washington, dc

The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Like a master stage magician’s best “sleight of hand” trick, Ruffini makes MAGA extremism in the GOP disappear right before our eyes.

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A Democratic Political Strategy for Reaching Working Class Voters That Starts from the Actual “Class Consciousness” of Modern Working Americans.

by Andrew Levison

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The recently published book, Rust Belt Union Blues, by Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol represents a profoundly important contribution to the debate over Democratic strategy.

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Why Don’t Working People Recognize and Appreciate Democratic Programs and Policies

The mythology of “Franklin Roosevelt’s Hundred Days” and the Modern Debate Over “Deliverism.”

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The American Establishment’s Betrayal of Democracy

The American Establishment’s Betrayal of Democracy The Fundamental but Generally Unacknowledged Cause of the Current Threat to America’s Democratic Institutions.

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Immigration “Chaos” Could Sink Democrats in 2024…

And the Democratic Narrative Simply Doesn’t Work. Here’s An Alternative That Does.

Read the Memo.

The Daily Strategist

March 29, 2024

Political Strategy Notes

In his latest email blast, Matthew Yglesias takes on “Trump’s middle class tax hike,” and writes, “Most people think (and I agree) that Trump flip-flopping the GOP away from its Reagan-Bush-Bush free trade positions helped him pick up votes in the Midwest. So Joe Biden has mostly kept Trump trade policies in place, which has induced Trump to raise his ambitions in an effort to outflank Biden. And what he’s stumbled on is an idea that, if explained properly to the American people, would be politically toxic. This isn’t a huge regressive tax increase that will finance useful public services — it’s a huge regressive tax increase that will partially offset the cost of tax cuts for the rich….But I worry that because a lot of progressive intellectuals are so invested in the industrial policy debate, they aren’t going to want Democrats to talk about why a 10 percent across the board increase in tariffs is bad….So it’s really worth saying that whatever you make of industrial policy, what Trump is suggesting is not a remotely strategic approach to national economic development. If anything, Trump’s entire trade agenda — not only these tariffs, but things like his 2020 effort to score a giant sale of soybeans to China — is geared around de-industrializing the United States and turning us into a primary commodity exporter….The right’s intellectual trajectory on these topics is somewhat alarming. Everyone in DC understands that Trump did not come up with this policy proposal based on any kind of detailed study of the issue. Unless it benefits him personally, Trump just pulls ideas out of his ass because he likes the vibe. Most professional conservatives have realized that the best way to wield influence in a Trump-dominated party is to say nice things about him and try to work behind the scenes. But the MAGA faithful don’t see the machinations behind the scenes. All they see is Miller talking about how amazing it will be for South Carolina to tumble backward to a more primitive state of development.”

Joe Trippi, a Democratic operative who managed Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential bid and Doug Jones’s two Senate campaigns in Alabama, told me in a phone interview that his major concern is that the Biden campaign should take the threats posed by third-party candidates “more seriously,” Thomas B. Edsall writes in his latest NYT opinion essay. “If Trump wins in November, it will be because of third parties getting a significant number of people,” Trippi argued. “No one who is a MAGA Trump supporter is going to vote for a third party. Most of it comes off Joe Biden.”….Polling supports Trippi on this score….In the RealClearPolitics compilation of recent polls pitting Trump against Biden, Trump led by 2.1 points, 46.7 percent to 44.6 percent….In the RealClearPolitics compilation of polls that add Robert Kennedy Jr., Cornel West and Jill Stein to the mix, Trump’s lead over Biden more than doubles, to 4.8 points, 41.6 to 36.8 percent. Kennedy gets 13 percent, and West and Stein each get 2.1 percent….Along with the threat posed by third-party candidates, two major crises — immigration and the Israeli assault on Hamas in Gaza — have become significant liabilities for the Biden campaign….Voters, as I mentioned earlier, overwhelmingly favor Trump over Biden to handle immigration and the southern border. Biden’s backing of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s prosecution of the war against Hamas in Gaza has weakened Democratic support, especially among young voters who were crucial to Biden’s 2020 victory….The Dec. 10-14 New York Times/Siena poll found that young voters, aged 18 to 29, favored Trump over Biden 49-43. These voters said they trusted Trump over Biden “to do a better job on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” 49-30. In the 2020 election, Biden beat Trump among 18-to-29-year-old voters by 24 points, 60-36, according to exit polls, by far his biggest margin in all age groups.”

Edsall continues, “Even so, Biden has the potential to regain ground on both immigration and the Gaza war….In the case of immigration, Biden has endorsed a hard-line, bipartisan border security bill — backed by most Democrats and some Republicans — that may be voted on in the Senate later this week, emphasis on “may.”….Many of the provisions of the act have been endorsed by conservative Republicans in the past, but the bipartisan measure is opposed by Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson, on explicitly political grounds. They want to keep public anxiety over immigration festering through Election Day and they do not want to give Biden a victory on the issue….Trump and his allies have provided Biden the opportunity to counter the Trump-Johnson strategy by portraying himself as a proponent of vigorous border enforcement and Trump as a politically motivated politician who doesn’t actually care about the border….According to Jonathan Cowan, a co-founder of Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank, Biden’s current strategy on immigration is a step in the right direction….“To win in 2024, Biden will need to convince voters that he is still the proud moderate they voted for in 2020,” Cowan wrote by email. “He has a lot of evidence on his side, but he still has a lot of convincing to do.”….The opening to win over swing voters, in Cowan’s view, “is there, including the blocs of soft Republicans and gettable independents we saw looking for someone else other than Trump in the New Hampshire G.O.P. primary.”….Douglas Schoen, a center-right Democratic operative and frequent critic of his own party, wrote in the Feb. 2 edition of The Hill that “evidence is beginning to emerge that Biden has at the very least, stabilized the race and that the ‘Trump surge’ has cooled off.”….Schoen concluded: “As for Biden’s chances one month into this election year, there is a lot of work to be done. However, if I were the Biden campaign, I’d be more pleased with the road ahead than just a few months ago.” Edsall concludes, “The biggest danger facing the Biden campaign is the possibility that Trump reins himself in. The chances of that happening, however, are virtually nil.”

In “The GOP Owns the Border Now. Here’s How Democrats Make Sure of It. Hard-right Republicans killed the Senate immigration deal out of fealty to Trump. That’s the perfect opening for Biden to go on the attack,” Michael Tomasky argues at The New Republic, “The GOP killed the border deal. The party that has been caterwauling for months—years—about the porous border dispatched one of its most conservative members, James Lankford of Oklahoma, to negotiate a bill. They had Democrats over a political barrel. President Biden was willing to sign a bill that included plenty of stuff that’s hard for many Democrats to swallow, but it’s an election year, and there’s Arizona to think about. They had a bill the likes of which they won’t see for another 15 years….So how can the Democrats be sure that voters get the message that the Republicans now own this chaos? Obviously, for starters, just say it and say it and say it. The Republicans blocked a bill because they and Trump want to run on the issue. They’d rather have the issue than fix the problem. Whatever Democrats settle on as the best way to say it, just say it over and over and over. They’ll never persuade MAGA voters, but that isn’t the point. The point is persuading the voters who’ll decide the election: the 20,000 in Wisconsin, the 15,000 in Michigan, and so on….Besides which, they may even persuade some Republicans voters of the merit of their message. They’re not all MAGA. A significant minority don’t love Trump. They won’t vote Biden, but they may stay home—and some of them may lose their ardor for Senate and House candidates who so cravenly kowtowed to Trump on this….Biden needs to rise up here. The State of the Union address will take place March 7. That’s the biggest audience he’ll have until his convention speech this summer, and he needs to use the occasion to drive home the Republicans’ naked hypocrisy. He should spell out all the strict provisions of the bill that made it a very tough sell to many members of his own party. He was willing to take some political heat to accept a compromise—one that included a number of Republican priorities—just to do something about the problem. And the Republicans killed it. They’ll boo him. Let them. It’ll be great theater, and to those few thousand Great Lakes voters, the Republicans will look ridiculous….How many times do swing voters need to see this movie before they understand the moral? Apparently a lot of times. Democrats: Remind them.”


Rothenberg: The Nine States That Matter Most in the 2024 Elections

At Roll Call, Stuart Rothenberg makes the case that 9 states will decide which party can claim victory in the 2024 elections. Rothenberg identifies “the nine states that in November will decide (1) the presidential contest, (2) the fight for the Senate, and (3) the fight for control of the House of Representatives.”

In the presidential contest,

Three Great Lakes states (Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin) and three Southern/Sunbelt toss-ups (Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada) are likely to pick the next president of the United States.

Donald Trump carried five of the six states in 2016 (losing only Nevada), while Joe Biden carried all six four years later. The margins in all those states, in both 2016 and 2020, were extremely narrow, and most nonpartisan handicappers expect they will be close again this November.

Rothenberg adds “Two other states are worth watching but aren’t likely to be as crucial: New Hampshire (carried by Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020) and North Carolina (carried by Trump twice). Two states that divide their Electoral College votes by congressional district (Maine and Nebraska) merit your attention, as well. But none of those states come close to being as decisive as the Big Six.

As for the Senate,

“this year’s map strongly favors Republicans. Democrats (and independents who caucus with Democrats) sit in 23 seats that are up in November, while Republicans defend a mere 11 Senate seats this year….At least seven Democratic-held Senate seats are in play. Four of them are also in states that are crucial in the presidential contest: including Michigan (retiring Debbie Stabenow’s open seat), Nevada (Jackie Rosen), Pennsylvania (Bob Casey), and Wisconsin (Tammy Baldwin)…. Three of them are in reliably Republican states: Montana (Jon Tester), Ohio (Sherrod Brown), and West Virginia (Joe Manchin III), which is certain to flip to the GOP now that Manchin is retiring.

Also at risk is the seat of one independent who caucuses with the Democrats, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Sinema has not announced whether she will run for reelection (most likely as an independent). If she does, Arizona will likely have a three-way race in the fall.

Montana and Ohio stand out because of their conservatism and strong support of Trump in the last two presidential elections. But Tester and Brown have won in difficult circumstances before, and they survived during Trump’s 2018 midterm election (when Republicans picked up two seats) by delivering populist messages that appealed to working-class voters….Also at risk is the seat of one independent who caucuses with the Democrats, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Sinema has not announced whether she will run for reelection (most likely as an independent). If she does, Arizona will likely have a three-way race in the fall.”

In House races, Rothenberg notes

“most states won’t have competitive contests next year. But due to extensive redistricting in New York state and court-ordered new districts that could elect a few more minority members, Democrats could add House seats in November….The Empire State has at least six Republican-held seats that look to be at risk later this year, a number large enough to determine whether Democrats can flip the chamber and make House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries the new speaker in 2025.”

Rothenberg concludes, “If you really want to identify the voters most likely to pick the next president, you can forget about strong partisans from competitive states. It’s swing voters from the swingiest states, like Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin, who will really matter if the race for the White House is close.”


Political Strategy Notes

From “What we’re getting wrong about 2024’s “moderate” voters: The voters who could decide 2024 are a complicated bunch” Christian Paz at Vox: “They constitute one of the most valuable, overlooked, and misunderstood chunks of the American electorate: the nation’s mythical moderates….They’re a complicated bunch. They’re often described as swing voters, fickle ideological creatures who exist around the center of the political spectrum. They get conflated with “independent” and “undecided” voters but aren’t exactly the same. They tend to be less politically engaged than their fierce partisan compatriots to their left and right. They’re both accused of not really existing and credited with winning elections for the major parties. And recently, they’re both the reason the Republican Party has been doing so poorly in the Donald Trump era and the reason Democrats should be careful that their winning coalition doesn’t collapse….you should break down moderate Americans into three discrete blocs….You have true moderates, whose opinions consistently fall around the center of the ideological spectrum. Then there are the moderates who are largely disengaged from politics and hold inconsistent opinions — sometimes, a mix of extreme views from both sides that, when averaged, often give them the false appearance of centrism. And then you have a kind of unicorn, the person who is engaged in politics but similarly has a mix of policy opinions that don’t place them cleanly on the ideological spectrum or in either major US political party….According to surveys of Americans’ ideological beliefs, those who call themselves “moderates” have tended to be a plurality of the American population since at least 1992. In 2022, they were roughly the same size as the segment of Americans calling themselves “conservative” — 35 percent moderate to 36 percent conservative, according to Gallup polling. Self-described “liberals,” meanwhile, trail at 26 percent of American adults, though that number has been trending up over the last 30 years….And Trump’s own brand of conservatism also appears to be less appealing to moderate Republicans in the first two states that have held primary contests so far: In Iowa, he garnered the support of about 20 percent of moderate GOP voters, a drop from his 34 percent showing in 2016 (the last time there were competitive GOP primaries). And in New Hampshire, he won about 25 percent of these moderates, down from 32 percent in 2016….Democrats face a challenge of their own: Their winning coalition counts on a bigger chunk of various kinds of moderate voters turning out for them than for Republicans.”

Highlighting this short message from top Democratic strategist and pollster Stan Greenberg, founding partner of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research (GQR) and Democracy Corps.

E. J. Dionne, Jr. explains “Why I changed my mind and think Trump should be thrown off the ballot” in his Washington Post column: “It is annoying when your political judgments come into conflict with what you decide is right. That’s what has happened to me on the question of whether Donald Trump should be barred from running for president under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment….Though I agreed that Trump had, indeed, engaged in insurrection, I thought it would be best for the country to have him go down to defeat again in a free and fair election. Keeping him on the ballot so voters could decide was the path to long-term institutional stability and might finally force a reckoning in the Republican Party….But the more I read and listened, the clearer it became that Section 3 was directed against precisely the conduct Trump engaged in. Its purpose is to protect the republic from those who would shred the Constitution and destroy our system of self-government. What Trump did in advance of the attack on the Capitol and on Jan. 6, 2021, legally disqualifies him from the presidency….to argue that barring Trump from the ballot is “antidemocratic,” wrote professors Carol Anderson and Ian Farrell in another brief, is “ironic … as he bears by far the most responsibility for attempting to subvert democracy on Jan. 6.” An effort to overthrow constitutional procedures, wrote Ifill, should be distinguished from political protests, even those “accompanied by sporadic acts of violence.” Demonstrators are not the same as a mob trying to hijack the government….There are paradoxes galore on this matter. Believing Trump should be unable to run, for example, is the opposite of a partisan wish, since he is without question the weakest Republican whom President Biden could face….The biggest paradox of all: Throwing Trump off the ballot would seem, on its face, the opposite of democracy. Yet the whole point of Section 3 is to protect constitutional democracy from anyone who has already tried to destroy it. If its provisions don’t apply to Trump, they don’t apply to anyone.”

Your daily downer comes from Harry Enten’s “The union vote is becoming more Republican” at CNN Politics, in which he writes: “Take a look at recent New York Times/Siena College polling in the six closest swing states that Biden won in 2020: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Biden and Trump were tied at 47% among union members when asked who they’d vote for in 2024. When these swing state voters were asked how they voted in 2020, Biden won the group by an 8-point margin….The union vote is especially important in Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania. Somewhere between 14% and 15% of employees in these three states are represented by unions. (Between 12% and 13% of employees in these states are themselves union members.)….Biden won union workers – who reside primarily in blue states – by 22 points, according to the 2020 Cooperative Election Study survey by Harvard University. Compare that with Bill Clinton’s performance in 1992, when he won the national popular vote by a similar margin to Biden 28 years later. But Clinton won union members by 31 points, according to an American National Election Studies survey….We’re a far cry from 1948, when Democrat Harry Truman won union workers by 62 points over Republican Thomas Dewey. Truman almost certainly wouldn’t have won the election that year without them….When Truman defeated Dewey, union workers represented about 30% of wage and salary workers. Today, they’re about 10%….Trump won non-college graduate union members by 6 points in 2020. Biden’s victory among union members was entirely attributable to those who had graduated college, winning them by 46 points….union workers are far likelierto be in education, training and library occupations (32.7%). Additionally, public sector employees are much likelier to be part of a union (32.5%) than private sector employees (6.0%)….About two-thirds of Americans approve of labor unions, which ranks among the highest percentages recorded since 1967. Just 15 years ago, only 48% of Americans approved of unions….In other words, it pays to be seen as friendly to labor unions even among those voters who are not members.”


NYT Interviews Ruy Teixeira

Ezra Klein interviews Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter and co-author with John B. Judis of the new Book “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?,  for The Ezra Klein Show at The New York Times. An excerpt of the interview transcript is cross-posted here:

EZRA KLEIN: From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

So last week on the show we had Simon Rosenberg giving the very optimistic case on the Democratic Party, the view that the Democratic Party is doing great, they are winning at a rate we have not seen since F.D.R., and that all of this panic about the state of the party, about its prospects in 2024, is misguided.

Today is the other argument, the argument the Democratic Party is not doing great. That, in fact, it’s doing quite badly. That it is losing something core to who it is, core to its soul, and it’s losing it because it is making bad strategic and even, as you’ll hear in his views, substantive decisions. So Ruy Teixeira is very well known in Democratic policy circles, longtime pollster and political strategist. And he wrote in 2002, alongside John Judis, a famous book called “The Emerging Democratic Majority.”

When this book comes out, things are looking real bad for Democrats. It’s the 9/11 era, George W. Bush is super popular. And here come Teixeira and Judis to say, actually things look pretty good for Democrats, that if you look at how the country is changing, the growth of nonwhite voters, the growth of the professional class, if you look at how those and other groups vote for Democrats, that just based on demographics you should expect the Democratic slice of the electorate to really grow. And if it grows, Democrats are going to begin winning.

Now it’s a weird time for that book to come out. George W. Bush wins again in 2004. But in 2008, reality begins to look a lot like what they’ve been describing. And then in 2012, when Obama wins on the back of huge, huge turnout among nonwhite voters, he has a share of the white electorate that is about what Dukakis had when he loses in 1988.

When Obama wins with that coalition, it really looks like Teixeira and Judis were right. And even the Republican Party seems to think so. It begins to think it has to moderate on immigration and put forward a kinder face. And then, of course, comes Donald Trump and upends us once again, wins when people think he cannot. And that sets off a set of soul-searching. What was wrong in the emerging Democratic majority? What did Teixeira and Judis get wrong? What did Democrats get wrong?

And so now they have a new book out called “Where Have All The Democrats Gone?” And this book’s fundamental argument is that most of what they said came to pass. But one thing happened that they had worried about in that book, and people didn’t really pick up on, which is that in order for that Democratic majority to happen, Democrats needed to keep the working class. And they, in particular, needed to at least hold down the ground they were losing with the white working class. And that did not happen — Democrats getting stomped among the white working class. There is some evidence of them losing at least some working-class Black and Hispanic voters, particularly men.

So the question is, why? It’s a question that Judis and Teixeira are trying to answer in the new book. You will hear in here that the view is both political and, I would say, substantive. Right? There’s an argument about what is good policy and also an argument about why that policy, why a much more moderate Democratic Party would be a more politically-effective one.

And so I wanted to offer this as the second way of thinking about the Democrats right now. That they have lost a constituency that, at their very soul, they are built to represent, and that they should be treating that as a real emergency. And then there’s the question of, what do you do about it? It’s a place where I think Ruy and I have some different views, but I was grateful that he joined me here.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Ruy Teixeira, welcome to the show.

RUY TEIXEIRA: Hey. Thanks for having me, Ezra.

EZRA KLEIN: So I want to begin with the older book, “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” which gets published in 2002 and later takes on this status as a kind of artifact of a certain era of Democratic triumphalism. But it was helpful to me to remember that it was in 2002, which was a really bad time for the Democratic Party. So tell me what you were seeing then that made you write the book. What was the context for it? Because at that time it was counterintuitive.

RUY TEIXEIRA: The context in which John Judis and I wrote the book was looking at the way the United States had evolved away from the Reagan coalition through the Clinton years and the very early part of the 21st century. If you looked at how their political base was changing and how the country was changing, it was clear that Democrats were going to benefit from the sort of inevitable rise of the nonwhite population, which was heavily Democratic. We saw the realignment of professionals toward the Democrats. We saw dramatic shifts in the voting patterns of women, particularly single, highly-educated working women.

And we looked at the more sort of dynamic Metropolitan areas of the country that we called ideopolises, and it was clear they were realigning toward the Democrats. So you could put these sort of demographic, ideological, and economic changes together and say, well, it looks like the way the country’s changing overall is moving in a direction that’s consistent with what we called at the time Democrat’s “progressive centrism,” and if they played the cards right, could conceivably develop a dominant majority that might last for some time. Even though, of course, it didn’t mean they’d win every election or even the very next election after the book was published, which was 2002.

Roiling underneath the surface there, Ezra, was a caveat we had in the book about the white working class, because we were very careful to note that secular tendency of the white working class to move away from the Democratic Party was a problem, and the Democrats really needed to stop the bleeding there and keep a strong minority share of the white working class vote overall nationally, maybe around 40 in the key Rust Belt states that were heavily working-class, more like 45. And if they did that, they could build this coalition. But the political arithmetic would get vexed and difficult if the white working class continued to deteriorate in their support for Democrats.

EZRA KLEIN: You mentioned something there, which is the ideological trends of the time, like the professional class becoming more Democratic. That hadn’t always been true. So what did you see happening ideologically in the parties around that time that was shifting these coalitions?

RUY TEIXEIRA: Right. Well, the professionals part was really important in our analysis. And if you looked at professionals, not only were they becoming a much larger part of the US occupational structure and of the electorate and, of course, they vote way above their weight in terms of turnout, but they were moving in a direction in terms of their views on cultural issues which was quite liberal.

Then also professionals, by virtue to some extent of their position in society and their occupational structure, they tend to be more public-spirited. They tend to be more sympathetic to the role of government. And those views seemed to be strengthening as professionals became a larger part of the American electorate. And we thought that was really going to help the Democrats. And, in fact, that turned out to be true, in a strict quantitative sense. They did, in fact, realign heavily toward the Democrats. It really starts in the late ’80s, kind of strengthens in the ’90s, and goes forth in the 21st century to the point today where professionals, by and large, can almost be considered a base Democratic group.

EZRA KLEIN: So then tell me what happens on the way to the Democratic majority. So you have this new book called “Where Have All The Democrats Gone?” It just published in late 2023, and it’s a bit of an update. Why didn’t this durable Democratic coalition emerge?

RUY TEIXEIRA: Well, point number one is something that we foreshadowed in “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” which was that the Democrats had a potential Achilles’ heel in their coalition in terms of the white working class. If that group started moving away smartly from the Democrats again, that would throw the whole thing into question. And that did, in fact, happen after Obama’s victory in 2008.

If you look at 2010 election where the Democrats get crushed to lose 63 seats, it’s a lot because white working-class voters bail out from the Democratic Party in lots of areas of the country, particularly the upper Midwest. 2012, Obama manages to get re-elected, and that was viewed or characterized as the return of the Obama coalition. But the part of the Obama coalition they missed is, he ran a kind of populist campaign against the plutocrat Mitt Romney, running on the auto-bailout and other things like that, and he really managed to grab back a lot of those white working-class voters in the upper Midwest. And if he hadn’t done that, he would have lost that election.

But the coalition of the ascendant kind of analysis that Democrats had been playing with becomes ever stronger. In fact, after 2012, in an odd sort of way, the Republicans even embraced it with their post-election autopsy. The Democrats were riding this demographic wave, it was going to wash over the country, and the Democrats were going to potentially be dominant.

But I think Trump — [LAUGHS]: Trump had a different opinion. He thought that, in fact, there was a wellspring of resentment among the working class in the United States that a politician like him could tap, and that the Democrats were going to have a lot of difficulty defending against, and that turned out to be the case.

So that’s part of what happened to the Democratic coalition. Another part of the Democratic coalition that is — I mean, the change that’s really still unfolding today that’s very important is, if you look at 2020, even though Biden did manage to squeak through in that election, not nearly as big a victory as they thought they’d get, he managed to hold what white working-class support they had, in fact, increase it a little bit. But what was really astonishing is the way Democrats lost nonwhite working-class voters, particularly Hispanics. There was big, big declines in their margins among these voters, declines that we’re still seeing today in the polling data.

So one way to think about 2020 and where we are today, is that racial polarization is declining but class polarization, educational polarization, is increasing. And that’s a problem for a party like the Democrats which purports to be the party of the working class.

EZRA KLEIN: Well let’s pick up on this question of the working class and how do we define it. At different times we’ve talked about the working class here, the white working class. What is your measure of the working class?

RUY TEIXEIRA: I use the standard definition at this point, which is those voters lacking a four-year college degree. There’s obviously different ways you could do it. If you’re going to use a more traditional definition, which is essentially impossible to operationalize in most polls, you would use blue-collar and low-level service workers as opposed to managerial and professional workers.

You could do it by income. There’s no right, scientific way to do this. But the way I typically do it is to look at the four-year degree and more, and less than a four-year degree. And that’s pretty standard at this point, and it’s certainly the easiest thing to operationalize in polls.

And it’s not like it’s without substantive value. I mean, we look at the economic and cultural trajectory of non-college as opposed to college folks, and they look very different. I mean, this has been a country, in the last 40 years, that has been much, much better to people with a four-year college degree than people who lack it. That’s very well-established in all the empirical data.

So it’s not like we’re making something up here. It does really capture a lot about people’s economic trajectories and the jobs they have and their position in the society.

EZRA KLEIN: One thing you do see is that, depending on which definition you choose, the situation looks a little bit different. So if you look at who wins college educated voters and who wins non-college voters in 2020 and 2016, Trump does. But if you look at who wins voters making less than $100,000, Biden does. And if you look at who wins voters making more than $100,000, Donald Trump does. And you can slice that even a little finer. You look at who wins voters making between $0 and $50,000, Biden. Between $50,000 and $100,000, Biden. And then above that it tends to tilt more towards Donald Trump.

So why do you prefer an educational definition here than an income definition? And what different things might the two tell us?

You can read the rest of the interview transcript and listen to the podcast here.


New Q Poll May Offer Insight About Third Party Effects

The new Quinnipiac Poll, which finds Biden leading Trump, is generating a lot of buzz, even though it could be an outlier and it’s only one poll. Sarah Fortinsky reports on it with a slightly different take at The Hill:

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley leads President Biden by 5 points in a hypothetical head-to-head 2024 match-up, according to a poll released Wednesday, but she trails him by 7 points in a five-person race including third-party candidates.

In the Quinnipiac University national poll, Haley’s popularity among independents would boost her numbers in a one-on-one match-up against Biden, but her weak support among Republicans would hurt her when factoring in independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

In a two-person race, Haley receives 47 percent support and Biden receives 42 percent support. Among independents, 53 percent support Haley and 37 percent support Biden. Among Republicans, 79 percent support Haley and 4 percent support Biden. Among Democrats, 89 percent support Biden and 10 percent support Haley.

In a five-person race, however, Haley loses independent and Republican voters, letting Biden pull ahead with a 7-point lead. Biden receives 36 percent support, Haley receives 29 percent, Kennedy gets 21 percent, Independent Cornel West gets 3 percent and Green Party candidate Jill Stein gets 2 percent.

With five people in the race, Haley sees her support among Republican drop from 79 percent to only 57 percent. Kennedy would get 24 percent GOP support, Biden would get 3 percent and West would get 1 percent.

Fortinsky adds that “Biden holds a 6-point lead over Trump one-on-one, 50 percent to 44 percent. A five-person race, however, narrows his lead, bringing Biden’s support to 39 percent, followed by Trump’s support at 37 percent. Kennedy then follows with 14 percent, West receives 3 percent and Stein receives 2 percent….In a head-to-head matchup against Biden, Haley outperforms Trump, thanks to independents. Add third party candidates to the mix and her numbers slip in part because of her weakness among Republicans,” Quinnipiac University Polling Analyst Tim Malloy said in the poll’s press release.”

As always, one poll doesn’t flag a credible trend, especially this early in the 2024 campaign. But if other polls going forward reveal similar results, the Kennedy factor may be significant in deciding the election outcomes in November – one way or the other.


Will South Carolina Democrats Save Nikki Haley to Stop Trump?

There have been some odd twists already in the 2024 presidential contest, and today I wrote about one of them at New York.

After a nearly monthlong drought in public polling of South Carolina, the state whose February 24 Republican primary could for all practical purposes clinch the GOP nomination for Donald Trump, we finally have some fresh data. And the new Washington Post–Monmouth survey shows Trump still has a big lead over Nikki Haley in her home state.

The former president is up by a 58 percent to 32 percent margin among voters interested in and eligible to (we’ll have more on that below) participate in the open Republican primary, and he leads Haley comfortably in voter enthusiasm and on multiple issue-position and candidate traits, including electability. Fifty-seven percent of poll respondents say Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election “due to voter fraud,” and 60 percent believe Republicans should stick with Trump as nominee even if he’s convicted of criminal conduct in connection with his efforts to overturn that election result. Trump’s favorable-unfavorable ratio is 66 percent to 28 percent; Haley’s is 45 percent to 41 percent. He leads among women as well as among men, and in every age category of voter. And Trump leads the former South Carolina governor by 60 points (77 percent to 17 percent) among those who call themselves “strong Republicans” and by 26 points (60 percent to 34 percent) among “soft” or “leaning” Republicans.

There is some good news for Haley in this poll: She slightly leads Trump (46 percent to 44 percent) among college graduates, and she leads him strongly (61 percent to 15 percent) among those who self-identify not as Republicans but as independents or as Democrats. These independents and Democrats make up 19 percent of the poll’s sample. Ifthey were a much bigger portion of the GOP primary electorate, Haley might have a chance at an upset win. That’s a very big “if,” though.

South Carolina has no voter registration by party. Registered voters can choose either party’s primary in any given election cycle (though the registration deadline for this year’s presidential primaries has already passed), but once they choose one, they are barred from the other until the cycle is over. As it happens, South Carolina’s Democratic presidential primary will be held on February 3. President Joe Biden has made a real effort to turn out the Democratic vote to resolve some doubts about his intraparty support in the state that gave him his big breakthrough in 2020. Nikki Haley really needs a lot of Democrats and Democrat-leaning indies to pass up that opportunity and turn out for her on February 24, says Monmouth polling director Patrick Murray:

“Haley’s hopes appear to hang on pulling in Democratic-leaning voters who would never support her in a general election but simply want to stop Trump. Our sampling frame for this poll did not include voters who have participated only in Democratic primaries. If a sizable number of those voters decide to skip this week’s primary and show up for the Republican contest instead, she could narrow the gap. It would remain a tough challenge, though, for her to actually close it.”

Keep in mind that for all of Nikki Haley’s self-portrayal as a beacon of civility and potential bipartisanship (at least as compared to the savage 45th president), she was the very partisan governor of South Carolina for six years after winning the election in 2010 as the candidate of the hard-core conservative DeMint-Sanford wing of the GOP and the high-profile tea-party protégé of Sarah Palin. As governor, she was known as a fierce advocate for big-business interests and for absolutely hating organized labor. Her one big enlightened gesture, the removal of the Confederate flag from the statehouse, was finally taken after a racist massacre at a Charleston church made the step largely noncontroversial.

For South Carolina Democrats to enter a Republican primary en masse to save Nikki Haley from a humiliating loss on her home turf would require either a great deal of amnesia or a fear of Donald Trump that makes all things possible. It would also represent a level of strategic voting that is rare in practice.

With three weeks to go before the GOP primary, we should be able to discern a major movement of South Carolina Democrats into the enemy camp if it happens. You can bet Team Trump will again warn (as it did prior to the New Hampshire primary) that Haley is inviting Democrats to “infiltrate” the Republican contest because they fear the former president. Sooner or later, of course, if Haley is to remain in the contest, she’s going to have to beat Trump among the “strong Republicans” who will dominate most primaries down the road. For the present, though, she needs a miracle and a lifeline from the other side of the partisan barricades.


Political Strategy Notes

New York Times opinion essayist Thomas B. Edsall addresses a question of strategic concern for Democrats in the 2024 campaign, “Can Biden Take a Page Out of Trump’s Playbook?” with respect to the immigration crisis.  As Edsall writes, “In a bid to weaken Donald Trump’s domination of the immigration crisis going into the 2024 election, President Biden has reversed his position and adopted a high-risk strategy….Biden is seeking enactment of border legislation that “would give me, as president, a new emergency authority to shut down the border when it becomes overwhelmed.”….On Monday, The Times described Biden’s rationale in “How the Border Crisis Shattered Biden’s Immigration Hopes”:

The number of people crossing into the United States has reached record levels, more than double than in the Trump years. The asylum system is still all but broken.

On Friday, in a dramatic turnaround from those early days, the president implored Congress to grant him the power to shut down the border so he could contain one of the largest surges of uncontrolled immigration in American history.

Trump, acutely aware of the critical importance of immigration to his campaign, is determined to block Biden’s border security proposal, now under negotiation in the Senate. Trump, of course, wants to make sure that the “crisis at the border” remains foremost in the minds of voters through Election Day….The prize in this struggle is the 2024 presidency and all the power that goes with it.”

Edsall notes further, “I asked political strategists and American and European scholars to evaluate the viability of Biden’s immigration initiative and received a wide range of responses….Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who has often argued that Democrats have moved too far to the cultural left, questioned the viability of Biden’s immigration strategy in an email:

It’s a steep political hill Biden has to climb on this issue. His approval rating on “handling the immigration situation at the U.S.-Mexico border” is now 18 percent. Eighteen percent! That’s really, really bad and the lowest presidential approval on the issue ABC News has measured since 2004. In the latest Wall Street Journal poll, Trump is preferred over Biden by 30 points, his greatest lead on any issue.

Illuminating detail, Teixeira continued,

comes from a December survey conducted by the Blueprint group. Between Trump and Biden, who are voters most likely to think is close to their views on immigration? It’s Trump by a country mile: 44 percent of voters say Trump is close to their position, compared to a mere 25 percent who say Biden is close to their position. Even Hispanic voters are more likely to say Trump is closer to their views on immigration than to say Biden is….It’s a bit late in the day to finally be moving on this issue and only under duress from the Republicans. The border debacle has been unfolding throughout Biden’s term and the political damage has been accumulating. A big part of the problem is that there are a lot of Democrats who didn’t — and don’t — really want to do much about border security….I don’t think Biden is really committed to being a different kind of Democrat, just a somewhat more palatable one. And I don’t think he really wants to go after some specific person or group to forcefully dissociate himself from “weak on border security” views in and around the Democratic Party. That limits the salience of his repositioning both in the general political discourse and to voters’ perceptions of him and his party.

“All this said, it’s still worth striking a tougher stance on border security,” Teixeira wrote. “It’s the beginning of a move in the right direction and could help Biden modestly….Would Biden “lose more support on the progressive left than he would gain in the center?” Teixeira asked. His answer: “My view is that, on this issue as on so many others, the progressive left is a paper tiger….The net for the Democrats,” he concluded, “is likely to be strongly positive”

Edsall also quotes Brooking Senior Fellow William A. Galston, who observes: “Biden’s shift on immigration will make a political difference to the situation on the ground well before the election only if his new policies change the day. In the last year of the Trump administration, encounters with illegal migrants at the southern border numbered less than 500 thousand. During the third year of the Biden administration, the total rose to 2.5 million, and the dispersal of these migrants throughout the country has produced fiscal and housing crises in large cities controlled by Democrats….Biden will have to undertake tough measures that won’t be easy to distinguish from Trump’s. The Democrats who understand the political stakes will probably go along with this, while those who see this issue through humanitarian or ideological lenses will balk. If he proceeds down this path, Biden will have to hope that gains among swing voters exceed the losses in his base.” Trump and the Republicans, in Galston’s view, “will pay a price if they are seen as being driven by politics rather than the desire to address a really difficult problem,” but Biden faces a big hurdle in his bid to take command of the immigration issue:

The administration has waited so long to act that it faces a credibility problem that will only get worse if it flinches and settles for half-measures whose effects are incremental at best. Turning this issue around will take determination — and a willingness to endure criticism from fellow Democrats that hasn’t been the administration’s long suit thus far.”

In addition, Edsall writes, “Joel Kotkin, of Chapman University and the Houston-based Urban Reform Institute, argued that adopting a tougher immigration stance is a plus for Biden that comes with little cost: “The progressives, faced with the odious Trump, will fall into line, except on the margins. The open border is not welcomed by most people.”….

It’s hard to see, Kotkin continued,

how either working-class Latinos or African Americans welcome their communities being inundated by people who have entered illegally and about whom we know nothing. Protests in New York and Chicago by working-class people should not be ignored. This year, if I were Biden, I would be more worried about them than far-left foundations or cheap-labor lobbyists who might object.

Edsall notes further that “in communities suffering economic decline and growing isolation, a relatively small influx of immigrants can propel voters to the right.”….Ed Goeas, a Republican pollster, replying by email to my inquiry concerning the current politics of immigration, argued that the Republican Party has increased the odds that the Biden strategy will work. “I believe the Republicans may have given the Biden campaign the opportunity to turn this issue into a real plus,” Goeas wrote, referring to the politicized reasoning Republicans are using to reject the legislation under consideration in the Senate.”….Overall, Kotkin contended, “The political rewards of standing up on the border are far greater than backing the current chaos. Everywhere in Europe support for stricter immigration is moving from the right to the center and even the left, particularly in the ‘enlightened’ North.” Edsall concludes, “The public clearly wants the government to take steps to control the border. If Biden does nothing, Trump will retain his advantage on immigration, which consistently ranks among the top three voter concerns in polls. And most progressive voters understand, deep down, that if they cast a ballot for a third-party candidate or abstain from voting at all, they are in practice supporting Trump.”


How No Labels Lost Its Way–and Its Soul

One of the more fascinating battles in politics is between the centrist Democratic group Third Way and the allegedly centrist non-partisan group No Labels, which I examined carefully at New York:

The ideological polarization of the two major political parties that took place during and after the civil-rights era fed a partisan polarization as voters began to sort themselves out into dual tribes with contrasting points of view on a broad range of issues. As interparty disharmony increased, it was inevitable that there would be a widespread craving for more cooperation across party lines. That has been the mother’s milk of “centrism” in both major parties (more prevalent among Democrats than Republicans, to be sure) and absolute rocket fuel for bipartisan and nonpartisan organizations like No Labels. That group has flourished since its founding in 2010 as a vehicle for Republican and Democratic centrists to signal their interest in, and in some cases actually work on, joint policy projects, particularly in Congress (where it sponsored the bipartisan House Problem Solvers Caucus).

In the Trump era of hyperpolarization, the craving for bipartisanship on which No Labels feeds has intensified along with voter fatigue with the traditional parties and the gerontocracy that often seems to rule them. Unfortunately, this development has seduced the leadership of No Labels to consider a fateful plunge into its own electoral project at the very highest level: a presidential candidacy in 2024. A significant segment of its original “centrist” supporters and sympathizers — especially those whose “label” being put aside was the Democratic donkey — has objected vociferously. These include the founder and CEO of the once-formidable Democratic Leadership Council, Al From, and, most of all, the organization that is in many respects the DLC’s successor, Third Way, which has become the Paul Revere of Democratic opposition to No Labels. Centrist policy intellectual and former No Labels booster Bill Galston has best explained his and other Democrats’ estrangement from No Labels, as reported by David A. Graham:

“’The initial premise was: We have no choice but to make the two-party system better,’ the political scientist William Galston told me. Galston helped found No Labels, but he parted ways with the group in 2023 because he feared that a presidential bid would help reelect Trump. ‘The current effort rests on a different premise altogether — namely, that we have to go outside the two-party system to make things better,’ Galston said.”

Running its own presidential candidate arguably makes the nonpartisan No Labels a third party, even though the group rejects that … label. In theory, the idea is to jolt Democrats and Republicans into cooperation by beating them to the White House, presumably just once. The premise seems to be that a No Labels president — or, in some iterations of the group’s shadowy 2024 plans, a president who takes office via a deal with No Labels after its candidate has denied either party an Electoral College majority — will retreat from the field after forcing the old parties to play pretty with each other. That scenario requires a degree of trust in No Labels’ leaders that they really haven’t earned, as Graham observes:

“No Labels isn’t offering much information at all about how it will choose its ticket without a primary. The group says it will make the decision about whether to field a candidate after Super Tuesday, based on an analysis of whether such a candidate would have a real shot. Many experts outside No Labels see such a calculation as basically impossible …

“Assuming No Labels does decide to nominate a candidate, how will the group choose that person? That’s a mystery too. Originally, the group planned an in-person convention of supporters this April in Dallas, but in November, it announced plans to hold the convention virtually instead. But No Labels hasn’t said what such a convention would look like or what role delegates would play in choosing the candidate.”

Based on Joe Biden’s own centrist credentials and the tight-knit Republican-base vote that Donald Trump commands, most of No Labels’ Democratic detractors echo Galston’s fear that any candidate sponsored by the group will take more votes away from the incumbent and pave the way for another Trump plurality win even more egregious than his 2016 election. And No Labels’ secrecy about the donors who have paid for its extensive ballot-access operation (which has succeeded in 14 states despite no one knowing the identity of its candidate) has fed the suspicion that a Trump victory could be the whole idea.

Even if you don’t believe the No Labels 2024 initiative is a sinister MAGA plot and instead think it’s a well-meaning but dangerously naïve undertaking (as Third Way’s leaders suggest), it’s just bizarre that its plans have gone so far without a clear plan of what they will actually produce. But there are signs the wheels are falling off this particular bandwagon, as CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere reports:

“Larry Hogan, the Republican former governor of Maryland, quit the No Labels board last month over frustration that power and information were being hoarded by group leadership — and not to, as reported elsewhere, clear the way for a presidential run of his own.

“’It’s been far less organized than he expected it to be’ and ‘he doesn’t see a plan coming together,’ a person familiar with Hogan’s thinking told CNN. ‘You don’t know where this train is going, and you’re signing up for something you didn’t necessarily sign up for.’

“Asked for his own assessment of the No Labels plan, [West Virginia Senator Joe] Manchin told CNN on the road in New Hampshire as he kicked off a national tour, ‘I don’t think anybody knows. I think it’s changing day by day, hour by hour.’

That’s significant since Hogan and Manchin are the two names mentioned most often as potential No Labels presidential candidates. Pretty clearly the organization has veered off course, arguably because it tried to change missions overnight. Historically, those who try to harness discontent with major political parties seek to break the mold by creating their own “third” party in hopes of realigning politics or actually aim at “reforming” one of the old parties in a more productive direction. No Labels’ ostensible strategy of knocking Democratic and Republican heads together and then fading away makes no sense and thus naturally arouses suspicion. It’s probably going nowhere fast in 2024, and that’s a good thing even for those unhappy with the Democrats and the Republicans. No Labels lost its original purpose and as a result has lost its soul.

 


GOP Now the Party of Open Borders, Constant Chaos

Reasonable people can disagree about the complex causes of the immigration crisis on America’s southern border. But there isn’t much doubt about which party is trying to block a compromise to address it right now. As and Republicans Who Screamed About A Crisis On The Border Now Oppose A Plan To Fix It” at HuffPo:

For months, Republicans have shouted from the rooftops about a migrant crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border and how President Joe Biden needs to act to address it, insisting the flow of migrants is an urgent national security threat.

Now many on the right are urging their party to reject the very same things they said were needed to fix the problem, including tougher enforcement measures and a proposal to automatically shut down border crossings when it is overwhelmed….

The GOP’s contortions aren’t just grating for Democrats but also on some conservative Republicans who have been deeply involved in crafting bipartisan legislation, which is expected to be unveiled soon, that would overhaul how migrants are processed at the border.

“It is interesting. Republicans four months ago… locked arms together and said, ‘We’re not going to give you money for this. We want a change in law,’” Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), the GOP’s lead negotiator on a deal pairing immigration changes with assistance to Ukraine and other allies, said on “Fox News Sunday.”….“A few months later, when we’re finally getting to the end, they’re like, ‘Oh, just kidding. I actually don’t want a change in law because it’s a presidential election year,’” he added.”

The authors add, “In a statement last week, Biden called the deal the “toughest and fairest set of reforms to secure the border we’ve ever had in our country” and vowed that if given the authority to shutter the border when it is overwhelmed, he would “use it the day I sign the bill into law.”

Meanwhile, Republicans have boxed themselves into an embarrassing contradiction. On the one hand they say that the urgency of the current border mess cries out for swift, decisive action. On the other hand, they say “Ah, let’s just just let it slide until after Trump wins.” So letting the border security disaster fester for an entire year until the next president is inaugurated is the GOP “solution” to the huge crisis they say is destroying America?

Putting political gain for a leader of Trump’s character before national security shows who they really are.

Ideologues will undoubtedly continue to argue about the causes of the border crisis. Leaders who are more interested in implementing practical reforms to help fix it than worrying about who gets credit for it have become scarce in the GOP. But there are a few Republicans, who are not cowering in the shadows, and congressional Democrats are eager to work with them to get it done for the good of our country.

As for the ‘chaos’ part of this post’s title, Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich put it this way, “The Republicans’ election strategy is built on chaos. The more chaos they create, the more pessimistic Americans feel about the capacities of our democracy to govern the nation. So we give up on democracy and turn to a so-called strongman….Trump wants voters to believe America is ungovernable, and that the only solution is an authoritarian like him taking over….Folks, the political struggle of our time is no longer Left versus Right, Democrats versus Republicans. It’s now democracy versus fascism.”


Political Strategy Notes

Democrats may be able to flip the prevailing media narrative regarding immigration policy to “The GOP is now the open borders party” For those who are following the progress of current immigration policy proposals, the flip merits consideration. As Ted Barrett, Manu Raju & Melanie Zanona explain in their article “GOP senators seethe as Trump blows up delicate immigration compromise” at CNN Politics: “Senior Senate Republicans are furious that Donald Trump may have killed an emerging bipartisan deal over the southern border, depriving them of a key legislative achievement on a pressing national priority and offering a preview of what’s to come with Trump as their likely presidential nominee….In recent weeks, Trump has been lobbying Republicans both in private conversations and in public statements on social media to oppose the border compromise being delicately hashed out in the Senate, according to GOP sources familiar with the conversations – in part because he wants to campaign on the issue this November and doesn’t want President Joe Biden to score a victory in an area where he is politically vulnerable….“I think the border is a very important issue for Donald Trump. And the fact that he would communicate to Republican senators and congresspeople that he doesn’t want us to solve the border problem because he wants to blame Biden for it is … really appalling,” said GOP Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, who has been an outspoken critic of Trump….GOP Sen. Todd Young of Indiana called any efforts to disrupt the ongoing negotiations “tragic” and said: “I hope no one is trying to take this away for campaign purposes.”….Underscoring just how damaging Trump’s comments and campaign to kill the border deal have been in the Senate, one GOP senator on condition of background told CNN that without Trump, this deal would have had overwhelming support within the conference….“This proposal would have had almost unanimous Republican support if it weren’t for Donald Trump,” the Republican senator said.” If Trump’s Republicans succeed in killing a bipartisan immigration bill, Democrats should make sure they – and Trump – own the kill.

Is the Good Economic News Good for Biden?,” Robert Kuttner asks at The American Prospect, and writes: “Thursday’s report from the Commerce Department displayed an exceptionally good economy. The economy grew at an annual rate of 3.3 percent in the last quarter of 2023, while core inflation, at just 1.7 percent, was actually below the Fed’s 2 percent target. The economy added nearly half a million jobs in the quarter, wage growth remains positive, and consumer spending is up….The index of consumer confidence soared 29 percent in the past two months, the largest such increase since December 1991. All of this means that the Federal Reserve, which meets next week to decide its next steps, is likely to stick to its plan to cut rates three times this year. It just doesn’t get much better….But can President Biden reap the political credit he deserves, come November? As pollster Stan Greenberg has pointed out, it’s a mistake to keep harping on how great the economy is, since it’s only marginally better for most working families. What Biden needs to do is make the election future-oriented—talk about how much more needs to be done, could be done in a second Biden term….“Soft landing” is one of the most dismal metaphors ever devised by economists. They, and their media mimics, use it to mean that we managed to get rid of inflation without resorting to unemployment. That’s to Biden’s credit….But the economy doesn’t need a soft landing, in the manner of, say, Alaska Airlines, that merely averts disaster. It needs a strong takeoff—even better jobs, wage growth, and more help for working families. Biden needs to emphasize that….This week’s endorsement of Biden by the UAW suggests the kind of help he will get from a resurgent labor movement. The best Biden “surrogates” in the campaign are working-class people and leaders.” In the NH GOP primary, “Fully 77 percent of Haley voters said they’d vote for Biden if Trump were the nominee. In about half the remaining primaries, independents can choose to vote in the GOP primary.” Haley’s cluelessness about American history and the role of trade unions notwithstanding, “The longer Haley stays in,” Kuttner adds, “the more she will remind voters of Trump’s deepening dementia, and the more she and Trump will argue about policy divisions that play to Democratic strengths (cutting Social Security, banning most abortion).”

Nikki Haley may not have much of a chance to unhorse Trump’s ride to the GOP nomination. But no Democrats should entertain the delusion that she is a political moderate just because her behavior appears less deranged than that of her GOP  competition. By any sensible standard, for example, Haley is one of the most virulent anti-labor extremists in the history of presidential candidates. As Noah Lanard writes in “Nikki Haley and Tim Scott Are Here to Remind You Republicans Hate Unions” at Mother Jones, “This weekend, Neil Cavuto of Fox News asked former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley what should have been an easy question about the ongoing UAW strike. Donald Trump had already made it clear how to respond from the right: Say something vaguely supportive about autoworkers, then pivot to claiming the Biden administration will send all their jobs to China by pushing electric vehicles. Instead, Haley portrayed workers in the largest industry in Michigan—a key battleground state that Trump won in 2016—as greedy and ungrateful….“It tells you that when you have the most pro-union president and he touts that he is emboldening the unions, this is what you get,” Haley replied. “The union is asking for a 40 percent raise; the companies have come back with a 20 percent raise. I think any of the taxpayers would love to have a 20 percent raise and think that’s great.” Land adds that “Haley, who as governor in 2014 said she didn’t want unions in South Carolina because “we don’t want to taint the water,” didn’t stop there. “I was a union buster,” she told Cavuto. “I didn’t want to bring in companies that were unionized simply because I didn’t want to have that change the environment in our state.” In “Nikki Haley’s Anti-Union Fanaticism Is Wild Even for a Republican,” John Nichols reports at The Nation, “She despises organized labor with a fury that is unrivaled in American politics….During her time as governor of South Carolina, she waged open war against labor—even going so far as to suggest she would sacrifice jobs for her state in order to keep unions out….“I will continue to be a union-buster, because every time you see me on national TV busting the unions, another CEO calls,” she said while serving as governor. “It just works.” All good Democrats hope that haley will continue to give Trump a hard time. On the outside chance that Trump tanks in the next few weeks and Haley somehow wins the nomination,  however, she would have a hard time convincing working-class voters that she would help them get better wages.

California Governor Gavin Newsom makes the case for President Biden on ABC News: