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

These are heady days for Democrats. After a near-death experience with the fading Biden candidacy they have been revived by the Biden-Harris switcheroo. The presidential race has tightened considerably and, though Trump is still favored to win, they’re feeling mighty good about themselves. Inspired by their historic standard bearer, exuberant partisans proclaim the second coming of the Obama coalition, which will decisively sweep away Trump and his deplorable legions. They’re getting the band back together!

Or are they? In truth, the Harris coalition bears more resemblance to the Biden coalition…but without as many working-class voters. Or to the Hillary Clinton coalition…but with far fewer white working-class voters. Indeed, that people would analogize Harris’ emerging coalition to Obama’s shows how much they’ve forgotten (or perhaps never knew) about the Obama coalition and how little they understand about how the party has changed in the last 12 years.

Here are some facts about the Obama coalition (based on 2012 election data from Catalist):

1. In 2012, Obama carried both college-educated and working-class (noncollege) voters. And there wasn’t much difference in the margins; he carried the college-educated by 6 points and the working class by 4 points.

2. Obama carried the nonwhite working class by 67 points; overall he carried nonwhites by 64 points.

3. Obama lost both the white working class and college-educated whites, the former by a comparatively modest 20 points and the latter by 8 points.

All this is very far from the Harris coalition today and how it seems to be evolving. The following data illustrate this. I use the post-switcheroo New York Times/Siena poll (one of only four pollsters rated “A+” by Nate Silver) for comparison. I also provide intermediate figures—Clinton, 2016 and Biden, 2020—so that the political evolution from the Obama coalition to today can be clearly discerned.

Start with the working class. While Obama carried them by 4 points, four years later Clinton lost them by 3 points. Four years after that, Biden lost them by 4 points and, four years later, Harris in the Timespoll is losing them by 15 points.

Contrast this with the trajectory of the college-educated vote. As noted, Obama carried these voters by 6 points. In 2016, Clinton carried them by 13 points and four years later Biden carried them by 18 points. Today, Harris’ lead over Trump among the college-educated is 20 points. This takes the college-educated/working class margin gap from +2 under Obama to +35 today—that is, from doing barely better among college voters in 2012 to a massive class gap today. That’s because Democratic support in the two groups has gone in completely different directions. You miss this and you can’t possibly understand the Obama coalition and why it is so different from the Democratic coalition we see today.

Similarly, consider the class trajectories within the white vote. In 2012, Obama lost the white working-class vote by 20 points, a bounce back performance after the Democrats’ catastrophic performance with this demographic in the 2010 election. Gaining back some of Democrats’ lost white working-class support was a widely-ignored key to his re-election, particularly his success in Midwest/Rustbelt states. But famously Clinton in 2016 did much less well, losing these voters by 27 points (and the election in the process because of these voters’ defection in three key Rustbelt states). Then in 2020, Biden lost this demographic nationally by a slightly lower 26 points, which included slight improvements in those key Rustbelt states—an underrated factor in his victory. But today in the Times poll, Harris is losing these voters by a whopping 38 points.

The trajectory of the white college vote has gone in the completely opposite direction. Obama lost these voters by 8 points. Then Clinton moved this demographic to the break-even point, followed by Biden’s solid 9-point lead among these voters in 2020. Now Harris has a 15-point lead over Trump among white college graduates. That’s quite a trend. And it’s taken the class gap among white voters from 12 points in the Obama coalition to 53 points (!) today.

The trajectory of the nonwhite working class also highlights another key difference between the Harris coalition and the Obama coalition. Recall Obama’s massive 67-point margin with these voters in 2012. That margin dropped to 60 points for Clinton in 2016 and further to 48 points for Biden in 2020. Now Harris, despite her progress relative to this year’s fading Biden campaign has only a 29-point margin among these very same voters. Moreover, this reverses the class gap among nonwhites that had existed under Obama—he did 11 points betteramong the nonwhite working class than among the nonwhite college-educated. Now Harris is doing 11 points worse among the nonwhite working class than among nonwhite college voters.

Finally, when looking at the nonwhite voting pool as a whole, we see the following trend in Democratic margin: Obama 2012, +64 points; Clinton 2016, +58; Biden 2020, +48; Harris today, +34.

It is difficult to look at these data and not see profound differences between the Obama coalition and the emerging Harris coalition. These differences reflect how much the party has evolved in 12 short years.

Of course, none of this means Harris can’t win. But no one should kid themselves that, even if successful, Harris’ coalition will represent the second coming of the Obama coalition. Instead it is likely to be a more class-polarized version of the post-Obama Democratic coalition with even more reliance on the college-educated vote, particularly the whitecollege-educated vote.

This seems consistent with how the nascent Harris campaign has been unfolding. Layering on top of Biden’s themes before he dropped out—”saving democracy” and abortion rights (particularly the latter)—we have seen a great deal of emphasis on social media and the production of memes that capture the “vibes” of the Kamala! campaign. The latter has certainly garnered a lot of attention but, as Freddie DeBoer acerbically remarks, Harris is not running for President of Online America but rather America as a whole. He detects, not without reason, a whiff of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and their misplaced faith in online success.

Related to this, we have seen a rather strange online manifestation of the identitarian politics that still dominates the Democratic Party and is certainly alive and well in the Harris campaign. This is the raft of sex- and race-segregated zoom fundraisers for Harris. This has included the “White Women for Kamala Harris” fundraiser and the just plain embarrassing “White Dudes for Kamala Harris” extravaganza.

On the white women call, the following wisdom was imparted by social media influencer Arielle Fodor:

As white women we need to use our privilege to make positive changes…If you find yourself talking over or speaking for BIPOC individuals, or God forbid, correcting them, just take a beat, and instead we can take our listening ears on…So, do learn from and amplify the voices of those who have been historically marginalized and use the privilege you have in order to push for systemic change. As white people we have a lot to learn and unlearn, so do check your blind spots.

Shades of 2020! It is hard to see a persuadable white working-class woman—a type of voter where Harris desperately needs help—responding positively to talk of her “privilege” etc. Really, the call should more properly have been labelled “White Liberal College-Educated Women for Kamala Harris.”

The same could be said of the “White Dudes for Kamala Harris” call. The call’s organizer averred that when white men organize “it’s usually with pointed hats on” and that the call and supporting Harris was a way for the trope (?) of masculinity to be properly channeled. This is how to be one of the good white men. I can’t imagine white working-class men of practically any flavor responding positively to this sort of appeal. Again, the call should really have been billed as “White Liberal College-Educated Men for Kamala Harris.”

And there were many other and more finely-grained identity group fundraising calls for Harris. This aggregation of identity and interest groups approach to organizing and coalition-building is exactly what Obama wanted to get away from. As Obama memorably put it 20 years ago:

There is not a liberal America and a conservative America. There is the United States of America. There is not a black America, a white America, a Latino America, an Asian America. There’s the United States of America.

We need to get back there….and fast. And that includes the Harris campaign. Right now, they’re on a narrow, polarized path to November and their reckoning with Donald Trump. They can do better, starting with remembering what the Obama coalition really was and  really was about.

As one in a series of ruminations on the Biden-Harris switch, I offered some thoughts at New York on the very different message and strategy the new Democratic nominee might offer:

Even for Democrats who had faith in Joe Biden’s ability to defeat Donald Trump, the Biden strategy and message were unquestionably a bummer. Having apparently lost the ability to convince swing voters his administration was doing a good job on the key issues of inflation and immigration, Team Joe had to make the election about the terrifying prospect of a Trump presidency rather than any happy thoughts about a second Biden term.

To use the language of political strategy, Biden had to avoid a “referendum” election like the plague and try to make swing voters focus with great intensity on Trump’s lawless character and conduct, recognizing all the while that his own age made it impossible to paint an optimistic picture of America’s future under his guidance.

So even before his horrific performance in the June debate brought his candidacy to a crisis point, the best-case scenario for the Biden campaign was a long, hard slog designed to make voters even more fearful and discouraged, driving both his and Trump’s favorability ratings to the bottom of hell in hopes he would win a lesser-of-two-evils contest. It tells you a lot that for the first time in living memory, Democrats were hoping for a low-turnout election to save their bacon from a sour and mistrustful electorate.

Kamala Harris’s replacement of Biden as the Democratic nominee has changed all these dynamics, and accordingly her strategy and message are looking very different as well, as Axios reports:

“Instead of portraying Trump as a dictator-in-waiting, Harris has dismissed Trump as ‘weird’ and mocked him as scared to debate while also calling his agenda ‘extreme.’

“She also initially signaled the campaign was not all about Trump, telling a rollicking crowd in Wisconsin: ‘Let’s also make no mistake: This campaign is not just about us versus Donald Trump. This campaign is about who we fight for.’

“Harris, more than twenty years younger than Biden, has also tried to portray herself as the candidate of the future as she has embraced the tagline ‘we’re not going back.’

“In her Atlanta rally Tuesday evening, Harris also did not mention Biden by name. The main super PAC supporting Harris’ candidacy also began running a new ad Wednesday that concluded with ‘let the future begin.’”

Harris appears to be adopting a “two futures” message, comparing her agenda to Trump’s instead of mostly offering dark warnings about her opponent. It enables her to promote the most popular elements of the Democratic platform — most notably a restoration of reproductive rights along with practical steps to help the middle class address high living costs, along with some targeted bashing of corporations — without an extended defense of the Biden record. It’s a decidedly upbeat message that accompanies a big strategic shift: With young, Black, and Latino voters beginning to return to the Democratic column, Harris’s potential winning coalition is beginning to look at lot like Biden’s in 2020, which would benefit from higher, not lower, turnout and open up the possibility of wins in Sun Belt states Biden had all but written off this year.

This doesn’t, to be clear, mean Harris won’t “go negative” on Trump; she will, particularly if she manages to get into a debate with the 45th president. It simply means her Trump-bashing will be more forward-looking and probably less apocalyptic. Axios suggests that Team Harris believes Biden’s efforts to get voters to dwell on Trump’s responsibility for January 6 just didn’t work, so we will probably get less of that, at least up until the moment MAGA preparations for overturning another loss go into high gear.

But it’s not just the tone of her campaign that will represent a big change from Biden’s: It’s the timeframe as well. Biden was engaged in a four-year struggle with Trump. Harris needs to navigate fewer than 100 days. If, as many Republicans believe, the veep’s big vulnerability is an ideology too far left of center for comfort, there will be less time for Team Trump to dramatize (or fabricate) it. As RealClearPolitics’s Sean Trende argues, Harris is a candidate better suited for a sprint than a marathon:

“I don’t think Harris is probably viable over the course of a year-long campaign …

“She doesn’t have to run a year-long campaign, though … Consider: Harris will almost certainly pick her vice presidential candidate this week. She has a large number of attractive choices from which to select, which will earn her another week or two of positive press.

“That gets us to mid-August, when the Democratic National Convention begins. It will likely be a carefully scripted, well-managed event …

“Then, in mid-September, Trump will be sentenced following his conviction in the New York fraud/hush money case. Regardless of whether or not he receives jail time, it’s another distraction from any substantive discussion of the issues in 2024. The attention is diverted from Harris and falls on Trump in a relatively unflattering light … [T]he election actually shapes up as a referendum on Trump at this point.”

Harris can wage a campaign that’s brighter, sharper, and shorter than what could have been expected with Biden as the candidate. You can expect more of a traditional Democratic effort to mobilize the party base while giving swing voters an attractive and, above all, fresh alternative to the ever-alarming Trump. The voters who will decide this election won’t be asked to face their greatest fears head-on before choosing a flawed incumbent.

Lighten up, America! Maybe even laugh a bit with “Laffin’ Kamala” Harris.

Some insights from “‘He wants to take us back’: Democrats eye new strategy against Trump’s attacks on Harris: The former president’s attacks have proven to be effective in the past at sucking up the political oxygen” by Myah Ward and Megan Messerly at Politico:

It didn’t take long for former President Donald Trump to return to his well-worn playbook of resorting to attacks based on race and gender — familiar tactics he has used against political rivals, including in his 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton.

But it’s not 2016 anymore, and Democrats assert that the lessons learned from Trump’s campaign eight years ago guide their strategy now: Respond aggressively, use his attacks to bolster the campaign’s message and don’t let them distract from the issues.

That thinking guided their response to Trump’s interview at the National Association of Black Journalists conference in Chicago on Wednesday, where he questioned Vice President Kamala Harris’ Black ancestry and suggested she was chosen for the job only as a “DEI hire.”

Harris was quick to counter: On Wednesday night, she dismissed Trump’s attacks as “divisiveness” and the “same old show,” in what Democrats and campaign allies pointed out was the new framework for the party’s strategy.

Harry Enten explains “How Kamala Harris can beat Donald Trump” at CNN Politics: “Kamala Harris seems to have more appeal among voters of color and younger voters than Joe Biden did before he got out of the presidential race. Still, the 2020 results show that Harris can make up even more ground with these groups in her expected matchup against Donald Trump….Take a look at our newly published CNN/SSRS poll. Harris leads Trump among Black voters 78% to 15%. Among these same voters (the poll recontacted the same respondents), Biden was ahead by a smaller 70% to 23% in CNN polling data from April and June….The same holds to a somewhat lesser degree among Hispanic voters. Harris comes in at 47% to Trump’s 45%, while it was 50% for Trump to 41% for Biden among these same respondents in the April and June data….Voters under the age of 35 demonstrate a similar shift. It’s Harris 47% to Trump’s 43% now. In April and June, these same voters put Trump up 49% to 42% over Biden….Despite the improvement, the results should leave much to be desired for Harris. She is doing at least 5 points worse than Biden did among these same groups in the final 2020 polls….Among Black voters, Biden led Trump 84% to 9% at the end of the 2020 campaign. Even more notable is that Biden led among Hispanic voters by a 58% to 32% spread….Finally, even as Harris has become a meme favorite among young voters, Biden’s 60% to 31% advantage over Trump at the end of the 2020 campaign is massively larger than where Harris is right now….This may seem like bad news for the Harris campaign, and, in one clear way, it is. Without improving among these groups, Harris likely cannot win against the former president….The good news for Harris, though, is that she’s showing that she can make up some ground with this group relative to how Biden was doing earlier this year….As Harris continues to define herself separately from being Biden’s vice president, there’s a real chance she could carve out her own political identity that may appeal more to voters of color and young voters….A big reason Biden struggled in those Sun Belt states is that each has a significant share of either Black or Hispanic voters. By doing better with those groups, Harris may reopen the possibility of more electoral paths….If, for instance, Harris won all four Sun Belt battlegrounds mentioned above, she wouldn’t need to carry Michigan, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin….Perhaps more likely, Harris could get to 270 electoral votes by winning some mixture of northern battlegrounds and Sun Belt swing states….Harris now has a bunch of paths toward victory, while Biden’s options seemed to be closing rather quickly.”

“Florida’s ballot initiative to protect abortion is winning and has more support among voters than either Vice President Harris or Democratic Senate candidate Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a new poll shows,” Nathaniel Weixel writes in “New poll shows Florida abortion amendment winning, outperforming Democrats” at the Hill. “According to the poll from University of North Florida’s Public Opinion Research Lab (PORL), 69 percent of respondents said they would vote for Amendment 4, which would prohibit laws from restricting or banning abortion until fetal viability. …Constitutional amendments in Florida need 60 percent of the vote to become law…. “We have yet to see campaigns on either side of this really get moving,” PORL faculty director and political science professor Michael Binder said in a statement. “Factor in the highly contested and contentious financial impact statement recently added to the ballot summary, and I would expect to see support for this amendment drop before November.”….The poll also showed an amendment to legalize recreational cannabis has enough support to pass, with 64 percent of respondents supporting it….If the presidential election were held today, 49 percent of respondents said they would vote for former President Trump, while 42 percent said Harris….Respondents were also asked about the Senate race between incumbent Sen. Rick Scott (R) and Mucarsel-Powell (D). The poll showed 47 percent said they would vote for Scott, and 43 percent said they’d support Mucarsel-Powell….The polling differences between candidates and the amendments show why abortion supporters have been trying to keep the issue separate from party politics out of fear it will sink their effort….Among backers of the abortion amendment, 53 percent identified as Republican, and 51 percent said they voted for Trump in 2020. There are almost 900,000 more registered Republican voters in Florida than Democrats.”

At Politico, Christopher Cadelago writes “Harris tripped herself up in 2019 by straying too far from what was then her political North Star: crafting an image as a tough-minded and empathetic prosecutor….In the run-up to the Democratic primaries, Harris allowed “Kamala is a cop” critiques from activists and members of her own party to get inside her head. While Harris was progressive by the standards of her era in law enforcement, she was nowhere near as permissive as today’s crop of liberal district attorneys. Still, she readily submitted to the left’s endless purity tests, and backtracked on key pieces of her record as a prosecutor and attorney general. In doing so, she undermined what Harris and her closest advisers viewed as one of her greatest strengths: her career-long commitment to pursuing justice through the legal system….The act of creating a policy platform on the fly while simultaneously trying to prove her ideological bona fides yanked her further left and outside her comfort zone. At different moments in the primary, you could almost see her calculating answers in real time during TV interviews, which had the effect of making her appear wishy-washy….Harris won’t need to worry about liberal carping about her prosecutorial background anymore. It may have been a liability in a Democratic presidential primary, but in a general election, it’s more likely to be an asset. And whereas she once struggled to articulate her views on broader issues like health care, she now can largely rely on the policy framework created under the Biden-Harris administration….One of the most serious flaws of Harris’ 2020 bid was the inability of the messenger to settle on a consistent, coherent and compelling message….Now that she’s about to be handed the Democratic nomination, Harris doesn’t need to compete for eyeballs against a massive field of serious competitors. She’s free to focus on a straightforward mission….It won’t be enough for Harris to just be the anti-Trump candidate. Her task will be laying waste to Trump while also articulating a forward-looking vision of a brighter future….Balancing those ideas and integrating them into a cohesive message won’t be easy. But Harris has already gotten started, showing a zeal for attack in her characterization of Trump as a fraudster and an abuser of women while wrapping her campaign around the theme of fighting for the middle class.”

From “Old and quite weird”: Democrats finally discover new effective attack — and Republicans hate it” by Charles R. Davis at Salon. The Democratic meme about Trump and Vance being just plain weird got a pretty good workout during the last week. As Davis explains, “President Joe Biden won in 2020 largely by promising to a return to normalcy and baseline competency. In 2024, Democrats are making a similar argument but more forcibly: They’re pointing, laughing and dismissing Trump and his circus as a total freak show to which we can’t return….“The fascists depend on fear,” as Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz put it over the weekend. “The fascists depend on us going back. But we are not afraid of weird people. We’re a little bit creeped out, but we are not afraid.”….They’re strange guys with sick obsessions, as the two-term Democratic governor and former congressman put it on MSNBC last week….“You know there’s something wrong with people when they talk about freedom — freedom to be in your bedroom, freedom to be in your exam room, freedom to tell your kids what they can read,” Walz said. “That stuff is weird. They come across as weird. They seem obsessed with this.”….Republicans, including Fox News anchors, “will take a look at Donald Trump and say he’s perfectly fine, even though he seemed unable to tell the difference between Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi; even though he’s rambling about electrocuting sharks and Hannibal Lecter; even though he’s clearly older and stranger than he was when America got to know him,” Buttigieg said….The Harris campaign, if anything, is leaning into what works. In a press release over the weekend, addressing a “78-year-old criminal’s Fox News appearance,” the vice president’s staff noted Trump’s failed attempt to distance himself from his ally’s hard-right Project 2025 agenda. But there was also a fact that the campaign did not want reporters to miss: the man with 34 felony convictions to his name is also “old and quite weird.” They are weird and pretty creepy, especially to younger voters, who don’t appreciate neo-fascist meddling with their reproductive rights. Democrats should rock that meme.

With so much going on in the major-candidate presidential race, it’s easy to forget there is a one-formidable indie candidate still in the game, so at New York I took a look at how the very new contest created by Kamala Harris’s replacement of Joe Biden has affected RFK Jr.:

Most of the buzz surrounding Kamala Harris’s replacement of Joe Biden as the presumptive 2024 Democratic presidential nominee has come from the revived intraparty enthusiasm she has generated and her stronger performance in general-election polls against Donald Trump. But separately from and perhaps contributing to this Democratic comeback narrative has been a notable fall in the political standing of independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

In the RealClearPolitics averages of national presidential polls that include Kennedy and other non-major-party candidates, RFK Jr. dropped from 8.7 percent before Biden withdrew from the race to 5.8 percent now. Looking at longer trends, Kennedy was at 10.3 percent in the RCP averages as recently as July 6. So it’s been a pretty steep downward drop for the former Democrat. And in terms of his personal favorability, he’s been struggling for a while. FiveThirtyEight’s averages showed RFK Jr.’s favorability ratio going underwater on May 14, and is now at 33.7 percent favorable–41.5 percent unfavorable.

A number of factors are hurting Kennedy’s candidacy. Perhaps the most obvious is the abrupt decline in the supply of “double-haters” (voters who gave both major-party candidates unfavorable ratings) from which the indie candidate naturally fed. The Times-Siena pollsters showed double-haters declining from 20 percent before Biden dropped out to 8 percent afterward. That seems to be the consequence of improvements in favorability for both Trump and Harris, squeezing Kennedy from two directions. An additional problem for Kennedy is Harris’s gains over Biden among Black, Latin, and under-30 voters, all major reservoirs of support for RFK Jr.

What’s unclear is whether the apparent reset of the presidential contest is the principal source of Kennedy’s misery or if instead (or in part) we’re just at that point in the election cycle when non-major-party candidates tend to fade. Kennedy has some additional problems that don’t directly stem from Harris’s or Trump’s standing, most notably a money shortage, as The Hill reports:

“Federal Election Commission filings show Kennedy spent nearly $1 million more than he took in last month and that the campaign is also carrying debt of approximately $3 million …

“His biggest super PAC, American Values 2024, brought in a modest $228,000 in June, according to the FEC.”

It’s unclear how deep RFK Jr.’s most important funding source, his running mate Nicole Shanahan, is willing to dig into her personal wealth to keep the campaign going. But it is clear most of the dough is going to the very difficult and intermittently successful effort to get the ticket onto general-election ballots. According to the New York Times, the Kennedy-Shanahan ticket is on the ballot in just 13 states at the moment, including just one battleground state (Michigan), though that number is sure to rise.

As for Kennedy’s strategy moving forward, it’s not very clear. His conversations with Trump during the Republican National Convention fanned Democratic fears that the wiggy anti-vaxx pol might be joining the MAGA cause. If that’s not in the cards, RFK Jr. still has his previous strategy, which focused on making the stage in the second presidential debate in September that Biden and Trump agreed to back in June. But it’s unclear if the ABC debate for September 10 is still on. And Kennedy’s lagging poll numbers (he’ll need 15 percent of registered or likely voters in four high-quality national polls, a level he hasn’t reached in a good while) mean he likely won’t make the grade even if he meets the debate’s ballot-access requirements.

In retrospect, the end of the much-loathed Biden-Trump rematch probably spelled the end of the Kennedy campaign as an ongoing enterprise. But he and his supporters can still make a difference on the margins, where close elections are often decided.

There’s always plenty of jabber about swing states the summer before a presidential election. But, really, “swing states” are often made by the trends in swing counties. Steve Kornacki explains at msnbc.com, highlighting the critical importance of two of them in Georgia and Pennsylvania:

Pass the political humility, please. Many people who live in conservative communities are hyper-sensitive to liberal arrogance. More rural conservatives than you would think share at least some liberal views. But you are probably not going to hear them say so because those who advocate liberal views frequently broadcast their political attitudes in a way that condescends to or disparages non-liberals. As a rank-and-file problem, this probably intensifies polarization between liberal and conservative voters. There is no quick fix for bridging this particular gap between ideological voting groups. That’s a long-term project. But there is a hard lesson that must be learned, and quickly, by Democratic political candidates. Leaders may not be able to do much to stop their supporters from condescending toward those who disagree with them on particular policies. A visit to any social media outlet will quickly confirm the reality of liberal to conservative disparagement at the rank-and-file level. What can and must be changed, however, is that candidates who want to win elections have to do better. They must become hyper-sensitive about not projecting liberal arrogance. It falls to Democratic presidential nominee-in-waiting Kamala Harris to set the instructive example here. She must be ever on-guard against projecting liberal condescension, not only making comments about “deplorables” or bashing conservative cultural icons, but also a whole range of lesser blunders, like cutting people off in conversation, or anything that says “I don’t have time for your nonsense,” which former prosecutors often do. Presidents Obama and Biden both did a good job of avoiding such self-set booby traps, which are the surest road to defeat. Yes, it is true that conservatives, leaders as well as rank-and-file, also often disparage liberals in equally-arrogant ways. But that is their problem, not something Democrats can do anything about. Let them hurt their own cause. But our candidates need not serve their campaigns as clueless accomplices. The key behavioral consideration is to treat all adversaries with respect, humility and courtesy, no matter how abusive they may become. MLK was the Zen master of leveraging these values to build bridges of goodwill across chasms of division. Avoid at all costs the temptation to pander to rude supporters who do otherwise.

Yes, he went there….again. “In four years, you won’t have to vote again. we’ll have it fixed…”

Thomas B. Edsall has a scary essay about “What the Trump-Vance Alliance Means for the Republican Party” air the New York Times. He quotes scholar Ariel Malka, who notes, “A notable segment of the U.S. population combines a culturally based conservative identity with some degree of affinity for left-leaning and protectionist economic policy. Trump’s brand of populism — combining anti-immigrant nationalism with worker-oriented economic appeals within a framework denouncing left-wing and globalist elites — is attractive to these citizens.” Edsall continues, “I asked Malka what share of the electorate simultaneously holds culturally conservative and economically liberal views. He replied that when measured by specific policy preferences, “a substantial segment of the population reveals a culturally conservative and at least somewhat economically left-leaning attitude combination,” citing one study showing that over a quarter of voters fit this combination….Voters holding these views, Malka noted, “were a good deal more inclined to support the Republican than the Democratic Party.” Edsall adds, “Economic attitudes, according to Malka, are more complicated. Those “high in need for security and certainty tend to show a leaning toward left economic attitudes, when they are not highly exposed to political discourse that cultivates a right versus left attitude organization. When they are highly politically engaged, however, they have tended to move their economic attitudes to the right to match their culturally based conservative identity.”

Edsall continues, “For many years,” Elizabeth Suhay, a political scientist at American University, wrote by email, “the Republican Party managed to persuade many working-class whites to support their economic agenda not only by contrasting it with Democrats’ emphasis on racial equity but also by arguing that small government, economically conservative policy rewards hard work….The persuasiveness of this message waned, however, with increasing inequality, low income growth, rural job loss, etc., creating an opening for Trump. His 2016 campaign directly addressed working-class whites’ economic concerns, even if his policies in office generally did not….With the Vance pick, we are seeing an even greater rhetorical shift toward economic populism aimed directly at working-class and rural voters, and it is likely that a second Trump term would advance more populist policy than the first….It is certainly the case that the two parties’ recent agendas have put many working-class people in a bind: The Democratic Party’s economic agenda suits them, but the Democrats’ social agenda has been far more progressive than the modal working-class person. This is true regardless of race; however, Democrats’ emphasis on affirmative action (broadly construed) will be perceived as threatening by white working-class folks for both economic and cultural reasons.” Edsall concludes, “This year, each political coalition — left and right — is fraught with contradictions. In a situation in which the vote count threatens to be close, defections of any kind, especially if they’re concentrated in the wrong places, can be extraordinarily costly.”

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

Democrats are nothing short of giddy. Biden, who looked like a sure loser, bowed out of the presidential race and was seamlessly replaced by Kamala Harris through deft and lightning-fast intraparty maneuvering. The race is reset! All is possible!

Who can blame Democrats for being a bit slap happy? They were staring into the abyss and now have a reprieve. They have a younger candidate and a more enthusiastic, unified party. Those are important and positive differences. But there are also similarities to their previous situation that are highly negative and can’t be wished away. Here’s one that I wrote about back in January:

Here is a simple truth: how working-class (noncollege) voters move will likely determine the outcome of the 2024 election. They will be the overwhelming majority of eligible voters (around two-thirds) and, even allowing for turnout patterns, only slightly less dominant among actual voters (around three-fifths). Moreover, in all six key swing states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—the working-class share of the electorate, both as eligible voters and as projected 2024 voters, will be higher than the national average.

It follows that significant deterioration in working-class support could put Biden [now Harris] in a very deep hole nationally and key states. Conversely, a burgeoning advantage among working-class voters would likely put Trump in a dominant position.

This is very important to keep in mind as we are swamped by a tsunami of favorable Harris coverage in legacy and other center-left media. Where once her retail political skills were disparaged, we are told that she is now (or always has been) a consummately effective, charismatic retail politician.

Polls of course will be scrutinized for signs that the race is shifting in the Democrats’ favor and even small changes will be interpreted as signs that Trump is on the run. But in truth it will take a few weeks for the race to settle out and one should be cautious about interpreting initial results.

That said, what we have seen so far does not suggest a fundamentally altered race. Trump was ahead and is still ahead. Democrats still badly trail among working-class voters and have compressed margins among nonwhite and young voters relative to 2020. Of course, that may change in coming weeks but that is what we see now.

Looking at the running poll averages, we have the following for Trump-Harris matchups: RCP has Trump over Harris by 1.7 points (2.8 pointswith the full ballot including Kennedy/West/Stein). New York Times has Trump over Harris by 2 points and DDHQ/The Hill has Trump by 2 points. Pretty consistent.

Another approach is to compare averages of Biden vs. Trump and Harris vs. Trump. Naturally, these only overlap when Biden was the actual candidate and Harris was a notional candidate. But the data are still of interest.

Split Ticket has the most recent data on this, covering the month of July, and they do not show much difference between the candidates. Harris does slightly worse overall, with a margin against Trump .4 points worse than Biden. She does worse among men, a bit better among women; worse among seniors, better among those under 30; worse among whites and Hispanics and better among blacks and, significantly, worse among working-class voters and better among the college-educated. But the differences are generally quite small.

If you confine one’s sample of polls to those that were entirely in the field after Biden dropped out (i.e., after July 20), rather than just partially—a tiny group–there are some signs of a tightening race. But Trump is still ahead.

CNN is one of those polls and it does indeed show Harris doing better against Trump than Biden did prior to dropping out. But Trump is still ahead and, interestingly, Harris is doing no better against Trump than she did before Biden dropped out—in fact, a bit worse (3 point deficit now vs. a 2 point deficit in late June). And the internal demographics are quite similar to the earlier reading and all run far behind how Biden did in the 2020 election. Notably, her working-class deficit to Trump is 15 points, compared to Biden’s 4 point deficit in 2020.

These double digit Democratic deficits among the working class have been a regular feature of this election cycle. These deficits have been driven by worsening performance among the white working class (recall that Biden in 2020 actually did a bit better among these voters relative to Clinton in 2016) and much lower margins among nonwhiteworking-class voters. It is difficult to see how Harris prevails without strong progress on this front.

Can she do it? Sure, anything’s possible. But Democrats would be well-advised to be clear-eyed about the challenge. What Harris has to overcome is illustrated by an early July Pew poll that had a large enough sample size (N=over 9,400) to allow blacks and Hispanics to be broken down by working-class vs. college-educated. Both racial groups show strong educational polarization that is much larger than what was observed in 2020. Hispanic working-class voters in this poll preferred Trump by 3 points over Biden, compared to a 22 point margin for Biden over Trump in 2020. Among black working-class voters, Biden was leading by 47 points over Trump, compared to an 82 point lead for Biden in 2020.

A working class-oriented campaign would appear to be in order. But so far there is little indication that is what the Harris campaign has in mind. A widely-circulated memo from the campaign sees Harris’ candidacy as building on the “Biden-Harris coalition of voters” and mentions black voters, Latino voters, AANHPI voters, women voters and young voters. Working-class voters are conspicuous by their absence. The memo proposes to expand this coalition among, for example, white college-educated voters by taking advantage of the fact that:

…[Harris] has been at the forefront on the very issues that are most important to these voters—restoring women’s reproductive rights and upholding the rule of law following January 6, Donald Trump’s criminal convictions, and the Supreme Court’s immunity decision.

There is little mention of any other issues. This is despite the fact that Harris is rated far below Trump on handling issues like crime, inflation, and immigration. The latter two issues typically top voters’ list of concerns.

To the extent Harris has talked about issues other than abortion, “democracy is on the ballot,” and Trump’s character it has been to emphasize, according to Axios, that:

…she’ll pursue big—and expensive—parts of Joe Biden’s domestic agenda that never made it across the finish line…Harris is signaling that even as Democrats play defense on Biden’s mixed economic record, she’s eager to go on offense for the next four years…Her plans include pushing for nearly $2 trillion to establish universal pre-K education and improve elderly care and child care…

This seems…unwise in light of working-class voters’ inflation fears and how poorly they view Biden administration economic management. Pushing for massively increased spending is highly unlikely to win them over to your side, even if they approve of some of the end goals.

As some of the saner voices on the left have noted, Harris needs to make a serious effort to assure skeptical voters, particularly working-class voters, that she will in fact do things differently from the Biden administration on key issues where Democrats are vulnerable. David Leonhardt mentions crime, immigration, inflation, gender issues, and free speech. As Leonhardt points out:

Democrats often describe Donald Trump and other Republicans as radical….But many voters also see the Democratic Party as radical. In fact, the average American considers the Democratic Party to be further from the political mainstream than the Republican Party…

…[S]uccessful presidential candidates reassure voters that they are more moderate than their party. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Biden all did in their own ways. Even Trump did in 2016, by supporting Social Security, opposing trade deals, and endorsing same-sex marriage. The strategy works because most voters see themselves as less conservative than the Republican Party and less liberal than the Democratic Party….

[These politicians] were sending a larger message. It was the same one Clinton sent when he called himself “a new Democrat” and George W. Bush did with his talk of “compassionate conservatism.” It was also the one Trump recently tried to send by saying he opposed a national abortion ban.

All these politicians were asserting their independence from their own parties. It’s hard to get elected president without doing so.

So far there is little indication that Harris will do anything of the kind. As Politico Playbook noted: “Three sources in Harris’ orbit we spoke to said people expecting Harris to take drastically different positions [to distinguish herself from Biden] are going to end up disappointed.”

Thus, instead of a “different kind of Democrat” what voters will likely get is a younger, nonwhite, female version of the same kind of Democrat. Put another way, the Democrats seem content to remain a Brahmin Left party and see how things work out. Gulp.

It’s pretty obvious Kamala Harris’s candidacy changes the 2024 presidential race more than a little, and I wrote at New York about one avenue she has for victory that might have eluded Joe Biden:

During her brief run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019, Kamala Harris was widely believed to be emulating Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign strategy. She treated South Carolina, the first primary state with a substantial Black electorate, as the site of her potential breakthrough. But she front-loaded resources into Iowa to prepare for that breakthrough by reassuring Black voters that she could win in the largely white jurisdiction. She had the added advantage of being from the large state of California, where the primary had just been moved up to Super Tuesday (March 3). For a thrilling moment, after her commanding performance in a June 2019 debate, Harris seemed on track to pull off this feat, threatening Joe Biden’s hold on South Carolina in the polls and surging in Iowa. But neither she nor Cory Booker, who also relied on the Obama precedent, could displace Biden as the favorite of Black voters or strike gold in the crowded Iowa field. Out of money and luck, Harris dropped out before voters voted.

Now Kamala Harris is the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee for 2024 without having to navigate any primaries. But she still faces some key strategic decisions. Joe Biden was consistently trailing Donald Trump in the polls in no small part because he was underperforming among young and non-white voters, the very heart of the much-discussed Obama coalition. Can Harris recoup some of these potential losses without sacrificing support elsewhere in the electorate? That is a question she must address at the very beginning of her general-election campaign.

There’s a chance that Harris can inject a bit of the Obama “hope and change” magic into a Democratic ticket that had previously felt like a desperate effort to defend an unpopular administration led by a low-energy incumbent, as Ron Brownstein suggests in The Atlantic:

“Polls have shown that a significant share of Americans doubt the mental capacity of Trump, who has stumbled through his own procession of verbal flubs, memory lapses, and incomprehensible tangents during stump speeches and interviews to relatively little attention in the shadow of Biden’s difficulties. Particularly if Harris picks a younger running mate, she could top a ticket that embodies the generational change that many voters indicated they were yearning for when facing a Trump-Biden rematch …

“In the best-case scenario for this line of thinking, Harris could regain ground among the younger voters and Black and Hispanic voters who have drifted away from Biden since 2020. At the same time, she could further expand Democrats’ already solid margins among college-educated women who support abortion rights.”

Team Trump seems to believe it can offset these potential gains by depicting Harris as a “California radical” and a symbol of diversity who might alienate the older white voters with whom Biden had some residual strength. Obama overcame similar race-saturated appeals in 2008, but he had a lot of help from a financial collapse and an unpopular war presided over by the party of his opponent.

Following Obama’s path has major strategic implications in terms of the battleground map. Any significant improvement over Biden’s performance among Black, Latino, and under-30 voters might put Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina — very nearly conceded to Trump in recent weeks — back into play. But erosion of Biden’s support among older and/or non-college-educated white voters could create potholes in his narrow Rust Belt path to victory in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

These strategic choices could definitely affect Harris’s choice of a running-mate, not just in terms of potentially picking a veep from a battleground state, but as a way of amplifying the shift produced by Biden’s withdrawal. Brownstein even thinks Harris might consider following Bill Clinton’s 1992 example of doubling down on her own strengths:

“The other option that energizes many Democrats would be for Harris to take the bold, historic option of selecting another woman: Whitmer. That would be a greater gamble, but a possible model would be 1992, when Bill Clinton chose Al Gore as his running mate; Gore was, like him, a centrist Baby Boomer southerner—rather than an older D.C. hand. ‘I love Josh Shapiro and I think he would be a great VP candidate, but I would double down’ with Whitmer, [Democratci consultant Mike] Mikus told me. ‘I don’t think you have to go with a moderate white guy. I think you can be bold [with a pick] that electrifies your base.’ I heard similar views from several consultants.”

Whitmer’s expressed disinterest in the veepstakes may take that particular option off the table, but the broader point remains: Harris does not have to — and may not be able to — simply adopt Biden’s strategy and tweak it slightly. She may be able to contemplate gains in the electorate that were unimaginable for an 81-year-old white male incumbent. But the strategic opportunity to follow Obama’s path to the White House will first depend on Harris’s ability to refocus persuadable voters on Trump’s shaky record, bad character, and extremist agenda. Biden could not do that after the debate debacle of June 27. His successor must begin taking the battle to the former president right now.

Democratic candidates and their campaign workers have an article to read, “Class, race and the chances of outgrowing poverty in America” at The Economist. Some of the observations:

A new study by Raj Chetty, of Harvard University, and colleagues provides fresh data on how America’s landscape of opportunity has shifted sharply over the past decades. Although at the national level there have been only small declines in mobility, the places and groups that have become more (or less) likely to enable children to rise up have changed a lot. The most striking finding is that, compared with the past, a child’s race is now less relevant for predicting their future and their socioeconomic class more so.

The greatest drops in mobility have been not in the places evoked in song, but on the coasts and the Great Plains, which historically provided pathways up (see maps). “Fifteen years ago, the American Dream was alive and well for white children born to low-income parents in much of the North-east and West Coast,” says Benjamin Goldman of Cornell University, one of the co-authors. “Now those areas have outcomes on par with Appalachia, the rustbelt and parts of the South-east.”

The fact that white children have become more likely to remain in poverty than before, whereas for black children the reverse is true, raises many questions. The finding comes from tracing the trajectories of 57m children born in America between 1978 and 1992 and looking at their outcomes by the age of 27. “This is really the first look with modern big data into how opportunity can change within a place over time,” says Mr Goldman. For children born into high-income families, household income increased for all races between birth cohorts. Yet among those from low-income families, earnings rose for black children and fell for white children.

A black child born to poor parents in 1992 earned $1,400 a year more than one born in 1978. A similar white child earned $2,000 less than one born in 1978. But on average, a poor white child still earned $9,500 more than a poor black child.

Convergence, not equality

This pattern has played out in virtually every county, though with big regional differences. As a result, the earnings gap between rich and poor white children (the “class gap”) grew by 27%, whereas the earnings gap between poor white and poor black children (the “race gap”) fell by 28% (see chart). The class gap did not meaningfully change for non-white people. This convergence between poor white and poor black children is as much the result of improved mobility for black children as it is of decreased mobility for white ones.

The effects echo in other outcomes too. The gap in early-adulthood mortality between rich and poor white Americans more than doubled between the 1978 and 1992 birth cohorts, while the white-black race gap for the same metric fell by 77%. Other gaps between black and white Americans, from sat uptake and rates of graduation to rates of marriage and incarceration, have narrowed similarly.

None of this means that race is no longer relevant for Americans’ chances in life. Although the reversal of the direction of travel is striking, a young black American born in 1992 to poor parents was still four percentage points more likely to remain in poverty than a poor white peer, down from a 15 percentage-point gap for those born in 1978. And while the near doubling in rates of mortality among young, lower-income white Americans is deeply alarming, mortality rates for their black counterparts have increased too, and they are still (a bit) more likely to die young.

In polarised America, where race remains a divisive topic, some are bound to misappropriate the findings. Anti-woke conservatives will claim that the data show how “white privilege” is a myth and that programmes targeting poor black children should instead invest in poor white ones. Woke warriors will argue that race remains the most important factor holding children back from upward mobility, and so dismiss concerns about left-behind white kids. Both are wrong.

Convergence has not yet brought equality. Despite improvements across America for poor black children, there is still no county where their outcomes match those of poor white ones. Yet the decline of the white working class is steep, and bound to cause grief. Telling a young white man with lower life outcomes than previous generations that he is still doing better than the average black peer is about as useful as telling a young black man that he’s doing well “for a black man”.

Another possible misconception is that social mobility is a zero-sum game: that poor white children are doing worse because poor black children are doing better. The authors tackle this by showing how in places where black children have done well, white children’s outcomes have remained stable; and in places where white children have done particularly poorly, their black peers have also not thrived.

In his previous work Mr Chetty demonstrated just how much a child’s chances of outperforming their parents depended on their race and where they grew up. One of the questions the authors were left with was how “sticky” these effects would be over time: could opportunities for the next cohorts of children change within these same places, or were they fixed? The new study’s most hopeful finding is that, far from being fixed, opportunities within a place can change significantly and rapidly. Neither history nor place is destiny.

This offers clues for policymakers. Jobs, and their role in ensuring that communities flourish, are at the heart of understanding these big shifts. Children’s outcomes are tightly correlated with those of the communities in which they grow up. The narrowing of the race gap and widening of the white class gap, write the authors, “can be explained almost entirely by the sharp fall in employment rates for low-income white parents relative to low-income black and high-income white parents”. Growing up in a thriving community is crucial for children’s future outcomes—and which communities have been thriving over the past 15 years has changed in a way that relatively disadvantages poor white families. “In the past 15 years, we’ve seen a decline in conditions in low-income white communities relative to low-income black and high-income white communities,” concludes Mr Goldman.

So the gap between upward mobility stats for African Americans and low-income whites is shrinking a bit, and that’s good for Democratic candidates to consider, when reaching out to working-class voters. When it comes to  dealing with cheap shots regarding Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs, however, note also that less than 10 percent of Fortune 500 C.E.O.s  are women and about 1.6 percent  are African Americans, with 3.2 percent of S & P 500 C.E.O.s  identifying as Latinos. A good question for D.E.I. critics is, “So, how would you improve these statistics, or do you think it’s O.K. the way it is?”