on a project that was doomed to fail. But that’s probably a conservative estimate of the true economic cost of the election, because making the threshold for referenda passage 60 percent could have set the stage for cascading taxpayer costs well into the future. As Spencer Kimball reports at cnbc.com, “More than just abortion rights were at stake in Tuesday’s vote. The 60% threshold could have also threatened efforts to raise Ohio’s minimum wage to $15 through a referendum that is expected to be on the ballot in November of 2024….If approved, the wage hike would go into effect in stages, and reach $15 in 2028.” The would translate into lost tax revenues and lost disposable income for a lot of Ohio citizens. Then there is the cost of making future referenda that could save Ohio taxpayers money a bad bet. And if the measure had passed, Ohio taxpayers would surely be shelling out more millions for state and local education, medical care and welfare programs. But it is a safe bet that none of the groups who lobbied so hard for the doomed referendum would be making contributions to help cover such expenses to any state entitlement programs.

Some ‘looking ahead’ considerations on Ohio’s political future from “Don’t Look Now, But Ohio Might Be A Swing State Again” by Phillip Elliott at Time: “Ohio, objectively, has grown more partisan in recent years. Rural counties have deepened their hue of red and the urban ones have gone darker blue. But the shift leftward in Ohio’s cities is lagging others in the region. (A terrific London School of Economics political science blog explains that data here.) But the basic gist is this: Ohio’s three biggest cities—Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati—are politically closer to Des Moines and Indianapolis than reliably blue Philadelphia, and thus insufficient offsets in otherwise red states. For instance, strategists can count on 70% support for Democratic nominees in Philadelphia, while Cincinnati broke for Biden with 57% support. And, unlike other states that went blue, Ohio’s three biggest counties account for just 44% of the population; Philadelphia makes up for 57% of Pennsylvania’s population. Ohio skeptics argue there just aren’t enough voters in Ohio’s big Democratic cities to offset deficits in suburban and rural areas….Yes, but this might not be the whole story. Brown, the state’s senior Senator, is on the ballot next year, and he’s one of national Democrats’ top priorities for defense-at-all costs. Democrats can afford to lose just one of the 23 incumbent seats on the map next year and stay in power. Brown already announced he is running again, and the Republican race to challenge him is likely to become a messy affair on par with the nasty 2022 primary for the seat being vacated by Sen. Rob Portman. For Democrats facing a tough map of defending seats in Montana, West Virginia, and Arizona, any breathing room in Ohio is a welcome development….With both Biden and Brown on the ticket in Ohio in 2024, Democrats might just have a shot at breaking the Trumpist hold over the Buckeye State. The abortion-minded vote this week only adds to the optimism—perhaps ill-placed, admittedly—that Ohio may be poised to roar back to swing-state status. After all, Brown has been preaching Ohio’s competitive nature to anyone who will listen, and his ear on Ohio’s political tuning fork is as good as they come.”

FiveThirtyEight’s Geoffrey Skelley addresses a question of interest to southern Democrats, “Could A Democrat Actually Win Mississippi’s Governorship?” As Skelley writes, “Mississippi’s contest for governor will offer little primary drama because Republican Gov. Tate Reeves and Democratic Public Service Commissioner Brandon Presley are all but guaranteed to face each other in November. But their impending clash will test how Republican-leaning Mississippi is, as Reeves isn’t especially popular and Presley has about as good a résumé as Democrats could hope for in the Magnolia State….First elected in 2019, Reeves is seeking a second term as governor, but his tenure hasn’t exactly attracted rave reviews. Morning Consult’s polling in the second quarter of 2023 found that he was tied for the dubious title of least popular governor in the country with a +6-point net job approval rating (48 percent of registered voters approved of him and 42 percent disapproved). Such middling ratings have been a regular thing, as Reeves has never surpassed 52 percent approval in Morning Consult’s surveys. Back in January, 57 percent of voters told Siena College/Mississippi Today that they’d prefer someone else to be the next governor, while just 33 percent backed Reeves….Presley, who I’m mandated by the journalism deities to report is a second cousin of Elvis Presley, is completing his fourth term representing the northern third of Mississippi on the state’s three-member Public Services Commission….Presley has won all four elections for his post by double digits (he was unopposed in 2019) despite his district’s sizable GOP lean: In 2020, then-President Donald Trump carried Presley’s seat by 23 percentage points. Presley’s moderate image — he describes himself as “pro-life” — and focus on less divisive issues like expanding broadband access have undergirded his success. Along those lines, Presley has made tax reductions a central feature of his campaign, including an ad in which he cuts a car in half with a metal saw to talk up his proposal to halve the state’s license plate tax.” However, Reeves does have better head-to-head poll numbers and more money. “The election is about three months away,” notes Skelley, “and Presley can’t be written off entirely, but Reeves is clearly favored.”

David Dayan explores some of the reasons why “It’s Natural That People Feel Bad About the Economy Right Now” at The American Prospect, including: “The dominant economic story in the country during the Biden presidency is the spike in inflation. While the jobs numbers are prodigious, changes in employment by definition affect a smaller number of people than the price of everything, which affects everyone….When inflation “goes away,” that doesn’t mean that every price reverts back to its previous level. For the most part, the rate of price increases just levels off. Anyone pissed off about prices at the grocery store is still going to be pissed off, because they’re still high relative to where they were in 2021. In fact, companies continued to raise prices on food in the second quarter of this year, even as supply disruptions eased. An opportunistic trend of volume dropping and profits rising, which means that companies are taking more margin per unit, has taken hold. We may finally be seeing the limits of this profit-skimming, however; Wall Street investors are starting to punish companies that aren’t increasing sales. If companies chase volume with discounts, consumers will see some relief….The main prices that have fallen already are on gas and energy, but that has ended, in part because of the ongoing heat wave, which prevents refineries from running at full capacity and increases demand for air-conditioning. The positive trends on consumer sentiment are if anything going to go down in the near term, as the most publicly visible posted prices in the country rise….It takes time for these sentiments to fade, even when the economy really has turned around. Ronald Reagan didn’t see the benefits of a stronger economy until a year or so after unemployment began to fall; Bill Clinton and Barack Obama saw the same dynamic. Those rebounds were slow, about a point a month between the summer before their re-elections and Election Day. (Obama’s was even slower, as his economy rebounded more slowly.) You could see this kind of imperceptible change for Biden, if consumer confidence continues on its upward path.”

In the wake of yet another pro-choice ballot measure victory in Ohio, I offered some thoughts at New York:

During the half-century when Roe v. Wade was law, anti-abortion advocates and their Republican allies frequently complained that the right of “the people” to determine abortion policy had been stolen by the unelected Supreme Court. It became a classic “wedge issue” benefiting the GOP, as frustrated traditionalist Catholics and conservative Evangelical Protestants left the Democratic Party in droves, providing votes and grassroots muscle to the GOP for decades. This legacy culminated in the devil’s bargain that cultural conservatives struck with Donald Trump in 2016.

Well, in the 13 months since the newly reactionary Supreme Court created by Trump reversed Roe and “the people” regained that right (which in reality meant the right to deny other people reproductive rights), voters in red and blue states alike have wherever possible used this freedom to restore the rights the courts and Republican legislators have sought to steal. It happened again on Tuesday in Ohio, the Republican-trending former battleground state where voters decisively rejected a sneaky GOP bid to make it harder to write abortion rights into the state’s constitution through a ballot initiative in November.

This is the seventh statewide abortion-ballot measure since Roe was reversed, and pro-choice forces have won every one of them, even in conservative states like Kansas, Kentucky, Montana, and now Ohio. When Ohio voters (more than likely) enact the constitutional amendment Republicans failed to block, the tally will be 8–0. And in 2024, voters in at least seven other states will decide on measures to protect or deny abortion rights.

If the rout continues, giving “the people” control over abortion policy may be quite the pyrrhic victory for the anti-abortion movement and even more so for the GOP whose electoral fortunes could be caught in the powerful backlash to Roe’s reversal. That backlash is already the prime suspect in the disappointing 2022 midterm results for Republicans who expected a “red wave” that never quite materialized. But the depth and breadth of popular commitment to abortion rights going into what may be an apocalyptic 2024 presidential cycle remains significantly unclear.

It should be understood, however, that the option of using “direct democracy” to restore abortion rights via citizen-initiated constitutional amendments that circumvent Republican legislators (as has now happened in both Michigan and Ohio) is available only in a total of 16 states. Voters may also fight back in cases where GOP lawmakers are trying to abolish state constitutional abortion rights that have been recognized by state courts and need voter ratification of their handiwork (that’s what happened in 2022 in Kansas and Kentucky). But to a significant extent, the fate of the right to choose in many politically contested states will continue to depend on partisan control of major offices, including legislative chambers, governorships, and in some cases elected judges. And that’s aside from the power of Congress to preempt state abortion laws if one party or the other secures a trifecta and can overcome a Senate filibuster. So even in states with no abortion ballot test on tap in 2024, the subject will very much be on the ballot via the two polarized pro-choice and anti-abortion major parties.

The pro-choice state-ballot-measure winning streak, the impact of the subject on key 2022 races, and bountiful polling showing pro-choice majorities in all but the most conservative corners of the country have combined to convince many Republican operatives and even elected officials that the subject is a loser for the GOP. When Donald Trump said just that at the beginning of 2023, it produced a lot of consternation among anti-abortion advocates who had previously adored him for his successfully redeemed promise to appoint justices who would overturn Roe. The Ohio results will convince even more Republicans that the 45th president was right. Perhaps they will even whisper to their abortion-obsessed allies in and beyond religious conservative circles to show some patience, keep their mouths shut, and help the GOP obtain enough power to give their friends what they want when political conditions are more favorable.

But now that Roe is gone, abortion politics is a 24/7 business, and anti-abortion activists are out of patience; that’s particularly true among the newer and more militant organizations like Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America and Students for Life. They are eager to use the competitive Republican presidential-nomination contest to increase, not hide, their leverage over the GOP, and Trump’s candid remarks on abortion politics have encouraged his rivals to pledge greater allegiance to the cause. Mike Pence and Tim Scott have both leapt to embrace the hard-core position of favoring a national six-week abortion ban. Ron DeSantis has punctuated his effort to run to Trump’s right by bragging to Iowans about the six-week ban (deemed “too harsh” by Trump) he signed in Florida.

It’s possible Trump will cruise to the nomination without renewing the vows underlying his marriage of convenience to the anti-abortion movement, and abortion will recede as a 2024 campaign issue. But national Democrats, who know a good wedge issue when they see one, almost certainly won’t let general-election voters who is pledged to protect abortion rights and who has worked hard to abolish them. We don’t have a partisan breakdown of the vote from Ohio (the state does not have voter registration by party), but there were clear indications the “No on Issue 1” coalition included quite a few Republican voters, as did the similar pro-choice coalitions in other states with previous abortion-ballot measures. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump has presented county-level data comparing 2020 partisan-vote margins to abortion-ballot measures in Ohio and five other states (California, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, and Montana) and the results are striking:

“In Ohio, about one-fifth of counties that voted for Trump in 2020 opposed Issue 1. The same pattern held in the six states included above. Of the 510 counties included in the analysis, only two counties that voted for Biden in 2020 also opposed access to abortion. Among Trump-voting counties, 81 supported that access.

“To use the parlance of political observers, abortion, particularly when presented to voters directly, is an effective wedge issue for the left.”

In a hypothetical Biden-Trump general-election rematch, a significant number of anti-Trump Republicans and Republican-leaning independents will be under pressure to defect to Biden, as a decent number did in 2020. Abandoned pro-choice swing voters of every background will have another reason to conduct their own protest against the GOP, or at least split their tickets.

The prominence of the issue will be enhanced in the media and the minds of voters by conspicuous abortion-rights ballot measures that will face 2024 voters in DeSantis’s Florida, and perhaps in ultra-battleground Arizona. It’s a bad look for today’s allegedly populist, anti-elite GOP to deny people fundamental rights or even the power to determine policies affecting their fundamental rights. Abortion rights could be the populist cause of the next decade or so. That’s a real problem for Republicans.

There are lots of good reports about yesterday’s vote in Ohio on the Republican plan to undermine both reproductive rights and democracy in the state. But Howard Wilkinson’s “Ohio’s GOP just learned voters are not as gullible as they think” at wxvu.org explains it with panache:

Nice try, Ohio GOP.

Issue 1, the incredibly bad deal you were offering Ohioans, failed miserably.

A solid majority could not figure out why, for heaven’s sake, they would agree to allow 41% of voters to shoot down an idea for a state constitutional amendment.

The 60% threshold was a miserable flop; and so too was another piece of Issue 1, which would have made it nearly impossible for any citizen-driven initiative to get on the ballot.

And the only thing you accomplished was to make Ohio taxpayers foot the bill for an August special election and waste the tens of millions of dollars both sides spent on this pointless campaign.

With 99 percent of the vote counted, the GOP measure was defeated by nearly 14 percent. Calling the vote a “GOP disaster,” Wilkinson adds, “Kyle Kondik, an Ohio native with the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said “This is a classic example of the old saying in politics, ‘pigs get fed, hogs get slaughtered.’ ”

This was an election that never should have happened. In fact, last December, the Republicans in the Ohio legislature did away with August elections altogether.

[Republican Secretary of State Frank] LaRose was all in favor of that. But when it became clear that the only way they could stop the November abortion rights amendment was with the 60% ballot initiative, he was all for the legislation to hold an Aug. 8 special election.

A coalition of over 250 organizations from across the political spectrum in Ohio were busy declaring victory early Tuesday night.

In recent years, Ohio has morphed into a reddish state. Democrat Sherrod Brown still holds a U.S. Senate seat, but he has a tough re-election campaign for November 2024. However, this vote shows the power of coalition building for Democrats, as well as the folly of the GOP’s efforts to undermine democracy. Further,

The Ohio Democratic Party has become very good at getting people out since the Obama wave of 2008. This special August election was no exception. It drew 642,000 early voters and the results skewed heavily Democratic.

The Ohio Republican Party has struggled in trying to convince its base to cast ballots early at the boards of elections or by mail. Republican voters tend to vote on Election Day, and that was the case in Tuesday’s results.

….The 60% threshold may be too high a bar for abortion rights groups to reach — although a USA Today/Suffolk University poll shows 58% support for abortion rights in Ohio.

….As odious as the 60% threshold was to opponents of Issue 1, the requirement about gathering petition signatures to place a constitutional amendment was even worse.

The standard since 1912 has been that petitioners have to gather the signatures of 5% of voters from 44 of Ohio’s 88 counties. Issue 1 would apply that to all 88 counties, which proponents believe would give more power to Ohio’s smaller, rural and reliably Republican counties….It would mean that one county — one — out of 88 could effectively prevent any proposed constitutional amendment, good or bad, from reaching the ballot.

Also this:

The most effective tool the One Person/One Vote campaign came from an unknown source — a meme that went viral on social media a month or so ago that made the issue plain and simple, and probably had a big impact on undecided voters or voters who were having a hard time understanding what exactly Issue 1 would do.

It was very simple: A box which showed the score of a fictional football game between the Ohio State Buckeyes and the Michigan Wolverines. The score said, “Ohio State 59, Michigan 41.”

Then it pointed out that, under Issue 1, the team with 41 points would be declared the winner.

Simple and understandable.

And a gut punch for anyone who roots for the Buckeyes.

But not nearly the gut punch this election turned out to be for the Ohio GOP.

Ingenious.

The Republicans have deployed football metaphors in politics for ages. They must be grinding their teeth at being creamed by Dems using one so creatively in a football-crazy state.

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:

The latest New York Times/Siena poll has made an impact and underscored the Democrats’ vulnerabilities on many fronts. The poll found Trump and Biden tied in a 2024 trial heat 43-43, with 16 percent saying they are undecided, would vote for another candidate or not vote at all. There are many striking demographic patterns in this result but one of the most striking has been little talked about: Biden’s weakness among nonwhite working-class (noncollege) voters. Biden leads Trump by a mere 16 points among this demographic. This compares to his lead over Trump of 48 points in 2020. And even that lead was a big drop-off from Obama’s 67-point advantage in 2012.

This evolving weakness among nonwhite working-class voters is a direct threat to the massive margins Democrats need to maintain among nonwhite voters to achieve victory. That is because these working-class voters are two-thirds to three-quarters of the nonwhite vote so the direction they trend in will drive the nonwhite vote as a whole.

Why is this happening? The beginning of wisdom is understanding that the nonwhite working class is not particularly progressive while the Democratic Party has become more so. In the Times poll, these voters overwhelmingly say they are moderate-to-conservative, with less than a quarter identifying as liberal. This has created increased contradictions between the Democratic Party and the nonwhite working-class voters they have relied upon for huge margins to make up for shortfalls elsewhere.

Data from a recent 6,000 respondent survey conducted by AEI’s Survey Center on American Life (SCAL) and the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) exposes these contradictions by allowing the views of moderate-to-conservative nonwhite working-class voters to be examined in detail. My analysis shows the following differences between the Democratic Party and nonwhite working-class voters:

1. Structural racism. Is racism “built into our society, including into its policies and institutions”, as held by current Democratic Party orthodoxy, or does racism “come from individuals who hold racist views, not from our society and institutions?” In the SCAL/NORC survey, by 61 to 39 percent, moderate-to-conservative nonwhite working-class voters (70 percent of whom are moderate, not conservative) chose the latter view, that racism comes from individuals, not society. In stark contrast, the comparatively tiny group of nonwhite college graduate liberals favored the structural racism position by 78 to 20 percent. White college graduate liberals were even more lop-sided at 82 to 18 percent. That tells you a lot about who influences the Democratic Party today and who does not.
2. Public safety. Voters were offered a choice between “we need to reallocate funding from police departments to social services”  and “we need to fully fund the budget for police departments.” Nonwhite moderate-to-conservative working-class voters supported full police department funding by 63 to 36 percent. But nonwhite college grad liberals favored moving police department funding to social services by 69 to 30 percent and white college grad liberals the same by a whopping 76 to 22 percent. Hmm.
3. Transgender athletes in team sports. Should “transgender athletes… be able to play on sports teams that match their current gender identity” or should they “only be allowed to play on sports teams that match their birth gender?” By a staggering 70 to 26 percent, moderate-to-conservative nonwhite working-class voters chose the second option, that sports team participation should be determined by birth gender, directly contradicting current Democratic Party doctrine. But nonwhite and white college grad liberals are exactly the reverse, endorsing the Democrats’ gender identity stance by 40 points each. Again, it is easy to see to whom today’s Democratic Party is really listening.
4. Renewable energy. As the Democrats rush headlong into an energy transition to replace fossil fuels with renewables, this too threatens to leave most nonwhite working-class voters behind. In the SCAL/NORC survey, when given a choice between the country using “a mix of energy sources including oil, coal and natural gas along with renewable energy sources” and the current Democratic approach, phasing “out the use of oil, coal and natural gas completely, relying instead on renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power only”, moderate-to-conservative nonwhite working-class voters endorse the continued use of fossil fuels by an overwhelming 75 to 25 percent margin. In contrast, the much smaller group of nonwhite college grad liberals favor getting rid of fossil fuels completely by 64 to 36 percent and liberal white grads feel the same by 66 to 34 percent.
5. Biden administration accomplishments. Nor is the nonwhite working class particularly happy with what the Biden administration has accomplished. Almost two-thirds (64 percent) of moderate-to-conservative nonwhite working-class voters believe Biden has accomplished not that much or little or nothing during his time in office. But 65 percent of nonwhite college grad liberals disagree, saying Biden has accomplished a great deal or a good amount. White college grad liberals are even happier, with 76 percent giving Biden two thumbs up.

Further confirmation of the divorce between the median nonwhite working-class voter and current Democratic Party practice and rhetoric is provided by The Liberal Patriot’s new survey of American voters conducted by YouGov.

1. Moderate-to-conservative nonwhite working-class voters give Biden just a 35 percent approval rating on handling inflation. These voters prefer Republicans to Democrats on building up America’s manufacturing capacity, on ensuring American energy independence, on maintaining a strong military and defense, on protecting American interests around the world, on being patriotic, on fighting crime and ensuring public safety and on standing up for free speech and freedom of religion (!).
2. Moderate-to-conservative nonwhite working-class voters overwhelmingly believe the Democratic Party has moved too far left on both economic and cultural/social issues. On economic issues, 72 percent of these voters say Democrats have moved too far left. On cultural and social issues, 69 percent say the same.
3. And consider the transgender issue again. Here are the three choices offered voters in the TLP/YouGov survey:

• States should protect all transgender youth by providing access to puberty blockers and transition surgeries if desired, and allowing them to participate fully in all activities and sports as the gender of their choice;
• States should protect the rights of transgender adults to live as they want but implement stronger regulations on puberty blockers, transition surgeries, and sports participation for transgender minors; or
• States should ban all gender transition treatments for minors and stop discussion of gender ideology in all public schools.

The first position here, emphasizing availability of medical treatments for gender-confused children (euphemistically referred to as “gender-affirming” care) and sports participation dictated by gender self-identification, is unquestionably the default position of the Democratic Party today. Indeed, to dissent in any way from this position in Democratic circles risks being labelled a “hateful bigot”—or worse. Yet a mere 17 percent of moderate-to-conservative nonwhite working-class voters endorse this position. Indeed, the most popular position of the three is the most draconian: that transgender medical treatments for children should simply be banned, as should discussion of gender ideology in public schools. That’s embraced by over half (52 percent) of these voters; another 31 percent of them favor the second position, advocating stronger regulation on puberty blockers, transition surgeries, and sports participation for transgender minors. Together, the latter two positions make it about five-to-one (!) among these voters against the Democratic position.

Possibly none of this will matter if Trump’s third indictment makes a bigger dent in his standing than his first and second indictments did. But I would not count on it. It still seems likely beating Trump or any other Republican will still be very challenging. Democrats should think very carefully if they can afford an image and policy commitments that are so unattractive to so many nonwhite working-class voters. In 2020, very few Democrats thought their support against the hated and presumably toxic Trump could possibly slip among nonwhite working-class voters. But it did. I wouldn’t be so sure it couldn’t happen again.

At his blog, No Mercy/No Malice, business analyst Scott Galloway crunches some numbers and logic in his post “Trump and Math,” and writes: “I don’t know, nobody does. However, I believe it is increasingly likely Donald Trump withdraws from the race for president as the result of a plea deal. Why? A: math….Facing prosecutions in at least three jurisdictions, it’s likely, if he is not reelected, Trump will be tried, convicted, and sent to prison. I don’t believe this will happen, as a plea deal serves everyone’s interests. Trump and the prosecutors, I speculate, will settle for a lifetime ban on serving in public office in exchange for the resolution of criminal proceedings against him. As the political map comes into focus, a plea deal will emerge as the best outcome for Trump. And as the knock-on effects of imprisoning a former president become a reality, a deal will also become the best (or least bad) outcome for the nation….President Trump is an obese 77-year-old male. Any sentence to a prison facility is likely a death sentence. Attorneys general wield the power of possible incarceration. Even more compelling? The prospect of survival — avoiding death behind bars. Incarceration, balanced against a life (post-deal) of golf clubs, sycophants, and porn stars weighs heavily on even the most delusional psyche….Federal prosecutors rarely lose: In 2021, 94% of defendants charged with a federal felony were convicted. State and local prosecutors convict at high rates as well — the Atlanta office expected to indict Trump boasts a 90% conviction rate. Of those convicted by the feds, 74% received prison time. In cases for mishandling national security documents specifically, the DOJ regularly obtains multiyear prison sentences. And the documents case against the former president is notable for the weight of the evidence, including audio of him sharing military secrets he admits he hadn’t declassified, the sensitivity of the papers, and his blatant obstruction — offenses the DOJ and courts take very seriously….It’s not any one case that cements Trump’s fate, but the compounding risk of several (indictments). Generally, defendants have a 3 in 10 chance of escaping an indictment without prison. A 30% chance of prevailing, four times in a row, is just under 1%.”

Galloway rolls out some caveats, including Trump’s formidable economic resources, possible legalistic glitches and the difficulty of selecting a jury that doesn’t have at least one bull-headed Trumper. Galloway adds, “Still, let’s improve his odds of exoneration from 3 in 10 to 8 in 10 — only a 20% chance in each case that he’s convicted and sent to prison. The math is still ugly: 0.8⁴ = 0.41 which means Trump has only a 41% chance of escaping prison, even when given remarkably favorable, exceptional, odds. The most favorable math still lands him in prison.” Galloway sees two potential ‘get out of jail cards,’ for Trump: “1) He retakes the White House, or 2) he (see above) reaches a plea deal.” There may also be a delayed ‘get out of jail’ card: Biden wins, then, after a while, pardons Trump for his federal convictions after he does some time. Pardons for state convictions would have to be negotiated with Governors. A lot of Democrats are hoping for an orange jump suit perp walk for Trump. After that, the appeal of Trump behind bars until his demise would have a limited shelf-life for many. Not much political cost to a term-limited Biden for being Mr. Nice Guy after a few months and making a gesture of reconciliation toward Trump’s supporters. The central goal of getting Trump and his democracy-trashing coterie permanently out of political office would have more enduring value, as would the lesson learned about the onerous personal costs of getting involved in coups against democracy. Of course, none of these scenarios may materialize. In any case, the important strategic play for Democrats is to seize every opportunity to leverage Trump’s mess to make possible a Democratic landslide that includes deep down-ballot victories. Democrats haven’t had a high-functioning, working majority of congress since the days of LBJ. Imagine what Biden’s second term could do with one.

In “Don’t Expect Biden to Get Credit for the Economy Anytime Soon,” Bill Scher explains at The Washington Monthly: “Despite near-record low unemployment, respectable Gross Domestic Productgrowth, wages outpacing inflation, and disposable personal income rising, Joe Biden’s job approval numbers have been stuck in the low 40s. Even more perplexing, approval for his handling of the economy is usually a tick worse than his overall job approval….In turn, several commentators are openly wondering: Why hasn’t Biden gotten credit for the improving economy?…But the better question is: How long does it take for any president to get credit for an improving economy?…But to expect Biden to reap immediate political benefits is unrealistic, considering recent history. Prices have been rising for over two years. During that period, wages have outpaced inflation only in the last two months (even though, as Washington Monthly contributing writer Rob Shapiro has noted, inflation-adjusted disposable personal income has been rising since the middle of last year). Past presidents have needed much longer stretches of good economic data before the public gets generous with political credit….Furthermore, what people feel about the economy often differs from what the data shows. A mid-1990s survey project conducted by the Washington Post, Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard University found that in the summer of 1996, when GDP growth was robust, 42 percent of respondents felt the economy was only growing slowly, while another 37 percent believed the economy was either stagnant, in recession, or depression. So even if you are dismayed, don’t be surprised by the newly released July CNN poll showing that 51 percent think “the economy is still in a downturn….The Post/Kaiser/Harvard researchers offered several possible reasons for the disconnect between positive economic data and public acceptance, one of which was “the media tend to emphasize the aspects of the economy that are getting worse and to pay less attention to the evidence that the economy is improving.” That’s why presidents should aggressively sell their own story, as Biden has begun to do with his “Bidenomics” strategy, and not expect the press to connect the data points.”

Alice Chapman and Yurij Rudensky flag “A Brazen Attack on Direct Democracy in Ohio” at the Brennan Center webpage. Subtitled “Conservative legislators are seeking to end majority rule by slipping in a constitutional amendment in a low-turnout August special election,” their article explain ns, “For decades, conservatives in Ohio have kept themselves in charge through extreme gerrymandering. But that’s not enough for them. Now this supermajority is going after one of the few remaining checks on their power: the citizen ballot initiative, a state constitutional right since 1912 that enables Ohio voters to enact state laws directly, without legislative approval. The conservative legislators are aiming to make the ballot initiative so difficult to pull off that voters will fail or will be too daunted to try. To enact these changes, lawmakers need to get a proposed constitutional amendment past voters. So they’ve called a special election on … August 8, a sleepy time when voter turnout is low. This is a sneak attack on democracy….Early voting is already underway on Issue 1, the measure that, if passed, would make future ballot initiatives difficult if not impossible to introduce and pass. The amendment would add onerous signature-collection requirements and require a 60 percent supermajority vote for passage. Just as threats to undermine election results are on the rise, partisan extremists are also looking to steal power away from voters by taking away this form of direct democracy….In Ohio, the strategy is clear: Put an unpopular antidemocratic measure to a vote in a month when families are on summer vacation, college students are away, and turnout is notoriously low. Describe it on the ballot in confusing language. Then count on out-of-state billionaires to flood the airways with ads to drive a small segment of voters to the polls. Illinois billionaire Richard Uhlein, fresh from bankrolling election denialist candidates and Jan. 6 insurrectionists, donated $4 million dollars….The legislature’s effort to restrict citizen initiatives is part of an alarming national trend. Ohio is following a playbook from Arizona, North Dakota, Florida, and Wisconsin, among others to erode an American tradition that for more than a century has served as a bulwark for democracy….Precisely because referenda have served as a check against gerrymandered legislatures and other political corruption, they’re now squarely in the crosshairs of powerful politicians.”

The clumsiness Ron DeSantis is exhibiting in the 2024 Republican presidential contest is most evident on the fraught cultural issue of abortion, as I explained at New York:

It used to be abortion politics were pretty easy to navigate for GOP pols. Nearly all favored a reversal of Roe v. Wade and demagogued about rare (and usually medically necessary) late-term abortions. Many walked on the wild side and favored fetal “personhood” laws and other total bans that affected not only abortion but contraception; outside the ever-attentive ranks of anti-abortion activists, nobody much cared what these pols advocated. After all, Roe protected pre-viability abortions from sea to shining sea as a matter of federal constitutional law.

When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe in June of last year, it was a huge victory for the anti-abortion movement and, in theory, for its GOP allies. But it has created new and difficult choices for Republican politicians, notably RDS.

When SCOTUS was deliberating over what would became the fatal opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, based on a challenge from Mississippi, the Republican-controlled legislature in Florida enacted, and DeSantis signed, a copycat law, banning abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Nobody knew for sure at that point exactly what SCOTUS would do; the leak of Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion was a few weeks away. But DeSantis associated himself with a cruel (and unpopular) approach with no exceptions for pregnancies caused by rape or incest.

Post-Dobbs, as DeSantis prepared to run for president, the Florida law, obnoxious as it was, became conspicuously modest as compared to the total and near-total bans being enacted by Republicans in other southern states. But at the same time, the backlash to the abolition of abortion rights grew intense almost everywhere, playing a big role in the underwhelming GOP performance in the 2022 midterms. So DeSantis characteristically played it both ways: He welcomed a six-week ban, but he signed it in the dead of night, and for a good while (even at the Christian right bastion of Liberty University) wouldn’t talk about it.

That changed when the DeSantis presidential campaign became focused on Iowa and its extremely powerful conservative Evangelical–anti-abortion constituency, whose leaders were offended by Donald Trump’s public remarks describing abortion as a loser of an issue, even as he refused to back any particular post-Dobbs abortion laws. Meanwhile, influential Iowa governor Kim Reynolds signed her own six-week ban (which is currently held up in the courts), and it began to look like DeSantis had gotten it right, at least for the GOP primaries.

But no, as Politico reported this week:

“The nation’s leading anti-abortion group on Monday called Gov. Ron DeSantis’ failure to support federal abortion restrictions ‘unacceptable’ — a blow for the Florida Republican, who has passed one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country.

“Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America was responding to DeSantis’ recent interview with conservative commentator Megyn Kelly, in which the governor said abortion policy would be best decided by the states.”

Like several other Republican presidential candidates (notably Trump and Nikki Haley), DeSantis had for months bobbed and weaved and avoided taking a firm position on the prospect of a federal abortion ban that would override state laws, even though the more strident anti-abortion groups like SBA had made a 15-week national ban a litmus test for those seeking their support. But Kelly pinned him down, and DeSantis decided alarming blue-state Americans by threatening state-protected abortion rights wouldn’t be terribly prudent, all the more because the Senate filibuster makes a federal abortion ban inconceivable in the immediate future, as he pointed out.

The SBA group’s president Marjorie Dannenfelser wasn’t having any of it, Politico noted:

“‘Gov. DeSantis’s dismissal of this task is unacceptable to pro-life voters,’ Dannenfelser said. ‘A consensus is already formed. Intensity for it is palpable and measurable. There are many pressing legislative issues for which Congress does not have the votes at the moment, but that is not a reason for a strong leader to back away from the fight.’”

Mike Pence and Tim Scott have signed onto the national ban, leaving DeSantis in a conspicuous spotlight as the advocate of an extremist position on abortion who’s under attack for not wanting to impose his extremist position on all 50 states, at least right away. He’s probably lost any advantage over Trump (already beloved of the anti-abortion movement because he kept his promise to get Roe reversed) on the abortion policy that he might have held or imagined. But the candidate who keeps pledging to make America a jumbo-size replica of Florida cannot run away from the fact that his own state’s citizens are being denied reproductive rights altogether.

The political impact of the new felony criminal indictment of Donald Trump could be both massive and complicated. But one thing it will do for sure is keep the 2020 election in view, as I noted at New York:

It’s easy to conflate all of Donald Trump’s legal problems into an undifferentiated blur of litigation serving as a sideshow to his 2024 comeback effort. But it’s important to recognize that the latest indictment from special counsel Jack Smith won’t just serve as a distraction for Trump and other candidates running for president. It will inevitably focus the intraparty and interparty debate already underway on the events of the last presidential election, a dynamic that will only intensify once the expected indictment of Trump under Georgia state law for election interference activities drops in Atlanta any day now.

It is almost impossible to overstate how much this development plays into Trump’s reelection strategy. From the get-go, the 45th president has made his 2024 campaign a vengeance-and-redemption tour based on his contention that Democrats “rigged” the 2020 election and subsequently conspired to waylay his career with an impeachment, the January 6 committee investigation, and multiple civil and criminal proceedings. In various ways, other Republican candidates and opinion leaders have sought to convince their voters to “move on” to a campaign based on negative characterizations of Joe Biden, his “far left” party, his economic and fiscal record, and his age and alleged disabilities.

But now there’s no “moving on” from the events of 2020 in all their wildly improbable trajectory culminating in the January 6 Capitol riot. The pathetic reaction of top Trump rival Ron DeSantis to the latest indictment — basically offering to save Trump’s freedom by wrecking the federal law enforcement system — shows how everyone other than the former president has lost control of the 2024 narrative. The sheer weight of Trump’s upcoming trials on the nomination-contest calendar will force his rivals to adjust the pace and direction of their campaign activities as well, even as they chase the man dominating the political landscape from a great distance.

That’s true, in a different sort of way, for Biden and other Democrats. The new indictment (which, again, will be echoed by the impending Georgia indictment) doesn’t involve some arcane matter like presidential records or some prepresidential or non-presidential Trump misconduct. It focuses on events virtually all Americans read and watched and heard about in great detail as they unfolded. Given the lens of partisan polarization through which the prosecution will be viewed, Team Biden will need to make a persuasive case to a narrow band of swing voters that Trump is the villain of the story and a criminal who must be kept from regaining power lest his crimes bear fruit. And if Trump is indeed the GOP nominee and the general election is as close as it appears to be right now, then Democrats will without question make their crucial voter mobilization efforts turn on characterizations of Trump and his cronies and allies as threats to democracy and the rule of law.

All roads lead right back to the crucial days between the wee hours of November 4, 2020, when Trump falsely declared victory, and January 6, 2021, when his election coup finally failed.

This is the ground on which Trump has always wanted to wage his 2024 election battle, from the day last fall when he announced his comeback bid as an effort to resume his interrupted presidency. If he loses this election or his freedom, it will be entirely his own doing.

An excerpt from “Public Opinion About Trump’s Criminality Is Shifting—a Bit” by John Cassidy at the New Yorker:

Will the accumulation of charges and evidence, and maybe even actual trials, gradually turn opinion decisively against the former President, especially among voters who aren’t highly partisan? Will things swing in his favor? Or will things stay where they are now, with views highly polarized on partisan lines?

In thinking about these questions, a good place to start is the latest opinion survey from Bright Line Watch, a group of political scientists that monitors threats to democracy. The survey, which was published last week, was carried out before the latest charges against Trump were filed. On the face of things, it confirmed the familiar picture that, when it comes to anything having to do with the former President, universally acknowledged truths hardly exist. Fewer than one in six Republican voters said they believed that Trump had committed crimes in trying to overturn the 2020 election, in his actions before the January 6th riots, or in making hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels. A few more Republicans said they believed that he committed a crime in the classified-documents case, but the total was still only one in four. By contrast, at least three in four Democrats believe that Trump committed crimes in each of these instances, the results indicated.

Among self-identified independents who don’t lean toward either party, the survey yielded more ambiguous results. Fewer than half of these respondents—between thirty-seven per cent and forty-six per cent, depending on the specific cases—said they believed that Trump had committed a crime. And about half of these respondents said that the charges were politically motivated. But, although these findings seem encouraging for Trump and his supporters, the survey also found that the number of independents who believe that Trump has done something criminal is growing, especially in relation to the classified-documents case. In a Bright Line Watch survey carried out last October, thirty-four per cent of independents said that a crime had been committed in that case. In the latest poll, that number had grown to forty-six per cent.

This suggests that, as prosecutors release more details of the charges and evidence against Trump, opinion is slowly shifting against him among less partisan voters. The survey even showed evidence of movement among Republicans. Since last October, the percentage of Republicans who said they believed that Trump had committed a crime in handling classified documents rose fromnine to twenty-five. “We have to keep two things in mind at the same time,” Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth who co-founded Bright Line Watch, told me on Monday. “On the one hand, the public is incredibly polarized on these cases. On the other hand, the new evidence does seem to be moving the needle.”

In a world of filter bubbles and willful propagating of misinformation, this shift can be viewed as an encouraging development. It’s evident in other recent polls, too. Last week, a survey from NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist College indicated that the percentage of Republicans who believe that Trump has “done nothing wrong” has dropped from fifty per cent to forty-one per cent since June. Evidently, public opinion isn’t set in stone. “Even among Republicans, it does seem like information is being taken in,” Nyhan noted.

However, he emphasized that there were two caveats to this interpretation. Regardless of Republicans’ views about the charges against Trump, there is still no evidence in the Bright Line survey that large numbers of G.O.P. voters will refuse to support him, Nyhan said. This finding is confirmed by other polls: in a New York Times/Siena College poll that was released on Monday, seventy-one per cent of Republicans agreed with the statement that, in relation to the ongoing investigations, “Republicans need to stand behind Trump,” and fifty-eight percent said that they would vote for him in the primary if it were held today.

Nyhan’s second caveat was that the classified-documents case might be special, because the evidence attached to it is so vivid and compelling. In their indictments and other court documents, the federal prosecutors have included photographs of classified documents strewn around Trump’s compound at Mar-a-Lago, and statements from his own lawyers and employees. “I’m cautious about anticipating the same type of movement we’ve seen in the documents case in the 2020-election cases,” Nyhan said. “I think those cases may play as rehashing old issues and evidence that is familiar to people. If it comes down to secondhand accounts of complicated political events, it is easy enough to talk people into holding with their partisan preconceptions.”

Nyhan’s point is well-taken. Together with the recent survey findings, it underscores the importance of the special counsel Jack Smith and the Fulton County district attorney, Fani Willis, laying out compelling evidence if they indict Trump on charges relating to the 2020 election and January 6th. Regardless of how strong these cases are, they will never persuade Trump diehards. (When he remarked, in January, 2016, that voters would support him if he shot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue, he was right.) But there is now at least some evidence that the public at large is more open to reason and evidence. With the next act of the Trump story set to unfold, this offers some ground for cautious optimism.”

On July 5, New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall shared some insights about the electorate going into the 2024 national elections: “Among the additional conditions working to the advantage of Democrats are the increase in Democratic Party loyalty and ideological consistency, the political mobilization of liberal constituencies by adverse Supreme Court rulings, an initial edge in the fight for an Electoral College majority and the increase in nonreligious voters along with a decline in churchgoing believers….These and other factors have prompted two Democratic strategists, Celinda Lake and Mike Lux, to declare, “All the elements are in place for a big Democratic victory in 2024.” In “Democrats Could Win a Trifecta in 2024,” a May 9 memo released to the public, the two even voiced optimism over the biggest hurdle facing Democrats, retaining control of the Senate in 2024, when as many as eight Democratic-held seats are competitive while the Republican seats are in solidly red states:

While these challenges are real, they can be overcome, and the problems are overstated. Remember that this same tough Senate map produced a net of five Democratic pickups in the 2000 election, which Gore narrowly lost to Bush; six Democratic pickups in 2006, allowing Democrats to retake the Senate; and two more in 2012. If we have a good election year overall, we have a very good chance at Democrats holding the Senate.

However, Edsall added, “The RealClearPolitics average of the eight most recent Trump versus Biden polls has Trump up by a statistically insignificant 0.6 percent. From August 2021 to the present, RealClear has tracked a total of 101 polls pitting these two against each other. Trump led in 56, Biden 38, and the remainder were ties.

Edsall notes further, “Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory, documents growing Democratic unity in two 2023 papers, “Both White and Nonwhite Democrats Are Moving Left” and “The Transformation of the American Electorate.”….From 2012 to 2020, Abramowitz wrote in the “Transformation” paper, “there was a dramatic increase in liberalism among Democratic voters.” As a result of these shifts, he continued, “Democratic voters are now as consistent in their liberalism as Republican voters are in their conservatism.”….Edsall believes “The education trends favoring Democrats are reinforced by Americans’ changing religious beliefs. From 2006 to 2022, the Public Religion Research Institute found, the white evangelical Protestant share of the population fell from 23 percent to 13.9 percent. Over the same period, the nonreligious share of the population rose from 16 to 26.8 percent.”….While acknowledging the gains Trump and fellow Republicans have made among Latino voters, a June 2023 analysis of the 2022 elections, “Latino Voters & The Case of the Missing Red Wave,” by Equis, a network of three allied, nonpartisan research groups, found that with the exception of Florida, “at the end of the day, there turned out to be basic stability in support levels among Latinos in highly contested races.” In short, the report’s authors continued, “the G.O.P. held gains they had made since 2016/2018 but weren’t able to build on them.”

Looking toward Electoral College votes in 2024, Edsall writes, “Kyle D. Kondik, the managing editor of Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ballat the University of Virginia Center for Politics, wrote in “Electoral College Ratings: Expect Another Highly Competitive Election” …..“We are starting 260 electoral votes’ worth of states as at least leaning Democratic,” Kondik wrote, “and 235 as at least leaning Republican,” with “just 43 tossup electoral votes at the outset.”….In other words, if this prediction holds true until November 2024, the Democratic candidate would need 10 more Electoral College votes to win and the Republican nominee would need 35…..The competitive states, Kondik continues, “are Arizona (11 votes), Georgia (16) and Wisconsin (10) — the three closest states in 2020 — along with Nevada (6), which has voted Democratic in each of the last four presidential elections but by closer margins each time.” So thus far, Georgia, followed by Arizona and Wisconsin, is currently the biggest swing state in terms of Electoral College votes. But that’s not a guarantee that it will still be the top prize 15 months from now. But it may be more useful for Democrats to focus on demographic outreach in particular states.

Edsall continues, “Kyle Kondik’s analysis showed that Nevada (17 percent of the vote was Hispanic in 2020) and Arizona (19 percent was Hispanic) are two of the four tossup states in 2024. This suggests that the Latino vote will be crucial. In “15 Facts About Latino Well-Being in Florida” at The UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Institute, Taemin Ann, Hector DeLeon, Misael Goldamez, Rocio Perez, Denise Ramos-Vega, Lupe Rengteria Salome and Jie Song write: “Florida Latinos are diverse, especially when compared to U.S. Latinos…Latinos of Cuban descent represent the single largest Latino ancestry group (28%), while Puerto Ricans (21%), South Americans (18%), Mexicans (14%), and Dominicans (4%) round out the top 5 groups by origin. In contrast, U.S. Latinos are majority Mexican (62%), while Puerto Ricans, South Americans, Cubans, and Dominicans respectively represent 10% or less of the Latino population….Florida Latinos are less likely to live below the poverty line than U.S. Latinos (19% vs 21.5%), but are just as likely to live in low-income conditions (25% vs 25.8%)….Over half of Latino children are covered by Medicaid—well above the rate for kids statewide (52% vs. 43% respectively)—while only 39% of Latino children are covered by private insurance (vs. 49% for all children statewide).”