From Mike Allen, Erica Pandey and Jim VandeHei of Axios comes news in an e-blast of yet another disturbing Gallup Poll about levels of “confidence” in American institutions. The authors’ take is how good it is that 65 percent of poll respondents say they have confidence in “small business.” OK, that’s a pretty good thing, although it seems reasonable to wonder why it isn’t even higher, small biz being the “backbone” of American capitalism and all that. I guess that roughly a third of Americans have had some sour experiences with independent contractors etc.

Still, compared to other ‘institutions’ in the USA, small biz is doing pretty good. The same poll reports 43 percent having confidence in police; 32 percent for churches; a walloping 27 percent for the U.S. Supreme Court;  26 percent for both public schools and large tech companies; a miserly 14 percent in television news and a pathetic 8 percent in congress.

Few will be shocked by these poll figures. Cynicism abounds, some media and many pollsters reinforce it, and let’s face it, we do have a hell of a lot of actual corruption in America – so much so that flashes of integrity or generosity by public institutions are often reported as hot news.

The Axios team notes a “partisan divide in confidence. Republicans’ confidence in organized religion (49%) exceeds that of Democrats (25%). Democrats’ faith in organized labor (39%) tops that of Republicans (15%).” No shockers there. Perhaps we should be glad that at least there is no great partisan divide in confidence in small business, with just a 2 percent divide between Dems and Republicans. Hard up for positive news, the Axios team requests upbeat reports from readers about “your favorite local businesses.”

But I remain pretty disturbed by the 8 percent confidence in “congress.” Granted, it’s not exactly a hot flash. Declining faith in “congress” has been a staple of polls for a long time. What bothers me the most is that I can’t count the many times I’ve tried to correct even my fellow liberals, when they bad-mouth “congress” for inaction on America’s many problems. Highly-partisan Democrat that I am, it is nonetheless absolutely true that Democrats have done a hell of a lot better job of passing needed and even popular reforms in one house of congress than have Republicans, only to see them crushed by the GOP in the other house of congress again and again.

Yes, those Republicans were elected and their votes are valid. But Mitch McConnell outed their purely obstructionist strategy when he urged blanket opposition to all of President Obama’s proposals, regardless of their merit. Even before that, Newt Gingrich’s scorched earth partisanship put a brutal end to the normal comity between Democratic and Republican members of congress that once produced historic and urgently-needed reforms like the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964-5. Trump and his twisted entourage piled on the polarization with gusto.

It’s hard to have an honest disagreement with George Lakoff’s argument that the public, even many Democrats, are routinely suckered into using preferred Republican terms in talking about the fate of needed reforms in our national and local legislatures. In large part, it is collateral damage of the triumph of ‘both sidesism,’ ‘whataboutism,’ or ‘false equivalence’ journalism. Whatever you want to call it, it distorts  public debate and makes political accountability increasingly difficult.

Despite the “liberal bias” that has been attributed to flagship press, like the New York Times and Washington Post, major media has too often been an eager partner with Republican propagandists in blaming “congress.” Republican wordsmith/strategist Frank Luntz has prospered for being openly candid about the necessity of using biased lingo to advance his party’s cause. The sad truth is that, with some exceptions, ‘the press’ has been an easy play for Republican propagandists.

Democrats, liberals, progressives, ‘the left,’ moderates and all others who don’t buy into the wingnut view of American politics, take note: It’s not “congress” that deserves condemnation for inaction; it’s Republicans who deserve it, even though many commentators are reluctant to say so.

Geoffrey Skelley explains why “Why Biden Probably Won’t Get A Serious Primary Challenger” at FiveThirty Eight: “….while Democrats remain concerned about Biden’s age, one ingredient is missing before there can be a significant primary challenge against him: unpopularity. The fact is, Democrats mostly approve of Biden’s performance as president. He has also made overtures to progressives, potentially stymieing a source of potential unrest — although the threat of former President Donald Trump’s return has helped maintain party unity, too. If we look back at incumbent presidents who encountered fierce opposition for renomination in the recent past, each faced substantial discontent over administration policies and/or ideological opposition from a frustrated party faction. Without such conditions, top-tier Democrats with White House ambitions are unlikely to risk upsetting leaders and donors in their party by launching a campaign against Biden. Time will tell whether Biden’s approval among Democrats will drop low enough to invite a serious primary challenge. But as of right now, Biden looks likely to avoid one….some of Biden’s hypothetically most compelling challengers, like Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, occupy roughly the same ideological zone as Biden, making it harder to differentiate themselves on issues besides age. (Whitmer is now national co-chair of Biden’s campaign.) Meanwhile, Biden has potentially avoided a notable challenge from his left: Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, Biden’s two highest-profile progressive opponents in 2020, have backed his reelection bid….Across polls of Biden’s approval rating conducted in June that included crosstab data for Democrats, an average of 77 percent of Democrats approved of Biden’s performance.² This puts him below Trump’s approval among Republicans in two polls from the summer of 2019, but almost exactly in line with former President Barack Obama’s among Democrats in two polls from the summer of 2011.”

In “The Emergence of the Anti-MAGA Coalition: There’s a voting bloc that hates Donald Trump, despises MAGA, and could help Democrats win the House and hold the White House next year,” Michael Podhorzer shares some insights about Democratic prospects at The Washington Monthly, including: “In 2016…Suddenly, white non-college voters became the “it” constituency for political analysts, an obsession that continued into 2022. Democrats must win over these voters, pundits proclaimed, or they had no electoral future….Seven years later, that advice seems misguided.” Podhorzer, former political director of the AFL-CIO and founder of the Analyst Institute, the Research Collaborative and the Defend Democracy Project, notes further “Since 2016, Republicans have lost 23 of the 27 elections in the five swing states Democrats need to win the presidency—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Such an outcome was hardly preordained. When Trump took office, Republicans held four of the five governorships in those states and six of their ten U.S. Senate seats….But Republicans haven’t just failed to make gains in those states. Last year, they were clobbered. It was a midterm where the out-of-power party, a party running against such an unpopular president, lost ground for the first time….Ignore those who complain that anti-MAGA rhetoric is “divisive” and might turn off swing voters. In the 2022 midterms, the expected “red wave” was blunted by what I call a “Blue Undertow”—but only in the 15 states where a MAGA candidate was in a competitive, big-ticket race, where MAGA’s dangerous agenda would have gotten more attention. That’s one likely reason Democrats faced such stunning losses in California and New York; it simply didn’t occur to Democratic base voters there that their ballots could be the difference between a MAGA-majority U.S. House and a chamber that could continue passing Biden’s agenda….Key purple state voters reject MAGA when the choice is clear because of the new anti-MAGA majority. Winning that majority over does not rely on finding a perch in the political center. On the contrary, victory for Democrats with these voters relies on making the choice of democracy versus fascism explicit.”

E. J. Dionne, Jr. gets philosophical and ruminates on the power of hope in Democratic politics, and writes, “hope is a demanding virtue, not a sunny disposition. It accepts reality, acknowledges obstacles and insists, as the bard of hope Barack Obama put it, “that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it and to work for it and to fight for it.”….This aspiration became so central to Obama’s political life that the word itself came to be seen as partisan. Campaigning in the 2010 midterm elections, Sarah Palin, the GOP’s vice-presidential nominee two years earlier, coined a memorable dismissal: “How’s that hopey changey thing working out for ya?”  Dionne, continues, noting “the celebrated work of Anne Case and Angus Deaton on “deaths of despair” among working-class Americans from suicide, alcohol-related diseases and drug overdoses. The loss of hope typically followed the loss of well-paying jobs and the collapse of communities….Deaths of despair, Case and Deaton found, were especially common among lower-income Whites. Black Americans, perhaps from their long experience overcoming discrimination and oppression, showed measurably higher rates of resiliency. But Graham notes that in recent years, suicide rates have been rising sharply among young Black Americans, and deaths from drug overdoses among Black men have shot up, too. Restoring hope is a moral and policy imperative across racial lines….It’s also an imperative in our politics, as Wake Forest University scholar Michael Lamb argues in “A Commonwealth of Hope,” a fascinating revisionist view of the political thought of St. Augustine. Contrary to a popular perception of Augustine as an otherworldly thinker who accents “darkness and pessimism,” Lamb sketches a persuasive portrait of a thinker who “encourages a realistic hope for a better form of community not only in heaven but on earth….Lamb highlights the high cost of despair in politics, which he argues “can license apathy or fatalism, encouraging citizens to withdraw from politics rather than stretch toward difficult political goods.” Dionne concludes, “Democracy cannot work if citizens are demoralized and demobilized by such despair. You don’t have to be a sucker for the hopey changey thing to see why we need a rendezvous with hope — in our individual lives and in our common life, too.”

Yesterday TDS cross-posted an article by David French, regarding the ‘joy’ of community that unites MAGA America. French makes a strong case that MAGA culture creates a potent sense of belonging that can translate into voter solidarity. In last year’s midterms we saw a kind of community emerge among Democrats, a community based on fear in the wake of the Dobbs decision. Politics suddenly got real for a large number of women voters and their families, rooted in the realization that Republicans really do want to meddle in and limit the most personal decisions women can make about their own reproductive choices. It did not end particularly well for Republicans. But that doesn’t not mean that the same kind community can work as well again for Democrats, regardless of the economic and other realities we will be facing in November, 2024. Sure it can help, especially because Republicans seem to be doubling down on passing anti-choice measures in state legislatures across the nation. But, as Dionne suggests in the article noted above, Democrats can also benefit from advocating a more appealing vision of hope. It’s the vision thing that Republicans are just not very good at. They have understandable difficulty in painting a hopeful picture of a future based on tax cuts for the already rich,  deregulation, banning books and dubious justifications for Trump’s trashing democracy. Not a lot of material there for a Reaganesque ‘morning in America’ rant. President Biden and Democrats, on the other hand, now have a track record of leadership for bipartisan accomplishments, including major initiatives in re-industrializing America, which lend credibility to their “hopey-changey” vision. But Dems must spell out the details of a credible economic vision for the future, which includes more good jobs, thriving communities, expanded educational opportunities for all, a cleaner environment, safer communities and a foreign policy we can be proud of – in stark contrast to everything the Republicans have been doing. President Biden has genuine bragging points on some of these goals already. He and Democrats must make sure voters know exactly what they have accomplished, and what they plan to do in the next four years – and put it all in inspiring detail.

The following article by NYT opinion columnist David French, author of “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation,” is cross-posted from The New York Times:

I’ve shared this fact with readers before: I live in Tennessee outside Nashville, a very deep-red part of America. According to a New York Times tool that calculates the political composition of a community, only 15 percent of my neighbors are Democrats. I’ve been living here in the heart of MAGA country since Donald Trump came down the escalator. This is the world of my friends, my neighbors and many members of my family. That is perhaps why, when I’m asked what things are like now, eight years into the Trump era, I have a ready answer: Everything is normal until, suddenly, it’s not. And unless we can understand what’s normal and what’s not, we can’t truly understand why Trumpism endures.

It’s hard to encapsulate a culture in 22 seconds, but this July 4 video tweet from Representative Andy Ogles accomplishes the nearly impossible. For those who don’t want to click through, the tweet features Ogles, a cheerful freshman Republican from Tennessee, wishing his followers a happy Fourth of July. The text of the greeting is remarkable only if you don’t live in MAGAland:

Hey guys, Congressman Andy Ogles here, wishing you a happy and blessed Fourth of July. Hey, remember our Founding Fathers. It’s we the people that are in charge of this country, not a leftist minority. Look, the left is trying to destroy our country and our family, and they’re coming after you. Have a blessed Fourth of July. Be safe. Have fun. God bless America.

Can something be cheerful and dark at the same time? Can a holiday message be both normal and so very strange? If so, then Ogles pulled it off. This is a man smiling in a field as a dog sniffs happily behind him. The left may be “coming after you,” as he warns, but the vibe isn’t catastrophic or even worried, rather a kind of friendly, generic patriotism. They’re coming for your family! Have a great day!

It’s not just Ogles. It’s no coincidence that one of the most enduring cultural symbols of Trump’s 2020 campaign was the boat parade. To form battle lines behind Trump, the one man they believe can save America from total destruction, thousands of supporters in several states got in their MasterCrafts and had giant open-air water parties.

Or take the Trump rally, the signature event of this political era. If you follow the rallies via Twitter or mainstream newscasts, you see the anger, but you miss the fun. When I was writing for The Dispatch, one of the best pieces we published was a report by Andrew Egger in 2020 about the “Front Row Joes,” the Trump superfans who follow Trump from rally to rally the way some people used to follow the Grateful Dead. Egger described the Trump rally perfectly: “For enthusiasts, Trump rallies aren’t just a way to see a favorite politician up close. They are major life events: festive opportunities to get together with like-minded folks and just go crazy about America and all the winning the Trump administration’s doing.”

Or go to a Southeastern Conference football game. The “Let’s Go Brandon” (or sometimes, just “[expletive] Joe Biden”) chant that arises from the student section isn’t delivered with clenched fists and furious anger, but rather through smiles and laughs. The frat bros are having a great time. The consistent message from Trumpland of all ages is something like this: “They’re the worst, and we’re awesome. Let’s party, and let’s fight.”

Why do none of your arguments against Trump penetrate this mind-set? The Trumpists have an easy answer: You’re horrible, and no one should listen to horrible people. Why were Trumpists so vulnerable to insane stolen-election theories? Because they know that you’re horrible and that horrible people are capable of anything, including stealing an election.

At the same time, their own joy and camaraderie insulate them against external critiques that focus on their anger and cruelty. Such charges ring hollow to Trump supporters, who can see firsthand the internal friendliness and good cheer that they experience when they get together with one another. They don’t feel angry — at least not most of the time. They are good, likable people who’ve just been provoked by a distant and alien “left” that many of them have never meaningfully encountered firsthand.

Indeed, while countless gallons of ink have been spilled analyzing the MAGA movement’s rage, far too little has been spilled discussing its joy.

Once you understand both dynamics, however, so much about the present moment makes clearer sense, including the dynamics of the Republican primary. Ron DeSantis, for example, channels all the rage of Trumpism and none of the joy. With relentless, grim determination he fights the left with every tool of government at his disposal. But can he lead stadiums full of people in an awkward dance to “Y.M.C.A.” by the Village People? Will he be the subject of countless over-the-top memes and posters celebrating him as some kind of godlike, muscular superhero?

Trump’s opponents miss the joy because they experience only the rage. I’m a member of a multiethnic church in Nashville. It’s a refuge from the MAGA Christianity that’s all too present where I live, just south of the city, in Franklin. This past Sunday, Walter Simmons, a Franklin-based Black pastor who founded the Franklin Justice and Equity Coalition, spoke to our church, and he referred to a common experience for those who dissent publicly in MAGA America. “If you ain’t ready for death threats, don’t live in Franklin,” he said.

He was referring to the experience of racial justice activists in deep-red spaces. They feel the rage of the MAGA mob. If you’re deemed to be one of those people who is trying to “destroy our country and our family,” then you don’t see joy, only fury.

Trump’s fans, by contrast, don’t understand the effects of that fury because they mainly experience the joy. For them, the MAGA community is kind and welcoming. For them, supporting Trump is fun. Moreover, the MAGA movement is heavily clustered in the South, and Southerners see themselves as the nicest people in America. It feels false to them to be called “mean” or “cruel.” Cruel? No chance. In their minds, they’re the same people they’ve always been — it’s just that they finally understand how bad youare. And by “you,” again, they often mean the caricatures of people they’ve never met.

In fact, they often don’t even know about the excesses of the Trump movement. Many of them will never know that their progressive neighbors have faced threats and intimidation. And even when they do see the movement at its worst, they can’t quite believe it. So Jan. 6 was a false flag. Or it was a “fedsurrection.” It couldn’t have really been a violent attempt to overthrow the elected government, because they know these people, or people like them, and they’re mostly good folks. It had to be a mistake, or an exaggeration, or a trick or a few bad apples. The real crime was the stolen election.

It’s the combination of anger and joy that makes the MAGA enthusiasm so hard to break but also limits its breadth. If you’re part of the movement’s ever-widening circle of enemies, Trump holds no appeal for you. You experience his movement as an attack on your life, your choices, your home and even your identity. If you’re part of the core MAGA community, however, not even the ruthlessly efficient DeSantis can come close to replicating the true Trump experience. Again, the boat parade is a perfect example. It’s one part Battle for the Future of Civilization and one part booze cruise.

The battle and the booze cruise both give MAGA devotees a sense of belonging. They see a country that’s changing around them and they are uncertain about their place in it. But they know they have a place at a Trump rally, surrounded by others — overwhelmingly white, many evangelical — who feel the same way they do.

Evangelicals are a particularly illustrative case. About half of self-identified evangelicals now attend church monthly or less often. They have religious zeal, but they lack religious community. So they find their band of brothers and sisters in the Trump movement. Even among actual churchgoing evangelicals, political alignment is often so important that it’s hard to feel a true sense of belonging unless you’re ideologically united with the people in the pews around you.

During the Trump years, I’ve received countless email messages from distraught readers that echo a similar theme: My father (or mother or uncle or cousin) is lost to MAGA. They can seem normal, but they’re not, at least not any longer. It’s hard for me to know what to say in response, but one thing is clear: You can’t replace something with nothing. And until we fully understand what that “something” is — and that it includes not only passionate anger but also very real joy and a deep sense of belonging — then our efforts to persuade are doomed to fail.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, co-founder and politics editor of  The Liberal Patriot, is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

Last Thursday, the Supreme Court struck down race-conscious college admissions. The reaction in Democratic circles has been to denounce the decision in histrionic terms and circle the wagons in defense of race-based affirmative action. A representative sample:

• “I fear what will happen… Will there be many lawyers who [are black] in the future? Or doctors? Or accountants?”—Catherine Christian, legal analyst, MSNBC
• “We will return to elite institutions… being the space for a particular population, for predominantly white and Asian students. We will begin to see a kind of segregated higher-education landscape.”—Princeton professor Eddie Glaude Jr.
• “Can’t wait until [the daughter of an Asian activist supporting the Court decision] reads that you gladly carried the water for white supremacy”— Jemele Hill, Atlantic writer, Twitter
• “[I]t just makes… a Native American kid, a Black kid feel like you don’t matter…Is it leading to no women in colleges soon? Who knows?”—Whoopi Goldberg, The View
• “This is a devastating blow for racial justice and equality…We condemn the Supreme Court’s decision to end these affirmative action policies and make it even more difficult for Americans to access higher education. While this decision is a setback… it is not the final word.”—Jaime Harrison, Democratic National Committee chair

But perhaps this is not a hill Democrats should choose to die on. Rather than implicitly or explicitly pledging to resist the law of the land and promote racial preferences by any means necessary, they would be far wiser to use the decision as an opportunity to rebrand the party as the party of America’s working class—the entire working class.

Start with the brutal fact that racial preferences are very, very unpopular. In a typical result, this spring’s Harvard/Stanford/University of Texas SCOTUSPollfound 69 percent of the public agreeing that private colleges and universities should not be able to use race as a factor in admissions, compared to 31 percent who thought these institutions should be able to do so. The same question about public colleges and universities elicited at 74-26 split. Pretty definitive.

In polling from Pew in 2022, just seven percent of the public thought high school grades should not be a factor in college admissions and a mere 14 percent thought standardized test scores should not be a factor. But an overwhelming 74 percent thought that race or ethnicity should not be a factor in college admissions.

This pattern applied to all nonwhite racial groups. Among blacks, 59 percent said race should not be a factor in college admissions compared to 11 percent who said high school grades should not be a factor and 21 percent who said the same about standardized tests. Hispanics (68 percent) and Asians (63 percent) were even more adamant in opposing the use of race in admissions.

Another indicator is how race-based affirmative action has fared in state referenda which is… not well. The most recent example was in the very blue state of California in 2020. Democratic leaders put an initiative on the ballot, Proposition 16, that would have repealed the state’s ban on using affirmative action in school admissions and government contracting and employment decisions. The measure, endorsed by Governor Gavin Newsom, then-senator and vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris, pretty much every other Democratic official in California and a staggering array of elites from business and labor to beloved sports teams, was widely seen as allowing schools to adjust merit-based admission policies to admit more blacks and Hispanics and fewer Asian Americans in order to make black and Hispanic enrollment proportional to their share in the population. But in spite of its prominent endorsements and generous funding—supporters of the measure outspent opponents by 10:1—the measure failed by 57 to 43 percent. Across racial groups, support for Proposition 16 ran 15-25 points behind support for Bidenin the 2020 election. This speaks volumes about the stunning cross-race unpopularity of racial preferences.

Why is this? It’s very simple. Most voters, especially working-class voters, think racial preferences are not fair and fairness is a fundamental part of their world outlook. They actually believe, with Martin Luther King Jr., that people should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” In a recent University of California Dornsife survey, this classic statement of colorblind equality was posed to respondents: “Our goal as a society should be to treat all people the same without regard to the color of their skin”. This MLK-style statement elicited sky-high (92 percent) agreement from the public, despite the assaults on this idea from Critical Race Theory (CRT) and the likes of Ibram X. Kendi and large sectors of the Democratic left. In a fascinating related finding, the researchers found that most people who claim to have heard about CRT believe CRT includes this colorblind perspective, rather than directly contradicting it. Perhaps they just can’t believe any theory that has anything to do with race would reject this fundamental principle. Guess they didn’t get the memo that it’s no longer cool to believe in this stuff.

Similarly a recent Public Agenda Hidden Common Ground survey found 91 percent agreement with the statement: “All people deserve an equal opportunity to succeed, no matter their race or ethnicity.” This is what people deeply believe in: equal opportunity. In the wake of the Supreme Court decision, Democrats can seize on this strand of the American character and trade a 2:1 or 3:1 unfavorable issue for a 9:1 favorable one. That seems like a pretty good deal.

The way to do this is clear. First, substitute class-based affirmative action for race-based affirmative action. This would boost proportionately more black and Hispanic students than white ones, thereby making up some of whatever losses in black and Hispanic representation might follow from simply eliminating race-based consideration.

But it would also boost some disadvantaged white students and that would be a good thing both substantively and politically. As President Obama memorably put it in 2008: “I think that my daughters should probably be treated by any admissions officer as folks who are pretty advantaged… I think that we should take into account [in admissions] white kids who have been disadvantaged and have grown up in poverty.” In other words, a black kid who grew up in a poor neighborhood in Baltimore and a white kid who grew up in a shattered working class neighborhood in Ohio are both more deserving of a boost than upper middle class kids of whatever race.

That makes sense and would strike most working-class voters as eminently fair. It is especially fair in light of the breathtaking lack of economic diversity at elite schools. Consider that at Harvard there are as many students from the top 1 percent of the income distribution as from the bottom 60 percent and at the University of North Carolina there are 16 times more students from the highest income quintile than from the lowest. Reflecting this pattern, the black, Latino, and Native American students at Harvard are also unrepresentative: 71 percent are from college-educated homes with above median income, a group representing perhaps a fifth of these populations. The working class is conspicuous by its absence.

That’s why it’s important to think of class-based affirmative action as not just a substitute for a race-based system that would accomplish some of the same goals. It would be a step forward in and of itself by pushing back against the incredible class bias of elite education. As David Leonhardt put it in his New York Times column:

Economic diversity matters for its own sake: The dearth of lower-income students at many elite colleges is a sign that educational opportunity has been constrained for Americans of all races. To put it another way, economic factors like household wealth are not valuable merely because they are a potential proxy for race; they are also a telling measure of disadvantage in their own right.

This approach could turn affirmative action from an issue that divides the working class into one that potentially unites it. Given how Democrats have been hemorrhaging working-class voters, this change of focus seems like a highly desirable course of action.

The second thing moving to a class focus could accomplish is encouraging Democrats to concentrate on where the overwhelming majority of kids across races get their college educations, if they do get them: unselective colleges where affirmative action isn’t even an issue. Just six percent of students attend colleges where the admit rate is under 25 percent and only another ten percent attend colleges where the admit rate is between 25 and 50 percent. The majority of black, Hispanic, and white students attend colleges where the admit rate is 75 percent or more.

As education professors Richard Arum and Mitchell L. Stevens put it:

The [Supreme Court] ruling provides America with an opportunity to redirect the conversation from a relatively small number of schools and instead direct urgently needed attention to the vast middle and lower tiers of postsecondary education. Non-selective colleges and universities can be genuine engines of economic mobility, but they do so in the face of significant headwinds.

This is how to get the working class on your side: help everyone, regardless of race, to get ahead. That’s a brand the Democratic Party should lean into, instead of a quixotic quest to preserve racial preferences that voters don’t want and that are now unlawful.

Adam Edelman reports that “Democrats are already running on abortion rights in battleground states” at nbcnews.com: “In swing states with vulnerable Democratic senators up for re-election in 2024, the party is already hammering likely opponents over abortion rights — even though most of those Republicans haven’t yet decided if they’re running….The early attacks by Democrats on the issue signal that the party is ready to carry on with what, in the year since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, has been a clear winner for the party. And even at this early stage of the cycle, it’s kept a spotlight on the struggles Republicans have endured in determining how to talk to voters about the divisive issue….The strategy could lend a hand to Senate Democrats who face a brutal map in 2024: They must defend 23 seats, compared with 10 for Republicans….The issue will be particularly hard for Republicans to run from in the perennial battleground of Wisconsin, where a deeply unpopularabortion ban will be working its way through through the state court system. The law — enacted in 1849 (only months after Wisconsin was admitted into the union) — bans abortions in almost all cases….“What we see in Wisconsin is also playing out nationally, which is that the GOP has built a machine around stoking up anger about Roe v. Wade but has never been able to do anything about it,” Ben Wikler, the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, said in an interview. “But now that the dog has caught the car, they have no message and no answers to tens of millions of Americans who don’t think politicians should be jumping between them and their doctor in the moments when they’re making their most intimate and personal decisions.”….polling released last week found that 66% of registered voters said abortion should be legal in all or most cases.”….Democrats in the state haven’t wasted any time bringing the issue to the foreground. Incumbent Sen. Tammy Baldwin has already begun talking up her support for abortion rights. Last month, the Democratic National Committee, as part of a campaign across multiple battlegrounds, put up a huge billboard in Milwaukee and began running digital ads in the state, all focused on Democrats’ support for reproductive rights.”

What’s wrong with Mississippi? It its routinely dismissed in major media as a hopeless cause for Democrats. Yet the state has the highest proportion of African Americans of any state (37.6 percent in the 2020 Census), which leaves casual political observers scratching their heads. Really? Democrats can’t pick up a piddly 15-20 percent from Mississippi white, Hispanic, Asian and Native American voters to win statewide races? Yes, there is deeply-embedded suppression of Black votes. In one study, Mississippi ranks as the 4th hardest state in which to vote (behind TX, GA and MO). For example, “In Mississippi, just under 16% of voting age Black people are disenfranchised because of a felony conviction,” April Simpson reports at The Center for Public Integrity.  But isn’t it time for a full-court Democratic Party/legal press to address this issue? With less than 3 million people statewide, Mississippi has the same number of U.S. Senators (2) as California’s 39 million people. The Mississippi Democratic party has had its difficulties recently. But there is some buzz that Dems might be competitive in at least one statewide race this year. As Adam Ganucheau writes at Mississippi Today, “Every statewide office, legislative seat and district attorney positions is on the ballot in November. And at the top of the ticket, Democrat Brandon Presley [2nd cousin of Elvis] is challenging incumbent Republican Gov. Tate Reeves in a race many political observers have opined will be close.” There is no substitute for the political grunt work of organizing community by community, which would be a good investment for the national Democratic Party and for well-healed Democrats generally. Democrats wring their hands about the U.S. Supreme Court and how hard it is to reform it. But wouldn’t picking up a couple of U.S. Senate seats be a big help in securing any kind of Supreme Court reform?

“There’s more to this fight, though, than a localized political battle,” Pat Garafalo writes in “The Secret to the Democrats’ Future Lies in Western Pennsylvania” at The New Republic’s ‘Soapbox.’ “Philadelphia usually earns the lion’s share of the Keystone State’s national media and political pundit attention—the recent Philly mayoral primary was treated as a proxy battle for the left’s various factions, for example, with progressive favorite Helen Gym’s uninspiring finish treated as proof positive that that wing has overreached. But Pittsburgh and its environs are actually worth paying attention to if you want to understand a viable path for Democrats to build the sort of coalitions they need not just to maintain what they currently have, but to build toward a model that can persuade more than the traditional liberal base. The strategy Democrats employed there, which focuses on centering corporate power while not forgoing what makes Democrats, well, Democrats, has allowed them to challenge political machines, best incumbents and Beltway darlings alike, build new models for local political organizing, and maybe, just maybe, set a standard for other Democrats across the country.” Garafalo spotlights a number of interesting local political races in western PA, including “In the same vein, Representative Sara Innamorato—another Western Pennsylvania official who recently won the Democratic nomination to be Allegheny County Executive—is working to rein in so-called TRAPS, abusive employee debt agreements which force workers to repay often hefty training costs before leaving for a new job. Her legislative work has also focused on reining in corporate power, whether through repealing tax subsidies, reforming antitrust and merger law, or ensuring people can access the resources fix their own homes, instead of selling them off to developers. That theme carried through to her county-level race, where she proved a whole lot of naysayers wrong and shook off a late barrage of attack ads to win, convincingly.” Garafalo concludes, “Marrying local worker solidarity, an unchecked corporate villain, strong local organizing, and an affirmative policy agenda for dealing with it may not sound revelatory, but in a world of endless political noise, super-short news cycles, and an election season that never seems to come to a close, it’s working in Western Pennsylvania—and that might just be good enough for everywhere else too.”

Some notes on voter turnout in 2022, from Madison Fernandez, writing at Politico: “More than 203 million people were active registered voters in 2022. That’s around 85 percent of eligible voters in the country, and a slight uptick from the 2018 midterms. The majority of states reported having a higher active registration rate in 2022 compared to 2018, as well….But getting more people registered doesn’t necessarily mean they’re all voting. Turnout among all Americans eligible to vote dropped around 5 percentage points compared to 2018. Last year, more than 112 million ballots were cast and counted in the 2022 general election, representing a turnout of around 47 percent….California, Indiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, North Dakota and Tennessee had the largest drop offs, with double-digit dips in turnout between the 2018 and 2022 elections….Only nine states saw increased turnouts compared to 2018: Arizona, Arkansas, Hawaii, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, South Dakota and Vermont. That’s a notable change from the 2018 report, when most states saw higher levels of turnout that year compared to the previous midterm election….In-person voting on Election Day rebounded after a pandemic-induced drop in 2020. But a majority of voters are still using other methods of voting, showing that there is significant staying power to the pandemic-era shift….Just under half of voters — 49 percent — cast their ballots on Election Day, up from around 30 percent in the 2020 election. Voting by mail was the second most popular option, with close to one-third of voters doing so. Around 20 percent voted early in-person….In-person voting on Election Day still didn’t hit 2018 rates, when 58 percent of voters cast their ballots that way. Votes by mail saw a 6 percentage point increase from 2018, and early in-person voting remained about the same.”

As someone who wrote intensively about Donald Trump’s attempted election coup in 2020, I’ve been on the alert for a recurrence in 2024. And as I noted at New York, we’re not at all out of the woods yet.

Lest anyone forget: The front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination is a man who has never accepted his 2020 defeat. More importantly, Donald Trump has convinced a sizable majority of GOP voters to accept his unsubstantiated claims that the presidency was “stolen” from him in 2020. It follows, then, that if Trump loses again in November 2024, he is very likely to deny defeat once again. But his options for challenging the legitimacy of the next presidential race are increasingly limited.

Looking back at the attempted election coup that culminated in the violence of January 6, it’s obvious that Trump’s long-range strategy was to allege widespread Democratic voter fraud based on disputing the legitimacy of voting by mail and in-person early voting, while seizing on and publicizing every available rumor of chicanery by Democratic election officials. This gambit arguably started way back in the wake of Trump’s 2016 victory, when he insisted on claiming he had won the national popular vote that he actually lost to Hillary Clinton by 2.8 million votes. It reached a crescendo on Election Night 2020 when Trump claimed victory based on partial returns before mail ballots could be counted.

While Trump has never abandoned his effort to delegitimize non–Election Day voting, he (along with other leading Republicans) is now urging GOP voters to fully take advantage of the voting rules as they exist across the country. And that’s largely what they did in the 2022 midterms; clearly, the partisan “taint” of early voting has worn off. That means there will likely be no basis in 2024 for a “red mirage” phenomenon, in which the Republican candidate will take a momentary lead based on a disproportionate share of the votes that happen to be counted first. If the election is close, Trump would have to wait just like the rest of the country for all the votes to roll in. And unless he reverses course once again, his “stolen election” claims will need a different rationale than the illegitimacy of early voting. What will replace it? That’s unclear.

The three tactics Team Trump pursued in 2020 in an effort to negate Joe Biden’s win probably won’t be available in 2024. Those were (1) the effort to supplant state-certified presidential electors in key states via the unilateral action of Republican-controlled state legislatures, based on an exotic constitutional theory called the “independent state legislatures doctrine;” (2) appeals to Republican election officials in key states to put a thumb on the scales to reverse the outcome (e.g., the infamous Trump phone call to Georgia secretary of State Brad Raffensperger), and (3) the culminating bid on January 6 to stop or reverse Biden’s final certification in Congress, which was the object of the attack on the U.S. Capitol by a Trump-inspired mob.

As the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent recently pointed out, all three of these avenues for flipping an election have been at least partially blocked since January 6:

“The Supreme Court’s decision in Moore v. Harper on Tuesday is a major reprieve for American democracy. By rejecting the radical idea that state legislatures have quasi-unlimited power to determine how elections are run, the court made it harder for lawmakers to engage in the shenanigans that Donald Trump encouraged to overturn his 2020 reelection loss …

“Along with the ruling, virtually all election-denying candidates for governor and secretary of state in key swing states lost in the 2022 midterms. [And] Congress reformed the law that governs how presidential electors are counted.”

Aside from the Supreme Court’s rejection of the “independent state legislatures” doctrine, Republicans lost control of legislatures in Michigan and (at least temporarily) Pennsylvania. And beyond the reforms of the Electoral Count Act of 1887 that make it much harder to challenge presidential-election results in Congress, the vice-president who will preside over the tabulation of electoral votes in January of 2025 is Kamala Harris.

So the loopholes Trump tried to exploit in 2020 to give his insurrection some legitimacy just won’t be available in 2024. Sure, the sort of state-by-state guerrilla litigation based on rumors and conspiracy theories that made laughingstocks of Trump’s legal team in 2020 will theoretically still be available. But it’s no more likely to succeed than it did before.

Is Greg Sargent correct, then, in arguing that “our democratic system is fortifying itself on multiple levels, unexpectedly reducing the odds of a rerun of Trump’s efforts in 2024”? Let’s hope so. But it’s also possible that in the absence of legal fig leaves for insurrectionary measures, Team Trump will resort to an overtly revolutionary approach, including summoning a mob to the Capitol, this time not to interfere with Congress’s proceedings but to suppress them altogether.

Without question, a host of institutions, including the Biden administration, the federal courts, responsible Republicans (such as they are), and the U.S. military leadership would stand in the way of a outright insurrectionary bid to reverse a presidential election result and impose an authoritarian regime. It probably won’t happen. But it shouldn’t be ruled out as a strategic option for this lawless man and his devoted following. Trump has, after all, openly and repeatedly described the existing U.S. government as an inherently evil and corrupt “swamp” whose inhabitants in both major parties are hell-bent on the destruction of the country and its values. It’s a bedrock principle among MAGA enthusiasts that they enjoy a right of violent revolution (the entire basis, they claim, for the Second Amendment) against “tyranny” as they define it. And Trump represents a lot of people living in a sort of cultural — and even religious — panic motivated by the demographic and geopolitical decline of the “great” America they imagine.

It’s good that Trump has been hemmed in institutionally since January 6 and may be forced to accept an adverse 2024 result even if he won’t admit he lost. The best way to ensure that happens is for voters to rebuke him by a margin that is simply unmistakable, convincing his GOP co-conspirators once and for all that he and his movement represent a losing proposition. But at the same time, we should take the 45th president’s regular revolutionary mutterings seriously if not literally.

From “Buttigieg’s master class in how Democrats should message the Republican Party’s implosion” by Kerry Eleveld at Daily Kos:

Democrats have been faced with a unique conundrum as the Republican Party self-immolates: How can they get headlines about all their government good works while the GOP black hole of degeneracy sucks all the air out of the political universe?

It’s a problem. Trump and his mess have been dominating the headlines for more than 8 years. One begins to wonder if frequency of being mentioned in the big media is more important for image creation than the content of what is being said about and by him. But there is an effective response, as Eleveld explains,

This is how: When Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, who is openly gay, was asked for his reaction to a weirdly homoerotic anti-LGBTQ+ adreleased by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign, Buttigieg lampooned it with a straight face, then contrasted the “strangeness” with Democrats’ efforts to improve the lives of working Americans across the country.

“I’m going to leave aside the strangeness of trying to prove your manhood by putting up a video that splices images of you in between oiled-up, shirtless bodybuilders,” Buttigieg said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” “and just get to the bigger issue that is on my mind whenever I see this stuff in the policy space, which is, again: Who are you trying to help, who are you trying to make better off, and what public policy problems to you get up in the morning thinking about how to solve?”

Buttigieg then launched into the Biden administration’s efforts traveling around the country to help communities, particularly in several underserved areas such as Appalachia, rebuild desperately needed infrastructure.

Buttigieg put a bow on the contrast between Democrats and the man-Santis video, saying, “I just don’t understand the mentality of someone who gets up in the morning thinking that he’s going to prove his worth by competing over who can make life hardest for a hard-hit community that is already so vulnerable in America.”

DeSantis could learn a thing or two from someone who actually has a natural talent for campaigning.

Bam! Eleveld adds, “But DeSantis aside, Buttigieg just gave a masterclass on how Team Biden and Democrats should consistently be messaging the wealth of depravity Republicans are dialing up on a daily basis. Donald Trump’s indictments and the GOP rush to defend him; House Republicans’ obsession with fringe hobby horse investigations; the right-wing Supreme Court’s attack on personal freedoms, bodily autonomy, and equity—pick your flavor. They are all ripe for contrast despite the fact that Biden has effectively issued a gag order about discussing Trump’s indictments.”

Here’s the video Eleveld posts with the story, showing how Buttigieg rolled out the take-down:

Elegant.

Some insights from “Oz, Fetterman, and the Future of Pennsylvania Politics: Candidate Quality Matters. A Lot” by Nate Moore and Ruy Teixeira at The Liberal Patriot:

This post is based on a new report breaking down the data from the 2022 Pennsylvania Senate race. The full report can be read here.

The most impressive Democratic over-performance of the 2022 midterms came in the perennial presidential battleground of Pennsylvania. In a state rarely decided by more than a couple points in either direction, John Fetterman’s five-point win over Mehmet Oz shattered even the most optimistic of Democratic projections. In the other marquee statewide race, Josh Shapiro beat state Sen. Doug Mastriano for the governor’s seat by an astounding 15 points. As Democrats rejoiced, Pennsylvania Republicans were left wondering what had gone wrong.

Teixeira and Moore argue that “Advertising, in particular, helped carry Fetterman to his eventual five-point victory. Pennsylvania contains six primary media markets: Erie, Harrisburg, Johnstown-Altoona, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Scranton–Wilkes-Barre. Candidates devote the vast majority of spending to these media markets, rather than waste valuable dollars on the few counties in largely out-of-state markets. This dichotomy creates a natural, if imperfect, testing ground on the efficacy of political advertising.”

Further,

….While nearly the entire state shifted left, the county-level variations convincingly correlate to media markets. The six counties that dodged most television advertising shifted leftward by 3.4 points. The remaining 61 counties shifted left by an average of 6.4 points. On average, the more voters learned of the two candidates, the more likely they were to vote for Fetterman.

Mercer County offers an interesting case study….Mercer is part of the Youngstown media market, one of Pennsylvania’s smaller media markets. Mercer’s four neighboring counties—Butler, Craw-ford, Lawrence, and Venango—are split between the Erie and Pittsburgh media markets and shifted 8.1 points toward Fetterman. Mercer, however, spared from incessant advertising, shifted to Fetterman by only four points. The five aforementioned counties are demographically quite similar—suggesting advertising produced dramatically different Senate results.

Issue advertising also plays an important electoral role. Rising violent crime, for example, should have been a home-run issue for the Pennsylvania GOP. Philadelphia and Pittsburgh both recorded historically high homicide numbers in 2022. Overall, violent crime, and particularly armed robberies, spiked compared to previous years. With progressive District Attorney Larry Krasner at the helm in Philadelphia, the conservative attack ads could have written themselves. But the Oz campaign failed to capitalize on this.

….In the closing stretch of the campaign, however, as the total number of ads increased, the share of public-safety airings cratered to a measly 27 percent. Meanwhile, the total share for pro-Democratic issues skyrocketed to 48 percent in October. Voters saw nearly two abortion, gun control, or health care ads for every one public-safety ad. The Fetterman campaign had a pure volume advantage as well. Between Labor Day and Election Day, 63,868 Senate ads aired in Pennsylvania. Of those, 37,055 were from Fetterman—a 10,242 ad advantage for the Democrat.

Moore and Teixeira note that “Fetterman’s greatest success—or, perhaps more accurately, Oz’s greatest shortcoming—came in Pennsylvania’s rural counties…..vote totals declined across the state compared to the 2020 presidential election. But across the four county groups—urban, suburban, small metro, and nonmetro—Fetterman was far closer to matching Biden’s raw vote totals than Oz was to matching Trump’s. Across the 30 counties classified as rural (nonmetro), Fetterman received 26,606 fewer votes than Biden did. Oz, on the other hand, saw a 136,005 vote decrease from Trump. The 12.5-point gap between Fetterman’s share of Biden’s rural vote and Oz’s share of Trump’s rural vote is the largest of any of the four county types.” In addition,

The average rural county moved toward Fetterman by 7.1 points relative to Biden’s performance, compared to an average of 6.1 points toward Fetterman in suburbs of large metro areas, 4.6 points in small metro areas, and just 3.7 points in urban areas. Intriguingly, rural counties, where Fetterman’s margin improvement was the largest, also have the heaviest concentrations of white working-class voters. These counties average 77 percent white working-class adults, 17 percent white college graduates, and only 6 percent non-white adults. A good example is rural and conservative Warren County, in the northwest corner of Pennsylvania, which is 79 percent white working-class voters and swung 10 points toward Fetterman.

One fascinating question is how much of Fetterman’s relative rural success was owed to persuading Republicans rather than simply mobilizing Biden supporters. Fox News/Associated Press (AP)/NORC VoteCast data offer a good place to start: 9 percent of self-identified Republicans voted for Fetterman, compared to 3 percent of self-identified Democrats supporting Oz. But VoteCast offers little information about the type of Republican who voted for Fetterman.

To approximate the number of Obama-Trump voters in each county, we use net Republican voter registration gain from 2008 to 2021 as a share of total registered voters. Republicans increased their share of registered voters in all 30 rural counties, but the net gain ranged from 2 percent to almost 14 percent. Counties with a larger increase in Republican voters are likely home to more Obama–Trump voters. Fetterman’s campaign rhetoric and style were explicitly designed to win over these once-Democratic counties that have shifted right rapidly over the past 15 years….

Moore and Teixeira note that “The Fetterman campaign did better in counties with larger increases in GOP voter registration—and by extension, counties with many Obama–Trump voters.” They cite “convincing evidence that Pennsylvania Democrats’ rural over-performance in 2022 is at least in part owed to Obama–Trump voters voting blue once again. Many national Democrats have written off these voters, but the 2022 Senate race proves a chunk of rural white working-class voters will indeed support a Democratic with the right aesthetic and messaging.”

Regarding “Fetterman’s Minority Struggles,” the authors write:

The Oz-Fetterman story is incomplete without a look at minority voting patterns. According to VoteCast data, in 2020, Biden carried Pennsylvania’s black voters 94 percent to 5 percent (an 89-point advantage), but Fetterman won black voters by just 87 percent to 10 percent (a 77-point advantage) in 2022—a 12-point swing against Democrats. Among Hispanic voters, Biden beat Trump 65 percent to 35 percent (a 30-point advantage), while Fetterman carried the group just 55 percent to 41 percent (a 14-point advantage)—a dramatic 16-point swing toward Republicans. As a whole, non-white voters shifted 14 points to the right between 2020 and 2022, driven by an enormous 21-point swing toward the GOP among non-white working-class (noncollege) voters. Fetterman’s victory derived primarily from a strong performance among white voters.

Turnout presented problems for Fetterman as well. Low minority turnout, especially black turnout, has long been a hurdle for Democratic candidates in midterm years. In the post-Obama era, few candidates have energized the core Democratic base of black voters anywhere close to 2008 or 2012 levels. But even accounting for expected differential turnout, Pennsylvania’s minority turnout was especially low in 2022—a warning sign for Democratic candidates in future cycles.

Turnout was even poorer in Philadelphia’s majority-Latino wards. Latinos, who comprise 16 percent of the city as a whole, are primarily concentrated in working-class northeastern neighborhoods. In the four wards with the largest share of Hispanic voters, turnout averaged an abysmal 49.4 percent of 2020 totals. A turnout drop of more than 50 percent is shocking, especially as statewide turnout remained so high and hundreds of millions of dollars poured into the Philadelphia media market. If Pennsylvania Democrats continue to ignore Latinos’ concerns, they risk a repeat of 2022’s rightward swing in 2024.

“Biden’s disapproval rating among 2022 midterm voters was 60 percent. Just 14 percent of voters strongly approved of his job performance, while 45 percent strongly disapproved,” Moore and Teixeira note. “But Fetterman was able to overcome this imbalance with an exceedingly strong performance among the “meh” voters—those who somewhat approve or disapprove. Fetterman carried the “somewhat approve” crowd by a whopping 92-point margin. More impressively, he won those who “somewhat disapprove” by 28 points—61 percent to Oz’s 33 percent. Soft disapproval of Biden was not a particularly salient factor in Senate vote choice. Plenty of Pennsylvanians disliked Biden but still voted blue up and down the ballot in 2022.”

In tbeir conclusion, Teixeira and Moore write, “Cynicism abounds amid record polarization, but the 2022 midterms in Pennsylvania reinforced that candidate quality matters. The GOP’s nomination of Oz and Mastriano—when matched against a pair of surprisingly strong Democrats in Fetterman and Shapiro—proved electorally disastrous.”

So, what will be the political fallout of the Supreme Court ruling that killed President Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan? Monica Potts explores the possibilities at FiveThirtyEight and writes: “The ruling could have big implications for the 2024 election. Now, borrowers will have to start repaying student loans at the end of the summer without any relief. It’s possible that the people who had looked forward to student loan forgiveness will blame the court for the decision. But it’s also possible that the court’s decision will backfire on Biden. Family budgets, already squeezed by persistent inflation, are likely to be even more so when payments resume, and some voters may see it as a broken promise — one that many Democrats really wanted Biden to fulfill….There’s a big divide among Americans about whether student loan forgiveness is a good thing at all, with very strong opinions on either side of the aisle. Biden and others have argued that the size of student debt — more than $1.75 trillion held by roughly 45 million Americans — is holding back the economy, contributes to generational inequality by heavily burdening young people, and hurts the 20 percent of student borrowers who ultimately default anyway….During his 2020 campaign, Biden had promised student loan relief, and a majority (64 percent) of Americans think student loan debt is a very or somewhat serious problem, including 56 percent of Biden voters and 51 percent of Democrats who think it’s a very serious problem. Some form of student loan relief was an issue during the 2020 Democratic primary season, and Biden’s proposal was popular with the Democratic base. Black voters strongly supported it, by 79 percent, and so did Hispanic voters, at 54 percent; among all adults in those demographics, support was 77 and 52 percent, respectively. College graduates favored it by 65 to 35, according to a Marquette University Law School poll. So did those with advanced degrees, by 64 percent, and, perhaps surprisingly, those with less than a high school education by 80 to 20. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a USA Today/Ipsos survey from April found that 83 percent of student loan debt-holders viewed Biden’s plan favorably….

Potts continues, “Student loan forgiveness was also especially popular with young people. Majorities of adults under 45 thought the Department of Education should have the authority to forgive student loan debt: 59 percent of adults under 30 and 54 percent of adults aged 30 to 44, according to a survey from The Economist/YouGov taken in May. The poll from Marquette University Law School found the exact same percentages for registered voters in those age groups viewed Biden’s plan favorably, and so did all adults under 60….Will Biden voters be disappointed in his administration if he can’t find a way to move the plan forward? It’s possible they will blame the Supreme Court, which has seen its popularity take a beating after a series of decisions that push against majority public sentiment. Fifty-eight percent of Americans disapprove of the Supreme Court, and only 28 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents view the court favorably. There’s a good chance that Democratic voters will blame the Supreme Court more than Biden for striking down his plan….But the economic costs of the plan’s failure may weigh more on Biden as he seeks reelection. A Penn Wharton analysis has found that Biden’s plan, two-thirds of which would benefit low- and middle-income borrowers, could cost as much as $1 trillion. However, there’s also a cost to resuming student-loan payments, as the administration is now obligated to do, in the form of reduced economic activity, which could be a drag on an already shaky economy. A Civic Science poll from June 13 to 14 found that a majority, 58 percent, of student loan debt-holders were at least somewhat concerned about being able to make payments….What happens to the economy may matter more than the success or failure of any given Biden proposal, and voters are already inclined to disapprove of Biden’shandling of the economy. If student loan burdens make people feel even worseabout their finances, that could spell bad news for his reelection campaign.” There’s always the possibility that supporters and opponents of the student loan forgiveness plan will cancel each other out on Election Day, or that it will be old news as new headlines about different issues dominate the news 15 months from now.

Did President Biden blunder in saying “I think if we start the process of trying to expand the court, we’re going to politicize it, maybe forever in a way that is not healthy”? Biden made the comment in an interview with MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace before the Court nuked his student loan forgiveness initiative. No one in politics has more experience with the Supreme Court confirmation process than Biden, a former chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. But why toss away a potential bargaining chip?  Victor Reklaitis notes that “In October 2020, Biden promised to establish a bipartisan commission to study reforms for the federal judiciary, including expanding the Supreme Court. The commission issued a report in December 2021 but didn’t offer a recommendation on the issue of expanding the court.” Down the road Biden could have used the threat of court expansion to get some leverage for other kinds of Supreme Court reform, including ethics, term limits, transparency measures, confirmation procedure etc.  Court expansion is a moot issue until Democrats have a working majority of both houses of congress, which may not happen for a long time. But in such a closely divided congress it could also happen pretty fast. Biden’s comment may have pleased some moderate Democrats and a lot of Republicans, but progressives and liberals who believe that the Republicans have packed the Court already have good reason to complain. As Jordan Rubin notes at msnbc.com, “Nicolle pressed Biden on whether he’s worried the court might do too much harm given the majority is so young and so conservative. Biden agreed but he raised the concern about politicizing the court in a way that can’t be undone. Of course, that ship sailed long ago.” Liberals also  argue that it’s a defeatist precedent to let Mitch McConnell get away with his betrayal of the bipartisan agreement on process in the way he stiffed Merrick Garland and greased the skids for Gorsuch. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Republicans play hardball on Supreme Court nominations, while Democrats play patty-cake and whine about it. Of course, there is always the possibility that President Biden could change his mind, as Supreme Court rulings become increasingly destructive.

Amy Walter addresses a question of interest, “Can Bidenomics Turn Gloomy Views on the Economy Around?” at The Cook Political Report. Noting that “voter opinions of the economy have become less predictive of the election outcome,” Walter observes, “Back in 2012, the campaign of Republican nominee Mitt Romney argued that the country’s pessimism about the state of the economy and their distrust of Barack Obama’s handling of it would ultimately doom the incumbent. In the end, Obama won rather handily, thanks in large part to his campaign’s ability to recast the debate from one about the state of the economy into one about who is best qualified to understand the struggles of average Americans….In 2018, the party in the White House lost control of the House, despite a robust economy. Why? Many voters who appreciated the job President Trump was doing on the economy were turned off by his polarizing style and behavior….In 2020, the pandemic-induced economic slow-down was a significant factor in Trump’s loss. But, just as important was the antipathy to Trump himself….By 2022, record inflation didn’t doom Democrats in the midterms. In fact, among the plurality of voters who rated the economy as “not so good,” 62% still voted for the incumbent party. Why? Voters’ concerns about the extremism exhibited by many of the Republican candidates proved to be more salient than their worries about the high rate of inflation….A recent Quinnipiac poll found that just 41% of Americans approve of the job Biden is doing on the economy. Yet, in a head-to-head matchup against Trump, Biden is at 48%. In other words, many of those who disapprove of the job he’s doing on the economy are voting for him anyway….Others argue that traditional measurements of voter opinion on the economy are ineffective. “Asking people about the economy is no longer a reliable measure of the state of the economy,” one Democratic strategist told me. “I don’t even think consumer confidence works anymore. Only behavior works as an indicator.”….Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg makes this point as well, and argues that the party needs to do a better job telling the story of the economy’s success under Biden.”