In the wake of the VP debate, the spinmeisters are working overtime crafting their take-away posts. In all likelihood, however, most impressions of the debate will be faded or forgotten in a month, if not sooner. Such is the power of myriad distractions in modern America. “Interesting Veep debate last night. Oh look, there’s a squirrel.”

Here’s one take from “Consider This” at npr.org:

In a race where so much of the polling is within the margin of error — it seems as though any one thing could affect the outcome of the 2024 Presidential election.

But have Vice Presidential Debates made a difference in past races?

NPR’s senior White House Correspondent Tamara Keith dug into that existential… and political question.

Keith says that vice presidential debates are often forgettable, but the one in 1988 is seared in American popular culture.

Judy Woodruff of PBS did the introductions for Senator Dan Quayle, the Republican nominee, and Senator Lloyd Bentsen, the Democratic nominee.

Benson was in his late sixties while Quayle was only 41, and that dynamic led to one of the most iconic lines in debate history, as Quayle compared himself to John F. Kennedy, and Lloyd Bentsen replied:

“I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”

It was a huge moment in the debate. But it ultimately had no real impact on the outcome of the race. Smackdown notwithstanding, Bentsen and his running mate, Michael Dukakis, lost in a wipe out.

One could could argue that, after all, both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris served as Vice President, as did Presidents Truman, LBJ, Bush (I) and Nixon during the last century. It’s a training school for future presidents. And the voting public undoubtedly likes to be reassured that the back-up is not crazy or lacking in basic intelligence.

The one call I got about the Walz-Vance debate applauded the civility of both candidates. That’s a subtextual knock on Trump, who is all about insults and threats, while Harris has kept a more dignified tone front and center. But my hunch is that Vance’s Cat Lady and other pre-debate gaffes will have more shelf-life than his debate performance, which included his refusal to admit the Jan. 6th riot was Trumps’ doing or that Biden won the 2020 election. His transparently-evasive comments on abortion probably offset any benefit he may have scored from his pre-packaged zingers blaming Harris for all of America’s immigration problems.

All in all, no one should be surprised that the veep debate will not be a game-changer. One revealing way to evaluate the importance of the veep debate is to ponder and answer the question, “Do I know of anyone who has changed their vote because of a vice presidential nominee’s debate performance?”

In “To win over seniors, Harris should highlight her support for Social Security” at The Hill,  top Social Security experts Nancy J. Altman and William J. Arnone write: “A formerly reliable segment of the Democratic Party’s electoral coalition, voters aged 65 and older have leaned Republican since 2000. The Harris-Walz ticket has an excellent opportunity to bring these voters back. Even if the Democratic presidential ticket does not carry older voters, just reducing the margin of loss might well decide the election….We call older voters “always-voters,” because it is only a small exaggeration to say that they always vote. They have disproportionately high turnout rates, including in the seven battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin….In 2020, older voters had a turnout rate of 71.9 percent, compared to an overall turnout rate of 67 percent. In Arizona and Georgia, older voter rates were 20- and 17-percentage points higher, respectively….In 2020, voters aged 65 and older were 22 percent of the total electorate. Voters age 50 and older comprised over half of all voters….the Harris-Walz ticket is underperforming with older voters. The most recent polling indicates that the ticket is losing voters 65 and over by seven percentage points. Before withdrawing from the race, President Biden was winning this segment by three percentage points….The problem is that recent polling shows that the American people do not know where the parties stand. And the Harris-Walz campaign has yet to run ads making the contrast clear.”….Moreover, Trump’s record shows he is no protector of Social Security. As president, he proposed Social Security cuts in every single one of his budgets.”

From “This election, a struggle for the soul of American Christianity is key: That’s why battleground North Carolina will be ‘ground zero for a faith war’” by Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr.: “Religion has created a coalition management challenge for Democrats whose ranks include large majorities of Jewish and Muslim voters and an overwhelming share of voters — particularly among the young — who left organized religion altogether…..But political scientist David Campbell, co-author of “Secular Surge: A New Fault Line in American Politics,” argues that the party still has ample room for appeals to religious voters….“We don’t see any evidence that [secular voters] are hostile to Democrats who use religious language,” he told me. “It’s a myth that because they have a secular world view, they are hostile to religion. What they don’t like is the establishment of religion by government, government stepping over the line between church and state.”….Harris seems to take this view to heart. She speaks often about her Baptist faith, routinely dropping religious references into speeches and at times offering detailed accounts of its influence on her worldview. Faith, she said in a 2022 address to the National Baptist Convention, taught her “to believe in what is possible and what can be, unburdened by what has been.”….But there is a more basic reason that religion is unavoidable in this election. It has nothing to do with any “God Gap” or political calculation. Augustine is right: There is an ongoing struggle for the soul of American Christianity between brands of faith that embrace democratic inclusion and extreme forms — particularly white Christian nationalism — that promote exclusion. It’s an argument that North Carolina might be called upon to settle for the nation.”

Should Democrats fund and run more women candidates? Read “How the news media cover women in politics: 5 recent studies to know” by Clark Merrefield at Journalists Resource for a perceptive take. As Merrefield writes: “By 2023, 25% of U.S. senators, 29% of Congress, 33% of state legislators and 24% of governors were women….As women have occupied more positions of political power, so has news framing and language used in media coverage become more scrutinized….The “likability trap,” as it’s known, refers to women in positions of power having to be both highly qualified and broadly likable to colleagues and clients in the corporate world, and to voters in the political realm. It’s similar in concept to the “gender double bind,” in which women in leadership positions are expected to be both competent and warm, according to research out of the University of Michigan.” In 2016 we witnessed the first presidential election in which a woman presidential candidate received a healthy majority of the nation-wide popular vote. If Kamala Harris wins the presidency this year, expect a dramatic uptick of women candidates for elective offices throughout the U.S. And it seems reasonable to expect an significant improvement in the quality of news coverage about their campaigns.

Be not suckered by Speaker Mike Johnson’s low-key demeanor and bland persona. As Nicole Lafond writes in “Now Mike Johnson Is Hedging On Whether The Election Will Be Certified” at Talking Points Memo: “The speaker is leaving town after prevaricating on whether Congress should play its normal role in certifying the results of the election. When asked during a press conference on Tuesday if he’d “commit to observing regular order in the certification process of the 2024 election, even if Kamala Harris beats Donald Trump,” Johnson hedged….“Well of course — if we have a free, fair, and safe election, we’re going to follow the Constitution. Absolutely. Yes. Absolutely,” he said….That big “if” fits alongside the various other cryptic, intentionally vague lines that Trump and his allies have been employing for months as they dodge questions about accepting the results of the election. Trump has said repeatedly that he will only accept the results if the election is “fair.” In other words, Democrats should anticipate the certainty of Republican “leaders” doing Trumps’ bidding by challenging vote counts in swing states. Johnson is every inch a shameless Trump lapdog and a dictator-enabler, who clearly has no commitment to democracy in general, nor integrity in the  certification process in 2024 in particular.

Trying to separate the wheat of legitimate concern about how the presidential election is going from the chaff of mere fear-mongering, I wrote a piece at New York assessing Trump’s electoral college advantage, such as it is:

With under six weeks left until Election Day, there are three major sources of anxiety besetting those who devoutly hope for a Kamala Harris victory over Donald Trump. One may not go away until January: the high probability that the 45th president would again try to overturn a defeat via legal action or perhaps even violence. The other two concerns are less distinct, if still alarming. One is that pollsters will once again crucially underestimate the Trump vote, either in the battleground states (as they did in 2016) or in both the national totals as well as the battleground states (as occurred in 2020). Pollsters keep assuring us they are making every effort to correct past problems and reach a truly representative sample of voters, and it’s worth remembering that there was very little polling error in 2022. But to many Harris supporters, no lead is going to feel safe.

A final source of concern is that any Harris lead in national polls, even if they are totally accurate, won’t be enough because Trump has an Electoral College advantage. This means he can significantly undershoot a national-popular-vote plurality and win anyway, as he did in 2016 (when Hillary Clinton beat him by 2.1 percent in the popular vote) and nearly did in 2020 (when Joe Biden beat him by a pretty big 4.5 percent in the popular vote, but Trump still came within 44,000 votes in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin of gaining a tie in the Electoral College). So even if Harris leads Trump by two or three or four points in the national polls, and those polls do turn out to be correct, she could lose anyway — in theory, at least.

The source of this Electoral College advantage (which did not exist as recently as 2012) can be explained in two ways. The first is that the handful of key battleground states are simply more Republican than America as a whole, which means they’re winnable with a smaller vote than the average vote share nationally. In 2016 and 2020, the so-called tipping-point state that gave one candidate or the other the 270th electoral vote necessary for victory was Wisconsin, which in both cases was nearly dead even. This year, the tipping-point state might be Georgia or Pennsylvania, and for the most part, polls have shown both as closer than the national vote spread between Harris and Trump. But probably the simpler way to explain any popular-vote/electoral-vote discrepancy is that candidates can and will “waste” votes in states they either can’t lose or can’t win. In 2020, for example, Biden got a huge number of votes beyond what he needed to carry the large states of California, New York, and Illinois, while Trump’s vote was more efficiently distributed among the states he needed to win.

Interestingly enough, in a deep dive on this subject, the New York Times’ Nate Cohn suggests that Trump’s Electoral College advantage could fade significantly this year because he’s making gains over his past performance in both the Deep South states that are in the bag for him and states like New York and California, which are sure to go for Harris but perhaps by diminished margins.

The bottom line is that maybe Harris does not need to beat Trump nationally by 5 percent to win, but what she does need won’t be clear until the votes are counted. The even more basic point to remember, however, is that national polls are simply an estimate of the national popular vote, and, unfortunately, the national popular vote just doesn’t matter in presidential elections beyond conferring bragging rights. If it did, we’d be remembering the presidencies of Al Gore and Hillary Clinton.

This does not mean national polls are useless by any means. Their typically larger samples make them essential for understanding both trend lines and the performance of candidates among different groups of voters. And unlike state polls, they are both frequent and diverse, making averages more reliable. In some states, polling is dominated by pollsters with dubious methodologies and records, making the averages suspect as well. And it bears remembering that the national-popular-vote winner has indeed won the presidency in 23 of the past 25 elections spanning a century.

But until the dust has settled, it will be difficult for highly informed Harris backers to forget the fact that in 2020 the final national polling averages at FiveThirtyEight showed Biden leading Trump by 8.4 percent and it still wound up being a nail-biter. So while you should definitely read national polls, it would be a good idea not to believe they necessarily predict the winner.

 

At The Washington Monthly, Jonathan Alter, author of the forthcoming “American Reckoning: Inside Trump’s Trial―and My Own,” writes that “the nightmare scenario—a Trump win—is still very real, especially if he carries Pennsylvania. So today, I’m paying special attention to polling in the Keystone State, though I’m told no one who lives in Pennsylvania calls it that.

The Pennsylvania electorate is about 25 percent Catholic, with fewer than 50 percent of its voters college-educated. In 2020, that helped Biden, who is Catholic and—before he became unpopular in the state—had some working-class appeal. Now, Trump leads among Pennsylvania Catholics by 18 points. Biden carried Lackawanna County—which contains Scranton, his hometown—by 8 points. (In 2016, Hillary won that area by three).

Unfortunately, Scranton is not Kamala Country, nor is Erie County in northwest Pennsylvania. And “Pennsyltucky”—all of the state’s rural areas—is overwhelmingly pro-Trump, despite hundreds of infrastructure projects underway there thanks to the Biden Administration.

That leaves the Pittsburgh and Philadelphia metro areas, where Harris must run up big majorities. Even if she does that, she has to cut into Trump’s huge margins in the rural counties at least a little to win.

The Post poll shows how deeply Trump’s lies have penetrated Pennsylvania. Surprisingly, the top issue there is not the economy, immigration, health care (the largest employer in the state), or abortion but “protecting democracy.” Good news, right? Not exactly. When asked which candidate is best equipped to protect democracy, 48 percent say Harris and 45 percent choose Trump, an insignificant gap. Nationally, about 40 percent believe the 2020 election was stolen. Those are Trump base voters, and there’s no changing their minds.

Like voters in other states, Pennsylvanians have a peculiar cognitive dissonance on the economy. While two-thirds think the national economy is “poor” or “not so good,” two-thirds are optimistic about their own financial condition. I figure these folks are in the 33 percent of the electorate who say they receive most of their news from social media and Fox News. (Only 7 percent say they get their news most often from “national print or online news organizations, like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal”).

Harris has an advantage on abortion, with the Post poll showing 64 percent say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. However, among voters who think the economy and immigration are paramount, Trump has the backing of 65 percent and 80 percent, respectively.

While Trump’s 15-point margin among white Pennsylvania voters in 2020 exit polling has declined by a third, a good sign, he is doing surprisingly well in holding down Harris’s margins among Black voters—especially males. In 2020, Biden won 92 percent of the Black vote; Harris is currently winning 78 percent, according to the Post poll. This may be because Black voters in Pennsylvania have been bombarded with ads saying that Harris wrongly prosecuted young Black men as San Francisco’s district attorney. Last week, Roger Stone signaled that another is coming that will feature a Black San Francisco woman who was carted off to jail in handcuffs because her daughter, a sickle cell anemia patient, was truant due to illness.

Harris won’t likely respond specifically to the sickle cell case, but she may engage on this issue more broadly. While her anti-truancy policies led to sharp educational gains among Black third graders, it might look defensive and off-message to point that out.

In better news, Harris leads Trump by 12 percentage points among Pennsylvania voters in union households and a comparable margin among the rank-and-file themselves. In 2020, Trump and Biden were in a statistical tie for that vote. The enthusiastic endorsement of Shawn Fein of the UAW and several Teamsters locals may prove crucial for Harris.

The New York Times/Siena/Philadelphia Inquirer poll held some surprises. Respondents found Trump to be the more “extreme” candidate, 74 percent versus 46 percent. That only sounds good to the uninitiated. “Extreme” is apparently no longer a slur in a good chunk of America. In 1964, Barry Goldwater said in his acceptance speech at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.” This may have played well with the GOP base, but it helped doom Goldwater, who lost to Lyndon Johnson that fall in a landslide. Nowadays, among voters in the Times/Siena poll who say “extreme” described them at least “somewhat well,” Trump won by more than 50 percentage points. And he doesn’t seem to be paying a price for his extreme views among independents.

Harris is making strides in convincing voters that she’s not a San Francisco liberal. It helped when she told Oprah that she wouldn’t hesitate to shoot an intruder. Even so, far more voters see her as too liberal than view Trump as too conservative, though this doesn’t account for independents and Democrats (like me) who would not describe Trump as conservative—because he isn’t. What true conservative is a protectionist, a budget-buster, and an authoritarian?

Both candidates are much more popular in Pennsylvania than they were last year. Trump’s approval rating is up nine points to 46 percent, while Harris’s has reached 51 percent, an astonishing improvement since July. The cross-tabs on “leaners” are ambiguous but appear to favor Harris, which could be critical late in the game. The vice president’s most significant advantage may be her five-point edge on “caring about people like you.”

From Valerie Bauerlein’s “Mark Robinson Scandal in North Carolina Injects Chaos Into Presidential Race” at The Wall St. Journal: “North Carolina is the swing state that former President Donald Trump won the most narrowly in 2020. Now Trump sees his fate tied to Robinson, the starkest example yet of the standard-bearers the MAGA takeover has brought to the Republican Party, and how hard it is to contain them….The state has become a place where all of the forces of a polarized nation intersect, from the divide between rural and urban interests, to hardened opinions about abortion…. North Carolina’s direction, potentially decisive in the presidential race, could hinge on another deeply flawed Trump protégé burdening the party with extreme views….Several top Republicans, including Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, have withdrawn support for Robinson. And Robinson, previously lauded by Trump as “Martin Luther King on steroids,” was neither seen nor mentioned at Trump’s Wilmington, N.C., rally on Saturday….In an unusual situation, the reverse coattails of a statewide candidate, Robinson, threaten to drag down the top of the ticket. An Elon University poll released Tuesday, taken Sept. 4-13, before the CNN report, showed that Robinson was trailing the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Josh Stein, by 14 points, with Trump neck and neck against Vice President Kamala Harris. In recent months, Trump consistently polled ahead of her….Robinson exemplifies, more so than Georgia’s failed Senate candidate Herschel Walker or Arizona’s current Senate candidate Kari Lake, the no-apologies, right-wing purists who sail through primaries but stumble in general elections….Democrats are seizing the moment. The Harris campaign ran its first TV ad linking Trump and Robinson after CNN’s report….Rep. Jeff Jackson, North Carolina’s Democratic nominee for attorney general, said he is running ads reminding voters that his opponent, Rep. Dan Bishop, previously called himself Robinson’s “sidekick.”…. “Mark Robinson has been the most popular person for his party in our state for several years, so lots of major candidates have fallen over themselves to be pictured with him,” Jackson told supporters by email. “The blast radius is going to envelop lots of other candidates.” Democrats certainly hope so. The whole mess provides as good a test of the negative power of ‘reverse coattails’ in political campaigns as anyone could hope for. It also provides a fertile field for testing ads that emphasize the moral bankruptcy of the NC GOP.

Some nuggets from “Harris’ Georgia challenge: reassembling Biden’s diverse 2020 coalition” by John King at CNN Politics: “In 2020, voters of color made up 39% of the Georgia presidential electorate, and Biden won 81% support of that vote. That lopsided margin helped Biden win the state, by fewer than 12,000 votes, even though Trump won 69% among White voters….In a CNN poll released Tuesday, Harris was well ahead of Trump among Black (79% support) and Latino (59%) likely voters, but still trailed Biden’s winning percentages with those groups in 2020 – 87% and 65%, respectively….Statewide, Asians constitute about 4.5% of Georgia’s population. In the metro Atlanta area, the number of residents of Asian descent has more than doubled in the past two decades….Trump’s often toxic tone hurts him in the suburbs, but that is just part of the shift. Cobb and the other Atlanta suburbs are growing more diverse, and many big employers in metro Atlanta require at least four years of college – now the clearest dividing line in voting preference.” Unique factors that many pundits missed about the Georgia 2020-21 political upsets include that the state not only has Black voters comprising a third of the electorate; it probably has the most well-trained and most dedicated Black voter activists anywhere in the U.S., along with Atlanta’s heavy concentration of HBCUs, predominantly-Black in-migration and expanding Black middle class. Persuasion of uncommitted voters (especially white working-class) is a paramount strategic consideration for all states. And yes, it helped in 2020-21 that the Georgia GOP was engulfed in internal infighting. But Georgia’s unique demographic profile still makes it the best state lab for testing the power of investments in Black voter turnout.

NYT opinion essayist Thomas B. Edsall addresses a question that seems to be on the minds of millions: “How is it possible that Donald Trump has a reasonable chance of winning the presidency despite all that voters now know about him?” He adds, “The litany of Trump’s liabilities is well known to the American electorate. His mendacity, duplicity, depravity, hypocrisy and venality are irrevocably imprinted on the psyches of American voters….Trump has made it clear that on a second term he will undermine the administration of justice, empower America’s adversaries, endanger the nation’s allies and exacerbate the nation’s racial and cultural rifts….Trump, from the start, was operating in a universe separate from the traditional politics of the Republican and Democratic parties; he was operating in a world rooted in his 25 years in pro wrestling, in which people put up good money to watch fake “fights” they know in their hearts were fixed.” Edsall notes further that “Based on eight surveys in the United States with a total of 10,921 respondents from February 2018 to February 2022, Petersen, Osmundsen and Arceneaux found that white men, a core Trump constituency, were unique in many respects: “White men react more aggressively than any other group to perceived status challenges. While white men do not feel highly status-challenged on average, they are more likely to seek chaos when they do.” Any demographic group will respond strongly and negatively to economic status reduction. it provokes more anger because the group has experienced a taste of the good life, followed by a take-away. That’s different from striving for status that has never been experienced. “The threat of marginalization,’ as Edsall terms it, is a time bomb that explodes in many elections. But it never seems to harm the beneficiaries of marginalization – the corrupt profiteers of anti-union policies and other divide-and-conquer strategies. Thus far, some, not all, Republicans have successfully redirected much of the rage of status anxiety toward low-income people of other races. Challenging this cynical strategy is a long-term project that will span several more elections.

It’s only one poll, so all the usual caveats apply. But one of our commenters has shared a report on a recent poll, which ought to encourage the Harris campaign to recalibrate its foreign policy image in the swing states. As Dave Lawler reports at Axios: ‘Voters in six key swing states think former President Trump is more likely than Vice President Harris to end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, respond effectively to a potential Chinese attack on Taiwan, and advance U.S. interests internationally, according to new polling from the Institute for Global Affairs….By the numbers: Voters nationwide narrowly see Harris (52% to 48%) as better able to strongly defend U.S. interests, according to the poll. But Trump leads 56% to 44% in that category among voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin….

• The gap is wider in favor of Trump (58% to 42%) in the swing states on the question of who is more likely to end the wars in Gaza and Ukraine. By the same 58% to 42% margin, swing state voters see Trump as more likely to respond effectively if China makes a move on Taiwan.
• Trump also leads Harris (56% to 44%) in the swing states on his signature issue: immigration policy.
• Harris narrowly leads Trump nationally on the questions of who would respond more effectively to a major global crisis (52% to 48%) or improve America’s reputation (53% to 47%). But once again those gaps are wiped out when you zoom in on the swing states.

Between the lines: Harris’ foreign policy vision is less well-defined for voters than Trump’s, particularly in the swing states Trump’s campaign has been bombarding with messaging for months, says Mark Hannah, a senior fellow at the Institute for Global Affairs.”….

• “We’ve seen that independents in battleground states tend to prefer a less interventionist foreign policy. So the fact that voters see Trump as more likely to end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza might strengthen his popularity,” Hannah notes.

Reality check: While foreign policy is arguably the area on which presidents have the most direct influence, it has not been a major issue for voters this cycle, with the exception of immigration.” Even though the notion that Trump’s foreign policy toward Gaza, Ukraine, Russia and China serves U.S. interests better is laughable to serious international affairs experts, the margins in this poll are large enough to indicate a problem as regards the opinions of swing state voters. The Harris campaign’s ad strategy should be tweaked accordingly, and soon, since people are voting already.

The following article,  “‘An indispensable weapon’: Harris mobilizes diverse labor force in the Sun Belt: Democrats are tapping into the organizational strength of unions with more women and people of color in key states such as Arizona and Nevada” by Natasha Korecki is cross-posted from nbcnews.com:

President Joe Biden has often proclaimed that he is the most pro-union president in history, a declaration that Democrats often tied to his appeal to white working-class voters in the Midwest.

Now serving as the party’s standard-bearer, Vice President Kamala Harris is building her own coalition by mobilizing a more diverse and expansive labor force in a different part of the country.

Harris is tapping into the organizational strength of a network of union groups that have a significant membership of women and people of color in the Sun Belt, a battleground region Democrats are aiming to keep out of former President Donald Trump’s column this fall.

“There’s no one that can organize quite like labor,” Harris campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said. “Having that powerhouse of an organizing machine in concert with our teams in all of our battleground states has been a really important effort that we’ve been building to date and will continue as we head into early vote and get-out-the-vote efforts.”

Workers with the Service Employees International Union, the Culinary Workers Union and the AFL-CIO are among the groups who labor leaders say have become especially energized since Harris ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket this summer. Hotel workers, health care workers, janitors, airport workers and security officers are among the employees these groups represent. The SEIU alone has around 2 million members nationally, and 60% of them are women and two-thirds are people of color, according to the group.

“It’s a special moment for our members, particularly when we think about women of color, who often feel unseen, who often feel undervalued, disrespected, demeaned,” SEIU President April Verrett said. “It really is a special moment where our members can see themselves reflected in a woman who has been their champion for a long time, being able to be the leader of this country.”

That appeal has the potential to give Harris a critical boost in the closing months of the campaign, providing her with a faithful army poised to connect with the kind of constituencies she is trying to reach, including low-propensity Latino and Black voters.

All together, labor leaders predict thousands of union members will deploy to swing states to knock on doors and work phone banks. Large groups are expected to travel from blue states such as California, Illinois and New York to crucial battlegrounds such as Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina.

Having workers vouch for Harris could help Democrats’ efforts to battle against Trump’s messaging on the economy, an issue on which most polls show him with an edge as he’s seized on inflation and high costs.

Read more…

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:

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. What American voters want is more fossil fuels. Shocking, no? But it’s true. In a little-noticed result from the latest New York Times/Siena poll, two-thirds of likely voters said they supported a policy of “increasing domestic production of fossil fuels such as oil and gas.” Two-thirds!

Support for increasing fossil fuel production is particularly strong among working-class (noncollege) voters: 72 percent of these voters back such a policy. Support is even higher among white working-class voters (77 percent). But remarkably, support is also strong among many demographics where one would think, based on conventional wisdom, one would likely see opposition. For example, 63 percent of voters under 30 said they wanted more oil and gas production, as did 58 percent of white college graduate voters and college voters overall. Indeed, across all demographics reported by the NYT survey—all racial groups, all education groups, all regions (midwest, northeast, south, west) and all neighborhood types (city, suburb, rural/small town)—net support (total support minus total oppose) was at least 15 points and usually much higher. Now that’s popularity.

No wonder Harris, in her recent debate with Trump, touted her administration’s record in achieving record domestic production of fossil fuels:

I will not ban fracking. I have not banned fracking as Vice President of the United States. And, in fact, I was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases for fracking. My position is that we have got to invest in diverse sources of energy…We have had the largest increase in domestic oil production in history…I am proud that as vice president over the last four years….we have…increased domestic gas production to historic levels.

This is a far cry from Joe Biden famously pledging on the campaign trail in 2019:

I want you to look at my eyes. I guarantee you. I guarantee you. We’re going to end fossil fuel.

Or Kamala Harris equally famously saying:

I’m committed to passing a Green New Deal, creating clean jobs and finally putting an end to fracking once and for all.

My, how things do change! But this reflects two fundamental facts that Harris and her party are belatedly facing up to. First, despite the strenuous Democratic rhetoric about the climate crisis, “net zero,” rapidly eliminating fossil fuels and ramping up renewables, energy realities have forced them to preside over record levels of oil production (both on federal lands and overall), record natural gas production, and record LNG exports. As Roger Pielke, Jr. documents, Joe Biden, fully supported by his vice president, really has been the “drill, baby, drill” president!

Second, as far as voters are concerned, this record fossil fuel production has been a feature, not a bug, of the Biden-Harris administration. The NYT poll result is just the latest in a series of findings that American voters, especially working-class voters, are not disturbed, but rather delighted, with this record production. Therefore, it makes all the political sense in the world for Harris to start owning up to this in an attempt to get credit for something voters view positively and reassure these voters that she is not seeking, as Biden put it, “to end fossil fuel.”

Of course, it’s one thing to finally admit to this record production and back off from banning fracking, but quite another to fully embrace energy abundance, rather than climate action, as the guiding star of energy policy. Findings from a recent CBS News poll of Pennsylvania voters, tied between Harris and Trump, underscore just how important an energy abundance approach could be for Harris. In this poll, climate change was rated one of the least salient issues motivating voter choice for president. Just 37 percent said climate would be a “major factor” in their vote for president. This was a massive 45 points below the salience rating for the economy, the most important issue, which 82 percent of voters said would be a major factor in their decision. The divergence in importance is even starker among white working-class voters, where Harris has been struggling: 85 percent of these voters said the economy will be a major factor in their vote, compared to 30 percent who said climate change will be.

In the same poll, white working-class voters were very dubious about their economic progress since before the Covid pandemic—a period of course when Trump was president. By an overwhelming 57 to 13 percent these voters said they are financially worse off, rather than better off, compared to that period. And in subsequent questions about their expectations “for economic opportunities for working-class people and those without college degrees” under both a Harris and Trump administration, white working-class voters decisively favored Trump on the provision of economic opportunities. They thought  Harris would actually make such opportunities worse rather than better by 49 to 27 percent, while Trump was viewed as making economic opportunities for the working class better rather than worse by 53 to 32 percent.

These data argue strongly for a robust embrace of energy abundance by Harris. As liberal economist Noah Smith has argued, Harris’s recent words are a good first step but she:

…needs to go much further. Instead of simply promising not to ban fracking, she should promise to expand it. And she should be loud and unambiguous about trumpeting what Biden has already accomplished in this regard.

Unlike climate action, energy abundance has an unambiguous relationship to economic advancement and prosperity for the working class, which of course is paramount for these voters. Maybe it is time to give these voters what they want instead of what Democrats think they should want.

More generally, it is becoming clearer and clearer that climate change policy, to be politically successful, must be embedded in and subordinate to, the goal of energy abundance and prosperity. In other words, as energy abundance is pursued, efforts to mitigate climate change should be undertaken within those constraints, rather than pursuing climate change as the paramount goal and trying for energy abundance within those limits. There’s a big difference and only the former approach offers a viable way forward for the left, both here and abroad.

Relatedly, it is high time for Democrats and the left to develop a more realistic understanding of what is feasible in terms of climate action. There is no point in setting goals and timelines that cannot be met. Discarding these will make it much easier to pursue an energy abundance path that also includes reasonable progress on reducing emissions over what will undoubtedly be a very lengthy time period.

As the polymath, Vaclav Smil, universally acknowledged to be one of the world’s premier energy experts, has observed:

[W]e are a fossil-fueled civilization whose technical and scientific advances, quality of life and prosperity rest on the combustion of huge quantities of fossil carbon, and we cannot simply walk away from this critical determinant of our fortunes in a few decades, never mind years. Complete decarbonization of the global economy by 2050 is now conceivable only at the cost of unthinkable global economic retreat…

And as he tartly observes re the 2050 deadline:

People toss out these deadlines without any reflection on the scale and the complexity of the problem…What’s the point of setting goals which cannot be achieved? People call it aspirational. I call it delusional.

Getting in touch with these realities should help Democrats get comfortable with the goal of energy abundance and understand how that goal does not represent the betrayal of a sacred moral cause to save the earth. However much Democrats may wish it not to be so, grand energy transitions take time—many, many decades. Absent drastically lowered living standards and/or radical social disruption, this transition will be no different. Fossil fuels, and the support they provide to the high living standards enjoyed by the advanced world and aspired to by everyone else, will be with us for a very long time.

That’s what voters want. And it’s what Democrats should want too. Let’s hope the Harris campaign is starting to walk down that road.

Would you be shocked to learn that voting in the 2024 presidential and down-ballot elections has already begun?  As Ana Faguy and Ione Wells report in “First in-person votes cast in US presidential election” at bbc.com: “The first in-person votes have been cast in the US presidential race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, a milestone moment that comes six weeks before election day on 5 November….Virginia became the first state in the country to allow in-person voting on Friday, and early polling sites will remain open there until 2 November. Some long queues were seen as voters cast ballots on national, state and local levels….The situation in two other states, Minnesota and South Dakota, is different as voters there can only hand in absentee ballots in person instead of mailing them….Some 69% of votes cast during the 2020 election were done through early in-person voting or through mail-in ballots, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s election data science lab found….Virginia has been a reliably Democratic state in the last few elections, but some Republicans have been bullish about trying to flip it in November. Voters there will also be casting votes for the state’s eleven members of congress and one of its two senators….Early and mail-in voting has been a hot-button issue since the 2020 election, with just 37% of Republicans saying people should have the option to vote early, according to polling from the Pew Research Center. That sharply contrasts with 82% support from Democrats.” Ponder the strategic implications for campaigns for a minute: Prep time is pretty much over or will soon be in the days and weeks ahead. Beginning with the “Mother of Presidents” (8 of them), Virginia, the swing states are in motion. It’s on.

From “Why these three states are the most consistent tipping point in American politics“. by Ronald Brownstein at CNN Politics: “Whether measured by campaign advertising, candidate visits, organizational effort or nervous obsessing over poll results, Michigan, Wisconsin and above all Pennsylvania have moved to the top of the priority list for both Vice President Kamala Harrisand former President Donald Trump – just as they have in seemingly every recent presidential election….,Trump won the presidency in 2016 by stunning Democrat Hillary Clinton to win all three states by a combined margin of about 80,000 votes. President Joe Biden won back the White House in 2020 by recapturing all three states by a combined margin of around 260,000 votes….Since Harris took over at the top of Democratic candidate in July, the candidates have spent more money in advertising in Pennsylvania than anywhere else, with Michigan ranking second and Wisconsin fourth, according to data provided to CNN by AdImpact, an advertising tracking service. Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin rank first, second and fourth as well in the amount of advertising the campaigns have reserved through November (with only Georgia intruding as number three on both lists.)….Bob Shrum, the long-time Democratic strategist who now serves as the director of the Center for the Political Future at the University of Southern California, said the three Rust Belt battlegrounds have remained pivotal in presidential elections for so long because they encapsulate so many of the entrenched divisions that now define American politics – between, for instance, urban and rural areas and white-collar and blue-collar voters. “They reflect the polarization,” Shrum said….In a clear statement of their priorities, the campaigns have spent nearly $120 million more on ads in the three big Rust Belt battlegrounds than they have in the four Sunbelt states they are contesting (Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada). After camping out in Pennsylvania for her debate preparation, Harris is appearing in all three of the big Rust Belt battlegrounds again this week. Trump is holding a town hall in Flint, Michigan, on Tuesday…..Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are not carbon copies. But they do share enough common characteristics that the long-time Democratic strategist Tad Devine argues they should be thought of effectively a single state – what he calls “Mi-Pa-Wi.” Each of them is less racially diverse than the nation overall, according to data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Whites account for about three-fourths of the population in Michigan and Pennsylvania and roughly four-fifths in Wisconsin. Although their Latino communities are growing, Blacks remain the largest minority group in each of them. The three states are also slightly older than the nation overall, with seniors accounting for about one-fifth of the population in each. None have many immigrants, with residents born abroad accounting for only about 7% of the population in Michigan and Pennsylvania and just 5% in Wisconsin. All three have seen minimal population growth in recent years.”

“At a time when education has become an increasingly powerful predictor of political allegiance,” Brownstein adds, ” the three converge, with about one-third of their adults holding at least a four-year college degree – just slightly below the share in the nation overall, the Census found. The median income just slightly lags the national average in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and trails by a larger margin (about 10%) in Michigan. All three are big manufacturing states that have seen substantial job loss in that sector since 2000, but have also seen employment in it increase by about 20,000-30,000 jobs since Biden took office, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data….In their religious orientation, they are very similar too: White Christians, who generally lean Republican, comprise about 55% of adults in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and just over half in Michigan, according to newly released findings from the Public Religion Research Institute. Meanwhile, voters with no religious affiliation, who have become a staunchly Democratic group, represent about one-fourth of the population in all three, PRRI found….While the big three Rust Belt states look similar on all these measures, in some other respects Wisconsin, on paper, should be the most difficult state of the three for Harris this year. Not only is the minority share of the population smaller in Wisconsin than the other two, but Whites without a college degree (the core of the modern GOP coalition, especially in the Trump era) cast about three-fifths of the votes there compared to about half in Michigan and Pennsylvania, according to calculations from Census data by William Frey, a demographer at the non-partisan Brookings Metro think tank….Heavily White and blue-collar small town and rural areas, which have moved toward the GOP almost everywhere, also constitute a much bigger share of the vote in Wisconsin than in the other two. In a six-category geographic measuring system, devised by the non-partisan Center for Rural Strategies, small metros and non-metros cast nearly 50% of Wisconsin’s votes in both 2016 and 2020, compared to about 30% in Michigan and 20% in Pennsylvania each time, according to results provided to CNN by Tim Marema, the center’s vice president and editor of its Daily Yonder website….Conversely, Democrats don’t have as strong an asset in Wisconsin’s largest metro area as in the other two states. The county centered on Milwaukee is only about half as big as the counties that encompass Philadelphia and Detroit, and doesn’t provide Democrats nearly as large a vote advantage, particularly with turnout there lagging in recent years; simultaneously, while Democrats have steadily gained ground in the suburban so-called WOW counties outside Milwaukee, Republicans still win those three big counties (Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington), by bigger margins than almost any other major suburbs north of the Mason-Dixon line….One last factor makes Wisconsin on paper less attractive to Democrats: unions only represent about half as much of the private sector workforce in Wisconsin as they do in the other two states, according to federal figures.”

Brownstein takes a deep dive into the demographics of Wisconsin and Michigan, then writes of Pennsylvania, “That leaves Pennsylvania as the consensus toughest of the three states for Harris. It’s also the state analysts generally consider the most likely to provide the 270th Electoral College vote for the winner in November. (Wisconsin played that role in both 2016 and 2020.) “To me, the tipping point is Pennsylvania,” said Giangreco. “If we win Pennsylvania, [Harris] is going to be president. It’s really, really hard to see where you win Pennsylvania and you lose Michigan or Wisconsin. It’s not going to happen.”….The same broad trends reshaping the political landscapes in Wisconsin and Michigan are evident in Pennsylvania. As in the other states, Democrats are gaining in white-collar suburbs, especially in the Trump era: Biden in 2020 won the four big suburban counties outside Philadelphia by nearly 300,000 votes – over 100,000 more than even Clinton did four years earlier….But, as in other states, Democrats have been concerned about the risk of depressed turnout and some gains for Trump among Black voters in Philadelphia. And Republicans have built an imposing and enduring advantage among the state’s large population of non-college educated White voters….“Pennsylvania has just become a much better state” for Republicans, said Ulm, noting how the Democrats’ lead in Pennsylvania voter registration has shrunk since 2020. “Places that used to be Democratic bastions aren’t anymore.”….Dante Chinni is founder and director of the American Communities Project, which has developed another well-respected classification system to sort the nation’s political geography. Chinni says that in Pennsylvania (as well as the other two states) many of the places where Trump runs best are what the project calls “Middle Suburbs” – middle-income places outside urban centers predominantly filled with White working-class voters, like the blue-collar counties around Pittsburgh….“These were union strongholds…and in the past that’s meant they were Democratic,” Chinni said. “But they’ve shifted. They’ve become Trump-y. Usually he runs up vote in tiny places. But these are Trump’s most reliable concentration of dense votes.”….Democrats, however, see the possibility of Harris amassing huge margins in the Philadelphia suburbs with voters who support abortion rights and reversing some of the turnout decline that Biden suffered among Black voters in the city itself.”

It’s a very close presidential election, so unsurprisingly Team Trump is looking for an illicit edge, as I explained at New York:

With the major-party presidential candidates in close battles in a sparse landscape of battleground states, every electoral vote matters. There are scenarios where either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump wins 269 or 270 electoral votes. Part of the underlying picture is that each of them has been expected to snag a single Electoral College vote from one of the two states (Maine and Nebraska) that allocate them by congressional district. Biden won the Omaha-based Second Congressional District of Nebraska in 2020, when Trump won the largely rural Second Congressional District of Maine. Polls are showing the same outcome is likely this year.

So the two campaigns have hungrily looked at a potential gain or loss of an electoral vote if either state adopted a winner-take-all system. But only Nebraska, pushed aggressively by Team Trump, has seriously moved toward taking that step in 2024. It hasn’t happened yet, in part because of internal Nebraska Republican dissension and in part because Maine Democrats have threatened to retaliate and make the whole exercise pointless. But now, at the very last minute, the heist may be back on, as the Nebraska Examiner reports:

“The national Republican push to help former President Donald Trump win all five of Nebraska’s Electoral College votes is ramping up again, and this time it might work.

“Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen on Wednesday hosted two dozen state senators at the Governor’s Mansion, along with Secretary of State Bob Evnen, the state’s chief election official.

“Several who attended the meeting said some senators who had wavered earlier showed more support now for changing Nebraska to the winner-take-all system of awarding electoral votes this year.”

Pillen has talked off and on in recent weeks about calling a special session of the legislature (the state’s second this year) to give Trump this very special gift if he could secure the votes to overcome a likely Democratic-led filibuster. Now he’s bringing in some outside help:

“State senators at Wednesday’s meeting at the Governor’s Mansion heard from Trump ally U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., about the national security and economic stakes if voters don’t return Trump to the White House.

“A national GOP spokeswoman said Graham’s visit shows how seriously Republicans are treating the need for Trump to win Nebraska’s 2nd District. Some have argued it could break a 269-269 Electoral College tie.”

One Republican legislator involved in this skullduggery dismissed complaints about such a last-minute change by citing the substitution of Harris for Biden on the Democratic side. Apparently, rules of fair play no longer matter, if they ever did, to Trump’s backers.

So why didn’t Pillen (and Lindsey Graham, and Trump’s other operatives) put on a full-court press earlier? This explanation from Politico Playbook is persuasive:

“Back in April, when the Nebraska idea was first gaining steam, Maine’s Democratic House Majority Leader Maureen Terry issued a statement indicating that if Nebraska made such a move, she would push for a like-for-like move in her state, which delivered one electoral vote to Trump in 2016 and 2020.

“[Democratic] Gov. Janet Mills would be required to call a special session of the legislature. But the stickier wicket is in the timing: A bill only becomes law in Maine 90 days after it’s passed, unless the bill receives a two-thirds vote in each chamber (Democrats currently have majorities, but not supermajorities). We’re 46 days away from Nov. 5, and 87 days from Dec. 16, when electoral votes are set to be cast.”

More than likely, the electoral-vote robbers chose to postpone their gambit until it was too late for Democrats to neutralize the theft in Maine.

It appears the effort to nail down the votes needed to pull off the Nebraska heist will come down to a very small handful of state senators. All sorts of horse-trading could ensue. But there are good odds Republicans will “rig” the Electoral College by one vote, and unless a creative lawsuit is in the offing, no one will be able to do anything about it.